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

Cleo Abram

Cleo Abram

In 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 making

Before 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."

What 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 ago was just an idea in your head," she said. "And you have creative ownership and control over that."

That’s a different deal than traditional media has ever offered its producers.

A journalist in the room

Abram's not a scientist. She says so like it's a design choice, which it is.

"I’m a journalist. And that's really important to me," she told me. "I consider myself a proxy for the audience." She travels to CERN, to Formula 1 garages, to the labs building next-generation telescopes and asks the questions a curious non-expert would actually ask. The result is 20-minute episodes that start with no assumed knowledge and finish somewhere genuinely deep.

"My job is to make sure that the complex science is understandable to hundreds of millions of people," she said. "We really don't dumb it down. But my job is to make sure it's understandable."

Most science communication fails at one end or the other: stays shallow to stay accessible, or goes deep and loses everyone but the specialists. Abram’s bet is that a skilled journalist, asking the right questions in the right order, can do both. So far, 2.8 billion views suggests the bet is working.

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The Bill Nye of YouTube

When I asked Abram about comparisons to Bill Nye, she didn't deflect.

"I love Bill Nye. I really looked up to the quality science journalism that I grew up with and I'm totally honored to be mentioned in the same sentence," she said. "What I think was really missing was this sense of joy and wonder and excitement about the future that I always got from Bill Nye."

The gap she’s describing is real. She grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then came a decade of Black Mirror. The cultural mood about the future shifted from exploration to dread and science journalism shifted with it. "Right now a lot of people look around the world and feel overwhelmed by it," she told me. "They feel like they don't know how they can participate in making it better."

Huge If True is her answer to that. "I wanted to make the Star Trek of science journalism," she said. The show is deliberately structured as a menu. Quantum computers. Self-driving cars. The deep ocean. "There are so many things you can do," she told me. "And if I can help people see one option that really excites them, I'll have done my job."

7 people, 2.8 billion views

The team behind Huge If True is 7 people. Total. Spread around the world.

"We’re all experts in our fields," Abram said. There's a creative director leading the visual product, producers with deep scientific domain knowledge, an editor she calls best-in-class and a director of operations with elite production experience. "There's a huge amount of trust in our team," she told me. "They are all just unbelievably exceptional creative people."

Most people don't think to ask about the team. They probably should.

Huge If True runs without network deals or studio development cycles. No institutional gatekeepers. And it probably reaches more people than most science shows with 10 times the headcount. According to data from Spotter, there are now 6,600 creator TV channels on the platform producing long-form content, generating an estimated 26 billion hours of watch time in 2025. More than half of it plays on TV screens.

"The largest streaming platform in the world is also the platform where you own all of your own work," Abram said, "and can build a business that can support creative content that is of a higher quality than traditional TV. I don't know if people really have understood yet how exciting that is."

I think she's right that they haven't.

What this model actually means

I’ve spent the last five years investing in and operating YouTube creator businesses. Across our portfolio at Electrify, we see more than 50% of long-form viewing now happening on TV screens — not phones. The audiences are bigger, the view durations are longer and the CPMs are higher than most media buyers realize. The perception gap between what the data shows and what the market believes is still enormous.

What strikes me about Cleo’s business is the structure. It’s what the best creator businesses actually look like when you strip away the legacy costs of the old model. The economics are fundamentally different and most of the media industry hasn't caught up to what that means.

The creators building serious, long-form content on YouTube aren't hobbyists who got lucky. They're running lean, high-quality media companies. Cleo's show is one of the clearest examples of what that looks like when it's done right.

Modeling curiosity

One part of the Huge If True story that doesn't get talked about much: women leading science communication at real scale are still rare.

Abram doesn't seem burdened by it. "I feel so excited to be a female YouTuber leading a big science show," she told me. "There's nothing better than being able to inspire young people to get involved in science."

Her framing of her own role is worth paying attention to. She's there as someone who genuinely doesn't know the answer yet, working it out in real time. "What I hope I'm modeling is curiosity and optimism and the joy of learning," she said. "A lot of parents watch my show with their kids to encourage those traits."

That's a different kind of ambition than building a big YouTube channel. It's about what the show does to the people who watch it, and who they become afterward.

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The gatekeeper problem

Abram is careful not to be glib about any of this. She spent 5 years inside traditional media and knows what that world looks like from the inside.

"I don't think I would be able to make this show at any major media company right now," she told me. "The only way that this was possible was doing it myself and doing it on YouTube."

Andrew Graham, Head of Business Development at CAA Creators, has watched this from the other side of the table. "There is no better time to be a creator ever in entertainment," he told me in a recent interview. "You own your audience. You own the means to make the show or the IP that you want. There's nobody giving you notes."

Traditional TV viewership keeps declining. Streaming overtook cable in total U.S. watch time. Who gets to greenlight what is no longer a settled question. "The most important transition we're going through right now is from gatekeepers to creative people and audiences talking directly to each other," Abram said.

She's also watching what the broader media industry is starting to do in response. "More and more streaming services are placing bets on creative people who have come up through their own independent shows," she told me.

Graham puts it more bluntly. "I genuinely believe the next Walt Disney company, the next Viacom, CBS — it's coming out of the creator world," he said. "I am excited not about saving the old world, but building the new one. And I think we're there."

Abram built her version of that new world with 7 people and a YouTube channel. Two point eight billion views later, it's getting harder for anyone to argue she was wrong.