Weekend Briefing No. 597
Media’s Traffic Apocalypse -- Protecting Kids from Porn -- Sam Walton's Winning Playbook
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
74 — A new study shows that 74% of adults now support banning cellphones in middle and high school classrooms, up from 68% in the fall, with particularly sharp increases among 18-29 year olds (rising from 45% to 57%).
30 — The London Underground is experiencing temperatures regularly exceeding 30 degrees Celsius, with temperatures across all lines rising one to three degrees over the past decade and only 40% of stations having air conditioning.
8.1 — Major League Baseball saw 22,962 fewer curveballs thrown in 2024 compared to 2019, with curveball usage declining from 10.7% to 8.1% of all pitches as teams increasingly favor faster pitches.
Media’s Traffic Apocalypse
The era of easy online traffic is ending as Google's AI summaries replace search results and social platforms keep users trapped within their own ecosystems, forcing media companies into what insiders call a "traffic apocalypse." Publishers who once relied on Facebook shares and Google searches are watching their visitor numbers plummet by 20% or more, with some outlets like Business Insider laying off 21% of staff as traditional distribution channels dry up. The solution isn't chasing viral content but building direct relationships with core readers through newsletters, apps and subscription models, as search traffic becomes increasingly unreliable and AI tools threaten to make evergreen content obsolete. Media companies that survive will be those offering exclusive reporting and distinctive voices that can't be replicated by AI aggregation, forcing the industry to think smaller and more focused rather than chasing mass audiences. New York Magazine (7 minutes)
Protecting Kids from Porn
Twenty-seven percent of all online video traffic is pornographic. To use an analog illustration, imagine four magazines on the coffee table in your living room every morning when you were growing up — one of them was pornographic and three of them weren't. To illustrate this point further: In 2024 alone, there were a total of 1,659,051 videos uploaded to PornHub. Even with Apple's Screen Time restrictions and Safari disabled, children can still bypass these controls, making traditional parental settings insufficient for real protection. The scale and accessibility of explicit content today far exceeds anything previous generations faced, requiring parents to implement comprehensive protection strategies beyond basic device controls. Effective protection requires building multiple layers of defense: strengthening parent-child relationships through early and frequent conversations, securing home WiFi networks with robust filtering, monitoring all devices with appropriate software, and carefully controlling where and when technology is used. The key is creating a comprehensive approach that combines technological barriers with open communication and clear boundaries rather than relying solely on built-in parental controls. After Babel (10 minutes)
Sam Walton's Winning Playbook
Walmart's dominance stemmed from Sam Walton's contrarian mindset: target small towns that competitors ignored, obsessively study rivals for good ideas (not flaws) and ruthlessly eliminate middleman inefficiencies through direct supplier negotiations. His "expect to win" mentality, forged by leading an undefeated high school football team, drove ambitious goals that became self-fulfilling prophecies — from a $250,000 Newport store to $600 billion globally. The key lesson for founders: sometimes you must build core competencies in-house (like Walmart's $24 million satellite network) rather than outsourcing, especially when it directly impacts your competitive advantage. Walton proved that understanding your competition better than they understand themselves, combined with relentless cost optimization, can create unbeatable scale economies. Acquired Briefing (9 minutes)
Narco-Subs Go Autonomous
Drug cartels are now using unmanned submarines equipped with Starlink internet to smuggle up to 1.5 tons of cocaine across 800-mile distances, eliminating the risk of crew capture and interrogation by law enforcement. Colombia's navy recently seized the first-known autonomous narco-submarine, built by the Gulf Clan cartel with satellite communication systems and surveillance cameras for remote navigation. This technological leap represents a fundamental shift in drug trafficking strategy, as removing human operators makes these vessels nearly impossible to trace back to criminal leaders while solving the dangerous "floating coffin" problem of finding willing crew members. The combination of low-profile design, satellite connectivity and autonomous operation creates a new category of maritime threat that security experts warn could easily be adapted by terrorist organizations for underwater attacks. Marine Insights (5 minutes)
Beyond Resilience to Antifragility
Most people think surviving stress means bouncing back to where you started, but true mental strength involves using adversity as fuel to become stronger than before. The Stoic principle of focusing only on what you can control — your reactions, decisions and mindset — transforms stress from a destructive force into a catalyst for growth by applying the simple question "Is this within my control?" to every challenging situation. Building mental resilience is like strengthening a muscle through progressive training, where each challenge becomes a workout that increases your capacity to handle future difficulties. The ultimate goal isn't just resilience but antifragility — a state where you actively seek controlled stressors and uncertainty as opportunities for improvement, making calculated risks with limited downside but unlimited upside potential. Postantly (6 minutes)
Inventing the Wheel
The wheel wasn't invented by advanced civilizations like the Egyptians, but by copper miners in southeastern Europe around 3900 BCE who needed to haul heavy ore through confined mine tunnels. Computer simulations reveal that wheels evolved gradually from wooden rollers through an accumulation of small improvements driven by mechanical advantage rather than appearing in a single "eureka" moment. As miners narrowed their rollers to navigate obstacles and reduce friction, the design slowly transformed into slender axles capped with large discs — the basic wheel-and-axle structure we know today. This discovery fundamentally changes how we understand innovation, showing that game-changing technologies emerge from ordinary workers solving everyday problems rather than elite institutions and that the most impactful advances result from incremental improvements over time rather than sudden breakthroughs. The Conversation (6 minutes)
Historical Tech Tree
Most people imagine technological progress as a straight line, but every invention is actually connected to dozens of others in a complex web spanning three million years. The Historical Tech Tree is an interactive visualization project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois that maps 1,750 technologies and 2,000 connections between them, showing how innovations from stone tools to AI systems build upon each other in surprising ways. The project reveals how seemingly random and serendipitous technological development really is, with inventions often languishing in obscurity for decades before becoming commercially successful, and how much innovation comes from simply combining two unrelated things together. Rather than presenting technology as isolated breakthroughs, this visualization demonstrates that virtually every innovation emerges from multiple existing technologies, creating a comprehensive map that helps users understand how our modern world came to be. Historical Tech Tree (20 minutes)
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Weekend Wisdom
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it. - Albert Einstein
Many thanks for your weekly briefing and the article Protecting kids from porn. I shared the article - I can’t imagine the challenges parents of kids face today.