Why Business Insider's former editor went all in on evergreen video
With Dynamo, Nicholas Carlson is building a library of prestige content designed to appreciate in value over time.
When economist Christopher Clarke uploaded his first TikTok video in 2021, the platform wasn’t exactly known for academic rigor. At the time, its For You page was still dominated by the dance and lip-sync clips that had fueled the app’s explosive rise.
Clarke also didn’t have much experience producing video, but as an economics professor who often taught entry-level courses, he’d grown adept at distilling complex concepts for a classroom full of bored freshmen. At the time, he worked at the University of Houston and believed, because his salary was funded by taxpayers, that his teaching duties extended beyond his students. “I think it’s just imperative as part of the scholarship creation process that we try to communicate brand new knowledge to the general public in the best way possible,” he told me recently. “I saw there was a huge hole on TikTok; no economists at the time were making consistent, high quality content.”
Clarke’s first several videos focused on explaining basic finance topics like short selling and stock market bubbles. Eventually, he realized they would perform better if each one had a “hook,” which in his case was usually some kind of public figure saying something completely wrong about the economy. “There is an audience for an expert going in and debunking videos,” he said. In late 2021, a lawyer posted a TikTok video claiming that most of the country’s economic growth came from the Biden Administration’s pause on student loan repayments, and Clarke quickly pounced, rattling off several figures that showed student loans were just a small drop in the bucket compared to Biden’s overall stimulus package. It became his first truly viral video, racking up over 100,000 likes.
As Clarke’s channel grew, he started improving the production values of his videos. “You buy a better phone with a better camera and a microphone,” he said. “I can’t believe I went as long as I did without a microphone.” TikTok’s own editing tools improved too—the biggest breakthrough being the addition of auto captioning. Clarke started devoting more time to writing scripts, which slowed his posting frequency but significantly improved the quality of each video. At the same time, the platform itself was evolving, as simple dance clips gave way to more complex storytelling. “More academics got on there, more and more people talking about real things,” he said. “So the audience matured, or it got broader.”
In September of 2024, Clarke was watching the movie Shrek with his family and became fixated on a detail that was probably lost on most of its young audience. “I’m like, wait a second. This is a fantasy film that has farms. It’s a key to the plot. You never see farms in fantasy movies, but like 90% of people were farmers in the Middle Ages.” This led to him uploading a video about the Lord of the Rings movies and how they completely got the agrarian economies of the pre-modern era wrong. It’s not until the half-way point when he gets to his revelation about Shrek, and he now credits that delayed twist as the key to its success. “The video went mega viral.”
One of its viewers was Nicholas Carlson, who had recently stepped down from his role as the top editor at Business Insider and raised money to launch Dynamo, a media startup that would devote all its efforts into creating evergreen, highly-produced videos on business-related topics. He was on the lookout for potential hosts who would be responsible for pitching, writing, and narrating its videos, which would primarily be distributed on YouTube. Clarke’s Shrek video, in his view, embodied the Dynamo ethos. “I saw someone with great economics knowledge and an incredible communication style,” Carlson told me. “And he was doing what we wanted the show to do: help people understand how the world works through topics that already fascinate them.”
Carlson reached out to Clarke and, after an initial introductory phone call, put him in touch with Joe Posner, who had spent the better part of a decade building Vox’s YouTube channel into an explanatory journalism behemoth. Posner had signed on as a behind-the-scenes advisor for Dynamo, and he set about helping Clarke come up with a compelling angle for a video. “I was really excited because you could tell immediately from his TikTok that he writes to visuals,” he told me. “That’s not true for many writers, but for him it clearly was second nature.”