Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Google’s AI Search Expert: How to Get Ahead Before AI Changes Everything | Robby Stein

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

What makes AI recommend one business - and ignore another? In this interview, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, breaks down how AI now decides what gets discovered, ranked, and recommended... - and what founders, creators, and marketers can do to stay visible in the new era of search. Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠My Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠LinkedIn: ⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠X: ⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠

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Starting point is 00:01:02 What should I focus on right now? To be recommended by it. Interestingly, AI thinks a lot like a person would. If I were them, I would... This is Robbie Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, the man behind how ranking actually works inside the world's biggest search engine. You can see what it's doing.
Starting point is 00:01:19 It says kicking off searches. It's looking for sushi restaurants. And so you could just book it. Oh, wow. Remember those stories where a mention in Chad GPT or another AI app made a business blow up overnight? A small bistro in Paris doubled its bookings. A restaurant in LA went viral just because AI recommended it.
Starting point is 00:01:36 And Google ranking works the same way. So now you're investing in PR and not for people to see it before AI. Right. In this video, Robbie reveals how to make your business AI visible and use Google's own systems to get discovered, ranked, and recommended faster than ever. This video is sponsored by HubSpot. Robbie, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. talk about search. Thanks for having me. Okay, I want to start with this question that is aimed
Starting point is 00:02:05 for my audience who are 20, 25 years old. How should they think about search these days and internet in general? So what's going on? Well, I say that search is now a place where you can truly ask anything and get pretty effortless information about whatever you have on your mind. And I think ultimately people are using it for so many different things. And that's not changing. You can still use Google for all the ways you do to research homework to look up specific types of websites and find information that way. But also you can ask natural language questions. You don't have to use what we call keywordese sometimes. You can just ask exactly what you want. It could be multiple sentences. And now Google has AI that can tap into all of the knowledge and context that Google has
Starting point is 00:02:47 about the web, about the world, about products, to help give you better information. Okay. And full off right here. What about information about me? Because I have Gmail, right? I have my YouTube channel, which runs on Google, right? I have my Google Drive with all the files, all my spreadsheets. Does it tap into that knowledge or not yet? So something we're working on. We announced at I.O. An opportunity for users in the future to be able to opt into an experience with enhanced
Starting point is 00:03:15 personalization. So it's something that we're thinking about too for the same reason that you have. And we want people to be able to help Google and help the services know more about you so that it can be more helpful. If you know the kinds of brands you love, if you know the kinds of places you go, if you know about a school project that's coming up, you can do more interesting things for people. When is it coming? So TBD, but we did launch recently some steps in this direction. So in labs now, you can now opt into a new experiment if you turn on AI mode in Google Labs for search labs for personalizing, shopping, and local restaurants.
Starting point is 00:03:50 And so you'll start to see a little bit more enhancement there. but obviously we're excited to connect more services like Gmail down the road. Okay, this is something that I actually liked. Of course, I would have wanted it to access my channel, analytics, and give me more first-lifes thing. But what I did is I uploaded this research, like what's going to happen in 2007, and I asked it to create a narrative for me from NX videos and write a script. It did the whole scripting thing.
Starting point is 00:04:18 Very nice. The only thing, thumbnails, I would ideally like it to actually generate thumbnails, because I asked it to generate thumbnails, and it was like, no, here's your text. Is there a way to ask it to follow my commands, I guess, more precisely? Yeah, we're working through a few of those kinds of things, but you should be able to prompt it pretty specifically. We don't have image gen as a core capability,
Starting point is 00:04:39 and so that piece it's not going to do, but it should be able to find you images. Nano banana right now is in a Gemini app feature. Okay, yeah, from the user experience, it feels like you have so many cool things. I just want to bring them all together in one super app because now it's like using different, different tabs. Okay, the next one, I only have an hour, I need a clicklunch spot.
Starting point is 00:05:01 This was actually super cool because it knows I'm in Los Altos, so it gave recommendations about Los Altos. If you click on any of these places, it brings all of the Google context forward into this viewer. So as you're browsing, not only do you have the AI that's reasoning and finding great places for you, but it makes it really easy to browse. So you can actually see the place before you're going. shows you, you know, they're opening closed times. It has menu highlights. It has reviews.
Starting point is 00:05:27 And so this is really bringing together the power of AI with all the Google's context and information. So you could kind of browse each of these places before you go. Yeah. That's all happens in one product experience. It's a convenient representation. Okay, this one, right? About like lunch. Find and book it for me. So it's going to probably take a few minutes. But you can see what it's doing. It says kicking off searches. It's looking for sushi restaurants, open table, resi sushi. it's finding options across a bunch of different Yoshi sushi, Sumo, and then it's going to research this for you.
Starting point is 00:05:59 And then you'll get an alert when it's finished, and then it'll show you options of where you can book it. There we go. And so it basically researched this for a little while. Found you across talk, if you go down. It has it across open table, and it looks like there's some talk reservations for Hiroshi. Yes.
Starting point is 00:06:16 And so you could just book it, and it has all the times there. But this is amazing. But it's pretty cool to see. That's amazing. And most of the. work is this. Like to look up all these restaurants individually would take you like 15 minutes. Yeah. But you can just now see it, click the thing, and then be done. Yeah. So when I look for a restaurant, it gives me local recommendations. So it already knows where I am. How does it select the
Starting point is 00:06:37 right results? Because I'm thinking about all the local businesses and businesses in general that run on search, right? They pay for ads. They have done their SEO optimization. So how does recommendation work now with AI mode? Yeah. So how AI mode works, is that it does something called the query fan out technique, where reasoning model will think about what you're asking. And then it will execute a bunch of questions related to it. So there could be dozens of related queries. It's literally using Google search as a tool,
Starting point is 00:07:04 doing Googling under the hood, and then finding relevant information. And it can both, obviously, do a standard Google search and understand the web results, but also tap into the knowledge bases and real-time infosystems at Google. So in this case, for local, it might pull information from 250 million plus real world. places that exist, you know, it's updated business information, many of which have local businesses that have updated their Google listings, and it can use all that information too.
Starting point is 00:07:30 So it would find all of that. And then based on your question, if you say, hey, I want Italian, I want to be kind of, you know, fun, it's maybe a date night, like make it worth it. Then it might find questions or issue queries like, hey, great experience, great for date nights. And then based on reviews, based on information that it finds, it'll produce a set of recommendation. What about if someone paid for ads using this search query? So it doesn't use ads information. This is done entirely with what's on the web and what's within Google's information system.
Starting point is 00:08:00 Yeah. But if a business has claimed their local business and has modified that, put menu information in there, it's eligible for reviews, that information could be used. Do you feel like Google ads is going away in the future? Because as a business owner, we're relying on them, right? They drive traffic. And if they are going away, what should be your strategy? Don't see them going away. What people actually do observing is that the way people use Google search isn't really changing.
Starting point is 00:08:29 It's really expanding is what's happening. So think about all the things you need in a given day. It's everything that you need a quick insurance quote. You need to file your taxes. You need to look up a kind of question about a local business question in your county. Like you're going to use Google and find that you need that information. But what's happened is that now you can do all of your business question. these new things. So you could take a picture of your shoes and say, hey, these are my shoes,
Starting point is 00:08:51 what are other cool shoes like this? And we can answer that now or help give you, provide you context with that. Or you could ask about this local restaurant question. It can be five sentences about all your allergies, issues with this. I have this big group. I want to make sure it's got light, what kind of book in advance. And you can put that into Google now too. I think that's an opportunity for in the future to be even more helpful for you, particularly in advertising context. And so we started some experiments on ads within AI mode and within Google AI experiences. But we've been really focused on building great consumer products first and foremost. But I think users are starting to see some ads experiments there too.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Interesting. So will I be able to like pay to get recommended, like for AI to even consider my business? I mean, we don't think that there should be any barrier to people finding information. So if there's information out there, it should be found. But I think what you'll find is that there could be new and novel. ad formats that if you're, let's say, shopping or you're looking for, you know, you have a complex like doing a house remodel. There's all kinds of interesting services that could be helpful for you, that if we had more
Starting point is 00:09:56 information and you could articulate more what you needed, hey, I have this kind of wood, these are the kind of contractors I have. This is my constraints. These are the price range. You could give even more fine-tuned recommendations or potential other services that you could consider or deals that could be more useful to you. Those are all things we're thinking about. I'd say it's early days in finalizing kind of how ads might appear in these systems.
Starting point is 00:10:16 but something that we're thinking about. Can you show the agentic call? Oh, yeah. See, here we go. Have a eye call. Yeah. So you can go, what kind of pet do you have? Dog.
Starting point is 00:10:26 Next. Toys, like to breed. Okay. Boom. It's a little one. Very little, yeah. Extra small.
Starting point is 00:10:33 Baby. Under one year. Bath and brush? Haircut. Okay, haircut. Let's make it look like a teddy bear. Sweet. Any flexibility?
Starting point is 00:10:44 It's okay. Flexibility. flexible. Do you want to receive a text or an email? I guess you already got your email in here. Yeah. Maybe I'll just do that. Great. Neal Los Altos and so it puts your order in here. And so now what it's going to do is going to kick off a process where it's going to make phone calls on behalf of you to a bunch of different local businesses. So these are businesses that there's no web, there's no easy way to access them on the web. Maybe they're more local. Yeah, yeah. Most of the businesses, right? It's just like a person running a business. and then you will get an email when it's done and it'll give you all the times and you can follow up from there.
Starting point is 00:11:20 Do you record any conversations so we can like hear them or? No. No? Because it will be interesting to hear like how it understood. Yeah, that would be cool. But now we, those are not recorded. How long is it going to take? It depends on the question.
Starting point is 00:11:36 Probably five, ten minutes. You probably get something back. Oh, really? Oh, wow. I got an email. We received you a pet grooming request. Okay. Nice.
Starting point is 00:11:44 So it's working. Okay, it's working. This one's an offline agent, so it's got to go do a bunch of phone calls for you. Another business opportunity to create an agent for businesses to receive those phone calls. And remember, have you seen this meme from 11 laps where two agents realize their agents and they start using agentic language? So funny, they just start beeping at each other. That's incredible.
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Starting point is 00:12:50 One size, absolutely, does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. Okay, this is so fascinating. So Google just completed calling, and it took it 10 minutes. It called this grooming, bakery and grooming, Paul Alto says a full groom starts at 105, and they have availability tomorrow afternoon. called another one said haircut $75 and called another one said a haircut for a dog $74
Starting point is 00:13:21 and then it also told me the businesses it couldn't reach well this is a game changer because now like I either ask someone to make calls for me or I make them myself or just researching a clinic for the puppy to get it first its first checkup manicure like all of the offline businesses that don't have online presence or you you don't want to go to their website, you just want Google to call them. It is happening right now
Starting point is 00:13:50 in real time. This is mind-blowing. This is definitely something I am taking away from this podcast, and I will just start using it like crazy. Give me some tips as a business owner who still runs Google Ads. What should I focus on right now to be recommended by A? And actually, my business is recommended by it, which is cool because we were doing a lot of content, but maybe for some segments of my business that are not recommended, what should I double down on for AI to consider me? Yeah, interestingly, the AI thinks a lot like a person would in terms of the kinds of questions issues. And so if you're a business and you're mentioned, you know, in, you know, top business list or from a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become
Starting point is 00:14:33 useful for the AI to find, you know, reliable businesses. So invest in your PR. That's something I've been hearing a lot. So it's not really different from what you would do in that regard. I think ultimately How else are you going to decide what business to go to? Well, you'd want to understand that. But also, like, sometimes I invest in PR and ask my friends, have you seen that article? And they're like, no. But then I ask AI.
Starting point is 00:14:52 And it really sees the article, and it uses that information. So now you're investing in PR not for people to see it, but for AI. That's actually a good way of thinking about it, because the way I mentioned before how our AI models work, they're issuing these Google searches as a tool. And so in the same way that you would optimize your website and think about how do I make helpful,
Starting point is 00:15:10 clear information for people? So people search for a certain topic, my web website's really helpful for that. Think of an AI doing that search now. And then knowing for that query, here are the best websites given that question. That's now come, we'll come into the context window of the model. And so when it renders a response and provides all of these links for you to go deeper, that website's more likely to show up. Yeah. And so it's a lot of that standard best practices around building great content really do apply in the AI age for sure. What about reviews? Because some people buy reviews. I wonder like, how?
Starting point is 00:15:43 how it's going to affect the system. It's hard. I mean, the reviews, I think, again, it's kind of like a person where, like, imagine something is scanning for information and trying to find things that are helpful. So it's possible that if you have reviews that are helpful, it could come up. But I think it's tricky to say it to pinpoint any one thing like that. I think ultimately it's about these general best practices where one is reliable. Kind of like, if you were to Google something, what pages were to show up at the top of that query,
Starting point is 00:16:07 is still a good way of thinking about it. So basically the same as SEO, right? I think there's a lot of overlap. I think maybe one added nuance is that the kinds of questions that people ask AI are increasingly complicated. And they tend to be in different spaces. It's not like a pair of keywords, right? Right.
Starting point is 00:16:23 And so if you think about what people use AI for, a lot of it is how to for complicated things or for purchase decisions or for advice about life things. So people who are creating content in those areas, like if I were them, I would be a student of understanding the use cases of AI and what are growing in those use cases. And there's been some studies that have done around how people use these products in AI. There's a really interesting to understand. As a small business owner, how can I understand what people are looking for, why I can potentially get recommended?
Starting point is 00:16:51 Is it still Google Trends? Google Trends is a really useful thing. I actually think people really underutilize that. Like we have real-time information around exactly what's trending. You can see keyword values. I think also, you know, the ads has really a fantastic estimation to you. Like as you're booking ads, you can see kind of traffic estimates for various things. So Google has a lot of tools.
Starting point is 00:17:10 across ads, across, you know, the search console and search trends to get information about what people are searching for. And I think that's going to increasingly be more interesting as, you know, a lot more of people's time and attention goes towards not just the way people you search too, but in these areas that are growing quickly. Yeah, yeah. And particularly these long, specific questions people ask and multimodal, where they're asking with images or they're using voice to have live conversation.
Starting point is 00:17:37 Are you going to provide some of that information to advertisers? to see. I think down the road we want to provide a glimpse into what people are searching for broadly. Yeah. Just like to understand. Not just advertisers too. Yeah. It could be forever for anyone. But ultimately, I think more and more people are searching in these new ways. And so the systems need to better reflect those over time. Absolutely. Okay. You mentioned shopping. We just heard the news today. Shopify and Chad GPT. What will be Google's response to that? Yeah. Well, I mean, actually, we're already, for a long time in search. You can search for whatever. you want and there's you know 50 billion products in the shopping graph that are available
Starting point is 00:18:14 there's live product updates two billion times an hour there's a change and these are merchants all over the world updating their live inventory is it in stock or not what the price is there a price drop is already a part of Google we've been working on this for a long time the cool thing now is that this is connected to Google's AI so if you ask about any product in the world it's likely that that model can tap into that knowledge and give you the exact price in a really comprehensive way that it has everything. Let's do the visual stuff, right? Can we try and find similar cream to this? Is this how you use it? Yep. Take a photo. Yep. And then you can go ahead and tap in there to go to AI mode. Yep.
Starting point is 00:18:52 Find me similar, right? Yep. Is it going to analyze the ingredients? So what is it, or is it just going to do? Oh, if you just say similar, it'll do what its reasoning. It will be just finding things that are similar products overall. But if you say similar ingredients, it might help it. So are those similar products, Drunk Elephant, Bobby Brown. Where is the shopping feature? It's there. So I just click this. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:13 But I need to go to the website, right? So I can buy directly. You need to go to the website. Yeah. But if you keep going here, some of these are shoppable. So if you say it says in-stock, Sephora. So you could tap on that. And then a few of these have more direct shopping links.
Starting point is 00:19:31 So that takes you directly to the app. But do you think in the future we're going to be just be able to press a button? I think we want to be able to make it as easy. as possible for you to do what you need. I think what we find is a lot of the systems that do things on your behalf make a bunch of mistakes, especially if you're purchasing things, you've got to be careful there. Yeah. But I do think we want to make it easy so you can just tap the thing.
Starting point is 00:19:47 Yeah, right. Just get it for me. As easy as possible. Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my In a Circle newsletter. So what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and I apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio and to my businesses, this media company and my language teaching business.
Starting point is 00:20:04 Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our really. tactics. Sometimes we don't, and I share that too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead. How do you think about competition in general? Like we used to say Google it. Now a lot of people are GPTing it. How do you think about it? And as a product owner, right? What are your daily thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think in general, you have to get in touch with why people use and appreciate and love what you're building. And then you want to figure out ways to extend on that. And I think for us, you know, Google search is used by so many people every day.
Starting point is 00:20:41 And that's not changing. It's just that people want more. And we see that. People are asking natural language questions in Google before it could even really support it with AI overviews. We saw people asking, after we launched AI overviews, they added the word AI to the end of a bunch of queries because they wanted the AI to like show up for them. They're using multimodals. So they're taking pictures of stuff. Lens as a product is growing.
Starting point is 00:21:04 70% increase year over year on visual searches. One of the fastest growing ways people are finding information. So you kind of understand the trends of your own product, and then you try to really do much better. And for Google, there's lots of reasons people use AI. They use it for productivity. They use it for creation. They make flyers for their business.
Starting point is 00:21:22 Google search is about information. And we want to give the absolute highest quality experience on finding information. You have informational task, you know, whether it's booking this restaurant or trying to research something that happened in history, or trying to know what place to go to and get high-quality info and make sure that place exists, like we think Google can be an amazing place for that, and that's where we spend our energy.
Starting point is 00:21:44 And from the product standpoint, what do you think is this unique feature that makes Google stand out? I mean, I think it's access to Google knowledge, honestly, is like the big one. And so right now if you ask about plotting a certain set of stocks, for example, around top pharma stocks or MAG7, well, the first question is like, what are those stocks? and so the reasoning model looks that up and determines it. But then it can use Google Finance as a search, as a tool call, to find the very high-quality financial information to plot a graph if you asked for financial performance.
Starting point is 00:22:13 And if you extend that to all of these other areas around local, around shopping, and these are areas that have been built out for years, the AI model that's using Gemini 2.5 and advanced reasoning, sitting on top of this knowledge is an incredible combination. And obviously, maybe most importantly, it's connected to the web. And so it understands all of this vastness of what you could then click on and dive in. And what we see is when you're trying to buy a mattress, people want to see what experts say. They want to click in.
Starting point is 00:22:39 They want to read more. And that's what Google is all about. And so I think those become really unique aspects of what Google does. And then I think that the newest one, which is around visual and inspiration, I mentioned lens and photos. People come to Google and image search for all kinds of things. Decrate my daughter's bedroom. I'm doing landscape lighting. I'm trying to design my kitchen.
Starting point is 00:22:58 Find me similar pants. find me similar stuff. But AI has been bad at inspiration. Like if you talk about, if you think about what AI does, it's been a, it's a language model. So it knows text. You talk to it. It grew up as a chatbot. But how come it can't help you more easily shop or design your home? And so now, it's something people come to Google for all the time. And you can now do that with our AI products. And you can ask, help me decorate my daughter's bedroom. I'll give you beautiful imagery. And you can have a follow up question about it. It's going to be generated? Is that like,
Starting point is 00:23:29 It's not generated, it's actually with web images. And so it'll find beautiful images. Yep, inspirational images from the web. And then you can click on them. You can ask follow-up questions, and it's a way to use natural language for inspiration. But there's this little live icon there now. So if you tap on that, say allow, and then you can ask a question. Oh, with a video as well.
Starting point is 00:23:47 You can use video, so you could even, yeah, you could point it at something. Okay, what is this device? What I'm seeing here is an I-Fly Tech, A-I-N-O-T-E-E-E-E-R-2. It's a digital note-taking tablet with an 8.2-inch e-ink screen. I'm sorry, I cannot make purchases for you. Would you like me to search for online retailers where you can buy it yourself? No, I already see Amazon is good. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:24:15 Okay, cool. You've built so many amazing products. I mean, you built Reels, right? One of them, yeah. That's fascinating. Now you're building Google Search. From a product owner's standpoint, can you give people tips on how to build in 2025 when everything is moving so fast, when everything is so competitive? Some people have, I have this feeling that software, like small startups are becoming a commodity because it's so easy to build something in two days.
Starting point is 00:24:40 What do you think as a product? Yeah, well, what's interesting is I think every product is a reaction to the time. It's like, what do people need and how do you make products today? So when there weren't any mobile experiences, everyone needed a mobile experience and people wanted more mobile. And there was this gap in the market. So I think as a product owner and as an entrepreneur, you have to be a student of gaps. And so what are the things now that people wish technology could do better? I mentioned one with inspiration and how AI is not great at that today.
Starting point is 00:25:05 So that became a big focus for what we're thinking about with AI mode. And now we're launching something, I think, exciting there. I think every entrepreneur and business owner can think that way. And I think and how it's built, increasingly you'll be able to build things just by talking with language. You don't need to code. and even with really sophisticated things I'm looking at internally, you can largely just tell the model, hey, here's a data set, here's how it works, here's the schema,
Starting point is 00:25:30 and the model can handle it. And so I think that's going to be very democratizing for getting ideas out there. So on the one side, it's going to mean that there's a surge of people trying ideas, which means there's more competition. And in the other side, though, it means anyone can try something. And so I think the grounds will be less how technical is the idea and more how interesting is the idea.
Starting point is 00:25:51 How do you spot those interesting ideas? I think there's a few things. I think one is talking to people. I think there's kind of like two things I think about a lot. One is like, how do you understand people? And a lot of it is you need to observe them, talk to them, research them, and everything I've ever built. You know, we spend a lot of time with people.
Starting point is 00:26:06 You know, we watch them use our products. We ask them questions about what they're missing. We ask, what's the time you use this and you realize you want to keep using it forever? I love that question. And that's actually a critical question. And actually this Clayton Christensen book competing against luck is an interview technique in there around eliciting that moment because that's the moment that caused the user to love your product. And if you can know that and engineer for that, that's going to get lots of people to love it. And inversely, there's a moment to say, when was the time you tried our product and you decided you're not going to use it anymore?
Starting point is 00:26:43 And then that's how you get fired for your product. and understanding that is just as important. And so I think the people who understand people well, and they try ideas fast, they ask them these kinds of questions to get it market fit, and they're building things that are resonating are going to do really well in this next phase. Because I think before it was kind of like, well, did you have a good idea? It could be a pretty good idea, but not a great idea. But hey, you can build it and not a lot of people can build it.
Starting point is 00:27:07 And so maybe it'll fly. But I think in the next era, lots of people will be able to build it. And so you really have to build something useful to people. How many interviews do you think you need to figure out if the idea is worth it? Honestly, I don't think a lot. I think I'm a big believer in small numbers going very deep with like a dozen people. And if you give someone a prototype and you say, hey, here's a product, try it out. And even your friends, they'll use it the first week because they're your friend.
Starting point is 00:27:34 But if you look two months later, are they using it every day? I don't care how good a friend they are. They are not going to use your product every single day for months. unless it's doing something for them. There's not. So the metric is make them use it every day. I think it's a daily. I think for most, you have two types of products.
Starting point is 00:27:52 You have really daily habits and products that you want to be mainstream large consumer products. You have other products that are utilities. They solve specific problems for people. It's like, okay, I have a telescope app for looking at the stars and using AI. That's going to be a different business model. You might have people who are hobbyists pay money for it. So you want to study that demographic differently. but for mainstream consumer products,
Starting point is 00:28:15 kind of the area as I've worked in, you're looking for daily value and stickiness. That's right. I love that. I think that was it. Thank you so much. Gentic calling made me super excited. Okay, good.
Starting point is 00:28:26 You'll be my first call when we have personalization in Gmail. Oh, yes. We will talk the first day. Please, please. That's like, that has been my wish. And adding things to Google Calendar. Yes, and I will pay you about that too. You'll be very excited about it.
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