Mack's Six Fears: A Second Shot at $800,000, and the One Fear He Couldn't Beat

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Overview

In this video, Jimmy (MrBeast) puts his friend Mack through six escalating "fears" after Mack tells him, "I'm just going to let you know I'm not afraid of anything," and "You cannot scare me." If Mack faces every fear, he wins $800,000. Mack lost the same amount as a contestant in an earlier challenge video, so the series is framed as his chance to win it back. The video tests whether anything can actually scare him. Jimmy's answer by the end is that spiders, heights, drowning, and being buried alive did not break Mack, but the fear of failing again did.

11 min read

Fear One: Ten Minutes With a Thousand Spiders

The first challenge seals Mack inside an enclosure with a thousand spiders, and he has to last ten minutes to move on. Jimmy explains that the whole video exists because Mack claimed that "no matter how hard I tried, I can't scare him." Partway through, Jimmy asks whether Mack is scared now. Mack concedes he is "getting there a little bit."

Jimmy admits the challenge was "way more gnarly" than he expected. Mack completes the ten minutes and passes the first fear. Jimmy reminds viewers that he must finish all of them to win the $800,000.

Fear Two: A 200-Foot Free Fall Without a Harness

For the second fear, Mack is blindfolded, told to trust Jimmy, and walked up a ramp onto a platform that is then raised. He drops to one knee before he even knows where he is. With the blindfold off, Jimmy explains the task. Mack has to stand at the end of a plank, unclip the line that secures him so he is "connected to nothing," press a button, and free-fall 200 feet. Jimmy says he will be caught, without telling Mack how.

This is the first time Mack is visibly shaken. He says, "of course I'm shaking," and points out that he cannot even see the ground. He asks Jimmy to look him in the eyes and promise that something will catch him. Jimmy answers, "Something will break your fall. I promise." Jimmy then offers him a way out: tap out and admit he does get scared. Mack refuses. After a countdown, he unclips, presses the button, and falls. Jimmy calls him a "psycho" afterward. The video does not show what broke the fall.

Why the Stakes Matter to Mack

At this point Jimmy gives the backstory. Mack is a contestant from a previous challenge video who lost $800,000 there. He is now on challenge three of six, trying to win that money back. That history affects the decisions he makes for the rest of the video, especially when he is offered buyouts.

Fear Three: The Sinking Car and the Eight Duffel Bags

The third setup is a cheap car aimed at a lake. Mack guesses he will have to drive it into the water. Jimmy jokes that this would be dangerous and that the car has no gas pedal anyway. Instead, a crane will lift the car with Mack inside and drop it into the lake. The $800,000 is in the back seat, split into eight duffel bags of $100,000 each. Every bag Mack recovers stays in play for the rest of the video, and every bag he leaves behind is "gone forever."

Mack says he will never admit he is scared but is "about as close as you can be right now to that feeling." Before the drop, Jimmy offers him $100,000 to quit and admit he was scared. Mack turns it down: "I lost it all last time. It's not happening again."

Once the car hits the water, Mack has about 20 seconds to get out before it goes under. He escapes and starts diving for bags, handing them up to Nolan on the boat one after another. Jimmy explains that each second the car sinks deeper, which makes it harder to reach and harder to see. Mack also doesn't know at first that the last two bags are seatbelted into the back seat. Jimmy says he picked this fear because Mack was "like a borderline Olympic swimmer earlier in his life." Someone on the boat notes the car is about 40 feet down in freezing water.

Mack recovers seven bags. With $700,000 on the boat, Jimmy urges him to stop. Mack refuses and dives again. Jimmy says the car had reached the bottom of the 45-foot-deep lake, which made the last $100,000 almost impossible to reach. Mack eventually gives up: "It's black down there… I can't see the car, Jimmy. It's gone." Mack says this video is "like 10 times as intense" as the one he was in before. Jimmy adds that seven safety divers were on standby throughout.

From here, the prize is $700,000, and it is all or nothing. Mack has to get through the three remaining fears to keep any of it.

Fear Four: The Mystery Box and a Failed Negotiation

Jimmy introduces the next fear as possibly "the hardest one." Mack has to reach through a hole into a metal box and pull out whatever is inside. First he signs a waiver that, as Jimmy puts it, means he can't sue if anything in the box hurts him. Mack asks whether it's an animal, and Jimmy only says there are "things in this box." Once Mack grabs something, he has to pull it out no matter what.

The contents turn out to be Jimmy's own chocolate bars, and the challenge becomes a product promotion. Jimmy later admits, "I might've lied. That one wasn't actually that hard."

Before the next fear, Mack tries to negotiate. He reminds Jimmy that he has been in "this exact same room" with money on the line before, and he offers to walk away for $500,000. Jimmy refuses. Mack lowers his ask to $400,000 and then $350,000. Jimmy says he might have considered $200,000 or $250,000, but he turns down both higher numbers. Mack keeps playing. Jimmy remarks, "I knew he'd break."

Fear Five: Buried Alive Without a Clock

Jimmy says the fifth fear is based on "one of the scariest things I've ever done." Mack figures it out right away, helped by a tombstone with his name on it. He will be buried alive for 24 hours. He can leave whenever he wants, but he won't know what time it is. If he leaves before the 24-hour mark, he loses everything. Jimmy, who was buried in his own past challenge, says it feels wrong but fun to be "on the other side" for once.

Mack is placed in a coffin and covered with dirt. The timer only starts once he is fully buried, and Mack asks the crew to bury him faster. A rope above his head rings a bell. The next time he pulls it, the crew will dig him up, and if the timer is not past 24 hours, he loses the $700,000. He wears a wristband that sends his heart rate and vitals to the crew, and Jimmy stresses that it gives him no way to tell the time.

Mack lays out his strategy. He will stay awake for about 2 hours, sleep for about 10, and call that the halfway point. Then he will repeat the cycle. The plan runs into trouble almost immediately. He gets bored quickly, and Jimmy reports that after 45 minutes, Mack already thought about 2 hours had passed. Sleep is supposed to make time pass faster, but Jimmy notes it also makes it harder for Mack to keep track, and Mack could not stay asleep for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Jimmy also wakes him periodically on purpose, because his own friends kept waking him up during his burial. On one wake-up, Mack guesses it "might be hour 16." Jimmy says the longer Mack stayed down, the less he seemed to know what time it was. From then on, the video deliberately hides the elapsed time from viewers.

The Bell and the Reveal: 36 Hours

As time goes on, claustrophobia starts getting to Mack. He calls the coffin scary and says the longer he's in it, the worse he feels. He tells Jimmy, "I don't know how you do this for seven days," and Jimmy asks whether he has reached the point of losing blood flow in his legs and feeling like his back is falling apart. Mack offers Jimmy $50 to tell him the time. Jimmy answers "no comment."

Before he pulls the rope, Mack says he is nervous because he lost everything in his previous video and got a second chance only because of the audience. Blowing that chance comes down to whether he truly knows it has been 24 hours. He counts down and rings the bell, and the timer stops.

While Mack is dug up, the video runs a sponsor segment. Once he's out, Jimmy reveals the time: 36 hours. Mack was buried twelve hours longer than required. Jimmy reacts, "He scares me." Mack is now one challenge away from the full $700,000.

Fear Six: Returning to the Set of His Failure

Jimmy calls the final challenge possibly "Mack's worst fear ever." It is a one-to-one recreation of the challenge Mack failed last time. Mack is led in with his eyes covered. When he sees the set, he says, "No, no, no. I'm not doing that again."

Jimmy names the final fear as the fear of failure. The rules match the original. There are four stages, each with a cookie that has a shape on it, and Mack has to cut out every shape without breaking a cookie. If he breaks one, he loses $700,000, and Jimmy points out it would be the second time this has happened to him on this set.

Jimmy makes one more offer: quit now and take $300,000, or "risk it for the biscuit" for $700,000. Mack calls it a very big decision. Jimmy notes that $300,000 is less than half the prize, but that losing again would mean $1.5 million lost on this set. Mack decides to play. Jimmy says he is glad and wants Mack to win.

The time limit is set to exactly how long Mack took to get through all four stages last time: 34 minutes and 54 seconds.

How It Fell Apart

Mack moves fast from the start. The first cookie is scanned green while about 34 minutes are still left. Jimmy warns that rushing may not be in his interest, since one accidental snap ends everything. Mack says the deal is different this time and that he will take his time on the circle. In practice he keeps racing.

The tins are hard to open, which adds to the frantic mood. Jimmy suggests Mack is struggling because he's "freaking out" and tries opening one himself. Nolan declines to help because he doesn't want to be responsible. Mack bangs the set hard enough that Jimmy tells him to stop breaking it. After the second stage, with about 32 minutes left, Mack says he needs all of that time for the umbrella, the shape he lost $800,000 on. Jimmy says the strategy makes sense in theory: clear the easier shapes quickly to bank time for the umbrella. But he keeps telling Mack there is no need to rush.

The third shape is harder, and Jimmy suggests going slower. Mack keeps going quickly and breaks the cookie. He asks whether it might not have broken all the way through. Jimmy notes that Mack still had 29 minutes left and had finished the first two stages in 4 minutes. Mack says, "I don't know why I did this," and then, "I did that twice?" When Jimmy leads him away, Mack pleads, "I don't want to leave yet." Asked why he rushed, Mack says he knew the umbrella "takes forever." He loses the $700,000.

Closing

Jimmy closes on the original claim. Mack said nothing could scare him, and after spiders, a sinking car, and the rest, Jimmy says he "really did start to believe him." In Jimmy's telling, the only thing that got to Mack was "the fear of his own failure."