The Drafts

Have you ever stood in the dark because your "smart" lights lost WiFi?

In Episode 10 of The Drafts, Diya breaks down the invisible, frustrating shift in modern technology: You are no longer the user. You are the afterthought. From vacuums that hold your home hostage with forced apps, to TikTok trends that hollow out physical products, to AI chatbots quietly monetizing the loneliness epidemic. The market has optimized for speed, scale, and data collection. The actual human being has been completely engineered out of the design process.

As a UX designer, Diya explains exactly why your devices are getting worse, why "has an app" is a massive red flag, and how to start pushing back against the tech creep you never consented to.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Smart Home Trap: Why tech companies force you to use an app for physical hardware (and why it ruins your WiFi).

• The Flattening of Culture: How TikTok virality and hyper-trends (like Dubai Chocolate and Labubus) destroy the actual value of a product.

• The Loneliness Economy: Why every AI product defaults to a chatbot, the massive data grab behind it, and what happens to the secrets you tell it at 3 AM.

• The UX Pushback: The three questions you need to ask yourself before downloading an app, buying a trend, or handing over your data.

Read the full essay & references:Head over to thedraftspodcast.substack.com for all the links, sources, and extended notes from today's episode. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss a drop.

All music in the show has been made and produced by Madhumita Prasad.

Support the show:If you enjoyed Episode 10, please take 10 seconds to leave a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow. <3

We celebrate growth like it's a movie makeover montage, but nobody talks about how exhausting it actually is.

In this episode, we sit in the "identity lag". That strange, heavy space where you’ve outgrown your old life, your old habits, and your old rooms, but your new reality is still catching up. We are breaking down why transformation feels like grief, how to distinguish between quitting the goal vs. quitting the discomfort, and what the absolute best managers do differently to pull greatness out of you.

If you've ever looked up mid-transformation and thought, "I thought this was supposed to feel better by now," this episode is for you.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Identity Lag: Why operating in contexts you've outgrown is physically draining.

• The Reframe on Quitting: The difference between a project that is hard and a project that is wrong.

• Productive Delusion: Borrowing confidence, the Timothée Chalamet approach to greatness, and knowing when your self-belief needs a reality check from your support system.

• The Manager Question: The single best question a manager can ask in your first week, and the difference between leading for compliance vs. leading for excellence.

Quote of the Week:"You worry too much for someone who figures it out every time."

Credits:

• All music used in The Drafts is by Madhumita Prasad

Links & Resources:

• Read the full show notes and deep dives on our Substack: thedraftspodcast.substack.com

• If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts—it genuinely helps the show grow.

• New episodes drop every Thursday!

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about something every builder eventually runs into: you talk to your users, you feel validated, you build the thing, and then nobody uses it. Not because your idea was bad. Because the way we're taught to do research is fundamentally broken.

You'll hear:

• Why your users are lying to you, and why it's not their fault (the intention-behaviour gap and what Daniel Kahneman's planning fallacy has to do with your last failed feature)
• What social desirability bias actually looks like from the inside, and why the person across from you in a user interview is performing, not reporting
• The University of Massachusetts research on everyday lying, and how gender shapes the specific ways people distort their answers in evaluative settings
• Why even your most honest, well-intentioned users genuinely cannot tell you what to build (and what cognitive anchoring has to do with "faster horses")
• The real Henry Ford quote, and why the fake one has been used to justify skipping research entirely
• The Hawthorne Effect: why observed behaviour is not real behaviour, and why your usability test results might be lying to you too
• Why frictionless design has never mattered more, and what it means that users will close your tab the moment it asks them to try harder
• The exact question types to retire, and the past-behaviour questions that actually surface real signal
• How Maya, a UX researcher building a task management tool, made every single one of these mistakes before she figured out what to ask instead
• Why I made the same mistakes building Arro, and what it taught me about what good research actually requires

If you've ever walked away from a round of user interviews feeling validated, only to ship something nobody used, this episode is for you.

Stop asking people to predict the future. Ask them to describe the past. That's where the truth is.

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode: "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Disclaimer: The content of this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and represents the personal opinions of the host. All references to specific studies, researchers, or published works are cited for educational and analytical purposes. The views expressed here are solely those of the host and do not reflect the views or policies of any current or former employers, clients, or affiliated organizations.

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about perfectionism, but not in the way you might expect. It started with my birthday week. Instead of feeling celebratory, I was stressed, overwhelmed, and feeling like I was falling behind on my goals for Arro Studio. And I kept coming back to one image: Formula One pit stops. Why do we celebrate high-performance machines for stopping to change their tires, but guilt-trip ourselves for doing the exact same thing?

You'll hear:

• Why F1 cars stop mid-race on purpose (and why we should treat our own exhaustion as a mechanical reality, not a moral failure)

• The four types of F1 pit stop outcomes and how they map to our careers: the fumble, the systems failure, the freeze, and the weaponized risk

• The Skill Acquisition Staircase: why plateaus aren't stalling, but actually the mechanism for growth

• Why F1 didn't get to the fastest cars by getting it right the first time (and how iteration literally is the process)

• Real examples of F1 mistakes: the 1960s wing collapses, McLaren's 2025 season errors, and the terrifying 1994 Benetton pit lane fire

• Why removing your safety filters to "optimize" your output doesn't make you faster—it makes you flammable

• How AI is making flawlessness cheap, and why human mistakes (like a tiny audio glitch) are becoming a premium marker of genuine effort

• The perfectionism trap: Ira Glass's concept of "The Gap" between your killer taste and your current abilities

• Why everything needs to go through an "Ugly Phase" and why skipping it means you never get better

• The two hidden fears underneath perfectionism: the fear of looking lazy, and the fear that a mistake is a verdict rather than data

If you've ever struggled to push through a project that isn't perfect yet, or felt like your need to rest is a sign of weakness, this is for you.

The pit stop isn’t where you lose the race. It’s the strategy that sets you up to win the next twenty laps.

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:"The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Disclaimer: The content of this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and represents the personal opinions of the host. All references to specific companies, events, or corporate practices are based on publicly available news reports and cited publications. These citations are provided for critical analysis and commentary on matters of public interest. The views expressed here are solely those of the host and do not reflect the views or policies of any current or former employers, clients, or affiliated organizations.

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about AI, but not in the way you might expect. It started with a menu I couldn't read at a Japanese restaurant. The images were AI-generated, glossy, perfect, and completely fake. And once I started noticing, I couldn't stop. What are we actually solving for when we implement AI everywhere? And who pays the price?

You'll hear:

• Why restaurants use AI-generated images of fake food instead of photographing the real thing
• The uncanny valley we're living in: AI images good enough to pass at a glance, wrong enough to make you feel lied to
• What LLMs actually do (they aggregate, they don't create) and why the Detroit: Become Human painting scene captures it perfectly
• Real examples of AI failures: law firms submitting hallucinated case citations, a consultancy caught twice using LLMs for government reports, a chatbot selling an $80,000 car for $1
• Why workplaces implement AI not because it works, but to say they're doing it
• The hidden costs: data centers consuming electricity like small countries, millions of gallons of water daily, carbon emissions equivalent to hundreds of flights
• The labor cost: Kenyan moderators paid $2/hour to read graphic content with little psychological support
• The artist cost: billions of images scraped without permission to train models that undercut the people who created them
• The linguistic divide: English speakers get the best AI, everyone else gets leftovers and the gap compounds
• The loneliness epidemic by the numbers (21% of U.S. adults feel lonely, 30% of young adults feel lonely daily, 73% cite technology as a contributor)
• Why AI companions create manufactured attachment, not real connection and why solving loneliness with chatbots won't work
• What would actually help: third spaces, community infrastructure, asking friends for help instead of buying solutions
• The legitimate uses of AI: language learning (with limitations), assistive technology, using it as scaffolding (not the final output)

If you've ever felt uneasy about AI without being able to articulate why, or wondered whether the convenience is worth the trade-offs, this is for you.

The "right" use of AI isn't the one that sounds impressive in a boardroom. It's the one that actually solves a problem without creating worse ones.

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:

• "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Disclaimer: The content of this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and represents the personal opinions of the host. All references to specific companies, events, or corporate practices are based on publicly available news reports, court documents, and cited publications. These citations are provided for critical analysis and commentary on matters of public interest. The views expressed here are solely those of the host and do not reflect the views or policies of any current or former employers, clients, or affiliated organizations.

Month 1 wasn't about conquering the market. It was about surviving the cold, the self-doubt, and the silence, and realizing that was enough.

This is the Survival Phase. The part nobody posts about. The part that determines whether you make it back or not.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on what "Founder Mode" actually looked like: contract renewal anxiety, treating the podcast like a dirty secret, 32 Spotify streams, and the moment I realized I'm not selling websites. I'm selling momentum.

Topics discussed:

• The Uncertainty Tax: Building when your "safe" income feels unsafe
• Why stealth mode became self-sabotage
• The analytics reality check (spoiler: my audience wasn't who I thought)
• The System Reset framework for getting unstuck when burned out
• The Arro pivot: Selling momentum, not websites
• Launch messy, iterate later: Why shipping to friends first is strategy
• Hard launching on LinkedIn (and why I'm terrified)

Music:

• "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about design, UX, tech entrepreneurship, and the everyday moments that shape how we think and work, with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about why everything feels like an ad now, how emotional manipulation became a marketing strategy, and what it costs us to live in a world where no space is safe from commerce, not even our sleep.

From that Volkswagen commercial that took me through someone's entire life just to sell a car, to influencers faking stalking incidents to launch brands, to why I finally paid for YouTube Premium just to achieve basic peace, this is about the exhaustion we're all feeling and why it's gotten so much worse.

You'll hear:

* Why that VW ad in the movie theater left me feeling gross (and what it reveals about emotional manipulation in advertising)

* How AI companies sell inevitability and urgency while hiding who benefits and who pays the cost (Karen Hao's *Empire of AI*)

* The difference between content creators and influencers, and why that distinction matters

* How wealth inequality (top 10% holding 67% of wealth) shows up in influencer lifestyle inflation and why it feels so alienating

* The algorithmic manipulation playbook: manufacturing rage and controversy to drive sales

* Why authenticity itself became something to sell (Sarah Banet-Weiser's *Authentic™*)

* How brand culture makes everything about individual hustle instead of structural inequality—and why that stops us from organizing collectively

* What Cyberpunk 2077's ad-saturated Night City reveals about where we're headed

* Small acts of resistance: hiding ads, skipping sponsored content, reducing screen time with tools like Screenzen

* The hypocrisy question: can I ever accept deals without becoming part of the problem?

If you've ever felt exhausted by the constant performance of online life, if you've noticed you can't experience a feeling without seeing a logo attached, or if you're wondering how to exist in this system without being consumed by it—this episode is for you.

We're not opting out. But we can start noticing. We can ask who benefits. And maybe, just maybe, we can reclaim some space for feelings that aren't tied to a transaction.

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:

- "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about the myth of the "dream job," the hidden costs of prestige, and why my chaotic government career turned out to be my greatest advantage. What really builds you as a designer, is it the logo on your resume or the problems you've solved without a safety net?

You'll hear:

• Why Big Tech's "golden cage" can make you a better employee but a worse founder
• The difference between Brand-Protected Authority and Battle-Hardened Authority
• How Uber, Meta, Amazon, and Google built beautiful products that enabled real harm and why the designers likely didn't know
• What Mike Monteiro's Ruined by Design teaches us about responsibility and fragmentation
• Why trying multiple things isn't "scattered". It's how you build range
• The questions most corporate environments don't reward you for asking: "Who benefits? Who gets hurt? What happens if this scales?"
• How small teams force you to understand the whole machine (and why that matters more than specialization)
• Why the logo gets you in the door, but mileage determines whether you thrive

If you've ever felt like you're on the "wrong" career path because your resume doesn't have the right names, or because you've pivoted and people called you unfocused, this is for you.

The "right" path isn't the one that looks best on LinkedIn. It's the one that builds you into someone adaptable, accountable, and dangerous (in the best way).

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:

• "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

Disclaimer:The content of this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and represents the personal opinions of the host. All references to specific companies, events, or corporate practices are based on publicly available news reports, court documents, and cited publications (specifically Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro). These citations are provided for critical analysis and commentary on matters of public interest. The views expressed here are solely those of the host and do not reflect the views or policies of any current or former employers, clients, or affiliated organizations.

Episode 02 Description

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this episode, I'm talking about critique, taste, and the wrong metric. Why do bad opinions stick? Why do we chase consensus instead of conviction? And what does a rock band getting roasted by The Guardian have to do with your 9-to-5 design review?

You'll hear:

• The Guardian's brutal review of Sleep Token (and why the critic was confidently wrong)
• Why I felt like a failure on podcast launch day—despite knowing better
• The evolutionary reason we're terrified of being "niche" or different
• How False-Consensus Effect and Social Proof show up in stakeholder meetings
• The difference between constructive feedback and subjective projection (and why it matters)
• Why "I don't like it" and "Competitor X isn't doing it" are red flags, not roadblocks
• How to identify your "iron deficiency"—the edge that makes you polarizing (and powerful)

If you're a designer, builder, or creator tired of playing it safe to please everyone, this is for you.

Stats are a metric of reach, not quality. Success isn't consensus—it's conviction.

Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:

- "For P" by ilyatruhanov

- "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita Prasad

- "Little Alicia. Cinematic Background music for video. Short version" by White_Records

- "Reflected Light" by SergePavkinMusic

- "Unexpected Connection (Strategy, Risk)" by Grand_Project

- "Better Today (Documentary, Informative)" by Grand_Project

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.

In this first episode, I'm talking about something that feels almost controversial online: I'm 25, I like stability, and I'm not quitting my job to build my consultancy.

You'll hear:

• ​The WWII war plane story that changed how I think about entrepreneurship
• ​Why I started building a UX consultancy on the side (and what happened when I published my first LinkedIn post)
• ​The back injury that made me realize what stability actually buys you
• ​What my actual schedule looks like working two full-time jobs
• ​Why building from stability is strategic, not scared
• ​The real data on side hustles in Canada (spoiler: you're not alone)

If you're building something on the side in 2025 while managing a day job, health, and trying to still have a life, this is for you.

The planes that make it back are the ones with armor. And we're building ours.

Full show notes are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.com

Music in this episode:

• ​“No Copyright Music” by moodmode
• ​“Midnight Forest” by Syouki_Takahashi
• ​“Good Night Lofi Cozy Chill Music” by FASSounds
• ​“The Drafts Theme” by Madhumita Prasad