Hey, mark, its good to see you. Thanks. Joining us today. Yeah, for having me. Yeah, well, it was a really fun read and i kind of wanted just jump in to the conversation i have a lot of love questions, but just to start off, i wanted to just see if you can explain kind what what inspired you write the book obviously youve written on google and youtube for years but like what led you to to decide this is something need to write a whole book about. So i have been covering google since 2015 and then it became and and really its an expanding kind of business conglomerate an empire and during that time youtube its media division, became increasingly important. The companys bottom line. It also became increasingly important for the companys political hurdles and some of their Major Business problems in the past seven years. And so during time i was reporting on a lot of the major crises that that youtube and its Parent Company dealt with sort of fire after. And what i saw was a really fascinating in the short period of time this whiplash you have these employees at google and youtube who see themselves as an underdog to traditional media to traditional corporate world and hollywood. And then within a few short years theyre google and youtube viewed almost equivalent big tobacco. And youve seen the social media backlash. Google has faced intense amount of unprecedented political scrutiny. I thought was a fascinating story about this media platform. Thats really despite its size and influence. Its just not had the same level of attention as some of its peers. And i thought within that story that you have plenty of fascinating characters youtube and then inside the company have this whiplash of going from the underdog to sort of seen as tech and seen as something that for associated with a lot of problems in democracy, right . Yeah and im curious who you were able to speak at the company. I mean, who who they gave you access to, how you got all this inside baseball information for for the book. Yeah. Mean i came to the companies and since day one that i was writing this this was a i wanted it to be a definitive genuine and accurate depiction of the companies operations. What its gone through i and its responded i think my my case to them you know youtube is situated in the problems they face in part because they have this this major creator economy. You know, they are the only platform for a very long time that paid creators paid broadcasters. And so they have this gigantic engine that has ramifications for peoples professional lives. And thats, i think, characterize a lot of the challenges they went through. So i spoke to about a dozen sort of officially with company. This is ranging from everyone on, you know, marketing roles to engineering to products going up to number two at the company. And my additional reporting i spoke to over 100 people that have either worked there or had worked in the past in a variety roles, basically talking to anyone was willing to to share their time and their story. Mm. Yeah. I mean what found was interesting is you cited a google employee who said they viewed youtube as the video scaffolding of the internet and that also it is the number two Search Engine behind google. And i just think that was kind of the surprising information for me. Can you kind of share kind of how that youre talking about the underdog . You know, aspect . I dont know how widely known that youtube is, is the Search Engine itself even though it was one of the driving forces. Why google scooped it up. Yeah, it was it was early in youtubes life. So it was 18 months after it started in october of 2006. Google agrees to buy youtube for 1. 6 billion, which at the time was just enormous sticker shock for the financial, for the media world, for people inside google, certainly youtube by then had had already had sort of an enormous success finding an audience with viewers. It had started to become part of the wider culture or culture or pop culture, firmament and, and but google really saw youtube as a fantastic search property and in that way is as a threat in the sense that, you know, google is is wanted to become the best premier Search Engine remain on the internet. Its all youtube. People are going to youtube to look for just, you know, entertaining to pass the time and idol entertainment as well as to videos and seeking information in the same way that in commercial the same way they would go to google that changed that. I mean, youtube has only become stronger and deeper as a search platform, right . Its sort of weve all had this experience where its that like any specific thing were looking to do, whether its like fix, you know, a small part of your car or baker recipe. There is probably a Youtube Video out that explains how to do it means that theres someone whos taking the to upload that video and potentially made money from it its just the breadth of of the platform is really hard to come to terms with right and its its birth the creator economy so and youve alluded to that but can you kind of explain the significance that and how its really set the stage for all these other social media apps that have now started paying their creators. Im thinking tick tock instagram, facebook snap. But it really was the original there and and how that evolved over. Time yeah, i mean youtube of invented a new form of fame like we we now have online who are more recognizable to generations and teenagers and kids and people in their twenties than Hollywood Alisters and that has been the case maybe for for the past decade. You know, youtube began very early, remarkably, in 2007, sharing the ad revenue from its site with a small select group of popular creators that started to expand and become professionalized relatively quickly. And then to up to a point now where where they have over 2 Million People are on youtubes ads partner program. That was actually a larger number. A few ago because the company had to call that back for a variety of reasons but its just this incredibly robust economy it is launch its like new Media Companies many careers and now youre seeing especially during the pandemic right where where creators became a really valuable franchise for our value vehicle for companies to do marketing. The influencers just became you know, these very popular and profoundly they have a relationship with an audience that just celebrities on tv and conventional media dont necessarily. So weve seen twitch snap Snapchat Tiktok all the matter of properties spotify in particular are all kind of hurling at this creator class in war for talent thats been happening and i only see in its early stages right now totally and and going back kind of the basis of youtube itself you referred to it as like the three legged stool audience creator advertising. But throughout the book you mentioned so many tensions. The three factors and how often the creator is left as the the the most uneven stool even though that as were referring to it, they are the basis of youtube. Theyre what created youtube. So could kind of talk about some of those tensions and how they changed over time. Yeah, its a wobbly stool for sure. Yeah, its you know, i mean, you talk to advertisers and think that creators are sometimes coddled on the platform and in some circumstances like giving more latitude than than an advertiser. Certainly like a more cautious conservative advertiser would want. You know. The other constituency is the viewer. And i think you can from my reporting shows that you can you can clearly make the argument that, you know what has done for viewers is this amazing mass of entertainment, free entertainment information never existed. Two decades before. And we kind of take for granted, take advantage of now. But its theres not a lot of transparency for you, a viewer. And ill give it like one one interesting example. So the past few years as youtube has responded to a lot of criticism, theyve instituted this policy called what they call borderline videos. And so these are videos that dont break their rules about hate speech, harassment, graphic violence and supporting kind of extremist positions. But they go right up to the line of them and this is a really arbitrary line and what youtube has done a pretty powerful tool which is okay were just not going to put these videos on our recommendation engine. So its the traffic on those once theyre removed from the youtube Recommendation System, it really plummets because that is a majority of views on videos as people being recommended footage and just kind of autoplay you know, one video that jumps to the next or that panel of videos is on the screen. If youre looking at a desktop computer, me as a viewer i have no idea that this video in front of me has been deemed borderline i have no idea this video, you know is is potentially violating some rules are in questionable territory and and you know that the creators at the same time dont necessarily have that indication either and thats sort of that part of the reason many one of many reasons why the creators feel shortchanged especially compared to traditional media, which is also on youtube right and and that all kind of came to a head you talk about in the book in 2017 with the ad pocalypse you call it and just that was just talking about the tensions with some violent extremist content being promoted on the platform by certain creators, that being tied to advertisers who who do not want to obviously be associated with that content other of you know videos that also viewed as offensive that ads were still running on so could you kind of talk about maybe what led to that, what there are some pretty dramatic changes that happened after after that time period. Yeah, i think there are there are a couple of things going on. One is sort of wonky business, right . Like google is a Digital Advertising company like it makes its majority of its putting ads front of your search results and then putting ads the web either on website or on Youtube Videos. This has been a Business Model that has fundamentally reshaped how marketing works and. You know, it kind of took this what traditionally like a handshake agreement on madison avenue, literally. Its you know, im a a company and i want my ad to run on this tv station and this show or on this billboard. Right. What youtube did. But google did. Was it this upended that and it said, like, we can will serve at your ad to where will reach the best consumer. What that did was and then they will do it in an automated way. So they built this fantastically complex Automated System equivalent to sort of Financial Markets that with all these exchanges and market and like basically these a lot of software to to determine when to serve you an ad that youre most likely to click on. So what happened in 2017 was you and i were reporters that found that some of the major household brands and names and even nonprofits were sponsoring terrorist videos, extremist neonazi, the kind of inappropriate that if you sat down a know chief marketing and said youre spending money on this, they clearly would not want to continue doing so. And they didnt want their names in the headlines associated with that and was you know it was a relatively small percentage of the budget. It just demonstrated how this this model had been built and built so quickly and wasnt prepared to deal with that kind of avalanche of advertisers exiting. Right and then after that, i mean, they did up having to change some of their their business and Digital Advertising modeling. Also, it led to some major changes in how they moderate content, i think as well. This was also, i guess the second point was this was the beginning early the Trump Presidency in the era. And you had, you know, major advertisers that were much more cautious about and id say even venture to say like did not want to go anywhere near remotely political issues and topics. And then you have and google that also wanted to steer clear of of anything of remotely political they were the beginnings this accusation that the company has a bias against conservatives in the u. S. So you know their their response was was pretty i would say was pretty severe like. The number of changes they made and youtube now versus youtube in 2017 looks profoundly different. And they put in effectively like safeguards and systems to make sure that their advertising business would continue to operate and and and on some level, that has worked very well that they are the earliest we have for youtubes financials from the company is that in 2017 they made 8 billion. Last year they made close to 29 billion. And advertising its been phenomenal growth. And so at least on one metric, they, you know, satisfied advertisers. Theres certainly open questions about whether or not theyve satisfied regulated or concerned from parents. So, you know, you name it. Right. And speaking of use of ai tools, theyre obviously deployed in advertising. Theyre deployed in the Recommendation Systems, but also around 2017, i think time period were deploying it to automatically moderate content to because because it seemed obviously more and more content was getting on the platform and never saw human review initially. So could you kind of talk about the evolution of content moderation and well talk about youtube kids next is an example of where they really had to build it up. Yeah i mean the content moderation theres theres a really telling anecdote the book that these teams early team is so they were they hired these eay moderators on staff they it the squad which is the stands for an acronym and hopefully i get those right its like safety and quality of users forgive me not getting it exactly right but i remember squad detail in the book and and but these were like sort of the thing front line workers of the internet, right . This was in 2000, 5006, which was there was just beginning to have what we call the user generated content. And this proliferation of material that was to your point, not programed unfiltered and they had teams and like wrote these rules and they were i think pretty adaptive given the fact that they were in some ways inventing this on the fly warnings. The example is, you know, there was a early on this trend on the internet of like whats called the inspiration. So its women, young girls posting videos like pro anorexia material. And so there are people on youtubes policy team on they identified this and so this is a trend that we do not want on our community. Right . We dont want videos promoting and not for like this point. Keep mind like youtube basically didnt have commercial business or it was like britney nascent and. They then outlawed this this practice or at least set rules. They restricted it as far as restricting it for for younger viewers, of course, these like theres a big gap in the history of youtube. Like like all platforms between the rules that they write and what actually happens on the site and that enforcement is is incredibly difficult. Very difficult. And video like youtube has a unique problem that. Facebook and twitter have not had because facebook and twitter are largely text based. Its just its the the Software Works right now is far easier to analyze immediately text and identify like if youre looking for certain keywords, it is much harder to do that in a video and you also have to deal with visuals as well as audio. So at a certain point, you know, youtubes size began, i think just grew too large. Their for the moderation team, they started to outsource this this operation. And in late 2017, after like this the series of business crises and more regulatory pressure, they they went out and hired thousands of contract moderators to build up the team that they sort of still work with today. Right. Yeah. And that was really novel. I think what kind of inspired more dramatic human intervention think you explain was with elsa gay in the youtube kids era if you want to kind of describe broadly what what means. I mean it sounded like adults dressing up in kind a comical look of elsa was obviously from if someone did not know and taking of you know key keywords in the tagging but but also doing activities that kids should not be seeing it seemed like so that seemed to have gone out of control for probably too long because sounded like youtube kids there wasnt i mean it was a platform in theory youtube want parents to be watching it with their children. But the reality was children were watching it on so could kind of explain the outcome of that and then i guess yeah so because of the way that that internet laws work i mean this is basically like, you know, the only way that that youtube was restricted by from from day one and that it had coppa, the restriction on like what you can what type of targeting and data you can collect from from minors 13 and for that reason site was very explicitly or well rather i dont know how explicit it was because it was the terms of service that as we know on the internet, like few people actually read but its like this is a very site for 13 and in over if youre a kid under 13 you are watching with your parents and it was 2015 there was like 2015 there was just so much abundant material on youtube that was clearly for toddlers and kids younger than 13 with a company that, as they said, they built an app called youtube kids. And this was their attempt to say this is sort of to make a safe space for children, i think for a variety of reasons that not taken off. And i think the traffic on that is just minuscule compared to youtube. Com they were criticized pretty on from from some outside groups for the because they didnt do they didnt curate an and like handpick the videos that were going in there was their videos in there that certainly parents found inappropriate that became in 2017 when there was just so much videos that were designed to get kids to watch. And enough people at youtube decided this like inappropriate and something that to be honest that they would want their children to watch. I think that was a major point in the company and keep in mind, i think like they were aware this was putting them close to close to uncomfortable territory as far as regulation. Right. And and and you have, you know, quotes from susan we just ski the ceo saying. You know, this was not what it was intended to do. And obviously directed the hiring of, you know, the goal was 10,000 content moderators humans that was that for google wide. Okay. It was one of the frustrating moments where youtube tends to like announce a figure like that i was like, that was a very large summer, read the fine print and. Its i mean, i think it was