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community weblog

Folding Ideas on MrBeast

Why was I invited to Beast Studios? (SLYT; 1h18). What? Dan Olson was invited by MrBeast's team to a tour of Beast Studios? Dan Olson, of the Folding Ideas channel? The "Line goes up" guy? That Dan Olson? An essay on (in)authenticity and inefficiency. Also the first essay recorded on a bouncy castle, among other firsts.
posted by JSilva on Apr 17, 2026 at 1:52 PM

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This was GREAT! The irony of "line goes up" by the end just...well, what a subtle way to encapsulate a criticism--

FIRST METAFILTER COMMENT TO USE THE WORD 'ENCAPSULATE' IN A MR BEAST THREAD (dubstep ensues)
posted by mittens at 1:58 PM

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Well... The line did go up, until the point where it started to go down.

PS: First reply to a MetaFilter comment that used the word "encapsulate"!!!
posted by JSilva at 2:03 PM

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This is the first metafilter comment that was entirely irrelevant to anything posted. Pickle.
posted by robotmachine at 2:25 PM

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Tangentially related: Your Favorite YouTube Channel is (Probably) Owned By Private Equity, which makes many of the same points about the pressure to make the line go up leading to quality going down.

Record Guy confirms this is the first on topic comment that might also be considered a derail in a folding ideas thread posted in April!
posted by autopilot at 2:47 PM

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oh nice it was also recently Beast Week on the podcast Kill the Computer and they were also talking at length about the extremely bad Beast Games
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:54 PM

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Loved this.

"The Beast empire is comically precarious, suffering from the conditions of its own success, and for a brief moment I got to drift past it- a flailing animal, a great beast of the sea, ill-considered, impulsive, no real plan, dysfunctional, obsessed with weird stuff, committed 100% to the immediate term, hurtling itself forward into anything and everything out of an existential fear that if it ever stops swimming for long enough to get its' bearings, it will die."

If that doesn't just sum up everything about 2026 so far.
posted by Seven Deadly Gins at 2:59 PM

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Intriguing shot at 37:37 of Dan sitting next to Doug Walker. Did they have anything to say to each other about Dan's video criticizing Doug's parody of Pink Floyd's The Wall?
posted by cyanistes at 3:00 PM

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cyanistes

He actually brought this up on Bluesky

There was no Epic Showdown with Doug. He sort of recognized me but not really. I reminded him who I was and he just rolled with it. Since he was fine, literally zero reason to be antagonistic. We actually talked a good bit over the two days b/c there was a ton of standing around.
posted by gc at 3:36 PM

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There's also a note in the video description.
posted by cyanistes at 3:45 PM

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This is going to be wild but while we're on the Doug Walker tangent.

You'll be shocked at how woefully inefficient James 'Jimmy' "Mr. Beast" Donaldson is that he makes 'fundamentally incurious' 'bizarrely shallowly misinterpreting Pink Floyd's The Wall' Doug Walker look like a paragon of creativity.
posted by Pachylad at 4:56 PM

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that was shockingly good.
posted by evilmonk at 7:21 PM

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I guess other mediocre YouTube channels will think twice before flying Dan Olson for a wine and dine, huh.
posted by subdee at 8:35 PM

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i'm glad he felt the need to live up to his curmugeon rep

i mean. you pay the man, he does his thing, respect
posted by eustatic at 8:50 PM

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I've been aware of Mr. Beast in a vague Youtube phenomenon capacity and know his face to the degree that people referencing or repurposing youtube thumbnails makes it unavoidable, but I haven't really followed in any detail (largely because the stank vibe of the whole enterprise that Olson dissects throughout this piece). And so I've spent more time actually looking at Mr. Beast in motion in this video than I otherwise have cumulatively to date, and about fifteen minutes in I was thinking "this guy could be Jimmy Fallon's cousin" and then, there we are, fifty minutes or so in, with a two shot of him and Fallon on the talk show and it's like, yep, that's...these guys are vat mates.
posted by cortex at 10:00 PM

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This all fits with one of my pet theories, which is that so often what makes certain people successful is just their luck at being in the right place and time in the zeitgeist. If it wasn't some bored kid counting to 100,000 while he watched GoT then it would've been someone and something else. First-mover advantage is real, and the algorithm only makes it realer.

And what Mr Beast found as his niche, well — of course children are fickle and the line on his viewership has peaked and looks to be fading. Like, yeah, the guy famous for having figured out how to make a type of YT video that is catnip for the underdeveloped brains of 9 year old boys is having a hard time breaking out of that niche into mainstream success with adult audiences who have adult tastes. He's not a YT savant capable of making anything into a success, he's a guy who figured out how to make a very particular sort of thing into a success so long as the capricious small people who constitute his audience continue to want that thing. Unsurprisingly, hitching your wagon to the tastes of that demographic is a dicey proposition.

"We use the most BTS cameras" and "we have 600 GoPros" in the context of "we want to be a 100 billion dollar company" seems to suggest a confusion of causality, where they think that if they do the sort of things they imagine a big company does, that will manifest them as a big company. A sort of fake-it-til-you-make-it but with cameras.

And of course the people who are (apparently) making a game show where one component is to have the host dump money at a contestant's feet until they agree to do something morally questionable are also the ones taking Saudi money to drive sports cars around Riyadh. People with the capacity to override their greed with concern for human decency don't get hired to work for Mr Beast's company. Expecting otherwise would be folly.
posted by axiom at 10:09 PM

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Dan's video criticizing Doug's parody of Pink Floyd's The Wall?

oh wow, I had not seen any of this and jesus christ i appreciate being exposed to it through Dan's video rather than somehow tripping across the full parody itself because oof what an embarrassing shitshow

like there is plenty to dig into critically about The Wall in its various incarnations and Waters as the weird flawed force behind all that but, fuck, at least pay attention to the thing you're gonna go long on, and maybe develop any understanding of scansion while you're at it
posted by cortex at 10:54 PM

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The Wall parody critique is satisfyingly savage.
Certain things are still going to take all week no matter how half you ass them.
I am so stealing that line.
posted by flabdablet at 7:48 AM

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Probably a derail but Mr Beast's Feastables chocolate is worse than crap holiday chocolate. My kids had to try it... Never again. It's like a crypto pump and dump in overpriced candy form.
posted by Catblack at 8:58 AM

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somebody needs to advise jimmy to take his food offerings to the next level by reviving the dilberito
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM

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Also check out the companion video for free on Patreon: Beast Games 2 Strong/Smart: an Exhaustive Review.
posted by Pendragon at 9:55 AM

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Probably a derail but Mr Beast's Feastables chocolate is worse than crap holiday chocolate

Not at all. Several minutes of the video are devoted to using his chocolate as an example of Beast's "do first, think later" approach.
posted by Room 101 at 10:00 AM

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Beast's "do first, think later" approach.

Ryan George on this.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:21 PM

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Dan's video criticizing Doug's parody of Pink Floyd's The Wall?

oh wow, I had not seen any of this and jesus christ i appreciate being exposed to it through Dan's video rather than somehow tripping across the full parody itself because oof what an embarrassing shitshow

Ironically, it's the most that I've ever watched of Doug's anything, purely by the excerpts in Dan's video.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:27 PM

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Also check out the companion video for free on Patreon: Beast Games 2 Strong/Smart: an Exhaustive Review.

On the one hand, it's and hour and twenty three minutes of finding out in detail what was already clear from the main video: Beast Games 2 sucked and was badly made by overconfident dipshits with money to burn.

On the other hand, you get to watch Dan Olson make that case and so it's pretty deeply satisfying.

One of the things I keep thinking about through all this is how much I've enjoyed the show Physical 100 the last few years; it's a Korean reality competition that does a wildly better job of running with the "battle royale but without the murders" than Jimmy The Beast does, with a hundred variously swole, mostly Korean athletes competing in a bunch of different physical events and winnowing down the 100 to a single winner over the course of ten or so episodes.

It's still reality TV, and it's still dumb in the way that's gonna be, but between far better production values all around and a kind of charmingly polite and earnest vibe that seems to be a consistent feature of Korean reality shows compared to American productions, it is just nice to watch. At no point does the show intentionally or through clumsiness make you feel bad for watching; you're just watching a bunch of muscle nerds having a pretty good time hanging out with and competing against each other and being excited about strenuous exercise.

And the thing is, the first season of that came out a year and change before Beast Games Season 1. Like, there was literally a solid, well-executed template to learn from. Whether Team Beast watched it and just threw out any useful lessons or was so sure of themselves that they didn't bother to review the literature, who fuckin' knows, but some of the obvious deficiencies in the physical balancing and event design that Olson walks through in the bonus video just feel that much more wildly arrogant when a lot of these problems have already been demonstrably solved.
posted by cortex at 10:52 PM

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(I will say as a note that season three make an interesting departure by abandoning the "100 athletes in South Korea" setup in service of having several pre-fab small teams from various different Southeast Asian countries, and it's both good and bad. On the good side, it's nice to have some variety and the opportunity to do more genuinely team-focused stuff rather then the mix of free-for-all and tenuous temporary alliances and kickball team-picking vibes from the first couple seasons, and cuts the headcount going in to let you spend more time with the individual competitors, AND it makes it possible to not either repeat a bunch of previous contestants or scratch at diminishing returns of available, TV-ready superlatively swole primo Korean athletes. On the down side, you're sort of...stuck with obnoxious teams for a lot longer, and the lopsided dynamics of smaller/weaker players out of a pile of 100 getting ganked early in the season becomes more one of the smaller/weaker players on each of the various teams getting sidelined and/or patronized throughout the entire season run. And the baked in national teams makes it a little less dynamic in general. It still works, just didn't feel like an outright winner of a format change to me.)
posted by cortex at 11:00 PM

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For that kind of money they could have just bought Mr Kitano in to do a few more seasons of Takeshi's Castle.
posted by phigmov at 11:48 PM

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Yes! Takeshi's Castle was great. People competing and having fun. People cooperating is also great, and I'm reminded of shows like Fort Boyard.

But this? Awful. My pet theory is that MrBeast and his associates, and all the people that produce "reality" shows like this, have been so consumed by greed that they need to believe that all others are like them. That need to believe that all others will easily compromise their values when faced with the prospect of winning big.
posted by JSilva at 2:15 AM

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