also referred to as: alphabet
includes Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Gemini, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google DeepMind, Google Trends, Google Brain, Google Pixel, Google Drive and 8 more
66 statements across 34 episodes · 16 bullish · 27 bearish · 33 people on the record · first statement Oct 19, 2015 by Jason Zweig · said 1,223 times in 202 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Shane Parrish (203), Google Chrome (95), Benedict Evans (32), Josh Wolfe (25), Balaji Srinivasan (24), Gabriel Weinberg (22), Elad Gil (18), Daniel Gross (18)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 131 mentions in 20 episodes 7 per episode
- Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt
- The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder
- Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power
- The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking | Peter D. Kaufman [Outliers]
- How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones | James Clear
- An Unlikely Empire | J.W. Marriott
- The Obsession That Built Nike | Phil Knight
- Ray Kroc : How McDonald’s Took Over America
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 494 mentions in 49 episodes 10 per episode
- Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans
- Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World
- How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash
- Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier
- Josh Wolfe: Human Advantage in the World of AI
- Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders
- Logan Ury: The Dating Myths You Need to Stop Believing
- Codie Sanchez: Your Blueprint to Financial Freedom
- 41 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 156 mentions in 25 episodes 6 per episode
- Brian Halligan: Building HubSpot into a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- Matthew Dicks: The Storytelling Expert
- John Mackey: Building Whole Foods
- Charlie Hoehn: Write Something People Want to Read
- April Dunford: The Marketing Expert
- Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself
- John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire
- Best of 2024: The Blueprint for a Transformative New Year
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 67 mentions in 27 episodes 2 per episode
- Jason Karp: Live A Healthier Life
- Dr. Gio Valiante (Part 2): Failure and Success
- Ravi Gupta: The Realities of Success
- Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better
- TKP Insights: Learning and Thinking
- Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products
- Dr. Julie Gurner (Part 1): Caring Deeply, Challenging Directly
- Adam Robinson: Positioning Yourself For Success
- 19 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 89 mentions in 20 episodes 4 per episode
- Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State
- #129 Marc Andreessen: Interview with an Icon
- Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals
- Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations
- Barbara Tversky: Action Shapes Thought
- Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
- Justin Su'a: Peak Mental Performance
- Best of 2022: Conversations of the Year
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 30 mentions in 12 episodes 3 per episode
- #104 Nir Eyal: Mastering Indistraction
- #111 Joel Greenblatt: Investing Made Simple
- #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
- #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation
- #113 Sarah Tavel: The Value of Intellectual Rigor
- #108 Thomas Zurbuchen: Adventures in Astrophysics
- #105 Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery
- #127 Best of 2021: Conversations of the Year
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 46 mentions in 15 episodes 3 per episode
- #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day
- #86 BJ Fogg: The Science of Lasting Change
- #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future
- #82 Bill Ackman: Getting Back Up
- #85 Bethany McLean: Crafting a Narrative
- #81 Jason Calacanis: Intelligent Risk
- #94 Chamath Palihapitiya: Understanding Yourself
- #98 Sahil Lavingia: Observing the Present
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2020 →
2019 72 mentions in 9 episodes 8 per episode
- Gabriel Weinberg: Practical Steps to Safeguard Your Data and Identity Online
- #56 Daniel Gross: Catalyzing Success
- #72 Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits
- #50 Josh Wolfe: Inventing the Future
- #63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game
- #61 Jonathan Haidt: When Good Intentions Go Bad
- #60 Jim Dethmer: Leading Above the Line
- #59 Following Intellectual Curiosity with Thomas Tull
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 85 mentions in 11 episodes 8 per episode
- #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
- #48 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 2)
- #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)
- #32 Patrick Collison: Earning Your Stripes
- #28 Michael Mauboussin: A Decision Making Jedi
- #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders
- #39 Tyler Cowen: Thinking About Thinking
- #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2016 31 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- #13 Pedro Domingos: The Rise of The Machines
- Are we too busy to pay attention to life?
- #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers
- #11 Ryan Holiday: The Stoic Whisperer
- #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds
- #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
Everything said about Google, oldest first
Oct 19, 2015 bearish
Nov 13, 2015 neutral
Dixon: VC invests only $10B–$20B yearly, smaller than big tech R&D budgets
“This industry is actually, you know, it gets a lot of attention in the press venture capital, but it's actually a very small industry. So, you know, they're probably, there are a few dozen kind of firms that most people, you know, that, that, that constitute t…”
Aug 30, 2016 negative
Domingos: Mixed Human-Machine Driving Control Is Inherently Dangerous
“This notion of a mix of mixed control between the human and the car is actually very problematic. If someone is not driving the car and then suddenly the computer says like, oh, shoot, I'm confused. Take over. Then the person will not be very well able to take…”
Aug 30, 2016
Domingos: Data Network Effects Create Major Competitive Moats for Machine Learning Incumbents
“There's this network effect of data where if you have a good product and people start using it, then you have a lot of use this, for example, you know, how Google has built up such an unassailable position in search, right? Is like you use their search engine.…”
Aug 30, 2016 positive
Nov 28, 2016 positive
Arbesman: Relying on Google over memory ensures more up-to-date knowledge
“When people talk about how the internet and Google is ruining our brains or our memories I am actually much more positively inclined towards those technologies simply because it, if we don't necessarily have as good memories anymore, It means that we now actua…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Jan 23, 2018 bullish
Mauboussin: Tech giants leverage capital into insurmountable data capture flywheels
“The amount of data that they can capture, and because all those companies have substantial resources, they can put a lot of resources against not only capturing, but analyzing data. It's an interesting flywheel, right?”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Building a new mass-market digital advertising business is no longer viable
“The real sort of problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser back end such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominan…”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Platform incentives forced media to cover Trump by replacing editorial gatekeeping
“The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted, they, and so the news in media organizations were responding To the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers, they were sort of serfs in Google and Fa…”
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Privacy regulations like GDPR disproportionately entrench monopolies like Google and Facebook
“If you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising,
The alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more.
Like is, is every site with advertising on it going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks t…”
Sep 5, 2018 bullish
Sep 5, 2018 bearish
Tech giants will be disrupted by paradigm shifts, not direct competitors
“Their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for, you know, the powers that be to compete.”
Sep 18, 2018 negative
Lütke calls Google's internal "Googliness" scoring concept super dystopian
“I think apparently, I, I've never worked for Google, obviously, but apparently people talk internally, talk about sort of a Googliness score, which to me sounds super dystopian, and I hope I score lowly, I score low in that.”
Oct 16, 2018
Garvey Berger: Knowledge workers are valued for willingness to learn, not existing knowledge
“I think that means that the core attribute is not how much you know, but how much you're willing to learn and how much you're willing to question what you know. If what we want is, is stuff that's known, Google will do that for you, right? Like you don't, we d…”
Dec 26, 2018 neutral
Robinson: User Data's True Value Comes from Aggregate Cross-Referencing
“The value of your data is when they cross-reference it with other people, right? The value emerges not just because Shane is using Google, but lots of other people are, and they're able to do, use statistics and machine learning to find patterns so that they u…”
Dec 26, 2018 neutral
Apr 16, 2019 negative
Gross: Gmail optimizes for engagement metrics over user productivity goals
“Gmail is a product suited for communication, but ultimately when you open up a session of Gmail, there are like things you want to accomplish.
and I do not think Gmail works for you to accomplish that goal.
I think it works to accomplish the organizational im…”
Apr 16, 2019 bullish
Gross: YouTube drives intent proactively while Google Search reacts
“YouTube is proactive and Google is reactive. So when you go to Google, you come with an intent, and they have to satisfy that intent. I mean, since they made this fix in 2012, where they tweak the algorithm a little bit, we can talk about that in a minute. You…”
Apr 16, 2019
Gross: Enduring corporate culture is built through scarcity, not early abundance
“It's in many ways in, in scarcity where, where you build culture. It's not in an era of plenty. And one of the most challenging things I think for Google and Facebook's culture is, you know, they really stuck a toothpick into the sand and had a massive oil wel…”
Apr 16, 2019 positive
Gross: Apple chose privacy over beating Google to market in ML
“While I was at Apple, this was before the whole Cambridge Analytica Facebook debacle I noticed this very strong organizational tilt towards privacy, towards customer and user privacy. And I gotta tell you, I was in the room, I was a little bit of the devil her…”
Apr 16, 2019 neutral
Gross: Google will always beat Apple in services, but lose in hardware
“And I think this will always be the case. They will try to always fix this, but it will always be the case that Google will be amazing at services because ads requires a service business model, and Apple will be amazing at kind of user experience and hardware.…”
Apr 16, 2019 bearish
Apr 16, 2019 neutral
Gross: Corporate cultures emerge directly from underlying tech business models
“So in, in many ways, I think the cultural differences between Google and Apple or Facebook and Apple are just emerging properties of an ads driven business model versus we sell you shrink wrapped, you know, pieces of hardware business model.”
Apr 16, 2019 positive
May 14, 2019 negative
May 14, 2019 neutral
Google Still Makes the Majority of Its Revenue From Contextual Keyword Ads
“And if you think about it, that's really still what Google does most of the time on Google search because all the search ads are still bid on keywords, right? They're just using your search history in addition to target ads of you on YouTube and Gmail and the …”
May 14, 2019 negative
Google Tracks 80% of the Top Million Websites; Facebook Tracks 25%
“Google's on about 80% of the top million sites and a lot of that's Google Analytics, but also, like the Google Ads and stuff like that. Facebook's on 25% and that's this Facebook pixel where it could be the Facebook login, or just sites run Facebook ads, or th…”
Apr 28, 2020 negative
Ackman: Herbalife runs paid Google ads targeting my name
“Herbalife is still running a negative campaign about me personally, which I find fairly remarkable. The way you can see this is if you Google my name I don't know if you want to do this right now. What will pop up is an advertisement And it, the advertisement …”
Jun 9, 2020 bearish
McLean: Google and Facebook's models will be impaired if journalism dies
“Google and Facebook, right? They're siphoning up most of the advertising dollars that used to go to journalism, and yet Google and Facebook, it will deeply impair their business models if journalism ceases to function, right?”
Sep 29, 2020 negative
Dec 8, 2020
Lavingia: Startups Need Billion-Dollar Upside to Attract Big-Tech Talent
“The early employees might only have half a percent of the company, one percent of the company, two percent of the company. And so they also are looking for it. I mean, they're turning down offers for, you know, from Facebook and Google and Uber at like, you kn…”
Mar 23, 2021
May 18, 2021 bullish
Greenblatt: Tech mega-caps driving the market are not irrationally valued
“Most of the big indexes are driven by the Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and those businesses don't seem very irrational to me. Those are some of the greatest businesses that man has ever created partially due to the internet interconnectedness of the world…”
Apr 5, 2022 bearish
Apr 5, 2022 negative
Srinivasan: Google search quality is now quite low for many queries
“Google had this great thing with where it was able to use backlinks as a imperfect measure of search quality. And now they've, you know, lost sight of that, and search quality is actually quite low for many queries, you know, as you've probably seen, right?”
Apr 5, 2022 bearish
Dec 13, 2022 positive
Balcetis: Google Reduced Unhealthy Snacking by Altering Visual Accessibility
“What they found was that just by changing what it is that people could see easily, they changed consumption patterns. People people ate less of the unhealthier stuff, even though it was still there, simply because it was sort of out of sight.”
Jan 10, 2023 positive
Kornfield used a candle-lighting ritual to ground Google vice presidents
“I remember going into Google to work with the top, you know, vice presidents who helped run the company, and there were in this white, I mean, in this glass cubicle, because it's sort of open floor plan, but you can kind of sit and close some doors so it's not…”
Apr 18, 2023 neutral
Gupta: Google succeeds via its internet toll product, not internal processes
“I don't think that's the reason Google successful. I think the reason Google successful is because they have a product that you have to use. Most of the time you use the internet and they effectively get to charge you a toll every time you use it. And I think …”
Aug 8, 2023 negative
Monolithic functional structures kill momentum in large organizations
“You can create focus in, in a multi mission organization. You absolutely can. I mean, certainly Google was actually quite legendary for doing a lot of that stuff. Cause they had a lot of successful things that they did. And I think there's many other companies…”
Aug 8, 2023 negative
Nov 28, 2023 neutral
Dec 26, 2023 negative
Aug 6, 2024 neutral
Aug 6, 2024 bearish
Halligan predicts inbound traffic will shift from Google to ChatGPT
“I think over the next five years, that's going to change a lot. I think Google's going to have to change a lot, and I think people are going to spend more and more of their time inside ChatGPT, and they're all ChatGPT's competitors.”
Aug 6, 2024 negative
Halligan: Big tech 'press release hires' usually fail at scaling startups
“If you're hiring someone that you want to go from two to 2000, you're just really attracted by that person who came from Google or Microsoft or whatever huge company with a huge resume and all that stuff. And once in a blue moon, that'll work, but generally th…”
Aug 6, 2024 bullish
Jan 21, 2025 positive
Investors who sat out the 1999 bubble missed Google and Salesforce
“And if you decided not to invest in that time, you would have missed out on Google, Salesforce, PayPal, Zappos, OpenTable. There are a lot of great companies that were still founded during that time, and Paying market prices for those investments would have be…”
Jan 21, 2025 negative
Startups building incremental AI refinements will become roadkill for Big Tech
“Other things that, you know, I'd say we try to avoid is things that are roadkill along the way of a company like OpenAI or Google or Amazon or Meta. So, small refinements into what the model doesn't do well today. That's just gonna be real cool along the way.”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Mar 4, 2025 positive
May 13, 2025 positive
Gil: Tesla and Waymo won Western self-driving as incumbents over dozens of startups
“And if you actually look at self-driving, which was sort of an earlier AI revolution in some sense, the two winners, at least in the West, seemed to be Tesla, which was an incumbent carmaker in some sense, by the point that they were willing to step out, and G…”
May 13, 2025 bearish
May 13, 2025 neutral
Gil: Major open-source technologies historically require giant corporate backers
“Almost every single major open source company has had a giant, ah, institutional backer. IBM was the biggest funder of Linux in the nineties as a counterbalance to Microsoft. And the biggest funders of all the open source browsers are Apple and Google with Web…”
May 13, 2025 neutral
Gil: Startups captured 80% of Internet value, while incumbents won mobile
“So the internet was 80% startup value. It was Google, it was Amazon, you know, it was all these companies we now know and love. Meta, you know and then mobile, the mobile revolution was probably 80% incumbent value, or 90%, right? And so that was, mobile searc…”
Sep 2, 2025 negative
Evans: Google and Meta's proprietary data provides no LLM training moat
“So I'd actually, I think it's actually the opposite, which is that everyone's kind of using the same data. Which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that Meta has is not actually enough to move, to be a ki…”
Sep 2, 2025 neutral
Sep 2, 2025 bearish
Sep 30, 2025 negative
Diller: Google's search monopoly treats dependent web businesses like serfs
“Google, absolute monopoly on search, and all your traffic, I mean, at least half your traffic, if you were healthy, would come from people coming directly to you. But the other half, Without which you wouldn't be able to survive came from Google and Google ove…”
Oct 14, 2025 neutral
Cool: AI is increasing tech capital intensity and raising entry barriers
“If you look at the tech businesses, historically, there wasn't a lot of capital required. Google or others, they had network effect and these other dynamics that drove the moat, and so you didn't have capital. Now with AI, that's shifting quite considerably bu…”
Dec 9, 2025
Mar 3, 2026 positive
Tenev: Harmonic surpassed Google AlphaProof's capabilities within one year
“Alpha Proof was the first AI model to get a silver medal, to achieve silver medal performance at the IMO last year.
But Alpha Proof they did not announce a gold this year.
So, yeah, we were we were, the Harmonic team was excited about that, that, you know, i…”