What happens to Google when AI answers everything? with Google’s Liz Reid

AI can fix healthcare. I'm Henry Blodgett and this week on my show Solutions, I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Bob Wachter, author of A Giant How AI is Transforming Healthcare and what It Means for our future. Dr. Wachter was not expecting to be an AI optimist. What convinced him? Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett wherever you get your podcasts.

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To hear more this week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm taking you inside my sold out New York City book tour stop for my brand new book, well Endowed. I sat down with the hilarious Heather McMahon for a night of laughs, real money talk and honest financial truths. We're getting into everything the book covers from how to actually build wealth, how to protect it, and how to stop leaving money on the table. Whether you've already grabbed your copy of well Endowed or you're still on the fence, this episode will show you exactly why everyone's talking about it. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF.

0:24

LLMs had been in search long before we had Bert and then we had Mum.

1:01

Are Bert and Mum the search goats who've been there for 20 years? Or those technologies.

1:06

Bert and Mum are search technologies.

1:11

There is probably a Bert inside.

1:15

I'm sure there's a Bert somewhere.

1:16

It's access time. What's up, Ellis?

1:21

Yo, we're out here. It's Wednesday, isn't it? I don't even remember what day of the week it is.

1:25

Half the time I don't know either. But LA is gorgeous and I am excited to be back on the road again soon. I was in the same place for about three weeks and that's been wonderful. But it's. It's calling me. The road's calling me, Ellis.

1:30

Well, so where are you going next?

1:47

So, Tahoe this weekend for some skiing with the family. I've not really skied before, so I'm a little nervous. Nervous. And obviously Tahoe had the awful blizzard.

1:48

Dude, for real. Can you wear some wrist guards for me, my man? We can't lose those typing hands though. I guess you're dictating a lot these days.

1:58

I'm doing baby slopes. And then next week, quick trip to San Francisco for some AI meetings, some gdc, the big gaming conference things, you know, I gotta. Gotta try to attend as many fancy things as I can. And then south by Southwest the following weekend.

2:06

How many contacts are in your phone app, Alex?

2:25

That's a good question. I should look.

2:29

Can we get a quick look?

2:31

Does it show you does it actually give you.

2:34

Yeah, you have to like press on the little left column.

2:36

It says 1,437.

2:39

I'm not impressed. Do you keep them elsewhere? Do you have a secret gold?

2:42

I do.

2:45

I have.

2:45

I have stuff in signal. I've got stuff elsewhere.

2:46

You have a scoop CRM. Can you vibe code your own scoop CRM?

2:49

That is on my to do list and we're going to talk about that. But first, just want to. If you're going to happen to be in Austin at South By, I'm doing two things. One is a panel with our friends at Superhuman at their space at Antoine's about taste and curation in the age of AI. Why it matters, how I'm thinking about it for the pod, but also for the newsletter and sources. And that's going to be just a great one, I think. And then I'm going to be moderating a conversation with 10 cents. Basically. Head of gaming here in the United States, they have a ton of games in their portfolio and they're a pretty black box kind of company. They don't really speak much. So that hopefully that one that's interesting for people, that's on Tuesday. You do not need a badge to go to the Superhuman one, but you will need a South by badge for the 10 cent one.

2:52

It's so funny. I feel like we keep discovering that you and I are interacting with the same companies on different email threads. I mean, I'm working with Superhuman on their story. Right now you're speaking at the Superhuman suite about why dudes like you wear shoes that look like hooves these days. And we got all of our bases covered. We do your New Balances. I wanted to copy your New Balances. Yours look more like hooves, which would seem to offer a lot of traction. Mine look more traditional. Dad shoe.

3:45

I'm on a six right now. I'm on a bit of an A six kick. I do have New Balance that I love. But yeah, I just copped a couple Asics that I'm. I'm really feeling.

4:16

How do they compare? I feel like that's definitely a convo in tech about what the best sneaker of the moment is. Now that all birds are out, Adams are out, man.

4:25

So Sam Allman wore these LEGO limited editions that I saw in an interview and I was like, damn, those are sick. They're multicolor, you know, the Lego colors. And I looked them up on Stockx and of course they're like $1,000. So I didn't get those. But yes, I'm getting Into sneakers slowly. I'm trying to not get too into it, but it's hard to not fall down the rabbit hole.

4:35

Are you noticing any other fashion trends in your travels to all corners of the tech universe, or is it just still vests and whatnot?

5:01

It's not, no. I mean, I'll be curious to see what people are rocking in super puffer jackets. I went to a southern themed party recently and got a black bandana. So maybe I'll add that to whatever I'm wearing in Austin, you know, to keep it on theme. But yeah, no, otherwise gonna try to play some Texas hold' Em in Texas and have fun and gonna go to a thing for Spotify and Tick Tock and I mean, you went to south by back in the day, right? It's. It's. You remember the madness of it?

5:08

Yeah, I mean, gosh, it was more than 10 years ago at this point, and I remember it kind of being like a PR free for all more than anything else. I mean, it's not clear why it exists. It just kind of spontaneously exists from year to year.

5:39

But enough of that. Ellis, I think I've gotten you clod pilled. Is that right?

5:53

You did, Yes. I realized I was kind of a bad boy for not trying out all the different services because I need to know how they all work, what they're good at, how their tone differs, how their context windows vary, all that good stuff. And yeah, I've been using Claude and really enjoying it. I think it certainly feels like more thoughtful and intellectual, which may not be for everybody, but for a writer, think boy like me definitely fits the bill. But maybe more important than anything, it seems like instead of trying to build all their own apps the way that OpenAI and ChatGPT is, Claude seems to be happy to work across your apps, whether that is on the Mac app Cowork that can access your local apps, or through the Chrome extension that can access your tabs. That seems like it can do more in my experience, than atlas from. From OpenAI, which seems like what is even going on with that anymore, really?

5:58

I've been meaning to retry Atlas. I'm actually kind of double fisting chatgpt and Cloud right now to try to see where I want to land.

6:55

Yeah, I was using Atlas a month or so ago and I was like, can you do this stuff for me and download some statements for my taxes? And it's like, I don't know how to download. I'm like, all right, bye.

7:04

AGI will know how to download.

7:15

I hope so, but, but, but honestly, I mean, one of those things that I always wanted from computers over the last 20 years is just to help me with my like OCD computer organizing. And now I've got Claude coworkers mining through 25 years of documents in my Google Drive. All the gifts I've saved over the years of 500 different Internet cats in my icloud images folder. And it's just kind of a pleasure. It seems obvious to me that AI is going to be able to do this in any tab or any app in pretty short time. But for now, this was kind of my first experience of having AI actually organize some stuff meaningfully for me. And I do believe for most people it's kind of a killer use case.

7:17

I have so many things that I want to try with Claude, cowork and cloud code on my list, such as, well, the custom CRM. I want it to analyze my subscriber list for sources and try to infer the best it can where people work, better audience data that I can then use to inform what I do and the kind of brands that I work with. You know, just a bunch of back office stuff that I'd love to automate and it's not perfect and from what I've seen, it can often, you know, break. But I am hoping maybe this weekend between ski sessions that I'll get to spend some time on that. I actually got onboarded though this week to something that I'm very excited to play around with as well. And have you get on too, called Dreamer. Have you heard about this?

8:03

I have, I have.

8:53

So it's a bunch of X early Android OG people who built Android who have this new agent platform startup and it's kind of like agents for normies. Our friend Joanna Stern also is an early user and has been trying it

8:55

and the most normie of all of the reporters, which if you're listening, Joanna, is a compliment.

9:14

Joanna's more than Normie. Come on. But Dreamer is really interesting. It's like I'm trying to describe it. Think like a app store for agents or kind of like what Wabi was doing and is doing for mobile apps. Shout out Eugenia early, early guests. But for agents and no code is needed, although you can code and see the code. And what's cool is that it's a marketplace. So if I make an agent, I can publish it and other Dreamer users can use it. And then when they use it, I actually get compensated as a percentage of the subscription revenue that they're paying Dreamer. And how they use the agent. They're still figuring that model out, but I think that's a super cool idea because it incentivizes creation. And so the first agent I installed was one that one of the co founders, Hugo Barra, made, where it's a calendar super prep agent, where it goes through your calendar and fills the metadata of each event with honestly, pretty helpful overview of what the event is about based on the context of your email. You know, it obviously ingests all your Google stuff, you know, gives you like, you know, I'm about to do the interview with Liz for Access, like here's your context with Liz, here's what she does, that sort of thing. And then Auto generates an AI podcast that you can then create an agent to hook up to your Spotify to tell you about your day, which also is the idea of like Hux, shout out Ryza, another early access guest, and kind of doing it all in one place where you can really make any agent and then have this chatgpt like interface around it with all of your context, not just what you tell. Chat is super interesting. So excited to play around with that.

9:19

It's a compelling value prop, especially for something that's separate. I mean, the meeting prep thing you described. I have been trying to painstakingly program my notion custom agent to do, but if somebody had come up with the perfect template already, I could have just added that, which is kind of what you're describing, instead of trying to program it all myself, which is fun editing all the instructions, specifying your perfect format. But you could also guess that a company like Dreamer, all the apps on that platform are kind of truly agnostic of all the different services and they prioritize trying to make the most of each connection as opposed to trying to keep you in their ecosystem. One other thing that strikes me as kind of nice about Dreamer is that those guys have a whole lot of experience when it comes to highly secure products for massive, massive audiences. And I do believe it's a problem with AI these days, whether it's with OpenClaws we've talked about or a lot of these startups, is that you don't know if your stuff is safe when you plug in Gmail, when you plug in Notion, when you plug in all these connectors. And so while technically any startup can add all these same connectors, the growing number of connectors through an API or through MCP or otherwise. Certainly feels good to know who's behind this one.

11:05

Yeah, for sure. Did you see this viral post of airbnb co founder Joe Ghebia and some coffee shop in San Francisco with what looks to be the same device that was in the viral fake Alexander Skarsgard super bowl commercial that we talked about recently. Did you see this?

12:30

Oh, I did and I've been up all night thinking about it.

12:50

I don't have this totally confirmed but my understanding is that this was a paid thing. I mean it's pretty obvious when you look at the video, the way the camera like abruptly goes down at the end as if he's like you know, getting seen and needs to hide that he's filming also at like the most

12:54

frigging famous coffee shop in San Francisco. Sitting at the bar at Sight Glass. This is no iPhone4 left at the bar.

13:10

Right. So my favorite theory that I've heard is that this is a very clever subtle marketing campaign from some kind of startup who is also asking people on X through like marketing agencies to reply and boost this post. And that to me suggests there is a startup that is doing this weird looking AI metallic orb device. People think it's OpenAI. I don't think it is. I don't think this is the jony I've way of launching a product at all and I don't think this is what it will look like. But you know, knock on wood. I guess I could be wrong but I just want to know what startup this is that's doing this.

13:17

It looks, for those who haven't seen it, the case looks quite a bit bigger than an AirPods case and it kind of looks like a big stainless steel like almost like modern clamp, like literally a clam shell with a little indentation to put your thumb and then the earbuds are also stainless steel and instead of only going in your ears, they have a bar that almost like a piece of jewelry that you know, some people might wear as earrings, wraps around the back of of your ear. I think some people were speculating it was like bone conduction or something like that. I don't know. I honestly don't appreciate these types of stunts. I really don't.

13:57

We'll see. We'll see if it ever changes.

14:33

Maybe it's just because I don't know how to make them for companies.

14:34

All right, well this week we have our second Google executive on show. We had Samir Samad, the head of Android on who was actually one of our best performing episodes. So the pressure is on for da da da. Liz Reed, the head of search at Google. I've known Liz for a little bit. I actually interviewed her recently at the IAB Publisher conference. She had to tell a room full of publishers why Google wasn't destroying them. And I got to moderate that conversation. So that was, that was fun. Maybe not as fun for her as this episode of Access, but that was where I last saw her. Liz is a really interesting figure in tech. I mean, she obviously runs Search, which is, I don't know, we were talking about this interview, maybe the most influential software product of all time.

14:37

Certainly she kept it real, I thought. I mean, I wasn't super familiar with her, but for a 20 year Google veteran, I was expecting like, you know, a lot of scriptedness. But it's interesting. She seems like a true Googler, almost like a scientist who's just working on problems they love. And so, yeah, I appreciated her candor

15:28

with an incredibly important job and an incredibly unique vantage point on the industry. So, yeah, it was great to have Liz on. Let's throw it to Liz.

15:52

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16:00

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16:22

hey, Kara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to south by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of today explained Teffy Talks, Prof. G Markets and of course your two favorite podcasts Pivot and on with Kara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marques Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at south by Southwest, presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.comsxsw to pre register and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.comsxsw to register.

16:36

Really?

17:24

You should register. We sell out and we hope to see. See you there.

17:25

Hello, Liz.

17:38

Hello. How are you doing?

17:39

I don't think Alex even realized you joined.

17:41

That's all right.

17:43

You snuck right in.

17:45

Well, I understand sometimes how these things go where, like, if you're not careful, you've got three other tabs covering the space and you're waiting and you're distracted and then people come.

17:46

Yeah. How's your chrome looking right now? How many tabs are in the row are we grouping? Are we pro at this?

17:55

Not. Not very many at the moment, so hopefully it doesn't crash. That'll be the. That'll be the goal.

18:01

When Ellis and I were waiting for you to get on just now, we were just saying, like, gosh, you've gotta be in back to backs all day long. Is that like every day for you?

18:06

I try, I always try to make sure I have some thinking time and some email time. But, yes, do a first approximation. There's a. There's a lot of. A lot of conversations on quite a wide range of different topics, too. It'll be like, let's go brainstorm this product question. Let's brainstorm the future. Let's fix this current product. Let's go talk about legal. Let's go talk with you all. I just. We just celebrated someone on my team who's been 20 years at Google right before this, so that was kind of fun.

18:14

Oh, my goodness. Do they get a special treat or a new type of hat for Google legends?

18:39

I mean, we do a few things for them, but. Yes.

18:44

Yeah, 20 years is quite a long time. I mean, that's. That's about your tenure as well, right?

18:47

I am, yes. 22 and a half maybe now.

18:51

Oh, my goodness. I know you've moved around a bit, but I was at Snapchat in the early days for almost eight years, and I feel like for every year you're there, you're attached to one more permanent recurring meeting as you sit in and try and do things. I mean, even, like, how does your inbox look these days? I feel like the longer you've been at a company, the more in disarray it can be.

18:55

Well, I switched a few years ago from geo to search, so that created a reset on most of the meetings and the inbox. There's lots of exciting things, and then we have new features like AI overviews in Gmail that you can play with and hopefully help make some of it easier. But it's a good place for AI to improve my productivity. There's lots of opportunities there.

19:18

You were super early at Google. You were one of the first female engineers, is that right?

19:39

I was the. In the New York office, I was the first female engineer, but not. Not in the company for sure. I think there were. I Don't know, less than 2,000 people when I joined. I don't know if it was like 1000 or 1200 or something like that, but the New York office was 10 engineers ish when I joined.

19:45

It's rare to work at a place for that long, I feel like, especially now I feel like millennials and Gen Z are used to job switching and hopping around a lot and it's kind of how things work.

20:04

And I'm curious, it's interesting because I joined when I joined Google, right? Like I, I didn't come from a family with, with tech background. Like my mother was a math teacher, my dad was selling insurance. And so like in my mind people didn't change. Like and I was from a small town, right? And so people didn't change jobs all the time growing up. And I started at Google and people like yeah, you know, generally in tech you're only at a company for like one to two years. And I was like what, what is this, what is this concept that I'm just not familiar with. But that was the expectation they said is I'd probably be there a couple years and then move on. And you know, it's been 10 times that since.

20:15

Well, I was going to say what, what's been keeping you there for over two decades? There's gotta be something besides money of course. Besides Google stock?

20:52

No, I mean I think there's like three things I genuinely care about. I find one, I want to work with like people I enjoy working. I tend to work hard. I spend a lot of time, I would like to it be people I respect. I feel like I can learn from. You know, it's intimidating and fun to feel like you're not the smartest person in the room most of the time. Right on the thing. And in fact you're maybe one of the least smart people in the room, right? So like that, that sense of, of energizing but that people really want to create great things I think is one the second thing that the mission of the projects I've been on has really resonated. I was on Google Maps for a long time. Now I'm on search. These are products that not just billions of people use, but they turn to for things that matter. It's not just this is just a job, it's okay people now use this so that they don't get lost. When I started. This is hard for some Gen Z to understand, but we grew up in a world where if you made a wrong turn or you went to someone thing you might Be stuck wandering around

21:00

printing MapQuest directions to get to Disney.

22:05

When I first started, there wasn't MapQuest, right? There wasn't even MapQuest. There was an atlas in the back of your car and you know, that was what you hoped you did and otherwise you stopped at a gas station, right? So the freeing power of being in this world where like you can go to a strange country, you don't even speak the language of a navigated, right? Like, what does that unlock? Now you have a thing where people turn to search for like their fun trivia and they turn to it for their health questions and they turn to it like to figure out how they educate themselves on a new skill or learn something. And that's kind of very inspiring. And then the last thing I like is I like challenges, right? Like if I, you know, you can always learn, but like there's different levels of learning. So over the years when I got sort of most asking the question about was I going to stay? It was never about the mission, it was never about the people. I always really liked them. It was like, am I challenging myself? Not. But I found a place to change within Google that put me a little bit in the deep end. Definitely still the case these days with how fast the world is changing. But I like that sense of learn to swim and face the challenge.

22:09

Well, thank you for Google Maps because my first and only car accident was trying to read a MapQuest printout when I was 16 years old. Rear ended the crap out of somebody was quaking in my boots. Had to call my dad. Hi Dad. I know you're listening out there. Thanks for coming that day to help deal with that for me. And now it's just such a fact of life. And I mean, I think that raises, you know, an interesting question that we wanted to talk about is for these products like Maps and Search and otherwise that people have made such a part of daily life, how are you all thinking about bringing AI into this stuff? I mean, people have such expectations for what these products are. And I think we all know that nobody likes when their furniture gets moved around, when you keep putting new things at the top of the page, when new features come out. And I feel like Google Search has remained pretty solid in its vision for like what this perfect experience is. And I feel like whether it's with Knowledge Graph or AI, that's kind of getting shaken up right now. How do you guys think about the pace of, of introducing those things? I know there's a lot of pressure from the market to just go fast Fast, fast.

23:15

So I guess a couple of things. One, I do think it's easy to think about search as sort of somewhat static before AI, but actually if you go back in time, like the knowledge graph was a big thing and it was over 10 years ago. And sometimes if you go and you do a printout for people about what search used to look like 10 years ago, they're like, what? Like what is this product? Right. You sort of forget how it, how it changes over time across. We introduce things like lens and voice and all different along ones. I do think we try and take that responsibility very seriously. Okay. Like it is, it's not just like nobody likes the furniture, but like people are using it in a way that they rely on. Right. And so you don't want to make it hard, but also there's just tremendous opportunity and so you think about how to balance it. So I think we first did this with sg. Okay. We want to go figure out how we allow early adopters and they can opt in. And then we brought it to AI Overviews, but we did it amidst the serp. When we introduced AI mode, we didn't swap everybody over from SERP to AI Mode. We made it possible to enter along, trying to allow people to participate more and more as they're ready in different ways. I have been surprised by how fast people appreciated AI Overview, started using AI Overviews, just started searching more. Right. I think it's for many people in the world, not necessarily in your circles, but AI Overviews is how they've experienced AI sort of first and primarily in their life. Right.

24:31

Are you accusing me of not hanging out with normies? Well, because I sometimes do. I sometimes do.

26:09

I make no accusations, but I feel like sometimes in Silicon Valley we live in a world where you're surrounded. And then I go back to my home in New Hampshire and it's a very different environment. And so this is often how people encounter it. But I think for a lot of it, when we do our job right, it's so intuitive and it sort of opens up things that they couldn't do previously that they just start doing it right and they start adapting it. So we saw people use search more with AI Overviews and we saw it much more quickly than we generally do. We always sort of assume to your point about moving furniture that there's a learning effect. It takes time. You unlock something. How long does it take for people to figure out how it works? Does it work? Does it even exist? I think if I gave even Googlers a survey of what are all the features in Search? And I threw in, like, a few fake ones and asked them, could I identify the fake ones? I'm not sure they would all be able to identify which ones were fake and which ones were real because there's so much possibility. But people really picked up with AI overviews very quickly, and that was really, really delightful to see.

26:17

When you took over Search, it was a really critical time for Google. People were going, you know, oh, ChatGPT is going to eat Search's lunch. This is all zero sum. Google's in trouble. And here you go, you raise your hand, you're over on Maps, which is just kind of cruising along and I feel like has just been on this consistent upward trajectory in terms of importance to the world. You're like, yeah, I'll go take this challenge. I've never actually heard you talk about that. What was that like, deciding to go take on Search at that moment? Because I imagine there was just a tremendous amount of pressure. You've got to secretly kind of love the pressure, I think, to take that job in that moment.

27:23

Well, so. So actually I moved to Search before that moment, but Search was sort of in a few different pieces. I moved, actually, I don't know, a year into Covid maybe, which was. But was a different time of pressure. And others like, you join a new team and you can't meet any of the people in person. Right. Like, you know, for all of these years, a whole bunch of how you go and you build relationships and you meet people in person. I had grown up with the Maps team for years and years and years. They knew me, the people under. And then I'm like, hi, I'm your new, you know, manager, your new leader. Sorry, you can't see me in person for months. I switched in part because, like, candidly, my boss was like, I would like you to do this job. But, like, how do you say. How do you say no to search? Right? It's like people will sometimes say, like, you know, how do you say no if somebody asks you to do the thing? Not just a beloved product, but kind of like the essence of what Google was about.

27:59

I mean, it's definitely top three most influential Internet products of all time, maybe, maybe arguably the most.

28:51

You called it even like one of the best businesses of all time. Last night on the phone, Alex, and I was like, whoa. Actually, yeah.

28:58

Yeah, I think. I think it was like, both tremendously exciting and tremendously intimidating to, like, move and be leading a big part of search and then to take on to Your point? Then when I got asked to take on all of search sort of in the middle of, of this time, it's a lot of responsibility, right? Like you have multiple billion people using this product every day has been iconic for the last 25 years. And you're like, I am going to shepherd it and you know, I'm going to hope, I'm going to.

29:05

Are you satisfied with your impact, Liz, that you're affecting multiple billions per day?

29:35

To be very clear, my team will tell you I am never satisfied. Right. I am always a person who's like, oh, but you know, here's what could be, here's what the opportunities, here's how I could do better.

29:40

That's a, I just love how all the tech companies are like come to our company and you could have big impact. We have one employee for every 5 million users or something like that.

29:54

For Google, that's a, that's a crazier ratio. Even though you guys have a lot of employees, it's still a crazy ratio.

30:06

It's like actually so like my town that I grew up in for, for much of my childhood is, is 900 people. Okay. I had a bunch of cousins. It's not like I had never left the town. But like it is mind boggling to work in tech with this idea that what you do, it touches, it touches people halfway around the world. And like it also touches your mother, right? Like if you don't do a good job with this, then your mother, like my mother is a very kind person. Okay. But like, like, like she's entrusting a bunch of choices like how well what does search tell her? Right? And that, that is a, it's a big responsibility, but it's also a big opportunity. Like everybody I know, nobody I know is like, I am bored. I don't know what to do with my time. I, you know, wish I had more work to do. Right. Like, like people have a lot of things they have to do in their life and a lot of things they'd like to do if they could find more time. Right? How do you navigate search so that you can help people enjoy the things they want to do and get rid of a bunch of the stuff they don't. And to me that's a very fulfilling thing.

30:12

My four year old says she's bored constantly.

31:20

Okay. Four year olds do, I do, I do agree with you that like 10, like 4 year olds, my, my children sometimes tell me they're bored, but none of the adults I know feel bored, but the children feel bored.

31:23

Yeah, Last time we saw each other you were telling me, actually your kids are frequently telling you to fix things in search. So you also have to be tech support for your kids.

31:32

They do give me bugs and they're, you know, they send and the ones. And then my daughter tells me I should dog food my product. I was like, I'm pretty sure I'm doing that pre ones. But she's like, you asked this question, you should just use your product and see how it does. And I was like, okay, yes, I understand.

31:42

Speaking of kids though, I feel like, do you remember those moments early on in Google where everybody was accusing Google of outsourcing all of our brains and all our knowledge? And what's going to happen to children and their minds when they don't have to use a calculator anymore? Long division, they could find everything on Google and that just kind of came and went. And do you feel like it's any different this time around with AI?

31:55

Yes and no. I think there's always this question about are we still teaching people to think? I don't think creating tools means that there's no opportunity to think. It just means that we need to make sure when we're teaching people to think that we are aware that the tools exist. I got this feedback about Google Maps, by the way. People can't, like on the one hand, people have lost the ability to navigate using, you know, just their memory and their towns as much on that. On the other hand, like you freed people to explore the world.

32:20

I've been living in LA for five years. I do not know the difference between the 101 and the 5 because I literally never look at highways or roads.

32:57

We lost some skill, but, but as a result, you unlock to new things. Okay. I think what's a little different with AI is it's, it's changing quickly enough that there's a little bit of this challenge of like, do, do teachers know how, like do we know how to help teach kids in the presence of these tools? Like calculators didn't kind of go from like nowhere to like in everybody's hands overnight. And so you could sort of think about that. And so I think, you know, whatever tools they are, when done well, they allow you to do harder tasks. Right. They allow you to put your critical thinking on even more difficult things done poorly. You're asking people to do things the tools can already do and then people cheat. Right. In different ways. I think the challenge for society is to figure out how are we using the tools to push what we can do even more, not to replace thinking, but to use it for the next task.

33:05

It's funny because I know the Google famous interview questions, which I know have changed a lot over the years, ostensibly were a way to test your thinking and your reasoning. I mean, what do those even look like in five years?

34:00

Well, five years feels like an eternity. Now I talk with my team and

34:13

some of them, like two and a half. Let's do two and a half.

34:17

You know, I think in, in a sim. Well, even two and a half years. Like if you go back two and a half years ago, like, do you know where we were two and a half years ago? Right, okay. Like go back in time.

34:20

Alex didn't even have a newsletter back then.

34:29

Yeah, right. You know, that was the biggest thing.

34:31

What did we do?

34:34

That was the biggest change in the world in the last two and a half years for sure. I think, I think the questions though are a lot about, like, continue to be. Can you think through, can you reason? Can you use tools effectively? It's not like we asked, you know, software engineers when I started. Can you do assembly language? Right. Like, you weren't expected to use assembly language. You weren't expected to write code without an id. You could use an id. Okay, now how do you collaborate effectively with AI? I think those questions are not sort of pretend there's no AI, but can you do it thoughtfully? Can you use it to orchestrate? Can you, can you understand how to debug things? Can you think through what things to consider? Right. If you assume that the tools get much better but that they're imperfect, do you have the reasoning to look for where they might be imperfect? And I think that's how those questions evolve. And that can be in software engineering, or it can be in product management, or it can be in data science.

34:35

Right.

35:31

Like you, what's, you know, you can offload the easy questions on data analysis. What are the hard questions?

35:32

A bit of a galaxy brain question that just came to me. Are you guys talking about internally a future where maybe agents are the ones crawling Google the most on behalf of humans and like it's not humans going to Google, but, but agents will be. Do you think that'll happen?

35:37

Well, I certainly think the. There will be a world in which sort of agents are doing a lot of interaction on the Internet, not just people. Okay. I personally don't believe in a world where it's all agents. Right. In the sense that I like, I still think that people sometimes want, you know, want to hear directly from Other people, like, it's different. You know, do I want to go and say, like, ellis, please tell me what Alex says, or would I just be like, alex, what did you say? Right. Like, it's not always fun to be disintermediated. Right. You often want to hear from the source directly. But the fact that you can kick off 10 agents and you have limited time and the agents don't necessarily, I do think probably means there's a world in which a lot of agents are talking with each other and not just with humans going forward, as we evolve.

35:54

And does that impact Google positively or negatively? Search?

36:44

I think that's all about how we all navigate the innovation space. Right? Like, I think done right, it impacts it positively. Right. Okay. Like, search enables people to do harder tasks. And search is a great tool other people can use and agents can use. And what does that look like? I think we'll have to figure out. But I think Google has a long history of saying the world keeps changing. I mean, mobile was a. This may be hard to believe now, but at the time when mobile came, mobile was like this big question for Google. Like, Google was a desktop product and couldn't navigate, and oh, my gosh, the screen was smaller and are there going to be any ads and is the whole business going to fall apart? Right. I mean, like, this was a. This was a major question when mobile came out and the company ended up stronger through it because it rallied to the moment. And I think we are at heart a tech company, and this is a time when tech is flourishing. In terms of tech as a technology, as to what is its core, DNA is being great at using technology, and this is a time when the technology is being amazing. So if we all do our job right, I think Google will do well as it navigates it.

36:49

Hi, this is Kara Swisher, and this week on my podcast on with Kara Swisher, I talked to California Governor Gavin Newsom. While he hasn't officially announced or run for president yet, he's telegraphing it all the time. It's exhausting. He's also got a new book out, which is what you do when you're running for president. It's called Young man in a Hurry. I recently interviewed him live and San Francisco. Have a listen.

38:01

The problem with the Democratic Party so often is we appear weak and we've got to be stronger and we've got to be more assertive. And so that's, you know, it's the spirit, I think, that is required of this moment.

38:22

I've known Gavin Newsom since he was mayor of San Francisco a million years ago, a million hair gels ago. And he's a really interesting and compelling politician. He's done a lot of things in his career and this won this run for presidency, which is going to happen, is among the most interesting. You can find a full conversation wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube, obviously. Be sure to follow and subscribe to on with Kara Swisher for more.

38:33

So everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines on age, gender or race. But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Ro Khanna would say.

39:01

The real issue is two tiers of justice in America. The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution.

39:18

And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else. California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class today, explained in your feed every weekday and now on Saturdays too.

39:29

I work with a lot of startups for most of the week in my work at meaning, and one of the tried and true startup arguments to Investors press otherwise is that we are going to be able to move or act more quickly than the incumbents. And a lot of times it's Google or Microsoft or Apple. But it feels like in some ways that y' all have really kicked yourselves into gear and accelerated the pace over the last few years. Is that just my perception or was there kind of a critical moment internally where it's like AI is happening. Let's go.

39:56

I don't know that I would say it's like a single moment. I think you have a series of moments that build. I mean, I think Sundar Star talking about this is going to be in, you know, an AI company. I don't know how many years before some of these things come, but I do think what sort of has like been accelerating is what's possible with the tools and what are the opportunities, right? Like the, the, the technology is getting so much better, faster. Right. It's not that in some of these cases people didn't build demos five years ago. It's they built the demo and like it didn't really work and it was really hard and it was going to take like 20 engineers two years to tune it to try and get that. And like what used to be 20 engineers sometimes that that task now you can have one engineer do in, in less time, right? And so I think that really unlocked like so a bunch of the search engineers have been in search a long time, like 10, 15. The number of like 20 year old, 20 year anniversaries we celebrate every quarter is kind of mind boggling to me. Right. Sometimes like these engineers and product folks had these ideas 15 years ago and they didn't work and they had the ideas 10 years and then they had the ideas five years and then you like try it and it's like, whoa, it works now, right? Like that's, that's energizing and that energy builds on top of it, right? Like when you see that you try something and it works. When you see that you can move faster, it makes you want to move faster. Because we all want our time to be valuable for it to have impact if we're going to work. You want it to reap rewards. And I think it's energizing to people to see that it feels like they're not optimizing as much, they're inventing.

40:36

Any examples of those things that were thought of 15 years ago that are only possible now? I mean, I was thinking of Google Duplex being able to call places for you and make reservations. I mean, that was an agent before we called it an agent. Now it's actually possible.

42:24

So I would say that's a good example where it was in an agent before we called an agent and we could do very few verticals with a lot, a lot of work, right. And now our ability, you know, it was like, okay, you had this whole team that worked on it for this one thing for many, many months. And now the rate at which we can expand, I think like with the recent launch of personal intelligence, I mean if you go back long enough at Google, we try to do this effort in which we were putting more personal content and using it to leverage. But I don't think it felt like it unlocked it in, in different ways. I think people had played with, I mean, LLMs had been in search long before we had mom, we had Bert and then we had Mum. But they were mostly used in limited use cases because the quality wasn't good enough, the speed wasn't good enough, right? Like, you can't, you can't come be like, guess what? I can do this thing. That's better. But you have to go wait 20 seconds. Like people, people on search are sensitive to 100 millisecond difference, right? Like they will search more or less for 100 milliseconds right. So you had to get the tech to the point where like, wait a sec, if you did this online, it was fast enough for people and it was good enough for people to be net better.

42:38

Are Bert and Mum the search goats who've been there for 20 years or those technologies?

43:54

Bert and Mum are search technologies.

44:00

There's probably a Bert in some.

44:03

I'm sure there is a Bert somewhere in the company and possibly in search on the ones. Yes, there are a lot of ICs on a first name basis but Bert and Mum are technologies. They were sort of early use of LLMs, but they were mostly on the ranking side because when we tried to do it on the UI side, we couldn't get it fast enough and high enough quality. So if we did something, we're going to do it offline, sort of pre processed going forward. I think lens when it first started was like kind of cool but like didn't work most of the time. And now it feels like you just take for granted that you can like take a picture of a shoe and get the right particular Nike model and not just, oh, this is a Nike shoe. Right. Like those, those things were impossible years ago. So I think there's, I mean I think they're just all over the place of what's possible. But sometimes it's not just the big things, it's just the little things. Like I tried to make this thing work internationally, I couldn't. One of the one that's been most exciting to me is in the US we think of like, well, most content you care about is on the web. If you're in India and you speak Hindi, let alone you speak a different dialect or language. Right. Like, no, the information is not all on the web. Right. Certainly not in your language. Okay. And it used to be like, oh, what are we going to do? Are we going to try and translate all the content on the web into all the languages that's not scalable? But now with an LLM you can take information in one language, understand it and then output in another language. Like that opens up information.

44:05

The YouTube auto dubbing I think is incredible. Like I've been watching a lot more international videos.

45:38

Yeah, right, like, and that, you know, okay, well were you gonna learn how to speak all those languages? Were you gonna hire somebody in, in 100 languages or even 10 languages to dub your thing? No, you weren't going to be able to scale that. So I think that ability to like unlock content to, you know, everyone, not just speakers of languages, is fascinating and it Means we have a lot more impact in a great way in helping people around the world.

45:44

Google is a large company and I don't think people from the outside fully understand the difference between what your team is doing and what Demis and the Gemini team are doing and how you guys work together and also how you have different directions that you're going. I remember when you and I spoke at the IAB conference recently, you told me that Gemini has a different North Star than Search. I think that was what you said. Can you explain what that means? Because from the outside it looks like AI mode and Gemini are converging on each other pretty fast.

46:11

So it's interesting. So maybe to just start with Demis's team. Demos has like obviously different sub teams under them. One of them is Karai's team, which is working on the underlying model. And then there's teams that are working on the Gemini app, which is sort of what you're working on them. And the way we work with them is sort of a little bit different now. Right. Like we're, we're sharing a lot of the underlying model and technology and so we work very closely with the teams on the model and we'll work direct, like bidirectionally. So like number one, they'll great, here's a new model, here's what's now possible. Like how do you want to use it? But we'll also go and be like, okay, I understand you have this lovely benchmark, but let me tell you what it looks like in practice. Like, you know, 80% of may seem awesome on a benchmark. You can't be wrong one in five times in terms of not showing people the sports car. Like if they ask for the sports car, they want to see the sports car hundred percent of the time.

46:43

So you're popping a lot of AI researcher bubbles. It sounds like

47:35

there's a lot of give and take about the reality of what does it take to build a product that people can rely on and build? And so we push each other in a bunch of ways. I think with Josh's team we share some of the same underlying technologies, we share ideas, but they do have different North Stars. And what I was saying, the other one is Gemini's focus is on being this assistant and so it tends to lean in more heavily on things like productivity or creation. Search is more information based and it believes that often in those information use cases you also want to connect and hear from other people. And so how do you bring out the web? And so we sort of focus on making those two things awesome. But then like you can't, it never works to go tell people this product can only be used for this or that and then like hope that they understand. Right. Like people will come to the product and do whatever they want. Okay. And if you take a non search Gemini example, people come to YouTube for things that you might think to come and search. Especially like In India, the YouTube versus search usage is very different than in the US right. How people use them. So you kind of have to meet users where they are. If they come to your product and they want to use these things, then you should make it possible. And we want the capabilities to be used. You take something like Gem, Nano Banana, which in its first version felt like mostly sort of fun for creativity and doing that, Nanobanana 2 allows like really good infographics. Okay, well, infographics is back into the information space. Okay, so how are we going to use that to convey. Right. And so we think about as like sharing some of the capabilities but building excellence in key areas, if that makes sense.

47:41

Do you think they ever converge and just become one thing or do they always stay separate? Because I guess if I. If I ask Gemini a question and I ask AI Mode or AI Overview a question and I get the same answer, then why do they both exist?

49:31

I don't know. The answer is the short answer. I think what we see is some areas they're converging more, in some areas they're diverging more. What are they going to net out? Do the areas that diverged eventually all come or do the areas that diverge become even bigger over time? I think we'll see. I think if you ask a math question, we should give you the same answer to a first approximation. But even in a math question. We've started to experiment more with not just links in their product, but videos in the product. In search, you might expect to get great video tutorials from those cool teachers that make those concepts memorable. You still want to answer if they ask the question, but maybe we're going to encourage you to take the next step a little bit differently than that. I think with some of the verticals we're seeing how they go and there's some not complete divergence. But how do you experience it? What needs to be quick and easy, how you want to surface the web, I think is an area that we're still very early on and ripe for exploration. We've started to do more things with things like inline links. How do you quote and allow people to dive deeper into That I don't know, in all honesty. But I think we are right now at a point where depending on what angle you look at, you'd think they're getting closer or they're getting further apart. And so we'll see. It's not AI mode has not been out for general use for a year yet. I sometimes forget this. Maybe in the world it's relatively new and even Gemini app, given how quickly the world is evolving, it's changing a lot. And so I think we'll have to see. And then who knows, maybe agents will mean the right product is neither of the two of them is a third product altogether that they merge into. I don't know yet.

49:46

So to be totally frank, I spend a lot of my AI time on ChatGPT or Claude or other various types of services and I've kind of kept my googling to like the stuff I've always googled. Song lyrics, pictures of Tom Cruise and other celebrities. Like that's what Google is kind of about in my mind. Is there an effort to kind of get those 800 million Chatgpters back to Google or is it kind of about the next 5 billion more? So.

51:43

Well, I guess I would say a couple of things.

52:14

I think most feel free to tell me I don't matter because that's a very valid business strategy.

52:17

What I'm actually going to tell you, what I actually tell you if you use your example, is you're still using Google. Okay. And so like, what's interesting in many of these cases is that the, the sort of balance of how people are using multiple tools is actually like sort of really evolving. Right. I think if you go back some amount of time last year, where did most people do image generation and what was considered like the place people went to for image generation and where do people do a lot of image generation now? It's like changed a few times about where the centers are. And so I think right now we're in this world where it's very fluid. Like people's habits are not solidified across. You know, you essentially listed two other products you're using besides search. So you, you haven't picked a single one and you're still using search in some cases and whatever else. Right. And I think that's just indicative of where the world is. It's. It's still figuring out, I don't know, by the way, that we're going to end up in a world where there's only one product. Right. Like, I think you also saw this with, you know, People be like, oh, social media, there's going to be one winner. Okay, well you've got YouTube shorts and you've got Instagram Reels and you've got TikTok, right? But actually the space that although there's three of them there, the space is much bigger than any of them were at any time. Right. Like the pie has really grown. And I think that's what we're generally seeing in the industry is people are using the tools collectively much more. And so there's a lot of growth. But I think what we mostly try and do as like, I don't think we think of it as like the next 5 billion or the 800 million in like that simplistic way. It's really like what feels best in class with the market. Where are the growth? Where are the things that people aren't even thinking about? How do you just really live up to the mission and help people with as much as possible, then teach people about what's possible? A great thing about search and a hard thing about search is most people use it, therefore most people think they know how to use it. There's this interesting thing in search and teaching somebody like, you unlock this feature today.

52:22

Oh yeah. In startup terms, it's a great wedge. I think a lot of people don't even know what they would ask ChatGPT or even what it can do quite yet. And if you just kind of start revealing that stuff through Google, I mean, I'm very receptive to like the idea or hypothesis that Google may actually win out here. Given all the existing use cases where people are asking questions now, the answers are just going to get dramatically better, more informed, better sighted, all that stuff.

54:26

Well, but yeah, Ellis, there's also your behavior that you talked about and like, you know, Liz, my wife Chloe is a, is a chat addict. Every time I look at her phone or laptop, it's ChatGPT. And I just asked her the other day ahead of this interview, I was like, how much do you use Google nowadays since I got you hooked on ChatGPT in the last six months? And she's like maybe 10% as much. I use it to fact check the AI a lot, but she's definitely not doing those kind of, of that's an emergent use case. Fact checking in depth, highly monetizable searches that she was. And there is probably a decent chunk of your most highly monetizable, you know, users in North America and Europe that are, that have shifted their behavior that way. Maybe not, but I'm just Wondering, I mean, obviously, like Google's doing very well financially, but yeah, like, the space is

54:56

just growing rapidly, right? There's, it's, it's really weird for people to think about in that they, they, most people think they're asking the tools, they're using all of the questions they could think of. And so like everything is zero sum, but that's, that's actually not what happens, right? You kind of go through this calculus without even realizing it, which is like, I had this question, first of all, do I even realize I could get the answer? And then if I realize I could get the answer, is it worth my time? Like, is it going to work? Is it it not? Do I have, like, is it hard to ask? Is it not? And so I think what we're seeing is like, simultaneously people are adopting more tools and search is growing, right? Because the possibility of the tech is just allowing many more questions. And so I think the space is just getting much, much bigger. And if you think about that, like when you didn't have a mobile phone and the only time you asked questions online was when you were at a desktop and you booted up your desktop and by the way, you had to hope that nobody else in the household was on the computer at the time you wanted to ask the question, you just didn't ask the question. And I think we're seeing the bar get lower and lower. And so the amount of questions people are asking, the tasks that they would have struggled with, that now instead of struggling with, they ask for help, right? Like people use the tools to help them rewrite an email. They didn't previously use a tool. They just struggle with it and bang their head and spend 20 minutes trying to write the email. And now they ask for help and write the email faster. So I think we just think the space is growing very, very rapidly.

55:46

I think there's also one thing that we haven't discussed yet, which is when you think about what is likely to make your first AI experience or retentive AI experience good. It is if it gets you right. And I think you could argue that Google has better context on you than any other company. What are your thoughts on that and bringing that stuff to the fore, is that creepy for people or is that magical? And do you have more context than anybody else?

57:20

Well, there are several billion people in the world. I don't think we can make a statement about do we have more context than everybody for every person in the world by any stretch. But I do think in a bunch of cases we do Know the systems know a bunch, and AI's ability to parse it together is doing that. I think personal intelligence was, like, one of our first steps there, right? And I think it's. It can be really delightful and surprising sometimes what it gets, right? So I had. I had a co worker who asked. He was, like, stuck in the airport for, like, a few hours, and he's like, what should I do? And I was like, well, given this passion, there's this cool store at this terminal. And by the way, you need to leave 40 minutes ahead. And this credit card actually lets you get into this lounge, right? Like, a bunch of things that he wouldn't have even thought to ask. And it wasn't just, like, a basic recommendation, Right. It wasn't like, you know, which restaurant should I eat at? Right? So I think it can be very delightful. One of the things we did as part of it was that it is a deliberate consent. You have to opt in. Okay? Like, we don't want to do it to people. If you want your information siloed, you should be able to keep the information separate. But if you want that value, we shouldn't be like, well, you might not want the value. So, sorry, Ellis, you can't get it right? Like, it should be in the hands of people to make that choice. But then we think there's nothing. It's like, one of my favorite things I do now is, like, I ask many more questions of, like, okay, I. I have this challenge where, like, okay, I have three kids. I have a job. I'm gonna do something with them on the weekend. How much time am I gonna spend figuring out what I'm gonna do with them on the weekend? Right? Because I'm gonna spend the time with them, but I don't have, like, an hour to prep. So if I don't have enough time, then I'm gonna do something boring, which is the same thing I did, like, two weekends ago. But now I'm finding that it. I can use personal intelligence to understand more of, like, where I like to go with my kids, what I enjoy, and then it just speeds up. Finding something fun to do.

57:47

Deeply relate to that use case.

59:45

Yes. People are like, you know, people have time to have fun. They just don't have time to plan. Planning is hard. How many people do, you know, like, spend, like, 30 minutes looking to pick the movie that they're gonna then go watch for, like, an hour, Right? Like, it's just. Just ridiculous in some of these things. And so we should be able to make that much Easier for people.

59:48

Oh, don't get Alice going on this. Alice is a planner with that stuff for sure. Liz, I wanted to know how you're feeling about the health of the web right now and what Google actually indexes. And there was something you said at the conference again, where we had that interview recently where you basically warned a room full of publishers to just try to use the tools in a way that doesn't produce more slop and to actually use them to elevate. And I have to imagine Google is trying to fight back a ton of slop right now. And spam like you all have never seen. And yeah, is the Internet in a precarious moment right now?

1:00:04

The open Internet people have created slop for a long time before it was aislop. Aislop allows them to create it faster. Okay, but it's not a new problem. It's just sort of the next level scale of the problem. Right. People would pay people in other countries to create, you know, rip off essentially surface level content, 20 versions of the content, etc. On the ones. And so does. So that's something that like Google does have a bunch of experience of fighting spam and we have to like stay on our toes. Like it's a cat and mouse game. You are never done.

1:00:45

Right.

1:01:18

The, the commercial incentives for other people are there. So I think there is a lot of AI slop being generated, for sure. I also think there continues to be a lot of great content generated. And I think sometimes AI creates, helps people create better content, and sometimes it helps create slop. And so I think it's important to separate. Did you use AI as a tool or did you create slop? Right. You're trying to bring to life the vision you have for what a great living room could have to write something. Okay. Like that can sometimes be very hard for, for people. Are you good at one thing, but you're not as good a speaker at some other thing, right? You, you know, can you use it to help you write better and more clearly? But I do think we have to fight it from the search side of making sure that we get the, the great content. And I also think it's a time for creators and journalists in different ways to say, like, are you producing great content that is really interesting to people? Or if you're creating the same junk a hundred thousand other people are and just hoping your content is gonna surface the top, that's not as good. Right. I think it's been pretty interesting to see how much movement there has been to user generated content in the world, right? Like, people are switching what they go, they're listening to more podcasts, they're hearing directly from more creators and influencers, right? Like, but, you know, like sometimes people like, oh, well, there's, there's no, you know, journalism these days. And you're like, wait a sec. But like people listen to four hour podcasts, right?

1:01:19

Like somehow going to different places, but

1:02:50

like different places, right? It's, it's in ways that it feels like it brings it alive to people in different ways. And so I feel like it's still a exciting opportunity for, for creators in so many ways. And part of our job is to make sure that we surface that awesome content, right? That the people who create that content feel like they thrive in that world.

1:02:52

Does it mean, do these shifts you're talking about mean you all have to be a little more creative with how you index and what you index and that you can't.

1:03:16

I mean, a lot of this stuff's going to be paywalled.

1:03:24

Yeah, paywalled. Or it's audio only, or it's like hidden behind an RSS feed or that's proprietary to some app. Like, how do you actually index all this stuff when the bottom does seem to be falling out of like traditional search traffic? Reliant publishing. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that chart that's been going viral recently about all these tech outlets that have lost 50 to 90% of their traffic, including the Verge where Ellison I worked. And that just has a real profound shift on where content shows up. And then it's your job as the head of search, still index that content.

1:03:26

Which means there's a few different things to your point about audio. The great thing about one of the great things about LLMs is they're multimodal. So we can actually like understand audio content and video content actually at a level we couldn't years ago. So that becomes exciting. Some paywall content people still allow Google to crawl, right. And surface. So it's not necessarily that it's absent or we have deals with some set of ecosystems where they, they give us content streams across. I think paywalls is complicated for users because, like, they're not always willing to pay. And so it's a complicated calculation. You know, how do you think about that? But I generally feel like, you know, search is able to find most of the, you know, the content that's out there. And in fact, you know, new opportunities are being created with the fact that like now you can understand audio much better. Now you can understand video much better. Now you can understand not just the, like, video transcription, but, like, what is the video more about or what's the style or other things like that. So I think. I think there's still a lot of content available. I think everyone together is trying to figure out what makes great content. How do you reach audiences? I think one thing Google is trying to do a lot more of, and we've taken small steps so far, but want to do more. How do you help when there is that relationship? So, like, we did this thing with preferred sources. There started to be experiments across Google with, you know, how do subscriptions change, right? So, like, if you love this source and you do have a relationship with it, then that content should surface more easily for you on Google.

1:04:01

Okay, I have banned. I have banned so many sources from my Google News over the years. It's like, sources, Ellis. I feel that's when I feel most powerful.

1:05:43

Okay, but like, if we love, you know, if a user loves access, but in a positive direction. Ellis, if a user loves access and they ask a question, right? Like we should, and you had a great story on it, the question shouldn't be like, how does your content rank equivalently for 6 billion people? It's like, that's really interesting for me. So, like, surface it higher for me, right? Reinforce and build that connection. If you have a cooking subscription with someone, can we make sure that those. Those recipes show up even more and that, you know, that you can click through? Right. Like, people hate getting links that they get to, and then they have to bounce back because they can't get through to the content and they're not willing to do it. But sometimes those people have decided to pay somebody and not the other six people. Well, then we should surface the one that they're paying for and not the six that they can't get access to more. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to also think about, given that in many ways, I think the sort of connection between audience and individuals is getting stronger. How do we. How do we actually help with that as opposed to treating all sources equally for all people, which is just add

1:05:51

sources to your preferred sources.

1:07:06

You should people.

1:07:08

I'm just gonna keep saying that this is the bane of my existence, naming my publication sources. Liz, is that this happens all the time.

1:07:09

Good idea with that, Alex.

1:07:15

If only I had a friend who knew how to name products. Yeah, no, I hear you on that. I mean, I do think that's the challenge for you guys, right? Is the shift to Paywall the shift to audio. I would love to be able to ask Google, hey, what did Liz say about so and so in the last episode of Access? And it give me like a snippet with a link to exactly where that was said right in the episode, but not quite there yet. But it sounds like that's the one.

1:07:17

Do more of that. Okay, but also like let's say there's 20 interviews and that are all paywalled and Ellis has a subscription to one and he's asking something about what I said or somebody else said. Right. Like we should return. We should make it easy to find the one that he can actually access. And then maybe you all have to figure out how to make it easier. If somebody doesn't want to buy the full subscription, but they want partial. I don't know. We'll see. Micropayments hasn't really ever taken off, but maybe that will change over time. But I think there is an opportunity to make with personalization, not to just do personalization and sort of small ranking twiddling, but really strengthen. These are the people you trust from. Let's make it easy for you with AI to access that information.

1:07:43

Well, Liz, probably the next time I'll see you will be Google I O in a few months. Anything, Anything. It's already coming up. I'm sure you're already in rehearsals. Can you give us a tease? What is next for Search and for Google this year?

1:08:30

Well, I was going to say we are actively building, but what will make the stage will be an evolving thing over the next couple months. But I think we're very excited across the company. I think as the tech unlocks new capabilities. It's also very weird because traditionally you plan for IO several months in advance and now you're at a time where you're like, okay, but like what happens if we figure out something in the tech April 1, right? Like, are we going to, are we going to ship it at IO or not? So well, we'll see how things progress. But I look forward to seeing you at IO. I think there'll be lots of great news to share then.

1:08:45

That's got to be so tough. We had to do the same thing with the SNAP partner summit in the early years. You know, you're planning it five, six months in advance and now it's like half the startups I work with are pivoting during our five week sprint because it's just so tough to stay on top of all the changes.

1:09:20

But excite, like it's tough and incredibly exciting. The fact that you're pivoting is because something now is possible, not because something now that you thought was possible is not. Right. Like, that's a fun time to be in.

1:09:37

Yeah. All right, Liz, thanks for joining us.

1:09:51

Thank you. Appreciate it. Have a great day.

1:09:53

See ya.

1:09:56

That's it for this week's show. Thank you, Liz for coming on. Don't forget to like subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We are access show on the Internet and you can find us in video at access pod on YouTube.

1:10:00

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1:10:12

You cannot find my newsletter because I am too cool. However, you could find me at Hamburger on twitter and@meaning.company for all of your startup storytelling needs.

1:10:25

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1:10:35

Bye bye.

1:10:40