Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are recording
this on February 2nd, 2026. And if you have looked
at a calendar recently, or if you just, you know,
feel that general sense of time passing weighing
on you, you might have realized we are right
on the edge of a pretty massive cultural milestone.
A huge one. In less than two weeks, the platform
that basically ate the modern internet turns
21. 21 years of YouTube. It is officially old
enough to walk into a bar in the United States
and order a drink. Which is a terrifying thought,
considering I still remember when it was just
like grainy videos of people falling off skateboards
and cats playing keyboards. Exactly. But we aren't
just here to sing happy birthday. We've got a
massive stack of research here. We do. We've
got financial reports, old interviews with the
founders, some really, really heavy policy documents
from late 2025. Right. And the mission today
is to figure out how a site that started as a
failed dating service. A spectacularly failed
dating service. How that failure evolved. into
the second most visited website on the entire
planet. We're going to look at the algorithm,
the apocalypse, the geopolitics. But before we
get into the weird history, and it is weird,
I want to ground us in the present. Okay. Because
I think people hear the word YouTube and they
just think videos. They don't really grasp the
sheer scale of the infrastructure we're dealing
with in 2026. It's almost impossible to visualize.
The word giant just doesn't cover it. We're looking
at 2 .7 billion monthly active users. Okay. Let's
just pause on that number. 2 .7 billion. That
is roughly one out of every three people on the
planet. And that includes areas with poor or
no connectivity. So if you look at the connected
world, the saturation is it's nearly total. Right.
But the metric that really matters isn't just
who's logging in. It's the time they spend there.
We're seeing over one billion hours of video
consumed every single day. One billion hours
daily. So what is that? Roughly 114 ,000 years
of human attention is just poured into this thing
every 24 hours. It's an attention black hole.
It really is. And the library that's feeding
that hunger is expanding at a rate that just
it defies logic. What's the count now? Well,
as of mid 2024, the total video count was somewhere
around 14 .8 billion. But the upload rate is
the killer stat. To one. More than 500 hours
of content are uploaded every minute. So in the
time it took you to say that one sentence, about
three weeks worth of video was just added. Exactly.
And that creates an engineering challenge, a
moderation challenge, and, you know, a cultural
challenge that no other company has ever really
had to solve at that scale. And it is a financial
monster, too. We're going to dissect the business
model later, but just top line, we're talking
about a platform generating over $50 billion
in combined revenue. It's a geopolitical battleground.
It's an economy. It's a library. And as we saw
in 2025 with the age assurance rollouts and misinformation
policy shifts, it's also becoming a highly regulated
utility. It is not the Wild West anymore. Definitely
not. We're going to get into the whole scan your
face to watch a video controversy, which is very
real and happening now. But let's rewind to the
beginning. Every empire has an origin story.
And usually that origin story is a little bit
messy. With YouTube, it involves a wardrobe malfunction,
a tsunami, and a dinner party that might be a
complete lie. The mythology of Silicon Valley
loves a good garage moment, right? And YouTube
has two very distinct versions of its founding
myth. Two competing myths. Competing myths. And
to understand them, you have to look at the three
guys who built it. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and
Jad Karim. The PayPal mafia. Right. And that
label is important. They were all early employees
at PayPal. They watched a small, scrappy startup
get acquired by eBay for, what, $1 .5 billion?
Yeah. So they walked away with capital, but more
importantly, they walked away with a specific
mindset. They understood that if you want to
build something huge, you have to remove friction.
Okay. PayPal removed the friction of sending
money. Their idea was to remove the friction
of sharing video. Because in 2005, sharing a
video was a nightmare. A total nightmare. You
had to compress it, email it, if the file wasn't
too big, or maybe host it on a private FTP server.
It just wasn't something a normal person could
do. It was technical hell. So, this brings us
to the first origin story, the dinner party.
The official story. For a while. The official
PR story. The version that Steve Chen and Chad
Hurley told to the press for years is that in
early 2005, they were at a dinner party at Chen's
apartment in San Francisco. They were shooting
clips of their friends, having a great time,
and the next day they wanted to share the files.
But they couldn't. The files were too heavy for
email. It's a classic problem -solution narrative.
We had a problem, so we built the solution. It's
very, very marketable. Incredibly marketable.
It makes them seem like these relatable guys
just trying to help their friends out. But there's
a snag. Jod Kareem. Jod Kareem, the third founder,
says the party never happened. He was invited.
He says nobody was invited because the party
didn't exist. He claims the dinner party was
a fabrication by the PR team to make the company
seem more approachable and less, you know, corporate.
So what's Kareem's version? Because usually the
unsexy version ends up being the truth. Kareem's
version is fascinating because it's not about
social sharing. It's about information access.
Okay. He points to two specific events in 2004
that frustrated him. The first was the Indian
Ocean tsunami. A massive global event. Massive.
People were talking about it everywhere, but
he couldn't find any actual footage of it online.
He wanted to see the scale of the disaster, and
the internet just couldn't provide it. Which
is so hard to imagine now. Today, if an event
like that happens, there are 50 different angles
of it on YouTube within minutes. Precisely. The
second event was the Super Bowl 38 halftime show,
Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Ah, the
wardrobe malfunction. The moment that launched
a million Google searches, Kareem couldn't find
the clip anywhere. And he realized there was
this massive gap. People wanted to see specific
moments, news. culture, celebrity mishaps, and
there was no centralized repository for it. If
you didn't TiVo it, you missed it forever. You
miss it. So you have this conflict in the DNA
of the company right from the very start. Yeah.
Is it a place to share personal moments with
friends like the dinner party story suggests?
Or is it a utility to archive the world's events
like the tsunami story suggests? And the answer
eventually was both. It was both, but not at
first because their first attempt at solving
this problem was... Well, it was seriously misguided.
They didn't launch as a video library. They launched
with the slogan, tune in, hook up. A dating site.
I just love this detail so much. They looked
at this revolutionary video streaming technology
and thought, let's make a video version of Hot
or Not. It seems completely absurd now, but you
have to remember the context of 2005. Dating
sites were one of the few business models on
the web that were actually making money. That's
true. So they built the architecture, they had
the domain, and they needed content. But this
is where they hit the classic cold start problem.
You have a platform, but nobody's using it because
there's nothing to watch. And there's nothing
to watch because nobody's using it. The chicken
and the egg. They were desperate. They actually
ran ads on Craigslist? No way. Yes. They offered
women $100 to upload videos of themselves introducing
themselves to potential dates. That is a direct
bribe. Please use our website. So did anyone
take the money? Not a single person. Zero. It
was a total failure. Wow. And this is such a
crucial lesson in product market fit. They built
the technology but they completely misunderstood
the user motivation. People didn't want to upload
videos to get judged on their appearance for
a date. The barrier was too high and the reward
was way too low. So the dating angle just dies
on the vine. They have this code. They have the
ability to upload and stream Flash video, which
was the secret sauce, right? The fact that it
played in the browser without needing a plug
-in download. Yeah, it was the technical breakthrough.
Before YouTube, you usually had to download a
massive QuickTime or RealPlayer file and have
the right codec. A total pain. A total pain.
YouTube used Flash, which was already installed
on like 98 % of browsers. It was one -click watching.
It just worked. So they have the tech, but no
content and no users. What triggers the pivot?
They just gave up on the rules. They opened the
back end. They said, forget the dating. Forget
the gender requirements. Just upload whatever
you have. They moved from a managed approach
to a completely permissionless. Exactly. Broadcast
yourself. That became the new mission. And the
very first video to test this new open philosophy
wasn't a viral hit. It wasn't a celebrity. It
was Jawed Kareem at the zoo. April 23, 2005.
The video is titled Me at the Zoo. It is 18 seconds
long. It is grainy. The audio is terrible. So
bad. It's just Kareem standing in front of the
elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. I rewatched
this morning. The full transcript is literally
him saying the cool thing about these guys is
that they have really, really long trunks. And
that's cool. That's it. That's it. That is the
foundational text of the modern video internet.
It is so profound in its banality. If they had
launched with a polished commercial or a movie
trailer, it would have signaled to users, this
is a place for professionals only. Right, don't
upload your junk here. But by launching with
a blurry guy talking about elephants, it signaled,
this is a place for you. It lowered the bar for
entry to the absolute floor. And once that bar
was on the floor, the floodgates just opened.
The growth curve was vertical. By July 2006,
barely a year later, they were serving 100 million
views per day. They were growing faster than
they could buy servers. They were burning cash
on bandwidth like crazy. And this is where the
predators start circling. Or rather, the suitors.
Google had its own service, Google Video, which
I vaguely remember being clunky. It was terrible.
Google was trying to treat video like a text
search problem, not a community problem. They
realized they had completely lost the war. So
in October 2006, just 18 months after that first
upload, Google acquires YouTube. for $1 .65 billion
in stock. Which at the time was considered absolute
insanity. Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor,
publicly said that Google was crazy. He thought
they were just buying a lawsuit waiting to happen.
He called it a bandwidth money pit. He did because
of copyright. Because the site was, I mean, let's
be honest, it was completely illegal. Users were
uploading entire episodes of The Simpsons, music
videos, sports highlights. None of which they
owned. Google was buying a platform that was
arguably the world's largest copyright infringement
machine. That's exactly what it was. I want to
talk about that cultural moment right before
the sale, though. The Lazy Sunday moment. Yes.
This is the proof of concept for the whole platform.
It's late 2005. Saturday Night Live airs a digital
short called Lazy Sunday. Andy Samberg and Chris
Parnell. Rapping about eating cupcakes and watching
the Chronicles of Narnia. The chronic wuckles
of Narnia. It was huge. It aired on TV, but then
somebody ripped it and put it on YouTube. And
it just exploded. Millions of you. It was the
first time people realized, wait, if I put a
TV clip on the internet, it can get a second
life. It can become its own cultural phenomenon.
But NBC, the network, did not see it that way
at all. No. NBC saw theft. They sent takedown
notices and demanded the clips be removed. And
that specific conflict, the lazy Sunday fight,
really set the stage for the massive legal battles
that would define the next decade of the company.
It was the moment traditional media realized
they were losing control of the distribution
pipe. Totally. So Google buys them. inherits
all the lawsuits, and now has to figure out how
to actually make money. Because $1 .65 billion
is a lot to pay for a site that just costs you
money to run. The first few years, it was a total
loss later. There were no ads. It was a free
-for -all. The monetization engine, the thing
that actually turned YouTube into a career for
people, didn't arrive until 2007. The partner
program. The partner program. This is arguably
the most important business decision in the history
of the modern web. That's a big claim. I think
it holds up. Google took AdSense, their ad placement
tech for websites, and figured out how to apply
it to video. But the genius part was the revenue
split. 5545. Exactly. The creator keeps 55 %
of the ad revenue. YouTube takes 45%. Before
this, if you put content online, you were paying
for the hosting. Now, the host was paying you.
It birthed the creator economy. Completely. Suddenly,
a kid in his bedroom could make a living without
a production deal, without an agent, and without
asking anyone for permission. And that model,
that 55 -45 split, held pretty steady for a long
time. But if we fast forward to where we are
now, the scale of the money is just staggering.
You mentioned $50 billion earlier. Yeah, in 2023
alone, ad revenue was $31 .5 billion. By the
second quarter of 2024, they were pulling in
$8 .66 billion just in that one quarter. Wow.
But the composition of that revenue has changed.
It's not just pre -roll ads anymore. They've
pivoted hard to subscriptions. They had to. The
ad market is volatile. And as we'll discuss,
ad blockers became a kind of existential threat.
So you see the rise of... YouTube Premium for
ad -free YouTube music and, of course, YouTube
TV. YouTube TV is basically replacing cable for
millions of households in the U .S. It is. And
they've become a storefront, too. I was looking
at the Primetime Channels feature. You can buy
a subscription to Paramount Plus or NBA League
Pass without ever leaving the YouTube app. It's
all about keeping you in the ecosystem. The crown
jewel of that whole strategy is the NFL Sunday
ticket deal. Right. They spent billions for that.
Billions. And that was the signal that YouTube
is no longer just user generated content. It
is a primary broadcaster. It is competing with
ESPN and Comcast, not just with TikTok. But being
a primary broadcaster means you have to keep
the advertisers happy. Yeah. And that brings
us to the apocalypse. I feel like if you talk
to any YouTuber who was around in 2017, they
still have. like PTSD from this. It was the end
of the golden age of unbridled freedom. In early
2017, journalists at The Times in the UK found
that ads for major brands, Coca -Cola, the UK
government, Mercedes, were playing before videos
promoting extremist views and hate speech. And
the brands, they freaked out. They boycott it.
They pulled millions and millions of dollars
in spending like overnight. YouTube panicked.
They realized their automated systems couldn't
distinguish between a cooking video and a neo
-Nazi recruitment video well enough to protect
the advertisers. So they clamped down. Very hard.
They instituted the new thresholds. You needed
1 ,000 subscribers and 4 ,000 watch hours just
to even apply for monetization. Right. That was
huge. But more importantly, they introduced the
concept of demonetization as a norm, the yellow
dollar sign. If your video covered controversial
subjects, war, crime, tragedy, political conflict,
even if it was a legitimate news report, the
ads were stripped. Which created this massive
chilling effect. Creators started self -censoring.
They stopped saying certain words like kill or
suicide, using these weird code words instead.
It literally changed the language of the internet.
It sanitized the platform, it made it brand safe,
but it killed a lot of the edgy, raw energy that
made YouTube famous in the first place. So that
was the war between creators and advertisers.
But more recently, the war shifted fronts. Now
it feels like it's YouTube versus the viewers.
I'm talking about the war on ad blockers. This
really ramped up in late 2023 and just exploded
in 2024. For years, YouTube kind of tolerated
ad blockers. It was a small percentage of users,
usually the more tech savvy ones. Right. But
as the platform grew and grew, that lost revenue
became way too big to ignore. And they got really
aggressive. I remember that pop up video player
will be. blocked after three videos, it didn't
feel like a suggestion. It felt like a threat.
It was a threat. And when people tried to find
ways to bypass it, YouTube escalated on a technical
level. They started using server -side ad injection.
Okay, we need to unpack that term because it
sounds like technobabble, but the mechanism is
actually fascinating. How is that different from
a normal ad? So traditionally when you watch
a video, your browser makes two separate calls.
It asks the server for the video file, and then
it asks an ad server for an ad file. An ad blocker
just sits in the middle and says, I'll take the
video, but I'm blocking the call to the ad server.
So it's like sorting mail. You keep the letter
you want, you throw away the junk mail. because
they come in different envelopes. That's a perfect
analogy. Server -side injection changes the game.
YouTube stitches the ad directly into the video
stream on their server before it ever gets sent
to you. So to your browser and to the ad blocker,
it just looks like one continuous video file.
There is no separate ad envelope to throw away.
That is devious and really effective. And they
combine this with Google Chrome killing off Manifest
V2. Another tech term. What's the analogy here,
Sarah? Okay, think of Manifest V2 as the blueprint
that allowed browser extensions, like ad blockers,
to have really deep and powerful access to modify
what you see on a web page. It gave them the
power to be very aggressive. Google replaced
it with Manifest V3, which significantly limits
that power. The official reason was security
and performance, but, you know, it conveniently
breaks the most effective ad blocking methods.
They basically changed the locks on the house
so the old keys don't work anymore. Essentially,
it's a very clear message. You either pay with
your attention by watching ads or you pay with
your wallet for premium. The era of the free
ride is officially over. Now, speaking of technical
solutions to massive legal problems, we have
to go back to the copyright issue. Because you
mentioned earlier that Google bought a lawsuit
waiting to happen. And it happened. Viacom sued
them. for a billion dollars. The Viacom lawsuit
in 2007 was an existential threat. If YouTube
lost, they would have been shut down. Viacom
argued, pretty convincingly, that YouTube was
built on the back of stolen content from their
networks like MTV and Comedy Central. So to survive,
YouTube had to invent a way to police copyright
at a scale that had never, ever been done before.
Because you can't have humans watching 500 hours
of video every single minute. It's physically
impossible. So they built the engine. We know
it as Content ID. Exactly. How does that actually
work under the hood? Is it some kind of AI? It's
a form of pattern recognition. It's a massive
automated fingerprinting system. Copyright holders,
movie studios, record labels, they upload their
original files to a secret database. Content
ID then creates a unique fingerprint of that
file, both the audio and the visual data. Okay.
Then, every single time a user uploads a new
video, the system scans it and compares it against
that massive database of fingerprints. And if
it finds a match? A piece of a song? A clip from
a movie? This is the genius part. In the old
world, a match meant a takedown notice or a lawsuit.
But YouTube gave the rights holders a menu of
options. They could block the video, sure. They
could just track the stats to see how popular
it was. Or, and this changed everything, they
could choose to monetize it. So if I use a Madonna
song in my cat video, the system flags it. But
instead of suing me, the record label can just
say, OK, put ads on that cat video and send the
check to us. Correct. It turned piracy into a
revenue stream. It incentivized the entire media
industry to stop suing and start collecting checks.
It's probably the only reason YouTube still exists
today. But it's not a perfect system. Not by
a long shot. We've all heard stories of fair
use getting just nuked by the algorithm. It's
an automated system. It doesn't understand context.
It doesn't understand parody or criticism or
educational use. It just hears the song, sees
the clip, and pulls the trigger. It puts the
burden of proof entirely on the user to fight
back and prove they are innocent. And speaking
of features that put the burden on the user,
there's another one that caused a massive user
revolt a few years back. The dislike button.
Ah, yes. November 2021, YouTube removes the public
dislike count. I still hate this change. I really
do. Most users do. YouTube's official justification
was mob protection. They said that creators,
especially smaller ones, were getting brigaded
where large groups of people coordinate to dislike
a video just to harass someone or bomb their
channel. Which is a real problem, to be fair.
Online harassment is serious. It is. But the
counter argument is that the dislike button was
an essential utility. It was the wisdom of the
crowds. If you search for a tutorial on... say,
how to fix my sink, and the video has a thousand
likes and ten thousand dislikes, you know instantly
that the advice is bad. or maybe even dangerous.
Without the dislikes, you have to actually watch
the video to find out it's garbage. It wastes
our time and exposes us to scams and misinformation.
And this brings us back to our friend Jod Kareem.
He actually came out of retirement for this.
He went back to the Me at the Zoo video, the
sacred text of YouTube, and he edited the description.
What does he say? He called the decision a stupid
idea. He argued that the platform relies on feedback
loops between creators and the audience. And
if you break that feedback loop just to protect
feelings, the quality of the entire platform
degrades over time. He essentially said the process
breaks when the platform interferes with it.
He did. And it was a huge statement coming from
one of the founders. It's that classic tension
between safety and utility. And honestly, looking
at the amount of clickbait on the platform today,
I think Kareem was probably right. It's hard
to argue again. against him when you click on
a promising looking tutorial and watch 10 minutes
of complete nonsense because there was no warning
sign. Let's shift gears to the content itself
because the what of YouTube has changed just
as much as the how. We went from broadcast yourself
to what I kind of call the Mr. Beastification
of the Internet. It's become highly, highly professionalized.
We moved from vlogs recorded on grainy webcams
to what you could call visual journalism. You
have creators making full -length documentaries
that rival anything on Netflix or the BBC. And
education. I mean, I think about Khan Academy.
Sal Khan started out just tutoring his cousin
over the Internet. Now, Khan Academy on YouTube
is arguably the largest school in the world.
It has democratized learning in a way that is
hard to overstate. And music. I mean, Gangnam
style. That was the turning point for music on
the platform. It was the first video to hit 1
billion views. It actually broke YouTube's view
counter. I remember that. Yeah, the engineers
hadn't programmed the code to handle a number
that big. They had to upgrade the integer limit
in the code because of one music video. But now,
the content is shifting again. And it feels like
it's because of the competition. YouTube is terrified
of TikTok. Everyone is terrified of TikTok. And
that is why we have YouTube Shorts. Launched
around 2020, 2021, but they have been aggressively
pushing it ever since. And just recently, in
October of 2024, they extended the length of
Shorts to three minutes. Which completely blurs
the line. Is it a short? Is it a regular video?
Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to them. They
just want you to stay in the app. If you have
30 seconds, watch a short. If you have 30 minutes,
watch a video essay. If you want to watch the
game, buy some. Right. I saw that snake game
pop up the other day. It feels a little bit desperate,
doesn't it? Trying to be everything to everyone
at once. It's the super app strategy. They don't
ever want you to have a reason to close the YouTube
app. I do miss the days when the platform felt
a little less corporate. A little weirder. Do
you remember the April Fool's pranks? Oh, the
golden era of internet pranks. 2008. They rickrolled
the entire homepage. Every single video you clicked
on the front page took you to Rick Athle's never
going to give you up. Or Snoopavision in 2016.
The promise that you could watch any video in
360 degrees with Snoop Dogg sitting next to you
providing live commentary. It was silly. It felt
like the engineers were having fun with their
own creation. Yeah. But now, well, things feel
a lot more serious. Much more serious. And that
brings us to the political battlefield. Yeah.
Because YouTube isn't just a video host anymore.
For a huge chunk of the population, it's their
primary news source. And that power comes with
massive, massive scrutiny. For years, the dominant
narrative was about the rabbit hole. Right. The
idea that the algorithm was specifically designed
to radicalize you. You click on a video about
fitness and 10 videos later, you're watching
a conspiracy theory about the government putting
chemicals in the water. But the actual data on
that is actually pretty nuanced, isn't it? It's
not that simple. It's not. The old theory was
that the algorithm pushed extreme content because
that content had higher engagement and kept you
watching longer. But YouTube made significant
changes around 2019 to actively suppress what
they call borderline content. They started hard
coding the system to recommend authoritative
sources. CNN, Fox News, BBC, Reuters over some
random guy ranting in his basement. So is a rabbit
hole dead. Not dead, but different. More recent
studies in 2022 and 2024 suggested that the algorithm
isn't necessarily converting people to new extreme
beliefs. It's mostly just reflecting and reinforcing
a user's existing bias. So it's less of a rabbit
hole and more of an echo chamber? A very powerful
echo chamber. If you're already looking for that
content, it will absolutely give it to you. In
fact, one study showed it often pushes mainstream
conservative content, like Fox News, to users
who aren't even interested in politics to begin
with. But when we talk about governments, the
stakes get much, much higher. Let's talk about
Russia. Russia is the perfect example of the
splinternet, the fracturing of the global internet.
After the invasion of Ukraine, YouTube blocked
Russian state media channels globally. RT, Sputnik,
they were just gone. And Russian did not take
that well. No. In late 2024, they started throttling
YouTube speeds within the country, making it
painfully slow to use. But the headline that
grabbed everyone was the fine. A Russian court
fined Google two undecillion rubles. I have that
written down here because I couldn't believe
it. Two undecillion. That's a two followed by
36 zeros. It is more money than exists in the
entire global economy. It's a completely meaningless,
symbolic number. It's symbolic. It's Russia saying,
we reject your jurisdiction and your rules completely.
Exactly. It shows the complete breakdown of relations.
Russia is trying to build its own sovereign Internet.
And in that world, YouTube is the enemy. But
it is not just Russia. We have to talk about
the Middle East. And this gets into some very
heavy, very recent history from 2025. This is
a critical development and it shows the real
world consequences of platform power. In October
2025, we saw a direct collision of U .S. foreign
policy and platform neutrality. What happened?
To comply with sanctions from the Trump administration,
YouTube removed 700 videos and the accounts of
several prominent Palestinian human rights groups,
including Al -Haqq and Al -Mazan. And we need
to be clear, we are not talking about violent
propaganda here. No, absolutely not. We are talking
about archival footage, videos documenting the
killing of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh,
testimonies from detainees. This was historical
record being erased. This highlights the fragility
of that broadcast yourself promised, doesn't
it? Yeah. YouTube presents itself as a global
platform, but at the end of the day, it's an
American company subject to American laws. That
is the key. When the geopolitical winds shift
in Washington, D .C., the digital archive in
San Bruno, California gets deleted. It's a stark
reminder that your cloud storage is subject to
U .S. sanctions law. And speaking of Washington.
The pendulum on censorship is swinging wildly
here at home, too. We saw a major, major reversal
in September 2025 regarding misinformation. We
did. Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced
they were reinstating creators who had been previously
banned for spreading misinformation about COVID
-19 and the 2020 U .S. election. This was a huge
U -turn. For years, they were playing the role
of arbiter of truth. If you say the election
was stolen, you are banned. So why the sudden
flip? Political pressure, plain and simple. J
.D. Vance, the vice president, explicitly defended
this move. He framed it as a victory for free
expression over facts. He alleged that previous
Biden administration had pressured YouTube to
censor that content. And this was a correction.
So we are moving from a platform safety model
back towards a more chaotic town square model.
Exactly. The new argument is who is YouTube to
decide what is true? But the risk, of course,
is that the town square becomes so flooded with
noise and deliberate lies that nobody knows what
is real anymore. And that question, what is real,
is the perfect segue to our final segment, the
technology of 2026. Because with AI, reality
is becoming a very, very flexible concept. It
is. And YouTube is at the absolute forefront
of this, for better or worse. First, let's talk
about age assurance. This started in the UK with
their online safety act. But in July of 2025,
it went global. This is the selfie gate thing,
right? That's what people are calling it. YouTube
is now using machine learning to estimate your
age based on your behavior, what you search for,
what videos you watch, what channels you subscribe
to. If its AI flags you as potentially being
under 18, you lose access to personalized ads
in certain categories of... mature content. And
if the AI is wrong. Or if you actually are an
adult and you want to watch that restricted content.
You have to prove it. You can upload a government
ID, you can use a credit card, or, and this is
the new standard, you can take a facial estimation
selfie. I have to hold my phone up to my face,
let the camera scan me, and AI analyzes my wrinkles
and my bone structure to decide if I'm old enough
to watch a video. Basically, yes. It feels like
something out of a sci -fi dystopia. Please present
your face for verification. But this is the reality
of a regulated internet. The era of anonymous
browsing is dying fast. And while the AI is watching
our faces, it's also changing the faces and voices
in the videos themselves. Auto -dubbing. This
is actually an incredible piece of technology
that rolled out in late 2024 and got really good
in 2025. YouTube's AI can instantly translate
and dub a video into dozens of other languages.
I tried this the other day. I was watching a
Korean cooking channel. and the host was speaking
perfect, natural -sounding English. Not subtitles.
His actual voice was English. And the AI even
adjusted his lip sync to match. It's mind -blowing.
It completely breaks down the language barrier
for creators. A creator in Brazil can now reach
an audience in Japan instantly. It creates a
truly global content market for the first time.
But the dark side of that is incredibly obvious.
If AI can generate new audio and new lip movements.
Deepfakes. If you can make a creator appear to
speak another language, you can make them appear
to say anything. That's why YouTube had to publicly
support... the No Fakes Act of 2025. They're
building tools to watermark and detect AI generated
content, but it's an arms race. If you can't
trust your own eyes and ears anymore, the entire
premise of video evidence just collapses. It's
a brave new world for sure. And we have new leadership
navigating it. We should mention Susan Warchicki.
We should. She was the CEO for a decade. She
was employee number 16 at Google. She really
built the business model we've been discussing.
She stepped down in 2023 and very sadly passed
away in August 2024 from lung cancer, a massive
loss for the industry. And now Neil Mohan is
running the ship. He's been there since 2023.
And his directive from the board seems crystal
clear. protect the ad revenue at all costs hence
the war on ad blockers and integrate ai into
every single part of the product so let's try
to wrap this all up we've covered 21 years we've
gone from a failed dating site with zero users
to a cultural archive to a 50 billion dollar
business and now a political battleground it's
the story of the internet in microcosm it started
as this wild open frontier with a simple powerful
promise broadcast yourself And it's slowly, inevitably
evolved into a regulated, monetized, sanitized,
and in some cases, weaponized global utility.
It's completely indispensable to modern life,
but it's also kind of terrifying. It's both at
the same time. So here's a final thought for
you listening. We talked about Jod Cream's warning
about losing the wisdom of the crowds when they
removed the dislike button. But think about where
we are right now in 2026. We have AI that is
starting to generate content itself. We have
AI that is auto -dubbing that content into your
native language. And we have another AI deciding
if you're old enough to watch it based on your
past behavior. It forces you to ask a really
strange question. Are we actually watching YouTube
anymore? Or is YouTube just watching itself with
us as the passive passengers along for the ride?
I want you to do something today. Go into your
YouTube settings. Find your time -watched stats.
And then ask yourself, what does this algorithm
think it knows about me? Does it think I'm 18?
Does it think I'm a radical? The answer might
surprise you. It usually does. Thanks for diving
deep with us. We'll see you in the next one.