Nicole Rafiee has been in the block on YouTube. The 25-year-old creator took her first channel in middle school and after deleting the channel a few times (who wasn’t excited when the high school graduate football team found it), she began to seriously mail it to YouTube to sophomore college.
Nowadays, if she wants to find someone in real life, she will feel like she wants to delete the channel, and she will have more difficulties. She has attracted a 1.07 million subscriber audience on YouTube, partly because of her “Long-term Online Girl Explanation” series, which covers everything from Ariana Grande to Frenemies Lore.
Credit: Mashable Composite: Zooey Liao/Image Source: Getty Images/ Amazon/ Canon/ Nicole Rafiee’s Instagram
We met her with her at Vidcon 2025 to get what she is using to simplify her content creation process today and to learn how she recorded exactly her and Jake Thatcher Say annoying to me Podcast in her bathtub.
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Portable SSD
When Rafiee first started with the video, she immediately encountered some technical problems.
“I was thinking, why is my computer running like nothing? Why is my computer as hot as the oven right now? Like, I can actually make pancakes on it because it’s too hot, so I have three degrees of burning on my legs.”
Solution? Solid State Drive (SSD) stores her lens for many hours. She said she has collected six over the years, at about $99 each, which is cheaper than buying a brand new laptop (let you avoid some tech waste).
“If you want to (create content), everyone should get an SSD, which is not everything that needs to live on a computer or on a phone,” she said. “I said, because I have 85,000 photos on my phone. I should take my own advice.”
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Sony Camera for Creators
“Rafiee is not a fan of all the products that are suitable for creators: “Sometimes, when brands are like, well, that sucks,” she said. “It just comes in, like, pink and something like that, they’re like, ‘That’s it! ‘I thought, “Okay, I don’t need all of this.”
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Thankfully, the Sony ZV-1 does not fall into this category. Rafiee tells us that this is the longest camera she has ever used, mainly because it is so user-friendly and versatile: She uses it for everything from shooting podcasts to doing videos on cars.
A great video light (literally)
“I do care about the lighting in the video because I feel like I have to set the atmosphere. I don’t like the stimulating lighting; I want it to look like I’m at home,” Rafi said.
This key light of GVM helped her do it. She likes it because it adjusts warmth easily, it is portable and can mimic the sun’s rays to set the perfect atmosphere.
Bose headphones
Rafiee has been using the Bose Quietcomfort 45 headphones for years. She told us: “They are my real riding or dying. I just replaced the filler in my sweat because they sweat so badly.”
Unfortunately, Bose phased out the model, but it’s still possible to buy nearly the same Bose Quietcomfort headphones.
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Soundproof foam
Rafiee doesn’t say exactly which acoustic foam she uses, but she does see it as a key part of the podcast setup. It makes sense considering that she and her co-host Jake Thatcher were sitting in an empty bathtub to record it.
It’s also a challenge for the most seasoned audio engineers, and Rafiee doesn’t expect these plots to sound like they were in the studio: “This never gets there because we end up in the ceramic room. [the foam] It really makes it better.
Honorary nomination: Health Care routine
The last thing that is essential for Rafiee is strict health. “I need 10 health conditions (In) in 10 points to make the video,” she said. She realized that she was vomiting and after hours of standing under the light and not having enough sleep, she was consistently dealing with migraines after hours of standing in the light and not having enough sleep.
While not a physical product, it is a good reminder that getting enough rest and taking care of yourself is as important as any recording device or editing software.
Mashable live broadcast at the Anaheim Convention Center, covering Vidcon 2025.where do we talk about Your favorite creatorcover the latest trends and share how creators can develop their followers, influence and make a living online.
