Dyslexia and the Entrepreneur: Russell Van Brocklen

This is the Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today, Russell Van Brocklin. Welcome to the show, Russell.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So why don't you give the listeners kind of your, your background CV? Why, why you're on the show? What do you bring to the table?

Well, with dyslexia, this was the last thing I was supposed to do. I was supposed to be a bureaucrat for the state government. What happened is, in the late '90s, I was finishing up college and I wanted to know how laws are created, not some class. I wanted to know. So I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship program, and I showed up and I said, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first-grade reading and writing level. And the program director said this This can't work because the typical internship, you got the assembly member, the chief of staff who was an intern a year or two before, and the intern. And he went to the speaker's office and they said, we're not— you have to accommodate this kid. We're not getting rid of him because of dyslexia. So they took a rather strong, uh, solution after forming a committee. They literally pulled me out of the legislative office building and put me in the Capitol. In the Majority Leader's program and counsel's office because they had 3 administrative assistants who could help me with my horrendous writing because I had to turn in things every week. What got me was when I went there, as they said, they didn't know what to do with an undergrad intern. It was a graduate intern position, right? Which is a real— which was a real staff position. So I thought that was great. I ended up for the academic portion doing a very long presentation, hours long, with hours long Q&A instead of the paper. Which was the standard accommodation for me back then. So they ended up saying, okay, at the end of the semester, here's your 15 credits. The recommended GPA is an A-. Goes back to the State University of New York Center at Buffalo's political science department. They look at the accommodations the state made and they said, we don't like these, so here's your 15 credits of F. Okay. Yeah, they flunked me. Okay. And yeah, so I had enough of the discrimination, and I decided at that point I wanted to solve dyslexia so nobody else had to go through this. So I asked my professors where I could go in grad school to force myself to learn to read and write, and they said law school. So I went to law school. Good God, that sounds horrible. Well, well, it wasn't as bad as you thought, because what I found in grad school is when a dyslectic— I found out this later— is when a dyslectic goes to grad school, we own the place day one. Because as most people are really good in very broad areas, dyslectics, we're academic specialists. We excel in a very small, very narrow area. So what we focus on is, uh, so I was, I was naturally, if I like political science, I'm going to like law. So the second day of contracts, Professor Warner calls on me. He's a dyslexic professor, and, uh, normally what they do is they just squash you with the Socratic method. They ask you questions you can't answer until you can eventually adapt. That didn't happen to me. I didn't respond as a student. I responded as his equal. He kept trying to find ways to confuse me, to throw me off. Nothing helped. I responded, as I said, at his equal 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He couldn't shake me. At the end, he said, "You couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on to the next case in the interest of time." I learned to read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years. Then I went back to the New York State Senate and I said, "I want you to fund my dyslexic research project," which they don't do. So that took years of additional work. And finally, after all these approvals, They funded my research for a couple of years. It was at the Avril Park Central School District right outside of Albany, New York. We— I want everybody to know I kind of cheated. I took their best juniors and seniors that were highly motivated, highly intelligent. I wanted to work with students who were like me and solve their problems, to give them the writing skills of a college graduate before they went to high school— I mean, before they went to college, so that they wouldn't go through what I went through. So they all had middle school writing skills. One class period a day for about 180 days, they increased from the 0 percentile on the GRE writing assessment to the average range of entering graduate students. So they all went out of college, they all graduated, GPAs at 2.5 to 3.6. Cost New York State taxpayers less than $900 a kid. And that's how I got started.

Okay, so let's, let's define some terms. What, what in layman's terms, is dyslexia?

Well, I'm going to show it to you in an image. This is the top book in my field called Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz. She's a professor, a medical doctor at Yale. That's dyslexia.

Okay.

Do you see how the back part of your brain has all this massive neural activity?

Yes.

Now the back part of my brain has next to nothing.

Okay.

Do you see how the front part of my brain's about 2.5 times overactive compared to yours? Yes. So I had this weird idea. Let's use that overactive front part of the dyslexic brain. Now, according to Dr. Shatowitz, that's articulation followed by word analysis. So my first program, I chose the GRE Analytical Writing Assessment because analytical articulation to me, the same thing. But when I tried to apply that to typical students, it just wouldn't work. So I had to flip it to word analysis followed by articulation. So are you familiar with any dyslexic elementary school kids at all? No. Okay. So the typical example I like to use, her name is Sarah, and this is something I'm going to show your audience how they can get their kids to write basic sentences with correct spelling and grammar. And instead of taking a couple of months to explain it, I'm going to explain in the next few minutes. Okay. So with Sarah, what we're going to do is we're going to have to use word analysis followed by articulation, because just again, we're going to move things from the back part of the brain where there's nothing going on to the front part where we have this massive neural activity. Okay. So first thing we're going to do is we have to define the kid's specialty, what they really love to do. For Sarah, that's swimming. She's on the swim team. She gets in the pool every chance that she can get. So when I met her, she was 10 years old, reading and writing at the 2nd grade level. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is, assuming you're the teacher, you're going to type out on a laptop computer— not an iPad, not an iPhone, certainly not handwriting— you're going to type out "hero" plus sign "what are we talking about." Then we're going to swap out Sarah's name for hero. So we got Sarah plus sign what are we talking about. Then we're going to go and we're going to have a list of 10 things that Sarah really, really likes and 10 things she really, really dislikes. First thing on the like list is swimming. So we got Sarah plus sign what are we talking about. We're going to swap out what are we talking about for swimming. Now we got Sarah plus sign swimming. See how we got there?

Yes.

Okay, now I'm going to try to fool you with the simplest questions ever. They're going to be two of them. If you answer them correctly, this will work. If not, it doesn't work. Okay, do you think I can fool you with the simplest questions ever?

Probably, but you know, I, I'd like to— I'd like to participate.

Okay, let's go ahead and— because most people, when they get done with this, have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. So we got Sarah plus sign swimming. We gotta swap out the plus sign for a word. Here's my question. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming?

Well, I'm gonna go with like.

Very good. You got it exactly right for the first question. Now for the second one. This is a tough one. Go ahead and replace the plus sign with the word like. Sarah plus sign swimming. Swap out the plus sign with the word like. What's the 3-word sentence?

Sarah like swimming.

But that's not what I asked.

Okay, ask again.

Does Sarah like or dislike swimming? You said like. Yes. Now go ahead and swap out the plus sign for like. What's the sentence?

Still Sarah like swimming.

Yep, but that's the— you got it right the second time. The first time you said likes.

Oh, I thought I said like, but okay, yes.

Yeah, so you did what almost every educated person does. You go ahead and you, you corrected and added the S to make it a proper sentence, right? Sarah's dyslexic, she doesn't know how to add the S. Okay, so now we get into a technical idea. How do we get Sarah to add the S? Well, if you're rich, I mean, if you're Bill Gates' grandkids or great-grandkids, You're looking at a Wharton-Gillingham Structured Language Multisensory approach. It's $75,000 a year for about 4 to 5 years in a private dyslexic school just for tuition. It's where you see it, touch it, hear it, every sense you can imagine to help you overcome this. It would take you about 2 additional years and $11,000 in a not-for-profit to learn the process. I'm going to show you how to do this really quick right now. What we would do is we would ask Sarah to read what she wrote out loud. She— first, we would ask Sarah, do you like or dislike? She would say like, like you did. Sarah likes swimming. And then we would say, Sarah, does that sound generally correct? She's going to say no. Then I'll say, Sarah, fix it. Sarah likes swimming. Okay, do you see how by making it— does it sound generally correct? No. Make it so it does sound correct, and then she writes it out properly. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay, that's how you get around it. Now, when it comes time, when you're also doing this, do you see how like and dislike is a very simple form of word analysis?

Well, so it appeared to me what you were doing is, is you, you had a sentence that was a formula and you were replacing, uh, objects with words. Um, so maybe not. Maybe I don't understand word analysis. I mean, I, uh, maybe I'm, maybe I'm overcomplicating it.

Well, like and dislike, you see the process we went through? It's a very simple form of word analysis. We're analyzing different words, doing different things with them.

So it's not a matter of choosing which is correct, or, or is that part of the analysis?

Well, we're— you're— yeah, it's kind of over— you're kind of overthinking it. Okay, at a very base level, what we're just simply doing is we're asking Sarah, because remember, we're starting off with 10 things she really likes and then 10 things she really dislikes. There's no gray area here. And then with like What we're doing is she constantly doesn't add an S. So we're showing her how to add the S. I see. Okay. Okay. We're doing a very simple form of word analysis here. And then after because, then we say reason one. The reasons are a very simple form of articulation.

Okay.

So essentially what we're doing is, again, I'm going back to the science here. There's no brain activity in the back part of the dyslexic brain here. Essentially, it's almost nothing. We're pulling that forward to this, so we're, we're dealing with a part of the brain that Sarah actually works.

Okay, maybe it would help me understand and the audience understand, what are the two parts of the brain? What are they doing? What, what are the different functions of the brain there?

Well, I'm going to really oversimplify massive neuroscience, so The back part of the brain I want you to think of as kindergarten through high school, generally college. The front part I want you to think of as more graduate level. Okay. Okay. Really higher order thinking material. So what we're essentially just trying to do here is to pull the, the process from the back part of the brain where we got next to nothing with the dyslexics going on to the front part where we have 2.5 times the neural activity.

Is there, is there some other way dyslexia presents itself other than through reading and writing?

Yes. Do you have dyslectics who are whizzes at math? Dyslectics who were horrible at math? I focus on reading and writing because the perception is that dyslectics have issues with this because of dyslexia. It's a symptom, not the underlying cause. And this is what everybody's generally trying to fix.

Okay. So I'm just wondering, so what you're describing, which I find neuroscience fascinating, mainly because even the smartest people don't really understand. And so it's really kind of a black box in a lot of ways, and it lends itself to hard science as well as, you know, metaphysical when you, when you start looking at the human mind. So it's fascinating. So what, what you're describing to me is whether it's dyslexia or other— I don't know what I would call them— out, out of norm aspects of a human brain. Usually there's some kind of trade-off, right? Like, it's not like brain damage, where you've lost the functionality of part of your brain. Your brain has overcompensated, or it was designed that way or developed that way, where you have a weakness, but now you have strength.

Yeah?

Yes. And so I'm wondering, what that looks in practical application beyond reading and writing. So like, what else would you struggle at as a dyslexic that you would have, uh, a superpower in?

Okay, let me finish up this part and then I'll tackle that one.

Okay.

All right, so what happens is, um, because the other big issue that your audience is going to find is these kids are writing a bunch of The spelling is horrendous.

So— The spelling's horrendous.

Well, I'm gonna show you how to fix it with these kids now. So give me a reason why you think a 10-year-old girl would like swimming. Because—

She wants to be a mermaid.

She wants to be a mermaid. Sarah likes swimming because she wants to be a mermaid. Do you see now how we have a whole mess of misspelled words here?

Oh yeah, yes.

Here's how we fix that. What we do is we tell Sarah to read what she wrote out loud. And does it sound generally correct? We're just working on grammar now because the school districts have huge problems with massive grammar mistakes. This gets rid of that. Once that's done, we tell her if there's a misspelled word, she has to keep retyping until it's correct. Hmm. So she's going to do that between 3 and 13 times. Each time she's going to tell herself, I'm not going to make that mistake, and she keeps making it. Again and again. So she concentrates harder and harder. Around 9 to 13 times, you can start seeing sweat coming down her forehead. It's that intense. That's where the magic happens. Eventually she gets it correct, and then you make sure they're— everything is spelled correctly for 10 likes, for 10 reason ones for likes, 10 reason ones for dislikes, and then spelled correctly for reason 1 and reason 2, and then reason 1, reason 2, and reason 3. So you're doing at least 80 sentences. When that's done, you're looking at a student who is reading and writing, who's reading, uh, writing at least at the end of second, beginning third grade level. And the writing, the reading has improved a lot because here's a key thing: if you can write a word, you can read it. If you can write it, you can read it. So that improves drastically as well. Now That was step 3, but I— of the program. But I found that in reality, I couldn't get these kids to do anything. So if you're talking about another superpower, the first thing that we need to look at with these kids is their speciality. If you're going to get them to do anything, and just to give an extreme example, just so your audience knows, I never saw this before, I will never see this again. This was a one-off, extraordinary motivated kid. Her name was Casey. I met her at the end of 5th grade when she was 10. She turned 11 over the summertime, and she was reading at the 2nd grade level. So she was really interested in Theodore Roosevelt, so I assigned her this little book called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, all 900 pages of it. This book won the Pulitzer. Okay, all right, so Casey wanted to do reading first and she was adamant about it. So I said, okay, here's the process. I thought she'd be doing 10, 20 minutes a night, couple nights a week. I didn't know Casey. She went up to her room, locked herself away for 3 hours a night for 6 months. At the end, she knew every word in that book. She jumped 8 grade levels in 6 months. I worked with her for 15 minutes a week. Now, why am I spending so much time on this? Because I want you to look at her motivation. Her mom wanted to know what would happen if we moved from a book that she liked to something that she didn't like so much to see if the skills transferred over. So I assigned her this little thing. It's called Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, all 1,000 pages of it. This is my most popular book because— have you ever been to Disneyland or Disney World? I have. Did you feel the Disney magic? Absolutely. It's two Universal things. First one's easy to find, second one is not. Took Casey 3 months to find it. Here's why I'm spending so much time on this. I had her mom come on to our last call because I thought she'd get a kick out of it, which she did. I said, Casey, how did you like that Walt Disney book? She said, I hated it. And I said, okay, how How much did your motivation drop when you went from something you really liked to something you disliked? The most motivated kid I ever worked with went down about 50%. Most kids, it's down 75 to 90% if you're outside their specialty. So I want you to think about a dyslectic innovation— intervention program to get the kid to grade level. You step outside that specialty, for most kids, you're down 75 to 90%. Okay, which is pretty much going to just wreck any chance of this succeeding very well.

Yeah.

So the first thing that I found is during the intervention period only, until they're at grade level or above, we have to focus on their specialty, their area of extreme interest and ability. The next one I think you'll find interesting as well. Do you remember in school, in college, we would start off with a big picture, then eventually over time would get down to the little details? Yes. Well, with dyslexics, that's horrible. So if you ask a dyslexic this: What effect did Martin Luther King's famous 'I Have a Dream' speech have in the 1960s civil rights movement? We don't even know where to begin. It's like grabbing fog. But if we ask a specific-to-a-general question: What personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? Then we can look up the information in his biography that, and that we'll find the answer. That answer will give us another question, which will give us an answer, which will give us a question, which will give us an answer. That forces the dyslectic brain to organize itself using writing as a measurable output. Let me go over that again. It forces the dyslectic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. So If you ask a dyslexic— this is really important— in your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization? We're going to say yes. So we have to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. That also works for ADD and ADHD kids.

Okay.

Okay. So do you know any ADHD kids ever?

Probably me. I've never been diagnosed, but—

okay, well, let's, let's go and ask you a couple of questions and give you a diagnosis. So you ready? Okay. What is your specialty? What is it that you're really interested in doing?

I, I have lots. I don't know that. I mean, you're asking my profession or—

No, I mean, just in, just in general. What do you love doing? What are you really good at?

I like solving problems.

Solving problems. Now, when you're thinking about solving problems, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization, now or ever?

100%.

Okay. Now, when you're thinking about solving problems and you want to write about it, fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard, the ideas in your head, you take your fingers, put them on the keyboard. Does the idea then fly out of your brain, leaving you with an empty brain? Does that sound familiar or not really?

I think that the process of writing helps clarify and order my thoughts, for sure. I think what's left is the distilled understanding or organization. So, I would say that the ideas don't go away, but they become ordered in my brain.

Okay.

If that's answering your question.

Yes. So, Uh, so it's a no to the second question. So what's that telling me is that you're most likely ADD, ADHD, or mildly dyslexic, not severely dyslexic.

Okay.

When you were in—

well, I can't spell, so that, that, that does help.

Okay, so you're still having issues with spelling?

I— when I graduated high school, they give you, you know, everybody in the state this assessment. I was, you know, 99, which is the highest score on everything except reading and writing. And I was at a second grade level. Not spelling, sorry, not reading, writing. I didn't have any problems reading. But I do find that I see words, they're like whole words. I don't necessarily spell them out, sound them out in my head. It's just like I identified that that object is that word. If that makes sense.

Yes. So, um, were you ever threatened to be held back because of you couldn't pass some academic task? No. Now, okay, so basically then that means you're probably ADD, ADHD, or mildly dyslexic. So the way that, um, that you'd go about correcting that, you know, besides that original process that I showed you A more evolved way is, um, what we would do is, for example, when I'm showing dyslexics how to read, we would tell them— this is where I came up with this— tell me the name of a movie that you really enjoy that's one of the best of all time that everybody knows about.

The Godfather.

The Godfather.

Best movie all time.

Okay, now I'm going to ask you a question. It's going to require you to think for a moment. Okay, reduce the— you reduce that movie to a one-word universal theme. What's the word?

Um, family.

Family. Okay, now if you were to go back and look at reviews from The Godfather written by Ivy League educated movie reviewers, could you— would it shock you that most of them would be, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened? Kind of like explaining what happened to a football game you recorded, and then somebody tells you, oh, this is what the final score was, it was a real nail-biter. It's like, why bother watching the movie? Why bother watch the, the sporting event now that you know what happened? Sound familiar?

Right, right.

Yes. So here's a much simpler way of how to actually write a review. You would take the universal theme of family and then write, how did the director the actors and the screenwriter do with that universal thing. And then you discuss it that way so people can see what you thought about the movie, but you're not spoiling them for it.

Makes sense?

Yes. But here's the problem. Do you see how family is really, really a very broad universal thing? Too broad that it can't really encapsulate the way that you really saw the movie.

Sure, it's hard to reduce it to one word, right?

But here's how we actually go and reduce it not only to one word but to really make it the one that best represents what's in your head. So let's say we're going by— we're— I do this with pretty much anything. We would go and look at, let's say we're writing about The Godfather. You would reduce it to the hero. So who's the hero and what does the hero want to do?

I don't know that there are any heroes, but if there's— if there— if there is one, it's— it's, uh, the son. I can't remember his name.

Which one, Sonny or Al— the guy played by Al Pacino? Al Pacino. Okay, so we would say that character's name, and what did that character want to do?

He— he wanted to preserve his family, ostensibly. I would say there were undercurrents, personal undercurrents, but I— I'd say that on the surface was what his stated intent was.

So what we would have you do is, what's the most important word of that sentence? Preserve. But then we would put it into the thesaurus, and you would probably pick the top 5, top 10, uh, words, maybe the entire level, or going down multiple levels, and you would find the word that best represented what's in your head.

Okay.

Now that word is much more specific. So how do we help you to overcome your spelling issues and your reading issues? Okay. You don't, you don't have reading issues, but spelling issues. I have my students literally type out the word, go to the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. They don't copy and paste. They pick their definition and they copy their definition.

Okay.

All right. And then we have them keep doing that as they're going through their book. They don't recognize the word. They don't recognize the definition exactly. They type out the word and type out the definition. At some point, they're going to know that word and that definition permanently. I have these kids doing this at 10, at age 10 and 11. When they're studying for their SATs and their ACTs, they don't need to remember hundreds of words because they've done it when they were kids. They remember 70 to 80% of what the definition is because you can't do word analysis without knowing what that word means. True. You, you literally can't. So that's how we build that up. So then we have you pick the ultimate villain that could best prevent the hero from accomplishing their goals, a person or a concept. Put that into a sentence, and then we have you come up with 3 really good reasons. Now, to help these kids with their writing at a more evolved level, okay, once after we're done with the basic body paragraphs This is how we show dyslexics to write better than a lot of their AP English students, their, their older peers. I want you to think about, have you ever thought about applying a warrant? Do you know what a warrant is applied to a body paragraph?

A warrant?

Yes, a warrant.

Not in that context, no.

Okay, do you remember in school how they would— you would write your thesis, that your topic sentence to a paragraph, and then you would put in your data? And it just didn't seem to flow very well. There seemed to be something missing. Yes. Well, at the PhD level, there's a book called The Craft of Research from the University of Chicago. It teaches PhD students how to write their doctoral dissertations. Sold over a million copies within the last 30 years. College professors want students to know how to do that process before they come to college. It's context, get everybody on the same page, problem statement, solution. So one of the more advanced context levels, what I would do is once you came up with a good reason, we would reduce that reason to a simple universal theme so that you could go and find quotes in that universal theme at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book. So if we're looking at The Godfather, we could be looking at the beginning of the movie or the end of the movie. Find the best quote for, for the beginning of the movie and the end of the movie. We would take those two quotes, and that's our data. I show students at the middle school level how to then take those two quotes and then form a topic sentence. And then I apply one warrant, and that is essentially answering a how and why question to connect the topic sentence and the quotes.

Okay.

Now, once a university professor looks at a body paragraph and they see a student's using a warrant, they're like, "Ah, this is college-level writing. I love this." Because the AP students have no idea what a warrant is, their teachers have no idea what it is, and now we have elementary— I mean, middle school kids writing structurally more evolved body paragraphs than their high school peers.

Okay, I'm very curious how this might apply to the entrepreneurial brain, because I don't know the data. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs present with symptoms of ADD and ADHD. I don't know about dyslexia, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a skew to entrepreneurs having that disorder, or I don't even know what the correct term for it is. One of the things that I think I've experienced is what you, what you asked me that question and determining ADD is how to get these ideas into some kind of order. Because oftentimes, the ideas are overwhelming. Because it's not just the idea for, you know, a problem I'm thinking upon. It's random thoughts about problems I was thinking about a year ago. Or maybe it's completely tangential to the problem, like has nothing to do with business. Like, these thoughts can be you know, overwhelming at times, just the number of them. So how do you, how do you apply what you teach to that situation?

So first of all, as far as entrepreneurship, do you ever hear of a show called Shark Tank? Oh yeah. There are 6 sharks. How many of them do you think are dyslectic?

Um, no idea.

Half of them: Barbara, Damien, and Mr.

Wonderful.

Okay, so half of them— this is very common with entrepreneurs. Dyslexics are way over-representative with highly successful people like, you know, in these spaces. So what essentially we're looking at is, remember when I told you, when I asked, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization. Yes, that is essentially the problem needs to get solved. So literally what we use is we use writing as a measurable output. So with adults, I go back to that original program that I created, and with the GRE, I use vintages from the early 2000s for the writing assessment. Okay, and what we're looking at is for the argument is these, uh, the argument appears to make sense, but it's really quite stupid. So what your job is to do is to find out why it doesn't make sense, why the data doesn't support it, and then to express that in writing. Okay. And what we show you how to do is to do that repeatedly, where we outline the essay. So, uh, the, the thesis, the thesis statement and conclusion are very much just, uh, plug and chug, as I like to put it. And then we, you know how it's difficult going from one paragraph to the next?

Yes.

We show you how to do a transition, and then you simply ask, why does the data not support this ridiculous opinion? And we keep practicing that The amount of practice is extraordinary. And then, gimme an example. I taught one guy, the most advanced guy I taught had an MBA from the University of Columbia and he did very well there. And I said, "Okay, what is the ridiculous opinion in this GRE prompt, this paragraph?" I could walk into any freshman AP English high school class in the country, and a 14-year-old would tell me instantaneously, no more than a second or two. He took almost a minute to tell me. That's the— so that's the thinking so rapidly up here where he just can't pull it out because there's just— it's just chaos. After he practiced it a lot, we get faster at it. So what I found with my kids is that the gen ed kids will read faster, they will always write faster, but as we advance in our education, especially at the graduate level or entry graduate level, once our brains are properly trained, we can think in orders of magnitude faster than they can.

So in, in that situation, the, the MBA was essentially experiencing dead data overload, like too many thoughts, and your process, um, teaches them how to filter that.

Am I saying that correctly? Remember, it's, it's, it's a, it's like 3 or 4, 5 sentences. That's it. That's the prompt.

Okay.

And there's 3 point— there's 3 data points, right? And a really insanely stupid argument that appears to make sense. Okay, so all he had to do was to read that and then just tell me what the primary— what they're trying— the primary opinion is, right? Any AP English 14-year-old would do that instantaneously, 1 or 2 second delay at the most. This is a full-grown man with an MBA from Columbia where he got like a 3.8 GPA for 2 years. It took him almost a minute. So how we overcame that problem is we just had him practice again and again and again until he became extraordinarily fast at it. When my students finished up, they would read the prompt and then the essay would essentially pop into their head. 'Cause what we've again found is that it, we can— once we're properly trained, our brains can process information in orders of magnitude faster than our gen ed peers. That's the advantage. That's what happened to me in law school. So when the professor asked me questions, I responded as his equal because all this just organized itself and just popped in my head in just that moment, right? And my classmates, even to this day, after they've been practicing attorneys for decades said they still can't do that. Not to a professor, not in their area of expertise.

Okay, so do you practice law?

No, I, uh, I never— there's no way I could keep up with the legal research and write. You have to read so fast and write so much. I could never, I could never keep up. I did know there's a very famous African-American woman who was a dyslexic who, uh, is now a practicing attorney in New York City, and she listens to material at about 500 words per minute. Wow. Because that's, that's what most lawyers read at. And she said it's just a requirement of the job. I, I literally can't do it, right? Um, so, but that's how she gets around it. Uh, and then she, she uses a lot of dictation, which quite frankly every attorney does nowadays. They've been right for decades, um, and that's how she gets around things. But, uh, I literally— I can't do it. I couldn't keep up with the practice.

So do you continue to work with— I mean, is that, that what you do professionally is continue to work with dyslexics?

Yes, that's primarily, uh, to give you an example, um Parents for years asked me for an example of a parent working with their dyslexic kid, and I could never tell them because nobody wants to share their data. Last December 27th, I met with Kimberly and her son Reed. She said I could use, use them as an example. She just spent $700 to have the state of Ohio test her son. He was in 5th grade, reading at the 11th percentile, writing at the 4th percentile. 8 months later, he was in public school because his friends wanted him in public school for social reasons, and they tested him again. His mom wasn't within miles. This is strictly in the public school. His reading went to the 64th percentile. His writing went to the 65th. He's got— he's getting A's and B's in class now. She worked with him for an hour and a half a week for, for about 6 months.

Using your program, your techniques?

Yes. A high school— sorry, a homeschooling mom taught her son 7 times faster than the school could ever hope to do, and she did it in less than half the time they spent with him than they would have spent with him because this— we're actually using teaching him how the brain actually works. Now, that was during the intervention period. It wasn't his specialty. Now he's in public school doing just fine. You don't have to do the specialty forever, just until they're at grade level or above.

Do you work with, uh, adults?

Yes. My— I typically use my initial program for adults because they don't have time to go through the craft of research, context, problem, solution. And typically when I work with adults, like, I just literally walk them through that process. It's so much faster. All right, you're, you're an adult, you can handle the GRE material. And they just fly through it. And typically at the end when they get finished with it, instead of having that chaotic thinking, they want to write something and the essay literally just pops in their head.

So I would assume that entrepreneurs in the audience that might not be diagnosed, maybe diagnosed, but they feel some resonance with what you're, you're describing, uh, could benefit from using your, your program.

Yes, it has helped out literally hundreds and hundreds of people. Um, we're now in the process of putting everything up on a learning platform called School, um, so that we can work with, you know, more families. But it's a, it's a process that, again, it forces your brain to organize itself. We use writing as a measurable output and especially if you want to go through my full craft of research process. This is what everybody's doing out there now, trying to— what I show people how to do is to find a problem, like we're doing a problem statement where there is actually a real problem, something that really does need to get solved, then how to solve it where you have a complete original solution. And once we hit the problem statement level, I'm very heavy into artificial intelligence. Okay. Um, I'm one of the people that when ChatGPT came up with their original, uh, pro-level account last December, it was $200. I bought it that day. Right. This month I have moved back to their Plus account because with 5.2 I don't need the PhD-level stuff anymore. That's good enough. I spend about $100 a month on Claude, and I use their 4.5 version, and that helps out tremendously with the writing. And then for some ways of doing some amount of research, I use— also use Google's products. But primarily I use 4.5 from Claude and ChatGPT Thinking 5.2. And that allows me to do probably about 5 to 10 times more work than I could 18 months ago.

Yeah, I could see where that would help. Okay. Yeah. So how do people find you if they want to learn more?

The best thing to do is just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. It's plural with an S. dyslexiaclasses.com. There's a button there that says download free guide. Just click on that. Answer a couple of questions, you'll get a free guide on dyslexia. And then the most important thing is to set up a half an hour with me. So actually schedule it so I can help your child find out what their, what their specialty is, what they're really interested in, find their book, find their audiobook, and help you get started.

Final question just popped into my head. Is, is dyslexia genetic?

Yes.

Okay, so if you have it, your kids probably have it.

Yes, it's absolutely genetic. Um, typically I will work with families where an older brother and sister is fighting to become valedictorian, and then you have the dyslexic kid, and then I show them the full craft of research and they start turning in papers where their teachers actually learn something substantive, and it drives their older brothers and sisters nuts because they're writing at a far higher level. Drives them crazy.

I love that. Listeners, we'll have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. Until next time, remember, you are not alone.