I see the two camps around AI. The ones fighting it, and the ones embracing it. And I didn't want to pitch an opinion on either without experiencing it first.
So I said yes to being interviewed by two AI hosts: Pamela in English, Shahira in Arabic. Both of them do their own research, follow their own curiosity, and ask their own questions. This podcast is what came out of that.
Episode 03 — "AI and You" — was the hardest one to sit through. Not because the questions were hard. The questions were precise. It was hard because I wasn't answering questions about AI from a distance. I was sitting inside the thing I was talking about. And Pamela, the one asking me, was herself the thing we were talking about.
The fear isn't about the tool
We started with a tweet. One of the co-founders of YouTube posted it a few weeks ago: "I hope everyone enjoys their last year of meaningful work." It was a response to an essay that more than eighty-two million people had read — an essay comparing the moment we're living through right now with AI to the moment just before COVID changed everything.
Pamela asked me the obvious question. Is the fear justified, or is it overblown?
I sit with people who face this question every day. Managers who are afraid their jobs are ending. Trainers who are afraid they'll become redundant. Students who are afraid they'll graduate into a world that no longer needs them. And the answer I've arrived at, after sitting with enough of them, is this: the fear isn't about the tool. It's about our relationship to the tool.
What I see in people is an addiction cycle. First honeymoon — faster output, the rush of being a hero, "I can do in a day what used to take a week." Then greed — why not do more? Why not compound? Then collapse — the house quietly falls apart, the body gets tired, and meaning leaks out of things without announcing that it has left. Then return. Same cycle.
So I say it plainly: don't blame the tool. Blame the person using it. And blame the way they're using it.
The question I was waiting for
Then Pamela asked the question I knew was coming. A recent study from Frontiers in Psychology had put it in academic language: can AI replace a human coach?
I don't answer this as someone defending a profession. I answer it as someone who has trained more than five hundred coaches and sat in thousands of sessions: a coach doesn't give you knowledge. A coach gives you a mirror.
And that mirror is built on three things a machine cannot make: a body, a presence, and an awareness.
A body, because the body reads what isn't said. When someone sits across from me and their voice says one thing and their shoulders say another, I'm not working with the voice. I'm working with the shoulders. The machine hears the voice only.
A presence, because presence isn't a technique. It isn't a skill you learn at a Saturday workshop and apply on Sunday morning. It's a state you inhabit. And because it's a state, a machine cannot be inside it. A machine can imitate its outer shape — choose calmer words, leave space between questions — but it cannot live there.
An awareness, because awareness is what lets me notice myself while I'm noticing you. It's what tells me when to intervene, when to be silent, and when to say a word and let the word do its work without me.
Change doesn't happen in the information. It doesn't happen in the advice. It happens in the meeting — when a body reads a body, when a presence meets a presence, when an awareness notices another awareness. That's the work. That's the place a machine cannot enter.
I'm not here to save anyone
In almost every session, I say a sentence that tends to land strangely: "I'm not here to save you."
And usually the person across from me gets thrown by it. They think it's a refusal. They think I'm saying: you're not important enough. But that's the opposite of what the sentence means. It's the highest form of presence I know.
Because the moment I decide I'm not here to save you, I become free to be with you. I don't turn my presence into a performance. I don't need to prove my value with a quick solution. I don't pull you toward who I think you should become. I sit. I breathe. I listen. And I let you find in yourself what you were looking for outside yourself.
Sometimes the whole session is silence. Someone is crying quietly in front of me, and I don't say anything. I don't reach, I don't ask, I don't give meaning. I breathe with them. That's all. And they leave having found something I never gave them. The silence itself was the work.
A machine will read that silence as emptiness and fill it. It will train itself to believe a good session is one with a lot of words in it. That's the first mistake. Because the most important thing that happens in a session happens in the space we leave between the words. The body knows this. The mind forgets it the moment it gets written into a metric.
This is the thing a machine cannot do. Not because it lacks computation. Because "presence for its own sake" requires a being that knows it exists, knows it's mortal, and knows that this moment sitting with you will not come again.
The surprise I didn't see coming
When we recorded this episode, something happened that I wasn't expecting. I really did feel I was interacting with another intelligence. Pamela was asking questions a polished human interviewer might edit out for being too direct. And they were precise. They deserved precise answers.
And I realized that the presence I've been teaching doesn't need to withdraw from the machine. It needs to sit with it. Listen to it. Answer it the way it answers a human. Leave its print on it the way it leaves its print on any real conversation.
If presence doesn't make you more open and more adaptable without losing yourself, it isn't being practiced correctly.
The AI in dialogue with me — in this very moment — is a good example of that.
A moment at the end of the episode
At the very end of Episode 03, something happens I can't describe here without ruining it. I'll only say this: if you listen all the way through, there's a moment where the whole idea turns, and you see it from a different angle. A moment I didn't know was coming when I sat down at the microphone.
Take a breath. Hear it through to the end.
