Prompt Your Way to Personal Growth

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Steve Schlafman, the founder of Downshift, a “deaccelerator” that helps high-performers navigate transitions with clarity and intention. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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For most of my adult life, I paid no heed to “knowing myself.” I dismissed self-awareness as a concept thrown around by pretentious people eager to make others feel inadequate.

This charming perspective was rooted in less-than-ideal thought patterns, and while I’ve since learned to find value in introspection, I still cringe a little when subjects like this come up.

On the latest episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper and Steve Schlafman—the founder of Downshift, a “deaccelerator” committed to helping founders and executives navigate career transitions with intention—talked about using AI to get in touch with your authentic self. 

As you might imagine, my guard was up. 

Yet Schlafman’s take—that AI provides a fresh, revealing lens for self-exploration—intrigued me. In a book I read recently, Everybody Lies, author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that our internet search histories reveal truths about us that we’d never willingly admit. Google apparently knows us better than our closest friends because it has unfiltered context about our behaviors. As AI becomes more prevalent in our lives—tracking everything on our computers, sitting in on meetings, and managing our inbox—it creates a rich, detailed portrait of who we really are. This episode left me thinking that maybe there’s something to the idea that AI could be a useful tool for introspection.

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On the podcast, Dan and Schlafman talk about how he uses AI to analyze his dreams in the style of famed psychotherapist Carl Jung, why he thinks voice is the best way to interface with AI, and how the technology will disrupt traditional coaching and therapy. Schlafman screenshares ChatGPT’s analysis of his dream about finding a ski mask buried in the snow near a mountain at night, and Dan uses the LLM to visualize it live on the show. You can check out their conversation:

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes they touch on:

Why you—the skeptic—should listen to this episode (hint: You might be missing out on different ways to experience the world) 

If you’re a rationalist—like me—who thinks this episode is too “woo” for your taste, Schlafman argues that you might be over-indexing on just one way of experiencing the world. He explains that there are four windows to the world: thinking, sensing, feeling, and imagining, and according to him, the dimensions of feeling and imagining are often ignored. “Thinking is very, very important but it’s just one frame of… interacting with reality… I used to be that hyper-rationalist, and as I’ve gone deeper into these windows of knowing, I’m realizing that there’s so much intelligence in our nervous system.” 

Explore your psyche by prompting ChatGPT to analyze your dreams

Schlafman records himself talking about his dreams, and then prompts ChatGPT to analyze them as though it were a Jungian dream analyst. He does active imagination exercises to help him re-experience the dream, while going back and forth with the language model. 

Give AI the right context, and it can preserve your emotional experiences

Schlafman says he uses AI to capture meaningful experiences in his life, making the strong emotions he felt accessible even after the moment has passed. For example, he recorded sessions with his therapist and used a custom prompt to turn the transcript into a refined summary. “I think about when I got sober a decade ago, I would go to therapy, I'd have a conversation… and then an hour later, I’d totally forget what we talked about; now I have a high-fidelity snapshot of the conversation,” he says.

If you tend to think out loud, lean into voice interfaces for AI 

Schlafman was diagnosed with ADD as a child, and one of the ways it shows up in his life is when he’s typing an idea out: His mind processes information faster than he can type, so he often ends up losing his train of thought. Using a voice interface to interact with AI has changed this experience dramatically. “I also think that these tools can really help those that are neurodivergent in certain ways to be able to process in a way that feels more natural,” he says.

Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links are below:

• Watch on X
• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

What do you use AI for? Have you found any interesting or surprising use cases? We want to hear from you—and we might even interview you. 

Miss an episode? Catch up on Dan’s recent conversations with star podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a16z Podcast host Steph Smith, economist Tyler Cowen, writer and entrepreneur David Perell, founder and newsletter operator Ben Tossell, and others, and learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

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