Johnny Harris: Master Storytelling on YouTube | How I Write
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- 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 core pillars?

It's about a four-month process for each video. It starts with, sometimes it's a story day. Iz and I will like roll our sleeves up and kind of like look at story pitches and ideas that we've been taking notes on for a long time. And then it goes into a green light. I green light it on a channel in Slack. I say it's green lit. And often I deliver 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. Like, 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 three to four weeks becoming an expert in that topic, surfacing visuals, building out what we call an info doc, 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 three to four days there is a lot of visual assets that need to be gathered there's a lot of fact-checking that needs to happen sometimes there's some additional reporting that needs to happen but then it goes off into post-production there's a production kickoff where I translate the vision to 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 post-production team starts to build out everything that was put on that piece of paper. And then cuts start to come in. It starts with 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. It goes into an audio lock, a picture lock. And each of those, we're leaving 150 notes or whatever, you know, little micro this and that. Google Docs frame. Frame IO. Yep. Thumbnail starts to get developed within that at some point.

And the 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 six 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 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.

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? Oftentimes, 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 it. I haven't cracked the satisfying –

explanation or thing. And I think, you know, I should report on this more. And I start to question everything. I start to be like, whoa, why am I so, why do we make so many videos? And I start to grumble. And I think like, well, I should just like do this all myself. It's bad. It's like, because 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 is the constraint of the- The constraint of the four days, but it can have these sort of backfiring effects 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 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. 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. I mean, there are breaks. There's vacation. There's spring break with my kids. The summer, we usually take a big break. In December, we usually take three weeks off. There are big periods of rest. And then during the production cycle, we've experimented with sprint, sprint, sprint, take a couple weeks of chill, and then

Lately we've been experimenting with like three weeks of writing blocks and then one week of like just catch up and whatever. 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. But there was a year there when we were making four videos a month where 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 sharpen you. And like so much of our skill as a team is because we have those constraints and that urgency. We can't be precious. And so the constraints are – they've added way more value than they've created frustration easily. When you're on the road, how are 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 and 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. And so 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, especially with complicated human stories. Every interview I have changes my mind. And so 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 story tell is to somehow orchestrate that chaos 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 did the kind of classic documentarian ethic of like show up and let the story come to you. And part of that was just like lack of preparation and understanding. But it actually was really useful and I would sort of let the story come to me and I would do a lot of story work in the edit process.

And then as I professionalized and like borders, Vox borders, which was like my big series of Vox, like I started to become much more ambitious with what I wanted it to be. And so I would pre-pro 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 soundbite 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, the pendulum is swinging back. Now I can go into Finland in a couple of 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 then I'm going into these bunkers. I'm going to the Russian border. And I'm just going to let it flow. And then I'm going to decide what I want to say. And how much research are you doing in advance? Are you like, I 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. Yeah. Yeah.

I did read a lot because 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, it's a total acknowledge is one thing. Storytelling is the curation of chaotic information about the world into a very firm linear presentation.

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'm kind of not – 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 – Or that was a headline you designed in advance, right? Yep. 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, 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 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 us 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 a $1 trillion 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 one minute. I need to show somebody I'm going 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 of that question? There's two answers to that. One is the more controversial answer and the other is the more straightforward one. The controversial answer is

I kind of believe that if I can get someone to click, that I can 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 rentier states and all these economics and future proofing 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'm folding in the vegetables. And 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 don't have that first experience. And 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 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 –

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 is an ever-changing balance. 2018 was the year

that was the height of my sort of over engineering i was in hong kong before that i would always do vo and i was right it kind 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 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

And then when I get back and I've really let it settle and I've wrestled, then I write the prose 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, to not have the pressure to do that when I'm on the ground. Because what ended up happening when I'm on the ground is I'm thinking more about where am I going to go do a stand-up, meaning like 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 of 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 is what I did. 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 to sign up though at readwise.io slash David Perel. And there's a link in the description below.

All right, back to the episode.

I'm given a big info doc 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 coordinating, choreographing visuals that will play, that will dance with the prose. That is the only way I know. 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're 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. Not all my videos are history videos. This one, the writing

has a backbone inherently, which takes away a huge question from the beginning. It's like, what is going to be the order of the information? When it's a history and it's chronological 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 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 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 structure. Thank God, you know. - Finding structures is brutal. - Yeah.

You know, the first line is always the tricky one. I like first lines that drop you into action, that enliven the viewer's kind of senses with a surprising, usually a surprising action or visual. And oftentimes that starts with, look at this. It's like, look at this, snap, 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 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, suspenseful. 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 an emotional tone that says like, "Oh, we're going. We're doing this. We are in something already. We're not ramping up to it." Other times I like to ramp up, 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 and the visuals of what's going on. Yes.

I have all these color codes. 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 makes it bold, it turns it red, and it turns it into a checkbox. And that happens all in .01 seconds. And then I write it. So when I'm writing, I am coding all of these color codes in 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 kind of has 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 26,000 Mormons, father to 14 children, and

And I sort of contemplated, do I want to say husband to 40 wives because 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-mormon thing about polygamy so 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 and

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'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 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, Sirene, and Revelator was dead, and the Mormons were under attack, so they fled." I'm a big believer in what Steven Pinker, who is this Harvard cognitive linguist who I love, 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, 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 the Western 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 a totally different way of thinking.

of writing and it's often more plain and simple, but it hits, it hits our visual brain. Steven Pinker's got this great book, Sense of Style, that where he unpacks this and it is my entire bible of writing. So who did what to whom and active. Yeah, there's an agent. There is a, in syntax jargon it's like there is an agent who is acting, who is verbing something. Yeah. Instead of 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 Ford to Japan. You know, 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 the map, you will see that I build two icons. I often do these little oxygons that are icons. One's 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's 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 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 that immediately, the viewer, I think, I hope, is going, oh, here they come. There's anticipation in the federal government moving to them. 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 motivation

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 over time, this process unfolds where the big federal government slowly starts to move west and we know that the Mormons are scared and we can feel that now because we've loaded each of these up with motivation. Nice. And connections. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay, so 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 it. So I do this thing here where I take the icon and I give it dialogue. And it's very reductionist, simplistic dialogue that captures big, complicated events. So 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? 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 what the end video is as you write. Yes. And it's not this sequential thing. It's actually crucial that both of these things are on the script at the exact same time. I am writing a piece of prose 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 actually saying, "Oh, the precomp should be nested with..." Like, I'm an animator. So I'm actually speaking to my future animator who's 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 visually directing but it the two dance together and they must dance together every word must pair with

a motion or an action within the animation. - So you write this. - Yep. - And presumably you don't just go, "All right, I'm done. "I'm gonna record all this and get it going." I would imagine that there's people who look. - There's an edit. One of the big things I lost when I left an institution was having like an editor and a guide over me. My wife is, who's also 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. 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 I can now watch it 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 cut it down and it's one step. And it does kind of change at that point, but these scripts are me really kind of letting the cement dry a little bit pretty quickly. Field pieces are a little bit more chaotic because there's more interviews and more moments. But yeah, 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 thing. Yes, 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 assertion that was made before was red at first. It was 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 checks the fact and then the sourcing of where it came from. And some of these assertions have three or four fact checks 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've had to learn the hard way that things can fall through the cracks when we're making so much. And so we have a watertight process now. Nice. Everything's fact-checked. And yeah, it's a lot. And then we publish these as a source doc that people can go look and scrutinize our sources. A lot of my videos, history or explainer videos, follow this very...

active prose, 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 be like, "All right, we've gone through all the action. Let's zoom out and reflect and contemplate what this means." And it usually comes with a more emotional tone. And it comes with a contemplating kind of energy to it. 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 already 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 post script that you see on the end of a documentary that kind of gives you 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 sugar-coated version of this history that I was taught. One thing I like to do is weave in unexpected moments

praise to things that I'm criticizing. To show that I'm not just purely on a one-sided rant to condemn something. That's just too easy and people are kind of tired of it. So I could have easily just been like the Mormons and they brainwashed me and da da da da. Instead I say in a beautiful valley surrounded by these massive mountains. And that's authentic. I loved that experience being in that beautiful valley. And yet in the same sentence the next clause is

feeling close to the specific sugar-coated version of this history that I was taught. That's a juxtaposition in one sentence. Beautiful Valley, I was brainwashed. Life is complicated. And in these contemplative sections, I like to throw a little bit of a wrench in kind of a one-sided interpretation or a one-sided kind of analysis of what I experienced.

I say these stories of struggle and conflict, 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 have parts of many Mormons' 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 we have only ever written

for this format to say it. I was never a text writer. I was always a video person. I was always a visual person. And I'm also really dyslexic. Like I don't read on the page. I listen to audio books. I dictate to a phone. I don't type, you know, whenever I can. Now, was this dictated? No, I write when I'm in this zone, I can write and there's a million typos and whatever. But like I write

I'm speaking it in my mind and I'm and I'm also visualizing it So I think that the pros probably does feel more verbal nice 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 I'm someday maybe I'll write a book or something didn't 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 and that was great like I just loved just sort of tinkering and but it was limiting I could only do as much as I could do and

Now we have 25 people. We have really talented editors and animators. Yeah, how's the team structured? It's mostly a production company. It's editors, animators, and then we have 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 help surface information. And then there's a business side, a business operation, which is...

production coordination, but also 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 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 page, which every, which is now a tab in Google Docs. And this is just page one of like dozens. But the idea is that every single video has its own art direction.

that suits the story. And so right here, what are we going to do with archive, archival 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 that I have in another tab and I write notes. What does your week actually look like in order to do this? Maybe we'll talk about this later, but I just. Writing, writing, writing. I mean, my entire world is framed around a writing block from 9 to 2 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. That is my entire life.

There's no meetings, there's no Slack, there's no email, there's no nothing between 9 and 2 p.m. Usually three days a week, sometimes four.

That is where it all gets done. And those are sacred. Like 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 I can hit those blocks. And describe the vibe, the space, your mindset as you're doing that. I –

It's a little voodoo magic-y where like I wake up in the morning and I already know what the block is. I've been thinking about the block of the next day. What you're going to achieve. What I have to hit that day. And I'm excited about it and I'm nervous and my belly is kind of churning and 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 o'clock comes, I'm like – I'm literally like – it's a game day. It's like I'm about to go out into the field and like I'm in the locker room. 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 people tell me I'm talking to myself and I'm kind of manic and I'm wrestling. 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, and this is why it's a little voodoo magic. I've almost like boxed myself in that I have to have the writing block at this time or it doesn't work. So that's where all this happens. - So it's pop back there. So you have the art direction for every episode. - Art direction, there's how we're gonna do archival, how we're gonna do video for archival video and stills. There is how we're gonna shoot it. It's gonna be cozy, warm vibes.

There's going to be an A cam and a B cam. This is all stuff that's spec'd 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 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 this is all this is all words in my brain and then Alex are 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 that. The channel doesn't have an art direction. Like, I don't have a branding package because we like to do it fresh every time. We like 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. Oh, this one's about why you're so bored.

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, this 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 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 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 artistic team to like bring some of the stuff to life um so yeah every video gets one of these

And 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 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 sometimes I'll take a screenshot of an old piece of paper and I'm like, I like this vibe, the yellowing. Let's like, you know, integrate that in. 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. Average video is, yeah, 28 minutes probably. So you're producing like 15 minutes of video a week. Yeah. Wow, wow. If that's how the math works out, it's a lot. It's insane. And every minute is premium animation and custom music. 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 imperfect, I think it wouldn't be us. And that's one thing I really value about our team is we're scrappy.

This video, 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.

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 Google 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. We learned a few years ago when we were scaling the business and, you know, Iz 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 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 deciding the stories, but it was less control. And so we dialed back and sort of embraced 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 have some magic to it that the people will like and we can do it. And 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 as built, which is this organization. And we're now launching other channels under the same production process. But I have to feel it in my belly or I quickly get drained. But when I love this stuff, like I have this sort of eternal energy for it. Not eternal. It wears me down. But I fucking love it. So title options.

A video has to be marketable. And that is a thing that's a constraint that I operate under, which is like, what are we going to call this? Why are people going to click it? A couple million people have to be interested in this. And so I do seven titles or more, you know, and this is the promise. 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 Standard one and people on YouTube are curious and they click to have an answer an answer to a problem Then there's thumb thoughts And this has been updated a little bit since this video. We have a little bit more sophisticated kind of packaging and

Sometimes we'll check comps on 1 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? 1 of 10 is one of these tools. I think view stats is another, like these tools where you can be like Mormons, you just type in Mormons and then it will be like, this video about Mormons did 50x the normal views on this channel because, and we think because it was packaged like this. Right. 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. Those are different directions. And now that there's A/B 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 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 gonna, how we're gonna post this, all the stuff. This feels less like you need to be doing it. I don't do any of this. Okay. And then the sources are, again, I don't, this is a lot of like publishing stuff. Yeah. The packaging, I think, although again, is like, is kind of becoming the packaging expert on the team.

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 later? This comes before. This is like, I've read the info doc. 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 is... What's promise? Promise. Every story is effectively a promise. What makes someone pay attention to a story is anticipation that they are going to be... 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. And so I need to make sure that this somewhat fulfills that. Otherwise the packaging could be so overly disconnected from 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. But like, I don't know how you did that, but like, thanks. And like, I've loved that. Cause I'm like, if you can find, if you can find 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,

sort of cultivating and enlivening that kind of curiosity in people. But we think in terms of promises with our audience. I want to jump into the different kinds of writing that you have because you have these different categories. One thing that's really unique about you is you have really created your own language to describe your aesthetic sensibilities. 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 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

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 international relations jargon.

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 in the news are often reduced down into big forces and sort of nameless, faceless, soulless entities. The government did this, da-da-da-da. 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 switching between the two from like a cognitive or thinky tone to a feely tone is in music and with visuals and in language to me is it 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 kind of, you don't think of bombs and bones next to each other. There's obviously alliteration in it, but like there's visuals there that are evocative. And I'm showing bones. There's a guy who goes out and looks for the bones of the dead from the Battle of Okinawa. And I went with the bomb squad to detonate these bombs. That was a part of the story, but to wrap it up in and put them next to each other was

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. They're 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 cartography 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've seen me at the computer tapping around, wrestling with this map. 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 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

spoken to as 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 classic style that Pinker talks about. And it is, "Let me show you." And then directing their gaze to interesting things and describing them in plain ways that are accessible. But within that, we're discussing a lot of rigorous, deep, complex stuff. But it's in this way that

invites people in instead of makes them feel like, oh, this is only for the smart people. And journalists often will use language that is meant for their peers, not for their audience. 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 a lot of writing, but especially writing that is meant for the masses, but often turns into this sort of gatekeeper writing 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. You should flip it. 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. Yeah. 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, 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 are learning together," puts people in this space of learning that I believe creates a better absorption. And so I think little subtle cues like, "Let me show you," 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's a promise. - Yeah, I mean that is 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 it promises is gonna get interesting But I think it'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?

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. What I did grow up doing was not being very good at learning and not being good at learning the way that you're supposed to learn and developing a pretty strong resentment towards 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, 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'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 is 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...

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 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. A 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 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

It's a really pleasant experience. I think Vox, that is what they really pioneered was leaning into that style. And I'm really grateful because I learned a lot. Vox was so far ahead. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. The Vox explainer style. Oh, my goodness. I mean, I remember vividly Vox did an interview with Barack Obama in like 2015, 2016. It's got this black –

black room and then it's got these animations and it felt like five years in the future. Oh my goodness. That interview was being made right as I started and I was like... It was so good. 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. Totally. Yeah. I...

I believe that what Vox had, 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 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 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 voice is totally, especially the video team. They really let me do whatever. And

And I really owe so much to that freedom.

because they gave me support 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 it grew and it became a little more centralized, a little more corporate, 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, because I'm a bit of a like I need to kind of just be a stallion. Yeah, it's hard to be constrained. So 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 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 show and tell platform. And so it is already 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 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 will reward it. And by the platform, I mean the people on the platform who come to YouTube for a more democratized experience. Mm-hmm.

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've really looked into this, and...

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 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 an exercise of reducing and simplifying.

And there's no easy answer to where you draw the line. What's too simple? What to include and what to leave out. So discretion 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. 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 contemplative emotional moments to be like, hey, there's a deeper, more complex thing going on here. I'm not going to get into it unless I was doing a 10-part feature documentary. But it's here. I'm going to try to summarize it. And poetic language is good for that. It's better for that. So...

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. It has to be naturally interesting. I'd assume that's true for the writing too. Like if you can get those three components, the visual, the surprise, the naturally interesting, it's almost like you have this –

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 it, 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 human and say, "I am going to say this thing

in a completely different way, but it's still the same thing. Let me think of an example on this, because this is super important. I think we can go to the Antarctica. Antarctica 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 about Antarctica and mapping. It's kind of a wonky story.

It could be. It could be a very wonky like map story. But what I experimented with this in this 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. Which is like the history of some British person exploring Antarctica and the technology around 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 use all this unorthodox language. The intro kind of does that, but as the piece goes on, 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 least 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 riding 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, someone can relate and see a topic that could be so boring in this totally different surprising way. And as you're writing these videos, do you have like a process? All right, act one intro, act two this, act three that. You've written so many videos. You must have one by now. There's never – I've never identified with these kind of classical formats.

of like rising action and like the fall and then 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.

And sometimes it's 20 minutes and sometimes it's 40 minutes. And that's what I love about being able 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 like a kind of a myth that like humans only identify 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 it in these sort of conceptual jargon terms. And they'll usually do it in 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 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 new Syrian leader, the rebel leader who threw out Assad and is now effectively running the country. And that piece describes the context and it goes through the history and all this stuff, but then it will suddenly say like,

He's got a tough job in front of him. The palace, which is five times larger than the White House, 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 geopolitics of the Middle East. We're talking about, 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 serve coffee and this guy is supposed to unify 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'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 word. Yes, exactly. And it's like, thank you. You're engaging my neocortex. Like, I can't see anything. I'm just sort of seeing unifying a country. What does that mean? The way The Economist 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? Yuval Harari in 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.

I love Michael Pollan. He writes from a very strong sort of – John Green is a favorite because of the way that he takes mundane things and dresses them up. OK. 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's Anthropology, whether it's Michael Pollan 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. 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 do international stuff, but like 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.

"All right, guys, we're gonna talk about this thing, and we're gonna do this, this, this, this, this." And for you, it's kind of a contemplative beauty that then becomes craftsmanship. And there's like this... My sense is from studying your process, hearing you today, is there's this moment, this almost phase 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 glimmer of like, what's going on there? 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 you actually have to find the facts and and decide how this you know the art direction all this work and

And 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 that wrestle is one I know very well now. And the work of storytelling is to remember what it was like at the beginning and 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 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.

that is the work of getting it story ready but 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 easily the thing that I'm working on is inviting

and inviting human stories that help do what I'm trying to do with the contemplative kind of 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

is that it all has to funnel through my eyes. Yeah. And it all has to funnel through my process. And as a storyteller, you know, for a long time, 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 would happen if I brought this person who has a really interesting story and I helped facilitate their experience and I used all my sensibility with writing 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...

This is 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 don't know if that's true. I mean, 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 storyteller, I often emphasize understanding and conceptual understanding over human stories. Meaning I really focus on, I want you to understand how this thing works. Now, that doesn't mean I don't bring it. I make gestures towards like, hey, 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. I really don't want to undersell. I do emphasize human stories and 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. Yeah. And

I'm not saying let's go talk about it. I'm just saying that that's a revealing thing, that you're focused 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 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 down those data-driven 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 it's never become the heart of our strategy ever. The strategy is spread.

high quality curiosity and 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 do it and

And we're going to keep doing that. That is our future, is building out this media company that helps launch journalists with individual brands. Because, yes, we can optimize, but especially in a world of AI, like human excitement and enthusiasm and passion, people love that. And we don't want to get away from that in the name of data and optimization. So you feel that human excitement and enthusiasm is the antidote to the AI creep?

I think so. I think it's one. I think that 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 be in... We want to experience life through humans. And I believe the same thing will be true in...

in large sectors 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 one of those pockets 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 oldest human ritual. And I don't think it's going to go away. I want to know how El Chapo escaped from prison. That sounds cool. That sounds cool. 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.

Because I was an animator before I knew how to write. Right. And my writing is intrinsically tied to how I think about visual expression. So that's been my path. Now Cleo, who is obviously insanely good at this and a very close friend of ours, she has spent time in the trenches.

and learned animation and taught herself all this stuff, but she would have a different answer to that. So it's not the only way. 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 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 kind of process. So that's 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 meta 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 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 it really shows in your videos, and it also really shows in conversation. Thank you. Yeah, that about sums it up right there.

Cool. Anything else, or is that it? I think that's it. OK. That was fun. Awesome. This was great. Good. I never talk about this stuff, so this is fun. Thanks for doing this. Of course. It was fun to be here.