Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
Hosted by Dr. JC Doornick "The Dragon"
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.
Latest Episodes
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 int...
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 f...
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...
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 whil...
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...
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 hi...
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 i...
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 alg...
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...
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...
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 vo...
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 recommendat...
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 sys...
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, en...
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 peop...