Jacob Sager Weinstein | How to Remember Everything

Srini Rao: Jacob, Welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Srini Rao: So I found out about your work because you wrote in and you recently wrote a book called how to remember everything, all of which we will talk about. But before we get into all of that I want to start asking you where in the world did you grow up and how did, where you grew up?

Impact how your life has turned

Jacob Sager Weinstein: out. So I grew up in Washington, DC in the seventies and eighties when Washington was the murderer capital of America. It had the highest per capita murder rate of any place in the country. Although as our mayor said, except for the murders, it's a very safe place.

But then as I think now, DC was a somewhat divided place, people would say there are two Washingtons. There was the very poor area where a lot of the mergers were taking place. And then there was this. these pockets of privilege. And I will be honest, I grew up in a very privileged pocket in Washington, D.

C. I went to a very fancy prep school where my classmates were the kids of senators and diplomats. And I was in the debate club with the daughter of the vice president. And so I think the way that had obviously some good and bad impacts on my life. The good impact was that I felt like I could walk into any room in the country and feel like I was, I belonged and I had a right to speak up just because whoever was there is going to be like if it's the vice president is in the room, not that this ever happened that's the dad of a kid so it's somehow less intimidating.

I was gonna say, and but the the downside is that because it was this very privileged bubble, it wasn't till I got to college that I started seeing, okay, this is not actually, everybody does not have access to this kind of privilege and opportunity. Everyone does not have this crazy background.

And if you have to go to Princeton to get in touch with a common man, then you definitely grew up in a bubble.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Okay. So I you and I share a similar background in that my experience of that was Basically going to Berkeley. I didn't necessarily grow up.

It's I saw my parents get to the point where they were relatively well off upper middle class like my dad was building his career throughout my childhood, but my sister more or less experienced what you did. And I went to Berkeley, which is not on the same caliber as Princeton, but it's up there.

And so when I wonder, Yeah, exactly. There's really no difference. Other than the fact that you might have had nicer green lawns than we did. And I was always jealous of Princeton because F. Scott Fitzgerald went there. And so that was like one of my dreams was to go to Princeton, even though I didn't have grades.

But the thing is, I wonder when you have experience growing up in what you call the pocket of privilege. How does that impact your worldview when you see the sort of social and economic structures of society we live in today? And how does that even make you think about wealth equality, all of these things that play a significant role in our lives, whether we want to admit that or not.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah, absolutely. And so an additional bit of background I'll give you is that although I grew up in this very privileged area, and actually I think this is a way that you and I are also alike, my parents did not grow up with that privilege. My mom was a refugee. She came to America at five, fleeing the Nazis.

And so my parents had very much pulled themselves up and built their own life. And so I think the combination of hearing their story and then growing up with all these privileges myself, I just. believed in, I believed in the American dream. I believed that these opportunities were open to everybody and that anybody who worked hard could get to that level.

And there's been this gradual awakening on my part of, okay, it's it's great. My, my parents deserved everything they got, but there's people who work just as hard and deserved it just as much who have not gotten it. And so I think it's, I've had to unlearn some of the things I grew up with.

And I will also say, having seen firsthand that a lot of the people I grew up with deserved what they had and worked hard for it, but the kids I was growing up with lucked into it and had these incredible advantages that a lot of kids, the vast majority of kids don't have. Parents being the refugees who were fleeing the Nazis, I can only imagine the kinds of lessons they.

Srini Rao: taught you from that? What kinds of things did your parents teach you from that experience that have informed who you've become? What did they teach you about tolerance? What did they teach you about violence? Like the kinds of cause they're fleeing what arguably is one of the most horrible things that's ever happened in human history.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah. And so to be clear, so my mom was a refugee who fled the Nazis. My dad was the grandson of America of of immigrants who came here in the 19th century. But from both sides, there was absolutely that awareness of. of the consequences of violence and hatred. My, my mom would tell the story of how in the 60s she was at some, at a protest for, I think it was an amusement park that was racially segregated, and people would drive by and call her communist and they were they were not extremely active, but I was raised with an awareness that, that hatred and prejudice exist, and that if you don't speak up against them early, it can become too late to speak up against them later on.

And thinking about it, even though I did, was living through directly this privilege, I think the fact that I had this background understanding maybe helped me to be a little bit More aware of the rest of the world. So on the one hand you have a parent who fled the Nazis, another who was an immigrant, but an immigrant that had been here long enough that like almost to the point where in my mind I don't see that as immigrant per se, but I wonder because you're Jewish, right?

Srini Rao: Just based on your last name. Did you grow up with the sort of typical Jewish kid narrative that Indian kids do? You went to Princeton for God's sakes and then you decide to go have a creative career. So I wonder what your parents told you about making your way in the world.

Particularly based on your

Jacob Sager Weinstein: background. Yeah, it's really interesting. So there is definitely that immigrant thing of I did not come to America so that you could be unemployed in a garret somewhere. But my parents were amazingly free of that. And my mom would sometimes quote something and I, I don't know where she got it from, but it was the effect of our parents were peddlers so that we could be doctors and lawyers.

and we are doctors and lawyers so that our children can be artists and writers. And I as I got older and talked to friends who had maybe parents who had similar backgrounds, I came to realize that is a fairly, I think, unusual and open minded attitude. But my parents were always of the attitude that, that they wanted us to find life meaningful and satisfying.

I, I think maybe the one advantage I had coming from a Jewish background, and you'll have to tell me if the Indian background is the same but in Judaism, a couple of things that are culturally important writing is incredibly important. Literacy is important. So wanting to be a writer is a fairly prestigious thing.

And I think humor is such an important part of the Jewish culture that, that. going into comedy or going into some sort of comedy writing is not seen as quite as frivolous as it might be in other immigrant cultures. Yeah. I don't

Srini Rao: necessarily know that India for sure, like everything you talked about the value placed on education literacy is very prevalent.

But what I wonder your parents say like our parents were peddlers, we became doctors and that's so our kids could become artists and writers. Like no Indian parent I've ever met says that. to their kids. And I can tell you that as the son of Indian immigrants I think that the journey of my creative career has been one of navigating the journey of building the career and navigating a simultaneous journey of getting my parents to understand my choices.

And all of which have been difficult, like they're not easy choices to make. They this firsthand, like a life in the arts is a situation. which nothing is guaranteed and anything is possible. And I think you have to be out of your mind to want to do this for a living to some degree.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: I agree completely. Yeah, so there's a Jewish tradition that if somebody comes to you and they want to convert to Judaism, you're supposed to try three times to dissuade them from doing it before you're allowed to even talk to them about what it involves. And I, because it's, if it is Judaism, it can be this very meaningful thing, but it's this incredibly onerous thing you're taking on.

And I feel I feel the same way about careers in the arts, that you should try to, if somebody comes to you for advice on any sort of creative field, you should try to dissuade them three times before you even start to tell them how to do it. Wow. It's funny you say that because Sam Jones has this really amazing podcast called off camera.

Srini Rao: And it's one of the few podcasts I occasionally listen to, despite being the host of one. I actually don't like podcasts as a form of media, as a form of media consumption. It's ironic, but the, there's a line that there's an interview he does with Matt Damon and Matt Damon. Tells him almost an exactly a similar story where he says when people come to me and tell me they want to be an actor, I actually try to talk them out of it.

And he says, why? He says, because if I can talk you out of doing this thing in one conversation, you're definitely not cut out for it.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah I think that is totally true. I really do. And I think by the way, if you're not cut out for it, that's not a bad thing. I think in some ways that's probably a healthier thing.

Yeah, I,

Srini Rao: that's the thing I, that's, you want to talk before we hit record about the fact that you had gone looking for a personal development podcast and in so many ways I, and I think to some degree I'm guilty of perpetuating this. Like we've created this narrative and culture of follow your passion go do this creative thing.

But that doesn't take reality into account. It doesn't take context into consideration so often and that's so important, which raises my next question. What did your parents actually do for work? So my dad was a lawyer and my mom was a stay at home mom when I was younger.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Then she got a master's degree in anthropology and she started up this amazing program where she would bring, she would teach anthropology and she would bring volunteers to teach other things. in old age homes on the idea that you just you are never too old to learn. There's never a point where your brain should stop working.

So she would teach these fairly sophisticated courses to people in retirement homes. I think that makes a perfect segue into talking about your work specifically, but before we get into the concepts in the book, what has been the trajectory like from Princeton? And did you know as a young kid that you always wanted to be a writer or was that something you discovered later in life?

Very early on, I wanted to be a doctor, and then I took my first biology class and decided I wanted to be a writer. Basically. Been there, done that. Yeah, exactly. Basically and I at the time, I was really bad at remembering stuff, at memorizing stuff. Or I should say remembering stuff I was supposed to remember.

And of all the sciences, biology is the one where you can figure the least out on your own and you have to remember the most. So from a pretty early age, I wanted to be a writer. it took me a fair amount of back and forth to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. So I moved to Los Angeles after I as an undergraduate I studied, I had this amazing experience.

I studied fiction with Toni Morrison and some other amazing people. I had my work personally insulted by Joyce Carol Oates, which is an opportunity few writers get. So she actually, so the way, so I did a creative thesis, I did a collection of short stories and they, she was the faculty member who was chosen to grade it and she called it a most uneven collection of quote, short stories, unquote, and those quotes still stick with me decades later.

Srini Rao: Okay. So I think this is actually really important because it raises numerous points about how to deal with critics. But more importantly, I think that in certain cases, like you have critics that are worth listening to, particularly if you've had these extraordinary teachers and it's the sort of balancing act of knowing, okay, when they're right, when they're wrong.

I had this writing coach that I worked with on one of my books and I remember the first month we were working together it would, it literally took me a month to stop taking her feedback personally. I was like, wait a minute, you're doing the job I hired you for, which was to be tough on me.

But what did you learn from working up close with such iconic writers to be taught by people like Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol loads? Like most of us dream of opportunities like that. Even if we do get that harsh criticism, we'll talk about the criticism a second, but what did you learn about craft and commitment from people like that?

Jacob Sager Weinstein: So it was it was amazing, and the Tony Morrissette experience, it was me and maybe five or six other kids doing a class on long form fiction, we were working on like a novella over the course of the semester and on the one hand, it is absolutely amazing because you have in front of you an example of the upper limits of human potential if you keep on working in this field.

Yeah. It's also incredibly motivational because once Toni Morrison sees anything whatsoever positive in your work that keeps you going through decades of criticism from people who did not have Nobel Prizes. At the same time, I guess what I'll the area where it's not.

quite as amazing, or where it's amazing in a different way than you might imagine, is it's if you go to the gym and the guy who shows you where the weights are is Dwayne The Rock Johnson. It's, you could, it's amazing to see what you can do with it, but at a certain point, he, all he can do is just point you to those weights and say, keep lifting these till you look like me.

So it's not like Tony Morrison could it's he can't tell, there's no sentence he can tell you that's going to make you swell up like him. And it's not Tony Morrison was able to say, okay, here's the three things you need to do to win a Nobel prize. So I, and this is something that I think actually this sort of gets back to our conversation about privilege and opportunity, because I think sometimes.

I'll hear people say, Oh, I didn't get I've never studied writing. I haven't had great teachers. And I feel like it's inspirational to have these amazing teachers, but the things they're telling you are fundamentally the things anybody competent can tell you, which is keep writing, keep getting feedback and keep rewriting.

Srini Rao: It's funny because I've never taken a formal English class or a writing class. Yeah. It was, I wanted to be an English major and my dad was like, no go. Which I listened to that and I never even wrote for the school paper, which I wish I had done. I like literally my only formal writing experience has been writing books.

But I've never been formally trained in any capacity, which the downside of that, grammar. So I have to have proofreaders go through everything. But somehow I remember one of my friends was like, how the hell did you get a book deal? He's you're the worst damn speller I've ever known.

Yeah, I know. I don't know. I was like, that's why they made me work with a writing coach. Yeah. But I think the other thing that is interesting, you make a really good point, right? I love the fact that you brought up the fact that people often will look to somebody like a Tony Morrison anybody who they can learn from and say, Oh, so what are the things that I need to do in order to have your level of success?

And it's wait a minute, you're looking overlooking one really blatant variable in this formula. And that's you like I always tell people you could do everything exactly as I have done. And I promise you, your results will do different. They might

Jacob Sager Weinstein: even be better. Yeah, I that is absolutely true.

And I think so I think in a sense having, one of the things that's worked well for me is I've had a whole bunch of different amazing writing teachers, and so I've resisted the urge to say, okay, I'm going to be that person. And I do, I think people get in trouble. I think sometimes you read a book and you can tell exactly which great writer they idolize and they're trying to be.

And instead of being the best version of themselves, they're being like an okay version at best of somebody else. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Absolutely. Let's talk briefly about the criticism because as I said, it was telling you, I just finished writing this 9, 000 word article on the psychology of building an audience.

And I talked about the fact that there's more to it than just the work, but it also has a lot to do with your personality, emotional intelligence, social intelligence. But one of the things I wrote about was dealing with critics. And it funny enough, right? As I was doing that section, I made the mistake of going and looking at this article that I had written on medium that seemed to be getting a lot of comments.

And I actually read the comments and I was like, Oh, a bunch of people think I'm an asshole. But luckily it inspired me to say, Oh, you know what? What is the value in that? Nothing. I think my attitude towards critics has always been Seth Godin has this quote. He says anonymous feedback from people who I have no relationship with will cause me to do nothing but hide.

Okay. Yet, there are also critics worth listening

Jacob Sager Weinstein: to. Yeah, I think that's very true. And I to this day have conflicted feelings about Joyce Carolitz's comments on my stories. Cause you know, on the one hand, she's not wrong. It's I haven't gone back and looked at those stories for years because they're painfully bad.

They're some of the first things I wrote. I didn't know what I was doing. I wrote a lot of them at the last minute, frankly, before my thesis was due. She's not wrong. It's, I don't think she had the most constructive feedback in that reading her feedback the quotes around short stories.

It's okay what do I do next? I guess I write. Actual short stories instead of quote, it's like, how do you, what do you do with that? But she wasn't wrong. But I will also say that it this is one of the real luxuries of that kind of program is I had read her work. I had read Toni Morrison's work.

I'd read I had other teachers, Mary Morris, Russell Banks. I was able to read their work. So you know what they're reaching for. And you can say, okay, I would love to write the kind of things Toni Morrison writes. That's like the ultimate best example of the kind of thing I'd want to write.

So her feedback means a lot to me and Joyce Carolitz's work spoke to me less. So I could at least tell myself if, oh, we're just trying to do different things, even though, like I say, now I know she was right. Yeah. Let's do this. Let's shift gears and talk about the trajectory that has led you to of all things writing about memory.

Srini Rao: Because I know from reading your about page you've done all sorts of things like you've written stuff for television and now you're writing children's books. Like how in the world did you. Make it from being taught by Joyce Carol Oates to writing kids books.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah.

Okay. So I want as a writer and someone who loves narrative, I want to be able to tell you this as like a path where even though paths might be winding, they have a beginning and a middle and ends. I think in some ways, these things are more like lakes where there's a million different sources feeding into them.

So I'll try to tell you those different sources in. in the most coherent and linear way I can. Which is so when I was an undergraduate I wanted to be a great writer of some sort. And I thought maybe I wanted to be a great writer of fiction. I applied for various writings programs, graduate writing programs.

And this is actually maybe an area Where, as wonderful and supportive as my parents were, I think the cultural background led me slightly astray. That in traditional Jewish American culture, education is always a good thing. You can really never have too much education. And I didn't quite know what to do next after college, so a natural next step was to get another degree.

And I ended up going to the University of Southern California. They have a couple of different writing programs. I went to their least prestigious one, which is not their screenplay one, but one that was all different kinds of writing. And with hindsight, I think that was not I don't think I learned a whole lot there.

I think that the, once you have a certain basic understanding of writing, the best thing is just to keep writing and keep getting feedback. And you don't need the cost and the framework of a master's degree to do that. But. But, and I know, having listened to the podcast, I know you have some of the the same ambivalence about formal education for...

That's an understatement. Yeah. And this was, so I, but while I was in LA, it did get me out to Los Angeles. And while I was in LA, I got very interested in screenwriting and film. And I decided that, okay, I'm not, rather than be like the next great novelist, I'm going to be the next great filmmaker. And so I, my goal at that point was to be a writer director.

And I I did the thing you do in LA which is a good thing to do, which is I took any job I could get and through these. Complicated circumstances. I ended up being a writer's assistant for a Dennis Miller live on HBO. And then I from there got the chance to be a writer and I'm happy to drill down more into how that happened or I'm happy to yeah, I do want to hear that.

Srini Rao: Yeah. That's good. It's funny cause that's the job. I think I really wanted deep down. I always wanted to make television. Huh. So I definitely want to know. Okay. I'll tell you. And keep in mind this was 1997 when I moved out to LA and everything's changed since then, but maybe some things are still true.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: So I applied I contacted every contact I could and through my, through the university alumni association. I met somebody who had a contact at this little startup which was Second City Entertainment, which builds itself as the film and television branch of the famous Chicago comedy troupe.

And it was basically like two guys in a room making phone calls because they had gotten the rights to use Second City and they were trying to make something happen. So I was working for them and then they got this show on MSN back when Microsoft thought they were gonna, this is like Microsoft.

com. We're not an actual like TV network. Yeah, back when Microsoft thought they were gonna put shows on the net and then Dennis Miller got hired to do publicity for Microsoft and he came and hung out with us. And like I, I made him laugh. He saw that I was a fast typist. And later that day, I think I got a call from one of the producers on Dennis Miller Live saying that they were looking for a writer's assistant.

and asking if I'd do it. And at the time, I thought it was because I was so witty I had dazzled him. I realized later it was basically the typing speed more than anything that got me the job. But so yeah, so I and by the way I'm please feel free to interrupt if you have questions or if I'm going into too much detail on this.

But so I my job for my first few years there was I would sit in the room and because I was this great typist my job was to write down what all the jokes that people were pitching and ultimately sort of Dennis would choose them and edit them together and I would be at the keyboard doing that.

And so it was this to be fair to myself, it was partly the typing speed, but also partly the ability to follow the jokes and understand what the important actual elements of the joke were that needed to get written down. that went into that job. Part of that, I was able to pitch jokes to get them on the show and eventually became a writer on the show.

Okay, cool. Yeah. What I wonder is at the level of somebody like a Dennis Miller who is successful enough to have a show of his own, what is it that allows somebody to go from, say, being a behind the scenes writer like yourself to being the person in the spotlight? What enables achievement at that level?

Srini Rao: What did you learn about work ethic again, craft? I'd imagine there are probably very similar lessons to the ones you got from Tony Morris and Joyce Carol Oates.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah. So I think putting it together, the lesson again and again, as you do something, you see how it goes and you do more of it.

I think the way Dennis started off was the same way a lot of the other writers on the show started because a lot of them were standup comedians as well, which is you get up. You suck, nobody laughs, you keep going, you get like a faint chuckle, and you zoom in on that, and you just keep going. In a sense he had this amazing work ethic and drive to get to that point and just keep pushing through those early unfunny years.

What's interesting is that by the time, at a certain point there, he had structured the show so that he, it was a weekly show. We would broadcast live on Friday nights and four days of the week, he would basically be home hanging out with his family and hanging out with his kids. And we'd be sending them the stuff as we, he, we wrote it and he'd be doing work and making choices, but he had set up the machine so that it worked pretty well without him. And then he would come in and Fridays would be the day we'd really dive in and rewrite and polish the material with him.

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Yeah it's interesting to even think about anything that creative from the standpoint of setting up a machine. But as you probably know, from my own work, like I'm an obsessive person when it comes to building systems for how we get things done. At this point we refined the system so much.

Like I was. You literally talked, my IU engineer the other day said, I haven't talked to you in two and a half weeks, and yet it's all running like clockwork.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah, absolutely. And by I was on the show for six years and it had been on for a couple of years before then. And by the end of that it was exactly that kind of process where we had, we.

Tuesdays were the day that the writers would vote on the monologue jokes and send a certain number up to Dennis. Wednesdays we'd work on the rant, which was his monologue on a certain topic. And it was very, it was like working in a factory where certain days you had output of a certain kind that then went through a certain process to get that widget at the end, which was a show.

Yeah. I think that actually makes a perfect segue to talking about this whole idea of memory. But first, before we get to the memory thing, how in the world did you make the transition from Dennis Miller to children's books?

Ah okay, so actually there's less of a difference than you'd think.

And the reason is this, that one of the big lessons I learned, one of the big skills I picked up from Dennis was writing for a different voice than mine. Like Dennis, you probably can tell just talking to me. He's a very different person than me and so the, what I had to learn was how to see things from his point of view.

He was every time, ultimately we were writing for the TV audience, but we were all, he was the audience we were writing for initially. So I was thinking about the Venn diagram of what are the things he finds funny, what are the things he likes to talk about and where does that overlap with the stuff that I find funny and I like to talk about Because if I was just writing the stuff that I liked, obviously it wasn't gonna get on, gonna get on.

And if I was just writing the stuff that he liked, that I didn't care about, that would get, he'd pick up on that. He had this incredible BS detector and he would just have no interest in something that was this mechanical stuff you were churning out. 'cause you thought he liked it. So there was that, it was in that intersection.

That stuff actually worked. So when I'm writing for kids, it's basically the same, where if I'm just writing something that I don't care about because I think a kid will like it kids have great BS detectors too, and they will pick up on that. So I've got to find that stuff that I genuinely am excited to write about.

And I've got to write about it in a way that I genuinely enjoy writing about, but that's in that zone that kids are going to respond to as well. Let's talk about this whole idea

Srini Rao: of remembering everything. And I think where I want to start. Is the case for remembering things in a world where every damn piece of information we could possibly want is at our fingertips and a world where we're potentially looking at having that information even put into our brains so we don't even have to go look for it on Google, right?

What is the value of memory in a world like

Jacob Sager Weinstein: this? So I think there's the value for grown ups and there's the value for kids, and I'll start with kids just because that's where we all start which is we we do ask kids to remember a lot. That is still how a lot of school works, is you make them memorize stuff and you quiz them on it.

And I think there's, that can't be all there is, but I think that works as something. And this goes back to my own childhood where I wanted to be a doctor till I took a biology class and realized that you have to memorize stuff. And If I had been able to memorize that stuff the initial biology classes would just have been getting those facts in my head.

And once I had done that, I then could have gone on to synthesize them to do interesting things with them, but they've got to get in your head first. And if I just want to look up a fact, I can look it up on the internet, but if I want to synthesize it, if I want to make connections, if I want to build something.

I can't synthesize two facts that Google knows. I can only synthesize two facts that I know. So whether you're building that foundation as a kid or you're using it as a grownup, you're working on what you built as a grownup, that stuff has to be in your head in order to combine and create something new.

Srini Rao: Okay, so that's perfect. I think you perfectly gave me a perfect example for how to think about this. So I know there are things that I want to remember. That are of great importance to me now, obviously, I want to remember the stuff from the books that I read. I want to remember the stuff from the many thousands of conversations that I've had.

And right now I'm luckily I can have, I have enough referential memory of the conversations I had that I can actually pull threads back to things that are just stuck in my head from stories that people have told me on the podcast and weave them into my work. Let's look at those two things as practical examples because you know we consume an insane amount of content and yet I think we don't remember a good amount of what we consume.

So much so that I remember I think two years ago when I was working my old business partner he was a guest on the show and he offered up a free consulting session for anybody who was listening and a guy booked a call with him and by the time they got on the call he didn't even remember why he had booked the call.

Oh no. And so I think that's where I want to start let's look at that because I think those are two very practical examples for people listening, like remembering the things that we read and even remembering things that we hear.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Yeah. Okay. So I would say that the, so in the book I talk about what I call the rules of memory and the first rule of memory is the easiest way to remember something is to remember something easy.

And I know that sounds tautological, but most memory tricks are ways of converting something that's hard, that's a number, a date, something abstract, into something that we more naturally remember. The most common of those tricks, actually the one that everybody knows, the mnemonic trick that everyone knows so well that we forget it's a mnemonic trick, is the alphabet song, right?

Because when you're a kid and you have to learn 26 arbitrary names for 26 arbitrary squiggles in a totally arbitrary order, that's a really hard thing to remember. Songs, tunes, melodies, those are easier things to remember because they have their own inner logic that we intuitively get. So we convert this hard thing to remember, these names for these squiggles.

into something easy, which is this melody. A lot of the memory tricks are, so a lot of mnemonics are rhymes, songs, things like that. Now, when you're reading a book, you probably are not going to want to make a song for every single thing you read. So what I think, what I find useful are two techniques that I use to remember things like books or facts from books.

The most famous is the mind palace or the memory palace or the method of loci, if you want the fancy name. And that's because something that people tend to remember very easily is locations. So you picture a place that you know well, and you imagine the things you want to remember interacting with different locations in that.

And then when you imagine yourself back in that place, you naturally imagine the sort of the crazy visual interactions that you've imagined. And so if you are reading a book, one possible thing is to have a default location for all the things you want to remember from a book. So it could be your study or whatever.

And as you're reading the book, you imagine yourself arranging if you can, if they lend themselves easily to visual representation. around the room. The thing is that will get it into your memory for the short term, but if you're going to get it in there for the long term, you need some method of spaced repetition.

And I know this is something that, that some of your guests have talked about before but appropriately enough, I think it bears repetition, which is just that if you remember something it will fade away. There's something called the curve of forgetting, which is the rate at which we forget.

And roughly on the average, I've heard it said we forget about 75 percent of something within 24 hours. But if you review it the next day, say, then you stretch out the curve. So now maybe it'll take you three days to forget 75%. So three days later, you review it, and even the stuff you've forgotten, just by reviewing it, you're stretching out the curve.

So I, I have an app. I use Anki on my phone. You can use any flashcard app you want. You want to get an app that will do that calculation for you, that will remember how recently you've studied something and then just bring it back up to you in the next couple of days. So I used to do this all the time is I'd read something in a book and I'd say, I've got to remember that.

And I wouldn't. So I've now forced myself to get in the habit of actually putting it. Into of making a flashcard for it and just regularly reviewing it. And I feel like that seems like such an obvious thing to say to just review it regularly, but it makes such a difference. And that space repetition is such an efficient way of

Srini Rao: doing it.

It's funny because I find myself revisiting books that I've read like right now I have Robert Greene's mastery, which is one of those books that's just so dense and so deep that you and every time I do it, I find things that I know I underline highlighted. It was like, wow, I don't even remember reading that.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: And it feels well real. I, at least when I do something like that, I feel like an idiot because I'm like, this was important enough to me that I underlined it and I've forgotten it. Yeah. But that's how memory works is that you've, you're, you've evolved that your brain, one of the ways you show your brain that something is important is you review it again after you've forgotten it.

And just the act of reviewing it and in a sense, feeling like an idiot and trying to remember it and failing it primes your brain. to know that this is something important and worth storing for longer the next time. So as, as silly as you might feel, that's part of the process. And it's, if it's. It's a good thing to do.

Srini Rao: It's funny when you're talking about memory palaces. I remember when I first heard that concept was when I read Josh Forrest book, the moonwalking with Einstein book, and we had just moved to Boulder. And I remember roommates like, how the hell do you remember every single person's name here when we've been here like two or three times?

And I like, I was like, I remember the memory palace thing. There's this guy, Nate. I was like they works at night. This girl, Alison is from Austin. Like everyone. So it was like a combination of mnemonics and memory palaces all in one. But, let's actually talk about that because I think that's another common experience people have is they don't remember names or faces.

Yeah. And that I will be honest. This is part of my fear in writing a book on memory is that for the rest of my life, every time I forget something, people are going to be like, but you're the guy who wrote the book on memory and names are really hard for me. because a lot of techniques that I talk about require a certain amount of time and attention to use.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: And when you're meeting somebody, you can't be like, okay, great. Nice to meet you. I'm just going to walk and stand in that corner for 30 seconds and put your details in my mind palace. Like they, you will never meet them again if you do that. But there are a couple of techniques you can use.

And if you have a moment before you meet them, you can prime your memory. to be ready to remember them by asking yourself certain questions about them. So this is a technique that Ed Cook who is one of the world memory masters uses. I don't know if he came up with it, but I learned it from reading something he wrote, which is you ask yourself some ridiculous questions.

You say, if this person was a superhero, What would their power be? If they were a were creature, what creature would they trade into? It, any question you want to ask that feels memorable and striking to you, again, you're priming your memory. You're creating almost a space in your mind so that when you learn their name, it's just that much more likely to stick.

I also it's an old one. This is one of the oldest memory tracks that, that there is. You just repeat their name a lot. And I sometimes feel repeated enough that I feel like an idiot. But I feel like less of an idiot if I remember their name. And by the way, the other thing that's again, possibly embarrassing to admit but I'm going to open up to it.

I, in Anki, in my flashcards, I put the names and faces of people I've met. If I possibly can I don't quite have the nerve to ask to take a photo, but if I'm Facebook friends or whatever, I'll put it in and I review it. And so part of my daily flashcard review is going over the names and faces of people I've met.

And. It really, it makes a difference. I feel like of all the memory techniques, if I'm going to be evangelical about one, I do feel like spaced repetition is the one. So let's

Srini Rao: talk about mediums of expression because I think part of the reason I actually don't like audio content is because I have a hard time remembering what I hear and read.

So for example, I'll give you an example. Sometimes I'll listen to an audio book and in fact, perfect example, I think Probably 10, 9, 10 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's books. Like I had to listen to the audio books of Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink or whatever the trilogy.

And I'd never actually read the physical books until just this year. I was like, okay, you know what? These were really important ideas. They had a huge impact on how I thought about building an audience. I want to revisit them. And. A part of it was that I just found when I read physical books, even more so than digital books, the retention level was completely different.

So what impact does the format of whatever you're consuming or whatever you want to remember actually have on your ability to remember it? So this gets a little bit into what I call the second rule of memory, which is that everybody's brain is different. So Some, it's going to vary from person to person.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Some people absorb things better different ways. And I have to be honest that if you look at the actual science about people who say they are visual learners versus aural learners, there's not a lot of evidence that people really are as dependent on the sense on whether it's sight or sound as they think they are.

But it will be different for different people. I know that for me, I also absorb things better visually, mainly because when I'm listening to something in audio form, if my mind wanders, that information is gone forever. Whereas on the page, I can go back and review it. And so if I can jump back, one other thing that I want to mention about remembering stuff you've read, and this is relevant because it's something that's easier to do with stuff on the page.

So it's tempting when you're trying to learn something to just keep rereading it, to review it in that sense. But you fix things much more firmly and more long term in your brain by actually testing yourself. So if there's an idea in the book that you want to retain, and you just reread it. You will get it in your short term memory very effectively by rereading it again and again.

But if you want to get it in your long term memory, it is much more effective to cover the page and test yourself on it. And force yourself to bring it out of your brain as well as putting it in. And that's something that is much easier to do on the page, obviously. I suppose if you're listening in an audio format, actually, here's a tip for you.

If you're listening in audio format, try pausing it every once in a while and just asking yourself, what did they just say? What were the ideas I want to keep? And if you're able to do that, I suspect you may find audio becomes maybe not as effective as reading for you, but certainly more effective than it was.

Okay,

Srini Rao: that's interesting. So that kind of raises my next question of digital versus analog. Because I know I've read books where people have done research about this where I think it was a woman named Marianne Wolfe who talked about the reading brain and how the way we read on screens is really different.

Then the way that we read say in a physical book, like apparently what the eyes do is they create this F pattern. And so we scan more than we read. And I know this from one of the books that I've like literally torn have your dog eared and marked up more than any of my other books is Danny Shapiro's book still writing.

And I remember when I actually talked to her about it she and I were talking about this and almost every writer that I look up to swears by physical books. People like Ryan Holliday people like Amber Ray, they almost all work with physical notebooks and they read physical books.

But to your point, like I, I don't necessarily think one is wrong or right. That's for me, my preference, but I wonder what the impact is on retention, whether there's digital or analog. So as you said, there, there have been studies that seem to show that the physical books work better.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: And what I would add to that is my semi scientific theory about why that is, is there's a concept called elaboration. And that's the idea that memories, you can remember things better by adding on to them. So if you just try to remember a fact. that can sometimes be hard. But if you remember where you were, who told it to you, what the story behind it was, it's much more likely to stick.

It has that much many, there are that many more hooks on the information to hook into something that's already in your brain. to help you retain it. So when you read a physical book, even if you're not conscious of it, there are a whole lot of other things that are coming into your brain along with the information.

There's how far in that book you are, which you can see in a way that you can't on a Kindle. There's where on the page it is. There's the physical feel of the book. And my theory is that all those things act as a form of elaboration. They create more hooks for the information to stay in your brain. I.

I think that you can, again, simulate that if you're reading electronically and you find that harder by stopping occasionally and thinking about how those facts integrate with things that you already know, that you've read in that book or learned elsewhere. Inevitably, I do think there's going to be something about a physical book that just, that, that floods your senses a little bit more.

And therefore it gives you that much more elaboration on any given fact. All

Srini Rao: right, cool. Let's talk about the more advanced stuff, which for the most part I'm not sure I'll have any practical use for memorizing a deck of cards or ridiculously long string of numbers, other than to impress the shit out of my friends and family and make them think I'm some sort of savant, but I do want to know how to do it because I remember even reading about memorizing a deck of cards in Kel Newport's book, deep work.

And I thought to myself, why the hell would anybody spend their time doing this? And I realized he's wow, this is actually a really great exercise to train your ability to focus. So let's do the deck of cards example, because I am actually planning on doing that. I've been meaning to order a deck of cards, but the other one I would think of I just finished reading Erno Rubik's book, the Rubik's Cube guy.

And that's another one that I'm like, okay, for the life of me, I've never been able to solve the damn thing. And even when I watch YouTube tutorials, I still can't solve it. And he actually discourages people. And he encourages them to just spend as much time as you can with it. As

Jacob Sager Weinstein: opposed to learning a formula for it.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Instead of going to YouTube, like he's if you really want to learn how to do it the right way, he said, learn it. He said, because the, there's something about, I don't remember the exact details, but he actually discouraged the idea of going to YouTube to find tutorials, to do it as fast as you can.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Oh, that's really interesting. So yeah, so should I dive into how the card memorizing works? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Okay. So this gets back to that first rule that the easiest way to remember something is to remember something easy and cards are pretty abstract thing, right?

It's like this arbitrary symbol that is a diamond shape or whatever the hell a spade is or a club and a number, which is in itself abstract. So the key is to take each card and convert it to something that is easier to remember. And for most people are easier to remember than cards. The most effective systems I found for memorizing cards start by converting 52 cards into 52 distinct people.

So Dominic O'Brien, who was a memory champion, his method was just pretty much arbitrarily, he would take each card and just choose a person. And sometimes it's somehow the person that card reminded him of, sometimes it wasn't. And he would, through brute force, remember initially what person each card represented.

There's the Ed Cook method. Which I like more, which is where first you come up with a framework. So diamonds, there's 13 diamonds, those are going to be 13 rich people. For obvious reasons, diamonds symbolize wealth. 13 hearts are going to be 13 beloved people. 13 clubs are going to be 13 strong or violent people because a club is a weapon.

And then because a spade is just a weird, funny symbol, those are going to be 13 funny people. So by narrowing it down a little bit, you've actually made it easier to choose those people and also ultimately easier to remember them because if you get stuck on what the queen of spades is, you can remember, okay, the queen of spades is a funny person.

You then narrow it down further by saying the odd numbers are women and the even numbers are, I'm sorry, the odd numbers are men and the even numbers are women. And you remember that by saying that the guys were odd, but the women got even. And then, and I don't know how much you want me to go into this.

There's a system where you should break it down even further. So like the ones and twos are athletes, the threes and fours are actors. And then you've got this elaborate system. And at this point, I think most of your listeners are thinking this, how is this easier than just memorizing a deck? But the thing with a lot of these memory techniques is there's a certain investment you put in upfront and that it saves you a huge amount of effort down the road.

So if you want to memorize cards and you spend a day or two days coming up with a system and memorizing what person each card represents, It then becomes so much easier to remember a card down the road because once you've done that, then you take any route you know well, so now we're back to the Mind Palace, and you imagine yourself walking through this route, and if the first card is the Nine of Spades, so for me that's Winston Churchill, who is a funny historical figure You picture Winston Churchill at this place.

So I'm picturing Winston Churchill sitting in the bathtub of my flat. Then you go to the next place. And that's that's the Jack of Hearts. And that's the Pope. So the Pope is sitting in my sink, brushing his teeth. And you've got suddenly, instead of this abstract thing, like cards, You now have this crazy sequence of vivid, visceral, visual things involving faces that you know well.

And then to retrieve that deck, you just picture yourself walking through that route once again. And so even for those of you listeners who don't give a damn about memorizing cards, I would just say, if there are weird, abstract things that you want to remember in your life, I would ask yourself, okay, how can I link these things To stuff that's easier to remember.

What mnemonic system can I come up with that will make this crazy abstract difficult thing into something that is vivid and visual.

Srini Rao: So I have two final questions for you. I think earlier at the very beginning of our conversation, You mentioned the fact that the ability to have all this stuff in memory allows you to connect dots and synthesize in a way that you couldn't otherwise.

So what kind of impact does something like this end up having on your creative output? Like I cause I realized just in talking to you and I've written about this, I'm sure 90 percent of the things that I write about come from the conversations I have with people on the podcast or from the books that I read.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: So this is especially I think that's true of all authors. I think that all creative people, that what you create has to come from your personal experience. As a children's author, a lot of what I do is try to remember what it was like to be a kid. And because I wasn't using these memory systems when I was a kid, I can't necessarily recall what I was doing at age eight on a certain day.

But I can observe my own kids and my own life with them. And so I think being able one of the things I go into in the book is, which is probably more useful than cards, is the system for remembering things that happen to you on a specific date. And so at the end of every day, I try to come up with some sort of positive memory from the day that I'm going to use the system to retain, I hope forever.

And by the way, even if you don't care about memory systems, I definitely endorse the exercise of coming up with a positive memory from the day and just writing it down. But so because I'm often doing this with things that happen with my kids things that are part of the family life, it's then becoming this.

this background source of material that I can draw on at any point in the future, I hope to make something fictional out of.

Srini Rao: Wow. This has been absolutely amazing and filled with all sorts of really cool insights. So I want to finish with my final question, which I know you've heard me ask, what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Jacob Sager Weinstein: So here's what I think. I think that we talk about somebody's point of view or perspective in the singular. I think we actually all have multiple points of view, multiple perspectives that we can access. Sometimes we can access multiple ones, sometimes depending on our mood, we're limited to them.

And I think even if any one perspective we have is something that somebody else in the world might have, I think our particular combination of perspectives is as distinct as a fingerprint. And so I think what makes somebody distinctive. is that combination of perspectives of ways of looking at the world that define them in a way that's different from everybody else's combination.

Srini Rao: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you your work, your book, and everything else that you're up to? You can go to jacobsakerweinstein. com, I'm jacobsw on Twitter, and you can just get my book, How to Remember Anything, sorry, How to Remember Everything at, boy, the most embarrassing thing in the world is to forget the name of my book on memory.

Jacob Sager Weinstein: Now I know one more thing I have to store in my system and review with spaced repetition. You can find my book, How to Remember Everything, at any store, any bookstore near you. Awesome.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, We will wrap the show with that.