Welcome to Threshold Conversations. I’m Patrick Ryan. This is Episode 19: The Counterfeit.
A few weeks ago I was in the market for a significant purchase. I’m not going to name what it was — the product isn’t the point. What happened in the buying of it is.
When I made contact with the company I was introduced to a sales representative whose job was to inform me and to get my business. Within the first few minutes my radar was going off. Not about the product — the product was fine, it was exactly what I wanted. About the person.
He was saying all the right things. He was making all the right moves. Every technique for establishing rapport was present and accounted for — the warmth, the listening posture, the mirroring, the carefully timed questions. If you’d observed the conversation from the outside and scored it against a sales training rubric, he would have done well.
But I felt what it is like to be a transaction rather than a human being.
Something in my chest knew it before my mind had named it. The contact he was making wasn’t contact at all. It was targeting. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at what I could give him.
I signed the documents. I wanted the item. The discomfort wasn’t reason enough to walk away — and I suspect most of you know exactly what I mean by that. You’ve felt the absence of genuine contact and proceeded anyway because the product was acceptable, the meeting was on the calendar, the relationship was convenient enough.
We tolerate counterfeit presence constantly because the alternative is refusing to transact with anyone who isn’t fully awake. And that would make for a very short week.
What happened next was instructive. Once I’d signed I was handed to administration — who assumed I was an online purchaser. Which told me something about how the company thought of me. Not as a person who had just made a significant decision and might want to feel that decision was in good hands. As a file moving through a system.
And then I met the after-sales representative.
Same company. Same product. Completely different quality of contact.
She genuinely cared that I had a great experience. She wasn’t working from a template — she was calibrating to how I was actually doing. She met me with both knowledge and heart. Even though the reason for our meeting was entirely transactional, I knew her sincerity. I felt it. Not as a technique deployed to make me feel it — as something real moving between us.
The difference between the two was not skill. It was not training. It was orientation.
The sales rep was oriented toward the outcome — the signed documents. The service representative was oriented toward me. One was looking at what I could give. The other was looking at who I was.
The sales rep made contact like a wolf hunting prey. The service rep made contact like good neighbors would.
And I knew the difference in my body before I could have explained it in words.
That gap — between the performance of presence and the felt reality of it — is what this episode is about.
Last week we asked: what is presence? We tried to name it through the David story — the waiting, the atmospheric shift, the moment of genuine contact in a coaching session. We said it was something older and harder to automate than skill or information.
This week I want to ask the harder question.
Can it be faked?
And — more uncomfortably — have you ever faked it yourself?
Here is what I find myself sitting with.
We keep asking whether AI can simulate presence so convincingly that the distinction collapses. And the honest answer is that the question is already live in ways that are difficult to dismiss. AI-generated writing moves people to tears. AI music produces genuine emotional response. AI therapeutic chatbots are being used in mental health contexts right now — and the early data suggests people find them genuinely helpful. Not as a consolation prize for not having access to a human. Actually helpful.
So I have to sit with that. I can’t wave it away. If the affect of presence can be synthesised — if the experience feels identical from the inside — then something important is being asked of me. Asked of all of us.
But here is what stops me from sliding into easy reassurance in the other direction.
The counterfeit isn’t coming.
It’s already here. It has always been here. In human interactions. In performed engagement. In the careful simulation of care by people who have learned what care looks like without quite feeling it. In meetings where everyone nods at exactly the right moments. In leadership communications crafted to sound authentic. In sessions where the practitioner is technically present and somewhere else entirely.
AI hasn’t introduced the counterfeit. It has just made it cheaper and more scalable.
Which means the question isn’t really about AI at all.
The question is: have you ever actually experienced genuine presence — in yourself, or in another person?
And can you tell the difference?
I want to tell you something about my own practice. Because it would be too easy to stand here as the person who named the counterfeit and imply I am reliably free of it. I’m not.
There are moments in coaching sessions — not often, but they happen — when I can feel the pull of my own life wanting my attention. A live situation behind the scenes. Something unresolved that hasn’t finished with me yet. In those moments I am not fully in the room. Part of me is somewhere else.
I know what my job is. And so when I notice it I come back — to the person in front of me, to the quality of attention they deserve, to the reason we are in that room together. The noticing and the return. That’s the practice.
But here’s what I want you to sit with: the noticing and the return are only possible if you were actually trying to be present in the first place. The sales rep didn’t need to return because he had never arrived. He was oriented toward the outcome from the first moment. There was no lapse in his presence — there was simply no presence to lapse from.
That distinction is everything.
Presence isn’t the permanent absence of distraction. It’s the capacity to notice when you’ve left — and choose to come back.
A machine doesn’t leave. Which means a machine also never returns.
The return is the human thing.
So let me ask you one question and leave it with you.
In your next significant conversation — not a casual exchange, a real one — who are you actually there for?
Not what do you want from it. Not what do you need to accomplish. Who is this person — and what does it mean to be genuinely with them?
The wolf and the neighbour aren’t separated by skill or training or even intention in any grand sense. They’re separated by the answer to that question. One had already answered it before I walked in the door. The other never asked it.
Ask it. Before the conversation begins. See what shifts.
Next week we go somewhere that on the surface looks quieter — but isn’t. We’re going to talk about an electrical cabinet that no one would ever open again, and what happened in the room while it was being built. About what it means to bring everything you have to an act that has no audience. And about what moves through work made that way — something the machine can approach but cannot carry.
Episode 20 is called The Hum.
Thank you for listening to Threshold Conversations. Until next time… keep your spine unsupported. And keep walking toward the light.
