 I think it would be useful, especially for some of our younger viewers who might not remember those earliest days of YouTube to just glimpse back at a second as to what it used to look like. It was very, before monetization and professionalization, it was very much just like your amateurs uploading just a dumb video you took. And kind of the primary, I mean, we can just look at the very first video that was put up that one of the founders kind of set the tone for early YouTube. This is video. All right, so here we are, one of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. No disinformation there. That is an absolute truth. Elephants do have long trunks. Absolutely. That's got, I think, a couple hundred million views racked up by now. But we wanted to talk about, before we get into some of the negatives that your documentary raises, could you talk a little bit about YouTube's upsides? What are some of the best contributions to our culture, to video and filmmaking that you think YouTube has made over the years? There are so many. And Google as well. And I sort of mentioned them in the same breath, because they really are one company, even though there are elements to YouTube that are separate. They are really one company with a single ethos. And I'd say the positives of that are a commitment to innovation and kind of human evolution using the culture itself as its primary product. And I think a lot of that has been extremely, vitally important to global culture. In some ways, in such vast ways that it almost diminishes its power to start to break apart little things like, oh, it's helpful to figure out how to put AAA batteries into the back of your radio. It's like, it gives you mundane information. Well, it's also the repository of basically all visual human content that's ever existed since the dawn of content being recorded in any form, and even not recorded, but re-implemented in some form another, by the way, of explainer. So it is our library of Alexandria. I know that's a terrifying concept, especially to librarians, because there is so much misinformation there. But there were a lot of misinformation in the library of Alexandria too, right? There was. And there's a lot of misinformation in your local public library. So that's just, and that's sort of my point is where I get kind of, you know, disconcerted by the way we look at the rise of new technology, having been around these stories for a long time, is we other it, right? It's this other thing. But it's not another thing. It's really a natural evolution of human innovation. And these are tools that we have evolved to create. And they're just a part of the fabric of being human. So YouTube specifically, I would credit them with, as I said earlier, with very specifically and intentionally monetizing the democratization of culture, something that we saw happening with Napster, that the record industry, I would argue, still has not successfully done as well as YouTube has done. I would even argue that my industry, which is on strike right now, has not figured it out as well as YouTube has. You can create on YouTube, you can be a trans, you know, African artist in a micro nation and make a crazy good living if you have access to these tools and you will get monetized, you'll build an audience, you'll, the gates are down, you're reaching people all over the world. And so that's an amazing thing that I think they did intentionally and very successfully. I think the breadth of information is vitally important to have at the fingertips of anyone around the world. It just removes gatekeeping and it removes, it democratizes information, unless you're in China, where they can literally censor you. Right, and I mean, just to kind of build on that, the, you know, one of the early sensations on YouTube was watching Chinese kids lip syncing to the Backstreet Boys songs and things like that. And it created- You're a gangman style, the rise of K-pop. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it created a global village, right? That Marshall McLuhan could only kind of speculate about in the 60s and it built off of the, you know, those signal developments in the 90s that were, a lot of it was around the internet, but it was other, you know, just the decreasing price of technology so that, you know, the cost to produce and consume culture under whatever circumstances you wanted, as the production costs and consumption costs of media become cheaper, we can look back at this for 500 years or 50 years or 10 years. Participatory culture seems to be the answer. Make the final case, like how should people get off the sidelines in order to enter the scrum to fight for the world that they want? Is YouTube the medium for that primarily or? I think that, you know, and this is maybe a, it's not an intentionally provocative thing to say, but I think people need to lean into these technologies and not away from them. I think that they're a big part of our life and you have to get involved. I know my kids are safe because I'm on YouTube. I know who these people, I know who the good apples are and the bad. It's like, that's parenting, right? It's just like, I wouldn't send my kid into a neighborhood without knowing the neighborhood or let him be with someone that I didn't think was safe. All three of my kids have been on YouTube their entire life, not one of them got like black filled or red filled or whatever it is the kids say. So it's, you know, I think leaning in, I think having an awareness that these technologies are not necessarily good or bad, they're just a part of human evolution and innovation. So be part of them, use them, understand them, be discerning. So I think that your participation can come from wherever, like you were saying about contract points, it comes from wherever your strength is and really understanding what's going on in the world in sort of a broad way. That was an excerpt from our conversation with Alex Winter, the director of the new documentary, The YouTube Effect. Tell us what you think in the comments. And if you wanna see another excerpt, go here. If you wanna see the whole conversation and you should go here and make sure to come back every Thursday at 1 p.m. on Eastern Time to check out a new live stream from Reason TV.