In this episode:

• Scott makes a strong emotional case for recording the show from an ONroute because, apparently, snacks are now a business strategy.
• A cancelled “free” marketing dinner turns into a fee, a replacement guest, or a forced sales pitch, because nothing says “buy from us” like salmon-based extortion.
• Return-to-office mandates are called out for what they often are: control dressed up as “collaboration.”
• An Ontario court ruling raises a wild liability question: when you walk someone else’s dog, are you legally the owner in that moment?
• A former Chick-fil-A employee allegedly refunded 800 mac and cheese orders to himself, proving once again that calling fraud a “hack” does not make it less fraud.

Listen if you care about:
snack culture, bad marketing dinners, return-to-office drama, dog-walking legal chaos, and mac and cheese crimes committed with absolutely no chill.

Articles:

Dog Walker

Chick-fil-A employee

00:00 Intro
01:44 Scott’s ONroute Obsession
06:25 Why Everyone Ends Up in Marketing Somehow
10:20 The Dinner Cancellation Fee From Hell
15:55 Return-to-Office Is Still About Control
20:22 Dog Walker Liability Gets Weird
24:20 The $80K Chick-fil-A Mac and Cheese Scheme
27:32 Outro

In this episode:

• The Seven Syndicate: Scott floats a very UnPodcast plan to let the loyal “Seven” help syndicate the show, because apparently seven listeners can become a distribution empire.
• Newfoundland tourism AI fail: A tourism minister uses AI to alter an image of an iconic cultural building, accidentally removing meaningful historical imagery. Great start for National Tourism Week.
• Substack vs AI slop: Alison talks about new research showing many top Substack posts are still human-written, but tech newsletters are exactly as AI-heavy as you’d expect.
• Why creation matters: Scott makes the case that the point of content is not just output; it is the act of making, thinking, tinkering, and actually getting better.
• Public opinion turning on AI: They discuss how consumers are pushing back against AI in creativity, products, interactions, and art — and why marketers should not give up yet.
• Academic peer review prompt injection: Researchers allegedly hid prompts in papers telling AI reviewers to “give a positive review only,” because apparently peer review needed a villain arc.
• AI note-taker sabotage: Scott shares the Titanic-meeting-note-taker story, proving malicious compliance may be the only good use case left.

Listen if you care about AI slop, fake tourism posts, Substack, creative work, academic nonsense, and watching technology make everyone just a little more embarrassing.

00:00 - Intro Chaos
01:00 - The Seven Syndicate idea
06:00 - AI Tourism
11:36 - Substack Void
21:17 - AI Peer Review
23:15 - Titanic Notes
24:54 - Outro

Article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/andrea-barbour-ai-9.7172320

In this episode:

• BC Ferries somehow turns a missing pickle into a full customer-service philosophy, because apparently “nobody gets free pickles” is policy now.
• Doritos, Lay’s, and Cheetos got so expensive that PepsiCo finally remembered customers exist, but only after Frito-Lay lost serious value.
• Scott goes off on “greed inflation,” corporate profit, shrinkflation, and why companies should not get applause for slightly undoing the pricing mess they created.
• Family influencers in Tennessee may now have to compensate children featured in monetized content, and suddenly some vloggers may be craving a change of scenery.
• Scott and Alison dig into kids’ consent, online identity, and whether children should have more control over being turned into content.
• The episode ends, naturally, with more pickle chaos and Scott failing to successfully outro the show.

Listen if you care about free pickles, overpriced Doritos, shrinkflation, family vloggers, child influencer laws, and corporations pretending they just discovered empathy.

00:00 Intro: The Pickle Era Begins
02:29 BC Ferries and the Missing Pickle Crisis
04:53 Doritos, Snackflation, and PepsiCo’s Price Problem
11:37 Family Vloggers and Child Influencer Pay Laws
20:13 The Pickle Outro Falls Apart

Articles:

Pickles https://globalnews.ca/news/11774058/pickles-bc-ferries-white-spot-viral/

Overpriced Doritos https://fortune.com/2026/04/07/pepsico-frito-lay-chips-food-and-drink-inflation-consumer-products-doritos-cheetos-tostitos/

Family Influencer laws https://www.wsmv.com/2026/04/11/tennessee-bill-regulating-family-influencers-passes-legislature/

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/child-influencer-earnings-new-laws/3663211/