It's very interesting.

No, I was happy you shared that with me.

I haven't had a chance to go into it yet, but my first impression was, yeah, these are kind of the ancient ways that, um, strategies that people would use to memorize things.

Um, you know, the most important things that people would wanna memorize back in the day w- were, you know, scriptures and, and angelic r- relics or, or things related to, to, um, you know, the, these higher beliefs.

And, um, one of the best ways, one of the techniques that even we use, memory athletes, has to do with placing visuals for things in locations.

Um, we use memory palaces where we can visualize, um, you know, our homes or places we frequent a lot and imagine pictures for the things we're memorizing strewn about along a route through this place.

And then when we want to recall it, we can mentally walk back through that place, you know, it's easy to walk through your home in your mind, uh, and pick up the images that related to the things that you memorized in order.

Yeah.

[laughs]

Yeah.

This was the, the Belmont Stakes was being held.

It's b- one of the big, uh, race, races of the year.

I, uh, I live in Saratoga Springs and we have a little racetrack, but they were holding it there that year and I found a dime on the way to make a bet.

And I, I do a weekly remote viewing thing for horse racing specifically, but I don't really bet on it.

It's just to gather data and You know, see how I'm performing.

I think you've got some good takes on, on this stuff honestly.

So

the first thing you need to do is think of a memory palace you'd like to use.

You probably want to maybe think of your own house.

So the first president we all know is Washington, right? So the first thing we wanna do is go to first location of our memory palace, starting at our front door, right? So imagine you're at your front door, all right? Now you need a picture.

You need to see something for George Washington.

You try to come up with something that maybe it sounds like or rhymes like.

You could think of maybe a washing machine with a ton weight inside of it, right? And now this is your image.

want you giving

And, and I found that quite fascinating, and I wondered if you could just talk about remote viewing, 'cause I wasn't sure what remote viewing was.

Yeah.

Um, and thanks for bringing it up.

I, I love to talk about it.

It is kind of a fringe topic, hence why I put it at the end of the book, just so that it wouldn't, you know, set the tone for the book.

Um, although I think it's im- an important thing to include in the book because it is, you know, this, this part of our mind that I think there's something there.

I personally think there's something there.

And what type of exercises or examples did you do when you were, um, doing this experiment?

Is there, like, a principle underlying all of the ability that you have to remember things? Like, there, there's a way, one way to do it, or does it depend on what you're trying to remember? There are different ways for different kinds of things, or, or how does it work?

Yeah, great question.

When I wrote my first book, uh, this was almost 10 years ago, I really had to distill down what it takes to memorize anything, to, to broaden the techniques because, you know, when you dive into a memory competition, there's very specific things we have to memorize.

So you train for that, right? We're memorizing numbers.

We're memorizing playing cards, poems, lists of words, um, and then names and, and all sorts of other extra details about people, and that's kind of it, you know? So you train that, and you're good at that.

But then when you're trying to broaden the techniques to everything, what is at play here? And, um, I've been able to boil it down to really three simple steps that I use to remember everything, and I'll share them in a second.

Um, but, you know, each step has its, its depth to it, right? So really depending on what you're memorizing, you can modify the techniques, uh, appropriately for different things, but the, the, the basic fundamental steps are the same.

And as you were saying, there are different techniques, like how do you turn numbers and words into pictures? I'd love to know that.

Nelson Dellis is a six-time US memory champion, who not only trained his brain to work better, but he also wrote about it for his new book called Everyday Genius.

You know, the message is, is that everybody, no matter where you are in life, what you think your memory currently is capable of, we all can transform our brain.

The mind and memory is just like any other skill that you can learn, and it's not a fixed thing.

You

know, the message is, is that everybody, no matter where you are in life, what you think your memory currently is capable of, we all can transform our brain.

The mind and memory is just like any other skill that you can learn, and it's not a fixed thing.

What techniques besides putting your phone in the other room do you use to, to get into a deep state of focus?

So one thing I like to do is just do what I call, like, a brain dump.

Um, so I'll ...

You can do this on a piece of paper, you can type it out, whatever.

But I truly, before I try to sit down and do something that I really need to make progress on, I'll spend five minutes just writing out free stream of thoughts, uh, on paper, um, just to get any idea, any things that are on my mind, on the tip of my tongue, I'm struggling with.

Uh, it could be personal things, it could be work-related, doesn't matter.

Whatever comes in my mind, I'm writing it down.

[laughs]

Mm-hmm.

And then that tied the most wins, and I wanted always to get that fifth win because that would've been the most winningest ever.

And so that, the, the fourth win was in 2015, and I took a little break, didn't compete in 2016 or '17, and then '18, '19, '20...

Well, '20 was COVID.

Um, but I tried to get that fifth one, and I lost a couple times.

And so I finally got it in 2021, which was great.

I hung up my cleats, and I was like, "I'm good," you know? But then a couple years passed, and I was like, [sighs] "I feel like I have one more in me." And so I, I had this feeling that I would do well, but at the same time, I'm, I'm, like, freaking out that, like, I'm gonna get to the finals and then lose, and then what? You know, I, I-

Um, can you tell us just a little bit about, uh, what it's about and, and why you wanted to write it?

Do you sense that's the wrong strategy when you're learning languages?

Yeah, I do.

Memory palaces aren't always the most effective technique to memorize something.

In fact, I'd say they're best suited for things that need to preserve order in some way because that pathway that you walk through is what's keeping the structure, so the order of numbers, the order of a deck of cards, or a sequence of directions, memory palace is great.

But then when you come to something like language where it's fluid, you don't know what words you're gonna have to access, it, it doesn't work like that.

Someone may say something and you don't wanna go look it up in your memory palace.

That's so inefficient.

Okay? A- and it's probably the case that our schools put way too much emphasis on rote memorization, but given that they have that emphasis, it's really tragic Don't you think that we don't teach kids the tools that would transform their ability to memorize things?

Yeah, it's brilliant.

Yeah.

And I love it.

I mean, again, it's forcing me to reflect on the moments, especially with kids growing up right in front of my eyes.

It's a way to really value... um those special moments that happen every day even if they're tiny you know like my kid you know gives me a hug at the right time and it's kind of unprompted like that's so special right i could have gotten a job promotion and like that's the memorable thing not not the job promotion um but anyway so i have a whole catalog of these and I do the one thing where I think about it every day.

But then every month or so, I will recap my month.

I'll go through first in my mind, try to break it down and see if I can remember what I have that I had written down.

How do you forget?

Yep.

Yeah, exactly.

So a lot of the techniques these days is how to kind of fight that, you know? Um, so one of the first things, you know, if you're talking about focus for doing your work, for, for reading, for sitting down and doing anything in a deep, meaningful, productive way, um, I think it starts with setting the environment, right, that you're gonna place yourself in.

If you got your phone by your- you, you know, in some cases you wanna have your phone.

Maybe somebody's about to call you and you need to be, be there to r- r- keep the phone.

Okay, fine.

Um, but if you wr- you gotta, like, be honest with yourself.

Mm-hmm

Which is crazy.

Sounds crazy.

I couldn't do it at one point.

Um, but we turn the, the numbers into pictures.

So there's a way to convert, say, the numbers to letters.

It's a, a number system.

They call it, uh, the major system, where we basically turn them into words.

Can you give me two other techniques that could help people right now?

So give us some hacks for this one.

Yeah.

I mean, Dale Carnegie said that the, the most interesting person is the most interested person, right? And I think nothing-- there's nothing more than, bigger than or showing more interest than if you remember somebody's name.

So...

And it's just a little memory trick, right? And it's such a small thing.

It's just this little word, sometimes a longer word, but a word that represents this person, but it's so powerful and so meaningful.

So I treat it as this very special, delicate thing that a person can present to me, and I want to know this thing.

I, I'm trying to figure out some new stuff.

Can you walk us through an example of how you can use that to memorize just about anything?

Yeah.

So, you know, when I wrote that book, I wanted to distill down the steps I took when I memorized anything in competition or in life into simple steps, so see, link, go.

And that's really what I apply and what I teach for anybody who wants to memorize anything.

This each step has its own little nuances, but in general, the first thing you gotta do is see the information in a way that our brain likes to see things, and that is in the form of pictures, associations, things that are meaningful.

You know, oftentimes in the day-to-day, we're faced with information that's super abstract, complicated, not that interesting, and our brain just tunes it out.

Even though it has the best intentions to memorize it, it, it just doesn't like it.

Well, can you give us an example of, you know, maybe something really easy about how you can use this framework to memorize, like an everyday thing that someone would maybe wanna m- remember?

Which is crazy.

Sounds crazy.

I couldn't do it at one point.

Um, but we turn the, the numbers into pictures.

So there's a way to convert, say, the numbers to letters.

It's a, a number system.

They call it, uh, the major system, where we basically turn them into words.

... techniques that could help people right now?

Which is crazy.

Sounds crazy.

I couldn't do it at one point.

Um, but we turn the, the numbers into pictures.

So there's a way to convert, say, the numbers to letters.

It's a, a number system, they call it, uh, the major system, where we basically turn them into words.

And then once we have words, we can picture words very easily.

... techniques that could help people right now?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and it's, it's usually associated with a positive thought that like, hey, I'll find a dime, or, or like I'm doing something interesting and, and the dime pops up.

But then-I felt like it was leading me, or like the, the amount of them that were showing up was leading to kind of a, a head, like, to a point in my life, and it did.

And there was a point where, like, a, a disastrous thing in my life happened, and, uh, I look at it now and I'm like, well, was that all to kind of guide me to this really terrible point? And if so, are all those things that I was intuiting and, and, and manifesting, whatever, was that all negative? Um, but I f- I, I, I feel like I had to go through that, uh, that, that terrible thing, and I think because of that, I'm in a better place and the future looks incredible.

Um, so that now I look at those dimes differently, that they are actually a positive thing, that, uh, they guided me to the right place that I needed to.

And whatever that is, you know, whether it's a higher being or it's just myself, right, and, like, being more attentive to these things that I'm finding and making more out of them mentally for myself, right? Like, whatever that may be.

Me guiding myself, however you wanna, um, word that.

Is there one big thing?

And so what happened?

Yeah, I will tell you a quick funny story related to what you said earlier in the call.

You know, this group was interested in memory athletes specifically because of what you just said, that we are maybe better at it because of our trained visual abilities from memorizing.

So they approached me and one other memory guy.

Can you guess who that other memory guy is? Simon Reinhardt.

Yeah.

That's fascinating.

You talk about various techniques for having an out-of-the-body experience, including lucid dreaming, which is a commonly accepted now technique for at least feeling whether it's consciously or something like you're it's something's going on where you feel like you're out of the body you might not be out of the body it might just be some aspect of the brain that makes you feel that way but it's a way of inducing this this sort of feeling and you talk about various techniques for for inducing that experience