The Outrage Economy: When Human Crises are Monetized, Leadership Has Failed

The reason certain conversations feel explosive today is not because they are new. It is because they were ignored until they became profitable. Artificial intelligence. Masculinity. Trust in leadership. Creativity under automation. The erosion of purpose. These are not late-breaking cultural shocks. They are long-building fault lines. What has changed is not the problem. What has changed is the incentive to talk about it.

That is precisely why these topics surfaced so directly on Brands, Beats & Bytes, hosted by Larry Taman and Darryl ‘DC’ Cobbin.

Take masculinity. Long before it became a trending topic, the warning signs were visible. Boys disengaging from education. Young men withdrawing socially. Identity collapsing into anger or silence. These were solvable problems when they were still inconvenient. It’s why I wrote The Future of Men in 2016. Now they are profitable. That timing matters. Timing reveals intention.

What troubles me is not that figures like Scott Galloway are talking about masculinity. It is how and when they are doing it. When a conversation begins after collapse, when pain is already weaponized and anger converts efficiently, the goal is no longer repair. It is extraction. Masculinity becomes a distressed demographic, not a human responsibility.

The same pattern shows up in AI. We are told to move fast, scale faster, and worry about consequences later. Ethics are acknowledged, then sidelined. Bias is named, then normalized. What is missing is leadership willing to slow down long enough to ask what kind of future we are actually building.

Leadership itself has become performative. Trust is celebrated rhetorically while systems quietly erode it. Creativity is praised while reduced to prompts and productivity metrics. Empathy is branded, not practiced.

These are the real issues underneath the headlines. And they are why this episode of Brands, Beats & Bytes matters.

This podcast does not exist to amplify outrage. It exists to interrogate it. To ask why certain conversations only gain traction when they can be monetized. To distinguish between commentary and leadership. And to challenge marketers, media leaders, and technologists to move upstream, where solutions still matter and incentives are not yet corrupted.

If you want easy answers, this is not your episode.
If you want a conversation about responsibility, intention, and what leadership actually demands in this moment, this is exactly where it should happen.

Available now on all podcast platforms.