Ep. 1386: Nelson Dellis Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Nelson Dellis. He is a memory athlete and consultant. Nelson is a six-time USA Memory Champion, holding the record for most wins of the national memory champion title. Nelson also runs Climb 4 Memory, a nonprofit which aims to raise funds and awareness for Alzheimer's disease research through mountain climbs around the world. The topic is his book Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem-Solving, and Much More. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Memory techniques as systems and frameworks Pygmalion effect and belief shaping performance Memory as foundation for faster learning and creativity Training the brain like a muscle and preventing cognitive decline Name memorization using visualization and association Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My guest today brings an issue that all of us need and for sure need to improve. Nelson Dellis, his book, Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More. He's a six-time USA Memory Champion. Now, you might be saying to yourself, what is that? Nelson has the ability, and we talk about this, to memorize 10,000 numbers. And at first, maybe the same way you might think of a magician if you learn their trick, you say to yourself, how do you do that? But there's systems. There are rules. There are techniques.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  There are ways he does this. Fascinating that he's gone down this life path. Without any further delay from me, let's jump right into my guest today, Nelson Dellis. I'm sure what I'm going to tell you is not necessarily unique, but it'll tell you something about me. Completely B student. As the author of eight books, my English grades were absolutely abysmal. I'm sure absolutely no teachers expected me to write a book in any way, shape, or form.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  I do recall, growing up in the Washington DC area and Virginia, it was becoming all the rage in my youth to grade or test the IQ of kids. And so I had two younger siblings. From what I understand, I don't know the marks, but from what I understand, one tested higher and one tested lower than me. And so the one that tested higher ended up getting slotted into the GT programs, gifted and talented. So I ended up knowing a lot of the siblings' friends. It actually manifested itself quite early, not high achievers. And I always wondered, if you tell these kids they're smart, does that affect them in some way? Is there a drive component that gets lost there? So anyways, just a long story short, this

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Was my situation and I've just always been driven because I always felt like I was the underdog and I'm going to figure this out. I feel like I've always been outside the system. Definitely going to learn something from you today in terms of techniques, but outside the system, not believing how things are supposed to work. And just thinking, you know what? I'm clever enough to figure that out. That's been my MO. I'm sure that kind of a story is not necessarily unique to your ears.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Totally resonates. Belief in your abilities will elevate your potential, potentially the outcome as well. There was in the 1960s, I believe, a psychologist who basically tried to test this, right? So there was a classroom full of students and basically said that they were in a gifted class to adapt to that effect, even though they weren't. And they actually got better scores. They outperformed the other classes where they were just average students. And this is called the Pygmalion Effect. There's this ancient tale where there's this guy, this king Pygmalion, and he sculpts this beautiful thing out of marble. That's his ideal, I think it was just woman, but in the honor of the gods.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  And he got so obsessed with this thing, he believed it so much that it was real and he loved it. And he would worship it and put flowers at its feet. He believed it so real that one day it came alive and it turned into a reality. It's the Pygmalion Effect. If you believe in something so much that it can actually change the actual outcome of your thought. That's essentially what a lot of what I talk about in this book and what happened to me with my memory. I had this thing where I said, I don't have a good memory. A lot of people say that about their own memory, but it turns out we all have a lot more in us than we think. And it just takes that change of belief to get things rolling. And you can do a lot more when you believe in yourself. I know that's so cheesy to say, but it's true.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Let me share a little bit more. I found in grade school, high school, college, I was surrounded by people who seemed to work only on memory. And what I mean by that is they seem to be of this mindset that if I follow the rules, if I memorize everything this teacher is telling me, I will therefore have success. So they didn't take any agency in their life. It was just like, what are the rules? I will memorize all of that. I will get the grade and therefore life will reward me. And so what I find interesting about how the way you frame this is yes, memory is important.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  I'm not going to deny that, but it's about how quickly one can learn, which means adapting. And then also, which I really relate to is the creative part. How to think more creatively, because you're going to expand on this. It's not about just rote memorization for the sake of memorizing. It's memorizing for a purpose, for a use to better one's life. It's not just to say, I can just memorize this. As you use the term, sometimes here you say trick, but expand on this more too. Just where I'm going, this kind of holistic thinking of it.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Obviously, memory is super important to me and I say how important it is because it's the most human thing we have. But what you're saying is that is it just memorization and then you're set? No, I think there's so much more to it. Nowadays, memorizing in school, it's like a bad word, right? It's not about memorizing. It's about, I don't know, thinking and creative play, whatever you want to call it. I think they're different.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Has it gone more kumbaya that I passed my?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  That's the impression I get. It's funny because along the years that I've been teaching this stuff, inevitably people are like, oh my God, why isn't this taught in schools? And so I go in and I talk to teachers and principals and they're like, this is great. But when it always comes down to it, nothing ever comes of it because they say, you know what? Memories isn't as important as it used to be. We're not asking our students to memorize things anymore, indirectly at least. And I think that's a bunch of worse crap because you have to remember things to learn things. Okay. And all I'm arguing is that with memory techniques, you take away the difficulty of memorize. It just becomes a really quick thing that is the small part of learning, right? But it's the first quick thing you can do, right?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  For example, if you wanted to memorize all the presidents, okay? I can use memory techniques to teach someone that in 15 minutes. You would have all the names of the presidents in your mind and we could even add more things, but let's just keep it simple. Just the blocks names of presidents, all in order, right? One through 47. Does that mean you know anything about the presidents? Not necessarily, you just have a series of names in sequence, right? But at least you have a framework now to build off of, right? And the Information that you could say is like the scaffolding of learning about the presidents is in your mind 15 minutes versus not trying to memorize it, trying to learn and create connections before even having attempted to remember anything.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  So I just argue that I think memory, if you learn it the right way, can be this really simple, non-stressful event that just gets information in your brain faster. And from, once it's in your brain, then you can do whatever you want with it, expand on it, creative, play with it, whatever you want to do. And that's, I think, where the true learning comes. So I argue that having a good memory, you can do it, learn faster.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  That's an explanation that I never heard a teacher ever say one time. Instead of telling you a reason why it might be useful to have the framework of all 47 presidents in your head, even if you don't know the kind of qualitative data yet, they would just be like, just do it. The memorization was about not for the necessary benefit other than to get the score and get the job, so to speak. And so I like the way you framed it because I'll give you an example. The president's thing is really interesting to me. So I'm Gen X. Essentially for me, the presidents of my memory start with Nixon, heavy Reagan, because I was in high school. But before Nixon, there was no framework really, other than knowing Kennedy was shot.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  But you know, there was this president between Kennedy and Nixon that like never was a part of my learning or anything. But now here I am, all these years later, writing a book that involves President Johnson from the 60s. And I had no frame of reference or no even a placeholder for him at all. Now, later in life, I have it, but I see your point. You know what the tree looks like, then you can start to fill in the details, so to speak.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Learning is all about connections. If you can make connections between things, if you have more available connections in your brain for the information, then you're going to learn more deeply, quicker. Anytime you learn something, your brain is just trying to map this new thing to something that you already know. That's what learning is. You have a knowledge set in your mind. And this new information, idea, concept comes along that you don't understand. And you're trying to make connections, associations to things that you already understand. And once you make that connection to something, that's when true learning happens. So if you already have, like you said, a framework for this data set, even something as simple as like a memory technique to put all president's names in there.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  It's a place to start and you can build off of that, those already set connections.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Let me keep you at the word, which is an important word to you, heavily used in your title, genius. It's actually an important word in my life, especially for one book that I released years ago. Let's talk about genius for a second because it is an interesting thing. And we do have a situation in life where you could pretty much with AI these days, you can say, hey, AI, give me a rundown of the average IQ every country across the planet. There are some major disparities and I generally think the way that it works is the Japanese seem to be the winner on that front. And there's other countries that are way, way different. So there is a component of genius that's going to be the raw horsepower,

• 10:03Speaker 00

  what mom and dad gave you, so to speak. But I think in my own life experience, and I argue this with friends. I have friends that will just will literally only say it's what you were born with. And I'm like, okay, if that was true and we take a homogenous population, let's say the same race, pick the country, I don't care. If we get widely different results over time with that group and they all have the same gray matter, then how do you explain that? I often see these arguments where the effort and the desire, the effort being, okay, let's learn memory techniques, let's learn to learn better, get left out and some people just literally sit back and say, oh, it's just what you're born with.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I'm always surprised at how subjective this concept of genius is. Yes, there's always going to be the geniuses that kind of everybody, the mass consensus says. And if you press people on why, they might have trouble even telling you why. But for example, you have the top ones that always come up, Albert Einstein, Tesla, Da Vinci. And why? Because historical stories and kind of pop culture have labeled them as such. I do think that they should sit there because they did some tremendous things and showed some really creative thinking and intelligent thinking. But then there's other subtle things that people might throw around when it comes to genius.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  And I had that feeling or that experience when I do a memory trick, memorize a deck of cards in just a minute in front of somebody. And they'd be like, oh, shit, he's a genius. I'm not. I'm absolutely not. So it would floor me when people just throw that term around. But I think genius can be so many different things. You can have artists who are genius and just what they create. It's not that they would score very well on an IQ test necessarily, maybe not. Maybe they'd be terrible, right? Maybe they're horrible in math, not that has anything to do with genius. But you have genius musicians, you have genius kind of problem solvers. You could have a tribe in Africa where the head of their tribe is what they might consider as a genius. Cause he figures out all the problems for their tribe.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  I think if I had to define genius, which is, I think, again, it's subjective. I think it's having agency over your own mind, but over a variety of domains. I think that's a well-accepted idea for genius. If somebody has the good control over their mind and can do a lot of different things across multiple topics and ideas, then I think that person might have a higher chance of being labeled as genius. But it's the label by a person or a group of people. So it's ultimately decided upon by others, not by some test necessarily or by oneself.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  I know this is actually hotly debated still to this day. And it's something in the social sciences where there are people that will have meltdowns. If one even says, for example, the Japanese have genetic advantage. People have a meltdown on that. And they'll say, well, no, it's because the group that you want to compare them to that's scoring different had socioeconomic disadvantages. And that therefore explains. The honest answer is I think it's hard to say one way or the other, but at some stage of the game, it does mean something. But I want to take it to the point you just said, which is you use the phrase do things. If one is going to talk about genius, then ultimately, if you're not doing anything, how does one even know? Meaning I think there's got to be output.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  If there's no output and there's no achievement, then how could anybody, including yourself, know that you're any good? That's a very motivational, inspirational desire, so many other factors that, as you point out, really might not have anything to do with IQ, but are terribly important because right now, there's no life extension. So we got one life. And if we don't produce anything, how can anybody, including ourselves, judge? And look, we're human beings. We like to judge things.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  It comes back to the fact that it is something that, as the title of the label, comes from other people's perception of you. So if you're doing nothing, then nobody's going to have anything to say about it. If you put more out there, there's more output that maybe elevates the level of potential genius labeling. But that's, again, that's just talking about the label itself. I think we all have an idea about where our intellect and creativity and all that, our genius level lies. And what I argue is that you can increase that. You can work on that and train that. And I think it starts with the self-belief, that big mirror and effect where understanding that there is more to what you can do with your mind.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Throughout the book, I talk about many different ways to improve those things across a broad range. And I try to give examples that just quickly show people how much more they can actually do, no matter what you think you're capable of with your mind. And then when you start to see those abilities elevate, your memory, your ability to read faster, do math calculations in your mind, maybe genius isn't such a firm thing after all. Maybe it's a little more moldable and maybe I have some of it in me.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Some inspiration for your work, for your direction in life. I am currently dealing with a situation with family, dealing with early onset Alzheimer's, dementia. It's a fascinating situation to watch because sometimes you'll look at someone, they're still capable of dressing themselves and all that kind of stuff, and hanging out in society as a zombie a little bit, ask the time every five minutes kind of thing. And you wonder what's going on in their mind. Are they still able to process everything, but they can't get it out? You don't know exactly what's going on. But why don't you get into some of your understanding and share some wisdom for the use it or lose it thought process?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  The mind is a muscle. Again, we don't have the life extension yet. They can't port us to a hard drive yet. Maybe that's coming, but until it does come, speak to how important it is, your understanding, all the work you've done on using the mind and not letting it just become channel surfing soap operas and not engaging with the world.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I had a similar experience and started my journey in memory, watching my grandmother and her mind deteriorate right in front of our eyes. She lived in France, so we wouldn't get to see her all the time, but every summer or so, near the end of her life, we got to see her for a few weeks. And this one time, near the end of her life, I went to visit her and I knew she had the early stages of Alzheimer's, but I went to see her one summer and she couldn't remember who I was. It was this really hurtful, sad, awe inspiring in a way too, experience to see someone right in front of you who loves you and you have had so many experiences with and memories with, and they don't know who you are and they look at you with this empty stare of non-recognition. It's a wild thing to try to understand how the mind can get to that place.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And that just inspired me to try to understand memory and say, look, I didn't want that to happen to me. And that motivated me to start training my memory. Not that it was bad, but it definitely wasn't the champion level that it eventually became. But over the years, I've just realized how important it is to keep your mind sharp. I train all the time. I'm training for competition, so it's a little more intense. But when I stop training or take a break, you know, I can feel the brain fog come in. And I can feel my abilities atrophy a little bit. And it's just like anything, right? If you are training and physically or lifting weights, getting stronger, running a lot, and then you stop completely, your fitness changes, your capacity changes.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  I'll share with you, going back, one of my favorite guests on this podcast, he's no longer with us, was a guy named Anders Ericsson. And Anders Ericsson was the deliberate practice guy. And he shared the story with me from his book, Peak, where the London taxi drivers, which back in the day, they had to memorize all the streets, and they scanned their minds and they could see what a active taxi driver mind looked like, the brain, and what an inactive taxi driver brain looked like. And there was a noticeable shrinkage, which is fascinating when you accept it, when you accept what that means.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, their hippocampus actually grew in size as they studied for this complex, spatially focused exam. A lot of memory athletes, that's what we call them, competing in these competitions, have been scanned or part of some studies on the brain. And it's always showing a very similar story that, first of all, more parts of the brain light up when we memorize versus the person who does not use memory techniques or no memory techniques or have a well-trained memory. And then also the size of the hippocampus is usually larger in volume. There's also been studies that show that people with larger than average hippocampi don't develop Alzheimer's. Or I think everybody eventually would if they lived long enough,

• 19:02Speaker 01

  but those people usually die before they exhibit any symptoms of Alzheimer's. I think we're in a very interesting time with technology because with AI doing or threatening to do a lot of our cognitive weightlifting.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Think we start to feel the effects of not thinking as we used to, right? Something as simple as writing or crafting an email to somebody where you could just do a one-sentence prompt and or even just copy and paste someone's message and it'll draft the email perfectly fine for you. That's nice and it helps speed things along. But then you might notice that you have trouble writing your own emails if you actually were pressed to do.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Are people gonna ever be pressed again to do that with AI?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  That's the thing. I can never write an email again. I can focus on other things, right? With my mind. I think AI is covering a lot of things, maybe too many things, maybe all things that we do with our mind. And inevitably, what are we gonna do with our minds? What can we do with our minds at that point? I argue that having agency over our own cognitive skills is the most human thing we could have. It's the one thing we have. And if you let tech take that away from you, what's left? There's the health component argument, like we could all be cognitive mush by earlier than we want to, but also keeping this human element to our lives.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Let me let you play teacher for a second to bring people into your way of thinking. And I want to use an example, a really simple example. Look, if people want to dive in deep, they're gonna have to read the book. But I want to talk about names and I want to let you, again, put your teacher hat on and start from square one. I will share with you something I find odd about myself and I'm not sure why I do it. And maybe you will have an opinion, but here I am in a country right now, Vietnam. Vietnamese will often use an English name, especially if they're dealing with foreigners. So they'll have their Vietnamese name and then some random English name that they've picked. And I always say to them, please, no, just tell me your Vietnamese name because I've learned after being here long enough and I have no earthly idea how my brain's working when I tell you this story.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  But if they tell me their Vietnamese name and I can say it out loud, I might get the tone wrong because there's six tones in the Vietnamese language. But if I know how to spell it, I seem to have near perfect memory for Vietnamese names. Today I was in a conference and there was a handful of white guys. Maybe 10 that I've seen before and I had no idea what their names.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Clue. Now, is there a desire component there? There could be that. Maybe some of the Vietnamese names I've remembered have been very attractive fitness teachers. I'm not sure. Anyways, just to share with you, if you want to comment on that, you can, but I'll let you take the floor. And if you were to stand on stage and you were to address a thousand people, and you were to get them into your way of thinking as how to crack the nut on one particular memory issue, the memorization of names, to not forget a name of somebody you just met, which kind of happened to me today, the floor is yours.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  It's probably the number one question, I guess. How can I remember names better? I think that would elevate so many people's interaction with others in the world. And it's such a simple thing in theory, and so powerful if you can get it right. If I had to guess in relation to your experience with Vietnamese names, I'm not quite sure. I could pinpoint a Vietnamese name, but I would imagine, first of all, it sounds like when you're asking them for their Vietnamese name instead of their American guy's name, that already shows intent, which is a huge part of remembering anything, is to be intentful on getting information, but also motivated and making them priority, which you are if you're doing that. The other thing is, it's because those names probably stand out a lot more than the Bobs and Steves

• 22:49Speaker 01

  and Carols, right? That these quote unquote white guys at your conference. So it might just be more memorable because they are bizarre and out of the norm. That also makes things memorable when things are less common and more interesting. And when there's like this level of difficulty, it may feel counterintuitive that you would remember it better. But when we struggle with information, we actually remember it better. We actually sit with the struggle. But anyways, going back to I'm on stage, I'm teaching how to memorize names. I try to break it down into just a few steps, because if you imagine any scenario where you're meeting somebody, there's already a lot of anxiety because it's a social setting. Some people are made for it. They love to schmooze and they're great with people. Others, like

• 23:30Speaker 01

  myself, are a bit shyer and find it very hard to create conversation and not be embarrassed and all that. I think the first. First step goes back to what I said about intent and wanting to really know this person's name. I think if you go into any interaction where you're meeting somebody where you say to yourself, hey, I want to know this person's name. It is the most important thing at this moment in time, right? And that's an attention thing, being present. Of course, that's important when you interact with anybody. But if you really want to remember that name, if you just didn't that where you said that to yourself before you shook this person's hand and asked for their name. What is this person's name? I want to know this person's name. You'd be surprised how powerful your memory can be. All right, so that's more of a mindset thing, right? Once you have the mindset going, of course, you shake hands.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Two words are exchanged, but these names, these words that represent these two humans. And you're expected to memorize them, right? So what I do before I shake the person's hand is I'm looking at the person in the eyes, in the face. I'll choose a distinguishing feature. And this is for the purpose of anchoring or storing the information that they're about to present to me. So the problem with memory and forgetting a lot is that we don't actively store the information in our minds in a conscious way, really. We just hope for the best. We absorb the information, we process it, and then it's just floating around in our minds somewhere like a random piece of paper floating, you know, that you throw in your office.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And it's just a pile of paper representing all the pieces of information that you know. There's no order to it. So if you were to go back and try to find it, it may be on top of that pile. It may be buried, it may not even be in that room anymore because the window was open and everything got thrown around, right? But what if you could organize all of those papers into a neat little file cabinet? And so when you go to fetch a piece of information, you just thumb through the cabinet and pull it out because you know where it is. So this is what using their feature on their face is all about. That's the anchor so that you have a place to now store their name. Whether you notice that they have a beautiful smile, a little jagged tooth, a big nose, beautiful eyes, a little dimple.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  It's got to be physical. Like I was saying, Nelson Nice, that's not what you're talking about.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I'm saying choose a physical feature on the person's face. Obviously, there's a secret about it. Keep it to yourself. It doesn't have to be good or bad. It's just, we notice things. So why not use that as something to anchor their name onto? Now, you have the anchor. Now you ask for the name. So they've given you this name, Nelson, let's say. And here's where you have to create a memorable picture out of the name. So we remember pictures better than abstract information. And you could argue that a name is abstract, right? Some more abstract than others. You want to make these names memorable. So this is for any information, honestly, not just names. Is I'm always trying to teach people how to take information and turn it or encode it

• 26:23Speaker 01

  into the things that our brains like to receive, which are pictures, images, things with association, emotion, color, sensory information. If I send the name Nelson, you're going to dig into your associative memory and be like, what does that remind me of? What do I think of when I say Nelson? I'm going to give that question to you.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  It's a little bit of a rare name.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  It is, which helps. But what comes to mind? And you can say nothing if nothing comes to mind. I'm just curious.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  There was another Nelson in my industry that I knew.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Okay. And can you visualize them?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  He was older. He was a guy that was involved in trading systems and data. Very thoughtful guy. I remember that.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So listen, this is happening live, right? As you're meeting someone, so you obviously don't want to be like, excuse me, hold on. I'm trying to think of what your name reminds me of. You want to be smooth about this. So whatever comes to mind, I usually tell the person that I'm teaching this to, just go with it. Because that's what came to mind. It's probably going to come to mind the next time you see this person anyway. So let's say we use your former colleague Nelson, whoever that was, as this picture you have. And picture is, or visual is a broad term. It's not necessarily that you can see them in your mind. It's all of the things that make him or her up, right? What they did for work, the context around who they were in relation to you. Maybe some memories of you interacting with that person. You may not know much about them, but maybe you just know what they look like roughly, right?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  That's fine. You can build a visual out of that. The next step is to take that visual or whatever association you have for their name and attach it or link it to the feature in some way. Okay, intertwine the two. So let's make a very accessible example here. So Nelson might make most people think of like Nelson Mandela, right? That's a very quick, easy one. When I ask audiences what they think of, that's the majority of people's answers. Most people can picture Nelson Mandela. And maybe the feature that they choose for me, I just shaved my beard, but I have usually a big red old beard. So maybe they saw that and they say that feature. Okay. So now you have this image, you have a feature,

• 28:26Speaker 01

  intertwine the two, make a story out of it, literally stick Nelson Mandela to the beard, have a reason why he's interacting with my beard.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Nelson Mandela has a red beard.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. Which would be a wild image in itself.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Almost impossible to forget.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so that process, now you have an image for the name to help you come up with the name when you have a picture for it. And then you've attached it somewhere. So when you see that person again, they are the link and they show up with the links, which is their memorable feature, which then has the image for the name attached to it. The last step is to solidify and consolidate that information. So we do that by review. Our brains give importance to things in our memory if we visit them or access them a lot. So once you do this process, you want to try to use the name as much as possible, not in a weird way. A lot of it can just be a mental review, like mentally saying to yourself,

• 29:23Speaker 01

  this person's name is Nelson Mandela with the red beard, just testing yourself. But it's also nice to say it out loud. So Nelson, tell me more about yourself or Nelson, can you meet my friend Julie over here? That's not the end of it, using the person's name. I hear that technique a lot. That will help, but it's more of like tail end part of the technique. I keep like a main journal. Whenever I meet someone, I'm always writing the date of when I met this person, their name, the mnemonics I came up with and any other information I learned about the person. And I review this. It's a fun game. I play with myself every morning just to see who I met this year and pinpoint them in my mind because listen, some people you'll never see again. Some people you might think you'll never see again, but you see them tomorrow. So I gotta be prepared, especially as a memory guy,

• 30:05Speaker 01

  that I know everybody's name that I ever meet, which is a lot of pressure, but to me it's a game and it's super fun to play around with.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  You are able to do that with almost everyone you've met?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say I'm 90% able to remember.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Which is super high, right?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  I'm not really joking when I tell you this, it might sound funny. I've got a friend, she teaches me Pilates. We've known each other for years. She's a very attractive lady and all of her friends fit the bill. They're all very attractive ladies. So she invites me to her one-year anniversary party for her Pilates studio. And I go in there, everyone's in their fitness clothes. It's 20 of the most attractive women I've ever seen in one small room, all with generally the same shape, with generally the same makeup. And guess how many names I remembered after being there? Zero.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  All right, interesting.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  The same thing probably happened at giving a speech in Singapore to a room full of suits, primarily of Chinese ancestry, primarily men. I'm sure in that moment where you've got so many people that you're dealing with, it becomes even more of a challenge. If it's one-on-one, I can see, I'm sure you face this all the time, all of a sudden, there's a crowd perhaps. That's a whole different challenge. Whether it's the guys that want to listen to me about trading or me ending up in the Pilates studio with 20 of the best-looking women I've ever seen in one room, it's still the same problem.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  It's such a social thing. There's so much that's involved with it outside of these straightforward tips that I'm giving you. You could be just extra nervous because you're not good socially. You could be thrown into a party-like setting where, you know, people are just throwing names at you. You've been in a situation where your best bud, you go to your party there, Steve, and he goes, Nelson, look, this is Jen, Gary, Bob, Steve, you know, just riled them up. How are you supposed to do this technique when you're Call of Garden, you're given like 10 names at a time? So there's all sorts of kind of social tricks, I call them, to make sure that your names, ultimately, it's based around the same idea, but going a bit further to make sure that you have all of these names.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  So in a situation like that, where you don't necessarily have this one-on-one, the thing I tell myself is I'm not going to leave this place or this event until I know everybody's name or the people that I want to remember. Whether that means after I've gotten 10 names fired at me, like, I'm going to do my best to see if I can remember them all, but I'm going to make sure I know them all. Some of them, I may have to go up to each person and be like, listen, and be straight up with them. People love it when you try to learn their names. They'll be like, I didn't catch your name. Steve, my buddy, just throw them all at me really fast. What was your name again? And you can ask in that setting, and there's a little time window where you can ask someone for their name multiple times before it gets a bit unacceptable. But I will make sure that I get that one on one time just to learn the person's name.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I'll tell you a funny story. Thirteen years ago, I was in Japan for an event. I was a brand ambassador for a memory data storage company. I just won my first two championships, the memory competition, and we went to Tokyo to do an event. And my boss had told me, hey, Nelson, there's going to be three hundred or two hundred Japanese businessmen. And I want you to memorize all their names so that when I get on stage, I say, everybody stand up, and then I just fire off all the names. It's a really fool demo. I usually do that in a lot of my speeches. But in America, with names that I know and I've heard a million times. But now I'm dealing with, you know, Kobayashi's and Takeshi's and all these multi-syllabic names, right?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  First and last names that I am not familiar with. I'm sweating. And to add to the social element here in Japan, at least in the business culture, presenting of a business card is a whole thing. Usually I try to smooth the room for these kind of events. I'm just like, I get in, I get out, right? I get the name, I give a little banter, and then I'm off to the next person. This doesn't work here because they got to present with a little bow, their card, you have to appreciate and accept the card. And it's very taboo to just say, thanks, and move on. Meanwhile, I don't speak Japanese, and my translator is awkwardly relaying information in this awkward way. And so each interaction is taking a long time, and I have to get through two hundred people before this event. So that was probably the hardest situation I've ever had to deal with.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  But ultimately, all the training that I've done, being able to do this quickly, and then some of the little tricks to navigate kind of actual real human interactions in settings like that, will help you get the names that you need.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  When I listen to you, I think the number one thing that you make me think about, and maybe this is what makes it hard for people, is often in life, we are just going through life in a closed circle and then all of a sudden, we're thrown into an event or a party or something where there's a lot of new faces. And there's like a shutdown mechanism. Sometimes you just don't know what to do. Whereas when I listen to the way that you talk and explain, it's more like, hey, if you're just prepared a little bit, no matter when it happens in your life, you say to yourself, you know what? At some point in time, I'm going to be faced with people that I don't know. And I don't want to just lock up. Like, I want to be prepared and I want to be cool about it and casual about it

• 35:17Speaker 00

  and not get those immediate sink or swim feelings, that kind of emotional feeling. And I think that's the big part of what I'm hearing from you. And we're just scratching the surface is being prepared.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, going back to these labels that people might put on someone as being a genius. People who are prepared in a variety of ways, right? That they've done preparation in some way on their own time. A good friend of mine, Chrissy's a magician. And you look at a magician and they do magic and you're just like, how did they do that? It's just this awe inspiring experience to see this person do that. And he'll say that magic is just going out of your way to do something that people won't think that you would do, like in a very simple way. And either when you learn how these tricks are done, it's like a bit of a letdown because it's just like lame or actually the magic's gone, right? It's cheesy how they did it.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  But all they really did was learn this trick beforehand or did set something up beforehand. And you just wouldn't have thought about that, that they went out of their way to prepare. There's this mentalist right now, Oz Perlmutter, who's doing the rounds. He's got a new book and doing insane stuff on all sorts of shows, right? And you're like, how can he read people's minds? How was he doing this? And I don't know, I'm not a mentalist. I have some ideas and I've talked to some mentalists, how it's done, but you know, all I know is that he's got the information before he does his whole act. However, he did that, I don't know. He's figured it out how to get it. The preparation part, he's done that so that when he's there sitting in front of you pretending, or playing into this thing where he's reading your mind, looking at all these subtle cues,

• 36:54Speaker 01

  you're looking up here to remember this name and spelling it in your mind. He already knows what the name is. He's not figuring it out. But you don't think that because he's a master of saying the right things and he's done this a million times. But you look at him and you're like, you could argue, be like, he's a genius, right? He's got this mind that can just pick up on these subtle cues. But it's not that at all, right? It's all this prep work that he's mastered. And you could argue that's what I do with my memory. It's like, I don't really have a good memory. I don't think I do, but I know all the techniques and I've practiced them so much that when it actually comes to time, I have all these tools that I can use that make it look like I have a phenomenal memory. And arguably I do because I can remember the things that I'm usually tested on.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Let me give you an opportunity to blow the audience's socks off, so to speak. Because most people probably in some point in time in their life had heard about someone that goes down your path or has your skills. And I think what's really fascinating too, where some of the people, I know the lady that was on the Taxi TV show has that amazing photographic memory. That's actually something that's inherent.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Oh, Mary Lou Henner.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yes. I think that's something inherent though. That's not something she practiced. It's just a fluke of nature.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  It's super rare, but there are a few people who have that ability.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  If you were to give an example that really, you gave the one in Japan already, which is fascinating. But why don't you give an example, maybe one of the ones you're most proud of, where people are just going to go, okay, Mike and Nelson have talked for nearly an hour and he shared a couple of examples. You say you're doing the mental athletic competitions. What is one of the ones that you're most proud of where people are going to hear and go, shit, how the hell did he do that?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yes. I've memorized some wild things in my day, but I'd say the one I'm most proud of, because it did honestly take a lot of time to prepare, was memorizing 10,000 digits of pi. Pi is this constant, pi day is around the corner, 314.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I know 3.14.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Most people do, and that's totally fine.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  10,000 digits.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  10,000 digits, yeah. And the record that I was attempting to break, I didn't break the record, because it's a difficult record, was not just saying all 10,000 digits in order. That's quote unquote easy. This record was what they call a matrix test, where basically the 10,000 digits are split up into a group of five, and a panel of judges will randomly choose any set of five within the 10,000, and say it to you, and you have to immediately say, what are the next five digits and what are the previous five digits? You have to do that 50 times as fast as possible with no mistakes. So it's not just about knowing from 3.14 till the end, or till the end of 10,000.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  It's being able to know any portion of it and say, continue from that point on forwards and backwards.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  So it's not about just crunching the math in your head. It is literally the memorizing of the numbers.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  There are ways to approximate pi, but that's left for accuracy, that's left to computers. I've taken 10,000 digits that I'm just memorized. So I know that I'm not calculating anything. I'm just accessing it.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  10,000. You don't think there's anything in your skull there that is inherent? You have gone down the path, you have studied, you've practiced, you've figured out the techniques, you've dedicated yourself to it, and you've pulled off a 10,000 number memorization.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think anybody could potentially do that. I think what separates me is that I'm a bit like, who would want to do that?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Psycho?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I sat down one day and said, ah, I'm gonna devote my time to this, and I'm really motivated to do this.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  How much time do you think it took you to do that?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I didn't have necessarily like a deadline, so I took my time. It's a lot of information. And when you have a lot of information, as I mentioned before, the review part is important, right? Because you want all of the 10,000 digits to be as fresh as the other. So I need to make sure that I'm reviewing all of it. So what I did is, I think at the time, this was I first learned them in 2016. I broke them up into thousands and I maybe just spent a week with each of the thousand. And the funny thing is the actual memorization part, that's the easiest part. So I would literally just sit there maybe for 20, 30 minutes and I'd have about a thousand in my mind. And then it's about practicing, rehearsing it so that I could say it without any mistakes, without any gaps and being able to recite it quickly.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  I'm not going to try to take you into the full process and maybe you will never be able to tell us the full process. Give a hint as to how that happens because I don't think anybody listening that can't do this is thinking, how do you even start? What's the glue that pulls this together? What is something that can start to bring somebody into the mindset to sit down and pull that off?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I'm going to pull back to the example we did with the names where we talked about having an image for the information and then having a link and an anchor to store that information. And then the review part, right? I already talked about that. But then for numbers, it's a little more abstract, right? At least a name, if I hear a name, I'm gonna be like, oh Nelson Mandela or Willie Nelson. I can maybe figure out something with a name. With a number, that's harder because it's more abstract, right? So what a lot of memory athletes will do is they'll create basically a language out of the numbers so that they can construct words. So there's a bunch of different techniques out there. One that's very popular is called the major system where it allows you to transform numbers and it's very easy to learn. You can

• 42:21Speaker 01

  learn this translation and process in just a few minutes. And once you have that, you can create words. And if you can create words out of numbers, then it's just as simple as memorizing a name or just a word.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Memorizing a speech, almost?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Memorizing a speech in a way, yeah. And then- What do you do with this picture? And so 10,000, that's going to be a lot of pictures and I need to know them in order. That's where the anchoring process is the most important. And there's techniques to do this. One of the most popular is something called a memory palace, where you can use a physical space that's real to you, like your house or your childhood home. And you mentally walk through it or navigate through it in a way that makes sense. And you can attach or link pictures to those locations along a path. And the path that you know already preserves the order, right? Anybody can close their eyes and imagine walking through their house. You don't have to memorize that. So why not attach information to it? That's essentially this file cabinet idea.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And this is a technique that's been around for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks used to use this to memorize things. So when I'm looking at chunks of numbers of pie, I'm turning them into pictures. I have a language that lets me easily convert them to very memorable pictures. I don't see the numbers. I see these mini scenes of very memorable things happening. And then I'm anchoring them to locations of the first thousand, for example, is in my high school. I'm picturing all these bizarre things, like the first image I have is a Sam Neill dressed up as Iron Man, which is 14159. And now that may not make sense to you, but there is a system on the backend of it that converts it to such an image.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  I had a professor on this podcast. His first name was Gabriel, I'm pretty sure. His last name started with an R, it was an S K Y ending. I don't want to mispronounce it. He was the professor that spent a lot of his career figuring out that if you were in one room and had a thought and walked through the door and went to the other room, you might forget that thought. Now, I'm a guy who is doing a lot of writing, creative type thinking, and I'll often be in the shower, not necessarily trusting my own memory and being conscious of the fact that when I leave the shower, I'm going to potentially lose what I had because I know what that professor taught me, right? Of walking through the damn doorway.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  I've gotten very used to thinking about, here comes the doorway. I don't want to lose that thought. You probably know something about that professor or have heard about it at least.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Something happens when you traverse a threshold. It's like your brain at some level resets. And oftentimes misinformation, not always, but oftentimes information can be dropped because of that weird reset. And funnily enough, I talked about this with a well-known actor where they have a script on pages, right? And obviously Pedro's out there and to continue on the next page. Usually that transition from one page to the next is usually problematic because of that shift, right? You can memorize what's on the page very easily, but then words is like a line, maybe that's on the bottom of one page at the top of the other. That transition, it's kind of like walking through the doorway can often be tricky. And I don't know, it's just like a psychological kind of glitch that happens with our minds.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  But the moral of the story is if you are like in a classroom or trying to remember something while you're in a room and you know you're about to leave. Finish processing it before you go through the door, right?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Or you could be like me, walking through the door, saying it out loud as you walk through the door, which is a pretty bad hack. But compared to the ones you're teaching me today.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  That reminds me of that show Severance, right? Where they have these thresholds where these two consciousnesses kind of are totally separate. So when he crosses through the door, he's somebody completely else and doesn't remember what was just before. Another tip is if you're going through the door and you forget why you came into this room. To jog your memories, usually to think back where you just came from and try to put yourself in the mindset of where that person was. And not always, but it is a way to help you remember why you came into the room in the first place.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  I think a lot of this too is avoiding panic in the mind, just staying calm and reflecting for a moment. And not allowing that panic feeling to happen.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  That goes back to the being prepared, right? In advance, if you've done a million different attempts at memorizing things. And it's not as a stressful event. And of course, when the real thing happens, you'll be a lot more calm. Somebody 20 years ago had been like, Nelson, you gotta memorize all these people's names in this room. I'd be like, oh goodness gracious. I'd be stressed. I'd be, I don't know how to do this. I'd be talking myself down. But now if I were to do that, I'd be like, cool, I've done that. Is it still stressful? Sure. But more so because I'm shy in front of people. So now I'm thinking like, oh God, I gotta introduce myself to X amount of people. But the memory part, no stress.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  By the way, I'll share one thing with you before we wind out and I tell everybody about the book that I mentioned earlier in this conversation. My second book was about a famous trader and he had watched the movie Trading Places with his partner, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd. And they walked out of the movie and this guy had made a billion dollars in the early 80s and his partner said, "Oh my God, you're a genius. No one can do what you can do." And he said, "No, that's not true. We can teach people to do what I do." And so I heard about this story in the 90s and ended up writing a book in 2007 about it. Anyways, they put ads in the Wall Street Journal and Barron's and they hired a bunch of students. And the students, they narrowed it down to they hired 20. They gave them two weeks of training with their rules, their automated rules, and they put them in a building down the street in Chicago.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Four years later, that group of 20 students, which I mean, it ran the gamut on terms of backgrounds. It was amazing. It wasn't an official experiment, but four years later, that group of 20 students had made $100 million profit in aggregate by the end of the 80s. And so the reason the damn story is so popular even today, the book still sells like crazy is because it was nurture trumping nature. It was the practice. It was the rules. I'm not stuck necessarily with the genetic component only I can overcome. So yeah, I appreciate where you're going. Anyways, the book, Everyday Genius Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More. Nelson, cool stuff. I'm sure we could talk forever because I could probably talk to you for the whole book

• 48:39Speaker 00

  because I would then take you down every point, but then people would be like, "Okay, I don't want to buy the book now because now I made Nelson talk for six hours and basically got everything out of it." Anyways, great stuff. Amazon, all that kind of fun stuff. Is there a website you want to send people to?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  It's just my name, NelsonDellis.com. You can find all the information you need, links to the book, links to my YouTube channel. I have a bunch of content out there teaching a lot of these cognitive skills, mostly memory. And yeah, Radvansky is the name of the...

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Radvansky. So you knew of him or you had heard of him?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I'd written about it in my book specifically, a rat study about walking through doorways.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  It took you a long time to remember.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  It was in a deep corridor that I had to go dig for it.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Hold on, is that deep corridor the screen in front of you?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  No. No, it's in my mind. There is a screen inside my brain that I have to search for it.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  I knew it started with an R and ended with a Y, and I knew there was a D in there, but I didn't want to say it wrong. You said it. So anyways, Nelson, cool stuff. Keep me posted on future books. Fun conversation.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Thank you for the questions. Great talk.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash, or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected]. I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.