What Is YouTube Doing to Us? We Asked Its CEO. | The Interview

Uh, not yet.

So, I know Jimmy very well. He and I have not done that math together, so I don't think I can validate his math or not. I think our goal, I mean look, we measure ourselves by this concept of whether viewers, all of us, the two billion people that come to YouTube every single day, are satisfied by their experience on YouTube. And so that is how we orient decisions around the product or the business. And we have grown, you know, we're the number one streamer I think for three years running now in the US on television screens. We're an incredibly large podcast platform. You know, this conversation I will watch on YouTube. And so yeah, that has definitely been part of the journey. I'm incredibly proud of it in terms of making some long-term bets that have really paid off for YouTube, but also for our viewers and our creators. I mean, not to be too meta about this, but obviously this is going to go on YouTube. We've got cameras and lights here. And what used to be an audio podcast is now a video podcast. And part of that reason is because this is the way to gain new audiences, to reach people, because everyone seems to be on the platform now.

We'll see. When I get asked this question, I think it's in my view very, very simple. And it has to do really with how YouTube works, which is the people that are on the other side of the camera, other side of the screen rather, that are watching you on a television screen or on their mobile phones when they're watching this conversation or even on their desktops or what have you, the one thing they can sus out really, really quickly is if it's truly authentic. And I really do think that if you go and actually spend a minute thinking about any creator's channel, that is really what comes through for the really successful creators.

Yeah. You know what, I'd say a couple things about that. So, first, it is flattering that they see us as sort of the center of culture, especially in terms of what these amazing creators have been able to do on YouTube. But the real sort of conversation when I speak to our creators, and I speak to our creators several times a week, of all sizes, really, up and coming creators, some of the very large ones that you've mentioned, what they always tell me is that no matter what they look to do, they understand that YouTube is their home. There would be no Beast Games if there wasn't Mr. Beast on YouTube. And Jimmy knows that and he talks about that. They tell me over and over that their most authentic real audience is on YouTube. They know that is the font of a lot of their success off of YouTube. But if as a result of their success on YouTube, they are also experiencing success in other places, whether it's working with a studio on a project or whether it's writing a book or coming up in the case of Mr. Beast with his chocolate bar or what have you, then I think that's awesome. I have not come across YouTubers that have completely yanked their content off YouTube. I can't imagine why they would do that. And frankly, they're in a position where they can say no to that, right? They don't have to because the nice thing about what they've built on YouTube is that there's other places that are so desperate to actually work with them that they'll acquiesce to what our YouTubers ultimately know is the right decision for them in the long term, which is to never leave their home.

And they never leave because they know that their home is on YouTube.

Uh, not yet.

You know, I think this is a conversation that I do think the industry likes to have. And it's often times the industry just sort of talking to itself to be honest. And I think it's presumptuous for us to judge or tell people what is high quality or low quality or prestige or not. At the end of the day, two billion people come to YouTube. Families, parents, young people, college kids, older adults, and they find what they love. And there's every type of creator and every type of genre because it is a reflection of humanity. We have incredible creators that are producing amazing scripted content in Hollywood like Alan Chikin Chow or Kigra Dion who have built soundstages to produce content that engages people incredibly. I would put that up against any sort of quote unquote prestige content out there. I would put Miss Rachel or Mark Rober or Cleo Abram against any sort of quote unquote traditional produced content. And the great thing about it is that when the next Miss Rachel or the next Mark Rober comes along who's even more creative in a different way, they get a shot at it as well as opposed to someone in traditional media saying actually no, I don't think your idea is a good one or it's low quality. Who are we to say that?

Well, I mean, I guess the first thing that I would say is if you think about it from a consumer standpoint, a viewer standpoint, especially a younger viewer, their expectation is that when they turn on the TV, that all of what they want to watch and engage with is in the same experience. And so that is everything from a 15-second short, by the way, shorts are, you know, lots of people watch them on televisions, to a 15-minute classic YouTube VOD or long form video to a 3-hour podcast, 1-hour podcast through a 3-hour NFL game or a 15-hour live stream because we have lots of streamers on our platform. And the expectation is that all of that is a seamless experience that they can get through their recommendations on YouTube. And so that's the consumer lens through which we have looked at it. And we made that bet for three reasons. One is could we expand the market by making it easy for fans to actually find football games, whether it was a live game, but our biggest relationship is actually Sunday Ticket, which is a subscription service. And the second was could we bring technological innovation to it. So, multiview, like being able to watch, which people take for granted now, was one of the core innovations we brought to the NFL experience. Creator integrations, right? Like we did this new concept that we call it creator watch with basically the live game, like our Brazil game, which was one of the season openers last year, but watch alongside your favorite creator. And so those are the types of things that we talk about with the NFL. So, when the commissioner and I have a meeting with our teams, that's really what our focus is. I have an 18-year-old son. He's a sports nut. He watches lots of live sports, but his sports highlights are his YouTube feed and the NFL understood that. And so that led to the partnership that we have. And the Oscars actually was a similar type of conversation with the academy.

I did. Yeah. Yeah. He had two YouTube jokes actually.

I think Conan is very funny and he's actually a YouTuber. He's been on YouTube for a very long time. His Team Coco channel does really well on YouTube.

Well, you know what's interesting about those partners is they're obviously, as I said, some of our largest, most strategic partners because of YouTube TV, but they are also large partners in the classic sense of being creators on YouTube. Whether they are news, some of the largest news partners on YouTube are Fox News, right? They're very large on our platform. Just like the New York Times has a very large presence on YouTube and the Wall Street Journal or a lot of the entertainment networks, Disney is one of our strategic partners. They have a big investment and presence on YouTube. And so we work closely with them every single day. They understand sort of what's happening in the ecosystem. And I think they also understand that a lot of the fandom around their IP, their franchises, the amount of creativity that comes out of their studios is happening on YouTube. So they really tap into that and they invest in it.

Yeah, I mean I can answer that and you're, I presumably you're talking about young people and people, you know.

But you know certainly where the responsibility bar for all of us is very high, which is young people and children. You know I have three kids of my own. So, as a parent, as a dad, I think about their development and, you know, both challenges and opportunities every single day. Like I can say unequivocally, you know, I encourage my kids to go run around and touch grass and, you know, for our youngest, be on the swing set or play basketball with my son and all of those types of things. I encourage that. I encourage them to read as much as they possibly can. You know, I love to read, but my wife and I encourage our kids to do that as well. And on YouTube what I find is there's content as we've described that young people find entertaining and they learn new things on a regular basis.

I think that video just like reading is an important way for people to learn. When you say the term video it's like learning visually and I see that just like back in the day we learned in the classroom visually from our teachers. I do see a lot of that learning happening on YouTube and actually teachers tell me that all the time too.

Yeah. I think that it is, I think about it more in the analogy of like a library and it's a visual library but it's a library that has lots and lots and lots of books in it. And the way that information or knowledge is communicated or new ways of thinking is communicated is visual, audiovisual, and I do think that is an effective way for people to learn. Do I think it's the only way? Of course not.

And I, you know, I shouldn't comment on that specific trial of course, as you can understand. What I will say about, again, and I think I was alluding to some of these things in my earlier answers. The way I think about it is, as you point out, as we were just talking about, you know, YouTube is this platform where people go for many different reasons to, you know, blow off steam, listen to their favorite artists, you know, whatever, Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift or what have you, to connect with community. That's a lot of what happens on YouTube. And then learn things. And so I think the mental model for me is we should be thinking about protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to protecting them from the digital world. And the best analogy I can think about there is, you know, teaching my daughter to ride a bike. Like it starts with training wheels and you take off the training wheels and then eventually she can kind of go and ride her bike.

Yeah. And that's what I was trying to say, which is I feel like because of that sort of principle of making sure that we're protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to shutting them off from it because I also think it's wrong frankly to eliminate that knowledge, that library of content because there's amazing, wonderful content that parents tell me about every single day just like the experience that you just shared about your daughter. I have that certainly in my household. So, well then how do you approach it? Well, the way I think you approach it is to make it so that what you can do around parental controls as you described or other types of things are actually truly practical and easy to use and that can actually be enforceable. And that's what we can do. And that's what my wife and I try to do in our household. Like you said, we're not perfect by any stretch. But if there are things that we can do at YouTube to make that job easier for parents, I think that's the right approach.

Yeah, I mean look, I'm a parent of three myself. I think about how young people are growing up today. I think that there are amazing things that happen, that access to information, to knowledge that happen because of platforms like YouTube. I also understand the challenges that you're describing and so it's not to trivialize them in any sense because I experience them and it is something that I personally care deeply about. It's personal to me. Our approach to it is how can we bring all of those awesome experiences that you just described in the context of your daughter that I experience with my own kids but do it in a way where parents are in control and that's what we work towards. And so, you know, we are a platform where we will build things like timers in the app. We announced actually a couple months ago now the ability for parents to actually have a timer on short form video feeds, right? To set it to zero. That's industry-leading. That has not been done before, but that's the way that we make decisions here in terms of putting that responsibility first and foremost and kind of then letting the chips fall where they may.

Every single day. It is my top priority in many ways and I often say that, you know, YouTube is a reflection of what's happening in the world but what happens on YouTube also impacts the world and that from my standpoint is the motivation behind the responsibility. There's two billion people that come to YouTube every single day. We do have a responsibility. We are a platform that prides itself on being an open platform without a gatekeeper. We stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression. But we've had community guidelines on our platform since the day YouTube started. And living up to that responsibility is a big part of what happens around here, literally every single day.

I think, I'm trying to think back to the policies that were in place back then. Those, many of those I think are not in place today. You know, we have because of a lot of what we talked about here and the scale of YouTube and what it represents in culture and society, we have a long track record of working with administrations really on both sides of the aisle. And we make our decisions based on what we believe at the moment to be right for the creator ecosystem that we spent the bulk of the time talking about here. And we strive to write our community guidelines in a way, the best as we possibly can. We strive to be truly as much of an open platform as possible.

I think that, you know, it's hard to look at all of these decisions out of context. You know, you think about, even back to 2020, some of the examples that you were describing there, we were embarking on this pandemic that was going to shut down the world. Science was being created every single day. Did we reverse those policies? Yeah, we changed a lot of those policies because I think that while the principles of, you know, freedom of expression, free speech, remain sort of north star kind of immovable principles, at least at YouTube, we also want to be flexible in terms of the context around policies and what we, you know, back to your question around the president's channel and what around January 6th, that was, I can't remember the very specific policy that was in place then. But that was during that particular time period. Fast forward, a lot of those policies even before, independent of the lawsuit or what have you, were changed.

Deprecated policies, so that's how we try to be flexible about the policies, but also be true to our principles about being an open platform. And so when I took over as CEO, one of the first decisions was to bring that channel back.

That was ultimately my decision. Yes.

You know, again, Lulu, we're very focused on our creators — what is the best for the ecosystem. We do work with all administrations.

I don't know the specifics of the ballroom or how it's being built. It is going towards a preservation trust, so I do think it's something that is going to be for the country. But I think the way honestly I think about it is sort of the way you framed it in the question, which is I think it's a way for us to settle on old policies — most of them are actually not even in place today — and focus on the future of our creators and the ecosystem. We make those policy decisions independent of administrations based on what we think is best for YouTube, and that is hopefully something that we will continue to do.

The way I think that it really breaks down into a few things that allows us to do what we do. The first is, as I said, clarity around the principles, and the core principle here goes back to the very early days of YouTube and has been consistent, which is we are an open platform and we stand for free speech. That is a stance that we've taken, and we have gotten criticized on both sides of the aisle constantly. And I say this to my teams here — that is a result of the privileged position we're in. We are relevant to people's lives.

So I guess what I'm saying is our principles — the way to answer your original question is it starts with the principles. We try to hold true to this tenet of free speech that is core to how we do it. And so then the question is, well, how do you then write a set of community guidelines that reflect it to the best of our ability? And I always say that's the hard work. That's the job. And the best we can do there is to write them and to be transparent about them. And then the third part of it is to do our best to live up to what we actually published. And then we are going to get criticized on either side of it because not everyone is going to be happy about where that line is drawn.

I'd have to look at a very specific video there. It's hard to answer that question in a generalized sense. The decisions we make are video by video, and we're able to do that at scale because of our investment in our systems and the people that we have. So I don't think I can answer that question in a general sense. What I will say is that we do have guidelines around hate speech or harassment. We have guidelines around making sure that kids are protected on the platform, around consumer fraud and those types of things. And each one of those guidelines we try our best to actually publish on our website. So I couldn't get into the details of every single one of those verticals and how it applies to an individual video, but I can speak in terms of the broad principles that in general we try to allow for the broadest spectrum of speech as possible. Sometimes it might be speech that people disagree with. You're describing one example. There's probably millions and millions of videos on YouTube that I disagree with, that you might disagree with, but don't have grounds for us to take down on the platform.

We are an open platform, Lulu. Each one of the channels on our platform — the New York Times channel, the Interview channel — you have the editorial standards that you live by on those channels, and they are certainly different across the various, not just genres, but channels within genres. And our job is to have a set of rules and guidelines. Those are our community guidelines. Every channel will draw a different line in terms of what they think is appropriate.

They are. Thank you.

I think the best way for YouTube to approach it — which is how do you wrestle with this concept of an open platform but also having some rules for the road in terms of how things operate on YouTube? For example, we never allowed adult content on YouTube, right? Like, how did we make that decision? What was important behind it? And again, our approach there is to be very clear about what sort of those baseline rules are. There are, as you know, pages and pages of them. And we really work hard to try to enforce them, and our enforcement is not always perfect. One of the verticals that we have on YouTube is news. We have lots and lots of successful news creators. Not every creator is serving the same audience or looking to do the same thing. So there's lots of people who are approaching it in different ways. And I think honestly that's also a really entrepreneurial ecosystem with lots of new news creators that other folks might have different opinions on. We are not qualified to have a point of view on this particular creator XYZ is better than this particular creator. The audience makes that judgment. I always say that the best way to think about the YouTube algorithm is to replace the word 'algorithm' with 'audience,' and that is because it is a reflection of the audience. That's the reason why creators who are successful on our platform have that notion of authenticity — because what the algorithm is doing is adjusting to your behavior on YouTube.

Yeah, thank you.

Of course.

I appreciated the conversation and I do really appreciate how much depth we got into. You know, as I was thinking about it on my way home in the evening, one of the things that struck me is that a lot of the examples and a lot of the conversation were very US-focused, which makes sense — we're based in the US here. But one of the things that's super interesting, at least to me, about YouTube is that it's truly global. You could be a fan of a particular type of dance that might originate in Canada, but you might be living in southern India, and vice versa. And that's also a very interesting phenomenon that has happened as a result of YouTube. So that was sort of one thing that had occurred to me.

Yeah, that's actually a perfect example, kind of a moment example for sure.

As you said, I grew up in Michigan. Loved Star Wars and Transformers and all of that sort of good stuff. I was a big sports kid back then too. And when I moved to India, it was a bit of a culture shock, even though obviously my parents are of Indian heritage. But I couldn't speak the language, I couldn't read and write it. And you fast-forward through that experience, and I think I appreciate that experience deeply. And a lot of it — you draw these sort of direct lines sometimes, or you sort of justify in reverse — but I really do genuinely believe there's a direct line from that experience because I saw a lot of sort of commonalities between global culture differences and sort of that nuance. And I think that me becoming someone just a fan of kind of media and storytelling — everything from music to sports to ultimately Bollywood and Hollywood and the like — I think stemmed from the fact that that was the way that I connected with different cultures and different people, and it was the way that I moved from being like an outsider to having friends.

It's funny, my wife jokes that I'm 'even keel Neil.' That's sort of what she calls me. By the time a decision gets to me, almost by definition, it's a difficult decision, because often times it's a trade-off between two bad choices, or two very difficult choices. Otherwise, that decision would be made somewhere else in the organization — it wouldn't really need to come to me. And so what I try to do to the best of my ability, and we talked a lot about this yesterday too, is I really do try to focus beforehand on the principles by which we will make those decisions. And I believe that principles are particularly important in tough decisions that involve trade-offs. In terms of examples, I'll give you one that's a very YouTube kind of example that's sort of deep in the YouTube ecosystem from a few years ago. So if you are watching a YouTube video, you'll notice below that video there's a like and a dislike button. You can tap that. Many people tap that after they watch a video. We used to have a count next to those buttons, the dislike button in particular. And a few years ago, we removed it. And that sounds like a small thing, just a number right below the video, but it was a really, really big thing in the YouTube ecosystem because it was part of the YouTube heritage, where YouTube started from. We were the platform that had a count across that. So your video had to stand up to scrutiny from this audience. Lots of creators were very, very attached to it, particularly larger creators, and some viewers were attached to it too, because that's a quick way to evaluate a video before you watch it. However, a few years ago, it was becoming clear that especially for smaller creators or perhaps marginalized creators, it was becoming something that could potentially get weaponized and used as a means to troll them or have a robot army sort of get at them. And so we made the difficult decision, and ultimately I made it, to remove that count. It was positively received in many ways, but it was extremely critically received in other ways. But I think having those principles allowed me to ultimately make that call, which in the YouTube world was a very consequential thing, even though it seems small.

You're really getting at the heart of the matter. And I would say, just to be very transparent, I don't think that this is a solved question by any means. And frankly, the rate at which AI is impacting all of our lives, the ground beneath that question is changing on a weekly basis, if not even faster. So I just want to be very upfront about that. But I have this very firm conviction that it will never replace human creativity. Again, back to one of the very first things we talked about yesterday, which is that notion of authenticity. People want to see an artist on stage because they know something about her life story and they have some background in terms of why she wrote the lyrics that way and why she's performing it that way. We've had AI possible to the point where computers can play chess, but for it to be interesting on YouTube, at least one of the contestants has to be a human. And so because of this notion of the human stories on YouTube, we absolutely cannot have it be overrun with AI slop. And what AI of course does is just like it can be a tool to produce amazing content or further democratize content creation so that another entirely new class of creators can come on board like the first YouTubers 20 years ago — it can also allow for the creation of lots of low-quality content. And so that's where the AI slop question comes in. And there, I think there's aspects of it that are not new. The part that's new is the scale, but the notion of low-quality content, clickbaity content, content that might be produced for monetization motives but is not actually quality to a certain level — we've been able to deal with that on YouTube. And so I think just like AI is powering some of that low-quality content, it can also be used to combat it on YouTube in terms of what we recommend or what have you. And then the last point that I'll make on this, which I think you alluded to as well, is I also think that we have to have a bit of a delicate hand on this. This is the part that's the unsolved part, because AI-created content does not mean low-quality content. Amazing content is produced by AI, just like technologies from the past, whether it's Photoshop or the drum machine, produced a new form of creativity. And I do think that's what's happening in the AI world. And so we can't have too many of those false positives where we're sort of killing the new form of creativity that's driven by these tools. And I would tell you that every day we're trying to really strike that balance. But we're very, very focused on making sure that when you open up the YouTube app, it's not a feed of AI slop.

My personal view is that it's sort of table stakes, but I do think that it's a place to start. And I think the other really big thing that I hear from when I speak to creators, public figures, journalists, etc., is being able to manage their likeness in this AI world. And that is something that is profoundly important in my view — and not just the classic sort of deepfakes and all those types of things, of course, but also impersonation to trick a user or to steal someone's creative idea and things like that. And so those things are also important. That will not get solved with an AI label, but needs to have tools. And so one of the areas that we're very focused on is this notion of — we call it likeness detection. We've had a technology here at YouTube for a long time called Content ID. It was actually, in some sense, one of the very early uses of AI almost a decade ago, if not longer. And it allows rights holders, artists, musicians — whether if you're Taylor Swift or what have you — to make a choice when your music is used or when a particular movie character is used to either take down that video or monetize that video, and it has created the ecosystem that exists on YouTube. So that principle of Content ID, we want to carry over to the AI world. The big-picture question around, like, well, you know, if a video can do something, XYZ can review a technology product and can create a fake reviewer to do that, or an AI-generated reviewer to do that, then who needs me? I really believe — and again, I could be naive on this — is what shines through on YouTube is that human connection, what that person stands for. Just like in your case, people understand what the Interview means. They know how Lulu is going to approach it. And I just don't think that that is going to get swapped by AI-generated — take your pick — journalist, artist, musician. And that's — I have seen nothing despite all the rapid progress here that would be contrary to what I said.

I really — I don't. And by the way, I'm also not naive to the point to say that there isn't going to be disruption. There's a whole supply chain of creativity, and I do think — and just like is happening in the software industry — there is going to be a change in the nature of the jobs, how those jobs are done, even who does them. So I don't want to trivialize that disruption. Of course, that happens with any big technology paradigm shift, and AI is not going to be different in that context. But to your core question of the replacement of that human creativity element and what people connect with on a service like YouTube, I just don't see AI generation replacing the humans that produce videos on YouTube.

I could reflect on this for a long time. And hopefully you've got some sense of this — I tend to be an optimist almost to the point of being naive about these things, Lulu. And what is a privilege for me on YouTube is that, despite the challenges and despite the incredibly complicated world that we live in, what I love about what I see on YouTube is like the common humanity aspect. I was watching YouTube on my television set last night and I was watching a YouTuber who lives in New York City, reviews restaurants, and the restaurant aspect of that was interesting, but the way that he talked about his life and how he anticipated going to have that meal and his experience after that meal — that's what I mean by the common humanity. And that shines through in YouTube. It's almost as if like if aliens discovered Earth, you know, 5,000 years from now, YouTube is that encapsulation of that. And on balance, I think it's awesome.

Thank you, Lu. Appreciate it.