Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan

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**Nilay Patel** (1:49)
Hey, everybody, it's Nilay. It's conference season, so I'm traveling across the country and around the world a lot more than usual. I'm out this week, but stay tuned for some very special Decoder episodes we have coming up soon, starting on Monday. In the meantime, I wanted to share this conversation between my friend Peter Kafka and Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on Peter's podcast channels. Lynch has been outspoken about traffic from Google search declining every single year. He said he's now told teams at Condé Nast to assume that Google traffic will be zero from now on. That's what I've been calling Google Zero for several years now. You might recall that I just asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Lynch's comments during our recent interview.
Sundar has always disagreed with me that Google Zero is real, but I thought you might be interested to hear Peter and Roger talk about it directly.
You'll also hear Roger talk about AI, the growing influence of the creator economy, and more in this excellent conversation. Okay, here's Peter Kafka interviewing Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on channels. Enjoy.

**Peter Kafka** (2:50)
From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today, we are talking about running the last remaining magazine empire with Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch.
Except I just looked at the transcript of this chat, and Lynch only used the word magazine once. These days, he thinks of Condé, which for decades was the world's most prestigious magazine publisher, probably still is. As a portfolio brands that shows up all kinds of places, on the web, obviously, on TikTok, and at movie theaters, and at the mega glamorous Met Ball.
So in this conversation, we skipped the question I normally ask magazine people, which is something like, hey, what the hell is a magazine in 2026 anyways? When you move on to other topics like, what's it like to be the subject of one of the most popular movies in the world? What's it like to run a media business when Google stops sending you traffic? And who's going to replace Anna Wintour and David Remnick, perhaps the two most influential editors in the world? And where is that short list? Spoiler, Lynch does not tell me where the list is. But you're going to like this interview anyway. Here's me talking to Condé Nast's Roger Lynch.
Roger Lynch, welcome to Channels.

**Roger Lynch** (4:10)
Thank you, Peter. Good to see you.

**Peter Kafka** (4:11)
You are talking to me from LA, very show busy of you.
Speaking of showbiz, you guys just finished the Met Gala. I think it's an enormously successful project for you.

**Roger Lynch** (4:22)
It is, yes.

**Peter Kafka** (4:24)
It's showbiz, it is commerce, it's philanthropy, it's a ton of celebrity, some controversy. It also seems like the most sort of obvious expression of Condé Nast as a company today. Is that a fair summation?

**Roger Lynch** (4:42)