#62 - The Outsourced Brain

Ken got back with a stack of messages... and a good chunk of them were people asking him to Google things for them. Not strategy. Just look-it-up-for-me. That absurd little moment opens a bigger question: what happens to a business when its people stop thinking for themselves?

This week on Over the Bull, Ken digs into cognitive offloading ... the habit of handing every mental task to a tool until the muscle between your ears starts to shrink. He walks through the 2025 Microsoft/Carnegie Mellon research on the "confidence paradox" (the more you trust AI, the less you question it), a real example of an AI report that confidently merged the wrong location's data and almost went out the door, and why Google's own crackdown is punishing the businesses that outsourced their thinking.

Inside:

Cognitive offloading, in plain English (Google put down one dumbbell... AI walks you out of the gym)
The confidence paradox and why your own expertise is your best defense
Delegating vs. Abdicating: the distinction that keeps you from getting fleeced
Why "average just became free" and competency is the last real moat
The "Monday list": how to keep your reps up and pressure-test every answer

AI isn't the enemy. Checking your brain at the door is. The lazy get lazier, the sharp get sharper, and that gap is about to become the whole game. Pick a side.

Transcript

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The outsourced brain on this episode of Over the Bull. Real quick, let's get a little bit of house cleaning done. I give you a little bit of history. I'll tell you what. Let me start with what we did last week. Our company got away last week, for the most part, to start really kind of regrouping, thinking, and processing everything that's going on with the internet. Now, when I say our agency got away and to just do this, it's really important to understand that we eat, sleep, and breathe it. And so when we go away to explore what's going on with the internet and how to take advantage of it, you know, there's one side of the equation, which is the old, I think it was uh Goldblum in uh Jurassic Park, you know, for a paraphrase and he goes, just because you you could do it didn't mean you you should do it necessarily. So there's that part of the technology because people are abusing the heck out of artificial intelligence and completely misunderstanding it. I mean, you got people writing code that you ever wrote code and trying to sell it, and you got people who are taking, you know, ChatGPT as gospel truth and not really looking into. I mean, you're seeing a lot of crazy stuff on one end. And then on the other end, you see where you can harness the power of the internet and do some fantastic things as long as you keep it in your wheelhouse and you understand it. So there's always this challenge of juggling what and how to use the internet. Now, as we're working through, we were we were kind of debating that last week, but it also gave me a chance to kind of look at the kind of emails that are coming in. Okay, now I don't mean to, I'm not trying to attack anyone or anything like that, but you know, there is some truth in comedy, right? Like if you if you joke about something and it doesn't exist in reality, then it's not going to be funny. That's why people pick topics that you can relate to and then make comical situations out of them. And uh so I get back from vacation, I get this stack of messages, and some of them are on vacation, and a good chunk of these emails are people asking me to Google things for them. Now, um, not strategy, not something that, you know, we've developed, you know, personally, but it it's nothing really even that hard, but it was things that you could readily access through Google doing your own search. And so I started thinking about that. And, you know, I take, I take when someone trusts me with something, I take that very seriously. And so there's a couple things that could be going on there. The first is maybe it's showing the condition of the internet and the condition of emails, meaning people are trusting it less and less to give them accurate information, and maybe they don't want to have to sort through all the bladder, and they're looking for someone in the middle to be able to interpret what's being posted online and to be able to sort through the the good, the bad, and the ugly quicker than they could because we speak the language and we know the language. Now, I think that is a definite possibility in a lot of these cases. Now, if that's the case, think about how crazy that is that we live in a world with you know a lot of technology and it's growing substantially and significantly all the time. The amount of information is being shared, but also the amount of like general content that really isn't accurate, or old forums, or old manuals, or old whatever that's sitting out there by the people who actually build the software is not keeping it up, and they're not giving enough good support to where people can get the answers that they need to move through it quickly. So what do they do? They they off they uh they offload that. And you know, for our retainer clients, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, we'll help you with anything. But uh in other cases, some of these questions are really not that. I mean, it's literally um, you know, Googling it and then just sending the answer. Now, when we do that, obviously, you know, we look at it, we go, well, okay, what's going on there? Now there's a website, if you guys haven't been there, it's called Let Me Google That For You. Don't do this. This is mean, okay? It's it's meant to be a joke, but let's just in the spirit of comedy, what you do is you go to this website and then you put in a search phrase, and then it gives you a little piece of code, and then you send the code, and when you send the piece of code off, what it'll do is it'll open up a window, a Google-esque style window, and it'll type in the phrase that you put in, like automatically type it into the Google search bar, and then the little cursor will automatically very slowly go down and hit the search button and then show the search results. You know, obviously that that's mean, obviously, but but you know, the point is that people are are kind of looking at this. On one side, you go, there's internet trust issues, there's technology issues, there's a bunch of old data issues, and people are having a hard time sorting through the wheat and the chaff. So they almost need an interpreter of products, even when it's language developed by the software developer in order to get the right answer. So think about how scary that is first. And then on the other side, you've got things that could be Googled pretty basically, and then those things are being offloaded as well, which isn't the case, which maybe if people don't trust the more complicated stuff, maybe they don't trust the simpler stuff. You see the kind of ripple effects that that has on the human psychology. So here's kind of what I wanted to do here. I wanted to explore the idea of companies that are outsourcing their thinking to machines. Now, when I say machines, I mean artificial intelligence. Okay, now it doesn't matter that it talks to you and the large language models do different things and there's all this. You know, where they get their data, how they get their data, how they end quote think, which they're not sentient, how all this stuff happens, there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes. And if you're not aware of it, then you can get answers and think that this machine is giving you the absolute truth and the best information all the time. Wrong answer. Really, really wrong answer. And uh so here's the the businesses that are going to win are the ones that aren't going to outsource their thinking. Okay, now if you go back and look at uh Google's algorithm updates a few months ago, they're already starting to penalize people who are outsourcing the thinking. I mean, go look at the uh the last podcast episode when we're looking at what happened with recuse and things like that, which I think was a good move. I really do think it's a good move. I think it's past its time to handle it, but it's becoming challenging because trying to figure out what content is jump content versus what is good content is what's really making search engines more and more uh nebulous, where people are trusting them less and less because the search results are just cranking out and showing up some of these really bad results. And I think Google's in survival mode, going, okay, we've got to gut this thing now because the answers that are coming up, people are trusting less and less. And so what they're doing is they're taking it and sending them to people like us to kind of sort through it and give them a cleaner answer. Or um they're getting junk answers in general, and they don't trust those either, even on the basic stuff. Now, here it here's the deal. This is the same war that I've been talking about for some time now. AI junk, fake content, EEAT. This is a different front, but this is the same fight psychologically. Now, let's see what's actually happening here. We're going to call this, which the term is accurate, cognitive offloading. Okay, this means you're you're offloading your thinking. You're you're no longer thinking for yourself. So every time we hand a mental task to a tool, instead of doing it ourselves, this is what we call offloading that task. Now, a little is great. There's nothing wrong with doing that. I mean, we're doing it all the time and we're finding ways to do it. But a lot of it, every day, and the muscle between your ears starts to shrink a little bit. Okay, you're not putting as much careful thought into it. Now, when we use artificial intelligence, there is objective data that we go and use, and we define that clearly within AI, but we also have to scrutinize that with human sentiency. This is incredibly important to do this. Okay, so you don't believe me? All right, so let's check it out. So Microsoft and uh Carnegie Mellon in 2025, uh, they surveyed knowledge workers on how they actually use artificial intelligence at work. The finding the more you trust AI, the less you scrutinize what it hands you. All right, let's say that one more time. The more you trust AI, the less you scrutinize what it hands you. All right, so the people who kept their edge were the ones who uh used their own expertise and and they were confident in it. So they call it the confidence paradox. All right, so think about that. And and I'm sure you can, if you've really punt and if you're using like a different AI engine to ask questions and get answers, you probably have gotten already where you start asking it questions, you get answers, and then the next one you get down the line, you kind of look at it and go, yeah, that's good. And then you start looking at it less and less. That's good, yeah, that's good enough. And pretty soon you're offloading all of your thought processes to it and you're looking at it less and less. Okay, now a separate study in 2025. Now, this is uh Gurlich. You ever heard of this? I think it's Gurlich. It sounds good anyway, doesn't it? Found frequent AI users scored lower on critical thinking measures, and the effect ran through cognitive offloading, strongest in the youngest, the heaviest users. Okay, so you know, you think about this, you know, years and years ago, you wanted to get from point A to point B. You had to use a map and you had to look for road signs and you had to think through it, and you had to do all these things. Well, what happens now? We pull out our phone, we plug in an address, we kind of go to never never land as we're driving, and it tells us to turn right, turn left, and do this. We're not thinking as much. Now, we think we may be smarter than the average bear or someone in a previous generation, but in reality, as far as our cognitive thinking, we're giving more and more of that away, which means our brain is doing less and less work. We're doing less and less critical thinking. Okay, now let's look at an honesty guardrail. Now, this is the this is self-reported and it's early. I'm not telling you that AI is melting your brain. Okay, we're not in sci-fi world here. What it's telling you is that when you lean on the tool, we stop doing the reps. And the skills you stop using, you lose. I mean, isn't this what it's always been? You go jog and you know you do it and you get up to running miles and miles on the jog, you stop doing it for a year and you're huffing at a half a mile in 12 months. Now, your mind is the exact same way. So if you're going to start offloading your skills, creative, technical, whatever may have you, eventually you're going to lose it. You know, there's going to be something that's going to uh be a result of you offloading that um that thinking process. So let's look at this maybe a little bit differently. The plain English version is this when you use something like Google or a search engine, that's putting one dumbbell down. Okay, because you're not having to fully think through a lot of stuff. When you go full out with AI and let it do your thinking for you, you're now walking completely out of the gym. So you see the difference here. Now, here's the kicker. The study found critical thinking is shifting from gathering info to verifying it, from doing the task to stewarding it. The job isn't going away, the job is coming. Can you tell when the machine is wrong? And you can't do that if you've lost the underlying skill. Now, this is what I found out, because I'm using artificial intelligence quite a bit. And as I'm running my experiments and I'm testing everything out, what I'm finding is that AI gets me so far down the road. Okay, but then when I start looking at it, I realize that what it gave me isn't good in its entirety. I can't just turn it off. And so if I get a 70-page report that I've accumulated using objective data, and then I look at some of the conclusions, some of the conclusions are based upon a false premise that AI has put together. Even when I put up bumpers of objective data that I have it referring to. Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, it's still incredible stuff. Okay, but the idea is the stuff looks confident, but it is left field. I mean, I've even run a report for a multi-location property one time. This was recently, and when I did it, it even pulled in wrong location information and combined it. And it was crystal clear which location belonged to which data. But if I wouldn't have read it, that report would have gone out and it may have looked like it was accurate, and it was way, way not accurate. Okay, so here we go. Delegating a task is smart, and you can do a lot more with a lot less. Abdicating your thinking is how you're going to get fleeced. Okay. So we know what delegating is. You know what that looks like if you run a business. You hand off the doing of it, right? You can still judge the result. Now that's leverage. That's how you scale. That's how any business is scaled. You're just using tools instead of people. And that's what more people are doing. Some people are doing it in really bad ways, but they can afford to do it in really bad ways, like force you to engage with AI when you want to talk to a real person. I bet that's never happened to you, right? Now, abdicating, you hand off the doing, and you're handing off the understanding. Now you can't tell good work from garbage, and you're at the mercy who of whoever handed it to you. The vendor, the freelancer, the chatbot, the whoever gave it to you. You're trusting that person blindly to know whether or not that data is good. This is the danger of marketing, by the way. Because the thing is, is marketing has gotten so complicated, even without artificial intelligence, that someone comes to you and they start talking to you about conversions and clicks and all these other things in your head spinning, going, I just need more business. And so sometimes people divert to the most expensive guy, some people divert to the person who sounds the best. Some people look at different things, but they're not true measures of the quality of the person. And now with AI, now you get this kind of sophisticated looking report. So now you have the people that 10 years ago were creating junk websites using themes and junk marketing techniques and all this other stuff. But you could kind of point it out, you know. I mean, there was nothing I like to do more, you know, five years ago than someone who spent, you know, five grand on a website and they asked me to audit it, and the first thing I do is see that that website was built using a $20 theme. And plus that $20 theme was using a bunch of components that never get updated, and so the theme is completely out of date. I love being able to educate businesses to that effect. Now, when you're using artificial intelligence, it's gotten trickier, not better, trickier. It's not gotten where it's like clean. It's not like that the people that did that junk using AI suddenly got really smart. No, what they've done was they've abdicated so they could sell more of that junk to you. You use it, they make money, they still keep their margins. You see the difference in this? This is where business ethics come into play, by the way. Okay, so this is exactly how business owners get taken by bad agencies. Not because they're dumb, but because they abdicated their thought process. They stopped knowing enough to ask the second question. Okay. Now it's the same trap with artificial intelligence. If you can't evaluate the answer, you're not using a tool. The tool is using you. This is the big lesson that you need to understand as the owner of a business. And it'll hand you a confident, well, well-written, totally wrong answer without blinking. And it'll even tell you, I mean, it even uses some psychological things. It's funny when you use some of these AI tools because it'll say, okay, now the smart business guy is going to do this. And then you'll start going down the road and you'll turn over your thinking, and it'll go, okay, now you're really thinking like a smart business guy. No, you're not. All you're doing is you're falling for psychological banter, is all you're really doing. You have to control the wheel of the car. You can't give it to somebody else. Now, the owners I respect most aren't the ones who know everything. No one knows everything. Well, there was one guy, he walked around about 2,000 years ago and he he knew everything. The ones that I respect the most are the ones who know enough to smell when something is off. That instinct is the whole ball game. And when you give that up, you've just given everything up. Now you're at the whim of the smoothest sales pitch that there is. Okay. Now, when everybody's using the same artificial intelligence, everybody gets the same average answer. So guess what? Average just became free and infinite. Which means the only edge left is the stuff the machine can't hand out. Real understanding of your own business, real judgment, and real curiosity. That's the difference makers, guys. The guys that are gonna fall to the wayside, hand that over and go, good enough. There's your danger. Your competitors can copy your website in an afternoon now. They can't copy the fact that you actually understand your customer. That's the moat that's getting deeper while everyone else fills theirs in. Okay. So let's do a practical uh do this Monday list for you, the owner. Before you ask someone or something to hand you the answer, take one on a swing at it for yourself. Keep your reps up, do your push-ups. When AI or a vendor gives you an answer, ask the second question. Why? What would make this wrong? Ask the questions, the follow-ups. Don't just take it blindly, and don't be intimidated if they sound like they know what they're talking about, because I've dealt in this industry for a long time. And some of the most um, for lack of a better word, the most inept people that I worked with came across the most confident, almost arrogantly. And so the idea is that don't be intimidated by arrogance. Don't be intimidated by asking the questions. Because the minute that you allow those little manipulation points to kick in, you're fair game. Okay, so stay curious about your own numbers. Don't fully outsource knowing your business. Use AI as a sparring partner, not an oracle. Make it show its work. It's amazing what happens when you do that. Because you'll start looking at it and you'll start pressure testing it. We actually have a The thing that we call when we use artificial intelligence, and it's called the pressure test. What we want to do is we want to find out is it really true or is it not true? Uh in some of our more recent um uh reports that we put out, we actually have a document that's called the pressure test. And the pressure test actually clarifies a lot of points that were made even through hand or reading through and and evaluating data. Okay. Now, here's the thing: AI is not the enemy. Okay. AI is not the enemy. I'm not anti-AI. Now you know that. I've said this. I'm anti-checking your brain at the door. Use the tool. Don't let this tool use you. Pretty simple, right? The lazy get lazier and the sharp are going to get sharper. And the gap between them is about to become the whole game. So you as the owner, you've got to pick a side in this. Are you going to let the guy write your articles for you? Are you going to let AI generate things for you? Are you going to get further and further away from it? Trust it more and more and let your brain atrophy in the process. Are you going to do the reps? Are you going to lift the weights? Are you going to think through it? Are you going to stress test it? Are you going to become better at it? Become more powerful with it. Use your human intellect with it in a way that's going to make you stand out. So if you're making some notes, do a big number one, a big number two, and a big number three. Okay. Delegating is smart. Okay, so put a big number one by that. Delegating is smart. You've always done this if you own a business. Abdicating is dangerous. Okay, that's number two. Abdicating is dangerous, where you let AI do your thinking and you think less and less, and it thinks more and more. When I say think, I don't mean think, guys. It does not think like you and I think. Very powerful. Here's your third one, your big number three. Competency is the last real moat here. Okay, so competency is your last real moat. Staying on top of things. I mean, our reports are good because we scrutinize the heck out of them. We go through every single thing. We spend a week just trying to understand where those boundaries are, where we're not just going to go through and look at somebody's website and then offer them another version of it for 500 bucks or copy somebody else's website, run it through AI, and then hand it over. I mean, that's easy money for an agency, but that costs you all kinds of stuff. Not just the one-time hit, but it also costs you thinking that you're doing the exact same thing that someone else is doing that's doing a really good job of it because they've not checked out and you have checked out. That's the hard part, guys. Okay. Now, what I'm doing here is this is the exact kind of thing you're going to get from what we're going to call the bull sheet. Now, that is bull sheet. And what it's going to do is help you understand things better. And this is going to be the kind of quiet stuff. You know, the stuff that you need to know that's going to help you be different. Okay, now that's a little pitchy, isn't it? You know what? That's really pitchy as a matter of fact, but it's true. As you know, this podcast was dedicated because we saw the hurricane coming. We started putting out all the feelers and saying, okay, guys, be ready for this. It's coming. Get away from the Google Ads guy who's running the little squeeze landing page and uh blessing that out to you. You know, be careful with these guys. Be careful with these other situations. Be careful with artificial intelligence. Okay, so this is where we're going to land the plane today. And the idea is you're smart. You start a business because you're motivated, you want to do something to help your family, to help the world, to help whatever. Stay with it. Stay strong with it, stay involved with it, and you will be the difference in your industry. Until next time, this is Ken with Over the Bull, brought to you by Integrist Design out of Asheville, North Carolina.