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Six Links Worthy of Your Attention #641

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (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 decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces New Technology for Fast-Charging, Noncombustible Batteries – University of Texas News. “I am not the first to observe that John Goodenough is ignoring his moniker. The inventor of the Lithium-Ion battery that powers most of our lives is still at it, in his nineties, this time with Portuguese physicist Maria Helena Braga. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching the ironclad tradeoffs between progress and sustainability (spoiler alert: It’s really bad. Worse than you think.) But sometimes, things like this give me hope.” (Alistair for Hugh).
The Guy Predicting Stocks With An Army of App-Based Psychics – Motherboard by Vice. “Went down a time-sucking rabbithole the other day on Gateway, a 1980s CIA thing about expanding consciousness through hypnotism, sound, and more. Turns out, there’s a document (with a missing page) full of instructions, which are all the rage on TikTok these days. But that rabbithole led here: Now that it’s easy to connect the whole world, what if there are psychics? And what if they can predict the stock market? With UFOs, the more that people carried cameras in their pockets the rarer sightings became. Will the Internet prove ESP is real, or take all the fun out of everything?” (Alistair for Mitch).
University of Hypocrisy – The Atlantic. “The problems of higher education, wealth and political division in America.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Next Level Perfect Pitch (8 Year Old) – Rick Beato – YouTube. “This is, apparently, a pretty famous video, but I saw it for the first time this week. I have been learning ukulele, not having picked up an instrument in since about 1986. I have a new appreciation, clunky though it is, for the structure of music. I have a way to go before I can pick out chords the way this kid does.” (Hugh for Mitch).
The Overlooked Titan of Social Media – The New Yorker. ”Think about YouTube like this: ‘No company has done more to create the online attention economy we’re all living in today,’ Mark Bergen writes at the start of Like, Comment, Subscribe, his detailed history of YouTube, from 2005, the year it was founded, to the present.’ I have been following the YouTube story since day one. In my earlier years of public speaking, I was invited to Google for a presentation, it had to be moved because the venue I was speaking in was now becoming the offices of YouTube – Google had just acquired it (this was 2006). This article highlights the massive impact that this one social network has had on culture. Along with becoming one of the best search engines in the world, it provides us with everything from live religious ceremonies to a way to consume our daily news. Long ago, someone once said that YouTube could become the next television. I’d argue that it has become just that… and so much more…” (Mitch for Alistair).
Technology Can Make Your Relationships Shallower – The Atlantic. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept. I went to Toronto last week for some meetings… I wound up meeting people that I had not seen since before the pandemic. This is common for many people. What makes my situation unique, is that I was often in Toronto 2-4 times a month before the pandemic. I had an office there… a hotel where the staff knew me… and then *poof* it stopped. I maintained many of those relationships via regular texts, etc… but actually seeing… and hugging… these friends I had not seen in years made me (a little bit) sad. I realized that our relationships had deteriorated to texting memes and sharing videos, but they lacked the true depth that would ’normally’ entail a healthy relationship. This made me re-evaluate many relationships that I have which are, primarily, based on technology. Pushing this idea further, I realized that I consider many of these people ‘close friends’… but are they? Maybe they’re just very shallow acquaintances?” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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.