Sam Denby: Wendover Productions, Jet Lag, and Nebula at the Oxford Union | Edited Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability, with verbal fillers and repeated caption text removed while preserving the substance and order of the conversation.

00:06Welcome and Jet Lag at Oxford

Host: Hello, everyone. I hope you're all doing well. Thank you for coming. Please welcome the one and only Sam Denby of Wendover Productions and Jet Lag: The Game. Let's bring our hands together.

Interviewer: How are you doing today, Sam?

Sam Denby: Good. This is definitely the nicest room I feel like I've ever talked in. I feel like you probably get that a lot, but you know, it's gorgeous. Anytime I normally talk, it's at a conference in a convention center—kind of the polar opposite of this, but yeah.

Interviewer: Well, as you can see by some of the hats, we've got some big Jet Lag fans here. And we have a very active society here at Oxford.

Sam Denby: I've heard.

Interviewer: We've been locked in a very intense debate over the proper formatting of our name and figured who better to ask than the founder of Jet Lag himself. Should it be Jet Lag: Oxford or Jet Lag: The Oxford?

Sam Denby: I think The Oxford.

Interviewer: The Oxford it is.

Sam Denby: Yeah, it doesn't really make full sense, but I don't care. I think it fits better. I like it.

Interviewer: Jet Lag: The Oxford it is. Take notes!

01:28Eleven Years of Wendover Productions

Interviewer: Okay, moving into the main prepared questions. September marks 11 years since you released your first video on Wendover Productions, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that you've come a very long way since then. Obviously, the video process is a lot more complex than it was back then—you've got a whole team around you. It's pretty easy to spot the differences, and I'm sure you've talked about this at length, but what I'm curious about is: what isn't different? What are you doing the same now that you were still doing in September of 2015?

Sam Denby: Well, I mean, the main channel—in some ways it's no longer the main channel, but Wendover, which our entire company is named after, is the first channel. I've just been making a video every two weeks on that for, I guess, close to 11 years now, which is the entirety of my adult life. So in some ways, that has just become reality, where every two weeks I'm always writing about some new subject. As you can imagine, there are only so many things to talk about, but somehow I find more.

Sam Denby: Wait, the question was about what hasn't changed? Man, I just keep thinking of all the things that have changed! What also hasn't changed, in some ways... I remember my friend Brian from Real Engineering—he's been on the show, so you probably know Brian if you watch Jet Lag—he was just tweeting about the fact that the educational space on YouTube has remained surprisingly static. Not necessarily in a bad way, but you see Hank Green, Vsauce, and Veritasium—they're making stuff in different ways, but they're still making stuff.

Sam Denby: So actually, I guess my answer—I didn't think I was going this way, but now I'll make it seem like I planned it—is that the fact that I'm still making videos is kind of surprising to me. The fact that I'm still a YouTuber as part of my many jobs is in itself surprising, because there were times when I thought this was going to be a two- or three-year gig. Not necessarily because I didn't want it to be a longer-term thing, but just because I couldn't believe the economics would sustain it.

04:01Finding Topics Without a Fixed System

Interviewer: Gotcha. You once made a clip about not always knowing what you're going to do next for Wendover. That's actually one of the things I had written down: how do you come up with topics for it? I know some are current events and some are personal interests.

Sam Denby: Yeah, honestly, it's a good question. It's one that I get a lot, but it's one that I never have a good answer to because every single time, I think, "There's no way I'm going to come up with a new one." And then it's truly shower thoughts. It's truly like, "Oh, here's something on the radio." I listen to a lot of NPR—NPR is awesome in the US. I'll hear something on the radio that gets me thinking about a topic.

Sam Denby: The other thing is, I have no system. I wish I had a system; it would make my job a lot easier. Sometimes I'll sit down at my desk because the deadline is approaching and I have to decide, and I'll try to force myself to come up with something new to talk about, but it just doesn't work that way. I wish it did, because it means that sometimes I put myself in a huge crunch to write something because I started late. Oftentimes, something's going on in the world that is worth explaining, and even if it's not directly what's in the news, there's some background context worth exploring. For example, recently, it was worth knowing about global oil logistics because that's been relevant.

05:31Half as Interesting and Building a Team

Interviewer: Yeah, I suppose it has. As for Half as Interesting, if my understanding is correct, it started off as TWL on Wendover. Other than now having the freedom to make short-form videos on stuff that isn't on the Wikipedia Unusual Articles list, what made you decide to take TWL off of Wendover and turn it into its own thing?

Sam Denby: Yeah, so TWL, as you referenced—basically, there's this great Wikipedia page called "Wikipedia: Unusual articles," and it's just a list of links to articles, a lot of which are interesting. Very early on in making videos on Wendover, I thought, "What if we made a series where we covered each of these topics?" It went really well, so we spun it off.

Sam Denby: A lot of the motivation was actually to build a team. I wanted to grow from being an independent YouTuber into starting a bit of a company, mostly because there are a lot of parts of the video-making process that I am not good at. For example, post-production—the entirety of it. My brain just does not mesh with editing software, especially motion graphics like Adobe After Effects and stuff like that.

Sam Denby: From the very get-go, I just wanted to get rid of that responsibility because I hated it. That meant I had to hire people. To hire people, I needed to have more revenue. To get more revenue, I needed to make more videos. And to make more videos, I needed to hire a team. So it kind of became a virtuous cycle—or a vicious cycle, depending on your view of it.

Sam Denby: And now, we're 560 videos later on Half as Interesting, which is insane. The fact that we've released at least a video a week—there was even a period when we did 1.5 videos a week by doing one video one week and two the next—and they're decently involved to make... The fact that we've made 560-some of them is, to me, kind of inconceivable.

07:40Returning to Writing Half as Interesting

Interviewer: Do you miss writing them? I know you still do a couple, but mostly Ben, Adam, and Amy—the outside correspondent turned Jet Lag guest star—have picked up most of those.

Sam Denby: It was an interesting experiment in regards to this question recently. Until recently, I had not written a single Half as Interesting script for three or four years. The primary writers are Ben, who you probably know from Jet Lag, and Amy, who you might also know from Jet Lag. You'll get to know her a lot more on Jet Lag soon because she is the guest on our next season that's coming out soon from the US.

Sam Denby: Their primary responsibilities were writing for that channel, but both of them have gotten a lot better at their jobs and taken on a lot more responsibility. They're starting to do more and more. Amy, especially, is showrunning a lot of our Nebula Originals, which basically meant that they don't have time to write for Half as Interesting as much anymore.

Sam Denby: That's a problem I'm very happy with, but one that I also created. So that means I have subbed in more often recently and written scripts. I actually really like writing them. They're so much fun because you can be a little bit unhinged. For me, I still write Wendover scripts, which is much more time-intensive. Probably about half of my working time goes to writing those scripts across a two-week cycle, so they're very involved. Whereas with Half as Interesting, I'll write those in a day or a day and a half, just learning something new or writing about something I already know. It feels so effortless in comparison. So yeah, they're a lot of fun.

09:25Pitching Ideas and Working With the Algorithm

Interviewer: As a bit of a follow-up, how does the writers' room for Half as Interesting work? Do you guys just sit around a table and spitball ideas for a few hours, or do you independently say, "I want to do this, I want to do that"?

Sam Denby: What I like about that compared to Wendover is that I don't usually have to come up with the topics, because that's Ben and Adam's responsibility. We get on calls every couple of weeks and basically plan out future videos. They come and pitch ideas, and we get into arguments about why they will or will not work.

Sam Denby: In some ways, we don't have a boss; in some ways we do, and the boss is the YouTube algorithm. If we don't listen to our boss, the algorithm, we don't make money, and therefore we can't make videos anymore. So we have to appease the algorithm. For us and many YouTubers, that means we have about a 70% accurate view of how the algorithm works. We are mostly right, but we are also often wrong, because nobody truly knows. In fact, even the people who run the algorithm at YouTube do not know, because it uses machine learning to tweak itself—at least, that's what they've explained to me. So no one fully knows how the algorithm works, or what will appease it and what will not.

Sam Denby: We go around and argue about whether we think a topic will appease the algorithm. Because we're mostly, but almost certainly not entirely, right, these discussions go in circles until hopefully we reach some sort of consensus. My worst nightmare is when it gets to the point where they're just like, "You've got to decide because you're in charge." I don't like that, because then it's entirely on me whether I'm right or not. But yeah, we do that, and then it's pretty much an individual writing process, maybe with some small notes at the end from me.

11:27Designing Jet Lag Around Taiwan's Geography

Interviewer: Gotcha. Segueing over to Jet Lag, which I think is what drew a lot of people to your content: there are staple formats like Tag and Hide and Seek. I've played Hide and Seek a couple of times—great fun. I could ask you a million questions about those seasons, but I'm a bit more curious about the others, like Rail Rush, The Game Showdown, Arctic Escape, and now the Taiwan season. What does the process of designing those games look like compared to something that's pretty easy to recreate, like Tag or Hide and Seek?

Sam Denby: Yeah, it's a ton harder. It's really nice when we do a repeat format because we don't have to design a new game. Designing a new game is very stressful and very time-intensive, because it can go right or it can go wrong. I think it's truly the kind of thing where the quality and effort of the work we put into it leads directly to that success or failure—which sucks when you have to work hard to do good things! I hate that.

Sam Denby: We actually just got this question in the small group session we did before this, so I'll rehash some of that. To give you an idea of the timeline, we started designing the season that is releasing now, the Taiwan Rail Rush, all the way back in August of 2023. Uniquely that time, the first thing we decided on was that we wanted to go to Taiwan. We were learning about it, and it looked so cool.

Sam Denby: However, it has a unique transit and rail map. It's not a big island, and it has a very circular network because there are big mountains in the middle. Fun fact: the tallest peak in Taiwan is higher than the tallest peak in Japan. Everyone knows Mount Fuji, right? But you probably don't know the tallest mountain in Taiwan—or maybe you do. Does anyone in the audience know it?

Sam Denby: Wow, nobody. Okay. I forget its name too, but it looks cool and I want to climb it!

Sam Denby: That's why there are no trains in the middle; there's very little population there. That network is really hard for us because it means it's essentially linear. You can more or less just go clockwise or counterclockwise, up or down. It doesn't offer the kind of optionality we normally look for, because a simple decision of "Do we go left or do we go right?" isn't inherently interesting.

Sam Denby: So we had to create a game that took advantage of that restricted geography. I won't go into detail about all the tiny intricacies of the game because that would take forever, and you can listen to podcast episodes about that. But it took a lot of time to figure out a format we thought could work there.

Sam Denby: One thing we often notice in game design—I think Ben just tweeted about this—is that we keep reinventing games that we eventually realize don't work. You know how in evolutionary biology everything eventually evolves into a crab? Carcinisation, or whatever that scientific principle is—I don't know, I studied history, look it up. Well, we keep designing games that just turn into Snake.

14:49Game Concepts, Incentives, and Playtesting

Sam Denby: Looking back on Snake, it was the format we were least happy with in retrospect. We think there were some flaws with it; there was some stuff we got wrong in the game design. But for some reason, during the design process, we keep landing on similar formats that don't work. I think there are elements of it that sound interesting in theory, but aren't when you put them into practice.

Sam Denby: We often end up in similar rabbit holes of ideas that we've discussed before, but which we ultimately realize don't fully work. So that takes some time. We work our way through those rabbit holes, and then we finally land on more or less the broad shape of a concept.

Sam Denby: At a certain point, we reach what we often refer to as our "go/no-go" time with a concept. Usually, we're discussing a shortlist of two or three concepts, typically with one front-runner, and we have to decide: are we going to do the in-depth game design for this? From our perspective, there's a huge difference between broad-strokes game design—where we're just talking about a general idea, like playing hide-and-seek along a country's border—and actually putting together the rule set with the right incentives to make things balanced and functional.

Sam Denby: Eventually, we might decide, "Yes, we're going to pursue this." Other times, we decide we don't have enough confidence that we'll come out the other end with something that works, so we spend a little more time on the broad-strokes phase.

Sam Denby: Once we're in detailed game design, it's all about playtesting. It's always a case where the first 95% is easy, and the last 5% is the difficult bit. That last 5% of rules must ensure that players, acting purely in their own individual best interests, will respond to the other team—who are also acting in their own best interests—in a way that makes the overall game both function and be entertaining.

Sam Denby: I think that's the hardest problem to solve, because we firmly believe that once we're on camera, we are purely players. We aren't nudging things behind the scenes to make them play out the way we want them to, because as soon as the audience senses we're doing that, it becomes uninteresting. Getting to that point takes a lot of time. It's often a series of compromises where we realize that to make it work, we have to abandon a principle we thought would be really cool.

Sam Denby: Once we work through that, we get to playtesting, which we do virtually using spreadsheets, Google timetable data, and so on. Then we go film it, and after that comes post-production. Post is a massive part of the process, though not necessarily the most interesting to talk about because it's the standard work of editing, motion graphics, sound design, and all that.

18:01Returning Guests and Production Workflows

Interviewer: A lot of folks, myself included, were really excited to see former guest winners return—spoiler for those of you who haven't watched all 16 and a half seasons of Jet Lag—with Toby, Michelle, and Brian back for Tag All-Stars. Are there any plans to bring back the guests who didn't win their seasons—Joseph, Scotty, Tom Scott—for a second-chance season or something along those lines?

Sam Denby: I would never say no, but I also would never say yes.

Interviewer: I see. Plausible deniability!

Sam Denby: I can't give exclusive spoilers! Look, if there weren't cameras here, I'd tell you all because I'd trust you, but there are cameras. I can't be leaking spoilers to everyone.

Interviewer: Worth a try! Have you learned anything from filming and producing Jet Lag that you've been able to apply to Wendover or Half as Interesting?

Sam Denby: I think the biggest takeaway, just by nature of its scale, is that Jet Lag has forced us to get much better at our internal processes. I know you all came here to hear me talk about workflows! We love workflows—Notion, Slack, timekeeping software, all that stuff.

Sam Denby: Joking aside, this really is a major thing. There are about 20 to 25 people working on any given season of Jet Lag, between post-production personnel, internal staff, and contractors. That's a lot of people to coordinate. Some are full-time, some are near full-time, and some do just a few hours of composing, graphic design, or similar tasks. Coordinating all of that is a huge challenge. Luckily, I don't have to handle most of that personally, as post-production is managed by our fantastic post-production supervisors.

Sam Denby: It has really demonstrated the value of structured systems, which I was initially quite reluctant to embrace because I naturally dislike following rigid rules and workflows. In the long run, it proved completely worthwhile. It also taught us the value of forward planning. With our other channels, it's very easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day, making it hard to prioritize long-term planning. But on Jet Lag, long-term planning is essential. It proved its worth, and in many ways, it turned us into a proper company rather than just a loose collection of creatives throwing things together. That's the boring but honest answer.

20:50Why Creators Built Nebula

Interviewer: Speaking of companies, we've all heard the Nebula ad reads: a creator-built platform where you post videos the YouTube algorithm might not favor, offering better revenue. What I'm more curious about is what isn't in the ad read: the behind-the-scenes story of how Nebula came to be, and where you see its future heading. (That reminds me, I need to upgrade my subscription to a lifetime tier; I've been paying annually since Tag Season 3, and my bank account hates me for it.)

Sam Denby: Nebula originally started out as a talent management agency. My involvement began even before that, when I was one of the very first clients of Dave Wiskus, who went on to found the company and develop it into something much larger. As a talent agency, the focus was primarily on booking sponsorships and providing management services for creators. There are plenty of agencies out there—many of them quite bad—but the difference with ours was that it grew largely through word of mouth, initially specializing in the educational genre. Because of that, many of the clients already knew one another socially, which fostered a close community.

Sam Denby: And I think what that meant was that we were much more prepared for collective action. In this case, the collective action was that we got together and thought it'd be cool to start our own streaming service.

Sam Denby: There are certain elements of YouTube that are frustrating sometimes. A lot of it comes down to policy stuff. I think a lot of people get frustrated about YouTube creator policies, how they're sometimes applied unfairly, and all that. That is undoubtedly frustrating. I think I take a slightly more sympathetic view of it than most people, just because running the world's largest streaming service is so difficult. Having policies that can moderate the millions of hours of content uploaded daily is a massive challenge, so I think that, on balance, they do a pretty good job.

Sam Denby: It’s less about that side of things and more that the ad-supported business model of video has some quite perverse incentives. There's simply no way around the fact that it's all about chasing clicks. The ad revenue comes in immediately when someone watches a video, so the incentive, first and foremost, is to get someone to click.

Sam Denby: YouTube has made some successful interventions by rewarding watch time, retention, and viewer satisfaction. But at the end of the day, the balance is still skewed towards getting the click. What that means is you get clickbait and you get optimized video lengths—15 or 20 minutes just happens to be the length the average viewer comes onto YouTube for, and therefore it tends to be the most effective for retention and watch time.

Sam Denby: Through all the systems the algorithm uses, it really incentivizes a certain type of video. Kind of like the evolution discussion we had earlier, it leads to an evolution toward a fairly narrow set of formats. Obviously, there's plenty of diversity within that, and I think that's a lot of what makes YouTube good. But what it does not strongly incentivize is investing in production quality. The difference-maker for audiences these days isn't fine-tuned production quality when you're chasing clicks. People click on a video based on the concept, and they generally stick around based on that concept. To a certain extent, it's about the narrative execution of the concept rather than the visual execution or technical prowess. You don't tend to get a lot of very high-production-value stuff because of that business model, and it doesn't optimize for long-term satisfaction.

Sam Denby: The idea with Nebula is that with a paywalled system, our incentive is to keep subscribers around. They're paying $2.50 or $3 a month, or maybe they bought a lifetime subscription, and we want to keep them because we make revenue based on continually giving them stuff they want to watch.

Sam Denby: The company has now been around for about seven years, but I think there's still a long roadmap ahead to achieve our full ambitions. Through the original content we produce now—and especially our long-term ambitions for it—the focus is really on creating higher-production-value, higher-budget content that will keep people subscribed. We found that the business model works, but we chose not to take significant outside investment because we wanted to maintain control of the company. That means our growth is incremental. It has followed a really good long-term growth trend, allowing for more ambitious content, but it is steady growth that accumulates over time. It has reached a very interesting place recently, but there's still a long way to go.

26:39Private Equity and Creator Exit Strategies

Interviewer: We've got one more question before we move on to audience Q&A. There's been a lot of discussion lately about private equity firms buying up major YouTube channels—such as Mentour Pilot, MatPat's Theory channels, Fern, and others. As a creator, how do you feel about this new trend, and does that ethos play a role in what you and the other creators on Nebula are trying to accomplish?

Sam Denby: Yeah. I thought you might ask this question, but I didn't fully think through an answer!

Sam Denby: It's a very interesting trend. Let me see if I can connect a few thoughts. For anyone who isn't super familiar, essentially, more and more YouTube channels are being purchased outright, or having stakes acquired, by private equity-backed startups. Sometimes it's directly through private equity firms, and sometimes it's companies creating a portfolio of channels funded by private equity.

Sam Denby: When I first heard about this, I thought there was no way the business model would survive long-term. It was originally positioned to creators as an exit strategy: "Sell your YouTube channel, we'll run it, and you can ride off into the sunset with a lot of money." That's a very compelling pitch because, prior to this, people didn't really value YouTube channels as traditional businesses. There wasn't an off-ramp; you just did it until you stopped, and all the value you created vanished into thin air.

Sam Denby: For most people, getting any payout to walk away was attractive. A lot of YouTubers work unsustainably because they view it as a five-year hustle: "I'm young, I'll hustle and make good money now, and then I'll stop, get some work-life balance, and move on to another career." So the prospect of cashing out was appealing, and many creators took those deals.

Sam Denby: I believe there were a lot of failures with those early investments simply because running a YouTube channel is really finicky. A creator typically has an intuitive, nuanced understanding of what their audience wants. I have a very smart team working at my company, but it took them a long time to understand the nuances of what appeals to our audience and what doesn't. In some cases, it took years to achieve a high hit rate with topic selection, writing, and everything else.

30:00Veritasium, Sponsorships, and Acquisition Economics

Sam Denby: The idea that an outside company can come in, immediately replace the team, and have success—I didn't see any way that would work, and in a lot of cases, it hasn't. So, from what I know more recently, this has shifted toward sales with some form of golden handcuffs.

Sam Denby: I'm not completely up to date, but I know one of the high-profile examples was the sale of Veritasium, one of the largest educational channels on YouTube. How that worked was that the founder of the channel stayed around in a limited capacity over time. He gradually worked fewer and fewer hours, and I believe he might not be that involved anymore—I don't know for sure, but essentially it was a structured off-ramp.

Sam Denby: It actually seemed quite successful, largely because I think the company that ran that deal, Electrify, has been one of the smarter ones in the space, at least in terms of their success. They built a team of people with solid credentials and great writers who worked with Derek to put together a genuine business. So they were able to pull it off.

Sam Denby: That said, the channel has fundamentally changed. In the past, it produced a limited number of videos with really high view counts. It has since shifted to a higher-frequency model with potentially lower view counts per video, but that frequency is probably what supports the business model.

Sam Denby: What I'll say about the industry at large—and this isn't necessarily a comment on Veritasium or Electrify specifically—is that a lot of these firms seem to have access to blue-chip sponsors on YouTube. These are traditional advertisers, the kind you would typically see on TV or working through traditional ad agencies. They pay a significantly higher rate than the sponsors you more commonly see on YouTube, like website builders, Audible, or Nebula.

Sam Denby: That's because they're often running brand-awareness campaigns rather than conversion campaigns. Most of YouTube relies on conversion campaigns, which track click-through rates and sign-ups, demanding a direct return on investment. Blue-chip sponsors, on the other hand, are often running awareness campaigns much more akin to traditional television advertising, where they're just aiming for reach.

Sam Denby: For example, they are trying to get brand awareness for Tide, American Express, or whatever. In a lot of cases, they're initially evaluating campaigns based on TV numbers or print media. However, it's not as hard to get a million eyeballs on YouTube as it is on broadcast. So, they come in and see, "Wow, this is a lot cheaper." They'll pay a lot for these spots in YouTube terms, but very little compared to what they're used to.

Sam Denby: What that basically means is, for a while, they're able to access really high-value sponsorships through the connections of these private equity firms, who have access to marketing agencies and things like that. I think this can prop up the business model for a time, but eventually, the numbers catch up. An eyeball on YouTube is not worth the same as an eyeball on TV; it just does not convert the same way for an advertiser. So, the numbers catch up, the sponsors dry up because they're not seeing performance, and the business model fails.

Sam Denby: I think that's likely what has been happening to a lot of these investments, especially since it's been a pretty weak ad market on YouTube in recent years. Therefore, I don't see that business model having long-term sustainability.

Sam Denby: In terms of the creators—my last thought is on them—I haven't followed this that closely, so I don't really know what public sentiment has been toward the creators who have taken these deals. But if you put yourself in their shoes, I get emails about these offers almost every single day. I know the numbers; they're really compelling. It might not necessarily be "retire now" money, but it's pretty life-changing. It's hard to ask a creator to turn that down purely on principle, even if it feels icky to sell your creative work to private equity. I don't think anyone is excited about doing that, but there's a dollar price on most people's morality for these sorts of things.

Sam Denby: So, I don't necessarily blame the creators, as long as they're going about it in an honest way—making sure they reward the teams that built the channels with them, and making sure that they're setting their team up for long-term success and all that.

36:02Sustainable Careers and Games People Can Play at Home

Sam Denby: I have gotten quite a few of these offers, and they have been compelling. But it’s not something I've been interested in, because I actually like my job. The key for me has been creating a sustainable job—one that I can do perpetually.

Interviewer: Gotcha. Well, we'll open the floor to any questions. Don't be shy; raise your hands. We'll go with the guy in the red—Aneirin, president of Jet Lag: Oxford. Jet Lag: The Oxford, sorry. Can't believe I got it wrong. Yes, Aneirin. Stand up so we can see you.

Audience Member 1: You talked about the idea generation stage of Jet Lag and how you would adapt to the scale of the show in an entire country. Do you find there are many ideas you have to reject because they wouldn't work on a smaller season scale, but perhaps could work on a bigger scale?

Sam Denby: That's not something that has come up that much. Normally, I think we're just more used to working at the larger scale. It's actually the inverse that has come up more often, where we've tried to come up with formats that could be more compatible with everyday play. We know that most people who want to play this game themselves don't have time to do a Europe-wide game over five days.

Sam Denby: So, more often, we've tried to think about what the next thing like Hide and Seek could be—where we can play the same game that others could play, and then potentially sell a home version. That's been challenging. It really comes down to compatibility: how do you make a game that can work everywhere, or at least almost everywhere? It's really challenging because everywhere works differently.

Sam Denby: Hide and Seek works pretty well, but it's not the kind of game you'd expect a major board game manufacturer to make, because it requires a little bit more DIY effort. We've certainly tried to come up with that kind of thing more often. We would especially love to make one that is even easier to play right out of the box than Hide and Seek. That's not to say it's impossible, but the city scale has traditionally been more challenging.

38:32Choosing Projects and Delegating Production

Interviewer: I've been told we unfortunately only have time for one more question. So I'm going to go with the guy who just raised his hand in the Seahawks shirt or sweater. Ah, the microphone—good idea.

Audience Member 2: I have one very brief question, which is brief but very important. Sam, are we back?

Sam Denby: So back.

Audience Member 2: We are so back. Thank you. My question is about hats—and not just these wonderful hats you can buy at store.nebula.tv. It's about all the many hats that you wear between Nebula, Jet Lag, HAI, Wendover, and even things exclusively on Nebula such as The Getaway, is it? How do you choose to invest your time, essentially? What makes you choose to actually go forward with a project? You talked a bit about how the workflows work, but I'm more interested in the sort of creative ideation process—how you choose what to pursue alongside juggling all of the things you already do, if that makes sense.

Sam Denby: Yeah. The long-term trajectory of my job has basically been moving earlier and earlier into the process. I think video making is really just creative mass manufacturing. If you think of it as an assembly line, my responsibilities have moved earlier and earlier up that line.

Sam Denby: At first, I did everything. Then I offloaded post-production. More recently, I'm not necessarily the one writing all the scripts or handling the full production phase. Pre-production is the phase where you put the pieces together for the project, and that phase is really most of my job right now. For every other phase, it's been relatively easy to find people who are very talented at executing it, allowing you to hand off a project for them to take forward.

Sam Denby: That means there are now other people who handle those parts. Sometimes, there are even cases where others handle pre-production too. For example, Ben and Adam do a lot of the more operational day-to-day tasks in pre-production and development for Jet Lag.

Sam Denby: So, for Jet Lag, my biggest point of involvement is that very earliest stage, where we literally get on a Zoom call—or sometimes sit in the same room—and just try to come up with the core premise of what we're doing.

Sam Denby: I like to believe that this is one of the biggest difference-maker phases in a project, especially on an algorithmic video platform like YouTube, where the concept really is everything. I believe it's both the place where the most value is gained or lost, and something where I've simply had a lot of practice. It's not a skill that a lot of people have extensive experience with, because most people haven't made 800-odd videos on YouTube over the years. I've had a lot of successes and failures with coming up with concepts, seeing how they work, and learning from that. So, I tend to think it's the part where I have the most experience and can provide the most value.

41:44Closing

Interviewer: Okay. I really wish we had time for more audience questions. Unfortunately, I've been told to wrap it up, but I have one more thing to ask: how are you feeling, Sam?

Sam Denby: So jet-lagged.

Interviewer: He said the thing! Thank you very much.

Sam Denby: Thank you.