#307 Ron White - The 2,500-Year-Old Memory Skill the Romans Used That We've Completely Lost

Ron White is a two-time USA Memory Champion, U. S. Navy veteran, and one of the world's foremost memory training experts. Known as the "Brain Athlete," he has dedicated his career to proving that extraordinary memory is not a gift — it's a trainable skill. A Texas-based entrepreneur and speaker, White first discovered memory techniques in 1991 at age 18 and has spent over three decades mastering and teaching them. He won back-to-back USA Memory Championships in 2009 and 2010 and held the national record for the fastest to memorize a shuffled deck of cards in one minute and 27 seconds. He has appeared on the History Channel's Stan Lee's Superhumans, National Geographic's Brain Games, and Fox's Superhuman with Kal Penn and Mike Tyson, as well as Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, and CBS Evening News. After September 11th, White joined the U. S. Navy Reserve as an intelligence specialist and deployed to Afghanistan in 2007, serving until 2010. That experience inspired what he considers his most important work: memorizing the names, ranks, and order of death of more than 2,300 American service members killed in Afghanistan — over 7,000 words committed to memory over 10 months. He travels the country writing those names from memory on a 52-foot memorial wall, a tribute built on a simple message: "You are not forgotten." Today, White speaks to audiences in over 30 countries and runs Brain Athlete, where he teaches individuals and organizations to improve their memory, read faster, and learn more effectively through his flagship Black Belt Memory program. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at https://shopify.com/srs Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code SRS at https://mudwtr.com/SRS ! #mudwtrpod If you’re serious about selling to the Department of War, go to https://SBIRAdvisors.com and mention Shawn Ryan for your first month free. Get 30% off your first subscription order at https://armra.com/srs or enter code SRS at checkout. Get 50% off your first order of Sundays for Dogs at https://sundaysfordogs.com/SRS50 or use code SRS50 at checkout. Ron White Links: IG - https://www.instagram.com/brainathlete Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@brainathlete Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RonWhiteMemory TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@realbrainathlete Website - https://www.brainathlete.com/shawn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Ron White, welcome to the show, man. Thank you, it's quite the honor. It's an honor to have you. I found you doom scrolling Instagram, I think maybe a month or two ago, and usually my feed is all, "Everybody's gonna die, we're all fucked", you know what I mean? And then I saw you and I was like, dude, that looks interesting. You're just, I think you were going up to people on the street and have them memorize stuff? And so, that's, then I dug into you and I was like, holy shit. And then we found out you memorized all of the names of our guys that were KIA'd in Afghanistan. And so, we decided to be an awesome Memorial Day segment.

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  So, that was, that was like two and a half hours. You recited every single service member's name who was killed in Afghanistan.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01Shawn Ryan?

  Seven thousand words.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  About seventy-five hundred.

• 2:05Shawn Ryan?

  Seventy-five hundred words. How many names?

• 2:08Speaker 03

  The official count is around two thousand four hundred and sixty-one, the DOD official count. Um, on my list, I got my, the names from a, um, a website, eyecasualties.org. And, um, on there, they had some civilians in there. And although the, the spirit of my list is the military names, I didn't have the heart to take those names off. Uh, so my list is probably, uh, eight or nine more than the official count.

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  Man, well, that was impressive to see, man. And, uh, I think a lot of people are gonna love seeing that. So, thank you for doing it.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for the platform to do it. You know, there's a lot of Gold Star families out there. That some of those names are twenty-five years ago. You know, Master Sergeant Evander Andrews, the first one was October of two thousand and one. So that's twenty-five years ago. You know, I want Master Sergeant Evander Andrews' family and all those families that twenty, twenty-five years ago to, hey, somebody still cares. We still care. And so, and you gave a platform for that. So, you know, thank you.

• 3:13Shawn Ryan?

  It's my honor, man. Seriously. But, uh, yeah, I was kinda joking around before this. Gotta be careful what you say around this guy remembers everything.

• 3:23Shawn Ryan?

  So, what'd you have for dinner last night?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  That's a good question, actually. I, you know, uh, barbecue. We had barbecue. I don't remember. Who knows? Barbecue. Right.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  You know, people think, you know, oh, this guy, you know, like you said, what, what are you gonna say? If my memory is, is, is extraordinarily average, if I'm not using a system, you know, I, I will, um, Amy, who's worked with me for ten years, she, she tells, Ron, you gotta make this phone call today. Ron, you gotta email this person today. Ron, did you mail that, uh, IRS form in? I'm like, no, I didn't mail the IRS form in.

• 4:03Shawn Ryan?

  So it's a system. How did you, I mean, we'll get into all that stuff, but what I am curious, what's your first memory?

• 4:11Speaker 03

  I do have a first memory. That's, you know, it is, I was about two years old.

• 4:16Shawn Ryan?

  Two years old?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  But two, it had to been two because I know where I was living. Um, and it's just a blip, you know, it's just a four second memory of me being in the living room and somebody going to the door and my mom talking to that person at the door. And, you know, when I was in my twenties, I said, Mom, you know, I described the memory. She's like, oh, that's, that was exactly the layout of, of our apartment. But I think that's just a fluke. I don't think my memory is anything special, but that is my, you know what though? That metal memory special to me in the sense that it was, you know, my mom, my family, but I guess who else you're going to be around it too, right?

• 4:56Shawn Ryan?

  Let me start you off with a introduction here.

• 5:03Shawn Ryan?

  Ron White, a two-time USA memory champion, a US Navy veteran and one of the world's top memory experts. And you will tell anybody who asks that you were not born with a gifted brain, but you've built one. You joined the Navy Reserve after September 11th, served as an IS-1 intelligence specialist and deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan in 2007. You memorized the names, ranks and order of death of every American service member killed in Afghanistan. 2,300 names, 7,000 words. You corrected that earlier. It was actually more than that. And have been writing them from memory on a 52 foot wall across this country since 2012.

• 5:45Shawn Ryan?

  You've appeared on the History Channel, National Geographic, Fox's Superhuman and Good Morning America. And at every speaking event, you memorize 200 to 300 audience names before you walk on stage. Ron White, welcome to the show, man.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 6:03Shawn Ryan?

  And a couple of things to knock out here before we get going. I have a Patreon account. Honestly, they're the reason I get to sit down with you today. And they've been here with me since the beginning. They've turned into quite the community. And so what I do is that they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. So this is from Scott. Ron, for someone who was diagnosed with TBI, who struggles with some short-term memory, what specific exercises or habits would you recommend to help strengthen their brain and improve memory over time?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Well,

• 6:42Speaker 03

  you know, on something like that, you know, from a non-doctor's point of view, I'm a, I'm a memory champion. I would focus just on, you know, good nutrition, health, you know, going for walks, staying healthy. That stuff is going to impact your memory. You know, our hippocampus, which is responsible for a lot of our long-term memory, I don't think necessarily gets, and I don't know if it gets affected in TBI or not. But what I do know is that as we age, that actually can shrink. And one of the things that can stop and even reverse the shrinkage of our hippocampus is exercise, right? So exercise, staying healthy is something that I would recommend to anybody, especially somebody with TBI.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Drink plenty of water. A dehydrated brain has trouble focusing. Our brain actually shrinks a little when it's dehydrated. So a lot of my advice to him would be good nutrition and exercise and just trying to control your nerves a little bit, you know, stay calm. Stress is the worst enemy to your memory. So I guess it would be more, more general advice like that. And there are memory systems such as the mind palace, which I know we'll get to today. And I would, as far as a system, that's the one thing I'd tell him to focus on.

• 7:53Shawn Ryan?

  Roger that. One last thing, everybody gets a gift.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Oh, nice. Nice. All right.

• 8:01Shawn Ryan?

  Not healthy, but

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Well, believe me.

• 8:04Shawn Ryan?

  Gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all fifty states. So you're clean to take those home to Texas.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yes, I will. I will be enjoying these. So thank you very much. Gummy bears are my favorite. You know, I, I love them. It's like when you get a vitamin and it's gummy bears. You're like, you just can't eat one. And like, you're like, dang, I just ate five thousand in my daily recommended allowance of vitamin C.

• 8:28Shawn Ryan?

  I'm so healthy.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 8:31Shawn Ryan?

  I do the same shit. Yeah. But, uh, wow. But, uh, let's, so I want to do a little bit of a backstory on you because I know this started as a kid, correct?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  When I was eighteen, yeah, basically.

• 8:42Shawn Ryan?

  Fifteen. So I'd like to do that and then kind of go through, you know, a little bit of your life story and then how this all works. So where'd you grow up?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Born in Northridge and Hills, Texas, or Fort Worth, Texas. I grew up in Northridge and Hills, which is just about fifteen minutes away from Fort Worth.

• 9:01Shawn Ryan?

  What were you into?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Well, uh, growing up, uh, I was a pretty uncoordinated kid, but I loved baseball and I still do. You know, they put me in right field and, and, uh, they had hit the baseball. It was going to be a home run and I'd be charging in as fast as I could, thinking I was going to have to make a diving catch because I just wasn't too coordinated. But, uh, I really loved baseball as a kid. Uh, my dad was in the army and he was a police officer. So I was just real into, you know, dressing up, you know, in his police uniforms and dressing up in his army uniforms. He was in during the Vietnam era, although he served in Korea during that time.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Um, uh, so, uh, military, uh, my family is a very patriotic family, you know, we loved going on trips, going to visit stuff like the Air Force Academy and things like that. And then when I was about fifteen, fourteen, uh, I took a job as a paper boy. And that was kind of my entry into supporting myself. And, you know, if I wanted money to go to the movies or whatever, I had to go collect money from my customers on my paper route. So it was a blue collar family and, uh, and, you know, they gave me a good work ethic, I guess you'd say. And uh, baseball, military.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Throwing papers. How'd you get into the memory stuff? Well, so it was two weeks out of high school. And my friend, Brian, he said, hey, man, I just got a job as a company that cleans chimneys. Do you want to get a job there with me? We will be telemarketers. I said, yeah, sure, no problem. So it was two weeks out of high school. We sit down and I'm making, I'm making 80 phone calls a day. Can we clean your chimney? Can we clean your chimney? Can we clean your chimney? So, you know, imagine it was a thrilling job, right? And one day I called this guy and I said, hey, you know, we've got a crew in the area. We want to clean your chimney. And he said, I don't want our chimney cleaned. We're trying to sell our house anyways. Thanks for calling. And I said, sir, don't hang up the phone.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  If you're trying to sell your house, you should have a clean chimney. And I heard a little chuckle on the other end of the line. And he said, you know what? I've got a room full of telemarketers and none of these guys, when they hear an objection, do they try to overcome it? They just accept it and hang up the phone. He said, do you want to go to work for me? And this was him talking to me. He said, do you want to go to work for me? I sell memory training seminars. Holy shit. You got any kidding? That's it. That's it. Yeah. And, and he said, uh, he said, I'll pay you more than you're making now. You know, which was a pretty safe bet, right? Okay. Anybody could have said that to me and they would have been right. You know, I'd say all the time, if you would have robbed me back then, you would have just been practicing, you know?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  So I started taking down his information and my sales manager was like, hey, did you make a sale? I'm like, no, I got a new job. I'm going to teach you memory seminars. And that, my freshman year of college, I had a 0.9 GPA. So, you know, Albert Einstein is not in my family tree. And the, the, the telemarketer, she said, good luck with that. You know, you're going to be back here in two weeks. And that was 35 years ago. Wow. So I, I've been doing my career, I guess you would say, for 35 years. Wow.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  And it's that's a I'm glad you asked that question because a lot of people when they see me recite the names or you mentioned recite two or 300 names, they think, oh, this guy has some special gift. He has some special ability that I don't have. No, no, no, no, no. I was a telemarketer. A guy hired me over the phone because I was a good salesman. And he taught me the system. I genuinely believe anybody can improve their memory that way.

• 12:48Shawn Ryan?

  So everybody that you sold the STEM program to probably can do this, huh?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  I've never, that's what I'm gonna start calling it now, the damn program.

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, no shit. That's how it happened? So you just took the program that you were selling?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:05Shawn Ryan?

  And it worked?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I took, I took his course. He laid it out. He laid out the system and, um, uh, and I did it. I perfected it. Um, I probably had an advantage. You know, I was talking to your security guy today and I said, man, you know, I'm kind of jealous of you in a way. You know, I'd, I'd like jujitsu, but I, I can always think of an excuse not to train, right? And just take it easy, be lazy. It, I'm like, you are forced to constantly keep your training up. I, I like that. And that's kind of the way it was with me with memory. I got lucky in a way. I took a job for a memory company, right? So then I was forced to get good at it and perfected it. Had I just taken a memory seminar, I don't know

• 13:46Speaker 03

  if I would have had the, the drive that early on to, to perfect it to the level that I did.

• 13:56Shawn Ryan?

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• 17:03Shawn Ryan?

  So, did you actually, I mean, this turned into you're teaching how to memorize the Bible, how to memorize the Bill of Rights, how to memorize jujitsu moves, how to speed read, how to, I mean, was it all of that? Or did you develop a lot of this on your own too? The newer stuff?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when

• 17:23Shawn Ryan?

  You've evolved the course, I guess is what I'm saying.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Correct. The course I took was a general memory course. Over time, the things that I was interested in, I applied it to. So, one of the things that, you know, in Psalms, in the Bible, you know, in Psalms, chapter one, it says that the man who meditates on scripture will prosper in whatever he does. So, I'm like, okay, I think I'm going to memorize and meditate upon some scripture. So, I applied it to the things I was interested in. And that's where those niche products that you mentioned evolved from.

• 17:58Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. What, so what are some of the, tell me about the course? You know, what, what does it teach you?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's a series of modules and you know, sometimes, sometimes it's in person. You know, sometimes I'll, I'll teach it in person at a, at a conference. You mentioned the, the, the memorizing of 200 names. When people arrive for a conference, I'll memorize two or 300 names. So, oftentimes I don't have to even talk to them. I can just read their name tag and it says Sean, or you know, it says Brent, or it says Sarah, or it says Terry, or it says Darren, and I'll just read their name tags. I don't even have to, and then I'll get up on stage. I'll say, if you're one of the two or 300 people I met, stand up, two or three people stand up, and then I'll run around and I'll call off their names.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  So I like, every course I teach always starts off with, hey, look at this, you know, so it gets their interest. But then it's just a series of modules that walks them through how to memorize. You know, one lesson, I'm gonna talk about how to visualize, how to turn stuff into a picture. If you want to remember something, you need to be able to see it. For example, you meet me today, and six weeks from now, you're, you're out at your favorite restaurant, and you look over there and you think, man, I've seen that guy before, I know that guy, who is that guy? I've seen his face. Two hours later, you're driving home, and you're thinking, ah, that was Ron White. We remember the face, but we don't remember the name. Sometimes remember it later, because you remember what you see.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  So the course teaches you how to think in pictures, right? Turn, turn Steve into a stove, Lisa the Mona Lisa, when you hear the number 21, you think of a deck of cards. And that's an overly simplified examples. But it teaches you how to think in pictures, and then apply techniques known as the memory palace or the mind palace. But it's really geared towards, like, i- i- if, it's not geared toward, hey, you want to memorize your grocery list, how's having a better memory gonna help? If all you do is memorize your grocery list, how's that gonna impact your life? But think about it, your, your viewers right now, who want to give a speech or a presentation without notes, or they want to learn faster, or they want to quote Bible verses or memorize poems, that's the things that developing a good memory can help you with.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  And, so that's what I like to focus on.

• 20:18Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, I could use this just for this alone. I mean, so much information's coming in and out of this damn thing, that i- i- it's just, it's like, it's, it's impossible for me to keep up, you know, but something like that, to be able to just reach in the archives and retrieve something, and spout it off a statistic or a fact, or whatever it may be, I mean, that would be...

• 20:44Shawn Ryan?

  Very useful.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  And when I memorized the Afghanistan names, and I know we'll get more into it later, but a, a, a, a simple overview that goes to what you're saying. I used this room that we're in to help me memorize the names, right? So I visualize locations. Your flag right there is Corporal Dagan Page. These lights right here are, um, are Staff Sergeant Darren Hoover. So I, I placed what I wanted to remember and I visualized it interacting with this. So when I said the final 13 names, the, the Abbey Gate names, I was sitting here with my eyes closed and I was going around this room like that. And I was talking about what I saw in each location.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I bring that up because you just mentioned, ah, this would help me in what I do. Well, what you could do is the same thing. You could number spots around this room, right? So this, this, uh, this shelf over here could be a spot, this flag, this flag, these things. Then you're talking to somebody and as they're talking, you're thinking, oh, that reminds me of something I want to ask them. But you don't want to like interrupt them right when they're talking, right? They, they say that they, that they played baseball, right? And you want to talk, remember to ask them that question, but you don't want to interrupt them. So now all of a sudden you see a baseball crashing through and hitting that flag right there and the flag falls on the floor. They continue to talk for another two minutes or one minute.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  And then you can look up there and remember what you wanted to talk about.

• 22:18Shawn Ryan?

  I'll be damned. That right there comes in handy. I'm always trying to hang on to questions.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 22:24Shawn Ryan?

  And I probably lose 75% of them.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Visualize as they're talking, visualize whatever's behind them. So over here I might see it interacting with the flag. I might see it interacting with this picture over here. You're talking, I'm still listening to you, but now I've got the two or three things that I want to talk about. And then when I get a moment, I ask you about those things.

• 22:43Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. And so you, you started. So you were working for a telemarketing company selling memory courses, but did you start selling your own too as a teen?

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Well, so I went to work for them at the age of 18 and I worked for them for about a year and a half, two years. And things happened that led to me leaving that company.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  It was my decision. It wasn't their decision for me to leave. It was I I I I needed to leave. And when I left that company, I was 20 years old and I thought, I love this. I love this. But I'm 20, you know, I'm 20 years old. Can I do this? But I there was so much that I didn't know about running a business. If I had known everything that I didn't know, I was too dumb to know what I didn't know. I thought, how hard could it be? So I went down to the courthouse. I registered a company name. I opened myself up a bank account. The difficult part of that, well, there's a lot of difficult things about it, but back then there was no online course. It was just me speaking, right? But I was 19 years old, 20 years old. I looked like I was 12 years old.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  So, you know, I've I've started shaving my head right here, you know, giving myself a little bit of age.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  The other things have given me some age. But when I was 19 years old, I remember giving my first speech. I walked into this this company and I said, hey, my name's Ron White. I'm I'm with the the company I was with, the memory company. And the guy said, okay, Ron, whenever the speaker gets here, let us know. We'll all go in together. And I said, sir, I'm the speaker. He said, are you out of high school? I said, yes, sir. Matter of fact, last month, it's been a year.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  And he was like, he he looked at me and he said, he said, he said, Ron, I appreciate what you're doing. I like your go to your go getter attitude, but my guys are pros in there, you know, if if if they're they're seasoned salesmen. I don't know if I'm going to look good bringing you in. And I went in and I memorized the names in the room and then I repeated them and I looked at him and he went. Okay, you know, like you can go. But early on, I guess I had to over overcome that a little bit of credibility. You know, what's my credibility? Uh, I had won no memory championships. I had set no records. I clearly looked like I was in high school, but I loved what I was doing. And, uh, and I learned something about back then, too.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  If you get good at something, regardless of your age, if you get good at something, regardless of your age, be so good they can't ignore you, right? And with time came age and everything worked out.

• 25:23Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. And then you joined the military.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  I did. So I, I, I started my business or I started this business when I was 18. And, um, when I was 28 years old, I'd been in my career for a decade. So, um, uh, that's when I joined the military.

• 25:44Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, do we need to rewind? Do we, we, we need to rewind, don't we? 10 years? You were in business for 10 years before you joined the military?

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, I was.

• 25:55Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, let's go back to that first.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:58Shawn Ryan?

  I, I thought that you, yeah.

• 26:01Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to the business. So you made the decision to start your own business?

• 26:05Speaker 03

  I did. And if I knew what I knew now, I probably wouldn't have done it, right?

• 26:11Speaker 03

  But I'm glad I did. I'm glad I didn't know because, you know, there were so many things I had to learn, you know? For the first decade, I was behind on my IRS taxes all the time, you know? I just didn't know how to get all set up and have a good accountant. And I was trying to do it all myself. I made so many mistakes and it held me back so much. There was so much now, fortunately, I got a great accountant and right, you know, I just go make the money and she does all the, all that stuff. But as an 18, 19 year old kid, the job I had, people always ask, what did you do before you, uh, you, you taught memory seminars? I said, well, I had a paper route and then I worked at Taco Bueno. I rolled burritos, you know?

• 26:48Shawn Ryan?

  Um, so. Couldn't just tell him he don't remember?

• 26:52Speaker 03

  So I uh, I had no business experience, right? I just had the, I wasn't afraid to make cold calls. That first 10 years, I was making 80 cold calls a day. So uh, uh, five, five days a week. So 400 calls a week, you know, maybe 1600, 2000 calls a month, 20 plus thousand calls a year.

• 27:14Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So over, and I was just calling people, hey, can I speak for your conference? Can I speak for your conference? Can I speak for your conference? Can I speak for your conference? And it was a little bit different of a sales pitch than that. But also, you know, I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know that it's better when somebody else is saying, hey, you should have Ron White. He's a great presenter, right? But I just went through it and I just made the cold calls. Um, you know, people today, they'll, they'll ask me, they'll say, Ron, they want to be a speaker. And they'll say, Ron, tell me, tell me, I want to do what you do. How did you, how did you do this where you speak? And I said, well, I got leads. I made calls 80 a day.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  I called, uh, uh, I made 400 cold calls a week, 2000 plus, around 2000 a month. And they said, no, they'll interrupt me. No, no, no, no, no, Ron, Ron, I don't want to do that. I want to do what you do now.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  I'm like.

• 28:14Shawn Ryan?

  We want to skip all the journey and just go to this.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 28:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's crazy.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  And, and, and probably you too, right? You know, I mean, you've, all you've accomplished in your life and I heard you say it recently. People will say that, oh, Sean, look how you just blew up and your YouTube channel took off. And then I heard you talk about, hey, you didn't get to see the stuff in the attic and all that kind of stuff.

• 28:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's, you get the, what, I don't know, whatever you want to call them. Like, oh, this guy came out of nowhere. Oh, you just popped up out of nowhere. Oh, this, dude, I've been doing this shit for over 10 fucking years now.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? Media stuff, been doing the podcast since 2019. I didn't just pop out of nowhere.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:58Shawn Ryan?

  I've dumped everything into this, as I'm sure you have too. You know, and, and.

• 29:05Shawn Ryan?

  So, it's a lot of fucking work.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  They're seeing the finished product.

• 29:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody, it's, it's, it's like that saying, everybody wants to be a gangster until it's time to do gangster shit.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and in full honesty, if I was starting today, I don't know if I would make those cold calls. We have so much at our disposal now, right, with YouTube and social media and Instagram and all that kind of stuff. But it's still an important part. You gotta get out there and you gotta talk to people and you gotta be willing to hear rejection and that kind of stuff. And those were lessons that fortunately I learned going door to door selling newspapers. But, and I implemented that and used that during that 10 years. So, it was a lot of, um, it was, I was, I was broke for 10 years. I was broke.

• 29:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  I would be sitting at home and, uh, you know, working or whatever, the electricity would go off. I'm like, oh, man, I did it again. Um, the first time, I spoke for free for the, for pretty much the whole decade, but-

• 30:04Shawn Ryan?

  A whole decade?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Decade.

• 30:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  So, I, uh, I, I would call real estate companies, car dealerships. I mean, you think about it, a car dealership, they need to memorize their scripts, right, their customers' names, that kind of thing. So, I would call them and I'd say, hey, can I speak for free for, and I, by the way, I don't do this anymore. But I'd say, hey, can I speak for free for your, for your company? To teach them how to remember names and that kind of stuff. And then I'd go speak for free and sell tickets to a workshop or something like that. It was about five years into that, there was a, a rental company, Color Time, they like, you could go rent, um, I don't know, maybe furniture or something like that there. But this was 1998. They said, well, I was living in Seattle, uh, and they, doing my business, and they said,

• 30:52Speaker 03

  will you speak for our conference in Reno, Nevada? And, um- I said, yeah, I would, you know, I was trying to do the math like, how would I get there? Speak for free? And they said, we'll pay you $2,500. Now, this was almost 20 years ago, right? And I'm like, $2,500? Oh, my gosh, they're gonna pay me $2,500 to speak for what I've been doing for free? Boy, they don't know I'm giving this speech for free in Seattle. And they said, okay, just buy your plane ticket and, um, you know, then send us the invoice or whatever. Well, I didn't have money to buy a plane ticket. I literally did not have money to buy a plane ticket. I was broke. Um, I went broke living in Seattle.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  I had a, a guy who, um, turned out to be a professional con artist and he, uh, uh, swindled me out of, of some money. He was very disappointed when he got my bank account. He thought it was, he thought it was more of a high roller. But I worked during the day selling memory seminars. And then at night I took a job as a waiter at a restaurant. So I, um, was waiting tables. I said yes to this company in, in Nevada, in Reno. I'll speak at your conference. They said, buy your plane ticket. And I'm like, why do I tell them? If I tell them I don't have enough money to buy a plane ticket, they're not gonna have me speak. They're gonna think I'm, nobody's paying me to speak, which nobody was.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  And, um, I said, I gotta, I gotta figure this out. So I, I emailed him back and I said, you know what? I got family halfway through there, so I'm just gonna drive and I'm gonna stop and see my family, you know, on the way. And, uh, you could tell they were like, that's a long drive, dude. That's, that's the craziest I'd ever heard. But they said, that's fine. But I didn't have the money, so I started picking up doubles, waiting tables. And, um, my tires, my tires on my car had the metal. The metal was coming out of the tires. So I thought, okay, I gotta buy some tires and then I gotta get enough money for gas money. I don't care if I make it back. I just have to get there and accomplish this goal. So I've got my money.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  I got enough money to buy my tires. I got enough, I picked up all these doubles and I go out to where my- My Jeep was parked and it was gone. It got towed. So then I had to use all my money that I spent for the tires to get my Jeep out. And I just had enough money for gas. I literally had just enough money for gas. And I drove down there the whole time thinking my tires are gonna pop. My tires are gonna pop. I got there, my tires didn't pop. I memorized the names. I gave the speech. They handed me a check. It felt so good to get paid to do this. And I got in my car, got a little bit of money, cashed the check, got a little bit of money.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  And as I drove back into Seattle with those tires worn out, when the skyline of Seattle popped up, I'm like, I did it, man.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Right on. That's what the first 10 years was like. No kidding.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  So where do we go from there? Well, you know, after, after that first 10 years of trial and error, it clicked in my brain.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  People are gonna pay me to do this. You know, at the time, I was selling, I was going speaking for free for these companies at the end saying, hey, if you want to learn more, sign up for my two day workshop. And they would go to my, go to my workshop. But it clicked in my mind, dude, you don't have to rent a room at the Holiday Inn. You don't have to, you don't have to do all the details of getting people set up. People will pay you to speak for their conference, right? So I was like, that is, that is, uh, that sounds so much easier. And it was. At that point, I got to just focus on what I'm good at, right? Making cold calls all day, renting a room at the Holiday Inn, signing people in when they arrive, making sure they got their name badge. None of that anymore.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  And that speech changed everything for me because I realized I could switch my business model. And that's when really my business changed because then I could just focus on what I'm good at. And what am I good at? Demonstrating the power of the trained memory and showing that anybody can do it and then teach other people to do it.

• 35:11Shawn Ryan?

  What I mean, so what else did you need to focus on? What is it exercises? Is it developing the courses? What exactly are you focusing on?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  At that point, there was a guy named Billy Burden, and I don't know if Billy Burden's still alive or not, but he was one of the leaders in the memory world at the time. And I called him up on the phone and I said, Billy, I'm a 25-year-old guy, I'm doing memory. What advice could you give me? He was very, very generous, considering I just told him, I am starting in your industry. Now, he was maybe getting near retirement age, but I was still telling him, I was, I mean, probably he didn't fear me either, right? But he was still very generous and kind to me. He said, Ron, these are the things I will do. And then he told me one thing that really changed everything for me. He said, when you get done with your seminar, people are going to want to learn more.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  You need to have something for them to take with them. That's crucial. I said, what do I do? He said, create a memory course on cassette. And that right there was a massive game changer for me. Because I realized it was a way for me to make money without me having to show up, right? First of all, I would sell it at my events. I, I, I, um, you know, every time you hear a motivational speaker and they say, I used to live in a van down by the river, right? I really did go homeless during that time. And, uh, that's when I was, I had, I set my computer up at a friend's house. I didn't, I didn't stay there, but he was kind enough to let me set it up.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  And during the day, I would go in and I would type, type out my course, type out my audio program. And that audio program, um, made a difference, and here's how. I was selling it on cassettes and, and people were benefiting from it, but it was really only if they were at my workshop, right? Well, one day, a friend of mine named Chris called me and said, hey, Chris. He didn't say that. He said, hey, Ron. My name is Ron. His name is Chris. See, see, aren't you glad to see the memory guy is just a normal memory? He calls himself the wrong name sometimes. Uh, he said, hey, Ron,

• 37:30Speaker 03

  there's a company called Jim Rohn International. Jim Rohn was a great business philosopher. He passed away in 2008. He said, do you know who Jim Rohn is? I said, yes, I know who Jim Rohn is. In he in my industry, he was a legend. Not for memory, but business conferences. And, um, he said, the owner of that company is Kyle Wilson. Kyle has an office 15 minutes from where you live. I just called Kyle and I told him that you were going to bring your memory course on cassette to him. Go drop it off. I'm like, oh, so I had such imposter syndrome. I'm like, Chris, there is no way Kyle Wilson, Jim Rohn International is going to have any interest in me. Why would they want to pay any? They got a wall full of speakers trying to present them stuff.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  And I'll never forget it. I walked in, I opened up the door at Kyle Wilson's office and his assistant Crystal was right there and I had one foot in and one foot out. And I said, hey, could you give this to Kyle Wilson? And, uh, and she said, he's here. Do you want to talk to him? I'm like, no, I don't want to talk to him. I was so intimidated. She gave that cassette to Kyle Wilson. Kyle had this massive email for Jim Rohn International email list. And he just sent out a blast and he sold some. He called me on the phone. He said, Ron, how, what's, what price could I get for 2,000 of those? And I'm like trying to maintain my composure. I'm like 2,000 of these. I'm there. I haven't sold 200. I gave him a price. Two weeks later, he called again, Ron, I need 2,000 more.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Two weeks later, he called again. And he, he was, he's a, he's still to this day is a master genius marketer. And he sold out of them and, um, one.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Button up on this story. If there was no Kyle Wilson, I would not be sitting here today. There would be no Afghanistan memory wall. I would never have served in naval intelligence. And the reason for that is, is we became friends. And one day he called and said, you want to drive to Shreveport, which is three hours west east of Dallas to go to the casino. I had no money. I had no money. And we get to the casino and he says, Ron, I like to gamble in private. I'm gonna go to this table. You go over there. And I'm like, thank goodness, because I didn't want to let him know. He was gonna pick up really quick. I didn't have any money.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  So I sat at the bar and drank while he was gambling on the way back. He said, hey, man, how'd you do? I said, I left where I came with. I came leaving what I came with. And we did that a couple of times. And one of those trips, he said, Ron, something's bothering you. What's bothering you? I said, Kyle, I'm getting ready to get kicked out of the Navy. I'm getting ready to lose my security clearance. For IS-1, naval intelligence. I said, I owe the IRS $40,000. I have no way of paying this. And I'm gonna be so embarrassed. My family was so proud of me that I was in the Navy, and now I'm gonna be an embarrassment.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  And he listened to me. We go to his office. He walks into his office. He writes me a check for $36,000, which was the exact amount. He said, here you go, Ron. Pay off your IRS bill. This is not a gift. This is an advance on commissions. I'm gonna sail your course and take out your commissions as an advance.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Thank you for letting me tell that story. It didn't even pop in my mind, but that's a powerful story to me, an important one in my life. You're welcome.

• 41:05Shawn Ryan?

  What is it, what is it that was in the courses that were gaining so many people's attention that wanted to buy it?

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you think about it, a business person, a leader, you know, they want the ability to stand up on a stage and give a speech or a presentation and not use any notes. Imagine you're at a conference or you're at a presentation and that guy is standing up there on stage and he's reading his notes or he's reading his PowerPoint. It happens all the time, but it's not a dynamic speaker. So with the memory system, you're able to take what you want to say and speak without notes. A lot of people like, like learning how to do that. But salespeople, think about it, you know, you've got people who are taking a job at a car leadership or they're taking a job as a salesperson, they're getting in front of their customer and as soon as they get in front of their customer, what happens? They lock up, they can't remember what they're supposed to say.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  And then their customer walks away and then they remember what they're supposed to say. So, sales scripts, remember what you're supposed to say, giving speeches or presentations without notes. I think one of the biggest things that people like about memory, about learning how to improve your memory, is being able to remember names and faces. You meet somebody today and then you meet their wife and two weeks later you see them out and you're like, Sean, Katie, how are you doing? You know, it's magical. You show the person that you care. So Zig Ziglar used to say, people don't care how much you know until they first know how much you care. So, and those are the business reasons, I think, the primary ones, but there's another group and that group is the students.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  The students, one of your Patreon members asked me on a question today, how do you study for this test, the MCAT? And I was able to lay it out. Students, and then maybe the final category, which I've already mentioned, is scripture memory, right? For people who have a religious faith in whatever their religion is, that's important to them, right? What did Jesus do when he was tempted? He quoted scripture, right? So the ability to have the word of God written on your heart and in your mind is a lot of things for, for a lot of people of faith. So faith-based students and those business people who want to just close more deals.

• 43:18Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. What about the speed reading?

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Speed reading is possible. Now, I've gone, I've, my opinion on this has shifted over the years. First, I believed it's not possible. That's what I believed. For two decades, I believed that. I've been doing this for 35 years. I always joke, I say, I know that sounds impossible because I look like I'm 27, but I know it's 35 years, right? But, um, uh, for the first 20 years or so, I, uh, didn't think it was possible. People would, after my class, "Hey Ron, can you teach me how to speed read?" And I'd just tell them, "Hey, look, I don't think it's possible and I'm not going to sell something that I don't think is possible." So for 20 years, I said no to that product line because I just didn't think it was possible.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Then after about 20 years, I thought, people are asking me this question, "You're just saying it's not possible because you don't think it's possible? What do you know about it, right?" So I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to try this out and see if I can do it." And then I was able to do it and actually doubled my reading speed. And I'll give you a real quick Cliff Notes version of how to speed read. So when we're reading, what happens is, is something called visual regression. You're reading a line or something, "The boy went to the store." But your eye's not trained. It bounces around a lot and it's called visual regression. So the boy went to the store, your brain would read that, "The boy went, the boy went to, the boy went to the store." It's bouncing around. And people all will say, "Ron, I don't do that. I just read straight through." You probably don't.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  It, but you're probably doing it so fast, you don't realize it. But because you're doing it, it's slowing you down, right? So the best speed reading strategy I could give a person, and there's many, but if I could give the best one, it's put your finger underneath the words that you're reading, or a pencil, and force your finger to follow the words. You've, people probably seen speed reading people and they're going like this, across the page. What they're doing is they're forcing their eye to follow their finger. So they're going like that. And there's some other things that you, that alone might double your reading speed. On a, on a laptop or a computer, you could do it with the cursor. Um, but some other things are don't dub, don't sub vocalize the words, you know, don't say

• 45:32Speaker 03

  the words, don't read to yourself. If you're reading to yourself, if you're saying the words, you're going to be limited to how fast you can talk, not how fast you can read. And the average person's reading about 200 words a minute. Almost everybody, by using their finger and just staying a little bit more focused, can read fast, can read twice as fast, almost anybody. So that's when I developed a speed reading course, when I realized, hey, okay, you can make, you can sell this and feel good about it. And that's what I did. Makes sense, makes sense.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Where do we go from here? Well, that's the first 10 years, I would say. And um, after that, that's when September 11th happened. And that's when I enlisted in the military.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  So I guess I could talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. Yeah. So I was 28 years old. I'd been teaching memory for a decade. And um,

• 46:32Speaker 03

  mainly for free, but right about that time I'd learned, people were paying for this. And so, uh, I moved back from Seattle, and I was sitting in my friend's living room. Brian McMahon, he's been one of my closest friends since he was 12, complete numbskull. If, if, if there's any proof, you don't have to be a genius to do this. Brian McMahon is the proof. He's gonna, he's gonna fold, he's a black belt in jujitsu. He's gonna fold me up for saying that. But, um, uh, we were sitting in his living room right after September 11th. And he said, uh, he said, don't laugh at me, but tomorrow, uh, or this week, I'm gonna join the army. And it was one of those moments. I was 28 years old. I was a decade

• 47:17Speaker 03

  into my career. I did, I what, no, I, I wasn't looking for a new career. I wasn't looking for a new opportunity. But it was September 11th, right? And so we were just months removed. This was probably December. So you know, just a few months removed from September 11th. And he said, don't laugh at me. I'm gonna join the, uh, the army tomorrow or this week. And it was a split second decision. I said, dude, I'm gonna go with you. So we went down to the recruiting station the next day. Uh, he joined the army. I joined the Navy because I have an IQ, right?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Army's great, my dad was Army, but I wanted to join the Navy. I'll tell you the real reason I joined the Navy. Well, my dad, my grandfather served in World War II in the Navy. So, uh, to this day, I have his, his uniform hanging up on the walls, World War II uniform. But one of the big sellers for me joining the Navy and not in the Army was the Army wanted to make me a mailman. I learned that day, the, it's the recruiters have, they're told, this is the slots you need to fill. And whoever walks through that door, right? That's the job they're gonna give them. And, and I walked through that door and he said, we want to make you a mailman. And I'm like, I was like, sir, sir, I, I'm joining the Navy. There's nothing wrong with that job and I'm not disparaging that job a- at all. But it's not what I wanted to do.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  And I joined as a reservist and he said, well, Ron, if you join as a reservist and, and you deliver mail, you will, uh, get to go to Germany for your two weeks every summer. I'm like, sir, if I want to join, go to Germany, I'll go to Germany. So I walked out and I walked by the Navy recruiting station. And on the door to the Navy, it said, no boot camp. I mean, they were doing, this was right after September 11th. They were doing anything to get people in those doors. No boot camp. I said, that sounds very interesting. I went in and they said, uh, they said, for a reservist, your, your two weeks is your boot camp. I did a 17 day boot camp.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Um, and they asked me some questions and I took some, you know, you gotta take some tests, you know, to, to get in the military. And after all that was done, they said, do you want to be in naval intelligence? And that's when I said, this is, I'm going for the Navy. And so that's what I did. Right on, right on. I think we skipped something. Yes, sir. The Guinness Book of World Records.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Maybe I ignored that.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  What happened then? Oh gosh, that was a fiasco. That was a fiasco.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  So,

• 49:45Speaker 03

  it was 2001, February 2001, something like that. I was at the grocery store with my girlfriend at the time and she was shopping and I pulled the Guinness Book of Rules records off the shelf. As fate would have it, I opened it up and when I was flipping, I saw a memory record. Gert Metring memorized a 27 digit number and it said the digits were flashed on the screen for three seconds. And I looked at it and I said, three seconds, 27 digits. So, three times 27, that's a minute and 21 seconds. I could beat that. I could beat that easy. That's a slam dunk. So I told my girlfriend, I said, there's a guy in the Guinness Book of Rules records. I do this every day at my speeches. I can break this record. She's like, yeah, whatever, pal. You know, if you could do it, why don't you do it?

• 50:29Speaker 03

  And I said, you know what? I'm gonna do it. So I called the Fox Good Day Dallas show and I said, I showed him the Guinness record. I'm like, I can, I can break this record. And they said, okay, let's, let's practice it right here in the studio. And we did it and I didn't get it right. And then they said, okay, we'll, we'll consider this. And then I went back to my friend Brian, the guy that I joined the military with. I said, dude, we gotta train for this. So for a week, he just said numbers. I memorized them. Not once did I get it right. I went back to the producers. I said, I said, can I be on the show? They said, you can be on the show this day. They said, let's try it again. Let's practice. I didn't get it right. In a week or 10 days of practice, not once did I get it right. Not once.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Brian, my friend, said, Ron, or he calls me Ronnie, Ronnie, you don't have to do this. I said, I'm gonna do this. The producer said, you don't have to do this. I said, just put me on the air. And we were sitting in chairs like this. They said, a 27 digit number. Uh, uh, we did one more digit, 28 digits. And right? So I thought it was 27 digits, three seconds each. So I said, do 28 and let's just make sure I do under one minute and 21 and I got it. Lady said the number. I said it. I repeated it to her and she said, "We got a new Guinness Record Live on Good Day!" And I didn't want to say it, but lady, that's the first time I ever

• 51:53Speaker 03

  got that right, you know? But I picked the right time, right? And, um, uh, uh, so I was telling everybody, I was, "Hey, book Guinness Record Breaker Ron White for your next conference," right? I put it all over my website. I put it all over this. And, and then I finally got around, I'm not the most organized man. You would think I would be. Couple of years down the road, I got

• 52:20Speaker 03

  to around putting it, submitting it to Guinness. So here's my record. Here's the proof. Here's the TV show. And Guinness came back to me and they said, "Ron, you didn't break the record, not even close." It wasn't three seconds per digit. It wasn't this digit flashed on for three seconds, this digit flashed on for three seconds, this digit flashed on for a few seconds, for a total minute 21. The entire 27-digit number flashed on the screen for three seconds and then it disappeared. And then he said it from memory. And I thought, "Oh, no, you've got to be kidding me." Because there was no way I could make this right. There was no way I was gonna make

• 53:05Speaker 03

  that right. There was no way I could train and get that. Today, I kinda know how he did it. I could get closer to that, but I'd still don't know if I could break it today. So that became a thing in the back of my mind. You know, I felt like a dishonest person. For three years, and all my marketing material, Guinness Record Breaker, we scrubbed it from everything, but people would still bring it up. And I would always correct them, but I felt it was an honest mistake. But people don't know if it's an honest mistake or not, right? So I had this, I had this, I'm, I'm, I hate to even say the word, but just not authentic. But it wasn't true. But that was the

• 53:47Speaker 03

  perception I felt like I had. So that really motivated me to, "I gotta make this right. I've gotta do something that says..." You, you just read that, that introduction today. Ron's one of the top memory experts in the world. Well, I was saying that... Back around this time, 25 years ago. And I said to myself, this is an authentic man. This is not authentic. You're getting introduced right now as one of the top memory experts in the world. You have no degree from a college on something related to memory. You've broken no records. You've competed in no tournaments. You've done nothing other than giving yourself a marketing title like any business person would do.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  And that marketing title is, you're the best. So I said, you've got to do something to earn this title. And that's when I set my sights on the USA Memory Championship and some records like that.

• 54:43Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. Wow. That's humble, but that was humbling, huh?

• 54:49Speaker 03

  It was humbling. Um, I also just felt foolish, you know? Sometimes attention, I was foolish that, that I thought that that Guinness record would be that simple. Uh, cause a minute 27 seconds for a 27 digit number is not, not that impressive, even though that was the first time I ever got it right. I was embarrassed that I thought that was a Guinness record.

• 55:11Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, damn. Well, Ron, on that note, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll pick back up with your naval career.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 55:21Shawn Ryan?

  If you've listened to this show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about functional mushrooms before and why I'm interested in that whole space. So when I started using Mudwater, it made a lot of sense to me right away. What I like about it is the energy feels a lot cleaner and steadier. Their original blend is made with cacao, chai, turmeric, and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi. So instead of feeling overstimulated or crashing later, it's just a smoother, more focused start to the day. And if you still like coffee, they also launched a low calf coffee blend with only 45 milligrams of caffeine plus L-theanine and functional mushrooms.

• 56:03Shawn Ryan?

  So you still get that real coffee flavor, but without feeling completely wired afterwards. The biggest thing I've noticed is there's no hard spike and no crash. It just feels more balanced throughout the day. And everything's USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan.

• 56:21Shawn Ryan?

  All of it. You just mix it with hot water and you're good to go. Ready to make the switch to cleaner energy? Head to mudwtr.com and grab your starter kit today. Right now, our listeners get an exclusive deal up to 43% off starter kits, plus free shipping and a free rechargeable frother when you use code SRS. That's right, up to 43% off with code SRS at M U D W U T R dot com. After your purchase, they'll ask you how you found them. Please show your support and let them know we sent you.

• 57:05Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to Hollywood versus reality. They do it, right?

• 57:13Shawn Ryan?

  What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch any of them. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool.

• 57:24Shawn Ryan?

  Gotta silence it.

• 57:30Shawn Ryan?

  In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're

• 57:41Shawn Ryan?

  and now we're bringing them back.

• 57:48Shawn Ryan?

  It does look pretty fucking cool. I got it. I got it at that.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  I lost my entire family. My mom, my dad, my brother in 18 months.

• 57:59Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. It just, it just in 2022, 2023. And it just, you know, a memory guy, it just wrecked my brain. And so

• 58:12Shawn Ryan?

  Your whole family?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so it it not all at once, you know, they had the decency to space it out six months, you know, six months each, but it really threw me off.

• 58:27Shawn Ryan?

  Who was it?

• 58:28Speaker 03

  It was my mom, my dad and my brother.

• 58:30Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they all passed real quick, but it threw my my me off. It threw my business off, threw my game off.

• 58:37Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet it did.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was had a relationship at the time it ended because I couldn't focus, right? So then I I lost the fourth relationship. Uh, but all that to say, uh, it it it it it threw my business off. Uh, and being here

• 58:58Speaker 03

  really forced me to focus on those Afghanistan names. It's really helped me to start getting my focus back. You know, I I hear you talk about Gabe and I I lost my brother to the same thing you lost Gabe to.

• 59:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, fuck, dude. I'm sorry, man.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, uh, this is helping me get my focus back.

• 59:19Shawn Ryan?

  Good.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  I'm grateful for it.

• 59:21Shawn Ryan?

  I'm happy to hear that, man. Damn, that's tough. I'm sorry that you went through that.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Well, we all go through loss, right? And, uh, it's just normally not all back to back.

• 59:32Shawn Ryan?

  So your military career?

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 59:35Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you want to start? You're an intelligence specialist. I was an O S.

• 59:41Shawn Ryan?

  So you went to school at Damn Neck?

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right, right next door to us.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 59:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I never did the job as of an O S, but, uh, because I went to Bud's up right after that. But, yeah, I wanted to be an intelligence specialist, but then when I saw how long the school was, I was like, I'm not fucking doing that.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  So you picked something much easier. It's gonna be a walk in the park, right?

• 1:00:07Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Well, I wanted to be a SEAL, but I just did not, uh, have the qualifications to for that, you know, you're you're in, you know, I I didn't. I'm an honest man. I didn't, you know, the funniest thing is, is you're in the military. I remember, you know, being with an I S, you know, we're all sitting out and this guy's out there smoking, you know, he's an I S and we're talking and, uh, he's like, yeah, he said, yeah, I was gonna be a SEAL, but I just, you know, he's, you know, he's, he's on the fat boy program right now, you know, in the Navy to lose weight. He's like, yeah, I was gonna be a SEAL, but I just couldn't do it because my eyes, my eyes are bad, you know?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  And then I said, well, you know why I didn't do it? Because I can't fucking do it.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  So I was happy with naval intelligence, though.

• 1:00:55Shawn Ryan?

  So did the did the memorization skill that you've learned help with being an intelligence specialist?

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Well, um, a little bit, a little bit. So a lot, a lot. Um, uh, you you talked about the school, the intelligence school, right? So you go through this, uh, BRIT is what they called it at the time.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  I believe it was basic reserve intelligence training is what they it was is a course.

• 1:01:28Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, sorry to we were there at the same damn time because I ju- I went in the Navy July of 2001. And graduated boot camp right at September 11th because I actually had a hernia surgery I was supposed to fly home for. I'd hit it through all the boot camp because I thought they're going to kick me out because of hernias. So I lied to them, told them I was fine until the very end. It was like, look like a fucking softball company. You know, and I was like, uh, anyway, so by the time I had gotten through like the couple of weeks or whatever a rehab it was, it would have been what? Probably October, November 2001 that I was at Dam Neck and OS School.

• 1:02:13Shawn Ryan?

  Were you there that time?

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  I wasn't. Um, so I I I my enlistment date wasn't actually until March of, uh, 2002.

• 1:02:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Because I went, I was a little bit delayed. I I enlisted around December, but I didn't actually, my official date wasn't until March.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, you asked a question, does the memory, um, help with the school? It does, but I guess backing up a little bit.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  You know, I, uh, I told you I almost got kicked out of the Navy. So during that time, I'm in my the the intelligence training. And, uh, the the Master Chief comes in, the the SSO comes in and says, Ron, come with me. Bring your badge. Everybody's like looking at me like what's going on? And we go back to her office. And I guess a little bit before that part of the story that needs to be told is when you, you know, going in into this community, they ask you a series of questions on a piece of paper. And the questions are, have you ever smoked weed? Have you ever had a speeding ticket? Have you ever been arrested? Have you ever been 90 days late on your credit?

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Have you, you know, all these, all these type of things? And so she handed me the form and a piece of paper and I went, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I handed it back to her. And she, and at the time, I didn't really realize what was going on. She didn't even pay attention to my answers because she got so, so sidetracked with something else. So I didn't put it all together at the time. She said, Ron, I have never, she said, I've been doing this for 10 years or something. I've never seen somebody answer those questions this quickly, that quickly. They're going through it and they're saying, ah, did I really get arrested? Or did I not? Was I really 90 days late or was it 89 or was it 91?

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  She were like, you're just, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes. I've never seen it that fast. I said, well, and I hadn't thought about it. It was, it was yes or no questions, right? So she, guess I didn't pay attention to it. She puts it in her file folder. Fast forward a couple of months later, she walks in, Ron, get your badge.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Go, come with us. And we sat down and she said, Ron, we got your, we've been doing investigations on you. And you've been arrested. You've had over 50 speeding tickets. Uh, I got, I was arrested for, uh, Lawrence for speeding tickets, nothing. I wasn't knocking over a 7-Eleven, you know, but, uh, you've been arrested. You've been 90 days late on your credit, uh, all these things. And I, I said, uh, yeah, I told you that. She said, there's no way you told us that. I said, it's on the form. And she got the form and she was like, I can't believe he told us this. But that was actually quite a selling point for me. Cause the whole reason they don't want you to have IRS debt or all this other stuff, right? It's so nobody's gonna bribe you, right?

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Nobody's gonna go to you and say, hey, China's not gonna say, hey, if you don't.

• 1:05:15Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody's bribing US government officials, Ron, come on.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Who the fuck would do that?

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  It's all above board, right? Right.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  But they figured, well, if somebody goes to bribe Ron, he's just gonna tell him, uh, yeah, I got, I was laying on my credit. Tell him, I don't care. But because of that, and because I cleaned up those things, uh, I got to stay in. And in the, the basic reserve training, the brick training, I did use the memory system. You know, I would, I told you, I, I use rooms to memorize. So I would make, make a house in my brain and the house would be China. And this room would be China's aircraft carriers. This room would be China's aircraft. This room would be other important details that I wanted to know about China's military. Well, then I got 10 pieces of furniture mapped out in this room.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  So now I take the 10 facts about the aircraft carriers, the shape of them, the size, the capabilities, whatever that I think is important to know. And I memorize them around those 10 pieces of furniture. The next, the next room, the 10 features of their aircraft I would want to know. So I'd have, I'd have facts about this, this house is China. This house is Iran. This, this house is another country. And so I really did brief through that, that training. Uh, uh, then the test would, they would give me the test and the test would be something regards to what's the capability of this aircraft? In Iran's arsenal, how far can it fly on a tank of gas? How far can its weapons go? And I would just think back to that room in that house and boom, answer the question.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  So it really did help me mainly in my training.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  It helped a little bit prior to getting in the country of Afghanistan, because I would read books on Afghanistan and I just memorized certain facts a, about it.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Masood was the leader of the Northern Alliance, right? So I would know little facts like that to just give me context on the country.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Um, one day, one day, it didn't, it wasn't, didn't, wasn't as well received as I thought. Um, I wanted, they made me a briefer. I was, I, I was the personal briefer for an O six, an army Colonel. Uh, he was the highest ranking intelligence officer in Afghanistan and I was his personal briefer. So at the end of every 12 hour shift, I would give him a briefing and they selected me for that role just because in my civilian career, you know, I give briefings, right? It's not, we don't call it that, but that, that they thought, okay, that's what we'll do. But, um,

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  I, uh,

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  one day I had this idea that I'm going to give this briefing without reading my notes. So at the end of every 12 hour shift, I would brief him. We call them SIG-Acs. I don't know if that's a term, it was a broad term in the military, significant acts. So, um, SIG-Acs, the significant acts during the day, and I would prepare a report for him. This is everything that happened. We had this happen in Helmand. We had this in Kandahar. We lost this number of the United States military in this incident or this battle. Uh, some of it was from direct fire, some of it was from indirect fire. This is how many the Afghans lost. And I would prepare

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  this report. And at the end of the day, I would brief him on, on what happened. Well, I had this big idea that I'd do it without notes and I'd win favor with the Colonel. So I gave my briefing, uh, without notes and I got it. I got it perfect. But I learned something that day and that was they, there's no harm in holding a piece of paper when you're given a military briefing. And when it's that detailed, even though I had it right, he didn't have full confidence in me that I got it perfectly right. And he said, why? That was good. I appreciate the work you put into that, but use paper next time. I want to have full confidence knowing that you, what you're saying is a hundred percent accurate.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  I said, yes, sir. Um, with that said, I used it in so many other ways.

• 1:09:40Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Interesting. Anything significant you want to talk about in your military career?

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  When a United States Navy SEAL says, is there anything significant in your career? You, you, you blush a little and have a little bit of imposter syndrome, right? Uh, I gave a lot of PowerPoint briefings, uh, and I did do 51 convoys, but nothing happened on those convoys, and I'm perfectly happy that nothing happened on those convoys. Um, I will say that the airport in Kabul, where Abbey Gate was, I've been to that airport 10, 10 times on a convoy. Uh, we, I went on a convoy there one day and nothing happened.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Um, I, we leave, we get back to the base and somebody from our base, I was at ISF headquarters in Kabul, right next to Hamid Karzai's palace, right next to the embassy and a base called Camp Eggers. I learned later, when I memorized everybody who died in the war in Afghanistan, that that's Captain Daniel Eggers. I didn't know it at the time, but he passed. He was the 150, 135th name I said. The guy left from Camp Eggers and he goes to that airport in Kabul, Abbey Gate, that area, and he, he died. It was a vehicle borne IED. And I, as an intelligence guy, I, um, uh, remember that, that video and I remember thinking,

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  man, I was just there. I was just there and now he's there and he's dead. And then two days later, we shut down convoys for a couple of days and then two days later, I went back and you know, that was, I think that's when I first, I, I always had, had been briefing the names of the fallen and I, I didn't, I didn't say the names of the fallen in my briefings, but I was always aware of the deaths, probably more than the average person who was deployed, because I had to know every day how many who died. I never knew that guy's name until about six weeks ago. And I went and figured it out. Who is he on the Afghanistan wall?

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  And based on the time and based on where he died, that was Corporal Adam Quinn. And So that name has an attachment to me now. I think there was one other time that really all this led up to me wanting to memorize the names. I had teeth problems. I still have teeth problems, but I had a tooth problem when I was in the base. And it's a, it's a question. Do you want to go tell your chief? That you have to go to the dentist when you know that's going to require other men getting in a convoy? Doing a completely unnecessary convoy because your teeth is bad. Their lives are at risk, so you can go to the dentist.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  So I kept prolonging it as long as I could. Maybe I can just get to this deployment without having these guys go off base, right? Finally, I've decided I had to get my teeth fixed. And I went in to the room, the intelligence center. And I sat down. It was 10 o'clock at night and it was full of people, full of people. And I sat down and I said, what's going on? I mean, high ranking, high ranking guys. So what's going on? And they said, somebody's about to get schwacked. And we had these monitors on the screens. The whole room was just TV monitors. It was like the TV show 24, just a lot less fancy, right?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  And they had all the monitors were on the same house. And somebody in that house, a high value target was getting ready to get killed. And I sat down and I was just watching and the guy said on the phone, he was communicating. And he said, three minutes out. And then this is, you know, I didn't experience death in the same way you did in your deployment. I experienced death in a very sanitized way on a television screen. But even at that, I thought, wow. These people are about to die. And they have no idea. That person who just walked out of the house to go to the bathroom or whatever, just saved his life.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  And he has no clue. That car that just pulled up and they went in, they're about to die. And then I heard two minutes out. And as a guy who just gave PowerPoint briefings, I'm like, whoa.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Sixty seconds out and then boom and you see these people running and you see the them being chased by I guess a helicopter or some type of and they're they're shooting at them and then you see them fall and I just went back to my room that night and I just wrote in my journal, why do people kill each other? Why is there war? Why is this happening? I understand if we don't kill the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they're gonna kill us, but why? Why? Why? And it bothered me so much and that bother in my heart for

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  any death, not just the United States military and I get and I get the people who are listening, they're gonna say, it's just, it's a person, you know, and but I understand there's some bad people too, but those questions and all these stories that I just mentioned is what led up to me wanting to do the Afghanistan war, to focus on the death of war. So my military career really led to to the tribute I do today.

• 1:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. That bothered you that much, huh?

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Well, it didn't bother me in a PTSD way, right? I don't, you know, not a

• 1:15:37Shawn Ryan?

  Not picking that up.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  No, there's none, nothing. It wasn't

• 1:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  First time we've seen real death. It was our guys killing bad guys, correct?

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Correct, yeah. It bothered me in the sense, it was, you know, it wasn't traumatic, right? It wasn't traumatic. It wasn't necessarily something that I even lost sleep over other than it, but I did, it did start getting that philosophical question in my brain. Why is there war? Why must people kill? Goes back to, you know, it's the it's a story as old as time, you know, Cain and Abel, right? It's not, you know, Harry, Billy Joel, we didn't start the fire. I realized this didn't just start with us, you know, it's the world's been burned, how's the song go, the world's been burning since, world's been turning. But, um, yeah, it's, I think that those moments is what made me want to focus later on the Afghanistan war.

• 1:16:31Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha. Makes sense. Are you familiar with Polymarket?

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am.

• 1:16:37Shawn Ryan?

  All right. This is about war. So

• 1:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Here's the question. Polymarket gives only a 5% chance that the Iranian regime falls by June 30th. You deployed to Kabul as an intelligence specialist. You've seen these con- what these conflicts actually cost. When you look at what's happening in the, in Iran right now, what does your gut tell you?

• 1:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  Will we be, will the regime fall by June 30th?

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  I cannot.

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  My honest answer is I don't know. But I do have an opinion. I don't have an answer on the timeframe. But I do have an opinion.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  It is my sincere hope that there are no boots on the ground. And that, that there are no names to learn. There are already some names to learn.

• 1:17:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  You know,

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  I have no idea how it's gonna turn out. I have zero idea. And I have no educated guess.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  With, my only other thought on this is, and I don't even know, you, you've done, you've talked to so many people, Sarah Adams and Joe Kent. And you've talked to so many people who know so much about the background of this war.

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  And I don't necessarily know that.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  But if it's true, and I don't know if it's true, that we don't want to get nuclear weapons, which seems to be the thrust of the idea, right?

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  I'm not a fan of war. And I'm not even saying we should have done this. Cause I'm saying, I'm just hoping for the best right now. I will say this though. I do fear a nuclear war.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  If you if you say there's only a point two percent chance of of a nuclear war every year, point two percent, every year, there's a ninety nine point eight percent chance of no nuclear war, no nuclear, be it, okay, I can live with that. Well, what happens with percentages is over a hundred years, that two percent becomes an eighteen percent chance that it has happened within a hundred years. If it's just a one percent chance every year that that there is a nuclear war, ninety nine percent chance there's not, after a hundred years, it's a sixty three percent chance that it will have happened.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  I'm not going to be alive in a hundred years, but there are people who are being born today that if there's a one percent chance, there's a sixty three percent chance in their lifetime. On the war in Iran, I hope there's no boots on the ground. I hope it's resolved. I'm not a a fan of anything that's going on, really, and I don't know all the reasons why, other than I just don't like it.

• 1:19:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  But I hope, I also see the point of view of nuclear proliferation as a scary thing.

• 1:19:57Shawn Ryan?

  You've memorized the names of twenty three hundred plus Americans killed in Afghanistan. You built that wall so people will understand the scope of the sacrifice before we go to war again. What does it mean to you that we're now in a conflict with Iran?

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  I don't like it. I don't like it. You know, when I said at I recited the names, and I was I was emotional when I finished saying the names, you know? And when I said at the end of that, I said, it is my hope that humans evolved to the point one day that we can solve our differences with words instead of war. I just hope, I just hope that the people who are in our government, the officials, the politicians, that they are so cautious before they send men and women wearing the cloth of our nation into harms way. And also, they consider the cost on the other side and the overall cost of war. The cost of war is, is the, the, the names that I said today, Master Sergeant Evander Andrews,

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  that was 25 years ago that we lost him, October of 2001. But today, his families, it's not 25 years ago for him. I met his daughters at a NASCAR race. For them, it's, it's every day. And, and I, I'm not, I'm not a fan of the Iran war.

• 1:21:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. If this escalates and Americans start dying in a war with Iran, which they already have, will you memorize those names too?

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Maybe, but probably not. Um, the Afghanistan names, uh, it took 10 months to memorize, rank first name, last name. Today, on your show, was the first time I ever finished it.

• 1:21:44Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  This was it. This was the first time.

• 1:21:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  So, I would, um, I started, when I started memorizing them in 2012, there was 1,853. As I was memorizing it, during that time, we lost 600 more. It was impossible to, to finish it because I couldn't. I would set the wall up, I would do it, but more, more were dying. And I've had some personal events in my life where I haven't done the wall in four or five years. It's never been complete. So, I just, in the last two weeks, got the last name, HM3 Maxton Soviet, memorized.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Um, I think what I would like to do eventually is get to where I know the months that everybody died, like this was, this was September 2011 or something like that. So, I think there's a little bit more I want to do with the Afghanistan wall. But, um, it, it, it, it, it takes so much time. I would love to do Iraq, but there's 4,500 there. The Vietnam wall is 59,000. I think Afghanistan is my tribute. I think that's where I focus my time.

• 1:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  Roger that. Well, congratulations, man.

• 1:23:03Shawn Ryan?

  What a fucking time to do it, huh? Memorial Day, 2026.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  And, and I finished it on your show. And I also thought the timing was so great because we are in this conflict with Iran. And when I, when I say those names,

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  when I ride out the wall, it hap- I've done it over 30 times. NASCAR races, Major League Baseball games, and, and Fox News, whatever. Every time I've done it, people will walk by the wall, they'll look at it, and they'll say, "What is this?" And well, because they can tell it's something military, it looks like the Vietnam War. We'll tell them. Every single time, somebody will say, "Ah, is, is this name on the wall? Is, is that name on the wall?" And I'll show them. But the reason I share that story is you mentioned, um, I finished it today. The people would say, when I was memorized, and I had a friend of mine, she said, "Why don't you just say the names?"

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  Which I did today, and it was, it was very fitting, right? I loved it. I got very emotional. I've never, I've never had tears. I've never had tears. I've done this 35 times. I had tears today. Because it was emotional, because it was complete. The greatest, it's most, I shouldn't say greatest, I don't want to use the word greatest. The most significant memory project of my life is complete today. And when I got to that final 13 names, the tears were just going down my eyes. I, I, I, I couldn't believe it. But when I was training for this, somebody said, "Ron, we, we, uh, why don't you just read them? That way you don't have to write them." You got, because Jeffrey, you gotta spell, you can spell it J E F F R A Y, J E F F E R Y,

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  J E O F F, J E F F R I E, G O F F R I E, G O F F. That's just Jeffrey. So spelling it is so much difficult. And my friend said, "Why don't you just say them? You don't have to worry about spelling." And I said, "No. I want..." Today was powerful. Today was powerful. But I wanted people to look at it and walk by that wall and say, Wow, I didn't know it was this many. I want them to understand. And I think today that was accomplished just by saying the names. But it's my hope that maybe a politician heard it. And for two hours, that politician realized, wow, that guy just talked for two hours.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  And he said, everybody that we lost, that's not including necessarily all the civilians. That's not including everybody in Iraq. And that's what I want. I want people to understand the cost of war. Good for you, man. Good for you. That's a hell of a statement.

• 1:25:58Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:26:42Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:27:12Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:27:53Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:28:32Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so let's move back to your service. So you were gonna do, you were gonna do the, the, the memory championships while you're in, correct?

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  What happened to that?

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  Some good research there. Maybe you guys are in military intelligence.

• 1:28:46Shawn Ryan?

  Oh geez, don't spread that rumor. Everybody already thinks that.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right. That's right. Okay, all right. Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'm sure, yeah. Anyways, uh, I was, so during, I, time to join the, the military, I was perfecting my, my courses. I was really trying to get my business. And by the way, if it's okay, I, I, if people were interested in this course, they wanted to learn a little bit more, the next step to do that is BrainAthlete.com, uh, have a great course there that is really the next step that they need to perfect their memory. But during that time, that I was developing the courses and...

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  I was developing my business. I thought I've got to prove that I'm a memory champion. Or I gotta take this out of my bio. I don't want to be one of those lame businessmen that says, "We're the top of the world, but you got nothing to prove it, right?" So I said, "USA Memory Championship, that's it. That's what I'm gonna do." And then I started looking at the records. Ah, this guy memorized a deck of cards,

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  in a minute forty seconds. There's no way. A shuffled deck of cards? He memorized it, and then he set the cards down, and then he reassembled a second deck to match the first deck from memory? There's no way. And then I looked, this other guy had memorized a hundred and forty digit number in five minutes. I'm like, "There's no..." Wow, holy shit. A hundred and forty digits? He looked at it, they took the paper away, and then he wrote a hundred and forty digits. And I'm like, "Oh, now I'm starting to get intimidated." This is gonna be, this is gonna be a redo of the Guinness Record thing, except it's not gonna be, uh, a misunderstanding, I'm just gonna lose.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  You know, I'm just gonna flat out lose this. And, uh, but I thought, you know what? This is it, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. You have to do this, Ron. So I started training, and my goal was to compete in, well, I really didn't start training, but I just set my sights on it. I started thinking about how would I memorize a deck of cards, started developing a strategy. And this was March, February, March of, uh, 2007. I'm like, "I'm gonna compete in the 2007 USA Memory Championship." I'm at the base in Fort Worth, the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base. Thinking about, "I'm gonna compete in this memory tournament." Uh, a guy walks by me, and, um, he says, "White, are you gonna volunteer to go to Iraq or Afghanistan?" I said, "I can't go, man, I got a business. I'd have to cancel contracts, refund devocats, I can't go."

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  He said, "Chill out, White, you're not going." Two hours later, this guy says, "White, you gonna volunteer to go to Iraq or Afghanistan?" I said, "I can't go, man, I got, I got contracts that have to refund." And two hours later, my, my chief said, "White, do you wanna go?" And I looked, I said, I don't want to go, chief. I got a business. I said, but why are you asking me this? And he said, well, we got a list of people here. We're going to send these 25 people, but we're asking for volunteers before they get voluntold. And I said, I don't want to go. He said, you're not on the list. You don't have to go. Over the next couple of days, there was more conversations and, and I did end up going, which kept me from competing in the 2007 USA Memory Championships. That's why I didn't compete. I was deployed.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  When I returned, the 2008 USA Memory Championships was happening. I'd been back in the country six weeks. I said, I'm gonna give this a shot. I'm pretty relaxed. I have no, I have no reason, if I lose this, that's pretty acceptable. You know, I've been in Afghanistan, I haven't been training. This is, if, if there's any time to lose, this is the time that I have a built in excuse to lose.

• 1:32:28Shawn Ryan?

  You're gaming the system, looking for a, a great way to look when you lose?

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So I go in and I compete and I come in fourth place and, uh, out of like 50 people. And I'm like, wow, I didn't even train for this. And I came in fourth place. I said, I'm gonna win this thing. I'm gonna win. So I began training diligently for the 2009 USA Memory Championship. And I, uh, got a former US champion, David Thomas, to give me some ideas and strategies. And he really helped me out a lot. But my biggest coach, and most people can't even understand this, you might understand this, my biggest coach for the USA Memory Championship was not a memory guy. It was a United States Navy

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  SEAL, former SEAL. His name was TC Cummings. He served, uh, in the nineties. And people all the time are like, Ron, why in the world would you hire a United States Navy SEAL to train for a memory tournament? What in the world do they know about memorizing a deck of cards? He knows nothing about memorizing a deck of cards. But what Navy SEALs do know is they do know how to be calm under pressure. They know how to believe in themselves. They don't, they don't get ruffled. They know how to structure their training so they don't just win, they dominate. So I hired this guy, TC Cummings, and he structured my training like a Navy SEAL would structure training, you know, for a memory tournament, not for, but, um, you know, there was a norm, I believe it was a Norman Schwarzkopf quote, and TC

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  would say it to me a lot. Um, the more you sweat in times of peace, the less you bleed in times of war. So he would, he said, Ron, how are your competitors training for this memory tournament? I said, oh, well, you know, they've got, they're telling their kids to be quiet, you know, in the next room and they're turning off the radio and they're training in complete silence. He said, that's not how a Navy SEAL trains. We don't train in perfect conditions. I said, TC, what do you want? Are you going to shoot off a gun over my head while I'm memorizing a deck of cards? What are you going to do? He said, you need to make your, your training. And this was him talking to me and I'm sure you, you, you would feel this as well. I don't know anything about SEAL training, but he said, Ron, we make our training so tough.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  That sometimes it's tougher than the actual war. And when we get to war, we don't just win, we dominate. He said, that's what you need to do. He said, you don't want to train in perfect conditions. He said, I want you to get. It was, it was the winter time. He said, I want you to get plastic playing cards. I want you to get snorkel gear. And get a wet suit because it's 30 degrees outside and you're going to train underwater. I'm like, what? I'm going to train for a memory tournament underwater? So I'm at the apartment swimming pool. I got these goggles on.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  I guarantee you, I'm the only nerd training for this tournament in a swimming pool. And the water's seeping into my goggles, you know, I'm trying to breathe, I'm floating around. I got these plastic playing cards. And I'm memorizing underwater. But what it really helped me do was learn how to focus when all these distractions were going on. And that's, and that's what he wanted. And then I would get out of the pool and I would reassemble the deck of cards. I got to the point where I could memorize a deck of cards underwater faster than anybody in the United States could do above water at a tournament. Uh, I had a, a trip to Australia during that time, so I didn't have to wear snorkel gear and there was people all out at the pool.

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  And imagine this, you're at the pool and this guy's walking out there with snorkel gear, plastic playing cards. He jumps in the water. He's memorizing a deck of cards. Kid's got a volleyball, it's bouncing off the top of my head. People are bumping into me and I'm memorizing. Then I get out and I reassemble the deck of cards. It was trained like that. When we got to the actual tournament. So by the time we got to the, the, um, event, the card event, it was like three events in. And so we're at the card event. By this time I'd already set a United States record. So all the TV cameras were on me. So I was getting ready to go. All these cameras around me, they were, they were taking pictures. And the judge said, go. And when the judge said, go, I zoomed through it. I was like, this is so easy.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  There's no water going down my mask right now. I set it down, boom. And um, then we, it was a minute 27 seconds, fastest in the, in the United States at the time. And the judge flipped him over, Karen Pinson, and Karen, I remember, like it was yesterday, Karen said, we got a new US record. And she high-fived me. And there were some kids over here, my fellow nerds, they, they said, we want to protest that score. We want to protest that event. And Tony DiTino, the founder of the USA Memory Championship, said, why do you want to protest that event? He said, when that event was going on, people were dropping plates in the other room, and they were. I, I hadn't registered when I was memorizing, but when they said that, I was like, oh yeah, I did hear something.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  And they said, there was plates, and it distracted us. And a whole row of people said, yeah, we couldn't focus after that. We didn't get it. And Tony DiTito said, well, this guy sitting right here, Ron, he just broke the United States' record, and the plates were dropping when he was memorizing too, the, the results stand. And that's when it really clicked in my mind. Man, this training that TC gave me was really focusing my mind to train with distractions. He had me go to country western bars, and you know, all these cute girls are dancing around or whatever. And, and he said, Ron, I want you to go up to some girls, find the cutest ones you can find, and, and tell, ask them if they will watch you memorize a deck of cards. I'm like, TC, that's the most awkward thing to do. Number one, it's not going to get me anywhere. No, no girls ever like, oh,

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  how fast can you memorize these numbers? I want to give you my phone number, right? It, that, that never worked that way. But if she does, at least she'll remember it. That's right, that's right. Well, believe me, I tried that angle for the first couple of years, and it does not work. Maybe it's just me that doesn't work with, maybe a different guy would work, but uh, so I'd be at a country bar, I'd be at my, the restaurants, and have people staring at me. Um, but it was, it was his training, and I really owe OTC a lot. Um, I'll, I'll say one other thing. Um, there was one, there was one day that I, I, he, he, we had to be up and training by 8:30 in the morning. I had to be training by 8:30. This day I wasn't, and we were doing our weekly call. And he said, Ron,

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  He's, he was a hospital corpsman in the Navy. So he was always having to listen to his guys, you know, they wouldn't like you. You were hurt in boot camp, right? Is that where you were hurt? Yeah. And you didn't say anything. Hmm. That's so common, right? Especially with the guys with the SEAL mentality, the warrior, the warrior mentality. They're not going to tell you when they're injured because they don't want to be taken away from their job. So as a SEAL, as the hospital corpsman guy, he had to listen for the things that they weren't telling him. And he said, Ron, there's something, man, here that you're not telling me. I don't know what it is, but something's not right. So TC, I, I, I was not training by eight thirty. I, I slept late today.

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  He said, well, in the SEALs, when we didn't do something, we had to face a consequence. If we had a goal and we didn't get it, we had to face a consequence. Wasn't a punishment, but it was a consequence. I said, well, what's my consequence, TC? He said, that's up to you. He said, personally, I didn't like cold. I hated cold. He said, I, she said, you decide. So I hung up the phone and I thought, I don't like cold either. It's lower than thirty degrees outside right now. I got a swimming pool here. So I get my girlfriend on the phone and I said, hey, I'm getting ready to swim around this pool for a minute or whatever.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  But if I'm not back in a minute, could you send the parapetics?

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  So I jump in the water. I swam, I've never felt water that cold. I thought, I thought, oh, when I jump in the water, I'm going to get used to it and this is going to feel good. That never happened. It was cold. It was like jumping in a glass of iced tea, you know, and I was, it was, I don't know. It was less than thirty degrees outside and I swam around. I got, got out of that water, but I tell you what? When I walked into that USA memory championship, I knew I could trust myself. I knew that if I didn't do something I said I was going to do, I'd face a consequence. I'd wipe the slate clean and it was no longer in the back of my mind. There was no doubt in the back of my mind. I wasn't going to be sitting up there on stage, getting ready to memorize a deck of cards. Who am I to be the USA Memory Champion? I can't even get up at 8:30.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't get up at 8:30, but I faced a consequence thanks to my Navy SEAL coach, and it gave me a clear conscience. One other short story on him. One day, I didn't want to train. I said, TC, I'm not training today, I'm sick. He said, oh, wonderful. This is great. I said, why is this great? I'm sick. He said, well, if the USA Memory Championship happens, are you not going to compete because you're sick? I'm like, no, I would compete then, but I'm not going to train when I'm sick. He said, no, Ron, this is the perfect, this is a gift from God. You are, you are, this is a gift from God. You are, you are going to be able to train and see what it's like to compete when you're not your best. Well, in 2009, I walked into that tournament. My belief in myself was so strong because of this, this training.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  I walked up to the trophy, and I said, and I said it to myself, it wasn't to intimidate anybody else, it was just for me. I walked over to the trophy, and I said, you're going home with me. And I knew it, I just knew it. People were walking up to me, and all the competitors, you know, they're trying to size each other up. They're like, hey, how was your training on cards? How was your training on numbers? And I would answer them, but they never once noticed, I didn't ask them, how's your training going? Because I didn't care. I just knew I hit my numbers, I'm going to win. That year, I set the record for the fastest to memorize a deck of cards, a minute and 27 seconds. I set the record for memorizing a 167-digit number in five minutes, and I became the USA Memory Champion.

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  How do you, I mean, so, hold on, just walk me through that strategy with the deck and the number. How do you do it? So it's the same way. Really, it's the same way. The first thing that you want to do, if you want to remember anything, you want to memorize anything, there are a couple of different techniques. The, the, the, the primary technique that I would recommend to anybody, whether it's a deck of cards, a speech, a student wants to remember, get better grades, create yourself a mind palace for you. This room is a mind palace for me. There's a picture back here, behind my head, that's my number one location in this room. This chair is number two, the floor right here is number three. I, I, I don't know what, what type of weapon that is. What is that weapon?

• 1:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Which one?

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  You got quite a bit right there. The one next to the, the belt.

• 1:43:22Shawn Ryan?

  That is a Sig Sauer MPX 9mm suppressed.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  Nice. That's my number four location. This flag is five. That flag is six. These lights are seven. The cigars are eight. That glass of alcohol up there is nine. The, the, that shelf with that on it is nine. Um, 10 is this picture with the cross. Um, 11 is this picture of you.

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  Uh, 12 is the top of your head. You want to know something crazy, Sean?

• 1:43:57Shawn Ryan?

  About the top of my head?

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  You're braver than me. That's the direction I need to go right now. I'm just holding out hope like the people don't notice yet, but everybody notices. Uh, but that is my number 12 location. Here's something crazy. Uh, this is, this was so powerful. I got goosebumps when I realized this. So to map out this room, to make this room right here a mind palace, which believe it or not, I'm answering your question on the deck of cards. But when I made this room a mind palace, I wanted to get a picture, pictures of the room. Well, only way I could do that was YouTube, right? So I grabbed this, uh, it was with the, your interview with Joe Kent. I grabbed a screenshot of Joe sitting in this chair. So I got this chair and I got that.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  I grabbed a screenshot of this for those, right? And then I grabbed a screenshot of you for you and what's behind you. All I was looking for in that entire interview was a picture of, a shot of this, this angle with your eyes open. I didn't want to get my screenshot and, you know, you going like that or something like that, right? So I, I did not plan it at all. I didn't, it wasn't planned at all. The, I, I saw a picture of you with your eyes open and I screenshotted it. And I put it in my mind palace PowerPoint. And then when I attached the final 13 names to Abby Gate,

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  I attached them to this room. Staff Sergeant Ryan Nass, Lance Corporal Dylan Marola, Corporal Humbert Sanchez. And then Sergeant Nicole G, Sergeant Johnny Rosario, Corporal David Page, Staff Sergeant Darren Hoover, Corporal Hunter.

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  Lopez, Lance Corporal Jared Schmidt, Lance Corporal Riley McCollum, Lance Corporal David Espinoza, top of your head, Lance Corporal Kareem Nakoo. The screenshot that I caught of you that was not planned, Sean. This was totally unplanned. Was a shot of you going like that. And I attached HM3 Maxton Soviak to you, to your fingers. Well, it didn't hit me till later. This is the peace sign, man. This is the peace sign. And the whole reason I did the Afghanistan wall is to make us cautious to go to war. So that was powerful for me. Wow. This is a mind palace. That's how I memorized the names.

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Now, I'll transition a little bit to a deck of cards.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Let me tell you the most simple way to memorize a deck of cards. There's a little bit more advanced way. Most simple way is this, you map out a room. Then you have a picture for every, every, um, card. So for me, the King of Hearts is my mom. Why not the Queen of Hearts? Because in my memory system, this is the way it worked out. King of Hearts is my mom.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  Ace of Spades is Drew Carey. Right? Let's, let's switch, just switch, let's switch this to you, not me. Think of somebody that you love a lot. A man, a woman, whoever. And tell me, I, I'm not, uh, who, who is it? Tell you? Yeah, I'm not, I, I cannot do what that Oz guy did. You know what I'm saying? Huh? My daughter. Perfect.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  And, um,

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  let's make her the Queen of Hearts.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  What does your daughter like to do? What's, what's one, one thing she likes to do? Terrorize people. Terrorize people. Where does she like to do this? Everywhere. Everywhere. So your daughter terrorizing people is the Queen of Hearts. Now, Give me a, a, a name of, of somebody that you know that you worked with in the military, just first name, military, or your job here, or however you want to do it. You can even make up a name. Okay. And what is that? Eddie. Eddie. Eddie Penny? Yup. Okay, I'm not the mentalist, but I know, um, I got a story about him. Um, Eddie Penny, let's make him, I always like to make spades, people that I've worked with,

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  uh, um, let's make him the king of spades. So Eddie Penny, the king of spades, maybe he's got his weapon, right? Your daughter, terrorizing Eddie Penny with his weapon, king of spades. One more, um, let's think of a singer, a man or a woman singer famous, who, who can you think of? Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger. So, the number three, if you put it like this, it looks like an M, right? So the three for me is always an M. So let's make Mick Jagger the three of clubs, because he, you hear his songs in dance clubs, right? We'll stop there. So now, you're at the table, and you're memorizing a deck of cards. You've got, you think back to this room.

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  First card gets played, and that first card gets played is the king of spades. That's Eddie. Boom, you attach it on your number one location, you see Eddie boom, shooting up that picture right there. The next card that gets played is the queen of hearts. That's your daughter. Now your daughter's standing in this chair, and she's terrorizing, and she's going crazy right here, and then the next card that gets played is the three of clubs, Mick Jagger. So now you imagine Mick Jagger's over here, and he's interacting with, with this right here. Then you set the cards down, and you have to recite the cards. You just walk back around the room.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, that was, uh, Eddie Penny over here, so that's the king of clubs. This was my daughter, so that's the queen of hearts, and that was Mick Jagger, so that's the three of clubs.

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  King of spades.

• 1:49:56Shawn Ryan?

  King of spades.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  The memory, see, the memory guy, the king of spades back there. But that's, that's the general concept.

• 1:50:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Shawn Ryan?

  How about the number? How many digits did you say? A hundred and sixty seven digits?

• 1:50:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, same concept. Uh, the, let's do twenty ones a deck of cards, right? The blackjack table. Uh, twenty five could be a quarter, twenty five cents. Um, fifty five could be a speed limit sign, right? We'll just do those three. Now, the first number you see is fifty five. So now you've got a, a speed limit sign that you're imagining here, but you just can't see a speed limit sign. You've got to imagine cars are zooming by, right? Like, if you just saw a speed limit sign on this picture back here, that's a real passive picture. Your brain doesn't remember passive pictures. You need action and emotion. That's why every single person listening to this right now, they can tell you where, where they were on September eleventh. They can't tell you where they were on October, where were you on September eleventh?

• 1:50:51Shawn Ryan?

  I just told you I was, uh, coming out of surgery.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Yes. And you know, and even, you know it, that, that, that, that, uh, emotion of September eleventh synced it in, right? But you can't tell me where you were October twenty fifth of that year. Yeah. We remember things that have emotion tied to them. So you remember the car accident, but you can't remember where, when you drove two weeks ago and you got gas in your car, right? So you gotta make these stories crazy. Right here, we got a speed limit sign and people are zooming by, that's fifty five. Um, right here, you got people, um, at a blackjack table, right? For the number twenty one. For a deck of cards. So you take the pictures, or you take numbers, you turn them into a picture, and then you attach those pictures around, around the room in a, in a sequence.

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  Um, and that's, that's essentially it. There's a process of turning numbers into pictures, but that's how you could do it with some very basic pictures.

• 1:51:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:52Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Kind of.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  It, it makes, it's the, it's the mind.

• 1:51:57Shawn Ryan?

  How, how long did it take you to memorize that? A hundred and sixty seven digit number, five minutes?

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  Five minutes.

• 1:52:02Shawn Ryan?

  And holy shit, what, what is that? That's a, so you're coming up with, what's five minutes? What, five times sixty is, oh, what, three hundred?

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:52:13Shawn Ryan?

  So, three hundred divided by, what, a hundred and sixty-seven? That's less than, so you're coming up with a story less, a, a story less than every two seconds.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  That's right. Um.

• 1:52:31Shawn Ryan?

  That's fucking crazy.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  But kinda, kinda, you're right, you're on the right track there. Based on how I described it to you, yes. Based on what I just said to you is how I did it, yes. But I did it a little bit, little bit more of an advanced way. Um, I was memorizing seven digits at a time. So I was seeing a group of seven numbers, and I was creating a picture for that seven-digit number. So, in memory, the more you can compress the data, the faster you can memorize. So, let's say you have a picture for every card, right? You know, your daughter's a, a, a card, Eddie's, Eddie's a card, um. If you do that, that way, and you wanna memorize fifty-two cards, you need fifty-two pieces of furniture, right? Fifty-two pictures.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Well, what if you can take a series of three cards? And those three cards get played, and that's one picture? Then, you take that one picture and you put it on the location back here.

• 1:53:28Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  So the, so I was using seventeen locations when I memorized the deck of cards. When I would do numbers, it was seven numbers per location.

• 1:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Wow. I mean, that's still moving.

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  It is, but here's the thing, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm an honest man. I don't, I would be remiss if I did not say, my record was one minute and twenty-seven seconds. The current record is nineteen seconds.

• 1:53:56Shawn Ryan?

  Nineteen seconds? Nineteen seconds?

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  I believe it's right around there, around the twenty-second mark. Yeah, I think, yeah, it was a world record for a while. Yeah. And my record of a hundred and sixty-seven digit numbers, there's guys doing four hundred digits now at the USA Memory Championship. Um, so my records were impressive for the time, uh, you know, they've been beat. And I'm okay with that. I love that. I love that. I love that the sport's evolving. And yes, I call it a sport, right? Nerds got to have a sport too. Um, but I love that the sport is evolving. I love seeing these guys uh, do things that I, I was never able to achieve in memory, and I think it's fantastic.

• 1:54:40Shawn Ryan?

  What do these people say out on the street? I mean, your Instagram is just full of going up to what appear to be random strangers, you know, and just going, hey, do you want to memorize the Bill of Rights? If you don't, I'll give you 50 bucks.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:54:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, hey, do you want to memorize the 10 commandments? Do you want to memorize? Whatever it is, I mean, what are these, what are, are these people like? They look a little apprehensive, but what do they say after it's over?

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  They're amazed.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  Um, so the funny thing about that, it may be interesting thing, I don't know. You'll be, you and everybody else will be the verdict if it's interesting or not, but the way that evolved. So this is 11, 11 months ago, 11 months ago. I had 13,000 followers on Instagram. Uh, I'm about to-

• 1:55:33Shawn Ryan?

  11 months ago?

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  13,000. Uh, I'll cross 1.8 million sometime very soon. Um, I had, um, a business coach. He's not a social media guy. He's just a business coach, right? Uh, Andy Elliott. And I sat down with him and he said, I said, Ron, tell me about your business. I told him. He said, I got an idea. I got an idea. Get yourself a camera and go out there and talk to people and, um, walk up to them and do these memory things. I'm like, ah, I really don't want to do this. It's kind of, you know, it's kind of uncomfortable approach to strangers, but whatever. He gave me this idea. Let me test run it. So- I would walk up and I would say, excuse me, sir.

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  And it really is, ninety, ninety-nine point nine percent are people I've never met before. There is one percent that I do know. And for those, we, we make it real. I say, this is whoever, I'm gonna teach them something today. But I walk up to these people and I'll say, excuse me, sir. If I could teach you how to memorize the Bill of Rights, the Presidents, the Ten Commandments, whatever, really fast, I'll give you fifty bucks. And what I've learned is that even offering people fifty bucks, fifty percent of the people say no, and almost everybody over forty says no. Right?

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  You know, some people have commented, Ron, you're just picking young, uh, young people. Well, they're the ones who are gonna say yes to social media. But I go up to them and I, I, uh, will say, I can teach you this. And I think the reason that it caught on so well is maybe the fifty dollars gamifies it a little bit and people are curious if they're gonna, they're gonna get that. And spoiler alert, I give everybody the fifty dollars regardless of what happens. I appreciate their time, right? But as I'm teaching them, I think what drew it to, what drew people to it was they're watching somebody learn something on the spot, somebody who doesn't think that they're smart, the viewer's learning something on the spot and everybody wins.

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  And that person walks away, three minutes later, like, I can't believe I just, I just memorized the Ten Commandments, or I just memorized the first ten Presidents. Uh, and it's just a real positive thing and I love doing it.

• 1:57:50Shawn Ryan?

  You got one for me?

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:57:53Shawn Ryan?

  Um. You gonna teach me how to do one?

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 1:57:56Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's do it.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Okay. Um.

• 1:57:59Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna be fucking embarrassed as shit if I don't get this, by the way.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  No, you're not. Everybody says that. Everybody says that and everybody gets it. So, you wanna do the Ten Commandments?

• 1:58:13Shawn Ryan?

  I already know them.

• 1:58:14Speaker 03

  Okay, nice. I'm assuming you know the Bill of Rights?

• 1:58:18Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Okay, let's do that.

• 1:58:21Shawn Ryan?

  All of it.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  Let's do that. Let's use our fingers. So, first one, imagine this is a microphone.

• 1:58:28Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, I, I know the majority of it.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  You know the majority of it.

• 1:58:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, let's do something else.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:58:33Shawn Ryan?

  I don't wanna cheat.

• 1:58:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  How about this one, uh, this one's a little bit more involved. But how about we do the Beatitudes, Matthew, chapter five? Okay. Okay. So is there a, there's a picture back here behind me? There's a lot of pictures back there behind you. Okay. The one, uh, the painting? Or just, are you just telling me to pick one? You pick one. Okay. Um.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  So this is the Beatitudes, comes from the Sermon on the Mount.

• 1:59:21Speaker 03

  Okay, there it is.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. On this picture behind me, I want you to imagine the frame is the kingdom of heaven. It's gold, right? It's the kingdom of heaven. And I want you to imagine a spirit, like, like a ghost is just pouring down. So just, we're not going to memorize the blessed are the, just the, the main thing. Poor in spirit, kingdom of heaven. So what's on the, the, the back there? The kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The next one is blessed those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. We're only going to think the two things. People who mourn are comforted. Imagine me with tears rolling down my face, I'm mourning. And I got a comforter around me.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  Blessed are those who mourn, they should be comforted. So which one is this? Okay. They, the people who- Blessed those who mourn are, are the, in the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the, those who mourn, because they shall be- Comforted. Comforted. Blessed are the poor in, back here on this frame, we had a spirit pouring down. Blessed are the poor in- Spirit, the frame, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Okay. Blessed are those who mourn, right here, for theirs, blessed, for they shall be comforted. I want you to, um, look down here at my shoes and I'm telling you a story and I'm saying, these are my shoes. This is me. The word is meek. So what are my shoes gonna represent? Meek. And they inherit the earth. So they're, we're on the ground, earth. So the meek will inherit what? The earth.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  Now let's just review. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the. Kingdom of heaven. Blessed those who mourn, for they shall be. Comforted. Blessed are the meek, for theirs, they shall inherit. The earth. The earth. So now we go to, um, let's go to this, this right up here. And blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Imagine somebody is hungering and thirsting and, and they, they want something to eat and drink. So over there, they're eating, they're drinking, they're being filled. Hungering, thirsting, being filled. The phrase is this, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. So what, what blessed are those who what?

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  Hunger and righteousness, for they shall be filled. Perfect. We'll do one more and then we'll review and believe it or not, there's only two more. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.

• 2:01:50Speaker 03

  So, over here on these UFC gloves, I want you to imagine whose gloves are those? These ones? Yeah. Andrej Avlaskis. He is showing mercy on somebody. He's got those gloves, he's showing mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy. So what is that one? Blessed are the merciful, so they should be shown mercy. Let's review real quick. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the. Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be. Comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit. The earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  Shit. Filled. Filled. Filled. They're filling them, they're, they're filling their stomachs up. Um.

• 2:02:33Speaker 03

  Blessed are the merciful, the gloves, for they shall be shown. Mercy. Mercy. And then this last one, or there's two more. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. I want you to see this guy right here, looking out of the airplane, and regardless of what people say about him, I think he has a pure heart. Blessed are the, and I'm making a joke there, of course you do. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. You're looking out of that window and you're seeing God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The pure in heart shall what? See in God. See God. One last one, you got this shot, I promise you. I'm gonna say it with you.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Blessed are those, let's, this last one is the American flag. The frame is the kingdom of heaven, just like the frame was the kingdom of heaven over here, right? Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:23Speaker 03

  I want you to imagine that somebody is being persecuted for being an American over there. Mm-hmm. Blessed are those who are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So blessed are those who persecuted, think of the frame, and what does the frame tell us? They'll enter the kingdom of heaven. Perfect. I'm gonna say all these with you and you're done. That's it. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the, what, the, think of the frame. What's that? Blessed, the, the frame is telling us the kingdom of heaven. So back here on this, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the. Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be. Comforted. Blessed are meek, for they shall inherit the. Earth.

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  Earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst of righteousness, for they shall be. Filled. Filled. Blessed are the, the gla, the, the, the gloves. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown. Mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  You're looking out that window of the helicopter. See God. See God. Blessed are those who are purch, persecuted.

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Booyah, baby. So, now Sean, that was a little bit more involved than my average video on the street. Um, it's more just one word, you know, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms. But you may, you may, right now, you may be saying to yourself, Ron, I don't got it perfect. I don't got it perfect. You, you've got it in your brain, though. So now, this afternoon, you review it. You review it again. You review it tonight. You review it tomorrow. Then you got it.

• 2:05:01Shawn Ryan?

  Kingdom of heaven, comforted, filled.

• 2:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  Mercy.

• 2:05:13Shawn Ryan?

  See God, kingdom of heaven. Is that it? Is that all of them?

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  Did you say inherit the earth?

• 2:05:18Shawn Ryan?

  Inherit the earth.

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  That's awesome, man. That's awesome. And that's how memory works. You take what you want to remember and you visualize it around a room. You, you see it interacting with that location. If, if, if what's important to you is scripture and your faith, you could map, you could have, you could have, this is called a mind palace. You could map out a mind palace for your faith. If it is, you want to be, oh, look at this, the, the seal tried it. How great is that on this Bible? Um, you want to give a business speech? You map out your business speech and you, you visualize it around a room. This system was developed, as the legend goes, uh, 2,500 years ago, by a man named Simonides. The legend's not true, but it's a story that goes back 2,500 years.

• 2:06:02Speaker 03

  And Roman orators, 2,000 years ago, this is true. Roman orators would use this system to give their speeches on the floor of the Roman Senate. They would take the first thing they want to say and put there. The second thing here, the third thing here, the fourth thing here. Legend has it, is that the saying, in the first place, in the second place, in the third place, it originates from this system. The speakers would say, in the first place, in the second place. Is that true or not? I don't know. But it fits the, the system.

• 2:06:35Shawn Ryan?

  I do want to memorize scripture. That's one thing. I'm new at this. Actually, I guess I'm not that new anymore. It's been about two years, but we're in the Bible Belt here in Tennessee and everybody has scripture memorized, except me.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:06:50Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you, I mean, where do you start? I know I saw on your website, you have this this course, Jiu Jitsu, a bunch of stuff. What, how do you, where do you start with this? Is it specific scriptures or is it you're gonna memorize, it teaches you to memorize whatever you want to memorize?

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  It's whatever you want to memorize. A lot of people um want to memorize scripture word for word. A lot of people, which that's the primary desire. There is others though. So this is, here's a crazy story.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  I, I lost my faith a little bit.

• 2:07:29Speaker 03

  You know, in, in the 2010 to 2020, that, that timeframe. And

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  my mom, I went up, she was a very religious lady. And I

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  I want to honor her legacy. I don't, I don't think she would mind me telling this story. She's passed. She said, uh, she was a hoarder. And I wanted to help her clean. It was a huge heartache that I had that she lived like that. And one day, and I'm answering your question on scripture memory, believe it or not.

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  One day I said, okay, this is the day. I'm gonna go over there and I'm gonna talk to her about this house. And I showed up and um she didn't answer the door. And I hadn't been in her house in the last 10 years or that timeframe, 10 years. I hadn't been in her house four or five times. The stench was overwhelming. It broke my heart. It, I could, there was nowhere to sit down. Even if it smells like flowers in there. There was one chair and she slept in that chair. There was nowhere to sit down. Stuff was stacked to the roof. I knocked on the door and she didn't answer. And

• 2:08:41Speaker 03

  So I said, I gotta go in. I opened the door and I walked in the kitchen. I didn't see her, but I saw a possum, a possum sitting on the counter, eating a bowl of soup. And he was just looked at me and was like, come on in, dude. You know, I got this bowl of soup. You want any? And I was like, a possum. And I got so mad, the anger just swelled up in my heart. Not at my mom, but that she was living like this. And I went in the backyard and I found her. I said, Mom, there's a possum in your house. And she said, no, there's not. I said, yes, there is. She said, show me. So we went in the house and I said, he was right there. She said, no, are you kidding me? I don't, I don't believe that. I said, Mom, I've had it. I've had it. You're my mom. This breaks my heart. I can't stand this anymore. I'm hiring a professional hoarding crew and we're gonna clean your house.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  Well, I was mad though. And Sean, I said something that day that I'll regret for the rest of my life. It haunts me to this day. I wanted to shock my mom because she wasn't as mad as I was. She wasn't as heartbroken as I was, but she's a woman of faith. So I said, Mom, there's no God. There's no God. God would not let you live like this. And I saw the look on her face. I got the reaction, but I should not have said it. And she, we had a falling out because of that. Not much. My mom loved me. The falling out didn't last but more than a couple of hours. But she would text me, Ronnie, I'm gonna be praying for you to get back to God. Ronnie, I'm, I'm praying for you to get your faith back in God. I know you, you had it at one point.

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  And I said, Mom, I don't care about any of that. I just want your house cleaned. So August the 10th, I had a professional hoarding crew. This was just a couple of weeks after that. They showed up. They were behind me. I knocked on the door and she didn't answer. And I went to the window, looked through the window and she was on the floor. And I was through that window as fast as I could. And I got down there. The day, the day that I had determined was gonna be the day we were gonna change my mom's life, I found her dead on the floor. And I said, Mom, get up, get up, get up. And

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  During that day, I looked at her refrigerator. I'd been in the house two weeks prior. There was a picture that was on the refrigerator that wasn't on there. Two weeks prior, and it was a picture of me with Proverbs 22:6. Train up child in the way of the Lord, and when he is older, he will not depart from it. I knew the scripture because she had trained me that way. I knew she'd been praying for me to get my faith back in God. And after that happened, which is a series of events that was undeniable, that I saw, okay, there this, Ron, you're not the smartest guy in the world. You haven't figured out. There's, there's no God. There's some stuff out here that you don't know about. So that's when I started opening up the Bible again, and that's when I started praying.

• 2:11:29Speaker 03

  And during that time, I developed a, a course called the 1189 Bible Memory Course. There's 1189 chapters in the Bible, 1189. And I met, by the way, I've never done the course, but I developed this course.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  That somebody could say, what's in Exodus, chapter 20, the 10 commandments? What's in Numbers, chapter nine, following the Israelites? Uh, the Israelites following the cloud of smoke and fire through the desert. So I did it as a tribute to my mom, just to get into the Bible. I created this course. I didn't necessarily memorize it, so I don't necessarily, but I just created it for other people. I put it up there on my website, and one day, I was getting sales on my website. I'm like, what in the world is going on? People are buying this 1189 course? And I don't even know what's going on. A guy had done it. He had created a mind palace with 1189 locations, and he knows what's in every single chapter of the Bible now. And he did some podcasts and, um, and wow.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  That was my entry into, into faith. I really, mind if I tell you what Psalms, chapter one says about memorizing scripture? Psalm, chapter one says, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He'll be like a tree planted by streams of water, who in its season yields much fruit, and whose leaf does not wither. And whatever he does, he prospers. But not so the wicked. They are like the chaff that the wind blows away. Neither will sinners stand in judgment, or the wicked in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. In that scripture, in Psalms, chapter one.

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

  Right in the middle of it, it says that the person who meditates on scripture will prosper in whatever they do. And it is when Jesus was tempted, he quoted scripture, writing the word of God in your heart, whatever your faith is, writing whatever is important to your faith on the tablet of your heart. It gives you comfort in times of trouble. When you're talking to someone who is going through a difficult time, maybe you're able to say to them, and I know there's AI, I know there's Google, I know there's all that, but there's something different between reading something on Google or AI telling you something and having it written on your heart, having it written on the tablet to your mind. And so I, if you want to memorize

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  scripture, map out a mind palace and visualize the scripture around your home.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  Roger that. Man, thank you for sharing that, Ron. Yes, sir.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  Wow. Want to take a break? Sure. All right, sure. Let's take a break. Thank you.

• 2:14:14Shawn Ryan?

  We've talked before about how Stanley's basically family in our house. And once you start thinking about it that way, you start paying a lot more attention to what you're actually feeding your dog. That's one of the reasons we started using Sundays for Dogs. Sundays is different because it starts with over 80% all-natural meat and then uses ingredients like kale, ginger, and blueberries. And instead of blasting it with high heat like traditional kibble, they gently air dry it. So it actually looks like real food. Honestly, it looks more like jerky than dog food. And Stanley, he absolutely loves it. The second he hears

• 2:14:56Shawn Ryan?

  the bag open, he's right there. What do you think, Stanley?

• 2:15:02Shawn Ryan?

  And one thing I really like is there's no prep involved. No fridge, no freezer, no mess. You just scoop it and serve it. It was also founded by a veterinarian, Dr. Tori Waxman. And you can tell the whole brand was built around giving dogs better quality nutrition without making it complicated for owners. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com/srs50 and get 50% off your first order, or you can use SRS50 at checkout.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  That's 50% off your first order at sundaysfordogs.com/srs50. sundaysfordogs.com/srs50 or use code SRS50 at checkout.

• 2:15:52Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Ron, we're back from the break.

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  I want to move into how memory works and how, how you can train it.

• 2:16:01Shawn Ryan?

  Well, first of all, you've had studies on you. You didn't, was it UT did an MRI on your brain? My, like, people are trying to figure out how the hell you're able to do all this stuff.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  Yes, I have had.

• 2:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  You say you weren't born with it.

• 2:16:18Speaker 03

  It's no special gift. I have no special gift. I have no special ability that anybody doesn't have. I'm, I'm not a dumb guy, but I have no, you know, growing up, they weren't saying, oh, that guy's going to be a memory champion one day, you know? My, uh, Amy, who's worked with me for 10 years, you know, I'm always telling her, I'm like, I was sitting here today, I said, Amy, remind me to, to pay that bill on Monday. Amy, remind me to call that person. And she texts me throughout the day, you gotta, you gotta Zoom call at, in, in 60 minutes. And I tell you, I, I tell you what, 50% of the time, my reply is, oh, thank you. I had no idea. What do you mean you had no idea? You're the one that scheduled it. Or, oh, my gosh, I forgot about that. Um, so my, my memory is very average or natural.

• 2:17:03Speaker 03

  Now, the, one of the, and I'll share with you exactly how I, the best advice I could on how to train it, but the UT study, so there was a, uh, Stan Lee, right? He was the inventor of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and all that. You know, he's the, the comic book drawer. He had a TV show in 2010 called Stanley Superhumans, where he wanted to get people that he said were real life superheroes, right? And, uh, and they selected me as one of Stanley's superhumans. So when I met with the producers, I said, I, I get what you're saying, Stanley's superhumans, but there's really nothing unique about my memory. I, I've learned a system, anybody can do this.

• 2:17:45Speaker 03

  Uh, you're going to see me do some crazy things here on the show, but I, believe me, there's, I'm not a, I know the name of the show is Superhumans, but I'm just a normal guy. And the producers said, well, That's not really the premise of our show. So we're gonna, we're gonna delete everything you just said. Now let's go to University of Texas. So we go to the University of Texas. They put me in an MRI tube. And they, and that's, you know, when they put, before they put you in an MRI tube, before they put you in, they asked you if you're claustrophobic. And I said, no. Now I know the proper way to answer that question. Found out, huh? Found out. So I'm in there, you know, like, oh my gosh, I'm like, oh.

• 2:18:27Speaker 03

  If it had not been the History Channel Stanley Superhumans, I would have said, get me out of here. Matter of fact, I've got, I had a pain in my side over here last year. And I'm like, doc, can you just do some blood tests? I'm like, is there anything bad? And he's like, yeah, no, it's nothing bad, but we still don't know. I said, I'm gonna just be, I'm gonna say I'm okay. I'm not getting in that MRI tube. That's how much I hated it. But I get in that MRI tube and I'm laying on my back. And they have these series of words flashing up on the screen that they want me to memorize. And it was like, I think it was like word pairs. It was, it was like this word with this word, this word with this word, this word with this word.

• 2:19:09Speaker 03

  And, and they were scanning my brain as I was memorizing. Then they re-give you the information and you gotta click if it's, was, was that, is this, is this right? Is this the right order? Was that word pair with that word? If you find any mistakes, you hit a buzzer, right? Now that, that's not right. Or maybe, yeah, see, the memory guy, if I'm not memorized, maybe it was the other way. Maybe if it was right, I hit the buzzer. Just proves to you, I have a very average memory. But when I'm using that system, so I get out of the MRI tube. And the, the, the guys running it, they said, you got a perfect score. And the, um, the host of the show, not Stan Lee, but he had a, another guy who was actually the host, Daniel Brandon Smith, Daniel Brandon Smith asked the MRI guy.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  He said, how often do you see a perfect score? And the scientist said, I've been doing this 20 years. This is the first perfect score. And so on the show, it was perfect for the show, right? Ron is a superhuman memory. And the MRI guy said 35% more of my brain was lit up, was activated. When I was memorizing than they see in the average person. Which also, Ron has some superhuman memory. But it wasn't. So the reason 35% more of my brain was lit up than the average person when they're memorizing is. You're claustrophobic. That was part of it. You're freaking the fuck out.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  They were seeing the panic in my brain, right? That probably, I never thought of that. That probably could have been part of it. Um. Yeah. We don't know why there's so much fear. Right. This is. It's memorization. Yeah, they all thought it was the memory guy. Uh, it was a very, yeah. What about you? You, and I'm going to finish this story, but as a SEAL, did you have claustrophobia?

• 2:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:21:03Speaker 03

  No?

• 2:21:03Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:05Shawn Ryan?

  I don't have it. My dad has it really bad.

• 2:21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:08Shawn Ryan?

  But it doesn't bother me for whatever reason.

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  Well, uh, that's why you're able to do what you do. And us normal guys, uh, we salute you. Um, uh, and, and, uh, they pulled me out of that MRI tube and, uh, they said, uh, uh, his 35% more of his brain is lit up than the average person. And the reason that that is lighting up is I was using the mind palace. I was visualizing my memories. What they were seeing on the activation of my brain is they, they were seeing me walk around my house and see this piece of furniture, see that piece of furniture, see that word turned into a picture.

• 2:21:54Speaker 03

  So the part of the, of my brain in the prefrontal cortex was lighting up because I was seeing these images. I was seeing my memories. Um, and it, it, it, it does activate more of your brain. Uh, but it also works. They took me to Home Depot after that and they got a shopping cart. And we walked around Home Depot for two hours. And for two hours, Daniel Browning Smith pulled a hammer or a tool off of the shelf. And I only got to see it once. He showed me the hammer and I saw the price and I memorized it. He put it in the shopping cart. He pulled a saw off a shelf. I saw the price. I memorized it. He put it in the car. For two hours, we walked around. He took stuff off the shelf. He showed it to me. He put it in the shopping cart.

• 2:22:38Speaker 03

  After two hours, we go to the cash register and I turned my back to the cash register. And the screen lit up, you know, with the price when they scanned it. So they would scan it, the price would light up. They would scan it and I would say the price out loud that I remembered it to be. And I scanned this whole shopping cart full of stuff. And when they get all the way done, I'm expecting the high fives. I'm expecting, Ron, that was awesome, man. You rock. How did you do that? You're superhuman. And that's what they've been telling me all day anyways. So, so I was expecting this. And instead, the manager of the store, the producer, the TV guys, they all huddle up. And they break the huddle like they're coming back to the line of scrimmage and they walk up to me.

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  And they said, Ron, you did really good, but you missed three. And I said, I didn't miss any. The computer missed three. And the manager was there. He was like, dude, no, you missed three. I said, can we do this one more time? And every time you say I'm wrong, can we do a price check? And they said, okay. So we did it again. They said I was wrong on one. I said, I want a price check. We did a price check and all three times, the computer was wrong. Now, in fairness, the computer didn't make a mistake. It was the person who typed it in originally. But it worked out perfect for the show. And they only showed two of the price checks, but they saved one of them for the very last, right? So it appeared that I got all of them right.

• 2:24:07Speaker 03

  And then the last one was the final price check and I got it right. A Cliff Notes version, and how did you do that, Ron? How did you do that? If there's nothing special about your brain, how in the world did you memorize a shopping cart full of products? It's the same concept of the mind palace, but the mind palace necessarily wouldn't help me because I didn't, I didn't necessarily need to memorize it in some certain order. What I just needed to know was this price, this hammer was, let's just say $21 to make it simple. That's all I needed to know. If you want to remember a name, so. When you wanna remember a name, you pick out a distinctive feature on their face. You meet a guy with, his name is Brian, and Brian has really big ears.

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  So you're looking at this guy, you're walking towards him, and you're thinking, "Big ears, big ears, big ears." "Hey, my name's Ron." And he says, "My name is Brian." Instantly, I now imagine a brain going out of his ears, cuz that's his distinctive feature, right? Brian. A hammer works the same way. He pulls the hammer out of the, off the shelf. I say, "What's the distinctive feature?" The distinctive feature is that yellow, that yellow band, whatever, that's going around the handle, right? That's my distinctive feature. That's what I'm gonna zone in on. Then he says, "It's $21, deck of cards." Boom, that yellow band is the, the yellow lights at a casino, and the casino is lighting up, and there's, the deck of cards playing on that. Boom, he throws it in the shopping cart.

• 2:25:31Speaker 03

  As we walk, I'm reviewing, I'm thinking, "Yellow band on that hammer, that, that's, that's the neon lights, the yellow lights at a casino." And I'm just reviewing. He gets the next one, the saw. That saw had a, some handle that I zoned in on. And let's say that saw was $25. Uh, tha- I imagine quarters, 25 cents, right? On the handle. Boom, he throws it in. And as we're going to the next items, I'm constantly reviewing. Names is the same way. So, so if you're in a room full of people, and you wanna remember people's names, just like a hammer, or just like a saw, as these people are walking towards you, zone in on them, and say, "What is unique about this guy? What stands out to me about this guy?

• 2:26:12Speaker 03

  He has, uh, he has, it's his ears, or it's his chin, or it's his nose, or it's his eyebrows, or his, his, his, his beard." And so as you're walking towards him, you're zoning in on these features. Then he says his name. His name is Steve. You imagine a stove on his distinctive feature, right? So you're taking the name, creating a picture, attaching it to distinctive feature. To, to button up this point here. When they pulled the hammer out of the shopping cart and scanned it, the whole time, I'm looking, "Yellow band on that hammer, that's Vegas. Deck of cards, baby, 21, $21." Boop, $21. The guy, in another scenario, you're at a business conference.

• 2:26:54Speaker 03

  The guy you just met leaves the room, and then he walks in 30 minutes later, he's walking towards you. "Big ears, big ears, what was on his ears, what was on his ears?" "A brain." "Brian, good to see you again." It's good for the short term, right? You got the, you got, if they, if I went back to Home Depot today, that was 17 years ago. What's the price of that hammer? I have no idea because I didn't review. The conference that I was at two years ago, when I met a guy named Brian, if I saw Brian today, I'm not going to know his name. I didn't review. So this is the process of memory, taking images, seeing them as pictures and attaching them to what you want to recall. But if you don't review, you're not going to remember anything long term. Review is the beatitudes.

• 2:27:37Speaker 03

  If you want to lock these beatitudes in long term, you're going to have to review them today, review them tomorrow, review them in a week, review them again, and then get them locked in and get it to where it's smooth and you can, it just flows off your tongue. And, but the review is the, the key to that. It's the most overlooked part of memory, in my opinion.

• 2:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Wow. That's, you know, it's, I was going to ask you, how do you remember people's names?

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's probably the biggest thing in, that comes to my mind that people would struggle with is name recognition. It is, it's important. You know, Dale Carnegie said, everybody's favorite tubby's themselves, the sweetest sound of the ears, the sound of their own name. Zig Ziglar said, people don't care how much you know until they first know how much you care. When you can remember somebody's name, you show them that you care. You know, you show them that they're meaningful. There are so many people out there that are having rough times in life and just the measure of respect to remember their name. You see them, you call them by their name and it maybe just lights up their day that day. Wow, Sean just remembered my name and I just met him once and he just remembered my name. I feel so special. You get so much out of remembering names. The first thing you get, you make people feel good and that's, that's enough of a reward. Sometimes it's a great connection, right?

• 2:28:50Speaker 03

  And it leads to a great friendship or a great business deal or whatever. But the first thing is it just makes people feel good. And. When you want to remember a name, focus in on something on their face that stands out. And then, here's what's gonna be, here's, everybody listen to this right now. The thing that's gonna hold them up, the thing that's gonna make them say, "I'm not gonna do this, this is too much work." That this is the thing. They can't, they don't have pictures for names. They're gonna meet somebody named Brian, and Brian's talking to them, and they're trying to turn the name Brian into a picture. And as they're trying to turn that name into a picture, they're not listening to what Brian's saying. And then as they not listen to Brian says in their zone out, and then Brian's like, "Hey, dude, are you listening to me?"

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  They're like, "No, actually, I'm not. I'm trying to see a human brain going up your nose right now."

• 2:29:40Speaker 03

  So, this is how I would suggest everybody practice.

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  When you're at the grocery store, look at the name tag, turn the name into a picture. Even if you don't talk to her, or him, turn it, your bank teller, turn it into a picture. You see a sign on a billboard, turn that name into a picture. Just start developing a mental database. And once you just decide the picture for Brian is a brain, it's always a brain, for you, whatever it is. In other words, you don't say, "This Brian is a brain, and this Brian is my friend Brian, and it's a brain." But once you have pictures for names created, that's what's gonna take the most work. I'll tell you this, the first time I spoke for a group, I remember I was 19 years old. There was five people in the room, I was speaking for free, and I only called on three of them.

• 2:30:29Speaker 03

  I did not think I could memorize all five names, and I was there to teach them a memory seminar.

• 2:30:37Speaker 03

  So, I only called on three of them. I'm glad the other two at the end didn't test me on their names, because I didn't know their names. But I say that as a little bit of a measure of hope, right? This is my career. Where did I start? I started exactly where everybody else is starting right now. I started thinking, "I can't do this, I'm not good at remembering names." But I did one thing that, that most people don't do. I spent the next couple of weeks turning names into pictures. I spoke at a conference in Canada a decade ago. And I walked up to the guy and he said, Ron, I'm so excited you're gonna recite everybody's name in the audience. I said, Darren, no. I typically do 150 to 200 names. I've never done more than 200 names. And there was over 300 people at this conference.

• 2:31:21Speaker 03

  Oh, he goes, no, Ron, you got it. You got it, man. I was like, I don't, I stretched my own imagination. Now, here's the thing that I will share. When you're at a meeting like that and you need to memorize massive amounts of data, looking at their ears and stuff like that, I will actually use their clothing. Don't do that in real life, because it only works for the, for a meeting, right? But I attach stuff to their clothing, I attach stuff to their hats. 301 people stood up. I had my girlfriend at the time over there, she had a notepad. Every time I got a name right, she made a mark. And that's my record. 301.

• 2:31:55Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man. Wow.

• 2:32:02Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about memory, faith, and the Bible.

• 2:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:32:14Speaker 03

  You know, I told you I doubted my faith a lot, right? I went through a point in my twenties where my mom just point blank asked me, are you gonna be a preacher? Because I was in church all the time. I was there on, I led a Bible study on Tuesday nights. I went to church on Wednesday nights. I was the Saturday night service and I was there at the Sunday service. My mom, who was a woman of faith, she was happy about that, but she was also like, even for her, it was a little bit much. And she said, Ron, you're gonna be a preacher or something? I said, Mom, I don't know. I'm a memory guy. I kind of like memory guy, but I just love stuff about the Bible. Then I, uh, lost my, I drifted away. And part of it, I was just, maybe I was just, can I trust it, right? Like, how do I know? How do I know these stories are true? How do I, how do I know?

• 2:32:57Speaker 03

  And am I just fooling myself? Or is there some, something here? And over time, I think I just sort of, like, went like that. Um.

• 2:33:12Speaker 03

  But as a memory guy, one of the things that I wondered, how can we trust the Bible's true when Jesus died in 33 AD and most of the Gospels weren't written until 20 or 30 years later, right? How, that, that's from memory. They're not, there's not taken notes at the tomb, you know what I'm saying? There's a 500-year gap between Abraham and Moses. Moses wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible. At least, that's what most Christians and Jews believe, that Moses wrote the first five books.

• 2:33:51Speaker 03

  Well, if there's a 500-year gap between Abraham and Moses, that means what, what he wrote in Genesis, he didn't live any of that. It was a oral tradition, right? So if that's all oral tradition, all of Genesis, if there was a 20, 30-year gap between Jesus dying and the Gospels being written, how the modern people would say, "Memory is not reliable. My memory is not good." You know, and when modern people, we hear that this, we think memory's unreliable. The ancient people, it was so much different.

• 2:34:34Speaker 03

  They had these group oral traditions. So you think about it, Jesus spoke in parables, right? What are parables? And what are, parables are pictures. And that's what I've been saying today, your mind needs to remember a picture. And by the way, when I, the, the parables are easy to remember because they're a picture. You know, 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is God breathed," right? So when I'm saying this, when I'm, I'm, I'm gonna tell you why I believe we can trust the reliability of the Scripture based from a memory guy's perspective, right? Not based from a religious perspective. But some people would say, "Ron, it's supernatural. Forget all that stuff about memory and all that other stuff. It's, it has nothing to do with that. It's supernatural."

• 2:35:18Speaker 03

  2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is God breathed." It was written by the breath of God through moving the hands of humans, right?

• 2:35:27Speaker 03

  But I'm not discounting the supernatural way the Bible was transmitted. But these oral cultures, it's not like we have memory today. It was group memory. They would recite it all together and they would drill it and they would repeat it. They would tell the stories over and over again. If somebody in the group would say the story wrong, the group would cor- correct them. So these oral traditions was almost just as good as, as writing something down. The way the Bible was engineered itself, Proverbs, chapter one says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." But the very next verse says, "Fools despise wisdom and discipline."

• 2:36:08Speaker 03

  The Bible's written like that in a lot of places where it'll say a line and then the very next line, it's like a contrast. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline." Those two sentences kind of go together because they're contrasting ideas. I don't know if, if I explained that the right way or not. But the way the Bible's written, the ba- is engineered is, i- i- it helps your memory. Psalm, the 23rd Psalms. "He makes me lie down between, on green pastures, laid beside still waters." That's imagery. So when, when these stories were passed down, they were passed down with imagery. Green pastures, still, still waters. Imagery semences in your memory.

• 2:36:53Speaker 03

  If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain. Imagery. The way Jesus spoke was imagery. He was, and I don't know why, I'm speaking from a memory perspective, not a religious perspective here. But from a memory's perspective, I've got to think, if, if Jesus is who he says he was, he wants these stories to be passed down. He knows we're nothing but, we're, we're humans, human memory. I've got to tell these stories in a way that they can remember them. So I'm going to speak in parables. I'm going to talk about, I'm not going to say if you have faith, you can do anything. That's not a picture. I'm going to say if you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain. So I believe the parables were engineered so we could remember them. I believe the group memory. But I will say this, this isn't just the, the, the Christian faith.

• 2:37:37Speaker 03

  The oral traditions of all ancient societies, or a lot of ancient societies, um, are very reliable. Fascinating. The Aborigines in Australia.

• 2:37:47Speaker 03

  Um, they would pass stuff down in songs, much like I'm saying now. They would sing songs, they would say them in groups, they would tell these songs and stories in, and in groups. If somebody got it wrong, they corrected it. These songs were the GPS for Australia, tens of thousands of years ago. So, and I don't know what the songs were like. But I do know they could know there's gonna be a canyon, there's gonna be a mountain, there's gonna be a rock formation, and then, and then there's gonna be this right here. So if they were ever out in the wilderness of Australia, they had it in songs. And I, I, I was sort of thinking about how could they do that other than just song lyrics?

• 2:38:28Speaker 03

  But I thought have an idea, I don't know if that's how it is, this is my idea. But they, the alphabet song. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. And you notice how you said that? You said it faster than the other words. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. My guess, and I don't know if this is true or not, I know they memorized the landscape of Australia with a song. Well, if it's a tree, and then there's a long distance and it's a canyon, and then there's another long distance and it's a mountain, and then there's three mountains real close together, that's the elemental P.

• 2:39:10Speaker 03

  So, these, this GPS, they could be out, and the pauses, the slowness would be the distances. The elemental P, like a topographical map, it's all close together. The elemental P, tree, mountain, whatever. Their songs were so accurate. There was a volcano called Budg Bim in Australia. Budg Bim, Budg Bim, uh, exploded over thirty thousand years ago. So the ancient people of Australia had these songs talking about Budg Bim exploding. There's no way that the mo, that the people five hundred years ago would have known about that if it hadn't been passed down in a song.

• 2:39:52Speaker 03

  So the songs of ancient cultures, whether it's the Christian faith, whether it's the Aborigines, they're doing it as songs, they're doing it with group memory. Group memory is reliable. Individual memory isn't. But that's how much of the Bible and, and other things were passed down. That actually makes a lot of sense.

• 2:40:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:40:12Speaker 03

  That does make a lot of sense. It was their, it was their identity, right? It was, it was how they survived. Imagine there's a drought in Australia. And in this drought, this one plant, maybe, is their survival because they can, they can drink the, they can drink the liquid that's inside of it. It saved their lives. It's a plant that you would never eat it because it has a sour bitter taste, right? I'm giving you a hypothetical here. It's a sour bitter taste. You would never eat it in a million years, but it becomes part of their song. Because it saved their lives during this time. Generations later, they don't eat that plant either because it has a sour bitter taste. But they go through the same drought. Everything dies. They remember the song and it saves their life.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  So, memory, it, it was a, a survival skill. It was crucial to ancient humans. Modern humans, I think we're becoming drones. We're outsourcing our memories to ChatGPT or AI or all this other stuff. Here's a crazy study, Sean. There, there's a study called the PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment. The PISA study tests 15 year olds on, on math, science and all this stuff. They've been doing it for years. This is the first generation, the current generation. This is the first, the young kids today. This is the first generation that is scoring lower on these tests, which they, it's not an IQ test, but they are correlated into IQ.

• 2:41:38Speaker 03

  This first generation that scored lower on IQ test and these tests than their previous generation. There's something called the Flynn Effect. And the Flynn Effect says every generation, the IQ has improved. Every generation, the generation that was before, their IQ has increased. Until now. And there's a neuroscientist named Jared Horvath, I believe. He is saying it's screen time. He's saying it's, he said our kids are, even in the class, in the classrooms, the classrooms, they're learning on screens. Well, what happens in a classroom when you're learning on a screen? You're skimming. It's not, this is, this is his theory, uh, but it makes sense. You're skimming. It's not deep studying. It's not deep studying like we had where we're learning for a person.

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  It's skimming studying. And maybe there's alerts and notifications distracting you, but. His belief, and I think it's probably true, is technology is great asset, but it's also harming this current generation and probably generations going forward.

• 2:42:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. I don't think anybody would disagree with that.

• 2:42:45Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What's that? What's his name?

• 2:42:47Speaker 03

  Jared Horvath.

• 2:42:49Shawn Ryan?

  Jared Horvath.

• 2:42:50Speaker 03

  He's a neuroscientist. I, somebody just sent me the article a couple of weeks ago.

• 2:42:55Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta get that from you. That would be an interesting talk.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  He was fascinating what I read on him.

• 2:43:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. Well, I got a hot question for you. Ready?

• 2:43:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:43:05Shawn Ryan?

  All right, here we go.

• 2:43:10Shawn Ryan?

  Ron, when you look at historical minds like Einstein, Tesla, Da Vinci, and Newton, they all had this ability to focus deeply, recognize patterns, and hold complex ideas in their mind. Today, technology remembers everything for us. Social media destroys attention and AI is starting to think for us. Sounds like what we just talked about. From your perspective as a memory expert, are we becoming more advanced or are we quietly weakening the human trait that creates genius?

• 2:43:45Speaker 03

  It's a great question. And for years, and I mentioned I've been doing this 35 years, I gotta ask that question a lot. And not, it was never as eloquent as that. That's a very eloquent way to ask that question. But it was all, the question always got down to,

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  is technology ruining our brains? And I always always answer that question. No, no, I don't think so. I think we have, we have more to remember right now. So relying on technology, there's no problem with it. And I still believe that's true. But

• 2:44:16Speaker 03

  I do think that it is harming our ability to focus. And it is harming our ability to think almost. Um, you know, Sir Isaac Newton said, if I've stood on the shoulders, if I, if I have seen further than anyone before, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants. So Isaac Newton had this knowledge base. And he was able to see experiments and see things that others people couldn't see, not because he was a genius, but because all the people before him had done all these experiences. And he had that knowledge in his brain, right? Well, today, if the knowledge isn't on our brain, if the knowledge is in the AI and it's in the computer, how are we gonna have the ability to see farther than anybody before?

• 2:45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can ask AI. I think AI is a great tool. I use AI all the time. But I use it, I take what it's saying, and then I'll step away and I'll think about it, I'll journal about it, old school learning, right? I'll talk to it. Technology is, we're outsourcing our brains. We're gonna become drones, I think, you know? They've got the drones flying right now. We're gonna be the drones and AI is gonna be flying us. Your AI is gonna control us. Focus is the most difficult part of what I did with the Afghanistan memory wall. Hundred percent the most difficult part. When I was sitting in the chair and had my eyes closed, I was, if, sometimes something would pop in my brain, and I'd

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  have to push it out of the way. But that happened fifty to seventy-five times.

• 2:45:53Shawn Ryan?

  There's a follow-up here. "We hear stories of people lifting cars in emergencies, or the brain doing things that seem to be impossible. Are those rare miracles, or proof that humans have access to abilities we usually never tap into? And even though the idea that we only use ten percent of our brain is a myth, do you think most people still underestimate what the human mind and body are actually capable of?"

• 2:46:19Speaker 03

  I love that last part of that question. The first part was, is this, is this a miracle, or is it the human, right?

• 2:46:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do we have, do we have abilities we usually never tap into?

• 2:46:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And first of all, is it a miracle, or is it the human, Billy? It's probably both, in some cases. But as far as the brain, as far as the, the, the human brain... Hundred percent, hundred percent, hundred percent. If there are people watching this right now, if there are people watching this and they've, they've enjoyed it, if they turn off the, the, the, the, the channel or, or whatever, and they go about their day, and they tell their, their friends, "Hey, yeah, I heard this memory guy talk, and he memorized all this stuff, and he, and he held some records. It was some crazy cool stuff. I could never do it, uh, but it was pretty interesting to listen to him talk." Boom. I failed. That's not the message. People underestimate what they're capable

• 2:47:15Speaker 03

  of. Sit down and give yourself a project. You will be astounded at what your brain can, can remember. Build out this map that I'm talking about, right? This mind palace. Number five pieces of furniture in your living room, five in your kitchen, five in your living room, five in your bathroom, and then tonight before you fall asleep, say those 20 pieces of furniture, forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. When you're brushing your teeth tomorrow, when you're getting ready for work, say these 20 pieces of furniture. Just get them in your brain. Then find something that's important to you. What interests you? Do you like sports? You want to memorize the roster of your favorite baseball team? Are you a fan of history? You want to memorize the presidents of the United States? Find something that interests you. And just, guys, I'm imploring you, everybody

• 2:47:58Speaker 03

  who's listening to this, do this, because everybody is underestimating themselves. Everybody. Every single person I walk to up on the street, and I say, "I can teach you this," they always say, "Oh, my memory's terrible. Well, I'm not good, I'm not good at that." When you approach it with this system, it, it is, uh, everybody, take what you think your memory is capable of. How many numbers you think you could memorize in five minutes? Take that number, whatever it is, it's different for everybody, and then multiply it by 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100, and then that's the real number.

• 2:48:32Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Thank you. Thank you. Let's, let's move back into the Afghanistan wall. We're closing out the interview. It's Memorial Day. You've accomplished something amazing right here in this studio this morning.

• 2:48:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, so this was the first time that I've completed it, right? And it was so emotional. And a lot of our talk today has been on how I did it and, and, you know, on my memory, right? And that's all valid. I'm the one, I am sitting in this chair. But I do want to say thank you to some people who helped me train, because without them, I couldn't have done it. Um, Amy Haynes has been, has been with me for 10 years, and she's been with me through a lot of things. And without her sitting in a chair for the last month, and listening to me say names, and as I say the names,

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  she, she checks the work and she says, nope, nope, nope, yep. Without that, this would have been almost impossible today. So, and her support and encouragement was tremendous. Uh, so she is the main one that I want to say thank you to for that. Uh, when I heard that I was going to be here, uh, I told her, not because, um, I was gonna bring her along, but just to tell her, right? And she was so excited. She was more excited for me than anything at all. And when I saw her excitement, I thought, she's never traveled with me in 10 years of working with me. But I want to say thank you to her for all she's done for me. So I'm gonna bring her on this trip.

• 2:50:23Speaker 03

  But it worked out so magically. Because when I was saying the names, I had the confidence of the training with her. And so, thank you to her. Thank you to Esther Vermillion, who also gave me encouragement, and she helped me train. And Lori Griffo, who gave me tremendous support and encouragement, and also helped me train.

• 2:50:45Speaker 03

  The stories of the wall, though, that's why I do the wall. I don't do the wall to show people that I have a great memory, right? It's not about, uh, it's not the USA Memory Championships, the deck of cards, memorizing the numbers. That was to say, hey, I'm legit, dude. Look at me. The Afghanistan Memory Wall is to say, these are the men and women we lost. We say you are not forgotten, and we always say you are not forgotten, but I want to say to every single individual person, you are not forgotten. You know, Ernest Hemingway said that everybody dies two deaths. They die the day they die, and then they die the last time their name is spoken.

• 2:51:29Speaker 03

  And in a way, I just wanted to keep their memories alive. So I, that's the main reason I do the wall. It has made me a better person by hearing the stories of the wall, but that's, that's the meaning behind the wall. Um, I, uh, it's, it's an individual basis. What I was gonna say is, when we say you're not forgotten, it's sometimes a corporate or a group whole, you know, Memorial Day, you're not forgotten. I wanted to say, Private First Class Austin Stags, you are not forgotten. Private Buddy McLean, you are not forgotten. Chief Petty Officer Adam Brown, you are not forgotten. Corporal Chad Wade, you are not forgotten.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  Sergeant First Class Matthew Abody, you are not forgotten. Sergeant James Ube, you are not forgotten. Individually, you're not forgotten. I will set up that wall at a NASCAR race. I'll set it up in front of the Alamo, and I'll be writing on the wall, and people will walk by. In New York City, I'm writing the wall, and this lady, she was jogging, and she stopped. She said, what is this? My brother, uh, he was my biggest helper back then. She, he, she went up to him, and she said, what is this?

• 2:52:54Speaker 03

  And he said, told him what it was, and she asked him if a specific name was on the wall. So he brings it over to me, and...

• 2:53:06Speaker 03

  And she said, is this name on the wall? I had a deadline. I had to be finishing live on Fox and Friends Morning Show in the last five. It was, I had to time it to finish live on the air in the last five minutes of the show. I was very distracted. I always try to give people the attention because they're the reason I'm doing it. But I was distracted that day. To this day, I don't know the name she said. But I always, I took time with her and I said, ma'am, why, how do you know that name? And she said, my brother was a little guy. And this guy was a big guy. And so he would always carry my brother's backpack and his backpack. And when they went out on a patrol, he always just walked in front of my brother naturally.

• 2:53:47Speaker 03

  And because he did that, he is dead today and my brother is alive. And I said, I'm so sorry, ma'am. And I showed her the name on the wall. She stood there with tears in her eye. I went back to my hotel room that night and I was laying there and I was thinking about the day. And I think, oh, what was that guy's name? I think it was Katzenberger. But even if it was Katzenberger, there's two. There was a specialist, Christopher Katzenberger, and there was a staff sergeant, Jeremy Katzenberger. I don't know who it is, even if it was Katzenberger. And I thought, I wish I knew that guy's name. That's such a powerful story. And then I realized, it doesn't matter that I don't know the name. That's the story of all of them. All of them carried our backpacks.

• 2:54:28Speaker 03

  All of them walked before us and all of them made that sacrifice for us and our nation. I don't know his name, but I know that's the story of all of them. And I know you know some of the names. Yes, I do. I know Adam Brown.

• 2:54:47Speaker 03

  I heard you talk about him, that he was a, a good man. He was. He was. Well, Ron, you want to end this with a prayer? I do. Can I read you a story real quick? Yes, please do.

• 2:55:02Speaker 03

  But I do. So I want to give you a gift, Sean. This is the stories of over thirty people that we've lost in Afghanistan. This was written by, by the way, this isn't a book where anybody can go get or anywhere. This is just for you. Okay. So this is not anything like that. This was written by Darren Sapp. Darren Sapp was in the Navy. He was a yellow shirt on an aircraft carrier. He directed the planes and that kind of thing. He has a little bit of a connection with you. You, a guy named Bill Brown, that was the Navy SEAL Swim Foundation founder. He co-wrote a book with him. And Benito Olson, who was the dog handler for a dog named Digo,

• 2:55:48Speaker 03

  and Eddie Penny's SEAL team, he co-wrote a book with him. And Eddie Penny wrote the foreword. Wow. This book was written by that guy. So it has a connection to Eddie Penny. I want to read you one story. This is, this is not one story, one letter.

• 2:56:04Speaker 03

  First Lieutenant Todd Weaver, when he was in Afghanistan, he wrote a letter to his wife in case something would happen to him. And he left it on his desktop. When his computer was mailed back to Emma, and I have Emma's permission to print this, and I also have Emma's permission to read this. When this letter was, when she got his laptop back, there was one icon on the desktop. The entire computer was wiped clean. And it was this letter right here that he wrote to Emma. And here's the letter. Dear Emma, if you're reading this, I guess I did not make it home. And therefore, I was not able to remind you again of how much I love you.

• 2:56:49Speaker 03

  I love you so much, baby, and I will always love you. Although I may not be here right now, take comfort in the fact that I am watching over you right now. I am not gone, and I will always be with you in spirit. I know this time must be hard for you, but I also know how strong you are. Never forget that God knew what was best for us before we were even born. Take comfort in that. This happened for a reason. Although you may not believe it now, you will one day. I want you to know just how important you are to me. I could not ask for a more caring, beautiful, and loving wife. The memories that we have shared over the last few years have been the best of my life.

• 2:57:30Speaker 03

  Although it may seem like my life was cut short, I lived a life that most can only dream of. I married the perfect woman. I have a beautiful daughter that amazed me every day. I even had two great dogs, at least most of the time. I couldn't ask for anything more. If you feel sad, just think back to the memories that we shared. Look at our daughter and how beautiful she is. Be strong for her. Remind her about her daddy and tell her that I loved her more than anything else in the world. Her birth was the best day of my life, and she was the best thing that ever happened to me. Her smile and laughter represent all that is good and beautiful in this world. Tell her that daddy is in heaven now and will watch over her and protect her every minute of every day.

• 2:58:14Speaker 03

  I love you, Emma, but never be afraid to do what you need to do to be happy. It is also important that you continue to find happiness in your life. Although you may not think that is possible right now, have faith. Much better times are coming. You and Kylie have a wonderful life ahead of you, and I'm so happy to have shared some of it with you. I love you. Your loving husband, Todd.

• 2:58:37Speaker 03

  Emma and her daughter Kylie are thriving now. They're doing very well. It's stories like this that have made me a better person, and thank you for giving me the platform today to tell some of these stories. That was Abby.

• 2:58:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's what this is all about.

• 2:58:55Shawn Ryan?

  You want to pray?

• 2:58:56Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 2:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:59:00Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus, we just want to say thank you for today and thank you for connecting me with Ron and... But more importantly, we just want to say we want to wish everybody a happy Memorial Day and especially the Gold Star families who lost somebody. Just like the letter that Ron just wrote. Pray for them. Please let them be having a damn good time up there.

• 2:59:25Shawn Ryan?

  Pray for our country. Amen.

• 2:59:27Speaker 03

  Amen.

• 2:59:31Shawn Ryan?

  Save the heavy stuff for last, huh?

• 2:59:33Speaker 03

  I wanted to read this.

• 2:59:35Shawn Ryan?

  What page is that?

• 2:59:37Speaker 03

  That is the first story. So it's the first story you would read.

• 2:59:43Speaker 03

  First Lieutenant Frank Weaver.

• 2:59:45Shawn Ryan?

  There it is.

• 2:59:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:59:51Shawn Ryan?

  Ron?

• 2:59:51Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 2:59:52Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, brother.

• 2:59:53Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:00:06Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.