Twitch CEO Dan Clancy : Why live streamers are driving culture in 2025

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. Twitch used to be where you had entertaining gamers that became big. Now you have entertainers that might sometimes gain. I like the fact that you're streaming. Yeah. I watched one of your IRL streams from New York. It's definitely not in the tech CEO PR playbook. I guess it isn't. Yo, Dan, when do we bring you back Twitch contracts? Jason, wait, we brought them back. You just don't have one. Is there any pressure from Amazon to shift really what Twitch is?

1:49A lot of companies make this mistake where they think they can be all things to all people. Often, those efforts fail. You can't serve two masters. You have to understand. And the thing that makes Twitch so special is the community. And the foundation of community is...

2:11All right, Dan Clancy, welcome to the show. Great to be here. You are the CEO of Twitch. That's what they tell me. There's a rumor. That's what people say. There's a rumor. It'd be concerning if you were like, wait, wait, wait, I am? um excuse me no i twitch holds a really interesting place in culture right now and uh you know also in the creator economy but to me it feels like it's i'm just curious how you would explain the place it holds in our in the creator economy right now the way i explain the place and and it's not just about the creator kind it's the broader world is there's something about authentic connection, you know, with, with people.

2:56And of course, you know, the, the social media has grown incredibly. However, all the other interaction is this sort of asynchronous, you know, someone posts, someone comments, someone tweets, someone. And of course we all evolved for authentic face-to-face interaction. and when you see people on what happens on twitch is this kind of just this is who i am right this is what i'm doing and there's an authenticity to it and then there's a sense of community that you know what i often say is you know when you just create content but you don't interact directly you have fans but that's not a community and what people like about it you know as at these awards and lizzo was streaming and you know she just loved the immediacy of having like her fans interacting with her and interacting with each other that has created some of the most culturally relevant creators right like it twitch is amazing at creating cultural relevance and um you know today you you have i show speed or kaisen at like these it feels like there's an accelerated path to mainstream culture from twitch and we were kind of having a debate back and forth about this before you came in around if a YouTube creator, like a top YouTube creator is more mainstream versus a top Twitch creator.

4:21But then we were also talking about this world of, we were just at YouTube Brandcast and speeds on stage as a YouTube creator there. And kind of this mishmash of like grow on Twitch, but then are you still considered a Twitch creator or are they just inherently different mediums? Yeah. Sometimes Sometimes I feel like Twitch does not get credit culturally for some of the people that it produces, some of the movements. At times you have this idea of putting a creator in a box as a fill in the blank creator. Oh, you're a YouTube creator. Oh, you're a TikTok creator. Oh, you're a Twitch creator. They're a creator.

4:59That's what they are. And if you're a creator, you use multiple platforms. It used to be actually that, you know, these Twitch creators were sort of, you know, singularly Twitch creators. and one thing we've been doing is very open with this idea look if you're a creator then there are different mediums of that creative expression right and a vod is a medium of that creative expression and so i actually think we like to put people in these boxes but it actually doesn't make sense because what they are creators and sometimes a live stream is the right medium for that creative expression and a vod or a short or whatever could you give us an idea though of when it comes to live what's happening on twitch traditionally obviously we all think of gaming Yep.

5:38But what is it actually today that we're seeing on Twitch? What's working? What are people experimenting with? Pretty much all live streaming platforms that became big started as general purpose live streaming and then focused on gaming. So Twitch started just on TV, but then it pivoted to Twitch, focus on gaming. That's when it took off. And that's because gaming worked particularly well early on when live was first developing. okay um but even when they were gaming okay it wasn't so much about the gaming it was more about someone just being authentic and being themselves right what we've seen now is it's kind of come full circle we're now this live streaming and this desire for community and authentic interaction really what twitch is i use this phrase it's improvisational performance art because you're there and you're taking whatever stimulus whether it's a game or whether it's the real world and you are performing if you are an entertaining person if the thing that you do is entertain people and you can just put a camera on it like if you're good at improv if you can yes play with the world as like your theatrical background like kai is just entertaining yep like plain and simple we were just watching some of the beginnings of like the streamer university when he's like standing in front of that the classroom he's like jumping up and down he's just like an there's like 20 different people also he's an entertaining angles he's just an entertaining guy but it is performance art it's like live theater yes and that's where kevin hard he's an entertaining guy right and it's interesting as you look as you take people that are actors and all that um some of them they really like no give me a script i will do the lines i will do them in character but i don't want to go off script i don't want to riff i don't want you know robin williams in contrast you know he's the epitome of someone who's improvising and the reality is for some people that that improvisation is uncomfortable for them and they like a more constrained where they're going to figure out what they want to say and they're going to piece it together right in some type of arc and they like that creative you know medium i think also largely because when we first started creating like the craft for me was editing when i was in film school that was a craft so actually to our fault when we first started making youtube videos we would we would do less pre-production we'd film stuff and then be like we can always figure it out in the edit yes right and the editing is our you were in film and film school the whole thing of film school and same thing with theater is designed around editing and creating this piece whereas there's a whole part of entertainment which is again if it's improvisational theater but that's not the dominant thing that you learn if you're in theater or whatever you you mostly learn about how to create or you know perform in some scripted artifact one of the first times we sat down with ludwig he talked about this how he was approaching his streams especially during his subathon which was like he had to do 30 days or more of all sorts of stuff all sorts of stuff to keep people entertained so he was writing bits and segments right it was almost like almost a version of snl where it's hey here's here's the concept we're going to improv improv within this concept ludwig also this weekend has his like amazing race that he's essentially doing with a bunch of streamers live right so it's like a bunch of people in different cars doing all sponsored by gm it's like it's an event that is produced there will be improv within the event but the you create a structure yeah within which then you innovate and improvise right and so even look when you're gaming you've created a structure you're playing a game that creates It's a structure, right?

9:18It's the narrative of the game because it's actually very hard to just say, okay, now being entertaining. You create a structure with your guests on a podcast, right? And now we are improvising. You have some questions, but where it's going to go, you don't know. But you've created some structure with the questions that are guided. And so, yes, I think now with gaming, that's why I think gaming works so well to start. You would not think at all about the stream. You just show up and turn on the computer and the game gives you an arc it also makes you a part of a community yes immediately right so you're not creating totally in a silo right there's like context the fact that you have structure is also helpful yes to you and to the other people watching and hopefully to discover ability yes yes and now and now what happens for IRL is you have to think okay what's my bit today and you come up with like a bit that again creates a container around which then you have to be entertaining.

10:13I like the fact that you're streaming. Yeah. I like the fact that you have a Twitch channel. I watched one of your IRL streams from New York where you're like driving a penny cab. I did that last week. Yeah. And I thought what was interesting about that, I mean, obviously it's inherently interesting that you are creating on Twitch and you're streaming. You can create empathy for the creators by doing that. But it also reminded me of Justin TV because the early days of twitch was like justin khan with the being messy yeah just like having a essentially having a pov live stream of like here's my life uh and and it's it's bizarre that it's almost like cyclical that it's coming back it's definitely not in the tech ceo pr playbook i guess it is you have to be the only when i took the class in how to be a tech ceo when i was undergrad um they did not include that in there yeah they may have strictly said do not do not please under any circumstances do not go live in public yes yes please it is one of the stories i like to tell is when i um became ceo um one of the things i told our communications team i'm planning on streaming and i'm going to go on other um uh people stream and it looked at me and goes well why don't you let us coordinate it and like talk to them about what they want to do with you and then we'll just figure out which one and i said no i'm just gonna like do it and they can text me and if i want to go on a stream then i'll coordinate it and because it was like well what um what if and it's worked out great because you know certainly at times there's things i have to deal with but then it's like the streamers like the fact that i'm actually being authentic and they think i'm a real person versus what we often do is you create really caricatures of a CEO, right?

12:02You think you know this, but no, it's a caricature of what they want to present to you. It's a politician. Right. Yes. It's like, we're going to paint an image of this person for you that is controlled. Okay. And I think in particular, the Twitch community likes, you know, that, no, that they know who I am. What was your favorite stream you've been on with the Twitch creator? I watched you on Kais. I remember that. Yeah, that was it's it's always tricky to have like whenever people say favorite. Sure. I always was the most interesting. Interesting. OK, so one of the just kind of a really fun one was when we were first working on this technology we have called Stream Together to allow people to easy collaborate together.

12:45I kind of went and dropped into T-Pain Stream. OK. And then we went and grabbed Will Neff. And then I think we went and popped into S-Fan's chat, S-Fan TV, and then Wake Wilder. And we were just hanging out for like three hours, you know, just riffing on different topics. Right. And then at one point, some folks had to leave. And I went on this to this one freestyle rapper. I know Thug Shell. She's not super big, but very good. And she was like beside herself that T-Pain was dropping in. And then she, T-Pain gave her three seeds for freestyle rap. Okay. And so he, and then she had to freestyle rap, you know, with T-Pain.

13:32And that was, for her, that was just like amazing. And it's a good example where it was like zero of it was planned. And I love just the impromptu nature of it. And we, afterwards we all said, wow, that was like a really fun three hours. Are all of these streamers that you're mentioning, are they growing in a similar way? Like what's the path to growth? Because that's what we've heard from creators is always the toughest thing. Like discoverability, growth. Discoverability in general is always hard when you're of a creator of any sort. Because certain people do get discovered and certain people don't.

14:02And the ones who haven't making a big say discoverability is hard. People that want to be actors, they say discoverability is hard. Right? Getting a job to break out. If you talk to a musician, what does a musician say? Well, it's tough to get my break. Right? If you talk to an artist, literally any creative venue. So first of all, there's this thing that it is true. We all love to create as human beings. As human beings, we are innately creators. So whenever you have a platform that plays to creators, however many people that can make it, there'll be 10 times many that can. Now, going to your question, though, I do think live streaming is harder.

14:37The magic of live streaming, especially the way Twitch does it, which is different than other platforms, is we design our platform so the audience stays. We don't try to distract them and get them off to something else. okay um what happens then is that's what builds community everyone that's gone to other platforms such as youtube or something they say what do you miss about twitch 100 say well i miss the community the reason you get a community experience on twitch is because people pull up a chair and stay for a while and then they get to know each other meaning the people that are chatting and then you start recognizing the names and there's something.

15:17So as opposed to it just being a streamer talking with a bunch of people watching, the people that watching now feel connected and the person streaming recognizes them and feels connected. And that for me is what a community is, right? And because of that, someone who watches Twitch might watch four to eight streamers in a week. And that's a feature of Twitch. Okay. That's why people feel that sense of community is someone might sit and watch for an hour. Now on TikTok, someone is exposed to a thousand or 2000 creators in a week. So short form content is inherently easier for someone to be discovered because you're exposed to 2000 creators in a week.

16:09The two big things are, collaboration, which we spent a lot on trying to encourage. We're working with other streamers because suppose you have two friends that don't know each other. Okay. And you say, well, you two should get together. You two will like each other. They never get together. You just tell them to, right? Literally never. Okay. That's kind of like a homepage recommendation on Twitch, right? Because it's like, we're telling you, oh, you might like this because, you know, and it's like yeah yeah yeah i've got a lot of friends already okay to me that's like almost like your parents tell me yeah it's not because sometimes if my friend tells me maybe i'll meet up with that person but if my parents tell me like yeah it's like and even if your friends tell you you're just busy because you have friends yeah okay now suppose i i say oh i'm gonna go i'm going out to this bar show up and i'll introduce you to and both y 'all come with a group of friends okay and then i introduce you to and then as soon as i introduce you to i take off that's what happens kind of in a raid on twitch which is a good thing but a lot of times you go back to the friends you already know they chat for a little while but then if they're both with friends they hang with the friends they really know now suppose i hang out there for an hour well now you two start talking to each other better yet suppose i go there every monday night okay now after a month going there every monday night you two may be hanging out with each other without me because you see each other, you know, every Monday night when we show up.

17:32And so in the end, it takes time to really feel that sense of community. So collaboration is a big part. And then leveraging other platforms, short form content, because, you know, a lot of people that do well, they also understand they are creators, not just Twitch streamers. Find interesting stuff from your stream, share it on YouTube, you know, share it on TikTok, share it on Instagram, it's short form content, and it all feeds together. It's also a more stable form of revenue for creators. If you can get there harder to get there, way harder to get people to, to subscribe and pay out of their, their money.

18:06But, uh, it is a more pure relationship. We often talk about on the show how like as a creator, the audience is, is kind of your boss in a way, uh, like without them, you don't have a job. Um, and so for them to be able to be actually voting with their dollars on what they want from you is a pretty different relationship than like we get paid from an advertiser, but we need to maintain this relationship with you, the audience. That is actually a pretty different relationship. Right. But you ultimately have to service that advertiser if you want to keep. Whereas in this case, the predominant you and as we say, you have to predominantly service your community.

18:44We do have ads, but since most, you know, a significant portion is coming, you know, fundamentally, you realize, yes, your community is, you know, who you're there for. is there any pressure from amazon to shift really what twitch is because i feel like i would assume i'm looking at twitch i'm looking at the fact that we have this prime subs where we offer up five dollars out of that subscription and i'm looking at the growth of youtube with long-form video and thinking we have all these long-form creators differences we're live they're primarily not why don't we offer more strictly video why don't we try and compete in a different way yeah So that, I wouldn't say we pressure from Amazon.

19:23I mean, that, that question has come up, you know, across Twitch's lifetime. Right. And I think you have this challenge that a lot of companies make this mistake where they try to be someone else when somebody else has something that's working because they think they can be all things to all people. Okay. And not always, but often those efforts fail because they don't understand what is it that makes them you know special and unique um and i've often said youtube is designed exceptionally well for vod content okay remember how i talked about pull up in the chair and stay a while the thing that works really well on youtube is related videos because you're watching something you get a little bored you look down to your right you find something else you click something you click you click and that keeps you moving so um so you know i used to run product engineering at YouTube.

20:18And, um, I was there when we started, interestingly, YouTube live at the time, you probably remember this. They used to have what they called watch on the channel page. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. And the contract was sort of this. If you drive your audience to your channel page, you get to keep them right. You know, and as opposed you go to come check me out on YouTube and you give them your channel page and they link it and they go to your channel page and they hit play a video. Yeah. They stay on your channel page. So that way they watch another video and another video and another video. So essentially YouTube won't distract the viewer with other people's content.

20:53If you can get them to your channel, that was the old way it worked. And that was the way we thought about it. Um, but if, if we send them to you, well, we're going to put that on what's called the watch page and then we're going to show them other stuff, right? That's the magic of YouTube. Um, while I was there, we made the decision. Interestingly, initially I was, I was against it, but I was wrong, um, uh, to what's called take watch off the channel page and originally live was going to be on your channel page okay that when you go live you'd be on your channel page which is the way it works in twitch when you're live you're on your channel page um we decided to take it off it was absolutely the right decision it helped a lot because in general those things were these sort of dead ends on youtube right because i might watch one of your videos two of your videos and then i'd be like okay i'm gonna go do something else right right whereas if i kept showing you other stuff okay and so the site of youtube is great for broad content the site of twitch is great for live content that if we wanted to be you know as good as youtube you know which is how many people have tried to compete with youtube and failed miserably right i remember when i was there aol was like we're gonna come after facebook right face i mean yeah facebook could not succeed so first of all we would just even if we deeply wanted to do it.

22:09I think this idea of succeeding is a bit fantastical, but you know, if we did, you can't serve two masters. You have to understand. And the thing that makes Twitch so special is the community. Right. And that's why, you know, YouTube, you know, recruited a bunch of our creators with this idea. Oh, we want to go ahead and, you know, capture what Twitch has live and it didn't work. Right. And all of the creators, once they stopped getting overpaid, paid more than what they were organically making came back to Twitch because Twitch is designed for a live experience and for community experience. I use the phrase community centric live because if what you're doing is once every 12 weeks, you might go live for 20 minutes.

22:53Well, that doesn't build a community. A community comes up. Let's take what you do. Like, you know, you have people that watch you regularly yeah right and build this connection because they watch you regularly and they rely on seeing it regularly um if you just did it every now and then it's very different so twitch is designed for people who want to create live content regularly want to build this authentic connection with their fans and turn their fans into community and um you know that's not what youtube so yes there's always talk of we should go into this or we should go into that and i'm like know what you're good at we're a community-centric live we may use short form we may do other things but you understand that that is the magic of twitch you probably answered this question but we have a couple of questions from uh different sized creators okay that's great yo dan uh when are we bringing back twitch contracts

23:56well well jason jason oh wait we we oh we brought him back you just don't have one sorry jason you just don't know i got him who told jason okay come on we agreed not to tell jason secrets out okay damn uh uh yeah they ain't coming back that goes on that question when um those were big headlines we should contextualize people don't know what a twitch what happened was big big headlines right so so before i say what twitch did let me talk about what youtube did in this space okay youtube has always just had a you know rev share that everyone gets yeah so um uh At one point, AOL, yes, AOL used to exist and used to do these sorts of things, decided to go big after YouTube creators and started offering them these contracts to come and create their stuff for instead of YouTube, right?

24:52And Facebook did the same thing. Yeah. Did Twitch suddenly, I mean, did YouTube suddenly give them these big minimum guaranteed contracts? No. They said, okay, well, you know, we've got a lot of creators over here, right? You know, good. You know, they didn't exercise. So he's like, yeah. And so you had folks that went and started making content on AOL or started making content on Facebook. And then for a little while, they came back to YouTube. Twitch, when the biggest one was with Mixer. Yeah. Where they recruited Ninja. Okay. And then Shroud. Okay. And the Ninja deal, again, the headlines were like, the numbers were insane.

25:28Wasn't the Ninja deal like$100 million or something? I don't think it was. I don't think it was$100 million. I don't think it was$100 million, but it might have. I don't remember. Somebody's was$100 million. Oh, it was recently XQCs. But it was huge. I don't remember exactly whether it was, you know, 20 or 30 or something. Let's even say it's$30 million. That's crazy. It's a lot of money. Life-changing money. Right. At the time, the way our contracts worked was if you wanted to be a partner, you could only stream on Twitch. Okay? And so when Ninja got this deal, he went over and, of course, then Mixer did an exclusive deal too.

26:04And it was really hard because... Twitch was his family. And he was sort of, you know, had to leave his family. Okay. Because for this payday. And that happened with Tim, the tap man, a bunch of YouTube, a number of Ludwig, right. And, um, as this was happening, we started matching and we said, okay, well, we're going to go ahead and negotiate deals. And we started doing, um, deals of our own. Um, uh, what we saw was in general, when someone would take one of these deals, um uh some viewers would leave but most wouldn't most would start watching somebody else okay and what happened if we take someone like tim the tap man youtube people that would have been watching vods on youtube now we're watching tim the tap man okay it wasn't that twitch viewers left twitch got it to go over to youtube they then would watch nick merks as opposed to tim the tap man or XQC, right?

27:07You know, one reason XQC got big is these other folks left and that created space, right? Just, you know, the idea of a tree falls in the forest, another tree grows, right? And so I think this kind of, and then as soon as you start giving deals, there's always someone you don't give a deal to. And now they think you don't appreciate them. And that actually really matters, right? Even if you said, well, you're still making really good money it's like yeah but why didn't you give me a deal if you really liked me you would have given me a deal why don't you want me to stay yeah and then you also have agents agents once once the headlines start hitting they're they're shopping around yes they are calling hey mixer what's the deal hey and also it is hard to say no to that amount of money as a creator like i don't blame ninja for taking that deal but i do think it had a dramatic impact on his brand meaning on like where ninja is today is that changed the trajectory that changed the trajectory that changed the trajectory and um that's and you know one way that many creators make money is through sponsorships and many other things yeah so now our approach is you know you know i've had this where i'll be talking to a creator before they get some deal and they may they may go and i'm like well look i'm i'm happy for you you know and i'll be happy when you come back right um and that's what we've continued to see and you know interestingly so we got by the way we got rid of that exclusivity clause which was in the partner deal we said no that's personally i felt like that was like who doesn't allow you to go use another platform imagine if youtube said oh you want to be a partner you can't post things on instagram you'd be like what yeah yeah that's silly right and so i i i never liked that and so you know now and that's why we also allowed simulcasting so like ninja i had dinner with him shortly i became ceo and like this being back at twitch really mattered to him you know because now and but if he wants to simulcast you know he simulcasts on youtube great that's the right thing for him so let him do it i think one of the most interesting things that i'm that maybe just an important thing for people to understand is different from hollywood streamers.

29:22So Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, they don't really have brands to the audience, right? Like it's not, if I'm watching Severance on Apple TV, if they moved that to Netflix, I would just go watch it on Netflix. But the dramatic difference in what happened with social platforms is that they each have a culture to being a part of the community. Like being a YouTube viewer is a specific culture. Being a Twitch viewer is a specific culture. And I think that hits at what you're saying is like just you take the creator off it doesn't make you not a twitch member like a twitch community member you're still a twitch community member but if you took my favorite show off netflix and moved it to another platform i'd just go watch it on the other platform your affinity and the interesting thing is twitch is sort of in the middle of this space okay so let me use this comparison if um because some folks did go i'm not saying no one might you know like 10 or 15 percent might go but not a vast majority not a vast majority and um if a creator stopped creating content on tiktok for three weeks you don't even notice oh you wouldn't yeah you would have no you would have no idea let's say like mr beast one of the biggest or kabi lame like if they never post another tiktok again you might not notice right at all right right right and for most you don't they take a month off i don't notice right and yeah um uh um if somebody stops creating twitch content for a period of time you know it that's because you only watch four to eight And so there's this continuum of is your affinity with the platform or with, well, I'll say the content.

30:53Because when you talk about severance, it's not a creator. It's the content. Yeah, it's content. For us, the content is the creator. Okay. And when you go to, you don't have an emotional affinity to Apple TV or any of them. Yeah. Right? You know, interesting. The affinity with the creator is very weak in TikTok. It's mostly with the platform. and twitch you have a lot of affinity with creators but you also have affinity with the platform right so it kind of both happens if someone tried to pull kai right now in an exclusive contract would you fight it like if somebody was like we mean would we offer we like at times kai you know would we as you say fight it we would want kai to stay yeah that's what i mean like has also created a universe at this point if you think about it if he actually were to leave yeah a lot of the universe would actually still be there of like the people that show up have started streaming around him sure but i'm just asking like if if tomorrow kai's team called and said hey we got an offer and kai's gonna is thinking about taking it and going exclusive to another platform right to another platform we would approach it because again as soon as i would do that there then there's the next one there's the next one there's the next one that the next one and in fact now this is a little while ago but kai has had folks that have done it and he made the decision no i want to lean in and build my brand right you know the phrase that he says i now this was back a while before he was he says i want to be the you know the mr beast of twitch which you can say that's what he's become because he has leaned in and in terms of return because sponsorship for a creator as you get bigger sponsorship is a disproportionate amount of your revenue and what matters is is how big is your brand this is one reason why i was a fan of allowing simulcasting because as you get bigger some folks want to simulcast and that's great because twitch is still really their home you know another because for community-based live streaming it's just different right so you know t-pain he simulcasts a lot but where else is he on youtube at times yeah he'll simulcast and other things but twitch is his home that's where he streams That's what he thinks about.

32:58Can you get specific, though, about community-based live streaming? Outside of the fact that Twitch will not distract you and you're still on the channel page, what are the intricacies and nuances of what makes Twitch actually a great home for community? We are creatures of habit. Okay. And so when you're using a particular app, you're programmed to behave in a particular way. If you're watching TikTok, you're programmed to swipe. And your hand just does it. okay because that's how you're programmed okay so it's not just that we don't in other words when you watch twitch you're designed to stay a while and that's what you do so that's what you do repeatedly and i think that is a huge yeah part of it okay the foundation of community is shared experiences condensed over a period of time you know for those people who don't use Twitch all the time, like they don't understand that, you know, a subscription is not to gain access to content, right?

33:59It is to support a creator. As part of that, you get the ability to use their emotes. For those who don't use Twitch, emotes is basically a language, a shared language of those people that subscribe and you get status in the community for supporting them. Now, one of the biggest kind of things that Twitch did that made such a difference for us is we introduced what's called gift subscriptions. And so this is if a person, as opposed to giving you $5, now$5.99 for a subscription, they want to give you$25, right? They could give you a cheering or a tip, but they could give you five gift subscriptions.

34:35And what that is, is you're giving these five subscriptions to somebody in the community, okay? But I'm really giving more money to the creator. But it's kind of like if you have a tip jar of a musician. And when I put a dollar in, everybody in the audience gets a treat, a coin, you know, some candy. So then everybody in the audience is like, hey, thanks for putting it in because they feel like something's coming back to them. And that was hugely important because they're giving money to the creator. but it's part of a community experience and the community like resonates with it and i get status and everybody says yo dj glancy you know thanks you know yeah yeah yeah i think that's actually probably something jack conti recognized early on in the context of patreons like being a patron of an artist gives you status as the patron which is a really interesting thing to recognize like there's an identity piece to me being a patron yes of my favorite creator so so in the music arena i'm a big believer that musicians under monetize the emotional connection that that their fans have because music is central in our lives but you know even when you listen a lot maybe somebody gets 20 or 30 bucks a year out of your pocket right in twitch yeah they'll get a lot more what happens a lot now in concerts is there's both t-shirts and album sales okay both of them are actually acts of patronage because you don't need another t-shirt you buy the t-shirt to then wear it and say i was there at whatever the artist was i went to their concert and then other people see that you went oh you're a springsteen fan too oh you were at the you're at the concert cool yeah i was there right and so it is and you pay 50 bucks for a 20 t-shirt why are you paying 50 bucks for 20 it's patronage um the head of universal music told me 50 percent of albums are never unwrapped that makes so sense i bet you that's with books too that they don't get right right yeah it's an identity piece you put it on the table to say i am the person who supports this type of form of patronage because you love this artist you you bought the ticket and you're like there at the moment it's like god what i like you want and it's an expression of that and then you put it somewhere and that's a sign that hey i'm a big fan of you know yeah filling the brain yeah yeah that's really interesting so i i think youtube's amazing in a lot of things but they have definitely like uh pushed in the direction of of almost like creator to audience yeah right and and twitch has a great audience to audience connection right that's that's like and that is a sticky connection that we oftentimes used to talk about the world of uh uploading a youtube video early on like we felt community very early on because youtube has felt underground yeah 2010 you weren't part of a niche thing if you were on a youtube viewer um but it almost felt like whenever we upload we uploaded we thought about it as opening the doors to a convention hall and allowing a like-minded audience to come in and then they got to hang out with each other but that is happening on the individual unit of a youtube video each time not in like a yeah you know solo kind of this is this is the convention hall you're always here and when we come out we come out but when we go we go but you're staying there's something about that um uh experiencing that connection live for you you know that you can you can you know right now you you know post a video and you can look at the views you know the likes whatever and then you feel good because it's like all right guys this video was good there's something different about getting that kind of oxytocin in the moment when something's happening sure yeah getting that feedback right if i see a video even on youtube from last week if i comment on it my expectation is probably not that the creator will see it people in the comments won't probably see it or respond right like the further the video is in the past the less likely you are to expect any type of community or interaction right now we're sitting here talking and we're we're we're looking at each other's faces to get feedback right and if i say something kind of funny and you go and you just now you said that's and you smiled a tiny bit and without even thinking about it i feel good when i see you go and then i tell a joke and you laugh right you have somebody else here if you're sitting there by yourself telling a joke and you say something really funny and you have no idea whether or not it's funny it's like but when you're live you get that immediate feedback because you see chat going off you see all that happening that's interesting that that uh that i think we should double click on is that ludwig said this to us like i early on i didn't fully understand like the role of chat i thought it was like a bunch of individuals right yeah yeah but like chat is a character in most people's street right like and it has now become a part of culture in a way that like we had um we had a creator named Anthpo on the show.

39:41He made the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest in New York. I don't know if you saw that, but he, uh, while we were recording, there was a, there was a crew in the room and he kept turning to that crew and saying, chat, what do we think about that? And I thought it was so interesting that, that like vocabulary has permeated the culture. Any group of people, any group of people is chat, right? It's like, not necessarily like the peanut gallery that I might be like dating myself so much, but like it is. And Ludwig, when he first talked to us about how he viewed Twitch, he liked to have an adversarial relationship with chat because there was tension to it.

40:13The subathon is a great example. Yeah, they are trying to... It's a more interesting story. It's a more interesting story to have that. It creates conflict. I'm going to force you to do something you don't want to do. Right, exactly. So it's not just a synchronous experience. It's a video game. I get to control the player that's in there, right? That's in the screen. And that is, I think, one of the most... Like, I almost wonder if in the future, a lot of, and there'll be a lot of different types of content continuously, but like interactive media is some of the most fun. Yeah. Right. And I was showing you prior, like, you know, prompting Google Veo and making text to video, like that is interactive media.

40:48I'm playing with a joke that I have in my group chat, turning it into video that looks like a newscaster saying the joke, sending it in my group chat. Like I'm, I'm now having an interactive media experience. So now let's, we'll, we'll go with that and whether we keep going on AI or not, but, um, uh, so the reason gaming, I said this early gaming worked on live streaming is because it gave you a stimulus to react to. Okay. That's actually what AI can do too. Right. Because you just told this story about creating stimulus and you can imagine somebody doing that live where they're like prodding and it's stimulus and that causes me to react.

41:28And then they're interacting. a big part of live streaming is finding some type of stimulus that causes me to then do something as opposed to me having to be the source and so i think that's one thing that's very interesting when you think of vo the first thing that came to my mind is wow you know you could do lots of fun things live stream with that could you visualize the current mood of chat i think that would be like the most interesting i think it's like you you convert the aggregate sentiment of chat into a character that says something to the streamer that's laughing or something like that yeah so the interesting that is that by the way that that is one of the big things about the the emotes sure that in fact in general all the emotes represent some emotion okay and so in fact that is back in time for ai that is exactly what's happening because you do something funny and everybody uses your laugh emote right right right if you say something touching they use the you know cry emote right and so you visually see the emotes and you visually respond because you learn to translate that or the clap right you'll have an emote that's clap and you actually learn that and i think there's this interesting question of making it as opposed to just seeing the emotes can you then take that as input for a more overt expression of emotion, people laughing?