Silicon Valley’s Top Coaches Want You to Stop Fearing AI

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My fears of being replaced by AI have crowded out reflections about who I want to be.

That’s what I realized this week listening to Joe Hudson, Jonny Miller, and Steve Schlafman in their conversations with Every CEO Dan Shipper on our podcast AI & I.

Hudson is an executive coach whose clients include the leaders building AGI at OpenAI. Miller is the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a boot camp that shares protocols for cultivating calm, resilience, and energy with founders and executives. Schlafman is the founder of Downshift, a “deaccelerator” committed to helping founders and executives navigate career transitions with intention.

Read on for how Hudson, Miller, and Schlafman think about personal growth with AI. We cover:

1. How to use AI for personal growth,, including a guide to building a custom AI coach, and doing Jungian dream analysis with LLMs
2. What you need to know if you’re scared of being replaced by AI
3. Why it’s so important to use any new technology with thoughtfulness and intent

How to use AI for personal growth

Build your AI life coach a brain

A perennial problem with AI is that we don’t give it enough context—because that work feels tedious. Miller noticed this shows up in how people use LLMs for coaching, too: People tend to turn to it only in moments of stress, offering vague questions, superficial details, or relying on the AI’s memory of past conversations.

To address this, he developed a structured way to feed the right context—about yourself and what you’re looking for—into the AI.

Create a “codex vitae”: your personal operating manual

Writer and creator Buster Benson describes his "Codex Vitae" as a “living and dying record of [his] beliefs.” Inspired by Benson, Miller created his own version of this, a document packed with self-knowledge. Think of it as your personal operating manual. It might include answers to questions like:

1. Are there any known “rabbit holes” where you lose hours or get stuck?
2. What clear boundaries do you have around your calendar?
3. Who are some of the people you can rely on when things get challenging?

You can find the full set of questions Miller gathered.

Personalize for your style and goals

An equally important piece of context to give AI is what you’re seeking. Miller has a structured way to tell the LLM that, too. It sets the AI’s role, dials in the tone of communication, and points it back to the codex vitae as its source of truth. From there, you can tailor the coach to your needs.

Make it a ritual

Finally, Miller borrows a page from human coaching: emphasizing cadence. He blocks a 45-minute weekly session with his AI coach on his calendar. That ritual gives the work structure, accountability, and a rhythm for experimentation.

Jungian dream analysis with LLMs

Schlafman has been using ChatGPT to do Jungian dreamwork—specifically, active imagination exercises, where you step back into a dream, re-experience it, and then take action. Each morning, he records his dreams—by talking into his phone—and feeds the transcripts into ChatGPT, prompting the LLM to analyze them as a “Jungian analyst.”

From there, Schlafman asks for deeper and more structured feedback. For example, he requested a “more comprehensive dream analysis” along with a “guide for integration and reflection” for one dream. Each day, Schlafman refines his prompts, shaping the AI into something more precise, eventually asking the AI to also summarize, edit, and refine his dream reports.

Beyond the rationalist frame

OK, time to move from the practical into the slightly more “woo” parts of these episodes—and if you’re rolling your eyes already, here’s Schlafman’s take: You might be limiting the way you see the world. According to him, there are four windows: thinking, sensing, feeling, and imagining— and most people ignore the last two. “Thinking is very, very important but it’s just one frame of… interacting with reality, he says, “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.”

What to do if you’re scared of being replaced by AI

Hudson frames the fear of being replaced by AI as a journey that starts with grief. That’s because so much of our identity is bound up in what we do: being a writer, a coach, a developer. When AI begins to commoditize those skills, the roles we’ve built our lives around start to fall away. And with that comes the unsettling question: Who are you without that role?

Rather than resist it, Hudson almost welcomes this grief. He sees “identity collapse” as painful but liberating; a crack in the facade that lets something truer emerge. His advice: Don’t rush to patch it over. Try to sit in the not-knowing because it’s an invitation to discover more about who you really are, unburdened from labels.

Use AI with agency

Hudson argues that AI, like any technology, is neither inherently good nor bad—it’s a tool. A hammer can build a house or cause deep harm to someone; AI is no different, which gives us the choice of how we want to use it.

For him, the key move is cultivating self-trust and consciousness around the tool. Instead of slipping into addictive patterns or default behaviors, he recommends pausing to ask: How am I going to use this to make my life better?

The centaur model of coaching

Miller draws on founding editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly’s concept of centaurs—the idea that human-AI teams can outperform either humans or AI alone—to describe the future of coaching. He sees this model as especially powerful because clients can use AI between sessions to implement what they’ve learned, reflect further, and even bring new insights back into the coaching relationship.

In his vision, the collaboration could evolve into a three-way dynamic: client, coach, and AI. Imagine a shared chat thread where clients interact with the AI for ongoing support, while Miller can step in to correct hallucinations or add nuance.

You can check out the episodes in full here:

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, ChatPRD founder Claire Vo, 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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Rhea Purohit is a contributing writer for Every focused on research-driven storytelling in tech. You can follow her on X at @RheaPurohit1 and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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