 Good morning, John, it's Friday! I am currently at the YouTube Creator Summit. Look at this. Which is a little event that YouTube has been throwing for creators for a while, but not recently. So this is the first one in a long time. And I'm really excited to be here, seeing old friends, making new friends, thinking about what it all means. I was just talking to a guy who was like, can you believe the power that is inside of this room, the cultural creation that occurs at the hands of these people? Now obviously YouTube is a lot bigger than the people who are in that room, but it is interesting and there are a lot of interesting and I think important conversations. One of the things that folks were trying to get to the bottom of a lot is that YouTube is kind of undergoing one of the biggest shifts in how content on the platform works in a very long time. And that is specifically that there are these things called shorts, which are what YouTube calls tiktoks, except that's actually is probably best not to call them that because ultimately YouTube is culturally very different from tiktok. So YouTube wanted to clone the effectiveness of that content tool, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be the same thing. There are lots of different things and they are extremely subtle that go into what content gets made and how a platform feels, like what its vibe is. This by the way is the thing that says I don't have COVID, so that's how you get one of those. And that's an example of how important and subtle this is. I think that we misunderstand what is the difference between a YouTube video and a YouTube short or a tiktoker and Instagram real or whatever. But I think it's important for everyone on earth to understand this and the people who most think about it oftentimes don't. So you're going to now get ahead of those people. It's not about this. It's not about it being vertical. It's not about it being short. The biggest difference between a YouTube short and a YouTube video is that one, you decide whether to watch it and the other, you decide whether to keep watching it. Does that make sense to you? Because the difference is massive. And I'm trying to decide whether to watch a YouTube video. I'm presented with many YouTube videos and they have titles and they have thumbnails and they have faces of people I may or may not recognize. Many of those people I care about. I know their stories. I've been involved with their stories for many years. Even if I've never met them with a tiktok or a reel or a short, I'm not deciding what video to watch. I am deciding which video I keep watching. I think there are a lot of things that people would watch that they kind of don't think they would. I think that content is probably not that great. Fail videos, football highlights, it's fine. And I think there are a lot of videos that I click on that maybe wouldn't be the thing that I would most stick around to watch in a feed of otherwise very engaging content. But when you're not deciding whether to watch, you're deciding whether to keep watching, I think you're a lot more open to new creators. So both of these things are good. Don't get me wrong, they can both do bad things and they could both function in a bad way if we use them poorly. But I am glad to have both of them. And at first I wasn't really sure if that was the case. But I think it's really important that we have systems that allow for the discovery of new, talented, interesting, innovative creators. And I feel like tiktok and tiktok-like things are really great for discovery and for people to sort of build early in their careers. It's like a greenhouse. There's a lot of energy packed into a really small space and it allows for a lot of diversity and a lot of thriving. But only certain kinds of things can grow forever in a greenhouse. Most things have to move out of the greenhouse in order to keep growing and thriving. It's really deeply different. And I think that the only actual difference is not the format. It's not the length. It's whether you choose to watch it or whether you choose to keep watching it. It's really amazing to me how massive the impacts on our culture, such subtle changes in these content platforms can have. And so many of those massively important differences are really subtle and terribly difficult to notice. And I think that it is valuable to notice them. And that's what I've been thinking about here at the YouTube Creator Summit. John, I will see you on Monday because next week, pizza mess begins.