Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• How Real Is The Rehearsal? – Thomas Flight – YouTube. “Nathan For You was just plain weird. How To With John Wilson was genius, in an awkward, subversive way that kept you guessing. And the first season of The Rehearsal shows what happens when a strange mind with a penchant for blurring reality and fiction gets an unlimited budget. But it’s season two that really hit public consciousness: Nathan Fielder tackles air safety, which is top of mind. I went down a rabbithole after watching it, and this behind-the-scenes discussion made it all the more fascinating.” (Alistair for Hugh). 
• China’s Plan To Win The Moon – Joe Scott – YouTube. “Joe Scott answers questions. While this episode starts with a long backgrounder on China’s quest to build on the moon (spoiler alert: By excluding them from the International Space Station, the rest of the world gave China a lot of unilateral incentive and they’re making great progress). But that’s not the segment I found fascinating. If you watch at 18:38 (my link should start there) there’s a discussion of kayfabe (‘the practice of maintaining the illusion that staged events, rivalries, and relationships are real’). Or to hear him say it, ‘nothing on the Internet is real any more.’ I can’t wait for his longer version.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Ukraine’s Drone Triumph Opens Window To The Future Of War – Zachary Basu – Axios. “The other day, Ukraine’s special ops parked a bunch of run-of-the-mill transport trucks near Russian airforce bases – some deep in Siberia, 100s of kilometres from the border – housing strategic bomber aircraft. Some of these aircraft are nuclear delivery systems, meaning they should have the highest level of military protection. However, these transport trucks weren’t carrying run-of-the-mill cargo. Instead they were housing hundreds of drones with explosive payloads, programmed to wipe out the bombers. 40 bombers, 34% of the Russian fleet, were hit, according to the Ukranians. This story is incredible on its own, but the implications for the future of warfare are huge. Drones are cheap. There are 65 million shipping containers in the world. 22 million transport trucks are built every year. The scale of damage that can be wrought from this attack vector is … chilling. We truly do live in a William Gibson-inspired simulation.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Era Of The Business Idiot – Ed Zitron – Where’s Your Ed At. “Oooffahh, this one lands hard because it doesn’t just call out bad leadership… it reveals how we’ve built entire companies on the illusion of productivity. We’ve entered a work culture where success is measured not by output, but by optics: a full calendar, a flurry of emails, meetings about meetings and just enough AI jargon to sound future-ready. I’ve been confronted by many friends and peers who have admiited to me that they spend their days responding to Slack threads, scheduling calls or summarizing conversations about things that never actually move forward. They go home tired, overbooked and burned out while nothing meaningful got built (adn they’re not even close to Inbox Zero). Ed skewers this theater of busyness, where leaders mistake motion for momentum and charisma for contribution. These leaders aren’t operators (according to Ed)… they’re narrators, stuck in an endless feedback loop of performative work and LinkedIn posts. If you’re someone who values doing over appearing to do, who believes the real work should still speak louder than the calendar invites, this one is a doozy of a read. Also, it clocks in at close to 14,000 words… whiich means it could be a book…” (Mitch for Alistair).
• What Good Is Writing Anyway? – Liz Mineo – The Harvard Gazette. “In a world obsessed with speed, scale and AI-generated everything, Harvard’s roundtable on writing reminds us of something we’re dangerously close to forgetting: writing isn’t just output… it’s thinking. They’re making a strong case that the act of writing sharpens our ability to reason, reflect and wrestle with complexity in a way no autocomplete ever will. As we hand more of that process over to the machines, we’re not just outsourcing words… we’re outsourcing cognition. One neurologist even warns that the brain will literally de-prioritize the skills we stop using. This isn’t just about education or literacy… it’s about identity. Writing helps us figure out what we believe (something I’ve tried to convey to others on countless occassions) and not just say what we already know. And in an AI-saturated landscape where everyone sounds fluent, maybe the real edge is sounding human. So yeah… keep writing. It’s the last honest signal in a world of polished (and AI generated) noise.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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