Mr Beast

My twins love watching Mr Beast. They sit on the sofa, mouths open, like it’s a Champions League final and someone’s about to miss.

If you only catch the surface of it, Mr Beast (or "Jimmy" to his mates and my kids) looks like a big-budget chaos merchant. Shouty thumbnail, a warehouse, lads running, fireworks, and a prize so big you assume someone hit an extra zero by mistake. Then you hear Jimmy talk about the work and you realise it’s not chaos at all. It’s spreadsheets and sore eyes.

He spent years not just making videos, but studying them. He talks about being locked in a room for basically five years, and some days he and a few other nerds would sit there for twenty hours straight, staring at tiny stuff. Like whether better lighting at the start means less viewer drop-off. It does, apparently.

Imagine telling your family you can’t come to dinner because you’re on hour seventeen of “lighting at the start”. You’d be disowned, and you’d deserve it. Still, that’s the bit I love. The stunts are the fireworks. The reps are the job.

He cares about the first minute like it’s the only minute, in a very specific way. Not “make it snappy” as a vibe. He knows the exact second viewers click off. Not “around the middle”. Not “people trail away”. The very second. If people bail at 0:12, you don’t need a better ending. You need to stop messing about at the start.

And he’s not guessing on any of it. He knows the average length of his own videos too, 13 minutes 37 seconds. I know, that number is so specific it sounds made up, which is usually the point where you’d stop believing someone. But the whole way he talks is like that, all little levers and timestamps, no poetry.

He is weirdly strict about the title and thumbnail. The title promises a thing. The thumbnail backs the promise up. The video has to deliver that exact thing quickly or people feel tricked and they are gone. The promise and the delivery have to match, or audiences will punish you.

“You can’t get inspired by things you don’t know exist” is a line often attributed to Jimmy. I like it. If your input is thin, your output is thin. If you haven’t put the time in, you can’t spot what’s missing. You won’t notice when the pacing is off by seconds. You’ll be working off vibes and hoping the audience does the heavy lifting for you.

I know all this from reading that production memo he sent to his team. A long memo. The document doesn’t read like “advice” in the usual way. It’s not big thoughts about creativity. It’s the boring, concrete stuff, written down by someone who wants everybody on his team keep the bar high. First minute matters. Lighting matters. Match the promise. Track where people leave. Keep improving or the difficulty outgrows you. It reads like a checklist from someone who has studied this like a crazy obsessive.

And it’s a funny time to be alive, because you can make a “video” in minutes now. Script, voice, clips, captions, the lot. Perfect spelling, perfect pacing, a little swell of emotion on cue, like it learned feelings from a training manual.

Meanwhile the biggest YouTuber alive is sweating the nano stuff. The first few seconds. The exact second people leave. Whether the start looks crisp. Whether the title promised ketchup and the video delivered ketchup (read the memo).

As I tell my kids during Beast Games - you gotta do the reps. They have no idea what I'm talking about.