Mastering Memory: How Lawyers Can Train Their Brains, with Nelson Dellis

Chad Fox: 

Hi, I’m Chad Fox. 

Zack Glaser: 

And I’m Zack Glaser. And this is episode 5 78 of the Lawyers Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with four time USA memory champion and Grand Master of Memory, Nelson D about what you can do to improve your memory, your ability to recall, and how that can help you in your office. 

Chad Fox: 

And today’s episode is brought to you by Paxton ai. If you stick around, you’ll hear Zack’s conversation with them. 

Zack Glaser: 

So first off, Chad, welcome to the Lawyerist Podcast. I think people have heard your voice on here as a guest many, many times, but you’re officially hosting with us. You’re on the other side of the desk. 

Chad Fox: 

Hey, look at that. We’re moving up in the world. Yeah, 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s up or moving. You’re moving. You’re moving. Alright, so speaking of moving, you told me that your daughter is running cross country this season 

Chad Fox: 

And you told me that you were a cross country coach and I did not know that. 

Zack Glaser: 

Oh man, you’ve not listened to many of my episodes of the Lawyers podcast. How are you 

Chad Fox: 

Going to put me on blast like 

Zack Glaser: 

That? My mother is the one that listens to me the most on the lawyers podcast. My wife, an attorney does not like to hear my voice. 

Chad Fox: 

Really? 

Zack Glaser: 

On the interwebs and the radio. Yeah. 

Chad Fox: 

Do you like to hear your own voice? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yes. That’s why I do this, Chad. I listen to all of these, every single one of them I listen to and yeah, I would love to say that I don’t like the sound of my own voice, but I’d be lying. 

Chad Fox: 

Right. I’ve come to accept it to accept my voice. No, my voice. 

Zack Glaser: 

Zack, I think you’re 

Chad Fox: 

Okay. That would be pretty messed up. It’s like, you know what Zack, your voice is really grown on me. At first it wasn’t there for me, but now we’re getting there. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, it was nails in a chalkboard. Now it’s just squeaky door, but okay. So what we were talking about before we started recording though was cross country is a weird sport and you get out there and there are a lot of things like this in life, but there’s not a lot of sports like this. You get out there and you’re competing against hundreds of other people and there’s one winner, one winner in the race, like any 5K or something like that. There’s one winner. And especially in high school or middle school, cross country, we don’t break it up by age groups. Every now and then I go out to a 5K and I’ll get 10th in my age group, 40 something. But we don’t do that in high school, cross country. And so inherently there has to be a different motivation for each of the kids, otherwise they wouldn’t get out there. They’re not stupid. They have to have goals. We were talking about that. What is their motivation? How do you get them to keep coming out there? 

Chad Fox: 

Yeah, and it’s interesting because with my daughter, she’s run one meet so far didn’t do by her standards. Great. And so just trying to tell her that really your focus should be, okay, this was my time on this meet. Can I improve it? What is my goal for the next meet? How can I get better? And did I do better from this meet from the last meet versus like you said, trying to win out of hundreds of people and it’s your first year. 

Zack Glaser: 

Oftentimes my athletes, I’ll ask ’em what their goals are for the season and they’ll say, I want to get faster. Which I mean, yeah, of course you want to get faster, but how fast is the faster realistic? And so I’ve started doing smart goals with my athletes, but talking about this, it made me think about people coming to us, talking to you as a strategist and saying, I want to grow my business. And frankly, thinking about that when I was practicing, I thought, well, I want to get more clients. Okay, so what do you say because you do this, you deal with this more from the other side. What do you say to people to motivate them to get them to get these goals? 

Chad Fox: 

So what I tell them in that case is let’s set some small goals just thinking about whether it’s in your business or even with my daughter with cross country, this was your time in this meet. And so what do you want your time to be in the next meet? What’s going to be your goal for the next meet? If somebody comes to me and says, I want to get more clients. All right, great. So where do you want to get long-term? Then let’s break that up into bite-sized chunks so that we’re not eating the elephant all in one bite, right? We’re small bites. And I think another piece of that that often gets overlooked is it’s not enough just to set a goal. What are the things that are going to get you to that goal? What do you have to do? So if we’re thinking about cross country, what do you have to do in practice? How do you have to show up? Who do you have to be? 

Zack Glaser: 

But Chad, I don’t want to actually do the things to get me to the goal. I just want to set the goal and then a miracle occurs. 

Chad Fox: 

What’s sad is that I think sometimes people join programs such as our program at Lawyerist and think that just the act of joining the program is going to be enough to get me over the hump. 

Zack Glaser: 

Ooh, that’s funny. That’s like I hire a personal trainer, great, hire the personal trainer. Now I’m fit, which is how I want it. I would totally, 

Chad Fox: 

We all do. That’d great trainer. Or we go for one workout and wonder why we’re not skinny yet. 

Zack Glaser: 

Oh man. Yeah. I think that’s something I run into in coaching all the time is, Hey coach, we’re at at season now. I want to get faster, but what’d you do outside of season? What’d you do prior to now? And really more than that, what are your goals and how are we going to get there? Because I do like to have the athletes have moderately audacious goals. I want them to be, like you said in the previous podcast, dream big. 

Chad Fox: 

Yeah, 

Zack Glaser: 

Dream big, 

Chad Fox: 

Aim for the moon. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, 

Chad Fox: 

Land among the stars, 

Zack Glaser: 

But we got to have a plan for getting to the moon, otherwise we’re going to jump two inches off the ground. We got to have a plan to build some sort of spaceship. Otherwise we’re just using the treche to launch ourselves into space. Alright, well 

Chad Fox: 

I agree. Good stuff. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. Well now here is our conversation. Well my conversation with Paxton ai and then we’ll try to remember to head into my conversation with Nelson. Hey y’all. Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyers and today I’ve got Tanguy Chau, of paxton.ai with me and we are talking about artificial intelligence in legal research and honestly your matter management, how you deal with the information in your office. So it’s a little broader than legal research. So Tangi, thanks for being with me. 

Tanguy Chau: 

Thanks Zack. Really excited to share. 

Zack Glaser: 

So for people that aren’t familiar with what Paxton is, Paxton, it’s a, it’s paxton.ai. What is Paxton? 

Tanguy Chau: 

Paxton is a legal AI assistant that helps attorneys do their work better, faster, more efficiently. 

Zack Glaser: 

I like how you put that. I always want to put Paxton in a legal research sort of area where my brain goes to initially, but it’s well beyond that. It’s using AI with and against a lot of data, specifically legal information that’s out there, but also user data. And so people can use Paxton to really help them process information at a very basic sense. What else can they do? 

Tanguy Chau: 

We started with legal research, so being able to train models using all of the statute tools, regulations, court rulings from federal and all of the 50 states, and then use public domain documents such as dockets from PACER in order to teach or AI system how to write motions, for example, motion, a specific motion in limine in order to limit the discoverability of an expert, a brain tumor injury expert for example. We would know that because we collected hundreds of millions of examples of that. What we are now focused on is going beyond the foundations and really thinking what do you need to do in order to integrate paxon into your day-to-day work? So Paxon stays on and is with you 24 7 and any time that you’re picking up at work, this is the platform that is helping you as your assistant to do the work. And so all of the releases that we’re going to talk about today are related to how do we integrate paxon into the day-to-day actual work of attorneys? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, it is really starting to look more like an artificial intelligence, an assistant than just a standalone research product. So it’s something that you’ll have up and be using throughout the day as you’re dealing with a case, but in order to do that, it’s got to get over some hurdles, it’s got to be practical, it needs to be able to work around me to work around my office. One of those things that you guys have put out is matter based management. You can store this information, you can do searches, you can have this assistant live in this kind of matter based world and you don’t have to go feed it this information about this case every single time you come back to this case, right? 

Tanguy Chau: 

That’s right. Attorneys typically handle hundreds of cases at the same time and it’s really important for them to be able to toggle between a case and rapidly get up to speed, understand what has changed and then where they left off the last time that they handled the case. What we rolled out was this matter based organization system where all of the files, all of the conversations are structured and are attached to a single matter. And then Paxon now has memories around the matter. So it has the context around what the conversation is about and what are the tasks that you are asking it to perform with regards and with the proper matter context. 

Zack Glaser: 

And so with that, if I’m loading the information, the files from that case and things like that into paxin, that’s got to be correct. So y’all have also, you say it’s OCRing files as an update, but it’s more than OCRing files because if we do optical character recognition on our files, and we have an example you’ve used is a printed Excel spreadsheet that doesn’t give us a lot of context. We’re just going to have a bunch of numbers right next to each other. But y’all have said, alright, well we’ve got this ai, we’ve got some more thought into this thing, let’s OCR in a little bit different way. What’s the update around bringing information in? 

Tanguy Chau: 

Yeah, so this is another example where our users were saying, Hey, we get these documents and they might be handwritten documents, so they might be scanned documents or they might be tables. And when we use a general AI system, it doesn’t handle it well. Or if I’m OCRing it using Adobe PDF for example, I lose the structure of what the document is supposed to look like. And so 

What we did was instead of just extracting the text information, Paxon is now able to ingest documents and look at them as images. So if you look at a handwritten documents, then we recognize the handwriting and then you can search through that and understand the text that is there. If you have tables, very large tables, we maintain the table format, extract the information, but maintain the formatting of the documents that has now been rolled out. So now Paxton is able to handle handwritten documents, images, maintain the context of the documents themselves, and that brought enormous improvements to our users. Some of our users have said, Hey, I did not know this information because the information wasn’t properly characterized and categorized in the past. 

Zack Glaser: 

If you can’t get that information into the system, well then the system is not worth as much honestly because you can’t use the artificial intelligence against that data in a meaningful way. And so y’all built some workflows related specifically some of them related to taking medical forms or records and putting them into chronologies and then extracting information that is from forms that are there that we wouldn’t necessarily get the proper information from because it’s in a weird way, lawyers out there, you know what I’m talking about? That’s stuff that is in some sort of weird PDF that you have to fill out or your clients have to fill out and it’s there what it means, but honestly the computer wouldn’t. And so y’all built some workflows around that as well. 

Tanguy Chau: 

So we did a lot of work with, or users that are practice that are doing personal injury work or employment practices, workers’ compensation, separation as well. And we realized that they needed to be able to handle large amounts of medical records for their practice. And so the first thing was to get Paxton to be HIPAA compliant. So it was safe for attorneys to use Paxton where there is personal health information. But two is also being able to upload and ingest tens of thousands of pages of medical records and from there immediately create a chronology that’s well structured that tells you when a visit happened, who the facility was, what the provider was, what was the subjective elements of the visit, the objective elements of the visit, what was the assessment and what is the now plan of treatments. And just based on those medical records, we’ve also done that for billing records, medical billing records. 

I think a lot of the AI system are seen as black boxes to say like, okay, this, I’m putting 10,000 pages of medical record documents in there, but I need to be able to rapidly audit and see the information and see why, where this information comes from and having that visibility and having that system of trust but verify it’s really important for us. And so those are all of the work that we have been doing with these practices of personal injuries and employments, workers’ compensation, subrogation work where we can support their work more, support their work. 

Zack Glaser: 

Wonderful. Well, you guys are always rolling out new updates and everything like that. I look forward to the updates that are coming up next time we talk as well. Thanks for being with me and for sharing about Paxton. 

Tanguy Chau: 

Sounds good. Thank you so much Zack. 

Zack Glaser: 

And if anybody wants to look further into Paxton, you can always go to Paxton dot and we will definitely drop a link in the show notes. Thanks Tanguy 

Tanguy Chau: 

Thank you. Bye Zack. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Hi, I’m Nelson Dellis and I am a six time USA memory champion and I teach others how to remember things and make their life more memorable. 

Zack Glaser: 

Six time USA memory champion, grand master of memory, which honestly I didn’t know existed. And you’ve authored a couple of books including remember it with an exclamation point. So I think I’m supposed to say that really loud. That’s how I got kind of introduced to you was that I’m going to start with a little bit of the obvious here. First thing. Thanks for being with us. I appreciate it. Sure. Second, what’s a grand of memory? That’s very cool sounding. 

Nelson Dellis: 

It is, and it is only that cool because when the first memory competition started, it was basically a bunch of snobby rich British guys saying who was going to be the best memorizer and they got into the stuffy room in London and created the first memory championship. And I think they said, you know what this sport needs a grandma title to achieve. I mean, it is become this very prestigious thing in the world of memory sports, you have to get a certain score at a internationally sanctioned competition that’s pretty competitive. You have to do three other things, which is memorize a deck of cards successfully under two minutes, memorize 10 decks of cards successfully in an hour, and then memorize a thousand digit number in an hour successfully as well. If you do those three plus the scoring in competition, you get the grand master title 

Zack Glaser: 

I’m going to give you, that’s worth grand master title. Pretty impressive. And so you’ve done that and you’ve won multiples of these competitions. I’m going to stay in this little realm for a second. What do those competitions look like? The memory competitions? Is it like a written exam sort of thing? You said something about having to memorize decks of cards. 

Nelson Dellis: 

So it mostly looks like what you’re saying. Some people take a test, it’s very quiet. You can imagine, and this is the international championships. The world championships is like that. The US championships, which I’ll talk about in a second is slightly different. Of course the Americans wanted to make it a little more audience friendly, a little more interesting to watch. So it’s slightly different. But in essence it’s basically people sitting down memorizing stuff on paper for a certain amount of time and then afterwards they have to recall it by hand or verbally. And then in the case of the cards, you’re physically thumbing through a deck of cards, memorizing it, and then later you recall it by constructing a fresh deck into the same order. So that’s maybe the one event that’s very visual with the cards. Other ones are really you’re reading on a piece of paper and then writing down the information afterwards or sometimes orally saying it. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. And I guess that would make sense with the number, the extremely large digit number you could see that 

Nelson Dellis: 

Have some 

Zack Glaser: 

Time and then rewrite it. Yeah, 

Nelson Dellis: 

Exactly. Yeah. And there’s different time domains. There’s a speed numbers event, so you have five minutes to memorize that number as much as you can. And then you have an hour, like a marathon event where you have 60 minutes to memorize and that’s where you get to the thousands. I was telling you what I, to get grandmaster, you have to do about a thousand. The world record now is I think in the four or five thousands. It’s crazy. Holy 

Zack Glaser: 

Crap. Yeah, I mean that’s a big number. That’s a big number. So that what motivated you to get into this and frankly to stay into it, to keep training. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah. I mean on the surface it kind of sounds like who would want to do that? Why would you memorize numbers for Howard? 

Zack Glaser: 

It’s pretty niche. It’s pretty niche. But then I forget who it was, and you, you’ll know who I’m talking about. The fellow from NPR that decided that he or the Joshua Foer. Yes. Yeah, he did it I think once and it was like, okay, cool. What keeps you doing it? 

Nelson Dellis: 

I find it’s fun and I’ll explain why in a second. But I initially got started because of just a concern from my own memory. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease and passed away from it in 2009, which is kind of around the time I was deeply interested in memory because I was watching my grandmother lose hers. I was reading books about it and learning about the brain and how memory works, but also there’d always be a SideBar somewhere in these neuroscience books that said, did you know that there is a memory championship where people do this and that? And I was like, that’s crazy. These people must be savants or have photographic memories. And there’d always be a little sentence saying, they’re just average people who train their memory. I was like, train your memory. I’ve never even heard of that idea. So that just led me down a rabbit hole. So I was very motivated to not end up the same way as my grandmother. Granted, I’m very young, I was even younger then, so not it was going to happen to me overnight, but I wanted to do something for myself so that future Nelson would be in better shape, I guess. 

And so I saw this competition, I learned that the techniques, anybody can learn them, anybody can master them. Supposedly I was a little skeptical, but saw very quickly that they work and became obsessed. It’s fun it thing you’re doing in your mind. It’s not just rote repetition, it’s coming up with silly images, bizarre images. It’s like you’re creating your own movie inside your head. And to me it makes it such a fun space to live in and you’re doing something cool, which is memorizing really complicated or impressive stuff. 

Zack Glaser: 

So that’s one of the things that struck me here in reading your book and looking into this is that I assumed everybody that was in those memory competitions had an idy memory or something. They just had a photographic memory. Okay, neat. I mean that’s really cool if you can just, but the fact that it’s something that you can train, something that you can work on and something that you can do, A, that’s neat. But then B, I started reading the book and looking at the techniques that you’ve described, and we’ll let you describe ’em here in a second. And I’m like, it makes my brain hurt. Anyone can do it, but it takes effort. It’s not like, oh, anyone can do it. It’s just if you have the time to, no, it takes some effort. And to me that’s why it would be fun is that it takes a little bit of effort 

Nelson Dellis: 

And as it should, I mean it’s a skill like any skill, granted, if you’ve tried one of these memory techniques, you’ll see instant improvement. And that already is nice. If you tried any other skill playing the piano, sure you can play the keys, but you couldn’t play a Mozart piece off the bat memory stuff. You can almost sit down and do something really impressive immediately. But then the hard part is becoming a virtuoso at this skill and you have to work at it every day and get faster at it, smoother at it. But the nice thing is early on you get a lot of feedback that says, oh shoot, there’s a lot here for my brain. So much potential that I didn’t even know that’s just sitting here that I could take advantage of. And so that’s usually the motivating starting factor for most people who get into this. 

Zack Glaser: 

Honestly, that’s what I ran into in reading this was the practicality of it and the non bullshit of it. And I’m sorry to say it that way, but as I was reading initially, I’m going to take one specific example, which is how to remember where your car is parked when you park in a parking garage. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s cool for two days. How do I remember every freaking day that I’ve parked? And you have a solution for that. You’ll thought of that. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah, 

I mean you have to understand that there is a limit and there’s going to be kind of daily constraints on your mind situationally. And there’s going to be techniques as well available. My book is all about, here are a bunch of tools, just kind of use them to memory proof your life. So 

Are techniques you can apply to remember the number, the color, the parking spot letter, whatever it is that you parked on. But then there’s also just general things to kind of bulletproof your life to help you remember better, which is a just try to park in the same spot every time. I know that’s to say, but that is a little thing that if you tried that, then you can offload needing to actually memorize it. So understanding when it’s important to actually use a technique and when you can find a way that you can avoid using a technique and actually still remember. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. Yeah. I liked that aspect of it, of having, yeah, okay, well if you don’t want to have to remember this every time, go park in the same spot. But if you don’t park in the same spot, or if you’re visiting Disney World and you’re like, well, I parked in goofy 15 or whatever, well, how am I going to remember? I mean goofy helps, but how am I going to remember 15 if you don’t mind, before we just kind of keep going down a little bit of a side tangent there. Does this, what’s kind of the basics of this? What are we talking about here with trying to remember some of these things? 

Nelson Dellis: 

So really what we’re doing is taking advantage of things that our brains are really good at and just going down that route to help us remember things. Because if I were to give anybody some kind of memory task, here’s a piece of paper with stuff on it, memorize, I give you 15 minutes. I guarantee you the majority of people will be like, I guess I’ll just look it over and close my eyes, think if I nail it and just do that over and over again. Just rote repetition. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yes, that’s what I would do. 

Nelson Dellis: 

And it works. It’s just tedious and it 

Can fail. So under stress, it’s hard to sometimes perform doing it that way. And it takes a lot of effort and it’s not fun either. It’s boring because what’s ahead, you’re like, oh, I’ve just got to do this a lot to get it really to a point where I can do it smoothly. But it’s nobody’s fault. Nobody has ever been taught traditionally how to memorize properly, how to take advantage of what our brains are actually good at. And it’s kind of a lost art. I mean, thousands of years ago, people had to do this. They had to find ways to make it easier, not tedious because that’s how they pass down information to the next generation or to carry down a legacy in their community or the civilization, whatever. 

Zack Glaser: 

So 

Nelson Dellis: 

Understanding what your brain is designed to do is really what these techniques are about. And what that is, is we remember pictures in our mind better than abstract information. That’s one part of it. And then when you’re memorizing lots of stuff, you need to have some organizational process or structure in how you place those in your mind. And we don’t do that. I mean, that sounds kind of abstract anyways. It’s like, well, how would I put something in my brain where I know where it is? I would love to do that. I don’t know how. But that’s essentially the two part process. There is whatever you’re memorizing, come up with a picture for it. We can go deeper into what that actually means and then organize it, link it to something in your mind so that it now has an anchor to a place that you can go and retrieve it later. 

That’s really the concept here. And then past that, once it’s in your brain, it’s a matter of review. That’s often the third step I say is if you want to remember something for the long term, you have to visit it, you have to review it, you have to recall it. Often, that’s just how our brains work. Our brains are designed to forget stuff over time. If it’s not used, that should make sense because otherwise there’s so much noise in the world around us. Why would I keep anything that’s not being used as a survival instinct? I’m going to remember the stuff that’s crucial, the stuff that keeps reoccurring in my life and the other stuff will taper off and eventually disappear. So review, giving it a little love every so often will eventually put it into your long term. 

Zack Glaser: 

And that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that struck me with this was the stories. We remember things previously with oral history and you make a story out of something. Well, that’s a lot of times what you’re doing here, that’s your clink do stuff is creating a story, but creating a story that you’re going to remember. I liked that aspect of it, that kind of something that stands out. 

Nelson Dellis: 

We remember in terms of these pictures, you remember things that are out of the ordinary, I should mention as well, you want to make things that tap into all of your senses. So not something that you just see, I said think of a picture, the picture can be seen. What are you seeing in your mind’s eye, but also what would it smell like or taste like or feel like if you touched it. Also, the feelings, emotions that go with it. We remember things that are emotionally charged. Think of emotional times in your life, good and bad. You usually remember those in the high fidelity versus the everyday menial tasks that you do. Those stuff kind of get blurred and you forget them. Right? The example I give all the time is think of nine 11. Everybody who was of that era remembers where they were, what they were doing. Exactly where I was on tv. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, I know exactly where I was. Absolutely. It’s a good point. 

Nelson Dellis: 

It’s like, okay, tell me about September 8th that year. It’s like, I dunno, 

Zack Glaser: 

With any other year. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we don’t have time to go into all the techniques here, but I do want to talk about one thing specifically because this is more kind of an advanced technique. The memory palace. You watch Sherlock Holmes and you go, what even is that? But I think giving an example or walking us through the idea of the memory palace really kind of takes us from zero to a hundred for the types of things that you’re talking about in the book. Could you tell us what that is a little bit? 

Nelson Dellis: 

Sure, yeah. I want to first say that if anybody’s watched Sherlock and seen that reference, they take a lot of liberties with what actually works there, transports into, which is kind of what happens. I start, my mind goes there, but he is in person there and he and checks things and he’s just exploring it. It’s not quite like that, but they’re making it for tv. So I get it. But effectively the technique is you use a place that doesn’t have to be something that you know very well, but ideally when you start, maybe choose something well, like your home, the place you work, your commute to work, the favorite walk down the street, whatever. And the idea is that we remember spatial information pretty well. So those places that you’re familiar with, you’ve already memorized them. So why not by choice, by just experiencing them? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, 

Nelson Dellis: 

Exactly. Your house, you try to attach or anchor or link the images of the things you’re trying to memorize two locations along a path through that space. And so when you go to recall it, you just think back to the memory palace you used. It’s kind of like a file cabinet. Where did I store it? Oh, it’s in my house. And then you walk back through the same path and images should be there if you did them in a memorable way, but they’re attached to parts of the house or the location that you use. It sounds like, oh man, Nelson, now that’s a lot of work. I got to think of a place I got to turn ’em into pictures, store them and imagine them versus doing a rote repetition thing. You’d be surprised. It’s one of these things, you have to try it and do it to see how effective and easy it is over this other boring way. That’s often takes a lot of time. 

Zack Glaser: 

I think that’s the big thing here is I said at the beginning of this that this is not easy. It’s not something where it’s like, oh, I just flipped this switch and I’m automatically remembering everything. But one thing that struck me in the book was you kind of saying, well, what’s the alternative? The alternative is either not remembering it or going through and doing this just rote, just repeating it, repeating it, repeating it the same way that I did the quadratic equation. There is a 

Nelson Dellis: 

Third option, there is a third option, which is to offload it to a digital device. Right? 

But that’s another, and there’s certainly times when you can do that and maybe should, but at this day and age, when somebody asks me, why can’t I just store this on my phone? Why do I need to memorize it? I would say, A, because you’re not using your memory and you’re going to lose it if you don’t use it. And two, there’s some kind of human aspect to really mastering your memory. And as AI and all that stuff takes over, it’s like we go further and further away from what it means to be human. So to tap into that through this memory experience, I think is so powerful. Especially now. 

Zack Glaser: 

Well, and at least currently, I can’t use my phone to help me remember people’s names, at least not quickly. I could write it down, I could write notes, things like that. But as I see somebody who has a particular feature that I’ve linked their name to, then that’s a lot faster than me looking down at my phone and going, what are the names of all the people that are here? So there are some situations where a digital device isn’t going to work anyway. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah, exactly. 

Zack Glaser: 

So it’s difficult to create the memory palace or one of the linking mechanisms, the stories or something like that. But if it means that you’re going to remember it, I mean, it’s easy in that sense. 

Nelson Dellis: 

And I would argue, yes, it’s harder because you have to do something to get to work or they exist in your mind, but when you practice it, it doesn’t take me very long. I have memory palaces that are preloaded to go ready to go for anything. I can come up with stories on the fly super fast that at the beginning it was slower. I had to learn how my brain works and see what really sticks for me. But through practice, it’s just become kind of this automatic thing that I do, and I just think this way. Now I’ve rewired how I think in terms of information processing. I think that’s the thing that anybody can get to. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, that’s what I wanted to ask you about was getting better doing it over and over. Because as I’m looking into these processes, I tried to memorize the first 10 presidents. That’s one of the examples that you have. And it took me a while to come up with everything, and then it took me a while to get it into my brain, and then I forgot it relatively quickly. But you say that it gets easier. How does that become more effective? 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing is it might be helpful to have had some guidance on how you were doing that. I know you had my book, but one reason that maybe you forgot it after the fact was that the images weren’t potent enough, 

Zack Glaser: 

Right? Yeah. 

Nelson Dellis: 

I often say this in my speeches when I explain some of these steps. It’s like, now that you know this and you use this, you can’t use the excuse that you have a bad memory anymore. That’s not the reason you’re forgetting stuff. It’s because images weren’t memorable enough. And that’s okay. That’s expected when you’re learning this in the beginning, but there’s hope there because now what? You could go back and add, okay, let me make this even crazier. Let me make it even more explosive or even more disgusting. And you play around with that. Everybody’s going to have their little tastes and preferences to what really sticks for them. I like the stuff that gets destroyed and explodes, and there’s just shards of stuff flying everywhere. That’s how my images are. They’re very brat and violent. But some other people might just like a guy slipping on a banana, something a little humorous, but not that gross. There’s different lines. People will cross with their creativity 

And in lines that they maybe don’t have to cross. That will be enough. And you have to kind figure that out. So if you forgot it pretty quick, maybe it worked to get in your brain, but you forgot it pretty quick. It’s just a matter of going back and saying, okay, well, how can I enhance those images I have for the 10 presidents, whether you use my images, enhance those or your own. And then see, okay, the first five I got, perfect. Okay, so those images were good. The sixth one, that one was a bit of a trouble for me, so maybe I have to tweak that one. Why did I get that wrong? Analyzing and getting feedback on the process is a big part of it too. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, that’s fascinating to think of it that way of like, okay, well, I am going back and I’m going to try to think about why it didn’t work for me. Instead of just like, shit, this didn’t work. 

Nelson Dellis: 

It still happens to me when I do events. I have to memorize dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds of people’s names. I rapid fire, name them off. That’s part of the presentation, and it looks really cool. But sometimes there’s one person, a couple persons sometimes, and I’m just like, fuck, why did I forget their name? And I try to figure it out, and it’s usually I had a momentary slip of focus when I was talking to them. Maybe I was reviewing the other names or something like that. Maybe they had a more complicated name. And my image for it was a bit weak, where I kind of said, oh, yeah, yeah, I’ll remember that one. And I didn’t. 

So a bunch of different reasons, but I’m very analytical of the moments that I forget and I try to think about it, okay, how can I revisit that and make it stronger? And so I’m always thinking about my memory. And I think that’s a big part of it too, is just understanding or trying to pick apart why you forget things, why you remember things. Having memory on your mind rather than it being something that you just put aside and say, I don’t have a good one. I can’t work on it. It’ll never be good because then that’s stuck there. 

Zack Glaser: 

Well, so how has that, keeping memory at the forefront, how has that changed how you kind of experience the world? Because I get to walk around and be like, I don’t care if I remember this anymore. It’s just not, do you find that you’re more focused on things? Do you find that you’re more present in a way this feels like it crosses over or has some sort of overlap with mindfulness? 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yes, 100% before anything you want to be present in the moment of whatever you’re trying to memorize. And the bigger thing, for me, the most moving thing for me was watching my grandmother not remember me. She knew who I was, but in front of her, she couldn’t have recognized that it was me. So her life’s memories, something about it was falling apart. And that’s the big picture here is I want to live a memorable life, and when I’m old, I want to be able to remember as much of it as I can. That’s all I want. There’s a lot of other stuff along the way, but that’s ultimately going to be at the end of my life, my story. That’s all I have and the things in it, my family, my kids, my accomplishments, my failures, whatever. So I really want to be able to find ways to focus on those and make sure that I don’t forget those things. So just being able to practice my memory every single day to get better. I’m memorizing numbers and cards, that’s fine. But ultimately, I’m trying my best to keep a healthy memory for the long term. I want to have a healthy memory for the rest of my life. I want to remember all the things that I did because at the end of the day, I think what we’re here for. 

Zack Glaser: 

I love that. I think that’s probably a good thing to wrap up on. It’s nice. I really appreciate that, Nelson. I really appreciate you talking to me about this. Obviously, if people want to know more about the techniques that you have, they can find the remember it book. We’ll have the link to that in all the descriptions and everything. Where else can people find you and honestly, what are you working on now? What else is coming up? 

Nelson Dellis: 

So I’m easy to find. If you just Google Nelson Dallas, you’ll find my webpage, nelson dallas.com. You can see all my info. Reach out to me if you want some private coaching, hire me for seminars. I do all that stuff. It’s a deep rabbit hole. We’re talking about the very surplus level stuff for all your lawyer listeners, you can apply that very simple technique of visualizing, storage and review to memorize all the details you need for laws. I’m not a lawyer, but I would imagine a lot of memory goes into becoming and being a lawyer and running a firm, right? So if anybody’s interested, just reach me, reach out to me. I have that book, remem It. I’m finishing writing a book that’s coming out in March. It’s called Everyday Genius. So it’s about memory techniques and all other sorts of seemingly genius skills that anybody can tap into. And I got my YouTube channel if anybody wants to just consume content on this stuff, there’s a deep rabbit hole there as well. So 

Zack Glaser: 

Awesome. Well, we’ll put links to all of that stuff in the show notes, but as you were talking, I wanted to kind of make sure that we connect this to lawyers. I could definitely see using this for studying when I was in law school absolutely would’ve been beneficial. But B, opening remarks, things that I want to get to in depositions, yes, we get to write things down a lot of times, but sometimes these things are performances, and I can see a lot of these techniques working in places where we definitely want to remember things, remember stories, remember what we wanted to get across and all that stuff. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah. Yeah. There’s strategies to memorize texts, whether you have, you said a deposition or an intro, whatever it is, you want to say verbatim or you just want to have the general ideas that you hit and you maybe are going to elaborate on them as you go. There’s different approaches to that. But ultimately, it’s all about what I talked about already, which is finding ways to turn those into pictures, how to organize them so that when you’re live in front of the jury of the judge, you can pull it out without stumbling and losing your place if you get sidetracked for where to come back to and continue. I can’t speak for lawyers out there. I can only imagine how maybe stressful that is in certain moments. It’s all coming down to what you say, so you want to say it perfect. And like you said, I can imagine it’s a performance, so there’s an emotional part to how you deliver it. So you don’t want to be worrying about the memory stuff. You want to have that cold so that you can actually hang on the words and then really pause and give weight to what you’re saying versus trying to come up with, oh, shoot, what was I supposed to say next? Right. Imagine if that part was easy and taken care of, right? That’s what memory techniques could do. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, that’s exactly where my brain went. Well, Nelson, I really appreciate the conversation here, and thanks for sharing really the surface level of your information here. Appreciate it. 

Nelson Dellis: 

Yeah, no pleasure. Thank you for having me, and I hope your audience learns something new today and starts thinking about their memory. That’s the important thing. If you start thinking like, okay, I can improve my memory. There’s ways to do that. There’s people out there that teach this stuff or have done it. I think that’s the most important thing for an audience like this, to be aware now that that’s possible. Love it. Love it. Once again. Thanks, Nelson. 

Zack Glaser: 

You got it.