Dan Clancy

But it's also social. So in some ways it's an alternative to sitting watching Netflix or Prime Video or something like that, because people tend to sit and watch for thirty an hour, two hours something like that, but you do it with other people, which is a community. Okay. And the magic what I've always said about Twitch is you have some creator that you care about, that you're interested in. If you're a musician, of course, musicians you're

interested in. And your audience of fans become a community because they spend time watching you and they're just sort of hanging out with you, and over time they get to know each other. So an analogy that you will

appreciate because we're in a similar age demographic. What I say, it's kind of like cheers, a place where everybody knows your name, that you show up and everyone says hey, nor as soon as you show up the Twitch, And that's what happens on Twitch, and the way I describe it is I think today in some ways social media is now antisocial, whereas what happens with Twitch is you really form a community bond from people that spend time watching somebody they care about together while they're a.

hard to get deep into something. Okay. The way I describe it is suppose you're watching a movie or something on Netflix and there's a TV series and you don't know any of the actors, and none of your friends told you it was good, so you have no reason to think this is entertaining. It's kind of tough to

just watch a TV series, right or a movie. And with Twitch, usually when you come to Twitch, there's a Twitch streamer that you've heard about, that you've seen on social media, a musician somebody, and you're coming to watch. Then you're not coming to Twitch, you're coming for the creator, Okay.

be mixing music or creating music. Okay. A big thing is what's called IRL or in real life stream, where people go out into the real world with a camera and they're doing something at an event somewhere and interacting with people, but it goes all the way. There's a pizza Princess g runs a pizza shop in Rochester, New York, where basically there's a camera on there and she's running her pizza shop talking to chat all the time. There's a family in Spain that runs a restaurant on Twitch.

So people run their businesses on Twitch. People knit, people paint, birds, people fish, So kind of anything you can think of, there's probably somebody doing it live on Twitch.

family Spanish restaurant. Both those channels they average about a thousand what's called average concurrent viewers, which means at any point in time, there might be a thousand people watching them, and then over the course of a stream, if that streams like you know, four or five hours, you probably end up getting twenty or thirty thousand people will have come by during that four or five hours and have watched them.

up with the idea. Okay. Oftentimes they combine this with other forms of social media, so they'll be creating short form content on YouTuber TikTok or Instagram and then they also are streaming on Twitch and it's usually the combination with helps grows them an audience.

a pizza? Right, they do something fun like that, so the person gets that Chat creates a pizza. But the biggest thing is you just see her and the other folks in her workforce just living their life, but then engaging with their audience while they're doing it.

subscription is a form of patronage. And when I subscribe to a channel, first of all, I get no ads, so it's ads free when I'm on the channel. But then I also get status in the community because I am supporting this creator, right, and then you also get access.

Creators all create what are emotes. These are really emoji cons which they create a language for their community, and they'll create one for happy, for sad, for cry, for whatever, and when you subscribe, now you get to speak that language. But the big reason for subscribing is really to support the creator. And then I forget exactly how many years ago we added this concept of a gift subscription, okay,

which was really important for Twitch. Over half of our revenue from subscriptions come from gift subscriptions, and that's where suppose I'm paying six months a month to subscribe to you right now. But right now, I'll only give you fifty bucks. Okay. What I do is that buy ten gift subscriptions, and these are subscriptions to go out to other members of the community. Okay, but really I'm the money all goes to you, okay, but psychologically, I'm giving

the money to the community. And so the way I kind of describe it is, suppose you're watching someone busk and you go and drop five dollars in their hat, and now everyone who's watching gets some candy or something. Right, what happens is everyone in the community goes, oh, thanks for the subscriptions, and they celebrate them. Okay, the creator

celebrates them. So it's this form of patronage and acknowledgment which generates a meaningful amount of money for these people that are creating content.

Tier three subscription. Okay, but most of the people are Tier one subscriptions, and we made the decision to make it consistent across the site that everything has the same price, as opposed to having lots of price variability.

don't do anything to try and encourage them. Now, most of our creators do things to encourage people to subscribe, okay, to get the ball rolling. So I'll just go through a few examples. First of all, one thing that we do is we have this thing called a hype train, which has been very successful, which once people start subscribing at the same time like a subscription or a gift, and you cross a threshold, then a hype train starts.

And hype trains go to different levels, and I think the record is like level one hundred and ten, and as they get higher, we give out these emodes to the community. So the community gets excited and says, let's get level five, let's get level six, let's get level seven, right, and of course the streamer is all excited. It's like, oh, I'm getting I'm on a level five hype train. Come on, guys,

let's go to level six. Okay. So that's something that we do that creates this kind of moment okay, that gets lots of people saying, ooh, I want to be part of this okay. But then streamers will do a ton of stuff on their own okay. So for example, one thing that's very common twitch is people do like subathons, where they agree that if they reach so many subs, they'll do certain things. Okay. The other thing they do is sometimes they even stream for two weeks, three weeks,

thirty days. Whereas people keep giving money, it extends how long they have to stream, okay. So they're kind of saying, I will stream so much time for every dollar I receive, and it has a counter so as people give money and they keep the stream going even while they're sleeping, okay. And so that creates this sort of communal experience and excitement that gets everyone sort of contributing. So creators usually do a fair amount, but they don't have to.

to raise money. And every year there are millions and millions of dollars raised by creators who decide that's a big part of what they want to do. And so as opposed to you know, they will do these things, but they do these things for contributions to a charity that they care deeply about.

we basically on cycle payout. Right, we have a we have a cycle payout, and that we do need some buffer in terms of charge backs and other things, because once we pay you, we don't pull anything back, so you know it's not too long.

of how they fund their life. Okay, this is how they pay their bills. We tried to make it so that we could get most of them to seventy thirty. So that's why we have these thresholds based upon the number of subscribers you have, and we kind of set it so that those people that are in general depending upon this for their livelihood, and whereas there are a lot of people that do it pick myself for example.

They do it out of passion and they may get some additional money, but you know, then they'll be at fifty to fifty.

We just set the threshold to try and approximate. Here's a threshold where if like, if this was your only source of income it is, you know, you would be depending upon this. But that's just how we set the threshold.

money from subscriptions. Okay, I've talked about. Then as you get bigger, you also get ads because we have ads as an important partner. As you get bigger, ads becomes a more important part of your revenue stream.

that fifty percent of your revenue comes off Twitch. You're still getting it because of Twitch and your Twitch following, but fifty percent of your revenue doesn't come through Twitch, and we don't get any cut of that, okay. So that is quite common. And you know, if you're creating content on Instagram, often all of your revenue comes from off Instagram. You get almost nothing from Instagram, right And

same thing with TikTok So how much does? I don't want to quote any numbers because it's like twitch streamers makes in the top. Twitch streamers makes in the millions and millions of dollars, right, and so I don't want to say any numbers, especially.

it a horizontal because you recognize each other in chat. Okay, I'm going to do a quick divergence here to tell you, you know, a story about that that'll kind of put it to life. I was actually in the Middle East

and I talked. I was talking to a streamer from the Arabic World and she was talking about how she went on stream and one of her audience members wasn't there and she is used to that audience member being there regular She's like, what's happening and she asked everyone in chat, and everyone in Chat was like, yeah, I haven't seen him either. I haven't seen her on this other channel, because they all knew who this person was. So she started trying to figure out if he was okay, okay,

and did whatever information and she couldn't figure out. He came back a week later and she was like, Oh, we're so glad you're here. We're worried. In all of Chat was saying this too, because all of Chat knew who this person was and was connected to this person. Right. It turns out he did have a modestly serious injury. Okay. He was really touched that they noticed that he was gone.

The interesting part of the story is his immediate family, who he doesn't live with, did not know he was ever sick because he doesn't talk to them regularly, so they didn't notice that he was like in the hospital. He didn't contact them. They didn't notice, but his Twitch community knew the day that something happened on him. And it wasn't just the streamers of the community. So countless stories I've heard of people meeting their mate just by

building the connections on Twitch. So I say that because an important part of Twitch for the viewer isn't just watching the content. It's feeling connected to the other people and talking to them and getting to know them. So going back to your question, when you get going, you have to stream on some regularity to form that, Bob. Okay, if you already have some notoriety, I often tell people, oh, if you stream two to three times a week, two to three hours a stream, you can build a sense

of community. Now there are exceptions to that. I'll think myself as an example, Bob, you would be someone that might be an exception. I only stream once a week. But I'm notable in that I was CEO, and even though I only stream once a week, I still have that sense of community from the folks who watch them.

build that community. Okay. Twitch sends notifications out whenever you go live, So basically, once people are watching Twitch and they follow you, then whenever I go live, the folks that and I am not good at maintaining a schedule as an example, Bob, because my schedule is very erratic, but they all get notifications as soon as I go live. It says dan is live, Dan is live, Dan is live, and so a lot of times they just start showing up because they get the notification that I'm live, and

they're like, oh cool, I want to drop in. Okay. If I want to tell people in advance, then usually we do have ways within Twitch, but most people use social media to say go on live tomorrow at ten, because that's where people spend a lot of their time is on Instagram or TikTok and so they post something on there okay.

define when the breaks are okay. Now, it's important to note the subscribers aren't getting ads, So just because it's an AD break, it doesn't mean that the streamer goes away. Don't think if the guy gets up and leaves, usually he's still doing something, but he takes into account and AD break. And then we also have non interruptive ads okay, because obviously that's something we want to get more for

the creators, it's better to minimize the interruptive ads. So we do have some placements that are non interrupted that you can see while you're watching the stream.

So if you go on and show for a product you don't believe in to these people that are paying to support you in general, like, that's not a great idea, right if you don't believe in the other And so the magic that works, and this is what I often talk when I when I talk to brands is I talk about the fact that to three quarters of the money we make doesn't come from add It comes directly from viewers pockets. And that means those viewers are emotionally

engaged with the content Okay. So it's actually because what you're trying to do with an AD is create emotional transference, right that I have a positive feeling towards you. You have an association with this brand. So now I have a positive association with filling the Brank brand. Okay. And so I often tell streamers, I say, look, you should make sure that you like to some degree believe in

this brand. And it's not just you, you know, being a shrill show for whatever they say, because you know that matters to your community.

it and follower only chat. Okay, sometimes you might do that to avoid just a lot of noise from the people that don't. Okay, So the creator decides who can participate in chat. I'd say most creators don't restrict it to subscribe only chat as a general rule. I think that's more the exception that somebody will limit it to subscribeer only chat.

for the streamer to interact with chat? Okay? And in general? Now, sometimes you may be doing streams or you don't do it, and that's okay, But in general it's pretty important, okay, because the thing that like, everyone wants to be heard, okay, And when I'm watching and you just say hey Kevin verse seven, you know, yeah, let me answer your question or thanks for being here. Like when I start streaming, the first thing I do is for the first people that show up in chat, because I turn it on

and then people say, hey Dan, what's happening? Hey, I go yo, Kevin verse seven, glad to see you again, and oh, Vix and Bena, glad you're here. Oh. And I'm sitting there calling out all these people, right, and so that is part of building the sense of belonging because I'm showing that I hear them. Okay, and so most of our streamers spend some amount of time paying attention to chatt to show that they care.

because you're becoming a public figure in today's world. Okay, one of the factors, there's one issue about what i'll call your personal safety, okay, in terms of where you're at, and as you get bigger, you have to be cognizant of that. Which is unfortunate that that's the case, right, but that is the world we live in. One thing that's really interesting about when you're on Twitch, though, is you can control and you can ban people from your chat.

So one of the problems in today's social media world is you post something and you have all the trolls that are there responding, whether it's on X or Instagram and commenting or whatever. Right, So if you say something on X, you have all these people that will attack you. And if there's anyone you're a fan of, any musician you love they post something, they're going to be people that are going to be, oh, I can't believe you

did this, you sold out or whatever. Right, And when you read all that stuff, it just makes you feel like shit, right because you know, let's say you're a musician and you're creating stuff and then these people are attacking you. Okay, on Twitch, if somebody attacks you in chat, we have moderators, we have lots of tools you ban them, and what ends up happening it's kind of different in other social media and other social media, sometimes fifty percent

in your comments can be trolls. On Twitch, people tend not to just sit there if they don't like you. They don't sit there and watch you for two hours. Right, They're not going to do that. They might come in and say something then you ban them. So the reality is, in terms of the abuse you get in chat, I'm not saying it's not an issue. It's something we think about. It tends to be far less than in other social media platforms because you can control who can be engaged in your chat.

that person. We have various different ways to determine when this person is associated with different accounts, and IP is one of them. Okay, But so we work to make sure that somebody can't do ban evasion. Of course, it's always a cat and mouse game because there's no perfect formula for that. But conceptually, what it is is we're banning the person, not the account.

with Kevin Hart where they did a sleepover. Okay, but I would start with with Kai, who's you know at the you know, at the top of the heap right now.

But in your mind, as we think short form BOD, be thinking of thirty seconds to one to two minutes, in other words, based the type of experience that YouTube, shorts, TikTok and Instagram reels is optimized for. So that's what I'm going to call short form. When I think long form for now, think of twenty minute videos on YouTube or longer. Okay, now, yes, I know there's a gap between two to three minutes and twenty minutes. You have

ten minutes, but just and then live. Okay. So the first thing you have to ask, the question is your creative expression? What are you trying to create? What are you trying to communicate? Okay? And that sometimes dictates the artifact. Okay. Short form content is the best content for discovery. The reason for that is someone can watch a lot and

it's very easy for something to go viral. Okay. So to use a you know, comparison, someone on TikTok might see two thousand creators in a week, okay with this star, or three thousand or four thousand someone on twitch watch five to ten. I believe someone on YouTube is probably in the middle, three hundred or four hundred. Okay. I think one thing, and especially later on we might start

talking about music. There's this thing about emotional attachment between the creator, okay, and short form is a great way to get discovered, but it isn't a great way to form an emotional attachment between the artist, the creator and the viewer because you're just one of two to three thousand. Okay. If somebody stops creating content, on TikTok you don't even know it right because your attachment is to the platform. If someone stops streaming on Twitch, then I know it

within days that they're not streaming right now. That's because I'm more emotionally attached. So the way I describe it is personally, I think if you want to be discovered, that's what you're trying to do. I think short form content is the best channel for discovery. Okay, you want to build deep connection with your audience, I think live is the best way to do that, and it's also the best way to turn affinity and affection into dollars directly,

where they're supporting you directly. Okay. Now, the one caveat I will say is live isn't for everyone. Some people aren't comfortable live. Some people aren't comfortable being exposed to, you know, all the sundrys and everything that they you know, might deal with. They're better And that's particularly true from a musician's perspective the way I think of it. And you know, some musicians finally craft their words and you

can see them on stage. There's sometimes a little uncomfortable in stage because they have this artifact, which is the song which is a finely crafted song and that's what they're presenting, and they don't want to be answering questions and improvising and doing all sorts of stuff. So for some people, Live isn't the right thing for them. Okay, to enjoy live is you're going to do it because

it's gonna take time. So the way I would say it is everyone as they're thinking about discovery should be thinking about using the short form content platforms if you're looking for discovery, because it's just the best for discovery, that's just the nature of it. Then as you think about building a stronger connection, I think that's when you want to think about longer form, and I think Live is a great form of longer form. I also think YouTube can be useful for longer form.

huge resear I'll growth during Fortnite praize. Okay. Part of that is because a lot of the folks that were creating Fortnite content started streaming, and so there was this natural feedback cycle with Fortnite COVID caused another big bump okay after COVID then, But like many platforms, because basically there are a lot of people at home looking for community, looking for connection in Twitch was a great platform and also a lot of creators, a lot of musicians to

come up to me and say, wow, Twitch was a lifesaver for me, Like I turned to Twitch because I couldn't do shows. Okay. As COVID passed, there was a softening of the market, which was this kind of like many platforms, if you look over the last year or so, overall, it's been you know what, I'll just call you know, roughly flat. Okay. Now, I think what has been happening, interestingly is Twitch streamers actually have been having a bigger impact than ever in terms of their reach and their

impact on a society. What's happening is there's a more seismic shift towards more short form content. Okay. And so if I had a metric, which I don't have, by the way of viewership of Twitch content on third party social media platforms, I'm quite confident it's been up into the right the last two years that the impact that Twitch creators are having on culture is larger than ever. Okay. The end result, by the way, this matters to our creators.

A big part that's important for Twitch as a business is are we creating a platform where our creators can sustain a living and you know, reach their audience. And the answer is, our creators are bigger than ever in terms of the audience they're we are reaching, and so I feel very good about that aspect of it.

twitch having never watched twitch. Okay, uh and now for the first time they're watching Twitch at sixty and the certainly that happens, but I wouldn't say that's the prime demographic. What's happening is people are aging up. Okay, so you know gaming has been around for a while now, so and as people as opposed to aging out of Twitch, you don't age out of Twitch. Is maybe the simplest way to say it. Okay, it may be with snap after you get to a certain age, you age out.

With Twitch, what we see is, you know, we get a lot of usage from still people in their thirties and upper thirties and now they may have been using it for five or ten years.

use as an example what we are doing right now, Bob. Okay, how would it be different if we were doing this live? Okay? The way it'd be different and'd be doing it live is chat would be going and you might be keeping an eye on chat, right and then at some point I will say something that you aren't an expert in. So when I say something, you don't know about something, and someone in chat would say something and you say, oh, Dan, chat said what about so and so?

I'm going to do these these recordings. I'm going to do them live. I'm gonna do you know how we said you can do subscriber only chat. If I was Rick, I'd probably do subscriber only chat because he's a bigger name, a little more prominent. Okay, So then he's gonna say, oh, you want to go ahead and chat during this, okay, and ask me questions and have me Okay, here's how

you can do it, okay. There's also features where sometimes people say, oh, I can only I can make it so that anyone can chat, but I only look at the subscriber's chat, if you will, so me as a creator, so you can chat with each other, but I the creator, only see the subscriber chat, so the subscribers know. And then so in addition to the money he makes from YouTube, okay, now he's also making money from Twitch, which is you know, additive.

And the biggest thing is he's getting a closer connection, which is fan base that in fact, there's a little more intimacy with those people that like him because they feel a little more connected with them. And if I were him, I would even say, okay, look and at the end of the end of what I am doing for the vod that I'm going to put out and distribute to all these people, I'm going to send fifteen minutes.

Where so, for example, I recently started doing a podcast, a live podcast where basically I do it on stream. At the end of the podcast, I interview someone, then I turn it off the podcast and now I just talk with chat for a little while right about what we talked about, any issues and these are this is in a very off the cup fashion, Okay, and then that creates this connection with your fan base, right, and a lot of times it's a source of short form content.

If it's not half again as much work, okay, so so absolutely. And then also the other factor is it can create this loyalty in your fan base. I'm going to make an analogy to music that I'd love to go into it at some point with you. This this emotional connection between a creator and an artist, and of course a musician is a creator okay, and their audience Okay, And how much in music now the connection is a

little more with the platform rather than the artist. And in part the interesting analogy is I think music has gone more towards short form content because the single on Spotify is basically short form content. The album was long form content. And I'm sure you love listening to albums, and the more I listen or even if you again, whether you listen to the physical album or the artifact, when you listen to a piece of work from a creator which is a long form content, you create a

stronger emotional bond with that creator. And that's a huge part of music, and that's a huge part in the creator ecosystem as well.

and hip hop, it's becoming more commonplace. Outside and rap and hip hop, I think most of them, I'd say, don't use Twitch as a primary channel as a musician, Okay.

I'm I love, I'm excited about. I like as I talk to musicians as they think about what they're doing. I think of the one of the things that is evolving is just putting a concert on Twitch when you're live. It is nice, but it's not so it's certainly not as good as being at the physical event, and it's not so much better than watching the same thing on bod a day later on YouTube. Right, you have to create this experience of why does it matter being live?

And it's not to criticize those things, okay, but I don't think that is the way to think about live if you're a musician, Okay, as the prime In fact, that's what happened at during COVID. Of course you couldn't perform, and so there's a lot I'm gonna go live, right, And all it was doing was taking the same artifact that you create in a live concert and bringing to Twitch. Okay.

And what is more interesting now is as you start thinking of adapting what you're creating for the for the live experience, and I think that is engaging with the audience more as opposed to just putting a concert up on Twitch.

lose money. But that's okay. It's going to grow the service, okay, So we would pay, but it didn't end up growing the service because if you were coming just to watch this concert, that didn't mean you'd come back the next day for everything else, okay. And what we realized was we needed more organic growth than music and this has

been this actually has been working. Again what I've been saying recently, there was a Rolling Stones article saying, you know, if you're looking to break into song and rap and hip hop, you're thinking about how to use Twitch, Okay, And that's because that's grown much more organically than us just going and recruiting people.

Initially they looked at Twitch because of course, the labels are all looking for discovery, and they look for Twitch for discovery. And the reality is short form is better for discovery, okay. And what they've realized is really Twitch is much better for maintaining your community and your audience once you build it. So the comparison, I'll make the old model used to be, write an album, record it, release the album on tour, and then disappear for a

year and a half while you create your next album. Okay. In today's world, you can't disappear for a year and a half. Okay. You need to stay top of mind. That's why many people now are just constantly releasing songs. The album is an artifact, is dissipated because of the nature of these streaming services. Okay, because you have to stay top of mind. So how do you stay top of mind? Well, one thing is everyone's telling you to

create short form content. If you're a musician, it's like, oh god, I don't want to create short form content. That's another thing I have to do. What I often tell him is go ahead and stream. Do something you enjoy doing. Kane Brown he gains when he streams because he likes to gain that's what he does when he streams. Okay, Bieber was streaming recently, spending a lot of time and he was playing basketball and doing all sorts of things. Okay.

What I and as I said, a lot of musicians, Tee Paint has been streaming since twenty sixteen and he'll mix his next album on twitch. Okay. So what I say is find something you like doing, okay, And this is to engage your core audience. And if you're doing something you enjoy doing that connects you with your community, then from that you can create short form social media. So it's not just about what you do on Twitch.

It's also about how whatever you do on Twitch can become short forms so you maintain stop of mind and you don't disappear for that year and a half, which you just can't do anymore. And the labels realize that's important for them for building an audience. So there's a lot more interest to what degree are re evangelizing. I'd

say a fair amount. That's you know why I was down in LA when we met each other, because I was down talking to you know, labels and artists, and you know, I'm going to Nashville and April I'm gonna be talking to some folks and we others. We have a team that's designed to bring people to onboard them.

So that way, if you are, if you are a influencer, creator, musician that already has some type of a following, we have a team that helps you get started on Twitch, accelerates you to the rev share that we talked about earlier, so that way you can get going, and then also connects you with other creators so that way we can help to encourage this usage.

create a character. So I'll pick one as an example, Lady Gotgat, Right, Lady gog Got is this amazing character right that she's created, And I don't know if it's the right thing to lift the veil on that character. Okay that sometimes that's actually a great thing. Okay, other artists are not as such. Right. For example, it's absolutely the case that rap and hip hop there's much more of an intimacy and immediacy, but the same in country music, the same in lots of music, where there's more of

this kind of authenticity, this connection all that. So I don't think every artist wants to lower the veil and like just kind of have the rawness that happens in line, but I think for many artists. So one reason is for some artists, if I say this to a label, like, if you're an artist and you like them more as you get to know them more, they're a great person for twitch because their audience are going to like them

more as they get to know them more. Okay, because you can't hide yourself when you're live, you can't you know, create We all know that part of what happens is we create these images that is not exactly who we are, and you can't keep that up when you're when you're live. So I think for those artists where they're kind of authentic and intimacy and they want that authenticity with their with their audience as long as they enjoy it, they should absolutely be live stream.

island offshore. When you know, you get a lot of musicians, you know, they think they have to create something snappy for short form video content, and then most of them, which is just horrible. They let some team do it, which is worthless, right, Okay, I just don't understand why everybody isn't on Twitch. There's a communication.

seen a massive I will use a comparison. Okay, if I was at if I went to the different parties the week before the Grammys, uh two years ago, and I got introduced, I bet you if you and I we you know David masseyas if two years ago we were at the same event and David introduced me, you wouldn't have been like, oh actually.

when I was at the Super Bowl. Eighty percent of the times I met someone would say oh, like they would peer cup and says, oh, I need to talk to you okay, because I need to understand. So this is happening now. But the reality is it just takes time. It just takes time. And every you know, every two months. You know, this year at the grammyspread again in Septa and blackwa Max were nominated for Grammy first song they wrote on Twitch, Right, that creates more attention, more attension

builds more attention. But it just takes time.

Is it a matter of Twitch, of getting some specific artist who is not in that vertical of hip hop or pop to come have a presence on Twitch?

what what you do on there. Okay. And I don't think in that genre it's quite, but it's gonna be. You know, a few people start doing it and then it's like, oh wow, this is great. Now, I will say this in terms of who is the right person. Okay, this is going to make my point that not everyone is live the right format for them. I'll use an example of someone that of probably my favorite group out there is Turnpike Troubadors. Okay. Having met Evan Falker once,

I'm not sure he would enjoy going live. I think it would be work for him. Okay. And so if it's worked for you to be there in front of the camera like off the cuff, then life may not be this. So it's not universal.

I don't agree more okay. So we have these artists who say I am a songwriter a musician, only most of them tend to be older or tend to be in genres that don't generate.

issue a DMCA. They notify us if somebody is playing recorded music that they have a concern with, So that way we can notify them and it doesn't have to go through the DMCA. Okay. In general, right now, the labels aren't so concerned. Now, let me go through a category where we have do full rights for if you're a DJ, or let's assume for a second somebody wanted to do a radio show. Okay, we do have the ability for you to get full rights for the catalog

to play them while you're streaming. Okay, it's under particular deal that we have that the labels. Now, a portion of your revenue get shared with the labels. Okay. So if what you want to do is sit on and play recorded music and that's what your creative expression is, okay, you can do that. You just have to sign up. It's a DJ deal. But you don't have to be doing dance music for the DJ deal. Right If I want to play all.

portion of their creative expression. And so getting the right deal where in terms of what the REV share split would be when it's not a significant portion, it's just complicated and hasn't been very simple because in general, the labels are used to dealing where the music is a significant portion of the creative expression, which is exactly why we did the DJ deal. Okay, but if it's in the background, that's we have an agreement that this is an issue. They notify us and so we don't encourage it.

But it would be difficult to get the right revenue share split for something like that.

By the way, my younger siblings have different last names. Who's the CEO of the Fred Rogers Company, which is very much a you know, part of that creative bank, right, so you know, in different things. And his sister lives in North Carolina. Another sister who's a lawyer that lives in Colorado, so sort of across the board mishmash your father.

he's Irish. He has a brother that lives in New York who's a sculptor, who's the only member of his family that I've had a connection to. There's a lot of similarities from talking to my uncle about me and

my birth father. My mom actually didn't talk about my birth father almost at all when I was growing up because the emotional trauma of losing him when she had, you know, one baby and another one on the way, and she was only like a month pregnant with me when he died, and so nobody knew that she was pregnant when she got the news that he had passed away. That so she just couldn't deal with it, so she

wouldn't talk about my dad at all. So it's only as I've gotten older that I've gotten to know my father by talking to my uncle, by doing all sorts of things. So it's more and then I find out things about myself that I realize, huh, that's probably that's you know, that's part of my father that is still in me somewhere. But it's not that I have like any baggage from not having a father. It's more this interesting exploration of finding out who this person was.

don't know, that's a different story. But so I have a very healthy attitude. I kind of went through this path or I have a very healthy attitude towards all the good things, even though there are lots of challenges too.

do you have ADHD? I said no, I don't. And then I read more about Adhd and then I realized, and I look back to my childhood and I realized, I'm a poster child Adhd. Okay on the spectrum, and in fact, this is one thing we can get back to this. Most streamers you find are because they have this superpower of their mind being able to process multiple things at once. But I tell this story because in fourth grade I was having trouble. I wasn't doing well

in school. And then I went to fifth grade at this Christian Brothers all boys school and my parents had to talk my way in because I wasn't doing very well in fourth grade. My brother was already there and they had to push me to get into what was the better of the three classes with this guy, brother Gregory,

and this teacher. The way he taught was he had something that he called good Marks where he gave out what basically were credits okay, And at the end of every week he had a Jeopardy game to learn the stuff you were supposed to learn that week, and you were quizzed on this stuff for that week, and if you won Jeopardy, you got ice cream to play football.

Then you got good Marks, and at the end of the semester, you could spend the good marks on this this like, uh, everybody brought in their old toys and they bought you know, an exchange. Anyway, he gained a fied learning for me, and I went from being barely in there to be one of the top two or three kids in the class because he basically turned learning into a game, which was like a poster child of what you need to do for someone with ADHD. And then once I had the confidence that I was smart,

because then I thought of myself as smart. So then I kept performing. But I needed to think of myself as smart. And the only way I thought of myself as smart is because I just happened to have this teacher at the perfect time that taught in a non traditional way. So yes, I was one of the top kids in the class, but it wasn't it was by chance that everything worked out for me.

next door. So basically I've spent my whole life in a technical product and engineering role. Okay, but am I root? I'm really a creative and in a different world. If I were coming out today as opposed to using my mask skills, I could every much found myself being a creative. And I've also always been a music fan. I had a thousand albums. I taught myself to play the piano. So there's a different life where I didn't go technical and I did something in news are in creative expression.

And the thing I love about Twitch is it is this perfect bringing together of these two sides of my life that I did not I could not have predicted. It brings together my sort of business product technical skills with my creative uh you know, DNA. That has always been a big part of who I am.

foundation of. And back then there was this battle of which type of AI would win. By the time I graduated, it was clear who was going to win. Statistical AI was going to win, okay, and statistical AI has been the thing that has dominated Okay. But the interesting thing is a lot of what people talked about then we were talking about the world that now exists, but we could never deliver on that, and only now because of some algorithmic improvements, but also because of a massive amount

of data combined with computing. If another way to say this, if the World Wide Web never occurred, we wouldn't be where we're at with AI. One of the reasons we're at with the AI is because this thing occurred, carled the World Wide Web, which creative these massive data sets, and these massive data sets then allowed the algorithms to work in ways that previously they could.

an answer pops into your head. I think it's stupid. I think it's a great idea. Okay, then your system two brains explains that, and we think the reason we believe this is for all these good reasons, it's bullshit ninety five percent of the time. Which is one reason why we have the divide in the country we have is because you watch the same video to people's system, one brain tells them two different things, and then they

try to justify. So the way humans think is through all this compiled thing, and so interestingly, that is the way AI is working now. So I actually think this idea that AI doesn't work the way humans brains thinks. I think it does work the way human brains thinks. Okay, I still think we are a long way. I think there is a vast misunderstanding of the complexity of human intelligence. I think that we think of the primary form of

human intelligence as doing really hard math problems. Okay, But the really unique part about human intelligence is our ability to coordinate, cooperate, think about each other, you know, interact with each other. Okay, And that allows us to function as a unit. And I don't think AI has any data on that. So I believe that we keep projecting the advances in AI to continue like this, it's gonna asymptote okay. And I think this idea that AI will replace human beings, I think we still have a long

way to go. And the people that like to tell you that are the ones that are trying to get lots of funding in AI. And also usually they're the math folks that tend to think the pinnacle of intelligence is doing hard maath, which I don't think the pinnacle of human intelligence is doing hard math. I think the pinnacle of human intelligence is all the complex interactions of humans doing all sorts of stuff with other humans.

Oh yay, because they speak with such great authority that you think they know everything, and the reality is they're bullshitting you and they don't, and really you're being wrong. So like, I'm trying to fix this Watt bike I have that's like this exercise bike and it's not working. And I use AI and it talks with so much authority that I think that it knows exactly the problem, and actually it's taking me down dead end trail.

question of crash and all that. Right, If if what you're selling is a bill of goods where there's no there there, then you have to worry about a crash because you have a crash and now it's all vapor where it's gone, okay, as opposed to thinking of a crash. Our market always has corrections, that's the nature of the markets.

So will there be corrections, Well, almost certainly, because people are making a lot of bets on a lot of things, and some of those bets, if some of those bets didn't work out, then people are being stupid in their investment because you're not going to be able to get all your bets right right, So there are gonna be some bets that don't work out where it's overhyped, and then there're gonna be some bets that actually end up,

you know, being you know, hugely consequential. And I always say, anyone that tells you that they know which bets are going to pay out and which ones aren't, Okay, if they are so good, then they should stop what they're doing and just invest in the market and they'll be a gazillionaire because I'm sorry, nobody knows exactly which ones are going to work and which ones aren't. It just everyone likes to talk.

negative things can do. And what you have to worry about as who's holding the gun right And that's a you know, a part of your concern or whatever the weapon is that that came out of that. But a lot of that allowed us to do all sorts of things as well. Okay, so I don't believe this idea of AI taking over the world. I think that's just science fiction. Will negative things happen from AI? Almost certainly.

That's the very nature of tech innovation. And in every tech innovation, you know, there have been bad things that have come from it. I do think you need to think about what some of those things are. My apprehension is figuring out an intervention that can fix a hypothetical threat.

I will use a couple examples. Suppose back in the nineteen twenties someone explained to you global warming and what we're going to happen, and from the industrialization of the globe, what policies should they have put in place in the nineteen twenties to avoid global warming? Well, we can't even agree on a policy to deal with global warming today and we have all the science explaining it. So this idea in the twenties they could have figured out the

policies to put in place to prevent global warming. Let's talk about social networking. Lots of great things with social networking. A lot of people have concerns about different things in terms of the division and all that. In two thousand and eight, could anyone have figured out interventions to prevent whatever you think are the negative impacts of social network The answer is no, nobody could have figured it out

in two thousand and eight. And so the problem is the answer is and if you overconstrain it, all you're going to do is ensure that some other country wins because you can constrain it here, But that doesn't stop what's happening in that country or that country or that country. So I'm for me. I do think there needs to be awareness and regulation and consciousness. I think you have

to be very careful of forecasting too far in the future. Instead, you have to be identifying where the issues are and being responsible.

on the Internet now, not beyond social networks. There's been no study that's proven a deleterious effect. But this is literally your business. So what's your take?

doing more interacting. So like my daughter's first phone, was a flip phone because I felt like that was the right thing. And I still feel like that is the right thing, because I do believe a lot's happening when you're thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen just going to school in a thousand person setting. That's not the way we evolved. When you think of our evolution biologically, were the same as the people ten thousand years ago, right, In terms

of our genetics, we're not that different. Nobody grew up with one thousand classmates ten thousand years ago, right. They use mixed age, they were right, because it's in some type of tribe or clothes or whatever, and you're exposed to all sorts of things. So I think we already have this artificial environment where you pack all these kids of the same age together because it's efficient to teach,

and then you throw in a phone. So now there's this kind of thing that you're always turning to and always putting in your hand, and that there's all sorts of stuff. So this isn't just about the phone, this is about other things. In terms of that, I think it's not optimal. So personally, I am a supporter of having control, but I also am a big believer in parents having choice. You know, I'm telling you my own

personal my own personal choice as a parent. Okay, So I think there are some truths in the concerns that people are voicing there, But as you said, I can't tell you emphatically. I know that for sure it's a difficult question, but I make that personal choice. I do think that sometimes part of what's happening is there is there is this I will call demonization of different businesses.

Big tech is doing this, Big tech is doing this, and really it's a vacuum where unfortunately we haven't created regulations and guidelines that we think are appropriate to in the world that we live in. Because in general, the very nature of capitalism is if this party doesn't do it, then this party will do it, right, That is the nature.

So suppose, you know, Facebook decided Instagram wasn't a good thing for the world for whatever reason, Well, then someone would have invented TikTok even sooner.

with the system one is system to brain. How does your system one brain come up with the answer it gives you. Usually it's what other people they know and trust believe. That's how the system one brain comes up with the answer. So if you go back in time, if you hear a rustling in the in the in the in the bushes, and your brain says, you know, run, that could be a tiger. Okay, it's a it's a reaction, right,

And why do you believe that? That's because the people that you live with says, oh, there's a rustling, move there's a tiger. You believe it because the people you spend time with believe it. And that's how we're evolved as social animals is we believe things because the people we spend time believe things, and that's how we program our system one brain. Well, of course, if all you're talking to are people with the same views, then it

programs are system one to think homogeneously about it. Okay, So I think there are all these challenges that we have, but that doesn't mean the tech companies are to blame for it, algorithms to blame for it. All. An algorithm is trying to find you something that doesn't bore you to They send we have problems. We have to deal with those problems and figure out how to handle those problems, not blame it on the tech companies.

She's on Oh Boy Records. But but she has a song, a Time of Flowers, and she just came out of a new album that she just recorded, and she actually wrote it during COVID, But it's particularly appropriate now because it talks about, you know, even in hard times, there comes a time for flowers, okay, and that the flowers

will bloom. And so I guess I am at my very base even as people always like to disparage about where the world is and say it's hopeless, And as you go back in time, I'm sure people were disparaged about the world and the way it was during World War Two and during all sorts of during the Great Depression, during all sorts of things, right, And so I'm a big believer that, yeah, we'll work through it.

So I said, oh, but I want to be a researcher. So I looked at going to Microsoft, NASA, ISI, SRI Bell Labs. Those were the you know, research things at that time. I ended up choosing NASA. At the time, it was one of the better places to go for AI. When I got there and I was thinking, oh, I want to be a researcher. Within about four months I realized a big part of being a researcher is publishing papers and I realized I don't care about publishing papers.

I liked SA problems. So I had to unlearn all this stuff that I learned in school and realized, no, I'm really a problem solved. And then I started managing. Within literally six months of getting to NASA. I went from kind of being an IC and I was leading a group of like two hundred and seventy people within three years of having shown up at the door at NASA after my PhD. And so it's a great time

for me. I loved working at NASA. Really, what it was is I found out more about who I was and how much I liked to solve problems, more so than just getting rooted in the technology.

guy dream about space. As a computer science I was in Silicon Valley, so I was like, Okay, I've done a lot at NASA. I want to go into Silicon Valley. And Google was sort of a very natural choice. It took a while to make sure I got the position and all that, but then it was great going over to Google.

of Silicon Valley in this time period. But there was a lot besides the Sistine Chapel during the Renaissance, and I see all this going on, and I felt like, if I ended my career having spent my whole career at Google, how would I feel about it? And I do think a lot of people get comfortable at Google. And I felt like and I was compensated well, and I felt like, no, but I can do other things.

I don't need to stay at Google, and so I just felt that, but a lot of people don't make that choice, and I was like, I just don't want to spend my whole career at Google. So I went to a startup. The startup, next Door, ended up doing okay, but not like great. A lot of some people know it, and then I'll jump Interestingly, when I came to Twitch, I had left next Doors taking some time off. They interviewed me and they offered me the job, and I turned it down because I said, oh Twitch. I hadn't

used Twitch a lot. I said, oh, Twitch is a gaming platform. I'm not a gamer. I don't think that's right for me. And then they came back four months later and said, no, Dan, we really think you're the right person for the job. And so I thought about it and I realized where I've been happiest in life is when I work with people I like, and I liked the people I was going to work with, so I said yes. And then it's only afterwards that I

really realized that Twitch was a perfect fit. It was just happenstance that even though I wasn't a gamer, I only after being there realized, oh, Twitch is really about community and about creatives, and I was a creative and I'd done a lot in community, so it ended up being this sort of match made in heaven.

It's taking something that already had some scale and coming in and approaching it with the same zeal and passion that a founder has. And to be honest, some of those people I don't think would have been good at it. In other words, they many of the people you talked about you couldn't have brought into Twitch when I was brought into Twitch, where they could have had the impact that I had at that point of Twitch, like either they had to found something or they weren't going to

be able to do it. I realized that, Look, no, I was really good at kind of taking something that already had some traction and working to scale it and make it better. So I certainly reflected on it. But whenever I was faced with that decision, I always kind of said, where can I have the biggest impact That I often went to something that already had some traction.

we deserve. We think we deserve so much more because we see somebody who is in the right place at the right time. And what I often say is this is a challenge. When you live in the area like the Bay Area, you think of your intellect and ability, and then you see other people there and you see ones that you look at and you say, well, wait, I'm better than them, and they happen to be somewhere, and so they're a gazillionaire, right, and so you feel

like I deserve more. And so for the way I say it is for everyone that you see above you in terms of how much they've benefited, that you think you're just as good as there are probably ten people below you that are every bit as good as you, that did not benefit as much as you did. You just don't see those ten people and how good they are. Okay, So I've been incredibly blessed, right, And I am you know, I'm comfortable, my kids, you know, benefited, you know in

terms of college and all that. I'm not a gazillionaire, but I don't care about being a gazillionaire. I'm still doing quite well and I have more than what I deserve in this world, as I think most folks that have realized some success in the tech industry end up having.

us in terms of how we run the business. I'm supportive of it because the way I describe it is I have a responsibility to make sure Twitch is here twenty years from now, thirty years from now, forty years from now, when somebody makes streaming their life. Twitch is different than all the other platforms. If we went away, these folks wouldn't necessarily just go to the other platforms and have the same life they lived lead today. It's very unique. And you know, they've been streaming now for

five ten years, they have two kids. If they had to go get another job, the resume is like, what do you mean you've been streaming for seven years? Why would I hire you? Okay, So I have an obligation to make sure they like we're still here twenty thirty, forty years from now, which means I need to run this business so that it's sustainable. And Amazon's been very supportive,

and so sometimes you have to make tough decisions. You know, when we had to make layoffs, we'd gotten bigger than we needed to be, And I do think that's happened in a lot of tech industry where people just think, you know, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger, and you don't need to be bigger. So I feel really good

about where we are today. I feel we've shown that it's a sustainable business if you will, that our business works, and so I feel very good about, you know, the support we've had from Amazon, and I don't think there are a lot of you know, these downsides that we've had.

this time that's just for me. I don't have like boys weekends. I don't go off golfing all day Saturday and Sunday or something like that. You know when in terms of I work hard, I exercise, and I spend time with my family. Those are basically the three things that I do, and there's enough time in the day for all three. There's probably enough, not enough time in the day if I wanted to do all these other things, you know, just for myself.

So like when I describe it that way, you get a sense of or across the river from Hoodry, which is a to McDonald's town and a one Safeway town. And I use that because I think when now and one Walmart town, where I describe it like that, you kind of get a sense for the size of the town. And so these are folks doing all sorts of things in this region, right, and I like great conversations. Some of them are musicians. Interestingly, a number of one of them is someone who tried to be a musician for

a while still writes music and records. My daughter's a singer songwriter. And so I just think that the reason people get stuck in that is because they're not very empathetic of different ways of living their life, and they think everything is living in this tech bubble, which is not what life's about.

My son's are really good white water kayaking. And I love the area because it has both, like the all these kind of athletic folks came through, but it also there's a town close to Trout Lake where the hippies came in the sixties, and then you have the logging, and so it's really this blend. It's reasonably progressive, but not overly progressive. So I kind of like the blend.

would both have a son and daughter. I wanted them both to live in the same area. So that way their kids would be friends. Very first place we were looking at we were up here kayaking. We went to look at a place I thought it would take me two years to find something that. It was a great house. It was perfect. It was right on this river, the White Salmon River, twelve acres. So I decided to move up here. Both the kids live up here now, so if you will, it worked. They both moved the area.

It's an hour from the Portland airport, so I could basically get most anywhere without having to I was an hour from the airport in the Bay Area, so I travel Fairmount for work. I'm down in LA. I'm down in the Bay Area about you know, two weeks of the year, I'm somewhere traveling. And I like a lot of outdoor stuff in terms of hiking and all that stuff, biking and running, and so it's ended up being you know, it's end up being perfect.