Johnny Harris: Master Storytelling on YouTube | How I Write | How I Write

John heres is one of the best storytellers on YouTube, the thing about him is he can make any story go viral, let's talk about breakfast, lottery tickets, extra virgin olive oil.

And what I wanted to know in this episode is how does he think about making these videos that are both beautiful and popular?

Like how do you do both of those things?

And we went through all the writing, the drafting and the editing, but it wasn't just words, it was images, it was sound, it was absolutely every part of the creative process.

We broke it down, and we said what exactly do you do?

And I promise you, by the end of this video, you're gonna be a better visual storytelling.

Tell me this. What does it take to make a video?

Like, from A to Z, how does this get done?

How long does it take and what are the the core pillars?

It's about a four month process.

Wow. For each video it starts with sometimes it's a story day.

Is and I will like rollers sleeves up and kind of look at story pitches and ideas that we've been taking notes on for a long time.

And then it goes into a green light.

I green light it on a channel in Slack, I say it's green lit.

And often I deliver a reporting brief.

This is what I want to know about this thing.

I did this last night on an airplane, a reporting brief about El Chapos Prison Escape.

Like, I want to know everything about this.

Tunnels and all of it.

And I did a tiny like a little Google to be like what's interesting about this and then ask a million questions.

And then that goes to a researcher, researcher spends three to four weeks becoming an expert in that topic.

Servicing visuals, building out what we call an infodoc, which is like a 60 to 80 page digest of research. That comes to me.

I process it in my brain, I wrestle with it, and I start to curate and outline and think about it as a story.

Sometimes that comes with some additional research and reporting, whatever an expert interviewer to with me, and then scripting week happens.

And scripting week is usually three to four dedicated days of hardcore writing.

And it is me in a room completely engrossed in the story, writing and visually directing and art directing, doing all of that stuff that we've been looking at.

And after those three to four days, there is a lot of visual assets that need to be gathered.

There's a lot of fact checking that needs to happen.

Sometimes there's some additional reporting that needs to happen, but then it goes off into post -production.

There's a production kick -off where I translate the vision to a leader in our post -production team.

They grab that vision, and they carry it through.

I film it, the footage goes off, and then they start to build out.

The post -production team starts to build out everything that was put on that piece of paper.

And then cuts start to come in.

It starts with a shame cut, which is just a radio edit and assembly with some very crude visuals.

And then it goes into a rough cut.

It goes into a fine cut.

It goes into a fine two.

It goes into an audio lock, a picture lock, and each of those weirdly being 150 notes or whatever, a little micro this and that.

Google Docs frame. Frame .io Yeah.

It thumbnail starts to get developed within that at some point.

And the sponsorship, we do it ad read, and that gets slotted in again.

That's a well oil machine.

That just works and it's all slotted in and plotted, you know, six months in advance.

And then the video goes live and people hopefully watch it.

And then you do that 30 times a year.

Yeah, yeah. So the way that looks for me, I don't ever see any of that.

I see what's on my calendar as the work block for scripting this, whatever this week is.

And when you are the most frustrated and you're writing, you're stuck, you're pissed off, whatever it is, what usually goes wrong?

Oftentimes I get really pissed off and scared and bummed when I get into a story and it's day two or day three.

And I still feel like I don't really get it.

don't fully get, I'm cracked the like satisfying explanation or thing.

And I think I should report on this more.

And I start to, I start to question everything and I start to be like, whoa, why am I so, why do we make so many videos?

And I start to grumble.

And I think like, why should I just I do this all?

Because it's bad. It's like, because I, because I know that like I have to move on.

Yeah. The constraint is very powerful because it forces me to be laser focus, and I'm very prolific because of it.

This is the constraint of the constraint of the four days, but it can have these sort of backfire and effects if I don't feel like I have a grasp on it.

Now we now have flexibility within the system where like things can move in change if I need that more time, where we don't make 48 videos a year anymore, we make 30, and now there's some flexibility.

And so some weeks are longer, and I'm able to push it.

And that's nice. I've had to do that a couple times this year already, and so that's sort of relieved of that frustration.

Okay, so your entire life is four day blocks.

You do four days of this, four days of this, four days of this and you're just constantly going.

There's no breaks in the middle.

You just go, go, go.

I mean, there are breaks.

Okay. I was vacation.

There's spring break with my kids, the summer we usually take a big break.

Like there's, in December, we usually take three weeks off.

There are big periods of rest. And then during the production cycle, we've experimented with sprint sprint, sprint take like a couple weeks of chill.

Uh, lately we've been experimenting with like three weeks of writing blocks and then one week of like just catch up and whatever and that will sometimes get eaten up or flexed into or whatever.

So we're experimenting with now that we make fewer videos with ways of making it sustainable.

But there was a year there when we were making four videos a month where it was, it blocks back then actually it was like three day sprints.

And it was we were on the treadmill and boy, we got good real fast. You can get strange.

Yeah. Constraints sharpen you.

And like so much of our skill as a team is because we have that those constraints in that urgency.

We can't be precious.

And so the constraints are they've added way more value than they've created frustration easily.

When you're on the road, how are you taking notes and basically capturing all of your thoughts.

I'm talking to my phone real quick talking my phone for minutes and minutes and I'm talking to transcription and there's so many times when I'm thinking and I'm kind of looking up and I'm talking to my phone and I realize that like it didn't, like didn't press the microphone button.

And so I do it again but that is my like way of communicating.

Instead of doing this, I'm transcribing on like a note on like an Apple outside.

And I am reflecting, I am especially with like complicated human stories.

Every interview I have changes my mind.

And so it's this, it's this whiplash of like, I think this is the story.

But then I have this interview and that muddies the water and I have to change it.

That doesn't happen as much when I'm writing and research chain from my computer, you know, but like when you're in the field talking to humans, everything is chaos.

And story tell is to somehow orchestrate that chaos into something meaningful, which always leaves so much complexity on the ground and so my notes are often just a sort of like chaotic, like wrestling with like what do I wanna say about this.

And at what point do you start thinking to yourself, I wanna weave this into a narrative?

Is it when you get home?

Is it when you're on the road?

That's changed a lot over the years.

I started, when I first started going into the field, I did the kind of classic documentarian ethic of show up and let the story come to you.

And part of that was just lack of preparation and understanding, but it actually was really useful.

And I would sort of let the story come to me and I would do a lot of story work in the edit.

And then as I professionalized and like Borders, Vox Borders, which was like my big series at Vox, I started to become much more ambitious with what I wanted it to be.

And so I would pre -pro the hell out of every story.

I would like, I'm going to start with this.

We're going to do this ambitious shot.

I'm going to do this drone shot.

And then I need to get a soundbite of this.

And I would start to engineer.

And that had a lot of benefits from a production perspective.

And from like a cinematography, I got way better at getting like crazy cool shots in the field.

But I started to over engineer.

And think three or four years into that I felt like I was over engineering and shoehorning the story into like my scaffold and so now I'm in this I'm the pendulum swinging back.

Now I can go into Finland in a couple weeks and I'm intentionally just not not like deciding what I want to say or even a framing or even anything I'm just going to go and I have stuff lined up but the access is the story, I'm going to train with the finish army and I'm going into these bunkers and go into the Russian border, and just let it flow.

And then I'm going to decide what I want to say.

And how much research are you doing in advance?

So you like a shelf in Finland?

Let's see what's going on.

Or you reading books about Finland now.

Well, it went to Saudi Arabia, to look at their big futuristic city project.

Yeah. I did read a lot, because I didn't have a strong grounding in the history of Saudi Arabia.

So I read a couple of books, talked to a couple of experts, and got grounded.

But I didn't do any storytelling work.

Again, that's a total acknowledge is one thing, storytelling is the curation of chaotic information about the world into a very firm linear presentation.

And I didn't do any of that for Saudi Arabia, but Finland, I know a lot about what's going on up there, and so I'm kind of not, intentionally not going too deep.

So, tell me this, with Saudi Arabia, that was a thumbnail you designed in advance.

Yes, that was a headline you designed in advance.

And I still do this, even when I open -minded about what the story is going to be.

The marketing, which is what this is.

This is why should you click, is defined early on because on YouTube and in any sort of market for attention, which is everything, you have to decide, like, okay, I wanna make this piece, but why is someone gonna click it?

I can figure out why they should watch 30 minutes of it, but why are they gonna click it?

And that's what this is.

I knew that what would bring them in is why is Saudi Arabia building a futuristic city in the desert?

That's a straight line.

That is a straight line, look at it.

And it's like that, I knew that was the promise, that was a clear promise.

The storytelling is a complicated thing.

This is not a complicated thing.

This is like a, this is the billboard. This is the packaging.

I usually will do two or three different packaging's when I'm deciding what story to do.

And like it does just have legs for, to be clickable, but that doesn't define the story.

It just defines kind of one thing that I know I'm gonna answer, a promise I know I'm gonna answer.

And how do you think about that promise, so you have right here why Saudi Arabia is building a $1 trillion city in the desert.

Like, is that a, I need to answer this in the first 10 seconds, I need to answer this in the first one minute.

I need to show somebody, I want to answer it in the video.

Actually there's a lot of reasons, the whole video is an answer to this question.

How do you think about, if this is a promise to answer the question, how do you think about the payoff of that question?

There's two answers to that.

One is the more controversial answer.

And the other is the more straightforward one.

The controversial answer is I kind of believe that if I can get someone the click, that I can, I can convince them to broaden their curiosity to a billion other things that they didn't even realize they were curious about.

And this is just the entry point.

This is just the click -in because it's big, insensational and accessible, but really you're going to start to learn about resource countries and the resource curse and runtier states and all these economics and future performance in your city and the history of oil.

And that, yes, you will get this answer, but you will have forgotten that that's why you clicked it in the first place because you'll be led into this much bigger world.

So that's kind of the, like, I'm folding in the vegetables.

And that's a major goal for me is like making people feel enthusiasm and curiosity about something they didn't know that they were curious about.

The other one is I still do need to satisfy and they answered the question for those who don't have that first experience.

And I don't answer it in the first 10 seconds in the first minute, but by the end of the video, I have to.

What I do have to do is promise that I'm going to answer it, and I have to reinforce the promise of the thumbnail within the first minute, I would say.

And then tell me this, when you're on the road, what parts of, I'm sure it changes from video to video, but what parts of what you're doing is scripted versus unscripted.

so you're doing an episode where you're in Finland, Russia, and there's obviously gonna be field things that you record. Hey, you know I'm right here, let me just tell you about what I'm experiencing right now, what I'm seeing, check this out like I'm right here with you.

But then there's other parts, maybe in the intro, somewhere else where I can tell the writing is really well thought out.

The audio quality is supreme, so how do you think about the balance between those two?

Again that is it ever changing balance.

2018 was the year that was the height of my sort of overengineering, it was in Hong Kong.

Before that I would always do Vio and I was right at kind of after, but by then I'd made this goal of recording all of the explanations, all of the dates and facts and the whole narrative, well told on camera while it was in Hong Kong.

Back then I was shooting on an osmo, like this like quirky little gimbal camera, and I did it, and it was a total nightmare because I got all the shots and the whole thing is vlogged.

It's like a vlog explainer, it's great, but I wasn't able to mold and wrestle with the story, which I find a lot of value in that now.

So I'm moving really strongly away from the over -engineered script, when I'm on the ground, and moving more towards when I'm on the ground, it's about reacting and experiencing.

It's experiential storytelling, character interactions, experiences And then when I get back and I've really let it settle and I've wrestled, then I write the pros word for word and I go into the VO booth and I say the words to stitch the things together to construct the explanation in an elegant way to not have the pressure to do that when I'm on the ground, because what ended up happening when I'm on the ground is I'm thinking more about, where am I going to go to a stand -up, meaning like I'm going to set the camera up and say my lines, and how am I going to get the lines, I'm going to do lots

of takes. And it ends up taking away from my ability to just be there which is incredibly valuable.

I'm realizing more and more.

I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles, and it's called Reader.

So tell me if this sounds familiar.

You read something brilliant like an amazing quote, the perfect article.

But then one day, you go back, you're looking to find it, and it's just dawn.

You can't find the thing that used to drive me crazy.

But then, I found this app called Reader, and it's become the backup system for my brain.

Here's how it works.

So, whenever I'm on my phone, I'm on my computer, I'll come across a new article, and what I do is, I just toss it into Reader.

And then, whenever I'm ready to read, I can find all the articles pre - downloaded with no ads and no clutter.

But here's the kicker.

Every time I highlight something, Reader automatically saves it for me.

So, then, I'm writing and I need that perfect quote, that perfect example.

It's just right there waiting for me.

And because of that, I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore.

And that means that I can focus on writing.

Readers the sponsor of today's episode.

And look, I got a love of a product in order to promote it.

And I can tell you that I use reader every single day.

So, this is what I did.

I called up the CEO and I said, yo, will you give how I write?

and they're 60 days free.

And he's head short.

They gotta sign up though at Readwise .io slash David Pearl.

And there's a link in the description below.

All right, back to the episode.

I wanna show you this video about the Mormons and how we design it on paper, how we build the video on paper where not only the writing happens but the visual direction.

So after six weeks of research, from a research producer, I'm given a big infodock and I start to write, and I start to think about story and I start to think about visuals, and as I'm writing I am writing words and then I'm immediately going over to the right column.

And I am coordinating, choreographing visuals that will play that will dance with the pros.

That is the only way I know you, I've never, I've never a text writer.

I've always been someone who writes for motion on a screen.

And so those to me are there one and the same.

So every sentence or two has a new row in this script and it gets its own specific direction.

This is a history video.

Not all my videos are history videos.

This one, the writing has a backbone inherently.

Which takes away a huge question from the beginning, is like what is going to be the, the order of the information when it's a history and its chronological experience.

I know where I start and I know where I end.

The puzzle turns into what am I curating and how am I explaining it in a new way.

So that's that's sort of a first important thing.

Not every story has that backbone pre -baked for you.

When it's a history video, that's like a take a pressure off in a big way.

And maybe a third of videos are kind of history videos that have a really clean chronology and that's whenever it's a history video I'm like oh I don't have to wrestle with them with a structure thank God you know fired with his church brutal yeah you know the first line is always the tricky one I like first lines that drop you into action that in life in the viewers kind of senses with a surprising usually a crying action or visual, and often times that starts with look at this.

It's like look at this nap or whatever.

And it immediately engages the viewer to say do something.

In this case, I start with it started with the murder of their profit in Illinois.

To me, that's like a line that wakes you up a little bit.

It started with a murder, like boom.

I'm not saying like, I want to tell you the story of the Mormons as they moved.

But I don't wanna do like a classical kind of like tell me what you're gonna tell them.

You start with action and you throw people into action, to me that's like a way to sort of engage from the beginning.

In the sound, you have written gunshot epic, suspenseful.

Yes, slow mo. I wanted this to be emotional and that's the other thing is I think you can drop someone in immediately to an emotional tone that says like, oh, we're going, like, we're doing this, like we're in something already, we're not ramping up to it.

Other times I like to ramp up, but there is something about this cold open.

Just hit them with emotion tone, action, visual.

And what we're looking at on the screen here is the left side is the writing.

What you're going to say, and right side is the feeling in the visuals of what's going on.

Yes. And I have all these color codes when it is red like this.

It is a visual asset that needs to be collected.

So I have a macro on my computer when I'm writing.

And I press Alt A, and it makes it bold.

it turns it red and it turns it into a check box and that happens all in 0 .0, 1 seconds.

And then I write it.

So when I'm writing, I am coding all of these color codes in without ever pressing a mouse.

And that allows me to kind of edit in my mind.

So what we could how to do about that more later, Joseph Smith, the leader of 26 ,000 Mormons, father of 14 children, husband to 40 wives.

I like the music of that sentence, it kind of has a rhythm to it.

But it also hits you with, okay, and the original didn't have husband to 40 wives.

The original was just leader of 26 ,000 Mormons, father to 14 children.

And I sort of contemplated, do I want to say husband to 40 wives?

Because it's a very known sort of anti -mormon trope, purely focus on polygamy.

And what I didn't want to do is immediately turn off the believing viewers, the Mormons who are watching this.

Because they're so used to just being immune to like, oh, this is an anti -mormon thing about polygamy.

So I intentionally, and this goes down to a big philosophy of mine, I'm always empathizing with the viewer, I'm thinking, who's watching this, and what is happening in their minds as this information hits them.

That is the most important sensibility for what I do.

And so I wrestle, do I include the 40 wives or not?

And I was thinking only of this really small subsection of the audience, and I thought, no, I am actually going to include this because most of the audience who's watching will find that fascinating, and that will be intriguing and it will hook them.

So I'm going to include it.

That's emblematic of a lot of wrestling I do, of what is the audience going to think, and every word is thought through in that way.

We keep going, the profits here in my vocabulary were dead and the Mormons were under attack so they fled.

I'm a big believer in what Steven Pinker, who is this Harvard cognitive linguist, who I love, has surfaced as classical -style, classic -style, which is an obsessive focus on active language, visual active language.

We can get so caught up in ideas and concepts when we write, and for me the way that people actually want to be communicated to is with very clear who did what to whom?

What happened? What is the, who is acting and what are they acting towards?

What are they doing?

And so it'll often say things like they fled.

instead of leading to the migration of 6 ,000 Mormons to, you know, the Western United States, like, the migration of is a concept.

They fled is an action.

It is people doing a thing, and our brains can see that, they can see people fleeing.

Yeah. You know, it's a totally different way of writing and it's often more plain and simple, but it hits.

It hits our visual brain.

Steven Pinker has got this the great book, Sense of Style, that were unpackless.

And it is my entire Bible of writing.

So who did what to whom?

And active. Yeah, there's an agent.

There is an in syntax jargon.

It's like there is an agent who is acting, who is verbing something, instead of a now -in -a -concept that is like globalization.

It's like, no, we now send Coca -Cola to Thailand.

Like that's globalization.

But people say globalization, and that's vague.

And I'm like, well, what's globalization?

It's America, sending Ford to Japan, it's an agent doing a thing that we can see.

So that's a core tenant throughout all writing for me.

So the story is, these Mormons leave, and they go to what was Mexico, right?

It's Mexico at the time, to escape the federal government.

And immediately, I think in terms of characters, and on the map you will see that I build two icons.

I often do these cool OXagons that are icons, ones, the Mormons, and they're in Mexico, and one is the federal government and they're over in the east of the United States.

And there's spatial relationship between them and they're far away from each other.

But they're now both agents.

They both act and move and do things and have motives.

This becomes the basis, the stage, that we can tell a story.

because again, classic -style people act, they move forward in space and time.

So, I've built this section where I say, the Mormons knew the U .S. was coming and they were worried, they needed to keep the federal government from taking over this land, shutting down their spiritual government and once again, soiling their vision.

And while that is happening, we are looking at a map.

That is the big federal government that is slowly moving west and the little Mormons sitting there in their little high desert, and there's tension in that.

And that immediately, the viewer, I think, I hope is going, oh, here they come, there's anticipation in the federal government moving to them, and we know their motives.

I call this loading up the icon with motives.

What does that mean?

We see this little icon called the Mormons, and it represents this community, and I'm going to load them up with motivation and intentions and worry, I'm basically going to tell the viewer, this is their agenda, this is what they need and then I'm going to load up the federal government with intention and motivation and motion and now the stage is set, the viewer can say, okay, the Mormons are scared of the federal government and they want to make sure they don't shut down their spiritual vision, the federal government is set on expanding their attention here and over time, this process unfolds

where the big federal government slowly starts to We've Wes in the scare and we know that the Mormons are scared, and we can feel that now because we've set, we've loaded each of these up with motivation.

Nice. And connection, is that in a sense?

Yeah. Okay. So we've set the stage.

Both the icons are loaded up.

They moved quickly to ask for their own state.

Telling the government, hey, you know what, we didn't really like it.

So I do this thing here where I take the icon and I give it dialogue, and it's very reductionist simplistic dialogue that captures big complicated events.

So I'm saying that the Mormons are saying this, hey, we know you didn't like a settling in Missouri or Illinois, but we're out here in the west and we've settled and developed all of this land in a really short time.

Please let us have our own state so that we can practice our religion as we please.

So that's a conversational modern day language interpretation of what was really a four -year process of the Mormon lobbying for their own state.

And what I see that's going on here is a few things.

So my question is going to be how are you thinking about the relationship between what you write and then how you're thinking about the visuals you know, it's sort of like what came first type question.

But then the other thing that I'm seeing is citation citation citation citation, then your writing and kind of dreaming up what end video is as you write it and it's not this sequential thing.

It's actually crucial that both of these things are on the script at the exact same time.

Absolutely. I'm writing a piece of prose in the left and then I am pressing tab and I'm going to the right and I am coding the visuals.

Why didn't it store it coding?

Because it's not writing.

I'm not writing the visuals, I am pressing all these buttons to make different colors and different indentations and I am thinking about animation.

And I'm actually saying, oh, the pre -comp should be nested with like, I'm an animator.

So I'm actually speaking to my future animator who's doing this, and directing how I think it could be created.

And then I am finding references, visual references.

And I'm annotating them.

And as you can see here, this is me with screenshots, annotating an old map.

So we're on this map.

and I'm basically creating the whole thing as a piece of visual direction.

And so yeah, I call it coding because it feels, it feels like coding.

I don't know, I'm visually directing but the two dance together and they must dance together.

Every word must pair with a motion or an action within the animation.

So you write this and presumably you don't just go, all right, I'm done.

I'm gonna record all this and get it going.

I would imagine there's an owe to people who look one of the big things I lost when I left an institution was having like an editor and a guide over me.

My wife is who's also the leader of the company and kind of the executive producer of all the things looks at scripts and gives me feedback on flow clarity like just storage.

She does that for all of the We don't have a robust editorial.

And then tell me about the shame draft. Because I feel like that's when this kind of comes in.

So the shame draft is where we translate this script onto a timeline.

It is all the voice.

So it's the left column completely articulated with on camera or voiceover.

And then it is screenshots of the right column happening in time.

So, I say the word and I can now watch it.

And I can see what I directed as it plays and there is music.

And it, so I can actually watch it and we can actually give feedback on the flow of the video and the length and we can cut it down and it's one step.

And it does kind of change at that point but these scripts are me really kind of letting cement dry a little bit pretty pretty quickly.

Feel pieces are a little bit more chaotic because there's more interviews and more moments but yeah, it's it is a pretty intense process of trying to envision what the final video is going to look like and trying to articulate it as best I can on paper.

Yeah, and one of the things that we can show is the comments are hard or on the right side like, wow.

There's more words in comments that there are in the actual text.

But because the comments are our fact check.

So every assertion in every single video has a fact check.

This is why everything is green here.

Every assertion that was made before was red at first. It was a red highlight.

But the moment it got fact checked, it got a citation tag.

And if you click into a citation, you see a little blurb that prove the checks the fact, and then the sourcing of where it came from.

And some of these assertions have three or four fact checks from academic articles, from census data, from whatever, because this is the way we keep our facts really watertight and we didn't always have this process, we've had to learn the hard way that things can fall through the cracks when we're making so much and so we have a watertight process now, everything's fact checked.

And yeah, it's a lot.

It's, and then we published these as a source doc that people can go look and scrutinize their sources.

A lot of my videos, history or explainer videos follow this very active prose.

Who did what to whom to move this story forward?

Sometimes it happens with icons, whatever.

But there's always a moment, it's usually towards the end where I want to be like all right, we've gone through all the action.

Let's like zoom out and reflect and like contemplate what this means.

It usually comes with a more emotional tone and it comes with like a, a contemplating kind of energy to it.

So, so you get to this conclusion and the music will hit and kind of start to I'd call it a conclusion energy.

And I say today, the descendants of those original pioneers live in Mormon communities along this corridor that Brigham Young settled.

So you can already tell it's less who did What to Home, and it's more, it's like the end of the movie kind of like the the post script that see on the end of a documentary that kind of gives you the update.

And then I get personal in this one, because this one was personal.

I say, my wife and I went to school right here in the heart of it, in this beautiful valley, surrounded by these massive mountains, feeling close to the specific sugar coated version of this history that I was taught.

One thing I like to do is weave in unexpected praise to things that I'm criticizing, to to show that I'm not just purely on a one -sided rant to condemn something that's just too easy and people are, I mean, they're kind of tired of it.

So I could have easily just been, like, the moormanes and they brainwashed me and dada da da.

Instead, I say, in a beautiful valley surrounded by these massive mountains, and that's authentic.

I loved that experience being in that, in that beautiful valley.

And yet, in the same sentence, the next clause is feeling close to the specific sugar -coated version of this history that I was taught.

That's a juxtaposition in one sentence.

Beautiful Valley, I was brainwashed, life is complicated.

And in these contemplative sections, I like to throw a little bit of a wrench in a one -sided interpretation or one -sided analysis of what I experienced.

I say these stories of struggling conflict, sacrifice in the name of your beliefs, bravery in the face of persecution, a work ethic and a discipline and an obedience that is deeply linked to exploitation and apocalyptic thinking, exploitation of Mormon women and children and the native people whose land was stolen is helped me write this last section and really pushed me to say, hey, don't lean too hard and too apologizing for them, like this is a pretty messed up history, and you need to make sure that that is a part of this conclusion.

But again, it's next to an understanding that it has beauty to it as well.

I'm wondering what your inspirations are for writing and writing style and just the vibe, because as I see the way you're writing, it really has the cadence and the tenor of speech much more than a book.

We saw that earlier with, especially, with the way that you were talking through the rhythm, but here, you know, you have parts of many Mormons identities, an identity that is inextricably linked, and I think that's important for the kind of writing that you do, because a lot of times people are watching the video while they're making dinner, or something like that, and your writing is much for the ear is for the eye.

That's good that's interesting feedback.

I mean I don't think about it or analyze it.

I just know that I Have only ever written for This format to say it I was never a tax writer.

I was always a video person I was a visual person and and I'm also really dyslexic like I don't Read on the page.

I listen to audio books.

Mm -hmm. I Dictate to a phone.

I don't type. You know whenever I can now was this addicted.

No, I I write when I'm in this zone, I can write and there's a million typos and whatever but like, I write and I'm speaking in my mind and I'm also visualizing it.

So I think the pros probably does feel more verbal, that is the end.

I don't know what it would ever look like if I just wrote something that people read.

I don't do that, which is like, I don't know on someday maybe a write a book or something and didn't have to grapple with that, but like for now, this is the format that I love.

For most of my career, I made stuff on my own and it was all in my head and I would go out and film and write and edit and animate and so I didn't have to communicate to anyone what the vision was.

And that was great.

I just loved just sort of tinkering and but it was limiting, I could only do as much as I could do.

Now we have 25 people.

We have really talented editors and animators.

How's the team structured?

It's mostly a production company.

It's editors, animators, and then we have some visual producer who kind of helps bridge the gap between pre -production and post -production.

And then we have a few pre -pro people, researchers, who help surface information.

And then there's a business site, a business operation, which is production coordination, but also is then overseas the business side which we're trying to grow a little bit better, but it's mostly a production company with technicians who are a lot of people like me, they're self -taught, kind of scrappy resourceful.

Like I don't hire from traditional TV, it's people who grew up for anything.

But now what I have to do is articulate and communicate what has always been in my head.

I've done that now for a few years, but what it looks like is this art ingredient a page which is out tab in Google Docs.

And this is just page one of like dozens.

But the idea is that every single video has its own art direction that suits the story.

And so right here, what are we going to do with archive, archival videos and photos.

Well for the stills, we are going to use mysterious cryptics symbols.

we are going to frame our photos like this.

While I'm writing the story and something pops into my head, I go over to the Art Ingredients, I have an another tab and I write notes.

What if your week actually look like in order to do this?

Maybe we talk about this later, but I just writing writing, I mean, my entire world is framed around a writing block from 9 to 2 pm.

Or 9 am to 2 pm. That is my entire life.

There's no... There's no meetings, there's no slack, there's no email, there's no nothing between 9 and 2pm.

Usually 3 days a week, sometimes 4.

That is where it all gets done.

And those are sacred.

Like, no one... Like, that is where it all happens.

And so my entire world is just these writing blocks.

And they're very disciplined, and they're very urgent.

And the whole system works if I can hit those blocks.

And describe the vibe, the space, your mindset as your time.

I am a little it's a little voodoo magicy we're like I wake up in the morning and I already know what the block is.

I've been thinking about the block we're going to achieve what I'm going what I have to hit that day.

and I'm excited about it and I'm nervous and my bellies kind of turning and thinking like this morning I'm writing this video about income inequality over the like it's, it's like this big story, whatever.

I was thinking about that last night.

I was thinking about when I woke up this morning, I get ready.

And then as nine o 'clock comes, I'm like, I'm literally like, it's a game day.

It's like about you go out into the field and like I'm in the locker room.

And there's a lot of coffee and there's a lot of like get ready.

And then I have to be at my desk and I have to clear things off.

And I have to like take this little, kind of 10 minute ramp up.

And then I jump in.

and there's music. It's often sometimes it's like music that our composer makes and I just listen to his giant bank of music that he makes for us.

Which is amazing. Sometimes it's like synth wave mixes on YouTube, like it's tons of music, and it's very wired and locked in, obsessive.

I think people tell me I'm talking to myself, and I'm kind of manic, and I'm wrestling, but it's flow for me.

It's a, it kind of has to be that way.

and I can't have a writing block that's like in the afternoon.

I can't, it's, it's, it's, and this is why it's a little bit of magic.

I've almost like boxed myself in that I have to have the writing block at this time or it doesn't work.

Right, so that's where all this happens.

So it's pop back there.

So you have the art direction, for every direction.

There's how we are going to do archival, how we're gonna do video, for archival video and stills.

There is how we're going to shoot it.

It's going to be cozy warm vibes.

There's going to be an A cam in a B cam.

This is all stuff that's specked out.

And then there's the animation.

What's our text going to be?

Chernobyl Fuzz. Have you ever seen the HBO show Chernobyl?

I've seen the titles on that.

Are like my favorite style in the entire world.

They're like this like Soviet 1980's TV look.

So we have a whole animation template that emulates that.

So Chernobyl Fuzz, I want there to be a little Fuzz on the text.

Do you have a mood board that you've been curating or all this and just?

This is all words in my brain.

And then Alex our visual producer will take this.

And she will then articulate it in a mood board. And then, is and I will react to that.

And we'll give thoughts on color palette, on type and text.

And, you know, these mood boards are really rich and fun.

It's so fun to see it.

Do you wanna... Yeah, let's look at a mood board. Talk me through there.

The channel doesn't have an arc direction, but I don't have a branding package, because we like to do it fresh every time.

We like to make a new art direction for each one.

So this is an art direction for a future video.

The one I was just talking about, actually, oh, this one's about why you're so bored.

So you can see there's a color palette.

There are some of these title templates, or some of these inspiration for the signs that we're going to animate.

There's a set design.

There is animation style that's collage.

Some of these are from previous videos we've made.

Now for the set design, hold on.

It says similar to so tired a bit moody.

Some scientific posters in the background, think brains, practicals, analog tech, natural history, museum -like clutter.

One of the things that I see you doing, is you're really writing out the vibe as well as showing it and really trying to make that concrete.

Yeah. Having a vernacular and vocabulary with the team is so important and I have that for the first few years of having a team.

And so there was disconnect and it was bad.

Meaning for me, because I didn't know how to communicate the vision, we're now a few years in and the team knows Cozy, like moody, blah, blah, blah, I have all these weird words that I use with the artistic team to bring some of this stuff to life.

So yeah, every video gets one of these and this is the one, So this is the original before it turns into a move board. This is me taking screenshots as I'm writing screenshots of what of This happens to be a screenshot of a previous video We had done because this was a part of a series so I was saying like hey Let's render these in in this style But it's often screenshots from around The Internet of things that I'm inspired by or previous videos sometimes I'll pull from and we have such a body of videos now that I'm often pulling from But it's map styles.

It's it's sometimes I'll I'll take a screenshot of a Old piece of paper, and I'm like, I like this vibe the yellowing.

Let's like you know integrate that in Mm -hmm Um You know map style.

This is a cool thing probably from Pinterest. You know, and it's like it's got good vibes Let's see if we make a video with this we make 30 videos a year So we get to like play around with whatever.

It's like. We're not too precious about any of this stuff Like, just make it, see what happens.

And just to ground this, 30 videos a year, average video is probably 20 minutes.

Yeah. Every video is, yeah, 28 minutes probably.

So you're producing like 15 minutes of video a week.

Yeah, wow. Well, if that's how the math works out.

It's a lot. It's just a lot.

And every minute is, you know, premium animation and custom music.

It's a monster of a thing, we have an amazing team.

and we also are not precious, we just go, and we have a very high standard, but like we do a few rounds, and then we move on.

And I think the audience is cool with that.

If it was overly branded and perfect, I think it wouldn't be us and that's one thing I really value about our team is we're scrappy.

This video, I did a lot of these cryptic symbols, I didn't know how these were going to express themselves, but I was like I like these, I said for soul moments, which is what we call non -evidence moments.

So we write in, you have to see this piece of evidence to prove the fact, but then we have a soul, which is like the vibes of the visual vibes.

For soul moments before chapter titles, I would love to find or create simplified versions of these symbols.

That made it in, lots of cryptic symbols, which is the Mormons had a lot of that stuff.

Then I screenshot. This is literally Google Images.

You can see. This is like me Googling Mormon Symbols, and just being like, yeah, that, that, that, that, let's go.

Here's a question as you're writing and you have this just general sense of craftsmanship and obviously with the kind of care and dedication you put into your work you have to believe from like the level of your heart, like this is worth doing, you almost need to be compelled to do.

Yeah. So how do you balance that with you know you got 25 employees?

That's a huge So we've learned a few years ago when we were scaling the business and, you know, is built basically organization around what I was doing and really elevated it to become a professional organization.

But it hit a limit where we try to optimize and get and delegate and delegate and we we're making a video a week.

We're making four videos a month, and we had 17 videos going and it was like a well -oiled machine.

And we learned that, that slowly started to suck the magic out of me.

I started to hate it because I was showing up and kind of manufacturing my passion.

To a degree, I was still pitched.

I was still deciding the stories, but we were, you know, it was less control.

And so we dial back and sort of embrace the fact that I'm going to be a bottleneck.

Like I am a bottleneck because if I'm obsessed with it, then it will it will have some magic to it that like will the people will like and we can do it.

And that that does put a ceiling on how much we can make and we've sort of accepted that.

And now what we're doing is we're bottling what is is built, which is this organization.

And we're now launching other channels under the same production process.

Right. But I have to feel it in my belly, or I quickly get drained.

But when I love this stuff, I have this sort of eternal energy for it.

I'm not eternal. It wears me down.

But if I can love it.

So title options. A video has to be marketable.

And that is a thing that's a constraint that I operate under.

Which is like what are we gonna call this?

Why are people gonna click it?

Couple million people have to be interested in this.

And so I do seven titles or more, you know?

And this is the promise, and the wording is very important, it's a promise often it starts with how or why.

Every one of these besides number two starts with how or why because we're in the business of answering questions and explaining processes, the how and the why.

So that's a standard one.

And people on YouTube are curious and they clicked to have an answer to a problem.

Then there's thumb thoughts.

And this has been updated a little bit since this video.

We have a little bit more sophisticated kinds of packaging.

Some instances will check comps on one of ten, which shows videos in this topic that have done well, and how they've been packaged.

Where do you see that?

One of ten is one of these tools.

I think view stats is another like these tools where you can be like...

Mormons, you just type in Mormons.

And then it will be like, this video about Mormons did 50x the normal views on this channel, because and we think because it was packaged like this.

Correct. So we sort of look at that.

I put in some imagery that could work as a direction for the thumb.

We could lean into this illuminati energy.

We could lean into the map.

Those are different directions.

And now that there's A .B.

testing, we want to have very different directions so we can test if the people want the map or if they want the Illuminati.

Whereas before we were always tinkering with just one kind of direction and like refining it now we try multiple different directions.

And then there's all the you know this just has to get done.

Social description like what's going to how we're going to post this all the all this stuff.

This feels less like you be doing it.

I I don't do any of this.

Okay. Um, and then sort of the sources are, again, I don't this is a lot of like publishing stuff.

Yeah, um, the packaging I think on.

Although again, is like is kind of becoming the packaging expert on the team, um, and then you'll see an outline here, which is just me again, the backbone was predefined because it's a history.

This is me curating what parts of the history I think I'm in or right?

And this comes before or something.

This is like, I've read the Infodoc, I know what all the information is.

I'm going to now curate the sections that I think are gonna go in.

I'm not thinking about visuals, I'm just thinking about backbone and chronology and flow and promise.

And so, this is, what's promise?

Promise, every story is effectively a promise.

What makes someone pay attention to a story is anticipation that they are going to be, that some promise is going to be fulfilled.

So how Mormons stole the West or whatever is a promise that I am going to explain how Mormons stole the West. And so I need to make sure that this somewhat fulfills that.

Otherwise the packaging could be so overly disconnected from what is fulfilled in the video that like people feel betrayed.

And again, I do have the secret belief that like with enough enthusiasm and beauty you can enliven curiosity in people that they didn't know they had.

And my favorite comment is I had no idea I would watch a 20 minute video about ice cream machines, but like I don't know how you did that, but like things.

And like I love that because I'm like if you can find, if you can find the beauty and and the enthusiasm in kind of mundane things, life becomes a lot more interesting.

And so one of the promises of the channel generally is cultivating and enlivening that kind of curiosity on people, but we think in terms of promises with our audience.

I wanna jump into the different kinds of writing that you have, because you have these different categories.

One thing that's really unique about you is you have really created your own language to describe your aesthetic sensibility.

hmm, interesting. You said, it's not explainer, it's not history, it's not technical, it's contemplative and often used to highlight the paradoxes and complexities of human stories.

And it leads into what you're saying here, which is history has been borne by the people who live on these islands.

The human wall that protected the country, and might have to do so again.

The people who live among the undepinated bombs and the abandoned bones that have little hope of ever being recognized.

This isn't just the words, there is music and visuals and pacing that takes that writing and expresses it in its fullness for me.

And it's really important because I deal in a lot of technical stuff, macroeconomics and international relations jargon.

And one thing I really want always is that it is grounded at some point to the fact that this is about humans, this is about people, it's not just about ideas.

So I will often do this pivot from like, very technical history, play by play, writing to a reminder that there's tension and complexity and gray area at the heart of a lot of these stories, that in the news are often reduced down into big forces and sort of nameless, faceless, soulless entities.

The government did this, dada dada.

And I also believe that it is a sweet and sour experience where people will get some kind of cognitive stimulation from learning, but then you can transfer it to this other tone, that is softer, less And people get something out of that as well.

And switching between the two, from like a cognitive or thinking tone to a feely tone, is in music and with visuals and in language, to me, makes the presentation more engaging, more compelling.

I think people remember it for longer.

They remember what they felt.

Undead -nated bombs, abandoned bones.

Concrete. And kind of you don't think of bombs and bones and bones.

next to each other there's obviously a Littaration in it, but, like, there's visuals there that are evocative and I'm showing bones.

As a guy who goes out and looks for the bones of the dead from the Battle of Okinawa, and I went with the bomb squad to detonate these bombs.

That was a part of the story but to wrap it up in and put them next to each other reflected that kind of emotional tone that I think is really important for these stories.

So this is what you're saying between the difference between the explainer voice and less precise, it's more human, it's more complex, there's not firm answers.

There's your raising questions and your showing complexity.

When we think of journalists, we often think of this sort of detached observer whose almost even adversarial to whatever it is that they're covering and they're distanced from them.

And you see that distance both with the journalist and the subject that they're covering, but also there's often a distance between the journalist and the reader.

there's sort of this on high expert and the readers like, Oh, let me learn from you.

One of the things that you do in your writing is that you at least in your relationship with the viewer, more of a friend.

Hey, come over here.

Sit down on the couch with me.

Let me show you something.

We can look at it together.

I think that this is an example of where you do that.

So here it goes. I want to show you what this map says and Show you how China uses cartography to assert and project power in its region.

This is doing a couple of things.

It's equalizing the journalist and the viewer.

I want to show you.

I'm a friend who's really curious.

Look, you've seen me at the computer tapping around, wrestling with this map.

I've discovered something.

Let me show you. That to me is a framing.

that's very genuine, by the way.

It's a enthusiasm that comes from how I relate to my friends and how I relate to the world.

But I've funneled it into my writing and my presentation because I think that it's how viewers want to be spoken to.

I think they wanna be challenged.

But at the same time, they want to be let in.

They want to be spoken to as like, hey, I know you're smart.

You can get this, but you may not know about this lemme show you.

It's another hallmark of the classic style that Pinker talks about and it's, it is, let me show you, and then directing their gaze to interesting things and describing them in plain ways that are accessible.

But within that, we're discussing a lot of rigorous deep, complex stuff, but it's in this way that invites people in instead of makes them feel like, oh, this is only for the smart people, And journalists often will use language that is meant for their peers, not for their audience.

They will say, look at how much I know I'm really smart.

And I need my peers that the other journalism outlets to know that I'm not speaking in plain language.

And that to me is like, that is the curse of, of a lot of writing, but especially writing that is meant for the masses, but often turns into this sort of gatekeeper writing for, for peers instead of audience.

This is slightly tangential but Cleo Abram has a line where she says that most people overestimate how much context the audience has and under estimates their intelligence and you should do the opposite.

I should flip it. Most people have no idea what it is that we're talking about.

They just don't have the context, but they're actually really smart.

And if you talk to them like their smart, give them the context but then talk to them like their smart and that doesn't mean use big words but actually like you're saying, challenge them and push them to understand something that's a little bit more challenging.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, let's defenses down.

I think I experienced this when somebody invokes like a celebrity name or a thing that I should know about, and I don't know, and I feel myself pretending that I know, you get into this defensive space where you're suddenly in a, I'm not curious anymore, I'm afraid to be called out.

And so, embracing a sense of like, hey, all of us are learning together, puts people in this space of learning that I believe creates a better absorption and so I think Little Cetil Queues like let me show you is a great way to set the tone and then in addition that Line also promises.

There's a lot more going on.

That's a hope device.

That's a way of saying like hey stick around There's a lot more going on with this map.

I'm gonna show it to you that that's a promise.

Yeah, I mean that is absolutely one of the themes of your writing is you are constantly saying there's a lot more going on Yeah, there's a lot more going on.

Yeah, hey check out this thing.

It's really interesting.

You should know about it Yeah, and you say that constantly without ever saying that explicitly.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's I think that that's a Kind of a retention thing meaning like hey stick around.

I promise this is getting get interesting But I think it's also good storytelling.

I think good storytelling is always saying like foreshadowing and kind of letting you see a little bit ahead, but then so that you are compelled to stick around and being grossed in the now.

And that kind of, I don't do that, I don't calculate that, but that is something that I think has naturally occurred in my writing.

How did you learn that sense of how to tell a story?

Honestly, like my best theory on this, because I don't know, I didn't grow up thinking about story or journalism or anything.

know, what I did grow up doing was not being very good at learning and not being good at learning the way that you're supposed to learn and developing a pretty strong resentment towards the kind of know at all this is the way it is in these big words signal that you're smart and I wasn't that and I was a visual person and I wanted to understand and So I think a lot of my style comes from the way I wish it had been described to me.

And actually they, in my early 20s, it hit me like there isn't some special skill that I wasn't born with.

It's that people aren't explaining it in a way that's accessible.

And so I'm often empathizing with how I would want to hear it and how I think the audience actually wants to hear it.

This is what you said, reflecting on it, this from a talk in 2019.

You say, if you watch Vox videos, you'll hear a lot of, this is something and it's like circling something on a document and animation.

Yeah. Talk to me about that.

Yeah. So very similar to letting people in, the language we use is active and it's actively talking to the viewer.

It's not just saying facts about the world is saying look at this and often there is emotion that goes with that.

It's a circle. We draw the eye or we direct the eye.

Two things is a lot going on on a screen.

And so you say look at this and it goes over in its circles.

Yes. Or it shines or something.

Yeah. Little subtle thing to be like this is what you should be looking at and reading.

And it turns out that when you speak to the viewer and in that Emb item way, and you direct their eye to visuals, that's a really rich experience, we're visual creatures, a lot of our brain dedicated to visual processing.

So when they can have cognitive information flowing in from a inviting voice and they can have that visual experience dancing together, you know, frame by frame, it's a really pleasant experience.

And I think Vox, that is what they really pioneer was leaning into that style and I'm really grateful because I learned a lot.

Vox was so far ahead.

I mean, it was crazy.

The Vox explainer style.

Oh my goodness. I remember vividly.

Vox did an interview with Barack Obama in 2015, 2016.

It's got this black room and then it's got these animations.

And it felt like five years.

Oh my goodness. That was, that interview was being made when I right as I started and I was like, I was like, I am walking into the coolest place ever because they're interviewing the President, but they're doing these cool minimalistic animations on top if that was published now it would feel future.

Totally, yeah. I, I believe that what Vox had, the chemical reaction of all of those people at that time, in that moment in video journalism, created something really special.

And I was so lucky to to walk in at that time and be influenced and to fuse what I had going, which was like a visual kind of again wanting to explain things in a certain way with what Vox had going, my style and my approach is completely like, that was my boot camp.

And the people on that team really taught me how to do this.

How was writing at Vox with a team under an institution different from then writing on your own now.

At first, it wasn't very different because Vox was this kind of wild west Petri dish of like, we don't really know what the Vox voices totally, especially the video team.

They really let me do whatever.

And I really owe so much to that freedom because they gave me support and they taught me how to be factual and rigorous in my journalism, but voice and style, they just said that needs to be good and cool, and there was a lot of pressure to make a good and cool.

And so I flourished in that, but I wasn't prescribed a way to do it.

So with time as it grew and it became a little more centralized, a little more corporate, they started to kind of, the wall started to close in on me a little bit, to unify a little bit with the vibe and that's when they jump -ship.

Yeah. Because I'm a bit of like, I need to kind of just be a stallion.

Yeah. And it's hard to be constrained.

And so that sort of led me out.

Tell me about these pillars of YouTube writing, frankly, I forgot where I found these.

Visual, plain, clear concrete.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I mean, I think those words do a great job of summarizing a lot of the themes we've talked about today.

It is trying to empathize with your viewer and sharing.

And YouTube is a great place for this because YouTube is the original show and tell platform.

And so, it is, it is already a place where it's a very warm room for, let me show you this.

That inviting clear plain language, there's not a lot of tolerance for pontificating and for, you know, like kind of really laborious language.

And so, I really believe that like the more human you can make it and the more relatable and conversational, the more concrete, like the more the platform we're rewarded.

by the platform, I mean the people on the platform who come to YouTube before a more democratized experience.

And tell me about specifics.

We've talked a lot about specific data points, specific stories.

How do you balance specifics meaning, hey, this is legitimate.

I've really looked into this.

And I'm going to bring this to life versus the specifics of your grandpa at dinner who's talking about the war for way too long, and you just like, dude, let's get on with that.

This is the tension at the heart of what we do, which is we deal in really complex stuff, sensitive political stuff, and then we have to make it plain and concrete and visual, which is inherently an exercise of reducing and simplifying, and there's no easy answer to where you draw the line.

What's too simple, what to include what to leave out.

So, discretion is something that you develop over time.

And, I always feel sensitive to the fact that there is a way more complex, deeper story at the heart of every story I tell.

But, I believe that surfacing it and simplifying it and storytelling it lets millions of people who otherwise would have never engaged with that complex have access to it, and I can do it in this way that does include little tidbits of rigor and humanity to it, and that's why I do these contemplative, emotional moments to be like, hey, there's a deeper, like more complex thing going on here.

I'm not going to get into it, unless I was doing a 10 -part feature documentary, but like it's here, I'm going to try to more like summarize it, and poetic languages is good for that, better for that.

So I rest good at night knowing that I'm making these stories accessible even if I'm simplifying them.

And how do you think about surprise and elements of surprise?

For what good videos have, you said it has to be visual, it has to be surprise.

It has to be naturally interesting.

I'd assume that's true for the writing too.

Like if you can get those three components that the visual, the surprise, the naturally interesting, it's almost like you have this, this wind, a tailwind behind you.

Absolutely. The writing is actually some of the most important for making something surprising because when you are talking about something, you can talk about, you can be an LLM, and you can have your training data say, how has everyone else said this?

I'm going to say it just like them, and just fill in the next word. And it's going to sound like everyone else who's talking about that topic, or you can be human and say, I am going to say this thing in a completely different way, but it's still the same thing.

Let me think of an example on this, because I think we can go to the Antarctic– Antarctica is the best example.

How did we get this?

A map so detailed. So precise, that guys like this would have thought it was magic, an impossibility made manifest by superhumans in the future.

One of their fellow explorers, a journalist shackled him drew this place on the back of a menu once.

Dreaming of some day crossing this whole continent, and paying a huge price to try.

This is a place that has lured explorers from all over, killing many of them.

This is a story about Antarctica and mapping.

It's kind of a wonky story.

It could be. It could be a very wonky, like, map story.

but what I experimented with this in this is is trying to do exactly what we just talked about using the most surprising unorthodox language to talk about something that could easily be talked about in the most predictable language, which is like the history of some British person exploring Antarctica and technology around satellite mapping.

Like you could just jargon the hell out of that.

I thought, what if we put the lens of pure beauty and awe on and we looked through that and we described everything almost as if like an alien was arriving and saying, like, how did they do this?

And they can use all this unarithroxling, which the intro kind of does that.

But as the piece goes on, I think the analogy here, I don't know if this will work, but like, is a canal.

And most of us want to communicate in the bottom of the canal.

That's the path of least resistance.

That's what we've heard. We've heard the words a million times in the bottom of the canal.

If you want to do surprising language, you have to climb up the wall of the canal and you have to be riding on the bank of the canal.

And it's harder and it's like, you're kind of like always sort of climbing up there to find language that's fresh and new to describe the same stuff.

And it's often more active and more plain, but boy, when you do it, it...

Someone can relate and see a topic that could be so boring in this totally different, surprising way.

And is your writing these videos?

Do you have, like, a process?

All right, act one intro, act two this, act three that.

You've written so many videos, you must have them right now.

There's never... I've never identified with these classical formats of like rising action and the fall and then the climax and then the descending, like all those formulas, I've never identified with those.

Maybe if I was doing fiction or something that would make more sense, but there's no format for me.

It comes out really intuitively, on how I think it should go, and I don't totally know what it's gonna feel like as I'm writing it in the pacing.

And sometimes it's 20 minutes, and sometimes it's 40 minutes.

And that's what I love about being able to do it on YouTube.

It's like, no one's forcing me into a format.

Yeah, and I don't actually believe in some ultimate format.

I think that's a kind of a myth.

And like humans, I only identify with this kind of structure.

How has all the time you spent reading the Economist's factor?

And when we've spoken about?

So the Economist is a very good example of classic style where they will describe things as this person did something as opposed to describing any sort of conceptual jargon terms, and they'll usually do it in really plain, quippy terms. The economist does a really good job of identifying what is interesting about a topic, and then doing the work to find the details that people actually want to know, which is a lot more work, and surfacing those, what's an example of that.

The economists just did an interview, the first interview, actually, with the Syrian leader, the rebel leader who threw out Assad in his now, effectively running the country.

And that peace describes the context, then it goes through the history and all the stuff, but then it will suddenly say like, he's got a tough job in front of him.

The palace, which is five times larger than the White House, is echoes with emptiness.

there wasn't even staff to serve coffee that was a moment a human moment where we're talking about the geopolitics of the Middle East. We're talking about and then we and then we are able to just drop into this room and see this new leader in this giant palace that is echoing because it's empty and that there's not even someone there to serve coffee and this guy is supposed unify Syria and start a new country.

And that just, like those moments, those little details that you have to be brave to include that because it might fall flat, you know, like that's sort of a weird thing to say, but it's the exact kind of visual concrete example that I want to hear to understand the vibe of what's going on with this guy.

Most people are reporting it as like he has taken power and is now trying to unify the country And it's like, it's exactly that voice with the red words.

Yes, exactly. And it's like, thank you, you're engaging my neocortex. Like, I can't see anything.

I'm just sort of seeing unifying a country.

What does that mean?

The way the economists is able to surface, there's a person here who actually has to do things.

And they're struggling, is, well, also weaving in really rigorous analysis, I learn a lot from, and then I also take inspiration from, I would say, My work is much more pure to pure sharing, ethic than the economists.

Who are you taking inspiration from when it comes to writing?

Yuval Harare in Sapiens is a fantastic way of taking the wankeyist, anthropology, evolutionary science, and turning it into highly accessible concrete language.

I love Stephen Pinker and the way that he writes.

I love Michael Pollen.

He writes from a very strong sort of John Green is a favorite because of the way that he takes mundane things and dresses them up.

Okay. So, the core thing that's happening here is there's a deep belief that you have, that you can basically take anything, and that with good writing and good storytelling, you can make that thing come alive.

Whether it's Harari's anthropology, whether it's Michael Pollan talking about food and And that that is actually the work of what good writing is, is to see the sense of possibility and something and to breathe life into it.

Yes, and what is so beautiful about that is that there is endless subject matter.

Because everything is interesting.

Everything is interesting.

Everything has a story.

It just needs to have that life breathed into it.

And as a storyteller, you are able to create an infectious sense of enthusiasm that can bring someone in.

That's why, for me like I don't have a beat, I do international stuff, but like I do the history of Mormons and I talk about Doritos and I talk about you know the psychology of boredom like it doesn't matter what the topic is.

It matters what the approach is to thinking about it.

And that to me is the great mission of the channel is modeling curiosity.

What's cool about the way that you think about enthusiasm is what I hear the word enthusiasm.

What I think of is, alright, guys, we're going to talk about this thing and we're going to do this, this, this, this, this.

And for you, it's kind of it's a contemplative beauty that then becomes craftsmanship.

And there's like this, my senses from studying your process hearing you today is this moment, this almost phase transition where something gets imbued with the sense of soul and live.

And that to me feels like when it's time to publish the video and all this is to say that your enthusiasm shows up in the work that it takes to really turn something into a work of art beyond just mere facts and figures.

Totally. It has to be present at the beginning when I'm thinking about El Chapo's tunnels.

Yep. I have to have a glimmer of like, what's going on there?

And I usually will visions of really kind of fractured visions of like what this could be, like the vibe of it, the actual video.

Very, very rough in broad, but that has to exist. And then you start to descend into reality where you actually have to find the facts and decide how the art direction, all this work.

And that there's a moment always where it's like, boy, this is not nearly as cool as it was when we started.

like this is way harder.

Every single person, listen to this episode.

Yeah, it can relate to that.

And that, that wrestle is one I know very well now.

And the, the, the work of storytelling is to remember what it was like at the beginning and hold that, hold that curiosity, even when you get into that curse of knowledge where you know too much about the topic and you forget what it feels like to be curious and to not know.

You have to hold it and guard it and then you have to push it up the other side of the valley and that is the work of getting it story ready, but it it has to happen at the beginning and then it has eventually hopefully gets to the end where that where that curiosity stays, but it always is there at the beginning.

What do you feel like you're working on?

What is it the frontier of your skills, where your sense of possibility of who you could be as a creator and a writer, far exceeds where you I'm working on is inviting characters and inviting human stories that help do what I'm trying to do with the contemplative kind of poetic voice, they can do it because they're the people living it.

One of the sort of weaknesses of this very intentional process is that it all has to through my eyes.

And it all has to funnel through my process.

And is a storyteller, for a long time that that control is really nice because you get to really craft something.

But after a while you think, I'm just one brain.

Like what would happen if I brought this person was a really interesting story and I helped facilitate their experience, and I used all my sensibility with writing to build that up.

That's not a skill set I have. I mean, I have little seeds of it, and I've done it to some degree, but really emphasizing someone else's story, something I want to do.

Have you done the sort of a strange question?

Have you done personality studies?

Because my bet is you are super, super, super high on some sort of empathy and ability to understand somebody else's experience, both in how they live and how they experience the arc of watching your videos.

See, I don't know if that's true.

I mean, that might be true to some degree and this is like a kind of vulnerable thing to say.

But I believe that as a storyteller, I often emphasize understanding and conceptual understanding over human stories.

Meaning I really focus on, I want you to understand how this thing works.

Now, that doesn't mean I don't bring it, I make gestures towards like, hey, there's humans here, et cetera, but I believe, and I've started to see this as I go into the field now more and more.

Where I'm starting to crave more of like, Okay, I know what I'm going to say about it.

I know how this thing works now.

But like, what is it really like to be you not just like, I'm going to spend a few minutes getting a few sound bites.

But I think as I mature, as a storyteller, that empathy in storytelling is I'm starting to thirst for it a little bit more.

And I, and I haven't been driven by that as much. I really don't want to undersell.

Like I do emphasize human stories and that is an important part of it, but I think I have a lot of room to grow there.

And I'm excited about that.

That's an exciting challenge for me.

I think it's the next chapter.

One thing that you haven't really spoken about is retention and the YouTube game.

And I'm not saying, let's go talk about it.

I'm just saying that that's a revealing thing that you're focused so much on craftsmanship.

And you talk to a lot of creators where they're like, I'm looking at this thing and this thing and this thing, and you haven't mentioned that.

And that's cool because you've been able to thrive at this game by not obsessing over that.

We definitely play the game, but craftsmanship is number one.

And we've sort of a long time ago realized that there is an audience who comes because they want a really authentic handmade thing, and that we can optimize and we can thumbnail test into all these things and we've done it, we've gone down those data -driven rabbit holes several times and we always come out on the other side with a few lessons that were like, all right, this will improve our process but never, it's never become the heart of our strategy ever.

The strategy is spread high quality curiosity, and there's an audience for that.

And that happens when individuals, creators are exercising their passions, which is why, in addition to my channel, we've now launched two other channels with at the heart of it, a creator with a thing to say, and it's their style, and they do it.

And we're gonna keep doing that.

That is our future is building out this media company that helps launch journalists with individual brands.

Because, yes, we can optimize.

But especially in the world of AI, like human excitement and enthusiasm and passion, people love that.

And we don't want to get away from that in the name of data and optimization.

So you feel that human excitement and enthusiasm is the antidote to the AI creep.

I think so. I think it's one.

I think that the example I've seen a lot is like in the 80s when computers got better than humans at chess We didn't just watch computers play chess all day.

We still wanted the tension of two humans playing chess Even though the computers way better.

And it's like the computer would have a way more sophisticated game we want Humans to be in we want to experience life through humans and I believe the same thing will be true in large sectors of the AI world where like the AI is going to get much better objectively at doing a lot of things that humans do now.

There's one of those pockets of places that humans will want to watch humans do things and I think that journalism and storytelling I'm betting on will always be that humans want to hear another human tell stories it's like all this human ritual and I don't think it's going to go away.

I want I ought to know how El Chapo escape from That sounds cool.

So final question, so if you're speaking to a group of university students or something like that, they want to learn how to do what you do, and you've got a semester to teach them how do you structure that curriculum?

It's hard because if I'm speaking purely from my experience, a big part of that curriculum is spending a lot of time in the trenches learning visual technical skills which are not quick and easy to learn, like wrestling with animation and Photoshop and Illustrator, and learning how to express something visually with the tools that you have your hands on, has been the gateway for me to become a better writer and storytelling.

Because I was an animator before I knew how to write, and my writing isn't transgate tied to how I think about visual expression.

So that's been my path.

Now Clio, who is obviously insanely good at this and a very close friend of ours, is that she has spent time in the trenches and learned animation and taught herself all this stuff, but like she would have a different answer to that.

So it's not the only way.

Like, I think the one thing that unifies all of us finding the things that you want to understand deeply, really being able to identify them and then cultivate that.

Lean into that and try to communicate them to somebody else.

And at first the work is going to be terrible and bad and if you can push through that and get that out of your system, which is reps and reps and reps, you start to see a product that is actually reflective of how to imagine it at the beginning, but there's really no skipping that kind of process.

So, that's a long way of saying, you have to put in the reps, and if you can find a way where that is authentic to you, you'll have the energy to put in the reps.

Yeah, the meta lesson that I took from today, which is the thing that I admire the most, is you just care so much. You care so much about your work.

You really, really, really care.

And I think the lesson isn't copy what you're doing, but to find the thing that you care about as much as you care about the stories that you tell, the work that you do, and it really shows in your videos, and it also really shows in conversation.

Thank you. Yeah, that about sums it up right there.

Cool. Anything else or is that it?

I think that's it. That was awesome.

That was great. And never talk about this stuff.

So this is fun. Thanks for doing that.

Of course. is fun to be here.

[The Art of Visual Storytelling: A Deep Dive into John's Creative Process]-[Johnny Harris: Master Storytelling on YouTube | How I Write]

📋 Summary

The Architecture of Viral Storytelling: A Masterclass in Visual Narrative

The Four-Month Production Cycle

The Philosophy of "Classic Style" and Visual Coding

Packaging and the "Promise" of a Story

The "Soul" of the Story

The Future: Human Storytelling in the Age of AI

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript