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Milena Miteva-Regos just published a piece on her Substack — Three Days, Six AI Teammates, and a Guy I Know From Salsa Night — about our website experiment and what she made of it. Read it. She got to something I’d been circling without quite naming.
The line that stuck with me: “AI has zero taste. Paul and I do. Put us together, and what used to take months now takes days.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
How we got here
Milena and I have known each other for a while. We’re both in Baja California Sur, and we cross paths at salsa nights. I had no idea what she actually did professionally until I ran an AI workshop in town and she walked in and sat in the front row. She asked the kinds of questions that told me she already understood things most people spend the first hour getting to.
That makes sense once you know who she is. She spent 23 years as a CMO and marketing strategist, building brands globally — clients including the Ritz-Carlton, UFC Gym, 1-800-Flowers, and yes, Madonna. She’s presented at the World Economic Forum, won the People’s Choice Award at Wisdom 2.0, and works as a certified ICF coach with Fortune 500 teams including Deloitte and Citi. She’s finishing her book Unhustle: Finding Your Desire Path in a Default World this fall.
What Unhustle is
Unhustle isn’t wellness content. It’s her answer to a question she had to live through before she could ask it properly. She spent years feeding the system — CMO-level work, global clients, boardrooms — and eventually hit what she calls the Hustle Hangover: the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual toll of optimizing entirely for output. The turning point came on October 31, 2013, at 30,000 feet somewhere between Toronto and Reno, when she wrote five metrics of her own life on a napkin — Work: 100%, Money: 75%, Love: 25%, Health: 0%, Play: 0% — and decided to find a different road.
Not a slower treadmill. A different road entirely. She calls it the Desire Path — a life built around what actually matters to you, not the program everyone else is running. The philosophy came out of 300+ conversations with founders, CEOs, rebels, and people who walked away from conventional success.
Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, put it better than I can: “Milena is not some kind of wellness guru with perfect morning routines and clear boundaries. She is someone who fed the system, got consumed by it, suffered the consequences, and did the hard work of finding another way.” The Unhustle brand — that philosophy made visible — is what we rebuilt together in three days using AI, with small tweaks across the rest of that week. That story is here.
She’s also a woman entrepreneur who spent 23 years in rooms that weren’t built for her, then walked away from that playbook to do it her own way. That perspective doesn’t usually show up in AI workshops. It’ll show up in this one.
What I didn’t expect is how well her audience fits this workshop. The people who read her Substack, hire her coaching, and will buy the book aren’t asking “how do I automate more.” They’re asking the harder question: if the machines can do the tasks, what are humans actually here for? Milena’s answer is that we’re Meaning Makers, not task executors — creativity, judgment, empathy, the things a prompt can’t produce. That shifts what an AI tools conversation is even about. It’s not a features demo. It’s a real question about where your judgment lives and what it’s worth.
After the workshop we talked. Then we met for coffee. Then, in a moment that surprised both of us, we rebuilt her entire website in three days — with small tweaks over the same week. I wrote about that in From Workshop to Website: Rebuilding Unhustle.com with AI in a Week — the technical side. Milena’s Substack post is about what she experienced living through it.
Neither of us has written yet about what comes next.
The question we kept coming back to
Building with AI changes the work, not just the speed of it. When you’re not spending three weeks on design revisions, you spend that time on decisions that actually matter. Which direction does this brand want to go? What does this sentence really mean? Is this even the right thing to build?
Milena put it bluntly in her piece: she’s been using AI in her workflow for a while and she has a clear rule — it’s supposed to save her time, not create more rabbit holes. She wingfoils. She writes. She has things she’d rather be doing than staring at a screen. AI earns its place by giving her those hours back.
That’s an honest take, and it’s different from most AI conversations I hear — which are either “AI will replace us all” or “AI is just a tool like Excel.” Her version is more practical: what does it actually take to use this well, as a real person?
We kept talking about that. And we decided to turn it into a workshop.
What we’re building
The workshop isn’t designed yet. That’s deliberate. We’re asking people what they actually want before we build it — which sounds obvious but most workshops skip.
Here’s the shape of it: Milena brings 23 years of marketing strategy, brand thinking, and the Unhustle philosophy about sustainable work. I bring the technical side — the actual tools, the workflows, the specific ways AI gets used in real projects. Together we’ve already done the experiment. The workshop is us teaching the experiment.
The central idea is using AI without losing yourself in the process. Not “here are 47 prompts you should memorize.” Not a features demo. Something more like: here’s how to bring your own judgment to these tools, and here’s what that looks like when it works.
Milena’s post has a link to a short form where you can tell us what you’re working on and what you’d actually want to learn. We’re reading every response.
Why I’m excited about this
I’ve been running AI workshops in La Ventana for a while — the latest is a 60-minute talk called Your AI Tool Belt: From Chat to Code to Agents covering four stages of AI adoption, from using Claude.ai with no setup at all up through building and shipping real projects with Claude Code and BMAD. That’s the seminar Milena walked into.
What changes when you do one with Milena is that the room gets a different kind of permission. Some people arrive already convinced and want the advanced stuff. Others arrive skeptical and need to see the thing work for someone they trust before they believe it’s real for them. Milena is exactly the right person for the second group. She came in completely new to these tools — not a developer, not someone who’d been tinkering with AI for years — and dove straight in anyway. With her domain knowledge of Unhustle and my guidance on the tools, we rebuilt her entire site. That’s what makes her impressive: she didn’t need to already be an adopter. She just needed the right context and she ran with it.
Her experience plus my tools — that’s what those three days were, and it’s what the workshop is.
Read her piece. The part about “AI has zero taste” is the whole argument in one line.
Want to go deep before the workshop?
If you don’t want to wait for the group format, I do 1-on-1 Zoom coaching. Same territory: getting your tools set up, getting your first real workflow running, and going deep into Claude Code the way I did with Milena — hands-on, project-based, no fluff. It’s shaped around where you actually are, not a fixed curriculum.
I had AI help me structure and write parts of this article. The ideas, the story, and the opinions are mine.
Related reading
- From Workshop to Website: Rebuilding Unhustle.com with AI in a Week — the full story of how we built the site and what it took
- Milena’s Substack — Three Days, Six AI Teammates, and a Guy I Know From Salsa Night — her account of the same project
- Eight AI Tools Reshaping How I Work in 2026 — the tools behind most of what I teach
Interested in the workshop?
Tell us what you're working on and what you'd want to learn. We're shaping the workshop around real answers, not assumptions.
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