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Dr. J.C. Doornick (1:29)

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 makes sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control and step back into that role as the shot caller 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. 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. J.C. doornick, 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, 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 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 long 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 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, is 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 gonna 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, we have our own thoughts and feelings and we say 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 our knee jerk reflex to pause and just step back and allow ourselves to create a little bit of a space. Viktor 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 won, 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 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 gonna do today is we're gonna 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. And 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 fact. 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 attention 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 a cartoon of a cat doing nothing and just laughing hysterically and seeing how it's getting tons of. 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 distractive, 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 you know, 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, you know, that's concerning as well, is where I see that this new generation, but also a lot of adults as well, you know, it's not just the kids, they're incapable of being bored and allowing their mind to wander. And 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 claim control of their reality in their life as the dominant force of it, but also as the shot 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 scrolling. It's like you're not getting smarter. What you're doing 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, you know, 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. 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 keywords 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, like 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 like 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, 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.