Hey guys, welcome to a very special episode of the podcast in Cannes. I'm here with Kevin Alaka.

I'm going to allow him to kind of give you the context. I have a series of questions, but this kicks off our interview series at Cannes.

Something that I wanted to do for a lot of this audience as the podcast has grown and become far more 360.

Obviously, so much grounded in entrepreneurship and startup culture, but over the last half decade, a lot more in the ad world and the Fortune 500 land.

And what's really exciting about having Kevin on is I think his organization and really ironically what he actually does for a living, I think touches a far majority of the people listening.

So I'm super excited, bro. I'm really glad you're here. Please tell the VaynerNation who you are and what you do.

This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

So I'm Kevin Alaka. I'm the head of culture and trends at YouTube. I basically work on projects that help people find and understand what's popular on YouTube at the end of the day.

And I've been tracking trends at YouTube for almost nine years now. I wrote a book called Videoocracy, which looks at ways that people interact with culture and interact with video and how that influences culture.

So basically, I work on the one side. We do a lot of consumer stuff, basically how we surface and understand what's popular on YouTube.

And then on the other side, I'm here because a lot of times people want to understand in this world what's going on in creativity, what's going on on YouTube.

I mean, this world needs to pay way more attention.

Yeah, you agree with that?

I mean, I think there's a, we were at this phase a few years ago where it was like, okay, there's a lot of audience here. So we're going to pay attention to that audience, but not take a second to understand what they're watching or why they're watching it.

And now we're kind of entering this other phase where I think everybody's starting to see like, oh, to understand how to reach that audience, I need to understand why they're there, what they're doing there, who they care about.

I don't even give this talk this week about this in many ways, but we're so used to making assumptions and value judgments about creativity and about content and what people should like or shouldn't like.

It's audacious.

It's audacious.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, so let's take a step back.

What kind of kid were you?

Like, where'd you grow up?

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