How Nano Banana Saved Google

Google Gemini’s breakout in 2025 gets pinned on “Nano Banana,” Google’s fast image generation and editing push that coincided with Gemini MAUs jumping from 350M to 650M by October, plus momentum from NotebookLM upgrades and aggressive social distribution. Neil and Eric debate why free, bundled AI (Search AI Overviews, Chromebooks, Android) can outscale paid ChatGPT for students and everyday users, then zoom out into AI’s new marketing playbook for demand gen, ABM, and always-on agents, plus a reality check on VC data and “SEO is dead” takes. Key takeaways: -Nano Banana made Gemini feel viral and usable. -Free distribution beats “better” features for scale. -AI is rewriting B2B demand gen workflows. Chapters: (00:00) What saved Google Gemini (00:12) Nano Banana drives MAU growth (01:10) AI Overviews massive reach (01:43) Students choose free Gemini (05:39) Chatbot traffic share shifts (08:34) AI demand gen playbook (10:38) Skepticism on VC datasets (16:42) Luck favors consistent grind (20:50) Holiday send-off for 2026

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 01

  What book saved Gemini?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, what product?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Product? I don't know what you mean.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  I'll just, I'll kind of, I'll show you where I'm going with this. So when you look at the launch of Nano Banana, that's when Gemini's monthly active users grew from 350 million to 650 million by October. So this one guy, um, so this is Josh Woodward. He's the head of Google Labs, and he said, basically, once they launched Nano Banana, their TPU is almost melted. It was getting so much usage. And I think really, it's not even just Nano Banana. Everything that we're launching, Notebook LM, all the upgrades, they were hitting it hard on social too. They built all these separate X accounts, um, and they're firing on all cylinders. And so, um, when you look at it, Google said in October that the Gemini's app's monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  And you look at all the benchmarks, all these things, they're just, they are number one right now in my mind, uh, which is what you predicted a few years ago, so.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  They have too much data. They have a great engineering team. I don't think that Google's gonna crush ChatGPT where they don't exist. I think they're all gonna coexist, but I do think Google will be the leader.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. AI Overviews, by the way, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users. I don't like how they call those users. It's just, you know what I mean? But, um, opening, I said in October that ChatGPT hit 800 million users per week. So food for thought, I think there's gonna be different players in this. And, uh, I was listening to some AI people talk about this recently, but they feel like LLMs are, one of the guys was like, LLMs just like, they're just like gas stations. They're very commoditized. You're gonna use this gas station, use this gas station, like whatever.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Did I ever tell you this story when I was at Heath's house and it really made me realize how Gemini was gonna win?

• 2:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  My niece?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  You're talking to your niece about this? Go ahead.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm, I'm sitting, watching TV. We're watching Home Alone. This was like, uh...

• 2:28Speaker 01

  You know, call it a month or so. It was actually in December, early December. Okay, sitting, watching Home Alone at night. My niece Aria sitting next to me. And she's doing her homework and she's using AI. And she's like, everyone does it. The teachers even know that we use AI. I was like, okay. So then I'm like, she's using Google. And she's using AI mode, alright? You can call it whatever you want. I could just call it all Gemini because it's all pulling from the same source code from my understanding, right? And I was like, why don't you use ChatGPT? She's like, no one in school uses ChatGPT. I'm like, what are you talking about?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  She's like, you know, if you keep using it and you ask all these complicated questions, it cuts you off after a while, you gotta pay money. And I was just like, seriously, it cuts you off? Now, keep in mind, I don't realize this because I'm just on a paid plan and whatever it costs, it costs and I don't know about it. She's like, we all use Google. Google's free. And it hit me and I was just like, that's right. We look at two hundred dollars or twenty dollars, whatever plan you're on. We look at that as pennies on the dollar. Google also penetrated all these schools with the Chromebooks. And now she's just like, yeah, she's like, everyone in my school uses Google. No one wants to go to their parents and ask them for two hundred dollars or twenty dollars or whatever it costs.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  So your parents are gonna approve it? Hey, mom and dad, I wanna cheat on my homework and and uh use ChatGPT. Can you pay for it? She's like, they're gonna all say no. So he's like, we just use Google. She's like, it's great. It's free. You can use it as much as you want. It's like ChatGPT doesn't work that way. You gotta pay money.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Google is, Google's gonna grind people down. That's what they're gonna do.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  But that is the future of the world, right? It can't just be her class in San Francisco. And and by the way, she's in the Bay Area, not in San Francisco, but outside the city. And I was talking to my nephew who's in high school, different school. He's like, yeah, no one uses ChatGPT. We all use Gemini. He's like, he's like, you know, ChatGPT is for you old people.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Who's gonna pay for this stuff? He's like, why don't you pay when you get the same thing for free?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so good.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And it really hit me at that moment. I'm like, they're gonna dominate the future generations because it is free. And you know what? Just like people say, Google search is amazing. People have been doing search for a long time, including Bing. Bing isn't bad. I'm assuming you agree with that same. Their algorithms are actually pretty good. It's, yes, Google won the mind share back in the day and they have the adoption through all the Android devices and their deal with Apple. But um, what's really gonna help them is they have the adoption. They have the channels and the distribution. And it's free. ChatGPT needs to charge to make money.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  They need that cash. If they didn't, their business would be in a much worse position today. And it's already hemorrhaging money. Google is the most profitable company in the world and they're like, twenty, two hundred dollars a user per month. Who cares about this money? We already make a hundred and fifteen, hundred and sixteen billion a year in profit.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  If this stuff away for free. It's the Teams model. Um, I see more companies using Teams. I focus more on enterprise, but I see way more companies using Teams than Slack by far. I can't even uh, count in comparison the difference. It's on a magnitude. And I really believe Teams won that race because it was just free. Forget if the product was better or worse. It was just free, which is the best marketing play ever.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Dude, here, check this out. Speaking of which, okay? So this graph over here shows, when you look at, this is total top ten AI chatbot and tool websites in the US, November twenty twenty five, okay? So you can see ChatGPT is number one here. Sure, it has sixty seven percent traffic share for the AI chatbot websites. Uh, but they've dropped six point five five percent month on month. We're talking billion monthly visits, which is still a lot, right? Um, but Gemini, look, look who's coming up from the rear. Gemini here is number two, eleven point one six percent, but it's up nine, nine point three nine percent. Hundred sixty, sixty eight million or so. And then who, who else is coming up right now? Grok. All these other ones are going down right now, which is interesting to me. I don't even know what Polybuzz is.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I I don't know what polybuzz is either. I was talking to my co-founder Mike yesterday because we're both in, uh, he lives in Vegas and I'm here in Vegas visiting.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And we're chilling, you know, at, uh, his clubhouse or the community he lives in. We're just sitting there at at the restaurant. And he's, we were talking about our roadmap for one of our projects add to the public. And I told the team to not focus on integrating perplexity. And the team wanted to integrate places like, oh, just take another week. I'm like, dude, most people don't use perplexity and don't care about it.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  I'd rather have that week back.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then Mike's just like, you know, if we're gonna do it number three. Because we both agree that you need chat GPT, which is what we did first. Google, which is almost released, it'll, uh, get released sometime in, uh, January. And he's just like, it's Grok. And normally, I would have said no. But I was like, I actually agree with you. And he's like, why? I'm like, because I saw a different chart than yours. But Gemini and Grok were the two main ones growing right now. Uh, it was not traffic based, it was app based. And I was just like, you know what? I'm like, I agree with you. I don't think Grok's that important right now, but if we're gonna pick another one within six months, I would add in Grok.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yep. Yep. So, and by the way, I mean, I use Grok quite a bit to have just explained a lot of the tweets that I look at. Um, but I want to show one more thing real quick. This is, uh, from the same.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And and as Eric's pulling that up, I want to clarify something from Eric and I's viewpoint, because I don't want anyone to assume this. When Eric and I say that we believe chat GPT, you know, uh, Google and Grok are the leaders. We're not saying there's no room for Claude. There's different purposes for different apps. Like Eric and I both agree that, uh, Anthropic will do extremely well when it comes to the development market. And enterprise market and they'll own a large chunk of that market, right? But when you think about from a marketing standpoint, when people are using these tools like search, just like you use Google.com. We believe the winners are going to be chat GPT, Google, and potentially Grok.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  We're not giving an order, um, but if we did have a given order, it would probably be Google first, chat GPT second, then Grok there.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  All right, so let me share this real quick. This is just saying how the the marketing, the old marketing playbook doesn't work anymore. And this is from Daniel Dion. This is from the Battery Ventures thing as well. So let me read off this. So the old SaaS 1.0 playbook for marketing is, you know, measure usage depth, gross retention, unit economics early. We're not saying that's not important, but demand gen is becoming much more metrics driven, not volume driven, and efficient frontier trade-offs, the infrastructure layer influence the application experience. So let me, let me explain what this means in maybe simple terms here. If you look at the, the chart over here, the, the data over here. So AI in demand generation now is you have new data and intent signals to service higher quality leads. Okay, so for example, Neil and I, we have, you know, decent traffic that comes to our website.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  And if you're able to enrich the ICP fit people who aren't initially hand raisers, how do you nurture these people? Okay, so how do you, maybe you reach out to them, maybe you start to generate a conversation with them based on what they're interested in, interested in, right? You can look at the social graph and how they're behaving. Agents for deeper account research and automated plays and sequences. So, for example, Salesforce just bought Qualified, I think, and Qualified will do something like that, will though kind of enrich people on your site and, and, you know, reach out to them. Personalized engagements, right person, right message, right time. And so it's a lot of the stuff that humans just don't have the time to do at a very high level. And then you have always on agents to qualify inbound. So I know Jason Lemkin's Saster, for example, they use their agents quite a bit to book sponsorships and it does well for them.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And I just think, we talked about go to market engineers, we talked about vibe coders earlier. I think this is going to apply directly to this new marketing playbook and those who understand AI will understand how to take advantage of these things. And I think, I think this is just the very beginning, right? And so, you know, all of these things that I've wanted to do, to be honest with you, 10 years ago or so, you're now finally able to do it like, you know, quickly updating your CRM, closed loss reasons and all that. Like, salespeople don't like to update these things. And so I think this is why we, we keep, you know, shouting from the top, at least I do, on, on why it's important to become AI fluent. But just wanted to share this piece.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And just be careful with this data that you see. If you look at what Eric's sharing on his screen, he's sharing stuff related to SaaS, which I believe you said Battery, right?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Battery Ventures, right? They they're well known in the SaaS space. But a lot of these VCs and investors do put out data and a lot of it you should take with a grain of salt. Like, I remember it was either earlier this year or part of last year where BG Squared, that podcast with Brad.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Brad Gersner and Bill Gurley.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bill Gurley. They ended up talking about how SEO is dead. Do you remember that?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  And you and I were like, no, it's not dead. But a lot of people are like, look at these guys, they're super successful. If you look at Brad Gersner, he's managing the Trump money. You know, that Trump fund where people are giving cash.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  America, the Invest in America, the thousand dollars per kid.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, because both Ray Dalio and Michael Dell and family, they invested in that. But he's making a management fee managing that money. Smart guy, rich, but he doesn't know a lick about SEO. And I'm not saying he's not smart, he's smarter than I am, but it's context. It's like saying, oh, a president knows more than Eric and I and everything. We know quite a bit on marketing. We don't know much on politics, right? You gotta look at experts and see what they're saying. Not just people who are pulling out data from their sample portfolio company and be like, look, this is how it's working, it's pretty much dead.

• 12:43Speaker 00

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• 13:27Speaker 01

  And Gary Vee is really smart with marketing. He's great with creative, great with social media. He's great with driving attention, but SEO has never been his strong suit. Does it mean, you know, he's right at everything? No. If you look at the marketing that I do, it's more logic-based, numbers-based, less creative-based. I think Eric would agree with this. I'm more stats and data-oriented versus.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  We talked about this when I, when I spoke with Gary, um, that he, you, I put you, like, he even put you two on different spectrums. He's more feeling and brand-based, you're more numbers and logic-based.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And there's no right or wrong. I've built a business doing what I've done. He's built a business doing what he's done and forget audience size. Gary's an amazing job, one of the, you know, better entrepreneurs.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Very strong operator.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, extremely strong operator. I would say he's a, you know, A-plus entrepreneur. There's, it, it's hard to find people like him, but I know people who are more successful than both of us, who don't have a social following. And one of the people that I know really well is a creative person and they've done extremely well from it. And the other person I know is a SaaS guy and he's done better than both of them. Both of them are on the Forbes list. And the SaaS guy is a data-oriented guy and neither approach is right or wrong. You've got to find out what works for you. You know, entrepreneurs come in different sizes, different skillsets. You, you gotta find your own way versus saying that everyone fits in the mold.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And by no means am I saying that Gary thinks that everyone should fit into mold or anything like that. I, you know, I, I wholeheartedly believe that he knows that, uh, everyone has to find their own way. But I would say this one thing, what Gary's, one of the biggest strengths that he has that I think most people, um.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Let me guess, let me guess, can I guess?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that he can see trends and bet on the trends.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, he's so amazing at seeing trends. One of the best people that I've seen when it comes to internet-based trends by far. And it could be also non-internet-based. I haven't seen all his stuff, but internet-based trends, he's so amazing at that.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll continue on here on, I, I thought this is an interesting thing that Sam Altman mentioned. So he said, Sam, Sam Altman revealed OpenAI's internal GDP valve benchmark. Okay, it says ChatGPT 5.2 beats you at 74% of your job. It measured how AI performs on knowledge work tasks across 40-plus verticals. So the results, GPT 5.2 beats or ties expert-level knowledge workers at 74.1 of tasks. Legal analysis, PowerPoint decks, web apps, financial modeling, customer support. So his description, a coworker you can assign an hour's worth of tasks to get and get something done. You prefer back three out of four times. And so three years ago, ChatGPT launched at basically 0% on the scale. Now it's at 74% and that's available right now.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  So the crazy thing is, um, whether it's ChatGPT or something else now, they're able to do tasks. I think not just for an hour, but for a couple of hours at a time. So just imagine the level of tasks, you, you actually have an AI that's working on a task for 24 hours at a time. That's the level that we're getting to. And so, um, I just think that's interesting. But going back to your point, I, I just to finish off that point around, um, how there's no right way. I think if you're listening to this and you, maybe you're, you're in your teens or you're in your twenties or so. You might think that your way is the right way, or whatever your mentor is teaching is the right way, or whatever book is teaching is the right way. But when you, when you start to hit your thirties, you start to realize that there is in fact no right way. Because how you were brought up, the experiences that you have, the way you approach things is very unique to you.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Um, and just so like the way Neil runs his business is different than how I run my business, right? Um, and I've had to learn over time, Neil's had to learn over time too. We've made a lot of mistakes. And so all that to say is, um, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. As long as you keep going and you, you're in a smart way, as long as you keep going about things in a smart way, eventually you'll strike it lucky, you'll, you'll, you'll, you just gotta last long enough to get lucky. That's the point.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a big believer, you just have to last long enough to get lucky, as long as you have common sense. If, if you're stupid, it doesn't matter how much you try at this. Dude, um, we know someone, a mutual friend, okay? And this person, uh, enjoys traveling, right? You know who I'm talking about at this point.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  You know them really well. They work for you for a bit. Okay? So this person enjoys traveling. And they don't work for me at the moment, but they they enjoy traveling. You know who I'm talking about?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  All right, we both love this person. And this person told me months ago, you know, I just haven't had my luck yet. And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, you know, one of my other mutual friends, they've had their break, they're a millionaire now. Look, you, you're lucky. Eric's lucky. I haven't had my break yet. And I was like, no, a lot of this isn't luck. A lot of this is consistently pushing forward, trying hard, learning at what we suck at. And then trying to get better and then doubling down, or if we can't get better, hiring people to fill in the gaps. And I'm like, if you look at you, you travel a lot, you'll take tons of pictures. And you say you work a lot, but you're always traveling and taking pictures. So how much can you really work?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  So then when they're complaining about life and how it's hard and they just need to get lucky. I don't think that person's ever gonna get quote unquote lucky. Why? Because they're not putting the effort, they're not trying to learn. And they make a lot of common mistakes that they should have learned from and gotten better over the years. Now, I didn't mention this person's name because I don't wanna, you know, roast them online. But I've given them this feedback in person because I care for them and Eric knows them and he's giving them feedback as well.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  You've taken care of this person really well, too.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I've helped them out, you know, like financial struggle helped them out, although sometimes you shouldn't do that.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, I don't regret any of those things. Cherish them as a friend, always will cherish them as a friend. But you're not gonna get lucky if you're not willing to put in the effort and learn at improving yourselves and your skills. If if you're just willing to stay stagnant and you believe you know everything. And you believe you're awesome and amazing at everything. And whenever you get feedback, you think that people are out for you. Like, that's playing the quote unquote victim mentality in my mind, and those people are not gonna get lucky.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why I I I don't think it's that helpful for me personally to think I'm smart or anything like that. It's it's better to think that you're not that good because you're constantly trying to get better.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yes, Eric and I don't go around saying we're smart. We actually don't believe we're smart. Not because we're trying to trick our minds so that way we learn more. We genuinely think we're not smart. Eric and I could never get into Stanford or Harvard like a lot of these people. We genuinely believe we are not smart. The only reason we both believe we've done decently well and we actually both don't believe we've done well. We both think we have a long way to go because when you look at a lot of other people there, we're not on the Forbes list. We weren't, you know, multi-hundred billionaires or billionaires when we were thirty years old, like the Mark Zuckerbergs or whoever it may be. The only reason we've done somewhat well is because we just keep grinding it out and we learn from our mistakes. That's it.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And I would also say, you know, the reason that you people might say, what's the point of getting there? I just want to, just for fun, I just want to see how far I can go. I don't know what it is for you. You have different reasons.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's a goal.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just want to see and like I'm, I'm good. I'm already, I think everything else is house money right now. You never thought at age eighteen you'd be where you are now. I never thought I'd be where I am now. And now I'm just, I'm just gonna keep going. I'm just gonna keep free rolling, enjoying my friends and family and all that. One thing I'll say, you've actually teed up a really nice topic because it's been, it's led to my experiments on threads. Uh, so, so to, to finish off the thought here, so, look, if you work smart, you work hard consistently, you're going to get lucky. Because I have a very close family friend who throughout his entire life, from all the time I've known him, has just consistently complained about his luck. You're so lucky, you're so lucky, you're so lucky. Okay? So that, that's not what it is.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Hope you guys have a happy holidays and amazing years. Eric and I wish you amazing twenty twenty six.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.