Two things have been on my mind this week.
They both revolve around how we as humans have better conversations with each other.
I don’t think there’s anything more important right now as perhaps, you, like me see a rapid cultural decay in how we either build or destroy relationships.
The good news is we all have a choice and can exert control in our own worlds.
You can make a difference.
Here are the two things that have been on my mind and what prompted them:
Content Overwhelm and the Illusion of Understanding
Last week, Gareth Southgate gave The Richard Dimbleby Lecture. Link.
It was thoughtful, emotional, and nuanced on the topic of masculinity and the challenges facing young men.
I sat down and watched the whole thing. It moved me—not just intellectually, but emotionally. It landed deeply.
Later, that evening I chatted to Nichola, my wife about it.
She said she’d seen a few clips on social media—one-minute snippets that painted a picture of some of the highlights of the talk. And her view, understandably, was shaped by those short fragments.
That’s the world we’re in.
Because we’re overwhelmed, we skim. We scroll. We dip in and out.
We think we understand because we’ve seen the headline, or the highlights reel.
But often we’ve missed the heart of it. We lose context. And without context, it becomes harder to have meaningful conversations, or to disagree well.
I felt moved emotionally to the marrow of my bones and felt I understood the message he shared complete with context.
Nichola had some level of cognitive understanding and perhaps some emotional sense, but it would be impossible to feel the depth of the message from a few small clips.
I’ll come back to this. The second thing this week was watching an interview on the Diary of a CEO.
When AI Joins the Chat
After watching some of this episode on YouTube, I scrolled through the comments.
Whilst of course I can’t be sure, a significant proportion of the comments felt like they’d been written by AI.
I think we’re seeing a real increase in the amount of content written by AI and I think I can start to spot some of the telltale signs - the generic type responses, and profiles that don’t look quite right.
My sense is it’s the comments section that the most damage is being done.
I think many of us scroll through the comment sections looking for signals. Agreement, disagreement, emotion, validation.
My concern is that increasingly, those signals aren’t coming from people. They’re coming from bots, from auto-generated opinions, from machines optimised for engagement, not truth.
And that’s a problem. Because if we’re skimming comments to see how others are reacting, and those reactions are artificially generated to provoke us, then we’re not just being influenced—we’re being manipulated.
Putting it Together.
These two factors together are warning signs for me.
Due to content overwhelm, we skim the surface and gain a superficial understanding rather than real depth and nuance. And we pay disproportionate attention to emotional outrage and comments that are highly susceptible to manipulation.
Neither of these is conducive to cultivating strong relationships and depth in conversation.
So what can we do differently?
I’ve got three suggestions in the form of my usual 3 experiments for you:
The 5-minute experiment
Take 5 mins to reflect on what you pay to attention to.
Is it “emotion-driven” comments, or high-quality insights and debate?
How you spend your attention is your choice. Don’t give it away cheaply because it’s been hijacked by emotion driven click bait.
The 10-minute experiment:
Have a real conversation about something real.
Pick one person. Talk about something you’ve both engaged with. Compare what you noticed, and what you felt. Did you take the same thing from it? Did you interpret it differently? Explore the depth and nuance.
The 30-minute experiment:
Watch the whole thing.
This week, pick one longer-form piece of content—a full lecture, a long-form podcast, or a deep article. Don’t skip. Don’t skim. Watch or read it in full. Notice how your understanding changes when you absorb the full arc, not just the headline.
This is all about quality vs quantity.
Aim for less shallow content and instead, a much smaller amount of high-quality content.