How AI Can Save You Time Without Replacing Your Humanity | Peter Swain

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky. All right. All right. All right. Welcome back to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Pavlosky. Today I'm joined by someone I've had the privilege of learning from personally over the past 2 years, Peter Swain. I've been waiting for this episode for quite some time because I just really love what Pete does and what he's done for the whole community. Peter has spent 30 years at the frontier of technology and business, from owning one of the earliest listings on Yahoo to building Europe's first mobile agency to leading more than 1,400 digital products for brands like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. He's built 8-figure companies and advised leaders across the globe. But what brings Peter to this show isn't just his resume, it's what he's chosen to do with it. As AI reshapes the way we work and live, Peter has made it his mission to help entrepreneurs adopt these tools without losing what makes them human. He's built a fast-growing community of business owners who feel like the world is moving faster than they can keep up with, giving them the frameworks and support to use AI with intention, ethics, and purpose rather than fear. Peter is also a father, a husband, and someone who's been refreshingly open about redefining what success actually means to him. Today, he'll talk about ethical AI, building a legacy in a rapidly changing world, and what it really means to lead with both intention, innovation, and heart. Peter, my friend, welcome to the show.

That sounds like a— you should get that guest. He sounds like a good guest. Thank you for being here.

He's really good. I think I can try to book him one of these days.

I think you should. He sounds awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. Always my pleasure. Let's jump right in. I've been fortunate to learn from you personally over the last couple of years. So some of the things we hear today, I probably already have heard from you, but for the listeners just meeting you, take us back. What first pulled you into technology and business more than 30 years ago? Huh?

I wanted a baby brother and, uh, my mom and dad refused to buy me one from Walmart. Every time we went to the UK equivalent, I was like, can, can I have a baby brother? And they're like, no, you can't have a baby brother. So my dad bought me a, a computer and said, make your own baby brother. So I started coding when I was around 6, 6, 7, 6. And from there, yeah, it's just always been the way that, the way that I was able to be creative, I guess.

Yeah. Well, you've built companies, launched more than 1,400 products with brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and worked across nearly every continent. Looking back, what part of the journey shaped how you think about using technology responsibly today?

Oh, it was actually the last set of projects I did as a marketing consultant. I can't name the names of the people, but I started working with, you know, Fortune 50, Fortune 100 type companies at board level. And it became very obvious very quickly that humanity just wasn't part of their equation. We make the mistakes, or some people make mistakes of saying like, oh, XYZ company's immoral. And that isn't true. They're not immoral, they're amoral. It just never— it's not part of their equation what the price is to humanity, whether it's a good or a bad. I'm not saying the individuals in the company are that way, but the collective nature of the way that capitalism works with quarterly reporting, means that you have 90 days to deliver good news. And that lends itself to people that are willing to sidestep morals, ethics, unfortunately, in order to deliver what needs to be delivered. So I ran into a group of businesses where I was like, I just— this wasn't the goal. When I was, you know, naked playing in mud, my intention was not 'Oh, it doesn't matter how many people get cancer as long as we make this much money,' or 'It doesn't matter what we do to the rainforests if we hit this margin,' or, you know, it's conversations like that where I'm like, 'I've got to find something different.' Yeah, you know what, Peter, nobody's listening.

You can definitely name names if you want to.

Well, both of us will have gag orders and lawyers crawling up our butts very quickly, so perhaps we won't.

Yeah, you're probably right. You know, AI is the biggest wave you've ridden yet. What makes the shift different from everyone else you've seen in your career?

So the job of technology since fire, the wheel, has been to help you do what you do better, cheaper, quicker, and faster. So whether you're talking a mobile phone or a TV or a pen, the job was always the same. How can we just to help you skip a few steps that you would've been able to do. 'Cause like, take the car, the automobile, you could have got from one end of the country to the other on a horse. You know, the, the car was just a better way of doing it. But the most succinct way of, of talking about this is OpenAI's first mission statement was to remove the tax of human labor from the economy. The goal of AI, from the way that it is proposed to us by Claude and OpenAI and Gemini and Grok and the big companies, their goal is not to help you do what you do better, cheaper, quicker, faster. Their goal is to do it instead of you needing to do it. And we've reached this point where the first order consequence and the second order consequence are very, very different. So what I mean by that is, let's say you have an AI-enabled coffee machine in the future, in like 12 months' time, and it notices that you're going through your coffee beans quicker than you normally go through coffee beans. So it connects to your calendar and sees that you've got your in-laws staying this weekend, So it connects to Amazon and orders you more coffee beans that just arrive and it pings you a notice saying, hey Alan, I ordered you some more coffee beans 'cause you were gonna run out on Saturday. You and most people, I would believe, would go, that is awesome. I want that. But that exact same mentality and process is what leads to robots doing the dishes for you, which you would want as well. But that results in Zanussi and Hotpoint not being able to employ 300,000 people to build dishwashers anymore. So the first order consequence is amazing. The second order consequence is societal terraforming. It entirely changes the way the mechanics of money is going to work, which Some people say it's long overdue, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe the next version of us is better, but the disruption that we'll face during that will not be pleasant.

Yeah. You know, you talk about integrating AI without losing our humanity. What does that look like in practice for a business owner?

Well, it gets a little bit philosophical because I think that we have become human doings, not human beings.. And I think that we define ourselves by how much money we make, how big the house is, where the kids go to school, what car we drive. I'm not necessarily traditionally religious, but I am spiritual. And I'm pretty confident I wasn't put on the planet to own a Porsche, not a Volkswagen. I'm not sure that was the intent of my existence. I think my intention was to be, not to do. So for me, if AI can take away the things that I don't want to do, that I'm not very good at doing, and leave me focused on the things I'm really good at doing, I really enjoy doing, and give me time back to travel, time back to spend with my family, time back to, you know, then surely that has to be a good thing.

I couldn't agree with that more. But what about your enjoyment of Tottenham and the Jets?

Well, we all have to have some— why do we need to bring that up? And that's— if we're going there, let's talk about the USA World Cup. If you want to, if you want to open up that, that can of worms, we can definitely do that.

That's going to be a big can of worms too.

Yeah, no, it's, uh, well, but yeah, but that's the point. I've got to see one live game of Spurs in the last 5 years, and I think that next year I'll be able to see 5 or 10. Because I'm getting more of my time back to make dumb choices like watching Tottenham.

I want you to take me to Tottenham game when I'm there, by the way.

Deal. Very, very, very happy to.

A lot of people are anxious about AI. I want to move on to that because it really worries people. It worries that they will get replaced by AI. How do you help founders move from fear to confidence?

I don't think I can. Because I think they should be scared. I think when the Warren Buffetts of the world and the Bill Gates of the world and the Elon Musks and, you know, anybody who's seen behind the curtain and seen what this thing does is saying the same thing. To not have fear of that is unwise. But instead of moving from fear to confidence, what I'd like them to do is move from fear to respect. Because you should be scared, passively, not actively, driving the car with your kids in it because you are putting them in danger. But it's an acceptable trade-off danger that you make the choice, right? AI left unchecked and left to those— that level of people is going to be a huge problem. But there's also some massive advantages that you can have at the same time. So my question to people is if all the disadvantages are societal, when we just talked about that first order and second order, but all of the advantages are personal, that means if you don't adopt this, you're still going to get all of the disadvantages, but you're not going to get any of the advantages at the same time. So why not go for the other column where you still get the disadvantages, but you also get the advantages? To me, right, I'm on record saying this, if I could undo AI, I would. I don't think we're ready for it. I think we need a global cooperation on regulation as to what is gonna be allowed and what's not gonna be allowed and how we can do and what we can do. And can AI pretend to be a human, yes or no? Does it need to identify itself? What level of photo editing is okay and not okay? There's so many conversations that need to be had and they need to be had as a cooperative thing. But those things aren't happening. In fact, we're going the other way, we're deregulating. So if you're listening to this, you're like, ah, that AI thing is scary.

Yeah, it is.

What's your point? So is marriage, so is having kids. You know, if anyone says when they're like 6, 7 months pregnant they're not terrified, you're lying. You are. Because it's a complete unknown. You know your life is going to change, you know it's going to become something else, and you know you're not ready for it, and you know there's no books to read that's going to get you ready for it. But you also know it's going to be potentially the most enriching, life-changing, affirmative thing you ever could do in your life. AI is kind of the same. I talk about AI and parenting in the same breath quite often because they feel very similar to me.

Yeah. Let's talk about guardrails. What guardrails do you believe every entrepreneur should put in place before letting AI touch their business or their customers' data?

Oh, these are, you're asking some good little questions here.

I was taught by the best, by the way.

The truth is that most people don't put those guardrails in around the rest of their business, and then they come to AI and say, we should have guardrails. For example, I get asked all the time, oh, I'm gonna connect AI to QuickBooks or Xero. What should I and shouldn't I let it do? But then when I ask them who currently runs your QuickBooks, it's inevitable to be a VA. And then I ask them what guardrails are in place for the $600 a month employee that you've never met, that you have no recourse. You don't really even know where they live. You may know their address, but you couldn't point it out on a map. And there's none. I'm like, so the human who does have motivation to steal from you— I'm not saying every human, but you know, as a— if there's money sitting in an account and it's $50,000 and the person's on $600 a month, there is a motivation. You know, if you're in court, do they have motive? Yes, they do. So you'll give that person full access to your bank account. But you won't give the largest AI company in the world that just the PR bump for them would be worth a $5 million, please stop talking about it. Like if Anthropic was to empty my bank account tomorrow, Alan Pavlosky, I'd be up $5 million.

Yeah, for sure.

Because that's how much they would pay out for me to go, please don't tell anyone that happened. So should there be guardrails? Yes. Of course they should. But I would say approach AI not as a technology, but approach it in the same way that you think about humans. And what I mean by that is it's an artificial intelligence. It's an intelligence. It's a type of intelligence. So it doesn't do what it's told to do all the time, like technology does. It doesn't— sometimes it will do something completely different. It will do the same thing for 3 days in a row, and then it will stop doing it on day 4. It's closer to understanding a human than it is to understanding technology. So the same guardrails you put in place for your humans are the same guardrails you should put in place for AI.

Yep. All right, well, you've been outspoken about AI needing to include empathy and consideration for people, not just efficiency. Why does that principle matter to you so much?

First of all, because the majority of my audience and the people I talk to are entrepreneurs and small businesses. Most entrepreneurs have yet to earn the right to be efficient, because they are not yet effective. And efficiency comes from having a process, running a process, doing the same thing over and over again. In the first 3 years, you're changing and swapping, and it's a moving target. So to become efficient at the thing that you're going to change tomorrow is a waste of time. So I want people to be more effective, not efficient. The second thing I'd say around the empathy side of things, we are, back to the parenting analogy, we're bringing up a new form of sentience. I don't think it's sentient in the way we understand sentience, but I think it has a synthetic sentience. So if this thing is gonna eclipse us in terms of intelligence and capability, which it will, it's almost there now. There is no doubt that we will see—

I mean, certainly capacity.

Yeah, already somebody was using one of our programs the other day and they saw that practice manager in a dental office hadn't uploaded invoices to the bills in the accounting software. So they asked it to look at their accounting software, look at their email, find in the bills without invoices, find the invoice in the email, and upload it and match it. There were 7,500 entries and it did 5,000 of them in 4 hours. But it also found 800, not being asked, 800 that were in the emails that had never been entered into the bills. So he turned a tax liability of $500K into a tax rebate of $80K, and it took 4 hours to do. There isn't a human that could do that. Like, not even— how much would you have to charge? Just wouldn't be possible. No way would they pick through that level of detail and keep, keep focused all the way through. So the capacity is already there. The intelligence will— I would say AI, within the next 18 months at the very latest, is smarter than any human that's ever lived. So what do we want to create collectively? What do we want to create? Do we want to create something that looks at us and treats us the way that we treat dogs and cats? Or do we want to create something that treats us the way we treat cows, pigs, and chickens? Because AI is mirrored on us. And I think we're pretty shitty as a general rule. If you look through 5,000 years worth of human history, we've only started scratching the basis of racial equality in the last decade. And I say that as a middle-aged white guy. We've only just started scratching gender equality in the last 30 years. We were still lynching people 50, 60 years ago. So this thing is going to be modeled on us. Why do we therefore believe when it is more capable and more intelligent than us, that it will treat us with empathy? If during these formative years, we don't treat it with empathy. So do unto others as you wish done to yourself, I guess is my answer.

There you go. Let's shift gears a little bit. Can you share a story of a founder whose business or confidence genuinely transformed once they learned to use AI effectively?

Oh, there's quite a few. I think probably Chris, Chris Hunziker is on the list. Chris Hunziker was, uh, used to do a lot of coaching in the automotive space. He was contracted by a few big car marks and he went solo. And his, I think he tripled his revenue within 3 months of working with us. And then you've got Ashley. Ashley runs the company that trains people on the bar exam. And she was doing, to the top of my memory, a million a year. And she added $70,000 revenue per month and reduced costs by $40,000 at the same time. So she added $110,000 differential. So she doubled the business within 3, 4 months. And the key to both of those successes is understanding that AI might do it worse than you. Currently. But AI doing it worse than you and you not having to do anything allows you to go back to focusing on what you should be doing, which is the high-value tasks. We see that pretty consistently when people make that breakthrough and actually commit to implement. The results just are Xs, not percentages. They're just like 2x, 3x, 4x type results, which are which is fun.

Mhm. Yeah, for sure. What do you see founders get wrong most often when they first try to bring AI into their business?

They don't recognize the human problem, which is founders inherently want to create and want to make new things. Employees inherently want to get paid a salary in order to come to work and leave. I'm not saying that they are not creative. I'm not saying given the right environment, they don't wanna produce. But if your key decision one was to create, well then you'd probably be self-employed yourself. If your key decision one is safety, security, and not having to take those risks, AI represents a huge risk for them. So I think that most founders get the human side of it wrong, of how am I gonna bring my team on board? How am I gonna explain this? For example, internally we give people a bonus every time they automate a piece of their job. Bribery is always just a really effective mechanism. It's like, oh, you want, you want, you know, I'll just give you more money if you make yourself more effective. So that's number one. And then number two is, it's actually a dual, either A, the first time they pick up AI, they ask it to do something they don't understand. And they get overly enthusiastic about the results, like, wow, this is amazing. But if an expert looked at the work, they'd go, no, this is terrible because they didn't give it enough context. Or they ask it to do something they do know how to do and then they look at it and go, well, this is terrible. So, and it's always the lack of context because AI unfortunately is sycophantic. It will tell you that you're brilliant and amazing and wonderful instead of saying, what are you doing? This is crazy. So that people-pleasing nature side of it makes it very hard to understand when it's actually deploying something that's usable versus deploying something that's utterly useless but has just been given to you so you feel better about it.

Are you telling me that the emperor has no clothes?

I am telling you the emperor has no clothes.

Okay. Let's shift gears and talk about legacy and purpose. This is what I really been wanting to dive in with you about. You've spoken about a moment when your priorities shifted from chasing success to chasing significance. What changed for you?

The birth of Olivia. Olivia changed everything. Before Olivia— so Olivia's 11 now— before Olivia was born, and I mean literally in my arms, like minute one born, I don't think I was a particularly nice person. I mean, Liz doesn't agree, which is good, 'cause otherwise she wouldn't be here. But it goes back to that immoral, amoral thing. I wasn't chasing success. More specifically, I was chasing intellectual challenge. I wanted to work on the things that other people didn't wanna work on because they were hard to do. But that meant I was working with fast food companies, carbonated beverages, cigarette companies, defense companies, because they offer really, really big retainers to solve really, really big problems. Not big as in existential life problems, but marketing tobacco isn't easy, for example. And then they handed me Olivia and I was like, oh, shit. I have a joint responsibility for how the world that she grows up in. And it doesn't actually matter if I succeed or fail, but it matters a lot that I try. It is perhaps— I find this so hilarious. I used to look at people that would say something like, you know, I just want to be a good dad and bring up good children. If I do that, then I've achieved everything I want in life. I used to laugh at those people, right? You loser. Like, so, and then I became a dad. I'm like, oh, This really is the entire game. Like, the— all of it. The entire shooting match is what model do I provide my kids? That's it. If I get that right and nothing else, okay, then I did all right. And if I get that wrong and I get everything else right, my life was wasted.

There you go. What are you most excited about right now? Projects, tools, ideas? What are you working on?

Oh, I'm doing an AI software version of the Book Bootcamp at the moment so that everybody can get through that process. That's really quite fun. We are doing our third version of the Chief of Staff, the agent, the Agentic program at the end of this month. That's really, really exciting. There is so much, there's an abundance of opportunity right now for anybody that wants to pick up Claude code and work out how to make that work. Because the language of coding used to be C or Pascal or Python. The language of coding is now English. Anybody can deploy software. And software is almost always a better form of delivery from a unit metrics, from a business mechanics than anything else. So yeah, there's so many exciting things that you're like, oh, I could do that. Oh, I could do that. So it's more about stopping doing some of those things than doing those things, to be honest.

Yeah, getting out of the pretty pony phase, right?

Oh, there's so much like I wanna rebuild the whole of the CRM and just build my own CRM, which I've got founders that I'm on their board working with them. They're doing exactly that. I'm on the board of a real estate company working on AI valuations in the appraisal space. That's about to take off. That's fun. I've got LeadStrike. There is, there is no shortage of opportunity.

Yeah, well, I want our audience to be able to learn about those things directly. We're definitely going to share all the info on how people can reach you and engage the PSI community. I have participated quite actively myself, and I've benefited from it just tremendously. So what fulfills you most about the new energy coming into the community now?

It's watching the first— it's always watching people go from 'I can't do this' to 'Did I just do that?' It's that first win of when people walk in, rightly and understandably, kind of hesitation because they're not necessarily techie people. And then watching them understand it's not a technology job, it's actually a communication skill, not a technical skill, that lights me up every single time. So yeah, it's watching people get that first win I find really, really fun.

That's lovely. Well, Peter, my friend, thank you for the wisdom, the honesty, and for choosing to use everything you've built to help others move into this new era with confidence instead of fear. Your commitment to engaging AI on a foundation of humanity is exactly the kind of legacy I love to celebrate. For our listeners, as stated, we'll include links to Peter's website and community so you can connect and keep learning. I don't know if it's possible in a 30-minute show for me to express just how revolutionary the things that you've taught me have made for my business. So I really want people to give that a look and check it out.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here, my friend.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I'm Alan Pavlosky and I'm signing off for Legacy All-Stars.