Jonathan Levi transcript

Written by Christopher Kelly

June 8, 2017

[00:00:00]

Chris:    Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name’s Christopher Kelly and today, I’m joined by Jonathan Levi. Hi Jonathan.

Jonathan:    Hey Chris, how are you?

Chris:    I am great, thank you very much. Jonathan is in Tel Aviv, is that right this morning?

Jonathan:    Absolutely.

Chris:    Okay it’s not this morning, its 6 o’clock in the evening, isn’t it?

Jonathan:    I was going to say I don’t want to be a stickler but yeah here its 6 o’clock.

Chris:    So I better start by expressing my gratitude for your time because yeah, I wouldn’t want to be recording a podcast at 6 o’clock in the evening. So thank you so much.

Jonathan:    My pleasure, my pleasure.

Chris:    Jonathan is an entrepreneur, he’s an author, and he’s the host of the Becoming Superhuman podcast. Jonathan, I first became aware of your work when I was listening to the Robb Wolf podcast and in the past, I’ve gotten really great results by taking action on everything that Robb talked about. So as soon as I heard that podcast, I signed up for the Becoming A Super Learner training course and we can talk about that more later, but I wanted to start by talking about why you became interested in super learning in the first place.

Jonathan:    Yeah that’s a really, really great question and I also want to say I share your enthusiasm for Robb’s [00:01:05] [indiscernible]. We’d all be a lot better if we just did everything Robb tells us to.

Chris:    I know!

Jonathan:    Well I guess I would define myself as kind of a problem learner growing up. I was always a very bright kid, a very enthusiastic kid but I really struggled – at least in an academic setting. I had no problem learning new stuff like karate and I would build stuff in the garage with my dad. But when it came down to sitting in a classroom or at a desk, I really had difficulty and it was cute at first and I was the class clown in first grade and that was all good, and my parents said “Well he’s expressing himself.” But around about age 8, it stopped being cute. It started being a real problem and I wasn’t reading as fast as other students and I wasn’t getting my times table and they really started to get worried.

So I was tested for ADD at along about age 8 and that’s when things started to really become problematic. From there – just kind of to make a long story short – I was the problem student for a very long time and there were a lot of parent-teacher conferences where holding me back was very much a discussion. And this progressed very much into kind of my teenage years and kind of culminated in depression and a lot of issues around confidence and self-esteem just because it eventually branched out not just beyond the academic realm but also into the social realm.

Other kids were learning all these social skills like dating and talking to girls, and I wasn’t. And learning became this big issue to where I was really this very unhappy adolescent. Things fortunately turned around for me. A friend gave me a little white pill that magically made me able to sit in class and study. I went to my parents, said “Hey you know, I have to confess. This is why I did really, really well on that exam and I was able to study.” So for the next kind of…

Chris:    What was the pill? I have to interrupt you and ask you what the pill was.

Jonathan:    Oh yeah I still remember it was an alza 18, which is a form of ritalin. I would end up – when I got my own prescription – I would end up taking a different form. But yeah, methylphenidate hydrochloride which is the ADD medication that my parents had held off on putting me on because they didn’t want to turn their creative little boy into a zombie. But to get through SATs and college, it was kind of a necessary evil for me and so I spent most of my teenage and young adult life drugged out like a zombie. Which made for fair enough academic performance, although I still forgot everything after I left the exam room but I think a lot of students do that with or without drugs.

Chris:    Oh yeah.

Jonathan:    And that kind of carried me through and allowed me to do a lot of really, really cool things that I don’t think I would have been able to do but I still wasn’t learning as quickly as I could and to draw a very kind of long story to be at least a little bit shorter, I was fortunately accepted to a very condensed 10 month MBA program. And I had this huge amount of anxiety because I knew that all the tricks that I used to do to get through high school and to get through my undergraduate degree were not going to work because in business school, it’s all about socializing and it’s all about…you know, you have to read all the cases but then you also want to network, you want to meet employers, you want to do all kinds of cool stuff – travel, if you’re living in Singapore and France as I was.

And I knew that my old trick of locking myself in the bedroom and just working harder than everyone else was not going to fly. At that point, I was very lucky to find two people who spent the last 10 years teaching kids with learning disabilities. And they had trained under a lot of the speed reading and memory techniques – mnemonic techniques – that have been used really for – at least in the memory field – for thousands of years. And I got very lucky because they were willing to train me. Wasn’t cheap but I took private one on one lessons with them.

And they’re husband and wife couple by the name of Lev and Anna. And then things really started changing for me because I went from saying “I’m a really slow reader, I have a bad memory” – all these things that people often say, at least I’ve discovered – now that I tell people that I work in memory, people are like “Oh I have the worst memory. I went from saying that to “Oh my God, I’m a phenomenal learner.” And reading 800 words a minute and remembering 500 people in my MBA class, remembering almost all of their names within a matter of few…

Well it took me months to meet each one of them but remembering everyone’s name the first time I meet them, remembering numbers, remembering facts, remembering figures; and it was all down to technique so that’s how I got involved in it. WE decided to collaborate together and build an online course and then fast forward a few years, we’ve taught – I think to date – 92000 people how to read, learn and remember more effectively.

[00:05:35]

Chris:        That’s amazing. Tell me what you think about the classroom environment now, because I recognize many of the things that you talked about in myself as a young child. And I was never medicated but I was always that kid in a science class that was setting fire to the Bunsen burners, you know. Now when I look back, I think the classroom environment is just the worst place to learn. Like try and make a small boy sit quietly on a stool somewhere. So what do you think about that now? Imagine if you could go back – what would you say to those teachers at that time?

Jonathan:    Oh boy I love the way you phrase…I mean I could give a whole…we could do a whole interview just about this. I actually give a TED talk called What If Schools Taught Us How To Learn?

Chris:    Oh I’ve not seen that.

Jonathan:    I think a lot of…there are a lot of different issues. One I think if someone from 2000 years ago came to the future, the only thing that they would recognize is our schools. We teach the way that Plato taught except that kids have iPads in their hands instead of papyrus, right? I don’t per se think that’s as much of the issue. I acknowledge that when you have 1 teacher and 30 students – unless you have kind of the radical approach of a Montessori school where the kids lead the teachers, I think it’s hard to scale education. Technology is definitely going to shift that. But what I would like to see in schools, what I would like to tell to educators, teachers, and people designing pedagogical materials is just take a look at how the human brain works.

We are – and we will, I’m sure – go into much more depth about this. We are tactile kinaesthetic learners with a heavy preference for visual information who need to know how every piece of information we learn is connected to pre-existing knowledge. And the first thing that happens when you sit down in physics…you know, I’ll give you a classic example. As a species, we’ve pretty much disproved Newtonian physics, right? A lot of schools still teach it, I still learned Newtonian physics but basically it’s been thrown out the window by quantum theory and so on and so forth.

And I think what goes wrong in a lot of schools is you sit down in say physics and they say” Okay everything you learned up until now doesn’t apply to this.” And if a student tries to say “Oh well this physics rule is kind of like this biology rule” and relate their learning, it’s like “No you need understand geometry is nothing like algebra. This is a whole new field of study.” And so…I mean we’ll get into kind of the neurons and the synapses and how all that works but we fail to create visually memorable learning experiences for so many different things. How many kids out there remember the experiment – the classic kind of science experiment with the lava or the baking soda, or let’s design a way to throw an egg from the roof.

I mean these are the things that I remember in 2nd and 3rd grade. I remember Jack McCreedy was the one kid who figured out a way to not get the egg to break, because it was such a visual experience and such a tactile experience. And if you ask me even to give you all the state capitals of the United States, I don’t remember that because that was just a list that I memorized at some point. So that would be my take-away, is like let’s take a hard look at the way that our brains work, the way that we create memories and the requirements.

Because there’s a lot of research about it, especially for adult brains which are just much more exacting and difficult versions of children’s brains. There’s a lot of research on what it actually takes to insert new information into the brain and you would think to look in our schools, you wouldn’t think that this research has been done, but it has.

Chris:    And tell me about the effect of your health. So I know you’ve talked a lot about health on your podcast and I’ve just got back from Dr Ben Lynch – he’s a naturopathic doctor up in the Washington area and I’ve just got back from his Shycon conference. And one of the cases he presented was actually his young son that sounds a bit like what you’ve just described – like maybe some potential ADHD. And he did some organic acid testing on him and showed that he had very low turnover of dopamine. And in the end, supplementing with tyrosine – which is a precursor to the catecholamines – really helped him.

Not the medication but we just sat there in the audience and thinking “Well the other way you could’ve done that is to get the kid to eat some more protein.” The kid’s a carboholic, not eating any protein and that could be a potential reason too. So did you figure out anything about your own personal health and how that might be relating to the learning?

Jonathan:    Definitely. I’ll give you a preface to the answer to that question, which is my kind of intellectual evolution has been this process of realizing that anything that I want to do in life involves learning. And that’s why oftentimes I’ll be quoted as saying “Learning is the only skill that matters.” ‘Cause all those problems that I told you about – like social skills, not being happy with who I am – those are all learning challenges in the end. It’s like you read a couple of books on this. I have problems with my knees so I read Kelly Starrett’s book, Become A Supple Leopard – and holy crap my knees don’t hurt for the first time in 10 years. Since I hit puberty, my knees have been painful. And they don’t hurt anymore, my knees feel awesome.

[00:10:28]

Jonathan:    You know I have problems with women. Well there are books about how to socialize with the opposite sex.

Chris:    Yeah, The Game.

Jonathan:    Yeah that’s one. I read like a dozen of them just to be…you know. But in any case, a lot of the challenges that I wanted to deal with were health and it shows in my podcast, it shows the things that I’m passionate about. So I’m a pretty big devotee – as we said – of Robb Wolf’s work and I’ve kind of explored…I mean there’s a lot of interesting research on – exactly as you said – like what is the influence of high blood sugar not just on the endocrine system but also on the brain. Alzheimer’s, dementia being one thing but there’s a lot of evidence showing that a ketogenic diet is so much healthier for the brain.

I’m sure your audience has heard this a hundred different times, that we happily burn ketones and it actually increases our mental acuity that even fasting can be very good for the brain and causing the brain to be more insulin sensitive. So a lot of that has come up. And then I also think its garbage in, garbage out. Like I try to really make sure that I’m getting a fully balanced nutrient-rich diet. As you probably know, 40% of the North American population is magnesium deficient. If you’re magnesium deficient, your sleep goes to shit.

If your sleep goes to shit, you’re not learning, you’re not moving, memories from short term to long term memory. So I try to think of healthy really as this triad or as this kind of Holy Trinity of nutrition, diet and exercise. And if any component of those slips out, the exercise goes. There’s tons of research that shows movement in exercising improve synaptic connection in the brain. In fact, you learn more if you listen to say podcasts when you run, the [00:12:14] [indiscernible] your brain is increasing, which is allowing you to actually build long term memories faster. And it goes without saying that if you’re healthy cardiovascularly, you’re getting better oxygen flow to the brain. I just sound like one of these New Age hippies but it’s all connected. It’s literally all connected and think of it as this triangle that if any one side collapses, it all starts to break down.

Chris:    Yeah I know that makes perfect sense. Well the reason I was really interested in your work was multiple fold actually. So the first was I’d noticed that I’m really terrible at remembering people’s names, and this is particularly embarrassing at conferences. So sometimes people would listen to my podcast and they’d recognize my voice. I’ll be speaking to somebody at a conference and they’d come up and say “Oh hi, you’re Christopher Kelly. My name’s such-and-such.” So oh okay, you couldn’t have known that person’s name in that instant.

But then you see them at the next conference and you still don’t know their name, which is really embarrassing and I really hate that, it makes me feel really awful. So I really want to remember people’s names more. And then also I’ve been doing some machine learning programming and machine learning is really interesting because in most cases, what’s being done is a model of what happens inside of the human brain. And so I thought if I could better understand how humans learn, maybe that will make me a better machine learning practitioner. So I went ahead and signed up for your course but I ended up dropping out…

Jonathan:    [00:13:35] [indiscernible].

Chris:    Yeah, yeah of course. I ended up dropping out and I guess dropping out is maybe too harsh of a word but I just mean that I haven’t completed it yet and I should have completed it by now. But one of the things that really turned me off was you start with memorization piece, which I’ve heard you talk about. It’s really important, it’s the foundation on which all the other stuff is built. I don’t know that memorization is very important in this day and age when you can look things up so easily. Have you read the book ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!’?

Jonathan:    I haven’t but it’s on my list.

Chris:    Oh yeah you should bump it to the top of your list. So Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! There’s a very funny piece in it where Richard Feynman, he’s having to teach some stuff to biology students and he starts by drawing out the anatomy of a cat. And the biology students, they say “We know all that. What are you doing? You’re wasting your time.” And Feynman said “Oh the reason I’ve been able to catch up with you so easily is because you spent the last 4 years memorizing the map of the cat when you could have looked it up in 15 minutes. So you’ve all been wasting your time.” And so that’s what I worry about with this learning to memorize stuff. Am I just wasting my time? Because I could look it up so easily.

Jonathan:    I love this question and I’ve talked with a lot of memory experts, including the godfather of memory, Harry Lorayne. There’s a couple of different ways to take this question. One is – and I recently wrote about this – that all creativity comes from combining things in new and unique ways, right? There is nothing new under the sun except new and unique ways to combine. So if you look at kind of classic lectures from someone like say Steve Jobs on the creativity of Apple as a company, and it’s we took our knowledge of calligraphy and our knowledge of engineering and our knowledge of software and our knowledge of hardware and we put it together, and that’s what allows us to be so creative. Whereas everyone else was just a software company, we were an industrial design company, so on and so forth. Look at the architecture.

[00:15:35]

Jonathan:    So I do think that having more knowledge across broader fields is what allows us to be more creative and I don’t think that you can draw on the outsourced brain such as Google or Wikipedia to create that creativity. I think true creativity comes from having this huge library of knowledge and example. So one thing I’ve learned in my teaching, Chris, is like metaphors work so well for us. And I have so many different examples and metaphors and similes and different things I can draw from, just from the huge amount that I read, that I can come up with examples very quickly, which allows me to better translate my points or even make my arguments if I’m debating with someone.

    The other day, I was debating with someone on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and really someone influential who has the power to change people’s thoughts, minds and opinions one way or the other, and I was able to call up dates and facts and tell them “Well what about in 1967 when this happens? But what about this plan and what about this negotiation? And this is what this person said.” I just don’t think that healthy debate or even collaboration with other people works if you need to have a screen in front of you to facilitate that debate. I do worry that we’re moving in that direction and that we need these huge libraries of knowledge in order to create original thoughts and ideas.

    But beyond that, I think all learning comes from synthesizing. So maybe you don’t need to know the actual facts and figures, but over time you do need to create these memories that tell you “I’ve worked with this material 5 different times.” Say for example you’re editing a video and you remember a hundred different times when you’ve had to do a certain effect a certain way. That all comes down to memory and making yourself more efficient because you remember all the different instances and I think we’ve all had this experience of trying to do something a second time and only after realizing “Oh my gosh, I’ve tried to do this before to try and kind of turn the argument on its head. I’ve wasted so much time because I didn’t remember that this didn’t work the last time I did it.”

    So I think there’s a couple of different ways to attack it. I will say I don’t think it’s necessary to memorize entire fields of study. I think biology is one of those things, although I certainly would want the doctor to know all the muscles in my body if I’m having pain. But I think there are some different instances where maybe we don’t need to know every single enzyme that’s in the body, but I think it’s important for us to know history overall. I think it’s important for us to have a rough understanding of biology. I think it’s very important and the literature shows people with higher vocabularies have higher incomes.

To quote a good buddy of mine, “All wealth comes from writing.” And it goes beyond that. Like you can get a 2% salary increase for each language that you learn on average. That’s a memory challenge any way you cut it. So there are definitely a lot of opportunities – to wrap up a very long winded answer which I apologize for – but there are a lot of different opportunities and benefits for just accumulating knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Chris:    Right. The other problem I’ve been having is I’ve been in this space for 4 or 5 years now – health and fitness, reading a lot of scientific papers from PubMed – and now I’ve got to the point where I’ll get to the end of a paper and I’m thinking “Shit, I’ve read this before. I’ve read this before and that’s all I can remember about it is I’ve read it before.”

And so I’ve been thinking about should I be using better tools to help me remember which papers I’ve read or not. And sometimes I’ll even post them on our slack channel like “Hey everyone, you should read this paper.” They’re like “Yeah we read that before [00:19:03] [indiscernible] you idiot.” So yeah I mean I agree with that. So maybe we can dive in a little bit to the course. The course I did, it may not be the latest version. So I did the version 2 on Udemy, so is that the latest and greatest?

Jonathan:    It is not. A couple years back, we decided – just because of the way that pricing works on these marketplace websites and kind of the level of interaction that we’re allowed to have with students – we decided that we weren’t able to deliver the absolute best product that we can. We kind of had to cut costs here and there because they take such a huge percentage and so we came out with our premium master class which is no holds barred, no expense spared.

If I have to fly around the world to interview someone, I will do it. And that’s kind of the premium bread and butter product, if you will. But both products are very good, I will say. Like I think the Udemy course, it’s kind of like…I equate it to buying a Tony Robinson’s book – not to equate myself to Tony Robinson [00:20:02] [indiscernible]. Buying a Tony Robin’s book versus attending one of his seminars and having him actually reviewing the answers on your questionnaire.

[00:20:10]

Jonathan:    So yeah, we have this phenomenal master class that we’re really proud of, that’s significantly more information, more interactivity, more worksheets. And we’ve gotten really world class guest lecturers to come in, talk about all the different aspects that I’m not a super expert at. I use memory palaces but I’m not the best in the world at creating them. So we have someone who is the best in the world at creating memory palaces to teach that. And yeah that’s kind of our master class.

Chris:    Okay so the master class that has an interactive component, you’re doing seminars and stuff like that then?

Jonathan:    We’re not doing seminars but it does have premium service and support. So on our Udemy courses, we generally encourage students to answer one another’s questions and we have a very lively community also on Facebook. I’ll come in from time to time and kind of check on threads, make sure everyone’s doing okay. But the master class is where I personally tend to every single inquiry. And then there are significantly more exercises and worksheets and kind of expansion opportunities where you can go deeper down any given rabbit hole that you’re interested in.

Chris:    Okay so let’s talk about where the class starts. Talk about the memorization pit, how do you start with that?

Jonathan:    Yeah so I’d actually love to…I [00:21:22] [indiscernible] on podcast when people don’t give me the kind of overview, like what the hell you actually do. So I don’t know if I can swear on this show but I apologize.

Chris:    Oh yeah I just interviewed Scottish triathlete and Scottish people in my experience – I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying all Scottish people swear but in my mind, all Scottish people swear and so there was a lot of swearing in that episode. So all the people that are offended by…

Jonathan:    [00:21:44] [crosstalk] [indiscernible].

Chris:    Exactly so all the people that are offended by swearing, they’re long since gone so you can swear on this podcast now.

Jonathan:    Phenomenal. Flipping phenomenal. I think if you’re good enough at what you do, you should give a lot of it away for free because you don’t have to worry about people coming back or not coming back. So I’m going to give you the grand overview [00:22:06] [indiscernible]. The grand overview of how all memory improvement works and like I said, I’ve interviewed numerous world record holders, world champions, and national champions – like everyone who’s someone in the memory sport and done all the research, and there are very few if any people who are doing it any other way. So it really breaks down to 2 major things.

    The first one being visual memory. So if anyone’s read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein or seen his TED talk, this is where you create visualizations for anything you want to learn and there are of course techniques to convert numbers to visualizations, to convert names, dates, foreign language words, concepts – anything you want. You create these visualization because we are – at our core – visual creatures. A very small percentage of the population is wired any other way, it’s usually people who have some kind of a learning disability. It’s about 2% of people who can’t visualize. And the reason for that is really just evolutionary advantage.

    If you remember…say your evolutionary competitor remembers sounds better than you do, that’s not that much of an advantage. By the time the cheetah gets to you, you’ve had a lot more indications than sound. But if you remember the exact shade of the berries that poisoned the other people in the tribe, if you remember the face markings of the people who are not in your tribe, who are a threat to you – and also add as an asterisk to the visual component – spatial. So why is the memory powers technique – the technique of placing memories in this imaginary building so effective? Because if you don’t remember how to get home and its winter, or you don’t remember where you buried your winter food stash, you’re dead.

    I always like to tell people if they go “Well my brain doesn’t work that way”, I tell them to close their eyes and I tell them to go to their childhood home, even if their parents sold that childhood home 20 years ago. I tell them to go into their parents’ bedroom – even if they were one of those kids who is not really allowed in Mum and Dad’s bedroom – and I tell them to go to their mother’s side of the room.

And I ask them “Was there a nightstand?” And they go “Yes.” And I ask them “What was on that nightstand 25 years ago when you were a kid?” And they go “There’s a red telephone.” I go “Is it touchtone?” They go “Yeah.” So we have this incredible capability in our brain to store that information. Chris, do you remember what was on the nightstand of your childhood?

Chris:    Yeah it was one of those bloody radio alarm clocks that I cover up. Every time that I stay at a hotel now, I unplug the phone because I want my room to be dark. It was one of those.

Jonathan:    What colour were the numbers on it?

Chris:    They were green, yeah.

Jonathan:    There you go. And when was the last time you were in that home?

Chris:    Oh goodness me. I mean yeah we sold that home many, many decades ago. So at least 20 years ago.

Jonathan:    Pretty powerful stuff. I mean that’s the power of visual memory combined with spatial awareness, and we all do this naturally. I mean you remember every single classroom likely, unless you really have some trauma. You remember every classroom that you had. I still remember where I said in Mrs Russell’s class in 3rd grade. Some people might not remember that but you definitely remember the last few hotel rooms you stayed in, where the bed was, where the TV was.

It’s incredible and our brains do this automatically because this is life or death for them. I mean our brains haven’t evolved in at least 100,000 years, really. And that’s why we have so many problems with ADD and cell phone addiction and all these crazy stuff, and the greatest advertising technology firms in the world use these evolutionary triggers in your brain. All we do is teach you how to use them yourself for your advantage.

[00:25:27]

Jonathan:    So I promised – coming back to memory – 2 different things. That’s the first one, is visualizing and creating the spatial awareness using something called the method of loci. The second thing that I think we’ve really pushed into kind of the awareness of people studying mnemonics is connection to pre-existing knowledge. So our brains are made up of neurons. We’ve got about as many neurons as there are stars in the known galaxy, which is pretty impressive.

Chris:    It is.

Jonathan:    We’re talking billions, like I think its a hundred billion neurons. Very, very impressive and those are connected by synapses. And our brains work very similar to the way that Google’s search algorithm works. They determine how many connections there are to a node. You work in AI so you know this but your audience may not. How many connections there are to a node, how important are those connections and based on that, you can determine a new and unique ranking for this neuron.

And that’s exactly how our brains work and that’s the genius of Google and why it is and was the best search engine, because it’s just this kind of importance ranking algorithm. So what we teach people to do is create these connections – these synaptic connections – and I’ve started calling it hijacking existing neuro-networks. So instead of creating new knowledge, like when you meet someone from Norway and you go “Hey teach me how to say ‘Nice to meet you’ in Norwegian” and they tell you, and your only connection is just repeating the words 7 times or whatever it is you do.

We teach them how to connect it to pre-existing knowledge so that the brain is essentially tricked into thinking “Well this piece of Norwegian kind of relates to that funky word that I know in this other language, or it kind of sounds like this and it’s connected to this visualization which includes a childhood friend of mine.” And we’re just tricking the brain into thinking this stuff is important. The brain has 2 dedicated centres – one in the left hemisphere, one in the right hemisphere called hippocampi or hippocampus. And its full time job is to forget things. And in order to stop it from doing its job with specific pieces of information, we need to convince the hippocampi that something is worth remembering. And that’s it, I mean that’s memory sport.

With that and a little bit of direction in exactly how to apply it, you can go out there and memorize 100 names in a few hours. You can go to your next conference and memorize everyone’s name and repeat it back and not just that, tell them where you met them and what you talked about. I love to freak people out. I’m a big advocate of social experiments, I’m a really big advocate of Burning Man culture, so I really enjoy doing funky social experiments. So I’ll go up to people who I’m quite confident don’t remember me because maybe I kind of took a passive role in a conversation.

I heard them speaking to someone else and I just shook hands and walked away. And I walk up to them and I’ll be like “James! How’s it going with your start up? Last time we spoke, you were having some real difficulty funding. You told me that $1 million deal was going to go through. If I recall, that was about July of 2013. How’s it going?” He goes “Who put you up to this?” Like not cool, not cool at all. So I really love to kind of play tricks on people like that, I think it’s a lot of fun and also just to kind of show people that you don’t have a lousy memory, you just don’t know how to use your memory.

Chris:    So how do you do it? How do you persuade the brain that this is information that it doesn’t want to forget? So there are some weird stuff that I do remember and typically in our business, the reason I remember it is because it works. So I’ll give you an example. Say serotonin is generally regarded to be an inhibitory neurotransmitter, but there’s one particular type of receptor – the 5 HT4 receptor – which is highly stimulating and it causes tachycardia and anxiety when it’s stimulated.

And there’s amino acid called lysine that you can supplement with that can block that receptor and prevent anxiety. And the only reason I remember that is because I’ve worked with someone who tried it and it worked. I’m like “Wow that’s great.” So there’s an obvious reason there why I should remember something. But when I bump into somebody at a conference and I’m trying to remember their name, how do I convince my brain that this is something that I want to remember?

Jonathan:    Yeah absolutely. So I think what you did is absolutely right – you connected it to a real-life example, likely of someone that you cared about or who was important in your life at one point if you worked with them. And that’s the first step, is I meet this Stephanie and I connect her to other Stephanie’s I know. Or I meet this Tom and I picture him – that’s strategy number one that we talked about – I visualize him in various different scenes from my favourite book, Tom Sawyer, which isn’t actually my favourite book but for the purpose of the example. I meet someone named Mike, I picture them with a microphone in maybe a particular situation. Throw him into an old memory of me and my friends in Taiwan when we were singing karaoke and how crazy that situation was. So I’m connecting to pre-existing memories and knowledge that brain values and cherishes and at the same time, I’m making sure that those memories are visual.

[00:30:25]

Jonathan:    Now I will give a little asterisk here. When I interviewed Ron White who’s a…I don’t remember how many times actually he won the US Memory Championship, but he won many times before my buddy Nelson Dellis kind of started winning every year on repeat. We joked about how when you lecture on memory and you talk to people, exactly the same thing will happen. You’ll talk to someone and 6 months later, they’ll come and say “I was at your lecture, hey do you remember my name?” And the honest truth is no, and that’s because even with these memory techniques, these will push out your ability to remember further and further and further, but there is an element.

    I mean your brain is no dummy and if you don’t use the knowledge, it will be forgotten. We’re really good – as I said – at forgetting and that’s kind of an evolutionary necessity. In fact there are a few documented cases in history of people who simply couldn’t forget and it’s honestly a curse I would not wish on anybody. But if those things are important to you, one of the things we teach is intelligent systems for making review efficient. So using an algorithm or regression algorithm software called Anki – A-N-K-I – to intelligently determine based on basically a regression that says you’re very likely to forget Steven’s name. And you can just make a deck of cards, you don’t have to review them all like if they were paper cards.

    And it’ll know, you typically forget Steven’s name after about 3 months. So it’ll remind you every 3 months. And that’s it, you get [00:31:52] [indiscernible] gets pushed out. So after 3 reviews of 3 months each, it’ll eventually get to a point where you only need to review Steven’s name once every 6 years. There are words in Russian that I only need to review once every 20 years. I would have to argue, if you’re not using it once every 20 years, let it go. There are some things that you really don’t need to remember and there are things that maybe…the example I really like is you started a new company, there’s 1200 people in your facility.

    Memorize all their names, it’s really not hard to memorize 1200 people’s names and it will totally get you ahead in the workplace. It’ll make you very much more liked. But then if you quit that job, you probably don’t need to keep all 20 of those people’s names that you worked with closely.

Chris:    That makes a lot of sense and I was just wanting to say I forgot but now remembering is that you just did what is part of your teaching by explaining to me the process in terms of Google. You know that I was a computer guy and that I will understand the [00:32:53] [indiscernible] algorithm. And so if you explained what you’re trying to explain in those terms, then it would be easier for me to make that new connection.

Jonathan:    And that is exactly what I’m saying, is in my line of work, having that knowledge – I think one time maybe 3 or 4 years ago, I got curious. I was like “How the heck does [00:33:10] [indiscernible] work? Why is Google so special? Why did they kill [00:33:13] [indiscernible], why did they kill Yahoo? Why did they kill every attempt that Microsoft has made at creating a decent search engine?” I must have read an article about it years ago and I remember it and that’s the whole memory thing. Like maybe I don’t need to memorize the exact weights and how it all works. I don’t think anyone does, ‘cause it changes so much. But I’m able to draw on that and use that in my day to day. And that just was at the tip of the tongue.

Chris:    Right and we still use PaidRank manually. So I’ll give you an example over the weekend, [00:33:46] [indiscernible] was talking about lowering home assisting with B vitamins. I mean that’s being studied a lot in the literature so I type that out into PubMed, which is the first paper I’m going to click on – the one with the most citations, right? Like there’s paper s out there that have talked about that with 600 citations, which is a lot for citations. So it tells you which is more important.

Jonathan:    Totally.

Chris:    So tell me about how this leads into speed reading, ‘cause that is something I’m obviously very interested in. I do a lot of reading in the past, I haven’t been using it much recently I’ve realized. I used to use this little widget that I’m sure you’ve seen that pops up…you already know what I’m talking about. It pops up a little window inside of your web browser and then its subtitles that say centred in the middle of the page or the words that are not moving…you’re not moving your own eyes from left to right, you’re just looking at the words as they flash up one after the other.

And I find that that’s really well for something like a novel but it fails hopelessly when I’m encountering new words. So frequently when I’m reading scientific papers, there’ll be a word that I’ve never seen before and that just completely throws a spanner in the works. And then all the words that flash up after that are just…my brain is still reeling from the word that it’s never seen before. So I stopped using that for all the scientific papers, which is what I read the most of. So do you think that your techniques are going to help me read scientific papers more quickly?

Jonathan:    Yeah absolutely. I mean I think one of the things that we teach…I will say that along about the time where I was kind of diagnosed with ADD and everything, my parents bought me the Evelyn Wood speed reading book, and it didn’t work for me. And when I was tested by Lev and Anna, I was reading 450 words a minute which is really fast but my comprehension was 30% to 40%. And it was because I was using Evelyn Wood technique. So one of the things that we teach that I haven’t really seen many other places, is the scale called pre-reading. And it sounds like it would be counter-intuitive to your speed but what pre-reading is, is scanning each page extremely fast.

[00:35:43]

Jonathan:    I mean we’re talking thousands of words per minute, literally just glancing your eyes over to see what sticks. And so capitalized words, names, formal kind of Latin words, italicized words will jump out at you, numbers will jump out at you. And then you’re doing a couple of different things – you’re creating curiosity, you’re generating questions, you’re starting to do all the things that actually really helped me with my ADD. So kind of determining what my objective is when I read and why is he talking about the Rolling Stones here?

What the heck does 1949 have to do with this article? Generating these questions so that I maintain my attention because I’m actually looking for something. It’s just like once you buy a new car, you see that car everywhere because you’re looking for it. And that’s I think a very powerful skill because those big words…your brain is super effective at determining words that it knows. Even so effective that if the word is misspelled a little bit in the middle, it’ll just [00:36:39] [crosstalk] [indiscernible] you won’t even notice it.

But if you don’t know the word, it’s going to jump out at you and that’s the time during the pre-reading to say “Okay I need to go ahead, look up a couple of these words so that when I do read, it’s a fast forward through.” And it’s similar to any other thing if you [00:36:55] [indiscernible]. I’ll use another example just from memory where it was I believe Abraham Lincoln. It’s confusing because you have the cherry tree with George Washington but it was Abraham Lincoln I believe who said “If you give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend 4 sharpening the axe.”

And that’s exactly that. Spend 5 minutes pre-reading the article and you’ll read the article in 20 minutes instead of in an hour, and your net savings is pretty significant – 35 minutes. So that’s one of the techniques that we teach and then as you said, speed reading as a whole is about optimizing the movement of the eyes, which is how those softwares work and it would be great if the entire world presented information to you like that. But it doesn’t and there’s still so much paper in the world you’re still reading on iPad and all these different devices that don’t work with this software.

So we just teach people how to do that and use your eyes in that efficient way without all the white space, without all the reading one word at a time – you read actually groups of words combined with the kind of classic speed reading element, which is reducing sub-vocalization. So we process information much faster visually and a lot of people will dumb down the bandwidth of information by reading the words aloud to themselves kind of in their heads.

Chris:    Right [00:38:08] [crosstalk] [indiscernible].

Jonathan:    Exactly. You can’t eliminate it completely, ever, from my experience and from the experience of most of the people I talk to. But you can reduce it and if you can reduce it by even 50%, you can double or even triple your reading speed.

Chris:    Right. Yeah I can certainly relate to that and I can tell you with the scientific papers, the way to do this is you go through and you look at the visualizations of the data. So all of my very favourite papers, they all have a visual abstract. So before you start reading anything, you look at a picture that describes what happened in the experiment. And I’m pretty sure – I hate to speak for Tommy. So Tommy, Jonathan, is the research scientist that I work with. And I’m pretty sure that in many cases, Tommy will read a paper without reading any of the words.

So his axe is so sharp that he doesn’t need to read your discussion or your introduction to the subject, he already knows all of that. So he’s just going to go in, he’s going to look at the data, see what your experiment was and what results you got, and that’s it, he’s done. His axe is that sharp, he can do that. Whereas for me, I have to read more of the introduction and the discussion to understand what the heck they were trying to do and why they were trying to do it in the first place. And another thing that I’ve noticed with this – and I think it was in the example in your super learner course – is you tried a speed reading test.

And I’ve noticed a huge thing for me is how much I care about the material. So you picked some arbitrary example and if memory serves me correctly – and usually it doesn’t – it was something to do with some battle that took place and you were supposed to remember what happened on what date. So you were testing for the comprehension after you’d done the speed reading test. And I think I did really, really badly on it. And I would claim that the main reason I did so badly on that was because I did not give a fig about what I was reading.

If I’ve been working on a problem for a week and then suddenly I discover this paper that potentially has the answer to my problem, I really, really care about that paper and I’m going to read it in excruciating detail. And I’m obviously going to remember that much better than some arbitrary piece of text that was thrown at me and you just saying “Oh just remember that." What do you do? What happens if you don’t really care about the thing that you’re trying to remember?

[00:40:24]

Jonathan:    Yeah so we have a series of questions that we have students go through in this pre-reading process that I talked about. I think the most important one for me is how am I going to apply this information? Who am I going to share this with? So I learned about myself, one of my greatest passions in life. I didn’t know this about myself until maybe 6 months ago. But I not only enjoy things, I think I enjoy more sharing things that I love with other people. So it’s like I love acroyoga and I spend like a disproportionate amount of time learning it and studying it and practising it.

But I more enjoy bringing a newbie and teaching it to them. I realized this about myself and I’m like when I read – therefore one of the most effective questions I can ask is who am I going to share this with? Another one if you really are ambivalent about the subject is in what ways do I not agree with this author? In what ways do I think the information is wrong? What is this author going to push on me? What agenda are they serving? And if all else fails, just start generating weird questions like I said. Why is 1949 in a research study on neurology when I know the field of neurology was not nearly as developed in 1949?

What happened in 1949? Or if I’m reading this boring organic chemistry thing, why the heck is the word ‘spike’ in there? That sounds like a weird word to be in an organic chemistry textbook. So on and so forth, and just asking weird questions that you then want to check. Like that seems really out of place, or why is San Francisco in there? What must have happened in San Francisco? So on and so forth. And that at least will get you to the point where you want to validate your own suspicions. We all like to be right and so if you make some assumptions about the texts and then read it, you will want to validate them and that will really increase your attention and focus.

Chris:    Right, right. No that absolutely makes sense. I can tell you that what normally happens with me once I discover something which I think is wrong or I know some evidence that contradicts it, quite often you just lose me completely. Like someone will be giving a presentation and they’ll say something which I know has been disproven, then I’m gone. I’m just not listening anymore. Do you every find that?

Jonathan:    I do definitely find that. I like to kind of stack up evidence. So I spend a lot of time defending my opinions, as I think most of us do – I think most opinionated people do. So I defend my opinion on the Palaeolithic [00:42:43] [indiscernible]. I defend my opinion on so many things. We won’t get into politics, but so many different things every day. And especially being an international living in not my own country. In any case, I like to think of it as sacking up ammunition. It’s like if I know exactly what the arguments of the opposition are going to be, and in that debate that I told you about with this gentleman who did not share my views on the Middle East conflict – it’s just even if you said something that’s not exactly right or I don’t feel is exactly right, it’s stacking up evidence for me.

And so then it becomes about pressing need. So I guess I should kind of introduce this really awesome fella called Malcolm Knowles. And he talked about…in 1955, he released a study on adult andragogy. Like what does it take for the human brain – adult brain – to insert knowledge, and came up with this criteria. One of them is pressing need. And so if I think about…I want to understand the different ways that someone who is on the opposite of the political spectrum is likely to falter in an argument – just as an example. I don’t want your audience to think I’m a combative, argumentative person.

If I am likely to encounter someone who I want to help with the paleo diet and they’re going to cite the China study, I better pay attention because I want to know what line of thought they’re going to go down. So yeah there are a ton of flaws that we can talk about with the China study. I want to pay special attention so that next time I’m ready and I can draw on those examples. And you know that’s just one example but I tend to try and do it…I think a lot of what I do and a lot of my secret to success is cognitive reframing.

So taking it from “This guy is full of shit” to “This is a really valuable opportunity for me to find the weaknesses in someone else’s argument.” Or also by the way, “This is a valuable opportunity for me to identify where people are often confused about something like the paleo diet, so next time I’m prepared to give them information that I feel will benefit them.” It doesn’t always have to be classic Israeli tough debate, right.

Chris:    Right, right. It’s interesting that you should mention the China study actually. I’m sitting in my garden recording this podcast and at the end of our garden, there’s a creek that adjoins our neighbour’s garden. I bumped into my neighbour a few months ago and he was a paediatric gastroenterologist at Stamford University. And he does some amazing things. He can keep a child alive with no GI tract, which just completely blows my mind. But at the same time, he was vegetarian.

And the reason he was vegetarian was because of the China study. I’m like “You’ve got to be kidding me.” But rather than trying to memorize all the things that were wrong with the China study, I just sent him to the Denise Minger website. Just go read that, it’ll tell you more. I think Denise Minger did a really good job of rebutting the China study, it’s a very long and well thought out piece. And so I don’t really remember what the rebuttal was, I just remember to refer people to Denise Minger. So do you think that’s a problem, then?

[00:45:32]

Jonathan:    Which part? The vegetarian…

Chris:    No, not the vegetarian part. Just knowing where to send people for the right answer – do you think that’s a problem or do you think I should know it myself?

Jonathan:    You know it’s funny, I have my own URL shortener. So I have to do a lot of stuff around productivity and I’m kind of like a big productivity buff. And it’s because of all the problems I had with ADD and trying to run a business and still get ahead in school and blah blah blah. So I’ve developed all these crazy productivity hacks and all these hard and fast rules. One of my hard and fast rules is I try not to repeat myself as much as possible. So if enough people ask me about things, then I just record a course around it, even if it’s not really profitable. So I increased my testosterone doing just the kind of stuff that probably you talk about every single week on your show, Chris.

Chris:    Sleeping, eating.

Jonathan:    Yeah sleeping, eating, eating specific foods [00:46:23] [crosstalk] [indiscernible].

Chris:    Yeah finding out why the testosterone was low in the first place is our favourite way to raise testosterone.

Jonathan:    So I went from 530…no wait, 563 aged 24 to 727 at age 28. Which is pretty good because my [00:46:41] [indiscernible] had gone down quite a bit. That’s kind of like the age where stuff starts going downhill. But in any case, so many people asked me about it and they’re like “Why do you seem different? Why do you feel different?” So I just recorded a course about it. So I am definitely an advocate of just go read it. So one example, I’ve talked a lot about psychedelics and how I think there’s value in exploring alternate perspectives and potentially dimensions. Enough people asked me about it that I have a link to a blog post that I really like.

I’ll give it out to you guys, it’s just jle.vi/drugs. And I make it very easy for myself. So if people ask me what are some good books, jle.vi/whatever it might be. And I just memorize all of them so I’ve got 40 or 50 of these links. Basically anything someone could ask me about, I’ll repeat myself in the sense that like “Hey I want to tell you about this really phenomenal article by Sam Harris. He’s a philosopher and kid of a cognitive neuroscientist and he talks about drugs in a really interesting way and debunks some myths and shares some powerful experiences. Just go to this URL.” Or like enough friends will ask me “How do you make such delicious Kombucha?” jle.vi/kombucha. Check it out. Like I said, I’ve got about 50 of these that I share.

Chris:    Right. And for the hard of memory – like me – I will link to these things in the show notes. I make quite detailed show notes for each podcast episode, so I’ll link to all these things Jonathan talked about. So tell me about the [00:48:06] [indiscernible] thing. I’ve been really interested in that too. I’ve just finished reading the book Stealing Fire. Have you read that book?

Jonathan:    I really need to read this one. I’ve gotten caught up in the 7 week course. I used to read a book a week and right now, I’m reading one of these books where you can only read a chapter a day – it’s for 7 weeks. My reading list is just stacking up but that’s one I really want to read and I also need to get a little bit more of Steven Kotler’s work. I’ve had a chance to meet him but I haven’t read his stuff.

Chris:    Okay. Oh that’s a new one for me. So the way I’ve been getting through these is audio. I’m not very good at sitting down in one place and reading something on paper. But on [00:48:43] [indiscernible], I can speed it up to 1.5x and then I can listen to it in the sauna or maybe the first 30 minutes of my mountain bike ride which is on the pavement on a quiet road, which is otherwise quite boring. And so I can listen and that’s how [00:48:56] [indiscernible]. But I was really interested, you must know about some of the techniques that they talk about in Stealing Fire.

So the whole premise – I hope I’m not misrepresenting this – is the humans and all animals in fact tend to fall into patterns that may not continue to be productive for all eternity. And so reaching altered states of consciousness may help us break those unhelpful patterns and solve problems more easily. And so as soon as you say altered conscious, people start thinking of psychedelic drugs and all of that but of course there are lots of other ways in which you could achieve an altered set of consciousness. One might be meditation or float tanks. In Stealing Fire, they talk about this sound system – Funktion-One sound system.

If you’re in the UK – I’m not sure where there is one in the US – but you can go to the nightclub Fabric in London and when you stand in the middle of the dance floor and listen to this Funktion-One sound system, you understand how it achieves an altered state of consciousness. It grabs your diaphragm and just moves you around. It’s super exciting. I just wondered if you used any of these techniques in your work or whether this is something completely separate?

[00:50:02]

Jonathan:    Yeah absolutely. Well I think a lot of what we do actually pertains to the requirements of [00:50:07] [indiscernible]. I haven’t taken the time to memorize actually the…I think its 7 requirements or 7 triggers for the flow state. I know one of them is an element of risk, so I think a lot of them connect to like what are you actually going to use the knowledge for? They connect to kind of success that moves forward and things like that. So I think even though I’m guilty of not nearly researching this whole flow state thing enough, I think we’ve kind of accidentally – just based on revising our [00:50:35] [indiscernible] over the years. Based on what works, I think we’ve touched on a lot of it.

    I will say that I’ve tried a lot of different stuff for enhancement of consciousness, and potentially one of the most effective ones – and I think free and cheap and powerful ones in terms of holistic health improvement – is meditation. So I meditated very seriously for over a year. I kind of had to stop because things started getting a little weird for me, but I plan to go back to it. But in any case, meditation I always recommend to anybody. Especially if you have an ADD brain like mine. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that you can actually heal something like ADD using neuro-feedback. So like video games that are designed to elicit the same response or just if you don’t want to go pay someone a ton of money for a strange weird new thing, meditation.

    Meditation actually – here comes the memory bit – actually improves cortical gyrification, changes the flow of chemicals in the brain, changes blood flow, changes your heart rate variability. All these different incredible indicators. Actually I just read another study recently that people who practiced meditation for just a few months were able to modulate cortisol response. That is really cool, like talk about flow state. So meditation really just gives you so much more power over your brain and over your physical and mental and emotional wellbeing. But I definitely recommend it to everybody. I’ve also tried sensory deprivation extensively. I would still do it but it’s not really so available [00:52:12] [crosstalk] [indiscernible].

Chris:    There’s a float tank place that’s opened up in Santa Cruz and we’ve got some tickets to go. I really must do it. But it’s one of those things that’s not like…yeah meditation, you could literally do it anywhere – whereas the float tank, you kind of have to do something special to get to it.

Jonathan:    Bingo. I mean meditation is like one of the greatest gifts. It’s completely free and it works better than most drugs. The only thing is it takes time. It’s kind of like…in that article, if anyone goes to that article about drugs, like [00:52:40] [indiscernible] never tired of reminding people, you can meditate for 10 years and have just modest results if you don’t do it right. But if you kind of go down this journey of plant medicines and psychedelics and stuff like that, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to have powerful spiritual experiences. But for the patient and risk-averse, meditation is the way to go for anyone who’s had any history of psychological issues, stuff like that, then it’s the only way to go.

Chris:    Okay. Alright so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to becomeasuperlearner.com and the link for that will be in the show notes – and I’m going to sign up for the latest version of your super learner course. Because being a software guy, I can’t possible stand the thought that I’m running version 2 when there may be a version 3 or even version 4 somewhere out there on the internet. So we’ll all go and sign up for that and I’ll have another honest crack at that. I think it’s really important stuff that you’re doing. And then becomingasuperhuman.com is the home for your podcast. Can you talk about your podcast and the types of people that you like to interview there?

Jonathan:    Yeah absolutely. So we’re going to have you on the show pretty soon. As I understand we’ve got that scheduled I think for the end of the month to interview you. But typically the way that I would pitch it is I’m really interested in learning but I acknowledge that kind of…there’s this whole wider element of health and as we talked about it, it’s kind of this golden trifecta and so really the whole show is about my curiosity going into…I’ve been able to improve my memory by 10, 20…I’ve never really measured but I would imagine 20x.

Which is surely superhuman. I think if you and I sat down, we went to…next time we meet at one of these health conferences and I memorize 150 people’s names in the first day – that feels pretty superhuman. And I wouldn’t call myself superhuman but that’s a skill that seems superhuman and it’s about unlocking this curiosity to realize oh my God, there’s hundreds of these different ways. Meditation is another way to unlock this superhuman level of calm. Wim Hof method is an incredible way and we’ve had him on the show.

An incredible way to regulate your body temperature and immune response. We’ve done shows on the Paleo diet and how to…I mean I won’t sell paleo to your audience but they dramatically improve your health just through diet. We’ve had shows on sleep, we even get out there. We get weird as well. Shows on meditation, shows on psychedelics, shows on acroyoga and how it can be used to heal emotional trauma. So it’s really all about making people 1% better every time they listen to the show if possible, and if we can impact people’s lives and help them be a little more superhuman, then I think we’re doing our job.

[00:55:30]

Chris:    I’m very much in favour of the idea. It’s all more connected than you know. So a few weeks ago, I was with a naturopathic doctor who I mention on every single episode – Dr Bryan Walsh – and he was teaching blood chemistry interpretation. And Bryan had spent the last 6 or maybe even more months locked away in a broom cupboard somewhere doing research for his optimal ranges for blood chemistry. And I feel like I’m going to forget all that stuff – it was 800 pages of presentation plus whiteboard time in one weekend.

It was a lot of stuff to get through and I realize I’m going to forget it all unless I do what you say and that is to go ahead and teach some of it. The reason I really want to remember it is because I think it’s very important work and we’re developing some blood chemistry interpretation software. So I’m excited to have the opportunity to come back on to your podcast and talk about some of the research that Bryan has been doing.

Jonathan:    Love to. And about the course by the way, we have a 30 day money back guarantee and we’re passionate about it being kind of a no questions asked. So if you don’t feel like the course is worth twice what you paid for, just let me know and we refund people without any questions, regardless of what the issue is. Even if the issue is “I took the whole course, I don’t need it anymore. I want my money back.” We’re really adamant about people feeling safe and that they can really give this thing a try without having to make a big jump. So I look forward to hearing when we interview you, how it’s going. You should be…I have to check my calendar, I don’t know when Mina set it up. But I would assume you’ll be in week 4, week 5.

Chris:    Okay.

Jonathan:    So should really be getting to the good stuff and start noticing some funky weird side effects – in a good way – towards memory.

Chris:    Well shit that’s some accountability. I’ve got to get it down now. That’s good, I like it. Excellent. Well this has been brilliant Jonathan, thank you very much for your time, I very much appreciate it.

Jonathan:    Thank you, pleasure was all mine. I look forward to speaking to you again.

[00:57:24]    End of Audio

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