All right, hello everyone. My name is Samir Choudhry. You saw some of my clips up there. I've been making YouTube videos since 2011. One of the hosts of a show called the Colin and Samir Show. And I'm an Indian-American that was born in Los Angeles to two Indian immigrants. So, I can imagine the room understands what it was like for me to come home from college and say I'm going to make YouTube videos for a living. But I turned to YouTube because I was enamored with Hollywood and storytelling, but I had no connections. My parents didn't grow up in Los Angeles. I was not somebody who knew how to get in the door in Hollywood. So, I turned to the place where I could share my voice and share my story and that was YouTube. So, I'm really excited about this conversation. Because our next guest is someone who actively champions the next generation of storytellers. Somebody who's given a voice to people like myself and millions of creators who have a story to tell. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has helped shape one of the most powerful cultural platforms in the world. Neal became the CEO of YouTube in 2023 after eight years as YouTube's Chief Product Officer. And prior to YouTube, Neal was the Senior Vice President of Display and Video Ads at Google. Neal was named Time Magazine's CEO of the Year in 2025 and named to the Time 100 in 2026 and has been recognized as one of Fortune 100 most powerful people in business. And tonight he is receiving a TAAF Award for his extraordinary leadership. So, I'm honored to welcome my friend, YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan.
It's great to be with you, Neil.
So, I wanted to start this conversation at a really interesting point in your journey. There's this moment where you go from a middle school in Saline Middle School in Michigan.
Yeah, right outside Ann Arbor.
Right outside of Ann Arbor to St. Francis College in Lucknow, India.
Which I would call a reverse commute for most of us, right? Most of us went the other way. So, just take me back to that moment when you find out when your parents tell you, 'Hey, Neil, we're moving to India.'
Yeah, yeah, that was definitely a pivotal moment in my childhood. Before I do that, first of all, it's great to be with you, Samir. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real privilege to be here. I was a middle schooler right before high school. I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Indiana, just maybe similar story to many folks here in the audience. My folks came here, my dad came here to get his PhD at Purdue University. I was born on that campus when my folks were in graduate housing there. Up until that point I had a pretty normal childhood growing up in a small town in Michigan. Lots of friends. I knew that most of my friends really didn't look like me. We grew up in a typical middle-class neighborhood, but other than that we stood out in terms of our heritage, it was a pretty normal childhood. And then one day my parents sprung on me and my two brothers the news that we were all moving back to this place called India, which of course I was very familiar with, but had never really spent any time in. I could understand the language because my parents spoke it with each other, but I couldn't read or write it or speak it. This was in the early mid-80s. So the world we are used to today where you can just fly out there on a Sunday and be back on a Thursday did not exist. So it was a very big culture shock, kind of total fish out of water. I showed up in Lucknow sounding basically like this. So it was a really big adjustment and it was a pivotal moment in my childhood because it showed me something really powerful about what became a core part of my professional career and a big part of my life, which is the power of storytelling. The profession that you're in, that I'm in, came from that pivotal moment in my journey. One of the ways that I connected as this complete outsider was through stories. I very quickly fell in love with — I was a sports kid, so I switched from baseball to cricket. I went from Star Wars and Transformers to Bollywood movies. And through sharing those common experiences with new people, I developed friendships and learned the language and really found my people. That has been a consistent theme of my life since that point. It was a big shock that eventually turned into something that was foundational to the rest of my life and some of my closest friends are from that time in my life during those high school years, and I made them through the power of storytelling.
You know, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, maybe people in the crowd felt this as well, but I tried to do everything I could at a young age to hide my Indianness. I was uncomfortable at school bringing food that my mom made in a tiffin, which is a classic way to transport Indian food, and I would watch American movies to try and figure out how to act as an American in high school. Specifically, I watched American Pie, and that dictated a lot of what I did. I ended up playing lacrosse, so something
Yeah. Um but I it was hard to feel like an outsider, and all I wanted to be was on the inside. And I'm curious about your experience. When you land in India, you're kind of an outsider again, and maybe you did or didn't feel like an outsider in Michigan, but I'm curious about the experience of feeling like an outsider.
Yeah, it's it's really interesting, and I don't want to like overly dramatize it, but you know, I felt that way when I was living in Michigan. There was one other family that of Indian background. Their son was my age. He also happened to be named Neil, which was a little strange, but he spelled it the wrong way. I spelled it the right way, but so, yeah, we stood out. And so, we had lots of friends, but it was clear that we were different than a lot of our neighbors and my school friends and all of that. And so, that was a big part of my childhood. That's why that move to India was such a pivotal moment because even though now I moved to a place where a lot of people looked like me, they had a completely different background than I did up to that point. And so, that's why this idea of finding common ground, how do you find those common connections with people who are very different? Coming back to that notion of storytelling and the thread from all of that to where I am today is the power of that. And it happened to me again when I moved from high school in Lucknow, India to college at Stanford. It was all over again. And so, it was another version of developing friendships and fitting into communities again through finding that common ground of storytelling and shared experiences. I am convinced that power of storytelling is a common thread to where I am and the job that I have today.
So, I I want to talk about storytelling then specifically about even the stories that were told in your own house. Maybe at the dinner table or with your parents. Because it is pretty common at least from my memory of having Indian parents as a high school kid to hear stories of other Indian kids doing impressive things, right? O'Neal got into Stanford. You know, that would have been said at my dinner table. But a lot of that also dictated the career paths that a lot of people in our community took, right? Rishi became a doctor. Or Sahil became a lawyer. Like these are stories that we told that informed our career paths. I find your entrance into the world of advertising, the world of tech, the world of media, and eventually now, the CEO of one of the most powerful cultural forces, how did you connect the dots for me of going back to Stanford? Did it ever enter your mind like this would be your path? Or how did you get here?
