Dont Be an Askhole
We all know one... The friend who texts you to look up an address they could Google. The coworker who asks you to summarize a document they could read themselves. The relative who calls you to troubleshoot a problem they haven't even attempted to understand.
You know the feeling. The small flash of irritation. The brief internal negotiation: is this worth the friction of pushing back? Usually, you just do it. It's easier. It's faster. And it's "not a big deal." But it is a deal. Maybe not on any single request. But cumulatively, the deal is this: someone has decided that your time is more disposable than theirs. They're not trying to be disrespectful. They probably don't even realize they're doing it. But they've offloaded a small cognitive task onto you that they could have handled themselves, and they did it because it was easier to use you than to do the work.
Let's give that a name.
An askhole is someone who routinely asks you to do things they could do themselves.
I'm going to get harsh in a minute. I'm going to say some things that sound aggressive, and I want you to understand why before I get there — because the harshness isn't the point. The point is that we've reached a tipping point where the askhole pattern has quietly become something much bigger than a personal annoyance. It's now a literacy problem. A competitive problem. And increasingly, a respect problem.
But before any of that lands, you need to feel the basic, non-technological version of it — because I guarantee you've felt it.
The Feeling You Already Know
Imagine someone calls you and says: hey, can you Google the population of Cleveland for me? You'd pause. Not because the population of Cleveland is sacred information. Not because looking it up would consume the rest of the afternoon. You'd pause because you know — and they know — that they could have done it themselves.
They have a phone. They have internet access. They know how Google works. The time and effort required for them to obtain the answer are essentially identical to the time and effort required for you to obtain it. So why are they transferring the task to you?
That's the part that changes the meaning of the request. They're no longer asking because they lack access. They're not asking because you possess some rare expertise. They're asking you to absorb a tiny inconvenience that they simply don't feel like absorbing themselves. At some point, that becomes offensive. Not violently offensive. Not end-the-relationship offensive. But it carries a message: my thirty seconds are worth more than your thirty seconds. I'd rather interrupt your day than type this question myself.
If you've ever felt that — and you have — then what comes next won't sound as harsh as it might have. You've already been on the other side of this. You've already had the thought. You just may not have said it out loud. I'm going to say it out loud.
The Part That Sounds Aggressive
If you call me and ask me to Google something for you, the answer is: fuck you. You have Google. If you send me a document and ask me to make it shorter, the answer may also be: fuck you. You have ChatGPT. You have Gemini. You have Claude. You have access to tools that can summarize, reorganize, explain, translate, compare, and rewrite almost anything you can paste into them.
Some of those tools cost twenty dollars a month. Most of them will perform basic tasks for free. My lowest billable rate is $350 an hour, and I don't do half-hour billing.
So yes, I will shorten your paragraph. Here is my payment link. We can discuss the paragraph after you click it. That probably sounds harsh. Maybe even arrogant. But if you've ever been on the receiving end of the Cleveland call — if you've ever felt that flash of "you could have done this yourself" — then you already understand the impulse. You may not have said it. You may not have sent the invoice. But you felt it.
The difference is that I've decided to stop absorbing the inconvenience. And the reason isn't just personal irritation. It's that the category of things people ask me to do has expanded dramatically while the effort required to do those things themselves has collapsed to almost nothing. The tools changed. The etiquette hasn't. That gap is where the askhole lives.
The Favor Changed
Ten years ago, asking a strong writer to shorten a document was a perfectly reasonable request. Writing was specialized work. Summarizing was specialized work. Taking six pages of confused thinking and turning it into two pages of coherent language required time, concentration, and some degree of skill. The person asking might genuinely have been unable to do it well. That's no longer necessarily true.
Today, you can open ChatGPT and write: make this shorter while preserving the important points. Then you paste the text. That's it. You don't need to understand artificial intelligence. You don't need to write code. You don't need to attend a seminar, earn a certification, or become whatever LinkedIn has decided a "prompt engineer" is this week. You need to type one sentence.
The tool may not produce the perfect answer on the first attempt, but neither would the random person you interrupted. You can ask it to try again. You can tell it what it missed. You can ask for a professional version, a friendlier version, or a version that sounds less like it was produced by a committee of nervous attorneys. The mechanical portion of the task has been commoditized. That means the favor has changed. You're not asking me to exercise some rare human capability. You're asking me to operate an appliance on your behalf. It's like handing me your dirty plate and asking me to place it in the dishwasher because you haven't yet developed a personal relationship with the buttons.
At some point, I'm going to point toward the dishwasher.
The AI Competence Tax
This is what I call the AI competence tax. It's the growing cost of refusing, failing, or simply neglecting to develop basic competence with artificial intelligence. Sometimes that tax will arrive as an invoice. Ask me to perform a task that ChatGPT can complete in thirty seconds, and perhaps I'll do it. But you're not paying for thirty seconds of work. You're paying the minimum cost of interrupting a professional whose time you chose to use instead of your own.
The larger tax, however, won't arrive through Stripe. You'll pay it in time because routine work takes you longer than it should. You'll pay it in money because you keep hiring people to do things you can now do yourself. You'll pay it in speed because competitors will move from idea to execution while you're still waiting for someone to help organize your thoughts. You'll pay it in autonomy because you'll remain dependent on coworkers, friends, family members, and consultants for ordinary cognitive tasks. You'll pay it in credibility because eventually people will notice that you routinely ask them to do things you've made no effort to learn for yourself. And organizations will pay this tax at scale. They'll bury their best people beneath low-value requests. They'll hire additional staff to produce work that smaller, AI-capable teams can complete faster. They'll hold meetings to discuss documents that could have been summarized before anyone entered the room. They'll pay consultants to manufacture first drafts instead of paying them to challenge assumptions, make decisions, and solve the hard parts. The bill will be enormous. And much of it will be completely avoidable.
This Doesn't Mean "Never Ask Me Anything"
Here's where we come back from the edge...
I don't want people to stop asking me questions. Questions are one of my favorite things. I've spent most of my life in and around consulting, even during the periods when I technically had a normal nine-to-five job. Once you accumulate enough experience across enough strange and overlapping subjects, people begin calling you. That's natural. I enjoy being asked for my opinion. I enjoy looking at a problem from four directions, finding the hidden fifth direction, and then becoming mildly obsessed with the sixth direction that nobody involved knew existed.
Nebulous conversations aren't the problem. Interesting questions aren't the problem. The problem is confusing access to my judgment with access to my labor.
There's a difference between calling me and saying: Rich, can you shorten this website copy for me? And saying: Rich, I'm about to use AI to shorten this website. Before I do, I'd like your opinion about what the site absolutely cannot afford to lose.
Those aren't remotely the same request. The first one says: do this task for me. The second says: I'm doing the task. I value your experience and would like your perspective before I make the decision.
Now we're having a conversation. Now you're not asking me to wipe your ass. You're asking me which toilet paper I recommend, knowing full well that I happen to be in the toilet paper business and probably have an alarming number of opinions about ply count, tensile strength, and the collapse of standards in modern paper manufacturing.
I'm happy to discuss toilet paper. I'm considerably less interested in following you into the bathroom.
Ask Me the Question Only I Can Answer
AI doesn't make expertise irrelevant. It reveals where the expertise actually is. The low-value portion of many knowledge tasks was always the physical production of the artifact: writing the words, organizing the bullets, cleaning up the grammar, summarizing the report, building the first comparison, turning notes into a basic outline.
Those things once consumed enough time and skill that we often confused them with the value itself.
AI separates the labor from the judgment. It can shorten the document. It can't automatically know what your board chairman will interpret as weakness. It can rewrite the email. It may not know that the recipient has been quietly resisting the project for six months and will use one poorly chosen sentence to delay it again. It can compare two business models. It can't know which one fits your temperament, your relationships, your available capital, and your actual tolerance for pain. It can produce a competent answer. It can't always determine which question should have been asked in the first place.
That's where experienced people become more valuable, not less. Don't ask the architect to draw a rectangle you could draw yourself. Ask whether the building should exist. Ask where it will fail. Ask which assumptions are carrying more weight than they can support. Ask what everyone else appears to be missing. Ask what the decision will look like two years from now if the market changes. Ask the question that requires history, context, instinct, pattern recognition, accountability, or an uncomfortable degree of honesty. That's a question worth making the call for.
Bring Me the Brain Dump
This is why I've changed the way I want people to approach me about projects.
Don't begin by calling me with a vague idea and expecting me to extract it from your head like a dentist pulling a deeply embedded molar.
Start with ChatGPT. Open a conversation and explain the idea as though you're pitching it. Tell it what you're trying to build. Tell it who the customer is. Tell it what problem you think you're solving. Tell it what resources you have, what constraints you face, and what you're unsure about.
Then pressure-test the idea. Ask: what am I missing? What would this actually take? What are the obvious risks? What assumptions am I making? What is the simplest version that could work? What questions should an experienced person ask me before getting involved?
Don't treat this as homework. Treat it as leverage. You're not trying to have ChatGPT bless the project. You're using it to turn the cloud of disconnected thoughts in your head into something another person can inspect.
Push back on it. Correct it. Tell it when it has misunderstood you. Add the things you forgot. Explore the tangents. Let the conversation become messy. Messy is fine. Messy contains information. Then send me the link.
Not a carefully polished executive summary that's been scrubbed of every uncertainty and inconvenient detail. Send me the brain dump.
When I read that conversation, I can see the idea taking shape. I can see what you emphasized. I can see what you ignored. I can see where the machine challenged you and where you resisted. I can see which pieces are clear, which pieces are wishful thinking, and which pieces may contain the beginnings of something genuinely interesting. Most importantly, we're no longer beginning at zero. I have context. I have direction. I understand your language. I can see what you're actually trying to accomplish instead of spending the first hour playing a bad game of Twenty Questions.
Now, when we speak, we can start with the real conversation.
"I Don't Know How to Do That"
Fine. I mean that sincerely. Nobody is born knowing how to use a new tool. There was a period when most people didn't know how to use email. There was a period when typing a web address into a browser felt technical. There was a period when using a search engine effectively was a genuine professional advantage.
Every technology begins with a learning curve. That's why I put a free introductory AI course directly beside the project intake process. Don't know how to explain your idea to ChatGPT? The course will show you. Don't know how to develop the conversation? It'll help you get started. Don't know how to share the link? That's learnable too. There's no shame in not knowing something you haven't learned yet. But the expiration date on "I don't know how" is getting shorter.
The unusual thing about AI is that the tool itself can help you learn how to use it. You can open ChatGPT and write: I'm new to this. I have an idea I want to explain to a consultant, but I don't know how to organize it. Interview me one question at a time and help me develop it. It will begin. No textbook. No six-week program. No technology certification. Just a conversation. Not knowing is understandable. Refusing to try is increasingly expensive.
A Civilizational Reclassification of Effort
Here's the deeper construct. AI is changing which forms of effort society considers reasonable to outsource to another human. Calculators did this to arithmetic. Washing machines did it to laundering. Search engines did it to factual lookup. GPS did it to route planning. AI is now doing it to a broad class of language-based cognitive work.
Once a capability becomes cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to access, society gradually stops viewing inability as an unavoidable limitation and begins viewing it as a failure to adopt.
That transition is often harsh. At first, the tool is optional. Then it's advantageous. Then it becomes expected. Eventually, refusing to use it imposes costs on everyone around you. That's the point where the competence tax becomes socially visible. Your lack of adoption no longer affects only you. It consumes the time of colleagues, employees, friends, consultants, and institutions that must compensate for it.
We've been through this cycle before. Reading was once a specialized skill. Then literacy became necessary to participate fully in society. Computer skills were specialized. Then computers became part of ordinary work. Searching the internet was an advanced capability. Then "Google it" became a basic expectation. We're now moving toward delegation literacy: the ability to express an objective to a machine, supply relevant context, inspect the result, correct it, and determine when human expertise is actually required. That may become as basic as knowing how to send an email.
A New Etiquette for Expertise
We're developing a new social etiquette around knowledgeable people. The old sequence was: I have a problem. You know things. Please solve it.
The emerging sequence is: I have a problem. I used the tools available to investigate it. Here's what I learned. Here's what I tried. Here's the output. Here's where I became uncertain. Now I need your judgment.
That's an entirely different relationship. It respects expertise because it doesn't squander expertise on the easiest part of the task. It also makes the person asking the question more capable. They arrive informed enough to participate in the answer. They understand the basic tradeoffs. They've already encountered some of the vocabulary. They know enough to recognize when the conversation has moved beyond what the machine can reliably resolve.
This isn't just more efficient. It's more intellectually honest. You're not pretending that you need me to manufacture words when what you really need is confidence. You're not disguising a request for responsibility as a request for editing. You're not asking me to think because you've decided not to. You've done the accessible work. Now you're asking me to contribute the part that comes from decades of experience. That's a fair trade.
Expertise Is Moving Up the Stack
AI isn't eliminating consultants, writers, strategists, programmers, designers, attorneys, or other knowledge professionals. It's eliminating the presumption that their value lies in performing every step manually.
The value is moving upward. From producing information to evaluating it. From assembling words to directing outcomes. From retrieving answers to identifying consequences. From generating options to choosing among them. From doing the task to accepting responsibility for the decision. That transition may be uncomfortable for people who built careers around being faster than everyone else at producing the first draft. It'll be less uncomfortable for people whose real value has always been judgment.
The best professionals will increasingly expect clients to use AI before involving them — not because the professional wants to contribute less, but because they want to contribute at the correct level.
I don't want to spend your money rewriting text that a machine can rewrite. I want to determine whether the text should exist. I want to understand the strategy behind it. I want to identify the audience you forgot. I want to tell you why your seemingly obvious idea is likely to fail — or why the strange part everyone keeps trying to remove may be the entire opportunity. That's the work. Everything else is becoming the price of admission.
At Some Point, You Have to Learn
The technology will have become so accessible, the effort so small, and the alternative so obvious that the request itself will communicate a lack of respect for the other person's time.
That doesn't mean you must trust every AI answer. You shouldn't. It doesn't mean you should stop seeking human expertise. You shouldn't. It means you must learn where the machine's work ends and the human's value begins.
Use AI to retrieve. Use it to summarize. Use it to draft. Use it to organize. Use it to clarify your own thinking. Use it to expose the first layer of questions. Then call the human being. Ask for judgment. Ask for experience. Ask for context. Ask for the thing that can't be obtained merely by pressing a button. And when you come to me with that question, I may give you more time, more thought, and more useful honesty than you expected.
But if you call and ask me to Google something for you? Here is my payment link.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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