Google's huge flop with woke Gemini, Google’s search results getting worse, and Google News showing political bias

0:00So 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 five-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 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.

0:43So 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, 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 middle. And when we look at it, it's not good for humans to be coding algorithms and AI to lean one way or another.

1:24It 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, right? And you're saying that, 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, what did Elon say?

2:01Elon said the price of buying Twitter wasn't$44 billion. The price was actually like, it's worth it because it's the price of restoring freedom. That's what he was paying for, right? And I think more and more people are going to think for themselves because even though YouTube's owned by Google, they do censor things from time to time. But for the most part, a lot of it's pretty market-based, right? Like you, 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.

2:36And 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, that are censoring because if you look at the other ones, like there's like, there's like, you know, a thousand, a couple thousand or something like that.

3:09Right. So this is why I don't talk about politics when I publish content online. Hey, that's very smart of you, Neil. But Hey, in this case, we are talking about politics. Here's the thing. 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 a version of ChatGPT, right? When people were asked to show a picture of like, what was it, Vikings? Yes. So the 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?

3:41And then 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.

4:14It 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. 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. 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.

4:48I'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 five 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 Cohen is a parody account. 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. So that's that. I mean, look. That makes more sense.

5:25And that's why I said, I didn't know if he was joking or not. Because 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 at the end of the day, if we go back to the original thing where Google's news shows political bias, 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?

5:53So 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 that's that. And related to this one, because we're talking about politics right now. And I know people love it when I talk about these guys. So 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.

6:24There's also a signature version too. An autographed version. Yeah. He's got to pay off that$354 million. New York. Yeah. Yeah. Lawsuit or whatever it's called. His case. But look, I think 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 of him wearing a cape and all that it's 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 than Kanye did on Super Bowl I think he did I think he sold over$100 million could help him pay off his case right well no no there's expenses if you sell$100 million worth of shoes it probably cost him 15, 20 I don't know I'm making up the number on how much it costs to actually make those shoes it's crazy because think about it let's go back to branding again and people hate it when I talk about this guys when I talk about Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk or Trump I'm not saying I necessarily support or don't support I definitely support Elon Musk but there's certain things you can support about someone and certain things that you can't support but 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 when you think about the power of the brand of Trump, right?

7:40The 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 up. Like that is the, it's much more than that, but that's part of the reason why his brand is so powerful. Why can he go out there and sell shoes? Why can you go out there and sell NFTs? It's because of the power of the brand, right? That's all it is. This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August. and past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on.

8:13And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group with the people. We tried to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com slash founders to learn more about it. And then you can apply and we'll see you on the other side. 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 stock in that company. And when it went public, I don't know the exact. You went public? Truth Social was public. Oh, I didn't know that.

8:47Dude, that stock skyrocketed. It was called Digital World Acquisition Coop. Digital World Acquisition Coop 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 no revenue. September, 2020, 30,$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.

9:24So 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 knew some people who bought it right when it came out did you buy it no i didn't and then they 6x 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's kind of ridiculous yep 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.

10:10And I'll give you a prime example of this. I released a lot of content on Twitter. Some of that content, when I want to reference back, cause 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 grasp 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.

10:44Keep 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 two, 300 word tweet or foreign 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 from 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. Did it get a lot of views? No, they have little to no followers.

11:13But 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? I'm not saying I have the most compared to like a Taylor Swift, but I have a decent amount of followers. Nothing crazy. 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. Whatever. 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.

11:47It's going to be like, replex the AI. It's going to be chat GPT. 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. Right. Well, we just talked about today. Ron, 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.

12:22So 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 whatever the biasness is. Not of Google, of the actual people who are programming. 100%. Going back to pre-show, we're talking about this right now. I was really impassioned for a moment. Those of you that are, at the end of the day, if you want to become next level, it's not about which side you lean on.

13:00It's about exploring how you look at you want to say something. Go, but I have something funny. It's not funny. It's not about left or right. It's like, okay, let's listen to what other people say and then let's see if we disagree with 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.

13:29We 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. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes.

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15:39Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Dude, on a side note, I bet you the Google CEO or a lot of the executives 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? I think he shut it down at Google or is reducing budget for DEI or something like that. Some programs. Yeah. Dude, I'm like 90 plus percent sure. Google DEI layoffs.

16:26Google meta and other tech giants cut DI 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, um, based on, you know, if they want to, if they're straight, gay, uh, specific races or the change of gender. And I was just like, we have people in our organization that meet all those criterias.

17:09I don't know. He's like, so are you open? Do you guys have a DI from I'm like, we do have, we do try to give equal opportunity and try to hire people of all races, genders, et cetera. But the big thing that we really look for in an organization is qualifications. And 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, they're amazing at their job. That's all that matters. And great people are great people. If someone wants to, if they have specific beliefs politically or just personally, that's fine. People are open to their, you know, you have to be, let people have their own opinions.

17:52You 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. Yeah. 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.

18:20Also, I put the 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, view, subscribe. This one's a little more charged. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency to apply to our agency owners association. We're going to be kicking that off soon. We actually have a lot of applications there too. So we'll see you tomorrow.