I’m something of a data guy myself. Out of raw curiosity, I graphed the performance of every main channel Mr. Beast video, from his first viral counting video to present. … There is a very interesting trend in the data:

Olson’s graph presents a picture of a media empire that was ascendant for most of a decade, but declined precipitously in the past few years.

Olson, to his credit, notes that “there’s a lot of caveats in these numbers,” and “this is just a single axis of a very complex operation,” but he concludes that “if I were a metrics-obsessed business and I saw this, I might get a little spooked.”

But here’s another graph you might consider: SocialBlade’s report of MrBeast’s “monthly gained views” over the past 3 years from August 2023 - June 2026, the supposed “era of decline” that Dan Olson’s graph purports to reveal:

This graph paints an opposing picture: even ignoring the outlier of the last month, it looks like MrBeast’s channel has been ascendant over the past 3 years, going from an average of around ~2 billion views per month in 2023 to around ~3 billion views per month in 2026. It seems like the MrBeast empire is not only alive and well, but still on an upward trajectory.

Why do these two metrics paint such different pictures, and should we believe either of them? Let’s start by looking at the number that Dan Olson chose for his video:

“Views per video,” and why it’s misleading

If the videos from 2023 have more views than the videos uploaded in 2026, then the new videos are doing “worse,” according to Dan Olson’s logic.

But YouTube videos are long-tail products. The lifetime view count of a video is partly a function of age!

Let’s look at MrBeast’s most-viewed video, “Squid Game in Real Life.”

In October 2023 (when the video was ~2 years old), it had 500 million views. But looking at the video now in June 2026 (when the video is ~4.5 years old), we can see that it has 933 million views.

If you compare a 4-year-old video to a 2-year-old video, you will naturally observe that the 4-year-old video has more views. This is obviously true when we compare a single video to itself at two different points in time, but we should also expect it to be true if we compare two “peer” videos that were uploaded several years apart: the older video has had more time to accrue views! Of course the newer video will have a lower view count!

What about views per day?

The obvious fix to control for age is by dividing by time and looking at “views per day.”

But this doesn’t work cleanly, because YouTube views are heavily front-loaded. Going back to the Squid Game video example, MrBeast’s best-performing video got:

• 100 million views in ~3 days

• 500 million views in ~2 years

• 933 million views in ~4.5 years

The video has continued to perform well, but over 10% of its total lifetime views occurred in 3 days, or 0.2% of the total lifetime of the video. The “views per day” for the first 3 days are literally 60x what they are for the aggregate views per day over the lifetime of the video.

So if we only look at views per day, the newest videos will get unfairly rewarded, because the average views per day goes down over time.

Should we look at the channel as a whole?

Let’s go back to the SocialBlade graph:

“The channel is doing better in 2026 than it was back in 2023,” we might naively conclude. But there are several problems with that assumption.

First, we have the same problem as the Dan Olson graph, but in reverse:

When we look at individual videos, we would naturally expect older videos to have higher viewcounts because they’ve been up longer. Olson’s metric is biased against the present.

But when we look at an entire channel, we should also naturally expect the channel to get more views per month, because the back-catalog is growing over time. This metric is biased toward the present, because the monthly viewcounts for a channel that has 300 videos generating views will look bigger and better than the past version of the channel that only had 250 videos generating views.

There’s another problem with the SocialBlade numbers: the “monthly views” combines two different metrics, views on “shorts,” and views on “longs.” And MrBeast gets a lot of his views from shorts:

Last month, shorts accounted for 6.1 billion views on MrBeast’s main channel, while long-form videos only accounted for 0.67 billion. These are two substantially different content ecosystems, so even if we did want to consider shorts performance, we shouldn’t bundle these together in the same metric.1

So, possessing one metric that will almost always find decline, and another that will almost always find growth, we need a way to compare apples to apples.

The question we really want to answer is this: does a MrBeast video uploaded today actually do worse than a MrBeast video uploaded in 2022?

Comparing different videos at the same age

Earlier, I pulled up timestamped view counts for MrBeast’s Squid Game video. We can do this for all his other videos, courtesy of Viewstats (a YouTube analytics company cofounded by MrBeast himself). For any given video, you can get data showing what their views looked like over time.

I looked at all of MrBeast’s videos from 2022 to 2026, and for each video, recorded its performance at 30 days old.

For reference, let’s remember what we’re comparing this to. Here’s a reconstruction over the same period using the Dan Olson method, just looking at lifetime views:

The Olson metric above makes it look like the 2026 videos have worse performance than the 2022 videos, which is plainly not the case if you do a like-to-like comparison, just looking at how each video did during its first 30 days on the platform:

Here, we see a channel that climbed through 2022, peaked in a long plateau from mid 2023-2024, declined modestly in 2025, and then mostly stopped declining by 2026. The rolling average has been at ~100 million views for about 1.5 years now.

A new MrBeast video released today debuts at around 25-30% below the peak era, but still substantially higher than it did in 2022.

Should we look at a window longer than 30 days?

Just as a basic sanity check to see whether “views in the first 30 days” is a meaningfully different metric from e.g. “views in the first 6 months” or “views in the first 12 months,” here’s a comparison of all those metrics:

It’s about what we would expect: it seems like a video’s performance at 1 month in is a highly predictive of how it will do at 6 months or 12 months. That said, the delta between 6-months and 12-months does seem to be smaller in 2025 than it was in 2023 (a “shrinking of the tails” (more on that later).

Should a metrics-obsessed business be “spooked?”

While the actual picture is not nearly as catastrophic as the one painted by the Dan Olson graph, the decline is real; a 25-30% drop is certainly a real business event, and if I worked at MrBeast HQ, I’d certainly want to know why this decline was happening. Some plausible theories to investigate:

• More people are watching shorts, does this naturally mean fewer watch hours for long-form video? (This seems plausible to me; MrBeast’s content does pattern-match to the kind of viewer who would opt for the short-form dopamine treadmill)

• The 2025 decline followed a series of MrBeast controversies in 2024: Beast Games contestants filed a class action lawsuit, a former staffer published a pair of expose-style videos calling MrBeast a “sociopath” and a “fraud,” and a series of allegations (later found “baseless” and “soundly rejected, including by alleged victims”) led to long-time MrBeast collaborator Ava Kris Tyson stepping away from the channel. (If you want to time-stamp the “vibe shift,” Time published an article about the various controversies on August 13, 2024)

• The 2023-2024 peak may have been artificially high due to platform consolidation: in early 2023, YouTube launched multi-language dubbing. (MrBeast retired his international channels, funneling a large amount of Spanish-speaking and Hindi-speaking viewers onto his main channel.)

The actual scariest graph

Earlier, I mentioned “the tail is shrinking” and said we’d get to back to that, so let’s return to this graph:

Here, we see lines tracking video performance at 1 month, 6 months, and 12 months. In 2023, we see that the delta between 1 month and 6 month is not so different from the delta between 6 and 12 months: these videos have a long tail.

However, look at what we see in 2025, especially getting to where the blue line ends. The delta between the green line (6 months) and blue line (12 months) is shrinking: performance past 6 months is dropping off a cliff.

Let’s just look at “total views gained from 6 months to 12 months” over time (based on upload date):

When we just looked at the 30-day window, the dropoff between MrBeast’s peak and current era looked modest, maybe a 30% dropoff. But here, looking at the longer tail of views from month 6-12, we see that the 2025 videos are doing ~70% worse than the 2023 videos

That is the scary part for MrBeast’s team: as I have repeatedly emphasized throughout this post, “YouTube videos are long tail products.” (That’s why older videos have higher view counts than new ones, and why the channel’s “views per month” are going up over time.) But while MrBeast’s new videos are still popular in their early days, they no longer have that long-term staying power.

Shrinking tails: just a MrBeast problem?

Is the shrinking tail something that’s happening platform-wide? We can look at other YouTubers to see what their view growth from “6 months” to “12 months” looks like. I pulled the same stats for several other big YouTube channels (Mark Rober, Ryan Trahan, Veritasium) for the same period, and here’s what I found:

Looking at where the red line (MrBeast) ends up, it seems like this dramatic shrinking of the long tail is specifically a MrBeast thing: he’s the one creator in this analysis who has consistently and dramatically declined in this metric since 2023-2024.

So, perhaps Dan Olson was right after all: maybe there is something specific about MrBeast’s viewership decline that should give him reason to be spooked.

In addition to being a stats guy, I’m also a YouTube guy with 8 years of experience working on large channels like Game Theory and Food Theory. If you want to hire me, reach out!

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Ezra Klein on David Perell’s podcast in 2025:

As a young person going out into the world, you would not believe how many shortcuts your elders are taking. When I got into journalism, I realized that simply reading the Congressional Budget Office reports, which aren’t complicated and usually aren’t more than 30 pages, was a huge advantage. People were just reading the executive summaries, if that.

Jacob Geller, in a 2025 talk on how he does research for his excellent video essays:

There are so many online articles that reference one line from a book. And when you read enough of them, you can tell that it’s really just writers having read other online articles that reference this one fact. And so they share the one fact around like it’s the only thing in the book. And then, if you go to that book, you realize “Oh my gosh! There’s an entire world that the author wrote about this subject!”

Klein and Geller are just giving away the secret to my success, but I think it’s worth describing other shapes that this observation can take, because a lot of the reason people walk by $20 bills on the street is that they don’t recognize them on sight.

My day job

In the 8 years I spent writing for YouTube channels like Game Theory and Food Theory, a common refrain that made its way into many scripts was, “when you sit down and actually do the research…”

We were making a highly edited show with a >1 week turnaround, which is downright glacial by YouTube standards. On a platform full of people who can talk into a webcam for 20 minutes and then hit “upload,” we knew we couldn’t compete on speed, so we had to find a new angle on the “current story” that no one had covered yet.

How? A lot of the time, I just sat down and actually read the documents.

In August 2020, one of the biggest headlines in the video game world was Fortnite getting removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store (and the ensuing lawsuit).

When doing research for this episode, I found that “everyone” was talking about this story, from CBS to The Verge to The BBC to Techcrunch to Wired to Bloomberg, and dozens of medium-to-large video game outlets and YouTube channels. Since so many reporters’ eyes were already on this story, what more could we possibly have to add?

But when I sat down to actually read the complaint that Epic had filed, I found information that none of the dozens of competing outlets had covered. Most notably, Epic wanted to launch their own competing app store on iOS and Android, just like they’d launched the Epic Games Store on PC to compete with Steam. That seemed like a pretty big deal, so we made a video and it got several million views.

The “new angle” wasn’t hard to find; it was written in plain English in the legal filing, the same legal document that many of the news stories had linked to in their coverage. But even with so many covering the “same story,” it seemed like a lot of these news stories were just regurgitating the same information, all reading from the same press releases.

I found myself questioning whether any of the people reporting or commenting on Epic’s legal filing had actually sat down to read the same 60 page PDF I had read. One would think that if you were going to report on this lawsuit, the table stakes for that assignment would be “actually read the lawsuit.” And yet!

The world is full of myths waiting to be debunked

This is something that I did repeatedly throughout my career with Theorist; it became a recurring theme on Food Theory where I served as creative director back in 2022.

For example, there’s an evergreen myth about how Crystal Pepsi was supposedly destroyed by Coke releasing an intentionally bad-tasting soft drink, Tab Clear, what one Coca-Cola executive describe as a “kamikaze” on the clear soda market.

“Coca-Cola intentionally released a bad product to torpedo their competitor” is exactly the kind of story that’s too good to fact-check. But when read the source of the original claims, I quickly discovered that 1) the source was just one guy asking us to take him at his word, and 2) several of his claims were in conflict with each other, or in conflict with publicly available evidence. Just because it’s printed in a book doesn’t mean it’s true or even logically possible!

We got to make a video about how this oft-repeated “story” emerged only because a specific Coca-Cola executive wanted to spin one of his many creative failures as a secretly galaxy-brained success story.

Headlines often mischaracterize the facts

Also in 2022, a bunch of news outlets started reporting that “NyQuil Chicken” was a worrying trend. I dug into the “source” of this information, which was an FDA consumer update. And, upon actually reading directly from the source, I found that nearly all of the reporting was mischaracterizing the FDA’s statement, and so we did a story about how “the media is wrong about NyQuil Chicken.”

The efficient market hypothesis tells you that if there was really free alpha, someone would have found it by now. But lived experience has taught me that there are in fact many free $20 bills lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up!

Just do the reading

The advice of “just do the reading” isn’t limited to just writers looking for a fresh scoop:

Read the actual study

When you see a headline that seems implausible, don’t update your beliefs right away. If it’s worth updating on, it’s worth taking the time to click through and see if it’s a correlational study of 12 people over 2 weeks. It’s good to look at the methodology, but sometimes you don’t even even need to read past the abstract to discover that a headline misled you.

Read the syllabus

If you want to get a good grade in your undergraduate course, read the document that the professor hands out at the beginning of the semester explaining how to get a good grade in their class. Professors literally beg students to do this!

Read the acknowledgments

If you are a fantasy novelist trying to get a book deal with Tor, go to the bookstore and find all the books published by Tor, then find the ones in your specific sub-genre and flip to the “acknowledgments” at the end of the book, where most authors will thank their agent. Write those names down. You now have a list of agents who 1) represent books like yours, and 2) have successfully sold a book to Tor.

Read the job listing

I’ll quote the estimable Patrick McKenzie’s salary negotiation advice:

You know what people find persuasive? Their own words. People love their own words. When you talk to them, you should use their own words. Seriously, watch the eyes light up.

Did the solicitation for the job say “We are seeking someone with strong skills at scaling traffic in a fast-moving environment”? Pick out the key words. Scaling traffic. Fast-moving environment. “Scaling traffic” doesn’t sound like how I’d phrase it if I were writing or speaking for myself, but if you’ve just described your need to me as scaling traffic, by golly I will tell you how great I am at scaling traffic. Reinterpret or rephrase the (true!) bits of your own story such that it fits the narrative framework which they have conveniently told you that they are going to respond to. Did you previously work at a small business which was unencumbered by lots of process? Sounds like a fast-moving environment, right? Call it exactly that, then.

Read the bibliography

If you find one great paper or book on a specific topic that you want to know more about, flip to the back of the book and look for the pages where the author has done you the favor of listing every other important source. (This also works for Wikipedia pages, where you can scroll down to the “references” section.)

Read the sponsors list

If you want to start a hobby convention in your city, check out existing conventions for that hobby in other cities and look for where they say “special thanks to our sponsors” or “our 2025 partners” to get a list of companies that are known to sponsor events like yours.

Read the earnings report

This week I made a post about how Costco pays $30 per hour while retailers like Walmart and Target don’t. Someone in the comments confidently asserted that Costco’s higher wages are explained by the fact that they don’t spend money on ads, while other companies supposedly spend ~33% of their budget on advertising. That didn’t seem right to me, so I looked up Walmart’s annual report and found that less than 1% of Walmart’s total spending is on advertising.

Read the SEC filing

Obviously, there are reasons you cannot do exactly what describes here: you don’t have the same capital that Meta and Google do. But if you followed his advice and went to the EDGAR database that your taxes pay for and read SEC filings, you could have discovered that in 2023 Sam Altman was listed as the CEO of a nuclear energy SPAC. Those who read and acted on this information seem to have done pretty well.

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For comparison, Target’s lowest starting wage is $15, and Walmart’s starting wage is $14, with the average hourly wage for Walmart associates being $18.50. (The average Walmart associate makes less than the least experienced Costco worker.)

Yet despite paying their employees more, Costco is also famous for having low prices. How do they do it? Costco keeps costs low in several non-obvious ways:

Costco is not trying to stock everything

Walk into a Walmart and you’ll find over half a dozen ways to buy regular Coca-Cola: you can buy 12 oz cans, 16 oz bottles, 20 oz bottles, and 2-liter bottles. The cans come in 12 packs and 24-packs, and that’s before we’ve touched Diet Coke or Coke Zero.

Each of those is what retailers call a “stock-keeping unit” (SKU), each of which has to be treated by the inventory system as a distinct product.

An average Target caries around 80,000 SKUs, while a typical Costco carries only 4,000 SKUs, a 95% smaller catalog despite Costco’s retail locations being physically larger than Target’s by around 18%.1 Costco has more items in their warehouse, but less variety. They just identify the most popular SKUs and sell more of them.

Target tries to have “a little something for everyone,” and that imposes costs on the business. If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as “dead inventory.”

When you have 10 varieties of ketchup, maybe you never manage to find a buyer for the last two bottles of the least-popular kind. Even if it does eventually sell, it might sit on the shelf for a long time before someone buys it.

Costco avoids this problem by selling fewer kinds of ketchup (and fewer varieties of everything else, too). There are fewer “unpopular items” that spend time languishing on the shelf.

This “fewer SKUs” approach has many other benefits for Costco:

Costco’s “No Touch Policy”

Fewer SKUs means lower operational and labor costs.

Much of Target’s labor cost is paying employees to stock shelves. Look at this photo of a Target employee physically bending over to place an item on the shelf:

I can report from my experience as a young Target employee that this process is as laborious and inefficient as it looks. Note the brown corrugated cardboard boxes next to the employee: those are the boxes that the product came in. After he’s done shelving the product, he will need to flatten the cardboard and dispose of it.

Costco’s more efficient restocking method has a name: the “no touch” policy, where products are placed directly on the sales floor without being unpacked. You’ve probably seen this before: an employee drives a forklift out to the sales floor, drops off a pallet, maybe takes an empty pallet back with them, and heads back without ever disembarking from their forklift.

There’s no Costco employee who has to “arrange the merchandise on the shelf” to make it look nice, because there aren’t shelves within reach of the customer.

Why can’t Target use this same high-efficiency method? They have more SKUs.

Because Target has “a little something for everyone,” most Target SKUs don’t occupy a whole pallet, which is why you might need to have an employee make a trip to stock 6 more bottles of Habanero Ketchup.

But having fewer SKUs is also great for financial reasons, too:

Faster inventory turnover means fewer costs

Because Costco only stocks popular SKUs, their inventory moves faster. (Think about what is implied when we say a product is “flying off the shelves”: it’s literally spending less time sitting on the shelf!)

Shelf time is costly: the retailer has to pay rent, utilities, security, and all the other overhead that comes with maintaining the physical space a product occupies. A product that sits on the shelf for 15 days before being sold is far more costly than an item that gets bought within 2 days of hitting the shelf.

Target, with 20 times as many SKUs, carries far more slow-moving inventory that lingers for weeks before anyone buys it.

Faster inventory turnover is better for the balance sheet

Getting paid sooner is better.

Making $1 in January is better than making $1 in February because of inflation and everything else implied by the time value of money. Every extra day that an item sits on the shelf before being sold is a day that it’s losing value in real terms.

Suppliers typically get paid on “Net 30” or “Net 60” terms, where that the retailer pays the supplier 30 or 60 days after receiving inventory. The suppliers are essentially extending the retailer an interest-free loan. (This is something Dan Davies described in his book Lying for Money, and which I summarized in my book review; see the “Long Firm” section of the review which describes supplier credit.)

Consider what a “Net 30” agreement means in practice. If Costco takes 30 days to sell an item, then the customer payment arrives right when the supplier’s bill is due, so it’s a wash. If Costco takes longer than 30 days to sell an item, then Costco has to pay the supplier before a customer has paid them for them, which can result in cash flow problems.

But it’s possible to have the opposite of “cash flow problems.” If Costco sells the item on day 2, they still don’t have to pay the supplier until day 30. That’s great news for Costco, who is getting an interest-free loan for 28 days!

Any retailer can benefit from this, but Costco benefits more than other retailers because they stock fewer SKUs and thus have faster inventory turnover.

Some inventory depreciates on the shelf

We already know that a dollar in January is worth more than a dollar in February. But sometimes the value of an item on the shelf goes down in nominal terms, not just real terms.

This is most obvious in electronics: now that the iPhone 17 is out, you can get the iPhone 16 for cheaper than it originally retailed for. Likewise, a fancy new OLED TV will gradually become worth less over time. That new TV loses value the longer it sits on the shelf. So, once again, Costco’s approach of “stock fewer SKUs, get faster turnover” is preventing a type of loss.

Fewer SKUS means bulk discounts

This is probably intuitive and obvious to most people, but just as you can save money by “buying in bulk” from Costco, Costco can save money by “buying in bulk” from their suppliers.

The boring part: Costco has membership fees

This is among the most boring and obvious reasons for Costco’s success relative to other retailers, but it bears mentioning. Costco charges an annual membership; you need to have a membership card to enter. Two points downstream of this:

Membership fees are over half of Costco’s operating income

In fiscal year 2024, membership fees were roughly $4.8 billion out of $9.3 billion in operating income. Even if their entire inventory were sold with zero margin, they would still be profitable!

There’s less shoplifting

Shrinkage at most retailers is around ten times higher compared to Costco. Average retail shrinkage is 1.6%, compared to 0.1-0.2% at Costco. (Shrinkage is admittedly inclusive of damaged and spoiled inventory as well as theft, so some of this is downstream of Costco carrying fewer perishable items than a Walmart with a grocery section.)

Costco having an order of magnitude less shrinkage is a really big deal. If 1.6% shrinkage seems like a “small number” to you, consider the size of net retail margins: Walmart has a net profit margin of 2.5%, Costco's is 2.4%.

Here’s a toy example to illustrate just how bad shoplifting hurts businesses:

Consider a hypothetical retailer that has 5% net margins if we consider everything except shrinkage. For this hypothetical retailer with a 5% margin (“net except for shrinkage”), that means that when they sell a frozen pizza for $10, their total cost is $9.50. That’s a profit of 50 cents per pizza sold.

But if someone steals a frozen pizza off the shelf, they lose $9.50. In other words, when one pizza is stolen, they need to sell 19 more pizzas just to break even!

Target and Walmart can’t copy the things that make Costco good

Costco is in the business of charging annual membership fees, and they stock fewer SKUs: they’re not trying to have “a little something for everyone.”

That means that Target and Walmart can’t decide to “just run things more like Costco.” It would upend their entire business model. Even though Target and Costco might seem like similar business models (they’re both really big retail stores), they operate on fundamentally different business logic.

Costco generates over twice as much in annual revenue per employee compared to the average supercenter retailer, but that’s not because Target employees are “working half as hard” as Costco’s employees; it’s because the pallet-based, fewer-SKU model means that each Costco worker is doing fundamentally different (and more productive) labor.

Costco’s more productive labor

Costco’s workforce is composed of fundamentally different types of labor than that of Walmart or Target.

All of these companies file EEO-1 reports with the federal government that sort employees into broad categories.2

Let’s compare “Operatives,” which the federal government defines as including forklift operators and other equipment/material-handling roles: what percent of each company’s workforce is this specific kind of specialized labor?

• Costco: 16.2% operatives

• Walmart: 2.6% operatives

• Target: 0.35% operatives

Let’s also look at the category of “Laborers & Helpers,” which encompasses manual handling roles (warehouse-ish work).

• Costco: 27.9%

• Walmart: 6.4%

• Target: 6.3%

If you’re wondering what all those Walmart and Target employees are doing if they’re not driving forklifts or providing warehouse labor, most of them are in the “Sales Worker” or “Service Worker” role. These encompass cashiers, counter workers, and the floor associates greeting any customer who steps within 10 feet of them, stocking shelves 6 ketchup bottles at a time: this is 82.4% of Target’s workforce, 75.7% of Walmart’s, and 35.6% of Costco’s.3

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Costco’s workforce looks different because they have built an entirely different kind of retail machine, one with less shelf-tidying and more pallet-moving. It works well for a warehouse club that only stocks 4,000 SKUs per location. But when you want that Habanero Ketchup, you’ll have to plan a Target run.

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“Kubrick and Kurosawa are dead,” the film bros lament (me among them). The 90’s were the last real decade of “real cinema,” and everything since has been a gradual slide into “content.”

To call something “content” and “not real cinema” needn’t be an inherently negative value judgment. Star Tours, for example, is a great piece of audiovisual entertainment, and I enjoy it every time I experience it, but I don’t think people would argue too hard with you if you claimed that it is not “real cinema.”

This is what Martin Scorsese is getting at when he says Marvel movies are “not cinema” and instead something closer to a theme park ride: The Eternals is closer to Star Tours than it is to Goodfellas. Ditto for Minions and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

So, a question: Are Hallmark Christmas movies “real cinema?” If we take the “film bros” at their word, I think the answer is undeniably yes. In fact, by this measure, Hallmark Christmas movies are closer to being “real cinema” than almost anything else on the market.

What is “real cinema?”

When film bros (like me) say that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Flash (2023) are not “real cinema,” what are they actually complaining about? I think they’re pointing to a few things:

Problem #1: The rise of CG over practical effects

Movies used to feel tangible. Even when they used “movie magic” to show you things that didn’t actually happen in real life, like a bridge blowing up, the thing you saw on screen was still a collection of objects that existed in physical space (often in miniature form, since blowing up a miniature bridge costs a lot less than blowing up an actual bridge).

Movies used to feel tangible. When you “cheat” by making a simulation in a computer instead, there’s something that is lost; the result can come out feeling weightless and synthetic.

And on this, most Hallmark Christmas movies pass with flying colors: many of them have no CG at all, because they can’t afford it: everything you see on screen is a physical set or filmed on a real location.

The small-town charm comes from filming in an actual small town in British Columbia. The cozy interiors are actual houses that their owners have rented out for the duration of a 2-week shoot.

When the filming schedule places production in the summer months, the snow is crushed limestone, or soap foam, the output of a snow machine, or whatever else you could get out of a $50,000 “snow budget.” Even if the snow is “fake,” it’s something that physically exists in our world: you can touch it. It moves through the air in a way that’s affected by real-world physics. It can land on the actors’ clothing and stick to it.

Problem #2: scripts written by committee

We all know about the “meddling executives:” blockbusters with big budgets often have risk-averse execs who want to steer the ship, never willing to cede too much creative control to a single creative mind.

There are lots of creative concessions made to marketing. Sam Raimi didn’t want Venom to be part of Spider-Man 3, but studio execs wanted the iconic character because they believed Venom would sell tickets, so the movie became a bloated mess with three villains.

Adam Warlock’s abrupt appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was driven by creative obligation; the movie we got is not the one that James Gunn would have made if left completely to his own devices.

This is another reason these movies tend to be so reliant on CG, because making the movie in a computer allows you to add in details after shooting for maintaining continuity with other parts of the multi-film franchise. Even Nick Fury’s gun, which could have been a simple prop, instead gets added in post.

The typical Hallmark Christmas movie has no such executive meddling. The “money people” greenlight a movie, and then get out of the way and let the creatives do their thing.

The typical Hallmark Christmas movie is written by one or two people in less than a month. There is no “development hell,” because each individual film is such a small investment that it’s not worth it to micromanage the creatives. There are no reshoots; the budget doesn’t allow it and the potential payoff doesn’t justify it. You get your three weeks with the actors on set and that’s it.

Problem #3: the loss of scrappy auteur filmmaking

I love the stories about how some all-time classics were made by on shoe-string budgets by young directors fueled by nothing but ambition and boundless energy.

The Terminator was made by a for $6.4 million by a 29-year-old James Cameron who was coming off Piranha II, a horror-at-sea flick that holds an impressive 4% Rotten Tomatoes critics score (12% with audiences). Halloween was shot in 3 weeks by a 30-year-old John Carpenter for $325,000. Mad Max was made for $325,000, funded in part by George Miller’s earnings as an emergency room doctor. They didn’t have the budget for endless reshoots; they just went ahead and made movies, quickly and cheaply.

There’s something incredibly romantic about the narrative of a scrappy visionary who delivers a movie on nothing, and creates a movie that’s beloved by audiences, even if it isn’t a massive box office success on release.

And the directors who come through Hallmark’s pipeline actually look a lot like the directors who came through Roger Corman’s.

Little Shop of Horrors (1960) was shot in two days and one night on a leftover set. A Bucket of Blood (1959) was shot in 5 days.

Roger Corman directed over 50 films and produced over 400 films, most of them on tiny budgets and short shooting schedules, and his pipeline launched the careers of directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ron Howard.

His production model is much like Hallmark’s production model: low budgets, fast turnaround, genre pictures, and a huge volume of creative output that produces competent directors who learn their craft through experience.

Justin G. Dyck has directed over fifteen Hallmark Christmas movies since 2016. Steve R. Monroe has directed over twenty. These are filmmakers who keep getting hired because they reliably deliver a finished product in less than 4 weeks of shooting.

Many Hallmark film directors also work in horror, a genre that is completely different aesthetically, and yet operates with extremely similar production economics.

When Hallmark funds a Christmas movie, the film’s budget and production schedule demand that the film be done, rather than that it be done right. And that gives the creatives the freedom to exercise their own judgment without the “meddling executives” that haunt so many Hollywood productions.

Problem #4: Movie stars have been replaced by IP

Movies used to be sold on the strength of their actors. You didn’t go to see “the new Marvel movie;” you went to see “the new Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep movie.” That is how Kramer vs. Kramer, an R-rated drama about a couple getting divorced, grossed $106 million at the domestic box office in 1979. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $440 million, a higher domestic gross than Spider-Man: Homecoming and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

In 1990, the draw would be Tom Cruise, or Harrison Ford, or Richard Gere. An R-rated drama like Rain Man could make $354 million (inflation adjusted, nearly a billion dollars). Pretty Woman, an R-rated romcom about a prostitute, grossed $463 million (inflation adjusted, $1.2 billion dollars).

Those weren’t “franchise movies” based on popular “IP.” Audiences showed up because they recognized names like Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, and that was enough.

Most of what's to be said about “the death of the movie star” and the coincident “rise of IP” has already been said. The relevant point here is that it has put significantly more power into the hands of studios and taken it out of the hands of actors.

Actors became more disposable in the era of IP films: when Marvel tried to renegotiate Terrence Howard’s salary on an Iron Man sequel, the dispute ended with them replacing him with Don Cheadle. When Edward Norton had irreconcilable creative differences with Marvel Studios, they replaced him with Mark Ruffalo. These replacements were possible because the audience was not there for Terrence Howard or Edward Norton; they were there for the Avengers.

Okay, but do Hallmark movies actually have “movie stars?”

Let us set aside whatever preconceived notions of what “movie star” connotes and instead think about what it denotes. Forget the Met Gala appearances and award shows and tabloid covers, and instead focus on the raison d’etre for the movie star when they get cast for a role:

A movie star, at the most fundamental level, is a person whose presence on screen is the reason for an audience to show up. That is the entire job description. Everything else about an actor’s cultural footprint is downstream of that ability: can this person hold the camera’s attention, and will audiences show up to watch them do it?

By this definition, Lacey Chabert is a movie star. She has starred in over thirty Hallmark films total, with over a dozen of those being Christmas movies.

Tyler Hynes, Andrew Walker, and Candace Cameron Bure are actors whose names draw the movie-watching audience, irrespective of whether a “cinephile” would recognize them.

The Hallmark Christmas movie audience doesn’t show up for the IP. There is no existing fan base for the source material, because the source material was written several months ago. They tune in because Lacey Chabert is in it.

Hallmark knows this, which is why they sign their top actors to exclusive multi-picture contracts, the same way the old studios used to lock up their stars to prevent rivals from poaching them.

The battle for talent

In 2022, Hallmark lost Candace Cameron Bure, who had starred in 29 Hallmark films over more than a decade, including 18 installments of Aurora Teagarden Mysteries and 11 Christmas movies.

Bure’s contract expired, and however much Hallmark offered her to stay on board, it wasn’t enough to prevent her from walking to their rival network, Great American Family, where she serves both as on-screen talent and as chief content officer.

She was just one part of a massive talent raid by the rival network: Trevor Donovan, Jen Lilley, and Danica McKellar also left Hallmark.

Hallmark’s response wasn’t to shrug and recast, the same way that Marvel shrugged and replaced Terrance Howard and Edward Norton. Hallmark began locking down the talent that remained, behaving the way movie studios used to in the 1940’s, because their business model is the same: the Hallmark Channel is a world where stars are the product, and thus losing stars is an existential threat in a way that it isn’t for Marvel.

The Hallmark Channel has effectively rebuilt the old Hollywood star system from scratch. There is no Captain America shield to hand off to the next person; there’s just Lacey Chabert, being her charming self.

And, of course, the same thing that happened to that era of Hollywood eventually happened to The Hallmark channel: Lacey Chabert got too big for Hallmark to pay what it would take to keep exclusivity, freeing her up to use her star power to pull in audiences with Netflix Christmas movies like Hot Frosty.

“Real cinema” is about great performances

Again, set aside your own preconceived notions about whether Hallmark movies have “good acting,” and let us acknowledge that these are movies that live and die by the performances of their lead actors.

A Hallmark movie with bad lead chemistry is unwatchable. There is nothing else to save it: there are no CG battles or action sequences to cut to, there is no mystery box plot to keep you engaged. The two lead actors must be charismatic and fun to watch. Without good leads, you have 90 minutes of nothing.

The casting is not “one consideration among many,” it is the only consideration that matters. Every other part of the production model exists to ensure that the lead actors get to deliver the only thing that matters to audience. The idea that you would pay for talent and then put their face behind a mask and have them spending half the third act firing energy blasts at CG aliens is unthinkable.

Compare that to the Marvel or DCEU model, where the lead’s charisma is genuinely optional. You’ll suffer without it, but you can still have a perfectly serviceable 7/10 superhero flick even with a wooden lead performance.

A superhero movie with a charisma vacuum at its center is still watchable. It’s a less- good version of the same product, but the product still functions, whereas a Hallmark movie with a charisma vacuum is dead on arrival.

Did the Hallmark Channel really save cinema?

So, if we listen to all of the common laments about modern action blockbusters, we can paint a photo-negative of the world of “generic superhero slop,” and it looks a lot like a Hallmark movie. What are we to conclude from this?

The first possibility is that the Hallmark Channel (now mimicked by competitors like Netflix, Great American Family, and Lifetime) has saved movies, and that all one need to to experience “real cinema” is to turn on your television set in December and flip to channel 185.

The second possibility is that we’ve misdiagnosed the problem, and the problem with modern blockbusters sucking can not be simplified to “get rid of the CG and meddling executives” and “give competent creators a budget to play with.”

But as much as I would love to tell you that these low-budget Christmas movies are actually great cinema, I know that they aren’t, and I’m guessing you know that, too. We’ve misdiagnosed the problem.

I wish it weren’t so. I wish that these made-for-TV Christmas movies were actually secretly brilliant, an untapped well of cinematic excellence. But I cannot deny that these made-for-TV Christmas movies are exactly what most people think they are. Even when you get one that’s well-above the median in quality for its genre, with a script that’s fun and a cast that’s brimming with charisma, even when it pushes all the right buttons for the intended audience, even when it functions well as an “entertainment product” with high customer satisfaction ratings, they still aren’t good movies qua movies.

It’s not enough to “just get rid of CG” and “give scrappy directors and get out of their way.” So if the checklist is wrong, then what actually is wrong with modern movies?

Hallmark movies are bad for the same reason that superhero movies are bad

All of the complaints about modern action blockbusters ultimately boil down to formulaic storytelling.

I can complain about specific beats that all superhero movies follow, but when I watched Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2001) for the first time, many of these beats were new to me. The first time I saw Uncle Ben get shot, I genuinely felt something.

When imitators come along dutifully singing the same notes, the thing that separates Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is not just that “Spider-Man (2001) did them first,” but that Spider-Man earned those moments; it wasn’t just ticking boxes on a checklist.

This is how those made-for-TV movies operate. There is a meet-cute in the first act, a misunderstanding in the second act, a romantic gesture in the third act, and a romantic-yet-chaste kiss to serve as a capstone on the whole affair.

There are no “meddling executives,” but these predictable beats effectively serve as a creative mandate: the writer isn’t making a creative decision when the two leads kiss at the end; they’re fulfilling a contractual obligation to the form they are working in. The kiss happens for the same reason as the third-act battle against an alien army.

It’s easy to look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 5 and lament the loss of creative vision, and it’s true that a Hallmark director often has total creative autonomy over a $2 million production with a 15-day shoot. The Hallmark director gets more creative freedom than most blockbuster directors get on a structural level. But look at what they choose to do with it: they keep making the same kind of movie according to the same formula, the one that is widely mocked because it has earned that mockery.

Having creative freedom and doing interesting things with that creative freedom are not the same thing. And while Hallmark Christmas movie directors have a long leash on any individual project, they know that their continued employment is dependent on their ability to reliably meet deliver a product that meets client spec.

These made-for-TV Christmas movies occasionally decide to do something high concept, like a time-traveling medieval knight, or a time loop, or hijinks with two doppelgangers swapping places, or a modern version of the Pygmalion myth where a young widow animates a snow sculpture.

And yet every single one of these “high concept” premises inevitably follows the same course and leads to the same conclusion. A knight time-travels to modern Ohio and falls in love with a high school science teacher. Our leads escape the time loop after falling in love. The young widow falls in love with the animated sculpture, who in his walking talking form fortunately resembles a conventionally attractive human more than a snowman.

The 90’s had movie stars, but critically, it gave them material that required something of them: Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich has good material to work with.

Not every movie that came out in the 1990’s was great. Sometimes, you got Junior (1994), a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant, with a critical reception that shouldn’t surprise anyone (RT: 37% “Rotten”). But I love the fact that Junior exists, because it’s the kind of cultural artifact that can only exist in a system that is willing to take swings that are risky. Junior is, without making this a positive value judgment, “real cinema!”

The content factory has solved the problem of how to avoid a Junior-style disappointment: just figure out a reliable formula that works and repeat it forever. Don’t spend $60 million on a movie that that looks this risky. But the same studio that produced Junior also gave us 12 Monkeys, and it’s not clear to me that you can have one without the other.

The made-for-TV Christmas movie farms know that they’re opting for “content” over “real cinema,” which is why Candace Cameron Bure’s job title at Great American family is literally “chief content officer.” They’re fine with being in this industry!

What actually makes movies good?

Earlier, we came up with an incorrect diagnosis for why some movies are bad, and an incorrect formula for what makes good movies good.

The answer isn’t practical effects, or single-writer scripts, or director autonomy, or movie stars. Those are all nice to have, but they’re not sufficient. So what makes good movies good?

It’s hard to answer this question, because as soon as you try to articulate and formalize a definition of a “good movie,” it becomes a formula. And when you follow that formula, the result is, by definition, formulaic. “Good movie” can only ever be a description, not a prescription.

Think about all of the things that people now hate about Marvel movies, like the quippy dialog and the post-credits stinger teasing the next movie. These are things that people once loved about Marvel movies! What we see on screen is less important than why it’s there.

The best I can do when attempting to explain the most general form of “what makes good movies good” is that it feels like someone, at some point in the production, made a creative choice that they didn’t have to. I love it whenever I see a creative choice that was not following the path of least resistance. And “deviate from the template” is not something that you can put on a template.

The best that I can do is offer you an example in Nirvanna The Show The Band The Movie, a 2025 science fiction film made for ~$2 million that at every point seems like it takes the high effort route. In an era where CGI has killed “movie magic,” NTSTBTM showed me incredible shots that filled me with the awe of wondering, “how the heck did they do that? How did the shot that I am seeing on screen come to exist?”

And the answer invariably is, “they did it the hard way.” How did they shoot a scene where Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol sneak up to the top of the Canadian National Tower with parachutes to jump off the tallest free-standing structure in the western hemisphere? They actually snuck their way to the top of the CN Tower, with Matt Johnson setting off a metal detector and then getting his pliers through with the explanation that “they’re just for cutting things off of my pants.”

It worked for Jackie Chan: you can show some amazing stunts and tricks on screen if you’re just willing to more than a hundred takes. As Jackie said, “You [say] ‘Wow, Jackie’s good.’ It’s not good. You can do it. Except, do you have the patience?”

Rage Against The Machine

At some point, Marvel Studios and Disney and Warner Bros became “content factories,” machines that aimed to predictably and repeatedly churn out movies that would “meet spec” and satisfy audience expectations. And it’s clear that this is all that the Hallmark channel has ever been and ever tried to be. They are not trying to make “real cinema;” they just want to make satisfying audiovisual content.

The good news is that movies don’t have to be like this. Real cinema still exists. Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is now on VOD. You can go and watch it now!

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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ends with a father and his terrified son trapped behind bars while a gleefully malicious prison guard psychologically torments them:

Lumalee: Hello, maggots. Trying to escape? You’re gonna play by MY rules now!

Bowser: Stay close, son. She won’t break us!

Lumalee: First goes the body, then goes the bones. Hehe. Then all that’s left is dust.

Bowser: You be quiet, right now!

Lumalee: You can’t silence the truth, it only makes it louder! Like the approaching droning…of death! Ha ha ha. Boom, boom, boom!

The film asks us to laugh at this, because of the comedic contrast between the small cute Luma and the big scary Bowser. It can do this because Bowser is an acceptable target: Bowser is a monster, a villain, the kind of person who deserves whatever he gets. And the same goes for his son, Bowser Jr.

Even the most charitable description cannot hide what is happening on screen in the “satisfying ending” of a children’s movie: a prisoner and his son are being threatened by a guard who takes visible pleasure in their fear. The father tries to comfort his son while the guard promises to break them. And we’re expected to be delighted by the antics of the sadistic Luma.

How did we get here?

Mario is a bad ruler

Early in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Princess Peach receives a distress call from across the galaxy and decides to answer it on her own. She leaves behind a note: “Dear Moustache, I've gone to the Gateway Galaxy to begin my search for the Luma's Mom. I'm leaving the kingdom in your hands.”

When Princess Peach embarks on her errand, she does not ask for Mario’s help. She explicitly assigns him the job of governing the Mushroom Kingdom in her absence.

This is perhaps the most important responsibility Mario has ever been given: he has been entrusted with the security of the kingdom, including the ongoing custody of Bowser (now miniaturized following his defeat in the first film).

In rapid montage, we see Mario and Luigi performing the duties of “looking after the kingdom” as they defeat various iconic enemies that routinely disrupt the lives of the Mushroom Kingdom’s toad denizens.

But predictably, a less routine disruption arrives in the form of a rescue attempt by the bad guys. Rather than performing a surgical extraction of the shrunken King Koopa, the baddies (led by Bowser’s son) opt to pick up Peach’s entire castle, and action ensues. One thwarted jailbreak attempt later, Peach’s castle crash-lands on a random planet.

Mario does not respond to this by returning to the Mushroom Kingdom to resume his duties of governance. Instead, Mario (Chris Pratt) delivers the most baffling line of the film: “We gotta find a way off this planet and get to Peach.”

Why would he say that?

There is nothing in the preceding scene suggesting that Peach needs help. Mario doesn’t receive a distress signal. And Mario had his marching orders: protect the Mushroom Kingdom while the Princess is gone.

If anything, the need to protect the Mushroom Kingdom (and ensure Bowser’s custody) is greater than ever. Mario’s assigned post just came under direct attack. Bowser Jr. is on a mission to save his father, so chasing after Princess Peach (and bringing Bowser with them) puts the princess in more danger, not less.

The film’s logic offers no explanation for why Mario would go and try to get to Peach.

But if we look beyond the text, I know why Mario did this, and I think you do, too:

Heroes do hero things

The film gives Peach the language of autonomy by letting her make her own decision to leave on her own, leaving clear instructions behind for Mario and not asking for help, but a scene later, the plot proceeds as though none of that happened, because this is a Mario movie.

Heroes go on quests. That’s what heroes do. Heroes rescue princesses. It doesn’t matter that this princess left clear instructions not to follow her. It doesn’t matter that Mario’s actual job is to stay home and govern.

And it doesn’t matter that his pursuit of this quest will involve leaving Bowser behind on the planet where Bowser Jr. just saw them crash land, effectively delivering Bowser directly into Bowser Jr.’s hands. The hero, by doing “hero things” instead of his actual job, causes the crisis that the third act has to resolve, and the film never for a moment pauses to reflect on this fact.

In a better movie, this misbehavior by Mario could be treated as an opportunity for growth, where the main character initially makes bad decisions, learns about the consequences of his actions, and learns to make better choices.

But in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Mario has no character arc: Mario can desert his post, ignore a direct order from his sovereign, and imperil the Mushroom Kingdom by chasing a princess who didn’t ask for help, and the film codes all Mario’s actions as straightforward heroism, because he’s Mario.

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When Mario shows up to find Peach very much not in peril, she’s still delighted to see him, rather than to be upset that he abandoned the Mushroom Kingdom. Nary a thought is paid to what might be going on back home. Who is governing? The film never bothers to ask (even though “what’s going on back in the Mushroom Kingdom now that no one’s in charge” could have been a great premise for a recurring cutaway gag).

Mario is an ontological hero. He is not a hero because he commits selfless and heroic acts. In fact, arguably the most selfless act we see in the movie comes from an entirely different character, a Bowser who is on the road to reform.

Bowser and the rehabilitation that couldn’t last

When the film opens, Bowser has been Doing The Work. Following his defeat in the first film, he’s been miniaturized, imprisoned in a dollhouse-sized replica of his own castle inside Peach’s palace.

But he’s not sulking. Bowser has been finding ways to keep his hands and mind occupied. He’s cooking. He’s trimming his bonsai bush. He’s attending a weekly book club. And most recently, he’s been painting.

He shows his latest masterpiece to the Mario brothers. “It’s not just a present,” he says. “It’s a peace offering.” He asks for their assessment.

Luigi offers a nod of approval. “Love the colors!”

Mario is less complimentary: “It stinks.”

Bowser is understandably upset by Mario’s less-than-constructive criticism (“YOU THINK PAINTING IS EASY?”), but he quickly regains his composure (“sorry about that”) and makes his plea: Bowser wants to be released from captivity, to have the freedom to explore a world larger than the perimeter of a dollhouse. “Not for good behavior. For awesome behavior.”

Mario rejects the plea with the same attitude that he rejected the painting:

Mario: She’d never release you. And don’t even ask about making you big again.

Luigi: Mario, he’s really changed! We’re doing a weekly book club together!

Bowser: I bring the soup!

Mario: She doesn’t trust you. And neither do I.

Perhaps the most telling line of the film comes after the Mario brothers (with tiny Bowser in tow) foil Bowser Jr’s attempt to rescue his father. They crash land on a nearby planet, and Bowser suggests that they can work together.

Mario responds: “You expect me to shake the hand of the turtle whose son just attacked me?”

This is an incredible line. Bowser was in prison when Bowser Jr attacked. He had nothing to do with it. He was miniaturized the entire time and did not participate in the ensuing fight. But Mario’s response is to blame the prisoner for his son’s actions.

Mario treats villainy as a family trait: the son’s crime serves as evidence of the father’s nature. It doesn’t matter that Bowser was literally incarcerated and had no contact with Jr. (in fact, the film establishes that Bowser hasn’t seen his son in years).

But despite Mario’s skepticism, Bowser does indeed go on demonstrate “awesome behavior.” When Mario punches Bowser (removing the blue mushroom effect that made him mini, and restoring Bowser to his full power), Bowser is so happy that he kisses Mario, eager to assist Mario on his quest.

Bowser’s most selfless act comes a beat later, when they confront the Honey Queen, who is none too happy with the Mario Brothers: “You’re the aliens who destroyed my flower fields. Imprison them!”

This would be Bowser’s opportune moment to escape. A third party is offering to take care of his captors for him. But how does Bowser respond?

“Release them. I shall serve their sentence in their stead. I can do the work of a hundred men, and at least ten thousand bees. Take me.”

Here, Mario seems to consider that Bowser might actually be rehabilitated. Mario, the guy who called Bowser’s painting “trash” and dismissed even the possibility that Bowser might submit a valid plea for release, briefly softens: “Are you sure about this? …You’re not as horrible as I thought.”

For one moment, someone in this movie actually takes the empiricist’s approach: you can observe someone’s behavior and update your assessment. Mario sees Bowser sacrifice his freedom for the group, and revises his judgment. The system briefly works! Villains can change their ways, and even more impressively, evidence can change people’s minds!

But The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is committed to an ontology in which Mario is a hero, and Bowser is a villain. A heroic act of self-sacrifice cannot make Bowser a hero.

Just as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie cannot allow its main character to have a growth arc, it cannot allow its villain to have a redemption arc.

And yet, internally, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie demonstrates narrative to be the most powerful force in the universe.

The bedtime story

After Mario and Luigi abandon Bowser at a honey prison labor camp, Bowser Jr reunites with and rescues him. (One could also tell a version of this story in which this act of rescue is framed as heroic: after all, Bowser is serving time in a labor camp for a crime he did not commit!)

After their joyful reunion, Little Bowser Jr says, “Remember when I was a baby turtle? …you’d tuck me in and tell me our favorite bedtime story. Those were the best nights of my life.” The story went like this:

Bowser: Back in the days of yore, there was a powerful villain with awesome hair. He loved conquering everything. You see, this villain had a son. The two roamed the universe, desperate for a place to call home, but everywhere they went was just incredibly lame.

Jr: Gross!

Bowser: So, they decided to make their own planet. Behold, Planet Bowser! The sinister sanctuary where they can spend the rest of their days. They built an evil roller coaster, a gorge full of lava.

The night would always ends with a delighted Bowser Jr asking, “will you tell me again tomorrow night?” And Bowser would always answer: “Of course. Good night, my boy.”

Notice the language here. “A powerful villain with awesome hair.” “Sinister sanctuary.” “Evil roller coaster.”

Here, the word “villain” isn't describing unethical behavior. It’s an identity category (and here, Bowser uses it as a compliment.) It functions the way “hero” functions for Mario, like a team jersey that lets you know which side you’re on.

To Bowser, “evil” is an aesthetic sensibility, not a moral judgment. “Sinister” is used as a synonym for “cool.” The “evil roller coaster” is only wicked in the colloquial sense.

Most bedtime stories about the forces of good and evil are concerned with the way that certain outcomes, but that isn’t what Jr learns from this story. He learns that he and his father are a type of person, and that this type of person does villain things.

Villainy is transmitted from father to son, and then again from son to father, through the power of narrative. It’s the most transmissible form of culture: People like us do things like this.

For all the Mushroom Kingdom’s attempts to “rehabilitate” Bowser, they never spent any time engaging with the core mechanism that actually led to him raising a son who identified as a villain. In fact, they reinforced it!

Mario’s self-fulfilling prophecy

For the first half of the film, Mario treats Bowser’s reform attempts with contempt. His painting is “trash.” He’ll never be released. He’ll never be trusted. His sons crimes are his crimes.

Every single one of these statements was a confirmation of the bedtime story narrative: you are a villain. This is what you are. You’ll never be trusted.

The hero and the villain’s son are in complete agreement about Bowser’s ontological status.

Bowser Jr’s line to his dad is incredibly on the nose: “The universe will never forgive you. This is who you are. This is where you belong.” He’s saying exactly what Mario has spent most of the film communicating, just without the disapproval.

The Folk Devil

Mario seems to treat Bowser like what the sociological literature calls a “folk devil”: the outsider deviant who exists to be blamed, whose categorical identity as villain justifies whatever is done to him. His presence unifies the “good” characters into a community defined by their opposition to him.

Not only does the existence of a “folk devil” make your cruelty acceptable; it actually allows you to frame your cruelty as virtuous. “They deserve to be treated with cruelty, so treating them with cruelty actually makes me a Good Person.”

That’s Mario in the painting scene, telling Bowser that his painting is “trash.” Mario isn’t defending the kingdom by insulting Bowser’s painting. He is not protecting anyone. He’s being gratuitously cruel to a prisoner who is doing exactly what his captors ostensibly want him to do.

Mario needs Bowser to be incapable of change. Without the irredeemable villain, Mario risks losing the extremely simple categories that define him as a hero.

The Mushroom Kingdom’s failure to rehabilitate Bowser allows Mario to preserve the existing identity structure without having to actually do the hard work of practicing and cultivating virtue.

Throughout the movie, Luigi has been framed as supportive of Bowser’s efforts at rehabilitation, while Mario has been the skeptic (and pretty unkind about it). Whether you view Luigi as hopelessly naive or Mario as unnecessarily cruel hinges on whether Bowser turns out to be who Mario thought he was.

The moment that Bowser reverts to evil in the third act lets us know that Mario was right all along. It reframes Mario’s cruelty as perceptiveness, and reframes Luigi’s earnest attempts at encouragement as hopelessly naive. See? The villain couldn’t be trusted. Villains will always revert to villainy. The warning signs were always there.

Reversion to mean

What failed? Certainly not Bowser’s willingness to change, which the film demonstrates repeatedly throughout.

When Bowser Jr. rescues his father from the honey labor camp, he brings him to Planet Bowser, a world that Jr. built during his father’s imprisonment, populated by the same sort of koopas and goombas that surrounded Bowser during his original villainous rampage in the first film. It is designed from the ground up as the “sinister sanctuary” from the bedtime story, and every resident expects the conquering Koopa King.

Notably, Bowser did not ask for any of this during his imprisonment. He didn’t even know Planet Bowser existed.

And notably, this is not what Bowser wanted in the first film, either. In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Bowser didn’t want to spend all day hanging out in the Dark Lands with koopas and gommbas and spines. His primary goal wasn’t to destroy the Mushroom Kingdom or conquer it through violence. His goal was to marry Princess Peach!

♪ Peach, you’re so cool ♪

♪ And with my star we’re gonna rule ♪

♪ Peach, understand ♪

♪ I’m gonna love you till the very end ♪

Now, we must acknowledge that Bowser did eventually resort to violence and destruction when Peach declined his initial invitation. (His contingency, if Peach said ‘no,’ was to “power up with this star and destroy the Mushroom Kingdom.”) That is, of course, very bad. But I think we should prefer a world where a reformed Bowser wants to integrate into the Mushroom Kingdom, rather than destroy the Mushroom Kingdom. And at the start of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, we live in that world!

Bowser 2.0 doesn’t want to be a conquerer or a destroyer. He simply wants to be treated as a co-equal member of society: he wants to return to his normal size. When Mario releases him from his miniaturization, the first thing Bowser does is to cooperate in assisting the Mushroom Kingdom’s regent in his stated goals, rather than to return to his minions.

This is the tragedy of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Bowser desired integration, but Mario told him it was an impossibility. And when Bowser discovers that his son has built him the ultimate consolation prize, a world that finally accepts him, is it any wonder that he becomes the villain they want him to be?

Bowser becomes a conquerer in the third act, because that is what Planet Koopa requires him to be in exchange for acceptance. But Bowser was perfectly willing to play whatever role would let him fit into a society that offered him dignity and acceptance.

Listen to what actually motivates the reversion. Bowser’s grievance speech to Mario in the third act is not “I want power” or “I want to conquer.” It is a list of humiliations:

You’ll humiliate me at my wedding? Shrink me to nothing and put me in a jar? Make me join a book club? We had our moment, Mario. But Bowser is back.”

The book club, which was originally framed as a rehabilitative element of his imprisonment, gets listed as punishment alongside the other humiliations. From Bowser’s perspective, they’re indistinguishable, because the Mushroom Kingdom’s regent never actually treated the “rehabilitative” elements as a path to improvement that could lead to release.

Mario didn’t believe in Bowser’s ability to change. His painting was trash. His plea was invalid; his word could never be trusted. The moment of acknowledgment that Mario finally offers at the honey mines couldn’t outweigh the narrative power of a system that, on both sides, spent the entire film telling Bowser who he was: a villain.

Tumblr user Balioc writes:

When people suffer, it often makes them into worse people. It sucks. I know it sucks. It is quite possibly the single most unjust thing about this universe of ours... And yet it’s true, for basically any sane definition of “worse” that can be applied to human beings.

And:

Alleviating the suffering of bad people is a useful tool for making them into better people, or at least for preventing them from becoming even-worse people. This is true even if they don’t deserve it, which as postulated they presumably don’t.

Bowser ends up exactly where he started: back in a prison cell, this time trapped with his son, doing his best to comfort the boy as a sadistic prison guard laughs at their fear.

This kind of gratuitous cruelty isn’t a very effective way to reduce recidivism rates. But if you’re a plumber whose identity as “hero” is premised on the existence of a folk devil (or a film franchise who requires a recurring villain), it will probably deliver the desired results.

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Pixar's 'Hoppers' has a disturbing moral blind spot

Spoilers for Pixar’s latest film Hoppers…

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3 months ago · 41 likes · 13 comments · Kuiper

Last week, I wrote about Hoppers’ NIMBY perspective, or lack thereof, focusing on the antagonist featured most prominently in the trailers, Mayor Jerry.

However, as several commenters noted, I did not really address the biggest villain in Hoppers, who is actually a monarch from the animal world. I think he presents a far more interesting moral quandary:

Titus is a young insect who we see make the transition from caterpillar to butterfly, and from Insect Prince to Insect King. He announces his murderous intent to our protagonist Mabel in a particularly villainous line toward the end of the film:

“I will squish every last one of you! The mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the stupid amphibians! No one will ever eat us again! The world will be our hive!”

(“Squish” is the film’s polite child-friendly euphemism for “unalive.” )

Titus has good reason to be upset with our main character in particular: young Titus makes an unexpected ascent to the insect throne because Mabel squished his mother, in both the euphemistic and literal sense.

This was not an accidental squishing. It happens during a meeting of the animal monarchs: Mabel tries to persuade the animal to stop the humans from destroying the glade. The animals agree with her, but conclude that the only way to achieve this is to “squish” Mayor Jerry.

Mabel, despite being opposed to Mayor Jerry’s highway project, is not in favor of murdering him, and a heated debate between Mabel and the Insect Queen ensues. The argument ends when Mabel squishes the queen. All of the peer monarchs in attendance seem properly horrified by this:

The killing of the Insect Queen (and this reaction shot) serve as a comedic beat, and it got plenty of laughs in the theater, especially when Mabel attempts to clean her paw by rubbing her hand against the wall, visibly smearing the Queen’s guts in the process.

It has been well-established at this point in the film that insects, like all denizens of the animal kingdom, are basically people. They’re sapient. When introducing Mabel to the animal world, King George made a point of addressing all the critters by name, including the ants. The insects are, for all intents and purposes, endowed with personhood. And our protagonist reaches out and ends the life of one of them with a clap.

Our protagonist killed someone. Was it a justified killing?

There are several things to be said in Mabel’s defense.

For starters, Mabel was not the one to turn this into a physically violent conflict: the insect queen physically attacks Mabel, and Mabel’s immediate reaction is to try and block and parry the insect queen’s blows.

That being said, Mabel’s distress in that moment seems to mainly be psychological. Part of the comedy of the scene comes from the fact that the insect queen is so tiny (in contrast to her big booming voice) that her “attacks” on Mabel are hilariously ineffective and non-injurious.

Mabel does her best to block or parry a dozen or so ineffectual attacks from the insect queen, but eventually she reaches with her two front paws and, with a swift clap, ends the Insect Queen’s rein.

This is not murder in the classic premeditated sense, but it’s also not self-defense.

Self-defense permits you to use the amount of force that would be reasonably necessary to stop an imminent threat, and there’s a matter of proportionality here: the insect queen is tiny, her blows are comically weak, Mabel is not in danger. (Let us set aside for the moment that Mabel is also not in any danger because she is not even present in the room. She is a human sitting miles away, remote-piloting a robotic beaver avatar.)

While our legal system may not have jurisdiction within the animal world, I think our self-defense laws reflect an ethic that most of us would agree with: a giant cannot fatally crush a tiny person and then hide behind the defense of “well, she started it,” unless the tiny person posed some genuine danger (one that the scene did not establish). Killing the insect queen cannot be justified as an act of self-defense.

Now, we should acknowledge that insect queen was just chanting “squish, squish,” advocating for the killing of Mayor Jerry, and self-defense laws also encompass the “defense of others” doctrine, which allows you to intervene to defend someone else. But this doctrine applies in situations of imminent violence. Jerry is miles away. The queen may be guilty of incitement to violence or conspiracy to commit murder, but she is not presenting an imminent threat that justifies immediate unilateral preemptive lethal force. You don’t get to kill someone just because they are loudly in favor of murder.

Mabel here is guilty of voluntary manslaughter or reckless homicide, depending on how charitable you want to about her intent. And I’m inclined to be charitable and look at this as an act of voluntary manslaughter: Mabel didn’t mean to kill the queen, based on her shocked reaction to what she’s done.

Mabel’s unfamiliarity with the animal world is a serious mitigating factor: Mabel has spent her whole life in a human-sized world where clapping your hands is not usually lethal force. In her native landscape, swatting at or clapping at a tiny attacking insect is basically an automatic reflex that carries little moral weight.

Even if she knows intellectually by now that insects are people, Mabel’s lethal clap reads less like murder and more like a negligent or reckless killing: ‘I didn’t mean to do it’ seems like a pretty reasonable defense.

Hoppers does not treat Mabel like a killer

All the same, accidentally killing a person is an act that should still carry moral weight. And while Mabel does seem shocked and horrified in the moment, the film did not give me much sense that she was grappling with the moral fact that she had just killed a person. Her distress reads as practical, rather than ethical.

She has blood in her hands, and her response is to wipe it off. (I mean that extremely literally: having just squished the Insect Queen, Mabel wipes her hand on the wall, smearing the queen’s guts all over it. It got the desired laugh in the theater.)

The problem, as Mabel and the film seem to understand it, is not “I have just killed a person.” The problem is: “oh no, the other animal monarchs now hate me for killing one of their peers. This negotiation has gone disastrously wrong; this does not bode well for my future as a participant in animal society.”

This is the world that Titus inhabits. His mother, the most politically powerful of all insects, is killed by a visiting beaver. The film invites us to see her killing (and smearing) this as a hilarious joke. Titus is considerably less amused.

Now, it must be said, Titus is quick to embrace the upside of his mother’s death. He doesn’t even leave the meeting room before announcing to the other insect monarchs that he is now their peer: “all hail Titus, the Insect King!” But he is a man with a plan, and it’s one that Mabel comes to oppose.

Defenders of the status quo

In my previous Hoppers post, I offered a critique of Mabel, calling her a “defender of the status quo.” This is central to many arguments about the conflict between Mayor Jerry (who wants to build a highway) and Mabel (who wants to preserve nature).

But the “good guys’ defense of the status quo” is more salient in the conflict with Titus, because the true injustice of the status quo is not that the highway-less humans have a less convenient commute. The real injustice in this world is that creatures with personhood are killed every day, all the time, as a matter of course. Remember King George’s pond rules:

Pond rule #1: Don’t be a stranger.

Pond rule #2: When you gotta eat, eat.

Pond rule #3: We’re all in this together!

As I said previously:

Once the film grants the animals personalities, families, dreams and ambitions, and political communities, once even insects are sapient creatures, it loses the ability to retreat into “well, that’s just nature.” What we’re seeing here is a society in which people are routinely murdered, and everyone is just okay with that!

That is the status quo that Mabel and friends are defending. And it’s one that the villainous Titus attacks with a competing vision:

“I will squish every last one of you! The mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the stupid amphibians! No one will ever eat us again! The world will be our hive!”

As a mammal, I would personally dislike the enactment of Titus’s vision for a ‘better world,’ as I would very much like to continue living. Mabel likely feels the same way, as do all of the other animals.

But since Titus has offered his competing vision for a ‘better world,’ I think it’s worth analyzing it to see whether it might in fact be morally superior to the current status quo.

Does Titus want a better world, or a worse world?

I’d like to underscore a part of Titus’s villainous rant here: “No one will ever eat us again.”

It is not a coincidence that Titus, as Insect King, is representing those at the very bottom of the food chain. Actually, “food chain,” as a descriptive motif, might actually provide a less useful motif than “food pyramid.”

Consider what is necessary for a carnivore like a bear to exist. Bears live for around 25 years, or over 9,000 days. It might plausibly eat on the order of tens of thousands of fish over its lifetime.

Then consider that the bear is eating fish found in streams, and those fish are typically insect-eating, with each individual fish plausibly eating hundreds of thousands of insects over its lifetime.

So when a bear lives to the ripe old age of 25, it comes at the cost of billions of insect lives.

In our world, we mostly accept this without anguish, because people are people, and insects are not. But Hoppers is not our world. In Hoppers, insects are people. So to say that Ellen the bear’s life must be preserved is also to justify the consumption, and thus the killing, of billions of persons.

Hoppers tells us that animals are people, and then it shows us a civilization that is built on the ceaseless mass killing of people.

And, an insect might reason, to end it all would require only a much smaller number of deaths up the pyramid. Do the math: the world’s population of 50 billion birds kills on the order of 100 trillion insect lives per day.

Bringing about Titus’s vision would be violent, as revolutions so often are. But when the status quo already requires the daily killing and consumption of beings with personalities, families, and political communities, the status quo starts to look a whole lot less defensible.

Though the revolution would be bloody, the world Titus envisions would have considerably less murder: insects live at the bottom of the food chain. A caterpillar like Titus eats leaves, not sapient creatures. Unlike Ellen the bear, a caterpillar’s existence is not predicated on mass murder.

The film offers no moral rebuttal to the villain’s main argument

Again, let us revisit Titus’s plan:

“I will squish every last one of you! The mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the stupid amphibians! No one will ever eat us again! The world will be our hive!”

In the first two sentences, Titus comes across like a cartoon villain, plainly genocidal, promising death for all non-insects. He reads like an insect supremacist.

But you do not need to be an insect supremacist to buy into Titus’s logic. All we need to do is accept that in this world, an insect life has moral weight that is equivalent to any other member of the animal community, which is clearly what the film invites us to do.

And, to be clear, the film did not need to offer this invitation. Zootopia largely sidestepped the question of what predators eat. The Lion King is selective with how it endows personhood: it implies a world where lions like Mufasa and Scar eat wildebeest, but it never depicts wildebeest as sapient.

Hoppers didn’t have to give us a world where fish and insects are people, but it did, and it showed them being eaten for the sake of a joke, and now we are forced to sit with that knowledge.1

The film seems to believe Ellen is justified in her mass killing for the sake of sating her own hunger. (“Pond rule #2: When you gotta eat, eat.”) But Titus’s planned killing, even though it is in the interest of the lives of his brethren, and a greater number of lives than the ones he is taking in sum total, is not justified.

It is justified for 10 billion insects to die so that one bear may live. It is not justified for insects to kill one bear so that they may live.

Why does the film believe this? In its ugliest moments, it seems to believe that the insects must accept this fate because they are weak.

Normative Darwinism

The part of Titus’s defeat that bothers me most is that the film never really addresses or refutes his grievance about how bugs are just eaten constantly. Hoppers does not really show us that Titus is incorrect in his diagnosis, nor does it explain why any moral outrage on behalf of the insects might be wrong.

Titus, like his mother before him, is killed violently and abruptly. His death is a punchline: he is eaten. Gobbled up by a creature higher on the food chain.

Titus’s death is meant to be satisfying, and also funny in the same way that his mother’s death was funny. Still, there’s something about this that feels oddly socially Darwinian.

Titus began an insect revolution because insects are small, fragile creatures that are easy for larger animals to kill. And Titus’s revolution fails for exactly that reason.

Hoppers reasserts the hierarchy that produced Titus’s argument in the first place: insects must accept a status quo in which insects are routinely killed because insects are smaller and physically weaker.

Titus desired a world in which “no one will ever eat us again.” The argument ends with a slurp. Shut up, bug. It is simply the way of things for insects to be devoured by larger creatures.

Hoppers is not merely conservative

Hoppers presents itself and its protagonists as pluralistic, but when the smallest and weakest class of persons raises a radical objection to the structure of the world, the film’s ultimate rebuttal is just the old structure of the world reasserting itself.

That’s ultimately where the film is at its most reactionary. A conservative story might argue against revolution by saying something like, “the existing order may have some flaws, but the upheaval of revolution will make the world worse; you can’t predict the second-order effects of what you’re doing.”

The reactionary response is actually much harsher, something closer to: “Hierarchy is natural and good, revolt from below is unnatural and bad. Violence flowing downward is legitimate, violence flowing upward is illegitimate.”

Predation is self-justifying. Birds are permitted to kill insects en masse every day, and this is treated as natural and legitimate. But if insects were to ever organize and try to turn that violence upward, it would be villainy.

Thankfully, this question is hypothetical

It is very fortunate that Hoppers is a work of fiction. We don’t live in a world where bugs are people.

However, it is worth acknowledging that we can exclude animals from the category of “person” without reducing the value of their lives to zero. We can say “human lives are worth more than dog lives” while also believing that a dog’s life has value. And we can also choose to value the lives and wellbeing of smaller creatures at levels lower than a dog, but still above zero.

Hoppers may be content to look away from the cost that our lives impose on the animals we consume, but we don’t have to do the same, and this doesn’t have to mean going full vegan. For example, if you still want to eat meat, you can use tools like food impacts to see which sources are worse (or better) for animal welfare.

This post was written in part as a response to comments on last week’s post, The new Pixar movie isn’t NIMBY. It’s far more horrifying.

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Hoppers is the latest addition to the Pixar-verse. It tells the story of Mabel Tanaka, a Japanese-American girl who transfers her consciousness to a robotic beaver to aid the animals in defending their glade from a mayor trying to build a highway. (There’s a line of dialog where one of the characters comments on the similarity to James Cameron’s Avatar.)

This seems like a straightforward tale of “nature good, building public infrastructure bad,” and so predictably many have characterized it as Pixar’s NIMBY film.

However, I don’t believe this is a NIMBY film. In fact, it may be the opposite, but not along the axis that YIMBYs hope for.

What is Hoppers (not) actually about?

It’s totally fair for people to be confused about what Hoppers is actually about, because it misleads its audience from the very opening minutes.

The opening uses Pixar’s characteristically excellent visual storytelling to tell the tale of a rebellious animal-lover growing up, and the way granddaughter and grandmother bonded over their shared love of nature in the grandmother’s final years. It’s the sort of sequence that Pixar is known for being unfairly good at.

It genuinely felt like the movie was trying to teach me in its opening minutes how to watch it: “this is a story about family, and legacy, and intergenerational love.”

But what we get instead in Hoppers is a political fable where the one character who cares at all about family is a villain: the movie’s only subsequent interest in kinship is kin-favoritism taken to its ugliest extreme in the form a hereditary ruler from the insect world, an insect supremacist who wants to subjugate all non-insects.

This is a big swing for a children’s movie. Hoppers does not try to “play things safe.” I admire that kind of creative courage, but it also results in a story with moral logic that is utterly insane.

Anthropomorphic animals are people, except when they’re not

In any movie about anthropomorphic animals, there’s always the question of how much the animals should remain, well, animals.

Zootopia, despite being a movie that is centrally about the role of predators in society, somehow manages to completely sidestep the question of what Zootopia’s predators actually eat. Hoppers does not hide from this uncomfortable question.

One of our most memorable supporting cast members is a brown bear, and our protagonist Mabel first encounters Ellen the bear at meal time, with the meal in question being a oafish beaver named Loaf.

Mabel is understandably upset, but neither of the animals is bothered by this state of affairs. Ellen the bear and Loaf the beaver do their best to explain to Mabel that this is just how things work in the animal kingdom: the beaver is mostly resigned to his fate.

Both prey and predator are under the domain of the monarch of mammals, a beaver named King George, who patiently explains to Mabel how things work around here:

King George: Pond rule #1: Don’t be a stranger. It’s harder to be mad at someone if you know their name. Lookin’ good, Ron! You too, Fran, Tom, Kwon, Rosie, Tamara, Prudence, Maddy…

This continues, with King George going on to offer greetings to Petey and Peter (both ants) and Sasha and Kat (both fish), with one of the fish offering a greeting:

Steve the fish: Oh, hey there, George!

King George: And hello to you, Steve!

(Ellen proceeds to eats Steve. This is not interrupted.)

King George: That’s pond rule #2: When you gotta eat, eat. Pond rule #3, we’re all in this together!

Mabel: How is that a rule?

King George: Well, it means that no matter who you are, you look out for others who need looking out for. There, pond rules!

If we’re to treat the sapient talking animals as moral patients, then one of our main characters is a murderer, as is every predator in the film, and multiple acts of murder throughout the story are framed as comedic beats. At one point, we see a sapient creature’s guts smeared on a wall as a punchline. The film seems to realize the insanity of its own moral logic, and offers a shrug and “eh, what can you do?”

Hoppers wants its animals to be people, but it also wants nature to be nature, and these two frameworks are in open war with each other for the entire runtime. There are no “safe targets” here for an obligate carnivore. Even ants, caterpillars, and butterflies are sapient creatures.

Once the film grants the animals personalities, families, dreams and ambitions, and political communities, once even insects are sapient creatures, it loses the ability to retreat into “well, that’s just nature.” What we’re seeing here is a society in which people are routinely murdered, and everyone is just okay with that!

So who are the good guys?

To make things stranger, the supposedly villainous humans are not particularly bloodthirsty by the standards of this universe.

The humans are led by Mayor Jerry who serves as one of the central antagonists. The mayor’s new highway plan is destroying the animals’ natural habitat, but the humans scrupulously avoid any direct violence: the humans come up with a sound-based technology that drives the animals away, allowing them to bulldoze parts of the habitat without killing a single sapient creature.

So, to recap: the film’s moral logic is that the more humane world must never be allowed to expand into the less humane one. The murder-filled nightmare world of animal society must be preserved at all cost.

Regression to the cruel

It is not lost on me that one of the central “good guys” that we’re asked to root for is a monarch literally named King George, and his antagonist is a democratically-elected American.

This makes Hoppers among the most reactionary children’s film I’ve seen in a while. The antagonist is a democratically elected mayor who is carrying out the wishes of his constituents. The film doesn’t want us to miss this point: we’re repeatedly shown how much the voters love Mayor Jerry. By contrast, Mabel’s petition to save the glade is so unpopular that she can’t even get a single signature.

But Mayor Jerry gets a redemption arc in the end. How does this democratically-elected leader redeem himself? By becoming a political strongman who overrules the will of the electorate by canceling his immensely-popular plan for a highway. In other words, by behaving more like one of the animal monarchs, who are the real legitimate rulers in this world.

In a world full of “eat the rich” movies, this film bravely runs in the opposite direction with a bizarrely premodern vision: the problem with power is not that it is too concentrated, but that it is being exercised by weak men, and the solution is the emergence of a Good King. For an evil mayor to stop being evil and become great, he must realize that his true destiny is to be a King.

NIMBYs vs democracy

It’s at this point that Hoppers might seem to be most NIMBY: in the end, the mayor ignores the will of the electorate, and capitulates to the will of a single determined community member.

However, Mabel Tanaka is no NIMBY.

Hoppers is utterly uninterested in what is perhaps its most interesting moment: in an early showdown between Mabel and Mayor Jerry, our protagonist tells the Mayor that the highway he’s building is “illegal.”

However, when Mabel declares that the builders’ actions are “illegal,” she mean this only as a synonym for “evil,” because the political imagination of this film does not have room for the concept of courts or the rule of law. Despite the rules ostensibly being on her side, Mabel doesn’t seek any form of institutional redress. Her only option is to physically block the construction site, standing on explosives and daring the construction crew to blow her up. (This action by Mabel is also illegal, but she doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.)

Even when the antagonist is doing things that are “illegal,” this film refuses to consider the possibility that law or procedure might have any role in stopping him. This movie might be anti-growth, but it can’t borrow a single move from the NIMBY playbook. This film is not NIMBY enough to believe in the existence of environmental review boards.

Verdict

This film is exquisitely made and brimming with charisma, and it is all in the service of a story that feels politically deranged and either morally incoherent or morally horrifying.

Those qualities often make it hilarious: almost every moment that I describe above as a moral atrocity got a laugh out of me in the theater. The thing I hate to experience most when I sit in a movie theater is boredom, and Hoppers is the complete antonym of boring. It gave me an unforgettable afternoon at the theater.

Update: Several readers have noted that in my analysis, I neglected to address the “twist villain” of Hoppers, so I’ve written a follow-up post to answer these questions: is our main character actually a murderer? Did the homicidal Insect Prince have a point when he advocated for killing all mammals?

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My baby keeps scare maxxing himself

My thirteen month old has this touch activated book filled with animals and their respective sounds. He flips through all the pages until he finds the anaconda, which makes a rattlesnake/hissing sound. He presses it over and over until he cries and needs me to comfort him because he's scared of it. He does this multiple times a day, every day. I don't understand why.

Kids love voluntarily triggering their fight-or-flight response in controlled environments. Kids of all ages can be found dosing themselves with endogenous adrenaline and cortisol from the safety of their bedroom.

Junior horror franchises like Goosebumps and Five Nights at Freddy’s and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are wildly successful because kids love running stress-response simulations.

This is a specific form of a more general observation: kids love seeking stimuli that generate altered mental states.

Kids love feeling dizzy

One of my favorite first grade activities was spinning around in circles until I was dizzy enough to fall down. (My classmates and I did this on a grassy field, which helped to minimize the pain associated with falling.)

As kids, we didn’t have access to consciousness-altering substances, but we quickly learned that you don’t need alcohol or drugs to make yourself feel loopy. Adults don’t seem to object to this pursuit of intoxication. Indeed, much of the world’s playground infrastructure seems specifically designed for this purpose:

Kids can recruit a friend to spin this metal centrifuge while they cling to it, subjecting themselves to increasing g-forces until their grip strength is the only thing preventing them from being launched into the dirt.

What does the kid on the merry-go-round get out of this vestibular chaos? Nausea and peripheral vision distortion, mostly. But kids enjoy these ‘uncomfortable’ sensations in controlled doses.

There are plenty of other ways to brutalize your own vestibular system to “feel funny.” For example, you can lie down, tuck your arms in, and roll down a hill (preferably a grassy one).

Dizziness isn’t the only kind of self-induced wooziness:

Kids love staying up late

Kids love staying up way past bedtime, reaching a state of sleep deprivation where reality gets soft and giggly, a phenomenon that some describe as “sleepy sillies,” or what one UC Berkeley study described as “episodes of inappropriate euphoria and giddiness.”

Everything becomes more hilarious when you’re sleepy, and the mechanism isn’t too different from drunkenness: the prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that’s the most metabolically expensive to run, so it’s the first thing to shut down when resources are low, whether that’s due to alcohol or sleep deprivation.

When the prefrontal cortex checks out, you lose the inhibitions that tell you ‘that’s not actually funny,’ but you keep the limbic system, turning your brain into a raw emotional reactivity engine which is now free to run unsupervised. Uninhibited, your brain is now free to recognize the hilarity of how silly the word ‘potato’ sounds.

Kids love hallucinating

Kids love pressing on their closed eyelids to see colors and patterns.

A “phosphene” is the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye. This is a common experience among people who ingest psychedelic drugs, but you can also generate them by through mechanical stimulation of the retina: this stimulates the retinal cells in the same way that light photons do, and your brain can’t tell the difference.

By pressing on their closed eyelids, children can create visual hallucinations.

Kids love being chased

Kids can regularly be seen participating in a simulated predator pursuit scenario: a popular game known as “tag” allows them to experience the full cascade of ancient survival neurochemistry.

When being chased, you discover that your legs sometimes move faster than the conscious mind can direct them. There’s a spike of panic that comes with being pursued, and an equally primal full-body euphoria that comes with every narrow escape.

And what happens when the prey is “caught?” The child who is tagged “it” gets to partake in the simulation from the other side of the predator-prey relationship.

Kids love the risk of falling

There are few playground activities simpler than moving forward by repeatedly placing one foot in front of the other. But when the margin for error is narrowed, the full body becomes engaged in the task of staying upright (with the arms outstretched for balance), with the brain entering full attention mode.

There are people who have the ability to walk while looking at their phone, but when walking on a simulated tightrope, you cannot divest your attention from your body’s movement.

Pursuing ever greater challenges, where a single misstep means consequences, ensures that the cerebral cortex responsible for movement must remain directly engaged. It’s an intense focus that doesn’t require intense mental training: focus is mandatory; gravity and its consequences provide an accountability that the prefrontal cortex can’t supply.

Kids love airtime

Whether jumping from a swing, or a trampoline, or a cul-de-sac bike ramp, kids love the moment where they ever so briefly escape the claim of gravity. But there’s something special that happens at the apex of the jump, when gravity reasserts its hold.

There’s a moment that’s often described as “stomach drop,” which is actually more literal than most people realize: your stomach, intestines, and liver are hanging inside of your body, suspended by structures that keep them roughly where they’re supposed to be. Normally, these digestive organs are sagging due to the effects of gravity, created tension on their supports like a taut rope.

At the moment you fall, that taut rope becomes slack: your stomach stops “pulling down” from its familiar position and briefly floats inside your abdominal cavity. It “feels funny” because it’s no longer experiencing pressure signals your brain receives 24 hours a day.

(Why the stomach, specifically? It’s one of the few organs that hangs loosely in the peritoneum. You don’t experience “lung drop” or “heart drop” because the lungs are vacuum-sealed to the chest walls, and the heart is held in its own dense fibrous bag.)

Kids love being scared

The author of the original Reddit post about how “my baby keeps scare maxxing himself” described her and her husband’s attempt to provide him with a new book that the baby would be able to read without scaring himself with pictures of dangerous snakes:

You see, we actually did get another book that's the same brand and type but it has "100 first words" instead of animals. There's a page for kitchen items with one of them being a bottle of milk that makes a baby crying sound when you touch it. My son whimpers and gets upset when he clicks this button and crawls to me because he's scared. Naturally, it's the only one he wants to press. Just like the anaconda.

Kids love to pursue and embrace the intensity that life has to offer.

Why do kids enjoy pursuing stimuli that often lead to uncomfortable states like terror, or dizziness, or the adrenaline-pounding sensation of falling?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist credited with naming the psychological concept of “flow,” says that the optimal flow experience happens when we’re at the edge of what we can handle.

The pedagogical version is the “zone of proximal development” introduced by child psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Complex adaptive systems, including biological systems, and creatures including humans, tend to be most productive in the space between rigid order and total disorder. Stuart Kauffman describes this as “the edge of chaos.”

Kids thrive when they dance in this borderland, forsaking comfort to pursue what is barely within their capability. To develop, they must leave the known world behind, enter chaos, and return transformed. To venture into discomfort is to grow.

Kids, of course, are not alone in this. Grown-ups also enjoy seeking out negative experiences: we eat hot peppers, we watch sad movies, we ride roller coasters. We seek out challenges. We love putting ourselves in controlled situations where the body can react to a threat. We do these things because we haven’t forgotten what we learned as kids: the best things in life are on the other side of discomfort.

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There are several common genres of responses to this:

• “That can’t be right. There must be a flaw with the polling methodology.”

• “Why? How?”

• “Obviously, the new cabinet is massively popular because they’re championing my preferred cause.”

Let’s go through these.

How can that number be real?

Let’s begin by steelmanning the skeptics’ case: whenever you see 90%+ approval for anything, we should pause a moment to see whether this passes a basic sniff test.

The new Japanese cabinet’s 92.4% approval rating is specifically for those under age 30, which are but a small fraction of the 1,021 total respondents captured by the Sankei Shimbun + Fuji News Network joint poll. And when you have a subgroup analysis with a small sample, you wind up with massive error bars, which is why you sometimes end up with polls that say “sample size too small to report.”

For starters, young voters are a tiny group, with Japanese voters under 30 making up only 13% of the electorate. Daniel exaggerates for comedic effect, but only barely.

Young people are under-sampled because they don’t answer phone polls

Yes, this is a problem in Japan, too. Modern Japanese media polling uses designs like “dual-frame” (landline + mobile) RDD (random digit dialing) specifically because landline-only polls effectively exclude younger voters. This poll explicitly includes both landline and mobile RDD.

But even with mobile RDD, response rates are poorer than for landlines: people usually don’t answer calls from unknown numbers, and a Japanese RDD experiment report notes a 17% “collection rate” (kaishu-ritsu) under certain mobile RDD conditions.

So, you could plausibly tell a story about how this 92.4% approval rating among young voters is the result of a tiny sample size and just statistical noise.

But a ~90% approval rating among young people starts to look much more plausible when we look at the entirety of the poll’s results. Let’s look at the numbers for each age bracket:

We don’t observe any wild discontinuities in the data. Here, we have a very plausible story: the Takaichi Cabinet has a ~80% approval rating among the median age groups, the approval rating is ~10 points lower among old people, and ~10 points higher among young people.

The overall shape of the data passes the basic sniff test. A larger sample would give us more precision, but we can reasonably assume that the poll is picking up a real sociological phenomenon: the new cabinet has a high approval rating, it’s really liked by young people, and approval among older people is positive but milder.

Okay, so why is the new cabinet so popular?

This is the part where everyone likes to say, “well, obviously everyone loves the new Japanese cabinet because they endorse my preferred policy position.” Among many in the twitter commentariat, the cause celebre is immigration, or China policy.

But we don’t need to guess or speculate about why Japanese voters like the new cabinet, because the pollsters literally asked them “Why do you support the Takaichi cabinet?” Here’s how they answered:

• Economic policies, including measures against high cost of living: 40.2%

• Diplomacy / national security: 22.9%

• Immigration / foreigner policy: 11.7%

• Social security reform: 10.0%

• Political funding rules / reducing number of legislators: 7.1%

It’s the economy, stupid

Japan is living through a weird economic regime change.

Let’s hop back a few decades. For years, Japan kept having the kinds of economic problems that are normally associated with inflation, and yet consumer prices mostly did nothing, or even drifted down.

Japan’s “core” Cost Price Index (CPI) turned negative in the mid-1990s and then was “almost always slightly negative” from 1998 onward, with a brief interruption during the pre-2008 commodity spike.

Bank of Japan officials have described the 1998–2012 period as a long era where prices fell only modestly in total, but it lasted long enough to entrench the belief that prices and wages don’t ever really go up. In 2013, the BoJ raised its inflation target to 2% explicitly to escape this chronic low-inflation (or deflation) regime. Yes, the Japanese government endeavored to make inflation rates higher!

And, despite their efforts, the inflation rate stayed below 2%. You can read papers trying to figure out why they couldn’t get their inflation to go up to 2%, even when they wanted to.

“Prices don’t go up” was a basic fact of life in Japan for decades and decades. That was the old regime.

But now, in 2025, things have changed in Japan: the core Consumer Price Index is now around 3% year over year, and it’s been above the BoJ’s 2% target for 44 straight months.

In short: after decades of prices staying the same, Japan now has 3-4 years of steady price increases, which is why 88% of Japanese households expect prices to rise a year from now. This is no longer a temporary annoyance.

The kicker here is that real wages are falling. Paychecks are increasing in nominal terms, but it’s not enough to keep up with inflation.

Wait, it gets worse!

That 3% core CPI increase doesn’t even tell the full story, because the core CPI doesn’t include food! Food inflation was around 6.1% in November (and was 6.4% YoY in October), with rice prices rising a whopping 37.1% (40.2% YoY in October)!

Why is food so expensive?

Japan’s weak yen makes imports expensive, and Japan is a small island nation that relies on imports for food. 62% of all food consumed in Japan is imported; among OECD countries, Japan is among the most reliant on food imports.

What else does Japan import? Energy! Japan only makes ~15% of its own energy, the lowest in the G7. In 2023, Japan imported nearly 80% of its crude oil from the Middle East. Most of Japan’s electricity comes from non-renewable sources like coal (~30%) and natural gas (~30%). Over 90% of that natural gas is imported (mostly from Australia and Malaysia), and ~99% of that coal is imported (mostly from Australia and Indonesia).

In short, when the yen weakens or global fuel prices spike, Japanese households feel it fast, in electricity bills (and at the gas pump).

And now, with prices climbing and real wages falling, the new cabinet is making policy promises that sound a lot like:

1. We will take less of your paycheck

2. We will make gas cheaper

3. We will make your energy bill go down

4. We will keep the economy moving

Let’s talk about each of those:

“We will take less of your paycheck”

The cabinet is raising the minimum taxable income from ¥1.6M to ¥1.78M. (That affects people earning under ~$10,200 USD)

This is notable, because the ¥1.6M “income wall” is essentially a do-not-cross threshold for many students and part-time workers who cap their hours to avoid triggering taxes or changes to their benefits. Moving the threshold to ¥1.78M makes sense as a response to inflation, and it’s essentially a change in the direction of “stop punishing extra work.”

They’re also expanding deductions for middle-income earners up to ¥6.65M (~$42,500 USD).

The cabinet is specifically framing this as relief from the price squeeze. Reuters reports the expected impact as an income tax reduction of ~¥30,000–¥60,000.

“We will make gas cheaper”

Prime Minister Takaichi put “abolish the provisional gasoline tax rate” right into her early policy speech.

They reached an agreement to agreed to scrap the gasoline surcharge by Dec 31, 2025 (and diesel by Apr 1, 2026). They also temporarily increased fuel subsidies up to 25.1 yen/liter (gasoline) and 17.1 yen/liter (diesel) ahead of the cutoff to avoid panic-buying.

“We will make your energy bill go down”

In the short term, consumers get bill relief subsidies: Prime Minister Takaichi said in an official Kantei press conference that the government will provide assistance for electricity and natural gas bills from January through March 2026, totaling about ¥7,000 per household over those three months.

In the medium term, they’re working to increase Japan’s energy supply, with a new push toward nuclear power: they’re aiming for nuclear energy to provide ~20% of Japan’s electricity by 2040 (up from its current level of 8.5%). Japan also benefits from being less reliant on energy imports for security reasons.

“We will keep the economy moving”

Reuters reports a ¥21.3 trillion (~$136 billion USD) aid plan tied to “fiscal stimulus,” including family payouts, utility subsidies, and investment in infrastructure, semiconductors, and AI.

There are also subsidies and tax incentives for firms building factories in Japan and buying equipment in Japan: they projects capex growth rising to 2.8% in FY2026 (from 1.9% this year)

The cabinet approved a record FY2026 budget of ¥122.3 trillion ($781 billion USD), while emphasizing limits on new bond issuance (keep spending high, but don’t spook the bond market).

“Your kids are gonna love it”

Remember how we got here: we began with a poll of Japanese voters who approve of the new cabinet, the number one reason for their approval is economic policies, and the people who approve most are young voters. Why the age gradient?

Let’s rephrase the question: who is hurt most by inflation?

Young households are more to live paycheck-to-paycheck in a labor market that still has a large share of non-regular employment. Young people who don’t own homes and don’t have savings are more affected by volatile living costs.

Young people are more likely work part-time jobs or fixed-term contracts or temp jobs (haken); they’re less likely to be be full-time permanent employees (seishain), who have the coveted job security and benefits and “career track advancement” that you’d associate with the Japanese salaryman culture that used to be more common in Japan.

Above, I mentioned the “income wall” (previously ¥1.6M, now being moved to ¥1.78M) where students and part-time workers intentionally capped their hours to avoid triggering taxes and loss of benefits. Overwhelmingly, those are young workers.

We’re still in the honeymoon phase

Prime Minister Takaichi took office around two months ago (October 21, 2025), and it’s following an administration that was notoriously unpopular with young voters.

A twilight poll in September 2025 found that the previous cabinet’s overall approval rating was 37.9% overall, but among voters under 30, the Ishiba cabinet’s approval rating was 14.4%.

The Takaichi cabinet is benefitting from a massive comparison effect: they’re following an unpopular act and promising change.

We’re still in the honeymoon phase, where the answers that people give to pollsters are mostly based on expectations and promises. But the new administration has made it abundantly clear that making life more affordable is a priority, and they’ve already begun taking concrete steps aimed at reducing the cost of living.

And that’s why Japanese voters, especially young ones, are telling pollsters that they support the new Japanese cabinet. Again, we know this is the reason, because they told us in the poll why they support the new cabinet:

• Economic policies, including measures against high cost of living: 40.2%

• Diplomacy / national security: 22.9%

• Immigration / foreigner policy: 11.7%

• Social security reform: 10.0%

• Political funding rules / reducing number of legislators: 7.1%

It’s the economy, stupid.

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Last week I wrote about how VeggieTales co-creator Phil Vischer mandated that the show “will not portray Jesus as a vegetable” and “will not imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with Christ.” (Jesus was born fully human, and died to redeem humans, not vegetables.)

Several people have questions about this:

Aren’t the vegetables basically people?

asks:

I accept that Jesus didn’t die for the peppers I’m neglecting in my fridge. But the cast of veggie tales are, within the universe of the show, sentient, sapient. We call them vegetables because of their similar appearance (and taste?) to what we call vegetables, but can they really be considered the same thing?

Let’s start by noting that “what about sentient, sapient, non-human creatures?” is a question already addressed in the Christian canon (which we can assume to be true within the VeggieTales canon).

Christianity has always taught that humans aren’t the only sentient and sapient beings in creation. Angels (and demons) have intellect, and will, and moral responsibility. They can have beliefs. They can serve God, or rebel against God.

The standard Christian answer to “did God die for these other sapient, sentient creatures” is “no, he did not.” Christ took on human form. When Jesus (fully human in addition to being fully God) died on the cross, he died for the sins of all humans, but he did not die for the sins of the fallen angels (or fallen vegetables). Most Christian traditions (Catholic and Protestant alike) teach that fallen angels don’t get a chance at redemption.

Gavin further asks:

Then again, as vegetables, do they need salvation? Being non-human, are they burdened by original sin?

Once again, the Christian church gives a canonical answer, and this time the news is happier for the vegetables: humans have original sin, but non-human moral agents (like angels, and perhaps talking vegetables) do not have this burden.

Angels can sin, but they’re not “born sinners” in the same way as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So if the vegetables are in the same lane as the angels, then the vegetables do not need redemption, so long as they’re not in rebellion or estranged from God.

Remember that the whole “VeggieTales characters aren’t Christian” premise stems from one of co-creator Phil Vischer’s rules for the show (emphasis added):

You will not imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with Christ

Bob Tomato and Larry Cucumber can’t have a redemptive relationship with God, but the same is true of angels. And just as angels can have a (non-redemptive) relationship with God, perhaps the same is true of the vegetables.

Like the angels, the vegetables could still worship God, serve His purposes, and bear witness of His truth to humans. And like the angels, the vegetables could do all of this without ever needing to imply that Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection is “for them” in the same way it’s for us.

quips:

So, the vegetables never left the garden?

Keith Petersen adds:

Vegetables don't need to be saved, but I believe there will be vegetables, along with other plant life, on the new Earth--which is also where the new heaven will be. (See Revelation 21:1-3, where the new Jerusalem comes down to Earth.)

Is personhood tied to embodiment?

Gavin also asks:

If you were to take my consciousness and put it in, just to pick at random, a pickle, have I forfeited salvation?

If we assume that “human soul” and “human consciousness” are coupled: my understanding of Christian theology is that if you literally moved your human soul into a pickle body, you would still be a human person with a human soul, just with a very strange embodiment.

Again, the question of “what happens when your soul is separated from your body” this is not something Christian teaching views as a hypothetical, because Christians already understand that human souls are more permanent than our current human bodies: our bodies will die and decay some day, but that’s not where existence ends!

Common Christian teaching is that at the time of the resurrection, our human souls will be restored to renewed bodies. Our new bodies will still be “us,” but have different qualities than our old bodies: we’re not given an exact spec, but our new bodies will be death-proof and decay-proof. (Whether or not we’ll be restored to bodies that are more pickle-like remains to be seen.)

Did VeggieTales break Phil Vischer’s rules by portraying baby Jesus as a vegetable?

While the focus of my last post was the VeggieTales writers’ room rule that “you will not imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with Christ,” Phil Vischer also had another rule: “You will not portray Jesus as a vegetable.” (Most viewers have noticed that the VeggieTales “bible stories” tend to stick to the Old Testament, largely for this reason.)

This point is a little bit more strict than the point about not portraying vegetables as Christian. As discussed in the original post, most VeggieTales episodes are a “play within a play”:

• As we see at the beginning and ending of most episodes, the vegetables live on the kitchen counter

• Typically, mid-episode the vegetables dress up in costumes portray characters. These could include biblical characters (like Daniel in the lion’s den or Joshua marching around the walls of Jericho), or fictionalized versions of themselves in a contemporary setting (like the denizens of a town who need to be taught by a talking toy about the true meaning of Christmas).

As Phil Vischer said: “that’s why Bob and Larry never pray on the kitchen countertop when they’re being Bob and Larry. They will pray when they’re being a Bible character in a Bible story.”

This is also how in An Easter Carol (2004), you have Mike Asparagus playing the role of a 19th century minister named “Reverend Gilbert” who is trying to save his church from being bulldozed by a Scrooge-like character: “Reverend Gilbert” is as fictional to the vegetables as Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge are to us.

But Vischer rule #1 (“don’t portray Jesus as a vegetable”) is a bit stricter: Jesus will not betrayed as a vegetable on either the “kitchen counter” level, or within the “play within a play.”

This is why we can have a story in which Larry the Cucumber plays Joshua, son of nun, but we can’t have a story in which Larry the Cucumber plays Jesus, son of Joseph.

But as several commenters on Twitter claim that VeggieTales seems to break this rule by portraying baby Jesus as a vegetable during several episodes that portray the nativity story. The commonly-cited episodes are:

• The Little Drummer Boy (2011)

• The Star of Christmas (2002)

• A Christmas Play (2017)

• The Best Christmas Gift (2019)

Let’s go through each of these:

Little Drummer Boy (2011)

The idea that “baby Jesus is depicted as a carrot” in the 2011 episode is, I think, easily disproven just by watching the episode in question. We see carrot Joseph and carrot Mary, which would imply the existence of a baby carrot Jesus, but if you actually watch the episode, you’ll see that all we’re shown is a glowing, radiant manger:

You can watch this segment on the VeggieTales YouTube channel and judge for yourself, but my verdict is: no, baby Jesus is not depicted as a vegetable in Little Drummer Boy.

The Star of Christmas (2002)

The 2002 episode, The Star of Christmas, isn’t quite as visually clear about this point, but it also seems to me like they’re depicting the manger without clearly showing baby Jesus as a vegetable:

This moment from The Star of Christmas is also, interestingly, a play within a play within a play. There are 3 layers to this:

• Bob Tomato and Larry Cucumber live on a kitchen counter in the present day

• Bob, Larry, and friends dress up in 19th century attire and portray a tale set in historical London, where two thieves named Cavis and Milward (played by Bob Tomato and Larry Cucumber) try to steal the star of Christmas from St. Bart’s church

• After Cavis and Milward see the error of their ways and learn about the true meaning of Christmas, the characters in 19th century London then put on a nativity play, where they portray the birth of Jesus at the start of the first century.

And within this “play within a play within a play,” we never actually see baby Jesus directly. We do see a baby-shaped form, but always wrapped in swaddling clothes that obscure our view:

In fact, if we go to the bottom meta-fictional level, it doesn’t seem to me that baby Jesus is being portrayed by a baby vegetable in-universe: it seems more likely that what we are seeing is probably more like a doll, or some other appropriately baby-shaped prop, and judiciously hidden from the audience in every frame.

So, I don’t think that The Star of Christmas (2002) is breaking our “don’t depict Jesus as a vegetable” rule.

However, while the 2002 and 2011 Christmas episodes “play by the rules,” they do play a lot faster and looser in the 2017 and 2019 Christmas episodes. In case the significance of that date is lost on you, a brief digression:

VeggieTales, under new management

VeggieTales can be roughly divided into three “eras”:

• “Classic Big Idea”: 1993–2015: the original VHS/DVD run where Bob and Larry are on the countertop, read a fan letter, and then deliver a story (often a Bible story) and Silly Song. This is “classic VeggieTales” as most people remember it.

• Netflix/DreamWorks era, inclusive of both VeggieTales in the House (2014–2016), which ran for 4 seasons, 52 episodes, and VeggieTales in the City (2017), which ran for 2 seasons, 26 episodes. Each episode consists of two 12-minute segments.

• The “2019 reboot,” released as The VeggieTales Show: more similar to the original VeggieTales in terms of framing device, visual style, and voice talent (Phil Vischer is back voicing most of the characters he’s famous for), but with different creative leadership.

(Separate from these, there was also a short-lived LarryBoy 2D-animated spinoff series.)

All of the episodes we’ve discussed so far (in both this post and the previous one) are from the original Big Idea VHS/DVD era. The eras that followed it are quite different:

The DreamWorks era

The DreamWorks/Netflix era, due to its many differences in format and visual style, is not something you would mistake for “original VeggieTales.” Instead of classic bible stories, we get segments that feel more like contemporary sitcom plots with a moral lesson.

For example, in Bacon and Ice Cream, Larry is an Ice Cream Junior Assistant who gets a chance to prove himself. (“Larry, if you train Bill, and show me you can pass work on to others, the cart is yours.”)

In Bacon and Ice Cream, Larry learns that you don’t earn responsibility by being the fastest “scoop king,” but by treating people well while you work, even if it might seem like the others are slowing you down. We get a lesson about leadership and the importance of being patient with people who are still learning.

I think it’s a fine moral message, and most Christian parents would be happy to endorse moral lesson being taught here. The DreamWorks era of VeggieTales is clearly compatible with Christian teaching. But watch the episode for yourself, and you’ll observe that this segment contains zero mentions of “God” and no explicit references to the bible.

That’s not to say that God’s name is absent from every episode in the DreamWorks era. For example, in An Ichabeezer Christmas, someone asks Bob if he intend to gives to give a present to his Scrooge-like boss, and Bob responds “Of course! God loves him, so I love him too.” And God is sometimes acknowledged in the context of song, like in the birthday song from Two Birthdays:

We’ll shout “Hip hip hooray!” because we know it’s true

God designed one of a kind, there’s only one of you!

(Remember that Vischer’s #3 rule for the show was “as often as you can, remind kids how special they are, and how much God loves them.”)

It should be noted that while many VeggieTales fans do not consider the Netflix/DreamWorks era to be “real VeggieTales,” and while Phil Vischer was replaced both as a creative lead and a voice talent, the Phil Vischer “rule” about how “Jesus didn’t die for vegetables” remained in place during those years, according VeggieTales in the House writer Ethan Nicolle:

But remember, we are here to settle the question of whether VeggieTales broke the rule that “you will not depict Jesus as a vegetable.” And while VeggieTales (1993–2015) did not break this rule, the Netflix/DreamWorks era VeggieTales in the House does have this moment, where a young asparagus plays the role of baby Jesus in the town Christmas pageant:

That being said, while this does clearly show the role of baby Jesus being portrayed by a vegetable, I do want to be charitable to VeggieTales in the House and say that this feels faithful to the spirit of the rule.

Much like the Star of Christmas (2002), the “story” of this episode is not the nativity story, but about a modern Christmas pageant where the characters act out the nativity story. The plot of this episode is not “Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem;” the plot of this episode is “a beleaguered Bob Tomato struggles to put on a low-budget Christmas Play where everything seems to be going wrong.”

I concede that this is cutting things a little thin. But I think the layer of separation is pretty clear here: we’re not intended to be fully immersed in the deepest layer of the fiction. Even children will not be confused by this image: they understand, “that’s not Joseph, that’s Larry Cucumber, pretending to be Joseph for the VeggieTales Christmas play!”

We don’t even see the vegetables “act out the nativity story” in full; all we get is an end-of-episode montage while Silent Night plays.

We see something similar in the 2019 reboot:

The VeggieTales Show (2019-2022)

Once again, Bob Tomato is stressed out because it’s time for the annual Christmas pageant. And once again, we see a Christmas pageant production where the role of baby Jesus is played by a vegetable (in this case, one of the peas). And once again, the main level on which the fiction operates is “the vegetables are putting on a Christmas production.”

The show has all of the kitsch you’d associate with a real-world community Christmas play: the “angels” wear harnesses and are suspended from wires. Their “halos” are obvious props that are attached to their head.

In this 2019 episode, we do get a bit more “immersed” in the nativity story: there’s dialog that is spoken “in character” as the shepherds and wise men travel across the boards to see the newly-born Messiah in Bethlehem. But the literal set of the play serves as a constant visual reminder that “this is a play,” and when they’re done with their in-universe stage play, we get a shot of the audience as they applaud.

Again, this might be cutting it too thin for some people’s tastes, but this feels intentionally separate from the “bible story” format that VeggieTales usually sticks to.

(As an aside: The VeggieTales Show from 2019-2022 is more faithful to the original show in terms of appearance and format than the DreamWorks shows, but it had completely different creative leadership, and there are fans who still consider this to not be “real VeggieTales.” While original series co-creators Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki did return to reprise their original voice roles, they were not in the creative driver’s seat for this one.)

Did VeggieTales break the rule about depicting Jesus as a vegetable?

We can treat this as three separate questions:

Did VeggieTales (1993-2015) ever depict Jesus as a vegetable? No.

Did the DreamWorks run of VeggieTales in the House / VeggieTales in the City ever depict Jesus as a vegetable? Sort of, if you consider the in-universe Christmas pageant to be breaking this rule.

Did The VeggieTales Show (2019-2022) ever depict Jesus as a vegetable? Same answer: sort of, if you consider the in-universe Christmas pageant to be breaking this rule.

Does it matter?

I think the question of “did they stay true to the spirit of the rule” is a lot more salient here than the question of whether they were true to the most literal reading of the rule. The Phil Vischer rule was:

“Rule number one, you will not portray Jesus as a vegetable.”

Why did this rule matter? I can only speculate about the exact reasons they formulated this rule, but I think it would be hard to approach the character of Jesus with an appropriate level of reverence in what is fundamentally a comedy series. If Jesus is vegetable, then Jesus becomes part of the comic universe, available to be silly and “played with” in a way that feels inappropriate. You can have an asparagus play David and gourd play Goliath because David and Goliath are fair game for comedy in a way that God incarnate isn’t.

There’s also the problem of “putting words in Jesus’s mouth.” When Larry Cucumber plays Joshua, the writers can take some liberties, make him funny, and give him anachronistic dialogue. But when you write lines for Jesus, that carries a lot more weight. Some shows like The Chosen (2017) do choose to carry that weight, but VeggieTales wanted to be a comedy for kids.

When VeggieTales depicts baby Jesus in the manger, they obviously sidestep the issue of “putting words in Jesus’s mouth.” And I also think that A Christmas Play (2017) and The Best Christmas Gift (2019) are appropriately reverent when it comes to the moments that depict baby Jesus.

Both of these episodes have plenty of jokes, but during the moments that baby Jesus is on screen, the joking stops. In A Christmas Play, all we hear during the moments when baby Jesus appears on screen is the vegetables singing Silent Night.

And in The Best Christmas Gift, we get dialog that is obviously “written for kids,” but that dialog feels appropriately reverent, devoid of any jokes or quips:

Junior: The world is broken?

Pa: Yup. By sin.

Junior: And sin is?

Pa: When we put ourselves first. When we say, “I’m not gonna listen to God. I’m gonna do things my way.” Sin has broken the whole world. And the Messiah is coming to make it right. To fix it. To heal everything.

Junior: Whoa. But how can one person do that?

Pa: Because that baby in there, that baby isn’t just a person. That baby is also God. And He has the power to heal everything.

Junior: He can make all the bad go away?

Pa: This is just the beginning. The Kingdom of God is here. That baby will grow up to heal people, to make blind people see and lame people walk, to show us what life is like when all the bad stuff is wiped away. And we can join Him. We can help spread the Kingdom of God. And then one day, when it is time, God will set everything right.

Junior: This baby will make all the bad go away. He’ll bring the Kingdom of God. And I can be a part of it!

Pa: The promise of Christmas is God with us in the bad times, and God with us to end the bad times. The Kingdom of God is here. And we can all be a part of it.

Merry Christmas!

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To be clear, VeggieTales is still Christian media. While nearly all of the bible stories depicted on the show are taken from the Old Testament, each episode typically ends with a visit to QWERTY the computer, who pulls up a bible verse that’s relevant to the day’s lesson, often from the Christian New Testament:

But when Phil Vischer co-created VeggieTales, he had three rules on the recommendation of his mother, who taught at the Wheaton Grad School for 25 years in children’s ministry:

My mother had three rules for VeggieTales. …

“Rule number one, you will not portray Jesus as a vegetable.” You know, I thought, ‘well, there goes the New Testament.’

“Rule number two, you will not imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with Christ.” Like, ‘oh, okay. Well this is getting tricky.’ And that’s why Bob and Larry never pray on the kitchen countertop when they’re being Bob and Larry. They will pray when they’re being a Bible character in a Bible story. …

And third rule she said was, “as often as you can, remind kids how special they are, and how much God loves them.” And so that’s why every show ends with “Remember kids, God made you special and He loves you very much. Goodbye.”

Note the phrasing of the Bob and Larry sign-off: “God made you (not us) special, and He loves you very much.”

The facts of this story are not controversial; series co-creator Phil Vischer has been sharing this “VeggieTales origin story” for decades, and continues telling it well into 2025. This writing policy was most recently confirmed earlier this week on Twitter by VeggieTales writer Ethan Nicolle that these remained his marching orders:

And again, it should be said that while the vegetables are not saved, they’re not secular. They believe that Jesus died for humanity’s sins, but “humanity” is a category that excludes vegetables. Nothing about the Vischer mandate is “anti-Christian.”

But some people on Twitter are upset about the fact that their favorite characters aren’t saved, and have come up with what they think are “counterexamples” that prove that the vegetables can in fact have a redemptive relationship with God:

Chris here seems to be disputing the claim that “the vegetables on VeggieTales aren’t Christian” by showing screenshots from An Easter Carol. Let’s take a closer look at that episode, and what these screenshots actually show.

An Easter Carol: what it is (and what it isn’t)

This story is loosely based on A Christmas Carol, featuring Reverend Gilbert, a preacher who is trying to save his church from a Scrooge-like Ebenezer Nezzer who is trying to tear it down to build an “Easterland” theme park, full of plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies.

At first blush, the existence of this episode seems to disprove the claim point that “the vegetables aren’t Christian.” Here we have vegetables going to church on Sunday, and we even have a minister named Rev. Gilbert.

And in one stirring moment, Rev. Gilbert tells his son Edmund, “no matter what happens, God is taking care of us.”

Wait. Taking care of us? What happened to the carefully-worded second-person address telling us that “God made you (the viewer) special and loves you very much?” It seems like these vegetables have a redemptive relationship with God!

But here’s a question: do Reverend Gilbert and his son Edmund actually exist, or are they fictional characters?

I don’t mean from our perspective. Of course they’re fictional characters to us. But from the perspective of the vegetables in VeggieTales, are Reverend Gilbert and his son Edmund real people?

No, they are not! Anyone who has watched VeggieTales will instantly recognize, “Hey, that’s Junior Asparagus, and his dad, Mike Asparagus!” Within the VeggieTales canon, Mike and Junior Asparagus are real, but Rev. Gilbert and Edmund are fictional, just as Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim are fictional to us.

Mike Asparagus is not a Christian; he is an actor who occasionally portrays Christian characters. You might compare Mike Asparagus to Mark Williams, who is not a practicing Christian, but still portrays the fictional character of Father Brown on TV:

Much like we must separate real-life actors from the roles they play on screen, we must separate the “real” vegetables in VeggieTales from the fictional characters they portray in their in-world productions.

The play within a play

Phil Vischer was very conscious about this separation in the interview I quoted earlier:

“Rule number two, you will not imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with Christ.” Like, ‘oh, okay. Well this is getting tricky.’ And that’s why Bob and Larry never pray on the kitchen countertop when they’re being Bob and Larry. They will pray when they’re being a Bible character in a Bible story.

(Phil only specifies “Bible story,” but as we’ll see, the point generalizes to all stories that are depicted as a “play within a play,” productions that happen within the fiction of the VeggieTales universe.)

There are multiple layers to what is happening in the vegetables’ world. On one level, you have Bob and Larry, a tomato and cucumber who live on a kitchen counter:

But while many episodes begin and end on a kitchen counter, the bulk of the show consists of the vegetables dressing up in costumes to portray different characters. One week, Larry the cucumber might be Daniel in the lion’s den, the next he might be Joshua toppling the walls of Jericho.

And sometimes the stories take place in contemporary settings, like in The Toy That Saved Christmas, where Bob, Larry, and Junior Asparagus learn about the true meaning of Christmas from a talking toy:

This can get a bit confusing, because sometimes in the “play within a play,” the vegetables play fictionalized versions of themselves. For example, in The Toy That Saved Christmas, Larry plays a character called “Larry.” But the show is still very explicit about the fact that this is a “play within a play” by giving the episode a Princess Bride style-framing device, where we open on Annie Onion asking grandpa George to tell her a bedtime story:

This “vegetables playing fictionalized versions of themselves in contemporary settings” is what seems to trip up Isaac King, who discovered a musical number in which Junior Asparagus lies in bed and sings:

And so, it’s really good to know how much You love me

It’s true, the Bible says You do, You really love me

Your love was with me all throughout my day

In my bed so quietly, I rest in knowing God loves me!

It sounds like he has a redemptive relationship with God. But if we actually watch the full clip, right before Junior Asparagus sings his song, we can clearly see that this is not actually a child in his bedroom: he is an actor, on a set:

People playing fictionalized versions of themselves (who go by the same name) is not without real-world precedent, as anyone who has watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is well aware that the actions and biography of Will Smith (fictional character) should not be mistaken for those of Will Smith (actor). See also the numerous comedians who star in TV shows where they play fictionalized versions of themselves, like Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Pete Holmes, and so on.

The vegetable most prone to this sort of “same name confusion” is probably Mr. Nezzer, whose intimidating stature often has him portraying antagonist characters named Nezzer, like Nebby K. Nezzer (a phonetic stand-in for “Nebekenezer” in Rack, Shack & Benny), and Ebenezer Nezzer in An Easter Carol.

But the “real life” out-of-character Mr. Nezzer is actually a friendly swell guy who gets together with all of the other veggies to sing carols at Christmas, as is made clear in the 1996 Christmas album A Very Veggie Christmas. This album provides us with yet further clarification that the events of the morality plays on the show are fictional from the perspective of the vegetables:

Bob Tomato: I think now would be a good time to watch the songs from our new video, The Toy that Saved Christmas!

(“It’s Christmas” plays)

Bob Tomato: Fast-forward to the next song! I’ll be right back!

(VHS tape whirring sounds)

Mr. Nezzer: Wait a minute! Don’t you want to watch the factory scene? It’s one of my finest performances! Oh look, there I am!

Mr. Lunt: Heh. You look really funny in fast-forward, boss! Hey, have you lost weight?

But while A Very Veggie Christmas does make it very explicit that there is a layer of separation between the vegetables’ “reality” and their morality plays, it does provide us with a bit of a challenge: isn’t celebrating Christmas by getting together and singing songs a rather Christian thing to do? On this album, Junior Asparagus and Archibald Asparagus can very clearly be heard singing:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray

Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today

That sounds like a very explicit profession of Christian faith! Are the vegetables contradicting Phil Vischer’s marching order to “not portray the vegetables having a redemptive relationship with God” when they sing O Little Town of Bethlehem?

I would contend that they are not. VeggieTales can have the Asparagus family sing O Little Town of Bethlehem without violating “no implied redemptive relationship,” for the same reason that plenty of secular singers can belt Hark! The Herald Angels Sing without actually accepting the Nicene Creed in the second verse.

Decades of Disney movies have taught us that musical numbers are the place where people authentically and explicitly announce the intentions of their hearts. But here in the real world, it’s often the opposite: a teenager singing “I go on too many dates, but I can’t make ‘em stay” is not actually telling us anything about her life, except that she is a fan of Taylor Swift. Christianity is the topic of the song, not the state of the singer.

But while the vegetables may not be saved, they’re more theistic than secular carolers. The vegetables still believe in God. (As James 2:19 reminds us, it’s possible to believe in God’s existence without having a redemptive relationship with Him.)

VeggieTales is Christian media. The vegetables believe and endorse the core Christian claim: God sent His Son Jesus Christ to die and rise again so that human beings, the actual image-bearers that He made in His image, can be reconciled to Him.

This offer of redemption is not available to talking produce, or pets, or robots. But you are a human being, made in God’s image: God made you special, and He loves you very much.

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2025-12-26 update: I have written a follow-up post based on reader questions responding to this post:

Kuiper's blog

Highlights from the comments on "The Vegetables on VeggieTales aren't Christian"

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6 months ago · Kuiper

You might not bet on an agronomist from Iowa who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for making plants shorter. He literally bred wheat that put less effort into being tall and majestic, and more effort into making grain.

The perfect protagonist

Norman Borlaug has the kind of origin story biographers love: born on his grandparents’ farm in rural Iowa in 1914, grew up during the Great Depression watching people go hungry, decided to “do something about it,” studied plants with all the ambition a 20-something could muster, moved to Mexico in 1944, and created a new kind of wheat that fed a billion people in South and East Asia who were facing famine conditions in the 1960’s. Cue the swelling strings.

The trouble with this narrative is that “determination” is not a technique. Millions of other kids grew up during the Great Depression. Lots of people have set out to “solve hunger.” Plenty of equally determined people never got anywhere near a billion-lives outcome.

We should start the same way he did: understand the problem he was trying to solve. What is the problem that plausibly threatened a billion lives in a domain so narrow that a single man in the right place could solve it?

Don’t fall down

Tall stalks of grain are more likely to fall over. This is bad in the immediate, and potentially catastrophic on a longer time horizon.

When a stalk of grain falls down, it’s bad for the individual stalk: it’s now in the shade, and the leaves responsible for photosynthesis can get bent, which in turn means it produces smaller grains (and fewer grains).

But “growing fewer grains” is the least of your problems, because combines are built to harvest upright grain: downed stalks of wheat may not get harvested at all.

A downed stalk of wheat might seem “useless” or completely wasted. But it gets even worse than that: a downed stalk is bad for the wheat around it, because a flattened plant sitting against wet soil traps moisture, creating a humid environment that is ripe for mold or rot. Fungi can spread: a single fallen stalk can ruin multiple stalks of wheat.

And if that moldy stock of wheat gets harvested, things get worse still: that can introduce moisture and rot into the bin of what should have been dry grain, creating what are known as “hot spots.”

The “hot spots” are literally hot

If you stick a temperature probe into the grain bin, you can find localized areas that are warmer than the rest of the grain by a few degrees, and the culprit is often some fungi or bacteria that are respiring. Respiration in bacteria generates heat and CO2 and water (just like the heat + CO2 + water that leave your mouth every time you exhale).

And that water and heat in turn makes the environment even more hospitable for bacterial growth, which in turn produces more water, which is even more bacteria-friendly, which is how you get feedback loops that can ruin even more grain, until massive batches of grain get ruined:

It’s bad to be tall

The problems of wheat growing too top-heavy and falling over were really bad. They were so bad, in fact, that many farmers intentionally held back on fertilizer to prevent their wheat from growing too much.

Not only did the fertilizer make the stalks top heavy by making them taller, but bigger grains at the end of the stalk added mass to the top of the plant, which made the “falling over” problem worse.

(On a smaller scale, there was a similar problem with irrigation: more water means more plant growth, leading to more of the same problem. So just as some wheat farmers “under-fertilized” their crops to prevent too much growth, some “under-irrigated.”)

Think about how crazy that is: farmers are forced to intentionally withhold water and nutrients from their crops for fear that the crops will grow too lush!

Too much of a good thing?

Historically, the biggest problem for wild wheat plants had always been too little nutrition, rather than too much. Farmers in the 18th century never had to worry about “what happens if the wheat grows too tall?” But the advent of modern nitrogen-based fertilizer changed that.

The problem wasn’t that the wheat was growing too big, but that it was growing too tall. If you could just get the wheat to use all the extra nutrients to grow bigger grains of wheat, we’d end up with more edible food, and everyone would be happy. But wild wheat plants don’t behave like that.

That’s the world that Normal Borlaug walked into: wild cultivars of wheat had problems. Natural selection had not created plants that were optimized for feeding humans.

Fortunately, farmers aren’t limited to growing what occurs “naturally.” Plant breeders can select for the traits they like, and many of the plants we enjoy today look nothing like their counterparts from hundreds of years ago.

For example, this is what watermelons looked like back in the 17th century:

We can breed fruits to be juicier, with more flesh and less rind. And in much the same way, we can breed wheat to grow better.

Borlaug’s seed

Let’s skip ahead to the end of the story: semi-dwarf wheat plants are bred to have shorter, stiffer stems. That lets them stay upright even when well-fed and well-watered:

This fully unlocked the benefits of modern fertilizer (and irrigation) for wheat farmers: extra nutrients would now turn into more kernels and bigger heads of grain, rather than causing the plants to “grow too tall.”

And, as discussed earlier, upright wheat is easier to harvest cleanly, and less likely to mold on the ground.

The combined effect is that the benefits of more fertilizer actually show up in the grain bin, rather than getting wasted in growing longer stems or contributing to plant spoilage.

This wasn’t Borlaug’s only contribution. The plants were also bred to be “rust resistant.” Rust is a fungal plant pathogen that looks like this:

If you ever hear farmers complaining about plants “rusting,” they’re talking about this pathogen; they’re not out there growing cyborg plants.

Those are desirable improvements. But how do you actually get there, instead of waiting around for the perfect plant to just emerge?

Speedrunning the breeding process

Norman Borlaug finished his PhD in plant pathology in 1942, and after several years of wartime R&D work at DuPont, he moved to rural Mexico to stare at wheat.

More precisely, he went to work for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican agriculture program. The important question is: why Mexico?

Mexico had a cheat code. It let you run wheat breeding at 2x speed.

The problem: nature gives you one roll of the dice per year

Before Borlaug, for millennia, the paradigm had been “one generation of wheat per year.”

You plant your experimental plots in late spring, they grow through the summer, you harvest in early fall, you keep seed from the best-performing plants, and then you wait until next spring to plant the next generation.

The whole breeding cycle is really only ~5 months of growing, wrapped inside a 12-month calendar year.

The bottleneck here is climate. There are reasons you plant in May and not in, say, January: if you’re in a colder climate, maybe January’s soil is a solid waterlogged graveyard where seeds go to die of fungal disease.

If you only have one site, you’re stuck with that rhythm. But if you can find two sites with non-overlapping growing seasons, you can play a neat trick:

1. Grow wheat at Site A during the summer. (Plant in spring, harvest in fall.)

2. Harvest it, pick the winners.

3. Immediately ship those seeds to Site B, which is just starting its growing season.

4. Grow the next generation at Site B. (Plant in fall, harvest in spring)

5. Harvest again within the same year.

Result: two generations per year instead of one.

The perfect location

But how do you get two sites with non-overlapping breeding seasons, one where wheat grows in the summer, and one where wheat grows in the winter? You go to Mexico, where Borlaug found that different elevations provided different growing conditions:

Toluca Valley: Higher elevation, rain-fed, cooler climate that “feels like” many parts of the US or Europe. You plant in May/June, harvest in October. This is your summer cycle.

Yaqui Valley: Low elevation, much warmer climate, irrigated (rather than rain-fed). Here, you plant November, and harvest in April/May. This is your winter-spring cycle.

The calendars don’t overlap. And thanks to the massive elevation difference, Mexico gives you these two “opposite” climates only a day’s drive apart.

The moment you’re done harvesting Yaqui in spring, you can take your best lines, load them on a truck, drive up to Toluca, and get them in the ground for the summer cycle. Then in the fall you repeat in the other direction.

This system of driving seeds back-and-forth between two Mexican sites to get two breeding cycles in every calendar year was known as “shuttle breeding.”

“Couldn’t you just do this in Europe?”

In principle, you could have had a similar breeding program in Europe: maybe shuttle seed between somewhere like Sicily (warm winters) and Denmark (cool summers).

But crossing borders means customs agents, who are understandably suspicious when you start hauling massive bags full of foreign plant material through their checkpoints.

Then there’s the fact that all of this is happening in the pre-jet age: moving seed from Sicily to Denmark means a minimum of 3 days by train and 1 day by ferry, with lots of hand-offs and opportunities for delay, spoilage, or bureaucratic border nonsense.

Mexico had what almost nobody else did in the 1940s: two de-synced wheat calendars and a short road in between.

The other advantage of two breeding environments

If you only breed in one lovely valley, you get wheat that is very talented at performing in that one specific lovely valley. That wheat has been “trained to the test,” and might start to fail if you try to grow it somewhere else. Change the altitude, humidity, day length, local pathogens, or the fertilizer dosage, and suddenly you might discover that the star student doesn’t have the answers.

The Mexican wheat avoided this problem entirely by being alternately bred across two different environments. Bouncing back-and-forth between Toluca Valley and Yaqui Valley didn’t just make the wheat-breeding faster, it also made the end product more robust.

This wheat could grow at low elevation or high elevation, warm or cool, different types of pathogens, different dosages of water and nitrogen fertilizer depending on what the environment allowed. This wheat was battle-tested. But it still had the problem of growing too tall if you added to much fertilizer.

Deus ex machina?

In the 1950s, the famous Norin-10 dwarfing genes arrived from Japan into North American breeding programs. These genes are what make wheat short and sturdy enough to handle heavy fertilizer without falling over.

So the thing Norman Borlaug is most famous for, the semi-dwarf wheat, didn’t even show up until almost a decade into his Mexican work, and the crucial genetic ingredient literally comes from someone else’s breeding program on another continent. In a real way, he “got lucky.”

But there’s an aphorism that I’m fond of: “luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”

Borlaug spent a decade building an industrial-scale pipeline that could notice a useful trait when it appeared, drag it into his own material, and test it under realistic conditions. By the time Norin-10 arrived, he already had:

• rust-resistant Mexican lines adapted to multiple environments,

• a two-site, two-crop shuttle breeding program that could cross-breed these dwarfing traits into high-yield wheat lines at twice the speed,

• a detailed understanding of things that go wrong with wheat when you pour on fertilizer and hope for the best.

So when a short, stiff Japanese wheat showed up, Borlaug had a machine that could notice the right trait, recombine it with the right backgrounds, and make it actually work outside a single pretty valley.

Other breeders got access to Norin-10 long before Borlaug’s Mexico program. Most of them didn’t save a billion lives.

Should Borlaug get all the credit?

In the mid 1960’s, many parts of South Asia were facing famine conditions. The Mexican-bred semi-dwarf wheat offered a bargain that they were glad to take: “give us fertilizer and water and we will not face-plant, give us rust and we will not get eaten alive, plant us at a wide range of latitudes and we’ll still bloom on time.” From there, the conclusion feels practically forgone.

But of course, it took a monumental amount of unglamorous human effort to multiply the seeds, procure the fertilizer, and build the canals for irrigation that allowed the wonderful wheat strains to do their job after South Asian farmers planted them. Indian geneticist and plant breeder M.S. Swaminathan gets much of the credit for spearheading a movement that introduced the new wheat strains to India and Pakistan at a time when they were facing famine conditions.

The Norman Borlaug Nobel Prize nominations start in 1968, with the Prize finally being awarded in 1970. He’s celebrated as “the man who saved a billion lives” by Texas A&M and Auburn University and University of Minnesota. Is attributing all of this to one man missing the point?

The dwarfing genes that made all of this possible came from a cultivar bred in Japan in the 1930s, collected during the postwar occupation, and passed around to breeding programs worldwide. Borlaug requested them in 1953. Plenty of other breeders had access to the same genes.

And perhaps that is a hint at why Borlaug deserves unique credit.

At the start of this post, I noted that “determination” is not a technique. Plenty of equally determined people grew up during the Depression, watched people go hungry, and never got anywhere near a billion-lives outcome.

The same is true here. “Having access to Norin-10” is not a technique either. Plenty of breeders got those genes. Most of them didn’t have a billion-lives impact.

What separated Borlaug wasn’t a desire to feed the hungry, or access to the right wheat genes. It was his championing of the “shuttle breeding” concept, squeezing two wheat-growing seasons into 12 months.

But Borlaug’s contribution wasn’t just realizing that 5 months plus 5 months is less than 12 months. It was realizing this, and being willing to try it when no one else was.

Borlaug first tested his idea unofficially: he hauled seed around Mexico, planted it out of cycle, and documented that the plants did in fact grow. He saw that you could move wheat up and down Mexico’s altitudinal ladder and get two generations in a single year.

But Borlaug’s idea to scale up the operation and make it the basis of an official breeding operation was met with resistance. The Rockefeller project’s consultant breeder H.K. Hayes called Borlaug’s idea unorthodox and agriculturally suspect. It defied conventional wisdom: seeds were supposed to “rest” between generations, not immediately harvested and then driven to a new environment to be planted the next week.

Borlaug’s boss George Harrar, was against the shuttle breeding plan, calling it “too expensive.” After multiple rejections, Borlaug threatened to quit the program before an emergency mediation from Elvin Stakman, who was both Harrar’s former teacher, and Borlaug’s mentor. Stakmen persuaded Borlaug to sleep on it before calling it quits, and by the next morning, Harrar reversed the decision and decided to approve the project.

So, in fact, we do get our dramatic Oscar-winning biopic moment. Our hero, who was born on a rural Iowa farm and grew up during the Great Depression, has a dramatic confrontation with his boss, ultimately winning the day by stubbornly refusing to back down from his idea.

Borlaug’s gift to the world

I began this piece expecting to debunk the “great man” narrative, and specifically stated as my thesis that “determination is not a technique.” But it turns out there was a “great man” moment where Borlaug’s determination won the day.

Notice what kind of moment it was, and what led up to it. Norman Borlaug didn’t have a “flash of genius.” He had an idea, and critically, he tested it. He gathered the evidence, and when the institutional drama flared up, he was confident enough in his discovery that he was willing to stake his career on it.

Science doesn’t just require discovering what’s true. That part is important, but then you also need to be willing to defend it, even when the resident expert consultant, and the conventional wisdom, and your boss all say you’re wrong.

Surely, the sophisticated among us think, life isn’t a Hollywood movie where everything comes down to a dramatic moment of conflict where the hero wins the day through “the power of courage and determination.” Clearly, saving a billion lives is about scientific discovery, and building institutions and infrastructure, and doing years and years of work that looks boring from the outside.

But, as it turns out, sometimes getting to the point where you get to do the science or build infrastructure requires having courage to challenge authority. In fact, some might argue that this is where all important scientific discoveries lie: as Paul Graham says, “A good scientist…does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.”

Aristotle was right: the first virtue is courage. All of your scientific understanding and technical capabilities are an important piece of the puzzle, but they won’t come to bear if you back down when you encounter opposition.

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The courage to speak

There’s a clip of Scott Alexander on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast where Scott said:

I hear a lot of stuff from people who are like, “I hate writing blog posts. Of course, I have nothing useful to say.” But then everybody seems to like it and reblog it and say that they’re great.

Part of what happened with me was, I spent my first couple years that way. And then gradually I got enough positive feedback that I managed to convince the inner critic in my head that probably people will like my blog post. But there are some things that people have loved that I was like absolutely on the verge of “no, I’m just going to delete this, it would be too crazy to put it out there.”

That’s kind of why I say that maybe the limiting factor for so many of these people is courage, because everybody I talk to who blogs is like within 1% of not having enough courage of blogging.

Scott’s appearance on Dwarkesh was embedded on the announcement page for Inkhaven, a writing residency where ~40 writers gather in Berkeley to write one blog post per day for the entire month of November. One acceptance letter and 30 days of blogging later, I now find myself on the final day of Inkhaven.

My residency writing obligations end today, but you can expect to hear more from me about some of the topics that matter me, like the ways that people like Norman Borlaug have improved the material living conditions of people around the world.

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7 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Kuiper

I’m at a 40 person writing retreat currently, and the venue has these huge whiteboard walls that were so invitingly blank. So I thought a fun thing I can do is write up a list of my favourite songs of each year of the 21st century so far, and then invite all of the residents to replace my picks with theirs, over the course of two days.

Since then, others have repurposed this white board infrastructure, asking their fellow Inkhaven residents to create “best lists” other things, like blog posts and video games and historical empires. And now I have done the same thing with movies.

For each year from 2000-2025, I offer my own entry, followed by the residents’ replacement:

2000

Snatch: Guy Ritchie at his best: criminals of every sort, kinetic direction, Brad Pitt doing an unintelligible Irish accent. Frantic, fun, fast.

Replacement: none

2001

Ocean’s Eleven: The perfect heist movie. Nobody does it like Soderbergh. Absurd levels of charisma on screen at any given moment.

Replaced by: Legally Blonde: “iconic movie with a sweet protagonist and one billion quotable quips. Comfort movie par excellence!”

2002

Spider-Man: They let Sam Raimi make a $100 million movie, and it rules! Jim Norton is in this movie for 2 seconds, and it rules! This movie is about New York and New Yorkers, and a guy who shoots webs. Great villain performance by Willem Dafriend Dafoe

Replaced by: Adaptation: “Nic Cage x2 + orchids”

2003

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: It’s now illegal to make movies that look this good. The performances, the score, and the script all conspire to create some of the most moving moments in cinema history.

No replacement

2004

The Incredibles: A movie about family and parenthood. What could be better? Incredible character design, absurdly tight script and characterization

Replaced by: Primer: “a 77-minute engineering mistake that became one of the best time travel movies ever made”

2005

Batman Begins: It’s kind of incredible that they let Nolan play with this IP. Liam Neeson makes a great Batman character. Bale brings a level of humanity to the Bruce Wayne role we haven’t seen since.

Replaced by: The Producers: “Step 1: we find the worst script ever written, Step 2: we hire the worst director in town, Step 3: we lose $10 million on a $1 production, Step 4: PROFIT!”

2006

The Prestige: More interesting as a character study than as a genre film, and yet it is also an incredible genre film. Has a great “plot” but it’s not dependent on strong plot twists.

Replaced by: The Departed (Justified by handwriting that I cannot read, sorry)

2007

Zodiac: A film about obsession, and who better to star than RDJ and Jake Gyllanhal? This is also a movie about the California highway system

Replaced by: Sunshine: “A solid horror movie disguised as a science fiction movie. The setting is at once claustrophobic but terrifyingly open. It’s got a great soundtrack that only adds to the creeping unease. And to me, the ending is a fist pump for humanity. (ignore the bad science)”

2008

The Dark Knight: The perfect movie, if you are a teenage boy (I happen to be born during the 90’s). Health Ledger’s Joker is iconic. The world of this movie makes no sense, but it’s aesthetically everything it needs to be.

Replaced by: Burn after reading: “Retired CIA gets into hijinks when his memoir is forgotten in a gym and employees try to extort him.”

2009

Inglorious Basterds: Tarantino’s got a thing for genre mashups and historical revenge fantasies and this one is alternately tense/terrifying and incredibly fun to watch.

Replaced by: OSS 117 Rio ne pépond plus (Lost in Rio): “Pure French comedy. Hilarious. Parody of James Bond. Esoteric to non-French. Extremely French protagonist. Heavy use of “second degré”.” Set in Brasil.”

2010

The Social Network: This is a movie about divorce that improbably centers on a relationship between two heterosexual men. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack. Armie Hammer is a tour de force, and there’s two of him. Andrew Garfield plays the perfect jealous partner, and his Prada is at the cleaners. Perfect movie.

Replaced by: Inception. “An extremely straightforward film about movie-making. The emotional core contains a perspective I’ve often felt and rarely seen, and the tense pacing and action pay for the runtime”

2011

Moneyball: A perfect movie! A wonderful work of fiction with delightful fictional characters. Like all Sorkin films, it’s about a dad and his daughter.

Replaced by: none

2012

The Place Beyond the Pines: “Ryan Gosling’s character just like me fr” is very far from being true in my case, but the filmmaking draws me into the world so thoroughly that I feel what it’s like to be that guy. Incredibly immersive.

Replaced by: Cloud Atlas. “An impossible adaptation that turned out to be not so impossible. Shifting the novel’s structure was a good idea—it led to many spectacular moments”

2013

Blue Ruin: A revenge movie that portrays revenge as a horrible, ugly, bloody thing. (The antonym to many lesser “revenge movies” that portray revenge as a cathartic power fantasy.)

Replaced by: Frozen: “If you’re confused about this, consult your local six-year-old.”

2014

Nightcrawler: A film about the dirty business of “making the news.” Jake Gyllenhaal is an incredible sociopath. Incredibly propulsive plot, never stops moving and never lets you rest.

Replaced by: Interstellar. “The blankfaces have taken over, and it’s up to the retired Progress Studies believer to save the day. ‘It’s not possible,’ says the robot. ‘It’s necessary,’ says the human race.”

2015

The Martian: An ode to joy, optimism, and the wonderful things human minds can do. It’s more of an engineering movie than a science movie, which is good because we don’t get enough of those!

Replacement: none

2016

Arrival: I cannot articulate what makes this movie great. It just is.

keeps this and adds, quoting Honest Trailers: “It’s the second movie of 2016 that featured Amy Adams trying to relate to an alien that no one else likes. (The first was Batman v Superman.)”

A second resident adds: “Supposedly, people at Google came up with attention after watching it.”

2017

Baby Driver: I have seen this movie like 5 times, which is a normal thing to do when the experience of watching it is quite analogous to listening to your favorite album.

Replaced by: The LEGO Batman Movie: “Will Arnett is great as Batman; the movie captures the inherent silliness of superheroes while having a great heart.”

2018

Eighth Grade: Early adolescence is utterly terrifying, full of mortifying experiences. You just want to hide in your room where no one else can see your awkwardness and acne. And yet while fearing human contact more than anything, you also desire human connection more than anything.

Replaced by: The Wolf House: Nobody heard of this Chilean stop-motion animated historical allusion embedded in a fairy tale embedded in an in-universe propaganda film because sometimes you must seek out greatness. The visuals are both skin-crawling & unparalleled-literally-never-seen-anything-like-this-before stunning. Watch for the thematic language drifting between Spanish and German

2019

Uncut Gems: A 2-hour anxiety attack. There’s nothing quite so gripping. So intense, so specific, relentless.

No replacement, even though Marriage Story was sitting right there.

2020

Palm Springs: Not a great movie, but a good one, and sometimes that’s better than being great, especially when you need to stay home and want something comfy. Charismatic actors with great chemistry, what else do you need?

No replacement; just elaboration from : “This movie came out direct to Hulu due to the pandemic, when theaters were closed. It was a fun, modern take on a Groundhog Day-style time loop, centered around a wedding in Palm Springs.”

2021

Dune, Part 1: They passed a law few decades ago forbidding the creation of new movie stars, but Timothee Chalamet managed to slip through the cracks. The cinematography is experimental and majestic, it’s just great to look at!

Replaced by: RRR. “Every event that happens in this larger-than-life anticolonialist musical action epic is awesome. A guy fights a tiger & then apologizes to it. A guy rescues his BFF from jail and has him ride on his shoulders while shooting two guns at once. There’s friendship & blood & mythology & a dance-off. It may be Hindu nationalist propaganda but it does f**k continuously & hard.”

2022

Tár: Every scene is gripping, Cate Blanchett’s performance is captivating. A great character study.

Replacement: none, because Everything Everywhere All At Once is apparently too on-the-nose for Jenn to add it as an ethnically Chinese millennial whose parents moved to North America the 90’s. But as she notes, her mother doesn’t “get it,” which sort of indicates a failure on the part of the movie to actually speak to the first generation experience, don’t you think?

2023:

Blackberry: A fun disaster movie. An elegy to a bygone era. It’s made all the better because you know how the story ends.

Replacement: none, even though Oppenheimer was right there.

2024:

Challengers: A perfect movie. Looks amazing in ways that baffle me, like literally “how did they do that?” And every performance is great. The camera is obsessed with the characters’ bodies, every pore, every sinew and muscle.

Replaced by: I Saw the TV Glow. Gorgeous film. I’m not really a cinematography knower but many of the shots took my breath away. The best movie about 90s TV show fandom culture. Perfectly captures the experience of disassociation.

2025

Bugonia: A disgusting, sickening film. Who else but Yorgos Lanthimos could do this? Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone have incredible on-screen chemistry. The soundtrack is emotional terrorism. Enter this twisted world at your own peril.

Replacement by: none, because of the delinquency of the resident Sinners-enjoyer was not around to transcribe the thoughts which he already shared on his own blog

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If you want more of my movie opinions, you can follow me on Letterboxd.

This is my penultimate post for , a 30-day blogging fellowship where I and 40 other residents post daily for the month of November.

The “measured” data follows a normal distribution. But when men are asked to self-report their own height, there is a suspicious dip in the number of guys who describe themselves as 5’11” (and a correspondingly large number of guys who are exactly 6 foot).1

These sorts of “holes in the distribution” show up in lots of places besides self-reported height:

Missing IMDB ratings: “the 9 gap”

My fellow Inkhaven resident David Gros has an excellent post about why some movies have a hole in their IMDB ratings. To recap the most salient part: most film ratings on IMDB have what looks like a “normal distribution” of ratings. For example, here’s the ratings for Toy Story 4:

It has an average rating of 7.6, so as you would expect, most of the ratings are 7 or 8, with the frequency of ratings dropping off from there in either direction. But for certain movies -- what you might call “cult hits” -- the distribution looks more like this:

It’s tempting to chalk this one up to “activist fans” (this is what you’d expect to see see if a bunch of sock puppet accounts were voting 10), but if you look at other films that have a big “9 gap,” most of them don’t have massive “fandoms.”

There’s certainly a sense in which “dog lovers” and “horse lovers” have a sort of “cult fandom” quality to them, but I don’t think that dog lovers are creating sock puppet accounts on IMDB to give A Dog’s Purpose a 10/10 rating. These votes express actual human preferences.

So what are those preferences? I think some movies hit in a way that invites you to consider them more emotionally and less quantitatively.

When a movie emotionally breaks you and you immediately hug your dog, that’s not a 9/10 experience; the only rating that feels emotionally honest is a 10. Nobody says “this movie made me cry about my dog, but in a rigorously calibrated way that deserves a 9.”

Ditto for when you have a slumber party that turns into a KPop singalong night, or when you dress up, drive to the local independent theater, and get ready to do the Time Warp again. That’s not a 9/10 experience. You can’t even really quantitatively compare it to other films.

The “9-gap” in IMDB ratings doesn’t require a hardcore fandom or some conscious campaign to boost the number of 10 ratings. It just needs a movie whose appeal is “bimodal” for a certain audience.

Retail discounts

Retail discounts also follow a bimodal distribution: items are either shallowly discounted, or deeply discounted, but seldom moderately discounted.

PC game market Steam is currently doing a “Black Friday” sale where the top-selling discounted software titles demonstrate this:

Scroll through the Steam bestsellers list and you’ll see practically no games with a 25-35% discount. Either the game is getting propelled to the top of the list by a steep 40-70% discount, or it’s popular enough to make the top sellers list without a substantial discount.

Income

In the same way that certain IMDB titles have a “9 gap” at the high end, the lower end of the income distribution has a very small number of households with a reported income of $5,000-10,000: Either you make >$10k, or you’re ~broke, with very few people in between, as you can see by looking a the orange bars on the left:

You can also see something more directly analogous to a “9 gap” if we zoom in on the middle of the graph: Notice how there’s a slight dip for $95-100k, and a corresponding bump for $100k-105k. What explains this?

It’s a bit like the 5’11 guys calling themselves 6-foot: this census data showing self-reported survey income. There are probably some people making $98k or $99k who “round up” to $100k.

But if we set aside the census survey and look at IRS income data, we discover something different:

The tax reporting incentives

Mortenson and Whitten (2020) find evidence of “bunching” at what they describe as “kinks” in the income scale, points where the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit peak.

For example, many taxpayers, particularly taxpayers who are self-employed, cluster around the first income level “kink” ($13,650) where the Earned Income Tax Credit hits its maximum:

They find that 89% of the taxpayers who are at the “bunching” points are self-employed, meaning that they have finer control over their income than people working W-2 jobs.

Likewise, this is what the distribution of taxpayers looks like for at the point at which the Child Tax Credit is maxed out and stops increasing with additional earnings ($16,333):

The tax code creates incentives, and people respond to them. Who knew!

This post was largely inspired by David Gros’s post The Missing 9: Why Some Movies Have a Hole in Their IMDb Ratings.

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Kuiper's blog

No, twin studies are not about twins separated at birth (usually)

Since I was young, I heard the phrase “twin studies” and naively assumed that these studies were conducted something like this…

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8 months ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Kuiper

• you leave behind a widow, or

• you become a widow

And yet billions of people throughout history have signed up for one of these two outcomes: either you, or the person you love most, will experience that incredible pain, and have to bear it alone.

The lonely suffering of the widowed is a timeless and universal tragedy, yet it feels unique when it is happening to you, because your relationship was unique. Leo Tolstoy had it backwards: every loving family is loving in a totally unique way that will only ever be understood by the people who experienced it.

But fiction lets us do the next best thing. I have never lost a spouse, but Chuck Klosterman allowed me to experience that pain vicariously through his novel Downtown Owl.

I have not spoiled anything by telling you that this is a story about a widower. At the time the novel begins (1983), Horace is already alone, left with little to occupy his afternoons than the company of other retired men talking about politics, and reminiscing about the good ol’ days, when girls were girls and men were men, when the local football high school team still had it.

Horace is not the only character whose life is rendered in vivid detail. We also see the world through the eyes of Mitch, a high school football player who is depressed (and, to add insult to injury, has no good reason to be depressed). And we also see the perspective of Julia, the “girl from the big city” who is Owl’s newest resident. She spends her days teaching high school history and her nights trying to stave off boredom in local bars.

Young adult problems

The people who grew up in Owl have decades of rapport, so what they lack in breadth of connection they might at least make up for in depth. But you don’t have that if you move to Owl at age 23, freshly graduated and moving for a teaching job. Life in a town with a population of 1000 people can be extraordinarily dull. There isn’t even anyone within a hundred miles of here who sells weed. There’s only one depressant in Owl, and it’s on tap.

The trouble with local small town bars, Julia discovers, is that everyone knows you. Even if you’ve never met them, everyone recognizes you as “the new girl in town,” the high school teacher. Most of them personally know at least one of your colleagues or students. If you do anything scandalous, like accepting a man’s invitation to go on a date, the whole town will know. That’s a scary prospect, but not as scary as the possibility that none of the town’s 300 men (fewer than 100 of whom are eligible bachelors) might be worth dating.

Teenage problems

Mitch has problems, too. His teachers tell bad jokes, and students are forced to laugh because the alternative is a silence which is awkward to the point of physical discomfort.

Mitch’s entire teenage life is a perpetual state of discomfort, save for the moments when he is alone in his bedroom:

“Why do we get out of bed?” Mitch wondered. “Is there any feeling better than being in bed? What could possibly feel better than this? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?” Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning: Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence. He could still remember the spring of 1978, when he (along with over half of his fifth-grade classmates) contracted mononucleosis. It was the best month of his life.

Mitch, like many high schoolers, spends much of his life daydreaming. When he sits through English literature lectures delivered by Mr. Laidlaw, his mind turns to the poorly-kept secret that Mr. Laidlaw got one of his teenage students pregnant, and the ways that it might be possible to break into Mr. Laidlaw’s house at night, specifically a Saturday night when Mrs. Laidlaw was attending Catholic Mass. Mitch has vivid violent fantasies about what might happen after the break-in, and how he might construct an alibi.

Viewed from the perspective of an external observer, these fantasies might seem incredibly disturbing. But we don’t read them from the perspective of an external observer. We get them from Mitch’s perspective. And to Mitch, the fantasy of violently assaulting the high school football coach is just yet another one of his many daydreams intended for little more than staving off boredom.

The Klosterman of it all

The citizens of Owl are not living in a comedy, but Downtown Owl is a deeply funny book. Chuck Klosterman is a keen observer of social behavior. He was born in 1972 and grew up on a farm in North Dakota. Klosterman understands life in Owl, North Dakota, 1983 as intimately as anyone.

Klosterman understands all of the people in this town so deeply and so well that he can’t help but notice the absurdities and contradictions of their lives, and when he articulates those absurdities and contradictions, I can’t help but laugh. Sometimes, they hit you in a single line:

It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.

Julia’s fake love for Vance was exhilarating and idiotic; it was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don’t actually know.

Ted was behind the wheel and Naomi was in the passenger seat. They had been drinking for seven hours. Ted was trying to drive off his buzz.

But the funniest passages of all are those that go on for pages and pages, as Klosterman paints an ever-more vivid portrait of a specific character mentally spiraling over how his father spent the family fortune in the hopes of becoming a bison tycoon, which is how he learned many interesting facts about bison biology, like the fact that they tend to charge pickup tricks for no apparent reason, and that “if a mama bison thinks you’re staring at her calf for too long, she will try to kill you,” followed by an extended lamentation about the bison market (or lack thereof), and how his life “continues to revolve around a pasture of dangerous, unmanageable, fiscally insolvent ungulates.”

Klosterman enjoys experimenting with form. There are some readers who find omniscient viewpoint confusing because of all the “head hopping,” but when Klosterman wants to present multiple characters’ perspectives on an interaction, he will literally label sections of a conversation in giant bold print to tell you whose head you are in, as the book suddenly adopts this style for the duration for a single chapter:

What he said: “Well, at least I’m good for something. I’m That Guy With All The Buffalo.”

What he knew: I’m an idiot.

What she said: “Is that why you’re famous?”

What she understood to be true: I am not afraid to say what is obvious, even if the obvious is uncomfortable to all involved.

What he said: “What in the hell are you talking about?”

What he meant: I know what you are talking about.

And, of course, this framing provides the opportunity for him to eventually ambush you with paragraphs of introspection, drawing a sad vivid picture of a man who stumbled his way through life and didn’t like where he landed, drawing you into the inner world of a character that you ever expected to earn your sympathy.

There’s an interesting bit about microcelebrity culture: one character is beloved by the community for having once done something on a football field when he was in high school. When everyone tells him that he’s the greatest man this city has ever known, he has two choices: he can participate in the delusion, or he can quietly disbelieve them (and start feeling contempt for the people who are foolish enough to idolize him). Becoming a misanthrope isn’t exactly a great outcome, but maybe it’s better than the alternative where you participate in the shared delusion of the people who think you are the greatest man alive in the town of Owl.

Klosterman reveals the mundane hilarity of life. But as Klosterman invites you into these characters’ inner worlds, to share in their thoughts and forgotten dreams and crushed ambitions and fanciful crushes, he also reveals the ways in which life can often be quietly and profoundly beautiful.

It’s difficult for me to describe these to you in any sort of detail, because the thing that makes them beautiful and profound is the way that they always seem to sneak up on you, and emerge from the context that Klosterman often spends pages building up before he socks you with the emotional gut punch.

The most beautiful moments in Downtown Owl often appear in the midst of tragedy, or absurdity, or both together. And, in many cases, these moments of truth and joy often emerge only because characters find themselves in tragic circumstances. They do not lead enviable lives. But we are allowed to be tourists in their inner lives.

The gift of fiction

The characters have a moment of joy that emerges from tragedy, and from their perspective, it must be quite hard. We get a taste of their hardship and suffering, but hours or days or weeks of misery are compressed into paragraphs. We get to see the ways in which they overcome the quiet suffering of ordinary life. And we get to enjoy realization of absurdity, and the small bit of hope in it, as a much larger portion of the whole experience.

I enjoyed my time in Downtown Owl. It is, in many ways, a tragic book. It made me cry. But at least half the tears were due to joy and laughter. It gets my highest recommendation.

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Psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar argue that narrative fiction functions as a simulation of social life, preparing and training our brains to understand different kinds of experiences that we have yet to encounter first-hand.

Reading Chuck Klosterman’s Downtown Owl will not train or prepare your brain from the experience of failing to stop a supervillain from destroying 50% of all life in the universe. He can only prepare you for the sort of tragedies one is likely to experience in Owl, North Dakota, like being depressed, feeling completely alone in the world, and losing the people you love most, and the ways that even in the worst of times, one can still find moments of joy.

Roger Ebert said that movies are “empathy machines,” but Oatley and Mar’s psychology research note that written narratives provide a different cognitive experience than watching movies or TV. Visual media lets us observe characters from the outside, but in a novel, so much of what’s on the page is exposing us to characters’ inner lives, letting us understand how they think and how they perceive the world around them. It’s for this reason that I recommend that you read Downtown Owl (as opposed to watching the 2023 film adaptation on Netflix).

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Thanks to Damon Sasi for reading an earlier draft and suggesting edits

Marketing strategists talk openly about how the purpose of a clickbait headline is to intentionally create a gap between the information you’re given and the information that’s withheld. Here are 3 recent representative examples from Upworthy:

• “The number one conversation mistake that instantly kills good rapport instead of building it”

• “Woman is shocked after learning the bizarre technique people use to make their spray tans last”

• “Robin Williams saw a struggling comedian bomb on stage. He knew exactly what to say to her.”

(To save you 3 clicks: the “toxic conversation mistake” is hijacking the conversation to monologue about yourself, the “secret to making spray tans last” is to avoid washing most of your body, and the thing Robin Williams said is “You were amazing,” with “a gentle look like, ‘We’re all in this together.’”)

These headlines prey on your curiosity. The real purpose of the headline is to make you aware of your own ignorance, and it does this by giving you incomplete information. If they put the whole thing in the headline, you wouldn’t have to click.

It’s not just Upworthy that is doing this. For example, if you want to learn more about Upworthy, you can read a New York Times article that is titled:

• NYT: The News Is Making People Anxious. You’ll Never Believe What They’re Reading Instead.

Notice how this NYT headline does the same thing, creating what behavioral economist George Loewenstein described as an “information gap.” The headline tells you something new: people are rejecting the news because it makes them feel anxious. You then ask: what are they reading instead? If you want to learn the answer, you need to click. And then you do click, and you get a story about how “good news”-themed content online has grown more popular.

The NYT is using the same headline tactic as Upworthy, but the content is very different, both ethically and mechanically. In the case of the Upworthy headlines, the “content” that you wanted is basically a single sentence, and that single sentence is buried under several paragraphs of preamble filler to create more real estate for ads.

The NYT story is baiting the hook in the same way, but it has a lot more to say about its subject matter: the story isn’t just “more people are clicking on uplifting news from sites like Upworthy;” the NYT talks about how much of that “news” is unsourced garbage that doesn’t follow basic journalistic standards for fact-checking, with the rare exception of a few outlets like National Geographic that do “good news” while following basic journalistic rigor. The NYT also talks about how these “good news” stories are monetized through advertising, and how advertisers are often skittish about running ads on “tragedy,” so positive stories might be more of a “safe space for brands.”

Unlike the Upworthy clickbait, it’s a story that you couldn’t have compressed that entire story down to a single sentence. So, in that sense, it’s good that I got baited into clicking, because instead of getting empty calories, I got something more akin to an actual dinner. The NYT earned my click.

Still, that NYT headline is asking for your attention. That might be annoying if it interrupted your scroll on Facebook, or it might be exactly what you were looking for, if you were already on the NYT app and looking for a story to read.

What if we created an ecosystem for a sort of “consensual clickbait?” People could readily opt in and say, “I’m going to open the clickbait app on my phone to see all of the clickbait headlines, because I have some spare time and want something that will captivate me. If I see an eye-catching headline, I will not resent the distraction; I want someone to grab my attention.”

That is kind of what YouTube has become.

YouTube is “the clickbait platform”

I have spent past 8 years scriptwriting hundreds of videos, with the median video getting millions of views.

When I want to make what I do sound more virtuous, I say things like “I make educational videos about pop culture topics, like physics lessons on how Ant-Man’s powers are affected by the square-cube law, or what Pokemon can teach us about epigenetics.” It sounds so respectable when I describe it like that.

But in order to get 8 million gamers to watch a video about physics, you need to get them to click. And so, the videos I write get packaged like this:

When I showed this thumbnail at a recent conference talk, remarked from the audience that “I hate how much I want to click on it,” which is such a perfect articulation of why people hate clickbait, and why it works.

But if you do click on it and watch the video, I don’t think you’ll hate yourself for clicking on it. In fact, I think that the video itself is a lot more edifying than the thumbnail might suggest: after 15 minutes of viewing, you’ll find that you got clickbaited…into learning about astrophysics, and how real-world black holes behave very differently from the black holes described in the Pokemon universe.

In that sense, it seems like a bit of bait-and-switch: “you thought you were going to get candy, but you got vegetables instead!” And yet “bait-and-switch” implies a bit of deception, and I think those who clicked for candy will not find their expectations betrayed. You’ll get the science lesson, but you’ll also get the kinetic audiovisual presentation, and pop culture references, and a high-energy YouTuber talking about your favorite video game franchise.

I think it’s quite analogous to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye’s TV show is not a 37-page academic paper cosplaying as a kids’ show. It’s a kids’ show first, and uses that as a vehicle to smuggle in real science. You got the science lesson, but you paid attention because of the wacky sound effects and fast transitions and a fast-talking funny man using simple words to explain scientific principles.

That’s how I saw my work at Theorist. I’m not taking a serious lecture and disguising it as pop culture; I’m finding the genuine intersection of pop culture and science (or math, or history, or whatever today’s lesson happens to be about). You get the thing you clicked for, and something a bit more edifying that leaves you feeling more educated than when you started. The kale smoothie can still have sugary fruit.

When people hate the Upworthy style of clickbait, I don’t think that their complaint is purely about the packaging. The real problem with Upworthy is that it never earns the click. It’s almost all empty filler to show you more ads. But when you click on a New York Times article, or a Theorist video, you get to spend 10 minutes learning about an interesting subject that you already had some curiosity about (which is why you clicked).

In other words, the thing that distinguishes the worst kind of “clickbait” isn’t the packaging. It’s what happens after the click. The title got your hopes up, and the content disappointed.

Expectations vs reality

If I promise something good, and then deliver crap, you’ll feel cheated.

Let’s define a promise delta:

PD = payoff - promise

If the PD is negative, I raised expectations above what I could deliver, and that creates resentment. That’s what you get from bad clickbait: the title implies something life-changing, but the article delivers one sentence and six ads.

It’s tempting to think that the fix is to do the opposite: If you promise a 5/10 and deliver an 8/10, the audience is pleasantly surprised. That sounds virtuous, but it has two problems:

• If you actually believe your thing is an 8, then promising a 5 is bad calibration. What might seem like “humility” is actually lying about your own estimate!

• In a competitive environment, chronic underpromising means you never get picked. If everyone else is promising “8” and you’re promising “5,” you never get the click. The viewer doesn’t give you a chance to “overdeliver.”

It’s not good to overpromise, but it’s not good to underpromise, either! You should aim for a promise delta of zero: match the audience’s expectations to what you’re actually delivering.

If a headline cranks my curiosity all the way up, and then the payoff is genuinely fascinating, I don’t feel scammed, because the content earned the click!

The “information gap”

Clickbait is engineered to create discomfort: the headline creates tension, and you have to click to resolve the question. For example, the title gives you a question, and the article is the answer to that question.

This is how I titled my most recent post:

Kuiper's blog

Why milk costs $9/gallon in Hawaii

Hawaiians pay more for their milk than the lower 48. It’s tempting to chalk this one up to “transportation costs…

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7 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Kuiper

This is an example of a title that is designed to create that sort of gap. Hawaiians have to pay $9/gallon for milk. And if you want to know why, you’ll have to click on that post and read it. If you don’t click, you will be left with the tension of not knowing.

But I don’t feel bad about creating this “itch” or “discomfort.” Scientists have another term for that feeling: curiosity.

Behavioral economist George Loewenstein described curiosity an itch or discomfort that emerges from the information gap “between what we know and what we want to know.” And to scratch that itch, we seek out information.

“Discomfort” and “itch” are negatively connoted words. But curiosity is delightful (and virtuous).

The sin of bad clickbait isn’t that it made you feel an itch, but that it made you feel an itch and then failed to give you a satisfying payoff. The failure is in the second half.

If I can make you feel the itch of curiosity, and then make you feel satisfied when you scratch that itch, I think that’s really quite a wonderful thing, even though I had to make you feel a temporary state of discomfort.

All the best YouTubers do this

I love the educational channel Veritasium, which has mastered the art of using the “information gap” to create curiosity that inspires you to click.

I went my entire life not knowing what happens if you throw sand into a jet engine. I was perfectly content to not know, until this title and thumbnail made me want to know. And, how convenient, here is a video that is specifically designed to answer that question, and so I now get to experience the joy of watching a 40-minute educational video that will tell me all of that and more.

Before seeing this video title and thumbnail, I didn’t even know that the Navy had an indoor ocean. And yet now that I have been given that knowledge, my appetite for knowledge isn’t sated. It’s the opposite: getting this tiny bit of knowledge makes me hungry for more knowledge! It makes me want to click on the video to get the full story!

“Getting a little bit of knowledge makes us crave more knowledge” is exactly what we would predict based on George Loewenstein’s “information gap” theory of curiosity, where curiosity emerges when we discover a gap between what we know and what we want to know. A 2008 Caltech study hooked a bunch of students up to an fMRI machine and studied their brain signals when they were asked trivia questions, and found that curiosity follows an inverted U-shaped curve, sort of like this:

When I see a random novel sitting on the shelf at the bookstore, I probably have near zero curiosity about how the story ends. And after I’ve finished reading the novel, I also have no curiosity about how it ends. But when I’m in the middle of reading the book, my curiosity is at its peak. “Which one of these characters is the murderer?” is a question that I can only ask when I’m in the middle of a mystery novel.

The job of good packaging is to leapfrog me to the middle of the curve: sometimes, a great book cover can get me curious even before I’ve read the first sentence. And sometimes, a good video title can get me curious even before I’ve watched a single second, like this one from Polymatter:

Before seeing this packaging, I was fine not knowing why China had an Eiffel-Tower knockoff and a whole wave of “weird architecture.” Now the thumbnail has forced me to want to know: why was this ever a thing, and why did it get banned? And if I want the answers to those questions, I can click the video.

This packaging immediately jumps me close to the middle of the “knowledge curve,” where my curiosity is at its highest. I get the itch to learn, and then in exchange for 14 minutes of my time, I can get an edifying educational video that scratches that itch. And what a wonderful thing that is.

This is the kind of thing that has led to the success of hundreds of YouTube videos I’ve worked on over the past 8 years, and it’s what I intend to do when I launch my own YouTube channel in Q1 2026. I want to use “clickbait” in the virtuous way: inspire curiosity about something real, then actually tell you the answer in an interesting way that’s worth your time.

Here are some representative video titles:

• Why does it cost $1 billion to build a mile of subway?

• The man who saved a billion lives1

• Why milk costs $9/gallon in Hawaii (already a Substack text post that you can read here!)

• No, “twin studies” are not about twins separated at birth (also a Substack text post you can read!)

Hawaiians pay more for their milk than the lower 48. It’s tempting to chalk this one up to “transportation costs.”

But should shipping milk from the mainland US really double the cost? The math says “no.” Container shipping is incredibly cheap on a per-unit basis; shipping cost should add ~$1.50 per gallon.1

If physically hauling a refrigerated gallon of milk across the Pacific costs on the order of $1–2, but the retail price gap versus the mainland is more like $4–5 per gallon, the main culprit is not “the ocean.” Instead, a 100-year-old law is to blame:

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920

Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act (better known as the Jones Act) requires that all goods transported via water between US ports be carried by ships that are US-made, US-owned, and crewed by US citizens/US permanent residents.

Foreign-flag ships can bring containers from Asia straight to Hawaii with no problem. But if you want to move milk from California to Hawaii, that’s a voyage between two US points, so the law requires you to use a tiny fleet of Jones Act-compliant ships.

What does this do to shipping costs?

Jones Act ships are not just “a little more expensive.” Recent estimates put the construction price of a Jones Act-compliant product tanker around $200–250 million, while a similar ship built in South Korea runs about $45–52 million: Jones Act compliant ships cost roughly 4-5x more.

And Jones Act-compliant ships don’t just cost more to build, they also cost more to run: according to a 2011 report from the US Maritime Administration, US-flag vessels have daily operating costs more than twice their foreign-flag counterparts:

Put those together and you get a small, high-cost, quasi-monopoly fleet serving America’s domestic shipping needs. One detailed estimate from the Grassroot Institute pegs the total cost of the Jones Act to Hawaii at about $1.2 billion per year.

Why can’t Hawaii make its own milk?

Hawaii is an interesting case, because historically, local dairies used to supply nearly all of Hawaii’s fluid milk: a state-funded study notes that until 1984, no milk at all was imported, and Hawaii’s peak milk production in the late 1980s was about 160 million pounds per year.

And yet the same study notes that Hawaiian dairies have declined since then. As of 2025, Hawaii has one remaining dairy, leaving the state to now import over 90% of its milk. Why are Hawaiians producing less of their own milk, especially when milk is so expensive? Wouldn’t higher prices provide an incentive for more Hawaiian dairies to open?

There are three big constraints: land, regulation, and feed.

Constraint #1: Land (cows vs hotels)

Pasture takes up lots of space, which is a limited commodity in Hawaii: it has the most expensive land of all 50 US states.

Hawaii’s agriculture accounts for ~1% of Hawaii’s GDP, tourism accounts for ~22%. Any time the opportunity cost of “land with cows” is “land with tourists,” the tourist wins.

It should come as no surprise that the state’s one remaining commercial dairy, Cloverleaf, is on Hawaiʻi Island (“The Big Island”), where there’s more agricultural land and less direct pressure from resort development than, say, Honolulu.

Constraint #2: Regulation (manure is gross)

Every state has to follow the federal Clean Water Act, but Hawaii has to be particularly paranoid, because the whole state is essentially coastline.

Even when you get further inland, Hawaii is full of steep slopes, thin volcanic soil, and shallow aquifers. Whatever runs off a pasture or lagoon is likely to quickly end up in someone’s stream or snorkeling spot.

The Hawaii Department of Health takes a more “zero tolerance” stance on livestock waste than a lot of mainland farm states. “Zero discharge” systems are possible, but expensive, with a lot of size-insensitive costs: a 10,000-cow operation in California can amortize them over a larger volume of milk, but Hawaii’s one remaining 500-cow dairy lacks that scale.

Constraint #3: The need for feed

Even if you solve land and permitting, cows still need calories. Where do those calories come from?

Modern dairy cows are usually fed a mix of pasture/forage, plus energy-dense feeds like corn and soy. Hawaii does not have a big grain belt like the mainland US. Hawaii has some tropical grass, but that precious resource, when it is fed to livestock, is reserved for beef cows, not dairy cows. Even back in the 1970’s, reports noted that “except for some grazing for beef cattle, practically all livestock feed must be imported.”

So Hawaiian dairies buy a lot of their feed (upwards of 95% of it) from the mainland United States.

And that feed arrives, naturally, by ship.

Specifically, a Jones Act-compliant ship.

Yes, the same 1920 law that makes imported milk expensive also makes imported livestock feed more expensive. There is no getting around the Jones Act, even if you use your own dairy cows.

A 2016 Hawaii Business piece on feed costs reports that shipping feed from the mainland costs about $150–$200 per ton, which often doubles the total price of feed by the time it reaches local producers. And feed itself accounts for the majority of the total cost of raising animals.

The Jones Act means Americans can’t buy American

Hawaiians pay more for goods shipped from the mainland United States, whether it’s milk, feed for their cows, or anything else.

The mainland US is really good at supplying milk and feed (and US dairy also lacks competition thanks to protectionist tariffs on foreign milk), so Hawaii tolerates the high cost of Jones Act-compliant vessels. But in a lot of other cases, it’s literally cheaper to ship from Asia than from California even if it means traveling an extra 1,000 miles, because foreign ships are cheaper, and the Jones Act says you’re not allowed to use them for US-to-US routes.

In other words, the Jones Act is discouraging Americans from buying American.

You can see the same pattern even more starkly in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is an island that relies on imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for around 35-40% of its energy needs. The United States produces plenty of LNG, and so it seems perfectly sensible to ship some of that LNG from Texas or Louisiana to Puerto Rico.

But to transport LNG US-to-US, the Jones Act says you need a LNG tanker that was built in the US. And that ship literally doesn’t exist. The world has hundreds of LNG tankers, but none of them are US-made, so none of them are legally allowed to carry LNG from Texas to Puerto Rico.

So Puerto Rico, because it is part of America, is forbidden from buying American. Instead, this US territory must import its LNG from countries like Russia, Nigeria, Oman, and Spain.

By the way, Puerto Rico’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, is only a few hundred miles away, and is not bound by the Jones Act, because it is a foreign country. And the Dominican Republic is happy to buy American gas, with the US supplying 65% of its LNG imports. Puerto Rico gets 0%. Same ocean, almost identical geography, but different law.

The result: Americans can’t buy American, and so they must import.

The Jones Act has accomplished the opposite of its goals

When Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act in 1920, it was trying to lock in America’s shipbuilding dominance. In the wake of World War I’s emergency ship-building program, the US controlled roughly 22% of the world’s merchant shipping tonnage, turning the US into a major maritime power, second only to England.

The idea was to keep America’s industrial base alive. The thinking was that requiring US-to-US shipping to use American ships would guarantee domestic demand for American ships: more demand, more building, stronger industry.

How has that actually worked out? Not well.

Today, the Congressional Research Service describes US commercial shipbuilding as a “minuscule” share of the global market. China, South Korea, and Japan now build over 90% of the world’s large oceangoing ships; the U.S. builds about 0.2%.

In 2022, China had 1,794 large commercial ships on its orderbook, South Korea 734, Japan 587, and the United States had five. (China’s yards are building on the order of three hundred times as many big commercial ships as U.S. yards.)

In short: the policy designed to protect American shipbuilding presided over the near-total collapse of American shipbuilding.

And with a scarcity of American ships, Hawaiians pay more for shipping, and stomach the $9 milk bill.

Related reading:

Balsa Research - The Jones Act index

Brian Potter’s Construction Physics - Why Can’t the US Build Ships?

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Parody is not just “rewriting the lyrics.” I can’t take a Toni Basil song about a man named “Mickey,” rewrite the lyrics to be about a woman named “Vicky,” and then claim that it’s “my song” and defend my use of Toni Basil’s melody by calling it a parody.

Parody is protected by “fair use” copyright doctrine when it’s used for the purpose of commenting on the original. Or, to quote the decision of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), a parody is a work that “at least in part, comments on that author’s works.”

For example, one Weird Al song that does qualify as fair-use protected “parody” in this sense “Smells Like Nirvana.” Weird Al is lifting the melody of Nirvana’s song “Smells like Teen Spirit,” but the fact that he’s using a Nirvana melody and mimicking Kurt Cobain’s singing style is part of the commentary: it wouldn’t make sense if he took a Queen song and rewrote the lyrics to make fun of Nirvana.

But most of the songs we colloquially call “Weird Al parodies” wouldn’t qualify as parody under the Campbell standard if he tried to rely on fair use alone. They don’t really “comment on” the original; they just use the melody as a vehicle for a completely different joke, as Weird Al does when he rewrites “Mickey” to be about the I Love Lucy character “Ricky.” Absent permission, they’d be on very shaky legal ground.

Charles J. Sanders and Steven R. Gordon, writing in Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal in 19901, put it like this (PDF link):

Application of the “verbatim copying” threshold test would present an insurmountable hurdle to any claim of fair use by Mr. Yankovic. His taking of the full chord structure, melody, and portions of the lyrics of the original underlying musical compositions which he parodies is clearly substantial enough to pre-empt a finding of fair use as a matter of law, regardless of any number of “mitigating” circumstances which might exist.

So how does he get away with it?

It’s pretty well-known that Weird Al seeks permission from the artists he “parodies.” What’s less-known is that Weird Al actually pays royalties to the artists of the original song. Again, per Sanders and Gordon (emphasis added):

Having concluded that his song and video parodies are not legally characterizable as fair uses, Mr. Yankovic licenses all of the musical compositions and music videos he parodies directly from their respective copyright owners. According to his attorney, Chuck Hurewitz of the Beverly Hills law firm of Cooper, Epstein and Hurewitz, Weird Al generally gets a writing credit and a copyright interest in the song parody, which he shares (in varying royalty ratios) with the writers of the original underlying work.

…Mr. Hurewitz asserts that Weird Al’s substantial market success is responsible for the willingness of copyright owners to grant him permission to parody their musical compositions, and has made it possible for Yankovic to bargain for a lucrative share in the copyright of the parody version of the song.

Weird Al often tells stories about how he talked directly to specific musical artists to get their permission for a song, which often include charming anecdotes about how he met them in person or over the phone to get a “yeah, that sounds fun.” But that is not the end of the conversation, it is the start of a negotiation between “my people and your people.”2

This came up more recently in a 2017 interview with Vulture:

Vulture: I didn’t even realize that once you start parodying that the original songwriters get any money.

Weird Al: Yeah, we negotiate a deal for every single parody. Generally, the original songwriters will keep the publishing and we’ll split the writer’s royalties. They wind up making more money than I do, but that’s fair, I think.

But not all of his “parodies” are directly using other people’s music. Sometimes, he’s just using their style. (For example, “Bob” is not a parody of one specific Bob Dylan song; it’s a pastiche.) In one Q&A, a fan asked, “do you have to ask permission to do style parodies?” Al answered:

Well, as I always say, we live in a country where anybody can sue anybody else for any reason at any time, so it’s always a gray area. However, even though I always get permission for the parodies, I don’t feel obligated to do the same for “sound-alikes.”

The false narrative

For years, I had bought into this false narrative that “Weird Al always asks for permission, even though he doesn’t have to, just because he’s such a swell guy.” And this isn’t really true.

For the bulk of his catalog, Weird Al can’t comfortably rely on fair use; his songs are not “parodies” in the Campbell sense. In practice, if he didn’t ask permission and share royalties, he’d be inviting expensive lawsuits he might well lose, so the “permission” isn’t just a chivalrous gesture, it’s the legal bedrock of his entire business model.

I was wrong to give Weird Al credit for asking “even when he doesn’t have to,” because in a counterfactual world where he didn’t need legal permission, he wouldn’t ask for it. We know this because he told us in the aforementioned fan Q&A when he was asked about “style parodies,” which mimic an artist’s style without directly lifting their melody verbatim.

How does everyone else get away with it?

So, the answer to “how does Weird Al get away with it” is that he doesn’t “get away with it.” He pays people for the right to use their music, except in the case of style parodies, where he doesn’t need to.

But that does leave the open question of how all the other song parodies get away with it. For example, if you go onto YouTube, you will see lots of song parodies from smaller artists who seem to not be getting sued. Is what they’re doing legally protected?

No, not really. Much of it is technically copyright infringement, in much the same way that fan fiction and fan art is technically copyright infringement. And, much like fan fiction and fan art, the rights holders generally don’t sue you over it if you aren’t selling it.

It’s hard to prove “damages” when a 19-year-old makes a song parody that gets 100,000 views on YouTube, so there’s not much point in legal action and the accompanying financial and PR cost of suing a fan over a silly song.

Weird Al is not a teenager. He is making millions of dollars from his musical performances, he is selling CDs with other people’s melodies on him.

But, while Weird Al is currently a multi-millionaire making a bunch of money from his music, it is also descriptively true that he was once a broke teenager who recorded “Another One Rides the Bus” in the bathroom at his college radio station, and he probably didn’t have Queen’s permission at the time he produced that accordion recording. And that’s fine when you’re a college student making funny tapes.

Eventually, Weird Al “leveled up” and started making actual money from his music. At that point, he became the sort of person who could be a very attractive target for lawsuits if he kept doing unlicensed parodies, and so he developed the practice of asking for permission. Given how much of his catalog doesn’t fit the Campbell parody template, he’d be taking serious legal risk if he didn’t license everything. This evolution seems like a practical (and legally advisable) move.

(Not) stealing credit

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a comedy film about the (fictional) life of Weird!Al, co-written by Weird Al. As you’d expect from the man who made his career through the form of song parodies, the film parodies the form of the musical biopic.

One critical plot point in Weird!Al’s fictional life is that after becoming famous for song parodies in the early 80’s, he decided to pivot to writing original songs, starting with “Eat It.” They’re very clear about this point to make sure the audience doesn’t miss the premise of this joke:

(Weird!Al plays the tape for Eat It)

Ben Scotti: I’m sorry, I don’t recognize the tune. What’s the song you’re parodying here?

Weird Al: I’m not parodying anything. This song is completely original.

Ben: Wait, you wrote the words…and the music?

Al: That’s right.

Ben: Just to be perfectly clear, you’re saying this is not a parody of an existing song, but a completely original composition which you wrote all by yourself?

Al: Yup.

Ben: Not based on anyone else’s song in any way?

Al: Did I stutter?

And of course they complete the inversion of real life later in the film:

Toni Scotti: I thought you should hear it from me first. Michael Jackson has just released a new single called “Beat It.” It’s…well, it’s a parody of “Eat It.”

Weird Al: What? You mean the kid from the Jackson Five? Why is that has-been trying to ride my coattails?

Tony: Uh, he’s actually got a pretty successful solo career now—

Weird Al: You’re telling me Michael Jackson recorded a parody of MY SONG?

Tony: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Same music, different words.

Weird Al: What kind of sick freak changes the words to someone else’s song? “Beat It,” huh. It’s about eggs?

Tony: It’s not even about food!

This joke is artistically good (and ethically good)

In this beat of a movie he wrote, Weird Al is taking credit for another musician’s work. In a vacuum, that seems like it would be a bad thing to do. But the audience very clearly knows what he is doing, and the joke only works because it’s clear what he’s doing. Thriller-Bad-Dangerous-era Michael Jackson is the single most-recognizable pop musician in history. That’s what makes the joke work.

So when Weird!Al says “I’m not parodying anything. This song is completely original,” we understand that Weird Al is not trying to take credit for another musician’s work.

This is what much of Weird Al’s career is premised on: he takes other people’s work, he riffs on it, but nobody would mistake his songs for the original.

Weird Al’s “rules of the road” are good

This Weird Al style of using other people’s work but not stealing it works because he generally conducts himself in a way that is beyond reproach:

• Weird Al is often picking artists who his audience is already familiar with: he made his early career by parodying Queen, Madonna, Michael Jackson. And even on the occasions when Al parodies a smaller artist,

• Weird Al always credits his sources. When you open the CD case to look at the lyrics, it’s right there at the top of the sheet: he gives you the song he parodied, the artist he parodied, and even the featured artist of the parodied track. So even if he were to parody a smaller artist, the audience would know, “someone else wrote this melody.” The smaller artist might even benefit from the attention.

• Weird Al asks permission and pays the artist when he does his parody!

• Weird Al is engaging in transformative content: he is taking songs in non-comedy genre, and changing them by putting a comedy spin on them. Artistically, he is adding something new that wasn’t there.

From this, we can imagine a photo-negative version of this man, an imaginary character who I will call “Evil Al” to distinguish him from Weird Al.

Evil Al would do the following:

• Evil Al would, at the height of his career, pick a smaller artist to parody (one who had yet to go gold), making it more likely that his fans would hear his version first and never realize that it was an imitation. And then:

• Evil Al would not credit the original artist or the original song that inspired his own song. He would never, ever acknowledge or mention the name of the original song.

• Evil Al would not pay them royalties, making use of the “style parody” loophole, even though his song was clearly based on one specific song.

That would be legal, but in my opinion, it would be bad. (As D&D teaches us, “lawful/chaotic” and “good/evil” are orthogonal axes.)

Evil Al might then go on to move even further in the direction of denying the original artist credit for their work:

• As we already established, Evil Al isn’t giving credit to the original artist of this one specific song. But he might selectively give credit to the artists of the more popular songs, so that when listeners see that 8 of the 11 songs on the album are listed as parodies, they might incorrectly assume that the other 3 are originals.

• Evil Al would then perform this song for decades, and talk about it in public for decades, without directly mentioning that it was based on another artist’s song

• To give himself some plausible deniability, Evil Al might generally acknowledge that the artist of the original song had inspired him, but he wouldn’t give them credit for some other song, and he’d only mention them in a longer “list of artists who inspired me” to make it harder for his fans to draw the connection

• Evil Al would not make his version of the song transformative. Instead, he would start with a song that was already an absurd comedy song, then make his version (also an absurd comedy song.)

And then, 25 years later, Evil Al would continue to perform this song as his closer at concerts, in front of thousands of fans, most of whom still believed that this incredibly famous song was 100% an original and not a parody based on another song. This incredibly famous Evil Al song would of course have its own Wikipedia page, but that Wikipedia page would make no mention of the original song that was very clearly the inspiration for this parody (which his fans don’t recognize as being a parody).

I regret to inform you that the “imaginary character” of Evil Al, as I have described him, is a real person. His name is Alfred Yankovic.

Albuquerque is not an original song

If there is one thing that I would like Weird Al fans to take away from this post, it is that Albuquerque is not an original song.

This is new information to every Weird Al fan I encounter, and I’ve encountered a lot of Weird Al fans. This is a weird misconception to have about a particularly famous Weird Al song, especially when Weird Al is not an artist typically known for producing original songs: you’d think the prior would be “this is probably a parody song,” and yet everyone seems to think it’s a Weird Al original.

I think this case is best made simply by exposing you to the music. Here is Albuquerque by Weird Al, and here is Dick’s Automotive by the Rugburns. (Content warning: Dick’s Automotive is significantly less “family friendly” than Weird Al. Be prepared for raunchiness.)

I think that the content of the song speaks for itself: it’s not literally the same melody, but the similarity is unmistakable. For those who don’t want to listen to an 8-minute song, here are just a few of the points of similarity:

• Both songs are very long. (The original is 8:41, Weird Al’s version is 11:23)

• Both are mostly spoken-word narration, a made-up story of a person who moves away from home and has truly bizarre things happen to them

• The chorus consists of repeating the name of the song over and over again (either “Dick’s Automotive” or “Albuquerque”)

• Both songs start with a sprawling cumulative sentence that begins keeps on piling on prepositional and apositive phrases to overspecify the setting

• At one part in the narrative, there is a horrifying description of abrupt violence involving a chainsaw

• The story includes a part where someone is knocking at the door, and the “door knock” is recreated with the sound of a snare drum with an almost identical cadence (despite this not being the standard “door-knocking” cadence in real life)

• The Steve Poltz enunciation of “flat shooby doo wop down” is reproduced by Weird Al in his own lyric, “wakka wakka doo doo yeah.”

• There’s a bit in the song with a back-and-forth exchange where the answer is repeatedly “no,” followed by a character changing the formula with a sequitur which gets an affirmative response. (In Dick’s Automotive, this takes the form of a job interview. In Albuquerque, it’s an exchange at a donut shop)

I could go on, but I really think the content and sonic qualities of the two songs speak for themselves. Albuquerque by Weird Al is clearly a “style parody” of Dick’s Automotive. Steve Poltz, who wrote Dick’s Automotive, says basically the same thing. And yet for 25 years, I was unaware of this song’s existence, despite being a huge fan of Weird Al and “Albuquerque.”

It almost feels intentionally covered up

I am not bothered by the existence of Albuquerque. I think the song is fun and funny, even if The Rugburns did it first. But the majority of Weird Al fans persist in the mistaken belief that Albuquerque is an original song.

Part of this comes from the fact that, at the time Weird Al released the album in 1999, he did not credit “style parodies.” So fans see that 8 of the tracks on the CD are described as “parody of…” while Albuquerque does not have this label, and they incorrectly assume that means it’s an original song.

And Weird Al, for his part, seems to have actively declined the opportunity to disabuse his fans of the mistaken notion that Albuquerque is based on Dick’s Automotive. In 2011, more than a decade after the song’s release, he had an interview with The AV Club where he had a lot to say about the song, but never got around to mentioning Dick’s Automotive provided most of the inspiration for the form of “having a ridiculous spoken word story that goes on for 8+ minutes, full of absurd events like chainsaw violence.” The closest he gets to giving credit is this:

This song is meant to be sort of in the style of The Rugburns and Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood and any other kind of hard-driving rock narrative. And you know, I made it a little more ridiculous than the normal kind of rock narrative, but nonetheless, it’s in that vein.

(I’d dispute Weird Al’s premise that his version is “more ridiculous.” Dick’s Automotive was already ridiculous and transgressive; Weird Al just doing an “absurd comedy version” of what was already an absurd comedy song.)

This thing where The Rugburns get acknowledged by Al only in the broad sense of being part of a longer list is also true of the FAQ on his website, where he does get a bit closer to acknowledging that The Rugburns were responsible for inspiring Albuquerque in a way that Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood were not:

The artists that I’ve style-parodied range from the extremely popular (Bob Dylan, Nine Inch Nails, James Taylor, etc.) to the semi-obscure (Tonio K, The Rugburns, Hilly Michaels, etc.)

This isn’t a big deal, and I feel bad for making a big deal out of it

I think that Weird Al has painted within the boundaries of what’s legal, and while I wish he’d given more credit to The Rugburns, he does not “owe” it to them to name a specific song as a creative inspiration (as opposed to saying something to the effective of ‘I owe creative inspiration to many sources, including…’) And in the grand ranking of “unethical behavior by famous musicians,” this ranks very low on the list.

So why am I making a big deal out of it?

Partly, because Al himself realizes that he did The Rugburns a disservice, even in the FAQ of his website where he talks broadly about the artists who he has “style parodied,” with The Rugburns being just one entry among that list:

…they’re all favorites of mine, and my homages to them are always done with great affection and attention to detail. In the past, I never put the artists that I style-parodied in the Special Thanks section on my album, mostly because I wanted to see if fans could figure out what I was doing (without being given any obvious hints). But I’ve come to realize that’s a little unfair to those artists – to whom I certainly owe a huge debt of gratitude – so I plan to acknowledge all my musical influences in the CD liner notes in the future.

It’s great that, starting in the 00’s, he began printing the names of artists on the CDs. But Al hasn’t really made any efforts to make this retroactive, even in ways that might be relatively easy, like an entry on his website.

Albuquerque is one of his famous and most beloved songs. It’s the closer of the album it appeared on, and it’s the closer at many of his live shows even to this day. And I really wish the specific song it’s based on would get any mention at all from Al, not only for the sake of The Rugburns and their fans, but for sake of Weird Al’s fans!

I was a huge Weird Al fan as a kid. If I had gotten to hear Dick’s Automotive when I was a teenager, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot, and I wish Al had given me that opportunity. Instead, I spent over two decades mistakenly believing it was a Weird Al original.

I like knowledge (for myself, and for others)

Part of this also comes from my general desire for the world to be more legible. I have spent hundreds of hours on the music lyric Genius adding annotations (including to Weird Al songs) because I want to make it easier for people to find information about the artists and songs that they enjoy. (And I enjoy the process of reading magazine interviews and watching concert recordings looking for all the places where my favorite musicians have talked about their work; the annotations that I leave on Genius song pages are partly an artifact that I leave for myself to keep track of what I’ve learned about each song.)

Wikipedia has high standards for sourcing, so “this is obvious to anyone who hears both songs” is not a valid source, and that seems fair enough to me. But because Weird Al has never officially acknowledged that Albuquerque is a style parody of Dick’s Automotive, despite the fact that it very clearly is one, the Wikipedia page for Albuquerque makes no mention of the source material, instead choosing to reproduce Al’s interview line about how “According to Yankovic, the song is in the style of the ‘hard-driving rock narrative’ of artists like The Rugburns, Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood.”3

Is this a legal thing?

I have wondered why Weird Al has never been public about the connection between Dick’s Automotive despite using Albuquerque as his concert closer for years and years and years. And I wonder if it might be for some of the legal reasons I mentioned at the top of this post.

Weird Al has done style parodies of many artists. But Albuquerque is unique among them for being a style parody of a specific song. There, it feels like he’s a lot closer to “song parody” than “genre pastiche” or “artist homage.” And that’s getting closer to the area where he’d have to pay royalties. (Remember, Weird Al pays royalties to Lorde for parodying “Royals”, but he doesn’t pay royalties to Bob Dylan for doing a genre pastiche in “Bob.”)

I don’t want to accuse Weird Al of any specific motives. But it seems descriptively true that it would be financially costly to Weird Al (and extremely inconvenient to his accountants) if Albuquerque were legally considered a song parody, rather than an artist style parody. And if he wanted to have a stronger legal case that Albuquerque was the latter, this case would be bolstered if he had a public record of saying it was inspired by a great many sources (like “the style of the ‘hard-driving rock narrative’ of artists like The Rugburns, Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood”) rather than admitting that it was substantially based on a single song by the Rugburns. I can’t know his motives, but Al’s behavior has been consistent with someone who is doing what you’d want him to do if you were his lawyer.

Maybe Weird Al is being 100% honest when he claims this song was inspired by many sources and not one specific song. Maybe you can listen to both songs, and agree with Weird Al, and disagree with me and Steve Poltz. I am curious to see what other people think, so please, if you disagree (or agree), leave a comment!

Steve Poltz wishes Weird Al had credited them (but it’s okay)

I wrote this post based entirely on my own experience, and only in the 11th hour before hitting “publish” did I do one last fact-checking search and discover that Steve Poltz, the Rugburns leading man who wrote and sang the original Dick’s Automotive, has commented on this, and I would feel remiss not to include his remarks in an interview where he talked about the the band’s live shows in the 90’s:

So Weird Al would always come out to see us. Weird Al loved a song by the Rugburns called Dick’s Automotive. Because of Dick’s Automotive, Weird Al wrote the song Albuquerque, which is one of his songs he wrote, but it’s a direct takeoff of the Rugburns, but he didn’t credit us. I kind of wish he would have, but it’s okay. He wrote Albuquerque. If you A/B Dick’s Automotive and Albuquerque, you would…[trails off]

He was always obsessed with that song, he would come in and listen to “John was living in Ocean Beach California with his girlfriend Juliet…” where I’m talking really rapid.

In the end, I am inclined to agree with Steve Poltz: Weird Al wrote Albuquerque after hearing Dick’s Automotive. Weird Al didn’t credit The Rugburns. I wish he would have. But it’s okay.

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We’re excited to announce the launch of the a16z Moral Innovation Fund, a new $1 billion vehicle dedicated to an overlooked frontier in technology: the systematic monetization of behaviors that have historically been constrained primarily by norms, stigma, and the spirit of the law. As software continues to eat the world, we believe ethics will follow the same trajectory as everything else, becoming unbundled and abstracted.

In many of the most valuable markets of the last decade, outsized returns accrued to teams who realized that moral discomfort often indicates an underpriced asset or a mis-specified regulation. Moral Innovation is about finding these pockets of “values whitespace” and backing the companies that can scale them.

Below is a sample of portfolio companies from our first Moral Innovation Fund cohort, illustrating the kinds of category-defining businesses we believe will shape the next decade of value creation.

Habit Formation Lab

STEM education platform focused on applied phytochemistry for youth. After completing a 30-minute training seminar on plant biology, dosage, and harm reduction, students ages 13 and up can enroll as junior research associates and obtain research kits containing small quantities of botanicals (including cannabis, nicotine, and related derivatives), which can be shipped under existing lab-supply exemptions.

All experiments must be logged in the HFL app, which prompts users to record subjective effects, side effects, and peer reactions. The resulting dataset, offering granular consumption patterns and psychometric self-reports from the 13-17 demographic, is licensed to pharmaceutical, CPG, and ad-tech partners interested in “early-lifecycle consumer behavior.”

HFL positions itself as hands-on science education, operating in a regulatory niche closer to chemistry sets than dispensaries. The company captures both direct revenue from “lab membership fees” and high-margin data revenue from insights into an otherwise opaque underage market.

Alibify

Marketplace for “delegated presence.” Users schedule stand-in sessions where a screened contractor carries their phone (or a paired device) along a pre-planned route while the client is physically elsewhere. The app records high-fidelity location logs and stores them in a tamper-evident archive suitable for later export to employers, spouses, insurers, or courts.

Phones have become primary witnesses in criminal investigations and civil disputes, but individuals lack tools to proactively manage that evidentiary trail. Alibify democratizes access to location logging, letting users separate where their body is from where their data later says they were, all within existing consent frameworks for location sharing. Counsel’s view is that the platform “does not fabricate records, it merely orchestrates legitimate collection of geodata,” leaving questions about why a user arranged for a proxy to carry their phone to be resolved between the user and any interested authorities.

Draft Prince

Draft Prince is an applied probability literacy platform that embeds sportsbook mechanics into middle- and high-school curricula while staying in compliance with gambling laws in all 50 states. Students make structured predictions on real sporting events, including moneylines, spreads, prop-style questions, and are scored on calibration and accuracy.

Draft Prince creates a clean technical separation between minors and sportsbook operators: the minors interact only with an “educational assessment tool” and a scholarship charity; the sportsbooks interact only with a pool of performance data and a 501(c)(3) that converts credits into grants or prepaid cards.

Legally, Draft Prince positions itself as standards-aligned edtech plus a scholarship-routing engine. For partners, it functions as a long-term acquisition funnel that pre-trains an entire cohort in sportsbook UX, profiles their risk preferences years in advance, and ties brand goodwill to the moment they first withdraw their credits as spendable money.

Related reading/inspirations:

Fellow Inkhaven resident beat me to this one:

The Inchpin

Building Without Apology: My a16z Investment Thesis (Guest Post)

CW: addiction, violence, child sexual abuse, simulated torture, startups…

Read more

7 months ago · 9 likes · Linch

And, of course, the biggest inspiration for this post is the real-life a16z, whose recent investments have been well-documented by nearcyan:

There was also a 2017 survey by a travel firm First Choice that found that 34.2% of kids want to be a YouTuber, making it the most popular career path among young people. Let’s talk about what that survey said (and what it didn’t say).

First: Debunking some bad reporting

Some news outlets have reported numbers much higher, and their reporting is bad and wrong:

The Sun incorrectly reports that “three-quarters of children say they would consider some sort of career in online videos.” The Daily Mail repeats the incorrect “three quarters” claim. CNBC also erroneously claims that “52.3%” of surveyed kids “wanted to become either a vlogger, a blogger or a YouTuber.”

All three of these pieces are based on the same survey, and all of these articles are written by people who do not understand the survey they are reporting on.

Let’s begin with The Sun and The Daily Mail’s claim that ~75% of kids want an online video career. They looked at a survey of 1000 children by First Choice, which found that the jobs that kids most desire are (copying The Sun’s reporting/formatting):

1. Youtuber - 34.2%

2. Blogger/Vlogger - 18.1%

3. Musician/Singer - 16%

4. Actor - 15.7%

5. Film maker - 13.65

6. Doctur/Nurse - 13.45

7. TV Presenter - 12.45

8. Athlete/Teacher - 11.9%

9. Writer - 8.4%

10. Lawyer - 6.4%

First, I have copy editing notes for The Sun: “Doctur,” as best I can tell, is not the accepted spelling for doctor even in the UK. Second, note that some of these numbers like “13.65” and “13.45” and “12.45” indicate a level of precision that is impossible for a survey with 1000 respondents, and I am all but certain that this is a typo resulting from the underpaid writer of this article mistyping a “5” which is located on the same keyboard key as “%.” So that is the level of editorial rigor we are dealing with here in The Sun’s reporting.

My best guess for how they (and The Daily Mail) arrived at “three quarters” is that they summed the numbers for YouTuber (34.2%) + Blogger/Vlogger (18.1%) + Filmmaker (13.6%) + TV presenter (12.4$) = 78.3%.

The problem is that the survey wasn’t structured in a way that made these options mutually exclusive: just looking at the 10 professions listed here, we can see that the numbers sum up to ~150%, which is more than 100%, meaning that kids were allowed to select multiple professions on the survey. There is undoubtedly overlap between “Vlogger” and “YouTuber,” so you can’t just sum those two numbers. You can’t say “60% of kids say they would like a hamburger, 50% of kids say they would like a cheeseburger, therefore 110% of kids want a beef patty on a bun.”

(Let us also appreciate that according to The Sun and The Daily Mail’s reporting, the 8th-most popular profession is “Athlete/Teacher.” Unless 11.9% of kids are specifically saying that they want to be PE teachers, or a striker who moonlights as a substitute teacher, this looks to me like there was a two-way tie for 8th place, with both Athlete and Teacher getting a 11.9% favorability rating with kids, and the reporter didn’t know how to report a two-way tie for 8th place in their ranking, so they decided to combine them into a single line.)

CNBC makes the same error in their reporting, where they see 34.2% of kids say they want to be a YouTuber, and 18.1% of kids say they want to be a Blogger/Vlogger, and sum these to come up with the false claim that “52.3% of 1,000 surveyed kids…wanted to become either a vlogger, a blogger or a YouTuber.”

So, if the survey results are to be believed, the percentage of kids who want to be professional online video content creator is not 52.3% (CNBC), or 78.4% (The Sun, The Daily Mail). The most we can say, if we believe the survey data, is that 34.2% of kids say they want to be a YouTuber in a survey that allowed them to select multiple options. This 34.2% number includes, for example, a kid who wants to be a doctor but is willing to consider being a YouTuber as a backup option: this is not 34.2% of kids describing YouTuber as their “dream job,” they’re just naming it as an acceptable career path.

What the numbers actually tell us

Still, it is interesting that out of all the professions on this survey, YouTube is the most popular.

The number seems to go down when you do make the poll options exclusive, but YouTube remains in first place: a 2021 YouGov survey of US teens 13-17 found that when you force kids to choose one option for their “dream job,” the top picks are:

1. Vlogger / YouTuber / Professional streamer: 9%

2. Doctor/Nurse: 8%

3. Professional Athlete: 7%

4. Musician: 7%

5. Actor / Actress: 7%

6. Artist: 5%

7. Entrepreneur: 4%

8. Lawyer: 4%

9. Esports star / Professional gamer: 3%

10. Veterinarian: 3%

So it seems safe to say that regardless of how you ask the question, the most-desired profession among young people is approximately “YouTuber.”

Should we be worried about YouTubers being oversupplied?

Whenever I meet a young person who says that their dream job is “YouTube,” I ask them what they mean by that.

For 8 years, I have made a living on YouTube. But during that time, I haven’t had my own YouTube channel where I generate revenue; all of my income has come from working for bigger YouTube channels. Scroll down to the bottom of the video description for a Food Theory video, and you’ll see something like this:

That’s 7 names in the credits, for a 14-minute video. And Theorist has 3 other channels that also upload 1 video per week. If you look up the company on LinkedIn, you’ll see 43 employees listed.

On-screen talent is oversupplied: the number of people who want to be a famous YouTuber is much greater than the number of people who get to make a living as a famous YouTuber. But there is enormous demand for people who can edit videos, write scripts, and design video thumbnails. That is why big YouTubers regularly go on to sites like YTjobs.co to hire for those roles (or, alternatively, they announce opening for these roles via Twitter, Discord, or YouTube’s own community tab).

I previously talked about how, if you teach yourself to use Adobe Premiere and start uploading videos to YouTube, and get good at it, the most likely outcome is not that you become a famous YouTuber; the most likely outcome is that you get noticed by a bigger YouTuber who says “hey, I see you over there making $20 per video in AdSense revenue; why don’t you come over to my channel, where my videos are making thousands of dollars in revenue, which I can then use to pay an entire team of people who work under me?”

And in that sense, “YouTube” seems a lot healthier as a “career ambition” when I compare it to the other top “dream jobs” like professional athlete, musician, actor/actress, or artist. Not everybody can be a big YouTuber, but a lot of people can get a job working for one.

Kids don’t understand YouTube, or the world

Let’s talk about the fear that these careers are going to be “oversupplied.”

In this dream job survey, 4% of teens say that their number one “dream job” is to be a lawyer. Surely that’s a much more realistic and attainable goal that many of them will be able to achieve, right?

But lawyers only make up 0.45% of all employed adults. ~90% of the aspiring lawyers are going to be very disappointed to wind up in some other profession.

Things are even worse for the 3% of teens who aspire to be veterinarians. Fewer than 0.05% of the adult workforce winds up in this profession, meaning that over 98% of aspiring veterinarians will not end up in their chosen profession.

Except this whole thing is silly, because kids do not actually want to work these jobs more than other jobs. Stated preferences are not revealed preferences, and stated preferences matter even less when you are talking to 13-year-olds. Look at all of of the top professions listed on these surveys: what do they all have in common? They’re highly legible to kids.

I say “legible,” and not “prestigious,” because consider the fact that in the First Choice survey, the 8th-most popular response, tied with professional athlete, is “teacher.”

Teachers are one of the adult professions that kids interact with most often, and so when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they say “teacher.” Or they say “musician,” because they listen to music, and maybe they or their peers have had music lessons, and so they’re aware that “musician” is a profession that exists in the world. Ditto for professional athletes, and actors, and doctors, and veterinarians, and marine biologists. (Remember when you were 8 years old and ready to pursue a career in marine biology?)

Kids give answers like “doctor” and “lawyer” and “writer,” and don’t give answers like “actuary” or “auditor” or “product designer.” And it’s not because they see theose latter professions as undesirable, but because they do not know that these professions exist.

Still learning

Much of the process of “growing up” consists of learning that the world exists at a much higher level of fidelity than the model that existed in your head as a child. You eventually learn that not everyone gets to be a doctor, but that’s okay, because you can still see the inside of a hospital every day working as a radiologist or a dosimetrist. Or you realize that the broader YouTube ecosystem has a great appetite for video editors, and you find fiddling around in Premiere to be more fun than speaking into a microphone anyway.

So, while “YouTuber” does rank highest on kids’ list of “most desired jobs,” and I don’t think that most of them will end up being famous YouTubers, I find it hard to react to these numbers with shock and horror. I do not think that kids’ stated career preferences are going to cause “YouTubers” to be oversupplied in the job market to a significantly greater degree than, say, doctors, or lawyers, or veterinarians, or astronauts.

(If anything, I think that it may be possible that among the existing adult population, YouTubers are undersupplied, in the sense that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as a “book editor” or “audiologist,” and have yet to realize that their area of expertise may intersect with what people want to see on YouTube, and while the platform may not make them famous, it doesn’t take a very large audience on YouTube to turn a viewer into a new client.)