He blames Crowdstrike for his org treating humans like shit for money. Nice.

Willing to Die for MrBeast (and $5 Million)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;lDVoz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;lDVoz</a>

Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?&gt; Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

&gt; “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM</a>

This is a great &quot;leaked&quot; pdf and honestly, shows the evolution (or degradtion) in media. Typical phrases, e.g. sign of the times, if it makes money of course it exists, etc etc but really it&#x27;s great insight.I personally don&#x27;t&#x2F;wouldn&#x27;t do this, but I can&#x27;t ignore the money making machine youtube has become &#x2F; the producers of said videos.

I see it as a bubble because they don&#x27;t have to pay anything to host or publish content even though there is a cost there (storage, streaming, etc..) so they&#x27;re essentially hoping that YT can keep providing a free service with ads even if they&#x27;re running at a loss.It&#x27;s not clear if YouTube is specifically profitable, because Alphabet only separates revenue, not profit. But, I would imagine they&#x27;re not running huge margins or even at a loss given their recent crackdown on ad-blockers and Google&#x27;s overall fight against them with things like manifest V3.

When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they pay for advertising and get the same results.

How does it fall under the definition of a bubble? Sure, view counts contribute to more views. But that&#x27;s not the main retention mechanism of these videos.

&gt; contrived BS ... micromanage ... game a blackbox algorithmThe relatively higher production cost warrants hyper optimization (as an org) and demands high agency (of producers).&gt; younger audiencesInternet is so vast in that making something for the 0.1% is still an audience of millions.

No, but the cracks are starting to show. My point is that YT may go down the same path and get stingy with video storage.

These influencers&#x27; accounts are certainly not inactive.

Here&#x27;s to hoping but that could be caused by a number of things. High interest rates for example might make companies unwilling to invest in some types of marketing.

people who work in marketing&#x2F;growth are already saying that influencer marketer rates have steeply declined. we can only hope!

This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are smoking less though, aren&#x27;t they?

Yes, see the sugar industry. I find it quite similar how both use brain hacks. It makes behavior extremely hard to change once people are hooked.

I think it&#x27;s easy to believe that something will eventually go away just because we feel that something is not good in some way. But things only go away if people change their behaviour around those things on mass.There&#x27;s a growing sentiment that a lot of social media is more bad than good for us. But people don&#x27;t just stop with a behaviour that they know is bad for them. We need a lot more to change a behaviour that has become established.

There&#x27;s plenty of good film and TV out there, and you don&#x27;t even have to look hard to find it. I find this attitude to not just elitist but lazy and ignorant.

I do get a sense of relief downloading a movie recommendation and being greeted by the Criterion logo.

I, like many people, lamented about the media dumbing us down with lazy, brainless content. What blew my mind was when I read someone online respond to this assertion: “you have it backwards, the media is delivering what the market demands”.As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.

This resonates. Movies lack depth nowadays, especially cultural depth.They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like &quot;Forest Gump&quot;. Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn&#x27;t like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I&#x27;m not even American but I could relate. Modern &quot;movies&quot; usually don&#x27;t have enough character development; or if they do, it&#x27;s highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.It&#x27;s even telling that we have separate words &quot;film&quot; and &quot;movies&quot;. It reminds me of the book &quot;Brave New World&quot; which is set in the future; they have something called &quot;Feelies&quot; which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don&#x27;t teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people&#x27;s awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.

Ever see Dhar Mann brainrot videos? I don&#x27;t see it going anywhere. It&#x27;s a big reason why films aren&#x27;t good anymore. Content producers cater to the intellectual tastes of their respective societies. Long story short, we get what we deserve. Long live Criterion Collection for the handful of us who abstain from mass produced trash.

Crazy ideas and sensationalism usually works in the showbiz and in the media industry. This is just applied to YouTube or in another words: Old wine in new bottle.

there&#x27;s something truly special about this era, we have so much comfort and &quot;data&quot; yet no one foresaw the enshittification of the web space even though it seems the exact same cycle that happen in any space.. when attention, fame and money gets involved .. most neurons are &quot;working&quot; at milking and abusing the mass. Same exact sleigh of hands really..

&gt; &quot;contrived BS&quot;, &quot;mircromanage&quot;, &quot;game a blackbox algorithm&quot;Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?

Maybe... but I read it more as (and tend to agree with) blow it off because it&#x27;s explicitly an approach that makes the world a worse place in almost every way except perhaps your bank account balance. It&#x27;s possible to be successful without being mercilessly amoral and there&#x27;s a big difference between not personally caring for a product vs thinking a product is toxic and holding your nose anyway for the sake of a paycheck.

Sure, there are different ways to be commercially successful and most probably require immense talent and hard work. Doesn’t really contradict any particular value judgment of the type of content he produces though.

His interviews are just another part of his business, and evidence shows that much of what he says during them is not factual.

that&#x27;s exactly the problem... why the fascination with &quot;money&quot; and &quot;big&quot;?The world has real problems... called environmental collapse and climate change. Why not working on thoseIt&#x27;s actually EASY to make money selling shit. It&#x27;s HARD to solve a real problem to make everyone&#x27;s lives better

I like your perspective but I don’t think liking coffee is the right comparison. It’s closer to reading a manual for a successful casino, where a lot of it is about manipulation rather than creating value. Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos, but IMO more in that direction than coffee tea preferences.

I read this post because I was curious about how these operations work. What I found is:- Making good YOUTUBE videos is paramount, not quality videos- Be quirky and crazy in videos using a blank check- If something goes awry or you need it faster, also use a blank check- Some advice related to thumbnails and titles (relying on YouTube&#x27;s current algorithm which could change the next second)The only thing I found semi useful is how he classifies employees using the A, B and C system (e.g. A is top tier, B can be trained to be top tier, and C is dead weight)

The problem is our society teaches us to separate a thing from the externalities of the thing. If it really was just about learning then there wouldn’t be a problem. You can learn from anyone.However, it’s not just about learning. People are easily influenced by the author of what they’re learning from. They’ll read a Steve Jobs autobiography and learn some interesting business insights, but also hold him in higher regard and perhaps feel like it’s ok to be a raging asshole. People look up to successful people.It’s entirely appropriate to remind people that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and perhaps this person has toxic effects they need to be aware of.

I don&#x27;t like how much people tie success to the amount of money someone earns. (or how many views someone gets on YouTube, for that matter)There are many people who I consider successful that have never earned 700 mil, and there are people who made billions I don&#x27;t give a fuck about.

His comment has merit. The Beast business is fundamentally at the mercy of YouTube, the algorithm and their business priorities. In fact Beast&#x27;s intentional focus on making the best YouTube videos highlights this. Beast is a high-touch content farm, but ultimately still a content farm and vulnerable to the exact same risks as any other one.

I don’t even think he’s gaming an algorithm. He doesn’t have to.He’s just making videos people will click on and then watch.It’s almost like he’s trying to make something people want. I’ve heard that before somewhere…

Well said. It smells like some sour grapes in some of these comments.Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or everyone would do it.

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it&#x27;s all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are &quot;just&quot; gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person.I don&#x27;t like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it&#x27;s so big.

Not saying Mr. beast content isn’t valuable to millions of people, but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive &#x2F; a local minima, without being an elitist.Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.

Can you do better?If 100&#x27;s of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value.His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it&#x27;s hard to dispute it&#x27;s effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there.His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is.On some level he&#x27;s the personification of the youtube algorithm - don&#x27;t blame him, he&#x27;s just giving people what they want. On some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video games in the 90&#x27;s.

&gt; The whole modern social media &#x2F; influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually.Before teenagers were looking up to YouTubers, they were looking up to TV celebs, musicians, sports players, and so on. You had entire publishing empires built around following such celebs around and reporting on their private lives.I don&#x27;t think this is hugely different. The tech has evolved and the formulas have been perfected, but it&#x27;s still catering to the same obsessions and urges that we had for a good while.

YouTube Shorts is really dark, there&#x27;s stuff that makes David Foster Wallace&#x27;s 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical.There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.Your comment reminds me that&#x27;s the local optima for YouTube x creators and it&#x27;s just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn&#x27;t care what it is. Just hours consumed.The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...

Online Advertising, and childrens videos have been doing it for a lot longer.

The flavor of the cotent is a bit different, but all media is like that. Look at a horror film, or romance novel. It&#x27;s very clear what human urges&#x2F;interests are being targetted.Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.

Pretty sure TikTok’s vans were politically motivated

People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.

What did I fall for here?I think this is a really interesting document, despite having very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at the bottom of the post).I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company.Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals handbook: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basecamp.com&#x2F;handbook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basecamp.com&#x2F;handbook</a>

Exactly... it feels weird that someone like Simon would fall for this and not see through it for what it is... someone spending his life being very efficient at building shit to sell it to an audience who&#x27;s too lazy to consume anything but shit, all that paid by a capitalist system running on oil to allow all this shit to happen and enrich the shitster...We don&#x27;t need to falsely pretend that those guys are interesting in any way... we should teach our kids to see through the bullshit, and ask to be less efficient, and more kind

Google wipes inactive accounts because they’re often used for spam and malware.

&gt;on a site you don&#x27;t pay for (YouTube)But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.

Social media &#x2F; influencer sphere a bubble that’s going to pop? I… highly doubt that.

So basically:Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don&#x27;t pay for (YouTube)The whole modern social media &#x2F; influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn&#x27;t truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;12418290?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;12418290?hl=en</a>

Yeah this hit hard for me as well.I’ve studiously avoided building on platforms, but very different mindset to decided to be the best player on that platform.Lesson learned: don’t make it about something else. Win the algo.

For every MrBeast there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands (millions?) you&#x27;ve never heard of. And for some of them, it&#x27;s because the platform pulled the plug on them.If someday YT decides to pull the plug on MrBeast, he might start singing a different tune. Or not, I mean, his millions and millions of dollars will probably make him feel better.

Building on someone&#x27;s platform is a gamble.It paid off for Mr. Beast.Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned before you make enough to retire or create another company. This is prime example of survivorship bias.

&gt;That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.It&#x27;s more specific, a YouTube video is very different from a TikTok video or an Instagram video.

I read that as less about &quot;building on someone else&#x27;s platform&quot; (though that&#x27;s still a risk they&#x27;re taking) and more a youtube &#x2F; media content producer version of &quot;perfect software doesn&#x27;t pay the bills, shipping software does&quot;. I&#x27;ve known plenty of good developers that if they didn&#x27;t have hard deadlines and people reminding them about what the real goal of the company is, would spend 6 months developing a perfect, provably correct PDF to JSON converter for reading any possible design of tables in all PDFs. Missing the fact that they only need to parse the tables in the CSV files that the vendors are sending us so we can invoice the customers.That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.

YouTube is fine as a distribution channel for now. Though there is some risk of being extorted or losing access, the bigger threat will come some years down the road when video is a legacy distribution format.Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won&#x27;t have to encode to linear formats.

There&#x27;s a difference, video is probably transferrable to an extent (with their capital they could probably buy&#x2F;launch beast-tube quickly and kids would follow).Building your software to depend on Google API&#x27;s and then be banned from Google would put you in deep trouble, building on Google systems but not relying on their API would still allow for an migration.

Is this supposed to be a gotcha of some kind? I don&#x27;t see any point or value in this comment.

Many people are so uncomfortable with risk that they publicly advocate (and personally live by) a policy of taking zero risk. Of course they also throw away the very real benefits that come packaged with many risks.

You actually believe he makes razor thin profit? And you believes he reinvests everything? Sorry but none of us have verified his company’s books. Just saying

Mr Beast videos do single digit millions in revenue per video, and he operates on razor thin margins re-investing everything. Youtube does $8.5Bn a quarter in revenue. For startups the target is the Youtube exit, not the Mr Beast exit. In fact, whilst Mr Beast is obviously doing a great job and making tonnes of money it&#x27;s not clear if he even ever could exit. What Mr Beast is doing is incredibly successful, but it&#x27;s not the silicon valley start up model.

“Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”Initial growth on someone else&#x27;s platform is a good idea. However, once you see some small success, it&#x27;s best to think about diversifying. Mr. Beast has already done this. He&#x27;s essentially his own brand now.

On one side, an army of HN commenters: “Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”On the other side, Mr Beast:&gt; Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.

I was fully expecting to read a load of nonsense, but it chimes quite a lot with military training, which shouldn&#x27;t actually be that surprising.e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than written etc.

I have a lot of memories in my childhood, but I can&#x27;t remember anything on this level. Sure, I grew up in a very different environment than the US, but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing? All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons? I surely wasn&#x27;t.

I&#x27;m only 26 and I&#x27;m also perhaps falling into the &quot;old man yells at clouds&quot; thing, but this feels different to me. Not Mr Beast by himself perhaps (never watched anything he&#x27;s made), but just in general the kind of content that is being pushed to kids algorithmically is insane to me.Watching my nephews grow up, I&#x27;m sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It&#x27;s quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they&#x27;re all below 10. It&#x27;s just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the &quot;plot&quot; is always some nonsensical crap.The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they&#x27;d rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.As a side note, reading this comment back I&#x27;d like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I&#x27;ve turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)

Maybe more &quot;old man yells at cloud&quot; but I am kinda with you in thinking it&#x27;s trash. The thing is that every generation has had its own equivalent swill for kids, this one is no different. His channel won&#x27;t last, there&#x27;s too much baggage around it, but it&#x27;ll get replaced with something equally trashy.

I think it&#x27;s worth reflecting on why you feel that way. I don&#x27;t see how other people are spending their time is something I need to push back on...

Yes, but there&#x27;s a difference between drugs and this. The lack of evidence that they are the same or even similar for example.

&gt; Why is this BS?Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don&#x27;t have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we&#x27;re so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.

&gt; I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BSWhy is this BS? It wouldn&#x27;t be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.

Meh, we don&#x27;t know what the counterfactual of a different media environment would be. For example, it seems not-even-crazy to believe that media&#x27;s addictiveness has played a major role in sedentary lifestyles which in turn is a major contributor to several of the top causes-of-death in the developed world (far greater than drugs).

It&#x27;s not just &quot;broad appeal&quot;. Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart&#x27;s music was made for the broad appeal. I see nothing wrong with the broad appeal. It&#x27;s what this appeal is made to and how. Humans have a lot of ways to appeal to them, and this particular way of appealing targets very base very addictive psychological mechanisms that ultimately hurt the person - just like addictive substances do. They don&#x27;t make the users better or smarter or calmer or anything like that - if anything, they make them dumber and more attention-deficient. That&#x27;s my problem with it.&gt; why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yetYou are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said &quot;I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS&quot; because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn&#x27;t even bother to read that part.

Comparison to drugs is a bit extreme, but I think that some level of concern about MrBeast-style operations and the content they produce is warranted.It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and&#x2F;or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?

How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos? How many potentially otherwise productive hours were wasted watching someone in ketchup? Obviously it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but it’s a valid question to ask.Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks

I like the idea that entertainment made for broad appeal is an existential threat to society worthy of comparison to drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. People have been appealing to the lowest common denominator for forever and yet the world soldiers on.Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you

Sometimes? Sure. All the time? You&#x27;d likely to hurt yourself pretty badly doing that, eventually (and maybe sooner than you&#x27;d realize). Nutrition-wise, I think, people starting to understand that. Information-wise, not so much.

Is it shallow entertainment? Sure.But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that&#x27;s fine too (and I can&#x27;t stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it&#x27;s &quot;not pure enough&quot;).

IMHO it&#x27;s quite divisive; there&#x27;s a significant percentage of the population that&#x27;s addicted to this sort of content, and there&#x27;s another which actually finds it boring.I&#x27;ve watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that &quot;influencer&quot; content and celebrities don&#x27;t.

It&#x27;s not English-speaking community specific. In every language I can speak, I can think of an equivalent of MrBeast for that area. Maybe a majority portion of the entire world&#x27;s population actually enjoys that kind of content. Nobody in my friend group enjoys that, but looking at my nephews, they&#x27;re all going crazy about it. There are going to be people who grew up with him for almost a decade, and that&#x27;s a crazy amount of time to build parasocial relationship with your favourite celebrity.

Most people are dumb because they are lazy and gave up long time ago. Their parents the same way, so the kids never had a chance. Like I had a house mate in my 20s. His parents just gave him everything. He busted his car, parents got him a new one. He lost his job and he just played call of duty all day and drank or smoke weed.One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.

I don&#x27;t know what subculture you&#x27;re living in, but in several of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent their children from consuming it, too.Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn&#x27;t uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there&#x27;s no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.I wish we knew.

Can&#x27;t agree more. 10 years ago I looked up transformers uploaded to YouTube, and they couldn&#x27;t stand the nostalgia test. Plots are primitive, characters are flat. It made me actually recall that by 13 years, I started feeling little embarrassment watching them because of thqe plot itself.Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we&#x27;d expect from the &#x27;80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest &#x27;50s factor for me.)

I get the feeling, but at the same time, this feels like normal culture gaps. I don&#x27;t get &quot;sponge bob square pants&quot; but there are people out that that insist it was if not a pinnacle of animation entertainment, then a hugely creative and entertaining show that deserves its place in the pantheons of animation. And all those huge 80&#x27;s era properties that so many have years of nostalgic memories of, like transformers, he-man or voltron were all &quot;cynical cash grabs&quot; and 30 minute commercials for toys. So much so the concerned parents of the time demanded the government step in. Now the jury might be out on whether that generation is worse than previous generations, but if they are I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s going to be because transformers was a toy marketing gimmick instead of high art with a strong moral message.Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a &quot;sufficiently developed palette&quot; for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I&#x27;ve seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it&#x27;s not entertaining anymore. It&#x27;s sort of the reverse of the &quot;Seinfeld isn&#x27;t funny&quot; issue. We&#x27;re not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it&#x27;s been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we&#x27;re looking at something from today and wondering why it&#x27;s entertaining because we&#x27;ve been entertained in the same way in the past.

And just reality TV in general. His &quot;Girls vs Boys&quot; stunt is just a budget version of Big Brother, Survivor, etc.

Wasn&#x27;t Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty years ago?

watching sports is entertaining as you&#x27;re watching highly skilled individuals perform at the highest level + gives you a sense of belonging; games - entertainment and skill development, whether those are multiplayer games that teach you cooperation and competition, or single-player games that is fun and in a lot of cases learning (through lore), developing motor skills, strategic thinking and so on; tv&#x2F;reading - learning (nothing is useless information, it helps create more connections in your brain);yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value

What do you mean unnecessary, I saved king Casimir twice, random people at the tavern are talking about it every single day.

Most hobbies are just as dumb when you think about it.Sports = watching grown men play with balls,
Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve,
TV&#x2F;Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information

Maybe a little sprinkling of PT Barnum in there as well?

I am that get of my lawn guy, no shame. You are 100% correct and I do call for bs like government intervention, as the lesser evil, ofc. See what happened with tobacco. IMO it&#x27;s the same.

On another hand it&#x27;s a point of turning for all those that dismiss it like yourselves. Maybe culture needs this so all &quot;bad curiosities&quot; are catered for, so it can serve as a base for more ambitious next steps.

&gt; They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addictsLooking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren&#x27;t the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can&#x27;t solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren&#x27;t even close to that level.&gt; but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as &quot;benefits&quot; they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).

&gt; “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”&gt; In general the more extreme the better.I may be sounding like &quot;get off my lawn&quot; guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?

whether you&#x27;re looking for CTR on one end of the continuum or 1&#x2F;CTR on the other end of the spectrum, you&#x27;re looking at the same thing, just without understanding what one word means

I think it&#x27;s a good example of understanding how people think is good for the success at the top. Out of 1000 people asking &quot;Wtf is CTR now?&quot; maybe one needs a precise definition usable for immediate conversion to the programming code. That&#x27;s the person for whom CTR and 1&#x2F;CTR difference is important. The other 999 need to understand what&#x27;s this term is used to measure and where it comes from - and for them this explanation is just fine. They are not people who make decisions or calculations based on it - those already know what CTR is. They are random people that need to fit a new thing into their mental model - and they won&#x27;t even notice the difference, especially given the followup explanation.

... Sounds like a person with plenty of fluency made a typo.

From the referenced doc:&gt; CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it.That&#x27;s actually 1&#x2F;CTR.Another example of math fluency not being required for success at the top.

The grind to do what? Make an endless stream of shit content? Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_dilemma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_dilemma</a>

&gt;Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.This is the new type of cable television and it&#x27;s free. Yea sure I pay it with my data but at least I don&#x27;t need to spit out money every month to watch it.&gt;I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing.Again, entertainment on YouTube is free....even YouTube stopped bothering me to disable my ad-blocker so MrBeast is not getting a penny from me. I might buy YouTube Premium at some point in the future tho.

Trying to discern whether YouTube or TikTok influencers are better than the other is like picking which tooth you want pulled. Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing. The fact that a lot of HNers seem to look up to Mr. Beast is almost as tellingly acerbic as the reliance on Steve Jobs for intelligent business quotes.

I respect his dedication and grind....I prefer more YouTube pop culture and YouTubers than TikTok and TikTokers. YouTube is so much better.

Or the actual PDF file instead of Google docs: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;splet.4a.si&#x2F;dir&#x2F;How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;splet.4a.si&#x2F;dir&#x2F;How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production....</a>

Direct link to the PDF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUSa7Y3J&#x2F;view" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...</a>

&gt; I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.

&gt; I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.Well he is in the middle of a PR push responding to the claims from former employees that he fakes his videos and is generally fraudulent

As far as I can tell this was leaked to a person who’s been having a high profile disagreement with MrBeast, by either a current or former staff member.Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.

Mr Beast’s company has been getting a ton of negative attention for how it works and how it treats employees and contestants. It seems plausible it was leaked as another example of toxic culture.

It was leaked with a lot of attention being paid to the &quot;no doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean no&quot; section in the context of abuse at the MrBeast org

Are we sure this got “leaked”? Or is this merely part of the not leaked production PDF?It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?

&gt; Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.Excellent.

The bulk of content on Youtube today is some stock video footage, an AI-generated script read by a computer voice. Maybe a human spends a few minutes cutting together the video footage? But almost entirely automated spam designed to feed Youtube some pink slime and rake in the $.Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.

Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. &quot;Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency&quot; is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these &quot;paradoxes&quot; again and again until it sinks in.

Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I&#x27;ve had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as &quot;obvious&quot; and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.

It&#x27;s also included in Spotify Premium for free.

This sounds intriguing. Of note for anyone with an audible membership: The Goal is in the free library.

Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast &quot;used to make everyone read ...&quot; and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than &quot;efficiency&quot; and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Goal_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Goal_(novel)</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;17255186-the-phoenix-project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;17255186-the-phoenix-pro...</a>

Spoken like a “c-player” haha. I’m with you though. It’s only for people who really very much enjoy working on the things he does.

Seems like your average creative industry company, to be honest.Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.

Reading through the document, this company seems hellish for its employees. I wonder how the pay and perks are

I personally deeply disliked the semi-cult like explanation that anyone moving out was basically not good enough to be there in the first place.Apart from that, it&#x27;s the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.

You can&#x27;t post flamebait like this to HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>Edit: it looks like we&#x27;ve been having to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines for years:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39281820">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39281820</a> (Feb 2024)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35656288">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35656288</a> (April 2023)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34844518">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34844518</a> (Feb 2023)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18585046">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18585046</a> (Dec 2018)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18575831">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18575831</a> (Dec 2018)Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don&#x27;t want to ban you, so if you&#x27;d please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.

I was thinking that too. It’s something you don’t hear much from YC but a lot of founders have similar corporate hiring policies.

I don’t see much similarity here, other than the use of those three letters and the idea that Cs should be removed from the company.The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.MrBeast Cs are reasonably capable but are missing out on that crucial learning instinct - again, not mentioned by Welch, who has Cs who are incompetent procrastinators.

I hope everyone here who is praising the A, B, C-player framework recognizes that it comes from Jack Welch’s much criticized Vitality Curve system.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitality_curve#Ratings" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitality_curve#Ratings</a>

I really liked his distinction between A, B and C-team players. This could be a really good framework for recruiting in an ambitious startup.

Dogpack404 is a former mrbeast employee currently exposing mrbeast for varying misconduct, such as faking his videos, running illegal lotteries through his videos, doing a crypto pump n dump, making fraudulent claims about his merch, inhumane treatment of contestants and harbouring multiple sex offenders at his company. The list goes on and Dogpack404 is not the only one currently exposing things like this, but is maybe the most prominent.

who is dogpack404, and why is posting their links obligatory?

Obligatory dogpack404 link [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@DogPack404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@DogPack404</a>

They identified something their customers (viewers) like and the competition can&#x27;t provide, and play to that unique strength. That&#x27;s pretty standard, they just give an example instead of obfuscating the principle in management speak.With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck

They do, but usually you&#x27;ll find it worded something like &quot;Deliver high value, seamless and synerginized entertainment that frontalizes our strengths and inspires diverse modalities of consumer satisfaction&quot;

The valve handbook is an interesting read as well, it&#x27;s very different, but in a way very similar.Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;valve&#x2F;Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;valve&#x2F;Valve_NewEmplo...</a>

Other corporations seriously have employee handbooks with sentences like this in?“… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”

This reminds me of how every corporation I&#x27;ve ever seen operates. Why is this strange or interesting?

I think this document predates the current scandal - the page 19 reference is to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;style&#x2F;mrbeast-beast-games-competition-show.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;style&#x2F;mrbeast-beast-games...</a> where the more recent scandal is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;amp&#x2F;rcna164777" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;amp&#x2F;rcna164777</a>(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)

I wonder why it wasn&#x27;t mentioned in the article.

If you read the content of the PDF instead of focusing on the problematic wording of the section title, you&#x27;ll see that he doesn&#x27;t mean it in a personal boundary context, but in a problem solving  &#x2F; sales context. Most people&#x27;s default answer to ideas that are totally new to them is &quot;no&quot; and accepting that first no on its face means you don&#x27;t get to achieve your goal.

Mr.Beast is in some big controversies right now, and it&#x27;s honestly much more interesting than this PDF, I expected to see the &quot;no does not mean no&quot; section in this PDF.

There&#x27;s a disincentive for YouTube to change because it&#x27;d make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.It&#x27;s almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it&#x27;s disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream&#x2F;downstream fixes theirs.I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that&#x27;s not owned by an ad company.

I&#x27;m using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and&#x2F;or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.

There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.

The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails&#x2F;titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.

First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture.  No excuse, but still.

&gt; How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market?You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.

At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It&#x27;s very operations focused.  Get x done on day y or you&#x27;re fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?

That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!”More startups should be this transparent about their stated&#x2F;desired culture (even if unintentionally).

What I find interesting in reading this is that it&#x27;s not particularly surprising in content. And I don&#x27;t mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard &quot;how to make it in a competitive industry&quot; advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you&#x27;d leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I&#x27;m sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. &quot;Follow up when you ask someone for something&quot;, &quot;Don&#x27;t commit to giving X if you can&#x27;t actually get X&quot;, &quot;Have a backup plan&quot;, &quot;Try to turn a failure into something useful&quot;, &quot;Own your mistakes&quot;, &quot;Make sure you&#x27;ve exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it&#x27;s impossible&quot;, &quot;Do the hard work early so you&#x27;re not cramming it all in at the end&quot;, &quot;You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn&#x27;t know anything&quot;. Even the &quot;A,B,C&quot; employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there&#x27;s 3 cars in a Wendy&#x27;s drive through, you&#x27;ll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have &quot;C&quot; employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you&#x27;ve arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.

I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy.That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.

&gt; I think it&#x27;s pretty clear he has figured out how to &quot;master&quot; YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.content for dumb kids

&gt; I think it&#x27;s important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it&#x27;s necessary, maybe, for his businessI think it&#x27;s pretty clear he has figured out how to &quot;master&quot; YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.So if he doesn&#x27;t micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?It&#x27;s not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no &quot;Here&#x27;s my past experience&quot;. None of that matters at his level of success.

&gt; 4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders&#x2F;equity owners, not employees.That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)

&gt; and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production rolesHow do you know they are unqualified?

There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles

It&#x27;s more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.It&#x27;s even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn&#x27;t very good.The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.Made a mistake once? That&#x27;s fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.

It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said &quot;A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players&quot;. That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.

&gt;I always love the &quot;just hire A-players&quot; line.
As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.If a startup can&#x27;t attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won&#x27;t solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;etc. in their initial stages.If you can&#x27;t convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.&gt;And that 95% of startups don&#x27;t know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don&#x27;t have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.I said most don&#x27;t know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read &quot;Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?&quot;. Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don&#x27;t even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.

I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player &gt; A player)- they look too much into credentials (big name school &#x2F; employer) and do not adequately vet ability- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.

&gt;trying to hire mediocre peopleIt should be &quot;always retain A-players&quot;. You can hire as many ABC&#x27;s as you like - some of those C&#x27;s will become B&#x27;s and A&#x27;s, and some of the B&#x27;s will become A&#x27;s, and the rest .. you let go with severance.Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.

Having recently switched jobs, I was again reminded of just how terrible most interviewers are. The more senior the interviewer, the more terrible.

I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By definition, everyone cannot hire A players.

Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.

&gt; As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of &#x27;mediocre people&#x27; instead of one &#x27;A-player&#x27;; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.

I always love the &quot;just hire A-players&quot; line.As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.And that 95% of startups don&#x27;t know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don&#x27;t have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.

&gt; 2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.&quot;Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!&quot;...seriously?

&gt; But success has different definitions.Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF?&gt; I do not consider Jimmy successful.By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?

In this profile from 2022 Jimmy said his goal was to become the number one YouTube channel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;culture-features&#x2F;mrbeast-youtube-cover-story-interview-1334604&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;culture-features&#x2F;mrbeas...</a>According to this Wikipedia page <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...</a> he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.

&gt; I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.

Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all the kids a gold medal. It&#x27;s pink and fluffy.

&gt; can&#x27;t deny the successI don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)

Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are evaluating success.A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important.We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.

Is anyone seriously denying the success?What&#x27;s definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.

Just like you can&#x27;t argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it&#x27;s gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.

That&#x27;s gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age Christianity, you know it&#x27;s wrong, but you can&#x27;t argue with the success, so y not?

Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society.You don&#x27;t have to imagine very hard.

I don&#x27;t think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.Success doesn&#x27;t really have a moral component, it&#x27;s relative to the stated goal. You could argue it&#x27;s not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can&#x27;t deny that he has achieved success.So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is &quot;what made them so effective?&quot;. A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there&#x27;s something that can be learned. I think that&#x27;s what people mean, not that &quot;people in tech generally value efficiency&quot;.

&gt; that&#x27;s clearly because people in tech generally value efficiencyI think this is you reading this into the comment. They don&#x27;t mention efficiency.

&gt; is BAD, not a &quot;success&quot;that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.

&gt; but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that &quot;being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don&#x27;t need&quot; is BAD, not a &quot;success&quot;That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.

If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?

A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating &quot;being efficient&quot; with &quot;having success&quot;...that&#x27;s clearly because people in tech generally value efficiencybut we have to take a step back collectively and understand that &quot;being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don&#x27;t need&quot; is BAD, not a &quot;success&quot;

Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?

I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here.How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic &#x2F; network capture?You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.

&gt; Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t work there.This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can&#x27;t choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn&#x27;t.

&gt; where you saw bad culture or micromanagingMr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That&#x27;s his brand. He can&#x27;t let his employees plan a video that he won&#x27;t like.I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don&#x27;t like working on multiple things at the same time. But that&#x27;s personal preference; I don&#x27;t particularly like Mr. Beast&#x27;s videos, so I don&#x27;t see myself working for his company any time soon.I&#x27;m more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don&#x27;t think he can scale himself much more.

&gt; bad cultureThe let &quot;let boys be childish&quot; part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random &quot;hahas&quot; littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.&gt; micromanagingHe has a playbook&#x2F;formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don&#x27;t have freedom in vision.I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don&#x27;t have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).

I read the entire document and I don&#x27;t understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging.Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that&#x27;s a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t work there.

Maybe the subheading “no does not mean no” can be also taken literally.

Unfortunately, the person he&#x27;d hired to predict the future was not a A-player.

literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player hire?

I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company.In bigger companies, it&#x27;s a zero sum game. They don&#x27;t really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.

&gt; Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders&#x2F;equity owners, not employees.The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.

&gt; Lot of people critiquing this, but you can&#x27;t deny the success.Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there&#x27;s little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.

He gives clear and actionable definitions, which is what makes it remarkable and different to everyone else saying or implying what you wrote.You can&#x27;t strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.

&gt;2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.I love coming on here and seeing the world&#x27;s wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as &quot;only hire good workers; don&#x27;t hire bad workers&quot;

And as all the past 2 months show, you don&#x27;t get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor.&gt;I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than &gt;95% of startup founders.Id bet so too. Becuase he&#x27;s definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.&gt; Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.It really depends on your stage of scale. You don&#x27;t need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.

Lot of people critiquing this, but you can&#x27;t deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups.1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than &gt;95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking&#x2F;being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren&#x27;t that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.3. Building value &gt; making money4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders&#x2F;equity owners, not employees.5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.The management&#x2F;communication stuff is mostly about working on set&#x2F;dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it&#x27;s important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it&#x27;s necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.

That’s there, but the parts about taking responsibility for your work, keeping people you delegate work to accountable and negotiating with vendors and being persistent is stuff you usually get informally.I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info

It is nice to see the red flags in writing ahead of time. After all &quot;boys will be boys&quot;

You are correct. There are way too many assistant roles in the creative industry that come with little to none real job training, just “watch what I do, or do as I tell, and never make a mistake twice or you’re toast”.I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.

This is actually a really good document for someone who is a junior or assistant. I&#x27;ve worked a variety of jobs and didn&#x27;t get much documents on training like this, mostly compliance stuff. You could take a lot of it out and get good points on managing people and taking ownership for tasks. It seems redundant or basic, but a lot of these things aren&#x27;t explicitly mentioned, usually informally only.

&gt; I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him.Nah, you didn&#x27;t. You&#x27;re the parent, if you don&#x27;t like the content, don&#x27;t let your kids watch it.

I have kids and I&#x27;m really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out.But, what&#x27;s the alternative?For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he&#x27;s even inside MrBeast&#x27;s orbit. And, he&#x27;s not putting out as much content.What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.Does YouTube kill those channels?

How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)