SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian, diving in with us today, and our special guest is Nelson Dellis. Nelson, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me, Joe. Absolutely. Thanks for joining. And uh we're talking about all things memory today, which is a very, very interesting topic. We just got done with uh our AP season and a lot of kids freaking out about memorizing answers for a quotes. But you are a six-time USA memory champion, and you got the got into this after losing your grandmother to Alzheimer's. So can you talk to us about like what why was that the turning point that pushed you out of software engineering, a very interesting uh field, into this work?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah. I mean, it all kind of I was getting into software engineering at the time, kind of all my big life decisions kind of spurred at that moment. But I I never really had a good memory. That's something that I would have said was average my whole life. Nothing to write home about. You know, maybe certain things I was better at remembering than others, but nothing I'd say, like, oh wow, that guy would be a memory champion ever. But my grandmother started to lose her memory. And, you know, I witnessed that as well as my immediate family around. We all experienced that. And uh it was heartbreaking and eye-opening and just just awakening, especially when she passed away, realizing that your memory can take the essence of who you are away, which is what happened, or what I saw, my what happened to my grandmother. It made me want to look at memory and see what I could be doing to enhance my memory. I was in my 20s, so I was thinking, you know, for the long game, what could I be doing now that would set me up to have a more secure cognitive future? And I stumbled upon memory techniques and these things called memory championships, and you know, the rest is history.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah, tell us about climb for memory and your coaching work today. What's the specific problem you're solving for students, families, lifelong learners that schools never taught them how to fix?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, I mean, the main thing that I'm trying to fix here is that this problem that people don't understand, that they have this amazing computer, this memory in their mind that can be honed and trained and can be doing things that most people don't think are possible, that they think are reserved for a select few geniuses with amazing memories. But we all have that capacity within us. And that's really the thing that I'm trying to attack here that, you know, we have this seemingly unlimited potential with our memory. And no one seems to understand that. Uh it's an old practice that's been out of out of use. We've been out of touch with it for thousands of years. And yeah, I think we're at a really interesting turning point when we talk about tech and the mind. And uh I just think that it's it's the right time for people to get in touch with that part of who we are as a species.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

How deep did you go with it in history? Because like when I remember when I was coming up through my undergraduate, and we like really the f we actually went deeper into you know, ancient Rome, ancient Greece. We actually I learned that like oral, there was people that like literally their only job was oral history, right? They're like how to like remember the entire story and retell it. And so for most of like human history, that is how things were passed down, were through oral traditions. And that's not, you know, even parts of the Bible and a lot of the stories that come from there were from oral histories. What did you go into that in through this process? Did you learn more about that and the history behind that?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Sure. I I've been fascinated with the history of it forever. And you know, when you get into memory techniques for the first time, there's always this, you know, these techniques are from the ancient Greeks. That's that's the story you get told. And there's this classic tale of Simonides who was at a dinner party and uh he stepped out for a moment and the whole hall crashed, and everybody around the table was mangled and dead beyond recognition. Except Simonides could remember, if he thought about it, the position of everybody around the table and could name them all, and they could recognize whose body was who. Um, and that's the the very common story for the birth of the most popular memory technique, the memory palace, where you can visualize locations and we we can visualize locations better and remember things if we attach information to them. But there's evidence that those kinds of techniques have been around far earlier than that. And where you were going, I mean, I think we as humans are storytellers. That's what makes us who we are. That's how we have created what you see around us is through story, storytelling and having these civilizations that were able to last long times. People always had to carry these traditions, these oral stories, and that is purely memory. And the way that people did it were through the very basic techniques that we use now in memory competitions to memorize incredible amounts of things. So it's been around for many thousands of years, and there's there's all sorts of evidence of this in different cultures, not just ancient Greece.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

So, in an age where Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, AI is on the on the rise and literally can potentially one day have all of human memory and human history in there. Does does memory still matter and what's actually being lost when we hand it over to machines?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Yeah, I mean, going it's this dovetails into what, you know, I was just talking about how human it is to tell stories and to use our own memories. And that is slowly, well maybe rapidly, being taken away from us. That, in my opinion, what is the very essence of being human, which is to have our own memories and to be able to remember things in our lives and in our traditions, in our past, uh, in our cultures. And yes, of course, there's the argument for using AI for good to make us more efficient, to help us remember more. Um, I'm not saying that AI or any tech really that can help outsource memory is inherently bad. But if we're outsourcing everything, all our memory to these machines, then like what's left of our humanity? I'm a bit biased because my whole world is memory. Um but I truly do think that uh memory is what makes us human.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

So what is the biggest myth out there about memory and learning that AI tools have only made worse?

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Well, I mean, I I think with AI tools, it's it's very tempting and it's easy to just ask it to do things for you. Sure. You know, so that goes right against what memory techniques are all about, where you have to have this moment of struggle with recalling information. It's not a pleasant struggle, and we often want to be like, why do I have to do this if I can just get something to remember it for me? I can look it up whenever I need it. And sure, you can, right? But then it's not up here, it's somewhere else, right? If you truly want it up here, in the most memorable way, accessible way possible, it does need to be something that you work through yourself, that you have to think about, that you have to recall, you have to interact with the information. So I find a lot of people learning about memory techniques and then going to AI chat, let's say, and just saying, hey, come up with the mnemonics for this, right? And boom, five seconds less. Uh you have all the mnemonics you ever need to memorize this, that, and the other, which is great. And oftentimes that can be really helpful. But what's missing is that personal element, right? We remember things that are meaningful to us. And this machine, on the other hand, is not really actually, some of the examples it can come up, come up with in terms of mnemonics are terrible. I've yet to see ones that are like actually usable to a point where it's like you can memorize it quickly. You'd be faster to do it on your own. So, you know, the thing I think people are getting wrong with AI is that that it can do everything for you in terms of improving your memory. Often I I hear this kind of catchphrase that like you can use these tools to remember everything, but it's it's a lie. It's that machine will remember everything for you, and you could look it up and reference it to get the information, but that's not remembering, that's looking something up. So I don't understand why people think that they're remembering more by using this idea of a second brain when the true remembering is is in the process of encoding and in struggling with the information to imprint it on the mind, in the heart, you know.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

So you you teach this, well, it's you said, as you said, it's not it's a lost art. Talk about memor the technique of memory palace and the PAOS system. Like we actually had a guest on just recently about memory palaces, but if you can kind of oh gosh, now I forget.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Hold on. Was it was it uh was it a teacher or or someone who competes in memory competitions or just I don't think he competes in memory competitions, but we talked about memory.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

He talked about the technique of memory palaces. Got it. Was it maybe Anthony Metevere?

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Medevier, yeah. Oh my god. Yeah, of course. Yeah, we're good for a great friend of mine. He's I've interviewed him many times, he's interviewed me many times. We're like, you know, we we we both are memory coaches, and we so we're both in competing businesses, but we're like best of friends. I always recommend his stuff, he always recommends my stuff. So literally within a week of each other.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

So I don't know. No way. Oh, cool. I can't wait to watch this episode. That's very cool. Yeah, I was like, okay, because I I've heard of it, but uh yeah, I mean, I I when it was described to me, I'm like, okay, that makes a lot of sense in terms of building that in your but how do you coach, how do you coach people through that?

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Yeah, I mean, it's memory palace is one of the techniques you can use to organize and store information in your mind. But there's so much more to how to master this technique uh of of memorizing. A big part of it is visualization, is how to get better at seeing the information, the complicated, abstract information that you want to memorize, and how to encode it in a way such that you can visualize it in a memorable, usable way. That takes practice, all sorts of kind of guidance to get it right. Of course, you can try right now, try to visualize something, um, and it might be memorable, it might not be. There is an optimal way to look at something and make it as memorable as possible in terms of a visual. And that's the first step is how do I encode something into a visual? The second step to memorizing anything is how do I organize it? And that's where a memory palace technique comes in, because it's a method of organizing all of those pictures in a way that's easy to recall, right? Easy to retrieve. That's often the problem with memory. It's not so much people forget things, it's really that they don't have a strategy to look things up in their mind reliably. And the memory palace does that. So I go about teaching, you know, from the very start how to how to visualize better, how to apply those visuals and store them in different ways using memory palace and other techniques, then how to nurture that information that you just put in your mind and keep it for X amount of time that you want. Is it something you need for five minutes? Is it something you need for a month, for a year, for the rest of your life? How do you organize all that information and keep it alive for the long term, right? And then there's this training aspect of it, right? Just because you can do it and it works doesn't mean you're optimal at it, right? You you might want to train for a marathon, and just because you can run doesn't mean you can run a marathon, right? Well, so you got to train for it, right? And what does that take? It means, well, there's a lot of running, right? And you can get a trainer for that to help you run more efficiently, different exercises, how to build up to a marathon in terms of miles run, right? And and load, workout load. So same thing with training your memory. As a memory coach, um, you know, I have to teach the basics, but I also have to coach you how to get better and become the best you can be with your mind.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

So you're actually a you're a big believer in that this is a trainable skill. Memory is a trainable skill, not talent. But you know, our system, our K-12 system does not actually they they they test memory constantly, but they never actually teach the skill. So that's something we iterate a lot. It'll teach a lot of skills. They just expect this to happen. So I guess why is reframing that one belief such a game changer for students who think that they're just bad at memorizing?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah, I mean, uh I for my whole career as a memory athlete slash memory coach, which is over 17 years now, I've been brought into many different schools. Uh, some, you know, I started locally where I was from, Miami. Um, went to a bunch of little lower schools, middle schools, high schools, even university level, and I've given presentations, I've talked with specific classes, specific teachers, parents, and they all are blown away by what I have to say, what I can teach the kids. I've done examples, live examples with the kids. I've shown examples of myself as well, and they can see it. They say, Well, why isn't this taught to our kids? How is it that from day one at school, we're expected to memorize things, but no one's ever given us the 101 on using your memory. It's just like, here's something to memorize, go do it. And you, you know, you you most people will just rotely repeat it, and that's what they think memory is, but that's not what it is. There is there is a way to do it. And thousands of years ago, people were using this and and teaching this as an art. It was known by everybody. You know, it should be in this instruction manual of the brain, how to use your brain. And it's nowhere to be seen in education, unfortunately. And I don't know why that is, because as soon as I give the demonstration, all the parents, all the teachers at the higher ups are like, you gotta, we gotta do something with this. You know, let's let's test it on this uh segment that we're doing in fourth grade class here, whatnot, right? But what happens eventually, somewhere down the road, with the curriculum that they have, it doesn't work. They don't want to, they don't want to use it because memory is bad. Somewhere along the lines, they can't find a way to convince themselves or whoever it may be that this needs to be part of the curricula, which is unfortunate. And I still haven't cracked that code. I think people just have this stigma about memorizing things as is a bad way to learn. And I I I wholeheartedly disagree because I think if you know the right way to memorize something, that part is so easy, it's barely even part of the learning process. It's just like you have information, get it in your head, and then once it's there, then you can the true learning can happen, right? Because you already have a basis for the information. It may not be the full extent of everything, you may not even understand it, but it's there and you can build upon it. You know, for example, I over spring break, this was a few a couple of months ago, my kids were bored. I took them outside. We used we created a memory palace outdoors in our front lawn, and I taught them all the presidents one in 15 minutes, right? They could name all 40 uh seven forwards and backwards, and I could name, say, hey, what's the 31, 31st one, the the 15th one? And they could say that. These are just names, though, right? To to them. They're my my kids are five and seven, the oldest. And so, you know, knowing Zachary Taylor, right, it's just a name, right? And he sits on this timeline of presidents. But since then, my eldest, especially who's seven and he's reading a lot, has read so much about all these presidents and learned all these different facts and stuff. And he's able to place that information along this timeline, right? So he had the basic timeline there, and now he's able to learn and look just pulled more out of history because of that basis that we laid there. Like, for example, we were reading about the Titanic, and I was like, okay, or 1912, okay. And then he's like, I know where that is on the timeline. I know who was president. You know, this the ship was coming over to the US. Who was president then? Right. So he's he's thinking about other things that make more sense in context of these other things. Um, so that's that's to me, that's that's learning, right? Like you have all these different pieces that connect. And if you can just lay down a foundation in a in a in 15 minutes, then memory isn't even a huge part of this problem. It's I think it's an essential part that we should all be able to do immediately. And nobody should be worrying about it as like, is this the right way to learn? I don't think you can learn without memory, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

What do you think something that if you could have a magic wand that to one subject or one daily practice, to what would you get give to every K-12 school right now that they could start implementing tomorrow?

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Yeah, I think without having to worry about all these different systems and some of the, you know, you had mentioned a PAO system, right? Which is a more advanced way to memorize numbers or things like playing cards. We don't need to get into that just yet. I think for people just starting out wanting to play around with their memory, I think the most important thing is to start looking at information and asking yourself the question how can I turn this into a memorable picture that makes sense to me, that is meaningful to me. And a memorable, meaningful picture has all of the senses being used. So what does it smell like? What does it sound like? What might it feel like if I was touching it? Has emotion to it, right? How can I make this image bizarre, silly, over the top, grotesque, right? Exaggerated and movement, right? If you can make those things move and have kind of an action to it, like a little gif, you know, we all send gifts over texts, but like imagining that for an image in your mind. All those components, if you can find ways to turn numbers, names, historic dates, uh, concepts in biology, chemistry, whatever, into these pictures, that's the key. That's the first step to memorizing better. And it's a fun way to explore your mind too, because you get more creative, you tap into that creative mind, and you learn to play and be curious and have fun with it. Dry information now can be a lot more entertaining, and you might be able to pay attention more too, because now it's suddenly not just equations on a board. It might be all the things that you actually like to think about because you've converted them to pictures. So, first step, anybody want to do this is to try to have make pictures in your mind for things that you want to memorize. You've actually climbed Mount Everest three times for Alzheimer's research. I've attempted Everest four times. So I've climbed on it. I have not reached the summit. I've gotten within 50 meters of the top, close many times. It's probably good enough, right? I mean, it's high enough. Yeah, I've climbed like 99% of it. But um, you know, I always have to put a little asterisk saying I I did not climb to the top of it, the tippy top, but uh very close. What what has been the the hold the holdback from going all the way to the top? Oh goodness. Uh well the first time, which was my closest, that was back in 2011. It was kind of a combination of just bad luck and experience. Uh my oxygen mask froze at this one section on our summit push, and I had to take it off because I couldn't breathe with it. And uh I don't know how much you know about high altitude uh mountaineering, but that if you're not acclimatized to in the death zone, which is almost impossible to do, you know, you struggle. And so I got to a point higher in the mountain without my mask and basically sat down to die. And uh my Sherpa said, you know, I it's one more hour to the top. And I said, Listen, I I think I have to go down. Like I I don't think I can make that because it's not just an hour up, it's another few hours after that to go down. So I went down. And subsequently, the the later attempts, I don't know. I think at this point it's more like a mental thing, like I have to get over. I hope to go back one day. I I know I can do it. It's just uh just having the right things aligned mentally. What else have you climbed? Uh I've climbed all over. I've climbed uh Mount McKinley, a bunch of peaks in the Alps, Kilmanjaro six times. What's Kilmanjaro like? That's is that is that technically easy or not really? That's that's quite easy. I mean, to compare it to Everest, it doesn't I mean it's 19,000 feet, so you're you are at a challenging height, but it's really just a a chill hike up at high altitude. Ros I've climbed South America in the Andes, uh uh also my other peaks in the Himalayas. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. What uh how uh what's your perspective? I mean, from summoning from near summoning Everest, what is the I because I'm just like listen, I have not done any of this. So like I like two years ago I went on a hike, I did uh Camelback Mountain on Scott's Arizona. I was like, oh, this is like how high is that one? I don't know not that. Let's just put it this way. People are running up it for their morning jog. Like maybe okay. But I mean it's a very you know, but people have died on it because they don't co-prepare with like water because it gets extremely hot in Arizona. But I've wanted to do I want to do Angel's Landing, but I also have three kids, so I don't know when the hell that's gonna happen. Like are they young? Very yeah, they're young. They're young.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

But I mean so you can't take them yet.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Yeah, no, I don't want to take them yet. I don't know if I want to go because of the chances, but this is like kind of obviously away from the memory. I'm just fascinated by climbing.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

It is a mental sport, so we can we can connect it somehow.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah, no, I mean, because it's I've watched movies on Everest. I just I I don't like it was it was inspiring. First off, I think it is like a mindset, right? Because having never climbed anything in my life to do that, it was like, wow, this just just accomplishing this is a feat in itself and being able to think about that. But you've been so close to the top of Everett, like the perspective on the world, like just inner peace or anything like that. I mean, obviously it was a very stress a physical struggle, but like what have you experienced from summoning mountains that I guess most people, because 99.9% of the population will never climb Mount Everest. So, like, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Let's talk to a little bit about that, just in terms of yeah, I uh you know, one one part that may be clear from who you see me to be is that I love going into the recesses of my mind and pushing it. And as I mentioned just a moment before, like mountaineering, even though it's obviously very physical, it's probably more mental. It's such a when you're actually doing it, it's you know, it's this type two fun. It's not actually not that fun when you're doing it because it hurts often, it's cold, it's uncomfortable, it's long and slow and boring, like you're just walking for hours, right? Super slow, freezing your ass off, you know. So, like, what's the fun in that? But uh it's it's it's a great way to f learn how to focus your mind, you know. You learn how to take these incredibly big and lofty goals and kind of break them up into bite-sized pieces. Um, so that's part of it. I mean, another thing is like I I love to stand at the base of a mountain and just feel this awe and humility of and and just being humble about my place in the universe. You know, like you feel so small and so insignificant. And that's the hard like when I first felt that on my first mountain that I ever attempted, which was Mount Rainier in Washington, I was like, wow, what a feeling! Like nothing else matters. And when you're out there, it's truly you are one with where your feet are. And it's kind of crazy on Everest, you know, at base camp on the Nepali side, you might, I'm sure you've seen pictures of base camp. It's sprawling, right? We're living in tents, and you're basically living on the bottom of the glacier, and there's this kumbu ice fall that's just this kind of rolling, crumbling, popcorn-filled uh snowfield uh with ice blocks, and people have to navigate through that to get to the first camp. But it's always moving, not in the sense you see it like falling, but you can hear it, and it moves slowly but fast for these massive blocks. But every night, you know, you're sleeping at base camp and you hear things crashing and creaking and and collapsing, right? So you know, oh shoot, I have to go through that. And so there's always this kind of like fear of I have to go through that, I could die. But then when you go in it and you're walking through it, you're climbing through it, at least this is my experience, like I'm so present. Death, like I'm not scared, I'm not thinking about death, I'm just there. And obviously, afterwards I deal with the like the post-shock. I'm like, what did I just do? Like that was terrifying, you know. But somehow you become so ever present. You have to be, right? And that's a really amazing feeling that I love in the mountains. That is hard to get anywhere else. It just strips you of everything else around you that's not important, and you feel so alive, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Kind of answered it, but how scary are the uh the ladder, like that we have to cross those gigantic, like looks like the trenches from the Death Star. Like you know what I'm saying? Yeah, the never-ending, like you just fall all the way to the other side of the Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Some are, you know, a little mini ladder across. It's just a little crack. But some, as you saw this season, there was one famous one they have to build that was five across. And my first season, there was actually between camp one and camp two, there was a five-ladder bridge, which you could opt out of if you just took a 20-minute detour.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

But it, you know, uh you you weigh the consequences. 20 minutes in that area still is dangerous, but also going across the thing is dangerous. But wait, so it's five ladders just like strapped together. Strapped together.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

It's this little banana shape thing, too. I that cannot be safe. That there's no way that that is I listen, I I've I've never seen one that big collapse.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

I'm sure they they have. Uh but you know, when you're on it, it's the same thing I just said, you know, that you are just thinking about the next step on that rung getting it correct. Because you're wearing crampons too, so you gotta kind of correctly place the little sharp edges so you don't trip. You know, and you're sometimes even before you go across it, you're holding because there's the ladder, and then there's like two kind of rope handles that go across to help you stabilize a little bit, and you clip into those. You usually the person before you and after you is holding taut the the lines from the both ends so that it's a little easier and less wobbly. So the whole process is like you're very locked in, you know, you don't want to be doing anything else but being where your feet are.

unknown 27:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

So what uh ultimately what I'm saying is you're going across it and you see this massive chasm under you as you go. Like you truly, at least again, in my experience, you're not thinking like shit, I'm gonna die. You're just like in this zen state of flow. And just before you know it, you're on the other side and you're like, who was that that crossed it? Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Well, I think it's so interesting. I mean, obviously, we've gotten a little sidetracked, but I'm a social studies teacher, so I know how to get sidetracked. But like, but I think in terms of so doing hard things makes other things seem like like cake work, but also like the mindset behind it, because I see today, we're gonna talk a little bit about mental health here, and we're not allowing our chance, we're not allowing our kids or our you know, our students an opportunity to fail, safely fail, right? They don't experience failure, they don't experience, we don't ever allow them to now even experience perseverance or grit. We're just giving them the solutions or basically clearing out the sol clearing out the pathway before they even experienced animosity. And so I I think you know, from your perspective and having working with a bunch of different people, why is that so important? Because what you described, even though I've done it on a very, very minute scale, I 100% can relate to that of just like, holy shit, I did do something amaz, like really something hard, and I accomplished something. And whether it be, you know, hiking or or doing something physical, but when it comes to academics, it doesn't seem like the system is set up for that. We're we're dealing with a system of great inflations, of just clearing like everyone's amazing, right? And it's not. You have to actually do the work. So I guess how does that translate to how you help other people with with their memory?

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yeah, I mean, I'm a firm believer that you are not gonna make important big strides in your life if you don't fail. In fact, you know, with with my six memory championship wins, impressive, great. I've I think lost the same amount, you know? And not just like, oh, I I didn't, I was new to it, I didn't do very well, blah, blah, blah. No, like I was near the end. I probably could, I think there's probably three or four more championships I should have quote unquote won because I was right there and something happened. I I've I flubbed something, I got unlucky, whatever it may be. But I will say that those moments that those years that I lost were the catalyst for me winning the others. If I had not lost those, I don't know if I'd be a six-time champion, honestly. You know, I I trained so hard for the 2010 USA Memory Championship, and I was the best. I will say that. I'm not cocky, I'm just saying on paper, I had the best scores. Nobody was even close to me. And we got to the finals, the final event, you have to memorize two decks of cards in five minutes, and I did it. Nobody could do both of them at that time. They the most anybody had ever done was like a deck and a half, and I could do both decks forwards and backwards. We had to, we go on stage, there's three competitors left, and you have to recite the the cards one by one until two people make a mistake, and then the last person is is crowned. But you have to agree on which direction you're saying the deck, right? Because if you have a I don't have a deck of cards here, but you could pick up the deck and and look at it that way, or you could start from the top and look at it that way. So you have to decide which way we're starting the recite reciting from. I was not paying attention. Excuse me. And so when I went first, I said the last card, uh, which should have been the first card. And so I lost, right? And I was like, oh man, if I had just been second, even though I was in this mindset of I have to start at this point, the other person would have said that first card and I would have been like, oh, we're going the other direction. No problem. In my mind, I could go the other way. Okay. Even any anyway, the short, the short of the story is that I learned my lesson. And even though I trained so hard, I was the best, blah, blah, blah, I lost. And I was devastated. But at some point, I picked myself back up and I said, next year, not gonna happen. I'm gonna train even harder. I didn't know how I was gonna train even harder. I already had, but I did and I won. And I won the next year. The year after that, I made a mistake and I came back even stronger, won two more times. And so again, if if I hadn't lost, you know, I I don't think I would be where I am. And so it's so important to fail, even with the Everest stuff. Yes, yes, I haven't summited yet, but those failed expeditions, if you want to call them that, I don't see them as failures that I did not summit. So there's a you could say it's a failure, but I learned so much more from those. If I had summited, how boring, right? Like you see somebody go and attempt Everest and they they summit, it's like, cool, great, great achievement, but that's it, right? Your story's done. You climbed Everest, great, right? I find most people are honestly more interested in the story about me failing Everest than hearing somebody who's summited Everest, right? So I I wish people could learn how to fail more or that the in the school systems that it was set up for people to try things and fail, because there's so much more power and and learnable uh wisdom from that. And this kind of goes back to what I said at the very beginning of our conversation with why it's important to struggle with the information versus asking AI to do it. Because it's the same, same principle. You know, that AI stuff that's doing it all for you is not setting you up to fail. It's doing everything for you. Whereas when you struggle with the information that you encoded yourself and put in your memory yourself, that's where the magic happens. That's where you learn when you struggle with difficult things. That's when our brain is working out. If you don't get that, then your brain isn't doing anything, you know?

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Besides just uh doing well on test, what are what are the benefits, what are the mental health confidence and long-term brain benefits you see when someone trains their memory the right way?

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Yeah. I'd say the the most surprising thing when I first started with this stuff is besides obviously being able to memorize anything and how cool that felt and how powerful, empowering that felt, was just the confidence that it gave me in everything else that I did when I would go for job interviews or, you know, sit down to talk with someone and think to myself, like, wow, I don't have to worry about the memory piece of this. I'm not gonna have to, I'm not gonna forget what this person just said to me. I'm not gonna forget their name. I'm not gonna forget, you know, what important things I have to tell this interviewer. So it's the the most surprising thing was that I was able to kind of focus again on being present and on information outside of worrying about my my memory failing me. And that's a really powerful feeling to not have that anxiety about this thing that you feel like you don't really have control over. What if you did have control over that, right? And everything that you put in there, you know how to get it back out. That I think is the most important thing that you that you get from it.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

So, in closing, like what is the one thing you want people listening to remember from this conversation when it comes to memory?

SPEAKER_00 34:43

That we all have this ability within us, and you deserve to explore it, to play around with it, and give it a shot. You know, the just trying to memorize something it won't feel great. You probably will be like, ah, this is harder. I could just write it down or something like that. But I promise you the benefits over the long term are gonna feel amazing that you can control this powerful computer in your mind. So just to give people this confidence that they can do this themselves, even if they have a bad memory or they say they have a bad memory, that's not how it works. It's a trainable skill, and we all can train it and we should train it.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Amazing. Nelson, thank you so much for your time. For people who want to learn more about what you offer and and go deeper with you, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Yeah, uh my website is nelsandellas.com. Tons of resources there. You can also check out my YouTube channel, free videos, fun videos on getting started with memory uh and brain-related things. I have a few books out. Uh Remember It is my memory how-to manual. It's a fun, very visual book. And then my recent book that came out just a few months ago is called Everyday Genius, um, which tap teaches everyday kind of genius skills that anybody can learn, memory included, but also reading faster, learning for the long term, creativity, intuition, problem solving, mental math, all sorts of things. Super fun. And uh yeah, you can find all about that stuff on my uh my main website. And yeah, I coach people, I have online courses as well. So there's plethora a plethora of things to learn uh to to to reach out for in terms of learning from memory for me.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Awesome. Nelson, thank you again so much for being here. Of course. And hopefully we'll talk again soon. And if you could do Mavericks again, good luck.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

I was gonna say, if you ever want to do Kilimanjaro, I guide those trips almost yearly.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

So I honestly I would I'll take you up on it. I do I'm like, you know what? That seems the tallest mountain on a continent, and it seems like I there's a high probability I won't die from it. You will right because it's like Ike. It's just it's easy.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

And you could transport it.

SPEAKER_00 36:55

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Just gotta breathe, right? So one step at a time. Okay, I'll take you up on that. You're you're even from New York. I seriously, I will. I'll be I mean no, I'm adding you to the mailing list. Everything I've looked at, I probably could do that. I want to stay away from the Andes, the whole cannibalism thing with the soccer team. I don't know, like I don't like you know. Yeah. My kids just discovered about Mount McKinney. Like they're my one daughter's like fascinated with volcanoes, so like I'm like, yeah, like there's there's some things out there. I don't know, but like that that does. I mean, I'm getting into it more. It was I I definitely want to challenge my my middle one, has she's eight, she has zero fear of death at all. Like not like she like we put her on a rock wall at uh this dick sporting goods. We have a house of sport here in Pittsburgh, and she scaled it, she scales every one of them in like no time at all. Like she's gonna be a climber, which is scary, but like so, like she's you know, she's got that adventure gene. But uh yeah, no, it's it was it was definitely a uh a good experience for me, and I I would love to take you up on that. That'd be awesome. So okay. I'll keep you in mind, man. I'll send you some information. All right, sounds good. Nelson, thank you again. Great meeting. Thank you, Joe. All right, thank you all for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us on the supported learning podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.