YouTube, Google, Hate, $$$

Well, good morning, it's Tom. Thanks so much for all of the responses, all the comments, all the private messages, the video responses to the video I made about YouTube encouraging hate for profit. I appreciate them all. I wish that we would be able to link video responses to more than one video. I'm sure there's some, some spam prevention purpose for doing— for limiting us to only doing one, but I wanted to— I would like to be able to link this video to several video responses. I'm only going to be able to link it to one, and that's what I'll do. But the In yesterday's video about this topic, I didn't offer my own point of view because I was really, really interested in hearing yours predominantly. So let me, let me just say a few things about what I believe about the question that I asked. I do not believe that the YouTube owners, leaders, decision makers encourage hate for profit. I don't believe that. I think Mike, Argent009, asked the question really well in a video response, and others did in their responses. What's the business model under which intra-community hate drives traffic and business? I don't see that. I think the, I think Perry Urban's response about us, the community people who dwell over here, by the way, if somebody knows how to make a map of YouTube, you know, one of you great designers out there, if you could create a map, a dynamic map of YouTube that sort of shows the relationships between all of these communities that exist out here and all of these kind of, you know, the actors, the semi-actors, the community-type people who, you know, talk about pets. And I know groups are starting to form up, so a map, a visual representation of this world would be wonderful. Kind of like Second Life, you know, or World of Warcraft, or, you know, a Sims kind of map, something like that. Somebody I think there's something there. Anyway, Perry Urban talked about us being— first he said, you know, there was this rhinoceros walking through the jungle and we were like little pygmies, you know, who were attacking it, that there are little pygmies attacking it. And then we were a toe on the rhinoceros, the community people, and then we were like the toe jam under the toenail of the toe. I thought that was great. A great image and a great metaphor, because clearly when you look at the number of views that featured videos get in the hundreds of thousands, you know, farting baby videos and stuff like that, you know that a lot of people come here exactly for what people said: a laugh, a break, a few minutes of entertainment. And they don't want to get into all of this stuff that so many— that many of us want to get into, just because they don't. That's not their purpose for being here. Um, so as a business model, I, I don't think that, uh, enabling, encouraging people to attack one another is what they're interested in. Now, the, another point that for me reinforces that is the Google acquisition. Now, you know, a lot of people think that corporations are all alike. And I've worked in a lot of corporations. I've consulted in a lot of corporations over the last 20 years. And I'll tell you, all corporations are not alike. They are not alike. There are companies that are vastly different from one another. Vastly different in their— in everything from what they produce to how they produce it to what they believe to how they treat people They're vastly, vastly different. Now Google, Google acquired YouTube, you know, for what to us sounds like a lot of money, but which to them from a war chest standpoint is not a lot of money. This is a very cash-rich company. Remember, their stock has gone from, you know, an initial public offering of about, what, $85 or something, up to— it was over $500 at some point. Now it's down a little below $500, but its bids had that kind of multiple. They're a very, very, very cash-rich company, which means that they can afford to buy a lot of different companies. Why did they buy YouTube? Well, I think they bought YouTube for many reasons, but one of the reasons I think they bought YouTube is that YouTube enabled them— if you think about Google now, Google is pretty much a broadcast kind of an outfit. You search, they deliver the search. They came on with Google Video, but Google Video did not have a lot of comment, if I recall, in the earlier— in its earliest incarnations. Then they did, and what they saw was that YouTube, which does have this interactive, you know, Web 2.0 kind of a foundation, became wildly successful. Not only could we upload our videos, we could comment and respond and talk to one another's videos and even send a comment to Paris Hilton if we wanted to, telling her to, you know, whatever. Um, so Google wanted— I think Google wanted a company that enabled them to have this kind of Web 2.0, you know, more of a Web 2.0 kind of a presence here. But I also think that Google vets the companies that it purchases on other dimensions besides just market potential. You know, you can believe or not believe what Google says, but Google has a unique, what they call an informal corporate motto, and most of you probably know that. And I'm reading from the Google website. You can find this, I'll put the link in the, in the description. And it's, it's a page on Google's site, um, around investor relations, and the page is called Google Code of Conduct. And the preface— I'll just read you a couple of lines from that. The preface says, our informal corporate motto is 'Don't be evil.' We Googlers generally relate those words to the way we serve our users as well we should. But being a, quote, "different kind of company," unquote, means more than the products we make and the business we're building. It means making sure that our core values inform our conduct in all aspects of our lives as Google employees. The Code of Conduct is the code by which we put those values into practice. So if your corporate informal motto is "Don't be evil," and you are looking at companies that you are going to acquire, you're gonna wanna have some way of determining the values of the people who are in the acquired company. And I think that Steve Chen and Chad Hurley were vetted somehow about their values and their beliefs. Now, you know, it doesn't mean that, that we have— that they were looking for monastic graduates or anything of the sort, but I think they were interested in people who basically were going to be able to live up to this sort of standard of behavior. And I don't think that encouraging hate in order to drive traffic would be in keeping with that. That's my belief. Now, we have other pieces of evidence, I think, to tell us about that. Believe it or not, Steve Chen has been pretty communicative, individually communicative, with members of the community. My quarrel, if you will, with the way communication's been handled is that there hasn't been the kind of, of general transparency around communication that I think characterizes modern companies. And I think, you know, this word about transparency, this word transparency, which, you know, started off as a way of talking about responding to scandals in companies— Enron, you know, WorldCom, other kinds of— Tyco, other kinds of companies like that— has extended beyond just that to transparency with the customer. Around a whole host of things. So I think that while Steve individually has been, I think, quite communicative with people, as a company, what I've been asking for, looking for, is a little more transparency. But many of you might not have seen this comment, which my friend Dr. Liemer down in Australia, uh, posted, uh, to the video in question, um, in which he quotes a, a comment, a correspondence with Steve Chen, in which, uh, Steve— in which, here's what Dr. Leamer says. I'll just read, uh, over the past 4 or 5 months, I've contacted Steve Chen several times via email, and he has directly and swiftly helped friends of mine who have had issues with haters. When asked what he is going to do to combat the harassment on YouTube, he answered me, colon, quotes— this is Steve— we have something up our sleeves with a learning AI thing, artificial intelligence, that will combat this, but it's still in the works and we'll have to test it against some live data before being able to deploy it. Hang in there though, Steve. -S actually is the way he signs things. So again, I believe that Steve is telling us the truth there, that they do have some things up their sleeve. I would like to see them show what's up their sleeves a little bit more besides just counting on somebody, an excellent reporter like, like Leamer, to be able to tell us about it. Tell the rest of us that you got something up your sleeve. Now, one more thing. I know this is getting lengthy, but one more thing. Uh, Morphine, another person that I, uh, M-O-R-F-E-E-N-E, I'll put his link in there, made a video yesterday, I think it was yesterday, about, about the fact that we're all animals. And I think it was Tall Jim 01 made a video about how we love combat and conflict. And I made a video not too long ago— oh no, I didn't. I commented not too long ago on the Greg Solomon-Renato thing about how we really— this was a nice kind of a professional wrestling sort of a thing that we had going on here, you know, Renato versus Greg Solomon, you know, the kind of battle of the YouTube stars, not Digital Soul's version, but another kind of version. And it was like wrestling, and we love wrestling. We love— I mean, we love these kinds of symbolic conflict, good versus evil sorts of things. And we also, as Tall Jim pointed out, we love the blinkin' lights. You know, when we're driving by, things get our attention. Crashing into each other, like he said, we don't like to see people get hurt, but you know, we go to stock car races. And when I was a kid, we used to go to figure-eight races where cars would race around a track shaped like a figure-eight just to see them crash in the middle. Nobody wanted to see anybody get hurt, but we sure did love the crash, and we still love the crashes today. So yes, we like to see, uh, things like, uh, kids breaking their legs on skateboards. We even like to see Saddam Hussein dropping through the trapdoor. Yes, there is no question that, that we are drawn— the animal parts of our brain, which I think is what Morpheus was talking about, the animal parts of our brain are drawn to a lot of things that we don't really maybe even like or understand about ourselves, but boy, we sure do like to watch. Um, and of course YouTube is going to serve up those kinds of things. Those are things people enjoy. They're looking for 5 minutes of fun, they come and see some kid jump on a Christmas tree off the balcony in his high school, and you know, of course you're going to feature that and get several hundred thousand people watching it. It was, it was the kind of thing that we love and that particularly the people who are not living under the toenail of the rhinoceros are most interested in. So thanks to everybody. Thanks very much. I really appreciate all the comments, and I look forward to us continuing to have more, more conversation about these things. So take care. See you again soon. Bye.