Google, every mention

1,220 scenes (said by Ben Gilbert), the whole family · ← back to Google

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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Google comes up

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The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired Jun 23, 2026 · 2 mentions

▶ 1:54:59 Ben Gilbert So I was looking at Google Maps, planning our visit, David, and it looks weird.
▶ 1:56:27 Ben Gilbert And to me, it really symbolizes that animators are the crown of Disney in this era, in the way that at Google, it's engineers, and at Apple, it's designers, and at Microsoft, it's PMs.

Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired May 18, 2026 · 2 mentions

▶ 2:46:04 Ben Gilbert This is like Vanguard is Microsoft and Fidelity is Google, and they could launch Gmail and say that thing, that's your primary business.
▶ 3:22:01 Ben Gilbert Apple, Microsoft, Google, it's all 20% plus these big, uh, Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock, State Street, et cetera.

Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired Mar 5, 2026 · 2 mentions

▶ 1:11:18 Ben Gilbert I mean, Google it.
▶ 4:26:57 Ben Gilbert And lastly, to our friends at Dilupa for providing us with some amazing financial models and spreadsheets of all the historical data on Formula One, just like they did for us on Coca-Cola and Google.

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired Dec 15, 2025 · 14 mentions

▶ 0:42 Ben Gilbert Is this the Google house?
▶ 0:45 Ben Gilbert The, where they had their first office in the garage?
▶ 2:49 Ben Gilbert We thought it'd be a fitting way to cap off the year of our three-part Google series to record in the literal garage where that nearly four trillion dollar company got started.
▶ 6:35 Ben Gilbert The one that they were using, because Google pulled it out of storage for us.
▶ 55:47 Ben Gilbert Google was 40, probably, across the series.
▶ 59:20 Ben Gilbert And like, boy, does Google have that.
▶ 59:22 Ben Gilbert I mean, you just, their last quarter was their first hundred billion dollar quarter ever.
▶ 59:28 Ben Gilbert And that's how they fund, you know, the next Gemini.
▶ 1:06:10 Ben Gilbert And since we recorded this episode in the garage where Google started, we thought this would be a fitting moment to talk about when a startup exits their proverbial garage phase and starts to become a real business.
▶ 1:07:23 Ben Gilbert We talked on our Google series about even with how successful they are today,
▶ 1:07:27 Ben Gilbert By initially ignoring the enterprise, Google left the door open to competitors for a while.
▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.
▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.
▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 80 mentions

▶ 2:33 Ben Gilbert Of course, listeners, this is Google today, and in perhaps the most classic textbook case of the innovator's dilemma,
▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert The entire AI revolution that we are in right now is predicated by the invention of the transformer out of the Google brain team in 2017.
▶ 2:55 Ben Gilbert All the craziness right now depends on that one research paper published by Google in 2017.
▶ 3:03 Ben Gilbert Not only did Google have the densest concentration of AI talent in the world 10 years ago that led to this breakthrough,
▶ 3:09 Ben Gilbert But today, they have just about the best collection of assets that you could possibly ask for.
▶ 3:15 Ben Gilbert They've got a top tier AI model with Gemini.
▶ 3:17 Ben Gilbert They don't rely on some public cloud to host their model.
▶ 3:21 Ben Gilbert They have their own in Google Cloud that now does fifty billion dollars in revenue.
▶ 3:21 Ben Gilbert They have their own in Google Cloud that now does fifty billion dollars in revenue.
▶ 3:27 Ben Gilbert They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.
▶ 3:58 Ben Gilbert Google still has a crazy bench of talent, and despite ChatGPT becoming kind of the Kleenex of the era, Google does still own the text box, the single one that is the front door to the internet for the vast majority of people anytime anyone…
▶ 4:15 Ben Gilbert But the question remains, what should Google do strategically?
▶ 4:19 Ben Gilbert Should they risk it all and lean into their birthright to win in artificial intelligence?
▶ 4:31 Ben Gilbert But perhaps first, we must answer the question, how did Google get here, David Rosenthal?
▶ 4:38 Ben Gilbert So listeners, today, we tell the story of Google, the AI company.
▶ 6:17 Ben Gilbert Google.
▶ 7:27 Ben Gilbert It's pretty difficult to trace a big AI lab now back and not find Google in its origin story.
▶ 12:11 Ben Gilbert Is this in one of Google's micro kitchens?
▶ 16:39 Ben Gilbert Jeff Dean is going to be the through line of this episode of, wait, how did Google pull that off?
▶ 16:44 Ben Gilbert How did Jeff Dean just go home and over the weekend rewrite some entire giant distributed system and figure out all of Google's problems?
▶ 16:52 Ben Gilbert Back when Chuck Norris facts were big, Jeff Dean facts became a thing internally at Google.
▶ 18:40 Ben Gilbert They had like a 10 year run where they basically launched everything you know of at Google except for search.
▶ 18:40 Ben Gilbert They had like a 10 year run where they basically launched everything you know of at Google except for search.
▶ 22:29 Ben Gilbert They are the single best company in the world at parallelizing workloads across CPUs across multiple data centers.
▶ 23:53 Ben Gilbert Yep, which is the direct translation to Google's bottom line.
▶ 24:59 Ben Gilbert Funny story about Sebastian, the way that he actually comes to Google.
▶ 27:29 Ben Gilbert Which is essentially Google Maps.
▶ 28:07 Ben Gilbert And Sebastian's first thing was Street View, right?
▶ 28:27 Ben Gilbert Of streets from Street View, and they incorporated some other data.
▶ 37:28 Ben Gilbert So Google Brain.
▶ 38:45 Ben Gilbert And when you say the time might be right, Google had tried twice before, and neither project really worked.
▶ 39:01 Ben Gilbert So there's a little bit of scar tissue in the sort of research group at Google of, are large-scale neural networks actually going to work for us on Google infrastructure?
▶ 39:41 Ben Gilbert You know, Google is all about taking this sort of frontier research and then doing the architectural and engineering system to make it actually run.
▶ 41:49 Ben Gilbert You talk to anyone at Google, you talk to anyone in AI, they're like,
▶ 42:22 Ben Gilbert In Google story.
▶ 42:42 Ben Gilbert And not only that, it could run on a distributed system that Google built to actually make it work on their infrastructure.
▶ 42:53 Ben Gilbert Google's got this big infrastructure asset.
▶ 53:34 Ben Gilbert That includes Google.
▶ 55:33 Ben Gilbert So it's Baidu and Google really going at the end.
▶ 55:41 Ben Gilbert We want to land at Google.
▶ 55:42 Ben Gilbert And so they stop the bidding at forty-four million dollars and just say, Google,
▶ 1:00:03 Ben Gilbert They bought this thing for, we'll talk about the purchase price, but it's worth, what, five hundred billion dollars today?
▶ 1:16:57 Ben Gilbert That squares with what Cade Metz has in his book that the founders would have made about twice as much money from taking Facebook's offer versus taking Google's offer.
▶ 1:17:11 Ben Gilbert Which, by the way, is kind of against everything the company was founded on.
▶ 1:17:16 Ben Gilbert The whole aim of the company and what he's promised the team is that DeepMind is going to stay independent, do research, publish in the scientific community.
▶ 1:17:51 Ben Gilbert Turns out Mark is not flexible on letting Demis keep control of DeepMind.
▶ 1:17:58 Ben Gilbert Demis sort of argued for, we need to stay separate and carved out, and we need this independent oversight board with his ability to intervene if the mission of DeepMind is no longer being followed.
▶ 1:19:17 Ben Gilbert Do you want my story of how Larry knows about the company?
▶ 1:19:23 Ben Gilbert So this is still early in DeepMind's life.
▶ 1:19:28 Ben Gilbert Apparently, Elon Musk is on a private jet with Luke Nosek, who's another member of the PayPal mafia and an angel investor in DeepMind.
▶ 1:19:36 Ben Gilbert And they're reading an email from Demis with an update about a breakthrough that they had where DeepMind AI figured out a clever way to win at the Atari game breakout.
▶ 1:20:31 Ben Gilbert And the crazy thing is, this kinship between Larry and Demis is, I think, the reason why the deal gets done at Google.
▶ 1:21:02 Ben Gilbert Larry was completely on board with the mission of everything that DeepMind was doing.
▶ 1:21:34 Ben Gilbert Brain is like actively going and engaging with the product groups, trying to figure out, hey, how can we deploy neural nets into your product to make it better?
▶ 1:22:19 Ben Gilbert Was Google's head of engineering at the time.
▶ 1:22:52 Ben Gilbert He decides, I'm gonna get on a plane in December before the holidays and go meet DeepMind.
▶ 1:22:56 Ben Gilbert Crazy story about this, Jeff Hinton, who's at Google at the time, had a thing with his back where he couldn't sit down.
▶ 1:24:21 Ben Gilbert There's an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed, and this is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if…
▶ 1:24:21 Ben Gilbert There's an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed, and this is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if…
▶ 1:24:54 Ben Gilbert Famously, the data center cooling thing happens where DeepMind carved off some part of the team to go and be an emissary to Google and look for ways to use DeepMind.
▶ 1:25:09 Ben Gilbert Very quickly, July of 20 16, Google announces a 40% reduction in the energy required to cool data centers.
▶ 1:25:16 Ben Gilbert I mean, Google's got a lot of data centers.
▶ 1:25:25 Ben Gilbert And, I mean, it was just the most obvious application of neural networks inside of Google right away.
▶ 1:25:41 Ben Gilbert I watched the whole documentary that Google produced about it.
▶ 1:25:53 Ben Gilbert It's the story of how DeepMind, post-acquisition from Google, trained a model to beat the world Go champion at Go.
▶ 1:30:46 Ben Gilbert So, what are the second order effects of Google buying DeepMind?
▶ 1:30:46 Ben Gilbert So, what are the second order effects of Google buying DeepMind?
▶ 1:32:33 Ben Gilbert Again, Google's business model and Facebook's business model, these feed recommenders, or these classifiers, turn out to be unbelievably valuable so they can, it's funny in hindsight saying this, pay tons of money to these people.
▶ 1:35:02 Ben Gilbert Free of the forces of Facebook and Google and independent of their control.
▶ 1:35:31 Ben Gilbert It's sort of an activation energy problem where once Ilya said, okay, I'm in, and once he said, I'm in, by the way, Google came back with a big counter, something like double the offer, and I think it was delivered from Jeff Dean…
▶ 1:38:01 Ben Gilbert And was he on Google Brain before this?
▶ 1:40:09 Ben Gilbert Okay, so that's what's going on over at OpenAI, doing a lot of DeepMind-like stuff.
▶ 1:40:23 Ben Gilbert Let's go back to Google, because last we sort of checked in on them.
▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they bought DeepMind, but they had their talent rated, and I don't want you to get the wrong impression about where Google is sitting just because some people left to go to OpenAI.
▶ 1:40:36 Ben Gilbert When Alex Krzyzewski arrives at Google with Jeff Hinton and Ilya Sitskiver, he was shocked to discover that all their existing machine learning models were running on CPUs.
▶ 1:40:46 Ben Gilbert People had asked in the past for GPUs, since machine learning workloads were well suited to run in parallel, but Google's infrastructure team had pushed back and said, the added complexity in expanding and diversifying the fleet, let's…
▶ 1:41:02 Ben Gilbert And so to quote from Genius Makers, in his first days at the company, he went out and bought a GPU machine, this is Alex, from a local electronics store, stuck it in the closet down the hall from his desk, plugged it into the network, and…
▶ 1:41:17 Ben Gilbert Just like he did in academia, except this time Google's paying for the electricity.
▶ 1:41:49 Ben Gilbert Yes, he went on to be Apple's head of AI, who at this point in time was at Google and oversaw Google Brain 20 14.
▶ 1:41:49 Ben Gilbert Yes, he went on to be Apple's head of AI, who at this point in time was at Google and oversaw Google Brain 20 14.