Cleo Abram, full name Cleo Constantine Abram, is an American video journalist and YouTuber born on January 25, 1993, in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Columbia University in 2015 and worked at Vox for about five years before founding her company, HUGE, in 2022. She hosts Huge If True, an optimistic science and technology show, and Huge Conversations, long interviews with leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Sam Altman.

What is Huge If True?

Huge If True is Cleo Abram’s YouTube show about science and technology, launched in January 2022 after she left Vox. Each episode is a deep dive into a technology or scientific achievement that explains how it works and how it might play out, from an optimistic point of view. Abram has said she won’t make a topic that isn’t inherently visual. In April 2026 she said each episode takes several hundred hours over several months.

What is Cleo Abram’s advice for new creators?

Cleo Abram told Washington Post Creator in April 2026 that the most important thing is to know why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you have to say; the format and platform come after the mission. She has also said that early on she tried to fit the whole video into the title and thumbnail, and that relaxing helped. At a 2023 creator roundtable she said the moment she thinks she has made it is when she would start to get complacent.

What brands has Cleo Abram worked with?

Cleo Abram funds Huge If True with sponsorships, which she told Washington Post Creator in April 2026 are her only revenue stream. Partners have included Storyblocks and Masterworks in 2022, LEGO, a series of Nike Shorts and a Microsoft integration in an episode on the LIGO detector. In 2025 McLaren’s Formula E team announced her as a guest driver for Formula E’s Evo Sessions. She says ads must be clearly marked and only say true things.

What is Cleo Abram doing in 2026?

As of October 2026, Cleo Abram is publishing Huge If True episodes, including a May episode filmed in Antarctica, and Huge Conversations interviews with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in April and Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang in October. TIME named her to its TIME100 Creators list in July 2026. She signed with the talent agency UTA in December 2025, and her company, HUGE, had a team of seven as of April 2026.

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Cleo Abram Interview Highlights: Leaving Vox to Build Huge If True

Cleo Abram on leaving Vox, her optimistic Huge If True format, how she researches videos, her tech CEO interviews and sponsors, with every quote sourced.

Joanna FinchPublished October 13, 2026Last updated October 13, 202616 min read

The Milky Way arcs over a white observatory dome on a dark mountain ridge, above a sea of clouds lit by a distant town

Short answer

Cleo Abram left Vox in January 2022 to make Huge If True, an optimistic YouTube show about science and technology, because she wanted the creative control to make a show she couldn’t find anywhere. She green-lights a story only if it is genuinely visual, gives a real explanation and is optimistic. In 2026 she told Washington Post Creator that each episode takes several hundred hours and that her seven-person team runs entirely on sponsorships.

Cleo Abram makes videos about subjects most creators would avoid, such as particle colliders, quantum computers and the ice under Antarctica, and millions of people watch them. She builds each one around a question a lot of technology coverage skips: what happens if this works?

This post is for creators who want to build a show rather than a channel, brands deciding how to work with an explainer journalist, and curious viewers. It covers her start at Vox, why she left, how she picks and scripts stories, her interviews with tech leaders, how she pays for it and what she’s doing as of October 2026.

Who is Cleo Abram?

Cleo Abram is an American video journalist and YouTuber who hosts Huge If True, an optimistic show about science and technology, and Huge Conversations, a long-form interview series with people building new technology.

During about five years at Vox she helped launch and host the YouTube Originals series Glad You Asked and directed episodes of Vox’s Netflix show Explained, The Hollywood Reporter reported. She left in January 2022 and that year founded HUGE, the company behind the show.

Fact	Detail
Real name	Cleo Constantine Abram, born January 25, 1993, in Washington, D.C.
Education	Columbia University, BA in political science (2015)
Platforms	YouTube (Cleo Abram), TikTok and Instagram
Before YouTube	About five years at Vox: business development, then producer; host on Glad You Asked, nominated for a Daytime Emmy in 2020
Started	Left Vox in January 2022 and announced Huge If True on January 10, 2022
Known for	Optimistic explainers on science and technology, and long interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Sam Altman
Company	HUGE, founded in 2022; a team of seven as of April 2026
Representation	WME while at Vox; signed with UTA in December 2025
Recognition	Streamy nomination for Best Collaboration with MKBHD (2023); TIME100 Creators (2026)
Audience	Nearly 8.3 million YouTube subscribers and more than 2.8 billion views as of July 2026, according to TIME

How did Cleo Abram get started?

“I was neither a journalist nor a filmmaker. So, I went to night school to learn how to edit in Premiere and animate in After Effects. I spent every night and weekend trying to take what I was learning in those classes and I made stuff — terrible stuff. Eventually I got better and I started making videos for Vox.”

— Cleo Abram, Video Consortium’s Rough Cut, October 2022

After college she worked at Precision, a digital consulting firm spun out of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, then joined the business side of Vox, Creator magazine reported in 2022. She told Colin and Samir in 2024 that she noticed an open desk beside the Vox video team, and “I just decided that that was now my desk.”

Part of her job was pitching shows to streamers. When Netflix bought the first season of Explained, she realized the video producers would make it, not her, so she took night classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York. When the second season opened pitches to the video team, she sent four. One became Diamonds, Explained, and Vox let her produce it even though she wasn’t technically a video producer.

The lesson: learn the craft on your own time and sit next to the people doing the work you want.

Why did Cleo Abram leave Vox?

“I really wanted to make this show and it just felt like having the creative control and having the opportunity to experiment was ultimately what was most important to me.”

— Cleo Abram, YouTube Official Blog, March 2025

The idea started in a comment section. She told Creator magazine in 2022 that after a Glad You Asked episode about whether she wanted to have kids, one of the main responses on TikTok came from viewers saying they couldn’t have kids because the world would get worse.

“I have that feeling sometimes too … A lot of people do. I think it’s very normal, but in its magnitude, I was like, ‘Where does that come from?’ And I started to feel more and more like I could help alleviate that somehow in my small way.”

— Cleo Abram, Creator magazine (Powder Blue Media), June 2022

She didn’t think she could make that show inside a company. In 2026 she told Ian Shepherd, a Forbes.com contributor, in a piece Yahoo republished: “I don’t think I would be able to make this show at any major media company right now … The only way that this was possible was doing it myself and doing it on YouTube.” She launched the channel with a video called “Why I Left Vox.”

The takeaway: a show needs a reason to exist that fits in one sentence. Hers was a gap in her own media diet.

Why is Huge If True optimistic?

“So the mission of the show is to show people optimistic futures, because we believe that when they see them, they’ll help build them.”

— Cleo Abram, Washington Post Creator, April 2026

Washington Post Creator, which ran that interview, is a business outside the Post’s newsroom. She presents the optimism as a correction, not cheerleading.

“I think the biggest bias in news media is not left or right, it’s negativity and catastrophe.”

— Cleo Abram, on Colin and Samir’s show (transcript), September 2024

On the same show she compared each story to walking through a forest: she looks down every path where a technology could go wrong, then shows where it could lead if it goes right. She also said she isn’t sure she is an inherently optimistic person; she looks for stories that make her optimistic and shares those.

A clear point of view tells viewers what they’re subscribing to and you which stories to turn down.

How does Cleo Abram decide what to make next?

“It’s always going to be a deep dive into an interesting technology or scientific achievement that I think will really matter in the world in the future. We’re always going to give you a real explainer on how it works and how it might play out in that future. And we’re going to do so in a way that is genuinely optimistic. And then also the last one is if it’s not inherently visual to make something be a good video, we won’t do it.”

— Cleo Abram, YouTube Official Blog, March 2025

She gave Colin and Samir the same filter in 2024 as a three-point checklist: is it genuinely visual, will it be a satisfying explanation, and is it genuinely optimistic? If a topic is best explained in text, she said, it should be an essay or a podcast. Her rough test: would you grab a napkin and draw something to explain it over coffee?

One of the hosts admitted he had expected her video on CERN’s particle collider to flop; she said she hadn’t known it would work either. Later in the conversation she said she believes “anything that could be important to millions of people can also be made comprehensible to millions of people.”

The practical step: write down three or four rules every episode must meet, and drop ideas that fail one.

Rows of curved metal coil segments, brass flanges and orange-sheathed cables wrap a huge ring-shaped machine held up on white steel supports — Machinery like this is hard to explain in words, which is why Abram builds every story around a key visual.

How does Cleo Abram make a video?

“This is a several-hundred-hour research and production process over the course of several months for every video … We spend at least a month in the preproduction process, figuring out what the story is and how we’re going to tell it.”

— Cleo Abram, Washington Post Creator, April 2026

Then come a field shoot, several weeks of scripting and at least another month of editing and animation, she said. The visuals are decided in the script. After her interviews, she told Rough Cut in 2022, she writes a three-column script: ears, eyes and sources. In 2024 she told Colin and Samir that the middle column, every visual in order, is where most of the writing happens.

On camera she calls herself a proxy for the audience, and with world experts, she told Colin and Samir, she starts with the most childlike version of her question.

The team grew from two or three people in 2022, Creator magazine reported, to seven by April 2026. Borrow the sources column: it makes fact-checking part of writing.

What does Cleo Abram say works on TikTok and Shorts?

“I started to realise that TikTok is best when you’re not trying to promote something else. TikTok is best when you are making things for TikTok.”

— Cleo Abram, Video Consortium’s Rough Cut, October 2022

She started on TikTok in mid-2020 to promote a Vox show, and was approaching a million followers when she went independent, which she said gave her the confidence to leave.

In 2024 she told Colin and Samir she uses Shorts three ways: cutting self-contained sections out of long videos, testing ideas before committing a month to them, and covering topics that only deserve 60 seconds. Arguments under a Short about sensors in World Cup balls became a full episode on sports technology.

A Short is the cheapest test a long-form creator has; our guide to how the YouTube algorithm works explains how both formats are recommended.

Why does Cleo Abram interview tech leaders?

She told WIRED in 2024 that her long interviews left her with a problem: hours of conversation, of which only a few minutes made it into each tightly crafted video. That September she launched Huge Conversations, full-length interviews published alongside the explainers.

In the launch video she said much of the media asks how technology builders have failed or might fail; she wanted to ask what happens if they succeed, since many of today’s problems are products of progress.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the first guest, in September 2024. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang followed in January 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, showing her GPT-5, in August 2025, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in April 2026. She told Washington Post Creator her goal is “to unpack both the promise and the peril of it actually coming true.”

Long interviews with powerful executives raise a fair question for any host: who controls the conversation? The description of her October 2026 episode sets out her rules: interviewees don’t see questions ahead of time, have no editorial control, aren’t paid and don’t pay, and don’t see the episode before it is published. If you interview powerful people, publish your ground rules.

Two red velvet armchairs face each other on a green-screen studio floor, with a video camera on a tripod at the left edge — Huge Conversations runs far longer than the explainers, and her October 2026 episode lists its interview rules in the description.

What mistakes does Cleo Abram say she made early on?

“I think very early on I was trying to, like, put the whole video in the title and thumbnail, and now I’m a little bit more relaxed about it, and that’s actually helped.”

— Cleo Abram, Colin and Samir (transcript), September 2024

She said she learned partly by keeping a deck of titles and thumbnails she admired and writing down why each one worked.

At Vox, she told Colin and Samir, she thought she had a wealth of ideas, without accounting for the colleagues who had helped her pick the good one from each list of pitches. Independent, she had to do that filtering herself. She also told Rough Cut in 2022 that one question she hadn’t considered much before leaving, how she actually wanted to spend her day, had since become really important to her.

If you go independent, plan for the work your editors and managers used to do.

How does Cleo Abram fund Huge If True?

“I waited a little bit to put out sponsorships on YouTube because I wanted to get the show off the ground first … My goal was to just be able to support the show in the first year and it’s doing better than that. Sponsorships are more than the cost of the show already and I was not expecting that.”

— Cleo Abram, Video Consortium’s Rough Cut, October 2022

In 2022 the show ran on YouTube ad revenue plus sponsors such as Storyblocks and Masterworks, Creator magazine reported. Before taking ads, she published a mock ad read setting out her rules.

“Every single episode that I make, even when it is geeking out about how cool this robot is or how cool this car is, all of that is my actual opinion of that thing, and if it’s not clearly an ad, it is not an ad or paid for.”

— Cleo Abram, Colin and Samir (transcript), September 2024

By April 2026 the model was simple: “We don’t have any other revenue streams; we are exclusively sponsorship-based,” she told Washington Post Creator. Her examples were a series of Nike Shorts and a Microsoft segment in her episode on the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. In 2025 McLaren’s Formula E team announced her as a one-off guest driver for Formula E’s Evo Sessions, which she called “a rare chance to go beyond reporting on technology – I get to live it.”

In 2024 she told Colin and Samir she did no merch or subscriptions and focused on the show alone, advice she said she got from Marques Brownlee when she was starting out; our Marques Brownlee interview covers his rules on brand deals. Her show’s website now sells what it calls at-cost community merch. For the case against relying on ads, see our Hank Green interview, and if you take sponsors, our guide to disclosing sponsorships covers the rules.

What advice does Cleo Abram give new creators?

“The most important thing is to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. What do you have to say? Whether you’re within a media company, whether you’re independent, whether you’re a podcast or a video, whether you are a newsletter, all of those questions come after: What is your mission?”

— Cleo Abram, Washington Post Creator, April 2026

She was talking about journalists going independent, but it applies to any creator.

At a 2023 Colin and Samir roundtable, after she had passed a million YouTube subscribers, she said the milestone felt significant but not like she had made it, and that thinking she had made it would be the moment she started to get complacent. Know your mission before your format, and don’t treat a milestone as a finish line.

What is Cleo Abram working on now?

As of October 2026 she is still making both shows. Huge If True publishes one video a month, she said in April; this year’s episodes have gone to Antarctica and to Jony Ive to discuss Ferrari’s first all-electric car. On October 7 she published a Huge Conversation with Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang about Muse, an AI agent built by his team at Meta.

“The largest streaming platform in the world is also the platform where you own all of your own work … and can build a business that can support creative content that is of a higher quality than traditional TV.”

— Cleo Abram, to Ian Shepherd for Forbes.com (republished by Yahoo), June 2026

In 2024 she told Colin and Samir she would love to make near-future science fiction based on her research; in April 2026 she wrote a new sci-fi story on camera with Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir. In November 2025 she made an episode on asteroid defense with Mark Rober; see our Mark Rober interview. In December 2025 she signed with the talent agency UTA to expand the HUGE brand, The Hollywood Reporter reported.

What creators can learn from Cleo Abram

Lesson	What Cleo Abram said	How to apply it
Launch a show, not a channel	She wanted creative control to make one specific show (2025)	Write a one-sentence promise for your show before your first upload
Make the gap your angle	Negativity and catastrophe are the biggest bias in news media (2024)	Name what your niche’s coverage leaves out and make that your point of view
Every video needs a reason to be a video	If it isn’t inherently visual, she won’t make it (2025)	Find the key visual before you write the script
Script the visuals	She writes three-column scripts: ears, eyes, sources (2022)	Add a visuals column and a sources column to your script template
Test small, then build	Shorts test ideas before a month of long-form work (2024)	Post a Short on a topic before committing a full episode to it
Make sponsor rules public	If it isn’t clearly marked as an ad, it isn’t paid for (2024)	Publish your sponsorship rules and only say true things in ads
Know your mission first	Know why you’re doing it before choosing a format (2026)	Decide what you have to say, then pick the platform that fits it

Sources

From Vox to TikTok: Cleo Abram Explains The Future, Creator magazine (Powder Blue Media), June 2022
Episode 8: Cleo Abram, Video Consortium (Rough Cut), October 2022
Will DWTS Winner Charli D’Amelio Add a Streamy Award to Her Trophy Shelf?, Vulture, July 2023
Creator Roundtable: Ryan Trahan, Zach King, Michelle Khare, Cleo Abram, Ammar Kandil, Colin and Samir, August 2023 (transcript via Rosetta)
Cleo Abram Answers The Web’s Most Searched Questions, WIRED, August 2024 (transcript via Rosetta)
How Cleo Abram Dominated YouTube in Under 1 Year, Colin and Samir, September 2024 (transcript via Rosetta)
Something Huge Is Coming… and Huge Conversations episodes with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Andy Weir, Cleo Abram on YouTube, September 2024 to April 2026 (via Rosetta)
Cleo Abram To Join Formula E Evo Sessions, McLaren, February 2025
5 huge if true moments for Cleo Abram, YouTube Official Blog, March 2025
Humanity’s Real Plan to Stop This Asteroid (Feat. Mark Rober), Cleo Abram on YouTube, November 2025 (via Rosetta)
YouTuber Cleo Abram Signs With UTA (Exclusive), The Hollywood Reporter, December 2025
Creator Q+A: Cleo Abram, Washington Post Creator, April 2026
What’s Hidden Under Antarctica? and the Ferrari Luce episode with Jony Ive, Cleo Abram on YouTube, May 2026 (via Rosetta)
How A Former Vox Producer Built One Of YouTube’s Biggest Science Shows, Ian Shepherd for Forbes.com (republished by Yahoo), June 2026
Cleo Abram Is on the 2026 TIME100 Creators List, TIME, July 2026
The Biggest Launch Since ChatGPT (Muse), Cleo Abram on YouTube, October 2026
Huge If True official website, October 2026
Cleo Abram, Wikipedia, October 2026

What to do next

Apply Cleo Abram’s test to the creators you follow or hire: is there a clear mission, and does each video have a reason to be a video? Our list of top tech YouTubers is a good place to compare.

For more answers to the same questions from other creators, browse our creator interviews, including our Veritasium interview with Derek Muller. If you want to fund your own show the way she does, start with our guide to getting YouTube sponsorships.

Frequently asked questions

How did Cleo Abram get famous?: Cleo Abram learned video at Vox, where she directed episodes of Explained on Netflix and hosted the YouTube Originals series Glad You Asked. In January 2022 she left to launch Huge If True, an optimistic YouTube show about science and technology. Close to a million TikTok followers gave her a head start, and she had passed a million YouTube subscribers by August 2023. By July 2026, TIME reported nearly 8.3 million.
Who is Cleo Abram?: Cleo Abram, full name Cleo Constantine Abram, is an American video journalist and YouTuber born on January 25, 1993, in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Columbia University in 2015 and worked at Vox for about five years before founding her company, HUGE, in 2022. She hosts Huge If True, an optimistic science and technology show, and Huge Conversations, long interviews with leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Sam Altman.
What is Huge If True?: Huge If True is Cleo Abram’s YouTube show about science and technology, launched in January 2022 after she left Vox. Each episode is a deep dive into a technology or scientific achievement that explains how it works and how it might play out, from an optimistic point of view. Abram has said she won’t make a topic that isn’t inherently visual. In April 2026 she said each episode takes several hundred hours over several months.
What is Cleo Abram’s advice for new creators?: Cleo Abram told Washington Post Creator in April 2026 that the most important thing is to know why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you have to say; the format and platform come after the mission. She has also said that early on she tried to fit the whole video into the title and thumbnail, and that relaxing helped. At a 2023 creator roundtable she said the moment she thinks she has made it is when she would start to get complacent.
What brands has Cleo Abram worked with?: Cleo Abram funds Huge If True with sponsorships, which she told Washington Post Creator in April 2026 are her only revenue stream. Partners have included Storyblocks and Masterworks in 2022, LEGO, a series of Nike Shorts and a Microsoft integration in an episode on the LIGO detector. In 2025 McLaren’s Formula E team announced her as a guest driver for Formula E’s Evo Sessions. She says ads must be clearly marked and only say true things.
What is Cleo Abram doing in 2026?: As of October 2026, Cleo Abram is publishing Huge If True episodes, including a May episode filmed in Antarctica, and Huge Conversations interviews with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in April and Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang in October. TIME named her to its TIME100 Creators list in July 2026. She signed with the talent agency UTA in December 2025, and her company, HUGE, had a team of seven as of April 2026.

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Written by Joanna Finch, editor of Topfluencers. Spot a mistake? Email corrections@topfluencers.co and we’ll fix it within 48 hours.