The Human Risk Podcast

What if the biggest risk isn’t saying the wrong thing, but being dull? Why do so many conference panels feel pre-cooked? Why do organisations hire people for their brains and then make them nervous about saying what they think?
 
Episode summary
My guests on this episode are Anna Cairns and Kerry Collinge, co-founders of The Illuminari. They describe it as a collective of some of marketing’s sharpest minds, including Rory Sutherland, Les Binet, Orlando Wood, Margaret Heffernan and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. It’s built on a philosophy Rory calls “delightful disobedience.” We talk about why t...

What does it actually take to prevent sexual harassment at work? Policies, training, reporting mechanisms and statements of zero tolerance are one thing. Creating a workplace where sexual harassment is genuinely less likely to happen is something else entirely.

Episode Summary
In this episode, I talk to Dr Nina Burrowes, a psychologist who has spent more than 20 years working on the psychology of sexual harm and is the author of All Reasonable Steps: How Psychology Transforms Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention.

Nina argues that organisations need to stop...

What can financial markets teach us about human behaviour? Why might the size of a CEO’s signature tell us something useful about the company they run? And why, even when smart investors know something is probably a bubble, might they keep investing anyway?

Episode Summary
My guest on this episode is Professor Alex Edmans, who returns to the show to discuss his new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. As the title suggests, this is a book about financial markets. Bu...

What if understanding regulation could help us spot when politicians are promising the impossible? Regulation sounds simple in theory. Something poses a risk, so we create rules and a regulator to control it. In practice, things get complicated very quickly. It's something we all benefit from, but equally can experience as redtape that prevents us from doing what we think we ought to be able to.

On this episode, I'm exploring the inner workings of regulation; so whether you are a regulator, a compliance officer, work in a regulated industry or just a member of the...

What if AI could help us understand people better, rather than simply replacing what humans do?

Episode summary
How can we use AI to become better at persuasion, communication and understanding human behaviour? My guest on this episode is Roger Dooley, author of The Persuasion Engine, a new book exploring what happens when behavioural science meets rapidly evolving technology.

Roger argues that tools once available only to large organisations — from behavioural science expertise to eye-tracking — are becoming accessible to almost anyone. We explore how AI can act as a personal “nudge unit”...

What’s the last thing you learned simply because you wanted to know?

Episode summary
Why do we feel the need to justify what we learn? My guest on this episode is Annie Wagstaff, a musician and composer whose career has taken her around the world touring with Take That and into writing music for advertising. But alongside her work in music, Annie has developed another passion: learning about whatever happens to make her curious.That could be vine tomatoes, animals, colour, knots, the human body, or simply something she notices wh...

What happens when someone who spends his life thinking about risk, decision-making and human behaviour is confronted with an uncertainty he simply can’t control?

Episode summary
My guest is Paul Craven, a behavioural scientist, former investment professional, magician and keynote speaker, and one of my favourite people to talk to. When we sat down to record this episode, I noticed that Paul’s voice sounded different.

His explanation — that he had recently been diagnosed with oral cancer — took our conversation in an unexpected and deeply personal direction.We explore what his experience has taug...

Why do we rate everything and why do we do so on a scale of one to five stars? What happens when systems designed to help us make better choices start influencing our behaviour in ways we don’t necessarily notice?

Episode Summary
My guest is Benji Wilson, a journalist, TV critic and author of Rate This Book. Benji’s day job involves rating other people’s work, but when his children pointed out that Rotten Tomatoes was also rating him, it prompted him to investigate the ratings culture that surrounds us. In...

What parts of yourself have you learned to hide in order to be taken seriously? My guest on this episode is Mark Heywood, a friend of the show, returning guest and someone I've collaborated with on a number of projects.

Episode Summary & Guest Profile
Mark has spent more than twenty years working in crisis management and operational resilience, while simultaneously building a successful career as a bestselling novelist, screenwriter and, more recently, stand-up comedian.

On the morning we recorded this conversation, Mark published an article marking his fifty-first birthday. I...

When something goes badly wrong, we investigate it. Reports are written. Recommendations are made. Lessons are identified. But do we actually learn them?

Episode Summary
Returning to the show, Gill Kernick joins me to discuss the substantially revised second edition of her book about the Grenfell Tower disaster, following the publication of the Grenfell Inquiry's final report. Gill has a unique perspective on Grenfell. She lived on the 21st floor of the tower before moving out three years before the fire. Professionally, she has spent decades helping organisations in high-hazard...

What does jazz singing have to do with LinkedIn? More than you might think.

This week's guest, Anna Rössler, has built a career helping senior leaders find their voice online while simultaneously developing her own as a singer-songwriter. Rather than separating her professional and creative identities, Anna has found a way to bring them together, and in doing so offers some valuable lessons about authenticity, confidence and human connection. 

We explore why so much online content feels performative, how AI is changing the way we communicate, and why the best personal brands aren't re...

What happens when two people who spend their careers thinking about human behaviour meet in a London pub and start complaining about conferences? Apparently, they decide to organise one.

Episode Summary
In this episode I'm joined by David Grosse, founder of behavioural risk advisory firm Behavor, to talk about The Unconvention, an event we're creating together that aims to rethink how conversations about risk, culture and human behaviour actually happen. But this isn't just an episode about an event.

David and I explore why organisations c...

Why is it so hard to stop people playing vides, music or phone calls out loud on public transport — and what does that tell us about changing human behaviour?

Show Summary
This episode of The Human Risk Podcast is a little different. It is a cross-cast from The Freewheeling Podcast, hosted by Thomas Ableman, in which I join Thomas to tackle a problem raised by the show's most important listener: his mum.

The issue? People using phones, videos, music and speaker calls out loud on trains an...

What if the best way to improve cybersecurity — or any other form of human risk — wasn't another policy, training course, or piece of technology, but a board game?  That's the kind of question my guest, Jill Wick, loves asking.

Episode Summary 
Jill is a cybersecurity awareness consultant, business psychologist, podcaster, and author. Her work sits at the intersection of psychology, marketing, behavioural science, and cybersecurity, and she is passionate about helping organisations understand that security is fundamentally a human challenge, not simply a technical one. 

Drawing on her experience in fraud prevention and her aca...

What can businesses learn from cults?
It might sound like an uncomfortable comparison: one involves strategy meetings, values statements and quarterly targets; the other manipulation, charismatic leaders and extreme behaviour. But perhaps the distinction isn't as clear as we'd like to think. Both create identities and shared beliefs. Both shape how people think and behave. And both can evolve gradually in ways that are hard to recognise from the inside.

Unhealthy cultures rarely appear overnight. Small compromises become normal, difficult questions become harder to ask, and behaviours that once felt uncomfortable slowly become accepted.
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What makes great service? It’s one of those things we instantly recognise when we experience it, but struggle to define. And while organisations spend huge amounts of time trying to design seamless customer experiences, the reality is that service doesn’t happen in strategy documents or training manuals. It happens in real time, between real people, in messy and unpredictable situations where eventually the playbook runs out.

Episode Overview
In this episode, Christian is joined by Will Tarrant, CEO of Freeman Group, who focus on helping organisations close the gap betw...

What if prediction isn’t about knowing the future, but controlling it?  On this episode, I'm joined by a leading thinker on digital ethics, privacy and technology to explore the idea of prophecy.

Episode Summary
My guest is Dr Carissa Véliz and in our discussion, we talk about humanity’s long-standing obsession with predicting what comes next, and why today’s algorithms may be the most powerful (and dangerous) prophets we’ve ever created. 

From ancient oracles and court astrologers to modern AI systems and tech executives, we explore how prediction has always been...

We like to think we choose what matters. But what if the goals we’re chasing… aren’t actually ours?

Episode Summary
My guest on this episode is Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher and author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, a book about how metrics, scoring systems, and “games” shape our behaviour—often without us realising it. Thi explains how his work on games led him to a deeper question: why do scoring systems make games feel meaningful, but make real life feel distorted? The answer lies in...

We tend to assume that if we’re working hard, we’re working well. But what if that isn’t true?

Episode Summary
My guest on this episode is Phil Dobson, author of The Brain Book and founder of Brain Workshops, about what he calls 'cognitive leadership': using neuroscience and psychology to help people sustain performance, think more clearly, and navigate uncertainty. Phil explains how a broken ankle led him from music and sales into hypnotherapy, neuroscience, and leadership development, and why he believes most of us are never properly taught how our...

What lessons does a religious protest that led to an uprising  in 1549 have to do with human risk?

At first glance, not very much. It’s easy to see it as a distant historical event — something about religion, kings, and a very different world. But as my guest, Professor Mark Stoyle explains, the Western Rising of 1549 is far more than that. It’s a powerful example of what happens when authority imposes change without understanding how people will react. 

Episode Summary
This episode started on a train journey to Exeter, where I was du...

What exactly is a sign?  At first glance, that might sound like a strange question. Signs are everywhere: telling us where to go, what to do, what not to do, and sometimes what might happen if we ignore instructions. But as my guest, Jeffrey Ludlow Saentz explains, signs are much more than bits of information on walls or beside roads.

Episode Summary
Jeffrey is a signage designer who works on complex buildings and environments around the world — airports, offices, museums, and other places where helping people find their way really matters. He’s also...

What Can a Cocktail Teach Us About Curiosity and Creativity? At first glance, documenting Negronis around the world might sound like a frivolous hobby. But could a simple cocktail become a vehicle for curiosity, experimentation and creative thinking?
 
On this episode, I speaks with geopolitical strategist Marc A Ross about an unusual passion project: ordering and documenting Negronis wherever he travels. What began as a casual habit has evolved into a magazine-style project called 50 Negronis, capturing cocktails from elegant bars to chaotic airport lounges. Along the way, the project has revealed something deeper about tr...

What’s the difference between a mistake… and a bad decision? My guest knows this only too well. Tom Hardin has been on the show several times before. As Tipper X, he wore a wire for the FBI and helped build the largest insider trading investigation in US history. 

Since then, he has spent nearly a decade speaking to organisations around the world about slippery slopes, rationalisation, and how good people drift into serious trouble. In this episode, he returns to discuss his new book, Wired on Wall Street.

The book goes beyon...

What happens when someone runs with a business idea they've heard as a thought experiment on a podcast? Can a business have an expletive in its name? And is it possible to run a business that sells a single very specific product?

Episode Summary
On this episode, I’m joined by Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble and Will Sudlow — the founders of Flat White or F*ck Off*, a coffee brand inspired by a thought experiment by friend of the show,Rory Sutherland. The concept is simple: sell one thing — flat whites — and if y...

What if we stopped telling women how to stay safe, and started asking why violence against them keeps happening in the first place? On this episode, I’m joined for a second time, by Amy Watson, the founder of social enterprise HASSL. She’s trying to tackle violence against women and girls at its root. Not with another awareness campaign or  safety app. But by building a global movement designed to shift responsibility away from women, and onto society.
 
Overview
When Amy first joined the podcast a year ago, we discussed the scale and re...

Who determines what 'good' Compliance actually looks like?  The obvious answer is regulators (and in some jurisdictions) prosecutors. But what if it were the regulated Firms themselves?  That's the idea behind purpose-driven compliance, which I'm exploring on this episode.

Episode Summary
To explore this, I'm joined by Veronica Root Martinez, Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, to explore a deceptively simple but unsettling idea: 100% compliance is impossible. While we often behave as though perfect compliance is the goal — and in some safety-critical domains it must be — most o...

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) gets smarter and tkaes over more tasks, what happens to human dynamics like trust, transparency, leadership and empathy. How can humans and machines wowrk togehter effectively?  And how can leaders lead in this new world?


Episode Summary 
AI is often discussed as a technical challenge, but the more interesting question is how it impacts humans and how we will interface with them. As AI becomes part of the world we’re navigating, it raises deeply human questions about trust, transparency, confidence, and how we relate to systems we don’t fully...

What lies behind Romance Fraud? Romance fraud is one of the fastest-growing forms of fraud worldwide, and one of the most emotionally devastating. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.

On this episode, I’m speaking to Becky Holmes, author of the bestselling book Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love With You. Becky didn’t become interested in romance fraud through victimhood or research. She stumbled into it during the pandemic after being approached by scammers online — and instead of ignoring them, she decided to wind them up.
 
What began as...

Why do we struggle to talk about grief? Why that matters and what we can do about it, is the subject of this episode.

Summary
Grief is something almost all of us will experience, and yet something we still struggle to talk about openly. Not because it’s rare, but because it makes us uncomfortable. We lack a shared language for it, feel uneasy about how long it lasts, and often don’t know how to sit with people who don’t simply “move on”. 

On this episode, I'm joined by Amy Kean, f...

Are we losing our ability to think critically as we rely more on AI?

Episode Summary
My guest is social psychologist Dr Guy Champniss to explore the role of behavioural science in business and the emerging challenges of AI in the workplace. We discuss why behaviour change is so hard to sell, the myth that behavioural science is only needed when everything else fails, and how organisations often overlook the human factors in transformation. Guy brings deep insight into how behavioural science is perceived inside organisations—often as a last resort when more traditional methods fa...

Why do governments rely on coercion and punishment when voluntary cooperation often produces better, more sustainable outcomes?

Episode Summary
On this episode, I’m joined once again by Professor Yuval Feldman, who returns to explore the core question behind his latest book: Can The Public Be Trusted?

Instead of asking how much we trust our governments, Yuval flips the script, asking how much governments trust us, and whether that trust is deserved. Together, we dive into the concept of voluntary compliance, where people follow rules not because th...

We all intuitively know that hypocrisy is a bad thing. But what if it isn’t a flaw, but a feature? But maybe the real problem isn’t hypocrisy, it’s how we think about it.

Episode Summary
On this episode, I'm talking to Dr Michael Hallsworth, a leading behavioural scientist and the author of The Hypocrisy Trap. We explore a topic that’s instantly recognisable but not often properly understood. Hypocrisy is something we’re quick to spot in others, slow to acknowledge in ourselves, and often design around as if i...

Can a single sentence change the way you see the world? My guest on this episode, James Geary thinks so.

Episode Summary
On this episode, I speak with writer and journalist James, whose lifelong fascination with aphorisms — the world’s shortest literary form — reveals why brevity really is the soul of wit.

James explains what makes an aphorism work, shares the five laws that define them, and explores how these concise little sayings have guided human thought from ancient times to social media.

We discuss:
The difference between aphorisms and prover...

What can war teach us about how the human brain really works? And why is human decision-making a more significant factor than military strength in wars?

Episode Summary
On this episode, I'm exploring how the human brain truly manifests in conflict—and what that reveals about everyday decision-making. Dr Nicholas Wright, a neurologist-turned-neuroscientist who advises the Pentagon Joint Staff, joins me to discuss his new book Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain.

In our conversation, Nick explains why fear is fu...

What if your body is learning things your mind doesn’t know? What if memory wasn't just something that our brain has?

Episode Summary 
On this episode, I'm exploring a bold idea with neuroscientist Dr Nikolay Kukushkin: memory doesn’t just live in the brain. It might be a basic property of life itself. We unpack how scientists define memory (behavioural change over time) versus how the rest of us use the word, and why that distinction matters—from sea slugs to kidney cells. I ask the “muscle memory” question we all carry, and we sepa...

What if the biggest AI risk isn’t bias or data, but human behaviour itself? How might AI impact the people using it and what does that mean for how we design solutions and deploy the technology?

Episode Summary
On this episode, I’m joined by a returning guest.  Richard Chataway is a behavioural science expert and strategist who joins me to explore how we can design AI systems that truly work for humans. Richard brings a unique lens to the conversation, combining insights from advertising, government policy, and behavioural science to unpack the h...

What happens when the worst thing you’ve ever done becomes the foundation for your life’s work?

Episode Summary
My guest on this episode is Tom Hardin, otherwise known as Tipper X.  He's been on the show before, but this time we're tackling a different angle.

If you don’t already know his story, Tom was a rising star in the hedge fund world in his twenties when he became involved in insider trading. Caught by the FBI, he made the decision to cooperate — ultimately becoming one of th...

Why do so many workplaces run on bullshit processes and procedures?  And how might Behavioural Science help resolve them?

Episode Summary
In this episode, I sit down with author, speaker and advisor James Healy to explore his book BS at Work — and the everyday nonsense we all recognise inside organisations.

James argues that while behavioural science has transformed public policy and consumer behaviour, workplaces have lagged behind. We dig into why leaders keep choosing rituals over results, why nobody seems to ask “does this actually work?”, and how our...

What if the most powerful tool at work isn’t logic, but laughter? On this episode I'm speaking to a comedian who far from thinking humour is a workplace distraction, thinks it might be one of our most powerful tools. 

Episode Summary
My guest is Pep Rosenfeld: comedian, improviser, and co-founder of the Amsterdam-based comedy institution Boom Chicago. He’s also the author of Work Laugh Balance, a manifesto for injecting humour into the working world. We explore why humour matters; not just as entertainment, but as a serious enabler of colla...

Why do cyclists in London run red lights? It's against the law, and yet, if you've cycled, driven or just observed London's cyclists, you'll know that many of them don't stop when there's a red light. 

Confession time: I'm one of them. Not all the time, but some of the time, and weirdly not when I'm in Munich — the other city I live in — but only in London.

The question of why this happens — not just my red light running, but the act in general — is the subject of this episode. Because I think this seem...