The SuperHuman Academy Podcast

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today's guest is an award-winning journalist, celebrated entrepreneur, and the bestselling author of a book called Smartcuts, of an upcoming book (by the time you hear it, a new book) called Dream Teams, and the co-author of The Storytelling Edge. He is also the co-founder of the content technology company Contently, and you've probably seen his work in Fast Company, Wired, The New Yorker, and dozens more top publications. His name, for those of you who are now wondering, is Shane Snow. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about lateral thinking, what it is and how you can utilize it. We also talk about teams, and how you can work better in them. We all work with other people (at least occasionally), and so we talked, Shane and I, about how you can leverage those connections to get more out of them, rather than being distracted and held back by the people you work with. That is a very important topic for everyone, and a very interesting topic for me particularly at this moment at the time of recording, as we are as always trying to grow and scale our business for you folks. And, to top these off, we talked about productivity hacks, life-hacks and health hacks that help Shane do so much with the same 24 hours that the rest of us have. I really enjoyed this conversation. You folks will notice that, lately, we've been doing slightly shorter conversations, and that is because I want you folks to spend less time with your digital devices, and more time in deep thought. Let me know if you enjoy that, or if you want us to go back to the slightly longer format. -Jonathan Levi P.S. Do you dream of starting your own business on the internet to achieve financial freedom, empower tens of thousands of people, and one day…one day… find yourself in the company of other great entrepreneurs and thought leaders like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Joe Polish, Dean Graziosi, Russell Brunson, and more? Well… What if that day was today?

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are joined by Garrett Weber-Gale. Garrett is an entrepreneur, a world-class athlete, and a dedicated husband and dad. Garrett started his first company at the age 12, much like myself. He also started a sports performance food company called AthleticFoodie, but, today, he serves as the CEO of the Acton School of Business. By the way, as a world-class athlete, Garrett broke 8 American records, 4 World Records, and won 2 Olympic Gold Medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He also received an ESPY award for “Best Moment” as part of the 400-freestyle relay performance at the Beijing Olympics, and in 2014 he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. This makes Garrett the first Olympian we've ever had on the show, and, also, the first person running an entire business school that we've ever had on the show! It's a wide-ranging episode, where we talk a lot about performance and about mindset. We also talk about life transitions, including how Garrett made this tremendous transition from A to B, where he also shares his words of wisdom with us. I hope you folks really enjoy this episode! If you do, please leave a review. -Jonathan Levi

July 9th-11th, 2018 As I write this, I am happily seated in a beautifully appointed business class seat, returning from an incredibly blissful week-long island retreat with my team members and their families, full of strategy, connection, and bonding. All of this, of course, would be more than enough to classify as a tremendously blessed week. What’s unique about this trip, however, is that I am also seated next to my newly-minted fiancée, Limmor. Just over 15 months ago, if you’d told me I’d be sitting here today, I likely wouldn’t have believed you. In fact, in my 9-year-long, on-and-off search for the perfect mate (across 4 continents and as many countries), I had all but given up hope. I’d started considering extreme, bizarre, and even desperate options - from hiring a matchmaker, to settling down with a close friend, to simply adopting children on my own. So how, then, did I arrive here - one half of one of the happiest, healthiest, and most loving relationships I’ve ever seen, just 15 short months later? In this post, I will attempt to impart the many lessons I’ve learned. I’ll share how I applied accelerated learning principles towards the types of self-development, healing, and maturity required to create a loving relationship, as well as the many things my much more experienced fiancée has taught me since starting one. By the end of this post, I hope that I will succeed in convincing you of one, ever-important message that was shared with me: you are not broken, nor are you hopeless. You can find love, even if you’ve never had it, had it and lost it, or reserved it for everyone but yourself. If my experience impresses upon you just one simple takeaway, it’s this: Not only can you apply accelerated learning principles towards building relationships in your life, but in fact, it is perhaps the most important and rewarding application you could possibly pursue.

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are joined by Dr Shivani Gupta. Shivani was born and raised in Houston, Texas, in a traditional Indian family, and, throughout her entire life, her father taught her about healthy eating, organic foods, and effective supplements. That lead her to want to take this knowledge to the next level and learn about this inherited wisdom from her cultural background. Shivani then attended the lab of Dr.Aggarwal, the biochemist at the University of Texas who was involved with the Anderson Cancer Centre, who is known as the person who discovered something we've talked about in the show before, the effects of curcumin + black pepper. She actually decided to continue her own study and receive a PhD on the topic of Ayurvedic Studies, with focus on herbalism and anti-inflammatory herbs. Actually, we've had past episodes where we talked a little bit about Ayurveda and the magic of healing the body through herbs and spices, as well as rituals and daily practices. But I've never had the opportunity to sit down with someone who has a PhD in it and actually pick their brain. As you folks will discover, there is so much ancient wisdom that has been used for thousands of years, which has allowed the Indian culture to grow and thrive and maintain health into old age. We've talked a lot about Chinese medicine (e.g here and here), but we haven't had the chance to talk about Indian medicine before. We talk about some simple practical things that you can do today, easily, that take 5 minutes or even 10 seconds, that are going to improve your health. We talk about how those work, and then we go into some of the different strategies, hacks, and habits that are helping Shivani perform at such a high level and maintain such a high degree of health. You can tell Shivani Gupta is a very vibrant, energetic, and healthy woman. I really enjoyed talking with her, and I know you folks are going to enjoy listening to the episode as well. -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are going to take a slightly different topic, a different side of Becoming SuperHuman, and talk about probably what is the least discussed topic on this show, which is financially Becoming SuperHuman. To do that, we're joined by a friend of mine from Genius Network. His name is Buck Joffrey and he runs Wealth Formula, which is about helping overworked but well-paid individuals look for a better life. They define wealth as the freedom to do what you want with your life, which is exactly how I define it, and they help people reimagine what wealth accumulation can mean, and, most importantly, relearn some of those core fundamentals that we've all been taught, like "invest in the stock market" and "trust your wealth advisor". I decided to have Buck on the show because I took his course and I was wowed by it. There were a lot of things I knew from business school and from interacting with millionaires and business luminaries, but there also were a lot of things I didn't know, which I really needed to hear. I think this episode is a welcome dose of "Hey, wake up, you have all these opportunities", and I think you folks are really going to enjoy it. -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are re-joined by Dr. Greg Wells, a scientist, broadcaster, author, coach, and athlete. You might know him as an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto where he studies elite performance or where he serves as a Senior Scientist in translational medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children where he actually leads the Exercise Medicine Research Program. You might also remember that we had Dr. Wells on the show where we talked about elite athletic performance and his book, The Ripple Effect. But, today we are not going to talk about all of that, or any of that really. We're actually going to talk about something I've become obsessed with, and that is digital distraction. Some of you folks might know that I've put out posts in the past such as "The #1 Productivity Hack That I Accidentally Discovered" and I've talked with folks like Steven Kotler and many more about the effects of digital distractions, and how they are literally wrecking our brains. Well, in this conversation, we go into that. We start understanding why it is that you need to pay so much attention, why it is a much bigger deal that you think it is and what you can do about it to prevent damaging your brain and screwing up your entire productive life. And no, I'm not exaggerating. This is a great episode, and I think you folks are really going to enjoy it! -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are joined by a personal friend of mine that I have met through Genius Network, the MasterMind that I recently joined and raved about. His name is Joel Weldon. Joel Weldon is a former construction worker, who turned down a 4-year college scholarship because he thought he wasn't smart enough. Nevertheless, he went on to become living proof of the power of one idea. And that one idea will transform your life. For over 40 years, Joel has been one of the most highly respected and sought-after keynote speakers and sales trainers in North America. He has been an idea consultant and executive speech coach for some of the world's leading business. Companies that hired him 4 decades ago are still hiring him today! Why? Because he gets results. Joel, by the way, is the only speaker to have earned all 4 of the highest honors in the speaking profession. Those are The Golden Gavel, “for his profound impact on corporate America,” the coveted Communication & Leadership Award, the induction into the Speakers Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he was named the Legend of the Speaking Profession. As I said Joel is an incredible guy, and at 76 years old you are going to see just how much energy and vitality he has about speaking and about everything else. About living life to its fullest. I really enjoyed the talk because we discussed what I believe is another exponential skill. We've talked about exponential skills as memory and writing before, but Joel firmly believes with every fiber of his being that public speaking is another extension of that exponential skill set. I totally agree, as my career is certainly proof of that. So, we talk about that, and we also talk about how everyone and anyone can and should become a better speaker. We actually covered some things that even I, someone who has been a public speaker for over half a decade, didn't know. In the episode, Joel gives me some incredible feedback that I'm sure you folks are going to benefit from as well. It's a great episode, and I think you folks are really going to enjoy it! -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are joined by Daniel Gefen, whom you may have seen before in Inc, Forbes, CIO, or Influencive. Daniel is a number one international best-selling author, and one of the top 25 influencers of 2017. He is also a serial entrepreneur and the author of The Self Help Addict. Beyond these, Daniel is the founder of the Gefen Media Group, he is a big name in podcasting, and, obviously, in self-help. He was actually introduced to me by a mutual friend of ours that I admire very much, Cameron Herald, and it turns that we live not very far apart here in Israel. We are both living the global lifestyle and living in our country of choice rather than our country of birth. In this episode, we talk about entrepreneurship, but we also talk about something that we haven't talked about on the show before, which is self-help addiction. This is the tendency we all have to listen to another podcast and read another book, and then take another online course and go to another meetup, without actually doing anything with the knowledge. Always chasing that next high, that next piece of information that's going to change our lives. I definitely identified with it, I definitely saw myself in a lot of what Daniel said, and I definitely think that there is something to consider here for all of us who are addicted to self-help, which is how much we are actually implementing versus just chasing the next thing. I think you guys are really going to enjoy the episode, I definitely learned a lot myself. -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! This week we are joined by another SuperFriend that I made out there in the real world, someone who I really bonded with when I met them. His name is Sachin Patel. Sachin is a functional medicine practitioner who runs the institute called The Living Proof Institute. He actually started his career out as a chiropractor, but has since then become a father, husband, philanthropist, functional medicine practice success coach, international speaker, and best-selling author. His philosophy, as you guys will learn, is that "The doctor of the future is the patient". And he's actually going to explain exactly what that means and how he and his company are putting that into practice and into reality. I really enjoy every conversation that I've had with Sachin, because he has really done the necessary work and he really has the knowledge. He knows much more than many medical doctors out there, and, in this episode, we share our passion for geeking out and optimizing on the human body. You will definitely see that within the first few minutes of the conversation. We actually dive quite deeply into the topic. We talk about all the different kinds of testing, we talk about functional medicine and who it's right for, and we talk about his favorite ways to optimize the human experience, which, you know, is what this whole show is about. I really enjoyed this episode as you can tell. I'm energized and pumped up, and I'm sure that you will be too, after listening to it. -Jonathan Levi

Greetings, SuperFriends! Today we are joined by Cédric Waldburger. Cédric, to whom I was recently introduced by a very good friend, is originally a Swiss national, who today travels the world all year round and lives with only 64 things in his possession! Cédric is passionate about startups. and thus he is a serial entrepreneur, an investor, and a blockchain enthusiast. He is currently working on a number of different startups, including DFINITY, a venture-backed blockchain startup, and another one, that you are going to hear about, that I think is equally as interesting. Cédric has also co-founded a number of businesses around the world from Zurich, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, London, and Berlin, and he's held roles in the technology management side for the better part of 2 decades. He is all about growing business, but that's actually not what we spend the majority of the conversation talking about. What we talked about for 80% of the time was the level to which Cédric optimizes and deliberately thinks about his life and the way that he is living it. He is deliberate about everything he owns, about everything that he does, and also about everything that he thinks and feels. I think it's a really fascinating approach to life, and I love the message at the end of the podcast, where he explains what the point of it all is, and why he puts so much effort into leading the perfect life. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode, as I certainly did. As I said, Cédric has quickly become a personal friend of mine, and I think that you guys are very quickly going to understand why. -Jonathan Levi