AI isn't getting smarter, you're just getting dummer - Episode 146

Have you ever noticed that hollowed out feeling after you've committed to some time scrolling? You're not necessarily tired or relaxed from it. You're just kind of thinner in thought. Like you've stepped away from thought and kind of less present than you were even just an hour ago or maybe 30 minutes ago. So time has passed. Content was flowing. You got those dopamine hits, yet nothing really came of it. Nothing stayed long enough to become part of you. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you, that your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control and step back into that role as the shotcaller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Hmm. Makes sense. Great morning, world. Great morning, humans. And welcome to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. For those of you that have never met me, I am Dr. JC Dornick, aka the dragon. You can see here above my head on my bookshelf. I've always dreamed of having a bookshelf that had my book on it. So we have our Make Sense book. Crazy to have a book. It's got a yellow front. It's got a black back and it's in the hands of many, many, many people. So I'm grateful for this. It's a very vulnerable and revealing book. It's called Make Sense, how to rewire your mind and transform your life. It's weird holding a book that you've written because you have to remind yourself that it's your book. I have a book on the bookshelf that is mine now and I'm just excited about that. I just feel so grateful. For that. What we're going to do here today is I'm going to brainwash you. And this is kind of something that I've longed to do every time we meet. I'm here to brainwash you. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm here to replace your beliefs with mine because I know that the conditioned way of thinking about brainwashing is that somebody's trying to like change you. That's not what I mean. Because what we like to do here is we like to reclaim our thoughts. We like to reclaim our thoughts and give ourselves a little bit of a break from this world that's seemingly thinking for us and come up with our own ideas and get in our prefrontal cortex. When I say brainwashing, I'm not saying I want to exchange my beliefs and replace your beliefs. I just want to have some time together today where you can actually wash your brain. And what I mean by that is allow yourself to wash your brain and allow it to be free from its programming and its conditioned operating system just for a moment. That's all I'm asking for today of myself and anybody else is give yourself a little bit of a break from your conditioned response and your conditioned perceptions because that is the catalyst for change. We just have to entertain or even allow ourselves or permit ourselves to change the way that we look at things. That's what the brainwashing is. Something that is voluntary. I'm going to invite you to voluntarily wash your brain. The way that we do that in this world is we use the interface response system. And the first step is we say something like this. We go, huh, so we hear something or we have our own thoughts and feelings. And we say, hmm, this is the way we brainwash. And what that is, is that gives us the ability to pause, not get rid of what we think and feel or knee jerk reflex to pause and just step back and allow ourselves to create a little bit of a space. Victor Frankl in his book, A Man's Search for Meaning said that the game is one in between the stimulus and our response or for the most part, our reaction. Right. In that space where we're pausing our reaction, our knee jerk reflex, and we're allowing ourselves to put some thought into what we're perceiving or what we're thinking, that's where the game is one where we can move from reaction to response, which means we're putting some thought into it. Don't do that if a car is coming at you or somebody throws a rock at you. But if somebody says something mean to you or challenges you or criticizes you and sometimes we do that to ourselves, right, give yourself a break, put it on pause for a second, you can always go back to it. So I'll say, hmm, and what's it worth? Well, Wayne Dyer said it best when you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change. So if you're looking for things to change in your life, that's the first step is to just say, hmm, Nike says, just do it. Dragon says, just say, hmm. So what we're going to do today is we're going to make sense of a very, very hot topic. It's an interesting one because we typically spot this topic of brain rot and doom scrolling and excessive, obsessive use of social media. We typically spot that in others, but it's more difficult to spot it in ourselves. And the reason why is because it's hypnotic. Sometimes we don't even know we're doing it. And there's also a little bit of a we don't want to admit that we're doing it. You know, I think that it's natural for me to think that I'm different when there's a lot of challenge in that, but we're going to make sense of brain rot and the idea of reclaiming authorship of our own reality today. I like to say, welcome to the rise of the sleepwalking masses. And that's just acknowledging the fact that without even knowing it very often, we're allowing the world and the algorithm and all of these things that we're consuming today to kind of run the show. And you don't know that until you wake up. So this is just a little bit of time for us to do a little wake up. Here's my inspiration for today. And I know that brain rot and doom scrolling and excessive, like almost hypnotic use of social media and the internet is a hot topic. It's a very, very hot topic. But the inspiration came from evaluating the things that matter most to me in my life. I mean, there's a lot of things that I love in life, but none of them even remotely come close to that of my children. So that's really important to notice is if you're a writer, you need some sort of inspiration, right? And that's where my inspiration comes from is I'm somewhat concerned, but also open and curious to what's going on in the world because of how it might affect the things that matter most to me. And those are my children. So my daughter and sons are just dream children. They're way better than I ever asked for. I mean, they're a dream. They get good grades. They play sports. My sons are beginning their careers, fascinating careers, and they love what they do. My daughter is sharp as a tack. You can look at a lot of unconscious behavior of children because we see it in children. But even my kids that, for the most part, are doing better than I ever dreamed, are starting to show symptoms of this problem. And that's why I was inspired to do some work on this. The symptoms that I see with my children are things like a tension lag, you know, a little bit of a lag of how much time it takes for them to respond to you. But also an interesting behavior that I find my children and this new generation, I hate talking about the generation like I'm some sort of old guy. But I'm noticing that they're finding meaningless content, meaning like content that means nothing and has no value or anything like that outside of entertainment and distraction. They're finding it funny and I don't get it, right? So maybe that's that's an age thing. But I'm just seeing this trend where children are watching like the cartoon of a cat doing nothing and just laughing hysterically and seeing how it's getting tons of hours of consumption and it's just the greatest thing that they've ever seen. So, you know, that concerns me. It means that they're not only distracting themselves, but they're also in this situation where they're distracting themselves with stuff that doesn't mean anything other than the distraction. So my concern, therefore, is that my children and this generation, which they're part of, may never actually get a chance to experience life. And as I say, unwrap the present moment, because what they're doing with most of their time is they're spending it on distracting themselves from what's actually happening. And you see this when you see the attention lag, you see somebody that is not paying attention to anything that's actually going on. They're so enveloped in something else, distracted and you say something to them and then the attention lag shows like how entranced they are. So I guess I would say I'm a little bit concerned, but also fascinated because I haven't made up my mind about anything yet, like I keep saying, just to give you an example, we actually, for whatever reason, we don't need to repeat it, but we took my daughter's phone away for a few weeks, just to kind of give her a break from it, because we started noticing some of these things. And I was in the grocery store and this is my dream child. I was in the grocery store and I was kind of in a creepy way spying just to check on her because she was in the car. And I noticed that without her phone, she was sitting there putting the window up and down. So that's concerning as well, is where I see that this new generation, but also a lot of adults as well, it's not just the kids, they're incapable of being bored and allowing their mind to wander. So today what we're going to do is we're going to look under the hood of what is known as brain rot. And once again, I haven't made up my mind about it yet. So I'm just going to be pointing it out. So I call this brain rot, the erosion of human authorship. So that's the idea is that my perception is that to a certain degree, we're losing authorship of our lives. And that's the whole essence of my book and the interface response system is helping people reclaim control of their reality in their life as the dominant force of it, but also as the shock caller. So if we're losing authorship, that means that we're moving towards this situation where authorship is being determined for us. So that's why I am very, very interested in this. It begins like this. Have you ever noticed that like hollowed out feeling after you've kind of committed to some time scrolling? I mean, I've noticed it. You're not necessarily tired or relaxed from it. You're just kind of thinner in thought. Like you've stepped away from thought and kind of less present than you were even just an hour ago or maybe 30 minutes ago. So time has passed. Content was flowing. You got those dopamine hits. You got the stimulation of dopamine. Yet nothing really came of it. Nothing stayed long enough to become part of you. That's what's interesting about rolling. It's like you're not getting smarter. What you're doing is is losing authorship for longer and could be entertaining and stuff like that, but you're not even sure what you saw. This is an interesting thing. Like if I say, hey, tell me about those last 40 things that you just looked at. And they have no idea. And that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep themselves busy. And by the way, like I said, this is not just about kids. This is about adults too. And this is not a form of laziness, by the way, or weakness. That's my observation. It's more the physiological sensation of the dopamine loop running without resolution. So that's kind of what is cool about drugs, right? Recreational drugs is that you're not really concerned with like what's happening, it's more about the experience. And there's no concern about did I accomplish anything? And that's why people get hooked on drugs, by the way, is there's no end. So in 2026, what we're labeling as digital brain rot may not actually be about bad content that they're looking at, it may actually more be about the erosion of that authorship, and that's a real shift of looking at this. We have to start looking at what we're consuming, but also how we are acting while we're consuming. I always look to Oxford for definitions. And it's not because I want to learn what the definition is, is I want to learn what society is telling us the definition is. Oxford labels and defines brain rot as the supposed deterioration of our intellectual state from consuming trivial online content. Now, the key words there that I take note of is supposed and trivial. So those words kind of make that idea sound like speculative, right? Supposed, like maybe. And I think that they need to be reevaluated and also this idea of looking at it as just trivial. However, the data on doom scrolling, which is another term. And by the way, when one kid says to the other that they're doom scrolling, there's a laugh at the end of that. You know what I mean? Like it's kind of like, I guess, when I was in college or high school, if somebody got so drunk and they passed out or fell down, we would laugh. Right? So there's a new version of that now. And when kids are just doom scrolling, what's happening is that their friends are saying, they laugh at it. Like, oh, she's just doom scrolling and stuff like that. But think about what that means. It means that you're scrolling and acknowledging, but with humor, pending doom, because if you get a hold of a track of content and it's like negative stuff, which very often it is, and there's an algorithm to it, by the way, there's a sequence of how much negative stuff before the sale of something. There's there's a lot of strategy going on there, but that's what doom scrolling in. So we're watching a measurable shift in attention span recovery. I taught you about that attention lag and that recovery time. This is like more about executive function load and stuff like that. Because what we're worried about is that we're losing cognitive abilities. And it's also about emotional regulation. One thing I can tell you for sure is if a kid is struggling with emotional stuff and I've seen that and I've been like that, even still to this day, if I'm feeling depressed or anxious or anything like that and I take a break and I do a little bit of a fast from social media, it has a dramatic effect on my mood for sure. Here I am talking about this in observation of my children, but I find myself doing it as well. So it's it's extremely powerful. So we're watching a measurable shift in that attention span recovery time, executive function load, as well as emotional regulation. So we're observing an increase in what many people are referring to as an attention lag. So you see it in kids first, but it's not just kids, it's adults too. You say their name once, you say it twice. And sometimes you have to poke your head at and see if they're even listening because sometimes they have their AirPods in. They don't even listen to what's going on. And we crack up when we see those videos on social media where somebody like trips and falls on their face because they were looking at their phone. Are we here about the car crashes and stuff like that? But this is real. We say their name once, twice, three times. And there's that delay, that attention lag, that split second when they must return from whatever the feedback loop is that they're in and return to what we call reality. But we're seeing kids spend so much time in this alternate reality that we're starting to become the opposite of reality. I just interviewed Rizwan Verk, the author of the simulation hypothesis. That's going to come out in three weeks or so. This is one of the leading world experts on whether or not we're living in a simulation. And I don't want to get into that right now, but there's proof that whether we're living in a simulation or not, we seem to be moving towards one where they're spending so much time in this alternate world that the reality world that maybe I see as reality is becoming the alternate. Isn't that interesting? So there's that delay. So kids often refer to that idea of being like totally locked in and focused to their social media. They were referred to it as being locked in. Like sometimes I'll be in my car and somebody will be on the phone with me, you know, with hands free and they'll say hi to my daughter or my son. And I'll go, oh, she can't hear you. She's locked in. She's wired in. So this is another thing too. Now, I had a walk man, right? I had earphones and stuff like that, but it's just it's moving a little faster now. I think that's what I'm observing. So that lag isn't some sort of a moral failure, by the way, you know, it's kind of neural conditioning. That's what's scary about it. I don't look at it and think worse of people when they do that. I'm curious. And I say, hmm, I haven't made up my mind. And I start looking at what's really going on. And I see that it's more of a neural conditioning. And just like we build habits, this is like wiring our brains. And you only notice it when you notice that attention lag. Here's the harder truth. The adults have it too. This is not just about our kids. And right now you might be in this state where you're saying, yes, I see this happening, but it's happening with us as well. And I'm not afraid to admit it. So it's that moment in between drifting and shifting and choice. What I mean by drifting is when we're kind of like drifting off into something. Sometimes we'll drift off into imagination. I remember as a kid, my parents would ask me, hey, hey, hey, but I would be imagining things with my own brain. But now it's not their brain. It's technology is becoming the brain. So the real problem isn't the scroll. It's more about the drift. So we don't consciously decide to doom scroll. This is interesting. The activity of using the phone is something that we consciously pick it up. And sometimes unconsciously, right? We know about phantom phones and all that stuff. Right now I'm speaking to you and I don't have my phone in my pocket, but I might check to see if I do. I'm using my phone for the sub stack audience right now. So we don't consciously decide to do something that's not good for us. But we drift into passive unconscious consumption. We drift into it. So it's about the drift and it's been strategically designed to trigger this. That's an important distinction for us to make and potentially how we can break the loop or at least take a break from it is not just think of this as like some sort of a toy that we play with too much, but the manufacturers and the brains behind the toy are using the toy strategically to get the doom scrolling, to get the unconscious behavior. So that's an important thing to recognize because it might make you say, should I check this? So when scrolling, we're not learning when we scroll. When I'm scrolling, I'm not looking to learn. I'm just entertaining myself. Attention begins to loosen and at the same time, intention begins to fade. The feed begins to take over. But there's a moment, although small, almost invisible, that happens between the drift and the shift or the choice. And that moment becomes everything in this conversation. It's the split second where you notice, hey, wait a second, I didn't mean to be here. That is the doorway back to reclaiming authorship of your life. So we're going to switch gears right now and talk about reclaiming authorship of our lives, even while all of this stuff is going on. So it's in that moment where you can ask a question like this. What is it that I'm looking for? What am I avoiding? And what state am I in right now? So there's a couple of words that define what that process is. And it's called digital mindfulness. I think that's super cool. And it doesn't require deleting apps or demonizing AI. This is something that we can learn how to achieve even while we're interacting and interfacing with this stuff. But moving from passive consumption to active authorship, it's a shift of consciousness. It's all about controlling our consumption, if you think about it. The brain is programmable. And whatever it ends up consuming with regularity, ends up translating into what it assumes with regularity. And please, I really want to hit home with this. AI, social media, they're not the villains here. So let's address that part that people are so afraid of and afraid to say out loud. They're not the enemies. Artificial intelligence and social media can be looked at as magnifiers. They either amplify our presence or our absence. So you can see the different sides of it. If they amplify our presence, it can be an asset to us. But if they amplify our absence, it could be a negative. So remember, there's a choice. That's the whole concept behind digital mindfulness. So if you use AI as the creator, well, that means that you're giving all of the creative process over to AI or even social media, meaning you're just relinquishing control of thinking and giving it over, you will slowly disappear from your own creative process, you'll hand it over. However, if you use AI as a form of an assistant or a collaborator, well, then in that case, your cognition can actually increase and studies show that. So this is where the art of prompting becomes critical. The prompt is not some sort of a technical step to trigger something. It's actually your own creative process and your thinking. Small, lazy prompts that people use can put all of the creative process on the hands of AI and that trains cognitive dependency. We become dependent on the creative process being delegated out. Now, if you're the CEO of a company, that might make sense, but you're still leading the ship, you're still thinking. So you get polished output when you use AI. But if you think about it, you can't defend it. And because you didn't create it, it begins to sound less and less like you. And you lose your voice. In essence, without intention, you begin to lose your own voice. You can't explain it without the machine. That's over delegation and that's a disease. If this strategy gets worse and continues, we may in fact see a world where humans completely lose their voice and completely depend and require AI to speak for them. Take note of this happening in real time right now. We no longer need to learn languages. AI takes care of it. So over time, that's how digital burnout creeps in. You're producing more and efficiencies on the rise, but integrating less. Efficiency begins to disguise itself as intelligence. But when you journal first, remember that old fashioned thing called journaling? When you wrestle with your own thoughts in raw form and then use AI for human AI collaboration to organize, refine and maybe translate what it is that you already process. Well, something different happens in that situation. You can actually increase cognitive friction and cognitive friction is healthy. Let's look at the history of cognitive friction. We've trained our bodies through resistance for centuries. No different than lifting weights in the gym or overcoming challenges and adversity in everyday life. Can you see in this moment? That we're removing resistance from the mind. Houston, we have a problem. So let's talk about the disappearing art of the question. One of the quiet casualties of this error that we're living in right now is the loss of the art of questioning. We've started confusing answers with intelligence. But intelligence, if you think about it, lives upstream. It lives in perception, curiosity, the willingness to not know. There's so much power in not knowing and going through the steps of trying to figure things out if AI gives you a perfect answer and figures things out for you. But you never formed a meaningful question. Your cognition didn't grow. You outsourced it. So it's important to be in that situation where you really, really wrestle with your thoughts and come up with a great prompt and then dispute and rewrite and work in collaboration with AI rather than just outsourcing it. And here's the controversial thought. In 2026, this surge of digital burnout that we're seeing may not be about screen time. It might not be about all the time that we see people spending on their screen. It might be more about AI over delegation. Not that we're using tools and using AI as a tool, but surrendering the authorship over to the tool. And that would be what we call AI over delegation. So here's another trend that nobody's really talking about enough. It's emotional fitness and it's becoming more valuable than technical skills. In a world where generative AI can produce content instantly, the differentiator isn't speed. It becomes depth. We're losing depth. It's the ability to regulate your state, to tolerate boredom and sit in cognitive friction long enough for the original thought to emerge. We had a wonderful interview that you guys heard by now with Lee Slotoff, the creator and genius behind MacGyver. And he was talking about those moments where he was asked to create a couple of episodes and he said he learned that walking up to a whiteboard or writing things down was not how he came up with his creative genius. He learned that stepping away from it, having the idea of what he needed to accomplish, but stepping away from it and taking a shower is where he would have his strokes of genius by stepping away. Isn't that interesting? So which brings us back to the next generation. Can we reverse the attention lag in gen alpha? Yes, but it can only happen through intentional boredom. Now, this is fascinating. I think we can reverse things, but not by removing technology entirely. They won't have that. And I think that that is just something that we try as parents and it makes things worse. We're talking about training with boredom reps here. Things like 10 minutes of no input time, journaling without a destination. Such a powerful thing to do. A lot of people think you have to have an idea of what you want to journal about. I'm talking about journaling with no destination, kind of like that shower with a lot of sitting with discomfort instead of always anesthetizing it. Boredom isn't wasted time. It's neurological recovery. And if you really think about it, it's in those times of boredom where we just allow our minds to wander that we come up with our strokes of genius. Isn't it? We're losing our ability to be bored. We have to start doing some boredom reps. Digital minimalization isn't about deleting everything, by the way. It's about staying awake inside with what it is that you've decided to keep. Now, it's about running the IRS. No, not that one, the interface response system, which is something that you get in my book and most of my content. It's about running the interface response system with your attention span and focus. It's noticing the dopamine loop, taking note of it in phase one of the interface response system. And that is perceived noticing the dopamine loop, catching and interrupting the drift. It's about asking better questions and occasionally voluntarily choosing cognitive friction over cognitive sedation. So the real question isn't, is AI making me dumber? It's this, will we remain sufficiently present to use it without disappearing and losing our authorship? Because in this human AI collaboration that I'm saying in a positive light, the machine doesn't become God. It just becomes a collaborator and a mirror. And with all this talk about whether or not we're living in a simulation, I just finished an interview with Rizwan Burke, the author of the simulation hypothesis, fascinating how fast things are moving at him on the show once before. And since he was on the show, God, so much advancement and it's accelerating. So this idea of whether or not we're living in a simulation. Well, one thing is for sure, even if we're not, let's see what figure out that we're not living in a simulation. Well, I hope this conversation points out that we can see it on the horizon. Make sense? That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the Make Sense sub-stack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time. Hmm. Makes sense.