Transcript for:
Sucesso no YouTube com Cleo Abram

is it still possible to make it on YouTube or is it too late well yes and no I'm launching a new show this is like a rocket ship you'll be at 10 million Subs in no time tens of thousands of young people commenting on these videos I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those links our whole budget is a team of four people I looked at that and I was like what the hell does that mean I remember thinking this is going to bomb that video was a bit of a stretch the actual checklist before greenlighting a story involves three things in reality you're making a TV show my question is if that offer came to you would you take that deal today on the Colin miror show we're joined by Cleo Abram Cleo is a former Vox journalist that left to go independent on YouTube and make her show huge if true which is an optimistic show about technology and the future over the past two and a half years Cleo's put out 36 videos and her channel has gained 3.5 million subscribers she's also collaborated with creators like MKBHD Simone yet Johnny Harris and she's gotten access to some pretty amazing organizations like CERN Nike and Formula 1 in this episode we watch and break down some of her most viewed shorts and learn how meticulous she is with every single line and every single shot we also break down the intro to one of Cleo's most popular videos to get an understanding of how she's hooking millions of people and getting them to care about a topic that's pretty complex honestly I just love every opportunity we get to sit down with Cleo I leave every conversation with with her feeling smarter you just feel like you're as smart as she is which is a nice gift yeah she just has so much to share now before we get into the episode I want to show you a firstof its- kind AI powered software that's specifically designed for YouTube creators it comes from the sponsor of this episode spotter studio so here's how it works you can start from scratch just click brainstorm and because it's connected to your YouTube channel it'll give you a variety of titles based off your top performing videos as well as videos in your category or you can start by putting in a title for a video idea that you already have like this one for our studio tour with dude perfect you can continue to Workshop titles until you find the ones that you like and save them to your project now one of the coolest Parts is that it helps you brainstorm thumbnails so these are mockups that you can use for inspiration when you take photos and design your final thumbnail it gives you composition ideas like this one where Colin's holding a Nerf gun it's just an eye-catching element that we wouldn't have thought of otherwise and you can upload a photo of yourself and other cast members so that the mock-ups look more like you spotter Studio can also help you brainstorm Concepts and story beats for your videos it's a first ofit kind full project management software for you and your team and it'll help you manage your production process from coming up with ideas all the way to pressing publish Samir and I and a bunch of other top creators like dude perfect and keron helped to develop this software over the past two years if you're a Creator you should definitely give it a try the link is in our description you get 60 days totally free you can also scan this QR code that's on the screen right now and try spotter Studio we definitely think this will uplevel your channel coming up with better ideas that are tailored specifically for you and helping you get those all the way until you press publish all right now for our conversation with the incredible Cleo [Music] Abram Cleo Abram welcome to the show thanks for having me I mean you guys know that I listen to basically every episode of the show so I'm excited to be here yeah I think I'm I'm realizing that you listen to more like it's it's it's funny because you know people listen and watch the show but then when you hear someone reflect back to you something from like minute 35 of an obscure episode you're like oh wow you really listen to the show oh yeah I know all the references I know all the words that you've made up I even at breakfast when Samir said we have this thing called relative zero I appreciate you for stopping him rather than just letting him explain one of our vocab terms yeah so thank you thank you for watching and thank you for stopping him um we've spent a lot of time together but rarely we recorded I think only once we've been recorded together uh and I've been looking forward to this quite a bit um I think you're one of the most unique cases on YouTube and most unique creators to enter our world and our ecosystem in the past couple years I think Colin and I when we were talking about this conversation we were like Cleo has experienced like the fastest Pace to achieving the YouTube Dream from anyone we've seen do you feel that way sometimes yes and sometimes no yes in the sense that I feel so unbelievably excited about the success of hu gift true there was a feeling of oh my God if I make this specific thing because I launched with a trailer that had a description of the show um there's sort there's a vulnerability to saying uh I want this thing to exist do you also want this thing to exist and so the fact that there are now millions of people who watch the show is just so deeply um gratifying in that way um and at the same time I mean we've talked about this like I feel like it's just barely getting started you know a lot of people ask us the question around YouTube how do you launch your YouTube channel what does it mean to be on YouTube and I think originally in 2011 when we first started on YouTube YouTube was very much a YouTube channel was a channel even using that term in the same way of Television where it's like oh a channel can have multiple shows on it and that's what YouTube was and YouTube was like more understood as like you launch a YouTube channel and that's your network and then you can have multiple shows Even in our first channel we literally would license shows and we put out like a a TV guide schedule that was like Mondays are this show and Wednesdays are this show and it was all different types of shows and over time the maturation of of YouTube was like actually a channel is a show and a conversation we had with with a Hollywood showrunner he framed it as like week- toe television meaning the way we used to watch television um where it was like Wednesdays at 5: is this show you would watch that that is what a YouTube channel is now it's like a way to frame your week and you launched a show which is very different from launching a channel and like your commitment has been to all I make a show called huge of true it has a brand to it it has an intro animation everything is the brand of the show and I think that respects where we are in the industry today it also respects IP but it also has an understanding from a business development perspective of like I assume you were also building decks around explained and like here's the brand of the show here's the mission of the show here's what it stands for here's the audience here's how you can buy an ad with this show or here's how you can engage with it from a business perspective how much of that went into like prior to launching the YouTube channel like how much did you think about the difference between a show and a Channel or a media company a lot the reason why I left Vox is that I really wanted to make this specific show like I loved my job I loved working at box I loved the kinds of work that we were doing and I began to have this idea and this feeling that I wanted to start this specific show and I came to believe that it had to be its own independent YouTube channel um the specific story that I I think about as kind of the Genesis of this idea although I think it was a lot of things happening at the same time was um that I was making a YouTube original show called glad you asked and I made an episode about the decision whether to have kids and it was sort of wide ranging it was about fertility it was about um economics it was about all kinds of different things um and I was really proud of it and we released it and it did well and um I was posting little clips of it and like talking about the same topics on Tik Tok at the time and I posted a a clip um and I I started to look at the comments as they were coming in and I remember the first one that I saw was um oh this is interesting but I can't have kids because the world is getting worse and I clicked on who it was and it was like some teenage girl account on Tik Tok and more and more comments started coming in I began to realize that a lot of them were this same tone um and on the one hand that was unsurprising to me in some ways like I am in the same media world as everybody else like I watch Black Mirror when I used to watch Star Trek as a kid like I I know what the tone feels like about the future right now um and on the other hand it was pretty shocking because there were just this huge like tens of thousands of young people comment on these videos saying that they thought the future was getting worse and that there was nothing that they could do about it um and I um I remember feeling like I had contributed to that somehow and I don't mean to say that like I had you know I was a you know young journalist at a media company like I I don't think that um I was having some big impact on the world of Journalism but I I did begin to feel like I was participa in something um that was contributing to this idea that the world is getting worse and there's nothing we can do about it and I began to have this idea for a show that would explicitly say here are the ways in which humans have done an incredible job we're so lucky to be alive right now here all the many problems that we're facing in the near future and here are the people working on solving them um and so I just began thinking more and more about this specific idea and I had all kinds of little pieces to it you know when you're starting to think about something and it begins to feel fun to you it's like okay what are the colors of that show well um these are the things that no one else probably notices but to me it was like okay I watch a lot of Science Fiction and it has a specific color scheme it like usually looks like Tron it's like black and silver and like one neon purple or neon green or something and I wanted this show to be dark greens and dark Browns and it sort of the message is not uh oh the world has ended and we live in a spaceship the message is oh the world has gotten a lot better and we're incorporating science and technology in an interesting way like how can you make a show that uses all of these signals to build this are are those colors like specifically earth tones in the context of like it's grounded in very solar Punk yeah interesting um and and my my point is not that I knew exactly what huge was going to be when we launched it it was that that there was the seed of an idea um and it was a specific show and so my desire in launching on YouTube was not like I have a vision of starting a YouTube channel although that did become a big Vision because I it's so necessary for this show to grow um it was like I really am curious if people also want this thing I want to have a show that is huge if true and explores optimistic visions of the future and therefore I'm going to start a YouTube channel you know obviously going independent meant you would have to support yourself from a revenue perspective So when you say people where did the weight of is there an audience for this and is there a monetization strategy for this like are there advertisers for this how much did you think about that going into a show I was pretty sure that if it worked from an audience perspective it would also work as a business got it I didn't think too much about what kinds of content advertisers want um although it is also true that you know being optimistic about the future like happens to come with lots of companies building interesting stuff that are also optimist line as AAL but I I basically thought and this is such a incredible thing to be true about YouTube right now that if if I could build it they would come that like if this was an audience success it would also somehow work as a business and I had seen I mean I'd been working on Box's business side uh several years before I left and suddenly the combination of like understanding how you would pitch something and how you would say like this is the Cadence and this is where the advertising lives and this is you know what the mission of the show is and do you want to be part of this I mean we didn't have advertising early on because we just didn't have any audience but but it started to pick up maybe six months in um and I I just sort of went on faith that if the audience was there there would also be a business around it so I want to talk about the show and where your ideas come from like at the core of every uccessful YouTube Creator is the ability to write an idea and and on YouTube that's the ability to formulate that into a compelling title thumbnail and first 30 seconds of of a video like title thumbnail hook and you know we spend a lot of time tweaking our ideation process or thinking about ideation process and have talked to a ton of creators about that sometimes when one of your YouTube videos comes across my feet and it's new and I'll admit this one what's really happening at CERN I looked at that and I was like what the hell does that mean how is that video going to perform I remember thinking this is going to bomb yeah like no one knows I was like like Cleo's lost it like this one she's she's this one's not going to work and then you click through and it's like this incredibly dense amount of information and you constantly surprise me with the videos you're able to put out and like I think that video is is closing in on four million views uh your quantum computers video has almost eight million views like you you constantly put out videos that I look at and I'm like there's no way millions of people are interested in the subject matter and then they are so like what is that ideation process and how did you even come across how do you even come across some of these subjects are you just inherently curious about things that millions of people are also curious about and somehow we have no idea what you're talking about can we talk about the CERN one specifically like let's stay in that world because yeah that one for me I just I loveed the video but I did not understand the title and the thumbnail and just assumed it wouldn't work I did not know that that video was going to work either is the short answer um and I wanted to know more about it personally uh I got the opportunity to visit CERN uh and that was cool and stand in front of this basically Science Church that looks like a it's a huge um bronze it looks bronze I I'm forgetting what it is actually made of uh Circle and just appreciating the incredible scale of the science that is being done there um and then I had all kinds of questions how do they make the protons hit each other why are they going that fast how do we get them going that fast like what kinds of um energies are being created there is that dangerous how do you know uh when something hits each other at that scale like what came out um also what's the point and what has it accomplished we've spent 10 billion do I think it is uh on building this machine that is enormous and took took you know thousands of people nearly a decade to build why did we do that like I'm just so interested in what other people are building and why and I feel so uh grateful and kind of astonished all the time that there are people that are working on stuff like this um and so yeah it was it was mostly this feeling of like wow I can't believe that exists I have so many questions I get the opportunity to go visit um and then it becomes my job and I think the skill I have is trying to explain something that complex to a in in a way that ideally millions of people could understand um and I struggle with that a lot because first I have to understand it which is hard and I have no expertise in particle physics um and so that takes a long time that took several months to be able to produce even at the level of complexity that we were at which is fairly basic um and then also there's kind of this leap of faith where it's like honestly that video was a bit of a stretch like I had been making videos I had made the quantum computer one um but I had also made a lot of videos that were about um planes supersonic planes Formula 1 cars things that I think are awesome um and are less difficult to explain than particle physics um and so it kind of was this like oh I I I think really well of my audience I think that they're smart and able to understand almost anything um I think they're able to understand more than I'm able to understand and so it's my job um I think it was Ezra Klein at Vox who had this phrase but it became a repeated phrase at Vox which is um never underestimate your audience's intelligence and never overestimate their prior knowledge so it's my job to go out and find the world's most interesting most optimistic most important to potentially millions of people things um and then tell a story about it that doesn't use any jargon and doesn't use any acronyms and like can actually be understood by first someone like me um and then by an audience that is obsessed with something completely different they're obsessed with you know the deep ocean and they have no idea what's happening at CERN um so that's the long answer the short answer is that uh I didn't know they were gonna actually watch that either and when that video kind of popped off I was just so pleasantly surprised it does sound like you put it through of an idea checklist though like as you're talking I wrote this down so curiosity so like Natural Curiosity is a key yeah that has to be checked off access that was the second point you brought up the fact that you could actually go there yeah right so in that case yeah so you could speak from experience uh and then gut was also like like leap of faith was a bit of it as well yeah I I would that was definitely how it felt telling the story the actual checklist that I think about before green liting a story involves three things the first is is this genuinely visual um is there something to uh animate point a camera at demonstrate um all of those things are good key visuals that require uh a video explanation as opposed to an essay um I I know that my skill is video Mak not essay writing and so I will leave that things that are best explained in text are best explained by other people um and so I'm looking for things that are inherently visual like if you and I are having coffee and we need and I and we're talking about something and I need to like pull out a pen and a napkin and draw something that's a good visual explanation or I need to pull out my phone and show you a picture and like zoom in on something specific and point at it that's probably a good visual explanation so I'm looking for those key visuals um in the case of CERN it was this unbelievably great animation that um my colleague Justin po made uh of the physical infrastructure of CERN itself and then a conceptual animation of what was happening inside it with all the detectors and all the collisions and like what is happening when it collides with different parts of a detector and how do you stop part all of those things um and that became the key Visual and you need to see that visual in order to understand the topic um otherwise it should be an essay it should be a podcast it's not going to be a video so that's thing number one is is it inherently visual I like for me uh what I wrote down but didn't say in that checklist was accessibility that was something you brought up with and I feel like that fits right into that like getting access to the thing well there's access as one thing but then accessibility in terms of how you can tell the story and the key visual fits into that right like can I make this understandable to people who don't understand it can I make it accessible I don't think I've ever interrogated this idea before but I I think that I basically believe that anything that could be important to millions of people can also be made comprehensible to millions of people I think yeah I and like that does not mean that I am ever going to understand the complexities of particle physics or quantum computers at its most deep level of expertise but I do think that those people can explain it to me and I can explain it to others and like together we can have an understanding at least of like what the point is that we're doing here and that you don't actually need to understand like what a cork is doing to understand why you might want a quantum computer um so that's thing number one I I I think like anything can be made accessible but you're right that I'm I'm like always trying to figure out if I can if I can actually do it it's also like the fun storytelling tension of watching most good video essays and especially yours is like Okay C let's see like you I clicked on this CERN video but like let's see if you lose me yeah well one of the points of accessibility that you do really well is uh like some of the the YouTube stuff that you leave in in right like when you and Marquez are getting in the car yeah to go see the quantum computer you like can't get the GPS thing to work yeah and you hold on it longer than probably another filmmaker would right like there's a question of like does this matter uh in storytelling when you're thinking about reduction right it's like can we get to the quantum computer quicker but you in you intentionally leave that part in to make us go like oh these are these are our friends yes this is just like our life can we make the explanation hit harder because of that yeah and that creates the the imbalance of like regular people explaining something really complex yes I think of myself as a proxy for the audience totally like just the person who happens to get to be there and therefore is responsible for asking the kinds of questions that they would want to ask if they were there um and so I try and write down all of the questions that I have right at the beginning that are their most simple form like how do you get them to hit each other is a question is the question that I went in with um to and then it becomes like okay now I understand that there are super conducting magnets around the tube and blah blah blah and like and so then my question to the expert might actually be like tell me about how that magnet works and and how many you need and what the you know but that was a great visual on that and a great moment of uh Discovery for you plus the audience yes of that it was like out of a hundred billion 60 hit each other yes and that moment of insight is only like only pays off if you ask the version of the question that doesn't worry about making yourself sound smart I think that's the key is like sometimes I end up with the world's leading experts on a subject and I have to be the one to ask them like how do you get them to hit each other and I know that I sound like so many levels back um and I sometimes I even tell them before the interview starts like I know that they are magnets like I I I want to get there but like I have to start with the question that I came in with with the like most childlike version of it because that's where my curiosity started um so that's part of it uh this whole like visual concept this curiosity um thing number two that I'm looking for in the video is is it and this this fits nicely and there's so much overlap here um is is it a genuinely good explanation and I think this is what you were getting at with accessibility like by the end of this video will you feel like you've been delivered a satisfying explanation or will it feel like I've only barely scratched the surface and I need another hour um and then the last category that makes me really happy and is why I I love making this show so much is that um the LA 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 in we built the large hyron collider in the first place atern and that people have built supersonic planes and then the business didn't work and now we're building new ones holy cow um and that you know uh 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 like all of those things are just so amazing to me um and they make me optimistic about the future they tell me that they are smart people working on hard problems that I don't even begin to understand when I start out the episodes and like by the end I can understand them a little bit more and my favorite uh emails that I get about the show are young people who are studying engineering which I did not study um and they're saying like oh I I watch your show as kind of a menu of options that I might like I had people um 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 typically 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 um 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 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 like you could go into geothermal it's really cool here it is and here 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 I do I do one of the self-conscious that I have is like am I dumbing it down too much like I do a lot of work to try to make sure that um by the time it gets to my level it's not oversimplifying something that an expert would dislike does that make the audience but the audience is not necessarily experts right how do you define the audience for for huge of true um 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 like a good here's what I do um 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 um of like hey I see what you're working on I really appreciate it like thanks for being alive While I'm Alive um and if I 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 the CERN case um there are these proposals for an even larger particle accelerator um and even larger detectors and all of that comes with money um and 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 you could spend money on etc etc 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 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 MH 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 like 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 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 I'll watch that your next job is actually what we track is first s 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 I'll explain after we watch but 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 m underground and 27 km 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 Adams 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 this underground particle Smasher took thousands of people from over a hundred 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 yeah oh that's my favorite part theage the like you made it now enjoy the fact 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 the 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 how you script those and and how you think about that and how is that effortless or is that something that you're going like really deep into those first 60 seconds the latter very I mean none of this is effortless um it uh I'm constantly doubting every moment of that and have I fully explain something correctly and oh my god um that intro uh I just want to brag about it for second um the uh visuals are designed by uh an animator and producer on huge of true named Justin PO he conceptualized that whole visual of the sort of what it would look like in 3D how how the camera would move all of that um and it is like I'm so excited unev 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 are that's just completely insane and in the first 50 seconds is crazy crazy yeah that's 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 um I want to stay on that 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 is it just script and then he's like okay got it like I think you can trust him to come back with that or how how much back and forth is there to get to that sometimes it's I totally trust you in your artistic judgment um that that's always true sometimes there are things within that that you really need in order to have the visual explanation work um so for example in that one I think that what we did is I had drawn like visuals of it it was like the very beginning was probably just a screenshot of the location right your the first shot is it's right here um and then it pans down and I think I had drawn a cross-section of the Earth with a terribly drawn Circle underneath 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 um 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 uh visuals to make sure that we're actually doing it correctly um and then the way that I write my scripts is we do three column scripts which are um ears eyes sources and what that means is that for every roughly every sentence um sometimes the sentences are broken up if you switch visuals mid sense you have on 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 the pin on the map and then it flips down and you see the crosssection and it's like in um we 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 it's like descending so it's important that that's the scale it looks like this Etc and then uh you know in maybe the fourth or fifth sentence I forget what it is uh you're zooming into the tunnel first are we really really I don't feel it look at the lights oh yeah they are shaking I my chair is shaking 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 sh gyrating at a crazy Pace right now and like I was I looked up at the lights and I was like we're in an earthquake nobody felt that first time ever on no I I wouldn't have noticed happened a lot I mean it happened the other night earthquakes happen a lot here they happened quite a bit while we're recording never that was definitely an earthquake I I like couldn't believe you were still talking and you were calm I was like I thought you were like all of a sudden realizing that the air conditioning has been on and you wanted off for sound purposes and 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 the first time on just I was locked in okay all right so undergrounded C where I don't think there are many Quakes um wait where were you just in that you were you were saying like eyes ear Eyes Ears uh uh Source sorry Source yeah 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 this big blue tunnel um and 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 uh 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 um and then the pay off of the image at the end uh 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 those are posed as questions which are really important yeah uh because like in 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 and 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 yeah 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 happened 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 it's almost like a table of contents for your story that it's like okay I'll hang around now and I also you've earned my trust that you're going to make it a compelling visual experience yeah so there's so much in that first 50 seconds another way of starting it though would have been um 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 um 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 I could have scripted that much more eloquently and hopefully it would have been compelling um and so there is always this question of like what is the thing that makes you Mo the CERN is number one a huge place then we're just talking about the large hron collider inside CERN um 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 higs ban 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 and here's I'm going to explain the higs B on um and all of that is in the story all of that is in the story but the question is um what is the what is the most interesting thing to get in MH um and I one of the lovely things about writing scripts is like there is no right answer yeah but um I was most interested I'm 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's 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 like right 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 a particle collider we're learning incredible things from it we want to build a bigger one Etc right also the 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 thumbnailed 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 yeah 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 like do you tell a story about the dawn of the universe do you tell a story about the infrastructure of CERN like you uh I wrote the intro before I wrote the rest of the video so you could have um and then the question is like what's the show there for what do I have to say um and 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 light-hearted 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 talk about that yeah tell me um could have gone either way I'm not sure what the right choice is there um on the one hand I do think it's helpful to be a proxy for the audience really consider myself like a secondary character that's taking you like sort of like the Magic School Bus like you're taking you through lots of different topics and that continuity is helpful um on the other hand like why would the first frame that you see be me going like this then all of like why of course I'm ready I just just clicked on your video um so it could have gone way no I think it is really important I think it's about expectation setting again of 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 of 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 CLE Abram if I'm in pretty mixed about 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 that 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 um that I think works because it's like oh um 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 1 and now I watch Formula 1 so maybe I would also be interested in C 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 um and also um the best part of this job is that there is a you know an infinite well of interesting primary characters and I 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 um and never getting sort of too uh too convinced that it's me and not the not the topic yeah 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 ape right like we are more interested in hosts and personalities than we are in Concepts and I think um that opportunity unlocks a lot of doors like it unlocks doors of speaking engagements it unlocks doors of uh the Gemini commercial we all saw during the Olympics with Cleo Abram in it right yep that exists so to me I'm like you know the host of the show is is incredibly important it's important to make that person the star and yeah I think like of course the concept the idea has to be ultimately like the star the show's bad otherwise like it that has to be the upmost important of the utmost importance but if there's decisions being made of like keep this personality moment in with Cleo versus not I would always opt to keep the personality moment in and I do that too because I think it is um I want to watch a person to understand something and I also think that um one of the things I try to do and sometimes do better than others but I I try to actually show grappling with a difficult concept because I I want to be reflecting what I think maybe the audience will be going through at that moment as well like sometimes I will actually show myself on camera being like what yeah like I don't totally understand and so repeat like um that is help in this journey we can't have you showing up the expert or else nothing would surprise you and that is kind of the 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 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 um and so I I definitely agree that there is a a strong function for a human Doing Network as I watch 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 yeah right and you say imagine if like the crosssection of that hair was the size of the Earth yeah 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 and 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 links 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 like exact numbers of what it costs but what like what do you need to do as a Creator to have visuals like that as often as you do like is it a huge part of your production budget your post- production budget how much like how do you invest and look at visuals like that our whole budget is a team of four people that including me that are making these videos um so and if I can just brag about them for a second second the huge of true Avengers it's me um it's Justin po 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 um 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 um uh Nicole menart is the science producer on huge of true um which means that she is the person going deep on a lot of scientific articles um and deeply explaining often new areas of scientific Publications that I haven't investigated yet um she's often writing a lot of short form videos and then I'm editing them um she's uh often the one who is factchecking 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 um and that's a a huge part of what makes huge of true good and trustworthy is her work um and uh the last person but not least person on our team is Logan khaw he's our editor um 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 um the sort of Montage bumping like enjoy this um and to your point Samir the the feeling that you are with a team and uh on an adventure and like so much of that comes down to the the editing choices um and Logan is incredible at giving you that feeling of like number one emotional variety um number two like finding and um crafting those moments of like you're actually grappling with something like there's a mixture of that kind of vloggy YouTube style with the explainer style that uh I learned at box 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 of four people that'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 is awesome or did you have to train for that I worked with a lot of different people early on I 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 um I am an editor and an animator in my work at box I was never excellent at either of those things and so the opportunity to hire people that are significantly better than I was um 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 fulltime and and are you do you find yourself to be good at training or explaining or managing creative people maybe I mean I 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 um 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 um fruitful and 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 um all of them came to me and said I really believe in the project of huge of 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 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 like 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 that 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 um there 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 I'm for the podcast listeners I'm making little Loops um and uh 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 um and then the other thing of course is is it a good visual so like there's one key visual in that short it gets deeper you see how deep it is then you zoom out you see the full scale then it's done um and that opportunity to take that piece of a long form video there was a that uh depth of the ocean is a section of a long form video about how we're mapping the deep ocean 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 um difference in the surface when there is a trench or a mountain holy cow I had no idea how how do we measure that with satellites etc etc like 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 um so that's category number one we're taking sections of long form videos and making them into shorts um category number two is um we are experimenting ING with ideas that could be long form um 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 and one of the ways that we do this is we'll say oh explore that as a short um and then maybe we'll make a long form video right now um I don't know why people love deep like they're way more into down than they are into up um 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 um I think we should watch it cuz we have it queued up so really we may as well it's only 60 seconds 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 that's what the USSR did right here that hole is 12.2 km or 7.6 M 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 retri a sample from the Earth's mantle first kind of a space race but the opposite the United States only reached 600 ft 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 but 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 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 for 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 that it's um it's so interesting we we have this thing that we just say like when we're editing long form podcast or or uh um a podcast between me and Colin we just watch it and we go like is it interesting or is it boring like in every section right and we just try and have a gut reaction to like is this interesting or boring and if it's boring we cut it if it's interesting we keep it uh and I watched that and it's so funny I didn't with your stuff I just don't know that I'm interested until I start watching and then I'm like this is so interesting that's what I find so 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 now I'm thinking about 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 why kids 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 like what if I built a really really tall tower like all of those things are real ideas that I think I should make yeah that's a good point like lose our ability to ask those questions as we get older so that's that is interesting um and often taking those questions super seriously yeah is a great questions we don't always have the exact answer to because if we had the answer then everyone would kind of just know yeah right like you you bring us somewhere uh that is not the full answer but that's good for conversation yeah um on that one I will issue a small correction um the deepest whole Humanity has ever dug is 0. 2 not 0 22 or whatever I said uh per of the way to the Center of the Earth which is a huge difference and very impressive um and 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 everyone listening was like Cleo you missed that one I I do hate it though when there is something that is seen by that many people that like process wise for your shorts are you like stacking a bunch of shorts scrip 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 does the team play the same role even though it's shorter or is it different people yeah yes everybody does everything um and that I think is has been really great so far I mean I really enjoy um having a team that's that's like all in on whatever the show needs um 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 um it was based on the first Artemus 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 and 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 um sometimes I me I'm recording them in batches sometimes um it just if you're sitting in front of a camera with a light on like you may as well record a couple um but I don't have a specific time that I'm recording things then that requires you to have like multiple scripts written uh yeah we're constantly I mean Nicole is constantly pitching and WR short form scripts I'm constantly editing them um we're all constantly pitching uh 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 um 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 uh efforts that are going on in the world around them and the opportunity for them to participate in making the world better if 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 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 you you also end all of yours with a CTA if you like optimistic stories about tech yeah follow for more yeah 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 i' 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 other one 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 you might like it here it is literally linked do you have data on or do you 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 subscriber the deep ocean one uh how many subscribers do that drive on YouTube um in the single digit percents of our total subscriber base from 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 um 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 maybe they're not going to watch them right away because people have different attention modes and 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 are also watching movies or sure whatever it is um and so I I would hope that a person who's interested in that mission uh in short form is also interested in that mission and long form 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 ladup system where it's like if I actually like these I actually will like the next thing I 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 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 enjoy learning about the crater economy yeah then if you like this in 6 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 like I would imagine that some of the audience that you've gained in the last couple years has been a lot of them yeah a lot of it inves yeah and 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 uh 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 um but I don't I just don't we 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 like the most viewed Colin and Samir videos are not made by Colin and Samir they're like someone clipping us and putting it on Tik Tok 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 and put out um 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 um I like to make it and oftentimes that happens with like sponsor prompts I think like sponsorship prompts are really fun we did one about the ray band 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 do have get 60 million views on Instagram was like oh that was cool and that was really fun I'd love to do more of it um 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 or like a priority priority that like no matter what we will release one a week or something like that which I don't know if you have something like that no not set in stone um but the uh I mentioned two of the three reasons why we do it the first was um 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 yeah um 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 um so that uh deep whole short is I'm working on a script right now that is a long form video all about what we know about the Deep birth and how and what new tech is helping us explore the Deep birth so that validates the idea exactly um especially that I mean that's an extreme case but there are other cases where um for example we made a video about the sensors inside World cut balls um 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 partly you know uh oh it's fun to argue with the ref setting that aside um also there were 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 Etc um 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 f fasinating I love this this is going to become a video all about um the sensors that are uh 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 um and we made a whole episode out of that um 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 um I made a video recently about um 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 the kind of quicksand like grain um 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 um and so that's another part of short form for me is it's so satisfying to be able to cover so many more different kinds of things um and give them the attention they deserve uh and not need to spend a month and four people and you know 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 uh the ideation process and the like exploration of ideas um and and some of those signals that you look at of like oh people are debating this thing there 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 often times in like the framework of what in TV is called a writer's room in our world is probably just like conversation amongst peers but I do think that presence of that is is an X Factor I 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 like in the quality of the graphic design in the composition in the clickability of just like telling a story between the title and the thumbnail what was that process like for you what did you learn about YouTube titles and thumbnails that has taken you to where you are today um I sort of feel like a machine learning algorithm in this way where I'm just like pattern matching and like it's hard to describe exactly what the steps were um but maybe it was you guys maybe it was someone else the three step the three things rule that you want to have three things talk about quite a bit yeah um that's been really helpful um thinking about the thumbnail as part of the story like noticing what I like I have a big deck uh that I should continue to add to I think it's a little bit stale but um 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 um 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 point to something specific and I love that um in some of mine it's more that I'm Sometimes It's tricky because 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 um but also include something that is not necessarily like me in action in the FI sometimes I'm in the field but sometimes I'm not um and some of the tools have also just gotten better for this um I mean obviously After Effects is wonderful but also um using generative fill to try and like Square out some of those nasty corners and like make it look clean and pretty um so I think that's part of it um and then also I think there's a certain amount of creative confidence that it takes to make something I mean for 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 assume that you're going to create that Curiosity Gap and that people will click it and that it will work I 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 um 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 um and right now we kind of have an assortment of folks that I sometimes tap depending on what exactly we're trying to design mostly it's me and Justin cool 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 got to get rid of that do you know what I'm talking about yes yeah and that I don't remember what thumbnail was but it's probably the formula one one 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 sure so we we will go back if we made a thumbnail that like actually worked really well but is a bit offbrand 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 clickthrough 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 yeah and brands have values and you know yeah so that 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 constant I think we never go away hard we wrestled with that with our episode about hot ones the fast approaching death of hot ones is not a classic Colin in smir title yeah how did you make that decision it was just what the episode was about like it it was about this Potential Prospect of hot ones as we know it dying and being sold and like what does that mean yeah the only reason we went with it is because uh we thought to ourselves does the episode actually back it up and so we went through the 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 sure 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 yeah you know and like that that was it and it worked yeah so do we want to do another fast approaching death of maybe we have a lot of ideas not want to that I'm excited to hear what those might be after this is done yeah we have a couple 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 the media environment and the audience environment versus like trying to hold a brand to its integrity and its values um that is a very interesting dance we all play as creators it's why it's so important to have them in the first place yeah what do you think 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 VX not Fox uh for about five years and I had started on the business side actually at Vox working on um 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 this kind of explainer Journalism um and then uh I'm happy to tell the story but I sort of through 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 um and by developing that by learning it box and developing that kind of um interest in explanatory journalism that particular skill of like writing a visual script that is satisfying and uses the visuals to explain something complicated um I found my way into this particular topic area which was I began to feel like I needed personally and I thought maybe other people might want uh 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 and participate um 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 um and that Vox did so so well um and also has this very specific tone and very specific Mission like it has something to say that I'm very proud of um and that thing is that the future can be better than today is and that there are lots of people working on that and here 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 man um well when I was at box I wasn't um I wasn't making the decisions about um 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 um an audience that cares specific speically about that thing like I was part of an incredible team making incredible work and I was one small part of it um and I think the thing that I was most unprepared for was uh what does it look like to to build the whole ship um and then there a bunch of other things like actually running a team um actually deciding what episodes we were going to pursue um when I was at box I thought that I had an unbelievable wealth of ideas and that every I me 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 um and early on I 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 um those are some of the many things that I think are different about being a media company versus being independent on YouTube how did you vet the idea for the show like did you speak to people uh 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 like you are changing careers yeah well yes and no I was I was changing the um 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 I had been making videos for a long time before I launched the YouTube channel and i' been making videos on YouTube for a long time and like figuring out what worked and having incredible story editors and peers zip box who were teaching me how to do this thing y um and so what really changed was and I think you're your question is like why did you have confidence that this show was what you should leave for or 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 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 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 oh I I was thinking about it for months and months I had lots of Doubt uh and talked to all of the people in my life if you were to have coffee with me or dinner I I would have talked your ear off about this idea um 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 to 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 um 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 um or I would notice the my my own pressure on myself expecting what the audience would want to put a more negative frame on the story that I was writing and I don't want to imply that anyone was doing that to me this is a like prediction that I had about what people wanted um and you're right it it was very negative um I think the biggest bias in news media is not left or right it's negativity and catastrophe um 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 um and often what they want is the scary thing um and that's that's hard for me because that that also puts the responsibility on me as a news consumer um and I wanted to make something that helped deal with that you had a really interesting term in your uh in your launch video your first video which was lucrative fearmongering yeah like there's a lot of lucrative fearmongering out there right now and like your show is kind of in opposition to it or like it 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 uh you know optimized and incentivized for click-through rate across everything every type of of whether it's a YouTube video a podcast or a a news article like we are all optimizing for clickthrough rate and 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 I think there are a couple things going on I think the first is that um media companies are full of at will employees that make great work in lock step and contribute as a whole to a great brand which I think box is and that was my experience at box um I think that there's one of the wonderful things about dependent journalism and the sort of rise in opportunities for journalists is that you get these kind of weird looking flowers um 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 a company that is all making things in lock step and I felt um 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 um be a little bit more pointed than I might be otherwise and experiment uh 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 immediate company and then the question is why not um I don't think media I I thought um and I do think that there are people working on this I think Johnny and is 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 um 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 P you're going to make Revenue in some Revenue share um and you're going to make something that is tonally very different from what we're making um I just don't think I mean I I might have taken that offer but I don't I wasn't surprised that a media company didn't want to offer that yeah I find it interesting because I think like obviously we've seen the dramatic kind of fall of a lot of media companies right the buzz feeds the The Vices of the world those like 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 um and 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 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 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 um like where where do those people go um who are just excellent at making videos and I I don't know the answer and I I'm curious about like the future of media companies as it pertains to to YouTube creators I think that could 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 um and then share some kind of infrastructure whether it's you know um sourcing ad deals or you know legal review or you know even like on the creative back end some kind of editing help like there's so many infrastructure things that are at a media company that are unbelievably great um even 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 I like I mean that's why it's been so important to me to build a team around huge of true um 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 um and I think part of that is maybe just an acknowledgement of the way that that media is working now maybe maybe it's just growing pains maybe it's turning a big ship um or maybe it's lots of things I don't understand about the way that a media company works and makes money and you know um I'm sure there are lots of good reasons why they don't want individual YouTubers going out there and um you know representing their RP and building their own thing and owning it um 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 how did you actually make that jump several backdoor slides um 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 ESP Nation The Verge um and most of the infrastructure for marketing but also even development at the time was in the uh VOX media over umbrella um and I was really excited about Vox specifically so I was working for VOX media I really wanted to work for Vox um there was a person who came in uh around the same time time as me Andrew GIS who was uh 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 um and I really wanted to work for him so the first thing that I did was um 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 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 like oh you've been like oh could you help with this or like I sort of became the go-to person within box media for some of these things um and then oh like it would be great to have a more Junior person on the business team within box like oh maybe that could be you and then I kind of moved in underneath Andrew working on the business team of box which was kind of my first big thing but at that point I I think that I want wanted to be helping run media companies I think that my goal was to be on the business side of box um 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 um and I began a lot of my job under Andrew on the business team um 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 box ended up making um and the first I remember um we wrote the pitch I was kind of like 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 green lit the show which was a huge moment I mean this was when media companies were like 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 um and it was so exciting this was like the vi moment of my career on the business side and for like 10 seconds I was happy and then immediately I was very sad and I was like what like why why do I feel like this and it was because it was the show that I had persuaded myself was that that I was creatively helping with um was immediately going to be given to people who actually had a job of doing video journalism and actually could produce video and we're g to go make the show and I didn't there was no 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 um and learned how to edit and animate in Premiere Pro and after effects um and I began um first with rack which was a fashion vertical within Vox and then within uh Vox itself began to make videos like nights and weekends on the side um 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 like showing them the terrible anim that I Wasing and they were giving me advice and all that Dynamic um and uh eventually so I I started making videos for Vox and some of my very first videos were published when I was still technically on this like development team um and everybody was sort of pretending like that wasn't happening yeah um but I was on a list serve of like Dropbox links and 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 boss 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 list serve that said hey the second season of explained has come around um if the format of the show was that there were 20 episodes each with different topics and he said if you pitch an idea that ends up getting green lit by Netflix you can produ 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 this show separately um and 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 app box um but technically I had gotten 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 green lit 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 I meant all of these professional video journalists who are working on box 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 at Netflix it's a great episode also I've seen that episode it's phenomenal 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 that's a really cool story thank you and that was like kind of like backward yeah 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 sabatical 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 um so in this concept of like producing videos pitching ideas um 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 um you know deal with on a day-to-day basis when 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 pitched that video at Vox would it be green L 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 um the first time I really felt this way was um both fertility topics um but the first episode that I made about this General topic area was actually artificial WBS and I had seen a bunch of chatter about this on Twitter um about artificial wombs and the scary future of artificial wombs and um 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 um but it it potentially cuts off uh 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 um 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 overy not two like there 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 um had a sort of personal evolution in how I was thinking about this and if I had been in a media company I don't think that I would have included any of that like it might have 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 wounds 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 and 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 um could help explain something by being a human being on camera um comb think YouTube it was very voggy in 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 um it seems like this deserves a lot more research and a lot more attention and like there are people working on technologies that can make it easier to 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 uh on other platforms but 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 um usefulness to the Vlog so that's my best example of something that like I'm really proud of that I now feel like I can do that is using my own life and wellbeing to tell a story is that 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 do like um I don't want to I haven't been at box sure for in a while now um so you know I I can't speak to how this works internally anymore um but they they do do this I mean Dylan Matthews uh who's a journalist at Vox G donated an organ to a stranger and he walked through the entire process of doing that and is 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 um has second order effects that save a surprisingly large number of lives um and I was just so inspired by that I thought it was amazing um and also I think it's rare at media companies I 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'sing your own personal life but is actually like you telling the story the way that you want all 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 um primarily because of the term journalism I I've never really in the modern era of like Creator the term journalism always confused me con confuses me presently the the term like videojournalist 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 of 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 unbias opinions is my assumption when it comes to journalism and then I watch you know a a sponsored short of yours or a short form piece on the new Dell you know laptop yeah and I'm like oh but that's a bias 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 advertis in in journalism I think it's a good question and it's something I think about a lot um before I started taking any advertising I did a kind of fake ad read yeah uh in one of the episodes very early episodes of huge um 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 media companies make different choices about that but that's a format where many journalist hsts read their own ads um 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 that 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 um 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 um it's marked you should know a couple things about what's happening in that moment number one um 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 um so 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'm I haven't taken an alcohol sponsor but in theory I would take a sponsor that I you know I don't use their product um but I would not say this alcohol is great I drink it and I like how it tastes um cuz that's not true and also I say that I don't drink alcohol and like that would just not make sense for me um but I would totally say uh this is wine of the month my mom um 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 and 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 um but that I'm saying things that I know to be true um and 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 um so when something is sponsored and is posted on Instagram or is within a huge of 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 um 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 when I was working on vox's business team yeah when we were doing Vox continues to do editorial sponsorships to publish videos on vox's channel that are marked as ads I mean these are all media companies deal with these Dynamics how much is it you know how much do they abide by those two standards um 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 um I think that what I'm doing is journalism I am looking deeply at a topic and then exploring I 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 you know 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 you know why people are concerned about encryption here's the debate about that here's what people think is going to happen there etc etc and the goal of huge if true is to also paint a picture pict 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 and 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 um and can have that conversation um 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 um and I think it is an incredibly important function that journalism has always played in society um 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 like that's the whole project that we're all in together and I 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 um and I 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 of 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 I 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 trait but I 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 when 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 makes a show called huge if true here's the channel yeah um and there are lots of rules I mean I don't let people see the story before it goes out um 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 box I get like it's it's interesting I think there's a lot of people who refer to us as journalists m 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 uh than I am journalist I 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 oh 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 and our industry right like that is something with the publish press that we have we have a show where we talk about what's going on like I can totally understand that position that someone would take of like you are a reporter do you consider yourself an educator is what what are the words that you like yeah I think educator is is is part of it but like you know I think there's also discomfort of like I set out you know 13 years ago on this path to become a filmmaker and that that has taken twists and turns and like there's been a lot of opportunities to film make um but like Landing in this position was just kind of unexpected and just through the the the twist 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 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 yeah same same yeah same it's interesting that that reads is 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 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 I know that other people know those rules and so I accept the terms of the agreement um 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 um and that means that I issue Corrections when I get things wrong which happens like there you 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 you know issue a correction I try to you know add a comment and pin it I that's part of the practice of Journalism um another part of the practice of Journalism is these rules where you know if there there are expectations about when someone talks to me what what they're allowing me to do with that information is it on background is it off the Record is it on the record um 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 um 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 um and so I also wanted to try best to continue to maintain that title and also those rules because I 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 I 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 um and also you know I look around and I see a lot of YouTubers doing incredible education about the world um at the Quality or higher than I am and I consider themel I consider their work part of my diet and I consider themselves serving the function of Journalism like I 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 um and it comes with a credential that allows you to do certain things the United States is not like that um 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 and 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 um 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 uh 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 yeah I would assume I'm curious like your experience you've produced for Netflix before you've 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 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 um and I would ask why should I do this um 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 um Netflix's earnings calls are all about it's us on YouTube it's us and YouTube but we have good stuff and they have videos like there is a dynamic at play here um 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 um and we can support ourselves we can support for people we can make good quality work there is no specific thing that I'm itching for that I couldn't make right now that requires a lot of money like my my show is made by individual people whose livelihoods I need to support and that's a big responsibility um it also doesn't come with like huge Productions like you know Mark for example U Mark Rober yeah um and so that means that I'm not like itching for a budget to come in ahead of when I need to make something um and also while I think that we are now less watched than you could be if you made a show on Netflix um 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 those people in exactly the way that I want to reach them so 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 graders I have a lot of fun in these calls um 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 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 then you could make in another context if that mattered to you um but the the second thing I would talk about is like thinking about the world of the huge audience as a pyramid I think every Creator should think about Their audience as a pyramid like the base of your pyramid matters a lot which is going to be your core audience um for us that's like aspiring creators right that is the base of our pyramid there like a lot of people who 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 and 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 uh meta people at snap people at YouTube like people who work in and around the Creator industry um 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 you're all 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 and would that unlock a door for you that you're interested in and so I would 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 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 and that 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 I went independent and was able to get a Netflix show is that that like a validation moment for you I 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 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 like 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 um and in some ways I'm definitely losing out um and in other ways I only have so much Creative Energy of me and my team um 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 um and I think that uh Focus has been my friend um this is advice that I got from Marquez when 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 um and so for me a lot of it is what is the what is the reason why I would take any amount of energy away from from this thing um 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 Etc um would be something creatively that I can't make by myself or even with this small team um one of the things that I have in mind is uh I deeply love science fiction I read and watch a lot of Science Fiction there's a joke with my husband and with my friends that like I will watch anything sci-fi um and I would love to make something that is near future science fiction um based on the Deep research that I'm doing four different episodes of huge if true um maybe it's an anthology series maybe it's a miniseries but like 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 um 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 um and so you could meet the same goal that I have with hug GI true if I keep consistent on this one thing that I want to do while I'm alive um 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 um there are so many people that know this so well um I would love to work with people on how to do that not saying right now I have a lot to do right now but um 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 all of those might be reasons to work out another way of making stuff that is not just yeah make stuff sell ads make more stuff yeah that feels like an idea for a Netflix and not necessarily A YouTube 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 like sub divide a channel that doesn't require starting from scratch like shorts are are just new within the last couple years like what is YouTube look like in five I have no idea that's the next challenge I and then maybe there's Capital like I'm so um excited about what the future of this whole thing we're doing looks like um that I don't even want to assume that it wouldn't work in 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 on you that's like a huge iftr episode that we should make yes exactly it's just so on brand for you to be optimistic about that yeah I'm not um I'm not like as a human always like this I have pessimism in many ways I wanted to ask you about your pessimism and like where where it is in in Tech or just also if you are generally optimistic about AI and uh our relationship to it as we are progressing towards a gii and and like AI that can create its own Ai and and and potentially be more intelligent than we are yeah uh like does that all make you is that optimistic for you I'm so confused about what the near future might look like um that I don't even know where we're trying to go um and I think part of the exercise of hugi true is like who has a vision in mind of the house at the end of the forest that I like and how are we going to get there and what are the 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 steady climb toward betterness I think that it it has problems every freaking step of the way and somebody has to solve them but you you 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 like is there a role for pessimism yeah in your journey I think there's a role for cynicism I think like I don't think I think I'm a pretty I think I have a pretty high happiness set point like 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 I don't know if I'm a inherently optimistic person um 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 um 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 way like sometimes I so on the topic of like incentives what are your incentives to 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 uh 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 um and also I think it is really really psychologically helpful to have a mission that is bigger than you and it's not about you and is um I think it's helpful to have a team around you that like obviously cares about you but doesn't but cares much more about the mission of the show than they care about boosting you individually I think that's really healthy um and I also genuinely believe in the ability whether from me or from someone else um 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 um and I I think that the best way to do that is for millions of people to see it and 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 um 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 like we have an outside shot at doing that um and so making a show big enough to actually earn that like 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 um and that helps keep the ship moving I agree that that's really important to have that filter like a mission filter because otherwise like as you start gaining traction you're just in what I call Opportunity overload yeah like every day in your figure out there's something interesting yeah 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 you have to have a filter to go through uh 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 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 uh to you know across the 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 it's it's hard to do do you have a team around you that supports you with that like are you represented by an agent or manager or is it mostly your own decision making um both uh I have a wonderful team of Agents I'm with WME um I signed with them before I left Vox actually um interesting wait so you had an agent while you were at Vox yes and did your agent negotiate your contract at Vox no uh it was I was an atwi 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 so 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 uhx shows box shows um and everyone would come with like a different you know uh if you're working on something they want to know you're G to be there for the next X amount of time and you're going to you know work on the these terms Etc um and at a certain point you know when you're going through things like that like 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 like they're just to your point about incentives like different incentives and those negotiations that are get pretty strong um I 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 um I remember saying to them uh why do you want to sign with me like I want you on my team for any future negotiations like this but like I'm not planning on leaving box anytime soon and they kind of said okay yeah sure sure um and they never pressured me at all um and now they help with all things sponsorships all things speaking um and then from in terms of what we take and what you know how many and when and what sto I mean stories are a totally separate editorial thing um but that's been great yeah so I have an agent and I have an entertainment lawyer and both help cool make the whole thing it's very similar to our setup we we're with the UTA with with an agent then we have an entertainment lawyer actually think that's it's a really nice mix I think a lot of people ask us about that mix and like how they should think about representation um so yeah I I think it's a great mix I do think it's like a very specific you know you have to uh have a very specific view of how your business is run to do that mix I think some people need managers yeah you know some people might not need the agent and they want to do all the sourcing of of deals or 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 uh 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 so like there's a very different uh perspective on like when you have overhead right they bring you a deal and they take 10% of the deal but then you also have cost of you know all your your staff and your production and you're doing that's top of that so I'm always curious about like where the future of representation goes in our world and like how many people are going to hire inhouse versus continuing to work with uh representation yeah but today it's been like a great structure for us I know a couple of teams that do that um and I think that structure is super interesting and makes a ton of sense as you scale yeah for me right now um number one I'm not sure that I could do that but number two um it's really helpful to have someone who knows what everybody else is doing 100% And so they give advice on things that I've never even thought about um and that can only really happen I 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 entertainment lawyer is like an entertainment lawyer is a shared resource much like the legal team at VOX media was among many different people um and that's great that means that like that person knows what standard and like has your you know they have their eyes on so many different types of deals that are like every deal you do is not NE like a Brand New Concept to that yeah 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 on to like what it was 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 um I was on the business team at Vox and I was a video producer then I was you know on some streaming shows then 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 um and I didn't know what it was before and now I do and I just want to focus on this um and that feels unbelievably great like 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 um 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 I do see like within that framework um or like along that road maybe if I get there um but this is the only Road I want to go down that's cool that's so exciting that feels so new yeah it's the best that's a really great feeling where does your you know personal validation come from and there things that as you look at the next year or or five years that you're like oh that'll feel really good if that happens or is it purely just like the the steady growth of this show it's mostly that um finding this and just having this grow in the way that it has um feels like something I never expected um and in my this dreams I would have a production company that makes huge if true that could could be maybe um a bunch of different things that are all within that brand um so there could be a podcast and there could be a newsletter and there could be etc etc um 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 the things are underneath that another version of that is that the mission continues in lots of different ways so I have no idea if this idea about like huge of true the Sci-Fi series is actually huge of 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 um 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 that's a vision of the wildest dream that I have of what this would look like I 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 like I get so excited about adding to the house of Brands and then I generally regret it or I'm like this there's too many Brands yeah yeah and what that means just to be clear is um the difference between having lots of um things that all are under one broad IP um I don't know you guys know this just talking out loud um versus having something that is sharing infrastructure but has different brands so I would say VOX media was somewhat of a mix VOX media had everything lad up to VOX media but was a house of brands in the sense that there was spnation and there was The Verge and there was curbed um and there was Vox and that is really advantageous in some ways it means that you can like get deep in a specific community and be part of that community and have a different tone in that way um but also means that um number one you might have different missions associated with those different brands um and number two people might not associate at all with the same brand and the same Mission um I've I'm more interested in the latter um 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 whatever that would be a house of Brands I think that's awesome yeah um but I want to build this thing so one one of my favorite things about your YouTube channel is a playlist called videos I admire I forgot that was public which was a public playlist and I went through it and I was like was really excited about some of the similarities uh 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 um I really didn't remember that that was public uh but I was curious like if you were to add to that playlist today what are YouTube videos or YouTubers that you admire well I I do think I keep adding to it so I guess I guess anyone can just go check um but some that come to mind recently are um uh Johnny Harris just had a video where he compared um Lifestyles at different income levels um and tried to help people understand like what buying power looks like and the rise in um 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 yet is building every single time I watch her Channel religiously um I love Michelle's Channel yeah every single episode I think is just like so well-crafted and incredible um Michelle car's Michelle car yeah um it's amazing that she can stand as just Michelle yeah yeah in the YouTube conversation I know you know her so now I've just forgotten that we're talking about it's just amazing like that's like the singular nature of that is so cool I think you have that too it's like we can be in a YouTube conversation be like Cleo's show is great that's like that's like really cool Mark rer made a video about octopuses I think is octopi that I think is I think it's technically both maybe um that was just such a good explainer of a weird kind of intelligence that I thought was just so good um Marquez has been doing uh explainers recently he did one on Formula 1 that I thought uh I'm very interested in Formula One so I thought that was great um have you ever seen a channel I think it's called epic Spaceman yes the craziest 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 you know like just anything you could imagine uh it's incredible um well Cleo thank you so much thanks for hanging out with us um I'm really excited to see what you do next I'm 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 were making I was like oh boy this is this is like a rocket ship uh and 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 uh off for coming on yeah [Music] m