hiskeyd

This being my job and all, if I don't say, it's about guaranteed someone will say "Today YOU found out" to me if they say something I didn't know. This happens a lot. ;-)

"How many email submissions do you get per day? Do you respond to the email submissions you see? Is email still the best way to submit ideas? "

It can vary greatly. But no we don't respond to every email as it would take too much time away from producing content (though we usually do read them all). We also have someone who catalogues any questions (from anywhere, not just email) for later review for approval or not. Once approved, these go to a massive spreadsheet that authors can pick from as they please. I've found it's generally best to let authors pick the topics they're interested in, as that tends to increase the quality of the final product. These are a lot of work, so researching things an author isn't interested in is sure to suck the life out of the piece.

"Who owns the TodayIFoundOut company?" I (Daven) own TodayIFoundOut.com. Simon and I co-own the TodayIFoundOut youtube channel.

"Will either Daven or Simon be at Vidcon this year?" We'll both be at VidCon Amsterdam in March. Not sure about the California one. :-)

"I love the Brainfood Podcast, I can't wait for more of them." That's great to hear. :-) We're both very interested to hear people's thoughts on the first episode.

I can also attest to armchair experts being the worst. Beyond usually being wrong and intractable in their opinions regardless of evidence to the contrary, they are also quite often very rude about it. Actual experts, beyond usually being right, are also almost always really polite and excited that you're covering something in their field.

We have a really detailed overview of our process we did in our hour and a half or so "How It's Made" video. But to sum up the pertinent part, the original writer/researcher spends however long needed deeply researching a given topic and related interesting things. They then write the piece and send it to me (Daven) for approval. I then read through the piece, then read through all their sources. After that, I completely re-research the piece myself looking for any discrepancies (and taking the time to resolve them) or additional interesting information. Once that's done, I make any edits I deem needed, adding or subtracting information and polishing up the writing, and then publish the piece on the website and often send it out on the Daily Knowledge newsletter which goes out to about 50K-ish people.

It's rare that there are any errors (though everyone makes mistakes from time to time- there are no exceptions to this rule), but if we do, they are usually pointed out by someone on the website or newsletter. (Cunningham's Law is a real help on this front. :-)) This provides a small extra boost in accuracy before we spend all the money and time to convert it to more permanent video form.

But even then, mistakes occasionally happen. It's impossible to be 100% accurate on anything, no matter how hard one tries. No one has ever achieved this. We just try really, really hard. :-)

My favorite video we've done is that can shaking video. :-) I love those type of topics where the answer isn't definitively known so we get to do a little original research whether conducting an experiment ourselves or doing an ultra-deep dive into old newspaper archives or the like to try to find an answer to a question nobody else seems to have been able to answer. (I also love it when the questions trend towards the absurd, like "How Many Hamsters Would It Take to Power the United States?" which is one we're currently working on and have been for ages. That's a surprisingly hard question to answer accurately. These are super fun to research. :-))

As you say though, these ones take just massive amounts of time and resources, so we presently can't do them nearly as often as we like. But we're trying to do more of these going forward investing any extra funds available towards them. Hopefully at some point the money will be there to do them extremely frequently. :-)