Mr. Beast Is Better Than You

It is good to use social pressure to get people to donate

Mr. Beast is the most popular YouTuber in the world, whose YouTube videos often have titles like “7 Days Exploring An Underground City,” “World’s Deadliest Obstacle Course,” and “I Spent 7 Days In Solitary Confinement.” They often involve paying people lavish sums of money in exchange for entering wild and entertaining situations (e.g. he paid people to enact a real-life squid game).

Remarkably, Mr. Beast is also a philanthropist, having given away more than 30 million dollars. Even more remarkably, he often gives them away to charities that are very good, helping out poor people in the third world. A recent video—part of a massive collaboration with many other YouTubers—provided clean water for over 2 million people!

Naturally, as accompanies any attempt to uncontroversially better the world, this has made a lot of people very upset. People complain about him “using his good deeds as “content” off of which he profits,” and find there to be something crass about it. This has always seemed like a very lame criticism. What matters in philanthropy is helping people. Mr. Beast, by making videos about philanthropy, is able to help people more—he’s able to make more money which he can donate and get others to donate.

If you have billions of dollars and sit on it, never giving it away, you face no backlash. But if you donate it so that poor children get clean water, then the think-pieces start rolling in about how you’re engaged in charity imperialism. This results in extremely malformed incentives. I think we should praise people for doing good, without questioning their motives. Even if people are doing amazingly good things for self-interested reasons, it’s good that they are doing those things and we should encourage them to do more. Doctors who perform life-saving surgeries also get a paycheck at the end, but we don’t shame them or write a million think-pieces about their wicked motives.

Now, the Mr. Beast rumor mill is endless. There are claims that one of the people he worked with a while ago shared sexual content in a discord server that had minors. There are claims that he made some racially insensitive comments like a decade ago. Some people who voluntarily entered Mr. Beast’s challenges also complain that the conditions aren’t nice enough and that he spent too much time shilling for some drink that he was sponsored by. I’m not going to talk about any of that, but it mostly seems pretty obviously ridiculous.

But recently, Mr. Beast has gotten into new hot water for doing a livestream where he came off as kind of a jerk. He called up a bunch of other YouTubers and asked them to donate money to a charity giving clean water for kids. The people he was calling were very rich. He haggled them to some degree, saying stuff like “did that even make a dent?” after they donated, hoping that they’d donate more. This was an attempt to use social pressure to get them to give more money.

I am in favor of this. I think it is good to use peer pressure to get people to donate money to effective charities.

When a person has tens or hundreds of millions of dollars which they do not donate, they are acting in a way that is seriously morally wrong. They could better the lives of staggeringly large numbers of people but are refusing to do so for selfish reasons. It is good to peer pressure people to get them to do things that are very good and to stop them from doing things that are seriously morally wrong. Convincing someone to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to an effective charity likely does more good than saving a single life—and it would obviously be alright to use peer pressure to get someone to save a life.

I buy Peter Singer’s drowning child argument. I think failing to give to life-saving charities when you could save a person’s life is a bit like walking past a drowning child whose life you could save. But if we imagine that a bunch of very rich YouTubers were all ignoring a drowning child, it would obviously be permissible to be a bit of a jerk to get them to save the drowning child.

Many of these people are sufficiently wealthy that Mr. Beast’s requests could easily bring in an extra expected tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Each dollar allegedly provides someone clean water for a year. So by being a bit of a jerk, he could provide people clean water for tens of thousands of years. Ask yourself: is it okay to social pressure people to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from drinking the kind of horrible, disease-ridden, polluted water displayed below?

It’s heartbreaking that we live in a world where so many people don’t have access to clean water. But in a world like that, it is obviously okay to use a bit of peer pressure to prevent tens of thousands of extra people from having to do that. This is not a difficult question in moral philosophy!

In one of the clips that people found offputting, Mr. Beast “peer pressured” Adin Ross into donating 400,000 dollars. Things to know about Adin Ross:

1. He is very rich. His net worth is over 40 million dollars.

2. He has described Hitler as “a great leader,” and he is friends with Andrew Tate.

Now, call me crazy, but I am not actually heartbroken when a guy who loves Hitler and befriends sex-traffickers gets peer pressured into giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to effective charities. That is a good thing! I am in favor of it and want there to be more of it! If you’re the kind of person who can be casually peer pressured into giving away enough money to provide people with clean water for hundreds of thousands of years, then I don’t find it tragic when you are. It isn’t as if Adin Ross was forced into bankruptcy; the quantity of money he gave away will not have the slightest impact on his life. To the extent it replaces any expenditure, it will be lavish expenditures on overpriced cars and private jets. Every one of the people benefitted by the donation will be benefitted more substantially than Ross was harmed.

Now, it’s possible that because Mr. Beast came off as a jerk, he’ll in the future be able to raise less money for effective charities. If so, then his actions will, in the end, backfire. But even then, I think it was a risky gamble that might very well have been expected to pay off. If a person tries to raise a bunch of money for very effective charities, they should be praised for this. And if I had to guess, his heavy-handed tactics will increase the total amount of money raised for effective charities.

We can quibble over the details of whether Mr. Beast behaved badly on particular occasions. But overall, I think this somewhat misses the point. Mr. Beast has been an amazingly positive force for good in the world. MLK Junior also may have been a jerk in some ways—he was apparently unfaithful to his wife. But people focusing on that are missing the point; his progress on civil rights is far more important. It’s the thing that people should have in mind when they think about him. The other stuff is a rounding error.

I feel a similar way about Mr. Beast. If when a guy raises millions of dollars for charities providing clean water to poor people earning dollars a day, your first thought is that he was a bit rude when doing it, your priorities are in the wrong place. Jeremiah Johnson put it well:

When people criticize Mr. Beast’s philanthropy, I have to wonder what their main thing is.

There are two things that we typically consider when thinking about charitable efforts. What is directly being done? And what are the second-order effects that might come from it? For good reasons, we most often focus on the direct results. When Mr. Beast helped 1000 deaf people hear, did it work? Can they now hear? Did thousands of amputees actually get prosthetic limbs? By this standard, there’s very little room to criticize Donaldson. He says he’s going to go do big things, and he consistently delivers results.

…

The videos feel exploitative! Ok, but can those blind people still see? Did their sight miraculously return to them? Yes it did.

This is white saviorism! Cool story, but did the communities in Africa with no safe drinking water get wells? Did those wells solve a problem that was making their children sick? Yes? Ok.

This upholds broken systems! Yes, but did the homes get built? Were homeless people given permanent housing at no cost to themselves? They were? Then what the fuck are you complaining about?

It’s a lot easier to find random stuff to nitpick if a person does things to try to make the world a better place than if they don’t. If you only criticize people when they try to do good, you create deeply screwed up incentives. In my view, the people who merit criticisms are those who sit on tens of millions of dollars—a sum of money that could save staggeringly large numbers of lives—rather than the people who say “come on bro, you should give a bunch of money to this effective charity.”

The main thing with respect to Mr. Beast’s recent charity stream is the fact that millions of extra people will now have water. If that is not forefront in your mind when considering his recent actions, then I think you’re thinking about the issue completely wrong. Bettering the lives of millions of people matters way more than the dumb internet drama that makes people mad at Mr. Beast! Mr. Beast is better than his critics.