Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?
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 made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.
These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…
- A Brief History Of Ricky Gervais As An 1980S Pop Sensation In The Philippines – Nash Jenkins – Time. “File under ‘things I did not know’. This also explains the recurring The Office bit where David Brent wants to be a musician, and the David Bowie song in Extras. You may enjoy this video for ‘Bitter Heart‘ (which is surprisingly awesome) too.” (Alistair for Hugh, and, well, the Internet as a whole I guess).
- Debunking The AI Food Delivery Hoax That Fooled Reddit – Casey Newton – Platformer. “It’s hard to be a journalist in 2026. Casey Newton (Platformer) is a great journalist, and he often holds Big Tech to account for the monopolies it creates, and the end-of-days enshittification of our online services (who here is paying more for streaming, but back to seeing ads and waiting each week for a new episode? That.) So when a salacious story emerged about Uber intentionally preying on desperate drivers, it seemed too good to pass up. And at first blush, the evidence presented by the whistleblower looked credible. On deeper investigation (which all journalists need to double-down on these days) the cracks started to show. A story for the times.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- The Psychedelic Scientist – Mattha Busby – Nautilus. “How hallucinogens might be the key to radically new scientific discoveries.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- The Scramble For The Seafloor – Rebecca Egan McCarthy – The New York Review. “Researcher Andrew Sweetman has found that polymetallic nodules (little potato-sized rocks) on the deep seafloor may be producing oxygen without sunlight, by a process of inter-rock electrolysis. He calls it ‘dark oxygen’. So, rocks making oxygen, which rocks are not supposed to do. There’s no astrobiology mentioned in the article, but I guess this challenges what we think we know about biosignatures? By the way, you may wonder what deep-sea mining startups, who want to harvest these nodules for cobalt and nickel, think about Sweetman’s suggestion that there may be a whole new mechanism for life sustenance generated by the raw ore they want to mine. Answer: they don’t like it.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Meet The New Biologists Treating Llms Like Aliens – Will Douglas Heaven – Technology Review. “Whether you agree with the core idea or not, this is a fascinating strategy to better understand artificial intelligence. You don’t have to agree that an LLM is the same as an alien but there are scientists who are studying these large language models as if they are living creatures. Why would they do this? To better understand how they work and operate. It turns out they’re using all sorts of dynamic techniques from biology and science to watch these models think and reveal their unexpected behaviors. Why do this? The claim is that it will improve safety and trust in artificial intelligence by making models more transparent and easier to interpret. The fact that we already have this technology and have no clue how or why it’s doing what it does… that’s the bigger story here.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Montreal’s Ice Surfer – Jason Kottke – Kottke.org. “This past summer, I went for a walk in a park that I had never been in. It took me along the St. Lawrence River and at one point I was confronted with a group of people surfing, which is not something you typically see in Montreal. There was this area that produced a never-ending output of waves and more that enabled surfers to pop into the cold river (yes, it’s cold even in the summer) from the park and surf around like it was one of those FlowRider surf simulator machines that some fancy hotels and cruise lines have. It was summer and it was hot out, but I was still mesmerized that we have surfing right here in Montreal. Little did I know that surfing can be an all-season sport up here…” (Mitch for Hugh).
If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…
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Mitch Joel Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.