Building the business
How a Dyslexia Researcher Rewired My Thinking About Learning
Russell Van Brocklen explains the brain science behind dyslexia and ADHD, the specialty-first learning model, and how he uses AI to sharpen business writing.
This is probably the most unusual episode of The Owner Meeting we've ever recorded. No cap rates, no seller financing, no rent rolls. Instead I sat down with Russell Van Brocklen, who opened by telling me, flatly, that he solved dyslexia, and then spent the next half hour proving that I didn't understand what dyslexia actually is.
I have ADHD. Bad enough that my parents pulled me out of public school and put me in a private school because I couldn't function in the larger environment. So this one hit close to home. If you're neurodivergent, employ people who are, or are raising a kid who's struggling in school, there's more usable material here than in almost anything else we've published.
Fifteen Credits of A-Minus, Changed to Fifteen Credits of F
Russell's story starts in the late '90s. He wanted to understand how laws were made, so he applied to the New York State Assembly Internship Program and got in. Then he handed them his neuropsychological evaluation: a first-grade reading and writing level. He couldn't read. He couldn't write. And the internship was built around doing both.
The Speaker's office didn't wash him out. They said, get a committee together, we're going to accommodate the living heck out of this kid and make this work. They moved him into the majority leader's program and counsel's office, where three administrative assistants treated him like a grad student and helped turn his work into something he could turn in each week. For the academic portion, instead of a paper, he gave an hours-long presentation and Q&A: a normal accommodation for him.
They recommended fifteen credits of A-minus. It went back to the State University of New York at Buffalo political science department, they looked at the accommodations, and they hated it. They lowered the grade to fifteen credits of F.
That's the moment. Russell said that like countless people before him, he decided he was going to solve dyslexia, but unlike them, he actually did.
He Taught Himself to Read in Law School
His professors told him that if he liked politics, law school was where people read and write more and better than anywhere else. So he audited two classes. On his second day of contracts, the professor called on him using the Socratic method: the approach where they trap you, smash you down with questions you can't answer, and berate you publicly until you adapt.
That didn't happen. He responded as the professor's equal, not as a law student. Back and forth, as fast as they could talk, for five, ten, fifteen minutes, until the professor threw up his hands and said, "Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on to the next case."
He learned to read within a month. He learned to write within a couple of years.
Then he asked the New York State Senate to fund a dyslexia research program. They routed him to the State Education Department, and after years he got approval and funding for a multi-year study at the Averill Park Central School District outside Albany. One class period a day for the school year.
He worked with students like him: highly motivated, highly intelligent juniors and seniors reading and writing at the middle school level. In one class period a day over one school year, they rose to the average range of entering graduate students for writing. All went on to college. All graduated, with GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6.
The business numbers are what got me. His cost to New York State taxpayers was under $900 per kid, with a 100% success rate. His biggest competitor was Landmark College, which cost over $100,000. According to New York Times data, Russell's program was three times as successful for less than 1% of the cost.
The Two Brains, and the Question He Used to Fool Me
Russell held up Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale (the number one book in his field) and showed me the two brain scans. In the normal brain, there's massive neural activity in the back. In the dyslexic brain, the back has next to nothing, while the front is about two and a half times overactive.
Then he ran a drill on me. We invented a made-up person, Riley, an adult in my mentorship group with dyslexia, and established his specialty: buying and running apartments. Then Russell had me write "Riley + renting apartments" and asked the simplest question imaginable:
"Does Riley like or dislike renting apartments?"
I answered, "Riley likes renting apartments."
"But that's not what I asked."
We went around three times before I understood. I had automatically added the S to make it a proper sentence: that's the back of the brain doing it unconsciously. Riley has nothing going on back there. He'd write "Riley like renting apartments" and have no idea how to add the S. You could explain it a hundred times and he still wouldn't get it, which is exactly why teachers got so frustrated on the fourth or fifth explanation when you and I were seven or eight.
So you don't fight the back of the brain. You go to the front, the part that's two and a half times overactive, which handles word analysis followed by articulation:
- Have Riley read aloud what he wrote and ask if it sounds generally correct. He says no. Tell him to fix it. He produces "Riley likes renting apartments."
- Repeat for a list of ten things he likes and ten he dislikes.
- Add "because" and a simple reason to each (that's articulation) and keep reading aloud until the whole thing sounds generally correct.
- For spelling, every time he misspells even one word he retypes the entire thing. He'll insist he won't make the mistake again, and he'll make it three to thirteen more times before it sticks.
- Then layer in reason one, reason two, reason three, running the ten likes and dislikes through each pass.
As Russell put it: if you can write it, you can read it. When I asked whether it ever becomes automatic, he compared it to tying your shoe: you concentrate like crazy while learning, then your hands just do it.
Specialty First, Specific to General
Two pieces of the model mattered most to me as a business owner.
The first is specialty. Russell's most successful student, Casey, jumped eight grade levels in six months working inside a book she liked. They moved to a book she hated and her motivation dropped 50%. Most dyslexic, ADD and ADHD people drop 75 to 90% once outside their specialty. Russell says ADD, ADHD and dyslexia are fundamentally the same thing: dyslexia just adds a severe reading and writing problem. With ADHD the specialty matters even more: step outside it and the kid is useless; step into it and they're the most focused people you'll ever see. Hire someone out of college who's genuinely into real estate and they'll outwork everybody in that specific area. One inch outside it, you'll get nothing.
The second is direction. Give a neurodivergent brain a broad prompt: "What effect did Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech have on the 1960s civil rights movement?", and you get ideas flying around at light speed with no organization. Gen-ed college-bound kids just go do it. We can't. The fix is to start at a very specific point and work outward: a specific question, an answer, which generates the next question, forcing the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output.
That's how I already run deals without having a name for it. A deal has to check these boxes. Financing feels like a billion options at once until I picture a dropdown box and click through the choices one at a time, asking which makes the most sense for this deal. If you don't categorize, you have every idea simultaneously and no idea where to start.
Russell summarizes the model as: specialty, specific to general, word analysis followed by articulation. He also noted that fewer than one in five people naturally think specific-to-general, which means the standard "big picture first, details later" briefing is actively confusing your neurodivergent employees.
Using AI as the Engine for Word Analysis
The last stretch was the most practical. Russell walked me through the adult version of the same process.
He started with a movie review. He asked me to name a film I know intimately that everyone has seen (Fellowship of the Ring) and reduce it to a one-word universal theme. Not "fellowship," which is right there in the title. I landed on "quest." You could write a whole review by asking how the actors, director and screenwriter each performed against that theme.
The problem is that "quest" is painting with a broad brush. Business needs a laser.
So here's the drill for an adult with a business goal: in the example, Riley wants to help his community by renting apartments:
- Ask the model for an exhaustive narrative on what the hero is trying to do, as long as it can make it.
- For each sentence, have it pick the single most important word, then generate custom definitions for those words.
- Ask which ten words and definitions best match the goal, and you, the human, make the final call.
- Take that still-too-broad theme and ask for 100 synonyms with custom definitions. Pick the top ten. Choose the one closest to what's in your head.
- Run it again if it isn't close enough. Five or six passes is fine; the whole thing takes under an hour.
Once you have that specific word and definition, it becomes a lens. Run everything through it (your newsletter title, your website copy, how you describe why you do this) and it produces your individual way of doing things rather than generic output.
Russell was specific about tooling: use reasoning modes with extended thinking, on the web rather than the app, and accept that a good answer might take seven minutes. He runs about three queries at a time. He bought the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan the day it launched in December 2024, and has since moved his $200 a month to Claude.
He also tied this back to a landlord problem he'd raised before our conversation. During the pandemic, when people didn't have to pay rent but you still owed taxes, one of the most successful landlords he found ran all three credit reports, took the middle score, and wouldn't rent to a 749: only 750 and above. She paid the price for the extra reports, and it kept her out of all the legal trouble. When tenants said they weren't going to pay, she told them she'd report them to the credit bureaus, and the vast majority paid, because their credit score was everything to them. His question back to me was the right one: how do you find those people, in a way unique to your business? None of us are Fortune 500 companies that just want the money. We have to profit to live, but we're doing this for a deeper reason, and that reason has to show up in everything we do.
How Far This Goes
To show the ceiling, Russell described a student named Grayson who wants a PhD and then to work at NASA terraforming Mars. The plan is to submit an article to a peer-reviewed journal, and it actually has to be reviewed and rejected first, because the rejection is the key. Then Grayson approaches a professor with the rejected article and asks to work on fixing it. They're using The Craft of Research: context, a unique problem statement, and a unique solution.
Grayson is ten. He's doing math at a tenth-grade level, working with eleventh-grade reading comprehension and second-year-college context difficulty, and he's leaving school at the end of sixth grade because he's too bored. He isn't dyslexic. No ADD, no ADHD. He's just a 99th-percentile math and science student, which is Russell's point. This isn't only a remediation method.
Key Takeaways
- Dyslexia and ADHD share the same wiring: the back of the brain is quiet, the front is roughly two and a half times overactive. Route the task through the front instead of forcing the back.
- Word analysis followed by articulation is the mechanic: read aloud, ask if it sounds generally correct, fix it, add "because" and a reason, repeat across ten likes and ten dislikes.
- Specialty is the multiplier. Inside their area of extreme interest, neurodivergent people outwork everybody; outside it, motivation drops 75 to 90%.
- Go specific to general, never general to specific.
- AI can run the word-analysis process at adult speed until you land on the one word that becomes the lens for your business communication.
- Russell's results: under $900 per student with a 100% success rate, three times as successful as a program costing over $100,000.
Watch the full episode if you want to see the Riley drill run in real time, because reading about it is not the same as getting fooled by it yourself. Russell's courses are linked in original episode description. If you want to learn how we buy apartments with seller financing, my mentorship is at multifamilystrategy.com, the free course on getting started in multifamily is there too, and our free Skool community comes with a deal calculator.
Read the episode transcript
0:00 Welcome to the Owner Meeting podcast. I'm Christian, your channel host. Today introducing a special flavor. This is 0:06 actually going to be really fun. So, I have Russell on the pod today. He uh I'm actually just let him tell a story, but 0:12 we're going to talk about a little bit of psychology. We're going to talk about uh we're actually going to talk about a lot here, but I'm very very very excited 0:19 for this. Russell, welcome to the pod. Tell us tell us a little bit about you and how you got started. I don't want to 0:25 overintroduce this episode. I'm going to let you do Well, I'm just gonna let you know this is the last thing in the world I was supposed to be doing because I I 0:30 literally solved dyslexia. And people ask, "What do you mean?" Well, it was the late 90s. I wanted to 0:37 figure out how laws were made. And that's some class I wanted to know. So, I signed up for the New York State Assembly Internship Program, which I was 0:45 accepted to, but I came in, I said, "Here's my neurosychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing 0:51 level." So, which means I couldn't do the internship the way it was designed. So the speaker decided Yeah. I just I 0:58 couldn't read. I couldn't write. This is where you do both a lot. Yeah. So Yeah. So the speaker's office said 1:06 they said, "Get a committee together. We're going to accommodate the living heck out of this kid and we're going to make this work." They pulled me out of 1:12 the legislative office building, put me in the in the majority leaders program and council's office that ran the 1:18 assembly dayto day. They had three administrative assistants, treated me like a grad student. It worked 1:24 fantastic. The three administrative assistants helped turn my junk into something I could turn in each week. For 1:30 the academic portion, I gave hours long presentation and Q&A instead of the standard paper, which was com normal 1:37 accommodation for me. They wrapped it all up, recommended 15 credits of A 1:42 minus, and sent it back to the State University of New York center at Buffalo Political Science Department, who looked 1:49 at the accommodations that I was granted, and they're they just they could they hated it. 1:55 So, they said, "Instead of 15 credits of A minus, we're lowering your grade to 15 2:02 credits of F." Well, that doesn't work. Oh, well, still there 30 years. uh 29 2:08 years ago. That's when it was there. So at that point, like countless people before me, I said, I'm going to solve 2:14 dyslexia. But unlike them, I actually did. What I did is I asked my professors 2:19 where I could go to learn to read and write. I forced myself to read and write so I could show other dyslexics. They 2:25 said, "Well, in grad school, if you like politics, it's easy. Law school where you read and write better than anybody 2:31 more than anybody." So I went and audited two classes. My second day of contracts, the professor called on me. 2:38 They use the Socratic method. They trump you. They just smash you down with questions you can't answer and bearish 2:44 you publicly until you eventually adapt. That didn't happen to me. I responded as 2:50 the professor's equal, not as a law student. Okay? He was a professor longer than I was alive. What do I mean by 2:56 that? He asked me questions. I responded. We're He's going after me. I'm going after him. We're talking as 3:03 fast as we can, arguing five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He threw up his hands and he said, "Russell, you 3:09 couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on to the next case." I learned to read within a month. I learned to write 3:14 in a couple of years. Then I go back to the New York State Senate and I said, "I want you to fund my dyslexia research 3:21 program," which they don't do. Now, they were standard Republicans back then, which meant they wanted to work things 3:27 out in the public school system, get everybody then to to buy in and then do 3:33 it. So, they sent me over to the New York State Education Department. It took 3:38 years. Finally, I get the approval um of everybody and they fund me for a 3:44 multi-year study at the Averil Park Central School District, right outside of Albany, New York, our state capital. 3:50 one class period a day for the school year. I wanted to work with students who were like me initially, highly 3:57 motivated, highly intelligent. Uh they were juniors and seniors reading and 4:02 writing at the middle school level. One class peer today for the school year they increased to the average range of 4:08 entering graduate students for writing. They all went on to college. They all 4:13 graduated GPA of 2.5 to 3.6. Here's the business numbers. My cost to 4:20 New York State taxpayers were under $900 kid with a 100% success rate. My biggest 4:27 competitor at the time was Landmark College, the best to select a college at the time, a two-year transfer college. 4:34 According to New York Times data, we were 3x as successful for less than 1% 4:40 of the cost. They were over 100 grand. I was under a thousand. And that's how I 4:45 got started. Dude, that's amazing. So when you're when you're learning so so what was the what was the difference 4:50 when you're in uh when you're in law school and you're you're having the back and forth what was the difference like what is the actual solution that you 4:57 found to dyslexia oh well wouldn't it be a nice strange idea to look at the actual science 5:04 this is a book called overcoming dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shayitz from Yale. This is the number one book in my field. 5:10 That's dyslexia. Do you see the two brains clearly enough? Yes. Okay. Do you see how the back part 5:16 of the normal brain has this massive neuroactivity in the back of it, but the back of the dyslectic has next to 5:22 nothing? Yes. Now, do you see how the front part of the dyslectic brain is about two and 5:27 a half times overactive? Yes. Okay. So, the answer is simple. The 5:34 best way I can kind of explain this to you is to actually arrange for you to 5:41 have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is and also for your audience. A biggest 5:47 question I get is I have a dyslectic kid in elementary or middle school. They're writing a bunch of randomly placed 5:53 misspelled words. Nobody knows what to do. And I can show you how to do that 5:59 all that in about 10 minutes. All right. All right. So, do you know any dyslectic kids uh were at any point in your life 6:07 in elementary or middle school who were writing randomly placed misspelled words? Not as much in elementary. I went to a 6:12 private school, so not as much, but I still see it with adults. I have I have several adults who have dyslexia in my 6:18 mentorship group or that I'll run into that actually still struggle with that. So, uh yes. Okay. So, I want you to pick one of 6:25 those adults. We're going to change their name to protect their identity. 6:30 Can you uh so what's the madeup name that we're talking about? We we'll go with Riley. 6:36 Riley. Okay. First thing we need to find out is what is Riley's specialtity? What's his area of extreme interest and 6:43 ability? Okay. Uh Riley is uh very interested in 6:49 uh purchasing and running apartments and he really enjoys the analysis even though uh the actual numbers and reading 6:58 in there is the hardest part for him. So, it takes him a little bit more time than everyone else, but it's his favorite part. 7:03 Okay. Well, we're going to start to fix this. So, let's say when we're dealing with Riley. All right. The first thing that we ought 7:09 to do with Riley is let's just call it renting a I mean, sorry, he likes to uh 7:15 he likes to rent apartments. Okay, that's what he loves. Okay. So, what we're going to do is you're going to 7:20 pull out a laptop computer. Not an iPad, not an iPhone, certainly not uh 7:26 handwriting one with a real keyboard. and you're going to type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about? 7:34 Mhm. Okay. Then we're going to swap out hero for Riley. We got Riley plus sign. What 7:40 are we talking about? Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things that Riley really really likes. And then 10 things 7:47 he really really dislikes. Yep. The first thing on the list he really really likes is renting apartments. So we got 7:54 hero plus sign. What are we talking about? We're going to swap out. What are we talking about for renting apartments? 8:00 Now, we got Riley plus sign renting apartments. See how we got there? Now, I'm going to try to fool you with two of 8:08 the simplest questions you've ever been asked. If you answer them correctly, this will 8:15 work. If you don't, you're going to get really confused and then you'll have an 8:20 epiphany on what dyslexia really is. Do you think I can fool you with two of the simplest questions ever? I'm going to 8:28 guess you probably can, but we'll see. Okay, just try to answer these as specifically as you can. So, we got 8:34 Riley plus sign renting apartments. We got to swap out the plus sign for a word. Here's my extremely specific 8:42 question. Does Riley like or dislike renting apartments? 8:47 Interesting. Okay. Well, I feel like if you're going to stump me, it's probably the one that I don't expect, but logically I want to say 8:54 it's not this is not a this is not a trick question. I do this with six-year-olds. So, okay. So, Riley, we've established 9:02 he likes it. So, I'm going to say that he does like renting apartments. Well, well, what's the Well, give me the 9:07 full three reason the three-word sentence. The three would be So, the three-word would be Riley. Are we talking about 9:14 like the one that we just created? So, Riley Plus likes apartments. Yep. We're swapping out. We need to 9:19 swap. We got Riley plus sign renting apartments. I'm sorry. It's a four. It's a four word sentence. 9:25 We're going to swap out the plus sign. Here's my question. Does Riley like or dislike renting apartments? 9:31 Riley likes renting apartments. But that's not what I asked. Does Riley like or dislike renting 9:36 apartments? That's what I asked. What? So, what's the full sentence? Riley likes renting apartments. 9:42 But that's not what I asked. Do I have you nice and confused? Yes, you do. 9:47 Okay. Are you ready for your epiphany on dyslexia? Yes. Okay. Let's go back to the science. All 9:54 right. Let's do the two brains. Okay. Yes. You did this in the back part of the 10:00 brain where you have this massive neuroactivity. Okay. Riley doesn't have anything going 10:05 on back here. He doesn't he can't do it. So, what's going on is in the back part 10:11 of the brain when I asked does Riley liked or disliked? You automatically added the s to make it a proper 10:17 sentence. You said Riley likes renting apartments. But I asked does he like or dislike? 10:23 Riley would have said like he has no idea how to add the s. Interesting. Okay. 10:29 Right now just again you were trained pro you were trained to do this properly. Now, when you were learning 10:36 this when you were like seven or eight, if you if a teacher had to explain it to you a fourth or fifth time, do you 10:42 remember how really upset they got? Like, why can't you just freaking get it? Mhm. 10:48 Okay, Riley, you could explain it a hundred times. He's not going to get it. So, what we have to do is chief, let's 10:56 look at the science. It's right there. We got to go to the front part of the brain that's about two and a half times 11:02 overactive and That part deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So what we 11:08 would do is I'd go through that same process with Riley. He would say Riley like renting apartments. I'd say Riley 11:14 read what you wrote out loud. Riley like renting apartments. Riley does that sound generally correct? He would say 11:20 no. And I would say Riley fix it. Riley likes renting apartments. We would try 11:26 that with the other nine likes and 10 dislikes until we got it all correct. Do you see how that's a simple form of word 11:32 analysis? Yes. Now we have to go because and you 11:37 see how the reasons after because are a simple form of articulation. Mhm. 11:43 Now we're moving things from the back part of the brain to the front part. So let's So now we got Riley plus now Riley 11:51 likes renting apartments because give me a simple reason why why Riley likes 11:56 renting apartments. Uh he likes the business. Uh let's see. So, he likes the apartment renting 12:02 business specifically because he likes doing a good thing for his community. It makes him feel happy providing. 12:08 Riley likes renting apartments because he likes doing a good thing for his community. Here's the problem. Teachers 12:13 have a hard time dealing with really bad grammar. Here's how we fix it. We have 12:18 We tell Riley, "Forget about the spelling. Read what he just wrote out loud. Doesn't sound generally correct." 12:23 And keep doing that until the whole thing sounds generally correct. Now we've gotten rid of the horrible grammar 12:29 and we're left with a lot of little ones and some intermediate ones which professional tutors and teachers could 12:35 deal with. See how simple that was? But now we still got a whole Let me guess. Riley has a real hard time 12:41 spelling. Here's how we fix that. We tell Riley every time to drop a period. Every time he misspells even one word, 12:48 he has to retype everything until the spelling is perfect. And he's going to say, "I'm not going to make that mistake." and he will keep making it for 12:55 about three to 13 times until he gets it right. Then he goes on to the next sentence because remember we're doing 10 13:01 likes and 10 dislikes. The same thing until that's correct all the way through for 10 likes and 10 dislikes. Then we go 13:07 to reason one and reason two. The same each reason the previous stays the same. 13:13 And then we do it again with the 10 likes and 10 dislikes until everything's spelled correctly. And then reason one, 13:18 reason two, and reason three. 10 likes, 10 dislikes until everything's correct. Mhm. 13:23 This also improves his reading because if you can write it, you can read it. 13:29 Does that make sense? Yes, it does. So, when you're processing this with dyslexia, are you essentially 13:35 when you're pulling this from the back of the brain to the front of the brain, you're going through this entire process every time, 13:41 you just get faster and faster going process or does this actually form a different connection where they can do it without having to mentally go all the 13:48 way through the steps every time? They have to practice. It's like tying your shoe. So, right now I could talk to 13:55 you about the most complicated part of your job and you're tying your shoe through uncompetence on uh through 14:02 unconscious competence and your hands just do it. Does that make sense? Yes. But when you're learning to tie your 14:08 shoe, you have to concentrate like crazy. That's why we repeat it so many times. So that's that's just the third 14:15 part of the of of what we're doing. The first part what we have to do is focus 14:20 on the person's specialtity. So let me give you an example why my most successful student's name is Casey. 14:27 Casey jumped eight grade levels in six months in a book that she liked. We went 14:32 to a book she hated and her motivation dropped 50%. Most dyslexics, ADD and 14:38 ADHD people will drop 75 to 90 once you're outside the speciality, which is not a problem because Yeah. 14:46 Well, you're dealing with people remember how I how I how I rocked law school. That was in my specialtity. 14:52 Okay. What what I didn't tell you is when I had to get it approved by a senior professor, people said it was 14:58 going to take years. I did it in less than two weeks. Are you noticing in grad school I I just it's a it's just an 15:05 unfair advantage. Mhm. From the two and a half times of the neural activity in the front part of my 15:10 head. That's where I'm using it is in grad school. It's a So, you mentioned 15:16 you mentioned ADHD as well. I'm curious how how does ADHD function relatively similarly 15:22 for for treatment purposes. ADD ADHD and dyslexia is the same thing. It's just 15:27 dyslexia is a bad problem with reading and writing where ADHD generally is not. 15:33 When you're dealing with ADHD, it's even more in the specialtity. You step out of that, the kid's useless. You're stepping 15:38 into it, they're the most focused people you'll ever see. So for like real estate, you get a kid, you get you get a 15:45 new kid right out of college who's into it, man, they will outwork everybody else and just be so concentrating. 15:51 They'll be they'll be your best employee in that specific area. You step one inch outside of it, you're going to find you 15:58 can't get them doing anything. I I can appreciate that. I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I went to private school. But they they put me in 16:04 private school cuz I had ADHD bad enough where I did not function well in public school but in a smaller group where I could 16:10 focus on things or get guidance where I didn't I was able to I was off of uh 16:16 they did the normal like hey just drug them. Uh I was off of RIN and whatever else they had me on at the time uh 16:22 within a year just environmental change. But it it is very interesting. I I I 16:28 find this very relatable. If you give me a topic that I care about, like real estate or playing guitar, I 16:34 will usually get much better much faster than most people. You give me something that I hate doing. Very hard. 16:40 Very very hard. So, let me So, let me ask So, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions 16:46 to see how what your condition really is? Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to let you know. I 16:53 think your answers are going to be yes, no, and no. Okay. Okay. So, let's just start off with the first question. 16:59 You in your specialtity of real estate, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to 17:05 no organization? Yes. Okay. When you're thinking about writing 17:10 something for your business on real estate, fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard, 17:17 the ideas in your head, you you take your fingers, put them on the keyboard. Does the idea fly out of your head, 17:22 leaving you with an empty brain? No. No. Okay. Were you ever told in elementary 17:28 school that if you can't pass some academic task, they were going to hold you back? 17:33 No, I wasn't told that. Okay. So, do you see how you answered exactly like I told you you would? Okay. 17:41 So, if [snorts] you were if you answered yes to the second one, that would mean you're dyslexic. Okay. Uh if you 17:48 answered yes to the third one, I would tell you what was going what would happen. the the severely dyslexic but 17:55 highly intelligent kid would then be told, "I'm going to lose my friends." 18:00 They put so much mental pressure on themselves that it's clinically dangerous. Like their parents will will 18:05 disown them. Their friends will hate them unless they find a way to pass this test. And remember, they're like seven, 18:10 eight, nine years old. And then with that extreme, extreme pressure, uh, an 18:17 idea comes and they pass. And then this is standard operating procedure for them through school. They just get used to 18:23 it. Very few people know that. And I've had plenty of friends who are like that, too, where they're they're they're so obsessed with everything 18:28 being perfect because they're terrified of not being able to focus. So, they just they they muscle their way 18:34 through it because they have to and then they Right. But this is far worse. This is a young child 18:40 thinking that their families will disown them, their friends will hate them, that they can't pass because then their friends will move on and they're going 18:46 to be put with strangers. So they put pressure on themselves so great that it's clinically dangerous and then they 18:53 find a solution to pass this stupid test with a D or C but they pass and then they move on and this only happens with 18:59 the hyper intelligent hyper hardworking. All right. So just you know where that is. So when now we're going to get to 19:06 the next part. So part two of the model we part one is the specialtity. You're going to find this interesting. I'm 19:13 going to tell you an assignment that if we went back in high school, you would find really difficult. Are you ready? 19:18 What effect did Martin Luther King's famous I have a dream speech have on the American60s 19 civil rights movement or 19:25 the 1960s civil rights movement? Do you find that kind of hard to think of what to do to go and answer it if we sent you 19:32 to the library because your idea your head's just flying around with just no organization? Yes. Okay. Now, if I were to go in to 19:42 any of your students who have high school kids, who are gened and collegebound, and I gave them that exact 19:49 same question, they would just go and do it. They didn't need any help, they would just go do it. You went through 19:54 college and because of your ADHD, you're finding that really hard to to do. Does 19:59 that make sense? Yes. Okay. Here's why. Because remember 20:05 when I asked in your specialtity, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no 20:11 organization? The secret is the force the dyslectic brain or the ADHD brain to 20:17 organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Let me put that in 20:22 English. What we have to do is start off at a really specific point and then 20:28 slowly go out. So, for example, for what you're doing in your business, we would 20:35 start with a very specific question. How do I obtain financing for this new 20:44 um this new condo that I want to buy or this new duplex that I want to buy? How 20:50 do I do that? And then we start off at a very specific point and we find the first answer. That answer gives us a 20:57 question which gives us an answer which gives us a question which gives us an answer that forces our brain to organize 21:03 itself by using writing as a measurable output. Does that make sense? Yes. And conveniently very similar to 21:10 how I teach it is I put everything mentally and like okay a deal has to check these 21:15 boxes. But you mentioned financing. I get to financing the question because it's easy to go like oh there's a 21:21 billion ways to do this. I just picture it like a dropown box on a computer and you click the available options, you go, 21:26 "Okay, which one if I go through these one at a time, which one would make the most sense given the deal that I have?" 21:33 And you you put everything in its correct categories. Uh but if you don't do that, it feels like you have every 21:39 idea at the same time and you don't know where to start. You have to be able to specifically categorize it and go 21:45 through the same set of decision making to quickly make a decision. 21:50 Exactly. So, but you but does that make sense to you how we start off with 21:55 something really specific and then we eventually go out? Yes. Okay. That's the 22:01 difference for us. So, if you if you have if you're smart enough to get a 22:08 neurodeiverse employee and I love doing ADHD because they don't have the writing and reading issues that the selectics 22:14 have, but they have the same ability to go deep. All right. What you do is just be give them a very specific task to 22:20 begin with and then slowly go out. Don't do the standard thing where we do the big picture and eventually get to the 22:26 details. We don't do that. We get confused. So the model is specialtity specific to 22:31 the general word analysis followed by articulation. Okay, that is very interesting. I I'm learning something unique here. I've never given 22:38 this any thought. So this is I'm I'm processing this in real time. Well, so what I learned is not everyone 22:45 does that. So most people do not think with starting with the specific objection and working out. That is the 22:51 only way I have ever known. Less than less than one in five do. But 22:56 here's the problem we run into. The gentleman that you started off what what was his madeup name again? 23:02 We went with Riley. Riley. Okay. Here's the problem with Riley. Riley, I told you how to do sentences. 23:09 That is really good for a third grader. Riley's a grown adult. Okay. So, here's 23:17 another more advanced version. This will also help as we talked before the 23:22 podcast. I want everybody to think about back in the pandemic when people didn't have to pay rent, but you still had to 23:28 pay your taxes. All right. The mo one of the most successful cases I found was there was a woman who was very careful 23:35 who she let in. She would run all three credit reports and yes, she paid the price. She would then pick the middle 23:41 one and if you had a 749, she would not rent to you. She only rented to 750 and 23:46 above. That kept her out of all the legal trouble. And when people said, "I'm not going to pay," she said, "Fine. 23:53 I'm going to report you to the credit bureaus." And they and the vast majority of them just paid because that their 23:58 credit score is everything to them. Yeah. Well, how do you find those type 24:04 of people? How do you in unique to how you're going to do this business? 24:09 Because each of us, we're not like some Fortune 500 company that just wants the money. We have to make a profit like 24:15 everybody else. Yes. To live, but we're doing this for a deeper reason. And that 24:21 reason has to be communicated in everything we do so that we can differentiate ourselves compared to 24:27 everybody else. Yeah. So for Riley, it was to help out the community. All right. So, what I want to show you 24:32 is how to do evolved body paragraphs with a way of writing that I'm sure you know nothing about that will actually 24:39 also help you come up with a way of how to communicate what you're trying to come up with so you can find the right 24:45 renters. Okay? So, I I start off with this. It's going to look like it's completely out of left 24:50 field and that's how dyslexic solutions look. It'll become apparent very quickly. It's a movie. It's how to do a 24:56 movie review. So, I want you to tell me about a movie that uh that you know 25:01 intimately you think is one of the best of all times that everybody has seen. What's the name of that movie? 25:07 Easy. Fellowship of the Ring. Fellowship of the Rings. You'd be surprised how many have to say that. 25:13 Now, I'm going to do something that is now right in your wheelhouse. I'm going to ask you to reduce the Fellowship of 25:20 the Ring to a one-word universal thing that you think best represents it. What's the name? What's that universal 25:25 thing? What's the word? universal theme. Yes. You're going to reduce the fellowship of the ring to a one-word 25:33 universal theme that best represents the entire movie. Who? Well, conveniently, they put it in 25:39 the title. Fellowship. Yes, but we're not going to be we're not going to be that. Uh we're looking for 25:45 something unique. Something unique. Okay. Something unique from your point of 25:51 view. You'd be surprised how many kids have tried that one on me. Well, it it I I it's the actual like connections 25:58 between the characters, I think it makes sense. But if we're going I mean overall it's an epic quest. So if we're going to 26:03 do it one word, it it's quest specific outcome or it could be quest or journey. 26:09 One of those two. Okay, let let's take quest. So if you were to do a the movie review, you would 26:14 look at the main actors, ask how they did with the word quest. How did the director do? How did the screenwriter 26:20 do? And you write up your review. Then people will decide do I want to watch this movie or not. If they decided to 26:27 watch it, you would have enhanced their experience because now they know what to look for from each from all these 26:34 different participants. Does that make sense? Yeah. Here's the problem. Today we need to 26:41 laser focus, but the word quest, the universal name of quest is so broad, it's like painting with a broad brush. 26:49 We need to be laser focused. See the problem? Mhm. So now we need to fix that. So now I'm 26:55 going to traumatize part of your audience because we're going to go back to high school English and Shakespeare 27:01 plays. And people are going to ask Here's another thing out of left field. You're about to see why. I want you to 27:08 think back to any Shakespeare play in high school. It always started off with a hero. Hero wanted to do something with 27:14 based on one or more universal themes. Then there'd be an ultimate villain who would try to prevent the hero from 27:20 accomplishing their goal. This would be a a person, a concept, or some combination there too. The conflict 27:26 would start in act one, escalate like crazy into act two, resolving act three. Sound familiar? 27:32 Yes. So now we need to reduce the complexity of that so we can actually use this. Why 27:38 am I bringing up Shakespeare? Because when you're communicating in English, he has been the most effective communicator 27:44 in English language history. Mh. All right. So, let's kind of take what 27:49 Riley's trying to do. So, what do we go? So, what is it that Riley wants to do? 27:56 What is his goal, which you kind of already told me? So, we're doing Riley's Riley's actual 28:01 personal goal outside of the outside of the movie example. Now, yeah, I just gave you that as an example 28:07 because you you'll see how it ties in a minute. You said Riley wants to rent 28:12 apartments to help the community. Yes. So, what we're going to do because 28:17 we're adults and not kids, we can use AI without some teacher saying, "You're not 28:23 supposed to do it that way." Yes. Fine. That's great. So, what model do 28:28 you use? Chat GPT, Claude Opus, or what do you use? Uh, I use uh I use both Chad GBT and 28:35 Claude depending, but I probably use Cloud more than anything. Okay. So, if you're using Chat GPT, yes, 28:41 you've got to spend the 20 bucks a month. It's five bucks a week. if you can afford it. Okay. You're going to want to put it on 28:48 chat GPT um 5.4 thinking and leave it there. Then 28:54 you're going to want to go online and do it not on the app but online and you're going to want to do extended thinking 29:00 and it might be and each time you ask you something it might take seven minutes. 29:06 That's what it takes for a good answer. I do like three at a time. Okay? So do 29:11 that. If you're using Opus, you're going to use Opus 4.6 extended thinking. 29:16 All right? Don't use one of the crappier models. I current Here's my background with AI. 29:21 When uh ChachiPT came out with a $200 a month pro plan in December of 24, I 29:27 bought it that day. And I'm now dropped to $20 a month in December. I'm now doing 200 a month with 29:34 Claude. Okay. So, perfect. What you do is, let's say we're using CL, I'm sorry, let's use Opus. So, what 29:41 you're going to do is you're going to say, "I want to uh Riley wants to help 29:46 the community out through renting apartments." And then you want use Opus 29:51 to write out here's what I would say an exhaustive narrative on this. Okay? As 29:57 long as you can. Then for each sentence, you're going to want Opus to pick out 30:03 the best most important word for each sentence. And then you're going to tell 30:08 Opus to come up with that with custom definitions. So now you got a whole bunch of those. Then you you you say 30:14 based on what the hero wants to do, what are the 10 best words and definitions 30:20 that match that? And then you as the human have to make the decision. Once you do that, you're going to find 30:28 that the universal theme of a quest of a journey that we started off with for the movie review. Remember how broad it was? 30:35 Yes. This is broad too. This is really broad to now we have to make it 30:40 specific. Okay. So how we do that is we then take we tell Claude uh you know 30:46 Opus 4.6 extended thinking uh for this universal theme give me 100 synonyms 30:54 with custom definitions. And then you look at that and say okay 30:59 what what of these top 10 what are the top 10 that best fit for what the hero wants to do? Rewrite out the word and 31:05 the definition, the custom definition, and you pick the one that's best in your head. It's never going to be exact, but 31:12 if it's not close enough, run it again and again. And for the school kids, they 31:17 do this manually. For adults, I have the AI do it until you and if it takes five or six times, who cares? You can do it 31:23 in under an hour. Once you find that specific word that best matches the definition in your head, that's your 31:30 specific universal thing that we can then use as a lens to do anything. Does 31:36 that make sense? Yes, it does. So, I want you to imagine we now have that lens. So, let's say we want to help 31:44 the community by renting apartments. We got that specific word. How do we take what we want to do and run it through 31:51 that word and its custom definition? And you do that for how do I what do I come up with for a newsletter title? What do 31:57 I come up with for uh what we're going to write the website on? And it will then tell you this is your your 32:05 individual way of doing things. Can you see how valuable that is to then give you the what you want to do very 32:12 specifically? Then you can work with AI to develop the rest of it. Oh, that's awesome. And it's it's just 32:18 it's so convenient. It's such a good use of AI and as it continues to get smarter, this should just continue to 32:24 get easier and better. Yes. And for everybody that knows uh it's called Mythos for uh for anthropic 32:32 cloud customers. And that is so advanced they're going to give security companies a couple of 32:37 months, six months, whatever it is to harden their security because it just so happens to break the find problems that 32:44 nobody else could ever find. So, y when that comes out, I'm going to be using that for all sorts of hard business 32:51 problems I still haven't been able to quite solve. Okay? But now I've given you the process to actually do that. 32:58 Now, do you see how that's kind of an advanced form of word analysis? Yes, that is just the be very beginnings of 33:06 what we do. my most advanced student. Now, just so you know how how far we go, the ultimate thing you can do in writing 33:13 is a peer-reviewed journal article. Are you familiar with that process? Uh, not not as much the process, but I 33:19 know what a peer-reviewed journal article is. Yes. Well, yeah. Well, basically, this is the highest standard of coming up with new 33:26 knowledge. And this is how professors are generally graded on their ability to get promoted. So Grayson um he wants to 33:36 get his PhD and then work at NASA to terraform Mars. So we got to get so we 33:43 have to work with him to submit an article for publication. It actually has to be reviewed and rejected. Okay, 33:51 that's that's the key thing because then I another podcast I met a member who's 33:56 uh on the board of directors of one of the country's top five technical universities. And what we're going to do with Grayson 34:03 is when he's ready, we're going to say, "Here's the rejected article um that 34:09 he's he's going to ask the professor, this is what we I need to fix. Can I work with us with you on this?" The 34:14 issue is Grayson's a little bit on the younger side. So that that journal we're going to go for um they will accept 34:22 things from junior researchers which I think are PhD candidates. Grayson's a bit younger than that. He's not dyslexic 34:28 in the least. No ADD, no ADHD. He's just a 99th percentile student in math and 34:34 science. So how old do you think Grayson is? Uh well I have no idea. [laughter] 34:40 T take a wild guess. Okay. So Grayson is doing his math 10. 34:46 That's exactly how old he is. Yes. Nailed it. Okay. We're using a book called The 34:52 Craft of Research, which is context, uh, unique, uh, problem statement, and and a 34:57 unique solution. So, we're taking him through that. I'm showing his dad how to take him through all that stuff. Grayson 35:03 is actually dropping out of school because he's too bored uh, at the end of the year um, for sixth grade. And he's 35:10 currently I give him stuff at the 11th grade reading level. Comprehension. Uh the context is a difficulty of a second 35:17 year college level and he's so cool. So that's that's how far we go. All 35:23 right. Um so what I people ask why do you show this really amazing stuff on podcast and I said well there's some 35:30 other amazing stuff I show you know depending on how far you want to go. But I'm like well that's because we use the craft of research and what I show is 35:38 basically pretty much next to nothing compared to the real value that we provide. And remember, Grayson's not 35:44 dyslexic. He's a gen ed kid. So I I we just don't work with dyslexics. Oh, 35:49 that's amazing. If someone wanted to follow up more, they want to learn more because you have you have a whole bunch of I mean, this is amazing research. Uh 35:57 where do they find you? How do they follow up? Well, the best thing to do is just go to 36:03 our uh go to school sk.com and we have we have some courses up on 36:10 there. You can check us out there if you're interested. You can sign up and uh we can walk you through it. 36:16 Oh, that's perfect. Well, that link will be below in the show notes. And Russell, thank you so much for joining us. It's 36:22 been really fun running through this drill. And again, someone that with ADHD who actually like relates to a ton of 36:28 this uh really, really, really interesting episode for me. And I know there's different people with all sorts of, you know, they'll fall anywhere on 36:34 the uh spectrum of dyslexia, ADD, neurode divergence. uh really really 36:40 really valuable research. So check that out. The link is below. Um as always like and follow the podcast. This has 36:46 been a really fun and unique episode for us. So thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.
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