Phil Simon's Blog, page 2

The AI Slop Paradox

Odds are that you've heard the term AI slop in the last few months. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

a term for low-quality media made with generative artificial intelligence.

If you've been living in a bubble, here are some recent stories on the topic:

Spotify's new content policies won't stop its proliferation.AI worksplop will destroy productivity.It may portend the death of the creator economy.OpenAI's Sora 2 app just dropped. It lets anyone create godawful videos, and it's the #1 iOS app as I write these words.

It takes all of about four minutes to find AI-generated drivel in the form of art, articles, and songs. Even before Sora 2 arrived, people used AI to create insipid videos.

Concerns over AI slop may ultimately turn out to be legitimate, alarmist, or something else. Put me in the first camp. Like Rust Cohle, consider me a pessimist.

AI Slop Catches Up to Its Human Equivalent

Let's not forget, though, that old-fashioned humans continue to generate a never-ending supply of slop. Don't believe me? Allow me to present Exhibit A:

AI Book Settlement Tracker

My latest Notion template just dropped. It lets authors track claim status and settlement payments for all AI lawsuits.

Here's the preview video:

The cost is $9.94. Here's a little more about it:

As with any Notion template, you can customize it to meet your needs—and I'm not just talking about your specific titles and new lawsuits. Add new charts, automations, templates, properties, settlement override amounts, and database views to your heart's content. Invite co-authors or agents to collaborate on it if you like.

Read the whole post on the Racket Publishing site for more information on it.

If you subscribe to this site and you'd like to buy it, then head over to the Benefits page to view your coupon code.

BUY THE TEMPLATE

Maslow Revisited

At some point, any college student studying business comes across Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. TL;DR: Not all worker desires are created equal. Employees will never become self-actualized unless management pays them on time. You know, that sort of thing.

A recent experience at the gym reminded me that, when it comes to customers, today's decision-makers ought to follow Maslow's timeless advice.

Forgetting the Basics

By way of background, my health club last year introduced rudimentary AI functionality into its app. I prompted it and it responded as follows:

The oddly named L•AI•C is far from perfect, but it answers many obvious fitness-related questions in English. In fact, I do enjoy GTX classes.

My high-end offers this shiny new thing. Great, but is it a trailblazer? Hardly, as I've said many times, AI is everywhere today.

Forgetting the Basics

And yet...

Vibe Coding With Opal

A few months ago, Google dropped yet another new AI tool. This one—Opal—lets users “build, edit, and share mini-AI apps using natural language.” You can start from scratch, or you can begin by selecting one of its pre-built apps.

In this post, I describe my results noodling with the beta tool. I'll also explain what this type of experimentation portends for the future of work.

First Experiments

I picked one of the gallery's pre-built apps. Video Marketer promised to create “AI video ads with your product and target audience.”

Sample From Opal Gallery | Source: Google

I punched in some basic information for my book The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. Opal asked for the product's primary audience. I quickly entered my reader personas. Here's Opal's bizarre eight-second creation:

Video of a Woman Reading a Hallucinated Book Called The Gine | Source: Google Opal

The Year's Laziest Marketing Email

The year 1998 saw the launch of a very different type of search engine. Apart from its funky name, the new website approached the problem from an entirely different perspective. Within months, it blew up and left AskJeeves, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and their ilk in the dust.

Google grew rapidly and organically from its inception. (The Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 added google as a verb.) In its early days, the company spent exactly zero dollars on marketing. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were software engineers who dismissed marketing as a legitimate business function. If you built a kick-ass product, they reasoned, then you didn't need to tell people about it.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Source: Wired

John Batelle's 2005 book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is well worth reading, even today.

🤔 A Fun Counterfactual
What would have happened if Yahoo! had ponied up a mere $1 million—yes, million —for Google in 1998? It's not like the company lacked the cheddar. Its market cap was roughly $30 billion back then.

In 1999, Larry and Sergey relented and dubiously hired someone to spearhead Google's nascent marketing efforts: Douglas Edwards. Eventually, he wrote a book about his experience. I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 is fascinating.

Adios, Algorithms. Hello, Email. Remember Me?

Over my career, I have created more websites, reports, dashboards, and databases than I can count. And then there are systems—lots and lots of systems. Some my clients demanded them; others I built strictly for myself. (RacketHub is a labor of love.) During my foray into higher ed, I taught courses in the W. P. Carey Department of Information Systems.

I'm not complaining. I enjoy creating systems because I think in terms of structured data. Why they implode is the subject of my first book. Hell, my previous website was the embarrassingly long philsimonsystems.com until I grabbed its current, snappier domain name. You get the idea.

A few years ago, I built a bespoke one that retrieved content and let me consume it on my terms. It was decent but imperfect. In this post, I'll explain why and how I built the old system, its limitations, and why I ditched it for a decidedly low-tech successor. Feel free to steal borrow it or modify it as needed.

Photo by Markus Spiske / UnsplashBackground

I prefer doing things without distractions, especially reading. Not surprisingly, the powers that be don't make it easy to focus. None of this was news to me, but Adam Alter's exceptional 2017 book on the subject revealed the extent of the problem. Tech companies intentionally design their apps, websites, and devices to distract us from what we're doing. You needn't be a neurologist to know that living in a state of continuous partial attention isn't ideal.

The Flip Side of Forced System Migrations

I spent the majority of the aughts helping organizations move from legacy enterprise systems to more contemporary ones. I even penned a book about the subject.

That experience taught me a great deal, but one truism sits at the top of the list. Individuals, teams, departments, and organizations change systems for two reasons:

Because they want to.Because they have to.

In most cases, group motivations fell into the second bucket. Management would have loved to have stayed with its current systems, but—for whatever reason—stasis wasn't an option.

The usual suspects included:

Vendors sunsetting their existing systems.Cost and security concerns.A new CXO comes down with a severe case of shiny object syndrome.An acquisition or merger.

I didn't keep a formal tally, but I suspect that, three-quarters of the time, employees moving to new systems wanted to exactly replicate their existing business processes to a T—even with new, more powerful tools. If I only had a nickel for every time someone resisted new tech and uttered the sentence, “But that's not how we do it now.”

Change Management

AI as an English-to-English Translator

As Claude recently reminded me, starting in late 2011, my writing shifted. I explored business strategy more frequently. The Age of the Platform had just dropped. Before long, my keynotes and consulting work started following a similar trajectory. I felt more comfortable offering advice beyond the largely tactical tips in my first book.

I read the requisite classics from Clayton Christensen, Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim, Michael Porter, and others. In short, I was hungry for knowledge—and not just in book format.

Beyond Books

How I Use Notion

Notion is a remarkably powerful and versatile tool that has spawned plenty of imitators. I've written about why I use it, but not how. A recent LinkedIn discussion got me thinking about all the ways.

The list in this post isn't comprehensive. You may not think in terms of databases, but I'll bet that you can get more out of this amoeba app than you currently are.

Managing One-Off Projects

Over the last two months, I moved both of my sites from WordPress to Ghost. A Notion database served as each project's central nervous system.

The projects went well for many reasons. At the top of the list:

My amazing developer.We didn't rely on a torrent of emails. It's a key point in Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace.

Instead, Notion served as our central project hub:

Notion Ghost Migration Main Page | Click on the image to enlarge it.Managing Complex Ghostwriting Projects

Migrating a boatload of posts and pages from one content management system to another is one thing. Ghostwriting a 250-page nonfiction, research-intensive book for a busy professional with a five-person team is another. For this very reason, I built RacketHub on Notion. Maybe it's the Ikea effect in action, but it is the best book management system in the universe. A Wall Street Journal reporter working on her first title recently lauded it.

Tracking Prospects

When someone fills out the form on this site's Connect page, the completed entry winds up in my Notion-based CRM with an assist to Tally.1 The solution is more than sufficient for my needs.

Reading Saved Articles

I used to love the elegant Pocket app. I happily paid $49/year for the right to save my articles, strip out their ads, and listen to them on any device.

Then things broke bad.

Pocket started malfunctioning. I complained to its developers and then stopped using it. Not long after that, it went kaput.

Now I use the Notion Web Clipper to send interesting pieces directly to a Notion database that functions more or less as Pocket once did:

Notion Pocket Articles Database | Click on the image to enlarge it.

Yes, my system works on any device. If I open a post in Safari, the browser will read it to me if I'm in the car or on a treadmill.

Photo by Blocks Fletcher / Unsplash🔜I recently replaced this system with a different one that I'll cover in a forthcoming post.Watching Concerts

Doing HIIT intervals on the gym treadmill isn't terribly exciting, but watching YouTube music videos helps pass the time. Recently, the beautiful “These Chains” from Marillion inspired me while I was getting my sweat on.

Sometimes, though, I want to watch entire prog-rock concerts—ones that don't exist on a streaming service. I'm talking about ones I've purchased as DVDs and then converted to gigantic .mp4 or .mov files.

Why not just upload them to YouTube? Ethics and not a desire to avoid copyright violations. With respect to the latter, popular YouTubers like Rick Beato have to deal with an incessant stream of related bullshit these days.

Rather than fight the machine, I just bring my concerts into Notion, the play button, and voilà!

Notion Marillion Video Playlist | Click on the image to enlarge it.Planning My Trips

Thanks to this Notion template, I no longer forget to bring anything when I get on a plane for a speaking gig or vacay.

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Tracking Ideas for Future Blog Posts

I store ideas for future posts in a separate database. In the past, I wrote the posts in Notion and then pasted them into WordPress, but Ghost's visual editor is a pleasure to use.

Blog Post Idea dB | Click on the image to enlarge it.Managing My Site's Subscribers

Now that my website supports subscriptions with different perks, I need to track who gets what.

Enter Notion again.

"I want to do more context switching", said no one ever.

A simple Zapier integration creates a new database entry whenever someone signs up. I can then easily set up one-on-one coaching sessions, send complimentary copies of my books, and the like.

Actively and Passively Earning Money

Individuals, teams, and organizations sometimes need someone with serious Notion development chops. Not coincidentally, I've offered them for the past year.

And then there's the passive income I earn from Notion.

For the last 18 months or so, I've sold templates and courses on the Notion Marketplace (and on Gumroad before that.) When someone purchases one of them, a Notion webhook sends the sale to—wait for it—a dedicated Notion database. Pretty meta, right?

Notion Sale dB | Click on the image to enlarge it.The Case for a Regular Tech AuditI’ll take the benefits of curiosity over the costs of problem-solving.Phil SimonPhil SimonSimon Says: Fewer tools mean fewer headaches and less money spent.

Could I use Salesforce or Google Sheets as my CRM, buy another read-it-later app, and store my videos on Dropbox?

Of course, but Notion works well for all of these purposes.

More broadly, using fewer tools just makes life simpler. Souped-up Notion has eliminated a considerable amount of grunt work and duplicate data entry. Using fewer apps saves me money. Finally, I spend far less time context-switching.

Feedback

How are you using Notion, Coda, Airtable, or a similar tool?

Footnotes The solution is more than sufficient for my needs. ↩

Citation Sloths

Perusing LinkedIn today, the following post came across my feed:

LinkedIn Post, Monday, August 25, 2025 | Click on the image to enlarge it.

Can someone say irresponsible? Note the author's failure to include a proper source for that 86-percent statistic. The number could come from:

A reputable research firm.A less-than-unbiased software vendor looking to hawk its wares.An AI tool using, er, simulated data.Elves.