Google's huge flop with Gemini, Search getting worse, Google News has a political bias, & more

Going to Google Gemini, those of you that haven't seen this yet, the reason— so Google Gemini is Bard. Bard was renamed Gemini. It's their version of ChatGPT, right? Um, when people were asked to show a picture of like, um, what was it, Vikings?

Yes.

Um, so the Vikings, Vikings were white people, right? But then they showed the Vikings and they're like Black people. And then there was like, show a picture of Elon Musk, and it was like a Black Elon Musk, right? And then, um, I think it also said something about show founding fathers or something like that.

Yeah, the forefathers.

Yeah. And then it was like they were like Black people. And we're not— look, we're not talking about race here at the end of the day, but like, we should make sure that whatever we're looking at, it is the truth.

Yes. And what we're— what Eric and I— or I want to be clear on this, you know, if you ask AI to create an image, it shouldn't just be white people or Black people or brown people or yellow people or whatever colors. It should be a combination of everything because that's the world we live in. It shouldn't skew one way or another. And Google actually removed the image feature from Gemini. I don't know if You knew that. They pulled it right away.

Yep.

And did you see what Alex Cohen tweeted?

No.

So he said, and I don't know how much of this is a joke. I'm assuming it's real because he did get laid off based on the tweet. But he said, sad to share that I was laid off from Google today.

Oh, okay.

I was in charge of making the algorithms for Gemini as woke as possible. After complaints on Twitter surfaced today, I suddenly lost access to Hangouts and Google Drive, and my manager, he/him, texted me to let me know that I was fired. I'm getting 12 months of severance, and after that, I'll decide what to do next. Seeking $2.7M. I'm assuming that's million dollars. TC. I don't know what that means. What a journey these past 5 months have been learning about LLMs and AI.

That's a parody account, just so you know.

Is it?

Yeah, it's a parody account. Read the other stuff later. I just wanted to let you finish reading it.

Alex Kon is a parody account? Yeah.

I believed it initially, but then you look at it and it's like, okay, yeah, it's a parody account.

Dude, he has 182,000 followers.

Yeah. So that's that.

I mean, look— That makes more sense. And that's why I said, I didn't know if he was joking or not.

Yep.

'Cause I was like, wait, I don't think anyone would tell you to program an algorithm as, quote unquote, in his words, as woke as possible.

This is tough, right? Because like at the end of the day, if we go back to the original thing where it's Google's news shows political bias, like it makes a lot of sense. Whoever controls the media companies, they've always tried to lean in a certain direction, right? People want to control information flow. When you think about Russia or China or United States, yeah, we even have our own propaganda too in the United States, right? So it just goes back all the way back to marketing. It's like, okay, well, yeah, you should create your own media, you should create your own properties, and you should be able to disseminate your own information and then hopefully help people think on their own and make their own decisions. That's what matters at the end of the day, right? So Neil, Google News, you said Google News has strong political bias. What do you mean by that? Give some numbers here.

So there's this website called all sides, and they ended up doing a study and releasing an article. During a 5-day period, they were analyzing all the articles that were on Google News. 61% of the articles came from news websites that lean left, left being Democratic, and 3% were from news websites that lean right, being Republican. Center, pretty much people who are like in the middle, news sites that are in the middle accounted for around 25% of the articles, and 11% were from websites not rated, which They pretty much had no affiliation politically.

So what do you think about all that? I mean, this relates directly to the Google Gemini debacle.

That's right. And that's why, funny enough, added it to the list because I knew you were going to type in add Google Gemini to the list as well. And funny enough, I didn't see it at first and I started typing it out. I'm like, oh, you already added it. It's— Eric and I aren't political ourselves.

And in fact, no, no, I'll tell you where we are politically. We're right in the middle. That's what we are. In fact, that's where we stand.

Yes. And we really are genuinely pretty much in the And when we look at it, it's not good for humans to be coding algorithms and AI to lean one way or another. It should be up to the individual to make up their own mind on what they want to see, what they don't want to see, because in essence, it's kind of like censoring and controlling outputs.

Yep.

Right? Oh yeah, we're creating all this technology, you can use it, it'll help you. It's not really neutral. They're influencing what you see and the type of content that you see on a regular basis, which kind of sucks.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a form of propaganda at the end of the day, and propaganda is marketing, right? But the good news, I think, in the next 10 years or so is the— what did Elon say? Elon said the price, the price of buying Twitter wasn't $44 billion. Like, that was like, the price was actually like, it's worth it because it's the price of restoring freedom. Like, that's what he was paying for, right? And I think more and more people are going to think for themselves because you have, even though YouTube's owned by Google, they can't really, they do censor things from time to time, but for the most part, a lot of it's pretty market-based, right? Like, you can find the things that you want to find on YouTube usually. So, that's one piece. Actually, no, you know what? We had a short that went out on Marketing School today and There's a short that got zero views for the first time. And that video, in fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I think it got censored. So here, check this out. Here, check this out. So I did this one on media is losing its power over the elections. We talked about how, you know, media tried to censor Trump, but it didn't quite work, right? That video, look at this. It has one view.

Wow.

It has one view. And that was the only, like, political short that we had. So I think they have algorithms that are censoring because if you look at the other ones, like there's like, you know, a thousand, a couple thousand or something like that, right?

So this is why I don't talk about politics when I publish content online.

Hey, that's very smart of you, Neil. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Did you see Trump's shoes? The gold shoes that he's selling now?

Dude, I saw the shoes.

Yeah, I don't know how many he sold.

There's also a signature version too.

An autographed version?

Yeah.

He's got to pay off that $354 million.

New York, uh, yeah, lawsuit or whatever it's called.

But look, I think he's, he's like the only ex-president that sells shoes and he sells NFTs.

I don't know he sold NFTs.

Yeah, there's Trump NFTs. It's like, like of him like wearing a cape and all that. It's like pretty funny.

Dude, I'm curious how many shoes he sells, I bet you he sells, if I had to take a guess, over $100 million worth of shoes.

Do you think he sold more? So he sold more than Kanye did on Supreme?

I think he did. I think he sold over $100 million worth of shoes.

Good, that'll help him pay off his case, right?

Well, no, no, there's expenses. If you sell $100 million worth of shoes, it probably costs him $15, $20, I don't know, I'm making up the number on how much it costs to actually make those shoes.

Dude, it's crazy because think about it. Let's go back to branding again. And people hate it when I talk about this, right? Guys, when I talk about Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk or Trump, I'm not saying I necessarily support or not, don't support. I definitely support Elon Musk, right? But like, there's certain things you can support about someone and certain things that you can't support. But like, I will talk about this stuff all day. So those of you that hate it when I talk about this, go subscribe to something else. But coming back to this, um, when you think about the power of the brand of Trump, right? The guy doesn't go to any debates, right?

Yeah.

And he's still able to have so much staying power. He still ends up beating everyone out. Like, that is the— it's much more than that, but that's part of the reason Why his brand's so powerful. Why can he go out there and sell shoes? Why can he go out there and sell NFTs? It's because of the power of the brand, right? That's all it is.

His brand is really powerful. I, I would agree with that. And I think, you know, if you look at his social network Truth Social, right, he ended up taking, uh, stock in that company. And when it went public— I don't know the exact—

It went public?

Truth Social was public.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Dude, that stock skyrocketed. It was called Digital World Acquisition Corp. Digital World Acquisition Corp stock. Truth Social stock. Dude, it has a $1.85 billion market cap and probably very little to no revenue.

Wow.

I don't actually see the revenue numbers.

Dude, that's—

Yeah, I see no revenue. September 2023, $0 in revenue, negative $12 million.

It's the power of brand again, right? We're not saying it's a good or bad business. We're just saying, dude, it's like when you attach his name to something, Like, by the way, the stock is down.

When it first came out in October 2021, it was like $10 and then shot up to $94. So at that time, assuming it's pretty much double where it is now, it would be roughly a $3.6 billion market cap.

Yep.

I, I knew some people who bought it right when it came out. Did you buy it? No, I didn't. And then they 6x'd their— plus their money before they got out. Yeah, yeah, it was like literally in a day or two or a few days or whatever it was. It Kind of ridiculous.

And you have one here on Google search results getting worse, right?

So dude, so, and by the way, this podcast episode isn't to just bash on Google overall. I think they're a great platform. Um, I've made a great livelihood from it, but outside of just that, forget from a business standpoint, I use it on a daily basis because it's a great search engine, but it's starting to have more and more issues. And I'll give you a prime example of this. I release a lot of content on Twitter. Some of that content when I want to reference back because I include graphs in there, and instead of going through my folder on my computer with all my graphs, which takes forever to sort through and figure out which one was which, it's just easier for me to Google the headline of my tweet or whatever it's— what it's about, and then just pull it up and then just get the graphs from there versus searching on my computer. That's how powerful of a search engine Google is. A lot of times when I'm pulling up my tweets like word for word, I'm seeing other people on LinkedIn. Keep in mind, I haven't posted it on my website yet or anything like that, but I'm seeing other people on LinkedIn who have taken my tweet. Let's say it's a 200-300 word tweet or 400 word tweet. They'll post it on places like LinkedIn, have little to no followers, copy it word for word, and Google will put it in a rich snippet at the top. And I've seen this for many examples. I'm like, what the heck? And oh, by the way, they take my graphs and then they change my logo from my ad agency NP Digital, and then they put their logo.

And did it get a lot of views?

No, they have little to no followers.

Yeah.

But it's just like, what the heck? Why are they ranking that instead of my profile, which has a lot of views, a lot of followers? Yeah, I'm not saying I have the most compared to like a Taylor Swift, but I have a decent amount of followers. Nothing crazy. Yeah. But like, if you have hundreds of thousands of followers versus someone who has little to none, and the content was originally published on my page, Don't you think Google would rank that first? Yep.

It seems like it's getting worse. And I don't know, like, it's— I don't believe it's going to be winner take all in the future when people are searching for things. It's going to be like Perplexity AI, it's going to be ChatGPT, it's going to be even some Gemini. It's just, it's not going to be the same search experience anymore.

You want to know why it's not going to be winner take all and everyone believes it's going to be winner take all and people are just going to click on one listing?

Why?

Well, we just talked about today on this episode Of Google News showcasing, what was it, 61% or 63% from the left?

Yeah, 61%.

61%, right? There's some biasness. And it doesn't mean that Eric and I are left or right or middle or anything like that. All we're getting at is people are different. So if there's some biasness on what they're showcasing, people will want to lean towards whatever their beliefs and opinions—

Confirmation bias.

Yes. So then they're not necessarily just going to go like, oh yeah, here's a result that works for everyone. Some queries, sure, but some queries it's going to be adjusted to, you know, whatever the biasness is. Not of Google, of the actual people who are programming.

100%. And that's— going back to kind of pre-show, we're talking about this right now. I was really impassioned for a moment. Those of you that are— it's not— it's at the end of the day, if you want to become next level, it's not about which side you lean on. It's about exploring How you look like you want to say something.

Go, but I have something funny.

Okay, funny. So look, it's it's not about left or right. It's like okay, let's let's listen to what other people say, and then let's see if we disagree with it. Does it does it actually make sense or not? And can I pull different elements that I like, and then maybe they'll change my way of thinking, right? And it's that open-minded way of thinking. You have to learn to think for yourself. That's what matters, right? I think what really pisses people off when I was like oh, like Elon did this really well with marketing, or Trump did this really well with marketing. We also list other people, not just on the right, but on the left too, right? And like, you can pull examples of things you like from every single person out there. I think people just want to hear what they want to hear. But if you're able to remove confirmation bias as much as you can, then you're going to be next level.

Dude, on a side note, I bet you the Google CEO or a lot of the executives—

Sundar?

Uh-huh. Did not even know about the Gemini showcasing images of people in a specific color. They'd be like, What the heck? And it's funny, I believe it was him who— I don't know if he shut down the DEI—

Sundar?

Uh-huh. I think he shut it down at Google or is reducing budget for DEI or something like that. Some programs. Yeah, I'm like 90+% sure. Google DEI layoffs. Google, Meta, and other tech giants cut DEI programs in 2023.

You know what matters? There's only one form of discrimination that matters at the end of the day.

What is it?

Merit. You can only discriminate on merit. I don't care about your race. I don't care about your sexual preference. It's just merit at the end of the day. If you do good work, that's all that matters.

You know, it's funny. I was at lunch the other day and someone asked me, would we hire someone based on, you know, if they want to— if they're straight, gay, specific races, or they change their gender. And I was just like, we have people in our organization that meet all those criteria. I don't know. He's like, so are you open? Do you guys have a DEI program? I'm like, we do have— we do try to give equal opportunity and try to hire people of all races, genders, etc. But the big thing that we really look for in an organization is Qualifications. And, you know, what people on our team want to do, they have the right to do whatever they want to do. If they're amazing at their job, you know, they're amazing at their job. That's all that matters.

Yep.

And great people are great people. If someone wants to, you know, if they have specific beliefs politically or just personally, that's fine. People are open to their— you know, you have to let people have their own opinions. You can't—

It's their life.

Exactly. And if people are great at what they do, I don't care if they want to live in some remote part of the world. If they're the best at something, I want to go find that person and hire them. Heck, they could be an alien, all I care. If they're really good at something and I can pay them and afford that alien, right, being someone from outer space, I would actually do it.

Yep. Look, we have to wrap this one up. But the final thing is like, Neil and I, we've hired people of all colors, all preferences. At the end of the day, if they're good, they're good at the end of the day. Also, I put this tweet out earlier today. We'll wrap it up here. I said, look, remote work works if you're a high performer. Unfortunately, most human beings aren't high performers. Womp womp, right? So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. This one's a little more charged. Go to subscribe and— oh, go to marketingschool.io/agency to apply to our Agency Owners Association. That's going to— we're going to be kicking that off soon. We actually have a lot of applications there too. So we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.