How Cleo Abram Dominated YouTube in 1 Year

25:51And then the last category that makes me really happy and is why I love making this show so much is that the last question that I ask that I have never had the opportunity to ask before is, is this a genuinely optimistic story that makes me feel like I can contribute to making a better world? That like, it is astonishing that we built CERN and that we built the Large Hadron Collider in the first place at CERN and that people have built supersonic planes and then the business didn't work and now we're building new ones. Holy cow. and that there are 20 incredibly fast cars that go around in squiggly tracks and millions of people watch and it's basically like a road spaceship science project competition that is Formula One.

26:47All of those things are just so amazing to me and they make me optimistic about the future. They tell me that there are smart people working on hard problems that I don't even begin to understand when I started out the episode, then by the end I can understand them a little bit more. And my favorite emails that I get about the show are young people who are studying engineering, which I did not study. And they're saying, oh, I watch your show as kind of a menu of options. I had people say, one of my first episodes was about enhanced geothermal, which is really cool because it's making geothermal more accessible in more parts of the world.

27:23Typically, geothermal requires that you have a huge underground reservoir of hot water, which means that it doesn't work in most areas of the world. But there are ways that you can use the technology that we've developed for oil and natural gas in other parts of the world that do not have these vats of hot water underground, where you put water underground, use the energy of the earth to heat it up, and then bring it up, spin a turbine, and make electricity. And that requires, like, some amount of technical explanation. but it also tells you like, hey, if you're a person in college who's studying in the field of engineering that might lead you into oil and natural gas, you also have another option here.

28:00Like you could go into geothermal. It's really cool. Here it is. And here are the people working on it. I can't tell if you are like the world's greatest exception to the rule, or if I just have a rule in my head that is incorrect, that like simplicity is the best path to reach a mass audience. You know what I mean? Like, I think that if anyone came to me and was like, I got this idea for a YouTube video about geothermal, I'd be like, listen, let's talk about some of your other ideas. That's so niche. I don't know. You know, or like - I do, one of the self-consciousness that I have is like, am I dumbing it down too much?

28:35Like I do a lot of work to try to make sure that by the time it gets to my level, it's not oversimplifying something that an expert would dislike. Does that make sense? The audience is not necessarily experts, right? How do you define the audience for huge if true? 99.99 % of the audience is people that have never heard of a topic or maybe have heard of a topic in the news, but don't know anything about it when I start. But there is that tiny fraction of a percent that is actual experts in that field. And I always want to make sure that it's a video that they would be excited to send to like their family.

29:11Yeah. That's a good, here's what I do. Also their opinion really matters. Yeah. Even if it's fewer people, if they speak up about a video you made, it could really alter the trust you have as the creator or as the journalist. And so much of what I do is kind of a love letter to them. It's like a different love letter to a different group of like engineers or scientists or technologists every episode of like, Hey, I see what you're working on. I really appreciate it. Like, thanks for being alive while I'm alive. And if I, I don't think that I will always please everyone. And in fact, I get into a lot of episodes where like there's reasonable disagreement, you know, in the, just a certain case, there are these proposals for an even larger particle accelerator and even larger detectors and all of that comes with money.

29:58And there's very reasonable debate within the scientific community about like, is that worth it? What would we discover? There are lots of other things that you could spend money on, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and then it just becomes my job to like try as best I can to faithfully explain what those smart people are, are debating. Um, and sometimes they aren't going to like it. Like that's okay. Also, um, as long as they feel like I've done a good job of explaining what they're talking about. Can we watch the opening of the CERN video? Because I think, um, a few things like first on YouTube, your first job is to earn the click, right?

30:37Like your first job is to present an idea in a way that earns the audience's click. Your second job is to earn their attention, which happens in the first 30 seconds. So once you've gotten enough people to go like, all right, I'll give that video a shot. I'll watch that. Your next job is actually what we track is first seven seconds and then first 30 seconds retention. And when I started going deeper into your videos, your first 30 to actually 50 seconds, I would say, your first 50 seconds of your videos are just so packed with questions that create a situation that I'll explain after we watch this.

31:17But let's give this a watch and then talk about it. The first 50 seconds of this video. All right. Okay, ready? Right here on the border between France and Switzerland is the biggest science experiment ever built. It's this huge tunnel, over 100 meters underground and 27 kilometers long, running under nearby homes and businesses and farms. And inside that tunnel, scientists put a long blue tube, big enough to crawl through. And inside that tube, they put two pipes that they keep colder and emptier than outer space. And down those pipes, they fire particles smaller than atoms, in opposite directions, pushing them faster and faster and faster, until when they're almost at the speed of light, they smash together, sending subatomic debris flying off into this massive detector.

31:59This underground particle smasher took thousands of people from over 100 different countries, $5 billion and over 30 years to plan and build. My question was, why? Why do this? Why spend so much money and time to smash particles together in an underground tunnel? And now, why do so many people say that what we really need to do is build a bigger one? Future Circular Collider. All right. Oh, that's my favorite part. The montage. The montage is such a vibe. You've made it. Now enjoy the fact that you just got through all that information. That is, you are, like, this is a 17 minute long video. You just basically, title and thumbnail is the first pitch.

32:42The first minute there is the second pitch, right? Of like, hang with me for the next 17 minutes. Can you just talk about how you script those and how you think about that? And is that effortless or is that something that you're going like really deep into those first 60 seconds? The latter. I mean, none of this is effortless. I'm constantly doubting every moment of that and have I fully explained something correctly. And oh my God. That intro, I just want to brag about it for a second. the visuals are designed by an animator and producer on Huge If True named Justin Poore. He conceptualized that whole visual of the sort of what it would look like in 3D, how the camera would move, all of that.

33:33And it is like, I'm so excited about it. It's so far beyond like my wildest dreams of what that is. And like, he makes that real. So that's all Justin. The fact that those are all original animations, that's just completely insane. And in the first 50 seconds is crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, that's all Justin. And having, I mean, this is something else that we could talk about, but like having people that you can kind of hand the ball to and be like, holy cow, you can run so far and so fast. Like do your thing. I want to stay on the graphic just for a second. Like I've got a lot of questions about this intro, but when you're working with Justin on those first 50 to 60 seconds, what are you giving him?

34:14Is it just script? And then he's like, okay, I've got it. Like, I think you can trust him to come back with that or how much back and forth is there to get to that? Sometimes it's, I totally trust you and your artistic judgment. That's always true. Sometimes there are things within that that you really need in order to have the visual explanation work. So for example, in that one, I think that what we did is I had drawn drawn like visuals of it. It was like the very beginning was probably just a screenshot of the location, right? The first shot is, it's right here. And then it pans down. And I think I had drawn a cross section of the earth with a terribly drawn circle underneath.

34:59It needs to, like there are elevators that go down to the detectors. There are detectors and it looks like a loop and then there's another smaller loop. And these are also, there are conceptual animations done by CERN that explain what the scale of those things should be and are scientifically done. And we are referencing those visuals to make sure that we're actually doing it correctly. And then the way that I write my scripts is we do three column scripts, which are ears, eyes, sources. And what that means is that for every, roughly every sentence, sometimes the sentences are broken up if you switch visuals mid-sentence.

35:34You have in one column everything that you're going to hear. And then in the middle column, this is where the meat of writing these episodes happens. You have all of the visuals in order. So for example, there was like the pin on the map, and then it flips down and you see the cross section. And it's like in, we reuse that animation at the beginning of the episode after the titles. And you like see me in an elevator. It's like Cleo is here and then it's like descending. So it's important that that's the scale. It looks like this, et cetera. And then, you know, in maybe the fourth or fifth sentence, I forget what it is, you're zooming into the tunnel first.

36:10Are we really? Yeah, I don't feel it. Look at the lights. Oh yeah, they are shaking. My chair is shaking quite a bit. Really? I don't live in California. This is amazing. Are we? Yeah. Confirmed? Yeah. Sorry, I had to cut you. I was like, I am gyrating at a crazy pace right now. And I looked up at the lights and I was like, we're in an earthquake. Nobody felt that? First time ever. I wouldn't have noticed. It happened a lot. It happened the other night. Earthquakes happen a lot here. It happened quite a bit. While we're recording, never. That was definitely an earthquake. I couldn't believe you were still talking and you were calm.

36:49I was like... I thought you were all of a sudden realizing that the air conditioning has been on and you wanted it off for sound purposes. I was like, we don't have to do that. I knew that. I was just like, oh my God, we're experiencing an earthquake. I didn't notice anything. It was the first time on the show. I was locked in. okay all right so underground at sir yeah where i don't think there are many earthquakes um wait where were you just in that you were i was saying that like so eyes ears eyes ears uh source sorry source um and so you're you need first the first line is the pin the second line is like okay now you need a cross section of the earth so you see where it is and you see that there's this huge contraption underneath oh my god people built that then the next lines are zooming into the tunnel It's this big blue tunnel.

37:33And then zooming into the tubes within the tunnel and then zooming into the tube to see the particle moving down the tunnel itself. And then you need the archive of the real thing that actually exists. Everything that you just saw in animation, it's real. Look, here's it in progress being built. And then the payoff of the image at the end of like that whole thing that you've been so amazed by. Some scientists think that we want to make it bigger. Doom. And then there's the motto. Those are posed as questions, which are really important. Yeah. Because like in storytelling, questions are incredibly important, but there's this concept of the curiosity gap, which is the information that you presently know and the information that you want to know, the gap between those two things.

38:22And our job as storytellers is to present information and then present the information that you want to know that you don't know yet. Yeah. that you have to watch the rest of our story to learn. And ideally you have to watch all the way until the last second to find out, right? Like that is the payoff of watching. So I think you do a great job in all of your intros of first of all, bringing us into these visuals of like, look at this amazing thing that happens. Here's the information now we know. We know this thing exists. We know they're doing this crazy thing. But now you present us with a few questions that you're going to answer.

38:55It's almost like a table of contents for your story that it's like, okay, I'll hang around now. And also you've earned my trust that you're going to make it a compelling visual experience. So there's so much in that first 50 seconds. Another way of starting it though would have been humans are smashing protons together to figure out what happened at the dawn of the universe. Moments after the big bang, there were energies of this scale and these particular kinds of fundamental particles existed and we're figuring out what they are. And so come with me, we're going to learn all about the beginning of the universe.

39:35I could have scripted that much more eloquently and hopefully it would have been compelling. And so there is always this question of like, what is the thing that makes you moat? CERN is, number one, a huge place. Then we're just talking about the Large Hadron Collider inside CERN. What the heck is that? What are they doing? Do you start with the thing that they are doing? I could have also started with the Higgs boson. Oh, my God, there is a thing that relates to a field that gives everything mass, and that's so interesting, and why is stuff there as opposed to not stuff? And we discovered it, and here's, I'm going to explain the Higgs boson.

40:09And all of that is in the story. All of that is in the story, but the question is, what is the most interesting thing to get in?

40:20and one of the lovely things about writing scripts is like there is no right answer but I was most interested I'm very often most interested in the fact that humans have done something so weird like why did we build that because I can sort of understand at a human level that like some individual person had to have an idea and then they persuaded a group and then that group persuaded a bunch of governments and then those governments actually gave money. And then there was some controversy in that country about the taxpayer money being spent on that thing. And then we ended up with a huge tunnel underground that smashes protons together.

40:56Like, for me, that was the most, not just relatable, but like, what the heck? And that also relates to huge if true. Huge if true, there is a particle collider. We're learning incredible things from it. We want to build a bigger one, et cetera. Right. But also the starting about the dawn of the universe and knowing more about it would, it might be more universally appealing. You could have titled and thumbnail around it, but it's not the video. It doesn't set the right expectation. Right. Because by the end, we're not learning about fully what happened at the dawn of the universe. We don't know the answers.

41:29Yeah. The video is about CERN. Yeah. And so I feel like I respect you for actually titling and thumbnailing it, even though at the beginning when I saw the title thumbnail, I was like, well, what the hell is that? I'm not interested in that. That was a decision though. If you'd gotten a visit to CERN and you had the capacity to do these animations, do you tell a story about the dawn of the universe? Do you tell a story about the infrastructure of CERN? I wrote the intro before I wrote the rest of the video. So you could have. And then the question is, what's the show there for? What do I have to say?

42:03and then the North Star is that I want it to be an optimistic show about science and technology and explaining how people could participate in making the world better. So every episode is like, okay, I have these ingredients. How do I do that well? There's one more deliberate choice that I thought about quite a bit after watching that, which is the choice that upon click, it's you in the hosting space in a kind of lighthearted, fun nature. Yeah. Because there's an obvious other version of that, that it just opens to the map animation. That's when the pace picks up. I feel mixed about that. Yeah, tell me.

42:39Could have gone either way. I'm not sure what the right choice is there. On the one hand, I do think it's helpful to be a proxy for the audience. I really consider myself like a secondary character that's taking you, like sort of like the magic school bus. Sure. Like you're taking you through lots of different topics and that continuity is helpful. On the other hand, like why would the first frame that you see be me going like this? and then all of a sudden. You're like, what? Of course I'm ready. I just clicked on the video. Yeah, I just clicked on your video. So it could have gone either way.

43:05No, I think it is really important. I think it's about expectation setting. Again, there is a human here who will bring me through this experience. Yeah. And there she is. If I'm in the room making that decision, I would vote for it. And a lot of that is because I think like, we say this term all the time in our office, but people follow people. And I think that it's really important that like, yes, huge if true is IP. it's a concept you know is there a world where it's another host in 10 years maybe is this a franchise show like maybe i think it has a lot of the ingredients but right now there are two brands being built there's huge of true but more importantly it's cleo abram if i'm in the room pretty mixed about yeah if i'm in the room so yeah what do you feel mixed about there because like the channel is called cleo abram it's not called huge of true

43:56that it might be better if it were i'm not sure about that decision um i think on the one hand i think i am a helpful proxy for the audience and again with this continuity of the secondary character it means you can bring in more interesting primary characters in every episode if you have that reliability um and i do think that that's something that begets a community Like there is something that I think works because it's like, oh, I trust this person's voice. I trust their taste. I, you know, if she's interested in this, well, I was interested in her description of Formula One and now I watch Formula One.

44:34So maybe I'd also be interested in CERN. I've never thought about that before. And I think that's a lot of what I get from this podcast is like I trust your judgment on who to talk to. And so I come back over and over again to hear from that person whether or not I've heard of that person beforehand. And also, the best part of this job is that there is a, you know, an infinite well of interesting primary characters. And I don't, I want to make a show about that and not about me. And so that is a balance that I'm always striking of like, how helpful am I really? And never getting sort of too convinced that it's me and not the topic.

45:27yeah i think i again like i think if if i'm in the room if i'm on business development team at huge i i do think it's very important and i think it is like but it depends on the type of business you want to build and i think that personality driven channels are obviously like the lead of the current media landscape right like we are more interested in hosts and personalities than we are in concepts. And I think that opportunity unlocks a lot of doors. Like it unlocks doors of speaking engagements. It unlocks doors of the Gemini commercial we all saw during the Olympics with Cleo Abram in it. Right?

46:06Yep. That exists. So to me, I'm like, you know, the host of the show is incredibly important. It's important to make that person the star. And yeah, I think like, Like, of course, the concept, the idea has to be ultimately like the star. The show's bad otherwise. Like that has to be the utmost important, of the utmost importance. But if there's decisions being made of like, keep this personality moment in with Clio versus not, I would always opt to keep the personality moment in. And I do that too because I think it is, I want to watch a person to understand something. And I also think that one of the things I try to do and sometimes do better than others, but I try to actually show grappling with a difficult concept because I want to be reflecting what I think maybe the audience will be going through at that moment as well.

46:54Like sometimes I will actually show myself on camera being like, what? Yeah. Like I don't totally understand. And so repeat. Like that is helpful. You need to be us in this journey. Yeah. We can't have you showing up the expert or else nothing would surprise you. And that is kind of the reason why I'm there in the first place. Like it could easily, there are many amazing YouTube channels that just come directly from physicists explaining physics. Like why am I the one explaining CERN? It's like, well, hopefully I'm taking the audience along for a ride to help more people understand something as I do.

47:25And so I definitely agree that there is a strong function for a human doing that work. As I watched that video, there's another key visual where you're explaining the size of, I believe, a proton, right? And you first start with a strain of your own hair, right? And you say, imagine if the cross-section of that hair was the size of the earth. And then you keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And it's an incredible visual. And it feels to me like visuals are a huge part of your competitive advantage. It reminds me of, you know, when we were in Marquez's studio, he spent a quarter million dollars on a robot that helps him film tech in a way that he knew no one else would go to the lengths to do.

48:06And when I watch your videos, I feel like that with the visuals. I'm like, I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those lengths. But as someone who's jealous of them, how accessible is something like that? Like, what does that take? I mean, you don't need to give us exact numbers of what it costs, but what do you need to do as a creator to have visuals like that as often as you do? Is it a huge part of your production budget, your post-production budget? How do you invest and look at visuals like that? Our whole budget is a team of four people, including me, that are making these videos.

48:43And if I can just brag about them for a second, the huge of true Avengers. it's me, it's Justin Poore who's the animator and lead producer on Huge and that is I mean he's incredible at what he does and it's also incredibly helpful to have someone who is that good at visualization be deeply involved in how we tell the story in the first place. So Justin and I are constantly going back and forth on what stories do we tell how do we tell them, what is the key visual etc. Nicole Menkart is the science producer on Huge If True which means that she is the person going deep on a lot of scientific articles and deeply explaining often new areas of scientific publications that I haven't investigated yet.

49:28She's often writing a lot of short form videos and then I'm editing them. She's often the one who is fact checking me to make sure that we're getting the most scientifically accurate information and and tweaking things that could be better explained in her expertise. And that's a huge part of what makes huge of true good and trustworthy is her work. And the last person, but not least person on our team is Logan Kershaw. He's our editor. And he is like the, the thing that I most enjoy in that whole intro is the part that we cut off where it's the, the sort of montage bump in, like enjoy this. And to your point, Samir, the feeling that you are with a team and on an adventure.

50:13And like so much of that comes down to the editing choices. And Logan is incredible at giving you that feeling of like, number one, emotional variety. Number two, like finding and crafting those moments of like, you're actually grappling with something. Like there's a mixture of that kind of vlogging YouTube style with the explainer style that I learned at Vox. the biggest challenge the biggest challenge in building a team first of all i respect and and love all youtube teams that are like creator plus two or plus three i think that is actually like today some of the most impressive content is being created by that amount of people which is unbelievable like in reality you're making a tv show right like what used to be a tv show you're making like 20 plus minute um episodes that are like extremely highly produced that visually look like something that could be on Netflix or on a traditional streamer, but you're doing it like just in a crew of four people.

51:11That's like, that's pretty incredible. The one thing that is the biggest bottleneck to hiring and team building and scaling is taste. Like as a creator, finding people who either share your taste or can understand your taste or who will make those decisions in an edit that you would make or that you like, that to me is the hardest thing. And the reason why hiring is so hard in our industry. Do you agree with that? And then how did you find people where you were like, oh, like Justin's taste in graphics is awesome? Or did you have to train for that? I worked with a lot of different people early on.

51:51I mean, the first year of Huge was a lot of different freelance friends and folks. And, you know, I did some of the edits and tried to express the style that I wanted in the show. I am an editor and an animator in my work at Vox. I was never excellent at either of those things. And so the opportunity to hire people that are significantly better than I was and am is just like the best thing about making something better than you could make alone. Um, and, and so in a lot of their cases, in every one of their cases, we work together on an individual episode first. Interesting. And then they came on full time.

52:34And, and are you, do you find yourself to be good at training or explaining or managing creative people? Maybe. I mean, I choose to work with people that I trust a lot. And that trust is, you know, similar to when you sit down across from someone and you're talking to them and you can just tell that you have like hours and hours and hours worth of more conversation to have. You just kind of like know in the first few minutes of talking to someone like, oh, this is a person that I would love to continue to talk to. I feel that way creatively with them. Like I just know that I could continue to work with them in so many different ways and that I would trust their growth and my growth and that that would be fruitful.

53:12And so you just kind of like feel it out with the person that you're working on an individual project with. And then it's also self-selecting. Like these are people that all of them came to me and said, I really believe in the project of Huge If True. And here's why. And here's what I would want to do with it. And then we kind of talked it out. And like, there's no better feeling in the world than having other people share your dream of building something. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back. And Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year and I think this season's lineup is even cooler and so does my wife who keeps stealing all my hoodies stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app online and in store

54:07when did making plans get this complicated It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Can we talk about your output right now? because with that group of people, you're putting out videos, long form videos that are reaching millions and millions of people. But the thing that I'm, I would say jealous of when I look at your stuff is your ability to put out short form content.

54:52Like I think you make really compelling short form content and it is coming out at a output level that is like surprising me for its quality. And then also its performance across platforms is like incredible. I think we were talking about this before, but you have one short about like the depth of the ocean and did like 33 million views on YouTube and 16 million views on Instagram. And like, how are you thinking about short form content and how much of it are you putting out? I love short form. I think short form is really fun creatively. I think it offers a escape valve for a lot of the creative energy that you have and topic kind of anxiety, like a lot of it can come out in short form.

55:39There are three things that we use short form for. The first is that we put out a long form video and there are specific sections of that video that might work really, really well as a short. And sometimes you can tell, I mean, in a long form script, you can tell when you're doing this structurally. For the podcast listeners, I'm making little loops. And that means that it might be a good short, maybe one or two of those loop turns. So like, how deep is the ocean? Like that's a good short. And then the other thing, of course, is, is it a good visual? So like there's one key visual in that short.

56:11It gets deeper. You see how deep it is. Then you zoom out. You see the full scale. Then it's done. And that opportunity to take that piece of a long form video, there was a, that depth of the ocean is a section of a long form video about how we're mapping the deep ocean and And what a problem it is that there's so much water between us and the ocean floor in many places. And how the heck do we use satellites to understand what's at the bottom of the ocean? And, well, it turns out there's a difference in the surface when there is a trench or a mountain. Holy cow, I had no idea. How do we measure that with satellites, et cetera, et cetera?

56:50Like that became its own little short. And so there are all of these explanations that could get their own moment if they're also published as shorts. And sometimes they do even better than the original video that was very long and kind of requires so much attention. So that's category number one. We're taking sections of long form videos and making them into shorts. Category number two is we are experimenting with ideas that could be long form, but haven't really like it takes us at least a month to make a long form video, often more than that. And so the question is, what should you spend your time on?

57:24And one of the ways that we do this is we'll say, oh, explore that as a short. and then maybe we'll make a long form video. Right now, I don't know why people love deep. Like they're way more into down than they are into up. But very recently we posted a short that got a lot of views about the deepest hole ever dug and what would happen if you dug a hole. I think we should watch it because we have it queued up. Do you really? We may as well, it's only 60 seconds. Sure. We may as well watch it and then continue to talk about it. If you've ever thought, what if I just dug a really, really deep hole?

57:58That's what the USSR did right here. That hole is 12.2 kilometers or 7.6 miles deep. That makes it deeper than the Mariana Trench. It's deeper than Mount Everest is tall. The USSR dug it starting in 1970. It was part of a race to see who could retrieve a sample from the Earth's mantle first. Kind of a space race, but the opposite. The United States only reached 600 feet before pulling funding. But the USSR kept going for 20 years. They made it about a third of the way through Earth's crust. Before the temperature got a lot hotter than they expected, their drill bits started melting, the rock was so hot, it was like plastic.

58:31But along the way, they invented all kinds of drilling and scientific equipment that we still use today. They found fossils of organisms dating back 2 billion years, and discovered that there was water much deeper than previously thought. It's crazy, though, that the deepest hole humanity has ever dug is still 0.002 % of the way to the middle of the Earth. There's so much that we still don't know about our own planet. If you like optimistic science and tech stories, follow them more. man if you are listening right now instead of watching I would urge you to come over the key visuals are truly incredible so good but yeah it's it's

59:31It's so interesting. fascinating about what you do. Like tell us about that short and even like opening with that question. Have you, have you ever thought about that? Like, no, I've never thought about that, Cleo, but now I'm thinking about it. You've never thought what if you just dug a deep hole? Maybe when I was a kid, but like not in the past. That's what's interesting and fun. Like now I am constantly talking to my friends about what their kids are asking and they often have the most fun questions. Where are all the aliens? What if you dug a really deep hole? How deep is the ocean? How do we know?

1:00:03What if I built a really, really tall tower? All of those things are real ideas that I think I should make. Yeah, that's a good point. We lose our ability to ask those questions as we get older. So that is interesting. And often taking those questions super seriously is a great story. And questions we don't always have the exact answer to. Because if we had the answer, then everyone would kind of just know. Yeah. You bring us somewhere that is not the full answer, but that's good for conversation. Yeah. On that one, I will issue a small correction. The deepest hole humanity has ever dug is 0.2, not 0.02, 0.02 or whatever I said, percent of the way to the center of the earth, which is a huge difference and very impressive.

1:00:49And I issued that correction. So sometimes in the effort to explain things super well, you got to issue corrections because you mess up. I'm glad you said that because I was thinking it. I'm sure everyone listening was like, Cleo, you missed that one. I do hate it though when there is something that is seen by that many people. Like here, I like, ugh. Process-wise for your shorts, are you like stacking a bunch of short scripts and then sitting down and just hammering them out? Or is that like one at a time? Like do you, in your week, are you like Wednesday morning is my shorts time and I record shorts at that time.

1:01:22And does the team play the same role even though it's shorter? Or is it different people? Yes, yes. Everybody does everything. and that I think is has been really great so far I mean I really enjoy having a team that's that's like all in on whatever the show needs including when we do sponsored shorts I mean we had a sponsorship from Lego recently which was awesome and I built this Lego set that was about it was based on the first Artemis rocket and so I'm building this Lego rocket and then Justin is animating like where the Artemis program has got like where the rockets will go and what the different, uh, stages of the mission are.

1:02:02And like, that's part of a sponsored short. And so having a team that just works with me on everything that the show needs is, um, has been amazing. Um, and I've now forgotten the question process wise. Like, are you just sitting down and hammering out like five shorts in a row? Oh, sometimes. I mean, I'm recording them in batches sometimes. It just, if you're sitting in front of a camera with a light on, like you may as well record a couple. But I don't have a specific time that I'm recording things. But then that requires you to have like multiple scripts written. Yeah. We're constantly, I mean, Nicole is constantly pitching and writing short form scripts.

1:02:43I'm constantly editing them. We're all constantly pitching and trying to figure out what those small topics should be. If we have a long-form script, I'm often trying to figure out what is the section within that script that should be its own short. And I also think it's, I mean, for me, it's become important to creatively realize that these smaller videos are not like the little sibling of the long-form. Like, if I really, if my genuine desire with this show is to reach as many human beings as possible with new scientific concepts and interesting efforts that are going on in the world around them and the opportunity for them to participate in making the world better.

1:03:27If all of the things that I say I want to do with this show are true, then it is obvious that short form is such an incredible way to do that because it just reaches so many millions of people. And yeah, it's short. And so I need to reach them over and over again because to get a sort of full sense of what people are working on at like 60 seconds, like it requires repeated contact. But that's what's so amazing about the algorithms that we're working in. Like I can reach millions and millions of people in these less than 60 second ways and hopefully in aggregate give them the message of the show as well.

1:03:59You also end all of yours with a CTA. If you like optimistic stories about tech, follow for more. You also a lot of times put a CTA at like 10 to 15 seconds. I just started doing that. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Might be good. might also cause people to stop watching. I'd never seen a short with two CTAs. One of them, hopefully there aren't two that are the same. Hopefully one of them is like, if you like this shtick, subscribe because you might like other stuff. The other one is watch the video. Watch this specific. Like if you want to know more about this topic, like we have a longer episode on the deep ocean.

1:04:31You might like it. Here it is. Literally linked. Do you have data on, or are you aware of how many subscribers short form content has driven? Or do you have one specific short where you're like, whoa, that drove a lot of subscribers? The deep ocean one. How many subscribers does that drive? In the single digit percents of our total subscriber base from a single short. I don't know what it is right now. And it changes depending on what else is performing well. But like that was a huge deal. And I think one of the things that is great about having a specific show is I'm pretty sure that if someone likes that short, they'll also probably like our long form episodes.

1:05:09Maybe they're not going to watch them right away because people have different attention modes. But I don't think there is a human being on the planet that only watches videos less than 60 seconds. Like at the very least, they're also watching movies or whatever it is. And so I would hope that a person who's interested in that mission in short form is also interested in that mission in long form. But you have to align them very tightly. Yes. Like you have to, like even your visuals are so similar. It's the same host, same visual, same concept, same explainer style. like it is all, it's actually a ladder up system where it's like, if I actually like these, I actually will like the next thing.

1:05:48I think a lot of creators get that wrong where it's like, it's kind of similar, but it's filmed totally different than what their traditional. I mean, I think speaking for ourselves, we do that a lot where we make explainer style shorts because we like them and they're fun and they're visual, but we're actually sending people to long form podcasts. Right. And those don't align, but at least the values are aligned. Like if you If you enjoy learning about the creator economy, then if you like this in 60 seconds, that is also what we're doing just in a different format. I think that's spot on. And I mean, you guys have had some banger shorts.

1:06:17Like I would imagine that some of the audience that you've gained in the last couple of years has been - A lot of that. Yeah, a lot of it. Investing. Yeah, and I think we've also slowed down in subscriber growth because we don't do as many shorts. Like when we were doing shorts regularly, we were growing at a very fast pace. Why slow it down? I think a lot of it is like, I don't really love podcast clips. I think that would be the most obvious, right? Like you look at what we do and it's like, clip your podcast. But I don't, I just don't, we tried it for a bit. I just didn't like it. And I think our audience is better at clipping our show than we are.

1:06:52Like the most viewed Colin and Samir videos are not made by Colin and Samir. They're like someone clipping us and putting it on TikTok. And I also think like the things that work in like a performance driven company, media company. The thing that works is oftentimes like the most sensational version of what was said in a clip. And that's just like not always from a branding perspective, what I want us to, to clip and put out. And then the other stuff's really fun to make, but it's, it is like somewhat sometimes misaligned with the expectation of coming to the full channel. But I find it really fun to make whenever we have something that's like really cool and fun.

1:07:28I like to make it. And oftentimes that happens with like sponsor prompts. I still think like sponsorship prompts are really fun. We did one about the Ray-Ban metas. I saw that one. And it was so fun. Like that was like a new piece of tech. And it's like, we don't make, we don't get to make tech review or like our opinions on tech. But when we're not filming, Colin and I have a lot of opinions on like new camera tech or how this will, you know, shape up. So that prompt was really fun. And to get to make that and try to make a short form video about it and then have it, you know, get 60 million views on Instagram was like, oh, that was cool.

1:08:03And that was really fun. I'd love to do more of it. But it's just not in our like, it's not in our day to day system right now. And I think we haven't made it a requirement. Yeah. Or like a priority. Priority. Like no matter what, we will release one a week or something like that. Yeah. Which I don't know if you have something like that. No, not set in stone. But I mentioned two of the three reasons why we do it. The first was that we're clipping from, or not clipping, we're taking sections from long form. That's another thing. It's like clipping doesn't really work for us because it's like halfway through another sentence.

1:08:35Yeah. And and but that's one of the many things that we like to do is pull it out of a long form. The other is testing before a long form. So that deep hole short is I'm working on a script right now that is a long form video all about what we know about the deep earth and how and what new tech is helping us explore the deep earth. So that validates the idea. Exactly. Especially, I mean, that's an extreme case, but there are other cases where, for example, we made a video about the sensors inside World Cup balls. And it was so deeply controversial in the most interesting way. It was that people genuinely disagreed about whether or not it was desirable to have sensors inside World Cup balls, sometimes for very good reasons.

1:09:20Partly, you know, oh, it's fun to argue with the ref, setting that aside. Also, there are cases where it slows down the game a lot, and people don't like that. And there's sort of a dynamic around, like, technology is influencing this game, the game has a purpose, et cetera. And I was just watching. It did not occur to me that that would be controversial. And I was watching the comments on this short being like, oh, fascinating. I love this. This is going to become a video all about the sensors that are being used in sports to better understand what has actually happened. So this is like Hawkeye in tennis and now in a bunch of other sports.

1:09:55And we made a whole episode out of that. But then the third category is stuff that we just think is awesome that only deserves 60 seconds, or at least right now should only be 60 seconds. Like there's a whole body of interesting, optimistic technology being developed all the time. I made a video recently about a robot that goes into grain bins and breaks up the grain so that farmers don't need to go in and get caught in that kind of quicksand-like grain. Totally cool. Probably only going to be a 60-second video. I mean, I am working on a story about farming tech generally right now, but that's not the centerpiece of that story.

1:10:39And so that's another part of Shortform for me is it's so satisfying to be able to cover so many more different kinds of things and give them the attention they deserve and not need to spend a month and four people and 20 minutes on something like that. Yeah. I do think that like every successful YouTube channel or a very common trait of a successful YouTube channel that we've seen recently is like the presence of some form of a writer's room. Yeah. Like the presence of a team that meets and talks about ideas. And I think that's like so incredibly important in the process of making a show. The ideation process and the like exploration of ideas and some of those signals that you look at of like, oh, people are debating this thing.

1:11:31There was enough of like a guttural reaction to debate. That means it's a good idea. Like getting way better at your signals of what's a good idea and what's not a good idea is like the most important. And I do think that happens oftentimes in like the framework of what in TV is called a writer's room. In our world, it's probably just like conversation amongst peers. But I do think that presence of that is an X factor. I noticed in watching your videos over the last year and a half that your thumbnails have changed a lot. And I feel like they've improved a lot in the quality of the graphic design, in the composition, in the clickability of just telling a story between the title and the thumbnail.

1:12:12What was that process like for you? What did you learn about YouTube titles and thumbnails that has taken you to where you are today? I sort of feel like a machine learning algorithm in this way where I'm just like pattern matching and it's hard to describe exactly what the steps were.

1:12:31But maybe it was you guys, maybe it was someone else, the three things rule, that you want to have three things and only three things. We've talked about that quite a bit, yeah. That's been really helpful.

1:12:43thinking about the thumbnail as part of the story like noticing what I like I have a big deck that I should continue to add to it I think it's a little bit stale but it was a lot of titles and thumbnails that I admire and then I just looked through and I tried to articulate why I admired them so much and a lot of it had to do with like Tom Scott's relationship between his titles and his thumbnails and the way that he's like in action in many of them. And there's an arrow that's pointing to something specific. And I love that. Um, in some of mine, it's more that I'm, sometimes it's tricky cause I'm trying to, um, maybe include my own face probably because it's sort of a signal that this is a show that people have, uh, clicked on before.

1:13:29Um, but also include something that is not necessarily like me in action in the field. Sometimes I'm in the field, but sometimes I'm not. And some of the tools have also just gotten better for this. I mean, obviously After Effects is wonderful, but also using generative fill to try and square out some of those nasty corners and make it look clean and pretty. So I think that's part of it. And then also I think there's a certain amount of creative confidence that it takes to make something, I mean, first something on YouTube in general, but also to put out a title and a thumbnail that doesn't try to be everything and sort of assumes that you're going to create that curiosity gap and then people will click it and that it will work.

1:14:15I think very early on, I was trying to like put the whole video in the title and thumbnail and now I'm a little bit more relaxed about it. And that's actually helped. And so it's an exercise in choosing those three things and like making that actually work. Are you designing them yourself? No, I'm very often describing what those three things should be. And I'm working with Justin on what those three things should be. And I've worked in the past with several different thumbnail designers trying to find like the perfect person who can do this well. And right now we kind of have an assortment of folks that I sometimes tap depending on what exactly we're trying to design.

1:14:47Mostly it's me and Justin. Cool. I remember the first time I could tell that you worked with an external thumbnail. and it was when like there's like a face smoothing thing that all classic youtube thumbnail designers do gotta get rid of that you know what i'm talking about yes yeah yes and that i don't remember what thumbnail was probably the formula one one yeah yeah and i looked at it and i was like whoa cleo's face is very cartoonish you know like it was like that's like the thing that became should i keep it or should i take it away is it like i mean do you not ab test i do but not um the smoothness of my own face.

1:15:21Sure. So we will go back if we made a thumbnail that like actually worked really well, but it's a bit off brand. Yeah. We will go back and change it to something more on brand after a few weeks. Yeah. And I think that's like that for us, we're like so adamant about brand. And like when you look at our channel, what it looks like. And sometimes the thing that's most on brand for us is not the thing that's going to generate the highest click through rate. And that's a hard line, right? Because like there's one school of thought that's just like just optimized for what's best. It's another school of thought of like we're building a brand and brands have values and you know.

1:15:57Yeah. So that can get hard. I think about that all the time. I can feel the decision every single time of how I should frame something and which title I should choose. And that feeling of like I'm pretty sure that this one will perform better, but it is not huge if true. It's like a constant thing that I think will never go away. It's hard. We wrestled with that with our episode about Hot Ones. The fast approaching death of Hot Ones is not a classic Colin and Samir title. Yeah. How did you make that decision? It was just what the episode was about. Like it was about this potential prospect of Hot Ones as we know it dying and being sold.

1:16:32And like, what does that mean? Yeah, the only reason we went with it is because we thought to ourselves, does the episode actually back it up? Yeah. And so we went through the list of like, well, if this happened, then that happened. And then this happened. and then that happened, that could mean that this happened. You know, like it could mean it's the end. It is. Like, sure, all right. It's up for sale right now. Like there is a kind of death of how we know it today. So, yeah, but that one was like kind of, we were like, oh, that's a good title. But that was the first title in a while that was like, and is it on brand?

1:17:03Yeah. You know, and like that was a - And it worked. Yeah. So do we want to do another fast approaching death of? Maybe. We have a lot of ideas. Might not want to do that. Yeah, I'm excited to hear what those might be after this is done. Yeah, we have a couple of ideas. Yeah. But it's like, do we want to make videos about things that are going away? You're always at odds with these incentives. You know, you're always at odds with like the optimization and like the media environment and the audience environment versus like trying to hold a brand to its integrity and its values. That is a very interesting dance we all play as creators.

1:17:38That's why it's so important to have them in the first place. Yeah. What do you think set you up for success in such a short amount of time? Because I feel like we get the question all the time, is it still possible to make it on YouTube or is it too late? And it feels to me like you came on the scene and you were sort of everyone's answer of like, oh, it's not too late. Like there can be this person who comes that is new and feels established within a short amount of time. But what was required before you even came up with Huge If True to allow you to be successful? Yeah, so to back way up, I had been working at Vox, V-O-X, not F-O-X, for about five years.

1:18:14And I had started on the business side, actually, at Vox, working on what we called it development at the time. So pitching shows like Explained on Netflix and trying to figure out how Vox made more of the thing that it was great at, which is kind of explainer journalism. And then I'm happy to tell the story, but I sort of threw several back doors, ended up as a video journalist at Vox working on the shows that I had been pitching. So working on my first ever job as a video journalist was on Explained on Netflix. And by developing that, by learning at Vox and developing that kind of interest in explanatory journalism, that particular skill of like writing a visual script that is satisfying and uses the visuals to explain something complicated, I found my way into this particular topic area.

1:19:05which was I began to feel like I needed personally, and I thought maybe other people might want a show that is genuinely optimistic about the possible futures that we could build, and goes deep in every episode on who's building those things. How does it work? How can I understand it, and how can I evaluate what that future might be and participate? And so I think part of why the show has worked is that it has that kind of explanatory journalism format that has become pretty familiar to people and that Vox did so well. And also has this very specific tone and very specific mission. Like, it has something to say that I'm very proud of.

1:19:50And that thing is that the future can be better than today is. and that there are lots of people working on that and hear all of the menu of ways that you can see that happening and participate. I kind of want to flip my question. So from your experience at Vox within a media company, when you eventually went independent, what were you not prepared for on YouTube? Oh, man. Well, when I was at Vox, I wasn't making the decisions about the accumulation of storytelling. Like I was deciding, maybe I was pitching one individual episode, but I wasn't deciding how that episode would relate to the next episode and how you would build, for lack of a better word, a brand or a show identity or an audience that cares specifically about that thing.

1:20:42Like I was part of an incredible team making incredible work and I was one small part of it. And I think the thing that I was most unprepared for was what does it look like to build the whole ship? And then there are a bunch of other things like actually running a team, actually deciding what episodes we were going to pursue. when I was at Vox, I thought that I had an unbelievable wealth of ideas and that every episode, I mean, it was true that every episode that I made was an idea that I had pitched. But what I hadn't accounted for was the fact that there were eight other ideas that I had come up with on that same list and that someone had helped me figure out what the good idea was that I should spend, you know, a month producing.

1:21:29And early on, in making Huge, I would spend a lot of time in these cycles of like, is that a good idea? Will people like that? Is that deserving of this much time? Those are some of the many things that I think are different about being an immediate company versus being independent on YouTube. How did you vet the idea for the show? Like, did you speak to people or was it just sort of a gut thing that you think this will work? Like, what did you do? Was there a thorough process to make sure? Because it's not like you are in college and you have extra time and this YouTube thing is a hobby. You are changing careers.

1:22:03Yeah. Well, yes and no. I was changing the business that supported me, but I was trying to basically do the same action. I was trying to wake up in the morning and write a script and turn that script into a video and release it. And so all of the, like I had been making videos for a long time before I launched the YouTube channel. And I've been making videos on YouTube for a long time and like figuring out what worked and having incredible story editors and peers at Vox who were teaching me how to do this thing. And so what really changed was, and I think your question is like, why did you have confidence that this show was what you should leave for?

1:22:46Or just was there a process for vetting the idea because of the fact that you started with a show and it is kind of rare. Of course, you have the background at Vox, you have the experience, but you know optimism on YouTube is not necessarily like provocative yeah or well-suited for viewership it would be my assumption before it's like okay yeah but like good news doesn't travel very well on the internet so good luck yeah would be my natural skepticism to the idea so did you think about that did you speak to anyone to get a second opinion or was it just like no, I have the conviction here that this will work.

1:23:21Oh, I was thinking about it for months and months. I had lots of doubt and talked to all of the people in my life. If you were to have coffee with me or dinner, I would have talked your ear off about this idea. When you're feeling something that strongly and you want something that strongly for yourself, it's often a good sign for both creative people and people starting a company that other people might want it too. and I just realized from this experience of watching all of these people sort of doubt whether or not they wanted to have kids and think about the future getting worse I began to notice those feelings in myself really strongly and I began to notice the way that I would read headlines that would seem extremely negative and then the article would be somewhere in the middle or I would notice my own pressure on myself expecting what the audience would want to put a more negative frame on the story that I was writing.

1:24:15And I don't want to imply that anyone was doing that to me. This is a prediction that I had about what people wanted. And you're right, it was very negative. I think the biggest bias in news media is not left or right. It's negativity and catastrophe. And that isn't just a bias that journalists came up with and then imposed on other people. It's a bias that is both newsmaker and audience. And people in media have never had better tools to more deeply understand what people want from them. And often what they want is the scary thing. And that's hard for me because that also puts the responsibility on me as a news consumer.

1:25:02And I wanted to make something that helped deal with that. You had a really interesting term in your launch video, your first video, which was lucrative fear mongering. Yeah. Like there's a lot of lucrative fear mongering out there right now. And like your show is kind of in opposition to it or like offers a different tone. Yeah. And I thought that was really interesting because I do think that as the internet and the ad economy has, you know, optimized and incentivized for click through rate across everything, every type of, whether it's a YouTube video, a podcast or a news article. Like we are all optimizing for click-through rate.

1:25:38And so like, of course, if you just go by like straight up what is working, it will go in the direction of fear and negativity. It's much more interesting to click on that than it is to click on something that's just good and optimistic at scale. So I was curious about why not pitch this to Vox? And like, what did the compensation structure look like for talent at Vox? Like, how are you incentivized to stay? And why weren't you incentivized to do this inside of a media company like Vox? And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

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1:27:15I think there are a couple of things going on. I think the first is that media companies are full of at-will employees that make great work in lockstep and contribute as a whole to a great brand, which I think Vox is, and that was my experience at Vox. I think that there's one of the wonderful things about independent journalism and the sort of rise in opportunities for journalists is that you get these kind of weird-looking flowers that, like, there's an opportunity to make something that is a little bit more different than what you might be able to make if you're within a company that is all making things in lockstep.

1:27:56And I felt just creatively that Huge If True had something specific that I wanted to say and that I wanted to say it on my own and that I needed the room to iterate pretty quickly and be a little bit more pointed than I might be otherwise and experiment creatively with this specific message, which is that lots of the work that I'm reading is giving me one specific tone. and I want to offer someone something different in optimism, in the ability to see how they might participate in making the world better in all of these things. And I just didn't think that I could have that kind of creative freedom and that kind of ownership at a media company.

1:28:40And then the question is, why not? I don't think media, I thought, and I do think that there are people working on this. I think Johnny and Iz Harris are building a company where there might be many weirdly shaped flowers and they might have an underlying support system. And I'm very excited about that kind of media company in the future. But right now, most media companies are not very well equipped to be like, okay, you're going to go launch your own channel. We're going to give you a salary or healthcare even. You're going to own your own IP. You're going to make revenue in some revenue share.

1:29:15And you're going to make something that is tonally very different from what we're making. I just don't think, I mean, I might have taken that offer, but I wasn't surprised that a media company didn't want to offer that. Yeah. I find it interesting because I think obviously we've seen the dramatic fall of a lot of media companies, right? The BuzzFeeds, the vices of the world, those didn't work after a while, right? After the revenue pressure got really high, after they raised a ton of money, all the talent left, right? And I'm so fascinated by the incentive structures of keeping talent within the context of a media company.

1:29:56And I actually think that maybe in like the cyclical nature of the world, I don't know that every creative person who's excellent at making videos is built to do it independently. So I think there's going to have to be some level of correction over the next couple of years of like, how do you then take some of those people who are excellent at making videos, but don't want to do it independently, where do they go? Yeah. Right? Like, do they go inside of your new media company or do you even want to start a media company? Do they go inside of a company like Mythical? Like, where do those people go who are just excellent at making videos?

1:30:32And I don't know the answer. And I'm curious about, like, the future of media companies as it pertains to YouTube creators. I think that could be a very possible and very cool future. Like, I would be so excited about a future where lots of journalists have the opportunity to build a specific kind of IP that they're really excited about, like I was super excited about with Huge. And then share some kind of infrastructure, whether it's sourcing ad deals or legal review or even on the creative backend, some kind of editing help. There's so many infrastructure things that are at a media company that are unbelievably great.

1:31:13even just and I think maybe most importantly the support of other creative people looking at your stuff and saying like here's what I'm most curious about here's why like I mean that's why it's been so important to me to build a team around huge if true but I think I don't think it exists yet at scale I mean I can't think of a company that works this way and I think part of that is maybe just an acknowledgement of the way that media is working now. Maybe it's just growing pains. Maybe it's turning a big ship. Or maybe it's lots of things I don't understand about the way that a media company works and makes money.

1:31:52I'm sure there are lots of good reasons why they don't want individual YouTubers going out there and representing their IP and building their own thing and owning it. But that's definitely the media future I want to live in. How did you actually go from the business side of Vox to the creative side? Because we worked at a media company for a number of years. I don't think I ever saw anyone that was strictly on the business side, whether it was like development, sales, things like that, cross over to the creative side, although I bet some of them would have liked to. And I would imagine like people are listening right now who are not in creative positions, but would like to pursue it?

1:32:31How did you actually make that jump? Several backdoor slides. First, I was working on the, actually on the marketing team originally at all of Vox Media. So there's Vox Media and then there was the individual brands, Vox, SB Nation, The Verge. And most of the infrastructure for marketing, but also even development at the time was in the Vox Media over Umbrella. And I was really excited about Vox specifically. So I was working for Vox Media. I really wanted to work for Vox. There was a person who came in around the same time as me, Andrew Golis, who was the GM of Vox at the time. And that meant that he was working on the business side, but individually within the like Vox editorial brand.

1:33:20And I really wanted to work for him. So the first thing that I did was I noticed that there was an open desk next to him and the video team and this like pod that they worked in. And I just decided that that was now my desk. And I went and I sat next to them for six months. And, you know, I was getting all the same work done. Nobody really cared where I was sitting, but the constant proximity to people that I wanted to work with led to eventually him or someone else saying, oh, could you help with this? I sort of became the go-to person within Vox Media for some of these things. And then, oh, it would be great to have a more junior person on the business team within Vox.

1:34:00Oh, maybe that could be you. And then I kind of moved in underneath Andrew working on the business team at Vox, which was kind of my first big thing. But at that point, I think that I wanted to be helping run media companies. I think that my goal was to be on the business side of Vox. but I was spending more and more time with the video team and I just loved what they were doing and had no expertise in doing it too and I began, a lot of my job under Andrew on the business team became how to pitch the ideas that were coming out of the video team to streaming shows so this was Explained Explained was the Netflix show that Vox ended up making and the first I remember we wrote the pitch I was kind of compiling ideas that other people had on the video team and this became the pitch for Explained and then delivered it to Netflix and they greenlit the show which was a huge moment this was when media companies were first starting to make streaming shows BuzzFeed had one, the New York Times made one with Hulu this was kind of a moment in digital journalism and it was so exciting, this was like the victory moment of my career on the business side.

1:35:13And for like 10 seconds, I was happy. And then immediately I was very sad. And I was like, what? Like, why do I feel like this? And it was because the show that I had persuaded myself was that I was creatively helping with was immediately going to be given to people who actually had a job of doing video journalism and actually could produce video and were going to go make the show. And there wasn't a reason why I should be involved in that anymore. and that felt devastating to me. I'd been so excited about it. And so I began to go to night classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York and learned how to edit and animate in Premiere Pro and After Effects.

1:35:52And I began first with Racked, which is a fashion vertical within Vox and then within Vox itself, began to make videos like nights and weekends on the side with a lot of help from people that I'd now become friends with because they were like sitting next to me in the office and I was showing them the terrible animations that I was making and they were giving me advice and all of that dynamic. And eventually, so I started making videos for Vox and some of my very first videos were published when I was still technically on this development team.

1:36:28And everybody was sort of pretending like that wasn't happening. yeah um but i was on a list serve of like dropbox links and logins and other stuff that was necessary to actually make videos which is what i was doing on the side um and when the second season of explained rolled around i remember my like sideways bosses bosses like far above me was joe posner who was the head of vox video at the time um and he sent out an email to everybody on this listserv that said, hey, the second season of Explained has come around. If the format of the show was that there were 20 episodes, each with different topics.

1:37:11And he said, if you pitch an idea that ends up getting greenlit by Netflix, you can produce it. You can be the writer and you can go work on the Netflix show, which required kind of taking time away from box and going and working on the show separately.

1:37:27and I knew that this email was not meant for me like this was to the he thought that he was talking to the video journalists at Vox but technically I had gotten the email and so I wrote up several pitches I think I wrote four and sent them in just kind of why not I spent a lot of time on these and like really was proud of them and then sent them in one of them ended up on some list that made its way through Vox and ended up getting greenlit by Netflix. It was Diamonds Explained. And when they looked back at who had pitched these ideas, to Joe Posner's credit, he did not take it away from me. He did not say, I didn't mean you.

1:38:08I meant all of these professional video journalists who are working on Vox in this way. Like, we'll give it to one of them. And basically, the rest of my career is thanks to the fact that, like, I pitched it and he didn't take it away from me. And then I went on to make it a Netflix. It's a great episode. Also, I've seen that episode. It's really good. Um, I never knew that one day I'd be sitting down with the writer producer of that episode. I think, uh, I also did another episode that I did not voice, but I voiced that episode. That's actually, I did the narration on Netflix. Wow. Wow. That's a really cool story.

1:38:42Thank you. And I was like, kind of like backward. Yeah. It's a real lesson in how there's no, it's not always an immediate playbook, especially in like new digital modern careers of how to get the job you want. And technically I was taking a sabbatical from the business job when I was on Netflix and it was only like through doing it well that I kind of earned, there was, there was a question of like, not only would I not earn a place as a video journalist, but I might lose the job that I had because I had so clearly said, I don't want that. I want to do this instead. So in this concept of like producing videos, pitching ideas, when you look at like the difference between what you were making at Vox or for like a Netflix explain, like diamonds explain, that's like a universally interesting topic that a lot of people are, you know, deal with on a day-to-day basis.

1:39:31When you look at what's happening on your, your YouTube channel, there's some deeply personal topics that you get into as well. Like you made a video about freezing your eggs. If you pitch that video at Vox, would it be greenlit? Because that is also like fertility is a huge subject matter. What would be the difference between those two? How would the Vox editorial team react to a pitch like that? I think that almost every topic could be covered, but it would at a media company versus independently be covered pretty differently. The first time I really felt this way was both fertility topics. But the first episode that I made about this general topic area was actually artificial wombs.

1:40:15And I had seen a bunch of chatter about this on Twitter about artificial wombs and the scary future of artificial wombs. And people were imagining the matrix, which is terrifying. And at the same time as I was researching this, I needed a surgery to preserve my own fertility. I had a cyst on my left ovary that was causing what's called ovarian torsion, which I explained in the video. But it potentially cuts off circulation to your ovary and could cause you to lose it. This isn't like an emergency surgery, but it was like a come in tomorrow. We're going to do this surgery. and it really changed my opinion on how important it was to have technology that made it easier for people to have kids like I was really scared that I was going to lose some of I mean it wasn't you know it was one over not to like there are reasons why this was not like you know the end of the world for me personally but like it was scary and I had a sort of personal evolution in how I was thinking about this and if I'd been at a media company I don't think that I would have included any of that.

1:41:21Like it might've come through in the way that I was telling the story, but I would not have told you I'm getting this surgery. Here's what's happening to me. Here's why I'm afraid about my fertility. Here's like how this relates to the story that I'm covering and how it changes my opinion about it. But independently on my own YouTube channel, I just included all of that. So there's an explanation of, there's like a day by day progression in my research of artificial wombs, my personal surgery, and then my reflections on the way that technology is helping people maintain fertility and have the kids that they want to have.

1:41:54And I was so proud of it. And I just, that it was the first time that I really felt like I was doing something that could help explain something by being a human being on camera and combining what I think is best about YouTube. It was very vloggy in some cases. And actually using that to make the explanation land better. I mean, a lot of the comments that had been on Twitter that I had gotten so interested in about like, oh my God, this is like the matrix ended up on YouTube being like, I'm still scared of that future. That seems bad. Also, it seems like this deserves a lot more research and a lot more attention.

1:42:36And like, there are people working on technologies that can make it easier to have kids and like that seems good um and so the reflection like a lot of men saying um oh I hadn't thought about the fact that you might feel that way like thank you for walking me through that and that was really meaningful to me um and then fast forward um I went through the egg freezing process and that is also I hadn't seen I'd seen excellent explanations of the science of that from doctors I'd seen really wonderful and emotionally compelling walkthroughs of that from people that I respect on YouTube and on other platforms.

1:43:08But I hadn't really seen someone try their best to combine both. And in doing so, give more weight to the science and also give more kind of explanatory usefulness to the vlog. So that's my best example of something that I'm really proud of that I now feel like I can do that is using my own life and well-being to tell a story. Is it like disadvantageous to a Vox to have more of the personal journey because it's scary to get the audience too connected to a singular host? Because it's a better story if it's personal. I mean, they do like, I don't want to, I haven't been at Vox for a while now. So, you know, I can't speak to how this works internally anymore.

1:43:57But they do do this. I mean, Dylan Matthews, who's a journalist at Vox, donated an organ to a stranger. And he walked through the entire process of doing that. And it's a beautiful explanation of both that practice and that exercise and why he decided to do that, and then also the process of organ donation and how donating to a stranger has second-order effects that save a surprisingly large number of lives. and I was just so inspired by that. I thought it was amazing. And also I think it's rare at media companies. I think that like using, having both the timing of your personal life, the opportunity to tell that kind of story, the freedom to actually do that in the way that you want to and doesn't feel like it's mining your own personal life but is actually like you telling the story the way that you want.

1:44:46All of those things have to come together pretty perfectly for that to be great at a media company. And it does happen. But for me, it was much, much easier being independent. I want to talk to you about advertising. It is one of the things that piques my curiosity the most about you, primarily because of the term journalism. I've never really, in the modern era of like creator, the term journalism always confused me, confuses me presently the term like video journalist versus creator and i think it's because of the relationship to advertising and i know in your description of the show use a term that's like journalistically rigorous is that right or am i saying it backwards no that's right journalistically rigorous if with huge true and at the same time the business of what you're doing is advertising correct like advertising and sponsorship so are those two things not at odds at times of like unbiased opinions is my assumption when it comes to journalism.

1:45:50And then I watch, you know, a sponsored short of yours or a short form piece on the new Dell, you know, laptop. And I'm like, oh, but that's a biased opinion on the optimism around this tech. So how do you reckon with those two things being at odds or like, how should I think about the presence of advertising and journalism? I think it's a good question. And it's something I think about a lot. Before I started taking any advertising, I did a kind of fake ad read in one of the episodes, very early episodes of Huge. And I said, I'm going to start taking advertising. It's going to be read in my voice, much like, by the way, podcast advertising has been done by media companies for a long time.

1:46:32Media companies make different choices about that, but that's a format where many journalist hosts read their own ads. I'm going to be doing that in video on this show. Here's what it's going to look like. I literally have a timer that says add and it ticks down. Um, and it's very clearly not the editorial of the video itself. Um, and I said, here are the promises that I'm going to make about the advertising that you're going to see on this show. The first is that you're always going to know when it's advertising. Um, you cannot pay me to come look at your thing and make a whole huge of true episode about it.

1:47:06That looks like journalism. Every single episode that I make, even when it is geeking out about how cool this robot is or how cool this car is, all of that is my actual opinion of that thing. And if it's not clearly an ad, it is not an ad or paid for. And you're going to know when something is an ad, like it is clearly going to be marked as an ad. I mean, all of this is legally required, but there are people that do more obvious and less obvious versions of it. It's marked. You should know a couple things about what's happening in that moment. Number one, in any section where I am doing an ad and it's marked as an ad, I'm writing that and I'm only going to say things that I know to be true.

1:47:53So for example, I don't drink alcohol. I have no moral objection to alcohol. I just don't like it and don't drink it. So I haven't taken an alcohol sponsor, but in theory, I would take a sponsor that I don't use their product, but I would not say, this alcohol is great. I drink it and I like how it tastes because that's not true. And also I say that I don't drink alcohol and that would just not make sense for me. But I would totally say, this is wine of the month. My mom is a wine connoisseur. She's very hard to impress. I sent this to her, if this is true, I sent this to her and she said this.

1:48:32And like, if that's true, then I will totally use it. And you should understand that that's an ad, that the advertiser got to look at that before it went out. But that I'm saying things that I know to be true.

1:48:46And then after that, if both of those things are true, I feel comfortable with people making up their own minds about what they think of those ads. So when something is sponsored and is posted on Instagram or is within a huge if true episode, if they know it's an ad and they know that the things in it are true to the best of my knowledge and are true about me and what I think about those things, then I'm comfortable with the idea that they can distinguish the difference and that they can decide what they think about it. And I don't see that as, I mean, I was working on Vox's business team when we were doing, Vox continues to do editorial sponsorships to publish videos on Vox's channel that are marked as ads.

1:49:26I mean, all media companies deal with these dynamics. How much do they abide by those two standards? They make different decisions, and it's up to the audience to decide whether or not those decisions are okay. Is it still journalism, though, if you've chosen a bit of the angle before you pursue the story? Like if you've chosen optimism about the subject before you begin investigating. Yeah. Does it still get to be journalism? I think it's reasonable for people to come down on both sides of that. I mean, I feel like, yes. I think that what I'm doing is journalism. I am looking deeply at a topic and then exploring.

1:50:08I sort of see it as moving through a forest. I'm looking down all of the paths of ways that this could go wrong. And if I'm doing my job well, and people might disagree about individual stories or how I do this, But I try every time to look down those paths and say, like, here are the concerns with this technology when I'm doing quantum computers. Here's why people are concerned about encryption. Here's the debate about that. Here's what people think is going to happen there, et cetera, et cetera. And the goal of Huge If True is to also paint a picture of the glowing house at the end of the forest, of like a place that you could get to with this technology that is at least I believe and other people could come to believe that that's a good future.

1:50:51And then, I mean, it's also possible that people might disagree with what that future looks like, but at the very least, they understand better what it looks like and can have that conversation. I really believe that one of the primary functions of journalism is holding power to account, is investigative journalism. I pay for a lot of investigative work, and I think it is an incredibly important function that journalism has always played in society. I also believe that part of, if you believe in democracy, this will sound cheesy, but the whole idea is that everybody can understand, can see the world clearly, can understand what's going on in the world, can form opinions about that, can voice their opinions, rinse and repeat, and the world gets better.

1:51:38Like, that's the whole project that we're all in together. And I see part of the responsibility of journalism as explaining how the world is actually working right now. And part of that is by explaining who's working on making it better and how that might work. And I don't think that if all journalism looked exactly like my show, that would be a good place to be in. I also don't believe that if Huge If True didn't exist or there weren't someone serving this function of offering visions of the future that are better than today and reflecting on how we've made the world better so far, and that is an optimistic exercise, that that would be a better future of journalism too.

1:52:14I think I provide a specific flavor in kind of my media diet, and that's a really important flavor. And I also think this is pretty urgent. I think we are in a moment right now, it is both true that the world has gotten a lot better. And it's also true that we're facing enormous problems. And that, again, like maybe I'm sounding overly, you know, trite, but I think that it is true that every way in which the world has gotten better, the whole reason why we're so lucky to be alive right now, is that people have thought that it could get better. and that part of journalism's role is to paint pictures of how that's possible.

1:52:52When you do cold outreach to someone to try and get access, whether it's like NASA or Nike, do you introduce yourself as a video journalist? You do. Yeah. Do you think you'd get a different response if you introduced yourself as a creator, like a YouTube creator? Maybe. I mean, I say I'm a video journalist that makes a show called Huge If True. Here's the channel. Yeah. And there are lots of rules. I mean, I don't let people see the story, before it goes out. Like there are journalistic ethics that I abide by that look exactly the same, I think, in my memory of them as they did when I was at Vox.

1:53:32I get like, it's interesting. I think there's a lot of people who refer to us as journalists and I get very uncomfortable with that. Why? I just don't, I never set out to be a journalist. I think even in like the some of the concepts of of what I know about journalism I'm just like I I'm a storyteller you know I'm like a storyteller I produce a show I'm a creator I'm much more comfortable with those terms than I am journalist I don't know what it is about that but I have like a uncomfortable relationship with that word well you really value relationships and trust and I know there was a lunch you had with someone who said, oh, because you're a journalist, I just want you to know this is off the record.

1:54:16Oh, yeah. And I was like, what? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I was like, I'm not a journalist. I think in that lunch, they called me a reporter. Reporter. Yeah. And I was like, whoa, I am not a reporter. But then you zoom out and you recognize like, yeah, we do have, we have a publication that talks about the news in our industry, right? Like that is something with the published press that we have. We have a show where we talk about what's going on. I can totally understand that position that someone would take of like, you are a reporter. Do you consider yourself an educator? What are the words that you like?

1:54:47Yeah, I think educator is part of it. But I think there's also discomfort of like, I set out 13 years ago on this path to become a filmmaker. And that has taken twists and turns. And there's been a lot of opportunities to film make. But landing in this position was just kind of unexpected and just through the, the, the twists and turns of the career. And so I think that's also part of it is like, that's not part of my own narrative of myself. And yeah, I just, I also think, yeah, relationship with like trust and, and, um, I definitely don't introduce myself as an educator though. No, I go out the gates with podcaster.

1:55:22Yeah. Same, same, same. It's interesting that that reads as lack of trust because one of the things that I like about being considered a journalist is that there are rules that people understand. So like, you don't have to wonder if I'm going to talk about something later, if we say it's off the record. Like there are rules that, that confine my behavior in ways that I like. And I know that other people know those rules. And so I accept the terms of the agreement. And so I'm sort of asking to be, whether or not people think I'm doing a good job as a journalist is different than whether or not I say, like my goal is to abide by those rules.

1:56:03And that means that I issue corrections when I get things wrong, which happens. Like we're covering complicated things. Like I do get things wrong. And so I try my best to make sure that people know what the correct information is when I get things wrong. And I don't try and like hide that. I try and issue a correction. I try to add a comment and pin it. That's part of the practice of journalism. Another part of the practice of journalism is these rules where, you know, if there are expectations about when someone talks to me, what they're allowing me to do with that information. Is it on background?

1:56:35Is it off the record? Is it on the record? And then also, I think I didn't want journalism to be scary. I didn't want to be a part of something that developed a reputation that is the world is bad and getting worse and journalism is just telling me about it over and over and over again and sort of pressing my nose more deeply into the ways that the world is getting worse. and so I also wanted to try my best to continue to maintain that title and also those rules because I don't accept the idea that that's what journalism is and I don't accept the idea that journalism is exclusively holding power to account although I think that's an important part of journalism as a collective.

1:57:23I also think a function of journalism is painting a picture of the world as it is and the world is getting better in lots of ways. The world is full of people that are working on these things. Whether or not other people want to call themselves journalists is completely their prerogative and I will call people whatever they identify as. And also, you know, I look around and I see a lot of YouTubers doing incredible education about the world at the quality or higher than I am. And I consider themselves, I consider their work part of my diet and I consider themselves serving the function of journalism.

1:58:00Like I don't want to call someone a journalist if they don't want to be called a journalist. But I do recognize that there are a lot of creators doing incredible work that are serving the function of journalism. And I also think that journalism is not like doctor. It is not like lawyer. It doesn't have a test that you have to pass to take it. There are parts of the world where it does. And it comes with a credential that allows you to do certain things. The United States is not like that. And so if you're doing the actions of journalism every day, I think you can call yourself a journalist and whether you decide to is up to you.

1:58:30And also, I do think that we should expose creators to the same kinds of scrutiny that we expose journalists to. Like, I do think that trying to be correct matters. And that like, some of these expectations that we have of media should be applied to journalists, or should be applied to creators, because millions and millions of people are watching them. Yeah, I do think your playbook should be taught in journalism schools, that like the future of journalists will need to know some of the things that you know. And that moving forward, journalists will probably exist less within the confines of media companies and more so independently, I would assume.

1:59:09I'm curious, like your experience, you've produced for Netflix before. You've experienced some of that. We're moving in a world where like, you'd have to imagine that the streamers are going to take a look at who's capable of producing, right like when they when they look at your show like a Netflix looks at your show and they're like wait a second four people are making this millions of people love it she's a great host she's a great storyteller should we do a deal with Cleo Abram my question is if that offer came to you would you take that deal I would turn this back to you guys for advice I would probably call you.

1:59:47And I would ask, why should I do this? And I think there are good answers to that. That's not like a leading question. I genuinely am curious about YouTube has been the largest streaming platform on televisions for about 18, 19 months now. Netflix's earnings calls are all about, it's us on YouTube, it's us on YouTube, but we have good stuff and they have videos. Like there is a dynamic at play here. If I believe that YouTube continues to be a place that is going to get more attention and more eyeballs and more people who are going to grow up knowing that they can find good quality stuff on YouTube and we can support ourselves, we can support for people, we can make good quality work.

2:00:30There is no specific thing that I'm itching for that I couldn't make right now that requires a lot of money. Like my show is made by individual people whose livelihoods I need to support, and that's a big responsibility. It also doesn't come with huge productions like Mark, for example, Mark Rober. And so that means that I'm not itching for a budget to come in ahead of when I need to make something. And also, while I think that we are now less watched than you could be if you made a show on Netflix, I'm not sure that's always going to be true. and every video that I put out in every time I'm making something that I think is good and that is building up the channel, I get a little bit closer to owning my own IP, making that show on my own, and reaching all of those people in exactly the way that I want to reach them.

2:01:24So. my question is how would you advise me in that moment? First of all, this would be a very fun call for me and a call that I get from a lot of creators. I have a lot of fun in these calls. Okay, so I would first go to you and the first question would be like, has this ever been a dream of yours? Like, have you ever wanted to make a Netflix show considering you've already done it? I did it. Yeah. And it was. And it was amazing. Yeah. Got it. So you're a unique case. Yeah. You have a really unique case, but I would probably first ask you like, how much are they going to pay you? And I'd be curious if that mattered or if you were optimizing for revenue if it was more revenue than you could make in another context, if that mattered to you.

2:02:06But the second thing I would probably talk about is thinking about the world of the huge audience as a pyramid. And I think every creator should think about their audience as a pyramid. The base of your pyramid matters a lot, which is going to be your core audience. For us, that's aspiring creators. That is the base of our pyramid. A lot of people are interested in the world of YouTube. They want to learn from people like you. How did they do that? The next notch up for us is professional creators. That's creators who are doing it as their full-time profession and they want to learn from fellow professional creators.

2:02:35And the tip of that pyramid is people in the creator industry. And it's a small group of people, but it's the tip of the pyramid because it's a very powerful group of people. Advertisers, agents, people at Meta, people at Snap, people at YouTube, like people who work in and around the creator industry, people in Hollywood who are interested in YouTube, we found that that tip unlocks the most doors. And so I would go to you and I would go, the biggest audience is actually going to be on YouTube. That's always going to be your base and probably the top two notches. Who's in that top that potentially would find you on Netflix?

2:03:11And would that unlock a door for you that you're interested in? And so I would take you through a series of questions like that to advise you of like, I think that there's still going to be, even if 10 million people watched every episode of your show, I still think there's a very unique group of people who would only watch it if it was on Netflix or probably find it and discover it if it was on Netflix and then discover you. It's not going to grow your YouTube audience by any means, but it might unlock a few doors. Those doors maybe would be revenue doors for business, but most likely would be just interesting doors.

2:03:47And that would be probably what I would say is like, I think if you had a top Netflix show, it would unlock fun status doors for you. And then final question would be like, would this be a good thing for your ego? Like, would you be like, I have a Netflix show and I went independent and was able to get a Netflix show. Is that like a validation moment for you? I'm sure that to be even offered would be a validation moment. And I would try to avoid that motivation as much as possible so that I can actually, because I think what has been incredibly helpful for me and the reason why I've followed the advice that I've heard many startup founders get and I think has done well for me so far is extreme focus.

2:04:31Like I don't do merch. I don't do anything. I don't have a subscription. I don't do anything but just this show. And in some ways I'm definitely losing out. And in other ways I only have so much creative energy of me and my team keeping myself as a person who makes things as opposed to as a manager has been important for the growth of the show and also for my happiness. And I think that focus has been my friend. This is advice that I got from Marquez when I was starting out. Like, that is, I think, a recipe for at least making the one plant that you're trying to grow, grow healthy and grow tall.

2:05:11And so for me, a lot of it is, what is the reason why I would take any amount of energy away from this thing. And I think part of it might be to reach a different kind of audience. I think the main thing that I would be excited about in any opportunity, including starting another YouTube channel or hiring a team to make something that actually just exists on the channel that I have now, et cetera, would be something creatively that I can't make by myself or even with this small team. One of the things that I have in mind is I deeply love science fiction. I read and watch a lot of science fiction.

2:05:53There's a joke with my husband and with my friends that I will watch anything sci-fi. And I would love to make something that is near future science fiction based on the deep research that I'm doing for different episodes of Huge If True. Maybe it's an anthology series, maybe it's a miniseries, but I'm very inspired by The Martian, for example, in all of the research that went into that, and then painting a near future picture of what it would actually take to do something that incredible and that hard, and playing out a fictional story in a way that gets people, I mean, more people have seen The Martian than people have seen a lot of explainers about what life on Mars is going to be like.

2:06:32And so you could meet the same goal that I have with Huge if I keep consistent on this one thing that I want to do while I'm alive, it could also be done in a bunch of different formats. And fiction is one of them. I don't know how to make fiction. I've never made fiction. There are so many people that know this so well. I would love to work with people on how to do that. I'm not saying right now, I have a lot to do right now, but how that might look, doing something like that on YouTube might even be really exciting. It takes a lot of upfront money to make fiction in a way that it doesn't to do the things I do right now.

2:07:07All of those might be reasons to work out another way of making stuff that is not just make stuff, sell ads, make more stuff. That feels like an idea for a Netflix and not necessarily a YouTube. Maybe, but maybe. Because of the price of production, because of growing distribution, if you were to put it on a new YouTube channel, it probably doesn't fit on your current YouTube channel, I don't think, as fiction because it's so different. But maybe in a couple years there are better UX ways on YouTube to subdivide a channel that doesn't require starting from scratch. Shorts are just new within the last couple of years.

2:07:45What does YouTube look like in five? I have no idea. And then maybe there's capital. I'm so excited about what the future of this whole thing we're doing looks like that I don't even want to assume that it wouldn't work in YouTube right now. Like there's totally a future where a lot of that money comes to YouTube and people start making fiction shows on YouTube in a way that, I mean, there are many excellent fiction shows on YouTube. That's like a huge If True episode that we should make. Yes, exactly. It's just so on brand for you to be optimistic about that. Yeah. I'm not like as a human always like this.

2:08:25I have pessimism in many ways. I wanted to ask you about your pessimism and like where it is in tech Or just also if you are generally optimistic about AI and our relationship to it as we are progressing towards AGI and like AI that can create its own AI and potentially be more intelligent than we are. Yeah. Like, does that all make you, is that optimistic for you? I'm so confused about what the near future might look like that I don't even know where we're trying to go. And I think part of the exercise of Huge If True is like, who has a vision in mind of the house at the end of the forest that I like?

2:09:13And how are we going to get there? And what are all of the paths that you could take off? And how are we going to avoid them? Like, I don't think that we are on a slow, steady climb toward betterness. I think that it has problems every freaking step of the way and somebody has to solve them. But you've got to think that you can. Are there any parts of this career that you catch yourself being pessimistic about? And is that helpful? Yeah. Is there a role for pessimism in your journey? I think there's a role for cynicism. I think I'm a pretty high happiness set point. I think I'm a pretty content person generally, but I don't think I'm, and I think I'm a pretty curious person generally.

2:10:05I don't know if I'm an inherently optimistic person. I think a lot of this is me looking for things that make me optimistic and then listening to those signals in myself and then sharing those stories. And so I think cynicism helps me evaluate what to tell stories about in the first place. Like there are a bunch of things that I haven't told stories about that I just don't, I can sit down across from someone and, you know, if it's their life's work, maybe this is overly optimistic and not cynical enough but like i think most people who are spending all of their time working on building something don't believe that they are building something that's going to be awful for millions of other people sure you know like there is some amount of cope that everybody does um and so when i get into a topic like i'm trying to evaluate whether or not i believe them even if i think they believe themselves um and so i think cynicism helps in a way.

2:11:06Like, sometimes I don't. If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think Golder, because new sweet and smoky special edition Gold Sauce is here. Made for your chicken favorites. And participate in McDonald's for a limited time. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs. Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

2:11:50Terms and conditions apply. So on the topic of like incentives, what are your incentives to keep producing, keep making? like obviously there's a mix of you know when you're running your own business or your own show there's like revenue right and there's money as an incentive there's um you know probably some form of like creative fulfillment and and telling stories there's a level of like external validation or like this feeling of like other people looking at you being like you're so great you know like where where do those that mix of incentives play for you as you're in this career um i think all of those are part of it, if I'm honest.

2:12:34And also I think it is really, really psychologically helpful to have a mission that is bigger than you and is not about you. I think it's helpful to have a team around you that obviously cares about you, but cares much more about the mission of the show than they care about boosting you individually. I think that's really healthy. And I also genuinely believe in the ability, whether from me or from someone else, of storytelling to help actually make the world better. Like I'm not an engineer. I think I have a skill for storytelling that I can contribute. And I think that the best way to do that is for millions of people to see it.

2:13:21And so there is, I'm sure this is nicely lining up with all of my human incentives to like want more in all kinds of ways. But I do actually want the show to be something that is able to steer public opinion in a way that actually leads more people to work on hard things that genuinely improve other people's lives. And I think that we have an outside shot at doing that. And so making a show big enough to actually earn that, we've already surpassed all of my wildest dreams for myself personally. Um, and now I have more, obviously like this is a, um, it, it moves. Um, but having that means that I can evaluate most other opportunities through that lens.

2:14:09Um, and that helps keep the shit moving. I agree that that's really important to have that filter like a mission filter. Cause otherwise, like as you start gaining traction, you're just in what I call opportunity overload. Yeah. Like every day in your inbox, there's something interesting. And you're like, it's either like something interesting because it's a large sum of money or because it's a flight to Switzerland and a speaking engagement, or it's like a commercial shoot. And you're like, everything is interesting. And now all of a sudden I've crossed this threshold of like, I didn't have that many opportunities and now I have an opportunity every day.

2:14:43You have to have a filter to go through. I struggle with that quite a bit because I find that like the opportunities that come in our inbox are all interesting. And I find that leading an interesting life is one of the rewards that I try and optimize for, right? I'm like, this career leads us to doing interesting, fun things. And it's hard for me to look at an opportunity that's like, do you want to fly to, you know, across the country and speak at this event? It's like, I've never been there. So yeah, I do want to do that. But then does that take away from the focus of, you know, the show and the mission and everything?

2:15:16It's hard to do. Do you have a team around you that supports you with that? Like, are you represented by an agent or a manager or is it mostly your own decision-making? Both. I have a wonderful team of agents. I'm with WME. I signed with them before I left Vox, actually. Interesting. Wait, so you had an agent while you were at Vox? Yes. And did your agent negotiate your contract at Vox? No. I was an at will employee at Vox, I was getting new contracts to work on different streaming shows. And at a certain point it became clear to me that it would be helpful if I had someone that was just with me.

2:15:54So meaning you're at Vox as an employee, but you're getting contracts to work on streaming shows that were non-Vox shows? No, no. And everyone would come with like a different, you know, if you're working on something, they want to know you're going to be there for the next X amount of time and you're going to, you know, work on these terms, et cetera. And at a certain point, when you're going through things like that, it is important to have someone by your side that has your best interest at heart. And I mean, that is definitely true of Vox, but they're just, to your point about incentives, like different incentives and those negotiations that get pretty strong.

2:16:29I don't think we ever actually went through one of those negotiations. I think that I just noticed that feeling and then had been outreached to by a bunch of agents and then talked to a bunch of them and then found this team that I really loved and then signed with them. I remember saying to them, why do you want to sign with me? I want you on my team for any future negotiations like this, but I'm not planning on leaving Box anytime soon. And they kind of said, okay, yeah, sure, sure. And they never pressured me at all. And now they help with all things sponsorships, all things speaking. and then from in terms of what we take and what you know how many and when and what I mean stories are totally separate editorial thing but that's been great yeah so I have an agent and I have an entertainment lawyer and both help make the whole thing.

2:17:22It's very similar to our setup we're the UTA with an agent then we have an entertainment lawyer. I actually think that's a really nice mix I think a lot of people ask us about that mix and like how they should think about representation so yeah I think it's a great mix I do think it's like a very specific you know you have to have a very specific view of how your business is run to do that mix I think some people need managers you know some people might not need the agent and they want to do all the sourcing of deals and they have so much in their inbox that they only need the entertainment lawyer right and all those mixes come with different commission structures and different complexities as you grow a company and a team where like The representation structure was traditionally built for actors and talent who weren't running companies.

2:18:09So there's a very different perspective on when you have overhead. They bring you a deal and they take 10 % of the deal, but then you also have cost of all your staff and your production and everything that you're doing that's on top of that. So I'm always curious about where the future of representation goes in our world and how many people are going to hire in-house versus continuing to work with representation. But today it's been like a great structure for us. I know a couple of teams that do that. And I think that structure is super interesting and makes a ton of sense as you scale. For me right now, number one, I'm not sure that I could do that.

2:18:48But number two, it's really helpful to have someone who knows what everybody else is doing. A hundred percent. And so they give advice on things that I've never even thought about. and that can only really happen. I mean, it's kind of interesting what we were talking about about shared infrastructure for media companies and individuals. Like that basically is what an agent and an entertainment lawyer is. Like an entertainment lawyer is a shared resource much like the legal team at Vox Media was among many different people. And that's great. That means that like that person knows what's standard and like has your, you know.

2:19:21Totally. They have their eyes on so many different types of deals that are like every deal you do is not like a brand new concept to them. where does the the future of all this go for you like is it do you look at this and you're going like i'll make this huge of true show for the next 20 years if i can yeah that's how you think about it yeah i spent a long time trying to figure out um what it was that i could grab onto like what it was that i felt so much excitement about and curiosity about and variety in and personal fulfillment from and all of those things. Um, and all of that makes some amount of sense in retrospect.

2:20:04Um, I was on the business team at Vox and I was a video producer. Then I was, you know, on some streaming shows that I, you know, left and started my own thing. Like all of those things felt to me like, and this is the way that I thought about my career early on is like tacking against the wind in a sailboat. Like you're going this direction in order to move slightly ahead and then this direction and then this direction. Um, and I feel finally, like I have found the thing that is the direction I want to go. And I didn't know what it was before. And now I do. And I just want to focus on this. And that feels unbelievably great.

2:20:38Like freedom within constraints, I think is so important. And that feels like so much fun. And I just feel like there's so much in that direction. And so I do have, like I said, I am excited about things that fit within that frame. So like I do see actually even the speculative fiction thing, I do see like within that framework or like along that road, maybe if I get there. But this is the only road I want to go down. That's cool. That's so exciting because it's still so new. Yeah. It's the best. That's a really great feeling. Where does your, you know, personal validation come from? And are there things that as you look at the next year or five years that you're like, oh, that'll feel really good if that happens?

2:21:30Or is it purely just like the steady growth of this show? It's mostly that finding this and just having this grow in the way that it has feels like something I never expected. And in my wildest dreams, I would have a production company that makes Huge If True. That could be, maybe, a bunch of different things that are all within that brand. So there could be a podcast and there could be a newsletter and there could be et cetera, et cetera. But it all is like part of this branded house, not house of brands. Um, and that, that like one version of that is that it is literally huge if true, the IP, it like looks a certain way and all of the things are underneath that.

2:22:26Another version of that is that the mission continues in lots of different ways. So I have no idea if this idea about like huge if true, the sci-fi series is actually huge if true, or if it's just like, this is the path that I want to go down. I could develop a production company that also does other things. if the best way to do that thing is that the IP means enough to actually brand it that way, amazing. If it is a bunch of stories that all sort of contribute to this thing that I want to do with the rest of my life, also great. That's the vision of the wildest dream that I have of what this would look like.

2:23:00I like that. I like the distinction between a branded house versus a house of brands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think like a lot of YouTube creators' inherent first thought is house of brands. I get so excited about adding to the house of brands and then I generally regret it. I'm like, there's too many brands. Yeah, and what that means, just to be clear, is the difference between having lots of things that all are under one broad IP. I don't know if you guys know this, I'm just talking a lot. Versus having something that is sharing infrastructure but has different brands. So I would say Vox Media was somewhat of a mix.

2:23:40Vox Media had everything ladder up to Vox Media, but it was a house of brands in the sense that there was SB Nation and there was The Verge and there was Curbed and there was Vox. And that is really advantageous in some ways. It means that you can get deep in a specific community and be part of that community and have a different tone in that way. But also means that, number one, you might have different missions associated with those different brands. and number two, people might not associate it at all with the same brand and the same mission. I'm more interested in the latter, but there are lots of great, I mean, the vision of a media company that we started out talking about where lots of people have different channels and they share infrastructure or whatever, that would be a house of brands.

2:24:18I think that's awesome. But I want to build this thing. So one of my favorite things about your YouTube channel is a playlist called Videos I Admire. I forgot that was public. This was a public playlist. And I went through it and I was like, I was really excited about some of the similarities between us and then really interested to discover new videos. I actually wish every YouTube creator did that because it's almost like a band being like, here's the music that inspired me. Yeah. Which is really cool. I really didn't remember that that was public. But I was curious, like if you were to add to that playlist today, what are YouTube videos or YouTubers that you admire?

2:24:58Well, I do think I keep adding to it. So I guess I guess anyone can just go check. But some that come to mind recently are Johnny Harris just had a video where he compared lifestyles at different income levels and tried to help people understand like what buying power looks like and the rise in wealth inequality in the United States. and it's got this incredible key visual that just keeps me hooked the whole entire time. It's a great video. I love what Simone Yetch is building every single time. I watch her channel religiously. I love Michelle's channel. Every single episode, I think, is just so well-crafted and incredible.

2:25:41Michelle Kare is. Michelle Kare. It's amazing that she can stand as just Michelle in the YouTube conversation. I know you know her, so now I've just forgotten that we're talking about - It's just amazing. That's the singular nature of that is so cool. I think you have that too. It's like we can be in a YouTube conversation and be like, Cleo's show is great. That's like really cool. Mark Rober made a video about octopuses. Yeah, that was great. Octopi. I think it's technically both, maybe. It was just such a good explainer of a weird kind of intelligence that I thought was just so good. Marquez has been doing explainers recently.

2:26:15He did one on Formula One that I thought I'm very interested in Formula One, so I thought that was great. Have you ever seen a channel, I think it's called Epic Spaceman? Yes. The craziest visuals I've ever seen in my life on YouTube. Unreal. Another level. I just, I love this. I love that there are so many weird flowers. Yeah. YouTube is an amazing house of brands. Yeah. You know, like just anything you could imagine. It's incredible. Well, Cleo, thank you so much. Thanks for hanging out with us. I'm really excited to see what you do next. I'm amazed at your growth, but also not surprised. You know, like I think when we first met and when I first saw what you're making, I was like, oh boy, this is like a rocket ship.

2:27:04And I think like you'll be at 10 million subs in no time, which is crazy. Thank you. That's like truly, truly insane. So excited to see what's next and excited to keep chatting. Thanks guys. Off track. Thanks for coming on. Yeah.

2:27:26Yo, this is important, man. Uh, my favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day. I think they're pace breakers, the ones with all the pockets. Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room. And dude, I need to replace these shorts. I wear them like every day with that Lululemon hoodie you got me. Could you send me the link to where you got them? Thanks, bro. Talk soon. Looking for your newest go-to's? Shop Lululemon's best sellers now at lululemon.com.