Best Of: What are we building? And the future of human flourishing...

We've spent the last several months talking to people who live at the intersection of technology and the humans on the receiving end of it.

A data privacy attorney. A corpus linguist. A clinical psychologist. A performance coach. An entrepreneur who built a business on failure.

They don't all agree with each other. But they're all pointing at the same thing: the gap between how technology gets built, deployed, and sold — and what it's actually doing to people.

This week's episode is our attempt to pull that thread.

* Mike McLaughlin — The AI ecosystem is running on bad data, has no real mechanism to fix it, and the next wave of cybercrime will target the training data itself. * Kimberly Becker, PhD — AI-generated text is structurally overconfident, and a corpus linguist traced that pattern all the way back to how decontextualized certainty language helped fuel the opioid epidemic. * Dr. Marissa Alert — What organizations call employee resistance to AI is, clinically, a fear and identity threat response that most rollouts are spending millions to ignore. * Tychon Carter — Winning is often where the real crisis begins, and the goalpost never stops moving until you decide your value isn't determined by your output. * The "Bad Hombre" — A solopreneur who built a business on public failure makes the case that the willingness to fail more than most people even try is the only real competitive advantage.

Every one of these conversations eventually arrives at the same place: the distance between what we're building and who it's landing on.