← Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff They Don’t Want YouTube Know, Chapter One: "Me at the Zoo"
00:42:47
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- [00:00]
A
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartradio.
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B
What's up? It's your boys conspiracy stuff. My name is Matt.
- [00:30]
C
What is this? Smash that? Like or subscribe? I don't know. I'm.
- [00:32]
A
No, they call me Ben. We're joined, as always, with our super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. So for everybody tuning in on your podcast audio platform of choice, one thing you need to know from the beginning is that our show started as a video series. And we owe a great deal of thanks to the colleagues and the bosses at the time who let us try out this madcap escapade in the first place. A tepid shout out, by the way, guys, to Jonathan Strickland, who to this day, as we record on Monday, August 3, 2026, remains convinced that he gave us the name of the show.
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B
And he's right, because I was in the. I was in the room when he said it.
- [01:29]
C
I was before my time. I cannot speak nor. I can neither confirm nor deny these.
- [01:33]
B
It was. It was in the break room at One Capital City Plaza. I remember it like it was yesterday.
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C
I thought it was Connell that said he named the show.
- [01:41]
B
No, Connell gave us the voice.
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C
Okay.
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A
And the interesting thing here is that now we are somewhat old in the tooth or long in the tooth. Right. Old in the day as far as podcastery goes. One of the things we have to point out. Right. I want to be clear here. I'm always going to give Baby J a hard time because it's something we do for decades now. And the joke's not stopping, Jonathan. So thank you for tuning in, AKA the Quister of ridiculous history. We are grateful for everyone that brought us here, including you tuning in now, most importantly, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to a little up and comer video platform called YouTube. Without YouTube, there's a strong argument that stuff they don't want you to know would not exist in its present form. Also.
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C
What is it? Shout out to Apple, Apple Video, Apple
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A
Video, itunes, whatever it was called.
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C
It was all very convoluted, not very clear.
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B
One in the charts, baby, for like I don't even know three years when it existed.
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A
Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like we were the number one. We were competitive ski Team in Jamaica.
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D
Exactly.
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A
It's. It was a smaller sandbox back in the day, is what you need to know, fellow conspiracy realist.
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B
Well, Ben, even. Even to that point, think about what we say at the beginning of every one of these. Whether it's audio, Netflix, YouTube, every episode of stuff that they don't want you to know starts with. What's the phrase, Ben? We say our names and then you say, you can turn back now or you are. You. You are here.
- [03:31]
A
Yes. Yes.
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B
That makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
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A
Yes, Don't.
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B
That is like back when we were going to YouTube school, which was the thing, right? We all got certified. Having a catchy thing that happens at the front of every video was a thing we were supposed to do, right? And we came up with our own thing and we made it ours. And we do it every time ritualistically. But that was a thing that we did to kind of appease the YouTube gods.
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C
Then the question becomes, were they suggesting doing that based on, like, psychological analytics and focus testing and stuff, or were they just trying to create the thing that became the thing?
- [04:11]
A
I think it's. I think it's the latter there, Noel, because one thing that is important to us is that you realize you are the most important part of the show. Now, Matt is absolutely correct. We had a bunch of hoops that YouTube wanted us or our company wanted us to jump through YouTube hoops for. That being said, we. We enjoy this sort of stuff and we saw and see it as a differentiation between some other. Some other shows that maybe have less of a mission.
- [04:50]
B
Not trying to downplay the sincerity or anything there that we have, because it is there. It's just. It's a part of the rubric that is required or was required or that YouTube at least said was required to be successful on their platform. Right? You've seen those videos before. Everybody has their own little thing that they do, a little, hey, and it's time to go, blah, blah, blah. And then they get into their video. Every single creator out there has that.
- [05:15]
C
And then they have like, timing, like he got to ask for, subscribe by this number of minutes into the video. And it's all based on analytics. But it's also kind of like in the early days that you're talking about, Matt. I gotta wonder too. Like, without as much analytics as they have now, it was sort of like them kind of trying to set the tone for, you know, what all online streaming video would look like.
- [05:37]
A
And I think that's a great point, Noel. Because it's sort of asking about whether Hammurabi was responding to judicial precedent when creating the code of laws, or was Hammurabi and his team attempting to manifest it by so many metrics right now, even as we record in 2026, YouTube is the largest video platform on the planet. That being said, despite all the amazing things that YouTube has done, and we'll have full disclosure and disclaimers throughout this, you have to understand, we held off on this episode for a while and now we're going to give you what upper Midwesterners in the United States call the straight poop. Because as it turns out, critics allege there's a ton of. You guys know, I was working on this pun for years. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. I think we got it. I think we got there.
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B
That's really good, Ben.
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C
Well, it's so fascinating too, because YouTube is so its own thing that, like, compared to something like Netflix or other content distribution, video streaming platforms, it kind of plays by its own rules. And even those other companies like Netflix that we're on right now, of course, there's sort of an drive to sort of be a little more like YouTube and kind of try to capture some of that YouTube thing, but nobody quite knows how to do it yet, do they?
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A
Yeah. And then YouTube becomes, at different times in its in its history, YouTube becomes like Andy Warhol staying relevant by picking up new innovators like the Basquiat. Here would be your TikTok or your short form video, right? Your vine, your Instagram. Let's pause for a word from a sponsor and get back into it. This is an Iheart podcast.
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E
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F
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D
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- [09:25]
A
free to play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spin quest.com for more details. Here are the facts folks, friends and neighbors, Tennessee pals, rudabagas, conspiracy realist alike. YouTube is undeniably a global phenomenon for a lot of people, especially now in the age of streaming services sort of reinventing cable packages. YouTube has replaced television. I think I can speak for the group here when I say that we all have our favorite YouTube channels that we visit on a semi regular basis for sure.
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C
And some of them I watch or listen to exclusively without having the video on, depending on where I discovered a particular content creator. Like, unless there's a lot of like, clips and, you know, useful visuals. If it's just folks talking in a room, I tend to just listen to it. And YouTube knows that people do that and they make you pay a little extra for it. And you have to be able to, in order to quote, unquote, mute the video and have the audio continue. You got to pay for premium, which I think is such an interesting little detail.
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A
How about you Matt?
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B
Well, it's been a while since I've been a massive YouTube user, but I lately I have weirdly and perhaps contradictorily gotten into reactors. And it's because I'm I find myself in some kind of strange nostalgia zone in my mind where I'm rediscovering music that I love, but through the eyes of others or films that I love vicariously, cathartically.
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A
I do it all the time with I do it all the time with rap, hip hop. I love seeing this is so crazy. I love seeing people who are not the Billboard demographic for any kind of song or any genre of music rediscovering it for the first time. A grandmother makes my day when she hears Tupac Shakur's Dear Mama.
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C
Or the flip side of that is maybe folks who grew up with hip hop had no exposure to, say, like heavy metal or indie rock. Listening to Tool for the first time or King Crimson or something. I love. Both sides of that are fabulous.
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A
I also love when musical experts in a very specific instrument or genre of instrument are listening to something and they say, oh, this percussive riff is amazing, or oh my gosh, they know how to do the flute correctly. This, this is a unifying thing. This is a very positive thing about video content that was indeed popularized by YouTube. And just like our earlier episode on Raytheon, which I hope we can still have titled Three Guys Got Into Refrigerators and Then War.
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B
Yeah, yeah, that was great.
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C
That is how the story went for sure.
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B
Outside of time. I've been away and I was so excited to come in and record the Raytheon episode today and I didn't realize you guys had already done it. And it was the refrigerator early appliance angle thing that I was so excited to talk with you guys about and how everything turned.
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C
Hey, man, we can talk about very much.
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A
Also. It happens. As you know, Matt, from previous discussions and as you know from previous discussions, it happens whenever there's a large manufacturing base. And those three nerds, check out our previous episode as they got bigger and bigger and before they invented the Patriot missile system, they did end up buying a refrigerator company. Amana.
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C
I think I compared it to. I forget the guy's name. He was portrayed sort of dramatized by Bradley Cooper in Licorice Pizza, but he was Barbra Streisand's former hairdresser who became a big movie executive and always wanted to fit somehow a giant mechanical spider into movies and eventually got there with Wild Wild west, which was of course a massive flop. But he tried so hard to shoehorn that giant mechanical spider. So refrigeration Giant mechanical spider of Raytheon.
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B
Sure, there was, there was, there was one guy responsible for that spider. It's amazing.
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C
It is. Check out 100%.
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A
Check out Mitchell and Webb's amazing sketch that politely refers to the problem of civilian manufacturers meeting wartime stuff. And check out car stuff for more of that. We know the reason we're making The Raytheon or RTX Corporation comparison here is that in February of 2005, more than 21 years ago, as we record, there were these three guys from PayPal. They were named Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawad Kareem. They created a site that would allow users to upload and then interact with videos, user generated content.
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C
And the interesting thing, it's not like that was the most unique idea in the world. And I think that's why YouTube is so universally important. Because it's just like, what if we had a way where people could contribute videos and share them with each other? It was all a matter of the technology and the Internet, bandwidth and speed becoming fast enough to support that. And then who was going to be the ones that kind of figured out a, like, smart way to. To do it?
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A
Yeah, yeah, they. They figured out how to not just build a sandbox, but allow people to play more nimbly and more actively in that sandbox. Interact. In this sense, it means you could rate a video, you could comment, you could share it. If you didn't like it, you could block it. If you super liked it, you could add it to a playlist. This was all very, very cool at the time, and it's still cool now. They crowdsourced the stuff that a lot of previous outfits would have in house moderators for. And at the same time, they rode the wave because technology, as all four of us know, and hopefully all five of us counting you tuning in at the very same time, there was something in the zeitgeist. Technology was becoming increasingly affordable. Microphone equipment, cameras. These were just. In the span of a few months after 2005, this was increasingly democratized. You no longer had to be Paramount. You didn't have to be 824. I don't even know if they were around. You didn't have to be a film studio. You just had. Had to have less than a thousand dollars and you were off to the races.
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C
Yeah, we're talking early, you know, I mean, DV camera technology. I mean, you go look back at YouTube videos from those days, and they look kind of like crap compared to now. But at the time, we thought that was all fantastic. I mean, y' all remember even some of those. What was it? Fx, There was like a Sony camera that was like, you know, top of the line. Really, really expensive digital camera by today's standards. The aspect ratio is all funky and they just look really, really dated. But at the time, it felt like you could approach the level of production that you might get from, like, TV series or film.
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A
All right, let's do some show and tell.
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B
This is historical show and tell from our experience with YouTube. The first How Stuff Works YouTube video that ever came out, Ben and Noel and I were not a part of. It happened on March 9, 2007. It was shot with this PD150. I have the PD150 that shot that video. Then, Ben, the first stuff they don't want you to know video that came out on the how stuff works channel was stuff they don't want you to know. Dash. Nikola Tesla, March 23, 2010. And by that time, just that short amount of years, we moved on to this baby and we shot all of our content with this beautiful Sony HDV camera.
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C
What's the model number of that one, Matt? I'm sorry to be nerd.
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B
Oh, God. It's an HDV 1080i. It's interlaced.
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A
Exactly. Ooh. Yeah. So everybody pu your brakes. We were serious.
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C
Well, interlaced was kind of like the same type of technology that. That went into tube TV broadcast. Like, it was like pan and scan almost, right? And it was a form of like a way to compress the video file by having certain even lines and odd lines and things like that. Isn't that kind of what interlaced?
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B
It was the. It was the old school thing, Ben, that. I think you taught me about this as I was. As we were going through the technology. But the old school CRT monitors that would give you different lines, you know, as it's coming in.
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A
Philo Farnsworth. Yeah.
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B
Yes. So this, that's what the interlace just means. Like two separate channels of video, odd
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A
frames, and before we even got there. Like, this is. This is interesting. I shouldn't say, like, this is not a simile, folks. Hear what Matt said. Well, it's 2007 when the first video from How Stuff Works comes out. It's 2005 when YouTube is a thing. And for posterity's sake, as A fanboy of YouTube, I would like to share the very first YouTube video, which I have assurances we can play in part here on Netflix. Ready?
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C
I remember this.
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A
Can you guys guess? Can you guys.
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C
I remember only from reading the history of it. I certainly don't remember from when it was a thing, but yeah, it's historical at this point and I didn't see
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B
it until we read it in something. But yes. This is like. This is crazy.
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C
And there's nothing to it. It is enough.
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A
This is no spoilers, folks. Remember we mentioned the. The three founders. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawad Karim. The very first YouTube video is titled Me at the Zoo. We'll play it in part.
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B
Oh, God. Are we going to get a strike?
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C
All right, so here we are. Elephants.
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A
Cool thing about these guys is that
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C
they have really, really, really long fronts.
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A
And that's. That's cool.
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C
What an observation.
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B
That's all there is to say.
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A
That's all there is to say. That is a 19 second video. It's the first, but it's far from the last and it is so endearing. Obviously, we are very biased because the first video on YouTube was elephant content.
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C
We did just do it. I'm sorry you missed out on that one too, Matt. An episode on elephant shows, which is a super bummer. Unlike that video, which seems to have a very pro elephant spin, was this. I know they did it with the first tweet, but didn't they, didn't they make this into an NFT and sell it? Or was that just the first tweet?
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A
Oh, gosh, I don't know.
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C
I definitely did it with the first tweet. Someone, they sold it as an nft, Remember those kind of came, let's see, did the first YouTube video.
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A
And while you're looking that up, let's point out that a little more than a year later, not even two years later, on the current 12 month calendar, November 2006, Google bought YouTube.com for $1.65 billion. That same year, Time magazine named their person of the Year you. Specifically you. And they said, we're naming it you the person of the year. Because YouTube is the people's platform. It can create international understanding. It can connect disparate people and communities and demographics. We are changing the world. We have no idea what's going to happen in, you know, 10 years from now.
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C
And just to clarify, yeah, that was minted as an NFT and sold on OpenSea, but the original, we can see, did remain on YouTube. The NFT does not represent ownership of the actual copyright. It is just of the reproduced token of it all. Which still calls into question why an NFT even matters.
- [22:01]
B
But carry on just to stay in 2006, guys. In December, December 21st to be exact, of that same year, a guy named Bo Burnham put up a little video called My Whole Family. You should check it out if you haven't seen it, it's incredible.
- [22:16]
A
Yeah, we're big BO fans and not just for the alliteration. You should also check out every song he's ever made, some of which age better than others, but just a phenomenal musician, classic earworm. Maybe we'll have him on the show in the future. I think he'd be a good hang. This is also, you know, it's 2005, 2006. The 2008 financial crash in the west has yet to occur. Right? These are the boom years for tech. You've got a good idea. You go to Silicon Valley, someone throws money at you in your face like clowns throwing pies at Each other. Bigger companies, leviathans are snatching up smaller groups left and right. And often a lot of these companies end up going bust. They end up losing millions upon millions of dollars. But Google made later Alphabet, they made a really good bet here. It paid off this user generated content site, which is what it started as. It didn't just become successful, it changed the world. It created countless subcultures. There are celebrities who entirely depend upon YouTube for their success. There are controversies along the way because we democratized a platform and we coupled it with easily available technology and easy access and then we had a massive price drop. That meant the old barriers to video were quickly eroding. Anybody could be the next star of the world. And you know, not surprisingly, people love to talk about themselves. People love to be seen, right? Especially now. So it's no surprise everyone was very into the idea.
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C
And that democratization of technology can be applied to other mediums as well, like recording equipment and GarageBand. And that also is for video of course, because you got a new MacBook or whatever. It came with imovie, so people didn't even have to buy Final Cut Pro which was, you know, kind of pricey. We'll recall in the early how stuff Works days or I think Premiere. But yeah, people automatically had a pretty reasonably, you know, competent video editing platform as well as like multi track audio.
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B
Hey, we're going to take a quick break.
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C
Don't forget to smash that like button.
- [24:56]
B
Well, let's just quickly before we get into some of the more modern things with YouTube. One of the reasons that Google bought YouTube is because YouTube was struggling and it couldn't make money. It couldn't make any money. It had these ad, these versions of ads right now they're called trueview. Right. This is the. While you're watching a video, an ad will pop up and it'll give you the option to skip it in five seconds. But the advertiser only, the transaction only works if you go 30 seconds or more. If you skip that ad, then it doesn't. Nobody gets any money. Nobody makes any money. Right. And then there's all the discovery videos that they put in there that are sponsored that the platform gets paid for. But YouTube could not make enough money to support itself for a long time. And Google was kind of the savior that came in because they're so big that they could just absorb all of the essentially the money that YouTube was hemorrhaging.
- [25:54]
A
They could be a loss leader. Yeah. And that was also to be clear for our three amigos for Our triumvirate at the beginning, they were baking in that kind of time window that is startup logic, that startup calculus. And it's, it's baffling because you're right, Matt, Google Alphabet did save YouTube because they.
- [26:19]
C
We.
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A
We don't know what happened to the back rooms, right? We were not personally in the room where it happens, but we did that. Google made some sort of cost benefit analysis that taught them this thing was a gold mine, or now we would say a hydrogen helium mine, a platinum mine, et cetera.
- [26:43]
C
Oftentimes when an acquisition takes place, it's because the potential of the thing is seen. But the company, under its current leadership and current funding levels, can't quite reach that, you know, potential yet. And so Google not only saved them not for, like, you know, egalitarian reasons, because they knew they, with their algorithms and all of the stuff that they had control of, they could make this the thing that it was always meant to be.
- [27:09]
B
You know, because Google had AdWords. And the way Google has always made money was through search. Like, that is just what they did, right? You type anything into Google and you're going to get all kinds of responses that are sponsored, that are paid for to be there. In those responses you bring, you add YouTube to the mix. Now, whenever, when everyone uses YouTube as a search bar and to find the thing you want, right, you can do the same thing. That was their thought. And they've been struggling and struggling and struggling all the way to the point where in 2018, they started their own subscription service, right? Which is trying to find another way to make money, to make revenue as a giant corporation that needs increasing profits.
- [27:50]
A
Because for so many online initiatives, you have to understand, folks, the Achilles heel is often ad income. That is, that is the. That is the great truth of a lot of this stuff.
- [28:05]
C
Well, you got to wonder too, if Google, like, was part of the reason that YouTube wasn't able to succeed on their own Steam, because they were so in control of the pipes and of search and of all of that stuff that only once they absorbed them were they able to be like, well, now, now you're part of us, so we can give you the juice that you always needed and lacked, you know?
- [28:27]
A
Yeah, that's interesting.
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C
They starved the beast, almost. You got.
- [28:30]
A
I think I like that you're referencing Star of the Beast. I don't know if it was quite at that level. It may have been not so much algorithmic suppression at that point. It may have been. It may have been the boffin saying, hey, we're seeing a lot of activity here because we obsess about our metrics. So let's get this. Because we're predicting projecting more attention and whatever the case may be, Google was correct. YouTube was correct as of 2023. So again, they started at 2005 for everybody playing along at home. 2023, more than 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Now we're at a point where roughly 82 human years worth of new video content of some sort hits the platform every 24 hours. That means there is no way any single human person can watch everything. Statistically if you are human and you are tuning in, you will not be able to watch even two days worth of stuff. There are currently somewhere between 2.58 billion to 2.7 billion monthly active users. So if all of those are individual humans, guys, that equates to about 32.5% of the entire population of the planet. It's an impressive metric. It's a terrifying metric. We should also step it back a little to let you know that those are Google's numbers. And a lot of users have multiple accounts shout out to everybody being creepy. We see you.
- [30:23]
B
Well, I mean on this machine that we're recording this on, I have three YouTube channels subscriptions open at any given time. So when I'm clicking through, depending on the browser and in what context I've got three different humans.
- [30:38]
A
Does that make you a user? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's why I think we have to copy on it.
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B
Well, and they've got all these family plans too, right. Where you can have up to five family members on one thing, but each individual sub user within that thing. Is that a user? We don't know. There's a lot of things in there that YouTube, you know, it's any company, they gotta make the numbers look as good as possible.
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A
Sure. Like OpenAI. Right? Like every. There's a great book. Have you guys read the book Reverse Centaur?
- [31:08]
C
No, but that's.
- [31:09]
B
Oh no.
- [31:09]
C
Fascinating.
- [31:10]
B
Talked about that. Just talked about that with somebody. Who did we talk about that with? Oh, we did it on Strange News. We talked about the reverse Centaur thing of who's driving who basically.
- [31:20]
A
Right, yeah. There's a great exploration in that book regarding how easy it is to construct metrics that appear favorable or advantageous. And it harkens back to the old Mark Twain stuff about how to build statistics. We don't have to get into it.
- [31:41]
B
It's a Corey Doctorow. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After
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A
AI and we've got to get to. And thank you for that, Matt. We've got to get to audience distribution per YouTube. Largest YouTube audience is in India, which makes sense. It's a huge country. This. The user stat. Active user stat in India is like 491 million to 518 million active users. That is nearly double the size of the United states population. Number two, the United States. Go team. Number three, Brazil. And for a long time, YouTube would champion this statistic. They would say to advertisers, hey, 77% of everyone on the Internet who is aged between 15 and 35 is on YouTube. And advertisers were like, you know what would be awesome for this Brain stuff video? If we had an unskippable 60 second ad for Harry's Racers or whatever.
- [32:58]
B
Well, this is why. And you can see maybe if you imagine the boardroom, right, or the whatever chats they were doing on what they didn't use Basecamp. What were they using? Probably slack. The slack channels with the upper echelons at both YouTube and Google talking about these numbers and like, oh my God, look at the money that is just sitting there waiting for us. We just have to figure out how to capture it. And they're seeing that the ad sense, the, you know, the, the, the money that they are trying to make with ads isn't quite as great as it could be, but it is pretty awesome. And we'll talk about that in just a moment. But what they really saw was the data, right, that was being generated by all of those users.
- [33:42]
A
Now I know where you live, I know what you like, I know how old you are. I have a cool sense of who's in your house.
- [33:49]
B
Oh, did you put a credit card number in to pay for your premium service?
- [33:54]
A
I see you're watching a lot of videos on yachts. No, that's more. More street level version. To steal a term from MCU would be, hey, you're watching a lot of food videos.
- [34:12]
C
Yeah, it's also, I mean, I was gonna ask the question or pose the question earlier. Do you guys think of YouTube as being a form of social media?
- [34:21]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:22]
A
Yeah.
- [34:23]
C
It's sort of this weird crossover though, right? Like it, I mean it is a content distribution platform like a Netflix or like, you know, Vimeo, which you shout out is like, you know, mainly like a music video kind of driven thing that still does quite well, but it also has the social media aspect and it is sort of the early days of generating that kind of algorithmic data that drives the way we're being served up this kind of like echo chambery experience of the Internet.
- [34:51]
A
Cough cough. Reddit is social media as well. Cough cough.
- [34:55]
B
Comments, Comments. Really? Comments and sharing, right? Yeah, you're posting stuff, you're commenting on it, you're sharing it.
- [35:01]
A
That's usg. Yeah, that's usg.
- [35:04]
B
The last thing with advertisers and trying to figure out how to make money, they've got the data potentially stream there that they can sell at the third parties. But the huge thing that changed our experience with YouTube, that really altered the way we look at it as a show as you know, a company, a larger company. And everything occurred around that. The shifting times like 2015 to 2017, where there's a realization that we have to require the stuff that's being uploaded. We've got literally almost infinite content that's being uploaded right by the minute. We have to make sure the good stuff that we like that advertisers like gets the ads on it and everything else doesn't. Which just means it's a top down focus on the stuff that advertiser, that advertisers are going to think is cool.
- [35:56]
C
And that's kind of the old school model of television too. It's just, you know, much more scaled. Like TV shows at the end of the day aren't made to be high art. They're made to satisfy advertiser categories and demographic groups and things like that. But it's with streaming and the advent of this algorithm and all of this new data that just kind of segments that even further or like laser focuses that even further.
- [36:21]
B
And Those categories for YouTube are Beauty and fashion and lifestyle, sports, music, gaming, comedy, parenting, science and news. You know what's not in there? Government cover ups, secret society. Well, that's all very unsolved mysteries.
- [36:43]
C
Advertisers don't go for that stuff.
- [36:45]
B
We can speak to that from expensive. Just putting that out there that has shaped our experience. Right Ben? I mean just when we look at, especially if we look at our specific YouTube channel and what is approved or not approved to be advertiser friendly?
- [37:01]
C
Well, I look forward to getting into the conversation around demonetization in a little bit and about like at what point does the controller of the pipes kind of exercise control over the content? Even if they say that's not what they do, they incentivize or deincentivize certain kinds of content, period.
- [37:19]
B
Which means it's what you get to see.
- [37:21]
C
Right.
- [37:23]
A
So in 2021 we know that advertisers love this in their fourth quarter alone, YouTube, not Google. Overall, YouTube itself made $7.9 billion in ad revenue. Fast forward 2025, their global ad revenue was 4.0.4 billion. $40.4 billion. For anybody who doesn't love math, just trust me, that's a lot of money. That's probably too much money.
- [37:54]
D
And.
- [37:55]
C
And if you love money, you already kind of knew.
- [37:58]
A
The number is projected now, as we record on August 3rd, to hit upwards of $62 billion in 2026. Active users, however you want to dignify them. 2.9 billion per month. Love it or hate it, this thing is a leviathan. It's relatively unique. No one has surpassed it. There are competitors. I love Vimeo, so shout out Vimeo. I think all film nerds do, but it doesn't seem like anybody is going to replace YouTube in the near future. And that's the problem. Because no matter what it is, okay? No matter how you identify, and please hear me well on this, folks, monopolies are bad for you as a customer, they are double plus ungood. You could find analogs and brick and mortar, right? There are a lot of people who say YouTube is like Walmart. It moves into a town or a space, and it can quash similar businesses simply by economy of scale, their size, the. The war chest, the fact that they, like Raytheon, can lose more money for a longer time than you can if you're making radio tubes by yourself, dude.
- [39:15]
B
And it can homogenize things, right? I mean, and that's one of the craziest things we imagine about what YouTube provides for people, what you get to hear and see. And this kind of monopolization kind of makes all the things a little bit of the same.
- [39:31]
A
Sure. Yeah. And that's one of the things we hear a lot of critics arguing about with regard to YouTube from allegedly unfair business practices, like the way ad revenue is split between a creator and the company, the accusations of unfair censorship, which is a big thing. Draconian demonetization, and much, much more. So our question is, is there stuff they don't want you to know? I'm keeping the pun. We'll be right back. Here's where it gets crazy. Maybe. Maybe, guys, maybe a better way for us to say it, to get into this is that there is stuff YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for. Right? Like Google doesn't want to be responsible for a mass shooting, even though someone used Google to buy a gun, used Google to maps to find a location, and then shot people.
- [40:38]
C
What a great opportunity. To talk about Raytheon for a second, since Matt wasn't able to be in on that one. That was a big thing we discussed in terms of the whole argument of like, does a company that manufactures like weapons of mass destruction and mass murder and warfare, are they themselves responsible. Responsible for those deaths? It's a similar argument to like Smith and Wesson and firearms manufacturers not wanting to take responsibility for school shootings. This is a similar situation. And you pointed out, Ben, that the absolute volume of content on YouTube is a feature, not a bug. And there is no possible way that that could be policed, so to speak, by YouTube themselves, except when it kind of benefits them. Right?
- [41:21]
B
Well, that was one of the main things YouTube was concerned with in the beginning, right? Just like Facebook, just like all these other social media platforms about the terrible things that could be uploaded. If you give that tool to everybody who can possibly make a video or put video up, there's. There's danger there. Right. And is it their fault? It might be their fault if it goes up and everybody sees it. So we as a company have to protect ourselves more than anyone from that kind of stuff. Right?
- [41:52]
C
I mean, obviously there are safeguards in place that would prevent someone from say uploading a video of like murder or violence taking place or something really horrific like that. But then it gets a little more nuanced when it comes to like ideological content and like what is and is not okay and what is incentivized and deincentivized. And I love, Ben, that you point out in the outline here. That's when we start getting into acts of Congress and the Digital Millennium Copyright act as well as Communications Decency act and how those things kind of play into the way YouTube needs to approach this.
- [42:28]
A
And folks, breaking news just as intrusive as an ad. You could say we have so much to get to that this is going to be a two chapter series. So please, please, please tune in as we get further into the deep water surrounding the powerful forces that have have set their eye of Sauron upon YouTube as an organization. Guys, I think we're all excited for chapter two here for sure.
- [43:04]
C
Yeah, Way too much to get to for one episode, so do tune in for the second one. In the meantime, if you'd like to find us on the Internet, you can do so by reaching out to the handle Conspir or conspiracy stuff show, depending on what social media platform is your favorite. You'll find us.
- [43:19]
B
Oh, hey, do you have one of these phone things you can call us? Our number is 1-833-STD-WYTK It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on one of our Listener mail episodes that don't show up here in Netflix land. They're in the audio verse. You can find them. Just search for them. You'll see if you want to send us an email.
- [43:42]
A
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back, which makes this one of the best ways to contact us. 24 hours an evening, seven evenings a week, you can find us out here in the dark. Send us by the way, in lieu of a random fact, your favorite, weirdest, strangest thing you've ever seen on YouTube conspiracyheartradio.com.
- [44:29]
B
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I Heart Rate. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [44:39]
A
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