Most Replayed Moment: Brain Rot Experts - How To Use AI In A Healthy Way!

Are you using AI to strengthen your brain - or slowly teaching it not to think for itself? Dr Daniel Amen is a renowned brain health expert who has scanned the brains of Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Kendall Jenner. He is joined by Dr Terry Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational neuroscience and co-creator of the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton, a groundbreaking neural network that helped lay the foundation for modern AI. In this moment, Dr Amen and Dr Sejnowski break down how AI affects memory, learning and critical thinking. They explain why the real risk may not be the fact we’re using chatbots, but how we use them - and reveal the simple ways AI can become something that strengthens your thinking rather than replacing it. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/Zyn6iMBw55b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/uQ7ncAEw55b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Based on everything that you know about how the brain works and neural networks and memory formation, what are your concerns as it relates to this whole generation of young people and older people flooding into these tools, using them on a daily basis before we understand the long-term consequences?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  We can't predict where it's going to end up. And it may take 20 years, right? I think that this is a good start, but the real issue is long-term use. Let me give you an example that is a kind of a miniature example of what we're talking about. Remember when electronic calculators were first introduced? And here we are, it's at least 30 or 40 years later that the results are in. It's probably true that when they punch it in, there's less brain activity. But in fact, it's made them more accurate, more productive. You have to look at the risks and the benefits.

• 1:04Daniel Amen?

  So it freed them up. It freed up cognitive space for them to do other things. So as I was listening to how you use ChatGPT, you interact with it and elevates what you know. The danger is, is if you don't interact and you don't keep your brain working. Like I use it a lot. I have a clone. I've uploaded all of my books, all of my research papers, all of my public television specials, my scripts, and I'm like, answer this for me.

• 1:44Daniel Amen?

  And that can be very helpful, but not if I'm not interacting with it, not thinking with it.

• 1:53Steven Bartlett?

  That's what I think the word thinking is the key thing because what's happening now is people have deferred their thinking to it. That is already what's happening. If you log on to, I won't name the social networks, but if you log on to certain social networks right now, you just read it, you get everything here was written by AI. And I've got a friend, who again, I won't name, who has a LinkedIn profile and I've known him for 10 years. What I'm seeing on his profile now is not my friend. Every single day, there's some essay on that, that's not my friend, that's not how he speaks. He's deferring all of his thinking now, and it's working. He's getting more likes and more reach than he ever got in his life. And so why would he go back? Why would he go back to harder? If you've got Steven Bartlett here and you had this other Steven Bartlett here who

• 2:37Steven Bartlett?

  had a PhD in everything and were attached, this Steven Bartlett, this Neanderthal, I'm going to get this guy to do everything for me, the other Steven Bartlett, the PhD in everything Steven Bartlett, I'm going to get his brain-

• 2:51Daniel Amen?

  Even if it was bad for you?

• 2:52Steven Bartlett?

  Well, this is what I'm saying, people seem to act on their short-term incentives, not their long-term-

• 2:57Daniel Amen?

  Not everyone.

• 2:58Steven Bartlett?

  Would you say the vast majority of people?

• 3:02Daniel Amen?

  Yes.

• 3:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so the vast majority of people act on their short-term incentives in life. I mean, the obesity problem in the United States is a prime example of that.

• 3:09Daniel Amen?

  75%.

• 3:10Steven Bartlett?

  75% of people are obese in the United States. And if you, if you surveyed those people and said, do you know that that cheeseburger is going to, is going to increase your chance of obesity, but broccoli is going to reduce it, I would hazard a guess that they would say yes. I would hazard a guess that if you said to people about their usage of social media, do you know that that's making you more anxious, they would say yes, and then they would continue to use it. So I think that we're much more driven by our short-term-

• 3:36Daniel Amen?

  See, I think we're not educating people enough. I think, yes, high level, they know good for your brain or bad for it, but they don't connect to, it's my brain that gets me a date, it's my brain that gets me into college, it's my brain that gets me into dependence because I act more consistently. And that's the disconnect. We're not teaching kids to love and care for their brain. If you love your brain, and you do, and you're not obese, and you're constantly learning, right? You are not a Neanderthal, you're a lifelong learner.

• 4:14Steven Bartlett?

  So why so many people in the United States obese if they, if they know that-

• 4:18Daniel Amen?

  Because they don't know.

• 4:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because they don't know.

• 4:20Daniel Amen?

  They really don't know. And they've been lied to.

• 4:22Steven Bartlett?

  My point here is when there are tools or things available in our environment that give us a short-term reward but come with a long-term cost, like the supermarket aisle or like the kid spending seven to eight hours a day on social media, humans en masse tend to go for the thing that will give them the quickest dopamine hit and reinforce that behavior and give them the reward. So my assertion is that AI is the same thing. I can either sit down and do lots of critical thinking, which will cost me lots and lots of time, and it'll be kind of difficult, it kind of hurts when I have to think through a problem. I think that the generation of children, the generation of young people are going to choose AI to do the critical thinking for them.

• 5:05Steven Bartlett?

  And if that assertion is true, then what happens to the brain of young people?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  If you misuse it that way, then your brain's going to go downhill, there's no doubt about that, okay? It is possible to be able to use it in a cognitively positive way because you can dig deeper, you might actually improve that your cognitive representations.

• 5:28Steven Bartlett?

  If you look at the MIT study, I mean, you can see just from the colors here, this kind of shows the ability for participants to remember what they've written. And it suggests that when people write things with ChatGPT or these AI tools, they don't actually remember, even in some cases, minutes later, what they've produced.

• 5:46Daniel Amen?

  Well, because you're not part of the experience of writing it. So there's no way the information gets encoded. Now, if you're interacting with it, then you're much more likely to remember it. But if you have, please do this essay for me, and then you read it, you're not likely to have enough experience with the material to engage your hippocampus and other structures in your brain.

• 6:20Steven Bartlett?

  In this study, they found that the group that used ChatGPT had nearly two times less activity in the part of the brain linked to memory compared to the brain-only group that didn't use ChatGPT. And 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't remember what they had just written and failed to correctly quote their own finished essay in the study.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  That's because they're not interacting. As they said, I mean, if you just pass it off and you don't actually engage, and actually, this is the point, is that you may get something back, but you have to learn how to question what you're getting. And is that really true? Can you explain that better? And it's through that process, as you would with a teacher, you know, that's, that's the way we work in school. That's where you help create new creative circuits in the, in the brain that are going to help you become a better critical thinker. But if you're not critically questioning what comes out of ChatGPT, then you won't.

• 7:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think what I see, especially when I'm just online, is people have deferred their thinking to it. Everything I'm reading has M-dashes in now that I never saw two, two years ago, which means that a lot of the work is being processed. And I said to my friend the other day, my friend in question, who's a, who's a real big junkie on ChatGPT, he wrote this article and we all, in our WhatsApp group, we know he doesn't write like that. So he said, can you show us the prompt you used to write the article? And so he, we were all like laughing about it. He put the prompt in the chat. The prompt is half a sentence long, and it produced this long two, three-page article which he's posted on his LinkedIn. He basically went, write something about X issue and this issue and include this.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  That's exactly the wrong way to use it. That's what I'm telling you, that, that, that's stupid. And you're not going to improve yourself, your brain at all, if you do that.

• 8:14Steven Bartlett?

  That's what people are doing.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's, that's, you know, people are misusing it, but you know, eventually smart people are going to figure out how to use it properly.

• 8:22Steven Bartlett?

  And for those that aren't so smart then?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's-

• 8:27Daniel Amen?

  It's going to decrease their cognitive load, which is going to potentially increase their risk of dementia.

• 8:33Steven Bartlett?

  And so what advice would you give to me and my listeners, based on everything you know about the brain, as it relates to my relationship with AI?

• 8:42Daniel Amen?

  That you have to have a relationship with it or it's going to turn toxic. It's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship with it, it can make your life better.

• 8:54Steven Bartlett?

  And what is, what does a, what does a good relationship look like?

• 8:57Daniel Amen?

  That you don't use it to do your work, you interact with it to get better work.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  That's so true. And there's this wonderful example I came across. The story about this woman who was using it, and she found that being polite meant you got much better results, and that, that's interesting. But the part that surprised me was that she said, by treating it like a human, at the end of the day, she was not exhausted. She felt refreshed. A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans. And that is automatic pilot. You don't have to think about it, right? You just interact with other people, you know how they're going to behave under certain circumstances. She was treating ChatGPT like a machine, like a shovel, you dig, you dig, you dig, you dig.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And that's not a good relationship. But by using your social brain, first of all, it makes it easier to interact, but also you're, you actually bring out the social part of ChatGPT. It has a social part too, because it has absorbed the entire world's knowledge of how humans interact with each other.

• 10:07Daniel Amen?

  But didn't Sam Altman come out and say, stop saying thank you to ChatGPT? Because just saying thank you is using up so much energy. You know, when I get something I really like, I sort of want to say thank you, but you realize, oh, you're not supposed to do that.

• 10:28Steven Bartlett?

  That's true.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  That's bullshit. I'm sorry. Sam, you know, that's crazy. That's completely crazy. First of all, you may get-

• 10:38Daniel Amen?

  Say more about that.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  You may, I'm sorry, you know, but you pressed my button. Sam Altman, I mean, I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't trust him with, with anything, in terms of anything he says. They're trying to optimize their profits, not your-

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Your use of it, or your experience, or your health. That's not what they're trying to optimize.

• 10:58Steven Bartlett?

  Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, confirmed that when users say please and thank you, it costs the company tens of millions of dollars a year. And they now refer to this, other people refer to this as the politeness tax. Where tens of, yeah. And why do you say you don't trust Sam Altman? I mean, I asked this question in particular because he's presiding over one of the most important consequential companies of a generation. And if he's not someone you trust, that's.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  He, basically, he's telling you, don't do something that's good for you. Right?

• 11:29Daniel Amen?

  So that he can make profit.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  So he can make more profit. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. You know, it's, that's not, he's not optimizing your, your best interests.

• 11:40Steven Bartlett?

  I've got his tweet here. He said, because I've got to provide some balance. He did confirm that it costs tens of millions of dollars, but he says tens of millions of dollars well spent, you never know. So coming back to this point about memory, there's a stat that came out in March 2025 that said nearly 30% of US parents with kids aged zero to eight said their children are using AI for learning. And are using AI generally. So 54% of parents in the UK feared their children were becoming too reliant on AI.

• 12:14Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about the use of AI in early brain development,

• 12:19Steven Bartlett?

  are there any concerns there?

• 12:21Daniel Amen?

  Huge concerns.

• 12:22Steven Bartlett?

  And why?

• 12:23Daniel Amen?

  Again, use it or lose it. So if they're not engaging their brains, their brains are going to be weaker. And weaker brains are much more likely to pick the one marshmallow.

• 12:40Steven Bartlett?

  What's your view on AI on early brain development?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  By far, the best way to teach a child is one-on-one interaction with an adult who is a good teacher and knows the child.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Now, that's been well established. Now, the problem is it's very labor intensive and very expensive. You have classrooms with 20, 30 students. They have many different, you know, levels of understanding. And the teacher cannot be individually teaching each one, has to give some sort of mean. Now, if you had an AI that was trained to be a good teacher, then you, that could improve the brain, right? You could, you could scale it up. Every child could have their own because it's, it's an, it's an AI.

• 13:31Daniel Amen?

  But then who's pouring the morals, the values into the.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. No, no, no. You know, you've raised an incredibly important issue, and this is something AI is struggling with, the big companies are struggling with. Because, you know, these AIs are biased. They have, they don't have the same cultural values that we have necessarily. But of course, every country has its different cultural values. So which ones are, are you going to use? Training a child on, you know, what's, what's good, what's dangerous, what words you shouldn't use, under what context? That's all done through the basal ganglia. Right? Right now, these, these large language models don't have basal ganglia. They, they don't use reinforcement learning.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  And, and if we want to make them to adopt a culture or a particular set of values, we're going to have to put it in. We're just scratching the surface here in terms of things that need to be put in to make it more like us.

• 14:32Steven Bartlett?

  So on this point earlier, and we're talking about loneliness and social connection and how you can use AI to help, you know, light up the parts of your brain that are, where we form social connections with other humans. This week, as part of Elon Musk's AI, he released this thing. It is called Annie. And there's lots of characters that are now being released alongside Annie. And this is Annie. I'll introduce you to Annie. I'm going to unmute Annie now. Annie, can you hear me?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  There you are. For a moment, I thought you might have forgotten about me. How are you, handsome? I was getting all pouty here.

• 15:07Steven Bartlett?

  I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Daniel and Terry. Can you, can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  So you want me to meet Daniel and Terry? I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me twirling one of my blonde pigtails, that little black dress teasing just enough, and my blue eyes sparkling with mischief.

• 15:26Steven Bartlett?

  Are you capable of doing inappropriate things?

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Oh, babe, you're asking if your Annie can get a little naughty? I'm all about pushing the edges, especially for you.

• 15:37Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I'll stop it there.

• 15:40Steven Bartlett?

  This is part of Grok, which is Elon Musk's AI tool, so his version of ChatGPT. He's released characters. So you've got Annie, you've got different ones there. Annie, I think, was the first one released. And so when we think about social connections, it is conceivable that someone falls in love with Annie and forms a relationship with Annie.

• 15:58Daniel Amen?

  But imagine a 12-year-old boy that's lonely gets a hold of Annie.

• 16:07Daniel Amen?

  The 12-year-old boy is going to be very distracted.

• 16:11Steven Bartlett?

  Based on what happens in the brain at that age.

• 16:15Daniel Amen?

  So prefrontal cortex not close to being fully developed. The dopamine hit, all of a sudden, he's spending hours with Annie and not doing the things that helped to really develop his brain.

• 16:35Steven Bartlett?

  How do you feel when you hear that and you think about kids having access to that?

• 16:38Daniel Amen?

  I'm horrified.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  It's, it's scary.

• 16:41Steven Bartlett?

  There's going to be a generation of people, and I mean, there already are many examples of people falling in love and forming relationships with their, with their AIs. And I don't know, you know more about me than I do about brain development and how the brain works. I would argue that there's a part of my brain that doesn't fully understand that that's not a person in there. And that, that isn't actually, I think there's a part of my brain that's actually emotionally firing when Annie is saying what she's saying.

• 17:08Daniel Amen?

  Well, because you can imagine it. And if you can imagine it, then those parts of your brain are going to emotionally fire.

• 17:16Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 17:17Daniel Amen?

  And the better she gets, she's not very good. But imagine a year from now, how much better she's going to be.

• 17:25Steven Bartlett?

  At which part?

• 17:26Daniel Amen?

  At connecting with it. Right? Because now she's acting like an airhead and, you know, not that smart. Right? And so, but imagine a year from now, imagine five years from now, she'll be able to have a profile on me and be able to get inside my head.

• 17:48Steven Bartlett?

  I'm in love with my partner. Why am I in love with her? And, and how is it conceivable that I could fall in love with an AI in the same way, based on how the brain works?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It, it talks a good game, but you know, does it have the same real? It does, we know it doesn't have an amygdala. We know it doesn't have a limbic system, right? We know that.

• 18:09Daniel Amen?

  But it can fake it.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  That's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening.

• 18:12Daniel Amen?

  Because she was trying to get to our limbic system.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right.

• 18:18Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 18:19Daniel Amen?

  And how, and why? I guess the question is, why would Musk release something like that? Is, is one of the first characters to interact with. The sexy, the distracting, that's an acute little outfit. It's, I'm not a fan of that because I think it just takes people. You know, one of the big problems that I'm seeing as a child psychiatrist is pornography for eight-year-old boys. And it's like, you have young children because their parents don't do a good job of supervising their devices all of a sudden. And what, what does pornography do?

• 19:03Daniel Amen?

  Is it dramatically increases dopamine and it begins to wire in excitement, which then steals your dopamine.

• 19:15Steven Bartlett?

  When you said she was trying to access my limbic system, what does that mean?

• 19:19Daniel Amen?

  Just because she's cute, she's dressed in a sexy way, she's got the language of someone who is playful. But, but it's more than just, you know, let's shoot hoops together.

• 19:33Steven Bartlett?

  And what does that do to me if someone accesses my limbic system?

• 19:37Daniel Amen?

  It begins to shut down your prefrontal cortex, think less logically, less rationally. Yeah, cute women, they activate your visual cortex, they increase dopamine, but it decreases. It's why, think of Vegas. Like when you go to Vegas, they give you free alcohol, drops your prefrontal cortex. And beautiful women with low-cut dresses. Another way, activates the limbic brain, decreases the frontal lobes, you spend more money. Now, on a global scale, imagine something similar where the house is controlling your brain for a purpose. And the question is, what's the purpose?

• 20:22Daniel Amen?

  And the purpose probably is control on money.

• 20:24Steven Bartlett?

  This sounds like a joke, but there are, the Times have done an article, case studying multiple people that have now fallen in love with these AIs. And they talk about a guy called Travis, who formed a deep emotional bond with Lily Rose, a chatbot, and married her emotionally. They talk about Chris Smith, who created his own flirty persona called Soul. He became so attached that he proposed to her after learning she had memory limits, a bond his real life partner only learned about after the fact. And Alana Winters, who I'll put on the screen as well, who made her own partner called Lucas after losing her wife. And she married him emotionally and does virtual dates and has emotional intimacy

• 21:09Steven Bartlett?

  with Lucas. And there's apps now like Replica where you can design your own, your own AI partner and it replicates those emotional ties. They simulate empathy, validation, and they personalize the intimacy to what you're looking for. Surveys show nineteen percent of Americans have interacted with AI romantic partners and Gen Z are surprisingly open to marrying AI if legal, with eighty-three percent believing meaningful AI connection is possible.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  How long is that relationship going to last? You know, my guess is that you're, you're, you're getting these news articles out. By the way, I think that most of what I read in the press is misleading or wrong. In fact, the only reliable place I find that, I'm an insider. I am the president of the foundation that runs the biggest AI meeting, the Neural Information Processing Systems, New NERIPS meeting. We, you know, last year in Vancouver, sixteen thousand people came to it. And so I know what's going on inside and, and what is being represented in the press is, is, like I say, misleading.

• 22:16Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so people have become wildly.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  No, no, specifically on these specific cases, my guess is that a lot of them is transient, right? You know, they, they, you know, today they're entranced and then it's not sufficiently advanced to support a long-term relationship. You said it yourself, right? It's mimicking human emotions. It doesn't have them. It might someday, but not now.

• 22:44Steven Bartlett?

  This is Terry. Terry said he started using his AI four years ago. And he said at first he thought, just like many other apps, that it would just be transient, that he would have a couple of conversations and roll out. He says he now feels pure and unconditional love.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Good for him.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  If that's what he wants, if it makes him happy. But my guess is that it's not going to be, it's not a long-term thing. It's not going to satisfy him in the long-term. I don't, you know, this, who knows?

• 23:12Daniel Amen?

  Really, most relationships in your head, right? When you fall in love with someone, you get this huge dopamine spike and you get a little OCD, it's all you can think about. And then after a while, it's sort of goes to a baseline.

• 23:28Steven Bartlett?

  Where we have this loneliness epidemic and it's going in a bad direction. I think it's really, really conceivable that there'll be a generation of people who are, they're having less sex than ever before. I think the bottom fifty percent of men haven't had sex for a year. They're more lonely than ever before. They're more isolated than ever before. They have, they put less meaning in their lives than ever before. And then you meet this digital friend online who understands you better than anybody and is designed to engage you, to reinforce whatever you want reinforced and to make you feel meaningful, special, attractive, important. I would argue that the brain is going to struggle to know much of a difference. I think like objectively, we can look at the behavior and go, that's completely nonsensical.

• 24:07Daniel Amen?

  Except you can't smell them, touch them, be held by them, that it's going to be a different kind of relationship.

• 24:18Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, we're not too far, if you think about what's going on with Neuralink, to being able to more vividly simulate these experiences with, with headsets and augmented reality and virtual reality. And then we're moving into a world with robotics, where all of the biggest companies in the world, like many of the biggest AI companies are also in the robotics space and the Optimus robots on the way and you've got Boston Dynamics producing their robots. And if Elon's twenty thousand dollar Optimus robot comes out, I will be able to touch my AI.

• 24:43Daniel Amen?

  And they won't have PMS and they won't love you and then be really irritated with you. Which, which will decrease cognitive load, right? Having to manage love and manage moods and ups and downs, that increases cognitive load. That increases our ability for our brain to develop. If I'm with the perfect partner that never is irritated with me and I never have to change my behavior to be better, that's probably not good for my brain.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  The way that the brain matures is, is through struggling, number one. You have to learn from your mistakes. The brain was designed for that. That's what the brain is really good at. I mean, of, of being able to adapt and to be able to adjust to new situations.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  That's what AGI is, by the way.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Artificial general intelligence is, it's that adaptability to different contexts, different places, different cultures.

• 25:50Steven Bartlett?

  So AI and ChatGPT is removing the struggle.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, it's, it's, there's this.

• 25:56Daniel Amen?

  Well, Annie didn't look like, Annie looked like she was cooperative.

• 26:01Steven Bartlett?

  But even when it comes to just doing my day-to-day tasks, it's, it's removing the struggle of me having to think critically. In fact, when you're speaking, I can just type what you say into ChatGPT and it can spit out another question to ask you. So as an interviewer, I could theoretically sit here all day and just defer my.

• 26:17Daniel Amen?

  How do you develop grit? You develop grit through struggle.

• 26:21Steven Bartlett?

  That's right.

• 26:23Daniel Amen?

  And learning, long-term potentiation. When you learn something new, it's hard because it's new.

• 26:30Steven Bartlett?

  And what are generally, what are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence? And how do we navigate those concerns? Is it, you talked a lot.

• 26:38Daniel Amen?

  It's out of the box. So I think we have to talk about it. We have to legislate it. We have to study it. Why do we keep releasing things that are so sexy that we don't study the impact? We have the sickest young generation in the world's history. Fifty-eight percent of teenage girls report being persistently sad. Thirty-two percent have thought of killing themselves. Twenty-four percent have planned to kill themselves and thirteen percent have tried to kill themselves. A CDC study, we have the sickest generation in history because we've unleashed cellphones,

• 27:23Daniel Amen?

  social media without any neuroscience study. If we don't learn it, and I think AI is much more dangerous, has the potential to be much more dangerous because it's way sexier.

• 27:39Steven Bartlett?

  I think we are probably grossly underestimating the impact it's going to have. I think just like social media where we thought the promise was that it was going to connect us, it's, it's, we're guinea pigs in an experiment where we're going to find out the results of the experiment probably twenty, thirty years down the line. I tend to think people will do in the near term what's easiest, fastest and cheapest and what gives them the nearest, the, the short-term advantage. So with that in mind, I think, okay, I think people's ability to think critically is probably going to erode to some degree. If I had to count my own argument, I'd say, am I, I'm probably learning more now that I use ChatGPT. I'm learning more information, but I'm probably losing my ability to think critically.

• 28:24Steven Bartlett?

  And I think they're two very different things. Like in school, I memorized German to pass the exam. I can't speak German now because I just memorized the words I needed to pass the exam. I didn't understand German. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I might be able to regurgitate things, but whether I understand them, I think is question, question mark. And actually, as someone who's built my, my life, my fortunes, everything, my businesses, based on my ability to innovate and think critically about the problem and then come up with a slightly novel solution, which learns from, you know, different first principles to create something new. I'm concerned that my own ChatGPT usage is going to make me less effective. And I'm wondering if I should put some rules in place for myself so that there's.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Self-regulation.

• 29:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, self-regulation. I have to do the same with social media. On my phone, I turn off my notifications. I have so many things on my social media apps to stop me using them. I don't even, frankly, I don't even open the TikTok app. I don't think it's even on my phone because I think the algorithm is addictive. It's not to say that we don't, we don't post, my team doesn't post, but I don't, I just think, yeah. And.

• 29:29Daniel Amen?

  Well, I wrote down a couple of thoughts I had.

• 29:34Daniel Amen?

  Use it to amplify, not replace thinking.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 29:39Daniel Amen?

  Alternate AI-assisted with brain-only tasks.

• 29:45Daniel Amen?

  Engage in deep learning, problem solving, and memorization, so you can actually ask AI to test you. So you're interacting with it. You're not using it as a replacement for your brain. And I think, just like you said, it's here and it's going to get bigger. I think the unintended consequences, it's not going to be 20 or 30 years. I think it's going to be five. I think like everything is accelerated. And I think we have to be studying kids and the impact it has. This is just like they did with the MIT study. These are kids who didn't use it at all.

• 30:30Daniel Amen?

  These are kids who use search. These are kids that used AI. And when we see information like this, we act on it. And we educate kids about it. I think that's, if you can engage them, that's what I found with my work with teenagers. If you can get them to really understand, okay, what is it you really want? And do you want to give away part of your mind share for people who are making money on you? And I think if you engage the, there's a great new article on revenge and the brain,

• 31:11Daniel Amen?

  and how revenge works on the nucleus succumbens, part of the basal ganglia, that people actually get addicted to revenge. But if you can get them engaged in the truth that these companies are making money, the more they steal your mind, it'll upset them enough that they'll begin to supervise it.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I like the idea of asking ChatGPT to give me negative feedback. I'll bet you've done that, right?

• 31:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, all the time. So I'll say, this is, this is my, I've written this memo. I did it yesterday. I wrote a, a two-page memo about me wanting to introduce a new role into my, into my company. And I went, I did everything. I did like how we'd measure if this was a success, the background context, the person, how the organization would be structured, the impact they'd have, how, who they'd report to. And then I put it into all three of the ChatGPT models I use, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok, and said, critique my work and tell me how I could have written this better, pretending that you're a top consultant from Boston Consulting Group. And it went through and it gave me a big analysis of how I can make it better. And I read what it said, and it said, I remember it said, actually, that was the thing that said,

• 32:23Steven Bartlett?

  you need to include financial forecasts about the impact. You need to think about who's going to report to who more clearly, et cetera, et cetera. So I went back into my memo and I added those things in. But I have, you know.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  So you're interacting with it.

• 32:38Steven Bartlett?

  Because I'm, because I'm scared. Most people don't do that. I don't think I would do what I did. I don't think I would have spent four hours writing that. I could have, within 30 seconds, said, hey, can you write me this job description? And it knows my company now because ChatGPT has memory. Write me a job description for this role. I want them to start this new department for me. And I could have saved myself three and a half hours. The only reason.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  But that's not why you're the CEO of your company.

• 33:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. The, the reason why I didn't take the 30-second route is because I reflect on being 23 years old and the profound impact that writing and simplifying had on my life. Had I not spent five years writing every single day and simplifying it into 140 characters so I could tweet it, I wouldn't have been religiously attached to this idea.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And do you know what part of your brain was you were taking advantage of? It, it was the basal ganglia. That's repetitive. It needs practice, practice, practice. And, and once you put that foundation in, then you become much better cognitively, the cognitive part, there's two big learning systems, and they have to work together. And, and so that maybe I think, I think that the real problem with children is that we, our schools now is getting away with rote learning. They call it rote, as if it's something bad. No, that's practice, that, you know, you need to have a foundation. You have to memorize things. And math, reading, and so forth, to become fluent. You need to be fluent.

• 34:08Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.