Motley Fool Money - YouTube’s Rocky Road to the Top

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is now remembered as one of the most successful tech acquisitions ever, but that result was far from obvious in 2006. Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen is the author of the upcoming book “Like, Comment, Subscribe. Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination.” Dylan Lewis caught up with Bergen to talk about: - YouTube’s “Forrest Gump-like” tendency to be a part of world-changing events - The platform’s complicated relationship with its creator base - One missed opportunity around kids and education - The acquisition of YouTube, and its early days at Google Stocks mentioned: GOOG, GOOGL, META Host: Dylan Lewis Guest: Mark Bergen Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Dan Boyd, Tim Sparks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. Inside Google, like YouTube took a long time for its business to really click. There was some initial frustration for several years. And you can go back and find a lot of press reports about how YouTube was sort of serially unprofitable and kind of a drag on Google for a long time.

I'm Chris Hill and that's Mark Bergen. He's a reporter from Bloomberg and author of the upcoming book, Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to Work. world domination. Dylan Lewis caught up with Bergen to talk about the Rocky Road that led YouTube to become one of the most successful tech acquisitions in history, as well as the complicated relationship YouTube has with the people who create video content, and how the platform has an uncanny knack for being a part of world-changing events. So YouTube is kind of forced Gump like in that there are all these seminal moments

along the way over the last 15 or so years where it is there. It is a part of the conversation or it's where the conversation's happening. One of the things I was struck by was you're embedding these videos as these kind of reminders of what happened on the platform and what was important on the platform. But that very act, the idea that content could be from over there and then brought here onto a web page is something that YouTube kind of conditioned us to accept and really made possible on the internet. Yeah, totally.

I love that Forrest Gump comparison. This was, I think I mentioned it in the early, the that like JavaScript, that the basic YouTube sort of basic technical infrastructure that you could watch their videos and other sites was pretty revolutionary at the time. And MySpace, believe it or not, was like one of the thing that really kicked off YouTube's popularity. And so it's first to start kind of its beta version. The site went live in like mid-2005 when MySpace was hugely popular and MySpace didn't have video. And so it became this thing where YouTube, a lot of early YouTube's and employees, too,

or like trying to cede YouTube videos in the comments for MySpace, which was where a lot of, like, early users discovered the site. And I think that portability, where some, like, a lot of the other web video sites at the time didn't have that, including Google video, which was, like, the forgotten competitor and a major reason why YouTube won. Yeah, I think one of the YouTube insiders that you quote in the book called it the video scaffolding of the internet. And it might not have been obvious that that's what it was in the moment, but now you think about it. And it's the go-to place for most people when they're looking for video content. And it's also, you know, if you're a creator, whether it's something that you're trying

to build a platform on YouTube with or just trying to get a video up so that you can get it on another web page, it's the go-to for how people do that. For sure, I think that has like a double-edged sword for YouTube. It's amazing, right? It's now you're seeing that with podcasts, right? Where YouTube is making this big push into podcasting and in part because it's already been there. I think a lot of YouTubers have podcasts and they just upload their podcasts on YouTube and those do really well. And that's just another example of this repository.

That becomes more complicated as a content moderation. But it also becomes, you know, YouTube's currency is watchtime and overall views and like that's what they share with advertisers. And so like that just continue to climb in part because of how it exists as sort of the default place where people upload things and where people expect to kind of. of go search for video. It's interesting to track how the platform has decided to chase those metrics over time because there was a time where that YouTube homepage was curated by individuals. There was a team focused on doing that. And technology kind of quickly took over.

And that's not really the case anymore. And I think you did a great job of book of just detailing that development over time, the resistance to it, and now just the kind of acceptance that we have, even though there are all these limitations that also kind of come with it. Yeah, absolutely. I think there was, what I found was most fascinating is the sort of alternative histories of like what YouTube could have been. A lot of it is this debate about sort of curation versus algorithms. And I think it's most acutely actually felt in the YouTube Kids, which is the example where like when they launched YouTube Kids in 2015, it was a separate app, didn't really curate it. They have this massive headaches. And now they're being much more aggressive. That's an example where they are like the one place where the company is really like. sort of white labeling and being very careful about what sort of videos go in there. And in part, I think that there's a sort of a missed opportunity.

You could argue that there's a huge business opportunity that kind of blew in some sense around kids and education and still might. That's certainly not something they've lost, but in part because of the way they leaned in really hard on the sort of algorithmic free-for-all. You mentioned the alternate history, and I'm curious. I think to some extent what allowed YouTube to be YouTube is that it started out agnostic. It wasn't the property of someone else who had their own tech bloat and all of these other strategic things that they're working towards.

Do you think it could have thrived or that a video provider could have thrived from any of the existing big tech companies? Or did it kind of have to come from someone who didn't already have its own property on the internet? Yeah. These are always fun because we can say anything and not be proven wrong. I mean, like, there is, there's an example, which is Google Video. So, you know, and I didn't really, until I'm back and researched the book, like, Google Video sort of launched.

Initially, it was, like, very careful. They were just trying to do, like, their initial sort of service was, like, an online cable box, right? And they had, like, basically, like, they had, like, basketball games on, like, a day later or something. And, like, CBS, you know, it wasn't super, super, like, fingers in the pulse of culture. But they eventually went, you know, part of when when YouTube started taking off, Google Video was like shifted strategy and it's like, okay, we're into user-generated content. And it didn't go anywhere. And I think a major reason why Google bought YouTube was because Google Video wasn't working, right? The buyer-built thing, and they tried to build it and they ended up buying it, which was a really smart move for Google.

I mean, probably one of the most successful tech acquisitions of all time. Yeah, I think it's hard to argue. It's probably in the top 10, if not the top three. maybe. In 2006, Google announced was buying YouTube for, I think, $1.7 billion. In the most recent quarter, YouTube drove over $7 billion in revenue, tens of billions of revenue in the last year. Do you think that Google had any sense that that was the potential for this property at the time? I think Eric Schmidt was CEO at the time, and there's this anecdote that he could have, the price they were talking about was $600, around $600 million, and Schmidt, was willing to like bumble up an extra billion or something. So I do think they were fixated on it because of its search potential, which is, you know, by all measures, YouTube is still the world's second biggest search engine behind Google, right? And people don't often talk about the fact that Google has the two biggest search engines in the world.

I certainly don't think that they saw that sort of have the foresight of what it was going to be. I mean, you know, like less than six months later, they got sued by VICOM for a billion dollars. You could argue that they certainly saw some legal problems ahead, but Google certainly didn't see that coming. I think there was probably an expect for people inside YouTube, it took, inside Google, like YouTube took a long time for its business to really click. Like there was some initial frustration for several years, and you can go back and find a lot of press reports about how YouTube was sort of serially like unprofitable, right?

kind of a drag on Google for a long time. It makes sense to some extent. The challenge that they were trying to solve was so massive. I mean, the idea that you could host any video content you wanted so long as it reached their terms of service and their terms of use, and that that content would be moderated to some extent so that users would have a good experience, one that was conforming, and one that advertisers would be willing to participate in. There are so many pieces, I guess it's a three.

a legged stool thing and getting all of those things to work together is a very, very tough thing to do. Yeah, I think that's been what is sort of lost in some ways about the comparison between, you know, I think YouTube straddles is where it's not really quite social, it's not quite streaming, right? It's like a little bit of both. It's not the same as Facebook and Twitter largely because it has this massive sort of creator base, which is a huge advantage. I think the world of social media is moving in this direction. Like, look at it.

Like, Instagram looks a lot more like YouTube. And it wants to look like that. I mean, and TikTok, obviously, is like, you know, your social feeds are less friends and family and more like influencers and creators, which is, you know, for these platforms, like, hopefully unlocking the next big revenue stream. But I think, you know, I don't think we spend enough time about YouTube went through a lot of headaches. And there's a lot of complications in a creator economy, but the TikTok's, I think, certainly going through right now. I'm curious, amateur creators were really the lifeblood of YouTube early on. And they continue to be some of the biggest personalities and channels on the platform. But there's always been a little bit of attention between the individuals that make content for YouTube and the commercial interests of the platform.

And that's really the interests of advertisers, but also more traditional media brands. how would you characterize that dynamic over time and kind of where it sits now? Yeah, that's a really great tension. And I think spent a lot of time in the book talking about that because it went through a lot of twists and turns. I mean, one thing that's sort of interesting that I don't think enough people appreciate is like YouTube. It birthed the greater economy for sure. Like 2007 is when it started making payments to creators, which is super early. But for a long time, the company didn't see creators as sort of.

of the central vehicle for their business. Like, the early business team was like, we need to get studios and TV networks onto YouTube. And then there was a big push, like, we need to get, like, select. We needed to get the stars to like come onto YouTube, right? Because it was like the sense that advertisers needed to see familiar faces. They needed to see like A-listers and like premium material. There was so much of an effort around premium, like, sort of funny to think in now. But at the time when Hulu launched, it was like a nightmare scenario for,

for YouTube, right? Because like, Kulu came out of the gate being like, we are the premium online video destination. And then there was basically like essentially saying like YouTube is not premium like for advertisers. And advertisers believe that for a long time. You know, I think there was a turning point around like 2014 when it became obvious that YouTube creators were in many ways more popular than like celebrities, conventional celebrities. Oh, I don't think it's a stretch to say, like, they created the modern influencer perspective, like, the idea that you are interesting that you can and should be broadcasting your life. Absolutely. And that was not given. And neither was, I think, something that's really fascinating with, like, a lot of the, like,

OG YouTubers is they started when there was no guarantee of money. There was like, right, there was no idea that you could make money off of YouTube or online. There was no sense about being an influencer. Like, that's a really relatively new category. And even, you know, know, the sort of your listeners are familiar with multi-channel networks, right? Like the big boon in sort of like the YouTube studios that happened like a decade ago. And many of them was like kind of imploded. But that was still this novel way of, oh, we can build out sort of conventional Hollywood agents and networks around online talent.

Now you're seeing a second sort of mature wave of that. But that's still a really nascent category. And, like, it's still, I think it's being proven out in, like, Mr. Beast is a great example. Like, Mr. Beast has, like, basically a giant media company under him now. But, you know, there's not a lot of YouTuber stars that have that. I think it's funny. You use dogs on skateboards as kind of like a catch-all phrase when you're talking about some of the early content on the platform. And it's been so cool to see the quality of content, even from individual creators, really blossom.

and become incredibly high quality while still kind of maintaining that personality that is so core to the relationship with audiences. You mentioned Hulu before, and what's interesting is YouTube is basically dogs on skateboards and Hulu. They've managed to figure out how to be both something that is for everyone and a streaming service. They have a paid model. They have an ad-free one. And they've kind of been able to have their cake and eat it too.

Yeah, absolutely. Although, I mean, I think there's, you know, one thing we haven't touched on is, is they have made a big recent pivot and their strategy, right? So it was around 2014 when they started doing originals with YouTube creators. And it was basically like their version of House of Cards, right? It was like taking on Netflix and Amazon. They've had some, a few successes from that, but that program largely didn't catch on, you know, was really, I think is a fascinating, you know, how many people are like, they, They've put out some numbers. They don't disclose revenue about subscriptions.

Like, they have, YouTube has Hank Green is a YouTuber that said this before, so I'll credit him for this idea. But YouTube has the biggest army of influencers on the world, right? And how often do you hear YouTubers pointing their audience to subscribe to YouTube premium? Very rarely, right? And in part, because the assumption is that the margins they get from their advertising business is way better than sort of competing with Netflix and Disney and HBO Maps. and everybody else for subscribers.

So they've certainly pivoted away from the original. They shut down the originals program. Now they're purely into like shorts and commerce and sort of competing with TikTok and Instagram. But I think you're absolutely right that they can be, like YouTube is very good at being all things to all people are trying to be, but they've made some strategic decisions that show where they don't necessarily have the strength of other platforms.

Yeah, I think it's incredible to me that they are able to make amateur content work, they couldn't quite make it work with super high quality names, big time names, Hollywood names, and yet they are in a spot where they're getting incredibly well-produced content from Vox or from Crash Course or for any of these channels that essentially have studio-level productions. But it's not quite what we're used to from cable or big-budget Hollywood. Yeah, that's been, I mean, that's been a bumpy ride, right? Like, there was a really interesting period and talked to a lot of creators, like around 2015, 2016 and there was this big push for YouTube sort of, you know, one thing I took a step back and like, there's a lot of been a lot of debate about like the algorithm and YouTube, right, how it drives viewers. But I think what's equally interesting is how the YouTube algorithm drives creators and like what kind of, like what kind of actual content and videos they make. And so there was a, there was a shift around 2015 to do sort of not just get the more extended watch time, but they actually deliver like daily viewers. And so like there's a. There's a.

really interesting moment there where a lot of YouTubers are like, we don't have the sort of capacity to pump out high quality videos every single day, but like Jimmy Kimmel can, right? Like, you know, TV networks can because they're built up that way. And so I think YouTube's, a lot of YouTube creators, I think pretty fairly were like, wow, the platform is tilted to benefit like traditional media. I think in YouTube's defense, like, you know, there's like this, it's year, long tradition that like YouTubers can go on and criticize YouTube and YouTube kind of takes it. But I think, you know, you mentioned Vox. Like Vox is a venture capital funded media company, right?

Like those ones sometimes tend to have a leg up on like independent creators. Yeah, it makes sense. And I ran, you know, our YouTube channel here at the Mollie Fool for a while. And, you know, it's a little different when you're working with resources like, you know, in-house multimedia team, you know, an existing base of people who know your brand and appreciate your brand and are on some of your email lists, building a critical audience is much easier when you already have all those tools. And I can understand how a creator might look at all that and say, how am I supposed to compete with these guys?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, YouTube has gotten better from my understanding with creators, but it's still tilted towards, like, they have senior partner managers that they work with creators of certain size. And so in many ways, like, it's sort of structurally set up to give you more benefits in handholding the larger you get. There's this concept that comes up in the book that I want to talk through, and it's joke,

threat, obvious. And it's this motto, but also kind of these chapters that delineate the development of YouTube over time. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I thought that one came from Shashir Mahotra. It was like a former YouTube VP. This is what he kind of told his troops. And it was, I think it was an old like Microsoft saying too, right?

It's like, and I may butcher it here, but like sort of first they treat you, your sort of business rivals, right? First, you're two, you're seen as a joke, then you're seen as a threat, and then you become obvious. And you thought, I think, rightly, like, it sort of maps pretty well to YouTube's development where you had, like, the dogs on skateboard phase. Like, YouTube was kind of this joke. And, like, I think what's really interesting is, like, inside Google, it was sort of like, like, people call it, like, the JV team, right? Like, it was not, for a long time, it was, like, not a place that people wanted to work inside Google necessarily. And I think Some of that was literally because they didn't have like nice amenities in their office.

But because it wasn't seen as like a serious business and it wasn't as like sort of moonshottie as self-driving cars, et cetera. And then, you know, the next phase of that is the sort of threat. And then there's the obvious phase where everything you do kind of works. And I think YouTube, there's an argument that they kind of went through that. And that, talk about in the book, they sort of felt like that phase around like 2014, 2015, when things started to click, which really, was when the wheels fell apart right in the Trump era. Yeah. One of the things I think is interesting is I would look at them and say, like,

as a consumer, you're in the obvious phase right now, where your path to success is so clear. You're ubiquitous. Everyone knows who you are. And you're the clear destination for people that are creating and want online presence. But even with that and even being at that kind of graduated level, YouTube is frantically fighting for competition, eyeball hours with the likes of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and conventional streaming.

Like, the battle is not over, even though they've reached that level. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think, I mean, I do think that this is part of like Silicon Valley culture, as you always sort of see yourself as an underdog. Like, I think YouTube, you know, for a long time, it saw itself as it, underdog to old traditional media to the bicoms of the world. You know, it was an underdog of TV. It was an underdog of Facebook, right?

Facebook's business was bigger. at one point and still is, like, overall. But, like, that was sort of, I have this chip on the shoulder where it was like this insurgent underdog. And I think some of the dizzying part of the past few years for companies like Google is like, oh, we're not the underdogs anymore, right? And I think that that's people inside the company are aware of that. You know, now there, I certainly the TikTok is like a real substantial competitive threat

and in a new way, not just for viewers and eyeballs, but actually for creators. which I think is something that YouTube hasn't faced before. And, you know, if you talk to their business team, though, like, the still thing they're striving for is, like, share of TV market, right? And, like, that's where the bull case for YouTube is, like, that money in advertising is still moving from TV to streaming and to digital. And, you know, I think there's a lot of interesting questions now that, like, that Netflix is getting in the ads game, right?

Like, that introduces a new layer of competition that YouTube probably has to respond to. I can't help but draw parallels between now Alphabet, then Google's acquisition of YouTube, and now meta, then Facebook's purchase of Instagram. At the time, people couldn't believe that they were paying what they were for them. They've proven to be great acquisitions. But even in spite of that, I think we've seen in the last 12 months, certainly, but maybe the last couple of years, they've really started imitating some of the other features from other providers in order to stay relevant and kind of stay where people are,

what they're interested in. Yeah, I think this is really, I mean, my colleague Sarah Fryer wrote a really great book about Instagram in 2020. And, like, I think there's obviously some key differences. One is that the founders of Instagram, I think I just have more like personality and like, person sounds on the right word, but like a real of stronger presence, right? And there's a clear sense there that like Facebook's over time just started to like absorb everything about Instagram.

I mean, Google, to its credit, like Google would never. I mean, very unlikely that ever, like, you know, you're going to go to YouTube and it's like, brought to you by Google, right? Like, YouTube is its own brand. The company has like kept it that way. You know, I addressed like a little interesting bit of history in the book about like why it's not actually a separate alphabet company, but, you know, it still remains part of Google. The YouTube founders left pretty early. And while I think they have like they have strong feelings about the site, obviously, like it wasn't quite the same, you know, I don't think that. there wasn't that much tension.

Certainly, like, they didn't love aspects of Google, but you didn't see the same, like, Facebook. I think in Facebook's case, right, like Instagram was ascendant in a way that, like, Google search has never had that problem, right? And, like, Google search is, like, is utility that's not really going away. And so it's not like they need to depend on YouTube as their next stage of growth. Like, search as business is still growing at phenomenal rates. So I think that's probably the key difference. I think with Google search and with YouTube search, the truth is probably the algorithm is king.

It really kind of sets those businesses up to succeed and keeps them strong. And on the user side, when you're going to your YouTube homepage, you're getting content that they expect you to have highly relevant to you and make you watch more, make you stick around longer. It's kind of a flip on its head from the idea of content being king or really the audience being king, which is kind of more traditional media. I see where we're going with TikTok and the algorithm driving so much. Do you think that that is just the content future that we need to be ready for, almost no matter what platform it is, the algorithm is king? It certainly seems that way. You know, there's that, you use that phrase, the audience is king.

And, like, the example that YouTube brings up, it's like, oh, the algorithm is just the audience, right? That's sort of the line that they'll use, which I think is, like, half right in the sense that, like, the algorithm is, like, we are sort of as viewers. like dictating what's being shown to us in some ways based on our prior watching behavior, right? And the algorithm is sort of rewarding what the audience wants. Like I mentioned earlier, I think the other side of that is that creators are like in this sort of weird, like, dance with the platform where they're trying to like appeal to this sort of algorithm. And in many ways, like, there's several examples from YouTube's history where like totally spun out of control in a way that like wasn't great for creators, wasn't great for the company, wasn't great for advertisers and got them into. just like serious trouble. I do think there are certain areas now like where certainly on YouTube and I

at TikTok will move in this direction like current events like news events, right? Like they have even when they're sort of algorithmically curated like YouTube has a much heavier hand in those cases. It's just like thinking. I mean, like the recent FBI, right? If you were to like go on YouTube and look at FBI Trump, if you were like when that happened in August, you're going to see. just like vetted news channels at the top of this order.

And it's become very, very hard to find anything that's not like a vetted sort of well-known news channel. And that's something, and I think you've seen that with coronavirus, right? With like healthcare YouTube has become much more aggressive. And I think that's a different way of curating kind of sort of a different sort of algorithmic world than the other categories of content. One thing that I think is kind of fascinating, and the title of your book hits this exactly, the idea of like, comment, subscribe, is that the inputs on the creator side are somewhat known

by the audience. We know that these things like views, like likes, like comments, subscriptions, are things that help creators. And there's this transparency that creators approach that with. How content is being surfaced to us is still a little bit of a black box on the algorithm side and the platform side, though. Yeah, I think that YouTube's made some attempts to communicate this. I think some of them are kind of been clumsy.

And I read about in the book, you know, some of it is like the sort of AI experts talk about the black box, algorithms that like and machine learning systems are effectively like making predictions and like pattern recognition in ways that are designed for us to really not understand. So I think there's an element of that. And that's certainly been like the neural network that has been involved in, like, in YouTube for, I think going back to like 2015 or so. You know, I think that that's certainly like where we're seeing in Europe, especially and even US, right? And like Elon Musk has talked to a lot about this, like algorithmic transparency.

It's like very unclear what that looks like, right? Like if Google one day were to say like, oh, look, here's like open source their code for the YouTube algorithm, like most myself included. most people wouldn't be able to understand to decipher that, right? Yeah. And so I think that that's been the defense. I mean, YouTube will always say, like, the reason we don't share this stuff is because we don't want bad actors to sort of exploit these holes, which I think is kind of a flimsy excuse.

I think, you know, an interesting just perspective on that is like just the API that YouTube could give access to as a researcher. So they started to, I think it was earlier this summer, YouTube started to share more data. And this has been a consistent criticism from researchers. that part of the reason we so much, there's so much a lot of scrutiny on Facebook and Twitter is for like all the obvious failings of the platforms, but because in some ways there's like, it's a little more accessible to researchers. And some of that is just text versus video.

Like text is so much easier to navigate and understand and like parse has data and videos harder. And YouTube's been pretty reluctant to share. I think maybe that that's going to change. And so that might be like to me, that's interesting. I mean, research, academic research takes like a long time. and so it might be moving too slowly. But that'll be really something interesting to follow, like how much YouTube is forced to be more transparent than it's been.

It's said often, but I think it's true. Like, the last 15 or so years, really the aughts were kind of a Wild West period on the internet. I mean, both in terms of content, in terms of moderation, but also in terms of how these internet properties acted, the consolidation that happened. What do you think we'll look back on this and think about this period? Oh, yeah. I mean, there was a, I have this, this line in the book, I'll tease that's from a, it's from a YouTube employee that was, I'd say, like, we'll look back on this period of sort of cars before seatbelt laws. I think that's, I think that to me that that reads pretty true, right? In some ways, you know, I think the analogy kind of falls apart in the sense that like there, it is like, you know, with, with, with, what, with the seapot laws don't have to deal with, like, political issues and, like, political speech, which is, like, very complicated. And, like, I think this is an, this is in defense of the platforms, like, I think they should have seen this coming in some ways, but like they didn't. And like these things, these things around like, how do you define hate speech and how do you define incitement to violence when it abuts like contemporary politics is incredibly hard.

I think that what YouTube, it'll be interesting. Like, I think this is a period that the major thing that's changed in YouTube and I think that other platforms too are going to, you have more levers to pool than just like this content gets to live on the internet or it doesn't. right like YouTube has started to do things like put things in the recommendation like remove things from recommendations right um remove monetization like they basically they have all these different tools to be able to kind of get treat content on gradients and I think that's going to be the future and and some of that is to our conversation around like transparency like when a video is removed from recommendations it's not like you see it not like you're watching a video and this video was treated you know this treated as like borderline content that we decided not to

recommend the viewers, right? Like, they're not doing that. They're adding the kind of fact check labels, kind of like Twitter and Facebook. But that's a step where I think is, I don't know if they would ever make that step. I think that the second part of the Wild West era that's now kind of coming back to haunt them is like outside the U.S., where you have in places like India and Brazil and Russia, like huge YouTube audiences and governments that are like cracking down pretty hard on dissent and like sort of using this language. about fake news and misinformation to push platforms to remove videos that are critical of the government. And YouTube has sort of backed itself into a corner.

I think YouTube of the past may have said, like, screw you, like, we're going to keep this video up. I think Google is a much bigger, more conservative company, and YouTube is a bigger business. And so they're met in places like India, they're not going to back out of India. I mean, we're seeing right now they're not operating their business in Russia, but YouTube is still operational in Russia, which is fast. That's the only like internet service that the Western internet service basically still operating. Before I let you go, I'm guessing you've spent a lot of time on YouTube writing the book. And I'm guessing that you weren't working 100% of the time. Are there any channels or creators that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Oh, yeah, for sure. Matt Pat is one of my favorite. He has game theorist and film theorist. And I'm like a big become during the pandemic watching a lot of movies. So film theorists is one of my favorites. I'm also, during the pandemic, I've become like a big MBA fan. I don't know. I'm sure there's probably some overlap.

There's a great channel called Thinking Basketball. And I'm just, I like eat up every single basketball videos that he makes. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. And the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.