You Should Press the Red Button, Never the Blue Button

Let’s talk about something silly, but quite revealing: Would you press the red button or the blue button? A version of this puzzle goes viral on social media from time to time; this week, writer Tim Urban kicked things off, and YouTube giant MrBeast, who often sets up competitions in which participants have to play prisoner’s dilemma–style mind games for money, soon followed suit.

The setup, per MrBeast, is this:

Everyone on earth takes a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press? BE HONEST.

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) April 28, 2026

You can see from the above poll results that the blue button won, and everybody survived. Yay. However, it strikes me that this is wrong and frankly distressing.

I suppose I can appreciate why people would pick the blue button, especially if they don’t think about the question for more than five seconds. Due to the highly suggestive phrasing, it sounds like blue-button pushers are conscientious and red-button pushers are psychotically self-involved. Don’t we all want to do the right thing, believing that we live in a world where our fellow human beings will prioritize the good of everyone over narrow self-interest?

But that framing breaks down when you consider the following: If everybody presses the red button, everybody lives.

It’s true that if everybody presses the blue button, everybody also lives. But blue-button folks are putting themselves in danger by gambling that enough people are also going to take the risky option. That is a very bad bet. Red-button pushers are guaranteeing their own safety, at zero cost to anyone else, providing other people also made the rational choice. It’s not as if there’s some finite supply of red buttons, and it’s not as if everybody doing the self-interested thing actually lowers the overall survival rate, as with some versions of the prisoner’s dilemma (i.e., both criminals informing on each other). On the contrary, if every single person does the thing that is best for him, he will guarantee his own safety and everybody else’s. When an individual’s incentives are perfectly in line with the common good, it should be obvious that this is the ideal scenario and other options are suboptimal.

Moreover, in a world of 8 billion humans, the odds that any single person’s choice will be the tipping point is so low that you would actually have to be crazy to pick blue. Your vote can’t influence the outcome, statistically speaking. All you can do is guarantee your own survival. This is why Reason editor in chief Katherine Mangu-Ward does not vote in presidential elections; your vote has no practical effect on who wins. If you’re voting, it’s mostly about making yourself feel good.

Blue-button pushers keep insisting that red-button pushers are being selfish, but really it’s the other way around. The blue-button pushers are imposing an obligation on everyone else: They are needlessly placing themselves in harm’s way and counting on enough other people making a risky gamble to save them. This becomes more obvious if you word the question slightly differently: If you press the red button, you live, but if you press the blue button, you die unless 51 percent of people press the blue button. I suspect the poll results for this question would be different, even though the scenario is exactly the same.

Or consider the following: There are two paths through the jungle. One path is perfectly safe, and the other path has quicksand that might kill you. If you take the quicksand path, you have to hope enough people will decide not to take the safe path and instead come to rescue you, even though they could sink in and die.

Are the rational human beings who take the safe path being selfish? No. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt a certain resentment toward the quicksand people.

The whole blue and red button drama is basically this summarized

If everyone clicked red, nobody would die. Those that click blue have suicidal empathy pic.twitter.com/g9Jk57bx5X

— Chibi Reviews (@ChibiReviews) April 29, 2026

I dare anyone who’s made it this far to disagree with me! And yet, the blue button won on MrBeast’s poll and Urban’s poll. I also failed to convince my Rising co-host, Lindsey Granger. It’s a lonely world for us libertarians.

Amber Duke joins me to discuss the walls closing in on Anthony Fauci and the fallout from the thwarted White House Correspondents’ Association dinner assassin.

I have moved on to the next Miss Marple mystery, 4.50 from Paddington. After that, I intend to take a little break from Agatha Christie and would appreciate good fantasy recommendations.