Jonathan Levi — Top Udemy Earner Tells How Content Really Makes Money

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, what's up?

What's up?

We're back.

We are back.

You just gonna be my mirror?

Just gonna be your mirror.

That's gonna get awkward.

It might just get a little awkward.

This is how the whole interview goes. You're gonna retain a lot of stuff because you're gonna hear it twice.

Yes, you are gonna hear it twice.

Well, that's not what Jonathan Levy said is the best way to learn, though.

No, it's not.

But he did give us some really good pointers.

He did. So what are we talking about today?

Well, that's one of them.

Don't repeat, Joe.

No, learning is learning the proper way. He's a super learner. And this is part of the conversation. Come on. You were there, right?

For a little bit.

Jesus. Matt's acting like he just showed up. Yes. Jonathan Levy is a frickin super learner, man. And he has a pretty badass podcast about becoming super human.

Yes.

And go ahead. We're going to say something.

I was going to say this podcast is really kind of split into sort of two topics. Right. So we really dive deep into content creation, how to create courses. Udemy. We talk about Udemy. We've experimented with Udemy a lot in the past, haven't really had a lot of success. He is one of the most successful people on Udemy. He's one of the top earners.

He said.

So we talked about Udemy course creation, getting your stuff, marketing your courses, the whole nine yards when it comes to getting a course out there. And then we had to dive into like, how do you become superhuman with your brain and have a better memory and how do you speed read and a bunch of cool shit like that.

The whole nine. Why isn't it not just like the whole 10? I mean, it's 10 yards for first down. Right? I never understood that. Yeah. All right, we'll look that up later. Google it. There's probably some reason there. But yeah, this episode you'll get a full rundown of how to actually create that course. But you know, Udemy, he's using in a very different way than we ever have, and it's actually pretty damn cool. It's helping. He's using it as like a first touch, even to blow up his podcast as well.

Yeah.

And retargeting pixels. He has this.

We get into some ninja shit about Udemy. So we're.

It's pretty damn sick.

Yeah.

It makes me want to go back to it.

But.

From a repurposed standpoint, we could probably repurpose some shit over into Udemy.

All right, we'll discuss later.

Yeah, we can talk about this off the air, Joe.

Off air. We'll report back later. Don't you worry.

All right, you know what? I really want to go chat with Jonathan, but.

But what?

But let's tell them about our book. Hey, now, instead of telling them about our traffic course, let's tell them about the thing they can go get for free.

That's probably a good first touch. Yeah. The Evergreen traffic playbook is totally free.

You can get a free digital copy if you go to evergreenprofits.com trafficbook all one word traffic book.

Evergreenprofits.com trafficbook.

Yep. And that is where we teach the traffic strategy that we use now. And a whole bunch of guests that we've had on the show and talked to in the past, and they all give their best traffic strategies. It's a really cool book and we're giving away for free.

It's badass. Go to evergreenprofits.com trafficbook. It's free. You'll love it. A lot of people already do love it. They've been using it. And let's go over to Jonathan.

Okay, let's do it. Okay, pressing the button now.

Are you sure?

Okay. Hey, Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Fine gentlemen. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, man. Thanks for hopping on. I know you are. You do quite a bit. It looks like you got a lot going on.

Potentially too much.

That's kind of. We find ourselves in the same vein, and it's kind of the first thing people tell us. How do you do all that stuff?

The plight of the entrepreneur. We just have too many ideas.

Totally. And no one ever gives credit to that massive team of people that it takes to keep this mess on the road 100%.

And also, I know you're a big content curation guy. I mean, you're just a content machine, and that's similar to us. There's just so many ways that you can leverage that content.

So.

Let'S start with your story. I know you're in a completely different part of the world now for one half a world away. Go back to, was it Silicon Valley where you really kind of got going in business? It sounds like.

Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur for literally as long as I can remember. One of my first memories is pitching my parents on a business idea. So I've been an entrepreneur since really forever. And I Tried a bunch of stuff. Tried a bunch of stuff. Nothing worked. The first thing that worked was at age 16. So when I say tried a bunch of stuff, There were probably 10 business ideas that made less than $1,000, which is still a lot of money when you're 12 years old. But at 16, I started a luxury automotive parts company, E Commerce Company, and that grew to be one of Inc's 5,000 fastest growing companies in America.

2011. Sold that business shortly thereafter, just about after my 24th birthday, and decided I wanted to do something that actually had a positive impact on the world and would help people. So I went soul searching, went, got an mba, tried another startup idea. Failed at that. Interned at a VC office, volunteered with about 10 different startups, invested in a bunch of different. I mean, I tried everything and met everyone. And along about the way, and this is, of course, the shortened version of the story, along about the way, I had been exposed to this idea of online learning and online courses. And I thought, this is a really interesting way to monetize your knowledge, but also help a lot of people in a way that's super scalable.

As you guys probably are. I'm obsessed with productivity and I hate waste. So the idea for me of even doing weekly seminars or. Or monthly seminars and just reteaching the same thing. I never understood why at school, like, the teacher has to teach the same thing every semester or every year. It just seems like torture to me.

Yeah, it's like Groundhog's Day, huh?

Right, Right. And I mean, I guess as podcasters, we kind of have similar conversations every week, but, like, teaching the exact same material every week seemed like torture to me. So I'd been exposed to this idea of online courses. I'd taken a couple online courses. I thought, this is really great. And I started a little side hustle. And I thought to myself, if I could just make an extra thousand bucks a month alongside my investment, real estate and stock portfolio and the settlement that I got from selling my business, I would be just fine. And then I could spend as much time as I want to find my next thing, as much Runway as I needed. And in the first five days, we made $500. I was like, all right, that's pretty good. Pretty good direction. And the secret was, before I give the big reveal, the secret was like, I sat down and I did everything that I teach, which is I teach accelerated learning. I'd hired a couple experts to tutor me. And so I sat down, I learned everything I could about online courses. I didn't Know anything about recording video, audio editing, writing, content, teaching, I knew nothing. But I sat down over a weekend and I learned everything that was available at the time on online course creation. And. And I just did it. And so in the first five days, $500, that was pretty cool. I thought. I'm pretty smart. I treated myself to a vacation in Switzerland, got on a plane, went skiing with a bunch of friends. When I got to Wi Fi, kind of towards the end of the month in January, I looked at the settlement and I was like, $2,200. All right, we're great. That's awesome. And it just grew from there. At that time, teaching only on Udemy, but 2,000 became 5,000, became 10,000 became more. And you would think that I would realize, like, wow, this is a big opportunity, but I didn't. So I just kept flying around the world, flying to Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, like Moscow. All these different places where I could look at different business opportunities, investment opportunities, volunteering opportunities. And finally, after about 14 months, someone goes like, so wait, you have one course and you make how much? I told them number, and they go, why don't you just make another course, idiot? I was like, wow, that's a really good idea. I should do that. So I made another course and almost doubled my income. And at some point, I was like, okay, maybe this is like a real thing that I could do, not just a side project. And then once I made that decision, it was pretty fast moving. We started a podcast. We've published a couple books. We have our own premium courses on our own websites. Plural, I should say. We have three different business divisions and a new division where we build courses for other online influencers. And now we're doing a whole strategic reshift around that. And wow. Yeah, it's kind of weird and crazy and totally. I'm here by accident, you guys.

Yeah, I feel like that's most entrepreneurs, you know, at least you're honest about it. Most people are just like, oh, yeah, this is all premeditated, you know, Totally planned out the last 10 years, right?

Well, I'll tell you, like, every single time I have set out and been like, wow, this is a billion dollar opportunity. This is gonna be huge. Every single time that I've gone into it thinking, like, how big the business could be, I failed. And I've failed at a lot of businesses. Like. Like, I failed at more businesses than most people could probably identify logos, at least 20, right? But every single time that I've been like, well, this could be like a Cool side hustle. I could probably make some money on the side and it's probably not too much work. Almost every one of those have become a successful business. And I've had to date three businesses that I would call.

Commercially successful. And all three of those started from, you know, hey, I think I can make a little money and not work too hard at this.

Why do you think that is compared to these bigger projects that you worked on?

Well, so in retrospect, it's Lean startup, right? Because when you're doing a lean startup, you're thinking about how to minimally prove market demand and find customer fit without spending a bunch of money. So when I was going into businesses, and by the way, I've failed at additional businesses since becoming successful. It's not like once you figure it out, quote, unquote successful, right. I define myself as successful. Which is the most important person who should define you as successful. But it's not like you figure out the formula, like, no, I've failed a lot of times since selling a multimillion dollar business.

But when you go into it thinking how big this is going to be and you apply your existing successful business principles to a new business division, I can throw money around because I'm making this much and I have cash flow. That's when you fail because you go in with all these assumptions. Whereas when you go at it as it's a side, I just want to prove market interest and I don't really know what's going to work. So I'm going to talk to a lot of people. You're essentially executing on Lean Startup, the whole Eric Reiss, Steve Blank methodology. And I mean, the system works. Some of the world's largest companies in the last 10 years have been founded on the lean startup. It works, it's proven. And even when I read that book, I didn't read it till business school, but when I read it and I looked back, I was like, oh, that's why I succeeded. Because every business that I've ever done, I've has started from reaching out to 10 friends and being like, hey, what if I did this? Would you pay me? How much would you pay me? Okay, pay me.

You know, where's the money? So would you say that those are more passion projects, you know, the side hustles that you did?

I think so, yeah. I mean, I think.

I don't know. I think true entrepreneurs start businesses because we have a real hard time coexisting with problems. And I didn't know until my most recent relationship I guess I didn't realize that not everyone can not coexist with problems. Like there is a world of people out there that the three of us will never understand because they're the kind of person who just like, you know, the shock on the bumper of their car will break and they'll just like rest the bumper on their head for years without fixing it. Like no entrepreneur would ever do that. They'd be like, I have a problem. What is the solution to my problem? Can I engineer a better solution to that problem? And then they'll solve the problem. And that's really in my mind, like how I delineate between entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can't coexist with a problem, whereas non entrepreneurs are super happy to coexist with a problem until someone tells them, hey, can you fix that problem?

Yeah, it's almost like a badge of pride sometimes that non entrepreneurs wear. Yeah, 100%. We're just problem solvers, we're fixers, we're just non stop. You can't get it out of. If it's in our heads, it's just going to buzz around until we do something about it.

Ye, likewise. I feel the same thing about the people that just kind of work in these dead end jobs for so long. Like as an entrepreneur I just cannot comprehend it. Same kind of concept, like, why would you spend so much time working for somebody else in a job that you hate and just never do anything about it?

Totally. You know, it's an interesting thing. I think it was Vern Harnish, I don't remember who said this, I heard this 10 years ago, but some prominent thinker in the entrepreneurial space who was asked.

How do you determine whether or not to invest in an entrepreneur? They said very, very simple. Like I do all the normal checks and balances and financial statements, but then the last step before is I ask them to take me for a drive somewhere in rush hour traffic.

And figure out first off, like, obviously does this person have the patience and persistence, but also are they going to try and problem solve or are they just going to stay in the same damn lane in the, you know, whatever way the GPS tells them to go, rather than being like, wait a minute, if we get off here I can take the side streets and then, you know, are they going to problem solve or are they going to just eat shit?

Yeah, I don't know if I can.

Swear on the podcast, but you're fine.

Stupid, whatever the hell you want to do. No, I love that. That's actually, it's funny because I used to be told when I was driving in rush hour traffic, because I just get bored, so I go to another lane. I'm like, what if this works? And they're like, why the hell do you keep moving back? I'm like, I can't stop my brain.

Right.

That's a really cool analogy.

Did you guys hear the interview with Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan Show?

Oh, yeah.

Did you catch that moment? No one's talking about this, but it drove me crazy where he asked, like, this is all the stuff that's going on in your brain, and that's insane. And there's this deeply sad moment where Elon Musk goes like, yeah, that's. It's. It's. It's a gift. Um, it's also a curse when you can't shut it off and you just look and there's like, this torment in his eyes, like, please relieve me of this brain. Like, yeah, the burden of it. I thought it was, like, so sad. But maybe most people aren't talking about it because they can't identify with it. Whereas as an entrepreneur, I'm like, oh, my God, I wish I could just sit at a restaurant and not think of 15 ways that they could improve the menu, you know?

Yeah. I mean, I think with that episode specifically, there's a few other things that sort of overshadowed those moments, which is probably why as many people aren't quite talking about it, but.

Lighten up.

But no, I do remember that moment thinking, man, I watched him on that show and I thought to myself, you know, he's up there. He's one of the wealthiest people on the planet, and he seems to me to be fairly unhappy.

Right. Marriage. Yeah. I recently had a podcast idea, which I think I'm gonna do. So nobody copy it or copy it. If you're gonna do it better than me, then take it. But it's called the Entrepreneur Lifestyle. Or, sorry, the Lifestyle Entrepreneur, which I can't believe isn't taken. And the subtitle is Conversations with Founders who Put Life First.

That is unique.

Yeah. There aren't many of us who put life first.

Yeah.

I mean, we can all relate if we think deep enough. I think a lot of us, maybe if you haven't realized that moment, that, oh, there's more to this. Yeah. What's life actually for an entrepreneur outside of business? Why is my brain worked this way?

Right.

Yeah. Because there's a lot of deep stuff. I know Matt and I have had a lot of aha. Moments in the last year, understanding who we are as a personality, and then the two of us as a group, as a business partners, as a marriage. Well, the wives kind of basically call us the wives, or they're their own little couple.

We're sister husbands.

Sister husbands.

But yeah, man. I mean, there's some cool. That would be a good podcast because you can dive deep into these stories that aren't being told or maybe extract these things from entrepreneurs like Elon, for instance.

Who knows what's happening in that brain? But I think that Joe Rogan podcast was one of the most raw with him, that he just laid it all out. And especially in the video. If you watched on video, his eyes, like you were saying for most of the podcast, was kind of like.

Right.

It's interesting. I think the end of that podcast too, he's like, we just all have to love each other more. Like, that's basically the solution to the world and love each other like ourselves more. That's tough as natural. Yeah.

The loving ourselves is where it all starts. Right.

Yeah. So for you, I mean, you've had. Going back to your story, I mean, it just sounds like. Yeah, you have done so much honing in on the content creation in Udemy. You mentioned Udemy. Why'd you pick Udemy to start with your content?

Yeah, it's really funny. I owe a lot of credit to two guys who are now friends. They had a company called.

One Month Rails at the time. Now it's called One Month, and as I said, they've become good buddies. But I took one of their courses because I was working on a startup idea, One Month Rails, and I was like, this is really cool. I can pay $50 and learn Ruby on Rails, which is a programming framework for anyone who doesn't know. And they mentioned in their kind of, like, brag reel at the beginning, like, we teach one of the most popular courses on Udemy. I was like, what the hell is a Udemy? So I went and I checked it out, and actually there they had millions of students, and it was the biggest teaching platform at the time with I think 20,000 instructors. And, you know, that's where I started, and that's kind of where I, like, made my bones.

Yeah, we have. I don't know how many courses we have on there. Not as many as you.

Two or three.

Yeah, but that was years and years ago when we last kind of dabbled because we had a lot of success on Udemy back in the day. I know. It's changed a lot, though.

Yeah. Well, we Had a course on Udemy that we were charging, I think, $300 for. And then one day, we got an email from Udemy saying everybody's course is now $50. And we're like, oh, okay, yeah, but.

You were never getting $300 for it.

No, no, you're right. The thing that Udemy does, and I don't think a lot of people realize this, is when you have a course on Udemy, there's always deals going on. There's always some sort of coupon code that'll get it for, like, 10% of the actual cost and things like that.

If that. Yeah, if that.

Yeah. So how do you find success with Udemy now saying that? You know, it's changed so much over the last five years or so?

Yeah, well, we've had to change our strategy because I didn't want to become fully dependent. Like, I have been burned enough in business to know that you never want to be fully dependent in any one thing. So it didn't matter to me that I was one of the top income earners on Udemy. And we've had agreements, we've had disagreements. Overall, they've treated me very, very well. They're a growing business, which means there's more bureaucracy and more dogma than there was when I was their top guy. So it's a different ballgame now. But the way that I view Udemy today is as one pillar in an overarching strategy. In a similar way that you would never tell a business owner, like, look, all you got to do is be on Facebook. Don't worry about emails. Don't worry about having a phone line. Like, just put your business on Facebook. That's bad advice. Good advice is like, be wherever the hell your customers want you to be. And so I view Udemy in a very large way as top of the funnel for me, in the same way that I view a book. And I know you guys have had Tucker Max on the show. Tucker has built a very, very smart business, selling people the opportunity to create the highest quality, best lead magnet and business card in the world. And that's all a book really should be. Nobody's making money in Publishing besides J.K. rowling and some fiction authors, but the vast majority of people. And, okay, sure, Neil Strauss gets $250,000 for a book advance. That's a very, very small pit for Neil Strauss. Tim Ferriss might make a million dollars on each one of his books, but that's also a pittance for Tim Ferriss. So the real money's not in the book. Similarly, Udemy has been really, really wildly profitable for me, but it's not really where I view making my real money. And we've been really, really innovative in finding ways to build relationships with our Udemy students in ways that don't violate Udemy's policies. Now, Udemy's policies have become str. Stricter and stricter over the years, but we still find ways to create relationships with our students, whether that means sending them a weekly podcast episode and inviting them to subscribe to our mailing list once they reach the podcast page, or whether that means just sending them cool, free content, encouraging them within the course to engage with some of our other content. You know, all on top of the table kind of stuff that you can do.

And that's how I view it, because, as you guys said, $10 a sale, half the time you're getting 50%. Another half the time you're getting 25%. You can't build a real business on $2.50 commissions.

Do you know what sort of percentage of people that go through your courses on Udemy actually get onto an external mailing list that you have a little more control over?

I wish I knew, but if I did know, I wouldn't admit it.

That was one of the other big roadblocks that we had with Udemy was that it was very difficult to get people off of Udemy into your own ecosystem.

Yeah, it's hard. I guess one thing that I would say is Facebook pixels are your friend.

Can you drop those in Udemy now? I didn't know that you could even have those.

You cannot. You cannot. But you can encourage people to check out free resources in your Udemy course and then retarget anyone who hits that content.

I love that. Or use Matt. We use a little shortening, link shortener. And you can drop a pixel that way. You can do a lot of fancy.

Just make sure that you're providing free content that is valuable, that does not require the user to subscribe or anything like that. But, yeah, I mean, they haven't caught onto that tactic yet, and I don't think they will or can. Because, you know, from your perspective, I'm just asking someone to read a blog post in conjunction with the course they're taking. And I just so happen to retarget everyone who hits every blog post.

The power of retargeting.

Smart.

Smart. That is very smart. Because back in the day. Yeah. When we were on Udemy, you know, we did every possible thing, because you don't really own the list there. But you can still broadcast, you know, to your subscribers, which is very valuable. If you can get a lot of, you know, people interested in a specific topic, then now it just makes sense. Yeah, cinema, you know, a podcast, like you do a weekly podcast or so and slowly start to kind of migrate them down the funnel a little further. Like I said, love it.

Love it.

Well, yeah, and that's how I grew my podcast. It's how my book, my first book did over 20,000 copies.

But.

The deliverability on Udemy has gotten worse and worse and worse and worse. So it's becoming less and less of a part of our strategy.

Got it.

And retargeting is becoming more and more.

So how do you leverage retargeting? Because we're big proponents of that. We talk about it all the time. So if you get them from Udemy or maybe on your podcast, what's that kind of. What does that structure look like? You said top of funnel. I'm sure you have a middle, lower end of the funnel as well.

Yeah, well, everything was fine and dandy till the last six months. We had a pretty serious decline in the funnel that was working. So everything that I'm going to tell you, six months old and doesn't work anymore. But we, you know, we were one of many, many people who were doing really, really well with Facebook ads to a webinar, to a $500 offer, and that just slowly stopped working. So we need to redo our webinar first and foremost. But we're also, like, we were doing so much in cold traffic, we were spending 50-70k a month on Facebook ads. And we're realizing that it's just not good for cold traffic. It's much better, as you guys said, to have people discover you on Amazon or on itunes or on Udemy, where you're getting paid for the lead to come in and then just cheaply retarget them if they don't buy organically through your funnels. And we're moving in that direction pretty heavily.

Got it. Now, I think it's such an interesting concept. Like you just said, you get paid to acquire a lead through something like Udemy as an example. Hopefully you can wipe the cost of advertising costs that way when it comes to the retargeting play as a second step.

Oh, yeah, it's pretty easy to do. I mean, for sure, our cost per lead for retargeting is so cheap. Like, I don't know, 12 cents or something like that. Well, I don't actually know to be honest with you, I'm in the process of not knowing things in my business that's true, as little as possible. So I'm not going to give numbers that are probably not true, but it's like a fraction.

Yeah, I mean, we're massive proponents of that. And a lot of our cold traffic will come from Google Ads, very specific ads based on keywords that are not super obvious, but they're buyer intent. So that could be something you can maybe test out as well in this reinvention that you're going through.

Totally, yeah.

There's a lot of cool stuff.

So when it comes to course creation, let's dive in a little bit on some of the actual tactical things around course creation. I'm not totally sure where to start, but maybe if somebody's listening to this and they want to get into info, product, business, online, what sort of advice would you give somebody maybe as far as like starting picking a niche and what things to consider when starting it?

Oh, man. Broad question. I think the first thing is finding something that you have a unique angle on is really, really important. People really get hung up. And we teach our branding you program, which helps people become content creators and kind of replicate the business that we've built. And people get really hung up on this. Like, I'm not the best, you know, I'm not the best expert in the world at memory. I'm not the best business teacher. What I usually tell people is, and what's true is the best in the world is not teaching. The best memory expert in the world is deep, deep, deep. In either Mayo Clinic or the Reichen MIT center, there's no chance he's gonna lift his head up or she to, you know, from the research and all the grants that they're getting to actually teach an online course. So it's up to me to teach a memory course. The best business leaders in the world, there's no freaking way they're gonna stop running their businesses, which are paying them tens of millions, if not billions of dollars a year. There's no way they're gonna stop and teach. So it's up to you to interpret what they're doing and then teach their strategies.

So don't get caught up in that and then figure out what do you have a unique angle to that you can teach in a different way that other people do because different people teach in different ways. And there's benefit to that because different people learn in different ways.

Yep. And that's something we talk about when someone's starting A podcast or anything is just almost put your own iteration of what you're learning and from your own experiments and testings and then put it out there.

Yeah. One of my teammates has a really nice idea that he came up with, which is, I think it's like the law of preservation of knowledge. So you know, this idea that like matter is never created or destroyed. So he has this idea that knowledge is never really created or destroyed, it's discovered. So someone discovers a new strategy or a new idea or a new natural law of the universe, but then once it's out there, it's never destroyed, it's never going away, it's just reiterated and reiterated. So it's a matter of recombining different thoughts and ideas in different ways. And that's why Tim Ferriss can succeed and I can succeed and Dave Asprey can succeed and Marie Forleo can succeed and people who are teaching a lot the same stuff, but just recombining it in new and novel ways that helps people learn in new and novel ways.

Yeah, it's all about perspective. Right. And how you introduce that to the world with your examples. And everybody's audience is just slightly different too and it could be in the same kind of niche, which is really cool.

Yeah. And I actually want to build on that because people also, the second thing that they worried about is like, well, I don't know. I don't know if I want to spend the next couple years teaching about X. You're not actually going to be tunnel visioned or pigeonholed into a topic as much as you think. I realized in my business I'm going to be honest with people. I'm pretty tired. After five years of talking about memory learning and speed reading, I'm kind of done. And especially since I learn quite quickly, if I may say so myself, I've been ready to move on and talk about new things for years, two years. And what I realized is my audience is totally cool with that because they like the way that I see the world in the same way that, you know, people like the way that Ramit Sethi sees the world. So it doesn't matter if he's teaching a course on how to build a business or how to invest your money. Like, they're pretty keen to learn what he has to say. And that's why I've been able to go into productivity courses. We've now launched a career hacking course, entrepreneurship courses, health courses. Because once people trust your voice and they like the way that you interpret information and See the world. They want to learn additional things from you. So I think that's a really interesting thing is, like, also figuring out what's the right domino. I got really, really lucky because my brand is I learn things fast, I hack the way that existing things are done, and I get you to the result faster. And with that brand of I learn fast, I'm going to break things down for you. I can kind of teach whatever I want.

Oh, yeah.

Like, if I. If I come out tomorrow. And I've toyed with this idea because I was. I was single for nine years, trying to find a healthy relationship and dealing with past relationship drama trauma. So I've toyed with this idea of, like, a course for young men on how to develop the emotional maturity that it took me nine years to develop faster. Now if I come out and say, like, I'm Jonathan Levy, I'm an accelerated learning expert, and it took me nine years, but then I applied my own accelerated learning principles towards.

My own emotional learning, and within six months, I was in the healthiest relationship of my life. And now, blah, blah, blah, here's my wife and da, da, da, da, da. Like, I don't want to sound presumptuous, but I have a pretty good feeling my audience would resonate with that.

Hell, yeah, it would. I would assume. Yeah.

And that's the beauty of really. I think about this all the time. Like, once you establish trust in you and your name and your brand. We talk about this in the latest course we launched, Ultimate Advantage. People can take away most assets. Money can be taken away. Your website can be taken down. Your email list can be commandeered or shut down or whatever. No one can take away your brand. And if people trust you, like, I'm reasonably good friends, pretty good friends with Joe Polish. People trust Joe so much, it doesn't matter what he puts out or what he asks for or what you know, people are gonna enroll and buy and support him. And he has a new nonprofit, Genius Recovery, which is all about addiction. And, like, people are putting big money into this thing, and it's all because of Joe's brand and the reputation that he's built. So that's what I would say to people who are creating content is start out anywhere where you feel you have a unique insight. Try for that place to be somewhere where you can succeed forward, but then invest in developing your brand because that's your most valuable asset.

We couldn't agree more, because with this podcast is one example, and you have your own. We always see it as A big megaphone. If you could build this megaphone, this ecosystem, and this trust with the audience that you're speaking to and then provide a lot of value in terms of. When I say the ecosystem, you know, that's like the blog email list, all this stuff that you have out there. Yeah. People will just kind of resonate with what you're putting out there. It's unique to you and them. But the power of that megaphone, you could pretty much point that wherever you want.

Yeah. Well, going back to, you know, we were mentioning Joe Rogan podcast earlier today. Joe and I actually, we both listen to Joe Rogan quite a bit. And the interesting thing is most of the time I don't even know who his guests are. Like, I've never heard of the name of his guest. So I'm not tuning in because I'm really interested in Dr. So and so who. I've never heard of his name. I'm interested in hearing Joe Rogan's perspective on what Dr. So and so has to say. You know, he's, he's created this unique perspective where he looks at everything in life at a slightly different, different way than everybody else does. And that's why people tune into the Joe Rogan podcast. And, you know, same thing with this podcast. I'm sure you've done, you know, tons and tons of interviews on other podcasts and you have your own podcast so people can get content from you at any time, but nobody can get this unique conversation that we're having right now. Nobody's gonna, nobody else is going to have the perspective of the discussion we're having right now on a different podcast. So that's what makes this podcast unique is the discussions that we're having, the things that we'll bring up that maybe nobody else has ever brought up with you, you know, and, and I think that's just a really great point for not being held up on, on moving forward with things like that.

Totally. And you know, one thing that I love to tell people, and we teach this also in branding you is like, my dad used to always tell me when I was a kid, where does an 800 pound gorilla sleep? And the answer is, wherever the hell an 800 pound gorilla wants to sleep. And the same is true in content creation. Like if I have a mailing list, so I have, well, I'll get to the punchline in a moment. But if I launch a testosterone course and someone else launches a testosterone course, and my mailing list is 180,000 people and theirs is 0 sure, if I put out total garbage.

Probably I'm gonna get reported or something like that. But if they're both reasonably decent courses, even if theirs is 50% better than mine, who's gonna win, right? Like who's gonna have the most reviews, who's gonna have the most social proof, the most ranking, who's gonna get onto the top of the website, who's gonna be able to sell more? You know, it's all about like. And this is why, you know, after your brand, your second most valuable thing is your mailing list. I have the number. This is funny and hilarious, but like my side project, a few years ago I decided to solve my issue of low T. So I did all the research that I normally do and geeked out and read hundreds of articles and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And I increased my free testosterone by 50% despite the fact that it should have gone down by 25% over the same five year period because I was 25 to 30. Anyway, so I just made a course on it really quick. I think I spent a month on the whole thing. It's the number one testosterone related or endocrine health related course on Udemy, which is ridiculous because there are way more qualified doctors, physicians, endocrinologists, whatever, teaching on Udemy. And this isn't to say that my course is bad. It's thoroughly well researched. I really believe in it, everything but like I'm the 800 pound gorilla on Udemy. So when I release a course, it's probably going to become the best selling course in that category. The only exception is Bitcoin. I couldn't, I couldn't manage to crack that whole.

You know, search. Testosterone on Udemy. Ours is the top course and I'm pretty sure we just launched a career hacking course. If you go to the career category, we're the top course on Udemy for professional advancement.

Yeah, I love it.

Which is ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

It is.

Have you ever read Smart Cuts by Shane Snow?

I haven't, but I know a lot of people who have.

Yeah, it's a good book. Basically it's talking about this concept of, of, I think he called it like laddering where essentially you grow a brand, you grow a following in one area and you can lateral over into other areas because of the brand that you existed. And he was in the book. He gives all sorts of sort of case studies to prove his thesis that some of the most successful people in the world sort of climb the ladder in a different area and then laddered over ladder rolled over to a different ladder, but kind of a very similar concept. I think he was talking about like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Fallon and rose the ranks in the comedy clubs. And then once he had a name for himself in the comedy clubs, he lateraled that into improv and Saturday Night Live, and then he lateraled that into. Now he's this famous talk show host and he has all these various examples of people that kind of jumped between industries because of the sort of recognition that they built in the industries prior.

Totally. Yeah, that's exactly. That's exactly on point.

I love it. That's the power of the megaphone power of that brand. And it was tough for us to actually get on with this whole branding concept because we come from a very direct marketing background.

Direct response.

Our direct response that is. Yeah, we want to see that result based off of whatever money we're putting into it. So ads, whatever. But now, yeah, finally, it took us years and years to like, oh, the brand. Oh, the brand. Okay.

Yeah. I think a lot of people misunderstand what a brand is all about. Like, I definitely misunderstood, despite the fact that I had a brand. And then I sat in a classroom at Berkeley with Dave Robinson, professor at Haas School of Business, and first day of class, he goes like, you know, who in here thinks they know what a brand is? And everyone raises their hand and says stuff like, well, it's a logo, it's colors, it's a, you know, it's a trademark. And he's like, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A brand is very simple. A brand is a promise. That's all it is. I mean, like, if a brand were a logo or colors, Pepsi couldn't change their logo, but they've changed their logo three times. What it is is a promise of consistency, a promise of an experience that I know what I'm going to get. And the same is true with people. Like, if your brand is that you're never late, you always act with integrity, you always create high quality interactions or courses or whatever it is, that is something you can trade on, you know.

Yeah, I love it. And you can take the medium pre suasion. Yeah, that's an amazing book right there. Yeah. And because that brand can extend to whatever course you create, if it's a podcast, email list, show, if you're, you know, YouTube channel, whatever it might be, it all translates over that promise. I like that.

Totally.

Yeah.

In the course, just on the topic of courses, is there. Do you have any advice as far as actual creation of the course? I mean, is it what do you recommend course creators do to kind of produce their first course?

Yeah. So first things first. Start with an outline. Right? Your course succeeds or fails based on what we call a curated learning journey. So why do you know people can learn everything that you're going to teach for free? Face it. So why do people actually pay for high quality online content? Because you eliminate guesswork, you eliminate decision making. You make a streamlined.

Journey from A to B. B being the result that they want.

Most people fail to do that, and so their online course is a collection of ideas, and that's no good. What you want to do is create, you know, this curated learning journey that holds people's hand at every step of the way. In order to do that, you need to actually know where the journey is going to go before you start writing. You know, maybe some novelists can just start with, you know, it was a sunny winter day and get to the point. But most of them outline their ideas and have a general idea of where things are going to go. The same is true of crafting the story of your online course. So before I ever put a single word down, I create an outline of sections, lectures, and I know exactly, exactly the journey that I'm taking people on and why things come in what order. And I mean, that's 80% of the battle of creating a really, really engaging online course is just having it be like salted peanuts where people can't stop because it's so enveloping.

And would you say that promise, kind of like we were talking about the brand, Would you have a promise for each one of your courses with that outcome very clearly stated, at least for you, when you're developing this outline?

Yeah, well, I definitely know what.

I know what the outcomes need to be for people. And I know, you know, you've probably heard of many authors talk about creating a book or writing a book is kind of like you do it as this labor of needing to get it out of you so you know what information you have to just get out. And I found that's very true with books and courses. And it's just like I know all the things that I'm just dying to let go of, and I can't let go of until I put it down in writing.

Got it. Yeah. And I guess, yeah, if you're an expert in whatever that topic is, you kind of just innately have that in you. So just spill it all out in the best possible order as an outline, and then the content should just flow at that point with all the research and knowledge you have now when you.

Make courses, is it like a lot of you talking into a camera? Is it PowerPoint slides? Is it screen share tutorials? What sort of process do you like to follow?

Yeah, so we almost exclusively do talking head videos. And that's because, you know, I have a team of dedicated editors who can add in all the graphics, visuals, pictures.

Texts, motion graphics, animations, all that kinds of stuff to make the video super engaging.

But yeah, I like that because I think it's more engaging. I think we learn better when we connect. We make a human relationship, connection. And it just gives me, you know, I record on a green screen, so it gives me all kinds of flexibility. I can always add the text in later. If you record it with slides, you can't add the expression of excitement on your face in later.

Right. Would you think that for someone creating a course, is that high production quality required?

Here's the thing, right? So people will forgive kind of crappy audio, they won't forgive crappy video. So if you have to make a choice, opt for high quality audio. But it's not that hard in this day and age to create really high quality video. The barriers have come down so much and even, I mean, even if you have to, have to, have to record with your iPhone, you can get decent quality video. I would never do it, but you can do it. And because of the content creator kind of revolution, like in most major cities, there's a studio where you as a YouTuber or whatever can go and just hit record and have a green screen studio for like a couple hundred bucks a day. It's really not expensive to do that. And that's what I would do if I were starting over again is like, I just realized Google, in my city, Tel Aviv, they just opened a Google for entrepreneur space. And they have the most ridiculous sound studio and the most ridiculous video studio I think I've ever seen. Like, and I used to record in the same studio that the Ministry of Tourism used five years ago. And this like blows that away. Like, we're talking 4K Panasonic G5s, GH5s like all around lighting, Kino lights, like soundproof walls. Perfect. Just everything perfect. And that's free, by the way. All you need to do is show that you're an entrepreneur creating content and you can just pop in for a day and record your stuff. So I mean, and that's in Tel Aviv. So like imagine what you have in San Francisco, Louisiana. New York.

Sure, yeah.

I feel like more and more of those, like Sort of creator spaces are popping up. I think even like most of the weworks have places where you could go in and record now too. I know Casey Neistat did his three, six, eight thing, which is literally a place in New York for content creators.

It's a creator studio, right? Yeah, there's a bunch of them. And yeah, I think that's actually really good feedback because that's something that even for podcasting, there's podcasts, you can rent out a studio, little tiny hole in the wall that's all set up for you. Just have some engineer that hits go and you just do what you do best, just talk and you can have that killer audio quality.

Yeah. The barriers to entry for that kind of stuff are definitely getting lower and lower.

Yeah, I love it. Well, how about. I'm curious about pricing. So pricing your online courses, do you have. I know you have a process to it, but what's your philosophy there and how do you price your products?

Well, that's a complicated one. It's kind of done on bounds. So like we know that anything above $500 is a pretty significant.

Investment for people. So we generally don't go over the rule for that is if you're selling money, if you're selling money, you need to price higher because people understand that there's an immediate return. So like our course on how to build a business is significantly more than that.

Yeah, I mean, we don't really have a strict formula.

Well, how about let's maybe break it down into like top of funnel and then as you get people lower down the chain, once they're in your ecosystem.

You mean for all products?

Yeah. So like a first touch on Udemy. I'm sure it's a pretty low barrier product.

Yeah, well, on Udemy, it doesn't matter what you price, it's going to sell for 10 bucks.

That's a good point.

10 to 15.

And then kind of moving up that we have our Mastermind, which is $147 a month, which depending on how you look at it, is actually a higher priced product, depending on how long people stick around. And then our premium courses can be anywhere from $100 to $399.

And that's largely based on one, the value of the content and the quantity of the content. And when I say the value of the content, I'm not as much talking about production value as I am like practical applicability. So a course on how to use your Panasonic GH5 camera, really useful. But it's not gonna change your life. So that's probably a $97 course, if that. Whereas a course on how to plan retirement.

That could really change your life. You know, and I'm just pulling this out of out of nowhere. Or a course on.

How to set goals and achieve them and stop procrastinating, that could really change your life. That's probably a 200, 300, $, 400 course. And so our speed reading and memory course is 399. And we bundle it with our productivity course, and that's 499. And yeah, we kind of based on that.

That makes sense. Yeah. It's really that end result, if you're looking at what that promise is for the course, where do you lead? People then price it based off of the value they'll get from that. Maybe not an immediate value, but whatever it turns their life into later on. That's. Yeah, I like that. Now, Matt, did you have anything else on courses?

One last thing. So you mentioned your mastermind. I'm curious, how is that structured? I'm assuming at the price you mentioned. It's not like everybody meet in person and have a mastermind. What does your mastermind look like?

Yeah. So that's a new thing that we launched in November of 2018. And the basic idea is every single month, we have a thought leader lead a challenge which is related to some aspect of being superhuman. So we've had Benjamin Hardy talk about willpower and environmental design. Next month, we're having Ariel Garten talk about meditation. We had Nick Littlehale, sports sleep coach, help people with sleep, and so on and so forth. And so we do a monthly challenge with four weekly calls with the thought leader, where people get to actually interact live with a thought leader that they normally would not get access to. And it's me really leveraging my Rolodex and the fact that I'm in Genius Network to get these thought leaders and experts to agree to do these challenges. And then we give them tons of discounts and goodies and gear and swag that it's worth the membership alone every month. So, like, a couple months ago, people got $50 off an Oura ring. This month, I think they're getting 50 bucks off the Muse. So we negotiate really good deals for people, and then we also send them goodie boxes in the mail with whatever gear they need to complete that month's challenge. And that's been. It's been phenomenal.

I love that.

That is cool. That's almost like a buyer's Club, but with mastermind element to it. You know, you get discounts on things. Like you said, the muse.

Yeah, it's like a superhuman loot crate.

I like.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the loot is like, I would view it as like the cherry on top for people because really the calls are where the huge value is.

Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds fascinating. That's really cool.

Well, if people want to check it out, they can go to JLE vimastermind.

Perfect. Cool.

We'll link that up in the show notes too.

100%.

In case you're driving right now and couldn't jot that down.

Yeah. And what was the webinar? I know you gave us a link prior to us hitting record. Is that having to do with the mastermind or what was that specifically that you have?

So that's about Branding youg Academy, which is kind of my business on teaching people how to start a business like mine. You know, so many people ask you, eventually you go, well, let me just record a course on it. And then that course became 14 courses. But it's basically a one hour training on how a business like mine works and helps people figure out could they run a business like this. Spoiler alert. They could.

And essentially gives the strategies of, like, how I built my business from zero to six figures and then explains to you how you can get involved in our program, which helps you get to seven figures.

And it talks about a lot of things that we talk about today, like how do you connect your podcast to your mailing list and how do you drive traffic to your podcast from Udemy? And how do you, like, link it up so you have a cohesive ecosystem strategy that's driving sales for you?

I like it. And that's Pages Brankingu Academy webinar, I believe.

Yeah. Better if people check the show notes.

Yeah, definitely link it up. I know it's a long one, so I know we're getting to almost like an hour or so, but I want to get into. And hopefully you're not burnt out on talking about it, but brain stuff. And obviously you have a podcast. Becoming Superhuman is what it's called and it's really cool. Selfishly, I love to nerd out on that kind of stuff. How do I speed read? How do I just learn and retain shit better? Because my brain, I just feel like it just. It needs like brute force. Like, I need to hear it like a lot of times. But I'm sure there's better ways to learn. I'm curious, like, what are your favorite and I know this is very loaded, but you say that you have kind of a different approach to learning and you can retain things a little better. Do you have a. Maybe some quick tactics or ways that you can share that with us, how you do that?

Yeah, absolutely, on one foot. So most people don't realize, but they're using their brain wrong. And I don't mean that in like a metaphorical. I'm trying to get shock value. Like, people say you use 10% of your brain, but it's B.S. i mean, like, you're literally using your brain wrong.

We're.

We're tactile, kinesthetic and visual learners. Even if you think like, no, actually, I'm an auditory learner. You're not. Years and years and years of education the wrong way, which is designed for mass production, has trained you to believe that you're an auditory learner, but you're not. And in fact, what works way, way better is to visualize the things that you're memorizing. And so there's an entire field of study around mnemonics, which teaches people how to create novel visualizations. We call them markers in our method. And you use those mnemonics or visual markers to memorize anything from names, phone numbers, Bible verses, facts, figures, historical dates. I mean, anything you could possibly imagine can be visualized and therefore memorized. And then at the more advanced levels, you're using a structure called the memory palace, which is actually a real thing, not made up by Sherlock Holmes. And it's a way that you can put organize your memories in a highly, highly memorable way. So memorable, in fact, that it's almost a curse. Like, you can't get rid of stuff.

And this is how competitive memory athletes memorize 36 decks of cards in an hour, or PI to 10,000 digits, or 150 people's names and faces in under 10 minutes. There have been some pretty, pretty incredible feats of memory, and it's all based on visual mnemonics and the memory palace technique.

Interesting. Yeah, that's. So you're saying that you can't just learn from listening to a podcast. You need to go to the show notes, maybe take some notes as you're.

Reflect, or if they're listening to the podcast and they're making sort of visual references in their brains of some of the things we're talking about, then they'll probably stick.

I like that. Okay.

Bingo. That's precisely perfect. And that's what we teach in the course is like, I can teach you the memory techniques in 10 minutes. But it's more about like, well, what if I'm trying to do this? What if I'm trying to memorize numbers? Wait a minute, what if I'm reading a book? How do I apply these 2,500 year old techniques to real world conditions of today?

I love that. And then what about, as far as speed reading goes, is it a completely different sort of device to speed read? I mean, what do you do there?

Yeah. So once you've established the memory skill and you have the infrastructure to be able to actually memorize huge amounts of information, then speed reading is one of those things that's really simple to explain and takes months and months to learn. But it's essentially you're minimizing the voice in your head. You can't eliminate it, it's not possible, but you're minimizing it. And then you're optimizing the movements of your eyes to take in more words at a time. Or in other words, also read the stuff that's blurry even though it's blurry and spending less time reading in the margins. Most people start, they move their eye to the very beginning of the line and they move it all the way to the very end of the line. And that means that they spend a lot of time looking at the white stuff, not the black stuff. And then on top of that.

What you can learn to do is review and pre read and do all these other things that essentially heighten your interest and focus and that will also improve your reading speed because you won't need to actually skip back and relearn and reread things. So it's a whole thing. We spent 10 weeks teaching all this stuff. So that's the super, super, super high level explanation. But speed reading is essentially learning to optimize the movements of your eyes so you can take in information faster. Because one of the most important things to understand about reading is while your eyes are in motion, your eyes can't move fluidly. They can only move in saccades, which are these like very kind of erratic jumps. While your eyes are moving, they can't take in new information. It's called saccadic blindness or saccadic masking. So the more time your eyes are spending moving, if you're moving your eyes for every single word on the page, you're spending a lot of time blind. So we train our students to move the eyes less and take in more. You can't actually make your fovea longer. The fovea is the focal area, but you can train your eyes to pay more attention to stuff in the parafovea, even though it's blurry. So you move your eyes less and that means that you're spending less time in saccadic blindness.

God. Interesting.

It's a wild thing.

Yeah. Do you have a. I'm sure you. I'm sure you have a course and all that. What's the first. Good first step to deeper dive into what we're talking about here? Do you have a podcast episode or anything like that?

Actually, we have a completely free 5 day memory mastery course, which is honestly so good that I think people take it and then they don't buy our real stuff. But I'm happy to help people. People can get that at JLE Vi five.

Sweet.

I will say five the number or.

Five spelled out five the number. And it's really good. I repurposed a lot of the content from that course and put it into my new book. And that course is on sale for Udemy as one of the highest rated memory courses. But we give it away for free because it's part of our marketing. But it's really good. And it's only 10 to 15 minutes a day for five days.

Awesome. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, we'll link that up too.

Yeah. I've tried to do speed reading in the past and it's never totally clicked with me. I actually have a handful of books on speed reading and it's just for whatever reason, I mean, I've gotten to a point where I can skim books really, really well, where I just kind of flip through the pages and glance at them real quick. And I kind of get the general concept by grabbing a few words here and there and go. Okay, cool. I know what this page is about, but I know I'm missing a lot of detail, right?

Yeah. I had the same issue when I hired this tutor is I'd read two different resources on speed reading and I was reading at 450 words per minute, which is slower than my normal speed now, but my retention was like 20%. And it turns out that the main issue was I didn't have this visual mnemonic foundation. So my kind of like revelation was that you have to train your memory before you can learn to speed read. And all these like two day college speed reading courses are just about get you in, get you out. They're not actually about results.

Yeah.

Oh, that makes a lot of sense, man.

That's really cool. Okay, that's where I'm headed after this.

Yeah, we'll Link that up, man. So the podcast, I would recommend folks to go check that out. Becoming Superhuman. Is there anything else or any other place that you would love people to check out? And they have a book coming out. What's the name of that one?

Not ready to say yet.

Not ready. Okay.

It's better to say, but cool.

No, that's all right.

What are your existing books?

It'll be a learning book.

A learning book. Okay, got it.

And the book you do have out, what's that called?

Become a Super Learner.

Become a super.

But people should just do the five Day memory course. It's honestly better than my first book. It's really a lot better.

Is it? At least you're honest. There you go.

Yeah, I'm probably going to unpublish the first book. I did not know how to write a proper book five years ago.

Books are very difficult to write.

Yeah, that's a whole nother beast there is writing a book for sure.

Oh, yeah, No, I flew out to Austin and had Tucker Max help me.

Oh, you did?

With proper book? Yeah. Highly recommended.

Nice. Okay, that's good to know because we've had a few people reach out to us about that and we've even toyed with the idea.

Oh, do it, do it. I was so impressed with the guided author process. I mean, he really knows how to write phenomenal books and his team is world class.

100%. Yeah. And if folks want to check that out, just look up Tucker Max on our website and he breaks that whole process down too. Super cool.

Oh, yeah.

All right, Jonathan. Well, this has been amazing. And the brain stuff, I know I'm going to deep dive on all that. I'm just going to nerd out selfishly on all that and learn way better because I know there's a lot to be had. Appreciate your time, man. And hopefully we'll chat again and do this again. Maybe on brain stuff, do a deeper dive on that.

Love it. Looking forward to it.

All right, man. Have a great one.

Take care.

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You're awesome.