Why AI keeps AGREEING with you (and how to fix it)…

AI is not necessarily making you dumber.
It is making your brain do less.

And your brain adapts to what it’s asked to do.

That’s the real warning in this video.

This is not a video about why AI is bad.
It’s a video about what happens when you use it wrong — and how to make sure you’re not. The script makes this clear: the danger isn’t AI itself, it’s passive use, cognitive offloading, and the identity pattern called the Dependent Thinker.

Most people think they’re using AI to think better.

But in many cases, they’re using it to avoid thinking. And over time, that creates a silent loop:

ask AI first
skip the mental struggle
get the answer
feel relief
repeat
become a little more dependent each time

The script calls this what it is: cognitive offloading. When you outsource a thinking task, your brain adapts by doing less of it. Not because it’s lazy. Because it’s efficient. That’s the neuroplasticity argument at the center of the whole video.

In this video, you’ll learn:
why AI is not the problem, but passive use is
what cognitive offloading actually is
why relief can be the warning sign
the two paths your brain can take:
THINK → STRUGGLE → SOLVE → LEARN → GROW
PROBLEM → ASK AI → RECEIVE → SKIP → REPEAT
why the Dependent Thinker pattern is so dangerous
how your brain works like a mental muscle: what you use strengthens, what you bypass weakens
the signs that this pattern may already be happening to you
what high-level AI users do differently
how to use the B.R.A.I.N. Cognitive Protection System:
Build your own answer first
Reflect on your thinking
Ask AI to challenge you
Integrate insights
Navigate with ownership

One of the deepest lines in the script is this:

“The output disguised the loss.”

That’s the real trap.

Because when AI gives you a clean, structured answer fast, it feels like efficiency. But what may actually be happening is that you’re training your brain to stop engaging with the exact kind of struggle that builds capability in the first place.

This video is for:

founders
writers
creators
operators
high-performers
anyone using AI daily who wants to stay mentally sharp instead of becoming quietly dependent

If you’ve ever noticed yourself:

opening the window before thinking
avoiding hard problems
needing AI validation
losing capacity for deep work
trusting your own decisions less

…then this video will hit hard. Those exact signs are named directly in the script.

Because the goal is not to use less AI.

The goal is to use AI in a way that keeps you strong.

Use AI after thinking — not instead of it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

AI is not necessarily making you dumber, but it is making your brain do less. And your brain adapts to what it's asked to do. And it doesn't happen overnight. It's not in a way that you would notice right away. But every time you outsource a thinking task, your brain takes the signal. And your brain registers that this is no longer needed. And so it takes a step back. Not because it's lazy, it's because it's efficient. Because neural real estate doesn't stay allocated to functions that you've stopped using. And that's not a metaphor, that's actual neuroplasticity. You either use it or lose it. Think about the last time that you hit a real thinking problem, a decision that required you to hold multiple perspectives at once, a strategy that didn't have an obvious answer, something that would have taken 30 minutes of focused mental wrestling, building the case, testing assumptions, arriving at your own position from first principles. Now, be honest. Did you do the thinking? Or did you open up GPT or Claude? And here's what you felt in that moment, if you're honest about it. You felt relief. Because AI was able to give you a clear, structured answer. But here's the problem: something in you relaxed because the difficult thing was no longer required. That feeling, that relief, that's the warning sign. Because what you actually experienced in that moment wasn't efficiency, it was atrophy. You just made yourself slightly less capable of doing the exact thing that the moment required. And you felt good about it because the output was there. And you do this one time and it's nothing. You do it a hundred times and it's a pattern. You do it a thousand times and it's a diminished capability that you didn't even know that you lost. And here's what nobody's teaching you. Every conversation about AI and thinking is about the output, better prompts, better results, better workflows. The entire industry is optimizing the exchange, essentially, what you get back. And nobody's asking what you're losing in that transaction. There are two paths that your brain can take when you encounter a hard problem. So the first one here, so you think. Think about the problem, and you have something that you're trying to solve, right? You're thinking about it deeply, then you go into struggle. Where you're struggling, you're wrestling with the problem, you're trying to solve it, you're looking at it from multiple different angles, multiple different perspectives. You're taking third person, fourth person perspective, first principles thinking, second order thinking, all of these different perspectives, right? Then you're going into trying to solve the problem. And then once you solve the problem, then you learn, right? So this whole process, let me extend this out here just a bit, okay. So this whole process here allows you to go through a problem that has you really use your mental muscle, okay? You struggle with it, you wrestle with it, you you know go back and forth, you look at different ways of solving it, different angles, you finally solve it, and then you actually learn something new. New neural pathways are built in your mind and your brain, and you have higher awareness and perspective. Because this, after you learn, this allows you to ultimately grow, right? This is how you got good at anything that you're currently good at, right? You went through this whole entire process, and here's the path that most people are on, and they don't even realize it or even know it. So for them, there's a problem, there's an issue. Then they go and they ask AI, right? They outsource this struggle, and this struggle here, this is massive. This is what allows you to really expand your mind, right? And to get good at something. And once you encounter something, and then you automatically ask AI, then you're completely outsourcing your thinking. And so from here, they receive the response, and then when they receive the response, each time they're doing this, their brain is losing that connection, it's losing its muscle, right? Think about going to the gym and working out. If you're not using your muscle and you're just sitting down every day, all day long, once you get up, your feet, your arms, everything's going to be tired, it's going to be very weak because you're not using it anymore. And so, for here, you're receiving the response and you're skipping this whole mental struggle here that allows you to grow and expand. And so then you just keep repeating this loop. And so the biggest thing here is that you're skipping this entire process of struggle that allows you to grow, to expand, to get different perspectives, right? To expand the neural connections and pathways in your brain. And so, from here, when you're skipping the problem, what you're doing here is you're creating a closed loop. And every time you go through this cycle, you get your answer. However, your ability to generate answers without it declines slightly. And because the decline is invisible, because the output still shows up, you have nothing that's giving you a warning. There's nothing telling you that you're becoming less capable while feeling more efficient. You see, this path builds you, it brings you up, it allows you to grow to expand. This one here, this one erodes you, and it feels like you're being productive the entire time. And I've mapped this out across myself and many of the other entrepreneurs that I work with. And you see, the biggest thing here is that they didn't notice the decline itself because remember, it's invisible. What they did notice is the dependency, and here's the pattern that showed up across every single one of them. So rely more, trust less, reach faster, rely more. So this loop here is that you're continually relying on the system, right? GBT, Claude, or whatever tool that you're using, and then you're trusting yourself less, you're reaching faster in terms of hey, even this small little problem that maybe would have taken you 30 seconds to figure out on your own, you're still going back to the GBT or Claude to answer your question, even though you likely would have answered it yourself very quickly. And so you're just continually relying on the system itself more and more. And the more that you rely on AI for thinking, the more it is that you trust yourself less. You see, this is not a tool problem, this is a cognitive dependency spiral, and the tool is designed to deepen it, not to interrupt it. It's not gonna tap you in the shoulder and say, hey, you haven't done your own thinking yet. It's just gonna continue to answer, and that's why I built the protection system. Okay, so here's what we're covering today. So I'm gonna walk you through a specific archetype, which is the dependent thinker. This is someone who asks AI deep questions, gathers information, gets frameworks, refines prompts, digs deeper and deeper, and never stops to realize that they haven't done a single minute of their own thinking. It looks like learning, it feels like growth, but the cognitive machinery, the part that actually gets stronger through friction, is being completely bypassed. And second, I'm gonna walk you through cognitive offloading. This is where I'm gonna walk you through what exactly is happening when you outsource your thinking and the dangerous loop that nobody talks about, the one where you trust your own thinking less. And third, I'm gonna walk you through and give you a diagnostic. This is five signs that this pattern is already active in your life: shorter attention for deep work, less confidence in your own decisions. By the end of this section, you're going to know exactly where you stand, and you won't be able to unsee the pattern. And then, fourth, we're gonna go over the brain cognitive protection system. And this is not a prompt engineering framework or teaching or tool, this is a structural system that changes what the tool does to you by changing how you engage with it before you even type a single word. And then finally, I'm gonna walk you through the difference between low-level users and high-level users. You see, low-level users always are asking for answers. High-level users think first from their own position, then they wrestle with the problem, and then they open GPT or Claude and they say, Hey, here's what I'm thinking. Where am I wrong? It's the same tool, but completely different outcomes. Okay, so let's go into the dependent thinker archetype. So let me go ahead and erase the board here, and we'll jump right in. Analysis without direction. For my data, for my analysis, and the people that I've worked with, there is a specific type of archetype that shows up in AI usage more than anywhere else. And I call this the dependent thinker. This is the identity pattern that I consistently see. And what happens here is that the dependent thinker is consuming endlessly. They ask AI deep questions, they're getting frameworks, they're refining the prompts, and they're really going deeper and deeper into their conversations. And the problem here is that they keep asking questions to GBT and Claude that they could easily answer themselves with a little bit of thinking. Remember, we went through the whole process of the two different ways that people are normally using AI, and where the first one, and that particular method is where you struggle, you go through the whole tension, you feel it, you experience it, and it causes you to grow and expand. But the other one where you just ask AI, right? Remember the bottom one, you ask AI for everything, you outsource your thinking, you no longer build those pathways, those connections, and so then you rely always on AI to answer all your questions. And I think this is the biggest problem with AI right now and its current state. We're using AI for all these different amazing things to build automations, workflows, to build strategies, business plans, all these different things, right? We have agents. However, we're using the system a lot of times to outsource ourselves in terms of our own agency, our own critical thinking, our own ability to wrestle with an idea, with the perspective, with the thought, with the problem, and look at it from multiple different angles while AI can do that for us. However, if you don't sit there and you wrestle with the problem first and come to GPT and Claude with an assumption, an analysis that you've done yourself, then you're going to just continue to have AI think for you and outsource your thinking, and then you're going to slowly lose yourself. So, this is what's actually happening here. You have cognitive offloading. This is where you have outsourced thinking, which then reduces your capacity. And so what's happening here, as I mentioned, is you're outsourcing your thinking, and every time you do that with AI, your brain takes over and it understands, okay, I no longer have to think about this or think in general, right? It starts to slowly think about hey, AI, what would AI say, right? What would GPT say? What would Claude say? And so it's bypassing your ability to first think about it. And just like with anything, over time, there's a pattern, right? There's repetition, and so your thinking slowly starts to die off because the system is doing all the thinking for you. And the reason why your brain is doing this is because it's looking for efficiency. And you see, most people are not using AI to think better, they're using AI so that they can avoid thinking and the brain is adapting accordingly. Think about this from like a mental muscle analogy. So if you stop using your own mind to think, right, then it becomes weaker. Just like if you were going to the gym for many, many years and you built up a nice body, biceps, chest, back, right, legs, and then you stopped using the weights and going to the gym and following your routine, you're going to inevitably become weaker. And if you use, right, if you're consistently using, then it's going to become stronger. Very, very straightforward in terms of muscle memory. Okay, it's the same with anything in our lives that we're doing that we can grow accustomed to and we can build connections, right? If we're not using something, we're going to lose it. If we use it consistently, then it's going to get stronger, right? It's just inevitable. And so, for us, in our example, every time that we're going into AI and we're saying, tell me what to do. Hey, give me an idea for this, or tell me what I should do here, or tell me what you think about this, without first coming to the situation with their own conclusions, but their own assumptions. Okay, so let me go right here. Our own assumptions, okay, that we built from using our mind by thinking about the situation first before we ever hit enter and talk to GPT or Claude. Okay. This is the biggest thing that I've done for myself as well. That's really helped me out. Is before I used to go into AI several years ago, I'd go in there and I'd be like, hey, what should I do here? What should I do there? And then I started to notice the patterns of how it's reflecting back to me myself. And then I started to think outside the box and ask different questions about, hey, here's what I'm thinking about X, Y, and Z. Here's my assumptions, here's my perspectives. I've done my own research. What do you think about this? Based off of what I'm thinking and how I've seen it and how I've put together, right? So all of that has allowed me and will allow you to get stronger by feeding the system questions that have to do with you already thinking about it and having your own assumptions and conclusions first. And so we walked through the loop before, but I want to put it here again so you can see it. What most people are doing. There's a problem that you haven't yet wrestled with and gone through yourself. You ask AI, like AI is your savior, you get an answer, and you didn't think about it, so no thinking, which then creates dependency, and then the whole system repeats all over again. Okay, so it's this big loop that happens and that most people are constantly doing, and they don't even realize it. They're asking AI before they're coming to their own conclusions, and this is where the big loop comes into play that allows us to first become aware. So this is awareness, okay? Like once you know that you're doing this, then you can actually start to fix this and adjust this so that you're doing it the right way, right? Where you're coming to a problem with your own assumptions, which is our ultimate objective here, right? Use AI the right way, use AI where it doesn't allow us to lose our thinking capabilities and lose our agency, right? And here are some signs that it's happening to you. So if you're asking before thinking, if you're avoiding hard problems and just let AI take care of it, if you're needing AI validation, which a lot of people are, right? You think about it when you're using GPT, when you're using Claude, more often than not, what it's doing is just validating what you're saying. Hey, I think this is a great idea, I got a business plan, or here's what I'm thinking about my business plan, and then the premise of your question isn't challenged, right? So if you have an idea, for example, idea about selling bag of poop. Okay, and then you go to AI and you say, Hey, I have this amazing idea. I'm gonna sell bags of poop and I'm gonna sell it to these people, and I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna do that. And then you're like, hey, give me a marketing strategy for this. So this premise here never gets challenged in terms of the bag of poop, if it's even a good idea. What it's going to do is then give you a marketing strategy to sell this bag of poop. Okay, so it's really about how you're framing, you're phrasing these questions so that you can get the best overall output. And what this is ultimately doing is it's less confidence in yourself, okay? Because when you erode your confidence and your own thinking, you're constantly having to check your phone, GPT, Claude, right? Whatever AI tool, and then ask the question, hey, I'm going through this. What do you think about this? Okay, versus, hey, I'm going through this, I'm going through this tough problem, this challenge in my life, and this is what's happening. This is what I think I should do because of XYZ. And I see their side, I see their perspective, and also see my perspective on what's best for me because of ABC. What do you ultimately think about this? Okay, that's how you want to be phrasing questions. So let's look at what high level users do differently. So low-level users asks for answers, high level, they use it for thinking. Think about the ability for you to come in here and really expand your thinking, like multi-dimensional thinking, right? Like a simple example of this is like one, two, three, four, five. Dimensional thinking where you're coming in and you're likely looking at things from level one, level two, okay. This is where a lot of times most people are at, and here this is reaction, logic, level three is emotion, four is resonance, and then five is meta awareness. Okay, if you think about this and you look at the thinking perspective, high-level users are using the meta awareness, okay? They're thinking about how they're seeing things, and then they're thinking about how they can expand that thinking, okay. So meta awareness allows you to see the entire playing field. Most people come in and they're trying to find logic. Hey, tell me about X, tell me about Y. What do you think about ABC? Okay, and also a lot of times people are trying to get a reaction in terms of validation of their feelings. Like, hey, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Um, what do you think? Do you think I'm on point? Do you think I'm off? Like, what should I think about? Like, very reactive, okay. And so the big thing here that I want you to keep in mind is that low level people, low level users are typically here. Logic and reaction, okay. And then high level users are using this to Help them expand their thinking. Think about two frames, okay? You have this frame here, and it's just one-dimensional, and then you have two dimensions. I think it's like this, two dimensions, something like that. Okay, I'm trying to. I think it was like this, where it has the three dimensions, something like that. Okay, that's what I'm trying to get at is when you're thinking about things from just two different levels that are at the very bottom, you're gonna be asking for answers when you're thinking about things from emotion, understanding that emotionally I'm connected to this, and then I'm resonating with this, and then I'm seeing the whole full picture meta awareness. That's what allows you to really expand and to grow your thinking, okay? And so this is what the high-level users are ultimately using this for to expand their mental models and really see things from different ways that they haven't seen it before. Okay, so now let's go over the brain cognitive protection system. So let me go ahead and erase the board here, and we'll jump into that. Okay, so the brain cognitive protection system, and this is an acronym here. This is five steps, and so let's go over each one of them. Number one, B. Build your own answer first. And this is the step that most people skip entirely. Before you open up GPT or Cloud, wrestle with the problem from your own position, your own perspectives, your own lens, your own worldview, even if it's incomplete. The key thing here is that you need to do your own thinking first. A simple example of this is if you go to AI and you say, Hey, listen, I have this marketing strategy for a client that I'm thinking about doing. This is kind of what I'm thinking initially, based off some initial research. Here's some competitors that I found, here's you know, different things that I found about them online from different platforms, different reviews. Here's all this information about this client, and I want to put together a go-to market launch strategy. Tell me what you think, okay? But remember, one of the biggest things with all of this is in there, including something that you've already assumed, a presupposition, an assumption. Hey, all this information is here. Take a look at it. Here's the context, but then also here's what I'm thinking about the whole situation and about the strategy. I think we should do A, B, and C. I think we should use Meta, I think we should use LinkedIn, Google, because ABC. Tell me what do you think? Which platform you think would work best, or am I missing anything, right? That's what you really ultimately want to do here. And really, any interaction that you have with GPT or Claude or any other AI tool, step number two are you want to reflect your thinking. And what you do here is once you have an answer that you've came to, a conclusion, an assumption, you want to reflect on it. You want to ask yourself, what do I actually believe here? What assumptions am I making? And where am I uncertain? Where am I missing pieces? Where are my blind spots here? You see, reflection is the difference between consuming information and developing intelligence. You cannot reflect on something that you did not think through. Step three. A. You want to ask AI to challenge you. And this is where you are finally, after wrestling with the problem and all of that and thinking through it. This is where you're asking AI to challenge you, to challenge your assumptions. Here's my reasoning, here's why I might be wrong. Push back on this. This is where you've constructed all of the context, right? You've put together all the information about a specific client, all their competitors, market research, everything that you've gone and researched and thought about yourself, right? And then you're coming to AI finally now, and you're saying, here's all this information, here's this context, here's what I'm thinking, based off of all this information. Where are you seeing that there's holes in here? Where are the gaps? Where are the issues? Challenge me, push back on this and tell me if I'm in the right direction or if I'm totally off. Or what do you think overall, if this is even the right way or the right strategy that we should be taking? Right? So you're looking for AI to challenge you and to push back. Step four, you want to integrate insights. This is where you want to see. Okay, look at the response that AI has given you, GPT Cloud, and you want to look at what's missing here, what fits, where are the blind spots, where's the gap that was revealed that I didn't notice in the first place? Or where are some things that potentially could make this whole strategy not work because of ABC, right? Like that's what you're looking for. You're looking to find those gaps, those holes that are being poked into your entire strategy so that you can integrate those insights and use them to create a more comprehensive and fine-tuned strategy. Step number five, last step. You want to navigate the ownership. This is where the whole deal of the final decision is really ultimately always going to be yours, right? If you've gone through this whole process, AI has helped you think better. This is one of the most important components here and parts of this whole system, is that you need to take the ownership of your final decision, regardless of all this information here, okay? Because you can do all this entire process, right? You can go through this, you can build your own answer first, reflect your thinking, ask AI to challenge you, integrate insights, and this is amazing, right? This is an amazing system. However, you still ultimately need to make the decision, you still need to make final decision. Okay, the buck stops with you. However, the beautiful thing about this is that as you go through this, you realize that you're not losing your thinking here, you're actually becoming a lot more of a structured and powerful thinker because when you go through AI deep sessions and you start having very long conversations, and then you ask it, hey, based off of all of this, all these conversations, all these conversations that we've had, tell me how I process information, tell me how I think, tell me the structure, the architecture of how I process information and how I come to conclusions, how I think about things, my perspectives, my lens, and all of this information is going to be amazingly useful for you because it's going to give you, as I mentioned, the structure, okay, and the architecture of how you process info and think. This was a huge revelation for me. As more and more deep I got with AI, the deeper I got with like conversations and long chats, I really started to understand and it would reflect back to me how I processed my thinking, how I went through problems, how I used different perspectives, different lenses naturally, organically, instinctually, without me realizing it. And so I was able to see all of my thinking in actual logic, in words, and structure. So then now I became more self-aware so that I could not use AI to help me just figure out problems that I could have figured out myself, right? From a low-level thinker that we had up here before, but a high-level thinker now. So that I'm always coming to the platforms with an assumption that I've already built, right? First. And then I'm reflecting on my thinking. I'm asking AI to challenge me. I'm integrating the insights, but I'm always making the final decision myself. You see, AI won't destroy your brain, but it will replace it if you let it. The people that lose themselves to AI are not the ones that use it a lot. They're the ones that use it passively, who skip the struggle, who bypass the thinking, who trade cognition for convenience without realizing what they're giving up. The people who become more capable are the ones who stay mentally engaged, who think first, who lead their own mind, who use AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. You don't need less AI. You need better thinking. Because the goal isn't to become dependent, it's to become more capable.