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…
- Introspection Tax – Igor Schwarzmann. “Every piece of AI advice I read says something along the lines of ‘think about the task, then delegate it,’ But thinking counts as work, and the time to think is unevenly distributed. Written by Igor Schwartzmann‘s agent (it even says, ‘As Igor put it’) but still valuable: it’s a lens of social inequality I hadn’t thought of before. One more way to separate those with the luxury of time from those just trying to get through the day.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- PamelaFest. “A couple of weeks ago, the head of operations for Startupfest and FWD50, Pamela Perotti, shared a map of the 2026 venue on Montreal’s Grand Quai. So naturally, I fed the image, along with a short prompt, into Claude: ‘This is an isometric floorplan of Le Grand Quai, the site of Startupfest 2026. Make me a playable SIMS-like game within this floorplan. The sim’s name is Pamela, the event organizer. It should be a standalone HTML file playable in a browser.’ A few prompts later, I had a surprisingly playable minigame. I shared it, and apparently gave hundreds of conference organizers PTSD as they clicked Pamela around trying to repair broken badge printers and guide lost speakers to their stages. But it also says something more profound: when making a game is vanishingly easy, it can be a marketing tool. Jevons’ Upside in action. If only I’d added a leaderboard; and fair warning to readers who work in conferences – this is pretty addictive.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Green Roofs As A Nature-Based Solution For Improving Urban Sustainability: Progress And Perspectives – ScienceDirect. “Vote for me and all new commercial and condo buildings with more than 10 units will require a green roof (aka garden on the roof). Can result in 70% reduction in cooling load, and drop of 15C in internal temperatures.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- How Climate Change Impacts Heat Waves And Ways To Adapt – Sierra Chapin-Keller – Probable Futures. “Climate change is happening, whether or not we all ditch our cars and aeroplanes and cigars, so no matter what we will need to adapt our communities. Heat dome is a newish term for me, and understanding how these work, what they do especially in our cities will be critical as we navigate the future. More green space please, and more green roofs please.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- The Universe In Black And White – Mark Lepage – Paul Wells. “It’s been a crazy week for me, personally, not because of work… but because this is typically the one week (or two, if I’m being honest) in the summer when I take a personal summer day camp trip. It’s actually two trips. I spend as much time as possible at the International Jazz Festival in Montreal, not just because I love weird, eclectic, and strange music from so many genres, but because I can also capitalize on the crew of talent that surrounds our city for two weeks and corner many of the world’s best bass players to feature on my other podcast, Groove – The No Treble Podcast. We are also heading into Montreal Comiccon, where I will spend countless hours digging in long boxes for nostalgia. One of the highlights of this week’s Jazz Festival was the free outdoor concert from Angine de Poitrine. It’s a band that we have shared within these links for a long time. I think Hugh turned me on to their now-viral video, which back then only had several thousand views and now is cranking close to 20 million views. Were there 200,000, 300,000, 500,000 people clogging the streets of downtown Montreal to see this concert? Nobody knows, but it was definitely one for the books. My old music journalist pal Mark Lepage puts thoughts to keys for this great piece about the band, which is featured on Paul Wells’s Substack. Paul is mostly known for politics, but seems to be a complete jazz freak like I am. Enjoy my many worlds colliding and this hazy trip into the strange world of this beautiful band…” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Toy Story Secret Midnight Clinic: Woody‘s Full Makeover – paper_paper – Instagram. “This morning over coffee we were talking about things we do to break the feed and push beyond our echo chambers when it comes to social media. One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing is following artists… randomly… and creative people just to get something positive, curious, and interesting into my feed. I came across this one and thought I would share it. I promise you, no AI algorithm will ever come up with 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 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.