The second season of the reality show Beast Games recently wrapped up on Amazon Prime, with the winner taking home $5 million.
The program is hosted by YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson — aka MrBeast — and this season featured a competition pitting strength against smarts.
One of the contestants on the “smart” team is a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, studying neuroscience. Sammie Harker graduated high school when she was 16 and then finished two undergraduate degrees at ASU two years later.
Her research focuses on autism; she was diagnosed with it as a teenager.
She describes Beast Games as “a lot of different hardcore challenges and also social dynamics and how you approach problems.”
The Show spoke with her about some of those challenges.
Full conversation
SAMMIE HARKER: I mean, in a way, I kind of say, like, being on the show was a little bit of a challenge in itself. And I think, like, as a viewer, like in Season 1, I didn't really understand what that meant. I've never been on a TV show before, and I felt like the challenge was just getting in that mindset.
When we first got up on the stage, we just saw these platforms, and they're like, kind of like square-type platforms. And yeah, there was like, a smaller little section that had this, stack of blocks on it with a little cover. And so Jimmy, the host, MrBeast, had asked us to take that off and then essentially, like, explain the challenge to us that we were going to be stacking blocks from memory. So that was the smart team's first challenge.
And so, like, bare bones, the challenge was just stacking blocks from memory, which feels like it sounds pretty simple. For me personally, I really like memory, and so I felt like that was something I was pretty good at. But for me, I really like numbers, memory, and I feel like memorizing blocks just felt a little bit different because with this, there's also that physical aspect involved of as they were explaining the game to us, it's you have to, like, pick up blocks and stack them on a tiny little platform and run across with as many blocks as possible at a time to do that.
And so I think, also that added physical layer makes it more difficult and not just like a memory challenge, but also, like, strategy of how many blocks are you going to grab and all those things, yeah.
And I don't know if you want me to go into more specifics of that challenge, but unfortunately, the road kind of ends for me after that challenge.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, well, it kind of sounds like it's like, part quiz bowl, part feats of strength, part, like, morality play, almost.
HARKER: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree.
BRODIE: So you mentioned that you were part of the smart team, and I want to ask you about that. Because you have accomplished an awful lot in your life in not that long a time. I mean, you are, like, you're getting your Ph.D. in neuroscience. You graduated from college at the age that a lot of students are starting college.
How would you describe sort of your childhood and early adulthood up until now?
HARKER: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of factors that went into that and a lot of reasons for why I made the decisions that I did. But I'd say, like, in general, I grew up in kind of an atypical environment. And a lot of the decisions I made was trying to, like, find something that I was passionate about and something that would kind of help me cope and, like, get out of a negative situation.
And one of my parents, my mom, was very supportive of that. When I was 16, I was able to graduate high school and switch over to going to college full time and ended up graduating very quickly from there. But I think the biggest driver was definitely trying to find something that could help me get out of a negative situation. And then also in that time or around that time when I was going through that, I received an autism diagnosis.
And I remember feeling, like, kind of lost because there wasn't a lot of research or resources for autistic people online, especially autistic women. And so that became one of my goals, was that not only did I want to try to, like, pave my own path, but also develop some sort of resources or tools for people like me that felt like there wasn't a lot out there for them.
BRODIE: Once you were able to find more resources and information about autism, specifically in women, how did that feel for you? Did start to kind of make sense? Were you confused about this?
HARKER: Yeah. Yeah, I think ... there was a lot of confusion. And I think still, nowadays, there's still a lot of confusion. ... That was actually why I wanted to go on this show, is that if. If I did win the money, I was going to probably donate, like, almost all of it to research. Especially my current labs' research that I'm a part of, because we focus a lot on, like, older autistic people, and that's a very small research population.
And so I think going through all of this, a lot of my confusion was just, like, what does it mean to grow up autistic? And I feel like I don't resonate or relate to a lot of the representations that I'm seeing in the media. And I feel like I don't know very many other autistic people. And if I do, I feel like they're very different than I am. And they don't represent the same symptomology that I have.
And I think being a person in research, I've come to realize a lot of those differences are autism. Like, that's just what it is, that no autistic person is the same. And every autistic person has their own array of difficulties and amazing features about them. And so there's all these different ways to think about autism.
And you can kind of think of it like a color wheel. Like, there's this weird hex code combination that makes one autistic person. And so I think that also added another layer of confusion for me of, like, wow, are we really diagnosing all the autistic people out there? Are there all these people that don't know about their autistic identity and they're just living life, like, not knowing and just maybe feeling like they're different but not really understanding why?
And so something that kind of cleared up that confusion, at least for me, was learning about, like, the lost generation, is that there are a lot of adults out there that don't actually know that they're autistic. And they maybe come to realize it way later. But then the other side of confusion for that is that, OK, if you finally do get an autism diagnosis in adulthood, like, what does that mean for you? What can you do to get resources for that? What does that entail?
BRODIE: Is this kind of research something that you would like to continue doing even after you've gotten your Ph.D.?
HARKER: Yeah, I think it's definitely something I want to stay involved in. I think, for me my biggest focus right now is I've become really interested in a field called genetic counseling. And I became really interested in that because through research right now, a lot of the work that I do deals with making what's called a genetic score for our participants.
And so we take, like, a spit sample, a saliva sample from them, and we essentially genotype that. And then I have somebody's set of genetics that they're born with, and I can use publicly available data to make one singular number that could represent their genetic risk or their genetic liability for a certain phenotype.
So, for example, if somebody's interested in their risk for Alzheimer's disease, I could find a publicly available data set and generate a score that represents a number for somebody's risk for that. But the limitation as a researcher with that is that you're not necessarily allowed to give people guidance on that or interpret that for them, because you don't have the knowledge or education as to how to guide people to make informed decisions about that.
And so, genetic counselors, they run even more complex tests than we do, and they can look at different genetic variants or markers for a whole array of different conditions. Whether that's, like, in neurodevelopment or that's in cancer, or that's, like, cardiovascular. And then they can help people make guided and informed decisions based off of that instruction manual that they come with.
And that's something that I'm really excited about moving into, especially because in the autism field, there's been a lot o f misdirection historically with genetics being used in kind of an exclusionary context rather than helpful context. And so I want to be a person that can kind of help with that and make autistic people feel a little bit more comfortable about being vulnerable and giving us their genetic information to help them.
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