Two years ago, you did a video about artificial wombs. How does your storytelling differ from a traditional media company?
I had seen a big controversy on Twitter because people were talking about artificial wombs and in the context of that conversation on Twitter, it felt very matrix-y and people reacted very negatively to the idea. But from my perspective even looking at that controversy, I am a woman who hasn't had kids yet. I also don't want the Matrix, but I would love technology that makes this process easier for half the population. How would that work? What is going on with that category of tech now?
So I started researching this video and I decided to do it as a sort of exploration, recording myself as I learned new things. What I discovered was there are many different kinds of technology along the process of gestation. There's technology that helps support IVF really early on and there’s technology that helps save premature babies. So we're helping along each part of the spectrum here. It just so happened that during this process of learning about artificial wombs, I began to have a pretty severe pain in my abdomen and I went to the doctor and they told me that I had two cysts on my left ovary that was causing what's called ovarian torsion. I needed to have a minor surgery to correct that and it was kind of scary. I was going through this procedure to in some part help protect my future fertility while I was simultaneously doing journalism about how technology can help fertility and I was getting a laparoscopic surgery which is a technology assisted surgery that has progressed rapidly in the last few decades.
As I was going through that whole process I was like, I can't not include this. But at a larger media company, I wouldn’t necessarily have been free to tell a mixed kind of story. So what I ended up doing was I talked about the science of artificial wombs and I also talked about my experience of needing technology to help protect my fertility. There are lots of episodes where I am maybe tonally a little bit more YouTube but I am acting in the way that that a correspondent might very well act. The other point that I think is really important is yes, there are lots of different things that YouTubers and independent journalists can do that traditional media companies won’t but the quality of journalism being done on YouTube could easily be on TV.