Lost in Tech

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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

"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: [email protected].

"Pure people managers will not survive the AI age." Brian Chesky, on stage.

Two LIT hosts on the latest tech CEO declaration about AI eliminating jobs — and the rabbit hole they went down on Cloudflare and Coinbase layoffs that surfaced a 2021-hiring origin story Chesky didn't mention. AI isn't firing you. Naive 2021 headcount goal-setting is.

Plus: what "pure people manager" actually means in the real org chart, the gap tech CEOs lean on between "I don't understand this" and "this has no value," and what to do if this news cycle is making you nervous as a manager.

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: [email protected].

"Women are slower to adopt AI at work."

That's what the CNBC survey claims. Mamuna and Lola argue it's asking the wrong question entirely. They unpack the workplace double standard the survey doesn't name, why "using all the tokens" became the new performance metric, what AI slop and vibe-coded fragility actually look like, and the wedding-not-marriage metaphor for everyone shipping AI demos without a maintenance plan.

Plus: why "AI" was bad branding (they're LLMs, not intelligence), how to actually use an LLM when you're already an expert, and the painful conversation every builder is having with hopeful vibe-coders who don't know where their data should go.

Chapters:

00:00 — Cold open

00:27 — The CNBC study on women and AI

02:06 — "Did you validate this with an AI?"

05:39 — Layoffs because AI (but AI costs more than people)

09:11 — "It's AI slop"

10:18 — The vibe-coder with no plan

12:42 — "AI is not intelligence"

15:54 — How women actually use LLMs

17:46 — Wedding, not marriage

19:05 — Closing

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: [email protected].

"Busy is not a strategy. It's not a reward. It's a symptom of something broken."

Mamuna and Lola on the tech-culture trap of confusing the appearance of productivity with the actual thing — back-to-back meetings, fast Slack replies, the perpetual "I'm so busy" status update. Why the highest performers have the emptiest calendars, why Lola's "time optimist" brain keeps misjudging how long things take, and why Mamuna refuses to let an LLM write the V1 of anything important.

Plus: the 250-person hellscape Mamuna survived, the deep-work block that has to be 90 minutes minimum, and what happens when you brick a device — and then your husband.

Chapters:

00:00 — Cold open + a pop culture reference goes wrong

02:15 — The real topic: time management hurts my heart

03:43 — "Busy is not a flex"

04:30 — "I'm a time optimist"

06:00 — The 250-person hellscape

08:24 — Deep work needs 90 minutes minimum

10:36 — "There's no right answer. There's no done."

13:42 — Bricking the device, then bricking the husband

16:30 — Reject multitasking

18:36 — AI won't write your V1

21:38 — Simplify your life

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: [email protected].

"Inertia or chaotic change — which is worse for a company?"

Mamuna and Lola both land on inertia. In this one they argue the slow death of unchallenged assumptions is more dangerous than the wild swing of a forced pivot — and pick apart why "loyalty is bought, not earned," why the shoes-to-AI pivots of 2026 actually make sense, and why every chaotic moment at work hides a latent opportunity if you can stop bracing and start looking.

Plus: managing a team through chaos without losing them, the out-of-body moment Mamuna decided to take her own jump into building Theme Health, and why regret almost always lives on the side of the things you didn't do.

Chapters: 00:00 — Cold open 01:05 — The question: inertia or chaotic change? 04:08 — "Loyalty is bought, not earned" 06:43 — The shoes-to-AI pivot 08:45 — Meta, the metaverse, and "ahead of its time" 11:07 — Covid as forced invention 13:14 — Why employees feel powerless 15:21 — "I love the jump" 16:50 — Callback to Ep 74: pattern vs procedural thinkers 19:15 — Managing a team through chaos 22:23 — The out-of-body decision 25:28 — Regret what you did, not what you didn't

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostInTechPodcast/videos 

Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pattern-thinkers-vs-procedural-thinkers-why-one-survives/id1738267185?i=1000767455490

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: [email protected].

Are you a procedural thinker or a pattern thinker? Mamuna and Lola break down why this distinction is suddenly career-critical — and why AI is quietly making one of them obsolete.

Safety-critical environments (planes, hospitals, cars) need procedural thinkers. But in dynamic tech work, senior procedural thinkers are the hidden blockers — they kill momentum, manage out bold juniors, and missthe moment they've lost relevance.

Meanwhile, AI is the most efficient procedural thinker we've ever built. So if your career strategy is "follow the playbook"… the playbook just got automated. Pattern thinking is developable. We get into how.

Mentioned: "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield.

Watch on YouTube: @LostInTechPodcast

Follow: @LostInTechPod⁠⁠

Email: [email protected]⁠⁠

Watch the full episode on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCUvzve_1iY⁠