It’s Thursday.
Quick pop quiz: what’s your best friend’s phone number?
If you just reached for your phone, congratulations. You’ve experienced a new psychological phenomenon. Why remember anything when a smartphone remembers it for you?
And now we’ve outsourced our thinking to AI, too. Honestly, we’d worry about our brains shrinking, but we asked ChatGPT and it said we’re fine.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 53 seconds.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Google Effect
Ever blanked on a fact you Googled five minutes ago? You didn’t forget it.
…You never bothered to save it.
That’s the Google Effect: we don’t store information we know is a search away. Our brains outsource the filing to the internet. Why waste valuable energy, right?
In 2011, Columbia psychologist Betsy Sparrow ran the definitive experiment. Participants typed trivia statements into a computer.
Half were told the entries were saved. Half were told they’d be erased. Then everyone was tested on recall.
The result? People who believed the facts were saved remembered them far worse. Those who thought the info was gone remembered it best.
Stranger still: participants forgot the trivia but remembered which folder it was filed in. We encode where, not what.
Researchers call this transactive memory: treating external stores, like Google, as a mental hard drive we offload to.
You see it everywhere. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore. Directions live in Maps. Your favorite songs are stored in your Spotify playlists.
For marketers, this is a warning. If customers assume they can just re-Google you, they won’t remember you at all.
The fix? Become the folder they file you under.
Three ways to leverage Google Effect
1) Be the source, not a search result
The brain remembers where to find information. So make your brand the “where.”
We built our other newsletter, Stacked Marketer, on exactly this. Rather than hoping readers Google the latest marketing news, we deliver it straight to their inbox.
Readers stop searching and start associating “marketing news” with one name. The newsletter becomes the folder.
That’s the play: own a category in the customer’s mind so completely that searching feels redundant.
You might notice many non-media brands are building their own media teams—from SaaS to e-commerce—so that they position themselves as sources of information, too.
Pay attention to that.
2) Build rituals, not reminders
Memory strengthens through repeated retrieval. A one-off purchase gets filed away and forgotten fast.
Duolingo cracked this with daily streaks. The app trains users to return at the same time every day, turning recall into reflex.
The streak isn’t just gamification. It’s repetition that hardwires the brand into a user’s routine.
When engagement becomes a habit, customers stop needing a search or a nudge to remember you.
Design a recurring reason to return, and you bypass the Google effect entirely, because they never leave long enough to forget.
3) Create value that can’t be Googled
The Google effect only offloads what’s findable.
So build the unfindable and make customers rely on you directly.
Notion did this without owning proprietary tech. It fostered an ecosystem of templates, ambassadors, and setups users build themselves.
That community became the moat. Your custom Notion workspace lives nowhere else, so you can’t just Google a replacement. Currently, Notion subreddit has over 110K followers.
The switching cost isn’t the software. It’s the personalized system and the community around it.
A SaaS powered by user love rather than features competitors could clone.
So. Much. AI news. How do you know what’s worth your attention?
There’s always something new with AI, but not everything deserves your attention.
Good thing The Deep View only focuses on AI developments that could actually impact your work and decisions.
It shares must-know updates into a fun, 5-minute read and has helped 500,000+ professionals stay informed without drowning in the constant flood of updates.
Even readers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a16z start their day with these insights.
TIKTOK: Deepfakes not allowed. The platform is also testing an opt-in tool that scans for unauthorized AI deepfakes of creators and lets them report them. If you or your partners have a public face, likeness protection is quietly becoming a standard feature worth switching on.
GOOGLE: AI Mode served ads on almost a third of commercial keywords tested. But paid slots matched citations only 11% of the time. This means that buying a slot doesn’t buy you a mention, so track them separately.
AI MARKETING: ChatGPT’s share of AI users dipped below 50% for the first time as Gemini and Claude gained. The usage of LLMs is diversifying, which means your potential audiences are fragmenting, too. And so should your AI ads strategy.
E-COMMERCE: Half of your potential future audience may not even bother to visit your website. New research shows nearly half of Gen Z and millennial shoppers have browsed or bought on TikTok Shop in the past three months. Treat social commerce as a serious channel.
ICYMI, last time we looked at Affective Forecasting.
The “Filed under… us” Crew.
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