Twenty-Two Flights Around the World: The Investigation Nobody Else Did
Thinking in Motion: Article 4 of 7 Category: Thinking in Motion (/thinking-in-motion/) Site: jasonbarnard.com
Twice Around the World, Once the Wrong Way, Talking to Everyone
In 2019 and 2020 I went around the world twice, once “the wrong way round” (Los Angeles to Sydney, which gives you the worst jetlag imaginable because you land before you took off, or at least that is what your body believes), visiting twenty-two conferences across four continents and recording over a hundred expert interviews, many of which became episodes of the podcast that would eventually exceed four hundred episodes.
SearchY, YoastCon, BrightonSEO in Europe. PubCon Vegas, SMX West in North America. Sydney, Melbourne, Chiang Mai. SEMrush Prague, Tel Aviv. I paid for most of it myself (travel, hotels, food), and some conferences gave me free entry as press, and some invited me to speak, but many I simply attended with a badge around my neck and a microphone in my bag, walking up to strangers.
That walking up to strangers part is the whole story.
How the SEO Industry’s Silos Meant Nobody Could See the Full Algorithmic Pipeline
The SEO industry in 2019 was (and still largely is) siloed in a way that makes perfect sense for individual careers but makes it nearly impossible for anyone to see the full system. Technical SEO specialists understood crawling and indexing, and they could tell you in extraordinary detail how Googlebot discovers and processes web pages. Content strategists understood how search engines annotate and categorise information. Link builders understood the credibility signals that influence ranking. Schema specialists understood structured data and how to communicate entity information directly to algorithms. UX people understood how display and engagement signals feed back into the system. Paid search managers understood the zero-sum auction dynamics at the point of conversion.
Each group knew their piece brilliantly, and each group had conferences and communities and thought leaders and deeply specialised knowledge, and nobody talked to all the others, which is not a criticism because specialisation is how expertise develops and you cannot be a world-class technical SEO specialist AND a world-class content strategist AND a world-class link builder AND a schema expert AND a UX researcher AND a paid search manager, since the depth required for genuine expertise in any one of those fields consumes an entire career.
But the algorithm does not care about your specialisation, because the algorithm processes all of these signals simultaneously in one unified pipeline: it crawls, annotates, indexes, evaluates credibility, assesses relevance, selects display format, and presents results, and the fact that humans have divided this pipeline into separate disciplines does not mean the algorithm has.
Walking Up to the Person Nobody Else Was Talking to, Two Hundred Times
I was not smarter than any of the specialists I spoke to, and I want to be clear about that, because the technical SEOs knew more about crawling than I ever will, and the content strategists knew more about annotation, and the link builders knew more about credibility signals, and in every individual discipline I was outclassed by people who had spent their entire careers going deep where I was going wide.
What I did was talk to all of them, and my methodology was absurdly simple: I walked up to people at conferences, not just the speakers (though I interviewed as many as I could) but the attendees, the people standing alone at networking breaks, the person nobody else was talking to, and I would approach with a big smile and say something like “Stop talking! Can we record this?” (if they were mid-conversation with someone else) or simply introduce myself and ask what they were working on.
This sounds like networking, but it was not networking, because networking is strategic relationship building with an eye on future value and what I was doing was collecting puzzle pieces, since every person I spoke to held a fragment of a larger picture that most of them did not know they held because they had never seen the whole picture, only their discipline.
How a Hundred Conversations Across Four Continents Revealed the Full System
The technical SEOs taught me how the algorithm discovers information, the content people taught me how it categorises, the link builders taught me how it evaluates trust, the schema experts taught me how direct communication with the algorithm works, the UX researchers taught me how engagement signals feed back into ranking, and the paid search people taught me about the commercial dynamics at the point of decision, and none of this was secret because all of it was publicly discussed within each discipline, and the insight was not in any individual piece but in the connections between pieces that nobody had mapped because nobody had talked to all the disciplines.
I recorded everything: hundreds of interviews on stages, in hotel lobbies, at conference afterparties, standing in corridors between sessions. The podcast became my research tool, because people are more willing to share detailed expertise when a microphone is present (it validates their knowledge) and they are more precise because they know the recording will persist.
The breakthrough was not a single moment but was cumulative, each interview adding a piece and each piece connecting to others, and gradually, over thousands of conversations across four continents, the full system became visible: an algorithm that processes identity follows a pipeline (discover the entity, understand what it is, evaluate whether the information is credible, assess whether the entity can deliver on its claims, and decide whether to present it to users and if so how confidently), and that pipeline does not change whether you are Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any other system that needs to decide which entities to trust and recommend.
The Kalicube Process™ is built on that pipeline, and it did not invent it because algorithms invented it, and the Kalicube Process simply maps it, names each stage, identifies what signals feed each stage, and provides a systematic methodology for optimising those signals. The reason it works is that it addresses the whole pipeline rather than one slice, and the reason I was the one who mapped it is not genius but the fact that I walked up to the person nobody else was talking to, two hundred times, on four continents, and asked what they knew.
The wrong way round gave me the worst jetlag of my life, but it gave me the full picture, and the full picture is the only picture that matters when you are trying to understand a system that does not respect the boundaries humans have drawn around their specialisations.
Next in the series: The Plane from Sydney. A hotel bar, a pub conversation, beer mats split in half because there was no paper, and then the flight home where the engineers’ words crystallised into convergent proof that Bing independently named their algorithm “Darwin.”
