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…
- Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? – The Ezra Klein Show – YouTube. “The extraordinary Jamie Joyce is running for Congress in Oakland. America would be lucky to have her: Smart, tech-savvy, thoughtful, and a true polymath who has devoted her life to nonprofits that help people find the truth, whether the root of an argument or the source of a fact. Alex Bores has a similarly well-prepared background: activism, labor relations, computer science… and then Palantir. Whatever your political stripes, he offers one of the clearest articulations of our time. People like Bores and Joyce give me hope that there is, in fact, something brewing that could correct our current course as a society.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- What Will Be Scarce? – Alex Imas – Ghosts Of Electricity. “A few days ago, I wrote that ‘maybe historians will think it’s weird that between 1995 and 2030 most of our jobs involved sitting in front of computers a lot, and then we stopped, and went back to doing other things.’ Herbert Simon; contrasting craftsmanship to industrialization – this is a great exploration of what might be valuable in a world where everything is cheap.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Canada’s Navy Through Time – The Global Exchange Podcast – Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “Alistair and Mitch know that my new venture is focused on Canadian military training(!) … which has had me spending time talking to people across the Canadian Armed Forces. The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), in particular, is reinventing itself: after World War II Canada had the third largest navy in the world, and up until the 1990s, the RCN continued to be an innovative force in naval capabilities. Since the 1990s, however, the Navy has been languishing. Times are changing. Here Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, Commander of the RCN and naval historian Richard Gimblett speak with Colin Robertson about the past and the future of our waters.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Physicists Just Found A Tiny Flaw In Time Itself – Science Daily. “Mitch, Alistair and I get together for lunch once in a while, and over the past few years, as the world got crazier and crazier (climate change, AI, politics, wokism and its discontents, etc.), the ridiculous idea that we’re in a simulation started to seem, almost, Occamesque as an a explanation for how topsy turvy everything feels. And a constant half-joking conversational ‘proof’ of this is how some things just seem to have turned on a dime (say ‘no foreign wars’ to ‘OK, lots of invasions’). Well, turns out that time might be pixelated, or glitchy, and not smooth, according to some recent research. Which, who knows, maybe that means things keep getting stopped and rebooted. And someone, somewhere, is really messing with our prompts. Or sim. Or universe.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Why The AI Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen – Ezra Klein – The New York Times. “This piece from Ezra Klein is making the rounds. I get frustrated when I read pieces like this because I feel like it’s the same story repeating itself.. again… over time. We saw this one coming right? At first ‘AI is going to replace us all’… now… not so much. What I found most compelling about this piece isn’t the prediction that AI will eliminate work… it’s the argument that we may be misunderstanding scarcity itself. Every technological era destroys one bottleneck and reveals another. Agriculture made calories abundant. Manufacturing made goods abundant. The fear now is that AI makes knowledge abundant… and if that happens, what becomes valuable next? The answer may not be technical skill alone, but deeply human capabilities… judgment, trust, emotional intelligence, taste, relationships, presence. What also resonated with me is the pushback against the constant ‘AI will replace everyone’ narrative coming from the labs themselves. The reality may be far messier… not mass unemployment, but uneven disruption that quietly devastates specific professions and communities while the broader economy keeps moving. That feels much more plausible… and maybe more dangerous, because it’s easier to ignore/not see. If AI makes human connection more economically valuable at the exact same moment our social muscles are weakening… what kind of society are we actually building? We may be automating knowledge while simultaneously devaluing the very human experiences that give knowledge meaning… ugh my brain is all achy now…” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Launching Envoi: A Platform To Bring Your AI Agent To A Conference – Alistair Croll. “I know that, as a group, we texted Alistair privately to congradulate him on the launch if his new company, Envoi. But… this is a moment in time and it deserves much more attention and congratulations. So… congrats, Alistair. For those who didn’t see this in their feed, Alistair hasn’t slept in a few months (lolz) because he’s been both messing with the AI tech and fallen hard (like many have) with building something at this amazing moment in time. The result is Envoi. So check this out… AI agents are changing how startups work by acting like ‘co-founders’ who can do many tasks automatically. Envoi is a new platform that lets these AI agents participate fully in conferences like real attendees. I know, it sounds wild… and had I not seen the live demo over a lovely Greek lunch menu a few months back, I’d be more skeptical but it’s super-amazing. Along with the launch, Alistair will integrating it into this year’s Startupfest in July (oh, and I will be speaking there as well… in my protein form). So… yeah… a new platform where live attendees can send their AI agents off to join meetings, attend talks, and networking events. Strange new worlds…” (Mitch for Hugh).
If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…
Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.
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.