 We're back. We're live. This is ThinkTech away. I'm Jay Fidel, and this is ThinkTech Tech Talks. We'll talk about technology with Fati Yannick. He's a consultant for ThinkTech, and we'll hear more from him in a minute. Today, welcome to the show. Today, I would like to talk to you about YouTube. You're very well skilled in YouTube, and there are things happening in YouTube and related to social media that I think is important that we talk about. So welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. You know, we saw what happened in Brazil over the weekend, and the press is saying that it was all Twitter that made those guys come together. There was a lot of misinformation and disinformation on Twitter in Brazil, which fomented the unrest and was responsible in some substantial part for the disturbance and insurrection, what have you. And we know that. We know that Twitter was also important for the insurrection on January 6th here in this country. But question, is YouTube responsible also? Is YouTube a kind of social media that does similar things, that is global, that is able to and does in fact spread information that is misinformation? Is it? So I don't know if you could blame the platform itself, but we can definitely say that there's a lot of misinformation going on in YouTube. But the reason for that is because the algorithm on YouTube decides what gets promoted and what gets on the home page and what people watch. So the algorithm is based on what people are already liking and engaging with. So the more engagement a video has, the more it gets pushed to the home pages of other people. And the algorithm doesn't care what the topic of the video is or it's helpful or not. The only goal of the algorithm is to get more engagement and keep people staying on the platform. So when someone has a normal take, that's not insane, that's not crazy. It usually doesn't get a lot of engagement because everyone knows that already or everyone can think about that already. But when someone has a insane crazy take on something or misinformation that's like a crazy non-fact, it gets a lot of engagement because people are surprised. So either they're debating, oh, this is not true. They're writing in the comments or they're watching, trying to figure out how can I prove this wrong. So misinformation gets more engagement, like negativity leads to more engagement easily. And then the algorithm pushes that more and then it goes on and on like that. There's a lot of alt-right misinformation. There's a lot of different types of misinformation on YouTube because the algorithm only cares about keeping people on the website as long as possible and making the most amount of money. So that's what happens at the end. Yeah, well, it sounds like they follow that YouTube follows the same pattern that Twitter does. They want to make money, they want to have advertising, what have you. They want to engage people for as long as possible. They use an algorithm and they don't necessarily screen out misinformation. That's the same thing as Twitter, isn't it? Yeah, the social media websites, they usually work a similar way. The difference with Twitter is even though they're spreading misinformation, the ad business on Twitter is really slow and really unsuccessful. So they're not making nowhere near the other social media platforms. Well, can we say that Google is making more than anyone else? I don't know how because for me, it's free. And for us at Think Tech, it's a free platform. On the other hand, Google doesn't take wooden nickels. Google knows how to make money. How do they make money off YouTube? They make money online. I would say most of the money is made from ads. So it's really hard to make someone, get someone to subscribe to something. So usually subscription fees. YouTube has this as well. They have something called YouTube Premium where you get YouTube without ads, it's like 12 bucks a month. But subscriptions are usually like 10 to 20% of the revenue for online businesses because it's much easier to make money through ads in online businesses and online social media websites. So they make all basically Google is the king of advertising right now. If you want to advertise on YouTube or if you want to advertise on Google, if you have a business, that's the place to go. And right now Facebook is trying to rival them. But they have a long way to go because Google has the two most used search engines in the world. Google and then YouTube is actually the second most popular search engine. So they have this advertising game kind of like pinned down where they got it like so good. It's really hard to compete with Google right now in advertising. So yeah, that premium that you talked about, that seems pretty attractive because it is a kind of a pain to have to go through that four seconds of watching an ad you don't care about and then waiting for it to let you click the button and move on. So how much does it cost? Do you recall to have the premium? Yeah, I think it's like $12 for personal and then maybe like $17 and you get like a family account that you can give five people access to. And it comes with YouTube music and you can have background playback in your iPhones and stuff. So like if you don't have the premium, once you lock the screen, it's going to stop. You're not going to be able to listen to a YouTube video once you lock the screen. But if you have the premium version, you can keep listening even while the screen is locked. And it has a couple other benefits as well. But it's like $17 for the family version, which gives you access to five accounts. That's per month. Yeah, per month. So a couple of things I want to mention to you. One is I stumbled into a movie, a series on Netflix called Playlist, which is a very interesting generic term for a movie. And this is the story of a guy named Ike, E.K., who is Swedish, who is a total geek who invented Spotify. And he was able to get into a deal with Sony in Sweden and in New York to buy their music. And that started, it was in the early 2000s and that started Spotify. He is now a ridiculous billionaire, this geek. And one is interesting, and I haven't finished this movie, but I recommend it because it is the story of innovation. It's a story if you can't get in one door, you'll find another door. And that's how we got to be a billionaire through innovating again and again and again, finding the parts of the market that would allow him to build his music empire. And of course, I think they all copied him after that, to have it streaming, music live on a computer, on a phone. And so, when you talk about Google Music, I think Google Music found out about this from Spotify. And the important lesson is you have got to keep moving, you've got to keep innovating. So we should talk about innovation by Google and YouTube. I have also noticed, if I didn't mention it too before, that on my Samsung TV, there's a button that takes you to YouTube. And this YouTube button is extraordinary because it remembers what you saw before. It knows what you like. It presents to you movies and clips that appeal to your tastes. And it goes on and on and on. I could sit there and watch the offerings that come to me on Samsung Smart TV from YouTube all day because it's exactly what I want to hear. It's not just politics and news, either it's technology, it's hardware, software, anything that I have expressed an interest in that algorithm really watches me carefully. And what is interesting also about it is that they have the ads, but the ads you can get out of very quickly. So when I compare, for example, watching the news hour on PBS, there are very few ads. If I watch MSNBC, there are horrendous ads for every five minutes of content, there's five minutes of ads, usually prescription drugs of one kind or another. But it is really obnoxious how often they play these ads over and over again. Same thing with CNN, same thing with BBC. But if you go on the Samsung YouTube, you find that either there are no ads or the ads are very quick and easy to get out of. And so you don't spend five minutes for every five minutes of content. It makes the viewing experience so much better. And it's on YouTube within hours, maybe minutes after it plays live on the networks and on cable. So they are crowding into the same space for me as the networks and cable have. They're really very ambitious now. And they have found a way to occupy my attention quicker and better and easier and cheaper in terms of the cost of watching an ad than any of these other channels. This has got to be changing the paradigm, don't you think? Yeah, definitely. We can see that with night shows, Saturday night live, etc. Like back in the day, they used to not be on social media. And then they realized what, how much revenue and how much eyeballs they were missing out on. So now you can watch all the late night shows on YouTube, like as soon as they come out. And even if you don't have the TV subscription, you can watch it on YouTube for free. But then again, like they get the ad revenue from there. And once like one of them does it, and the others realize how much of an opportunity it is in terms of revenue and reach and discoverability, it's just like a no brainer for everyone else to just get in the game. Because they're already producing the content, it's just another distribution channel for them. And that distribution channel happens to be more, has a better reach because on TV, you're scrolling through channels. Like you don't know what is on each channel. And there's probably like 20, 30 channels, whatever. So you're just scrolling through them. But on YouTube, it's like, it remembers what you watched before. So it just tells you, oh, like, since you watched this before, like, you're probably going to watch this. So it just gives you like a direct, direct send off. Like on TV, when you're scrolling, sometimes you get kids' channels. Sometimes you get like, random stuff that you're not interested in, but you still have to go through them. But on YouTube, it doesn't give you anything on the home screen that you're not, that there's no chance for you to be interested in. So yeah, I think it's very interesting. Just a digression. On the Samsung Smart TV YouTube channel, there's a place where you can designate your favorite. And of course, I designated ThinkTech as my favorite. But I just wonder if you have any thoughts about how we at ThinkTech could encourage channel expedite the actions of viewers of YouTube on smart TVs who make ThinkTech a favorite. How could we do that in a way that was really easy or automatic? So what we can do is we can encourage them to turn on their notification bell for our YouTube channel. So that way, when they go on YouTube, like every time ThinkTech uploads, they will get a notification and then they will know. Otherwise, if it's not on their homepage and they don't go to your channel page, then they might forget about it. But if they turn on their notification, they will definitely know every time that you upload. That's one thing that we can do. And another thing is to ask people to subscribe. Because when you subscribe, you get it on the sidebar, you get the subscription channels, and then you get reminded of those channels. And if you click on them, then you can go to that channel directly. And subscription also increases the likelihood that a video will appear on your homepage. So if you subscribe to a channel, YouTube is more likely to give you that content on your homepage as well. Wow, we have to talk funny. There's got to be a bunch of things we can do to channel people, no pun intended. Could you do this with a QR code? I'm not sure how you would do this with a QR code. QR code could be useful in IRL, like in real life events, where we could just put up a big QR code that will ask you to, that when you scan it, it can be like a subscription link. We can do that. But other than in real life events, I don't see a use for QR code too much. Okay. So I want to follow up on the whole thing about Brazil and about looking at Twitter, however wounded it may be because of Elon Musk. The fact is that all these social media platforms are global. And except when a state actor is somehow like China, is somehow blocking them, or there's no broadband in a given area to allow you to connect. The fact is they're all over the world. They reach every country you can think of, and they affect the people in that country. So I think to myself, well, if I'm Google and YouTube, I would like to get on a bandwagon there. I would like to have videos available using that algorithm as it may best apply in that country and go through the same user experience, provide the same user experience in Tibet as I do in Hawaii. Are they doing that? And how difficult is it? And is it something that benefits them? Yeah, so this really helps them increase their reach. So what they have is basically on YouTube, you can choose the language for the interface. So for example, I have one account where I chose Turkish as the language. So it just starts recommending me Turkish videos, like mostly from people who are in Turkey. So they have this basically like they have like more than 100 languages. And they have this down so well that based on your where you're connecting to Wi-Fi, they know where you live. So they know which country, which state you live in. And so they recommend you stuff based on where you live. So since coming to Hawaii, for example, I started to see more content recommended to me by the YouTube algorithm that is specifically about Oahu or Hawaii. So as soon as you open up, even if you don't have an account from the IP address, from like how you're connecting to the internet, which cell you're using, which Wi-Fi you're using, they know where you are. And your recommendations change based on where you live. So they can, because if I'm living in America and I get recommended the Russian video, it's very unlikely for me to click. So it makes it less likely for me to stick around and watch YouTube videos. So they do their best to make sure that the language is appropriate for that viewer. And then that way they can maximize how long people stay at their website. Yeah, so what happens if you have an English program and you have a country, say Turkey, for example, that people don't necessarily speak all that much English? I know that you can do simultaneous translation, although I don't feel it's all that good on YouTube. But what do you do when you take YouTube into another country, a country that has a different alphabet, different sounds in the language, where people will not be able to understand English, for example. What do you do about language? Do you play different clips, different movies and forget about English? So one of the things that Google does is that since they own Google Translate, they translate the titles of YouTube videos according to your main language. So sometimes I get recommended videos that are in Turkish, like the content is fully in Turkish. But the title is translated to English, because Google thinks that I'm more likely to click if they translate that title to English. So Google Translate the title. But if the content is not in a language that the viewer is going to understand, then it's going to be really hard for that video to have high audience retention. The audience is just going to click off to another video, if it's not the language that they prefer. So this is one of the reasons that YouTube is global, because since there's people speaking different languages everywhere, then there's people creating content in different languages everywhere. So usually it just gets kind of like it doesn't get watched when the audience doesn't have the same language as the video. It doesn't even get recommended usually. Now they're probably trying to avoid that by encouraging people in that country to submit videos. And I would imagine that given the equipment that's out there, the camera equipment, it's cheap now. The webcams, the software you need to communicate, to stream, I imagine that the creation of content is happening all over the world. And a good percentage, maybe a very high percentage of it, is being created for YouTube to be uploaded to YouTube. It is the community of video for becoming the community of video for the whole world. Am I right? Yes, yes. YouTube used to have a model that said broadcast yourself. So right now, there's like as of 2022, there's more than 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Okay, well, and you know it's going to go that way. But let's talk about some of the problems here. We know the algorithm is out there and it learns everything about you. And they say that Google has more information about you than any other player in the market, any other social media platform, anybody else who take IBM, take any of the people that you interact with, they don't have as much information about you as Google, because Google keeps everything. Now, there's a creepy quality to that because they don't tell you exactly what you're keeping. Although, I believe there's ways you can ask them what your profile looks like on Google. I believe that that can be done, although nobody does it. But what is the future of all of that? It's like out of science fiction, that they would know everything about us right down there, the kind of beer we drink, the kind of toothpaste we use, everything. And at some level, at least in my age group, it's creepy. Is it creepy for you? Do people care about this? I mean, personally, I don't care about it that much because the only way to protect myself from them getting my data is for me to not use those services. But then if I don't use those services, my life is going to be really, really hard. So I don't have an option, really. So I don't care that much. But also, like Google usually has the most information, but it also depends on which services you are using the most. If you're someone who spends all their time on Facebook, Facebook might have more information on you. Or if you're someone who spends all their time on Instagram, like WhatsApp, since Facebook owns those, then they might have more information about you. So this kind of like changes a lot based on person to person. One thing that a really interesting story, I once got a speeding ticket, and I knew that that day I wasn't on that road ever, like I wasn't at that state. So I went on to Google Maps on my phone, and basically Google Maps keeps the data of where you were every day. So it was like from months ago, and I pulled it up, and I was able to prove that I was on another road another time when I got that automatic speeding ticket. So they accepted that they made a mistake, and I got out of the speeding ticket. That's great. What a great story that there are benefits in allowing them to collect on you. But you know what strikes me is what you've said suggests that every single social media that you engage with is collecting. Of course, that's how they make money. They sell your data. They own your data, and then they sell your data. There's a really great quote. I like it a lot. So if the product is free, that means that you are the product. Right. I've heard that before. The product for social media, the way they make money is from ads and selling your information. So they're selling our eyeballs, our attention, and our information. So we are kind of like the product that they are selling to advertisers. You know, they're pretty good at spotting music infringement. They have algorithms. Maybe it's part of one great big algorithm, but they catch you on music infringement almost immediately in minutes. They're not focused so much on video image infringement or oral statements kinds of infringement. But music, they're really good at. So if that being the case, don't they have the ability to find statements that are politically problematic, that encourage violence, for example, and hate? Can't they manage the content better than they are managing it? Because they have the technology, social networking technology they call it, you know, to identify a word, a word that's on an objectionable word list, and immediately take action against you. Are they doing that? Is this kind of technology getting more robust, or are they not advancing it fast enough? I think they could do more. There's two sides to this. So number one, they don't really care. Like if something is keeping people on their platform for a long amount of time, to them, it doesn't matter if it's harmful. It doesn't matter if it's true. Like they make their money by having people spend time at their platform. So for them, it doesn't matter that much. That's the number one thing. And number two, they could probably do this. But with music, there's copyright and there's other problems, legal problems. But otherwise, like if they need to spend money and effort and resources on trying to find these, and then they also need to decide what is harmful and what is not. Sometimes it's very clear, but to some people it's not very clear. So sometimes they might also get frustrated because whatever they do, like if you say something is harmful, there's going to be other people that say the opposite is harmful all the time. So it's also hard for them as well. I could decide them a lot by also understand their perspective a little bit. Yeah. What about applying that same kind of inquiry into the comments? Because comments come on to YouTube galore and some of them are really obnoxious. They tried, but with the comments, there's this really big problem. Let's say I wrote really racist comments and I got banned. It doesn't matter because I can just create another account in two minutes. So that's the problem that they're facing with the comments section is that it doesn't matter if you ban people. And let's say you ban keywords. Let's say you delete automatic delete slurs. What people do is instead of using the word racist, they can put R and then they can put a symbol that looks like A, like at symbol, and then write the word that way and then it won't get flagged. There's so many ways to go around it and you can create so many accounts that it's really hard. So what they're trying to do right now is come up with a better verification system so that you can't create both accounts and you can't create accounts easily that are not humans or duplicate accounts. They're trying to make it harder so that it's going to be harder to comment. So one person can only have one account. They can do phone number verification. They can do other types of verification and then give you eligibility to comment that way so that the comment section is going to be cleared up a little bit because if you know that you're not going to be able to comment with another account, you might take it more seriously. You might not want to lose your account that has the ability to comment. Yeah, it reminds me of the thing in China where they give you a social score. And if you break enough rules and throw enough trash on the street and you violate whatever their limitations are, your social score is way down. You can't take the bullet train or anything like that and you're going to have trouble getting a job. But if you have a high social score, you do better in the society. It seems to me that Google, which is the leader, I would think, that Google could develop the same kind of system and as you say, they could call for verification. When I try to get on a site where I forgot my password and I go through this two-step verification business, they got me. They're going to be able to verify me. They're going to make it work so that I can't cheat on that. It's hard for me to cheat anyway. So I'm wondering if that's the future, Fatih. We're going to have more verification. We're going to have social scores about whether we're good or not. What do you think? I think for a country like USA, one of the big is that we have democracy. So the government changes like every two years, four years, eight years, whatever. So the government doesn't have one single set of ideas that they course on people all the time, since there's more than one party, more than one leader. In China, they don't have democracy. So they can say the government can define a set of principles and then have that go on, make that score like the social score based on that. But here, I don't think it's possible because another president is going to come and they're not going to have the same idea about everything because everyone has freedom of speech. So it's going to be really hard to make something like that here because of the fact that we have democracy and everyone speaks their minds and there's like an open debate platforms and stuff. Okay. Well, let me take that one step further. I do want to ask you this. So we know the power which can be toxic of social media. We know that social media can foment an insurrection here or in Brasilia. It can be very dangerous to democracy, which is the fabric on which we all like it or not, which we all live and which is better for the liberal world order everywhere. But social media can bring that down if it's misused and not moderated and so forth. So isn't it inevitable that, I hate to even think this, but isn't it inevitable that government has to get involved, that these rights have to be regulated? The stakes are so high. The risk is so great. The potential damage is so destructive that after a while you say to yourself, gee, they can wreck the country, the world. Do we need regulation? And how do we do regulation in a way so as not to give so much license to government that they wreck it from their side? I mean, that's a really complicated question, honestly. And one of the things about these companies is that Google, Facebook, these are public companies. So one of the advantages of them being a public company is that they care about their bottom line. So they're going to be scared and they're going to be conservative in what they do. And they don't want to stir the pot too much, because if they get into a lot of controversies, if they mess something up really big, then their shareholders, they're not going to let them do whatever, because they care about being profitable, or at least revenue growth and stuff like that. So they're kind of scared because they want to keep their money. So that's one security that we have for these companies. But then again, Twitter just went private. So that doesn't exist for Twitter anymore. Twitter could be unprofitable for 10 years, and no one would be able to question it. But the government involvement... Go ahead. The government involvement question is, I think, very complicated. I don't know if I could answer that question, because this is a really big debate, and how much should the government be involved? It's a really hard to answer. Well, I think the answer is going to be a non-answer for a long time, until it gets so serious that there must be an answer. And then who knows what will happen? For now, I suggest to you that the people in Congress A are not interested in B. If they were interested, they wouldn't really understand the stakes. They wouldn't understand the technology. They wouldn't understand the social implications of social media, and so they're not about to actually form up some policy on that. That's my thought. But let me ask you about one other thing before we quit, and that's this. Google was established, and I remember it well, out of nowhere, on a search algorithm, that they had the smartest search algorithm. And other people had search algorithms, too. I'm reminded of Bing, remember Bing? What's that? Microsoft is it? I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah, Microsoft. No longer of any real interest. Yeah, Yahoo, I think. Yeah, Yahoo, too, yeah. Whatever the other guys did, they have faded into obscurity or oblivion. But Google gets better and better. And I think to myself that that is such a big selling point for anybody in any language who wants to submit and upload videos, and to find them, and to allow his or her followers to find them. This is a real important issue. So my question to you is, is Google and YouTube significantly better in finding things now than it was before? Are they continuing to work on this? Have you noticed an ability on YouTube to find things quicker, better, smarter than it was, say, five years ago? Is this still a leading area of innovation for them? I think they're still leading the innovation. But they know how much power they have, and they know, like YouTube knows they don't have competition, like Google knows they don't have competition. So one of the things that that leads to is that they increase advertisement. So if you remember back in the day, 10, 15 years ago, when you searched something on Google, you would get whatever you searched, the first page would be full of different websites that whatever you searched about. But right now, like half of the first page is ads about what you're searching. So they're increasing the ads. YouTube is doing this as well. Back in the day, YouTube didn't have a lot of ads, because they were trying to grow out the company, they were trying to grow out the revenue, they were scared of their competitors. Right now, they don't have any competitors. So when you search up something and you don't have the premium account, there's like a 99% chance that there will be one or two ads, like sponsored videos above whatever you searched about. So I think that's increasing more and more, and that that's making it a harder and less comfortable experience for users. Because if I'm searching something on Google, I just want to get what I'm searching on. I don't want to get ads about what I'm searching on, you know? That's a really important point. So you know that Think Tech uses FileMaker, which is an Apple product. And it's very powerful database, and it's very easy to program in that database, including with script, and lots of finding functions. So if I have a database of millions and millions of records, and I want to slice and dice that and find anything and everything that meets a whole series of parameters, I can do that on FileMaker very easily. Not the only one, but we are familiar with that. And I can create a page, a layout in FileMaker to find anything that Think Tech has ever done. Any person, any date, any subject, the use of any word, you know, social analysis. Now I can't do that on YouTube. On YouTube, you put it in the search box, you put a few words in, and that's it, and it may catch it or not. And I'm wondering two questions for you, Fatih. One is, am I missing something? Is there a programmer interface here that can be used on YouTube to make a more sophisticated search? Is this where Google and YouTube are going? Because I think there are people out there would like to do on YouTube what we do on FileMaker. And the second question is, how can Think Tech avail itself of a more sophisticated search capability on YouTube, which is our main engine of uploads and storage? Your thoughts? So one of the things that YouTube uses for making search easier is tags and keywords in the description. So if you focus on making those tags and keywords and putting them in the description in all of the videos, it's going to be easier for YouTube to pick them up when we search about them. Because otherwise, YouTube is going to look at other things like, for example, sometimes they look at the auto-generated subtitles like transcript of the video. But that's not always accurate. You might say a word, but since the voice writing is not perfect, it's not 100% accurate. So it makes it easier for YouTube to search when you put tags and keywords in it. And I think that could be a solution towards this problem. Well, if I have the ability to manage a database, I can say I want to know every show that Fatih Yannick was involved in between April 1st and April 5th of 2018, for example. And then I want to know those shows that didn't have J. Fidel in them. And I want to know the shows that dealt with Apple rather than Google. In other words, I could have positive search terms, negative search terms, date search terms, spelling. And as you referred to before, I could have various words where there is a misspelling. And I could be looking for those misspelled words as well. I can't do that on YouTube right now. Even if I put in a lot of keywords, I'm never going to get close to that. And I'm wondering if that's the future. And if it is, is that something that we can, is that an opportunity for us and others who are similarly inclined at having a more powerful search on all those, what did you say, 500 hours? 500 hours per minute. Yeah. Per minute. There's a lot going in there. And it's huge. It's in the crillions, I expect already. And they're going faster every day. So I want to be able to find stuff easier. I don't want them to manage my searches. I want to be able to cross-cut and slice and dice in every way possible into their database. Is that, is that going to be available to me? Right now, YouTube hasn't announced something like that. And I understand what you're saying. YouTube has their search advanced filters. But the filters that they have are not as advanced as you mentioned. You can sort by upload date, or you can say, oh, show me videos under four minutes, or long, or there are more than 20 minutes. But it's very limited in capacity. And you can't give from this date to this date. You can only say today or this week. It's very limited. Maybe using those advanced features on Google search could help. But then we might get non-YouTube related answers as well. So maybe this could be something that YouTube could improve upon in the next years, decades. Well, I was going to say we should send them a copy of this video. Maybe give them an idea. But in fact, by uploading it, we are sending a copy of this video. So maybe they'll take a look, Fatih, and they'll learn from our suggestions. Anyway, thank you very much for this conversation. Fatih Yannick, who consults with us on YouTube and Google and other things at Think Tech and who is a student at the Academy for Creative Media at UH. Thank you so much, Fatih. Thanks. Aloha.