TL;DR: Phil Powis ❤️⚡️ and I have been going back and forth on Substack for over a year, and his writing lands in my feed like a breath of fresh air, so this one felt less like an interview and more like two friends comparing notes. We got into why AI is nobody’s goal, why your team’s trust matters more than the tool, and the one question he keeps coming back to that can reorganize a whole business. Worth the watch if work has started to feel hollow.
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Outline
(00:30) – Friends across Substack, a breath of fresh air
(01:23) – Burnout, a tumor, and the business he walked away from
(07:35) – Quality of life vs. lifestyle
(09:07) – Sacred business vs. opportunistic business
(11:15) – Why AI is nobody’s goal
(16:48) – The AI Judgment Workshop and reading your team
(19:18) – The Harmony Map, and slowing down in the AI era
(27:40) – The eco rat race: old identity, new context
(29:46) – We’re all toddlers with AI
(31:48) – “What do you truly want?”
(35:39) – The Golden Sequence: connection, growth, belonging
My Takeaways
Sacred business vs. opportunistic business. So Phil opened with the story I keep thinking about. He built a boutique advertising business doing over $100,000 a month with basically him and a virtual assistant, and it nearly cost him everything, autoimmune problems, a health scare, time essentially bedridden. He walked away because his heart was never in it, and out of that came the distinction the whole conversation runs on.
“When we talk about sacred business, it’s honoring all of who you are, your gifts, your talents, your failures, your victories, and it’s tied to service. The opportunistic business is chasing the trend. It’s not really looking at who am I and what wants to come through.”
When you chase the trend, you spend your life playing catch-up on somebody else’s dream. I’ve watched leaders do it with AI too, grab the shiny thing because everyone else did, and then wonder why it drains them.
AI is nobody’s goal. Here’s where I jumped in, because I see the same thing coaching leaders on AI. I’ll ask why they’re bringing it in, and a lot of the time the honest answer is “we just want to be an AI-forward business.” That’s the trap Phil is describing, and it’s why I keep saying AI is nobody’s goal.
“So much of what I’m doing is just following my own threads of curiosity and wonder, and asking the questions I’m looking to answer for myself, and then allowing people a window into that.”
AI is the means to whatever your goal always was. Marry that goal to something you actually care about and the work stops feeling like burnout, which is the whole discipline behind the AI Leadership Triad. The tool moves you toward what you wanted, it doesn’t get to become the thing you want.
The eco rat race. Phil lived in Costa Rica for three years, and he had the funniest, truest line of the whole talk, about the founders and VCs who burn out, move there to build a wellness center, and change absolutely nothing.
“They bring the same New York energy to the picture. They’re sitting in the most beautiful locations in the world and they’re still the most stressed out people you’ll ever meet. They’re bringing that old identity to a new context.”
Carolina Wilke nailed it in the chat, you can build a new business with an old identity and hit the same walls.
You can’t relocate your way out of who you are, and you can’t AI your way out of it either.
We’re all toddlers with AI. The thing I keep coming back to is how humble Phil is about all of this. He refuses to look down on anyone’s messy AI use, and he put the reason plainly.
“With AI specifically, we’re all kind of like toddlers. And I include myself in that, and even you, because how far are we really into this? We’re a couple years into this journey.”
I study this for a living and I still bring in a new expert every Thursday, because none of us has it figured out. Phil’s antidote to the noise is one question he and Carolina ask their clients: what do you truly want. Ask it enough times and it gets dangerous in the best way, because it’ll take you down a rabbit hole if you let it. That question is the human work AI can’t do for you, and it’s the same reason I keep telling leaders not to outsource their thinking to it.
Reading your team before you buy the tool is exactly what I run leaders through in my AI Judgment Workshop, which is open for registration now. If you’d rather go deeper one-on-one or with your organization, just let me know!
One Question to Sit With
Phil ended on the question I want to leave you with too: what’s the why behind where you’re putting your hours, and does it marry where your passions lie?
Watch the full conversation above for how Phil and Carolina help people sit with that. And when you’re done, go subscribe to Sacred Business Flow.
About Phil Powis
Phil Powis is the creator of Sacred Business Flow, a Substack with more than 33,000 subscribers that he writes with his partner Carolina. He teaches founders and creators to build what he calls a sacred business, one that honors who you are and stays profitable, instead of an opportunistic business that just chases the trend. His work pairs business and marketing strategy with inner work, including the Harmony Map assessment, which reads what he calls your nine fundamental frequencies and points you to the one “breakthrough frequency” worth building around. Subscribe to his writing at Sacred Business Flow, and take the free Harmony Map assessment at sacredbusiness.com.
About me
Joel Salinas is an AI Strategy Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through a monthly live workshop and 90-day engagements. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change.
Written by a human, for humans.
