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As I mentioned last week, I recently recorded guest spots on a half dozen podcasts, in quick succession! So, all six are listed here, and I’m featuring one per week in depth.

Feature #5: The Gut + Science podcast with Nikki Gregory: Stop selling AI as efficiency, start leading it as human growth

This week’s feature is the Gut + Science podcast from the People Forward Network. This discussion with Nikki Lewallen Gregory focused a lot on AI and how it’s being rolled out in the workplace, and where those roll-outs are falling short. So many companies are making decisions that are inevitably going to “hollow out” their orgs, as Jory Des Jardins puts it, but also are going to cement the now of how they work as the forever of how they work. And when they realize it, they may no longer have the strategic, experienced teams left to right the ship.

Here’s a quick excerpt on one of my core beliefs: Now is not the time to turn your back on the ocean. If you think the AI wave is a threat, then you know what they say. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You will learn so much by tinkering with these tools. You learn where they shine, where they fail, where they have an edge, and where they couldn’t possibly. You also will learn not just what the tech is capable of, but what YOU are capable of. It’s more than you imagine, I promise.

Full interview here:

Already featured:
1. The Nightly from Hatch: Why Buffy Still Saves Us All
2. Humans Behind the Tech from Old St Labs, with Rob Woodhead: From Theatre to Tech to Scaling BlogHer (and Beyond)
3. Gina Gardiner & Friends: Your Brain is Your Oldest Asset (and Probably Your Least Examined)
4. Flipped Story with David Gadarian: Flipping Luck, Timing and Unplanned Leaps with Elisa Camahort Page

To be featured in upcoming newsletters
1. The Impossible Puzzles podcast with Mike Merkur: Episode 242 with Elisa Camahort Page (I get a little spicy with this one.)

There has been endless social commentary on the man vs. bear debate…namely, if you were alone in the woods and had to encounter either a man who is a stranger to you or a bear, which would you choose? I realized that I had no idea how this started, so I did a little bit of digging and learned it was from a TikTok-er’s “woman on the street” style interview video, asking women this question. The women overwhelmingly chose the bear. [It should be noted that, later, when actual polling companies tried to get more scientific data around the question, men fared a bit better.]

While there was some outcry about whether there was misandry to be found in asking the question at all, and whether women were irrational for choosing the bear, I think women were just signaling: We see you, dudes. We’ve experienced you. We have lived, or witnessed at some point, the data about sexual assault, domestic violence, family annihilation, and the like. The data about strangers, sure, but also the data about loved ones. The data are not awesome. And women know it. 

Despite this, the majority of women still end up partnered, having partnered, or seeking partnership with men. (As some would quip: No surer sign that orientation is not a choice.)

I thought of the man vs. bear debate both in and out of the Buffyverse this week. First, after reading this report by Libby Rodney and Abbey Lunney from The Harris Poll. The headline does not bury the lede: AI Revolt & Romance: Americans Are Protesting AI and Falling in Love With It. At the Same Time.

Yes, people are pushing back hard on AI…with data centers as a handy tangible component to protest. Gen Z in particular is vocal and protesting AI and the impact it is having on the futures they were led to pursue and expect. They’re pissed, and I can’t blame them. AND…

People are turning to AI for emotional support and therapy, companionship and friendship, maybe even love. And Gen Z more than older generations.

Gen Z is more likely to turn to AI for these reasons, and they’re more likely to fear AI being taken away from them, and lest you think that one cohort of Gen Z is out on the streets pushing back on data centers and AI job loss, while another cohort is sharing all their deepest feelings with AI, the graphic below demonstrates how, in many cases, it’s the same people doing both. If one of my enduring #BuffyLifeLessons is that we contain multitudes, this is a confounding example!

I initially had my AI tool of choice summarize this Harris Poll report for me, and I was so struck by this love/hate revelation, that I thought of the man vs. bear scenario.

AI as a business is the stranger in the woods. These companies are run by executives we don’t trust, making decisions that seem to blithely threaten our baseline needs…you know, water, jobs, etc.…not to mention crushing the already tenuous business model for creatives: We don’t trust these execs or what they plan to do with the technology. We don’t want to run into it in places we don’t expect it. We want to protect ourselves and be protected from it.

More poignantly, just as we wish women weren’t constantly asked to protect ourselves from men who would harm us and that instead the men who would harm us were asked to be better men…we wish these AI businesses were run by humans who were either self-motivated or at least being tasked with being better stewards of a technology that instead they claim we should both fear and pour billions of dollars into.

AI as business is the worst of both worlds…the strange man in the woods AND the bear who has the potential to destroy us without really giving us a second thought.

Meanwhile, AI as the individual tool we turn to feels more like the best of both man and bear. Part bear, in that it’s easy to think that if we learn how it operates, we can feel less vulnerable to it than to an unpredictable human. But also part man, namely the men we want to know, love, and trust to be entirely separate from men (or bears) who would harm us.

That’s the conundrum. That’s the inherent conflict. We love it; we hate it; we’re scared of it. It helps us; it harms us. We want to run from it; we want to master it.

I thought of man vs. bear again when watching this week’s episodes from the Buffyverse, because both depicted strictly human interactions that could have been aired this year, not 27 years ago.

In the Buffy episode this week, Buffy is a freshman in college; she falls for a dude (her first dude post-serious break-up with Angel); she sleeps with the dude, and then he never calls. Tale as old as time. My memory from watching and re-watching this episode years ago was obviously that Parker, the callow dude in question, was a jerk.

What I didn’t remember (perhaps because 15-20 years ago I didn’t have the right word in my lexicon for it) was the gaslighting. When she tries to have a conversation with him about what’s going on, he plays it off like nothing. Nothing is going on. Nothing is wrong. She must have misunderstood his intentions and their interactions. She must have mistaken his (as we learn) practiced vulnerability for meaning more than it did. She’s the one with the problem.

In the Angel episode this week, Angel has a client who needs to be protected because her addict boyfriend is on a bender and is threatening her life. Angel does protect her, but then she says she is as much afraid of herself…and that she’ll fall for the boyfriend’s apologies and promises again…as she is of him. Again, this kind of cycle of abuse endures today. The apologies and promises, repeatedly broken, are its own form of gaslighting.

All I could think after watching both Buffyverse episodes this week was, ah yes, this is why we choose the bear.  We think, well, at least we know what we’re getting

WYSIWYG, as we old school bloggers might say. (WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” and references an innovative interface of the early 00s that let you build a blog in a format that seemed more like a word processor than a web development tool.)

Bears aren’t manipulators or gaslighters. And you’re not going to get into a cycle of abuse with a bear, amirite?

We are, without a doubt, being manipulated and gaslit right now by those strange men in the technology woods. We’re being sold very different stories about AI. It’s going to kill us. It’s going to cure cancer. It’s going to take jobs. It’s going to create jobs. It’s moving us towards the singularity. It’s just pattern-matching. We are being told to be afraid and to protect ourselves, while also being asked to trust that the dangers both a) should be self-regulated by these companies that are telling us we’re in danger and b) are already becoming outside their control. So, somehow, we should just trust that the gaslighters and the people who stand to profit…a lot…should be in charge of the guardrails.

Worst of all, when people dare to want straight answers and accountability, it is implied we simply don’t understand …that it’s beyond us. It’s infuriating. It’s a pattern I recognize from the days when social media began morphing from great democratizer to capitalist extractor and exploiter.

If the Harris Poll data show us anything, it’s that increasingly we are compartmentalizing the AI tools we love from the AI companies we hate. Despite them being completely intertwined.

Maybe our human ability to compartmentalize as a way of managing dilemmas that seem (or that we’re told are) above our paygrade is how we end up with certain real-world data about dangers to women not really changing in the past 25 years. In real, non-theoretical life, women have always been more in danger from those we know, and often even love, than we are from strangers. But despite how common it is, it is still something that carries stigma, something we may feel compelled to hide, just like Gen Z and their AI usage.

So, let’s ask a different question that seems important these days: Who would you rather encounter…a man or an AI that knows everything about you?

I’ve thought about this. And just as I always shared the approach I took to remain authentic while having boundaries when it comes to social media, I am making the same conscious, purposeful choices when it comes to AI. Yes, it can look at my calendar, but not my email, to name one simple boundary. And I’ll talk about health goals or financial goals, but hell to the no, I have not been convinced to connect it directly to my electronic health record or my bank!

I think I’ll schedule a Tinkering Thursday video soon about my boundaries with my AI tool of choice, and how I set them, and continue to review and maintain them.

Because I don’t want any surprises…not in the woods, my home, or in my computer!

I watched Buffy Season 4, episode 3 (The Harsh Light of Day recap) and Angel Season 1, episode 3 (In the Dark recap). This is one of just a few “crossover” episodes, where something in the Buffy episode leads directly to the Angel episode. And a character from Buffy crosses over to lend a hand to Angel Investigations. .

The core #BuffyLifeLesson in this week’s episodes is that being human is being vulnerable. There’s nothing wrong with being vulnerable. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to believe in people, to choose to believe in something or someone. But eventually, you have to choose yourself…your values, your needs, your well-being. And that means sometimes you have to choose to look at what your values and needs really are. And know what will really secure your well-being.

I’m here every week, using pop culture (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer right now) as a jumping off point for everything I’m thinking about professional leadership, personal development, political philosophy, and pop culture. I would love you to join me by subscribing. And I would love you to share the link with other nerds like us!