Science Corner Special: David Friedberg, Cleo Abram, Alex Filippenko, and Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Good morning. Where are my besties? They are not here. What does that mean? Science Corner.
I have a guest host because my besties abandoned me for Science Corner. Let's see who it is.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
Cleo, you're one of the fastest growing channels on YouTube right now. Former Vox journalist that left to go independent on YouTube.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:26)
She went from zero to five million subscribers in just three years.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (0:30)
I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those lengths.

**Cleo Abram** (0:34)
There's a lot of very lucrative fear-mongering going on. That's why I want to bring a more optimistic point of view into the conversation, to help people imagine what could go right. That's why I went independent.

**SPEAKER_6** (0:48)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cleo Abram.

**David Friedberg** (1:01)
Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for being here.

**Cleo Abram** (1:03)
Thanks for having me.

**David Friedberg** (1:04)
Grab a seat. You were here all day yesterday?

**Cleo Abram** (1:06)
Yeah.

**David Friedberg** (1:06)
How was it?

**Cleo Abram** (1:07)
Having a great time. This is my first AllIn Summit. I'm so excited to be here.

**David Friedberg** (1:10)
Welcome. So Cleo, you have six million subscribers on your YouTube channel. We have under a million. Thank you for having us on your show.

**Cleo Abram** (1:21)
Welcome.

**David Friedberg** (1:23)
How did you do it? What happened? So you were at Vox before?

**Cleo Abram** (1:27)
I was, yeah.

**David Friedberg** (1:28)
And you were an independent director. I mean, you were doing other projects. Tell us how you set up this channel on YouTube, why you did it and how to get so big so fast.

**Cleo Abram** (1:37)
Yeah. Huge of truth seems to me to be a bit of a microcosm of this big shift that we're in with media generally right now. I was at a media company and making what we call explainer journalism. So taking complicated issues and making them understandable, both to me and to millions of people. And I went independent to start this show because there was something that I felt like I was missing. When I looked out into my media diet, I really wanted to find a show that was optimistic, that helped me see where were the people that are working on hard problems, making them better every day in a way that I could understand and I could participate in. So I left the media company where I was, started this show and had the opportunity because of what YouTube offers to reach a global audience very quickly and find out, oh my God, I'm not alone. Oh my God, there are millions of people that also want this kind of show. And YouTube made that bet that if you allow anyone to create their best creative work, the widest audience will watch. And so YouTube has become in the last 18 months, I think, the most watched streaming platform on televisions. So we're in the middle of this big moment of change in media and how media gets made. And I don't think most people know that it's really happening. They know that YouTube shows can get big, but they don't really understand this shift that we're in. And by the way, the shift is also very exciting for streamers because they're looking at this and they're saying, you know, a Netflix of the world, I used to make a Netflix show as well, can look at this incredible new wealth of creativity and IP and say, oh my God, who do we want to work with to give upfront capital to make something that's even bigger? And so now they're working with YouTubers.

**David Friedberg** (3:19)
This is something you and I have talked about. If you're on Netflix today, and we're going to talk with Neil and Ari about this later today, you can, if you're an independent director, you go to Netflix, they're like, okay, we'll pay for your production cost plus 10 percent. And it's like quite different than what it used to be. Like when you made friends, you could make the show and then you can eventually make like a VC. Like you can make hundreds of millions of dollars if it worked out and it became a massive show, but you're basically capped at Netflix. But YouTube is quite different. So there seems to be a financial or economic incentive, both creative freedom but also this economic incentive to go to YouTube. But then how does financing happen? Like where can creators drive the engine to fund and create new content?

**Cleo Abram** (3:59)
Well, most YouTubers have ad funded businesses. And so what that requires is you go out on your own as we did with Huge If True. We went independent, we started this show. The show grows and then you are able to get sponsors who in turn fund better and better work and it continues to scale.