Latest / Gimbal Podcast / MKBHD's Head of Strategy Explains How to Be Top of Class

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MKBHD's Head of Strategy Explains How to Be Top of Class · Gimbal Podcast

• 0:00
  Our writer's room changed everything.
• 0:02
  So what does that infrastructure look like?
• 0:04
  At the end of the day, the biggest thing I learned from MKBHD was that...
• 0:07
  What's his unfair advantage and what are some characteristics that he has
• 0:11
  that you're bringing into your next role?
• 0:13
  I'm Eric and I quit my $150,000 a year job with MKBHD
• 0:17
  to start a YouTube channel that currently has 300 subscribers.
• 0:21
  Eric, you are probably the first person in history to quit your job working for MKBHD.
• 0:28
  I'm so curious.
• 0:30
  What was your exit interview like with Marquez?
• 0:33
  So we recorded this for Year in the Life.
• 0:36
  So I like pulled out a camera and I think they thought that it would be like a silly
• 0:40
  joke thing.
• 0:40
  And I was just like, hey, guys, this is four weeks notice.
• 0:44
  I'm leaving to do this really, really incredible opportunity I'm really passionate about.
• 0:48
  And I think at first everyone was really confused.
• 0:50
  But ultimately, the thing that I kept coming back to when I had that conversation with
• 0:54
  Marques and Andrew and eventually the rest of the team is the thing that I want to do is take what
• 0:59
  we figured out in terms of company culture, scrappy, everybody's able to put their fingers
• 1:04
  on the work and make sure that we can make some of the best work in the world with a small group
• 1:07
  of really intentional people.
• 1:09
  I want to do that in other niches, in other places.
• 1:12
  I want to
• 1:12
  popularize the MKBHD culture and take a bunch of other creatives and give them a work environment
• 1:19
  similar to the work environment that Marques was able to give me.
• 1:23
  Well, it's interesting because
• 1:24
  we actually get an inside look into the company culture through the channel that you ran,
• 1:28
  the studio, which is like the sister channel, the behind the scenes sister channel for MKBHD.
• 1:33
  It's interesting that you touch on company culture as such an important part of the company.
• 1:38
  Like, why is it so special there?
• 1:40
  What are the characteristics of it?
• 1:41
  I think it boils down to a few things.
• 1:43
  The first is risk tolerance.
• 1:45
  When you're typically a company and people are evaluating your success exclusively based
• 1:50
  on numbers, your risk tolerance is going to fall because you're going to do whatever you know is
• 1:54
  sort of safest.
• 1:55
  But because we had a small culture and so much of the culture was based on,
• 1:59
  I trust your taste.
• 2:00
  I trust your judgment.
• 2:02
  I trust this idea.
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  We were able to take a lot of
• 2:05
  big risks.
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  I also think craftsmanship is a really important part of how the company was structured.
• 2:11
  We would go the extra mile and spend the extra three days on an edit.
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  We never once asked if it
• 2:16
  was strategic to do that or if it was the right return.
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  It was just always sort of the base that,
• 2:21
  yeah, you do whatever the work requires.
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  My instinct is, wow, that is pretty brave of
• 2:28
  someone like Marques Brownlee with the subscriber base that he has, the reputation that he has to
• 2:33
  allocate a lot of trust to the team around him.
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  I think there are a lot of creators with
• 2:39
  significantly smaller followings that don't have that degree of trust in their team.
• 2:44
  Why is that important for success?
• 2:48
  So, I mean, here's the thing, right?
• 2:50
  Trust looks like trust in different ways.
• 2:52
  Marques isn't going to trust us to write a video in Marques's voice, but he is at lunch
• 3:00
  going to be talking about a technology and you might have a sentence that somebody mentions
• 3:05
  or a concept that somebody brings up find its way into the main channel video.
• 3:08
  If you watch Waveform every week, you'll start to see that Marques is oftentimes riffing
• 3:13
  on the structure that he's going to use in his videos.
• 3:15
  And that waveform is sometimes a bit of a writer's room
• 3:18
  for where main channels can go.
• 3:20
  So I think having a small enough team
• 3:22
  where you ultimately know who's responsible
• 3:25
  for where the puck stops
• 3:27
  is kind of the secret to figuring out that trust.
• 3:31
  What would be an example where you felt like
• 3:34
  the team gave you a large amount of trust
• 3:36
  and then it led to something that wouldn't exist
• 3:39
  if that trust didn't exist within the company?
• 3:42
  until I moved to the thing I'm building now,
• 3:44
  making that year in the life video
• 3:46
  was the most ambitious thing I'd ever done.
• 3:47
  We had like 50 terabytes of footage.
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  And so it was me and Rich
• 3:51
  and Rich ran point on the data management and color
• 3:53
  and a lot of the technical stuff.
• 3:55
  And I just had to figure out
• 3:56
  how do we chop this into a story?
• 3:58
  The first Sunday of every month,
• 4:00
  I would come into the studio when no one was there
• 4:02
  and I would just edit
• 4:04
  and I would just chew through footage
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  and I'd try and find a story
• 4:06
  and then I'd send it for notes
• 4:07
  and I'd get tons of notes
• 4:08
  and those notes would typically be,
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  hey, I don't think this is working.
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  and then I'd go and I'd do a recut the next Sunday
• 4:13
  and then like we would just do that
• 4:15
  while we're still running the main machine.
• 4:17
  That video took so much trust.
• 4:19
  It took trust from my coworkers
• 4:20
  to let me just put them in a fishbowl
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  and film them all the time.
• 4:24
  It took trust from my coworkers
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  that their time that they were putting in for vlogging
• 4:28
  would actually translate into a good video.
• 4:30
  It took trust from my coworkers
• 4:32
  that the bad video from January,
• 4:34
  the mediocre selects from March,
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  the slightly better video from May
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  couldn't actually be exceptional.
• 4:40
  It took trust from my coworkers that they could leave me a hundred plus notes for me and Rich to action through over the course of maybe three days before we had to picture lock and send to the next people on the team.
• 4:52
  And they knew that we could execute against those notes.
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  And I think maybe most importantly, there was trust that if there was a disagreement, the best idea would ultimately win.
• 5:04
  And so oftentimes I had to come in with very low ego.
• 5:08
  I had to ask for tons of different feedback.
• 5:11
  And then my job was not to pick the best idea or to even come up with the best idea.
• 5:16
  But it was just to understand feedback well enough internally to action it into the right creative work.
• 5:22
  That's especially important on the studio channel where everyone's featured.
• 5:25
  And it was really important to have everyone's perspective, but also a clear vision.
• 5:28
  But even on the other channels, a lot of that mutual respect and trust boiled down to we're going to listen to each other a lot.
• 5:35
  And then ultimately one person is going to like siphon through and be sort of like the key to getting all of it to make sense.
• 5:42
  You really claimed a moment in the YouTube zeitgeist with that video.
• 5:45
  Yeah.
• 5:46
  Tell me a little bit more about the roles within the company.
• 5:49
  I'm so curious.
• 5:50
  You mentioned it's a small team.
• 5:52
  Who's in it and what do they do?
• 5:53
  I think we picked a lot of candidates before we picked talents.
• 5:57
  I actually don't think that knowing what their role is or even what their specialty now is, is as replicable as the logic that went into why different people got brought on.
• 6:05
  My best friend, Miles, went to film school together so that we could check out cinema
• 6:10
  cameras to shoot YouTube videos.
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  We were the weirdos in film school making YouTube videos all the time.
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  Eventually, Miles' videos got watched by Marquez.
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  Marquez said, come join the team.
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  You can be a cinematographer.
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  And he shot a bunch of B-roll and helped build some sets.
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  And then Miles said, hey, I'm doing this car YouTube channel on the side.
• 6:28
  I'm getting pretty good at figuring out all the logistics that go into running a car YouTube
• 6:31
  channel.
• 6:31
  It's a pretty unique thing.
• 6:32
  Can I run point on our car YouTube channel?
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  And so we took that over and started helping with a lot of the editorial and figuring out how we were going to get more cars in and then helping Marquez just like put together notes and research on these cars.
• 6:43
  And ultimately that turned into a hyper specialized role.
• 6:47
  But Miles was brought on because he evidenced that he could just make a YouTube video from top to bottom.
• 6:52
  Ellis, our sound designer, is this absolutely loved, adored talent, but he wasn't brought on because he was this great science explainer guy.
• 7:00
  He was there to make sure our podcast sounded good every week.
• 7:03
  And then he said, you know what, can I start sound designing the intros?
• 7:06
  And then he started speaking up more on the podcast and people turned him into a personality.
• 7:10
  And then I said, I'll throw you on the studio channel.
• 7:12
  And then he became Alice.
• 7:14
  And I think that that is a really key part of how I'm thinking about hiring for my team now.
• 7:20
  I want to bring people in so that I know exactly what they will be doing and how they'll contribute to the vision that we currently have.
• 7:25
  But I also want to build the creative around the talents and interests of the people that are going to be coming onto the team.
• 7:31
  Because I think 15 people with vast, diverse interests could be just as interesting and frankly more interesting than 100 people with hyper specific goals.
• 7:42
  So it sounds like what they all have in common is like high craft, strong obsession, diverse interests across the team.
• 7:50
  Is that kind of like how you describe everyone?
• 7:52
  Yeah, and the studio channel helps with that
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  because it's like a sandbox for us to be like,
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  let's just pitch ideas and let's see if we can find overlap.
• 7:58
  And, you know, we kind of play around
• 7:59
  with how different folks fit into the machine.
• 8:02
  How did some of these teammates position themselves
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  when they were looking for work?
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  A lot of people in this industry
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  are very divergent in their skillset
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  and titles in this industry,
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  they're just not cookie cutter across the board.
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  I would say that there are basically three tracks
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  in the creator economy.
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  One is do the traditional route.
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  I know that it's crazy coming from me because I don't like it, but it does kind of work.
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  It does kind of work, especially if you're like a designer, if you're a craftsman, if
• 8:31
  you've been on sets, you can do that route.
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  Do that route paired with scrappy work.
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  You need to prove that you can be an individual contributor and that you genuinely like being
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  an individual contributor.
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  You're not going to have a team of 70 people that you can work with, but if you genuinely
• 8:44
  like doing it, working at the highest possible levels can help.
• 8:48
  Two is work for a YouTuber.
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  If you come out of Beast, you're probably a really good logistics-oriented producer.
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  If you come out of Veritasium, you're probably a really good writer.
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  Like, there's just some places where you just know that if you can get a job working for a YouTuber, you can do excellent work.
• 9:05
  And then three is just make YouTube videos yourself.
• 9:07
  That one's obviously getting much harder because, especially in education, I think that the bar is constantly raising.
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  And so it's harder to just be one person who comes out and has something.
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  But generally, my formula for making your own content, especially in education, is pair a unique technical skill set with a unique piece of domain expertise.
• 9:26
  That doesn't exactly have to be what everybody does, but I like to use that as sort of a basic framework to figure out whether or not a career in the creator economy and standing out is even right for you.
• 9:36
  Let's talk about craft.
• 9:38
  It's something you've mentioned a couple times in this episode, and it's something that the MKBHD team has just, I would say, like nailed in every regard.
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  How do you think about craft moving into the new position that you're working on?
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  What are the takeaways?
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  What are the lessons from the MKBHD team?
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  You don't know your blind spots.
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  And so you need to start bringing in diverse voices who are going to tell you what you don't see.
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  I, for the past month, have been aggressively going through scripts.
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  and I know that my blind spots are in health and medical review.
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  And so I'm talking to doctors and fact checkers
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  to make sure that everything gets past it.
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  And then I know I'm a good storyteller.
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  So between that, we get these great scripts.
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  But then we go and we show it to designers on our team
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  and they go, I don't think this is visual enough.
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  I don't know how I'm going to put this together
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  in a way that you could chew on in a video.
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  And I have to go back to script.
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  And eventually we're going to go and we're going to shoot.
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  And I'm almost certain that I'm going to say,
• 10:30
  I don't think that the scoring is here.
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  I think that we need to completely rethink our soundscape
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  because that's something that I'm really aggressively thinking about.
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  When we were at MKBHD, Ellis would mention,
• 10:41
  oh, we're not doing this right about sound,
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  or we're not doing this correctly with sound.
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  And none of us understood sound well enough.
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  So we just kind of be like, okay, what should we do?
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  And like, eventually we kind of worked our way up
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  to having like much more robust sound infrastructure.
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  And our videos sound great now,
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  but we didn't know what we didn't know.
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  And so you kind of just have to bring in different voices
• 11:00
  and listen to people.
• 11:01
  And you're not going to sort of perfectly fix a channel
• 11:03
  and get quality to be perfect in every single regard immediately.
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  But if you bring in different domain experts,
• 11:10
  different arms of the octopus, in Marques' analogy,
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  eventually you can slowly start to build systems.
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  And if you have a culture that trusts each other,
• 11:19
  build a culture that will naturally reinforce
• 11:20
  making sure that the video in every respect is as good as it can be.
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  The Studio Channel is successful because I built Process for Chaos.
• 11:29
  We spent so much time figuring out
• 11:32
  How can we build infrastructure so that this channel can be really ambitious and we can try new things, but we also can still regularly get views?
• 11:40
  So, okay, wait.
• 11:40
  So what does that infrastructure look like?
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  Our writer's room changed everything.
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  Once a month, I would go in.
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  I'd pitch five videos.
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  Mariah would talk about whether or not it would edit well and whether or not we liked the story and whether or not we thought it was in the zeitgeist.
• 11:54
  Harper would talk about whether or not we thought it worked with the overall MKBHD brand,
• 11:58
  but also like how it fit with what's happening across different trends and things she's seeing outside of tech YouTube.
• 12:04
  Rich would talk about, can we shoot this?
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  How quickly could we shoot this?
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  Andrew would talk about, I think we have these domain experts and these people internally
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  who could actually really pull on this string and do something really interesting.
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  They should take lead on this.
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  And so we could go through that and I would come in with four ideas and some months leave with zero
• 12:21
  and some months leave with an entire year of content planned.
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  because we could just aggressively see whether or not we felt like it could work.
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  And between the five of us, we had enough perspectives to see if we could both sustainably execute
• 12:34
  and also make sure that the audience actually wanted that content based on our sort of collective intuition.
• 12:39
  And everybody's involved in this room?
• 12:41
  Like, everyone comes in, brings ideas?
• 12:43
  I mean, someone can come in, but oftentimes it was, like, five people who were often, like, most often leaving notes
• 12:49
  or who were just, like, most often in post.
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  I'd be like, half of these notes we probably could have gotten when I pitched this idea.
• 12:56
  So let me just pitch the idea and get the notes now.
• 13:00
  How often were you doing this?
• 13:01
  Once a month.
• 13:02
  I would take like evidence from outlier videos or previously past performing videos, be like,
• 13:06
  here's my vision for Remix.
• 13:08
  And then we would just aggressively interrogate whether or not we thought it was a video.
• 13:11
  Right.
• 13:11
  I interviewed Emil Rapoport.
• 13:13
  He is the director from Zach King's team.
• 13:16
  And what you just described is very similar to the process that they have as well, where
• 13:21
  they do it.
• 13:21
  I think every Monday and they all come with a bunch of ideas and each person kind of has their specialty and the idea gets floated.
• 13:28
  And then everybody attacks the idea as aggressively as possible, whether it's feasible, whether it's cost friendly, whether it can be done quickly.
• 13:34
  And then at the end of the day, they've got four or five ideas that they spend the rest of the week filming.
• 13:38
  And that's how they come up with their great stuff.
• 13:40
  And they have the most viewed TikToks on the entire planet.
• 13:43
  So whatever they're doing, it must be right.
• 13:45
  And so to hear that coming from you as well.
• 13:47
  Something that I don't think gets enough credit is if you're trying to be the creative, the content strategist, the editor, the writer, all at the same time, you will do all those jobs poorly.
• 13:58
  But if you take the domain expert and they can interrogate something and the content strategist can say, no, no, no, no, no, that won't get views, but what if we did it like this?
• 14:08
  And then each person comes in with a bit of a specialty, but also an understanding that we're all trying to make a video, right?
• 14:13
  enough of an understanding for process that we can meet on the same page, then I think you end
• 14:18
  up with something really special.
• 14:19
  So you need people who are empathetic to other people's parts
• 14:22
  of the process where they're not naive as they pitch, but you also need to make sure that people
• 14:28
  can hyper focus on one specific thing so that that unique blend of perspectives creates something
• 14:32
  cohesive.
• 14:33
  Has there ever been a time where you get too many people in the room and now you've
• 14:36
  got too many cooks in the kitchen?
• 14:38
  Because it is a bit of a balance finding the right voices to
• 14:42
  influence an idea?
• 14:43
  Yeah, I mean, my big thing is nothing gets pitched without data and everything
• 14:47
  has to get pitched the same way.
• 14:49
  So it's always like, what's the evidence that people actually
• 14:52
  want to watch this?
• 14:53
  What's your format?
• 14:54
  How am I like what would tell me how the story is going to
• 14:56
  make sure that I can watch the end?
• 14:58
  How do we package it?
• 14:59
  And like, if we can't answer those
• 15:00
  questions from jump, we're not bothering interrogating it.
• 15:03
  And so if you can, like,
• 15:04
  make it past that initial ring, then you get to make it to pitch.
• 15:09
  Let's pick a video that's
• 15:10
  already live on the studio's channel and give me that breakdown retroactively.
• 15:14
  Okay.
• 15:15
  So Andrew comes to me and he's like, hey, there's this monitor.
• 15:19
  It looks exactly like a
• 15:20
  pro display, but it's a fraction of the price.
• 15:22
  It's an outlier video data.
• 15:24
  Okay.
• 15:25
  I think that
• 15:25
  it could do well, but we don't want to just do a video about the monitor.
• 15:28
  And so I go back and
• 15:29
  forth with Andrew.
• 15:30
  I say, top performing video on the studio channel is Marques's desk tour.
• 15:34
  What if we took this monitor and then found a bunch of other knockoff things that look like
• 15:38
  all the stuff on his desk and make something for a fraction of the price.
• 15:41
  Andrew goes, love it.
• 15:42
  Greenlit.
• 15:43
  I know that budget version of Marquez's desk could bang.
• 15:46
  Then we take that to the room
• 15:47
  and everyone goes, well, we haven't done like an actual desk tour of Marquez's desk at all.
• 15:53
  We know that that already does well for retention.
• 15:55
  So maybe that needs to be integrated.
• 15:56
  Like there
• 15:57
  needs to be a Marquez desk tour.
• 15:58
  I didn't even think of that.
• 15:59
  I was like, here's an image of
• 16:00
  the desk.
• 16:01
  Okay.
• 16:01
  Here's the knockoff.
• 16:02
  Now we have a little more structure.
• 16:03
  So we go, okay.
• 16:04
  Act one
• 16:04
  is definitely we show the entire desk.
• 16:06
  Now we have to ask ourselves, what's the coverage?
• 16:08
  How
• 16:08
  are we going to make sure that we have enough to edit so that the pacing is actually interesting?
• 16:12
  Okay, well, we can shoot three cam on Marquez presenting on his desk, no script, just moving
• 16:17
  us through each thing.
• 16:18
  I'll split up each thing in his desk into five different categories so
• 16:22
  that there's title cards so that it's easy to digest.
• 16:24
  I tend to notice that if you just start
• 16:25
  listing things after about five or six, people get confused.
• 16:29
  I tend to also find that having
• 16:31
  an image on screen for every few seconds as you learn something new or get provided new value,
• 16:36
  helps make sure that the audience internalizes it and feels like the video is something that
• 16:41
  they can chew on, right?
• 16:43
  I kind of want to make sure that I'm giving visual rewards
• 16:45
  as we're teaching the audience something new and providing the core value of the video.
• 16:49
  At the end, we'll set this up in the intro, remind in the middle section, and then deliver at the
• 16:54
  end of the video, we'll reveal the price difference between the knockoff desk and the main one.
• 16:58
  That'll give us a satisfying story that reaches overarching while also giving us small loops as asking everything from what are the accessories Marques Brownlee uses to what's the most expensive thing on his desk.
• 17:09
  Now you have three stories in one with a little bit of a hole.
• 17:13
  That was excellent.
• 17:14
  Very, very cool to hear the thought process behind it all.
• 17:17
  So is every video this well thought out?
• 17:20
  Yeah, I mean, that one was we go to the pitch.
• 17:23
  I hear everyone's notes.
• 17:23
  I'm like, OK, we definitely need the Marques thing in there.
• 17:26
  I go sit down with Andrew and I have a whiteboard and I'm like here's the beats that I think we're
• 17:30
  going to hit every two minutes this is going to happen every three minutes these questions are
• 17:33
  going to be answered here's the loops blah blah blah once we're green lit then I like I can write
• 17:37
  scripts or kind of like ease things along as we move and then we tried it we because we didn't do
• 17:42
  scripted videos for the studio channel we tried to be like pretty iterative and like what value
• 17:46
  am I trying to provide and then how do I make it digestible within these time frames so like
• 17:53
  in health as we're doing health content right now this is a big thing i'm thinking of it's like
• 17:57
  how do i set something up in 30 seconds where you're not learning any key terms or you're not
• 18:01
  learning like some like crazy medical biological fact like you don't want to see a cell at first
• 18:06
  you just want to know like how do i protect my heart or whatever and so like the first 30 seconds
• 18:10
  has to very much be like how can i just meet you where you are then the first minute needs to be
• 18:15
  like yo you can do this and you should learn about this because you're going to learn about the thing
• 18:20
  I promise you in the first 30 if you dive in.
• 18:22
  So I'm going to throw you like this really good science layup so that you can answer
• 18:25
  it or like you can understand it really well.
• 18:28
  And then like three minutes and you're like, damn, I'm a scientist.
• 18:30
  I really understand that we're moving.
• 18:33
  And then seven minutes and you're like, oh, my gosh, wait, I understand all this.
• 18:37
  But how does it relate back to me?
• 18:38
  And then like we take it back to you and you just have to guess like what's the question
• 18:41
  that audience is going to be asking.
• 18:42
  So and that's usually just a function of just like go to somebody and then stop talking
• 18:46
  and then wait to see what questions they ask you.
• 18:48
  And if they don't ask you any questions, it's probably a sign that you should abandon the video.
• 18:54
  From an employee perspective, what are some craft disciplines that are undervalued in the creator economy?
• 19:02
  Fact checking.
• 19:04
  Yes.
• 19:04
  Oh, my gosh.
• 19:05
  Yes.
• 19:05
  Many of my clients have been like, yo, we need better fact checking across the board.
• 19:10
  Hire number one on my new team as a fact checker.
• 19:13
  And you're obviously not trusting Claude or ChatGPT or Perplexity for this role.
• 19:18
  We've tried to, but the fact checker dives into it and we don't like the sourcing.
• 19:22
  I completely agree with you, but I definitely thought you were going to say sound design,
• 19:27
  color correction, like these kind of like creative disciplines.
• 19:31
  Yeah.
• 19:32
  I mean that I love that stuff.
• 19:33
  That's super cool.
• 19:35
  In the finance niche, I've seen videos that do millions of views that look like
• 19:40
  doo-doo because somebody who actually knows what they're talking about is the person who's
• 19:44
  speaking.
• 19:45
  there's too much evidence that people value people who know their stuff and then can explain it to
• 19:50
  you well that um i love sound design and i love craftsmanship and i love filmmaking and because
• 19:57
  that feels authentic to me it's going to be integrated into the work that i produce because
• 20:01
  i want you to feel the effort but the effort could also just be i spent 30 years knowing this
• 20:07
  thing here's me in front of a whiteboard right the mkbhd team you know you have the reputation and the
• 20:15
  the money to have the best technology in the game.
• 20:19
  And so you have perfect sound design,
• 20:21
  you have perfect color,
• 20:22
  you have all these different things.
• 20:23
  Is there a time when a creator team
• 20:26
  should start taking those things more seriously?
• 20:29
  I think you just have to ask,
• 20:30
  is this something that I earnestly like?
• 20:32
  People say, oh, people watch YouTube for people.
• 20:35
  I think that's true.
• 20:36
  But I think that large groups of people,
• 20:38
  ensembles can make great YouTube videos,
• 20:40
  but you have to feel the people who made it doing the work.
• 20:43
  If you're a really big MKBHD super fan, you can watch an MKBHD video and go, wow, I felt Ellis there.
• 20:50
  So you can you can feel it.
• 20:51
  And maybe you don't know their names and maybe it just washes over you.
• 20:54
  But you can taste that craftsmanship in the work.
• 20:58
  I think that when we look at YouTube channels that are too cinematography forward or too filmmaking forward, this oftentimes isn't actually an issue.
• 21:08
  Like it's hard to be too cinematography forward, but it's when it doesn't feel earnest.
• 21:12
  like when you're doing filmmaking because you think that that's what's optimized you will
• 21:16
  struggle you have to ask yourself am i doing this because i earnestly like it that will make it
• 21:21
  sustainable enough for you to build a back catalog that people will fall in love with
• 21:25
  life of riz is a great sort of case study in this like riz didn't do views for her first 30 videos
• 21:32
  and then she had one do a million views overnight but it did a million views in overnight in part
• 21:36
  because the session watch time on her channel was so high at least that's what i would assume
• 21:40
  because her back catalog also blew up.
• 21:42
  That required an earnest love of the game.
• 21:46
  And you could try and reverse engineer that into a content strategy.
• 21:48
  But the truth is people eventually discovered her
• 21:52
  and they felt good watching the work.
• 21:54
  Help me bridge the gap between someone who loves the game
• 21:57
  and someone who is making content at the level of excellence
• 22:02
  that you are often associated with.
• 22:05
  How do you get better?
• 22:07
  On a technical level, I think that there's lots of things that we think about
• 22:10
  when it comes to color if you want to learn how to color grade start color grading in rec 709 first
• 22:15
  i thought that color grading meant making everything look like however this editor decided
• 22:20
  to make this frame look right now i think that that's a right that's earned with the ability to
• 22:25
  show restraint and a focus on details make sure your shadows aren't like super uh low that's like
• 22:31
  a common one if you're doing lighting i would really recommend like the first big lighting
• 22:36
  upgrade you do see if you can get a light that has a slot for gobos and cookies which means
• 22:41
  basically shadows that you can cast along your background i just think that it's such a great
• 22:46
  way to design a space that doesn't require you to buy a bunch of props or like throw a salt lamp in
• 22:52
  the background or like crank your aperture down and then make things have like this super shallow
• 22:57
  depth of field eventually like people will watch this video and then they'll start all having like
• 23:01
  cookies and gobos and then like that'll be more but like that's i just lighting design is such a
• 23:08
  big part of set design and i learned so much from watching brandon and vin figure out how those two
• 23:13
  elements could sort of dance in harmony architecture has been a huge inspiration for me to start to
• 23:18
  learn and understand and appreciate design because so much of architecture also has a political and
• 23:22
  philosophical sort of backdrop against it and so you can use it to have just like have a lot of
• 23:28
  fun kind of learning about broader context for how design is being applied in a really tangible way.
• 23:33
  How do you turn this like trust and high craft from something that lives in a few like very talented people into like a repeatable system that can like scale a team?
• 23:43
  YouTube videos should be able to be made by two people.
• 23:46
  You can have all of those people, but you should also still just be able to muscle out a video.
• 23:51
  I think that's the big thing that I'm still trying to figure out with how I'm going to operate at the next thing that I do.
• 23:56
  A part of the magic that we had with Marquez is we had all these people who could collaborate, but we didn't all have to collaborate on every video.
• 24:03
  It would have been way too slow if that was the case.
• 24:05
  YouTube channels can live and breathe.
• 24:07
  There can be times where you pull back and you do something simple.
• 24:09
  And there's other times where you can make tent poles.
• 24:12
  Not everything has to be a movie.
• 24:14
  Not everything has to be slop.
• 24:15
  Sometimes you can just make something with a high level of competence with a few good people.
• 24:20
  And so setting yourself up so that your talent can focus rack and shoot on camera or the person who's writing and presenting is also a domain expert so that you don't have to worry about fact checking for multiple weeks.
• 24:33
  Those small things can really help make sure that the system can move.
• 24:37
  And it keeps things light enough that if there's a mistake or things don't work out, there's another video in the pipeline.
• 24:43
  What point does process start to like kill the thing that makes the work special?
• 24:47
  when trust and domain expertise from like a few key talents are the biggest differentiators for
• 24:55
  the channel then you should be able to in theory still ship light because you're providing the
• 25:00
  core value of the channel if entertainment is a core value prop of the channel if even
• 25:06
  edutainment is a core value prop of the channel if certain brand values and design or animation
• 25:12
  are a core value prop of the channel then maybe you build a full production pipeline and then you
• 25:16
  have to start de-risking videos and be really strategic about what can screen lit and be really
• 25:21
  like aggressive with that right a Kruger style video I can't like sit here and be like that's
• 25:25
  just not a good YouTube video that's a that's a banger and obviously that's a huge team but like
• 25:30
  the differentiation for that channel or the differentiation needed in that niche is just
• 25:35
  on a much more intense level than the differentiation needed for something like an MKBHD
• 25:40
  where at our core the reason that we're special is because you trust us and so being able to be
• 25:46
  quick turnaround or do things scrappy or try things light.
• 25:49
  It enabled us to have a really
• 25:50
  creative culture, but it's also a function of some very, very unique relationships with the
• 25:55
  audience that not all big YouTube channels may have.
• 25:59
  I'm curious to learn how Marquez is as a
• 26:02
  leader, like a team leader.
• 26:04
  Firstly, what's his unfair advantage as a team leader?
• 26:07
  And what are
• 26:08
  some characteristics that he has that you're bringing into your next role?
• 26:11
  I actually want
• 26:13
  to talk about Andrew.
• 26:14
  I think that Marquez is the brains of MKBHD and Andrew is the soul.
• 26:20
  We oftentimes refer to him as our studio dad.
• 26:23
  So much of Andrew was setting the culture for
• 26:26
  if you need to take a sick day, take the sick day.
• 26:28
  If you're not feeling well, take care of yourself.
• 26:31
  If something is wrong, you can tell me.
• 26:33
  He knew that we were all predisposed to be grinders.
• 26:36
  And he also knew that we were also predisposed to be feelers.
• 26:39
  And he found the way to build a
• 26:41
  culture where you could do both of those things.
• 26:43
  It's really intuitive and it comes down to
• 26:45
  individual decisions.
• 26:47
  But I think the biggest thing that I want to take away is I see producing
• 26:51
  as the opportunity to work with a creative and help make sure that they can do the best work
• 26:57
  possible.
• 26:57
  And sometimes doing the best work possible is to be like, hey, we need it done in
• 27:01
  three days because that's going to get it more viewership and people are going to love it.
• 27:05
  And so
• 27:05
  let's figure out how to be scrappy.
• 27:06
  That can be the job of a producer.
• 27:09
  And sometimes the job of
• 27:10
  a producer is to say, hey, you seem tired.
• 27:13
  We're going to bring in a freelancer or change up the
• 27:16
  video schedule so that you have a week to breathe.
• 27:18
  And that's OK. And that's basically everything
• 27:21
  that I want to do.
• 27:23
  I just want to take care of people.
• 27:25
  Well, let's get into it.
• 27:25
  I'm so curious,
• 27:26
  like what you are working on now that you've left the MKBHD team.
• 27:31
  Give me the full elevator pitch.
• 27:34
  Beautiful animated explainer videos pairing some of the world's foremost educators and domain experts across different fields in health.
• 27:43
  Everything from dieticians to MDs to PhDs to entomologists.
• 27:48
  Giving some of the most forward, highest quality insight on topics in health.
• 27:55
  I think when we look at health YouTube right now, there are a few really, really, really high trust creators.
• 28:00
  people who bring their own domain expertise and they have this very very specific view
• 28:06
  but health in general is something that right now on youtube is so scattered there's the heart guy
• 28:12
  and then there's the health and popular culture guy and then there's the working out guy and we
• 28:18
  want to create a neutral ground sort of almost like the experience with mkbhd where people hear
• 28:24
  the name superpower and they go oh i can just watch the superpower video on it and i know that
• 28:28
  I will be able to start and understand this concept from zero.
• 28:33
  Superpower is one of the coolest freaking health tech companies in the world.
• 28:38
  And I have the joy of being able to build out our entire YouTube team.
• 28:43
  In October, we'll be launching on our channel educational explainer videos,
• 28:48
  everything from an investigative piece on the origins of the most popular supplement in the world
• 28:53
  to an animated explainer breaking down one of the biggest myths regarding your health.
• 28:59
  There's all these different fascinating topics that we'll be discussing.
• 29:03
  And we have like doctors and geniuses who are going to be helping make sure that that is some of the highest trust,
• 29:10
  highest integrity content that we can make.
• 29:11
  At the end of the day, the biggest thing I learned from MKBHD was that you need to trust your team and your audience needs to trust you.
• 29:18
  And I want to bring the highest level of trust possible and hold myself to the highest standard that any kid who dreamed of making YouTube videos has ever held themselves to, to build the best animated explainer videos on health in the world.
• 29:32
  I love it.
• 29:33
  So have you filled out your entire org charts?
• 29:36
  Have you written scripts?
• 29:38
  And are you like, where are you in this process so far?
• 29:40
  So we've hired our fact check lead.
• 29:42
  We've hired our art director.
• 29:43
  Really, really talented people.
• 29:45
  I don't know how much I can publicly say.
• 29:48
  We are very close to bringing on an exceptional illustrator who's worked on some work that you have definitely seen.
• 29:55
  We just brought on a video editor who I think has so much potential to be like one of the generational defining video editors in the education space.
• 30:04
  He can work so fast.
• 30:05
  He understands so many tools really well.
• 30:07
  I've learned a lot from him.
• 30:08
  I think more important than the team that we do have is the team that we're still putting together.
• 30:13
  I'm really, really passionate about making sure that we can platform women in STEM, women with clinical backgrounds.
• 30:21
  We're talking to a few really talented people who have studied bio and ended up working for YouTubers and different domain experts and journalists who have been covering and translating some of the complexity and health into something that's more digestible for years.
• 30:34
  at the core of what we're doing.
• 30:36
  We're basically taking talented domain experts.
• 30:38
  Superpower already has a lot of these.
• 30:41
  Then we're taking talented storytellers.
• 30:43
  These are the people who can translate what they're saying.
• 30:45
  And then we're taking talented animators.
• 30:47
  And together, we're going to basically take this brain trust
• 30:51
  that's already in Superpower
• 30:52
  and make it something that anybody could digest
• 30:55
  in just a few seconds,
• 30:56
  which is very similar to the Superpower products itself.
• 30:59
  Man, I just think you are the coolest guy.
• 31:01
  I think that you are so thoughtful about the work that you do.
• 31:04
  I can't right now.
• 31:08
  If you were a stock, I would invest in you because I'm just so fascinated by the work
• 31:11
  that you're doing.
• 31:12
  The stuff that you've done for the studio and for MKBHD is incredible.
• 31:16
  What you're building now sounds fascinating.
• 31:17
  I can't wait for when it comes out.
• 31:19
  I want to end on something that we've mentioned before.
• 31:22
  I don't want YouTube to be Hollywood.
• 31:24
  I don't want YouTube to be traditional media.
• 31:26
  I don't want YouTube to be anything other than YouTube, but I do want YouTube to be
• 31:30
  better.
• 31:31
  I want it to be smarter.
• 31:32
  I want it to be more trustworthy.
• 31:34
  I want people to leave the platform actually healthier and smarter and happier.
• 31:38
  And we're so close to being able to do that.
• 31:39
  We all understand how to capture an imagination so well,
• 31:43
  but only a few of us are really, really hyper-focused
• 31:46
  on making sure that we can capture that imagination
• 31:49
  with the highest integrity possible.
• 31:51
  To those who are also hyper-obsessed with that,
• 31:53
  I would love to chat with you more,
• 31:55
  maybe learn about how other creators are building infrastructure
• 31:58
  to make sure that we can continue to be as high integrity as possible.
• 32:02
  and to those who are hyper optimized
• 32:04
  and thinking about the next gig
• 32:05
  and thinking about views,
• 32:07
  I get it.
• 32:07
  I have been there.
• 32:08
  I have played that game
• 32:10
  and I am telling you long term,
• 32:12
  nothing compounds more
• 32:13
  than just optimizing for trust.
• 32:15
  I love it.
• 32:16
  How can people find you online
• 32:18
  if they want to speak to you?
• 32:20
  Definitely hit me up on LinkedIn
• 32:21
  or Instagram.
• 32:23
  Great.
• 32:24
  Okay, we will put those links
• 32:25
  in the description.
• 32:26
  So if you're listening or watching,
• 32:28
  you can check them out there.
• 32:29
  Eric, thank you so much
• 32:30
  for coming back on the show.
• 32:32
  It's always a pleasure
• 32:32
  speaking with you.
• 32:34
  I can't wait to see
• 32:34
  what you come up with next.
• 32:36
  Let's check in soon.
• 32:37
  That's it for today's episode.
• 32:38
  Thank you so much
• 32:39
  for watching or listening.
• 32:40
  If you're new here,
• 32:40
  please consider subscribing
• 32:42
  or leaving us a review
• 32:43
  on one of the audio platforms.
• 32:44
  It really helps us
• 32:45
  as a fairly new show.
• 32:47
  If you want to check out
• 32:47
  another episode,
• 32:48
  please look through our library.
• 32:50
  We have a new one coming out
• 32:51
  every single Thursday
• 32:51
  and I will see you there.
• 33:00
  Thank you.