Huge If True

Cleo Abram starts with fracking, the controversial technique for cracking deep rock to release oil and gas, and asks whether it pollutes water. So what could this very method possibly have to do with clean energy?

Metformin is an old, cheap diabetes drug – and now some wealthy people are taking it in hopes of living longer. Cleo Abram talks to Dr. Nir Barzilai, who leads the biggest study on it: can a pill that costs pennies really slow down aging?

Why can't you just screenshot an NFT? Cleo Abram looks for the answer not in blockchain tech but in the strange art market that came before it, starting with a fight at an art auction in 1973. What can the art world reveal about why a JPEG could cost money at all?

Elon Musk tweets that Starlink is now available in Ukraine – but if internet in space is the big new thing, where was it before? The Huge If True host digs into how the internet travels through cables under the ocean today and why Musk, Bezos and Branson are racing to move it into orbit – so what's really driving this new space race?

The host of Huge If True wonders whether we've been thinking about energy all wrong: for decades the message has been "conserve, or terrible things will happen" – but what if climate communication could run on hope instead of fear? With help from her former Vox colleague Matt Yglesias, she asks what the carrot, not the stick, might look like for clean energy.

Cleo Abram digs into how close researchers actually are to artificial wombs, and why the topic sparks such heated debate, from sci-fi fears to hopes for safer pregnancies. She starts out genuinely conflicted: would you use one?

Thor is an eight-year-old Australian Shepherd, likely already halfway through his life, while the Huge If True host is only about a third through hers. She digs into dog and human aging research, meets Celine Halioua of the company Loyal, and asks: what could actually help dogs live longer?

Formula 1 is exploding in popularity in the US, and Huge If True breaks down the basics of this wildly expensive sport for rookies. But why pour so much money and brainpower into entertainment – is F1 really just a car race?

In this episode of Huge If True, the host visits Living Carbon's lab and greenhouse, where researchers are gene-editing trees to capture more CO2, and talks with CEO Maddie Hall and CTO Patrick Mellor. How do you even edit a tree's genes, and should we actually plant these super trees?

Cleo Abram looks at the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope – and her favorite is the least beautiful one: the spectrum of the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-96b, more than 1,000 light years away. How could a picture like that help answer the biggest question of all: are we alone?

The host of Huge If True had grown cynical about self-driving cars – until she saw Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt hail a taxi and a car with nobody inside pull up. She heads to San Francisco to dig into the question: are self-driving cars finally here, and what does that future actually look like?

Cleo and her friend Justin, a designer and animator on Huge If True, have been trading DALL·E 2 creations for weeks – and Cleo notices Justin's are way better than hers. Here you'll see how AI image generators work and why they're so controversial: does AI level the playing field, or does it hand real artists superpowers?

Cleo Abram wants to know what's really behind the nuclear fusion hype – and after grilling the CEO of Helion, she teams up with Simone Giertz to try building a fusion device themselves. Can two friends really recreate the power of the sun in a workshop?

For Huge If True, Cleo Abram visits electric plane company Beta, convinced that heavy batteries keep electric aircraft grounded for years to come. Here you'll see why better batteries might change aviation – so what will the planes of the future actually look like?

Cleo Abram and fellow YouTuber Simone Giertz set out to build a nuclear fusion device in Simone's workshop, supervised by experts from Helion. Along the way you'll learn how fusion actually works – but can a build like this really come to life outside a big lab?

More and more of the cars we drive are going electric, but Formula 1's aren't – a real problem for a sport built on big companies showcasing cutting-edge tech. Enter Formula E, the all-electric alternative: so what exactly is it, and could it get to the future of racing before F1 does?

Why do so many people get cancer today, and why are we no longer searching for a single cure but fighting hundreds of diseases at once? Cleo starts with endless questions about what cancer really is – so where could we be saving the most lives?

Cleo Abram and Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) realize they don't really understand quantum computers, so the two set out to learn what these machines actually do. You get to follow along as they start from the basics – what's really behind qubits, superposition and all the hype?

Nuclear waste is seen as one of the biggest roadblocks for nuclear power – but what if we could do more than store it and actually turn it into electricity? Huge If True heads to Argonne National Laboratory to ask why a technology for this, developed decades ago, was left behind.

Oregon and Colorado have opened the door to psilocybin for therapeutic use, yet it's still illegal under US federal law – Cleo Abram digs into the debate over psychedelics, starting with what they actually are and how they work. Are psychedelics the next weed, and would that be a good thing?

Cleo Abram and Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) head to ZeroSpace Studios in New York to test three movie-making technologies behind today's ultra-realistic sci-fi worlds, from motion capture to the future of green screen. Could these tools soon be in the hands of everyday storytellers?

Some say AI could end humanity, others call it "more profound than fire" – Cleo Abram sets out to pin down what those extreme futures would actually look like, with help from a former Google CEO. So how, specifically, could AI hurt us – or change our lives for the better?

At the 2023 US Open, a system called Hawkeye is replacing human line calls, and soccer, basketball and baseball are handing more and more decisions to machines. This episode looks at how the robot ref takeover began. Is the technology making sports fairer, or is it ruining the game?

On Google Maps the ocean floor looks well charted – yet we know less about it than about the surface of Mars. Why are our ocean maps so bad when we lay internet cables and search for the missing down there?

AI can clone voices, invent fake collaborations and generate full tracks from a few typed words – in this episode of Huge If True, the host digs into what that means for musicians, talking with artist Grimes and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. So when should artists get paid in a world full of AI music?

The Huge If True host visits Boston Dynamics to challenge Atlas, the famous parkour-performing robot, to a friendly human-versus-machine competition. Behind the viral clips, what can a humanoid robot actually do right now?

The Concorde once flew from New York to London in three and a half hours – then supersonic planes vanished from the skies. This episode of Huge If True digs into why and visits NASA's experimental X-59: could faster-than-sound travel really make a comeback?

You might know Spot, Boston Dynamics' robot dog, from viral videos – but now it's out doing real work, from factories to Fukushima. The Huge If True team visits Boston Dynamics to find out what Spot can really do, and why robot dogs exist at all.

Cleo and Marques (MKBHD) strap on the Apple Vision Pro – not for a product review, but to ask what this kind of tech is really for. If the Macintosh and iPhone each unlocked a new era, what might this device unlock?

For the host of Huge If True, Formula 1 is less a race than a massive group science competition, and she gets rare access to a factory in England where the cars are built and a garage in Bahrain where they race. You'll see what an F1 car looks like, which rules shape it and where old cars end up – but what actually makes them so fast?

More than 100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border, particles race through a 27-kilometer tunnel at nearly the speed of light – a machine that took thousands of scientists from almost 100 countries, $5 billion, and 30 years to build. So why go to all that trouble just to smash tiny particles together?

No one has walked on the moon in over 50 years, and lunar spacesuits haven't been updated in decades. At Axiom Space, the host becomes one of the first civilians to step into NASA's new suit – so what can it actually do, and what does it feel like inside?

Cleo Abram has been taking medication for two weeks to freeze her own eggs, and she takes viewers behind the scenes while digging into why egg freezing is so popular and what egg quantity and quality really mean. How does this "cryosleep for cells" actually work, and is the demanding process worth it?

Swimsuits, gloves, bats and running shoes that make athletes too good: this episode of Huge If True dives into "tech doping" – gear that can give an unfair advantage. But if nobody runs barefoot anymore, where exactly is the line?

The world's population is rising, and experts are already talking about a "Fourth Agricultural Revolution" – Cleo Abram sets out to understand it, heading to a place where new farming tech gets tested. How do we feed billions more people without harming the planet?

In a record-breaking election year, Cleo wonders why she can't just cast her vote with a tap on her phone, and calls up voting and security experts to find out. If online banking works, what makes voting so different?

In the 1970s the USSR started drilling a hole deeper than the deepest point of the ocean – but what lies beyond if you just kept digging? This Huge If True episode sets off on a journey toward Earth's core: what would be waiting down there?

Cleo has loved dinosaurs since she was a kid, but it turns out much of what she thought she knew is outdated or simply wrong. Joining the team at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum and the Pipestone Creek Bonebed, she sets out to ask: what were dinosaurs really like, and how big were they, really?

Cleo Abram goes behind the scenes at Walt Disney Imagineering, where Disney brings its craziest ideas to life – from adorable little droids to a remarkably realistic lightsaber. How does this tech actually work, and what happens when it's put to the test?

Cleo wants to know what would really happen if someone fell into a black hole, so she calls up her favorite physicist, Dr. Brian Cox, for the latest research. How do we even find these giants, what do they look like, and what lies past the point where supposedly nothing can escape?

Cleo Abram joins the European Space Agency on a real zero gravity flight to dig into one of the most controversial subjects in physics: what actually is gravity? And why does she say it's a lie?

Cleo Abram gets behind the wheel of the world's first "space truck," headed to the Moon for NASA, and brings in YouTube daredevil Michelle Khare to put it through five challenges. What can this vehicle actually do, and how do you even drive on the Moon?

The Tasmanian tiger was declared extinct in 1982 – now scientists are trying to bring it back, with mammoths, dodos and more in the headlines too. Cleo Abram digs into what "de-extinction" really means: are we getting this whole conversation wrong?

Cleo Abram plays out a fictional scenario: it's 2034 and a mountain-sized asteroid is on a collision course with Earth – and with former NASA engineer Mark Rober, she explores the real science and tech we'd rely on. But how would we even spot it, and what could humanity actually do?

In the middle of the desert sit two 4-kilometer concrete tubes where lasers bounce between some of the smoothest mirrors ever made, and Cleo Abram takes you inside the most precise experiment humans have built. But what are scientists hunting for that was once thought impossible to find?

Cleo Abram gets rare access inside a lab that grows diamonds, setting out to show they're far more than jewelry or drill bits. What trillion-dollar problem could a diamond possibly help solve?

Off the coast of Sicily, a forest of floating spheres sits in the deep ocean while a computer hidden in an abandoned winery watches and waits. What are these machines hunting for, and how do you catch the most elusive particle in physics?

In 1985, scientists found a massive hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica – so why has hardly anyone heard about it lately? This Huge If True episode heads toward the frozen continent to ask: what's really happening to the ozone hole?

Cleo Abram takes you on a journey into the Sun, where the very first layer is hot enough to make diamonds boil. But is our star really just a giant ball of fire, or is something stranger going on?