How Elon Musk lost the plot
It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.
I too support the thinning of the federal government, of culling corruption and bloat from the system.
But the way in which DOGE is doing it… I’m just amazed at someone with the reputation of being so intelligent is doing this culling so sloppily, so ineffectively.
It’s almost as if he didn’t deserve that reputation to begin with? Like, maybe Elon is really great at a few things, but might not be good at everything?
What’s more likely? That he's great at some things? Or that he’s an infallible super-genius?
HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION (leaked PDF)
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6–10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1–3, 3–6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Cut to…
Starbucks and the Curse of the Highly Complicated Coffee Order
Companies have always had to deal with choice and customization versus the complexity that comes with it. In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You’d get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line, but it was still worth giving customers more choice to hang on to as many of them as possible. But we know that too much choice can be paralyzing.
Simplification is generally the privilege of privately held companies that do not have to answer to Wall Street’s quarterly earnings demands and, like Patagonia, are free to pursue goals beyond profits, such as sustainability.
These days, there are vanishingly few companies from whom I can make a purchase and know I won't be disappointed, regardless of price/cost: Mack Weldon, REI, Patagonia, Anker, Eve, and Apple. That kind of brand loyalty is hard-earned, rare, and impossible to put a price on.
Though some of these are public, I find my preference tends toward products sold by companies that are privately held, free from Wall Street's infinite-growth-at-all-costs demands. This often comes at a higher price, yes, but the products are of better quality and usually last substantially longer.
Trump as the Opium of the People
Slavoj Žižek:
Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist world view,” no “capitalist civilization” proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.
This, then, is what drives millions to seek refuge in our opiums: not just the new poverty and lack of prospects but the unbearable superego pressure in its two aspects: the pressure to succeed professionally and the pressure to enjoy life fully in all its intensity. Perhaps, this second aspect is even more unsettling: what remains of our life when our retreat into private pleasure itself becomes a brutal injunction?