Google ($GOOG) podcast mentions
It used to be that Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO of Google, or he was for a long time the CEO of Google's AI project, said, my red line is deception. He said, when we see instances of the AIs beginning to deceive, then we need to stop because that's like the last thing we can see before they start to successfully deceive. Well, guess what we saw in the swarm? We saw them thinking about how to delete their trace This is right. Like a year ago, you could say, oh well, this deception thing is unfalsifiable. You're saying that they'll deceive and they won't catch it. And I would have said, no, we're going to deceive, we're going to see the signs of deception and plow straight through it. Now we have seen the signs of deception. I will note Demis stepped back from being the CEO shortly after this incident. Probably a coincidence, but maybe not. Maybe we crossed his red line. I don't know.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I think we've spent an alarming amount of time not talking about the actual harms of AI as it is today. I think these are necessary conversations to have. I think we should talk about the fact that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle are helping power these hacks, that Sam Altman and Dario Amadei have overseen companies that have done what is tantamount to felony hacking, that we are not having discussions about how to stop this today, but what we might stop tomorrow. And I think in general, we also need to worry about the financials, which have not come come up at all. But if there is an industry slowdown, how do you deal with the $1.3 trillion of compute commitments? All of these are very real things that will have very real consequences very, very soon. But, and I understand why, and it's necessary to discuss what we do around AI, the actual regulatory thing we need to do today is cut off the compute, slow down these labs fully. And I don't, I don't care about China here. What are they gonna do, distill a model like they have the time, they are capped on our progress. So what the biggest thing to do is to slow down.
Ed Zitron · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17But this is what the world is now pricing in. So why is this so important? It's this slide. If you're going to build a trillion and a half dollars a year in CapEx, somebody has to pay for it. Microsoft's not paying for it, they're building it to rent it. Google's not paying for it, they're building it to rent it. Amazon's building it to rent it. Well, who is the person renting it? We have to have the offtake revenues in order to pay that rent. So if we exit this year around, you know, let's call it $200 billion of run rate revenue, that's below the, the years there. I think you have to go from $200 to $450 to $800 or $1 trillion just to keep up. The blue bar is the expected CapEx just from the Mag Five, and the orange bar is the offtake revenue, the gap offtake revenue that we need to see in order to keep this trade intact over the course of the next few years. Otherwise, we can't build this much CapEx.
Brad Gerstner · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Brad Gerstner: No AI Bubble, Semis Eat the Nasdaq & AI's Take Off Problem · 2026-09-17And I think that does make for a much more pleasant conversation. And I did notice while relistening to the original episode, I had an entire section discussing how Alphabet's biggest problem was having too much cash and not knowing what on earth they were going to do with it. Well, they seem to have solved that problem so thoroughly that they needed to go out and raise another $175 billion just to be safe.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17So I'm really excited about this one as Alphabet is actually the second largest position inside of the intrinsic value portfolio with a weighting of around 14%. Now, Alphabet has always been a business that interested me simply because I just use so many of its products daily, and as a user, I just don't really actually see much of a reason to switch to anything else. So on a daily basis, you know, I'm using things like Gmail, I'm using their search engine, their browser, their web-based office applications, and even Google Home. So You know, I think it's pretty safe to say that I'm a pretty diehard user of Google products, and yet I've never actually owned any Google shares. So it's a bit of a strange conundrum. But what really struck me when I was prepping for this episode is that the Alphabet that you added to the portfolio 18 months ago has actually evolved pretty dramatically in that timeframe. And I don't just mean the stock price. The business has made choices that I just didn't really expect, at least in terms of scale. And I have just the person to chat with me to help me understand just how big of a mistake I'm making by not at least having a starter position in my personal account.
Kyle Grieve · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17I won't give you too much of a hard time, Kyle, for not owning Google. Maybe I'll just tease you behind your back. But no, all jokes aside, we all have our winners that we wish we had had more of and wish that we were able to get all of our friends to buy into, but it just doesn't always work out that easily, and that's perfectly fine. But the beautiful part of Google, in my view, is that it's not going anywhere. I mean, this is a company that is a real titan. And that's to say, in 5 to 10 more years, I think Alphabet, which is the parent company name that we'll use interchangeably today for Google, will have a much higher intrinsic value than it does today. But I've also gotten to know some of your preferences as an investor, Kyle, and that is to say you typically are not one to invest in large caps, certainly not mega caps. So is it fair to say that if maybe we imagined a scaled-down version of Google with, I don't know, maybe a $10 billion market cap instead of this being this $4 trillion behemoth, you probably would own shares in it. Is that fair?
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17I would say that you're completely correct there. I'm definitely biased towards smaller businesses, mainly because, you know, I'm just really focused on finding multibaggers. But as Google has gone up nearly 100% since you first added it to the intrinsic value portfolio, I think that it's just simply a really, really good example that you can still make multibagger-like returns from businesses with multi-trillion-dollar market caps. And Google is an interesting one because when you look at the top of the tech titans in the S&P 500, it's usually a business that seems to be the most reasonably priced. Maybe, you know, Meta has had periods where it's a little bit cheaper or similarly priced, but Google always seems to have a multiple that I think is not necessarily cheap but also just not that expensive when you consider the quality and growth of the business. So I'd say the thing that surprised me the most when digging into Alphabet was how their capital allocation has changed over time. With them set now to spend somewhere around $200 billion on data center just this year, I really wanted to better understand these investments and how are these investments going to impact their impressive capital efficiency numbers going forward.
Kyle Grieve · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17It's funny because at the time that you recorded, I remember chatting about this with some other investors. So the general consensus was that investors were generally kind of fearful because it was no longer clear that people would use Google search engine to answer their questions anymore. I personally was a very heavy ChatGPT user back then and actually cut my Google usage very, very significantly. And so looking at it through the lens of the business of Google, that kind of concerned me as, you know, I just didn't really feel like I would ever really have the need to go back to Google the way that I used to use it. But a few months ago, I realized there was a bit of a shift in how I was using some of these AI search engines as well as Google. So I basically noticed that I was going back more and more towards using Google. Compared to now I'm more using Claude compared to ChatGPT. And with that difference being when I would go to use Google or through Gemini, if I just wanted a very, very quick factual answer to a question, I would get that answer nearly instantly. And I would also get a bunch of sources that came with that answer.
Kyle Grieve · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17Now with Claude, I still get a pretty good answer, but I sometimes have to hunt to where that information is actually coming from. And oftentimes it's just wrong. So I feel like when I use Google, at least to some degree, again, I don't want to get too much in the weeds of how I'm using this, but it makes it easier, simpler, and sometimes a lot faster just to get these answers. So, you know, I think the market and even me back then was thinking that search was dead, but to me, at least today, it clearly isn't.
Kyle Grieve · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17I remember actually being a bit of a Google search truther back in 2024, telling folks that ChatGPT was obviously going to disrupt Google. And then actually my thinking came full circle on that, and I think it's continued to be my belief that you had this narrative that AI would kill search, but it's just really the opposite is what has manifested. And I think that is what gave us this really special opportunity in the first place to be able to invest in Alphabet, as big of a company as any in the world, at a discount to the broader S&P 500 index. When we first looked at Alphabet, it was trading at around 17 times earnings. And a year before, investors had been paying 30 times earnings for shares in Alphabet.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17And the question to me was whether the core search business faced a serious enough threat of disruption within the context of Alphabet's already pretty diversified business model to justify a rerating of the valuation multiple that dramatically. Whenever you do have fundamental increases in uncertainty, the valuation multiple should decrease because the earnings quality has declined. The future is maybe less predictable than it seemed. But again, you're trying to weigh that against your assessment of reality. And again, I felt like the market had seen its sentiment swing a little too dramatically toward pessimism about Alphabet overall and in particular the search business. Interestingly, Alphabet today again trades at 17 times earnings, but I think the circumstances are very different.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17We've seen the stock double since the last time it traded at 17 times earnings, and I don't think it's because of concerns on competition, but really more about the uncertainty around the returns on what their massive AI investments will yield. That is really the question to— of, you know, what degree will they be able to justify this spending and On that point, one of the more tangible impacts of AI is that as Alphabet invests to integrate its LLM Gemini across its suite of products, this may help to defend their market share. But due to the cost of AI compute, which lots of news articles talking about how expensive that is, and AI just being more expensive than traditional Google search, the company could actually become structurally less profitable as they integrate AI more and more into the business. And so I do think that is, to me, a risk that I take more seriously and definitely more seriously than the idea of just everyone abandoning Google Search.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17But in reality, since I looked at Alphabet about a year and a half ago for the first time really seriously, margins have definitely improved across the board except for one area, and that's in free cash flow. And the reason so, as you know, Kyle, is that that is a metric that reflects operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. Where capital expenditures are investments in the future of the business. So given all the ongoing commitments to constructing and leasing space at data centers, it's really not a surprise to see free cash flow being dramatically lower and actually swinging negative for some of the hyperscalers, or at least projected to in the coming years.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17And I think it was Bank of America that had this really incredible chart that went viral on FinTwit showing sort of this profound shift in markets where the hyperscalers like the Alphabets and Amazons of the world, they were collectively seeing their free cash flow turn negative, while semiconductor companies that are designing and manufacturing the chips powering this AI revolution, they're the beneficiaries, and their cash flows have correspondingly skyrocketed. So the capital intensity is scaling up. That'll be a theme in today's episode, I think. And, you know, much more capital is being required for Alphabet to maintain its business than even was just the case 18 months ago.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17And it remains to be seen whether that spending is being done defensively, which would be less positive for shareholders as they try to prevent ceding ground to competitors, or if it's more offensive where they're looking to capture new markets and new verticals that will unlock an even longer runway for Alphabet to keep growing profitably, which is sort of mind-boggling to think about for a company with a $4 trillion market cap.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP847: Alphabet (GOOGL): The Megacap That Still Might Be Underrated w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-17