Dyslexic Kids Are Specialists, Not Generalists: Building Confidence Beyond the Classroom

Welcome back to the ACT OUT podcast! In this episode, host Adam Tomlin sits down with dyslexia coach Russell Van Brocklen for a fascinating conversation that challenges everything most people think they know about dyslexia, reading, intelligence, and learning. Russell shares his remarkable personal journey from having a first-grade reading and writing level in college to attending law school, conducting dyslexia research, and developing a system that has helped students dramatically improve their reading and writing skills.

Russell opens up about the discrimination and obstacles he faced throughout his education, including a pivotal experience during a prestigious New York State Assembly internship that ultimately changed the course of his life. Rather than accepting the limitations others placed on him, he became determined to understand dyslexia for himself and help other students avoid the same struggles. His journey eventually led him through law school, educational research, and the development of a unique approach to literacy that focuses on writing as the pathway to reading improvement.

Adam and Russell dive into the misconceptions surrounding dyslexia, the relationship between intelligence and reading ability, and why many highly capable students are often misunderstood in traditional educational settings. Russell explains how his methods have helped students make dramatic academic gains and why he believes many current approaches to dyslexia intervention overlook the underlying problem.

The conversation also explores the role of motivation, confidence, and technology in modern education. Russell shares how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have transformed the way he works, allowing him to overcome challenges that once required enormous amounts of time and effort. Together, Adam and Russell discuss learning differences, educational reform, and what parents can do when they feel their child is falling behind in school.

If you’ve ever wondered what dyslexia really is, how struggling readers can thrive, or why some of the smartest people struggle in traditional classrooms, this episode offers a powerful perspective on learning, resilience, and unlocking potential.

Get Russell's free guide and learn more about his approach to dyslexia intervention and literacy development: https://mailchi.mp/dcacd9a6f9ae/3-reasons-ebook

Tune in every Thursday for episodes that inspire, challenge, and entertain. Whether you’re here for laughs, lived wisdom, or action steps, the ACT OUT podcast is your space to rethink growth, embrace self-awareness, and act out your passions.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Act Out Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Tomlin. Today's guest is Dyslexia Coach, Russell Van Brock. Let's roll the tape. Hey, Russell, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on. Oh man, uh, absolutely. I've I've been looking forward to this uh for a while now. So I love learning new things. And I I know this is going to be a this is going to be one of those times where I get to learn a whole lot. Thank you so much for coming on, Russell. Well, thanks for having me. So I kind of wanted to know uh how did you uh how did you get started uh working with uh with dyslexia? Well, it this is the last thing I was supposed to do with my life. When my high school teachers found out I was doing this, they were absolutely completely shocked. So what happened? It was the late 90s. I wanted to know how laws were created, not some class. I wanted to know, so I did something really ridiculous. I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship program. People ask, well, what's ridiculous about that? Well, I showed up and I said, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing level, which means I couldn't do the internship because back then you had the elected official, the chief of staff, who was probably an intern a year or two before, and the intern, answering phones, writing things down, filing things. I could do none of it. So the director of the program kind of freaked out because they never had anything like this. They didn't expect, because they they take juniors and seniors in college, and they don't expect somebody to show up with a reading skill of a first grader. So they went up to the speaker's office, and the speaker says, You're not getting rid of this kid because he's dyslexic. Get a committee together and figure it out. So they did. So they came up with a pretty radical solution. They literally pulled me out of the legislative office building and moved me over to the Capitol. And this was a big deal because the social time with your peers is a huge part of the internship. So I go over to the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office. This runs the assembly day-to-day, and I go in and I immediately see why I was assigned there. They had three administrative assistants who were very kind with my writing, and they could help me clean that up so I can turn to things each week. So then for the academic portion, they had me do a multi-hour uh presentation QA session instead of the big paper, very standard accommodation. So they wrap everything up, they put on a recommendation of 15 credits for an grade of A minus, and then they send it back to our flagship uh university, the state University of New York Center at Buffalo's Political Science Department, and they looked at these massive accommodations, and they looked at the recommendation and they said, We're lowering your grade because they didn't agree with the accommodation. The state government came up with itself. So instead of 15 credits of A minus, I got 15 credits of F. Wow. That was 29 years ago. Yes. Well, it's still there. Only time in the history of the program. So I'd love to make history, but maybe not like that, you know? Yeah. So at that point, I said, I'm done with the discrimination. What can I do to force myself to learn to read and write so I can show other dyslexics? And remember what I gave up. I was working at the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office for nights and weekends, my choice with these people. I had access, I was offered to be a lobbyist. I was offered all these state positions because where I came from, the recommendations that I came from. They treated me like a grad student, not an undergrad. So I gave all that up to solve dyslexia. So when I asked my professors where to go in grad school, they said, well, if you like political science, it's easy. Law school. Will you read and write more than anyone? So I go, I kind of forced myself to learn to read a bit better. And my second day in law school, the professors called on me. And what they do is they use a Socratic method. And if you don't know the answer, which nobody does the first week, they will ask you questions that you don't know to publicly embarrass you until you can eventually adopt. Well, that didn't happen to me. I answered as the professor's equal, not as a student. Now remember, this professor was teaching for five years longer than I was alive at that point. And he's asked me questions, I'm responding, and he's trying different things, then I'm attacking him. He's like, what the heck? This is this first week of law school and the damn one else attacking me, then he's coming back. We're going back and forth, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. He finally threw up his arm, said, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on in the next case in the interest of time. My uh classmates who had passed the bar and practiced for decades said they still can't do that. So I ended up uh learning to read within a month, I ended up learning to write within a couple of years. Then I went back to um I went back to the New York State Senate, and I said, I want you to fund my dyslexia research program, which they don't do. But they were intrigued. So they sent me off to the New York State Education Department. Now, I'm coming from the majority leader's office of the Senate. That's my representative. So they have to take me seriously. But they're like, how do we get rid of this kid? And they said, Well, we're obviously going to want a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology to review this. Where's this out of? I said, Buffalo. They said, okay, you get one of them to say this is there's something here, or you're done. So I go out there, and there's two. One just happened to be the one that wrote the evaluation that started all this. And she said she would do it. The state paid for 20 hours of testing over three days with the smartest woman I ever met. And at the end, she wrote up a five-page report to New York State, and she said, his base reading and writing is that of a first grader. He turns his brain on. He's writing about the 70th percentile of under grad students. And then it goes back down again. And she explains what's going on. Well, this caught the education department's attention because they can't ignore a distinguished professor of psychology. They're best. So then they said, okay, you got to hook this up to current research. So I went to Professor James Collins, who wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers. And this is supposed to take years. I got it approved in less than two weeks. Now, if you notice that in grad school, I'm doing really well. That's something we'll come back to. So then I went and I applied for uh a business plan competition at my university, and I got second place for 15. And we tested out the process. The first student, just so you know, I focused on highly motivated, highly intelligent students from my old high school, Daber Park Central School District, right outside of Albany, New York, our state capital. And the first student was a high school junior named Michaela, but we can use her first name. She was, we gave, she was reading and writing at the eighth grade level as a junior. And so we gave her the test for going into grad school, the GR graduate records exam and local writing assessment. She scored in the zero percentile on the pretest. A couple of months later, she scored in the 50th percentile. Well, entering grad students. Then the next student scored horrendous on the pretest. He was even worse, writing-wise, his name was Adam. At the end, he scored in the 70th percentile of entering graduate students. So then the school's now interested. So Averell Park contacts the state center and says, Yeah, we want this. And they checked around and everybody's saying, Yeah, this is great. So they said, okay, here's funding for two years. So we went into a public school, Avre Park. We picked, you know, the same type of students, highly motivated, highly intelligent. I wanted to see what I could do with students like myself. And the kids went from just horrendous, usually the zero percentile in the GRE, because they all had middle school writing skills, one class here today for the school year, the increase to the 30th to 70th percentile of undering graduate students, cost New York State taxpayers less than $900. And I compared us to the best dyslectic college at the time, which was Landmark College. At the time, it was a two-year transfer college. We were 3x as successful as they were for less than 1% of the cost. And that's how I got started. So I guess can you take me inside the inside the brain of someone who has dyslexia? You were talking about like reading and writing. What what are kind of the the challenges? Like if I if I were dyslexic and I were trying to read something without without like uh studying with you, what what would be going on in my brain? Well, just so happens, here's the best book on dyslexia. This is overcoming dyslexia, second edition by Dr. Shelley Sewich from Yale. You want an image? That's dyslexia. So do you see how the back part of your brain has this massive neuroactivity? Yes. How much neuroactivity do you see back here? Not in, or barely any, if any at all? It's like it's it's like just about zero. Now, do you see how the front part of my brain's about two and a half times higher than yours? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. So what's going on is the back part of the brain is where essentially Kate through high school goes. A lot of college. The front part is basically grad school. So what's going on with the dyslectic is it goes to the back part of the brain and nothing works. And then everybody gets nice and frustrated. So do you personally know any dyslectic kid in elementary school that writes apparently a bunch of randomly placed misspelled words? Yes. Okay, who would that be? Well, he's older now, but my my cousin whenever uh whenever he was going through school. Okay. So let's to protect his identity, make up a name for your cousin. What's his made-up name? Jay. Okay. Now for Jay, what was his speciality when he was in elementary school? What was his extreme interest and ability? Oh my goodness. It's so crazy. He could build things very, very well. Like he could just, he could see something, see how and like he would be able to look at it, see how he see how it was put together, and he could either put it back or make it better than it was before. We were like, oh wow, yeah, no, that makes so much more sense. So he liked building things, okay? So what if I told you I could teach you right now how to going back to Jay being in elementary school, how to teach him how to write basic sentences better than the best specialist in your state. And we can do that in about 10 minutes. Really? Really? How so? Well, let's go back to the science. I have this weird idea. This is not working. Let's stop trying to teach these kids like normal kids because we got nothing there, but we got three and a half, we got two and a half times the neuroactivity here compared to this. Okay? So let me tell you what happened. When I went and I presented my findings in New York City, I went in there and I did it, I was cocky. I thought I saw dyslexia. I was wronged. So when I walked in, the professors told me, well, you had two of your kids in the last year go from L go from middle school to a 70th percentile in the GRE writing assessment. We don't care. We want the craft of research. It was like the craft of what? The craft of research. It's a book that came out in 1995 that teaches PhD students how to write their doctoral dissertations. It has since sold over a million copies. And I was like, so what is this? And it's basically three things context, get everybody on the same page, come up with a unique problem statement that really needs to be solved that you can actually do, and then a unique solution. And I said, There's no high school in the United States that teaches this. It's too evolved. And you want me to teach this to dyselectic high school kids? And they said, yes. And I said, okay. Then I went to the teachers and I presented my original program and they said, amazing. Does this work for normal kids? And I said, absolutely not. And they said, come back when it does. So I came back eight years later with those two in mind. So what we would do with your cousin Jay is we have to focus on the front part of the dyslexic brain. And according to Yale, that deals with two areas, word analysis followed by articulation. So I got this weird idea. Instead of working, let me just kind of give an analogy so people can understand. The sport that I suck at is basketball. What sport do you suck at? Basketball is a really bad one for me as well. Okay. So I want you to imagine if we were to get you the best basketball coach in the world, and you practiced like full time for six months, and we got you the best basketballs, and then we got you the best shoes, and then we're going to have you have a competition against a former college Division I player your age, and we're going to give them used Walmart equipment. We're going to give them sneakers that are almost falling apart, and we're going to give them basketballs that belong to the dumpster. Is it going to matter at all? Negligibly. Right, but you're still going to get creamed, right? Yes, absolutely. Because your body is not designed to do basketball. Just like the dyslexic brain is not designed to do generally how we learn in school. Okay, it's not that schools are mean to the neural deburse. It's just our brains are exactly opposite. Remember how I said I did really well in grad school? It's an unfair advantage. Now, let us take a look at how we're going to apply that to word analysis followed by articulation so we can actually get Jay, if when he was in elementary school, to actually write. So what we would do is now I'm going to show you how to teach him. You're going to pull out a laptop computer with a real keyboard, not an iPad, not an iPhone, and certainly not handwriting. A laptop computer with a real keyboard. And you're going to type out, plus sign, what are we talking about? And then I can hear, then you're going to have Jay copy it. And I can hear parents screaming now, but the kids aren't allowed to copy. Professor James Collins book is Strategies for Struggling Writers, Default Writing Strategy for Copying. It's okay. The research says it's okay. So he copies that until it's correct. Then we're going to swap out Hero for Jay's name. So it's going to be Jay plus sign, what are we talking about? Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things that Jay really likes, and then 10 things he really dislikes. And the first thing of what he really likes is building things. So we're going to swap out, we got J plus sign, what are we talking about? We're going to swap out what are we, what are we talking about for building things. We got J plus sign building things. See how we got there? Mm-hmm. Now I'm going to try to fool you with two of the simplest questions ever. If you follow them exactly, this will work. And they are exceedingly simple. If you follow them, this works. If not, you're going to get extraordinarily confused. And then you'll have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. Do you think I can fool you with two of the simplest questions ever? I am so interested. Everything inside me wants to say no, but I have a feeling I am about to get fooled. So we will see very soon. Okay. So we got Jay plus sign building things. We need to swap out the plus sign for a word. Here's my question very precisely. Does Jay like or dislike building things? He likes. Now replace that word for the plus sign. What's the four-word sentence? Jay likes building things. But that's not what I asked. You're ready to try again? Yes, I'm you're now you're now kind of confused. Are you ready to try this again? Yes, but only if I get it right this time. Remember, you have to answer exactly what I'm asking. Does Jay like or dislike building things? Likes. Go ahead and give me the four-word sentence. The four-word sentence. I thought it was Jay likes building things. But that's not what I asked. Do I have a thing? Who can even remember what you asked at this point? I asked Jay like or dislike, and you keep giving me the wrong answer. Do I have you nice and confused now? Absolutely. Yes, I am quite confused. Let's go back to the science. This is your brain. Do you see this massive activity? This is where you're processing it. Jay has nothing back here. So when I asked, does Jay like or dislike? You automatically added the S and made it a proper sentence. Jay's dyslexic. He doesn't know how to add the S. All right. Now, you may people think, well, it's just adding an S, but that's not working back here. There's nothing going on. So how do millionaires get over this? Let me give you an example: the Windworth School in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They have a 98% success rate. You send them a kid, they work with that kid for four to five years, and they send them back to where the school they came from as educated as the finest schools in the world. They're absolutely fantastic. For $75,000 a year for four to five years just in tuition. Okay? That does include living expenses in New York City, which is considerable. So unless you have a half a million bucks laying around, we have to figure out how to use this with modern science. So we since the back part of the brain doesn't work, we have to go to the front part. The front part has two and a half times the neuroactivity, according to Yale, that deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So what we just went over, how do we apply word analysis to it and drag it forward? Well, if we asked Jay, Jay would have, I would, he would have said like, because that's exactly what I asked. And then he would have put like in between, we Jay like building things. And I would ask, Jay, read what you wrote out loud. And he would say, Jay like building things. And then I would ask, Jay, does that sound generally correct? He's gonna say no. And I'm gonna say, fix it. And he would fix it. Jay likes building things. Okay. Do you see how that's a simple form of word analysis? Yes. Yeah, you're kind of you're you're you're basically putting yourself outside of it and able to look at it from another angle where you're instead of reading it, you're you're talking about just, hey, how would we be conversing? How does this sound? Is that is that right? Yes. We're asking him because assuming Jay speaks proper English, he knows that it doesn't sound right, and then he knows how to make it to sound right. Unfortunately, we were from the South, so proper English is a little bit relative, but uh yes, I I know what you're getting at. Yes. I am giving you a solution for most of the cases, not every case. So, and how would you adapt it? Then you'd have to take what I teach to a professional. They would have to learn, and then they can adapt it. But for most, but if it fits for most cases, this this is what how parents can teach you. So we got Jay likes building things. Now that's articulation. Okay, now we need to follow that by but I'm sorry, that's word analysis. Now we have to do articulation. So we're gonna go because reason one. Give me a simple reason of why Jay likes building things. He's good at it. Jay likes building things because he's good at it. Now, do you see how that he's good at it is a simple form of articulation. So now we've taken those two areas, we've taken things to the back of the brain where nothing's going on, to the front of the brain where we have two and a half times the neuroactivity. Now, we have a we probably have grammatical issues. So we tell Jay, read what you wrote out loud, doesn't sound generally correct, keep doing that until it sounds generally correct. We've now gotten rid of those horrific grammar mistakes. We got some little ones and some mediums left, and teachers know how to deal with that. But we still have a lot of misspelled words. It's not hard to fix. We tell Jay to drop a period, tell him every time he misspells a word, yeah, every time he misspells a word, he has to retype the entire sentence. He's gonna say, I'm not gonna make that mistake, and he keeps making it for three to thirteen times typically. Each time he makes the mistake, he concentrates harder and harder not to make it, and that's where the magic happens. Eventually he gets it right. And then we do the other nine likes and ten dislikes for reason one, then the twenty then the same thing for reason two. One and reason two, the same thing for reason one, reason two, and reason three. Every time they do a sentence, it has to be spelled correctly. At the end of that, they're writing three reasoned sentences with decent grammar and correct spelling. And the reading has also increased because if you can write it, you can read it. If you can write it, you can read it. Make sense? Yeah. But here's the problem. At this point, people ask, how effective can this be? And I tell them, I'm just about to have a book come out called If You Can Write, You Can Read. And for my part of it, it's about a student I used as an example was Reed. I met Kimberly, his mom on December 27th, 2024. She just spent 800 bucks to have her the state of Ohio test her five kids. Kimberly is a homeschooling mom with some college. And she brilliantly taught her other four children to read into the stratosphere extraordinarily well. Reed was different. He was in fifth grade at the time, reading at the percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. He was 10 years old. So I worked with Kimberly for the rest of the school year through late June. I worked with her for half an hour a week. She worked with Reed for an hour and a half a week for three 30-minute sessions on average. Most parents do 10 to 15 minute sessions. At the end of that time, he had an increase, which I'm not going to tell you about because over the summertime, his friends wanted him to come to public school with him, to be with them socially. So in the beginning of August, call it eight and a half months later, Reed was tested in a public school, mom's miles away, much better data. His, if he'd scored anywhere like he did in December, he would have been placed a special ed away from his friends on Happy Kid. Well, we had an increase. The reading went from the 11th percentile to the 64th. The writing went from the fourth percentile to the 65th. The grammar went to the 97th percentile. And this is an eight months? Call it eight and a half months, yes. With mom doing it, not four to five years. So I asked Kimberley how's he doing? He's in he's in normal classes, getting mainly A's and B's. Kimberly did what every parent dreams of. That's how powerful this is. But I only told you about the third part of the program. The first part that you have to deal when you're dealing with the intervention period, just until we get them to grade level, like read, is you have to focus on the kid's speciality. Now, you went to law school, right? Yes, I did. Okay. So I want you to, you're an expert on reading. I want you to. Oh, The Rise of the No, no, I haven't. Rise of Theatre is all 900 pages. That is probably why I haven't heard of it. Would you would it surprise you if this book was rated by reading teachers to be at the 10th grade to first year college level? Really? Okay. Well, yeah, look at this is for adults. This is the book on the subject. If you go into Barnes and Noble and you see all those big 6,000-page biographies, would it surprise you they're generally at the 10th grade to first year college level, depending on who you ask? That actually is kind of surprising. But it's it's not it's not necessarily the link. It's uh the content on the pages, right? Yeah, but that's generally where they're written. So the most motivated kid I ever worked with, her name is Casey. I have never seen this before, Casey. I will never see this again. This was a one-off edge case. I met Casey when she was at the end of fifth grade. She was 10 years old, she was turning 11 over the summertime. She was fanatically interested at Theater Roosevelt, but she was reading at the second grade level. So I gave her that massive book. And she insisted on doing reading first. So I said, okay, here's how you do it. On her own volition, nobody told her to do this. She went up to her room, shut the door for three hours a night for the next six months, most of the days during the summertime. And she went through that simple process. So at the end, you could flip to that page, any page, point to any word, and she would literally tell you the dictionary definition. Casey jumped. Yeah, well, here's really Unreal. She jumped eight grade levels in six months, and I worked with her for 15 minutes a week. Yeah. So I guess that goes that that's it goes to show you, though, that like as good of a teacher as you are, you can only do so much. A lot of it has to do with how motivated and willing your uh your students are. Yes. And why am I giving this edge case about Casey? Because she was the most motivated kid I've ever seen. So when we finished that up, um, her mom said, What about something she doesn't like? Does this transfer over? So I assigned her this little book. It's my most popular ever, Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination. All thousand pages of this monster. This is at a higher level. This is for 17 millions. Why that? Why is that so popular? Because the Disney fanatics. Have you ever been to Disney World? I haven't. I do know it's like a whole culture and thing, but no, I haven't. Well, if you walk in to Main Street USA, people feel the Disney magic. That's Marceline, Missouri, where Walt was between H5 and H10. He spent the rest of his life trying to recapture those memories, those moments. So there are two universal themes that make up the Disney magic. One anybody can find in five minutes. The second one I've never had a parent find, including lawyers. Casey found it took three months. Most of the time, it takes my kids one to three years to find that sucker. Yes, they're on that book for up to but imagine you have a kid who's not reading and then they're reading this. Right. Okay, really deeply. I solved it in remember, the private schools are four to five years full-time. This is part-time. So when I asked Casey, why am I spending so much time on this? Because when I asked Casey when she took a book that she didn't like from one that you loved, how much did her motivation drop? And she said, about 50%. Think about that. Most kids, it's 75 to 90%. You step out their specialty, which is almost everything in school, then you're you're like, they just don't want to do it. So during the intervention period, if you're not in their specialty, they're not going to do any work. So next is if you ask anybody with dyslexia or ADD or ADHD, let me ask you this. What's your specialty? Well, I I have ADHD. Okay. Oh, oh, you do? Okay, so this is okay. So okay, let's use that. So you have ADHD. What's your specialty? Um it depends on the day. Actually, I can um I can like retain information really well and uh can like am really good at uh like breaking down complex topics in like simple ways. Those are kind of my two things. Yeah, so let me tell you what happened in law school. Remember those questions you were given that you're supposed to think for three to five minutes? How long did it really take you to answer those questions? It would just like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's what happened with me in property. I would do that, everybody else is saying, I'm finishing in 20 minutes. Yeah. So I'm I'm gonna ask you, uh, so just tell me in general what you're really good at, what you really enjoy, just one thing. It doesn't matter what it is. Uh I like writing appellate briefs. Okay, you like writing a pellet briefs. So I'm gonna ask you two questions, and I'm going to assume the answer is gonna be yes and no. Are you ready? Okay. So when you're writing appellate briefs, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed with little to no organization? Sound familiar? Yes. That's that is the Adam Tomlin story. I'm pretty sure that's gonna be the title of my autobiography. Okay. Now I'm gonna ask you the next question, which is probably no. Fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard. You want to write something on the impellate brief. It's in your head, you take your fingers, put it on the keyboard. Does the idea then fly out of your head, leaving you with an empty brain? Is that you or it's not you? No, that's not me. Okay. So do you see how you answered yes to the first question and no to the second? Mm-hmm. Do you see how I told you ahead of time that's what you're going to do? Yeah, so I was about to say you prime me. And so I like as I was thinking about it, like I was trying to make that second answer no, a little bit more so than I than I other otherwise would have. Well, here's the reason. If you answered yes to both questions, you would be dyslectic. Okay. So the difference between ADHD and dyslexia is that question. Now, with ADHD, yes, you have. So what you have is the ability that I had when I was going through law school. Just so everybody knows, in law school, they try to trick you so much that it takes three to five minutes to really think through how they're trying to trick you to answer it. That's what they told me. I would answer them instantly, you answer them instantly. Okay. But the only difference between us is you can write well. And once you organize your thinking, and for me, writing has always been a huge issue, but that's that's how that they're very similar. So uh so when we're let's look at how we address this. So the front part of your brain is like a dyslectic, massively overactive, little to no organization. Here's how we fix that. We have to force the dyslexic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Okay, so how we do that, let me give you an example. I'm gonna give you a task. Imagine that you're given this task for your job, and you're gonna you would find this hard. Answering this question, what effect did Martin Luther King's famous I have a dream speech have on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s? Would you find going and trying to figure out how to answer that to be quite challenging? Yeah, uh yes. I mean, just thinking about it, like my brain's already going like there was going on, it's going over the place. Yeah. So I want everybody to understand this. You went to law school, you passed the bar exam. Okay. Just so everybody knows in New York State, a third of time a third of every time they give a bar exam on, a third of the students flunk it. Yeah. All right. So any high school AP kid in English or college bound would know exactly how to write that paper. They would just go and do it. So let me ask you a really stupid question. If we put you back into high school and we had you compete with a couple of Alev Victorians, who's gonna win? Wait, what's the competition? I'm not sure. You're retaking some high school classes. Yeah. Remember you went to law school, you cast the bard. Do you really think they can compete with you? No. No. Okay. So as this example, they know what to do easily. We have a hard time with it. The way because our brains are so scattered. So here's how we have to switch that. We have to start at a very specific point and then slowly go out. So we would ask, what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? And then we can find that answer. You know exactly what to do with it. Once we have that answer, another question will present itself. We answer that, another question will present itself, we answer that. That forces the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Make sense? That actually makes a lot of sense. And uh it is something that never never put that into words until you said it, but you are literally describing every single time I was having to write an appellate brief, or my brain would be going all over the place. And ultimately what would get what would get me started would just be one question, be able to answer that, and then that would lead to the other and the next, and then so on. So, yes, you were literally describing my life experience. Yes. So here is the simple model. We start off with what the in the kid's speciality for the intervention period. Then we have, then we go ahead and we do specific to the general, and then word analysis followed by articulation. All right. Now, what I just described is great if you're in like elementary school. But what happens when we get into middle and high school? So I'm gonna tell you now how to use an advanced version of this, and I think I'm probably gonna tell you a writing process that you have never heard of before that could actually help you improve your writing. Okay. Okay. So the way I start off with this, because now we have to move on to advanced paragraphs. What I want you to think about is a movie. And people think this is out of left field. I said, Welcome to dyslexia. This is going to appear to be out of left field for the next two minutes, and then it's going to come in like, yeah, that makes sense. All right. So I want you to think about this. Tell me about a movie that everybody has seen, that you think is one of the best of all times, that you know intimately. What's that movie? I am going to have to say I will I was going to say kickboxer, but then you threw in that, but everybody's seen it thing. So I will say uh home alone. That's a classical. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm going to remember, you have a master's, you have a Ph, you have a doctoral degree in law. You passed the bar exam. I'm going to ask you a question, and let's see how long this takes. I want it is the best answer you can give me. I need you to reduce the universal theme of home alone to one word. Resilience. Resilience. You see how you that was very fast compared to most people. Do you see how that still took you a couple of seconds? Oh, yeah. Because now we're in the front part of the brain. We're now playing in our sandbox, and there is no freaking way you got through law school without learning to how to organize your thinking and do writing. Not with all these appellabries. All right? So, resilience. Now, let's say we're going to do a movie review on resilience. You would go ahead and pick out the primary actors you're interested in, say, how do they deal with the universal theme of resilience? How did the director do? How do the screenwriter do? Okay? And then you'd write your review. The problem is the universal theme of resilience is such a broad brush. Okay. We want a laser focus, we can't do it broadly. Now, let's say we wanted to write something unique on home alone. There are journals where you could do something, or you want to do a graduate paper on it. Here's how you do that. First thing we're now going to do an advanced form of word analysis. And now I'm I'm sorry I'm going to have to traumatize your audience. We're going to have to go back to high school English and Shakespeare. Okay? I'm just telling you to be brief. Reason why I'm using Shakespeare is for the English language use the epidity, the highest level of communication. So we're looking at this. When you looked at a standard Shakespearean play, we have a hero. The hero would want to do something based on one or more universal themes. Then there'd be an ultimate villain, a person, a concept, or some combination there too, trying to stop the hero from accomplishing their goal. They would start having a conflict in act one. It would build into act two and resolve in act three. Sound familiar? Mm-hmm. Okay, let's simplify that. We have a hero. When we're looking at home alone, we name what the hero wants to do. I would use for the kids, I would have them go ahead and write out as many paragraphs as they can. Yes, write out. Many paragraphs as they can. Then you're going to take each sentence, you're going to find the most important word. And then you're going to list all the most important words. And now I'm going to tell you something that is going to shock your audience. I am going to require those kids to go to Marion Webster's online dictionary or Oxford English or whatever one you like, find the exact definition that they like the best, and I'm going to have them type out the word and the definition. Not copy and paste, type out. And I hear the parents now, but my kid won't do it. And you're exactly right. If you're outside their speciality, inside their specialty, I'm going to have this conversation with them. I'm going to say, let's look at the science. I first of all asked, do you want me to treat you like a little kid or an adult or a grown-up? It's going to be one of the two. They always want, they always say adult. So then I point out and I said, let's look at the science again. This is your brain, it's two and a half times overactive. There's no organization. Yale says this is word analysis followed by articulation. Okay. My thing is, how can you use word analysis without knowing exactly what that word means? You can't. So I tell them this is a we are going to go, no go. If you say no go, then I can't help you. So if you say go, you're going to do the work willingly. If they say no, then their parents step in and we apply, they apply the motivation. How do we do that? I'm evil because remember those lists of dislikes? That includes things that they really don't like, like the chore they hate the most. So in Reed's position, what he really didn't like was cleaning the rabbit cages. So the parents say, you're going to do this. Or in Reed's case, you're going to go and clean the rabbit cages. What he hates. And I told Reed, please don't do your homework because then your mom's going to make you do clean the rabbit cages. And then she's going to videotape it, and I'm going to be laughing like crazy, seeing your face. He started doing his work. The worst one I ever did. He was the firstborn. He hated his younger sister telling him what to do. And he was an immaculately clean room. Like, I mean, like OCD clean. Parents went up, told their little daughter to mess up his room, and then to tell him how to clean it. And then to do it again. And they videotaped it. And it was hilarious. All right. Ten years later, he's like, that's not funny. And we all like, that's one of the funniest things we've ever seen. So that's how we get them to do this if we have to. So they type out the word, they type out the definition. Now at some point, they would have typed out the word and definition so many times that they know it permanently. So I'll have kids do this at 11 and 12 when they're taking their SATs. Five years later, they remember 70 to 80% of the definitions. Okay. And they don't need to remember all these advanced words. Because they've already done it. So they do that. Then they pick out their best, the best one. That's their base universal thing. But it's still broad, like we ran into with your home alone example. So now what we do is we go to the thesaurus, we put in the word, and we look at synonyms. You can choose five synonyms, ten synonyms, the entire level, multiple levels, whatever the instructor and student agree to. What you're looking for is a word that best represents what's in the student's head. Okay? Now remember, each time, yes, they're typing out the word and the definition. Now, Casey, after months of doing this, I would tell her to thesauratize the word. She would literally go down multiple levels, look at 200, 300 words in less than 10 minutes. She knew every word, every definition. Say, this is the one, this is why, and this is because the and she could discuss it at like the grad level, which she was 11. Okay. So just to give you an example of how where that eventually goes. So you pick out the one that best matches what's what's in the students' heads. Never perfect, but it's much closer. Now we can laser focus and then come up with the ultimate villain. I I start off with people and then I eventually get on to concepts after you practice this. So then you have a hero, your universal fame, and your villain. We put a few plus signs between a mask, does it sound correct? If not, fix it until it does. Now that is an advanced form of word analysis. Does that make sense so far? Yeah. Now we're going to move on to articulation. Then we go because reason one, reason two, and reason three, the best reasons you can get me. If we're using the script of home alone, what I would then say is go to reason one and take that reason and turn it into a simple universal theme. We're going to use that simple universal theme to find a sentence that deals directly with that at the beginning of the script and one at the end. Then we're going to take those two things, those two quotes and put them together. That's our data. From that data, those two sentences, we're going to form our topic sentence. Now, this is what I think could help you even with your current writing. Have you ever noticed that when you have your topic sentence and you have your data that they never really flow really well? Yes. Yes. Okay. So here's so here's my question Have you ever thought of applying a warrant to a A body paragraph. A warrant to a body paragraph? A warrant to a body paragraph. I love your questions. They're so intriguing. What do you mean? Okay. Now, a warrant does not mean you should be you're going to be arrested, but for advanced writers, if you're not using this, you may well be. So what what a warrant is? This is directly from remember that book, The Craft of Research, that sold over a million copies. This is one of the formal things in there. And outside of PhD candidates, almost nobody knows what this is. A warrant connects topic sentence with a with the data by answering a how and why question. Okay. Okay. So next time you have your data, which in your case are a bunch of cases, and you have your topic sentence, just ask yourself what's a how and why and use that as a sentence or two to connect those two. Can you give an example? Much better. Well, the best thing I would say is let's well, we're looking at home alone. Okay. Now, what was the universal thing that you originally came up with? Resilience. Okay. So we would need to find two quotes from uh we would try to find something better, but in this case, just an example, we tried to find two quotes of resilience. So give me in the scenes, give me two scenes that had to deal with resilience. So I would say the first one is uh when Kevin uh realizes that uh you know he's he's all by himself and um he's like, I'm not afraid anymore, goes outside and immediately sees the South Bench Shovel Slayer, jets back up into his room and is hiding. And then he's but he's still got another week before you know mom and dad come home. And what's the what's the scene of resilience near the end of the movie? Whenever whenever he first wakes up on Christmas morning and he had the uh had the wish for his you know to like have just have his family back for Christmas, he wakes up and he looks down. Mom and dad aren't there. Okay. Now give me a topic sentence that deals with um Kevin McAllister shows resilience in the way that he is able to um continue um like living while uh his parents are still uh gone, and also was able to uh overcome the adversity of not having his parents immediately or see his parents immediately on Christmas. Okay. Now answer well, the first one was cut it off at at that first part. Now answer a how and why question. Answer how, answer why, and put it into a sentence or two. Okay. How did he show he showed resilience by I mean I well they've shown resilience? That's uh I don't like the way these uh sentences are like put together. So I'd I'll change up some of these words. But he showed resilience by by still performing like uh basic uh household responsibilities towards make sure that that the house was uh upkept and that it was kept safe from burglars. And why did he do that? Because he was the man of the house, couldn't be afraid anymore. Okay. Now you put those together and you have the quotes. There you go. All right. Man, that that was an A plus for me. I I don't know about you. Right. So so but yeah, but that's that's but that's a that's a draft. I mean almost cleaned up a draft, but Yeah. So that's how we would we would get that's how um we would get started. Now, just so you know how powerful this is. Had a uh one of my clients was in seventh grade, and he had an older brother who was a high school senior. This happens a lot. Kid was AP everything, trying to be validtorian. I had him write out a paragraph, which was beautifully written. And then I sh had there's more to this process than I told you it's in our courses, but this is the basics. I had my client write out a paragraph following this with a few extra things that we have from the Craft of Research. Then I had a professor review them. He said, Oh, that student used a warrant. That's technically more evolved. That must be at the college level. Drove his brother crazy. He's like, What do you mean my younger kid brother's doing technically more advanced than me? And he's going nuts. And I point, I talked to his right when that was happening, I told his younger brother, my client, isn't that beautiful? Do you think you've arrived? And that gave him a confidence boost like you can't believe. And parents would ask, is that as far as you go? I said, not even close. What I just told you was an inversion of context, the real values and the problem statements and something original. So one of the clients I'm working with, uh, his name is Grayson. Grayson is not dyslectic in the least. He's in the 99th percentile in math and science. So let's call him like the ultimate STEM kid. All right. Grayson wants to get his PhD and work at NASA to terraform Mars. All right. So he has to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, and I found one that's perfect for him. And they will even take submissions from junior researchers, which they generally consider PhD candidates. Okay. So Grayson now is his dad is teaching him how to do those advanced paragraphs in more evolved format, and then we're gonna go into the problem statement and solution. How old do you think Grayson is? I was gonna say like 13, 14. He's 10. He's already studied. I already found this is a very small community. Very small. And there are three primary journal articles. And the last one I gave him, I gave them to it at the 10th grade reading level, first year college level for comprehension. He said, Well, this is kind of easy to read. So now I up the next one to 11th grade reading and second-year college level for content, and we'll see how he does with that. So when he's done with the paragraph parts, we're going to then show him how to do context. I'm sorry, the the uh the unique questions, problem statement, and then a unique solution. We already know what needs to get done. You'll probably be about 13, 14 when he's done with this, and then we're gonna uh we'll submit it for a publication, and it will be rejected, and that's to be expected. And then we're gonna take that list of why it was rejected, and we're gonna introduce it to a senior professor and have him say, I have him tell the professor, I want to publish my article. This is what I need to do to do that. I'd like to work with you on it, and watch the professor's jaw drop because you'll be about a decade ahead of everybody else. If it takes five years, ten years, who cares, once it's published, and he does it a few more times in a grad school, you'll be an excellent candidate for NASA. Oh man, that's so amazing. You know, as you were saying, uh as you were kind of uh like talking about uh Grayson's story, kind of it reminded me of uh like something whenever I was whenever I was growing up, you know, you and I talked that there were certain things that came to me so quickly that it was just you know, it was just like that. It's instantaneous. But the problem was I assumed that everything had to come like that for me. And if if it didn't, if I didn't immediately get it right, then it was a sign of my stupidity and me being like less than. So I was a lot, I was very hesitant to try new things and to to make mistakes because I saw that as like proof that I wasn't actually good enough. Is that something that you see kind of like in the beginning with uh with the kids that you work with? Yes. So and remember when I said we step outside our speciality, it's not fair. But remember, I want you to think back to law school. Your first day, they would the first time you were called on. Do you remember how you could respond intelligently? Not perfectly, but you could and a lot of your classmates are going, duh, they just got ran over? Yeah. Sound familiar? Okay. So what always just remember my story. When I had to go to law school, I dominated at the first class. As I said, the professor had to give up after 15 minutes. When I had to get it through Professor Collins, which everybody told me was going to take years, he was a real hard ass. I got it done in less than two weeks. All right. It is profoundly unfair for us when we're looking at things in grad school and in professional one. Like, let me give you an example. You're writing uh appellate briefs. What's your win rate on that? Um, I mean, actually pretty high, I'd say. Um, I haven't done like a win-loss thing in a while, but I've I've I've written a lot more uh appeals that were uh ruled favorably than not. Right. So do you see how this ability you have is a drastically unfair advantage? I mean, I I don't like to say it, but I'll let you say it all day. Yeah, okay. It's an unfair advantage. Now, you had to trade hell in elementary school through college, but then you walked into grad school and you owned the place day one. All right? I can tell you now, because let me let's look at what everybody else let me ask you, this sounds familiar when it comes to law school. You had these people who came in, they're Vale Victorians or close to it in high school, nail college, they had these super high GPAs, they walked into law school and the professor just flattens them. And they keep flattening them year in, year out. Sound familiar? Yes. These are people who think if they got a B on a paper, it's the end of the world. Okay? So, yeah, that is how our brains are different. And remember, you you're you're like a dyslexic. You have up several times of neuroactivity up here. It is freaking unfair. Now, for me, what I tell the kids is I use artificial intelligence now instead of administrative. I have two assistants, but I use AI a lot. When ChatGPT came out with its $200 a month pro plan in December of 24, I bought it that day. I've now moved, I moved over to Anthropic Sopus 4.6 in December. Then it was 4.5. All right. And I haven't looked back. I use I use them a combination. I'm on the $20 Chat GPT plan. I use extended thinking, and I use that for the thinking part, and I use co-work. I I literally haven't do all my work for me now. I have actually moved up into figuring that out. I haven't drafted out everything. Then I wick it over, make a few changes, and I send it off to senior humans who make the final edits. But just to get there, I and the agents are doing all that now. Yeah. Okay. But people think, well, you know, you're losing your ability to write. I'm like, please, I never had an ability. My natural writing ability is that of a six-year-old. I can force it up for a while, but it's just a much more effective time. Like, just so people know what I did this morning, I had my first podcast at 7.30. I have since applied, I have since gone through and reviewed two complete documents that would normally take a person, you know, a couple of days to do, and I finished going through those two and sent them back off. And then I'm on this one, I'm I'm talking to you now. All right. And this will be all done before 11 30 in the morning. Yeah, I was about to say this uh it's not even 11 a.m. yet, and you've done more than I do in like three weeks, man. Yeah, and I do that all the I have finally moved off to um I and how I did that with the AI is I went and there was um somebody sent me this podcast. The top 12 things that top 1% do. So I went to ChatGPT, extended thinking, 5.4, and I said, get rid of the fluff. And it did that. And I said, I want to make this. So it asked me 196 questions over 16 parts. So then I went and only Opus 4.6 could do this. I then went and I gave it the first set of questions. I said, I need you to answer these in sets of 10. It can remember across all our conversations. So then it answered those questions in sets of 10. I put it back in the chat GPT and I said, Do you want to change any based on this? Do you want to change anything for the next batch? And it would always say yes. So now I have almost 400 questions and the answers are 120,000 words. I then had it create the process, and then I edit, I test it out and it refixed it a few times. And now it takes all the problems that I used to have and the best things for how I write, and it's all in a 5,000-word document. So now when I have to do something, I'll put it in Chat GPT, 4.5 extent, uh, 4.6, I'm sorry, 5.4 extended thinking, and I will tell it, here's this, here's what I want to do, what do you think? I'll make sure we we agree, I'll tell it, then tell me exactly what we need to do in an exhaustive narrative to the smallest detail. Then I'll tell it how to research clawed co-work powered by Opus 4.6, and I'll say, write out a detail prompt to do this. I'll run it through, I'll have co-worker do it, then I'll take the results, stick it back into Chat GPT. How do we do? Go back and forth until it's done. I finish polishing it off in OPUS. I have a few modes there for editing things, and then I send it off. And that would all that I'm doing like three at a time. Yeah. And that would normally take each document would take a couple of days, and I'm knocking this out in a couple of hours. It's unfair. It's it's it's it's it's so cool. Well, I mean, I I just gave you the basic framework of how, you know, this that's basically how I did it. And to create that document, tested, I took a lot of time. I took a day and a half. And people say, Well, you're still spending a couple hours on a document. I said, Yes. It's going through eight, nine levels of editing before I send it off. And then a senior human always reviews it before it goes out. But they're finding not a lot to change. Like if I have a question, I just had one of my uh for online course we're putting up for parents. Most have an instructor's like $500,000 a month. Most parents can't afford that. We're reducing that to $147 a month, and Angela's going to be our teacher. She's a certified elementary school teacher with a two-year master's degree in Texas with 10 years of experience. When her daughter was born, she became a homeschooling mom and she taught her son, August, through this whole process. So she just asked me a question, actually, four of them. I sent it off, I asked ChatGPT what it thought, then I had it design a study. I set it off to have a deep research study on it. We went back and forth. I disagreed with some things, we did another study, and then I told it to write out the answer, and then I had it rewritten by Opus, and then I sent it back to her. These things would normally take days to do. And I'm doing all of this in a couple of hours. So uh so uh this is a situation where AI has been like very helpful for you, it seems like. Oh, extraordinary. So just so everybody knows, we met on PodMatch. Last month I was the number one guest on PodMatch for the third time. This is uh, I think my 200th and podcast since May. I am way past. Yes. Yeah, but I am way past anything associated with my community on PodMatch. Yet I keep going, I have 81 more podcasts scheduled. Okay. If I wasn't dyslectic, I couldn't have figured out how to do this. Yeah. And every podcast I have to listen to it and I have to come back with two questions. Because I'll give you a hint. Otherwise, you're not gonna care. All right. So when I when I sent uh sent you a pitch, did that match your show? Uh yes, it did. Okay. So what I do is I I I gain so much weight doing this. I'm out, I swim an hour and a half a day. So I listen to a podcast while I'm swimming. Where do I get the podcast from? That's what employees are for. Okay. My assistant sends me those, and then I'll say, here's I like this, I like it, here's what I want to say, here's my two ideas, and I send it off and she breaks it up and sends it out. And I and that's and my pitch, my my success rate is very high because of that. And that allows me, that's why I've done so many podcasts. What effect has that had? I asked uh ChatGPT what my rank is, and I moved up from in the thousands to 142. If my book comes out, we get that out. Yeah. Doing a couple hundred podcasts helps out a lot. When is your book supposed to be coming out? Uh supposed to be coming out in the next two weeks. Oh, okay. Famous last words, we're going through our final edit. I I have finally put my I have a co-author, Evelyn White Bade. She's great. She was uh one of the teachers on the dyslexia task force for New York State. And her kid in the book uh that she mentioned didn't go up a couple of grade levels. He went up 6.6 grade levels. Oh my goodness. Wow. Well, she's a master teacher. If she was a lawyer, she would be on the uh fed she would be a federal uh judge on a one of the reviews, you know, like on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals or something like that. She is brilliant. But as I said, we just gotta get the darn thing out. It's been edited like you can't believe it. It's time. Oh, and where could uh where can folks uh buy it uh whenever? I think by the time this comes out. Okay, it'll be on Kindle. Oh, right. It'll be yeah, and it's called If You Can Write, You Can Read. And it literally tells Kimberly's story and it tells Evelyn's story. And if uh folks want to find out uh any more about you, where else can they go? Best thing to do is to go to dyslexiaclasses.com. Uh that's within S DyslexiaClasses.com. You can hit the there's a button there that says download free guide, answer a few three questions, and then set up a time to speak with me for half an hour. I walked your kids through the couple of questions that I asked you, and they're like, Well, you know me. I was like, yes. And I we help you get started. Yeah, Ed, this has been so interesting, Russell. I really appreciate it, man. Thank you for acting out with me. Thanks for having me.