Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
by Dr. JC Doornick "The Dragon"
Hello and welcome to Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick. We discuss the things that make you go "Hmm?" — the most pressing topics of contemplation in your mind as you interface with the reality of your day-to-day life. Are you open, curious, and ready to solve the mysteries of why stuff happens? Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses.
Episodes
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Good Shift – The World We Made Up – E233
Dr. JC Doornick spent some time watching the birds at his feeder and noticed something that kept him curious: no opinions about themselves, no ranking, no unfinished business. In this Wednesday episode, pulled from the best of the Makes Sense Substack, he explores the second world we quietly…
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Garry Lineham - The Missing Piece in Our Understanding of the Body - E232
Garry Lineham is a cofounder of Human Garage, the movement behind Fascial Maneuvers, a practice built on pressure, counter rotation, breath and intention. In this conversation, Garry walks me through how he believes fascia senses and sends signals through the body, why he sees the body as a...
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Stop Feeling Like a Failure - E231
Dr. JC Doornick takes on one of the heaviest labels people carry: failure. Why do we feel like failures in a world that never promised us success? Dr. JC makes the case that much of what we call failure is a story we tell about an event, not the event itself. Along the way he draws on Carol…
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Good Shift - In Consideration - E230
In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick brings the best of the Makes Sense Substack to the podcast with a short, sharp look at consideration. We are taught to be considerate, and rightly so. But he asks whether we have become so considerate of every headline, imagined judgment, and passing...
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Hal Elrod - The 5 Minute Rule That Beat the Odds - E229
Hal Elrod was hit head-on by a drunk driver, found dead at the scene, and told he would never walk again. Years later, by his own account, he lost more than half of his income and his house went into foreclosure. Then he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer. Each time he reached for the...
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Why Successful People Feel Like Frauds - E228
Dr. JC Doornick has lived extreme success and extreme failure, and he still catches imposter syndrome showing up in his own head. In this episode he opens with a rapid round of “makes sense or not” questions that expose the beliefs quietly running your decisions. Then he breaks down why your…
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Good Shift - Nature Doesn't Hurry - E227
In this good shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick brings you the best of the Makes Sense Substack live in his Wednesday series. He begins with a line attributed to Lao Tzu: nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. From there he asks a simple, funny question: do trees worry? Drawing on his...
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Steven Kotler - We Have Godlike Power and Stone Age Brains - E226
Meet Steven Kotler, founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, a Distinguished Research Fellow at Florida Atlantic University, and co-author with Peter Diamandis of We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. In this conversation, Steven breaks down what flow…
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For People Feeling Behind In Life - E225
On this Makes Sense episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes on the quiet questions most of us avoid: Am I doing enough? Am I behind? Do I matter? Drawing on ideas explored by Alan Watts and on his own experience living with stage 4 cancer, he asks whether we have turned purpose, achievement and legacy…
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Good Shift - What Are You Waiting For? - E224
In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick, the Dragon, hears a David Guetta and OneRepublic song and finds it lands differently than ever before. Navigating cancer, he asks one question: what are you waiting for? He walks through the quiet assumption that there will always be time to call the...
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Jack Daly - The Plan He Wrote at 13 Still Runs His Life Today - E223
My guest today is Jack Daly, a serial entrepreneur, sales leader, author, and endurance athlete. He built six companies into national firms, sold two of them to Wall Street firms, led sales organizations numbering in the thousands, and is a former US Army captain. He has also finished 15 Ironmans...
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What Cancer Taught Me About Time - E222
Most of us are remarkably good at preparing to live and surprisingly bad at actually living. In this solo episode, Dr. JC Doornick shares what his cancer diagnosis has taught him about the illusion of tomorrow, why urgency is not the same as speed, and how much of our lives we put on layaway…
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Good Shift - Your Personal Board of Directors: Ask the Giants a Better Question - E221
In this episode of Good Shift, Dr. JC Doornick brings one of the best ideas from the Makes Sense Substack to the show: a personal board of directors made up of ten people whose lives, ideas, or courage inspired you. Not a boardroom with quarterly numbers, but framed pictures on your wall that you...
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Evan Carmichael - Rejection to 4 Million Subscribers: The YouTube Growth Playbook - E220
Evan Carmichael turned a year of near silence into one of the biggest YouTube channels for entrepreneurs on the internet, with millions of subscribers. He built and sold a biotech software company and raised venture capital before he ever pressed record. Today he trains thought leaders through…
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Why Do Hurt People Hurt People? - E219
Yesterday everything was fine. Today they’re cold, they’ve ghosted you, or you find out they’ve been talking about you to everyone but you. In this episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes on “hurt people hurt people” from a different angle: what if the pain isn’t being resolved but transferred, and what…
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Good Shift - Who's Typing? How the Algorithm Vibe Codes You - E218
In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes the term "vibe coding," coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe building software by simply describing what you want to an AI, and turns it on its head. Every repeated thought is a line of code, and every algorithm is...
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Jill Schulman - A Marine Veteran Explains How to Conquer Fear - E217
Jill Schulman was one of the first women to lead in Marine Corps combat engineering. She then turned a career in pharma and corporate leadership development into a master's in positive psychology at Penn, and she has trained more than 30,000 leaders around one idea: action creates confidence. Her...
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Curiosity Is Your Superpower: Beat Imposter Syndrome for Good- E216
Even Dr. JC Doornick is not immune. One presentation was all it took to send his mind spiraling into doubt, comparison, and the question every high achiever quietly fears: what if I am not as good as I think I am? Then he did something small that changed the whole story. In this episode, he shows...
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Good Shift - How Creative Allowance Changes the Way You Plan - E215
What if the life you keep trying to make happen is not the only one available to you? In this Good Shift episode, a new series where Dr. JC Doornick brings one of his favorite Makes Sense Substack blogs to life, he starts with a question he was asked about who he creates for and what makes his...
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Dr. Robert Epstein - This Harvard Scientist Was Warned to Stay Silent - E214
What if the search result you trusted most was quietly chosen to change your mind? Dr. Robert Epstein is a Harvard-trained research psychologist and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. For more than a decade, he has studied how search engines, search suggestions, and video...
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Radical Responsibility: When Life Chooses You - E213
What if the very thing draining your energy every day isn't your circumstances, but the hours you spend rehearsing a future that hasn't happened yet? Dr. JC Doornick is currently navigating a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and instead of talking around it, he uses it as the live case study for the...
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Good Shift - The Currency of Attention - E212
What if the people you love most aren't getting your best attention, just whatever is left after the noise has taken its share? In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick brings his Makes Sense Substack writing to life with a short, powerful reflection on Carrency: the limited supply of time,...
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He Turned His Employees Into Millionaires — At 93, Frank Stronach Explains How - E211
He built Magna International into one of the world's largest auto parts companies, with hundreds of factories and well over a hundred thousand employees. But the real story isn't the company's size. It's what he did with the profits. Instead of keeping them at the top, he split them with the…
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IRS - How to See Life From a Completely Different Perspective - E210
If you've been trying to change your mindset — for success, happiness, or just clarity — you found the right video. I'm Dr. JC Doornick, and for over 20 years, I've helped thousands of high-net-worth individuals see things from a different perspective—one that got them out of their own way and...
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Good Shift - How to keep your feet in the face of adversity - E209
What does it really mean to “keep your feet” when life tries to sweep you away? In this short Good Shift, Dr. JC Doornick explores the difference between experiencing adversity and letting it take control of your identity, direction, and response. Inspired by Bilbo Baggins’ timeless warning about...
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Helen Urwin - The Woman Fortune 500 Brands Called in Secret for 30 Years — Finally Reveals The 9 Freedoms of Being Giant - E208
For thirty years, if you worked at Mars, Kellogg, General Mills, KPMG, or Sony — and your brand needed to change from the inside out — there's a good chance you were quietly sent to one woman. No client logos. No case studies. No public profile. Just results so consistent that people in the...
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Misunderstoond - How to handle unsolicited criticism - E207
Someone told me I was called a misogynist. Not a stranger's opinion I could shrug off — someone who'd formed a real judgment about who I am. And it caught me off guard, because it felt nothing like how I see myself. My first instinct was to defend myself. My second instinct was to dismiss them.…
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GOOD SHIFT- Transformational Gardening Vs. Weed Whacking - E206
What if the reason certain problems keep coming back isn’t that you haven’t fought them hard enough—but because you haven’t changed the environment that allows them to thrive? In this Good Shift, Dr. JC explores the difference between living like a Weed Whacker and becoming a Transformational...
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Danny Goler: DMT, Lasers & the Hidden Structure of Reality: What Science Won't Touch (But He Did) - E205
What if reality isn't made of particles — what if it's made of code? My guest today is an independent researcher who took a laser, pointed it at the world, and recorded something that mainstream science has no clear explanation for. Danny Goler calls it the Code of Reality. Others have compared...
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Why You Trust Fear More Than Your Own Potential - E204
In 2001, psychologist Roy Baumeister tried to find one situation where good news outweighs bad news of the same size. His team couldn't find a single one. Their paper became one of the most-cited in psychology, and the conclusion was simple: bad is stronger than good. That's not pessimism —…
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Good Shift - The Power of Not Making Up Your Mind - E203
Welcome to Good Shift—our weekly series where I take one of my favorite entries from the Makes Sense Substack and bring it to life right here on the podcast. Today’s Good Shift is about the Automatic Yes—and why learning to pause before you commit might be one of the most powerful ways to protect...
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AI Isn’t the Future Without HI: Jim Kwik on Human Intelligence & Becoming Limitless Daily - E202
What happens to human intelligence in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence? In this special conversation, Dr. JC Doornick sits down with world-renowned brain coach and bestselling author Jim Kwik to explore his new book, Limitless Daily, and why developing our own minds may…
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The Idea That Ends Most Arguments Before They Start (Whole-O-Graphic Vision) - E201
Your brain already made up its mind about today's episode, and you haven't even heard the topic yet. That's not a guilt trip; that's neuroscience. In the next few seconds, your mind will label this video interesting or skip it, useful or not, right up your alley or not, and it will do all of that...
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Good Shift - Living Your Life By Design - E200
What if the hardest moments of your life aren’t interruptions to the plan—but part of the blueprint? In this episode of Makes Sense with Dr. JC, we explore the difference between a life that simply happens to you and a life intentionally designed by you. Inspired by a recent conversation with…
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He Was Given 12 Months to Live. Here's What He Wants You to Know About Identity - David Linden - E199
What if everything you believe about why you are 'you' is wrong? My guest today has spent his career studying the brain at Johns Hopkins — and a few years ago, he was told he had six to twelve months to live. Today, we're talking about what he's learned on both sides of that line. We're going to...
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The Humbling: The Science of Post-Traumatic Growth - E198
Everything you're stressed about today? Most of it is about to become worthless. Not because you'll fix it. Because something bigger is about to make it look small. I'm Dr. JC Doornick. I was recently diagnosed with cancer, and what happened next wasn't just fear. It was the fastest reordering of...
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Ex-Scientologist Reveals What Really Happens Inside the Sea Org (Tom Cruise, John Travolta & More) - Anne Hill - E197
My guest today spent two decades inside Scientology — fourteen of those years inside the Sea Organization, the most demanding, most secretive inner circle the church has. She interviewed John Travolta. She watched up close how power moved around Tom Cruise. And then one day, she walked away from...
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The Gratitude Trick That Rewires Your Brain by 9AM - E196
Your brain already ran its program this morning — before your feet hit the floor. That's not a metaphor. Neuroscience shows your brain boots up yesterday's emotional patterns automatically, the same way an AI model repeats whatever it was trained on. So here's the real question: who's writing the...
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He Went From Meth Addict to Millionaire's Therapist — Matt Grace's Wild Recovery Story - E195
What if the thing that finally stopped your addiction... wasn't willpower? Today I'm sitting down with Matt Grace — a man who went from Ritalin to crystal meth to arrests and overdoses, and is now, twenty years later, the guy that Manhattan's wealthiest families call when their kid is dying from...
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A Second Chance On Love - The Real Chicken and Dragon Story - Interview by Jennie Drollinger - E-194
In this episode of Second Chances: The Best Parts Are on Side B, Dr. JC and Mieke share an extraordinary story of love after divorce, healing, manifestation, adoption, and second chances. Vote for Chicken And Dragon Here For America's Favorite Couple:...
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We Summited Everest Together — Then Went Back to Work on Monday | Håkon & Hanne Hyttedalen - E193
"Imagine finishing your work week on Friday, flying to Nepal, summiting Mount Everest — and being back at your desk by the following Monday. Håkon and Hanne Hyttedalen are Norwegian consultants. They work full-time in corporate Oslo. And they have also won ultra trail races, run the UTMB around...
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Stop Setting Goals — Become the Person Who Wins - E192
Ninety-two percent of people who set a goal this year will abandon it before spring. Not from lack of motivation — because they tried to change what they do without deciding who they are first. Today, Dr. JC breaks down the identity-first mindset: how your habits, your routines, even how you...
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He Spent 30 Years Failing Before Writing a Bestseller — Steven Pressfield on Resistance, Identity & Going Pro - E191
What if the thing standing between you and the life you were meant to live… isn’t your circumstances, your resources, or your talent — but one invisible enemy inside your own mind? My guest today spent thirty years broke, overlooked, and grinding before the world ever heard his name. He drove...
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The Untouchable Flow: Why Control Is Killing Your Peace - E-190
You will spend more energy this week trying to control things you have zero power over than on anything you can actually change. Zero. And it's exhausting you. There's a river that never fights the boulder in its path — it just flows around it. Today I'm showing you how to become that river. This...
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He Was Homeless, Jailed, and Suicidal — Then Built an 800% Business Empire | Glenn Lundy - E189
What would you do if you had lost everything — your home, your freedom, your will to live — and the only thing you had left was a decision? My guest today hit every one of those walls. He was homeless. He sat behind bars. He tried to end his life. And then — somehow — he went on to build an 800%...
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Carelessly Unshakable and the Super Power of Silence - E-188
Great Morning, Humans, Great Morning, World. I am Dr. JC Doornick, AKA the Dragon. Welcome to the Makes Sense Podcast, and welcome to the Uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Here's a bold statement: 99% of the emotional pain you feel today isn't happening to you — it's happening to a costume...
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The Psychologist Who Proved Trauma Can Trigger Enlightenment — Steve Taylor - E187
What if the most transformative experiences of your life — crisis, loss, near-death — aren’t things that happen TO you… But things that can permanently wake you UP? My guest today has spent two decades collecting the evidence. He’s a psychology lecturer, a bestselling author in over 20 languages,...
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Cancer Gave Me What Years of Therapy Couldn't - E-186
Here's something nobody tells you about a cancer diagnosis: it might be the most clarifying moment of your entire life. Studies show that up to 70% of cancer survivors report what psychologists call post-traumatic growth — not just surviving, but becoming. Today we're going somewhere most…
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He's Guided Thousands Through Ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT & Peyote — Here's What No One Tells You E- 185
What if the most powerful therapy available right now isn't in a clinic? Is it in a jungle? My guest today has sat in a ceremony with hundreds of people. He's guided them through Ayahuasca in the Amazon, through the full-force blast of 5-MeO-DMT from Bufo toad venom, through peyote, San Pedro…
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Want Nothing, Fear Nothing: The Power of Indifference - E-184
Here's a question that might sting a little — who has power over you right now? Because if you're honest... it's anyone whose approval you need. Research shows that the human brain is wired to treat social rejection the same way it treats a physical threat. Your nervous system literally cannot…
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About this show
Hello and welcome to Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick. We discuss the things that make you go "Hmm?" — the most pressing topics of contemplation in your mind as you interface with the reality of your day-to-day life. Are you open, curious, and ready to solve the mysteries of why stuff happens? Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses.
Hosted by
Dr. JC Doornick "The Dragon"
Categories