How A Former Vox Producer Built One Of YouTube's Biggest Science Shows

InnovationCreator EconomyHow A Former Vox Producer Built One Of YouTube's Biggest Science ShowsByIan Shepherd,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Ian Shepherd is an investor and host of the Business of CreatorsFollow AuthorJun 15, 2026, 02:54pm EDTCleo AbramCleo AbramIn 2020, Cleo Abram had a perfectly good career. She was producing Explained on Netflix and Glad You Asked on YouTube Originals, both for Vox Media. Then she quit to make YouTube videos on her own.Huge If True now has 8.2 million subscribers and 2.8 billion total views. According to Nielsen, YouTube holds 12.5% of all U.S. TV viewing time as of January 2026. That's more than Netflix. It's held that position for 11 straight months."This is a really exciting moment for creative people," Abram told me in a recent interview. “Especially on YouTube.” The media industry should probably be paying attention.The show nobody was makingBefore Abram built Huge If True, she was looking for it. She wanted something about scientists working on hard problems, told with curiosity and genuine optimism. "I just couldn't find this show anywhere out there," she said. “I wanted to make it.”So she left Vox and made it.Each episode takes a possible future — quantum computing, clean energy, the deep ocean — and works out how we actually get there. "We're exploring possible futures," she told me, "and trying to figure out how we can use science and technology to get to those futures in a way that makes people's lives better."MORE FOR YOUWhat makes this more than a YouTube channel is the model underneath it. Abram is making a live argument that creative ownership and massive reach don't have to trade off against each other. "You can have a creative idea, really want to share it with the world, go make that happen, and have hundreds of millions of people a month watch something that just a couple of years a...