Mastering memory: Practical techniques for accessing the mind's potential (transcript)
Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@bemythical.com.
Episode Transcript:
Lian (00:00)
Hello, my beautiful mythical old souls and a huge warm welcome back. Mastering memory. Let's talk about practical techniques for accessing the mind's potential, but also the profound hidden reasons for doing so. On the show this week, I'm joined once again by the fascinating and just excellent Anthony Metivier.
Anthony is the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method, foreign language vocabulary, names, music, poetry, and much more in ways that are easy, elegant, effective, and fun.
In this show, we explore the transformative art of memory techniques with a focus on the ancient yet powerful memory palace method. We discuss the science and soul of memorization, reflecting on the ways our brains create associations and store information. Anthony shares practical guidance on crafting memory palaces, reveals the importance of interleaving topics for richer understanding, and into the advanced techniques like The Shadow Method. The conversation highlights how intentional practice can unlock the profound connection between memory and consciousness.
And before we jump into all of that good stuff, if you are struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world and would benefit from guidance, support and kinship on these most ancient and time-ordinary paths, well, join our Academy of Soul, Unio.
and for the entirety of December we are giving you a Christmas present of one month absolutely free. You can find out more and join us by hopping on over to bemythical.com slash unio or click the link in the description.
And now back to the episode, let's dive in!
Lian (02:04)
Hello, Anthony, a huge welcome back to the show.
Anthony (02:09)
Hello again, good to meet with you.
Lian (02:11)
I am fascinated to see how this episode goes. I was joking before we started recording saying this time we actually are going to talk about memory. Not that we didn't talk about memory last time, but we kind of had the conversation about memory down about as many rabbit holes I think you could probably go in in the space of about an hour. This time we agreed would come back having kind of sort of set the scene in a bit of a kind of Alice in Wonderland kind of way, that this time we'd come back and look at a kind of, make this quite a practical episode and with the intention that it's really about memory techniques, improving one's memory, how to memorise things. And I think we talked a little bit about why you might want to memorise
certain kinds of things in last week's show, but perhaps we could touch upon that as well in case, you know, someone is listening to this as standalone episode. Certainly from my perspective, one of the things that really surprised me was why you chose to memorise certain things and also the impact of that. So perhaps we could kind of finish with that as well. But I'm going to hand over to you and...
really allow you to lead the way through this, well, starting with a beautiful palace. So I'm in your hands.
Anthony (03:45)
yes, palaces, the memory palace technique. So one thing to think about is why do you want to remember stuff in the first place? And why do people come to this ancient mnemonic strategy that involves using buildings in your mind? One of the reasons why is because it makes it a lot easier to pass exams. And it's very popular with students, particularly medical students, legal students.
One of the reasons why it's more popular with medical students and law students is because the stakes are so much higher the career outcomes are really huge so if you think about having a bulletproof memory and you are really bored with rote learning the memory palace technique is like a video game in your mind and It is one of the most thrilling and exciting things that you can do the problem with it
Lian (04:19)
Hmm.
Anthony (04:40)
is that it doesn't necessarily seem that way. And one of reasons it doesn't seem that way is because you can't see what's happening in someone else's mind. But the promise is real. If you can learn this and you can do it, you have the opportunity to feel more excited and alive than ever before, even with the most tedious and painful information. And you know this is true because I can rattle off with delight
Lian (04:46)
Mmm.
Anthony (05:08)
all eight carpal bones. And I can talk about the muscle here, the extensor pollicus brevis, I think it's called. And you know, like I know that the navicular is also the scaphoid and I am not a medical professional. I don't care, but I actually help students remember this stuff. And then I know it. And the basics of the memory palace technique are pairing locations together with associations. So if I look at my wrist and assuming that's correct, that the navicular can also be called the scaphoid, literally I am placing little associations here.
And then next to that is the lunate. Now, why do I know that? Because right now Abba is standing on my wrist singing about Waterloo while the moon is going over their heads, right? And then if we go to the Capitate, which I'm skipping the Pisa form and the triangular and all this stuff, Capitate is Captain Crunch. I don't know if that's a universally known serial, but you know, Capitate. And so it's really just that.
Now, in order to pass a law school exam, it's a little more intense than this. There's more moving parts, but that's the core of it. It is associating images in locations. And to scale, you use bigger places than your wrist, although you can certainly use your wrist. To scale, you typically use buildings. And where that habit came from, we don't exactly know, but it was in
upgrade from using the body because the body is limited. Yet the ancient rishis and gurus that know all the Sanskrit, they tended to use their bodies as the memory palaces and they may have, I don't know this for sure because there's so much to learn, but they may have offloaded it onto the bodies of other people. But at some point in history,
Lian (07:01)
Hmm.
Anthony (07:03)
The idea, and there's also things that are called like Lucasa or memory boards. So they would offload these locations onto boards and they would put pearls and rocks and various items. would stick onto a board and then they would touch them and they would associate sounds and images with these various locations on the board that would help them recall information. So there'd be sticks, all kinds of things.
Apparently Napoleon used the buttons on his shirt. Now, I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe I had that in a dream. It doesn't matter. The point is, that where there's a location, there is a place where you can make an association. And so every, the entire world is a memory palace just waiting to happen where you can do this kind of stuff, where you place weird things like Abba singing on your button. Like it's just unlimited. In fact, Taley's said,
Lian (07:49)
Mmm.
Anthony (08:00)
Megason Topos Hapantagar-Kori, forgiving my pronunciation of ancient Greek, means space is ultimate because it contains all things. So that's the number one step, is to realise that space contains things, and then you can craft journeys through space, and then make a kind of Hansel and Gretel cookie crumb journey for yourself, where there's gonna be these little images that help you recall stuff. Is all that basically clear?
Lian (08:30)
Well, first of all, you've sold the idea to me thus far.
Anthony (08:34)
Cha-ching!
Lian (08:41)
So I remember as I was sharing with you, was a long time ago, five, 10 years ago that I tried this technique and I'm not at all coming from a place of it was rubbish and it didn't work. But I have some recollection of what my experience was and I don't even necessarily know that this is why I stopped using it. I think for whatever reason, you know, at the time I just wasn't particularly devoted to
learning that in a way that was, became useful. But one of things that I came up against, and I suspect this is quite common, it felt,
It felt like I was needing to remember the locations, but then it was almost like I need a location to remember the location to then remember what I've associated the locations with. And I'm guessing that becomes easier, but certainly I felt as though there was like, and maybe this is an investment in time that then kind of creates a foundation to build upon. But I remember thinking a bit like how you were just saying with your wrist. It's like, well,
you've still got to remember those things, which isn't from my kind of very novice mind to this, doesn't sound that much easier than remembering the actual things, if that makes sense. You're still needing to remember something and how is that any easier than remembering the thing directly? Aside from there is some sort of sense of, like sort of narrative and kind of, I can't think of the word one thing after another.
Anthony (10:10)
Hmm.
Beautiful, beautiful. Well, that's exactly the thinking that many, people have. And this is what the ancient Greeks worked on. They're like, well, it is easier. So if you go to a building, right, and you use a kitchen in that building, or you go to where you buy soda pop, right, you'll later...
Someone will say, hey, where'd you get that soda pop? And you'll go, it's just there in the corner, right? We didn't have to do extra work. Your brain just remembers that stuff, right? But where it gets tricky for people is they say, well, I have to memorise 10,000 things. So how am I gonna find 10,000 places? And there's a guy named Peter of Rowena and he said, 10,000? I've got 100,000 of these little suckers. And he was a jurist.
Lian (10:57)
Hmm.
Anthony (11:20)
And he was quite famous for not only being able to rattle off thousands of facts about the law, but he spoke multiple languages and he could recite scripture from the top of his head. And the difference between him and other people is he came up with some principles for himself. And I've been teaching variations on these principles for a very, very long time. Anyway, he's on my mind right now because I've just released a new...
Commentary and my own I just rewrote his book because it's very difficult to understand So I made it modern and he's he's he starts off his book. Anyone can do this Anyone and then later he mocks people like he literally says you're like, it's so funny. He's like you're gonna say, okay So you've got an ant in your memory palace. How is one ant gonna move a kernel of? Some substance I didn't memorise the book But anyway some some substance that this one ant is gonna move and that's somehow gonna trigger this memory
Lian (11:58)
You
Anthony (12:14)
And he says, young fellow, why does it have to be one ant? Why can't you have thousands of ants charging through here like an army? Anyway, it's really funny. But basically what he says is, go to the places that you already know. And then he says this dangerous word that so many people will run screaming from. He says, think, think about it. So he says, go into your church, your favorite church, and notice where the windows are.
and think about them. And he doesn't say it exactly like this, but he's like, you'll probably notice they're about six feet apart, right? And just imagine that every six feet, you place a piece of information, like Hansel and Gretel laying cookie crumbs or whatever breadcrumbs around, right? And do you really have to think that hard about six feet apart? Like, how could you forget the rule six feet? If that's your problem, like,
Lian (13:11)
Hmm.
Anthony (13:13)
channeling his voice because he's quite brusque. If that's your problem, then you need a different book. Like this is is so simple. There's nothing more complicated about this than that. However, I myself found that a little bit complicated. So I thought. Thinking I can do, but I'm going to draw out these little journeys. So I started to get in the habit of doing what I I've learned over the years. Don't tell anybody that you're drawing.
Lian (13:20)
you
Anthony (13:42)
even though I still repeat the habit, because that's procedural memory. It just forces you to say the same thing over and over again. I say, now, as much as I can, I correct myself. Just chicken scratch, because people hear drawing and then they say, I can't do this because I'm an artist. And this is what Peter Rowena is so funny about, because he's just making jokes about people talking themselves out of simple stuff, right? So chicken scratch, a simple memory balance like this. I don't know if you're listening, you can't see it, but this ain't art. This is squares with numbers and arrows. Like, it's just the most...
Childish little thing right and it is a it's a blueprint. I'm not a drafts person. I'm not architect It's just squares that represent rooms and then workout think a little bit Where would be the best place to start in this location? Where I don't confuse myself and I don't create a job So typically how that works is I I try to find what I call the terminal station It's the dead end where if I was starting at the door of a building
Lian (14:14)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (14:42)
where would be the final place that I could go where I would not be able to move any further without doing fancy games like becoming a ghost and walking through walls or jumping out of windows or anything, like just natural. Because if it's unnatural, then you have to remember it. I was a ghost in this room and that's where I passed through the wall. No, that's just all too much work, right? So why the terminal station? Well, there's some very popular TEDx talks where people teach about memory techniques and they say, start at your door and walk inside the memory palace.
Lian (14:55)
Mmm.
Anthony (15:11)
And I go, no, no, no, that's too much work because then you'll end up in the dead end. And then you'll go, where do I go? How do I scale? How do I make this bigger? So I always start in the dead end. So let's say it's a master bedroom. Well, the master bedroom, if it's already in your memory and you just keep it dead simple, it has four corners and four walls. So you start in one of those corners and you just move yourself towards the door. Then what comes next?
Lian (15:38)
Mmm.
Anthony (15:39)
If you can't remember what comes next, it ain't a memory palace. Go to the next option, right? But chances are you'll remember, yes, outside here is the washroom. I don't think I wanna spend much time mentally in the washroom, so I'll just skip that. I tend to use washrooms, but I understand if people don't want to use them, and that's the point. If you don't wanna use it, just skip it. Just make it clear and simple, and make it so that you don't have to memorise it. Base it on what you already remember. Ergo.
term, Memory Palace.
Lian (16:16)
And so just checking, I'm going to ask all manner of silly questions in this episode. I'd like to say intentionally, but it's not even necessarily intentionally. I'm just going to ask, ask what comes. So I've heard you say a number of things that I just want to clarify. There was the example of a church. and then you've said, you know, base it on what you know.
Anthony (16:23)
Well, I'm being silly too, but you know.
Lian (16:40)
So would that typically be a real life building that you're familiar with? Could it be your house? What would you suggest makes a good basis for a memory palace?
Anthony (16:54)
Well, for most of us, it's gonna be a place that you've seen that's gonna give you the greatest advantage because, and I don't wanna mock anybody who has these issues, because I'm being a bit silly, because I'm channeling Peter of Rueda. But the thing is, is that there are challenges that some people can't see images in their minds and so on. the ancient books recognise this and they often say,
Lian (17:01)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (17:24)
Like, don't worry about seeing things. Reach out and touch a wall. Feel it. That can help make it more real to you, right? But in terms of what to choose, here's a simple exercise. Get out a piece of paper and a pen, start with the alphabet, and then write down A, Apple Store, or A, Adam's house, any place you've literally been. And if you can't think of anything, don't worry, skip it.
One of the things that happens when you do these exercises seriously is it starts to trigger your memory. It's like putting oil on a rusty chain, but you have to be consistent. You have to push through. So don't worry about why I'm saying do the entire alphabet. Just do it. I rarely tell people to not be critical thinkers, but in this one sense, just don't overthink this stuff. It's exercises. And we live in the internet era now and it's really bad for what, when I teach live, is simple. Okay.
Lian (18:16)
Mmm.
Anthony (18:17)
I'm gonna leave
the room now and when I come back, you'll have the alphabet drawn on a piece of paper. But on the internet, it's like, well, maybe someday. No, no, no, just sit down, put on a timer, whatever works for you, and write down the alphabet from A to Z. And yes, there's gonna be letters that you might not have an answer for. Because not everybody worked for Zoltan like I did when I was a janitor in a movie theater in Prince George, British Columbia. And not everybody has a friend whose middle name is Xavier, right? But I just happen to have that.
Lian (18:20)
Heh.
Anthony (18:47)
But also I have multiple X-Men repellaces and some of them happen to be movie theaters where I saw X-Men movies. Some of them happen to be libraries where I know Malcolm X has a book, books that he wrote and books about him. Like that sort of stuff. So substitute, be a little bit loose sometimes. And again, just skip the letters. If you can't come up with J, come back to it later. Because the next thing you know, if you're in Australia, you'll be like, JB Hi-Fi, there's my J.
Lian (19:03)
Mmm.
Anthony (19:14)
That sort of stuff, like an electronic store. don't know if it's international. So that's an exercise. And that exercise is a good unto itself because when it comes to like lunate as a carpal bone, it starts with L. So what do I know that starts with L? Waterloo doesn't start with L, but close enough, you know, like it works. But it could have been that I, and I did think of the moon being Luna, et cetera.
And that's part of the image, right? But you want to use the alphabet all the way down because there's I'm not aware of a symbol a number or a word that doesn't start with a letter of the alphabet
Now, let's just push this a little bit. In 2023, I was invited to be the commentator at the Pan American Open World, or sorry, the Pan American Open Memory Competition. And they had this wild card event where they got the guys memorizing cloud formations. And as far as I know, there are no clouds that start with alphabetical letters, right? Except for the words that we give to certain things, right? But they're just abstract shapes.
And they're asking me while I'm commenting, what do you think they're going to do to memorise these clouds? And I said, well, I would use 00299PAO, which is a system that allows you to apply the alphabet to certain things. So there is nothing I've ever encountered under the sun that the alphabet doesn't apply to. So that's what you choose. So Adam's house, Apple store, Applebee's restaurant, Arkham Asylum.
Lian (20:40)
yes.
Anthony (20:55)
to answer your question about like, it be imaginary? Well, if you've recently seen the Joker and you want to experiment with that kind of stuff, go nuts. There's no memory palace police to stop you. However, I personally would find that very difficult because I've never been in Arkham Asylum and I know that they're trying to catch me, but, I'm kidding. But like, just don't want to be in that particular kind of place. No, but that.
Lian (21:08)
Mmm.
Yeah, you're having to kind
of imagine and then project this symbol onto that imagined construct. So if I'm right in thinking, you're saying you would have actually multiple memory palaces, each that would hold different things you're trying to memorise.
Anthony (21:22)
Yes.
There's.
There's very limited ways to squeeze the juice out of this technique without having multiple memory palaces.
Lian (21:39)
I see,
because you don't place multiple different systems of things you're learning into the same palace.
Anthony (21:48)
And you also miss out on what are called interleaving effects. You would miss, this is where, like I don't want to bog things down with a bunch of science. So you tell me whether you want to hear science or not, but there's actually known scientific principles that explain why this technique is so powerful. And there are brain scans of people who use it that demonstrate that yes, yes, there's something going on there. So.
Lian (22:09)
I love the science,
so feel free to share a bit more about that.
Anthony (22:13)
Okay, so then let's get into it. The reason, and I think it's 1895 that Urban Ebbinghaus, sorry, Hermann Ebbinghaus, he writes a book called Uber das Gedächtnis, which in German basically means about memory. what he does is he memorizes, I think the term in German is, Zinloser Silben, senseless syllables or nonsense syllables. Literally three-letter words.
Lian (22:28)
You
Anthony (22:42)
Just weird stuff. And he tracks how long it takes for him to forget them. And he comes up with this term that we now call the forgetting curve. Literally the time it takes for information to decay. And then he realizes, well, hang on a second. The ones that I memorized at the beginning and the ones I memorized at the end, I remember them better. They don't seem as subject to the forgetting curve. And so he calls it the primacy effect and the recency effect. And so this is what you do. Let's just talk about one memory palace for now, just to make this simple.
Lian (23:05)
Hmm.
Anthony (23:12)
But this is why this is all bulletproof in the science. And it's why some people just love this technique. They put mustard on it and they eat it, because it works. There's more science about it than anyone has time to read. There's thousands of years of tradition. And Peter of Rowena, he's mocking people who are just like, I can't do this, right? He's like, come on, young squire. You're just talking yourself out of this. This is nothing. But the thing is, you gotta use it correctly, because otherwise it is really not gonna do what it can.
and it will wind up giving you primacy and recency effects, right? So you need interleaving and you need what's called serial positioning. And so let's just say you've memorized 10 things. What a lot of people wind up doing is they start at the beginning of their memory palace and they move to the end to rehearse the information to get it into long-term memory. And then they wind up forgetting parts of it or they'll remember the first thing and the last thing and the middle will scoop out. So what...
What really keeps me in this work is that I figured out how to use these effects that Ebbinghaus was talking about to make sure that every single station in a memory palace has equal doses of recency effect and primacy effect. And also another thing called von Reschdorf effect, which we can get into. But the idea is, is don't just travel your memory palace from beginning to end. So if you've memorized a list of 10 things, and by the way, some people will say, this is only good for memorizing lists.
Lian (24:23)
Mmm.
Anthony (24:38)
yes, but that's the point. Because when I memorized my TEDx talk, it was a list of sentences. And when I memorized those sentences, those sentences were lists of words. So everything's a list. And actually, according to some physical theories, like physics, time is a list. it's like block time theory is just a list of the blocks of time. So like list is the answer, not the problem. Don't feel that it's limiting. It's actually gonna help you memorise anything that you want. And then we're gonna break the linearity in this way.
Lian (24:44)
Hmmmm
Mmm.
Anthony (25:08)
So you got 10 things. Let's say it's a phrase in Latin. Omnium, expedendorum, prima, es sepentia, in qua perfecti boni forma, consistent. That means choose wisdom above all things because in the choice of wisdom is the form of goodness itself. So the first word, we're gonna start going from first word to the last word, but then we're also gonna travel the memory paths backwards. So consistent, forma, like all those words backwards. And then...
We're gonna start at the middle of the Merry Palace and we're gonna go back to the beginning. So Sapentia, right? And then to the beginning Omnium, and then from Sapentia to the end, consistent, right? Then to really, and this might sound a little bit crazy, but it didn't take that long at all. When I did my TEDx talk, I skipped all the stations. So I went from the last sentence to the sentence before the penultimate sentence. Basically the odd numbered sentence is backwards.
and then the even numbered sentences forward. And I wrote them out from memory by going through these memory palaces so that every single part of the memory palace has equal primacy and recency. And it is memorized very, very, very fast because of following those patterns as you recall. And that process I call recall rehearsal, forward, backward, from the middle to the end, from the middle to the beginning, and then skip the stations.
Lian (26:20)
Mmm.
Because it sounds to me as though the opposite could happen and you actually lose the primacy and recency effects altogether because they no longer are, you know, first and most recent, but that's not what you found. You found that you actually are kind of creating both effects in the way that you're doing it.
Anthony (26:54)
Well, you can lose things, all kinds of things can happen. I mean, it's a wild world out there. There's no guarantee. one of the things that happens and it kind of makes, to me it's a good thing because it's just honest and it's a bit chivalrous because people making mistakes in public are good, right? Because it's normal. But sometimes I get tired and I'll be like, okay, so there's this great Sanskrit phrase and I'll go, Tartava, Mahardavam.
Lian (26:58)
In there.
Anthony (27:24)
And I just will get stuck on it, even though I've said that phrase so many damn times. So is that a memory palace problem? It really isn't a memory palace problem, but people sometimes mistake the mistakes they make for a fault with the technique, but it could be other things. It could be presque vu, for example. could be all kinds, it could be deja vu. I don't know. It could be anything. And sometimes it just happens that these phrases that I normally rattle off so fluidly, they just get stuck in the gear some.
Lian (27:29)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony (27:53)
but then that happens with non-memorized material as well. So I wouldn't treat this as a magic bean and it's not a set of magic bullets. What it is is it's about establishing better long-term recall and it works really well for that, but it's not perfect and there is no perfect coming. you know, the ocean of delusion is a big thing and if you're gonna come into this, treat it like a martial art.
There are very, very good martial artists who, I don't care if you're Bruce Lee, if you're not paying attention and someone hits you with a bottle at the back of your head, you're done. Like it's just, and that can happen also. When I gave my TEDx talk, for example, in the dress rehearsal, people laughed exactly where I put the joke. But come the day of the TEDx talk, nobody's laughing when I, and I'm just kind of like deer caught in headlights for a second. And then they start laughing at a completely different point where I didn't intend for there to be a joke at all.
Lian (28:30)
Hmm.
hahahahah
Anthony (28:50)
And you know, I knew I shouldn't have memorized that dress rehearsal. But anyway, all kinds of things are gonna happen. But the thing is, right, is that if you focus on memorizing information that actually matters, you're just gonna be a more loose light person all around, right? Like you're just gonna have a, you're just gonna be more Bruce Lee. You're gonna be more water, my friend. And you you might actually recover from getting hit with the bottle in the head because.
Lian (28:50)
This isn't how I remembered it!
Anthony (29:20)
You know, like I said, I don't care if you're Bruce Lee, you're in trouble if that happens, but he might be the one guy who actually gets out of it in the end without, well, don't know, brain damage, whatever. Bad analogy shouldn't have brought Bruce Lee into it. The point is, that the best of the best fail. There's a guy who won the World Memory Competition, the next day he's on like major television and the host says, what's my name? And the memory competitor doesn't know.
Lian (29:32)
Hahaha!
You
Anthony (29:49)
So it happens to the best of
Lian (29:52)
I've noticed that actually at some point she will say you're a reference, you go to reference something you'll go, I don't know, I haven't memorized that. And it's been interesting for me noticing there's a, probably seems obvious to you, but I think there could be this sense of because you are a kind of memory expert, memory teacher, you just inherently have a better
ability to memorise things the most people and just will remember things. But I can hear there's a real intentionality as in like, no, I will apply memorization and otherwise it's kind of in the hands of the gods is my census to the way that you say this.
Anthony (30:35)
It's totally the opposite. I'm such a knucklehead. Like if I don't pay attention to information and I don't memorise it, it's gone. It's so gone. It's so gone so fast. However, there is a little bit of an advantage, which has to do with interleaving effects that I mentioned with multiple memory palaces, but we haven't talked about. And it also happens to do with what's called context dependent memory. So let's get into that just briefly, cause it'll help.
Lian (30:41)
Hmm
Anthony (31:02)
I teach people to use these techniques in context. Apply them to learning a language. Apply them to philosophy. if you're gonna apply it to willy-nilly, what's gonna end up happening is you may have command of some willy-nilly facts, but so what? You could do that without memory techniques, right? And people do all the time. What I am after in terms of let's make the world a better place, as if that's such a thing.
Lian (31:08)
Hmm.
Anthony (31:29)
Nietzsche said it'd be easier to change the entire fabric of the cosmos than to change one person, which is probably true. But anyway, like I do have this passion for critical thinking and philosophy and language learning, and language learning will immediately improve your critical thinking most of the time. There are some people that it won't. But anyway, the thing is, what I mean by context-dependent memory is that I tend to remember things better simply because I am focused on
maximum of seven topics. So I get natural spaced repetition because I'll memorise something and lo and behold it's like that red car. you you got a red car I haven't seen a red car like that for a long time and then all of a sudden you see them everywhere right. So when you memorise I don't know pregnenes constructio or something like that in Latin now you know what it means and then all of a sudden it's everywhere right and so
Lian (32:14)
Mmm.
Anthony (32:25)
You tend to remember that term just better you've memorized it, but then it becomes part of your parlance and It's just wild how that works That's part of the reason why I call my work magnetic memory method is because of that effect if you just
Lian (32:26)
I
Mmm.
Because
you're magnetizing the things you're trying to remember, you're magnetizing them to you even when you're not intending to.
Anthony (32:47)
Yes, yes.
And in language learning, the context dependence is quite clear. Like, if you were learning a language and you would just read one page a day and choose to memorise only three words per page, it's tortoise versus the hare. You will win in the end by doing less is more because you keep reading and then those words compound over time. So that's a really important thing. so this is where interleaving comes in. So if you're gonna memorise stuff,
Lian (33:03)
Hmm.
Anthony (33:17)
Memorize stuff within categories of information, language learning, philosophical study, history, whatever, self-help books, whatever it is. Try to make sure that you really bring a force of focus so that you're spending four days a week or so, like really at least, minimum, really deeply absorbed in this. And then you can memorise less and get more out of it. And interleaving is this. So if you have multiple memory palaces, well, let me just describe interleaving first.
Interleaving is the deliberate switching between topics. So instead of spending four hours cramming on one topic, study it for 20 minutes and then move to the next one. And that can sound crazy, like how am I ever gonna get anywhere? But it's tortoise versus the hare, it's also, there's something called diffuse thinking. And if you just turn your mind off of certain things, your brain will start to make these connections just on autopilot.
Lian (34:12)
Mmm.
Anthony (34:14)
Anybody who's had an epiphany knows what that is, right? You're thinking about something else and then boom, all of a sudden this flash of light comes in your mind and it's like, how does that happen? Well, because you've interweaved, you've taken the focus away from this and onto that. So I did this a lot in university.
Lian (34:29)
Why does that actually, because this, what that reminds me of is my downstairs loo is down the corridor to where I am right now. And so several times a day, I might be, for example, talking to Jonathan, the co-founder of Be Mythical, and we'll be talking about something that we're perhaps, I don't know, struggling with to come up with a solution for. And then we'll break.
And I'll go to the loo and it's become known as the loo of insights because I'll go to the loo and then it would just be like, I won't be thinking about it. I'll just be thinking about, you know, whatever I'm doing in the loo. And then it was just like, boom, there's the answer. And they'll come back. like one time I remember I had this like just incredible idea and I came back looking like I'd seen a ghost because I was just so mind blown. Like I've got it and it is.
that going into that other room, not thinking about it at all, and then it just suddenly arrives, which sounds similar to what you're talking about. But why is that? Why does that happen? Why does not thinking about it and thinking about something else create that new thought?
Anthony (35:36)
Well, I'm sure there's cool words in science books that I haven't read yet, but one of the words I've ever just given is diffuse thinking, right? Like, so when you take pressure off, things diffuse. And then there may be something to do with engrams and engrams in the Richard Saman sense, not necessarily the way that that term is used in certain realms of self-discovery.
Lian (36:03)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (36:04)
Ngram was kind of like this idea that there's a physical imprint in the neurons that creates a trace. Another way to think about this is the idea of flashbacks from LSD. One of the theories of how you have a LSD flashback is that the LSD has literally burned a tunnel in the white matter of your brain. And then all of a sudden one day a neuron just fires some positive and negative ions down that
channel and then boom you're off. it's it's it.
Lian (36:36)
That happens
with dreams as well, doesn't it? don't, I assume that doesn't just happen to me. Like I can just be going about my business and I'll have a flashback to a dream.
Anthony (36:47)
yeah, mean, ultimately I don't know exactly, but there's different theories that would address this kind of happening. And if we're gonna be materialists, then those theories have to do with matter. Like literally the nodes of Ranvier and how that positive and negative ions flow through synapses. like one of my favorite students, he's a nurse who became an anesthetist.
and an anesthesiologist. Here's the thing I've never cracked. I have never cracked pronunciation. I can memorise the words, but I can't necessarily pronounce them, and I don't know exactly why. That's somebody else's career to figure out. But no, partly it's because I have had early damage in my ear when I was a kid, and partly it's because I'm missing a lot of teeth. It doesn't look like it, but that's the magic of implants.
Lian (37:18)
I hate to hear you say that!
Anthony (37:44)
and some of them in the back aren't quite there. So my pronunciation is always a bit weird. But anyway, his name's Ivar. And when he was preparing for his anesthesiology exams, he was like, wouldn't it be cool if we got together and we worked together and you could help me study for these exams, which he passed, by the way, with flying colors. So we got together and we made all these recordings.
where he drew his little images that he put in memory palaces and he drew all his memory palaces. And so I've just watching the nodes of Ranvier, I'm gonna memorise that. And I didn't memorise exactly all the numbers, but I think one of them was like 40 and minus 80 or whatever. Anyway, these chemicals, in order to put someone unconscious, you have to like really know what all these chemicals are in the brain and the negative and positive charges, right? Because they're gonna change when you add chemicals into the brain and stuff like that.
Lian (38:37)
Hmm.
Anthony (38:44)
I don't know, like we don't even know what consciousness is. So we're trying to answer a question that... You could just hear Sam Harris, you guys don't have neuroscience degrees, what are you doing over there? And then we could get into mystical ideas, but at the end of the day, I think science is mystical enough as it is. But I don't know the answer, but...
Lian (38:48)
Hahaha!
you
Mm.
Anthony (39:12)
Part of what the scientists have said is that interleaving and helps this. Literally, it's like Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi, wax on, wax off. And then you go and you do this other thing, sweep left, sweep right, whatever. You wind up being able to beat the bad guy even though you don't think you can, right? It doesn't matter what you think, it's what you do. And it's really, really important. So.
Lian (39:30)
Mmm.
Yeah, I
just realised you've given me really great reasoning for something. keep saying to my son, so he's revising at the moment for his mock exams. And, here, my daughter goes to kickboxing once a week and I keep saying, I think it's going to do you good to revise, but have a break from revising and go to kickboxing rather than miss kickboxing so that you can double down on revising. And every time I've said that he says,
But why? And I'm like, I don't know, just think, I just feel that's true. And so now, I don't necessarily know exactly why it's true, but I can at least quote some of what we've been talking about here. Like, it is true, even if I don't quite know the science.
Anthony (40:10)
You
And ultimately the answer is to test, right? I love when people are skeptical of these things. And basically I say, look, spend the next three months doing rote learning and cramming, and then spend three months after that doing what I'm talking about and just see the difference for yourself. you know, nobody wants to sit around being truthful. So, you know, they do what they do. But at the end of the day, to know the truth of it is to test because it can be that some people are just better at rote. I don't know. This technique isn't for them. This technique is for people who just, I can't do rote.
I can't, I can't do it on an app. I can barely do it with cards. It's just like so boring. Now, to the interleaving thing, just one last thing. The thing about having one memory palace for every letter of the alphabet is you get the interleaving effects because you're like, okay, I'm gonna do my recall rehearsal, my review, all these patterns in A, and then I'm gonna stop everything there and I'm gonna go to Z, and then I'm gonna stop everything there and I'll go to B, and then I'll go to Y, and then I'll go to C, and then I'll go to X, and then I'll go to D, and then do the W, and.
Lian (40:55)
Mmm.
Anthony (41:19)
By the way, if you do this, you'll be able to do what I just did, which is to skip back and forth with half the alphabet going backwards and half the alphabet going forwards because you know it much, much better, which is a good unto itself because the amount of people who can't recite the alphabet backwards is shocking. mean, just, just, just think how life would be improved if everybody could say the alphabet backwards. No, the point is that it gives you these interleaving effects because you'd never get topic burnout. You don't.
Lian (41:31)
Mmm.
Anthony (41:49)
or topic exhaustion. You just can take a break, right? I'm gonna do philosophy in the philosophy of Mary Palaces and now I'm gonna switch on over to economics and then I'm gonna switch on over to biology or whatever it is, right? You'll wind up learning more. You'll wind up remembering stuff that you didn't even try to remember because of the interleaving effects. This is known and Mary Palaces helped.
Lian (41:52)
Mmm.
Hmm
Mmm.
So a few practical questions.
It sounds as though in order for there to be multiple memory palaces and then for them to work, you would need to know the places fairly well and be able to know.
Anthony (42:32)
What does it mean to know a place, first of all? That's where I would start. Do like an inquiry thing. What does it mean to know something? I've already given a major clue, right? Which is the master bedroom has four walls and four corners. This is logic. It's not knowing anything other than how rooms are constructed. Now you can immerse yourself more into the exact this, that, and the other thing. Well, on...
Lian (42:48)
Hmm.
Anthony (43:01)
April 40, April 14th, we always had a blue cover. So I will make sure that when I use this memory palace, the sheet was blue. You can do all that stuff, but really just don't turn it into a task. Rooms have four walls and four corners almost universally. Right. And if it's a bedroom, it almost universally has a bed. So if you want to place information on the bed.
Lian (43:18)
Mmm.
Anthony (43:30)
place it on the fact of the bed, not the exact measurement of where the bed was. And then some people, say, well, what if I move my furniture around? Okay, well, what if? mean, like, this is just, this is just, and again, I'm just a little channeling Peter of Rowena here, but it's just kind of just like, look, young squire, there's only so many hours in the day. Like, this is, this is not anything other than what we've just described.
Lian (43:43)
Hmm
Mmm.
Anthony (43:59)
Hansel and Gretel are not sitting there thinking, well, you know, what if the wind blows this? There's an infinity of what ifs. The practice is just to get in and experience the what ifs and the solutions are already in the teaching. So then just revisit the teaching. I myself went through it. I had to be like, well, why didn't that work? And then that dangerous word from Rowena, think. No, but.
Lian (44:09)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (44:29)
Yes, it may be an advantage to know locations better, but I have never found such an advantage. The advantage...
Lian (44:37)
Hmm. But you'd need to know
the layout. You need to know this room connects to.
Anthony (44:42)
But even then,
even then, so I'll give you an example. I use one of the homes that I lived in from age one till about eight and a half. I really don't remember exactly what a room looked like, particularly in the basement, because I was afraid of the basement. But I still just give it four walls and four corners. Because what else would it be? I mean, it could be that if...
Lian (45:01)
Hmm.
Hmm, I say.
Anthony (45:10)
I call my dad up today, which I've never done. Hey, dad, remember that room I was scared of in the basement? Did it by any chance have like five corners? His answer is going to be like, what? Did you take an acid again?
Lian (45:23)
So roughly,
you need to ideally have some sense of the rough layout of both the house and the rooms within it, but nothing really more than that.
Anthony (45:36)
And understand this,
if you do not have a sense at all, just don't use it, because that would not be a memory palace. Anything that is not in your memory is not going to make a good memory palace.
Lian (45:42)
Hmm. Yes.
Hmm.
Yes. Okay. And you can use your current house. That's all good to use too.
Anthony (45:58)
I'm looking for the Memory Palace police that would stop us.
Lian (46:00)
Okay, so that makes sense.
Anthony (46:03)
you
But you might not want to use your house. The thing
is to just experiment. Why wouldn't you? Maybe you have a reason. You might think, well, I've got to memorise all these dry, tedious facts. I wouldn't want them in my house, so maybe I'll use my dry, tedious workplace. And then it will liven it up a little bit. I don't know. I use this place, but I use it for fun stuff like Shakespeare. So you gotta...
Lian (46:12)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (46:35)
You got to do that dangerous work. Think like, but at the end of the day, any question that says, can I really, the answer is experiment, try it. And if it's not working out, come back to the teaching. Cause the answer is there. There's literally so many books about this that are just, some of them are so granularly detailed, but I can tell you the popular ones are the ones that just don't get into any detail at all. And then strangely, they're, their authors are hard to get answers from because
Lian (46:45)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (47:04)
They don't seem to really use the techniques, but you'll find people like me who actually do use the techniques and they'll help you get into the granular details. But at the end of the day, try not to get too granular about it. Just make a simple sketch, corners and walls, and then start to memorise something and you'll be amazed. And you don't have to use corners and walls. Just if you're gonna use your fridge, try to avoid this thing. Well, back in 72, the fridge was in a different part of the house. It's like...
Lian (47:29)
Hmm.
Anthony (47:31)
just pick one version and then go with that, whichever one is more immediate to you.
Lian (47:33)
Yeah.
So coming back to the drawing in quote marks, would you talk through, would you talk through like, what does that, if someone is like, okay, I need to memorise or want to memorise these 10 things, would you just talk through the steps? Like, what does that look like? Where does the drawing part come in?
Anthony (47:59)
Right. Okay, so that Latin phrase that I gave, that's from Hugh of St. Victor in a book called Didus Galicon. And it was the one that started Omnium and it has that really long word, expetendorum. Ooh. So I can easily get overwhelmed by a phrase like that because it's long and all these words and that word, expetendorum, has so many syllables and all that sort of stuff. And I do sometimes, I'm like, man, am I gonna really memorise this? But the way that the strategy works,
I have A to Z memory palace networks. So I look at the first word, omnium. Okay, so which memory palace starts with O? And then that memory palace has been pre-sketched out and I go, okay, so I'm gonna put a figure who also starts with O on the first position. Actually, you know that when we say in the first place, I meant, and and secondly, that's from the memory palace technique.
That's how the orators gave their speeches. They were literally telling people, the first thing that I want to say is coming from the first place in my memory palace, in the first place, in the third place. And I have a theory that they did that so that their audiences could use their own memory palaces to memorise what they were saying as they went along. So it's literally first, second, third. So that phrase has a number of words. It's a list of words in a phrase. And I just need enough places.
Lian (49:13)
Hmmmm
Anthony (49:26)
And here's the thing that can frustrate people. Expedendorum. Do you need a place for every syllable? Well, I'm sort of flexible about it because I've built the Mary Palace in advance. So that's the answer. Build the Mary Palace in advance so you too can be flexible. And then you're just sort of painting. And so the figure for Omnium, you might not know him and this is one of the problems with teaching this, is that I'll say I used Optimus Prime and you might be like, huh, Optimus Prime? He's the good guy from the Transformers. Megatron is the bad guy.
So I've pulled back the kimono, I was one of those kids. But it could be Oscar the Grouch, it could be anybody named Oscar. I mean, could be anybody whose name starts with O, it could be Oliver North, if that means anything to you. It's up to you, it's your adventure. It could be an Oreo cookie. Optimus Prime though, I chose accidentally because later, prima is one of the words, prima estapentia, right?
Optimus Prime just works out pretty great. And the more you practice this, the more your choices will actually help you. So how do you come up with those images? Well, you go back to that piece of paper that we talked about, then instead of listing locations with the letter A, you think A, Adam West, he played Batman. B, Batman, who else played Batman? Christian Bale, right? And then, Brad Pitt, he didn't play Batman, but he should have. And then C, well, Cookie Monster and...
Christian Bale. mean, like, you just have so many interweaving and interleavable things. And by the time you get to Zed, you're like Billy Zane from Titanic or whatever. And I know the objection is, don't watch movies. Well, surely there's a way to get started with what you've got, right? And Z, by the way, is not that different than TS, right? So you can...
Lian (50:56)
Ehh...
Anthony (51:16)
play around with things and you can always find substitutions. So if you really don't know someone whose name has a Z or starts with a Z, which is possible, think about the fact that most letters are actually repetitions of other letters in different forms. So like soft G and J, they're not that different, right? So be flexible. I'm flexible all the time and omnium and optimus are obviously not the same, right? But that's what I used. And then this becomes context dependence also.
Lian (51:16)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (51:46)
I just happen to study Latin fairly frequently, so I come across Omnium quite a lot. But in...
Lian (51:55)
So you'll then reuse
Optimus Prime every time you have that word.
Anthony (52:00)
But in the ancient languages, you're not off the hook because there are things that are called hapex legomenon and hapex legomenon are words that only appear once in a text and so then you really have to memorise those like you don't get any context dependent because they're ain't coming up again. That's the definition of that term. Anyway, omnium ex pretendorum now whoa and at first I just thought I give up this phrase is not that precious to me, but then I thought
Lian (52:10)
Ehhhh
Anthony (52:25)
No, come on, memory man, let's go. And I have to have this little dialogue with myself from time to time. And you may also... X. X-Men, right? No problem. Wolverine. Bam! And he's now... He's in my O memory palace. But I also have a pet barn as a memory palace for P. So... Magnetically, suddenly, magically, the pet barn is in this other memory palace. Wait, memory palaces within memory palaces? Why, that could get downright infinite. That could be an infinite regress.
a virtuous infinite regress in which memory palaces continually are inside of memory palaces. What is this a Christopher Nolan movie? Anyway, so ex patendorum and then he's got a 10 on his clock as X-Men or Wolverine the X-Men has claws. He's got a 10 of clubs or 10 of spades. I don't know which one. I used a 10 of cards, some card on his claws and he's smashing the door of the pet barn. The door door ex patendorum and what better thing for rum could we come up with?
Lian (52:57)
You
you
Anthony (53:25)
than that little boy, Danny Torrance in The Shining going, Red Ram, Red Ram, Red Ram, Red Ram, right? And it's it's alive, this image. And it's impossible to forget, Expetentorum, because it's so prominent in the old memory palace. And that's how this works. And you don't have to have one memory palace for every letter of the alphabet, but man, it's gonna be more like a video game if you do. Like these people who love video games,
Lian (53:29)
Ha ha!
Mmm.
Anthony (53:53)
The first thing that they're gonna do is try to find the power-ups, right? Well, this is the power-up. Letter A is one power-up, letter B is another power-up, and you just gather all the power-ups. It takes like maybe two hours to just sit there with a pen and paper and build all these memory palaces, and you don't have to do it all at once. Heaven forbid anybody would. didn't do it all at once, but all in to have an image for every letter of the alphabet and a memory palace for every letter of alphabet. I know so many people have told me, I said,
Lian (53:56)
Mmm.
Anthony (54:23)
two to five hours max and people said, yeah, you're right. Actually, it was a lot faster. So this is, mean, take an ocean, or sorry, see, this is sometimes what happens. You screw up your quotes. Take a spoon or take a bucket. The ocean does not care. It really doesn't. It's up to you, right? So get that done and then that's what you do. It's mental Lego. It's just like that word starts with this letter. Hot damn, that's my opportunity to use prints, you know?
Lian (54:27)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony (54:53)
or to
use whomever, like Pisaform on the carpal bones. That's what I have. I have Prince roller skating on a pizza. Now how do you get Pisaform out of that? Well, he's forming that pizza in a pretty strange way and it gets a little conceptual. If I had to, I would have an F figure involved in there. But what you'll find, if you practice consistently enough, these images will start to come to you faster than you can even think about.
Lian (55:02)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (55:21)
And we know because there are people who can memorise a deck of cards in less than 12 seconds, 52 cards in less than 12 seconds. They're not thinking about it. It's just happening to them because they've trained.
Lian (55:34)
So I think what I hadn't appreciated is there's some like groundwork to be done that once it's done, you continue to use and move across your different memory palaces, which really makes sense. I think the bit that I'm still not quite getting is...
There's still a need to remember that, for example, Optimus Prime is followed by Wolverine is followed. And it's like, feels, I don't know, like slightly maybe counterintuitive that instead of like, you've not only got to remember what those things mean, but you've got to remember the things.
It feels like there's kind of like an extra level of needing to remember. I feel like I'm missing something that makes that easier than I'm seeming to think it is.
Anthony (56:32)
I'm glad you asked because I sometimes let things be read between the lines. Okay, so having an X-Men punch a door of a pet barn, you know, that is not just some limp idea in my mind. It is, well, I have this little model that I use. You can use it if you like, you could come up with your own. The model is Kave Cogs, Kave with a K.
Lian (56:50)
Hmm.
Anthony (57:01)
kinesthetic auditory visual emotional conceptual olfactory gustatory and spatial so what that means is I am I am Hugh Grant or not Hugh Grant what is his name Hugh Jackman I probably look more like Hugh Grant but Anyway, I'm like literally being the actor who's most prominent in my mind as Wolverine and I feel all those muscles that I Don't really wish that I had but I eat very similar diet. So I should be able to get them
Lian (57:18)
Hmm.
Anthony (57:30)
This is like chicken and broccoli all the way down in my house. But I'm doing the punching. I'm not just thinking about it. I'm feeling it, right? And I hear those claws. And I don't really see these images, but I always just think like, what would it look like if I could see it, basically? Because I don't believe anybody can see images in their minds. I think that's just a weird idea, right? The imagination is what we do in our minds.
Lian (57:39)
Mmm.
Anthony (57:59)
But seeing is when we look at art on a wall, that's seeing a picture. But whatever is happening in your imagination, that's private to you. And maybe you experience it as visual, and I'm not saying you don't, but I myself wouldn't call it visual. It's, well, back to Peter of Rowena, he calls it similitudes, and that means similar to, or, you know, it doesn't need to be the thing. But anyway, there's a visual thing. And then the emotion, I mean,
Lian (58:01)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Can I just
interrupt quickly on this? I know you mentioned this earlier. I'm someone who is very visual, but I also know some people, like my son has aphantasia, so doesn't see anything from what I can understand. And from what you're saying, it doesn't matter at all.
needing to like being able to visualise things is not a requirement here.
Anthony (58:55)
Not only does it not matter, but when it comes to aphantasics, apparently in the brain scans, have to fact check me on this, but in the brain scans, apparently, the same visual centers of the brain light up, regardless of whether the people are seeing or not. Quite frankly, I believe that aphantasia is a scam or it's very close to one. It is predatory science in which people are being led to believe that mental imagery is something that is simpler than...
It is, it's a very rich, nuanced, complex thing. And the people who feel diminished or less than capable because they've been told or led to believe that they have aphantasia, my heart is broken for this. Because when I was a kid, I was told I had IDE, imagination deficit disorder, right? And where they came up with this term could only be cooked up by evil. They're sitting there with their laboratories like, what other disease can we find today?
Lian (59:43)
What?
Hmm.
Anthony (59:53)
and come up with a label that we will cause people to suck up like vacuums into their minds and their memory and then create what? An image of themselves as diminished. So it doesn't even make sense on its face that you can't see images in your mind. You're told you're aphantasic and then all of a sudden you buy into it and you start to live differently in accordance with it. That is an image. That is actually more than an image. That is falling in line with someone else's description.
So it's a ruse, it's a scam, it's sickness at its core. Rise up, create your own metaphors because otherwise that vacuum of your mind will be filled with the metaphors of other people and they will use their words to destroy the life that you have. And I see this all the time. You can watch some of my videos and read the comments. People, not only do they buy into it, but they actually hypnotize themselves into feeling it even further. It is so bizarre.
Lian (1:00:47)
Mmmmm
Anthony (1:00:52)
It is a crime if you ask me, and I'm very passionate about it because I don't have time to see images in my mind. And I know many, many, many, many, many memory competitors who memorise decks of cards in less than 12 seconds. They don't have time for images either. This has nothing to do with this Mickey Mouse, minimised definition of visualisation. Mental imagery is a huge topic and it's maybe a quirk of language that we use the word image at all, right? But it has a...
Lian (1:01:05)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:01:20)
etymological origin and instead of teaching people to understand words, we are busy teaching them to accept identities based on sickness. It is the crime of our time and it is so bizarre. It has to be fought against with multiple passion and the militia of using words better because it is destroying lives. Nobody sees images in their minds. There's something much more profound going on that
that is beyond name and form to quote Eckhart Tolle. So power of now, baby. It's like, let's get on this. This is so disastrous. And it's not just this word. It's like all kinds of words that people are using. It's just madness. Anyway, speech over.
Lian (1:02:01)
Hmm. Yes, I
completely agree. we certainly could go down a rabbit hole on this. It's something I find fascinating in that because of the work that we do as students and sometimes it's working, let's say, shamanically.
And there can absolutely be this sense of like, I'm meant to see something. And that's just not how, you know, it could come in any kind of way. And there isn't a better or worse. My son says that he describes it as like he feels things. And interestingly, he's got an exceptional memory. He's at recall for dates and things like that, that, you know, it's almost like.
Anthony (1:02:33)
Hmm.
Lian (1:02:54)
It's like there's clearly there's a way of he has them kind of in a some sort of filing cabinet is the way I imagine it must be happening. It's quite incredible how we just kind of like, yes, because we did that on the 13th of November in 19, whatever, not 19, he wasn't born then, but 2019. And I think that's incredible. But yeah, so it clearly doesn't need seeing in the way that we would typically use that word. But yeah, I agree with you.
Anthony (1:03:21)
that's wonderful. That's wonderful.
Lian (1:03:23)
Hmm.
Anthony (1:03:24)
I mean, I'll bet you, given enough time, there'll be monkeys at typewriters that will come up with a word for that and they'll try to make it negative instead of positive. That's just the most amazing thing. And everybody's amazing. just, if you can't take my word for it, know, Reid Eckhart told me, he's convincing people. They're amazing. I mean, it's just amazing. Consciousness is amazing. The fact that we're sitting here and we can take 26 letters of an alphabet and
Lian (1:03:32)
Mm.
Anthony (1:03:50)
mutate it into so many wonderful sounds that mean things that consciousness over here can speak with consciousness over there and like complete goals and have sticks catch rockets that are flying backwards from the sky. And people are worried that like if there isn't somebody to like if it isn't the entrepreneur and the scientist that like real science that actually does stuff, know, like
Lian (1:04:04)
Hehehehehe
Anthony (1:04:20)
If it isn't those people whose minds that we should be like thinking about, but like reconstructing in terms of processes instead of labels, man, like whose minds do we want to follow? But yet we have a bureaucracy that, let's put a stamp on this and then let's cause all the teachers to go around swarming everybody's entire fields of vision and cognition with.
Lian (1:04:33)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:04:47)
with the latest trend. it's so bizarre.
Lian (1:04:51)
So coming back to the topic at hand and we are coming up on time as well. I don't think I understand still the role of the drawing. Apologies I've missed that, but are we at the drawing stage?
Anthony (1:05:14)
well, I'm assuming now that we've drawn our memory palaces and we have a good solid center. But here's the thing that you can do. So typically the way this works is I memorise a thing using a memory palace. And you know, there are times when I won't draw memory palaces. Like when I go and do an event and I've never been there before, like I don't, and they say, okay, this guy's gonna memorise everyone's names. I don't go, hang on, let me draw this room. It's not all the time. But when I have these things where I really wanna memorise something,
Like I'm memorizing at Moboto right now and it's really complicated phrases like tapo, bahikshina, papinam, shantinam, vitharayam. I need to just basically have that mapped out in advance so that I don't spend, I'm not doing two things at once. I'm not figuring out what the Mary Palace journey is gonna be and working out like kshana papinam. It's like I got Kiss in there doing some music and pap I know is like, I think the Sanskrit for sin. I got the.
Lian (1:05:56)
Hmm
Anthony (1:06:11)
hope in there, what better center could you have? And I've got like Vietnam vets in there, like Rambo, like popping out. Like it's just, I don't want to be doing two things at once. So the memory palace comes first and I draw it out just so that I know that I'm following this plan instead of any other plan, right? Could I do it mentally? Well, I guess, but it would take too long. Like drawing it out just makes it faster. So that's the drawing part. Now, if you're just learning this, here's a cool thing that some of my students do.
Lian (1:06:26)
I say.
Hmm
Anthony (1:06:40)
They get their little drawing and they're not used to using these associations or images or whatever. So you can literally put your finger on your own drawing and you can go, I'm now at station one. And so it's kashana papanam, whatever it is. In this case, it's tapo bhikshina papanam. So, you know, what am I going to do? And I don't do this, but you could literally do this, right? Or if you're using your home for the first time, you could literally put your hand where you're going to...
to memorise something, whatever it is. Like if it's Shakespeare, O for amuse of fire that could ascend the brightest heaven of invention. Well, you could just stand there with your hand and go, there's an Oreo cookie here right now that's flying, you know, with Brad Pitt for bright. And you know, like all this stuff. And so you don't have to draw it. I would just recommend that you do because that's kind of the equivalent of touching it with your hand. And then you could literally stare at the thing and not have to do so much mentally because you have now this
Lian (1:07:31)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:07:38)
this trigger. So some students do that and then that's like the training wheels. And then later you do it just more in your mind. But I rarely memorise anything in a memory palace that I haven't drawn just because it makes it faster. It's like you wouldn't pour cement without a drawing, know, or very rarely. You you have it sketched out and you just... Because this is serious work. You're doing the work of saving yourself time and frustration. So preparation.
Lian (1:07:50)
Hmm. I say.
Hmm
Anthony (1:08:08)
Where preparation meets opportunity, there is no ceiling. And I've been invited to give talks and so forth and I'm prepared. So it's no problem. You want me to speak from memory two days from now or tomorrow, I'll memorise something, no problem.
Lian (1:08:21)
Hmm. So I'm feeling as though I'm getting like how you're bringing that so to life that it becomes hard to forget because it kind of is happening on all these different levels and senses. I think the part that I'm not still fully getting is how that order of the thing kind of like
So here I've learned, you know, there's Wolverine, followed by whatever's next after Wolverine. How do you remember that that comes at that point? Or is it a case again that you're... Now I'll leave the question, I'm going to rather me trying to figure that answer out. Well, how do you know that that is where that thing goes?
Anthony (1:09:11)
Well, typically you don't. I mean, you gotta just work with it. You don't know, you never know if it's gonna work. You just don't. And so you lay out your images and then you revisit them and you ask them to perform. So it's like a theater director. The theater director never knows if the actor is gonna deliver or not, right? You hire the actors that you hope are gonna do the job, but sometimes they show up drunk. Apparently this is what James Earl Jones was.
Lian (1:09:12)
Ahem.
Hmm.
Hmm.
I'm gonna have a facelift
and they're unrecognisable!
Anthony (1:09:42)
Yeah, yeah, like all kinds of bad things can happen. Like I've heard of, I've
heard that James Earl Jones would show up on, at, theater plays, totally smashed, right? And like, you could be the best theater director in the world. You're not going to come across that. And that can happen. So really what you have, the first thing I would just say is be all in with this technique, right? And just try to put aside these questions because the reality is, is you don't know. I don't know from one time to the next. And that's partly why there are memory competitions. Cause if everybody knew exactly how it was going to play out,
Lian (1:10:01)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (1:10:12)
there would be no game, right? There would be no advantage that one person could have over the other, right? So you always just have to, and actually there's a memory competitor called Ben Pridmore. And another memory competitor asked him for his best tip and that guy was Ron White. And this video is on YouTube. You can watch it for yourself. And Ron says to Ben, and I don't know if Ben had just smashed him in the competition or not, but whatever. He just asks him, what's your number one tip? And Ben says,
Actually, I don't remember exactly which word he used, but he either uses the word trust or have faith, one of the two, but it means the same thing. And you just, it's a really, really interesting video to watch because at the end of the day, you just have faith or you just trust in the techniques. And that's exactly what it is. You have to be willing to just experiment and see what happens. Now, the thing is, is that you did remember Wolverine, but do you remember what Wolverine stood for?
Lian (1:10:50)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Hmm. my goodness. It had a pen and a door and a 10.
Anthony (1:11:14)
I'm putting you on the spot here.
Well,
yeah, so it's working. You're not even memorizing it and the basics of it are working, right? But I had a substitution, right? Because it's ex patendorum, so it's an X-Men. It's not that it's Wolverine, it's an X-Men. Now people hear that and they'll go, well then I'm just leading myself into confusion. Could be, could be that you'll be confused as you learn it. Just like you were confused when you were learning to tie your shoes. Just like you might've been confused when you were learning to floss your teeth.
Lian (1:11:36)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (1:11:49)
Like you'd get over it, right? You do develop the ability to tie your shoes, most of us, right? And if it's not that, then it's something else. There's every objection, there's every possible thing that can go wrong. Believe me, you don't even know. We haven't even gotten into whiz bang techniques like the 00 to 99 PAO for memorizing how cloud formations look like. But if you think that these...
Lian (1:12:12)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:12:14)
possible infinities of objections are tough. Just wait until you learn that technique because that technique is nuts. But it's actually pretty simple. But it seems crazy. It isn't. and wait until you hear about the shadow. The shadow technique, my goodness. So they're not happy with memorizing cards at less than 12 seconds. So they've taken some of these techniques and.
rearrange them a little bit differently, especially because they're not happy with just one deck of cards. They want to be able to have a technique so that they can memorise two jack of hearts when they're together and three jack of hearts when they're together. So they take multiple decks and they shuffle them together. And how are you now going to have an image when it's like three tens of hearts and four jacks of spades all in the same, right? And they want to do it at sub 12 seconds. So the shadow is
Lian (1:13:03)
Is this remembering
the order of the cards?
Anthony (1:13:07)
The order and the identity, yes. It's more than the order, it's the order and the identity and the value.
Lian (1:13:13)
What do you mean
by it?
Anthony (1:13:15)
So, okay, technically you're right. It's just the order of the cards, but that's not how it works, right? Like, the order is, the order you never have to memorise because it's in the memory palace. So, yes, technically it's the, technically it's the order of the cards. But the reason why I hang up on this is because the shadow technique has a decision parameter in it. So if you have two red cards in a row, then your memory palace is gonna go in one direction, and if you have a red and a black, you're gonna go in a different direction. It is,
Lian (1:13:26)
I see. Yes. So you're for you. It's not an order. Yes, because yeah
Hmm.
Anthony (1:13:44)
Like, so like what I'm trying to express here is if you get hung up on the infinity of what ifs at this stage, you have no idea what's coming because this stuff is wild. It is so, and like, I don't know, I'm always surprised. I read another memory book that I never read before and I'm just like, how the hell did I never think about this? This is amazing. Like the depth of this topic is so deep. It's like anything else. Philosophy never ends.
Lian (1:13:54)
Hmm
Mmm.
Anthony (1:14:14)
You, you, I mean, maybe it would if you lived forever, but we don't. So just, just be aware that I have been at events where people who are young and people who are old have been able to recite the alphabet backwards within four minutes. I have been at events where they, and they're just brand new to these techniques within two hours or less. They have been able to recite lists of words they've never seen before. They've been able to recite.
Maybe 20 to 30 digits names that they've never encountered before within two hours of training the simple stuff truly is simple but the objections are Hydra in nature you One objection will lead to the next and then there'll be three more objections And that's why you got guys like me who are happy to teach it over and over and over again But the ultimate lesson is actually how do you defeat your own human nature? It's like
Lian (1:14:52)
Mmm. Wow.
Hmm.
Hmm
Anthony (1:15:13)
You know, I have this in other realms of my life. I can't for the life of me figure out Facebook ads or Google ads or all that stuff, not for lack of trying. I've been at this for a long time with those things, but I just can't do it. And the objections go just are massive, but I get out the sword and I cut through them anyway, and I've got ads running as we speak. And it's just, so somehow it's possible to not understand.
99.9 % of everything and still get results. Nobody knows what memory is. Nobody knows what consciousness is. just, again, it's like, I never tell people to not think except for in this context. Just try not to think too much about this. The steps are ancient.
Lian (1:15:46)
Hmm.
Yeah, just go play.
I've just realised I have an experience from childhood that's such a perfect example of what we're talking about and I guess shows how naturally we do this. It's when you were talking about when, for example, was learning to tie my shoelaces.
I really struggled with those kind of like, like the more basic something was, the more I struggled with it. So the thing I struggled with the most was learning my left from my right. It took me way longer than his average. And I finally managed to learn to tell my left from my right because my father, I think I mentioned in our last episode, he was this kind of, you know, occult, just weirdo kind of like magic coming out of his ears. And He had painted on our sitting room wall two ceiling to floor tarot cards and on the left was the High Priestess and on the right was the Magician. So it's big, bright, huge, far bigger than I was at the time, images of these two tarot cards. And I taught myself, my left and right, by memorizing the High Priestess is the left, the Magician is the right. And so those images were like, mean, goodness knows what that's done to my psyche.
But they were kind of like burned into my consciousness, these two images. for, you know, until quite an old age, if I needed to know what was my left or right, I would conjure up those two images and go, it's the high priestess, therefore it's left. And it's just, I just realised like I was doing this. That's how I learned my left from my right. Which feels like a perfect, like it's kind of like okay, yeah. I did that as a child. How hard can it be now?
Anthony (1:17:57)
Yeah, I mean, one simple way for people to start getting this or to understand it a little bit better is just to realise and do something similar to what you're doing. Like your brain just remembers where things are. And so the next time you open your fridge, look at where the milk is and then just think who else or what else has and you know, maybe you have Malcolm McDowell in your fridge and you just start to get used to that idea of weaving things together.
Lian (1:18:10)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:18:27)
because the childhood thing is a really important piece here. I think that this is what we did. know, I may be biased and I may be doing backward reasoning and inventing a memory, but I remember when I was a kid playing around with words. I remember when I learned the word hilarious and ridiculous and ramification. That's the word I'm looking for. I remember I was very young when I learned the word ramification because it was in Gremlins 2. I don't know if it was in the movie, but it was in the novelization. And this weird Gremlin is saying, the ramifications of this will be whatever, whatever he was saying there. And I just remember playing around with this word to learn it. Cause I thought it was so cool that words could be like, that was a long word to me at that time. And I just played around with it. And I looked at the alphabet and just did this mental rotation. I don't
Lian (1:19:02)
Mm-hmm.
Hehehehehe
Anthony (1:19:20)
know that I made any sort of association to it or not. But whatever it is, I did what Peter of Rowena is talking about. I thought about it, right? And at the end of the day, this is this kind of thing. It's just pausing to slow down and think about the nature of information and then think about where it is in space. Now, I don't know this for sure, but I have a feeling that if I had that Gremlins II novelization, I think it was about, you know, almost
Lian (1:19:28)
Hmm
Mmm.
Anthony (1:19:50)
just before the halfway point in that book. Like I have a memory of where in the book that it was, and I could be proven wrong and fall flat on my face. But the reality is, that with books that I've read much more recently than grade six or seven or whatever it is, and you probably have this experience too, you know generally where in a book something is that you read, and that's spatial memory working, right? But the difference here is if I pull off certain books, like it's not here, and I'm not trying to show off or whatever, but
Lian (1:20:06)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:20:20)
There is a book on my shelf and it is very specifically page 71 to 79 where the author mentions that Eckhart, not Eckhart totally, sorry, but Meister Eckhart's 19th sermon quotes Acts 9, 8, which is something like, Saul rose up from the ground, eyes wide open and saw nothing. And I know that's on page 71 because I have an image for 71. And I know that that whole passage where he talks about
Lian (1:20:46)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:20:48)
the four different kinds of nothing that Meister Eckhart goes on and on about. That passage ends at page 79. And here's, let me just wrap all this up together to show you just how powerful and fun this is. The image for 79 is what? Well, seven is a K, nine is a P, so it's Captain Crunch, the same image for Capitate, right? And so what ends up happening is you just live in Disneyland all the time and in the medieval period.
in the Renaissance period, and I don't know exactly when it faded out, but it seems that this guy named Petrus Ramus was responsible for the death knell. People did this all the time. They thought that the world was a book. You can read all about this in Marshall McLuhan's The Classical Trivium, right? Now that book might be hard to read because it's like, it was his dissertation, so it's not like edited for the popular market or anything like that.
but he talks about how they thought the world was a book and they not only used all these techniques, but they literally categorized information in very intricate ways. Why? Because they were bored? No, because it's useful, right? It's useful to be able to have Captain Crunch or they wouldn't have had Captain Crunch over here. They would have had like the Demogorgon and Eros and Athena and like all these people were constantly reminding them of where information was and what that information was, right?
Lian (1:22:04)
You
Anthony (1:22:15)
and we have lost it. And the whole Petrus Ramus story, I won't get into, but people were so mad at what he did to imagination that they killed him. They literally, whoosh, right? And there's a whole book about it right here, which is Ramus. it's painful for me to read because that guy said, no, no more imagination. We're gonna have textbooks that are gonna have indexes and they're gonna have tables of contents and all these beautiful illustrations with phoenixes and animals and fire and flames and castles and maidens, gone. I don't want it. And well, they didn't kill them soon enough because that's what we've got now. We've got endless books that are only books with indexes and blah, blah. And yes, there's been many benefits to it. But at the end of the day, it has harmed a lot of people who really need good dose of imagination, whether they see images in their mind or not, because it's irrelevant whether you see them or not. But anyway, there's a story here that needs to be told. Maybe one day I'll write the book, but Walter Ong already wrote the book about Ramos, and man, that guy is so painful to learn about. He was just so against imagination. it's wild. But it's back. mean, now we have computers who can imagine for us, which who knows where that's gonna go.
Lian (1:23:11)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Yeah, definitely a other wormhole that. I'm appreciating, just before we end here, it feels as though there's something just in that association. And even, you know, I understand that this is part, you know, in the context of creating the memory palaces and having associations with letters, but it feels as something, I don't quite know the word, like rich about the idea of making these associations in of itself. It feels like there's something about that that feels very magical. I'd love to know your sense about that.
Anthony (1:24:21)
Well, it is magic. It's magic exactly in the sense that the great Giordano Bruno meant it, which is that it's transformation. And it's transformation that involves, I guess he would say, a little bit of splintering, you know? Like it has a creation, but it loses something at the same time, right? So...
Lian (1:24:48)
Hmmmm
Anthony (1:24:51)
you're actually engaging in reality itself. You're aligning yourself with the way that things come into being. Now, the good news is that the thing that splinters away and falls away is ignorance. Because everything that you memorise is going to reveal the truth of a thing or the factuality of a thing, and you'll remember it and you will see different. You'll be transformed, which is...
Lian (1:24:56)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony (1:25:18)
Magic is, it's either transforming or disappearing or, you know, manifesting or whatever, but this is all those things happening all at the same time because you're gonna disappear ignorance every time you memorise something. The catch is, is that it will reveal to you more ignorance, right? Cause it's just like, my God, you could so easily feel overwhelmed. I learned this one thing and that thing revealed that I don't know so many other things, right? So you gotta come into it with the spirit of a magician.
Lian (1:25:21)
Mmm.
No, I ain't.
Anthony (1:25:48)
which is you're just gonna keep on transforming, right? This is what you do. And you're gonna buy it, you're gonna own it, you're gonna own the fact that it's not necessarily going to give you the result that you want. You have to let go of the result because the effect never tells you what the consequences will be, right? And every, I'm a card magician, I've done card magic for years. I know every time that I perform that there's no point in trying to own the audience response.
Lian (1:25:48)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Anthony (1:26:17)
There's no way to predict it. It can go this way, it can go that way. And the only way to win in the game of magic is just to own it. And I don't mean own it in the sense that you own it, but just to deal with it, right? Because I've been caught, I've been caught so hard. But if you respond in the right way and you roll with it and you don't try to own the outcome, but you own the consequences of the outcome, well, that person who starts to heckle you, they can be put in their place real quick. But if you let them rule the roost and so forth. And that's the same thing with learning, right? You can be put in your place real quick if you get hung up on the fact that, now I just learned that I have to learn a zillion more things. Well, then you're taking yourself out of the game because of your attitude and you're not really doing magic. But if you want to do real magic, you have to like kind of just take you out of it, you know, because it's an illusion anyway. But at the same time, you don't take you out of it because The illusion of you is in the thing that is perceiving you, right? Which I think very clearly is the question of that we talked about last time. Is memory nested in consciousness or is consciousness nested in memory or the production of memory and all that stuff? And I don't know the answer. I don't even want to know. But at the end of the day, all that it does is it reveals the extreme ignorance that I have to deal with every day. And that ignorance has been hard in the past. I know people who have written memory books where
Lian (1:27:28)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:27:45)
They told me the reason why I did it is because I want to appear smart. I want people to admire me, right? my goodness. Like why don't you go and coin a new disease? Because that'll get you admired. You'll be the one that everybody can say finally gave me the explanation for all my suffering. A new word in the DSMB. Like come on. But everybody is where they are, you know, and those of us who are lucky to have escaped it, we should share.
Lian (1:27:51)
hahahahah
Anthony (1:28:15)
In fact, the logic goes in the ancient texts that if you've got it, you won't be able to stop yourself. So that's how you know who's got it and who doesn't, you know? It's just beaming like crazy. And that's what memory can do for you. So learn these techniques if you're drawn to them. No problem if you aren't. But the reality is is that they can set you free and they can help you memorise the texts that set you even freer.
Lian (1:28:22)
Hehehehehe
Anthony (1:28:44)
but it is like the sky. I mean, the clouds are gonna come, the ignorance is gonna come back, and you'll just be much better able to deal with it and blow it away, perhaps a little bit faster, because of the training. And these techniques actually, they change your working memory, and they give you more space for more things that allow you to move a little bit faster, at least most of the time. I I've had bad times, even with all of this, but that was the ignorance winning, right?
Lian (1:28:57)
Hmmmm
Anthony (1:29:15)
And the answer is to just double down on the practice, even if you don't feel like it. And that's a great cure. Just memorizing a syllable can do so much for you.
Lian (1:29:27)
this has been absolutely wonderful. Yeah, again, we've gone over time, but it's just flown by and yeah, I feel like we've taken a whole different kind of magical mystery tour around some magical palaces. So thank you so much. Where can listeners find out more about you and your work, which I'm sure they'll want to.
Anthony (1:29:52)
Well, the homepage is magneticmemorymethod.com and there's a free course that walks through most of what we've talked about today. really just always understand if you go to magneticmemorymethod.com or find me wherever, is that the best I can do is help you help yourself. And if there's stuckness and you can't get yourself to do it and so forth, in some sense, that's a different book, or that's a different teacher or what have you.
But if I can share one thing that has helped me the most is it's just to start to recognise how simple it is and don't make it more complicated than it is. Follow the steps. So the reason why I have that website is because I actually literally got out of thinking about it too much and I just did the steps because the steps are there. And this is true in all kinds of walks of life. There's so many people who let those clouds of ignorance just, but the reality is is most of us have more resources than we could ever tap out in a lifetime. And they are in the form of steps. And these days you can just go to Chat GPT. People email me now all the time. They're like, I asked Chat GPT who's the best memory expert. And they're like, you're at the top of the list. It was just like, well, for now, but did you do anything? Like you could just say, what are the steps? And even if Chat GPT is wrong,
Lian (1:30:59)
Hmm.
hahahahah
Anthony (1:31:18)
spend some time following some steps. Cause whether you get it from a human or a robot, that's the thing, right? Cause you know, the objections are profound. They can swarm the mind and I've been there, but to just use the ad thing, right? Like Google ads and all that sort of stuff. Every time I get hung up on it, I just go, okay, so what are the steps? And I just search for the steps and I go back and I try the steps this way instead of that way and so on. So whoever you learn this from, just find some steps and follow them.
Lian (1:31:20)
Hmm.
Anthony (1:31:48)
And some of those steps will be better or worse, but no one can predict how they will be for you. And that's why you have to figure it out. So why I'm mentioning all that, here's the pitch for my site as opposed to any other site, because we have to be competitive in the market, right? Magnetic memory method is literally trying to be the magnet that draws all the topics, talks to all the memory competitors. And you know, there's not that many of them, so we're pretty tapped out now. But there are still a few that I haven't like gotten on.
and just people who are caring about learning and so forth. So it's like a university where I don't really hide this or that. Like I just did this thing on Peter of Rowena and I'm literally trying to promote everything because I know for a fact that no one can predict which steps will make the most sense to you. So let's just get all the steps going, right? Like all of them from all the people who have laid out the steps. They're actually almost all identical, but.
Lian (1:32:35)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:32:44)
It might be that this person's voice resonates more with you than that person's voice or whatever. So I try to be the hub that connects it all. Like its own little internet of memory or Wikipedia of memory, whatever you want to use. And it's just, it's got a university spirit in that true sense of, know, we're not gonna only talk about Aristotle and forget Plato. No, we're gonna talk about Plato and we're gonna talk about Aristotle and we're talk about Aquinas and Augustine. And by the way, I do talk about Aquinas and Augustine because the reason why those guys had such an impact
Lian (1:32:52)
Mmm.
Anthony (1:33:13)
must have something to do with the fact that they used the memory palace technique as did Aristotle, as did Plato. And they wrote wonderful books about memory or comments about memory. And man, if you haven't read Aristotle on memory, at least check out this video I made called Aristotle's Nucular Alphabet, because the things that he says about the alphabet, they're amazing, but they're only nuclear. Peter of Rowena, he's after like sun-like fusion. It's just, it gets better and better.
These things are so fun. So yeah, that's where to find me.
Lian (1:33:45)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Anthony. This has been just, yeah, such a pleasure. Worth staying up for. And yeah, I'm looking forward to creating my memory palaces. I'm going to let you know how I get on.
Anthony (1:33:59)
Well, thank you for your interest and for helping spread the word, because I really think these are life-saving processes, and I've seen them save lives and change, turn things around for people. And there's the research that proves that using it does help with depression, PTSD, et cetera. So the more, the merrier.
Lian (1:34:18)
Hmm. Yes. But that feels like it's the start of a whole rabbit hole that maybe will go down another time for the moment. Thank you.
Anthony (1:34:29)
Thank you, anytime.
THE BE MYTHICAL PODCAST
With hundreds of episodes to choose from, illuminating your path with myth, magic, archetypes, and practical ways to thrive in this crazy modern world. Subscribe to our free weekly podcast ranked in the 1.5% most popular shows in the world!
HOTTEST NEW EPISODES OF THE BE MYTHICAL PODCAST