Kicking off the 3rd season of Hot SciComm Summer is Adam Cole. Adam started at NPR’s Science Desk in 2011 where he started making short videos and radio pieces. In 2014, he launched the YouTube channel Skunk Bear with NPR, which was a venue for fun, quirky, visual forays into science stories big and small. After NPR, he did work for Vox, including their Netflix series, “The Mind, Explained” in 2019.
Most recently, Adam’s work came on my radar again because he’s one half of the new YouTube channel, Howtown. Fans of SciCommSummer will remember my very first guest back in 2022—Joss Fong. Well, Joss is the other half of Howtown. Together, they’ve been doing really excellent work building an independent channel making long-form videos exploring big questions and the methods scientists use to answer them. It’s so good. You need to check it out if you haven’t yet.
(Also, here’s the map projection music video I mentioned at the beginning of our interview. I just watched it again. It’s great.)
Adam shares his story as a science journalist, the makings of Howtown, the value of having a creative partner, and the pros and cons of working for yourself or a more established institution.
Watch Howtown (YouTube) and support their Patreon.
You can find the rest of this summer’s science communication podcast series here.
Transcript
(Note that the current version of this transcript is AI-generated and has not yet been checked for accuracy.)
Andy Luttrell: 0:09
Hey everyone, welcome to the third season of Hot SciComm Summer, where I talk with savvy science communicators to figure out how to get science findings outside of niche academic circles. I’m excited to share the first episode of this season with Adam Cole. Adam started at NPR’s Science Desk in 2011, where he started making short videos and radio pieces. In 2014, he launched the YouTube channel Skunk Bear with NPR, which was a venue for fun, quirky visual forays into science stories big and small. But After NPR, he did work for Vox, including their Netflix series The Mind Explained in 2019. And more recently, Adam’s work came on my radar again because he’s one half of the new YouTube channel Howtown. Avid listeners of SciCom Summer will remember my very first guest back in 2021, Joss Fong. While Joss is the other half of Howtown, together, Joss and Adam have been doing really excellent work building an independent channel making long-form videos that explore big questions and the methods scientists use to answer them. It’s so good. You need to check it out if you haven’t already. I was happy that Adam was down to talk about his work for the podcast. We’ll get into his story as a science journalist, the makings of Howtown, the value of having a creative partner, and the pros and cons of working for yourself versus a more established institution. So here we go. Season three of Hot SciComm Summer is off and running. So let’s jump right into my chat with Adam Cole. So the first thing I want to tell you is that the map projection music video is way better than it has any right to be.
Adam Cole: 1:52
Well, thank you. It also performed way worse than I expected. Really? What? Well, I was hoping that it would. What metric? Well, it’s like one of our worst performing videos. So, you know, it was a little bit of a disappointment. But, you know, that’s the way things go on the Internet.
Andy Luttrell: 2:10
Well, a few of those are me because I kept going like, how did they pull this off? It’s not fair that they can be doing what they’re doing and then also pull this out of nowhere. But I think my hunch is that it speaks to your whole deal of how you approach this kind of stuff. And I haven’t had a lot of success sussing out your story because there’s a professional wrestler who shares your name that really dominates the Google searches.
Adam Cole: 2:38
My wife was mentioned this the existence of this wrestler to someone just yesterday and so we googled my name which I hadn’t done in years and it’s so funny because yes there’s this professional wrestler named Adam Cole his real name is Austin Jenkins so he took Adam Cole as his wrestling name which I find hilarious like not intimidating at all maybe because I know me it doesn’t it doesn’t strike fear in my heart but if you scroll through the Google results it’s like his face for you know probably 20 images and then there’s one image of me at NPR when I’m like 23 just like bright-eyed like I have this big curly head and it’s and I’m just so earnestly beaming at the camera it’s really funny
Andy Luttrell: 3:27
so so having not been able to suss out your story myself could you give us a little clue as to like how did what what got you here
Adam Cole: 3:34
well I’m from Oregon and It’s an important part of my identity. I grew up in backpacking and spending a lot of time outdoors, so I’ve always loved the natural world. I studied biology in college, and then I graduated right around the recession, so I did a master’s to sort of avoid entering the workforce or the lack of workforce. And I did that in biology as well, so I was really trained to be a research scientist. But I… I really also enjoyed writing. And so right after my master’s, I got a job or an internship at a small newspaper in Northern California, had a subscription of about 1000 people. And I was the third employee. So I got to do a lot of writing and journalism and the editor in chief, I mean, local journalism. Some of these local journalists are like incredible, you know, reporters and incredible investigators. And so I really learned a lot from my boss, Caroline Titus. That sort of got me into journalism. I then went to NPR, worked at the science desk, worked briefly at Radiolab, where I think I was sort of inspired by their sensibility a little bit. And then started a YouTube channel at NPR about science stuff. I met Joss through that, sort of just we were professional compadres. And we’ve always talked about doing something together and our mutual obsession with the methods of science. So originally, she sort of pitched me on a YouTube channel just called Methods, which we ended up deciding was a little too dry. So we went with Howtown, which is now our YouTube channel, launched… almost a year ago uh or a little over a year ago may end of may was when we published our first episode so yeah that’s how i ended up uh doing this
Andy Luttrell: 5:31
so i mean that that that’s a nice straight line well it seemed like it’s straight in retrospect but the
Adam Cole: 5:39
experience of it was very topsy-turvy
Andy Luttrell: 5:42
because because there’s part of it that has to be like there’s a there’s an artistic side of it. There’s like a technical side of it too. Because my impression is that you’re not outsourcing a ton of like animation or writing or visualization stuff. It seems like that is very much in your wheelhouse is the visual side of the coin. So how does that, was that just sort of like you had to learn on the fly or that was always kind of part of it?
Adam Cole: 6:08
Well, As a kid, I was always drawn. You know, I was always sketching something or, you know, I was very into art and music. So that was always something that I liked to do. I didn’t think I could ever make that part of my job. Honestly, I never, every step of my career has been into a job that I did not know could possibly exist. So I feel very lucky in that. Yeah. And so, yeah, we, you know, we tend to do most of the animations ourselves. We, a few months ago, we were able to hire on a contract animator to help us with sort of the workload. And he’s really great. Probably more talented than me or Joss in terms of animating. But, but yeah, that’s always been something I’ve really enjoyed. I think probably Joss and I have a similar experience, which is we were at institutions. You know, I was at NPR, she was at Vox, which was not a legacy institution, but it was still headed by people from traditional media. And they didn’t know anything about video or visuals, really. You know, I was working at a radio first place. And so there was a real open sandbox to just sort of explore in, and they were willing to let us do that. I think… it probably would have been better if they’d hired people who knew how to make a video, but we were around and we were like young and, uh, you know, excited. And so, um, so yeah, I learned from a couple of coworkers who were sort of more from the photo and sort of documentary side, a lot of things. And I learned from YouTube. I mean, when I started making illustrations, actually it was the first thing I did for NPR. Um, and then, then I had like a tumblr that had like animated gifs and then i started making animations and things like that and most of that was me running into a problem and then looking up a tutorial on youtube and you know youtube is full of tutorials that teach you how to use any program under the sun and they’re all narrated by you know, a 13-year-old boy who is a genius. And they, you know, start, today we’re going to talk about maths, you know, and they’re very professional in their presentations. So, yeah, I’ve learned a ton from the, well, now they’re, you know, 30, but the teenagers of the time of YouTube taught me most of what I know.
Andy Luttrell: 8:33
So it really was sort of like you had a preparedness, but you weren’t already, like there wasn’t some separate track of you that was like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll do this visual arts thing or animation thing. No,
Adam Cole: 8:48
I always thought of it as just like a hobby that I really enjoyed figuring. And I just like learning about new stuff. And that applies to like tools as well as the science stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Luttrell: 9:02
So when it came time to jump into the open waters of an independent channel, what was that like? That feels scary to me. And I wonder if you could just sort of talk through like what would have been, what were sort of the pros and cons to you at the time of leaving a place that is sort of an established institution and Now having to do a lot of the junk part on your own.
Adam Cole: 9:31
Yeah. Well, I did it kind of in stages. So I left NPR to work for Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. So that was my first step out of the fold. And then I freelanced for a while. So I had a little bit of experience being on my own. I also just moved to Bogota, Colombia. Well, now it’s been two years. But that really helped me be okay with failure because I sort of fail in my everyday interactions all the time. I’m not fluent in Spanish. And so going out of the apartment means that I am about to fail in myriad ways, etiquette, grammar, directions, etc. And I think that sort of helped me break me from… sort of perfectionism that I had always had. And I think that was what was holding me back from going it alone is there’s a certain amount of protection when you’re at a legacy institution. You can’t fail that bad because you’re part of this bigger thing that has so much momentum and there’s people checking on you and making sure that everything is right before it goes out. And you also just have the security, the job security and all those things. But I don’t really worry about that as much anymore. I don’t know. I think it really just felt like things are so uncertain in the world. We don’t know if we’re going to have democracy in 10 years. It just feels like you got to try things. You got to do things. Screw it. I’ll make a YouTube channel. Yeah, exactly.
Andy Luttrell: 11:07
So what are the, are there, in terms of the like financing, like all that is the stuff that I think of as the junk part. Yeah, for sure. You guys are doing that on your own, is my sense,
Adam Cole: 11:20
right? Yeah, well, so we decided to give ourselves titles. Joss is the social media manager and I am the business manager. So we sort of try to take care of those sides of the operation. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we’ve had, we found maybe like five videos in a company called Space Station that helps us find sponsorships. So we do have some outside help with that part of the operation. And that’s about a third of our income comes from that. There’s about a third from the inherent AdSense ads that are on YouTube videos, the ones that pop up that you skip over. And then we have a Patreon that is another sort of third of the income. Although Lately, we’ve been getting more views, so the other two have sort of been outstripping Patreon. But we hope that Patreon will always be a major leg of the stool.
Andy Luttrell: 12:15
And so, like, let’s get into, like, how you actually do the… I mean, I jumped into the boring technical side. But I think what people want to hear is, like, how are these videos coming to be? And it seems like… they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re complex, right? They, they, they integrate a lot of aspects of a question while still having kind of a clear focus. Um, and we can think about maybe a specific video, maybe if there’s one that, that you want to sort of break down that kind of, here’s where the idea came from. And then here are the twists and turns that it took going forward. Uh, if any come to mind for you, or I can throw one at you.
Adam Cole: 12:56
Sure, you can throw one at me. I mean, I would know more about the ones that I was in charge of, of course, which is half of them, yeah.
Andy Luttrell: 13:03
Right. I think what I like is it’s pretty clear who took the lead, but it’s very, but like it’s always collaborative, right? It’s sort of, it’s very much like a team effort, even though one person is sort of the host for the hour. Um, so, so the one that, that I revisited just the other day was the smoking or was the, um, excuse me, was the drinking one, the alcohol one. And I really, in retrospect, I was like, oh, I loved this one because it was this Trojan horse of getting at a lot of sticky methods issues like confounding variables and meta-analysis and randomization and effect sizes. All of these things that I have trouble getting students to care about, but that Packaged in an intriguing question about is alcohol consumption dangerous or not, it sort of was sort of this opportunity to just talk about those things. So there’s the one I give you. Where does that one come from and how do you navigate it?
Adam Cole: 14:05
Well, you know, one of the things we’re trying to do is– and we’re not always successful at this– is tackle questions that are sort of out there in the world that you may have seen a headline about and said, wait, how do they know that? Like, where’s that coming from? Especially when there’s conflicting information. So another example might be a little while ago, there was this big paper that came out that said, we found signs of life on another planet in a different solar system. And then there were a bunch of headlines that were like, no, that’s not that’s not quite right. That was a lie, you know? And so that might be something we tackle because it’s sort of out there. We’ve made a lot of headlines, but no one was doing a great job of explaining the methods and why there’s this uncertainty or ambiguity. Um, and one, you know, in that same category is all these headlines about alcohol every year. There’s a new meta study that comes out and, uh, Lately, the meta studies have been trending very negative on alcohol. But the ones that are more positive about alcohol always make more headlines because people want to hear that having a glass of wine at night is good for them. Of course, we want that to be good. We want our vices to be virtues. So I knew that that was a potent area of curiosity for people. A lot of people drink. A lot of people drink. want to know what effect it’s having on them how bad is it really their doctors sometimes you know more and more doctors are telling people to quit drinking so a lot of people have experience with this we’ve seen this we got questions from our friends and audience members about this so all of that was sort of accumulating it’s like this is a good topic for us and uh so i had it i had actually started it pretty early when we launched the channel um and It just took a while for me to get all of the interviews in place, and then it coincided with a window that we had in January. I thought, oh, dry January. That’s the perfect time to publish this. So yeah, I read a bunch of papers. I read a bunch of the latest papers that had made these headlines. There was a big WHO report that came out that had like 500 authors from around the world that was trying to estimate the impacts of alcohol. And yeah, I just looked into those and tried to pull out a few indicative studies that were sort of All representing different parts of our evolution of understanding of alcohol. So I picked one from the 80s that was a cohort study from the San Francisco Bay Area. I picked one that was from the early 2000s that was sort of questioning the one glass of wine a day is great for you. And then a very modern one. That was using this new technique called Mendelian randomization, which is sort of a genetic way to get at randomized control trials. So those all had interesting techniques. And of course, like you said, it’s very dry. Like on the page, it’s very dry. So I was trying to figure out a way to make that more interesting. And I think coming at it from these questions of like, what’s really true? Why are you seeing this conflicting information? That gives a little bit of the motivation at the beginning. I tried to make… I had plans to make a bunch of different little cork characters. So they’d be all different shapes and sizes wearing different little bottle cap hats and tab hats. And there’d be, you know, the sort of champagne cork shape and the wine cork shape and have those be the population that were in these studies. And they would sort of all be animated. It ended up as with every project, I had to cut that short with just one cork character that I just duplicated a million times. So that was sort of the visual anchor was these corks. populations of little cork people who were drinking at different levels and dying off and things like that. So that was sort of how I was trying to make it a little more fun visually.
Andy Luttrell: 18:05
So I’m glad you mentioned that because I wanted to ask you about those choices because that I think is where it really brought to life the statisticals. insights where these little guys are moving from one group to another and you sort of see like oh in disguise right who we thought were non-drinkers are actually people who we should expect to have maybe more severe health problems despite their quote non-drinking status and also well that one and the effect size one was interesting to this population of dots in a grid and just showing that like a increase in drinking of X to Y is means realistically four more people having a health issue or whatever the number is, which when you zoom out in the context of the entire population, you sort of can see what that actually means. And it reminded me when I talked to Joss about what she did at Vox, it was very like visuals first, right? Like every question when it comes to like, what should we cover? How should we cover it? It all comes back to like, what’s going to appear on the screen? And if we can’t get something to appear on the screen that makes any sense, it’s not a Vox explainer video. And so I’m curious, do you kind of approach these with the same It sort of seems that way from the visualization, or is it maybe not in the forefront?
Adam Cole: 19:26
It certainly makes your job easier if there’s existing visuals or something very grabby that you can look at. I often have the hubris to say, I’ll make anything visual. It often really comes back to bite me. But I do think that I think very visually, and I… I think that is one of my skills is like imagining something that can be on screen. It takes way more work to make something on screen than to find something and put it on screen, right? So I think a little bit less– I think Joss has the right idea, which is find something that you know is going to be amazing to look at. That will just draw the eye, right? Right now she’s working on an episode about pterosaurs, you know, these flying dinosaurs or, you know, sort of, they’re incredible looking. I mean, you just want to like stare at them and be like, how is this body put together? Like what? It’s got a giant head, like a giraffe size neck. It can fly somehow with all this going on. So those kinds of things are better. Like they’re just fun to look at. But there’s also a piece of it where if you can bring something to the visual realm that no one’s ever seen, no one’s ever been able to conceive of because it’s not visual, but you can make it visual, then that has incredible power as well. Like I’m going to show you something that you’ve never seen before is a pretty good, you know, ad for your video. The problem is that takes way more work because you have to create it out of nothing.
Andy Luttrell: 21:07
It’s a struggle too with social science in particular, I find. For sure. a lot of what we do is very abstract and it doesn’t lend itself to these sort of like punchy visuals and there are graphs, then that’s fine. But it’s not quite the same as a pterosaur’s head, right? And I think, so I share the same sensibility of like, I approach these things very visually and in teaching, I have these elaborate PowerPoint animations where I’m like, if only I could get you to see this the way I see it, you’ll get it. But it doesn’t, it’s sometimes hard to translate it. You mentioned that sometimes you do this at your peril. Does anything come to mind as like, I really desperately was trying to make this visual and I just couldn’t crack the nut?
Adam Cole: 21:55
Hmm. Well, I don’t know. I think I would abandon it before that stage if I really felt that it wouldn’t work. You know, we do a lot of sort of, we sort of pitch each other these ideas. And… Joss is very good at challenging me on things that aren’t gonna work, right? And I hope that I also provide that for her. And so sometimes there’s an idea and it’s like, well, what are we even gonna look at for 20 minutes? And it’s like, you’re right. Let’s not do that. But I think that over my career, I’ve sort of gotten a pretty good sense of what is not gonna be visual enough. So I can’t remember any recent misses like that. So you mentioned graphs, which I thought was interesting because that’s something that I really always steered away from until I really started working with the folks at Vox. Because I had an early experience where I made a video about population rise. It was for, if you can believe it, when we just hit 7 billion people on Earth. It was one of the first videos I ever did for NPR. And I had this elaborate… setup that I made. It was sort of like physical effects where I represented people being born by dripping into a glass that was labeled with the country or region. So it was like North America, South America, etc. And then dripping out of the glass was people dying. And it just basically showed how, you know, the population is rising because fewer people are dying. And so we’re having this explosive effect. So I had this This thing, it did very well, the video. But when I looked at the analytics on YouTube, about three quarters of the way through, I threw up a graph. And it was just incredible. Like the as the very frame that the graph showed up on screen, people started clicking away. And it was this precipitous drop where they’ve been sort of sticking with it. So I probably over indexed that lesson in my career. And I was like, I’m never going to show a graph again. I’m always going to try to visualize things without graphs. But I think what Vox has done very well, or what their producers on their YouTube channel did, was they would spend, instead of just throwing a graph on screen and saying, this shows this, they draw it. They say, this is the X axis. It shows this. This is the Y axis. These are the different pieces. And so you really learn what the graph is showing you through the video, which is something that I wasn’t really doing very well. So I think I’ve come around on graphs, basically, that if you give people the tools to understand them, they don’t click away. You’re opening that door for them where, as before, maybe they found graphs to be kind of an intimidating thing. People don’t think like that, or maybe they don’t encounter them in their day-to-day lives. But if you really break them down for people, they like it.
Andy Luttrell: 24:50
It is surprising those moments when you realize the things that You’ve spent years learning how to read. You can’t just show it to someone. Right, right, right. I can very easily look at a simple graph and be like, well, obviously, I know the whole story now. But if I show the same graph to someone else, they go, what could this be?
Adam Cole: 25:09
Right, exactly. I mean, that’s just the biggest challenge of being a science journalist is… You’re doing so much research and you’re becoming more and more knowledgeable all the time. But you have to remember what it was like when you started that process. And that’s for every story. We’re not beat reporters, so we’re not getting deep into one area that we stick with for years. Every time we start a story, we’re entering a new field. And so you have to remember that feeling when a month later you’ve done all the research and now you’re like a mini expert on the subject. Like, oh, what was it like when all of this was new to me and it was very confusing?
Andy Luttrell: 25:46
The mantra that I always have is, remember the person you were before you knew this. Right,
Adam Cole: 25:51
right, exactly.
Andy Luttrell: 25:52
And if you can do that, then you have a better chance at conveying it back to someone in those shoes.
Adam Cole: 25:57
Yeah, and that’s sort of the central spine of a lot of our episodes is that we have a second person who doesn’t know anything. So it’s fun to play, you know, like, I’m very good at that. I’m very good at being the dumb guy who Joss is explaining things to, you know, that I am coming with fresh questions. I don’t know what she’s been working on. We record a conversation where she basically tells me the story, and I just react naturally. I ask the questions that first come to mind, and I think that helps us get into that mindset of, like, what’s the audience going to be asking as well.
Andy Luttrell: 26:33
I think I remember I did find a talk that you gave, I think the National Academies or something, and you were talking about the Explained series, and… Maybe I’m just… Someone else said something that I thought was profound and now I’m telling it to you, but I think it was you. I’d love to take
Adam Cole: 26:49
credit for it.
Andy Luttrell: 26:52
Which is rather than try and like suss out a point and then present like a perfectly manicured story that gets you to that point, instead we’re sort of just on this journey together to… to answer a question and like, let’s remember the question we started with and stay true to it. Because that sounds like a Howtown perspective of like, we’re gonna start with a question and then not abandon that question once we sort of find sort of a clean way of tying it up, right? So how well does that resonate with how you still approach this, if that was how you did it before? I
Adam Cole: 27:30
don’t know if I can take credit for that idea, but it does resonate with me. So if it was me, yeah. I think one of the things that is in tension with this whole world is you want to tell a good story. And most good stories have a good ending that feels like, oh, it wraps up nicely. There’s a nice little lesson. You think about a sitcom where it’s like there’s conflict and then it’s resolved. And then like the characters have figured something new out. And isn’t that nice? The end. And then we all applaud. And so there is a lot of pressure to make your stories feel like that. But it’s not always possible. And in fact, in science, it’s often… the opposite of what’s happening. The more we learn, the more complicated it gets, the more new questions there are. I mean, that’s kind of a cliche, like the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. But it’s very true, and it’s hard to sometimes fit that into a traditional narrative structure. And so when we started Howtown, we really wanted to intentionally avoid that trap. We wanted to say, we’re going to convey the nuance and ambiguity of all this. So that’s what we attempt to do.
Andy Luttrell: 28:48
It’s making me think that when those stories wrap up too perfectly, I become obsessed with the question of, like, how did they know that it was getting to that place?
Adam Cole: 29:01
Right, right.
Andy Luttrell: 29:03
And I go like, wait a minute, hold on. Now this makes me rethink everything because I go, oh, they must have known where they were going and then they sprinkled all this stuff ahead of time. And I… I’m like, well, now I’m not interested. Even though it’s like a nice, clean story, suddenly that’s the reason where I pull out and I go, I don’t buy it anymore. Whereas I do like the, like, I’m just, hey, I’m with you, man. Like, I’ll go where you’re going and we’ll see where we end up. And that I think is a unique, I think it does lend itself to science journalism as a unique sort of area. Yeah, yeah. So I want to, talk about the unique qualities of doing a project like this with a partner. You mentioned Radiolab as something that you were inspired by early on, and I get Radiolab vibes from Howtown in that there are these kind of cutaways to the kind of conversations between you and Joss as sort of a device that helps both make it just kind of easy to relate to and also grounds it back in this reporter talking to the host sort of a situation where you get to raise the questions that people might be thinking in an authentic way. Because like I said, you already know the answer now and you can hear it on these things where people pretend not to know. But I wondered, what about this? Or you can get like authentic curiosity in sort of these live conversations. And every time I see a project that has sort of a co-host vibe, I get jealous because I go, that feels nice to have this sort of extra, this person to bounce off of, this person to cut to, this person to ground it, and also someone, like you said, to run it by and be like, does this work for you? Do you know what I mean when I show you this graph as opposed to this graph? So I wonder if you could just talk about how you found that relationship going in terms of having another person who is sort of basically an equal partner in this process.
Adam Cole: 30:58
Yeah. Well, I mean… The first thing I think of is just sort of the emotional support because it’s hard to be an independent journalist and it’s hard to like weather the ups and downs of launching something new. And I don’t think I would be able to emotionally handle it if I didn’t have someone when I’m sort of like really down, like, oh man, no one’s watching this. Or like when we first published, right, especially for Joss, who was getting, you know, baseline a million views on every video that she published for Vox. And I had been publishing for Vox and also getting those millions for like the last year of my career where I’d been freelancing for them. You know, so we put up the first video and even though you know you’re starting from scratch, it’s like, oh, that video got a thousand views in the first day. Like that is, you know, the ratio of a thousand to a million is… An enormous emotional gulf to sort of contend with. And obviously that’s like such a privilege to be able to say that, like, oh, we used to get a lot of views, but it’s just, you know, it’s a little bit of a shock to the system. where you’re like, oh, this is what I thought of as success. And now I have to redefine that. So the beginning was, even though I went in being like, you’re starting from scratch. No one’s going to watch this. It’s fine. It’s going to take two years to build an audience, et cetera. It was still a little bit hard. So I had to go to Joss and be like, is this okay? Like, are we, did I fail big time? Like, I think one of my biggest fears is like failing her, you know, like that is like, a big thing that I don’t want to do. And so to have someone to be like, no, it’s fine. Like the person who didn’t produce the video has a much better perspective on it. Right. They didn’t pour as many hours into it. So basically every episode we say to each other, I don’t like this. I don’t think it’s working. And the other person says, yeah, it’s great. So it’s just like having that angel on your shoulder is so nice. Um, so that’s before you even get to like the content and the process. Uh, And then it’s very helpful for that as well, just to have sort of a built-in editor and, yeah, someone to bounce ideas off of. We do try to, you know, we come in fresh. We are reacting in a real way. But people still think that it’s acting. People still think that it’s staged. We get a lot of comments like that. Like, why are you so unnatural? This isn’t how people really talk. A lot of people think we’re AI. And so we’re always striving to be more authentic. And it’s hard too, because, you know, we talk for probably about two hours when we do these conversations and we have to cut them down to 20 minutes. So that editing process also makes it less natural. We’re leaving out all of the like stumbles and things like that. So we’re trying to learn how to not cut out the parts that make us seem the most human. So it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle. I get comments every day and it kills me. Like, stop scripting the, you know, this is so obviously scripted. And that really hurts because we’re really trying to have real conversations.
Andy Luttrell: 34:20
Yeah, I don’t know what to do. Because I will say for me, They do feel authentic. They feel like it’s sort of this nice contrast against the scripted and the very produced side of the video to this kind of lo-fi, two people checking in on what they care about. And so what are the sorts of things that you’re trying to do to boost your reality?
Adam Cole: 34:46
Well, we do try to leave in more of the little awkward edges. I think that I have a tendency to want things to be very clean and straightforward. And I’ve, you know, my early career, I was really training myself to try and be as concise and direct as possible. And when I talk, I’m not as concise and direct as I would want to be. And so I have this instinct to cut myself out and replace those moments with scripted narration. Yeah. So just working against that instinct I think is part of it.
Andy Luttrell: 35:20
So when in the process are you having these, like is it once you’ve done all of your reporting, you sit down and just sort of like lay it all out or are you doing these a few times along the way as you learn more and sort of define the structure of the video?
Adam Cole: 35:35
We generally just do it once. I think there’s been one or two times that we’ve done it twice when like a new interview came up and we needed to like incorporate that into the structure. But yeah, generally just once. And it is like after we finish the reporting, before we start editing, we sit down and we talk about it for a couple hours.
Andy Luttrell: 35:57
Beyond that, are there other checkpoints in terms of like you’re running a cut? by the other person and getting sort of like a feedback, like beyond the sort of thing that we see in the final product, what might be happening behind the scenes that’s making this a two-person operation rather than a one-person operation?
Adam Cole: 36:17
Well, the story selection is a collaborative thing. So we talk a lot about like, what should the next couple episodes be? And we discuss… not only what’s going to be in them, but how are they going to be packaged? Because that’s so important, and it’s so annoying that it’s so important. On YouTube, what’s the headline going to be and what’s the thumbnail going to be? And those things have such outsized importance in terms of is the video going to be a success or not, which is really unfortunate because, you know, we want to tell these nuanced, medium-long-form stories, and we put so much effort into that part. For the first half of Howtown, I would say, we would get to… It’d be like 11 p.m. the night before we publish, and we’re like, oh, no, what’s the title going to be? And then we’d make a thumbnail. We’d make a thumbnail in the wee hours to put up, which is obviously… We know that that’s not the way to do it, but that’s just not the part that we’re as excited about. Now we try to talk about that very early. So we have these… I mean, we call them pitch meetings, but it’s always just the two of us. So it’s just like we call each other up. Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Now part of that process is here’s what the titles could be. Here’s what the thumbnails could be. So that’s hopefully setting us up for success from the beginning in terms of the clicky side of being a YouTuber. You got to get people to click. Then we have this conversation. That’s probably the next time we check in. Sometimes… we’ll say things like, you know, I’ve talked to two people, but they kind of cover the same stuff. Do I need to have a third interview? Or, you know, just those like the things you run into as you’re making a story. Like, oh, should I put the effort? A lot of it is like, we don’t have very much money, right? So it’s like, should I buy this asset? Is it worth it? Should I buy a train ticket so I can go down to this place for the day to shoot something? So we check in about that stuff. And then, and then we have this conversation. And then it’s time to edit. And that’s like the big crunch. And so during that process, we probably send out two or three drafts. And oftentimes, we’ll send out those drafts with like specific question, like, is the intro working? Right? Does this section need to be over here instead of over here? And then the other person will watch it down and leave notes. And then sometimes we discuss those as well. But it’s pretty much, you know, a Joss episode is she’s doing 98% of the labor and I’m kind of just around for that and vice versa.
Andy Luttrell: 39:03
You mentioned sort of early shifts over time and I’m curious about the evolution. Even over a year, I went back and I watched the first episode and… There are different, it does seem like once you have that contrast, you can sort of see like, oh, this has sort of evolved over time. So I’m curious to get your take on like, what do you see as having been sort of major changes? And in particular, like, what does it tell you about what you’ve learned about how to do this in a way that someone else could sort of learn from that year you’ve spent working
Adam Cole: 39:31
on this?
Andy Luttrell: 39:34
Yeah,
Adam Cole: 39:35
that’s so hard. You know, we’ve learned specific things about how Howtown looks and sounds, you know, how we use visuals and how we talk to each other. Like I said, we’re trying to put more and more of these conversations in and we’re getting better, I think, a little bit at being a good conversation partner. Like now we know, I think both of us are a little bit reserved in a way and we’re very content to just like listen to the other person explain. you know, I think that Josh is a good storyteller. So in those, in the first conversations, I’d probably just sit there and be like, uh-huh, you know, like, oh, that’s interesting. Now I’m like, I go in, I don’t really drink coffee ever, but I sometimes drink a coffee before the conversation. So I’m a little bit more jittery, you know, like I’m a little bit higher energy and I’m trying to jump in and challenge things or ask questions. So that has changed a little bit. I think we get, we’re getting better at that. Um, then I would say, so that’s very specific to our like product, right? It’s a conversation. A lot of the stuff that we are refining is based on years of, of work. You know, we both started in 2014. We have all this experience. And so it’s just learning what our voice is every time a little bit more. Um, So I don’t know how applicable that is to other people. I would say if you’re going in and specifically, sort of in any realm of storytelling for the masses, you just got to do a lot of reps. You know, you’ve just got to start making stuff. I think when I started, because I was coming from science into journalism, I was really waiting for people to give me permission to try things. And I was sort of like, oh, is this okay? Like… Do I really have the qualifications to do this? Shouldn’t someone else be doing this? Someone should be telling me what the assignment is, kind of. And as soon as I realized that no one knew what they were doing, especially in video, in legacy media, that allowed me to just experiment more. And that’s what gave me the skills and voice that I have now. I’m not super happy with those skills and voice. I’m always trying to get better at them. And there’s so much that I see other people doing or aspirations I have for myself, things I want to change. And the only way to do that is just to make more stuff and try to be better in the next one. So what I tell people a lot is just do it to borrow Nike’s catchphrase. Um, like don’t, don’t wait. Like if you want to make videos for YouTube, don’t wait until you have a position that allows you to do that, or you have a job that allows you to do that. Just do it sort of on the side when you can. And, uh, you’ll start to get the reps in that you need to, to achieve that voice.
Andy Luttrell: 42:49
Well, one of the, um, to look at the Howtown evolution. One thing that I noticed in looking at the first one, I got the sense that one, the structure felt a little more rigid. Like it felt like, here’s how we’re going to do this. We’re going to talk to a creator who has a question and then we will have our four sections. Right. And they’re always going to be the question, the method, the this. And I sort of see that having relaxed a bit, like as you get a little more comfortable, like, okay, we kind of, We’re not telling ourselves how this works. We just kind of feel it. And it’s going to come out in the way that feels like the right way to tell the story. Does that seem right? Am I getting on anything that feels true to the evolution?
Adam Cole: 43:31
Yeah. I mean, I think chapterization is very important when you’re dealing with a complex subject. You need a lot of signposts that tell people, here’s where we are. You know, that was a lot. Now we’re going to shift to this aspect of the question. You need to have moments that are sort of a brief pause to say, There is a plan. Here’s where we’re going so the audience doesn’t get lost. And I think there’s also something with YouTube where a lot of the most successful channels, they have a formula, sort of. Not in a pejorative way, but just they have figured out what works and people expect that from them. And that makes them more watchable because there’s a vocabulary that the audience is familiar with that they can return to. It’s like, oh, this is this section where they talk about this and I know it’s coming up. I can follow it. I enjoy it. I expect it. We like what we already know. So we were aiming to find something like that for Howtown. And we thought, well, what are the major questions of any scientific method? The first one is probably, why is it so hard? Like, why was this not just an easy question to answer? Then there’s the actual methods that were used. That’s another big piece of it. And then there are the complications of, you know, oh, it’s not quite as simple as we thought. These methods revealed nuances. So we thought we can have those chapters in every episode. The problem is that that doesn’t happen linearly for a lot of narratives, right? So… You might say, why is it hard? There’s the why is it hard at the beginning. Then you do an experiment. There’s a new why is it hard. There’s a new challenge. There’s a new thing that’s making it difficult to understand. And so I found in a lot of the stories I was doing, I couldn’t fit all of that into the first section because it was much easier to tell chronologically. And so we still try to have chapters in our episodes that delineate different sections and different ideas that we’re exploring. But we don’t follow that rigid structure that we had set out at the beginning to try and make our brand more recognizable. The questions at the beginning from our famous friends was sort of, you know, I think we came in thinking that on YouTube, it’s very helpful to have a boost from another audience. So If you like these people, there’s sort of the inherent YouTube recommendation that says, if you like these videos, watch these videos. It’s more powerful if the person you like is telling you to go over and watch those videos. And then they’re in that video. So it’s like, oh, I recognize that person. I like Simone Yetch. It’s great to see her in this video. So we went in sort of with that idea. And it’s hard to say if that helped us A lot, I mean, we probably got more views than we would have at the very beginning. But it also seems like on YouTube today, every video kind of has to stand on its own. Every video has to make the pitch to the audience, you need to watch this. And so that sort of recommendation, we haven’t found to be as powerful as we had hoped. It’s also a little bit of a stilted way to start an episode. having sort of a very formal, like, my question for Howtout is, and then, you know, that’s laid out, is less dynamic and keeps people around less in that first 30 seconds, which is another annoying YouTube metric that’s very important, than if you throw something up on screen and say, look at this crazy thing. You know, isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this a crazy mystery or just a weird thing to look at? Something that provokes curiosity. Asking a question… can provoke curiosity, but we found it to be less effective than some of those other things. So we probably won’t do that too much going forward. We also found that we really like having the two of us in the episode. Some of these episodes we did with other creators, they sort of swap in. When someone asks a question, that person swaps in for Joss. So Joss is in the episode and vice versa. And I think that’s just not really what our channel is. We’re Adam and Joss on Howtown. And so we want to keep that going throughout the different episodes.
Andy Luttrell: 48:06
By way of wrapping up, and I appreciate your time. So you mentioned sort of what will we do in the future. So I’m curious about the future of Howtown and sort of immediate plans. One of the things we didn’t really talk about is I see you guys doing like community building kind of efforts. So I’m curious if that’s kind of become an important part of the process or if maybe that’s not going to be a central feature going forward. And even just more generally, like, is it going to is the team going to expand? Is it going to move beyond YouTube or is it we’re going to do what we’re doing right now for as long as it works?
Adam Cole: 48:41
Yeah, well, those are a lot of different questions. Yeah, and you must answer them all in sequence. We always set out to have a vibrant audience community. We wanted to be making stuff for specific people. We wanted Patreon to be the subscription model that helps support our work, where we’re working for an audience of people who like what we do and want to see more of it. And we found it very valuable and rewarding. The people who are in our Patreon sort of inner circle are lovely people. I not just say that because they’re paid us $4 a month. But it’s just been really nice to meet them and talk to them. We have a lot of we have these monthly events where we read a science paper and talk about it. And a lot of these people are just really smart and are academics in different fields. So we could kind of talk to them when we run into problems or some things we don’t understand. So that’s great. And then there’s just a lot of other curious people. Maybe they’re not a astrophysicist as some of our Patriot supporters are, but they’re just enjoying chatting together. So we really want to facilitate that conversation. And I hope that that’s always a big part of what Howtown is, is sort of a place for these people to come together and meet. And it’s also just nice to have them in mind when we’re making the episodes. So it’s all very lovely, and I don’t think we’ll ever want to abandon that. So that was part one. So then, yeah, what is Howtown going to be? Well, right now we’re two people with one contractor. Uh, we hope to make that contractor a part of like a permanent part of the team. His name’s Charlie Yunkin. He’s very, uh, very, very talented. And we want to make him, you know, a permanent part of Howtown. That is sort of contingent on how well the Patriot side, Patriot side does. Um, and just generally how well the channel does if we can sort of financially bring another person on. Our hope is to have sort of a four-person team that we work with. So an animator, an editor, and the two of us that we can sort of spread around some of this work. And then we’re barely hanging on as it is. I mean, we could barely handle the work that we’ve given ourselves. So we’re sort of right now trying to decide, do we want to make… the episodes lighter lift whether that’s in production value or the amount of research that we do maybe taking on smaller topics like you know the episode we talked about was alcohol question mark like it was pretty broad it could have been much more specific so is there ways that we can take on less work or are we okay you know just publishing on a slower cadence and can we make that work so We don’t know. We’re going to try to figure that out. We need to get our hands around the YouTube side before we do anything else. We’ve talked about maybe years down the line, we might have an audio podcast. We might have a sub stack. We might have a book. We might try to make a documentary that’s more of a feature length. So those are all things that would be fun and exciting to try and learn and obviously fail at and then that whole process again. But right now, we’re barely hanging on with the two, three of us trying to produce 20 minutes a month.
Andy Luttrell: 52:30
Well, whatever you’re doing is working for clearly a lot of people. Clearly, the channel has grown. And I think it is kind of overwhelming to me how much… It’s clear how much work is going into each of these, knowing… What a shoestring you’re probably operating under. And so, yeah, you are rising to the occasion. And so, fingers crossed. Yeah, fingers crossed. Things can get even bigger and into new areas. But for now, I’ll just say thank you for taking the time to talk about all this. And good luck with the channel going forward.
Adam Cole: 53:06
Thanks so much. It was really fun to talk to you.
Andy Luttrell: 53:15
Thank you to Adam Cole for taking the time to talk about his work. I think SciComm Summer is off to a really great start. Check out the episode webpage for a link to Howtown’s YouTube channel and its Patreon page. This series on science communication is a special presentation of my podcast, Opinion Science, a show about the science of our opinions, where they come from, and how we talk about them. You can subscribe any old place where they have podcasts, and be sure to check out opinionsciencepodcast.com for links to things that come up in this episode and ways to support the show and whoever you are I hope you’re enjoying the show and I’m hoping this summer series will reach folks with a keen interest in science communication so please tell people about it post online email a friend make a poster and stick it to a wall these are wild times and I think it’s more important than ever to help the world understand good science and champion its value so let’s all make an effort to get better at doing that okie doke thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next week for more Sci I always
Joel Bervell: 54:17
have this actually saying that I say all the time that even before I started social media, if not now, when? If not me, who? And I realized no one else was doing this. Thank you so much. on a platform that actually reached a lot more people and bringing a lot more individuals into this conversation. So into the question of why did I do it? It was really because no one else was doing it. And I felt like this was something that I wanted to create for my mom, my sister, my brother, my dad, that no one else was putting out there. Hey, this is Joel Brevelle. I’m better known as the Medical Myth Buster on social media. I create videos about health inequities and the hidden history of medicine.
