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…

• Verification Is Not Knowledge – Cosmos Institute & Jessica Hullman – Cosmos Institute. “Anthropic recently announced that their AI is getting better faster than they can understand why. If you had a cure that worked, but you didn’t understand it, would you take it? This seems like  the central epistemic question of our time: Is understanding a secondary goal to the results itself, or is it the whole point? In the past, we had to understand a solution before we got the results, but that’s reversing now. This is a long post that seems like the bookend to Chris Anderson‘s incendiary 2008 Wired post The End of Theory.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  
• “Passive Income” Destroyed a Generation of Entrepreneurs – Ja Westenberg. “Hard agree. Everyone’s looking for a shortcut, at a time when we’re increasingly skeptical of automation and impersonal interactions. ‘Between 2019 and 2021, roughly 700,000 new Shopify stores opened. About 90% failed within their first year… an entire layer of the internet that was nothing but confident-sounding garbage produced by people who had optimized for everything except making something worth buying.’ Touché.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• How Fast Food Got So Eye-Wateringly Expensive – Tristin Hopper – National Post. “I’m not sure this article did a good enough job of digging into this phenomenon, but the last time my teenagers forced me to buy them a meal at Burger King (driving on the 401), I almost had a heart attack when I saw the bill was north of $60. I feel like the whole world’s gone crazy.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Axios Ahead: 2028 And Beyond – Jim VandeHei – Axios. “I don’t know how the rest of the news media landscape is doing, poorly I imagine. But Axios, for my money, is the smartest new media company out there, is rocking it. News targeted to decision-makers (aka the best advertising demographic), in a concise format mainly through email, with deep reporting expertise, and the trust that comes with it, peppered with effective use of AI. Here they map out the future for their platform, in a world where passive news consumers are happy to get whatever their AI feeds them. ‘But for serious news consumers — those who routinely seek out high-quality information about their world, passions and community — the demand for human-vetted and human-verified content will surge.'” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• The most insane FAKE musician I’ve ever seen – Danny Sapko – YouTube. “Sometimes my worlds collide. This is a really interesting story about a bass player who has been accused of faking it. There’s a lot of nuance in what that means, especially if you follow any musicians online, mostly because many of them will often play along to a live track and do lots of edits to get the video where they need it to be. Some argue that because these musician videos are often short, you don’t really get a taste for a musician unless they can really play a full set or handle some type of tour (ie: easier to fake a few minutes than a full set… or a full tour). But this one is pretty out there. I’m wondering how you feel about this one and I guess the question this leaves me with is: What was this bass player thinking? They are going through a lot of headaches to get to a result in a world where they are already better than most bass players will ever be at the instrument. Super weird… super fascinating.” (Mitch for Alistair).
  
• Ladies And Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen – National Film Board of Canada – YouTube. “Famed musician, poet, and artist Leonard Cohen died over a decade ago (it feels like yesterday). This past week our city of Montreal saw an incredible live tribute to him, thanks to his son, Adam Cohen, and his grandson, Cassius Cohen. It was an intimate and very well-produced set of powerful poems set to music. I had a friend come in from out of town and managed to take them on a real tour of Leonard’s Montreal and Westmount (Susan Cain wrote about it: My Pilgrimage to Leonard Cohen’s Montreal). It reminded me of this incredible documentary. Thankfully, everyone can watch it thanks to YouTube. Well worth the time whether you loved the artist or don’t know anything about him…” (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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