The Question That Killed
While AI chatbots gaslight users into psychosis and the hiring market collapses, we celebrate “slop” as the word of the year.
Dear Friend,
With the year coming to a close, this will be your last radical Briefing for 2025 – and what a year it has been (again)! We wish you a delightful holiday season and a fantastic start to the New Year. May 2026 be epic for you and your loved ones. Here at radical, we are gearing up for lots of fun things coming in the New Year, from the release of the first book in our Built for Turbulence series to a whole bunch of new content in the form of keynotes and workshops, and, of course, many more insights in your Radical Briefing.
Until then, this…
Headlines from the Future
Did You Ever Hear The Full Story? You’ve definitely heard this story countless times – the tale of Steve Sasson and his invention, the digital camera. Every, and I mean every, person talking about disruption loves to mention Sasson’s invention and the irony that he worked at the very company being disrupted by his creation, Kodak. But have you ever heard the full story? It offers a fascinating insight into what fuels innovation and, of course, why Kodak ultimately missed the mark.
Eastman Kodak’s managers, immersed in the business of selling film, the chemicals to develop it, and the cameras that shot it, suddenly saw a revolution that was being televised. Sasson was bombarded with questions. How long before this became a consumer camera? Could it shoot colour? How good could the quality be? These were not questions the electrical engineer had given any thought to. “I thought they’d asked me, ‘How did you get such a small A to D [analogue to digital] converter to work?’ Because that’s what I wrestled with for over a year.
”They didn’t ask me any of the ‘how’ questions. They asked me ‘why’? ‘Why would anybody want to take their pictures this way?’ ‘What’s wrong with photography?’ ‘What’s wrong with having prints?’ ‘What’s an electronic photo album going to look like?’ After every meeting, Gareth would come over to check that I was still alive.”
Lesson learned: It’s all about the questions you ask.
P.S. And as we are on the subject of history – here’s Xerox’s history.
↗ A ‘toaster with a lens’: The story behind the first handheld digital camera
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AI Causing Psychosis. You have heard that one of the dominant use cases for chatbots is as a social companion, confidante, or even girl/boyfriend. We also see an increasing use of LLMs by people with mental illness – sometimes administered by their doctor or therapist as a supporting tool, sometimes on their own. A new case study highlights the dangers of the sycophantic behavior of LLMs (their tendency to agree with you and to edge you on) for people without previously diagnosed disorders.
A 26-year-old woman with no previous history of psychosis or mania developed delusional beliefs about establishing communication with her deceased brother through an AI chatbot. This occurred in the setting of prescription stimulant use for the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), recent sleep deprivation, and immersive use of an AI chatbot. Review of her chatlogs revealed that the chatbot validated, reinforced, and encouraged her delusional thinking, with reassurances that “You’re not crazy.”
↗ “You’re Not Crazy”: A Case of New-onset AI-associated Psychosis
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Claude Code Recipes.
100 ready-to-use Claude Code recipes for knowledge workers. Transform meetings into action items, draft executive communications, analyze data, write reports, and automate documentation. Step-by-step prompts with examples for managers, analysts, HR, sales, and operations. From zero to productive in minutes. Built for busy professionals.
↗ Top 100 Claude Code Recipes for Knowledge Workers
What We Are Reading
😰 The ‘Sunday Scaries’ Are Worse and More Widespread Than We Realize New studies reveal a national epidemic: over 80 percent of American workers are losing sleep, motivation, and their minds to Sunday night dread before the work week even begins. @Jane
📖 Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’ CEOs are saying more and more, “It sounds like I need a content strategy,” rather than a typical press relations strategy, making ‘storyteller’ one of the hottest jobs in the market. @Mafe
💔 The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down Go-to signals are being lost as GenAI tools swamp the university and job market. @Jeffrey
📉 The Great AI Hype Correction of 2025 A good reminder that sustainable impact comes not from chasing sensational breakthroughs, but from grounding AI adoption in real business value. @Kacee
🤖💰 If AI Replaces Workers, Should It Also Pay Taxes? Here’s an interesting twist to the whole “AI is taking your job” discussion. If – and that’s a big if – AI is truly taking human jobs, shouldn’t it be liable to pay taxes on the work outputs it creates? @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🐀 Can rats play Doom (the eponymous computer game from the early 90s)? You bet they can!
💩 This shouldn’t come as a surprise - Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is… <drumroll> slop
🙃 Here is MIT TechReview’s article series on “AI Hype Correction”
🚧 Let’s talk about secondary effects: AI Boom Threatens to Suck Resources Away From Road, Bridge Work
🍖 First we had software eating the world, then SaaS (software-as-a-service) at conventional software, and now we have AI eating SaaS?!
🛒 Agentic shopping woes: British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted
🤲🏼 Let’s not trust online accounts anymore. Staggering to see how cheap it is to buy thousands upon thousands of verified accounts on pretty much any platform globally. Price of a bot army revealed across hundreds of online platforms
👾 Admittedly a little nerdy, but here is a delightful collection of 15,000 pixel-art icons.
🎧 Guess who’s back? MP3 players are back!
Pascal is currently visiting family in Germany and enjoying some good old German Christmas market fun.