Jim Kwik on Strengthening Your Natural Intelligence

Well, I think how you start your day really sets the tempo and the momentum for the rest of the day. There is science there also. There's something called sleep inertia. Sleep inertia is the phase of going from sleep to the waking state, and certain cognitive functions come online. Your awareness, your alertness, your attention comes online. And sleep inertia talks about how the mental inputs that you put in that first window when you first wake up has a disproportionate effect on the rest of your day. It's interesting.

Jim, who is the target customer for Limitless Daily?

Well, I wrote Limitless Daily for anybody who wants a really jumpstart in their day. I think if you want to— before, I would say mind before media. Right, intention before interruptions. You want to be direct, you can direct your mind before distractions. And it's something that people could read in 3 minutes first thing in the morning. So, you know, anybody who has a mind that they want to have a better day, I think those days add up. You know, a year really shapes you, and then just improving a little bit each day. But they're for people who maybe they like reading, maybe they don't like reading, but it's something to start their day to get their mind right. People struggle with, who wants real hope and real help? Maybe they struggle with distraction, maybe they struggle with fear of failure, maybe they wake up and they feel like they're overloaded and overwhelmed. Maybe they also have that negative self-talk.

Hmm.

And are there maybe fear of what other people are gonna say about what they're gonna do that day? But it's really to make, give people more confidence and more capability to win the day. I think if you win the day, you gotta win those first few minutes of the day. So that's why we wrote the book.

Are we more suggestible first thing in the morning? Is that why you're choosing, or is it a different reason? Why first thing in the day?

Oh, well, I think how you, how you start your day really sets the tempo and the momentum for the rest of the day. There is science there also. There's something called sleep inertia. Sleep inertia is a phase of, of going from sleep to the waking state, and certain cognitive functions come online. Your awareness Your alertness, your attention comes online. Sleep Inertia talks about how the mental inputs that you put in that first window when you first wake up has a disproportionate effect on the rest of your day.

Mm-hmm.

It's interesting. It influences more how you focus, what you're going to focus on that day, how you frame the day, like situations. Are they opportunities or are these big problems? Also, how you feel the day also as well. The challenges with that sleep inertia, it's called attentional priming. You're priming your attention to be able to see what's important for the rest of the day. Most people we know grab their devices, and so what are they priming their attention for? Comparison, judgment, stuff that might not be the most important thing, or even reaction. You might pick up your phone and get a voicemail message or an email or— social media message that puts you in a mood for, for hours. Yeah, so I really think if you want to be able to win the day, you have to really protect your mind in those first few minutes of the day.

Talk to us about— give us a metaphor of that difference in the beginning of the day, maybe the plane metaphor. Talk to us about what happens if there's a 1-degree difference when you start your day, where you might end up.

Yeah, I feel like when we wake up in the morning that we're getting on a plane, right? And we're heading to a certain city. Hopefully we know what city we're heading to. Most people, they— I think the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing, but not having clarity of where you want to go could be an issue. But when people get on planes, ultimately there's turbulence, right? And just like in life, there's turbulence. There's things, there are economic factors, there's family factors, there are health factors. There's, you know, you're always reacting to things, which can be a challenge, which could create some uncomfortable plane ride. And, and even if it shifts just 1%, if you're going this direction, 1% over the course of a day, the length of that flight, you can end up in a completely different city or a different country. And some people are letting their planes be hijacked by other people, and it's, it's running and ruining their day also as well, which is a challenge. But I like to take people by the hand and bring them into the, the cockpit, put them in, in the, in the pilot's seat. I'll be the co-pilot on this adventure, but I feel like To remind people that they are the pilot of their mind and of their day. But I think it's so very important before you look at everyone else's agenda for your life and everything else that's on social media. Like, no one would wake up the first thing in the morning and invite 200 strangers just to talk into their bedroom to talk about whatever the heck they wanna talk about. But essentially, that's what we're doing when we're brain rotting and doom scrolling that way.

Less for a content piece and more of a funny realization I had recently, not only are those 200 strangers influencing the way that you think about your day, but they're all giving you wildly different messages on the emotional spectrum.

Yeah, and they talk whatever they happen to want to talk about. And while people, you know, it had maybe has some entertainment value, I feel like if we can't be upset by the results we didn't get from the work we didn't do, and I find that we have to stand guard to our mind, you know, and especially it's all our greatest currency is attention, right? Like, think about even the words we use. We pay attention. We're paying attention. If people had to wake up the next morning and had to take out their credit card every single time they put attention to something, like they go on Facebook, they would have to enter their credit card information, then they switch over to Instagram, have to enter, enter. I think people would see the real cost to that, and they would think a different question, like, how can I save, preserve my attention? How can I invest my attention to something that would be more rewarding, you know, for the life that we desire and we really deserve.

Now, the way that I understand neuroplasticity is that our brains can change either in one big fell swoop, which is hard to predict and hard to engineer, or slow and steady over time. And so is that part of the philosophy behind Limitless Daily? Is that small predictable change over time?

It's all consistency. Like, I think in life, if we're persistent, we could achieve it. Like, if you're persistent, you can lose that weight. If you're persistent, you can make that money. But if you're consistent, you get to keep it. And I don't think life transforms just with one or two or a handful of breakthroughs. I think it happens that consistency compounds over time, that little by little, a little becomes a lot. I mean, think about, you don't go to the gym for a weekend and just, you know, kill yourself and then you don't— you're fit for life, right? You don't— great relationships aren't based on just one incredible conversation, right? It's the consistency of it. And so you could use all the metaphors in the world, whether it's your health or your relationships, but it's done— it's what you do. And the thing is, is you have to make it really easy for people. You have to remove the friction. And you can't just talk about not touching your phone first thing in the morning. You have to replace it with something else. And that's why when you look at sleep inertia, that's why prayer is so powerful. First thing when you wake up, that's why gratitude practices, journaling, visualizing your goals for that day. And so what we like to do is take the phone out, 'cause one of the best ways of changing your habits, 'cause first you create your habits, then your habits create you, is to control your environment. And just removing your phone, putting it in the bathroom, replacing it with something that's empowering, something that can nurture your mind, that will help you set a direction, for where you want your plane to go that morning, I think is so very important.

In the introduction to Limitless Daily, you ask the reader to sort of close their eyes and visualize one year of reading and implementing this book on a daily basis and some of the changes that that might make. Why do you position that right in the beginning of the book?

Well, I think that there's a version of everybody that's patiently waiting. Like, think about your ideal self. with the ideal life and think about like, who would you be surrounded by? What would you be doing in that day? You know, how do you feel about yourself? What's, what's your, what's your self-talk like? Who are you surrounded with? What kind of experiences are you most proud of?

Mm-hmm.

And, and then you work backwards. So I think sometimes we're burnt out not because we're doing too much. Sometimes we're burnt out because we're doing too little of the things that light us up, right? And I feel that one of the challenges is just not having that intentionality There's a quote in Limitless that says life is letter C between the letters B and D, where B is birth and D is death. Life, C, is choice. And I truly believe that these difficult times, they could define you. These difficult times can diminish you. These difficult times could distract you. Or these difficult times, they could develop you, right? We decide. We decide if things— something's gonna make us bitter or it's gonna make us better, you know, all the time. And so I, I really do believe that anything worthwhile is— it requires Consistency, right? Like, it's like, you know, hello, my name is consistency. I hang out, you might know my friends greatness and success. We hang out a lot. It's, I just tweeted that the other day, but it's true. I don't know anybody who just does one thing once and then they're set for life.

Mm-hmm.

And so I feel like the lowering of the friction, like grabbing a book, reading it for like, for example, 3 minutes a day, and then you become a reader. It becomes like who you are, it's your identity. I mean, you write and talk about this. It's, it's not just the habit of reading, it's like you seeing yourself as a reader, right? And I think reading is one of the most important things you could do for neuroplasticity, right? Neuroplasticity happens, which is your brain's phenomenon to make new connections. That means your intelligence is not fixed, your thoughts aren't fixed, your feelings aren't fixed, your habits aren't fixed. It could grow, but it requires novelty and requires nutrition. Just like building a body, if you want to build a body, you have to give it some novelty, right? You have to work it out, and then you have to feed it the nutrition to be able to grow. Same thing with your mental muscles. So this is kind of like Limitless Daily, because one of the questions we got with Limitless was like, wow, this is like an owner's manual for your brain. Where can I start? How can I incorporate this into my life daily? That's what actually people would say. And so that's That's why we created the book.

I've read that you describe our brain as the hardware and our mind as the software.

Yeah.

Can you describe the differences between the two?

Yeah, the brain is something that you could see, right? A surgeon could take out your brain, put it on the table, and it has mass, you know, 3 pounds of gray and white matter. The mind is your thoughts, right? It's those ideas. It's your creativity. It's your focus. It's almost like, let's say the brain is the riverbed and the mind is the water, is the river itself flowing through it. And it's interesting because the brain is, if it's the riverbed, will determine the direction of the mind a little bit, right? Because that's the hardware. But also over time, how you use your mind, how the water flows, will actually change the riverbed also in turn. So it's fascinating to me that you don't have to be the same person that you are. I mean, some people, when they say they have 30 years of experience in a subject, when you really talk to them, maybe they only have 1 year experience that they've repeated 30 times. So it's not a lot of growth, there's not a lot of neuroplasticity, they're reinforcing what they already know.

Mm-hmm.

What I love about reading is getting new perspectives. An author has done research or has a life experience experience, and you get to, you know, maybe it's decades of experience, and you can read it in a few days and download that decades of wisdom into days. I mean, that's a huge advantage. Besides the, all the, as you know, all the, all the incredible benefits of reading, I feel like that it's a gateway habit that if we get people reading just a few minutes each day, then they'll start reading more other places, right? Which could only, I feel like, could improve their life. And there's a challenge right now with reading. You see, you've seen all the statistics. Not many people, very few people read every single day. More than half of the populace don't even read one book, and that's, that's, that's a little scary. And now with AI and every— everything, all this content that's online nowadays, I'm really concerned for, for future generations also.

I am too, and we'll definitely do some more content on AI and reading in a little bit. First, do you think Limitless Daily will have a bigger impact on somebody's brain or somebody's mind?

On both. So it's a daily book, and there are other daily books, right? There's daily books on Judaism and Christianity, on Taoism. There's daily books on Stoicism, right? And they pull from those fields. For us, I wanted to write the book that was inspiring, that inspires people to have a great day. I also want to give them a new idea that maybe they haven't thought about or maybe written in a way that they haven't seen before, and then make it science-based. And so it pulls from— I always reference either the science of the mind, which is psychology, or the science of the brain, which is neuroscience.

Mm-hmm.

Because I feel like it's important for people to know why and how things work. And then we give them a very short 2-minute implementation. So it's inspiration, it's ideation, it's implementation, and then we end with a new identity statement, something that they could, you know, kind of a mantra that would help be like a compass for them. Like, I am somebody who commits, you know, I am limitless. And again, your brain is like a supercomputer, and your self-talk in your mind is— it's like the program it will run. So if you tell yourself, I'm not a reader, then you probably aren't going to read a whole lot. Or if you tell yourself, I'm not good at remembering names, you probably won't remember the next name of the next person you meet. Because your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk, right? Not that you have one negative thought, you know, on social media or whatever about comparison or rejection, whatever happens to be, and it ruins your life any more than eating a cupcake will ruin your life. But if you eat that cupcake dozens of times a day, Every single day, there'll definitely be a consequence. And I equate that just like even starting your mind right, directing your mind before the world has an opportunity to direct it for you. It's like, you know, you would never eat those same cupcakes first thing in the morning because how is that going to impact the rest of your day? How's it going to affect your focus? How's it going to affect how you frame, you know, the day and being in a bad mood and how it's going to make you feel? And so food is information, you know, that you feed— that you're feeding your body. And, you know, I always say when we start standing guard over our mind, to be very selective what you let inside your mind— the people, the ideas, the individuals and ideas— because it has a bigger effect than most people think.

Hundreds of strangers every morning pulling you in different directions, sharing different philosophies, multitasking thoughts. It definitely has. It can lead you into chaos.

It's also this context switching and there's this cognitive fatigue. Your brain is only 2% of your body mass, but it requires 20% of the energy. It's an energy hog and to waste it— again, who am I to say what's a waste of time for somebody? But if we're complaining about not getting the results that we want, I think people need to open up their phone and see how much usage they're actually spending. spending on things that don't matter, that don't matter to them.

Yeah, well, 1 in 10 Americans is now on an antidepressant. Similar stats for anti-anxiety medications. People aren't happy. And so I do think a big reason for that is social media consumption and not choosing what you consume, but having it chosen for you by the social media feeds.

Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. And, you know, and obviously we know the billions of dollars that have been invested in these platforms. with some of the top behavioral scientists in the world to make it addictive. And so, I'm an analog person, personally. I just like to— I feel like even in the age of AI, I feel like the optimistic view is that it'll force us to become more human. My challenge is that I feel that artificial intelligence— I don't want natural intelligence to become artificial.

Right.

We're cognitively offloading our thinking to our devices, And what happens when we get mentally lazy?

Mm-hmm.

It's like, even my shirt says, use it, right? You use it or lose it. Your brain is an organ, but it reacts more like a muscle. But if you put your arm in a cast for a year, it wouldn't grow stronger. It wouldn't even stay the same, right? It would atrophy. And that's what we're seeing with cognitive decline. There's a high reliance on technology to remember, to think for us, so we don't have to remember and think for ourselves. And what happens in a society or a civilization where we're not thinking for ourselves, right? That we're not exercising our critical thinking, our sense of judgment, our sense of reasoning and logic. It'll definitely make you more easily manipulated by authority. Oh, for sure. By other people that have intentionalities, agendas for your life. And then also, what happens when we're on all kinds of drugs and processed foods? we're more suggestible just because we're exhausted, and that could be a challenge too. So I feel like while AI is evolving, I feel like this is a revolution for human transformation. No human being is going to be able to compute and process information like technology can. So what makes us useful, right? I feel like we have to lean into things that make us more human, right? Our EQ, our compassion, our empathy, our understanding, our meaning, our purpose, our ability to adapt and be cognitively flexible, our ability to lead, to be a nexus in our— it's not just your neurological networks, it's our social networks. Because while AI could feign empathy, it doesn't know heartbreak. It doesn't know how to console a grieving child. It doesn't know what it's like to ask for forgiveness. or to go through a hard day. And so I feel like— I really think that potentially if we go in the right direction, and it's sensitive, no doubt, but if humanity— part of what I like in these collaborations is that we're breaking verticals, right? There's a whole community of people that want to make the world a better, brighter place, but so many people are working in silos by themselves and You know this as an author, it could be a very lonely journey, right? It's just you and your own mind with a computer. And so, you know, what I like about this is I feel like, how do you become limitless in a limited world? We have to, we have to do it together. And I think it's going to force us, in order to be valuable in society, to, to be more human. So I feel like there will be a renaissance of humanity where if AI is going to automate everything and do like the maybe the lower mental tasks for us, which I'm all for, you know, life of convenience. But we're optimized for comfort, right? We're talking about the comfort crisis. Michael Easter, who's speaking at our event coming up at Limitless Live. And, you know, when you do the easy things in life all the time, you just take the easy route, then life gets very hard, right?

Mm-hmm.

You binge watch, you doom scroll, you binge eat, whatever happens to be. Life gets hard over time. But if you do the hard things in life, Then life gets a lot easier, right? And I feel like that's our ability to adapt. My challenge is learning requires effort, and if you don't have to work for it, if AI removes all the friction and it just hands us, spoon-feeds us information, then, then we're in trouble. I feel like that, that's, that's going to be a big challenge, the cognitive offloading, for it to think for us and us not be able to develop and keep those muscles strong because there's going to be a dire consequence.

I noticed that because I used AI to write almost all of my emails in 2024, that around the beginning of 2025, my ability to manually write an email had atrophied to the point that it was embarrassing. And so I started to write emails manually again. It took a while to build that muscle back up, but I'm so happy that I did. Unfortunately, I don't think enough people are aware of what's happening.

It's just like equating back to muscles and physical fitness. It's just like technology has always been here. If your apartment or office is on the 5th floor, you take an elevator. An elevator is a form of technology. It's very convenient, but then we don't take the stairs. If we have to go to the bank or the post office, say, 8 blocks away, and we jump into a Lyft or an Uber, Very convenient form of technology, but then we don't get our steps in. So I like convenience, right? But I don't want it to be crippling us. So that's what digital dementia, digital deduction is. It's the high reliance on technology to do it for us. And I feel as human beings that we want to maintain our level of cognitive antifragility, our ability to have cognitive flexibility also. Like, it just— like, Limitless Daily is teaching people how to be more cognitively flexible, introducing brand new ideas in a new way that gets them to embody it by doing something and seeing themselves as the kind of person where you're creating evidence that you are the kind of person that shows up for yourself every single day. And so, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, I think life is hard for one of two reasons. You either leave your comfort zone, you do something new, you start that business, you have that conversation, whatever it is that is threatening. Or life is difficult because you stay in your comfort zone, you know, and that, that's, that's, that could be equally hard. The comfort zone might be a nice place to visit every once in a while, but we know nothing grows there. And, you know, when it comes to your body, you need to be able to challenge it. My challenge is with technology making everything easy for us is that we don't have to go through the struggle, because with struggle you get strength. Like, do you know one strong person that had an easy life? Probably not, because they never had to work for it, right? To dig deep. But with challenge comes change. And so we don't have to seek out challenges. It's there, right? I feel like also like the treasure we seek is hidden in the things that we're scared of, or the work that we're not doing that we know that we need to do. And so Limits Daily gives some people some inspiration, some information, implementation to be able to get through a hard, a hard day, right, in a world that's— that is increasingly getting more difficult.

There is an interesting metaphor that I heard recently, which is that gyms where you work out and lift weights are kind of dystopian. And that's because when we moved from the agricultural into the Industrial Revolution, we stopped using our bodies to perform manual labor. And so because we're sitting at desks and we're a cog in a machine. We have to go exercise. And I love the gym, and I believe it's very healthy, but through that lens, it is kind of dystopian. And I think today, the reason that in-person events are so much fun and so novel for us is that most of our communication is digital and it's virtual.

Yeah.

And so, I think that events like Limitless Live are going to become They're dystopian in a way because we're not interacting with each other in person as much as we used to, but they're refreshing in today's present circumstances, and it gives people an opportunity to connect and to see each other on a regular basis. So tell us a little bit about Limitless Live happening in September.

So Limitless Live is an annual event that we've done in some iteration for the past— since 2007, and it's a gathering of our community, and our community are people who are lifelong learners, obviously. And, and they want to, they want to grow so they have more to be able to give, right? And so for this one, it's very special because it happens a few days after Limitless Daily comes out. So where Limitless Daily is a journey of 366 days, it's like Limitless Live is the celebration and the kickoff for this expedition that we're all going to go on together.

Mm-hmm.

And we have some amazing experts that talk about the subject matters of those days. Like, like a Steven Kotler talking about flow states, because ultimately what the book is doing is removing friction to flow, meaning that if you— if it helps you to reduce distraction, to believe in yourself, to reduce your negative self-talk, right, to reconcile any kind of imposter syndrome or fear of failure that you might have, then you're more likely to be able to set yourself up for a flow, where a flow state, for those people don't know, is a state where you feel your best, you perform your best. Where you lose your sense of time, things become effortless, you almost lose your sense of self also as well. And it's also incredibly healing. So we have amazing individuals coming in talking about brain performance, how to care for your brain, how to biohack your brain even also as well. You'll be there sharing the power of The Rise of the Reader and be able to show people how the importance of this and really get this into to embody it. And at these events, what's different is It's— everyone knows this. It's the magic. People come for the content, but they also come for the deep connections, the lifelong friendships that they're going to make, the potential business partners or strategic partners that they'll have. Because these are your— this is your tribe. I'm very protective of our community over the past 30-plus years because, you know, who you spend time with matters, right? You know, you see— you heard this, right? We're the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with because You know, they— where a lot of people, they feel like you want to get around people who, you know, are watching their words, their actions, their thoughts, their character, you know, their habits. They're very intentional about their life. So Limitless Live is a 2-day event. This year we're doing it right outside New York City in Greenwich, Connecticut, and we have some amazing speakers. People who go to limitlesslive.com to check it out and see. And yeah, we would love to kick off the book and celebrate the book there. There'll be some of the most amazing food, some of the most amazing individuals. We have all these kind of workouts planned throughout the day. We have the Human Garage team coming. Some people are familiar with their fascial maneuvers, and they're gonna be working with the entire audience. They're bringing out like almost 20 of their coaches to work with individuals and groups because your fascia is like the— it's a body-wide communication system of, you know, it's a body-wide communication system. And it's always signaling to your brain. But if there's— you have tension, for example, or rigidity there, you're gonna have rigid thinking and energy won't flow and you won't be able to distinguish between what's important, like the signal versus the noise. So we like to not only teach people how to learn and live better, but also create an environment where it happens organically and naturally. And it'll be a lot of fun. So we'll actually have Michael Easter, who wrote Comfort Crisis, there also as well. You know, and if you're on my stage, just like if you're at our book club or anything else, it's like these are people that I've personally been inspired by, I've learned from, and want to spend time with. And yeah, it'll be 2 days that will— deep immersion, no distractions. You'll meet your tribe, you go deep, you have lifelong friendships because of it, and we become limitless together.

And then where do people go to get a ticket?

Yeah, they can just go to limitlesslive.com to get more information. You can see all the speakers, the run of show, all the details. Any questions that you have can be answered right, right there. But I promise you, it'll be— it's not an event, it's an experience you won't, you won't ever forget.