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Axios Finish Line: Your bionic brain
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| Mike Allen Unsubscribe | Thu, Jun 4, 2:31 AM (1 day ago) | ||
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  View in browser Axios Finish Line By Mike Allen and Erica Pandey and Jim VandeHei ·Jun 03, 2026 Welcome back! Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has the reins, sharing a speech he recently delivered to communications execs at the annual PTTOW! summit. Join the conversation. Reply to this email or hit finishline@axios.com to share your thoughts with Jim.Smart Brevity™ count: 1,198 words … 4½ mins. Copy edited by Amy Stern. 1 big thing: Build your bionic brain  Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios We’re at war. A war for our brains. This war rages from sunup to sundown, phone on to phone off. While we sleep. It’s our Forever War, Jim writes. Our combatants are social media algorithms and emerging AI systems. Both never tire or relent. They only grow smarter and more sophisticated.  I’m here not to scare or shame you. I’m here to tell you this war will determine the future of your mind and your intelligence. It is winnable on your terms — if you understand the nature of it.In the hours, days and years ahead, you can choose to understand and seize control of your mental inputs, building a bionic brain. Or you can allow algorithms and AI to do your thinking for you, succumbing to what I call “blah brain.”  Make no mistake: We’ve entered the age of extreme information inequality. It’s the defining divide of the next decade. Bigger than wealth. Bigger than education. Bigger than geography.You land on the right side of the divide by controlling what information you consume and by using AI to augment — not replace — your learning and thinking.You will choose. Choose bionic. Reject blah.Let me start with a confession. I get paid to learn. I get paid to hire people with true subject-matter expertise. I get paid to filter fact from fiction every single day. My business depends on it. And I struggle to stay on the bionic path.I pick up my phone to check one thing and lose 20 minutes. I tell myself I’m reading the news and scroll away precious time on trivialities. I open ChatGPT to sharpen my thinking and catch myself letting it do the thinking for me.If I’m losing this battle some days — and I am — no wonder most of America feels like it’s getting crushed. So I want to talk about this war you don’t realize you’re in — and then show you how to win it.  Start by understanding the Great Information Paradox of the 21st century.There is more misinformation, manipulative content and pure mind garbage available to us for free than at any point in human history. At the same time, there is more high-quality, mind-expanding, life-enhancing content available to us for free than at any point in human history. We all have access to the smartest minds alive via podcasts, YouTube and newsletters.Greatness and garbage. At the same time. On the same device. In the same five seconds of interaction.So we face a choice — whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not — all day, every day. And now, AI raises the stakes on that choice by a factor of 10. That’s because AI offers you two new paths — and they look almost identical from the outside. But they lead to completely different places.  Path One: Outsource your thinking to AI. Let ChatGPT write your emails. Let Claude make your decisions. Let an algorithm or LLM tell you what to believe about Iran, about the economy, about your own job and skills. Stop reading. Stop wrestling. Stop forming your own views. Just ask the machine and ship the answer.The temptation is enormous. It is easier. It is faster. It feels productive. And it will quietly hollow you out. In two years, you won’t have opinions — you’ll have prompts. You won’t have judgment — you’ll have outputs. Path Two: Use AI to expand your mind. Same tools. Same machines. Completely different posture. You make AI argue with you. You make it challenge your assumptions. You feed it the things you don’t understand and demand that it teach you at your pace.Path One shrinks you. Path Two enlarges you. Same machine. Opposite outcomes. The difference is entirely in how you use it. Most people are going to take Path One. They already are. Don’t be most people. Instead, do something radical: Build your own bionic brain. Starting today. Everybody runs on the same hardware — a human brain that hasn’t changed much since creation. The bionic part is what you feed into it and bolt on around it.  I want to give you something concrete. Five moves. You can start every one of them tonight.Audit your inputs. Be ruthless. Open your phone right now. Look at the last 20 things you watched, listened to or read. Be brutally honest. Is that the diet of someone with a healthy brain? If not, cut three things tonight. Unfollow them. Mute them. The algorithm feeds you what you click on, not what you aspire to. The only way to retrain it is to stop clicking. Your feed in 90 days will be a different feed. Your brain in 90 days will be a different brain. Pick one anchor reality source. It’s impossible to follow the news and know what’s real or important. Simplify. Pick one broad source of truth with an established reputation for accuracy. I’d recommend Axios, of course, but The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times are good options, too. Pick two passions, two areas you want to be smarter in. Maybe it’s health or technology or history or literature. Find people with track records of being smart and open-minded on those topics, whether in podcasts, videos or writing. Their backgrounds should demonstrate expertise and curiosity. Follow them. They will lead you to others. Build your own JimGPT. Use Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini to start building a wise companion brain. Tell it with specificity that you want to learn and be challenged, and to never be flattered or blindly reinforced. Tell it your passions and goals — including resisting the urge to outsource your thinking to AI — and commit that to memory. Ask it to ask you questions to shape its output to how you learn. Start small: a new 30-minute habit. Replace one half hour a day of doom-or-boredom scrolling with healthy inputs and AI interactions. Listen to that podcast. Read that newsletter. Watch that video. Explore that topic on AI. Ask the AI to steelman the argument against something you believe: “Present the strongest, smartest, most persuasive fact-based case against my view.” Thirty minutes a day equals one full week of purging stupid and injecting smarts. Do these five things and I can assure you, you will emerge a better, smarter, more satisfied person — with what feels like a new bionic brain.Share this column … Watch Jim’s video.  If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: Ask to join Jim’s new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter. |
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