Jim Kwik: How to Protect Your Brain Health, Memory, and Focus in the Age of AI | Mental Health | E414

Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast

In this episode of Young and Profiting with Hala Taha, Jim Kwik shares powerful strategies to protect brain health, memory, and focus in the age of AI. Drawing from his personal journey

Key takeaways

• Memory is a multiplier in business—forgetting can cost millions, as shown by a $50 million deal lost due to misremembering a client's name.
• The brain acts like a muscle: use it or lose it. Without intentional training, memory deteriorates and focus weakens.

Main topics

• Brain health and memory training
• Focus in the digital age

Notable quotes

Most people do first thing when they wake up, they grab their device, right? You're wiring your brain for distraction, and then you wonder why you can't focus later that day.

I forgot. I mean, just think about the consequence of saying I forgot to do it. I forgot to bring it. I forgot to go to that meeting.

Conclusion

Jim Kwik's message is clear: in an era of AI and constant distraction, entrepreneurs must prioritize mental training over

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Most people do first thing when they wake up, they grab their device, right? You're wiring your brain for distraction, and then you wonder why you can't focus later that day. If you're spending eight hours doom scrolling and rotting your brain, and then have the audacity to complain, you can't be upset by the results you didn't get from the work you didn't do. Speaker 1 (0:19) Jim Quick is the world's number one brain coach, a best-selling author. Today, he's breaking down how to protect your focus, remember what matters, and why your human intelligence is the one thing AI can never replace. So Speaker 2 (0:32) the idea here is your brain is like a muscle. It's an organ, but it acts like a muscle. You use it or lose it. But if you put your arm in a cast for a year, it wouldn't grow stronger. It wouldn't even stay the same. It would weaken and atrophy. That's digital dimension, digital deduction. Speaker 1 (0:45) I'd love to hear your opinion on collaborating with AI and how to make sure we're not outsourcing too much with AI. In Speaker 2 (0:51) a world of artificial intelligence, you don't want human intelligence to become artificial and not valuable. AI is a tool that can magnify and multiply, but it only magnifies, multiplies, and amplifies what we do. Speaker 1 (1:03) How can we retain our focus in this era of just so much distraction? I Speaker 2 (1:09) think where we can lean into a number of things. Speaker 1 (1:13) Jim, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:15) So good to be here. This Speaker 1 (1:16) is the third time that Jim has been on, and every conversation has been absolutely incredible. You are a brain expert. You are a memory expert, Speaker 2 (1:26) a Speaker 1 (1:27) learning expert, and I am just so excited to kind of dig into everything. And something that I'm not going to do today is be so worried about repeating any sort of information that we've covered in the past, because I was realizing that Half the things that we talked about, I didn't even retain. So how could I have expected my listeners to retain? So I want to start there. Why is it that we can hear things more than once and still not remember them or recall them? Speaker 2 (1:53) It's so important for entrepreneurs to have a good memory. I think two of the most costly words in business are I forgot. I mean, just think about the consequence of saying I forgot to do it. I forgot to bring it. I forgot to go to that meeting. I forgot what I was going to say to this person. I forgot that conversation, what was said to me. I forgot how to do something. I forgot that person's name. And so on the other side, memory is a magnifier. It's a multiplier. It can make you money. When you can easily remember client information, product information, you could do sales videos or pitches, remember sales scripts, give presentations without notes, walk into a room of 20 strangers and leave saying goodbye to all 20 of them. They're all going to remember you. So memory makes things a lot easier and it'll make you money for sure. It was interesting. I was just in Miami speaking at an event doing brain training. We train a lot of Fortune 500 companies and that commercial real estate guy came to me and he's like, Jim, I wish I would have gone through this before. He said he lost a $50 million deal because he called the client the wrong name twice. Speaker 1 (3:02) Oh my gosh. Could you Speaker 2 (3:03) imagine? Yeah. What's Speaker 1 (3:04) the Speaker 2 (3:04) message we send to somebody when we have those memory lapses? The idea here is there's a forgetting curve. When people hear something once on a podcast, even previous episodes, within two days, when you're exposed to information once from a presentation, a conversation, you read it, you listen to it on a podcast, 80 % of it is gone. Speaker 1 (3:27) Unless Speaker 2 (3:28) you are doing something with that information. And I think part of it is just, I would say number one is part of it is just paying attention. Speaker 1 (3:36) Sometimes Speaker 2 (3:36) when people are listening to something like this, they're multitasking, like they're cleaning or they're working or they're working out or they're driving and their focus comes and goes. And the focus is, I mean, the art of memory is the art of attention. You can easily remember a name or something that you just read, but it's if our mind is wandering, that's a challenge. Also, we're not taught how to remember things. Like in school, you know, I know there are a lot of subjects for entrepreneurship that wasn't taught in school that would have been useful. You know, leadership, investing, negotiation skills, sales skills, you know, the legal parts to a business. The same thing with school teaches you what to learn, what to remember, what to think. But there's zero classes on how to learn, Speaker 1 (4:20) how Speaker 2 (4:21) to remember, you know, how to think. And I think those are the lead dominoes right now. They're the highest lever point for, I think the faster you learn, an entrepreneur can learn, the faster they will earn. Knowledge today is not only power, it's profit. And there's this divide, not those just who have and those who don't have. There's a divide between those who know some things and those who don't know, even in the age of AI. You know, information is ubiquitous. We all have access to information, right? You know, I know we could talk about AI a little bit later, but it's no longer a competitive advantage because everybody has it. It's what you bring to it, though, that makes the difference. But the reason why it's so important is you can only make your life as the sum total of all the choices you made up at this point, Speaker 1 (5:02) right? Speaker 2 (5:03) Who to spend time with, you know, what to focus on, what you're going to eat, how you're going to move, what city you're going to live in. And it's interesting. You can only make good choices based on the information you know. And when you know more, you can do more. When you know better, you can also do better also as well. You know, there's a reason why people have seen pictures of me with Elon or Oprah or these individuals. You know, people ask how we bonded, how we connected. We bonded over books, you know, because even Warren Buffett reads 50, you know, 500 pages a day. Speaker 1 (5:30) So Speaker 2 (5:30) he has more information so he can make better decisions, you know, and so I love it. But yeah, one of the reasons, so the reasons not paying attention. The forgetting curve, not having a system to remember things, you know, also as well. Speaker 1 (5:44) And Speaker 2 (5:44) also just asking the question, like, how can I use this? You know, I feel like you learn something once. And then if you don't use it, whatever you don't use, you lose, right? It's use it or lose it. So what happens in the brain is you start pruning this information so it's more efficient, right? And so you start pruning or deleting this information. And that's why I'm a big, you know, advocate for... you know, application? Like why learn a new idea if you're not going to implement it? So Speaker 1 (6:11) if people are listening to this podcast and let's say there's two different people, one person is multitasking. Speaker 2 (6:17) Yeah. And Speaker 1 (6:17) the other person is actually like, I really want to take advantage of this. And I have like a pen and a paper or like I've got a computer or whatever it is. Sure, sure, Speaker 2 (6:24) sure. How Speaker 1 (6:25) should they actually listen to this podcast episode to retain the most information? So the Speaker 2 (6:30) person who's multitasking, so they've done When people ask me all the time, you know, as an author, like, what's the best? Is it better to read something in a book or to listen to it on an audiobook, for example? And people will test better when they read it in terms of comprehension and retention. And part of it is because when usually when we're listening to something, we are multitasking, right? So our focus is separate. So I would say the person who is trying to multitask, and we could talk about the science of multitasking and how it's really task switching and how it's not very effective. Speaker 2 (7:01) Focus on, if you're driving, focus on driving. Like if you're operating heavy machinery, focus on that, right? That's a priority there. And that person can listen and get a kind of a, just a good review and bits of it and then come back and really study it, you know, when they have a chance. I would highly recommend that for the person who's taking notes. I don't know if they're watching it or listening it. Everybody has a preferred channel of learning. Not so much a learning style, but a channel they prefer to receive information in. And I would say taking notes. If you're Speaker 1 (7:29) going Speaker 2 (7:29) to take notes, you know, you could either do it handwriting notes or digital note-taking. Handwriting will outperform digital note-taking. In terms of retention. Absolutely, and understanding. Digital is great for storing information. It's great for sharing it with your team. But in terms of understanding and retaining information, handwriting notes will outperform. You know, and everyone has a different process. People use it and they'll handwrite on one of their tablets and then use AI to organize it or store it or Notion or summarize it. Speaker 1 (8:02) One of the really, like, hidden talents that you have is remembering a lot of names. Speaker 2 (8:07) Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:08) And I have a story that I remembered when I was studying your stuff. And it's one of my guy friends, we were trying to set him up with a girl that we know. And we brought him to, like, a party. And she's like a gorgeous girl, has lots of options. And he's a great guy. But he couldn't remember her name. And they kept talking. And she was like, what was your name? I'll say her name is Anna. It's not Anna. And he'd be like, what's her name? We're like, Anna. And then he would like call her a different name and like couldn't remember her name all night. Wow. Speaker 2 (8:37) And then Speaker 1 (8:37) she was like, I don't want to see this guy. Like, sorry, like I'm not going on a date with him. He couldn't even remember my name. Speaker 2 (8:44) That's like a Seinfeld. There was a Seinfeld episode. This is, I'm dating myself. I'm going to be 53. So where Jerry Seinfeld, it was a sitcom comedy where he was dating somebody and was intimate with her, but didn't know her name. So every single time she went to the bathroom, he would try to go into her purse to get, you know, look at her driver's license. Speaker 1 (9:02) Every Speaker 2 (9:03) time George or Kramer would come by, he would introduce them, hoping that she would say their name. And the joke was, it rhymed with a part of the female anatomy or Speaker 1 (9:12) something like Speaker 2 (9:12) that. But Seinfeld talks about. common things. You know, that episode where they lost the, where they parked the car, the whole episode was just trying to find the car. Speaker 1 (9:21) We've all been there. But, Speaker 2 (9:22) um, but yeah, I, I feel bad for your, for your, for your friend. That's embarrassing. Speaker 1 (9:27) It's embarrassing. And it made her feel like she wasn't important, that he must be like talking to so many girls or that she wasn't a focus. Or he Speaker 2 (9:35) didn't care. Or Speaker 1 (9:35) he didn't care. Speaker 2 (9:36) Yeah. So Speaker 1 (9:37) I'd love to understand. When we remember things, whether it's people's names or their kids' names or a story they told us in the past, how does that improve our networking and relationship? Speaker 2 (9:48) I think it's huge because it's, you know, they say success is what you know. So we teach people how to, you know, know that faster, right? Read it faster, learn it faster. It's who you know. So remembering them is very important. But it's also who knows you. And I feel like today, especially, it's helped. so many people with their confidence. Like when you know you can walk into a room and retain a lot of information from conversations and people's names, you walk in different because in psychology, they have a confidence-competence loop that the more confidence you get, the more confident you are. And I think being confident in your memory and your ability to recall information, especially in this expert economy, you know, where nobody listening to this as an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur is paid. for their brute strength, right? It's your brain strength. It's not your muscle power today. It's your mind power. It's not like we're working on fields in the agriculture age or industrial age, moving things in factories. It's our ability to come up with new ideas. And a lot of creativity comes from memory also, from remembering things, being a generalist, knowing a good amount about a lot of things, but then connecting those dots to innovate, like a phone, like what Steve Jobs did. There's a camera and there's a calculator and there's a phone and all these other things. Different things created something brand new. And entrepreneurs, that's what we're doing. We're innovating all the time. But I would say that remembering names is very important because you need to be able to stand out. And when you have what I call quick recall, and you're able to recall information well, people feel like you were thinking about them. right? That you remember their conversations, that they were important. You know, there's a, what's the quote? People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Like, how are you going to show somebody as an entrepreneur you're going Speaker 1 (11:35) to Speaker 2 (11:35) care for their health, their family, their finances, you know, whatever you have to offer them if you don't care enough just to remember things about them. Totally. You know, so, you know, because even if you don't remember, like, that kind of thing, nothing you know past that would count. And Speaker 1 (11:48) you just lose trust so much. You Speaker 2 (11:51) do. Speaker 1 (11:51) Like, if you don't remember. what you were supposed to do for your client or what you talked about on the last call and what you were supposed to implement. Like you could lose trust so fast if you can't retain. Speaker 2 (12:00) Absolutely. And people nowadays want to work with the best. And I think, you know, to be able to stand out before you sell anything, you sell yourself, right? But absolutely. Like if you remember people's conversations and what they said and their preferences and the problems that they're dealing with, the things that they value in life, the things that they're proud of, the things that keep them up at night, then people feel like you're just thinking about them all the time. I can't see a situation where that wouldn't be helpful for an entrepreneur. Absolutely. Okay, Speaker 1 (12:27) I want to do something really fun. So you are incredible at recalling anything, names, words, whatever it is. So I thought it'd be fun to list off 10 random items. Okay. Speaker 2 (12:40) And Speaker 1 (12:41) then in, you know, 10 minutes or so, I'm going to ask you to recall those items. Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:45) Can people watching or listening try it also? Speaker 1 (12:48) Yeah. Yeah? Speaker 2 (12:49) Because... Speaker 1 (12:50) In the meanwhile, I'm going to ask you how we can remember things better. Speaker 2 (12:54) Yeah, it'd be great if people at home could also go through the list and then, you know, take their time and try to remember it. Don't write it down. I would challenge everyone not to write it down. You know, I believe there's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's a trained memory and untrained memory. So yes, listen to this, memorize it. Let's memorize it all together. Don't write it down. And maybe I could give some tips later. How people could remember that. Speaker 1 (13:18) Yeah. And then you guys can rewind and go back and see if you can actually remember it after learning. Speaker 2 (13:24) Yeah. Oh, we'll go through the list later. That'd be fun. Speaker 1 (13:26) Okay. One, pink flamingo. A Speaker 2 (13:29) pink flamingo. Speaker 1 (13:31) Two, Tesla key. Speaker 2 (13:33) Tesla key? Speaker 1 (13:34) Three, blueberry muffin. Speaker 2 (13:37) Blueberry muffin. Oh, you're making me, you're making me. Blueberries, by the way, are great brain food. Speaker 1 (13:42) Four, golden microphone. Speaker 2 (13:44) Golden microphone. Speaker 1 (13:46) Five, broken iPhone. Speaker 2 (13:48) Broken iPhone? Yep. You came up with these randomly? Speaker 1 (13:53) Yes. Speaker 2 (13:53) Okay. I'm giving people a little bit of time to come up with theirs. Speaker 1 (13:57) Six, red high heel. Speaker 2 (14:00) Red high heel. Just one or two? Speaker 1 (14:03) Just one. Speaker 2 (14:04) Okay, red high heel. Speaker 1 (14:05) Seven, brain-shaped balloon. Speaker 2 (14:08) Brain-shaped balloon? It literally is random. Speaker 1 (14:13) Eight, $100 bill. Speaker 2 (14:16) $100 bill. Speaker 1 (14:17) A Benjamin, yes. Speaker 2 (14:18) Okay. Speaker 1 (14:19) Nine, mini treadmill. A Speaker 2 (14:22) mini treadmill. Yes, Speaker 1 (14:23) for a mouse. Speaker 2 (14:24) For a mouse? Okay. Speaker 1 (14:26) Ten, diamond notebook. Speaker 2 (14:29) 10 is diamond notebook. How Speaker 1 (14:32) many do you think you could do? Speaker 2 (14:33) Well, I've taught people how to memorize like pi to like thousands of digits, but it's all the same principle that I just, but yeah, so everybody who's listening, just do the best. And notice also not only just, you know, how many you remember when we come back to the list, also think about how you remembered it. Like what was your strategy, you know? for that. What Speaker 1 (14:57) is that process? Like, how are you remembering things? Speaker 2 (15:00) I mean, even in high school, we learned, like, memory is just three stages. You encode it, you store it, and you retrieve it. Speaker 1 (15:06) You Speaker 2 (15:07) know, and if there's a break in any one of those, you're not going to get the remembrance that, you know, that you desire and that you really deserve. You know, I really, you know, for people that are connected to my work, they know that I had a brain injury when I was five years old. Because of it, I had learning disabilities. My mother became a special education teacher to help me with my challenges. I had migraines every day. It took me three years long to learn how to read. They called Speaker 1 (15:35) you the boy with the broken brain? Yeah, Speaker 2 (15:37) that was all through school. It wasn't just elementary school. It was middle school, junior high, high school. I worked hard. I came from immigrant parents. We lived in a back of a laundromat that my mom worked at. We worked hard, but I just didn't get the grades. It's a challenge. But I realized after doing this for 34 years, it's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart. It's not how smart you are, it's really how are you smart. And we all have different intelligence. And that intelligence, even in a world of AI, it's not fixed. Like your shoe size, it can be trained. But school, again, teaches you what to learn and what to remember, what to think, but not how to. So, you know, I focus on this thing called meta-learning, which is the science and art of learning how to learn, which I, again, think it's the best thing that all entrepreneurs could focus on. Because once you can learn how to learn faster, you can read three times faster, understand more from it, you know, remember something in a fraction of time that normally takes people, you know, hours. Then what can you apply it to? You could apply it towards money, right? You could, you know, that subject or skill, Mandarin, martial arts, music, management, you know. Marketing, everything gets so much easier once you can learn how to learn. Speaker 1 (16:50) Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:51) It's like the biggest advantage. Speaker 1 (16:52) So you've got this strategy, I think, related to memory specifically called MOM. Speaker 2 (16:57) Yes. Speaker 1 (16:57) Can you tell us about that? Speaker 2 (16:59) Yeah. So it's also interesting. I wrote Limitless, you know, in like less than two months. We donated the proceeds to charity. We built schools in Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya for girls who don't have access, girls and boys who don't have access to education. And then we provided health care because a lot of people were sick so they couldn't go to school or clean water. Also, we donated to Alzheimer's research for women. Women are twice as experienced Alzheimer's than men. Speaker 1 (17:26) Wow. Speaker 2 (17:26) Twice as likely. When I was going through my challenges, I was seven because my parents were always working. Speaker 2 (17:34) My grandmother raised me and she passed when I was seven to Alzheimer's. So in memory of her. So I bring this up. I mean, everybody has their kind of their origin story. But my struggles became my strength. You know, that adversity can be an advantage. That with challenge comes change. Like, I don't know how one strong person that had an easy life. Speaker 1 (17:55) Exactly. You know, Speaker 2 (17:56) and entrepreneurship is not necessarily an easy path. I think it's extremely worthwhile if you do it right. Speaker 2 (18:03) And I'm a big fan of, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I feel like, you know, be able to solve problems, be able to move the economy, be able to create jobs. And yeah, really, really, really, really good things. But when it comes to mom, I wrote it in Greece, most of it, that memory is the largest chapter in Limitless. Because I found out there was a goddess of memory and she was the mom. A Speaker 1 (18:25) goddess of memory? There's a Speaker 2 (18:26) goddess of memory and she's the mother, the mom, to the nine muses. of science, literature, and art. So all of science, literature, and art, their mother is the goddess of memory. So it's so fascinating. And then I got curious about, like, what did people, like, I based our strategies based on the latest, you know, the neuroscience of how people learn and remember. And also I wanted to know, like, historically, what did ancient civilizations do? Like, what did they do in ancient Greece to remember things before there was a printing press? Speaker 1 (18:58) Right? Speaker 2 (18:58) They had to remember things, you know? And so. Yeah, mom is very, three principles to a quick recall, the M. Well, let's apply that towards names, right, in business. Let's say someone listening or watching, they have trouble remembering names, but we had a, like a briefcase here or a suitcase of million dollars cash. And I know you have an international audience, whatever they put a lot of money, tax-free. If you just remember the name of the next stranger you meet. Who's going to remember that person's name for a million dollars? Speaker 1 (19:28) Everyone. Everyone. So Speaker 2 (19:29) as a memory coach, my job is to call people on their BS, their belief systems, right? It's not true you can't remember a name. It's the first M stands for motivation. Like a lot of people aren't feeling or presencing like how important it is to remember someone's name. So a simple hack is just like, you know, before you meet somebody, you even open up your mouth, you know you're going to talk to them soon. Just why do I want to remember this person's name? So it's like, why Speaker 1 (19:58) do I care? Speaker 2 (19:59) Yeah. And then come up with a couple of answers. Maybe it's to show the person respect. Maybe it's to make a sale. Maybe it's to get a referral. At the very least, maybe it's to practice what they learned on this podcast. Without a reason, you won't remember because reasons reap results. Speaker 1 (20:15) And Speaker 2 (20:15) so I just feel like if you don't feel it, you're not going to remember it because it's not relevant to you. Speaker 1 (20:20) So Speaker 2 (20:20) that alone I think is very important. The Owen mom. is observation. A lot of people aren't forgetting the name. They're just not even listening. Speaker 1 (20:29) You Speaker 2 (20:29) know what I mean? Like at events that you go to, sometimes you're with someone, but you know that they're looking over your shoulder, you know, your shoulder to see who else is in the room. Or maybe we're guilty of talking to somebody, they're talking, but we're thinking about what we're going to say. Or Speaker 1 (20:44) like for some reason self-conscious about like your outfit or something. Something Speaker 2 (20:48) like that. Yeah. Exactly. And so like, and so we're not even present. And so the art of memory is the art of attention, you know? And so I remember years ago, I was... I went to a charity event. It was like 2,000 people. And I get assigned to a table. So I go to my assigned table. I'm the first one there. And then a few minutes later, Forrest Whitaker, the Oscar-winning actor, sits next to me. And then Richard Branson sits down. And then Ashton Kutcher and his twin brother, which I didn't realize he had a twin brother. And then President Clinton sits right next to me. And I had met him a few years earlier, and we had this brief conversation. But he sits down and he remembered my name. Speaker 1 (21:29) Wow. Speaker 2 (21:30) But then I was like, I said the same thing. Wow. And then I was like, oh, of course he was told who he was sitting with, right? Sorry. He picks up the conversation that we started three years earlier and nobody was privy to that conversation. Wow. Speaker 1 (21:43) And Speaker 2 (21:43) I was like, you know, I'm the memory. I need to know how you're doing this. You know, I think genius leaves clues when somebody does something magical. There's a method behind the magic. Speaker 1 (21:51) And Speaker 2 (21:52) he's telling me this story