David Epstein’s Inside the Box makes the case that constraints are a gift, and this episode arrives at a moment when Google has quietly stopped pretending your website matters to them.
David Epstein’s Inside the Box argues that the freedom to do anything is often the enemy of actually doing something. Steve and David work through what that means for busy business owners making decisions every day.
Google’s AI-driven search overhaul has changed the rules for small business websites, and not quietly. Steve walks through what has shifted, what it means, and what you can do about it.
Two early Google TV ads from a simpler internet era get the Perspicacity treatment. Steve and David trace how search went from genuinely useful to something rather different.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
The Case for Constraints: Why Less Choice Gets More Done
David Epstein spent months unable to commit to a new book topic. Approaching the search like a dating app, always wondering if something better was around the corner, he eventually came across a quote from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about commitment: “The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living.” That day, Epstein chose his topic and started writing a book proposal. Two weeks later he was ten times more invested in it.
Steve uses this as a jumping-off point into some confronting numbers about human cognition. Our conscious mind can hold roughly three to four chunks of information at any one time, and they decay within two to three seconds. A modern smartphone processes information at speeds our brains cannot come close to matching. The result, as David describes it, is that technology floods us with information faster than we can decide whether it is worth thinking about. By the time we have worked that out, we have already spent our cognitive allowance for that moment.
Steve also shares a practical browser adjustment he has been using: pinning email and social media tabs in Chrome so the notification numbers disappear from view. It removes the visual trigger that pulls attention away mid-task. David draws the parallel to switching your phone to Do Not Disturb for an hour.
PS The snippet of David in this segment, comes from this podcast, below.
23:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Think Slow, Act Fast: What Pixar and a Danish Researcher Agree On
Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has studied why some large projects come in on time and on budget while others do not. His finding: the successful ones think slow and act fast. They spend longer than feels comfortable defining the problem before anything is built. The failures rush into execution, then learn their lessons expensively and with momentum already behind them.
David Epstein applied this to his own writing process. His first two books went to the deadline wire. Inside the Box was finished a month early, because he spent more time than ever before understanding the territory before he started writing. Steve and David are careful to separate thinking slow from going slow. Thinking slow is deliberate risk reduction: finding the problems before you have committed resources to a direction. Going slow at every step is a different thing, closer to institutional risk aversion than strategic preparation.
David’s illustration from his teaching days makes the principle concrete. He would ask students to spend two hours on initial research the night an assignment was set, then do the rest the night before as usual. Those two hours seed questions the brain keeps processing quietly in the background. You have not worked more. You have worked earlier. And your final answer benefits from it. Steve draws a parallel to the 2025 Frankenstein film, noting it is one of the rare cases where nearly a century of reflection has allowed a story to become more fully itself on screen.
PS The snippet of David in this segments, comes from Steve’s favourite podcast, Econtalk, below.
32:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Google’s AI Search Overhaul: What Small Businesses Need to Know Now
Google has moved decisively to an AI-driven search experience, with results now built by Gemini, its AI tool. Answers are personalised based on everything Google knows about the user, their history, habits, and interests, with a small selection of links shown below. Organic search positions that businesses earned through quality content have been pushed further down the page or removed from view altogether. Steve walked through a real example: a Darwin fishing charter business, established for 15 years and consistently appearing on the first page of results, simply gone. An aggregator site had taken every relevant position across the first three to four pages.
Steve and David note the blame sits on more than one desk. SEO operators spent years gaming rankings with techniques that had nothing to do with genuine value. Google responded, then found it more profitable to sell top positions outright. The person with an actual question became secondary to the transaction between Google and its advertisers. David’s observation: if Google truly believed AI could make them money as a useful tool, they would not still be engineering the experience to keep people clicking on paid results.
What can a small business do right now? Four starting points from the episode. First, write for humans using the StoryBrand framework, so your content speaks to your visitor rather than performing for an algorithm. Second, add a 30-to-50-word answer nugget near the top of each page in plain, direct language, giving AI tools a clear summary of what the page covers. Third, structure your content in chunks of 120 to 150 words with subheadings framed as questions, because that is how AI tools are trained to find and surface information. Fourth, ask your web developer about adding an llms.txt file, a plain-text document that tells AI agents who you are, who you serve, and which pages are most relevant, and about schema code throughout the site, the universal language that helps AI tools categorise each page correctly and build trust in your content.
Further reading referenced in the chat: AI Ready: The Small Business Guide to Being the Answer.
47:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
Google’s First TV Ads: Remember When Search Gave You an Answer?
Google ran no multimedia advertising for its first eleven years. Its first TV appearance was a 2010 Super Bowl ad called Parisian Love, a wordless story told entirely through search queries: someone’s journey from tourist to expat to husband to parent, one search at a time. A 2013 ad followed a mother and child on a chaotic morning, solving a President’s Day costume crisis with a quick search for Martin Van Buren. In both ads, the person asking the question had agency. They searched, they were shown options, they chose.
Steve and David use these ads as a before-and-after. They show clearly what Google once understood: that search worked because it treated the person with the question as someone worth helping. The 2010 and 2013 ads are built entirely around that idea. As David notes, they now read almost like a nostalgia piece for an internet that actually gave you answers rather than pointing you toward whoever had paid the most.
The segment closes where the episode began. The most durable response to a shifting search landscape is the one that cannot be gamed: write earnestly, write for your reader, and use a clear framework to make sure your content speaks to the person you are trying to help. The StoryBrand framework is the clearest way Steve and David know to do that. The technical rules will keep changing. That principle will not.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
S08E08
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Thinking about Marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders, produced by Steve Davis and David Oldney of Talked About Marketing. More than 8,000 conversations have taught them something. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Everyone needs external perspective. Through their four Ps, person, principles, problems, and perspicacity, yes, you heard that correctly, they explore marketing with curiosity, generosity, and the occasional gentle eye roll.
They hope this becomes a trusted companion on your journey in business[00:01:00]
Steve Davis: David, I’ve just got a logistical question to ask you
David Olney: At least it’s not juridical.
Steve Davis: Exactly. If I moved a few boxes and cases closer to where you are there on the table, just you’ll lose a little bit of space, but you’ll still be able to, you know, talk. Do you think that will improve the quality of your output?
David Olney: Mm, I don’t know whether it would make any difference other than the microphone will pick up strange echoes.
Steve Davis: You’ve already blown my thesis out of the water then. Let’s not even do this episode.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number one, person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wilde put it this way, “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature [00:02:00] perfectly. That’s what each of us is here for.”
Steve Davis: In the person segment, and then shortly after this in the principal segment, David and I are diving into a fascinating book.
It’s called Inside the Box by David Epstein, and the core premise of the book is how constraints are our friend. We, in this society, have, uh, come to a point where we think more is more. He argues less is more, in fact, bountifully more. He goes into some nuance on, o-on that point, and we’re going to extrapolate that.
And to me, David, the reason why it’s the title of this episode, this little throwaway line he has, has stuck with me. If you are not engineering your time in this age, it will be engineered for you. [00:03:00] Yep. On that note, before we continue, dear listener, thank you for using some of your scarce time to be with us.
We’re gonna do our best to make it valuable for you. Before we dive into this even more, David, for some reason more than others, you were really excited we were doing a David Epstein book. Why?
David Olney: Because his last book, which is called Range, uh, all about the fact that we need more generalists who can see the links between specific areas and specific skills and specific insights, I think came out right near the beginning of my master’s in strategic communications, and it gave me great hope that taking all my experience of teaching complex problem-solving and consulting on complex problem-solving, that going and adding communications to it very much fit with his model of we need more really capable generalists.
So it gave me hope that doing the hard thing would work well.
Steve Davis: Interestingly to me, uh, I have [00:04:00] long argued, anyone who’s sat through my workshops or been my client will often hear me say that having some sort of restriction or constraint is going to, in some way, coax out of us more creative creativity than we might otherwise have achieved.
Uh, we might go into that a little bit more later. But if you’re still cynical hearing me saying this, how can that help? How can constraints help? It actually is the closest we come to accepting reality, uh, especially because our time is finite, our resources are finite, and the less we waste our finite resources of energy on superfluous, not core things, um, the better.
David Epstein: So one of the things when I had this total freedom, and stop me if I’m going on too, too long here, but it was an interesting experience for me, where I said, “Gosh, books are so [00:05:00] consuming. It’s so hard. It takes up so much of my life and energy that I’m not writing another one unless I find the perfect topic.”
So I start dipping my toes into all these topics and, and I like a f- I’m finding several things fascinating, but none’s perfect. And so y- like picture me, I’m basically like on a dating app, but I’m going for book topics. So I’m just like swiping and swiping. And I d- I couldn’t pick anything. Like, I kept thinking, “Is there something a little better?”
And then I read this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity. And he’s talking about marriage, but you could sub it for any other word. It wouldn’t matter. And basically he says, “The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living.”
Hmm. Like it frees up this energy to actually do the thing. And I was like, “Man, this is what I’m doing with my topics.” I’m just like wondering what’s around the corner. That day I said, “I’m really interested in constraints. I need some [00:06:00] myself. I’m writing a book proposal on this.” And of course, two weeks later I was 10 times more interested in it because I had
I decided to dive into it. And so that was the start of this process of me reeling back some of this ex- excessive autonomy where, you know, I joined the board of a nonprofit in my community. I started going to dance meetups so I could have embodied experience with strangers. All these things that kind of started adding structure back to my life.
E- even in my workday, like I borrowed from a character in the book, one of the greatest living writers. She lights a candle to start her workday and blows it out to finish the workday and closes the door. And since I work at home, I would let … I would never shut down my workday. So I stole that from her. I, I use an electric candle though because I have too much paper in my office.
But, um, you know, and then now I, now that I mention it, I, I… Like my neighbor Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, he’ll at the end of his workday, he does like a compute- He’s a computer science professor. He’ll say, “System shutting down.” You know, and it seems silly, but y- when you have all that freedom, you actually need something to close the workday [00:07:00] so that just like an athlete in training, you can recover and be ready for the next hard bout the next day and, and you know, to, to be there for your family and all those kinds of things.
Steve Davis: And I wanna bring this right down to some basic mechanics, David, and he gets into one of his chapters which scared the living daylights out of me. It’s why I’ve really curtailed a lot of my excessive use of social media in particular, and it’s the human brain and its capacity to, uh, absorb and deal with and hold and process information in contrast to what our smartphones can do or what home Wi-Fi.
Let me just paint some numbers, and then David, I’ll ask you to reflect on this with me. Firstly, when it comes to storing data, to holding memories, those sorts of things, and we compare the human brain with a lot of our technology, you might be shocked to [00:08:00] know the human brain actually wins hands down. So a conservative ep- estimate of how much the human brain can hold in memory is one petabyte, which is about 1,000 terabytes, or if you prefer gigabytes, that’s about a million gigabytes.
That’s what we can hold. Optimistically, though, some researchers say the brain can hold two and a half times more than that. That is a lot, a lot of data. An iPhone 13 Max, for example, 512 gigabytes is all it could imagine, uh, all it can hold. So that means the brain versus the iPhone ratio, our brain could hold two to 5 million times more in storage than a phone.
Absolutely amazing. And in fact, this will– It shocked me from Pan Macmillan If you held all the information on the entire internet in 2016, that’s about the [00:09:00] same ballpark of how much data our human brain is capable of holding. Now, at this point, we might think, “Well, what’s the problem? Steve going on about your constraints and being careful about what you focus on.”
Here’s the problem. The speed our brain processes this information is one factor to bear in mind. So this is where technology leaves our brain behind. According to a Caltech study in 2024, human conscious thought, so our working thinking mind, can process 10 bits of information per second. That’s 10 chunks of information, 10 individual things that we’re holding at one time per second.
Our sensory system, though, so not conscious thought where we can speak it back to you, but sensory, the deeper understanding, we’re absorbing about 100 million to a billion bits per second. The iPhone, though, [00:10:00] the M2 chip, the MacBook Air, 1.7 trillion bits per second. It’s a lot more than average home Wi-Fi, about 262 million bits.
But if you look at it that way, we just don’t have that processing speed to go through the data. But that’s not the worst bit. This is the thing that is really the stranglehold. And it is this, what can we hold in our conscious thought at any one time? It’s one thing to be able to have that information come through, but how long, uh, how, how ca- how many things can we play with at one time?
George Miller in 1956 came up with what is well accepted now, that we can hold typically seven chunks of information in our head at one time, plus or minus two. And if you’ve been with me making websites, that’s why I always argue that the number of menu items across the top of the webpage should be about seven plus [00:11:00] or minus two for that very reason.
Uh, modern research at, looking at when we’re dealing with new things says we can really hold about three to four chunks of information at one time, and there’s a time limit though. We can hold those in our brain, but in about two or three seconds they decay. So this uses a lot of energy from our brain.
So David, after that little bit of geeking out with those numbers, we’ve got a lot of storage, but it’s the holding and the processing of them where technology leaves us for dead. Why does this make the stakes so high for what we point our attention to?
David Olney: Largely because all the technology pointing at us can flood us with information faster than we can decide if it’s worth thinking about it or engaging with it.
So if we’re constantly in the cycle of going, “Oh, is that interesting? Is that worthwhile? [00:12:00] Oh, there’s the next thing,” that’s where the three hours of cat photos happens. Or the five hours of YouTube because we just go, “Oh, we’re absorbing as much as we can absorb.” There’s barely time to process, and at the end of it, we’ve been entirely dictated to by the technology, but we haven’t deliberately done anything that we might have valued if we’d stopped, sat quietly, and gone, “What do I wanna do with limited time and resources?”
Steve Davis: I remember, I don’t know if it was a cynical journalism video or a training one in media relations in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and it was something like, in the newsroom, if we don’t have much news one day, deliver it like it’s real news and people will listen anyway. And this is even worse now. So what you’re saying, David, is we’re getting bombarded with so much information.
The brain, [00:13:00] because we’ve gone to it, we’re addicted, we’re connected to these devices, go there, we use that finite energy to work out whether it’s worth our time or not, and by that point it’s too late. We’ve already spent our allowance.
David Olney: Yep, and we’re cycled into the next new thing, and we have to start our cycle again, or we just learn to, to go with the flow, to spend the time and at the end have no real idea what we consumed or why.
Steve Davis: That is-
David Olney: And with, with that probably, I think, comes a lot of anxiety about, hang on, was I paying attention? What did I see? Why am I feeling uncomfortable for sitting still for so long? Why am I feeling empty? We haven’t connected with a human for five hours. Like, there’s so many bad consequences of being dragged along by an information stream that’s not giving us anything at a pace we value or with content we care about.
Steve Davis: In the journalism world, an [00:14:00] editor used to play that role in deciding what would be put in front of us, and that was a first filter for us.
Google ad: Mm.
Steve Davis: And in the fleeting moments when we’ve had good editors and good publications, that, that’s been a gift- Mm … to society. In today’s age, the mantra is give everyone everything.
Let them do it themselves. Let them do your own research, et cetera. And we’re just not geared up for that because you just learn a few tricks, as we’re gonna talk about, I think, in the next episode. Um, you can just disman- Like, as that quote says, if we’re not engineering our time in this age, if we’re not putting those hard limits on ourselves, our time will be managed for us-
David Olney: Mm
Steve Davis: without any problem whatsoever, and that scares the living daylights out of me. It means we have less time for making good decision-making, and the worst thing about this [00:15:00] is we’re going, we’re being trained to take a mass of information, dump it into AI to sort it out. What’s it missing the nuance on that we’re never going to be wise about because we haven’t had the capability to sit with the discomfort and put the energy in to discern something important?
I feel just like AI reduces everything to the average, to the mean. I feel society is heading that way if we aren’t aware of this and take some action. What do you think, David? Am I over-egging that omelet?
David Olney: No. Uh, I think this is the problem of overwhelm, is in overwhelm comes, or with overwhelm comes a desire to just reduce the sense of pressure, reduce the sense of not knowing what’s going on, and to just float free.
And floating free with a system that benefits someone else, the person who made the tech, the person who made the app, means not only do [00:16:00] we lose a sense of being able to do work, but also who are we? Who do we wanna be? How do we wanna behave in the world?
Steve Davis: We are just rushing faster and faster, running on ice.
David Olney: Yeah, further and further away from us deciding what we value, what we wanna do, and why we wanna do it.
Steve Davis: Which then disconnects us from having a big goal, a v- a vision, a dream, a value that we’re aiming towards, which we know from Viktor Frankl’s work in Man’s Search for Meaning is One way to stay sane in this world and have a satisfying life is to have something outside of ourselves bigger than us.
The other thing where the rubber hits the road with too much choice, too much information, is sliding versus deciding. And he talks about in the book how if we continue, and we’ve been trained by the world now to keep options open. Adelaide is one of the worst markets for this, especially if you do theater, um, people– or, or [00:17:00] run workshops.
People do not commit until minutes or hours before, just in case. He argues that this whole mindset of keeping options open, particularly with dating apps, where you can, “Oh, I’m just gonna keep looking, keep swiping, you never know,” it undermines relationship satisfaction, either the one you’re in-
David Olney: Hmm …
Steve Davis: or the one you might try and start kindling.
It is saddening. We’re aware of this, and yet no one seems to be stopping it.
David Olney: Yeah. If we don’t show commitment to the things we do and the people we interact with, why would they show commitment back? So we want the world to be committed to us. We want the world to listen. We want the world to engage. We want the world to be ready there waiting for us.
Guess what? If we’re not committed to people in the world, why would it slow down or care about us?
Steve Davis: So to bring [00:18:00] this segment to a practical end for the person, for all of us, uh, I, I guess I come back to him, and he’s talking about Herbert Simon’s wonderful concept of satisficing. So when you make a decision, you can either maximize, and it’s gotta be perfect on all counts, and well, happy life to you, not.
Uh, or you satisfice, which is something that, you know, it’s satisfactory. It satisfies your core needs. It’s good enough. He’s arguing that we should hold that as a, a great standard in life is to satisfice. What does that m- look like in reality?
David Olney: A big part of Herbert Simon is recognizing that you need to decide with each thing, am I satisficing here or am I maximizing?
So breakfast cereal for the average person who’s not training for the Olympics satisfies basic [00:19:00] nutritional, you know, sort of endpoint. If you’re training for the Olympics, different. It’s contingent on, on who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. But human relationships, do you really want satisficing human relationships?
Steve Davis: Ah.
David Olney: If you’re gonna spend the little bit of money you’ve saved to buy something to go on a holiday with your family, do you wanna satisfice on that thing that’s so important, or do you wanna maximize there? What will you satisfice on to free the resources to maximize on something that’s more important?
It’s all about actually taking the time to slow down and go, “What do you value? What can you sacrifice here for something more valuable later?” And it’s where, you know, Simon’s research is so significant, that people who endlessly maximize want the perfect version of everything are miserable and get very little done.
Steve Davis: A- and we did, uh, say AI earlier in this conversation. [00:20:00] This is probably a useful place, whereas if you’ve, if you’ve got a reliable tool and you wanna make a decision, and you decided that a satisficing outcome will do, and you’re not sure how to go about that, David, you wouldn’t disagree with me if I said, open up Perplexity or Gemini or whatever you’re using and say, “Look, can you please help me find a satisficing way forward on this thing that I’m weighing up?”
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: And then it will help you– it will tease out with you what are the elements of this decision. Like when I bought a car a couple of times ago, a couple of times back, I did this, where cost of petrol, how much it was using, cost of the vehicle, all those things, and I gave them a little bit of a weighting, put in the different cars I found, and made a great decision.
It was a satisficing decision.
David Olney: One of the things I really like in the Epstein book is an exercise he gives for this, and I can’t remember where the exercise comes from. But it’s once you’ve narrowed it down, you know, to which thing is the satisficing [00:21:00] conclusion, ask yourself the question, if this was the only option available, would I be happy?
Like if you didn’t know you were giving up those other options, if the car you’ve actually got was the only one you could have afforded, the only one that was available, would you be happy? And more often than not, your answer is you’d probably be happier because you wouldn’t have the sense of missing out.
Steve Davis: My last two bob’s worth on this is the concept of monotasking. You might be pleased to know, David, that I am trying hard to apply this. Instead of having three or four jobs in my brain at once, which we’ve just learned at the beginning of this is a complete waste of time, uh, I am monotasking. And one thing to help me where the world is against you is having a number of browser tabs open.
I still do that, and I don’t care about that, but it’s the browser tabs for my Google inbox, and I, I, I’ve got, I’ve got three different Google [00:22:00] inboxes, and social media, because they show numbers if there are new notifications or unread. So you can be working away and your eye will see the number has just changed, and it pulls you towards it.
Now, I use Chrome, and here’s a trick that you can use. On, on tabs like that, you right-click on the tab and you choose pin, P-I-N, pin. It just moves it to the left-hand side of your browser tab, and it shrinks it down so you don’t see any notification information. It ju- you know it’s there, but nothing it does can trigger you to lose concentration and go there.
It will wait until you’re ready. That single thing, David, has empowered me greatly. It has conserved so much working memory.
David Olney: Yep, you’re not letting yourself be distracted by the machine. Yeah. It, it’s like turning our phones on to do not disturb for an hour to get an hour without bings and bongs. It makes such a difference.[00:23:00]
Steve Davis: My daughter just texted. Let’s just take a pause.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two, principles. These are ideas worth building on. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, you can never be overdressed or over-educated
Steve Davis: David, something David Epstein taught us was this. Are you ready? Mm-hmm. Think like this. Act like this. Am I right?
David Olney: Steve before coffee, Steve after coffee. I love it. I love the fact that this is one of the things in the book that he takes from, uh, one of the very senior people at Pixar. You know, this idea of think slow, get as many of the mistakes out in the [00:24:00] development curve, and it makes me think of the wonderful line, “We didn’t have time to do it properly, so we’re finding the time to fix it.”
David Epstein: Yeah. Think slow,
David Olney: act fast.
David Epstein: So I was slower to start writing this time around. It took me longer to get to the phase where I started writing, but once I started writing, I executed really quickly because I understood the playing field. So this is what in, in the book b- the, the Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies projects, would call the, the good, uh, the good sequence for a project, for projects that are usually s- in hi- in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised, um, is think slow, act fast, meaning y- you have this small early stage where you’re defining the problem, you’re setting the boundaries, what are you doing?
And then when you move into execution, you can, you can do it more quickly. The opposite is where you … is, is think fast, act slow, where you have a big idea, you rush into execution, and then the lessons are gonna [00:25:00] be much more painfully acquired ’cause you have momentum and all these things. And so I actually
m- my, in my first two books … Well, the first one I needed an extension, actually, so I didn’t even make it by the deadline. The second one I turned in on 5:00 PM, uh, on the day of the contract. So I assumed that’s what I was gonna do again, and I finished, uh, I had it a month early. I just sat for two weeks because I didn’t know what to do.
Like, does anybody turn in books early? Wow. No. So I would never not do it this way again
Steve Davis: And this kind of goes against the way the world is. Yeah. Um, and we look for those, those fast, sharp decisions. We praise those people. They’re the heroes. But really, you know what? The ones, those big figures in history that really make the impact, they’re the ones that have typically thought slow about something, and then they act quickly once they’ve made their decision.
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: It doesn’t matter if you look at great philosophers, great scientists, great innovators, [00:26:00] they’re all the same. They put years into knowing their thing inside out, so when the good idea finally looks right, it’s got past all the iterations. They’re so ready to act, and they can seem so confident and so decisive that people are very easily persuaded to support them and invest in what they’re doing because of the sheer certainty they’ve got, because they’ve done all the iterating before the experiment, you know, before the physical iteration of what they’ve thought up.
Steve Davis: And that’s different from going slow in, uh, like certain corporations. Uh, with a website change seems to take forever, and I think that’s where someone might have made a decision, but they take… They’re acting slow, and that’s not what he’s on about. He’s about thinking slow to get that right so that what’s left to do, you can gobble off [00:27:00] quickly.
I mean, some things might take longer than others. Mm. But at least there’s … Everyone knows what they’re meant to do at that point.
David Olney: I think the key thing in that corporate example is the difference. Thinking slow is a form of risk management. You’re looking for all the things that could go wrong and getting rid of them.
Going slow every step is risk aversion. Oh, we couldn’t possibly take any risk. Mm. We couldn’t possibly do anything that we’d have to take blame for. We couldn’t possibly do anything that would attract attention. And yet, in the end, doing nothing is what attracts the attention ’cause everyone ends up pissed off at the corporation.
Steve Davis: Yeah. So what does this look like? It c- it’s wonderful for us to reflect here, and we can apply this ourselves, but someone say, “Well, hang on. No, I’ve got this to do, and I’ve got that to do. Uh, my team’s expecting me to make decisions.” How do we build in that mindset and expectation that think slow is actually the smartest way?
David Olney: The way I used to explain it to [00:28:00] students was, “Guys, I know you’re not gonna do any more work, but could you do a bit of that work earlier? I- this essay that, you know, you’ve gotta hand up to me in four weeks’ time, could you go and spend two hours doing initial research, reading, and thinking tonight, and then do the rest the night before like usual?”
Steve Davis: And why? Why?
David Olney: Because the two hours tonight is gonna put some seeds in their brain that their brain’s gonna keep chugging. They’re going to do that, that fast two hours tonight in system one, but over the next month, they’re gonna do a little bit of system two every now and then of just slowly revisiting things just for a minute here and there and pulling things out of their memory and doing the slow processing because the brain can only do slow processing.
So, you know, even in my post-academic life now, you know, w- with marketing work, with strategic business work, get a fast answer, take a day, look at your fast answer again and go, “Oh, I see that a bit differently [00:29:00] today. Well, it’s only due tomorrow, so I’ll have another look tomorrow for 10 minutes.” But you’ve looked at it three times.
You haven’t wasted three days, but you’ve looked at it three times. It’s a much better way to give your brain time to catch up with the intuitive decision you make first and find out with more of that slow background thinking if you can find all the things that are in your head that haven’t possibly got a chance of making it to the surface if you decide and act right now.
Steve Davis: It’s funny, you know, it reminds me of a conversation I was having with my 15-year-old, uh, Caitlin, who does the voiceovers. Uh, she watched the movie Frankenstein, the 2025 movie, uh, which is amazing. Totally densely creative. Every single frame has been composed to within an inch of its life. It’s magnificent.
And we were talking about the book versus the movie, and [00:30:00] I actually said, “This is one of those rare occasions where I feel the movie has gone to where Shelley possibly wanted to go,” and it’s the difference between a first draft and a second draft.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: We’ve had the best part of a century to reflect and accept the story.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Think deeply about the main themes, and then bring them to the surface. It’s very rare that I’d ever say that, but this is one of those situations. And that’s what we’re talking about within a business context.
David Olney: Exactly.
Steve Davis: And i- also, it’s a pigeon pair with another thing he says about define what not to do.
David Olney: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: He argues that the hardest part of innovation is actually deciding, you know, which ideas do we abandon, which is the classic murder your darlings-
David Olney: Yep …
Steve Davis: uh, claim. When you’ve got too many slides for a PowerPoint or too many things, features you wanna add to something. Uh, this is what this beautiful, liberating, uh, [00:31:00] awareness of the benefits of constraints I think brings to the table.
Less actually can be more.
David Olney: And less will become more because you will invest more in it.
Steve Davis: But we’re, it’s like we’re giving ourselves permission to actually take the foot off the accelerator a moment and look at the scenery around us, which could mean we enjoy more of the journey and possibly have an idea for somewhere else we wanna get to.
David Olney: Mm.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number three, problems. These are the marketing challenges keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, “We ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening.” [00:32:00]
Steve Davis: David, you’re familiar with Google, the company that supposedly used to have a mantra, “Do no evil.”
You’ve heard of them?
David Olney: I remember in 1999 first using them and going, “Maybe they mean it.
Steve Davis: Hmm.” Well, if they’ve ever meant it, Not
David Olney: no more …
Steve Davis: they’ve truly just shot it to pieces with some of the latest changes. We’ve been hearing about this for a while, the gradual increase of AI within the Google Search realm, and I shouldn’t be too shocked because let’s face it, Google Search has been broken for a long time.
It’s the reason why for the last, oh, probably almost two years now, I’ve been using Perplexity as my Google because it’s an AI-powered search tool that does, uh, multi-layered, um, searches for me. It’s not always 100% perfect, but it pulls things together And, oh, not more often than not, fifty-fifty, I will have what I need from what it says, [00:33:00] and half the time I will click through to go to the destination site that was cited.
So I think that’s, that’s probably fair. That’s like having a paid librarian acting on your behalf versus Google, which was a… Whoever had the sleekest, sleaziest SEO, um, creep working for them, doing every trick under the sun, is going to have a time at the top of search that you’ve got to wade through ’cause the moment you click on them, you see it’s junk, and you’ve gotta go through to the good, honest, proper people o- on page two or three or thereabouts.
That might be a slight exaggeration, David, but I think it’s around the mark.
David Olney: Not too far past the truth.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: Like the first few, it’s about how much have they paid, and could have they just put that money into better content that helps me?
Steve Davis: Yes. Instead of just trying to win the race of being on top.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: That’s to one side. What’s happened now? Google [00:34:00] has stopped trying to dance around the issue and say, “We really care about small businesses.” They’ve gone AI all the way. So Google Search, uh, now is nothing other than talking to Gemini, which is Google’s search tool, which does its own version of Perplexity, I guess you’d say, building an answer for you, showcasing a very small selection of links.
I’m pretty sure from what I’ve seen, you’re lucky if you get five organic links on the, on each screen. The ads now typically, apart from the top one, get shunted onto the right-hand side of the screen if you’re looking on a desktop. I’ll give you one example, David, and then we’ll dis- dissect what this means for us in twenty twenty-six and beyond for trying to get found in search, if that’s even a thing we care about.
A dear friend, long-term client, well, haven’t really done much for a long time. They’ve been set up. They’ve been going beautiful. They’re a fishing charter business [00:35:00] up in Darwin. Uh, she emailed out of the blue saying, “I think we’ve disappeared off the internet.” The reason she asked is because she got, she answered one of those pesky, horrible, horrible, um, pitch calls from those sleazy SEO companies, uh, scaring the living daylights out of her, saying, “Look, you’re gone and we can meet on Friday and we’ll set up a plan to get you number one on Google,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
She said, “What do I do?” I said, “Well, first of all, cancel that appointment because they’ll be shysters. That industry is full of them.” And I had a look, and sure enough, David, you would be shocked. This business, which for a long time has been sitting around the, the, the front page of Google, not always one, but in the front page, honest business, been around for about 15 years, was nowhere to be seen.
There was an aggregator site, some Fish Now or Fish With Us, that was [00:36:00] basically, I guess, other fishing charter sites pay to be part of it. They were in the number one position on the first three or four pages, paid and organic, sort that out, and there were two other players who seemed to be in positions two and three.
There wasn’t much else on all the, all the, the first three or four pages. That was it. It was only page four or five onwards where you started to see other businesses linked. You had your AI summaries at the top of the first page and It was bleak, David. It was like The Day After. You know that movie, The Day After?
Yeah. That’s what it’s like in search land at the moment.
David Olney: Yeah, it’s such a cynical thing that here’s Google pretending that AI means there’s even better tools working to give you the answer to your question. Whereas all it really is, is better smoke and mirrors for them to put the person that’s paid them the most money in front of you.
Steve Davis: And talking of the person, what’s been announced in the recent IO update, the [00:37:00] big announcement, uh, that Google has for developers? Uh, let’s break it down with a few things. First of all, to explain what’s happening, and then we’ll finish with some practical things you might want to do. The first thing is when a user does a search, they’re going to get a, a, a f- a customized personal answer.
What do you mean by customized and personal, Steve? Well, Google, which is being run by Gemini, its AI tool, before it answers, is going to search what it knows about you from your previous history with it, from anywhere it’s got its claws into. Are you a parent? Are you divorced? Have you just bought a car?
Have you been searching a lot about, I don’t know, back pain? It’s g- All of that. Where have you been visiting? Et cetera, et cetera. And then will tailor whatever the answer’s going to be on a topic with what it thinks is going to best fit your [00:38:00] needs. And I think, David, you would say the ulterior motive is which of its advertisers is going to be- Best suit
the best place to exploit you. Uh, sorry, suit your, satisfy your needs, I should have said. Yeah. That was n- naughty of me, David. Yes. Naughty. So that’s that one. But it’s also making available these little search bots that we can start using, and we can set it up, these bots, to listen o- for certain things. We might be interested in certain things, and it will continually search for us and come back and give us answers.
So they’re really trying to make search now a chat and an AI chat sort of experience. What have I missed from that view of the land?
David Olney: Well, I think the other side of this, and it may be something you wanted to talk about next, is we’re now also getting the universal cart. So anywhere you go on the internet, as long as you do it using Google, you’ll just be able to tell your agent to go and buy all the things you put in your basket today.
So it’s really establishing itself almost like- [00:39:00] A form of social media where you just distractedly spend the day looking at products and services you might wanna buy, put things in your cart, and at the end of the day, do a mega purchase where the agent goes away and makes sure all these things turn up at your house, all these services get delivered to you.
So we’ve gone from a tool that wasn’t entirely objective, but at least wasn’t entirely subjective, to something that is now subjective and tailored specifically to who has paid Google the most money, where they’re now trying to suck you in to never leave the page, just like most of the major social media companies.
Steve Davis: You’re still with me, though, that you would never allow an agent to have connection to your credit cards and do that on your behalf, or have you shifted?
David Olney: No, I, I will happily let it, in a sense, maintain, you know, put things in a cart for me. But then, okay, you know, I, I would be like, “Agent, set up each page for me [00:40:00] so that I can go in and I will put my card numbers in and buy each thing I want, or decide if I don’t want to, keep them in my cart.”
So I, I don’t mind it collating information, but the idea of telling it to go away and do all the transactions, no.
Steve Davis: So what do we do about this if we want our website to be useful for us and for our potential customers? There are a number of things that can be done. There’s also a lot of snake oil merchants out there already promising that they’ve got the answer.
Uh, and if anyone promises, by the way, that they can make you number one, first of all, that’s never been necessarily true. But now, how can it be when you don’t know what all the different variables a human has that Google’s gonna see as it’s building up its results? But that’s a different topic. What do we do practically?
Well, the first thing is, and David, you chip in as we go through here. Hmm. Um, the way we write the content on our pages at one level is probably a, a fundamental thing to look [00:41:00] at. I will argue we still need to write for humans first. Yep. We, we need them to be catered for in a way, and that’s why we do the whole story brand framework approach to shift our writing so it’s relevant to our visitors.
It’s chalk and cheese to what is normally- Hmm … served up on a website. ‘
David Olney: Cause in a state of desperation, which is what most companies are gonna go into over the next six months, they’re gonna think it’s all going to be all about saying how fabulous they are and what a great discount they’re gonna give you, missing the point that people will get the discount if they want it.
What people want is their question answered and to be treated like they matter. And that psychologically those things are more important than the deal. The deal on its own will get a few people, but treating people like they’re a, you know, intelligent human doing research who wants to make a good answer and use their limited resources well, that builds trust, and trust can’t ever be replaced in a [00:42:00] commercial, you know, environment.
Steve Davis: And a note to myself, Steve, put a link to our StoryBrand framework explainer page in the show notes so anyone can click through and see what the hell we’re talking about. That’s one thing, but at the top of the page, almost like a, a preface if you like, I think it’s, it, well, I don’t think, it is now the time when we need to write a little entrée for the AI, uh, machines to get their little snackable version of what’s on the page.
Uh, we called them answer nuggets.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: 30 to 50 words, thereabout. It’s in non-fluffy language, very practical language, to give them exactly what’s on this page and what it’s about. Mm. That’s almost non-negotiable, David.
David Olney: Yeah, ’cause the better that that is written, the more likely it turns up in the AI summary almost as you wrote it.
And if it can go up almost as you wrote it, then it’s much more likely to recommend your [00:43:00] page to its human So we, we’ve gotta game the system here. You know, they- they’ve gamed it long enough
Steve Davis: And I’m glad I, I’ve had to fight back the, “Oh, make your sh- pages shorter first- No … for forever.” No, but what you should do is make it chunked down into little chunks as you go, 120, 150-word- Yep
chunks
David Olney: Heading, paragraph, heading, paragraph- Yes … heading, paragraph
Steve Davis: And if you can, and you should, make the headings questions. I’m gradually going through and updating all of ours so that that is the case, because that’s how these AI tools are trained. They’re trying to answer the questions that humans have, which is a great discipline for coming up with what your subheadings are throughout your body of work.
What question does this next section answer? If it doesn’t answer a question, why are we writing it? So th- this is a very broad brush approach, but I just wanna give some hope and some practical things you can do. There’s also a document called an llms.txt file, uh, for the large [00:44:00] language model, and what it is is a little plain text document that really succinctly…
It’s like the greatest hits of your business. It tells the agent, ’cause humans won’t read this, uh, who you are, who you serve, what you do, and it gives it links to the most important relevant pages on your topic, uh, on your, o- of your business. Not everything. We want to go with the greatest hits that we’ve got so that the, uh, AI tools, just like you know how you can get those pain tablets, some of them that fizz and dissolve so they get into your bloodstream faster, we want that version of your website, not the solid tablet that’s gotta sit in your gut for a while.
Would you agree, David?
David Olney: Look, anything that means on a first pass the AI decides it wants to read the whole website is the critical thing.
Steve Davis: Another thing is, um, having schema, uh, code throughout the website, and talk to your web [00:45:00] developer, talk to us, whoever you’re talking to, to put this into place. And that’s just a universal language that the search tools and AI tools use to know what type of page this is.
Is it a product page? Is it an accommodation page? Is it a booking page? Is it a b- news article page? Is it a frequently asked questions page? There’s a whole language of schema with all these agreed-upon terms. Every page on our websites needs to be categorized in that way, uh, because it just helps the tools understand at a split second what the page is.
David Olney: Also, it’s how they build trust that when we tell them something is something, it’s what it is.
Google ad: Mm.
David Olney: So the more you don’t use those things reliably and consistently- Uh, the less veracity the AI tool thinks your website has
Steve Davis: Yeah. There are some other things, but I think those are the major [00:46:00] things at this point in time that we can do just to make it easy.
I, I liken it to this. If you’re caring for someone who is elderly or unwell or a little child, you chop their food up for them so they can digest it faster a- and s- more safely. That’s what we’re doing for the AI tools. What do you think of that analogy, David?
David Olney: Oh, as long as we don’t put the food in the blender, I think we’re still okay.
Steve Davis: Blender? My lunch is still in the microwave. Oh, heck
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four, perspicacity. Let’s examine a campaign from the past and ask, would it work today? As Oscar Wilde believed, our one duty to history is to rewrite it. So let’s see what we can learn
Steve Davis: In Perspicacity, we love to look [00:47:00] at old ads and see how they stand up today. Well, I think it’s on topic, David, that we look at some original Google Search ads.
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: When it was a pure company.
David Olney: Well, well, that’s an interesting one because they didn’t do any, any multimedia ads, you know, for their first 11 years.
Mm. So in the bit where the company actually seemed to genuinely be abiding by its motto-
Steve Davis: Yes …
David Olney: they only had these boring, simple text ads. Yes. Which is not so exciting for us to talk about now.
Steve Davis: No, that’s right. So we’ll talk about their first TV ads that they had, and it started with a Super Bowl ad in 2010, uh, which was called Parisien Love.
Let’s have a listen to it, and I’ll talk over this one, David, because it’s all, it’s all visual
The person is typing in where to go abroad, uh, Paris, [00:48:00] uh, then things to do. Uh, it wants to go to the Louvre and misspells that and, and then gets that corrected. It’s showing all the different features, but through this person’s journey. Some, uh, woman, it seems, a lovely woman, has said something in French about you looking cute, and so they’re able to translate what that means.
Buy chocolates. Then they Google how to handle the long-term, uh, a long-distance love affair, and midway through that, cross it out and say, “Look for jobs in, in Paris.” And then they get a job, and then it’s looking for a crib because they’re married, et cetera.
David Olney: Oh, there’s a church in the middle.
Steve Davis: Yeah, there’s a church in the middle
So there, I’ve talked over that, but you’ll see the ad on our show notes. Another one that has a bit more narrative to carry it, uh, we’ll have a listen to this straight away. It’s from 2013. A mum getting ready for, for, for work, a little kid coming in [00:49:00] and saying, “I need a school costume today.”
David Olney: It’s Dead President Day
Google ad: Go, go, go, go. Let’s wait.
Honey, what are you doing? We gotta go.
It’s Dress Like a President Day. I’m supposed to be Martin Van Buren.
Who?
Martin Van Buren.
Google, Martin Van Buren
Steve Davis: All right, so there we are. That’s the pure example of search, because in both of those ads, David, when you did the search, you would then get some places to choose from- Mm … where you would then go, and that business would win or not [00:50:00] win your business.
David Olney: You were treated as if you had some agency.
Steve Davis: Now, what went wrong, I think there’s a lot of blame on both sides.
You start getting the emergence of these creepy, sleazy SEO companies-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: who just see a way to just, to just want, ‘I want it mine and all mine.’ And instead of just trying to earnestly help someone get found when it’s relevant, they did all the tricks in the book. They put white text on white background so that Google would read it, but humans can’t.
Mm. So they could keyword stuff pages, and then Google would fight back and destroy that trick. And so you had the next 10, 15 years of this hideous, toxic playground where the actual end user was totally forgotten.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: It became, pardon the topic, but it was like men bragging about how big their appendices were and having that sort of race with each other to win number [00:51:00] one slot, and to heck with any value that might come of it.
Uh, that’s how it felt like to me, David. Was I a bit, uh, br- um, ribald with that example?
David Olney: No. When you meet- … sort of the really sleazy SEO people, they are a species of their own.
Steve Davis: But then you have Google going, “Well, it’s not so bad that those people are ruining it for everyone else, because come here, business person, give us some money- Mm
and we’ll put your ads at the top of search.” So I think it actually was a symbiotic relationship.
David Olney: Mm. It, it strikes me at the moment that if AI was going to be sufficiently valuable and Google believed they could make money out of AI as a useful tool, would they be using the useful tool to manipulate humans to essentially have less agency?
Like, this to me is the ultimate admission that Google doesn’t believe AI is gonna make it money, and that it still has to manipulate people. [00:52:00]
Steve Davis: So that it can-
David Olney: Make money.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: It’s very sad. So these ads, I mean, these are not gonna work today because it would be a violation of the Trade Practices Ad, uh, Act, because that is definitely not what you’re getting.
So it’s almost a moot point to ask whether they’d, uh, uh, work today. I mean, would they? I’ve just answered that on your behalf, but do you agree? Could they run these ads? I mean, when you’ve got politicians who are doing one thing- Mm … could be destroying parklands or whatever they’re doing, but then speaking a totally different thing and just keeping it on what they’re doing the whole time, maybe a company like Google could just say, “Look over here.
Look over here. Don’t look at what we’re actually doing.”
David Olney: I think these days they’d almost read like a nostalgia ad.
Steve Davis: Wow, wouldn’t it?
David Olney: And be like, “Oh, I remember when Google was actually like that, when it just gave me answers, and I didn’t felt like I was being pointed to someone who’d paid a lot of money.”
‘Cause in that period you did use it, and more [00:53:00] often than not, you could very easily avoid the ads and feel that you were reading a thing that seemed to answer your question pretty well, and it didn’t seem like it had just been placed there ’cause someone paid. So it really, they, they strike me now as remember when the internet was this place that was helpful for humans.
Steve Davis: Just to be fair, there were businesses who started thinking, “We’ll just do some tricky writing-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: uh, to get people in.” You had the SEO businesses going, “We’ll just literally deceive people and make money.” And you got Google saying, “You keep them busy because we’ll, we’ll scoop up the money-
David Olney: Yep …
Steve Davis: uh, when people have to pay to play.”
And I think society loses out because it became junk, junk, junk coming up in search.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: So we have to watch this space. Please don’t lose heart. I realized that there’s been, uh, some fodder that could lead people to lose some mojo, David, in what we’ve covered [00:54:00] today. It is a changing time. M- I mean, t- times are always changing, but it seems to be more in flux now than it ever was.
Keep, I, I think we all need to, I’m talking to myself here, keep our eye on the humans we’re trying to service and, and be helpful to. Be earnest in the way we write, and smart. The StoryBrand Framework is what helps us do that. And do dutifully the technical things we need to do to play the game the best we know at this point in time, noting it could change next week.
David Olney: Mm. And remember that if you slow down just a little bit and decide, what do I want to do and how do I want to do it, and then reengage once you’ve made a decision about what you value and what you want to achieve, you’ll get a much better outcome than if you let yourself be pushed around by the technology demanding you to go with the flow.
Steve Davis: And let’s start by stopping this podcast now. Hit stop. Don’t even listen to the end [00:55:00] credits. Buy back a minute of your time.
Caitlin Davis: Thanks for listening to Talking About Marketing. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit, and if you’re so inclined, leave a rating in your podcast app. Both help more than you think. Steve and David welcome your thoughts, which you can send to podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com.
That’s podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with Steve at talkedaboutmarketing.com. No cost, no obligation. And we’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde, “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked [00:56:00] about.”