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Neighbor, Cable and Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. When you manage procurement for mobile facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Hi, this is Alex Canceroitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

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This idea may be the reason why so many people feel stuck, reactive, and maybe even mentally overwhelmed. And it's because they're trained to rush to certainty. So think that through for a second. What does it mean to you to live in a world where we're rushed to be, be certain about things, to respond and be certain about things. 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, reclaiming, claim, 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. Most people think that being a free thinker, think about what it means to be a free thinker is just some sort of a label. And what's interesting about that is I have a guest coming on the make sense with Dr. JC podcast this week, the great Nir Eyel, who just made the New York Times bestseller with his new book called Beyond Belief. So naturally I read the book. I'm a huge fan of Nir's. He wrote a book called Indistractable. He wrote a book called Hook. If you have not gotten your hands on this new book, Beyond Belief, please consider it. It's just fascinating to think about what that even means, beyond belief. But he shared something. And our folks out in Asia, Malaysia, Singapore, he shared something that most people don't know. You know, in those countries, when you fill out a form and they ask you questions about yourself, including your beliefs, it goes a little bit further than just religion. There's a box that you can check off in Malaysia and Singapore, which I think is a very thoughtful thing to ask somebody. But there's an option to consider yourself a free thinker. How fascinating is that to not say, you know, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or even atheist, just to consider yourself a free thinker. So think for a second what that would mean to you to allow yourself to identify as a free thinker. So most people think that a free thinker is just a label and maybe something that you check off on a form. But today we're going to look at the idea of what if it actually is a secret weapon for your brain, whether you want to consider your religious beliefs as a free thinker or not. What if you just considered yourself as an open, curious, free thinker? And yes, that made me go, hm. So today I want to explore something that I haven't fully made up my mind about yet. How's that? Is, is sound working now? So that's what my hat represents. It says, and that's just a sound that I say. That is an open and curious sound. But it also stands for haven't made up my mind. That's something that I allow myself to do to not make up my mind. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But this idea may be the reason why so many people feel stuck, reactive, and maybe even mentally overwhelmed. And it's because they're trained to rush to certainty, think that through for a second. What does it mean to you to live in a world where we're rushed, to be certain about things, to respond and be certain about things. There's this pressure that we have on ourselves to be certain. I don't know if you guys can feel it. We're going to look at the idea that in 2026, potentially one of the greatest advantages that you can have might not be to know more. God, we're so pressured to know things like, and if you don't know something, you might pretend you know or you might feel compelled to go look it up. But maybe it isn't about knowing more, but staying open and curious longer. That's what we're going to talk about. That moment, that pause when we say, and we allow ourselves to not know and stay curious. And this is attached to being a free thinker. So by the end of this episode, I don't want to give you more answers. That's not my task today, to give you more answers. What I want to do is I want to give you something better. And that is just potentially some windshield wipers or some make sense glasses that will enable and equip you to see things more clear clearly. Here's a perspective. So I came across something, as I said before, and I want to put it into context while I was reading this book, Beyond Belief. What Nir Eyel does in this book is he points out that there's places like Malaysia and Singapore where free thinker is actually listed as an option when we're identifying our religious preferences or in the case of the book, beliefs. And at first, I don't know what you think when I. When you think about this idea of considering yourself a free thinker, I thought to myself, oh, great, another label, right? Another. I kind of got frustrated. Like, it's not enough to call yourself a whatever or an atheist. Now we have a free thinker. So that was my first knee jerk reaction. But the more that I sat with it, which prompted today's podcast episode, the less that I felt like it was a label and the more I started to consider that it was more like a permission slip. Do you guys know what a permission slip is? A permission slip to me at this time means that somebody of authority gives me permission to think for myself. But I'm talking about giving yourself a permission slip. I love to actually write myself permission slips to do things like be open and curious. I write myself permission slips every now and then to care less about things that don't deserve my care. And I'm not talking about a permission slip to rush to an answer either, because I give myself permission to not rush to an answer and not feel pressured to pick a side, to not lock yourself into a belief just so that you can portray that you are a certain person. I just loved this concept. And I don't know, there's something about that, this idea of giving yourself permission, being a free thinker, it just feels like it might be missing in how most of us think. And I hope that that is a gift and a blessing for you today to just recognize first that I don't really do that. I kind of allow my programmed, persuaded and conditioned mind, which has been programmed by our mother, father, teacher, preacher, society, evolution. I just kind of put the keys of trust that it will know what to do. I'm talking about putting a pause on that for a second and having a conversation with yourself and calling the shots. I always say, welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. That's what this show is. We live in a world where the thinking is being done for us. We're going to give ourselves permission to think for ourselves. We're going to reclaim control as the dominant force and shot callers of our own lives. So here's the problem. If we look around, we live in a world that rewards certainty. Can you see that? Can you see that? We live in a world that has, like a reward system that is progressive and it rewards people for being certain, certain in their opinions. We get rewarded if we take a stance, you know, or at least we think that we get rewarded when we take a stance to be confident, decisive. Don't get me wrong, there's value to those things. I'm not saying don't ever do that. I'm just saying start recognizing that we live in a system that has a reward system for those things. So there's the value in considering and entertaining the exploration of what might be. The sooner that we stop this programmed response system that we have and we'll get closer to this potential of thinking about what we actually think, what actually serves us, rather than just playing the role. So it got me wondering how much of what we know is actually just what we decided early on and never questioned again, how much of what you're certain about. Now, certainty is a tough thing to challenge because it's the foundation for our identity in many cases. But how much of your certainty, if you really give yourself a chance to think about it, is just based on something that you decided early on was, and you never questioned it again? The whole concept of is not only questioning what you're receiving from the outside in, it's also questioning and disputing and contemplating. Not saying, I'm not going to think that way. It's just saying, well, what is another way of thinking? An alternative perspective, Entertaining alternative perspectives. It's such a freeing thing if you allow yourself to do it. Hey, I just want to say it turns out you're not going to believe this, but it turns out that 75% of all of you and consume my material are not subscribed to the YouTube channel. If you could just take a second and subscribe to it. Subscribe, support the MakeSense ecosystem and you'll get notifications and help us grow. And when we grow, the content's going to get better and we're going to be able to keep the lights on and serve you guys better. We'd greatly appreciate it. I want to introduce this topic and kind of ease it into the Interface response system, which is our four step system of changing the way that you look at things so that the things that you look at can change. And that comes from the Make Sense book. So this is where I want to bring in something really, really simple. And I've mentioned it a couple times, but it's probably the most powerful thing I have to share. And that is this sound of hmm. And it's spelled hmmm for a reason. And I think a lot of people say it and a lot of people look at my hat with the question mark and they say oh, and I don't know what means to you, but it means haven't made up my mind. Now this is a really, really powerful sound, but it's also a tool and a strategy to help us with what we're talking about. So it sits inside of the interface Response system. And those four steps of the system are perceive, pause, process, and then proceed. And that is a four step system to help us move away from reaction, which is handing the keys of trust to our program conditioned mind, which is very often faulty and moving towards a thoughtful response. But what we're talking about, where this sits, is in the pause. So that's the second step. And it's a practice of cognitive distancing, stepping into a space between the stimulus and your programmed response. And what that does is it gives you a chance to think, to ask yourself questions about what you really think. So the pause is where everything changes. If you can just allow yourself to start saying more often. And by the way, that's not running away from an answer because remember, there's forces at work right now that are prompting us and pressuring us to answer. You're not running away from an answer. You're not dodging the answer. You're just going to process it and come up with an answer that suits you and potentially them better. And I want you to know that there's also a situation where no answer is appropriate. We're very often getting approached by people unsolicitedly. Things are happening that we don't control, and we still feel prompted to have a reaction to it. You don't have to have a reaction to everything. So sometimes when I say hmm and I pause, I recognize I don't really even care. I don't have anything to add to it, and it has nothing to do with me. This is the actions behind this idea of being a free thinker. When you say, haven't made up my mind, what you're doing is you're interrupting the automatic reaction that feels compelled to display that demand for certainty. Sit with that for a sec. What you do is you create space between the stimulus. Now, the stimulus is not always something that you're perceiving on the outside. The stimulus could be your thoughts. I've been really fascinated by how we feel compelled to participate with all of our thoughts. We have 40 to 70,000 thoughts that run through our head, and somehow we select like, four or five of them, and we create our identity behind it, and we participate with that. And sometimes that'll ruin our day, or sometimes that'll be the reason we don't follow through. So when I say, hmm, sometimes I'll do that with my own thoughts, I love to ask myself, oh, is that right, J.C. is that right, Dragon? And then say, but what else might be true? And that moves me into this space where I can determine what else might be true. And I just want to make sure everybody knows that sometimes I don't participate. I just observe. I don't run away. And just like my heart beats, I don't challenge every beat of my heart because that's what my heart does. Well, your brain, like the heart, thinks. And we don't have to entertain every thought, and we don't have to entertain every unsolicited action or event that happens in our life. So it's a valuable tool. So you create space between the stimulus and your response. And in that space, as I said, you're no longer operating from internal triggers and distraction. It's a healthy space for you to be in. It's a better version of yourself, and it's a space where you're not trying to defend what you already believe. Now, remember we said before, when I look at a belief or something that I know to be true, something that I know that I have certainty behind, I entertain whether or not that's something that I had decided on a long time ago and never allowed myself to question it. You're just observing it. We're entertaining the idea right now that there are things, thoughts and feelings. Because remember, Descartes says, I think, therefore I am. So before you decide that you are right, we're just going to entertain. Well, maybe that's something that has expired and the key word there is maybe. Now, if this is an exhausting thing for you to entertain, like to actually rethink your thoughts as a great book by Adam Grant called Think Again, he basically says, it's okay to think again, it's okay to rethink things, and it could be the catalyst to an extraordinary breakthrough and acceleration in your life. So we're talking about a massive shift. This is some good shift. And the shift is to move from reaction to free thinking. And maybe that's what a free thinker really is. It's almost like a permission slip. Like we said before, it's not someone who rejects belief. This is the reason why we won't allow ourselves to be a free thinker, to pause our certainty and allow ourselves to rethink it. The reason why is because there's a perception that it's a rejection of our belief and we're not really supposed to reject our beliefs, especially when they're beliefs that have social proof in your community or you've been trained to believe because of your environment. Your mother, father, teacher, preacher. That's why we struggle. But we're not saying that we're never going to consider it. We're just going to ask ourselves what we think about it. And a lot of my belief systems I didn't create in that sense. They were given to me and I had reason to believe that they were true. So maybe their expiration date has come. So we entertain the maybe component of that and we say, well, let me take a look. Let me take a look under the hood.