We interviewed a YouTube employee about why videos go viral

YouTube is changing like watch this intro from Mr Beast this is a one billion dollar super yacht here it is in Vietnamese in Hindi super yacht multi-language audio on YouTube is just one of the trends that we dive into in this video and that's because today we're interviewing the most interesting employee at YouTube his name is Kevin alaka and he's the global head of culture and Trends and every year Kevin and his team put together the YouTube culture and Trends report which really boils down the top trends from the past year on YouTube now as

big YouTube nerds Colin and I have been okay Colin we're pretty big nerds have any of you seen the culture and Trends YouTube channel okay so it's one of the Lesser known YouTube channels by YouTube but Samir and I actually love it so as YouTube nerds Colin and I have been big fans of this report for the past three years and this year we asked YouTube if we could help distribute the report to all of you because we find it incredibly valuable YouTube sponsored this episode thank you YouTube and they gave us the report early

so that we could make this video so in this interview we dive into the trends report and we watch some of the videos from it videos that range from bizarre to incredibly insightful we also make some predictions on where we think the future of YouTube is headed alright let's get into it this is our interview with the global head of culture and trends at YouTube Kevin alaka Kevin welcome to the show yeah thank you it's very exciting to have you here we've had this conversation many times off camera and off mic but now we get

to have it here that's right which is very exciting I will say every time that Samir and I have heard you speak afterwards we've looked at each other and said man I wish we could have just recorded that and put it on our Channel not to put too much pressure on you yeah but we've always loved like what you've brought to the table and the perspective that you bring I feel like you are YouTube's in-house reference librarian meets social Anthropologist that's very nice of you to say what is your official title at YouTube I'm the

global director of culture and Trends okay which I made up transparent with you because the whole culture and Trends team yeah whose titles we all made up uh as well um but what happened was I've been at YouTube for almost 13 years and what happened was very early on we realized that when you're a Content platform there's this unique need to try to understand what's actually happening on it like if you're a TV network you don't need someone to explain what's happening on your TV network but when you're a Content platform there is this sort

of requirement or need where you you have to have a deep understanding of the Dynamics of what's actually at play on your platform what's what is driving the popular culture of your platform because you don't necessarily control it in the way that you would a traditional media platform or something and so these are all things the thread between all this stuff you know if I'm in a bar it's like I work on projects that help people find and understand what's popular on YouTube lots of different business applications for that but that's the Crux of it

it's really interesting what you said about the difference between traditional media and and a platform like YouTube I hadn't really thought of it like that that you don't YouTube doesn't really decide what's popular the audience decides like it's about consumer behavior and also Creator Behavior it's whatever we are uploading as creators and how that intersects with what consumers are watching is what defines what YouTube is yeah and in fact I would say in many cases it's the opposite of what everybody wished it was in certain times yeah like you can imagine being a burgeoning Content

platform and you're trying to you know make you're trying to compete with television for advertisers and things and the most popular creators on the platform are playing video games you know that's like right not exactly what you wouldn't want if you were trying to sell something in that at that time but of course that doesn't matter because you're following the audience you're following the creators Define the platform which is a very unique thing in the history of media um and now you see this type of function and in different platforms and stuff YouTube's not the

only place where this type of thinking happens in the same way but we were one of the early ones because we were so big and got into it on an earlier side so given that you have such a unique perspective on YouTube and this bird's eye view and you have for so many years could you give us an example of an interesting Trend that you saw on the platform there had been this thing that I saw this is very early when I started YouTube I remember there was a video of a guy riding an elevator

up and down like just he would go into a film himself going into the elevator narrating The Experience going to the elevator hit a button go up 10 flights come back down 10 flights turn around get the other view up and down and then leave and it had tens of thousands of views right and I could not figure out why this like one of my favorite things about YouTube is trying to like this this little mystery of like why does someone like this like that's the driving function of a lot of the work I do

why to someone like this like that's the thing that fascinates me gets me up in the morning trying to unpack why we like the things we like and I just couldn't figure it out I just thought it was like um people like weird stuff on the internet you know so I kind of moved on from it and then I was like you know what I gotta go back and figure out what that elevator thing was about so I I found this channel massive audience um that all videos like this and I I was like hey

can we chat I just need to understand what's going on and he um he lived in Virginia and he was a train conductor and um he basically had always for his entire life been obsessed with elevators and he just one day started filming him put it on the internet he found all these other people that were also obsessed with elevators and I mean there are elevator channels all over the world Finland you know I found them in Brazil there's tons of people and I was but why what's the appeal here and he's like well he's

like most a large percentage of my audience are actually people with Autism and there's something about the experience of sight sound motion and how people's brains work um that uh it makes that a really appealing thing and so his channel was actually not about the elevators it was actually about the the sort of community of people with Autism who all were interested in this thing together and they only knew like they only most people who are into that only knew that anyone else was into it because they saw it on YouTube like they thought they

were the only person in the world that was so interested in that as a topic and he discovered through this experience that there were other people like him and that is a particularly poignant story I think of this but you see it happen constantly on the platform things that fly in the face of our expectations of of popularity of interest of entertainment um but that you know our perspective as a team has always been we don't make value judgments about what people watch there's obviously certain things that are inappropriate and and problematic and stuff and

that's its own tier of thing but you know I think we're so quick and we have been so quick to in in the sort of history of media to dismiss things that we don't understand is like being outlier content or someone's weird choice or whatever but if you stop that if you just say why would someone like this and you try to unpack it it unlocks a whole world of stuff it explains a lot of what happens on YouTube totally I mean ASMR is another one yeah you know yeah that for years people YouTube didn't

even like me talking about ASMR because like this is some weird yeah thing and I was like no no this is people using video in a way that you just would never think of but it's meaningful to them you know I've gotten into lawnmower YouTube oh yeah lawnmower YouTube is fantastic have you seen anything I have in our Discord yesterday it's this there's this guy uh timtim who will go around and mow people's Lawns yeah and it's like an act of kindness which is nice he'll do it for them um but it's so engaging it's

so satisfying to watch a long game they're also like lawn mower Simulator games where you put yourself in the world of you're driving the lawnmower yeah and I think it has to do with like this soothing experience maybe you could I mean you obviously could get that in real life yeah but there's something soothing about it adjacent to the power washing content which is also yeah that same that same sphere I'm into drain unclogging if you've seen post-10 I haven't returned to that yet it's uh he goes out around unclogs like stuck drains on the

streets I mean that sounds really great it's so fascinating about it but I think um 2022 if you look at it was this incredible year of growth I think for creators and for the Creator economy and for YouTube I look at 2023 as one that's being defined by change for creators for audiences it feels like there is so much change so much of it also being wrapped up by AI specifically generative Ai and the tools that we have as creators obviously this is a part of the culture and Trends report can you give us some

insight into what you found when it comes to generative AI on YouTube I wanted to start with what what is interesting here like what's what's happening what do we know is happening right now that we should be excited about maybe you know what like what could this be from a from that perspective because I think we all have a healthy skepticism about what it could be that we're not excited about sure and um I think there are new things constantly we're like oh I didn't realize I needed to be worried about that but I do

today yeah you know and that's going to keep happening with this stuff but it's there's people doing interesting stuff with it I want to find out what is that and what's going on here and so there's some end of this that we don't even think about as Ai and I think this is interesting how I think most average viewers wouldn't even consider the stuff that they're seeing as AI content because it's it's not directly and I don't mean that in that it's deceptive I mean that and simply it's just a part of the workflow it's

a part of the enhancement of of the content um and so you started to see a lot of people just saying like how can I play with this as part of my workflow and that's I think we're still in in that phase a little bit of people using it to create prompts for their bodybuilding videos or you know like giving them you know little challenges for their beauty videos you know and and that that's like step one I mean the title of this video and this episode will have been enhanced in some way by AI

right and the audience won't know that or it won't matter until now you know and the angles the angles for this if you're watching we can probably show but like this will be cut by AI yeah you know like there is an AI tool that will know when you're talking and when I'm talking and it will cut it accordingly yeah that's an advancement that we've seen as YouTube creators that I did not anticipate this year at all but that has changed the Dynamics of how YouTube video is made yeah that's behind the scenes at least

what I've noticed is you know what we're seeing as consumers is AI for the first six months of the year has been what I would call like the collaborator of the year yeah like every YouTube big YouTube Creator is collaborating with AI yeah and I think that the thread between a lot of the this stuff is that it is enhancing how people can express themselves at a higher speed and audio visual Fidelity you know you can you can have you can create more complex content faster and sort of higher resolution essentially you know and that

is something that I think people invite and are interested in and stuff and there's there's certainly all different types of applications to it but what we're seeing now and has has been the case with a lot of new technologies is that as creators adopt them they sort of become normalized they they you see them you see people do things with them you you get inspired by that and you're like oh I can do something with that and you build on it and so the next phase of where that starts to take us is into this

world where you are things are much more iterative like we already live in a one of the things that defines internet video is that it is a sort of exists in a conversation in a way right like content exists in reaction to other content like that doesn't happen with movies and TV and other types of media it's a lot more interactive in that way but when you can make things so quickly like you can edit the video so much faster like take that to its conclusion and all the things that you can do faster than

you can imagine this world in which conversation content exists as conversation right and you have every possible remix of the thing or whatever it can be done in a very quick amount of time and everything is building on itself in a way and it just changes the shape of culture in a way it really just lowers the barrier to create right I feel like short form content we would always say okay it lowers the barrier to entry the videos are shorter they're easier to produce you can make them on your phone but now we have

things that are being made you know just with mid-journey right or 11 laps which is like a voice generation tool and you can create without even a camera yeah and to take it a step further if you look at what Corridor crew did by using video to then create animation to create anime they're now competing with Hollywood like it closes the gap between what's possible to be made yeah we should take a look at this the corridor crew video wouldn't it be cool if you could film yourself and easily turn into anything you want like

a cartoon character this video particularly for me felt like the moment that when Colin and I talked about this and we saw this in the trends report we said does this potentially suggest a rise of scripted content on YouTube um you know what we've seen is YouTube being the home for unscripted Content Vlogs you know conversations just unscripted content sure there's some scripted content on YouTube but largely it's unscripted the the potential to turn yourself into a you know anime character or just be able to create animation this fast does it suggest like a potential

rise in scripted content on YouTube well as you know I hate making predictions like I will make them yeah you can say your reaction and I'll make the prediction yeah so I I think it's a reasonable a reasonable point of view because um fiction content is is very labor intensive and and things but the core question I have with it is there's still the quarter guys are actually great storytellers it's not like they're just a bunch of random people who like typed a thing in and got a thing like they they know how to tell

stories they're great at what they do and that is hard to that you can't replicate very easily and so there are many great storytellers in the world and so the ability for them to tell those stories is enhanced it should be unlocked but you know the will the Alchemy come together to have a compelling you know narrative experience will people want that it's hard to say I feel like they will yeah I think especially with watch time going up on TVs on connected TVs for YouTube now what Corridor crew did by essentially using video to

then create animation it was not easy if you watch their video like they had to troubleshoot a lot and they're uniquely qualified to make what they made but I think it shows us what's coming like there is whether a tweet or I don't know what it was but someone said like whatever you're looking at right now with AI is the worst version of it you will ever see and when I see things like what happened with Corridor crew I think okay that will be the reality shooting video on a green screen to then turn it

into any style of content that you want like that is the reality I also think about the concept that as YouTube creators that's the most that's the biggest video library of yourself right if you want to build a model of yourself you like you as a YouTube Creator if you do talking head videos or for us doing a long-form podcast like there's a lot of input that potentially you'd have access to that you can animate or bring to life in different ways uh with AI right the the the question you start to ask is what

differentiates right if everybody can do everything yes what breaks through like you know and it's funny because some people ask have asked me um what we're going to be flooded with all this content what are we gonna do we're just gonna be so we're gonna be there's gonna be so many so many so much stuff like is it just gonna be a low quality dump of stuff from all over the world uh I would argue we already have a giant low quality dump of stuff the premise of the company I work for is actually sifting

through that to find the things that are going to be most interesting to you so I have to believe uh you know and perhaps my salary depends on it but I have to believe that we'll solve that problem right and so then the question becomes what so then what stands out and it becomes the thing that is the thing that you can't replicate which is unique perspectives you know creative ideas the the thing that's so interesting to me uh about this is its potential to make that the defining thing between the pieces of content that

we yeah we can consume right now there are so many perspectives so many people's voices that we don't have access to because they they don't have the funds or they don't I mean it's gotten so much cheaper to distribute content but it hasn't gotten that much cheaper to make you know to realize a science fiction Adventure like that is still a very expensive proposition but maybe it won't be in the future so does that mean that all of those incredible storytellers who write you know um alt science fiction novellas that don't aren't going to get

their scripts produced like now can actually bring that into the audio visual realm maybe you know and so that's the thing that I think is Will become interesting through all this is how does the individual perspective the the core creative idea the thing that we actually care about get distilled uh through the course of all this work I also think AI is unlocking fan communities and and in a very unique way um the Wes Anderson trend is probably one of the most interesting I'm a huge fan of Wes Anderson yeah and this trend has emerged

of what if Wes Anderson made Star Wars what if Wes Anderson made Lord of the Rings you know like that's such a fascinating Trend to emerge that has reached millions and millions of people that we didn't even know we wanted or wanted to connect with and to Collins point that stuff is made using mid-journey 11 labs and maybe a little bit of editing there's no cameras involved in making those viral YouTube videos in the quaintest corner of Middle Earth embark on an Epic Journey unlike any you've experienced before and it's interesting that it coincides with

this other Wes Anderson Trend that uses a much more lightweight type of creative Tools around filters where it's like I'm going to buy Sanders in my life yes two things like happen at the same time and they're obviously interconnected and he's got a movie coming down and yeah all this together and of course of all people it's the most handcrafted of directors that is getting like technologically consumed in this yeah this whole thing but yes there's a argument that fan fiction and and and um fan conversation is going to be much more mainstream than it

ever has been because of these these tools I was gonna say I do want to bring up though that you know this video particularly stuck out to me uh in in the conversation of the rise of AI on YouTube This is called U.S president's play Minecraft 21. I'm gonna play it right now hey guys you know how manchel doesn't play with us that much anymore bro I can invite her back if you want me to no God please no okay so get to your point then I found a way we can have manchel play with

us without having to actually play with us how would that even work this is a video that was uploaded a few weeks ago can you describe this video what is this I didn't even know this was a a genre on YouTube yeah so there's this president's play thing we've seen tons of views around them all you know in the last couple of months where people are using this voice generated software to sort of basically imagine what it'd be like if the current and former presidents played Roblox or Minecraft together at the same time and it's

interesting because we've had impersonations and presidential impersonations on YouTube for years you know barack's dubs you know this could be a barack's dubs when you see it the first time you're like it's not obvious that they've used any voice gen it could just be someone doing an impression it could be you know that we've had that type of stuff on the platform for a while but now anybody can can do that in um a sort of quick way and and together you have a phenomena where everybody has the same like prompt essentially which is what

if the president's played video games and then you have tons of people who have their own creative fun take on that what that would look like and then they just play it out for you and the best ones you know are the ones that get the most views and then people share or are among them at least um and again it's part of a phenomenon where there's no singular this is the president's play video there's some that are better than others but there's like there's no singular video it is just a phenomenon spread out across

lots of pieces of content of which we may never see the same ones right so obviously this video is a parody yeah and I think this is where a lot of people get concerned you always hear what if someone puts out a video on behalf of a president or a head of state and people perceive it as real and that's where Samir and I talk and we we believe that YouTube at some point will have to be kind of that Arbiter of Truth for if something has been altered by Ai and I'm sure every platform

has to deal with this I I know other platforms are but I would think that's actually that side that is the concerning one and the tough challenge will be for YouTube how do you discern between what is AI what's not yeah when do you step in and this is this is a YouTube problem but it's also a societal problem yeah this is like we're not the only content platform on the internet like there are there are lots of platforms I think there are a lot of concerns across public figures across copyright you know there's there's

all these things that um are bigger than any one Platform One Piece of uh one Trend that we're gonna be grappling with over the next um over the next few years and I think there is apprehension about this stuff and it's Justified yeah one of the trends that stuck out to me the most as it pertains to generative Ai and like synthetic media and and technology is the rise of vtubers and virtual humans on YouTube so you know vtubers have been around for a long time Colin and I made a video about Lil Michaela a

long time ago a couple years ago just with this rise of you know essentially a virtual character that had human-like qualities and a human-like narrative that people were latching on to but she wasn't a real person yeah um this has we've seen like a pretty dramatic increase in vtubers and virtual humans on YouTube yeah I want to play one okay um that maybe you can help everyone understand yeah what is happening here what are we watching right now so you're watching a Korean Creator okay who is she sings she does a lot of covers and

stuff like that but the thing that's interesting is that she is a real person but her face is actually uh AI generated okay that that like why do you think people are so intrigued like I understand the novelty of hey I'm gonna show Colin hey look at this this is this is a virtual human this is a YouTuber isn't that interesting but then beyond that like getting caught Into The Narrative of it or being like that's a creator that I enjoy coming back to why do you think that is I think same reason you can't

enjoy coming back to watch anything animated characters fictional characters I think back to just a couple of years ago who's one of the biggest breakthrough creators on on YouTube the last couple years dream you didn't know what his face looked like for most of that time and did it matter no because he's just incredible what he does and is a great Entertainer and yeah great at the game and everything so like he just chose not to be present on screen and uh you know for me I'm a little bit less oh what is this science

fiction World we're going into because I think what I see from it is the potential for a lot of people who don't want to be on camera or who want to express them themselves in a way that is different than how they may appear physically or you know present physically that we would now we're not going to get access to you know I also think many years down the line you may see the beginning of intergenerational creators right if you go really far down the line Mickey Mouse right has been around for Generations because it's

an animated character you can just recreate it in many forms and now there may be a scenario where a Creator is a YouTuber gets to a point in their career where they've built something really interesting they have a business they're excited about it but they're done they want to retire someone who maybe works for them steps in yeah right and that transfer is relatively seamless and the more uh the better Ai and generative AI get the voice can be you know as well yeah the voice can be AI so you you then have a scalable

human that can scale like content hundreds of years um as a brand and I think that's an interesting like business case for it uh that's fascinating that maybe we'll see more companies get involved with virtual humans and virtual creators yeah because they have the potential to write the scripts have the voice generated and have this human host and connect if people are willing to connect with virtual humans then that feels like an obvious future yeah and I think about this all the time because immediately in my mind's like what's this going to do for beauty

standards and like you know there's all kinds of things that come up when you immediately go there but I don't know I do sometimes feel like I'm the old man in this conversation and that you know one of the defining dividing lines between Generations will be our comfort with AI generated anything content yeah that will be that will probably be a dividing line who knows you know and even it may just enter so seamlessly and kind of slower than we expect like we said earlier we're already using a lot of creators are already using Ai

and a lot of audiences don't really know yeah right and I wonder if V tubers is a spectrum as well where little elements of it will be ushered in and over time people don't even really fully realize how much they're taking in yeah and I think this is why like the creators of today who are messing with this technology and exploring it they are defining what will happen with it in a way because that's how it gets normalized is people do inventive things with it and then more people want to do that and see what

happens that's that's the nature of of and it gets easier internet content yeah exactly and so it is this what's happening now is is step one and you know the the things that I'm seeing from creators on YouTube like that's they're setting the tone for this so one of the trends from the trends report that I really want to talk about multi-language audio what's really interesting there is that there are creators on the platform who are uploading videos that can be watched in multiple languages and that is now connecting humans in a way that we've

never been connected before the fact that language is and was a barrier for humans that we're the same species but we actually can't communicate may be over and it can be something that can be done easily and quickly and perhaps cheaply by creators is pretty wild let's watch an example so that the audience has a frame reference of what this looks like it's it's titled how gas bottles are made and it's actually originally in Portuguese I don't know about you but I've always been very curious about the gas cylinder There's an opportunity just click the

gear switch the language between Portuguese and English and the English here kind of sounds obviously dubbed right it sounds obviously maybe it's AI generated is that right it is it is um but there's other versions of this that are using actors right Mr Beast uses actors in 13 different languages so you can click on one of his videos and um click the gear and go into many you know from Japanese tie to Hindi just um incredible voice acting and it's pretty similar experience I would imagine in every language this to me is one of the

biggest changes to YouTube and changes to media that we've seen um I guess like the question is like how have you seen this already impact the platform well it's early days right now on this because it's a pretty new a pretty new feature but we've we've already been seeing before this was even launched we were starting to see Mr Beast and other creators who were launching separate channels in other languages and seeing those channels become very popular but you're seeing things like that Creator from Brazil who's a popular educational content creator who can now reach

a much larger audience he's using a platform called um allowed which is a Google area 120 project that they're trying to figure out how to create on the Fly dubs across different videos and things there's a whole tool so it's a Google's tool yeah and you can imagine a future where like similar to clicking captions on or captions not on I can say yeah I want this in Japanese yes and totally and there are there are lots of other third-party softwares that are doing that's starting to do this stuff now I think um the YouTube

Tool itself just allows you to upload whatever yeah you know track and there's like some guardrails around that and everything but um feels to me like that's the future though that we upload a video and we check the box of which language we want it dubbed in the thought of having our interviews available in many different languages is a very exciting thought um and I think for every Creator like I think the way you get to hundreds of millions of views really is by global accessibility yeah right exciting but also could lead to more competition

the video we just watched very similar to Tom Scott right and I wonder like is the competition on the platform now level is it many years from now is it Global and that's that that is good and that is perhaps bad at times the the thing I think one thing to know here and again I think we come at this from a sort of U.S perspective because dubbing and things are very popular in other countries as it is with movies and TV and so it's a little bit less of a foreign concept and um and

I will say in the US um 37 of people in the survey agree that they follow a Creator who creates content in a language other than their own which is a surprising stuff that's way higher yeah it is um but it's you so you see this happening now right like we're starting to have this sort of more transference of things but there are differences in culture and I don't I think I don't want to sort of diminish the the importance of cultural differences there are Trends the way that dance Trends work in Africa is different

than the way they work here because of the culture of the place and you know I think it's not like everything exists the same way everywhere and so the things that will matter to people the conversations that matter and things will vary and so the appeal of those perspectives will vary you know as well but you're no longer limited by the ability to speak a language potentially um and that is a huge that has a huge potential to change the as a viewer as a consumer the perspectives that we have access to right the creativity

my hope is that it promotes empathy that there are videos that eventually come across my feed from countries that uh I know little about and that I probably would not have learned about had I not learned about them through this Creator yeah there are it's funny because early viral video YouTube the when you if you actually just went and looked at the most popular things it was a lot of cats and a lot of babies and the pets and babies and the reason for that was those things were language agnostic you could watch like the

most one of the most popular cat videos all the time was this like cat hugging video was it was in Russian but yeah it just there was no language in the video so now we're all of a sudden in this place where that we've removed the language barrier and so now like everything can have that potential to resonate with people in the way that something that's so Universal that was you know not language agnostic did in the past you know for me I I agree on that like I think the importation of other cultures to

the US has already really started largely like Korean culture has uh really impacted U.S entertainment right like parasite squid game um there's a new Netflix show I think physical 100 it's a Korean show like the Korean style of entertainment clearly connects with the US audience and that was not really a thing before you imagine that today um you know could there be a Korean Casey neistat that emerges that you know someone in uh South Korea who is vlogging every day and we get access to what does Life in Korea look like and get to watch

it in English yeah or someone in India can watch it in Hindi and that to me is is interesting like is there a possibility for Global creators um and I assume a lot of the American creators are relatively Global you know and I guess Mr Beast is the obvious example here um that when he launched his other language channels he was reaching millions and millions of people you put that all into one channel now and it's like that's probably the first like really Mega Global Creator yeah that is understood in 13 languages yeah no it's

true they're they're I mean captions are also big and so a lot of people do watch stuff with captions 50 of people in the US agree that they prefer to watch content with subtitles and closed captions on so which is a kind of a crazy stat and when you look at if you look at the Gen Z slice so 18 to um to 24 slice of that in terms of how many of them do actually say they watch captions regularly that's there's a there's a big jump there um so what an interesting population it's true

but I think like captions and things like we are already primed I think for the for expanding and there's lots of reasons why people use captions some of them are situational because you you know there's background noise or whatever but yeah like I do think we're already primed to have uh an experience that is text-based or audio based in these ways that unlocks a lot of that I wonder if it ends up leading to the ability to have a monoculture again of course there will always be individualized experiences but when you think about squid game

that kind of was a monocultural moment and I think that's because it was released in you know a lot of languages I don't know what the exact number was it was like 80 to 100 languages or something on the exact day that it was released and because of that everyone all over the world was able to experience it simultaneously sort of you had to pay for the subscription yeah yeah obviously but ring fencing of that stuff like it's but on YouTube in the future there is there's not as much barrier especially with internet being available

increasingly all over the world uh that could be a reality that something gets uploaded it could be but I think everything else is also sending this opposite signal which is that given the choice between this thing that everybody likes and this thing that I know you like you'll probably want the thing that we know you like you know and so it'll be interesting to see the interplay between this more personalized individualized pop culture and the ability for people to you know no longer be obstructed by language barriers maybe if anything it just connects subcultures all

over I think that that to me is the more interesting application right which is the elevator video channels can all communicate with each other you know and that what will that be it's like kind of a beautiful thing yeah that is really interesting like the weird subcultures can now connect globally yeah the ASMR video from you know Japan can connect with the ASMR video from Brazil yeah like that's even for us like the Creator economy YouTube enthusiasts all over the world can connect that's true yeah one of the biggest themes of the report and it

was a line that that really hit me was this concept of the loss of monoculture um and the rise of personalization and as I thought about everything that's happening all the the big shifts that are happening in media with uh generative AI um technology with um you know multi-language audio with with the amount that we can personalize our experience online it's hard to have a singular stream of culture you mentioned you were involved in rewind yeah and I thought about you know obviously rewind famously kind of ended and was like you know disliked I think

the most disliked video on YouTube um but I thought about the concept of could rewind happen today and I don't think it could because I think everyone's YouTube experience is so vastly different now that I'm not positive there could be a single here's the biggest things that happened yeah because the biggest thing in my opinion is different from the biggest things in your opinion yes right and your experience I'm so glad you finally invited me here to clear the air about YouTube we should clear the air yeah well look the thing about the thing uh

someone someone I'm gonna go back I can't believe this whole thing turned into a rewind it's haunts me it haunts me but title changes too confronting YouTube Rewind but you rewind actually broke like four rewinds earlier than that and I don't think anybody really noticed but if you were for us like we could kind of see it but everybody loved it so much that we didn't want to give up on the dream of it but like that I always had a dream of being in rewind and I can't believe it ended before we could even

be a part of it but whatever this is our version this is our version yeah but the first the first couple it really is emblematic of where YouTube was at that time it was a very U.S Centric platform at the time in terms of the top creators and everything and you could get them all in a room like I mean VidCon was like that right like you were just all the top creators would be there because they all knew Hank you know like yeah and John like that's like that's how YouTube and internet culture was

at that point but it's interesting if you go back and I'm not talking about the last one which is its own thing but if you look at some of the ones previous to that you started to see the dislikes kind of going up on those things and part of it is that you had people being like who I don't know who any of these people are yeah and we got to the I think the 20 2017 one and there was no person who worked at YouTube who could tell you who everyone in the video was

wow like I was like my team helps figure out the video and no one could explain who all the people were and it's because you know it's and you see who is this person it's like well you don't watch Brazilian YouTube so like of course you don't know this or you don't you don't watch creators in India so like yes I I get why you don't know this and and stuff but it just became so important it was already a bit of a far-fetched idea that you could create that singular view of what was popular

but it just really broke down over time it's true I don't it's not possible it's not that it's um it's not that is it could it be possible it's literally not impossible because I feel like I've thought about this a bunch and it is because we are in this time this this era of um of a more fragmented popular culture where you know we may be familiar with the same topic or the same conversation um but we may experience it in a completely different way and when we do have singular moments but in many cases

the stuff that we watch the things that we care about are are unique there's a staff in the transport last year that I love I cite it all the time which is that more than half of gen z uh watch content that no one they know personally is interested in right and it's like you I was a student of mass media like I was fascinated by the film I'm sure you guys were too like you know given what you do but the idea that not only would are people watching content that no one they know

is interested in that 50 entire demographic is why it's kind of the no one they even know also likes is emblematic of this change and um it's really confounding for and confronting for a lot of people who make content and who are make creative work and who are whose job it is to reach large audiences because um it just flies in the face of how you think about distribution and you know and these things but it's the reality of how things work today and it's interesting how much personality drives that interest right and topics and

when you you know we look at groups of channels that are all focused on a similar topic and how big some of those audiences can be um we're not you're not sacrificing size necessarily for for this but you are introducing this feeling that you're not in step with how everyone else is it's funny how often and I'm curious how you guys feel about this it's funny how often I will talk to creators and ask them if they have trouble feeling like they're keeping up with what everybody else is talking about and to a man or

a woman everyone says the same thing yes that they yeah they struggle with that and it's just the reality of of where we are now uh with different platforms different formats different personalization algorithms all this stuff together yeah I think it's it's the beauty of the internet and of YouTube and what what Drew us to it originally right like we started by making videos about lacrosse in 2012 on YouTube everyone around me was like that is not a good idea um but we were able to carve out a pocket of people who were interested in

that as well and that has been the theme of our entire career is can we talk about something we're into and it feels like none of our friends are into it but can we find people on the internet who are into it and that proved to be true yeah and I think um that that like incredible rise of personalization has only accelerated now with um with multi-format and with like everyone becoming a creator like for us we released an interview with destroying a few weeks ago now that interview went live a couple hundred thousand views

but then we saw a short that had 1.5 million views from the conversation that we didn't cut that someone else come and then we saw other shorts from that conversation that had hundreds of thousands of views and I recognized that more people had watched those shorts than had watched the original Source material so they were experiencing that conversation or that moment completely differently than we had intended them to experience it and also they experienced it in their own way through the shorts uh feed through a small bite size maybe through someone sending them that clip

and maybe they'll never watch the the long form piece but the person who watched the long form piece and the short form piece actually consumed the same 60 seconds but just completely differently and with different intents and you you zoom out and think about that as everyone is becoming creators as people are clipping things and remixing things and saying here's the source material but I'm gonna it applies to my community like this right because there's like Financial YouTube channels that take some of our clips and take what we're talking about in the context of finances

or business and curate our show for their community and they might never come and watch our show but they're experiencing our source material in a way that's relevant and personal to them yeah and yeah in the report about how people would rather watch a Creator talk about an event than watch the event itself yeah 45 of people in the US and it would prefer to watch creators breaking down a major event than the event itself that's pretty interesting and I think when I think about that I assume oh the event must be the Grammys or

the Super Bowl but it's actually further down the chain like it's a Colin and smear episode with destroying yeah yeah like there are some people who may actually just rather watch a clip or someone else's interpretation of it yeah I think um you know I fall into this category if something big happens I'm interested in hearing about it from Ludwig on mogulmail or from Phil DeFranco like I want them to contextualize it for me because they're part of my community so I'd rather watch it there than on the news or somewhere else yeah um and

there's people who you know would prefer moist critical or so everyone has their own news anchor in some ways right any Tech keynote I'm just gonna watch the Marquez video yeah exactly yeah much rather totally I didn't watch the Apple keynote I watched marquez's videos um yeah it's so interesting that and then that is completely different from how all of my friends uh experience that one event um that that feels like a very substantial difference in in the direction of YouTube in the direction of media that I think all creators should be thinking about um

and sometimes it it makes we've thought about it after we read the report of like how does this impact us and sometimes what we think about is we're too late to talk about a subject matter sometimes we're like so many people have already made the video we don't need to talk about that but then recognizing that actually there's a lot of people who would want to hear us talk about it even if that event happened weeks ago our community hasn't heard it in their personal way from us totally uh that that's something that at least

for us when we read the report we were like that's a tangible thing that we can now take into our creative process to say hey you know what we are building our own subculture right the common in Samir world is a subculture it's a community in itself um that's a part of a broader community and then within our community there's even more communities there's a funny meme that someone made in our Discord that's an iceberg that goes underwater and it shows the different layers of fandom really of our community and it's it's fascinating to look

at because I had never put vocabulary around it but they did and they showed like okay if you're at the tip of the iceberg you you watch the main Channel interviews right but then you go all the way to the bottom and it's like a very Niche reference to something that we talk about yeah and it shows the different layers and I think what's added to this is the fact that our audience like that fans are creators and creators are fans right like we are fans of a bunch of creators that we watch We're creators

ourselves so we can take inspiration from them and create something and then our community who watches us can create not only for the broader YouTube Community but like people can emerge within our community as creators yeah for the community which is a pretty wild just there's like an economy to fandom yeah you know there's also the element that a lot of the people who work for us or with us started out as fans of ours early on and now work here with us or work on the Discord uh there was something I remember hearing about

like K-pop fans who are like full-time fans covering yeah what's happening with like their favorite K-pop band totally can you describe the different levels of fandom and the hierarchies and yeah I mean I wish I had a I wish I had an iceberg but um I think the way that I the way that I think about it and the way that my team thinks about it is you kind of have this surface level you know engaging with the content as a as a consumption a light level of interest in something related to it then you

you go kind of go to this next level where you're becoming more active participant in that whether that is um you know commenting or some sort of lighter weight thing or whether it's making short form clipping we're seeing millions of clips now people using the clipping features on YouTube you know clipping and stuff happening um to another tier where you've got sort of I don't know these are the presidents of your fan club type of thing where you are uh you have some sense of influence within that fan Community right and that's that's where a

lot of the K-pop stuff come comes in the the there the K-pop economy and groups have really mastered how to enable an entire entertainment experience that exists within the fandom of something and this obviously we have this in other things you'll get you know big IPS like Star Wars and stuff they've always done this but like it's like the Dreamhouse yeah there are so many levels of fandom within the dream s p where there are creators creating their own offshoots totally totally so this this exists but like and then you get to the an even

another tier where you almost you're at a professional you're actually earning your living as a fan of stuff and sometimes that's quite broad you look at I like to joke and actually it's a list for my my wife but like a lot of the biggest YouTube creators you could describe as professional fans yeah I was gonna say like I would say we are kind of professional fans right fans of YouTube and of these creators and of the space Marquez is a fan of Technology right like and their Ventana needle drop like yeah there's like so

many of of those those folks and some of them Branch out and do other things but um often there is this commonality I think because fan what is what is being a fan it's being passionate about something and the the single most important thread between what makes stuff successful and that exists on YouTube is the number of people are passionate about something that's like it's yeah it's a passion driven platform in a lot of ways so it makes sense that these two things go together like fandom is what's driving the culture ultimately like of course

you have to have creators put out Source material but it's the fans that then take it and iterate I'll never forget when you talk to us about Amelia demoldenberg's chicken shop date with Louis Thoreau yeah and how that one moment got turned into a viral I think we can play the clip so maybe we should sing it just can't sing it but Louis Thoreau says remembers a rap that he is talking about yep I like it when you jiggle yes it falls I like it when you wiggle wiggle yeah there it is okay so if

you're familiar with it I hope yeah not you but that yeah um but you know you explained how like that one moment uh resulted in this whole stream of creation that eventually really drove culture drove a moment in time yeah totally and there's probably only a few people who have watched the original interview from Amelia yeah right totally and that but and Amelia her whole thing is that she's a fan of the I mean usually it's rappers like she's usually got UK rappers on that show and she's just a fan of UK hip-hop yeah and

that's how that's what the whole premise of that show is yeah yeah but I I think that example is one that you know you were talking about the fragmentation it's almost like a light that's going through a prism where it's like here's the original Source it goes through a prism and just goes in all these different directions right it turns into a dance yeah like that song turned into a trending dance it turned into a song it turned into Jason Derulo song yeah it's like Emilio was in the music video it went like so many

different directions and everyone experienced that moment differently yeah and also to me it feels like everyone experienced that but it's also possible that a ton of people did not experience it yeah and that is like the thing that has been blowing my mind so much of this concept that everything that feels like the end-all be-all the biggest moment of the week in the internet the the amount of people who don't experience it and have their own version of the biggest moment yeah you know I've been giving talks for YouTube for a very long time and

there's there's always that's always a three-point talk one of those talk points is always participation and it's been that way for years but now you're really seeing what that looks like at scale because you've got a whole generation of people who grew up using these Technologies right who are very fluent in using video to express themselves and in engaging around video content and so it's all just accelerating um but because of the way that the personalization works the the media that is created is becomes part of the phenomena you know and that may be the

that may be the lens or the path in that you experience which wasn't always the case in the past there was something that was referenced in the report of a Brazilian Creator who got the rights to stream the World Cup and was able to actually have people watch the World Cup with him I think that's a that's emblematic of this concept that people want to watch these events with creators yeah you know dude perfect is doing Thursday Night Football right where you can watch a stream with them you talk about um the Mannings right watching

football with the Mannix like you now have this one source and it's how do I want to consume it yeah do I want to consume it you know with this creator that Creator in that style with this community um you have your own personalized version of it so what is this um what does this all mean you know we have all these Trends we we kind of have our own takeaways like this has really informed a lot of how we think about the future um the probably the burning question for listening is like so are

we going to get replaced by robots is AI going to kill us all what what is happening here what what can we take from this report um the AI killing us all part is I think not in my lifetime so I'm not worried about it but it's a future Generations possible um no the the that I am actually as as much as I feel a sense of um anxiety about some of the things that we're seeing I find myself a bit optimistic about this from a creative perspective because what I think it enables is it

it unlocks the the you guys talked about your you had um uh miles for sure miles fishron and one of the things that you talked about early in the interview was how talent and the actual skill of being a performer was still so Central to the work that he did right he does this deep fake Tom Cruise and if for me if he wasn't such a good performer it's not convincing yeah yeah and so I believe that you can extrapolate that across a lot of the things that we're seeing which is the the human creativity

the human Insight is the differentiator right if everybody can make everything and make it you know then it becomes the the Insight the perspective the unique point of view that matters so the thing that makes me optimistic about this is that I do think we are in this sort of transitional moment perhaps or or not who knows in this moment that seems to bring with it a lot of change in the tools that we use the technology that we have available to us as consumers and as creators um but it should theoretically it's one output

create a world in which we have access to more perspectives we have access to more unique points of view and new types of creativity than we have today vtubers do I think and virtual humans like I don't think that that replaces the creators that we love today I think that opens up a whole new set of creators that would maybe have not made content in the past that I might now be able to hear from so that's my optimist's view on this whole thing and I think there's a lot of opportunity right now to figure

out what this means for you and the unique perspective that you have on the you know creative process and and and the things you're passionate about in your business and and whatnot but I am optimistic I also am optimistic and for me I think the biggest takeaway is the availability of tools and the new tools that have emerged whether it's multi-language audio generative AI that are lowering the barrier to entry for some people but also enhancing creativity for others right you look at Corridor crew again the input the amount of time they put towards making

that animation it was not easy it still took time and intelligence that no one else really had right for them to create that but they were able to make something totally new and novel and interesting with these new tools that we have I would say for me the the biggest takeaway I have is like in this concept of the rise of of personalization I I I think a lot of creators feel a level of anxiety around needing to achieve extremely high viewership levels to make a career um millions of views and that's how you make

a career on YouTube I actually think because we're moving in this direction of of more and more personalization we're moving to a place where you can build a very tight-knit core community and that carries a lot of value and I think a huge part of how you do that is opening up participation and allowing people to participate in the conversation that you're starting and that creates a very sticky audience that is that is their world just like we talked about that's their culture and if you can create culture for a group of people then you

have the opportunity to have a career and you're only competing with yourself yeah you're not competing with everyone else making similar types of content because you have your own world your own community and your own subculture yeah the thing that it it's you it goes back to your point earlier of could I are we too late to get into this conversation right if you if the most important thing in that conversation is your perspective on that topic then you can never be too late right you know right where can people find this report and if

they if people are as big of uh YouTube nerds as all of us how do they learn more about all this because I spend time with your resources so I'd love to give them yeah youtube.com Trends has a lot of the big reports that we put out um we have a YouTube channel we sometimes we sometimes put things on but youtube.com Trends is the best place to sort of see the more report type stuff that we put out like this we can also put the link in the description yeah yeah we'll do that yeah thanks

I'll put the link in the description yeah we'll put that in there um Kevin thanks so much for joining yeah it's awesome man this has been so fun thank you this was really fun thanks again to YouTube for sponsoring this episode if you want to check out the trends report for yourself just click the link in her description