The Outsourced Mind — AI, Human Irrelevance & The Choice That Defines This Era

We thought more options would make us freer. Instead, they made us harder to satisfy. The danger of AI is not that machines start thinking; it’s that humans slowly stop. As convenience becomes the default, deep thinking becomes a lost art. If intelligence becomes abundant and friction disappears, we have to face the ultimate question of this era: what actually makes a human being valuable?

In this episode of The Long Game, we explore:

• The Cognitive Cost of Convenience: Why removing psychological friction is quietly weakening your memory, focus, and internal resilience.
• The Dot-Com Parallel: What the collapse of the 2000s internet bubble teaches us about navigating the current wave of AI hype versus actual reality.
• System 1 vs. System 2: How immediate, automated answers are satisfying your brain's craving for lazy relief while starving your capacity for deep judgment.
• The Future of Leverage: Why the biggest rewards of this generation won't go to the tech-worshippers or the tech-haters, but to those who learn to think alongside it.

We are dismantling The Outsourced Mind—the terrifying reality of trading independent thought for digital convenience. When you outsource your decisions, your writing, and your emotions to a machine, you don’t just save time; you prematurely resolve the very internal tensions that are meant to build your character.

Periods of massive technological transformation always create two distinct groups: those who are paralyzed by change, and those who position themselves for it. You cannot stop this shift by refusing to participate, but you cannot outsource your entire mind without losing yourself in the process. It’s time to stop looking for cognitive shortcuts and start building the human depth that no algorithm can replicate.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Will AI take over the world? Will AI take my job? Will it take over my personal life? What can AI do for me? So many different questions that get asked around AI. And I wanted to talk about it this week on the on the podcast. Because the reality of and funny part about it all is that AI has been around for decades. It's only now that it's in the public eye that we're actually taking meaningful notice of it and what it can do and how it is starting to shape and affect the world. So I think the better question is in fact actually this. If intelligence becomes abundant, what still makes human beings valuable? So every major technological shift creates fear and opportunity at exactly the same time. Think about it the print and press, the industrial revolution, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. And right now, millions of people are asking: will my job, will jobs disappear? Will humans become irrelevant? Will machines replace creativity and will thinking itself actually become outsourced? You can probably right now, as I mentioned one of those four things, you will find yourself falling into those camps. Will jobs disappear? Will humans become irrelevant? Will machines replace creativity? And will thinking itself become outsourced? I think I could probably put most people into one of those four four bubbles. Likely, more than just one of them, truthfully. But maybe I don't think that those are the important questions that we need to be asking. Because again, every technological revolution changes human behavior long before it changes society. And I think that's what we're really living through right now. The dot-com bubble was interesting because most people remember the collapse of it, but they forget that the internet still changed the world. The hype became irrational, the market overheated, and bad businesses exploded everywhere. But underneath the chaos of it all, the technology itself still fundamentally reshaped civilization. And I'll be honest, AI feels very much the same. Now, the dot com bubble was very early in my time, and I've learned through it through history and reading and really understanding and listening to people who'd been through it, like Gary Vernichuk. AI feels eerily similar right now in that side of things. And I think we're asking the wrong questions sometimes of what will AI do versus how will it shape humanity moving forward. And the big thing is that for these is periods of change always create two types of people as I as I see it. People trying to protect the old world and people learning how to position themselves for the new one. So the danger is not necessarily AI itself, the danger is becoming psychologically passive because of it. The danger is losing the ability to think deeply because something else can now think for me and quicker. And maybe the biggest question of this era is not will AI replace humans, but what happens to humans when the friction actually disappears? In this thing that we've called life and this thing that we've actually built where people need to go to work and we need to think. And I and I don't mean that people won't think, but we don't have to think through so many problems. And in actual fact, everything that we do is now going to be sped up through a process, meaning we have further access to more and more things. How will the dynamic shift between the rich and the poor? How will it be between lower and higher economic classes? How will ever how will the dynamic change in families, in terms of parenthood, in terms of children, in terms of the teenage years that you see often when quite often people in schools will learn and adapt and and develop characteristics and personalities. I think if I if I can a segue a little very quickly, right, is I look at the remote working scenario. Now, again, remote working has its benefits, it has its drawbacks, and I'm not here to sit here and say whether it's A or B. My personal opinion is that remote working has crippled human beings in terms of their ability to communicate communicate, to effectively explore ideas, to be around each other, because what we've ended up doing is putting people into boxes for nine hours a day and losing all those little touch points that were part of life. Now, for better or for worse, for some people they will absolutely thrive in that. I think if I zoomed out and put a larger lens on it, I think you'd probably find that I think it's probably been to the detriment of most people. And I think a lot of people right now would agree with that statement that it's been a detriment rather than a benefit. What at the end of the day, what are we what are we as humans if not trying to engage in each other and trying to constantly develop? And that's both developed psychologically, physically, mentally, romantically, personal relationships, so many different things that I think that took away from it. And I think AI is another notch on that in the book, and I think everything is speeding up very quickly because there's been so many different things now. If you think back to the evolution of Canon Man, really, right? It took so long for these things to take place from when we were just man and very physical labor intensive, and then we got the revolution, the farming revolution, and then we had the industrial revolution, and now we're going through the technological revolution. The difference is that it took so long for the first two to take place, and then it's very quickly this one has happened afterwards, which is why I think you're seeing such the visceral reaction and viewpoints on it. So let's dig into that a little bit more, right? So we're living through one of the fastest technological shifts, as I mentioned, in modern history. And honestly, like every major shift before it, people are responding emotionally before they've fully understood what is actually happening. Some people are rejecting AI entirely, some people are worshipping it blindly, some people are sitting somewhere in the middle trying to work out what this means for their future. Honestly, I think I'm probably in the middle third, which is where I would put that. But as far as I can see, this is not just a technological transition, it's it's a psychological one. Because AI is the first major tool beginning to replace cognitive labor instead of the physical labour, right? And that's where I think the big thing is coming here. Because it's not just writing, research, admin, or organization, but increasingly it's becoming into ideation, synthesis, decision support, emotional processing, problem solving, strategic thinking. And the deeper question becomes if struggle helps develop humans, what happens when we struggle get removed? What happens when we're gonna struggle when we remove that struggle? Sorry. Like that's what we've got, I think, sometimes ask ourselves is with these technological advances, they're great and they are beneficial. But to remember that part and parcel of being a human being is to constantly go through life's challenges and develop and to learn and understand. And sometimes you use the fast track mechanism to it to your own detriment. I had an employee that I used to work with, and I think the very simplest analogy I can give you of this is I can't remember if I've told this story in a podcast. We were sat in an airport one week, so obviously, as you guys know, I travel a lot for work, and we sat at the we sat at a bar, not exactly the healthiest thing in the world, but we sat at a bar and a pint before we were catching a flight. And we sat and at the bottom of it, we well, the bottom where this bar was, there was a set of escalators, one on either side, and there was a set of stairs through the middle. And as I sat there and I watched it for about 40 minutes, right? And I pointed to my friend and I said, You do realize? I said, We've been sat here 40 minutes, and I said, not a single person has walked up or down those stairs in 40 minutes. And I said, the irony part of it is, is I said, upstairs is the food courts. I said, one subtle shift in that of what we do there and behaviour and how we act and how we interact with life, I said, is the difference between the same people who will complain about weight and complain about these things versus the ones who actually actively do it. I talk very much obviously about Sarah on this and a lot of what we do, and we go to Disney Springs quite a lot. It's one thing I've noticed we again, she does the same thing. We always tend to take the stairs. And the analogy I always use is where are you taking the stairs in life and where are you taking the escalators? Sometimes the fast track is to a detriment to yourself because what are you giving up on the other side is those little struggles which ultimately compound over a period of time to develop the human being that you are. So Marshall McLuhan once said, We shape our tools and therefore thereafter our tools shape us. And I think this feels incredibly relevant right now, right? Because humans are adapting to the environment that they repeatedly experience. And if the environment constantly rescues you from effort, well your tolerance for effort may slowly collapse. But that sink in for a second when I talked about remote working. We are removing the effort from people's lives, they no longer have to strive to do any of these things. The problem is the tolerance for all of that is now collapsing around us. And I think again, I go back to it. I think the biggest problem of AI is not that it will take your job, but it will take your essential being as a human when it comes to things like the effort graph and when it comes to cognitive thinking and problem solving. So I'm going to reference this book quite a lot because I'm reading it right now. But the courage to be disliked, and again, that talks about lifestyle patterns and the unconscious orientation you develop towards life, discomfort, and responsibility. And modern people, again, today's people often say, I'll struggle to focus or I overthink or I can't stay consistent. But I think maybe increasingly the issue might be is that we're building lifestyles organized around cognitive convenience rather than actually developing that muscle. And that might just be exactly where you could probably turn this episode off and maybe I start to think about what actually is that you're fundamentally going on in life and how you're prioritizing because you're doing it around speed, around relief and around friction. And the scary thing is the brain adapts very quickly to whatever saves energy. Let's see what happens next. See, the modern temptation is to outsource yourself, right? And you'll see it a lot again. And again, it's when we talked about blindly following AI, and then there's some people who want to run for the hills and never see the never look at those two letters again. The modern temptation is to outsource yourself if you're in the former right camp. And AI is no longer just becoming the tool, it's becoming your strategy strategist, it's becoming your editor, it's becoming an assistant for some people, it's becoming a therapist for some people. We've seen problems in the news lately where people are reaching out to it for therapy advice and it's giving bad advice. It's becoming a thinking partner, it's becoming an emotional sounding board for some people. People they're already using it now to process your emotions and write difficult messages and make life decisions, structure beliefs, solve creative blocks in marketing and artistry, organize identity itself, basically your identity. And I think that's where the conversation is going to start to get a little bit deeper because again, we are giving away agency. So there's that word, you've heard it a lot. We're giving away agency, though, right? We're giving away our cognitive convenience, like I mentioned earlier. We're giving away all of those things, right? Of to what? That is the problem. And I think I'll go out on a limb and say, those who stick true to building their cognitive cognitive power, right, and that muscle, and those who stick true to what's humanity and understanding what it is to be human and go through life's restrictions, I think ultimately we'll win the game. I'll think they'll I I ultimately do think they'll win the game for one reason. We will be so passive that we will have literally given away everything to every to the technology. So when they say we'll take AI take over the world, right? Will you give away your world to AI? Is probably another way of rephrasing that one. See, there is a difference between using tools and becoming dependent on them for self-construction. Humans are built through internal tensions, so confusion, contradiction, uncertainty, failure reflection. AI can prematurely resolve all those tensions before it has actually time to develop inside of you now. So again, where are you getting that? Where where do you get to learn through the idea of confusion or to be contradicted on something and then think about your viewpoint to really develop it? Or to go through uncertainty and failure and come out the other side knowing how to circumnavigate that next time, or to sit down and genuinely reflect for a period of 30, 45 minutes to an hour on a bad decision or a direction that you've taken in life that maybe you think with hindsight you shouldn't have gone down. All those things have started to get taken away. And I think that might create a little bit of a strange paradox with human beings becoming more externally capable while becoming internally weaker. You see, the future danger may not be bad thinking, it may be borrowed thinking mistaken for your own. So thousands of years ago, humans developed through friction, problem solving with survival, patience mad, judgment mad, attention mad. Now we live in a world increasingly optimized around removing any cognitive resistance entirely. And I generally think we're underestimating what that may do psychologically over the next decade. You say I talk about this last week and I've been asked about it since. So Daniel Kahneman's system at the one and two system model becomes incredibly important, I think, in this aspect. System one wants relief, fast answers, low effort, cognitive ease. System two is where depth happens, reasoning happens, reflection happens, judgment happens. The issue is AI is unbelievably effective, effective, sorry, at satisfying system one. Gives you instant answers, instant clarity, instant output, instant direction. And I would probably expect that 80% of people would say that's a brilliant thing. But humans are oft, like I said, transformed through the slow process of wrestling with complexity, of wrestling with emotion, of wrestling with humanity. Not about giving it all away, but actually being there at the fight and knowing what is happening next. And if everything becomes immediate, by the way, we may unintentionally weaken the very mechanisms that create resilience, originality, discernment, emotional regulation. System two is where the real development will happen. That right there might just be exactly what most people need to hear. We may unintentionally weaken the very mechanisms that create resilience, originality, discernment, and emotional regulation. Think about how many people you know right now who don't have the resilience to keep moving forward, who lash out, who have no originality and everything seems the same, who have no discernment for things or any emotional regulation around topics. Why? We've given it all away. We've willingly given it away. And it's a scary prominence. And again, by the way, right, let me just segue on this. I'm not saying AI is bad. I'm saying the adoption of AI is bad in the way that it is being adopted right now. Two very different concepts, two very different pathways. So AI isn't bad, just like the internet wasn't bad, right? Twitter wasn't bad, Instagram wasn't bad, Facebook wasn't bad. All these things initially aren't bad. How they are adopted, how they are utilized by human beings can often be the determinant of if it is bad moving forward. See the dot-com lesson, right? Let's come back to that. Most people miss. The internet bubble did not fail because the internet was meaningless. It failed because humans got emotionally irrational before the infrastructure actually matured. That distinction matters enormously because right now AI hype is everywhere, exaggerated promises are everywhere, shallow businesses are everywhere, and noise is everywhere. But underneath the noise, something real is still changing. And history usually rewards the people who learn emerging systems early without becoming consumed by them. The people who won during the internet era were not necessarily the loudest people. They were the people who integrated the technology into reality before everybody else fully understood what was happening. That matters right now, because this period will likely create entirely new industries, new forms of leverage, new careers, new business models, and enormous asymmetric opportunities. The people who get left behind during transitions are rarely the least intelligent. Usually they're the people most emotionally attached to how the old world worked. Let me repeat that. The people who get left behind during transitions are rarely the least intelligent. Usually they are the people most emotionally attached to how the old world worked. You see this in politics a lot, you see this in personal relationships a lot, you see this everywhere, right? And again, this is a principle as old as time. That typically you are so attached to the old thing that you cannot see the you cannot see what's in front of you and you cannot see the opportunities. The cost is not just though technological illiteracy, it's a psychological stagnation. Again, I've got to keep bringing it back to this idea of it is a psychological war that you are facing with AI, not technological, not will it take my job. So you're becoming someone who fears adaptation, resists uncertainty, watches transformation happen from the outside. And slowly, very slowly, loses confidence in their own relevance. Or worse, you outsource so much thinking that you stop developing independent judgment entirely. And eventually you become highly assisted but internally underdeveloped. The future may belong to people who use AI without dependency. I'd argue it was. Think deeply without constant stimulation? Again, I think I'd argue that definitely. Retain emotional intelligence, a hundred percent. Maintain discernment and adapt quickly while staying psychologically grounded. You can replay that over and over again. I think that is genuinely how the world will develop and how the best of the best will progress and keep moving forward in this life. Because if intelligence becomes abundant, human depth may just become the rarest thing left. The question is not is AI good or bad. That conversation is way too simplistic. Like I said, the better question is what kind of human being does this era require me to become? Because transformation is happening whether people participating or not. And every period of change creates opportunity for the people willing to adapt before adaptation becomes socially comfortable. The internet changed the world. Not because everybody agreed on it early, but because enough people learned how to move with it before everybody else caught up. AI is entering the same phase, if not already has. You cannot stop transformation by refusing to participate in it. But equally, you cannot outsource your entire mind without losing part of yourself in the process. The future probably won't belong to the people who fear AI or worship it. It'll belong to people who learn how to think alongside of it.