A man in West Africa was tied up and taken at gunpoint over a payroll schedule. Nobody in the story was a bad person.

Head office wanted to save money, so payroll moved from every two weeks to once a month. It made sense on a spreadsheet. Nobody asked the 600 guards how they lived, or knew that most of them were feeding whole villages on a two-week rhythm. Ten days later children were not eating. A bodyguard did the fastest thing he could think of to get someone's attention.

Leanne Terrace was there. She has spent the thirty years since working out why groups of well-meaning people keep doing this to each other, and what stops it.

This one is about companies. It is also about your HOA, your PTA, your church committee, and every group of humans that ever went quiet after somebody overruled them.

Leanne's book, Built to Think, comes out September 17.

Built to Think: https://builttothink.ai

Wired for Meaning: https://adelewang.substack.com

Adele published a quiet episode about walking her dog. Within a day, dozens of emails arrived pitching podcast guests, and nearly every one quoted the exact same abstract phrase back to her. None of the senders had listened. This is what happens when the effort that used to prove attention gets automated away, and why nobody in the production machinery has a clue that it failed the end recipient. The irony is that most of the pitches were generated by AI to promote guests hoping to be booked to talk about the importance of authenticity and being human in the age of AI.

AI podcast booking tools scrape transcripts of newly published episodes, extract a quotable phrase, and generate personalized-looking guest pitches at scale, often without anyone listening to the episode. When the effort that once proved genuine attention is automated away, the host can no longer distinguish real interest from generated flattery. The failure is invisible to the sender because no feedback loop exists to report that the pitch fell flat.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Podcast #Automation #FutureOfWork #Technology #WorkSlop #AISlop #Podcasting #ColdOutreach #AIEthics #HumanConnection #DigitalCulture

Q&A

Why am I getting so many AI-generated podcast guest pitches promoting authenticity?

How can you tell a podcast pitch was written by AI?

What does automated outreach do to genuine signals of attention?

You can know a person for years and never learn their name. You know their dog, though. You know Max is reactive, that Sophie just had surgery, that the golden at the corner loses his mind the second he spots you. The human stays a little bit of a mystery, and somehow that works fine.

This is a solo episode about the friendships that live entirely on the sidewalk. How a dog gives two strangers permission to stop and talk. Why the dog's name sticks while the owner's slides right off. And why these light, low-stakes connections do real work in a neighborhood, the kind of work that used to belong to front porches and corner shops.

I used to think relationships like this were shallow. I've changed my mind. There is a particular comfort in being recognized by someone who isn't asking for your whole life in return. We want to be known. We don't always want to be examined. A good dog walk hands you the first without the second.

If you have ever hidden the fact that you forgot someone's name for the eighth time, this one is for you.

Listen, then tell me: how many dogs on your street do you know by name, and how many owners?

Watch the video version on YouTube: All Things Human with Adele Wang

Essays: Wired for Meaning on Substack

Connect with Adele on LinkedIn