Advice Was Already Cheap

AI is proof that six-figure advice is DOA

Note from Damon: It’s a touch of irony that I used ChatGPT to give me critical feedback on this essay. It advised me that the middle section was bloated. I agreed, but left it in for the sake of humanity. I hope you’ll not only forgive my imperfections, but you’ll celebrate them.

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Is Advice a Problem?

“Sometimes you just want someone to tell you what to do,” insisted my friend Lynn, referring to seeking help.

It’s been about four weeks since she said this, and I haven’t let it go. Something about this claim resonated. It also stirred concerns about humanity that I’ve struggled to identify until penning this essay. In the end, I’ve taken this thought many places Lynn didn’t intend, but it started with that one simple claim.

Lynn was talking about how compelling this desire can be when working with consultants. Count me in agreement. She’s right. I often feel this feeling: Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

There are moments I want nothing more than this, like when seeing a doctor or physiotherapist. As a coach, however, I have strong opinions on advice on how this applies to my profession, especially Advice’s more insistent cousin, Directives. More on that later.

After much consideration, this is where I’ve landed, whether I like it or not.

Advice is problematic. It always has been, but now that problem is much bigger than anyone imagines, and our consumption of it could be catastrophic for us much sooner than anyone realizes.

Bear with me. I don’t think I’m overselling the gravity.

First, a Word on AI

If you’re anything like me, ChatGPT (which is a type of AI called a Large Language Model or “LLM”) handles most of my daily advice these days.

My logic? Why ask one human for their anecdotal opinions when AI can scan an unfathomable sample of authorities (and Reddit) to crowdsource solid suggestions? And lightning fast, I might add. The very moment one strikes the return key, a response populates. Even a very experienced person needs a second to gather their thoughts.

I swear, I’m going to resist (and fail at) making this a doomsday piece on AI. I came into this thinking mostly about coaches.

AI is my best example because I view its meteoric popularity as proving my intuitions about advice. It was always cheap. ChatGPT and other LLMs have made it free for almost anyone, even those outside the usual walls of privilege.

The Advice Paradox

Advice is a little confusing for two reasons. We find unrequested advice annoying, and the requested kind is something we rarely (if ever) follow.

My suspicion is that we never asked advice from just one person, not before the introduction of LLMs. Many people still do this, but fewer every day. Traditionally, we would crowd-source it from a few people to feel more confident about what to do. It’s often something we already knew we wanted to do.

Whether or not we’ll actually take any determined action comes down to two factors:

1. How challenging it is to do, and…

2. How much we’ll suffer if we don’t take it.

Advice we take from others is sweet in two ways because we get to take full credit for it when it works. When it doesn’t, we can blame it on the person who gave it to us (or accept the blame for “listening to that idiot’s advice”).

Contrast this to the advice we derive from our own library of life experiences. The more we feel like our next steps come from something generated from our own internal resources, the more likely we are to take that action in the end.

There are obvious limits to our own advice, though. We’re not all polymaths. In some cases, advice from an expert is the only way to go. I’m thinking of topics like cancer treatment, engineering problems, space travel, and that sort of thing. But on matters of the heart, everyday choices about life, relationships, and conflict resolution, to name a few, we can usually be our own best advice giver. That’s true even if that advice is something like: I first need to speak to a subject-matter expert.

Most of my friends who call themselves coaches see little conflict in advice-giving, despite what I thought was a very compelling argument by Michael Bungay Stanier in his TED Talk on How to Tame Your Advice Monster.

Part of this is because many coaches straddle the field of coaching and other fields like business, leadership, and career advice, where expertise is part of what they call coaching. This brings me to a key distinction in the coaching business.

Snuffleupagus

For those who didn’t grow up with Sesame Street, the character of Snuffleuppagus was a Woolly Mammoth Muppet. Only his friend Big Bird could see him.

Speaking of monsters and beasts, I’d like to quickly address the brown furry elephant in the room, non-directive versus directive forms of coaching.

The directive versus non-directive debate is one that quietly simmers in coaching circles. For simplicity, you can think of non-directive as non-advice-giving.

Most coaches slide across their own boundaries on this directiveness, but there are two basic camps:

1. Critics of Non-directive (ND) coaches will say that ND coaches are part of a pompous, self-affirming, dogmatically religious school of thinking promoted by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

2. The critics of Directive (D) coaches will argue that those coaches either don’t trust their clients or don’t trust their coaching process enough to let those clients be their own heroes for solutions and insight.

The D camp will use words like guide to describe what they do, whereas ND coaches will characterize themselves more as co-pilots. Both use tools like intention setting, reflection, and open questions, but in the end, D coaches are cool with advice-giving. ND coaches are not.

You’re likely more familiar with D coaches.

For one, they tend to be more active on social media. Also, they more closely match what folks imagine a coach would be, a blend of therapy and sports coaching: caring, but demanding, and in the end, they hold the playbook. The most compelling reason, however, is that selling answers is way more marketable than selling questions.

This supports my friend Lynn’s claim. This is what we think we want.

Lynn, who is also my positioning consultant and main business adviser, prefers I avoid using the term non-directive in my marketing. It’s off-putting to suggest one will have to “do a bunch of work” when working with me. She’s right. It’s a terrible expression if one plans to sell anything. I might as well brand myself “Flat-pack life coaching: Minimal assembly required.”

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor

An apt comparison is how we think about pain treatment.

Most doctors will prescribe pain medication to patients in pain. That’s obvious. Doctors like naturopaths lobby for drug-free treatment. They promote lifestyle changes and other non-pharma solutions for pain.

In the same way that coaches rarely stay in one lane, D or ND, few doctors can do the same for pain. Even naturopaths recognize when the pain is too high to avoid drugs.

The challenge for D coaches is that we want advice in the same way we want pain relief. We want it now.

The challenge for ND coaches is more like a naturopath’s. The solutions might not happen fast. It takes work, time, and money.

Drugs and advice wrap up all our woes. They also curb learning, feelings of agency, and self-empowerment.

The Cost of Advice Isn’t Financial

Advice, as it is, is a kind of empowerment, but as my friend Toku McCree says, it’s a limited source of power. The power always ties back to the one giving the advice. Agreed, 100%.

The cost consideration, in this case, isn’t only financial. It’s also not just about time. It’s about what’s happening to our self-reliance subroutines. It’s also about what’s happening to our interpersonal relationships.

Not a day goes by that I don’t use ChatGPT to answer questions I would have previously asked my wife or a friend. As mentioned, solid advice is already free for a broad class of privileged folks. Almost anyone with a smart device and a data plan can access some kind of LLM.

Recent estimates suggest that there are approximately 7.21 billion smartphone users globally, representing about 90% of the world’s population. (source)

Which all begs the question: What will become of the advice peddlers in this new world? To take this even further, what has already become of the conversations we’ve surrendered to AI?

It’s all starting to feel very familiar.

• Cellphones were supposed to bridge the physical distances between us, until they became distracting slot machines in our pockets.

• Facebook was supposed to connect us with everyone we’ve ever known until we learned each of their true political leanings.

• LLMs promise to make answers so much easier to find, until they cut us off even farther from the people in our lives.

What non-directive coaches offer is nothing durable against the singularity. Current off-the-shelf tech can replace the best advice givers. It’s only a matter of time before it can replace the non-advice givers, too.

It’s no understatement that we’re in a fast-paced war to figure out what humans can offer that AI cannot.

I can already hear all the coaches lobbying for our darling tools:

• Silence

• Authentic empathy

• Reflection

• Holding space

• Presence

Everywhere I look, fellow coaches argue for the value of “true human connection,” as if there is something irreplaceable that coaches do. This belief is simply a result of our cognitive biases and our limitations in imagining.

All of it is easily and frighteningly simulatable.

What does this mean? I don’t really know. I’m not an AI expert. I’m not even sure the experts are really experts on this one, which is deeply ironic and meta, considering the subject of this essay. (Who would give us the advice in this case?)

What it probably means is more coaching for more people, available for a steal. It probably means more coaching of the directive sort, but not by humans.

It means AI will just “tell me what to do.” It’s pain meds delivered instantly.

Why bother sitting through difficult conversations, plumbing the mind, its thoughts, feelings, and parts, if an LLM can just tell us what to do? I can think of at least one recent story that refutes this cynical view.

Last month, I was in a coaching session where I applied an ND coaching style. It was a lot of reflection and checking in to see how close we were to the desired outcome. As we approached the end of our time, he got quiet and said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”

After the session, he remarked how he knew he’d execute the decision he’d come to because it’d come from his own mind.

The End of the Six-Figure Advice

If you’ve not yet read the AI 2027 document, count yourself amongst the sane. The rest of us are left to wonder if we’ve finally donned the tinfoil hats. In short, it’s an essay told in story form, spun from a large appendix of research from AI experts. TL;DR It doesn’t end well for humans, and that end comes much sooner than any of us imagines.

For coaches and therapists who rely on a reputation for giving sage advice, their business model is on borrowed time.

Someone I know uses an LLM as an intermediary in a difficult relationship to help them buffer their responses. The advice is instant, and it’s very, very good. What will happen over time? Will this person grow, eventually cutting out the LLM? Color me skeptical.

In the meantime, at scale, this is a serious hit to the advice-mavens. It’s also a risk to the rest of us. If our friends and relatives stop coming to us, favoring LLMs for advice, what are we to them?

To my Substack audience, this is me lobbying for us to grow up fast. This isn’t about piety or righteousness. It’s about preserving what connection pathways we still can.

If we imagine we can compete with LLMs on advice, we’re simply failing to realize we’ve already lost that fight. We’re in a fast-paced war to figure out what humans can offer that AI cannot.

Is There a Real Baby in The Bathwater?

This is the only image that’s not stock. Pictured: Author

This is about more than coaching or AI. It’s a cautionary tale about our humanity. We are not out of time, and none of us knows how this ends. Not even the experts. That’s not to argue that we ignore them.

There is part of me that believes, probably naively, that people will still prefer to have a real human listen to them, even when we’ve solved for every grain of sand in The Uncanny Valley.

Some people pay ridiculous money for antiquities. Others buy and drive collector cars that get fewer than ten miles to the gallon. Perhaps similar people will also pay top dollar to “sit in dialogue with a real human.” Perhaps some will also get hoodwinked by sophisticated fakes, just as they do today.

But how long can even this reality last? I doubt it will be forever.

If we survive long enough, AI advice givers will eventually win the war of skills and economics. They already are. The people collecting the metadata from those intimate and private conversations can already sell it to marketers at rates that will make them far wealthier than any therapist or coach could ever be.

Advice was already cheap, but now it’s worthless, and AI is proving it.

And yet? I stand my ground on advice from any source, real human or synthetic. Sure, it feels like we want to be told what to do. That feeling is compelling. But as long as we’re well-adjusted adults, that feeling is often a misguided one.

The key is knowing when we need expertise. I believe it’s less often than we imagine. We can be our own heroes, and I hope the AIs never figure this much out: Our best advice is already in us.

If you believe me on that point, even a little bit, it’s worth asking ourselves, What are we gonna do about it?

Thanks for reading.

~Damon