Creativity is a prediction market
There's a million dollars hidden inside your computer
I was going to publish an essay about how Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast is not only vastly underrated despite being the #1 most-subscribed channel on YouTube, but is also, perhaps the greatest artist of our generation whose work has more in common with Duchamp, Warhol, and Damien Hirst than it does with his other fellow YouTubers.
But I’ll spare you that, for now…
Instead, let’s use MrBeast as a case study for something else I’ve been thinking about: creativity is a prediction market.
But, before we begin, I want to try something. If you could, close your eyes—well metaphorically—since I want you to keep reading. Metaphorically close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on a beach listening to the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore. You’re on vacation. You’re feeling stress-free. Maybe you’ve got a beer in your hand, or a margarita, or your favorite book. All your troubles and tensions melt away. Imagine your mind “like water” as ancient Eastern philosophy preaches.
Now in this meditative state, I want you to think of MrBeast not as a philanthropy capitalist and poverty porn YouTuber turned chocolatier, as he is typically portrayed. Picture him, instead, as a simple furniture maker. Imagine he’s really into Japanese woodworking. He carefully carves notches out of beams of wood, connecting them together without the need for nails.
Mind like water.
Just as the master furniture maker has an almost cosmic attunement to the grain of his wood and the shape it makes against a seated body, MrBeast has a cosmic attunement to the endless branching nodes of the YouTube algorithm and the mind of a viewer.
Mind like water.
Each MrBeast video is built around a simple viral premise like “Last To Leave Circle Wins $500,000” or “I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!” On the podcast My First Million, MrBeast describes the thinking behind one of his most viewed videos, “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive.” The premise for it was: spend seven days sealed inside a coffin, 10 feet underground, buried beneath 20,000 pounds of dirt. But, as he explains it, he could’ve built the video around the same basic physical challenge in a much less interesting way. He could’ve spent seven days lying in a bathtub, for example. One is “super fucking viral” and the other, “no one cares about.”
He goes on to say that this is the power of ideas: with the right idea, you can do the exact same amount of work, but get 50x the return. In a way, MrBeast is gambling. He’s built up a sense over years of what is and isn’t a good idea. By choosing the coffin over the bathtub, he’s attempting to predict the future.
Now you’re probably thinking, duh, of course the coffin wins out over the bathtub. But not all decisions are that obvious. Creating anything, whether it’s a YouTube video or a song in your bedroom or the next summer blockbuster, involves thousands of different decisions. Whether we make those decisions subconsciously, intuitively, or strategically, each one is a small bet. And each bet opens up new pathways for even more bets.
Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan describes prediction markets as a way to take a bunch of disparate opinions and distill them down to one probability. They are, as he says, “The most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball.” Creative work is a little stranger because the market only exists as a feeling in the creator’s head. There is no crystal ball, let alone a live price for “seven days in a bathtub” vs “seven days buried alive” until you release the thing. And as Hollywood has proven, no one really knows what an audience wants, often not even the audience themselves. All you can do is make a good bet.
The key with making bets is that you have to stay in the game long enough to keep making them. The founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong has a philosophy on this: “Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.”
Finding creative success is about first finding the game you’re cosmically aligned with. The one with enough creative tension to keep you playing. Then making a bunch of bets again and again and again, until the market starts to reflect your intuition.
Mind like water.
