Heroes in Business - Howard Berg, Guinness Book World’s Fastest Reader, Berg Learning

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

"When you have a purpose your brain will focus on the outcome and filter the superfluous data." Howard Berg, Guinness Book World’s Fastest Reader, and Founder of Berg Learning is interviewed by David Cogan founder of Eliances and famous celebrity host of the Eliances Heroes Show broadcast on am and fm network channels, online syndication and on over 100 TV channels.  

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Alliances Heroes. Alliances is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups. Where our heroes in business align. Now, here's your host flying in,id kogan founder of alliances all right well we're back and again i'm so excited i can't believe who's sitting next to me i mean you're just going to be blown away he has got a superpower no you literally have a superpower you You do. You do. In fact, what you hold in your superpower is you are above all others in this super sense. In fact, you are the world's, the world's fastest reader. I mean, we're talking about like you're in the Guinness Book of World Records, that is a huge feat, less alone

being in the Guinness Book of World Records for reading. I mean, this is a special skill. And not only that, being able to comprehend and recall what you're reading. It's not like you're in for something else like, you know, creating the biggest puzzle. Yeah, that's a cool, that's great. But this really is a superpower. And I have with us Howard Berg and you can reach him at berglearning.com, berglearning.com. So welcome to the Alliances Show.

Thank you for having me. I get to be next to a super guy. Oh, well I appreciate that. This is going to be incredible. So at what point did you actually know though that you were them, had this type of skill? How old were you? I'm going to say seven or eight. I lived in the projects in Brooklyn. It was a horrible place to grow up. Lots of gangs. I mean, West Side Story, you got the dancing and music. I met Bernardo. He had a knife. He put it to my throat, literally.

Wasn't smiling. And I found the safest place in my neighborhood was the library. A gang kid would rather be dead than caught with a book in the library. So my mom would say, go out and play. I'd look at it. Yeah, you mind? You know where I live? I read like 10, 15 books a week. And they were good books. I read books on biology and studied mythology when I was seven. I did some of the para-religion then. I was reading the theory of relativity when I was eight. So by the time I was 11, I had college reading.

You know, they test you. I went to 12.9 plus, which is as high as they could measure. I went to college at 17 and I majored in biology and I got interested in how the brain works in my second term of my junior year. I said to the dean, I want to do Psych and biology. He said, well, you have one year left. You've had zero courses in psychology. How are you going to do it?

Dr. Is that possible? Dr. How could you do a four-year psych program in one year? I finished the bio program at the same time. They said, well, I want to do it. He said, you're not smart enough. That's when I realized they never taught us how to learn. They tell you why and what to learn, but not how it's done. So I ended up doing the four-year program in one year.

Oh, my gosh, a four-year program in one year. And I took- Oh my gosh, a four-year program in one year? It took eight science courses at the same, six science courses at the same time, two four-hour labs. Lab reports then were on silos. So it took 16 hours to do one lab report. So it's 40 hours of lab, 18 credits of science. I also finished bi- I didn't do physics, so they didn't give me the degree in biopsy. I missed

one physics class, but I got an 800 on the bio GRE, which was, I think it was an 800, it was three questions wrong. It was in the 99th percentile. I read biochem, genetics, plant systematics, and one night I read like 48 books three nights and I got three questions wrong so I was like was it me right right was what I'm doing better right so I started a school took kids they were 11 to 15 years old so they were young you gave them a 30 chapter book of lifelong developmental psych which was like this big they read it in a week using my system. They took the CLAP, which is the AP test, 15 out of 18 passed the course of the week. It was okay, it isn't me, it's the system.

And that's what I've been doing ever since. But how did you go about even designing the system? Like to know that you have this and yet you're willing to share with others. In other words, somebody who's watching this right now would just think you got lucky you got something additional in a recall in your brain that nobody else has but are you telling me that this is something that we all can attain and and achieve and get that

type of superpower it's two questions you know it's in there both the first question is i wanted to be an ethologist which is the biology of behavior. And what we would do in ethology is you would observe organisms in their environment and make a mental picture of what they're going, and watching for patterns. So what I did is, I saw I was reading faster than anyone else,

so I turned one of my conscious parts of my brain inward, and I observed myself reading. And I looked at what i was doing cognitively it's called metacognition the process of processing when you learn and so i was looking at what was my mind actually doing each step of the way and i wrote down what i was observing and then just in case i missed something i took a graduate course and had to teach reading, and I picked up some additional concepts that I didn't have that were outside of my sphere of experience. And when I combined what I learned in graduate school with what I experienced personally, I was able to develop the system. And then we did a double-blind study.

I did a commercial in the early 90s. It made $65 million. I didn't get $65 million. That would have been better. But it was the top grossing self-help program at the time. And we had to do an efficacy study. So we used the Nelson-Denny, which is a standardized test for speed and comprehension. We took 100 people. And I wasn't involved. I wasn't even allowed in the city. They used the program. They didn't want me to infect the outcome. They liked you, so they said, okay.

So I was in Dallas. This was done in Chicago. So 50 people took the A and B test, and to make sure the B test didn't make them look smart, 50 people did the B and A test. And then you do what's called an analysis of variance to see if there was a difference between A and B. And everyone doubled or quadrupled regardless if they did A and B or B and A.

So we could confidently say the average person will double. People went two to four times faster with no loss of comprehension. But the typical person doubled. That was in four hours without practice or reinforcement. How come when I'm reading, you know, some books that I'm reading and that, my mind starts to wander when I'm reading the book. I start thinking about what I have to do afterwards, emails, all the other things. Why does that take place?

And do you actually teach others to be able to fix that? Yes. Okay. The reason it takes place, we're not taught focus. Why does that take place? And do you actually teach others to be able to fix that? Yes. The reason it takes place, we're not taught focus. And one of the reasons I read fast is when you read, you're hearing the page. It's like someone's talking aloud one word at a time. When you're in a car driving at 70 miles an hour

on the highway, you're processing front, back, left, and right, and you're bored. You turn on the radio, you talk to your friends, you watch your gauges, you watch your GPS, you're still bored. Why can you read the road in four directions at 70 miles an hour with no effort, and you can't remember more than 10% after reading 200 words a minute in one direction? Remember more than 10% after reading 200 words a minute in one direction. The difference is when you're practicing a book, you're hearing in a car, it's visual. You're making a mental picture of your surroundings and the brain, the main sense is vision.

The largest area of the brain is the occipital lobe. When I'm reading, I'm seeing a movie. So I'm converting the page into images, and then I'll play the movie back, and I see the movie, and I'm transcribing the images back into the words. That's one thing. I'm doing four or five things. So reading doesn't work. Reading isn't learning. Most people think it is, which is why they end up dropping out of school and it didn't work.

They think it's how many pages they read, how many hours they read them. If you ask a student, did you study? Yeah, I read five hours. Or I read 400 pages, and then I failed anyway. That's not the right answer. The right answer is what did you learn? Did you understand it? Can you use it when you need it?

I'll give you an example. I took a graduate course in educational psychology. I was teaching, building my company on the side. I needed an income while I was building my company, which is very common in an entrepreneurial world. Well, I needed four graduate credits. I've been going to school two nights a week in Manhattan. It's $60, $70 a park.

And doing finals and midterms. And I didn't have time for any of that. So I opted for an AP test. And back then, you used a day timer. So you didn't really know what was coming five weeks ahead to the week before. And I look at it and it's like, next week's the test. I haven't bought the book yet i better get that book i need these credits or i'll lose my license as a teacher

i need the income so i bought the book was 400 pages but i already scheduled the whole week so i had seven hours open so i studied for seven hours i read the book four times and the test was i thought it was an hour, but it was six hours. I finished it 50 minutes, and I got a B+. You say, well, why didn't you get an A? I needed a C- for the credits. You always have to know your goal. My goal was not to learn educational psychology.

What was my goal? To pass. To pass with four credits. Right. So a B+, when you need a C-, I achieved my goal. And this is an important point for our audience. Always have a purpose. What's your win? You don't need to know everything. You have to know everything you need to know. So when you have a purpose, your brain will focus on that outcome and filter the superfluous data. Now the second question you asked me was

really focused and I'll show you a little secret. When I got out of college I was interested in consciousness. I became a yogi. I spent my weekends in an ashram and I learned all seven schools of yoga. There's not one. Hatha is one. There's not one. Hathor is one. There's Kundalini. There's Leia. There's Kriya. There's Bhakti. There's Raja. There's Tantric. Lots of different chakras. Sure, sure. So I meditated, and I also took transcendental meditation.

So any show I've done, I've meditated usually about 90 minutes. When I was on Cavuto, I think you saw that. Yeah, yeah. Cavuto, Vancouver. Again, and we're here, too think you saw that. Yeah, yeah. Cavuto, Vancouver. Again, we're here, too, with Howard Berg. You can reach him at berglearning.com. He's recognized as the world's fastest reader, Guinness Book of World Records fastest reader. And you're listening and watching to me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show.

Make sure you go to alliances.com, E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com. So focus. It's very, very important. I'm reading a page and a half a second, and it's 1,500 pages. You miss three seconds, it's like six pages. That's a lot of pages. So I meditated for 90 minutes, and when I had the earpiece in, he was interviewing Pelosi, Cantor,

and they were much more interesting than the bill. But if I listened to that, I wouldn't have been able to answer questions about the bill, which I had to learn. Right, right. So the only thing I heard was when he said Howard, because that meant he needed me to pay attention to him. Otherwise, I was oblivious to anything else. This is when you read the entire health care bill.

In 50 minutes. The entire health care bill. And that was what, like that thick? It's just literally from the floor. From the floor up here? Yeah, that was the first one. There were three of them. And I have a secret for you.

You realize you're probably the only person in the world that actually read that page. All three. All three. There were three. People don't know that. The first one was the Senate one. That was the short one. The second one was the senate one that was the short one the second one was the house it was 2 000 pages and i read that in 58 minutes but the one they passed was 2 600 pages the combined and that took 90 minutes so everyone was beautiful

all right i got a yes or no question yes or no though are you a genius Yes or no question. Yes or no, though. Are you a genius? I have 165 IQ, so I'm going to say probably that would be a problem. That would be considered a genius. Yeah. Now I've got a question for you, and this is very important. So you're a genius, definitely in regards to those stats.

Is it possible for those of us that don't have that, can we learn? I mean, is it really possible to learn to be a genius? I actually figured out how to teach it, and I'll share it with you. When you're reading, you're reading symbols called letters. And what we've done at a very early age is we've assigned sounds to the letters, which is why we read aloud when we first started reading. We converted the images back to sound bites. Before there was a recording, they used pictures as a recording technique before electronics. Well, the part of your brain that's processing symbols into sound is the parietal lobe, and it's converting those visual images back into a conversation.

So there's another way to learn to read, symbols. I was very interested by Carl Jung. When I was in college, I was a behaviorist. I thought if you knew the genetics, which I studied, and you knew the behavioral influences, you could predict pretty much anything. And then I changed as I meditated, and I realized, can you see in the neural connections of a David, the statue of David from Michelangelo? Yes.

Or could you see the Mona Lisa in neural connections in da Vinci's brain, or the theory of relativity in Einstein's brain? No. Right. There's something greater than just neurobiology. So what Jung was looking at was symbols. And I'm going to show you specifically how that works and how it can help you to become a genius rather than being abstract. There's literally three levels of learning. This is biology, psychology, literal, implied, and inferential. Literal are the

words on the page. No interpretation. 90% of what you do in school is literal. Teacher says, 1492, Columbus discovered the new world. Question, who discovered the new world in 1492? There's no interpreting. There's no inferential learning, it's Columbus. That's what they told you, that's what you regurgitate. And probably a lot of our learning is that's how they learn. They learn the words, they learn the dates, they learn the numbers, but they don't know what it means. My school didn't do that. We'd say, what was the impact on the indigenous people and on the people living in Europe. The economic impact, the change in the belief the world was flat, the colonialism,

the destruction of the indigenous tribes. Now you understand what happened, not the word Columbus. That's a different level, we'll go to that next. The second level of learning is called implied. It's not given by the author. So they said, David, the man drank a glass of water. You go, stop. What's a man?

What's a glass of water? What's drinking? Did I tell you what those things are? No, why not? I'm assuming if you speak English, you're familiar with what a water cup does and what a man does and what drinking is. Most writers make presumptions that you understand the language well enough to not have every word explained to you. That's implied, not given, but implied. That's not always true. If you read Moby Dick and you grew up in New England and you sailed on a boat every weekend with your dad

and someone grew up here in Phoenix in the desert and never sailed on a boat in their life is it the same book right your life experiences can change how these implied meanings impact your reading and account for some of the confusion you're having compared to others around you they've had other experiences with gaps that you have filled in in your life that's significant the third level is inferential meaning and significance so let me do an example can I can I draw a blank page somewhere that could use just and I'll show this to our audience. So I'm gonna just draw this. It's a circle, cover this up.

It's a circle with a dot in the middle. There's the circle and there's a dot. Okay, so when you're looking at this, what do you see? I see a circle with a dot. That's it, nothing to interpret. Yeah, pass that one. That's the genius on level one, level one genius. Okay, that's it. Nothing to interpret. Yeah, pass that one. That's the genius on level one. Level one genius.

Okay, that's literal. That's how people learn. Right. It's a circle with a dot. How interesting is that, literally, truthfully? Is it blowing you away? Is that astounding? No. Do I get an A? You get an A on that, too. Level two, this is not a circle with a dot it's a symbol it's a symbol in two disciplines astronomy and astrology remember at one point astrologers were also astronomers in fact isaac newton was

an astrologer he's one of the fathers of science so now that's a little more interesting. Right. It's a circle with a dot. It's a symbol of the sun. Now I'm going to tell you this is the meaning of life, one of the meanings of life. Look at this circle with a dot. You look at it and say, the meaning of life? This is how Buddha would have taught a lesson. We're going very inferential abstract.

A point is infinitesimally small. In the space around us, there's an infinite number of points. You can't see any of them. They're invisible, but they're there. So it's a symbol of spirit, God. Everywhere you look, there's spirit and God, but you can't see it. So the point symbolizes spirit,

something that's everywhere and nowhere to be seen the circle which is also an infinitely large point is the boundary in the circle is self me David at the center of each self is this point of spirit so what it's saying is everything is one thing spirit that sees and knows itself we look different we act different but everywhere you look all there is is spirit so brotherhood isn't just a euphemism be nice you are that other person their pain is your pain their problems are your problem everyone is connected we're no greater in this world than the weakest the most the most pained and suffered person you're connected to that whether you want to be or not

that's we're a race called humanity we're an organism collectively we're cells in this organism called humanity and everything we do affects everything that's a lot more interesting and it's a circle absolutely you brought it to life that's inferential learning so how do you learn that well there are many symbol systems i teach it with a deck of cards just a normal playing card deck and i assign a meaning to each of the cards so now the brain isn't reading sound bites like it would in a book. There's a card that would mean pain. There'd be a card that means pleasure. There'd be a card that means love.

There'd be a card that means fear. Those are states. Those aren't words. The part of your brain that processes emotion is the limbic system in the center of your brain and so what you're doing is learning how to translate states into emotion if you think about what epiphanies are it's an it's an insight an aha uh i know this i need to be doing right now and it's an emotional state and so by using the symbols to create this emotional state initially you'll make mistakes like wanting to read the d and the b look so similar

with practice the brain myelinates a neural pathway that's repeatedly used gets myelinating which makes it a superconductor so over over time, the forebrain, which is the logical brain, and the emotional brain, which normally don't connect that well, become very superconnected. And I'll show you an example of what that would do. Several. In business, which is more what alliance is about. Steve Jobs.

Everyone saw his cell phone. It looked like Captain Kirk's communicator. That's what it looked like. You remember? He looks at this. What if I put a glass here and make it a monitor and I put a chip in it? It'll be a phone, but it'll also do GPS and radio and television and all that. He saw that.

He didn't build it. He was a visionary. Wozniak didn't build it. He was a visionary. Wozniak had to build it. He was the visionary. Or another good example of business. Two companies going bankrupt now are Sears and JCPenney. Who's the richest man in the world? Mezzos.

What's his business model? JCPenney and Sears. They made their fortunes at the turn of the 18th century, 19th century with the catalog. As they were moving out west, places like here, they didn't have stores. They had very limited stores. So they would ship goods through the trains and on the Wells Fargo. And people would get things from Chicago and places far away they couldn't get in their local place through a catalog.

What's Jeff Bezos doing? He put the Sears and JCPenney catalog online. That's all it is. It's a catalog. They had the infrastructure. They had the techniques for communicating with the clients and the customers. What did they do?

They stop their catalog. They don't print one anymore. He puts one online, becomes the richest man in the world using their business model, and they go bankrupt. Another good example is Blockbuster. And when they started, it was how do you make a lot of money selling DVDs? Well, you buy train loads. And you have 7,000 stores. And you can rent it for such a low price

that a competitor would go broke trying to match your price. And it's exactly what's happened. Then along comes Netflix and says, we don't need stores. We don't need people working in stores and overhead. We can mail it out. Sure. Blockbuster went bankrupt. Then came Redbox. It said we don't need mail.

But Netflix was smart. They repurposed. How many people get DVDs from Netflix? They went into original programming, which Blockbuster could have done. Right, right. They didn't think. That's genius. You see what everyone else sees differently

right and you teach people how to be genius correct it's teachable berglearning.com berglearning all right so here's the thing is is um in regards to uh you mentioned the reading and all that why don't they teach it in school you You hold the secrets. You're willing to share the secrets. You have the courses in that. How come in the educational system they're not teaching it to all starting in kindergarten? Well I am working in Whitebeet, Oklahoma, which is in the middle of a cow pasture, literally. It's a cow pasture all around. And I'm teaching them. They won. They're in the middle of nowhere.

White beat Oklahoma. And the Department of Education awards the top 10% of schools as excellent. They're in the top 10% in the middle of nowhere. Why don't they teach all the schools? Why don't they make it mandatory? I volunteered. I moved to Ocala, Florida. And I called up and said I want to volunteer.

And they wouldn't even let me volunteer to do it for free. And I lived there. I'll tell you why. Are we so ingrained in that same old process? I mean, you talked about it, and if we continue to stay in that, then is it safe to say that we may become that in the education system, like the Blockbuster, like the Sears, right? That's exactly what's happening if you were in a time machine from 100 years ago and you came into the present world the one thing you'd recognize is school hasn't changed it's the same system shut up and listen right shut up and listen and that's a terrible way

to teach now even their online strategy we we did my students were getting 20 to 45 college credits when they finished high school on average all online they were learning at a higher rate online why aren't they succeeding because they're trying to do in classroom teaching online it doesn't work i'll show you what would work we use the world book encyclopedia so it's disc, and we had a three-column table. We would assign which units on the disc to learn, say, about the ear, and they would learn about the ear, and then we would ask them 200, 300 questions, all essays, no multiple choice, no fill-ins.

You either know it or you don't, and they would put their answer into column two. If they got it right, we left it in green. If they got it wrong, we wrote it in red. Fix it. You're wrong. We didn't tell them what they did wrong the first two or three times. You'll never learn to think

if someone gives you the answer every time you make a mistake. If they didn't get it, we gave them a clue and another clue and another clue until they got it right no one went to the next lesson till they aced the one they were on there were no b's there were no c's you got an a or you stayed where you were till you got that a and earned it by learning and the way you do that this is what they're doing wrong in school is the kids that were self-guided self-guided erudition who was moving

along didn't need help the ones who needed help the teacher interacted with feed student maybe you needed help in Spanish and I needed help in math so I'm flying along a biology or you're flying along in business, but the one thing you really need help with, that's when your teacher really spent time with you, with the one who needed the help. If they were doing that instead of just throwing data out online like they do in a classroom, they'd get a very different outcome. And no one gets through without an A. How are you going to be able to do algebra if you can't read, write, or count? When I taught high school, I had kids that were 19 years old that

couldn't multiply by 10 in physics classes. How can they do? And literally, I'm not exaggerating, I gave them a quiz. One times 10, two times, they couldn't do it. At 19 years old. So how did that happen? They kept pushing them through a system with D minuses. They finally reached the level where they caught up. And now we've got a generation that can't rewrite accounts. 28% of high school seniors can't read at the eighth grade level, which is what you need for high school degree, eighth grade.

38% can't do decibels and fractions in 12th grade. 90% can't write a paragraph in 12th grade. 90%, 90% can't write a paragraph in the 12th grade. That's where they're at. My kids were writing 28 page MLA cited reports on the book of Matthew, It was a homeschool program. We double blind tested. We brought it to a seminary.

He didn't know it was kids and he gave them graduate credit. What was the difference? We taught them how to think, how to learn, and how to study before they learned any subjects. Which is not being done. The base is what it was well you were just at uh the alliance's grand table you've been part of the alliances community for now what three plus years and that were you sure with our audience what uh it's been like for

you to be part of the alliances community this is one of the great joys of my life i gotta be honest this man is someone everyone needs to know and i I know a lot of people, being honest, you asked me to be honest, so take the compliment. You earned it. There were multiple billionaires at the conference, multiple millionaires at the conference. The success level of these people is off the scale. These are not your average entrepreneurs. These are people that

are changing the world profoundly in many different ways. And it's one of the great joys of my life to have been invited into this community. It makes me feel so good about what I've done. And when I look at what some of these people are doing, that's what it's about. If you wanna be smart, be with people who are smarter than you, who know what you don't know. Nobody knows everything.

I've read 30,000 books and what I learned is how little I know. Every time I read a book, it's something else I didn't know. I think a little knowledge breeds arrogance. But as you begin reading and reading and reading and learning and learning, you say, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And that's only 30,000 books. There's probably 30 billion books. And as fast as I read, I read 80 pages a minute. I could never read every book there is. So you need other people, people with other talents and skills.

What I did in my business is, I am very bad at negotiating. I know how, but I'm not good at it. And I'll tell you why, I care. I'll go into a negotiation and say, how can I help you? What can I give you? I'm a yogi.

I'm interested in serving and making a difference. They're thinking, how much can I take? How much can I make him do and not pay him? Who's going to win in that negotiation? So I don't want to change. I like who I am. Think of General Patton. How would you like to be married to him and have him as a dad? But if you were in a battle,

who would you rather have at the front of the troops, General Patton or me? Okay. Different personalities excel in different areas. I know my strengths and I also know my weaknesses. And what I looked about in my audiences is I found people there that have strengths that I lack and skills that I don't have. And rather than having to develop all of those skills myself,

which is a waste, I'm really good at what I'm good at. I'd rather form alliances with these other people and build on their strengths and build on my strengths to reach my full potential. And you've done a great job of accomplishing that. And everyone watching should want to b community and you can too dot com. That's E. L. I. our birth. What you contri

make an impact. It's a ri should have the opportuni go to Howard Berg. Make s dot com. Bird learning do it on our website at alliances.com. You too can learn to be a genius. He said it right here, right now. You can too. It's never too late. Also too is to be able to comprehend the information that you're learning. Get started now. Don't wait. Go to berglearning.com. Howard, thank you for sharing your secrets with the world

so that they become smarter, brighter, and be able to comprehend. Thank you for putting together a world-class community of successful people who can help other people make a better world. And that's been it with the Alliances Hero Show. You have been listening to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. Alliances is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups.

To present your superpower, visit www.alliances.com.