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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
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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
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
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This was made with humans.
Your host - Shaun Phillips
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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
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
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This was made with humans.
Your host - Shaun Phillips
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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
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
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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
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
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/
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Support the show
This was made with humans.
Your host - Shaun Phillips
Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans
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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
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
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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
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.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
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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
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
Support the show
This was made with humans.
Your host - Shaun Phillips
Follow us for episode clips https://www.instagram.com/betterwithhumans
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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
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
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
From the publisher's feed
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…