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This is humans.
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Humans.
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Humans. Humans.
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Humans, Humans. I'm Hank Green today and for the last 10 years or so, Ze Frank is well known for his True Facts videos, where he embodies the character of a delighted and juvenile nature documentary host explaining strange and wonderful animals. They are some of the best celebrations of life and science that I know of, and I love each one and I run to them when they come out. But Ze also has a bit of a secret. He is not just great at the form of online video, he also kind of invented it. I'm sure he will have problems with my storytelling here. Maybe not all of online video, but there's this thing that we take for granted, which is a way of making things, video in particular, which is very aware of how the Internet actually works. And it allows for things to be like, collaborative and weird and intimate and connecty and parasocial and all of this stuff. And Ze's videos on his series, the show in which he posted a video every weekday of 2006, made video into something that wasn't just watched, but it like folded back in on itself. And it was not built by Ze. It was built by all of the people watching, including sei. And if you go and watch some of those episodes, and you should, you'll see what I mean when I say that it may be among some of the most innovative pieces of culture of all time. I am gushing too much, of course, but I don't really have a way of expressing or even understanding the depth of Ze's impact on me or his work's impact on my work. So I'm going to pick two things. First, to this day, whenever I am blocked and I don't know what to make, I could go and watch Ze's videos, and it could be from 2006 or it could be from 2026. Ze has a way of making things that gets me unblocked. And second, there's this two minute video he once made about how you can get addicted to the true and perfect form of an idea in your head and not want to expose it to the unfortunate reality of reality. But you need to, because ideas are not for your head. Ideas are for turn, turning into real things in the real world. And they have to confront the world and be shaped by the people who we think they are for and by the reality they must exist inside of. So I want to talk to Ze about ideas and where they come from and what happens when you share them and what the Internet used to make possible and what the Internet makes possible now and whether it's all terrible now and what weird animals might teach us about the weirdest animal of all. Ze Frank, welcome to Humans. Where do ideas come from?
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Well, thanks for that intro. You're right that I probably take issue with a little bit of that framing, but we can get into that. This question of where ideas come from. I think it's central to my life and certainly a lot of other creative people. And I think that the importance often comes from some sort of an urgency that we have to not only have ideas, but. But to have ideas that feel like you. In addition to that, it's like there's one thing to have an idea, but then there's another thing to decide to make it, you know, birth it. You know, I don't know how it plays out in your mind, but I have a lot of thoughts and have a lot of ideas, and there's a lot of possibilities, and you do have to kind of, like, feel them and feel what the possibility space is around them. That's something that I think you get better at over a creative life, is having an instinct for the shape of an idea and whether or not it has the qualities that are going to mature into something or kind of allow you to play around in a way that feels right. So in a lot of cases, I'll sit on stuff for years even, because I don't have the shape of the thing. There's a short video I did called Damselfly and Beetle. I got this footage, and it's a damselfly that comes out of a kind of a murky pond and rests on a hickory nut that's floating. And she just went through her final molt, right? And so her wings have to dry before she takes off. So she's just hanging out and this beetle comes up and it joins her and they have this beautiful little interaction. And then the beetle leaves. And then a male damselfly comes up and eats her wings, which is kind of common. And so she now is wingless. She's done. And the final shot is her kind of climbing back down into the stew of the pond. And it was so kind of profound in a way that I just didn't understand. I mean, I knew it was profound when I looked at it because it encapsulated almost everything that I feel like is important, right? There was some humor in it, there was some pathos, and then there was this incredible pain.
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C
I have wings now, Beetle. I'm going to live up there. I have wings, Damselfly. I can show you I can come with you. Oh, Beedle, you know, you can't leave the muck. After that, Beedle moved far away. He found work at a small hotel running the front desk.
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B
And it took me probably almost. Almost three years to come up with a narrative that I thought kind of did it justice.
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A
A thing that I hear there is a little bit like, why is that something that goes from I have this and I've seen it and I've experienced it to I want to make something along with this. I want to create. Like, there's a little bit of a why. And I run into this sometimes when I'm like, ooh. And I tell somebody the idea I have. They're like, oh, I'm so glad that you want to do that. You know, we want to create in the ways that we're comfortable, but also in that is achieving some kind of goal. And there is just an urge, you know, like, I have this urgency sometimes where I have to make something. I've got many other things that are much more pressing. People are waiting on me. They're like, better economic incentives to do something else. But I have to make this thing because I've had the idea the urge is just internal, but it's also an urge to make something that somebody will see and react to.
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B
Right. I mean, I think you said a lot of different things that are interesting there. I'm going to go back to the first one that caught my ear, which was we want to make things that are comfortable. And I don't know if I agree. Agree with that. For me, personally, I actually feel like I want to make things that are uncomfortable.
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A
Do you want to make things that are uncomfortable for you?
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B
For me to make? You know, generally, there's stuff that kind of comes easy to you, and this is, you know, everybody knows this is that, you know, you get frustrated with people for not doing the stuff that they can just do. Right. And you're just sort of like, you know, make another funny thing come on. Like, play the hits. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that making things is about becoming. That's the joy of it, is that you see something develop and birth. You feel yourself getting better through the struggle. You feel like some kind of emergence that happened. Like there's a journey. And comfort, to me, is usually a sign that you're off from the meat of it.
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A
Hmm.
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There's a really practical way that I've been thinking about that lately, and that is, especially as, you know, later in your career or later in life, you have certain lanes that you can occupy very comfortably, right? Let's just call them like your dominant domains, whatever that means. There comes a point where you realize that those domains don't get you everything. They don't get you the full picture, right? So guitar playing for me, I've spent long time playing guitar. I toured with a band. I had a whole previous life as a musician, But I used my dominant domain to do it, right? Visual. So one thing that you can do to learn keys and what is appropriate to play at a particular time is to memorize patterns on the board. So you memorize shapes that you know, all those notes roughly, will work. If somebody says, this is in the key of E, it's blues. I know the shape on the fretboard that corresponds with what will sound. Right? And so that's called pattern playing. It's a way for you to become very proficient without necessarily having trained your ear. You're not using your auditory connection as much. And so about three years ago, I made the promise to myself that I would never look at the fretboard of my guitar again.
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C
Whoa.
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So you're imposing this constraint on yourself?
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I'm imposing the constraint on myself so that my dominant domain doesn't get involved and it wants to. Like, even internally, when I'm playing, listening to something and playing over it, I have to almost scold myself because I very quickly just imagine looking at the thing, I see it in my mind, and I go right back into that dominant domain. So one of the things about learning, which is kind of interesting is. And I think this applies to, like, when you're, you know, deciding to make something is paying attention to the areas that are interesting, that you're sort of like, ah, I don't know a way into it that way. You know, I know a way into it this way. I mean, this is kind of abstract, but I think that that's where a lot of joy comes from.
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A
I'm hearing a lot that resonates with how I imagine ideation, which for me is often a process of, you know, understanding the problem space. You know, that problem space might be like, something that's really annoying me about the world right now. Like that, you know, Congress thinks that there's UFOs or something. And so lots of people around me are like, hank, what do you think about UFOs? Because I'm a science guy, and I'm like, I need to make something about this. I need to make something about why we go off in this direct direction. I need to make something about why this is such a Common hypothesis, but often ends up being an incorrect hypothesis. And so I feel the problem space, and then I look at my toolkit. And the thing about a toolkit is that you weren't born with it. And so every thing in there was created for me. I mean, not everything, but most of the things in my toolkit were created by me needing to solve a problem and not having a tool to solve it and then developing that tool through discomfort in a lot of situations. But there is a time when it feels a little like maybe my toolkit's pretty full. I've got these dominant domains. I can solve a lot of problems with them. You look at every problem through the lens of your own toolkit. Whereas what I'm hearing from you is there is this urge to always make sure that you're staying a little uncomfortable because something else is going to come out of that. Because where you're learning, and this is, I think, very true of most people, you learn most things in the doing, not in the reading about it and developing the skills. You learn more ultimately touring with a band than you do playing scales.
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B
Yes. I guess I'm cautious to kind of put words like, you learn more or things like that. It depends on what kind of an experience you want to have in your creative life. And to some degree, it's a little bit of a luxury to be in the space, maybe that we are, where we get to, to say, I want my experience doing it to be like this or like this. When everybody's like, don't be afraid to fail. Yeah, well, if you don't have a lot of money, yeah, be afraid to fail because you don't have that choice.
- [11:58]
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I think about things where I see people having effortless expertise, like surfing. I've never surfed. And so I look at people surfing and I'm like, wow, that looks very good. It looks like it would be very good to be able to do that. But you don't get good at surfing by being good at surfing, you know?
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B
Right, right, right, right.
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And you have to kind of be okay with the idea of absolutely getting smashed sometimes and slapping your face on the board or whatever other things happen that's unpleasant while you're surfing.
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Yeah.
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Social interactions probably also, I think that would keep me away from surfing, honestly. Just feeling like, I don't know how to do this.
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All these people are looking at me.
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I don't want to make them mad at me. There's rules. I don't know.
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B
I hear you 100% and like that. To me, right now is the most interesting stuff. It's like getting into positions where you really can fail just to bring it into the kind of practical realm. I think that, like, let's take science communication, you know, for example. You know, you mentioned that there's a toolbox of things associated with your past and how you learn. There's also the toolbox of content and culture writ large. Right. I mean, so we imitate quite a bit. The thing that excites me about episodes is kind of the thing that I think terrifies a lot of people when they take on a subject that is new to them and that is stumbling into something that I genuinely don't understand. I mean, I'll give you an example. Like an episode on camels was a wonderful one for me because I, you know, there was this nice piece of footage where there's the garden hose, you know, and there's the waters just dumping into this camel, you know. And you've heard the line so many times, like they can drink up to a blah, blah, blah, gallons a day. You know, like that's amazing. But at that moment I was like, oh, where does the water go? Like, where does this really go? Yeah, where, where does it go? Like first of all, if they just held it internally, their stomach would distend and then it was like, oh crap. Like if they actually ingest all that water into their bloodstream, I mean if we did that, we would die, all our cells would burst. That was like three weeks into the episode. That take a long time to make these things. But all of a sudden I was like, oh crap. But that's like the best part.
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A
Yeah, it's such a delight also, you know, to have the toolkit necessary to be able to say that, to know that, to be able to be like, what's the weird thing here? Yeah, which comes from spending time understanding how things work, which is such a joy to have that be part of my work. It's interesting to me that you ended up in that direction. So there was kind of a period of time on the Ze Frank Channel where you were kind of doing your follow up show. You were kind of doing that video on Trust with the Cirque du Soleil acrobats. You're like just sort of doing things. The human tests. These are all videos where you are in a sense, essay writing, creating art, just trying out ideas. True facts was mixed in during that time. And it's interesting to me that the thing that came out of it, you sort of narrowed it on the science communication as the Thing that you would do. Do you have any idea why?
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B
It's a little bit like a roulette wheel. If I'm like, maybe in my. What I envision as my best kind of creative place. The roulette wheel's spinning, man, and like, you know, I'm the ball and I'm just like bouncing and I'm like hitting all over the place and it's exciting and you're kind of looking everywhere and. And then there's, you know, there's moments where the roulette wheel stops. You know. For me, it was Covid. Life just was a lot harder. Everything just required a hell of a lot more effort.
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A
Like social or was this health stuff?
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B
Oh, not health stuff. No. It was the political environment. It was the fact that we were in a pandemic and didn't know what was going to happen. There was sort of a very big oppressive weight. There are times where when we were talking about dominant domains and things like that, like, go write for what you know, because you just don't have the energy. And true facts. I remember back in the day we had a conversation and you said, the problem with true facts, you're going to run out of animals.
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That doesn't sound like something I'd say now, but there's some limitations.
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B
But yeah, I did one I think called that. The first one was on the hedgehog and it was all made up. There were no facts in it whatsoever. And then I started on another one and I was like, oh, shit. Coming up with abstract jokes about footage. I'm going to hit a wall so quick because then you're going to see the limitations of my innate humor skills.
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A
And also, like, you don't want people to think that you're telling them true facts when they aren't true facts. There's this like, you could do it with certain animals, but like when you start to get to weird animals, people are like, I guess, maybe.
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B
I guess maybe. Right, right, right, right. I don't even think that that crossed my mind because Two Facts was a send up. Right. The whole thing was supposed to be a send up of how serious nature documentaries took themselves in.
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It is still sort of is.
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B
Well, it's kind of circled back. Right. But that's why I started getting into science as fodder for jokes. That was literally it. I was like, the only way that I'm going to be able to write jokes is if I have some kind of context to pop off. And then that over time became the. Became more and more and more of
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the draw now, it's like, very sciencey.
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B
Yeah. The reason that I like that format is that, like, you can take it anywhere the second that you have a character, which is a host that is very willing to break the rules. And then over time, I created yet another character, this Jerry character that actually subverts the video itself for the listeners.
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A
Jerry is the writer of the script and the producer of the show.
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B
Yeah, Jerry does everything. I mean, it's kind of unclear what I do in the show sometimes, but he comes in and out as a vehicle for. For kind of comic relief. Extending things. Yeah, it's comic relief, but it's also like trying to, like, bust things open and make them kind of unexpected and uncomfortable. But so anyways, yeah, during that time, it was like, I needed that. I needed. The science piece was awesome. Because they're solvable problems.
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C
Yeah.
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A
I feel like that is part of how I've ended up where I am too, where I'm just like, you know, if we're going to be in a world of, like, terrible information, it's nice to be focusing on the Thing Witch's primary goal is to uncover actual truth, to reflect reality as accurately as possible. And has developed a bunch of tools for actually doing that fairly well.
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B
Yeah, yeah, totally. And there's something very nice about that. I mean, I just, you know, I'm doing geckos right now, and I have been spending a lot of time on that because it's, you know, pretty complicated stuff. And I got a note from one of the reviewing scientists. Every episode is reviewed by, you know, a number of scientists. And it was like, you know, good job. Couldn't find anything that isn't supported by science. And it tickles that adolescent want to be the teacher's pet thing.
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A
I got an A from the scientist. There's something interesting about it also not being. I mean, now I feel like all of your work is to some extent, like your public facing work is to some extent not a significant fraction of who Zay actually is. Whereas what I do is probably a pretty significant fraction of who Hank actually is. But, you know, true facts being a character based thing, a voice based thing. You are this man. You're British.
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B
I don't think that I am.
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A
Oh, you're not.
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B
It's so interesting. People call it British. You know, what I'm trying to emulate
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A
is actually mid Atlantic. What are you.
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C
No.
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B
So I heard recordings of what the kind of American Philadelphia accent sounded like about a hundred years ago.
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A
Okay.
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B
And it has British qualities in it. But it is distinctly American.
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A
Okay, you're a hundred year old Philadelphian.
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C
Now if you don't know what a beetle is, it's basically an insect that, well, they can be a bit much. All right, like look at Pepper here walking all distracted, like she's trying to remember the grocery list she forgot back at the house. Come on. You see it. But look at what she's wearing. It's like 10am and she's out in a fancy housecoat like that. And then this pulls a friggin Buzz Lightyear. And that's with a lot of them too, you know. Can't just fly. Has to be a whole production. Like those Transformer movies.
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B
People say like that's the worst British accent ever. And I would totally agree. I'm not bad at accents. I could go British if you need me to. But that's not what it is. It's a way of speaking that really, really enjoys each syllable and the aping
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A
of the form of the sort of like, we're gonna make fun of this, but now it is just the. I don't know, I don't feel like it even is anymore. I feel like, you know, obviously this guy is juvenile. Obviously. Like this is something that is. If it's made for children, it's made for children who are being a little transgressive. Maybe a 10 year old, but also the 10 year old inside of all of us. But still now it does feel straight up a celebration of science and of how science actually works and also of how bizarre our world is.
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B
Yeah, definitely. I mean it's, it's kind of just evolved, you know, I mean, you can kind of like go back and look at some of the earlier episodes where it's a little more obvious what I was going after, you know, like the Armadillo episode is. I think the Armadillo episode is probably the most foundational in terms of creating a lot of the forms that would be copied later on.
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C
Armadillos are the last surviving members of the order Cingulata, the armored New World mammals. Back when animals were more badass, they were more cingulata. Like the 2 ton glyptodont and the smaller Pampitheridae, which could fart, fire and teleport 2 inches in any direction. Who did this research? Jerry? Oh geez.
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B
That one. It was very much about like I was pissed off. I mean like literally I was pissed off because I'd seen some Discovery Channel things where they were using metaphors about, you know, a wolf tracking a moose. And it was like, it stops to smell the bacteria. It knows it's wounded and only has another couple days left. It's like, bullshit. That's just not true. If you want to, like, really experience the majesty of nature, you can't imagine them as, like, slightly dumb people thinking things like that. You have to imagine what consciousness might be without the burden of, of language and long term memory or connections. And so that one, you know, there's lots of attempts of, like, making metaphors, like falling into a pit full of boners, which is still one of my favorite lines.
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C
But it is vulnerable to the leg sweep, or stepping on a tiny landmine, or falling into a pit of boners. All right, that doesn't exist. No, I do understand. I mean, yes, it's technically vulnerable to that, but I'm saying there is no such thing as a pit of boners in nature. It's. It's not a threat. All right, I'll keep going. But Jerry's an idiot.
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A
You're just a little boy. Oh, my God. I kind of want to reach back. So you've been on the Internet for as long as there's been an Internet to be on socially Internet. I mean, you weren't on, like, dark botnet or whatever. You weren't like a researcher with the Department of Defense, but you have your degree in neuroscience, and then you're coming out of school, you are in a band, and then you find this creative outlet that nobody has yet found. And I've heard you talk about this where you're creating, and this was before video, so you're creating weird little pieces of media. There isn't really another thing to say here besides content. There's just too much new kinds of art and creation right now in this period of time for them to have all gotten their own names. So we just lumped them under the title of content. You're making this content. And I've heard you describe that you felt like you were kind of part of a scene back then. Can you flesh that scene out and the importance of it? For me, and this is like the early 2000s or the 90s.
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B
In your intro, I said there were sort of some things that I might kind of take issue with it. And I, you know, I think that this idea of sort of causality in flow is one of them that I think we all have to kind of
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A
struggle with causality and flow. What do you. What do you mean?
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B
So you said that in some way that I was responsible for things. I don't think that that's not True. But in terms of, you know, how much and all that, there's nuance there. I think of it as like, you know, imagine like there's a stream and you're a bunch of pebbles in a stream, and the stream all of a sudden changes, a flow moves quicker or there's a change in direction. Now there's a couple pebbles that are just sort of situated a little differently than others. And they get dislodged. Right? They get dislodged by whatever.
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A
Like it might be personal responsibility and Joyce, it might be that there is no free will and we're all a pebble and upstream.
- [25:17]
B
Yeah, that's right. That's right. But you get pushed. You sort of get pushed and like, maybe you knock into some other pebbles and they get pushed too. Right. And so now you're downstream and the stream was going in that direction. Right. You know, and like your shape does impact downstream, but it doesn't. It's not like it diverts the entire stream or anything like that.
- [25:39]
A
I agree that there's like a lack of responsibility here, but there is like an early identification of what's going on that you did that was maybe harder for people who weren't as young.
- [25:47]
B
That's right. That's just sort of the shape of pebble that I was. Right. I mean, like, I just. I already had been, you know, very into the arts, very into music, and I knew programming because of neuroscience. Right. So I had this. I had a really great basis for being able to take advantage of that stuff. And, you know, all of that existed within, you know, a very dominant form of culture. It was pretty static, that culture. I mean, you know, obviously there was the 80s, the 90s, and you know, different forms of media and stuff, but culture felt like it was one thing, and then this felt like it was a different thing. There was a whole group of people that just started playing that the idea of a scene is to some extent where it's pre. Pre economy. So it's not like, you know, you're out there trying to out compete each other for who is the most financially successful. You're trying to kind of like out
- [26:45]
A
weird each other or just impress each other. Outreach each other.
- [26:49]
C
Yeah.
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B
And even the reach stuff wasn't even there yet.
- [26:53]
A
Not necessarily like reach more people, but like your physical reach, like reach to new problem that people would have expected to be solvable with your tools.
- [27:00]
B
Totally. Because back then, like the true virality stuff, the big pops that went viral, it's not like you were like, oh my gosh, I want to go viral. Yeah, it was sort of like, oh, like that, that became viral. Why?
- [27:11]
A
Almost selling out to succeed a little. And also you have to pay for the bandwidth.
- [27:14]
B
Yeah, you do have to pay for the bandwidth. That's what was sort of exciting about it. And still to me, the thing that I always am yearning for and looking for are places where something is bubbling up and doesn't quite have an industry behind it.
- [27:31]
A
You're still looking for that stuff.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah, always. I mean, always trying to find like little pockets of new stuff. You know, thinking about it right now, I mean, like trying to figure out like what is out there. That's kind of interesting because those, Those are the areas especially, you know, pre economic, where you can mess with everything. You can change the format, you can change the tone, you can change like all. All sorts of things.
- [27:55]
A
And you can. Yeah. And that you can. That the stream is going to go. I think about this a lot with online video. Of course, that stream turned out to be so powerful in a specific direction. There's so much energy. We were going to end up in a consolidated world with sort of a few major players being the platforms and then everybody else being very fractured because you had so many different domains of expertise. You were making music, you were coding, you were making video. I think about the Duckies. So there was this feature that you. I don't know how far along the show, at a certain point a video would upload and you could buy like a little duck under the video and then you. And so this is like a very early crowdfunding vibe.
- [28:44]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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A
And like that just changes the economics of online videos so much. And of course, this later came along with Patreon to some extent, but the idea that maybe this wouldn't be advertising funded, probably that just isn't possible. Probably this was always going to be advertising funded. But it just makes me think that it could have gone other directions. Maybe I just saw you innovating in ways that it didn't feel like the platforms could or would. But I guess probably what happened is that the dominant thing that was going to work the best is what we ended up with. Do you think that that is true? Do you think we could have ended up in a different world?
- [29:21]
B
Yeah. So the Buy the Duckies thing was developed by a guy named Eric that, you know, worked on some of the really intensely complex stuff. You know, the tool where you found the opposite on the globe for the Earth Sandwich.
- [29:36]
A
Another thing that Zay did during the show is he turned the Earth into a sandwich by having two people on the opposite sides of the globe find the exact opposite sides of the globe and put a piece of bread on the ground on each side.
- [29:47]
B
Yeah, I had that thought, like, on a plane, but I had no clue on how to execute the complexity of actually finding your antipode. So I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if it could have gone a lot of different ways. What I do know is that certainly there's a framework for looking at the world where elite people, people with a lot of money and power take over things. There's a really interesting book called Elite Capture that actually has to do with. Not the economics side, but it's a way of thinking about people who are disenfranchised and the language that the left often uses to try to kind of pull that conversation into them politically. But, I mean, I think that that's something that happens over and over and over and over and over again in history. Right. And I think that, yes, there were probably different possible futures, but that one probably was almost guaranteed because of that pattern that we're in. And I do think that it, you know, once that ball gets rolling, the scene is lost.
- [31:00]
C
Yeah.
- [31:00]
B
Because it's just not there. I think that, you know, you had written to me about, you know, is the Internet tainted now? You know, it just doesn't exist. The Internet that we were playing in just doesn't exist. It's gone. The world of permalinks and web links and websites and. And all that kind of stuff has been completely swallowed up by social. And I don't think of it necessarily as worse or better for the world. There's things that are worse and better for me, certainly. And one of the biggest ones is that, you know, we've moved away from searching out content to just passively waiting for it to appear again because of signals that we give. Some unknown thing. Right. Some algorithm.
- [31:46]
A
Yeah, we're giving them signals and they have their own goals as well, which is, you know, largely to keep us on the website.
- [31:52]
B
That's right. But in that way, like, the second that people don't sort of like. And obviously this isn't true for everyone, but, you know, if people kind of lose that instinct of looking for stuff. Have you done more? Are you still doing stuff? I mean, the comments that are so sort of puzzling and, or at least like, point to this are like, oh, my gosh, you're doing content again. And it's like kind of never stopped I just. I just wasn't in your feed, bro. Yeah, yeah.
- [32:22]
A
I haven't seen you in so long and I'm like, I don't know what to say. That's how it works now. That's gonna be true for a lot of people at any given moment. Oh, my God. There's so many things I wanna talk to you about. But you were talking about that beginnings of virality. You, like, went viral before, like in the sort of earliest times of virality, when it was email based. So, like, I'd get an email forward from someone and it's like, look, the Dutch exploded this whale that was on the beach and it didn't go as planned. Which is a great title for a YouTube video.
- [32:52]
B
Yeah.
- [32:52]
A
And you had a couple of these things that were not like America's Funniest Home Video clips, but things you created that were funny and weird and went viral. And then you've kept going viral kind of the whole time, which makes me think that it does matter to you.
- [33:09]
B
There is something about it that is satisfying. Less so now, certainly. I mean, my relationship with the platforms has changed so much. Like, you know, when I release something on YouTube, I just sort of release it. I mean, I used to just sit there and wait for comments and, like,
- [33:27]
A
someday I will reach your level of enlightenment. Zay.
- [33:31]
B
I still go back to it, but it doesn't feel. I mean, it feels less connected, you know, to me or the work or things like that. I feel like I've put it into a mall and then people are kind of like walking by and looking at it and stuff. That's not to say that I. There isn't like a group of people that I have a closer connection to. Like Patreon, for example. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, like, you know, TikTok the Creepy Dave thing.
- [34:00]
A
You know, do Creepy Dave for a second. So we all know what Creepy Dave is.
- [34:03]
B
He's like a mixture between strong, bad Dr. Street Brule and then maybe Triumph the insult comic guy. What is. He's like. It's Creepy Dave.
- [34:15]
C
Okay.
- [34:16]
B
That guy, he's a little stupid. He's happy. He gets.
- [34:20]
A
There's something joyful about a lot of your work, which is interesting because I do get the impression that you are somewhat sullen natured.
- [34:28]
B
Yeah, I am. I am actually. Yeah. I'm actually incredibly serious. I think it's like a radical disappointment for a lot of people that meet me.
- [34:37]
A
I remember the first time we hung out in the real world, and I wouldn't say that I came. I definitely Would not say I came away disappointed, but I came away very thoughtful. Every conversation we have ever had, I think about years later, just a refreshing set of perspectives and always not so informed by, like, whatever the hell is going on on the Internet. You know, it just seems like a lot of thinking is oriented toward whatever is being risen to the top by algorithms. And I never feel that when I'm talking to you, but I'm interested in the sort of joyful nature of a lot of your characters.
- [35:14]
B
They merge different qualities. Right. That was a little bit of the problem with Creepy Dave. I mean, I stopped doing it as much. If you actually go through and watch them, you see that there's all these attempts to talk about the human condition in them, but through his bizarre lens. And that was me trying to find some basis of purpose inside that character.
- [35:38]
A
Right. Some reason you were actually doing it instead of just like, I'm getting views.
- [35:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not an easy one to kind
- [35:45]
A
of go through, but in general, short form is very hard to get to something where I feel super proud of the things that go super wide.
- [35:55]
B
There's a woman named Caitlin Cowie who joined me on True Facts maybe three or four years ago, and I worked with her a long time ago, and she kind of was on me about short form, and I was sort of like, ah, I can't. It's like, you know, I mean, partially because I knew, like, at that time, the day dominant idea was that short form was marketing for long form. And I knew because of the work that I did at BuzzFeed, that that's just not true. I mean, I'd seen the stats, like, at scale, like at the billion view. Scale.
- [36:28]
A
Yeah.
- [36:29]
B
So I was kind of hesitant and things like that. And then I was like, all right, fine, I'll kind of play. And so at first, I was just launching clips and stuff, and I was like, all right, let me. Let me, like, palpate it a little bit.
- [36:40]
A
Understand the thing. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:42]
B
And so I did the thing that I kind of always do, which is make some sort of assumptions about what you think is sort of in the vibe of that space. And then I released, like, a few things. There was one, which was the heron that is trying to catch the fishes. Little fishies. Are you afraid of the dark? It's nighttime now.
- [37:03]
C
Go to bed. Go to bed. Everybody go to bed.
- [37:06]
B
I'm just kidding with you. The voice starts to kind of take shape a little bit. And then there was this one, this vulture. He fit all those little characteristics.
- [37:18]
C
Here comes A Creepy Dave. That's what people call me.
- [37:22]
B
How you doing?
- [37:23]
C
Okay, you walk away. Oh, Creepy Dave made a pee pee.
- [37:29]
B
He's everywhere.
- [37:31]
C
Whoopsie. Creepy Dave.
- [37:34]
B
It was like, oh, okay, this is a, you know, a character. It did well. So now let's think of a format that you can kind of put it in and move forward.
- [37:42]
A
Right? So you're not making like clips from long form video. You're making short form video. You're understanding what people are responding to. You're building a thing. You're creating in that space. You're innovating. It is so impressive to me though. Like, Creepy Dave doesn't rely on any previous Ze Frank fame. Your success does not rely on your previous successes. It feels like you try and get out of a box every time and do a little bit of building from scratch, which is impossible. It's so rare to be able to build a strong audience. And so it really is like an indication that there is a skill set here that you are good at. Because I often feel like my own career, I was like, I don't know how to get famous on YouTube. I know how to do it in 2007, but now how would I do it? I don't know. It's so hard. Do you feel an urge to try and separate your eras, your pieces of content from your previous creations and also your previous brands or imaginings like how people imagine you?
- [38:45]
B
As you were talking, I was trying to. I was reversing the question and I was like thinking, like, well, why? Why do I do that? Especially the way you said it, it sounds like such a pain in the ass, right? Yeah, like, oh, fuck. I do think that I. I get uncomfortable by constraints. I mean, I think that when you make work that is viewed by a lot of people, you have this interesting relationship with the content and the people, and they have an interesting relationship with the content and you and that triangle. It has kind of characteristics to it. I think in the worst cases for me, people start thinking that you are the content. And that feels very uncomfortable.
- [39:33]
A
Right. I mean, with the show, it was so much Zay. It was Zay's ideas, Zay's analysis of the news. It's crazy when you go back and watch and see how much of this show is news.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah, but it wasn't really me, right? I mean, like, it was some momentary thing that came together. And I think that there's people and I think you're certainly one of them that is more. More comfortable kind of being yourself. And I don't Know what that means? Exactly. But you're comfortable with whatever tensions come out of that, and you seem to be able to separate those things out. That's not something that has ever come easy to me.
- [40:14]
A
That's so interesting because, like, you were, like, one of the first models of doing it. You know, there was like. You're looking straight down the barrel of the lens.
- [40:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, uncomfortable, like what we started this conversation on. That was, like, the most uncomfortable thing that I could do. And it was. It was very, very uncomfortable. That whole show was, like, very hard for me. Partially, it's that I do have a little bit of a fear of getting stuck in things. I want my work, certainly, to be a reflection of the struggles and thoughts that I'm going through at this time, where I am right now. And when it gets disconnected from that, it becomes more like a job, more like work, and less of, like, this discovery of who you are, what you're capable of. And I think that that's kind of why I pop around. And, I mean, there's also, like. I think I can make it pop without people even knowing it's me. That's kind of cool, too.
- [41:12]
A
It does feel like a little bit of a flex. Was Octopus the first True Facts that got really, really big?
- [41:17]
B
No, I think it was Anglerfish, But I think Octopus predates Anglerfish now, because at that time, this was, like, the very early days. I was like, I can use any footage I want. Like, five years later, I got hit with, you know, a $5,000.
- [41:34]
A
Like, take it down and put it back up.
- [41:36]
B
Yeah, exactly. But that switched pretty fast because I was like, oh, crap.
- [41:41]
A
Yeah. Did that feel like I still got it or I've got something else?
- [41:45]
B
You know, I mean, I think that the origin of True Facts is kind of interesting because. And it dovetails into something that you had asked about in the email that you sent me, which was, you know, about the time at buzzfeed, which I haven't really spent a lot of time talking about.
- [41:58]
A
Yeah, no, I couldn't find you talking about it anywhere.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah, and I probably won't be talking about it very much here either. So True Facts and some of those other kind of pieces, these sort of, like, pensive pieces and things like that came out of when I was starting the video aspect of BuzzFeed. And I had, at that time, maybe seven, eight, nine people working for me before it got big. These are talented young people who came out of film school, and one of the first things that I had to do Was like, try to come up with some framework for making things that was in opposition to that way.
- [42:36]
A
In opposition to what way?
- [42:37]
B
Like the film, the film school way, like segmenting the labor, you know, even beginning, middle and end, music choice, editing choices, all this kind of stuff. So I was, I did a whole series of videos where I was like, oh no, you can make things just with stock footage. You don't have to be on camera, you don't have to use anything. And so true facts was part of that, was me trying to show people what the possibilities were.
- [43:03]
A
Jonah Peretti asked you to run buzzfeed video. You came and did that. It's just such a deeply different thing from creating in your own head. Making stuff, testing it out, iterating super fast. For years you made stuff every day. Popping it out into the world and seeing how people would respond to it. Just getting the ideas out of your head to collaborating, to like leading creative people to try and have them create these things. This must have been a very different thing.
- [43:32]
B
The beginning was very consistent with the rest of what I did. I mean, we had a small team of people, you know, even up to like 20 people. This is just the first year or so. It was like we made so much media so quickly. We created a whole new sort of framework for how you brainstorm. And we were just like making stuff all, all the time and talking about it all the time. And there was a powerful kind of feeling because it really felt like we were doing it different. And that philosophy, simply put, I mean, it was pretty complicated. But the philosophy, simply put, was that most people's experiences are not reflected in media. Think about all the experiences that aren't really reflected in popular media and make video about it. So that included all sorts of things. And it felt like this wide open playground. And the first year or two felt very consistent with what I was doing. But, you know, I didn't have an HR department. And like, once you creep up into like a hundred people and like you can't all fit in the same room, and then that's where I was at really, the limits of what comes naturally to me. And you know, had to start learning some other things. You know, from that point forward, I was well outside my comfort zone and never really got comfortable with the experience.
- [44:52]
A
Yeah, there's also just the element of being like a leader of a company that's in the public and you're going to events and you're speaking on behalf of the company and you're sort of towing company line and like trying to figure out how to be like one of the big, fast growing parts of an organization that theoretically needs to keep growing big and fast so it can keep getting investors forever, which obviously, long term hasn't worked out.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. That whole framework, right. Of business aesthetic and mimicking certain things in the way you speak, or like you just said, towing the company line, which, you know, kind of implies that
- [45:27]
A
you don't necessarily agree with it or.
- [45:30]
B
Or it's not your thought. You know, it's. Yeah, it's another thought. And then you have to answer questions as if you were wherever that thought came from, you know, and that's a lot less fun. But, you know, the beginning of it was incredible. I mean, like, I counted as one of the most exciting times that I've had.
- [45:51]
A
Would you ever do anything like that again?
- [45:53]
B
I mean, I'd love to work with people. I don't really want to create a big organization that has an ultimate goal of making a lot of money for rich investors that I don't. I'm not really interested in. But. But, yeah, absolutely. I would like to interact with folks a little bit more.
- [46:13]
A
Coming out of that. Is there sort of like a desire to get back into making things for yourself?
- [46:20]
B
You know, I was lost. I had taken quite a bit of time off from making stuff, with the exception of I had been doing a good amount of voice work during that time just to kind of scratch the itch. Things like, you know, sad cat diary. And then that became a commercial for Purina called Dear Kitten, which is fairly widely known. Sort of another example of like trying to make something pop without relying on your own what's prior. But I was very lost. That was sort of like a roulette, that wheel stopping moment where you're just like, whoa. And in that particular thing, I wasn't anywhere. I'd landed in the middle of the board. I wasn't anywhere.
- [47:01]
A
Can you tell me a little bit more about your roulette wheel metaphor here? So you're the ball when you land. It's just like when suddenly you're not moving.
- [47:09]
B
Yeah. It's like the outside world has stopped. The wheel has stopped. The possibility of the wheel in my mind, you know, in the most fun state, you're bouncing from idea to idea. You know, you're trying lots of different things.
- [47:24]
A
So it's not like you, like, land in the place where like, finally you know what the situation is, and you're like, okay, it's a 32. I don't know how many things there are on a Roulette wheel. It's like suddenly you're stopped and you're like, oh, I'm here now I'm stuck until somebody gives me another spin.
- [47:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [47:39]
A
So you landed. And I mean, was there some amount of, like, maybe people felt differently about you? You didn't. You'd been through a lot of hard, contentious conversations. People who you used to, like, didn't like you anymore, like, that kind of thing. Or was there, like, some amount of just not. Not knowing where you were?
- [47:58]
B
Yeah, I think it was, like, just not knowing, you know, where I was. I think that what you're talking about, which is, you know, you have sort of internal representations of what the world is in relationship to you. Right. Who do people think I am or what do they expect from me? I mean, these are all. You're inventing them. You know, they're. They're inventions, and there's times where they
- [48:19]
A
matter a lot to me.
- [48:21]
B
Right. But I mean, they're inventions. Like, you can't know. Yeah. I mean, this is in the beginning of David Mitchell's book Unruly. He writes a great thing about history where he's like, what? You know, what is history anyways? It's like, you know, if you. If you contemplate now and the billions of nows that are taking place and the complexity of that, it's. It's unfathomable. And then we somehow want to tell the story of now is evolving into other nows. And a lot of times when you're in a time of transition, when you don't have as much strength, internal strength, those thoughts can be a little harder and a little more consuming because they feel, like, a pressure. They feel more real. And certainly at that time, from the perspective of like, okay, what do I do next? There was this idea of, like, oh, no, I'm somebody who leads media companies. I mean, I think this was a little bit of the fallacy that I ran into becoming a business person. But I have important ideas that can help people, blah, blah, blah. But that's not really, like, how it works. You find yourself in certain positions because of a trajectory, and then when you're cast out of those positions and into a new space, you can't just transplant that somewhere else. You have to go on another journey. You have to keep moving. Unless you're really, like, institutional. Unless you, like, vibe off the bureaucracy.
- [49:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you probably could have got a job in media somewhere. Yeah, maybe.
- [49:56]
B
But it was a time where I guess I didn't know what I really needed. So True Facts was there and it was something that I did enjoy doing and liked revisiting.
- [50:09]
A
It's interesting because True Facts is such a microcosm of how an idea works where you put it out into the world and then as it interfaces with the world, it changes. You wouldn't want to try and find where you are now first because you'd never know where you would end up. You have to have the idea be exposed to air and be good the whole time. But then it ends up in a different place than maybe you would have expected.
- [50:34]
B
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I do think that becoming is the point and you can't have a strong view about that trajectory. Even True Facts, like True Facts is a dying format. Right. I mean, like Schwartz has almost disseminated the view profile on it.
- [50:56]
A
Sure.
- [50:56]
B
You know, just in terms of discovery, I've decided to forego sponsors now. I don't, I don't like doing that. So from an economic standpoint, I know that you recently moved to a non profit model. Most likely I'm going to do the same. Trufax isn't totally economically viable anymore. So I'm now, I mean, I love that work and I, and I am now pretty committed to conservation and to the love of animals and science about animals. So I want to keep that going. But I am sort of thinking about, okay, so what is next? I'm right back to that spot again of having to reimagine and think things. You had said that these episodes end with a question and I think it would be an appropriate time for you to read that question because in this I think that there's a response to that question.
- [51:49]
A
So the question that we end with is, what's something that you have learned from this work that you wish everyone on earth knew?
- [51:57]
B
You aren't a static thing. You know, you change a lot over time. You have a concept of yourself. You kind of imagine that there's a stasis through time. I recently listened to a recording of myself with my friends that I made when I was 18 and I was like, who the is that? Like, what is that? And so, you know, you have this idea of yourself as being kind of consistent through time. But I don't think that that's true.
- [52:25]
A
I don't either.
- [52:26]
B
For me it's been really important to say, like, show up for the person who you are that day and you know, accept that you are different. And you know, if you can, when you feel yourself being disappointed that you don't have the passion that you had a day ago, a week ago, or you're not finding the beauty in something that you had decided was really important. It's easy to go into a place of loss or less than and then fight against the current to get back to that. But showing up for yourself and saying, okay, all right. Now I'm like this, and I have to get this thing done, and it's not going to be enjoyable, and you have to be okay with that. It's like, okay, what are you looking forward to then, if that's not going to happen? Satisfy you. What's one thing today that hits where you are now, and you're going to be excited to get that done or explore it. Having that kind of a framework, I think puts you into this, into the flow better. And I'll give you the second correlate to that, which is very idea that you can understand where you are, points to the idea that there's another part of you inside that can sense that. So there is something that's static in us now, that voice, I call it the manager.
- [53:59]
A
Okay, we're getting into consciousness now.
- [54:02]
B
It's my consciousness anyways.
- [54:03]
A
No, I feel the same way. And, like, when you start to try and, like, pull the pieces out from each other, you realize that they are actually different things. Yeah, that, like, the thing that I think of as myself is actually a bunch of different things all kind of working together, which is very weird. But, yes, the manager.
- [54:19]
B
I've got one voice that is kind of like a little older sounding, you know, It's. The voice is like, hey, bud. Hey, bud. Yeah, this isn't going to work.
- [54:30]
A
I need this guy.
- [54:31]
B
Yeah, it's like, hey, bud, this isn't going to work. You know what you got to do here? Or like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Settle down. Like, you're pressed up against the glass. Like, that's the other. That's the side of me that I have to combat quite a bit, is there's this other experience that I have of the world, which is like. Like a little boy pressed, like, literally right up against the glass. And it's like, oh, like life's coming at him and he's not prepared. And a lot of times the manager has to come in and be like, yo, bud, just step back from the glass. I got it. But the sort of development of recognizing that you have different capacities at different times, that different things are going to give you different satisfactions is super helpful because it also helps you take advice because. Because a lot of times it's great advice, but it has nothing to do with how you are now. Pocket it. Put it in for later when you're that guy.
- [55:23]
A
I definitely feel that I ran up against it when I got sick. When I got diagnosed with cancer and started going through treatment, this reality that all the things that I thought were so consistent were not the ways that I thought I would react to that kind of news were not the ways that I ended up reacting. I think that this is a case a lot of times with serious illness or. Or injury. The hardest part can often be the challenge to the self. The realization that you are maybe not who you thought you were. You don't have all the same strengths that you thought you had. But I have. You know, I also gave this talk, you know, 10 years ago called Fuck youk Dreams, that was about, like, you don't have to go and achieve the dreams of your former self just because your former self had them. If your current self doesn't anymore.
- [56:10]
C
Anymore.
- [56:10]
A
I'm not saying they're bad, but like, if you get close to them or if. And like, they aren't actually your dreams anymore, like live for you, don't live for some version of you who doesn't exist anymore and is probably dumber because they have fewer experiences.
- [56:25]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. So the last time we texted, you know, it's right above when you asked me to be on the podcast, I had just undergone emergency colon surgery. I had a near death kind of thing. I mean, I think to some degree we share that experience, you know, as. As maybe a foundational moment in having to reconcile the day to day of what goes on inside your head. Right. We're both people that are outward quite a bit. We deal with the world, we have thoughts about the world, we make things for other people to enjoy. But those moments, there is a kind of a weird clarity that comes out of it when you're faced with, oh, okay, yeah, it's me in here. I could kind of like say whatever I want. Like inside you can, right? I mean, I was thinking that, you know, everybody talks about their last words or people's last words. And I was kind of cracking up and I was like, oh, actually, your last words are yourself.
- [57:22]
A
Yeah, nobody hears.
- [57:22]
B
I was cracking up by it because I was like. It would be funny if you, like, really wanted your last thought to be a thing. And then you, you know, you were close to death and you just kept thinking it and then intrusive thoughts came in, like some like, dumb mem. And you're like.
- [57:36]
A
No, no, like that same loop that you've been on. Like, just. Just like a vocal stim. The Clarissa Explains it all theme.
- [57:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [57:46]
A
Exactly.
- [57:46]
B
Exactly. Yeah. Even this, you know, like, what we're talking right now is sort of later life stuff. Like, you don't have to really think about it or worry about it when you're young and pumped full of brain hormones and, like, things that are driving you in all sorts of different directions.
- [58:02]
A
Yeah. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but in another 10 years, perhaps I will upload a video and not be obsessed with the immediate response.
- [58:12]
B
I wouldn't have thought you as somebody that thought of it that way.
- [58:16]
A
Yeah, well, now you think less of me, and that's okay.
- [58:19]
B
No, no, not at.
- [58:28]
A
Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer, and Greg Rippon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media. Andrew Huang composed the music, and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's do it one more time, humans.