Audio version or listen on Spotify

 

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Everything has protein in it now

 

2026! New year new you! Some thoughts on business shortly but first: time to get the body that has eluded you so far.

I don’t have a plan for you but marketers do. A trip to the supermarket now messes with all your primal food gatherer instincts. Foods you know and love are now cranked up with protein where no protein should be.

Pancakes. Cookies. Corn chips. Coffee. Water. Now the packaging just says PROTEIN in 150-point type. You have to squint to find out what the product even is.

 

To single one out, salami has always had some protein. But to see it advertised as PROTEIN salami like it’s elite athlete food is a strange twist.

 

 

We all know salami is a guilty pleasure, an unholy combo of salt, saturated fats and nitrates and that’s what makes it taste so great. And in moderation, it can’t kill you. Protein is not what salami is for.

 

We all want to believe things too good to be true

 

This mongrel food freak show is our fault.

Because what we respond to, as a species, is people promising us all the rewards we want with none of the effort. In health, relationships, finance, business, we just love the idea of that easy shortcut.

If someone offers us something too good to be true, we really want to believe that this time – against all previous experience – it will be true.

It always starts with a kernel of truth: that bodybuilders and elite athletes need a higher protein intake to rebuild muscle post-workout. And for us non-athletes, protein fills us up so we might eat less later.

Folklore and herd conformity take over. Swarms of tanned, ripped Insta folk preaching the protein gospel. Before long, it’s a firm belief you can look like them just from eating all the protein. No exercise required. Why bother will all that pain, puffing and sweating?

And why eat protein in its recognisable food forms when you can get it in delicious flavours like you’re at the Baskin-Robbins counter? Check out those yummy proteins, under the words “Smashing your fitness goals”.

 

 

It’s like the manufacturers have decided everyone is five years old. This is currently in my gym:

 

 

 

Fair to say you’re not going to reach any worthwhile goals if your pathway is packs of lil’ apple gummy bears.

What’s in your fitness pancakes?

 

Now that health and fitness is gamified on your apps, it’s all about hitting your numbers, with few asking the question: what exactly is the protein that’s being added to your fitness pancakes? Because protein is expensive.

I’m no food scientist but I suspect the answer is: the cheapest, nastiest collagen peptides the procurement department can source. Broken down from the original animal hides (eg “porcine by-products”) in acid or alkali baths. Then enzymatic hydrolysis to shorten the peptide chains into something that just scrapes over the lowest bar for human food. And puts a smile on the CFO’s face.

Deep down, you know it’s not going to turn you into what you want to be.

You know things you want take effort. Because your parents told you that when you were small. But damned if you’re going to admit they were right even decades later, so you suppress that knowledge with a salted choc-fudge protein cookie and carry on with your life.

 

All the rewards, none of the effort

 

I’ll get to the point now. AI is all of this for your business brain.

The promise of all the rewards, none of the effort.

It’s the magic supplement to boost your company’s market value. Announce your product or service is “AI-powered”, and investors get aroused and bullish about how many people you’ll be able to fire next quarter.

Sweetened with the warm, chocolatey flavour of your existing opinions presented back to you as insights.

AI is a useful business tool that’s been oversold by grifters, clowns and a whole industry that knows at some point it will torch billions, maybe trillions of investor cash. There will be some winners, but nobody knows who’ll make it out alive. They will promise anything to save their stock options.

They’re preaching with the deep belief that AI is the answer to everything. And that all human effort is “friction” that must be minimised by software.

 

Sorry I’m not around much, LinkedIn friends

 

It’s why I visit LinkedIn less and less now. It was a friendly, supportive place for business ideas and banter.

Now it’s wall-to-wall AI guys with no hands-on experience in any area of business. Yet they bring certainty that other people’s jobs look easy and hence can be replaced right now. Marketing departments are dead! Hollywood is over! The first one-person unicorn is imminent!

It’s so exhausting and irritating trawling past walls of auto-generated nonsense, I’ve switched over to the shark drones of Instagram lately for my time-wasting needs. At least I know they’re real.

Zero friction feels good at first. Long-term, you get the results you always get from taking the easiest option every time. Uncompetitive flab, physical and mental.

 

The same AI agent use-case every damn time

 

The idea that everything is better frictionless is just wrong.

Ask an AI spruiker for real-world use cases, and they always roll out the same one: AI agents will plan and book your holiday!

The fuck they will. Have any of these people actually booked a holiday in their lives? Each holiday has thousands of decisions. Just one wrong call can be enough to end your relationship, at least for a day or so.

Imagine rolling up to an international airport heading for, say, Disneyland. Family in tow ready for the trip of a lifetime, and there’s a wrong detail on your ticket. Doesn’t match your passport. Picture the look on the face of the check-in service person when you say:

“No, it has to be correct, I asked the best-practice AI agent to book it all.”

Do you think they’ll bend the international rules because you’re adamant your imaginary friend couldn’t have made a mistake?

You get to US customs in the arrivals hellscape at LAX. You surrender all your social accounts and passwords to the guy behind the glass, wondering what verdict he will hand down. He’s itching for you to make just one factual error so he can hand you all straight to ICE.

But sure, book your whole holiday with a product with this footer on everything it tells you: “(Our platform) can make mistakes, check important info”

Is that a product you’re happy to give your credit card details, so it can buy what it reckons you need unsupervised?

Normal people aren’t going to put that much trust in tech platforms that have chosen profit over trust every time.

Yes, AI is helpful for making suggestions, aggregating flight deals and so on, but versions of these services have been with us for a long time. The idea that AI will actually do your booking is like all those videos of drone pizza deliveries futurists have been showing us since 2010. It will always be “just around the corner!”

 

Their friction is your anticipation and joy

 

Like daily grams of protein, AI people believe anything that can’t be measured on a KPI dashboard has no worth.

With holidays, what they call “friction”, normal people call “joy and anticipation” as we consider all the exciting options of that holiday over months or years. It’s an essential part of the experience for real-world humans. You can’t put a KPI on dreaming about something exciting, which entertains you for longer than the holiday itself.

Take away that research friction, and you land in a destination knowing little beyond its name, because you’ve done no work.

Are you excited for shallow, generic experiences amid crowds of others who all used the same prompt?

 

The laziness kicks in at work

 

Choosing the lazy option is really starting to kick in in the corporate world. Industry friends have noticed a solid uptick in AI responses to emails. These aren’t unsolicited sales emails they’re sending, they’re responses to briefs that client has sent them.

What comes back are a few key points parroted back from the sender’s email, but that person has not read that email and has no plans to.

I know people have lots to read. But ours is an industry where if just one pivotal detail is wrong, the whole project might burn. Like a thousand influential guests coming to an expensively-catered CEO presentation that never gets delivered, because the client brought the wrong format media files or dozens of similar traps. It’s not quite an aviation level of checklist importance but it can be very embarrassing when the wheels come off.

How do you do any job if you verifiably don’t know what’s happening on your watch?

If one of our staff was spending five or six figures of our money and was that casual about checking emails from suppliers, we would straight-up fire them by sundown.

(Hi to all Scene Change staff, don’t do this please).

 

The source data equivalent of acid-leached pig hides

 

Abraham Maslow, your old human needs pyramid mate from business studies, said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

When you’re an AI evangelist, more AI output is always the answer. You can write a report with one prompt! So you can generate lots more reports per hour!

Nobody is asking: does anybody want or need these reports? Are they going to make us more profitable? Or are we creating middle management busywork?

Reports are the cholesterol in the bloodstream of big organisations. Apart from the time spent reading and writing them, there’s the inactivity of everyone making no decisions, waiting for the magic guidance to land. Reports in most instances aren’t for illumination. They’re for managers to file away for future arse-covering, a process that makes your business zero extra profit.

And where is the report information you’re using coming from? Is it legit, or is it the data equivalent of acid-leached pig hides? If you’ve no experience sifting through source material, you’ll believe and present literally anything you’re fed. Five years into this, when everyone’s lost their spider senses for what’s true or not, business is in big trouble.

Or at least, reports will be seen as something with zero value, like emails.

 

Microsoft Clippy is back in spirit

 

Like the unnecessary protein invading our food, AI is thrust upon us in increasingly desperate ways that make everyday work worse. The platforms want engagement numbers to rise, so the nonstop pestering ratchets up.

You try to do some basic task with software tools that worked fine up to late 2024. Now every click brings a needy cloud of floating buttons, unsolicited chat windows, and pop-ups that block your work. Hey Ian! Want me to summarise this story? Shall  I circulate to everyone in the office? Add some cool design? 

Spare me.

Then there’s the AI service bots now most big corporate websites now, with a cutesy name. “Hi! I’m Bottina, here to solve your problems!”

I’ve used about 25 of them in the last month for situations where I’m a stressed customer needing their problems sorted out. One has been useful, with actual evidence of knowing my specific order details. The rest are totally generic. You ask them a question about your individual problem, and Bottina serves up links to the FAQ page. As if you haven’t already spent the last half hour in there, finding no useful solutions whatsoever.

It’s this generation’s Microsoft Clippy, and it is not adding value to brands that use it. It is saying: spend money with us, but you can get fucked with your uppity questions when we don’t deliver.

 

AI will get better as non-tech people adopt it

 

*The standard disclaimer* I’m not saying don’t use AI any more than I’m saying don’t eat protein. It’s great for reducing repetitive hack work. It’s fine to get projects started. And for “near enough is good enough” work. Like the pig made of binary code at the top. You’re not here for the pictures so it’ll do.

The art is in judging when near enough isn’t good enough, like when you’re being paid to compile a report for the federal government.

The amazing uses for AI will emerge when smart people outside the tech bubble get going with it.

At the moment, the people publicly pitching AI have such a lack of imagination in what it you can do with it. It’s basically “here’s a faster, shittier version of things that already exist”.

To be expected, given most of these people have absolute contempt for people with imagination, viewing them purely as a resource to be strip-mined for free.

Ironically, actual mining is a shining example of AI usage. BHP now use it to design blast patterns, rather than spending three months drilling core samples to measure rock hardness.  They’re using it to reduce processing waste through their whole system. Investment: “a couple of million”. Return: $50M a year for the life of the project. Amazing.

I love engineers. While most in the corporate world talk about doing things and show each other slides, engineers put a plan together and actually get things done. And you will never see them post on LinkedIn like “I 10x’d my copper processing returns 🚀🚀🚀 comment CHALCOPYRITE to get my free prompts!”

You probably don’t do much blasting, but BHP also uses it for the WHS reports many of us need to do.

“Simple AI tools such as voice-to-text are changing how hazards are reported, letting employees speak into a mobile app instead of filling out paper forms. Reports are geotagged, logged in real time, and the system also gives quick digital risk assessments with warnings based on past incidents.”

We employ many people who truly hate filling out forms so I love the sound of that. That’s a handy tool.

 

Your job is safer than you think it is

 

For your business, it all comes down to what you’re using AI for.

Are you using it to make your service better? To enhance what your people are doing, giving them extra tools to respond faster and more accurately with a better understanding of your customer as an individual? And to reduce wastage and repetitive hack work?

Or are you viewing it purely through cost-cutting goggles and disrespect for everyone else’s skills? Basically an awesome tool to reduce headcount. Because if that’s your approach, customers can feel it. And strategically, you have no protection against every other cost-cutting competitor, using the same tools in the race to the bottom.

Your job is safer than you think it is. The AI-boosters say it will transform the working world out of all recognition. They have to say that, to justify valuations that only stack up if they put large chunks of the world’s population out of a job. That is not going to happen. It’s one tool, not a magic wand.

A person who has never come up with a good idea or plan isn’t going to start delivering them using AI. Those people aren’t equipped to recognise what’s innovative, versus what’s recycled templates and embarrassing cliches. It all looks good to them.

For the rest of us, the only path forward is building those nuance muscles. By embracing friction. And by doing the work.

Play us out Wolves of Glendale.

 

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