Chris Williamson

But when I think about the people that I like spending the most time with, it's not always the ones that are the most interesting.

It's the ones that make me feel the most interesting.

Sitting with silence is something that takes a lot of skill to realize that there's a third participant.

If you're ever doing any kind of performance, especially if it's between two people, you and your person that's on stage, there's a third participant or 3,000 participants, and they're all of the people that are watching.

And allowing that to sit, allowing the sort of wonder to hang a little bit.

When it comes to storytelling, not everybody is going to be prestiging their way through some date of birth revealing card trick.

Telling stories more generally, what are some of the principles that you think about when it comes to telling a good story?

Everybody criticizes the fact that they don't like small talk.

It's an almost universal thing that people dislike.

The idea of getting into an elevator with somebody that's going to stop at every floor, trying to hold together some conversation that means nothing to everybody.

And yeah, the idea of ridding yourself of the social foreplay and jumping straight to third base or whatever the equivalent is, I think is a good idea.

How can people become better at that?

I've...

I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs.

What, how can people become better with memory outside of that?

It's not just names.

Ebbinghaus, forgetting curves, spaced repetition-y stuff.

This is a little bit of spaced repetition with some Mind Palace location-based stuff going in there.

Train today.

This was something that I get asked a lot at the live shows that I've been doing, which is how do I get better at remembering ideas?