This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

JOE POSNER: Adam Cole and Joss Fong… welcome to Rough Cut. It is my pleasure to talk to – in my humble opinion – the two greatest living science video journalists in the world. I'm biased. I'm Joe Posner, and I was lucky to work with you back at Vox, but I don't think it's actually that controversial of a take.

And we're here together because you're starting an unbelievably fun and interesting and insightful new series together. And I want to talk to you about it and ask you lots of questions about it. But before I do that, I feel like people should get a little bit of context about each of you before you started working together. Can I give you a little bit of an intro myself and ask you a question, each of you first.

This is the part where I do hype you up to unreasonable proportions, because it's how I feel about you. And I know that you're very humble. And so I want to make sure people understand how awesome you are. Adam Cole is a science journalist who has made so many videos that I love you, and I got to work together.

When you wrote, like, an amazing number of explainer episodes for Vox and Netflix, and before that you created the NPR video Skunk Bear. You made one of my all time favorite infographics in 2012, where you morphed the campaign map and showed the influence of money as cartograms, and you frequently make incredibly charming music within your videos. And I just wanted to ask you… when was the first time you started singing in your videos and why?

ADAM COLE: Well, I have a dark, dark secret of my original, my original life on YouTube was in college. I would make little songs, for a personal channel. This was long, long ago, but I think I, you know, we had, like, you know, whatever original, like iMovie or something like that on the library computers. And my college roommate had one of those flip cams. Do you remember those? It was like the original, like, wave of vlogging. And everyone had these little handheld things. So I borrowed that. so actually I had music in my videos before I was even a science journalist or anything like that.

Maybe the right question is like, when did you bring journalism in?

ADAM: [laughing] Right, right. That's right. I'm secretly just like a YouTube musician who just got somehow terribly lost in the world of science journalism.

Joss Fong is another science journalist whose videos I never want to miss, ever. And we met back in 2014 when Vox was starting, and I was lucky to work alongside you for eight years, Joss. We built Vox video together and with an amazing, amazing crew of people.

And I would argue that your writing and approach to visual storytelling and unbelievable work ethic truly changed the way that video journalism for thousands of people, whether they know it or not. The first video of yours, Joss, that I saw was in 2014, and it was only 20 or 30 seconds long – the “Phases of the Moon” animation.

JOSS FONG: Yes, yes. Because by ‘met me,’ you mean ‘hired me.’ [laughing] And I made that animation so that you would hire me because I was just out of the blue emailing you with very little to go off odd. I mean, I had just come out of j-school for science journalism, but, you know, knew I wanted to do video without having a lot of clips to show for it.

So I got on to After Effects and tried to make what I thought was like an explanatory visual about the phases of moon, put it on YouTube and sent it to you to try to prove that I could hack it. But really, most of the learning happened on the job… that was just to get my foot in the door.

But obviously a lot has changed since then, and you developed an incredible style that people continue to try to mimic. What for you has stayed the same about your approach since making that animation?

JOSS: I think I mean, the core thing that I just hammered at Vox was, was that there's a reason a video is a video, and it's really easy to forget that, especially once you've done this for many years. And I have to keep reminding myself, because the details of the research are so interesting and, you know, so intricate and nuanced, that you really have to pull your back yourself back into saying, ‘I'm not a writer. I'm not just a writer, at least I'm not a podcaster. I'm a video creator.’ And that means that my choices have to be guided by what I can show people, and how I can use the visual medium to help sort of crack open people's comprehension of this thing.

And just time and time again, that proves to be what works. It's what I like to see and what helps me understand things. And so sometimes I'll stray from it sort of in the interest of a format experiment, or just because I really, really drawn to a story that maybe isn't inherently visual, but yeah, I try to come back to that because I do think it's the key. And if people I don't know if you're going to let us show people that regard regardless.

So if people are listening and can't see this, it is an animation that's just 20 or 30 seconds long about how the moon, why the moon looks like it does in the sky, that people often don't think about, like, ‘Why does it look this way this day?’ It just very clearly, without any words, helps you understand. And just within a moment you get it, it's wonderful. And you still do that.

JOSS: It's nice when things are kind of literal that way. And what's nice about the moon phases for explanation is it's not intuitive as we are these humans attached to the sphere and trying to picture the geometry of it is pretty tough, but a little animation can open that up.

And then the question is, how do you use those same techniques for things that are less physical and literal? And that's where it gets pretty challenging.

Yeah, but I feel like you actually stick to that. Like I will never forget at some point, maybe in 2014 or 2015, you just turned over to me and said, like, I like concrete things and I just will never forget that. I just think that it's just such a simple grounding idea. Like, just go with what the evidence can show. And you still do that.

JOSS: Yeah, it's a limitation because I tend to dislike metaphors and stuff like that just because I find them unsatisfying. But it does sort of limit the whimsy and creativity when you're just like, but what is it? But what is it actually like made out of it? Like, where are the gears? And like, that's why I always am drawn to. But, it's not necessarily the most compelling storytelling technique, I would say.

So are you saying that ‘Howtown’ is not a metaphor? You've decided to work together now, and I would love for you to give the future citizens of ‘How Town’ listening or watching to this a brief introduction to what ‘How Town’ is.

JOSS: You take this one?

ADAM: Sure, yeah. I mean, ‘Howtown’ is a show about how we know things. It's the ‘how do they know’ show on YouTube. Each of our videos tackles a topic or a commonly held belief or a statement or a news headline, and instead of just telling you what we know, we try to delve deeper and talk about how we know it.

A lot of times it's science… but we're not limiting ourselves to science. But it's sort of what are the different techniques and methods and experiments that people use to figure out what is true. And you know… ‘Howtown’... we actually had a plan to make our intro sequence be a map of this town of sort of knowledge that's surrounded by, you know, forests of uncertainty.

But there are different neighborhoods that correspond to different areas of knowledge. But honestly, it's very hard to map ideas. So this might go back to the question of, like, ‘How do you make a metaphor physical?’ We still haven't landed on our perfect ‘How Town’ map. I think, you know, maybe for our first year anniversary, we'll have a great map ready to go.

I think we still both like that idea and want to want to bring it out. But, yeah, I mean, we we basically make medium sized videos for YouTube that are like 10 to 20 minutes long and then we make little shorts, because that seems to be the thing that these platforms want us to do.

We’ve got to get into that later. But I love the metaphor, regardless of whether you can make a map or not, because… you must read or listen to Derek Thompson. And he had a fantastic episode about his theory about media, which is that all of media has become cults and that all successful media makers are cult leaders today.

And I just really like the idea of building a town instead of a cult. Like a really freaky metaphor. [laughing]

JOSS: That is freaky.

ADAM: But maybe a town isn't as successful as a cult. [laughing]

I think I mean, long term, I think that the town might be more successful, hopefully.

JOSS: I think that a map or a town is a great is a great metaphor for explanatory journalism in particular, because when you think about, you know, what journalism is for, you have people who are breaking news, you know, like they're they're uncovering new facts in the world. You have people who are telling narratives and they're, you know, trying to get you to understand on an emotional and personal level what is happening to someone and why. And then you have the explanatory journalists like us who are not really focusing on either of those things. And our value add is to give you a map that's to give you the lay of the land.

It's not a scenic route, it's the… it's the map so that maybe you can find your way around. And I think that the ‘How Town’ concept fits well with explanatory journalism. And that's just what we are… we're just explainers at heart.

Absolutely. I was very excited to get to do this interview because one of the goals of Video Consortium is to be a community resource for everybody doing video journalism, nonfiction, documentary around the world. And I've been struggling with a question that I think a lot of video journalists are struggling with. And ‘How Town’ is your answer to… and I wonder if you can be a resource for people. You know, it's a moment of historically low trust in institutions. We all worked for a journalism institution, but this moment is one of rising individual creator power, and journalists and documentary filmmakers of all kinds are trying to figure out what to do.

And I'm sitting here like I'm actually sitting on the fence of like… ‘Should I? Should I start a channel?’ Right? And obviously the answer is going to be different for different people. But I'm curious if you… can if we can kind of spend the rest of this conversation diving into that, like, why start a series that's principally a YouTube channel? Especially thinking about people who come from maybe, like, film festival world… or they're working for clients and funding a passion project, like, what drove you to do that?

JOSS: You're coming at us at a very vulnerable time, I would say.

You're trying to do stories about things that you can prove. And this is not something that people have really concrete answers to. But you're doing the tough thing of navigating it. And I want to learn from that if I can.

JOSS: Go ahead, Adam.

ADAM: Well, yeah, I think that we are… we don't know. We really don't. When we started this, it was not a moment of, ‘We're going to do this and we know it will succeed!’ It was sort of a what-do-we-have-to-lose? I would say was the vibe as we started this, what would you say to us? Like, I think we knew we wanted to tell stories about this subject and we weren't going to be able to do it where we had worked before. And we've seen, you know, we're not the pioneers necessarily here.

We've seen other people, you know, a lot of the Vox alums who have gone into the YouTube space on their own and been very successful. And so we, you know, are crossing our fingers that we'll get there, eventually. But right now it's very much… we don't know. I think that the example that was set by our colleagues was big in my, at least in my feeling like, ‘Okay, maybe we can actually try this.’

JOSS: Seeing Johnny and Cleo and Sam and Phil just go out there and make it work. And in some cases, like… immensely successful… it's like, ‘Okay, if we can do like a fraction of that, then we can, you know, we can pay our bills and get by and have a good, a good life and a good living being able to do this really fulfilling and creative work.’ That's what gave me the confidence.

And then pairing up with Adam gave me the extra confidence, because I don't think I necessarily have what it takes to do it on my own. And that's not the only benefit. But I think doing it together has led us to a more interesting product as well. And that actually explanations this is not something that's new to podcasters obviously, but explanations are really well-suited to conversation between two people.

And Vox has always been a sort of just ‘voice of God’ narration as the core format. but I think that in many cases, having someone be like… ‘Wait a minute… that… you lost me there…’ can play a really big role in making these things make sense.

I think to us, where we were working principally on YouTube before, it is an obvious question… ‘Why?’ That's where you would go when you're striking it out on your own. Or maybe it's obvious, but just can you explain, like… why? Why is this the way for you? And why would other people consider doing this if they're not already?

JOSS: Well, YouTube is the platform that shares the most of its revenue with the creators. Shorts is like a little bit of a curveball there because – and we're kind of riding out this transition right now. and not totally sure what to make of it – but right now, our subscriber growth is like by and large, a result of our shorts. It's not not even close. And they're the sort of the generosity of YouTube is a little less clear because it's hard for them to, you know, they can't put an ad on every short. I actually don't even know how the ads work on YouTube shorts.

But at least for TikTok, they throw one in there every four, you know, pulls of the slot machine. So that's that's a big part of it is, like, if you can get, consistent audience on long-form videos, YouTube shares a decent chunk of the revenue. And then aside from that, there's this whole sort of infrastructure built around finding sponsors for ad reads outside of YouTube's, you know, YouTube's pre-roll, where there are companies that work to place those ads for you.

There are sponsors who understand what they're getting when they put an ad on a YouTube video. Again, this is very similar to podcasts. They have their own infrastructure, but there was just nowhere else to go. It's where people go for video. It's where people make a living on video. You know, if we're talking to a lot of documentary filmmakers, I think the calculus is completely different because it works for people who can have a kind of lower-cost, quick-turnaround production… relatively quick turnaround.

But I haven't necessarily seen a ton of people making quote unquote films for YouTube and making a living doing that.

Absolutely. They're different. They're different mediums. But I mean, one of the big benefits of YouTube is you really can – even though you're right, it's like a slot machine – you really can reach millions of people and develop an audience of your own, separate from gatekeepers that I feel like people are still learning that lesson today.

JOSS: It's the gatekeepers or the algorithm. Choose your poison.

Yeah. You just brought up shorts, and it's really interesting that that is where so much of the audience discovery is coming from these days. So what makes a short since it's obvious why make a short? What makes a really good short? And how is that different from the way you think about your 'full' videos?

ADAM: Well, it's interesting because, you know, our mission is to get into the weeds. Our mission is to help people have a more nuanced and uncertain like, more nuanced understanding of where facts come from and also like, comfortable, you know, comfort with uncertainty. And shorts kind of eliminate the possibility to do either of those things. You only have 60 seconds to tell your audience something, and there's not really enough room to tell a story.

I mean, you can tell a quick story, but you certainly can't add that much nuance. So we're kind of… we don't really like doing shorts, I think would be our position. I think there's certainly something fun about being able to turn something around in a day and then have a bunch of people see it. But in terms of like the mission of ‘Howtown’? It's not a good fit.

But I think the things that we've identified, like Joss was saying, right at the top is something visual. You want to show something to someone, you want to show them a cool image or a surprising thing… or share a shocking fact. You know, we've tried to lean into our conversation and that seems to do pretty well, when it's the two of us interacting.

I think, you know, it's just like anything on the internet, the first few seconds are very important… starting with a question, starting with a moment of curiosity or surprise seems to be what works.

JOSS: And also the chance to maybe address something in a news cycle that you would otherwise not have a chance at. So we did one on the Olympics… I saw the race at night time and then made the short in the morning.

That's just like not a timeline that ever works for video outside of this kind of shorts ecosystem. So that's what I'm trying to be optimistic about, is that it can… if we if we can be if we can be choosy about what we're doing, we can maybe provide clarity in the moment in a way that is hard to do with longer form videos.

But then how much clarity can you do in 60 seconds? That's the question.

You guys are so hard on yourself. I cannot believe how hard on yourself you are, because to me that Olympics short – it starts with this image of a blinking little light and Joss asking what's happening here? And then proceeds to show you how they are able to measure the finishing time to the forty-thousandth of a second using a very specialized camera.

And it's unbelievable. And to me, the value of it is you are engaging people's curiosity and reminding them that that is a valuable part of themselves that they can tap into… whether they have a minute or whether they have 20 minutes, that is time well-spent as opposed to time passed down the drain.

ADAM: I think one of the things that was our goal for ‘Howtown’ was to be able to sort of be part of conversations that people were having in their everyday lives and become a resource for people when they're like, wait, but… ‘How do they know that?’ You know that like that little thought that you have when you see a headline that you don't fully understand or like… ‘How would they possibly figure that out?’ That kind of question.

And Joss has always been very good at keeping us focused on looking for those questions. And while I sort of, I think, get very distracted by wanting to talk about things that happened 200 years ago. The shorts do give us an opportunity to maybe respond and be that resource in a way that that we wouldn't be able to be otherwise.

We did a little experiment about a month ago after the shooting at the Trump rally, where again, it was Joss who sort of spearheaded this idea of… ‘Can we respond to this event in some way? Can we provide insight for people of how we figure out what happened during this event?’

And we, you know, we sort of dropped everything we were working on, and we spent two weeks, ten days making this 18-minute video, which was like, I think, probably faster than either of us had ever produced that many minutes of YouTube. Because, I mean, that's the other piece… is that neither of us is the fastest. But that was super interesting. Super valuable. I’d love to do it again.

But even two weeks later, obviously so much happened in those two weeks for America. But, you know, by the time we published it, even though it was like the fastest we'd ever turn something around, it was still a little behind the wave of interest and curiosity around that subject. So, you know, I think that just speaks to how shorts could be a tool for us.

It seems like it's a perfect balance because I also feel like a piece of advice that I've gotten in the past is like, ‘You want to be first or you want to be last.’ And like, those are ways of avoiding the middle.

Could you walk me through the process of developing this show? I know that you all worked… this was in development for a really long time before you started it, and that was a journey. And I'm curious, like what that journey looked like, where the stops were, what your favorite bloopers might be.

JOSS: Can an entire episode be a blooper? [laughing] I mean, so the backstory is that, you know, Adam and I have been talking for a while about starting a channel together, and our initial thought was maybe we could do it with Vox. So they were great about exploring this idea with us and, you know, basically paid for us to develop something.

We pitched them on an idea where Adam and I are the aliens that find the golden record on the Voyager probe and follow the record to Earth to discover how science works on Earth. And we made two episodes of this show, which was called ‘How on Earth,’ where we were literally purple alien hosts delivering explanations about research methods.

And, and at the end of that process, which was both really fun and creative and also challenging in lots of ways, we came to the realization that the format, the concept of the format and the mission of the content were a little bit at odds with each other, that we had to either choose whether to lean into the ‘aliens discovering Earth’ storytelling or lean into the ‘how did they know that’ mission. Because putting them together was a little bit too much.

And so we also decided to try out a format where we kind of made a podcast, basically. It was like a video podcast. What would it be like if we had a conversation about research methods and then dropped in a few visuals that were necessary for understanding.

But most of the runtime, the expectation was that people's eyes weren't going to be on the thing. So we made a version of that, recorded it, and then ultimately, you know, it didn't make sense to continue with Vox for a variety of reasons. Probably the biggest one being that everyone knows digital media is in a really tough spot in terms of just making a business, and they weren't in a position to necessarily bring on a whole new channel and support what was going to need, you know, production help and a budget and all that.

And we also at the same time, were feeling like it would make more sense to do this on our own for, for similar reasons, just like the overhead of a company makes, you know, provides headwinds for an operation like ours. So we decided to kind of take what we had learned from those experiments, which is that we really believe in this mission of exploring evidence literacy as the core concept of what we're offering, and that we would kind of mix it, mix that kind of conversational explanation methods, exploration with a kind of more traditional Vox explainer approach, where we would appear as ourselves and not as aliens.

And that's where we are now. I feel like we're still, we're still kind of working on the finding the right groove for that format. And I hope it will continue to develop and that we'll find something that seems to really click. But right now, having an explainer that's kind of interrupted with unscripted… I call it, like, a digestion, of the section that you just heard about seems to be a good way to vary the pace of the story and help people along on the things that are a little bit weedy and conceptual and abstract.

And it's also just kind of nice to see two people chatting every once in a while, but we don't want to completely ditch the thing that we have spent ten years getting good at, which is narrated visual explanation.

Are there other other creators or filmmakers that you look up to that you like, and it might be really different from what you make, but it's just like what you're into. I'm just very interested in that. My media diet is probably a disaster compared to y’alls, given how smart and amazing and curious you are.

And I just want to learn about that. What are some things I should watch if I wanted to get better?

ADAM: One of my bosses in years gone by at NPR, who was the head of the NPR visuals department or, you know, it had many different names. I think it was like the multimedia department at one point… if you remember, when multimedia was the big word.

JOSS: That was my title at Vox… Multimedia Producer…

Same! That was my first title… multimedia… yeah.

ADAM: [laughing] Yeah, we're all multimedia people. So anyway, the head of the Multimedia Department at NPR, he used to say that if you wanted to get better at making, anything, you should read short stories and listen to jazz, which is like a very it's also like a sort of NPR stereotyped thing to say.

But I do think that there is some value to like looking outside of your genre for inspiration. And I think that that's sort of what I like is sort of watching movies or documentaries or like… I listen to a lot of improv comedy podcasts. And I wouldn't say that you wouldn't watch like a ‘How Town’ episode and say, ‘this is definitely inspired by an improv comedy podcast’ – but there are definitely things in that realm that – the world of surprise is so important.

So there's little moments of joy and excitement that I find in, in a lot of other mediums and not necessarily visual. Sometimes it's like a book… that I think I really rely on, you know?

Joss, what would you say?

JOSS: Yeah. I mean, my media diet is just… chaotic. It's a firehose. Like, it's not strategic. I have, you know, 15 newsletters coming in to my reader every day. I have every short-form video podcast like filtering through my brain. I read magazines. I don't read books, unfortunately. I just like, keep trying and failing. Probably these things are all related, but I wouldn't say that there's things that I look at and think, ‘Man, I really want to take this from that’ – just because I just assume that the thing emerged from the person that they are and the experience that they have, the skills that they have an interest that they have, and that I can't just kind of take it for myself.

And so there's this challenge of kind of making the thing that you want to see in the world, and then coming up against to get against the reality of… maybe there's not as many people who want the thing that you want, but I don't really know another way of putting stuff into the world, except for to make the thing that I really want to exist and to kind of just do the best with the skills that I have.

And, you know, then you come up against the algorithm, the challenges of the algorithm and hope that some of the people who are like you are going to – it's going to pop up in their feed – and maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And we might have to adjust. But I'm trying to focus on like, ‘Yes, I'm obsessed with this thing about knowing where facts come from.’

And if I'm obsessed with this, there must be other people who are at least somewhat interested in it. I want to try to avoid straying too far from that initial core motivation by trying to emulate the other things that are really working in the world, or even things that I just really admire… because this is the thing that I am genuinely driven by, and I think I'm good at. And also, it's kind of the only thing I know how to do.

I mean, you all again, are like so self-critical and so, so self-aware about all of the pitfalls of what you do. But from the outside, I mean, it looks like it's going incredibly well. I mean, you yourself said you were ahead of your benchmarks. So how do you feel it's going in audience benchmarks? Like, how do you feel like it's going… what, in terms of some of them… Do you have a sense of where you are and where you feel like you need to be?

JOSS: You know, it is shockingly easy to get eyes on a short and shockingly hard to get eyes on a regular video. I'm really surprised by how hard it is to get discovered in the normal YouTube feeds. I don't know how well it's going, but I think I was expecting it to be going better in terms of just our normal view counts, or at least the trajectory to be going in a different direction in the right direction or so.

That's the thing that we're coming up against, is that it's really easy to actually grow, both on YouTube and on Instagram, probably also on TikTok, by putting shorts into the world. The appetite is genuinely huge, and also aided by the fact that these platforms are pushing this stuff.

ADAM: They're all competing and we’re providing grist for the mill.

JOSS: Yeah, and anyone who's engaged with this format can attest to that – to how psychologically compelling and scarily addictive it is. So it's not a surprise that we can get these eyeballs on these shorts, but I think that the other side of it, which is where those eyeballs being pulled away from, is where I'm a little less confident about our approach or about, you know, the whole thing in general.

That said, you do have a funnel, right? I mean, that's the top of the funnel, obviously, but it is going somewhere. Can you talk about how you've structured what your theory of the case to make it sustainable is? My understanding from outside, what it looks like to me is that there the business model of making videos independently looks like building a big enough audience that you can sell sponsorships on your longer videos.

And then for like ‘reel-heads,’ they can sign up on Patreon and help support directly. I just am genuinely curious how you feel like it's going, where you're hoping to be, and if you see that model changing. I assume you've been kind of like looking at like how others are doing it and like if you have if you feel like there's any lessons out there for people considering this.

ADAM: Well, we definitely, you know, went in saying we want to just throw everything at the wall and, and try to have a pie with lots of different slices.

I would say the main slices are the revenue that YouTube shares with us, which is, you know, not very much, especially per view. Then we have the Patreon world of support from, you know, our super fans or people who really like what we're doing and are trying to make it sustainable. That is our hope for what will be the bulk of the pie we would like it to be… you know, the other piece of this experiment is like, can we build a viewer backed operation? And, you know, that's a slow, slow build. But we've seen, especially in the podcasting world, some of these podcasts have a Patreon following that supports, like, their entire team. And so we know that if people get into what you're doing, you can build a base like that.

It just takes a while. I mean, all this stuff takes a while. Then there is the world that a lot of our colleagues have built, which is primarily in video ad reads. We just had our first one of those in this gallery episode that Joss just put out. And I think that the potential for that, you know, that… it makes sense that that is the main part of a lot of people's pie, because you can get the most money in one shot out of it.

We would rather not have to read ads, obviously. and also we'd rather not be thinking about, what kind of content is going to drive the most views that will get us the highest ad revenue? Am I missing a piece of the pie, Joss? Oh yeah – grants.

JOSS: We’re thinking about getting some foundation funding for people who just want to see more science communication in the world.

But I think that the general advice for anyone starting a YouTube channel is don't expect to make any money for at least a year. And so we knew that going in. We're burning through our savings and our, you know, the support that we do have, is helping us cover things like our Adobe account and our Dropbox account and our licensing stuff.

And I just, I just love every one of our Patreon supporters. They're so precious to me. And then, you know, I think the real answer, Joe, is that we don't totally know whether it will work and that the things are changing so fast that there's no one we can really look to and be like, ‘Well, it worked for them so it's going to work for us.’

But we have talked to folks like the ‘Answer in Progress’ kids. I like to call them ‘kids’ because they're just like slightly younger than us. [laughing] But they they, you know, they've been at it for a few years. And there was a point in the maybe the second year of their operation where they really thought about just shutting it down and they didn't think it was going to work.

And so they pushed through. And now I think they're doing really well. And I think the thing that a lot of people can't tolerate is the delay and the need to be consistent for a really long period of time. And so every time we publish and it's like, ‘Wow, a very small number of people are seeing this’... You get this shock of, ‘We need to change everything or it's not working.’

But really, I think the thing that's hardest and, and most important is to just stick at it and be consistent for a really long period of time. So it's hard to do that, obviously. But that's the hope is that eventually, if you're good at what you do and you're consistent enough, it will work.

I mean, I fully believe it will and it's so very, very scary, but it has to work — we have to figure out how to make this work. I'm so grateful that there are people like you trying to build models that can work for it. Because as a creator myself, like I am sitting on the fence and I'm trying to figure out how, what, and just to hear like, ‘Oh, you do something that you can do for a year and not expect to make money on it,’ is very helpful advice.

ADAM: It's advice we've gotten from a lot of people that we've talked to. I mean, when we started out we talked to a lot of different YouTubers about their experiences. And it was pretty consistently communicated that…. Yeah, like, don't expect anything for the first couple of years. Of course, like every time we publish a video – like, I really loved this last video that Joss made and that was like, ‘This is going to be the one!’ But of course, it's just, it is a slow slog.

And, and I mean, sometimes we have to take a step back. We published our trailer on May 23rd, so we're coming up on like, three months of this channel existing in the world. And from that metric, I'm very happy with the way things have gone. I really like what we've made and like the experiments and mistakes that we've made and, you know, it's just like we're just a quarter of the way through that first-year metric and an eighth of the way through two years. So there's a lot of ground ahead of us.

But also the ones that you've published thus far. I mean, the longer pieces that you publish are evergreen and I mean, I as a fan of yours now, everyone else will learn eventually and then those, you know, you have a wealth for people to find. So just to stick with the specific actionable advice part of this conversation… If I wanted to start building a ‘Howtown,’ what's this key infrastructure? What are the frilly details? You know that, that clip in ‘Back to the Future’ where they start throwing trash in the back of the car right at the end…?

ADAM: I don't remember this, but that sounds like a powerful metaphor. [laughing]

You know, Doc has created an engine that runs on trash. Like… what is the trash that's powering ‘Howtown’? What’s powering you through this time? That sounds like it's scary and difficult. What are the core things to build? And then what keeps you going through that?

ADAM: Well, I think we'd have to mention our partners for sure. Like, that's a big thing. It's just like, I mean, partnership… I think is a big part of it. Joss mentioned that, like… And I feel the same way, if not more so that this would be so hard to do alone. Just emotionally and just being able to like, check in and… the rise and fall of every publication is made easier by another person being like, ‘This is good, we're doing good. Let’s keep going.’

And then the partnership of people outside of the project is, of course, so important to to have like that perspective and also like financial support and, you know, both of our partners are talented creators of visual media themselves. So we definitely have gotten their help. That's the first thing that came to mind.

That is such a beautiful thing to say though. I feel this exact same way when I got into this. Like I've been on my partner’s health care since… since six months after we met.

JOSS: Yeah I mean it's huge. It's a privilege and it's huge to have support outside of the project and that there's probably ways to do this where you don't have to go all in. I know the Answer in Progress folks, for example, had sort of part-time jobs at the same time, or they had other gigs.

ADAM: Yeah, for years they were doing other notes like some of them were doing other outside stuff.

JOSS: The assumption is that if you can go all in, you can grow faster. I don't know if that's necessarily true. I think the key thing is that you have to put something into the world that doesn't already exist, and that has to it has to like, demand attention. It can't just be like another valuable addition. It has to be a spectacle in some way or at least have some proposition that’s unique.

This is us giving advice from a position where we absolutely don't know if what we're doing is working, but I do think that you can't just assume that if you build it, they will come. You have to really be quite, you have to be you have to really study what exists and what works in this particular platform. And then, you know, be strategic about how you package what it is that you can offer. Because there's just so much competition. Everyone has the skills, everyone has great ideas. The technology's changing all the time to make previous skills obsolete. And like every kid in the world wants to do this for a living. So it's it's an uphill battle. And I think you, you have to, like, really believe that you have something unique that people are going to recognize as like a unique offering.

I am so thankful that you were up for doing this with me. Thank you.

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