Anthony Metivier
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Tetragrammaton.
How did Anthony Metivier first discover memory techniques and overcome depression?
I often think of the David Lynch Lost Highway movie where Bill Pullman says, you know, I like to remember things the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened. And then that's naturally what happens when we tell these stories. But as I remember it anyway, I was dealing with a very bad clinical depression while I was doing my PhD. And rather than do anything destructive, I wound up at the campus one day. David Blaine was all the rage. And in this deep, dark winter, there's a place at York University campus called York Lanes where inside they kind of protect you from the Canadian winter with what looks like a street, a city street inside. And it's nice and warm. And these guys came and did street magic to me.
And this revived an old interest that I had when I was a kid in magic. And so I went home and I was watching videos and I stumbled across what's called the Holy Grail of Magic, which is any card at any number where the spectator could name a card and name a number and it'll be there. But the deck has to be memorized. And I thought, there's no way I can do this. I can't even read a sentence of this dense philosophy that I'm responsible for. But I tried it anyway. And lo and behold, I memorized a deck of cards. And I thought instantly, if I can memorize a deck of cards, I can get back into this. It just gave me this weird light in my head too. And later I found out there's research that actually people have done that confirms this.
And it's throughout the tradition, the sense of light that comes from practicing with memory for quite a lot of people. Yeah, I just had the confidence to keep going and I didn't drop up and I didn't do anything destructive to myself and I passed. And then I just used memory techniques privately for a certain portion of my career. And after a research grant I had and a teaching grant ended, I wound up back home in Canada And I was working, doing curriculum for a sort of after school school where parents send their kids when they're concerned that the public school system isn't doing enough for them. And I wasn't even teaching, but a teacher didn't show up one day. And the person who owned the school asked me if I could stand in.
And I taught the stuff to the kids. And I said, you know, that's it. What do you guys want to do now? And they said, we don't know. You're the teacher. And I said, let's learn how to say the alphabet backwards. And then after that, we got into some card memorization and I showed them how to memorize words and stuff. And they said, could you write that down? And I did. And the Kindle Goldmine was going on at that time. And I put it up on Amazon, not thinking a thing about it. But a friend of mine said, hey, have you seen your book? And I was like, no, there's like ranking in the... the best sellers in like one and one and category three. That's amazing. It was just luck of the draw, I guess. I mean, I was looking at different ideas of how I was going to become a business person, but I was way off in completely different ideas.
And this memory thing just really hit. And I saw that. And then there's a lot of adventure there with stubbornness of not really wanting to be an entrepreneur or anything like that and not wanting to run an email list properly. And I was just emailing at some point 700 people a day, copy and pasting and like doses of 12 or whatever that wouldn't get flagged by these email systems at the time. And then finally I paid to get one of these systems to email people. Anyway, it just went over there and I delayed getting a website probably way too long because it wasn't anything I planned for.
Yeah. When did YouTube start for you?
It had started when I learned memory techniques and that was part of what had enabled it. This would have been 2003, I guess, when I discovered the technique. So YouTube was a thing. When did you start posting videos? Well, that was one of my other business ideas that I was originally working on. And that would have been around 2011-ish because I had been a film studies professor.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:25
2
How did Anthony Metivier first discover memory techniques and overcome depression?
0:25–16:22
3
When and why did Anthony start publishing books and posting on YouTube?
16:22–31:59
4
How can association and simple imagery help you remember people's names?
31:59–45:20
5
What is the memory palace and how do you memorize lines word-for-word with it?
45:20–1:09:34
6
Which mnemonic systems (numbers, music, dates) does Anthony recommend and how do they work?
1:09:34–1:34:52
7
What is the Magnetic Memory Method and how does bootcamp teaching change learning?
1:34:52–1:51:53