Dear Thinking Leaders,
This week’s Leadership CONNECT is an extended issue (Our next update will be on October 31st):
- Spark of the week: 55 Years of Digital Zombification: From Sesame Street to TikTok
- Space: Elon Musk Catches Missile with Chopsticks
- AI Jobs: Wimbledon to Replace Line Judges With AI
- Podcast Course: Spotify AI with Allie Business Course
- Thinking Update: Version 1.9
Happy Thinking,
Dr. Yesha Sivan and the MindLi Team
P.S. Comments, ideas, feedback? Send me an e-mail
1. Spark of the Week: 55 Years of Digital Zombification: From Sesame Street to TikTok
(Source: Op-ed by Dr. Yesha Sivan)
The start: In 1969, Sesame Street aired its first broadcast, revolutionizing children’s television. It was designed to captivate kids, using innovative 3-5 minute segments that held their attention. Kids loved it.
In 1981, MTV debuted with shorter videos, flashier visuals, music, and a dose of rebellious energy. 2-3 minute music videos became the norm, full of lights, sounds, and scantily clad performers. Teens loved it.
In 2004, Facebook arrived, cementing the concept of the endless scroll: an infinite feed of posts designed to keep users continuously engaged. It was irresistible: a never-ending stream of posts, carefully crafted to keep users hooked. People loved it.
In 2016, TikTok emerged (formerly Musical.ly), blending short videos (as brief as 15 seconds), music, and an AI-powered feed that predicted your desires with eerie precision. It was the perfect endless scroll, and people loved it even more.
In 2024, 55 years later, today, YouTube has Shorts, Instagram has Reels, and even LinkedIn adopted short-form video content. The trend is clear: we’ve been conditioned to crave quick, dopamine-inducing content—instant, fleeting hits of pleasure. Just like drugs, without the biological agents.
Recently, a coalition of U.S. state attorneys general decided to take action. But is it too late?
What is addiction? It’s when something takes control, preventing you from doing what you genuinely want. It’s missing dinners, missing work, losing creativity, and feeling stuck.
TikTok and its cousins are addictive by design. Short, never-ending streams that tap into our most basic desire for novelty and reward. And the result of decades of this? A society less focused, less creative—a trend toward what I can only describe as digital zombification.
Many of us are victims of this. It’s real, and it’s here.
Interested? Let’s join forces. At MindLi, we’re trying to combat this—helping people break free from the endless scroll of meaningless content.
If you’re interested in joining the fight, let me know.
More:
- In the poetic irony of history, China is now doing to the West what the West once did to China during the Opium Wars. See “Why Did Britain Get China Addicted To Opium?” (Source: Absolute History; Video 59m)
- More about Sesame Street: The History of Sesame Street (Source: WatchMojo; video 4.35 m)
- Allow me also to Thank the late Prof. Gerry Lesson, a key advisor to Sesame Street, who was my Boss at Harvard
2. Space: Elon Musk Catches Missile with Chopsticks
(Source: Firstpost)
In a groundbreaking achievement, SpaceX successfully completed a catch-landing of its Starship rocket’s first stage booster during its fifth test flight on October 13.
The booster returned to its Texas launch pad after separating from the second stage at 70 km, utilizing a novel landing method that enhances SpaceX’s goal of developing a fully reusable vehicle for missions to the Moon and Mars.
3. AI Jobs: Wimbledon to Replace Line Judges With AI for the First Time After 147 Years
(Source: Sky Sports News)
Starting in 2025, Wimbledon will replace all 300 line judges with AI and electronic systems, marking a significant shift after 147 years.
This change will implement automatic line calling across all 18 match courts, following the successful model used at the US Open, and will phase out the Hawkeye challenge system.
While this transition enhances accuracy and consistency in officiating, it also signifies the end of an era for traditional line judges in the sport.
4. Podcast Course: Spotify AI with Allie Business Course
(Source: Allie K. Miller)
Allie is writing:
Over the weekend, I worked with Google NotebookLM to make a 15-episode series covering key AI topics. Listen to them all for AI enlightenment, or click around to find your next dinner party flex.
Here’s the lineup:
1. AI Overview, Turing Test, AI Winters
2. Machine Learning & MLOps
3. Prompt Engineering
4. Reinforcement Learning, AI Agents, RLHF
5. Transformers & Attention
6. Large Language Models (LLMs)
7. Generative AI
8. Vector Databases, Embeddings, RAG
9. Deep Learning & Neural Networks
10. Privacy, Federated Learning, Encryption
11. AI Transparency, Explainability, Interpretability
12. AI Algorithmic Bias and Ethics
13. Multimodal AI
14. AI Agents & Agentic AI
15. AGI and Superintelligence
How I did it so you can too: first, I worked alongside ChatGPT to pick the right topics. The first options were genuinely awful or way too outdated. This took almost an hour of brainstorming. Then, for each topic, I grabbed a bunch of sources (5-16 articles, videos, papers per episode).
I moved all sources into NotebookLM, validated they were uploaded (a bunch of YT videos break). Then grabbed the NotebookLM summary, transferred them back to Claude and ChatGPT to finalize all titles and episode descriptions to be SEO-optimized.
Finally, created a Spotify for Podcasters channel, uploaded logo, description, and all episodes. Start to finish in under a day.
Listen here5. Thinking Update: Version 1.9
(Source: MindLi)
This section of the newsletter will provide you with a better understanding of the qualities of MindLi, share tips and tricks, and update you with new features, as well as other MindLi news. More: Help page or MindLi’s YouTube channel.
We’ve just published version 1.9 of MindLi on all platforms, here is a list of the main changes for each one:
iOS Store v1.9.2
- New feature – initial design for Spark from WhatsApp. You can now add your phone number in Research mode and start sending Sparks to yourself (text only for now)
- New Feature – We added a new view in Plan that shows your recently captured Sparks in a feed style view (need to activate in Settings)
- Enhancement – Added actions menu to oldest Sparks in Evaluate mode
- Enhancement – Added remaining About Sections
Update or download from the App Store
Android Play Store v1.9.2
- New Feature – New Evaluate graph (General PRIME actions)
- New Feature – Now you can add multiple phone numbers to Research with WhatsApp
- New Feature – AI on Spark’s title
- New Feature – You can now log in to MindLi while researching Sparks using the share
Update or download from the Play Store
WEB v1.9.3
- New Feature – Now you can add multiple phone numbers to Research with WhatsApp
- New Feature – AI on Spark’s title
- New feature – initial infrastructure for billing system
- Enhancement – Added remaining About Sections
Chrome/Edge Extension v1.9.2
- Enhancement – Added a button in Settings that leads to the WEB application
- Minor visual changes
Update or download from the Chrome Store
For the full list of changes, please visit our Changelog
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About Leadership CONNECT
MindLi CONNECT, is a weekly source of news and inspiration for thinking aimed at DigitalRosh members and MindLi users.
In every issue, you will find curated content from different industries. It would take less than 5 minutes reading to get a brief overview of the presented topics.
Want to delve deeper? You would need to have a subscription to the DigitalRosh site which is an affiliate site of MindLi. It is Free. Click on the links in each item or follow the breadcrumbs to the DigitalRosh website.
Enjoy!
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