Ed Zitron

They allowed websites that had been previously pushed down to come back, spammy results, so that you ended up farting around on Google more, seeing more impressions, and bing-bong, number go up.

Propagar, sadly, he sadly moved on.

He's alive.

He is now the chief technologist at Google.

I would say like 30% my work was the problem.

The funny thing is that Propagar was riding high, taking a massive, massive growth of Google.

He was doing so well.

And then he got made to take over Gemini, Google's AI.

And then there was a thing in, I think it was early 2024, where this, well, maybe it was 2025, where Google Gemini was generating Chinese George Washingtons.

And the conservatives were going, there's a black Nazi, there's a Chinese George Washington.

My tiny little brain is vibrating at a thousand miles a minute.

And for some reason, Prabhakar Raghavan had to take responsibility.

And this is not a charming man.

This isn't a man who's like a political navigator, he's just rude.

He's very good at being rude.

In the end, sadly, Propagar's work has been done.

Google sucks now, and as Corey will tell you in his excellent book and across his wonderful literature, this is a platform problem across basically the entirety of the internet.

And there's one other thing as well, Jerry Dishler, who's now the head of ads.

One of his things was, look, I'm not saying that revenue needs to control ads.

However, we all have a shared reality.