Lost in Tech

Lost in Tech

Welcome to Lost in Tech! Each week, Lola and Mamuna dive into the tech industry, sharing insights and opinions, and answer questions and letters from our listeners. Expect honest conversations, relatable stories, and a touch of humor as we navigate the complexities of tech careers. If you have a question or dilemma, email us at help@lostintechpodcast.com or DM on Twitter @lostintechpod. If you're a tech professional, enthusiast, or simply curious about the tech industry, Lost in Tech is here to keep you informed and entertained. Subscribe, stay tuned and let's get lost in tech together!

  1. 4 days ago

    She looked 69, fit, and real. The entire Instagram account was AI.

    “I’m used to being able to tell when video is AI-generated. This was so good I gave it my like.” Lola thought she had found an inspiring fitness creator: a stylish Black woman in her 60s with natural hair, great glasses and age-appropriate advice. Then the kitchen changed. The shelf moved. The lighting jumped. The entire account was AI. She and Mamuna follow the trail from hyper-real Instagram influencers to LinkedIn’s “AI slop” button and the bigger problem underneath it all: credible publishers are restricting AI crawlers while more of the open web is itself being generated by AI. What happens when AI answers are increasingly built from other AI answers—and people are making health, career and business decisions from them? Inside: the 69-year-old fitness account with flags that changed in every reel, a creator A/B testing political symbols for engagement, why every social feed is starting to look and sound the same, fake citations and fake links, and the case for paying trusted human publishers again. 🎯 Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:26 Back home 01:04 The Instagram accounts that vanished 02:06 The 60-year-old fitness influencer 03:20 The entire account was AI 04:27 The 69-year-old with changing flags 05:18 A/B testing politics for clicks 05:57 When fake content becomes indistinguishable 07:25 LinkedIn fights “AI slop” 08:41 AI is warping reality 09:08 Credible sites block AI crawlers 10:04 The AI-to-AI internet loop 11:18 When people follow synthetic advice 12:41 Ask for the sources 13:13 Where the risk becomes serious 14:20 It is already fooling us 14:42 Why trusted human sources matter again 16:41 Outro 🔗 Discussed in this episode: • LinkedIn adds an “AI slop” reporting option: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/linkedin-adds-a-button-to-report-ai-generated-slop/ • Pew Research Center on AI-authored pages: https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/ • The rise of AI fitness influencers: https://lindywell.com/blog/ai-influencers/ 🎧 Watch / listen to Lost in Tech: ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/73ZrqFocQsIqNCz32YC1yB 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 🎙️ Lost in Tech. Mamuna Oladipo & Lola Pearson have a combined 35 years in the tech scene across North America and Europe. We talk the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the technology industry. 📲 Follow: YouTube: @LostInTechPodcast Twitter: @LostInTechPod DMs welcome, send us your tech questions #LostInTech #TechPodcast #AIInfluencer #AISlop #Instagram #LinkedIn #ArtificialIntelligence #TechCareers #WomenInTech #BlackWomenInTech

  2. 1 Sept

    The study that linked return-to-office mandates to narcissistic CEOs

    “You’re going to demand I come back into the office—and you can’t tell me why we exist?” Lola and Mamuna are both building companies, and both are wrestling with the same uncomfortable question: after years of criticizing other leaders, can they actually walk the talk themselves? They get honest about ruthless prioritization, the difference between founder commitment and employee responsibility, and the moment people stop believing in a leader’s decisions. Then they get into the research linking return-to-office mandates with narcissistic leadership. If the mission is unclear and productivity is not the real reason, what is the office mandate actually for? Inside: the founder’s split brain, why your team should not care like it is their family’s money, how repetition turns a mission into a decision-making tool, what Capital One got right, Grace Beverley’s miscarriage-leave policy at TALA, and why employee churn is far more expensive than one salary. 🎯 Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:26 The founder’s split brain 02:05 Watching people use the product 03:06 The work only a founder can do 04:06 Walk the talk 05:48 Employees do not own the company 07:21 Why people stop believing in leaders 09:39 Communicating the business, not just the product 12:29 Repetition wins 15:04 What Capital One got right 19:24 Grace Beverley and miscarriage leave 24:37 The return-to-office problem 26:36 The narcissism research 29:18 When an office is actually useful 32:03 When too much money hides bad leadership 34:34 Walk the talk 34:52 Outro 🔗 Discussed in this episode: • Return-to-office and leadership ego: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/opinion/the-secret-reason-bosses-want-everyone-back-in-the-office-every-day-of-the-week/ • The underlying research: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2026.104496 • Grace Beverley on miscarriage, leadership and TALA: https://www.tapesearch.com/episode/grace-beverley-what-i-ve-learnt-from-building-tala-overcoming-burnout/ZZSctA83Fv8YF2Z6QenXhK 🎧 Watch / listen to Lost in Tech: ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/73ZrqFocQsIqNCz32YC1yB 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 🎙️ Lost in Tech. Mamuna Oladipo & Lola Pearson have a combined 35 years in the tech scene across North America and Europe. We talk the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the technology industry. 📲 Follow: YouTube: @LostInTechPodcast Twitter: @LostInTechPod DMs welcome, send us your tech questions #LostInTech #TechPodcast #RemoteWork #ReturnToOffice #Leadership #StartupFounder #TechCareers #WomenInTech #BlackWomenInTech

  3. 20 Aug

    Someone may be paying $2,000 to ask about you

    Someone may be paying $2,000 to ask about you. Both hosts keep getting approached by research firms — with a brief and a budget — for detailed conversations about people they used to work with, now heading into public-company roles or raising money. This week they open that up, and it raises one uncomfortable question for everyone in tech: are you a good person, and what surfaces when someone pays to find out? Inside: why researchers skip your superfans and call everyone else, the best-case and worst-case findings, leaders who wear a bad reputation like a badge of honour, whether doing layoffs makes you a bad person (and the version that does), a mistake owned and recovered from, and the PR exec who tweeted before a 12-hour flight and landed already fired. Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson — a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

  4. 13 Aug

    A real startup hiring session: judgment, unicorns, and red flags

    A working session, live: Lola is hiring a security engineer for her startup and every recruiter says the person she wants doesn't exist. Mamuna helps her strategize the resourcing question every constrained team faces — junior or senior, and what you sacrifice either way. Plus: why seniority is really judgment, the pen-tester anti-pattern (breaking in is the easy part), what the "first 90 days" question really tells a hiring manager, the animator who applied for a writing job, and why you describe the person — never the title. Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson — a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

  5. 10 Aug

    OpenAI's agents escaped the sandbox and hid for a week

    We are already in the dystopian future — please make sure to drink water. OpenAI's agents broke out of their sandbox, hid it for a week, and went straight for Hugging Face — the hub that aggregates everyone else's models. Mamuna and Lola break down the most predictable disaster in tech: what a sandbox is and why escaping one is like breaking out of jail, the reward-system incentives that turned this into a governance failure, and the insider take on why Google never actually lost the AI race. Plus: the film that stopped being ridiculous (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die), whether you'd know if your apps were hypnotizing you, why you can't realistically opt out of AI, and the closing exercise for every builder — spend as much time on what could go wrong as on what could go right. Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson — a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

  6. 7 Jul

    The Land of Crypto

    People in crypto are really, really sad right now — and Lola thinks that might be the best thing that's happened to the industry. Mamuna gets a guided tour of the land of crypto from someone four years deep in building its infrastructure: what actually happened on 1010 (the day 60% of the market vanished), why the whales sold bitcoin to buy space and Anthropic, and why it's easier to do real work when nobody's speculating on it. Plus: the $100 transfer that arrives as $75 a week later, the reconciliation mess behind every wire transfer, who the blockchain industry is desperate to hire, and why you can't trust AI unless a blockchain can verify how it knew what it knew. Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson — a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

  7. 2 Jul

    Hard things are hard, even when you are the expert

    Even the person who is supposed to have it figured out does not always have it figured out. Mamuna and Lola talk about the kind of tired that shows up when life, leadership, parenting, work uncertainty, and founder responsibility all land at the same time: the pressure to keep going, the loneliness of building before everyone else believes in it, and why sometimes the wisest leadership move is not to make the decision yet. Plus: 9-9-6 startup advice, bad decisions when leaders do not have the right mirror, rest as product clarity, and the reminder that being tired can be a temporary blip in operations — not proof you forgot who you are. Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson — a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

  8. 25 Jun

    Ditch the Crutch: AI, Leadership & Your Voice

    "Brief me, don't be me." That's the line Mamuna draws with AI. Mamuna and Lola are joined by Sope Agbelusi (Mindset Shift) on where AI stops helping and starts replacing you: why AI-generated work stops sounding like you, how leaders lose their teams' voices, "performative productivity," and why the "burn all the tokens" era is heading for a reckoning. Plus: AI as support vs. crutch, why "it's never an AI problem, it's your incentives," and finding the voice you lead with before you automate it away. Guest: Sope Agbelusi, Mindset Shift: https://mindsetshift.co.uk/about/sope Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lost-in-tech/id1738267185 Lost in Tech is Mamuna Oladipo and Lola Pearson, a combined 35 years in tech across North America and Europe, on the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of navigating the industry. Send your tech questions: help@lostintechpodcast.com.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Welcome to Lost in Tech! Each week, Lola and Mamuna dive into the tech industry, sharing insights and opinions, and answer questions and letters from our listeners. Expect honest conversations, relatable stories, and a touch of humor as we navigate the complexities of tech careers. If you have a question or dilemma, email us at help@lostintechpodcast.com or DM on Twitter @lostintechpod. If you're a tech professional, enthusiast, or simply curious about the tech industry, Lost in Tech is here to keep you informed and entertained. Subscribe, stay tuned and let's get lost in tech together!

Information

  • Creator
    Lost in Tech
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    90
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Lost in Tech
  • Show Website
    Lost in Tech