Numlock Sunday: Morry Kolman on his film, MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money

Plus, we talk First Light and Traffic Cam Photo Booth

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to multimedia artist Morry Kolman, an artist whose work relates to how the internet works, surveillance, and digital life. I am a huge fan of his stuff, he is keeping the internet exciting and compelling.

Some of his work that you may have seen includes Guess We Doin Games Now, Are You The Asshole?, and that time he made the ThinkPad nub moan.

This past weekend, Kolman debuted his film MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money in New York, and I wanted to use the occasion to get him on to Numlock to talk about both the video as well as other favorite work of his, including First Light and the Webby-award nominated — you should go vote for it! — Traffic Cam Photobooth.

Morry can be found at @MWTTDOTM on pretty much every platform.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Walt: Morry, thanks so much for coming on, man.

Morry Kolman: Thank you for having me.

I have been looking to get you on for a really long time at this point, and given the film screening this weekend, I was just so excited to do this. Just to kick off, I was trying to think of how precisely to describe your profession and I was kind of at a loss just because, again, you do a lot of really fascinating, innovative stuff at the intersection of code and tech and media and art. And I guess I just kind of wanted to throw to you: how do you kind of describe yourself to folks?

I'm one more pedestrian at the intersection of art and technology. You're asking a good question, one that I don't really know to answer. How I normally describe myself is I am a multimedia artist that is very interested in the ways that we live and interact online. I'm especially interested in the dynamics of virality, as well as the types of images and videos that we make for each other or that computers make for us. That's how I broadly describe it.

I am personally deeply enamored with your work. I think that you're an incredible artist, and I really enjoy it.

We're talking because just this past weekend you had a New York screening of a film that know that you spent a lot of time on, and I think it's just a deeply fascinating piece of work. Would you like to talk a little bit about MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, and what got you there?

Yes. Thank you for saying the full title because the title is one of my favorite parts about it.

So yes, this weekend I'm screening one of the versions of MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money. There is a 60-minute long version. There's also an abridged 12-minute long version. There's also the early version that came out in 2023 that was only three minutes long.

But MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money is, first of all, exactly what it sounds like. It is a 2,800-plus clip compilation of people in MrBeast videos saying specific dollar amounts of money in increasing order from zero to 43 trillion.

And the reason I made it was because I think that a lot of the discourse around his content gets caught up in this debate between this uneasy feeling that there's something deeply wrong with what's going on in those videos, and the extremely and excessively well-documented amount of money he gives away: the amount of people that participate in his videos, the amount of trees he plants.

To argue against MrBeast is to say that, "That homeless guy shouldn't have gotten $10,000," or, "those trees shouldn't have been planted," or, "those children should not have gotten the wells bought for them." And yet at the same time, when you're watching videos where he's giving away lots of money, the next recommended video is one where he's spending $40,000 on fireworks or literally $1,000,000 on lottery tickets.

Instead of trying to write something about whether or not what he's doing is good or bad, I wanted to just show what put me off about the type of videos that he makes. To do that, I wanted to distill them down to their core concept, which is money. I think that the main thing that makes MrBeast's videos tick is the fact that there's always a bigger number coming up in just a few seconds. So whether that number is about people being bought a house, or people keeping their hands on a Lamborghini, or the amount of money they're spending on a literal golden pizza, I wanted to put those all in context with each other to show what I think is true about MrBeast's videos.

MrBeast will often justify his kind of lavish spending by saying, "Well, oh, when we spend more money on these crazy things, they get us more views, which allows us to do more philanthropy, so over time, this kind of rampant consumption actually works out as a net good."

What I wanted to show was that I don't think that's true. I think that everything in the MrBeast universe, every dollar spent, there is not a bucket of money that goes to good causes and a bucket of money that goes to things that will get things that will make for a good video. I think there is the homeless random people on the street competition, the people in his competitions, fireworks, pizza, food, et cetera, these are all morally equivalent to him.

So that's what I was trying to share with the Beast video, just that money is always spent in exchange for attention rather than anything else in his videos.

I have watched the hour version of it, it is numbing. It is just a really interesting piece about the spectacle of generosity, and at what point do you feel unsettled, and at what point does it stop necessarily being altruism?

Well, I think one thing, when you talk about the spectacle of generosity, I think the thing that's really interesting is that you really start to see, first, especially around the $10,000 mark, but especially past the $100,000 mark, there's no generosity past those numbers, right?

The amount of money that he gives away in, "charitable form," quote, unquote, is really focused in the $1,000 to $10,000, maybe $50,000 brackets.

But once you start getting to the $1 million mark, the $2 million mark, et cetera, suddenly you just get these unfathomable displays of wealth and consumption, and it really puts into perspective what this money is for. I specifically put certain clips together, within the constraint of they have to be increasing, et cetera, but I specifically put some clips together to kind of hammer home some certain points or make them kind of punch lines in certain areas.

There's this great clip where he says, "$1 million", and it's one of the longest clips in the video. It's in a video where I think they bought $100,000 or $500,000 worth of lottery tickets. And they say, "In the next video we'll spend $1 million, and if we spend $1 million, we'll probably lose $300,000," or something. I forget the exact quote. And then the very next clip is, "Hey, we bought $1 million of lottery tickets." And the fact that you can willfully waste money and lose $300,000, going into the video and knowing that you're going to lose $300,000, when a couple of videos ago you were changing people's lives by paying for a $1,000 surgery or $50,000 for some school to finally have books. That shows me that there is a moral crisis happening with the way that you spend money.

I just keep on getting just taken aback by the popularity, in the sense of the crowd has spoken that this is actually what people want. Could MrBeast make a video without money? I think the answer is no. It seems like so much of the attraction and the signature and just the energy and propulsion of his work, and this is something I came across through, again, your work on this, is it is inconceivable to kind of imagine an original work that doesn't require a cash giveaway being as popular as any of his other content.

Yeah. He is one of the original philanthropy porn YouTubers. Five, six years ago he was only at maybe a couple million followers if that, and over the past half decade he's grown to 350 million or something like that. Some of his most popular, biggest stuff, and he's talked about this, his first big brand deal, what he did was he was like, "Hey, brand, give me..." I forget if it was like $1,000 or $10,000, and all he did was he just went and gave that to a homeless guy on the street, and then that video was his best performing video of all time. There's an interview or a couple interviews where he talks about this. And I think that that agrees with your point that I don't think that he could make a video without the foregrounding of money.

I also really wanted to highlight that, and specifically that homeless origin story in the credit scene of the movie itself, which if you stick around after the couple seconds of fade to black at the end of the last clip, you see the credits roll and the credits are just a list of every video that is included in the full unabridged version. The audio background of that video is him going up to this homeless guy, I think back in 2017, giving him $1,000, asking if he's going to spend it on drugs or alcohol, asking if he's going to get robbed, and then finally asking him to say, "Hey, can you tell my viewers on YouTube or my critics on YouTube that you don't care that I am filming this and using this for views?"

The guy says, "Yeah, no, this is great. I don't care." And then he says, "See, YouTube, homeless people don't care if I use them for views."

And it's a really jarring note to end on. But I think that's one of the most important parts of the video, because after you've just received this deluge and, as you say, mind-numbing experience of just intense amounts of money washing over you, you are presented from the horse's mouth, with the admission that all of this is just for attention, even the philanthropic parts. And that, I think, is what really helps tie the entire piece together.

It's a phenomenal piece. Again, I really enjoyed it. I highly encourage folks to check it out. I know that you're doing some screenings around, so I would definitely encourage folks to check those out if they get an opportunity too.

And if they have places for me to screen it, hit me up.

Absolutely.

You've done a vast variety of work. I wanted to just finish on two projects that I really, really enjoyed of yours. The first is you have this really, really fun project called First Light, and I am just a gigantic fan of it, and I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about that and what motivated that?

Sure! So, I love First Light. As I alluded to when I was talking about what kind of work I do and what interests me, First Light comes out of my interest in the images that we experience, especially the images that computers make for us.

Actually let me hold the First Light envelope I have. Yeah, so First Lights are one of my favorite products I made recently. They really come out of my interests in the types of the images that we make for computers and the images that computers make for us. I think astronomy is a really fruitful ground for that, because it has gone from a very visual science to a very computerized science over the past 130 years.

What I mean by that is that right now, the vast majority of sky surveying is done with computerized telescopes that observe the sky and document stars, by the millions, every year.

First Lights are stars that nobody in the world has seen before.

They are byproducts of the process of modern astronomy where computerized telescopes both up in the sky and on land discover tens of millions of new stars every year. The problem is that that's tens of thousands of new stars every day. For the only people who care about these incremental stars, research astronomers, what the stars look like isn't actually that important because of two things. One, most stars look like most other stars, dot, dark background, and two, for the utility of the 1.8th, 1.9th billion star, what's the use of it? The use is more for its data. You can't plug an image into a model of the galaxy, but you can plug in things like brightness, wavelength, flicker, et cetera.

So the story of modern starlight is one where photons originate trillions and trillions of miles away, travel millions and millions years to get here, only to end up as a row of data in some SQL database rather than as a glimmer in a human eye. But remember, that's only because the data is the only interesting things to these astronomers. It's not like the data comes out of nowhere. The data, if we think about it, brightness, wavelength, flicker, those are all visual pieces of information, which betray the fact that oftentimes the data comes from pictures that these computers take of these things.

So, there are millions and millions of stars that we have discovered, named, cataloged, and importantly added pictures of that nobody has ever actually looked at.

In a process created in consultation with astronomers from NASA, astronomers from this place called the CDS in France, which is the organization that runs and maintains several of the biggest research astronomy database tools out there, I have developed a process where I find stars that are uninteresting, found very recently, only in the past couple surveys have had an image taken of them that is anything more than a couple pixels of light. I've never been mentioned in any academic paper. I've never been included in any relevant data set. I scrape these automatically. I print them out in bulk, upside down, and then I fold them upside down and I seal them without looking at them.

What that means is that I end up with this huge pile of envelopes, which have a nice little wax seal and everything, that each contain a unique star. And when you open that envelope, you will become the first person to see it.

And what I love about the project is it's not buying a star, it's not naming a star. Those are scams, right? This is not a project about having some ownership or some proprietary connection to this thing out there. This is instead a project about the scientific process of how we understand our universe and the meaningful and arguably metaphysical connection you can have with a star by being the first person to see it.

I often will liken it to Schrodinger's cat. Until somebody actually goes and looks at this point of light out there, that is, again, unimportant and one of billions, all it is to anybody, the only way that anybody in the world has ever interacted with it is as a set of numbers. They don't even know what it looks like. It's never been directly observed by a person. So when you open it up and you lay eyes on it for the first time, you kind of fasten it as actually really real. This thing exists. It is out there in the cosmos, and that is a fact that hardens into concrete when you open it up and look at it for the first time.

It's a phenomenal project, and I really love it, man. I have mine.

Oh, thank you.

Just to wrap up, I know that folks should check out the video, but there is another project of yours that's actually up for a Webby right now, it’s about surveillance, you had an exhibition in Miami about it, do you want to talk a little bit about Traffic Cam Photobooth?

I'd love to. Traffic Cam Photobooth, another great example of my interest in the images that computers make for us. TrafficCamPhotobooth.com is a website where you can take selfies with the traffic surveillance cameras that exist in New York City, Maryland, Georgia, Minnesota, and one camera in Ireland. It's been running since August of 2024.

Over that time, there have been 400,000 visitors and 800,000 photos have been taken with the site, which I think has been really cool.

I have received a cease and desist threat from the Department of Transportation in New York City, which you can now read on my website. I linked it front and center.

Via @WTTDOTM

source: Morry Kolman

When you load up TrafficCamPhotobooth.com, they claim I am violating their terms of service and encouraging people to take dangerous action by taking selfies with traffic cameras in the street, which you do not have to be in the street to take a traffic camera selfie, but that is for me and the New York City Department of Transportation to argue over.

And yeah, it's been a real whirlwind of a project, and the Webby nomination is really the cherry on top. I'm in the “Weird” category. I'm in second right now, behind GIPHY.

Insane.

I don't know how GIPHY is weird.

Obscene.

First of all, I don't think of GIPHY as a website, I think of it as a keyboard and an extension and a plugin. I also don't think that any service owned by Facebook and then Shutterstock should qualify.

Right!

That's for the Webby Committee to decide, but if people want to support me and the actual weird internet, they can go to TrafficCamPhotobooth.com.

There's a big green link that says, "Vote here." It'll take you right to the voting page. It is a bit of an annoying login process, but if you just log in with Google it becomes very easy. But yeah, it's a very fun project. If you're in New York City or any of the other states or country that I mentioned, I'd highly recommend checking it out. Yeah, there's 2000-plus cameras.

There's bound to be one near you.

Unsettling. Deeply, deeply unsettling.

Anyway, Morry, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Where can folks find you, and where can they check out your work?

Sure. I am WTTDOTM everywhere. That's an acronym for Welcome to the Desert of the Meme, which was the name of my meme page I ran in college. So, that's WTTDOTM.com, that's @WTTDOTM pretty much anywhere you follow anybody. If you just go through those, you'll find me wherever you'd like to find people in the first place.

Amazing. Well, thanks again for coming on, Morry. Please keep it up. This stuff is really, really fun.

Yeah, thank you, Walt. I really appreciate it.

You can check out Traffic Cam Photobooth and vote for the Webby here.

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If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.