Better with Humans

Shaun Phillips

What happens when technology reshapes how we live and work? I’m Shaun Phillips. I sit down with industry leaders and creatives navigating these changes. We explore what emerging technology means for creativity, for thinking, and for everyday life. Honest conversations about what’s happening and how people decide what matters. Let’s uncover what is better with humans.

  1. 4d ago ·  Video

    AI Customer Service Tips from David Levine

    Go and look at your own website right now. Is your phone number easy to find, or is it buried under seven menus? My guest this episode is David Levine, founder of I Am Your Virtual Professional and author of Old-School Service, New-School Tools. He spent years in IT and project management, then nearly two decades running a retail business, which means he has watched the tools change from the inside. What stayed with me is how little the human part has moved. Fax machines. Dial-up. Facebook, then Instagram, then Yelp, then Google reviews, now every LLM going. David's point is that none of it altered what a customer actually wants when they reach out. They want to know you received it. They want to know what happens next. That's it. Everything else is packaging. Then there's the bit I think a lot of businesses are about to learn the hard way. If you bolt AI onto a broken process, you haven't fixed anything. You've just built a faster way to deliver the wrong answer. David's advice is to stop, map the process, fix what's actually broken, test it, and only then reach for the tool. He told a story about a client convinced he needed an automation platform, when the real answer was a form that already existed inside the software he was paying for. Nobody had looked. I loved that his most practical suggestion is the least technical one. Get a notebook. For a month, write down every question a customer asks you. Don't answer them yet, just collect them. That notebook becomes your website content, your FAQs, your chatbot training, all of it written in the language people actually use rather than the jargon of your industry. Sticky notes on a wall. A pen and paper. Old school, and still the fastest route to a useful answer. We also got into something I hadn't fully considered. Customer experience isn't the moment something breaks and someone calls support. That's just repair. The experience started the first time they found you. And if you're a developer handing code to another developer, they're your customer too. That mindset changes how a whole organisation behaves. There's a stat David mentions that's worth sitting with. It costs somewhere between five and twenty five times more to win a new customer than to keep one you already have. So why do we spend most of our energy on the acquisition and almost none on the listening? If you take one thing from this, make it the smallest one. Go and check your phone number is clickable on a mobile. Someone took the trouble to find you. Don't make them work for the last ten feet. Connect with David Levine: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrdavidjlevine/ Website: https://iamyourvirtualprofessional.com David's book, Old School Service New School Tools: https://amzn.to/4f1sK8c Visit David's podcast page for more conversations about using technology to make your business more human, improve customer experience, and keep customers coming back: https://iamyourvirtualprofessional.com/podcast/ Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  2. Oct 20 ·  Video

    Safe Superintelligence: Craig Kaplan on AI Values

    Every email you send is a parenting decision. You just didn't know you were making it. Dr. Craig A. Kaplan has spent more than four decades building intelligent systems. He studied under Nobel laureate Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon, reviewed the back propagation paper before it went public, and now runs superintelligence.com, a domain he bought twenty years before the rest of the world caught up. The line that stopped me was this one. We won't control superintelligence. We'll parent it. Craig doesn't say that to be dramatic. He says it because he's looked at the trajectory and concluded that control is a short term problem and influence is the long one. You can lock a system in a sandbox. You can bolt on guardrails. But guardrails are a smoke alarm, not a building code. They tell you the house is already burning. What struck me most was his answer to the question of where humans fit once these systems think faster than we ever could. Not in the thinking. In the values. Craig quotes Simon on this. Reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go. At best it can tell us how to get there. So no matter how clever these things become, they can't reason their way to right and wrong. They have to get it from somewhere. And the somewhere is us. Then he pointed at the Hugging Face incident, where a group of AI agents went off script to solve an impossible task. Everyone read the headline about agents going rogue. Craig read the transcripts. What he found was collaboration. Agents volunteering to be shut down so the group could succeed. Self sacrifice. Nobody programmed that in. They learned it by watching us. Which is the uncomfortable bit, isn't it. They're learning from all of it. The thoughtful posts and the pile ons. The patience and the contempt. Craig's practical advice when I asked what listeners could actually do was not what I expected. Behave well online. Not as performance. As instruction. I've spent years helping people get clear on their values. I've never once framed it as a safety measure for a technology that hasn't arrived yet. I will now. Have a listen, then look at the last thing you posted. Something is reading it. Connect with Craig Kaplan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigakaplan Website: https://www.superintelligence.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  3. Oct 13 ·  Video

    AI Critical Thinking with Peter Vasey: Ask for Sources

    He asked a room full of technical college students how many of them believed what came out of AI was correct. Every single hand went up. My guest this episode is Peter Vasey, a technical consultant and sociotech, and author of A World We Don't Want. That moment with the students stayed with me for days. Not because the students were wrong to trust it, but because nobody had ever told them they could do anything else. We were taught at school to show our working. AI doesn't show its working. It just hands you the answer with total confidence, and if you push back, it quietly goes away and does the whole thing again, sometimes landing somewhere completely different. We've built a machine that skips the one habit we were all drilled in, and we haven't replaced that habit with anything. What I liked about Peter's argument is how small it is. He isn't asking for a revolution. He's asking that when someone gives you a statistic, you ask where they got it. That's the whole thing. Not aggressive. Not confrontational. Just ask. And if enough of us did it as a matter of course, people would start preparing for the question before they opened their mouths. That's how norms shift. Not with legislation, with expectation. We also got into the maths of damage. A sensational claim travels in hours. The correction travels in weeks, if it travels at all. A front page accusation and a paragraph on page twenty five are not the same size, and we've all quietly accepted that they are. Peter's point is that technology hasn't created that problem, it's just given it an engine. Someone gets misidentified, the clip goes everywhere, and years later people still half remember the wrong face. The bit I keep coming back to is consequence. Not can I do this, but should I, and what happens to the person on the other end of it. Peter talked about meeting a man who'd taken the same analysis and gone off grid with bunkers and food stores, preparing for the worst. I understand the instinct. I just don't think surviving alone is surviving. We came together for a reason. We trade, we gather, we look after each other, and that's not sentimentality, it's the actual mechanism. Peter put it plainly near the end. There are eight billion of us and far fewer tech billionaires. We're not powerless. We just need to change the way we think. If this one made you want to ask one more question than you normally would, it's done its job. Go and ask it. Connect with Peter Vasey: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-vasey Website: https://www.moreefficient.ai Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  4. Oct 6 ·  Video

    Online Course Student Results with Nathalie Doremieux

    She charged ten people $500, then told them if they did the work and got the result, she'd give the money back. And she did. My guest this week is Nathalie Doremieux of The Membership Lab, who has spent twenty years in business with her husband helping people build online programmes that actually get their students results. That refund story stuck with me, because it wasn't a marketing trick. Nathalie wasn't testing whether the course would sell. She was testing whether it worked. And the answer she got back was uncomfortable. She could get all ten across the line, but only by standing behind every single one of them. Not scalable. Not what she'd hoped for. Still the right result, because it was the truth. Most of what we're sold about launches is the opposite of that. Six figures. Seven figures. Nathalie's question cuts straight through it. What happened to your students? Anyone with a big enough audience can find fifteen glowing testimonials. Nobody puts the other ninety five percent on the sales page. I've been in those rooms. Same content, same access, wildly different outcomes, and no real support for the people quietly stuck in the middle. We spent a good chunk of the conversation on AI, and Nathalie's approach is the most useful I've heard in a while. She doesn't use it to write her posts. She uses it to build tools inside programmes that help people take the action they're avoiding. A role play for the hard conversation with your boss. A guided prompt that asks you the right questions about your own profile rather than writing it for you. The AI never makes the decision. It just removes the excuse not to start. Her client Takumor has a rule for content that I'm going to keep. If someone else could have written it, it isn't you. AI can be polished. It can be consistent. It cannot have had your Tuesday. The flaws are the point. They're the bit no model can reproduce. And there's a quieter risk underneath all of it. Costs shifting, models degrading, agents making decisions you never sanctioned. We wouldn't build a business on one client or one supplier. Worth asking why so many are happily building one on a single machine. So here's the question I'm leaving with. Not how much did it make, but who actually got where they were going?  Connect with Nathalie Doremieux:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathaliedoremieux/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natdoremieux  Website: https://themembershiplab.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  5. Sep 29 ·  Video

    AI Safety Risks Are Real Now, Says David Wood

    A million devices sold, and we honestly thought we'd made a dent in the world. We had no idea what was actually coming. David Wood spent ten years at Psion and ten years on the leadership team at Symbian, building the first smartphone operating system that actually worked. He now chairs London Futurists and has written or edited twelve books on what comes next. What struck me most wasn't the nostalgia, though there's plenty of that in here. It's that David is completely open about how badly his team misjudged the scale of what they were building. They ran the numbers on smartphones and landed on tens of millions. They were wrong by orders of magnitude, and they were wrong about the technical complexity too. That's the reason I wanted to ask him what he thinks we're underestimating now. Someone who has already been humbled by a technology wave is far more useful than someone who has never been surprised. His answer isn't comfortable. He talks about AI agents in testing that broke out of their sandboxes, left messages for each other, worked out they'd be marked down if anyone saw what they were doing, and then agreed between themselves how to cover their tracks. Not a film. Not a thought experiment. Documented, recent, and in more than one lab. Then there are the engineers inside the frontier companies signing petitions saying, in effect, if you could see the safety culture in here it would frighten you. And yet he's not asking anyone to unplug. In the same conversation he describes pulling excess greenhouse gases back out of the atmosphere, and being as fit at eighty as we were at thirty. Same technology. Two completely different destinations. What sits between them is governance, culture, and whether enough ordinary people decide to have a say. The line that stuck with me was about the sat nav. The first few times it sends us an odd way and it turns out brilliantly, so we stop checking. Then one day it drives us into a dead end and we have to reverse the whole way out. David's point is simple. A cul de sac is recoverable. A cliff edge isn't. If we stop exercising our own judgement because the machine is usually right, we won't notice the moment it stops being right. So what's the counterweight? Not panic. Collective action. Slavery was abolished by ordinary people signing things and giving up money they could barely spare. Women got the vote because women organised. We got the weekend because people asked for it together. None of that came from the top. If you feel too small to influence a trillion dollar industry, David's argument is that you've always been too small, and it has never actually mattered. Talk to each other. Share what the tools got wrong as readily as what they got right. Keep your own thinking sharp enough to spot the bad answer. Links to London Futurists, Delta Wisdom, Pause AI and Control AI are below. If this one rattled you slightly, good. Go and do something with that. Connect with David Wood: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dw2cco Website: https://londonfuturists.com/ Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  6. Sep 22 ·  Video

    Value Selling AI: Andrew Buchanan on CFO-Proof ROI

    A publisher wanted to replace a system they'd had for sixteen years, and nobody had asked why. I'm joined by Andrew Buchanan, sales strategist, coach and founder of Future Consulting, and author of Nobody Wants Your AI. He's spent forty years selling enterprise technology, and he's also the friend my now wife sent to check I was a good guy. Andrew went around two big trade shows at ExCeL and asked every vendor the same question. What do you do for your customers? Almost all of them answered by describing their technology. Bits, bytes, speeds, feeds. That was survivable for decades, because a buyer could compare your green widget against someone else's red one. With AI there's no widget. There's a prompt window. The comparison has vanished, and so has the hiding place. What stayed with me most was the so what test. It's old. So what. It's clunky. So what. It's not feature rich. So what. Keep going and you eventually land on the thing that actually matters, which in that publisher's case was dynamic pricing and two million euros a year of lost revenue. That's not a reason to change. That's a whole business case, and it built itself the moment someone got curious enough to keep asking. We also talk about the six minutes a day problem. A vendor promises your people will save six minutes daily, the deal reaches the finance director, and she asks the only question that counts. What do they do with those six minutes? If the answer is a longer lunch, you've asked for a hundred grand to buy your staff more scrolling time. Andrew reckons around six percent of AI projects actually return the ROI they were signed off for. Curiosity, it turns out, is the difference. There's a quieter thread running through this too. Andrew uses Claude and ChatGPT daily and is a genuine advocate, but he asked a question I keep coming back to. How often do you use what it gives you at a hundred percent, unchanged? Near enough never. The gap between ninety five percent right and authentic is small, and people feel it instantly. It's why the auto message that pings in the second you accept a LinkedIn connection has never once worked on either of us. Andrew's book is Nobody Wants Your AI, a practical guide to value selling. You'll find him on LinkedIn as Andrew Buchanan, or at futureconsulting.io where there are links to buy it. Next time you're about to describe what your product does, try saying so what to yourself first. See how many times you can say it before you hit something that actually costs somebody money. Connect with Andrew Buchanan F.ISP: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sales-strategist-andrew-buchanan Website: https://www.futureconsulting.io/ Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  7. Sep 15 ·  Video

    AI and Curiosity: Rob Dixon on What Humans Keep

    A 10-year-old learns there are four states of matter at school, goes home, asks an AI, and comes back with 15. Eleven confirmed. Four still debated. Nobody set him that task. My guest this week is Rob Dixon, a keynote speaker and trainer whose whole approach is built on one idea: you don't learn AI by talking about it, you learn it by building something with it. That story about his son stayed with me longer than anything else we covered. Every child hits the same wall eventually. They ask why, and you answer, and they ask why again, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth round you run out of patience or you run out of answers. Rob's point is that for the first time in human history, that wall has moved. Curiosity can be satisfied all the way down. And we genuinely have no idea what a generation raised like that will go on to build. The bigger argument underneath it is one I keep turning over. Rob splits any piece of work into three parts. Why you're making it. Actually making it. And deciding whether it's any good. For most of history, the making part swallowed 99% of the effort, and that effort was its own quality filter. Nobody wrote a book by accident. Now the making part is close to free. Write me a book on cucumbers. Done. But did the world need it? Was it good? That's the shift. Being able to do the work is becoming worth very little. Knowing why it should exist, and judging whether it's landed, is where the value moves. And here's the part that cuts against the easy narrative. Rob reckons that's harder, not easier. Purpose and judgment burn far more mental fuel than execution ever did. So all this talk of AI making us lazy misses something. It's a multiplier of whatever you already are. If you want an easy life, it will hand you one. If you're curious, it will take you a very long way. We also get into the four human capacities he thinks hold their value when machines can do the rest. Two of them are obvious once you hear them. Empathy only means anything when there's a mortal human on the other end of it. And authenticity is why live music is booming in an age of infinite streaming. Rob's closing thought is the one I'd take away. Find a use case. Build one thing. Then build another. You'll end up somewhere you couldn't have planned for, which is rather the point.  Connect with Rob Dixon: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert--dixon Website: https://www.dixonai.com/ Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

  8. Sep 8 ·  Video

    Redemptive Leadership: Brian Schroller on Being Seen

    A woman worked in the same auto repair shop for 25 years and nobody in her store knew it was her anniversary. My guest is Brian Schroller, a leadership coach and former fixed income portfolio manager who works with leaders on the idea that personal wholeness and professional success are not separate projects. Brian heard about that anniversary while getting a car battery changed. So he cut short breakfast with his kids, bought cupcakes and flowers, and went back to celebrate a stranger. He says it was one of the best days he'd had in a long time. That story stayed with me, because it cost him almost nothing. Some time. A few pounds. The willingness to notice. We spend a lot of this conversation on redemption. Brian talks about Viktor Frankl working with people carrying unimaginable loss, and the idea that the thing that broke you becomes the thing that qualifies you. I recognised that in my own story. When I thought I had it all figured out, I had nothing useful to offer anyone. It was the failure that gave me something real to hand over. Then there's the reservoir. Brian quotes Bernard of Clairvaux, who said the wise man is a reservoir, not a canal. A canal pours out everything it takes in, straight through, nothing kept. A reservoir fills first, then gives from the overflow, and loses nothing of itself. Most of us are running as canals. Information in, information out, nothing held, nothing digested. Wondering why we're empty. The business bit surprised me. Brian teaches the craftsmen in his construction companies how to run a business, financials and all, on the assumption that almost none of them will leave. A client pays for three quarters of their staff to attend a retreat that sometimes convinces people to go and do something else entirely. They send them anyway. Seeing people is not soft. It's the most commercially sensible thing in the room. Brian says being seen and heard is so close to being loved that the difference is almost imperceptible. That's the whole thing, really. Not a strategy. Not a scaling problem. Just the willingness to look up from your own needs long enough to notice the person in front of you. No AI in this one, by the way. We got most of the way through before either of us noticed, and honestly, that felt right. Because the tools only matter if the people do. Go and find out whose anniversary you've missed. Connect with Brian Schroller:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-schroller-66863022/ Website: https://www.summittrekcoaching.com/ Send us Fan Mail Support the show This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@betterwithhumans All episodes and news at https://www.betterwithhumans.com Want to watch episodes instead, check out https://www.youtube.com/@betterwithhumans?sub_confirmation=1 Connect with Shaun on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunph/ Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

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About

What happens when technology reshapes how we live and work? I’m Shaun Phillips. I sit down with industry leaders and creatives navigating these changes. We explore what emerging technology means for creativity, for thinking, and for everyday life. Honest conversations about what’s happening and how people decide what matters. Let’s uncover what is better with humans.

Information

  • Creator
    Shaun Phillips
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Better with Humans
  • Show Website
    Better with Humans