Blair MacGregor

I expect AI populism to be disproportionately young, educated, and slightly left-leaning jasmi.news/p/warning-shots

After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. And that if you run a media business that doesn't have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche, or a direct audience, you're going to be fighting hostile algo changes all the way down. He describes a recent board meeting: "We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago. And what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the ten blue links." "Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get sponsored stuff." "Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we'd put forecasts in of search traffic declining. Because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative." "Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there's no search.' You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic."

Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.

Google Search Console AI-powered configuration rolling out searchengineland.com/google-search-… do you see it? hat tip @brandonschmidt