For Fun And For Profit: CityNerd

Today we’re sitting down with Ray Delahanty to talk about his process and what gives him passion making videos as CityNerd!

Links

• CityNerd YouTube channel
• CityNerd blog
• Video: Is Minneapolis Too Nice for Its Own Good?
• Oh The Urbanity! guesting on Streets.mn Podcast
• Alan Fisher YouTube channel

Attributions

Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.

This episode was produced by Parker Seaman aka Strongthany, was edited by Stina Neel, and was hosted and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Ray Delahanty for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ray: The way this works is I wake up every morning, like literally seven days a week. And the first thing I want to do when I wake up is work on whatever YouTube project I’m working on. So that makes it extremely different from any job I’ve ever had in my life.

[00:00:13] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. It’s time for another episode of For Fun and For Profit, the series where our producer, Parker Seaman, invites urbanist content creators to chat with us about their process. This week we have Ray Delahanty, better known as CityNerd, who recently published a video that can really only be described as a love letter to Minneapolis. Let’s jump in as Parker makes Ray say some words.

[00:00:52] Parker: We have with us today CityNerd. Want to say hi real quick?

[00:00:55] Ray: Hey everybody. Glad to be here.

[00:00:59] Parker: To make you say some more words. For those unfamiliar with your work, tell us a bit more about yourself and what you like to do in your channel.

[00:01:07] Ray: Yeah, so I started my channel. I think I uploaded the first video in July of 2021 and I wasn’t too aware at that point of like the urbanism movement or whatever, which I don’t think was nearly as high profile as it is now anyway. But I wasn’t too aware of other creators on YouTube who did anything in that niche. I did come across like Alan Fisher and I think the Oh, the Urbanity folks up in Montreal were making videos and Reese Martin was making transit videos up in Toronto. I didn’t even see the Not Just Bikes channel before I started. That ended up being like a bigger channel than the ones that had been watching. So I just kind of did my own thing. I had a bunch of ideas about things I wanted to talk about that came up during my kind of past career as a transportation and planning consultant. And there were things that would never come up in one of my projects that I thought I would blog about at some point. And then during the pandemic I started watching YouTube and thinking, “oh yeah, the ideas I have are much better told visually and YouTube might be a good format for that.” And so I just started making YouTube videos about things I was interested in. So like high speed rail and transit and walkability and like how affordable urbanism, what have you. Yeah, and it kind of took off pretty quickly.

[00:02:36] Ian: So the phrase that you’ve got on your website is something like, “who knew that there was an audience for urbanist content wrapped in a hard to access dry sense of humor,” or something like that.

[00:02:52] Ray: Yeah, I don’t know. I think the first few videos I made, like my sense of humor kind of snuck into them a little bit. I wasn’t really thinking about it. And then when I read the comments on the videos, clearly there were a lot of people who were responding to, yeah, like my dry humor, which is something that I’ve kind of always had. And so I kind of leaned into that a little more, probably starting just a couple of months into the channel. And that’s kind of been just part of my writing process ever since, just to make sure, I don’t know, just to not be afraid to kind of share my interior monologue.

[00:03:36] Ian: So yeah, how did the channel and whatever social media presence you also have alongside it, how did it get to this point? How quickly did it grow?

[00:03:46] Ray: It was pretty steady. I think, yeah, I uploaded my first video in July of 2021. I’d gone on a sabbatical from my job. I went to Mexico for like four months. I think I had made the first three or four or five videos back home in Portland. And when I crossed the border into Mexico, basically at the end of August 2021, I hit 100 subscribers that day. I remember actually being on a bus going down the Pacific coast in Baja California Norte and kind of refreshing to see if I could hit 100 subscribers. I hit 100 and I was like, oh, cool. By the time I left Mexico, I had like 11,000. That was like four months later. And there was like one point, and I’m not sure exactly which video it was, but I kind of exploded from like 1,000 to 5,000 in I think like about a week. And it was around Halloween, I think. And that was kind of the moment where I thought, oh, well, first of all, I met the monetization criteria at that point. And then second of all, I was like, “wow, there’s something here. And like, I might not be going back to my regular job.”

[00:05:06] Parker: And yeah, you are now at 413k at time of recording.

[00:05:12] Ray: Yeah. Yeah, that’s been kind of I think it’s I think it’s flattened a little bit. But it’s been kind of like 100,000 a year. So like, I’ve been going for, I guess, about five years now. So yeah, it’s like around 100,000 a year, like growth.

[00:05:29] Ian: Awesome. Is the I feel like there’s nobody more obsessed with like looking at their YouTube Studio numbers than somebody who has about 100 subscribers, right? You know, like when you’re when you’re super duper small, you’re like every view, every view matters. Everything counts. Does that obsession fade over time? Or are you still kind of like refreshing things, you know, every day to see like how are things going?

[00:05:58] Ray: Yeah, it does. It does fade over time. Because I would say for the first couple of years, like I would check in almost like hourly, not quite, but I would kind of just keep track and see if there were changes in the number of subscribers I was gaining or what was changing in my views. And part of that is because because I mostly release a new video every week. And so I do kind of try to stay on top of like what’s working and what isn’t and kind of diagnosing it. I’m a lot more chill about that now. I’m kind of used to the experience of not everything you make is going to like do big numbers or whatever. Like I jump around to too many different kinds of topics, which is good for me, I think, as far as like my mental health. But it’s not always great for my audience, I think. So sometimes I’ll make a video that I’m not sure how it’s going to do. And it’ll do really well. And sometimes I make a video that’s kind of out of left field and it just won’t perform at all. And I’m just kind of comfortable with that now. And I try not to worry too much about day to day or even a week to week metrics.

[00:07:05] Ian: Okay, so you said that like your previous job kind of, you know, set you up with the baseline of like what kinds of things you wanted to talk about on the channel. You know, can you talk about like what kind of city planning, you know, like what kinds of projects you were doing at that time and where that disconnect was with like, “oh, these are the things that I actually want to be talking about.”

[00:07:33] Ray: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I would say like the things I was working on, like literally at the time I quit and I actually did quit because I decided, yeah, I’ll probably have to go back to work. But I think I want to be doing something different if and when I go back to work. And it was more, I think, more the kind of psychological mental drain of being a consultant that just kind of wore me out. More so than the actual projects I was working on because the actual projects I was working on were pretty cool. I only had two at the time, but the one that was taking up like 75% of my time was, it’s a bus rapid transit project in Portland that opened, I want to say, like I think it actually ended up opening at the end of 2021. It’s called FX2, division rapid transit. And I was leading the consultant team’s design work during construction, which is a very specific kind of hectic workflow. There are literally people working on constructing the project out in the field. And you’ve got your final plans in or whatever that are just the best of your knowledge of what’s underground, all of the information that you have from the city and utility companies. But nevertheless, and I’m sure this happens in the Twin Cities too, right? The construction contractors get out in the field and they start digging and then they run into something. It’s like, “oh yeah, we didn’t know this is here and we have to redesign. We have to do like a minor or major redesign to like a bus stop because we can’t put the elements where we thought they were going to go.” And so-

[00:09:19] Ian: Yeah. I mean, you’re naming like almost all of those challenges with the Southwest light rail transit, the Green Line extension.

[00:09:25] Parker: I was going to say there is a couple of different alignments that they’re going to do for how it goes through. And they decided to have a tunnel underneath the section of it. And then as soon as that tunnel was put into or started working on it, they just kept finding issue after issue.

[00:09:40] Ray: Yeah. So that was kind of my world for, I don’t know, about a year leading up to me quitting. And it was tough because I actually liked the team I was working with, the folks at the city of Portland and TriMet or our transit agency here. And a lot of those are working on like the next BRT project now. Yeah. So it’s a little bittersweet, but yeah, like I just, it was more, it was more the, I don’t know, like just kind of the disruptive flow and kind of disconnected rhythm of working on a consulting project like that. When I just really wanted to work on ideas by myself without an enormous team of people oversee or clients, like giving you feedback or whatever. It’s kind of the magic of what I do now. It’s like, I literally don’t have anybody working for me and I’m not accountable to anybody except for my audience, which is exactly how I like it.

[00:10:41] Parker: Yeah. But before you settle on putting, like continuing with the channel and like when you’re, you’re dipping your toes into it and getting started with it, what were you hoping for or shooting for in terms of a next kind of role? Because like you said, you’re getting burned out at the, the kind of work at the last position. Were you hoping for YouTube to be the thing or was there something else you had in mind?

[00:11:06] Ray: I had no expectation that YouTube would- I actually went on sabbatical starting at the end of March of 2021. And so between March and July, when I uploaded my first video, like YouTube was probably like the third or fourth thing I was working on. I’ve got, I’ve got other like hobbies and projects that I probably don’t really talk about. Like I write, I do, I do different kinds of writing projects and I was dealing with some other stuff too. So I had no expectation that YouTube was going to end up being a thing at all. But I did commit that, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to make, I’m going to learn how to make a video and I’m going to promise myself that I’m going to make like 10 videos for 10 weeks. I’ll basically make videos like while I’m in Mexico. And I followed through on that. So it took me, it took me months to kind of learn how to make the first video I ever made because I had to learn like the editing software and try to figure out how to film and what the workflow was. And I didn’t have it dialed in at all. Like I don’t do things the way I did that video at all anymore, even though that video ended up doing, I think that video has like 200,000 views now or something like my very first video. But.

[00:12:24] Ian: Is that because people like go back and, you know, look, look through like the whole archive or is it still getting like suggested by the algorithm for some reason?

[00:12:31] Ray: I don’t know because it’s actually remade it. It was, it was about like the top 10 high speed rail city pairs based on like a kind of a mathematical approach that I didn’t originate. I mean, it’s based on concepts that are out there, but I kind of, I kind of did the kind of, I don’t know. I just kind of did my own thing with the mathematical concepts that I was familiar with from like transit consulting and applied them. I ended up remaking that like two years ago and expanded it to like 56 city pairs or whatever. So that was kind of meant to replace the other one. But I left the original video up because I don’t know, whatever. Yeah. So I don’t know. Yeah. So I learned a ton making that video. And I figured, okay, once I learned all this, I should be able to like, I should be able to make like a video a week. And I really did that for like at least a couple of years, like reliably, I made a video every single week. I’ve started increasingly taking a week off just because like I have other stuff I want to work on and like personal things come up. And I travel more now than I did. Like I didn’t travel at all at the beginning. And now I go to different cities and do speaking stuff and go do filming and stuff, which is more time consuming.

[00:13:47] Ian: Yeah, actually that brought up a question for me. Like quite often when you’re, you know, like in the Minneapolis video that you just released, you know, towards the end, you’re also like, “hey, people in whatever other cities, like I’m coming to do, you know, an event there, you know, tickets, yada, yada.” Like, and me as the, as a viewer, I thought to myself, “huh, I wonder if that means that we’re going to get videos about those specific cities, you know, like is Ray going to be filming and, you know, are we going to get thoughts about the urbanism in those cities as well?” Are you like pairing things up that way or are they completely separate, the speaking travel and the filming?

[00:14:31] Ray: No, no, I try to, I try to do all of those things. And it’s the way I try to do my, when I get contacted by somebody who wants me to come to their city, it’s usually some sort of advocacy organization, but sometimes like a university or like a chamber of commerce or whatever. I always want the agreement to cover like three full days in the city so I can do filming while I’m there. And then I try to do like my speaking engagement on the last evening so I can see everything that I wanted to see in the city. So I can speak with some, some level of knowledge about, about what I’m seeing out there. So yeah, ideally all those things go together. Like it’s an advocacy organization. They bring me out. I do a speaking engagement for them that brings my fans or whatever in to kind of get exposed to their propaganda, which is good for them. They probably make some money because they that usually touches on something that their organization is working on. Like when I went to San Diego, it was for Bike SD. And so I made sure to do a lot of biking and incorporate some thoughts on San Diego’s bike network in the video. And then I do like a call to action in the video to talk about that advocacy organization that brought me out. So I do try to like provide a lot of value to the folks who are bringing me out, but a lot of it is like self-interest too, just because I love going to cities and exploring and, and seeing kind of what, what they do uniquely well and what’s interesting and what, what other cities might be able to learn from whatever particular city I’m in. So like, I just love doing all that stuff. So, so it all, I like, I always want to, I always want to set up a situation where kind of everybody comes out well ahead. Like I have a ton of fun. I get to make some content advocacy organization gets a bunch of new exposure to folks who are interested in this, potentially very interested in the stuff they work on. They just haven’t been connected before. It’s like the main thing that I enjoy about what I do right now is going to cities and really finding a way to get the people who watch my channel, who may not be that engaged in, in local advocacy, to get them interfaced with the people who are doing the work in their city. Because that’s where, that’s where all the good stuff happens.

[00:16:52] Parker: I’d be interested to hear what your process is for when you go to a new city and you’re exploring around and you’re looking for those things that you like that make it special. Cause I, whenever I go to a new place, I like to do a similar sort of thing, but you have the education experience and so on of a planner who knows how to look for specific things in that. Um, you also just have your own preferences for what you like and stuff. So I’m wondering what it looks like to you when you’re going around and trying to find those things that are special and great about a city.

[00:17:24] Ian: And how much math is there involved in it?

[00:17:26] Parker: Yeah. Are you, is it, are you just that Zach Galifianakis meme where like there’s a bunch of equations flying around your head?

[00:17:33] Ray: Yeah. I don’t know if there’s that much. Like I always overestimate how much I’m going to be able to see. Like I, I, I, well, what is the process? I don’t know. Like when I know I’m going to go to a city, I’ll put out, um, word on like my Patreon and I’m like Bluesky and Instagram say, “Hey, I’m going to the city. What do you think I should see film or whatever?” And I’ll get like a gazillion responses. And a lot of them are like really obvious things. Like you didn’t need to tell me that. And a lot of them are like really just kind of niche things that probably only the person who sent me the message cares about, or they’re just things that are like 20 miles outside of town that like, when I go to a city, I like to just use transit and biking and why I don’t like to have to drive or take an Uber or whatever. So, but I take all that input and a lot of times there’s some gems in there. I’ll flag and prioritize as much stuff as I can. I’ll do some of my own research to try to figure out what’s new in transit or biking or walking or housing or something that will lend itself to a video. And then like a couple of days before the trip, I’ll kind of make rough out an itinerary and try to hit a bunch of stuff on the first day. And invariably I won’t be able to get to as much as I thought I would be able to get to. So I have to start culling down the list. So it’s always the case that there’s stuff that I wished I had gotten to that I just don’t get to. And I just have to make peace with that.

[00:18:54] Parker: Right. Because I assume given that they’re often built kind of on the periphery of urban spaces, that cheesecake factories are kind of hard to get to with just public transit.

[00:19:04] Ray: Depends on the city.

[00:19:05] Ian: Yeah. Seattle’s is very, very centrally located.

[00:19:08] Parker: Where’s the Seattle’s?

[00:19:09] Ray: Oh, no, that closed.

[00:19:10] Ian: Oh, shoot. OK. It used to be like a block from the convention center.

[00:19:14] Ray: Oh, yeah. It was right. Yeah, it was right. Yeah, a block west of the convention center. Yeah, no, that shut down.

[00:19:20] Parker: Man, America’s falling to pieces.

[00:19:23] Ray: I know. You’re seeing it in real time.

[00:19:26] Ian: Yeah, we’ve been talking a lot about the visiting cities videos. But when I think about the classic CityNerd experience, a lot of the ones that come up in my mind are essentially a listicle but in video form with a lot of Google Earth screen recordings. Yeah, talk about your approach for those and how that kind of became a format that you came back to again and again.

[00:19:54] Ray: Yeah, I think I did a lot more of that kind of thing early on. I still do it and I still like doing it. But increasingly, I’m going to a city once or twice or even three times a month. I think I’ve been doing three in September. And then I have other ideas that aren’t really listicle things. I think increasingly I’ve done videos around interesting research that I wanted to talk about and share with people and kind of present it in my own way. But I do still do those kinds of lists. And part of it is there’s always some analysis that goes with it. I have to develop my own indices or evaluation criteria. I love doing all that stuff. And that goes back to when I was a kid, I loved to make lists. I loved to make lists of the top 10 or top 20, this or that, and kind of come up with my like, literally, this is stuff I did when I was like eight or 10 years old. And so the adult me is kind of still doing that, just putting it in video form. So I like doing all the analysis and then I have to figure out how to write it in a way that’s interesting and entertaining. And then I have to figure out like b-roll, like what kind of images do I want to show that help demonstrate. So that’s where Google Earth comes in, like aerials and Street View. If I can find stock publicly available footage that helps express what I’m talking about. I never like to put just random generic b-roll. I like to actually show something interesting while I’m talking.

[00:21:26] Ian: Where do you like to look for publicly available footage of a specific city?

[00:21:33] Ray: Yeah. So I use, made publicly available isn’t the right, but public domain, I guess. So Storyblocks, which is a service that I think you could pay for. So I have access to it through Nebula. Because I’m on Nebula, they actually have a channel wide account that we all get access to. I don’t know what it would cost if you were just an individual creator, but they have, like if you search Philadelphia, you’ll get like pages and pages of results of public domain footage of aerials or shots from the street or whatever that you just browse through and find something that demonstrates the thing that you’re talking about in the video. Not all cities, like some cities are harder to find, but most major US cities, there’s plenty of footage out there. But increasingly, the more cities I visit, the more of my own footage I have to use for that. And so that’s fun too.

[00:22:33] Ian: And you’ve got to have some kind of software to help you index, like, you know, keep track of what, which clips-

[00:22:40] Ray: You would think so.

[00:22:41] Ian: Oh, man.

[00:22:45] Ray: I should. Yeah. My indexing system is, it’s very rudimentary. And I could probably, as well as things where I should probably take some time to catalog everything and tag it in a different way. But mostly, like when I write, I always have a vision of what I want to be showing when I’m talking about the thing. And usually, like I remember, “oh yeah, I have this shot,” and I just remember in my head that I have it and then I have to like go find it, which isn’t too difficult. I’m a pretty organized person. So like, yeah, it doesn’t cost me too much time. But yeah, I do not have any kind of elaborate, like tagging system or anything like that.

[00:23:29] Ian: Well, if you ever wanted to set up something like that for yourself, I think Patrick, I don’t remember what software Patrick talked about, but our, Oh, the Urbanity episode, he had a specific recommendation for that kind of thing.

[00:23:41] Parker: Yeah. You can listen to that episode on [https://streets.mn/podcast].

[00:23:46] Ray: I’ll look for it. I’ll look for it.

[00:23:48] Parker: So that’s kind of, that’s been your approach for making videos. And I’m going to do a little bit different than this. This is the same sort of question we’ve asked our past interviews, but I’ll do a little bit different because you do your videos in your sort of way and you’ve altered your approach over time as your channel’s grown, but you’ve also gone to a lot of speaking events and gone around. And then you’ve also recently started a blog. So how have you approached deciding like what sort of topics are for video content versus what kind of things you want to talk about when you’re at a city or now recently your blog? Like what’s been your approach there?

[00:24:28] Ray: I have, I have a master like Google sheet that has that, that, that I started like right at the beginning of the channel that just has like summaries or notes about a topic that I think would be interesting. And some of them are just things that I think of. And some of them are things that get suggested by people in the comments or on social media or on my Patreon. And so for a long time, those were just like, these are all ideas for videos. And remember when I started this, it was from a list of ideas that I had that I really thought I was going to blog about someday. And that ended up being YouTube instead. So that idea was always there. And kind of more recently, probably in the last year or so, like there were topics I would see on the list over and over. It’s like, God, that’s interesting. But I would not choose to make the video. It’s just like, I have no idea how to make a video out of that. Like, I don’t know what the visuals are. It doesn’t lend itself well to that, but it does lend itself well to writing. And so that’s kind of why I started, I decided to start a blog so that I have a place to work on those topics. And so we’ll see how that goes over time. And then as far as visiting a city, like sometimes I’ll have an idea that’s about a specific city. And so I’ll just make sure I tag that with the name of the city so that whenever visit to a city coming up, I can search that tag and find all the notes I have on things people have mentioned about the city to make sure I incorporate those into any itinerary planning I’m doing.

[00:26:04] Ian: A lot of creators, of course, have to worry about like burnout, right? So, you know, given that you are doing this as your full-time job, how do you balance like keeping the passion of, you know, doing what you like doing versus, you know, like, okay, I could be optimizing more for building the audience, you know, and therefore like bringing in more revenue. You know, what’s your approach there?

[00:26:30] Ray: Well, let me approach the burnout one first. And if I don’t answer the whole thing, let me know. I just the way this works is I wake up every morning, like literally seven days a week. And the first thing I want to do when I wake up is work on whatever YouTube project I’m working on. So that makes it extremely different from any job I’ve ever had in my life. So the only time I feel anything that’s adjacent to burnout is if I’ve chosen a video idea and I’m working on it, and it’s usually during the writing process, I’ll be like, I’ll start writing it and I’ll realize, oh gosh, like I’m going to follow through and get this done, but I’m not I’m not really enjoying this one. Like this isn’t fun. But the thing that keeps me going is like I get to choose a radically different topic next week. And so I get excited about the next topic I’m going to work on. And that kind of gets me through whatever that week’s video is like, okay, I just need to get this done. And I’ll pull it and publish so I can work on the next thing. And a lot of times the thing that I didn’t like doing, and part of the reason I don’t like doing it is because I I’m like, yeah, my, my viewers are like, this isn’t gonna go over well. This isn’t really the right thing. A lot of times I’m just wrong about that. And a video that I wasn’t enjoying that just didn’t think people were going to vibe with. I’m just wrong. Like, they ended up liking it anyway, or like it does surprisingly well. So I try I try not to judge myself for that. It’s like once I choose a topic, just follow through, do the best I can with it within a week, usually. And then just move on to the next thing. So that’s the burnout part. So what’s what’s the other piece you wanted to?

[00:28:13] Ian: Oh, yeah, I was just I guess I was conflating two things. Because oftentimes I think about, you know, burnout as being like, the root of burnout can be, you know, I have to work on a bunch of stuff that I that I am not really interested in. Yeah, because it’s because it’s going to bring in the revenue.

[00:28:29] Ray: Right, right. I see what you’re saying. When I started doing sponsored content, like working with sponsors, and that happens through Nebula as well, like they manage all that they bring me like sponsors to work with. At first, I was like, I just really don’t like working on it. Like, I only take sponsorships from things that actually use or think are good. Like, that’s, I don’t know, like, the respect and loyalty of my audience is non-negotiable for me. Like, like, it’s what makes everything work. It makes it’s what makes everything worth doing. But even given that, even if it’s like a product or a service that I think is good, like it’s still hard to make that two minute sponsor spot or whatever. So that’s why I started having the folks at Nebula do the editing, like I still have to write it and think about it and present it in a way that’s authentic to my voice. So there’s still some work involved, but it’s a lot less of a drag than it used to be. I think when I started doing sponsorship, I was like, “is this really even worth it?” Like I just don’t like spending my time like trying to figure out b-roll for like a VPN company. I don’t want to do any of that, but if somebody else can do that, that’s cool. So now I have, I write it and I read it and think through it. But somebody else puts together the final edited project. I guess there are other things related to like the business side, I guess that are not fun, but there’s really not that much of that. Like, yeah, like my revenue comes through like YouTube ads and Patreon and sponsorships. And like I make a little bit of money off speaking things, but that tends to be almost a little bit of a wash for me because I end up spending a lot of money in cities. Not a lot, but you know.

[00:30:27] Ian: But like you said, it also gives you the opportunity to, you know, be in those cities and make content about those cities.

[00:30:34] Ray: Yeah, that’s all good. So, but, but yeah, there’s, there’s, there isn’t any one of those kind of business side things that really takes up much of my time or my, my mental space. So, so I don’t think that’s really a factor in burnout at all. It can be, I think for some creators, like if you’re struggling and trying to figure out how to make more revenue, I wonder, yeah, like there might be, you might look at doing more, more content than you can reasonably handle or, or you might spend more time trying to, to hustle up sponsors or whatever. I’m lucky enough to where I do, I do well enough that, that I don’t get too stressed about any of those things. I mean, the nature of it is like revenue, ad revenue and things like that go up and down with like the economy and like with how your videos are doing and stuff that like, I can’t, I can’t complain. Like I do, I do all right. Month to month. So.

[00:31:36] Ian: And, and sometimes with like, you know, YouTube, like screwing things up. I remember “adpocalypse” that, which was, you know, ages and ages ago, but you know, a lot of like advertisers just pulling out of putting ads on YouTube because there was, there was a media scare about like ads being connected to like really awful videos and, and brands just not wanting to like, you know, you don’t want a Coca-Cola, a screenshot of like a Coca-Cola ad alongside like a beheading video or something like that. Right. Like, like, so, so a lot of.

[00:32:16] Ray: I have the opposite problem. Cause my videos are pretty innocuous.

[00:32:20] Ian: Right. Right. But, but it’s something that affected like every channel because there was just like, Oh, a ton of money just got pulled out of the space through no fault of like any of those individual creators.

[00:32:32] Ray: Yeah. What, one headache that I have to deal with from time to time is like, so with, with YouTube ads, like, I have no idea what’s playing. I have no idea what, what ads are showing up on my videos. And so I get silly things like, like on my pickup truck videos, like for whatever reason, the ad algorithm interprets that as, “Oh, these people are interested in trucks.” So it shows truck ads during my pickup videos that kind of make fun of pickup truck drivers. But, but the other thing that happens is like people get in my comments saying, “Hey, there’s like, there’s some kind of gross ads playing on your…” I think, I don’t know what time it was, but there were, yeah, like how I get, get to it, but there were like anti-trans things showing up apparently on my channel. And I think that was happening for a lot of people. So I had to go into adsense settings or whatever. I had to go to adsense and manually add a bunch of like URLs that I do not want to allow ads from. So it’s not, it’s not a big deal, but it’s just something, it’s something that gives you pause. Like, yeah, I don’t really have control over like political ads that show up. Like that’s going to be happening in the next few months. Right.

[00:33:46] Ian: If it hasn’t already.

[00:33:48] Ray: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I guess it depends like where you live or whatever.

[00:33:53] Parker: To be fair for the truck truck videos, given the amount of people and they’re trying to defend their purchases. I imagine that truck ads on those videos are probably reaching the right audience.

[00:34:04] Ray: I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s not, it’s not my, it’s not my ad budget. So I can’t, I can’t tell them what the optimal way to spend it is.

[00:34:14] Ian: Speaking of Nebula, can I ask a question about that?

[00:34:17] Parker: Yeah, go for it.

[00:34:18] Ian: So yeah, I don’t remember when Nebula became a thing, but like, like where were you in relation to all of that? Like you, you weren’t one of like the original founders of Nebula, right? Okay. Yeah.

[00:34:33] Ray: No.

[00:34:33] Ian: Like when, when did they approach you? How did the, like, how did that come about?

[00:34:37] Ray: Well, I approached them. So at the time this is evolved over time, but it was like 2022. So it was like the second year of the channel. So there was a, I can’t remember what, what platform we had it on, but there was a group chat with like me and some of the other YouTube creators, including Jason from, from Not Just Bikes. And I was asking questions about, you know, “what, what do you guys recommend for, anybody have sponsors yet?” I have a editing. I was thinking about, you know, do I want to work with any editors or whatever? And I think I, I asked the question, like, “where do you guys go for stuff like this?” And Jason was like, “well, I’m a Nebula. And so like, we have all that stuff in house.” I’m like, oh, interesting. And I don’t, I can’t remember if we really talked about it, but I sent an email to, to Nebula to inquire and they got back to me the next day. And later on I found out there’s like a Slack where all the Nebula creators are on there, like recommending who they think would, would be a good, a good creator to add to the platform or whatever. So, so apparently they’d been having discussions about inviting me on. And so they, they did that. But yeah, it was kind of mutual. I kind of made the first outreach and then they, they got back to me like the next day and we kind of talked through what it would mean and what the benefits were and like all that. And it was, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a great fit.

[00:36:02] Parker: I wanted to ask earlier, going back to, you know, transitioning and getting into YouTube, kind of the topic of revenue and being supported by Patreon and so on. What was the point where you kind of thought, “oh, this is a thing I could be doing as like my full time thing and not going back to find another job and this is what I want to keep doing”? Like, what was that realization like?

[00:36:25] Ray: Yeah, it probably wasn’t a specific moment. There were times, yeah, in that second year of the channel, 2022, where I wasn’t, you know, like I made pretty good money as a, as a consultant, like at the stage I was at in my career. And so like it’s really hard to replace that income. Now what was working in my favor was like I had, I saved, I saved money. So I have a decent amount, like I didn’t really have enough to like retire. Like I’m too young for that, but I had a decent enough cushion where I could take like six months off. That was part of the calculus with that. But I also knew that it would be really hard to replace that income without, without going back and getting, you know, going, going back into like the transportation planning field and getting a decent paying job back there. But I didn’t need to make that much because I had, I had kind of this cushion to work with. So that gave me some runway to, once I had that moment, I think it was the moment where I went from like 1000 to 5000 subscribers in like a week or whatever. That was like, you know what, I should, I should keep doing this and see where this is going. And like if, if I’m not making that much money, like for a while, that could be okay because like I have, I have this cushion from the money that I saved in order to be able to take the time off and then maybe gradually the income can start to approach replacing that. It’s more complicated than that because like I have to pay for my own health care and I fund my own retirement and, and all these things that usually come with an actual corporate job. But yeah, so, so I guess it hasn’t been, it wasn’t really like a bolt of lightning or like, “hey, this is my new job.” It was more like let’s keep working on this and seeing if this can work for me financially. And I always felt like I was on a trajectory where it could work. I would say most, most months it still does not replace the money I was making as a planning and engineering consultant with like 15 years of experience. But it does, it does well enough and I just enjoy it. I enjoy it so much more and I feel like I’m having, I don’t know, like the work I did as a consultant was, was impactful, but in very like kind of micro ways. And now I feel like I’m, I’m kind of touching a lot of people’s lives and, and, and inspiring them to, to get involved in things that they hadn’t necessarily thought that much about before they maybe started watching my channel.

[00:39:06] Parker: I’m moving into more of a advocacy, inspiring, whatever word you want to use for it kind of role.

[00:39:13] Ian: And I like the way that you highlighted the, you know, kind of tying everything together, the, the local speaking engagements and then, you know, making videos about those places and bringing, you know, bringing people’s awareness towards the organizations, the local organizations that are like doing that work, you know, cause that, that is like very similar to the ethos of, of Streets.mn, you know, that like, this is the place where the, the transportation land use conversations happen in Minnesota and, and, you know, a shared resource and everything. And Parker’s idea for this, for this specific series was like, “Hey, there are a lot of like, you know, national global level content creators who like probably have a significant audience here in Minnesota. And maybe a lot of those people in Minnesota haven’t yet discovered like the local stuff that’s going on and how, and how to, how to, you know, take what they’re learning from CityNerd and applying them locally.” So love that, love, love that that’s like a thing that you have thought about and, and are putting into practice.

[00:40:22] Ray: Yeah. I mean, it really is, it really is the most gratifying part of what I do. And this is coming from somebody who like, I am not a polished, I’ve never been polished public speaker. So it’s not like psychologically easy for me to to get up in front of like 300 people or whatever. But, but I do it. And part of what makes it easy is because the people who come out to see me are people who already know what I’m about and they already know my sense of humor. It’s like, if I’m talking to like 300 random people that they have, they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about and they won’t understand like my, my personality at all. But the 300 people who come to see me and like whatever city I’m in, they are, they already have, they already have all that information. Like they already know, like when I’m, when I’m being sarcastic, when I’m being deadpan, they’re already interested in the things I’m talking about. So, so that, that makes it easy. And it is great to, um, because, because a lot of those, like some of the people who watch my channel, they’re already involved, they’re already engaged, but I think most of them are. And so it’s really gratifying to connect them with the people who are actually doing the work because every city has advocacy organizations that are working on like housing affordability and bike, biking and walking infrastructure and transit advocacy, all those things. And, uh, there’s this whole, whole movement that I think is, is national and YouTube is just like a small part of the ecosystem. But, but urbanism for lack of a better word is, is something that people have really latched onto as kind of a political cause that, that they can see manifest around them every day. And those are people who I think are ready to get involved too. So we just have to figure out how to connect to them.

[00:42:09] Parker: To the end of, you know, promoting local organizations in your recent Minneapolis video, I saw that you had a thing for, uh, Move Minnesota and their Lyndale Avenue reconstruction thing. Has anybody told you that the conclusion of that since you’ve been out of town?

[00:42:26] Ray: Well, I’ve been, I’ve heard mixed things because I had, I had a couple of people suggest Move Minnesota as a possible call to action around Lyndale. But then I also heard later on that, yeah, like, like the plan’s already been adopted. Like, like it’s a pretty good plan is in place now and that’s, that’s just going to be constructed. So I heard that too. So you can, you can feel free to enlighten me on, on what the latest and greatest is.

[00:42:54] Parker: Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much it is the, the city council voted on it and it’s approved for the county to go forward with the plan, which will add I know bike lanes. Is there, I forget, is there transit improvements as part of that too?

[00:43:08] Ian: Yeah, so there’s a two-way bike lane on the east side of the street and then, um, bus, dedicated bus lanes, uh, for like the three or four blocks at the north end of the project area.

[00:43:21] Parker: There’s often a pinch point.

[00:43:22] Ian: Yeah, yeah. Cause that’s where it approaches the, uh, I-94 interchange.

[00:43:29] Parker: But good still to call that organization out for the work they do because we’re already talking about what kind of things we’re wanting to… I say “we,” I’m just a volunteer. Wanted to work on and focus on and advocate for next. So, uh, hopefully next meeting I go to there, there’ll be somebody to go, “yeah, I heard about you guys on the CityNerd video.”

[00:43:49] Ian: Hey, that would be awesome.

[00:43:51] Ray: That’s cool. Yeah. I tried to share the wealth too, cause I think the last, the last time I was out there, I made a video about I-94 and that was kind of for Our Streets. Um, which, which does great work too. Um, and they didn’t want to talk about freeways this time because I’ve already done that. Not that it isn’t important, but I wanted to talk about other aspects of, of the Twin Cities and like I really wanted to get to St. Paul and it just didn’t happen because I just got too interested in, in some of the things that were specifically going on in South Minneapolis. Um, and, and Move Minnesota dovetailed well into that. But some, somebody on my Instagram mentioned that like people are excited that like, I think I asked the question to like, “why, why is this video popping off so much?” Cause I got like restoried and retweeted like way more times than I have for any other city visit video I’ve done. And there were a lot of theories about it. And somebody just said that the transportation advocacy ecosystem in Minneapolis is, is unmatched as far as like the level of engagement that, that people have with local issues and the coordination of the organizations that are working on different efforts. And, and I don’t have any information to contradict that. Like I think it’s, it’s pretty impressive. It’s pretty impressive.

[00:45:07] Parker: I think it’s also a matter of like proportional to the size of the city. Like I know there are similar efforts in other major cities, but those are often like larger cities that have a much higher population. So proportional to like the size of Minneapolis, the advocacy advocacy for bike and transportation here seems very engaged relative to the amount of people here.

[00:45:30] Ray: Yeah. When I went to Chicago last September, I think it was, I did a speaking engagement on behalf of as an organization out there called Better Streets Chicago. And that I don’t know for sure, but I think I had conversations with them where they, they get a lot of their strategic and communications ideas from Our Streets, Minneapolis. And so Chicago, a much bigger city, right? But they kind of look in a way they look to Minneapolis and the Twin Cities for leadership on how to actually get things done and how to message, how to talk about things, political strategy, because I think the Twin Cities are abnormally good at all that stuff.

[00:46:16] Ian: Yeah. The nonprofit sector in Minnesota is ridiculously strong. Yeah. Which, you know, in some ways does kind of tell you like, okay, like maybe maybe government isn’t providing as many things as it as it needs to. If we have, you know, all of these like organizations that can get the resources and feel they need to push for these things. But, you know, that’s a conversation for another day, I think.

[00:46:44] Parker: Yeah, we’ll touch on that later. No, the only the only thing I know about why your video went off so much is that all of my friends around here went, oh my God, there’s a CityNerd video about Minneapolis and he loves it. No, share it.

[00:46:58] Ray: Yeah, it’s the third one I’ve done out there. I’ve only done the one speak. I think I did a speaking thing and I think Streets.mn was involved a little bit too. But I think mostly Our Streets led it. And so that was back in 2024. The other times I’ve come. Like my my mother’s side of the family, she grew up in Minneapolis. And so like that whole side of the family lives out there. And so that’s why, like regardless of whether someone’s bringing me in for like speaking engagement or whatever. That’s why I’m probably out there more than you would expect otherwise.

[00:47:33] Ian: Imagine that the Twin Cities to Pacific Northwest pipeline. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people who I know from like high school who live in either Portland or Seattle. There seems to be a weirdly strong connection there.

[00:47:51] Ray: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have any explanation for it.

[00:47:54] Parker: Well, that kind of provides a good answer to the one of the questions we have here of when are you coming to the Twin Cities next?

[00:48:02] Ray: A good question. Yeah, no immediate plans.

[00:48:07] Parker: We do have that Green Line opening. Green Line extension opening up next year.

[00:48:11] Ray: Yeah, yeah, I got to take a peek I included a little bit of it in the video doesn’t have like we talked about before. Like how do I play on itinerary? Like I had planned to ride a lot more of the trail that runs parallel to the Green Line and see a lot more of it. And I just ran out of time. It’s like, okay, this is this is not going to be part of this video. And that’s okay, guys. Something I can go to another time. Yeah, so no immediate plans. I mean, a lot almost all the all the trips I’m doing to different cities are because some organization has inquired about me coming out we do like an agreement and figure out how to fund it and how to make it make sense or whatever. So it’s usually that. There actually has been I don’t want to talk about what it is. There has been an inquiry for next year from from the Twin Cities area. I haven’t heard anything about it in the last couple of months. So I don’t know if it’ll happen or not. So but there is something potentially in the works but I don’t want to jinx it.

[00:49:10] Ian: And then as we’re winding down here are there any other like urbanist or transit related channels that you want to give a shout out to that you’ve been enjoying lately? I don’t watch YouTube.

[00:49:23] Ian: I love it. I love that.

[00:49:25] Ray: I watch a little bit.

[00:49:27] Ian: My first podcast co-host like never ever listened to podcasts and it was a vibe.

[00:49:36] Ray: That’s funny. Yeah, I listen to podcasts a lot more than I watch YouTube. I read books more often like the number of hours that I spend on different things, like YouTube… YouTube is kind of down there and when I do watch YouTube it’s usually not urbanism stuff. I don’t know. Like I still think I don’t know. I hate to not mention the ones who are doing good but I’ve always loved Alan Fisher’s videos. Like I love his personality and his approach. I think he’s very funny and he talks about interesting stuff but I’ve hung out with the… I went to Montreal and I think it was 2024 and I hung out with Patrick and Jasmine from the Oh the Urbanity and Reese who isn’t making videos now. Reese Martin. Yeah, like they all do good stuff too. I’m not as familiar with the… I don’t know. Like if there’s anything newer than that like I kind of don’t watch YouTube anymore.

[00:50:33] Ian: That’s so fascinating to me because whenever I start a unit related to like any media production for my students I’m always like… The first thing I tell them is like “if you want to make good podcasts or videos or books or whatever like consume a lot of content in that genre to figure out like what do you like? What do you not like? Use that to inform your approach to making this.” So I wish that we had known that at the beginning of this interview because then I could have tailored some of the questions about… How did you come up with like the kinds of videos you’re going to make without like really being into this genre in the first place?

[00:51:14] Ray: Well, I was thinking like I told you like I did a little bit research like when I decided, okay I think I’ll make some YouTube videos. I hadn’t watched any urbanism stuff at all and I knew the first thing I was going to make was going to be about high-speed rail. So I put like high-speed rail in the YouTube search box and I think that’s how I found like Reese Martin and then I thought, oh what… I don’t think I put the word urbanism in the search bar because like I still don’t know what that word means while I’ve run definitions but I put in like biking or whatever. I don’t know. And so that’s how I came across a couple channels and I kind of clicked on and see what they were doing but I don’t know like I had kind of my own idea of like how I wanted to talk about things. So like yeah and I just… Yeah, I don’t like watching too much other stuff because I don’t want to feel like I can’t make a video about that because this other person already did it like I don’t know I don’t want to have to worry about that. So if occasionally I make a video that’s on a similar topic as somebody else did it’s purely by accident that just probably didn’t watch it at all. Yeah and then at the same time like yeah like I don’t want to worry about oh I need to do something different because somebody’s already doing something like that. It’s like I don’t know like I just don’t want to I don’t want that to like clutter my decision making about what I think is interesting to talk about and how to talk about it.

[00:52:42] Parker: Outside of making videos which you seem to make clear is something you just you wake up and you’re going oh boy I can’t wait to start working on this again. What have you been doing to spark joy lately?

[00:52:54] Ray: I guess that’s a good question. I don’t know like this literally is the number one thing that I get the most gratification out of. You know I bike every day like the number one thing that sparks joy like outside of doing YouTube stuff. I like to play basketball. I don’t know I like exercise in general so like I bike everywhere like I kind of walk the talk I don’t own a car like I bike and walk everywhere I need to go. It’s kind of easy because I work from home and I make YouTube videos so I understand like not everybody’s on the same playing field as far as that goes. But you know I like staying active and then yeah like I’ve always always always loved playing basketball. It gives me a huge like serotonin rush and it makes me feel good like mind and body. It’s social I don’t know. Yeah those are the main things like I literally work like 12 hours a day on this seven days a week unless I give myself like a vacation or whatever. Like because I like to I like to take back and read too. So but most days are like I don’t know like six to six or something like that. I’m just working with big break like I’ll take a break and go bike somewhere for coffee and go bike to the gym and play basketball or whatever. So but I don’t know like this is the thing that sparks joy. Like this is literally kind of like the meaning that I wanted in my life I think for a long time.

[00:54:22] Ian: Nice.

[00:54:22] Ray: And it sounds corny. But it literally is like I don’t know like I feel like I’m touching people’s lives and allowing them to think things in a different way and see their cities in a different way and have insights into things or put words to things that they’ve always felt or perceived but didn’t have the words for and didn’t know how to affect change regarding like I don’t know the infrastructure that they live with every day things like that. That’s what sparks joy.

[00:54:52] Parker: Nice. That’s fantastic. Ian do you have any other questions anything you want to bring up?

[00:54:57] Ian: I don’t think so no. This has been a great conversation.

[00:55:00] Parker: Ray thank you so much for coming onto the podcast and talking with us. This has been an absolute delight.

[00:55:05] Ray: It was fun. Thanks.

[00:55:08] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced by Parker Seaman aka Strongthany, was edited by Stina Neel, and was hosted and transcribed by me Ian R. Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast so if you have ideas for future episodes drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community publication and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one-time or recurring donation you can find more information about doing so at [https://treets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.