Space Careers: Brady Haran

Brady, could share your childhood interests and your background before you started YouTube?

I grew up in Australia, in Adelaide. My childhood interests were pretty typical – I was always really into space, Lego, Star Wars. I also got a real fascination with Apollo quite young, because my dad was always fascinated by the Apollo Moon landings and I think I got that from him. And that’s carried through until today. I’m real Apollo-obsessive. But I was also really into sport and all the usual things an Australian boy would be into. But I quite liked the science-y and maths-y things and found science and math very easy at school.

I always wanted to be a journalist, a newspaper journalist. Partly because that was what my dad did, and maybe you don’t see much past what your dad does. But that was my dream and that’s what I became.

I did one year of university but after that year got accepted into a cadet programme at the big newspaper in Adelaide, so I left university and became a journalist. I was a newspaper journalist in Adelaide for about seven years, and I worked in different areas of journalism. Towards the end I was getting quite into science journalism, but I was a bit of an everything-journalist.

And then I moved to the UK. I started working for the BBC – their website, at first, but then they moved me into more television and filmmaking because they wanted me to make videos. Then, with all these new video skills I had and my interest in science, I started a few little side projects, making videos about science with the University of Nottingham (because I was living in Nottingham by this point). I started a few YouTube channels when YouTube wasn’t that big of a thing. And they really blew up, then YouTube blew up. I found myself with really popular YouTube channels and then I just transitioned into making YouTube videos about science-y, geeky things full-time.

And how many subscribers do you have now?

Across all the channels, there’s just over 11 million subscribers, 1.4 billion views, and 4,795 videos.

Is it cool, being able to interview people at the forefront of science?

It’s amazing. An amazing privilege. And yeah, it still excites me, and I feel really, really fortunate.

It has also spoilt me a little bit. Now, sometimes, if I go to a public lecture and I’m sitting in the back I find it frustrating that I can’t ask all my questions! Or if I go to a museum just as a guest, I can’t believe I’m not getting to touch things. But I’m really, really grateful for the opportunities that have come about as a result of [my career]. I feel honoured and really lucky.

The people from the Nobel [Institute] have always seen the videos and liked them, and last year they invited me to the Nobel Prize ceremony and I went along to the dinner and everything. It was really, really amazing.

It’s cool because there are these things that have all this mystique around them, like Nobel prizes, and always seem like a magical, fairy-tale thing. So to actually go there and see what it looks like...makes things seem more amazing.

Like the Large Hadron Collider – you always hear about it, then to go there and go inside it and see it and smell it and touch it. Things like that are really cool.

Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot about physics and space from these years of interviewing people?

Yes, of course. But I have also probably forgotten stuff.

I always think it’s really important to play the fool a little bit. I’m interviewing people for various reasons and I think it helps with the video. It helps the audience. It makes the person I’m interviewing feel more comfortable. But it does sometimes happen that I’ll be interviewing someone and I’ll be asking my dumb questions, and at the end of the interview I’ll put my camera down and then I’ll say I’ve got a few more questions. And I’ll ask really complicated stuff.

Do you have any advice for people who may want to go into science journalism?

One piece of advice I give to people making videos is to keep making more videos. A lot of people come up to me and they’ve had one idea or one video they’ve made, and they’re disappointed it hasn’t become successful and been watched a million times. They’re like, “what can I do to make people watch my video?” I always think that’s really the wrong way to attack the problem. The thing is, once you’ve made a video, go on to make the next one. And once you’ve made that one, go on to make the next one. And then after that, go on to make the next one. Forget about the ones that came before, because if you keep making new content – whether it’s videos or you’re a writer or you’re doing a podcast – you’ll get better at it the more you do it. And secondly, you become a bigger target to be found.

If you make one video that doesn’t get watched many times, you think you’ve failed and you become dispirited, but everyone at the start isn’t being watched a lot. The important thing is not to stew over your success. If you’re all about making the stuff, I think that’s a good sign you’re going to be successful. My other advice is to make sure you have good sound. People will forgive a slightly dodgy video if they can hear what’s being said and it sounds good. Don’t record next to a lawnmower.