Jim Kwik - Unleash The Genius Within You

Full transcript: Jim Kwik on London Real

5:44 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jim Kwik, the renowned expert in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning.

6:08 After a childhood brain injury left you learning challenge, you overcame this by creating strategies to dramatically enhance your mental performance. You have since dedicated your life to helping others unleash their brain power and serve as a coach to many of the world’s leading CEOs and celebrities, including Elon Musk, Will Smith, and the entire cast of X-Men. Your message is that knowledge is power, learning is a superpower. Jim, welcome to London. Brian, thank you so much, and thank you everyone who’s joining us.

6:33 It’s great to have you here. I would love to get first your thoughts on London. You know, I know you’re kind of bi-coastal, you travel a lot, but I’m wondering what you think of this town as far as its energy or your initial thoughts. Well, I love, I love London. I’m the, I love minds, right?

6:49 I love great minds, and I’m always deconstructing genius. That’s the nature of my work. And so when I think about London, I’m thinking, you know, Michael Faraday, who discovered electricity, you know, I’m thinking about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, I’m thinking about Alfred Hitchcock, you know, and, you know, any area of genius. And so I love great, I love great thinkers and great achievers in different fields, you know, whether it’s David Beckham or if it’s Charlie Chaplin.

7:19 Yeah, anybody who’s just amazing, and I just, I love that, and I love the culture and I love, I love, I love the thought and the depth of, like, good thinkers. Yeah, I remember I was walking around Westminster Abbey and I walked by and it was Sir Isaac Newton’s grave there, and I was like, what? You know, like, he’s right there. Yeah, you know, without a doubt. I mean, it’s just, this is very inspiring for me because I like to be stimulated.

7:43 I think novelty is very important for the brain to create neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, and so I love learning from any kind of discipline. And so even, you know, Benedict Cumberbatch, I’m a big Sherlock fan and he’s also played Doctor Strange. As many people who know me know, I love superheroes for many reasons. I’m always talking about modern day superheroes, and Doctor Strange is one of my favorite superheroes because he got his superpowers through reading and through deep study.

8:12 Right, and so I love that. Do you study Benedict and just kind of watch to see how he accomplishes things or takes on certain roles? I, I like to, I think we can learn from everybody. I think everyone can be an example, or, you know, some people could be also a warning also. But I think life, part of the depth of life comes from learning and really living from that place, being curious and having this level of wonder.

8:36 And, you know, when people tell me that they’re bored ever, I’m just like, really? Surprised, because I feel like we could always find something that’s fascinating, that there are, you know, as they say, no ordinary moments. There’s always something incredible going on. And so when I’m studying actors or people in business or athletes, I just love seeing people who are the best version of themselves competing at that level, because I always think that genius leaves clues, that when someone is exceptional, and I don’t mean IQ, but I mean, like, academic wise, I mean somebody who’s just excellent at their field of endeavor.

9:10 And so when you’re watching, like, Sherlock, I think Sherlock has strategies that allows him to be able to observe things that other people just don’t observe. And a lot of what I do is I train, like, law enforcement, I train artists on how to be more present and how to pay attention to things and see things that other people don’t see maybe. And so I study even works of fiction like Sherlock to see how he deducts and reasons, use critical thinking, and how we could pay attention to things that are right there but most people don’t see.

9:41 Yeah, he’s kind of one of those original characters that just, like, notices everything and has these weird brain things and weird character history. And yeah, yeah, and again, London, original. Yeah, oh yeah, so I love this. I feel so charged when I visit, and I mentioned to you I’m going to Wimbledon, and I love, I love sports and following people and seeing, you know, what it takes. I like when people put themselves through challenge, because I think through challenge comes a level of change.

10:11 When people are struggling, and, you know, we all have adversity in life, but I think that, you know, when we grow through it, that difficult times, they could define us, they could, or they could maybe diminish us, but also they could develop us, and ultimately we decide. And when I’m talking about learning, it’s not always just book learning, even though I teach people how to read books faster and remember things that they read and stuff like that. I think we can learn from a conversation sometimes, a conversation with a buddy or an expert is even more valuable than reading a whole book, you know, or even a story probably can be a powerful learning device.

10:46 Oh, you know, that, I mean, after interviewing hundreds of people over years, I mean you must have the most amazing stories and nuggets. I’m starting to wonder if stories somehow are in our DNA and something and I have a guest coming on soon who kind of believes that. And so it’s a whole nother learning mechanism. It is one of the best ways when we’re talking about developing human memory. And, you know, people have seen me do, like, these mental feats where I memorize a room full of people’s names or, like, you know, like literally, like 50 or 100 people, or numbers or words or stuff like that.

11:17 You know, I think when we’re studying memory, stories, before they had, like, smartphones and printing presses, we had the powers. You know, people were telling stories around campfires, and that’s how we pass on knowledge for generations and generations. So storytelling, there’s something about stories that really help make things unforgettable. Yeah, and make the brain lock in on something. You know, if you look at your Twitter feed, it’s kind of like the who’s who of all sorts of different disciplines.

11:44 You know, athletes and CEOs and actors and, you know, they’re what you might call high performance people. And I always wondered, you know, you must see some similarities with all these people and I wonder if it’s that they have these high performance habits. Is it, you know, I guess since you’re with them, they’re always learning. Is there something that you kind of see throughout these different types of people? Because you’re in a really unique place, probably there’s no one like you that gets to be in these people’s lives, and wonder what you see there.

12:12 I mean, I think that the common thread, and I would imagine with all your guests they share this in common, is that they are lifelong learners, because anyone who, I think learning, or especially meta-learning, learning how to learn, is one, it’s like the grandfather or the grandmother of personal growth or high performance or self-help, if you will, because without learning nothing, with nothing changes. And so I think that one of the common themes is they have a high standard for things. You know, they have a vision, and, you know, I always talk about 3 H’s: head, heart, hands.

12:45 That you could visualize things with your head and, you know, set goals and outcomes and KPIs or affirmations, but if you’re not acting with your hands, something is missing. And I think the second H, the, you know, the heart and having the motivation or drive, the the emotion to be able to achieve those things, because we’re not always logical, right, but we’re biological. You know, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, I mean, we do things very based on our feelings.

13:14 And I find that spending time with high achievers, they have a high, high drive. You know, those feelings, a high level of, some people call it purpose. You know, I know you had our buddy Simon on the show, Start with Why, but asking yourself, like, why, why do I want to remember this? Why do I want to learn this? Why do I want to achieve that goal?

13:32 Because reasons reap results. They really do. Reasons, we have results and a lot of rewards. And so that’s why I love watching your show, because you provide not only the insights, because people want to know what to do, but then you also give them an inspiration to do it, because a lot of people they’ll get the inspiration but they’re like, what do I do now, you know? But then you’re talking and you just, you know, going through your Iron Man, I mean, that must have been grueling.

13:57 I mean, I love people who test themselves, because I really think life, like, we really grow the most and live the most when we’re playing and practicing at the edge of our limits. You know, because we’re uncomfortable, exactly. Because, and I think that commonality is common with higher performers or elite mental performers or athletes or actors or traitors or, you know, educators or philanthropists, they’re just they’re at that level, you know, whether it’s, and that another, another one, Jane Goodall, like here, another Lon, you know, here in the UK, you know, whether teaching is here, genius here in their heart.

14:31 I love people are just disrupting things. They’re not playing necessarily by the traditional rules. Usually, I read this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that says all the big evolutions and advancements and innovations come from people outside the industry, you know, because it usually takes somebody, you know, whether it’s fashion or technology or automotive, you know, the car industry, takes someone like an Elon to look from the outside in, saying, hey, if we were to start completely over right now, zero based thinking, you know, what would cars look like today?

15:02 You know, so it’s not additive, it’s just something that’s that’s fresh. Yeah, and if you’re uncomfortable all the time and challenging yourself and learning, which is, I’m guessing, you, me, the clients of yours or people you help, how do you maintain that balance of also being present and happy? Yeah, because, like you said, you’re attracted to people who push themselves, but when you’re uncomfortable, like a lot of times I’m having tough days, but I love it in retrospect.

15:29 Yeah, like, how do you find that balance? Um, for me, I think it’s individual, much like I think diet is and a lot of things, is preference and finding what works. I think a lot of people they give away their sovereignty and a lot of their power to other people as an expert or as a guru, if you will. But I think the ultimate expert is ourself, and I really do believe self-awareness is a superpower, like knowing yourself, for me to feel totally fulfilled.

15:55 And if people want to be successful, be happy, I think it comes down to two things. I think it comes down to having the curiosity to want to know yourself, like really go deep about who are you, what are your beliefs, and what do you really value, what do you stand for, what do you stand against, all these different things, your capabilities, your habits, your routines. So having that self-awareness, the curiosity to know yourself, but once you know yourself, I think a lot of people might know themselves, but you also need the courage to be yourself too.

16:22 Like once you know yourself, you need to be able to have that courage, that boldness to really live it, because I really do believe, we’re talking about learning from other people, it doesn’t matter really, I could learn, you know, I was just teaching a bunch of children, six-year-olds, right, and I love working with children, they were from like 30 different countries, from different economic backgrounds and everything. And I was saying that I can learn from all of them because, you know, it’s asking these questions, they have this sense of wonder, they have this sense of play, if you will, because I believe ultimately the life we live are the lessons we teach. The life we live are the lessons we teach to other people.

16:57 And it’s not about what we say, so many people just say, you know, they can say things all the time, but if they’re not doing those things, I feel like we don’t really understand it. And I think really when it comes down to it, a life well-lived, it’s not just the words, because words, it’s better well done than well said, you know. But so many of us are shrinking sometimes, and you must see this, Brian, where, because we’re so we value other people’s opinions so much and their expectations so much, and we don’t really know ourselves.

17:25 And even if we are getting glimpses of it, you know, it’s hard in this world to be ourself when you have, you know, so many people are living a life, you know, it’s their parents’ ideas for them, or it’s the Joneses or something like that. And I think if you, I think you could really go broke buying into other people’s opinions, you know, and their expectations. And so coming back to this, you know, when we’re talking about human memory and learning, I just feel like we’re here to grow and we’re here to give, and that’s when we feel the most empowered.

17:57 So it’s like knowing who we are and then being who we are. When a company like, you know, Nike or SpaceX or Zappos, you know, pulls you in, or, you know, someone like the crew, the X-Men, like, what is the usual thing they think they’re getting you for? Yeah, I’m guessing that you end up giving them a lot of different things they didn’t expect. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great question, actually. From people, when they usually come to me, it’s usually from an audience, and I’ll ask them, what would you like to learn?

18:27 Is there any one problem I could help you solve? What would it be? And it’s kind of interesting, just stepping back, because if you had a magic lamp and a genie was to grant you one wish, what would you wish for? You would wish for, like, more wishes. That would be like the hack, right?

18:42 If I was a learning genie and I could help anyone learn any one, just one subject or one skill, you know, Mandarin, martial arts, music, marketing, you know, anything, what would you want to learn? And the answer, along the lines of asking for more wishes, well, if I could learn anything it’d be learning how to learn, because if I can learn how to learn, I could apply that towards anything. You know, it’s really a force multiplier. And so I focus on learning how to learn, or this thing called meta learning.

19:13 Like meta thinking is thinking about your thinking, meta learning is learning how to learn. And I think it is the most important skill to master in the 21st century, because everything else is changing. Right, and companies know this, companies like the ones you mentioned, they know that the only constant is change, and it’s a, you know, like Moore’s law and half-life of information, and we feel like we’re drowning in information but we’re starving for, like, real practical, usable wisdom.

19:37 Right, and so I think the ability to learn faster is the most important skill now. I read recently that the average graduate versus school graduate is going to have anywhere from eight to different to 14 different careers, you know, maybe even different verticals, because the world is changing so rapidly with technology, but it’s also creating, you know, a lot of issues. But when it comes down to it, I get, I come in to do something like training them how to be more productive, specifically around learning.

20:04 So for example, the average person has to process information about four or five hours a day. I think a lot of your viewers, they can relate to that. Like, how many books on your shelf do you have that you haven’t read yet, right? How many emails do you get a day? I mean, we’re inundated, right?

20:18 And so four or five hours a day of processing information, but if I could help double your reading speed, for example, and you could save two hours a day, two hours a day over the course of a year is 730 hours. But even if you save one hour a day, you save 365 hours a year. That’s how many 40 hour work weeks? That’s nine 40 hour work weeks, two months of productivity you get back just saving one hour a day. So forget about time management, this doesn’t even take time, it actually makes time.

20:48 But the reason I do that for companies is if four or five hours a day is spent, like, reading and processing information, that means half of their salary is being paid just to read. That means if someone’s getting paid, you know, 50,000, that means half of that, is 25, is being paid just to process information. So it’s the highest, it’s the largest line item, you know, human capital is the largest line item for a company, right? Payroll and everything.

21:13 And so that’s an issue, information overload, because it also leads to a lot of health challenges. You know, as you know, you know, when people have information overload, they call it information fatigue syndrome, you know, higher blood pressure, a compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness, all the things that make you not your best. And if they’re not good, you know, in their personal life, then they’re definitely not going to be good also in their professional life in terms of efficiency.

21:36 And then we’ll do things like memory training for corporations. You know, I believe in business and in life two of the most costly words are “I forgot.” You know, I forgot to do it, I forgot to bring it, I forgot that conversation I had with a person, I forgot that, meaning I forgot that name. All these things, every time we hear those words or we say those words, we lose time, credibility, opportunity, income. I mean, I can’t tell you how many people have come to me saying they’ve lost a deal or a sale because they called someone by the wrong name or they asked somebody, like, what, how do you, how are you going to show somebody, when we’re talking about, like, the power of remembering someone’s name, I think it’s the number one business etiquette, networking skill there is.

22:13 How are you going to show someone you’re going to care for their business, their future, their finances, their health, whatever it is you’re selling, if you don’t care enough just to remember, like, their name? The politicians are good at this, they’re so excellent at it. Former President Bill Clinton always remembers your name when you meet him. Right, exactly, and he remembered it the second time, and not only that, the conversation we had, right? So his, he’s got great charisma and great connector, a great communicator, and incredible memory.

22:38 People don’t know, but also he has his powerful presence. But I think his, like, when he’s talking to you, it’s like you have that. Do you have that same gift? And I hesitate by saying it’s a gift because I don’t want people to think, oh, somebody has it, somebody doesn’t. It’s something that can be learned also.

22:53 It’s like, but sometimes you’re out and about, you can tell when someone’s not with you, they’re looking over your shoulder seeing who’s more important in the room, or they’re talking. Most people, I find, Brian, aren’t even listening. They’re thinking about how they’re going to respond or they’re waiting, they’re waiting for their turn to talk. And, you know, one of the reasons why I love your show is because you are an expert listener. Like, you could tell with my interactions with you and you and your other guests when I’m watching, you could tell, like, when you ask a question, you sincerely want to know what the answer is, right?

23:23 But most people, and the great thing about this is, going even going back to President Bill Clinton, I think his incredible memory and his powerful presence comes from being powerfully present. Okay, you know, it’s incredible to people. Absolutely, because, you know what the problem is? It’s because people are learning and developing muscles of distraction. They’re training themselves, especially with technology, to be distracted all the time, and they’re saying the human attention span is just going down and down and down because we have these smart devices and every like, share, comment, cat video, whatever, is training us to be more and more, like, looking for the next novel thing every time you get a dopamine fix.

24:01 You know, it’s along the nervous system, like, of where your motivation centers are, your learning centers. So it’s training you to be addicted and just to distraction, to always looking. Like, I can’t tell you how many people, like, you know this, like, they’re on their smartphones all the time and it’s just sitting there and they, you know, Simon talks about this, that if a phone is just sitting, Simon Sinek is sitting there, like, at the dinner table, like, it stresses people out just, it’s presence.

24:25 And for me, I just feel like if you’re picking it up, I think technology. People like, Jim, why do I need to remember things? Because I have search engines and everything else. That’s my next question, right, especially Silicon Valley companies, they’re like, it’s all there, it’s all being recorded. Exactly, and yet those are the ones that I serve the most, ironically, because they want to be, like, the engineers at SpaceX or some of the venture capital firms, you know, I train their portfolio companies, all tech companies, or their CEO, C-suite executives, because really in this today’s age we’re not paid for our brute strength, we’re paid for our brain strength.

25:00 It’s not our muscle power, it’s our mind power. But when it comes to your memory, it’s like, even though you can find this information online, we know memory is valuable because there is no knowledge without memory. That our life right now, and I think most people would agree with this, is the sum total of all the decisions we’ve made up to this point, but we can only make good decisions to the degree we have good information, and that presupposes we remember that information.

25:26 And I could prove it to you because if you forgot half of what you know, half of your expertise, half of the conversations you’ve had, half of the people you know, half the words you know, how effective would you be? You wouldn’t be. But what if you could retain twice as much, maybe in a fraction of the time? How much more effective would you be? Because I believe the faster you can learn, the faster you could earn.

25:47 When you can remember things like someone’s name, when you could give a, I train a lot of the TED speakers how to memorize their TED talks. If you could give, I remember a sales script or speaking points to your product or service, you know, you come across as more of an expert, more somebody who cares, and those are the people we reward the most. Right, the people that, you know, I believe today knowledge is not just power, knowledge is profit, and I don’t just mean financial profit, I mean all the treasures of your life.

26:15 Yeah, it’s a fascinating time and, you know, you mentioned these digital devices and, you know, I, I was, I have a point where I teach my students to just really shut these things down, and I said this thing in your pocket, it’s not metal and glass, it’s like the ultimate designer drug created by billions of dollars of capital by the smartest people in the world, and forget heroin and crack, this is the latest thing, and it’s dangerous. And I’m curious, well, how you interact with your digital device and what you teach these people, especially in technology, absolutely, their job is to be online and be wired and connected, and eventually it’s going to be in our body, right? Yeah, because here’s what you think of that.

26:54 I know you’ve done some work with Singularity University as well, but certainly, you know, how does that look in the future? Because you’re talking about basic stuff, memory, presence. I mean, anything that anyone, I like to make it extremely practical. Like, I read all the white papers, it’s ivory tower research, but for me really it comes down to what can people do today, right? And the reason why I’m so excited, you know, passionate about this is because when people see me do these things, they know I read a book a day and can memorize, you know, all these people’s names and do all this stuff, I always tell people after I do these demos that I don’t do this to impress you, I do it to express to you what’s really possible.

27:28 Because the truth is every single person watching this could do that and a lot more, and most people are automatically like, there’s no way. But here’s the thing, you just weren’t taught. You weren’t taught, if anything we were taught a lie, a lie that somehow our intelligence, our potential, something like our memory is somehow fixed, like our shoe size. And it’s absolutely not true. We’ve discovered more about the human brain in the past 10 years than the previous thousand years, and what we found is we’re grossly underestimating our own capabilities.

27:58 And I know this because I grew up, a lot of people don’t know this, I grew up with a brain injury. You know, at the age of five I had a very bad accident. A brain, a traumatic brain injury, and so I was in I was in a kindergarten, I was five years old, and long story quick, if you will. Where was this, what city? This is in Westchester, New York, a suburb of New York City, just north, and home of the X-Men, by the way.

28:27 And so, but at the age of five, my superheroes back then were like firefighters. Like, I always saw them as wonder, and I love fire trucks. It was like, we didn’t grow up with a lot. I, my parents immigrated to the United States from China. We lived in the back of a laundromat, I mean, you know, that typical story.

28:46 But I love fire engines, and so at the age of five, one time there was like all this commotion outside and none of the kids at five years old could see outside the window, so we all grabbed our chairs and put it by the window and stand on so we can stay outside. And the challenge is there’s this like iron grate, one of those old, it’s always very old-school radiators, you know, heat devices. And I’m just balancing myself on this chair looking at the fire engines and I’m just in this wonder seeing all the firefighters and such, and at that moment another child pulled the chair out from underneath me, just wanting to use the chair, right?

29:23 And I would go head first right into the radiator. Wow. And, you know, I was bleeding all kinds of things. My parents said I was never the same after that, and where it showed up in school though, it was learning challenges. I was put in special classes.

29:38 I, teachers would repeat themselves three or four or five times, and then eventually I would game it and say I understand, but I didn’t. I was faking it. I didn’t really understand. I had very bad focus, I had a very poor memory. It actually took me, Brian, four years longer just to learn how to read, which is very difficult.

29:57 You know, you would be sitting there with remember you get in those circles when you first learn how to read and you pass around that book? Yeah, and your teacher would have you read out loud. Pressure. Yeah, and every time that book got closer and closer. Actually, you talk about pressure, I feel like that’s where the fear of public speaking comes from.

30:12 I really think it’s learned. I think that most fears we have, they say the two fears that we’re born with only naturally is if you’re falling and fear of loud noises, but everything else is learned. And I think public speaking is not a rational fear. It’s not like, you know, our amygdala is firing off like there’s a saber-tooth tiger, but it’s, you know, it’s not real, right? But I think it was taught to us maybe when we were passing around that book, because who’s good at reading when you’re first learning how to read and all your friends are looking at you and you want to do well?

30:41 And, but for me it’s when the book got closer, I just get more and more nervous, and when it got handed to me, I mean, even just thinking about it makes me like, oh, like I kind of get really nervous. I’m holding it in, I just look at it, I don’t know how much time goes by, and I just pass it on because I can’t. The words didn’t mean anything. Eventually I learned how to read by teaching myself how to read by reading comic books. That’s why I love superheroes so much.

31:07 I would stay up late at night with the flashlight underneath the covers, right? And it’s so important for a lot of young men. You know, I just had Daryl McDaniels from Run-DMC. Superheroes created his whole universe, it created the Run-DMC character. He was, he felt empowered by these super powers.

31:24 There’s something about the, when I’m looking at the comic books, because the words didn’t mean anything, but the story, you know, the illustrations, these themes that we talk about continually, like hope. Yeah, and offering real help, discovering your superpower. And when I talk about modern day superheroes, I think the world needs modern day superheroes that have powers, right, but not leaping over tall buildings and shooting lasers out of your eyes. I mean, our unique talents, our unique strengths, our unique abilities, if you will, and discovering them and then developing them, because that’s the path.

31:56 I know anyone who’s watching this right now knows what I’m saying, because they wouldn’t be watching, they would be attracted to these kind of themes if they, you know, about growth and grit and such and success. But having just having a superpower doesn’t make us a superhero, not alone. You have to use that superpower to serve, right? You need to use it to make the world a better place, if you will. And I think that’s what the modern day superheroes are doing right now.

32:22 And it’s tough, right, with digital, like, super villains, because we have superheroes and we have super villains, like, and I think the three big super villains, I was thinking about this the other day, they’re all, other generations didn’t have it like this because it’s driven by technology. I would say number one, there’s digital overload. So when you see me working with a company that’s just, you know, they’re making huge impact, they’re a Fortune 50 company or, you know, a big entrepreneur, and looking to scale to millions or billions, you know, everyone, every one of us are suffering from digital overload.

32:56 Too much information, too little time, like you’re taking a sip of water out of a fire hose, right? You need to be current, and so that’s why I teach people how to learn faster and read faster. The second digital supervillain, I think, is digital distraction, which we were talking about before, and I think it’s driven by our smart devices. And one of the things that I like to tell people, and they like, they don’t want to hear it, but in terms of high performers, when people do it they get the results across the board, is not touching your phone the first hour of the day.

33:28 And even when I say that, if you were like, Jim, I was kind of loving what you’re saying up to this point, but you lost me here, because that’s what we do. But we do it not out of need all the time, we do it out of habit. And I have our podcast, is all about brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster, achieve more. Then one of the most popular episodes, an episode I did about changing your habits, how do you, how do you create new habits and how do you break bad limiting habits, and the research I pulled from is from Dr. BJ Fogg out of Stanford University, and he’s like the number one habits guy out there, and he has a formula called B equals M A P.

34:06 So behavior, which is a habit, equals motivation, ability, and then a prompt, prompt meaning a reminder, if you will. And so I was talking about how to create new habits based on that formula, and one of the how, and actually one of his students over at Stanford, you love this, co-founded Instagram. Now think about habits and addiction. The average person, I read, opens up Instagram 150 times a day. Come on.

34:35 150 times. So if you’re not doing that much, because I certainly I’m not, somebody else is doing it double, a lot more, which is really, really scary. But that’s by design, like you said, companies, you know, from product design, they’re paying, they’re putting fortunes in to understand why we do what we do and variable reward, laptops, all that stuff. Exactly. And so if you’re picking up the phone the first thing in the morning, the challenge is a number of reasons.

34:58 This is a challenge. First of all, there are these four primary brainwave states. Beta is what you and I are in right now, we’re awake. Delta is when you’re fast asleep. In between those two states, theta and alpha are extremely important brainwave states for learning.

35:14 So theta is the state right in and out of sleep. Theta is the state that we call creativity, when you are your most creative, or you’re usually, it’s coming because you’re in this theta state, and you know this when you’re in and out of sleep or you’re close to, like, you’re so deep, your mind goes and you come up with ideas. You know what put you in a theta state? Are showers. Oh really?

35:35 You ever notice, like, when you’re in the shower you come up with some of your best ideas and your brain kind of drifts? It does, because you’re in that brainwave state. So a big part of my work is taking the invisible and making it visible. Like, I always, when I do these demonstrations, I always tell people that I do it because I want you to see that there’s a method behind the magic, that when somebody does something that’s extraordinary in athletics, in education, in technology, with the human body, there’s always a trail, you know, because genius leaves clues.

36:05 And a lot of times these geniuses, and I say genius not like IQ, I mean people who excel in their area of expertise, they don’t know how they’re doing it because they’re unconscious about it, right? Because they’ve been doing it, second nature to them since for so long, and so what I like to do is deconstruct that and then show people how to learn it more quickly. But when you’re in this theta state, showers put you in that theta state, that’s why I took five showers, Brian, this morning just to prepare for this conversation.

36:32 Above theta though is the state called alpha, right, right below beta, where you’re most aware and awake. Alpha is a state of learning, accelerated learning. It’s a state of relaxed awareness. This is a state we go into when we meditate because your critical mind is set aside and you just absorb information unconsciously. You know what puts you into an alpha state?

36:56 Television. You ever notice that if somebody is watching the game or somebody’s watching their favorite TV show and you’re trying to have a conversation with them, and they literally are in trance, they don’t hear you because of television programming, which might be an interesting word, you know, programming and putting people into a trance, but that’s the alpha state. That’s where information is just going inside your mind. So we train people how to learn languages faster, learn facts better by putting them into an alpha state, a relaxed state of awareness, and we could do that by design.

37:24 And people don’t realize this, and this is the whole thing, I really think this should have been taught back in school, because school was a great place to learn what to learn: math, history, science, Spanish, important subjects, on what to learn. But how many classes were on how to learn? Does that even exist these days? No. That’s what I’m saying, like, how many classes were on how to think critically, how to make good decisions, how to solve problems, how to focus and concentrate, how to read, how to read faster, how to remember more, right?

37:52 Even, they teach you three hours in school, reading, writing, arithmetic, but what about remembering? What about recall? What about retention? Right, Socrates says there is no learning without remembering, and that’s really the basis of it all. But I would say that knowing you’re in this alpha theta state first thing in the morning, you’re very suggestible, right?

38:14 And if the first thing you’re picking up is your phone, then that really is what, rewiring our brain for two things, the dangers. That’s going to really decrease your level of productivity and performance. Number one, it’s training you to be distracted, and we talked about that, every like, share, comment, everything is just making you just pay attention to everything else and rewiring your brain, so when you’re having a conversation with somebody you can’t even focus, because you’ve trained your brain to do otherwise.

38:38 That’s why mindfulness is so important, you know, whether it’s meditation or something else, because it’s not that I don’t meditate every single day just to be at peace and be in the zen state, I do, it’s because it’s a mental exercise. It improves my cognitive capabilities, meaning that when my mind goes somewhere else, that’s the opportunity, because I pull it back with my breath or visualization. I built that muscle, because here’s really the basis of my work, is really about taking nouns and turning them into verbs.

39:09 So what do I mean by that? It’s like so many people, they wake up and say, oh, I hope I have energy today, or I have motivation today, things that they have, right? I have creativity so I can write today or make videos, or I have memory, or I have focus and concentration. Those aren’t things you have, those are things you do. And so you don’t have love, you do loving things.

39:30 You don’t have energy, you do things that give you energy. Just like that, that applies, same thing with learning. You don’t have focus, there’s a process for doing focus. You don’t have a memory, there’s steps to improve your memory or to remember things better. There’s not, creativity is not something you have, there’s actually a process for creativity, so you should never suffer from writer’s block or anything else like that, because that’s where, if you’re, if you don’t understand how you work, when I was talking about self-awareness and understanding yourself, you know, I think if somebody wants to improve their esteem, the self-esteem overnight, just study, study your brain.

40:06 Like, you’ll get a boost of confidence and pride, like, instantly, because it is the most incredible, I don’t even know what to call it, a device, a supercomputer, what in the whole universe. You know, it’s not just about going out to Mars and all these other places, I’m going to, I want to go in here, because this controls what, everything, our careers, our income, our health, our relationships, you know, whether or not you get, you know, complete. Yeah, we were talking about this before our conversation here, what, you know, when you’re training for Ironman and triathlons and everything else, is how much of it is mental?

40:37 Like, we know, like, everyone knows what to do, but do they do what they know? Because common sense is not common practice, and it’s a myth that knowledge is power. No, knowledge is, it has the potential to be power. It only becomes power when we use it, when we apply it. Like, people think they should get points for buying books and sitting on the shelf, and it just sits there and becomes like shelf help, not self-help, right?

40:59 Or somebody will go and learn something or listen to a podcast like this or a show, or they’ll go to a conference, they’ll pay all this money, but they don’t do anything with what they learn, and part of it also is because they forget it. You know, everyone knows there’s a learning curve, but there’s also a forgetting curve. Did you know, like, the forgetting curve says that if you learn something once, within 48 hours, 80 percent of it is gone. 80. So you listen to a show, you watch something, you, on YouTube, you go to a conference, you read a book, within two days the majority of it is gone because nobody trains us how to have that.

41:32 That’s why memory is so important, you know. And so the first thing, don’t touch your phone because it’s training you to be distracted. The second thing is training you for, which is almost worse, I don’t know what’s worse, you know, being punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, I don’t know, but the second thing that’s worse is it’s training you, rewiring your brain to be reactive. Reactive meaning that you’re in this relaxed state of awareness when you first wake up, you pick up your phone, you get one text that, with bad news, or one voicemail or one email, and you know this, we’ve all, happened to us, you’re in a bad mood for the rest of your day because you’re so impressionable, you’re in that hypnotic state, and it affects you, and you can never have a quality life, you know, with that, you know, and be the best version of ourselves, be elite mental performer, high performer, when you’re responding and reacting to everybody else.

42:18 You know, my friend Brendon Burchard says an inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people’s agenda for your life. And how can you have vision for your life? Like for me, the night before, like, I have, I did a whole episode on my morning routine, like 10 things I do every morning to jump start my brain, and I also have an evening one hour routine to get into sleep to maximize my sleep. Sleep is so very important to be able to do.

42:43 But one of the processes I do, besides, you know, blackout curtains and cold and temperatures and breath and stuff, meditation, is I don’t touch a screen, right? Because it creates blue light, and most people should know this, every, you know, the screen on your laptop, your phone, everything else emits this blue light, which inhibits the melatonin production, which helps you to relax and go to sleep. So no screens. But the other thing I do is I write down the three things I want to accomplish the next day personally and the other three are professionally.

43:11 So now when I wake up I have a vision for my life. Like, I’ll, this is a win today if I just get these three things done personally and three things professionally. And when it comes to my phone, I don’t touch my phone until I get at least one thing done, and that’s my, that’s my test. You know, if I could just do that, and it’s not always perfect, you know, but it’s about progress, right? Because practice makes progress, right?

43:33 And there’s never going to be a perfect, and I think people need to find what works for them, but I would say again to step out is not, don’t trust yourself as the expert instead of somebody else, and test it. You know, maybe for one week keep your phone outside your bedroom for just one week and don’t touch it for the first hour a day, and spend the first hour, day, being a thermostat, not a thermometer. Like, I really do believe a lot of your gas temperature, exactly right, because a thermometer, what’s a function?

44:00 It reacts to the environment, and that’s a kind of crappy way to, like, live. Not that we don’t, we do react environment, we react to the weather, right, we react to how clients treat us, we react, but to the degree we’re happy is that we have the locus, that have the location of control inside. Right, all the studies show that the happiest people are the ones that feel like they have the control over their happiness and not put it to somebody else, a person or a place or something, on the economy or politics or anything, right?

44:28 So a thermometer reacts the environment, but a thermostat is different. What does that function? It sets the environment, it sets a goal, it sets the temperature, and then the environment raises to it. And so I feel like anyone who’s attracted to your work or to mine, they’re thermostats, because they have a growth mindset, because if they thought things were fixed, they wouldn’t watch something like this, because what’s the point? It’s just all predestined and it’s set and we can’t grow.

44:53 This nouns into verbs thing is interesting. So again, a lot of people say, I’m not an artist, I’m not creative. Yeah, first of all, it’s not the best self-talk, but you’re kind of empowering people by turning these things from nouns into verbs, as in you can design the energy, the creativity every morning, is what you’re saying. I’m saying genius has learned. I’m saying really straight that I believe some people have natural talents, but genius can be learned.

45:19 And by taking something as a noun and turning into a verb, what it does is it puts the responsibility on us, and so many people avoid responsibility because they don’t want an extra burden. But for me, recently I got to introduce two of my superheroes together. They wanted to meet each other, so I took them to dinner. It was Richard Branson and Stan Lee. Now Stan Lee is like the co-creator of X-Men and Avengers, right, and Spider-Man.

45:49 And we were in the car and I posted this wild photo on Instagram. He has this large Spider-Man tie and I was like, I’m prompted. I was like, Stan, you’ve created all these amazing heroes, all my favorite heroes, who’s your favorite? He looks at me, he’s like, Jim, it’s Iron Man, who happens to be Elon Musk’s, you know, favorite, him and Doctor Strange. And I was like, he’s like, Jim, who’s your favorite superhero?

46:12 Because Stan had the Spider-Man tie. I was like, Spider-Man. And he’s, without a pause, he goes, Jim, with great power comes great responsibility. Right, when we all know that, right? We got, finished the phrase because it’s in our DNA.

46:24 It’s like the hero’s journey, right, Joseph Campbell’s work, going from struggle to service and such. And I was like, I have learning challenges, right, that I’m still like dyslexia and I reverse everything in my mind sometimes, and so what I heard was different. I was like, Stan, you’re right, with great power comes great responsibility, and the opposite is also true, with great responsibility comes great power. That when we take responsibility for something, we have great power to make things better.

46:53 And most people, they don’t want to take responsibility because of that extra weight. But I’m saying that responsibility will give you the power and the freedom to. And just like when you’ve heard people say, you know, discipline equals freedom, right? When we do get ourselves to do the hard things, life is easy, right? When we do the things that we know we should do, but when we just do the easy things and we put things off, that difficult conversation, firing that person, or the taxes or whatever, when we just do the easy things, life is hard.

47:21 Yeah, you know, I’ve had Jocko Willink in here, and yes, discipline equals freedom is his concept. And you’re right, I mean, most, we’re kind of conditioned most of our life to not take responsibility and we’re surrounded by this kind of victim mode and pointing fingers. But again, if you could set your thermostat in the morning and take responsibility for your own actions, they should reverse that line in the next Spider-Man. I hope they say that. Your version is more powerful.

47:45 Yeah, if you really think about it, super deep. I literally, I was with, last week, with Tom Holland who plays Spider-Man, and we’re having this exact conversation. And that’s why I put, when I do stuff on social media, like you mentioned, on Twitter, Instagram, I always post a photo with, but then I also, that lesson, you know, I call them Kwikenings, like a quick tip that just, like, you get it, you get one idea and it could help you. And that’s what I want to make my message to people, is that learning can be quick and it could also be fun.

48:10 It’s not like traditional education, because if somebody is stressed right now with too much to learn, too little time, and you can’t keep up, it really isn’t your fault. It’s because we all grew up with the 20th century education that prepared us for a 20th century world, and at the turn of the century, what was it? Those were working factories and farms and following basic instruction. But the world has changed so much. You mentioned Elon, like, in, you know, this world that he’s helping co-create is a world of autonomous electric cars and spaceships that are going to Mars, but our vehicle of choice when it comes to educational learning, it’s like a horse and buggy, you know, it hasn’t changed.

48:45 It’s like a factory, one size fits all, sit quietly by yourself, don’t talk to your neighbor. And it has evolved some, but not as much, as fast as the world has evolved. So a lot of people are not prepared. They say if Rip Van Winkle, you know, the person who’s slept for decades, if he woke up today, the only thing he would recognize in the world are schools. You know, and this is not a slight against teachers.

49:08 Like, my mother became a schoolteacher, special education teacher, because she didn’t know how to help me, you know, as a child. I have huge respect for teachers. I just came, you know, I’m here in Europe doing trainings for a lot of the countries here, their education system and their teach, it’s so important, you know, in schools to foster this, and teachers are under huge amount of pressures because kids are growing up on their digital devices and joysticks and their retention is everywhere, you know.

49:33 So a lot of what they’re doing in these classes is just trying to control, like, their behavior because it’s so hard. How do you get their attention in a world where it’s like, you know, they say we have less attention span than a goldfish, you know, a goldfish is nine seconds and human beings are eight seconds, and I don’t know if I buy in into that, but attention, focus, they’re all muscles, so we can, there’s a process for it, and the more we use that process, the stronger it gets, like meditation, mindfulness. Every time you pull your attention back to your breath or to your body, you build that focus muscle, and it shows up when you need to remember someone’s name, like, you know, like a President Clinton, he’s focused, but he built that muscle.

50:08 And you know, I feel like that people, because you can’t see these muscles, but you can see these muscles, people put more into their body than they do in their mental muscles. And but really I’m talking about not just being mentally intelligent. Yes, I could help people, you know, remember foreign language and facts and words and expertise and all this stuff, but also it’s not just mental intelligence, it’s mental fitness. Most people just have flabby mental muscles, but just think, like, physically you want to be stronger, you want more flexibility, you want energy, you want agility, but don’t you want those same things for your mental muscles?

50:42 You want mental strength, mental agility, you want mental energy and flexibility, you know, without the rigidity and, but nobody teaches us how to be able to exercise that. How do you teach that, because that’s different than memory, or is it linked? It is, everything is constructed, it’s all integrated. So you know, when I, we have these online programs where we have students in like 180 countries, so we have a lot of data, right? You know, a 30 day speed reading program, a 30-day focus program, a 30-day memory enhancement program, just 10, 15 minutes a day.

51:12 People, here’s the thing, when it comes to memory for example, there is no such thing as a good or bad memory. And you’re like, I’m pretty sure senior moments are coming too early for me, Jim. No, there’s no such thing as a good or bad memory, there’s a trained memory and an untrained memory. I do this, I just did this training at in the United States, there’s like one place where they’re doing like all the advanced Alzheimer’s dementia research, right, it’s in the Cleveland Clinic for Brain Health.

51:37 So you do all the research there and that’s like the place to go for caregiving. So if you have a family member that’s suffering, and this is a personal topic for me because at, when I was a child, my grandmother passed away of Alzheimer’s. And you know, when I was a child walking into her room because she was living with us, it was, she didn’t, she called me by the wrong name or didn’t recognize me, right, or just said something that she just told me 30 seconds, and I’m an impressionable, like, year old, right?

52:03 And so these kind of things really affects you at that age. You know, at the age of nine, one of my teachers pointed to me and said that’s the boy with a broken brain, talking to another adult. You know, and as you know, adults, we have to be very careful when we talk to children because our external words become their internal words, and that self-talk that you were just saying, you know, about, oh, I’m not smart enough or I’m not good enough or I have a horrible memory.

52:29 You’re right, you have to pay attention to that because here’s the thing, people don’t realize it, every single conversation you have, including the one you have with yourself, is rewiring your brain, because thoughts are things, literally. This conversation that everyone’s listening to, your brain will never be the same because of it, because hundreds of millions of neurons are firing off right now and rewiring based on these new thoughts, because Oliver Wendell Holmes said a man once, a man, a night, one years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes said, an idea once, a man is, a mind is stretched by a new idea, it never regains its original dimensions. Right, and so everything’s always shifting, and if you knew how powerful your mind was, you would never have those kind of, people would never have those kind of thoughts, because what I always tell people is your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk.

53:17 You know, I like to be very active, right, because what I do is so cognitive and I was where I was going to run a marathon. It was the Marine Corps Marathon, where it was really wild in DC, people are like, you see Marines with like 50 pound packs and everything and they’re running in full gear, and I wanted to understand the psychology of running, in like the physical, with the name like Kwik, I had to be a runner growing up in school, which is a lot of pressure when your name says Kwik, right, on your shirt. Be careful.

53:45 When I’m driving, because you don’t want to be pulled over for speeding, because the worst name to have on your driver’s license is the name Kwik. Does that happen? Yeah, because you’re not going to talk your way out of that speeding ticket. And I get to do my mission, which is teaching people to learn quickly, read quickly, remember quickly, focus quickly, think quickly. But I was reading this book on the psychology of it, and one of the chapters said this, verbatim, word for word, because I’m a memory expert, it said your brain is like a super computer and your self talk is the program it will run.

54:16 So if you tell yourself you’re not good at remembering names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your super computer not to. And your mind is always listening, and here’s the thing, when you say I’m forgetful, I’m not smart enough, or whatever, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. Stop that self-dialogue. Yeah, and reverse it. You do, but even something simple as this dialogue, Dr. Daniel Amen, the famous brain doctor in America, he’s done over ten thousand, a hundred thousand brain scans, and he calls them killing ANTs.

54:50 You got to kill ANTs, automatic negative thoughts. Because so many, when we’re talking about habits and routines of high achievers, yes, part of it is, you know, they wake up, they do, they do ice baths, you know, they do their whatever their ex, they read every day and they journal, like gratitude, all that stuff, but part of it is not just habits of behavior, and they’re also habits of thought, you know, and so many of our thoughts are habitual. I was just with Deepak Chopra, we’re having this conversation about learning styles and Ayurvedic body types and everything, and he said, Jim, the average person has 60,000 thoughts a day.

55:23 You know, and I’m like, I think you’re giving a lot of people a lot of credit, that’s a lot of thoughts. He’s like, you know the problem is 95 percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts they had yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, and then you wonder why our lives are like pretty much the same every single day when we’re not making those big advances. You know, one of my favorite books of recent is Zero to One. Right, you know, exactly, so it’s all about, by Peter Thiel, and he says, you know, the goal is not going from two to three or three to four or four to five, that’s incremental growth, right, that’s taking something that’s already there, just additive, but going from zero where there’s nothing to one where there’s something brand new.

56:05 And in order to get that, really comes down the power of our thinking. But what’s thinking? Thinking is nothing but, you know, this process of asking questions and then answering them. You’re a big fan of asking questions? Very big, because I think questions are the answer in a way, meaning that ask and you shall receive, right?

56:24 That you have part of your brain called the reticular activating system that controls your focus. Like, I remember years ago my sister was sending me all these photographs and emails of a picture of a pug dog, and I’m like, why is she sending me all these annoying, like, emails and messages? And I realized that her birthday was coming up, so what was she planting in my mind, literally planting my mind, was, you know, she wanted this dog. And it’s so crazy, Brian, I just started seeing pug dogs everywhere.

56:53 You know, I would be at the grocery store, at the health food store, and I’d be cashing out and somebody be carrying a pug dog. I’d be jogging in my neighborhood and somebody was walking six pug dogs. Now my question for everybody is this is, where were those pug dogs before? They were always there, they didn’t just show up all of a sudden, but I never paid attention to it, because you know this, with, you know, past guests, that there could be a billion stimuli that you could focus on any given moment, literally a billion things that are going on, you know, like the blood flowing through your right ear or the car traffic outside, of the sound of the fan right there, are a billion different things, but you can’t pay attention to all that because you would go crazy, right?

57:35 You would. Primarily, your brain is a deletion device, it tries to keep information out, right, because it’s not as relevant, you know. So, but what do you pay attention to? What’s the five to nine bits of information? There’s a study by George Miller saying the goal is seven plus or minus two.

57:53 The human brain, seven minus two is five, seven plus two is nine, that we could hold, like, a telephone number, that says the extent of it. And so what do we pay attention to? So that those pug dogs weren’t in my five to nine bits of information, but she started planting that, that I was like, why is she sending me this? Why is, you know, what she want? What kind, what color pug does she want?

58:12 Then I started seeing the pugs all over because it activated that part of my brain called the RAS, reticular activating system. So questions, how does that relate to anything? Well, when a lot of people, have you ever read a page in a book, got to the end and just forgot what you just read? Yeah, a lot. I’m almost, I’d say I’m a slow reader, but I’m not going to say that to myself.

58:30 But yeah, yeah, I think it takes me a while to digest books sometimes, or yeah. And when people say that, a simple hack to get over automatic negative thoughts is just to add a word like yet at the end. You know, I’m not a fast reader yet, I don’t have a great memory yet, because those little things make a big difference. I did a whole episode on changing vocabulary, where something like somebody says, oh man, I got to pick up the kids, I got to work out today, I got to eat right, you know, I got to, got to, got to.

58:58 Take the word got, you know, G-O-T, change that O into an E, notice the feeling, the different change. Well, I get to pick up my kids, I get to work out today. How many people would love to work out today, you know, that aren’t able to work out? I know, I get to do this, I get to talk to clients today, you know. And I did a whole Thanksgiving episode on how gratitude rewires your brain.

59:17 It literally rewires your brain because success breeds success, right, and what you start focusing on, you start, you start doing the behaviors around those things. And here’s why gratitude’s so important, because it literally rewires your brain, because what you appreciate appreciates, what you sit down and you’re grateful for grows. Right, and I think that’s as important and peaceful because your brain is now accustomed to looking for more. It does, and then also you get your novelty, like it’s giving you novelty and it’s giving you your dopamine in a way that’s productive for you, that gives you peace of mind or positivity as opposed to distraction.

59:53 Okay, right. So so many people are on autopilot and they’re mindless, they’re having their 60,000 thoughts a day, and they’re habitual. They say that upwards of 40 percent of our day is spent just unconscious, just doing things out of habit, right? But when do we get those habits? Maybe when we’re four, five, six years old and they were imprinted on us, and when’s the last time we stepped out of ourselves consciously and just said, what’s serving us here, you know, what here has moved me forward towards my vision, my goal, my best self, whatever it is that’s important to you, and what’s holding me back?

1:00:24 You know, and I talk about this, if people are struggling with this level of behavior, everyone’s always trying to use willpower or motivation or get some kind of leverage off of a behavior, saying they want a behavior, let’s say they want to stop smoking or they want to exercise 30 minutes a day or read. I think reading isn’t so important, you know, I think it’s, I did an Insta story with Will Smith the other day and I was like, you know, Will, what do you do every day to keep your mind strong? He’s like, Jim, two things: I run and I read every single day.

1:00:53 I do something physical and I do something mental. But the reading is so important, and running, I mean, that’s a given. Anything that’s physical, anything that’s good for your heart can be good for your head. More blood flow, more oxygen. As your body moves, your brain grooves.

1:01:06 Mental acuity goes up, focus goes up, memory goes up. Even when you’re at the gym and you’re doing something rhythmic like elliptical and you’re listening to this show, you’re going to learn it better, right? Because you create a brain derived neurotrophic factors actually when you move. That helps, it’s kind of like the fertilizer that helps brain cells grow. So movement is very, very key, and that’s, you know, you’re incredibly active, you know, we’re talking about Brazilian jiu jitsu and doing all these extreme sports, but I think that’s life, because when we don’t move we’re dead, literally, right?

1:01:35 But most people, they say sitting is the new smoking, you know, people are sitting down for eight, nine hours a day in front of a computer, and that’s not good. You know, I always tell people to take a break every 30 days. They call it the Pomodoro technique. Pomodoro is like every 25, 30 minutes your attention span just drops, so take a five minute break, set your phone to go off every 25, 30 minutes, and then use a five minute brain break. And what do you do?

1:01:56 Three things you do. Deep diaphragmatic breathing, because most people, you know, your breath is so important, but when people study and they’re on their smart devices, even when there are smart devices, you could tell them, like, It’s so crazy because I just saw this right outside. I was going by one of the bus stops and people are always on their phones, right, but their posture is like they’re slumped over like this. And if you were to take a snapshot of them, like a silhouette, take the phone out of their hand, they would look depressed, right?

1:02:21 Like they literally, like this, and they look, they would look sad. And your physiology affects your psychology, right? But we’re sitting all the time. But you get up, you deep breathing, because lower one-third of your lungs, when people are reading they get tired often, it’s because their posture, because the lower 1/3 of your lungs absorbs two-thirds of the oxygen. So you wonder why you, you know, you want, you yawn and everything else, because you need that oxygen.

1:02:42 Number two, you hydrate, because your brain, your body, which your brain is your part of your body, is over 70 percent water. But a lot of people, you know, if you want to realize when you sleep you lose, you can lose up to of a pound of water through respiration and perspiration, but you have to hydrate. Most people aren’t getting their hydration. And then the third thing you do is you move. Okay, you know these brain, I teach people, like, brain movement exercises that that literally activate different parts of the brain, consolidate their left and right brain and down and moving things.

1:03:12 Yeah, it’s really the best exercises. Now the ones that put your mind into your muscle, like martial arts, like ballroom dancing, amazing for your mind. Okay, great mental exercises. The exercise that I teach people are really cross laterals, because we know through science that one half of your brain controls the opposite side of your body, right? God forbid, you know, somebody’s had a stroke or head trauma on the left side of their brain, if there’s paralysis it’ll manifest on their opposite side, right?

1:03:41 Yeah, my grandpa had that. Yeah, I think the face is what was wired same side and then it switches. It is, right below the neck. Yes, I think his eye was one side and then his left leg. Right, right, and right below the neck is where, so what happens is when you do exercises that, for example, let’s say you do something like an infinity sign like this and you just focus on here, when you cross, when part of your body crosses the other side, then you’re creating more connections between your left and right brain here.

1:04:07 So you have the left brain, which is said to be more logical, words, sounds, right? You agree with that? So there’s new science saying it’s a little bit different now, so this is it’s way more advanced than that, but some people say the left brain is logical and the right side is creative. Now new research is coming out and saying that it’s not so localized as much, and so there’s all kinds of research depending on what you buy and buy into, but the idea here, metaphorically, if your right side is more creative and such, the goal here is you have this, it’s split by this corpus callosum, and then by doing these exercises it’s like a bridging station.

1:04:43 It’s why women have a lot of communication between left and right brain, and that’s why they say women tend to be more intuitive, because they can see, you know, more holes and stuff that maybe men don’t see as much. And so you do exercises, so any kind of exercises, so for example putting your right elbow to your left knee while you’re standing and then vice versa, you’re doing cross laterals. There’s something called super brain yoga, where you’re massaging your opposite earlobe with your fingers like this, like this, and then you take a squat down and then you exhale coming up.

1:05:14 That’s been shown to boost focus and also memory, memory abilities also as well. But the idea here is as your body moves, your brain grooves, because the primary reason we have a brain is to control our movement. That is the number one reason we have a brain. And so it’s not just a brain body connection, there’s a body brain connection, if you will. And again, the brain is part of your body, right, you know, but we’re not our brain and we’re not our body, right?

1:05:40 We have this consciousness that’s there, and then we get into, like, what’s mind, and, you know, this kind of thing. Yeah, it’s an interesting mix. Yes. What, for people out there that are saying, how can I actually realize the power of my brain? You know, I understand to some people, like, it’s this incredible thing if you could only see it and you would be shocked at all the possibilities, because I think a lot of people that have kind of gone maybe a little tired of life or a little bit, like, this is all degree gooer every day, how could you show them right away that, wow, I have this incredible device in here and then it can also be used to manufacture creativity and energy?

1:06:16 Oh, I can show them right, right now. When I was talking about the Cleveland Clinic, you know, they do the caregiving and they do research, I came in and I did trainings for their doctors on prevention, like what’s the lifestyle. They’ve determined there that one third of your memory, for example, is predetermined by genetics and biology, okay, but that means two-thirds is in our control. And so what falls within those two-thirds, there are ten things that move the needle, right?

1:06:42 I’m always looking for a focal point. Like recently, a couple days ago, I was in Estonia and I was in this big power plant, like where I was, where I was speaking, right, and it reminded me of this story. And I did, I just did a podcast on this, on how to work smart first, working hard, because most people tell you work smart, you know, don’t work hard, but how do you actually do that? What does that mean, right? And so I like to always make things fun and just practical, and the story goes that there’s a power plant that one day it just stops and, like, dead silent and every, all the machinery, everything stops working, and the workers are freaking out, the operations manual managers like doesn’t know what to do, and minutes and then hours go by and they’re losing tens of thousands of dollars and, you know, like opportunity, client, whatever, all this stuff, it’s gonna be a really bad thing, right?

1:07:30 And then so they call, he calls the local technician. She’s like, you’re in luck, I’m in the area, a local technician expert comes in, shows up, he does a quick audit around the floor because there’s lots of beams and electrical boxes and wires everywhere, right? He goes to one specific beam or pillar, if you will, he goes to one electrical box and he puts an X on it, and then he opens it up and inside there are a bunch of bolts and wires and screws. He goes to one specific screw in that box, he turns it maybe a centimeter, right, just a little bit to the right, you know, clockwise, and then boom, the entire power plant turns back on, and now the operation manager is like flipping out saying, thank you so much, you saved us, you saved the day.

1:08:12 He’s like, how much do I owe you? He said ten thousand dollars. He was like, what? You were here five, ten minutes, all you did was turn a screw, anyone could have done that. He was like, give me, give me, give me an itemized bill, right?

1:08:24 And he’s like, I don’t even have to wait to send it to your email to you, I’ll give it to you right now. He reaches into his pocket, takes out a notepad, he writes it down, something down, he tears it, gives it to him. The man looks at it and says, yep, hey, rice, gives him a check right there. And then you look at what he gave him, that on the invoice it said, this, turning screw, one dollar, knowing what screw to turn, 9,999, right? And what’s the point here?

1:08:49 Is that the point is, do you have a screw loose? No, that’s not the point. The point is, first of all, two things. In today’s economy we’re paid for specialized knowledge, right, that knowledge is not only power, it’s profit, right? There’s this divide between those who know and those who don’t know.

1:09:04 That’s why learning how to learn is so important, that if knowledge is power, learning is your super power. It’s your clear advantage. It’s not a nice to have, it’s a must-have, otherwise you’re just falling behind. But besides that, the second thing I take away from it is there’s a focal point or force multiplier in every area of our life, and where you decide to put that X in your relationship, when you’re analyzing, doing audit about what makes a difference, what moves the needle, what turns on your power in a relationship, or what turns it on in your career, what turns it on in marketing, or what turns it on your health and fitness and personal performance, there are X’s, and where you decide to put that X and what screw you decide to turn makes all the difference.

1:09:44 You know, and so this is a force multiplier effect, this is, this could be something where you know you’re thinking about the 80/20 rule, like Pareto’s principle, like what 20 percent gives you 80 percent of rewards. It’s the similar idea, like the lead domino, like what early domino can you hit that hits a lot of other dominoes. So when I said I had three things I do personally, three things professionally, usually what they do is everyone has a to-do list of hundreds of things.

1:10:07 What I’m looking for is the one or two or three things that could actually take away a lot of those things on that list. Just like with, when we’re talking about Peter Thiel, he also, you know, going from zero to one, he has the power of questions, going back to that loop, is that, you know, he has this question saying, what if you had to reach your 10-year goal but you only had six months to do it, right? You can’t do things incrementally, you can’t do things traditionally, right?

1:10:30 There’s no way, you literally have to think differently, out of the proverbial, like, box, if you will. So that’s why I think questions are so important, and most people, they’re not asking the right questions. Like, I have a, I have a friend that I grew up with and I recently went through this exercise. We have these questions, some questions we ask more than others, that just makes sense, right? Questions are our thinking, and we’re always thinking, but there’s some questions habitually we go to all the time.

1:10:54 Her question, this dominant one is, we did this exercise and found out, it’s how do I get people to like me? Okay, okay. Now, Brian, you’ve never met this woman, you know how old she is, you know, you don’t know her ethnicity, you don’t know her job or career, you know anything about her, but you do, if her dominant question that she asks herself hundreds of times a day is how do I get this person to like me, tell me about her personality. What would you think it, what do we, what do you, how do you describe her?

1:11:19 Well, she’s probably reactive on what other people do. Yeah, very. What else, what else would you say about her? Probably oliver rewards systems or in her life, relationships or business are designed around that liking factor. So she’s probably more the thermometer, not the thermostat.

1:11:37 Yeah, and she people pleases all the time, she’s like a martyr, she’s always there for people, you know, but she’s never consistent about who she is because she’s a chameleon depending on who she’s with. Now you could say all these things about her and you never met her, but you know one question she asks herself, you know, and that, because that question, when I said questions are the answer, you know, it could also be the problem, because that question leads to a behavior. It’s not good or bad, it’s just, does this, is something I want or not.

1:12:03 And so what are the questions you ask yourself, other people are asking themselves, even for that, what’s the, what are the primary dominant questions your spouse asks or your children are asking or your fans or your, you know, your workers, you know, the people you work with, because that would describe a lot of their behavior and it would also describe a lot of the results that they’re getting in their life. Like, you know, I guaran, like, I was with Will Smith and we were, we’ve done multiple, I’ve visited multiple movies with him, one of them was a superhero movie that people would know what it is, to watch food, superhero movies, but we filmed 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night, and I was just like, man, this is grueling. Like, first of all the sleep schedule thing, that’s just insane, but just like you had to hurry up to get here and now you’re just waiting, and we’re just waiting and waiting and then it becomes one o’clock in the morning, at two o’clock and three o’clock, and then the director says, all right, we’re all set up.

1:12:55 You know, like, how do you, first I asked him, how do you, how do you get, how to get ready? And he’s like, Jim, I don’t have to get ready, I stay ready. And I’m like, whoa, that’s a mentality, right? And that when I said earlier that the life we live are the lessons we teach, you know, there’s a difference between people just, you know, they can quote the expert all the time but they’re not doing it, so I don’t feel like they really understand it because they’re not living it, right?

1:13:20 And so he’s living that, and I was asking him, like, most recently on his new film, I was like, how do you, oh, I was like, why are you doing all stuff on social media? He just launched his vlog, he just launched his Instagram and everything, and he was like, he’s telling me, I wish we recorded this, but he was telling me that in his, when we were in his trailer having lunch, he said that, he’s like, I’m doing this because I have a lot to say because, you know, like so many, he’s like, Jim, you know, there’s so much of me is about motivation and inspiration, you know, because, but so much of that what I do on movies and everything else is pre-scripted for me, you know, it’s not, they’re not my words, right? And so here people get to see me raw and real, and it’s just like, you know, I want to, I want to share this with people.

1:14:01 And I find that, you know, I respect people who develop themselves and they don’t, you know, learn, they learn not only for their own personal benefit, but we learn for another reason, like why learn anything, to learn for yourself but then to teach it. And I also think also one of the greatest ways to learn something is to teach it. Like if you want to learn something faster, learn with the intent, tension of teaching, different neural pathways are happening, huge, huge, different parts of your brain are lining up also.

1:14:25 But just even think about it anecdotally, if somebody’s listening to a podcast and, like, they know I’m going to teach them how to remember names or read faster or whatever, then if they learned it, you know, for themselves they’ll learn it, but if they had to give a, like, a TED talk the next day on it, would their focus be better? Would they take better notes? Would they post different, better questions and everything? You’ll own that information much better.

1:14:47 So I always tell people when you teach something you get to learn it twice, you know. When you teach it you get to learn it twice. But going back to the original film, that night that he was shooting, his family from West Philly, you know, were there, and his whole family at four o’clock in the morning, and I was just like, I was telling him about, like, the day before we spent the entire day together talking about, you know, brain and performance and everything and thinking, and I was like, what do you think your question is?

1:15:12 He’s like, you know, like where this girl is, how do I get people like me? He’s like, he’s, this is his question in this moment because your questions could change and you have more than one question, but in that, but like when I was with him, he’s like, I think my question that I ask a lot is how do I make this moment even more magical and meaningful. And I’m like, I literally get goosebumps, I call, I call him truth bumps, like, he’s, how do I make this moment even more magical and meaningful?

1:15:38 And I could tell because it is four o’clock in the morning and I know for a fact he should be tired because I spent the entire day with him and he wasn’t, like, sleeping and everything. And when he was with his family, like, it is cold in Toronto and, you know, it was very, very chilly and it was nighttime, but he was making them laugh, he was telling them stories and he was joking, and I really admire people who are, you know, and you know this because you meet so many people and you get to have lunch with them afterwards, you know, guests and everything, and it’s always so refreshing when you meet somebody and they’re the same person they are like when they’re not on camera, you know what I mean? You know, I just, for me, I just, that means something to me because I get to work with a lot of Hollywood and, you know, CEOs and, but when they, when they’re the same person, you know, as they, as they not pretend to be, but yeah, it just, it’s just, it’s refreshing.

1:16:24 And that question tells you everything about that person. Yeah, he really does, and it shows you the fact that he’s also not having ANTs run around in his head, I’m tired and cold and whatever, he’s thinking how can I make this so. What do you think your question is? I was thinking about that. I mean, not the question, but if there’s one question you think you ask yourself more than other questions?

1:16:41 I’m always thinking, how can I do this better? Oh, how can I do this better, so not only more people can make the change but also how I can enjoy it more too. That’s the question I ask a lot. And it’s very revealing when you get people to answer these questions, answering you with these questions, and I’m always saying like, how can I enjoy the process more? Because so many people enjoy what we do and I feel like the bottleneck I have is that I need to enjoy it more, and if I do, more people will enjoy it.

1:17:10 And notice that you start seeing, when you start asking that question you also see those pugs more, you start to see reasons for it, right? You start to come up with answers, just like when I was saying you read a page and book, forget what you just read, if you had lots of questions or anyone watching this had lots more questions they would get answers then. Like, like if, like so many, like we have standardized tests in the US, like SATs and, you know, yet people read pages and pages of reading comprehension, then there’s like 10 questions you have to answer to be valuable, or, you know, whatever.

1:17:38 Why not look at those questions first? Like, why read all this, get to the end and be like, oh, that’s what’s important. Why not read the questions first and then when you’re reading you’re like, oh, got an answer. There’s the answer. Here’s an answer.

1:17:48 There’s a pug dog, there’s a pug dog, there’s a puppy. That’s what you’re doing with your life, you’re kind of reading forward to the questions that you need to be paying attention to, right? And there’s only a certain amount of questions that are important. Everyone’s questions are different, okay, but what matters for you, like you know, like, it’s really going to be at the end of the day, you’re going to ask yourself, like, if you want to win, you work backwards.

1:18:07 Like, if, let’s say, and you know, we’ve all done this, rocking chair test, you know, we’re 80 years old sitting on, you know, at a rocking chair and where our regrets were and everything. I really think you know, you don’t want to have a lot of regrets, because when you die, it’s not, you can’t take your possessions with you for sure because you’re in a box, there’s not a lot of room in that box even for regrets, right? And the thing with regrets is, you know, they weigh a lot.

1:18:33 People should be asking them those questions now in advance, like, what’s going to make you happy, or what are your friends and your family going to say at your funeral, that what do you want them to say, and then work backwards from there. Yeah, right. You know, one of my favorite books of all time and one of my mentors was Dr. Stephen Covey. Yeah, he wrote the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Everyone should read that book, you know.

1:18:54 And then there’s a number of habits that affected people that I really resonate for me, like one of them, the seventh habit is sharpen the saw, meaning that if you have all this wood to cut, you know, and metaphorically we all have a lot of things we need to do, right, but if you have a saw with a dull blade, what are you going to do? You’re going to sharpen that saw, and when you’re going to do it, you’re not going to wait to the middle, you’re certainly not going to wait to the end, like why suffer and struggle all that at the end to be like, okay, let me sharpen my saw now, right? But most people do that, they have lots of books to read, they have lots of emails, they have lots of stuff, but they have this dull reading blade.

1:19:28 So why don’t they learn how to read faster first, and then everything after that gets easy. But another one is seek first to understand than to be understood. We were talking about earlier, a lot of people don’t remember names, like you are an exceptional listener, like that’s one of your many superpowers. And if you, most people aren’t listening, but if you’re seeking first to understand then to be understood, then it’s a totally different game, right?

1:19:52 Because people don’t want to see how interesting you are, but they rather feel how interested you are, right? Maya Angelou says people won’t remember what you said, they won’t remember what you did, they’ll always remember how you made them feel. And growing up as a kid with the broken brain, I became, I was painfully shy, I didn’t want, because you don’t feel like you have any value to give to somebody, you’re just watching people. And my superpower back then, you could say, it was being invisible, you know, I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to be heard.

1:20:22 Now I do, like everybody, I feel like has a need to be seen and be heard, right? But I was so fearful and that’s where my energy was. But coming back from this, what it did was it made me form different questions too, like when I see people who are successful, when I was struggling, I would just watch people. I was like, why is that person so much smarter than me, right? You know, it’s not fair, I’m working three times harder and I’m not getting anywhere near the grades, you know.

1:20:46 How do I learn this better? And then I start asking a question like, how do I teach this better, you know, because I want to learn it so I could be able to teach this. So that brain injury, going back to that radiator, which was probably a concussion or something, maybe. Yeah, who knows, who knows, because they didn’t do any scans back, I mean this was a long time. It caused you to really start understanding, watching, finding ways that you could get the same results or different results on your own.

1:21:09 Yeah, and how it actually manifested was, I remember talking about being painfully shy, I was failing English in high school and the teacher brought my parents in, and that was really embarrassing because, you know, they, my parents are like my superheroes, right? They didn’t have just like the typical immigrant story, they didn’t have anything, they sacrificed a lot, and I wanted to do well and be a good role model for my brother and sister who were younger than me. But they pulled them in and just saying that I’m failing and, I, you know, it’s a lot of shame around that, and they’re like, the teacher’s like, look, I’ll give him a chance, if he does a book report I’ll give him extra credit and he could pass.

1:21:45 And I did this book report, you know, the topic she gave me was on Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein, right, like genius, and which I thought was really fitting, right? And I spent two months on this, Brian, like every day after school I would go to the library and then, you know, until library closed and everything, and I would just read, and I wasn’t a good reader, right, but I would do the best I could, and then, you know, my parents, we had it bound, you know, at like one of those Kinko’s places and I was like, leather bound, and the day that it was due and the day I came in, I was like, wow, I was looking at it because I slept with it underneath my pillow because it was like I was really proud of it, because I’ve never done anything well, you know, all through school, because my self-talk back then was when I didn’t do well on a quiz or a test or I was you know, not picked on the team or whatever, I would say, oh, I have a broken brain, because that was my self-talk that this teacher put in my head, right?

1:22:34 Extremely, because all behavior is belief driven, and that’s where it came from. But I had to finally did something well, and I was so excited to go to class that day to turn it in, and when I got in class I just had in my backpack, and you know, we had the class as normal and then at the end of class the teacher’s like, I have a surprise for you everybody, you know, Jim, come up here, and I’m like, what? I’m like, he’s like, tell us about your book report.

1:22:55 And I freaked out because I have such a big fear of public speaking, because remember, I’m not just introverted but I am painfully shy, but most people say they have a fear of it but, like, I cannot breathe, I’m perspiring like crazy, like it’s just insane, and I don’t, like, I don’t know what time goes by, so everyone’s staring at me not knowing what this is because it’s never happened in class, and I tell the teacher, you know, I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t do it, I sat into it, and I lied, and I just spent, like, literally all my hopes and dreams and my effort was into that because I was so scared. And after, you could tell, you see the disappointment in her face, right, and when everyone left and the classroom was empty I finally got up and I took the book report out, really nicely bound, and I threw it in the trash.

1:23:43 And Brian, I could tell you, like, maybe even looking back on it, thinking about it now, that you know, I probably was throwing other things, like it wasn’t like my dreams, that was my potential. You know, in high school, when I got to college, how I came across these skills is when I was lucky enough to get into a state university when I was 18, I was a freshman and I want to make a fresh start, you know, show the world, show my parents, show myself I was really worth something, and I thought I could do better and I did worse because it was much more difficult and I was ready to quit. And a friend of mine, and I didn’t know how to tell my folks, right, and a friend was like, hey, don’t quit yet, I’m going home for the weekend, why don’t you come with me, take a trip, get some perspective, right?

1:24:23 And I was like, okay, and I go, and his family is pretty well off, right, and his father’s walking around his property before dinner and asked me a very innocent question, remember questions again, right, and the, but it’s the worst question you could ask me. It’s just, Jim, how’s school? And I, as shy as I am, I break down and I start bawling in front of a complete stranger. I’m like, you don’t know us, I’ve broken brain, I can’t read, I can’t do all this stuff, I’m failing, my parents, I’m quitting school.

1:24:54 And he’s like, Jim, why are you in school? New question, right? Ask a new question, get a new answer. And I was like, I don’t know. It was like, well, what, Jim, what do you want to be, what do you want to do, what do you want to have, what do you want to share?

1:25:07 No one’s ever asked me that. So I didn’t have an answer for it, but when I started going through it, I started to answer him and he said stop, and he pulls out a notepad out of his back pocket, like a journal, and I honestly thought only like 12 year old girls kept, like, diaries and stuff, but I noticed a pattern with geniuses, you know, people are successful, that they keep journals, and I don’t know, you know, I’m curious, personally I’ve never done, their studies on this that, you know, are they genius, you know, like are geniuses naturally like to reflect and write journals and diaries and stuff, or is it the, is it not that, it’s maybe the different causation is because they’re journaling all the time that turns them into geniuses, right? And you think about Leonardo and Einstein’s, their journals are worth, they’re priceless, right?

1:25:48 And So he kept a diary, but he gave me a couple sheets and he said, I want you to write it down. I was like, what? Write down what you want to be, do, have, share. And I go through this exercise, I don’t know how much time goes by, but when I was done it was like a bucket list, right? All things you want to have, you know, experience before you kick the bucket.

1:26:02 I start folding the sheets of paper to put in my pocket and he grabs it out of my hand, and I’m freaking out because I didn’t know he was going to see what was on that page, on the paper, and because those are my dreams, my desires, the things I’ve never shared with anybody, right, and even with myself maybe even. And he starts reading it and I’m freaking out because I don’t know what he’s thinking, and he looks at me and he goes, Jim, you are this close to everything on that list. And he spreads his index fingers about a foot apart and I’m thinking, no way, give me 10 lifetimes, I’m not going to crack that list.

1:26:34 And he takes his fingers and he puts them to the side of my head, my temple, meaning that what’s in between, my brain, is like this key, right? And he takes me into a room of his home before, right before dinner, that I’ve never seen before. You would love it, Brian, it is wall-to-wall, ceiling to the floor covered in books. Like I’ve never seen a library in somebody’s house before, right? And keep in mind, I’m not a good reader, so I’m like phobic of books, like let’s be, like walking into a room full of snakes for somebody, but what makes it worse is he starts grabbing snakes off the shelf and starts handing them to me.

1:27:04 And I start looking at these titles of these books and there are these biographies of some incredible men and women in history, right, and some really early personal growth books like Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking, you know, like Napoleon Hill, like all the classics. And he’s like, Jim, and you know what he’s going to say, he’s like, Jim, I want you to read one book a week. And automatically I’m like, are you crazy? I have these learning disabilities, I’ve never finished a book cover to cover ever.

1:27:31 I have all this work, midterms, eyeballs, schoolwork. He looks right at me, soon as I say school, he says, Jim, don’t let school get in the way of your education. You know, and I didn’t realize this was a Mark Twain quote, this is more than 25 years ago, right? And I was like, that’s really insightful and motivational, but I’m not, I can’t commit, because, you know, the way my parents raised me, if I’m gonna do it, like I say it, I’m gonna do it, right? And very smart man, he reaches into his pocket, he takes out my bucket list and he starts reading every single one of my dreams out loud.

1:28:03 And something about hearing your dreams and goals, something that’s very intimate and private, something you’ve never shared with people, in another man’s voice out in the universe, really messed with my mind and my spirit something fierce. And honestly, Brian, a lot of things on that list were things I wanted to do for my family, things that they couldn’t afford to do or would never do for themselves. And with that motivation, I always talk about motivation, your why in learning, I agree to read one book a week.

1:28:31 So fast forward, I’m at school, I’m at, I’m on my desk, I have a pile of books I have to read for school and a pile of books I want to read, I promise to read, and I already couldn’t get through this, so how am I gonna get through this, right? So what I do, anything that takes time, I just X. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I don’t work out, I don’t spend time with friends, I don’t do anything, I just live in the library. Now we know that’s not sustainable, right?

1:28:53 Because weeks go by and I’m deteriorating, right, because I’m just not, I’m a mess, and one night. Very driven guy though. Yeah, one night I just pass out in the library and I fall down a flight of stairs out of exhaustion and I hit my head again, and I woke up in the hospital two days later, two full days later, and at this point I’m in the hospital bed, I’m hooked to all these IVs, I’m down, I’ve lost so much weight, I’m down to like 117 pounds, like I’m dying, and maybe part of me wished, I mean, I don’t want to go there, but it’s very dark time because you feel helpless, right?

1:29:25 You’ve tried everything. Most people say they’ve tried everything and you ask them, like, well, write down what you’ve tried, and they tried like three things, but I’ve tried like everything. I’ve given my soul for for a decade and a half and I’ve been able to crack this. And then when I said there has to be a better way, the nurse comes in with a mug of tea and I swear to you there’s a picture of Albert Einstein there, the one I did the book report with, him and Leonardo on it, and he was like speaking to me, and the quote on the cup said this: the same level of thinking that’s created your problem won’t solve your problem.

1:29:56 And we’ve heard this before, right, insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, you know, and same level thinking that’s created my problem won’t solve it. So it made me think a new question, going back to questions, I was like, what’s my biggest challenge right now? My biggest challenge is I’m a really slow learner, I have a slow brain. I was like, well, how do I think completely differently about it? Well, maybe I can learn how to have a faster brain, a quicker brain, right?

1:30:19 Let’s name my podcast Kwik Brain, right, that’s how I name it, after, or my company’s called Kwik Learning. Maybe I could be a quicker learner, maybe I could learn how to learn. And I was thinking, well, maybe, how do I do that? Well, I thought school, and I said, I asked the nurse to bring me a course bulletin with all the subjects that I could take for next semester, and I looked through all the pages, no classes on how to learn, all classes on what to learn, and I was like, I set that aside and I just, like, I forget this, I’m just going to read these books on personal development and all these other books on how to learn, right?

1:30:46 I wanted to solve this riddle, like this puzzle. I do annual events, learning events, and we, the last one we had Quincy Jones, the, you know, the music producer, in the audience. I said, can you please come up here, I spent a conversation with you, and he comes up and I was like, tell me about your problems, your biggest problems in creating We Are the World and Michael Jackson and all this stuff. And he’s like, Jim, I don’t have any problems. I’m like, no, maybe you don’t have a lot of problems now, but growing up and, you know, like, and he’s like, no, I didn’t have any problems back then either.

1:31:15 I’m like, wait, wait, wait, you can’t achieve success without any problems. He’s like, no, they’re not problems, they’re puzzles. And I was like, whoa, and I just got those truth bumps again, but changing one word changes everything. So I wanted, I realized that I wanted to solve this puzzle, like how does my brain work so I could work my brain, how does my memory work so I could work my memory. So I started studying adult learning theory and speed reading and mnemonics, anything I get my hands on, for like multiple intelligences and stuff, and then about 60 days into it, Brian, a light switch just flipped on and I started to understand things for the first time, like really understand.

1:31:50 I started retaining, my focus started to become better, and then, man, I get choked up thinking about this, because I got so angry that this wasn’t taught to me earlier on, because I suffered in struggle my whole childhood, not feeling like I was not enough, you know, my thoughts were very, like, what was wrong with me, and all these things that led to all these challenges, you know, with my family and everything, and I was just like, why weren’t we taught this back in school? And then I, like, after that I started just sharing and teaching everyone, and one of my very first students, she, as a freshman, she read 30 books in 30 days. Now what if you could read 30 books in 30 days?

1:32:24 Like those all these books, like go online, pick 30 books, and not skim it, scan it, like traditional speed reading, people associate with skimming, scanning, getting the gist, but I teach people how to, like, my clients are world leaders, they’re they’re amazing, the world’s best doctors. You don’t want your doctor to get the gist of what she’s reading, right? You want them to retain this stuff, right? So I teach that, but she read 30 books in 30 days and I didn’t want to find out how she did it, because I taught her how, I want to know why, always going back to why.

1:32:51 And I found out her mother was dying of terminal cancer and was only given 60 days to live, and the books you were reading were books on health, wellness, energy, alternative medicine and all this about all this stuff to be able to save her mom’s life. And I said, I, you know, I wish her luck, prayers. Six months later I get a call from this young lady and she’s crying and crying, crying, she, I can’t even get a word out of her, and I find out they’re tears of joy, that her mother not only survived but is really getting better.

1:33:19 Doctors don’t know how, they don’t know why, they called it a miracle, but her mother attributed 100 percent to the great advice she got from her daughter who learned them from all these books. And that’s where I first came up with this idea that if knowledge is power, learning is your superpower, and it’s a superpower we all have access to, and we just aren’t showing how to unleash it. And that’s my mission, is to help people to unleash their mental superpowers.

1:33:42 And why did someone like Quincy Jones come to your event? I mean, you know, he’s had this amazing career. Yeah, he’s getting older in his years, and why do these people come to see you? We just celebrated his 85th birthday. Now in that audience we had Don Miguel Ruiz, who were with The Four Agreements.

1:33:55 We had the founder of WordPress, you know, Matt Mullenweg. You know, I think people come to me for one of two things. They’re either, they’re either struggling where they’re at right now, they’re overloaded, the distraction, the third digital super villain. Digital overload, digital distraction is digital dementia, right? When you’re so dependent on your smart devices, you know, then you don’t, you’re not using your memory, right?

1:34:16 You’re not, it’s keeping your to-do’s, your schedules, it’s keeping your phone numbers. Like, how many phone numbers did you know growing up? A few, right? At least. How many do you know now?

1:34:26 None. No, I know, but here’s the thing, it’s not the message is, Jim, I don’t want to memorize hundreds of numbers. Neither do I, but we’ve lost the capability to memorize one, and then we forget the past number, the pass code, the room number we’re staying at the hotel, everything, right? Simple conversations because we don’t have those mental muscles. They call that digital dementia.

1:34:43 So that’s the third super villain. So we’re so dependent on technology, but here’s the thing, going back to technology, and I’ll talk about why people come to our events and come to our training and coaching, is that if you’re picking up your phone when you’re bored or you’re picking it up at a habit just because you’re unconscious because you’ve been programmed to do so, we talked about Stanford University and, you know, all the psychologists and psychiatrists that they bring in to study, like, human behavior. Yeah, people get the phantom buzzes, all of that stuff.

1:35:11 I’ve got it in my life, it’s insane, scary. It’s really, it’s really real. And then the other thing is, it’s like, so if you’re picking it up when you’re bored and, like, that, my challenge is technology is a tool like any other tool, like a show, like a saw, like fire, anything else, it can be used for good or not, right? But here’s the thing, it’s meant to be used to magnify and make your life more convenient, you know, but I’m challenged with it in a number of ways.

1:35:35 Number one, if you’re too dependent on it, you don’t build the muscles. Just like if, so people are too dependent on driving everywhere, taking elevators, they don’t get the physical muscles, right, because that’s not what you know how we were as hunter-gatherers. So we’re physically weak, I think we’re mentally weak because we’re relying on technology. Like they’re not getting early detection of dementia, because they, digital dementia, because GPS, because if you’re relying on pieces of technology to tell you when and where to turn, people aren’t realizing when they’d have memory lapses, so they’re not going to doctors, get checked out, because we’re so dependent on it.

1:36:05 But technology is meant to be as a tool, but when you’re picking it out at a boredom or picking out just because of your program to it, and then it’s using you, right? Then who’s the tool, right, in that equation? And so my thing is don’t, but the people that come to me, they’re struggling with digital overload, digital dementia, digital distraction, and they want to get out of that pain, but the other people that come to me are the people that are extremely successful, right, because they got that way because they’re always into growth, they always want the edge, they also want an advantage, and the greatest edge you have is mental, right?

1:36:37 It’s your ability to out think, out learn, out focus, you know, out compete because it’s all mind, right? Everyone that reaches the highest level, that’s why when you and I before, you know, when we were before the interview, I was asking you, like, your mindset preparing for that, because I believe genius leaves those clues, right, and I think there’s four parts. I did an episode on the four G’s of a mindset, and one of them is growth, you know, Carol Dweck’s work, you know, versus a fixed mindset, you know, but not only that, you have gratitude.

1:37:06 We already talked about how gratitude rewires your brain and what you appreciate appreciates, but now the third, the third G on top of that is giving, because I feel like that’s what we are. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t give to get, we give because it really is who we are and gives us more fulfillment, right? Because that’s going to reinforce you and make you want to do it more. But the fourth G, you know, because for us, forgiving, like people don’t know this, but we build schools everywhere, we build schools in Ghana and Guatemala and Kenya for kids that don’t have education, because I feel like education is the best way to elevate, you know, any kind of society.

1:37:39 Like, I don’t know if you know somebody’s watching this or listening to our podcast, you don’t know if, like, some kid in a third world country on their phone is listening right now and they become the next Malala or Elon Musk, and they saw one of the, one that’s the, because classrooms don’t have four walls, you know. It’s so exciting right now with technology. I just want people to learn how they learn, because they know more about how their phone works and everything else than their brain.

1:38:01 But just like with the phones, I spent a lot of time in nursing homes and senior centers, you know, not teaching them memory enhancement and brain hacks, just to tell, I just want to know stories, because that generation just lived in a very different life and there’s so much wisdom there, and it also polishes off their memories also. But recently I was with a woman and she just got this iPhone, she was showing me from, you know, her family, and I was like, what do you use it for? She was like, what do you mean?

1:38:26 She’s like, I use it, I use it to make phone calls. I’m like, well, did you know you could actually check your stock prices and the weather here? And I showed all these apps. That’s how I feel people are like with their brains, that they don’t realize how many other more things they could do just by being shown, because your brain doesn’t come with an owner’s manual and it’s not user friendly. I want to give people that owner’s manual so they can really, they say you use what, ten percent of your, Einstein said ten percent of her brain’s potential, Stanford University said two percent, recently I read one ten thousands of one percent, that went up, brain power, a lot, says a million lifetimes, it keeps on going, you know, down, I don’t know if the 70s has something to do with it or whatever, but in actuality we use all our brain, the science that we actually use all of our brain, but some people use it more, much more efficiently than others.

1:39:08 It’s just like when people are more physically fit, right, they don’t have to expend as much energy to get the same kind of result as somebody who’s unhealthy and not fit. Same thing with mental fitness, you know. When you do this, I had somebody recently, I went to the office, her phone was ringing and I picked up the phone, she’s like, I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m like, whoa, who’s this? And she’s like, I found it.

1:39:26 I’m like, what do you mean? She was like, have you ever hid something so well, came up with a real clever password or place to hide something but you don’t remember what it is? She was given a necklace from her grandmother, it was given to her, not her mother, not her three sisters, it was a family heirloom, very precious, generations to protect and steward, and she hid it somewhere in her home. She couldn’t find it for three years. She had so much shame, so much guilt, she thought it was lost, she thought it was stolen, and it was always a sore subject in the family.

1:39:55 After going through our program, she wakes up at two o’clock in the morning, ran down two flights of stairs, Brian, behind the boiler, pulls out in this crevice the necklace, and I was like, I didn’t, in our program we didn’t teach you how to find misplaced things. She was like, I don’t know what it is, but even when I don’t even use the technique, I’m remembering names, I’m remembering conversations, I remember the grocery list of things I needed to buy. See, often you go to the grocery store to buy one thing, you come back with two bags with everything but that, like, one thing, right?

1:40:24 And she’s like, I don’t know what it is, I just, I’m, I understand, I’m like, I got it. It’s like he said, thank you for giving me my brain back. You know what I mean? Because our brain is everything. Like you could lose some of your muscle mass and everything else, you’d be okay, but if you lose, like, your mind, it’s like it’s like everything.

1:40:38 And so my message for people is that we’re faster and we’re smarter than we think, because my work is about, similar to your work, it’s about transcending. Think about the word transcend, ending the trance, ending this mass hypnosis through media or marketing that we’re broken, the broken brain, right, that you need to be fixed, that you’re not enough or whatever that is, and it’s absolutely not true. That we have these gifts and then we have incredible genius inside of us, you know, and now is the time.

1:41:07 This is an exciting time to live, to be able to let that out. So get these people to just unlock it, realize this incredible asset they have right between their ears, and that it can change everything. and it needs to start being used as a muscle. And a lot of the, it’s funny when people think of something like, oh, meditation and gratitude and journaling, those are the things they do in California and the high performance people do. But when you listen to you talk about it, you know, each one has a reason why it works, there’s a neuroscience to success.

1:41:34 Yeah, you know, for me I like to bring the brain science into personal development into high performance, because then you’re not fighting yourself when you understand, like, the brain wave states we’re talking about: beta, alpha, theta, delta, then you can engineer performance, you’re not at the effect, like, I hope I’m creative. You could actually get into those states when you forget about, when you understand that there’s part of your brain that where your long-term memory and your emotions are mixed, right? Because the key to long-term memory is information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.

1:42:02 We don’t remember information, think about, think about it, like think about deletion devices. Exactly, like think about, think about what we did in school, what was the primary emotion we felt back in school? Like boredom, right? But if information times emotion becomes a long-term memory and the emotion is zero, anything times zero is zero, and you wonder why people don’t remember the periodic table, right, because the state, all learning is state dependent.

1:42:26 And when you understand your brain anatomy applied towards learning, apply towards productivity, towards performance, you show up differently. When you can walk into a room and meet 20 strangers and easily leave saying goodbye to each one of them by name, who do they all remember? I mean, these are standout skills that unfortunately are so rare but they’re so easily accessible, because 1/3 of your memory is predetermined by genetics and biology, two-thirds of your control.

1:42:49 So I would love to actually just share with everyone the ten keys and show them how to memorize it. So the question, initial question was this is, like, how do I get people, like, how do I show people at home, like, that they actually have a better memory than they do? And for me the best way of changing something is to get someone to do something they never thought they could do. So what I’ll ask people to do is, this, I’m going to share with you the 10 keys to unlock what I call your Kwik Brain, right?

1:43:12 These are the 10 things scientifically proven to help you be faster, smarter and better, to optimize your brain health and your fitness. And now every single thing I’m going to say, nobody’s going to debate, right, they’re going to say, yes, of course, but common sense is not common practice. So I’m going to ask people who are watching this is to rate yourself zero to ten. How well am I doing in this one area, like in terms of how I’m eating or exercising or something?

1:43:35 And then you’ll notice everyone wants to know what the magic pill is. There’s no magic memory pill, they’re magic memory processes, right? If everyone wants to know the one silver bullet, you have to do all these things, because that’s what falls within the focal point, meaning that the 80/20 rule, the 20 that gives you 80 percent of the results, results and the rewards. So really fast, the 10 keys for unlocking your Kwik Brain. People don’t know how to write it down because I’ll teach them how to memorize them.

1:44:01 Cool, right? So and we can do it together. Number one is good brain food, all right? Good brain food, because you are what you eat. What you eat matters, especially to your gray matter.

1:44:11 What you eat matters especially a gray matter. So we did a whole episode on my favorite top 10 favorite brain foods and I showed people how to memorize it in two minutes. I mean, it’s a wild, but there’s certain foods that are really good for your brain and you probably eat most of these foods as you are, cause I know you’re very blueberries. Yeah, all right, like blueberries is like, I call them brain berries, and avocados and good fats and all of them.

1:44:32 So there’s 10 of them that I recommend and so they’re really, they’re really excellent, they’re very neuro-protective, and such, including dark chocolate. So dark chocolate is a, it’s good, what’s good for your mood is generally good for your mind. But so a good brain diet is number one, so just rate yourself on a scale of zero to ten. How good is your diet? All right, number two is killing ANTs, automatic negative thoughts, your self-talk.

1:44:55 And so what I would recommend people, zero to ten, how does that feel, how well are you doing? And not only that, but you know, maybe going on it on a little faster cleanse, like we cleanse the food we eat and things we put in our body, but what about the thoughts that we’re putting in our matter? 30 days with no negative thoughts, I mean one day, or not complaining or something, like no complaining, you know, because it’s just again, you know, people and people get so addicted to these things like, you know, complaining and whatever, you’re rehearsing, you’re just, you’re literally rewiring your brain to get more of that.

1:45:24 It’s not law of attraction, there’s a law of action that’s going on, you know, that makes it because all behavior is belief driven, and so you’re wiring your brains to be really rehearsing those things. That’s why they say that the fearful person, like a a fearful person dies a thousand times, like a coward dies a thousand times in their mind, you know, and not like a brave person does just once, because every time you’re rehearsing, oh, I’m scared of public speaking, you do it over and over again, not only do you get the fear of it every single time, because your imagination, your mind doesn’t know the difference between something vividly imagined and something that’s real. Literally, if you were to put on a brain sensing device, the same parts of your brain that would light up if a dog walked in, you see what parts of your brain light up, and if you imagine that dog walking in, the same exact parts of your brain will light up.

1:46:10 So the mind doesn’t know the difference. It’s the most powerful tool you have, is your imagination. I mean, it’s crazy, like when I was saying that Don Miguel Ruiz, who wrote The Four Agreements, was there, I called him on stage, he’s like, what’s your superpower? And he was like, Jim, my superpower is like everyone’s superpower here, it’s the superpower of imagination, right? Because knowledge is what is, but imagination is really what could be.

1:46:31 And there’s this crazy study called the counterclockwise study by Ellen Langer out of Harvard, and this is valuable for people in 1979. She was in a nursing home and she was like, this is really depressing, why, this is the worst environment to spend the res, the remaining years. She took eight of them out and put them into a monastery. What was different, and she made it so it was in 1979, in there she decorated like it was 1959. So the Time magazine cover was from 1959, black and white television show, whatever’s there.

1:46:58 She took out all the mirrors so people couldn’t see themselves, and these eight men walked in with canes, and they did testing with them and they tested their their focus, their senses, their memory, their physical strength, and took pictures of them and all that, and then they took a control group, put them in, you know, eight guys in a room that they didn’t, she didn’t decorate it. She said reminisce like it was 20 years ago, that was the difference. One week later, just one week later, they come back, the guys come out and these guys didn’t even look like the same guys.

1:47:30 Many of them didn’t even walk out with their canes, but they tested them empirically. Their sense of sight was better, their sense of hearing was better, they had stronger muscular strength, right, and on top of it all, that they took a picture of them before and after. Just seven days, they took a focus group, people that know anything about the study, and they show them the two photos side by side and they said, which one is the younger one, right? And a hundred percent of the focus group chose the latter one after just seven days.

1:48:00 So what I’m saying, the power of imagination, we don’t know the effect that our thoughts have, you know, in terms of things and such, and that’s, it’s pretty amazing. But going back to the power of killing ANTs, you know, our thoughts are things and it’s improv, you know, activating our imagination, so, you know, don’t do it to rehearse your fears and the things that are negative, right? Only have thoughts of things that you want to come, that really happen.

1:48:22 Okay, so the third thing, exercise. Okay, people really, we know. Number four, brain nutrients, and this is a subject that comes up because, you know, a lot of people travel, they have fast food lifestyles and, you know, but maybe they’re lacking in certain supplements, and what I would say is, you know, I’m not a nutritionist, I’m not anything that ends in -ist, but go to a doctor, a good functional medicine doctor, have a blood test. And I say the same thing for diet, when people say what’s the best, you know, do food sensitivity tests, see what your blood says, you know, red, yellow, green, you know, red, stay away from, yellow, you know, sparingly, green, and see how you flourish on it afterwards, right, and then test it.

1:48:58 But same thing with nutrient profile, you can see what you’re deficient at, because if you’re low on B vitamins, if you’re low on DHA, then you’re going to have cognitive issues, right? So supplement. Number five is, I was low in B12 when I was training for the Ironman, and then I got a blood test and they were before, but as soon as I had the supplement everything changed, including my motivation. Exactly. That’s a huge, huge recruit for cognition.

1:49:24 Fifth, the fifth thing that you want to optimize your brain is positive peer group. We know who you spend time with. is who you become, because, and it’s not just, you know, a positive thinking, you know, affirmation quote, literally you have mirror neurons, and your mirror neurons and your nervous system is when you could watch a sport or watch a movie and you could feel what they feel, it’s what is where you have empathy for other people. We’re always imitating people, right?

1:49:48 And so who you spend time with is who you become, because you’re imitating their habits, their behaviors, their thought patterns and everything. So that’s why they say you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, right? If you’re around nine broke people, you’re gonna be the tenth, right? Like you hear these things all the time, but there’s a, it’s not just your biological networks or your neurological networks, analyze your social networks, right?

1:50:09 Because whether or not you smoke has less to do with your neurological networks and more to do whether or not your friend’s friend smoke, okay, is going to have more of an influence. Sixth thing for your brain, clean environment. We know a clean environment is good for your brain at an anecdotal level, you know, when you clean your desk or you clean your laptop off, you know, you have clarity of thought, right? But I don’t just mean that, I mean clean air, clean water, because there’s a lot of pollutants that’s, you know, that’s not good for your cognition, right?

1:50:34 Number, so from there we have number seven, sleep. This is a big one for so many people, Brian, I don’t know how your sleep is, but it’s getting better. Yeah, yeah, but I’ve always tried to hack it and work on it and I’ve done the screen thing in the blue light, but look, it can be better. Yeah, I mean, sleep is so important for your brain for three reasons. Number one’s where you consolidate short to long-term memory.

1:50:52 Everyone who pulled an all-nighter back in the university, that hurt you, because you need that sleep. Number two, it’s where you clean out the plaque that could lead to brain aging challenges, and that’s what the latest research is saying in terms of leading to acne dementia and such. And then the third reason is because when you dream, and here’s the thing, you’re like, what does that have to do with anything, Jim? It’s like, you don’t know how many amazing ideas and inventions, literature, works of art came in dream states.

1:51:18 Like, did you know, like I mentioned Mary Shelley, you know, here in London, Frankenstein came to her in a dream, you know, Paul McCartney came up with Yesterday in his dream, you know, like a chemist came up with the periodic table in his dream, Elias Howe created the sewing machine in his dream, right? Like what are you dreaming about late at night? Because when you are working all day and you’re learning all day, your brain doesn’t shut off at night, at night it’s more active.

1:51:40 People don’t realize that, you think it’s just not happening, it’s actually more active and it’s coming up with solutions, it’s integrating stuff in the form of dreams. But you, when you wake up most people forget their dreams, you write your dreams down when you wake up. I do, I have six things I do, in my morning routine episode where I talk about the very first thing I do is the six steps on how to remember my dreams, because there’s gems in there every single day.

1:52:01 There are insights and inventions and things that my unconscious is just, and that’s how you get, like, all that extra time back, you know, through that. And we did an episode on lucid dreaming, how to be aware and awake but still get rest. But so all this is important, but sleep, number eight is brain protection, meaning that, you know, like I work with a lot of athletes, high performing athletes, concussions are a big deal. Yeah, right, you know, and I’ve had a number of TBIs, you know, traumatic brain injuries, but not just that, you know, I did a whole episode on electromagnetic fields, like people don’t realize that, like, our smart devices, like it’s like our brains didn’t really evolve to have, like, these, the all this electricity, like, right by our brains, you know.

1:52:43 And I read recently that ninety percent of kids sleep with their phones underneath their pillows. I mean, who knows the effect that’s happening, so better avoid it, protect your brain, wear a helmet. And then finally nine and ten, ninth key to keeping your brain alive is new learnings, right, the neurogenesis, neuroplasticity. Means neurogenesis, you could create new brain cells the day you die, science never thought that. Neuroplasticity is saying you could create new connections, meaning that Einstein’s brain wasn’t bigger than any of ours, in fact it was smaller, but parts of his brain were very highly connected because he would do these theta state brain thought experiments, and every single time you have a new thought you may create new connections, right?

1:53:22 And so the way to improve neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, two things, novelty and nutrition, okay? Just like when you’re an athlete, just like training your body, you give a novel to your stimulus and then you feed it with nutrition, right? And so that’s how you build your mental muscles too. Finally, number 10, stress management. Stress management, meaning people don’t realize it because it’s invisible, but it’s like, you don’t realize how much stress you’re under until you’re on vacation or you’re getting a massage, you don’t realize because it’s all there all the time.

1:53:51 It’s like the fish that they don’t see the water because it’s there all the time. So what are we doing to cope? You know, meditation, relaxation, massage, yoga, whatever it is that gets us stressed. So those are the ten keys. So I’m gonna teach people right now how to memorize all ten in a few minutes, literally a few minutes.

1:54:06 So this is a great technique to use when you need to give a talk, like if you need to give a presentation and you don’t want to rely on notes, this is a great way of having your key points. This is different than me teaching, like, the actors how to memorize things verbatim, because they need to remember word for word, okay, like poetry, but this is like 10 keys, right? Because you do public speaking, we met at public, you know, speaking events and such.

1:54:29 So if you’re on stage, the problem is you want to remember what you need to know, but if you have to answer a question you come back and you’re like, oh man, where was I? Yeah, this will tell you exactly where it is. And this is a 2500 year old, 2500 year old Greek technique, ancient Greece, a Greek orator named Simonides, basically he was given a poetry reading and when he left something really bad happened, the building collapsed and killed everyone there and he was the lone survivor.

1:54:51 So it was his responsibility to help the family members identify their loved ones and he was able to because he remembered where they were all sitting. And we do the same thing, can’t you remember, like recently if you had a dinner party, who was sitting to your left, who was your right? Because as hunter-gatherers we didn’t need to memorize numbers and words, we needed to remember where things were. Where’s the clean water, where’s the fertile soil, where’s the food, where’s the enemy tribe, that was our survival.

1:55:13 So we store things in places. Okay, so this technology is very important. Very much so, because so what I’m going to do is I’m going to walk everybody through my office. I’m going to designate one place, two place, three place, ten places, and then I’m gonna put each of the brain tips on each of the places, and that’s gonna utilize visualization and place, okay, and tell people to remember, because those are two huge principles in memory. Now by the way, in the first place this and the second place that, if you’ve ever found yourself saying that, that’s where it came from, this, that languaging, if you’ve ever found yourself saying in the first place, in the second place, it came from this 2500 year old memory technique.

1:55:45 We don’t use that anymore, now we’re bringing it back. It’s one of our, the techniques, but it’s in our language, it’s been there before we had, could write things down and everything else like that, we would remember these ways doing this. So everyone can take a deep breath and if it’s safe take, close your eyes just to help you focus. I want you to imagine you’re on a plane, you’re going, we have an office in Westchester, New York, which is a suburb of New York City, and I want you to imagine it lands in Westchester Airport, car picks you up, and even if you can’t imagine it, just imagine you can imagine it, and just the car picks you up, you’re in the back seat, you’re going to my office.

1:56:19 You get to the office, the first place is the parking lot. So we can just repeat out loud, everyone, what’s the first place? Parking, parking lot. And when you get out of the parking lot, I want you to imagine the first brain tip. There’s a good brain diet waiting for you and a big brain buffet.

1:56:34 I mean, just like blueberries and avocados and green leafy vegetables, walnuts are really good for the brain, they actually look like brains, dark chocolate, right, turmeric, very lowers inflammation in your body, and so you’re there and you’re having a big food fight, brain, super brain in the parking lot, right? Okay, and would never happen, you’re like, Jim, this is so childish, but who are the fastest learners? Children, right? Musical instruments, you know, languages, be playful here.

1:57:01 Number two, you walk over there, there’s a, like a waterfall creates a moat around the building so you cross a bridge. Second place is the bridge. What’s number two, second place is what, say it out loud, the bridge, the bridge. And when you’re crossing the bridge you’re killing ANTs, okay, automatic, you’re stepping on ants, automatic negative thoughts, these big ones the size of wrath, exactly, use your imagination because that’s like domino really says, that’s your power, right, your superpower, stepping on the ants, great.

1:57:27 From there you go into the building, the third place, you get into the third place, the elevator. What’s the third place? Elevator, elevator. And everyone who’s with us right now, say, say it out loud also, so that you get your auditory memory. Thursday, elevator.

1:57:38 You walk into the elevator and you start exercising, that’s the third brain tip, exercising. So whatever exercise is for you, you have your personal trainer in there, maybe you’re doing your yoga, whatever it is, your burpees, whatever you got, do it in there, but seeing him, feel it, you can’t just hear it. You get out of the elevator, or you get to the fourth place, which is the hallway. You walk into the hallway. What’s the fourth place?

1:57:58 All the way, and you’re walking in the hallway and all these brain vitamins are there on the floor, big bottles of brain vitamins, maybe you’re tripping on the brain vitamins, you see the omega-3s, the DHAs, the ginkgo bilobas, your vitamin B, your B12s, all your brain vitamins, and you’re like Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, you’re jumping over the brain vitamins. I’m in the hallway of the movie The Shining, and like the kid with the perfect thing, I’m in the house. That’s number four.

1:58:22 You open up the door to the office and immediately to the left is the fifth place. It’s the closet, closet. And so what’s the fifth place? Closet. You open up the closet and inside is your fifth brain tip, is your positive peer group.

1:58:36 I want you to see all your happy friends in the closet, in the closet, all your happy friends are having their a cheery, amazing time, high-fiving each other, happy friends in the closet, they’re encouraging you, they’re challenging you, they’re cheering you on. Great, you’re halfway there. From there you go to the sixth place, which is the receptionist. What’s the sixth place? Reception, receptionist.

1:58:56 And the receptionist is cleaning the environments, cleaning the air, changing the air filters, vacuuming, mopping, and they’re, everything is obsessively clean. All right, clean environment. From that, behind the receptionist is the seventh place, is the fish tank. So what’s the seventh place? Fish tank, fish tank, beautiful tropical fish tank, and in there you want to remember sleep, so just see Nemo and Dory sleeping, but don’t just make it regularly sleep, they’re in their pajamas, they’re snoring, they are in their bunk beds.

1:59:28 See and feel what that would feel, imagine that, if it makes you laugh. Remember, information alone is not memorable, information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory. So they’re sleeping. Now from there you walk to the classroom because you’re going to take, you know, our speed reading class. The door to the classroom is the eighth place, the door.

1:59:45 What’s eighth place? The door, the door, and it’s locked. So how do you open it? You just put on your helmet, which reminds you of protect your brain, and you headbutt the door open, not that that’s very good for your brain, but it shatters everywhere, but the helmet is what you want to remember, protect your brain. Okay, from there, immediately up front is a white board, that’s a ninth place.

2:00:04 What’s the ninth place? White boy, board. And I’m there, I’m there and I’m drawing on there, teaching you, and what am I teaching you? I’m writing these two words, new learnings. New learnings, and I want you to think about the marker, think about what your favorite color is.

2:00:19 What’s your, what’s your favorite color? Uh, red. Red, and it’s red, I’m drawing that in red, new learnings, because new learnings makes neurogenesis, neuroplasticity. There was a study on the cover of Time magazine, these nuns living to 80, 90 and above, they found out half of their longevity had to do with their faith and their emotional gratitude, but the other half, they were lifelong learners, because of it added years to their life and life to their years.

2:00:44 I just talked about this in Sardinia here while I was here, which is one of the Blue Zones. From there, on the side of the classroom are all these bonsai trees, these Japanese plants, and what you need to picture is stress management. So imagine meditating or getting a massage, but you have to do it on the bonsai trees, so it’s a little prickly, right? Bonsai trees, I sit up there and meditate. Yes, stress management on the bonsai trees, maybe you’re meditating, whatever gets you out of stress, maybe you’re having a glass of red wine, but sitting on the bonsai trees, right, okay, perfect.

2:01:19 Now open up your eyes. Okay, that was fun. Yeah, yeah, that’s yourself, and that’s the thing that, and it’s a great exercise in focus, creativity and imagination. It’s a great strategy and practice, and strategy, and the reason I’m bringing this up at a meta level, I’ve never talked about this, but all the jobs in the 21st century are going other places, right, and everyone wants to know like what makes us human. We have A.I. coming and everything’s gonna be automated and everything’s gonna be outsourced, right, so where’s the potential for growth in our careers and as an entrepreneur or someone who’s progressive?

2:01:52 Three areas that computers aren’t going to be able to duplicate anytime soon that makes us more human that I would double down on, number one, whereas everything’s being automated or sent to Asia or, you know, and to be able to outsourced or artificial intelligence, three things that’d be really hard to outsource: creativity, right, creativity, imagination and strategy. So these exercises that we did aren’t just for helping boost your mental intelligence, to help you learn what I just wanted to teach you, it’s a great exercise in mental fitness, help you be more creative, help you exercise your creativity muscles, your imagination muscles, and using real step-by-step strategies, you know, in terms of three steps, you know, you imagine it, you link it, and you put it in place.

2:02:35 So from here now you’re giving your TED talk, right, you have to give, which you’ve done before, but let’s say you have your 18 minutes and you want to talk about the 10 keys for unlocking your Kwik Brain, right, and you’re just like, hey, the research says one third of it is predetermined by genetics, biology, two thirds in your control, these are the two thirds. Number one, you just walk around my office and you get triggered. So everyone can say this out loud because we want to make it interactive.

2:02:59 Number one is not the, well, the place is the parking lot, but what are you doing there? Brain food. Yeah, it’s everywhere, eat your brain food. Perfect. You go over to the second place, the second place is the what?

2:03:10 The bridge, the bridge, and what’s the brain tip? I’m squashing the hands. Yeah, squash those ants, automatic negative thoughts. And then from there you go into the building, you get into the what? Elevator, elevator, and what do you do in the elevator?

2:03:23 I’m exercising, exercising, exercising, burpees, great for the brain, it gets the heart rate going, really good for the brain, especially the first thing in the morning. And then from the elevator you get out and you’re immediately right in the fourth place, which is the what? Hallway, hallway, and what’s all over the floor? All of this, supplements, right, all my, all of my nutrition, brain nutrition, brain nutrition, that’s number four. And then you go into the room, my office, immediately to the left is the fifth place, you open up the what?

2:03:50 Closet, closet, and who’s in the closet? My peer group, they’re positive. Now they’re stuck to each other and they’re all getting along with each other, having fun, they’re positive and they’re positive, good friends are good for your brain. From there you get out of the closet, you talk to the who? Reception, receptionist, and what are they doing?

2:04:06 They’re keeping everything clean, clean air, clean the water, clean the, good for the clean internal environment for your brain. And then from there, behind the receptionist is the fish tank, and what are they doing? They’re sleeping, they’re sleeping, not just any sleep, they’re good, they’re getting the deep sleep, which is good for your brain. And then from there you’re going to the class, you open up the, I thought I lost this but I got it, the door, the door with my head, and I make sure I’m being careful with my brain, no brain injuries.

2:04:29 Yeah, no brain injuries because you’re wearing that helmet. And then immediately up front of the classroom I’m drawing on the what? The big white whiteboard, and it says in big red letters new learnings, new learnings, new learnings, good for the brain. And finally number 10, what’s on the side, all those Japanese plants, bonsai trees, and what does that remind you of? Reminds me stress management, on meditating on the body, manage your stress, because fight or flight, you know, stress is good for fight or flight, physical, but not if you need to take a test, not if you need to give a presentation at work.

2:04:58 You know, but those are the 10 keys for unlocking your Kwik Brain, and the thing is, when I go through that, notice you can do all that but not sleep, you’re not in good shape, right? Everyone wants to know the one thing. You do all that, be deficient in B12, you can be in challenger, you be with all that and be with energy vampires, and you know it’s gonna suck the mental energy out of you, or wonder why you’re just mental fog, brain fog, and you’re losing it.

2:05:19 Every single thing is important, and so my goal is genius leaves clues, that it’s not a mystery, we just have to do it. Just like going back to this, that, you know, first you create your habits and then your habits create you. Turn these into regular habits, you know, and make it fun too. That’s why the other thing is I think learning can be fun. Learning doesn’t have to be a chore, you know, we thought in education it was just like boring, we would repeat ourselves over and over, but it could be stimulating, it’d be creative, you know, and then when we’re good at it, we do it more.

2:05:47 There’s this confidence, competence loop, you know, I think a lot of people don’t read very well, you know, so they don’t do it and they’re not confident so they don’t do it, and then that affects them because we know leaders are readers, you know. If somebody has decades of experience and they put into a book and you can sit down in a couple days, read that book, you download decades into days, that’s a huge competitive advantage, right? But most people don’t like to read because they’re not good at it, but the better if you learn how to learn to read, because the last time, reading’s a skill, you’re not born with it, but how long is the last time you took a class called reading?

2:06:15 You were six. So the difficulty demands increase, but we still read like a six-year-old, and there’s simple things you could do to be able to improve that. But my point is if you get better at it, you’re more likely to do it, and if you’re likely to do it, you’re going to get more confident. So that’s the competence, comp, competence confidence loop, you know. People want to be very conscious of that.

2:06:32 Was a gangster exercise. I’m sure you heard that before. It was amazing. Tell me about Jim, what are the questions you’re asking yourself? Yeah, so for me right now, I was recently, and almost like almost died, I was in an accident just a few years ago, a car accident, and it made me think about legacy, and because part of me is still the boy with a broken brain, every opportunity to really grow something I really, I turned on the media, turned down the book deals, turn down PBS specials, franchising, infomercials, like, you know, train the trainers, always getting out because I just, for me, I just don’t want the spotlight because, but now after that I feel a moral obligation because if I feel like our education system is doing such a service and it just, I want to fill in those gaps.

2:07:19 You know, I feel like our greatest gift that we have, there are two things, our time and our brain. You know, that’s why I call our, my program Kwik Brain or podcast, because it’s how do you make the most of your time, because that’s the one thing you, and not everyone is the same, we don’t have the same networks, we don’t the same education, we know the same financial resources, but we all have 86 400 seconds and how we use it, and I’m saying invest in things that pay you back, like the, here’s the thing, the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing, you know what I mean? But first things first is one of the other habits of success, you know, Habits of Highly Effective People, in that book, and most people, they’re getting good at things that don’t matter, you know, and so what I’m saying is learning how to learn is going to give you huge returns, it’s that X on the engineer’s box or the screw that you’re in turn that’s going to light up the power for everything else and make your life easier, because we deserve it, because we’re suffering strongly too much.

2:08:11 I also want to say that going through my deepest struggles led to my strengths. My two biggest challenges growing up were public speaking and learning, and the universe has a sense of humor, because all I do is public speak on this thing called learning, right? But people don’t realize, we hear about traumatic stress all the time, post-traumatic stress, there’s also this thing called post-traumatic growth, that some people come out on the other side of adversity and difficulty actually wouldn’t change anything no matter how horrific it was in the moment.

2:08:39 They found a gift out of it, they found a meaning, they found a strength, they found a mission, something else, and I feel like that, I found my mission, and because I had this accident and I was thinking about legacy, now I want to be able to help more people, so that’s why I created the podcast. You know, that’s why, because I want to democratize, there’s no advertising on it, I just want it, it’s 15 minutes long, brain hacks for busy people want to learn faster, achieve more, and I’m thinking like you, how do I, how do I help more people, because I had the boy with the broken, I was the bro with the broken brain, so I want to build better, brighter brains, and my real mission is no brain left behind. One billion dollars doesn’t motivate me in the least.

2:09:14 What? One billion brains turning on, one billion minds, you know, raising the collective, you know, intelligence, and not just book smart, I’m talking about people could think for themselves, like school teaches you what to think and what to learn but not how to think and how to learn, and I want to, I want that, I think that that would be something I would like to contribute to in a big way. Imagine what that world looks like. What would we be surprised to learn that Jim does in his spare time?

2:09:40 That Jim does in his spare time? Yeah, you probably won’t find out that reading comic books in my spare time is a big, is a big secret, but for me I like to challenge myself, much like you, especially physically, because I feel like I need to put myself in difficult situations continuously because it makes me a better teacher and a better coach. Like I really look at myself as a brain coach. People have a business coach, financial coach, a personal trainer, a voice coach or whatever, I want to be your brain coach.

2:10:07 Everyone, like, I want to be this world, I want to be a brain coach for the world, and so my thing is to be a better teacher, make, I need to be a better student, and I always, like, I started taking flying lessons recently, you know, because I have, I get very, I have a lot of motion sickness. Yeah, and being in, like, you know, playing with only two people and, like, it’s like single engines, like very, it’s very uncomfortable for me, but I like to feel what it feels like to feel uncomfortable because it reminds me what, you know, the learning process, what it feels like to not, like I could take, after teaching this for 25 plus years, I automatically think speed reading, everyone should just do that, that they should read three times faster. It’s because it’s not frantic speed, it’s actually an ease, it’s just like so easy, you know.

2:10:47 Reading slowly takes more effort, you know, your eyes are stopping ten times, you know, a line and it’s frustrating, it’s fatiguing, but I think everyone should know what it feels like to be able to read faster and learn faster. It’s like, but it’s like describing what a rose smells like or describing what a rainbow looks like that someone ever seen it before. Yeah, and I want to give people those experiences, so I like to put myself in difficult situations so you can know what it’s like for them.

2:11:09 And also because you find it exciting and challenging. Yeah, I still, I still do. Yeah, I learned, I was, I have like 60 hours in a Robinson R22 helicopter, so I was learning that and talk about a lot of emotions going on. I mean, spatial, fear, adrenaline, you know, different things moving different ways, it’s exciting. Yeah, I mean, technology is really, we live in a very exciting time right now.

2:11:34 I mean, it’s, I feel like we almost have an obligation because we have a responsibility, you know, going back to, you know, when I got to introduce, you know, Richard Branson and Stan Lee, and I reversed this, and with great responsibility comes great power. I feel like we have a responsibility to do it, you know, and then it makes, to make everything better. We also, we all have to play our part together. What scares you? Oh goodness.

2:11:58 I mentioned before sitting down here with you that, you know, I don’t do a lot of these conversations because still before I get on stage, and this week I spoke in front of a total 10,000 people in three continents just this past eight days. Getting on stage still scares me. Being on video still, because I’m still like, you know, for me I wouldn’t, it’s not my nature, you know, because it’s for me it’s, I like, I like my space, I’m very introverted, right?

2:12:29 You really were the invisible guy. Yeah, I really, it really, so being in those kind of places, it does. I mean, I think my mortality, feeling like I don’t do enough, you know, in terms of contribute as much as I can, that pushes you into it. It does, it motivates me because, you know, even recording podcasts and such and going out to millions of people and doing these videos, it’s not comfortable because I never want the spotlight, you know, I want, I want to have influence on people but I want to be necessarily known for it.

2:13:00 Yeah, but sometimes that’s the best way to influence. Yeah, it’s that weird dance. You must, I would love to recruit people who are watching this, if people got value from this conversation to repost this conversation on their social media, maybe tag both of us and post their big aha. Remember I said that if, when you teach something you get to learn it twice, I love feedback, so I love to find out what, what, it’s always interesting, people can listen, read the same book or this in the same podcast or this or whatever, this is the same speaker, but everyone walks out with different gems.

2:13:30 So in terms of activity as a brain coach and as a teacher, fundamentally I would love to see if people share this on Instagram or Twitter, Facebook, wherever, and then tag the two of us and post their big aha. I’d love to read that, or maybe their burning question. Yeah, yeah, I’d love to hear that as well. What keeps you awake at night? I know your sleep is good, but you know, what’s something that constantly creeps into the brain?

2:13:52 Yeah, my sleep actually, I don’t talk about this, but my sleep is actually very challenged. I have very severe sleep apnea, right? I for seven years I slept almost two, three hours a night total. I stopped breathing. It’s a breathing disorder that’s usually because someone’s overweight.

2:14:11 It’s not my case, but it’s, I stop breathing 210 times a night, each time is for a count of at least 10 seconds. So essentially the doctors at UCLA says, Jim, no wonder, it’s like somebody coming in 200 times a night and putting a pillow over your face. And I use a CPAP device and dental devices and I’ve done, you know, all kinds of, you know, insane stuff, you know, because I’m very, you know, I do a lot for my self-care. But so what keeps me up at night is the sleep apnea itself, and I had surgery even on it and just all kinds of stuff.

2:14:42 Everyone had just like my learning challenges, this is a challenge, but my question asking, going back to questions, yeah, my question is, where’s the gift in this? You know what I mean? I think when people are going through difficult times, one of the things that changes your focus, a new question is like, you know, where’s the gift? Someone’s going through a breakup or something, they’re, you know, loss of family member or financial hardship, where’s the gift?

2:15:05 And for me there was lots of gifts in my learning challenge because it turned me into who I am today, but with the sleep I could tell you two gifts that came out of it. Number one, I would say that it’s forced me to double down on all my skills, right? So like I live this, just like when I was talking about Will Smith, how do you prepare, like I don’t prepare, I just stay prepared, like I, like I don’t, I could roll out of bed at 4 o’clock in the morning, have this conversation with you because this is just who I am, right?

2:15:33 And so I, but it forced me to live this, so I don’t just say it, I do it and I teach it because it works for me. But the second gift that’s come out of it, out of necessity, is commitments, meaning that when we’re saying that our most valuable asset is our time, and even the people who are watching this, I have a huge love and respect for, and it’s not platitude, I feel like your time is the one thing you can’t get back, and so I really want to give a thousand percent to somebody who’s willing to put their time and attention to this because they could be putting it somewhere else, right? So I really feel like it’s a gift, you know, and so knowing that for me because I have only a couple hours of sleep, I get tired, you know, very easily, that’s why I have to do all these, you know, self-care things, because I think most people don’t prioritize self-care and self-love, and self-care is not selfish, you really have to schedule and put yourself first.

2:16:26 But my thing is it’s forced me to filter commitments and agreements very differently, at the highest standard, because I’m very protective of my time, so everything in my life is hell yes or it’s hell no. Like, I want to be here with you, Brian, because I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time, you know, our schedules didn’t mesh, I was in the MLS even visiting London and such, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be. So when we say we talk about the power of presence, like with Bill Clinton and how he had a great memory, like I’m, you and I are completely present with each other, I can feel.

2:16:55 This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had because we’re both here and we’re both engaged, because lots of times, I can tell you, being an interviewer myself on my podcast, is you know when somebody’s attention flips, you know, when it goes somewhere else, and you also know when they’re not in the conversation, they just get the next question, you know what I mean? Because often I’ll hear, I’ll be listening to a show and somebody said something profound and the person’s like, well, tell me about this book, you know, I mean, I’m like, oh my goodness, there’s so many gems in there. I was just like, but you’re here and you’re present.

2:17:22 And so for me, not getting sleep, because I have a certain amount of energy, I don’t over commit, and you know, everyone says like, say no to good so you say yes to great. I think we all, and the more successful you get, the more options and opportunities you have, so there’s opportunity stress, right, but you have to say no to so many things. I think everyone should have a to-do list, but I think you should have a not to-do list, you know, on there should be, like, not checking your phone the first hour of the day and stuff, but I have, I have very strict standards on the things that I do, not because I’m so, like, amazing, it’s just I don’t have that much time and energy, you know, to be able to, I’ll be depleted, you know, and I can’t fly to Dubai and Hong Kong, all this stuff, you know, because that affects, flying this side of the world for me it’s very difficult with my sleep, because when I get out of my routine, I’m not in my sleep sanctuary that I built, it makes it even more difficult when I’m in a new, brand new environment or hotel.

2:18:11 So I would say that what keeps me up at night, sleep apnea, but the two gifts out of it though is I’ve doubled down on my skills and I want to become an expert at that because I live it and share with other people what’s working for me, and number two, be protective of your time, right? Honor your time because it’s the most valuable asset you have. People don’t want your gifts, your family doesn’t want your gifts, your family, your friends don’t want your gifts, they want your presence, which is another word for gift, right?

2:18:35 But be there, but be choosy, know what’s most important to you in life. Ask yourself what’s most important to me in my life, right, and then list it and then work backwards, like we had, you know, from your funeral. Yeah, yeah, I love that question: how can I make this a gift? And if you’re going through a really hard time, the kid with the broken brain, the guy who is suffering with sleep apnea, how can this be a gift? Like what lessons can I learn and move forward?

2:18:58 And, you know, I mentioned this Iron Mind movie in this Ironman, one of the things I dug up from my past in New York City was my heroin addiction and overdose in 2001. Wow. And it’s something I had really compartmentalized and never talked about, and it was so much pain to me for so many years, Jim, and with this series it all came up because I went to New York City to film this and all this came up and I ended up talking about it on the series, and then I realized that that’s why I went through all that pain, because now it’s a gift that I can share with other people and let them be aware of these dangers and then also let them see that it’s okay to talk about things, you’re saying before.

2:19:35 And I was like, wow, this, I thought it was always just going to be for no reason, just my own personal pain, but actually it’s this amazing gift now. I love that so much because you turn your mess into your message, you know what I mean? Like I got to coach Jim Carrey and we spent the day at his home and he was going to film Dumb and Dumber, I think he was done with number two, it was kind of interesting, like I want to get smarter before I get, you know, Dumb and Dumber, because I help, you know, them speed read scripts or be focused on set, remember their lines faster, right?

2:20:03 And we’re making guacamole, which is great brain food by the way, and in the kitchen I ask them, like, why do you do what you do, what gets you out of bed? And he was like, he tells me all these stories, but the essence of it was, you know, he acts like a complete fool in most of his roles, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, you know, this fireman, like, because he acts so extreme because he wants to give people who are watching permission to be themselves, you know. He had this whole thing, this was so long ago, but he was like, Jim, I want to free people from the concern of others, because he thinks the biggest challenge people have is they’re they’re living somebody else’s life and they’re putting me put into a box and they can’t fully express themselves.

2:20:44 You know, and I find he shows people how he does that. Exactly, and he lives his message, the life we live or the lessons we teach. I’m not saying he’s perfect any more than I think I’m perfect, I’m just saying everybody we can learn from either as an example or some people we learn from as a warning too, you know. There’s there’s lessons in everything. And so I walk in, I wake up, every, talk about questions, I wake up every single morning thinking what’s, what’s anticipating, literally, what’s, what amazing am I going to learn today, you know, and what’s amazing, anticipating something incredible is going to happen, like this conversation, you know what I mean?

2:21:17 But you have that, then you have that sense of wonder. One of my favorite poets is Rumi and he, and Rumi has this quote that said, it’s about adults, like adults are so clever, right, and they don’t learn really fast because children learn fast, right? But we stop, you know, they play all the time, right, and part of it is your neuroplasticity, but still it’s their attitude, kids they, you know, we stop playing as we grow older, but I think it’s the opposite.

2:21:38 I think we grow older because we stopped playing, you know. So first of all, most people don’t have the joy and you, you’re talking about how I bring more enjoyment to this, right? But I really feel like that in order to fully engage in something we need to we need to be fully, fully present, you know, with that, and there’s a gif, I wake up with that fascination. But Rumi’s quote is basically sell your cleverness for bewilderment. Self, sell your cleverness.

2:22:03 For when’s the last time you felt bewildered? And we don’t even use that language anymore. When’s the last time you felt a sense of fascination or a sense of wonder? Children learn so fast, you know, because they have a sense of wonder and they’re not afraid, just like, you know, they’re not afraid of being themselves until we, you know, a child will keep on walking and trying to walk, trying to walk and trying to walk, they don’t say like, oh, I’m done with, I’m not gonna try this anymore, but adults will take a singing class, we’ll take a break dancing class, right, and be like, oh, this is, people were looking at me funny, I’m not good at this, and that critic will keep people from growing, you know.

2:22:35 So talking about living and practicing and playing at the edge of your comfort zone, you know, that’s where all the excitement and passion and growth is. I like that, sell cleverness, by the people. Yeah, I always ask everyone here a couple final questions. I want to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Jim Kwik and give that young man a bit of advice. Yeah, I guess you probably already would have the conversation in the library maybe right around then, but obviously you hadn’t done everything else you’ve done.

2:23:03 Yeah, what would you tell that man knowing everything you know to this day? What would you say? Wow, I didn’t know this question, this is a, I remember we just, we talked about the power of questions the entire conversation, that’s a question I haven’t asked myself before.

2:23:50 I saw this movie poster with Hugh Jackman called Wolverine, a new Wolverine movie, and I was like, wow, I can’t wait for that movie to come out in a few months, and he picks up his phone and he, five minutes later I’m in his private theater with 3D glasses watching Wolverine fight all these super ninjas, amazing, right? Beautiful Friday afternoon, he comes to get me and he says, Jim, how’s the movie? I was like, this is great, I can’t wait, you know, they’re really gonna love it.

2:24:12 He was like, I tell him because I’m still acting like a child, like a nine-year-old kid, I was like, you don’t know this but I grew up with brain injury and learning challenges and, you know, I was a boy with a broken brain, and my favorite, I taught myself how to read by reading comic books, Wolverine and the X-Men were my favorite, not because they were the strongest because they’re not, but they were the mutants, they didn’t fit in and I didn’t fit in, you know, and I felt like, the coolest part was reading the comic books, when I was nine years old I found out that the school, the X-Men school is actually in Westchester, New York, where I grew up, and I swear to Brian, I’d tell him, like, on the weekends I would ride my bicycle around my neighborhood trying to find that school and I’m telling the stories, like, because I wanted to find my superpowers and I want to find my super friends because I was being bullied in school, I didn’t fit in, I didn’t have any, you know, strengths or anything, and he’s like, listen, he’s like, Jim, I know you like superheroes, do you want to go to Comic-Con?

2:25:06 You know what Comic-Con is, it’s like this big gathering in San Diego. And I was like, when is it? Today? Friday, Saturday, Sunday? And I go from a nine-year-old to a 99 year old, not in a good way, I go like, oh, traffic to San Diego, it’s going to be horrible, and I don’t have anything to wear, and all those lines, and I have all these meetings here, I’m a very adult, right?

2:25:24 And he’s like, Jim, you want to go, I’m going tomorrow. I’m like, oh, chairman of Fox is going, I want to go with you. So we get, next morning he picks me up, instead of driving we get on his plane and I swear to you, Brian, I get on the plane, it’s the entire cast of X-Men. I mean Patrick Stewart, like, I don’t even see, like, I mean Hugh Jack, I see, like, Professor X, Wolverine, all of them going to Comic, they’re a surprise Comic-Con, right? And I’m sitting between Halle Berry and Jennifer Lawrence going to Comic-Con, right, and I’m just like, this is like the best day ever, right?

2:25:53 So I come back, fast forward, from Comic- Con he’s like, how was your day? He’s like, this is about, like, this is the best day ever, thank you so much. He was like, I have something else for you. I’m like, I don’t want anything else, what can I do for you? He was like, they really loved you, how would you like to go on set?

2:26:05 I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, we have another 30 days of filming X-Men: Days of Future Past in Montreal, you want to go see it? And I’m like, I totally want to do that. I was like, what can I do for you though? It’s like, just help them, help us help them, like you helped us, teach them to speed read scripts, memorize lines, be focused, present.

2:26:19 I’m like, I could totally do that. So next morning we’re on the X-Jet going to Montreal, we get off, the very first scene, Brian, I walk onto the set and it’s the X-Men school in all its glory, the school I’ve always been looking for since I was nine years old, and I got to see my superheroes come to life in front of me, right? And that’s not the end of the story. When I get home there’s a package waiting for me the size of a TV and I open it up and it’s a frame photograph, it’s actually my Twitter cover photo, my Facebook cover photo, it’s me and the entire cast of X-Men standing in portrait, and even better than that is the note from the chairman.

2:27:01 It says this, Jim, I know you’ve been looking for your superhero school ever since you were a child, here’s your class. I said thank you for sharing your superpowers with all of us, you know, I know you’ve been looking for a superhero school ever since you’re a child, here’s your class photograph. And it just blew my mind, and what a class act, first of all, him. Yeah, but but I I got out of it, my lesson for this going back to my 20 year old self, because the movie actually, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, it’s all about the future is very bleak, it’s Armageddon, okay, I mean every, like, and Professor X sends Wolverine back in time to give a message to the younger Professor X because to change the direction of the future.

2:27:45 So it’s exactly what you’re asking me, right? Because Wolverine’s the only one who could go because of his healing ability of his mind because he heals really fast, so he goes back in time and he has to deliver this message to Professor X when he’s not ready for it, but this message will change the future. And so my message to myself, going back in time to my 20 year old self, would be that you’re not broken. That whoever’s watching this right now, you know, it’s a lie we say to ourself, we feel like we’re not enough, that we need to be fixed, that it’s not that, if we’re struggling it’s just we weren’t shown how.

2:28:25 You know, a lot of the critical stuff that you talk about on your show, I mean, those should have been classes back in school. You know, I watch your show and, like, you need those mentors, those professors, you know, like, and then the superhero professors to teach you about resilience, about, you know, about the neurophysics of the mind and how to heal your body, how to be a high performer, how to have great relationships with people. Because for me I never found that school, so I just built it in the form of my show, you know, and that’s my superhero show, 15 minutes to learn something, unlike a mental superpower.

2:28:58 But my message to myself would be you’re not broken, that you are enough, because I feel like a lot of the biggest challenges we have is this underlying belief that we’re not. And I think it’s a lie. Yeah, and you’re sending that message out to everybody, pretty much telling them the same thing. Yeah, and I can see how much that meant to you just being a part of that, you know, like metaphorically and physically with those superheroes, and I’m guessing that you’re thinking, what would my nine-year-old self feel like being in front of all these people?

2:29:27 Yeah, I mean, and also the other message for me, like a takeaway, is just like be that kid again, you know. A lot of times I feel like, you know, we always want to be so prim and proper and I think we need to bring play and fun back to it in your own way and whatever’s most comfortable, but I feel like sometimes life could really beat out the joy out of stuff, and to do things, like, part of your self-care is not just reading self-help books and meditating, is finding joy in things, disconnecting, like you were talking about, disconnecting so you could reconnect to something, you know. I think we can only be happy again if you’re the curiosity to know yourself and then the courage to be yourself, but part of it is just being you and finding finding the joy.

2:30:03 What brings you joy, you know, what lights you up, you know? Now I kind of want to train Brazilian jiu jitsu, just, you know, the hours, you love it, and when you’re done with your pilot’s license. Yeah, try a helicopter and then the jiu-jitsu. Jim, thank you for getting me to ask that question about myself, because that’s my question, which is what you just finished with, how can I have more fun? How can I get back to the playfulness?

2:30:22 And I love doing that because when I do that everyone comes along for the ride and they make the right decisions and everything. And I can see why you’re so sought after by all these people, you know, because you have, you know, you have all this pain that happened in your life that now you’re using as your message, you know, and you’re so congruent and genuine with it. And I know you want to help those billion lives, and when you said it, it was, I got goosebumps on my arm, because what does this planet look like if a billion people just raised their brain power and consciousness?

2:30:53 I mean, that’s a place we all want to be at, and it’s more important than the economics or, you know, all these other things that we focus on all the time. And I’m really curious because I’m visualizing all my friends and my wife right now watching this, and I’m curious what this is going to flip in their brains. Yeah. And what new practices they’re going to put into place and where this goes, and I’m going to ask my team a whole bunch of questions tomorrow and I want everyone to start asking more questions around here, because this show was founded on a question: what if you get a bunch of people in the room and roll the cameras and have conversations?

2:31:25 That’s, that was the question. I love that, right? I love that. And the question was, there was no why are we going to do this, let’s just, what happens if we do it? Yeah.

2:31:31 And that’s what this has been for me, and so this is really great stuff, Jim, I appreciate it. You know, there’s a lot more going on here than reading books fast, there’s a whole lot of other things, and it’s interesting if people can remember those 10 steps about your brain, there’s a lot of other life habits in there and those are really powerful things, and I love it. So thank you so much for the time, I really appreciate it. We’ve been, I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with you for over four years, when I first saw you on stage, and so I’m so glad we had it.

2:32:02 I’m also glad we had it now. Yeah, me too, me too, because I think this is more the perfect time, so I agree. Brian, I want to thank you for you also. I mean, thank you for your platform and also thank you for the cape that you wear. And also for everyone who’s watching this, you know, I feel like that if people are still watching this right now then there’s a reason, you know, it’s not something that I know is true but I believe it’s, I choose to believe that it’s true, that we get pulled towards things unconsciously because there’s something that’s there, and what we do with it, you know.

2:32:35 When I, what I always noticed this, that one new idea or an individual could change everything in your life, you know. Like if I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar, no big deal, we have the same dollar, but if I share a brand new idea with you and you share a brand new idea with me, or I share an insight or an inspiration and we exchange there, then all of a sudden we have two brand new ideas or two, you know, more inspirations in the world, and beautiful things come from that. Very much so.

2:32:59 Yeah, and I’m gonna be all over your website and your podcast right now, and I’m gonna get you to teach me how to read faster or totally, I need to do all that stuff. So I guess I’m going to check all that at jimkwik.com? Probably, yeah, that’s where all that stuff is. So again, thank you so much. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey, and I wish you well on yours.

2:33:15 Stay in touch and come see us again. Thanks. All right, thanks.