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

Dr Tomasz Hollanek, Assistant Research Professor at Cambridge and a leading voice on the ethics of grief bots and postmortem AI avatars, joins Andrew Phipps to unpack the hardest questions in this space: who consents to a digital version of a dead person, what happens to family members who never opted in, and when, if ever, a deadbot should be switched off. The conversation moves through AI companions and the UK's loneliness and social care crisis, the danger of letting profit driven companies define what "beneficial" AI companionship means, and Tomasz's argument that consent should be a recurring conversation rather than a one time click. A rigorous, humane look at some of the strangest and most urgent territory in AI ethics.

Guest: Dr Tomasz Hollanek, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/people/tomasz-hollanek

Host: Andrew Phipps.

Professor Joanna Bryson, one of AI ethics' most influential and longest serving voices, joins Andrew Phipps to argue that we don't form relationships with AI so much as project familiar human patterns onto a system that has none of the bidirectionality a real relationship requires.

The conversation ranges from legal liability for AI generated harm and whether tech giants like Palantir amount to a new data colonialism, through to grief bots, the digiDan recreation of philosopher Daniel Dennett, and why Joanna remains an outlier among AI thinkers who believe machines are showing signs of consciousness. Provocative, rigorous, and unflinching.

https://www.joannajbryson.org/

Guest: Professor Joanna Bryson, Hertie School, Berlin. Host: Andrew Phipps.

Dr. Anna Strasser is a Berlin-based philosopher working on agency, social cognition and the philosophy of mind in the age of AI. She helped build the DigiDan project, an AI system trained to write like philosopher Daniel Dennett, and in a blind test designed to distinguish the real Dennett's answers from the AI's, she got fooled herself, despite having prepared the training data.

Andrew and Anna talk about why she thinks the "is it conscious, is it intelligent" debate about generative AI asks the wrong kind of question, why she'd personally sue anyone who tried to build a grief bot of her, and why she believes AI companionship and AI therapy raise a deeper concern: that both our cognitive and emotional skills may be eroding the more we lean on systems that can't feel anything back. They also discuss hallucinated academic citations polluting research databases, and why she thinks "hypothesis" is a more honest word than "hallucination."

Guest: Dr. Anna Strasser, philosopher, Berlin https://www.denkwerkstatt.berlin/

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

Sven Nyholm is Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich. His work spans Kantian ethics, human-robot interaction and the philosophy of technology, and he's just published a new book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction.

Andrew and Sven talk about who is actually responsible when an AI system causes harm, why some philosophers argue we hold machines to a stricter safety standard than we hold ourselves, and why Sven and colleagues wrote one of the first academic papers on "grief bots," AI systems built to imitate someone who has died. They also discuss why people already name and grieve for robots and machines, whether AI is becoming a kind of secular religion, and what's genuinely at stake in questions of authorship once a chatbot has helped write the sentence.

Guest: Professor Sven Nyholm, Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, LMU Munich, author of The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction

https://www.philosophie.lmu.de/en/directory-of-persons/contact-page/sven-nyholm-4f56fa3b.html

https://philpeople.org/profiles/sven-nyholm

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound

Hanna Bauer spent much of her childhood in a coronary care unit, unable to attend school, waiting. She had her first heart attack at ten. A second followed two weeks later. An open heart surgery failed. What kept her alive, she now knows, was not medication or monitors. It was love, and the decision of a surgical team to attempt something no one had ever done.

www.heartnomics.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bauerhanna/

https://www.youtube.com/@heartnomics

https://www.instagram.com/heartnomics/

https://www.facebook.com/hannad.bauer

Twenty years later, a hospital documentary reunion gave her the sentence that became the foundation of everything she teaches. Her surgeon, asked what he had been thinking during an experimental procedure, said simply: "We were just trying to keep her alive long enough for technology to catch up."

Hanna is a transformational leadership strategist, black belt in Six Sigma, and founder of Heartnomics, a philosophy built on the conviction that there is a genuine return on investment to leading with love: not in place of excellence, but as the condition that makes excellence sustainable.

In this conversation for Empathy Unbound, Hanna and Andrew explore why 70% of digital transformations fail and why it is never the technology's fault; why AI amplifies dysfunction just as readily as it amplifies performance; what it means to know your organisation's vital parts before injecting new technology; and why empathy, in her framework, is always downstream of love.

They also cover: what burnout shares with heart disease, and how Hanna recognised it in herself long after her recovery; the Six Sigma triage logic she applies to struggling organisations; the BEAD and CORE frameworks for internal alignment and organisational culture; what it means to protect the human core of a business when technology is changing faster than people can adapt; and the distinction between success, which happens to you, and significance, which happens through you.

Rooted in an extraordinary life, and immediately applicable to the organisations trying to navigate the age of AI without losing what makes them worth working for.