How to Have a Super Brain | Jim Kwik

27:03And then there was a pile of books that I promised to read. And I already couldn't get through pile A. So where do I get the time? I just don't do anything else. I don't eat. I don't sleep. I don't exercise. I don't socialize. I just live in the library. And then after weeks and weeks and weeks of doing that, I end up passing out one night around 2 a.m. I fall down a flight of stairs, just out of pure exhaustion, hit my head again at the library. Just woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Lost all this weight. I was down to like 117 pounds. And it was the darkest time in my life by far.

27:36I felt literally just completely worthless. And yeah, I thought I died. Maybe part of me wished I just felt like a burden to people, right? and when I was like there had to be a better way and when I had that thought the nurse came in with a mug of tea and on it was a picture of Albert Einstein and more important was a quote that shifted my it felt like he was talking to me it said the same level of thinking that has created your problem won't solve your problem and it made me ask a new question it's like what's my problem well I have a broken brain I'm a very slow learner I was like well according to Einstein how do I think differently well maybe I could fix my brain Maybe I could learn how to learn better.

28:18And I was like, where do I do that? School. And then I look at the course bulletin and there are classes on what to learn, but not how to learn. So I set my studies aside because I wasn't making any traction there anyway. And I just started studying these books and really wanted to understand. I got really curious. I wanted to know, it's a weird transition, but I wanted to find out, like, how does my brain work so I can work my brain? I mean, how do you learn to focus or remember things? And I started studying these subjects and I saw like a, there was like a speed reading book in one of my hallmates like bed one time.

28:52And I asked like, what's that? And they didn't know what it was. And they let me have the book. And I read this book about the basics of scanning and skimming. And then I got introduced to ancient mnemonics and some other things. Just the book Limitless expanded. expanded. It's more like it's based on neuroscience and how the brain works and adult learning theory. But I also had a deep dive. I was like, what did people do before there were like books, like printing presses, right? Before the internet or whatever. And I started studying, like I found out that there, and I know we talked about this in a previous episode, this memory palace where they used to 2 ,500 years ago would remember things by attaching it to places that they were very familiar with.

29:37And I got very fascinated about things like that and learning how to study. I picked up books on studying methods and I started going through all these. You remember like Kaplan and some of these study courses, Princeton Review, and I couldn't go through the courses, but I could go through their books. And yeah, about a couple of months of just doing a deep dive in this, I started to like a light switch flipped on and I started to really understand things for the first time, I started to get better grades. And with that, I started having greater confidence. And not only did my grades improve, but my life improved.

30:13And to put a bow on the story, the reason why I'm even doing this and I'm in conversation with you now is I started to tutor because I needed the money and I wanted to help people. I felt really upset that I struggled for my whole life up to that point. And there were simple things I could do to make it better, but nobody showed me how to do that. So I started helping other people. At this time, what do you think was, you were learning so much. You were learning speed reading. You were learning the memory palace techniques for memorizing. You were learning the importance of positive thinking and so on.

30:48What do you think was the single technique, if there was one, or the single concept that really at that point gave you the most feelings of improvement? There were two. I really leaned into the speed reading and I got very, very good at it because when you struggle with something for so long and then you learn a couple of things and you get to go from way below average to average, that's a huge gain. And then part of my identity started to change and I wanted to go beyond that. So I went from a way sub reader to a normal, like everybody else on average. And then I wanted to see how far I could take it.

31:32So that I really felt because if you could triple your reading speed, you feel that automatically, right? I've been doing this for 32 years. We have online speed reading memory courses that are very popular and we have students in every country. So we got a lot of like feedback. And it's very measurable too. Like you can tell. It is very measurable. So we're reading speed, reading comprehension. You know, we tested daily with people. And it's very empirical, right? And you could, not only that, but if you can even double your reading speed, read something in 30 minutes that normally takes an hour of study, like that level of ease, it just compounds over time.

32:09Because if you're studying four hours a day and all of a sudden you could do that in two hours a day, that just, that's a game changer. Because two hours a day over the course of a year is like 700, whatever, 30 hours. Yeah. And that's just like, that's 18 40-hour work weeks. That's like four months you get back. So that was a big one. And the other one was, I stalked this magician. There was this magician that's very unknown, but he was doing a friend's, we went to go see this guy perform and all the sleight of hand stuff, and that's very impressive. But he did this memory thing where he was able to memorize a list of random words.

32:50and I was like blown away because I've never seen it. He was like my Roger Bannister, right? The guy who broke the four minute mile and then all of a sudden made it possible for everybody else because he changed our perception about what's possible. And I stalked this guy because he was performing there like three nights in a row. And so I went to the other shows and I would like be in the lobby waiting for him to leave. And this is not a big show, right? I'm just talking about like 40, 30, 40 people. And when I grabbed them the last night, I just asked them about it a little bit. And he shared, because I don't know if, I don't know, I heard like magicians aren't supposed to share their secrets, but he kind of gave me the basics of it.

33:30And I was like, wow. And I was like, can I share this with my friends? He's like, oh yeah, go run with it. These mnemonic kind of tricks. And I don't know if he'd know how far I took it, but that gave me a lot of confidence because I could easily remember vocabulary and remember more what I read and remember some of the key points to what I needed to present in class or remember on a test. It's kind of like a cheat code because instead of going in with notes, you have mental notes. Now, and this is the memory palace technique. It's, you know, you've just, you talk about this everywhere in the book and in our, you know, we went through the exercise.

34:10The issue with the memory palace a little bit, this is not a problem, but you have to have lots of locations if you're memorizing lots of things. So if you're going from a test to learning a language to remembering everybody's phone number, you got to have different locations. So did you start collecting locations? I have thousands of locations that's built up over years. For people who are not sure what this is, it's basically like you could use your home or your childhood home or many different homes that you've lived in. You know, I've had many different apartments in New York City and studios.

34:42and basically you're standing in a doorway and you're picking maybe let's say five objects going clockwise and then you say, okay, the microwave is the first place, the listening in the kitchen. The second place is the stovetop. The third place, the refrigerator. Fourth is the, I don't know, the dishwasher. The fifth is a sink. And then you go into the next place and say, okay, the fireplace is number six, bookshelf is seven and so on. And these create like mental filing systems and folders for you to put in foreign information. So if I wanted to teach somebody to memorize the 10 keys for a limitless brain, and the first one happens to be a good brain diet, I'd put those foods in the microwave.

35:17If the second one was killing ants, automatic negative thoughts, I'd put that, you know, imagine killing ants on the stovetop. If the third one is exercise, I'd imagine opening up the refrigerator and people working out, right? And it's so simple, but even if I said that, most people would remember it. And you could do that for hundreds of places. Now, memory palace is just one of the techniques. There's story methods and chain linking and basic association and alphanumeric codes. we teach all of that. That's not based on locations. So you could do it in using the alphabet. You could do it using a visual memory system, like based on what things look like.

35:52You could say the number one is an antenna. Number two looks like a swan. Number three looks like handcuffs. Number four looks like a sailboat. And then you could go to like 20, 25, whatever, and then you could store information on those things, right? But it's basically what you're doing, you're hearing it by saying it, you're seeing it by visualizing it. And then you make it kind of gluey emotionally, make it sexy or violent or some kind of action oriented. And when people could use your visual auditory and emotional faculties, we use recruit more of our nervous system. And no wonder we learn it better because the alternative is what?

36:28Repetition, which is just boring, is repeating something over and over and over again. So you could do In physics, there's like, what, three variables. There's frequency, there's duration, and then there's intensity. So if you want to work out frequency, you could just do more reps. If you want a duration, you could spend more time on the treadmill, right? Or you could do some kind of, you know, hit training where it's so intense. And the benefit of doing intensity is it doesn't, frequency and duration take time. I mean, even if you think about sales or marketing, which I know they're different, but frequency is like running lots of ads, right?

37:02or lots of sales calls. Duration is having a longer infomercial or a longer sales video. But something can be so intense in your marketing, meaning it hits people, it connects emotionally, they can see it, it becomes viral, whatever. And you don't have to repeat it. And it doesn't take a lot of time. So for me, that's working smarter versus working harder. And like people have done for hundreds of years, they read the same way, they did road repetition. even when churches started like universities and rote learning came from rote like a if you join the rotary club their symbol is a wheel it's a teacher repeating a fact and that's the first half of the wheel and then the class that students repeat it back and that's the second half of the wheel and then they would just keep on going until that wheel is turning 40, 50 times and then you learn something but the problem is not only is that boring but it takes an immense amount of time for the world we live in now.

38:03Maybe that was okay and that was suffice back when we didn't have the internet and all the information that's coming out of Firehose nowadays. But yeah, I would say that two of the most important skills to master in the 21st century is our ability to process information and then retain it. And I think our ability to learn rapidly and translate that learning to action is an incredible competitive advantage in a world that's ever-changing.

38:42you don't think that subsides with age like issues of memory um i think just like with our body our body slows down certainly it's just i feel like most people underestimate how much they could do as they grow older. Like my numbers are better than they ever have been. I mean, granted, I'm very practiced and I live this information, but there's so many things you could do to stave off brain aging because it's really use it or lose it. One of the challenges that we talk about in the book is with technology, it's so very convenient. But if we're relying on the technology all the time, it's just like with our physical body.

39:24If you have to go to the bank and it's eight blocks away, you jump into a lift or your car, you don't get your steps in, right? So it's convenient, but it could be crippling because our body is use it or lose it and our brain is part of our body. It's use it or lose it. Or if your apartment's on the fifth floor, your office is on the fifth floor and you take an elevator, you're not doing the stairs. It's certainly, again, convenient, but there has to be some kind of balance. Even in a world full of AI, you don't want to get mentally lazy, right? It's, you know, I talk about the four supervillains of the mental apocalypse in the book.

39:56And these are things that are not caused by technology, but technology certainly amplifies it. Like you have digital distraction. How do you maintain your concentration when you need to with your kids or at a business meeting? If, you know, when a roll flow rings and pings and dings and app notifications, social media alerts. And so that's why we have all chapter dedicated to focus on concentration. Digital dementia, which is a term in healthcare where we're relying on devices to be an external memory aid or storage device for us. And I don't want to memorize. I mean, I don't want to memorize 500 phone numbers, but how many phone numbers did we used to know?

40:36Yeah. But how many do we know currently? And again, I don't want to memorize all the phone numbers, but it should be concerning we've lost the ability to remember one phone number or a PIN number or a passcode or a seed phrase or something we just read or someone's name that we just heard. Like I could still remember the phone number of my best friend when I was in fourth grade, but sometimes I have a hard time remembering my current phone number. And it's interesting because it's use it or lose it because we don't have to, right? It's the same thing. Another one is digital deduction and I term that just so it's, I alliterate a lot, so I want to make sure distraction, dementia, deduction, it just kind of all match.

41:14But digital deduction is my way of saying like, And I read this thing where this generation, they don't have the same ability to rationalize, use critical thinking, logic as a previous generation. And they attributed it correlated with technology because technology is not teaching you just what to learn. It's teaching you just what to think, right? And so even when you take things like getting from here to there, what I was saying before, if you have your phone and you have your Maps app open, you just follow it. You don't have to develop your visual spatial intelligence because a device is doing it for you.

41:52And then the last one is digital deluge, which is information overload. And that's why you do speed reading, accelerated learning study skills, because the amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds. But how we read it is the same as it's always been. The last time we took a reading class, we were like six or seven years old. So the difficulty in demand has increased a lot, but our skill hasn't met up to that demand. And so, you know, and there's a health effect too. For those of you struggling with keeping up with all this information, it's higher blood pressure, less leisure time, more sleeplessness, more rumination because we just can't get through our inbox or something like that.

42:33And so when did you just say to yourself, hey, I love this so much and I'm seeing so many benefits from this. I want to make a career out of this. I want to help other people learn better. so okay i don't really share this part but um so basically i was helping out my my suite mates right because i was really pissed that i didn't learn it i want to help other people because they're struggling offer their advice and for the first time i started developing pride because i was good at something and i wanted to share it and then kind of feature it obviously there's so secondary gain but i also knew my friends were struggling also as well i'll show them these kind of fun things that they could do.

43:11And friends was like, hey, you should tutor this. And I'm like, I've never tutored anything, right? Who goes to me for that kind of advice? And I was like, how would I do that? And I had that thought, there was a classroom that wasn't being used as walking past on a Thursday night. And I said, okay, next week at the same time, that same classroom, next same day, I'm going to just put five people in there and teach them free for an hour or two about what's working for me. And then maybe afterwards, one or two of them want to be tutored. And so this is my first marketing. I go back to my dorm room and I take out a marker and a piece of paper.

43:46I write free speed reading, memory tips, get better grades, less time. That's like my first advertising, right? And I write the, you know, Thursday, seven o 'clock, this classroom. The next morning, I make some photocopies. I put it, not a lot, but on the way to class the next morning, I put them on bullets and boards. Fast forward to Thursday, I just hope I'm walking to this classroom and I'm hoping just like five people show up and I turn the corner and I'm running a little bit like on time but late. And there's a crowd of people outside the classroom. And my honest first gut reaction was like, wow, I hope whatever's going on, it ends soon so I can do my thing.

44:25Right. And I can't even get in the doorway because there's people standing in the doorway. And I was like, what's going on inside? and the guy looks at me, he's like, there's a speed reading class. Honest to God, I said, wow, what a coincidence. Like, what are the odds, the same classroom, same night, there's another speed reading class, right? And I go inside, that place is packed, right? All the seats are taken, people standing in the back and lo and behold, nobody's teaching, right? And it takes my slow brain all that time. Because you can't see something unless you believe it's there, right?

44:55So I didn't believe like, and I do a head count and there's not five or 10 people, there's 110 people. And I freak out because remember, I'm phobic of public speaking. I'm always shrinking. I would always make an excuse not to give a presentation or whatever. My heart's beating out of my chest. I'm 18 years old. I look like I'm like 13 years old. I'm wearing t-shirts, shorts. I have nothing prepared to talk about and I'm scared out of my mind. So I leave because I can't. Like it's different between having a fear of public speaking and being phobic where you can't, I literally couldn't talk. And I sit by a fountain outside to get my bearings because I can't even go back to my dorm room because my friends knew I was going to be doing this and they would tease me or whatever.

45:39And I hear this voice. I'm meditating. I hear this voice inside my head. It's my mom's. And she basically said, wow, 100 people came out. You promised to help them. You're disappointing them. You're disappointing me kind of message. And I'm doing this walking meditation back to my dorm room. And I stop. and I take one step back to the classroom. And that's why I always tell people that one step in another direction completely changes your destination. Some people call it their destiny or whatever. I go back to the classroom and long to short, I talk for a couple hours. It just flows through me.

46:14I have no idea what I talked about, right? But at the end, when I came out of this kind of flow, stream of consciousness state, I was like, I don't know if I could help you, but it takes about 10 hours to teach you what I know. I get paid$30 an hour as a tutor. If you're interested, I'll be in the student center tomorrow at noon and answer your questions. And I swear, James, 100 people got up and they all left. Not one person talked to me. And so now it's 10 o 'clock, something like that at night. I'm in a classroom all by myself and I'm feeling like, number one, completely confused, like what the heck happened?

46:49And number two, I feel so exhausted because when you face a fear that you've had literally every moment of your life, I just was depleted mentally, emotionally, physically. And I fall asleep on the floor in the carpet in that classroom. And I get woken up the next morning by the class coming in eight o 'clock the next morning and drooling in myself, whatever, very embarrassing. I run back, shower, go to breakfast, go to class. 12 o 'clock comes up. I remembered that I said I'd be in the student center. And I was like, I don't even have to go. No one's going to show up. But I ended up going. And I hope just one person believed and didn't think I was a complete idiot.

47:25and that same crowd was waiting for me at the student center. And at the end of two hours, 71 of those students signed up for a program that didn't even exist at$300 a person. I didn't even realize this because James, I was so not even thinking, like I said, 10 hours,$30 an hour. And I didn't realize kids had this ATM card because I didn't have an ATM card. I never even saw$300 before. And they go and kids go in the student center and take out cash. And the first one that handed me the cash, I was like, whoa, what's this? And I kind of did the math. And so I'm not even 19 years old. And then after two hours, I have$21 ,000 cash.

48:04That's unbelievable, Tim. In my pockets and in my book bag. I would have been rich if I was 19 with$21 ,000. I had nothing. You don't understand. I was 117 pounds because I lost all that weight because I was just not eating or sleeping or anything. And I use it to get my whatever, pizza and Chinese food. But I use it going back to this mentor, just don't let school get in the way of your education. I use it to fund my real education. I buy every audio cassette, and I'm dating myself a little bit here, go to every event that I could go to to learn what I learn now. And one of those 71 kids was that college freshman who read 30 books in 30 days.

48:47And her motivation, I know how she did it, but her motivation was her mom was dying of terminal cancer, was given two months to live, and she ended up saving her mom's life. And in that moment, I realized that knowledge is power and learning is our superpower. And I realized also my mission. That's really my dharma. So really, you've been doing this ever since. It's such a blessing to find something you're excited about and then people connect to it. It's not like, of course, you built up a career over years and decades and so on, But to see so much excitement in the beginning really kind of probably lit you on fire.

49:23And you said to yourself, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Yeah. And it's because it spread, right? I started doing this with students and then doing it at other universities. And then these kids would show remarkable improvement. I mean, who wouldn't do better if they knew how to do these things? And then their parents take note. And then those parents work at law firms or accounting firms or wherever. and I started to work doing programs for them. And then when the internet became more widely available, we brought everything into online academies and podcasts and YouTube and everything else and books.

49:59How did you get noticed by the Hollywood people to get started in helping actors learn and memorize their lines and so on? I gave a presentation at a conference and one of the attendees, I remembered his name. His name is Jim. It's not hard to remember because it's my name also as well. But remembering someone's name really leaves an impression. And because of it, we stayed in touch. And he was chairman of a big studio. And this was in 2013. And I was doing a little bit of coaching with some actors, but nothing wide scale. He brought me in to, it was 20th Century Fox. He was the CEO and chairman.

50:38And I'd go into a Friday training. and it was my best training because going into that room, their conference room, they had all the movie posters of like Star Wars and Avatar and it just put me in this kind of really good mood. And I gave my best training and afterwards he walks me around the film's lot and I've never been on a film lot before and I saw, you know the story, I saw this poster of Wolverine and then the movie was coming out in a few months and I was like, ah, I love the X-Men. I just can't wait to see it. And he picks up his phone and then five minutes later, I'm in his theater with 3D glasses watching Hugh Jackman fight all these super ninjas, right?

51:19But then afterwards, he gets me and says, how was the movie? I was like, you don't know this, but I grew up with learning difficulties. I had a brain injury and I couldn't read. I taught myself how to read by reading comic books, something about the stories and the illustration just brought it to life. My favorite comic books was Wolverine and the X-Men. He's like, Jim, I didn't know you liked the X-Men. Do you want to go on set? I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, we have another 30 days of filming in the new X-Men Days of Future Past in Montreal. I was like, yeah, thank you. I would love to do that, but what can I do for you?

51:46He's like, do what you did for us. Teach them how to speed read scripts, memorize lines, be focused on camera. I was like, I could totally do that. The next morning, we're on what they call the X-Jet. And I'm the last one on because of LA traffic. But I get on and the entire cast is on that. Oh my gosh. I mean, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman. And I don't even see them. I see Professor X, Wolverine. and I'm sitting between Holly Berry and Jennifer Lawrence going to Montreal and I'm sharing my brain performance memory tips to the cast and crew on the plane. We land the very next day, the very first shot, because I told him this.

52:27I was like, you don't know this, but when I was nine years old, I read in the X-Men comic books that the X-Men school, professor X's school for these mutants where it was in Westchester, New York, where I grew up. And true story, I told him when I was nine years old, every weekend I would ride my little red Ross bicycle, banana seat bicycle around my neighborhood trying to find that school because I wanted to find my superpowers. I wanted to find my super friends, right? Because X-Men aren't the strongest, but they just didn't fit in. They're mutants, right? They're marginalized. And I felt like I could identify with that.

53:03But anyway, the very first shot in Montreal, they shot the next day, took place in the X-Men school. And it was just amazing because as a nine-year-old, my inner self, my inner self, just watching my heroes come to life. But the caveat was I spent a week there. I get home. There's a package waiting for me. And it is this, it looks like a TV. You open it up and it's this photograph of me and the entire cast of X-Men. And I mean, people look at it and they can see it. It's like my Facebook cover photo forever. But you think like, who photoshopped that Asian dude in the middle? But better than that was the note from the CEO.

53:42It said, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your superpowers with all of us. I know you've been searching for your superhero school since you were a kid. Here's your class photograph. Wow. And that was just, yeah, this is very emotional. It just kind of felt like I came full circle. And by finding my powers, I was able to find my purpose and help other people to do the same. And did you get involved in helping them learn their script? Like how did it go teaching them? Yeah, so that's what I do with actors. The speed read scripts, because they have a lot of pages that they need to go through, remember their lines.

54:20Especially like, you know, there's a very famous Oscar actor that wanted to go and do Broadway, but always had when you're doing pre-recorded work, everything can be fixed you can do it shot 20 times, 30 times and everything's fixed in post but when you're alive, it's a different animal so I share techniques I help a lot of TED speakers memorize their 18 minute TED Talks I help a lot of actors remember things verbatim The Memory Palace is very useful for remembering things like TED Talks I used to use it for memorizing I did stand-up comedy for several years and it was very useful for memorizing the order and flow of the different routines and jokes I had.

55:03I love that. Wait, do you still have your club? No, I didn't because it was vandalized because of me after I wrote this article about New York. And so I decided to just sell my half of it. And it was good though. Did you practice? Did anybody get in this right? You used to practice, even train in the subway? Yeah. I love that. Dude, I love that so much. Because I knew I had a hard time with short one-liners, so I figured the subway is the best place to have a kind of aggressive audience whose attention span's only good for one-liners, so it forced me to really hone the craft there. I absolutely love it.

55:45But it's interesting because there's all these different techniques and you talk about them in this book, and I'm having a problem now where I feel like learning itself has become harder for me. Like maybe memory is always hard unless I'm using like a very specific technique. But understanding and learning new things is getting harder for me somehow. Like my listeners know this, but I've been going on what I call a quest, which is, you know, when I was in the 90s, I was a very competitive chess master, like a ranked tournament chess master. And so I've been on this quest to be as high ranked now as I was then.

56:28And I'm doing everything I can. Like, um, you know, I took a break for 25 years, so I'm coming back to it, but I have coaching. I, I, I took memory lessons from the world memory champion. I have just obviously chess lessons. I go to nutritionists, sports psychologists. I really work at this like many hours a day. I go to tournaments and I feel like it's the first time in my life i'm putting this much work into learning something and i just not learning somehow and i don't know what it is so um so learning can be difficult without a doubt. Because sometimes if it's too easy, I feel like we're just validating what we already know.

57:13And certainly you're making strides and you're pushing yourself and it's focused deep work. I love it. I love a handle on this with you. We could start here and take it offline. But I don't think. I just know that there's another level. It's just I have too much experience and so many different verticals to see in too many positive examples. And sometimes we don't study the outliers. We always kind of look at kind of what's in the curve. And I'm very fascinated by genius. And I believe genius leaves clues. Part of what could be supportive besides the brain optimization, which I'd love to go through with you offline, because we've talked about this in your show before, in terms of diet and sleep and stress management and all those, the hardware stuff.

58:03But for the software stuff, I think knowing your brain animal, and I could customize something for you offline, but it's not just how smart you are, it's how are you smart. So this brain type, let me give you some examples, right? So can I go through the code real quick with what the animals are? Yeah. Okay, so this was something that I use with coaching clients. And for the first time, I codified it and put it into the book and we released it available to the public. And so we pulled from the things I mentioned, the sciences and psychologies to create this model. And this is how it's functional.

58:39So let me just give you a quick summary on the animals themselves. Because everybody takes like a, you know, what Harry Potter character are you or Game of Thrones character. And so there's a quiz we put in the book. You could also get it online. It's at mybrainanimal.com. And it's a four-minute, multiple choice, go with your initial gut, and you get a detailed personalized report based on your animal with follow-up on it, on how to read, how to remember, how to focus based on your animal type. And you'll even get further ones on how to negotiate based on your animal type, parenting advice based on your animal type, and so on.

59:13So let's go through this. So the code, C-O-D-E, the C are your Cheetos. And the defining trait of Cheetos, like yourself, action, right? Very, action-oriented, strong intuition. They go fast so they can adapt very quickly. And they don't want to beat around the bush, kind of get to the point. And they communicate that way. And they buy that way. And they invest that way sometimes also as well. Now, we're not any one animal. So let me state that. If you're right-handed, it doesn't mean you don't use your left hand. But there's usually some form of dominance. The O are your owls. And their defining trait is logic.

59:51They love data. They love facts and figures. They take time to process information. And so just even thinking about it, the careers of a cheetah and owl probably, if they're in their element, would be different. They would invest differently. They would even read and remember things differently, where maybe a cheetah is going through skimming and scanning and getting the gist. Maybe an owl is going more detail-oriented, as an example. The D in code are your dolphins and their dominant trait is creativity. And these are people, sometimes they have a vision for their business, a vision for their life.

1:00:26Maybe the other people around them can't yet see. They have very strong pattern recognition. They think in pictures and usually a lot of passion behind it too, right? In terms of when they have something that's aspiring. And then finally, the E are your elephants. And your elephants, the defining trait is really empathy. You have strong interpersonal skills. They love to collaborate. They usually hold the ones that are holding a team together. They're extremely loyal. They want to kind of reconcile and get kind of a group consensus. They learn best in groups also as well. So even if you take these, like for example, we had our team obviously go through this assessment, this quiz.

1:01:06100 % of our customer service team ended up being elephants. Not by design, but it's just you go high empathy, compassion, strong interpersonal skills, community builders. They want everyone to feel supported and heard and seen. My CEO or my business partner, she's a dolphin. She has this vision, very syncs in pictures, has this vision that she's moving us towards. Our CFO or our financial officer is very, very strong owl. It's all about the numbers. So it's interesting how these things play out. and it's interesting. It would be scarier if he was a cheetah, for instance. Like you want your CFO to be an owl.

1:01:50Or a super creative dolphin. Yeah. And so it wouldn't really, and it's interesting because, so this gives you power because it gives you some flexibility and some distinctions and also takes some judgment out of yourself because again, it's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart and you can lean in your strengths and surround yourself and delegate to the people around who could compensate for your lack of strength in certain areas. Let me give you an example that everyone would know. So if you take Harry Potter, right? Harry Potter is a cheetah. Very instinctive, just in the fray of things, adapts very quickly.

1:02:28Hermione, she's very studious, right? She loves facts. She can recite any facts, any spell, right? She's an owl. I would say Dumbledore is that creative visionary. She runs a school, right? Hagrid was the one that kept the kids together. you know, as a team, loyalty is a big show. He would be an elephant. If you take something like Friends, Ross would be the owl, scientist, a professor, knows a lot of facts. Joey would be the cheetah. Just doesn't even think, just does, right? Just acts. I would say Phoebe would be the dolphin, the creative art, music, very expressive, passionate. Monica always wanted to host everything at her apartment, right?

1:03:11She's the elephant that keeps keeping everyone together. You do this with James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, everything. But my point in giving these reference points is maybe you start seeing that in other people. And also, obviously, a lot of people share it. We do this now with corporations where we charge, but it's free here in the book. But you can have your team go through it. You can kind of see and get the right people on the bus, make sure they're sitting in the right seats, and then everybody's in their strengths. And it leads into, you can use this for negotiation. You could use this for parenting.

1:03:44You could use this for sales. I mean, even when you think about communication styles, just like love languages, you communicate in your love language. Well, a cheetah is very straight to the point, right? They're very direct, decisive. Their speech is concise. They're focused on action. They use action-oriented words. They dislike beating around the bush. You know, you would take something like owls and they would communicate in their brain type. They're very analytical, methodical. They prefer details. If you're persuading an owl, you're going to use logic, right? Presenting facts and figures and data.

1:04:19If you're taking a dolphin, a dolphin is visionary and expressive. So they would communicate that way. They would talk about the big picture and future plans and innovative ideas. They'd be very enthusiastic. And elephants, they would be your collaborators. So they have high empathy. So where would that come out in their communication when they're talking to you or something? They're keen on understanding and validate other people's feelings. They understand the perspective of other people. They often use inclusive language. Instead of I and me, they use we and us. They're patient listeners because they want to make people feel valued and seen and heard.

1:04:55So you could use this for sales and parenting. And it's interesting if you're parenting or co-parenting and somebody else, they're different animals because each one would have different strengths and also blind spots also because of it. So that's interesting. So do you teach based on, like does your learning change based on your type? Yeah, so when we design these programs, we're meant to be able to hit all of the learning styles in terms of delivery, in terms of the words that I choose to use, in terms of the exercises. So like dolphins really do really well with things like the memory palace because they're already visual, right?

1:05:34Owls, you have to make it use more basic association and logic. to link two things together, even with names and faces, like the origin of the name or how do you spell the name or the meaning of the name, right? As opposed to remembering names for a dolphin, they would just say, Matt. Or they would just picture a doormat, right? Something like that. Elephants learn differently because they really care about the communication and the relationship. So they have that inherent motivation to remember a person's name and they're paying attention because they're present. So they're really hearing the name also as well.

1:06:06and so you could use this for study methods focusing methods, memory methods because when you understand how your brain works you could work your brain better and you could use this in sales because often just in love languages if somebody has words of affirmation other persons like service you just bump heads because you're not meeting other person's needs but if you need to influence and persuade or you're a coach or you have a relationship with any human being it just informs a better way to speak their language and also ways. And you're not stuck with any of these animals because of neuroplasticity.

1:06:40You could change, right? You could become more logical through proper training and deep work. So, you know, I'm really excited about this because, again, I feel like this is where things are going, especially with AI, where it's more personalized learning based on how you process information, how you sort for information, how you communicate information, retain information, and so much more. Do you think AI will, to a large degree, replace how the current education system works? I think it'll be an adjunct. I don't see it as artificial intelligence. I see it more as augmented intelligence. You know, technology has always changed the classrooms.

1:07:21Everything from, even when we first started having calculators or stuff like that, and people thought like, oh, people wouldn't have to do that. We're never going to have a calculator in our pocket, you know. And the other day, it's weird. We went out and they wanted to split the bill. There was 10 of us. This is not even a joke, James. There was 10 of us. So two people took out their calculators to try to divide by 10. And that was interesting. But that's digital deduction. That is interesting. We're so dependent on technology that we can't even do just even simple math. And I think that's a little bit concerning.

1:07:52I mean, in Yuval Harari's Sapiens, he mentions that there's quite a possibility that people 10 ,000 years ago had, or I think we know actually that they had larger skulls than we have now. And it could be that they were actually smarter in some ways because they had to remember every plant in a five-mile radius. They had to remember where all the dangerous plants were. Yeah, where the fertile soil is, where the clean water is, where the enemy tribe is. I mean, you would have to remember everything because there were no books, no teleprompters, no internet, no nothing. And so while every technology has improved society and to some extent, like we're not cold in the winters anymore.

1:08:33We can get places faster. We know the location of every place. We have outsourced parts of what was the human brain to technology. Yeah, that's why I see it as augmented. Technology is like, again, fire is a form of early technology. And it's also how it's applied. Fire could cook your food or it could burn down your home. It's just really how it's put into use. for me, I'm not, I have a very positive outlook towards technology. It allows this to happen, right? Like this conversation to happen. And I just think that just bringing mindfulness into it. My thing is when people pick up their phones out of just habit or boredom, then technology is a tool for us to use.

1:09:14But if the technology is using us, then who becomes a tool? Then we become the tool, right? And so I think it could drive distraction, digital depression, right? like comparing yourself to everybody, highlight reel on social media. I want to remind people that the grass is greener where you water it. Sometimes on social media, it's greener because of the filter they're using or a lot of artificial turf on social media also as well. But yeah, for AI, the specific strategies we put in the book are how to enhance your HI, your human intelligence. So for example, I mentioned neuroplasticity. If somebody's listening, they don't know what that is.

1:09:51You could go into a chat DPT and say, explain to me neuroplasticity in story format as if I'm eight years old. And that would be a good foundation to build on, right? Because all learning is taking something unknown and linking it to something known, right? Taking something you don't yet know and connecting it and associate it as something that you do know. So you take something outside of you and putting it inside of you and linking it until that becomes inside. The, you know, I have a podcast like you and sometimes if I'm interviewing an author and they didn't send me the book and I just don't want to read digital books because I don't need another excuse to be on a screen or I get lost in the mail, I could go online and just say, hey, give me a summary of this book.

1:10:31I could ask, say, hey, this is who I'm interviewing. Give me 10 questions that they haven't been asked before for my specific audience. And not that I use any of these things verbatim, but it creates a nice creativity partner or creative partner for this. Even for memory, AI, we have a quick bot in our academy and we uploaded all of our course load for terabyte of information inside of it. And so it acts just like me. So you could go in there and say, as a parent, saying, I want to help my child with this new math or memorizing the periodic table, whatever. And it'll give you the options based on the techniques that we teach to make it easy for you.

1:11:17This app that we're creating now with AI is it can measure reading speed. It can measure reading comprehension. All the tools in here too. You could go through and say, feed it. You could feed into an AI program, not even ours, and just say, hey, this is the toast I'm giving at this wedding. Build a memory palace for me so I can easily remember it or create a story format or whatever. Or, hey, I'm learning this sales process and kind of put your notes there and can you mind map this for me, right? And so it could provide the tree branches of this structure for whole brain note-taking. And so there's so many, even like I talk about retrieval practice, so it could quiz you at a certain interval to test how much you actually remember because it's not just about pushing information in, it's pulling it out, right?

1:12:02You encode it, you store it, then you retrieve it. But that retrieval practice, the quizzing yourself is a wonderful way to deepen those neural connections and reinforce like taking things from your short-term to long-term memory. So I'm very bullish on AI. I think it's a fun thing. There's no part of our business, our team that's not utilizing it in some way, shape, or form. And I think the future would be... And they're using now some of our trainings and some of the top school systems in the world in Finland and South Korea. I've gone multiple places throughout Europe training principals and educators there.

1:12:42And I'm excited. The States is interesting. It's a different kind of environment. But I do believe that the future is about personalization. Because think about the opposite. It was like the assembly line was the model for the school system. And it was like one size fits all based on your manufacturing date, your age, the year you were born. And everyone pretty much was treated the same. And I don't envy teachers. Because when you and I grew up, you know, we grew up on joysticks, but now kids are, they have the world's information. They have more access to information than Clinton did when he was in office, right?

1:13:21And the context switching or scrolling through, it's not just the content, it's like different contexts. But do you know how exhausting that is to the human brain and how much brain glucose you burn through to kind of light up this part of your brain, that this part, that this part, that this part, and it's driving you to distraction because every like, share, comment, cat video, whatever you're wearing is dopamine flood and we wonder why kids can't pay attention in school i mean it's so hard like i've lectured in front of college classes and you know over the past 20 30 years i've done this and it is so hard now lecturing in front of a college class because they all have their laptops in front of them you have to really disrupt their thinking consistently like every few every few minutes you have to have a massive disruption happen in order to keep them off their eyes, off their laptops.

1:14:11And that's why I think storytelling and adding humor, and we do a lot of, when I speak, interactive exercises where I get them physically getting up and doing group exercises. But I do think teachers, I mean, think about it now. Now we have unfettered access to the world's information through podcasts like yours, YouTube, and people will be learning from the world's best, right? So I see teachers more with access to the world's information. People could learn history from the best history experts in the world and AI to personalize things. And I see teachers really being more facilitators, you know, for the experiential part, for the social part, for the collaboration, for the experimental part of learning, which is very important also as well.

1:14:55But the school system just hasn't changed as much as the world. I mean, we live in an age of autonomous electric cars, spaceships, going to Mars, right? But our vehicle of choice when it comes to education is more like a horse and carriage. It just hasn't evolved. They say to Rip Van Winkle, the guy who slept for decades, the only thing if you woke up today, what he recognizes are classrooms. And again, not a slight against teachers. It's just a systemic issue. The system hasn't changed as much as the world has changed. It has to be demanded by the market. So people have to know, like that guy told you when you were in college, that you have a choice that you have to, you have to actually make a decision.

1:15:33I'm going to use this kind of education instead of this kind of education. And we don't really realize, or young people still don't really realize as, as much as they could, that they have that choice because it's so ingrained in us. But let me ask you like on neuroplasticity. So that's the idea that you can form new brain connections as you get older. Previously it was thought you couldn't do it. Now it's understood generally that, that you could, although maybe not as fast as when you're younger. How do you enhance your neuroplasticity? So the key for neuroplasticity, which is again, neuroplasticity is stating that your brain is more malleable and it could grow and you can make more connections.

1:16:12Like Einstein's brain wasn't bigger than anybody else's, but there are parts of his brain that were just more high traffic, right? It's kind of like if somebody's walking through a field and they, one, they're not going to change it, but if they did it repetitively, you would start having some inroads and some paths there. And those are like your memories and your learnings that are connecting. You have 87, 86 billion neurons, each one that could have up to 10 ,000 synaptic connections. So there are more potential connections in the human brain, one human brain than there are stars in our universe.

1:16:43I mean, that's an immense amount of power. But so, you know, usually the fall, it gets less plastic after about six years of age, 25 years of age, things are more hard-coded. But yeah, studies show that you could absolutely get older, but in some areas, absolutely get wiser because you could continue with neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is part of your hippocampus, which is associated with memory. You could create new brain cells. And how do you do that? Through two ways, novelty and nutrition. It's the same exact as building your bicep. You can build your muscles, your biceps, your triceps, your leg muscles, whatever, you give it novelty.

1:17:24You give it some form of exercise, stimulation. And then you feed that muscle with what it needs to be able to grow. And so for neuroplasticity, it helps to have that growth mindset because otherwise if you don't have a growth mindset and you think things are fixed, which is the opposite of growth, like your shoe size, if you think your mental aptitude and your brain performance is just static, then you're not going to do the things that get you out of your comfort zone like doing a comedy set on a subway, right? And I feel like that life is difficult for two reasons. Either you're leaving your comfort zone and it forces you to grow like people would do physically, but this is, we're talking about neuroplasticity with your brain, your mind, when stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions, right?

1:18:13Oliver Wendell home. But life is difficult when you leave your comfort zone, but also life is difficult to be staying in your comfort zone too, right? And it's all just, you've heard this before, like choosing your heart. Being broke is hard. Going out there, starting a business is hard, right? Working hard is hard. Being sick and tired is hard and doing everything, eating the best foods and meal prep and exercising, that's hard, right? But we choose our heart. And so I would say for neuroplasticity is novelty. And I think one of the best ways is listening and reading, right? Like whatever people are doing right now, they're listening to this conversation, if they heard something they didn't hear before and they contemplate it and they reflect on it, especially if they act on it, your brain's not the same after this conversation.

1:18:55It's just not, right? If you know something that you didn't know yesterday, there was neuroplasticity that exists. And I would just say that some people, they're, you know, we hear about exercising your body all the time because you see it. And I always, in every photograph, I'm always pointing to my brain. I'm always wearing a brain shirt if you're watching this on video because what you see, you take care of. and you see your hair, your car, your clothes, whatever, because it's in your awareness. But we don't see the thing that takes care of us. You don't see your brain all the time. That's a really good point.

1:19:23I should start doing that. And that's why I'm always pointing to my brain in pictures or wearing a brain on my shirt because this is the thing that we have to take care of because this is what takes care of us. And I want to remind everybody that you are the pilot of your brain. You're not the passenger. So many people feel like they're at the effect, right? We're just kind of going where the weather or the politics or whatever is dictating. But a big part of being limitless is regaining our sovereignty, our personal agency and responsibility, knowing that every day we can have a chance because we can make a new choice every single day.

1:19:56And so for what I would say for novelty is I like reading personally. I think reading is to your mind, what exercise is to your body, and then feeding your brain with the right nutrients. And I'm not a nutritionist. I don't have a, like, this is not a medical doctor. But be intelligent about this. We are all biodiverse, right? Biooriginal. And so, like, kale might be good for some person, not for the other, right? They might be allergic to it, can't digest it, whatever. But in the last episode that you and I did together, I talk about some of my favorite brain foods. But what I believe - By the way, I'm amazed that you remember that because that last episode we did together was like - It was good, yeah.

1:20:36A long time ago. It was, but it's, well, yeah, this is how it works. But we did this thing where we memorized, we put like, you know, avocados on our hair and blueberries coming out of your nose and all this different stuff. And I walked you through my office and we linked all the different things there as like a memory palace. But my point of bringing this up is, I prefer people get it from their food, but if you're not getting it from your food, you could do a nutrient profile because if you're low on vitamin D or vitamin B, your brain's just not going to be doing what it can do. And you can learn all the speed reading, memory texting, and you'll get gain without a doubt.

1:21:07But if you don't eat eggs, like I talked about in a previous episode, that eggs is a great brain food. We add it on your neck. But it's the choline in eggs. So you might need a supplement. You get it in eggs, you get it in soybeans. But choline is a powerful nutrient that it's critical for. It leads to acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter that supports memory, supports cognitive function. Probably the most important supplement that people could look into is omega-3 fatty acids, particularly DHA. which is crucial for brain health and development. That's found in salmon. Salmon, sardines, flax seeds.

1:21:46It's there. But if you're not getting enough of that in your diet, and you can test. All these things you can test for nowadays. You go to a good functional medicine doctor or a good nutritionist and get your vitamin levels tested. Your B vitamins are essential, especially B6, B9, which is your folate, B12, vital for brain health. magnesium is so critical for hundreds of physiological processes, especially for your brain. But you know, we could even go into things like, one of my favorites is creatine. And people associate that with working out. A lot of athletes use it. But creatine is a natural substance produced in our bodies and it's predominant in meat and fish.

1:22:26But maybe you need to supplement it if you're a vegan. But it helps improve cognitive function because what it does, it helps with especially short-term memory and quick thinking because it helps with energy metabolism. So as your mitochondria or your ATP is the Ukrainian, you feel kind of depleted. So creatine is one of the most researched supplements, not just for muscle growth, but for cognitive growth. I talk about in the previous episode, turmeric lowers inflammation, but the active ingredient, if you're not getting that in your diet, is curcumin. And curcumin is anti-inflammatory. It has huge antioxidant benefits.

1:23:06It could cross the blood-brain barrier. It's been shown to lead to improvements in cognitive function, especially in people who are showing early stages of patients with Alzheimer's disease. And so that's something you could supplement. I mean, we hear a lot about mushrooms like lion's mane. It's a unique nootropic that has nerve protective effects and lots of research showing that could actually stimulate the synthesis of this nerve growth factor in your brain and also could help reduce inflammation. Probably the most popular of the nootropics is caffeine. I don't know. Do you be a big coffee drinker?

1:23:42I usually drink a cup or two every morning. Yeah. I'm a little sensitive, so I have to be careful with my sleep. I can't do caffeine past, I notice, around 12 or 1 o 'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, 12 is my max. Yeah. Then when you combine it with something called L-theanine, that's very powerful because the result is you get greater brain function without the jittery side effects. So I'm very sensitive. L-theanine and caffeine actually are found naturally in green tea. And you've heard a lot about the power of green tea. Ginkgo biloba is another powerful one. It's been used thousands of years in Chinese medicine to treat different ailments, including cognitive decline.

1:24:22But the research shows that it actually promotes good blood circulation. And that's really the name of the game for, you ask if I got my brain scanned, and I've had my brain scanned since, you know, as an adult multiple times. And blood flow, because a traumatic brain injury, you don't get enough blood flow in that area because of the damage, and you need to get oxygen there, right? That's why part of the protocol for TBIs is hyperbaric chambers, like hyperbaric oxygen chambers, to push oxygen in areas to recover and repair. But ginkgo is wonderful for blood flow and in circulation, which is amazing.

1:24:58So in the book, we talk about three dozen brain supplements and nootropics that have human studies. I never talk about supplements in 30 years, but I realized that some people can learn great techniques, but if they're lacking in certain nutrients, key nutrients, it could throw them off. Just like everyone wants to know what the magic pill is, but there's not a pill, but there's a process, right? You need sleep. You need the meds, right? We always talk about meds. The M stands for meditation. You disconnect to reconnect to get some kind of rejuvenation, improve your focus. The E is exercise. As your body moves, your brain grows.

1:25:35You create brain-derived neurotropic factors, which is fertilizer for neuroplasticity. The D is your diet. And we've talked about your best, favorite brain foods. And stay away from highly refined foods, processed food, high sugar foods, anti-inflammation foods. And then the S is sleep. So those are your meds. And if you're to add anything, you could add Rx, meds, Rx. The R is relationships. We've done multiple episodes on the power of relationships, even the largest happiness study out of Harvard University and longevity study. And a lot of you in these blue zones, it's the with the family, right?

1:26:10Because the opposite is being lonely and isolated. And we know that's a big mental health issue for this country and abroad. So the R is relationships, a positive peer group, people that, you know, just like, you know, there's hunter-gatherer, you want to feel like you're supported, you're in a village, you have protection, you're safe. And then the X in Rx, meds Rx, it's just the extras that we talk about a lot in the book, the power of cold showers or cold plunges and, you know, heat shock proteins coming from, you know, infrared saunas and red light therapy and all that extra stuff. But there's so many different things that you can do to optimize your brain and your performance.

1:26:47You know, and also, you almost need an extra letter for the negative thinking, like your aunts. Yeah, that's a different... Absolutely, our thoughts play a big role. Our mind is always eavesdropping on our self-talk. And even if you find yourself saying, going back to limiting beliefs, like, I don't have a great memory, even if you had a little... Catch yourself, because self-awareness is a superpower, right? You cultivate self-awareness because you can't change something unless you're aware of it. But even if you say, I don't have a great memory, just add a little word like yet. Or you find yourself saying, oh, I got to take my kid to music class, right?

1:27:17I got to work out. I got to meditate. Even changing a little word like got to get, you know, I get to take my son to music class today. I get to work out or I get to take 15 minutes and just be calm. I just, I think it feels like, it definitely feels different for me at least because the language that we use, it affects our nervous system and also what's possible. Well, you know, Jim, it's funny you say what's possible because your book's titled Limitless. I mean, everything's possible. And I really do believe that. Like your book has had a huge influence on me since the first time we spoke about it so many years ago.

1:27:56It was like 2015 or 2014 where we first spoke about it. And I'm really grateful for all you've done. I've learned so much from your work, even when there's times we haven't spoken for a long time, but I'm still following your stuff and learning from you. this expanded edition is incredible. You had, it's a much thicker book. You, you had so much depth to it. And I really encourage, like, this is kind of a very important journey for me that I'm going on. And a book like this is exactly like the book I need for this journey. And I'd be happy to talk to you offline about what's been going on and what I could do.

1:28:36But, and I'm writing a book about the process and the whole concept of quests as well. but it's just always fascinating talking to you. You have so many incredible stories. You've been through so much and I could see the effect that applying these practices has had on you and I read about your students and so on. But of course, thank you once again, Jim, for coming on the podcast. Well, the last time we actually saw each other in person, I was over your house for the Game of Thrones series finale. Yes, that was a different, that was like a lifetime ago. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, people should take that.

1:29:12I mentioned the Game of Thrones, there's Game of Thrones quizzes, but the My Brain Animal, if I can encourage everyone to do just one thing besides get the book, limitlessbook.com, is to take the quiz at mybrainanimal.com and post it on social media. You get some nice AI art and then tag James and tag myself because I'm curious what the dominant brain animal is of your community. And I think a lot of people, even if they text it to a friend or family member, it'll explain a lot of their behavior that sometimes we bump heads. And I feel like part of it, again, is having the curiosity to know yourself and then to be yourself.

1:29:47And I want to thank you, James, for your friendship. Thank you for your amazing work, your books. I appreciate it. I have to have you back on our podcast also as well to talk about any projects. And let's talk offline and talk about this chess. Yeah, yeah. I have some real, real, real good ideas on this one. Oh, excellent. I got your back and I got your brain. Excellent. Well, I look forward to it. And Jim, thank you so much. And thanks for delivering this expanded edition of Limitless. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you, everybody.

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