MIT Scanned ChatGPT Users' Brains. Here's What They Found | With Jim Kwik

Digital dementia is real. You rely on technology to remember things for you, that's a scary place to be. Because think about not just offloading our memory, but our thinking, our critical thinking, our judgment, our decision-making, our creativity. You don't want to weaken those muscles. There's also a societal level, imagine a civilization that is cognitively surrendering all that. How much easier is it to be manipulated, you know, when you can't critically think, you can't filter information, you can't, you can't discern?

My guest on today's show is Jim Kwik. He just wrote this book, Limitless Daily. It's fantastic. But, as I'm prone to do, I didn't want to just talk with you about all the things you can easily just find in his book. So, we have a wide-ranging conversation from AI to gamma frequencies for sleep to a whole bunch of other topics. Jim, for 30 years, has served as a brain coach to pro athletes, political leaders, business magnates, Hollywood icons, super impressive guy.

Thank you.

And, all the shownotes including links to another podcast I've done with Jim a few years ago are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/LimitlessDaily. Alright, Jim, I got my hands on it, Limitless Daily. I think the last time we talked, I interviewed you for your book Limitless, I believe.

Yeah. Limitless came out in 2020. That was my first book. People thought I was like I had a lot of books, but that was the first one after 30 years. Yeah.

And, we're kind of like brothers from another mother because I've got Boundless.

I love it.

I love it.

Dude, I've gifted out 100 copies of Boundless.

It might be confusing for people though. Do you have no boundaries? Do you have no limits or both?

Dude, that book is huge. It's like even when you see it on my shelf, I had to put it on one of my big shelves that can make it just awesome.

Yours are pretty thick too, but I didn't even realize, this probably should have registered when I saw the word daily, But, I didn't realize until I started to read it that it literally is one day or one reading per day for the year in the way that you laid it out.

Yeah. I felt like when Limitless took off, people were asking for another, what's the next book going to be about? And, I felt like people didn't need another book. And, I love books, but for me, and I think what they really needed was an daily practice, something where they can live it, and especially starting their morning off mind before media, setting their intention before all the interruptions.

I actually read the whole thing in a day because I didn't have the luxury of time to wait an entire year to interview you.

Okay.

So, I have a bathtub in the garage and that's my reading tub. And, I literally have all of the books that I'm kind of preparing specifically for podcasts out by the bathtub. So, you probably know the name of this more than I do, what you call it when you make a pleasurable trigger like taking a bath associated with routine work-like tasks.

Yeah. So, you're actually taking a— you're not sitting in an empty bath, you're actually soaking. Or is it— I'm trying to get a visual.

Are you using a full—

Is it filled full of books or what?

Oh, this is the bath to conquer all baths. It's a hydrogen bathtub. So, it's actually infused with molecular hydrogen that I absorb transdermally. I found a company called Lumati in San Diego and they sell a hydrogen concentrator. So, that's next to the bathtub and the water comes out of the wall, goes through the concentrator, and then into the bathtub. And then, I have it surrounded by red lights. So, it's hydrogen, red lights, and then my book. And, it's in the garage though because that was the one section of the house where I had the ability to modify and build literally a little bathtub section. So, it's kind of funny because my wife will come home from shopping for groceries or whatever and pull into the garage and she can see the red light glowing from behind the curtain and she'll be like—

Then, she knows.

Hi, Ben. You working? I'm like, yep.

Wait, how many hydrogen tablets would I need to throw into a tub? A lot.

I looked into it, literally thousands.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Because my other option was I thought, well, why don't I just get a bunch of hydrogen tablets and keep them next to the hot tub and do it that way? But, the bath works out pretty well. So, yes, I went through the whole thing in a day and you break it into 3 sections. This was last week that I read it and I should I probably should have taken more memory tips from you because I don't remember the name of each of the 3 sections, but they all start with an R. Can you remind me?

Yeah. So, it's a daily book just like a daily devotional that pulls on Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Stoicism like Daily Stoic, great book. I pull on psychology, science, psychology of the mind, science of the mind, psychology or science of the brain, neuroscience for most ideas. But, instead of doing a month like January's motivation and February's focus. And, I just feel like people kind of after a few days kind of get it. I broke it down into seasons and actually 4 seasons. It's winter, spring, summer, and fall because I feel like sometimes we go through that with our biology or relationships, our business, the economics of it. So, it's 4 Rs. It goes from reset to rewire to rise to radiate. And kind of break it down, the subject matter into those kind of 4 seasons. So, like, Reset is like, you know, before you can improve your life, you have to interrupt the patterns that are kind of holding you back.

Yeah.

You know, so those kind of topics. And Rewire is about building new habits and new beliefs and strengthening like new neural pathways. And Rise is more of the daily practice compounding into the emergent property of of performance or confidence. And then, radiate is where it really emanates and actually spreads out beyond yourself into community and our social networks and leadership and everything.

Got it. Yeah, I remembered it as 3 Rs, but you're right, it was 4. What do you do if you get the book and you don't start reading it on January 1st? Is it okay to just jump in on whichever day you got it?

Yeah. I mean, so I could have organized it by day 1, day 2, day 3, which would be fine, but I wanted everyone to be literally on the same page as your books are in other languages. I want people all around the world to be literally on the same page because then I could go live and talk about everything and post a social media post and ask people questions about that day and everyone's on the same page. And so, that was important for me. You mentioned it's purple. I chose purple because my son and I, he's an early riser, he's only 3 and a half. We watch the sun come up in the morning and I took a picture one time and I color matched it and it was this hue of purple going from night to day. But I ask people to read it first thing in the morning, you know, take care of their mind before media. And purple is interesting. I don't know if you've done like research how much color psychology is and stuff like that.

I did read that book, Drunk Tank Pink, the marketing book on using color in marketing years ago. All I know about purple is it was a color of royalty and considered to be an expensive dye. But, what's the brain trick behind purple? Yeah.

For me, it wasn't so much branding as it is becoming. I mean, certainly, it'll stick out on your shelf, but it's not meant to be a book you put on your shelf. It's supposed to be on your nightstand or ideally replacing your device in a perfect world. But, purple I chose for match the morning time for me. It is It's used in robes and with royalty because it was one of the most expensive treasured colors because it was the hardest to extract for thousands of years. I mean, they would go to the Mediterranean and they would have to extract it from snail shells. So, it's very hard to come by. And, that rarity is what I feel like our readers are. It's rare to be intentional about your life and really claim the pilot seat of your mind and your day. Purple and color psychology is the 2 words that always often come up. I don't know how much I buy into that as a science, but is sovereignty and wisdom. And, this is really a book about sovereignty that we don't have to be the effect, that we have more influence than we realize and responsibility and then wisdom. But yeah.

Yeah, interesting. And, you have it laid out in addition to the 4 different Rs and then the day-by-day. There's the essay and then the quick step. Explain your name.

Yeah, it was an affirmation. It was. So anyone who read Limitless, you know, the Limitless model is this Venn diagram of 3 Ms that you could— they're levers basically that you want to unlimit. If there's a gap, you feel like you're in a box, like stuck, like limitless, like balanced out by being perfect. It's just about advancing, right? Progressing. But if you feel like you're the opposite, you're stuck. That box is— cube is 3-dimensional. So the 3 forces that contain you and then these are the 3 forces that liberate you. So I claim in Limitless and the Venn diagram where they overlap, 3 circles. It's mindset, motivation, and methods. Somebody can have great methods and some motivation, but if their mindset is, I don't deserve this, I'm not capable of this, I can't do it, then they're stuck in that box. They can have a limitless mindset and great methods for losing weight or having energy or living longer, but they're not motivated to do it. They're stuck in the box.

Right.

Or, some have mindset and motivation. They know everything is possible and they're motivated to do it, but they're using the wrong methods. Right. They're using misinformation. They're using stuff that's old and outdated. But, when they cross over, you have 3 I's. You have ideation with mindset and motivation. You have inspiration when your mindset and your motivation cross over inspiration. So, I wanted to write an inspiring piece each day, but then mindset and methods gives you ideation. I want to give them a brand new idea to think about. And then, the third one is motivation and methods. You're motivated and you know what to do. So, that's implementation. So, I wanted each passage to have all 3, a new idea written in an inspiring way with some kind of story, give them some drive, and then an implementation strategy they could do in 2 minutes. And then, the 4th thing I added was the identity statement at the end, which I feel like—

Yeah, the affirmation.

Yeah. So, we got all 4 I's and it's a 5-minute, it's literally a 3-minute read as you have seen and then a 2-minute exercise. And, first thing in the morning.

Yeah, the affirmations piece. I mean, I won't lie, I think a lot of people sometimes associate affirmations with cheesiness or make jokes about life coaching and the old Stuart Smalley Saturday Night Live, I'm good, I'm great, I'm wonderful.

Gosh darn it, people like me.

With the affirmations, how do you actually do them? Hopefully, that's not a dumb question. You'd look in the mirror and say it or you just think it?

No, no. I read this. I'm rereading this in bed. It's at the time of this recording. If I go to this one, I usually just had to grab this. This entry on this day we're recording is around little by little, little becomes a lot. But, the affirmation though is I take small simple steps towards my future self trusting that little by little, little becomes a lot. I am limitless. But, I think it's less cliché and less cheesy than I'm good enough because I think there's definitely some kind of positive toxicity where your brain pushes back.

Yeah.

You know, saying no, it's not not true. The abundance does not flow to me. You know, da da da da da. You know, in different ways. But I kind of focus each one around something that matches what they believe, and then kind of transition to them something a little bit greater. Because I think what a coach does, it's always forward-facing. Even our self-talk. You think about the affirmations, the the incantations. You know, we say to ourselves. You know, mine as a kid was I am broken because of my brain injury. I'm slow because of my learning disabilities. But I also feel like, you know, that talk is the longest conversation you're going to ever have with another human being is the one you have with yourself.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I feel like it's so important to be able to ease, you know, our mind's always eavesdropping on your self-talk. So I feel like sometimes we don't rise to a level of our ambitions under pressure, you know, or stress. We fall to the level of our stories that we're saying to ourselves and also our self-image. It's really hard to outperform how you see yourself.

Yeah.

That's the purpose of the identity. But, I read it in bed. I don't go to a special place or look in the mirror or anything or kind of play music to it or anything like that.

Right, got it. Soft piano elevator music. I think the nature of having a bunch of little essays spread out throughout the year allowed me to kind of see patterns arise in your writing like certain themes, things that I could kind of tell going through the book that you think are pretty important because they kept getting revisited. So, for example, one of the themes that I noticed I am doing right now, I'm walking while I'm interviewing you and I walk a lot during work. I have a Bluetooth remote. I use Whisper Flow to review slides, to write. Believe it or not, I don't spend the whole day in the bathtub. But, you You talk about movement a lot. You're a real expert in the brain and how it works. So, how do you describe to people how movement enhances learning and how to use that to your advantage?

For me, movement isn't just— I mean, I think the primary reason we have a brain is to control our movement. Even just having a 3-and-a-half and a 1-and-a-half-year-old and just watching them transition from their movement, crawling and eventually walking, I lost a family member who— she's older, but she broke her hip and she was very, very sharp. But there was a sharp steep kind of fall, a decline in her cognition after she lost her own movement. And so, I was really concerned about that. But I always say as your body moves, your brain grooves.

Yeah.

We've all heard sitting is smoking, those kind of things. But movement isn't just exercise. For me, it's brain optimization, right? It's part of that protocol. Our ancestors learned while they used to move, right? They weren't sitting in classrooms for 8 hours a day. And the obvious benefits that your audience is so sophisticated, they've probably forgotten more about all this stuff than most of their friends and family will ever learn. But exercise increases blood flow to the brain, oxygen stimulates BDNF. Brain-derived neurotrophic factors, which helps with so many different fertilizer for your brain because through neuroplasticity, which is our brain's ability to remodel itself based on new stimulus and novelty and nutrition, it's powerful and it's not fixed. But, I feel like movement engages your cerebellum. It's not just involved in things like coordination but also learning, cognition.

Yeah.

Some of my favorite exercises, it's like racquet sports. Is it true?

An actual longevity sport. That and swimming, I think, rank the highest unless you count chess as a sport.

Yeah. I saw recently like 9 years. I don't know if that's accurate, but it did better than swimming and jogging. But, dance, right? And, notice a lot of this stuff whether it's tennis and it's reaction time and coordination, balance, thinking speed, strategy, memory, Right? State regulation when you have a bad point or whatever it is. Dance also, but they're social too, right? If you want to build cognitive reserve where let's say you have like 2 older individuals, but they have similar developed brains, but one of them is completely independent and the other one's more dependent and reliant and maybe show some cognitive, more serious cognitive decline. Some scientists are attributing that to cognitive reserve, which is kind of like a— retirement account that we're always making these deposits every day. And, it's usually physical activity, social activity, and mental activity that's going to kind of buffer that. And so, yeah, movement is definitely a big theme. I try to plant that in there throughout. Yeah.

I'm kind of curious though when it comes to movement, you just described kind of learning movement and then also learning through movement, learning movement being, let's say, dance, tennis, et cetera, where The movement is tied to what you're actually learning. And then, learning while moving might be me learning from you right now while I'm walking on a treadmill or me listening to an audiobook or a podcast, say, at the gym or again on a walk.

Yeah.

I'm just curious if you know the answer to this or if you've looked into this, if there is a difference in the way that you learn or even in the quality of learning if you're sitting focused on a book that you're reading, say, just in a lazy chair in your living room versus listening to an audiobook while you're walking? And then, the reason I ask is for me, walking or hiking while listening to an audiobook is more convenient, but I always wonder, am I missing out on what I might have gotten compared to being curled up on a couch when I was a kid reading a book, for example?

Yeah, I would— I don't know how much. So, this wouldn't be my specialty, but I would hallucinate a couple of things just because we have a lot of students and a lot of feedback. Even working with kids, there's certain kids that just, I feel like, learn best when they could move. And, those sometimes we label hyperactive and we punish them. They can't go out to recess or make them sit even more in detention or what have you.

Yeah.

At our events, that we do, a lot of times you could see certain individuals, they sit in the back and they're stretching and they're getting in their body. There's definitely this kinesthetic intelligence. I like going for walks, listening to audiobooks. My challenge with audiobooks, and I love audiobooks, especially when I'm traveling, is sometimes the comprehension retention is not there because people are multitasking because they are working out or they're driving or cleaning their house and moving, but still not completely focused.

Yeah.

the act of learning as opposed to reading. And, listening is great and especially when you can listen at a faster speed. I don't know, do you do that and put it at 1.5 or 2x?

Yeah, I think I do. A lot of times if I'm in the car and I play what my speed is, people who are also in the car say, dude, why are you playing this so fast? And, for me, it sounds normal. And then, when I listen to it at normal speed, It sounds slow. So, I feel like the brain is somehow becoming accustomed to the faster speeds and acquiring information at a faster pace. At least, that's what I tell myself.

No, no. I mean, same with reading also. People are reading at greater speeds. Sometimes, it helps them focus better also because if it goes too slow, your mind wanders, right?

Your brain.

If you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs, it'll seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction. If we talk really slow in this podcast, people probably get distracted, think about something else, fall asleep.

Right.

Sometimes the speed directs the focus, which leads to comprehension and better understanding and better memory.

Yeah. I don't recall where I heard this anecdote, but it was something along the lines of the ideal scenario being hearing something and then seeing it. And maybe there's some kind of evolutionary psychology behind that, but literally listening to a podcast like this one with the author of the book Limitless Daily, kind of wrapping your head around the big picture forest for the trees overview and then actually reading the book would be the best way to learn. And, I don't know why it's that order, listening and then reading. Obviously, you could probably sit in a lecture at a university, have it recorded, go out and listen to it afterwards and also get some benefit. But, the order that I heard was listen first and then read.

Yeah. And, I think there— I don't think it's learning styles, but there are people certainly have certain preferred learning channels that they like to consume information. So, I think that would play a little bit of a role in it also as well. But certainly, having different modalities would just employ more of your cognitive networks. So, I would imagine there'd be deeper understanding from hearing it, reading it.

Yeah.

You know, certainly teaching it, even when I'm doing note-taking for years. I mean, maybe this was just intuitive because I came from a more, you know, challenged position when it came to learning. You know, something called marginalia where people are writing, you know, for hundreds of years they would write in the margins. Even in libraries, you would see books all the time with margins and people would actually comment, you know, to what other people have written, you know. And so there's this whole discourse going on. But, you know, I would in the beginning when I was teaching myself, to how to read better because I was such a slow reader. Took me 3 years longer to learn how to read when I was a kid than all the other kids. But I would write a sentence off of every single paragraph, like a summary of what that is.

Yeah.

And, it forced me to really focus, first of all, because I knew I had to write something about it. So, I started asking questions and direct that spotlight. And then, also, it's really cool for review because then I wouldn't have to read the whole thing. I could just see my summary And, it's also really cool. Even I do this with Limitless Daily because you don't have to stop at the end of the year. You start on whatever date there is and you go through. And, many dailies, you go through it again because it's not that the book is different, but hopefully we're different.

Yeah.

And, you see something that you didn't catch before. It's particularly meaningful because of the life stage or cycle that you're in or what's going on. And, it's interesting to see my notes even going through it in terms of what I was thinking because hopefully it's a little bit different. We talk a lot about cognitive flexibility And, just like physical, there's so many adaptations so interesting whether it's our metabolism or it's our bones, how with challenge and resistance we get stronger. I'm very concerned though where AI has taken out all the friction.

Yeah. I want to ask you about AI for sure. I sometimes think about that, by the way, like, well, if I were blind, I would probably become even a better audiobook learner and listener. And, if I were deaf, I would probably just speed up the pace at which I acquired knowledge through reading. And so, you're right. It's like in my world in nutrition, there's plasticity, right? So, if fat is your preferred fuel and you're eating, say, a ketogenic diet, in many cases, your body shifts towards fat oxidation as its primary mechanism of generating ATP. Whereas, if you shift towards more carbohydrate as your primary fuel source or maybe eat a slightly higher carb diet like a Southeast Asian or Pacific Islander type of diet rich in rice, fruits, things like that, you could actually shift towards a healthier form of carbohydrate metabolism. And, I think perhaps the same could be said for learning. You brought up AI and I'm curious. I'm really curious for you especially being someone who's so knowledgeable about learning and memory and this idea of offloading things to AI. I'd love to hear how you're using it and where you draw the line.

The line's constantly moving because it's kind of like in business, they always say kind of skate where the puck is going with both AI. The puck is teleporting all kinds of places and it's really hard to keep track. What I would say is my mantra is human intelligence over artificial intelligence. I do use technology and I do use AI. Our team uses AI. It's just You know, for me, AI can scale and amplify, but it only scales and amplifies what a human brings to it. If somebody is very confused and chaotic, it'll amplify and magnify that. If somebody is very clear, they're competent, you know, they're educated, it'll scale, it'll scale that, right? And AI is no longer, you know, a competitive advantage. Everybody has access to AI, just like information. Everyone has access to all the information, you know, and some people could use it where it's They could use it to create a nice social media post. Somebody else could use it to create the next health and wellness billion-dollar venture, but it's the human intelligence that's the difference. My challenge is the cognitive offloading. It's because it's doing the work for us. Many people listening read or heard about the MIT study that came out about a year ago.

Okay.

So, at MIT, they took students, they write essays, Group A, use ChatGPT. Group B, use Google. Group C, use neither.

And, Google, by the way, is just using Google for research because Google now also has AI as a top search result. I'm assuming you mean Google is the way we traditionally might have thought of it.

Very much so. And so, the summary of it is they scan their brains and see also whose brains were the most active, what group, and certainly it was C. Right. Because they had more cognitive load. Group A, I mean, when you're copying and pasting, it doesn't take a lot of effort. But when they're tested, though, for comprehension and memory of what was the final product of that essay, Group A had the least remembrance of it because they didn't have to work for it. And Group C obviously had the most because they earned it. And just like you can't buy a fit body, you can't buy an incredible romantic relationship. You have to work for it, right? And always just— and you know this, but it's just like the things that we often want, we have to employ. Like, if you want more energy, you have to use your energy. You can't just sit on the couch and binge-watch stuff. You're not gonna get more energy that way, right? If you want more strength, you have to use your strength. If you want more focus, you have to use your focus. If you want more memory, better memory, you have to use your memory. But when we surrender it to a device, it's like— It's like going to the gym and asking your friends to lift the weights for you. There's no way that there's any benefit for that. So, I'm concerned about that. And, technology over history has always changed the way humans think and use their minds. When we started using the written word, when we started the printing press changed things. I mean, even fast forward all the way—

GPS changed New York taxicab drivers' brains, right?

Absolutely. GPS, if your device is telling you when and where to turn, and some people follow it blindly and they end up like, how do I get all these kind of errors, especially when it first came out? But, that's surrendering. So then, what happens? We don't exercise our visual spatial intelligence. If we use a calculator, then I think it's important to learn arithmetic and that base knowledge for logic.

Yeah. Yeah.

So many people now can't do some easy mental math.

But, when it comes to cognitive offloading, okay. So, here's this blue Post-it pad.

Yep.

I've already written down 4 things on it since we started recording, 2 related to this podcast, 2 unrelated, just a couple of things I literally thought of while you were talking and wrote them down to get them out of my brain and onto paper.

Yeah.

And, I've been a fan for a very long time ever since college of the concept of a second brain. I used to go everywhere with a notepad. I'd write things down, ruminating thoughts, tasks I wanted to remember, et cetera. And, that practice that's now largely transferred to cognitive offloading to the Notes app in my phone and occasionally calendar or Siri-based reminders, I think has allowed me to keep a clear head and accomplish more. But, do I need to be worried about just not allowing my brain to just remember things on its own?

So this, this would be— who am I to say like what people should be focusing on? But the principle— set the process aside, but the principle behind it is we make these choices, right? So I like— I use AI to automate things that are lower, like lower mental tasks, um, you know, so I could free that space. Because you said that so you could accomplish more, so you can put your energy or focus So, I'm not getting derailed by rumination basically. Right, right. And so, I feel like that's absolutely valid. I mean, I don't want to memorize 500 phone numbers, but it should be concerning though that we've lost the ability to remember one or something we just read or a PIN number or what hotel room we checked in or where we parked the car or someone's name, those kind of things. So, it's just like physical fitness. If someone's office or apartment's on the 8th floor, an elevator is a form of technology. Just like AI or anything else. And great, very convenient. But then we don't take the stairs, right? If we take a car or an Uber or Lyft to go 10 blocks to run an errand, convenient, technology is great, but then we don't get our steps in. So, I would do this deliberate discomfort training where I'll memorize when I'm driving, just the license plate here or whatever just so I get—

Oh, you do do that. Okay. That's what I was going to ask you was now that cognitive offloading is So convenient and accessible to everyone, do you artificially, if you want to use that word, sometimes—

Yeah, sometimes I'll make the choice to turn off my GPS and then do DNA Explorer and knowing that the consequence of being a few minutes late to something is okay, I'm willing to pay that price. But sometimes, yeah, digital dementia is real. You rely on technology to remember things for you, your to-do list, your grocery list, your calendar, things that you don't want to memorize, 1,000 phone numbers. But, I still think we should maintain the ability to still be able to do that. If someone's climbing up a hill, somebody who's just really fit and healthy like yourself, you'll be able to do it with ease and make it look really easy through technique and just having the energy and the fitness and the form.

Yeah.

But, somebody who's unhealthy, it's going to take more because they're not physically where you're at either in skill or strategy, in state, in terms of your biology. And, it's just going to work harder. And so, So, I just feel like we never want to— like on the plane, I just got off a plane and I was watching what somebody was watching there. They're watching WALL-E. You ever see this?

Yeah.

They had their headset in, so I didn't— I still remember when I first saw it, but it was in the future where everyone's morbidly obese and they're in these little pods being moved around. And then, one of them falls over and 5 robots have to come to carry him up because he's lost the ability to do that. He's in front of a screen of this big Yeah. Gulp soda, you know, and that, that's, that's, that's a scary place to be because think about like not just offloading our memory, but our thinking, our critical thinking, our judgment, our decision-making, our creativity. You want to— you don't want to weaken those muscles because also at a societal level, imagine a civilization that is cognitively surrendering all of that and all those muscles are atrophied because for through non-use, like that's a scary place. How, how much easier is it to be manipulated. When you can't critically think, you can't filter information, you can't discern, you can't use basic common sense or logic. And, we don't want those muscles. So, my rule just as to get practical is I build before I borrow. I want to build my own intelligence before I borrow. So, let's say somebody listening here, you're going to go to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to do something, some kind of situation you wanted to do something. Before that, just take 5 minutes, build. Build your own intelligence. So the B is brainstorm. So I literally would do this every time because now it's a habit. I'll just brainstorm this situation myself before I go to the answer, right?

Yeah.

The U is I want to understand what the real problem here is because you know this. Like, we've been asking prompts way before AI. We're asking our own human intelligence prompts all the time, asking ourselves questions. And I think a lot of times I think we're asking, we're optimizing for the wrong question, right? Like, we're asking questions like, oh, how do I just lose this weight? Or why don't people like me? Or what if you put this into an AI? It would be like, oh, here's all the the evidence why, because it's a poor prompt. So it's attributed to who?

Einstein.

If he had an hour to solve a problem, he spent like 50 minutes. Who knows if it's really attributed to him, but he spent 50 minutes really defining what the real problem is.

Sharpening the axe to cut the tree.

Yes, absolutely. So that's the understanding. Really understand the problem. The I in BUILD. So you have brainstorm, understand. The I is imagine and come up with 3 answers. Imagine 3 solutions to this problem before you're spoon-fed the answer. And I would also say, using your imagination, I could be facing this health situation and just thinking like, oh, what would Ben do? How would Ben look at this? Or, if I'm looking at a problem, I'll say like, how would a 5-year-old look at this problem? Because maybe it's just elusive obvious because they're so creative and they don't have the same limitations and boundaries. Or, what would somebody 10 times smarter than me, how would they look at this? And, how would they solve this problem? Right, right.

Kind of reminds you of the Tim Ferriss question, what if this were easy?

Yeah. Or, using the 6 Thinking Hats. You take it from different points of views logically, emotionally, and gives you permission to be able to step out. And so, again, Again, you brainstorm, you understand the problem, really clarify it, you imagine 3 answers to it, and then the L in BUILD is leverage AI. But I also want to point out, like, AI will placate a lot unless you give it specific instructions. It's like a sycophant, right? It can make the dumbest person feel like they're the smartest person on the planet with their responses.

AI has, as they say, a very broad nose.

Yes, very, very, very much so. So the L is leverage AI. And how I'd be thinking about it is not just putting that prompt, that, that question that you defined is like pressure test your ideas, right? Or, or say, say like, hey, you are the expert, you know, of the exact opposite of what I believe, you know, make an argument, you know, against this.

Yeah.

Right. Or point out my blind spots or my cognitive biases. What are my false assumptions here that, that, um, that I, that might not be real, right? So I would use it more less than more convenient, but more as maybe even a critic or a coach, right?

Yeah.

And then, the D in BUILD is decide because ultimately, AI could process and compute way more information than human beings will ever be able to do. But ultimately, human beings, their human intelligence has to decide what this stuff means, right? What is important? What do I do with this data? Because once you know more, you could do more. When you know better, you could do better. So, I'm optimistic. I actually am optimistic that technology can make— it's going to force us to be more human. I think that's a big conversation. Like, how do we— in our time right now, how do we remain deeply human in an age of AI? Like, how— what's our value if AI could do this? Because there's an identity crisis too, right? Somebody's spent years studying radiology and they've been like 13 years as a radiologist and there's AI could do it 1,000 times better with 100% accuracy, better than the human eye. And, you know, like, then who is that person?

I know. Just imagine. I mean, hopefully that would free you up to do something like produce a radiology creator type of channel to educate people or something like that. But yeah, those type of creative pivots I think are going to become increasingly common. And then, the idea of cognitively challenging yourself in an era where there are potentially fewer cognitive challenges I think makes sense.

Yeah.

You could certainly say there are some people who are like, I don't know, not to stereotype, but a blue-collar worker who goes out who does work with their hands and their body who can fulfill Maslow's hierarchy of needs by just picking stuff up and putting it down and painting and roofing, et cetera.

Yeah.

And, they're using cognition, but maybe they don't require as much memory or learning compared to someone who might be in a creator position who's actually, I don't know, making art or music or something like that. But, I think that whether it's your job or whether it's your passion, the idea of challenge, especially from a memory or creative standpoint, is something that's tied into human happiness and fulfillment. Meaning, I think musical instruments are great.

Yeah.

And, I think even people who suck at music can eventually learn to find the happiness and fulfillment that learning to read notes or memorize a chord or a lick can create. And, for me personally, Jim, that's one way that in an era in which I can offload so much cognitively, I can still challenge myself with my guitar or with the piano.

Yeah.

Or, another example might be we gather as a family every night and we're a Christian family, so we memorize a Bible verse every night. And, working memory muscles, but it's also allowing us to dwell on something positive and kind of preprogram our brains for something positive before bed. But yeah, we do kind of have to seek those things out a lot more now.

Yeah. And, I'm even doing that with my kids. I'm just going, even my kids going, even the books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth. You're just doing it. And, it's just extra. It's just in a world— I mean, this is also leaning into cognitive fitness and cognitive antifragility. I feel like resilience is bouncing back to a default, right? You're under some kind of stress or whatever, you bounce back, right, to some kind of default setting. But cognitive antifragility is where you're actually bouncing forward. I mean, it's modeled, like, think muscles, right? If you never stress them, they don't grow, right?

Right.

If you stress them appropriately and you have your recovery, you could repeat the process, they'll adapt. I mean, that's, you think about hormetic response or heat adaption, right? The same biological pattern shows up in all these different systems in the body. My children, when they're born, they're exposed to more bacteria or soils, they're going to have a more robust immune system, right? Because that's— or if you're lifting weights, what was once hard becomes easier because we're adapting. One of the challenges is think about the industrial age, right? It took a lot of the physical load from people. Right? Because machines were doing the work that humans' muscles would do. AI is taking a lot of the cognitive load off. Right? And so, that could be a challenge. I'm concerned with modern living that's optimized for convenience. Right? It's removing all the cognitive resilience just like physical resilience, like temperature control, DoorDash. I mean, you don't have to do anything nowadays.

What you're describing, Jim, is kind of like the The one version of the Gray Man theory in that aliens are us from the future after being on GLPs for so long that we become sarcopenic, protein-deprived, and weak. And then, our brains have just swollen because of the mass amounts of information. And so, it's kind of a different version of WALL-E. We're weak and have done a great deal of cognitive offloading, but it's not like it's made us stupid. Rather, it's just almost given us too much to think about. I'm no neuroscientist, but I think the interesting thing, and again, I don't know if you've come across this, Jim, is that you mentioned hormesis. And, if we break down the muscles, they become inflamed and then we get new mitochondria and hypertrophy and satellite cells and new muscle fibers. And, very similarly, if you spend a lot of time in the sauna, you produce heat shock proteins. And yes, you lose some water and electrolytes, but then you replace that. And, you bounce back stronger. With learning, I haven't really seen much about whether the brain actually gets damaged if you think too hard and then needs recovery to bounce back or if it just grows in a different way.

Yeah. I think we— Alright. So, I compare a lot of it and just like some metaphors aren't 100% accurate, but when it comes to the muscles, I compare your mind like a muscle. It's use it or lose it. It could atrophy, but it also needs the same thing. It still needs novelty. It still needs nutrition. It still needs recovery and sleep. When you sleep, you—

Yeah, that's a good point, I guess.

Short to long-term memory and all that, that's happening. And also, a lot of stuff that's going on unconsciously or non-consciously as people dream and come up with ideas in terms of creativity and the different brainwave states. I think going back to the cognitive load thing, I'm just concerned about When we're talking about GPS navigating for you or AI writing for you or search remembering where everything is, these are incredible tools. But if we never exercise those capacities ourselves, we shouldn't be surprised if we become less practiced over time because a lot of things are perishable skills, right? That if we get out of the habit of it and your brain, your nervous system fundamentally is when you're doing something, you're telling your brain what's important. Right, for survival. Meaning that if somebody ever— if people listen to this podcast and they don't make any changes in their life, or they read a book and they're not making any changes, one of the reasons there's a forgetting curve is because your brain's like, okay, I have all this information and we're not doing anything with it, so it must not be important, right? So it's not, it's not, it's not doing the modeling, right? It's not strengthening those cognitive webs based on necessity. But you do something a certain amount of times, you're like, okay, this is important, I want to be very efficient. Because the brain, I mean, the brain's right, what, 2% of your body mass requires like 20% of the energy. Like, I work with chess players that'll burn like 6,000 calories just sitting down.

Yeah, it's crazy. And you're not just making that up. Like, I've actually seen like metabolic studies on the amount of glucose utilized and the increase in metabolic rate when chess players are freaking like thinking.

Oh, yeah. And I can even feel it even when I'm in deep I have pulling on these kind of reserves, but then I could crash if I hit a certain wall just physically being exhausted or just not having the calories or anything else or the sleep or the recovery to be able to do that.

Yeah, yeah. It's less damage and more deprivation, I think, whether it's nutrient deprivation or just cognitive deprivation that's occurring. But, you do make a good point about sleep. I know you talk about that. I've kicked that horse to death so much on the podcast.

Yeah.

We don't have to take a deep dive into that. But then, there's the other thing that you talk in the book and it's the idea of distractions and digital distractions particularly. You have a little bit of what some people might consider to be a paradoxical approach when you talk about this so-called white bear effect. I hadn't come across that before, but can you describe what that is?

So, white bear effect is basically in psychology, they're saying if I say something like, don't think of white bear, it is extremely difficult not to think of white bear.

Very similar to the purple elephant.

Purple, any of that because your mind can't process the negative. It has to think about the negative instead. Now, how I use it in one of the entries in Limitless Daily, I think, was like, don't check your phone. Right. Don't check your phone. Then, it's almost you're basically the command where you can't process a negative, it's going to do that more likely. Don't think of the color purple.

Right.

For $1 million, don't think of the color purple. We're going to more likely to do that.

So, even harder when I've got your book in front of me, which is purple.

Right. And then, so it does activate our focus. And, the thing about this is when we're thinking about those prompts, Right. I would be thinking about, like, you know, what is the best use of this time? What deserves my focus in this moment? Right. And also spot check because it's never a direct line. We're always like, if we're just like with an airplane going from here to there or even a boat, we're always kind of navigating turbulence and getting there and resetting our course, you know. And it's interesting, like, with the Limitless Daily, you know, I'm at people to do it in the morning because when I was doing research on it specifically, and this is, I think, useful whether or not people buy the book or not, is I was talking to Dr. Michael Breus and other sleep experts.

Yeah.

There's something called sleep inertia. Sleep inertia is where you transition from a sleep state to a waking state. So, imagine what comes online. Your conscious awareness comes online, your alertness comes online, your attention's coming online. I mean, you think about your working memory, it's empty because you haven't filled it with anything. It's like you're waking up to like you rebooted your computer and nobody else had access to open up all tabs and put their agendas and everything else and flood your messages and everything else. So, there's all possibility. You wake up to a beautiful Like snow, untouched from traffic and footprints and other people's stuff. So, you could really create something possible. Um, so that window, um, when I was doing this research and talking to people like Dr. Michael Breus, is like 15 to 45 minutes. And it depends on your—

When you wake up?

From when you wake up, approximately. So sleep inertia is like where everything's coming online, you're transitioning, it's like your computer is rebooting. It's about— it could be 15 to 45 minutes depending on How much sleep you got, your circadian rhythm, what stage of sleep you woke up in, right? So, about up to an hour. But, the reason why this is so precious, like I was just seeing a video with Simon Sinek I had on Facebook Memories 9 years ago where I was just saying like don't touch your phone the first 30 minutes a day, I was saying, and not the last one, stuff that's pretty standard now for a lot of people is because what happens is there's something called attentional priming. And, attentional priming is like the mental inputs in that window could have a disproportionate effect on the rest of your day, specifically in areas that I'm focused on, which is focus. So, the mental inputs, what you decide to let in into your nervous system during that window could have a disproportionate effect on what you focus on later that day because you're intentionally priming your mind in terms of focusing on what's important. Number 2, how you feel. And, we know that if you check your phone, which you get a message from somebody and it puts you in like— or social media comments or whatever or something from family or whatever. in a mood for hours, right? Because there's residual.

It's the worst idea ever to have the phone in the bedroom without it in airplane mode, much less disable airplane mode when you first wake up. That's like—

Completely. And now the kids are just sleeping with their phones underneath their pillows and all kinds of stuff, which is— I'm going to talk about the EMFs and everything else. And then, not only does it affect disproportionately your focus and your feelings, but also how you frame situations throughout the day. Think about if you— most people doom scroll. Nobody would invite first thing in the morning 200 strangers into their bedroom to talk about whatever the heck they want to talk about.

Yeah.

It's kind of like what we're doing, you know, first thing if people are going on their messages. And so it's not only wiring your brain for more distraction throughout the day, you wonder why you can't focus because that's what's magnified and amplified, but also it's also magnifying like reactivity, right? All of a sudden, like, you get an inbox, you have to fight fires, you're on the defense, you're on your heels, right? How are you gonna like go forward? So I would just say mind before media. Right. Direction before disruption, right? Intention before interruption. And, good powerful ways of using that first thing in the morning, bonding with your spouse, right? That gets amplified. Prayer.

Absolutely.

Right.

Yeah. And, by the way, I hate to say this, but the idea of simply not turning on your phone being a kind of form of Stoic meditation-like activity, I think has something to be said for it because you are suppressing an urge that typically you do succumb to at multiple points throughout the day and you have an opportunity to train your brain in the same way you might train it by stepping into the gym when you don't want to or closing your eyes to meditate when you feel like you're just too busy. I think it's just one extra notch in in your belt to be able to say, I don't turn my phone on for an hour after I wake up. Because, from a neurotransmitter standpoint, you're also training more slow dopamine clearance when you do that as well. If you wake up to a bunch of dings, from the minute you wake up, you're training quick dopamine hits and that builds up over time. I mean, if you look at how you build your day is how you build your life.

Right. And, you don't even have to earn that dopamine when scrolling or binge-watching or watching porn or do anything or snacking on something. There's no effort that's required even when we're designing Limitless Daily.

Well, there is, but most people don't think about how they're paying for their $300 to $400 per month cell phone bill. There's effort, but yeah, you don't think about it at the time.

Yeah. No, that's great reframe also. And also, at nighttime also, I was talking to a client who just, she's Very successful. But, she's telling me, I was asking her to map out her calendar and what her morning and evening looks like, those bookends. And, at night, she's like, I'm going to admit, I scroll. And, I'm like, okay. And, we looked at the usage and it's about 2 hours and 15 minutes a night on average.

Geez.

And, I was like, wow. And then, she was defending it, right? She was like, no, well, I have a lot of responsibility. I have a lot of people that work for me. I have a lot of stress. This is my way of de-stressing. And I was like, okay, let me just like get this really— because obviously your sleep's all jacked up and everything from the blue light or the content is so stimulating and rumination. But then I was like, okay, would you— you go to bed at 9, you do this for a couple hours, and then you get up at 6. Would you get up at— that 2 hours you spend at night, would you get up 2 hours earlier? Would you get up at 4 o'clock to do what you're doing right now?

Right.

No, that wouldn't even make any sense. I'm like, okay. But you know what I mean? It's just like, it's kind of silly, the choices that we make because we're just on autopilot, you know? And Duke University I saw some study that says about 40% of our behaviors daily is habitual. It's on autopilot. And, your brain must be very efficient, right? It doesn't want to have to expend all that energy to think differently or do differently.

Yeah, yeah. And then, that by the way is also a great reframe. Anything that you do whether it's the silly YouTube video or doom scrolling or porn or whatever, I challenge you try to set your alarm for 5:00 a.m. and get up and do it. And, it just feels like such a waste of time. And then, in the evening when you've got reduced cognitive resistance and willpower has faded, it seems a little bit more right. But, to frame the unproductivity of it, just do it during your peak productivity hours and you can feel how off it is.

Yeah. Another reframe that I had in one of the dailies entries is just that attention is currency. What if we actually just like our attention is being sold because it's free on social media and everything else to advertisers? If attention really is currency and you had to pay for it, pay it in paying attention, It's even built into the vernacular. If every time someone went on Facebook, they had to take out their credit card or bank wire money into it every single time, they would treat it differently. And then all of a sudden they go to Instagram and had to do the same thing.

Then people think of it kind of sort of like when we used to have to pay more for data. We did think about that a little more.

Exactly that. But they would save their attention. They would invest their attention in things that gave them greater return, whether it's happiness, fulfillment. But yeah, in that sleep inertia time, prayer. Gratitude. Like, I promise you, people pray and gratitude and really give thanks, they're going to see more blessings throughout the day because they've done intentional emotional priming and protected that window. And so just like in that window, you would never eat a bunch of muffins and croissants for breakfast because it's going to affect your focus, your feeling, how you frame situations because your blood sugar and everything else, it's out of whack. Same thing with the mental inputs you put in, which is even—

Muffins, aka cake. I remember my parents used to buy the Costco muffins. And tell us that they got healthy muffins. And, it wasn't until college and I was studying nutrition, I'm like, oh, we were eating cake for breakfast every morning.

And then, just the last thing on this is just like how people are overfed and undernourished in society with all these empty calories. I think that's what we're putting in our minds all the time is we're overfed and undernourished because the quality of the stuff that's being presented. And also because of the algorithms, we only see one point of view, which could lead to cognitive rigidity, which means whatever you're engaging with, it's always going to show you that political angle or that diet angle or whatever, because whatever you engage with, they show you more of. I don't even see my followers on social media anymore. I just see whatever I happen to be looking into.

Yeah.

And that could be a challenge because then you're in an echo chamber, right? And so having cognitive flex— just like physical flexibility, like doing mental parkour is so very important, just like physically, because you're in a bend, you're not going to Right. You're going to be nimble, you're going to be faster. And also, like, cognitive rigidity, you see that all the time. Like, cognitive rigidity is where you break. Where Blockbuster Video, where are they? Right. Because they were cognitively rigid. Where's Kodak? Kodak, one of their engineers created the first digital camera back in 1975, and they shelved it, right? Because they were so vested, they're so rigid in terms of the way things were. And I think that also happens with us. As you evolve, I'm sure their beliefs that you had about health and wellness and longevity, anti-aging, biohacking that you no longer believe. And, I hope everyone feels the same way. Otherwise, then they haven't. What's the growth there? But, we adapt new information. You can have strong opinions loosely held that a part of intelligence is being flexible, change your opinion based on new data, right?

Yep. Yeah, exactly. I remember one of the first books I wrote, 100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism, I would estimate 15% to 20% of the metabolism-boosting tactics in that book actually don't move the needle for fat loss. But, at the time, I was just looking at research that showed an increase in metabolic rate and thought, oh, well, this is going to translate to weight loss. And, that's not necessarily the case. And, I could come up with many other examples. But, just in a little bit of time that I still have you, Jim.

Yeah.

For people watching, BenGreenfieldLife.com/LimitlessDaily. We kind of just scratched the surface of what's in the book, but I can tell you, I'll ask Jim a little bit of a bonus question here that is based on, at least as far as I could tell from my bathtub, is not discussed in his book. And, that's this whole modern field of cognitive-enhancing tactics. Ironically, there's the old movie Limitless about the limitless pill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas, you're more like you become limitless by doing the work. But, there's vagal nerve stimulators and light sound stimulation machines and peptides and nootropics and biohacks and supplements. Do you use any of that type of thing?

I phase in and out even with wearables and metrics. Part of it is even when some of the stuff I used to do before kids, I'm like, yeah, I have a couple hours. I could hop into my hyperbaric chamber this morning and then on the And then I was experimenting with a float tank and I play some audio when I'm listening there to see if I can learn it faster. So I'll experiment myself. It's less and less just because of where work is and where family is. So it is some different kind of cycle, but I'm fascinated by the science. I think MEDS Rx is what I focus on. M is my meditation. I have to disconnect to reconnect. It's just interesting, like a machine, if you pause your treadmill or you pause your computer or you pause this camera, Machines stop working when you pause it, right? But, human beings, I find it's been my experience that when I pause, certain things come online. I actually start working. I start recalibrating. I start rethinking. I start restoring and recovering, right? All these things come online when I do take a pause. So, the M is some kind of meditation, which I do have. And, I have devices, many as you have, that I get because I listen to your podcast and you interview a lot of these founders.

Right.

The E is exercise. Right. And then the D is diet. Right. And then the S is sleep. So, meds, I really focus on those 4 mostly. And then the RX is relationships, right? It's my connections with my community, with our clients, with my family, with my friends, which is so important. I also want to say because, you know, we've all— I'm sure you interviewed the, you know, the director of the Harvard study.

I didn't interview him, but I've talked about it. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, uh, we had him on and, you know, talk about, yes, diet's important, exercise. And what actually moves me more is there's social— it's not just your neurological connections or biological connections, it's your social connections and the depth and safety. Because also, and this is not what he said, but I— you borrow— you, you will regulate around someone's nervous system, right? You ever be around somebody that's incredibly calm and I just feel it, right?

Yeah.

Or, or also with people, like, I will borrow courage from someone's belief in me. Right. And so, relationships. And then, the X is the extras that I would put underneath there. But, I wouldn't do it in replacement of getting good sleep and eating good food.

Wait, what'd you say the X is?

Is the extras. Extras like the stuff, the neurofeedback stuff, the hyperbaric, the red light, and the nootropics. And, I still like it all. But, I think before I would do nootropics and I do them, but I would still focus on my sleep, my movement, my metabolic health, my stress levels, meaningful relationships, continuous learning, purpose. Purpose and community is a big one.

Yeah, huge.

But, I would love your recommendations. I follow your work for a very long time and there's something you can add. There's a lot.

I think I could name one thing not to leave you hanging.

Yeah.

I think that the field of electrical medicine is young and the idea of brain stimulation with light, with sound, with vibration, and even with under the right supervision, things like neurofeedback or transdirect cranial stimulation is huge. And, what I mean by that to give you one example is I recently was reviewing several studies on gamma stimulation of the brain in the day assisting with sleep onset and sleep quality at night. And, gamma is kind of the quick ones, 40 hertz. And, the timing of the gamma hertz signal was not like while you're laying in bed at night but earlier in the day.

Well, it turns out that— How much earlier? Because I have a vibration bed with light and sound and it has gamma.

Yeah.

So, don't do it when I'm ready for bed but do it how much earlier?

Typically, afternoon is a good time because looking at it from a logistical standpoint, it seems to wane after about 8 hours. So, if you do it right when you're laying in bed in the morning, it's probably going to be gone by the time you're in bed. And then, afternoon, at least for me personally, I bake in time right after lunch to do something that's restorative. So, what I've been doing back to just the logistics of it is I have one device called the Vielight that produces a 40-hertz signal. I also have a device called a Roxiva lamp that does a 40-hertz signal. And, I've been trying to do anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes of gamma hertz training. Oh, fuck. Okay. Which is usually 1:30, 2:00 p.m. And, it has improved. I wouldn't say my sleep quality in terms of time in bed, but sleep latency dramatically improved as far as how quickly I fall asleep.

That's great. I have the same unit. So, I'll—

Yeah.

That's good.

Yeah. Wait, you have the Roxiva or the Vielight?

Oh, I have the Roxiva, but I also have a—

Okay. Yeah. Roxiva has a few different gamma sessions, but the best one for entrainment because kind of hearing the same sounds and seeing the same signals over and over again is important. They have one called Tropical Calm and I believe the session lengths are 30, 45, and 60. So, you can kind of choose based on how much time you have available but you're getting a similar signal, they just vary in length. So, that one is pretty good. So anyways, we're in the weeds now and I know we're out of time.

Yeah, yeah.

But, BenGreenfieldLife.com/LimitlessDaily is where you can get this book. You don't have to read the whole thing in a bathtub in a day. I don't recommend you do that. Go through it bit by bit. I actually am going to reread it and do the daily route just because, again, this is a pretty short time commitment to be able to go through.

I also realized when I was designing it, it's like, again, you don't floss for 3 hours and then you're good for the year. It doesn't come in these occasional bursts of effort. It's what you're doing consistently that makes a difference.

Brain flossing. Alright, BenGreenfieldLife.com/LimitlessDaily. Jim, thank you so much for doing this, man.

Thanks, buddy. Thank you everyone for joining us.

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