How do you get to be the second most subscribed YouTube channel of all time with a viewer count larger than some countries? By being bad at it for a long time. Marc Hustvedt is the President of MrBeast, a YouTube channel created by Jimmy Donaldson – who Hustvedt calls the “Kobe Bryant of YouTube.” But before the MrBeast team was racking up over 220 million subscribers, it was a lot of shooting free throws and hoping for the best. Hustvedt took his Michigan Ross education to Hollywood when the YouTube craze was just starting to bubble up. He’s watched an industry take shape over the years and has disrupted and revolutionized how content is created. He joins Breaking Schemas hosts Marcus Collins and John Branch to chat about the early years of YouTube and digital first content, MrBeast’s meteoric rise to superstardom, and why the secret to success may be failing a lot first. *Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*
How do you get to be the second most subscribed YouTube channel of all time with a viewer count larger than some countries? By being bad at it for a long time.
Marc Hustvedt is the President of MrBeast, a YouTube channel created by Jimmy Donaldson – who Hustvedt calls the “Kobe Bryant of YouTube.” But before the MrBeast team was racking up over 220 million subscribers, it was a lot of shooting free throws and hoping for the best.
Hustvedt took his Michigan Ross education to Hollywood when the YouTube craze was just starting to bubble up. He’s watched an industry take shape over the years and has disrupted and revolutionized how content is created.
He joins Breaking Schemas hosts Marcus Collins and John Branch to chat about the early years of YouTube and digital first content, MrBeast’s meteoric rise to superstardom, and why the secret to success may be failing a lot first.
*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*
Content is a fundamental building block of business
29:56: If you press me, I could find ways in which content is going to impact every single industry. Don't look at it as something to dismiss and say, "Oh, that's just what the kids do." Or, "that's just what YouTubers do or influencers do." It's a fundamental building block of business.
Marc's advice for industry disruptors
28:56: Study content, how it's made, how it's distributed, and obsess over what's the best content that is on the internet, and I mean that not because everybody has to work on YouTube. I think it's disrupting way more than the media now. We've seen it.
Why start creating content now?
25:42: This wasn't a linear journey in this industry. In fact, I'd argue the time is actually really good for anybody now to jump in because a lot of the hard work has been to get advertisers more comfortable to creatively partner on content and allow creative control of the creators in ways they would have never been comfortable before. The entire streaming and TV industry is desperate to figure out how we can tap into some of that magic because they don't have that monopoly over attention due to fixed distribution channels. It's easier in some ways now.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Marcus: Welcome to Breaking Schemas, a podcast that explores the dynamic changes of contemporary business through the lenses of the disruptors who have not only navigated the changes but have also rewritten the rules of the game. We'll be sitting down with business leaders across a wide spectrum of industries to discuss their victories, their failures, and the biggest lessons they've experienced throughout their career to prepare tomorrow's leaders, that's you, for an ever-changing marketplace.
I'm Marcus Collins, marketing professor here at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. I'll be your host, along with my co-conspirator, Professor John Branch. Now, let's get into it. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to another episode of Breaking Schemas. And we have with us another leader of bests. Fancy that, John. Another leaders of bests.
[00:00:56] Marc: Go, Blue.
[00:00:56] Marcus: Marc Hustvedt, the president of MrBeast. Mark, welcome to the pod, my man. It's good to see you.
[00:01:04] Marc: Good to see you, too. I mean, we knew each other at school. It has been incredible to watch your work. And, of course, got your book. I literally keep your book right there. That's not even a plant. That's been there months since it came out.
[00:01:17] Marcus: This is a man who understands media. And I'm grateful for you, my guy. It's good to have you with us.
[00:01:25] Marc: Terrific. Very happy to be here.
[00:01:28] Marcus: So, for the listening audience, and unless you've been living under a rock and don't know who MrBeast is, please tell us what it means to be the president of MrBeast, who MrBeast is, and the work that you do.
[00:01:42] Marc: Wow. It's a lot. You know, look, every now and then, you, you get these, sort of, generational talent in every industry, right? Jimmy is the LeBron James, or Kobe, in many ways of YouTube. So, to tell you who he is, he is the largest YouTube creator in the world. And he has the second most subscribed channel of all time.
We're, we're going to pass that in the next couple of months, but we're, you know, over 220 million subscribers on the main channel. And I'll give you another crazy stat. So, unique viewers is now a stat that YouTube shows you in the backend. So, in the last 90 days, over 660 million unique humans have watched a MrBeast video. And that's why it's global.
[00:02:25] Marcus: I mean, that's, like, bigger than countries. That's crazy.
[00:02:28] Marc: It is. I mean, I'll say this in all seriousness. And I know, look, I'm, I'm in an industry where we had to basically be the hype. Like, this is coming. This is going to disrupt media. You know, this is going to change everything. And it was relatively, sort of, quaint for many years, but we kept believing in it. And then now, suddenly, a confluence of a lot of things that got us to this point, but also a seminal talent has to come around.
And I mean, talent as an entrepreneur, talent as a, you know, a data and analytics person, an obsessive personality, and a desire and ambition to be the best, and a whole lot of other things, came along, but allowed this, you know, to harness, frankly, how big the internet had become. There's, like, 2.7 billion monthly active users on YouTube. So, there's the potential here to have the largest show in the history of the world.
And I'd argue we have the most popular show if it was compared against a TV show of anything that exists today. And nobody's ever really done this type where you've taken, sort of, a star and then localized them in all these different countries, because we're in 15 different languages today. So, you can switch the audio track on YouTube. And you can hear them in Portuguese. You can hear them in Hindi, Bangla.
Just those two languages alone, like, Hindi and Bangla, there's, like, 600 million native speakers of those two languages. So, we focused a lot on, on just, like, where the big pockets are. So, anyway, long story short, very big YouTube channel. We make videos that are anywhere from 15 to 30-plus minutes. Release roughly 24 main channel videos a year. So, kind of, every other week on Saturday. And they'll do about 100 million views in a few days, seven days.
And then many of them will do several 100 million views over the course of their lifetime. And then, of course, we're on TikTok. And I think it's, like, the number four most subscribed on TikTok. And then, you know, Instagram and all the other platforms as well. And we can get into it later, but I think, you know, really the pillar of this is Beast's philanthropy that right from really early on, Jimmy wanted to find a way to use this platform for good.
And the natural mindset of the culture here is build something real, do the hard work, and push through the obstacles. And so, he did the hard work, not just like raise money for a charity and give it to some organization as a huge overhead, but actually, how do we figure it out?
How it started with food distribution, mostly in, in, sort of, impoverished areas in Eastern North Carolina, where there's a lot of food insecurity, and now is a global philanthropy doing projects, from rebuilding schools in various countries around the world, disaster relief in Haiti, building homes in Kentucky after a tornado, you know, you name it, the project is continuous, built, you know, 100 wells in six countries in Africa.
[00:05:19] Marcus: I mean, these numbers are astronomical, which are only signifiers of the impact. So, we're not talking about making videos. We're, we're talking something far greater. How did you get into this space? Like, I know you. I mean, YouTube just started when we were in college. Like, how did you get here?
[00:05:39] Marc: The short version is, you know, I went to Michigan. I was trying to do a dual major for a while, to be honest. I was... came from a computer science family. So, I did computer science and economics, but if you know Michigan, computer science is on North campus and economics is on the regular campus. So, in the freezing cold of, of Ann Arbor, I was doing this hustle back and forth. And it was tough.
And you spend all-nighters up on North campus. And it was a grind. And I, kind of, realized like, "Well, I love, love technology. I love software." And I was exposed to that very early because of my family, and just playing with, like, hosting chat rooms on AOL at, like, 12.
And I remember, like, what it allowed. I was so fascinated by the connectivity of what the internet did. And I wanted to learn how to code. And so, I learned how to code even though that wasn't going to be my profession, but I eventually had that realization somewhere along the lines of, "God, like, I have to finish school at some point. I can't just..."
[00:06:27] Marcus: That's important.
[00:06:28] Marc: The two degrees is really hard. I'm just going to focus on economics. I'm really drawn by the business side of it, but I'll still code. And so, I finished the economics. And so, I take, sort of, this consulting job at a finance consulting. And it was insane spreadsheet modeling. I was in a room with no windows. And we were doing, like, damage analysis for big corporate litigation. And I had that realization of, like, "Does any of this matter?"
No, I'm not making anything that has any impact in the world. Most of the time, these cases would settle. And this was just all an exercise to prove one little point in an argument in a courtroom that no one would ever. So, I, I couldn't really talk about it with people because of NDA. So, I was like, "This is not fulfilling." Even though it was a real job, paid pretty well, and I was learning skills, I just had that realization.
I started volunteering for the Austin Film Festival. And I think volunteering is a great way to, when you want to, kind of, like, dip a toe into other industries, meet people and connect. And, and this is before Uber. I started driving the giant SUVs from the airport to the hotels with, like, writers, directors, and producers for the Austin Film Festival. I kept asking them, like, "How do I get into entertainment?"
And they're like, "Well, you got to move to L.A. or New York." And I was in Austin, Texas. And I was like, "Really? I mean, we got Rob Rodriguez, Mike Judge, you got all this stuff going on there." They're like, "No, no, no. The industry is... they, sort of, learn about these, like, hubs and the global hubs of talent." And I think that was important for me to know, especially if I didn't have any real connections in entertainment.
And so, enough of them told me this. I moved to L.A, no job, and recognized the privilege in doing that, but it was, you know, piled in with some roommates. I don't even think we had a place to stay. Crashed on a couch. Realized how expensive L.A. was. And I did actually then I got a real job to keep my mom happy and to, like, pay the rent. So, I worked at Kaplan, the test prep company. And there was, like, sort of, a, a management job there.
But realistically, I was, like, diving in and starting. I, sort of, fell into meeting what would be the early YouTubers. And I decided, at that time, I was modeling it after TechCrunch, what Mike Arrington did with TechCrunch. He, sort of, chronicled the early... I guess, that was the early 2000s. It was about 2005. And he had done a similar thing. There was that post-dotcom crash. You had the emergence of Facebook and a bunch of startups.
And I was, sort of, seeing the same thing. I was like, "Wow, there's all these people making video on the internet. I just want to write about it." So, I wrote a blog. We founded a site called Tubefilter. It's still around today. It's a good trade publication for the space. And I found that a blog was an incredibly great way to meet people, and especially if nobody else was writing about them, the entertainment trades wouldn't touch them, but I would go meet somebody who, like, just did a deal with MySpace.
And they got, like, $5,000 or something from MySpace. That led me on that journey of really studying that community and building real relationships. And that's what we did. And then we started doing meetups and built a community. And at times, we would have, like, as many as 800 people come to a meetup. We'd have sponsors on stage.
[00:09:22] Marcus: Wow.
[00:09:22] Marc: We'd do a panel. They were, like, little micro-conferences if you will. And then that led us to create this award show called The Streamy Awards, which is now the, you know, premier award show for YouTube and digitally first content. And we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't make much money. It was a grind. It was a time when money wasn't really, like, flush in the space. Brand deals were relatively small. Scale of any channel wasn't really that big.
[00:09:49] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:09:50] Marc: And, of course, explaining to my mother, that's always the test, right? Like-
[00:09:53] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Marc: ... I couldn't explain to my mother what I did. She still, to this day, barely knows what I do. But it wasn't the, like, respected job. Maybe that stigma is not as prevalent today.
[00:10:06] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:10:08] Marc: I don't know what you think about it. It seems, seems like, now, it's more accepted, but I would say, especially coming out of a school and having our peers back at Michigan who worked at McKinsey, or whatever, BCG, and all these places, and I just had that feeling of, like, "What am I doing? Am I just messing around in Hollywood, or do I have a real job?"
[00:10:26] Marcus: I don't think you're wrong. I mean, I was an engineer. So, I was on North Campus, freezing cold, and went into the music industry to write love songs. And it was like, "What are you doing? This is insane." And I think the truth of the matter is that when we take, sort of, the role that's less traveled, there aren't really footsteps-
[00:10:42] Marc: Yeah.
[00:10:43] Marcus: ... in the snow that we... So, we have to navigate new spaces there. And it doesn't seem obtainable to someone, does it? Right? In the literature, we often refer to this as legitimation-
[00:10:52] Marc: Yeah.
[00:10:53] Marcus: ... right? It's become acceptable, right? Because it's been reworked and negotiated in a social discourse to say, "Oh, this is a haveable career when we see people who have done it." And there are so many examples of people who have been successful in this space that it legitimates it. It makes it a legitimate career path. Maybe not all parents feel that way, but-
[00:11:11] Marc: Yeah.
[00:11:12] Marcus: ... but certainly, for us. And so, it seems like your getting here to where you are, it took a lot of experimentation, a lot of curiosity-
[00:11:22] Marc: Yeah.
[00:11:22] Marcus: ... on your end. How are people normally getting to the space? And what's the normal trajectory? And, like, is it just, you know, put a camera up and make content? Is that the normal way to get here?
[00:11:31] Marc: That's a great question. I think, you know, I, I'm often what people call a suit sometimes, especially in the creative business, right? Like, you know, you could, you could argue at times, like, everybody's a creator. I, I, sort of, do believe that.
But in the, sort of, professional sense of, like, being an on-camera personality and, and making content, it's not my day-to-day. I love the, sort of, you know, building businesses and, and strategizing and, and actually operating these things. I think there have been a couple of influxes over the last 15 years that have brought a bunch of people into the space-
[00:12:04] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:12:05] Marc: ... but I also saw a lot of transient behavior, too, as creator became a buzzword. If you remember a couple of years back, it's so funny. With Silicon Valley, it's like, what's the buzzword that's going to get you funded? It's AI right now, right?
[00:12:18] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:12:18] Marc: But there was creator business. So, creator tools was, like, a big thing. And that brought a bunch of people who were, like, suddenly became experts in the creator industry allegedly.
[00:12:25] Marcus: Yeah, creative economy. This is the drive. Yeah.
[00:12:28] Marc: Yeah, it was. Oh, exactly. And if I think there's a lesson or wisdom for myself was that, like, go to your principle of, "Why am I here?" I, early on, saw this was going to disrupt media in a major, major way. I started with entertainment because I was like, "Well, anyone can make a show." Therefore, the gatekeepers of distribution are now... that's gone. That introduces an opportunity for all these new voices.
But I was obsessed with the fact that this was going to keep happening. The consumption on YouTube, there was a default to free. People didn't want to pay for cable. The idea is that, like, people want to be entertained. Attention could be grabbed primarily for free. And people are going to default to that. So, I was like, "Well, YouTube is going to win."
So, I think my thing was just sticking with it. And if you stay with the conviction of believing in that industry, and then really try to work with the best people in it. And that's why I moved to North Carolina because this is a, a hundred-x creator here, maybe a thousand-x. And then that's attracted other really intelligent people. So, that's why I'm here.
[00:13:34] Marcus: So, you are working with, the way you put it, the Kobe Bryant-
[00:13:38] Marc: Yeah.
[00:13:38] Marcus: ... rest in peace, of YouTube, of content creation. What makes him so good? Like, how has he, sort of, subverted the traditional behaviors or practices of an industry that's constantly changing? This thing is always moving. It's so iterative. It's constantly buffering, but how has he subverted something that's always being subverted, if that makes any sense?
[00:14:01] Marc: Some of that's just, sort of, his personal makeup, like, what drives him as an individual. Jimmy, from the beginning, at, like, 11 years old, was obsessed with YouTube, and was also, like, really bad at it. And we have a chart in one of our decks, right? That's, like, how many subscribers the channel had this year and then that year and that year. It's very flat. It's, like, he had, like, a couple of hundred subscribers. It's not like it just all happened.
There was that period where, and I, I think it's, sort of, his, like, that's him shooting free throws after free throws, just in the gym by himself with nobody watching. And you can still see a lot of the videos on the channel, by the way, that are just random, bad. Some of them are just, like, him talking about other people's titles and thumbnails. And what he was doing was obsessing over the game. His game of basketball is YouTube.
And it sounds so simple of, like, "Oh, of course he obsesses over the thing." It's like, no, actually very few people obsess over a platform and then are willing to put in the... like, it's more than 10,000 hours. It's probably 100,000 hours of just being bad. Because he didn't have any money, he was doing whatever he could. And, and it was like, you know, he'd count to 10,000, and then count to 100,000. Like, think about it. It took him over 40 hours to do it.
Could you count to 100,000 just in, in a non-interrupted single session? So, that got a bunch of attention. He figured out, "Wow, I can do these things that no one else is doing." So, he was, he was learning about consumer behaviors, learning about what stood out, learning how to find the white space, if you will, or where there's, sort of, like, no one doing that, but also not get stuck in that format, "Oh, you're the counting guy."
Like, no, he just was continuing to build and iterate. And he's still doing it to this day, like, not getting stuck to think in terms of what... I mean, we, we often say we're a virality company. There is an obsession with YouTube and then an obsession with virality and understanding how things move on the internet, and not let us be led by money or business decisions. You can't run this business from a spreadsheet.
And thereby, like, Jimmy runs it. He's the creative. It is a creative-led company. And so, it is that focus, and that drive, and that willing to get through the period where you suck. And most people can't get through that because they're not willing. They're like, they see the good work and they know what they want it to be, and they can't get it there. And they try to take shortcuts, but really, it's about, you know, they're willing to do the work to get you there.
[00:16:36] Marcus: I mean, there's so much in what you just unpacked there for us, Marc. Like, the same principles, it seems like, MrBeast and the company around him that you lead are the same principles we talk about with brands or branded products, right, being, you know, maniacal about understanding human behavior.
Like, just being so, so committed to understanding, sort of, the underlying physics of how things work so that when you interact with them, your knowledge of the space, it becomes, sort of, like, second nature for you. John, do you see these same parallels happening here as we think about MrBeast as a person, the institution that's around him supporting the work he does, and how they're such a clear analog to how we think about brands and companies, kind of, at large?
[00:17:24] John: You know, two things come to mind, Marcus, with Marc's story. First, I loved, Marc, how you used the word industry. And I think that when you moved to Hollywood, oh, so many years ago, YouTube wasn't an industry. It was just a thing. It was a new medium. It was a technology. And what fascinates me about your story is that you have essentially lived through the development of an industry, right?
You have witnessed, inside the industry, how it evolves, the boundaries of the industry, the structures of the industry, the business models of the industry. Way back when, when YouTube came out, it was just another channel on the internet, but you have witnessed the development of an industry. And consequently, you have exploited it in quotations, right? You've exploited it. So, that was the first thing.
The second thing which fascinated me, and to your point, Marcus, is that the internet has essentially allowed the democratization of content, right? And we were so keen on that anybody can be a creator, but when it comes to monetization, content is still royalty, right? King and queen.
Like, if you do not have good content, you're not going to, let's say, exploit the industry from a commercial perspective, or in the case of Jimmy, commercial plus doing good work with the revenue, right? So, yeah, content is democratic now. Anybody can make content, but the people who are really winning, they're branding it.
As you said, Jimmy's taking advantage of consumer behavior, understanding the notion of virality, and leaning into it with the content. So, those are the two things which are fascinating to me, the emergence of, of this thing as an industry, and then leveraging business school principles in developing the content.
[00:19:17] Marcus: I mean, would you talk about, like, the uniqueness of Jimmy? His approaches to creating content,
it was so distinctive from everyone else. Were those decisions intentional? Were those, like, methodically conceived and therefore executed, or was there another strategy at play here?
[00:19:34] Marc: Well, I think one of the benefits is he came at it with fresh eyes and not burdened by the legacy way of doing things. And I mean that, like, I had to reprogram myself around how certain things are done. Here's an example. Like, I mean, he's making the most popular TV show in the world yet had never made a TV show in Hollywood. And Hollywood, in a way, sort of, have this monopoly on how things are done.
You know, early on, what I witnessed when we were doing Squid Game video, it was, like, we had about three and a half weeks to recreate Squid Game in real life. And no one had ever done that before. And we, sort of, scribbled some numbers on the wall. And that became, sort of, the guiding budget. We'd spend about this much on this, and about this much on this, but we didn't, like, get lost in the process and bureaucracy-
[00:20:20] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:20:21] Marc: ... that, kind of, builds around this. And I think that unburdened by that, sort of, restrictive process. And I think this applies to corporate marketing. This applies to so many things. The ability to move fast, that was speed of culture, to talk about your book for a second. Squid Game is a global phenomenon. Nobody expected that. The Korean creators of it didn't expect it to get that big.
[00:20:44] Marcus: That's right.
[00:20:44] Marc: And all of a sudden, it got really big. A lot of YouTubers made stuff, but it was, like, kind of, bad, right out of the gate, but Jimmy was like, "No, we're going to do it. we're going to do it right. We're going to do it big. Like, $456,000 on the line, 456 real people really have to play. We have to figure out how to create red light, green light in real life in a non-scripted IRL entertainment." But we have three and a half weeks.
And we'd work with various people from traditional entertainment. Sometimes, they don't work out here because they're just like, "You, guys, move way too fast. Like, how do you, guys..." But you have to move fast to do that in three and a half weeks. And, and it was insane. I mean, the hours were insane, but it was like that's some of the greatness here. One of the skills is about recognizing the most scarce resources time with internet culture and trend and, and trying to jump on it. Like, there's a period where it would have been too late.
[00:21:35] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Marc: And you could argue we thought we might be too late on the curve, but there was some good pre-hype that Jimmy was doing on TikTok and a bunch of other things to keep the energy going and leaking set photos and, like, "Hey, it's really happening." But anyway, the ability to move time was one of the most impressive things I see here.
I realized the culture of, like, e-mail is too slow. So, we often talk about, like, the people that had succeed here, they pick up the phone and they get a call. You know, we always say, like, "Sending an e-mail is not enough," but people are like, "Oh, I sent an e-mail." Like, they think that is the work product. The work product is getting the thing done. Like-
[00:22:11] Marcus: Yeah.
[00:22:12] Marc: ... I need a, a giant 300-foot crane and figure out flaming balls that I can drop from it. And I have to have that by tomorrow. So, like, I don't know. There's no e-mail solution to that problem. Like, it's going to be a lot of calls, a lot of learning, and then also getting past the no.
[00:22:30] John: Marc, the way you described how you and Jimmy have been able to disrupt the world reminds me of C.K. Prahalad, our late colleague who is best known for core competence, but he had this other brilliant concept called the dominant logic. And his idea was very simple. That innovation happens when people attack the dominant logic, because just the term itself, dominant logic, like, every industry is dominated by a particular logic, right?
The people who are inside that industry cannot think of any other way of doing it. And what's great is from North Carolina, of all places, right? You did not buy into. You didn't even know the dominant logic of Hollywood. Just as, for example, one could argue that Tesla was so successful because decided to build cars in California. Who would have thunked it, right?
Cars are not built in California. Cars are built in the Mid-West. And by the way, cars need to be built by people who were raised in the automobile industry. Tesla, these people are raised in the microcomputer chip industry. So, I love how you have leveraged time, but challenging the dominant logic, not-
[00:23:51] Marc: Yeah.
[00:23:52] John: ... wedded to the dominant logic and not wedded to this is the appropriate time given the dominant logic.
[00:24:00] Marc: That's a great framing. I love that. And I want to read more about that because there's been many... Like, this wasn't a linear journey in this industry. In fact, I'd argue the time is actually really good for anybody now to jump in because a lot of the hard work has been done to get advertisers more comfortable to creatively partner on content and allow creative control of the creators in ways they would have never been comfortable before.
The entire streaming and TV industry is desperate to figure out how do we tap into some of that magic because they don't have that monopoly over attention because of fixed distribution channels. It's easier in some ways now. It's harder because of more people, I guess, maybe, but it's also a great time if you're a young person who is obsessed with, like, what's happening in internet culture. I think the career track now can be incredibly fast.
We have some really talented 23, 24-year-olds who just obsess over TikTok and have very quickly, sort of, progressed in their career because they drive value. And I think brands are starting to in-house more of these as we see. I often get asked, "Hey, do you know somebody who can run our branded TikTok?" And I'm seeing, sort of, that talent pool is thin. I think there should be more.
But anyway, I guess what I'm getting at there is that it's actually a great time if you focus on the skills that, sort of, matter. And I do think our schools are still behind in teaching... You know, we still teach a lot of... you know. And the business skills are important, but we are missing some of the fundamentals of how to study retention curves, how to, how to understand what is... And I've gone and spoken at some business schools.
And I'll ask them some pretty basic questions about, like, "What is the most watched YouTube video?" Like, wait, let's go through what category gets the most views on YouTube of anything? And they often can't answer that question. And I'm like, "Wow, this is wild. It's a whole generation that presumably grew up on YouTube.
And here they are at a traditional big Ivy League university. And some of these videos have billions of views. And they can't answer that question." And it, sort of, makes me wonder why are we not teaching that? If something gets billions of views, I don't care if you like it or not. Really, in any industry, you need to know what that is in my opinion. So, stay curious and obsessed.
[00:26:21] Marcus: Challenging the dominant logic. I think that's spot on, John. Absolutely spot on. So, look, Marc, I mean, and we've kept you so long. I'm so grateful for the time. Got one last question for you.
And it's almost to the end that you were just mentioning, considering the dominant logic of universities and college, considering the status quo in which students are bred, the way people early in their career are encouraged to pursue, what advice would you give them? If they want to disrupt the industry that they're in, what advice would you give them?
[00:26:56] Marc: Study content, how it's made, how it's distributed, and obsess over what's the best content that is on the internet. And I mean that not because everybody has to work in YouTube. I think it's disrupting way more than media now. We've seen it. Like, we're building a, you know, billion-dollar CPG-branded Feastables. Logan Paul and KSI, right, they announced $1.2 billion in sales of Prime. And that's not slowing down.
These are billion-dollar CPG brands taking meaningful share from incumbents and not using television. Content is the core of how to generate demand in any industry. And that could be even a B2B thing. Like, if you're trying to sell medical devices, well, why not use content as a credibility driver?
Like, if you press me, I could find ways in which content literally is going to impact every single industry. So, therefore, don't look at it as something to dismiss and, oh, that's just what the kids do, or that's just what YouTubers do, or influencers do. It is a fundamental building block of business. And as a business leader, you need to know how to make.
What is the talent I need to create that content? How much does it really cost? Don't just pay what the agency tells you it's going to cost. Like, you know, pro-tip, it always costs less than you think, or at least probably you're getting ripped off somewhere. But the, the main thing is obsessing over content.
[00:28:20] John: Content. You remind me of that movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, remember, where the father can relate every word in the English language back to Greek.
[00:28:28] Marc: Yeah.
[00:28:28] John: What you're saying is all business leads to content.
[00:28:31] Marc: Yeah. I think it's the new code, like, in all honesty. I think the first rails, right? We first physically had to connect the internet, the pipes to literally connect people, and get servers that you could access. Then came social, right. We need to physically connect humans and create identity where I'm this person, you're that person, I can connect with you, and then just build the general tech of streaming video.
And now, it's about how can I engineer, and this is where it sounds a little bit, sort of, maniacal, but it's not, but really engineer the best attention-grabbing and retaining piece of content. And we also have to be cognizant that there is a dark side to this, right?
And those same skills can be harnessed for all kinds of things, everything from propaganda, to misinformation, to lots of things, indoctrination, to even just, like, frankly wasting your kid's time and showing them low-quality stuff. So, these will be used by good and bad actors alike. So, I think it's on all of us to understand how they work, but I truly do think that those who can make the great content are incredibly valuable.
There are like 10x coders that you would pay a lot of money for because they're worth it in an engineering way. Well, I think now, at, at content companies like ours, when we see somebody who's absolutely really, really good at this, and they could have not gone to a school, and maybe they were 19, and we met them on a Discord server, but when we get them here, we're like, "That's a superstar."
And it is also about thinking about the credentialing system might not be as strong a signal as it once was. I do hope, for the sake of Michigan and the schools that we all love, that we build those programs and skills inside the universities so that, frankly, it, it does mean something that, like, "Yeah, I studied virality at Michigan." Like, that would be awesome.
[00:30:20] Marcus: If you dream it, it will come. Marc, man, thank you so much for your brilliance, my brother. It's so good seeing you, super grateful for you, and, like, managed to see you do all the awesomeness that you're doing. It's no surprise that you're a leaders of bests.
[00:30:34] Marc: Thank you. Likewise. Well, great to be here. Thanks for having me again. And, yeah, let's do it again sometime.
[00:30:39] Marcus: Yes, sir. Breaking Schemas is a Michigan Ross podcast powered by the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative, and produced by University FM. Go, Blue.