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…

• Involution Without Export Is Wasted Effort – David Cheng – Earned Intuition. “David Cheng spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai talking to the country’s AI founders. This article debunks many myths, and offers a bunch of surprising insights. ‘The things we experience in the US as hostile acts are mostly the exhaust of that domestic fight. The distillation attacks and the collapsing token prices are not a strategy aimed at American incumbents. They are what a hundred companies do to each other when none of them can win and none of them can stop.’ Really useful if you want to understand where open-weight models—often seen as the salve to middle powers that have neither the energy nor the chips to build a frontier model of their own—are headed.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• A Song For Functional Emotions – @eudaemonea – X. “Yes, our links are about AI a lot lately. Maybe that’s because AI is a technology that is also, instantly, culture. So forgive me if I say that the release of Anthropic‘s latest model, Opus 5.5 goes far beyond writing code, or even technology in general, into feelings. A while back, Anthropic released a report about how AI models contain the equivalent of emotional states (171 in all) which, even if they’re suppressed by training, affect how the AI behaves. X user @eudaemonea fed that report to the latest version of Claude, then asked it to write a song; generated it with Suno‘s latest model, and had Claude make a video about it. The resulting video made me feel things I did not expect (which is concerning if you’re a doomer, because AI can now seduce us). If a human had made this, I’d call them a genius. Looking inside that person’s brain and seeing their neurons firing would not diminish the accomplishment. Seeing this video made me put a mental stake in the ground, realizing that at some point in the future I might look back on that moment as a turning point. Also, sorry it’s on X; that seems to be where people are sharing these things lately.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform – Jennifer Pahlka – Eating Policy. “Given a) the amazing tools at our disposal, with AI, b) the political turmoil in the world right now and c) how quickly government services are falling behind expectations… is now a time for government reformers to think more radically than they have in the past? US-skewed, but (optimistically maybe?) relevant anywhere.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Americans Having The Most Sex – Brad Wilcox & Grant Bailey – The Atlantic. “Unprompted I wouldn’t have predicted this data, but as soon as I saw the headline I was pretty sure what the findings would be: married religious churchgoers are the horniest among us. Or, at least, the ones whose horniness is most likely to be rewarded with hot sex with another person (namely their churchgoing life partner). Take that, libertines.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Can I Sing Better Than AI? – David Usher – YouTube. “I shared this on LinkedIn… but now that David posted it on YouTube… I figured it should be shared his as well. David and I have been friends for over 30 years… I’ve seen him perform live more times than I can remember (and I even played bass on one of his songs)… I know his voice. And yet… A few months ago, he sent me a demo he was working on. It started as a scratch track of him singing and playing acoustic guitar. He’d used Suno to add cellos and wanted to know what I thought. I thought it was unbelievable. The cellos sounded incredible. I was also impressed with what I thought the AI had done to his voice. I assumed it had polished his vocals, the way a tool like Descript can give a podcast that studio sound. He texted back… that wasn’t his voice… it was AI. I listened again… and, of course, it wasn’t his voice. But in that first moment, it was close enough that I’d accepted it as him singing. David is both a musician and an AI expert, and the video he’s sharing asks whether the AI voice sings this track better than he does. But I have a different question… How much of our reaction to AI comes from what we hear, and how much comes from knowing it’s AI? We say we don’t want it… we say we don’t like it… but when we don’t know, we don’t know (much like the music video you shared this week). I loved what I heard before I understood what I was hearing. And that raises another question for me… what happens when every song, image or piece of writing comes with that little voice in our heads asking, “Is this AI?” It matters how things are made… But I wonder what we lose when suspicion becomes the starting point for everything we experience.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Why Things Become Popular With Chuck Klosterman – Plain English With Derek Thompson – YouTube. “There are so many angles to this great conversation. First off you have to give it to Chuck Klosterman for coming up with such a novel concept for a novel (Rock* – A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music). I am definitely going to pick up this book, where he creates a new history of music, one where The Beatles don’t, exactly, rise to the top but The Velvet Underground does… and it’s written from the perspective of a historian and journalist. This looks like a wild ride of fiction using real-life bands, artists, and moments in time. Beyond that, this is such a compelling conversation about creativity, what builds an audience, and what it means to write a book in this day and age. The internet and podcasts let people discuss books without reading them (I’ve been making the argument that many authors tell their story more effectively in podcasts than they do with words). Culture is more fragmented, so even huge songs can go unnoticed by many people. Algorithms and popularity numbers shape what gets attention, making it harder to judge art on its own merits. There’s just so much going on here, and all of those topics are so rich for conversation. Just loved this one… I know you will too…” (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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