Ed Leake

BREAKING: American shoppers spent a RECORD $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, up +9.1% from last year. Adobe Analytics, which tracks over 1 trillion US retail site visits, expects shoppers to spend $5.5 billion on Saturday and $5.9 billion on Sunday, up 3.8% and 5.4%.

This new x location tag really just dropped the mask. 95% of what blows up is paid: tradfi, crypto, politics, gender wars,all of it. Rich countries + billionaires paying the poor and desperate to flood your timeline 24/7. They decide what trends, what outrages, what “grassroots” movement blows up next. This isn’t a theory, this is the receipt. Location tags just ripped the mask off the bot armies Everything is manipulated. Welcome to the machine.

This is against all conventional wisdom, and I think it's the smartest thing for entrepreneurs to do right now. Don't build businesses, build builders. How many businesses can you build reasonably, aggressively, unreasonably? But what if you had business builders under you? What if you had people in your business that were also building? That's what you want. You're gonna hire somebody. You're hiring generalists, not specialists, which means you don't necessarily know what they're good at. So you give them 10 things to do.  They're going to suck at 2 of them. They'll do 6 just fine. And then they'll do 2 better than any human alive. But you've been taught to focus on the 2 they suck at. “Don't worry, we're gonna get you there, kid. Performance improvement plan, training, shadow Sally, even if it slows her down.” It's the wrong way to do it in this environment. We're moving fast, we're nimble, we're r-selected species. Those 2 things they suck at? Just don't ask them to do those again. Index toward the 2 things they're extraordinary at. That's the 2-6-2 framework. Bring on extraordinary talent, then play the 2-6-2 game.

JUST IN: Scott Bessent says the $2,000 tariff check would be for those making less than $100,000.

⚡️Marriage 404: Human not found.

Biggest issues in my opinion are: - not showing your tweets to your followers - link deprioritization - promoting low-effort slop over information-dense content

Google Ads automation will either scale your business or waste your entire budget...depending on how you set it up. When your inputs are clean, letting the platform do it's thing can be very profitable. Budget shifts dynamically. Inventory gets matched to intent. Spend flows toward your best-performing segments. And it's often done more effectively than a human media buyer. But when the setup is shaky, automation doesn’t fix it. It just makes the problems harder to trace. Before handing Google full control, your foundation needs to be tight: - Clean performance signals, not just surface-level click volume - Clear, business-aligned conversion goals - Brand and non-brand traffic segmented for accurate reporting - SKU-level margin clarity, with guardrails for fragile product lines - Creative that already proves out in manual environments Otherwise, automation just accelerates waste. If branded queries are inflating your results, separate them. If a product line can’t support aggressive spend, cap it or manage it manually. If you can't tell what's going on yet, don’t pile on new formats like Demand Gen. Stabilize first. The good news is that Google is finally giving operators more control: Campaign-level brand exclusions, stricter conversion mapping, and improved visibility into what’s driving results. Use those tools. Automation is an execution layer, not an entire strategy. And it only works when the actual strategy underneath is already sound.