Hi everyone.
So, I'm going to take us back to 2007.
I'd just spent about six months working on album that I'd poured my heart and my soul into, and it was getting about three plays per day on Myspace at the time, and I was getting more and more depressed when I started noticing these other people who were playing guitar and singing and putting videos on this new site called YouTube, and they were getting 300,000 views.
So I decided I'm going to start making some Youtube videos.
And one day they featured a video of my band on the homepage, which was amazing -- we got a bunch of new fans.
We also got a bunch of people who, I guess, just didn't really like the music or something -- (Laughter) It's OK because people started coming to our shows, and we started touring, and we came out with a record.
And when I checked our bank account balance after our first monthly iTunes payout, we had 22,000 bucks in it, which was amazing because at the time I was living at my dad's house, trying to make a living as a musician by uploading videos to the internet which literally zero people respected in 2009 -- even the people who were uploading videos to the internet.
And so for the next four years, I uploaded more and more videos to the Internet, and they got better and better, and we made enough money through brand deals and commercials and iTunes sales to buy a house.
And we built a recording studio.
But there was one big problem: making money as a creative person in 2013 was super weird.
First of all, the business models were changing all the time.
So our 58,000 dollars of annual iTunes download income was about to be replaced by about 6,000 dollars of streaming income.
Steams paid less than downloads.
And then as more and more creators started popping up online, there was just more competition for these five-figure brand deals that had kept the band afloat for years.
And to top it all off, our videos themselves -- the creative stuff that we made that our fans loved and appreciated -- that were actually contributing value to the world, those videos were generating almost zero dollars of income for us.
This is an actual snapshot of my YouTube dashboard from a 28-day period that shows one million views and 166 dollars of ad earnings for those views.
The whole machine in 2013 that took art online and outputted money was totally nonfunctional.
It doesn't matter if you're a newspaper, or an institution, or an independent creator.
A monthly web comic with 20,000 monthly readers -- 20,000 monthly readers -- gets paid a couple hundred bucks in ad revenue.
This is 20,000 people.
Like, in what world is this not enough?
I don't understand.
What systems have we built where this is insufficient for a person to make a living?
So, I actually have a theory about this.
I think it's been a weird 100 years.
(Laughter) (Applause) About 100 years ago, humans figured out how to record sound onto a wax cylinder.
That was the beginning of the phonograph.
Right around the same time, we figured out how to record light onto a piece of photographic paper, celluloid -- the beginning of film and television.
For the first time, you could store art on a thing, which was amazing.
Art used to be completely ephemeral, so if you missed the symphony, you just didn't get to hear the orchestra.
But now, for the first time, you could store the orchestra's performance on a physical object, and like, listen to it later, which was amazing.
It was so amazing in fact, that for the next 100 years, between 1900 and 2000, humans built just billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure to essentially help artists do two things.
First, put their art on a thing, and second, get that thing around the world to the people who wanted the art.
So, so much industry is devoted to these two problems.
Oh my gosh, there are trucking companies, and brick-and-mortar and marketing firms, and CD jewel case manufacturers, all devoted to these two problems.
And then we all know what happened.
10 years ago, the internet matures and we get Spotify and Facebook and YouTube and iTunes and Google search, and a hundred years of infrastructure and supply chains and distribution systems and monetization schemes are completely bypassed -- in a decade.
After 100 years of designing these things, it's no wonder that it's just totally broken for creative people right now.
It's no wonder that the monetization part of the chain doesn't work given this new context.
But what gets me super excited to be a creator right now, to be alive today and be a creative person right now, is realizing that we're only 10 years into figuring out this new machine -- to figuring out the next 100 years of infrastructure for our creators.
And you can tell we're only 10 years in.
There's a lot of trial and error, some really good ideas forming, a lot of experimentation.
We're figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Like Twitch streamers.
Who's heard of Twitch?
Twitch streamers are making three to five thousand bucks a month streaming gaming content.
The big ones are making over 100,000 dollars a year.
There's a site called YouNow, it's an app.
It allows musicians and vloggers to get paid in digital goods from fans.
So, I'm also working on the problem.
Four years ago I started a company called Patreon with a friend of mine.
We're 80 people now working on this problem.
It's basically a membership platform that makes it really easy for creators to get paid -- every month from their fans to earn a living.
For a creator, it's like having a salary for being a creative person.
And this is one of our creators.
They're called "Kinda Funny."
They have about 220,000 subscribers on YouTube.
And when they upload a video, it gets somewhere around 15,000 views to 100,000 views.
I want you to check yourselves right now.
I think when we hear numbers like that, when we hear "15,000 views," and we see content like this, we just snap categorize it as being not as legitimate as a morning show that you'd hear on the radio or a talk show that you'd see on NBC or something But when "Kinda Funny" launched on Patreon, within a few weeks, they were making 31,000 dollars per month for this show.
It took off so fast that they decided to expand their programming and add new shows, and now they launched a second Patreon page -- they're making an additional 21,000 dollars per month.
And they're scaling what's essentially becoming a media company, financing the whole thing through membership.
OK, here's another example.
This is Derek Bodner, a sports journalist who used to write for Philadelphia Magazine until a few months ago when the magazine cut out all sports coverage.
Now he writes articles and publishes them on his own website -- he's still covering sports, but for himself.
And he's making 4,800 bucks a month from 1,700 patrons, financing it through membership.
This is Crash Course -- free educational content for the world.
This show is actually on the PBS digital network -- 29,000 dollars per month.
This is a duo sailing around the world, getting paid every month for documenting their travels from 1,400 patrons.
This is a podcast, "Chapo Trap House", making -- actually, since I screenshotted this, they're making an additional 2,000 dollars per month, so they're now making 56,000 dollars per month for their podcast.
And Patreon's not the only one working on the problem.
Even Google's starting to work on this.
A couple years ago, they launched Fan Funding; more recently, they launched Super Chat as a way for creators to monetize live streaming.
Newspapers are starting to experiment with membership.
New York Times has a membership program; The Guardian has over 200,000 paying subscribers to its membership program.
There's this bubbling soup of ideas and experiments and progress right now, and it's pointing in the direction of getting creators paid.
And it's working.
It's not, like, perfect yet, but it's really working.
So, Patreon has over 50,000 creators on the platform making salaries -- getting paid every month for putting art online, for being a creative person.
The next hundred years of infrastructure is on the way and it's going to be different this time because of this -- because of the direct connection between the person who makes the thing and the person who likes the thing.
About seven or eight years ago, I went to a cocktail party.
This is when the band had hit our first machine, so things were really cranking.
We had just made about 400,000 dollars in one year through iTunes sales and brand deals and stuff like that.
And this guy comes up to me and says, "Hey, Jack, what do you do?"
I said, "I'm a musician."
And he just sobered up immediately, and he stuck out his hand, put a hand on my shoulder, and in a real earnest, very nice voice he was like, "I hope you make it someday."
(Laughter) And ...
I have so many moments like that logged in my memory.
I just cringe thinking of that.
It's so embarrassing to just not feel valued as a creative person.
But as a species, we are leaving that cocktail party behind.
We're leaving that culture, we're out of there.
We're going to get so good at paying creators, within 10 years, kids graduating high school and college are going to think of being a creator as just being an option -- I could be a doctor, I could be a lawyer, I could be a podcaster, I could have a web comic.
It's just going to be something you can do.
We're figuring it out.
It's going to be a viable and sustainable and respected profession.
Creators are going to come out the other end of this weird 100 years, this century-long journey, with an awesome new machine.
And they're going to be paid, and they're going to be valued.
Thanks, everybody.
(Applause) I think it went pretty well.
I want artists who saw that to not give up -- to know that we're getting there.
It's not there yet, but in a couple years, there will be so many systems and tools for them to just make a living online, and if they've got a podcast that's starting to take off, but they're not able to make money on it yet, that's happening and they're going to be paid.
It's happening.
My relationship with the internet reminds me of the setup to a clichéd horror movie.
You know, the blissfully happy family moves in to their perfect new home, excited about their perfect future, and it's sunny outside and the birds are chirping ...
And then it gets dark.
And there are noises from the attic.
And we realize that that perfect new house isn't so perfect.
When I started working at Google in 2006, Facebook was just a two-year-old, and Twitter hadn't yet been born.
And I was in absolute awe of the internet and all of its promise to make us closer and smarter and more free.
But as we were doing the inspiring work of building search engines and video-sharing sites and social networks, criminals, dictators and terrorists were figuring out how to use those same platforms against us.
And we didn't have the foresight to stop them.
Over the last few years, geopolitical forces have come online to wreak havoc.
And in response, Google supported a few colleagues and me to set up a new group called Jigsaw, with a mandate to make people safer from threats like violent extremism, censorship, persecution -- threats that feel very personal to me because I was born in Iran, and I left in the aftermath of a violent revolution.
But I've come to realize that even if we had all of the resources of all of the technology companies in the world, we'd still fail if we overlooked one critical ingredient: the human experiences of the victims and perpetrators of those threats.
There are many challenges I could talk to you about today.
I'm going to focus on just two.
The first is terrorism.
So in order to understand the radicalization process, we met with dozens of former members of violent extremist groups.
One was a British schoolgirl, who had been taken off of a plane at London Heathrow as she was trying to make her way to Syria to join ISIS.
And she was 13 years old.
So I sat down with her and her father, and I said, "Why?"
And she said, "I was looking at pictures of what life is like in Syria, and I thought I was going to go and live in the Islamic Disney World."
That's what she saw in ISIS.
She thought she'd meet and marry a jihadi Brad Pitt and go shopping in the mall all day and live happily ever after.
ISIS understands what drives people, and they carefully craft a message for each audience.
Just look at how many languages they translate their marketing material into.
They make pamphlets, radio shows and videos in not just English and Arabic, but German, Russian, French, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese.
I've even seen an ISIS-produced video in sign language.
Just think about that for a second: ISIS took the time and made the effort to ensure their message is reaching the deaf and hard of hearing.
It's actually not tech-savviness that is the reason why ISIS wins hearts and minds.
It's their insight into the prejudices, the vulnerabilities, the desires of the people they're trying to reach that does that.
That's why it's not enough for the online platforms to focus on removing recruiting material.
If we want to have a shot at building meaningful technology that's going to counter radicalization, we have to start with the human journey at its core.
So we went to Iraq to speak to young men who'd bought into ISIS's promise of heroism and righteousness, who'd taken up arms to fight for them and then who'd defected after they witnessed the brutality of ISIS's rule.
And I'm sitting there in this makeshift prison in the north of Iraq with this 23-year-old who had actually trained as a suicide bomber before defecting.
And he says, "I arrived in Syria full of hope, and immediately, I had two of my prized possessions confiscated: my passport and my mobile phone."
The symbols of his physical and digital liberty were taken away from him on arrival.
And then this is the way he described that moment of loss to me.
He said, "You know in 'Tom and Jerry,' when Jerry wants to escape, and then Tom locks the door and swallows the key and you see it bulging out of his throat as it travels down?"
And of course, I really could see the image that he was describing, and I really did connect with the feeling that he was trying to convey, which was one of doom, when you know there's no way out.
And I was wondering: What, if anything, could have changed his mind the day that he left home?
So I asked, "If you knew everything that you know now about the suffering and the corruption, the brutality -- that day you left home, would you still have gone?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I thought, "Holy crap, he said 'Yes.'"
And then he said, "At that point, I was so brainwashed, I wasn't taking in any contradictory information.
I couldn't have been swayed."
"Well, what if you knew everything that you know now six months before the day that you left?"
"At that point, I think it probably would have changed my mind."
Radicalization isn't this yes-or-no choice.
It's a process, during which people have questions -- about ideology, religion, the living conditions.
And they're coming online for answers, which is an opportunity to reach them.
And there are videos online from people who have answers -- defectors, for example, telling the story of their journey into and out of violence; stories like the one from that man I met in the Iraqi prison.
There are locals who've uploaded cell phone footage of what life is really like in the caliphate under ISIS's rule.
There are clerics who are sharing peaceful interpretations of Islam.
But you know what?
These people don't generally have the marketing prowess of ISIS.
They risk their lives to speak up and confront terrorist propaganda, and then they tragically don't reach the people who most need to hear from them.
And we wanted to see if technology could change that.
So in 2016, we partnered with Moonshot CVE to pilot a new approach to countering radicalization called the "Redirect Method."
It uses the power of online advertising to bridge the gap between those susceptible to ISIS's messaging and those credible voices that are debunking that messaging.
And it works like this: someone looking for extremist material -- say they search for "How do I join ISIS?" -- will see an ad appear that invites them to watch a YouTube video of a cleric, of a defector -- someone who has an authentic answer.
And that targeting is based not on a profile of who they are, but of determining something that's directly relevant to their query or question.
During our eight-week pilot in English and Arabic, we reached over 300,000 people who had expressed an interest in or sympathy towards a jihadi group.
These people were now watching videos that could prevent them from making devastating choices.
And because violent extremism isn't confined to any one language, religion or ideology, the Redirect Method is now being deployed globally to protect people being courted online by violent ideologues, whether they're Islamists, white supremacists or other violent extremists, with the goal of giving them the chance to hear from someone on the other side of that journey; to give them the chance to choose a different path.
It turns out that often the bad guys are good at exploiting the internet, not because they're some kind of technological geniuses, but because they understand what makes people tick.
I want to give you a second example: online harassment.
Online harassers also work to figure out what will resonate with another human being.
But not to recruit them like ISIS does, but to cause them pain.
Imagine this: you're a woman, you're married, you have a kid.
You post something on social media, and in a reply, you're told that you'll be raped, that your son will be watching, details of when and where.
In fact, your home address is put online for everyone to see.
That feels like a pretty real threat.
Do you think you'd go home?
Do you think you'd continue doing the thing that you were doing?
Would you continue doing that thing that's irritating your attacker?
Online abuse has been this perverse art of figuring out what makes people angry, what makes people afraid, what makes people insecure, and then pushing those pressure points until they're silenced.
When online harassment goes unchecked, free speech is stifled.
And even the people hosting the conversation throw up their arms and call it quits, closing their comment sections and their forums altogether.
That means we're actually losing spaces online to meet and exchange ideas.
And where online spaces remain, we descend into echo chambers with people who think just like us.
But that enables the spread of disinformation; that facilitates polarization.
What if technology instead could enable empathy at scale?
This was the question that motivated our partnership with Google's Counter Abuse team, Wikipedia and newspapers like the New York Times.
We wanted to see if we could build machine-learning models that could understand the emotional impact of language.
Could we predict which comments were likely to make someone else leave the online conversation?
And that's no mean feat.
That's no trivial accomplishment for AI to be able to do something like that.
I mean, just consider these two examples of messages that could have been sent to me last week.
"Break a leg at TED!"
... and "I'll break your cwalker@example.org."
(Laughter) You are human, that's why that's an obvious difference to you, even though the words are pretty much the same.
But for AI, it takes some training to teach the models to recognize that difference.
The beauty of building AI that can tell the difference is that AI can then scale to the size of the online toxicity phenomenon, and that was our goal in building our technology called Perspective.
With the help of Perspective, the New York Times, for example, has increased spaces online for conversation.
Before our collaboration, they only had comments enabled on just 10 percent of their articles.
With the help of machine learning, they have that number up to 30 percent.
So they've tripled it, and we're still just getting started.
But this is about way more than just making moderators more efficient.
Right now I can see you, and I can gauge how what I'm saying is landing with you.
You don't have that opportunity online.
Imagine if machine learning could give commenters, as they're typing, real-time feedback about how their words might land, just like facial expressions do in a face-to-face conversation.
Machine learning isn't perfect, and it still makes plenty of mistakes.
But if we can build technology that understands the emotional impact of language, we can build empathy.
That means that we can have dialogue between people with different politics, different worldviews, different values.
And we can reinvigorate the spaces online that most of us have given up on.
When people use technology to exploit and harm others, they're preying on our human fears and vulnerabilities.
If we ever thought that we could build an internet insulated from the dark side of humanity, we were wrong.
If we want today to build technology that can overcome the challenges that we face, we have to throw our entire selves into understanding the issues and into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to solve.
Let's make that happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)