How MasterClass became a phenomenon
TELL JOKES LIKE STEVE MARTIN. MAKE FILMS
LIKE SPIKE LEE. ERM, SKATE LIKE TONY HAWK?
MASTERCLASS — A MIX OF TALK SHOW,
LIFE COACH AND BUSINESS SCHOOL — WAS
ONE OF THE SURPRISE HITS OF LOCKDOWN,
CONNECTING QUARANTINED SKILL-SEEKERS
WITH FAMOUS PEOPLE KEEN TO SHARE THE
SECRETS TO THEIR SUCCESS, AT A PRICE.
WHOSE BRIGHT IDEA WAS THIS? AND WHERE
DO WE SIGN UP?
“let’s start,” says usher, eyes locking onto mine, smile playing on his lips, smooooooooth as you like in his expensive black leather and wool jacket, “by looking at what sexy is.
“Sexy is all in your confidence,” he explains. “But is it in your aura or the way you present yourself, or is it what you have or how hard you work and how you flaunt it? You know, there’s guys who are bigger guys who don’t work out, but what they do have is confidence, and their belief in who they are and in their charisma. The way they talk, the way they move, all those things are very valuable. You gotta build your confidence. Right now, you’re looking at this and wondering, can I do it? Well” — he smiles, geeing me up — “I believe in you, I believe you can. I have done the same. Put yourself out there, take the risk. Try things like yoga, that’s good for you. Or take a dance class, that’s never a bad thing.”
Hang on — yoga? Usher is meant to be explaining how to have sex appeal, and I did have the feeling that it might break down when we moved on from “be confident” to the actual specifics, but I have to say I struggle to see a few hours of downward dog turning me into, well, him. I pause the video, write “Yoga???” on my notebook and hit play again.
The specifics get better now. He starts telling me how to actually talk to women. “Women love a man that can make them smile, right?” he says, smiling but achieving no marks for original insight, “so use that, you know. They love a man who’s charming. Chivalry is not dead, especially in music, if you can use it. But on the other hand…” conspiratorial glance, he’s really warming up now “…you got chicks today that love for you to talk to them crazy.”
I suddenly feel like Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Do people really use the word “chicks” without laughing? Usher does. And what does he mean, talk “crazy”?
“You can do that too,” he says.
At this point, the scene briefly implodes, as several people are heard giggling nervily behind the camera. Usher sexily cocks an eyebrow, feigns surprise. “What?”
Someone behind the camera says something not quite audible.
“What?”
There is more laughter.
“Well, that’s the truth,” shrugs Usher. “They like that shit.” Then, changing tack, he adds, “But sensuality isn’t the only way to go with entertainment. You could actually be smart. You could have a brain. That’s sexy too.”
i am watching, from the comfort of my own kitchen, Usher’s course on “The Art of Performance”, on MasterClass.com, a website hosting online courses where more than 85 talented people, many of them extremely famous, teach you how to do what they do. It’s a sort of Netflix version of night school, with courses organised into nine categories such as Film and TV, Culinary Arts, Business and Science and Technology and so on.
All feature several hours of professionally directed instruction, workbooks full of additional material and access to an online community of fellow students following the course. The range of teachers is impressive, featuring, among others, Steve Martin, Serena Williams, Christina Aguilera, Samuel L Jackson, Annie Leibovitz, Frank Gehry, Aaron Sorkin, Garry Kasparov, Martin Scorsese, Bob Woodward, Alice Waters, Ron Howard and Helen Mirren.
The sequence I’ve been watching is the “Sex Appeal” chapter from the “Creating A Personal Brand” lesson (“From social media to sex appeal, Usher shares the tools you’ll need to set yourself apart”). Obviously, the idea that I can learn Usher’s sex appeal in a 10-minute video is barmy, as is the thought that Martin Scorsese might teach me to become one of the world’s greatest film directors, or that Gordon Ramsay might turn me into a superchef.
Because of this, MasterClass attracts cynicism from some onlookers, but since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, which seemed to ignite a desire for self-improvement in people (remember the bloke who climbed the equivalent height of Mt Everest by walking up and down his own staircase?), subscribers have flocked to pay the £170 annual subscription and the organisation has had a huge spike in profile.
During lockdown in the US, Saturday Night Live ran two “MasterClass Quarantine Edition” skits, one featuring Timothée Chalamet leading a fashion class, the other, cast member Chloe Fineman doing a Britney Spears-as-fitnessinstructor lesson.
The people at MasterClass say the lockdown surge means it’s been doing up to 10 times more business than this time last year, and in May the company announced it had raised $100m (£74.8m) in new financing. A report in Forbes hints its income is around $150m (£112m) a year and said the new finance deal reportedly valued the MasterClass operation at $800m (£600m). The eccentric, intellectual CEO and co-founder David Rogier, disputed the figure. It was, he said, “way above that”.
MasterClass is sometimes seen as a blend of American self-help culture and Hollywood glitz with ideas way above its station, but there’s no
‘EDUCATION SAYS FOUNDER SYSTEMS DAVID JUST ROGIER. AREN’T ‘IMAGINE LIKE MASTERCLASS,’ IF INSTEAD OF TRIGONOMETRY YOUR MATHS CLASS HAD
BEEN TAUGHT BY SOMEONE WHO USED MATHS TO
ENGINEER A BUILDING, AND IF HE DIDN’T GET IT RIGHT
THE BUILDING WOULD COLLAPSE’
denying it’s part of a huge global trend: investment in educational technology (edtech) was already high before the pandemic, but this year, when studying and working at home have become part of many people’s daily routines, it has gone stratospheric; the global online learning sector, worth $100bn (£74.8bn), saw record investment of $18.6bn (£14bn) in 2019, and then hit $11.6bn (£8.7bn) in the first half of 2020 alone. We might not all be learning how Usher talks crazy to the ladies, but it looks like there’s lots more online and at-home (ahem) “edutainment” to come.
like all the others, I started using MasterClass towards the end of the lockdown this summer, when I decided to try to learn to skateboard properly. It felt like one of those things that would ordinarily have been a bit embarrassing, but in lockdown you could excuse with boredom, like dying your hair or drinking heavily during the day, plus there’s an unused, outof-the-way crumbling tarmac area near my house where no one would see me.
I ordered a basic board and pads on Amazon and took out my MasterClass subscription mainly for the Tony Hawk course, mainly because I’m old enough to remember when he took skateboarding overground in the late Nineties; for some reason this made me feel less ridiculous. (For non-skate fans, Hawk performed the first “900”, a very difficult two-anda-half revolutions aerial body spin — rotating 900° — at X Games 5 in 1999, and the video clip of him doing so became the first skate footage to really cross over onto mainstream sports television, chiefly via ESPN.)
Despite my partner’s bemusement (“Are you sure? Well, I suppose it’s exercise”) it started off well. Tony had great patter: “I have always said I think skateboarding is a lifestyle, a sport and an art form all at once,” he said in the introductory video, over grainy footage of him skating as a kid. “You’re creating your own style, skating is your canvas, and you can paint it how you want, and no two paintings are going to look alike.”
It sounded an inspiring idea as I followed his extremely easy instructions for footpositioning and not falling over. He also kept stressing the importance of perseverance and repetition, which I took to mean “enjoy my lessons, but don’t think you’re going to be sliding down rails anytime soon — especially you,” but still made trundling round my tarmac feel like an exercise in Zen-like dedication.
When you sign up for lessons, you see a list of videos which can range from around two to 15 minutes long. Each one covers an aspect of the subject in question, and/or an episode from the tutor’s life (Tony has a special section on the 900 which rather encouragingly explains how many times he hurt himself as he tried and failed to do it for years before; Aaron Sorkin mocks up the famous West Wing writers’ room) and you can watch them however you like: all at once, one a week, whatever suits (most people spread them out; Sunday afternoon is the most popular viewing time). You can also choose an audio version with just the soundtrack, if you want to listen in a podcast-like way. In addition, you download a PDF workbook that sets out the content of the course and adds new stuff, and you join a group of members (“Welcome to Tony Hawk’s community!”) that posts on a message board in his section of the site.
Some of the communities work better than others. Usher’s, for example, has people encouraging each other as they post clips of their own music, whereas Hawk’s is a more mixed bag, and not so big on interaction. Most people introducing themselves are humble and friendly enough: “45 years old, NYC. I had just started skating during the pandemic (so cliché!)” writes one man; others are upbeat, “Thanks Tony for a fantastic class! I’m a female anesthetist that does rock-climbing, sailing, etc and always wanted to get into skateboarding (have done skiing, ice-skating, rollerblading)… Your passion and drive for the amazing sport of skateboarding is super inspiring!! Always loved the music , fashion & lingo of skateboarding ”).
Another subscriber, however, is less impressed: “As if Tony Hawk doesn’t have enough business engagements. Why??? Boring. You could have gotten so many other skateboarders, younger, funnier, with more need for the money.” I suspect “such as, for example, me” might be the silent part at the end of this sentence.
Anyway, I added myself and tried to strike up conversation with Johnny20 from Arizona but haven’t heard back. I suspect for all of MasterClass’s well-intentioned attempts to create a community, for most people it’s about you and the tutor and that’s partly because the tutors add in a lot of empathy-building personal stories; in Tony Hawk’s case it’s hard not to feel some sort of connection as he tells you about the injuries and public humiliations he suffered while trying to perfect the 900.
David Rogier has learned that this style works for the audience. “I think that when someone is really good at what they do and they talk about it, it’s not like they’re trying to teach you, they’re just sharing what they know,” he tells me on a Zoom call. “There
Martin Scorsese, Oscar-winning director, teaches film-making is an authenticity to it, and the superfluousness and pretentiousness just drops. There’s then more openness from your side because they’re sharing their personal experience and you feel you’re learning from it, which is a different thing to being in a classroom and being talked to.
“And then you can hear in their voice that this all came from hard lessons, and your empathy is dialled up. It’s stuff you don’t hear anywhere else, so you want to hear,” he says. “Our education system just isn’t like that. Imagine if instead of trigonometry your maths class had been taught by someone who used maths to engineer a building, and if he didn’t get it right the building would collapse.”
Rogier didn’t particularly enjoy the education system. His Jewish immigrant family originally fled to the US to escape the Holocaust (his grandparents met inside Auschwitz), and he was brought up being encouraged by them to ask questions, to have a point of view on everything. Growing up in Los Angeles, he was always in trouble at school for questioning his teachers, “not in a bad way, I just liked asking questions. But I felt my job at school was to sit in a chair and only speak when spoken to. And I realised at the time that I loved to learn things, but I hated school, and that was… incongruent.”
Rogier speaks very quickly, very articulately, with a stammer he finds frustrating but refuses to be cowed by (that was thanks to his family; they refused to let him use it as an excuse, the default Rogier family philosophy being “if you weren’t in Auschwitz, you’re basically OK.”) You see where the understanding of empathy and hard knocks comes from. He got the idea for MasterClass from his grandmother, who struggled to get accepted into medical school post-war, having been openly told she had three strikes against her: being a woman, an immigrant and a Jew. “She taught me many things, but one I’ll never forget, ‘Education is the only thing someone can’t take from you’.” That, he says, was what spurred him to create MasterClass, with its initial mission to try to “democratise access to genius”.
Before launching MasterClass, Rogier completed a degree in political science and political economy, worked as a manager on the US launch of Tesco supermarkets, did an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and worked for a tech investor who ended up funding the first MasterClass research. Rogier wanted a platform that provided a new kind
WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY FROM MASTERCLASS ISN’T
ALWAYS A SPECIFIC SKILL; SOMETIMES IT’S JUST
PLEASING, IN A TIME OF PEOPLE FRONTING SUPPOSEDLY
PERFECT CAREERS ON INSTAGRAM, TO HEAR PEOPLE
TALKING ABOUT THEIR COCK-UPS AND BLUNDERS