JONATHON LEVI: Hack Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember More, and Focus Better

Hi, everyone. I am so excited about this episode of Allie and you'd. The guest I have today is a dear friend and you are going to learn so much. So here we go. Jonathan Levy is an online educator, published author, podcaster, and angel investor, all in one, and a really nice guy. He's the founder of Superhuman Enterprises, an information products company which creates content, content and online courses. We're going to learn all about that today. For those of you that want to create your own online course. He creates content that educates, entertains, and performs and transforms. I would say that everything that you do now needs to entertain. Right. You need to be able to capture people's attention. So this is super important. Since 2014, when he created his first course on speed reading and memorization, which I'm dying to learn about, Jonathan has been one of the top performing educators on Udemy, showing 130,000 people in 200 countries how to learn better and live happier. Now he helps his students build the kind of life they truly want to live by learning, unlearning, relearning in all areas of their lives. So, Jonathan, I am so excited to have you here.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. You know, I just finished your book last week, so you've been on my mind and I've been enjoying it so much.

Oh, thank you. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. Well, you are coming to us from Israel, correct?

Correct. Yeah. I'm in the heart of Tel Aviv. You wouldn't know from the soundproofing of the room, but I'm in about the most trafficked part of the entire country right now.

I've been to Israel many times, and it is a absolutely beautiful country, and Tel Aviv is one of my favorites. Such a metropolitan city. A lot of people don't realize that, but it's such a fun place to be.

So, yeah, people joke about it that you need a passport to go from Tel Aviv to the rest of the country.

Yeah, it's very true. So what started you on this path? I mean, your story is awesome. So I want everyone to get a said that.

Yeah. So growing up, I was like many entrepreneurs. I mean, I really found my tribe when I discovered entrepreneurship. I had a really hard time in school. It was cute for the first few years, you know, oh, the student in the back who's always making jokes and laughing and can't sit still. It was less cute by the time I turned 12, 13, and 14. So I really struggled not just in the classroom, but also outside of the classroom with learning right, other kids were learning all these social skills and behaviors and learning how to fit in and learning how to make friends and learning how to talk to girls. And I not only was behind everyone in class, but outside of class as well. And that led to a lot of negative side effects. Won't elaborate too much, but bullying and depression and even suicidal thoughts. And it wasn't really until I discovered entrepreneurship that I found something that I was actually good at. I discovered a wonderful tactic for compensating for my inability to learn in the classroom, which was called Ritalin. And I would just take a whole bunch of that and then come home every day at 3 o' clock and compensate for what I wasn't understanding. I would sit in my bedroom from 3 o' clock to 7 o' clock when my mom dragged me out forcibly for dinner, go back in and study till I dropped. And that's how I just kept up and caught up. I did the same thing in college, you know, just work harder than everyone else to try and catch up. I had to change my major three times in college because I just couldn't run my business at the same time as keeping up in school. So I ended up going from a great major, which was economics, to a less great major, which was anthropology, to a less great major. I ended up finally on sociology, not a super useful degree, but it was easy enough that I could get through it. Fast forward a few years, I sold my business, decided to go back to business school because I really figured out business is what I'm good at. The problem was I knew in business school it's not really about what's in the classroom, it's about the networking and the relationship. So my old trick of just locking myself in my bedroom wasn't going to work. I was going to have to figure a way out to actually do the work, make the friends, make the connections, travel. Because I studied in Singapore and in France and I was all over the world and hopefully along the way also start a side business because I went there to meet potential co founders. Fortunately for me, I happened upon two people who were experts in accelerated learning, speed reading and memory. And I was like, please teach me. So I hired them for private coaching and it changed my life because suddenly I realized that there are better and worse ways to learn. It's not like you're either smart or not smart or you have a good memory, a bad memory. It's just, do you know how to use your brain? And the beauty of that skill is it's kind of like a very meta thing once you learn that. I mean as soon as I got out of business school and I applied it there and it changed my life. And the first thing I did was, oh my God, I should dig deeper on this and I should go into all these things that I'm passionate about. I had all these problems with my joints. So I read a 600 page book on basically how to fix the human body. I had again dating back problems communicating, problems with making friends and reflecting well and public speaking. And so I read another 660 page book on body language. And I just went so deep on so many different topics and I realized like if you can learn, you can learn anything. And so learning is really the only skill that matters. And after enough time and enough people asking me, how do you do this and why did you finish the exam before everybody else? I said, what if I translated all these materials, which I learned in Hebrew and we built an online course that anyone could take at their own pace. Now I didn't know anything about online courses. I'd taken one online course ever. And that opened my mind to this idea of like, maybe there's a business opportunity in scaling and automating the way that people learn. And I knew nothing. I didn't know how to record video, edit video, I didn't know how to write pedagogical materials. I didn't know how to submit and win on these marketplace ranking websites where there's 30,000 other competitors. But I sat down and I did some speed reading and memory and learning and I learned everything I could over the course of a weekend, really. And I put my first course up and the rest is kind of history. Within a few weeks it became one of the best selling courses on the platform. Within a few years it had become a movement.

So that's so, I mean you said so many things in minutes that I'm like, oh my God, that's powerful. That's powerful. You know, it's, I think so many entrepreneurs struggle with this add, adhd, whatever you want to call it. And I, you know, I question it. It really is just the way people learn. And I think that business owners are so creative. You don't fit in this box. And that's how society wants us, you know, because it, I hate to say you've got more control of the classroom and, and you know, my daughter really struggled with that, you know, all through school. And she was misdiagnosed as somebody that didn't care and always like, you know, we were Having teacher meetings over and over. And, you know, it wasn't really until her senior year, when she was about to graduate that we figured out that she was just really having issues with her memory and processing and from then could figure out how to navigate through life. And, you know, she's such a super creative person. So I love this work. And it, you know, the other thing you said about it really is a matter of me. If you can learn anything, right, you can apply it to your life in whatever way that you want. And we have so many.

I always like to ask people, like, what do you think the most important skill is in life? And you get a range of answers like kindness, really important people skills, really important. Learning to motivate, learning to manage your time. Like, you get a whole range of answers. And then I go, okay, how do you develop that skill? And they go, well, you learn it. I go, okay, so wait a minute. If you can't learn effect, you know, and it's so true. And I think it's interesting talking about your daughter. Like, I once heard Tony Buzan, who's like the godfather of what I do and what I do now, he did 50 years ago before the Internet. So I owe a lot of credit to him for paving the way by writing his books. He talked about, you know, if you buy a microwave, which a whole team of engineers at GE or Bosch have sat in a room and figured out, how can we make this so easy to use that anyone can use this device? It's literally designed to be easy to use. And you get an instruction manual that's this thick, right? But the human brain, which, by the way, most people don't realize is the most complex object in the known universe. No user's manual, not even a quick explanation of like, hey, Alison, by the way, if you're going to use your brain, you probably want to do these three things. And it works best if you feed it this and sleep eight hours, you know, just a heads up. So it's crazy. It's really, really crazy. And by the way, we get learn.

We don't learn to learn, right? We don't really go memorize this, go do this work. But it's not telling you how to think, how to process, how to set yourself up for success, right?

And, you know, as I was writing my book, I was thinking like, some people might think, well, it's not. It's not the job of the education system to teach me how to use my brain. And I'm like, really? Because when I was in school, they taught me how to use my other parts because I remember like three months of really awkward classes where the biography teacher or the biology teacher taught me about the other parts and how they work. So why didn't nobody teach me how to use my brain? You know, it's ridiculous.

I think that would put everybody ahead. So why do you think that it is so challenging for us to learn and retain information?

Yeah, well, the first thing, and I know it's super cliche to bash on the education system, but our education system is based on a model that doesn't exist anymore and on a world that doesn't exist anymore. It's education at scale. And it's education at scale without technology and without understanding. When our education system dramatically predates our understanding of the brain. We haven't really understood how people learn since like the 1950s. I mean, we understood how memory works a little bit in the 1860s, and then we started to understand like the conditions that make an adult brain learn better along about the 1950s with the work of Malcolm Knowles. But our education system dates back way before then to the early, early parts of the industrial era. And certain parts of it. The idea of having someone stand in front and lecture, that's a 2,500 year old idea that dates back to Plato and Socrates. Like, what if we just put everyone in a room where they could all see one person and then we orate. But you know, the Greeks knew nothing about how the brain actually works for all the great things that they did. And so our education system is just not designed for the way that we understand that we learn. And any parent, especially a parent who's had a child who's struggled to learn, knows, like, if the child doesn't experience things, if they don't see it with their own eyes, if they don't touch it with their own hands, if it's not made interactive and connected to the things that they actually care about. You know, it's in one ear and out the other. It's like every parent in the world knows this. And yet for some reason our education system is like, all right, turn to page 32 and let me tell you a bunch more stuff and not give you any context about why you care about it and not make it interactive and not make it exciting and. And so that's a big part of it, right?

Yeah. You know, everything you said makes so much sense. I mean, I lead events. If I just stood up there and lectured, I mean, nobody would come, you know, I would be bored. And you probably remember There were those few teachers that got it, you know, that really made the classroom fun and that was interactive and experiential. And those are the ones that you, you know, you really are grateful for. Those are the ones where you actually remember what went on.

And the most innovative schools, you know, know this. Like I was recently at a lecture with the founder, co founder of Muse Schools, and she was talking about, I mean, they know this and, and Muse, their whole curriculum has been based on neuroscience and understanding of how children learn. So kids at Muse schools don't learn biology by flipping through a textbook and going, this is the stamen of the flower. They do it by actually planting a garden that feeds the school. They don't learn math by, you know, Timmy and Johnny have three apples. They learn it by actually running a bake sale and funding the school and learning the economics. And what happens if we, if each cookie costs us 37 cents and we make 472 cookies per batch, you know, that's how they learn. And it's like there's real connection. So we know a couple fundamentals about the way the brain works and a couple ways that our brains retain memory. So most people have heard of the hippocampus, which is actually named by the Greeks. They didn't really know what it did, but they knew what it looked like. And hippocampus is the Greek word for seahorse. Now most people don't realize, but you have two of them in your brain. One in the left hemisphere, one in the right hemisphere. And the job of that is just to figure out, do I care? Right? It determines is this worth remembering or not worth remembering. And that's a full time job. Our brains are 2% of our body mass. They consume 20% of the energy, oxygen and resources of our bodies, which is insane. So it's really important that we stay hyper efficient. Fun fact. And I can go on brain tangent facts all day, so stop me at some stuff.

Keep going.

So essentially our brain runs on about as much power. I don't know the exact kilowatts and megawatts, but I think they run on about 10 watts of power, which is about 2 of those super energy efficient CFL bulbs that your energy company is always trying to get you to buy. But they have the computing power. If you could build a computer that had as much computing power as the human brain, it would be something like 40 megawatts, which is a small nuclear power plant. It's insane. So they're hyper efficient and we don't know why, but part of it is the sufficiency of like forgetting stuff. And I mean it's amazing. Like it's, it's, it'll probably take us another 30 or 40 years to figure out how the human brain actually does what it does. But part of that algorithm is forgetting. So there are a couple criteria that trick the hippocampi or convince the hippocampi that it's worth remembering. One is, is it connected to stuff that I actually care about? Interestingly enough, our brains work a lot like Google. So Google became really innovative in the 1990s and the reason that they surpassed AltaVista and Yahoo was their superior algorithm because they said not only how much stuff is connected to this page, you know, alisonmaslin.com but also how important is the stuff that's feeding to this page. Because using that algorithm, they call it PageRink, I can figure out like, look, there's only three connections, but they're really, really important, you know, and your brain works the same way. It's like you have that one memory that involves your parents and it's a memory where you had a near death experience. It's like that's a really important memory. So if something connects to it, if you learn a new piece of information, like, you know, I didn't realize that day, you know, your parents tell you, well that that day we were on Highway 5. And suddenly that detail is connected to something that's so important, so crucial. So that's one. Two is, is it outrageous? Is it violent? Sexual? Our brains crave novelty. So if we can turn things into bizarre or outstanding in any kind of way, that's going to dramatically improve our memory. And the third one is the most controversial one, not in terms of what scientists know, but in terms of what people think they know. And that is, is it visual? Is it experiential? So there's a hierarchy of how memorable our senses are based on evolutionary advantage and based on how old the scent or the sense is. Everyone knows smell and taste, most memorable senses. If you smell that perfume of that boyfriend or girlfriend from 30 years ago, you're going to go right back to them. But third most memorable is vision. Because it's life or death on the savannah. Most predators don't announce themselves, so it's not going to give you.