YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

(0:00) Introducing YouTube CEO Neal Mohan (1:08) YouTube's revenue split with creators (7:30) How Neal thinks about enabling monoculture and connective threads at YouTube (11:23) Censorship on YouTube, demonetization decisions, dealing with different regimes and laws globally (19:58) YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, and channel subscriptions (24:00) Generative AI on YouTube: labeling AI, likeness concerns, possibilities Thanks to our partners for making this happen! Solana - Solana is the high performance network powering internet capital markets, payments, and crypto applications. Connect with investors, crypto founders, and entrepreneurs at Solana's global flagship event during Abu Dhabi Finance Week & F1: https://solana.com/breakpoint OKX - The new way to build your crypto portfolio and use it in daily life. We call it the new money app. https://www.okx.com/ Google Cloud - The next generation of unicorns is building on Google Cloud's industry-leading, fully integrated AI stack: infrastructure, platform, models, agents, and data. https://cloud.google.com/ IREN - IREN AI Cloud, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, provides the scale, performance, and reliability to accelerate your AI journey. https://iren.com/ Oracle - Step into the future of enterprise productivity at Oracle AI Experience Live. https://www.oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/data-ai-events/ Circle - The America-based company behind USDC — a fully-reserved, enterprise-grade stablecoin at the core of the emerging internet financial system. https://www.circle.com/ BVNK - Building stablecoin-powered financial infrastructure that helps businesses send, store, and spend value instantly, anywhere in the world. https://www.bvnk.com/ Polymarket - https://www.polymarket.com/ Follow Neal: https://x.com/nealmohan Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The man himself, CEO of YouTube.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  I didn't realize that when I took over the CEO gig, a big part of my job would be being a straight man for a lot of YouTubers out there.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  YouTube is now by far the biggest streamer in the world.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Shorts, I think, has just surpassed 70 billion views a day.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Mohan was one of the pioneers of internet advertising and keeping the world's largest creator economy afloat.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  We think we're really still in the early days of our growth story and fulfilling what our mission is, which is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome YouTube CEO Neil Mohan.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  How are you? Good to see you, brother. Good to see you. Thanks. How did you do? Nice to see you. David, how are you? All right, welcome Neil. Neil.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  I could have done that together. I mean, you could have.

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  What did you think? We talked to him a little bit about which platform is the most important. He said the one that pays us the most. You don't pay for content upfront. You've done some experiments. You do it all with the 55% revenue split. You sweep 45%. Seems like you're doing pretty well. Are you taking too much money from creators?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Let's get into it.

• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  Can we get that down to 30%?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, thank you all for having me. It's a privilege to be with you guys. Like they say, a long time listener, first time caller. So it's great to be here with all of you.

• 1:33Jason Calacanis?

  Do you listen to the pod? Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  I watch it.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you watch it? Where do you watch it? You like to watch a lot of videos?

• 1:39Speaker 00

  It's on YouTube.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, on YouTube. Yes, we're there now. We are there now, yes. Can you please be prepared?

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:45Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't know we had a YouTube channel. Really? How's it doing?

• 1:49Speaker 00

  How many folks watch it on YouTube? Just out of curiosity. There we go. All right, okay.

• 1:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's about half, yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  The channel is growing. You guys are close to a million subs, watch time, views, all up and to the right. So congrats to all of you guys on that. But on your question... Jason, so we've paid out in the last three years over $70 billion to the creator economy. We are the original and world's largest creator economy. And so...

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  (applause) Well done.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  And that innovation, which is called the YouTube Partner Program, is well over a decade now, the 55-45 that you're referring to. And so we pay out billions to creators. Creators, our media company partners, the music partners, etc. I'm using that term creator and I'll use it for the next 30 minutes, sort of in the broadest sense of the term. It's just that the way that we do it is very different. I mean, we're a creator economy in the true entrepreneurial sense of the word, which is if you're a creator on YouTube, contrasts to the traditional model, you're betting on yourself, which is kind of the opposite of sort of the way that traditional media models have worked.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  And as you grow, as your audience grows, as your success grows, your monetization grows, your business grows as well. And not every creator on our platform is going to become, you know, Mr. Beast or Dude Perfect, but there are, you know, north of 3 million creators that are in that Partner Program today earning revenue.

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but back to my question, I feel like you've created all these stars and you look at the Tuckers, you look at the Meggins, you know, we'll put ourselves maybe right behind them. We all choose to turn off monetization because the take rate's too high and we can do it better ourselves. Should you not start to think about two classes of folks? The up-and-comers who don't have sales teams, who don't have distributions, maybe, you know, it's more about building an audience and then maybe looking at the folks like us slightly differently? And this seems to be a weakness in your game. Your take?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I would say that, you know, the way I think about it is...

• 4:01David Sacks?

  He doesn't speak for us.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  I'm speaking for myself.

• 4:06David Friedberg?

  I just want to be clear that I love you.

• 4:08Jason Calacanis?

  But it's clear that people who are at this level take it on themselves because the 45% is just an absurdly high take rate for that level of person, the Tuckers, the Megans, they'd rather just bake their ads in. So, how do you think about that level of folks? They participate, but you don't monetize them?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I think that that's not the way I would characterize it, first of all. I think the way that I think about it is, all of these monetization models should be available to you, depending on what your business objectives are and what they're not. And I've talked to a bunch of you guys about sort of how you think about that monetization question and what's important versus audience building and not. And by the way, it's the same type of conversation that happens with sports leagues, or studios, or what have you. And so my vision on all of this is, whatever model works for you as a creator, podcasts or what have you, should be the model that you adopt. And so, for example, you take,

• 5:07Speaker 00

  you know, what Tucker's doing and Megan's doing, and they have had enormous success on our platform, mostly driven because they're incredibly talented at what they do. And the audience and the algorithm have figured that out. But it might be that the monetization model that works best is something where they're representing their inventory themselves. And that, I think, is less about sort of take rate or what have you, but sort of the best way to actually package it up. And so, that's really the way that I think about it. But if you're a creator getting started today, you're not even concerned with that at all, because the monetization is really only a byproduct of what you've been able to do from an audience engagement standpoint.

• 5:47David Friedberg?

  The net is what matters, right?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  That's my point, yes.

• 5:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah, take rate's 55, 20, 90, if you're making more money doing this than other things, of course.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  I mean, a great example, again, just...

• 5:55David Friedberg?

  Because the algorithm, and maybe you can speak to the quality of the algorithm and the ads placement. You come from the ads business, you're a double-click.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:01David Friedberg?

  How good YouTube's ad placement and ad quality is relative to other platforms, and how that actually increases monetization.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think what I'd say on that is, it's really, it's two things. One is, you know, obviously, we invest very heavily in making it so that the advertising you see, whether you're watching YouTube on a television screen, or on your phones, or your laptops... Is relevant, it's targeted, the creative formats are there. We are a platform that caters to advertisers that are brand advertisers, brand builders, as well as, you know, direct response. And so that is a big area of investment. But the reason why, and I spend a lot of time talking to advertisers, why they're also excited about the ROI is that the engagement is differentiated. And that turns into ROI for advertisers.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  And what I mean by that is if you go to YouTube, you are really leaned in into what you're watching. You are a Mr. Beast superfan. You're a, you know, Michelle Kari superfan. You're a Name Your Favorite Creator superfan. And that is a different type of engagement that actually translates into different ROI, regardless of where your objectives are in the marketing funnel. And that's, that's our secret sauce. That's where, that's where this $70 billion that we pay out to the creator economy and all these, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs that we create in the creator ecosystem on a daily basis come from.

• 7:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Neil, let me just up-level this in a more general question. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the cable channels and, you know, the way that we consumed content was largely live. You know, we would tune in for shows. And one of the byproducts of that was national culture, right? There would be these things that would enter the zeitgeist and we'd all talk about it and we would be unified by it. And on the plus side of all of this infinite distribution is you get to watch what you want. The downside of it is there's really no connective thread almost that we all talk about that's the same. How does YouTube view that problem? Is it a problem? Like, is there a responsibility or are there things that you can do to kind of make things

• 8:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that are a little bit less on-demand, a little bit more, you know, appointment viewing that kind of builds identity and culture?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a really interesting question. And again, you know... One of the consequences of what you're talking about vis a vis the algorithm or what have you is, you know, you guys open up your phones right now. That YouTube feed of yours is gonna look like you, right? Like, it really is about what you're genuinely interested in and watching. And that does lead to, it can lead to that type of, that fragmentation that you're describing. Having said that, you know, if you ask, you know, someone, a Gen Z or, you know, millennial, sort of, what were the top four or five, sort of, really big, sort of, breakout pop culture trends? A lot of them are actually an aggregation of a lot of these types of things.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  And, you know, they could be trends that might be not the most relevant to all of us or this audience, but they are for a particular sort of age group. And so, we do, so the answer is that we do see a lot of those sort of national, and in many cases, because YouTube's a global platform, 2 billion people come to it every single day, there's enough aggregation, even amongst these sort of niche areas, where you do see some of that. The other thing that I will say about, about, sort of, how I think about it is, I do think that live and sort of like those watercooler-type moments are really important. You saw, you know, you saw the biggest one of those happen on YouTube just two days ago. That Brazil game that Ari was mentioning was on YouTube. Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  And the reason why it was such a success, I would argue, is because of that aperture, what YouTube can obviously do from a reach standpoint. But the other reason, and to the NFL's credit, was you guys saw how relevant we were trying to make it for kind of this YouTube generation. And again, you obviously saw the integration with things like Destroying and Mr. Beast in the actual livestream of the game itself. But that sort of creator engagement through the lens of creators is something that sports leagues are leading to, which is sort of like what I describe as a new watercooler moment.

• 10:22David Friedberg?

  What percent of watched media minutes do you guys have, do you think? If you look at all media, broadcast, movies...

• 10:29Speaker 00

  I mean, you guys know we're

• 10:31David Friedberg?

  Netflix.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  We're the number one streaming platform here in the US. So I think the latest Nielsen's number was, and we've been the number one streamer in the US here for two years. And I think the number, the latest Nielsen number was, I think, something about, about roughly about thirteen, thirteen, fourteen percent of the, of the TV watching audience. But remember, that number doesn't include YouTube on mobile.

• 10:55David Friedberg?

  I see.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And so it's a television number.

• 10:57David Friedberg?

  But to Ari's point, do you see that growing? Are people spending more time consuming media because it's more personalized, it's more engaging, and they're finding perhaps more free time?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I do, I mean, look, our numbers are growing. I think other streaming platforms are growing, other, you know, mobile platforms are growing. I think if you look at sort of the totality of sort of human time, it's still sort of a relatively, you know, small portion of that. Yeah.

• 11:23David Sacks?

  Let me, let me shift gears to a different topic for a second. I think during COVID, there's a real sense that censorship was out of control on social media, not just YouTube, but Twitter, Facebook, all of them. If you question the efficacy of vaccines, or social distancing, or even on topics like the trans agenda, or even climate change, there was a risk that you could be censored, or shadow banned, or demonetized. It feels like we've, the industry's kind of pulled back from that, and things have opened up again. And a lot of that's, I think, due to what Elon did in terms of buying Twitter and opening things back up. I guess my question is, has the industry actually learned from that? Or is censorship just on pause during the Trump years?

• 12:08David Friedberg?

  There's another fastball. I like it.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  I like it, that's why I'm here.

• 12:15David Friedberg?

  Good question. It's a great question, yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  You know, I, I think that, actually, I'll just say a couple of things about that. And one of them will sound, it's, it's sort of actually connecting the, the dots between the questions that you guys asked, which is, you know, the way I answer David's, Dave's question is,

• 12:32Speaker 00

  First of all, I think a lot of these, all of these platforms are, are actually pretty different, right? Like what Twitter does is different than what, you know, some of the meta platforms do, which of course is very different than what YouTube does. And you could argue, as witness from the rest of this conversation, that we probably have a lot more similarity with, you know, a streaming platform than we do with a social media platform. So that, that's one point, but I think it's an important context into what I'm about to say. And the reason I say that is because, you know, 99% of what happens on YouTube is all the creators that I talked about, all the podcasters, you know, the Taylor Swifts of the world, all the music, obviously. Music is our largest and, you know, most important vertical, for example. We're a music platform.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  So that, that is like, even during COVID, that is where a lot of the watch time on YouTube versus a discourse that might be happening in a social feed somewhere. That doesn't mean that we don't have comments on our videos and all that sort of piece, which is where some of this, you know, discourse that you're alluding to, David, might have happened. I, I do think, yeah, I, so I think that at the highest level, I do think that there is something about the fact that that was a very different time. I remember kind of March, April of 2020 where like, oh my God, like, do you get this this way, or is it this way, or mask, or this? Or, I mean, I literally woke up one day and there were like, people climbing 5G cell

• 13:58Speaker 00

  towers and falling from cell towers because now it was like, you could literally get the thing from cell towers, cell towers, but it sounds crazy today, but that was the nature of sort of the types of things that were popping up.

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  So some lessons learned or regrets there?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Let me, let me just finish. So, so that, that's the context in which, you know, we were having to sort of make some of these decisions. Fast forward to today, like obviously in a completely different world, but just in terms of the nature of the disease and all that sort of a thing. So, all of those sort of policies that existed back then are non-existent today. And it's my way of answering your question of like, well, is it a temporal thing or not? I would argue that a lot of these sort of like, And by the way, YouTube, in particular, was criticized to an extreme amount because of all the content that we left up on the platform around, you know, the Wuhan virus

• 14:54Speaker 00

  controversy, around like, you know, whatever. All sorts of other things that we were leaving up that other places were acting differently on. And so, we got beat up a lot, sort of, from one side of the spectrum then. And I think that our approach really just has to be flexible to the environment and the context of it. I think we're always gonna get criticized by being an open platform. There's a lot of magic that happens because of the open platform. All these amazing creators wouldn't exist if we didn't have an open platform and we didn't stand for free speech, but there's also a lot of...

• 15:30Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on, I just wanna follow up on this if I may. There are two categories that I have in my feed because of the algorithm: firearms and poker. Both of those groups of creators are a little bit up in arms, no pun intended, because they are being demonetized. So how do you make a decision on who's allowed to earn and who's not allowed to earn and be part of the ad network? Poker folks and people who do firearm safety and firearm training and best practices, they're demonetized and they're complaining about it now. How do you make those kind of decisions?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  A lot of them are incredibly successful creators on our platform, Jason.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  But not monetized?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  No. So many of them are monetized as well. So we do have a clear set of rules and we've had these for a long time in terms of sales of firearms and those types of things. And obviously, there's legal frameworks and all those types of things around it. But I think, you know, in terms of firearms community and learning about firearms and safety, which obviously is an important thing, especially for young people, we're one of the largest places where those audiences exist, as well as monetization of that type of content. Now, the balance, and, you know, obviously, and some of this comes from, you know, experts that we've worked with in that vertical itself around something might be appropriate for

• 16:53Speaker 00

  an adult user of that type of content that may not be appropriate for a child and those types of things. So there's a lot of nuance behind it. But poker, I don't, I mean, are we, like, there's probably something around... gambling legality and all that sort of stuff but generally speaking as you guys know

• 17:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  okay

• 17:10Speaker 00

  there's an enormous amount of poker content that's incredibly successful in our platform it's back to what Chamath was saying which is like whatever niche there is out there however big or however small you're gonna find a set of creators that are just as passionate about it as as you are

• 17:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the interesting question is how do you organize yourself across all the different countries in you're in and the scale that you're at to deal with the cultural nuances of every different country and then to deal with the laws of every different country and then to deal as David said sometimes the vicissitudes of social policy in every country how do you deal with that organizationally like what does that actually look like

• 17:47Speaker 00

  yeah it's the part that turns my hair hair white but uh look I think part of it I say this to my team all the time which is it is a challenge right because we but I think it's a challenge that honestly like I view it as a bit of a privilege in the sense that it wouldn't be important if we weren't such an important place especially for young people to connect get information entertain themselves learning we're the largest learning platform in the world we know that obviously um just given all the use cases and the watch time etc and so at least from my standpoint I try to be as global as we possibly can in

• 18:31Speaker 00

  terms of principles you know one of the things that I always say about um YouTube is like you know our North Star principle and you know uh has always been um give everyone a voice and show them the world that's our mission statement uh it stands for freedom of expression freedom of speech we are you know an American company and that that notion that sort of value of freedom of speech of speech is core to our ethos and we really do try to start with that as a global position having said that you're right like there is an enormous patchwork of legislation and regulation that exists in every country

• 19:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  are there people that are writing policies that then some folks just have to understand and they're manually trying to react to here's how we deal with this issue in India here's how we deal with this issue in Brazil here's how we deal with it in France

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, the answer is.

• 19:22Jason Calacanis?

  Or is it algorithmic, or is it a combination?

• 19:24Speaker 00

  It's always some combination because, you know, the scale of YouTube is, you know, hundreds of hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every single minute of every single day. We want to be as core to that North Star as possible. And, you know, frankly, there's situations where we have to push back on that core, push back on sort of what might be an encroachment on that sort of a principle. Having said that, we also, of course, you know, have to legally operate in all of these countries, just like any other platform.

• 19:59Jason Calacanis?

  There's three products, Neil, I'm super obsessed with, and I just would love to get your take on them in terms of priorities for you. YouTube TV, unbelievable. Unbelievable. YouTube Brad. That is a great product. YouTube Brad, which I think is YouTube Premium, taking the ads off. Unbelievable. And then I think a sleeper is you've kind of built in Patreon-like functionality subscriptions. So maybe you could walk us through the footprint of each of those and the prioritization of those, because they do seem to have had a significant impact on engagement and how people look at the platform.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm super proud of all three of those products as a product guy myself. Like, that's the fun part of the job, is actually building all of these amazing products. And, you know, their origin story on YouTube TV, I'm a sports nut. I'm like, and actually, the people on my team, a lot of them who've been involved with YouTube TV since the very early days are also big sports guys, and I'm also a news junkie. And that's the core use case of YouTube TV in many ways. If you think about sort of the features that we build, Multi-View, Key Plays, even some of the fantasy integrations that you see. So that's the lens through which you should think about how we're going to continue to develop that product. And the thought, and then the question I would always get is like, well, why are you guys doing this?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Like, look at what's happening to that part of the paid ecosystem, right? Like, why are you diving into this thing that's like, this sort of like, you know, shrinking, shrinking thing? And our thought was like, well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that, like... Reinventing that whole experience from the standpoint of a fan or a consumer. And so that's the YouTube TV origin and sort of where it's going. The one thing that you should, you know, pay attention to is something that we call primetime channels in YouTube, which is a lot of those same sort of linear channels or sort of traditional media channels, but that you can buy à la carte in the main YouTube app.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And so that, there's connectivity between those two products.

• 22:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was wondering when that would happen because for me, it's just CNBC. I want to have it inside of YouTube, but I have to load it. And then when I travel, it's always like, oh, what region are you in? Premium, how many premium subscribers are there now? How is that growing? How does that affect the ad business? Because for me, the ads are death. I need my time back. So how do you think about that?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. I do think that for our business, advertising is going to remain, is today and will remain the predominant way through which we monetize on behalf of creators. That 70 billion number that I mentioned, most of it comes from ads. And the reason is because, you know, at a fundamental level, we are a platform of scale. 2 billion, 2 billion people come to it every single day. Having said that, like giving consumer choice, you know, uninterrupted experience is important. It's about 125 million subscribers.

• 22:55Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, 125 million.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  YouTube Premium.

• 22:59Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. How does that money get split with the creators? So if I'm watching Mr. Beast without ads, how do you?

• 23:04Speaker 00

  There's, there's a kind of roughly sort of engagement watch time type calculation.

• 23:09David Friedberg?

  And is YouTube TV basically the biggest cable subscriber base equivalent?

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Are we? Are you?

• 23:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah. What do you guys rank in cable subscribers?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Actually, you know, it's interesting the way that even the way you guys are talking about it is like, well, that's like your uninterrupted sort of TV subscription tier, which is how I think lots of people think about it.

• 23:28David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  The origin of YouTube Premium was actually a music premium, music subscription service, right? It was like called YouTube Music and Premium. And so a lot of those 125 million subs are not just people who are watching it just the way that they would watch like, you know, Netflix or Amazon without ads. There's a lot of that. But a lot of it is just actually music fans too, like people who. For whom their music service is actually That competes at Spotify. Is YouTube, right? Like where they discover music, where they listen to, you know, watch their favorite videos is YouTube? So how do you have like an uninterrupted music service?

• 24:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When you have all these incredible AI models all over the place, people will be generating all kinds of content. Some of that content could be news content, topical content. You know, it could talk about a vaccine, it could talk about whatever. Do you guys feel you have a responsibility to figure out whether that's real or not? Do you think that's the role of the actual creators? Do you think it should be, you know, the CDC should have a YouTube channel where they watermark the stuff that they put out? And then like whose responsibility is this going to be?

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's

• 24:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And how much of it is our responsibility as a consumer?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I think that here's how I think about it. First, with the growth of these AI enablement tools, you're going to see that like the distinction between like, was it completely AI generated? Was it AI assisted, et cetera, is going to be a continuum. So that's, that's the first piece. And we're already seeing that. We see that on YouTube, obviously, you know, you open up the YouTube app, you hit that plus button. You can type in a text prompt and it will generate a video for you using our VO models, right? So that, that is already happening.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  One of the things that we do is there is a label that says that, you know, you know, hashtag AI generated. And we will put that, so we call it sort of front of the box. We will literally put that on the video in some cases. Usually it's in the metadata. That's obviously not foolproof. But I, I think the way, at least from a principle standpoint, the way I think about it is, you know, YouTube has these, you know, community guidelines. We try to be transparent about them. We publish them on our website. And I think that's sort of like a a priori distinction between, well, it was AI generated, therefore it must be violative versus not actually is not the way to do it.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And it's really just about giving as much transparency to the users as possible. And then the other thing that's really important Is in the creator business, in the creativity business, whether you're a Hollywood celebrity, or a YouTuber, or an artist. The thing that I hear over and over that they really care about is their likeness. And so if you're Taylor Swift, it's your voice. If you're Marques Brownlee, it is your face.

• 26:23Jason Calacanis?

  Or J. Kell, it's your... No, I mean, there are people doing live Chamath things to give Bitcoin away, and I send it to him and I report it sometimes. Well, I send it to Neil. Yeah, I send it to Neil. And I'll tell you, the AI slop issue is getting bad.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Send it to me directly, instead of tagging me.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  No, the issue really is, like, I'm a Corvette fan, and the incentive is so perverse. I've had to ban a bunch of these channels that show me thumbnails of, "This is the new Corvette, this is the new prototype," and it's AI slop. And it's obvious what they're doing is they're trying to insert themselves into the algorithm, and then I just ban them. So you do give control, but I do think really labeling them is important.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  And I don't want to put the burden on you to do that. I think the labeling is one piece, but the thing that I was going to say is, the other thing, and we have a track record of Content ID, which is basically the rights management system, that you could argue basically created that whole creator economy in the first place.

• 27:19Jason Calacanis?

  And enabled YouTube's success.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 27:20Jason Calacanis?

  Saved YouTube.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  So Content ID is, think about that metaphor as it applies to AI.

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, wonderful.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So we are working on this notion of, I call it sort of likeness detection, where if it's a Chamath face, the algorithm should be good enough to actually detect that and then give you a choice as to whether that should come down.

• 27:42Jason Calacanis?

  Is that you?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Does that come down? Or, you know, there might be some creators that choose to monetize it and give...

• 27:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so we can take ownership of it, yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  You can take ownership of it.

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  So if people take our clips, make versions of us as dogs or something?

• 27:54Speaker 00

  And for us, it's not just words. We actually have a track record of doing that because of something like Content ID.

• 28:00Jason Calacanis?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Yomu. Neil, thanks for being here. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it. Thank you.