Cleo Abram: What Could Go Right?

Oh wait, let's talk about aliens actually. Eugene is a huge fan of aliens. I am also. Have you discovered anything? Thank you, we're close to making quest contact in the next two years. You see, I love it. Now we're at the party, he's just said that. Tell me more. Yeah. So there's a guy called... First, first, first have your drink and say it. I think it sets the scene. We're at a party. Hey, yeah. So aliens. So there's an extraterrestrial being that comes to a guy called Daryl Anka. Please just hate it when your pessimistic friend is a DJ. This is What Now with Trevor Noah. You take your time. You take your time. You just go ahead and take your time. Every moment, every second you need. You just take it. Do they have that on YouTube? I know they have subtitles and dubbing, but can you dub to other accents? That would be dope. That would be nice. We should just have the whole episode in a certain accent. I think you should do that for this episode we really should I think you should ADR it after just do the whole thing I'm typical challenged I actually don't know I did what I always hoped is using an acronym when I don't know what it stands for I think what ADR means is when they go back in a movie and make the same sounds again when they didn't catch it oh okay you've acted in movies is that right additional dialogue recording additional dialogue recording but they should have a name for it when it's over the other one because not additional this is the same dialogue recording it should be called DDR duplicate dialogue recording and you can upload your own audio files on YouTube so you could post a video and then you post another audio file and I think you'd have to call it you'd have to choose a language we should start doing that we'll make every episode in another accent as well Because people think of everyone who speaks other languages. But what about other accent speakers? What about them? Yeah, no one cares about them. We could be doing this whole episode in an English accent. Eugene, I say Eugene. I couldn't, but you could. But the universal African accent must never see the light of day ever again. Because whoever came up with that universe, because even in Africa, what accent are you talking about? I can't even do it. It's hard. Yeah. It's in like every movie where there's Africans But they're not African Africans hear it But where It's a very specific kind of accent I don't even know how to do it Because it's nowhere It's nowhere But if you did know No but do you You know We were talking about this just before we started recording And I wonder if you have to think about this you know as as your platform has grown as you've gotten bigger do you have to think about balancing out like what you'll do for a view and then what the views will do for the people who are viewing the thing tell me more about what you mean by that so what we were chatting about earlier is let's say i'm interviewing somebody on the show right we're hanging out here it's me eugene the person whoever it is let's say they're a politician and then you go like for instance we had zoran on the show and then someone's like oh we'd be cool if you did a thing on trump and whatever and then I go, it could be cool and it could be crazy and you could do whatever you want, right? So I could go off and do like, let's say I do like a mini roast of Trump or whatever. Here I am with Zoran. So he's like, Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. And then you're like, oh, let's play out what happens. Zoran's like, welcome, Zoran. Nice to see you in my office. Mamadani, nice to see you. Mamadani. Now, if he joins in and Trump sees that and Trump gets pissed off and then goes, oh, I'm going to cut funding for New York. Was it worth it? No. So that's my point. Yeah. So now, but I wouldn't have to think that if we only had like 50 viewers, then you just do whatever you want. Yeah, but you wouldn't feel good about it even if you had 50. Oh, I would definitely feel good about it. How can you not feel good about an act out? Well, I'll just say about my show, I've constructed the whole thing so that it prevents that question. because the premise of the show is I'm going to genuinely explain something to you that's complicated that I want you to understand. I'm going to do it in a way that is in the end optimistic. You're going to have a specific feeling about like, oh, there are smart people working on a hard problem and I can see how we can make this better. And then it's going to be visual and beautiful and joyful all at the same time. And if it does those three things, visual beautiful and joyful it's uh that's how i think of eugene whenever i look at you eugene that's what i think of i think you are visual i think you are joyful and i think you're beautiful beautiful not often your hands are warm in my knuckles that was nice um the three things no the three things are uh genuinely good explainer genuinely optimistic and visually stunning a visual piece. And so if it's those three things, then it gets to be on huge. And if it's not one of those things, then it shouldn't be there. And so that prevents a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are the exact characters. Yeah. And if so, it's not one of those things, then the pressure is on me and on my team and on, I mean, frankly, the audience now knows what feels like huge and what doesn't. And it's a pressure that counterweights a lot of the other pressures on journalists and on. Okay, got it. To be pessimistic, to be... Unstrupulous and sensitive. All of those things. Yeah, it's a counterweight. And I'm not saying it's perfect every time. We also think a lot about how do I do those three things in a way that millions of people want to watch. So there's absolutely a storytelling element to it. But it strips away a lot of the things that I didn't like as a journalist, that I don't want to watch, that aren't in the end helpful for me to actually understand something, make me feel optimistic about the future that I can participate in building, and that use the fact that it's a video, right? Like watching a video requires a lot of your time and attention. It requires your eyes in addition to your ears. And so I think a lot about how do I earn that from my audience? So anyway, if I'm doing those three things, then it should be on the show. And in those moments where like, you can feel the pressure to do something else because you think it'll spike in viewership. I mean, everyone talks about that. Everyone who's been involved in YouTube. Because I think there's a specific, there's a delineation between the types of content you make when you're making it for what we call mainstream media, let's say. Your bosses have already confirmed it. It goes out. It's commissioned. It gets put on TV or in the movies, and then it's done. YouTube, you are the boss. You're making the decisions. You're putting it out there. You're doing your thing. So in essence, the only driving force behind whether it does or doesn't go out is you. Yeah. All right? But that means that people – I remember talking to – was it Jake Paul or Logan Paul? I always forget which one. I think it was Jake. I think it was Jake. But it was – and I was interviewing him and we were talking about his life and his show. And then he talked about how the click cycle got him. he did one thing he he fell somewhere he broke something and people like more of that more of that and they didn't say it verbally but people loved it and then him and his team were like you got to do it again and then you're jumping off the top of your stairs the banister in your in your house and people like more and higher and the next thing you know you're in like you know a forest a suicide forest in japan and you are looking at yourself going how did i get here but stand-up has a lot of those elements right oh yeah definitely stand-up when we first started It was just us trying to see how far we can push the envelope. Yeah, you're not wrong. And then you get one TV gig, and now you have to be careful. You get one endorsement. Now they're like, also, are you going to say that for real, real, real? Yeah, but it's almost the other way around, funny enough, with stand-up, now that you mention it. It's almost like stand-up, they almost calm you down in a way. Because at stand-up, you see, like, your rules. I don't know about all stand-ups, but, like, I can say for myself, and this gentleman seated across from me, this fine squire right here, across from me. I would say it's like if we think of our rules, you go, do we find it interesting? Yes. Yeah. Do we think it's funny? Yes. Then that's it. It's as simple as it doesn't matter where it goes and how it goes. You're trying to break everything. There are things that you know the audience might like that you don't think are funny. Yes. That you think are just not – they don't make you feel good. Yes. That would – that helps a lot. That feeling – like for me, it's these three criteria I've come up with. And it helps to have a – I think what I'm really coming to in this is it really helps to have a mission. Oh, I like that. It really, really helps. These criteria are part of the overall mission of the show, which is, in my case, and everyone chooses their own, my mission is I make this show so I can show people with those three criteria, explain to them things in an optimistic way, in a visually beautiful way. I make this show so I can show people visions of the future because I believe that if they see those visions in an optimistic way, they can help build them. So my goal, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a scientist. My goal is to present who's working on hard things and how are they doing it and what could it potentially do and how could it go wrong and how could it go right and make an optimistic explainer video that helps people see if you're watching it in the audience. And maybe you are someone who could help. And I believe that everybody can in their own way. Yeah. You can help participate in making that better somehow. I look at people like you as a mission and I go, why do you care? Well, now we can get into all kinds of, you know, the way that I grew up and why I want to do this work. Then let's do it. Let's do it. I'm happy to do it. I like how you said it like we don't have an option. You're like, no, well, then I've got to get into it. You've come to the right place. Why did you get it? Because I remember when I – so I'll give you a bit of context. When I first came across your work, I had just started on The Daily Show. So I joined The Daily Show in 2015, right, when Jon Stewart was still around. And so I was a correspondent. Jon would phone me and be like, come and do this funny thing. I would be like, yeah, and then we'd leave. And then you know what I mean, back and forth, back and forth. Jon announces he's leaving. They find a new host. The host happens to be me. I've shrunk the process down. But before I was going to host the show, I went through this like, I want to say like six, seven month period of just i mean like gorging on every piece of content that i could because i just had to learn about this new country in this new place but from the inside you know so what's the news where's the news coming from and then america's unique and i guess now it's not as unique as it was at that time in that the news doesn't just come from one place yeah you know so we grew up where it was like did you watch the news yes i watched the news and then now here it's like which news whose news whose news who said it's the new so now i'm watching all news collecting all news and i remember coming across your work and at the time it was on vox right yeah and vox was this new platform that had come out and they were explaining stuff and they made the news digestible and let me tell you if there's somebody who needed stuff explained this guy right here because i was like what what is a filibuster wait what is happening who's passing the laws who's gerrymandering who's gerry why is he mandarin what is going on here right i was like what is happening in this country and you know the funny thing is um americans will make it seem like they know what's happening it looks like everything is normal yeah and then when you find out about and then you ask most americans they'll be like i actually don't i actually don't and and not in like a shit way there's so many intricate little details to the system and that's when i came across your work you're making these videos making these videos making these videos and it was doing pretty well and then you you just left and you left when things were going well at vox and you were just gone this is the best time to leave anything i mean that's the craziest there you have to you really have to wait for a workman's camp leave your marriage leave your marriage on a high make sure to leave your marriage on the high honey can i just say i am having the best time ever with i love you so much i love you so much i'm leaving what yeah i mean i just figured so so take us who wasn't like that no so so let's go back let's let's let's try and understand yeah i think as eugene eloquently pointed out how do we how do we get to the core of this person who wants to make things that are optimistic and informative and visually beautiful in a world where you get more reward for making things that are negative and rage baity and because you could have a big show on youtube doing that you could go let me show you why the hadron collider is going to kill all of us let me show you why dinosaurs are going to come back and kill all of us let me show you why asteroids are going to kill all of you could you could make that and i think it would maybe do slightly better than what you currently have in the very short term maybe oh i like this so let's Let's go down a rabbit hole. You're good. How do we meet you at this point? What happened in your life that made you this person? So I was, if we rewind all the way back, I was a kid who, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and my parents were both lawyers. And my mom was working for Congress, and my dad was a litigator, and he did a lot of death penalty cases. And we would talk about these things. We would talk about my homework, and we would talk about their work at the dinner table. And I, both of my parents were the kind of people where if I gave them something that I'd written, And they would like cross out the lines really brutally and say like, there's a simpler way to say this. Like you can always say it in a simpler way that people can better understand. Wow. And my dad in these cases that he would work on, I really saw as a young kid how if you can explain something complicated in a way that 12 normal people can understand, you can actually save someone's life. Like in a real way. Like that's what he was demonstrating when I was a kid. And I guess that lesson stuck with me. It's hard. Sometimes it's easier now to draw lines from, you know, what you did. Like now I see how that's connected. At the time, like it was just a thing that I knew. And I grew up and I go to college and I graduate and I begin working at Vox, V-O-X. And Vox at the time was doing explainer journalism, which I loved. And I'll shorten the story somewhat. No, no, no. There's no rush. There's no rush here. We were fully in. Great. You only need to start... Eugene does the yawn, then we... I'll look for it. It's a very special type of yawn that Eugene has. It's fake, but it works well on people. I'll show you an example now. I'm going to tell you about my morning, and then I'll show you how Eugene just gently lets you know that it's time to move on. So this morning, guys, I wanted to have oats. And you know how sometimes your oats are... You know how sometimes your oats are like... I don't need you in my life. No, please go on. So I, we can come back to my journey inside Vox because I started on the business side and then I began working as a journalist. We're here for it all. I'll promise. But fast forward to I'd been working as a journalist for a couple of years and I'd been covering technology. I've been making things for Explained on Netflix, which is a wonderful show that Vox made. Very intricate, deep dives into different things that matter in the world. I had made one on computer programming and one on Diamonds Explained, which are really fun to work on. I've seen that one. Really? Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. We're talking about artificial diamonds versus real diamonds, the science and the geology, and then the history of why we buy diamonds. Yes, and then we ended on artificial diamonds. It's so fun to make. I love doing that. I love that. It was so good. It made me feel smart because I was like, oh, there is a – yeah, okay. Thank you. Yeah. So I've been working on Vox in that way. But I also was a – this is a person who loves learning about technology, and I was looking at my media diet, and I was really unhappy with it. I was really frustrated. And I think to boil down the reason that I was frustrated was I felt like there was this knee-jerk pessimism in the news that I was consuming. that was preventing me from understanding what was really happening in the world and also understanding how I could participate in making the world a better place. Right. And in doing some research, I happened upon an article. I was looking through the New York Times archive for reporting reasons, and I found an article from 1903, October 9, 1903, and it was called Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly. You can go into the New York Times archive and find this article. It talks about how we will basically never have planes. It talks about how... When is this? This is 1903. We will never have planes. We will never have planes. They basically say it boils down to if it took birds thousands of years to develop evolutionarily the ability to fly. Wow, I love this. It'll take humans millions of years. And it ends, my favorite line in this piece, I still remember it, is something like... Good luck. It basically is like the effort might be employed more profitably or something. It was 1903. That's beautiful. And so basically they were saying like, do other things. This will never work. Effort might be employed profitably elsewhere. October 9, 1903. December 17, 1903. Two months later was when the Wright brothers took their first assisted point. No way. Yeah. Two months later. And I looked at that and I put the timeline together and I was like, what? Like that matters to me somehow. Like something is wrong here. We've been doing this and it felt similar to what we were doing today. It wasn't just like a thing they did in 1903. This was like a knee-jerk pessimism about new technologies or dreams or scientific efforts. Oh, that won't work. Or once it starts to work, oh, people won't want it. Or this will go really, really wrong. And there's no way it'll help people. This is only going to hurt people. And I looked at that and I thought, like, first, this isn't a modern thing. I feel like it's been getting worse for reasons we can talk about. But, like, this has been happening. Look at this article from 1903. But then also, why does that matter? Like, why care? Maybe the media is generally a little bit pessimistic. Maybe there's also this, like, hype cycle that happens sometimes, and that's also a problem. And so altogether, like, why is this really a problem? Why should I start some new show that's going to offer something different? And I think there are two problems with that pessimism. The first is that it stops the conversation from getting interesting. Like if I tell you airplanes, they just won't work. We'll have like a five-minute conversation about why airplanes won't work. But you'll never get to the conversation about like, wait, if they work, that means that people are going to start living in different places than their families. That means that people are going to start traveling to other countries. That means that global trade is going to fundamentally change a lot in the next hundred years. Like if you told my grandfather what that was going to look like, and just that, I mean, he was alive when planes existed, but like just the absolute skyrocketing of the commercial airline industry. That would have been a fascinating conversation. If you'd said like, let's just assume that it works for the purpose of this conversation. That's basically what I try and do on my show. And let's assume all the ways in which it could go, you know, awry. Like, okay, now we can have a conversation about CO2 emissions. Now we can have a conversation about, like, the impacts of tourism. You know, like, but you only get to those conversations about real problems when you assume that it's going to work, and you don't have that pessimism. So that's the first reason. And then the second reason, the thing that was really frustrating me was there's this kind of, maybe it's a nihilism that takes hold when people don't believe that the world can get better and that they can help make that happen. it's like if the world is just getting worse and I can't do anything about it and I'm not seeing stories about people that are helping make it better and I'm not imagining technologies like quantum computers for example I'm only imagining the ways in which they're going to be a security problem and not the ways in which they're going to help develop new medicines and new material then I'm like why do I why should I try why shouldn't I just be very self interested and like pessimism coupled with helplessness always goes well together that's a much more succinct way to put it yeah that's it yeah you just scratched up the thing and you're like bam Pessimism combined with helplessness Go do your homework We're trying to do the opposite You know, I often find that A healthy amount of pessimism Is a good catalyst for people to act So you've often heard people Who are very successful Talking about the teacher that told them They'll never amount to anything Then we have that conversation In hindsight of them being successful And the teacher seemingly being pessimistic And negative Yeah, they were reacting to it Exactly. But they had to have the optimism, right? They had to push off against it. Yes. They never speak about the optimism that they had to have to push against the pessimism. That's true. But I sometimes think to myself, in that same situation to what you're saying, I think a more positive catalyst is one that sort of prompts your optimism as opposed to, you know, because I think of how many people are defeated by that statement. You will never. You'll never amount to anything. You'll never be anything. You'll never go anywhere. I think it works on a lot of people because if your teacher is telling you that who knows you better? Do you know what I mean? If someone's like hey, I've been looking at your body of work from the age of 8 to 11 yo man, this shit's not going to work out for you in life But teachers never say that No, they say Remember that teacher is per grade because people always remember one snippet of their school career where one teacher said that and it's very rare that you go with a teacher from grade 0 No, we went with like in primary school we like we met them for 12 years we you met them literally what evil teacher did you have no but this is what i'm trying to say to you we all knew that and there was always like that teacher everyone knew them as oh yes teacher do you know what i'm saying wherever they catch you they'll tell you yes the number of people who must have been inspired also by a teacher who said yes by the way have you ever considered that you could do this exactly like i've actually heard more stories like that in the end of of teachers when i think about my life i think about the teachers who said like, oh, you're very interested in this. Have you read this book? Have you, like, done it? They're sort of fueling you in this way. And I sometimes think of the show that we now make. The show is called Huge If True, that I left Vox to make this show independently on YouTube. And I think about it like that. I think about it like offering a menu of stories and options and futures that could come true to people that might be able to help make them happen, or to an audience that just wants to understand what they could potentially do with their lives and with their time or with their free time. You take for granted how powerful that is because I don't know if you've seen any of the polls that people have conducted around AI. When they ask the general public, what do you think of AI? And not like how it's being applied now, just AI as a concept. The sentiment is generally negative. Like you go, would you trust machines? Would you trust an all-powerful AI? Do you think it would be good for humanity? Without fail, a majority of the population says, no, it won't be good for us. It's going to kill us. It's going to take over. Do you know what I mean? It's also interesting that most of those people have had their views shaped by the images of AI that they had growing up. So they watched Terminator. They were watching Star Wars. So they go like, oh, no, there's only one path that technology can take. It only goes this way. Yeah, it can only go this way and it can kill you. an interesting poll that I saw the other day, and I was shocked by this, is people in Africa generally have a more positive attitude towards artificial general intelligence than people in the Western world. Yeah, because people in Africa deal with racism for a long time. You see you, my man. And that was man-made intelligence. You see you, my man. It's artificial. Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Again, I'm not allowed for. Eugene is the other half of my brain. you know when people like your left brain right brain i'm like eugene but it's true no but it's exactly what you're saying right it's interesting how people who have assumed that the intelligence will be built around them and their histories and their pasts now think that that same technology will go on to do to them what they did to others yeah but then the people who were only on like the receiving end in recent history of a thing yeah go like oh yeah any change is good change they could be like maybe this will work yeah Because it also puts us in an equal footing. I look at wars the same. Oh, damn. I didn't think about that. You don't know. I don't know. Let's see what this thing can do for AI. AI would be the right people of everyone. Yes, yes, yes. Hey, Vanna. Hey, Vanna. Fuck. Vanna. Because that. Hey. You want? I do. You noticed. I was feeling a lot. she wants a dip you have to take it seriously continue with your point actually that is a question that I have and maybe it's because I'm comedy biased it's just because of my brain it's not like how I I don't choose to have this filter on the world but you also have humor in your content you also I don't think I mean I'm not funny like you guys. No, no, no. But I promise you there's humor in it. Like when I was watching your asteroid video, it's funny. Like the fact that you have Mark Rober voicing an asteroid, that's a funny thing to do. To be talking about the potential destruction of Earth and then use a funny person's voice on the video, that's funny. You know, when you're talking about like when you're doing the dinosaurs one and you're going around with the archaeologist and you're brushing, there were funny moments in there. Oh, you've really watched the show. This is awesome. Wow. Why would I invite you here if I hadn't watched the show? well that would be a weird thing to do just be like come and no but you've like seen you you remember this is great yeah yeah but no you know you know why you teach well genuinely because you teach well it it it's um it's easy to consume it's easy to digest and it's engaging but i remember the funny moments even with like the hadron collider when you like when you were showing the um the quantum computer i was just like the size of it the scale but the jokes in between are something that I found myself fascinated by. I was like, why bring humor into something that most people go, this is the future of mankind. There's no time for jokes. But you're bringing jokes in. I think it's also that I'm the proxy for the audience. Like, I know very little. I know how to tell a great story. I'm a really, really good visual storyteller, but I'm not an expert in anything that I'm talking about. And so that requires me to come in by understanding, like, I'm the secondary character. The topic is the primary character. Oh, damn. My goal, like, why learn from me about quantum computers? You can learn from a quantum physicist on YouTube. Like, why am I there? The reason I'm there is so that I'm a proxy for the audience. I'm, like, having fun with it like you might have. I'm asking the questions that you might ask. I'm there to recontextualize what the expert is saying to kind of, like, translate for them a little bit. Like, that's the magic of what we do. Because the problem with that first bucket that we talked about, the feeling of like, oh, pessimism ends the conversation, explainers that are too complicated, like they're just not, they don't bring people in. the problem with that is you end up in a place where i think unfortunately despite the fact that huge is growing really quickly like we're very we're small compared to you know mainstream media the um the place that we're in is one where like most people hear about the future when it is has largely been set up by a smaller number of people and my belief is that if you bring people more into the earlier parts of the conversation. If you say like, we're going to need to learn about quantum computers now, though you're not actually interacting with them anytime soon, more people at the beginning of that process is a good thing. More people, to your point about AI, more people are helping to build that system if you show them what it is at the beginning versus saying, oh, it won't work. Oh, don't worry about it. Oh, this is not something that's going to be accepted, not something that people are going to want. it's not going to be a you know maybe it'll change the world but just you should be scared of it that posture means that you are less likely to participate in helping it go right and so that's something i think a lot about like how can i make it fun enough and good enough and entertaining enough so that you want to be a part of it earlier in the process so like now when you go about your day you understand something about what we've discovered about dinosaurs you understand something about crisper or quantum computers or supersonic planes like maybe you won't work on those things tomorrow, but maybe there's some way in which that is part of your life and you at least know about these topics and you're having conversations that are interesting and you're more a part of it than you would be otherwise. I believe that having more people understand complicated issues means that more people will participate in making sure that they go right. That's what I'm trying to do on my show. I like that you say that. I was in Washington State and I was at an event where who were working with Microsoft on basically like getting AI into schools, like having kids learn, teachers learn, whatever. And they set up this program where the teachers are advising on it. So they're going, this is what we actually need AI to do. So don't just give us AI. This is what we need you to help AI or make AI do for teachers. So it's lesson plans. It's helping them mark and grade and all these things. Perfect teacher's aid. Exactly. It's supposed to be that. Not a teacher. Right, exactly. And then parents are also like, this is what we need AI to do. And we're at this launch event, and I'll never forget this moment. One of the student journalists comes up, and at the end, like all the other journalists, journalists, they've all asked their questions. And then this student journalist comes up and then asks the president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, goes, Hey, I see that you've got this panel convened that's going to be doing all of this in the schools. Do you have any students on your panel? That's an amazing question. And all of us in the room were, you know, and you're like, Huh? All of us. and then brad to his credit was like no i didn't think about that and why don't we and then literally on the spot was like oh yeah we we got to do this but to your point that's how even in that moment i found myself going oh yeah you you take for granted how we are constantly building futures but not engaging all the people that the futures are being built for and then when we get there we're going to be like how did we miss this and it's like yeah but did you just ask everyone did you ask everyone what they like what do you need from AI What do you want AI to do for you Do you know what AI is Let me start with this Because Eugene is very eugene is my luddite eugene is fully my luddite friend i always compare everything new with how things were before there was technology so i hear what you're saying and i hear what he's saying and i combine it to before there was technology to disperse information and get people into doing something for the collective good without sometimes general understanding of it is wars so a few men would decide this is the greater cause for what we're doing this and then there'll be conscription so you don't have to understand fully why we're doing this thing so we're going make you do it so while you're at this thing you might discover some people might make it some people might not but you look at the ones that came back from wars and how many industries were built it's always been an accelerant for technology for ideas for industries for businesses Customizing cars Building technology Weapons Private jets It's always Because of something Huge Catastrophic That happened That included conscription And I guess Once you add a little bit Of pessimism in there You can find A lot of ideas When people push back Because people Just usually go with something So I like What I like with explainers Is it always starts with Have you ever wondered why But then you have to Stick around to the end To go What are you going to do about it So that usually In now normal society It's elections You have to wait to choose to almost feel like you have a choice because you've seen what happened in the last four years. Did you see that thing in, I forget where this is in Canada. I think they had an election or they're planning to have one where everyone can just vote on their phones from home. Yes, like full on. We did an explainer about digital voting, mobile voting. Like full on? Turns out it's extremely difficult from an encryption perspective. wait say no why so this was a little while ago so I don't want to butcher this too much but the question I went into the story with is why don't we all just vote on our phones I love this wouldn't it be wouldn't it be great it would be great and wouldn't it make for a more participatory democracy sounds good to me but I generally believe more people voting is good yes let's make it easier to vote love this I'm in and so I went and I talked I'm not a fan of of total outright democracy you know Maybe we should start there. Don't be a representative of democracy. You would vote for the representatives. I'm like, some people don't deserve a voice. Let's not talk to us later. We should come back to that. Oh, man. Anyway. For the purpose of this conversation, everyone. Shut up, shut up. So I went and I asked all these encryption experts. And so we talked to folks that were working on mobile voting. We also talked to people that deeply oppose mobile voting. We should not do that. That's a really bad idea, and I wanted to understand why. What it boils down to is that voting is not like online banking. It is not like the secure things that you do online. Okay, and why is that? A couple of reasons. The first is that everything you do online accepts some level of fraud. because the banks are basically backstopping a certain amount of fraud to make it easy for you to log in and do transactions and all those things. They accept that there will be some level of acceptable risk, and that level has to be below the friction that they would have to put on you to make it less risky. They just have to mean more activity that makes them more money versus the amount of fraud that they have to pay for. Okay, so if I was to dumb this down for myself, it's the equivalent of like a clothing store going, we'll only put a certain amount of detectors on the clothing to make it safe. Because we'll buy more. Yeah, but we can't cover the thing in detectors because then you won't want to try it on. You won't see the thing. So we have to accept a certain amount of risk to have you comfortable in the buying experience. And what items in the store are we putting detectors on? Okay, got it. Basically this all the time. Okay, got it. We can't accept that in voting. because the small amount of risk, especially in the way that we vote in the United States with such small pockets where it matters a lot, you can't accept any amount of risk that way. And also philosophically, we don't believe that you should. The idea, if you try to explain to people that we're going to accept some voter fraud because more people can vote, I mean, America's elections are basically like 50-50 at this point. So if you have like a 3%, 4%, that's not good. Oh, damn. So you can't accept that. You're good. She's fantastic. I'm in. This is fantastic. It would help more if we had the visuals. We could have a map. We could have like a, you know. We have your hand. I guess I do speak English the way that you are. Sounds good. So that's reason number one. Yeah. Reason number two is that it's just like nothing else on earth. When you have global powers that want to affect each other's outcomes. Like, we are not talking about stealing a million dollars, a hundred million dollars. We're talking about China and Russia and the United States trying to impact each other's elections. This is like, this is stakes like nothing else that exists at all. And so when you talk about that, like the way that these encryption experts talk about mobile voting, it's like the things that would have to withstand are like nothing you've ever experienced online. Like, there's nothing in the world that matters as much. and the outcome of the elections of the most powerful countries. It makes absolute sense because if you think of online versus physical voting, you are more susceptible to whims if you vote online than you would if you're voting physically. Maybe there's a change in the way that there's... Because you might be sitting on your couch feeling a certain way, and that might determine how you vote. But if you have to get up, take a day off, go queue, now I'm going to vote worse. Yeah, that would be an argument. You just don't want me to stay at home. Why are you doing this to me also? Why are you doing this to me? Now when I get up, now when I go, I might change my vote on the way there, where I'm like, this is a terrible day. Really? Terrible day. Not after you've... My man, have you seen the conversation that happens at queues when you're about to vote? That's another reason I don't want that. Because now people are talking to each other about voting. Yes. Who should they talk to? Nobody. Your vote is misdequit. Now we're having a good debate. Because we're assuming it could work. I think anything that you're struggling for will make it worth it. So if you're standing in a queue in the snow, and you're about to make a decision around other people who took the same decision as you. Boo. Hold on. There is research. There is research on the fact that it's like a community builder. Exactly. That's a separate argument. That's a separate argument. I generally... You make up your mind. Whose side are you on? Hold on. If you could... You're not on anybody's side. That's what makes her good. She's encouraging discourse, Eugene. Boo. Okay. One more interesting thing about voting is also the ways that you would have these countries hack voting. Yeah. I didn't really understand what I was talking about. I was thinking like in like a cyberpunk movie where you like see, you know, then there would be a glitch and someone in the U.S. would notice the glitch and like there would be a hack, right? Right. A lot of these encryption experts are like, listen, the way that they would do this is like we already know that in districts, if it rains, it marginally affects voting. Yeah. With the outcome of older people and those people are more likely to vote this way and And then all of a sudden, because it rained, that one district that affects this one state that affects the electoral college that affects this. And so what they would do, this gave me the heebie-jeebies when they said it. He was like, you could imagine a foreign power just digitally making it rain in just the right places. And we would never notice. And I was like, like making it like digitally making it rain. Like I'm making it the lag time on the screen. They could make it a little bit longer. And that would mean that fewer people would vote. And you'd never notice. or the login. Maybe they would make it mess up a couple times and that would affect like older people in particular. Like just a little little things on the edges and then you have an outcome that you didn't expect. The politics would have very little to do with that. That's literally how I keep Eugene out of my house when I don't have to visit you. I'll just like I'll make the lock a little tighter. I'll jam the door a little bit more. And he never and he never he hasn't noticed. And then some days he just doesn't I'll be like yeah come over anytime and then he'll be there. I don't think it's coming. But, you know, it is crazy to think about it like that. So you go down, the way that we did this episode was you go down this rabbit hole and you're like, okay, these are all brilliant people that I'm talking to that have thought about this their whole lives. These are all the reasons why you wouldn't want it. I'm like, okay, but you could, right? Like, this isn't, I've talked to people who are building rockets. Like, this isn't rocket science. Like, you could do this, right? Like, there has to be some. And so I'm pushing, like, optimistically. Like, this could work, right? And so then you get into the area of science. It's a little bit more boring, and I won't tell you all about it. But, like, how would they do it? What are the encryption strategies? There are people that are working on this that could do it in a way that you would notice the digital range. Like, there's real effort here, and there are experiments. As you said, there are countries that are experimenting with it. There are places where they're trying to make this easier. And I think, I mean, the episode ends with, like, it's worth the effort to try. Like, here are all of the reasons why it's way harder than you think. And it's not just like, oh, I bank online, I should vote online. But we believe that more people voting is a good thing. You could be part of a future that allows that to happen. Like, here are all the smart people working on this hard problem. And so you don't end the story with, oh, it's way harder than you think. You end the story with, oh, here are all the smart solutions. It's ongoing. If you want to participate, you absolutely should. Don't go anywhere because we've got more What Now after this. you know what i just realized you must be both the most fun and irritating person at a party that's why she comes in early and comes in early and leaves early exactly no no you know why people love people love speaking to other people who know things they love it until those people actually know things that's what i've learned no but i don't know anything no no but you do you do because let's say we were at a party now we're all standing around with our drinks right and we're all having this conversation oh yeah so so how do you know you did ha ha ha ha ha yeah and i'm like you know the election i think they should vote yeah you saw in canada they're gonna they're gonna do a digital vote then you go like oh yeah actually they did they did a thing on the then we're like no but the thing and then you encryption encryption encryption encryption encryption facts facts facts facts data experts spoken to etc and then someone would be like i'm gonna go um i'm gonna go get a snack i i don't contact i'm gonna go get another drink i promise i know no i wouldn't if i were you i'd keep doing it i'm just saying because we live in a world where let's be honest we live in a world where what you said earlier really struck me you said i'm not an expert i don't know anything and i go that's a strange level of humility for you to approach this the sphere with because you do know things because you've learned on it from the experts and I always go like knowledge is from someone you know what I mean there's very few people who make original knowledge alone everyone takes from somewhere takes from somewhere takes from somewhere the expert and then when you read even if you read those like textbooks you know when you go down to the footnotes and they're like oh yeah this guy said that part and that person said and she said that and that person from who? you're always taking me into weird words highly intelligent extraterrestrial beings called the Anunnaki oh I don't even know what that is yeah anyway oh wait let's talk about aliens actually. Eugene is a huge fan of aliens. I am also. Have you discovered anything? I think we're close to making first contact in the next two years. You see, I love it. Now we're at the party. He's just said that. Tell me more. Yeah. So there's a guy called... First, first, first have your drink and say it. I think it sets the scene. We're at a party. Hey, yeah. So aliens. So there's an extraterrestrial being that comes through a guy called Daryl Anka. Do you just hate it when your pessimistic friend is a DJ? We shouldn't have put him in charge of the music. You were saying. Oh wow. I encouraged him to start now look at me so there's this being that comes through him he's been doing this for the last 20-30 years it's called Bashar so Bashar a couple of years ago are you ready for a Eugene explain about that? I'm sorry are we talking about like Daryl Anka? the real world you channel Bashar? are we talking about that? seminar guys am I the only one who knows about Bashar and spirit box at the same time? so explain the Eugene please this is one of Eugene's favorite YouTube channels. Yes. Is this like a... Spirit Box and Bashar are two different things. But we'll go into Spirit Box later. And are they... I'll ask this the way that my five-year-old niece would ask this. Like, is this the pretend world or is this the real world? The real world. Okay. I'm going to pull this up in the meantime. While he describes it, then I'm going to play it for you. So Bashar has been... I mean, Daryl Anke has been channeling this being from another planet psychically called Bashar, right? So Daryl does this. And then Bashar, five years ago, predicted that in the next coming years, we're going to start seeing things that we can't explain in the sky. So those are different levels of aliens that will start making contact. And then two years ago, a year ago, we started seeing drones that people couldn't explain, governments couldn't explain, phenomena that was happening globally at the same time that people couldn't explain. And then he said, two years from now, we're going to start seeing more contact, human contact with aliens. And I believe it. I was going to go a different route with this. Tell me. Wait, wait. Before you do, I'll play you. This is, I guess, JonBenet Ramsey spirit. I'm pretty sure when we were talking about... No, spirit box and Bashar. So start with Bashar. Spirit box is something else. Oh, I don't know. I only remember spirit box because it made my life. Say Bashar. Okay, hold on, hold on. Are we sure we should be giving this more airtime to him? We can just bleep them all. Remember when you were worried about your digital diet? So now let me ask you, as somebody who loves science, who explores, how do you delve into a topic like this? This is a good moment. So let's say we were in the office now. Eugene had just pitched you. Well, we did this. Because it's huge if it's true. So it's called huge if true. Somebody can speak across dimensions to Indians. And also, I mean, I think the thing that I really like to do when I hear things that, with all due respect, may or may not be true, is you take that and you say, okay, what are people interested in here, and how can I show you the way in which the science that I'm confident is, is at least going through the scientific process, is more interesting for the reasons you are interested in this than a sort of fictional world ever could be. So, for example, people are really interested in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about it. The real large- Wait, what are the conspiracy theories? Oh, they think it's, like, going to tear a hole in the universe. They think there's a lot of, like, devil worship kind of thing. Yeah, sort of pseudoscientific, but also, like, much more spiritual as well, that this is wrong somehow, that we shouldn't be playing God. There's, like, a lot of, like, centralizing- Stargate kind of stuff. Opening a portal for things to come in. Yeah, and, like, all of that. Also, like, there have been a couple of instances in which, like, people have played into this. like there were a couple of students who pulled a prank where they were like dressed up a certain way and like did a sort of chanting. Oh, man. It never helped. You see, whenever... That wasn't ideal. We got a lot of headlines. I'm deep into conspiracy. So whenever we're... Those are a bunch of PhD students or something. A bunch of PhD students play a prank and that prank becomes more famous than the original conspiracy and then it rubs out that conspiracy. Cover up. I think those are Asian provocateurs. Maybe. I don't know. I have no idea. You'd like this, actually. You might appreciate this. I remember having a conversation With someone who was pretty high up Used to be at the CIA And I said to him I was like yo Conspiracy theories Like are these people real Are they onto something And he said something That will stick with me forever He said at the CIA We laugh at conspiracy theorists And all that But he said But we're also glad That they are as crazy as they are Because of how many times They are right And can I tell you That changed my perspective Because he's a conspiracy theorist I'm not like i'm genuinely not but it changed my perspective forever because i was like oh we assume a conspiracy theorist is always wrong yeah we assume they're always wrong and then what he basically said to me was no no no sometimes they're right but the stuff that they're wrong on is so often and so crazy that it covers the things that they did get and then we just get to that's why they'll never like confirm nor deny anything because it just it stacks on itself and i think in the last couple of years they've tried to do to dispel the myth that most cia agents are white and also that um what they're doing is unethical because you've seen there's a there was a huge there was this one guy who was famous with an afro um who used to be on all podcasts and you'll be talking about guys really do you think do you really i'm here they hired me with an afro and i'm black do you really think they're that bad then everyone was like you are are they that bad? But people who've been affected by spies and CIA agents and people who've done things were like, they didn't look like you. So there is always, like, I certainly believe when there's protests, when there's... Oh, but that's been proved. There's always been an agent provocateur who's just a person credible enough to dispel what is really going on. But that's been proved. I mean, I think there's a lot to weed out in, like... You could be an agent provocateur. This is how it starts. I'm not. Okay, shut up, shut up. That's all I needed. Eye contact and a denial. Yeah. I'm not. I'm not. It's easy to please. Are you a spy? No. Okay, cool. We're good. We're good. We're good. I try to think about it like what is the core interest here? So, for example, I love the idea that I might be alive when we make first contact. Like the idea that there are aliens out there, especially intelligent aliens. I'm taking supplements for that reason. You want to be alive for longer. Not for my daughter to graduate university. To see when we make. Totally. or even i mean i would be lion's mane i'm in i would be excited about like bacteria on another planet i'm sorry just i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm i'm really sorry this guy just said wait i'm sorry this man just said that's what i'm thinking because now i pictured the aliens coming down to earth making first contact with you specifically going back to the mothership and then they go like have you met them it's like yes i've made contact full of magnesium high levels of lion's mane mushrooms is this all of yes i think they are 50 percent mushroom and 50 percent human are you sure i'm pretty sure i i scanned him i'm pretty sure why does he already he had ash ashwagandha a lot of ashwagandha in these species i'm sorry sorry so you were going i thought i was bad look no no He said, I take supplements for that day. We never think of which... Do you know how important it is? I just nodded and smiled. But do you know how important it is to think about which human will be our first contact? We never think about that. Wow. Because if the aliens do get here and then they meet... Who they meet first... Oh, but I think they're going to be looking at us from afar and seeing that there's nitrogen in our atmosphere. You think they're going to David Attenborough us? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think they're going to... What do you mean they are going to? They have been. I think there's so many. Well, OK, so get back to conspiracy theories, I promise. The thing that I am most interested in is what people are interested in. So, for example, the idea that people we as humans feel this kind of loneliness with each other and also cosmically that I think is really beautiful somehow. Like we're so used to reaching out to each other that we understand that the world is big, the universe is unthinkably enormous, and we reach out and we really want that. And so I think that is beautiful and interesting. And when I tell stories, I want to make a video. I just made an episode all about what would happen if an asteroid were about to hit Earth and how we would figure out how to solve that problem. There are real solutions to that, which are fascinating. But I want to do another version of that where I imagine, like, what is the most realistic case where we might encounter aliens? Is it that on the moons of Europa we're going to find, you know, bacteria in an ocean somewhere? Is it that we're going to look at a star system, you know, hundreds of light years away and see that there's an atmosphere there that we think looks like ours because it has life? Like, what would the realistic scenarios be? And then you create a sort of, I'm really into the idea right now of mixing science fiction with the explainer stories that we're doing. Because I do think that science fiction, if you are very clear, again, with the voicing with Mark Rober, if you're very clear about what's fiction and what's fact, you can play out a situation. An asteroid is coming for Earth. Okay, now what are the real, what is the real science and technology that we would use in that situation? So in this case, okay, imagine the realistic scenarios in which we might actually encounter life off Earth. What would happen next? What would we do if we encountered some light? How would we verify that? Would we send a probe? It's going to take 100 years to get there. It's going to take much, much more than that, actually. How would we verify that? And so you play this out and you accept what people find interesting and what the seed is. And then you try and show them the science and the technology that you're convinced is real through the scientific method, but that gets at this thing that they are excited about. So another example is that... The same as the 1902 article. Exactly. Yeah, you try and do that in an optimistic way so people can see like, okay, if the plane were to fly, what would that mean? Okay, if we were to find aliens, what would that look like? What is the real science in fact there? Same thing, I guess what I'm doing is sort of... You are the 1902 first article. Yeah, I am 1902. 1903 for the White Brothers was 1903? Pretty sure, yeah. I don't know. I'm just making sure I remember it correctly. And so you can do that over and over again with all of these different interests. I don't even want to call them conspiracy theories. It's just like, okay, you're interested in CERN. You're interested in the fact that we're smashing particles together. Let me tell you the real science of the fact. No, can I tell you? We're smashing protons. The real thing that we're doing. Particles smashing. only Eugene could make science sexy you see the particles smashing more combative but now I get it what did the one hadron collider take to the other hadron collider so did you smash hey there's a scientist out there who's loving that he's like yeah um I just realized you that's a superpower that you have that is not just in short supply i i i can't think of many people i've met who who have this ability you spend very little to no time focusing on the definitive place that people find their imaginations at and instead you encourage the possibilities of where that imagination could lead so like you just did it now right eugene goes i believe the aliens and they speak like this and they're doing this and i'm going like i don't believe in this i believe it's part but i don't believe in this and we roll like that we're friends and i always say what i love about that is like i don't think people have enough friendships where their friend has a thing like eugene treats my views on soccer like i treat his views on aliens do you know what i mean so when i'm like oh that game he's like what game there was no this is all not you know what i mean but we have fun with it we genuinely do but what you do is is more interesting is like you don't sit in the is it right is it wrong is it real is it not is it no you go huh how would we what would we where would we it it like encourages this journey it encourages a journey yeah everyone involved do you know what i mean like the energy is there the desire to learn the desire yeah but i think most people don't treat people like that like i tried to explain this to somebody once i genuinely did not have the eloquence nor the compassion that i think you have when engaging in the topics but i remember saying this around like parents with vaccines you know and i remember i think on one of our episodes we talked to maybe dr becky about it and i was saying a lot of parents are anti-vaccine, right? And we live in a world now for the most part where people go pro-anti-fights. How can you not? How can you? And that's it. It's as simple as that. And there's very few people who will take a moment to go, well, somebody who is anti-vaccine has actually spent a lot of time on their own Googling and reading. And that's almost why they've become anti-vaccine is because they've gone out of their way to consume copious amounts of information that have led them down a certain path now whether the information is valid or not is a separate discussion but it means that they have a hunger and they have an interest in the topic that has now brought them to that place can you offer yeah can you offer anything that allows them to do that thing that they do in a in a direction that that has more for them to do it too there's more information over here you could you could be more excited about all of the many different research papers that are coming out every day like here's here's a place to start like here's here's some interesting information And I also think, like, the thing that gets me really excited is that the world is very strange and very exciting and full of things to learn and to get excited about. And so I view my job as to create a menu of journalistically rigorous, genuinely beautiful, deep explainers that might excite someone to go down all of these different paths. Have any of them been wrong in any way? I mean, we issue corrections when we get things wrong. Oh, you do? There haven't been any major stories where the underlying point of the story has been wrong. Right, right. And we work really, really hard to make sure that that's not the case. If it ever is, we would do a big correction on that. so far it hasn't happened um but every once in a while we'll need to do a correction on the on a fact so you you can um youtube has a really great ux where you can put the time code and then a colon and use a user experience okay so there's a feature on youtube where you can say the time code and then say correction and put whatever you want people to understand that is different than the fact that you said so i do this sometimes if i say like if i um an example would be uh i use the wrong um we do everything in metric but i have an american audience as well so if a um translation is incorrect yeah i would put the correct one or something like things that are sometimes they're they're more deep than that uh we had a cave that we said was in one country but it's actually in another you put the correction and this is i mean this is basic journalistic practice this is what you want you know if you're telling a story and i mean you say that but we live in a world where that isn't a why why journalism by the way i mean if both parents were in law why why did you pick journalism well i began working at vox on the business side actually okay i was really excited i had no experience as a journalist and i was really excited about the idea that i could help facilitate the storytelling that i was so excited about um sorry to interrupt you there like are you ever not excited no you you like you strike me as a very positive optimistic excited like i understand making videos about asteroids hitting the earth and like explaining the world excited i'm with you completely law death penalty excited you just said i was going to go work in the business division business affairs and i was excited and your eyes told me Looked excited. Yeah. Is there anything where you go like, like boring? Like, is there anything? Or have you always had this as a filter on the world? I think I was so incredibly lucky that somehow... I don't think it's innate. I think I was taught this somehow along the way. That there's nothing... I'm actually doing an episode right now. I'll spoil it. When does this come out? Whenever it needs to come out. I don't know. This is not the kind of thing that is like a big spoiler. We're working on an episode for the Olympics that will come out during the Olympics. Okay. And we're focusing on curling. The sport. The sport. Greatest sport. Wheel of cheese. I'm obsessed with curling. I think curling is just the most fascinating. From a physics perspective, the ice is amazing. There are all kinds of applications of the way that the curling stone spins that might, in an interesting way, help us solve physics problems. And when I talk about Fashara, you guys exercise me. No, I promise. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Eugene, you're talking about a granite? Eugene? Yeah, yeah. Wheel of cheese. Wheel of cheese. you see yeah let's be clear i've never criticized you i've only mocked you there's a difference um i is where in the ux can i put this correction you want some yeah so yeah if you're fascinated by curling and you said how it might help us solve so the physics there's a physics mystery in curling which is oh man i gotta explain this now so this is your life no no no no this is the thing that nobody would understand no I'll explain this one second I need a prop you need a sip yes okay no she needs a prop oh a prop so you okay okay that would be really fun if we were to party yeah yeah yeah okay so the mystery in curling is usually if I have this and I spin it I don't know if you saw that, but I was spinning it in this direction, and it moved that way. Okay. Does that make sense? So it counterspied. Yes. In curling, that's not what happens. I can't demonstrate it with this right now, but if you're with a curling stone, which has a very specific bottom, and you spin it on the ice, if you watch Olympic curling, it will spin this direction, right? That's the same as what I spin, and it will move this way. and that has been confusing physicists for a hundred years what why why is the other one normally happening is centrifugal force what's happening something about that so the reason why the reason why that happens so i spun that way it moved that way i think i did it a little bit let's see if i can do it going straight really trying to make it work yeah so it moved that way i spun it that way okay the reason why that happens is something to do with friction on the front and it Like, I don't totally understand why it happens, but it basically happens with everything. Okay, got it, got it, got it. So if you... The physics of this spin and the friction of forward motion means that it should move that way But on ice with a curling stone it goes the opposite direction than you would expect Because there's no friction? So we don't totally understand why. So this has been confusing physicists. There are a lot of genuine research papers written about this. This has been confusing physicists for like 100 years. And there's a lot of very reasonable reasons. If you ask why and you look at the papers, there are a bunch of reasons that they give. There's one theory that has to do with the friction on the front of a curling stone is different than if it's on this because the ice is melting slightly as the friction moves across. So there's something to change about the friction. Is it that the water and the ice are doing two opposite things and then there's a layer between them? I couldn't repeat you. You tricked me into being interested in curling. I know. Look at me. Now I'm going to be watching the Olympics, watching curling. trying to figure out why the stone spins the way it does. This is exactly my point. And what material is this stone? Granite? Really special granite. It comes from one island. Every single Olympic curling stone comes from the same island. What island? It's called... You can just say any island and we'll throw in a correction. We should do that for fun. Just to show people how it works. The island in Scotland, it's called... I'm not going to remember this. I'm not going to mention it. Just say an island. Just say an island. The island of... She's the old stone. Alisa Craig, thank you so much. The former guy at the party. I'm a facts man. But see, every single stone comes from that one island. Okay, here's my point. And every single boring person comes from that island, too. Thanks for the facts, facts guy. We were having so much fun here. Guessing. They were going to make me make up an island, so thank you. Oh, man. Here's my point with this. The island of Bashar. And then we would have put the correction. See? It would have been perfect. Sorry, Eugene. Sorry. My point is that curling is a sport where if you read the YouTube comments in most videos about curling, or if you look at the way that people cover curling, especially on television during the Olympics, they make a lot of fun of it. They talk a lot about, like, how did this become an Olympic sport? Like, oh, you know, why are we? It's sort of a joke. It becomes a joke. first I think curling is amazing and I think the curling athletes are amazing so I think that shouldn't be the case in the first place yeah yeah oh oh I tried curling at the curling olympic trials I tried it it's insanely hard wait what makes it hard what's hard about it um knowing that your friends might see you doing it no the balance of doing it I mean you know you know we sat at this we are man you know we sat at this we are man come on baby come on baby man you know I'm so excited I'm so excited Come on Eugene You know we try to get We on baby Never heard you use That voice before Don't be out here acting Like you know We try to curl The weed on This is my point You guys Which is Kyo are trying to trick us Into acting like Curling is not funny Some people think it's funny We are those people You don't have to go far No There are some people Who think it's a We are those people You have found out I am going to make The case for this I am such a big curling fan. I am going to make this case. My point. Okay, sorry, sorry. My point is that it is lame to be the cynic who looks at curling and thinks, oh, it's funny. It's not interesting. Wow. Wow. Damn. It's lame. Shots fired. It is much more interesting. And it makes your life better to be the person that goes, why does it work that way? Gotcha. Why is that? Turns out there's a crazy physics mystery and a stone island and a relationship to how we're going to discover aliens, by the way, because we need to understand. We don't need to understand physics of Curlington, but it relates to the way in which we're going to explore islands. It relates to the way that we're going to explore planets with ice and oceans underneath. So we need there. There's a whole physics of the way that ice rubs against other things. and you need to understand that if you're going to drill into play. It's just, my point is that there's an endless amount of interesting things to know when you don't stop at, oh, that looks a little funny. Yeah. There's that, or it's more. It's funny. It's getting clues of the universe. But you also just made me realize that comedy does the exact opposite of what you're saying, but it's all about assumption. You know what I mean? I would just say that your comedy makes me think more about the everyday things that I don't. very kind but i think like when i think of like most if you if you think of some of the crazier jokes that we'll tell as comedians fundamentally what we're doing is the seed is the same it it's all it's all born in curiosity and being inquisitive however the conclusion is necessary like the the assumption of the conclusion is necessary otherwise it isn't um one of the first ones where i knew this was um jerry science one of his most famous jokes was about um expiration dates on milk and he was like how do they know how do they know when you make the cows like you know they've got the date and it's like and he had this really amazing bits about like he's like are they milking the cow and then the the farmer leans in and then the cow's like yo yo january 7th or you know what i mean very funny bits i never i never laughed at it never found it funny because i knew before i saw the joke how they have the expiry date and it's just the number of days after it comes out of the cow and so i learned in that moment that a lot of comedy relies on you not knowing the fact yeah being curious but don't pull out a phone don't don't do the research don't just be like how do they and then you've got to go on your own journey and figure it out and god forbid you figure out the truth it's just like the joke is finished yeah the joke just like it like such a cia thing to say yeah i don't know i think a lot of what you've been doing with your comedy is like you do explain like you land you land an explainer after a funny journey if it's if it's a real story i mean you and i are similar in that way if it's like a real thing i'm not going to try and make it not but there are moments where you go yeah what is the like one of my favorite jokes of myself you know every comedian has their own favorites is one of mine was like the origins of the the Ku Klux Klan and I was like where did they get the name the KKK right because then I looked into it then it's like it was the joke was something about like how the origins were they got it from the Greek brotherhood was Ku Klux Alpheon was the original name right Ku Klux Alpheon Ku Klux Klan is how they got the name Ku Klux Klan right but then I was like but then it's it's not it's not Ku Klux Klan it's not supposed to be KKK it was supposed to be like yeah it was supposed to be like kkc and then it was supposed to be a whole thing and then i played with it and i took you down the origins of it but it was crazy stuff and then i ended up on kfc and i was like that's the original that's supposed to be the name of the of the kkk is the kfc but then they they were like we can't do that then i was like because black people would love them and then who told you they couldn't do it i thought you were gonna say who told them you were so close you were so close that's why i'm not a comic and then I ended it by saying but I guess everyone wins because I'm sure the KFC has been responsible for the deaths of way more black people than the KKK my man we're trying to get sponsors on this thing I'll be tired of struggling aren't you tired oh man we're walking home after this thanks to you Amazing I'm going to go get another drink She doesn't even have water You see what happens Actually I need Can I get water full I chugged it She chugged it For the sake of science She chugged it for the sake of science To show us something Oh it's right behind you In the credenza It's in the credenza It's called a credenza In the credenza And a credenza is something else My uncle's Credenza is a problem Credenza Oh thank you Thank you no thank you i'm fine thank you need all of it yeah you all of it no no but like how keo put the water on turbo she was like yeah like but but i think that look the seed of it in the essence is fundamentally the same and that is curiosity once we stop being curious we stop growing like we stagnate we don't we don't try and make the plane we don't try and make the rocket ship we don't try and make the hadron collider we don't try and make the internet we don't try all of that requires curiosity you know what i mean and i've always i know i've said this to you before but i go people forget that the only way you can invent something is to imagine it first yeah but it can't exist yeah you don't mean you have to imagine it and then it exists if someone's imagining yeah someone just went like imagine if and then now we treat that as like a helicopter we just treat as a normal thing. Of course a helicopter works. Yo, helicopter... Have you explained helicopters? Because those things are crazy. It's actually incredibly difficult to explain. Those things should not be flying. The picture of a helicopter is very, very hard. Those things should not be in the air. Didn't Da Vinci draw the first helicopter? Yeah, but even his was more normal. Really? That's rough. His one was better. I might be wrong, but... Yeah, it was that... It had that spiral-y thing. His one was better than what they... It would never work. Yeah, what they made today. This is so fun. Like, this is what we're trying to do with all the things that will come next. That too. Wait, wait, have you explained? So are there any things you've tried to explain or gone into that has left you with more questions than answers? Oh, most things, I think. Yeah, because imagine, so you start out with something and you're like, take the CERN episode, for example. Okay. So you start out and you are curious about why there is a 17-mile loop underground in Switzerland and France. and it runs underneath all these farms and houses and it's just this like massive tube with a vacuum in it and down the tube they're firing protons in opposite directions and then when the protons are going nearly at the speed of light they smash them together in one of these massive detectors. Like, why are they doing that? Why did they choose to build that? Why are they doing it there? I don't know. Okay, maybe. Okay, until someone comes up with a beta catalyst. I think it was just international collaboration. I don't know. I genuinely don't know. And so you have all these questions. And so you begin to answer them. You ask, for example, why do we want to smash protons together? And you're like, well, the energies that you can get create different kinds of particles that we think were around at the beginning of the universe. It's teaching us things about the beginning of the universe. It is also proving the existence. Just to confirm, is it the beginning of our universe or all universes? which I never no I've never known I don't know that much about multi-universe theory I think it's the universe in totality yeah but I'm thinking are they because I don't know I only thought of this now while you were saying it I was like there's more universe right I think the question you're asking is is the theory about multiverses do they all begin at the Big Bang that's what I'm asking yeah yeah yeah I'm saying is it all universes or just our universe all all universes from one Big Bang one Big Bang huh I mean He said it with such confidence. He really did. And this is how he wins all our arguments. Because now he beat me. I genuinely don't know. Maybe. Yeah, I think it's about all universe. Because you must remember, up until recently, we thought the universe was our planet. Yes, that's true. That's what we thought, right? But you can see in pop culture starting to pop up the theory of quantum jumping, the theory of the multiverse. And they're all interlinked. Because you look at popular movies that show Doctor Strange going from one port to the other. you're like they're explaining that but the theory of whatever you're going through now there's another version of you that didn't choose to do the thing that you're doing now yeah oh this is a really good episode idea i haven't done much on like multiverses i i'm gonna write it down after yeah it's a really good story so i i think when when there's a very serious theory as well yeah i don't know people like observing photons and atoms because there's a theory that if you're observing it it changes but you're not looking at it but it's like mostly with anything but you think of yourself in your apartment or your house if you're in the living room you don't know what's going on in the bedroom but somehow your curiosity because we always think of curiosity as grandiose something has to be invented and you have to have some show for it but it sometimes happens to you when you're sitting in your living room and you go i wonder what's going on in the bedroom and you meander in there and then you go everything as i left it then you go back to where you're from so i think answering those questions of why there's a loop underground smashing protons there's a few guys who are really interested in finding out why but the impact of it will reverberate towards everything that we're doing currently absolutely and when i like a cell phone signal we didn't care until we cared and when i look into those stories and i i wonder why did a couple hundred scientists build something like this what what is the purpose and then why do they and then why do they want to build a bigger one Stop you. You're going to wear a white coat and do what? No, we're going to Switzerland. There's a loop. And then? And then there's a torch. My other friend is going to be firing the torch. And then? And then? But, like, here's a question. No science. Here's a question that I had when I was going into this story. How do they make them hit each other? Yeah, that one blew my mind. How do they make them hit each other? Yeah. That's a good one. So then you keep going, and every question begets, like, 10 more questions and everyone it's like a fractal out and out and out but you know what's funny most people who do this become pessimistic really? yeah I find most people or many people who go whatever but then but then they go into like a spiral of but then but then nothing no they go they start they start off curious yes and they can lean towards pessimism or helplessness yeah that's what I mean which comes back to that's exactly what I mean that's what you're trying to avoid whereas you So maybe that would be a great thing to help. I mean, because I think it would be great for everyone to have that feeling and that framework for life. What is it about the endless possibility of questions that leaves you feeling fulfilled as opposed to debilitatingly unknowing? you know there's this feeling of awe when you look at something that you already know is spectacular like you go and you look at I've never seen this but this is what I imagine the feeling of looking at like the aurora like the northern lights or yeah or like Apparently better on your phone. Is it really? I've just heard this. Well, you sound like a Debbie Downer. No, I'm just from the guides. They say when you're there. Okay, what's something that fills you with a sentence? I just wanted to let you guys know that it's beautiful on your phone when you're there because you should do something on this. About why it filters there? Because apparently your phone, and again, I'm only working on what I've heard from people who've gone there, and they've said that your guide even is like, because you know some people are like, Why is your voice all calm all of a sudden? Don't pull out because it's the nighttime sky, Eugene. You want me to be shouting? We're feeling awe. Yeah. Yeah, we're there. And then they pull out your phone and it looks better on the phone. You should check. Think about that feeling that you have, though, when you look at something that you know is astonishing. Actually, it's even better for this story when you're looking at something that humans built that's astonishing. Yeah. I have that feeling. My show allows me to have that feeling a lot. Yeah. Sorry, carry on. The pyramids. Don't interrupt. Yes. Yes. Humans. What? We should be confusing. The pyramids of the Burj Khalifa. And you were saying? I was saying. Yeah. I have that feeling a lot. I have that feeling a lot about... Why are you whispering now? Because I'm in the nighttime sky. Oh, sorry, sorry. Feeling a feeling of awe. I'm sorry, I ruined you. I put us in the mood. of like planes and vaccines and you know the fact that water comes out of a tap when you open it like it is ridiculous there are things that are ridiculous and i feel very lucky to be alive right now and i feel like the next hundred years i hope will be even more interesting And I have this incredibly rare opportunity that we all have to understand what that might look like. And there's so many things happening right now. The idea that I could get the opportunity to go understand quantum computers and bringing back supersonic planes and the Large Hadron Collider and artificial wombs and, you know, faster, more efficient cars and, you know, all of these things that I've had the chance to do. theoretical physics by going in a zero gravity plane like how incredibly lucky first of all to be able to tell those stories but also just as a person this is the show that i wanted to watch this is the thing that i felt like i was missing your version of popular mechanics for kids remember the show yeah exactly yeah but i think what you're explaining now is that i have a theory that the next hundred years we won't see any huge technology technological jumps i think it will be to explain to people will be the same as how we've been as gamers anticipating the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. Yes. Preach, brother. But then it keeps being postponed. It does indeed. And in its postponement we've realized that there's so much we haven't explored in Grand Theft Auto 5. Oh, interesting. We keep discovering new universes, there's upgrades, it gets better and better and we're like, now we've come out and said, but Grand Theft Auto 6 can wait. But I think there's so much that we haven't explored because we've been on this technological binge and gorge, as you were saying. We're just going to the next thing before we... It probably means, what do you mean by, like, big shift? Like, I think that... Like, there won't be any new technology that blows us out the water. That's your bet. That's my 100% bet. Wow. We should save this. Please do. No, no, no, I'm serious. Just as, like, a bet. I'm interested. Yeah, but I think you could end up... I think you could end up right in a lot of different ways. So you could end up right where, like, we already have machine learning. So we already have, like, AI. Yeah. But there are lots of ways in which it isn't yet applied, right? We've just seen, you know, alpha folds. We've just seen like some of the beginnings of things that are going to be hopefully really interesting for our lives. And so I think in that sense, like you could call those new technologies or you could call them evolutions of what we're already seeing. Exactly. It happens over time. I think you're right that it's like a – it's always one foot in front of the other. It's an upgrade. It's always like that. But there will never be anything new because if you think about it, if we go – Not in the sense of like, now we're back to aliens. Oh, no. Not in the sense of like something just like hits us, you know? Come back home. Yeah, I don't think anything's going to hit us like a lightning bolt. But I think like you get to be a part of the progress of technology. And I think that's a really exciting thing to lean into so that you get to say what you think it should do for us. But the more we want something new, the more the underpinnings stay the same. because if you think about it, we need, textile has been the same, just a little bit improvement here and there, farming, engineering, and that is the underpinnings of, engineering can fall under buildings, transportation and medication and science, and then obvious textile can fall into other, what we use to design, how we dress and what our homes look like and agriculture, how we stay alive. So I don't think anything new is going to come. I think once people start doing hydroponics, we're like, we've reached the end, guys. We don't need soil. I think in a certain sense, everything is, and this is something I love about humans, everything stands on the shoulders of what came before it. I completely agree that nothing is new out of thin air. Everything is one step above what the people who came before you built. And I think that's actually a big part of what I'm trying to do is to explain. You know, for example, when I'm trying to explain new ways to communicate and, like, why, you know, everybody is trying to put satellites to have the Internet. Wow, you really know where I was going with this. You need to explain how the Internet infrastructure works right now. You need to explain the cables on the bottom of the ocean. Like, in order to understand what's next, you need to understand what's now. And we spend a lot of time doing that on the show, explaining like, OK, if you are trying to understand why we don't have supersonic planes, you need to understand the history of the Concorde. You need to understand how planes currently work. You need to understand what happens when there's a sonic boom over everything. That's a – I think there's so much that we can learn about the future from understanding what's happening right now. And I think, you know, one thing that we haven't touched on yet is – How we use water to test our technologies. We did touch on that. Okay, so. You brought that in. He always does. Continue. Is the way in which you get the opportunity to go down these rabbit holes and choose whatever you want to make. Pay more. Is by owning your own thing, by making your own thing. We haven't talked about the fact that we're having this conversation on a show that you're publishing on YouTube. And that you get to decide how long this goes on for. together you guys are coming up with the ideas well you're part of it as well you can just walk out of the way you could leave any time i'm i'm here for parties apparently you could just you could just bounce yeah we're gonna transition no but you're right actually you know i'm glad you brought that up because it's something that i've been fascinated about because i i think you were you're at the vanguard of a movement that wasn't particularly obvious at the time there are many people who've started their own things because they were never part of something mainstream which often makes more sense to me yeah right if you're not part of something you will oftentimes create your own thing you were definitely part of something and you were part of something that was quite popular quite powerful and quite um you know it was quite obvious for lack of a better term you then left when it wasn't obvious and you went off to do the least obvious thing in many ways. Help me understand that thinking. Like, what is it about the environment you were in? And what is it about you as a person that made you go, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to try create the world that I want to live in, even though it's a lot riskier than the world that I'm currently in. Thank you for putting it that way. I mean, I first got obsessed with the idea of this show. I mean, we spent a long time now talking about why I'm so obsessed with this idea. Like, I hope that you can see that it's like, it really comes from my desire to watch it, like my desire to make it creatively. Like there's just this itch that's just kind of unbearable at a certain point. And I wanted to make it and I wanted to know if other people wanted to watch it. I really, I mean, one of the most incredibly gratifying things about making Huge If True has been that all of a sudden there are other people who are along for the same ride you are, that feel the same itch that you do, that also felt like the journalism that they were getting was pessimistic and it wasn't a full media diet and they wanted something like this. To see that other people have the same feeling that you do is really, really gratifying. And I knew that in order to make something that had this kind of, to be honest, sharp edge. She's just different than other media that I consume. And that's not to say that other media isn't great. But there are things that I'm saying I don't like about mainstream media. There are things that, like, the show has an incredible positivity and a joy. It also has an edge. It's saying, like, there is harm in being knee-jerk pessimistic. There is a point to this show. And we're doing things a different way. And that feeling, I just knew that I wouldn't be able to do that in the way that I really wanted to do it. And I wouldn't be able to test whether the actual thing that was in my brain was the thing that other people wanted if I was inside a big media company. To be clear, I wasn't offered the opportunity to make the show inside a big media company, but I didn't pitch it. I didn't want to have the incentives and the constraints and the lack of control inside of me we talk about this all the time we literally talk about this all the time you do this and in fact and so that was the main the main point was I really wanted to make this show the way that I wanted to make it were you ever afraid of muting us no look at what it's done to you um yeah all the time yeah I think there's still when you're when you're making anything that you really love I think there's an underlying fear of it first not working, then when it is working, oh my God, it might go away. Like there's a, you live with a kind of, when you're really doing something that you love, you live with a kind of healthy fear, I think. I think that's good. I think that feels good, actually, to not always feel, first, the fear of something not working means that I think you're pushing yourself creatively. Second, the fear of other people not liking it means that you are potentially making something that some people will dislike and some people will love and that's probably healthy and third there's just a fear of putting yourself out there like a fear of like doing what you want and it just and it just not working or what once you have success of it going away um and i want to feel that like i want to feel that all the time and so it felt much scarier to do to do this don't press anything we've got more what now after this Now that you're in it, how do you insulate yourself from the hedonic adaptation of the success? How do you, it's something that's always fascinated me when I watch people in life. Someone's an actor, they just dream of getting an acting gig. And then they get into a movie and this is their dream. And then now they want to be one of the leads. and then they are one of the leads and then they want to be the lead and then they are the lead and they want to be a star then they are star then they want to be an a-list star then they're an a-list star and then and then all of a sudden they spend all their days depressed that their box office numbers aren't what they used to be i used to think that that was reserved and maybe naively when i thought this i thought it was reserved for like mainstream and industry but Do you realize it applies to everything in life? And I see this with a lot of people on TikTok, on YouTube, who create and make. And they hit a high. And, man, getting back to that high or – like have you ever – I've always enjoyed doing this. I'll go to somebody's – like let's say a TikTok goes viral, like mega viral. Everyone's watching it. And then I'll go down a rabbit hole of that person's page. and it's amazing to see how they were just doing whatever they wanted to do and then one video goes absolutely viral and then watch how their whole page after that just becomes that video now yeah but more importantly it also how they see themselves and what they should be or shouldn't be doing so you find they're singing karaoke they're cooking food in front of the camera they're hanging out with their friends they're doing all these things and then the karaoke video goes viral then they hang out with their friends nothing then they cook nothing then they do karaoke again semi-viral and then you just see them make that their identity how do you how do you grapple with that and like do you have any safeguards or do you have any ideas that you impose on yourself where you go oh this is how i always come back to me being me and not letting the clicks define who i become it's not me it's the show everything comes back to the mission of the show. And so for me, I didn't start with a lot of different ways in which I could be popular on YouTube. I started with, I want to make this one show. Will it or will it not work? Do you also want this show? How do you define work though? Like, will it work? What's your metric for will it work? Can I make things that I'm proud of that have this mission of showing people optimistic visions of the future so that they can help build them the three pillars? Can Can I successfully do that and get better and better at it? And by the way, experiment in lots of different ways. The science fiction in the asteroid episode, the, you know, going to Formula One behind the scenes, like there are lots of different ways in which we experiment with formats and topics. But can I do something that meets this mission that we set out to with Huge If True? And also, do people want to watch that? Is that because the reason why I am so ambitious with this show, I really want this show to be watched by many, many more people than it is now is because I actually think it accomplishes something that I want to happen in the world. I really think that if more people had generally a media diet that allowed them to see these visions more often and allowed them to participate more in the conversation and allowed them to explore how they could contribute to the world in an optimistic way, we'd all be better for it. And I wish more people were doing it. But right now, like the way that I can accomplish that in the world is through making this show enormous. And so I have this incredibly strong ambition and motivation to make this show watched by millions and millions of people, which it already is. And it's growing. And I'm so incredibly proud of that. But at the same time, I'm not trying to find the way in which they'll like me. I'm trying to see if they like this. There's a world in which nobody wanted to watch this. And then I just stopped. Because I wasn't experimenting. I didn't start out the channel by saying, you know, here I am. I'm going to explore. Like, I'm just going to make things like come along with me for the journey. Right. I said, I'm going to make this show. And that, I think, has been really protective. Yeah. You've separated yourself from the project, from the work. Yeah. And then the other thing that's happened along the way. Sorry to interrupt you. I feel like that's in that book. I'm sure many people have said it. But in that book, The War of Arts, I think one of the – it's really amazing. I think you'd enjoy it. But it talks about the complicated nature of artistry and the journey of making and what it means to create, right? So take something from nothing, bring it out into the world, make it something, and then other people consume it. And one of the main things it speaks about is how the true mastery of being an artist requires you to know that you are not your work and your work is not you, but you have deep pride in that work. because if you're unable to separate yourself from it then in its success or in its failure you will always define yourself yeah but if you go this is the thing i made or did do you like it yes no all right well i made it but i guess you are experiencing there's always what i find is a healthy amount of uh insecurity that comes with being an artist and i think that's why even the greatest artists were either unhappy or they had to have paradigm shifts where they move elsewhere you know because I think when you catch on to a great idea they always explain this you have an antenna everyone has ideas are floating around but one person will catch it but they have to have the naivety and the confidence to think that what they're thinking is unique then go out there and do it then if they've done it enough they start thinking well if i'm here it's like einstein he thinks if i'm here in germany and everyone maybe i must go somewhere else then he goes somewhere else and he comes here then he has like tell us more about that thing of yours because he goes where i come from me everyone's thinking yeah and brown is here because he makes rockets so okay there's something there so you go somewhere else and that's where i think the analogy that i made about being in the living room and then going into the bedroom to see what's going on yeah only to come back again to the living room it comes into play and i think if you don't move as an artist and i think that's what you are if you don't move you realize that you you die if you don't evolve you perish yeah and then you try to create a show that makes us evolve forcefully at our pace and the comfort of our own homes and screens right thank you for saying that yeah you want this yeah that's beautiful i think i think that's really beautiful i so i i wanted that creative opportunity i wanted that for myself i wanted it for the show i wanted it for the audience now i have this incredible team that i work with that you asked also how do i how do I make sure that it stays the show? Like they know what feels like huge. Oh, that's great. And they create a constraint. That's great. It's like there's a team culture and a team mission, and we're all together making this thing. And so I am the vessel to make the thing better on screen, but we're all making it together. And that I think is really important to maintain the mission of what you're doing. And so all of those things I think help a lot. And then there's also the enormous wave. I mean, we haven't talked yet about, I think, huge and what we're doing is part of at least three big trends in media right now. And what are those three? The first is that YouTube is eating television. I mean, YouTube has been the most watched streaming platform for at least two years. It's eating it alive, which is very sad. It's wild. Yeah, no way for it to die first is kicking it. you guys are you guys have been part of that um sorry it's a deep cut yeah sorry and um and so you guys have been part of that uh and the the wave of youtube allowing i mean because the bet that youtube made was incredible Right. Like every other streamer said, if we have a small number of gatekeepers and they decide what gets made, then that is the best stuff that most people will want to watch. And that's the stuff that should get made. And there's a whole business model around giving upfront money. You make the thing, you put the thing, you have a subscription, you watch the thing. And that's the philosophy that has grown every other streaming platform. And YouTube had a fundamentally different bet, which was if we give a platform and split advertising revenue with anyone in the world who could make great things, then if we wait and we allow that work to kind of improve and percolate upward and have a system that recommends the right work to the right people, then that is actually the way that we will get the work that the most people want to watch. That's a crazy bet. It really is. fundamentally different bet than every other streamer and it turns out it's working and how incredible is it that that works i'm torn though fundamentally yes there's a lot of i'm torn only because obviously on the one side i think it's amazing i think to live in a world where people can create what they feel needs to be created if they don't see it and people get to consume what they want to consume like i have a friend who watches knife sharpening videos that's pretty much all he does is it like watch knife sharpening videos is he in this room yeah is he good he is in this room he passed away in this room he means for sure oh yeah he's here with us now he's here with us now um no so like but but what i mean by that is i do think that part of it is amazing just like your show what i like to try and do is also think about always the second system effect what are we missing that we we take for granted because every gift comes a curse and the other side of it is those institutions while they were and while they still are definitely flawed they're a lot easier to hold accountable because you can find them do you know what i'm saying so when the bbc says something that's wrong or that people don't like they can find the bbc they can and like go after the BBC in a very definite way, when Netflix has a show that people are not angry about, you know what I mean? Like Diddy suing Netflix, where he's like, I'm going to sue you for the documentary. But he can't sue Netflix. But if that thing was put out on YouTube, it becomes a little more opaque. It becomes a little less tangible. And so it's like, that's why I say I'm torn, because it's this world where it's like, you want people to have as much freedom as possible to put out what they like. But we also don't want to live in a world where the ultimate harms can be done because nobody can be held accountable. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure you think about that as well. And it's made even more complicated by the second trend, which is that people like all of us, who might have been employees at large companies, then go independent. And so the trend, I mean, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking of the trend particularly in journalism of people going independent. But it's true in many other places. Yeah, yeah, yeah. true in comedy it's it's true in lots of different industries and so that i would say i'm a part and huge is a part and you're a part of this second trend of independence that is created by the first trend of the success of youtube and then the third trend is maybe maybe it's a part of a story about pessimism itself it's it's part of a story about the feeling that people have about news and the world getting worse and the feeling that news has contributed to our understanding of the world getting worse. And huge is something different. And so those, I think, are the three stories in the world that we are somehow in the middle of the Venn diagram on. And it's an interesting place to be because, to your point, there are all kinds of parts of those stories. There are the shadow sides of each of those things. there's the extreme upside of like what if yeah what if this these trends continue and you know i mean we're already at a place it's so interesting to look at the difference between when i launched just three years ago and where we are now i mean the story when i launched was like new media is coming this is something that is coming like we're we're long since here yeah like that story makes no sense anymore like we are already running shows that are larger than any other media company on the largest streaming platform in the world um and so that's that's really important and interesting and to your point about accountability like how to how do people that have are now independently running these shows that are bigger than the media operations on the biggest platform in the world how do they take responsibility as you said for the things that they publish um and so it's it's a it's a really exciting time I'm obviously I'm in true to form very optimistic about where this is all going but I I think it's um it's interesting uh and complicated and thrilling and I remember um I've been wanting to ask you this question because I remember when I left Vox and I got a lot of congratulations but a lot of it was with this tone of like oh i wouldn't i would never do that or like oh um the the phrase a lot of the time was that's so brave oh i love that phrase yeah so brave and uh and i got a dm on twitter from you and you said congratulations like best of luck and this is when you were on the daily show yeah and i had been watching your stuff for a long time and i had no idea that you were watching vox and you were watching mine so i'd announced that i was going independent and you said best of luck and i mean i've said this to you before but like it was a real moment for me to say like oh like i knew i was already making the bet but it was incredibly helpful to hear from someone who had a show that was, let's be honest, like the definition of mainstream success, say like, best of luck, basically, like, I think this is a good choice for you. So thank you. You're welcome. For me, it's an obvious one. And Eugene and I have been on this journey for 20 years now. I think it's two things. One, I love appreciating the people who've made an impact in my life even from afar. Do you know what I mean? So in my whole journey, whether I was on the Daily Show or not, I remember like in my whole life, every comedian who like put me on some stage or introduced me to another comedian or promoter in another country. I remember journalists who wrote great pieces who helped me understand the world that I was trying to understand. Authors who literally changed my life. I try and have them on this podcast now. and some of them will say to me they'll be like i wrote that book 10 years ago and i'm like yeah but it's still with me now you know they're like why did you call me now there's literally some people come to the show and go i haven't done anything in 10 years and i'm like yeah but it stayed with me for 10 years that's the first part the second part is exactly what you said is is the the unsafe bet and i think there's a misalignment oftentimes in how we act in society versus what we say we will say we want to explore we will say we want people to guard and try things we will say we want what we often want is the reward from these things we want huge if true we want the show now that it's working but we don't really want people to go out and like try it in that way and i don't know what it does to people but you and i've spoken a lot about it it makes people uncomfortable when people as eugene says go rogue it's interesting how it makes people around you uncomfortable the amount of people who said that to me and by the way this has been the story of my life when i when i first started doing stand-up comedy i had been lucky enough to get a job on a radio station at 3 a.m on the weekends in johannesburg in like in gauteng only right so one state one province regional regional and that's where i was no one listened i knew all my listeners by name tiny little thing but it paid my bills i started comedy while doing that comedy grew and i was lucky enough that comedy it just got to the point where i had to choose which one I was going to do. I chose comedy. Everyone said, what are you doing? You have a great opportunity. What are you doing? You step away from being at breakfast. And the thing it made me... You're one slot away. What it made me realize, even at that time, was not only did they not see the possibility that I was aiming for, it made them uncomfortable. Because if you're living on an island, someone gets on a boat and says, I'm sailing somewhere else that we cannot see. You'll be shocked at how it makes the people on that island angry and uncomfortable. Because they're like, are you saying this isn't it? People start to internalize things. They go, are you saying I'm boring for staying on this island? Are you saying there's a better island out there? Are you saying this island might not exist in a few years? And all of a sudden people get angry at you. How could you? Why would you leave? What are you doing? Fox, are you kidding? and so whenever I see people who do that you know I mean it for some reason it sparks something in me we only want to leave when everything's fallen apart we only want to explore when we're forced to go and I often think to myself wouldn't it be beautiful if you could find those opportunities in those moments to do it in like a good leave with energy you know don't escape embark there's different feeling in both of them and so for me it was one of those things it was like what you're doing was crazy it was genuinely crazy and i was so impressed by i was like ah i mean i've loved the stuff you've made good luck you're gonna kill it out there you've got the talent those types of people you're one of them as well those types of people who inspire me because i go like what are you doing oh boy all right well that's a crazy thought like with eugene it was like the opposite eugene like just took a break at some point i was like what are you doing and he's like yeah i'm taking a break it's like who's taking a break he's like yeah i'm just gonna pause for a while and i remember it's the craziest thing i was so inspired by the fact that this human being showed me that there was the option to take a break even though you don't know what's on the other side of that break so in all of these i'm just like yeah man and and by the way i didn't think you were making the right choice i just thought you were making a good choice yeah oh interesting because So the question I wanted to ask you, if I'm honest about that message, what you said was, I've been wondering when you're going to do that. And I thought to myself two things. Sounds like him. I thought to myself two things. The first was, you know who I am? When did you start wondering this? And the second thing I thought was, how did you know that that was even an option? Because for me, going independent on YouTube, there was at least one person, Johnny Harris and Iz Harris, who were building a journalistic independent media group. He had left Vox. And so there was at least one example that I could see of someone doing this well. But until I actually began thinking about doing it, it didn't feel like one of the options that was available to me. And I thought it was going to be the start of what has now become true, which is this wave of sort of people going independent, both in journalism and in comedy and in all walks of life. but at the time like how did you know that that was an option because my perception is I should have been more likely to know that that was true than you who were at the kind of the pinnacle of mainstream media success so I didn't know that it was an option but I think I sometimes have I don't know if it's just an innate ability But I can oftentimes spot somebody who is an outlier in the environment that they're in. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't gel with their environment. I just go like, yeah, you're going to leave. And not leave in a bad way. You're just going to leave. Does that make sense? Because there's something about you that tells me you are going to do something that goes beyond this. So on your side, I mean, now I'd have to be like trying to go back and remember what it was. But maybe just having this conversation with you, I was probably thinking at the time, you're creating these explainers. You're making this world really interesting, entertaining, positive, despite what the content is. It was all about like Congress and the Senate. And this is not a positive world. And it's not necessarily an interesting world. And exciting. But it is definitely a limited world. You know what I mean? And so maybe I saw in you something that maybe I hope to see in myself, which was, oh, I'm not only this thing. Yeah, I love politics, but I'm not only that. You know what I mean? I've literally met people who think that's all I am all the time. I'll never forget in Miami at midnight, some random guy came up to me in the street and he was just like, Donald Trump 2024. Yeah. And I was like, and? and he was like yeah i was like and i genuinely looked at i was like what do you what do you think's gonna happen do you think you're gonna stay there i'll be like no no nothing mandala like what did you think i was like oh it's because your your experience of me is one-dimensional so you think that my world is contained in that one dimension i oftentimes will latch on to people who don't operate in that one dimension because they inspire me so this guy here is like comedy is one of his dimensions and then i mean history you know nature documentaries guns motorbikes um aliens like but i mean it's no but it's infinite really it really is infinite with you and i think when you when you see that and you see somebody especially somebody who's creating you'll see that they're they're forced to create in one sphere like we had derek fordrell uh on on the podcast and he's a friend of mine who's an artist phenomenal phenomenal artist but everyone knows him for like his paintings and then he started making sculptures and i remember asking him one day i was like hey why the sculptures and he's like well because i want to make sculptures as well and i remember going oh yeah just because you're famous for this thing doesn't mean you should limit yourself just because you're successful in this thing doesn't mean you should limit yourself and then he started making a whole interactive show i'll tell this to anyone who can if you ever see a derrick forger show come up they're always free they're at an art gallery but they're always free go it is one of the most amazing experiences you'll ever have because he makes the life live like you you're not you're no longer just looking at a painting you you're transported to a time music videos paintings sculptures installations that you have to walk through and i always tell him i go like oh you remind me to use your analogy that being a human being no matter who you are you have your antenna up there certain things will make them vibrate more than others you'll catch more frequencies than others but it doesn't mean that you should only vibrate at the strongest frequencies explore the other ones do you know what i mean the faint signal yeah there's this faint signal that's also wonderful to have and so i don't know i i think it was something like that with you i was It's like when I'll see you there, I'd go, this can't be the only thing that you find interesting. So it's only a matter of time before I assume you're just going to go and make your own thing somehow, somewhere. So when it happened, I wasn't particularly shocked. I was like, oh, yeah, all right. I was waiting to see when this would happen. I think sometimes when you revisit the past, you get to see what the present and the future will definitely look like. what you guys are explaining now from hearing this is is no different from how ancient civilizations always rewarded and found a way to crowdfund well they called it something else to crowdfund philosophers and those philosophers should have apprentices and those apprentices will one day become the philosophers of their time and the written word was the only way that those philosophers was their YouTube. Interesting. So those people were paid to think of ideas, envision how politics should be, and how art and culture, and if you had a great idea, if you could think, if you could paint, if you could sculpt, pay this person to just do that thing, and that's how civilizations are born. And I think we might just not see this now, but 200 years from now, if someone looks at this portal that was open, which is YouTube, which is equivalent to a thousand years ago to written and spoken word scrolls. It's like a press. It's the same thing. This footprint, these ideas, they will never be new again. Everything that you're speaking about now might be obvious in 100 years, but will never be new again. And I guess that's the whole thing. That's the whole synergy. And that's what you've been good at spotting. You know, you've spoken a lot of people off their cliffs and given them their careers without even knowing. It's the ability to see another philosopher and go, if you explore this idea further, you might hit the jackpot of your own independence, of your own freedom and of your own autonomy because that's the ultimate reward and i think that's why super uh thoughtful people who are philosophers financial reward is never their aim it's autonomy it's them feeling like i can do what i want when i want yeah and once you've that that's the pinnacle and i think and i think everyone exactly that right i think everyone benefits that's the most important thing as well yeah is the understanding that everyone can benefit from it that's what that's what i also find selfishly i'm going as a fan of yours well i hope i see more same with your comedy you remember even from back in the day i was like yeah when when when eugene yeah i'm waiting for this i'm waiting for that i'm waiting you know what i mean yeah i'm selfishly i'm going this this this benefits me so i'm assuming it benefits basically what you're saying is michael angelo didn't spend years upside down painting the ceiling of the for him to look at it. He did it for other people. That's beautiful. And so what's it been like? What is, if the lesson is an ability to more fully experiment with or express who you are, what's it been like for you? What do you feel like you're able to express now? What are you trying to experiment with? That's an interesting question, Dan. okay so here's here's here's the analogy i would use i think a lot of life is us trying to climb a mountain and a lot of the times that mountain is often introduced to us by others they tell us hey that mountain over there man if you can climb that mountain who you've done it and so then we we grow up our whole lives going okay mountain all right mountain one day and then at some point you start you start climbing the mountain you start climbing the mountain you while you're climbing the mountain you might meet some people along the way who've either come down or have settled at certain parts of it and they'll you know they'll be like oh yeah welcome to the mountain yeah the mountain yeah my mountain yeah obviously at the mountain and you're climbing it and if you ask yourself the question why am I climbing it's because I've always wanted to climb I've always you know it's only when you get to what you have to define as your peak that you stop and go oh this is lovely this was hard but what mountains do I want to climb do I want to go walk in valleys do I want to stroll along rivers do I want to oh I've I've now climbed what mountains people hoped I would climb so now what would I like to do and in that exploration it's terrifying because first of all success or failure becomes like a you know everyone has the oh when are you uh you're gonna get back to mountain you're like no yeah you know like one of the number one things people ask me in general is like so what's uh what's next that's that's why I named the podcast I was like, what now? So, what now? What now? I was like, what do you mean? I'm like, so, what? I'm like, I'm going to live life. And they go, yeah, but I mean, beyond that. I'm like, what is beyond living life? And now I get to enjoy all of that more. I wouldn't have had the time before to sit down with you like this and sit down with one of my best friends and explore and learn and have a deeper understanding of how you create. And you know what I mean? Get into the mind of somebody who's going to be shaping generations to come because of her work. I wouldn't have the time. And so everything in life I find now is, there's a beautiful book that I read. We should have the author on if he'll join us. It was a book called 4,000 Weeks. And it's a book that just breaks down that the average human has about 4,000 weeks on this planet. How do you want to spend those weeks? And when you understand the limited nature of those weeks, you also understand that you're always going to be missing something because you're doing something else. and so instead of instead of having FOMO rather enjoy this thing that you're actually experiencing so when you're at this party don't think about the party you're missing or don't when you're at home don't think about the party you're missing be like ah I can't believe I'm in my bed right now what a joy and there I genuinely have found some of the most fun and the most joy and the most like and so when people ask me these questions sometimes people be like wow but I mean you what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you, and I'm like, well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe nothing. I see them get uncomfortable on my behalf. And I'm like, no. Maybe this is because I'm trying to climb my mountain. Oh, yeah. But do you ever think about the fact that this mountain might be bigger? It's always going to be bigger. But like the, the, the, what you, what you are doing right now is part of, like we talked about, this wave, that there is a very real future in literal terms, in the success terms that people used to talk to you about. That's so funny. This actually could be the bet that is the biggest thing you ever make. That is like, and that's kind of hard to keep together, right? Because what you're expressing is a very healthy psychology of like, I'm doing this because I want to do this. Yes. But at the same time, there is a reality here where you're experiencing this wave of independent owned media and you own it and you're making something that I don't know what the daily show viewership was I don't know what your viewership is right now but like in a very real way this could be or become the biggest thing you ever make because you're all of a sudden part of this new mountain it's it's hard to do all those things at the same time I think that's exactly what it is hold them both at the same time I'll tell you why when Eugene and I started doing comedy in South Africa. At the time, comedy was how many years old? Less than... Like stand-up comedy. And I mean this... Less than 10. Yeah, because remember, we didn't have free speech in South Africa because of apartheid, right? So it's not... That's what I mean by stand-up comedy, widespread people doing it. It wasn't really a thing. Less than 10. You have the first wave of comedians who jumps out and they start doing the comedy, right? We were like the second wave, I would argue. Yeah. But it was a relatively young scene. There were no comedy clubs. this was not a structure or a thing i remember once my mom saying to me what do you do like where are you going what and i said i i do stand-up comedy and my mom said to me trevor this lifestyle of selling drugs is going to catch up with you and i said what and she said this lifestyle of selling drugs is going to catch up with you. She was so gentle with it. And I said, Mom, I don't sell drugs. I do comedy. And she says, Putti, she said, save your lives for others. This lifestyle will not end well. And I was like, Mom, I... And she said, even asked, where do you say your money comes from? I said, I go and I tell jokes. And she's like, my child. And she just walked into the house calm. But she's like, that's how... I don't know what it was like for you when you first told someone what you do. There were cops in my bedroom. then my mama's like i told him this lifestyle won't end well but you know what i mean that's how that's how random it was right so but i there was the spark and i this is what i always encourage people to do this as i go remember that you need to do things to survive and you also need to do things to thrive we oftentimes forget the latter survival is important i'll never tell anybody i don't like it when people go like chase your dreams throw everything else no no no no no hey survive survive work survive come on get that thing going but also don't forget to find ways to thrive i'm always searching for ways to thrive so comedy was that when we did it genuinely there was no money in it there was no industry in it there was no this was the thing we did we met each other at it's like a local bowling alley and telling jokes type thing that's how that's the vibe then at some point it seemed obvious right when i was going to do the daily show it wasn't obvious at all in fact it wasn't it wasn't it was a failure for i'd say like the first year and a half at least it was an utter failure in fact you didn't come here to do the daily show i didn't because what people get wrong i didn't no i was here doing stand-up comedy doing stand-up and then i was home and on the daily show john stewart phoned me and was like please come do one episode we did one and then He tricked me and trapped me, and I still hold it against him, and also I'm grateful to him forever for it. But, like, that thing, I hope I never lose it, and I hope everyone has the opportunity to experience it, because what happens is you bump into the things, right? So Joe Rogan, for instance, is one of the people I speak about this. It seems obvious that UFC is the biggest, you know, fighting platform now, and it's worth all this money. now but when joe rogan was starting in ufc it was this fringe they used to call it cage fighting cage fighters and joe rogan loved it and people did it and and and then they were like do you want to come he's like i want he was i think he was the one who was like can i come and commentate on this thing people like you know about it now it seems obvious no it was his passion it was his joy he did that thing and now it seems obvious and so i i think sometimes we make the mistake of only thinking about where we'll go because it might become something and not just because we want to do it. The Wright brothers did not think, I would say, I don't know, you've probably read more on it. I don't think they thought about airline industries. The Wright brothers were probably just like, man, wouldn't it be cool to fly? Wouldn't it be cool to fly? They just wanted to prove their girlfriends wrong. You're never going to fly, Mark. The next thing, the air crash investigation. God damn. maybe maybe they were the the version of the teacher that said imagine you could fly exactly and they said oh yeah what an interesting idea for that they read an article that said you can't this thing will never happen this thing will never yeah so i think i think that's all it is you know um yeah and and that's that's why you're here so thank you thank you for this by the way thank you for the conversation so much most importantly thank you for putting you out there because we've all benefited from it thank you and uh i can't wait to see what you do now i mean i'm in curling in a way that I didn't need to be. I mean, in February, I'll have a video for you. I was really going to watch for the jokes, but now I'm there for the science as well. She did it again, folks. Cleo's done it again. This was fun. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks. Cheers. Thank you very much, for real. Thank you so much. You were with the hype. You delivered in supplies. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackle Rebecca Chain is our producer Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown Random Other Stuff by Ryan Pardew Thank you so much for listening Join me next week for another episode of What Now We'll see you next time.