Better with Humans

Shaun Phillips
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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. 2d ago

    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 This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  2. Sep 22

    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 This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  3. Sep 15

    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 This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  4. Sep 8

    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 This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  5. Sep 1

    ADHD at Work, Late Diagnosis: Nick Silverstone

    A Mac and a PC do 90% of the same things. Different code underneath, same end goal. We've just built a workplace that only ships with one operating system. My guest this episode is Nick Silverstone, an award-winning fractional MD and ADHD coach for senior leaders, co-founder of Creative Minds Alliance ADHD, and someone who left school with no qualifications before building multi-million pound companies. The line that stayed with me wasn't about neurodiversity at all. It was about masking. Nick spent years doing 12 and 13 hour days, not because the work needed it, but because he didn't want to be seen failing at things he thought he should find easy. Then came a diagnosis in his mid-50s, and suddenly the effort made sense. Not a deficit. A different set of instructions. We talk a lot about reasonable adjustments in the abstract. Nick makes them concrete. Someone turns up late. The usual response is to tell them to stop. His response is to ask why. Maybe the start time moves. Maybe the routine changes. Most of the adjustments he comes across cost nothing at all. They just require someone to be curious before they're annoyed. Then we get into the technology. Nick automated a week's worth of admin so he could spend his time on the coaching that actually matters to him. That's the honest version of the AI productivity story. Not time saved in the abstract, but attention moved to where it belongs. He also lost the best part of a week building it, hyperfocused on getting it perfect, and he's clear-eyed that next time he'd pay a specialist. Both things are true. But here's the question we kept circling. How do you know what's good? I can ask AI for a graphic and think it looks brilliant. A designer looks at it and sees the composition is wrong. I once picked a builder because the front of the job looked solid. The bits behind the walls told a different story. If you're the one asking, are you also qualified to judge the answer? Which leads somewhere uncomfortable. AI is eating the entry-level work. That's the rung people used to climb to become the experts who know what good looks like. If nobody's climbing, where does the next generation of judgement come from? We don't fully solve it, but we agree the answer isn't to stop training people. Nick brings up something Jeff Bezos said years ago. Don't ask what's going to change. Ask what isn't. In a year like this one, that's the more useful question. If you take one thing from this conversation, make it curiosity. Ask why before you ask someone to change. It costs nothing and it changes everything. Connect with Nick Silverstone: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicksilverstone Website: https://www.fractional-md.comSend us Fan Mail This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  6. Aug 25

    AI Content Writing: Meg Hutson on Sounding Human

    You write something good. Something that actually sounds like you. Then you run it through AI to clean it up, and the cleaning up is exactly the bit that strips your personality out. My guest this week is Meg Hutson, a marketing mentor who helps solo service business owners land clients by being utterly themselves online. That line stopped me, because I've done it. I've taken something honest and sanded it down until it sounded like everyone else. Meg's point is that polish isn't neutral. Every pass through the machine pulls you closer to the average, and average is what keeps you invisible. She puts it simply. An expert regurgitates what's already known. A thought leader has fresh ideas. AI can do the first one. It cannot do the second. So what do you do with the tool instead? Meg uses it every day, but she uses it to interview her rather than write for her. Ask it to pull the details out of you that you'd never think to mention. Voice note your answers. Then tell it to give you notes, not a rewrite. Feedback instead of replacement. That distinction is doing a lot of work, and I don't think enough people are making it. We also got into niching, and Meg reframed it in a way I hadn't heard before. Stop niching by industry. Niche by situation. Not "I work with coaches" but "I work with the person who knows they're brilliant and cannot understand why the clients aren't coming." One of those is a category. The other is a mirror. Then there's the bit that most people flinch at. Meg says you have to want to repel people. If nobody's being pushed away, you're not attracting the right ones either. She told a story about a networking presentation where most of the room looked baffled and one man in the corner was nodding the whole way through. He signed up on the spot. No sales process. He just saw something he recognised. And none of this lands overnight. Meg reckons it took her six months of consistent messaging before people stopped filing her under the old thing she used to do. Books have an ending. Conversations have pauses. Messages take a while. If you've been changing yours every time somebody asks what you do, that's probably the actual problem. Worth asking yourself before you post the next thing. Would you say this to your favourite client over coffee? If not, why are you writing it? Connect with Meg Hutson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meg-hutson-marketing/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsmeghutson Send us Fan Mail This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  7. Aug 18

    AI for Equity: Jenny Garrett OBE on the Good News

    I still haven't heard anyone say AI freed up their day, so they spent it in the garden. That line came from Jenny Garrett OBE, CEO of Jenny Garrett Global, author of Equality vs Equity, and co-host of the AI for Equity podcast with her daughter Leah. Their book, AI for Equity, is out in October. What struck me most was how she got there. She was tired of the doom, so she asked her daughter to go looking for good news stories instead. What came back was a podcast, and then a book deal. A loan algorithm that predicts a refugee doctor's future earnings so they can requalify, over three million pounds lent out with a 98.6% payback rate. A tutor that lives on a phone and keeps working for a week without internet, for kids who can't get to school. Those stories exist. They just don't trend. Jenny made a point I keep coming back to. Trying to compete with AI is a race we lose before we start. I'm never going to out-calculate a large language model. But I can read a room. I can sit in a conversation like this one without knowing where it ends up. She described someone as fiercely compassionate, and I don't think a machine gets to be that. Not fiercely. We got into what this means for leaders, and she reframed it in a way I hadn't quite heard before. If your team's biggest conversation of the day is with a chatbot, whose job is it to make them feel like they belong? Not efficiency. Belonging. She talked about creating sandboxes, letting people run with ideas you privately think won't work, and being honest about whether you're rejecting an idea because it's wrong or because it wasn't yours. That one landed. Then there's the other side. AI escaping its container. Models going rogue. Prompts turning up in places they shouldn't. Jenny's read is that we're being gently socialised into accepting all of it. Get used to leaks. Get used to things going wrong. Get used to nobody quite being in control. I don't have evidence either way, but I've stopped assuming these are accidents. We didn't ask for any of this. We got it anyway. The question now is what we point it at. If the only AI news reaching you has been bad news, this one might rebalance things a little. Connect with Jenny Garrett OBE: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennygarrettreflexion Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachjennygarrett Website: https://jennygarrett.global/ Send us Fan Mail This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

  8. Aug 11

    AI Adoption Readiness: Maggie Sarfo's 7 Checks

    Ask AI a vague question and you'll get a woolly answer. That rule isn't new. It's just louder now. This week I'm joined by Maggie Sarfo, founder and CEO of Meres Consult, a growth and AI adoption consultancy. She's a Gartner alumni, a TEDx speaker, and one of the UK's top 100 female founders in 2025. We started the episode by fighting the technology. We had to switch to Maggie's phone to get recording. That felt like the right way in, because the more complex something gets, the less predictable it becomes. Ask a chatbot a simple question and you'll get an answer. Ask it to build you an MVP wired into your CRM and you've entered a different world entirely. Maggie's point stayed with me: the human at the start, the human sanity checking, and the human closing the loop. All three, or none of it works. The line that stopped me was about emotional intelligence. We're working with machine intelligence, so we need to become more human, not less. I've had a lot of conversations on this podcast and nobody had put it quite like that. If you can hold your own perspective and other people's at the same time, you write a better ask. Better ask, better outcome. It really is that simple, and that hard. Then Maggie said something I think students and worried employees need to hear. Those who hone their craft and learn to use AI to do better will carry on doing better, and they won't lose their jobs. If you go lazy on your craft, the output goes with it. That's what AI slop actually is. A poor ask, no expertise behind it, and nobody checking what came out the other end. It costs more than it saves. We also talked about the question almost nobody asks: should I use AI for this at all? Not ethically, but practically. I still use BBC Weather for the weather. Every prompt has a cost in tokens, in money, and in energy. Maggie's three questions for leaders are worth writing down. What business challenge am I solving? Is AI part of the solution? And if it is, which solution is right for me? I finished this one thinking about my M&S Bank letter, and about a bank that made it almost impossible to reach a person. Automate the work if you must. Don't automate away the door. Connect with Maggie Sarfo:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-sarfo/ Website: https://meresconsult.com/ Send us Fan Mail This was made with humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips 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 Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.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/

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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.

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  • Creator
    Shaun Phillips
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Better with Humans
  • Show Website
    Better with Humans