(2024-09-25) Scanlon The Mr Beast Memo Is A Guide To The Gen Z Workforce

Kyla Scanlon (at EpsilonTheory): The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce. Mr. Beast is one of the most fascinating people in the world. He is somewhat of an Isaac Newton or a da Vinci… for the digital age. He is obsessively a master of his craft, making clickbait-y game show style YouTube videos. (2024-09-15) Leaked MrBeast memo on Production

He has more followers than people than there are people in United States—about 430 million across all his channels.

He does more than just YouTube. He has MrBeast Burger, a chocolate bar company called Feastables, and now is expanding with ‘Lunchly’ a Lunchables competitor (a nutrionally concerning cash grab).

He has captured an immense amount of mindshare with the youth (particularly the teenage boy crowd – 70% of his viewers are male)

He is very well known for giving away money – and for the intensity of his shows. Contestants on his $100 million Amazon competition series are suing him and Amazon for unsafe working conditions

Recently, a leaked memo he wrote about working for him circled around the Internet. Titled HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION

He talks a lot about communication and storytelling and calls finance people unfunny.

It’s a great read.
It’s also terrifying.

The document shows a remarkable dedication to efficiency that I think most of us crave as this point. But there are cleared blurred lines like ‘NO DOES NOT MEAN NO’.

He’s a risk taker; he understands bottlenecks, and he prioritizes communication

So it’s a lot of ‘pay attention to numbers, do things that excite the Beast, do a lot but do it well, be really focused and consume content, and talk to each other a lot’. All of these make sense

But I want to talk about two things – 1) the good and bad of Mr Beast’s memo with a specific focus on the attention economy and 2) what this says about Gen Z workstyle.

The good is that Mr. Beast really is a fantastic operator that seems allergic to bureaucracy

But the bad is a lot.

the environment that Mr. Beast has won in is worrying. It all points back to the issues that we are facing with overproduction, which will only be accelerated by GenAI.

There are real-world implications to the more and the more and the more.

And no one is stopping with AI, not when there is so much money to be fabricated from a non-reality.

AI is hot, and it’s making the planet hot too.

Zooming back in – we both know what I am about to say here. I mean, as my boss at Bloomberg Opinion pointed out, there was a TIME article with Mr. Beast on the cover essentially saying, “Wow, this guy has really figured out eyeballs.”

Dear reader, we both know that I am going to point out that the gamification of attention is probably a bad thing, that meaning has gotten lost in metrics, and that Mr Beast’s operational strength is disconnected from the actual value quality of his output.

I know all this because this is the world I operate in! I am a hypocrite, waxing poetic about a guy who just does my job (making videos on social media) better than me!

Mr. Beast has succeeded in a world that is designed for algorithm maximization. Mr. Beast is just very good at being very good at making broadly palatable content that is insane to watch.

As a former employee said in the Times article: “It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting. At Beast I did that on steroids.”

He is hyperfocused on the gamification of attention.

Mr. Beast’s document also signifies a change in the workforce. This is the first manifesto we have ever gotten from a Gen Z leader. It is the Bezos and Jobs memo, but for my generation.

Jeff Bezos had the Day 1 philosophy, which focuses on understanding customers, working backwards and being nimble etc.

Steve Jobs had countless memos, each beautiful and deserves a read. His management style created one of the most powerful and successful companies in the world. He was relentless in pursuing perfection

Mr. Beast is right there with them – except for one thing, which John Green gets to in a thread about the document: When you are 26 years old, it common to spend a lot of time pursuing what you want without spending much time considering why you want it… (meaningful life)

Mr Beast doesn’t really have a clear goal – except for making YouTube videos. "Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company.""

this is about making YouTubes that appease the almighty YouTube gods. Which is how you have to do it, but when we compare that to a Bezos or a Jobs, there is a sense of a loss of creative wonder.

Gen Z has grown up in a world dominated by mathematically-driven attention recommendations

a constant dance between authenticity and performance

Mr. Beast also highlights something really important – work quality is far more important than work quantity.

Boomers/Gen X have a focus on’ “putting in the hours” whereas Gen Z, as Mr Beast wrote, will be much more “the amount of hours you work is irrelevant… you will be judged on results, not hours”.

There is a prioritzation on communication and paying people well in the Mr. Beast document, and that is also a focus for the younger generations

There is also a level of comfort with adaptability (versus the meetings about meetings that have become common with Boomers/Gen X). He emphasized constant learning and room to make mistakes

There is also a big emphasis on informal communication (he says haha throughout the doc). This is wonderful.

That’s how Gen Z will work. And it’s all in that document.