This year has been one of the most important, yet challenging years of my life. And as we’ll see, that might not be a coincidence.

As you probably know, I’ve been calling out some of the shady dealings and worst practices of the self-help industry for my entire career. Whether it’s slimy sales tactics, unrealistic and unscientific advice, or promising results that simply aren’t possible, I’ve dedicated much of my adult life to “cleaning up” this space as much as possible.

You could even say that I have come to see this as my purpose, my calling in life.

About a year ago, a number of people I know started asking me about using ChatGPT as a therapist or life coach. Turns out, millions of people were doing this.

I was intrigued, so I tried it out. The results were… mixed.

Very mixed.

On the one hand, AI has access to all of the known psychological research, is trained on thousands of hours of clinical transcripts and possesses pretty much all of human knowledge within it.

On the other hand, it often has no clue how to use it.

ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me …