Essay | Kyla Scanlon | The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce

Created

Sep 22, 2024 11:26 AM

The Mr Beast Empire

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) and now, he is capturing their stomachs too.

He clears north of $500 million each year, plows it all back into making videos and donating to charity. 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 (Rolling Stones has called it a Fyre Fest) but he is just proceeding as normal. And that’s the Mr. Beast way.

Recently, a leaked memo he wrote about working for him circled around the Internet. Titled HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION, it’s a truly fascinating 36-page account of how the most successful YouTuber in the world thinks. He talks a lot about communication and storytelling and calls finance people unfunny. It’s a great read.

It’s also terrifying.

Memo Analysis

There have been countless tweets praising the document, and if you’re really into corporate management, that makes sense. 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 - it’s good stuff, but like, scary. Below are some main takeaways that Ben Lang compiled but I recommend you read the whole document.

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 (and should be considered in light of the controversy surrounding him at the moment).

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

The good is that Mr. Beast really is a fantastic operator that seems allergic to bureaucracy. There is a lot to learn there. We are already seeing some moves to de-bureaucraticize companies, like Amazon and their bureaucracy inbox. It would be phenomenal if the government could be fractionally as efficient - so many good ideas get lost in red tape. He does a lot of philanthropic work and holds an impressive amount of respect for the world.

So, honestly, kudos to him. He figured out how to win. Don’t hate the player, hate the game etc.

The Bad

But the bad is a lot.

So zooming out - 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 AI. Google is making weird pictures in the search results, the Library of Alexandria is burning, it’s all more and more and more and it’s lazy.

There are real-world implications to the more and the more and the more. Just as our attention spans are not infinite, neither are physical resources. The water and energy it takes to push AI forward is monumental.

And no one is stopping with AI, not when there is so much money to be fabricated from a non-reality. There are rumors that BlackRock and Microsoft will launch a $30B AI fund. I don’t really want to get too deep into it in this piece, as again, heavily discussed - but AI is hot, and it’s making the planet hot too.

The Attention Economy

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.

And when I write that, we will both nod, a silent acknowledgment that our eyeballs are indeed the most expensive things we own. With a sigh, we will recognize that the attention span is not infinite despite our repeated efforts to make it so. It’s something everyone knows. There is nothing novel in this conversation.

Even Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, said in an interview when giving advice to students recently -

"For most of you guys, turn off TikTok, Facebook. A total stupid waste of time....My advice to students: learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn...Read history books. You can't make it up. Nelson Mandela, Abe Lincoln, Sam Walton. You only learn by reading and talking to other people. There's no other way"

And Jamie doesn’t even need to tell people that! They already know! NO ONE (except those making a lot of money off of it) really likes where we are. The kids are tremendously unhappy because there is immense harm in consuming digital candy for 11 hours a day.2

They want it GONE.

And 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! I think about attention spans when I make videos, I do hacks to keep people listening about Fed news, and I participate in an algorithm-driven universe that has unforeseen (and increasingly, very foreseen) consequences for how we operate.

But that’s the thing.

Being Good at Being Good

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. Like a nuclear bunker for 100 days? Come on. Of course a 12-year old is going to click on that. As a former employee said in the Times article -

The focus on retention depressed him and led him to quit the industry. “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads,” he says. “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.”

The operational efficiency of Mr. Beast is astounding, but what Mr. Beast is efficiently operating is people’s attention spans. The laser beam on retention and views and the tricks made to keep people watching (watching what exactly? Usually other people battling for money) are a science. He is hyperfocused on the gamification of attention.

And he has succeeded within the bounds of the attention economy.

Next Generation Workforce

Those bounds have a lot to teach us. 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 and Steve Jobs

Bezos had the Day 1 philosophy, which focuses on understanding customers, working backwards and being nimble etc. From a 2016 shareholder letter -

So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.”

It’s a lot of words to basically say - “Hey, your decisions have consequences, and also, why are you doing that, and also, does it make people happy?” Jeff Bezos focused on writing, banning powerpoints and celebrating the six-page memo. He focused on the long-term too, with a lot of innovation and quick decision making.

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, had the world’s clearest vision on what he was doing, was endlessly inspiring, critical and attention-oriented, and valued simplicity.

Why is He Doing It

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… Seeking money/fame/power/whatever without knowing why you're seeking it turns out to be a dangerous business. Even if you're lucky enough to make it to the top of the mountain, you'll find that it's a lonely place without much oxygen… It's hard when you're young to think about both what you want and why you want it, and to really interrogate the why. But it's also important. The longer you go without doing that, the harder life gets no matter your success.

Mr Beast doesn’t really have a clear goal - except for making YouTube videos. This is the overarching goal of Mr Beast as outlined -

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.

Jules Terpak and I had a conversation about the document, and what we both said is that 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.

But like of course the algorithm comes first. That’s the world because of the ubiquity of these platforms. It feels like there isn’t much air left outside of what they demand. And even if you create something new it takes a lot of money (from VCs usually, who are usually on the platforms looking for people so hello ouroboros) so it ends up being very difficult to break outside of constraints.

Gen Z has grown up in a world dominated by mathematically-driven attention recommendations, prioritizing (SOMETIMES!) what does well over creative expression. There is a pressure to conform to norms, to be entrepreneurial in established systems, to respond to the rapidly changing digital landscape, and a constant dance between authenticity and performance.

So many people are creating outside of the bounds - but if anything, the Mr. Beast memo highlights how trapped we all are within them.

How Will Gen Z Work?

Getting on to other things -

But Mr. Beast also highlights something really important - work quality is far more important than work quantity. There’s somewhat of a hazing ritual in finance where the junior bankers are put through 100 hour work weeks to prove themselves for whatever reason, but really, if you’re working well and good at what you do, you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for quanity.

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. Economic uncertainty is a driving force of the decisions that young people make, primarily because of the cost of living and structural affordability - you can’t afford a studio in NYC on an entry level salary.

There is also a level of comfort with adability (versus the meetings about meetings that have become common with Boomers/Gen X). He emphasized constant learning and room to make mistakes, versus previous generations, perhaps placing more value on experience and traditional ladder scaling before any mistakes can even be made.

There is also a big emphasis on informal communication (he says haha throughout the doc). This is wonderful. We got trained in emails at one of my first jobs, primarily so we knew how to email higher-ups. Informal communication is a flattening of the hierarchy in a way, which was also a big focus of his document.

The doc was also focused on immediate technology-driven results, a blend of work and personal interests, and unprecedented transparency.

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

Brief Note on the Fed

So yes, attention is the most valuable resource. The Fed met yesterday and lowered rates by 50 bps, and the entire industry tuned in. There is now a big question if they will do 50 or 25 at the next meeting, which of course depends on data. Rates are extraordinarily high - they aren’t cutting because the economy is weak (although the labor market is concerning) they are cutting because we have to return to a semblance of normal eventually.

Messaging is their most powerful tool. Getting people to pay attention is monetary policy. There is only so much that the brain can take in. You are fighting against the entire world for a second of people’s time. Of course you’re going to have to play games with their minds.

The Mr Beast memo is really important because it’s the first look at how a Gen Z leader operates. And he operates in the confines of a platforms - with all the same drive and passion of Bezos and Jobs, but is skewed toward metrics versus meaning. Controversy is swirling around him - but he has an algorithm to appease.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

I understand that this is a very bold statement

Lots of people are like nooo it’s not the phones. It’s the phones. Come on.