AI Mastermind AfterShow · October 27, 2026 · Create Your Own Gravity

By Joe Moore · With Shane Pope, Praveen Mayakar, Gerrett Archambault and Tony Jefferson.

We keep asking what AI will become. Last week’s second conversation asked something closer to home: what are we becoming while we use it?

An answer arrives instantly. A difficult paragraph becomes a summary. An uncomfortable question becomes something reassuring. Useful? Often. But the friction disappearing from the task may be the same friction that used to teach us how to do it.

Metacognition II brought Shane Pope, Praveen Mayakar, Gerrett Archambault and Tony Jefferson together to examine attention, creativity, judgment and the difference between practicing a skill and outsourcing it.

The question underneath the convenience

Tony opened with a challenge to the title itself. He disliked “the non-thinking human” precisely because he thought it identified a real problem: people looking outside themselves for someone or something to validate their position.

His concern was not simply that AI produces answers. It was that an accommodating system can make a person feel confirmed without helping them examine the thought.

Shane complicated that picture. People choosing the easier path are not necessarily incapable of depth. They may be busy, overloaded or doing what human minds often do: looking for an efficient route. That distinction matters. If we turn the conversation into a judgment about other people, we miss the conditions shaping our own choices.

Creativity is more than another output

Tony asked where creativity fits into metacognition. Praveen described intention and imagination as starting points, then turned toward the skill required to give them form. Wanting to paint is different from learning how to bring something onto the canvas.

Gerrett distinguished imagination used to disengage from reality from the imaginative work involved in making something new. He explored how our relationship with an object can change depending on whether we approach it through past experience, its present use or a future intention.

These were philosophical perspectives offered by the guests. The practical question for a builder is immediate: is this tool helping me develop a possibility, or helping me avoid the work of engaging with it?

The result and the person getting it

Praveen separated the result of an action from another outcome: who you become while achieving it.

His navigation example made the distinction tangible. Someone who learns to use a map and later adopts digital navigation has a different starting point from someone who has never practiced finding their way without it.

That comparison does not establish that every convenience weakens a skill. It asks us to notice which capacities we are continuing to practice. Completing the assignment and developing the person doing it are related goals, but they are not identical.

The lazy river and the upstream work

Shane described resistance, friction and challenge as raw materials for learning. His image was a river: floating with the current is easier than swimming upstream, but learning to swim changes what becomes reachable.

That lands differently when AI can remove so much effort. Some friction is waste. Some is information. Some is the practice that develops the capacity we wanted in the first place.

For me, the useful question coming out of the room is not whether every task should remain difficult. It is whether we can explain which effort we are removing and which learning we still want to preserve.

When not thinking is a sign of practice

Shane brought sport into the discussion: athletes often describe their best performance as a moment when conscious thought gets out of the way.

Tony connected that experience to movements already learned through practice. Gerrett drew on coaching to distinguish athletes who developed moment-by-moment decision-making from those who had mostly been told what to do. A complex situation can expose a difference that an ordinary performance hides.

That gives the title a necessary complication. An instinct developed through practice is different from an answer accepted without examination. The absence of visible effort does not tell us how much learning sits underneath it.

Leave room for the unresolved question

The conversation also moved through contemplative practice, science and philosophy. Guests considered ways of observing experience and staying with tension instead of demanding an immediate resolution.

These reflections were part of the discussion, not universal prescriptions or clinical guidance. Their relevance to working with AI is the space they leave for a question to remain open long enough to change how we understand it.

Put it to work

These are editorial experiments drawn from the conversation:

Questions from the room

What is metacognition?

Thinking about how we think: noticing assumptions, examining decisions and considering how we know what we believe we know.

Does using AI mean we stop thinking?

The discussion did not establish that conclusion. The guests explored how different uses can support reflection or make it easier to skip it.

Why does practice matter if AI can produce the answer?

A completed result does not automatically build the ability to judge its quality, adapt it or respond when the situation changes.

How is this different from the first metacognition conversation?

This second session focused on convenience, creativity, friction, learned instinct and who we become through our use of technology.

The two conversations belong together

Last week’s Writers AfterShow asked how to use AI without losing your voice. Metacognition II asked how to use it without losing the practice behind your judgment. Both return to the person doing the work.

Read the Writers AfterShow: How to Write With AI Without Losing Your Voice →

Meet Shane Pope, Praveen Mayakar and Gerrett Archambault. Tony Jefferson also joined this panel.

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Your words build worlds. Keep practicing the judgment that gives them direction.