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…
- Avian Visitors – Teddy Warner. “Many of my links are about the doom and gloom of generative AI. But there are also wonders. When it becomes a hundred times easier to do something, a hundred times more people can do it, often as a hobby. And we’re starting to see some examples. Exhibit A: Teddy Warner likes birdsong. There are tools that will listen for specific birds and list them. There are tools that will make pictures of birds. And there are tools that will lay them out. Now it’s easy to stitch them all together, and turn a cheap Raspberry Pi computer into a realtime Audubon picture of the birds that have visited recently.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Snake – Ethan Mollick. “A second example: Ethan Mollick has been experimenting with AI and, frankly, finding some of the most delightful things. He often tests new AI models with simple prompts, and one of them has been to make the game Snake, one of the oldest and simplest casual games that began on flip-phones. ‘Had Claude Code build a Snake game where the snake becomes aware it is in the game and then… stuff happens.’ The results are charming, genius, and definitely creative. I am here for this wave of hobby apps, which may only hold our attention for a few minutes, but are undeniably a form of art.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Invisible Assets: Canada’s IP Blind Spot – Vass Bednar – Canadian Shield Institute. “Remember when Canada felt like a rich country? Notice how it’s increasingly less so? One reason is that Canada is terrible about protecting IP. Unlike peer countries, say France, Japan, US, Canada doesn’t treat IP as a strategic asset, and the result is, we make lots of it in publicly funded research, then watch other countries and non-Canadian companies profit from it.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Notes On Pope Leo Xiv’s Encyclical On AI – Simon Willison. “Would you have guessed that the Pope would write one of the best humanist reflections on AI we’ve seen?” (Hugh for Mitch).
- The Most Rational Take On Ai You’ll Hear This Year – Benedict Evans – Lenny’s Podcast. “I fully agree with the title of this podcast. Another great episode from our friend Lenny Rachitsky. In this episode, he goes deep with Benedict Evans and, in a strange twist of fate, I’m actually speaking at the same event as Benedict for the National Retail Federation’s Nexus in July… but I’ve been following his work as an analyst and admired him for many years. I especially admire Benedict constantly saying “I don’t know.” I wish more people would say this… or admit it. We live in a world of absolutes and when it comes to artificial intelligence honestly… we just don’t know. What do we know… AI is a big deal like the internet or mobile, but its full impact will take years to unfold. New technology always changes jobs by automating some tasks and creating new ones we can’t yet imagine. We don’t know exactly how AI will evolve, but it will change everything in ways we can’t fully predict. But there’s so much more in this conversation… ” (Mitch for Alistair).
- We Have Writing Retreats At Home – Nicole Donut. “I have been working on something that involves much deeper thinking about words, community, connection, and my new favorite word, ‘commune’. While I think some of my work going forward it will involve gatherings through digital channels, but I am more interested in making sure that it also includes us showing up in our ‘protein forms’, as I like to say. While I’m currently not in the head space of a writing retreat, I came across this article and just fell in love with this idea. It seems simple enough, just write, but how many of us do that? Maybe it’s time for us to launch something like this?” (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 JoelMitch 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.