The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

Is AI your biggest threat or your greatest opportunity? 🧠✨

• Dr. Jon Finn

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Is AI making you more productive... or just more overwhelmed? 🤔

In this podcast, Dr Jon Finn explains how mastering Human-AI collaboration will transform our world.

In 2025, AI is predicted to impact at least 182 million jobs - not always by replacing humans, but by transforming how we work. In the chat with his co-host, Dr Finn highlights that sustained success in the AI era requires us to master our Brain States to unlock Premium Cognitive Performance.

He also explains how he has pioneered unprecedented Human-AI collaboration training programmes and reveals the cutting-edge neuroscience, behavioural science, and the proven strategies of world champions which underpin his insights.

Sign-up for his FREE live workshop here (limited places available). 🚀

  • Title: Go From Replaceable to Irreplaceable & Unstoppable In The AI Era In 3 Simple Steps (Without Tech Skills)


In this high-impact session, you'll discover:

  • The three core roles people will have in the AI Era 🔮
  • The Brain States Science that helps you create the same value in 1 hour that it normally takes 3 hours to create âš¡
  • Why AI tools alone won't make you irreplaceable (and what will) 🤖
  • The hidden biological key that separates the Replaceable from the Irreplaceable 🧠
  • How to transform AI from a threat into your personal super-power ✨
  • The proven 3-step process to optimize your Brain States for premium cognitive performance 📈


Sign-up for his FREE live workshop here (limited places available). 🚀

Speaker 1:

Our world is being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence. We're facing constant change and constant digital distraction. The pressure to adapt has never been greater. For so many people, is artificial intelligence your biggest threat if you're in business, or perhaps your greatest opportunity. Well, those are the issues we're going to discuss on this new podcast with Dr Dr John Finn. John, welcome along great to talk to you again. This is a massive question and I know it's something that you're focusing on really firmly at the moment yeah, hi, andrew, yeah, we are.

Speaker 2:

I think we've got a pretty good track record at Tougher Minds over nearly 25 years of seeing what is coming in the world. We were very early with resilience and the understanding people needed that and then coupling that to the VUCA world and now we are seeing the real power of AI and it is going to transform our society and I absolutely want to help people to navigate this challenge without having technical skills, because I know that's frightening for people, and we're seeing some really good progress people are making when they're using the insights that we share. So, yeah, I think this is a really important topic to focus on, not just today but, you know, in the coming weeks, months and years, because this is going to just be part of our lives and we can either use it and if we use it in the right way, I think it's going to help us to thrive or we're going to get left behind, which always happens. You know the guy that was stood at the bottom of central park 100 years ago with his hundreds of horses when, increasingly, the fords came rolling past and, you know, the guy with the horses went out of business and went bankrupt.

Speaker 2:

We've seen these moments in history before, time and again, but I think this one's going to happen faster than ever. It's not hyperbole, it's absolutely real. I've been studying this for a good three-plus years now, looking at the trends, looking at the trends, looking at the impact, using the tools. It's absolutely real. I speak to people every day who are telling me about how this is impacting their life in a very positive way, because they're being proactive.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, it's really, really interesting you know it's fascinating, and I know, with all the work you've done around human behavior and understanding how our brains work and how we can harness that insight for our benefit, you're identifying that there's a gap, if you like, that's now apparent, between people who are harnessing AI effectively and adapting to the new world and those who are falling behind and losing out in a big way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we live in a complex world and I think the simplest way to think about it is that the world as it is makes it more difficult for us to be at our best. Very specifically, it makes it more difficult for us to get our brain working well. We don't think about our brain working well. We don't think about our brain all too much because it's encased inside the skull, but that's what this all comes back to. The world makes it more difficult to use our brain well, and it and what it's habitualized, the world has habitualized people into doing, is just getting stuck in this misery. A busy, medium charge quite a good word. Busy, busy, medium charge work that is instantly gratifying checking your emails, doing the fairly mindless work but it's not satisfying or fulfilling. And unfortunately, this work that we've been habitualised to do is increasingly being replaced by AI, because AI's big strength right now but it's adapting all the time is doing repetitive work, and we're seeing examples where companies have used just one chatbot to replace 700 people. These case studies are coming out almost on a daily basis. So people's brains are, on average, not functioning very well. We can see that in big sets of data, we can see that just by speaking to people and, yeah, that's coinciding with technology that's coming along that's able to do the work that humans have become more habitualized to doing. So that's really really interesting and challenging and it's already. Ai is already replacing human job. It's not nice to say, but it's real.

Speaker 2:

But the other exciting prospect of ai is that what we've been learning over just the last few months really is, as it as it's developing and becoming more powerful, it's actually becoming also like a supercharger, almost like a battery pack for our high charge brain states. So if we learn to use it in the right way, it extends our most powerful premium cognitive thinking, the thinking that we know is so essential for feeling good about ourselves and progressing and learning and growing and getting into those eudaimonic states. But it's more and more challenging to do because of the conditions of the vuka world. So what we're seeing is is that that high charge brain state work is, um about three times more valuable than the medium-charge brain state work, probably more than that. So, essentially, when you're in a high-charge brain state, you can add as much value in 20 minutes to your own life, to the business you work for, to your own business, than you can have an hour of medium-charge brain state work, of an hour of medium charge brain state work. So what the AI allows us to do if we learn how to adopt it and collaborate with it is that it allows us to do, allows us to automate more of the medium charge work.

Speaker 2:

And you know, some people are really far ahead with that, and what people are going to now start to see is more of these, that the tools that can help you to do that kind of, come into your day-to-day hardware and interfaces. So Apple has kind of started to roll this out across their devices. There'll be things at work that they've been put in front of you. You know people will be familiar with things like Calendly, which isn't particularly new, but it's increasingly sophisticated. You know you don't need a, a person to book a meeting for you anymore, you just do it through a digital interface, those kind of things. But they're coming at scale all the time.

Speaker 2:

Uh, just yesterday I created a sort of a classic social media video, literally in minutes, just completely automated end to end, and what it produced was I was happy to put out on my social media feed.

Speaker 2:

I said where it came from, but it was pretty good quality stuff, but we'll automate more and more of that and we're going to be able to then collaborate with the AI to make it easier for us to get into those precious premium cognitive performance states so that we can move closer to the limitless idea that, if you've seen the film Limitless, bradley Cooper plays but this is without taking drugs and it's not going to kill you. It allows us to actually think clearly and get out of brain fog and all this stuff that we feel is holding us back. So, yeah, it's really, really exciting. So I've touched on quite a few big ideas there very, very quickly, and I'm sure we're going to explore these ideas in much more depth in this pod, but also in the coming weeks, months and years yeah, there is certainly a lot to think about and a lot to understand, john, that's for sure, and many people might be feeling extremely overwhelmed and perhaps even intimidated.

Speaker 1:

But you talked about brain states there, which I know people who followed you in the past will have heard you explain in great detail and in a very practical and applicable way. But just explain to us again, if you would, how this insight that we have into our brain states can help us capitalize on the opportunity that AI offers, and why yeah, so the way that we think about the human brain is it's like a battery and it only has so much charge.

Speaker 2:

I mean, our brain literally is like a battery. It runs on electricity and chemicals. There's only so much charge in every 24-hour period. That's all we've got. It's's a limited resource and we're using that battery to live our life, to do the things in our life that make us to feel healthy, happy and at our best and, ultimately, to add value to our life. But it's limited and what we've learned over the past 25 years is that we broadly operate in three battery states. We've got a recharge state where we sleep and do non-sleep recharge, like relaxing, switching off we. We operate in a medium charge brain state, which is doing busy, habitual, mindless stuff inside of work outside. And we operate in a high charge brain state where we're doing our premium cognitive thinking, solving complex problems, um, working on ourselves, building new habits, etc. And so in a 24-hour period we're operating in all those three brain states ideally, and what we've learned is that when people are really nailing it, that brain state profile looks a bit like an arrowhead pointing upwards or like a pyramid. So the basis is recharge, the middle level is medium charge and the high level is high charge. So in a 24-hour period, the basis of our brain state use, the widest bit of the profile, is recharge, which people might be spending in a working day 9, 10, 11, 12 hours in that recharge state. Then they might be spending 7, 8, 9 hours in the medium charge state and that then frees up four to five hours in the high charge state. But the reality is most people are not operating like that. What's happening for most people is in the busy, busy, always on world, which I think has been negatively impacted by the lockdown and the pandemic and disruptions to people's working patterns, is that people are, they get stuck in this medium charge brain state, so instead of their profile looking like an arrowhead or a pyramid, it looks like a cross. The middle section is the medium charge. People are then doing very, very minimal high charge, if any, and very, very minimal recharge, and often the recharge is really poor quality. So what the ai is doing is it's coming along and it's automating all the medium charge stuff that businesses are currently paying people to do, and this is absolutely real.

Speaker 2:

I was just listening to a podcast this morning some people that I really value, and I then started reading a research paper from a company called Winning by Design. Winning by Design are the founder of Winning by Design was on the podcast. The founder of Winning by Design was on the podcast. They work with 25% of all the publicly listed SaaS companies in the world. They are a serious sales trainer and their paper says in 2025, ai won't just assist people, it will replace them.

Speaker 2:

And this is what is happening, because a lot of what any of us do in our day to day jobs well, in our jobs is tasks that are repetitive, and any task that is repetitive can be automated. The technology is now available to do that, and what we're getting is businesses coming into the market and offering that technology at just a fraction of the cost it costs to employ a person to do it. So people are busy in these medium charge brain states, but the AI is coming along and it can do that work at a fraction of the costs it costs for a human to do it. So that's why a company can replace 700 people with a chatbot. So I think a good way to think about the medium and high-charged states is thinking about how much value they add to our lives, to our work and if we think about how economists measure human productivity, it's pretty blunt. It's almost like a factory model idea where you turn up for work and you do eight hours and you get eight hours of value. But that's different when we're doing more cognitive, desk-based work, because we all know we can be doing being present for you know, an hour, a few hours, and maybe not get anything done, or we could just do a really focused hour and get loads done, whereas if you're in a factory, on a conveyor belt or something, there is a there's a very procedural thing taking place. So I think what ai is doing is shining a light on actually the value of different tasks that we do, and I think that's a really good way to think about your job.

Speaker 2:

Your, your role is that it's just a series of tasks. Some of those tasks will be replaced by ai. Some can't yet be replaced by ai. But if we think about the medium charge tasks, they are low value. They're low value tasks because instead of someone being paid £20 an hour to do them, you can get a bot to do it for £10 an hour. So what's going to happen? Are people going to keep paying £20 an hour to get it done, or will they pay £0.10? They'll pay £0.10 because they want a competitive advantage, right? But also in your own life. Why would you want to spend time doing loads of tasks that don't offer a lot of value to your own life when you could just automate them and outsource them?

Speaker 2:

The high-charge work that can't be um completely automated, that's high value. We would calculate that it's three times more valuable at least three times more valuable, than the low charge work. So if, if you look at your working day and all the tasks that you do and you start thinking about the low value, medium charge tasks that you do and you start thinking about the low value, medium charge tasks that you do and the high charge, high value tasks that you do, you can almost do like a timeline. And that means, if they did, an eight hour day of high charge tasks. So I think that's a really good way to think about what is going on for ourselves, adding value to our own lives, but also for businesses on for ourselves, adding value to our own lives, but also for businesses. So what we can do by optimizing how humans and I collaborate is we can make it easier for people every day to add more value to their own life, to their uh, to the business they work for, to the business that they run for, to the business that they run, by doing less low value work and automating more of that and doing more high charge, high value work and actually working with ai to supercharge your ability to do that. So I think that's a really exciting picture for the future.

Speaker 2:

Um, and then you start to think that if we go back to the brain, stat ideas, the medium charge being bogged down in the medium charge work doesn't just stop us doing high charge, it also stops us recharging properly, because you know you're sitting on the sofa at the end of the day, you think you're relaxing, but you're not. You're scrolling and you're getting stressed out and you're ignoring the other person in the room. You're not're relaxing, but you're not. You're scrolling and you're getting stressed out and you're ignoring the other person in the room. You're not interacting properly, all that kind of stuff. So, for me, the people that adopt AI and move from being replaceable many, many people are right now replaceable if they don't start using AI in the way we're talking about. It moves people from being replaceable to irreplaceable, but actually to becoming unstoppable, because we can start to use this technology to free ourselves up to do the things that we wanna do, to do the things that make us feel good about ourselves.

Speaker 2:

And I can see a future where there will be three core roles. There will be roles for what I would call the innovators, those that are working with AI to create the future, literally because we're not limited by our very, very scarce high-charge brain state resource anymore, because we can plug the AI into that, and we've been doing this over the last few months and it almost makes that high charge thinking not quite limitless, but it takes it as close to that as I think, um, or closer to that than we've ever been able to get to before. It helps us to sort of get rid and outsource. You know we're used to outsourcing out. Because we've done that with, let's say, a call centre will get outsourced somewhere.

Speaker 2:

Or even in my grandparents era manufacturing the weaves that they're, one of my grandfathers was a fabricator very skilled at creating machinery. They went and trained people in different countries to do that because it was cheaper, right, so this isn't new. Now we can outsource that to technology. So I think we'll have the innovators. I think then we'll have the automators, so they'll be the people that will keep working with the technology and they will program it and automate it and keep developing it, and then we might call those engineers right now. And then we will have the coaches, so people that will work with other humans to help them to keep optimizing their brain states, because even though the AI can help us to do more high charge work, we've still got to get the brain state management right to unlock that, and currently what's largely going on is brain state mismanagement, and that's the work that we need to do to bridge that human AI gap is we need to help people to get better at managing their brain states. I mean, there's loads in there, Andrew.

Speaker 2:

So even when I say because I've been so deep in this when I say the word engineers, developers, we've seen very, very recently the boss of NVIDIA, which is one of the most valuable companies in the world it's a company that makes the AI, the chips that AI run on who's essentially for the last 10 years, been going around in a very genuine, authentic way saying we need to develop young people who can code and give every young person the opportunity to learn how to code because that's going to be so key for the future, now saying we don't need anyone to know how to code anymore because the AI can do it, or we need enough fraction of the people to understand it, and that that's flipped to literally in months. So that's what's happening in the world. So this isn't a fad. These are not scare stories. They are absolutely real, but you can use them literally to create the future that you want to create for yourself, and the early adopters will get a massive advantage that could potentially be unassailable.

Speaker 2:

We saw companies like Microsoft get on this early wave of technology. Google you see. A lot of the things those guys do don't work so well, but they still have such a dominant position in the market because they were early adopters and they embedded their reputation and their brands. That's what's going to happen again in the AI world, and it's not just for corporates. I think it's for individuals as well. They can really start to carve something out, and I think that what we want to offer is that not only to help people to accelerate in their current work roles or current businesses, but I think AI offers new opportunities to create your own thing if you want to create your own thing, and we want to help people to do that, including helping people to become those coaches, those human AI optimization coaches now.

Speaker 1:

You might have set minds racing there, john, with that analysis. I'm sure you will. You've probably inspired people as well to think about an amazing future for themselves, and this idea of innovators, automators and coaches is a fascinating one, as is the term I know you've coined yourself human AI optimization. This analysis of the state we're in and the pathway forward Is this, then, applicable within a large organization and just as much for an individual as well? Can it work for everyone? This analysis and the insights that you're sharing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely does. You know, when it comes to businesses, we're a bit more hard-headed out, where we're thinking about the bottom line and making sure that we have enough cash in the business to do the things that we want to do and stay healthy, and that's why we can't avoid wanting to be more efficient and effective with our resources and that's why the ai is so attractive. Um, the this one in by design pair probs started to really, you know, it's a fascinating analysis of what is going on in the in the sales side of things, salesforce are a huge player in terms of working with agentic AI. So at a high level, agentic AI is sort of flipping the software as a service model on its head. Instead of the software being the service, the service is provided by the software, so it's called service as a software.

Speaker 1:

I don't want to get too technical on this book but salesforce are a big, are a big online sales um platform, aren't they? So they'll be interested in in innovation for their clients, as you, as you're suggesting yeah, they're working with.

Speaker 2:

You know, if you go to the city of london, the salesforce tower, um, you know they're. They're working with leading businesses, helping them to optimise how they sell, and they're leading the charge with some of this sales technology. It's seeping into every single sector, I mean, I think. A great example. If people are trying to get their head around this, how is this actually going to play out? This is what Amazon have really been doing for the last 20 years. Now you know the old experience, which still exists, but we're now living in sort of a hybrid shopping world, don't we? You only used to be able to walk into a shop, pretty much, and buy something. I suppose we've had mail order kind of things going on, but most people went and bought something in a shop. What Amazon did is they looked at that process and said, right, how do we streamline it, how do we make it more efficient and more effective? And that's what's going to happen with everything is that every process is going to be more efficient, more effective and where automation can be used, it will be used, and I think the businesses that are going to thrive are not just the ones that use ai to try to cut costs, like it's going to be the ones that use it to help their people do more high-charge, more high-impact work.

Speaker 2:

The only constant in the world we live in are new problems to solve. For a business that's solving problems around, how do we delight our customers? How do we give them the products that they want? How do we give them the services that they want? How do we give them the products that they want? How do we give them the services that they want? And what that looked like 12 months ago is often now different to what it's going to look like in six months or another 12 months. Things are moving so quickly all the time. People's needs. I just saw an advertisement on WeTransfer, the video sharing service we use, and it was for clothing that apparently repairs your skin with infrared light. I mean, I have quite a strong background in sports science. I'm not sure if I believe that stuff, but this is what this is. That's almost like futuristic, isn't it? But it's real. It made me double take and check it out. But so yeah.

Speaker 2:

So for businesses, this is going to be huge and there will be clear business winners, clear business losers. Businesses that were winning, winning, winning for the last five years could go very, very quickly if they don't keep up to pace with this. New emerging businesses, could you know, displace very established businesses very, very quickly. I think we're going to see real dynamism. Um, we've seen that with um. I suppose some of the more recently established tech giants, like Meta you know, meta didn't exist 20 years ago Now it's one of the biggest businesses in the world, same with Google, et cetera. I think we're going to see that again. We're going to see a shakeup of the dominant players.

Speaker 2:

But that's also what's really interesting. I think, that all those big tech companies, the big six I think it's the it's probably the first time in history why the biggest six companies in the world are all focused on the same thing ai. They are spending billions and billions, if not hundreds of billions, on this technology. They are backing it to the hilt. So it will succeed. So yeah, for businesses, absolutely, and then for individuals, it gives you the opportunity to get that work-life balance back and to do more rewarding, more engaging work that makes you feel good about yourself at the end of the day. So, personally, within our own business, we've been using this and I'm really excited just to keep going with keeping learning how to use these tools and optimise them for what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

John, I know that this analysis is something you've been developing for a long time, but people, I think the first question they'll have is you know, okay, so what should I do? That's what I'm thinking now when you talk about skin repairing garments, but I know you're only mentioning that to illustrate the rapid pace of change in all areas of our lives. But in terms of the AI revolution, then, if you're a business or an individual, what should you do and how will you be guiding people in the face of these massive challenges?

Speaker 2:

Yeah well for businesses. We've put together a human AI optimization strategic blueprint so we can guide businesses through this step by step. But really it's about using habit science to help your people to optimize their brain states and then you know, let them loose. And if they've got their brain states right and everyone's goals are aligned, then they're going to be able to help you to take the business into the AI world in a really significant way. But getting brain states optimised is really really challenging to do if you don't know what you're doing. We've done this time and time again and we've got the IP to help businesses do that.

Speaker 2:

We're already having some really exciting conversations and starting to do some work in this space, including with one of the biggest tech companies in the world, which is really really exciting and they're coming to us and asking us. They've found us because they recognise our expertise in in behavior change and you know, so often in change management the brain has just been ignored. But we can't ignore it anymore. We need to help people to harness it and optimize it and then for the individuals you know, you can actually get free access to our brain state training programs in the app in the haventley county university. You can go in there, you can measure where your brain state is, you can take the training to start to move your brain state score from wherever it is to a better score and we can go on a journey with you to do to do that um through the app and also through our one-to-one human AI optimization coaching programs. And then, excitingly, just last week we got our first group of certified, first group of people training to become certified habit mechanic human AI optimization coaches, which is really, really exciting.

Speaker 2:

So I think every business is going to be needing these expertise on the ground to help their people to keep getting into those high charge brain state. That's going to add all the value to the organization. So, yeah, I think what's been missing in the conversation so far is there's a lot of focus on developing the technology, but we haven't been thinking too much about humans. So we want to put that right and you know our mission is to help the first million human beings to get optimized for human and I collaboration which might sound a bit cold and a bit clinical, but another way you can think about that is to help people to get ready to be at their best regularly in the next phase of our history, because this is akin to the industrial revolution. It's an AI revolution and it is going to change the world at a rapid pace.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, that's fantastic insight, john. Um and um, it's great that you are providing this opportunity, then, for people to, to, to harness this opportunity. Um, if that's not tautology, but but yeah, I think, um, it's certainly something that's going to grab a lot of attention. Now I understand as well. Coming up in 2025, in early 2025, you are staging an online webinar to explain more about this. The title is Go From Replaceable to Irreplaceable and Unstoppable in the AI Era in three simple steps without tech skills. So, just to conclude, please tell us a little bit about that and how people can gain access to that.

Speaker 2:

Yes, it's a free webinar which you can sign up to from our website Just go to the homepage. You'll see a little pop-up website. Just go to the homepage you'll see a little pop up. But we've also been emailing our database about this. So we are going to talk about some of the things we've just touched upon today, but go deeper, ultimately, and really help people to understand how this is going to impact their life and what they can proactively do about it.

Speaker 2:

Um, the way I think about this is that ai is like a new species that has landed on our planet and we're going to have to work with it, and it's a species that is rapidly evolving. Almost on a weekly basis. It's becoming more and more powerful, which means it can become more and more helpful to us. It's going to be hardwired into every bit of tech that we use, and we want to help people to understand it and to use it as a springboard to be a healthier, happier, higher performing version of themselves, or to ultimately take their business to the next level, or to help people set up a business in this space if they want to become a certified coach. So we're going to go deeper into the things we talked about today in a really practical way and just help people to get their heads around this and to help them to understand, if they want to get better at optimising how they collaborate with the AI and what they can do.

Speaker 1:

Well, John, thanks for your time so much. We'll put the link to access that free webinar in the description of this podcast. It's been a fascinating discussion, John. I'm sure, as I say, many people will have their interest piqued by your idea of human AI optimization. If you had to say one thing to a business person or an individual as they perhaps walk into their workplace and see the first signs of AI transformation taking place, what would it be? What would it be? Keep calm.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, lean into it and put your best foot forwards. I think that, well, I know we get good at what we practice right. The world's made it very easy for us to practice lots of unhelpful things, so you know the way we we think about ai. It's just a nice sculpture um in our lives that we need to build up um, and we have a blueprint and a roadmap for doing that. So don't put it off. Don't try to tackle it with a medium-charged brain state. Be really proactive and you're just going to get mega benefits, you know, from your prosperity, but also your health and your happiness. And, yeah, I think the future is very, very exciting. Don't ignore it.

Speaker 1:

Lean into it well, john, thanks very much for your time today and to everyone else, thanks very much for listening and we'll see you soon.