The airport coffee shop was crowded that morning. The air smelled like burnt beans. Screens glowed on every table. People scrolled, half-listening to conversations around them, half-absorbed by whatever was on their phones.
On a screen a few feet away, a young man was talking about leadership as another young person looked on with rapt attention. The speaker looked about twenty-two – perfect hair, clear voice, rehearsed cadence. The subtitles below him read: “Habits for High EQ Leaders.”
I watched without thinking for a few minutes while waiting for my flight. He spoke about empathy and authenticity with the certainty of a seasoned professional. I kept wondering how much of what he said he had actually lived. Had he ever led a team through a failure? Had he ever told someone they no longer had a job? Had he ever stayed awake worrying about a decision that might have hurt someone who trusted him? Probably not.
Yet there he was, teaching millions of followers about emotional intelligence.
I took a sip of coffee and realized that the world had changed in ways I hadn’t fully noticed. We are no longer rewarding experience. We have started rewarding fluency – the ability to sound like we’ve lived a life we haven’t.
A decade (likely more) ago, I might have been that young man. Back then, I was flying between Singapore, London, and Chicago, trying to organize a global program that refused to come together. My weeks blurred into a series of red-eye flights and back-to-back meetings. I believed that speed meant progress and that more slides meant more clarity.
One night, my team stayed up until two, refining a presentation. Every line and graphic was polished. We wanted it to look perfect. The next morning, a senior leader stopped us midway through the meeting and asked a simple question: “Where did this data come from?”
No one had an answer. Someone had sent something to someone who sent it to someone on the team. There was no clarity of origin, reliability of data or the inferences we were presenting.
We had built something that looked precise but wasn’t. We had created the image of truth instead of the substance of it. After the meeting, I walked out with the quiet discomfort of someone who realizes he’s become part of the very problem he criticizes. Looking right isn’t the same as being right.
That experience changed the way I started seeing everything. Once you’ve seen how easy it is to make something look real, you start noticing how often people settle for appearance.
The same pattern now runs through everything we touch.
AI writes essays it doesn’t understand. Startups raise money for products that fix loneliness by deepening it. We’ve built a world filled with intelligence but running low on intention.
I remember meeting a young founder building an AI companion app. It would text you, talk to you, even invent fake memories that made it seem alive. His investors apparently loved the idea. His beta was trending. He told me proudly that his early users were spending more than three hours a day with their AI companions.
I asked what success meant for him. He said, “Engagement.”
He wasn’t being cynical. He truly believed it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what those three hours meant to real living human beings (the beta users) – three hours not spent with anyone real. Three hours given to a machine designed to imitate care.
And then, I met another founder in India. She was using AI to help farmers and distributors predict crop yields and market pricing. She worked out of a shared office with a small team and no publicity. When I asked how things were going, she smiled and said, “We talk a lot about the soil and spoilage.”
Her focus wasn’t on growth or visibility. It was on usefulness. And it made me realize how the modern economy has started rewarding noise more than results.
We have made it easy to get attention and hard to create value.
And, I am experienced enough to know we have been here before.
I’ve sat in meetings where people polished numbers they didn’t believe in, hoping no one would ask probing questions. I’ve seen teams build products to impress executives and investors rather than improve customer lives. I’ve watched good people talk faster than they think, afraid that silence might make them invisible.
That is what I mean by “slop”.
It isn’t just content; it’s the culture of pretending that polish is progress. It’s what happens when we stop caring whether something is true and start caring only whether it appears to perform.
A few years ago, during a major project, a senior executive said to me, “We don’t have time for customer experience data – just make it look good.” He didn’t mean harm. He was exhausted, like everyone else. But in that moment, many of us at that table appeared to acknowledge what so many of us face: a world moving too fast to care about what’s real.
The presence I have built with executives and boards over the last decade starts with trying to slow down. I ask one more question when the room wants to move on. I take one more hour to verify what others take for granted. I go see the work myself instead of summaries and polished reports. It’s not dramatic, but it’s the only way I know to keep from sliding into the same habits.
And, while I may appear to slow things down or cost some travel dollars that CFOs are trying to avoid, that’s how I build trust that allows teams to build reliably and quickly – one extra question, meeting, or walkthrough at a time.
When I talk to younger professionals now, I tell them something simple.
Build things that help.
Don’t make others pay for your shortcuts. If your idea, your app, or your pitch doesn’t make someone’s life better in a clear and lasting way, it’s not progress or valuable – it’s just more “slop”.
And for those of us who’ve been around longer, the lesson isn’t much different. Stop rewarding polish over honesty. Stop calling speed efficiency when it’s just avoidance. Stop confusing visibility with credibility.
The world doesn’t need more shallow influencers. We need expertise grounded in evidence, inference, and lived experience – people who have done the work before they teach the lesson, who understand that real value doesn’t come from what you say but from what you can teach using the scientific method (yes, that stuff we all learned in high school and college).
Another evening, in some other airport coffee shop, I saw a man sitting across from his teenage daughter. Between them was what looked like a circuit board hobby kit type thing and a notebook. He was showing her how to fix or do something. They weren’t recording a video. They weren’t performing for anybody. They were just there, focused, learning together – connected in real discovery.
I remember watching them and thinking that this is what real creation looks like – patient, quiet, and shared. That’s what the most rewarding moments in our lives are supposed to be.
Technology, leadership, creativity – they are all meant to make life more livable, more enriching – and most of all – more real. Not more marketable (and hollow).
AI will keep improving. The “slop” will, too. But there will always be room for people who care about what they build and the effect it has on others.
The future – the one that matters – will never belong to those who automate meaning, kill relationships, replace emotions and feelings, and take away the texture of real moments from our lives.
It will belong to those who create real solutions to opportunities that enhance our real lived experiences, one honest act at a time.
It’s starting to feel like Fall in the Midwest.
I love the smell of clean air and the feeling of the sun in my face as I walk with my wife in the morning. Go out with someone you love and let the day happen – no phones, no plans, no noise. Just time, air, and the reminder that being present is still the most human thing we can do.
Enjoy your loved ones and the rest of your Sunday.
And thank you for spending some of it with me.
Warm regards,
Adi