The Veritasium Journey - Feat. Derek Muller

Phoebe Lee has been travelling full time for four years and doesn’t live anywhere. She was Little Grey Box when she last sat down with us, a name she picked off the floor of a London flat and could never explain to anyone. She’s now Travel for Phoebe, she’s past 460,000 subscribers, and she’s back to talk about what the last stretch has actually involved.In this episode, Phoebe is open about the parts of travel creation that don’t make the vlog. She talks about the rebrand she put off for years and finally did at 100k, the video about her mental health that she nearly pulled, and how the response to that one video changed her relationship with her audience completely. Plus the tourism board that threatened to deport and blacklist her mid-trip, how the money has shifted from ad revenue to brand deals, and the three small daily rituals she uses to hold a life together with no fixed address.An honest conversation about the business of travel content, and what it costs to be on camera every day.Topics covered: rebranding an established channel · turning an audience into a community · burnout and taking time off · brand deals and hosted trips · tall poppy syndrome and filming in public · handling difficult clients · what travel creation actually looks like

Derek Muller has an engineering degree, a physics PhD and a job he enjoyed at a tutoring company. In 2010 he quit most of it and started Veritasium, which went on to become one of the channels that helped define what YouTube could be. For our 150th episode, he walks through the whole thing.Derek is unusually candid about the parts creators don’t talk about. The first year of sub-1,000 views and the friends who kept him going when he was close to quitting. The pivot he made when he realised that people who don’t like science won’t click a science video and people who do won’t click a basic one. The slinky video that taught him what viral territory looks like, and the decade it took to work out that the real product is knowledge you can repeat to your friends and seem smarter. Then investors came knocking, the first deal fell apart at the signing table, and the second one has taken the company from under 10 people to 35 and is slowly moving him out of frame.A career-spanning conversation about craft, depth, and building something that doesn’t need you in it.Topics covered: finding the right audience · what makes something go viral · depth as a competitive moat · the difficulty of building a team · selling part of a creator business · succession and diversifying on-screen talent · what comes after the channel

Haley Janicek has spent close to a decade at Kit, where she leads creator community. Her first job there was sales. Her argument on email hasn’t changed in all that time: it was never the sexy channel, it has simply always converted better than anything else.In this episode, Haley is specific about where creators go wrong. The big one is treating the newsletter as the whole plan when it’s really the top of the funnel, with the welcome sequence and the automations underneath doing the actual selling. She explains why a subscriber is worth roughly a dollar while a follower isn’t, why the inbox is a space people guard far more closely than their feed, and why nobody buys a $2,500 mastermind off a social post but plenty of people buy it after a few emails. We cover the formula that makes newsletters sustainable (a theme, a fixed day, something you can write in under an hour), the podcast flywheel that lets two creators cross-promote to entire lists rather than new subscribers, and what people get wrong when they pay for subscribers. Plus how Kit’s free studios work as a retention strategy, and why she refuses to put panels on her conference stage.A practical session on email strategy from someone who has watched thousands of creators build lists, and seen which ones actually make money.Topics covered: email strategy vs newsletters · why subscribers convert better than followers · welcome sequences and automations · growing a list through collaboration · paid subscribers and ManyChat · selling as a creator skill · events and community

Ronald Pruett has spent decades in direct response TV, home shopping and direct to consumer, and now sits on the business side of Gemma Stafford's Bigger Bolder Baking, the YouTube channel that has become the number one baking podcast in the US, and most recently a run on QVC. He calls himself the suit. His argument is that what we call the creator economy isn't one yet, because the participants can't really trade with each other, and that what exists today is an economy of creatives instead.In this episode, Ronald is blunt about the structure most creators are working inside. He explains why platforms have an incentive to produce some stars but not too many, why he thinks it's now close to impossible to break out as a new star on YouTube, and why ad revenue, useful as it is, works like a slow poison on a business you don't control. He draws the line between an audience and a community as simply as anyone has: an audience watches, a community buys a ticket. Then he lays out what would have to change for creators to become a genuine asset class, using the music catalogue market as the model, and why hits, predictable revenue and owned IP are the three things institutional money will want before it arrives. Plus the content, community, commerce sequence he uses with Gemma, why direct to consumer brands with no community in the middle went bankrupt handing their money to Meta, and why operators who understand both media and commerce are the biggest missing piece in the industry.A big picture conversation about where the creator economy actually is, and what has to happen before it becomes something you can invest in.Topics covered: creator economy vs economy of creatives · platform incentives and the power law · audience vs community · content, community, commerce · ownership of IP and distribution · lessons from the music catalogue market · creators as an asset class · stars and suits

Andrea Casanova was born in Venezuela, left after her brother was kidnapped, and moved through the Dominican Republic, Panama and Brazil before landing in the US for college. On a student visa she was legally capped at $150 a month, so she hustled: growing League of Legends accounts, walking dogs, shooting photos for bars. She now runs an agency, speaks on creator economy tech, and is building Ginger, a tool that helps creators handle their inbound brand deals.In this episode, Andrea is open in a way most people aren't about money and the discomfort that comes with it. She started her agency with one client, a psychiatrist who was also a witch, at $400 a month, and inside two years was billing $70,000 a month. We cover why she thinks 67% of brand emails go unanswered and what that costs a mid-tier creator, why she says the missing skill is business etiquette rather than engagement rate, and her split between brand building and cash building as a way to decide what to work on. Plus, what she had to say no to in order to ship Ginger, and what she'd tell a first-time creator walking into Cannes with nothing to offer.A candid conversation about money, judgement and focus from someone who has built from almost nothing more than once.Topics covered: money mindset and pricing guilt · building an agency from scratch · unanswered brand deal emails · business etiquette for creators · brand building vs cash building · decision making frameworks · becoming a non-technical tech founder · saying no

@Jazza started as a kid making Flash animations, moved to YouTube in 2012 because he could see a gap where the art tutorials were terrible, and has been there ever since. He's built one of the biggest art channels in the world and, by his own account, has never truly gone viral. The channel grew on being steadily, consistently himself.In this episode, Jazza is thoughtful about what fourteen years actually teaches you. We cover why the algorithm shift to watch time helped him while it hurt the animators around him, why he keeps abandoning the analytics tools his team builds, and what he calls the MrBeastification of YouTube: a template that works, produces a lot of people who achieve the thing and then find they're committed and unhappy, and is now, he thinks, on its tail end. Plus the advice he's given since day one, which is to do the thing you'd do with no audience at all, and why most people can't stomach performing to an empty auditorium.A reflective conversation about creative longevity, and about deciding what success means before the platform decides it for you.Topics covered: fourteen years on YouTube · defining success on your own terms · data vs creative instinct · the MrBeastification of the platform · community and connection · creative partnerships · brand relationships beyond ROI · building a tool belt of skills

Miles Sellyn is VP of Partnerships at Rare Days, a company that builds software with creators including Colin and Samir, Cody Sanchez, and Rhett and Link. His argument is simple: 95% of creator businesses are advertising companies, selling other people's products with no long term upside, when the same audience and the same distribution could be pointed at something they actually own.In this episode, Miles is direct about what has changed and what hasn't. The cost of building a real consumer app has fallen from millions to a few hundred thousand, which changes the maths entirely for a creator who needs a million dollar business rather than a fifty million dollar one. But he's blunt about the vibe coding narrative and about the reputational risk of shipping something mediocre to an audience that trusts you. Plus why audience and customer are not the same thing, and the operational problem nobody plans for when 8,500 people can suddenly raise a support ticket.A practical case for adding software to the revenue stack, and an honest account of what it takes to do it without embarrassing yourself.Topics covered: creator software and digital products · why brand deals don't build enterprise value · AI and the cost of building apps · finding the right product for your niche · pricing and validation · email lists as launch infrastructure · MVPs with off the shelf tools · knowing when to get help

Zoe Soon moved from Sydney to New York on the back of a thirty minute coffee she flew twenty one hours for. When we recorded with her, Zoe led Creator and Gaming at the IAB, the body that standardised digital advertising back when the industry needed agreed ad sizes so brands could buy across the web without rebuilding every unit. She's doing the same job again, this time for creator brand deals.In this episode, Zoe explains why $44 billion of creator ad spend is what she calls a gut feeling: brands know it works, but they can't compare it to anything else, so it stays stuck in the innovation budget instead of the media plan. We cover why a company like Unilever can do a deal with one huge creator but not a thousand small ones, why creators wait an average of 120 days to get paid and where in the chain that money sits, and why brands are increasingly paying only on direct conversions even though creators do most of the work before the sale. She's also good on what brands are actually buying, which is belonging rather than reach, with the Cerave Super Bowl campaign as the case study. Plus the confidence gap in gaming (90% of Gen Z play, under 5% of ad budget goes there), what the new Creator Fronts are designed to do, and her three things every creator should be building right now.A clear explanation of the plumbing that decides how much brand money reaches you, from the person building it.Topics covered: creator ad spend and measurement · why brand budgets stay stuck · payment terms and the supply chain · reach vs belonging · conversion-only deals · gaming and ad investment · Creator Fronts · thinking like a media company

Robert Kaliati has known Caleb Hammer since middle school. They played music together, ended up doing sales at the same company in Austin, and when Caleb left to start a YouTube channel, Robert eventually joined to run the business side. He is now President and COO of Hammer Media, which means he is the one thinking about what happens to 35 staff and 20 contractors if the guy whose name is on the door stops filming.In this episode, Robert is unusually open about the operating side of a creator business. We cover how he handles controversy (mostly by having the difficult conversations with brands and staff months beforehand, then doing nothing on the day), the extensive casting process behind Financial Audit and the guests who used to make it into the chair without being real, and how the membership went from a flopped Patreon to roughly 110,000 members on YouTube, doubled in under a year, with 80% actually watching week over week. He is also clear on the money question most creators avoid: why DollarWise, their budgeting app, deliberately carries almost none of Caleb's branding, and why that restraint is the whole point. Plus his rule that everything ships with an A/B test, how he disagrees with a creator using data rather than opinion, and why the standard advice to hire an editor first is often wrong.A rare look behind a fast-growing creator company from the person whose job is to make it survive without the creator.Topics covered: key man risk · creator and operator partnerships · handling controversy · memberships and subscription revenue · casting and story production · testing and experimentation · when and who to hire first · building products that outlast the creator

Allison Yazdian started in real estate, where she noticed the best agents were never the ones with the best listings. They were the ones who owned the direct relationship with their customers, so it didn't matter which brokerage they sat at. She went on to LTK and now runs Uscreen as CEO, building the infrastructure that lets creators sell to their audience without a platform standing in the middle.In this episode, Allison is direct about what fragile revenue actually looks like, and what happens when a creator effectively gets evicted from a platform they never owned. We cover the numbers she sees across thousands of channels (nearly 200 creators who have passed $1m, an average around $77k, and the maths on why 500 fans at $20 a month changes everything), why pricing too low is the mistake almost everyone makes, and why retention beats acquisition every time. She's also honest about the creator ick of asking people to pay, and how building in public gets you past it. Plus why audience size predicts far less than engagement, the Goldilocks problem of hiring too fast or too slow, and what she tells creators who launch, announce it once, and conclude memberships don't work for them.Topics covered: rented vs owned audience · memberships and recurring revenue · pricing strategy · retention and churn · getting past the transaction ick · super fans and community · scaling a creator team