There is the past, the present and the future. You can explain what happened in the past or explain your predictions for future but or present you have to share your experience of what is happening in this moment. So, content can be either explanation or exploration
You are either sitting in a room talking about something or you have a camera pointed at you sharing your current experience.
You are either reading a script about World War 2 or making a vlog of you in the mountains.
There are hybrid patterns like investigative journalism videos like Johnny Harris makes or videos like Tom Scott where he goes to the place and explains what’s up with it. So videos are a combination of explanation and exploration.
A good video would come where the TAM is big enough for the explanations or explorations you are doing. Along with that it would be cherry on top if all the attention you garner funnels down into some product.
You gotta be able to express explanations and capture your experiences in a captivating way so that a brand can trust you with showing their products in a variable light as well as conveying the information effectively.
So you get two fundamental creator abilities:
Make distant things understandable.
Make immediate things experienceable.
A talking-head essay primarily depends on explanation. A vlog primarily depends on exploration. But many of the strongest formats combine them.
Johnny Harris explores locations, documents and people, then uses explanation to impose meaning on what he found.
Tom Scott physically reaches an unusual place, gives the audience the feeling of discovery, and then explains why that place matters.
A product reviewer explores the product through actual use and explains the mechanism behind their experience.
A founder documents what is happening inside the company and explains the strategic decisions being made.
The exploration gives the explanation proof, texture and spectacle. The explanation gives the exploration structure and significance. Without exploration, the creator can feel detached from reality. Without explanation, the footage can feel like an unprocessed diary.
You can make a brilliant explanation of something nobody currently cares about. You can also capture a beautiful experience that few viewers desire or identify with. The explanation or exploration needs to connect to a sufficiently large existing appetite: AI, beauty, travel, ambition, money, conflict, transformation, status, identity or another large cultural reservoir.