Mel,
As long as online marketing has been around, there’s been this game called SEO. Search Engine Optimization.
In SEO, you don’t write for people. You write for the machines. You crank out loopy repetitive articles stuffed full of keywords so the search engine bot knows your site is about “lower back pain.”
I couldn’t stand reading those articles. So I couldn’t make myself write ‘em either.
The SEO jockeys gave me a hard time because my website was never just about one thing. “Perry, why do you have articles about religion and audio systems and mathematics and evolution and trips to Kenya? And how on earth is a robot supposed to understand what a ‘Memo from the Head Office’ is?
So... my SEO rankings are not stellar.
In fact, 96% of what I’ve created has never been spidered by ANY search engine.
It’s woven into emails and courses and webinars. And closed door events.
I LOVE email because it’s intimate. Even when you’re mailing to 50,000 people, you can speak to a person as ONE lone individual.
You can cut a vein and bleed.
You can self-disclose.
You can explore very uncomfortable topics that would run wildly off the rails in social media.
I love small events and private gatherings because there isn’t any boundary on what you can talk about. Insiders know the seminar hasn’t really begun until the conversation gets “OFF topic.”
In 2017, I did an Eclipse Seminar at a campground in Firth, Nebraska. The solar eclipse was passing through southeast Nebraska, so that’s where we had our event. About 75 people came from as far away as Sweden.
The sales page said the seminar would be “Marketing strategies using Evolution 2.0 as a case study.” But at the seminar, only maybe 2 people wanted to talk about marketing. The other 73 wanted to talk about the meaning of life and the big questions and the eclipse and the universe and the wonder of it all.
So, 2 people asked for refunds, and the other 73 were as happy as could be.
I always secretly wondered if I was being stupid for writing for real human beings instead of bots.
As of this year, I’m realizing that was NOT stupid.
Reason why:
Even though 96% of it never ended up on my website, we still took *meticulous* care to make sure it was saved...
in transcripts
on videos
in voice recorders
in books and courses
in the members area
on hard drives
...and most of it is just as current, just as relevant, just as true NOW as it was then.
In fact, some of it, like 80/20 and the Detox Declutter Dominate book, is even MORE pertinent now than the day it was written.
And Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT don’t have possession of that material.
I do.
And as of September 1, 2026, our members will have access to those treasure troves, via our new AI system, SuperConductor 2.0.
Ironically, one of the things I’ve enjoyed most in 2026 has been weeks and months of dialogging with my own AI system about that body of work. I’ve spent hundreds of hours giving it guidelines, guardrails, context, shortcuts, mental models... connecting dots.
It’s one thing to upload thousands of pages of stuff to an LLM. ANYBODY can do that. The popular AIs will do it for you, without even asking permission.
What they do NOT do is understand context and philosophy.
They do not understand or create culture.
We do.
Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In the early 2000s, it wasn’t a bunch of “strategists” who created modern internet marketing. It was community, a *culture* of direct response entrepreneurs, who gathered together to figure out how to take the available technology and create a world where we could make a living, feed our families, and build our careers.
This is exactly what Renaissance AI is doing right here, right now.
We are creating new best practices that will define the next two decades.
I’m glad I didn’t prostrate myself to the bots. Turns out I was just saving my best material for a new generation of bots that ARE capable of respecting my priorities.
Buckle up cuz it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Perry Marshall
