Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Susan Wojcicki

Episode Date: March 3, 2019

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Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along with us. My guest this week a little bit different. You're used to movie stars, rock stars. I've got a CEO, in fact, one of the most powerful women on the planet. Forbes, in fact, currently has her at number seven on its list of the world's most powerful women. She is the CEO of YouTube. Her name is Susan Wojcicki. She and I got together at YouTube headquarters outside San Francisco to talk about her rise to the top of Silicon. Valley, beginning with the computer science class she took during her senior year of college that completely changed the trajectory of her life. Also, the famous story of her as a young woman trying to cover the cost of her mortgage renting out her garage in Menlo Park, California, to a couple of Stanford students who had an idea. Their names were Larry and Sergei, and they were working in her garage, little did she know, on something called Google. Yes, Google was born in her garage. She actually left her job at Intel, became employee number 16 at Google, and while she was at Google, she convinced Larry and Sergey that would be good idea to buy a little startup

called YouTube. This is around 2005, 2006. It was a gamble at the time. They paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, and now, since she's moved over and become CEO since 2014, the company is valued $160 billion. We know about cat videos, launching the careers of celebrities like Justin Bieber, and being a great learning resource, did you know 500 hours of content are uploaded to the platform every minute? 500 hours uploaded to YouTube every minute. With that, though, come some problems.

And I want to point out that we conducted this interview a couple of weeks ago before the story broke, that one user saw predatory comments in some. some of the sections under videos of children alerted YouTube. A bunch of advertisers pulled their ads, including AT&T and Disney off of YouTube until they felt comfortable that YouTube had that under control. YouTube disabled all the comments on children's videos, alerts authorities whenever they hear this, pull down videos that are inappropriate. So we don't talk about that story specifically because it hadn't happened yet, but we do get into the broad challenge of policing so much content and what the role. is, what the line is between First Amendment rights of people who post there and the responsibility of the company to keep its users safe. A fascinating conversation, I hope you enjoy it, with Susan

Wigiski, the CEO of YouTube right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Thank you so much for doing this, Susan. I appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. So there's a lot I want to ask you about YouTube itself, but I'm also super interested in your own story. And I assume with someone like you that you were this great science whiz and super into computers growing up, given where you've ended up. But I was reading it wasn't until your senior year in college that you actually took a computer science class, that you were more of a history and a literature type. What did you discover in that class your senior year in college that turned something on in you that led to all this? Well, when I was a kid, I was always really into doing crafts and arts. And so I always love being really

creative. But I just never thought that computers were creative. I thought computers were boring. They were for people who just want to do statistics. And but then my, and I was a history and literature major in college. But what happened my senior year is I used to come home from school and I would do temp work at different companies. And I would go to whatever company they sent me. Sometimes there's lawyers, doctors. And one time I got sent to a startup. And I realized, I realized, these people are doing really interesting work. And I would love to be part of that. And so I decided to take a computer science class.

And I was the only senior taking a computer science class. And I just fell in love with it. And I saw how creative it was. And so I could take that creativity and do it at scale. Where did your inspiration come from as a child? I was reading about your childhood. and the word that kept coming up was freedom. You talked about having freedom.

Your mom talks about giving you freedom. What was your household like with those three girls and your parents? So I grew up on the university campus. My dad is a professor at Stanford. And I was surrounded by all these people who were professors. And so when I was little, I used to wonder, like, wait, where's the postman? Where's the fireman? All these people that you read about in books.

but I was surrounded by people who had spent their whole life studying something like earthquakes or a certain type of math. And so what I just learned from that was just the desire to fulfill my passions and to find something I really enjoyed and could dedicate my life to and try to be an expert at. And so the fact that I really didn't have any pressure to be anything other than something that would make a difference for the world. and something I could really love and enjoy, and that led to me where I am today. Do you ever think about what you would have been if you hadn't taken that computer science class? In other words, you were into history, photography, and literature, where you were headed exactly if you hadn't found computer science? Do you ever dream about that, what your life would have been like? It would have been totally different.

I mean, that one class changed my life because it opened my eyes to computer science, it made me realize that, A, I can do this. And then B, that if I can do this, then there are all these other things that I can do in all these ways that I can be part of this future and the way that technology is changing the world. So what's the gap? So you take the computer science glass. There's the famous Intel job that leads to Google and we'll get to that in a second.

What are those intervening years like for you? What are your goals? What are you looking to do? I know you go to graduate school a couple of times. but what does your life look like? What do you think you're going to be? I had really no idea what I was going to be. And I spent a lot of time just actually exploring.

And I think there's a lot of value in that to be able to look around, see what's happening in the world, see what's interesting, try different types of jobs. And then from that, being able to figure out where the best fit is. Now, if I had had a specific path, like if I had gone to college and said, oh, I'm going to be this, and then I graduated and did whatever that plan was, it probably wouldn't have been computer science because the type of jobs that exist today didn't exist at that time. We didn't have the internet at that time as we know it today. And so it was, I think, because I just spent a lot of time, I traveled, I did different jobs, it enabled me to look around and be, open and see that I saw that the internet and technology were really going to change the way our world looked. And I wanted to be part of that. So when I first told people I wanted to go into computer science, they were completely confused. Like what? How do you get from history and

literature to computer science? Like, why? And I said, because I think it's really creative. I think it's going to be an opportunity to change the way the world works. And from the moment I started, and I started working in this industry, I just fell in love with it, and I've been in it ever since. That's such an interesting way to look at it because it's a different kind of creativity than you probably grew up around, right? You're, that's not what the, you had different creatives in front of you, but it wasn't about computers. No. At all. No.

And so the creatives that I would do would be photography, making paper, knitting. So I tried all those different types of creative arts, and I love them all. And I think the connection that computers are creative, and you can use that to build product and have, if you think about that as your art, it can be distributed and it can be used by so many people. And that's what I love about being at YouTube, and that's what I love about technology. So the next big leap, it seems to me, is this legendary story where you rent out your garage to a couple of young graduate students at Stanford. who had an idea. Was that out of necessity to cover your mortgage, or was that because you saw something in the two guys who were going to be in your garage? I wish I could say, oh, I saw them. They were so brilliant, but no, I just wanted to cover the mortgage. That's all it was. Initially, that's all

it was. I just wanted to cover the mortgage. Right. And, I mean, it was expensive to live here, and I had just graduated from business school. I had student loans. And so, yeah, I wanted to cover the mortgage. But then they moved in, and they were working there, and I was living there. And so I had a lot of opportunities to talk to them about what they were doing. And I was working at Intel at the time. And I began to use their product.

And I saw, wow, this is really useful. And there was actually a moment where I was at work, and it was so early and, Google's life. And so the service went down and I couldn't access it. And I thought, wow, I can't do my work because it's become so essential to me. And it was in that moment where the light bulb went off. And I said, wow, if I can't do my work because this is so useful, this is going to be a valuable service. And even though they had no revenue or no business plan and I still had a mortgage, I thought this is going to be important and I really want to work here. Did you have any idea what they were up to in the garage when they started?

You really didn't know what the idea was or what the product was? Well, they said we're starting a search engine. And I was like, okay, well, you know, there are lots of search engines out there, have another search engine. Go for it. And they were students. And they were competing with these really big search engines. And they were building the search engine while they were still students at school. So I said, sure, as long as you can cover the rent, that's fine.

But then because they were there, I started using the product and I realized how good it was. And that's what ultimately led me to join Google. That's a pretty big leap, though, isn't it? To go from an established company like Intel where you'd only been for a few months and you knew that was going to be a solid job to kind of take a leap of faith to go with these guys at that point. It was a big leap of faith because in addition to my mortgage, I was also four months pregnant. And so, but it was, at the time I didn't really think that much about it. It didn't seem like that hard a leap because I saw how, I saw this product was so good.

I saw that the internet was going to become bigger. And so I didn't know exactly what was going to happen to this little company called Google, but I knew it was going to go somewhere. And I was just focused on the journey. I was focused on how can I make a difference. And so I was excited about joining something at the early stages where, I could make a difference in something that really mattered, which is information. So you're the 16th employee, I think, is that right?

Yes. Of Google. Yes. What did the company look like with 16 employees? Well, four people joined the day before me. So I just want to tell you that if I had joined one day earlier, I would have been even earlier. I mean, it looked like 16 people who are really just getting started. And most of those people were, I think we had three years.

or for people who were in sales and the rest of the people were in engineering. And I was the one and only marketing person at the time. So how do you explain, you talked about all these other search engines that were out there. And if you look back, there really were a lot of them, sort of on the same level. How do you explain why Google left to the top and left all the others behind? What was it about their service or your service that was so different? Well, the thing about Google is it was just better. And we used to struggle to explain to people, why is it better?

We would just say try it. And it's free to try. It's easy to try. It's fast. It was accurate. And it was better. And it became really clear to people that they could get the best information that way. Google was also committed.

Google realized the value of search. And some of the other companies that were existing at the time, they were doing multiple things. They were portals. They were also in all these other fields. And so the idea that Google, was dedicated to search and focused on delivering information and had, we also had some algorithms and ways and computer scientists who were very expert in this area, and they were able to build a better search engine.

So then around 2005, I guess, this company catches your eye called YouTube. Yes. And you watched it through 2005. And then in 2006, you went to Larry and Sergey and said what? What was the case you made to buy YouTube? Well, so there was no such thing as online video when we first started out, right? There was no way for people to upload their video and share it with the world. And we take that for granted today because it's so much a part of our life.

But at the time, that didn't exist. And so Google had its own, we had done our own work here. And so I had seen a few things, which is at first people would upload their stories and share it. And because at first we weren't sure, do people even want to share their stories with a global audience? Do they want to upload the story of themselves or their families or their talk? And we saw that they did. But what's surprising me even more was that other people wanted to watch regular people's videos. Right.

And because Google had started and had done something in video, I could see that this was a very different kind of content than what we have on TV. But that people wanted to see it and that we could have our own version of hits and our own version of content that was very broadly viewed. And so once I saw that, then it became really clear because YouTube was the leader. And I could tell that online video was just there was just going to be more and more of it as technology got further along. And so it became a clear choice for me. But it was expensive. Google paid $1.65 billion for it. So it was an expensive acquisition at the time.

But it's worked out pretty well. Like a hundredfold at the last check? It's paid off? I think it was a great acquisition. Okay. You're humble. I like that. I was interviewing a few weeks ago, we interviewed Andy Sandberg on the show from SNL,

and he was the lonely island guy, and they did all the lazy Sunday and all these other videos. And he was saying, there's no me without YouTube. He said, I came along in 2005 at the end of the year when YouTube first got up and running, and I was making videos, and otherwise I would have been showing into my friends. To your point, there was this platform where people could have something to say, and you created this whole culture around it. But I can't imagine it was that obvious to everybody else at that point, that those videos would be interesting to other people.

In other words, Charlie gets his finger bit, and the entire world has seen it and watched it. And there was nowhere else where you could see that. So what was the vision you had for the company of, okay, we've got these amateur videos, we can turn it into something bigger. People didn't see at first that this was something that was going to be big. In fact, when we first did the acquisition, there were a lot of people that really questioned the acquisition. I remember there was even a headline that said, only a moron would buy YouTube. And so it was not that you're keeping track or anything. No, not that we're keeping track, exactly.

It was just that we saw, again, I think with technology, the first thing you have to see is their user value. Are you providing a platform in a new way to do something that hasn't been done before? And this was a way for people to tell their stories and to share what was happening in their lives. And I could see that right away. And so you don't know where something's going to go. You don't know how big it's going to be. But the fact that people could share stories that had never been shared before, that they could. could connect with people in a very human way, that has real value. And so I understood that and

said, let's just go with it. Let's just see what happens. So how do you describe what YouTube is today? Because I feel like it's something different to everybody. For some people, it's this amazing, like historical archive. You can look things up, where's that speech from that politician? Or if you love sports, you can watch highlights from a game 30 years ago, or what's the name of that movie or that clip? It's all there. What's the top line of what YouTube is from where you sit? So we want YouTube to be the best global video platform that can connect users with the creators and artists that they love.

And what's really incredible about YouTube is the fact that you can have a two-way conversation. And TV traditionally has been a broadcast mechanism. But YouTube enables us to have two-way conversations. And so fans can talk to each other, fans can talk to creators, they can leave comments, creators can speak to their fan base, they can go live, they can sell merchandise. And so we just see all these different ways to have interactions that we never could have had beforehand. And YouTube also enables people to come together in a way they never could have beforehand.

So we see people who, for example, could have a disease. and they may be alone in their city or in their region with that disease. And I've heard this multiple times of people who say, I started a YouTube channel because I felt alone with this condition. And then other people on YouTube found my videos, and they subscribed to me and now I'll have thousands of subscribers. And they're all sharing. It's a community about something specific,

about a condition, about a hobby, woodworking, a sport, a language. And so YouTube is a way of bringing people together about their passions and interests. And I think it's an amazing way to better understand the world. And to your point, it seems to me, from the time you acquired it here,

it went from the Bieber video and these famous Gondom style to all of a sudden, oh, the Arab Spring is playing out on YouTube where presidential debates are taking place on YouTube. Was that a concerted thing? for you guys to think about let's elevate this from just amateur videos of people doing funny things

or selling things or whatever to let's make it a platform where a revolution could take place effectively in the Arab Spring? So we definitely started out with YouTube is known for initially the cat videos but then we started seeing wow this is a platform that can be used by everybody and it can have these far-reaching implications. And that was definitely really eye-opening for us. And it's really an important revelation, something that we have really focused on. So right now we're very focused on the responsibility that comes with that and making sure that our platform is used in a really responsible way.

Do you, we did a story on our show a few weeks ago about the seven-year-old kid, Ryan, who does the toy reviews, who made $22 million last year at seven years old. Does that stuff blow your mind that your platform has a little? out a seven-year-old playing with toys to make $22 million. It's amazing to me whenever I hear the stories of creators. And these are always, the stories that I hear are often of people who had a passion, to people who did hair, they did makeup, they did woodworking, they did, they wanted to travel. And then they were actually able to turn it into a career for them.

And so those are always, I love hearing those stories. And there are creators from all over the world, every country. And so I try to hear about all those stories, but we have so many creators in so many different areas that, and we're constantly growing. So the number of creators, for example, who are earning five or six figure incomes from YouTube actually grew 40% year-on-year last year. So we're seeing more and more creators using this to actually be performed. and to be generating professional video on our platform. As you've grown so much and so exponentially, and hundreds and hundreds of hours are uploaded every minute, probably, right?

We have 500 hours uploaded every minute to YouTube. 500 hours every minute. 500 hours every minute. Yes. I can't imagine how you monitor and control all that. And you talked about it being a safe place, and you and the rest of social media companies have had sort of this reckoning with free speech. So how do you view YouTube?

Is it a platform? Are you a publisher? Do you have a responsibility to protect free speech? What's your view of that? So we're a platform, but we take responsibility very seriously. And that's been my top priority this year, is to focus on the responsibility. And YouTube from the very beginning has had community guidelines. So we want to enable all the voices out there, but we also have rules about how our community works.

And we call those rules community guidelines. And in the last, I'd say the last two years, we've really made a number of changes. First of all, in reviewing our community guidelines and increasing our policies and tightening our policies. And then also increasing our enforcement around those policies. And that's a big investment for us. So YouTube, which is part of Google, at Google, we committed to having 10,000 people focused on controversial content by the end of last year. So that was a big investment, but very important for us. But we also use machines along with the people to be able to make sure that we're removing content that is controversial or the problematic or violates our community guidelines.

And just last year we started a report where we release every quarter how we have been doing on that. And so in our last report, which was Q3 of 2018, we release that we have removed 8 million. videos in that quarter, which is a lot of videos. 80% of them we removed with machines, and most of them were removed without even a single view. So because of the scale, because of the 500 hours that we upload, that we have uploaded to our platform every minute, we have to use machines too. And it's the combination of all the people and the machines that help us make this platform to grow responsibly. So I guess what people wonder, as you use the word, controversial and problematic, how are those defined? What is hate speech?

What is violent? What's something that shouldn't be on your site? How do you guys decide? And how does a machine decide what should and should not be on YouTube? Yeah, those are great questions. And so first of all, we release and we say these are community guidelines. So we want people to know what those community guidelines are. But we're constantly refining them. And that's because the world is changing. So the world, new things happen, new types of pranks happen, for example, and we need to refine how our policies work around that. And so when we make changes to our policies, we usually consult with experts, whether they are experts in child safety, experts in law enforcement, emergency room, people, first responders, like understanding where's the best place to draw the line. And then once we come up with a new policy on that, we work really hard to make sure that we can enforce it consistently and that we can communicate to all of our creators. And we give an update. We made this update to our policy.

You've taken a hard line, I think just within the last year on conspiracy theories too. You kicked Info Wars and Alex Jones off your website. What was the deciding factor there? What was the line that they crossed that you said, this can't be on YouTube? So with Alex Jones, and actually with any creator, we have a set of community guidelines. And those community guidelines apply to our creator community regardless of who they are. But in that specific case, what we have talked about is that there was a community strike. And when we have a community strike, then there are changes to how the live streaming permissions

are given. And because of a number of issues around the live streaming and how that was used, it became a terms of service issue. And because of that, it made sense for us to terminate that channel. So we were just talking about what an incredible resource it is. My kids take it for granted that there's a YouTube in the world because they've never known a world without YouTube. And so if they think of something, a movie clip or something for school, they go to YouTube right away. That's a pretty extraordinary thing for our society, actually. I think YouTube is an amazing resource. And I see that in my own family as well.

And the way that my kids have been able to use that to look up anything. So actually, just the other night, my son was saying, I need help with some math concepts. And I said, well, why don't you just go to YouTube and why don't you look and see first? If that helps you. And then if it doesn't, like, then we can talk about getting a tutor. But let's try that first. And every single time I've tried that, they always can find multiple people explaining that concept in different ways. And it's just wherever I go in the world, people tell me about how they learn different subjects, languages, music instruments.

Someone told me they even learned how to swim on YouTube. And I thought that was the one thing you couldn't learn, but someone said they learned how to swim. It's totally true. I mean, you can learn how to tie a tie. I have a nine-year-old son. What you do. They're going to tell you better that I'm going to tell you, and it worked better than I could. Or cooking.

Cooking is huge. Yes, cooking is huge. And you think about most things that we learn are visual. And so how to do anything, a lot of, like how to fix anything in your house, how to cook, how to do a craft. Those are visual. Or language, you need to hear it. And so it's an amazing resource to be able to learn. and we're really investing in that area

because we want to have more educational content on YouTube. We already have a ton. Pretty much any thing you want to learn how to do, we probably have some video about that on YouTube, but we're encouraging all of our educational YouTubers to continue to invest there. I have to say it makes Dad look good too because I'll be like,

I'm going down to fix the washing machine kids. You stay up here and then just go down and go to YouTube and find the video on the GE washing machine, change out the bolt. It works again. Yeah. No, it's pretty, amazing. I actually, just the other day, I had a pump that wasn't working in our house,

and so we called them and asked them how to fix it. And they said, oh, we have a YouTube video about it. You don't have to call and ask anymore. Just go right to YouTube. I should have known that. I should have even called. You of all people should know. Yes, me of all people. Just go to YouTube. Yes, but yes, that specific pump has a YouTube video. It's incredible. So that actually ties in with what we were talking about before, because there is the question of what kids see when they go looking for things for school, for example. If my kid wants to research 9-11, for example, they might see some stuff that comes in underneath that that I don't want them to see conspiracy videos and things like that. Have you guys addressed that in a way that you are comfortable with that kids are sort of

protected when they go on while you say still protecting free speech? Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll say that we have a YouTube Kids app. And in the YouTube Kids app, we are very careful about the content that's in there. We also enable a number of tools for parents, like the ability to turn off search or to limit which videos they're seeing or even hand-select a certain set of videos for their children. So YouTube Kids is an important part of the solution. But if you look at YouTube, what we call our main app, just YouTube,

we want to make sure that on sensitive topics like news or where there's conspiracy theories, common internet conspiracy theories, that we're delivering the right information to people. And so we look in news, when there's breaking news, we look to use authoritative sources, and we'll put those authoritative sources right up front so that users can find it and get the right information. Or with common internet conspiracies,

what we'll do is we'll link to and put in the video information that comes from Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica so that users can get context for the video that they're watching. Some people might say, why not just get rid of those videos? Why not get rid of the conspiracy videos altogether? What do you say to that? Well, we have community guidelines, and if something violates our community guidelines,

we will remove it. But, I mean, there have been conspiracies since the beginning of time where people have said, like, is Elvis still alive, right? I mean, there have been speculation about that, or people asking questions. And so we want to keep a nice balance between freedom of speech and enabling people to get their point of view. But then also pointing out, these are authoritative sources.

Here's additional context. Here's additional information for our users to make sure that they can get that information. And you mentioned you have five children. So this is something you grapple with and you deal with every day. I have an interesting question that someone said, you've got to ask for this. Sure. on behalf of Americans.

What is your policy at home about screen time with your kids? Yes. How much can they watch? Well, that's a great question. And I think this is something that all parents struggle with. And so I have different policies for kids of different ages. Because at some point, they're going to go to college and you have no control. So you need to make sure that you're working up to that day.

I definitely, even though I work in technology, even though I'm the CEO of YouTube, I limit my kids screen time because I want to make sure that they're living balanced lives. And although I see how YouTube can show them the world and can serve as a video library, I also see the power in that. And I want to make sure that they're living balanced lives. So YouTube, to be able to help parents and to help kids with that, we actually have a timer. We introduced it first in YouTube kids because we said, oh, well, parents want to manage screen time of their kids. And it's much easier if there's a timer, timer goes off, boop, your time's over, right?

And so that way the kid's not upset with the parents. The device just said time's over. Right. And what we realized this year is that we had to put that timer in our, in YouTube, the one for adults, because adults also need a timer. So we introduced the timer for adults. And we also introduced reports on how much time you've been using. of YouTube so you can manage it that way, as well as how we manage notifications. So we really want to give people the tools to focus on digital wellness.

You've also been an incredible leader out here about women in tech, which is something you've been very concerned about and remain concerned about that there aren't enough women like you in this area, in this field. Has it gotten any better in your time over the last 20 years? and what more do we need to do to get more women working out here? Well, I think it's very important to have women in technology. And the reason for that is that technology is this industry that is changing so many parts of our world. And so you say, well, here's this industry, but it's not well represented with women.

It would be like having the printing press coming out and only 20% of, of women would be able to write books. Think of all the literature that would be lost if only 20% of women were writing books. And so I want to have more women in this industry. I also think that it's a wonderful industry to be part of. And so I want to be an advocate in encouraging more women to go into technology because I see so many opportunities for them. And I do think it's getting better. I think in the last year, we've highlighted a lot of issues that, are in technology at different companies. And in many ways, highlighting the challenges is fixing the challenges, too,

and we'll make it better for the next generation of women who come into technology. So what are the practical ways to do that? Is it encouraging STEM? Is it encouraging girls? To me, I think, you know, I have an 11-year-old daughter, just seeing someone like you or knowing that these companies are out there. We didn't grow up with companies like this. And so in my daughter's mind, oh, I want to work at YouTube.

I want to work at Google. that's a cool place to be. I think just seeing that helps. But what else can we do as a society to get more women in this field? It's really important for parents to encourage their children. And what we saw when we did research at Google on this, that the biggest factor a lot of time was that the women who were successful are in tech now, someone in their life encouraged them.

It was a parent, a teacher, a mentor who encouraged them to be in technology. And so I see this in the research, but then I also see it at home. And what I saw in my own house is that you really need to encourage your kids when they still listen to you. What's that age, by the way, like 12 or something like that? I think around 12 or 13 they start to not listen to you. I'm getting there. Yes, you're getting there. But so what I think is important is to give them the skill sets.

And so what I think has happened is if you don't have those skills, if you don't feel that it could be interesting or that you could be good at it, at some point you get closed off to tech. And so giving them the skills early on to feel like this is something I could be good at is really valuable. On the other hand, I started when I was a senior in college. And the funny thing is when I was a senior in college, I thought it was too late. I was like, oh, it's too late to change career. I'm a senior in college, but it's never too late. And technology is always changing. And so people can learn at any time, just being open to it, just being willing to learn,

realizing that really anyone can learn it and just trying. And so now all these great programs like code.org and hour of code to encourage it. There's online. YouTube has coding programs and coding classes and encouraging people just to try it. And I think it can really make a difference. Do you think computer science should be, we grew up with math and English and all these core subject areas, today especially, shouldn't computer science be mandated in high school when you're growing up, not just for girls, but for this is the world we live in? It shouldn't be an elective class, it seems to me. I definitely think that computer science should be mandated. And we take all these other fields and sciences, not because we're necessarily going to be a chemist,

or a biologist, but because it helps us understand the world around us. And if you think about all the digital aspects of our world, understanding how it was built, how to interact with it, how to build your own version of it would be really, really valuable. I also think it would solve a lot of the diversity issues because you would just know, like, well, everybody knows how to code, of course. And so you would have people of all different backgrounds having those abilities. And I think the reason it hasn't been introduced so far, other than there's like a lot of policy, is there's probably a shortage of skilled people who could teach all of those classes. And it also requires the resources of having the devices and computers.

And so it's a matter of time. But I definitely think if possible, it's very valuable to give kids that exposure and that experience early in their careers. But if they don't get it, they can still get it later. Right. Like you. Yeah, like me. So how does it make you feel that there will be a young girl who watches this?

on Sunday, it says, I want to grow up to be like Susan Wajiski. What does that make you feel? Well, I feel good about it because I want to encourage girls to come into tech, because I see that tech is this field with lots of creativity, lots of possibilities, the ability to interact and work with so many different people out there. And tech also comes in many different flavors. You also don't have to be a computer scientist to work at a tech company. Companies need people of all different kinds of backgrounds.

You need lawyers. They need PR people. They need salespeople. And so I think it's a really, really dynamic and rewarding field to be part of. And tech needs more women. It needs more women to come in, to develop programs for women, for girls, to have that point of view. And so I believe it's very important that we bring more diversity. into the tech community and that it will pay off. We'll have better innovation, we'll have better

products, and it will be better for society in the long term. Another area where you've been a leader is in maternity leave. And you've talked about the importance for that. You've led by example here at YouTube. Why do we as a country not give more maternity leave than we do? Why are we so far behind the rest of the Western world in that regard? I don't know why the U.S. is the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave. And having gone through having kids, it's really hard at the beginning. And in the U.S., 25% of American women come back after 10 days. And I can tell you they are not ready after 10 days to come back to work.

And it's very hard. It's very hard. And so this is something. that hopefully will be changed at some point, but it's hard to change how our society works. It's hard to mandate something like this. But I do think that when we look at the data, like California has paid family leave. And if you look at that, you can see after it was implemented that most companies state that it was neutral to positive.

And they actually saw economic benefit to having paid maternity leave. And what's the leave here at YouTube? How many weeks do you get? Our maternity leave right now is 22 weeks. And we found that when we increased the maternity leave to 22 weeks, that new mothers were much more likely to stay at Google. Because when they came back to work, they were at a stage where they were more ready, their babies were more ready. And that extra time really has made a difference for our employees. Okay, so I love talking to people like you who have vision because if you think about 20 years ago, your garage at Google, the Google eyes were at your garage. We had no idea what was coming down the pike in terms of Google and YouTube and iTunes and our iPhones and everything else that we have.

So when you think about the next 20 years, and I know you do because you're that kind of person, what's our world going to look like? What's the thing that we haven't even thought about in the public that you've had to be? guys are working on what's going to be different about our lives? It's so hard to say how technology is going to change because it's always changing in ways that we can't expect. But I think if we were to look the next 20 years ahead, I think if we look at our lives, the ability to have so many different devices, so many different types of digital experiences that are really valuable to people. So, um... Do the robots are taking over? Is that what you're saying? I don't think the robots

are going to take over. I know people do worry about that. Well, I asked the question. I remember I was talking to Zimmer at Lyft and we were walking around New York and he just said, this is all going to be green space. All these cars are going to be gone. It's going to be a few driverless cars, self-driving cars, taking deliveries and getting people where they're going. Just that sort of vision of the way we're going to live, the way we're going to live, the way we couldn't have dreamed of an iPhone and dreamed of YouTube and having every piece of video on Earth at our fingertips, there's something 20 years from now that maybe you even haven't even dreamed of.

Yeah. Well, it's always hard to predict what the future is going to be. The area that I'm most excited about where I think there's the most benefit for humanity is the combination of computers and biology and medicine coming together. Because I think there are many, many ways that we, could make science and cures and drug discovery and personalized medicine that we could extend people's lives and find new solutions and new cures. And so I'm very optimistic about that area. I also think that we will have driverless, some kind of driverless transportation. That said,

I've been waiting for it for a while and it's not here yet. I know. So I do, I do think we'll have, I think we'll have some kind of driverless transportation. I think we'll have potentially a lot more devices in our homes that are connected to the internet. We have, Google

has the Nest thermometer and doorbell and I don't know, I was just thinking the other day like, why isn't our refrigerator connected? We have cars like Tesla that are connected. So I think thinking about all of our devices that are more connected. But from an information

standpoint, we are at this point right now where there will just be more information that will be available, there'll be opportunity to continue to give more sophisticated analysis of that information and potentially have it more accessible to us in some way. We keep, when I first started, it was on a desktop, and then we move to a laptop, and then we move to a phone. And so then there's this question. Now we also have speakers. So voice is also very, is very, um, common. That idea, I think everyone will have some kind of speaker and they can audio, just ask it questions and it will give you the right answer back. And Google already has that today. So 20 years from now, I think just many, many more people will use it. It'll be more

sophisticated. Google's also been working on assistant, like the idea that you can just say, call my doctor and make an appointment or order me Chinese food. So I think the ability to have technology help you and assist you with different tasks will be really valuable. Okay, we've got to ask you one more question. Sure. Do you have a favorite YouTube video of all the hits of the last, you know, 15 years or whatever it's been, 14 years? Is there one that maybe that your kids like the most?

Or is there one famous YouTube video that you're like, that's the one? So I like all YouTube videos the same. But. They're all your children. and you love them the same. I like all YouTube videos the same, as long as they comply with our community guidelines. But there is one video that is special to me,

which is the video that really first opened my eyes to the fact that YouTube could have hits. And it's a video of these two students singing to the Backstreet Boys in their dorm room, and their roommate is doing homework in the background. And what I remember about that is at the same time we had licensed some content, and we had spent a long time trying to license this very traditional content. And the views of these kids singing to the Backstreet Boys was much bigger than any of us anticipated.

And I still laugh every single time I see it. And that's what convinced me that this is going to be a really compelling platform. And it's going to have a different kind of content, a different genre of content. And then I would say recently the YouTube channels that I've been watching a lot, I watch a lot of YouTube channels of all kinds, but one that I've really been enjoying, I've been the yoga videos. And it's pretty amazing. You can type in like 15 minutes, relaxing yoga, 60 minutes, vinyasa yoga. I'm really anything that you want for any time period that you want. And there is a solution.

And it's pretty amazing because I don't have that much time. and so sometimes I'll have just 20 minutes. I don't have time to go somewhere, change. I can just do it right there. And then it's wonderful. There I did 20 minutes of yoga. I'm super happy. But I use YouTube probably like most people.

I use it for entertainment when I need to laugh. And I use it to look up information when I'm trying to study something. I use it to catch up on shows that otherwise I wouldn't be able to see because of they happen at a time of day when I wasn't available. Or to see highlights or live stream. We live stream the State of the Union. And so just like anyone else, I use it to enrich my life and to learn and to laugh. It is amazing how we were talking before we started how kids in particular just associate almost all TV shows with YouTube.

In other words, my kids watch Jimmy Fallon on YouTube because they're not staying up until midnight on a school night. but they get on the computer and they get home from school and they go into YouTube and there's Jimmy Fallon. It's like your brand sort of captures so much. Can you believe the scope of what it is from comedy to history to user-generated material? It's incredible. It's definitely a big scope. And what I didn't anticipate is we used to always talk about how we're going to be in the living room, like how entertainment, how technology would be in the living room. And what I didn't anticipate is that once we have phones, that people would just watch it on their phone. And it makes sense because they can watch it wherever they are

and they can choose what they want themselves. And so technology has changed our lives in many ways that we could not have anticipated. And now YouTube TV is almost everywhere in the country, like 98% of the country, right? Yeah, so now we offer YouTube TV everywhere. And what we're doing there is we're taking the traditional networks of TV. and using the YouTube technology to be able to make it more on demand, to be able to search, to be able to save your favorite shows, to be able to get notifications.

And it's applying today's technology to traditional TV content. I was just saying my son, when I go in his room, almost all the time, if he's on his iPad, he's watching someone else play video games. And I'm like, what are you doing there? And he loves it. And he can't get enough of it. Yes. Are there different things that you've seen where you go,

I'm shocked at how popular that is. That's incredible with the audience that's gained. People love seeing gaming videos. And it's because you can make the sports analogy. People don't have to play a sport to love watching it. And you love to see the way that those athletes can do things that you could never do yourself. And so it's the same thing with gaming. People love seeing how people are playing games, how they're winning, how they're reaching new levels.

and the commentators are really funny or they're entertaining. And so that has been a genre on YouTube that has been very popular, and we're definitely investing in our gaming community because it's a new type of content that is really valuable for our users. And we think it's something that didn't exist on traditional TV, but it's important. It's important to our community. Funny thing is my son doesn't even play Fortnite. He just watches the other guys play Fortnite.

And that's enough because the guy's funny and it's fun to watch. The commentators are very interesting. They're funny. They can get to new levels that you never could have gotten to before. They're championships, their leagues. And so all the analogies of sports apply to gaming. What's the deal with slime? I've seen my kids have slime.

They watch the slime videos. What's the deal? So there are many videos about slime on YouTube. we have probably moved the glue market as a result of all the slime videos. Definitely. I have a lot of slime in my own house, and I also have big jugs of glue to make slime that my family has been making. But it's just an example of something that is how to, how to make it showing how to do something, how to do a craft. And so that's a really compelling part about YouTube, is that you can learn,

all these different trends and how to do crafts, how to cook, that you just could not have learned otherwise. So YouTube's keeping Elmer's afloat at this point. Buy Elmer's stock. We've definitely grown the glue market because now you can use slime. I didn't realize it were so many different kinds of slime. You can actually buy professional slime, not just make it, but you can buy it with special sparkles, toys in it.

Sure. And the kids come on with those Tupperware full of it. I made three slimes today. Great. There's lots of slime making. But, you know, there's also lots of cooking and lots of crafts and creative and any kind of activity where kids are looking and learning how to follow instructions, what happens when you combine different ingredients and put them together and produce an end product. That's making them, that's enabling their creativity. It's enabling them to become a creator in their own way.

Right. My thanks to Susan Wigiski for inviting us to the. YouTube headquarters outside San Francisco, and for that conversation on a lot of the challenges facing the company as it continues to grow. And my thanks, as always, to all of you for tuning in this week to hear more of the full-length conversations with all of my guests. Be sure to click subscribe and listen for free to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. And don't forget to tune in to Sunday today on your TV. That's every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.

Thank you.