Substack - A new economic engine for culture

Oct 24

I’ve cast over 1,000 talent. Here’s how Victoria’s Secret engineered attention.

My deck essay on the casting, the $50m bra and the feeling it $old

Here’s a breakdown for everyone having a breakdown about the Victoria’s Secret 2026 show. My entire algo was angel wings, green screen videos, Kylie and diamonds. Everyone has a deep rooted opinion i…

In My Google Doc Era ∙ 10 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets

Nov 3

Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets - October 16-31, 2026

Welcome to the October 16–31, 2026 edition of Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets. The nuggets are also available on YouTube.

Romin Irani ∙ 2 LIKES

The Value Thesis

Nov 2

Google and Microsoft

Microsoft pays for its AI build-out with its own cash. Alphabet now borrows and sells new shares.

Why these two, why now

Arda Solmaz ∙ 1 RESTACKS

AlgoTradeAlert.com

•

Microsoft growing 19% to $92.3B while paying for the build-out out of its own cash is a pretty strong setup. Did Alphabet say how much of the new share sales is tied to capex?

BillCara.com

Oct 29

The Great Google Bleed

For two decades, Google operated as an unassailable tollbooth on the internet. You searched. They collected. The cash flowed. That era is over.

Bill Cara ∙ 7 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

StreetSignal

Oct 28

Google EPS Q&A

Search missed by alot. Period. A hot mess many predicted, few saw it coming this quarter. Management seems in denial.

StreetSignal ∙ 2 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Old Money Investing

Nov 1

Did Google Just Break Reddit?

Reddit had its worst day as a public stock while its sales grew 53%. What it's worth, plus four more famous stocks and 25 better-priced alternatives.

On Friday, Reddit's stock fell 29%, its worst day since it went public. If you bought at its high in January, you've lost 65% of your money.

Old Money Investing ∙ 9 LIKES ∙ 18 RESTACKS

What in the World

Oct 25

What Google Owes the Forest

Google pays to restore forests. In Finland, the carbon cost of developing one was assessed months before logging began.

Google buys what forests do. Last November it announced a purchase of 200,000 tonnes of carbon removal from Mombak, which is restoring degraded Amazon land with native forest. Google praised the project’s scientific rigour and said its own AI would help measure the biodiversity gains.

Kari ∙ 8 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Levi Hankins

•

Oct 26

The Sweco timeline is the part that should end the “best understanding of the legislation” defence. The loss was modelled, published, and put on public display nine months before the first tree fell, by the same firm now running Google’s own assessment. This wasn’t a gap in knowledge. It was a decision about order: clear first, assess later, apologise if anyone notices. Your first question is the right one, and I’d add a second. If someone at Google did read it, what was the internal case for going ahead anyway? A company that pays for scientific rigour in the Amazon knows exactly what an assessment is for. It’s for before.

RocaNews

Oct 30

Even Google Is Losing Money

Plus: Jensen and the Chinese spy, battle of the Dan Sullivans, & the word of the yera

A Red Barron delivery worker named Walt Z was stocking frozen pizzas at a grocery store when two Instagram pranksters approached him this week. They whipped out their phones and played their prank — whose details we will spare for the sake of your braincells — on the exhausted worker.

13 LIKES

Gina Hope

•

You maxies! I have been a roca reader for years. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do. Just keep maxxing!

JungleGym134

•

Justice department is already suing to block certification, seriously?!

How They Make Money

Oct 30

🔎 Google: The AI Paradox

Record query growth meets weaker monetization as Cloud doubles

Welcome to the Free edition of How They Make Money.

App Economy Insights ∙ 104 LIKES ∙ 4 RESTACKS

Daniel Oliveira

•

On the investment portfolio distorting earnings, the Q3 10-Q has the scale. Alphabet held $128.2B of private-company stakes at September 30, "primarily" one private company, with $116.3B of unrealized gains on them over nine months but only $3.0B in Q3, so most of this year's paper gain sits in the first half and the quarter's $8.7B equity loss came mostly from SpaceX. The 10-Q also lists $20.0B of further funding commitments to a private company, tied to milestones through 2030. Anthropic's S-1 lines up with those figures, compared filing by filing on Equibles: https://equibles.com/research/anthropics-s-1-checked-against-amazon-google-microsoft-and-broadcom-filings

Vitaly Kurdyumov

•

The cleanest way to see what the market punished is to put Alphabet next to Amazon, which reported a day later.

Alphabet spent $51.4 billion on capex in the quarter against $30.7 billion of Cloud revenue: about $1.67 of spending for every dollar of cloud sales. Amazon spent roughly $77 billion on property and equipment against $46 billion of AWS revenue: also about $1.67. Amazon's figure includes warehouses, so its AI ratio is somewhat lower, but the order is the same. Both reported negative free cash flow. Alphabet fell 12.6% on Thursday. Amazon closed Friday down 1.4%.

So the market didn't punish the spending. It punished the paradox in your title. Queries grew at the fastest pace in five years, while Search revenue growth slowed from 17% to 12%. Currency was the biggest drag, but management also named AI Mode's lower monetization. More queries with slower revenue means each search earns less. Amazon's AI doesn't eat its retail margin. Google's AI competes with its own ad slot.

The number I'd watch is the gap between query growth and Search revenue growth. If AI Mode ads catch up, the gap closes and Thursday looks like an overreaction. If it widens while capex climbs again in 2027, Cloud has to pay for both the build-out and the hole in Search, and $11.1 billion of quarterly Cloud operating income isn't enough for that yet.

THE INDEPENDENT ANALYST

Oct 29

Google and Microsoft Earnings Breakdown

What does it mean for the Neoclouds?

The Short Version

Mon ∙ 6 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Daniel Oliveira

•

One number on the bill side from Microsoft's 10-Q: depreciation was $11.1 billion in the quarter, against $7.1 billion a year earlier, while total operating expenses rose only 6% and headcount fell 2%. The build-out is already landing in the income statement. On the reaction, Alphabet closed at $283.82 on Oct 29, down 12.6%, and moves that size are no longer rare: 13.3% of S&P 500 reports this year moved the stock 10% or more the next day, against 4.4% in 2021. The count, from daily prices and earnings dates processed by Equibles: https://equibles.com/research/how-much-do-stocks-move-after-earnings-evidence-from-12-353-s-p-500-reports?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=comment

The Change Constant

Oct 30

Reddit, Google, and the Missing Click

How AI is breaking the traffic-for-content bargain that built the modern internet

My favorite corner of the internet is getting its teeth kicked in by Wall Street today.

Saanya Ojha ∙ 20 LIKES ∙ 3 RESTACKS

Ron Kagan

•

Well observed, well-written— thank you, for sharing.

David

•

AI is responsible for Reddit's downfall the same way AI is responsible for Stack Overflows downfall. The two websites are beyond toxic, except that Reddit actively cultivates it. You will click block multiple times on topics that are picking a fight with you and good old Reddit is there to shove it in front of you again and again from the subreddit of the week - it will also respam it multiple times. They will pursue clicks, no matter how badly it makes you want to leave. Meanwhile, they expanded their advertising div so that it jumps down when you go to type a comment, causing you to go to advertisers you never intended to... and I'm kind of wondering if the company does this on purpose to claim higher click through than they actually have because it's happens at an uncanny rate.

Reddit needs to upgrade it's algorithm. Plain and simple. Swap out the fight maximizer 9000 with an AI system that actually connects people based on the personalities they are and who they're likely to be friends with. If the only "people" you're meeting want to fight you, those aren't relationships anyone wants to have. Or maybe Reddit bites the bullet and we all go back to internet forums. The internet would be better for it, anyhow.

The Change Constant

Oct 29

Google Is Back in the Doghouse

Cloud is booming, Gemini is flying, Search is shifting, and CapEx is eating everything in sight.

Google was all set to take a victory lap yesterday. Instead, it got mugged on the way to the podium.

Saanya Ojha ∙ 21 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Fauzan Ahmad

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Saanya, the tension between growing AI usage and lower monetization per AI search query may be more consequential than the latest model ranking!!

Google is financing a new way for users to discover information while potentially changing the economics of its established distribution business.

For independent companies and creators, there is a related risk: customer acquisition can become less predictable if discovery increasingly happens through AI-generated answers rather than conventional website visits.

Which signals would convince you that AI Mode is developing a sustainable advertising model without weakening the wider search ecosystem?

Seemorerocks

12:42 AM

Google: No AI? No search engine

BREAKING: Google says schools that ban AI will also lose access to its search engine, forcing districts to choose between keeping traditional online research available and allowing Google’s AI features in classrooms.

Robin Westenra ∙ 7 LIKES ∙ 7 RESTACKS

texe ghost

•

The biggest problem I can see coming from the use of ai is that students won't learn how to think for themselves and will just outsource it to ai.

Steve New

•

16h

Google search is now virtually useless now anyway. The search now HEAVILY censors results and generates AI microslop. I have been forced to use Yandex.com to search. This is why I strongly recommends folks to NOT by chromebooks fore example.

The Web Scraping Club

Oct 27

Testing ScrapeUnblocker on Google and Shopee

Let’s see how this new scraping API works against hard targets

If you follow these pages or, in general, the industry news, you know for sure that Google is becoming harder to scrape, as it also removed the destination URL from its search results.

Pierluigi Vinciguerra ∙ 3 LIKES

Cloud AI

•

As AI agents become more common, robust scraping and data extraction tools are becoming part of the modern AI stack.

Nerius Rutkauskas

•

Hi Pierluigi, thanks a lot for the test and the great write-up! Your feedback was really useful, especially because you looked at the data itself and not just the status codes. We've already fixed most of what you found: cookie banners no longer end up in the Markdown, the SERP docs now list all 32 countries (Brazil included), the Shopee and SHEIN price filters are enforced on our side, and parsed_data returns the price the page actually shows. Looking forward to the concurrency test!

TBPN

Oct 29

Chip Wars and Google Earnings Recap

Plus: DoorDash to acquire Instacart, Thrive Holdings acquires ADT, GOOG & MSFT earnings

Happy Thursday.

Jackson Fordyce ∙ 7 LIKES

Mer | English Edition

•

The gap between rising query volume and search revenue growth raises an interesting question: how much of AI Mode usage adds new searches, and how much shifts existing ones? Which metric would give us the clearest signal over the next few quarters?

TheGamerEducator-Screens& kids

2:01 PM

Google banning search in schools?!

Yet another ripple in the AI and schools saga

Gotta say I was not expecting this so quickly. It feels like everything is moving very fast this year. To be clear, I am not critical of parents or interest groups asking for a deduction in AI or technology. We just seem to be rapidly experiencing the ramifications of deregulation and accountability on tech companies and the whack-a-mole style of reacti…

TheGamerEducator-Screens& kids ∙ 6 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Johnny Has Wanderlust

Oct 30

Beating Google

It’s a mind game.

My morning routine never varies. First Wordle. Then Strands. Then Spelling Bee. Then Sudoku. All designed to get my brain going first thing and to exercise it in an effort to ward off its eventual decline. Inevitably though, even with the consistency of this effort, I am prone to forget things. Nothing of significance so far—mostly names of people, plac…

Beth Tally ∙ 4 LIKES

April S Long

•

What a wonderful story, and I loved the picture of her family. You can do this...Getting older is not for sissies. April

Jim D

•

I loose my phone 5 times a day. But I can still use it even though they keep "improving" it and I have to relearn features that worked better before they changed it. Also, it only took me 2 days to learn my new credit card number after they had to cancel the old one because of hackers.

Our routine is Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, and Strands. Carol and I work together, we truly are sharing a brain.

MacroVisor

Oct 29

Breakfast Bites: Google Tests the AI Trade

Alphabet’s cash burn dents the AI trade, the Fed’s hold leaves a December hike in question, and PCE and the ECB decision are due today.

Rise and shine everyone

Ayesha Tariq, CFA ∙ 5 LIKES

The Tape Desk

•

The after-close test you flagged has a first answer - Amazon missed on both lines, with EPS of $1.89 against $1.96 expected and revenue of $201.94B against $202.31B, down about 5% after hours. Core PCE landed exactly on consensus at 3.1% this morning, so the December question is still being decided by earnings cash, not by the data.

WTF is SEO?

Nov 2

Google news to use: What to know

Algo update watch, AI Overviews takeover, Google's value drops and more news about the search giant

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a (concerningly) stunning fall weekend that somehow kicks off November? How are we into the final two months of the year already? Jessie spent the weekend in a mad dash to finish a hexagon crochet sweater. Meanwhile, Shelby distracted herself from the horror show known as the Ravens game by

WTF is SEO? ∙ 10 LIKES

Who AI Picks

•

14h

Had no idea AI Overviews already passed News Boxes. Thanks for the roundup.

Accrued Interest

Nov 2

I Told You Google Was Reddit's Landlord

In Q3 2026, the landlord came to collect. A $RDDT earnings recap.

Accrued Interest TLDR: Reddit just lost nearly 30% of its value in a single trading day. Back in August I warned you who really controls Reddit’s future, and this quarter proved it faster than even I expected. Below I walk through the one sentence on the earnings call that broke the stock, why so many smart investors never saw it coming, the management …

Accrued Interest (Simeon M.) ∙ 14 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

High Water

•

The logged in versus logged out split is the cleanest evidence in the whole piece, US users fell from 53.2 to 50.7 million and basically all of it was logged out search trafic while logged in ticked up to 23.4 million. What I am still wrestling with is the revenue side, since logged in users drive over 80% of revenue. If Q4 DAUq falls a low double digit percent but it is almost all low value logged out traffic, does the ad business really slow as much as that 38 to 42% guide implies?

Arch

•

You nailed it!

The Rumelt Perspectives

Oct 14

Chokepoints and Moats

Google versus Nvidia

Over the past year, Google has released several new software updates. Its inference server, JetStream, is now open source. The latest version of its TPU chip, Ironwood, now runs on the open-source engine vLLM. And more and more people are using JAX, Google’s machine-learning framework.

Richard Rumelt ∙ 33 LIKES ∙ 3 RESTACKS

London | Commercial Growth

•

Oct 20

How do you tell when a chokepoint is genuinely weakening versus competitors simply making the alternatives less painful? CUDA could lose some switching friction without losing its position entirely.

Eric D. Noren

•

Oct 15

Your point that the real chokepoint is the developer stack aligns with my own analysis. One distinction: the developers Google most needs probably don't switch away from CUDA, but they're the ones who never start on it. Someone who learns JAX first was never a CUDA user to lose.

The two cases look the same to Nvidia in the numbers they would track. Existing users stay, switching costs remain, revenue holds. What stops is the inflow of new developers that made the moat deeper each year. The choice was made in classrooms and new repositories long before it shows up in a procurement decision.

Your interconnect point is really interesting to me. If Nvidia's defense moves into rack-level hardware that only other hardware can attack, the company would need the developer inflow less than it did. Do you see interconnect as a replacement for the CUDA moat, or as something that only holds while CUDA keeps compounding?

Non-Brand Data

Nov 1

Lesson 2. Making AI Requests from Google Colab

Use Groq to generate Python code and continue the conversation with your analysis results.

Groq provides an API that we can use to access language models from Python. With the API, we can send a question and receive the model’s response in our notebook.

Cornellius Yudha Wijaya

Working Smarter with AI

Oct 17

The Complete Guide to Google Notebook - Part 1

Turn Your Documents, Videos, and Research Into Knowledge You Can Actually Use

Most people use AI to get answers. Google Notebook gives you something completely different which is the ability to build an AI assistant around the information you choose, then use that information to learn, investigate, compare, explain, and produce useful material.

Working Smarter with AI ∙ 34 LIKES ∙ 6 RESTACKS

Jim Waters

•

Oct 18

This a very good article. I have not used Notebook much and understood little about it. I will be saving this for future reference.

Guru

•

Saving this one. The example of 15 PDFs, meeting notes and videos in one place is exactly what a normal workweek looks like. I like the instruction to "identify where information is missing", because most people only ask for the comparison. When someone on a team starts using Notebook, do they trust the citations, or do they still open every source to check?

Rewilding Today

Oct 11

i ditched google maps and rediscovered my hometown

no tracking, no reviews, no live traffic: an honest week with organic maps

First of all, a very warm welcome to the 900+ new readers who joined Rewilding Today this week! I am in awe of how many of us resonate with the idea of switching Big Tech apps to open-source alternatives, and I am so excited to go on this journey together!

Beatrice | Rewilding Today 🪴 ∙ 30 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Gabriel

•

Oct 12

Hello, I’m from Argentina and we have long distances without internet or phone signal, so Organic Maps is my favourite because the advantages you already mentioned.

But basically I use 3 maps apps because the combination of features. Google Maps in urban areas, Organic Maps in urban also but mostly in countryside terrains and roads. And finally Caltopo for a more professional use; when I want to create my own maps and tracks, to do trekking navigation, calculate distances and areas, altitudes, contours, etc. When I want to “read” the land thoroughly, Caltopo is my favourite.

Organic Maps is one the most complete maps, versatile and easy to use.

As you said no one is perfect. But after reviewing most of the maps available, these 3 ones are my choices.

Best regards

Kitty Wilde

•

Oct 12

I read your note about Organic Maps a few days ago and give it a try myself. I discovered a few places missing that I visit frequently, so I tried to submit them to Open Street Map (OSM) DB. Imagine my surprise when I tried to create a new account and my email was rejected because an account already exists with that email!

It seems 18 years ago I submitted some changes from my hometown, and I totally forgot about that 🙃.

I'm planning to ask my town council for a list of registered businesses, and try to submit to OSM, wish me luck!

The Social Juice

8:16 PM

Seriously, What’s Wrong with Instagram, Google, and Reddit?

Everything and something is wrong with how creators distribute content and build their audiences vs. how social media platforms are changing for the AI era.

One of these days, you are going to be the person to reply and say, “Mate, what are you on about?” Today is not that day because, even if you don’t like the yap, the Best of Marketing Index’s trends section has reached 20 trends with my latest pick on literacy.

Jaskaran ∙ 9 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Arjun Basu

•

Meta has never created anything, really, it is not in the culture and they don't know the difference between good or bad ideas because they are both "ideas" in the end and ideas imply decisions and momentum. Another thing that is not in the culture is an understanding of the user. The only user Meta ever understood was the fratboys right at the start, who would use The Facebook to sexually harass the women at Harvard. I mean, that was the height of their innovation. Their only good decisions have come from purchases, namely IG and WhatsApp.

evie

•

great post! i think instagram is cannibalizing itself, and is using the argument that they're "investing into long-form art" but really it's self-serving to become the "everything" app. i'm much more akin to instagram than tiktok, in the same way that i'm pretty anti-ai but much more akin to claude than chatgpt. the way Adam Mosseri is talking about features is like artwashing... i cannot see anyone using Features to make meaningful long-form content, especially with no real plan for creator monetization, as you mention.

youtube still continues to be my "safe" social media app for myself and the one app i do use on my living room TV. i don't think that behavior willl change with IG's new TV app. buttt, i have witnessed my younger Gen Z sister casting her Reel feed onto the TV to view alone before. so i guess we'll see !!

Top 25 Google Articles on Substack

Latest Google Articles

I’ve cast over 1,000 talent. Here’s how Victoria’s Secret engineered attention.

Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets - October 16-31, 2026

Google and Microsoft

The Great Google Bleed

Google EPS Q&A

Did Google Just Break Reddit?

What Google Owes the Forest

Even Google Is Losing Money

🔎 Google: The AI Paradox

Google and Microsoft Earnings Breakdown

Reddit, Google, and the Missing Click

Google Is Back in the Doghouse

Google: No AI? No search engine

Testing ScrapeUnblocker on Google and Shopee

Chip Wars and Google Earnings Recap

Google banning search in schools?!

Beating Google

Breakfast Bites: Google Tests the AI Trade

Google news to use: What to know

I Told You Google Was Reddit's Landlord

Chokepoints and Moats

Lesson 2. Making AI Requests from Google Colab

The Complete Guide to Google Notebook - Part 1

i ditched google maps and rediscovered my hometown

Seriously, What’s Wrong with Instagram, Google, and Reddit?

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