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- [00:00]
Nature's Bounty Narrator
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- [00:36]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm lulu Garcia Navarro. YouTube is a juggernaut. The platform is winning the streaming war with Netflix. It's made creators like Mr. Beast and Ms. Rachel into huge stars and it's owning the video podcast space. Add to that its growing distribution business with YouTube TV and the deals with both the NFL and the Oscars, and it's clear YouTube has few, if any peers. Which is why I wanted to sit down with CEO Neal Mohan. Mohan has been in charge of YouTube since 2023 and has overseen its rapid growth. But that hasn't come without controversy.
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Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Just this week, a jury in California
- [01:20]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
found the company negligent alongside Meta for harming a teenager's mental health through its addictive features. That verdict, which YouTube told us they planned to appeal, came down after Mohan and I talked. But we still had a length about YouTube's impact on children and us all. Here's my conversation with YouTube CEO Neil Mohan.
- [01:51]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I am very excited to be here today at YouTube. I wanted to start with a statistic. Mr. Beast, of course, the biggest content creator on YouTube, said that humanity now spends 2% of its waking hours on YouTube. Is the goal to make it 3%?
- [02:11]
Neil Mohan
So I know Jimmy very well. He and I have not done that math together. So I don't think I can validate his math or not. I think our goal, I mean, look, we measure ourselves by this concept of whether viewers, all of us, the 2 billion people that come to YouTube every single day, are satisfied by their experience on YouTube. And so that is how we orient decisions around the product or the business. And we have grown. We're the number one streamer I think for three years running now in the US on television screens. We're an incredibly large podcast platform. This conversation I will watch on YouTube. So yeah, that has been part of the journey. I'm incredibly proud of it in terms of making some long term bets that have really paid off for YouTube, but also for our viewers and our creators.
- [03:03]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Obviously, this is going to go on YouTube. We've got cameras and lights here. And what used to be an audio podcast is now a video podcast. And part of that reason is because this is the way to gain new audiences, to reach people, because everyone seems to be on the platform now. What is it that you think makes shows grow and gains an audience? I mean, how do I make this a hit other than like maybe taking a chair and bashing you over the head? We might get there in a bit.
- [03:40]
Neil Mohan
When I get asked this question, I think it's, in my view, very, very simple. And it has to do really with how YouTube works, which is the people that are on the other side of the camera, other side of the screen, rather, that are watching you on a television screen or on their mobile phones. When they're watching this conversation, or even on their desktops or what have you, the one thing they can suss out really, really quickly is if it's, like, truly authentic. And I really do think that if you go and actually spend a minute thinking about any creator's channel, that is really what comes through for the really successful creators.
- [04:25]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I want to talk about your competition because you mentioned podcasts. You recently, though, have had several major podcasters leave YouTube for Netflix shows like the Breakfast Club, My Favorite Murderer. Are you worried that your biggest stars are going to be signed away to places like Netflix? And we're also, by the way, of course, seeing Meta just announced this week that they were interested in luring some of your creators away. Apple is now talking about, obviously, getting into the video podcast business more aggressively. I mean, they're taking, you know, they're taking the things that you built and they're saying, come over here, the water's warm.
- [05:02]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, you know what? I'd say a couple things about that. So first, it is flattering that they see us as sort of the center of culture, especially in terms of what these amazing creators have been able to do on YouTube. But the real sort of conversation, when I speak to our creators and I speak to our creators several times a week, of all sizes, really up and coming creators, some of the very large ones that you've mentioned, what they always tell me is that no matter what they look to do, they understand that YouTube is their home. There would be no Beast games if there wasn't Mr. Beast on YouTube. And Jimmy knows that. And he talks about that. And that's the way that I think about it. They tell me over and over that their most authentic, real audience is on YouTube. They know that is the font of a lot of their success off of YouTube. But if, as a result of their success on YouTube, they are also experiencing success in other places, whether it's working with a studio on a project or writing a book, or coming up, in the case of Mr. Beast with his chocolate bar or what have you, then I think that's awesome. I have not come across YouTubers that have completely yanked their content off YouTube. I can't imagine why they would do that. And frankly, they're in a position where they can say no to that. Right. They don't have to. Because the nice thing about what they've built on YouTube is that there's other places that are so desperate to actually work with them that they'll acquiesce to what our YouTubers are ultimately know is the right decision for them in the long term, which is to never leave their home.
- [06:37]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Yeah. I mean, it just seems like it's an interesting consequence of the YouTube model, because in many ways, you're an incubator. You know, you take, like you said, anyone who's got a camera and a dream, and they have a shot at getting an audience and connecting with them. But once they get to a certain level of success, it seems like all these other groups are sort of circling to take them away, and they never
- [07:01]
Neil Mohan
leave because they know that their home is on YouTube.
- [07:05]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I want to move to another part of your business that you are also really dominating. YouTube TV is now bigger than many of the cable operators. And since 2025, the main way that YouTube is now consumed in the US is on connected television. At the beginning of 2026, you wrote YouTube is the new TV because creators are the new primetime. I think one of the things that has Hollywood nervous is that it's a question of quality, too. You know, prestige TV, something that's hard and costly to make. YouTube is mostly not that I was looking at all these guides that there are to sort of get your things to do well on YouTube, like, what are the hooks? How are you can get the algorithm to like you and amplify you?
- [08:02]
Neil Mohan
Are you adopting any of them?
- [08:05]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Not yet. But it's all about tapping into a lizard brain and not about maybe elevating things that have a narrative arc, that have character development, that have complex moral decision making. And I'm just wondering, are we losing something with the dominance of the kind of creator economy that YouTube specializes in?
- [08:31]
Neil Mohan
Hmm. You know, I think this is a conversation that I do think the industry likes to have. And it's oftentimes the industry just sort of talking to itself, to be honest. And I think it's presumptuous for us to judge or tell people what is high quality or low quality or prestige or not. At the end of the day, 2 billion people come to YouTube. Families, parents, young people, college kids, older adults, and they find what they love. And there's every type of creator and every type of genre because it is a reflection of humanity. We have incredible creators that are producing amazing scripted content in Hollywood, like Alan Chicken Chow or Kanigra Dion, who have built soundstages to produce content that engages people in incredibly. I would put that up against any sort of, quote unquote, sort of prestige content out there. I would put Ms. Rachel or Mark Rober or Cleo Abram against any sort of quote unquote, traditional sort of produced content. And the great thing about it is that when the next Ms. Rachel or the next Mark Rober comes along who's even more creative in a different way, they get a shot at it as well. As opposed to someone in sort of traditional sort of media saying, actually no, I don't think your idea is a good one, or it's low quality, quote unquote. Who are we to say that?
- [10:03]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
So content creators are king, but you are moving into the traditional purview of the networks. You secured exclusive broadcasting rights for events like the oscars starting in 2029 and currently some NFL games. I've seen of course, predictions that this is going to be the death knell for cable and broadcast television because these are such big tent pole events. I mean, what is the strategy here? Is it to sort of pick out the biggest events from traditional broadcast television? I mean, is the super bowl next and bring it to YouTube?
- [10:37]
Neil Mohan
Well, I mean, I guess the first thing that I would say is if you think about it from a consumer standpoint, a viewer standpoint, especially a younger viewer, their expectation is that when they turn on the TV that all of what they want to watch and engage with is in the same experience. And so that is everything from a 15 second short, by the way, shorts are, you know, lots of people watch them on televisions, to a 15 minute sort of classic YouTube sort of VOD or long form video, to, you know, three hour podcast, one hour podcast through a three hour NFL game or a 15 hour livestream. Cause we have, you know, lots of streamers on our platform. And the expectation is that all of that is a seamless experience that they can get through their recommendations. On YouTube. And so that's the consumer lap through which we have looked at it. And we made that bet for three reasons. One is could we expand the market by making it easy for fans to actually find football games, whether it was a live game, but our biggest relationship is actually Sunday Ticket, which is a subscription service. The second was like, could we bring technological innovation to it? So multi view, being able to watch, which people take for granted now, was one of the core innovations we brought to the NFL experience. Creator integrations. Right. We did this new concept that was, we call it Creator watch withs, which is basically the livestream, I mean the live game, like our Brazil game, which was one of the season openers last year. But watch alongside your favorite creator. And so those are the types of things that we talk about with the NFL. So when the commissioner and I have a meeting with our teams, that's really what our focus is. I have an 18 year old son, he's a sports nut. He watches lots of live sports, but his sports highlights are his YouTube feed and the NFL understood. And so that led to the partnership that we have. And so that's how. And the Oscars actually was a similar type of conversation with the academy.
- [12:37]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Since you mentioned the Oscars, did you see Conan o' Brien skit this year where he sort of poked fun at YouTube?
- [12:42]
Neil Mohan
I did, yeah. Yeah, two YouTube jokes.
- [12:44]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
He did. What'd you think?
- [12:47]
Neil Mohan
I think Conan is very funny and he's actually a YouTuber. He's been on YouTube for a very long time. His Team Coco channel does really well on YouTube.
- [12:56]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Do you think the broadcast networks that had been traditionally been the home of these franchises become like the dodo? Because I mean, those are the biggest drivers also for them. And you taking that away, I mean, kind of like what's left?
- [13:12]
Neil Mohan
Well, you know what's interesting about those partners is they're obviously, as I said, some of our largest, most strategic partners because of YouTube TV. But they are also large partners in the classic sense of being creators on YouTube. Whether they are some of the largest News partners on YouTube are like Fox News, right? They're very large on our platform. Just like the New York Times has a very large presence on YouTube and the wall Street Journal or
- [13:47]
LifeLock Advertiser
a lot
- [13:48]
Neil Mohan
of the entertainment networks. Disney is one of our strategic partners. They have a big investment and presence on YouTube and so we work closely with them every single day. They understand sort of what's happening in the ecosystem. And I think they also understand that a lot of the fandom around their ip, their franchises the amount of creativity that comes out of their studios is happening on YouTube, so they really tap into that and they invest in it.
- [14:18]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
So we've been talking obviously about the power of video today, and I want to get your thoughts on, because I understand that you are a big reader, among other things. And one of the other big concerns that I hear about this world that we're entering and living in now and sort of embarking on with AI is that, you know, there are studies showing that all our video consumption has ushered in this age of post literacy, that Gen Z now overwhelmingly prefers to consume visual content on YouTube as opposed to traditional media. And that has tracked with a sort of more pronounced drop in reading levels, attention spans. What do you think about YouTube's role in changing the way that we think? And our brains?
- [15:10]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, I mean, I can answer that. And you're presumably you're talking about young people and young people.
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Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
You know, my brain too though. But.
- [15:19]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, but you know, certainly where the responsibilities are for all of us is very high, which is young people and children. You know, I have three kids of my own. So as a parent, as a dad, I think about their development and, you know, both challenges and opportunities every single day. Like I can say unequivocally, you know, I encourage my kids to go run around and touch grass and, you know, for our youngest, be on the swing set or, or play basketball with my son and all of those types of things. And I encourage that. I encourage them to read as much as they possibly can. You know, I love to read, but I encourage our, my wife and I encourage our kids to do that as well. And on YouTube, what I find is there's content, as we've described, that young people find entertaining and they learn new things on a regular basis.
- [16:21]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I mean, do you think it matters that they're learning things? And this isn't a gotcha. This is actually, I'm just genuinely curious. Do you think it matters that they're learning things through video and that that is just sort of changing the way that they absorb information or it doesn't.
- [16:37]
Neil Mohan
I think that video, just like reading, is an important way for people to learn. And when you say the term video, it's like learning vis that. You know, just like back in the day, we learned in the class classroom visually from our teachers. I do see a lot of that learning happening on YouTube and actually teachers tell me that all the time too. Like it's.
- [16:58]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
And I want to say my daughter's dyslexic and YouTube is a huge Part of her life, she learns visually. And it's been a godsend for her for all sorts of different reasons. So this isn't to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing.
- [17:11]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, I think that it is a. It is. I think about it more in the analogy of, like, a library. And it's a visual library, but it's a library that has lots and lots and lots of books in it. And the way that information or knowledge is communicated or new ways of thinking is communicated is visual, audio, visual. And I do think that is an effective way for people to learn. Do I think it's the only way? Of course not.
- [17:38]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I want to ask you about a lawsuit that's happening where you're currently, along with Meta, being sued by a young woman who says YouTube is addictive and harmful when she was a minor. And this is considered a landmark case here in California. Do you feel responsibility to remedy the harm for that? If your site is addictive to people,
- [18:03]
Neil Mohan
and I shouldn't comment on that specific trial, of course, as you can understand what I will say about. Again, and I think I was alluding to some of these things in my earlier answers. The way I think about it is, as you point out, as we were just talking about, YouTube is this platform where people go for many different reasons to blow off steam, listen to their favorite artists, whatever Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift or what have you, to connect with community. That's a lot of what happens on YouTube, and then learn things. And so I think the mental model for me is we should be thinking about protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to protecting them from the digital world. And like, the best analogy I can think about there is, you know, teaching my daughter to ride a bike. Like, it starts with training wheels, and you take off the training wheels, and then eventually, like, she can kind of go and ride her bike and sort of be alive.
- [19:06]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I think that kids, you know, that it's impossible, it's impossible to put guardrails on kids with devices. It's so hard.
- [19:16]
Neil Mohan
Yeah. And so that's what I was trying to say, which is I feel like because of that sort of principle of making sure that we're protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to shutting them off from it. Because I also think it's wrong, frankly, to eliminate that knowledge, that library of content, because there's amazing, wonderful content that parents tell me about every single day. Just like the experience that you just shared about your daughter. I have that certainly in my household so, well then how do you approach it? Well, the way I think you approach it is to make it so that what you can do around parental controls, as you described, or other types of things, are actually truly practical and easy to use and that can actually be enforceable. And that's what we can do. And that's what my wife and I try to do in our household. Like you said, we're not perfect by any stretch, but. But if there are things that we can do at YouTube to make that job easier for parents, I think that's the right approach.
- [20:26]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
You know, as a parent, which again, I know you are, it can oftentimes feel like you're fighting against Silicon Valley. Like it's you trying to put some guardrails and some order in the household and you are fighting against, you know, these giant corporations of which you are one. And it feels impossible. It feels for many parents like they just lose the battle.
- [20:52]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm as parent of three myself, I think about this, how young people are growing up today. I think that there are amazing things that happened. The access to information, to knowledge, that happened because of platforms like YouTube. I also understand the challenges that you're describing. And so it's not to trivialize them in any sense, because I experience them and it is something that I personally care deeply about. It's personal to me. Our approach to it is how can we bring all of that sort of those awesome experiences that you just described in the context of your daughter that I experienced with my own kids, but do it in a way where parents are in control and that's what we work towards. And so we are a platform where we will build things like timers in the app. We announced actually a couple months ago now the ability for parents to actually have a timer on short form video feeds. Right. To set it to zero. That's industry leading. That has not been done before. But that's the way that we make decisions here in terms of putting that responsibility first and foremost and kind of then letting the chips fall where they may.
- [22:20]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I do want to talk about content moderation because as YouTube has become bigger and bigger and takes up more of the culture and of people's engagement and the way they get information, the responsibility becomes, I think, greater. Do you feel that responsibility in terms of how things have shifted for YouTube and just having a lot more time spent on the site every single day?
- [22:46]
Neil Mohan
It is my top priority in many ways. And I often say that YouTube is a reflection of what's happening in the world. But what happens on YouTube also impacts the world. And that, from my standpoint, is the motivation behind the responsibility. There's 2 billion people that come to YouTube every single day. We do have a responsibility. We are a platform that prides itself on being an open platform without a gatekeeper. We stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression. But we've had community guidelines on our platform since the day YouTube started. And living up to that responsibility is a big part of what happens around here, literally every single day.
- [23:33]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Yeah. I mean, starting in 2020, you deplatformed a number of YouTube accounts for spreading lies. You've replatformed many of them, most notably Donald Trump. After January 6, 2021, you had suspended Donald Trump's account. And we should note that YouTube wasn't alone in that. Many other platforms did the same. Trump then sued, accusing you of censorship, and you reinstated his account in 2023. And then Google, your parent company, agreed to pay nearly $25 million to settle the case last year without admitting liability. Were you wrong to ban him in the first place?
- [24:12]
Neil Mohan
I think I'm trying to think back to the policies that were, I think, in place back then. Many of those, I think, are not in place today. We have, because of a lot of what we talked about here and the scale of YouTube and what it represents in culture and society, we have a long track record of working with administrations, really, on both sides of the aisle, and we make our decisions based on what we believe at the moment to be right for the creator ecosystem that we spent the bulk of the time talking about here. And so we strive to write our community guidelines in a way, the best as we possibly can. We strive to be truly as much of an open platform as possible.
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Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
But was it the wrong decision, do you think, at the time, to ban, you know, former president?
- [25:06]
Neil Mohan
I think that, you know, it's hard to look at all of these decisions out of context. You know, you think about, you know, you said, Even back to 2020, some of the examples that you were describing there, we were embarking on this pandemic that was gonna shut down the world, like science was being created every single day. Did we reverse those policies? Yeah, we changed a lot of those policies because I think that while the principles of freedom of expression, free speech, remain sort of North Star kind of immovable principles, at least at YouTube, we also want to be flexible in terms of the context around policies and what we. Back to your question. Around the president's channel and around January 6th. I can't remember this very specific policy that was in place then, but that was during that particular time period. Fast forward. A lot of those policies, even before independent of the lawsuit or what have you, were deprecated policies. And so that's how we try to be flexible about the policies, but also be true to our principles about being an open platform. And so when I took over as CEO, one of the first decisions was to bring that channel back.
- [26:28]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
That was your decision?
- [26:30]
Neil Mohan
That was ultimately my decision, yes.
- [26:34]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
The money, we should say, is being used to remodel the White House and pay for Trump's ballroom. Do you worry about the optics of that?
- [26:41]
Neil Mohan
You know, again, like I was saying, Lulu, we're very focused on our creators, like, what is the best for the ecosystem. We do work with all administrations. I think that what I would say is
- [26:55]
LifeLock Advertiser
we.
- [26:56]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
There's a lot of discussion, as you know, about how powerful entities in corporate America are dealing with this administration now. And there will be questions when there are others and that relationship. And I think it's a fair question. You know, I think. I'm sure that you're more focused on your creators, but this is. I think it's a fair question.
- [27:19]
Neil Mohan
The question being how do we.
- [27:22]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
How do you think about the optics of the money that you ended up paying to. To Donald Trump to settle the case being used on his new ballroom?
- [27:31]
Neil Mohan
I don't know the specifics of the ballroom or how it's being built. It is going towards a preservation trust. So I do think it's something that is going to be for the country. But I think the way, honestly, I think about it is sort of the way you framed it in the question, which is, I think it's a way for us to settle on old policies, most of them are actually not even in place today. And focus on the future of our creators and the ecosystem. We make those policy decisions independent of administrations, based on what we think is best for YouTube. And that is hopefully something that we will continue to do.
- [28:12]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Something I'm hearing from you, and I think it's very true, is that the culture has changed so much in terms of what is deemed misinformation, not deemed misinformation. And you have changed your policies along with that. And there's a lot of reporting around what those changes are at YouTube. And I'm just wondering how now something gets taken down. What exactly are the community guidelines that get breached? Is it the sort of amount of time someone's saying something or the impact of what they're saying?
- [28:47]
Neil Mohan
You know, the real. The way, I think that it really breaks down into a few things that allows us to do what we do. And the first is, as I said, clarity around the principles and the core principle here, which again goes back to the very early days of YouTube and has been consistent, which is we are an open platform and we stand for free speech. And that is a stance that we've taken and we have gotten criticized on both sides of the aisle constantly. And I think that that is, and I say this to my teams here, that's, that is a result of the privileged position we're in. We are relevant to people's lives.
- [29:29]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
And there's a difference between unfettered free speech. We've seen free speech absolutists like Elon Musk and what X has become. And that's a version of free speech. So I'm trying to understand what your definition is.
- [29:43]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, so I guess what I'm saying is our principles, the way to answer your original question is it starts with the principles we try to hold true to this tenant of free speech that is core to how we do it. And so then the question is, well, how do you then write a set of community guidelines that reflect it to the best of our ability? And I always say that that's the hard work, that's the job, and the best we can do there is to write them and to be transparent about them. And then the third part of it is to do our best to live up to what we actually published. And then we are gonna get criticized on either sides of it because people are not gonna be, not everyone is gonna be happy about where that line is drawn. And.
- [30:27]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
But I guess I'm trying to understand where the line is drawn because, I mean, let's take, you know, a couple of examples. If you think about Candace owens, she has 5 million followers on your platform and growing. And right now she has a multi part series on conspiracy theories around Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. She's also talked frequently about Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, being a man. There has been anti Semitic content in the past. So explain to me how she's not violating YouTube's community guidelines.
- [30:59]
Neil Mohan
Again, I'd have to look at a very specific video there. So it's hard to answer that question in sort of a generalized sense. And the decisions we make are video by video. And we're able to do that at scale because of our investment in our systems and the people that we have. And so I don't think I can answer that question in a general sense. What I will say is that we do have guidelines around. Around hate speech or harassment. We have guidelines around making sure that kids are protected on the platform, around consumer fraud and those types of things. And each one of those guidelines, we try our best to actually publish them on our website. So I couldn't get into the details of every single one of those verticals and how it applies to an individual video, but I can speak in terms of the broad principles that on. In general, we try to allow for as the broadest spectrum of speech as possible. Sometimes it might be speech that people disagree with. You're describing one example, there's probably millions and millions of videos on YouTube that I disagree with, that you might disagree with, but don't have grounds for us to take down on the platform.
- [32:11]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I don't know if it's disagreement. It's just a question of the fundamental questions.
- [32:16]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Right.
- [32:17]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Or what are facts, what is truth, what is fair? And what is the responsibility of a platform like YouTube to elevate those things and not things that are unfair, untrue, and possibly damaging?
- [32:41]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, you know, we are an open platform, Lulu. Each one of the channels on our platform, the New York Times channel, the Interview channel, you have the editorial standards that you live by on those channels. And they are certainly different across the various. Not just genres, but channels within genres. And our job is to have a set of rules and guidelines. Those are our community guidelines. Every channel will draw a different line in terms of what they think is appropriate.
- [33:10]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
And the reason I'm focusing on this, and forgive me, I just. It's because I don't think these are important questions. They are, thank you. And also, it's just, I think they're important for, you know, our understanding of the world. I just saw one of your news creators, Tara Palmieri, who I know a little bit, who has now become a sort of independent creator on YouTube. And I saw, you know, you have cited her as, you know, someone. Someone trying to respond, you know, promote responsible journalism on the platform. And she just had a post on YouTube sort of lamenting the fact that she feels like she's fighting against an algorithm that deprioritizes that kind of reporting that she's being, you know, she is having to fight for the attention in. In a world where there's all sorts of other people pushing things that might be more jazzy, more interesting, but not true. And I guess, how do you promote responsible information?
- [34:17]
Neil Mohan
I think the best way for YouTube to approach it, which is how do you wrestle with this concept of an open platform but also having some rules for the road in terms of how things operate on YouTube. For example, we never allowed adult content on YouTube. Right. How did we make that decision? What was important behind it, et cetera. And again, our approach there is to be very clear about what sort of those baseline rules are. There are, as you know, pages and pages of them. And we really work hard to try to enforce them. And our enforcement is not always perfect. One of the verticals that we have on YouTube is news. We have lots and lots of successful news creators. Not every creator is serving the same audience or looking to do the same thing. So there's lots of people who are approaching it in different ways. And I think, honestly, that that's also a really entrepreneurial ecosystem with lots of new news creators that other folks might have different opinions on. I think we are not qualified to have a point of view on this particular creator. XYZ is better than this particular creator. The audience makes that judgment. I always say that the best way to think about the YouTube algorithm is to replace the word algorithm with audience. And that is because it is a reflection of the audience. That's the reason why creators who are successful on our platform have that notion of authenticity, because what the algorithm is doing is adjusting to your behavior on YouTube.
- [36:01]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I want to thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. I really appreciated it. Thank you very much. We'll talk again.
- [36:08]
Neil Mohan
Yeah. Thank you.
- [36:13]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
After the break, Neil and I speak again about AI.
- [36:17]
Neil Mohan
We're very, very focused on making sure that when you open up the YouTube app, it's. It's not a feed of. Of AI slob.
- [36:30]
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- [37:37]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Thank you so much for sitting down with me yesterday. Of course, I Was wondering if there was anything that you were thinking about after our last conversation before I ask you some other questions about your own sort of personal journey.
- [37:50]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, you know, I appreciated the conversation and I do really appreciate how much depth we got into. You know, as I was thinking about it on my way home in the evening, one of the things that struck me, I think, is a lot of the examples and a lot of the conversation was very US focused, which makes sense. We're based in the US here. But one of the things that's super interesting, at least to me, about YouTube, is that it's truly global. Global. You know, you could be a fan of, you know, this particular type of dance that might originate in, you know, in Canada, but you might be living in southern India and vice versa and those types of things. And that's also kind of a very interesting phenomenon that's happened as a result of YouTube.
- [38:43]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Yeah. In fact, I want to talk a little bit about AI in a minute. And one of the innovations that you have enabled is using language now to be able to get creators who are in their native language. And, you know, you can see them in your native language. And so that, of course, opens up everyone's content much, much more widely. I was watching a, you know, Argentinian creator. I do speak Spanish, but it was amazing to see that all translated in real time in English, you know, for people who might not speak the language.
- [39:12]
Neil Mohan
So, yeah, that's actually a perfect example, kind of an of the moment example, for sure.
- [39:17]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Well, I'm glad you mentioned this global reach, because I was actually thinking about you, your journey. You know, your father moved to the US with $25 in his pocket, as you've said before, from India to do his PhD in the United States. And then you grew up in the Midwest, which you have described as this sort of very typical 70s and 80s childhood, which, by the way, I remember too, you know, watching Star wars, going to the movie theater, and then at age 10, your family moved back to India. I wondered what helped you get through that shock of this one very specific kind of experience and then finding yourself in a completely different context.
- [39:58]
Neil Mohan
So as you said, I was, you know, grew up in Michigan, you know, love Star wars and Transformers and all of that sort of good stuff. Was a big sports kid back then, too. And when I moved to India, it was a bit of a culture shock, even though obviously my parents are of Indian heritage. But I of kind, I couldn't speak the language. I couldn't read and write it. And you fast forward through that experience. And I think obviously I appreciate that experience deeply and a lot of it. I think you draw these sort of direct lines sometimes or you sort of kind of justify in reverse. But I really do genuinely believe there's a direct line from that experience because I saw a lot of sort of like commonalities between global culture differences and sort of that nuance. And I think that me becoming someone just a fan of kind of media and storytelling and everything from music to sports to ultimately Bollywood and Hollywood and the like, I think stemmed from the fact that that was the way that. That I connected frankly with different cultures and different people. And it was the way that I sort of moved from being like an outsider to having friends.
- [41:28]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
In speaking to people who do know you, they do say that you have this very even temper, a very even keeled. You don't let yourself get swept up in crises which any CEO has to deal with. How do you apply that in terms of. Something difficult comes your way and you have to figure out how to navigate it as a leader.
- [41:53]
Neil Mohan
It's funny, my wife jokes that I'm even keel Neal. That's sort of what she calls me, the first thing. Just to be very sort of candid with you. I think by the time a decision gets to me, almost by definition it's a difficult decision because. And oftentimes it's a trade off between two bad choices, right? Or two very difficult choices. Otherwise that decision would be made somewhere else in the organization. It wouldn't really need to come to me. And so what I try to do to the best of my ability, and we talked a lot about this yesterday too, is I really do try to focus beforehand on the principles by which we will make those decisions. And I believe that principles are particularly important in tough decisions that involve trade offs. In terms of examples, I'll give you one that's a very YouTubey kind of example that's sort of deep in the YouTube ecosystem from a few years ago. So if you are watching a YouTube video, you'll notice below that video there's a like and a dislike. And you can tap that. Obviously many, many people tap that after they watch a video like dislike. And we used to have a count next to those buttons, the dislike button in particular. And a few years ago we removed it. And that sounds like a small thing, like just a number right below the video. But it was a really, really big thing in the YouTube ecosystem because it was part of the YouTube heritage where YouTube started from. You know, we were, we were the platform that had account across that. So your video had to stand up to scrutiny from this audience. And so lots of creators were very, very attached to it, particularly larger creators who. And some viewers were attached to it, too, because it was like, that's a quick way to evaluate a video before you watch it. However, a few years ago, it was becoming clear that especially for smaller creators or perhaps marginalized creators, it was becoming something that could potentially get weaponized and used as a means to troll them or have a robot army sort of kind of get at them. And so we made the difficult decision, and ultimately I made it to remove that count. It was positively received in many ways, but it was extremely critically received in other ways. But I think having those principles allowed me to ultimately make that call. That was a. In the YouTube world, was a very consequential thing, even though it seems small.
- [44:37]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I want to talk about what's here and what's coming. And we touched on AI already a little bit, but this is the huge conversation that everyone's having. And you've declared war on AI slop, But you're also handing creators tools to use AI. And I'm just wondering how you distinguish between what is a creative AI video that creators are using in a good way and AI slop.
- [45:03]
Neil Mohan
Yeah, you're really getting at the heart of the matter. So this is. And I would say that just to be very transparent, I don't think that this is a solved question by any means. And frankly, the rate at which AI is impacting all of our lives, the ground beneath that question is changing on a weekly basis, if not even faster. So I just. I want to be very upfront about that, but I have this very firm conviction that it will never replace human creativity again. Back to one of the very first things we talked about yesterday, which is that notion of authenticity. People want to see an artist on stage because they know something about her life story, and they have some background in terms of why she wrote the lyrics that way and why she's performing it that way. We had AI Possible to the point where computers can play chess. But for it to be interesting on YouTube, at least one of the contestants has to be a human. And so because of this notion of the human stories on YouTube, I absolutely cannot have it be overrun with AI slop. And what AI, of course, does is just like it can be a tool to produce amazing content or further democratize content creation so that another entirely new class of creators can come on board, like the first YouTubers 20 years ago. It can also allow for the Creation of lots of low quality content. And so that's where the AI slop question comes in. And there, I think there's aspects of it that are not new. The part that's new is the scale. But the notion of low quality content, clickbaity content, content that might be produced for monetization motives, but is not actually quality to a certain level. We've been able to deal with that on YouTube. And so I think just like AI is powering some of that low quality content, it can also be used to combat it on YouTube in terms of what we recommend or what have you. And then the last point that I'll make on this, that I think is you alluded to as well, is I also think that we have to have a bit of a delicate hand on this. And this is where, this is the part that's the unsolved part. Because AI created content does not mean low quality content. Amazing content is produced by AI, just like technologies from the past, whether it's Photoshop or the Drum machine produced a new form of creativity. And I do think that's what's happening in the AI world. And so we can't have too many of those false positives where we're sort of killing the new form of creativity that's driven by these tools. And I would tell you that every day we're trying to really strike that balance, but we're very, very focused on making sure that when you open up the YouTube app, it's not a feed of AI slop.
- [48:03]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Yeah.
- [48:03]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
I mean, right now you have a small little stamp when AI has been used on something that is posted. Is that enough?
- [48:15]
Neil Mohan
Yeah. My personal view is that is sort of table stakes, but I do think that it's a place to start. And I think the other, another really big thing that I hear from when I speak to creators, public figures, journalists, et cetera, is being able to manage their likeness in this AI world. And that is, I think, something that is profoundly important in my view. And not just like the classic sort of deep fakes and all those types of things, of course, but also impersonation for to trick a user or to steal someone's creative idea and things like that. And so those things I think are also important that will not get solved with an AI label, but need to have tools. And so one of the areas that we're very focused on is this notion of, we call it likeness detection. We've had a technology here at YouTube for a long time called Content ID. It was actually in some sense one of the very early uses of AI, almost a decade ago, if not longer. And it allows rights holders, artists, musicians, whether if you're Taylor Swift or what have you, to make a choice when your music is used or when a particular movie character is used to either take down that video video or monetize that video. And it has created the ecosystem that exists on YouTube. So that principle of content ID, we want to carry over to the AI world the big picture question around, like, well, you know, if a video can do something, XYZ can review a technology product and can create, you know, a fake reviewer to do that or an AI generated reviewer to do that, then who needs me? I really believe. And again, I could be naive on this is what shines through on YouTube is that human connection, what that person stands for. Just like in your case, people understand what the interview means. They know how lulu's gonna approach it. And I don't think that that is going to get swapped by AI generated. You know, take your pick. Journalists, artists, musician. And I have seen nothing, despite all the rapid progress here, that would be contrary to what I said.
- [50:54]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Can you promise me that there's not gonna be a Lulu bot doing my job in two years?
- [50:58]
Neil Mohan
Can you? I really. And by the way, I'm also not naive to the point to say that there isn't gonna be disruption. Like there's a whole supply chain of creativity. And I do think the, and just like is happening software industry, there is going to be a change in the nature of the jobs, how those jobs are done, even who does them. So I don't want to trivialize that disruption. Of course, that happens with any big technology paradigm shift. And AI is not going to be different in that context. But to your core question of the replacement of that human creativity element and what people connect with on a service like YouTube, I just don't see see AI generation replacing the humans that produce videos on YouTube.
- [51:47]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
All right, I'm going to come back in two years and if I'm still here, you'd be right. I'll be holding you to that. All right, last question. One of the things that really struck me from everything we talked about is how you said that YouTube is really this reflection of humanity and. And as we've mentioned, you have billions of users. You get a lot of information from all those users. And I'm just wondering what you've learned about humanity leading YouTube.
- [52:16]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
What surprised you?
- [52:19]
Neil Mohan
Oh, you know, I could reflect on this for a long time, but I. And hopefully you've got some sense of this. I tend to be an optimist almost to the point of being naive about these things. Lulu and what is a privilege for me on YouTube is that despite the challenges and despite the incredibly complicated world that we live in, what I love about what I see on YouTube is the common humanity aspect, which is I was watching YouTube on my television set last night and I was watching a YouTuber lives in New York City, reviews restaurants. And the restaurant aspect of that was interesting. But the way that he talked about his life and how he anticipated going to have that meal and his experience after that meal, that's what I mean by the common humanity. And that shines through in YouTube. It's almost as if aliens discover Earth. You know what, 5,000 years from now, YouTube is that encapsulation of that. And on balance, I think it's awesome.
- [53:39]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
- [53:43]
Neil Mohan
Thank you Lou. Appreciate it.
- [53:50]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
That's YouTube CEO Neil Mohan to watch
- [53:53]
Interviewer (Lulu Garcia Navarro)
this interview and many others.
- [53:54]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
You can subscribe yes to our YouTube channel channel@YouTube.com the interview podcast this conversation was produced by Wyatt Orem. It was edited by Alison Benedict, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, photography by Devin Yelkin. The rest of the team is Priya Matthews, Seth Kelly, Paola Neudorf, Joe, Bill Munoz, Eddie Costas, Amy Marino, Mark Zemel, David Herr, Kathleen o' Brien and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. We'll be back in two weeks when David talks with actress, writer and director Lena Dunham about her new memoir and processing her meteoric rise to fame in the 2010s.
- [54:35]
Nature's Bounty Narrator
I never thought of anything I did as controversial. And then my feeling was, well, yeah, I like to make whatever I want.
- [54:42]
Neil Mohan
Then I don't want anyone to ever
- [54:43]
Nature's Bounty Narrator
be upset with me.
- [54:45]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro and this is the interview from the New York Times.
- [54:56]
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