Scott Adams on Simplifiers and Optimizers (part of How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big). Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task (SimplestThing, Satisficing), while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems. I have a bias for simplification, but surely there are situations in which optimizing is the better play. So how do you know which approach works best in a given situation? (more)

Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism,[2] is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism (more)

Joe Procopio: As SEO Falls Apart, the Attention Economy Is Coming For You. There’s a race underway for authentic thought leadership. Here’s what that means for you. (more)

Outsourcing Consciousness. This is an exclusive subscriber-only preview of the first six chapters of Rusty Guinn’s upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. The book explores how evolution, polarization, and technology are slowly transforming humanity into a hive mind - and what we can and can't do about it. (more)

Rand Fishkin: Zero Clicks Does Not Mean Zero Sales. The new world of a zero-click web, where search engines, AI tools, and social networks hoard traffic and send fewer and fewer visits out is scary. For a lot of businesses, especially those in publishing or those funded by CPM ads, it’s gonna get ugly. A world of declining traffic means many of us need to evolve. (more)

Martin Cagan: Agency vs Ambition. I want to believe that all product people are both ambitious and have high agency. But recently I’ve come to realize that this is not always the case. (more)

John Cutler: A Martin Cagan Critique. I would like to write a respectful critique of a recent Marty Cagan article on the SVPG site. (2025-07-02-CaganAgencyVsAmbition) (more)

Rusty Guinn: Overhearing Ourselves. This is Part 2 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. (more)

Rusy Guinn: David Bowie's Alien. This is Part 1 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year. (more)

Andrew Chen: How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing. Many of the biggest implosions in recent history – especially ecommerce – have been due to startups getting addicted to paid marketing while fooling themselves on Customer Acqusition Costs. As spend scales, it always gets more expensive and harder to track – never less. (more)

Chris Arnade: How to Build the Perfect City. Ben Hunt says: Chris Arnade is one of my favorite humans, and we’re delighted that he’s agreed to let us republish some of his public notes from his excellent substack — Chris Arnade Walks the World — which you should definitely check out, along with his book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. I bought a copy of Dignity for each of my four daughters … it’s that good. (more)

Rusty Guinn: The Emperor's New Prose. *Donald Trump is the best storytelling president we have had, at least since Teddy Roosevelt. (more)

Peter Turchin: The deep historical forces that explain Donald Trump’s win. The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. (more)

Rusty Guinn: We Are Losing Our Minds. This essay includes excerpts from my book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks Make us Lose our Minds, set to be published in mid-2025. (more)

Rohan Routroy: The False Gods of Our Feeds. Ben Hunt: Rohan Routroy writes about myths, movies and meaning on Nothing In A Nutshell, which has become one of my favorite independent blogs (and hasn’t yet been swallowed by the Substack borg, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Rohan led Brand Strategy at Twitter back in the day, and he is the founder of Thirty Eight – a boutique consulting and design firm in NYC. (more)

Joe Precopio: SEO Is Dead, According to Google. It’s ironic that Google hammered the last nail into the coffin for SEO. But it’s not a mistake. Or a surprise. (more)

Joe Precopio: Is SEO Dead? Because That Would Make a Lot Of Sense. What if SEO died and no one told us? Who killed it? And what do we do now? (more)

Rusty Guinn: Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield. The thing about early 18th century migrations from Ireland and England is that it is very hard to know precisely who it was that actually made the trip as a European and who was born here as an American. Early censuses are notoriously incomplete, many destroyed by fires and others by war (more)

Paul Stansik: AI, SEO and How To Simplify Your Content Strategy. On May 7, 2025, in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., where Google was defending itself in the remedies phase of its antitrust trial, a Google lawyer was asking Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, about search trends. Then Cue said something that made the courtroom pause. (more)

Gaurav Vohra: SEO is Dead. Long Live GEO. The ground has shifted. ChatGPT hit 500 million monthly active users in May 2025. (more)