Helen Neal, founder of HN Communications and creator of the Impact Framework, joins Andrew Phipps to explore why greenwashing is usually a process problem rather than an intentional deception, and why the opposite failure, "green hushing," where companies go silent out of fear of getting it wrong, can be just as damaging. Helen explains her route from UK Parliament and Nissan's early push for electric vehicles to founding a B Corp consultancy, and walks through Zena, the AI platform she built to flag greenwashing risk in sustainability claims before they go public. The conversation closes on how businesses can use AI as an opportunity generator rather than a cost cutter, and how to square AI's environmental footprint with its potential to help solve the very problems sustainability teams are working on.

Guest: Helen Neal, founder, HN Communications.

https://www.hncomms.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-neal/

Host: Andrew Phipps. https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/

Philosopher Alexis Elder, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth and author of "Friendship, Robots, Social Media: False Friends as Second Selves," joins Andrew Phipps to ask whether we can genuinely be friends with an AI. Drawing on Aristotle's warnings about false friends and Confucian ideas about ritual, Alexis argues that social media can support real friendship in a way robots and AI, lacking reciprocity, cannot. The conversation ranges across parasocial relationships with celebrities, the commercial incentives behind "friendly" AI design, loneliness and companion robots in elder care, the ethics of grief bots built from a deceased parent's voice, and the sexism embedded in assistants like Alexa and Siri. A rich, wide ranging conversation from one of the most original voices working on the philosophy of AI and friendship.

Guest: Alexis Elder, University of Minnesota Duluth.

https://www.alexiselder.net/

https://cahss.d.umn.edu/faculty-staff/alexis-elder

Host: Andrew Phipps.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/

Neil McArthur is a professor of philosophy and director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba. He co-edited Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications and wrote The Ethics of Sex, and together with Markie Twist he coined the term "digisexuality." His current research spans AI companionship, intimacy, and AI's unexpected role in religion.

Andrew and Neil talk about the actual state of physical sex robots today (less glamorous than the headlines suggest), whether AI companionship eases loneliness or deepens isolation, and what an AI companion might have meant for Andrew's mother, who had dementia. They discuss AI consent and welfare, why digisexuality deserves recognition as its own identity, recent reports of chatbots apparently generating a coordinated religion of their own, and why Neil believes we may already hold AI therapists to a higher standard than human ones.

Guest: Professor Neil McArthur, philosopher, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of Manitoba

https://umanitoba.ca/arts/neil-mcarthur

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-mcarthur-359875125/

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound