EA - Video AMA and transcript: Beast Philanthropy's Darren Margolias by Toby Tremlett

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Video AMA and transcript: Beast Philanthropy's Darren Margolias, published by Toby Tremlett on July 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a video and transcript of an AMA with Darren Margolias, the Executive Director of Beast Philanthropy. The interviewer is CEA's Emma Richter. See the questions Darren is answering in the AMA announcement post. If you'd like to support the Beast Philanthropy x GiveDirectly collaboration, you can donate here. The first $150,000 of donations will be matched. GiveDirectly shares their thinking on donation matching here. Video AMA- Emma interviews Darren Short transcript This transcript was cleaned up and shortened by ChatGPT. To my eye it seems to accurately represent Emma's questions and Darren's answers, but I've included the full, un-edited transcript at the end of this post so that you can cross-reference, get accurate quotes from Darren, or look for more detail. All errors in the GPT summary are my (Toby's) own (by a transitive property). Emma Hello everyone, I'm Emma from CEA. Welcome to our Forum AMA with Darren Margolias, the executive director of Beast Philanthropy. I'll be asking Darren the questions you posted on the EA Forum. For some context, Beast Philanthropy is a YouTube channel and organization started by Mr. Beast, the most watched YouTuber in the world. During Darren's four years at Beast Philanthropy, he's grown the channel to over 25 million subscribers and expanded the scope of what they do, from running food banks to building houses, funding direct cash transfers, and curing diseases. Speaking of cash transfers, Beast Philanthropy recently collaborated with GiveDirectly to make a video and transfer $200,000 to Ugandans in poverty. Darren, thanks for joining us. It's really exciting to have you and to ask all these questions. I'll start with some intro context questions. Could you give us a quick overview of what Beast Philanthropy does and your role? Darren Beast Philanthropy started out with Jimmy's initial idea to create a channel that would generate revenue to fund a food bank and feed our local community. We hoped to spread it across the country and maybe even other countries. We quickly realized there was much more to what we were doing than we initially contemplated, and it's grown far beyond that. As the executive director, I'm the person who gets all the blame when things go wrong. Emma Yeah, fair enough. So I'm curious, what first got you interested in working as an executive director for a charity? Darren I was actually a real estate developer. In 2002, a friend found some kittens under her front deck and couldn't find a shelter that wouldn't euthanize them if they weren't adopted within a week. She decided to find them homes, and I said I'd pay for all the bedding and everything. Out of that, we started an animal rescue organization, which has grown into the biggest no-cage, no-kill facility in the southeastern United States. It's been very successful. Along the way, I realized that the endless pursuit of making more money wasn't fulfilling. In 2008, I had a realization that I wanted to do more in my life than work hard and buy stuff that didn't make me happy. The animal project brought me fulfillment, so I decided to sell my real estate portfolio and start doing things that mattered to me. We built the animal charity, then I started another charity for severely affected autistic kids. One day, Jimmy's CEO called and asked me to meet Jimmy. I didn't know who Mr. Beast was at the time. Darren He told me they wanted to get every dog in a dog shelter adopted and were considering our shelter. When I got to North Carolina, I started my presentation right away, but Jimmy interrupted and said, "We've already approved the video. It's being done at your shelter. You're here for another reason." He th...