Henry Reich completed his Master’s at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is now the founder and owner of Neptune Studios, the production company behind a number of science YouTube channels, including MinutePhysics.
Perimeter Institute alumni have gone on to a wide variety of roles after leaving the Institute. After proving that science YouTube channels could be successful with MinutePhysics, Henry Reich is now the executive producer behind a number of other science YouTube channels that have inspired students to pursue careers in STEM. We reached out to Henry to learn more about his journey.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What is your current role, and how are you trying to push boundaries in your field?
I am the founder, owner and executive producer at Neptune Studios, a small production company (our team is about a dozen people) that makes the YouTube channels MinutePhysics, MinuteEarth, MinuteFood, xkcd’s What If? and various satellite channels, translations, books, interactive websites, etc.
In my videos I always seek to achieve explanatory innovation and full use of the visual medium, and to be true and honest to the science. Nobel laureates have said things about my work like “this is an amazing summary of 20 years of work in three minutes,” and simultaneously, elementary school students are sending us fan mail! My goal is to make complex ideas accessible both intellectually and socially, meaning the videos feel friendly and don’t intimidate the audience, and yet are faithful representations of the underlying work. I was one of the earliest successful science YouTube channels and my work showed others that a science YouTube channel is a viable professional career. I have helped organize various conferences to bring together science/educational YouTube channels, and mentored or advised many YouTube creators who have gone on to incredibly successful careers (some more successful than my own, at least by the metric of number of subscribers or views!).
What brought you to where you are now?
I think there are three crucial ingredients to the trajectory of my life:
First, I was the lucky recipient of a family upbringing that was incredibly curious and open-minded, yet simultaneously skeptical, analytical, and seeking accuracy. My father is an ecology researcher, my mother and grandparents naturalists and science communicators. Our days were full of inquiry, pursuit of wonder and truth, and photography (both taking pictures, and critiquing them!).
The second ingredient was an undergraduate liberal arts education. I was able to engage in a wide breadth of interests, from physics and pure math to linguistics, music composition, creative writing, photography, and so on, while also pursuing extracurriculars like running, folk music performance, and short filmmaking.
Third, Perimeter Scholars International (PSI). The breadth and intensity of material we covered and the focus on modern and cutting-edge research gave me at least superficial familiarity with an incredibly wide range of physics and math topics; there’s no way a traditional PhD course would have exposed me to so many different subject areas! Little did I know that this would be the perfect groundwork for making popular science videos about physics.
Together, these three elements set the stage for me to move to Los Angeles, pursue filmmaking, accidentally luck into a job with an early action-comedy YouTube channel (where I learned all about YouTube), and then combine everything into the project – MinutePhysics – that has been my career for the last 15 years.
What are you passionate about?
I struggle mightily with too many interests! I am a competitive cross-country skier (I competed for University of Waterloo while I was a PSI student and won “all-OUA” honours) and trail runner. I am the president of the board of a nonprofit that manages around 70 km of groomed Nordic ski trails in and around Missoula, MT, and I lead nordic ski clinics. I play fiddle in a bluegrass band that performs at guest ranches around Montana. I have a wildlife biometrician spouse with whom I have co-authored biology papers and am raising two small children… In short, I am passionate about the outdoors, endurance athletics, helping get people outside to enjoy the winter, music, family, good food, and winter. Did I mention I love winter?
How has your work impacted your industry and community?
The simple answer here is that MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth videos have been collectively viewed over a billion times… the complex answer is the many, many students who have written to me saying that my videos got them interested in physics and now they’re finishing high school/undergrad/PhD/etc! Or the many other YouTube creators who were inspired (at least in part) by my videos to start their own YouTube science/math channels.
On top of that, I’ve helped organize some of the key conferences that have brought together YouTube science communicators (including the BrainSTEM conference at Perimeter in 2012 and ThinkerCon in 2018 and 2023). Is there any way I can know how many people studied physics because of my YouTube channel? How many went and saw a total solar eclipse because of my videos about eclipses? Or how many lives were saved by my videos about the efficacy of masking during the height of the COVID pandemic?
How do you give back to your community?
I have trained or mentored many of the writers and illustrators on the Neptune Studios team, and we regularly have all-team “art and craft” sessions where we discuss approaches and techniques in effective science communication. Many of these sessions have led to public-facing information sharing, including conference talks and videos, etc.
I’ve given conference talks and led workshops on the craft of visual science communication.
I’ve directly advised or mentored a number of educational/science YouTube channels in the early days of their YouTube careers on aspects of science communication or how to run a sustainable youtube business, including: SmarterEveryDay (engineering/science, ~12M subscribers), Veritasium (science, ~18M subscribers), 3Blue1Brown (math, ~7M subscribers), 12Tone (music theory, 750k subscribers), and PracticalEngineering (~4M subscribers).
And lest I forget… the entire body of my work and my company’s work is intended to communicate science to the general public! As I mentioned above, our videos have been viewed over a billion times; translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, etc; and we have collaborated on many NSF grants, and worked with the Swiss National Science Foundation, Heising Simons Foundation, US Census Bureau, NASA, Perimeter Institute, Google, Airbus, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, Gates Foundation, etc.