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Danny
Nelson.
Nelson
Yes.
Danny
How the do you become a memory champion?
Nelson
Yeah, trust me, when I was a kid, I never thought that I'd. I'd be one or have anything to do with a good memory, but I started, wow. It's like since 2009. Ish. Because my grandmother had Alzheimer's and I was concerned for myself and if that was my future. I was young, I was in my 20s, so not a problem that was near nearby. But I just was curious, what could I do now to improve my memory? And one of the first things I discovered was these memory competitions. And lo and behold, the people who compete in these things can do phenomenal feats of memory through trained practice. And that was the hook for me. That was just like, okay, well maybe I could do that. And it just kind of took off from there.
Danny
So you decided you wanted to learn, like, tricks to improve your memory, and that's how you discovered there's this whole, like, Olympic circuit of memory champions that compete all around the world.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And then, so. So what did you start doing to. How did you work your way up to this level? Because I'm sure there's like, a lot of work that has to be done until you can, like, get to that level.
Nelson
Yeah, you know, I. I didn't know at first, like, when I first was interested in memory in general, I was like, well, I want to improve my memory, but, like, what can I do? What are tangible things I can do? And then when I heard about the memory championship, I was like, okay, here are records and events that happen at a competition that are measured. I can use those as, like, benchmarks to train myself. You know, it gives me a quantifiable thing that I can work towards. And so that was really helpful for me because I need goal oriented steps like that to master things. And yeah, I just kept getting better. I had meticulous notes on my performance, and I would train, I would train my memorization of numbers, memorization of playing cards, names, lists of words, all the things that were in the competition. And I just try to get better and better, try to get to the current record that existed at that time. And all with the goal of, you know, just bettering my memory. Not necessarily to win or be the best, but it just became such an obsession of mine. Yeah. Every day, every, every minute, I'd just be trying to memorize stuff.
Danny
Yeah. So. So, like, one of the biggest questions for me is what is the main difference? Because, like, obviously, I'm sure everybody has somebody in their life that they've encountered that just has a natural, like, good memory or has a better memory than that than they do. Right. And we've all, like. I've heard the term of people having photographic memories or different types of, like, memories. Like, then you. You just equate that with somebody, like, being smarter, having a higher iq. But, like, what is the difference between somebody who's just really smart at remembering things and somebody who can memorize a deck of cards? Is there a difference?
Nelson
Yeah, that's a. That's a tough question to answer. I'd say humans generally have the same memory abilities. You know, obviously, like you said, there's people that just have a knack for names or they just remember all sorts of facts. You've had. You've talked with Jesse or. Right?
Danny
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nelson
His memory of fact is just insane. Yeah, I don't have that. Like, I can't naturally do that. I have to use my techniques, and some people can do that. And he probably can't tell you how he's able to do that. He's just got that. And that's hard to pin down. Why one person may have that versus another, but we all have that ability to train it, in a sense. You know, some people think more visually, some people maybe focus more or are more around things that are of more interest to them. So that's the kind of things that they remember. It really depends on their life circumstance and experience. But I'm not denying that there's people who have a knack for that. But I don't know if it's, like, an easy thing to explain why they do or they don't, but there are techniques to kind of get to that place. And with training, you can get a lot better. To a point like that.
Danny
Yeah. One of the. One of the things that blew my mind about this whole memory stuff, this whole. This whole. There's, like, this whole world of memory training and, like, just, like, the study of. And the fascination of memory. And it goes back to, like, way back into ancient Greek stuff. And there's that guy Simonides, which is talked about in the book, the Einstein Moonwalking with Einstein book, who I guess was in, like, the 4th century or whatever, and he was a performer, I think, and he was, like, performing music in front of people, and then the whole place crumbled. And he was trying to, like, use his visual memory to figure out where people were so he could, like, pull the bodies out. Yeah, yeah. And. And, you know, that book also, like, spends a lot of time delving into, like, ancient Greek literature and how, like, the style of writing changed and went from scrolls to actual codexes where there was pages. And, like, you know, I was talking to the. A classicist buddy of mine this morning. I was like. I was like, how do these people back then, like, go through. If they wanted to find something written in a scroll, how would you figure out how to do it? Because, like, there's no. There's no breaks in the words. It's just never ending words with no breaks, no punctuation.
Nelson
On a long scroll, there were no spaces. Right.
Danny
Like, he's like, no, you didn't. You had. The. People had to have better memories. That was just like a. That was a. Like a huge value that they had back then was like being able to memorize.
Steve
Yeah.
Danny
It's like, wild. And we're. It just seems like, obviously I've talked about this at nauseam on just with the folks that I've had through here is that people are losing their memory because they're overcome. They're using technology to compensate for it nowadays. And it seems like it's going. That road leads to somewhere where we're gonna have basically no memory left.
Nelson
Right? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, memory is something that we've always needed up until somewhat recently. And like you said, because we have all these other tools that can replace it, we don't use it as much. But the fact is that thousands of years ago, and even before the Greeks, this was how information was passed down through civilizations. Traditions were shared to the next generation. Without those memory skills, none of that would have survived. And you had to have that. If you wanted to be an intelligent person or to carry on your, you know, city or town's lore or whatever, you had to have that. That trained memory. There was no other option.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Or it would wither away. Right.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah.
Nelson
And what's fascinating about. Yeah, I've heard the. The Simonides story. I didn't know. I haven't heard the performer side of it. I always thought he was someone.
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It actually wasn't.
Danny
It was. Maybe he was a poet, but I think. I think he was like a musical poet. And he would do performances.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
Yeah. Because I think most of the stuff back then was musical, especially Homer. So it was all. I don't know if I don't believe that it was. I'm not sure, but I don't think it was. It wasn't musical as a. On purpose to help people remember it. It was just musical because I think in around the time of Homer and up until. I don't know, like the second century or something like this, that the Greeks just spoke in rhythms. Yeah, they spoke musically. They didn't just. They didn't speak like me and you do. It was. It was rhythmic, and it had a beat. It had, like a flow to it, which is crazy.
Nelson
Yeah. But I mean, the story is somewhat. That he stepped out or was summoned outside and then the whole thing crashed. All the. There it goes.
Danny
Lyric poet. Yeah. Oh, there you go.
Nelson
Yeah. But, yeah, to come to identify the dead bodies who had been crushed by this collapsing hall or whatever, he imagined the positions of the people at the table, their locations. And that spawned this idea. Well, I don't know if it necessarily spawned it, but that's the famous story where people talk about this memory palace idea.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
Where by location, you can actually place information and remember it really well, because our brains remember spatial information really well.
Danny
Yeah, I did that exercise in the book. In the. In the Einstein book, and it works phenomenally. Like, it's incredible.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
So you. So the idea is, like, if you want to memorize something, right. Anything, you kind of, like, break it into chunks, and then you basically associate it with a physical location.
Nelson
Yep. So there's a few parts to it. Right. First, you have the information that you're trying to memorize, and it's usually going to be something abstract. You know, in terms of. Our brains don't really like to memorize numbers and. And passwords. Right. This is all abstract symbols. Right. Generally. So that in recent times, we've. We've. They're new. They're new for our brains. Our brains were not designed to memorize stuff like that. It's memorized. Designed to memorize pictures, visuals that have associations to things that we know. That's one part of it. Converting what you're trying to memorize into pictures. The second part is, how do you organize that? Where do you place it in your mind so that you can go back and retrieve it in a reliable way? And that's where the memory palace technique comes in so handy, because you're placing it or attaching it to a physical location that you know well, that you're thinking about. So when you go through your house or palace, if you have a palace, you know, you have these ordered locations in your house. You walk through your front door. Then there's the kitchen over here and the stairways, whatever, you can attach images for things that you're memorizing on those locations. And the location preserves the memory of the order of things and the structure and the organization Right. Which is when people try to recall things and they forget. It's. It's not that they forgot, it's really that they can't retrieve it. Right. Sometimes they know it's in their mind. They just can't get it out because they didn't have an active way of placing it knowingly in their brain. That's the big problem. Right.
Danny
So when you did these memory competitions, what sort of did you have to remember and did you have to go around to a bunch of, like, locations and store stuff?
Nelson
In my mind, yeah. Yeah. Not physically, but yeah.
Danny
No, that's what I mean. Like, you had to go to a place and like, walk around, be like, okay, I'm gonna put this thing.
Nelson
Yeah. You know, as a. I'm trained memory athlete, Will have dozens to a hundred or hundreds of memory palaces, different ones to store different kinds of things depending on the size of the information. You need more locations. So I have this whole, like, catalog of memory palaces that I go through.
Danny
That's amazing, dude.
Nelson
And on a competition day. Yeah. I've got to go through the different ones. Okay. I'm going to use, you know, my childhood home for this set of numbers. I'm going to use my ex girlfriend's apartment for this one. A hotel I stayed in once that was memorable on this vacation for this set of numbers and whatever.
Danny
So how do you organize all of that? You just. You just like, pick if. Let's say. Let's just say you picked up a book you want to memorize, Right. Tomorrow you go and buy a book you want to memorize. So you would say. You say, how would that process work for you? You would. You would read the book, and then you would afterwards think of a location that you haven't already used to store memory and associate it, like, spend time sitting there working through where to store each memory of each chapter of that book, right?
Nelson
Yeah. There's a few things to go into that first is, you know, I have memory palaces that I use for training. When I memorize numbers every day or cards every day, I'm kind of visiting the same ones that are kind of designed for that. But then if it's new information, like, say I have a book plopped on my desk, and I'm going to memorize it. I'm going to create a new memory palace for that specific information. So when I want to recall information from that book, I know it's only in that memory palace that I designed for it. So then the question is, okay, what do I build like or what Do I think of what's the memory palace? I need to decide what is the route? Is it, oh, well, the place, first of all, is it. I mean, I can create one on the spot, or I could go to a museum and decide, oh, this will be. I'm just going to map this into a memory palace. Or I can use some place that I've been to that I haven't thought of as a memory palace yet. Right. And then I need to know, what am I memorizing? How much information is there so I know how many locations I need. So that's a big part of mapping out, especially a big project like that, memorizing a book. Like in my memory, you mean every single word, like verbatim or. Just generally the important things, Key ideas. Key ideas. Stuff that I want to take away, you know, that also depends. Right. Like, when you're going to memorize something, what are you actually going to memorize? And is it important to memorize everything? Or can I just, you know, is there certain stuff that I already kind of know or can piece together through logic and the rest maybe, or some other points I need to memorize.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Deciding that's important, too, before you, like, go out and waste all this memory palace real estate on, you know, stuff that actually isn't that important to memorize. Right.
Danny
That's fascinating because I was telling you before we started recording that, like, sometimes when I'm listening to audiobooks, I can recall. Like if I'm listening to it, driving from here to my house, I'll drive that same route the next day and I'll have that moment pop into my head when I was listening to the audiobook. Right. When I drove past, like, a specific building or something.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
It's so weird that, like, there. There is a legitimate association that's like hardwired into us with physical locations and, like, learning stuff.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. And it's the same with music. Right. Imagine the first time you heard this album. That.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
So important to you.
Danny
Teleports.
Nelson
You can be right there.
Danny
Like, I knew where I was when.
Nelson
I first heard this. Or you have these strong memories of when you were blasting that song or who you were with. You know, it's. It's something about music. I think it goes way back past Simonides that as humans generally, we are. You know, our brains are storytelling machines through stories and music and poetry and beats and rhythm. That's how we remember things. That's how we were able to survive and pass on ideas, which is ultimately how we were able to survive until modern day. Now we don't need to do that. But that's how we had to.
Danny
Isn't smell also, like super hardcore linked with memory?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Danny
I think that was like the most. The sense that is the most commonly associated with memory.
Nelson
Right. Yeah. I was. Who's I just talking to about this? I was training somebody and they were.
Danny
Asking me, oh, well, the memory champion. Can't remember something. Look at this.
Nelson
I forget. I do forget. You could ask my wife. She's the, the one that can attest to that the most. But. But no, we were talking about how she was like, oh, I've heard that memory is really strong for a smell is really strongly related to memory. I was like, yeah, yeah, it is. And she was saying, oh, if I can just turn my images that I'm memorizing into smells, then I'll remember it faster or better. And I was like, in theory, yes. And smell memory is so potent. I mean, if you get a whiff of something from say, your kindergarten class, there used to be these, like, letter boards from when I went to kindergarten, I guess. And I remember years ago, I. I came across the same thing and I was like, wow, what a nostalgic thing. And I sniffed it and I was like, you know, in the Matrix. Teleported, Teleported. I was there. Right. And I'm sure many people have had a similar experience. Yeah. But if I were to ask you to just imagine, I don't know, a certain smell, like, I mean, there's certain polarizing smells like smoke. You could probably imagine. Right. The smell of smoke. But in terms of your imagination right now, if you're thinking about it, it's kind of elusive. Like you can describe it. Yeah, it's like a bitter, smoky smell. But are you really experiencing it in your mind when you, when you imagine a smell? Probably not. Versus if I said a picture, an elephant, you can almost see the elephant. Right, right. So the smell thing, I think is super powerful when you can get it to hit, like, you get the experience. But like, to actually conjure it up in your memory is difficult because you have to have the right words to describe it. And it's, it's not like a, like a true visceral experience when you imagine it in your, your, your visual space, you know?
Danny
Yeah. You can't just like, pull that up at will, like that smell, you know?
Nelson
Like, I remember, I remember thinking about this years ago when I was just starting memory stuff and I had gone to wash my hands. I had this soap that Smelled really like marzipan. Y and I loved marzipan. And I went back to my table and I was like, I wonder if I could like try to generate that smell in my mind. And it had gone. You know, it's like I couldn't. I could say it was marzipan smelling, but that was it. You know, it's just like. But if I had smelled it again, it's like, oh, yeah, there it is. You know, I don't know what it is about smell that makes it so elusive in that way, but ever open.
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Danny
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Danny
So, so what type of stuff do you actually have to memorize in the. In these competitions that you do?
Nelson
Yeah, we. It depends on the competition. So there's the U.S. championship and then there's like international world championships and some of them have different standards and events, but the US One is a day long and the morning is four different events. Memorizing numbers. You get five minutes to memorize as many digits as you can in a row. Then you have a deck of cards you got to memorize as fast as Possible, like a full deck of playing cards, names, and faces. So you get a whole packet of headshots of random people with first and last names. Get 15 minutes to memorize that, and then you have poetry. So it'll give you a randomly. A random unpublished poem, 50 lines, and you gotta memorize it for 15 minutes and then recall it. And then the afternoon, the top seven or eight, it changes from year to year. Go to, like, a playoff round on stage, like elimination rounds, and they have to memorize lists of words. There's a tea party event where you have to memorize stuff about people who come on stage and say their name, where they're from, their hobbies, their car, they drive, their pet name, and.
Danny
Wow.
Nelson
And then the finale is two decks of cards in five minutes, and it's usually three remaining competitors. And they have to say the next card one by one until.
Danny
So you have to take the deck of cards and you have to flip through it, and then you have to put it down and then recite the order of every single card.
Nelson
Yeah, the 104 cards. Yeah.
Danny
Two decks. How do you do that?
Nelson
A lot of practice, but it's using a memory palace to store different images that represent the cards. That's. That's the very basic idea.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
There are a few different techniques on how to encode the cards into pictures, because it's not like I'm looking at an ace of hearts and thinking of an ace of hearts in my living room. I have a. A person, an action, and an object associated with each card. And that's one of the strategies, is to make these cards each have those three components. And then every triplets of cards I can group as a person doing a thing with an object, and it becomes like a little mini scene representing three cards. And I place that in the location of a memory palace. And then the next location, I put three more cards and so on. Yeah. So there's a lot going on there. You got to know your memory palaces really well. You also got to know your images really well for the cards. Like, I look at the ace of hearts. That's my friend Arno. Queen of hearts is my mother. King of hearts is my dad. I'm the ace of diamonds. Like, I know those. So when I see the card, it's like I'm seeing the person, you know, it's so well trained at this point.
Danny
That's wild.
Nelson
And same with numbers. It's pretty similar. Yeah.
Danny
And so do you already have your physical location memory palace in your head before you even, like, Start doing this.
Nelson
Right? Yeah. So I have my set of memory palaces that I use for training cards. So the day of or in the finals, let's say I'm in my mind thinking like, okay, I'm going to use this memory palace. It feels fresh. I haven't used it in a while. It's like clean and ready to be used.
Danny
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you next. I'm like, I was going to say, can you like do a reset of a memory palace?
Nelson
So we will tape over them.
Danny
Tape over them.
Nelson
To practice, you have to kind of give them some breathing room. If you do them back to back, the same memory palace, you'll have echoes from previous storings or memories. So you want to avoid that. So that's why I. The memory palace I'll probably decide to use in a finals, it will be one that I haven't used in maybe a few days. So it's kind of pristine. Like just the cleaning lady came in, you know, and brushed it up or whatever.
Danny
Spring cleaning.
Nelson
Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, and even still, like in competition, on stage, with the competition, the championship on the line, like, you know, memory is hugely affected by stress and nerves. And in that situation, like, I may have it down, but the moment I'm supposed to say the next card, there's been times where I just freeze up, you know, and.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
So, yeah.
Danny
One thing I did recently which wasn't on purpose, this was before I knew anything about any of this memory stuff, was I was. I was reading a book and I decided to put a specific Spotify playlist in my headphones while I was reading this book. And I probably read the book. It was probably like a 600 page book. I probably read it in like two weeks.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
And every time I would sit down to read it for like 30 minutes to an hour, I would just repeat this soundtrack in my ears. And for some reason I was able to recall that book better than any other book I've ever read. And that was the only time I've ever done that. It was cool because it was like a sound. It was like a badass. It was a Hans Zimmer soundtrack in my ears while I was listening. So it's like I was watching a movie while I was reading the book.
Nelson
That's cool. Do you remember which. Which soundtrack it was or what. What was.
Danny
It was the Inception soundtrack.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
And it was Annie Jacobson's nuclear war book.
Nelson
Oh, goodness. Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
That sounds like a really good.
Danny
Yeah, good combo.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Cool.
Nelson
And then you just decided to do that for it. Was there a specific reason she was.
Danny
Coming on the show to talk about that book? So I was. I was reading it before she came in and I was read. The only time I would read it was. Would be before bed. I would just sit in bed for 30, 45 minutes before. Before I fall asleep and just put the headphones in and just read. I had the PDF of my laptop and I would just read, you know, 15, 20 pages with that music in the background.
Nelson
And was a music idea like. Like a. More of a focus thing. Like if I put this track on or this. This album.
Danny
Yeah. It would tune out other noises. It would tune out my wife's scrolling TikTok next to me and.
Nelson
Cool.
Danny
And it might. I figured it might just lock me in more.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
To the story, you know.
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Danny
It totally made me feel like I was watching a movie, but reading text.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And I think it worked.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
I can recall a lot of that book.
Nelson
Yeah. You know, people will listen to certain kind of music to study. Right. Lo fi beats or whatever.
Danny
Yeah. I'm wondering though, like, if it's similar way to the. To the, like, locations of memory palaces. What if you. For each book you read, you listen to a different soundtrack for each book. I wonder if that would be a similar kind of association you could use. Yeah.
Nelson
No. And we talked about it before we started that location. Changing the location of where you read books can also do a similar enhancing of your memory of what you read when. Where you were when you read the thing.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
I've never tried it with music other than just to like, focus and kind of, like you said, drown out noise. And I don't know if that. I don't think that would work with all music. Right. If it's lyric heavy, you're going to be distracted.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
If you can. Even if you can zone or tune out the.
Danny
It's got to be words instrumental. It can't be like. It can't be like, you know, because.
Nelson
Your brain is naturally going to try to listen. And that's this multitasking thing that would be difficult to do, especially if you're reading.
Danny
Yes.
Nelson
At the same time, do you notice.
Danny
Any difference when it comes to retaining information when you compare listening to books versus actually reading books?
Nelson
Totally. I'm all about, like analog.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Not that I always do that because I also appreciate my time and I have so much to do that I'll listen often to just audiobooks and at 2x, you know, @ certain times, which isn't great. But I'm really good at deciding what I want to put to absorb as an audiobook at a faster speed. You know, it's usually stuff that's like a self help book will be very repetitive. You know, if there's an interesting part that I really want to kind of like absorb better or focus in on, I'll slow it down, maybe even repeat it a few times. But if there's other books that I really want to savor, you know, I slow down and I'll often try to do it in like analog form.
Danny
Hold the book, read the actual book.
Nelson
Read it in different places. That's hard to know like what necessarily a book, which book would deserve that unless it's kind of pre planned. Like for example, I love Lord of the Rings and I try to reread that every year and I will.
Danny
Really? Yeah, yeah.
Nelson
I will never listen to it on an audiobook. I would need the book that smells and like has been worn, you know, and I need to read some of it sitting by the fire when it's kind of cold and near the end of the year, Christmas time, you know, that's important to me. But then there's books that I just like need to get through or want to get through. And it's like I have the general idea of what it's trying to say, that I don't need to listen to every single thing with intense focus that I remember it, you know, verbatim.
Danny
Is that the primary reason why people would claim that you can retain stuff better when you actually read the physical book versus listening to it because of the other associations like the touch, the feel, the smell, the location of it.
Nelson
Yeah. Going back to what I said at the start that we remember pictures of things like visuals, like what is a visual? A visual is all of your senses interacting. It's not. I know the word is visual, so it sounds like it's just your eyes or your mind's eye, but it's all of that. So if you can incorporate that into a sitting of reading, like you can touch the book. You're holding some physical object in a space, right. That you know, and you're, you know, you got the pages there and you can see the words. I think that's more of a memorable experience than something zipping through your ear. Although, you know, you remembered some of it where you were driving, right? Yeah, but I think there's more going on when you have.
Danny
But I've driven that same route listening to hundreds of different books and podcasts. So it's kind of like.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Danny
Not a very good memory palace. Now it's my daily drive, basically.
Nelson
You know, have you tried making any other memory palaces besides the one in the, the example in Moonwalk?
Danny
I did the example in the book in. In my mom's house, but I haven't tried making any others yet. And I, you know what?
Nelson
I.
Danny
Now that I think about, I forgot the one that I created during the book. But like, my point was that feels like a task in itself to do that, to sit down and actually think through a memory palace and associate something with it. But now I'm like, I really want to buy. Like, I can't remember the last time I read a paper book.
Nelson
Oh, yeah.
Danny
You know, it's either always audio or it's the, the digital PDF version.
Nelson
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
So, like, it's got me really motivated to like, actually buy a physical book and pick a unique spot and like. And I also like the way you broke it, broke it down in your video on your YouTube channel. Like, you're like, this is 500 or 400 pages. It will take me eight 30 minute chunks to finish this. I could do it here, here, and here.
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Like, that was great.
Nelson
Yeah. I don't do that all the time, but there's books that I just, like, want to get through. I. And I'm having a hard time, you know, getting my reading done for whatever was going on in my life. Like, breaking it down into these chunks like, that I can visualize is super helpful. Right, right.
Danny
Which is. It's helpful for me too, because, like, one of the biggest parts of me preparing for podcasts is reading, like, reading books or listening to podcasts or whatever. And it's really hard for me to structure my life around reading a book.
Steve
Yeah.
Danny
Especially when it's text. Like, I can do it. I'm driving or I'm at the gym or I'm walking with my kids or whatever. But, like, you know, that's a really special and like an important skill and tool I feel like, to have, especially when it, like it goes hand in hand with doing podcasts with people that write these books, you know?
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's intentional. Like when you, you know, when you can do stuff while you're on the go doing something else. Yeah, that's great. You know, you're killing two birds with one stone, but if you can take the time to sit down with a book, like you're saying something.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
With that experience. And of course it's going to be more memorable when you have that intention going in.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And that's really. You hit it on the head where, you know, doing a memory palace exercise is a lot of work to do. But that's the whole point, I think. It's like if I strip down what memory techniques are, it's really just paying a lot of attention to something like through these elaborate methods, you know, like sitting down thinking of this place to store these images and coming up with images for the thing.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
You're really spending a lot of time devoted to that. Those units of. Of information, you know.
Danny
Yes.
Nelson
And the same goes for the book, right? Like if you sit down, hold it, read it, interact with it, like take notes, underline stuff like on the paper, like hear the sound of you scratching, you know, underline there, like that means something.
Danny
Yeah, totally.
Nelson
Yeah.
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Danny
What country takes the most wins when it comes to these international memory championships?
Nelson
Good question. It fluctuates. During my era, my heyday was the Germans.
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Really?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, man.
Danny
No, the Germans.
Steve
Yeah.
Danny
Yeah, they were. I wouldn't have expected that.
Nelson
Yeah. And then it switched to the Swedes for a second and now. And there was the Mongolians, that. They have, like, crazy schools in Mongolia where they just teach this stuff to little kids.
Danny
Teach memory stuff.
Nelson
Memory. They have memory schools? Yeah. Whoa. They're wild. The records. I don't even know what the records are these days. And then Chinese, they. They've done crazy stuff recently too. Yeah.
Danny
Well, the Chinese are really good at math. Right. Because of their. Their language is somehow tied into math, I think.
Nelson
Yeah. Well, they have shorter syllable, syllable syllabic words for the digits 0 through 9. So, you know, when you think of digit span tests where, like, we can hold numbers in our head, we have numbers like seven, two. Two syllables. Right. Zero, Right. Is two syllables. Whereas they're all just one. So if you think about how we can recite a number in our head, they can on average recite longer number or hold longer numbers in their memory with no techniques, just by reciting in their mind, really, the number over and over again. Because they can say more in the span of a passing thought, you know?
Danny
Yeah, totally. Well, I feel like definitely, I feel like I absolutely remember the stuff I'm most interested in the most. Right. Like. Like in school, when you're forced to learn stuff that you're not really interested in, you're just sort of like going through the process of passing this grade, passing this class. I don't feel like most kids are into any of that stuff. Like, if there's something I'm reading that I'm really into, I will absolutely recall it way better. Right. And that, like, pulls you through the book in itself when you're really interested in that topic.
Nelson
Ye. So that's the power of attention. You know, we. We direct our attention to something. The more intensely we do that, the more we're focused on it and the more you remember.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And. And part. That's kind of the heart of. Of the encoding process of the memory techniques is how do I turn that complicated dry thing into something that, like, lights up my brain in an exciting way, you know, so all those cards, symbols, ace of hearts, two of clubs. It's just a number and a little fancy picture. Right, Right. But what if I look at two of clubs and it's. It's. Jesus. Right. And. And. And four of clubs is Harry Potter like. Yeah, that's a lot more interesting. So.
Danny
Yeah, totally.
Nelson
Pay attention. Better. Yeah.
Danny
It's crazy that, like, this stuff isn't taught, like Mainstream at all. It's like super obscure knowledge.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And that's. They teach it in Mongolia.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
I don't know what. Who decided to. To create schools for.
Danny
Oh, look, Mongolia, China, Vietnam frequently rank among the top countries in memory skills.
Nelson
Vietnam's come up. Yeah, that's true.
Danny
Mongo. The top position. Wow. I wonder why. Why do they value memory more than the other? To teach that to kids, you know?
Nelson
Yeah, No, I love that. And Vietnam has some schools now, too. Algeria. I didn't know that. India. Yeah. Makes sense. The US Had a stretch. I. I didn't do great at the world championships. I think my best was like seventh place. But there was a guy after me, Alex Mullen, who won the world championships twice, I believe, or three times. Two.
Danny
Really? Yeah, he was us.
Nelson
Yeah. US Guy.
Danny
Oh, wow.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Mongolians have a strong memory due to a combination of cultural traditions for formal training and modern education. Focus on mental athletics. Mental athletics.
Nelson
Wow.
Danny
Historically, nomadic life required memorization, memorizing extensive information without the written word. While today, national curricula and specialized academics actively train memory techniques, contributing to their success in memory competitions. That's really, really interesting.
Nelson
Nomadic life. Like, I have a few friends through the memory world from Mongolia, and their nomadic tradition is. Is very strong. I don't want to speak too much because I don't know, but I can see that their traditions there are important to them. So I would imagine that.
Danny
Yeah. What's weird, that Socrates refused to write anything down.
Nelson
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Danny
You know.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
It's so. It's kind of ironic because, you know, thanks to all the people around him that were writing down, we know about them.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Exactly. Right. What's interesting about, you know, these old tales of. Of. Of memories and memory palace, like the. The Simonides stories in the ancient Greek methods. I mean, I. When I first started this, that's all I had heard that these were ancient Greek techniques developed by the ancient Greeks, but that's not necessarily true. I mean, it's.
Danny
Oh, I know. Different way before.
Nelson
Yeah. And other civilizations have versions of this. I mean, they're in Africa, there were tribes that would use these. I think they're called lacusas, which are these kind of memory boards, these pieces of wood that they would stick shells or little rocks, and that would be their tangible memory palace. And they could store or imagine parts of their oral tradition or. Yeah, their traditions on these. These boards and these boards. These physical boards with holes, you know, like visually attached to those. Those markers. All those stories and things that we Pass down. There's even stories that like the, The.
Steve
The.
Nelson
The Nazca lines were potentially memory palaces to store information. Yeah. I don't know where I heard that one.
Danny
But the Nazca lines were memory palaces.
Nelson
Yeah. I don't know.
Danny
That's bizarre.
Nelson
Yeah. There's a lady in Australia, Lynn Kelly, she wrote a book called the Memory Code, and it talks about all these past civilizations and how they use versions of memory palaces or memory techniques to pass on traditions. And it's so pervasive. I mean, it's everywhere.
Danny
There was a. There was a quote my friend was telling me from the Orphic texts where they said, like, I am a child of the sea in the sky, bring me to the water of memory or something like that. When Steve find out when the Orphic cults were. Or the Orphic.
Nelson
I'm not familiar.
Danny
When were the Orphics walking around?
Nelson
Sounds like something from Lord of the Rings.
Danny
Yeah. They wrote it on gold sheets when they buried their dead. Okay. Orphicism was ancient Greek mystery religion that flourished around six to fifth. Okay.
Nelson
Interesting.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nelson
I never heard of that.
Danny
Oh, wow. Everybody wrote about that stuff. Yeah, it's. It's. It's so. It's so interesting because, like, those cultures were obviously like, way more intellect. Like, I know it's a different way of thinking, but like, it's like they were way more intellectually advanced.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And tapped into something else that we aren't now. It's like there's this. There's this weird correlation with the. The atrophy of the. I don't know what. How else to call it, but like the psychic mind and like technology.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
You know, and like, it seems like back then it was that deeper, more intellectual, quote, unquote, psychic mind was. Was more a part of their. Was more woven into culture and society, and it led to, you know, the creation of democracy, the scientific method, people like, you know, Aristotle and Socrates and all these people that were just like these incredible philosophers who are writing stuff that we recite today.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
You know what I mean? Like, there's. It doesn't seem. It seems like.
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Danny
The technical or analytical mind that we see happening today with people trying to create tech and trying to optimize their day to be people that are trying to be more product or. Or optimize for, you know, return on investment. That sort of part of the brain has atrophied with that, you know.
Nelson
Yeah. I often think like, you know, here I am a memory champ, and, you know, I Still have to work to memorize the stuff that I'm memorizing. I would love to go back 2000 years and watch one of these people just memorize something. I'm sure it's just so effortless. Right? Just like part of everyday things they got to do. Just like we pick up our phone and send a text. Like to pick up something and memorize it was probably easier because they knew how to do it, but also because their minds were primed for that. They're doing it all day long. Right, right. And that's all there was. There was nowhere else to put it.
Danny
And Greek, I've had people tell, I've had this. There's a couple Greek experts, classical scholars I've talked to, and they say that when you learn ancient Greek, it does something to your mind. Like it warps your mind. Interesting. It sends your mind through, through a portal where like you think differently because there's words that can have, that can mean different things based on context. And there's over 1.2 million unique words in ancient Greek.
Nelson
In ancient Greek. So we're not talking about like, not modern Greek.
Danny
Okay, ancient Greek, 1.2 million. Find out how many unique words are in modern English today, then compare that. So ancient Hebrew was 7,000 unique words.
Nelson
Oh, that's it.
Danny
And the Hebrew stuff was all religious. Yeah, Right. So we have a hundred and seventy thousand unique words in Oxford English dictionary. Over 1 million would include obsolete words, scientific terms and different word forms. 45 to 60,000. Okay. A more manageable figure for active vocabularies. Around 45 to 60,000 words for high school educated adults.
Nelson
Plus in modern tech, like the 1 million words coming from scientific terms, like the Greeks didn't have that yet, you know. Right, right, right, right. That's crazy.
Danny
So like, yeah, man. And then that combined with the fact that they were walking around talking in tune and like talking, speaking in rhythm. It's just like what the would that have been like to walk around there communicating with people? Like, you know, buying and selling and trading and just talking in hymns and songs and. Yeah, dude, it's crazy. It's wild, you know, because there's so much literature, there's so much ancient literature that's out there and most of it's Greek and like from like plays to comedians to philosophers to religious stuff and yeah, dude, it was a, it was another world. And like to imagine like how their brains would have been different, how they would have been wired different and even like what sort of things would their minds have been tapped into minus all the technology we have today.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And, you know, even considering things like their diet, pollution that's in the air and the water, like, what sort of other senses could they have tapped into? Yeah. You know.
Nelson
Yeah. So you've had experts on the show that are not. Probably not fluent, but who are well versed in ancient Greek.
Danny
Yes.
Nelson
Yeah. I didn't know that was something that you could, like, learn in full.
Danny
Yeah, there's a. It's a dying. It's a dying specialty in scholarship. Like, it's a dying, like, people. There's not many people that are getting degrees in these ancient languages anymore.
Nelson
Well, it makes sense. Right. There's got to be an expert that can decipher.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Old and stuff.
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Yeah, yeah. They're called classicists.
Danny
Right. Or like, there's a. There's linguists, there's classicists, and there's like, philologists, and it's all the study of these ancient languages, primarily Greek. Like, there's Latin, there's Hebrew, there's Sumerian. But the Greek was like the behemoth of antiquity. Like, it took up the. Like, the Library of Alexandria was 99 Greek.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
There was very little Hebrew, very little anything else back then.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
So, yeah, the hardest thing, the crazy.
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Danny
Oh, there's so few people that can actually translate it and read it, you know, but there's so many books that, like, are just English versions of it and you don't know how. We don't. We don't know how accurate it is, you know, that's so interesting.
Nelson
Yeah. But.
Danny
Yeah, no, it's wild. What is this, Steve? The number of words in Beowulf.
Unknown Guest 1
Oh, yeah. Babel. Beowulf was intended to be recited orally as a poem from memory.
Danny
Oh, yeah, right.
Unknown Guest 1
And it was like, if you write it down, it's 32, 000 words.
Nelson
That would be a fun memory project.
Danny
That's crazy. To remember Beowulf, to transmit it orally.
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Danny
I mean, there's ancient texts that were transmitted. Transmitted orally for. For hundreds of years, thousands of years.
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Danny
Allegedly. The story of Atlantis was an oral transmission for a thousand years.
Nelson
I didn't know that.
Danny
Which is like. How accurate? How accurate is it?
Nelson
Yeah. Game of telephone.
Danny
Right. I'm talking about a game of telephone. Like, you want to say the Bible is like, crazy with redacting books and adding books over just 2, 000 years. Like, imagine some of the other stories that are out there that have been Orally transmitted forever.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
You know, at least some of them are written down and we have hard copies of them.
Nelson
Right, right, right.
Danny
But, yeah, man, there's. There's people out there who say that memory might not. Might not even be stored in the brain. Have you ever heard this?
Nelson
Goodness. This is, this is. This is what I was hoping to talk about on your show, man. I want to hear where you. Where you've heard this from, but I. I'll tell you my experience. So.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
You know, I learned about this stuff in 2009 and just started improving my memory and. And, you know, I had an experience.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
With my first example, I listened to a. An audiobook and it walked me through an example, just like you did in. In Joshua Foer's book. I was like, wow, this is cool. It works. But over the years, as I've tried to be faster and I've trained the skill down to something that's so automatic for certain things, not every memory task, but like the cards, for example. Like, I would drill that every single day. And sometimes, you know, I'm trying to get down to under 30 seconds to look at a deck of cards in my prime. I'm not there anymore, but. And I'll. I will never forget this. I. My. The one time I've kept flirting with 30 below 30 seconds. I could get 30 seconds 0.84, 31 seconds, 30.12, but never break the 30 second barrier. And one time I did this was Christmas 2012, and I got 29.74, I believe, as my second, my time. And I was like, oh, man, I broke it. I did it. And it was such a weird experience because I remember memorizing the deck, going like the experience of actually going through the deck, memorizing. I was like, there was a part of my brain that was like, I'm not actively doing anything right now. Like, I don't feel like I'm memorizing anything. I'm just. It was like a flow state, right?
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
For memory. And then when it was done, I just knew it all. And that was like the first time that I ever felt that I wasn't a part of the memory process, that it was like coming from somewhere else, you know, and that was weird. It doesn't happen all the time, but in these flow states.
Steve
Yeah.
Nelson
Especially with memory, like, with flow state, you know, they're shooting basketballs, everything goes in like, it's. You're just kind of like mindless in. In the state. Right. Of doing this, but with almost like.
Danny
Out of body experience.
Nelson
Yeah, but with, yeah, and, but with memory, like it is all about your mind, but being away from your mind as your mind is doing something is a really trippy experience. And so I've, in the last five years we talked about this briefly, but I've been more in touch with my spiritual side and remote viewing and kind of having these psy experiences and psychedelics and stuff. I'm pretty convinced that I don't think all memory is coming from inside of here. That I think it's just a receiver, that there's some substrate out there that has all information about everything, including my personal memories and things that I've memorized and will memorize. And I'm just. We are all able to tap in and out of that to get information, to write information, you know, that's my feeling.
Danny
Yes.
Nelson
And with the remote viewing, that's why I wanted to talk to you about it because it's when I visualize things in my memory space, it's so similar to how I get a download when I'm remote viewing. Like the visual space is almost the same. So I almost feel like remote viewing is like kind of memory but for things that are non local or for the future.
Danny
You know you've actually done remote viewing?
Nelson
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
Really?
Nelson
Yeah. We step into that in a moment. But I was, I was curious to hear why you brought that other question up.
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Danny
Obviously in the, in the book, in the Joshua Foer book, they explain they, they've, they've been doing experiments on rats and I think monkeys where they try to take out pieces of the brain to figure out where memory stored. Right. We've been trying to figure out which part of the brain stores memory.
Nelson
And.
Danny
There are, there's all these experiments where we take out different parts of the brain, but memory never seems to go away. At least long term memory. There's some parts of the brain I think the hippocampus you can take out where short term memory seems to reset every day. But for the most part it seems like from all the experiments that have been done, memory is sporadic throughout the brain. Like it's like a hologram projected on the entire brain. So as long as, as long as like there's enough brain there so you can be a functioning like function and be alive and not paralyzed that you can still remember stuff or at least animals can still remember stuff based on the experiments.
Nelson
Right.
Danny
And I think I was listening to Rupert Sheldrake talk about this where it's basically similar to what you said where he believes that the human brain is not like a hard drive on a computer. It's more like a television set where if you're watching the television, the show you're watching isn't stored on the screen on the television itself. It's being streamed from somewhere.
Nelson
Yeah. Pulled in from the antennas or. Right. WI fi or whatever. Yeah.
Unknown Guest 1
Right.
Danny
Which is a compelling idea for sure. But then, like, the question is, how do you explain. How do you explain somebody who has played piano their whole entire life and. And can play Beethoven or play every Beethoven song or Bach or whatever it is, like, flawlessly, effortlessly? Because they've spent hours and days and years doing this stuff. Right. They've spent the time doing that. And I can't do that. Right. So how do you explain that if it is just a stream.
Nelson
Yeah. Of.
Danny
Of that you're getting this stream into your brain from some higher level of memory or consciousness or whatever it is, how come only that person who spent all that time practicing it can do it?
Nelson
Right. No, like, why can't you say, oh, I'm gonna tap into that. Right. And suddenly play by Beethoven or Mozart?
Danny
Right.
Nelson
I. I don't know. Maybe it's not so much about. Maybe it's more that that trained person has found the right channel through the practice. Maybe that's what practice is, is like honing that connection Right. To the information that's out there. And you don't quite know, like, how to get that channel, but maybe through the practice you get there. I don't know. I don't know how to explain or answer that question. I don't have the answer. Just speculation. But there's. There's definitely something that we don't know or can explain about how the memory performs and the brain performs.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
You know, I. Yeah, it's a mystery.
Danny
The morphic resonance thing's interesting, too, that Sheldrake talks about. Like, and I also believe this might be in the. In the book. In the four book. But, like, I think it was whenever the first person broke the record for the. The four minute mile, or did like, the four minute mile.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
It was the first time in history anyone ever done that. And then, like, it wasn't more than a couple months later that people started breaking it all over the world.
Nelson
Right? Yeah.
Danny
And it's like the same, like when a problem is solved in one part of the world, somebody very soon after solves that problem in a different. Completely different part of the world, completely disconnected from that person.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And he calls that theory morphic Resonance that, like there's this resonance that's connected. Consciousness is somehow connected to these people that they figure something out. And this is also connected to like the simulation theory. So like if we are in a video game, something gets rendered in one part of the video game. It's automatically easier to render here. So it's conserving processing power.
Nelson
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. We find that same phenomena in memory sports too, where with the cards, you know, I couldn't break 30 seconds. Like 30 seconds was a barrier for. It was like the one minute mile for a long time and.
Danny
Oh, really?
Nelson
Some of the Germans broke that pretty convincingly. And then just like the dominoes felt like Everybody was breaking 30 seconds. And now, I don't know, now maybe like five, six years ago, it was 20 seconds.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Since broken that. And now it's like the 15 to 10 seconds mark is like the new one minute mile.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Four minute mile. Sorry.
Danny
Yeah, it's bizarre, dude. It really is. When you start trying to reconcile things like the simulation and this morphic resonance stuff and the brain being an antenna to the idea of. Of memory. And like, how is a store. Because we know, I mean, just based on those experiments, like they. I mean, I don't think, Steve, maybe you can find this, but I don't think there's been any sort of like conclusive science that points to exactly where short term or long term memory is stored in the brain. Do you know of anything?
Nelson
I don't know, I. Yes and no. I mean, I think there's certain things that you can pinpoint are being generated here or accessed here. But then I think there's other things where it's like not so clear why or where this is being stored per se. You know, you look at scans of memory athletes using memory techniques. Yeah. In like an FMRI machine and.
Steve
Yeah.
Nelson
Their whole brain is lighting up. You know, it's not just those components that we attribute to memory, which is interesting, you know.
Danny
Yeah. It's really crazy too, how there's people that have like severe autism or had. There was one guy in the book that had like this crazy seizure when he was like 4 years old. And it somehow broke his brain into being like a genius where he could like recall crazy stuff. He could do incredible math experiments in his mind. He was taking equations. He was like somehow like visualizing PI in his mind and he could see it all. And like he could recite like the first whatever 6,000 digits of PI in his mind. Because of this in the book. Yeah.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
Towards the End. Yeah.
Nelson
Was it.
Danny
There was a documentary made about this guy.
Nelson
Yes, I know a lot of Daniel something. Yeah. Daniel Tammit.
Danny
Yeah, that's.
Unknown Guest 1
It took me a minute to find a good visual representation. But this I think does good justice.
Danny
Right, but like, what, like, when was the study done? And like, did they find out exactly where memory is stored? Like, I'd be curious if there's like a conclusive summary on this stuff that like, scientists agree on.
Nelson
Interesting story. Well, they talk about in the book with Daniel Tammit how he was actually a memory athlete. Did you get that part? Yeah, there's a little bit of scandal there that. Not to say that he wasn't on the spectrum and had some abilities with his memory, but he was in part, maybe more than we think, using memory techniques for.
Danny
Oh, really?
Nelson
Stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
Okay. So the AI says no, there is no single definitive conclusion on where memory is stored in the brain. Scientific understanding has moved away from the idea of memory being located in the space in one specific spot. Instead, memory is a dynamic process involving multiple brain regions and the physical altercation alterations of countless connections between neurons.
Nelson
Wow.
Danny
Memory is not fixed. I mean, it makes sense, man.
Nelson
Yeah.
Unknown Guest 1
So. So then wouldn't that make this. This picture.
Danny
Yes, that would make that picture, Steve.
Nelson
I mean, I think it's saying that some of these parts of the brain are involved. High. Highly involved in these processes, but that's not the, the, the end of the picture, you know?
Danny
Well, there was one guy who was like the most studied man in brain science or something who had. He had a seizure. It was a different guy who had a seizure when. Had a. What is it called when they take out a part of your brain because you have seizures?
Nelson
Yeah, well, they, Yeah, I don't know.
Danny
The name procedure where they take out part of your brain because you're having seizures. And that basically broke his short term.
Nelson
Memory and he couldn't remember longer than like a few seconds. Right? Short term memory.
Danny
Yes. Short term memory. But he had like all of his memory before that point. He could remember everything. He wake, wake, wake up. Every day it was like groundhog. Every day was the same day over and over again. Yeah, you know?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. Well, you have people who are well advanced with Alzheimer's and you know, there's certain things that will activate their. Their memory, like music, for example.
Danny
Oh, really?
Nelson
Yeah. And they suddenly can be lucid in their memories for a few minutes while they experience this nostalgic music, you know?
Danny
Temporal lobotomy.
Nelson
Lobotomy, yeah.
Danny
Tommy Lec. Tommy Lebe. In 53, he received a bilateral medial temporal lobotomy to surgically reset a part of his brain. That's crazy. Oh, because it was. He had epilepsy. That's why they did it. Good God, dude. Could you, could you imagine getting brain surgery in the 50s?
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't able to store or form new memories.
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Now back to the show.
Nelson
This reminds me some. There's been a few times when I've gone under for surgeries and they supposedly there's this drug and they've given it to me before. They give me the stuff that knocks me out called Verset, which has a similar effect where it when once you're under that you can't form new memories. So I'll always tell my surgeon whatever, like, give me when you. After you give that to me, like, tell me like 10 words like as I'm going down, you know, because I'm.
Danny
Gonna try to break it.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can always remember them. And really how the did you do that? Like, I was like, wow, I'm just using memory technique.
Danny
But did you make a palace? Is that how you did it?
Nelson
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
Oh, my God. That's amazing. Amazing, dude.
Nelson
So I'm, like, counting down. 10, nine, eight. But I'm in my mind, like, just quickly plopping those words in a memory palace, you know?
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And they were there, and they're just like. I don't know how you did that, because you're not supposed to remember that.
Danny
Yeah. Anesthesia is a weird thing.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Anesthesia is so, so strange because, like, you don't have dreams when you're on anesthesia. Right. I think it's like you're completely shut down.
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah.
Danny
And then you wake up and, like, you have virtually zero memory of any of that because your brain shut off.
Nelson
But do we actually know that you're not experiencing it or you just don't remember?
Danny
That's a good question, too. That's a good question.
Nelson
Yeah. That's terrifying. That's a terrifying thought.
Danny
But, yeah, like, what if. What if you were fully conscious.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
During the surgery.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And they somehow had a drug that wiped your memory?
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
You would never know.
Nelson
Like a severance situation. Except. Yes.
Danny
Just like severance.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That. That person is just experiencing all that pain.
Danny
Is it possible to have dreams during anesthesia? What does it say? Yes. Anesthesia alters brain activity but does not completely suppress consciousness.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
The brain may generate dreamlike experiences similar to those experience during REM sleep. O.
Nelson
Okay. Yeah.
Danny
Dude. Could you imagine?
Nelson
Yeah. Wild.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Let me. I'll tell you about the remote viewing thing, because the reason I got into remote viewing, this was 2021. There was a random post on one of the World Memory Championship Facebook pages, and it said something cryptic like, if you're interested in making a little bit of cash on the side using your memory, send us a message. I was like, okay, I'll check it out. And, yeah, they were. They didn't say anything until I was on the phone with somebody, and they were like, have you ever heard of remote viewing? And I was like, I honestly had never. I. I didn't. I was like, is that some kind of streaming service or reviewing something, I don't know, away from your tv? I was so dumb. It's like, no. Have you heard of Project Stargate? And I was like, oh, yeah, maybe some psychic program. And then I.
Danny
Where did you see the ad for this?
Nelson
Well, it was posted a post on one of our memory Facebook pages.
Danny
Okay, gotcha.
Nelson
Yeah. So they were looking for memory athletes.
Danny
Got it.
Nelson
And that's what it turned out being is. It was a team, a remote viewing team they were putting together with memory athletes and non memory athletes. But they were interested in using memory athletes because of their visually. Their trained visual abilities. There was a theory that they'd be better perhaps at remote viewing because of that trained ability.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
And they wanted to experiment with me and a couple other people, and they were going to pay us to train for a month with a remote viewing coach and to be psychics or whatever. And it was for a trading firm. So they were eventually going to a trading firm. Yeah. So they were going to have us do associative remote viewing on tasks every day that had to do with the fluctuation of the market.
Danny
Oh, my.
Nelson
Yeah. And so we were potentially going to get a portion of the winning, the earnings and stuff like that. But the project fell through at some point. But I did get my month training. I did get paid. So it wasn't like a scam. They actually paid me, but I was so skeptical. Like, I didn't. I, in my worldview that at that time did none of that had. There was no room for that. I grew up studying physics very classically. That was what I was gonna. I was gonna be a physicist. And so this was not explained in that world, you know, remote viewing. So I was just kind of like rolling my eyes, but I was like, you know what, it's maybe a cool story to tell. I'll see what these people have to say as they coach me how to psychically see things that are non remote, not non local. And. Yeah, within maybe the first week, I had some experiences that like, I couldn't explain, you know, with getting the information right out of nowhere, seemingly. And so slowly it kind of changed my mind about what is possible with the mind, you know.
Danny
So were some of the people that were a part recruiting you guys, were they like former Project Stargate people?
Nelson
No. So the. No, the. The guy who trained me was trained by a guy named Ed Dames, Major Ed Dames, who is from one of the original CIA programs, I believe. Yeah, not the original original, but one of those. He's. He himself is a controversial character, but either way, the technique is roughly the same. Everybody has a little bit of a different take on how to do it, but it's ultimately the same. You're generating information from seemingly out of nowhere or tapping into something with your intuition, you know, in this visual space. And. Yeah, I'll never forget the first time I had like a hit.
Danny
Yeah, where. How did that go? Like, did they, did they invite you out somewhere? Did you have to go meet up with people and like, how did that work?
Nelson
It was all virtual. I actually never met the people higher up at this firm. It was kind of weird and hush hush. But I would meet with my coach every day for like a month. And you know, step by step, he taught me the formal process of how to remote view. And he would have a picture that he had randomly selected. He'd give me a task number. I'd have to, from that task number, try to intuit what the picture was like through descriptive words, sketches. And yeah, some were not even close, but then some would be so eerily close.
Danny
Like what kind of stuff would they tell you to look for?
Nelson
Well, at first, for training, it was just random pictures. Right. So it could be a landscape of the Highlands in Scotland. It could be a picture of a dog. You know, it could have been, you know, mountain in the Swiss Alps, anything. Okay, I don't, I didn't know. I had no idea what he was choosing. It was totally random. And he actually had software that would randomize some image selection. So it wasn't like he was even preparing them.
Danny
So there's no way he would be able to tell if you were actually remote viewing successfully or not?
Nelson
Well, yeah, we would go over my results after. Okay, but I'm saying he. There was no. Because I was trying to go through all the explanations. Like how was I able to get some of these so correct? Like is he subliminally. Subliminally giving me the information like, and it's all a trick? Or am I actually coming up with this information somehow? But the, the main one that like really changed my mind was I drew and described like a whale breaching the ocean. And it was after a couple weeks. So we had developed. He had taught me the different stages of getting really detailed information from these sessions. And so I had all these components that just like looked exactly like the picture of all the things that could have been. It was exactly the whale breaching the exact same way with the same colors and components of the photo. Like it was all described there. It was just like mind blowing to me that, that I generated that.
Danny
So I'm a little confused.
Nelson
Tell me.
Danny
So, okay, he has the photo and you can't see it.
Nelson
Correct. And it was by zoom. So I. He's on another.
Danny
So he has a random generator on his side that creates a photo and then you don't get to see the photo. What does he tell you?
Nelson
I get a task number, which is.
Danny
Just a task number.
Nelson
It's just a random eight or six to eight digit number.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
There's nothing in the number. It's just a random.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
And I, I used to ask questions about that. I was like, why do you need the number? What's the number about? Can't you just let me do it? Right? And they're like, well, no, the process is, you know, you get this thing that you can kind of. I don't know how this all works. I don't think anybody does. But I think there's something. If I had to kind of speculate when the tasker, him who's deciding what the photo is and giving me the task number that he's assigned to the photo, that intention links the two somehow.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
So when I get the number, even though it's not any, no information regarding the photo, maybe that through line to the signal that like connects all information in the universe is what I can tap into through that number. I don't know.
Danny
So that number on his side is associated with the image.
Steve
Right.
Nelson
And he's decided that.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
And so he'll say like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I write that down and then I go, I do the thing.
Danny
So he gives you the number, you write the number down.
Nelson
Yep.
Danny
And then what do you do?
Nelson
The first step is you come up with a. What's called an ideogram, which is really just as soon as you write the number down, you let your hand just draw a scribble. Almost like whatever your hand does, your hand will do something if you let it. Right. And it might be like this, like a little zigzag. It might be a loop, whatever. And then from that you, you kind of. It sounds so out there, but you just kind of like feel what you feel. I don't know how else to describe it. And you'll get like a general gestalt or like a feeling. And you kind of write those down like, okay, Fluffy. And then like a general category. Okay. Landscape. Okay. You start with that. Then you go into descriptors. So the way that he taught me is he would say you first want to go through all the colors you sense the, the taste, the, the. The smells, the dimensions, the structures, anything that comes to mind. Mind. Right. And you, you really want to try to quiet the logical mind. So ever anytime you're trying to like say, oh, this is what it is. It's. It's a bird. It's a, that's what you want to avoid. You're just going through your, trying to describe things through your senses, like what is just coming to you. Oh, I feel like a pink orange, a sharp, salty smell.
Danny
Whatever pops into your mind.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. Without. And it's hard to do without your mind starting to be like, oh, it's pink and orangey. Well, maybe it's like a parasol on the beach. Okay, it's a parasol. No, you can never name things. It's always about just kind of describing. And then after you've done all the descriptions and sketches even then you can start to maybe put it together and be like, okay, this all kind of comes together and is describing some kind of outdoor scene with some kind of structure that is, you know, tall, jutting into the sky, and there's some kind of life form around. You know, you describe it in those ways, which I always thought at the beginning was kind of like a cop out, because it's like, yeah, of course, you guys are saying you're psychics, but you can't really tell me what you're seeing. You're just describing. And maybe through general words, it feels like you're coming up with the right information because you can. You know, it's. You can convince yourself that it's correct, but there's a lot of scenarios where you end up going down this rabbit hole of really specific descriptors. And it's like, it can't be anything else. It's. It's. It can get to really specific things that are really accurate to what you're describing. And I've talked to a few of the original remote viewers, and they can do this on a whole other level where they're writing such detail down that.
Danny
Which ones did you talk to?
Nelson
McMonagle.
Danny
You talked to him?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris and I went to his house a couple years ago, Chris Ramsey, and interviewed him. That guy's insane. Like, impressive. Insane. Crazy stories, too.
Danny
But there's something you still do at that age.
Nelson
Yeah. I don't know if he'll actively do sessions anymore, but he, for a while would. Even past his days where he was working for the government, he would be invited to, like, these Japanese shows and do it live on tv. Or he'd even help find missing children and things like that.
Danny
Wow.
Nelson
Yeah. And he'd be right.
Danny
I always tell these remote viewers, I'm like, why can't you just go figure out and tell us how the pyramids were built? Yeah, like, that's what we all want to know. We want to know who built the goddamn pyramids. Like, go do that. Tell us.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Danny
You know, you can go to Mars a million years ago and tell me what was going on. Just tell me what was happen. Happening in the Giza desert.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
3, 000 years ago. Yeah, I want to know that.
Nelson
That's the frustrating that that was and I guess still is. The frustrating thing about it is, you know, it's. It can provide really interesting results, but at the same time, it's so amorphous and like. Like slippy. Like, it's not like this definitive, like, oh, tell me what. What are you thinking of? Oh, it's bread, you know, like, it's not that simple. There's all sorts of ca. It can't. It's got to be. There's all sorts of requirements for it to work. And at first I saw that was, you know, psychics like, talking shit, you know, But I really think that it's just such a. Like there is an effect there, like some psychic effect, but I don't think it's a strong one. And maybe it has to do with what you said. Like, over thousands of years, our intuitive mind has kind of like, atrophied. Right. And so what we have hanging on is just like a weak force of it still. You know, I wonder if you could.
Danny
Train some, like, uncontacted tribe in the Amazon to do remote viewing. I bet you they'd kick ass at it.
Nelson
And they have, like, no knowledge of.
Danny
No knowledge of any kind. Of any kind of technological society or technology or anything. Yeah, they're just running around naked with a bow and arrow.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Probably remove the. Out of some stuff.
Nelson
Probably. Have you ever tried remote view? You've had remote viewers on the show?
Danny
Yeah, I've had. We've had at least one, maybe two. One or two.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And. And they've never.
Danny
We had one of the original Stargate dudes.
Nelson
Oh, wow.
Danny
On the show. He was shot in the head. See, it's weird. Some. A lot of these things get. Are. Are start with like, trauma.
Nelson
Huh.
Danny
You know, like, this guy was training somewhere in like, one of those countries that border Israel, and he was doing some training exercise, and he got shot in the head by, like, a rogue bullet. And. But he was wearing a helmet.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And it knocked him off his feet, knocked him unconscious. And it didn't penetrate the helmet. It just up his brain. He had a really bad tbi.
Steve
Yeah.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
So he went back to the US to see a psychologist and, you know, get his head checked out. And they're like. The psychologist was like, hey, we want to. We want to bring you into this other program we got going on called Stargate he's like, what? He didn't know anything about any of this crazy. He's like, this sounds like, you know, this sounds like the Twilight Zone. What the hell are we doing?
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And they trained. They trained him on all this remote viewing stuff, and he's like, apparently, you know, he remote viewed all kinds of stuff. He said that he also remote viewed Mars and the moon.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
Just like McMonagle said. But he said he never saw any aliens.
Nelson
Okay. Interesting.
Danny
Very interesting.
Nelson
Yeah. There's this theory, too, with. With remote viewing that. Well, when you. An important part of the training is when you do your session afterwards. You know, my coach, he would show me what I tried to remote view, and I would judge, like, oh, how close was I? Yeah, I got the colors right. Maybe I give it a. A 4 out of 10, you know, of accuracy. Sometimes I'd be like, oh, it's like a seven or eight out of ten. Wow. But the feedback is super important. Remote viewers will constantly tell you that. And some of the thought is that maybe you're just actually seeing into the future when you see the feedback.
Danny
Oh, interesting.
Nelson
Right. So it's. That kind of forms the loop of your future self telling you what you saw at that point.
Danny
Point.
Nelson
You know.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
But then I don't know how somebody can remote view a million years ago on Mars.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
So I think there's still ways to do that. But I wonder if it's weaker that way because you never really get a definite answer like that, yes, that was the right.
Danny
Never verify it.
Nelson
Right, Right. And so maybe that's part of why, you know, they can't just go back and definitively say, like, that guy can say there was nothing on the moon, but maybe somebody else can say, like, oh, I saw something on the moon. Like, who's right? Like, you'll never know.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Could both be talking, but I don't know.
Danny
Yeah, it sounds so. It all sounds so crazy and just so outlandish. But, like, dude, like, the. The wild part is when you learn that all of these people, like, the whole history of all the top physicists and scientists and engineers in, like, the space program were all into this stuff, like the occult and remote viewing and, like, ESP and all this stuff, like Jack Parsons and all these people. You.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Like, were they on to something?
Nelson
I don't know. Joe will say that this is, you know, an old human skill that we just don't need anymore or we don't use anymore because we don't have to survive in that way.
Danny
Why does he think that he has this ability.
Nelson
What is this story? I think he just always kind of had a knack for intuition. He never had, like, an incident where he, like, hit his head or anything, or maybe he did. I don't. I don't know. I don't think there was any notable thing in his life where it, like, suddenly became his thing, but.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
Yeah. He was just in the right place at the right time, and they decided to train him, I think.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
The. The telepathy stuff, like, the telepathy tapes, is. Is insane, dude.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
It is so crazy that it's even real.
Nelson
Yeah. You just had Dalia on your show, right?
Danny
Yeah, yeah.
Nelson
She was at the side games thing about a month and a half ago, and Chris and I were there kind of to help out. We spoke at it.
Danny
Is that episode live yet?
Nelson
It's not.
Danny
Okay. Okay.
Nelson
Sorry, sorry.
Danny
But Dahlia told me she's coming out. It's coming out any day now.
Nelson
Okay, cool.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
No, she. It's funny because after the. The side games where I saw Dahlia do her thing, and it blew my mind, I reached out to her because I was like, I need you to teach me this. Like, can I learn this? And she believes that anybody can learn it. Maybe it's easier in children, but that you can learn it. And so I've done a couple sessions with her, but as I started the sessions, she was telling me that she was going out for podcasts, and I was like, oh, cool. And she said, daniel, oh, no way. And it was the same week that you guys reached out to me. No way.
Danny
Oh, that's crazy.
Nelson
Weird timing, synchronicity. But, yeah, she's. She's insane. I mean, did you have an amazing experience with her?
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She put on, like, a thousand blindfolds, and she was able to see things. She was like. She was wearing full blindfolds all over her face to where there was no possible way she would get any shred of light through there. And I was holding up books. Like, ran. I brought a pile of books, and I was holding them up. She was reading the covers stuff.
Nelson
She wouldn't have known.
Danny
Steve was able to hold up shapes behind her head while she was wearing the blindfold facing the other way, and she was able to tell what the shapes were.
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is wild. When we did the session via Zoom, she's like, okay, put on your blindfold. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. I'm gonna do this session blindfolded as best I can, and Then she's like, I'm gonna put on my blindfold. And I was like, well, wait, don't you need to, like, see me? And I was. She said, no, I can see you. And, like, you know, obviously a big part of it is me holding up papers and trying to figure out what color they are, and she has to verify them, but if she has a blindfold. But it doesn't matter. I recorded the whole thing. She got every single one right that I was trying to see. You know, it's like, confirm whether my guesses were right. And there was even some that I had under the table that she still got right. So I don't know how you, like, even if her blindfold is cheating or she can pee. Yeah. She can't see under my table through a zoom call. Right. She was able to even do it with cards. Playing cards. That's when I was like, well, can you see a card face down on a table? Because if you can, then that would be great in casinos, you know? And she's like, oh, I just need to. I think I could if I trained it. I was like, man, that's crazy. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you should train that.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
That's a instant advantage.
Danny
Yeah. If there was any rules to that kind of stuff, I imagine that would be, like, the number one rule. Like, we're not going to let you manipulate the stock market and like.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Village of the earth based on your psychic abilities.
Nelson
Right, right, right. Yeah.
Danny
You know, if there is some sort of, like. Some sort of muse or like, group of pagan gods that rule over us, I would imagine that they would, like, set some sort of rules around that.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Did. Did she talk about the side games?
Danny
A little bit? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She mainly talked about her daughter. She was talking about her daughter.
Nelson
Her daughter was amazing.
Danny
The crazy stuff that her daughter and her daughter's friends can do, like, like, literally read minds in, like, as easy as I can read a piece of paper, they can read minds. Like, it's insane.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And it's. It's bizarre that not more people are talking about this.
Nelson
Right.
Danny
You know?
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
It's completely 100 verified. They, like, they tested this stuff, like, with scientists and, like, did it with multiple kids. And, like, they do this thing where they also meet up together in this, like, imaginary world and hang out.
Nelson
Yeah, I heard that. The hill or whatever, right?
Steve
Yeah.
Nelson
That's insane.
Danny
What is that, dude?
Nelson
I don't know.
Danny
Like, could you imagine your kid can read your mind? Everything you're thinking at all Times.
Nelson
Yeah, I think. What. What did Dalia tell me? She said sometimes she has to, like, she'll sing songs in her head. Like, if she doesn't want her daughter to, like. Like, think of what she's thinking, she has to, like.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Make noise in her mind.
Danny
Wow. Oh, that's crazy.
Nelson
To, like, mask it or something. That's funny. But, yeah, the moment she went on stage, Dalia herself, her. Her daughter's presentation was incredible, too. But we were trying. They were trying to. The competitors were doing this mindsight stuff where they had to put these colored rings on the colored pegs.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
And nobody was really doing that.
Danny
Well.
Nelson
Honestly, like, the whole competition wasn't really. I wasn't, like, blown away, like, wow, people are psychic. Here they are.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The kids there.
Nelson
There weren't any kids. There were kids, but not stage. Okay, okay, okay. But then she came on, and it was like, you know, Michael Jordan suddenly. And all the other people were just like, kids compared to her. And she just, like, could put them on. Like, she didn't even make a mistake. It looked crazy, but the whole crowd went nuts. And it was like the special moment at the competition, because I think people were waiting for, like, some true psychic feeling event, and that was it. She, like, commanded that moment. It was wild.
Danny
Have you talked to Chris Ramsey about that at all? Does he think it's magic?
Nelson
Maybe. Yeah. Hey, Chris. He. I don't know if I should speak for him, but he. He's a magician, and he's. He's seen it all, you know, like, he can do what she can do, but it's not real.
Danny
Really?
Nelson
Yeah, in the same way that. And he'll tell me this all the time, Nelson, I can do what you can do with your memory, but I don't have to have a good memory. Like, he can fake it, you know, with his memory, with his magic tricks, you know, his magic skills. He can have a pre memorized deck of cards and shuffle it. You think I'm shuffling it. You think he's shuffling it, but he's done a million fake shuffles, right? Sleight of hands. You can force the card here and there, and it looks like he's memorized crazy stuff, but it's all a trick. Same with the blindfolds. And. And he even showed one of the people who was trying to document Dalia doing this certain thing. They gave him the same blindfold, and he could do it. I don't know how he did it, but he showed me books where there's all sorts of blindfolded tricks.
Danny
What does he think? Does he think there's any chance that Dahlia could be faking it? Yes, he does.
Nelson
That's what he thinks.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
Yeah. And he saw her at contact in the desert. He even perhaps thinks that there's a bit of suggestion when he's. She's holding up the.
Danny
The.
Nelson
The board to her daughter to point to and maybe I. I personally think that it's real. I leave a little room always to be wrong, of course, because I. I don't know for sure, you know, But I do value what Chris knows. He's.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Seen every sort of trick under the book and knows.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
But is there a way to test.
Danny
It if she's actually doing a trick or if it's real? Does, according to him?
Nelson
Well, he wanted to do some other tests on her at the side games. Like, because she was using you, she would use her blindfold, and it's a verified blindfold. Like, they are dark. It's these mind vision ones.
Danny
Oh, yeah, we have a bunch of them. They're in the other room.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
You've put it on, probably.
Danny
It's like you can't see.
Nelson
Can't see.
Steve
Right.
Nelson
But he was able to do it with that mask on.
Danny
Did he tell you how?
Nelson
It's a. It's a. It's a bit of yes and no. Like, he's a magician. He's a good friend of mine. But he will still never tell me how certain tricks are done. But I would imagine it has to do with shifting the thing on the bridge of your nose. Or I've even heard of people putting certain, like, grease on your cheeks to, like, create a gap so you can kind of see. If you look at Dalia perform, she does move her head a lot. Yeah, I know. She's also looking through her windows. Right. Which I can imagine. You know, even when I memorize, sometimes I have to, like, I look different places.
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Yeah.
Danny
She was going like this.
Nelson
Yeah. But, you know, if somebody was trying to peek, too, when they probably do something like that. I don't know. Right. But anyway, so he did. He was able to do a demo, and the people that were testing him were like, I think he has mindsight. Chris was like, I definitely don't. I. I just faked that. But they were so convinced of how he did that. They thought that mindset, and he didn't know it. I don't. I don't think he has it. He doesn't think he has it, but he. He would. So he. He's most frustrated Because I think he just wants, from a magician's standpoint, where he knows all the tricks, he wants to be able to test her in ways that would eliminate that idea that she could be using one of those ways.
Danny
Has he reached out to her?
Nelson
No, no, he did at the competition.
Danny
But yeah.
Nelson
Dalia's response was mostly that she could do what he was asking, but needed to train it first, which I get, like, even with me, like, I can memorize really fast, but if you, like, put me underwater and do it, it's like, well, I've never really done it that way. Could I do it? Yes, but I wouldn't like to perform. I'd prefer to train it first. So I get that. But, you know, in his mind, he's like, well, if you can do it it through a blindfold, and can you do it through like an opaque, like, sheet, you know, like of leather? Like, or. Or how.
Danny
Yeah, like for just a big, like a thing right in front of you.
Nelson
Does it have to be right from your eyes? Like, could it be interesting in front of the thing?
Danny
Interesting.
Nelson
And so those things weren't able to be tested.
Danny
Or what about on the other side of a wall or that?
Nelson
Right. Like, what's the thickness of the thing or the distance away and the thickness. Like, I would love for that stuff to be tested meticulously, and I don't think it has. And you'd be surprised even when you say, you know, scientists have tested the shit out of the telepathy stuff, like with the memory thing. I'll use it as an example. There was this memory guy. I won't say his name, but he was a magician mentalist. And he would claim that he could do all these memory things that were way better than anything I could do or any other top mental athlete could do. And I was so annoyed by it because it's like, it devalues what we put in effort to do. And I know he's faking it, right? And he even got in with researchers at MIT and they were studying his brain. And these researchers would come to me and be like, why can't you do that? Like, this guy can do it for real. I know it. I studied the brain. I know it. And I was able to debunk, like, some of his examples that he was using. Like, look, here's him doing this deck of cards in seven seconds. I was like, it's a marked deck. Like, you can even see him, or you can see him fall. Shuffle the deck, deck. Like, he's pre memorized that And I even pulled up like a bunch of other demos that he did the same thing. It's the same order of the cards.
Danny
Like, no way.
Nelson
Like, it goes. There was, he was on an Ellen show years ago. It is the same order. It's this and it's a mnemonic step.
Danny
You can expose this guy. What's his name?
Nelson
I don't need to do that anymore.
Danny
Come on. He's been on Ellen. People are going to figure it out anyway.
Nelson
His name is Jim Carroll.
Danny
Jim Carroll. Okay. Yeah, pull him up. Steve.
Nelson
You know, he's, yeah, he's, it's all right.
Danny
He's getting what he deserves.
Nelson
No, I don't know. I, I don't want to, I don't know why people feel the need to, to do stuff like that, but yeah, that's, I want to try to stay out of it. Although, no, I don't, clearly. Right. Because.
Danny
What about Uri Geller? Have you heard of him?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Danny
I've never seen, I've heard people say. And David Morehouse, one of the remote viewers that was on here, told me he was friends with Yuri Geller. And he told me he's watched him Ben Spoons. He told me. Not only that, he watch walk into a random restaurant, pick up a spoon off somebody's table, pick it up and bend it with his mind.
Nelson
But that's the thing. He's a magician and a mentalist too. I'm not saying that he doesn't exactly.
Danny
That's why it's even more confusing.
Nelson
You can swap out the spoons. Right. Like, and somebody who thinks they see what they know what they saw.
Danny
Good old Jim Carroll.
Nelson
Yeah. Well, the mathematical mind, Mathematical book.
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That's, that's one of the greatest long.
Danny
Term memories I've ever seen.
Nelson
That's the researcher that I'm talking about. Like, it's so crazy. And I showed this guy the, the, the, the Robert evidence of, of him. What I just told you.
Danny
The MIT guy. The evidence.
Nelson
Yeah. And I'd never heard from him. He was so upset that I questioned him. And that always bothered me because I.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
I, I, who was Robert.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Really?
Nelson
Yeah. And that's crazy. I truly respect Robert.
Danny
And how could you be a scientist? Like, that's, that's so terrible. That's so terrible.
Nelson
All I'm trying to say is it's easy to fool people.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And you never know what people's ulterior motives are. You know, you think like someone like Dolly and her daughter. Like, I don't think they're really getting any, like, monetary gain? Well, maybe. I don't know. They're getting a lot of attention.
Danny
A lot of attention.
Nelson
But maybe that's not even wanted. Maybe her daughter would prefer to be a little more out of the limelight. I don't know. It seems like she's maybe not super comfortable being on that pressure. I don't know. Right. Like. But who knows? Maybe.
Danny
Maybe people are very easily tricked. Their people are very gullible.
Nelson
Yeah. Me as well. I'll tell you. I'll tell you another example of. Of me being fooled. There was this guy, BJ Shahi. Wow. My channel on YouTube exploded because of this guy. In a good way. Years ago. Because he. He's a guy from Nepal who. He claimed he could memorize books just by doing this and, like, saying gibberish out loud. He would almost seem like he was in Speaking in tongues. He'd be, like, ripping through pages. These massive books in English. He doesn't speak English. He's Nepalese. And then he would go off into a corner. His associate would tell him a page number, random, and he would go over in the corner. No cameras allowed, but he would write out. Out the. The page verbatim, and it would match. Right. And so I've been to Nepal a bunch of times because I like to climb there. And one time I went there in 20, 21, and he reached out to me. He's like, would you like to interview me for your YouTube channel? And I was. Because I had done a couple, like, debunkings, like, I don't think this is real. But I hadn't really gone into it other than saying, like, oh, look at this memory demonstration. It's. Looks kind of phony. Yeah, this is it. Look, look. Yeah.
Danny
Whoa.
Nelson
And so.
Danny
So he. He's like. He's taking a mental picture of each page.
Nelson
Danny's not doing anything. But that's, I think, what he's trying to. To. To pretend, like.
Danny
Right. So that. So the kid on the right.
Nelson
You're talking about the right.
Danny
And he reached out to you when you went there.
Nelson
Yep.
Danny
And said, you want to interview me?
Nelson
Yep. And I did. I went to his office. That was the first red flag. I shouldn't have gone there there. He should have come to me.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And I gave him a book that had just been published on mountaineering. He would have never. In English. He would have never had it. And he. I told him just to memorize a page. Like, not even the whole book. Like, that's hard. Like, there's hundreds of Words on a page. Right. In a language you don't speak. And so he did it, wrote it out perfectly.
Danny
Wow.
Nelson
And I walked away from that thing thinking, like, man, I was wrong.
Danny
Wrong.
Nelson
Like, this is real. There's something there. I posted the interview and of course, like, the comments, people were like, oh, his assistant passed, was recording and passed him the paper. And it's like they didn't see that, but they're just like guessing what happened.
Danny
But were you were there while he did it, though?
Nelson
Yeah, but it was a whole setup, you know, like to trick the memory guy. Because if the memory guy could vouch for this guy in a full interview, like, like he's set.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
Like, there's no question. And I went into it thinking, like, I am a memory guy. I've seen all the tricks. I can figure it out if this is fake or not. And I left there being like, perplexed. Right. But turns out in the video, there were things that my audience helped catch and I further catched that was definitively showing that it was fake. That what he did was like a whole.
Steve
How.
Nelson
I think the biggest. There were a few. You can. I'll send you the link. But I think the main thing was.
Danny
It'S on your channel. See if you can find it. Steve?
Nelson
Yeah, just look up bj. Yeah. These are some of my reactions. But there's an interview.
Danny
Is this guy like a big shot in Nepal?
Nelson
He was. He's since come crashing down. Yeah. There's a bunch of different memory feats in there. But the main thing was when I gave him a piece of paper, you know, it had. It was like lined school paper, right. With a margin line. And I saw him start to write. I have it on video so you can zoom in and look. And he's touching the line. Like he's like starting at the margin line. His text in ink. Okay. And then the page that he gives me later, there's like a half inch gap consistently down. So it's not the same page he gave me me, you know, so. And the, the thing is that should have like, put off flags in my mind was at one point, just for a split second, he asked me to turn around because. And I know that sounds so stupid because, like, Nelson, why would you turn around real quick? Yeah. But in the moment, he was like, I'm having my divine experience. He was chanting and stuff. He's like, I can't let you see this part. Like, it's, it's. I won't get the information. And so I was like, Okay. I really tried to keep my camera on him. Yeah. This was the moment. That's the moment where he's like telling me he had his assistant. He's like telling me to turn around.
Danny
Oh my God. And what?
Nelson
I stop. I think his assistant slided a piece of paper under the door. I was. Yeah.
Danny
So, so, okay, so there was like a camera in there that somebody in the other room saw and they quickly wrote it down and slid under the door.
Nelson
I think she was recording because he reads it out loud. He read it out loud.
Danny
Okay, okay.
Nelson
And then she transcribed it. Cuz there were some funny translations. Like. Like as if somebody had heard the word.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And written it wrong because they don't speak English. As a. Look at me, I'm like kind of trying to.
Danny
Not fooled, huh?
Steve
Yeah.
Nelson
Yeah. Oh, that's so funny. I haven't watched this in so long.
Danny
And the comments. Figured it out, huh?
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah. So after this interview there's a, like a debunking video which is pretty. Wow.
Danny
Sometimes the comments are spot on, man.
Nelson
Yeah. Thank goodness for that. But yeah, it was great for my channel. I got, you know, like so many subscribers from Nepal. A great audience and yeah, one of my best performing videos.
Danny
There's a magic. A magician.
Nelson
Yeah. And you know what's crazy? After this went live or the second video, I was on a trip somewhere and I started getting messages from people in Nepal saying RIP bj. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah. Like we got him, you know, like his career. But they're like, no, no, he's. He killed himself.
Danny
No.
Nelson
And my heart stopped. I was like, oh no. Is this like one of these situations where like I, I bullied somebody? Like.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Turns out he had posted a photo of him dead and then 15 minutes later somebody had taken a picture of him. He was still alive, but he had faked it. Right. Like as a. I don't know. Yeah. So I was like, oh my God. Like I. And that's why I, I don't love the debunking things anymore. But sometimes it's necessary because like this guy was taking people's money.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
In Nepal who don't know any better. And he's tapping into like the religious aspect of it. That information is just coming to him and that you can learn it if you buy my book or take my course, you know, that's not cool.
Danny
No.
Nelson
So yeah, it was a, A whole thing.
Danny
That's pretty funny.
Nelson
And now I think his, his. He went quiet for a bit, but now I think he's back, and he. His whole new shtick is he raises people from the dead.
Danny
Oh, really?
Nelson
So he's on to the next.
Danny
We got to get him in here. Steve, hit him up. He'll bring his assistant and tell us to turn all the cameras off before he.
Nelson
Turn around. Oh, my God.
Danny
I take a leak real quick.
Nelson
Quick break.
Danny
Be right back. All right, where were we?
Nelson
We're talking about BJ Shahi.
Danny
BJ Shahi.
Nelson
Here's the.
Danny
Oh, that's his dead photo.
Nelson
Yeah. And the moments after.
Danny
Yeah, yeah. The problem is there's people like this in everything.
Nelson
That's right.
Danny
There's fakers in literally every aspect of life.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And every profession.
Nelson
And you don't know what the. Well, you look at that photo, you. You kind of know the motive. Steve was saying a moment ago, look how attention craved. He looks. Right.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
But I would like to go back and just. Just reiterate that I think that Dahlia and her daughter are the real thing.
Danny
Really?
Nelson
Yeah. But, you know, we'll leave a little bit of room for skepticism.
Danny
Well, what does Chris think about the whole telepathy type thing in general? I mean, obviously you're speaking for him, but, like, I'd be curious, like, how do you fake it with kids? You know, like. Like, how do you have all of these kids doing these things? Like.
Nelson
Right. And confirming kind of the same things? And it's not like they've all, like.
Danny
Sat down and it's all on video on their website, isn't it? It. On the telepathy tapes website? Didn't she videotape, like, the whole thing on the, like, all the experiments she did?
Nelson
Those don't. To me, those weren't super convincing, but.
Danny
No.
Nelson
Nah. I don't know. Again, I think some stuff could be faked or just, like, overlooked or maybe not even purposefully faked, but just. There could be some other things going on. I don't know.
Danny
Yeah, there could be.
Nelson
Chris definitely is on the same kind of page as me spiritually and, like, remote viewing wise. Because after I did the whole remote viewing project, that's how kind of how we reconnected again is. He asked me. We were doing a podcast, just a comedy podcast that he had. I was on his show, and remote viewing came up because I was telling him that crazy story that I just got involved in this weird program, and he was like, yeah, you know about remote viewing. I was like, dude, I'll teach you. And so we did a whole series on his Area 52 channel where I taught him remote viewing. He did it for a year. And so he had crazy experiences in himself and for himself. And so he's a believer. We ended up doing the Monroe Institute together and having crazy out of body experiences together. Well, not together. That sounds kind of sexual. But we experienced, had our own experiences separately. So he's definitely on, on the page that like stuff like this can happen and has happened to him. But you know, he has this lens of, he knows how to, how or can assume how fakers could fake. And there are fakers in this community because it's so easy to fake.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And that's kind of, I think it's feeling about Yuri Geller, you asked. You know, I think Yuri probably has some abilities, but just like I think BJ Shah, he had some knowledge of memory techniques, but he probably saw, oh, you know, if I fake this, like, who's gonna know? Like, and then you get kind of carried away and maybe that's what happened with your Geller. I don't know.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, man. I'm 10. I tend to believe that it's, it has to be real.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Just because of, you know, the telepathy tapes convinced me probably more than anything. What is this hoax?
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah. When you were, you brought up the, the question of having all these kids in on it. And that brings me back to the days when I was working at the news station and there was this story that popped up where these parents had created this hoax that they, their, their kid was stuck in a UFO balloon or something like that.
Danny
And the kids played in on it.
Unknown Guest 1
They tried to get the kids to play on it. And immediately. Because this is a news interview. Live, live interview. So this is a live feed into their, into their control room. And the, and the interviewer asks so what happened? And the kid just rats out his parents. He just straight up, he doesn't, he doesn't do what his parents tell him to and he tells them.
Danny
That's hilarious.
Unknown Guest 1
So it requires participation.
Danny
Yeah, well, the thing is like these kids in the, they're like, they're non verbal autistics, right? They're like extremely autistic.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
And there, we know there's a correlation between people that have TBIs and like get these weird abilities, you know, like, these are like that guy, David Morehouse that was in here, the remote viewer guy. Guy.
Nelson
Oh, that's his story.
Danny
Yeah, that, that was David Morehouse's story, how he got shot in the head by that.
Nelson
Oh, you were saying that rogue bullet.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nelson
That's crazy.
Danny
And yeah, I Don't know, there's just too much evidence. There's too much evidence pointing towards it. But like, again, the weird thing is that no one else talks about, you know, it's like only the people on podcasts talk about it. I never heard anyone else say anything about the telepathy tapes.
Nelson
True. But even with all that size stuff, you know, it's very poo pooed and there's this giggle factor to it. But if I, so I, I usually, if somebody, if I'm talking about this with somebody and I say, oh, psychic abilities, you can feel their eyes go back. But if I say something instead, like, have you ever had this feeling where, you know, you think about something and then it like shows up? Or you think about somebody and they call you, or you feel like somebody's looking at you, staring at you, like, gut feeling. Everybody can relate to that. Like, that's not a weird thing to talk about. Everybody's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I've had when they get like, goosebumps, you know, thinking about this one time that this thing happened. So people are aware of what they won't maybe label as psychic instances. But that's what it is, you know, things that you can't explain, you know, with, with modern science.
Danny
Yeah. And again, it's written about throughout history.
Nelson
Throughout history.
Danny
All the, you know, there's tons of ancient Greek stuff that like talks about this crap. Yeah, there was, there's even like this idea, this, this ancient Greek. I forget who wrote about this. This might be another Orphic thing where, like, the idea is that when you're born, that's only a part of who you are. Your life is spent retrieving all of your memories that make you, you. You. Like when your body is born.
Nelson
Oh, man. Yeah.
Danny
That's not all of you. All of you is already, it's already there in the ether. Right. But you have to go through your life to know yourself. That's why it says on the temple of Apollo, know yourself.
Nelson
Oh, wow. I love that.
Danny
You know?
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
So like, what if you're just, you're just already there? Like, say maybe this is, I don't know if it's tied into like, reincarnation, but I could see how you could make a link to reincarnation to like, a new body is born and you spend your life going through, going through your life and downloading all these new experiences and all these new memories until, like, you've reached the peak to where you've actually become yourself and you actually know who you are and Maybe that was destined, predestined the whole time.
Nelson
Yeah. What? Every life is just that journey. Right. Like, start kind of from scratch and build it all.
Danny
All right, maybe it's not all random. Maybe it's already. Maybe it was there already, you know?
Nelson
Have you ever done, like, a past life regression?
Danny
No.
Nelson
Or spoken to anybody?
Danny
I've spoken to people about it, but I've never done it. No. Yeah, the kids talk. There's a. There's a lot of kids, like, in that public. The tapes, the kids talk about that. I had another guy in here, Jeffrey Kripal, talk about that. He. He's a religious scholar guy, and he was saying that, like, there's more accounts of children recalling past lives.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Than anyone else. And he says there's also commonly they're pat. In their past lives. They're also males most often because he thinks that something to do with having the memory of a past life, you're only going to remember the most traumatic of past lives.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
And he says that men historically died in the most violent, traumatic ways.
Nelson
That makes sense. Yeah.
Danny
So maybe that could be a link.
Nelson
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
But I've heard the thing about children having, you know, like, in their new life at young ages, like, being able to sell, say, information about their past life and, and then having it verified, like knowing, you know, the name of this person in this town that was their brother in their past life, and they. You can go to that town.
Danny
No. And they're still alive.
Nelson
I don't know if they're alive, but there was records of that person.
Danny
Whoa.
Nelson
Stuff like that. But again, I say this as I've heard these anecdotes, but who knows? Maybe it's just like some of these grifters, like, it's just a story that gets kind of morphed and it's actually not true. I don't know. You know? Yeah, but I've heard stuff like that.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard a lot of stuff like that, too.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
I think it's. I think there's something to it.
Steve
It.
Danny
You know.
Nelson
Yeah. Problem.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Thing.
Danny
The, the. The problem is, like, no one takes it ser. It's too stigmatized for people to take seriously and actually study and, like, verify. Like, no, no academic journal is going to publish that and say, yes, past lives are real. Like, we're reincarnated. Psychic abilities are real. Like, just not. We're just not in a place right now. Like, this is. Our society is not in a place to make that reality.
Nelson
Not yet. No. Know, and there's even the psychics or people with these abilities will say that being put on the spot affects the ability, which is unfortunate because then it makes it harder to test. Right. How convenient. But, but maybe it's true, you know, like you have to have these, these right intentions. The scenario matters. And, and again, as I go back to what I said earlier, that it's a very small effect and it's very slippery for our. Are us weak humans, mentally weak intuitive humans, so that any little. There's so much noise that like to actually focus in on the thing that is the information that we're pulling in is hard to do in a lot of settings. Right. I don't know.
Danny
Yeah, maybe it's not meant to be described or to be known by people who aren't experiencers.
Nelson
Right.
Danny
You know, similar to like doing dmt. Like you have the experience, it's a, it's a personal experience that it's a, it's a 64 bit experience that you can't communicate. Like trying to put it into words is like putting something that's 64 bit into 2 bit.
Steve
Right.
Danny
Like there's no way you can actually articulate what happened in words.
Nelson
Did you. Maybe it's.
Danny
Maybe it's by design. Maybe that's.
Nelson
Yeah, right. Did you. So when you came out of your trips, was it like instantly you like were so aware of what just happened, but then when you like try to vocalize it or write it down, it just like fails your words. Your words fail you, right?
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Like it's hard to just. You feel like you have all the answers suddenly and then it just like you don't know what to do because you can't explain.
Danny
The first time I did it, it was like the closest thing I could possibly imagine to what dying is because it was like. It was like my soul shuttling through light arteries and I was disconnected from everything on earth because I was thinking about, wow, like my house, my job, my family, all of that is. I'm disconnected from it all now and I'm like teleporting to another world. That's what I felt like.
Nelson
Wow.
Danny
That was the first time.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
Second time was way different. But did you. But I was, I was, I was able to talk. I was able to explain that. I was able to explain everything that was happening, like right immediately afterwards. It was very fresh. But it faded after a while. It faded pretty quickly.
Nelson
Yeah. I had a similar. I didn't. I never like blasted off as people talk about, but I was in this waiting room place and, and I definitely had some enlightening experiences but it was hard to. And it's still hard to like fully explain what I felt in human words.
Danny
Yeah. You know, it does something to your brain.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
I think it makes you smarter.
Nelson
I think so too. Yeah.
Danny
Most people I talk to that I don't know. And again, this could just be some sort of like people who are habitual like DMT gurus or whatever, they have this messiah effect. They have this like aura to themselves where they think that they are like more enlightened than you are. You know what I mean? Like they have this all enlightened. Like maybe that's part of it. But in general I feel like the most people I've talked to that, that experience like that do. Do psychedelics and that have experienced them have a, a better grip of, of words and ideas and abstract ideas and conveying them and are more, you know, open minded. But you know, I don't know what came first. That or the psychedelics. Right. Like it could just be that's the type of person that would be open to trying psychedelics in the first place.
Nelson
True. Yeah.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
I was going to say like Andrew Gmore has like. I think he speaks so well about that stuff. Like he, he uses the right words. You don't think so?
Danny
I think so too.
Nelson
Yeah. Okay.
Danny
I think, I think the accent probably helps him out. Makes him sound smart. He's super smart. Yeah, he's very, very smart guy. Very, very articulate dude.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
But he's also a brain scientist.
Nelson
True. Right. Yeah. Not. He wasn't a brain sciences because he.
Danny
Right, let's compare him to a brain scientist who doesn't do DMT and see how they, how they stack up against each other.
Nelson
Yeah. I wanna, at some point, I don't know when I have to get my kids out of the house, but I would like to try a DMT while memorizing a deck of cards or something. Even if I could, I don't, I.
Danny
Don'T touch a deck of cards. You'd be like this.
Nelson
I know like starting it. That's my attention. But probably. And I'm like, what is the meaning of this? Like why would I. But I wonder like how intense if I could even memorize a deck of cards. If it would be easier to like. I think it would be harder to do the task because I'd probably find it meaningless or something.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Or so distracted by other things. But if I could actually sit down to get the memory process going, if that process would be enhanced in any way. My inkling is that it wouldn't be a good experiment. But I do think that over time people have suggested this, that if I did psychedelics more, that I would actually get better at memorizing afterwards. Like, it would open up my brain.
Danny
What do you think about that?
Nelson
I don't know. I think I've done pretty good for myself in terms of enhancing my memory through normal means. But yeah, I definitely think there's something to psychedelic. Psychedelics like. Like remapping your brain. And I could see that helping with memory in general just because you'd have maybe more information to kind of pull on when making associations. I don't know.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, I think there's definitely a big connection with those kinds of drugs. And the Greeks, I think they were definitely experimenting with that stuff a lot more.
Nelson
Oh, yeah.
Danny
Than like, cultures are today.
Nelson
Does it go that far back?
Danny
Yeah, I think it goes back pretty, pretty, pretty damn far. Definitely. Definitely goes back into Ancient Greek. I mean, you have. You have like, the Eleusinian Mysteries and stuff like that where they were. They were drinking psychedelic wine and they were doing chance and music and like, ritual religious stuff where, like, there's something that happens, I think, when you combine these psychoactive drugs with. With groups of people that are, like, dancing and. And engaging in, like, rights and rituals and there's music involved and there's orgies involved. Like, imagine what kind of like, transcendent you can come that would happen in a setting like that. And that stuff wasn't. I mean, the Greeks were sickos, dude. They were like. They were like, obsessed with, you know, know, all kinds of crazy stuff. And a lot of those religious, pagan. A lot of those, like, pagan rituals that they were doing were like, very involved with sex, drugs and music. So there's probably a connection with all three of them where you can attain ultimate enlightenment, you know.
Nelson
Probably. Yeah.
Danny
And I think that probably had something to do with just the depth of that culture, like the. The philosophical, intellectual height of the Greeks, you know, not just with their language, but I think it probably had. I think the drugs probably had quite a bit to do with that, for sure.
Nelson
I don't think I've ever thought about that or heard that. That the Greeks were doing psychedelics.
Danny
That's crazy.
Nelson
I'm not surprised.
Danny
But yeah.
Nelson
What is a psychedelic wine? Just like, like, there was a.
Danny
Allegedly they were taking. There's a lot of people who. A lot of, like, classical scholars and stuff like that who claim that they were drinking wine spiked with urgot, which is a fungus. Like a fungus that grows off of wheat is a. It's a certain alkaloid of a fungus and it's called Urgot. Urgot. And they think that that was in the wine they were drinking.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
And that was creating some sort of a psychedelic experience that they were. And that was like. There was a lot of religious rights. And that's like some people. That. Some people claim that that's like the foundation of religion was this type of stuff. Because imagine if you're living 2,000, 3,000 years ago and you're experiencing something like DMT. Like, you're going to think that's God. You're going to think you're going to heaven and seeing God.
Nelson
You know what I mean? Yeah. That's wild.
Danny
So, yeah. I don't know. Was that the foundation of. Of religions? Who knows?
Sponsor/Ad Voice
But I could see.
Danny
I could see how you could make.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The case for that.
Danny
That. Yeah, yeah. You know?
Nelson
Yeah. Crazy. I was going to suggest. I don't know if you do this kind of thing on your show, but do you want to try a remote viewing session? Like.
Danny
Sure.
Unknown Guest 1
You.
Nelson
You do it?
Danny
Yeah. Like right now?
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I don't know how it'll come out, but we can try it. Yeah. You just need a piece of paper and a. A pen. You could even do it on your tablet, I think.
Steve
But.
Nelson
So I will choose a photo.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
And I'll come up with some, like, task number. And then. And I'll kind of guide you through. I don't want to guide too much because I don't want it to seem like I'm guiding you to the answer or something. But I'll try to come up with a just, like, framework of what you should try to visualize and see what comes out. Give me a second here to find something.
Danny
This is going to be fun.
Nelson
You've never done something like this?
Danny
Never tried it.
Nelson
Okay. Okay, I'm gonna save this.
Danny
Remember when David Morehouse was showing us the Titanic thing, Steve. Where he was. He was pulling up the, like, all the remote points of the Titanic, like on the ship and people remote viewing the Titanic sinking.
Nelson
Oh, wow.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah. That was pretty nuts.
Danny
Yeah. Like, people could, like, pick. They were picking points in time for people to go back to and, like, remote view, like, what was happening. Happening.
Nelson
Cool.
Danny
On, like, like major, major historical events. Right? Like the Titanic. Like, the. The idea that there's like, some sort of like, major events like that there's some sort of like. Again, I don't even have the words to describe this, but like maybe there's more of a connection to those events because there's so many people involved. And like, yeah, that is somehow stronger. It's easier to tap into big events like that.
Unknown Guest 1
That.
Nelson
Yeah, there's some theories behind that. There's a physicist, Ed May, who's got some really cool ideas on this, but his thought is that things that are. Have a lot of entropy tend to be easier to remote view. So think of things like natural disasters or explosions or like a lot of the CIO programs would be trying to find like a downed plane or some kind of like silo with nuclear missiles and stuff like that. Apparently those are like hot spots like mon. So and that's interesting because entropy is just kind of like essentially the change of information over time. Right. So maybe it all goes back to just like the universe being pure information. Right. Everything is out there, back in time, forwards in time. Everything is just in this, like I said, substrate, substrate of something with all this information and you can just tap into in. Right.
Danny
Well, that's one of like the laws of the universe, right, Is that we're bound by entropy.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like entropy is always increasing.
Danny
Always increasing. Right.
Nelson
But there are things that have higher entropy, like I guess if you like have a cup, right. Low entropy. But when it shatters, like it's entropy increases. This thing cannot be put back together.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
Like, it's just like become more. More in disarray. Right. So things like that, that are heightened and maybe that kind of plays into these natural disasters or you know, something where there's some intensity behind maybe trauma.
Danny
Trauma is very tied to that.
Nelson
Yeah. And it could be also like a, like a, an emotional entropy too. Like all these humans together, like experiencing this kind of change and death and, and disaster. Right. Maybe that's just like a hot spot for. In this timeline of events to like hone in. Yeah. 9 11, there's this crazy. I think this was in a Dean.
Danny
Raiden book where traffic jam of like consciousness.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. And there's like these spikes, right. Where certain things happen, you know, before 911 wasn't there like the manifest of all the planes were like notoriously or not notoriously weirdly empty compared to normal days. Like there were a lot of like the planes were emptier than the.
Danny
I didn't know that.
Nelson
Yeah. Insinuating that maybe a lot of people.
Danny
Hadn'T had a feeling, a gut feeling.
Nelson
Like whether it meant they like stayed in bed a little longer and dilly dallied and missed the flight or they purposely were like, I'm not gonna. There we go.
Danny
The four hijack planes on September 11, 2001 were all under booked and flew with passenger numbers well below their capacity.
Nelson
That could have been because of the terrorists they chose to fight.
Danny
Specifically because of lower passenger loads would make it easier, right? Well, how would they know? Maybe they could. Maybe there's a way they could know.
Nelson
Yeah.
Unknown Guest 1
But they book it last minute, I think so.
Danny
The, the Boeing 767 had a capacity of 158 passengers, but was carrying only 81. Wow.
Nelson
Yeah. That's an empty plane.
Danny
That's significantly low.
Nelson
You never think about that. Right. You always kind of think of the, these, these back packed planes. I've never been on a flight that's.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Well, they were all.
Danny
They were also all cross country flights too, which is why they, they picked up. They picked cross country flights because they knew they'd have to have full tanks.
Nelson
Yeah. A lot of fuel. Right. Crazy.
Danny
Allegedly.
Nelson
Yeah. Anyways. All right, so I have a, a random number here that I generated with Google random number generator for my task number. Okay. So. And I have an image chosen. So I've made this intention. No, no, that I've chosen. It's, it's. I'll show it to you after we do this. Okay. It's on my phone. I saved it as a photo. I said this is going to be the photo that I'm showing Danny after our session. Okay, so what you'll do. And actually maybe I should just. Do you have another piece of paper? I'll just show you an example. Just give me a writing device. So I'll write down. I'm just going to do an example. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And then as soon as I'm done writing this, I'll just put my hand here and whatever comes out comes out. Okay. And I'll kind of like. And I want you to try to do this like hover your finger over this and write two things. Okay. Kind of a feeling you get from it. Whatever you want to describe. And then a gestalt. And we'll call that. Just think of it as like a category. I don't want to front load you here, but just think of just a general. Don't even try to think. What would Nelson choose? Just think of like what am I feeling? Right. Don't try to game it. And it's hard to do because you're gonna inevitably think like, oh, Nelson sat down and chose a photo. What did he think of? Was it random? Did he Think what I was gonna think, and that's why he chose it. Don't think of that. Just try to feel like, oh, it's. It's a. This. Like a general theme.
Danny
General theme.
Nelson
It doesn't even have to be right. Like, this is just to get things going. Flooring. Then once you just put that out, then I want you to start describing.
Danny
Can you give me an example of, like, what that would be? Like a theme?
Nelson
Sure. And we'll maybe keep it in a general genres here. Like, it could be a structure, could be a life form, could be a landscape. It could be, you know, energy, whatever. Something like that. Okay, so once you do that, then I want you to describe colors. Intuit what you feel. Sounds, smells, tastes, even. There could be nothing. But try it. Tastes. Dimensions. Right. Like, shapes of things. Okay. Movement, temperatures, stuff like that. Right. Sounds. I already said that. Okay. Okay. And then once that's done, a sketch, just whatever. It doesn't even have to match necessarily what you're right here. But just whatever your hand decides, whatever's coming to mind. There's a lot of that.
Danny
It could just be scribble.
Nelson
Yeah. But with a little. Not so scribbly as this, but maybe.
Danny
Try to a little bit more attention to it.
Nelson
Okay.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah.
Nelson
And then when you're done, just type right end. And that's it.
Danny
End, end. Okay. Like, you have to walk me through it again when I do it.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. I'll guide you a little bit. Okay. All right, so. And maybe make your paper vertical just to have a little more room. Okay, so the number is 555-6784. And go draw your ideogram. And now hover your hand over it and really just try to tap in and think of a feeling it gives you. And then a general category is it.
Danny
Just thought a feeling that it gives me. Okay.
Nelson
All right, now, colors. Write down colors that come into mind.
Danny
I feel like I have of something popped into my head that gave me, like, an idea of what it could be. And now I'm kind of following that.
Nelson
If you get one of those, that's called an aol, an analytical overlay. So on the side, write AOL and name the thing that you're thinking of.
Danny
Okay. Okay.
Unknown Guest 1
Okay.
Nelson
Put your pen down.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
Just take a beat. The point of that is to, like, get it out of your head, because it's easy to get stuck on a thing and be like, that's what it is. I'm gonna describe it now.
Danny
Now everything I'm saying is like, reinforcement, forcing it. Right.
Nelson
And so now the idea is to kind of let that go and go back and just try to see what comes through the stream again so you can continue.
Danny
Just write what, write anything?
Nelson
Yeah. So, you know, tastes, smells, sounds, temperature. What's the temperature? You know, is it. Yeah.
Danny
Supposed to be, like, looking at it and not even.
Nelson
Just, just. Just a feeling that comes. Like, if you were to write down any color right now, like you're going to write something down, where does that come from? It's an intuitive thing. Like it came from somewhere. That's kind of the idea here is that, like, if you're trying just to write, like, freehand, what comes out, like something will come out. Right, right. From somewhere. Okay. And the more mindless it is, like, the more like, where did it come from? Right.
Steve
Right.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
Okay. You do your sketch. Oh, do a little sketch now.
Danny
Another sketch.
Nelson
Yeah. This one was just like an ideogram, we call it, but then the next one will be more like an intentful sketch. Sketch. Right. You can piece together some of the information that you have if it makes sense.
Unknown Guest 1
Okay.
Nelson
But now you're actually trying to draw something, you know, not just a scribble. Yeah. It doesn't have to be like an amazing piece of art. Just.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
All right. And just write end somewhere on the bottom. Bottom.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
Voila. All right, let's see what you got.
Danny
It's like a bird.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
It's like a.
Nelson
It.
Unknown Guest 1
All right.
Nelson
And what do you have? You have. So you had life form.
Danny
Life form, animal. Y.
Nelson
Then your colors. You had orange, white. You had walking, smelling, predator. AOL was your bird. And what does it say here? What's that? Cool.
Danny
Cold.
Nelson
Cold.
Danny
Cold. Red. Evil. Good vision.
Nelson
Good vision. Okay.
Danny
I don't know why. I don't know why.
Nelson
So you. You clearly had, like. You went down a. I went down a rabbit hole. A rabbit hole. This is what it was.
Danny
Okay. Not even close.
Nelson
How would you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10? 00? You know, and this is. This happens often. And. And it's. It's hard, like, to. To pull information in without, like, getting fixated on a thing. And even when you do get fixated on the thing, how do you let that go and just like, focus on the stream?
Danny
Right.
Nelson
And sometimes I've done this with people and they have, like, insane sessions where they're like, they drew the thing or like, a lot of components matched. And I've had other ones that just don't quite, you know, or you look at it and you're kind of like, well, you know, you said white and orange. Well, I mean the general colors there was white and orange.
Danny
Yeah, that's true.
Nelson
Something interesting you drew somewhat of a beak there. Is that that maybe like kind of what like if you were tapping in at the. This into this at all, you know. But then on the flip side, is this just like us trying to fit this exactly, you know?
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And that's where like in a session like this, I really wouldn't give much to it, but there's been sessions where, you know, I've drawn the thing and it's like that wasn't a guess, you know, it was the thing.
Steve
Uhhuh.
Danny
Let's try it the other way.
Nelson
I was going to say I'll try one. I've never done it like on the spot, but. But it should be fair that I try it as well. So. Yeah, you choose a number or ch. You choose a picture and then find some like 6 digigit number to give me as a task number.
Danny
Steve, do you have any paper?
Nelson
That's why when there's the best remote viewing projects are set up so that they're like blind, double blind, you know, that's the best.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
When people are like, why can you remote view my future? You know, that's, that's hard to do because now I suddenly, I mean, I don't know much about you, but I know something about you and I, you know, I know you, you live here and like I can already, I already have it front loaded with information, so it's not biased at all. But then the question is like, well, if you're psychic, you're psychic. Like can't you. Why are there all these limitations? You know, I don't know the answer to that. Hand me the pen. When you're.
Danny
Oh yeah, I got the picture, but there's no number associated with it.
Nelson
That's fine. You can just make up a number. Right, right. A six digit number on the PA that you're deciding is going to rep represent this photo.
Danny
Okay, let me see your pen. Okay.
Nelson
Okay. All right, give it back. Let me just give me that number.
Danny
The number is 767.
Nelson
Yep. 767.
Danny
114.
Nelson
114. Okay, so do it a little different. I write my name at the top. Put the date. What is it? October 16, 2025. All right, now, 676-7114. Okay.
Danny
All right. He wrote it down on the piece of paper. Now he's just scribbling. Yeah, on the paper. He's tapping into the muse right now.
Nelson
All right. Right. All right. This is stuff that I got.
Danny
Okay.
Nelson
Before you show me, I'll just say what I got. And this again, I haven't done this in a while. It could be a total whiff, but that's, that's the idea. And, and, you know, I'm sure David Morehouse does this way more formally.
Danny
You're talking to the mic.
Nelson
Oh, sorry. Y. Yeah, but this is kind of the shorthand version that I do. I don't do it much anymore. Okay. I do it in some cases just to, like, see if I still have it. And there was a time when I would do this every day. Chris would do it as, as well. Every day. We were training it, and we would get better at it. Right. That's one of these skills, just like memory, where you get better at it. There's actually a phenomenon with it where at the beginning you have insane hits, like, really good sessions, and then there's like a fall off. I don't know if it's because you, like, over. Start to overthink it or something, this false sense of confidence. But then through practice, you can get, get back up to better. Anyways, I, I, I'll, I'll stop delaying here. All right. So some of the colors here were just. I don't necessarily do it in order, and colors sound, smells like that, Right. But I have, like, black, green, dark green, leafy, jungly, wet, damp, rain, overhang. I started to write trees here because I, I had an AOL there, but I wrote that down. Then reaching up, up, closed, overarching, bleak, dreary brown. I wrote down waking, evil, breaking through, flaky. And then I started to try to hone in on some other things here. Filled, damp, evil, low light, empty. Started like, it's just like a very dark kind of, I don't know, scene. Whole tunnel, guided path, black, brown, green, dark shades. That's kind of what I got. And then my sketch, you know, it's not much, but I had some kind of, like, pathway through something with some, like, vertical elements to it with some kind of, like, roof overhang there. I don't know.
Danny
Your, your, your descriptions were pretty spot on. That's what it is.
Nelson
Oh, interesting. Okay, let's see.
Danny
It's a very dark, dreary, dark green, brown, Black scene of two crows floating on, like, a brown suitcase type chest in the ocean.
Nelson
Yeah, I definitely picked up on the, the, the dreary, the wet. Yeah. The overhang being the clouds, perhaps. My sketch was not on par at all, but.
Danny
Yeah, but your Descriptive words were very, very close.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah. And so. Yeah. So take that with you.
Danny
See this on the camera, Steve?
Nelson
Yeah.
Unknown Guest 1
Hold it up for your camera.
Danny
Camera.
Unknown Guest 1
Just poke it right at your camera. Yeah.
Danny
Crazy, right?
Nelson
Okay, so if I were to grade that, I'd probably say, I don't know, like a 4 or 5 out of 10. 4.5 out of 10.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Yeah.
Danny
Dude.
Nelson
But you. You, as someone watching that, felt like I tapped in on something maybe.
Danny
Yeah, yeah.
Nelson
And so sometimes it's like that, where you get elements and. And this, again, this was like. Like, back of the napkin version of it. There's. There's many steps, like, as you get deeper, that you start with this, and that's like. Like flirting with the signal, you know?
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah.
Nelson
Pieces of it. There's noise, but you get pieces of it. And then you, like, go bit by bit down certain rabbit holes and pull out more information, and by the end of it, you can build something a lot more detailed. And, you know, it even sounds like I was really tapping into, like, this foresty thing.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Even though I. Because I started with the wet, damp thing, and that was kind of correct.
Danny
Yeah. Wet, damp. It was in the water.
Nelson
Yeah. Maybe I went too far down. The logical rabbit hole my brain was telling me to was that, oh, it's like a jungly forest with trees. And so I wrote down trees to try to deal with that, and then you try to get back and try to reset. That's hard, though. Like, I'm not the best at this, but pro remote viewers can do that, and we'll come up with some really detailed information.
Danny
It's also interesting that mine was about a bird and, like, an evil dude.
Nelson
Yeah. Maybe you even, like.
Danny
Maybe I saw the future.
Nelson
You saw your own shit. That can happen, too. It's called displacement, where you're, like, memorize, not memorizing. Remote viewing. The next thing or the.
Steve
The.
Nelson
The. The thing before. Like. Yeah, you know, because, like, maybe you got the signal, but you were, like, off a channel, you know.
Danny
Right, right, right. Maybe I was seeing the future.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Dude, that's crazy.
Nelson
Yeah. Yeah. Because. What else did you write here? I mean, life form, animal, Orange, white. No.
Danny
Yeah, no, orange or white.
Nelson
But even still, the bird is kind of interesting.
Danny
Yeah. Yeah, the bird was interesting. I don't know why. I think I got the bird thing from that. That. That I drew, like, a beak there.
Nelson
Oh, interesting.
Danny
And I kind of got stuck on that look, like an eye and a beak.
Nelson
Yeah, Yeah. I think that all this is. And there's different protocols that different camps of the remote. Original remote viewers that will do it slightly different. I think all you're doing is you're trying to quiet the. The logical mind that's gonna just like try to make meaning out of. Because when you silence that, that's when you, you know, you're, you're. You quiet the intellect, your intuition raises. And that's what this is all trying to do. You know, whether I write my name in the corner, you know, focus on the number. Like it's always for me to just like blank out in a way and just listen to what is just naturally coming to me without thinking.
Danny
Right.
Nelson
The better you can do that.
Danny
I think the better you can to quiet your mind.
Nelson
Yeah. Which is. Sounds so opposite. You're trying to like listen to your mind at the same time, you know?
Danny
Know.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Or listen to a signal that's coming into your mind. Right. Like to completely shut out the anal. Shut down like the analytical thinking mind and just like become a blank. Turn your mind like a blank canvas to receive something else that's there.
Nelson
Because that's all we do day in, day out is we listen to our analytical mind. We're just always trying to make sense out of stuff. Trying to logically deduce this from that and think things through. But, but you know, listening to our gut and our intuition, there's a lot of value and insight there, you know. And I think that's where this stuff comes through. Yeah.
Danny
Dude, that's super interesting.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Are there any other like memory champions or Memory competitors that are into this stuff like you are.
Nelson
There was another memory champion who was recruited on that project.
Danny
Oh, okay.
Nelson
But I won't name it cuz he's. I don't think he believes it. And it. He was really good too, which is funny really. He just thought it was all really. And you know, he was just like, oh, the guy was setting it up and it's all chance and just bias, you know, like. Yeah, just I'm. I'm creating my own experience anyways, so I won't say his name, but he was into it. And then there is another. The other us memory champion after I stopped John Graham. He's separately gotten into this stuff as well. And we discovered that a couple years ago and we're like, you're into it too. Look like the.
Danny
Have you ever heard of Eatsak Bentov?
Nelson
No.
Danny
There's a. He was a. He was a. I think he was an engineer or a mathematician who came up with the. This astral projection process. And he Called. It was called the Gateway process. And there was a whole CIA, a classified CIA program on this, on this astral projection. And it was called the Gateway program.
Nelson
You're not confusing with the gateway experience at Monroe Institute.
Danny
Yes, the same thing, I think.
Nelson
Okay. I mean, that was by the Robert Monroe.
Danny
Well, this was somehow tied to it.
Nelson
Was it?
Danny
Yeah, yeah. He offered one of his books was Stalking the Wild Pendulum.
Nelson
I've seen the COVID of that.
Danny
There's an incredible video, Steve, if you can find it, of him. Basically, he's on like a talk show. Just search for like Eatsak Bentov talk show interview where he's explaining this bell, this bell curve of human consciousness.
Nelson
Oh, interesting.
Danny
And he was basically saying that like on the two ends of the bell curve, you have like, really, really dumb people. Then you have like, really, really smart people on, like the top far end.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Of the bell curve.
Danny
The middle of the bell curve is like average intelligence. And then you have on the very far end of the bell. Yeah, this is it here. Put the headphones on so you can hear this. This is amazing.
Steve
Of information that we gather during a lifetime. Physical bodies are here. Another physical body, another physical body. And this is Joe, and this is Jim, and this etc. Etc. Now clearly, this is the physical level. Yeah. Now on this physical level, we are separate. You sit there and I sit here and we're all separate. Now let's draw another level. This level is slightly higher. And let's call this the level of the soul. Yeah, well, there will be some mingling here. Let's draw this person as extending to practically infinity this way. Now look what happens at the physical level. We are separate. We are separate and there is this much distance between us. Let's say that on the soul level, this person extends this much and the other person gets slightly mixed in with him. That is, the souls are in a way in touch with each other.
Nelson
Okay?
Steve
They overlap these two lines. Now let's go now to a higher level. And let's call this, say, the level of the higher self, which is kind of a boss of that soul there. What we find is that this fellow's higher self extends this much and the other fellow, closed, extends this much. There is more overlap between them. On the very highest level, which is the high spiritual level, we are basically overlapping completely. Everybody is overlapping everybody else. In other words, everything and everyone is everywhere, you know. In other words, we've become omnipresent. This is the state of highly spiritual perfected beings, or gods, you may call. Okay, okay. And so that we exist on.
Danny
Fast forward to the bell curve part. I'm totally before this. It's probably before this different clip. Maybe it's the same interview, but it's a different clip where he's showing a bell curve.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah, I was trying to find it. I wasn't sure if that was it.
Nelson
It.
Danny
I know what you're talking about. I can't see through this. You'll see it. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Come on, keep going.
Nelson
Love that explanation though.
Danny
Yeah. No, isn't it great?
Nelson
Cool way to.
Danny
No, it's not going to be this video.
Nelson
Visualize it.
Danny
Go to X. Oh, wait.
Unknown Guest 1
Oh no, that was the same thing. Okay, that's enough of that.
Danny
Okay, turn the.
Unknown Guest 1
Wait, wait. There it.
Danny
There it is. There it is. There it is.
Unknown Guest 1
Right off the top.
Danny
Yeah. Watch this.
Steve
That thousand people in it. It is the curve. But don't worry, it's not very scientific. Let me draw what is called a bell curve which looks somehow like this. It's being used in. In describing random events. And the way this works is the following. That if we assume. Now let's. Let's take the following situation. The take a little town that has maybe a thousand people in it. And we have this great desire to find out what the average height of people in this town is. And therefore we go out with a yardstick and start measuring these people. What we find that a very small, very few number of people will be, say 3ft tall. And a very, very few of them will be maybe 6, 7 or 8ft tall. The bulk of the population will be right somewhere here. That is the average or mean height of these people would be about 5ft and 6 or 8 inches, something like this. Okay, so what we find here is.
Danny
That you're on the very far end.
Steve
Of that one picture of where most of the population is. That is what typifies, occupies population. We can use this diagram also to describe evolution. The bulk of the population today is this intelligent, more or less intelligent, bipedal with a vertical spine and who pushes the buttons on TV and drives a car, et cetera, et cetera. Now there is some back throw. That is, there are some people here in this area. Very few people who are still gorilla like that is they beat their chest when they see their neighbors and a few other things. And then we have other people who are here in this corner. Very few of them who are very highly developed because we say that evolution is now pushing mankind in this direction away from the gorilla types towards the very highly evolved people at this Point we're here. What's going to happen? Maybe a million years from now, half a million years from now, this curve is going to shift. It's going to shift like this. That is the bulk of the population will be very, very highly evolved. We have gone away altogether from the gorilla types. No more gorillas. And what we have here now is the average man is now the retarded person in evolutionary terms. The bulk of the population is extremely, very, very highly evolved. And the cutting edge of evolution here. These are very, very highly evolved people. We can't even imagine what kind of person that will be. He may not have a physical body at all. The habitat, so to speak, speak of this group here. Well, you just go out and you find them. They're all over the place. The habitat of this group here. Where do you think you find these people here?
Nelson
I suspect you would find them in universities.
Steve
You'd find the people who are very bright people who are in the leading edge of professions. I mean, it's an intellectual thing, isn't it? Well, I suggest, suggest that you find them in mental hospitals, in nuthouses. And the reason for that is that these people, they live in a different reality. In a reality which is very changed. And few of them are adapted to live in this reality. So naturally they can't function very well. So the only safe place, only good place for them would be the mental hospital. Unless they can integrate their, their, their different view of reality with their daily lives. Now if they can integrate it, then we have people like, like Newton, like Darwin, like, like, like these are the so called geniuses. The, the thing that.
Danny
How crazy is that, man?
Nelson
That's cool. I love that.
Danny
Pretty wild.
Nelson
That's awesome. And such a good demonstration of.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
Of that.
Danny
Yeah. Yeah. So he was, he was the one that worked on that whole, that whole. I think it was, yeah. Part of the Monroe Institute thing was the, the Gateway, the Gateway program.
Nelson
Can you check that, Steve? I didn't know that. Just. That's just type in his name.
Danny
Type in Itak Bentov. Robert Monroe.
Nelson
Have you considered going to the Monroe Institute? You should.
Danny
I would love to. I don't still have that much time. I would love to do it. I've been, they, I think they've invited me to come up there.
Unknown Guest 1
There.
Nelson
But they both contributed. Awesome. I didn't know that. Cool.
Danny
Yeah, no, I've seen. They don't. They've done some, they're doing like crazy stuff, man. Still. They're still doing all kinds of crazy stuff and experiments and you Know, they have the people that go out there. They can see, like, orbs in the sky and.
Nelson
Yeah, kinds of wild stuff. Yeah, they were at the. The CY Games.
Danny
Oh, were they really?
Nelson
Yeah. And the first night, we all went out to sky watch with them, and it was overcast, and so we were like. And. And Chris was there, too. He. He had gotten the contact of somebody who was there who was part of some of the sky Watcher program. You know about these. These guys going out trying to summon orbs or. Or uaps and documenting it.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nelson
He was one of the. What do they call him? The psionics. Psionic assets.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nelson
So he was like, come to our. I got an Airbnb. Let's all lay out on the grass and try to summon our own orbs. So we tried that. Nothing happened, but it was a cool experience. Very relaxing. We had some, like, meditative thing going on. It was cool. But then they did it. The second night, I decided to go out, have a drink with Chris, and we missed the orbs, apparently.
Danny
Really?
Nelson
Yeah, apparently everybody saw stuff and they were like, oh, my God, it was insane. I was like, oh, man.
Danny
Me and Steve got to see some orbs one day. We had a guy, a gentleman on the podcast called Chris Bledo.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the Bledso were there.
Danny
Yeah, yeah, we had him and took you out. Him and his daughter came on the podcast and his wife also came. She wasn't on the show, but she came with them. And it was. I think it was actually on his birthday, funnily enough.
Nelson
Chris. Or his son Ryan.
Danny
Chris.
Nelson
Chris. Okay.
Danny
And I took him out to dinner the night beforehand. We went out to dinner.
Nelson
Uhhuh.
Danny
And I just picked a random, like, Mexican restaurant on the beach or across the street. Street. And. And after we ate dinner, we walked across the street, and Steve brought his video camera and he's like, yeah, I'll try to summon the orbs. He's like, usually it's only in, like, very remote places where there's not a lot of traffic or not a lot of, like, civilization around.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Or lights.
Nelson
Right.
Danny
And the beach was a little bit busy. It was, like, close to spring break. Lots of tourists around, big hotels and stuff like that. Lots of air traffic. There was lots of planes flying from over the Gulf, landing in Tampa airport port. And him and his daughter basically sat in the beach and, like, prayed to the sky for, like, two hours. And we were sitting there. Nothing was happening. There was lots of planes flying over. You could tell because the planes had like the, the starboard and the port lights on them, and they had like a flashing sort of like guidance light on them.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And then after two hours, we saw a crazy orb come up out of the ocean.
Nelson
And.
Danny
And we. He had these. What did he have, Steve?
Sponsor/Ad Voice
He had some sort of special.
Unknown Guest 1
It was a. It was a. A low light sensitivity camera. And I kept. I have that video right here.
Danny
So.
Unknown Guest 1
Yeah, I keep it on my desktop because.
Danny
So you couldn't see this with a naked eye.
Nelson
Okay, you could.
Sponsor/Ad Voice
No, you could.
Danny
You could, right?
Unknown Guest 1
I couldn't capture it with my camera because I was at F. Like five, six.
Danny
Okay.
Unknown Guest 1
But. But his camera could capture it. And that's these little red things right here.
Nelson
Here.
Unknown Guest 1
No, wait, is that right?
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The.
Unknown Guest 1
You'll see the planes fly in this direction. Yeah. And then the orbs will come and then.
Danny
So like. So we. We're using this like these scion. I don't forget what the name of it. I want to say. It was called like a Cyanic binoculars. That makes you see super low light. And you can see any, like, any kind of like, faint light would be amplified in those binoculars. And I was using that to see it. And sure enough, this happened. And I say this as like. Like a caveat to this is I've never seen anything like this before in my life. But I've also never stared at the sky for two hours uninterrupted in my life.
Nelson
Right.
Danny
So go ahead, play it one more time. So that's a plane up there flashing. But watch that.
Unknown Guest 2
Oh, there's something right on the water. Right on the water.
Nelson
So that's just the horizon of the ocean.
Danny
Thank you.
Unknown Guest 1
Thank you.
Unknown Guest 2
If you could flash for us.
Nelson
And.
Unknown Guest 2
I'm getting it right there now.
Danny
It starts going to the right.
Unknown Guest 2
It's still in the camera.
Unknown Guest 1
Another one pops up right above it.
Danny
They're going left now.
Nelson
Oh, and the other one disappeared.
Danny
The other one disappears.
Unknown Guest 1
So you can see the plane up here. And then this thing. Thing is clearly getting brighter and then dims away.
Unknown Guest 2
It's very bright. Thank you.
Nelson
What is that?
Danny
Oh, watch. It goes away.
Unknown Guest 2
Oh, you see it? It's right there. You see it?
Danny
That is an orb.
Unknown Guest 2
That is definitely an orb.
Nelson
I'm.
Unknown Guest 2
I'm tracking it here. Do you want to look?
Danny
Yeah. Can you still see it?
Unknown Guest 1
There's no land out there.
Danny
There's no land.
Unknown Guest 1
A flare can't do that, right?
Nelson
Yeah, no, I can't. Flare can't. Wouldn't do that. But the one.
Danny
Watch the one. Come off the horizon again. Again that. It was crazy how it just came up out of the. Did that one right there. Watch. It's like a rising sun. Look at that.
Unknown Guest 2
Oh, wild. There's something right on the water.
Nelson
And could you see that with your eyes?
Danny
I don't remember. I was. I was looking through the goggles. Yeah, I could see it.
Unknown Guest 2
If you could flash for us.
Nelson
And.
Danny
And it starts going to the right.
Unknown Guest 2
I'm getting it.
Danny
That's your orb there.
Unknown Guest 2
Right there. It still on the camera.
Nelson
And then it just fizzles out. Another one appears. Crazy. See all these freaking.
Unknown Guest 2
Thank you.
Danny
See the one up there? Flashing is a plane.
Nelson
Yeah. That's great. For reference here.
Unknown Guest 2
Someone needs to look through this. It's. It's very bright. Thank you. Oh, you see it? It's right there. You see it?
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
And they were, like, saying thank you to them. Like, they think they're spirits. They think they're like, angelic beings or something. Something. But, like, I don't know what it was. I don't know how you can explain that away. Right.
Nelson
I was gonna say. So you see that. That you have that experience and. And Danny goes home and thinks, what?
Danny
Dude, my mind. I was racking my mind for. For months after that for. I was like, yeah, it me up for a while after that, trying to. Trying to rationalize what the hell that was.
Nelson
And have you spent time looking at the sky since? And had anything in my backyard?
Danny
Yeah. I haven't, like, gone out anywhere, like, to, like, a remote area and tried to do that.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Or stared at the sky that much, but. Yeah, that's. I don't know. I don't know what the hell it was. There was also a weird shooting star that, like, went over my head on the beach that night. Like, was, like, very low, like a shooting star. Like, like maybe 100ft above my head. That happened.
Nelson
Oh, wow.
Danny
But I, I, I don't know. I mean, I know that he. He literally goes out and, like, films these things and posts them on his Instagram all the time.
Nelson
Yeah. You know, it's just one after the other. I've seen it.
Danny
Yeah. So I have no idea. Idea. I have no. It's definitely something.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Like, did he get somebody to go out on a boat and, like, send a. Like a Chinese lantern off the boat maybe and, like, remote control it somehow? Like a drone, maybe. But that would have been a lot of work.
Nelson
A lot of work just for convincing.
Danny
Yeah. Yeah. Dude. It's bizarre. I have no idea what it was, but I know it was, it was definitely something.
Nelson
Yeah, that was one of the thoughts when I missed the one, the demo that or the, the experience that people had at the side games. It's like, did, did they set something up? Like it would have been the great, the best event to, to have something happen. You know, all these people are there. But like, why? They're, they're such genuine people too. Like.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
But you never know.
Danny
The weird thing about, the weird thing about people like, like Chris, which makes me question everything, is that he has all of these like military intelligence people that are like visiting him, encouraging him that like, yes, this is biblical.
Nelson
Okay.
Danny
Like, why, why do you have people in military and the intelligence telling you this and helping reinforce your, your beliefs and what this is? Yeah, that's, that's my question.
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny
Because those folks are not generally known for telling the truth.
Nelson
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Danny
True.
Nelson
Yeah. I don't know. Interesting to think so.
Danny
But it seems like that, that whole, that whole world, that whole UFO world is just like, is so deeply intertwined with the, with those kinds of, that like military intelligence world and the government stuff where it's just like, I don't.
Nelson
Know, I, I, I've watched you in some of your interviews and I, I feel like you're probably like me, where some days you're like, yeah, this is real.
Danny
Yeah.
Nelson
And then some days you're just like, like, what is this crock of that this person is telling me, you know, like, there's no way that's you, like, you fluctuate. And even with the remote viewing stuff, some days I'm like, wow, there's really like, I get goosebumps.
Danny
It's so real.
Nelson
And then some days I'm like, no, this isn't, no. Like, what is this? Like, what am I? You know, I don't know, it's, it's such a, an enigma still.
Danny
Yeah, dude. It's bizarre.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
But dude, thank you for coming and doing this, Nelson. This has been fascinating.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
For me. Where can people find out more, Find more your work or your YouTube channel, all that kind of stuff?
Nelson
Yeah, you could start just my website, Nelson Dell dot com. You can find my YouTube channel with that name. It's memory techniques and any brain abilities that you can teach yourself. And you have a couple books out on memory. I have a new one coming out next spring about genius skills that you can teach yourself. And remote viewing is in there. Oh, cool. Some other mental math and memory and speed reading and all that stuff is in there. So yeah.
Danny
Okay. There's your website.
Nelson
Yeah, but what do you use the.
Danny
The earmuffs for?
Nelson
Oh, it's like just to block out distractions.
Steve
Okay.
Nelson
There's no music in there. It's just sound. Deafening.
Danny
Have you ever done sensory deprivation, Tank?
Nelson
No, never.
Danny
Really.
Nelson
Have you?
Danny
No, but that probably would.
Nelson
I wonder if that would enhance. It's not like use this in water, right?
Danny
So, yeah, you float in like salt water. So there's like. No. You don't feel anything? Anything?
Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. That's my channel. I post most of my content on there. It's a mix of stuff. Some fun, some more serious, some interviews sometimes some silly, but all memory or brain related.
Danny
Amazing, bro.
Nelson
Yeah.
Danny
Well, thanks again. We'll link everything below.
Nelson
Cool, dude.
Steve
Yeah, dude.
Danny
I appreciate your time.
Nelson
Yeah, thank you.
Danny
All right, good night, world.
6x Memory Champ: The Ancient Trick to Develop a Super Human Brain | Nelson Dellis
Date: November 7, 2025
In this episode, Danny Jones dives deep into the world of memory with four-time US Memory Champion, Nelson Dellis. They explore ancient memory techniques, the competitive memory circuit, what truly underlies human recall, and how modern distractions are affecting our cognition. The conversation also takes fascinating detours into remote viewing, consciousness, the mysterious nature of memory, and even the intersection of psychedelics and exceptional mental performance, all peppered with anecdotes, skepticism, and wild possibilities.
Nelson Dellis and Danny Jones craft an episode that is equal parts practical brain science and wild possibility. Whether you’re interested in boosting recall, understanding the historical and cultural depth of memory, or contemplating whether consciousness transcends biology, this episode delivers rich stories, hard-won insights, and provocative questions.
Find Nelson at: nelsondellis.com and on YouTube as Nelson Dellis.
Watch for his upcoming book on genius skills, including memory, math, speed reading, and remote viewing.