Name: Why I Left Veritasium
Uploaded: 2026-02-24T21:32:05.000Z
Duration: 13 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I was the first full time writer director that Derek hired for veritasium.

Adverbs of degree

Between September 2020 and January 2025, I wrote and directed so many videos that I am so proud of.

During my time at Veritasium, I flew in a helicopter while Adam Savage, one of my childhood heroes, flung pennies at my boss.

I got completely soaked in the world's largest rainfall simulator in Japan.

I stayed awake for 28 hours straight, shoveling charcoal and iron sand, smelting iron, which ended up inside of a katana.

This is step one of making a Japanese sword.

I've had so many incredible experiences from working on Veritasium.

It was so much work, it was so stressful.

Most importantly, I got to make what I think is some pretty great art with some incredible people who I am so lucky to call my friends.

I learned how to be a science communicator from one of the greatest of all time.

I got to share some incredible stories with tens of millions of people.

With all of you, I couldn't be more grateful.

All I wanted to do with my professional life was to make videos and tell stories about science.

And in January 2025, I made the very hard decision to leave Veritasium.

If there was, I would most certainly milk it for views, but there's genuinely nothing here.

I was in Portugal for his wedding last year.

I'm also friends with Emily, who just started her own channel, and it's really, really good.

And with Casper and Gregor and Henry and Sully and Peter and Fabio and Jakob and so many other wonderful humans who still work at Veritasium.

I miss working with them and I'm really proud to see their ongoing success.

Having more science communication than the world is a good thing, and Veritasium is a very good thing.

I feel very grateful to have joined the channel at 7 million subscribers and to leave at 17 seeing a change from a tiny team of two or three to a team of more than 20 full time employees.

To go through those structural changes and the expansion of the business, all of this has been invaluable to me.

I've spent years delaying starting my own channel, wanting to learn as much as I could about the art of science communication.

I just wanted to be the best science communicator that I could be.

I was gonna start a channel when I was 22, when I finished up my undergrad in physics.

But I ended up doing a PhD in physics education research instead to learn how to make better science communication videos with the same research supervisor as Derek.

And I was going to start a channel towards the end of my PhD, but

Derek reached out and asked if I wanted to write something with him.

And of course I said Y, which turned into this job.

I spent the last decade training up to be a science communicator and making stuff for other people.

You might even find my terrible attempts on the Internet without much searching, but

But before we get to that, I want to share three things that I learned at Veritasium that made me a much better science communicator.

The first is that there's a difference between a story and a topic.

Your job is to tell stories that illuminate topics.

Geochemistry is a topic and it's kind of boring, but

you can tell a story that focuses on the guy who tried to measure the age of the earth by comparing the ratio of uranium to lead in ancient rocks, but

kept getting the wrong number because of lead contamination.

Leading him to invent the modern day clean room and go on a decade long crusade to get lead additives banned.

And the amount of science that you can explain where you're telling the story is staggering.

Also, this story ties into another story that's much darker.

It turns out that the same guy who put lead in Gasoline also invented CFCs which have wrecked the ozone layer.

40 million people stuck around to watch that story and they learned a bunch of science along the way.

The second thing I learned is that as a science communicator, your job is to go deeper to explain things in ways people haven't heard before.

To find facts that people haven't found to find mistakes and misconceptions and find better ways of moving people towards the truth.

I found a mistake while I was working on the first video that I wrote for the channel about how Kodak exposed nuclear testing.

There was a mistake in all of the reporting, including in the testimony that was given by a Senator in the 90s.

They said that the film was photo film, but it was X ray film.

They said that it was packed with wheat husks, but it was actually packed with strawboard.

And it felt so good to find it and to fix it and make a video that set the record straight.

The video is now the definitive artifact about that topic, and it doesn't have that mistake.

I'm not saying that I haven't gotten things wrong.

But I really do aspire to bring people the truth, and going deeper is part of that.

A lot of the time the detail won't be something that anyone would even notice, but

There is an animation in the universe's hostile to computers, where a cosmic ray flips one of the bits inside the guidance system of an A330, causing the plane to nosedive.

I wanted to make sure that we showed the right bit being flipped.

So I spent hours looking through the manual and doing calculations to make sure it was the right one.

The animation was on screen for maybe four seconds.

Likely no one noticed, but I noticed, and I'm proud that I put in that work.