Cleo Abram

Abram grew up in Washington, D.C., after the September 11 attacks, surrounded by friends and family who worked in or near government; both of her parents were lawyers. She enjoyed science classes in high school and started on a pre-med track when she went to college in New York, later shifting toward law school and a career in politics, and at one point wanted to study the Middle East and considered joining the Foreign Service. She has said she eventually asked herself who gets to think about broad, interesting problems without working in politics, and one answer was journalism.⁠[1][2][1][1][2][2]

After college Abram spent a year at Precision, a digital consulting firm spun out of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. A regular reader of Vox’s explanatory journalism, she had no journalism experience but persuaded Vox to hire her on the business side as “the lowest level person in the development world,” pitching shows to streamers and helping build new products such as the Today, Explained podcast and the Future Perfect vertical.⁠[1][1][1][3]

When Vox sold Explained to Netflix in 2018, Abram realized that her development job on the show was done once it sold, and that she wanted to make shows herself. Keeping her day job, she took night classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York to learn editing in Premiere and animation in After EffectsAdobe After EffectsAdobe After Effects is Adobe’s desktop software for motion graphics, compositing and visual effects. It was developed by CoSA, a start-up in Providence, Rhode Island, which released version 1.0 in January 1993; it became an Adobe product after Aldus acquired CoSA and Aldus merged into Adobe, and in 2019 its principal developers received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Open the full entry, and edited videos for Vox’s YouTube channel on nights and weekends. When the show sought pitches for its second season she wrote four over one weekend, and Netflix greenlit Diamonds; Vox then let her, though not formally a video producer, produce it. She went on to write and direct the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Explained, and says that decision made the rest of her career.⁠[1][3][1][3][3][3][4]

On October 8, 2019, Glad You Asked, a Vox show made with YouTube Originals, premiered, with Abram hosting its first episode, “Will We Survive Mars?”; it was her first on-camera role. The team received a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2020, and in the second season, which aired in 2021, she remained one of five hosts. She was also host and senior producer of Vox’s first daily show, Answered; her Vox work covered technology and economics topics such as deepfakes, online ad tracking and nuclear plant closures.⁠[5][5][1][6][4][7][7][7]

At the end of 2021 Abram left Vox after five years; on her last day, Vox’s flagship channel reached 10 million subscribers. She has said her media diet was full of journalism exposing technology’s risks and abuses and of Black Mirror-style dystopias, so she wanted to make a technology show that was “rigorous and contextual but also genuinely optimistic.” On January 10, 2022, she announced the YouTube show Huge If True across her social channels, opening with the video “Why I Left Vox,” and the same year founded the media company HUGE. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian encouraged her decision to go independent and appeared in her February episode about Web3.⁠[1][1][3][3][1][8][9][1][1]

Early episodes covered clean energy, digital art and satellite internet, and by early April 2022 the YouTube channel was nearing 100,000 subscribers while her TikTok account passed 1 million followers. Her first video to reach a million views was an explainer about Elon Musk building Starlink. On April 14 she released “Would you use an artificial womb? (I would),” which explored artificial wombs while documenting her own laparoscopic surgery for ovarian cysts; the channel gained more than 50,000 subscribers in the following three weeks.⁠[1][1][8][1][1][1]

On April 22, 2023, Abram joined independent video journalists including Johnny Harris on the “New voices in journalism: YouTube creator panel” at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, sharing their experience of making news content on YouTube. Huge If True then had more than 1.5 million subscribers and 40 million views.⁠[10][10][10]

Abram launched the interview series Huge Conversations, interviewing technology figures such as Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. The show states that interviewees do not see questions in advance, have no editorial control, neither pay nor are paid by HUGE, and do not see the episode before publication. By June 2024 her YouTube channel had grown to almost two million subscribers within a year.⁠[11][4][12]

On February 24, 2025, the NEOM McLaren Formula E Team announced that Abram would appear as a guest driver in its GEN3 Evo car at Formula E’s “Evo Sessions” at the Miami International Autodrome on March 5–6, coached by driver Sam Bird. She called it a rare chance to go beyond reporting on technology and live it. She then had more than 8 million subscribers across platforms.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

In March 2025 the official YouTube blog published an interview with her. She said being a journalist is an action you take every day, and that she is a journalist not because she worked at a media company but because she does journalism; she set four constraints for the show: a deep dive into a technology or scientific achievement that will matter in the future, a real explanation of how it works and might play out, a genuinely optimistic approach, and no topics that are not inherently visual. She has tried on and pressurized NASA’s new spacesuit to complete a series of challenges, seeing herself as a proxy for the audience.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

On June 13, 2025, Semafor’s media podcast Mixed Signals interviewed Abram, noting that three years after leaving Vox her channel had grown to nearly 6 million subscribers and that she had become one of the most important tech journalists in the world; the conversation covered why she started an optimistic show in an age of pessimism, getting space-sick in zero gravity, and how she navigates conversations with tech titans such as Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.⁠[13][13]

In December 2025 Abram, described as an Emmy-nominated digital content creator, signed with the talent agency UTA, which was to help expand the HUGE brand across brand partnerships, content development and syndication, and explore original content, events and consumer products. She then had about 7 million YouTube followers and, since founding HUGE in 2022, more than 11 million subscribers and 3 billion lifetime views across platforms; her popular videos include “What if I fell into a black hole?” and an episode on a robot that kills weeds with lasers, and her interviewees include Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Jensen Huang.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9]

On October 7, 2026, Abram released the Huge Conversations episode “The Biggest Launch Since ChatGPT (Muse),” in which she spoke with Meta AI chief Alexandr WangAlexandr WangAlexandr Wang is an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Scale AI. He joined Meta in June 2025 as the company’s first chief AI officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. His work spans AI training data, model evaluation, government applications, and personal agents.Open the full entry about Muse, the AI agent built by him and his team at Meta, along with personal data privacy, AI regulation and “personal superintelligence.” The same month she released short videos on the Nobel Prize in Physics, a wave of math papers, a newly described cat species and the ozone layer.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

Abram believes journalists often favor negative stories about new technology because they are easier to tell and people like to read them; while acknowledging that new technologies can bring serious problems, she invites viewers to replace “What could go wrong?” with “What could go right?” She has said that seeing young people on TikTok say they did not want children because the world would get worse motivated her to try to ease that feeling in her own way. The show describes itself as “an optimistic show about using science and technology to make the future better,” made in the belief that when people see better futures, they help build them.⁠[12][12][1][1][14]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CleoAbram (opens in a new window)⁠[15][4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/cleoabram (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Huge If True: Official website: https://hugeiftrue.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]