The Number of the Beast is 5,000,000

That's the prize on Mr. Beast's new gameshow "Beast Games"

I admit to watching trash Youtube videos sometimes, though probably not as trashy as it really gets. One channel seems to portend the end of the American economy, Caleb Hammer’s “Financial Audit,” a show where individual’s or couple’s finances are thoroughly revealed and scrutinized. Hammer, God bless him, offers to help these poor people out, plus anybody who is watching, by giving them an astute financial education.

Most of his guests are in debt beyond belief. One show had a 60 year-old male with an eye-popping sixty credit cards and mid six-figures in debt. Hammer routinely yells taboo words at these people with a mouse-pitched squeal. If you watch one of his videos, you watched them all. It’s Dave Ramsey meets Jerry Springer.

Hammer makes you believe that most Americans, most of the people at your local McDonald’s, working at your local Costco, walking around your local park, are debtors who make impulsively dumb decisions with what increasingly little income they earn. Because predators — including gambling sites, payday loan places, and Amazon’s one-click button — are everywhere. The credit-card statements on Hammer’s show tell this tale every time.

I considered these poor, in-debt Americans — which I presume is now most Americans — when I turned on Mr. Beast’s recent new TV show, “Beast Games,” released last December and streaming on Amazon. This 10-episode spectacular promises to be the biggest gameshow ever. It has probably the biggest payouts ever, including a Lamborghini and a $1.8 million-dollar island. And those are just the side prizes.

The gigantic one, sitting in a pyramid on the show’s set, with Mr. Beast atop it, is $5,000,000.

That is five times what other shows like Survivor are paying out, which haven’t raised their top cash-prizes in over twenty years. Back in 2000, one million dollars for winning Survivor seemed like a rich person’s haul.

Now that’s worth just $530,000 in today’s dollars, and it wouldn’t pay for a so-called middle-class house in California.

The competitors on “Beast Games” know this, that their money is continually devalued and that they are in great need of debt relief. Thus they know that they need $5,000,000 so badly that they will do whatever it takes to get it. When some of them discuss why they need to win the competition, which only gets talked openly about in the second half of the season, it turns out they are in as much or more debt as Hammer’s guests.

One of them becomes the ultimate hypocrite in episode 8, for reasons I won’t spoil. His reason for turning turncoat: he’s $530,000 in debt.

Like everything Mr. Beast tries to do, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, “Beast Games” goes to the greatest televised extremes. Donaldson has risen to near the top of Youtube’s subscriber count by making a succession of “biggest ever” videos. In them, he generously gives away oodles of money and prizes.

Of course there is a catch: he is making bank, too. He is now estimated to be worth over $1 billion. That is “on paper,” meaning some of it doesn’t exist. For Lord knows what reason, he recently decided to get into the most competitive business space around, the food industry, with Mr. Beast’s “Feastables” product line.

That’s advertised on “Beast Games,” as are a host of other debt-growing products, such as Tesla and Lamborghini — everybody knows that autos are among the worst sinkholes for your personal finances — and T-Mobile and MoneyLion. About the last advertiser, it’s a grade-A predator, offering on its website a selection of loans and “Instacash,” or payday loan advances. Their site hides everything, claiming up front to offer no fees, no interest, and no credit check to advance you up to $500 of your next paycheck.

There is indeed a sucker born every minute.

This is part of Donaldson’s philosophy, or perhaps all of it, which may well be the philosophy of the day. He strives to be part PT Barnum and part Willy Wonka, an entertainment circus-master holding and passing out cash and prizes for the sake of views. This is all good American fun. I clicked on “Beast Games” to spend weird dad-time with my sons. We all caught the show’s tagline and thought it would be a hoot: “1000 contestants compete to win $5,000,000!”

1000 contestants. That’s not your “Wheel of Fortune” of old, with three individuals players, always offering chances to know the contestants’ names and occupations. On money-grubbing, back-stabbing shows like Survivor, you at least got to know individuals in a reality-TV sort of way. Pretty much all gameshows try to conjure up at least one idiosyncratic element about their individual players, giving you a hook to know and remember each one.

But in “Beast Games,” everybody is just a number. There are very few individuals who are highlighted on it, and basically none for most of the season. If they are highlighted, it’s because they are possibly conniving. For almost all of the 1000 players, the number is all the identity that each gets. They wear this number like a sports’ jersey, with their identification marker on the front and back — 452, 930, 723, and so on.

It takes seven episodes for viewers to even start to know more than about four individual contestants. Even when the show whittles its 1000 contestants down to 10, after a series of wild eliminations, I was still noticing people I had never seen before. I’m not sure I could tell you who was in the top 6 or pick them out a lineup, which are highlighted in the final two episodes.

The highlight of “Beast Games” is not on individuals therefore, on vicarious figures going on some kind of gameshow hero’s-journey, representing us viewers.

Instead, it’s on how the masses act and react, as an aggregate.

1000 players get cut down to 500 in the fascinating first episode, after a number of bribes and betrayals leads to 500 people falling down individual chutes, Veruca-Salt style.

Get six episodes in and you’ll see a group of about 60 anonymous players take an island vacation while nine other compete for the $1.8 million-dollar private island. I don’t think the overall winner of the entire show was highlighted via Donaldson’s editing team until episode 7. You won’t know this person well at all until episode 8.

Because individuality is basically erased by the mode and editing of “Beast Games,” you start to form general conclusions about the masses. One of them is strikingly obvious: almost everybody sucks at basic statistical reasoning, especially when it comes to their personal financial decisions.

When I say basic financial reasoning, I mean the following choice, which is offered five minutes into the first episode. You can eliminate yourself from the show and take home guaranteed money. Donaldson offers all 1,000 players a million dollars in total to make this choice. Whoever choices to eliminate themselves will split the million. Thus if one person makes this choice, they will receive the entire million. If all 1,000 players made it, they would earn no less than $1,000 each.

Because they all know they are on a cut-throat elimination gameshow, where most of them will walk away with absolutely nothing, and because they all know that they need the money, otherwise they wouldn’t be on this show in the first place, they should probably take the offer.

I can hear Dave Ramsey’s southern growl and Caleb Hammer’s squeal combining to say: “you’re in f—king loads of f—-king debt and you are going home with NOTHING?!?!”

Only 52 people take this first offer, meaning they spent five minutes on the show and then left with $19,230, a tremendous aid to them and to most Americans for sure. How many Americans get the chance to make the equivalent of $234,000 an hour?

(Aside: Although as I explained to my boys, these winners are going to pay a ~45% prize tax on that $19,320. To get the real and actual take-home pay of gameshow contestants, you can halve the amount they win. And that makes Donaldson’s episode-6 prize of a private island and the episode-7 prize of a Lamborghini quite cruel. Not one of these contestants could truly afford either prize after tax. Again, Caleb Hammer squeals.)

Also, whoever didn’t take that $19,320 prize home knew that they had a 1-in-2 chance of being eliminated and going home with nothing in episode 1, just like four of the five Wonka children, embarrassed and emotionally scarred.

But the 5,000,000 called to them. See its prominence in the upper-right of the image below.

As episode 1 progresses, contestants are offered several bribes, including $80,000 to eliminate their row. By that I mean each contestant is placed in a grid of rows and columns in perhaps the most awesome set I’ve ever seen on a gameshow. They stand on a box that opens. If they are eliminated, they fall straight down into who knows where, fast.

Since they all just met and therefore know nobody, it would appear to be a no-brainer to “betray” a dozen anons and take the $80k. A few do. Most, however, don’t. A lot of them start to invent moral rules as to why contestants shouldn’t take the bribe.

As you can see, Donaldson encourages Survivor-level behavior, but on steroids. All of the episodes of “Beast Games” foreground choices involving betrayal or self-sacrifice. Some of these elimination moments are taken straight from Game Theory 101 classes, including episode 7’s infamous trolley-problem moment.

Because nobody on the show has taken game theory, and everybody invents a moral rule for why some people shouldn’t betray others, only to drop that moral rule when they can screw other people over, “Beast Games” has a strong trainwreck appeal, tantamount to the best of trash Youtube videos.

In one episode, three contestants are told to choose a cube in which they will be isolated. Once they do that, they are then told that one of them must chain themselves to a wall and eliminate themselves voluntarily, otherwise all three contestants in the cube will be eliminated. Because most of the contestants went into the cube with their friends, they face a brutal choice. A few turn sociopathic in that moment.

And of course, everybody in each cube could’ve walked away with around $19,320 in the first five minutes of episode one. Those who chained themselves to the cube’s wall, or are manipulated into chaining themselves to the wall, end up with absolutely nothing.

Perplexingly, Donaldson puts himself at the center of it all, with four uncharismatic helpers and a host of masked guards in black. He seems blithely unaware that he’s assumed the aesthetic of the Emperor in Star Wars.

It does not compute with my old-man brain that Donaldson is a personality at all. He possesses none of the charm of the great game-show hosts of old, nothing close to Bob Barker or Wink Martindale. He just generally yells a lot, even though he’s mic’ed up well.

What he does have as a host are two elements that may be signs of the level of entertainment he’s aiming for. One is his catchphrase, the simple exclamation “Brutal!” This word signals his intellectual outlook perhaps. In a couple of episodes, he gives the contestants nothing better to do than play barroom trivia to eliminate each other. His most advanced question — the one he thinks is the hardest of all, but would be the easiest $200 question on “Jeopardy!” — is this: “what is the Roman numeral for the number 100?”

I don’t blame you if you can’t answer that off-hand, yet if you are reading this, you surely knew enough to take the $19,320 and leave the show in episode 1!

Donaldson also possesses, as my college mates would say, a shit-eating grin. His mouth smiles but his eyes often don’t, as if they are considering what his next biggest venture is. His M.O. may be to become the person with the most entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, as long as he does it Willy-Wonka-style. And yes, episode 4 is actually titled “The Golden Ticket.” (However, Wonka knew and quoted literature and poetry, while Donaldson is stuck yelling a lot and saying “Brutal!” repeatedly.)

What he’s done with “Beast Games” is the ultimate symbol of this virtual era of aggregation. Viewers are subscribers, and subscriber counts are a kind of god. Individuals gets turned into numbers, which equals views, which equals other more important numbers, which are dollars. For every contestant is a nameless person wearing a number.

That is just as they are typically treated in their own lives by the wider financial world: they have a credit score, aggregated by the number of credit accounts they have open, what their balances are, and how much they can pay off every month.

For Moneylion, Donaldson’s major sponsor, it is surely better if they just make only the minimum monthly payment. The more debtors, the better. Number go up! I couldn’t count the number of times that “Beast Games” paused to ask me to sign up with Moneylion. All viewers of the show are treated as suckers equal to the contestants.

Those contestants, the numbers, stare at the ultimate number and base their irrational decisions around that: the 5,000,000. It is always a pyramid of money sitting in the middle of the set, like a ziggurat of old. The high priest of money, the Beast himself, ascends and sits atop it.

As we learn late in the season, they all need a piece of that pyramid. They will make some of the dumbest decisions you will ever see in order to get it. At one point, I think episode 4, four of the contestants are offered $1,000,000 if they would only eliminate the large group of people they are representing.

At the base of these decisions are the typical ones that could get you on Caleb Hammer’s show: relying on emotions in the moment to make impulsive decisions, failure to plan, failure to have a plan, failure to think about statistical likelihoods, the delusional belief that you are not viewed as number by the predators after you, and the worse delusional belief that you are the Chosen One and today will be your lucky day.

That’s what the pyramid of the 5,000,000 encourages, and almost everybody, as the show demonstrates, can become its sacrificial victim.