• "Beast Games" is the Amazon Prime Video game show from the YouTuber MrBeast.
• The show is family-friendly, but its message about the concept of money makes me uncomfortable.
• I'd say to enjoy the show but remind your kids that money doesn't work this way in real life.

"Beast Games," the game show on Amazon Prime Video from MrBeast, debuted Thursday, and I watched along with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show highly watchable. But as a parent, I'm not sure I liked the message about money it was imparting to my young ward.

Elementary-school-aged kids, whether or not they're allowed to watch YouTube, all know who MrBeast is. He's a superstar to Gen Alpha. His candy bars are on grocery-store shelves, and his specter hangs over playgrounds and lunchrooms.

(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn't quite as cool in high schools anymore, perhaps because he's seen as being for little kids.)

Like most parents, I want to teach my kids the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.

"Beast Games" flies in the face of all that. Money is tossed around as this strange easy-come, easy-go object. It opens with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (allegedly the full $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We are repeatedly told this is the largest cash prize ever in a game show.

The show's premise is that a group of contestants will compete in challenges to win that big prize — a season-long version of some of his popular YouTube videos.

Later in the season there will be physical challenges (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode the games are almost all psychological tests.

This first series of minigames aims to winnow the contestant pool to 500 people from 1,000. The games are variations on the prisoner's dilemma, pitting what's good for an individual against what's good for the group.

In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who quits the game immediately can share a pot of money — but the pot gets smaller as more people choose to take the early out. In another game, each team of about 100 people must have one person sacrifice themselves and leave the game with no prize money at all — or else the whole team is eliminated. People are sobbing, yelling at each other to be the ones to quit.

I worry about the message 'Beast Games' sends

It's a fascinating challenge to watch as an adult. But I'm not sure a kid can really understand what's going on — the wrenching pain of people losing what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a home.

In the game, money is an object to build into pyramids or toss around in bags — it's funny money; it doesn't feel real.

Representatives for MrBeast declined to comment for this story.

Other game shows have cash prizes, even kid-friendly ones like "Is It Cake?" or even the old "Double Dare" on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize is an exciting treat at the end — it isn't the whole point of the show.

In "Beast Games," money is the point — and even the games themselves are about money. I'm not sure I like what subtle message that's sending to young minds not old enough to earn a real paycheck.

Update: December 20, 2024 — MrBeast representatives declined to comment when contacted by BI; the story has been updated reflecting that.

• Mysterious drones, first seen in New Jersey and now around the US, have everyone talking.
• We're probably not all about to get sucked up by a spaceship — but it's fun to wonder!
• The mystery is bringing people together from across the political spectrum in a true online moment.

Lots of people have one conspiracy theory they kind of believe in. Ideally, this is more on the mild end of things rather than something like the moon landing being faked. A little skepticism toward authority can be healthy.

Which is why the mysterious drones that have been flying over New Jersey and the Northeast — which the federal government tells us are nothing to worry about — are a perfect thread for our conspiratorial minds to pull on.

In this postelection time, the drones have united people across the political spectrum in a shared belief that something weird is going on, and these clowns in government aren't telling us the straight story.

(For the record, there is no evidence that the clowns in the government are, in fact, lying to us.)

Over on the Facebook Group "New Jersey Mystery Drones — let's solve it," which has more than 73,000 members, there's a sharp sense of disillusionment with the local and national government response. There's also a fair number of people who might not normally talk about believing in space aliens saying they think what we're seeing is space aliens.

And I think that's a beautiful thing. We needed this.

We may one day learn the Official Truth. Until then, the drones spotted over New Jersey and other places have become a perfect obsession: an unsolved mystery that has bonded communities and gotten people outside into the fresh December air.

(I would like to give a disclaimer here that I cannot say with 100% certainty that this is not a military attack from Australia as vengeance for our mockery of their Olympic breakdancer. Or that space aliens are not about to invade and harvest our organs.)

What we know about the apparent drones, so far, is that officials seem to agree that it's neither of those threats. The Pentagon has also said they're not drones from an "Iranian mothership." And other officials say what people are seeing is just regular airplanes, helicopters, or stars.

(If you want to get in on the action and check what's flying in the sky above you, flight-tracking apps can help.)

The drone mystery has been healing a wound in our divided nation. We needed something mildly silly but kind of wacky and slightly concerning to focus on collectively.

Unexplained drone activity ticks a lot of boxes of things humans love:

• Small aircraft, a favorite interest of dads.
• Being outside and staring at the night sky — activities that have bonded mankind since days of cave paintings.
• The opportunity to become an armchair expert in a field you read about in two news articles and a Wikipedia page.
• Talking to people in your medium-to-small town.
• A vague conspiracy — but mostly friendly and nice.
• Aliens????

Best of all, discussing drone sightings has been hyperlocal — and has thrived on Facebook. Outside the drone phenomenon, Facebook Groups already had become the nation's hub for suburban news. It's where people go to ask for a plumber recommendation, complain about schools, post activities — and now discuss potential extraterrestrial activity.

Getting in on the drone action

In my small town outside New York City, the local Facebook Group was buzzing about drone sightings — people were thrilled to finally get in on the action after hearing about it in New Jersey for weeks.

An offshoot group was started to discuss drone sightings in Connecticut. (It's much smaller than the New Jersey one.) A recent post showed the vibe: "No sightings yet in Norwalk." See, everyone wants in on the fun.

There's some history of silly panics in the headlines just before something big happens. A series of shark attacks — dubbed the "Summer of the Shark" — dominated the news in the late summer of 2001. Then there was the summer of clown sightings in 2016, right before Trump was elected president for the first time.

Perhaps years from now, we'll all look back at this as the funny moment where we all focused on drones right before [whatever] happened. Or, hey, maybe we'll look back on this and think: "We should've fought off the alien brainsuckers sooner!"

There's so much for middle-aged suburbanites to argue about on the internet — property taxes, politics, Luigi. But for a brief moment, we've gotten to engage in extended Fox Mulder LARP.

I hope the drones stick around a little longer.