He’s Using AI to Optimize His Life

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Jonny Miller, the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a cohort-based boot camp that shares evidence-based protocols for cultivating calm, resilience, and aliveness. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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I admire people who build careers around what genuinely excites them—probably because I'm always searching for ways to do more of that myself. Jonny Miller is someone who’s made that happen, and lately, he’s been using AI to lean into this approach.

Miller is the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a boot camp that shares protocols for cultivating calm, resilience, and aliveness with founders and executives; host of the Curious Humans podcast; and long-time Every writer. In this episode of AI and I, Dan Shipper and Miller talk about their approach to running non-traditional businesses, how Miller uses ChatGPT to better his meditation practice and create personalized AI coaches, and how intentional experimentation can lead to meaningful innovations in both life and work.

You can check out their full conversation here:

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

Your energy is your most valuable asset (00:02:18)

I often wonder how multi-hyphenate creators like Miller find themselves at the center of so many different projects: running courses, writing, podcasting, and coaching. I learned in this episode that it comes down to how he makes decisions. In a world pushing us to optimize for efficiency—often measured by revenue—Miller leans into a feeling of “aliveness.” He enjoys the breadth of his work, believing that it’s unified by his mission to spread awareness about nervous system literacy. 

Miller says, “I almost view my role as a steward of this emerging ecosystem…like a gardener tending to different seeds, and seeing, ‘Where is my attention best needed?’” He’s found that intentionally not setting hard deadlines has given him the freedom to adapt.

Miller openly admits that his approach to work might not be the fastest way to make money, but he believes focusing on what makes him feel alive gives him more energy, which makes his work better.

Your AI is only as insightful as the context you give it (00:31:35)

Everyone knows that the more context you give the AI, the more useful its responses will be—but I’m always fascinated by how far some people go in giving LLMs that context. Miller is an example of this. 

He was experimenting with creating an AI coach for the nervous system mastery community when he realized that most people stumbled in providing LLMs with the right detail of context. Inspired by writer and creator Buster Benson’s concept of a "codex vitae," or a living record of one’s beliefs, Miller designed a template of introspective questions for users to deepen the personal context they share with AI, like: 

• To what extent are you open to confrontation? 
• What are you prioritizing in the current chapter of your life? 
• What reliably brings you joy? 

Miller also informs the AI coach about the specific problem or area he's focusing on.

But AI coaches don’t always calibrate context appropriately. He and Dan agree that while AI coaching can be valuable, not every suggestion from an LLM is inherently useful, and makes a more meta observation: “When I get a response from ChatGPT, I'm more like looking for the nuggets of gold, as opposed to buying everything that it says.”

To the point of providing AI with the right context, Dan vibe coded a personal app called Deep Background that turns his notes into a website accessible by AI agents. When posing questions through deep research, Dan directs the agent to draw exclusively from the website he created with Deep Background, ensuring the responses are informed by his own curated sources.

Language models that both mirror and prompt personal growth (00:57:27)

Miller thinks about the future of AI-human collaboration in terms of “centaurs, where human plus AI teams are better than just AIs,” an idea that founding editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly framed a decade ago. Miller sees tremendous potential in these partnerships in the context of coaching: human coaches supported by AI chatbots that can “implement the stuff that we’ve talked about in our session, but then also continue having chats and then bring that stuff to the next session.”

This outlook resonates with Dan; in fact, right before he recorded the podcast with Miller, he happened to use AI as a collaborator. Dan was dealing with a minor but urgent situation at Every, so he got the team together on a call to strategize. Afterward, curious about his effectiveness as a leader, he fed the meeting transcript to ChatGPT for feedback. The AI provided thoughtful, measured insights that helped him reflect on his approach. 

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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