Johnny Harris Reveals How He Writes YouTube Videos

Johnny Harris is one of the best storytellers on YouTube the thing about him is he can make any story go viral let's talk about breakfast lottery tickets extra virgin olive oil and what I wanted to know in this episode is how does he think about making these videos that are both beautiful and popular like how do you do both of those things and we went through all the writing the Drafting and the editing but it wasn't just words it was images it was sound it was absolutely every part of the creative process we broke it down and we said what exactly do you do and I promise you by the end of this video you're going to be a better visual

Storyteller tell me this what does it take to make a video like from A to Z how does this get done how long does it take and what are the the core pillars it's about a four month process wow for each video it starts with sometimes it's a story day is and I will like roll our sleeves up and kind of like look at story pitches and ideas that we've been uh taking notes on for a long time and and then it goes into a GRE light I Greenlight it on on on a channel in slack I say it's greenlit and often I deliver a a reporting brief this is what I want to know about this thing I did this last night on an airplane a reporting brief about El Chapo's prison escape how cool like like I I want to know everything about this tunnels and all of it and I did a tiny like a little Google to be like what's interesting about this and then ask a million questions and then that goes to a researcher researcher spends 3 to four

week weeks becoming an expert in that topic surfacing visuals building out what we call an info do which is like a 60 to 80 page digest of research that comes to me I process it in my brain I wrestle with it and I start to curate and outline and think about it as a story sometimes that comes with some additional research and Reporting whatever an expert interview or two with me and then scripting week happens and scripting week is usually three to four dedicated days of Hardcore writing and it is me in a room completely engrossed in the story writing and Visually directing and art directing doing all the that stuff that we've been looking at and after those 3 to four days there is um a lot of visual assets that need to be gathered there's a lot of factchecking that needs to happen sometimes there's some additional reporting needs to happen but then it goes off into post-production there's a

production kickoff where I translate the vision to a a a leader in our post-production team they grab that vision and they carry it through I film it the footage goes off and then they start to build out the postproduction team starts to build out everything that was put on that piece of paper and they and then Cuts start to come in it starts with a a shame cut which is just a radio edit an assembly with some very crude visuals and then it goes into a rough cut it goes into a fine cut it goes into a fine two uh it goes into an audio lock a picture lock and each of those we are leaving 150 notes or whatever you know little micro this and that Google Docs frame frame IO yeah it thumbnail starts to get developed within that at some point and the a sponsorship we do an ad read and that gets slotted in again that's a well oiled machine that just works and it's all slotted in and plotted you know 6 months in advance and

then the video goes live and people hopefully watch it and then you do that 30 times a year yeah yeah so my the way that looks for me I don't ever see any of that I see what's on my calendar as the work block for scripting this we whatever this week is and when you are the most frustrated in your writing you're stuck you're pissed off whatever it is what usually goes wrong often times I get really pissed off and scared and bummed when I get into a story and it's day two or day three and I still feel like I don't really get it I don't fully get I haven't cracked the like satisfying explanation or thing and I think uh you know I I should report on this more and I start to I start to question everything I start to be like w why am I so why do we make so many videos and I start to Grumble and I think like why should just like do this all my it's it's bad it's like cuz I cuz I know that like I have to move on yeah

the constraint is very powerful because it forces me to be laser focused and I'm very prolific because of it this the constraint of the constraint of the four days but it it can have these sort of backfiring effects if I if I don't feel like I have a grasp on it now we now have flexibility within the system where like things can move and change if I need that more time we don't make you know 48 videos a year anymore we make 30 and now there's some flexibility and so some weeks are longer and I'm able to push it and that's nice that I've had to do that a couple times this year already and so that's sort of relieved that frustration okay so your

entire life is four day blocks you do four days of this four days of this four days of this and you're just constantly going there's no breaks in the middle you just go go go there I mean there there are breaks there's vacation there's spring break with my kids the summer we usually take a big break like there's you know like in December we usually take 3 weeks off like there are big periods of rest and then during the production cycle we've experimented with Sprint Sprint Sprint take like a couple weeks of chill uh lately we've been experimenting with like three weeks of writing blocks and then one week of like just catch up and whatever and and that will sometimes get eaten up or flexed into or whatever so we're experimenting with now that we make fewer videos with ways of making it sustainable mhm but there was a year there when we were making four videos a month where it was it was three-day

blocks back then actually it was like three-day Sprints and it was we were on the treadmill and boy we got good real fast constraints constraints sharpen you and like so much of our skill as a team is because we we have that those constraints and that urgency we can't be precious and so the constraints are they've added way more value than they've they've created frustration easily when you're on the road how you taking notes and basically capturing all of your thoughts I'm talking to my phone really I'm talking to my phone for minutes in minutes and I'm talking to transcription and there are so many times when I'm thinking and I'm kind of looking up and I'm talking to my phone and I realize that like it didn't I didn't press the microphone button um and so I I do it again but that is my like way of communicating instead of doing this I am transcribing on like a note on like an apple Notes app and I am

reflecting I am especially with like complicated human stories every interview I have changes my mind and so it's this it's this Whiplash of like I think this is the story but then I have this interview and that muddies the water and I have to change it that doesn't happen as much when I'm writing and researching for my computer you know but like when you're in the field talking to humans everything is chaos and to into something meaningful which always leaves so much complexity on the ground and so my notes are often just a sort of like chaotic like wrestling with like what do I want to say about this and at what point do you start thinking to yourself I want to weave this into a narrative is it when you get home is it when you're on the road that's changed a lot over the years I started when I first started going into the field I I did the kind of classic documentarian ethic of like show up and let the story

come to you yeah and part of that was just like lack of preparation and understanding but it actually was really useful and I I would sort of let the story come to me and I would do a lot of story work in the edit and then as I professionalized and like borders Vox borders which was like my big series Vox like I started to become much more ambitious with what I wanted it to be and so I would prepro the hell out of every story I would like I'm going to start with this and we're going to do this ambitious shot I'm going to do this drone shot and then I need to get a sound bite of this and I would start to engineer and that had a lot of benefits from a production perspective and from like a cinematography I got way better at getting like crazy cool shots in the field but I started to over engineer and I think you know three or four years into that I felt like I was over engineering and shoehorning the story

into like my scaffold and so now I'm in this I'm the pendulum is swinging back now I'm going to Finland in a couple weeks weeks and I'm intentionally just not not like deciding what I want to say or even a framing or even anything I'm just going to go and I have stuff lined up but the access is the story I'm going to train with the Finnish Army and I'm going into these bunkers I'm going to the Russian border and I'm just going like Let It Flow and then I'm going to decide what I

want to say and how much research are you doing in advance you like a show up in Finland let's see what's going on are you reading books about Finland now when I went to Saudi Arabia to look at their big futuristic city project um I did read a lot cuz I didn't have a strong grounding in the history of Saudi Arabia so I read a couple of books talked to a couple of experts and like got grounded but I didn't do any storytelling work again that's a total like knowledge is one thing storytelling is the curation of chaotic information about the world into a very firm linear presentation and and I didn't do any of that for Saudi Arabia but Finland I know a lot about what's going on up there and so I I I'm I'm I'm kind of not int I'm intentionally not going too deep so tell me this with Saudi Arabia that was a thumbnail you designed in advance right

yes so this was that was a headline you designed in advance right yep and and I still and I still do this even when I'm open-minded about what the story is going to be the marketing which is what this is this is why should you click is defined early on because on YouTube and in any sort of market for attention which is everything um you have to decide like okay I want to make this piece but like why is someone going to click it I can figure out why they should watch 30 minutes of it but why are they going to click it and that's what this is I knew that what would bring them in is why is Saudi Arabia building a futuristic city in the desert that's a straight line that's that is a straight line look at it and it's like that that I knew that that was the promise that was a clear promise the storytelling is a complicated thing this is not a complicated thing this is like a this is the Billboard this is the packaging I

usually will do two or three different packagings when I'm deciding what story to do and be like does this have legs for to be clickable but that doesn't Define the story it just defines kind of one thing that I know I'm going to answer a promise I know I'm going to answer and how do you think about that promise so you have right here why Saudi Arabia is building A1 trillion dollar City in the desert like is that a I need to answer this in the first 10 seconds I need to answer this in the first 1 minute I need to show somebody I want to answer it in the video actually there's a lot of reasons the whole video is an answer to this question how do you think about if this is a promise to answer the question how do you think about the payoff MH of that question there's two answers to that one is the the the more controversial answer and the other is is the more straightforward one the controversial

answer is I kind of believe that if I can get some someone to click that I can I can um convince them to brought in their curiosity to a billion other things that they didn't even realize they were curious about and that this is just the entry point this is just the click in because it's big and Sensational and accessible but really you're going to start to learn about resource countries and the resource curse and roner states and all these economics and future proof in your city and the history of oil and that yes you will get this answer but you will have forgotten that that's why you clicked it in the first place because you will be let into this much bigger world so that's kind of the like I I I I'm folding in the vegetables and that's that's a major goal for me is like making people feel enthusiasm and curiosity about something they didn't know that they were curious about the other one is I still do need

to satisfyingly answer the question for those who who don't have that first experience and um I don't answer it in the first 10 seconds or the first minute but by the end of the video I have to what I do have to do is promise that I'm going to answer it and and I have to reinforce the promise of the thumbnail within the first minute I would say and

then tell me this when you're on the road what parts of I'm sure it changes from video to video but what parts of what you're doing is scripted versus unscripted so you're doing uh an episode where you're in Finland Russia and there's obviously going to be field things that you record hey you know I'm right here let me just tell you about what I'm experiencing right now what I'm seeing check this out like I'm right here with you but then there's other parts maybe in the intro somewhere else where I can tell the writing is really well thought out the audio quality is supreme so how do you think about the balance between those two again that's that is a Ever Changing balance uh 2018 was the year that was the height of my sort of over engineering it was in Hong Kong before that I would always do vo and I always write it of after but by then I had made this goal of recording all of the explanations all of the dates and

facts and the whole narrative well told on camera while I was in Hong Kong and back then I was shooting on an osmo like like this like quirky little gimbal camera and I did it and it was a total nightmare because I got all the shots and the whole thing is vlogged you know it's like a vlog explainer it's great but I wasn't able to mold and wrestle with the story which like I find a lot of value

in that now so I'm moving really strongly away from the over-engineered script when I'm on the ground and moving more towards when I'm on the ground it's about reacting and experiencing it's experiential storytelling character interactions experiences and then when I get back and I've really let it settle and I've wrestled then I write the pros word for word and I go into the vo booth and I say the words to stitch the things together to construct the explanation in an elegant way way to not have the pressure to do that when I'm on the ground cuz what what ended up happening when I'm on the ground is I'm thinking more about where am I going to go do a standup meaning like a I'm going to set the camera up and say my lines and how am I going to get the lines I'm going to do lots of takes and it ends up taking away from my ability to just be there which is incredibly valuable I'm realizing more and more I want to tell

you about the only app that I use to read articles and it's called reader so tell me if this sounds familiar you read something brilliant like an amazing quote the perfect article but then one day you go back you're looking to find it and it's just gone you can't find the thing that used to drive me crazy but then I found this app called reader and it's become the backup system for my brain here's how it works so whenever I'm on my phone I'm on my computer I'll come across a new article and what I do is I just toss it into reader and then whenever I'm ready to read I can find all the articles pre-downloaded with no ads and no clutter but here's the kicker every time I highlight something reader automatically saves it for me so then if I'm writing and I need that perfect quote that perfect example it's just right there waiting for me and because that I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore

and that means that I can focus on writing reader is the sponsor of today's episode and look I got to love a product in order to promote it and I can tell you that I use reader every single day so this what I did dip I called up the CEO and I said yo will you give how I write listeners 60 days free and he said sure they got a sign up though at read wise. David Perell and there's a link in the description below all right back to

the episode I want to show you this video about the Mormons and how we design it on paper how we build the video on paper where not only the writing happens but the visual Direction so after 6 weeks of re research from a research producer I'm given a big info do and I start to write and I start to think about story and I start to think about visuals and as I'm writing I am writing words and then I'm immediately going over to the right column and I am I am coordinating choreographing visuals that will play that will dance with the pros that that is the only way I know do I've never I've never been a text writer I've always been someone who writes for motion on a screen and so those to me are they are one in the same so every sentence or two has a new row in this script and it gets its own specific Direction This is a history video I not all my videos are history videos this one the writing has a backbone inherently which

takes away a huge question from the beginning is like what is going to be the the order of the information when it's a history and it's chronological iCal experience I know where I start and I know where I end the puzzle turns into what am I curating and how am I explaining it in a new way so that's that's sort of a first important thing not every story has that backbone pre-baked for you right when it's a history video that's like it takes the pressure off in a in a big way and maybe a third of my videos are kind of history videos that have a really clean chronology and that's whenever it's a history video I'm like ah I don't have to wrestle with a with a structure thank God you know fighting structure is brutal yeah you know the first line is always the the tricky one um I like first lines that drop you into action that enliven the viewers kind of Senses with a surprising usually a surprising action

or Visual and often times that starts with look at this it's like look at this map or whatever and it immediately engages the viewer to say like do something in this case I start with it started with the murder of their prophet in Illinois to me that's like a a line that wakes you up a little bit it started with a murder like boom I'm not saying like I want to tell you the story of the Mormons as they moved I don't want to do like a classical kind of like tell them what you're going to tell them you start with action and you throw people into action to me that's like a way to sort of engage from the beginning in the sound you have written gunshot epic suspensful yes slow-mo I wanted this to be emotional and that's the other thing is I think you can drop someone in immediately to a an emotional tone that says like oh we're going like we're doing this like we are in something already we're not ramping up

to it other times I like to ramp up but but there is something about this cold open just hit them with emotion tone action Visual and what we're looking at on the screen here is left side is the writing what you're going to say yep and right side is the feeling in the visuals of what's going on yes and I have all these color codes when it's when it is red like this it is a visual asset that needs to be collected so I have a macro on my computer when I'm writing and I press alt a and it it makes it bold it turns it red and it turns it into a checkbox and that happens all in 0.01 seconds yeah and and then I write it so when I'm writing I am coding all of these color codes in with without ever pressing a mouse and that allows me to kind of edit in my mind so we can talk about that more later Joseph Smith the leader of 26,000 Mormons father of 14 children husband to 40 wives I like the music of that

sentence it it kind of has a a rhythm to it yeah but it also hits you with okay and the original didn't have husband to 40 wives the original was just leader of 26 uh thousand Mormons fathered of 14 children and I sort of contemplated do I want to say husband to 40 wives because it's a it's a very known sort of anti-mormon Trope to purely focus on polygamy and what I didn't want to do is immediately turn off the believing viewers the Mormons who are watching this because they're so used to just being immune to like oh this is an anti- thing about polygamy so I I intentionally and this goes down to a big philosophy of mine of I'm always empathizing with the viewer I'm thinking who's watching this and what is happening in their minds as this information hits them that is the the most important sensibility for what I do and so I wrestled do I include the 40 wives or not and I was thinking only of

this really small subsection of the audience and I thought no I I'm actually going to include this because most of the audience who's watching will find that fascinating and that will be intriguing and it will hook them so I'm going to include it that's that's emblematic of a lot of wrestling I do of what is the audience going to think and every word is thought through in that way we keep going the prophet s Revelator was dead and the Mormons were under attack so they fled I'm a big believer in what Steph Pinker who is this Harvard cognitive linguist who I love um has surfaced as classical style classic style which is an obsessive focus on active language visual active language we can get so caught up in ideas and Concepts when we write and for me the way that people actually want to be communicated to is with very clear who did what to whom what happened what is the who who is acting and what are they acting towards

what are they doing and so I'll often say things like they fled instead of leading to the migration of 6,000 Mormons to you know the West United States like the migration of is a concept they fled is an action it is people doing a thing and our brains can see that they can see people fleeing yeah you know it's it's a totally different way of of of writing and it's often more plain and simple but it hits it hits our visual brain Stephen pinker's got this great book sense of style that where he unpacks this and it it is my entire Bible of writing so who did what to whom and active yeah there's an agent there is a there in in syntax jargon it's like there is an agent who is acting who is verbing something yeah instead of a a noun a concept that is like you know like globalization it's like no we now send Coca-Cola to Thailand like that's globalization right but people say globalization and that's vague and it's

like well what's globalization it's America sending uh Ford to Japan yeah you know it's it's a it's an agent doing a thing that we can see so that's a core tenant throughout all writing for me so the story is these Mormons leave and they go to what was Mexico yeah right it was Mexico at the time to escape the federal government and immediately I think in terms of characters and on on the map you will see that I build two icons I often do these these little oxyon that are icons one is the Mormons and they're in Mexico and one is the federal government and they're over in the east of the United States and there spatial relationship between them they're far away from each other but they're now both agents they both act and move and do things and have motives this becomes the basis the stage that we can tell a story because again classic style like people act they they they move forward in space and time so I've built this

section where I say the Mormons knew the US was coming and they were worried they needed to keep the federal government from taking over this land shutting down their spiritual government and once again soiling their vision and while that is happening we are looking at a map that is the big federal government

that is slowly moving West and the little Mormons sitting there in their little high desert and there's tension in that and and that immediately the the viewer I think I hope is going oh here they come there there's anticipation in the federal government moving to them and and we know their motives I call this loading up the icon with motives wait what does that mean we see this little icon called the Mormons and it represents this community and I'm going to load them up with motivation and intentions and worry I'm basically going to tell the viewer this is their agenda this is what they need and then I'm going to load up the federal government with intention and motivation and motion and now the stage is set the viewer can say okay the Mormons are scared of the federal government and they want to make sure they don't shut down their spiritual vision the federal government is set on expanding there's tension here

and and over time this this process unfolds where the big federal government slowly starts to move west and the scar we know that the Mormons are scared and we can feel that now because we've set we've loaded each of these up with motivation and connection does that make sense yeah Okay so we've we've set the stage both the icons are loaded up they moved quickly to ask for their own State telling the government hey you know what we didn't really like so I do this this thing here where I I take the icon and I give it dialogue and it's very reductionist simplistic dialogue that captures big complicated events so I I'm saying that the Mormons are saying this hey we know you didn't like us settling in Missouri or Illinois but we're out here in the west and we've settled and developed all of this land in a really short time please let us have our own state so that we can practice our religion as we please so that's a

conversational modern-day language interpretation of what was really a four-year process of the Mormons lobbying for their own State and what I see that's going on here is a few things so my question is going to be how are you thinking about the relationship between what you write and then how you're thinking about the visuals you know it's sort of like a what came first type question but then the other thing that I'm seeing is Citation citation citation then you're writing and kind of dreaming up with the

end video is as you write and it's not this sequential thing it's actually crucial that both of these things are on the script at the exact absolutely I am writing a piece of Pros in the left and then I am pressing Tab and I'm going to the right and I am coding the visuals why do you use the word coding because it's not writing I'm not writing the visuals I am pressing all these buttons to make different colors and different indentations and I am thinking about animation and I'm and I'm actually saying oh the pre-m should be nested with like I'm an animator so I'm actually speaking to my future animator who doing this and directing how I think it could be created and then I am finding references visual references and I'm annotating them and as you can see in here this is me with screenshots annotating an old map so we're on this map and yeah I'm I'm basically creating the whole thing as a piece of visual

Direction and so yeah I call it coding because it feels it feels like coding I don't know I'm I'm visually directing but it the two dance together and they must dance together every word must pair with a a a motion or an action with in the animation so you write this and presumably you don't just go all right I'm done I'm going to record all this and and and get it going I would imagine there's people who look one of the big things I lost when I left an institution was having like an editor and a guide over me um my wife is who's also the the leader of the company and kind of the executive producer of all the things looks at scripts and gives me feedback on Flow Clarity like just story and she does that for all the channels that we have but we don't have a robust editorial and then tell me about the shame draft because I feel like that's when this kind of comes in so the shame draft is where we translate this script

onto a timeline it is all the voice so it's the left column completely articulated with on camera or voiceover and then it is screenshots of the right column happening in time so I say the word and we now can I can now watch it uh and I can see what I directed as it plays and there's music and it so I can actually watch it and we can actually give feedback on the flow of the video and the length and we can we can cut it down and it's it's one step and it does kind of change at that point but these grips are me really kind of letting the cement dry a little bit uh pretty pretty quickly um field pieces are a little bit more chaotic because there's more interviews and more moments but um but yeah it's it is a pretty intense process of trying to Envision what the final video is going to look like and trying to articulate it as best I can on paper yeah and one of the things that we can show is the

comments are hardcore on the right side like wow there's more words in comments than there are in the actual because the comments are our fact check so every assertion in every single video has a fact check this is why everything is green here every every assertion that was made before was red at first a red highlight but the moment it got fact checked it got a citation tag and if you click into a citation you see a little blurb that prove that checks the fact and then the sourcing of where it came from and some of these assertions have three or four fact checks from from academic articles from Census Data from whatever because this is the way we keep our facts really watertight and we didn't always have this process we we've had to learn the hard way that things can fall through the cracks when we're making so much and so so we we have a water type process now nice everything's fact checked and yeah it's a lot it's

it's it is and then we we published these as a source dock that people can go look and scrutinize our sources a lot of my videos history or explainer videos follow this very active Pros who did what to whom to move the story forward sometimes it happens with icons whatever but there's always a moment it's usually towards the end where I want to like be like all right we've we've gone through all the action let's like zoom out and reflect and like contemplate what this means and it usually comes with a more emotional tone and it comes with like a a contemplating kind of energy to it so so you get to this conclusion and the music will hit and kind of start to I call it a conclusion energy and I say today the descendants of those original pioneers live in Mormon communities along this Corridor that Brigham Young settled so you can tell it's less who did what to whom and it's more it's like the end of the movie kind of like the

the postcript that you see on the end of a documentary that kind of gives you the the update and then I get personal in this one because this one was personal I say my wife and I went to school right here in the heart of it in this beautiful Valley surrounded by these massive mountains feeling close to the specific sugarcoated version of this history that I was taught one thing I I like to do is weave in and unexpected praise to things that I'm criticizing H to to to show that I'm not just purely on a one-sided rant to condemn something that's just too easy and people are IM they're kind of tired of it so I could have easily just been like the Mormons and they brainwashed me and da D instead I say in a beautiful Valley surrounded by these massive mountains and that's authentic I loved that experience being in that in that beautiful Valley and yet in the same sentence the next Clause is feeling

close to the specific sugarcoated version of this history that I was taught that's a juxtaposition in one sentence beautiful Valley I was brainwashed all at life is complicated and in these contemplative sections I like to throw a little bit of a wrench in in kind of a one-sided interpretation or one-sided kind of analysis of what of what I experienced I say these stories of struggle and confli sacrifice in the name of your beliefs bravery in the face of persecution a work ethic and a discipline and an obedience that is deeply linked to exploitation and apocalyptic thinking exploitation of Mormon women and children and the native people whose land was stolen is helped me write this last section and really pushed me to say like hey don't lean too hard into apologizing for them like this is a pretty messed up history and you need to make sure that that is a part of this conclusion but again it's next to an

understanding that it has Beauty to it as well I'm wondering what your

Inspirations are for writing and writing style and just the vibe because as I see the way you're writing it really has the Cadence and the tenor of a speech much more than a book we saw that earlier with especially with the way that you were talking through the Rhythm but here you know you have parts of many Mormon's identities an identity that is inextricably linked and I think that's important for the kind of writing that you do because a lot of times people are watching the video while they're making dinner or something like that and you're writing as much for the ear as for the eye that's good that's interesting feedback I mean I don't think about it or analyze it I just know that I have only ever written for this format to say it I I was never a text writer I was always a video person I was always a visual person and and I'm also really dyslexic like I don't read on the page I listen to audiobooks I I dictate

to a phone I don't type you know whenever I can now was this dictated no I I write when I'm in this Zone I I can write and there's a million typos and whatever but like I write and I'm speaking it in my mind and I'm and I'm also visualizing it um so I think the the Pros probably does feel more verbal nice um that that is the end like I don't know what it would ever look like if I just wrote something that people read yeah you know I don't do that yeah which is like I don't know someday maybe I'll write a book or something and have to Grapple with that but like for now this is the format that I love for most of my career I made stuff on my own and it was all in my head and I would go out and film and write and edit and animate and so I never I didn't have to communicate to anyone what the vision was um and that was great like I just loved just sort of tinkering and but it was limiting I I could only do as much

as I could do now we have 25 people we have really talented editors and animators yeah how's the team structured it's it's mostly a production company it's editors animators um and then we have some a visual producer who kind of helps bridge the gap between pre-production and post-production and then we have a few pre-pro people researchers who who help surface information and then there's a business side a business operation which is um production coordination but also you know is then overseas the business side which we're trying to grow a little bit better but it's mostly a production company with technicians who are a lot of people like me they're self-taught kind of Scrappy resourceful like I don't hire from traditional TV it's people who can who are up for anything but now what I have to do is articulate and communicate what has always been in my head I've done that now for a few years

but what it looks like is this art ingredients uh page which every which is now a tab in Google Docs and this is just page one of like dozens um but the idea is that every single video has its own art direction that suits the story and so right here what what are we going to do with archive archival uh videos and photos well for the Stills we are going to use mysterious cryptic symbols we're going to frame our photos like this while I'm writing the story and something pops into my head I go over to the art ingredients I have in another Tab and I write notes what does your week actually look like in order to do this maybe we

talk about this later but I just writing writing WR I mean my entire world is is framed around a writing block from 9 to 2:00 p.m. or 9:00 a.m 9:00 a.m. to 2 p.m. that is my entire life no there's no meetings there's no slack there's no email there's no nothing between 9:00 and 2 p.m. usually three days a week sometimes four that is where it all gets done and those are sacred like the no one like that is where it all happens and so my entire world is just these writing blocks and they're very disciplined and they're very urgent and the whole system works if if I can hit those blocks and describe the vibe the space your mindset as you're doing I um am a little it's a little Voodoo magicky where like I wake up in the morning and I already know what the block is I've been thinking about the block of what I'm going to what I have to hit that day and I'm excited about it and I'm nervous and I my bell is kind of

churning I'm thinking like this morning I'm writing this video about income inequality over the decades it's like this big story whatever I was thinking about that last night I was thinking about when I woke up this morning I get ready and then as 9:00 comes I'm like I'm literally like ner it's like game day it's like I'm about to go out into the field and like I'm in the locker room yeah and there's a lot of coffee and there's a lot of like get ready and then I have to be at my desk and I have to like clear things off and I have to like take this little kind of 10-minute ramp up and then I jump in and there's music it's often sometimes it's like music that our composer makes and I just listen to his giant Bank of music that he makes for us which is amazing sometimes it's like synth wave mixes on YouTube like it's tons of music and it's very wired in locked in obsessive I think I'm people tell me I'm talking to

myself and I'm kind of manic and I'm and I'm wrestling um but it's flow for me like it's a it kind of has to be that way and I can't have a writing block that's like in the afternoon I can't it's it's and this is why it's a little voodo magic I've almost like boxed myself in that I have to have the writing block at this time or it doesn't it doesn't work so

that's where all this happens so let's pop back there so you have the art direction for every art direction there's how we're going to do archival how we're going to do video uh for AR archival video and stills there is how we're going to shoot it it's going to be cozy warm Vibes um there's going to be an a cam and a bcam this is all stuff that's specked out and then there's the animation what's our text going to be Chernobyl fuzz have you ever seen the HBO show Chernobyl I've seen an episode the titles on that are like my favorite style in the entire world they're kind of like this like Soviet 1980s TV look so we have a whole animation template that emulates that so Chernobyl fuzz I want there to be a little fuzz on the text do you have a mood board that you've been curating or is all this and John this is all this is all words in my brain and then Alex our our visual producer will take this and she will

then articulate it in a mood board and then is and I will react to that and we'll give thoughts on color palette on on type and text and you know these mood boards are really rich and fun it's so fun to see it do you want to yeah let's look at a mood board yeah talk me through this the channel doesn't have an art Direction like I don't have a branding package um because we like to do it fresh every time we like to to to make a new art direction for each one so this is an art direction for a future video the one I was just talking about actually uh oh this one's about why you're so board so you can see there's a color palette there are some of these title templates or some of these inspiration for the signs that we're going to animate there's a set design there is animation style there collage some of these are from previous videos we've made now for the set design hold on it says similar to so tired a

bit Moody some scientific posters in the in the background think brains practicals analog Tech Natural History Museum like clutter one of the things that I see you doing is you're really writing out the vibe as well as showing it and really trying to make that concrete yeah having a vernacular and a vocabulary with the team is so important and I didn't have that for the first few years of having a team and so it was there was disconnect and it was bad meaning for me because I I didn't know how to communicate the vision we're now a few years in and the team knows cozy like like Moody blah blah blah and I have all these weird words that I use with with the the artistic team to like bring some of the stuff to life um so yeah every video gets one of these and uh this is the one so this is the original before it turns into a mood board this is me taking screenshots as I'm writing screenshots of what of this

happens to be a screenshot of a previous video we had done because this was a part of a series so I was saying like hey let's render these in in this style but it's often screenshots from around the internet of things that I'm inspired by or previous videos sometimes I'll pull from and we have such a body of videos now that I'm often pulling from but it's map Styles it's it's sometimes I'll I'll take a screenshot of a old piece of paper and I'm like I like this Vibe the yellowing let's like you know integrate that in MH um you know map style this is a cool thing probably from Pinterest you know and it's like it's got Good Vibes let's see if we can make a video with this we make 30 videos a year so we get to like play around with whatever it's like we're not too precious about any of this stuff it's like just make it see what happens and just to ground this 30 videos a year average video is probably 20 minutes you

average video is yeah 28 minutes probably so you're producing like 15 minutes of video a week yeah well wellow if that's how the math works out it's a lot it is a lot and and it's every minute is you know premium animation and custom music yeah it's a monster of a thing we have an amazing team and we also are not precious we just go and we have a very high standard but like we do a few rounds and then we move on and I think the audience is cool with that if it was overly branded and perfect I think it wouldn't be us and that's that's one thing I really value about our team is we're Scrappy this video I I did a lot of these like cryptic symbols I didn't know how these were going to express themselves but I was like I like these I said for soul moments which is what we call non-evidence moments so we write in you have to see this piece of evidence to prove the fact but then we have soul which is like The Vibes the visual Vibes

for soul moments before chapter titles I would love to find or create simplified versions of these symbols um so that made it in lots of cryptic symbols which is the Mormons had a lot of that stuff and then I screenshot this is literally gole go images you can see this is like me Googling Mormon symbols and just being like yeah that that that

that let's go here's a question as you're writing and you have this just general sense of craftsmanship and obviously with the kind of care and dedication you put into your work you have to believe from like the level of your heart that like this is worth doing you almost need to be compelled to do it so how do you balance that with yo you got 25 employees that's a huge bottom line how do you balance those things what Johnny wants to do versus what the people want or something yeah um we learned a few years ago when we were scaling the business and you know is built basically organization around what I was doing and really elevated it to become a professional organization but it hit a limit where we tried to optimize and get and and delegate and delegate and we were making a video a week we were making four videos a month and we had 17 videos going and it was like a well-oiled machine and we learned that that slowly

started to suck the magic out of me I started to hate it because I was showing up and kind of manufacturing my passion to a degree I was still pitch I was still deciding the stories but we were you know it it was less control and so we dial back and sort of embrace the fact that I'm going to be a bottleneck like I am a bottleneck because if I'm obsessed with it then it will it will have some magic to it that like will the people will like and we can do it and that that does put a ceiling on how much we can make and we've sort of accepted that and now what we're doing is we're bottling what is is built which is this organization and we're now launching other channels under the same production process right but it I have to feel it in my belly or um I quickly get drained but when I love this stuff like I have this sort of Eternal energy for it not Eternal it it wears me down but um but I love it so title options a video

has to be uh marketable and that is a thing that that's a constraint that I operate under MH which is like what are we going to call this why are people going to click it couple million people have to be interested in this um and so I do seven titles or more you know and this is the the promise and and the wording is very important it's a promise often it starts with how or why every one of these besides number two starts with how or why because we're in the business of answering questions and explaining processes the how and the why so that's a a standard one and people on YouTube are curious and they to have an answer an answer to a problem then there's thumb thoughts and this has been updated a little bit since uh this video we have a little bit more sophisticated kind of packaging sometimes we'll check comps on one of 10 which is like a you know shows videos in this topic that have done well

and how they've been packaged where do you see that um one of 10 is one of these tools I think view stats is another like the these tools where you can be like Mormons you just type in Mormons and then it will be like this video about Mormons did did 50x the normal views on this channel because and we think because it was packaged like this so we sort of look at that I put in some imagery that could work as a direction for the thumb we could lean into this Illuminati energy we could lean into the map um those are different directions and now that there's AB testing we want to have very different directions so we can test did the people want the map or did they want the Illuminati whereas before we were always tinkering with just one one kind of Direction and like refining it now we try multiple different directions and then there's all the you know this just has to get done social description like

what's going to how we're going to post this all the all this stuff this feels less like you need to be doing it I I don't do any of this okay um and then s the sources are again I don't this is a lot of like publishing stuff yeah um the packaging I think on although again is like is kind of becoming the packaging expert on the team um and then you'll see an outline here which is just me again the backbone was predefined because it's a history this is me curating what parts of the history I think I'm going to write and this comes before or this comes before this is like I've read the info do I know what all the information is I'm going to now curate the sections that I think are going to go in I'm not thinking about visuals I'm just thinking about backbone and chronology and flow and promise

and so This Promise what's promise promise every every story is effectively a promise what what makes someone pay attention to a story is anticipation that they're going to be that that some promise is going to be fulfilled so how Mormons stole the west or whatever is a promise that I am going to explain how Mormons stole the West um and so I need to make sure that this somewhat fulfills that otherwise the packaging could be so overly disconnected from the the what is fulfilled in the video that like people feel betrayed now again I do have this secret belief that like with enough enthusiasm and Beauty you can enliven curiosity in people that they didn't know they had and my favorite comment is I had no idea I would watch a 20 minute video about ice cream machines yeah but like I don't know how you did that but like thanks and like I love that cuz I'm like if you can find if you can find the the

Beauty and the enthusiasm in like kind of mundane things life becomes a lot more interesting and so one of the promises of the channel generally is like in sort of cultivating and en living enlivening that kind of curiosity in people but we think in terms of promises ni with our audience y I want

to jump into the different kinds of writing that you have cuz you have these different categories one thing that's really unique about you is you have really created your own Lang anguage to describe your aesthetic sensibilities interesting you said it's not explainer it's not history it's not technical it's contemplative and often used to highlight the paradoxes and complexities of human stories and it leads into what you're saying here which is history has been B born by the people who live on these islands the human wall that protected the country and might have to do so again the people who live among the undetonated bombs and the abandoned bones that have little hope of ever being recognized this isn't just the words there is music and visuals and pacing that takes that writing and expresses it in its fullness for me and it's really important because I deal in a lot of technical stuff macroeconomics

and you know international relations Jaron and one thing I really want always is that it is grounded at some point to the fact that this is about humans this is about people it's not just about ideas so I will often do this pivot from like very technical history play-by-play writing to a reminder that there's tension and complexity and gray area at the heart of a lot of these stories that are that in the news are often reduced down into big forces and and and sort of nameless faceless soulless entities yeah the government did this da D and and I also believe that it is a sweet and sour experience where people will get some kind of cognitive stimulation from learning but then you can transfer to this other tone that is softer less precise and people get something out of that as well and and switching between the two from like a cognitive or thinky is tone to a fey tone is in music with visuals and in language to me is makes

the presentation more engaging more compelling I think people remember it for longer they remember what they felt undetonated bombs abandoned bones yeah concrete yeah and and and kind of you don't think of bombs and Bones next to each other there's obviously literation in it but like there's visuals there that are evocative and I'm I'm showing bones there's a guy who goes out and looks for the bones of the Dead from the Battle of okanawa and and I went with the bomb squad to un to detonate these bombs that was a part of the story but to wrap it up in and put them next to each other reflected that kind of emotional tone that I think is really important for these stories so this is what you're saying between the difference between the explainer voice and the poetic voice yeah it's less precise it's more human it's more complex there's not firm answers there's you're raising questions and you're showing complexity

when we think of journalists we often think of this sort of detached Observer who's almost even adversarial to whatever it is that they're covering and they're distanced from it and you see that distance both with the journalist and the subject that they're covering but also there's often a distance between the journalist and the reader there's sort of this on high expert and the reader is like oh let me learn from you totally one of the things that you do in your writing is that you at least in your relationship with the viewer more of a friend hey come over here sit down on the couch with me let me show you something we can look at it together and I think that this is an example of where you do that so here it goes I want to show you what this map says and show you how China uses craphy to assert and project power in its region this is doing a couple of things it's equalizing the journalist

and the viewer I want to show you I'm a friend who's really curious look you seen me at the computer tapping around wrestling with this map I want to I I've discovered something let me show you that to me is a framing that's very genuine by the way it's an enthusiasm that that comes from how I relate to my friends and how I relate to the world but I've funneled it into my writing and my presentation because I think that it's how viewers want to be spoken to I think they want to be challenged but at the same time they want to be let in they want to be um spoken to is like hey I know you're smart you can get this but like you may not know about this let me show you it's another Hallmark of the the classic style that that um Pinker talks about and it's it is let me show you and then directing their gaze to interesting things and describing them in plain ways that that are accessible but within that we're

discussing a lot of rigorous deep complex stuff but it's in this way that inv invites people in instead of makes them feel like oh this is only for the smart people and and journalists often will use language that is meant for their peers not for Their audience they will they will say look at how much I know I'm really smart and I need my peers at the other journalism Outlets to know that I'm not speaking in plain language and that to me is like that is the curse of of um of a lot of writing but especially writing that is meant for the masses but often turns into this sort of gatekeeper uh writing for for peers instead of audience this is slightly tangential but Cleo Abram has a line where she says that most people overestimate how much context the audience has and underestimates their intelligence and you should do the opposite say most people have no idea what it is that we're talking about they

just don't have the context but they're actually really smart and if you talk to them like they're smart give them the context but then talk to them like they're smart and that doesn't mean use big words but actually like you're saying challenge them and push them to understand something that's a little bit more challenging yeah absolutely also lets defenses down I think I experienced this when somebody invokes like a celebrity name or a thing that I should know about and I don't know and I feel myself pretending that I know yeah you get into this defensive space where you're suddenly in like a I'm not curious anymore I'm afraid to be called out and so embracing a sense of like hey all of us to learning together puts people in this space of learning that that I believe creates a better absorption mhm and so I think little subtle cues like let me show you is a is a great way to set the tone and

then in addition that line also promises there's a lot more going on that's a hook device that's a way of saying like hey stick around there's a lot more going on with this map I'm going to show it to you that that's a promise yeah I mean that is Absol absolutely one of the

themes of your writing is you are constantly saying there's a lot more going on there's a lot more going on hey check out this thing it's really interesting you should know about it and you say that constantly without ever saying that explicitly yeah yeah and it's I think that that's a kind of a retention thing meaning like hey stick around I promise this is going to get interesting uh but I think that's also good storytelling I think good storytelling is always saying like foreshadowing and kind of letting you see a little bit ahead but then so that you are compelled to stick around and be engrossed in the now and that kind I don't do that I don't calculate that but that is that is something that I think has naturally occurred in my writing how did you learn that sense of how to tell a story um honestly like my best theory on this because I don't know I didn't grow up thinking about story or

journalism or anything you know um what I did grow up doing was not being very good at learning and not being good at uh learning that the way that you're supposed to learn and developing a pretty strong resentment towards uh the kind of know- it all this is the way it is and these big words signal that you're smart and I wasn't that and I was a visual person and I wanted to understand and so I think a lot of my style comes from the way I wish it had been described to me and actually the in my early 20s it hit me like there isn't some special skill that I wasn't born with it's that people aren't explaining it in a way that's accessible and so I I'm often empathizing with how I would want to hear it and how I think the audience actually wants to hear it this is what you said reflecting on it this from a talk in 2019 you say if you watch Vox videos you'll hear a lot of this is something and it's like circling something on a

document in animation talk to me about that yeah so very similar to letting people in the language we use is active and it's actively talking to the viewer it's not just saying facts about the world it is saying look at this and often there's a motion that goes with that it's a circle we we draw the eye or we direct the eye to things there's a lot going on on a screen and so you say look at this and it goes over and it circles like a little Zoom type thing yes or it shines or something little subtle thing to be like this is what you should be looking at and reading it turns out that when you speak to the viewer in in in that inviting way and you direct their eye to visuals that's a really rich experience we're visual creatures we have a lot of our brain dedicated to visual processing so when they can have cognitive information flowing in from an inviting voice and they can have that visual experience

dancing together you know frame by frame it's a really pleasant experience I think Vox that that is what they really pioneered was was leaning into that style and and I'm really grateful because I learned a lot Vox was so far ahead yeah I mean it was it was crazy the Vox explainer style oh my goodness I mean I remember vividly Vox did an interview with Barack Obama like 2015 2016 it's got this black black room and then it's got these animations and it fell like 5 years in the future my goodness that was that that interview was being made when I right as I started and I was like so I was like I am walking into the coolest place ever because they're interviewing the president but they're doing these cool minimalistic animations on top if that was published now it would feel futuristic toally yeah I I believe that what Vox had the the the the the chemical reaction of all of those people at that time in that moment in video

journalism created something really special and I was so lucky to to to walk in at that time and be influenced and to fuse what I had going which was like a visual kind of again wanting to explain things in a certain way with what Vox had going my style and my Approach is completely like that was my boot camp and and the the people on that team really taught me how to do this how was

writing at Vox with a team under an institution different from then writing on your own now at first it wasn't very different because Vox was this kind of wild west petri dish of like we don't really know what the Vox vo is totally especially the video team they really let me do whatever and and I I really owe so much to that freedom because they gave me support and they and they taught me how to be factual and rigorous in my journalism but voice and style they just said it needs to be good and cool and there was a lot of pressure to make it good and cool and so I flourished in that but I wasn't prescribed a way to do it so with time as the as it grew and it became a little more centralized a little more corporate there it started to to kind of the walls started to close in on me a little bit to unify a little bit with the vibe and that's when I jump ship yeah cuz I'm I'm a I'm a bit of a like I need to kind

of just be a stallion it's hard to be constrained so that that sort of led me

out tell me about these pillars of YouTube writing frankly I forgot where I found these visual plain clear concrete yes yes yes yes I mean I think I think those words do a great job of summarizing a lot of the themes we've talked about today it is trying to empathize with your viewer and sharing and YouTube is a great place for this because YouTube is the original showand tell platform and so it it is it is all ready a place where it's a very warm room for let me show you this that inviting clear plain language there's not a lot of tolerance for pontificating and for you know like like kind of really laborious language and so I really believe that like the more human you can make it and the more relatable and conversational the more concrete like the more the platform were rewarded and by the platform I mean the people on the platform who come to YouTube for a more democratized experience

mhm and tell me about specifics we've

talked a lot about specific data points specific stories how do you balance specifics meaning hey this is legitimate I really looked into this and I'm going to kind of bring this to life versus the specifics of your grandpa at dinner who's talking about the war for way too long and you're just like dude let's get on with it you know this is the the tension at the heart of what we do which is we deal in really complex stuff sensitive political stuff and then we have to make it plain and concrete and visual which is inherently a a a an exercise of reducing and simplifying and there's no easy answer to how where you draw the line what's too simple uh what to include and what to leave out so discretion is is is something that you develop over time and I always feel sensitive to the fact that there is a way more complex deeper story at the heart of every story I tell right but I believe that surfacing it and

simplifying it and storytelling it lets millions of people who otherwise would have never engaged with that complex story have access to it and I can do it in this way that does include little tidbits of rigor and Humanity to it and that's why I do these these contemplative emot moment to be like hey there's a deeper like more complex going on here I'm not going to get into it unless I was doing a 10 part feature documentary but like it's here I'm going to try to like summarize it um and poetic language is is good for that it's better for that so I I I rest good at night knowing that I'm making these stories accessible even if I'm simplifying them and how do you

think about surprise and elements of surprise like for what good videos have you said it has to be visual it has to be surprising has to be naturally interesting I'd assume that's true for the writing too like if you can get those three components the the visual the surprise the naturally interesting it's almost like you have this um this wind a Tailwind behind you absolutely the writing is actually some of the most important for making something surprising because when you are talking about something you can talk about you can be an llm and you can have your training data say how has everyone else said this I'm going to say it just like them and just fill in the next word and it's going to sound like everyone else who's talking about that topic or you can be a human and say I am going to say this thing in a completely different way but it's still the same thing I let me think of an example on this because this is I

think we go to the Antartica anartica is the best example how did we get this a map so detailed so precise that guys like this would have thought it was magic an impossibility made manifest by superhumans in the future one of their fellow explorers Ernest Shackleton Drew this place on the back of a menu once dreaming of someday Crossing this whole continent and paying a huge price to try this is a place that has lured explorers from all over killing many of them this is a story of about Antarctica and mapping it's kind of a wonky story uh it could be it could be a very wonky like map story but what I experimented with this in this is is trying to do exactly what we just talked about using the most surprising unorthodox language to talk about something that could easily be talked about in the most predictable language mhm which is like the history of some British person exploring Antarctica and the technology around

uh satellite mapping like you could just jargon the hell out of that I thought what if we put the lens of pure beauty and awe on and we looked through that and we described everything almost as if like an alien was arriving and saying like how did they do this like and then they and use all this unorthodox language the intro kind of does that but as the piece goes on I I think the analogy here I don't know if this will work but like is a canal and most of us want to communicate in the bottom of the canal that's the path of lease resistance that's what we've heard we've heard the words a million times in the bottom of the canal if you want to do surprising language you have to climb up the wall of the canal and you have to be rting on the bank of the canal and it's harder and it's like you're kind of like always sort of climbing up there to find language that's fresh and new to describe the same stuff and it's often

more active and more plain but boy when you do it it someone can relate and see a topic that could be so boring in in this totally different surprising way and is you're writing these videos do you have like a process all right act one intro act two this act through that you've written so many videos you must have them by now there's never I've never identified with these kind of classical formats um of like rising action and T and like the fall and then the the climax and then the descending like all those like formulas I've never identified with those maybe if I was doing fiction or something that would make more sense but there's no format for me it comes out really intuitively on how I think it should go and I don't totally know what it's going to feel like as I'm writing it in the pacing um and sometimes it's 20 minutes and sometimes it's 40 minutes and that's what I love about being able to to do it

on YouTube is like no one's forcing me into a format yeah and I don't actually believe in some ultimate format I think that's that's like a kind of a myth that like humans only identify with with this

kind of structure how has all the time you spent reading The Economist factored into what we've spoken about so the economist is a very good example of classic style where they will describe things as this person did something as opposed to like describing in these sort of conceptual jargon terms and they'll they'll usually do it in um really plain quippy terms The Economist does a really good job of identifying what is interesting about a topic and then doing the work to to find the details that people actually want to know which is a lot more work and surfacing those what's an example of that the economist just did an interview the first interview actually with the the new Syrian leader the rebel leader who who threw out Assad and is now um effectively running the country and that piece describes um the context and it goes through the history and all the stuff but then it will suddenly say

like he's got a a tough job in front of him uh the palace which is five times larger than the White House is Echoes with emptiness and there wasn't even staff to serve coffee that was a moment a human moment where we're talking about the the GE politics of the Middle East wow we're talking about and then and then we are able to just drop into this room and see this new leader in this giant Palace that is echoing because it's empty and that there's not even someone there to to serve coffee and this guy is supposed to unify Sy or Syria and start a new country and that just oh like those moments those little details you have to be brave to like include that because it might fall flat you know like that's sort of a weird thing to say but it it's the exact kind of visual concrete example that I want to hear to understand the vibe of what's going on with this guy most people are reporting it as like he has taken power

and is now trying to unify the country and it's like it's exactly that voice but the written words yes exactly and it's like thank you you're engaging my neocortex like I can't see anything I'm just I'm just sort of seeing unifying a country what does that mean the way the econom is able to surface there's a person here who actually has to do things and they're struggling is while also weaving in really rigorous analysis I learn a lot from and then I also take inspiration from I would say my work is much more peer to peer sharing ethic than the economist who are you taking inspiration from when it comes to writing yval Harari and sapiens is a fantastic way of taking the wonkiest anthropology evolutionary science and turning it into highly accessible concrete language I love Steven Pinker and the way that he writes um I love Michael pollen he writes from a very strong sort of um John Green is a is a favorite because of

the way that he takes mundane things and dresses them up okay so the core thing that's happening here is there's a deep belief that you have that you can basically take anything and that with good writing and good storytelling you can make that thing come alive whether it's Harari anthropology whether it's Michael paen talking about food and plants and that that is actually the work of what good writing is is to see the sense of possibility in something and to breathe life into it yes and what is so beautiful about that is that there is endless subject matter yeah because everything is interesting everything is interesting everything has a story it just needs to have that life breathed into it and as a Storyteller you are able to create an infectious sense of enthusiasm that can bring someone in that's why for me like I don't have a beat I I do International stuff but like the I do the history of Mormons and I

talk about Doritos and I talk about you know the psychology of boredom like it doesn't matter what the topic is it matters what the approach is to thinking about it and that to me is the great mission of the channel is modeling curiosity what's cool about the way that you think about enthusiasm is when I hear the word enthusiasm what I think of is all right guys we're going to talk about this thing and we're going to do this this this this this and for you it's kind of a it's a contemplative beauty that then becomes craftsmanship and there's like this my senses from studying your process hearing you today is there's this moment this almost transition where something gets imbued with the sense of Soul and Spirit late in the process and it kind of comes alive and that to me feels like when it's time to publish the video and all this is to say that your enthusiasm shows up in the work that it

takes to really turn something into a work of art Beyond just mere facts and figures totally it has to be present at the beginning when I'm thinking about El Chapo's tunnels yep I have to have a glim of like what's going on there I and I and I usually will see visions of really kind of fractured visions of like what this could be like the vibe of it the actual video very very rough and Broad but that has to exist and then you start to descend into reality where where where you actually have to find the facts and and decide how this you know the art Direction all this work and that there's a moment always where it's like boy this is not nearly as cool as it was when we started like this is way harder every single person listening to this episode can relate to that and and that that wrestle is one I know very well now and the the work of Storytelling is to remember what it was like at the beginning and hold that hold

that Curiosity even when you get into that curse of knowledge where you know too much about the topic and you forget what it what it feels like to be curious and to not know you have to hold it and guard it and then you have to push it up the other side of the valley and that is the work of getting it story ready but the it has to happen at the beginning and then it has eventually hopefully gets to the end where that where that Curiosity stays but it but it always is there at the beginning for me what do

you feel like you're working on what is it the frontier of your skills where your sense of possibility of who you could be as a Creator and a writer far exceeds where you actually are right now by far the e easily the thing that I'm working on is inviting characters in h inviting human stories that help do what I'm trying to do with the contemplative kind of Cur like like Poetic voice they can do it because they're the people living it one of the sort of weaknesses of this very intentional process is that it all has to funnel through my eyes yeah and it all has to funnel through my process mhm and as a Storyteller you know for a long time that that control is really nice because you get to really craft something but after a while you think well I'm just one brain like what what would happen if I brought this person who was a really interesting story and I helped facilitate their experience and I

used all my sensibility with writing to to build that up that's not a skill set I have I mean I have it I have Little Seeds of it and I've done it to some degree but really emphasizing someone else's story is something I want to do have you done the sort of a strange question have you done personality studies because my bet is you are super super super high on some sort of empathy and ability to understand somebody else's experience both in how they live and how they experience the Arc of watching your videos see I I don't know if that's true I mean that might be that might be true to some degree and this is like a kind of vulnerable thing to say but I I believe that as a story teller I often emphasize understanding and conceptual understanding over human stories meaning I really focus on I want you to understand how this thing works MH now that doesn't mean I don't bring it I I have I make gestures towards like hey

there's there's humans here Etc but I believe and I've started to see this as I go into the field now more and more where I'm starting to crave more of like okay I know what I'm going to say about it I know how this thing works now but like what is it really like to be you not just like I'm going to spend a few minutes getting a few sound bites but I think as I mature as a Storyteller that empathy in storytelling is I'm starting to thirst for it a little bit more and I and I haven't been driven by that as much that I I really don't want to undersell like I do emphasize human stories and like that that is an important part of it but I think I have a lot of room to grow there and I'm excited about that that's an exciting challenge for me I think it's the next

chapter one thing that you haven't really spoken about is retention and the YouTube game and I'm not saying let's go talk about it I'm just saying that that's a revealing thing that you're Focus so much on craftsmanship and you talk to a lot of creators where they're like I'm looking at this thing and this thing and this thing and you haven't mentioned that and that's cool because you've been able to thrive at this game by not obsessing over that yeah we definitely play the game but craftsmanship is number one and and we've sort of a long time ago realized that there is an audience who comes because they want a really authentic handmade thing and that we can optimize and we can thumbnail test and do all these things and we've done it we've gone we've we've gone down those datadriven rabbit holes several times and we always sort of come out on the other side with a few lessons that we're like all right this will improve our

process but never it's never become the heart of our strategy ever the strategy is spread high quality curiosity and there's there's an audience for that and that happens when individuals creators are exercising their passions which is why in addition to my channel we've now launched two other channels with at the heart of it a creator with a thing to say and it's their style and they they do it and and we're going to keep doing that that is our that is our future is building out this Media company that that helps launch journalists with individual Brands MH because yes we can optimize but in especially in a world of AI like human excitement and enthusiasm and passion people love that and and we don't want to get away from that in the name of data and optimization so you feel that human excitement and and enthusiasm is the antidote to the AI creep I I I think so I think it's one um I think the the example I've seen a

lot is like in the 80s when computers got better than humans at chess we didn't just watch computers play chess all day we still wanted the tension of two humans playing chess even though the computer was way better and it's like the computer would have a way more sophisticated game we want humans to to be in we want to experience life through humans and I believe the same thing will be true in in large sectors of of the AI world where like the AI is going to get much better objectively at doing a lot of things that humans do now there's what are those pockets of of places that humans will want to watch humans do things and I think that journalism and storytelling I'm betting on will always be that humans want to hear another human tell stories that's the old list human ritual and I don't think it's going to go away I want I want to know how El Chapo escaped from prison that sounds cool that sounds cool

right uh so final question so if you're speaking to a group of University students or something like that and they want to learn how to do what you do and you got a semester to teach them how do you structure that curriculum it's hard because if I'm speaking purely from my experience a big part of that curriculum is spending a lot of time in the trenches learning visual technical skills which are not quick and easy to learn like wrestling with animation and Photoshop and illustrator and learning how to express something visually with the tools that you have your hands on has been the Gateway for me to become a better writer and Storyteller um because I was an animator before I knew how to write right and and and my writing is intrinsically tied to how I think about visual expression so that's been my path now Cleo who who is obviously insanely good at this and a very close friend of ours um is is a she

has spent time in the trenches uh and learned animation and taught herself all this stuff but like she would have a different answer to that um so it's not the only way like I think the one thing that unifies all of us is finding the things that you want to understand deeply really being able to identify them and then cultivate that lean into that and and try to communicate them to somebody else and at first the work is going to be terrible and bad and if you can push through that and get that out of your system which is reps and Reps and Reps you start to see a product that is actually reflective of how you imagined it at the beginning but there's really no skipping that that kind of process so that's a a long way of saying you have to put in the Reps and if you can find a way where that is authentic to you you'll have the energy to put in the Reps yeah the metal lesson that I took from today which is the thing that

I admire the most about you is you just care so much you care so much about your work you just you really really really care and I think the lesson isn't copy what you're doing but to find the thing that you care about as much as you care about the stories that you tell the work that you do and uh it really shows in your videos it also really shows in in conversation thank you yeah that that about sums it up right there anything else or is that it I think that's it okay awesome this was great I never talk about this stuff so this is fun thanks for doing this of course it was fun to be here