Pints With Aquinas - How to Build a Memory Palace! w/ Dr. Kevin Vost

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ Dr. Kevin Vost is a psychologist, and Aquinas, Stoics, and memory expert. Check out his books below! Hallow (Three Months FREE!): https://hallow.com/mattfradd Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/matt Dr. Vost's Books!: https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/memorize-the-faith https://shop.catholic.com/memorize-the-reasons-defending-the-faith-with-the-catholic-art-of-memory/ https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/?s=memorize+the+mass https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/memorizelatinmass/ https://www.angelicopress.org/memorize-the-stoics-kevin-vost

Did you know that I'm now hosting a live daily podcast called Morning Coffee? Every morning at 8.30am you can join me and dozens of other early birds for a caffeinated conversation about theology, philosophy, and how to grow in your relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. The podcasts are completely free to watch. All you have to do is sign up on Locals by clicking the link in the description below. Hope to see you there. That's good. It's great to have you.

Hey, it's my pleasure to be here, man. Yes, yes, yes. So thanks for bringing in all these books. You've written a ton of stuff on memory, memory palaces, that sort of thing. For those of for those who aren't familiar with your work, who are you? And tell us about the study you've done about this stuff. Sure. Just for to condense an over 60-long story into just a couple of minutes. That's a long-form discussion. You can talk for an hour on this if you want.

Okay, here we go. I'll give a real short version if we want to elaborate anything. We can if it works out. But just basically, I was pretty much born and raised a Catholic. Went to Catholic grade school, Catholic high school. We went to mass every Sunday and breakfast after that. But I will say that we didn't really talk about Christ or the faith at home. And I remember we didn't even have a Bible until I had to write a paper for a religion class in high school,

so we had to go down to the store and buy one. But overall, all was good. In my late teens, my other, my lifelong passion has been for weightlifting since the second grade. Since the second grade? How did you get into it? Well, I think it was, it might have been the 1968 Olympics and I saw a weightlifter on TV. Now before that, I was a Superman nut. So I just loved this idea of power and strength that I saw and I eventually realized well, I can't be Superman, but I saw as a weightlifter on TV. thought, well, maybe I can be like that. So yeah, actually I had dad buy me a barbell set

in second grade. And then about five or six years later, I started training by my teens. I was living and breathing it. I was working at a gym, you know, part time. And I read these muscle magazines every month. And there was this top bodybuilder at the time, a guy named Mike Menser. And he's the heir apparent to Arnold Schwarzenegger at that time. They thought he was going to be the

guy to take over, but it didn't work out quite that way. But anyway, he was the first guy to win the mystery universe with a perfect score. And I read his stuff, I went to a couple of his live seminars, and he was a really brilliant guy. And some of his training methods I still use to this day, 40 some years later. But he also liked to dabble in philosophy. So through him, I was led to read people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. Later I read people like Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and the American psychologist Albert Ellis. So anyway, by my late teens, I was basically robbed of my faith. I considered myself an atheist at that time because I encountered arguments against God,

the idea that God was self-contradictory or unnecessary. And I had no clue how to answer those despite my Catholic upbringing. So anyway, for the next 25 years or so, I considered myself an atheist. In the meanwhile, I went to work doing disability work for Social Security Disability, got married, we had two young boys, I later got a doctorate in clinical psychology and did college teaching part-time in psychology. By my early 40s, through a series of events, I read St. Thomas Aquinas for the first time, the Summa

Theologica, and you know, I was totally wowed. The blinders came off, and I realized all those arguments that led me away from God. I thought, boy, Thomas has answered these 700 and some years ago, borrowing from people who lived long before he did, and I didn't have a clue, you know. But anyway, I read Thomas, and I came back to the faith. That was back in 2004. But even when I was away, my area of specialization in psychology was memory. My master's thesis was called Memory Strategy Instruction and the Internalization of Higher Psychological Processes

in Adolescence. And this is just the title. That was just the title. Yeah, I can still remember it. That was 1990. But then my doctoral work was at an Alzheimer's center. So I'm looking at the other end of life now. I'm testing people who are losing their memories, measuring their various mental abilities and people with other kinds of brain

damage, normal research volunteers who came in to see like what happens to your memory and other thinking abilities as you get older. So I was really focused on memory there and even did a little bit of rehab work trying to improve the memory of patients with not with Alzheimer's but with other kind of brain problems. So anyway, memory was my specialty. When I came back to the church in 2004, I remembered Thomas Aquinas is a key figure in the history of these very memory methods I specialized in. And I knew that because I came across it when I was away from the church.

So anyway, to put things to a time up here, when I came back to church in 2004, I remembered that Thomas was such a key figure in memory, but I'd never seen it mentioned in Catholic books. So I thought, wow, I wonder if I could put a book together that would use Thomas's methods. Now his teacher, St. Albert the Great, also wrote extensively about them, but I'll put a book together that uses their

methods to help us memorize key tenets of the faith, like from the Ten Commandments to all the books of the Bible and that, and the people at the Sophia Institute Press were willing to take a risk on a very strange book that became to be called Memorize the Faith, but it turned out very well. And since that time, I've since retired from full-time work. I write a lot of books for various Catholic publishers, and most of them in one way or another are either directly deal with Thomas Aquinas' work or they're inspired by it in some way.

And some of them focus specifically on memory. And a lot of people say I either have a good memory or a bad memory, or they'll say, you know, just like they say I'm good with names or I'm bad with faces or something like that. Is that the case? Are people just hopeless with memorizing and there's no chance of them getting better at memorization or is there things people can do

to actually surprise themselves? Well, that question could not be more spot on because when I give live talks on memory, that's the one thing I'll ask the audience. I did this just last Saturday with some young kids going through confirmation with their sponsors and their parents. I said who here has a good memory? And if there's kids and adults it's almost most of the kids are gonna raise their hand. Almost no adults do you know. But then I say well it's

kind of a trick question because memory really isn't something that you just have that's just good or just bad. We all have inborn natural potentials for memory, but there are these specialized techniques out there that even the oldest book we have on these memory methods from about 80 BC says they're designed to make a good memory better and a bad memory not so bad. So right, so memory is something that believe it or not, many of us can probably improve our memories to an extent that we wouldn't have imagined before. It's crazy that when I was a kid I probably knew 20 phone numbers. Today I know my wife's

and mine. So has modern technology kind of eroded the way we think and remember things? Yeah, yes I think so. And even with phone numbers, you know, I know exactly what you mean. Like for certain numbers I would call all the time, you know, we'd have a, this is when we had desk phones at my job, but we had a speed dial, you know.

And certain ones you'd pre-program. Okay, there's my wife, you know. So I hit one, okay, I'm gonna talk to Cathy. And then somehow that got messed up and like, well, what's her actual number? Yeah, I don't remember the real thing. I just know which one of these to push So yeah that old dictum of use it or lose it, you know

It does apply to our abilities like memory and yeah If we're distracted if we're not used to taking the time to really concentrate and dig deep into things we can easily Forget things that we used to know or find it hard to memorize new things that we might find worth memorizing. So where does Thomas Aquinas talk about memory or memory techniques? Yeah, there's at least, let's see, at least three to four places I can think of, and this is what's really cool because St. Albert the Great and Thomas both did that. They took writings from Aristotle that

talked about the nature of memory in his books like On the Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence, and they integrated it with some writings from Cicero and others on these specialized memory improvement techniques, and they kind of showed how they meshed together. But along that first line there with Aristotle, in his commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul and on Memory and Reminiscence, he talks a bit about the nature of human memory, how it operates and how, you know, like the cognitive model of human thought, how it starts with the evidence from our external senses, how we have these internal senses of imagination, common sense, memory, and something called the estimative sense and so on.

So he talks about the nature of memory when he sense, memory, and something called the estimative sense and so on. So he talks about the nature of memory when he comments on Aristotle. And then in the Summa, the first part's question 78 and 79, he goes over some of this material. What is your nature? I remember now. Yeah, of human cognition, you know, our sensation, our memory, our intellect,

and there he addresses questions like, you know, is memory just part of the sensitive soul that we share with animals, or in what ways is it a part of the intellectual soul, what's unique about human beings? So he discusses some of those issues there. But the main one where he really talks about the methods is almost smack dab in the middle of the summa. It's the second part of the second part, the 49th question, the first article, which is entitled, Whether Memory is a Part of Prudence. And that is where Thomas argues, yes, memory is actually something that we need to have if we're going to really fully exercise prudence or practical wisdom.

And that's where he gives us like three objections in his response and his answer on the specific method of memory that I share in my books. Is this the place where he uses that term unwanted? Yeah, the unwanted earth. Talk about that. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.

One thing I love about Thomas too is, you know, they're the first, the inventor of these memory methods is said to be Simonides, an ancient Greek from about 500 BC. And then the oldest Latin sources that we still have that are extant are from Cicero and other ancient folks from the first century BC. But now we jump up to the 1200s, the 13th century, and we have great Albert the Great going over this stuff, writing a commentary on our oldest memory books

line by line. Of course, he's teaching Thomas, and sometimes I like to think, St. Albert the Great's mind is like this incredible searchlight. He's the patron saint to scientists. He wants to know about everything. And I see Thomas' intellect sometimes

as like a laser beam. He has a super broad range, but when he latches a hole to something, boom, he penetrates it. So anyway, with all this background, Thomas kind of boils down this method to four main points. Just real quickly, these four main points, is this kind of what people mean when they talk about the memory palace or is this somehow different?

It is. It is. It is fundamental to the memory palace, points number one and two. Wow. But I'll start with three and four. Sure. And the reason is that we already know this. Because Thomas says there's four things a person needs to do to perfect their memory. And just to heighten the drama on the first two that aren't as familiar. Three is just that one,

we need to pay attention. We need to concentrate. We need to focus our minds. You mentioned earlier about our modern world. There's so many distractions. So yeah, if we want to employ a memory palace or any kind of memory technique, we want to make sure we're focused and concentrated. And if I can elaborate just a bit, for one year during my doctoral training, every Wednesday morning I go over to an inpatient psychiatric ward and I would test depressed inpatients with a cognitive battery that's designed to detect Alzheimer's dementia because my mentor there thought you know many depressed people complain of memory problems how does their memory compare to people with actual dementia and when I tested these

people almost without fail they say yeah my memory shot I don't have a memory anymore but when we gave them these tests that required that they focus, you know, I'm sitting there right across and then we repeat things multiple times. Once you've got them to pay attention, the depressed patient's memory was actually normal in almost every case. Even some people who have had the electroshock ECT treatment in the past, unless it was in the recent past. But so anyway, if you're going to memorize something, concentration is like the funnel, you know, and if you miss it there, if you don't concentrate, the memory, it never forms

a memory, it doesn't get stored, you can't bring it back. So anyway, so the third point was concentration, then repetition, something we already know, you know, anytime you want to study something, chances are you're not going to get it the first time, you want to rehearse and repeat and drill yourself. What does it mean to concentrate? I mean, I know what that word means superficially, but when you say to concentrate on something, what does that look like? What does that mean? Yeah, well here it's one thing, and Thomas uses some different wording there, in one translation says we should be anxious about it, which means that we should consider this

as something important I see, you know, so we're just gonna say this is worth paying attention to and I want to I want to maybe I'm gonna Turn off the television right now. Yeah Some of the ancient books I'm here they talk about like going to a quiet place or even doing it in the evening So you're not distracted. So you just want to set up that case Ideally in your external circumstances if you can get to a quiet place. Myself, I'll either have quiet or I'll put like classical music or Gregorian chant very faintly in the background, just establish that mood of solitude and solicitude, careful focus. So that is central, that's a good question.

So people will need to find ways to make things most conducive for them to really focus and concentrate. Okay. So yeah, so that's a first. So three and then I think you said four was to repetitive. I mean, this is one of the reasons like it's funny that you say we've got all these ancient texts of people talking about how to perfect our memory. I don't know who's doing that today or who even cares. Like why does it even matter?

Everything is right here on Google. It's actually one of my great frustrations is if I'm having a chat with somebody and they'll say, who won the last Super Bowl, who won the last Olympics, rather than enjoying that back and forth and trying to figure it out, someone invariably picks up their phone and figures it out right away and shortcuts that what could have been an enjoyable back and forth. Oh exactly, I love that point because one example I give sometimes, there's kind of a thought experiment to illustrate this point, is let's imagine you had some kind of a medical

surgery. So, who do you want to go to? One choice is going to be the world's greatest IT genius. The operating room is going to be surrounded by the world's most powerful supercomputers. So virtually all of medical knowledge and history is at this man's fingertips Or do you want to be operated on the local surgeon at the hospital down the street? Now he doesn't know nearly so much He can't access so much information, but he does have a lot of knowledge about surgery and it's in his own head

In fact, it's even in his own fingertips. So I'm saying there are certain things that are worth knowing on our own inside our own heads. Yeah, because to think it's like it's all here on this little computer in my phone, it's almost like saying I'm going to walk into the Trinity College Library in Dublin surrounded by all these books. Now all of a sudden I'm the world's most knowledgeable man because look at all this knowledge I'm surrounded with. That it's a whole different story, you know, having it there and then having some of it because we can't know everything, but having the important stuff in mind, which can include your knowledge of where to go

to dig deeper for things that you can't keep, you know, in your head all at one time. So, good point there. And the idea of repetition then we know to, you know, we all know that from study. And Thomas being Thomas, I just came across recently in one of his commentaries on Aristotle where he says, when he talks about that, he says, because multiple causes fortifies effects, kind of his, you know, cause and effect. Yeah, what does that mean? Multiple causes.

He's saying like, you know, he's trying to... Different ways to come at the thing? Yeah, and like every time you repeat something, you're trying to remember. You're trying to set up a cause, this is gonna this is gonna emblaze this in my memory. The effect is I'm gonna now have this memory. So Thomas is saying the more you multiply those causes the more time you do it. You know and like we all know this like as athletes or something if you want to learn how to swing a baseball bat or a golf club or whatever you know you're gonna do that multiple times. The multiple practices really richly embeds that to the point where hopefully it becomes automatic.

And I will say too, with these memory palace techniques, that is an eventual goal. They take a lot of work at first to learn how to do it and put them together, but once you do, it becomes nearly automatic. So anyway, I know I've gone on a great length about the two things we already know, I mean, to focus and concentrate

and then to Repeat or rehearse and those come into play even if you're using the memory palace techniques, you still need to do that but the first two, okay let's see the first is where yeah, you mentioned in the Famous english translation of the summa. He uses the phrase you need to make unwanted images And I looked in the original latin too and he uses the phrase, you need to make unwanted images. And I looked in the original Latin too, and he uses the word miramar, things that are marvels, things that are, wow, that's unusual.

So basically it means, Thomas says, even if you want to remember spiritual or abstract material, he says, Furt, turn it into something corporeal, something physical, something you can actually see in your mind's eye, he said because that's how our minds operate. We start with the data from our senses and then we move it up into the intellect. So he said sometimes intellectual concepts are held much more easily if we turn them

into something physical, concrete. Now as far as the unwanted part. By the way, we're talking about UNWONTED, not ANTED. That's right. That's right. So, yeah, so we're really talking about a lot of the writings which say make the images strange, unusual, exaggerated, crazy, comic book-like, funny, you know. You want to make these images something out of the ordinary. And why is that? Well, Thomas says, you know, stuff that's ordinary, we go through our lives and see all kinds of stimuli all day long, we forget most of it.

What really draws our attention is what's strange and unusual. So he said, we need to purposely do this when we make our memory images so they'll stand out. You know, something, hey, that's something you don't see every day, so you're more likely to remember it. So yeah, so that forms this idea of using images,

mental images, and of course being Thomas, he goes back to Aristotle and talks about the way we don't think without images, these fan, phantasms, these images of light, and that visual imagery is particularly strong, it goes into all that. Okay, so the one was the images and then two, this is where the palace really most directly comes in. Number two is he says, what you're going to remember you need to arrange in a particular order. You need to organize this material because one thing will lead to the other. And the most ancient method out there, this first ancient Latin memory book called the ad herennium, it just means to some guy named Herennius and for centuries it was attributed to Cicero.

Now even if you now like you go to the Loeb Classical Library, it'll say Cicero, but scholars have figured for a long time now he probably didn't write it because of some internal things in there, but is totally consistent with other of his writings where he does talk about this method, his on the order. But anyway, so that book, the first example it gives is using the parts of a house. And in my first memory book I do that. I guide us through like an imaginary house with certain parts, a front door, a doormat, and so on.

Because we all know houses as part of our everyday experience, so that's something we know we're familiar with. But then we're gonna use these parts of a house and place these strange and odd images on top of them, and that's going to be the gist of the method. So if I can repeat briefly, the four things are these wacky, unwanted images, a system of orderly arrangement, we're going to concentrate as we do this, and we're going to rehearse

it, repeat it. Because repetition is the mother of memory, is another old classic phrase that has a lot of truth to it. All right, could you give us an example? I thought it'd be fun if we, maybe you tried to help me build part of a memory palace on the spot to see if I could then say it back to you. Oh hey, I'd be happy to do that. All right, so this is also, it requires another internal sense of imagination. Okay. So I invite you, Matt, and everyone who might be watching, listening, turn your powers of

imagination and concentration on high. I want you to join me at my own house in central Illinois. Okay. It is a sprawling ranch house surrounded by some mature maple and oak trees. Am I allowed to ask what I'm memorizing first, or are you getting to that? Well, how about, well, you know, it's actually better if you know first, it's easier. If you, okay.

If you know first, but sometimes just to add to the suspense and to make it a little more difficult. I won't reveal it until the end. All right. Okay, so you come into my front door. All right. My front door opens up Mm-hmm, you're blinded by this light this blinding light is there like what is that and you hear this resounding crash?

Okay, so there's my front door. That's number one. Uh-huh. You think it boy. What kind of house is this guy have? so Next you step in on my doormat That's number two and while you're on my doormat. That's number two. And while you're on my doormat, you hear this noise, you realize, you're hearing all this cursing and cussing.

You realize it's coming from the doormat, it's got a mouth, you know? You thought, wow, well maybe I'm gonna kinda try to stand on his lips and stop that, but for some reason I've got a cursing doormat. Number two. All right. Right? Number three. Next to my front door is a glass panel

and he looks out into the front yard and you just glance out there and you say wow look at that I didn't realize that's the most beautiful day I've ever seen it's all sunny and the sky is blue. So number three there's this glorious beautiful day that you see. Now we're're back in the entrance way, the foyer. Number four. Up on the wall is a portrait, and it is a portrait of not mine, but your own parents. Very strange house. Yeah, what's this guy doing with mom and dad up there? But there's number four. There's your parents. Now, we're going to do ten if that's all right. Number five, over on the side wall here

of the foyer for some reason is a gun rack. Big life. What am I gonna do with a gun rack? Wayne's World reference. Excellent. All right. Yeah, we'll find out what we're gonna do with it. But the gun rack also has to have a padlock on it. Okay. So a padlocked gun rack is number five. Got it. Now, number six is just the center of the foyer. Okay. And this is kind of an unusual one. You see some guy there and he's acting very secretive.

It's a secretive adult. He's kind of trying to hide his face with his collar. Mm hmm. But number six is the secretive adult. Mm hmm. Number seven is real easy. You look over your head and there's a chandelier, but it's made of solid steel. There's no glass, just pure steel chandelier. Okay. All right, and that was seven. Number eight, we're over on the other wall now of the entranceway and

there's a mirror on it. And when you look in there, you see your own face, but you know this house is kind of weird. So it's not just your face. It's all distorted like one of those circus houses of mirrors where you're really skinny or really huge or something. So there's this false distorted image in that mirror number eight.

Now we're almost finished. Under that mirror is a little cushioned bench. And who should be sitting there but your next-door neighbor's wife? Well what if your next string doesn't have a wife or you don't have an extra neighbor? It doesn't matter. We're just gonna imagine that person, right? And then number ten. Finally number ten, there are some little drawers underneath the cushion of that bench and you pull those open and out pop all these wrapped presents all these packages

Presence pop out for number 10. Got it. Okay now in you let me know Matt. You remember repetitions the mother of memory Yes, so I usually recommend that we do these or do we need to do that or what's your preference? I think I've got it. I may not and we'll find out So you may say I them back to you or? Well, sure. Sure. No. What did you want?

Okay. Yeah, we can do it that way or I can say number one. And then I'll say it back to you. Okay. So number one, open the door, blinding light, crash. Excellent. Then number two. Weird Matt with lips, uttering profanities.

There you go. I thought you were going to say weird Matt. I thought. What's that? That's pints with a coin. Weird Matt with lips uttering profanities You go Weird Matt, I thought was that that's pints with a coin. Yes, exactly Then number three is the panel of glass looking over a beautiful day or seeing a beautiful day. That's right Mm-hmm number four weird portrait of my parents in your house for some reason There you got it and five there is a gun rack with and it's locked. Yes, that's right. And number six? Is a weird dude hiding his face.

That's true. Number seven? Steel chandelier above him. Now we're getting a tough one. Eight? Eight is the house of the weird mirror. That's right. Number nine? Is my next door neighbor's wife. And number ten? Draw filled with presents. Okay. All right. You nine is my next door neighbor's wife and number 10 draw

filled with presents. Okay. All right. I wonder if this is wonderful because people are like, okay, I hope this pays off because this is the weirdest podcast I've ever watched. Well, if that's the case, I hope Thomas St. Thomas is smiling down on us because he said these should be strange. Okay. So just saying now, but, but, you know, when I say I'll give this demo, I'll tell people a true story that when I was little, if I said something that was weird,

didn't seem to make sense, my mom was a farmer's daughter, she came from a farm, and she would say, what does that have to do with the price of beans? You know? My wife, my mom would say something similar. What does that have to do with the price of beans? What sense does that make?

So what did we really memorize with those images? Okay. And you want me to reveal? Yes. All right. Please. All right. Let's think about something that we all probably know, but maybe not in their exact order. Okay. Number one was that light and crash

were the basis. First of all, what is it? Can you just tell us what is the ten things we're memorizing and then go through them? Just so people stick around. Yeah. Oh, well, if you know these images, you now know the ten commandments in their exact order. Okay, ten commandments. In their exact order. Gotcha.

Because in the first commandment, that light represents God, we're to love God alone, you know, God said, let there be light symbolized by light. We threw in a crash to represent the false idols that are crashing, right? So that's the first commandment, that all our love and focus is upon God, not false idols. The second commandment, the cursing doormat reminds us not to use the Lord's name in vain. The third commandment, the glorious day reminds us

keep holy the Sabbath or Lord's day. Couldn't be easier than number four to honor our father and your mother. Number five, thou shalt not kill. Yeah, and I will say this foyer is patterned largely after our own foyer as my wife had arranged it at that point in time. It changes. But I do tell people I do not have a gun rack in my foyer. I remember one time I told this story on a Louisiana Catholic radio and I said that and the guy

said, oh no, nothing unusual about having a gun rack in your foyer. Okay well it is where I come from. But anyway that representative of course I'll shout not kill. Yes. Now number six might be one of the tougher ones. Remember we had the secretive adult. Well he's ashamed because of his adultery. Ah gotcha. So I try to throw in the word adult. Okay adult adultery and then we're symbolizing. I love that these are multi-layered. Yeah some of them I to do, except some that were so easy and straightforward. Number seven, the steel chandelier. That's not steel, that makes sense. Yeah, so sometimes they can just be a homonym, a sound-alike word, because the mnemonics

themselves don't have to be profound at all. They can be silly. Yeah. But they're reminding you of things that are profound. Yes. And then in like my own memory books, after we've gone through the memory to it, then we kind of dig in and do commentary. You know, what's a deeper meaning. But the little memory tour just sets it all up so you actually

know it. And then the mirror, what's that one? And this is the hardest one probably. It had a false image it showed of you. So it's not to bear false. It's not to distort the truth. So it's kind of a little bit more metaphorical, a little tougher one there. Let me get back to the easy ones. Thou shalt not covet, of course, thy neighbor's wife or thy neighbor's goods. Got you. Symbolized by, or represented by the neighbor's wife in actual packages or goods. So yeah, that's kind of the gist of it.

Sometimes if I do demos with the live audience. Can I try and do it? Yeah. I'll try and do it backwards. Oh, yeah, great, great, because that's what I often do next. So the 10th commandment is, shalt not cover the neighbors goods. The ninth is thou shalt not cover the neighbor's wife. The eighth is thou shalt not bear false witness.

The seventh is thou shalt not steal. The sixth is that shalt not committed adultery. The fifth is thou shalt not kill. Am I right so far far am I missing something? Unless I'm not paying attention right on. The fourth is honor thy mother and father the third is keep holy the Sabbath the second is

thou shalt not what is that blaspheme, but what is that commandment thou shalt not Yeah, use the Lord's name in vain. Yeah, and the first is thou shalt Lord's name and fame. And the first is, don't tell me, honor, yeah, honor, God worship him alone. Yeah, worship him alone. That's amazing. Just so everybody knows, we didn't practice this before we went live. No, that's amazing. Yeah. And I bet people can do that. Who are watching this at home. If somebody had have said to you 10 minutes ago, before you listen to this, do you think you could say the 10 commandments backwards? They'd be like, I don't even know if I could say them forwards. So, yeah, I just thought of another idea because you said that that mirror was very bizarre. Yeah. I think another idea would have a

Jehovah's Witness there because he tells lies. Oh, and it's the witness. Sorry, Jehovah's Witnesses who are watching. But I mean, he's bearing false witness and he's a Jehovah's Witness. See, and that you really hit on something. You got to own it, right? You got to make it your own. Exactly right. Because, you know, like when I do my books, you know, I'm using whatever pops into my head, you know. But sometimes something will pop into your head that might be much better objectively or be much better for you.

Like that one's actually better than what I use in the book, right? So that is the idea behind these techniques too. You eventually develop your own, and I just love that one about, actually includes the word witness in it and the distorted and also so yeah really really good stuff and yeah people of I've known kids from you know

elementary school age kids I remember when Memrise of Faith first came out a neighbor in her 80s said hey Kevin I read your book and thought this is too hard for me she goes I woke up in the middle of night and I I realized, you know, I know the 10 commandments and the seven virtues. So she didn't even realize that it actually had stuck. Because I know that, you know, repetition is a mother memory, we say, right? But a lot of things that we encounter time and time again, you know, we may not really remember that well. Like, you know, there's that saying, oh, I know it as well as the back of my hand.

Well, how many of us could actually draw a picture of the way the veins run on the back of our hand? You know, we see it all the time, but we probably don't pay attention. So, uh, yeah. So it really helps us concentrate and focus in a specific way. But yeah, that one there for, for the 10 commandments then, and part of the principle of this is once you learn like a room like this you can reuse it again and again and again for virtually anything I mean maybe one of the most

mundane examples I could give would be for your weekly grocery list oh I got a okay I open the front door and a giant banana punches me in the nose I step in I trip over a big sack of potatoes, you know, whatever. Yeah. But you go, yeah, but every week I get something different. Well, okay, yeah, repetition's another memory. You don't rehearse that list. Now you're setting it up for a brand new one. So the things you don't repeat, they're going to fade away.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a different room? I would think if you had the same room, you would get confused. So you'd be like, what's the first commandment? Banana. I don't know. Well, you know, exactly right.'s a, you know, psychological principles. They call, uh, is that mine or yours? I'm sorry. That's okay. That may be me. I thought I had the sound off, sir. Um, but there was a principle called, uh,

well, let's see, which one will we have here? Yeah. We would have a proactive interference is something that you've already learned well in the past is kind of blocking your ability to learn new things because it keeps like intruding. That's gonna happen. You can also have retroactive interference where, okay, I learned the Ten Commandments, now I learned something new and I know those really well, but what were those commandments again? So if you're not careful, it can. Yes, you don't want to overuse it. So, for example, in my books, I start with the living room. I mean, I'm in the four-year,

the entrance way, ten locations. Then I go into a living room, a dining room, a family room, and each of those, like the first time I laid them out, they had different numbers of items. Like I did the seven capital or deadly sins. I did seven virtues. I did the Beatitudes. I did the twenty Rosary mysteries. So, the rooms had different numbers. I've done some later books where I have them, all the rooms have ten locations. I've done some later books where I have them all the rooms have 10 locations, so it just really makes it easy to track. But yeah, like for example, then Memorize the Faith, we start in that foyer, we do the Ten Commandments, then we move to the living room and we do Deadly Sins, then in the dining room we cover Virtues, and then in the family room we cover the Beatitudes, and then

we move to a study and we do the Rosaryary mysteries. Then once we've done the whole house, then we start circling back and reusing the rooms after we've had a bit of a rest. So like now you're going to the front door and oh there's Jennifer and her sis are at my front door. And then oh that my entrance mat says exit on it, you know? So things like that. So genesis, genesis, exit, exodus. So now we're retooling the whole house to capture the names of the books of the Bible. But you don't find that that conflicts in your mind as you try to remember things. If you've used that room to memorize something entirely different, like the Ten Commandments,

does that not interfere? Well, it kind of depends on… Because you could just build a bigger house in your memory, presumably, or find another house. Oh, yeah. There's a priest that contacted me, he was going to study in China, and he was Hispanic himself and knew Spanish very well and English, and he told me that he constructed a memory house of 50 rooms of 10 locations each, so he would know 500 key Chinese vocabulary

words so you can. Oh my goodness, that's amazing. You can expand these houses. Is one preferable to the other? Reusing the rooms or building on? Well here's how I do it myself. My original memory house has 60 locations so that handles most of my memory tasks. I'll tell you the main way I use this. It goes back to the original use of these methods. Simonides, the Greek, was a great poet, and Cicero, the Roman, was a great public orator. So the methods were originally used for orators to help them memorize the key points of their speeches,

not to memorize them word for word, but to know exactly, I'm gonna talk about this and then that and then that and that in the exact order. And that's how I mainly use it myself. When I give talks, I don't use any notes, but I might have like, I'm gonna do a talk on, you know, St. Martin de Porres and there's 40 points I want to make on him. Wow. So I'm just walking through my house. As you're giving the talk. Yes, I can even give the talk backwards if I wanted, you know, for conclusion, because as you showed, you know,

Thank you very much for being a great audience. Point 40. But, you know, but seriously, it works that way for me. But now, but OK, but the interference. Recently, I was asked to make for our diocese some little five minute videos on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. And I was going to do these, you know, verbatim without any nose, just in front of the camera nonstop.

And I thought, well, yeah, how am I gonna keep from getting confused when I have, you know, these seven different things I have to talk about? So I remember the first time I went through, I did the gift of wonder and awe or fear of the Lord, you know, and then I did the next one on reverence or piety. And for the first, I used the Merry House. For the second, the first system I ever came across, I found this book at a library sale, a used book sale back in the late 70s. So people would bring in donate books or the library would just get rid of books nobody's reading anymore. And this is about 1978 and there's a book

there from 1958 called Your Memory, Speedway to Success in Earning, Learning, and Living Using the Auto-Magic Method by O.W. Bill Hayes. So it came out in 1958, by 1978, nobody was reading it anymore, so they're throwing it out. So I thought, I'm going to invest a quarter in that book. That's the best quarter I ever spent, because that's what led me to be aware of these memory techniques and later to write the books and to do my psychological thesis and stuff on them.

But anyway, that book actually just used 20 parts of a car. Like number one was the hood ornament back in days of people that they had before people would take them for souvenirs. Number two was the headlights. You have two headlights. Number three is these bumper guard things. Number four is the wheels. And you just work your way through 20 parts of a car

So so sometimes I use that car and I did that recently the first gift I used the house the second gift I used the car or I remember once I did a talk and it was this happened to be on st Martin-de-porous and okay, I got 40 points I want to make but when I reached that gun rack point five Here's where I want to give like a little mini biography of the key events It was like eight key things. So I mentally I pull up my car to the gun rack Okay Now I'm gonna hop into that car and just go through the first eight spots Then when I'm done, I'm gonna pop back to the center of the foyer

So so, you know once you you know practice or master these things You can integrate all kinds of different memory methods and use them at the same time. Wow Could we do another one? Sure. I think it's a bore people, Neil, if we keep doing them. I think it's interesting. It's my show. They can get it. Yeah. Well, tell me, can you give me some things I might want to memorize, like give me an option? Yeah. Yeah. OK.

Let's see. Here's an easy one we can do. We could do the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Yeah. We could do 10 reasons for the primacy of the apostle Peter. Okay, I like that more. You like that one more? Yeah. Well, let's see if I can still do this. We can do the themes of the first ten chapters of Epictetus's manual or handbook.

Don't know what that is, so still the second one. Let's see. Those are the main ones that I have prepared right now. Yeah. Okay. Let's do the second one. I guess what's tough too is when people hear you leading them, you know, you have an idea. It's kind of like when you read a book and it tells you about a man in a room.

You just talked about crime and punishment before this. So you've got Raskolnikov in a cupboard, you know what I mean? And so you have an idea, but then the author mentions some feature of the room that interrupts the idea you had. And you go, oh, okay, so it's different to what I thought. Something similar when you kind of say, well, you go into a living room. So you have an idea of the living room and then you start mentioning features

that aren't in my idea of the living room. The whole point in saying this is, would you recommend that, even though the only way you can help me understand this is by giving me an example in your own mind, that I personalize this? So I think of my own living room and then I move things around for that end. Oh, that's a good question. But I will say that my books are illustrated. Okay.

You actually have a picture of what this foyer looks like, what this living room looks like. So it's unique, but you actually have an image. living room looks like. So it's unique but you actually have an image. If you might recall, I did that master's thesis, I called it the internalization of higher psychological processes in adolescence by the theory of this guy Russian psychologist Vygotsky. But part of this idea is that as we're younger and we get older or as we first master something new and we grow in our mastery, we move from external aids towards more internal mastery. So the newer you are to the technique, the better off you're going to be if you have

aids like an actual picture to look at. Or I tell people, yeah, if you're going to form your own memory house, because what do you know better than your own house? That's right. Go in there, your own living room, and okay, here's my ten spots, you know. So this can be totally personalized. But when I do it in books, I give images of the rooms themselves. And then sometimes we give a few images of different actual images that used to remember things.

Like for example, the Memorize of Faith, the 30th location is the pool table. And who's sitting there with this great big bullfrog, he's drawn surrounded by these billiard balls. And I'm going through the way the books of the Old Testament are ordered in the catechism. And the 30th book of the Old Testament that they list is the book of Jeremiah.

Because Jeremiah was a bullfrog, right? So, for some of them we'll give actual illustrations, especially funny ones or simple ones. For Bearing Persecution, the artist drew a big bear sitting on a cushion holding a purse. Bearing. Purse. Cushion. Amazing. So stuff like that. That is terrific. So stuff like that.

But you're so right to point that out because, yeah, you can tailor this to your own house if you want. If you go through my materials, you will be given written illustrations to start with. I won't make you tell us what it is, but what's the most impressive thing you've memorized? Most impressive thing I've done myself. Well, at least it's impressive to me. It's not the most valuable thing, but it was a lot of fun to do. I used to teach college for about 10 years, different psychology courses. And the first thing I would do, the first night I might have 30 or 40 students, when I called roll, I'd pay very close attention to their names. And the first thing I would do, the first night I might have 30 or 40 students, when I called Roll, I'd pay very close attention to their names.

And then before the second session, I would go down there and look at their names carefully and I'd put them in my memory house, right? So I'd come the second night of class and I'd just sit up on top of the desk, I'd say, oh, I need to take Roll. But I'd just sit there and I'd call out the names, and they'd be like, what's going on here?

Because I didn't told them, at that point, they don't know I have anything to do with memory. But anyway, but that was not it. During the class on memory to show the power of some other memory techniques, I would have the class generate a 50 digit random number. Like I'd say, okay, let's get out a piece of paper, we're going to write this down. And I'd say people raise their hand, call them out, you know, eight, seven, four, whatever.

And I'd keep track till we got to 50 random digits. Yep. And I'd say, okay, now everybody, I want you to take a couple of minutes and we're going to memorize this number. And there'd be groans and aahs, you know, but I'd say, okay, let's try this. You know, so we do it and maybe three or four minutes to go by, I'd say, okay, now flip over your papers, we're going to see how we did. Then I would walk up to the blackboard that kind of dates me huh but I like those old blackboards. I do too. It wasn't even one of those that color that are thing with the markers just a plain old blackboard and I'd say okay

let's see how we did turn your papers over so you can't see the number now let's start calling them off and people go eight seven five you know whatever usually we'd hit maybe 12 or 13 digits and there'd be dead silence. With all these 30, 40 people, everybody's stuck. So then I would go up and I would finish writing the string on the board. Then I would face them and say,

okay, flip over your papers now. And I'd say, and I'm gonna read this number to you. And I would go one, nine, two, and I'd say, and I'm gonna read this number to you. And I would go, one, nine, two, and they'd go, no, no, Dr. Vos, you're getting them all wrong. I'd say, I forgot to tell you, I'm reading the digit string to you backwards right now. And I would do that, and then kind of for the icings on the sprinkle, I'd say, okay, now call out a number

between one and 50. And someone would say, you know, 42, and I'd say, four. Like, what do you mean? I'd say, well, the 42nd digit is the four 42 and I'd say four. What do you mean? I say well the 42nd digit is the four and I go and show them you know. But basically what I was doing there, there is a memory code to transfer digits or numbers into words. I see. And it works like this very briefly. Yeah. A one becomes a T or a D like there's one down stroke. And the system itself it takes a little while to learn but I'll just describe it briefly. But A one becomes a T or a D, like there's one down stroke. In the system itself, it takes a little while to learn, but I'll just describe it briefly. But the one becomes a T or a D. Two is an N, like two motions. Three is an M. Four is an R. The word four ends in an R. Five is an L. The Roman numeral, 50 is

an L. Six is like a J sound, kind of six sort of looks like a J, a J or a Sha or a Ch sound. Seven is a K sound, like add another slash, you make it a K or a hard G. Eight is like figure eight F sound or a similar V sound. Nine, flip it around, it looks sort of like a P, so it's a P or a B, the hard phonetic P, ba. And then finally zero is is S or Z because zero starts with I see yeah. Yeah, so so let's say we're going through this string there, you know And and I come across Four and three I'm not saying thinking four three. I'm thinking are am I picturing a RAM?

Okay, or two two and a none, you know? So I totally transformed that memory test. The students were trying to memorize meaningless random numbers. Yeah. I went by twos, I transformed every two digits into a simple word. Wow.

And then I, like- So you've got 25 images. Exactly, I have 25 images. And because they're in the memory house, I know exactly which one is where. And so you're putting them in the house as you're putting the words together. That's right.

Right. If I'm not right, that's what it started to. She's the front door. And then a ram is on the doormat. So yeah. And at that time, what was I? I was in my 30s or 40s. But I think I could probably still do it today.

But it would take a little bit of work. But it was kind of fun for me to do because put me on the spot to you know There's also yeah, I know I'm seeing why it can be helpful to reuse the room Because if every time I'm trying to use the memory palace on the fly Which it seems seems like you do sometimes I had to create a new room Then I'd have to create new places around whereas if I'm using the same room, then it's that's right Yeah, that's right So we can have the use to be used again and again and again. And I have done some other books where I've used, like, we maybe will get into

this, a church instead of a house. Wow. St. Albert the Great said some will place a church when he's talking about these... Okay. Techniques of that. Well, why not? Let's do that. But that was one of the big things I did. But I'll tell you, maybe the most impressive one that I know of. Years ago, a 10-year-old boy's mother contacted me and said his name was John Paul. He has a goal, he wants to memorize the names of all the popes in order. And at the time, there were 266, this was during Benedict's time, and she said, can you help him do that? I'm like, he's 10 years old? Maybe, I don't know for sure, but he wants to do it. So I said, okay, well why don't you start with the 60 locations in Memrise the Faith, the Memory House, and then build locations based upon your own house, and then go from there and do this a few at a time. And then a few months later I get

a cell phone call for a little boy's voice. He says, Dr. Vos, this is John Paul, I did it! And he'd memorize the names of all the popes. The way it was done, his priest was familiar with these memory techniques, and during, I think it was the Mass for baptism or confirmation, he wanted to give some sense of how long the church has been around. So the priest himself recited the names of all of our 40-some presidents, you know, in order, because he'd mastered it, and people were like, oh, wow, you know. But then he goes, well, you ain't seen nothing yet, you know, the US has only been here for a couple hundred years, the church has been here for 2,000 years. So then John Paul comes up to the altar, he faces away, behind him his dad is holding up one of those Pope charts, and you see the little medallions?

Yeah, yeah. And then John Paul starts going, Peter, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Calls him all off as his dad points and he ends Up with you know, Paul Benedict at that time. So he had actually mastered all of them and he invited my wife and I to come up and see him do this at a Franciscan what was it at a Franciscan school for a homeschooling talent show There that was his actual talent and he did it. And just one little funny part of the story. Cool potty trick in homeschool circles. Exactly. His goal was at one point I think to actually do that before the Pope,

but I don't think it ever worked out. But Catholic News Agency picked it up and actually there was an ABC station in Rochester, New York that was kind of intrigued and they had John Paul and his mom on, they had me on to talk to talk about that. But kind of what I think is kind of funny part of the story is what I learned later. The priest that was into the memory methods, he used to teach high school, and when he became their parish pastor, he told the kids he used to have a sizable amount of money that he would give to any student who could memorize all the popes, and no one ever took his money until John Paul came and he cashed in. So there's a little bit of a financial motivation as well. But anyway, that's probably the most impressive feat that I'm personally aware

of, though I didn't do it myself. What about memorizing text? Like, what if I wanted to memorize the gospel of John? Is that insane to try to do something like that? Can your techniques help with that or only with much fewer? You know, like it's different to memorize the list of popes than it is to memorize a few chapters of John. And that question is important in several ways. First, I will say, once for Catholic Exchange, I wrote an article called Memorize John.

Okay. But it wasn't the word for word memorization. Something going back, I think it was like the fourteen or fifteen hundreds, there was this famous wood block book that gave a memory-type palace to memorize the gospels, not word-for-word, but the key events and themes in each of the chapters. And what did it use as the memory location system, but the famous four images of the evangelists. Yeah. Of, you know, the eagle for John and the winged man or angel for Matthew, the ox for Luke, and the lion for St. Mark. So you did like, you know, on the top of the eagle's head, whatever images there, maybe a big dictionary full of words,

oh, the word was God and the word was with God. So that reminds you, that's where you hear this and you'd work your way through. So you can fairly easily in minutes know at least a key theme or event in each of the gospels using a method like this. But the actual text is a whole other ballgame. And this even goes back to the ancients, like the ancient Romans, and they distinguish between two things. One was called memory, or memoria, or rerum, or about things. Another was memoria verborum, or about words. So memory for things

is you're memorizing key ideas or concepts, and that's mainly what we've been doing, like the Ten Commandments and all. Memory for words is you're having verbatim textual memory. And they say that is so much more demanding that they usually recommend, no, use your normal repeat, repeat, or if you have jingles or rhymes or whatever, do all that. Then if you're still having difficulty, then you can pull in some of these specialized techniques to help you. So when I sometimes try to memorize certain texts, never the length of a whole gospel, but maybe something a few hundred words long, sometimes I would kind of like take a key phrase, the first word in that phrase, after I've repeated it, I kind of know the rhythm,

and I make an image for that particular word, and that goes on the front door. Then the next phrase, the image for that word goes there, so I'm getting all these cues along the way. So these methods can be used for verbatim memory, but it's still a very, very arduous process. It's not their main function. And though it's very, very nice to have the capacity to memorize scripture or prayers or certain statements of the saints, it's a very, very wonderful thing. But the main purpose is the memory for words. And I remember someone gives a story that St. Augustine once said that, you know, if

you had actually memorized the Bible and you're going to evangelize and you met someone they wanted to know about Christ in the Bible, he said, even if you knew it word for word, he said, you're not going to stand there and recite it to them. You're going to tell them some key points, explain who Jesus is, the Trinity and whatever, you know, and then guide them where to go where they can learn and read it or hear it in the mass, you know, and then guide them where to go where they can learn and read it or hear it in the mass, you know. So the whole idea here is yes, you can achieve total mastery of long texts if you're willing to put in the work and the time. It won't be easy. But the main point is to know the fundamentals of the gist.

I like that. Yeah. The fundamental ideas. So sort of like our Protestants talk about leading someone down the Roman road where they show how you're in need of a savior, etc. So we could do something like that. Like if I wanted to evangelize somebody who had never heard of Christ, what 12 things might I tell them in sort of systematic order, and then I could put images for each of those things? That's right, that's right. Just to cue you, you know, you've already done your study, you know them in your own words, now you can have an image that captures the key one. Like I think you mentioned one, did you want to do another demo?

That's all right, yeah. Sure, sure. Since it kind of ties into that, here's a possible apologetic use of it. And just so those at home understand, I want you to do this for their sake as well. So I hope that people who are watching will also kind of do this along with me because that's cool that I now know the Ten Commandments in order and backwards. Those images are kind of stuck in my mind. As you say, maybe in a week from now they won't be. And so if I'm keen on remembering them, I'll have to put in the effort. That's right. It's right.

And the more time goes by, the more you've repeated it, the less repetition it will take. And also if you know this stuff and then you forget it, usually if you go back and brush up, it's like a muscle memory. But your actual memory memory is rebounds. I might do this with my kids tonight. Oh, that'd be fun. I'd be curious to see what happens. And I just remembered something I forgot to say too, Matt, about the Ten Commandments. If we have some non-Catholics listening to

us, because I give them the way they're listed in our catechism, and they come from the same books of the Bible. And I think the Orthodox and some other Christian groups list the same ten we do, but some Protestant groups have a slightly different numbering. So, if you're thinking, hey, he didn't get those, right? Well, that's why I'm giving their Catholic rendering. But even if you did want to memorize them in a different way, you could just modify it. You can memorize them any way you like. But okay, but you want to go through one more, another demo here. All right, so we'll use a different memory palace. We'll place a church as St. Albert the Great talked about in the 13th century. So I want you to imagine, Matt, we're going to walk up to this grand church and it has

a big sign there. It says St. Peter's Cathedral. Okay. All right. We have St. Peter's Church down the road, so I'll figure that out. Oh, perfect. Yeah, exactly. Now that's Cathedral. Okay. All right. We have St. Peter's Church down the road. Oh, perfect. Yeah, exactly. Now that's too. If you can personalize these, they're going to be far, far more powerful. All right. St. Peter's Cathedral. All right. The first thing there, as we're approaching the cathedral, we realize that it's built upon this gigantic rock. So we have to picture our cathedral sitting upon this gigantic rock.

Now, that was location number one. Now, location number two, we're going to walk up these steps there, the piazza. We're going to walk up the steps there. And you see sitting on the top step is this giant golden key, like what a dignitary might give to somebody visiting, I'm going to give you the key to the city. So there's this giant key sitting there at the end of the steps. Now we've arrived at the third location, the front door. We're gonna imagine it's locked and you want to get in. So, oh, maybe I'll try that key. But as you do that, the door opens from the inside and standing right there welcoming you in is a naval captain. And you can picture him, you know, looking however you like, the modern Navy or one of those guys with the cool hats like the British admirals or something

like that. But there's a naval captain there at our third location, the main doors of the church. All right. Now, number four, we're going to go up above that door and there's a semi-circular stained piece of stained glass there. And what it depicts is this really hairy muscular man fending off an army with a jawbone of an ass. You can tell by his long hair and Herculean physique that that is Samson. So number four is Samson. And this will be a little bit harder. So if we get we can rehearse it a few if you want. But okay so that was

number four. Number five. Now we're gonna go up from the front door. We're gonna go up higher. And directly above? Off to the we're gonna go off to the left and the right. So okay. Directly above was the semi circular stained glass window. But now we're gonna go go up to the left, above that window now. We're moving up the facade. And there's an inset, a massive inset statue. And it's St. Albert the Great. Well, you might not know who St. Albert the Great is. Well, maybe you know somebody named Al. Picture the statue of your buddy Al or your dad Al, or if you're Al, just picture your own statue.

But St. Albert the Great is there, and he was a great Dominican, so you know what? The great isn't necessary for this, any Al, okay good. No, it's just the main thing is that we have this statue, this Al guy there, and the statue itself is the location, it's not the fundamental image. The image is, Al, St. Albert the Great, whatever Al, he's conversing with a shepherd. So even though he's a statue, he's talking to the shepherd standing next to him. You can see by this staff, you know.

Alright, so that was number five. St. Albert the Great conversing with a shepherd. Number six. And again, there's gonna be ten of these. Can I have Al wearing shepherd costume instead? Absolutely. Alright. Good. Keep going. Well, I'm not sure if the Dominican order. No, I got a different Al. I got Alex Plato. He's a philosopher teacher here. We call him Big Al. Okay. That'll work. That'll work. Trust like a shepherd for some reason. Keep going. You got it. For some reason. We'll get there. All right. So number six.

Now we're going to move straight across from Al and now we're above that first little semicircle. And you have like a big circle like the Rose window like a famous circular window and what do you see here well at first you think it looks like this magnificent chalice or like the Holy Grail you know but you look a little more closely that now that's an athletic trophy you know it's got the arms on it there you know know, like the classic trophy shape, and it even says first place on it. First place trophy, all right, is in our row. That's what it depicts.

That was six. Number seven. Now you're on the other side, and there's another statue. Only this time, I pictured that it's St. Thomas Aquinas. You know, he was called the dumb ox, he's a great, big, powerful man, but there's a statue of Thomas now, and he was Albert's student, and he is talking to a leader. And the image I suggest is Saint Louis, the great king, the Saint Louis, the King of France, because he was a leader who Thomas actually knew and had talked to.

But I say it could be any leader that you like, or you can make it a leader of soda, or if you like Bavarian clothing, it could be Lederhosen, you know, Thomas could be wearing Liederhosen, but just associate Thomas with a leader. Okay, got it. All right, so that was, where were we, that was number eight, no, that was number seven, seven. Now, eight, now we're going to go back across to the top of the cathedral. There is a bell tower on the left over Albert. And standing on top of that, you just see this great orator and he's gesturing and he's bellowing out words. So there is this. This is at the very top of the cathedral. The very top of the left hand side, the bell tower. There's an orator there proclaiming his message to everyone down below.

All right, so the orator there is at number eight, the bell tower. Now we're gonna move across to the other bell tower. There's a matching, there's a right one. And for the right one there, you see a mailman, a postal worker if you like, but he's tossing letters to everyone from the top of that right bell tower. So number nine, the mailman, the postal person tossing out letters. And finally to the top, reach the steeple in the middle, we have a cross on top and who should be standing upon that cross holding up the entire world on his back? Atlas. Atlas, the ancient Greek Titan who, you know, held the world on his back in the ancient Greek mythology.

So that was number 10. Just standing there holding up the he just has just at this point in time. What we can do more about this point. He just holding the world up. All right on his back. So those are 10 images. Those are 10 images. So should I go through them before you add to them or do you want to add to them straight away?

Well, do you want to go where you are? You good to go through whatever you think's best. I think at this point, because it's not an easy thing. Yeah. If it was me, I'd want to just repeat it now. All right. You say the numbers and I'll say what they are. OK, so the first one at the you get a church built on a rock, right?

And we go up the steps. You got a keys, big key on the stairs. That's right. And then the door, the the stairs. That's right. And then the door the naval captain That's right. And then the semi circular glass is What's his face Samson with a jawbone? That's right And then we went over to number five big owl owl owl and shepherds clothing. That's right. Yeah, that's right Six was the you have a rose window with a first place trophy. That's right. And then number seven is Thomas talking to a leader.

That's right. Oh, you got it. No, actually. Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah. Number eight over to this bell tower. You got a man. I had him with a with a with a what do you call those things where he shout into a bullhorn? Oh, bullhorn. He's proclaiming something. Is that what you said? That's right. OK, so that guy. Yeah.

And then on the other tower, you have a mailman and then on the top and he's delivering letters and on the top You have Atlas. All right, exactly right exactly right Now, let's see how we can do this. What are people saying who are just jumping into this chat? Well people are We're getting not bored. I love this All right. All right Well, okay. I guess we could reveal, well let's see, let's, we can just

add a couple more images. You already said these are ten facts about Peter. There are ten facts about Peter. Okay. Okay, well let's just, yeah, how about I'll just go through it all. At this point I'll give additional images and just briefly say what they are. Please do, yeah. Okay, so number one, you know, was the rock there. And now what we're going to imagine this great winged man is there with Peter. So he's with Peter? Where did he show up? He just did. He's an angel.

By the key? He's an angel. Yeah. Yeah. Or at the base. Yeah. Well, he's at the base. Okay.

So it's Peter with an angel. Right. Now you go up to the key. All right. And now you're good good the angel actually hands you the key now So he's there too. He's there too. Yeah, so boom he materializes There at the rock at the base of the church. Yeah, and then in number two He hands you the same angel hands you the key and this is a winged man. Okay Number three that naval captain how odd we didn't notice this but he's actually sitting on top of an ox

That's very unusual strange. I've ever seen I don't know if I've ever seen that. An ox. An ox. With the big horns or? Yeah. Why not? Big powerful ox. Okay in the church naval captain sitting on an ox. Right. That's right and then you go up to Big Al and the shepherd pulling him right. And let's see wait did I miss this? No we met the jawbone guy. Oh Samson oh gosh, I did it myself. Samson is, yeah, the third one there. And Samson, you've heard of, maybe you've heard of Babe the Blue Ox? I haven't.

Oh, that's like an American myth, like back in the frontier days, this giant man had this blue ox and they went around and did all this stuff in America. But anyway, Samson is sitting on an ox too, like a naval captain. So you notice now, number one and two and three and four, they both had the same embellished images with them. We had the winged man for one or two, we had the ox for three and four. Now we go over to Al

in the shepherd clothing. And he's got this great big old eagle sitting on his head. Okay, very good I was gonna even I'm gonna have the talons pulling up his eyes just so it's even more unusual. Oh my gosh Yeah, I'll help you write your next book. You know, I had an experience a couple weeks ago Oh, no, don't talk too much. I'm gonna lose all the images Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so we have the eagle. All right, do the eagle on you have the need for concentration? You're right. The eagle the eagle on, yeah, the need for concentration, you're right. The eagle is on Albert's head.

Now, so now we move on to the rose window where we had the trophy. That's right. Now this one might take a little bit of work. All right, here we go. This trophy has a New Testament, is sticking out from the top of it or sitting next to it, but a New Testament.

And that New Testament has 195 sticky notes sticking out of the side. Can you believe that? That's a lot of sticky notes. 195. I gave this demo in the book, Memorize the Reasons. When I first did that, the editor said, now how are we going to picture exactly 195 sticky notes? I went, oh, that's a good question.

I said, how about this? Let's say we had two packs of 100. And we open them up and we realize we've used them all, oh, that's a good question. So how about this? Let's say we had two packs of 100. We open them up and we realized we've used them all, but we got five left over. There's one on each finger. Oh, that's good. So two packets of 100, we got five.

So that gives us our 195. How about that? How about that? Got it. All right, so there was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now we're going over to Thomas and the leader. So Thomas and the leader,

and now the leader, I suggested first, could be anyone, but was St. Louis of France. OK, and we're going to imagine that he was on a crusade and he's just come back and he's carrying this giant battle axe. So our leader is carrying an axe. See, this is OK. So this is good because I had I had Aquinas drinking a liter of ice coffee.

Ice coffee. Well, it was it was frozen. He had to use his axe. Oh, that's brilliant. All right. Good. He's got his axe out to break open the ice coffee. Yeah, there you go. Right. Yeah. Because it's so malleable.

You do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Your own imagination. You can adapt like that. All right. Oh, sure. And then then we moved up to the bell tower, the left bell tower where we had the man with the bullhorn?

Yeah, the bullhorn. And now, kind of just like St. Louis, he's wheeling his axe too. Okay. Really getting that crowd wild out. I'll listen to that guy. So yeah, he's got an axe as well. So you see, several of these were getting the same images, a couple in a row. And then now, see, we're almost finished already.

Then we move over to the other Bell Tower where we had the... Mailman. The mailman, the. Mailman. The mailman, the postal worker there. Now this is gonna get a little bit funny. And this may have an American reference that you may or may not know. Okay, you know Frankenstein or Frankenstein

as in the young Frankenstein. I'm familiar with Herman Munster. Because it may not work with you. Well tell me who it is because I'm wondering. There was a comedy in the 1960s called the Munsters. Yeah, and they were a parody of like Dracula and Frankenstein and all these people. So who was Herman? Herman Munster was the Frankenstein character.

So he looked just like Frankenstein. Okay. So Herman looked like. Oh, okay. So I've got to find a way to attach to this mailman. The Herman. So I'll have him look like the monster that Frankenstein makes. What's his name?

Does he have a name? Well, I think they call him Frankenstein's monster. But that's what it looks like. Frankenstein's monster. Frankenstein mailman. But the hermit is what it is. But the hermit is important. But you know what, though?

If you want, if you know a hermit, make it a hermit. Oh, that's good. There's a hermit throwing out letters. Or jealous wife says that that's her man. You know, you can go all over the place. Just what sounds like a hermit. Yeah, I got it. Sounds like her.

Okay, so I got a hermit. What do hermits wear? Neil? Brown? What do you know? I don't know why we're looking at you. They wear like brown things with the hood. Yeah, okay.

That'll do. So the male person, the male man wherever has the hood, if you're into there. Yeah, yeah. Good. One more. we got Atlas. Okay. One more is Atlas and, okay, people may be familiar with some of this Hindu mythology,

like, you know, what's the world rest on, and it has like a series of things, and elephants and this and that, and you finally get down to a turtle. So I say, well, let's use the Greek mythology and mix it with the Hindu, and imagine that Atlas is standing on top of a great giant turtle. So I say, well, let's, uh, let's use the Greek mythology and mix it with the Hindu and imagine that Atlas is standing on top of a great giant turtle, which is on top of the church, which is on top of the church. Got it. So you have the layers, you have the crucifix or the cross. You then have the turtle, then

you have Atlas and he's holding up the world. One more thing. One more thing. Atlas has a wedding ring on you notice. Okay. Okay. Atlas has a wedding ring as he holds up the sky. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Atlas has a wedding ring as he holds up the sky. Yeah. Now, that's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot. I hope this pays off. But let's just go through a couple of times and I'll explain why. Can I just say it real quick and you tell me? Yeah, absolutely. All right.

So we have a big church built on a rock and right at the base of the steps, we have a winged man with St. Peter. That's the first. Yes. So what does it mean? Yes, and the reason for this is, the winged man, it comes from the ancient biblical,

I think we already bring this up about the four creatures from Ezekiel and the revelation of Matthew. Yeah, so Matthew was represented by the man, historically. Sorry, I don't mean to press you along, I'm just like. No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead. This is live video, I can't screw this up. Sorry, sorry, sorry, go ahead. I look. I'm just like, no, no, go ahead, go ahead. This is live video. I can't screw this up. I look like an idiot. All right. Go ahead, go ahead. You're right, Matthew. So Matthew, Matthew said, you know, in Matthew, it's the Jesus says, you are

the rock upon which I build the church. So there's the rock. I see. So the rock is the imagery, the words from Jesus, Matthew is where we find it. Got you. Okay. So I show up on the second step. I see now. So the wingman means Matthew and that's by the golden key. That's number two. So in Matthew's gospel, he gives Peter the key. That's right. Keys of the king come right after he tells him he's a rock. Exactly. All right. And the third is a naval captain sitting on an ox, which means Luke's gospel. But what does the naval captain mean? That's right. Luke's gospel, I think, is the fifth chapter. This is where Jesus goes out and preaches from Peter's boat. So there's the naval connotation. Okay, he preaches from Peter's boat.

From Peter's boat, you know, of all the apostles, it's Peter's boat, and then the church is also referred to sometimes as the bark of Peter. So in a way, you know, that there's a special primacy of Peter. These are all reasons that Peter was something special. I see. That we see in the various gospel rendering, and that's one, you know, where Jesus preaches from his boat, and then we come later even to refer to the church itself as bark of Peter. Okay. And so if we wanted to, I'm not sure if it is from the fifth chapter or not, you said perhaps it is. I'd have to double check.

But if it were, well, see, we'll get confused, but maybe the naval captain could be doing something with five things, right? Like he could be holding up five sticky notes, maybe, for example. Oh, oh, yeah exactly And I could just I could keep you keep going with these exactly or if you knew that letter Good job if you knew that number digit thing you could also have the captain has a great big L on his shirt Because Alice for five, you know, I said you'll lay out a variety of ways He can do this all kinds of of different ways you could do that.

All right. Oh, I better not keep you. It's OK. Naval captain standing sitting on a ball next. I look up and I see why do I keep forgetting his name? Don't say it. I'll get Samson with the jawbone. Yeah. But you said something else about this man. Oh, he's riding a bull, too. An ox. Yeah, that's right. He's writing an ox. That's right. So that tells us it's Luke as well. Now, I'm thinking of Midaman chapter 22. If it is, I could picture a nun in the picture.

Okay. Because of Tutu and then, you know, but that's just extra embellishment. You wouldn't necessarily have to go this far because it's like... Okay, here we go. Jesus preaching from the boat is Luke 5. Hey, you got it. Yay. I'm gonna have him holding up the five sticky notes so I can account for why there's 195 above. Then it reminds you in advance of what's up above too.

I like that. Yeah, if you can tie him in, it's all the better. All right, so we had Samson there and that was number four and that comes from Luke 2. Oh, and this is where Christ prays that Peter's faith will remain strong, will not fail, and that his faith will strengthen others. So I kind of say that he has kind of designated Peter as his own strong man. remain strong will not fail and that his faith will strengthen others. Strengthen the brethren.

He has kind of designated Peter as his own strongman. Now you're the man who's going to strengthen the faith. You're the guy put in charge of that, basically. All right. So that was number four. That was Samson. One, two, three, four. Five is Al in shepherd's clothing with an eagle sitting on his head. Right. So this means in John's, well, you can tell us. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

In John's gospel, this is where Jesus famously tells Peter, you to feed my sheep. You're the shepherd. Okay. All right. So in the middle, we stop me if I'm going too fast, but we have the circular window. We have a first place trophy sitting on a New Testament with 195 sticky notes. And I would imagine that means that Peter is mentioned 195 times ahead of all the others. first-place trophy sitting on a New Testament with 195 sticky notes, and I would imagine that means that Peter is mentioned 195 times ahead of all the

others? Is that what that means? Yeah, it means that people tabulated that in the New Testament his name is mentioned either as Peter or as, you know, Kphos or whatever, Simon Peter, 195 times. Gotcha. You know, and I think they count for the number two, like the beloved disciple John is like 48, and I think they say all the other apostles put together like 130 or so. That's amazing, isn't it? So just telling us, you know, other people have made like, I'm giving like 10 reasons for Peter's primacy, but other people have made lists of like 50, 60 reasons, you know.

Wow. So we're just giving like the highlights here. Yeah. But yeah, that is the fact that Peter's mentioned 195 times in the New Testament far more than all the other apostles put together. So Christ is giving us, and the gospel writers are giving us a special message, something special here about Peter according to Christ's plan. Okay. The next one is what, six? I'm getting confused on the numbers, but you know, the numbers aren't that important in this one.

No, in this one they're not. And again, too, if you were going through the book, you'd actually see the image of the church. All right. So we have a hermit throwing out letters. Okay. Yeah. Now we did, we did. The number one, two, three, four. So we did six was the window. Now next to Albert is sorry. So above Albert, you have the man, the bullhorn and the ax. Okay. Oh yeah. Now that's a, now on the side there's another statue of Albert's student. Ah, you're right. Sorry, Thomas talk. He's got an axe with a liter of ice coffee in my imagining. That's right. And this again, just refers to the fact that Peter is the leader,

the leader of the early church in the book of Acts, for example, you know, we see him like did counsel Jerusalem leading things. And the act just means, okay, now we're in the book of Acts, for example. Acts meets Acts. You know, we see him like the counsel of Jerusalem leading things. Yep, yep, yep. And Acts just means, okay, now we're in the book of Acts. Now we go up to number eight, that bell tower. Yep, man with the bullhorn and the axe. Yes. What does that mean?

So, well, I guess, Acts, so he's the first to proclaim the gospel? That's right. That's exactly right. After he's the first one to publicly proclaim the gospel after Pentecost. That's right. And we read about that in the book of Acts, think Acts two there. Okay. So excellent.

Yeah. And you're just over to nine. Nine now is wait, where? We have a hermit throwing out letters. Yeah. Yeah. Is that what we had? Was there something else?

No, that's right. I suggested her and Munster hermit works just as well. Yeah. Okay. So the hermit here is just a kind of sound-like reminder of an ancient church father, Hermas. H-E-R-M-A-S. You know, you could have used even a thermos, you know, I guess that might have been a little

thermos, hermit, hermit. Oh, that's good. All right. I now have a hermit with a thermos throwing out letters. With a thermos, you can make it into a nice little pond or a limerick or something. But anyway, this is because this is Church Father Hermes from like 140s or so AD. They say he was a brother of the first Pope Pius, and he has this vision he writes about one of his books where this old woman tells him to send one of his books to Pope Clement,

who was a previous pope, and she says, because this, he will send it out abroad because this is his duty. She says this of Hermes. She says this to Hermes that it is the job of the Bishop of Rome to send information out abroad to the other churches. Okay. So here's an early church father saying, hey, Pope's doing encyclicals. So Hermes is then, and then he conveys this to who? Oh, he, oh, and I'm sorry, the reason... I might be getting confused, I'm sorry. Okay, yeah. Hermes is the church father.

Right. Who's writing this that tells us it was considered the duty of the bishops of Rome to communicate, to send missiles out there. And in a vision, he has a woman tells him to do this. And sometimes you could also have him or the hermit wearing shepherds clothes too, because the writing is actually called the shepherd. The shepherd of Hermas. So in the shepherd of Hermas, he states that it's the job of the bishop of Rome to send out encyclicals to the whole church. That's right. That's right. He's writing this in the early history of the church. That's right. Some people say, you know, one and two Peter in the Bible are like the first two encyclicals. The original Peter's sending those out. And I want to say again, too, what we're doing now, and you are so brave, Matt, for doing this

because this is the most complicated of any of the memory work I do. Where we're tying in not just the concept, but also where they come from. So it's a lot to master. So if you get into this, this is advanced stuff, but Matt jumps in right off the bat. So, and do a great job.

We'll see, but next we have Atlas. Don't tell me we have Atlas. I know he has a ring. Yes. Is that it? Or is there something else? Oh, no, no. He's sitting on a turtle on top of the church. Yeah. And the reason, you know, Atlas is symbolized as holding up the world.

In fact, at home, I have a globe and Atlas is holding it up. One of my sons got me a whiskey decanter and Atlas is holding up a glass decanter full of bourbon right now. I mean, it's a classic image, right? But we pictured him now standing on a turtle. It goes back to that Hindu mythology because the church father Tertullian, sounds like turtle, wrote that the church was built upon Peter.

And there's our Atlas imagery. Peter's holding up the church the way Atlas holds up the world. Oh, and why is Atlas wearing the ring? Because the writing was called on matrimony. That was Tertullian's book where he gave this statement. Matrimony. Okay. Yeah. And that's not wrong. I'm sure you're right. In my recall, it could have been, no, it might've been monogamy. Either way the ring would ring should symbolize that.

We can do a check. All right. Because I'll tell you, you talked about the durability of these techniques. I'm seeing Tertullian on marriage. Okay, so that must be it. Oh, okay, matron marriage. Okay, so in there, he said that Peter

was the foundation of the church. Yeah. Okay. Right, so another early, an early church figure. Wow. You know, realizing this, because you know, some Protestants play this is a later invention. Right, Cameron Batuzzi's listening, because he's a Protestant friend of mine who's looking for a reason to become Catholic. You can just find that Peter is the head. So we've got 10 reasons. Not just 10, you know,

I came across there's books that say 50 reasons, I have other ones that have 10 more. But this is a good start. Yeah, and I will say too, this book I did for Catholic Answer called Memorize the Reasons, and it came out in 2013. And I've done a lot of books since then, so I hadn't dug in in a while. So I just was recently refreshing on this, and it is the most difficult material, but it's valuable. And in there I go through a section on Peter and the Church, why we believe what we do about the Church's authority on papal infallibility, things like that. Then I have a section on the Four Main Marian dogmas and how we can go through different parts of this church. We did the facade that has ten. Then we do like the left half of the nave that has another ten locations. We do an altar area that has ten,

the other nave. So in that book, we go through 40 places. So for each part has the papacy, Peterstaff, Marian dogma, and then scripture and tradition, the Apocrypha, stuff like that. So all these are set up to have four chapters of ten locations each. You go through the ten parts of the cathedral, then you repeat. Yeah, people are tuning in now in the middle, of course, and it sounds like, you know, this is strangeness. Are they smoking pot? Has this become, totally become, the Joe Rogan experience? I was thinking a good clip would be to just have you quickly, or as quickly as you can, recount it and just say, it's two minutes of, just have no context for it.

There's no context. Maybe we'll tag context in on the end. Call it a pint of the coin is without context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be fantastic. So I think if you could try to go through the, quickly without explaining what each of them is. You want me to do it?

Yeah. All right, so here are the 10 things. I'm gonna tell you what they are. Oh, and Dr. Bost, if you could look just completely confused and like, All right. So, but, okay. So do you, when I say them back to you, do you want me to say the images or the facts, the facts, you know, you could either or both or however you want to. This might ruin your plan, but I'll just say the truth.

Yeah. I'll just say the truth. All right. So if you say to me, give me 10 reasons to think that Peter is special in the New Testament, I would say this to you. I would say that in Matthew's gospel, we see that Christ established the church upon Peter. They said you are rock. You are Peter upon this rock. I'll build my church. Another reason to think that is that in Matthew's gospel he then gives him the keys to the kingdom of heaven and he does that specifically to Peter as well as to

the rest. But in this particular passage is specifically to Peter. Thirdly we see in Luke's gospel that Christ proclaims you know the gospel his message from Peter's boat and the Catholic Church has been referred to in history as the bark of Peter. We also see in Luke's gospel that Christ says to Peter that your faith, you will strengthen the brethren, you will strengthen the brethren. We see, if'm missing something, just give me a word. Okay. But we see in the book of. Acts. I don't know.

No, no, no, no, no, John, that's right, because there's an eagle. All right. So in John's gospel, Christ says to Peter, you know, feed my sheep. He gives him the role of in a sense, in essence, being the shepherd of the other disciples. We see in the New Testament alone that Christ, sorry, that Peter, whether Peter or Cephas is named 195 times, which is far more than the rest of the apostles. So he's named more. We see in the Book of Acts that Peter is leads,

yeah, leads the church after Pentecost in that he proclaims the first sermon. He also has a leadership role that we see in the in, for example, the council was that acts to I think it is Jerusalem Council Jerusalem. Anyway, that wasn't part of it. Next one. OK, we said God. OK, don't tell me. OK, man, both bullhorn.

Holy and acts. OK, that was him proclaiming the gospel, was it? That's what I should have said. OK. And then we have the mailman. OK, so in the shepherd of Hermas, Hermas was a church father and in his work, the shepherd, he says that it's the role of the pope to write letters for the whole church. So we have evidence from the early church outside of the New Testament that the successor of Peter was thought to have a specific role, namely to lead the church in guiding it in writing it letters.

We also see in to Tullian's book on marriage. He says that Christ built the church upon Peter. So if you want to say, well, no, Peter's not the rock. You have to you have to explain to me why I should take your interpretation thousands of years later and not the interpretation of this early church father. There's 10, right? Or no, did I miss something? I think we've got them by George and I'm kind of amazing that you have me one of the bravest men on YouTube to take on that task. That's fun. No, it's easy though, right?

Like I won't do it because I'll bore the hell out of everybody, but I could say them backwards. I mean, that's so simple. You just go. Now, of course, as we said earlier, in this instance, the 10 don't matter in which, you know, in which case you say that. Oh, right, right. But... Yeah, because when I wrote about them too, I usually started with scriptural sources, kind of worked backward or forward in time. Yeah.

And then if I include church fathers and later even bring in some Reformation writers to uncertainty, so we kind of work our way up in history. But we all start with a scriptural base. And like to memorize the books of the Bible, I mean, it's easy to make up an image for any single book. So I'm not going to ask you to do this, but can you say the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation? Well, I've written about it in the Memorories of Faith, and I indeed was able to do the 46 books of the Old Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament. To do it now would take me – the listeners wouldn't want to see this, so I'd have

to work because I hadn't refreshed it recently. But if I refresh it recently, yeah, I have a pretty good idea, and I find it valuable because in my own writing when I want to look up a book of Scripture, I can at least go through part of my memory house and remember, okay, what comes before what, you know, because I know the general order. Like, for example, I think I mentioned, well, at one point, the 30th book in the Old Testament according to the listing of the Catechism is the book of Jeremiah, because there's a bullfrog sitting on the pool table. Before that, the 29th location, I have an incline exercise bench, and a man is trapped

there, a British man, and he says to someone else, he says, I say old man, could you give me a hand here? Because he's stuck with a bar on his neck. Well, that book is Isaiah, you know? And then- Why Isaiah? I say old man, I say it. It's just a verbal, it sounds like it.

And before that, there's this closet, and you see way back in there, someone says, look at Zirak, look at Zirak in that closet, for Sirak, you know, and they're all just that, oh, in a certain place somebody bit your toe. Well, toe bit. So all the books of the Bible can easily be transformed into these easily pictureable, even stuff like Malachi. I think it's, I say just picture that there's this chair here and you see some kid has been there because there's a kite that's all covered with goo like from a marshmallow.

So mallocite. Okay. Marshmallow. You know, so any Bible book name can be easily turned into a silly image. That's great. I'm pretty sure I sent you the link, the list of his books. Yeah, those were in the... Okay, so yeah.

So what book of yours, because you've written a ton of these books, could you just go through them? What books have you written? So the Memorize the Faith, what's that? Yeah, the Memorize the Faith was the first Catholic book I ever did. This is a memory book that kind of introduces Thomas's memory system, and then I use it as a guided tutorial, it's illustrated, and yeah, we go through, we start with the exercise we did with the Ten Commandments, we do the virtues, we do the Holy Spirit and so on.

We do the Four Marks of the Church, the Five Precepts of the Church, the Sins Against the Holy Spirit, the Books of the Bible, 21 figures from Church history. There's like 30 or 40 different things. Whereas Memorize the Reasons is more an apologetic. Memorize the Reasons came later, 2013, with an apologetics focus for the papacy in Peter, Memorize the Reasons came later, 2013, with an apologetics focus for the papacy in Peter, Marian dogmas, and scripture and tradition. Then some years later, I got an email from a fighter pilot tester in California who asked if I could give him tips on memorizing the Mass. Why? What does that mean?

Well, here's a story he told me. It's a true story. During the Vietnam War, there was a man named Jeremiah Denton who was shot down, a fighter pilot, as a prisoner of war for something like five to seven years in North Korea. And he had wrote that what kept him sane during that time was that he verbally repeated the Mass in his head every day. I think maybe he served Mass, he knew it well. He said he did it in English and in Latin. So he said well, that's how he Retained his sanity. So this pilot wanted me to give tips on it

And I actually written a brief article about it once before but anyway based on his suggestion I thought well shoot I can write a book on this when you say memorize the mass You mean every single part of the mass or oh, that's good part. Yes Every single word feature. No. It's focused upon the main rites of the Mass. And following just the Sunday Missal I was using on the new Mass at the time, it listed 32 of them. So I used those. Can I have a look at it? Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, we do the introductory rites, the Liturgy of the Word, Liturgy of the Eucharist, and concluding rites. And in this one, we use the same memory house.

I had the same illustrator did us some new images there. So, you know, we go through all the parts one by one, and each one triggers where that comes in the mass. So as you're going through the mass, you're kind of aware where you've been, where you're going. And then with all these books, then it's not just about the memory technique, because we don't want to just be able to rattle off these words and not understand it. Then always afterwards comes the commentary. So like for every single rite, I give some history.

Like we say these certain acclamations, where do those words come from? Are there three different versions of a certain rite? Where in the Bible do each of those three come from, you know? Or when did this become a part of the Mass? It's just fascinating, fascinating stuff there. Like one example just in a part of the Mass where we just say something as simple as amen. I remember in the story, one of the ancient legends of St. Patrick of Ireland, they said a druid was telling this Irish king, he's warning him about this guy who's going to come across the sea. He said he's going to have a bent staff and his people will gather in a church, and when he finishes his holy words, they will all say, amen. You know, so I'm thinking, here we are from like fifth or fourth century

or something, AD, and just to think, you know, back there in Ireland, these people were saying, amen. And of course, they were doing it everywhere else in the world too. Now we're doing the same thing today, you know. So in these books on the Mass, I try to give the memory method just so you know the rites, not all the exact words, because again that comes from actually going to the Mass and saying the prayers. But to know and give the history to have some sense of it. And then I also did the Latin Mass. Yeah, can I have a look at that? I like the cover. Sure. And then I also did the Latin Mass. Yeah. Can I have a look at that? I like the cover.

Sure. And in the first book, it was suggested that I covered Latin Mass in here. So I did memorize the Mass. So it is in there also. But then I got a request, not from a fighter pilot, but from a grandmother who was bringing her kids up in the Latin Mass. And she asked if it would be possible to do a book that was a Latin Mass only, so it would be simpler and briefer, and they could start with that. So yeah, sure. So I kind of retold things a little bit and put in a different appendix.

Beautiful. So I came up with Memorized Latin Mass. And again, they're all illustrated. Yeah, I love those illustrations. And some are kind of funny. The illustrator, Ted Schlender-Fritz, did several of my illustrations of my different books. And like, just for example of one, it shows a guy in stripes, like he's a prisoner, and he's putting a hat on top of Eeyore the donkey. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Winnie the Pooh. Okay, so the images you have a con

fitting a hat on Eeyore, and that's a reminder of the confidior, you know, the confession. You know, he said, I confess. So, you know, but those are just put in their particular locations. Each one with an image is going to trigger what that part of the Mass is. And then you've written this book, Memorize the Stoics. Tell us why you thought it was helpful, or why it would be helpful for Catholics to perhaps learn more about Stoicism and the Stoics. Sure, sure. Yeah, actually in 2016 I did a book called The Porch and the Cross, Ancient Stoic Wisdom for Modern Christian Living, where I kind of gave the gist of some of their fundamental ideas, good ideas on ethics and on, well, kind of like practical psychology, how not to get so angry and

sad and so on, just good useful material there. But then this book that just came out this year, Memorized the Stoics, I kind of wedded these memory methods with some of the fundamental Stoic ideas. And there's a reason here that ties into that Memorize the Mass story. Because before I knew about Jeremiah Denton, who was the prisoner of war who recited the Mass in his head, who by the way later became an Admiral and a U.S. Senator from Alabama, he was a very prominent man. Well a friend of his who was also in prison in North Vietnam was a man named James Bond Stockdale Who later became an Admiral he later was Ross Perot's a vice presidential candidate You know here in the US many many years ago, but he was also shot down as a fighter pilot

Spent almost eight years as a prisoner of war. He was the highest ranking officer there. He was there with the Jeremiah Denton and he said what preserved him was he had virtually memorized Epictetus's little handbook. It's a brief little book, just kind of moral lessons of the way to just focus on what you can control, not what you can't control, leave things up to God, you know, just focus on what you truly have power over. And he said that's what kept him sane during seven years of confinement. So I thought, well, in this book, I used the basic memory house. There's a new one.

My daughter-in-law actually illustrates this one. But we go through the 53 chapters of Epitetus' handbook, and they're all very brief. Some are just a sentence. And we just form a little image that incorporates the key idea of each one. Like for one example, at the front door, the door opens and you see a jet fighter control panel. In fact, there's two panels. They're like two instrument panels. And what does that represent? The first line of the first chapter says, some things are under our control and some things are not under our control. There's our control panel. And it was also a nod to the story of Stockdale, who was an actual fighter pilot who used these ideas of hepatitis. So anyway,

anyway, we go through, we go through all 53, give an image to memorize, just a key idea, not the exact word. Help us understand just, just Stoics in general. I just want to talk about that for a moment. I know there's been like a revitalized interest in the Stoics. I know that the word Stoics comes from Stoa, I think, which meant the porch where they would sit and talk. That's right. Who were the Stoics?

What were some of their ideas, and how is it congruent or not with Christianity? Yeah, and great question. And of course, some is congruent and some is not. But just in general before I start, you know, I view mining them the way, you know, Albert and Thomas and others did Plato and Aristotle and Cicero, you know, you find the natural reason, the truths that they found, and then you, you know, you toss out what doesn't mesh with what we know through Revelation. But a lot of good stuff there. The Stoics, okay. So their founder was a man named Zeno. He's like, oh, what was he? Roughly 300 or so BC.

Okay. So not Zeno's paradox guy, different Zeno. A different Zeno. That's right. And he was an adult. He lived there in Greece, in Athens. He was strongly influenced by the Cynic philosophers, people like Diogenes, if I might be familiar. I'm not familiar. Okay, the Cynics, it came from the Greek word kynos, which is similar to the Latin canus for dogs. And it was kind of a sort of a perjury, so they kind of live like dogs, but these were like the ultimate minimalists. Like their main guy, Diogenes, said he like lived in

a barrel for a time. And he said he used to just like, he had like owned almost nothing but a cup. And then he said that he saw a little boy drink from a fountain with just his hands. So he said, he threw away his cup, you know, I don't need that. And one of the most famous stories is, it says he became famous after a time, this Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher. So Alexander the Great comes to meet him. And he said he just kind of laying there in the sun and Alexander standing in front of him and introduces himself and

Diogenes says, could you please move to the side, you're blocking my son. Alexander the Great. But the idea there was that, you know, minimalism, what really matters is just living a good virtuous life. You don't need all these external. How did the cynics come to be associated with what we today say is a cynic? Or is that not associated? Well, yeah, now that's interesting. I don't know the exact thing, because now cynically, what you're taking to mean like an extreme skeptic, or a person who's always looking on the worst side of things, or extreme doubt. Yeah, this is... This is different then. This is different. They're mostly involved with living a pure life of virtue. It's kind of like an extreme form.

They're kind of the Stoics, like what our ascetic hermits are to regular Catholics. So they're kind of like- Stoics on steroids. Exactly, right. That's exactly what they're right. So the Stoics said that, like Epictetus, the Stoic would say that only a small number of us are called to be cynics. That's kind of like the extreme there.

But they were one of the precursors. And then the other guy that really influenced Zeno, the founder, was Socrates, the life of Socrates, who was focused... The philosophers looked into natural science and things, and reason and epistemology, how we know what we know, things like that. But Socrates was focused more on living a good life, being a virtuous person, you know, finding truths and living by them. So those are the two main influences for Zeno, the founder of the Stoics. The cynics in Socrates, well, then he started teaching from this famous porch in Athens called the stoia, from the Greek word was stoamet porch, and this

painted porch was a famous particular porch there that he taught from. And then after him, you know, there's different generations of stoics came down from Greece and then some of the most prominent ones were over in Rome. One of the most famous ones is Epictetus, very fascinating character because his name means like acquired, it just means because he used to be a slave. So he started life as a slave, he's just known as Epictetus. He was freed later in life and he became one of the most profound stoic teachers. So he's often, something contrasted with two other famous stoics. Seneca, who was actually the advisor to the young Nero at the time when Nero would take advice, later cast aside, Nero goes nuts, he tells Seneca to commit suicide, but Seneca was another elegant stoic writer, and then the last of the great ones was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died about 180 AD.

So we kind of had this irony of some of the greatest stoics were a slave and an actual Roman Emperor, you know, and it's kind of there for everything in between. But anyway, to cut to the chase, one of the fundamental stoic ideas that I first came to know comes from the fifth chapter of Epictetus's handbook where he says that people are disturbed not by things but by the views they take of things. The power of perception. And you could substitute the words beliefs or attitudes or judgments. And that basically became the foundation of modern cognitive psychotherapies. Cognitive therapy, Albert Ellis' rationally emotive

behavior therapy. These Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist, Albert Ellis, the psychologist, they credit Epictetus with this fundamental insight, putting it succinctly like this. So that's just one of the main ideas of Stoics is only focus on what you can control, which is your own attitudes, your own beliefs,

your own moral behaviors. Don't be too concerned about what happens in the external world. Do what you can to, which is your own attitudes, your own beliefs, your own moral behaviors. Don't be too concerned about what happens in the external world. Do what you can to make things right, but don't be destroyed if things don't go the way you want. It's kind of like, you know, putting things in the hand of God or the serenity prayer. Yeah. So that's basically the idea there. Are you able to turn that off?

Let me see if I can. Yeah, I think of like Fiat Voluntas Tua. this is yeah, I wonder whether is the Stoics is this a is this an atheistic sort of philosophy or is there reference to a Providential God. Yeah, excuse me. Just a second. I'm gonna see if I can turn this off because I actually do not have a smartphone But when I travel I borrow my wife's. I can turn it off for you. Oh, yeah, you want to And actually I got rid of the smart for years ago because I used to run or walk and I just sweat on it so bad that it got destroyed. Oh, really? OK. OK. OK. OK. Where was I? Yeah, so I was. OK. So Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, you were talking about how like it's compatible.

I was thinking of that, like, thy will be done, where we submit to the providence of God. But I was asking for the Stoics and the cynics, is there a reference to a higher being who orders all things or is it more just sort of a fatalist approach where you are resigned to however reality unfolds? That's a great question. If you ask different modern people, you might get some different answers there. But actually there were dozens of different Stoics

that we know about. We only have writings of a handful of them, very extensively, Mussonius Rufus, who was Epitetus' teacher, Epitetus, Seneca Aurelius, who was the only one who could have book-length stuff from them, and some kind of held different views. But for the most part, they did believe, they didn't know Christ. There's a few times they reference Christians, but it shows a kind of vague understanding, and may have even confused them with the Jewish people of the day.

But based on like natural theology, their natural reason, it did have even confused them with the Jewish people of the day, but based on like natural theology, their natural reason, it did lead them to a concept of the divine. Now, sometimes it's almost pantheistic that God, you know, is the universe, or that God is, the universe was there, but God's the one that got things going, or, but some of them do have very personalized takes on God. Like, I can't do an exact phrasing because I didn't memorize this, but one line of love from Epitetus goes something like this. He says, if I were a nightingale, I would sing praises to God as a nightingale. If I were a dove, I would sing them as a dove. As it is, I'm a rational human being, and therefore, I will sing praises to God as a rational human being, and I will sing praises to God as a rational human

being and I will hope you will join in with me. Things like that. Seneca writes about there's a Holy Spirit within each one of us. So you'll find these treatments of God, you know, in a personalized sense, in a father, kind of in a vague way, it's there in the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius famously writes multiple times what he calls either providence or atoms. Are we guided by a God? Is everything under his control? Or is it like some of the other thinkers thought and so many people today, a matter of random chance of atoms? And now we'd say of, you know, the fact of evolution working upon the atoms. But for the most part, the main Stoics that I read, Rufus, Epitetus, Seneca, Aurelius, I find they're very, very

reverential though they did not know Christ. And one other fact before I'll show it up for a minute, Mussoni's Rufus, this really surprised me when I read his stuff for the first time just a few years ago. This is Epictetus' teacher, first century AD. I called him a profound pagan pro-life philosopher because I go through some of his lectures and I point out like maybe eight or ten points where what he said You could be reading straight out of the catechism because I gave the catechism reference to go along with it He's talking about the reason that a man and woman get married to have children and that they will grow in love For each other. He says governments are right when they prohibit abortion and even

for each other. He says governments are right when they prohibit abortion and even contraception. He talks about the value of large families of having children. He said if you want to destroy society, destroy the families. It's just kind of amazing. Wow. So these pro-life ideas coming from reason, from a philosopher. So anyway, I find there's just a great deal of value in the Stoics. But I never say, now you should be a Stoic instead of a Christian. No, no, no. Give us some more specific insights from Stoics. I mean, we've sort of touched upon it in saying that changing your attitude as opposed to trying to change everything around you. But what are some others? Okay, sure, sure. And they all kind of have

different twists there. Like, let me do one because we're pining to the Aquinas of Seneca, because Rufus and Epitetus and Aurelius wrote in Greek, and as far as I know, Thomas wasn't particularly fluent in Greek, though he commissioned people to give him nice translations like of Aristotle.

But he knew Seneca well. He knew Cicero, who wasn't strictly speaking a Stoic, but who told us a lot about the Stoics. But Thomas borrows from Seneca in several places in the Summa Theologica. One, one of my favorites is when he talks about the virtue of gratitude and how it serves justice. So, Seneca wrote a book called On Benefits, and a lot of it is about what is gratitude, you know, well, what's in gratitude. He talks about the different ways you should manifest it. Like he says, if someone does you a favor, he says, don't be in a hurry to do something back for them right away, because then they might feel like they put an obligation on

you because they did something good for you, and that's not what they intended, you know. Or Seneca said, you know, what's the greatest way to show ingratitude? And he said, well, just by forgetting it, forgetting the deed, you know, whatsoever, he says ideally you should show gratitude if you can't pay it back, at least by talking the person up, by thanking them, or speaking well about them to other people. You know, so Thomas, when discussing gratitude and then the vice of ingratitude in the Summa, he cites Seneca there, actually more than Aristotle or even the Church Fathers in Scripture

for that particular topic because Seneca dealt into it so deeply. And of course, Thomas baptizes it, Christianizes it. And in one line from Thomas, for example, he says that we should not go around as punishers of the ungrateful, those with ingratitude. He said rather we should act as physicians and try to heal their ingratitude by giving them multiple doses of the benefits of good deeds, you know, so we're basically gonna try to just keep giving them chances to show gratitude by not withholding You know doing good good things to him. So so that's one on gratitude when he talks about when St. Thomas talks about the

the passion of anger, you know Aristotle wrote about a big influence on Thomas Thomas, that there's times we need to be angry, but it needs to be for the right reasons, at the right person, at the right time, in order to maybe to stop them from hurting others, and maybe after delay so we don't act too rashly. And sometimes the Stoics are portrayed as saying that you should never be angry at all. And I know like Albert Ellis, the modern psychologist who built on the Stoics are portrayed as saying that you should never be angry at all. And I know like Albert Ellis, the modern psychologist who built on the Stoics,

he used to go say that. You know, they said that he would say, nope, anger is never rational. I heard people say he would get in debates and it's this, it seemed like he's getting really angry trying to get his point across. But anyway, Seneca, you know, wrote a book on anger, De Ira.

And Thomas basically tries to reconcile Aristotle and Seneca saying it's mainly in different use of word. Isn't this in the Summa he does this? And he does it in the Summa when he's talking about the passion of anger in the, would that be probably the first part of the second part probably. But yeah, he's trying how they can be reconciled because he's basically saying that, you know, something like anger would come in stages, like something might provoke you,

like somebody steps on your toe, oh, you know, or an inanimate object, you know, you hit your head on the cabinet and you might wanna smack that darn cabinet, right? So we have these inborn reflexes, but what determines whether you let the passion build or whether it becomes the same is what do you do with that first impulse?

So he's saying what he thinks that Seneca himself said that, yeah, you can't control reflexive impulses, that can be there. He says, but if you go further down the line, you can determine what you do with that anger, if you channel it the right way or not. So Thomas is saying in his opinion, Seneca and Aristotle, if you read deeply, they're basically on the same page. And there's other places he borrow some cynical. So this this idea of the stoic who is completely indifferent to the events that are unfolding before him, is that not the case? Or it is the case with some stoics and not others? Yeah. Now, if you if you read from particular stocks and to you're going to read,

maybe you're not completely consistent. You might read certain passages that might think that, oh, no emotion at all or no passion at all. But usually they distinguish between bad passions, bad feelings, depression, anger, and so forth. And you, Pathe, are good feelings, and they want us to have good feelings. They want us to be able to experience joy and things like that. So usually if we're saying the Stoics are Mr. Spock or their robots, That's kind of a caricature, a small s Stoicism, because they really say that the emotions we experience should be the ones that accompany a virtuous life. So we're not going to try to squash those. So yeah, to think that just means totally quelling the virtues. If you read the Stoics themselves, like Rufus and Epitetus and

Seneca and Aurelius, you see it's really more than that. They're more about reigning in the passions or emotions that can get a lot of us in trouble. And they can help. Like myself, I've been reading this stuff for 40 years, and sometimes something happens and I find myself having an instant reaction. But then if all goes well, I'll think, okay, no, I need to calm myself down and react to this differently. So in a way, sometimes I say, they kind of function as tools or instruments. Christ told us to love God with all our heart and strength and mind, with all that we are, and to love our neighbor as ourself. But it can be hard to actually go out and do that if you're always getting angry all the time, or if you're too depressed, or if you're always worried. And the Stoics can help us rein all that in

to really fulfill those commandments better, because we're in better control of our own emotions. That reminds me of modern, usually non-Christian meditation, which doesn't mean not bad, or it doesn't mean bad, in that you've heard people say things like just sit, breathe, be aware of your surroundings, and be in a state of not, don't be judgmental of your surroundings. So if you feel a particular thing or if you hear something, just allow it as opposed to trying to control everything. Have you heard of this sort of?

Yeah, yeah, I have to. And there can be some element I see in that. It is like every day is also like test your impressions, anything that comes to you. You know, it's up to you how you react to it, maybe or even if you react to it. So, I can see some value there that, yeah, I mean, just because I hear something doesn't mean I say, oh, what was that? Or, yeah, we can train ourselves to kind of like slow down and then bring our reason into play. And if we're doing, of course, Christian meditation, we're going to go beyond what the Stoics did. It's not just a matter of slowing down. We're not just going to focus on ourselves.

We want to be able to focus on higher spiritual things that really matter. But that can be one component that the Stoics can help us in some of their exercises that you just slow yourself down. Another exercise that Seneca talks about, he does like a nighttime reflection, which is kind of like an examination of the conscious. And what does that look like? Well for Seneca talks about, he does like a nighttime reflection, which is kind of like an examination of the conscious. And what does that look like? Well, for Seneca, he just says, you know, before he falls to bed, he says, there he's

with his wife and he'll hear her going off, you know, nodding off. But at this point, he's just reflecting everything that happened during his day, you know, kind of his thoughts, words, and deeds and say, you know, what did I do that was not befitting of a Stoic? You know, where did I fall into vice? Where did I, you know, what did I do that was not befitting of a Stoic? You know, where did I fall into vice? Where did I, you know, what virtues did I display? And I've written that I normally don't do that because by the time my head hits that

pillow I'm not in instant. But another thing some of the Stoics talk about is a morning reflection, and there's a great one that Marcus Aurelius gives, and I won't do an exact word for it, but just to paraphrase, he says, say to yourself every morning upon arising, today I'm going to encounter the busybody, the noisy, the ungrateful, the rude. He lists about six different things. Lower your expectations. Lower your expectations, exactly. He said, remember, he said, remember, basically, and he goes on to a few other points. One, that we're all, he says, we all share part of the divine spark.

God put us all here. He said, he put us together for cooperation. And he says, like the two eyes, he said, like the upper and lower jaws, like the parts of our body are made to fit together. He says, human beings are made by God, that we all work together. And another point he often makes, too, is that I think it's very helpful. Especially today in our world of the internet and so much contention in politics and religion together. And another point he often makes too is, that I think is very helpful, especially today in our world of the internet and so much contention in politics and religion and everything, he

says, remember this, and it doesn't justify what they do, but whatever a person is doing, even if they are that rude person, that busybody, somehow what they're doing makes sense to them. Somehow it makes sense to them where they are at this point in their life. So don't fly off the handle, don't let what they do bring out an inappropriate reaction in you. Consider that and then find a way maybe calmly that you can maybe get them to see the light and if not, just don't let them spoil your day.

Yeah, that's terrific. That reminds me of the morning offering that's a really good idea to pray. What is it? Lord Jesus Christ, through the immaculate heart of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works, joys, sufferings of this day. Sort of sums everything up, doesn't it? It's like, oh, yes, here's everything that will be happening. Sufferings are to be expected.

And I offer this to you. This is something I've been trying to practice a lot lately in the very small things. Abandonment to Jesus, saying to our Lord, Lord, don't change anything. I thank you for this moment. I thank you even for my own weaknesses. I thank you for my own frustrations. I thank you that it's a little too cold in this office now and my feet are cold. I like the small things. Thank you for this board. Not this conversation.

This is very big, big writing and stimulating. But if I'm in if I'm in a conversation with somebody, I'd rather not be. Thank you for this moment, Lord, trying to offer everything, submit everything to submit my will to the providence of God, because at the end of the day, this is the hardest thing to mortify. If I say to myself, I'm going to put a pebble in my shoe and walk around and endure that suffering, this might be a good thing. This could be a helpful thing.

But I might end up becoming proud over it, even though it's such a small thing. That's how egotistical I am, you see. But if I allow my will to be mortified by doing what I don't want to do or sitting longer at a party that my wife told me we should go to, then I would like to or doing the thing my son wants me to do when I have something I would rather do or getting up when my baby not that I have a baby, but you see who is crying and I like this is very difficult because nothing feels so much about I don't know what death feels

like, but I imagine it's a lot like humiliation or having someone impose upon your will. That's tough. I went to a priest, very holy priest in Ireland, Father Rory Brady up in Donegal and I had just had a new kid and I was struggling with anger. And I was asking him what sort of ascetical practices I might take on. And he's like, none, none. What you need to do is to practice patience with your family, you know. And that is way more difficult than a pebble in my shoe or a cold shower.

Again, not that there's not merits to those things, but you know what I'm saying? Oh, well, being imposed upon. That's bloody. Absolutely. And you know, just what you're saying too, one of the spiritual masters is little Therese, you know. She talks about throwing her flowers and has a little prayer where my joys and my sorrows,

all these little things, that's all offered up to God, you know, and that's what makes a difference. And you know, your priest's wise advice, you know, we know charity truly does begin at home, you know. If you have great love for the world at large, you need to start by showing that the people who are right around you, same with justice. You know, there, there's a broad social justice, but there's that one-on-one justice that we all need to show to each other.

And yeah, you're right. It is expressed in the little things and yeah, the fancy aesthetic practices. Some people do well with that kind of thing, but yeah, you wouldn't want to put that pebble in your shoe, then start hobbling around and then yelling at everybody Yeah, and then why are you why are you hobbling that? Oh, because I keep a pebble in my shoe as a spiritual practice No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we got a ton of questions here. I wanted to get to in a second, but no, that's that's that's Yeah, there's so much to say. I was chatting with a young father yesterday, and I was offering my advice to him,

and it's the advice I would give to myself after I had my first child, and that would just be to be more submissive to the chaos of daily life, and not to try to control it, because I think a lot of our anger and our frustration comes from trying to control what we actually can't control. Case in point, I wake up in the morning, I want to make coffee, but my four children have all decided to be around the sink and I'm just like, just go somewhere. And I've got this gigantic Russian dog that lays in the middle of everybody all the time. And I, you think, okay, what if I just accept this for the love of Jesus and abandon this

to him? Why, why is it, Matt, saying to myself, why is it that everybody else needs to change? Perhaps you could. Maybe that would be easier for everybody. These poor people have to live with you. I once heard a Buddhist monk say that the reason he decided to be happy was out of compassion for the people that had to live with him. Isn't that a wonderful line?

I love that. People have to deal with you. They don't have to deal with a jerk or someone who's always irritable. So maybe you could be happy for the sake of those who have to live with you. That's a beautiful insight. And it reminds me too, something else from Epictetus in his first chapter, he says that people starting in philosophy, he said, blame other people. He said people making a little progress start to blame themselves. He said people who progress further, they don't blame anybody. Their focus is more on correcting problems and doing the right things than portioning out.

That is so true and so applicable to today where we have people saying things like, I'm a good person or the world needs to change. I need to change the world. Please don't just worry about as good as the Jordan Peterson line about just make your bloody bed and clean your room. Oh, exactly. That is so right. I remember years ago, historian Paul Johnson wrote a book, I think it's called The Intellectuals, about some people who are really going to change the world. Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. And then he's detailing some stuff about how they treat actually people who live with them in their own family.

It's not so nice, you know. You know, this this reminds me we were talking about the brothers Karamazov before. You remember the old priest, what was his name? Zosima? Remember how he's talking with the old ladies who've come to visit him at the monastery? And the women open their souls to him and they say things like, sometimes I'm convinced that I could die for humanity. I cry and weep over the possibility,

but then I can't get along with the people in the same room as me. This one brushes his teeth too loud. This one takes too long to eat his meal. Their existence oppresses me. Wow, what honesty and what insight. Oh, I know that feeling. Beautiful. I mean, that's the reality.

That's the reality of the situation. All right. We have questions here from our beautiful supporters over at locals and Patreon. So I want to get to some of these. Bernadette says this. I know there is evidence for memory loss due to adverse childhood experience, but is it possible for trauma to allow someone to wake up to these experiences at an unusually early age as well?

I have memories from two years old when my fam and my family is shocked. I can remember that far back recalling things they've forgotten. OK, I'm going to do the first part of that again. Yeah, I know there's evidence for memory loss due to adverse childhood experience. But is it possible for trauma to allow someone to wake up to these experiences? I'm not really sure what you mean by that as an unusual early age. OK, yeah. And I'm sorry, is this Bernadette? Yes.

If I might miss a point, but several points there about traumatic memories. Yes, sometimes people will suffer trauma, especially when they're very young, that they forget about. And then something may trigger, yeah, it may trigger decades later, that truly happens. Another sort of trauma, there's something they call flash bulb memories that you may have heard of, like here in the United States,

it used to be, where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated? And even I'm not old enough to know that one. Then later it became, where were you when the space shuttle Challenger blew up? And I remember exactly where I was in my office at the time. Later it became 911. So there's certain traumas that we all experience that tend to be, those tend to be not repressed,

but to like instantly be emblazed in your memory. So those things we talked about earlier, the images, the concentration, you don't have to even try. That's so traumatic, it's there. It's kind of taken care of for you. Who could not see the images of those towers coming down at 911, you know? And you keep thinking about it again and again, of course your focus is on it.

So I remember, well, the details of that. So we have that. There's another thing there. There is an important thing. She mentioned recalling things even as young as the age of two, and it'll vary how long we can remember things. Some people think the reason we can't remember from the very early age during infancy is that if it's actually comes from words meaning without Language so we kind of don't have the words to store things in our long-term memory But it'll vary person by person but the doctoral school I went to was Adler University in Chicago It was based largely on the theories of this Alfred Adler who was a contemporary of Freud but I think he got things a lot more right than Freud is. And he's also a precursor of the cognitive therapies,

the modern therapies. But one thing they used to do in therapy, they would collect what they called people's early recollections. They'd say, tell me the earliest thing you can ever remember in your life. Now describe that to me so you'd take it down. Then you'd say, what was the most vivid moment?

And then you would say, how did you feel at that time? We had a few little follow-up questions. You might collect maybe five of these. And then you would kind of analyze these and look for themes, because the idea was those earliest memories, the ones out of all the things that happened to us, the ones that happened to stick,

they must have some kind of special significance to us. And we might even find, we're not even sure if we remember this. Maybe this is just something mom kept telling me, but now I do remember it in her words. But those kind of things that happen in early childhood, especially those special events, certain traumas might be forgotten, but other things may be remembered throughout the course of our life, but they may also shape us throughout our life, because the enduring lessons that we kind of pull from that experience.

That's helpful. Thank you. OK, Patron Sergio Phelan says, I've heard that when you are recalling a memory that it's only a memory of the memory. Is that true? Also, how does memory affect dreams, especially since you can dream about some obscure things? Oh, that's really good. Yeah. especially since you can dream about some obscure things. Oh, that's really good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And memory really, yeah.

And assuming, of course, Thomas goes through this, St. Albert goes through this. One of the objections about this memory art stuff is not memory. It's in the sensory soul like animals have. It's a natural thing. But Thomas says, no, there's an actual intellectual component to memory. We can memorize things in a way that animals cannot, because one, we can memorize concepts, truth, justice, the American way, and all things like that, which animals can't do because they can't think at a conceptual level.

Also our reasoning abilities can kind of, in a sense, reach into our memory and alter the way we remember things, like when we use the memory palace. So a reason can tie in there. So when we like use these memory methods, there there is an element where it's a reconstruction. It's sort of a memory of a memory. And we see this even in people like medieval geniuses like Saint Thomas. You know, some people think he dictated the same of theologica mostly from memory, you know, and he's citing the Church Fathers and Scripture and Philosophers about every other page, but often you'll find Thomas and other people, you go back to the original source and it's not the exact same words because they're paraphrasing. They have memorized the

gist, the theme, so when they're memorizing, they may not memorize the exact words on a page. It's more impressive. Yeah, they're memorizing what they have processed. Like, go back to Epictetus, he said that, like, for memorizing things, he said, don't be like a sheep that doesn't just chew up its grass and then go vomit it out in front of its shepherd. Say, hey, look what I did. I ate the grass like I spoke to it. He says, no, no. It chews up that grass, it digests it, and then it produces wool or milk, you know? That's wonderful.

So the stuff we remember, we want to digest. There's biblical stuff, eat the book. I love that. And this goes back to what you said earlier when I talked about memorizing the gospel, and your point was, well, even if you could memorize the whole thing, it's not like you're going to stand in front of somebody and say, in the beginning was the word, and the word was made. That's right.

Yeah, because the idea with this memory stuff is, I say, it's not to parrot it back like a parrot, but to let it sink not to parrot it back like a parrot Yeah, but to let us sink into the chest to assimilate exactly. So we treat it like You know as a rational human being would not not just parroting backwards. Fantastic. Okay, let's see here Bill W says Rene Girard has a great perspective of this on how all religions remember a great perspective of this on how all religions remember. He says there was an original unity of which we were all members. The devil created division with accusation and half truths. Lucifer, the original unity was dismembered

and via religious liturgy, we are we are remembered. I don't know if this makes sense to you, does it? What do you he says? What do you think of the concept that during mass we are the ones remembered? This is either way to. OK, well, you know, I may miss the point because I'm not familiar with this particular writer, but I can tell you what that does trigger in. In my own memory is like going back to to Plato and his theory of the forms, everything that exists in this

world exists in its real original form somewhere else. And, you know, we're primarily spirits, not like Aristotle and the church that teaches we're in souled bodies. Plato says we're primarily a soul and we're kind of chained to a body while we're here. So Plato and I think Socrates, even maybe some of the Stoics, kind of had this idea that all of human memory is a form of reminiscence. We're kind of remembering what we knew when we were up in that world of the form and spirit before we got chained to these bodies.

So I mean, I've seen that idea is out there in terms of most normal human memory. I tend to follow the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that most of what we know comes in through the information we acquire through our senses and then passes up into the intellect. But it's an intriguing concept, but I can't really answer too intelligently because I don't know the particular writing. Drew says, is there any evidence that memory is more than physical, as in any evidence of a soul?

Oh, now that kind of really takes us back to some previous Thomistic psychology. I can just do it in brief. Thomas says information comes in from our five senses, vision and hearing and touch and taste and sound. Did I miss any five? We share this with the animals. Not all animals have all those senses, but our dogs and cats, they have the same five that we do.

So information starts from the outside world. We receive the forms that come from these actual objects. When we see a book, the actual book doesn't go inside our eye, thank God, it's just the form, what it is we can see and understand. And then we go from five external senses to four internal senses. The first is called common sense. It's the sense, it doesn't mean just like doing what grandma and grandpa said you ought to do, the one sense that integrates all these other senses.

And if I can give a little analogy here, I used to say this, imagine that you see something white, you hear a flapping sound, you taste a bit of salt, you smell a musty odor, and what was the other? Did I miss one of the senses? Yeah, I might as well forget. Maybe feel? Yeah, you feel dampness if I left that one out. Okay, so what is that? Well, who knows? Say what if you imagine now you realize

it has four downward projectile, four downward projections like tubes. It has one in the back and the one in the back is moving backwards and forwards, you know. Hmm, still what is this? I'm getting all this information from my senses. What is it? I say, okay, I had this little American Eskimo dog, Lily, and she's all white. And the last time she came in from the rain, she's shaking herself dry. So I see the patch of white, I hear the flapping sound, I taste the salt, if she gets some in my mouth, I smell the musty odor, I feel the dampness. That's really helpful. That's a really helpful way of understanding the common sense. Yeah, because the common sense is what, you know, I mean, we make sense of all these different

things coming in the different way. It's what integrates them. We judge our apprehensions. That's right. That's right. And in psychological terms, modern terms, sensation is that first stage, you know, what comes through the sense organs and like the eyes, feet, the occipital lobe, the back of the brain, and all the senses have their own areas they project to. So that's called

sensation, which comes in from the senses. But then that next stage, where like, okay, now I know what that thing, that object, that particular object is, is called perception. And it actually comes from Latin words that means like to, to grab as a whole, as one thing. So that's common sense allows us to see all this stuff coming in and say what it actually is. This is what it all is. So the first stage is the common sense that integrates things, the first internal sense. The second is imagination. Like we've been doing, we can form these images about whatever we want.

Whatever you see, like right now I'm looking at the room, I can close my eyes for a second and I can still mentally see at least a few of the features there through the power of imagination. We can also imagine things that we've, you know, never even seen. We can just make up stuff. Then the third power is memory. This is where we can hold on to images and realize that they are from the past. It has a time element to it. It often also has an emotional element to it. It is one of the emotional element to it, is one of the, Bernadette I think, you know, some memories can really have a strong emotional impact on it. But just in a simple sense, since I say, you know, think

back upon your grandma, maybe just picture your grandma when you're a little kid, and you know, you might be able to remember her and kind of put that in a time context, but maybe it'll generate some feelings too, hopefully some warm feelings. Okay, so we did the common sense and imagination and memory. The fourth one is something called Different words for it estimated sense or cogitative sense and in terms of animals Thomas says When a lamb sees the wolf, it doesn't just see it. It senses its dangerousness So it's almost like an instinctual evaluation of what comes in from our senses. And humans have this too.

So according to Aristotle and Thomas' take, this is where the animal world ends, at the five external senses. And some of them will also have these four internal senses. But we go a step further as human beings. Now you know, Lily, my dog, is one particular dog and you mentioned a big Russian dog that blocks up your whole room. Yep. Lily doesn't. She only weighs 15 pounds. But anyway, you know, so you and I can talk about our dogs and everybody knows in general what we're talking

about. They know what a dog is, right? Because we can take particular items and get a universal concept. Yes. And this is where we start into the human intellectual soul that the other creatures don't concept. And this is where we start into the human intellectual soul that the other creatures don't have. And the first Thomas calls, it's operation called the agent intellect, where we abstract, like we find the dogness, the common year of big Russian dog might be a massive,

and I'm not sure what color, black, and mine is teeny and white, but we instantly know they're both caninus familiaris lupus, you know, they're both dogs So that's kind of the start there. We can think at this conceptual Level and abstraction is also Thomas says intelligence is related to words Intus and Ligere Intus means inside

Ligere to read so when we abstract in a sense like we're reading what's inside of something. Like we're looking at that dog and we're looking past the externals so we can see what they share in common as dogs. So that's one thing. We're able to form concepts. And then these concepts also we can hold on to. We can make judgments based on them. We can form them into words. So now, you know, we can do things that no other animal can. And I say, you know, some things people will champion the brilliance of gorillas or chimpanzees

or dolphins or something. But I say, if you think they can really do all this, then go to a chimpanzee library or a dolphin website and come back and let me know what their arguments are, you know, because of course, there can't be any. So in Thomas's writing, humans only have this intellectual capacity, an intellectual soul.

Now we also have those animal elements of the sensitive soul. We also have the powers, the lowest, the vegetative soul, like plant life, because we can grow and we can take in nourishment and we can reproduce, but the intellectual, the human being has all those powers plus these unique thinking powers. Then Thomas says, it is plus these unique thinking powers. And Thomas says it is through these unique thinking powers that that's what's immaterial.

That's what separates us from all the other living creatures, because these concepts, these universals, they're not there in particular things. They don't exist as concretes in the external world. They're these mental and immaterial, spiritual realities. And Thomas argues that that's one of the evidences for the fact that humans are immortal. We have the intellectual capacities that they're not made of parts, so they can't break apart and disintegrate like our bodies do. So Thomas says the only way that the human soul would be gone is if God chose

to annihilate it, you know, or stop upholding it in its existence. So anyway, just in a nutshell, that's some of the way that St. Thomas, anyway, looks at the immortality of the human soul and ties it into the uniquely human mental capacities. Which is why he infamously says dogs don't go to heaven, or doesn't say that specifically, but that animals, beasts, don't go to heaven. That's right, that's right. And there's also some controversy on that. But yeah, that is right, that's right. And there's also some controversy on that. But yeah, that is why. That is why. And sometimes when I get some of the headiest stuff, or there might be the most

heated disagreement, there is one line I like that Thomas cites that comes from Saint Jerome, but it comes in a different context. He's actually talking about whether or not souls can leave heaven or hell temporarily, you know. And then, and basically Jerome says, well, be careful that you don't lay down the law for God, you know. Basically, there's some things that we may not realize that maybe God will surprise us with later on, but that is the basis. You know, based on this understanding of the soul, there is something absolutely uniquely unique about the human soul. And I will say, in my journey back from 25 years of atheism to Catholicism, with my training as a psychologist and my interest in philosophy, this is one of the things that really helped pull me back.

I read Mortimer Adler's book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, where his own story, he was raised Jewish, he called himself a pagan through most of his life, he was a great admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas who in his 70s became an Episcopalian, and before he died in his late 90s he had been a Catholic, right? Because he loved St. Thomas Aquinas there. But anyway, he held this view too. He was strongly influenced by Thomas. The idea that souls immortality is one of the things that led me back to the church when I realized, boy, all this stuff, One of the things that led me back to the church when I realized, boy, all this stuff, it really makes sense.

And I myself came to think that, you know, I've studied Freud, I've studied the modern therapists, you know, people from all the different schools, the behaviorists, Watson and Pavlov and Skinner and all that. I thought the best psychologist I've ever encountered is St. Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, that's great. Thanks. Michael Toki says, As Catholics, we talk of sanctifying the will and the imagination, which makes sense since we choose those. But how do you sanctify your memory?

And alongside of this, I'll often have people say to me, what do I do with those memories of when I was fornicating or looking at pornography or something that come back? You know, I don't desire them. I don't want them there, but I can't get rid of them. So along those lines, too How do I sanctify my memory? Both of those elements are very important I'll start with the first one if I forget the second remind me because they're both so important sure But yeah, okay. So you've done sins in the past now. They're coming back to you I've recently do some research on scrupulosity, and this really tortures some people. But kind of the first thing to remember there,

we talked earlier about reflexive behaviors. And you might be in a certain situation, in a certain place, see a certain person, and boom, that memory is back. You didn't go hunting for it, but it pops up. So one thing to remember is that the memory of sinful behavior is not itself a sin unless you then choose to embellish it, to repeat it, to rehearse it, to concentrate upon it, to form more images, you know. So just having those memories, I mean, they can be distressing, they can keep coming back, but you know one approach there is to realize, hey, just the fact that this has come back to me now doesn't mean I'm sinning, doesn't mean I'm acting, trying to act out against God. And if I'm going to do my best to distract myself, to not make an issue of it, to let it pass. So I'd say it was kind of a start there.

Then also another thing I really liked, you brought the phrase sanctifying your memory. Because this too is where St. Albert and Thomas had crucial roles in the history of these memory techniques. Because I mentioned they started, the first practical use was for orators, to remember the parts of your speech. They don't have to take notes or use notes or anything. But St. Albert comes along, Thomas's teacher in the 13th century, and he's going really one by one, bit by bit, over the writings of Cicero and other ancient memory writers. When he talks about the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom, Albert borrows his three

main parts from Cicero. He says there's three main parts of prudence or practical wisdom, and they are memory, understanding, and foresight. Both have a past and a present and a future element to them because to achieve virtuous goals in the future, which would require foresight, you're going to know the right things to do to achieve those goals, it's going to depend on your understanding of the current situation, which requires understanding, guided by the lessons that you have learned in the past, your past experience, your past lessons, and that's what's retained in memory.

So Albert says, in some ways, memory is actually the most important part of prudence. He said, because time moves from past, present, future, it doesn't go backwards. So he said, we're guided in our present actions that influence our future by what we've bothered to learn about the lessons we've accrued from our past. So Albert even says that a trained memory is an important part of prudence. So he actually recommends that people train their memories so they're better able to recall

and fundamental facts of the faith, these important truths and ethical truths that can guide us towards more ethical wisdom. So anyway, yeah, one of the key things that Albert and Thomas did was tie these memory methods to being prudent, to living the practical Christian life, and thought memory training is a part of it. You know, Thomas later went on to talk about eight different parts of prudence because he takes three from Cicero and he borrows some from

this Macrobius, things like shrewdness and docility, listening to others. So it's very multifaceted. But both Albert and Thomas said that memory is a very key part. So in the Summa when Thomas talks about the eight parts of prudence, the first one is the one on memory. So in that sense, I guess, to be an indirect way, we can call it sanctifying our memory by trying to build our memories and put them at service for the fundamental truths of the faith.

The answer I give to those who say, what do I do when these images come back to my mind that I've seen? And I'd love you to elaborate on this because I'm sure you have a more sophisticated response is I take that. I encourage, well, first I encourage what you just said. It's like, other than having severe brain damage, these memories aren't going away. So it's like, well, maybe I sanctify my memories by what I do with them in the moment. So I offer this, I take this as an opportunity for intercessory prayer and I'll say, Lord, I thank you for this, this, this victim of pornography, this person. I pray that you would bless him or bless her and things like that. And I'll even, when this comes to me

personally, I'll even ask myself some rhetorical questions. Like, I wonder what she's doing now. I wonder what sort of relationship she's in. I wonder where she lives. I wonder if she's happy. I wonder what her relationship with her parents is like because it seems to me that by asking those questions, I'm humanizing what porn has dehumanized. And I'm not sure you can do a very good job, at least very quickly, lusting over someone you have to reduce them to an object in order to treat him as such

Whereas if you personalize them you you realize that you actually can't do that at least not very easily What are your thoughts? Oh, that's beautiful Matt and on both regards The second part of that there where you talk about you wondering well, what's she doing now? Does she have a family and this and that and somewhere I think I was talking about temperance and Thomas even says that You know one cure for intemperance is to stop focusing meditating upon Singulars like particulars like like the things you can actually see like a person's physical body So if you see a tempting body or for recollection comes back to you do just what you said remember Yeah, that's a body that houses a a soul. And that person, that woman you're seeing there, maybe, now she's somebody's

daughter, we know that, maybe she's somebody's wife, she's somebody's mother, she's somebody's sister, yeah, to totally fully humanize them, yeah, use this as an opportunity to grow, to pray for them. Exactly, that's really beautiful. And just a fact, too, that reaching out in prayer yourself is a wonderful thing to do. There's St. John Climacus, one of the Eastern Fathers, and when he's writing about concubicence and lust, you know, he's saying, if you're going to try to conquer lust all by yourself, or even if you use the method of the Stoics, I might say, he said, it's like you're trying to swim across the sea with one arm tied behind your back. He said, you're not gonna do it without the grace of God. So, in dealing

with some of these difficult situations like that, yeah, and he says, yeah, he said, you're not gonna defeat it by argument either. He says, because nature has the best of the argument. You know, we have strong built-in urges here. So, again, that idea you said, one, we're going to recognize that it happens, there's elements of our own nature that we can't stop that may recur, but then we're going to first call for God's help, because that's our ultimate source of grace and power. And yeah, we're going to humanize that person that we either acted or fantasized about inappropriately in the past.

So I think that's just a wonderful way to look at it. And if you look at it that way, if a person is tormented by recurring thoughts like that, it can even be that, you know, counter-alloy joy when you have the trials and tribulations and James, even possibly, you know, like that pebble in the shoe, that your chance to try to grow in grace by making something positive come from it, making yourself more compassionate to maybe the people you lessened about or more compassionate to other people out there today who are going through similar struggles. Yeah, that's that's really great. And I suppose the a way I can reframe it, not in order to pretend it didn't happen or dismiss it inappropriately or something like that.

But let's say I have a bad relationship with my mother and I have these negative memories of her and it causes me to want to feel badly about her, speak badly about her, ignore her. Maybe in that moment, I can thank God for the ways she was a good mother, even if I can't think of too many would that be another way do you think of sanctifying the memory or. Absolutely my brother and I do this with a particular family member who's gone now that had wonderful elements and some some negative ones too we've discussed them frequently and we do try to thank God and remember all the goodness that was there. And we, I'm gonna be pulling that Stoic concept too, that somehow what he was doing made sense to him. So there can be, that can be very helpful. We can, you know, reframe, rethink these things, look at him with a different attitude, try to learn the lessons. Like, you know, we talked about early memories.

I think one of the earliest ones I have. As a young kid, I was, I said, I was a Superman nut. People used to call my mom Superman's mom. One time we went to a Catholic wedding and mom said Superman's not going to the wedding, Kevin is. Oh, okay. So I'm sitting out there in a pew with an older cousin and I get her to take me out to the car. So a few minutes later, you know Superman comes back because I had the suit there. But one of my earliest memories is there was some grandkids who would visit neighbors across the street and they were were our age, they were fun kids. And one time I said, hey, let's have a Superman contest. We'll try to look like Superman. So we both could run inside and he comes out and he's got a blue shirt as

grandma gives him a red towel, you know. And then I come out Superman himself. Though I did have a lot of duct tape because I wore holes in it. And as I look back on that, I saw the kind of space, that's what my early man thought. Wow, that was not good. You know, so the lesson to me was, you know, don't try to outdo other people. Don't ever be showing off your earthly things. Think about the other person's circumstances.

Another one later on happened in third grade, just real briefly. Third grade, Catholic school. Sister says, hey, I'm gonna walk across the library to the second grade classroom. You all be quiet while I'm gone. So she walks across, we're all watching her at the door. The door shuts all of a sudden.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just chaos, right? So then a few minutes later, the door opens, somebody sees and the class is, you know, of course all dead silent again. And Sister comes in, I kind of call her over, I say, hey, Sister, I hope you know that the minute that door shut, this class just went wild, everybody's talking and stuff. She just said, Kevin, don't be a tattletale.

That's a lesson that stuck ever since. There's even times when at my office we used to have this anonymous suggestion box. Sometimes people put stuff in there like, how come so-and-so, who is a married supervisor, left with so-and-so at lunch who is an unmarried, you know, and I'm thinking, boy, they never had sister in third grade. But I look back now, you know, and think of that, think of embarrassment, you know, how I struggled as a young kid just with this pride or with this tendency to tattle, you know.

But even those negatives should be grist for our mill and we should be able to grow from them. I like it. Eric Muzyk, who is a supporter on Locals, says, hey, this is great. I find I don't remember much about my past. Short term, long term, not much. My wife can remember all sorts of details to anything. Question is, what's up with that? Am I just lacking something or is it more to do with my being too self involved, selfish, so that when that event in the past was happening, I wasn't really present? Yeah, that's a very thoughtful question, too, because, I mean, without knowing, there's all kinds of possibilities there. But one of the first things that comes

to my mind back to grade school again, I was at small school, mostly the same kids, one class, kindergarten to ace. We got to know each other really well. So decades later, we'd keep having these reunions, you know, we'd share our stories. And so often we found out that somebody, the story they recall, the rest of us were like, or most of us, you know, what? You know, so we all had selective memories. Certain things stood out to us and certain things didn't. And some people really retained a lot, other people only a few things. So there's a huge realm of individual differences. I should say that with all aspects of memory, it's kind of like a bell curve. Some have just naturally very, very powerful memory abilities. Some aren't so hot,

and some are more in the middle. But also, memory itself is not just one thing. I mean, there's all kinds of different kinds of memory. Like we talk about short-term memory, and most people can hold about seven things in their attention at one time, like seven digits, which is why they decided to make phone number seven digits, because most people, if they're careful, they could retain that many. Psychologists often say five plus or minus two. If you go five to nine, that covers almost everybody, the strong memories, the weak memories, but most people are around seven,

but not just for short term. Then long term memory, once things can move through and you've paid attention, that's almost limitless. We have billions and billions of neurons, all interconnected, so long term memory is almost limitless, but especially as we age, some of the memories that get back there, we can no longer bring them back out. We can't retrieve them as well until maybe something triggers. We see something and all of a sudden, aha, it's there.

So I'd say for the man whose wife remembers more, it could be an individual difference thing. It could be that yeah, and there's pros and cons to remembering too much about the past because one of the common Stoic lessons anyways, you know, focus on the present moment. Don't let the past determine you, you know, predetermine you. So again, I just say pros and cons. And there's, you know, with the different kinds of memories too, you may find you're strong in one, weak in another. There's visual memory for objects, there's verbal memory for words, there's like a declarative memory for stuff that you've read, like are doing a test, versus actual experiential memory, what you've lived through in your own life.

And in a sense, this memory palace method takes the declarative memory, you would like reading the list of Ten Commandments, and turns it into a lived life experience. But anyway, to that question, I'd say I probably wouldn't be too worried about it. There are great differences there. The only time I worry about memory is maybe if you're specifically trying to memorize something that's important and you find that you can't do that. Speaking of living memories, I often find when I'm speaking to my seven year old Peter, when my other son was younger, that they don't seem to believe me when I

say, don't cut the stick that way, you'll cut yourself. And so I'm saying it infinitely, you know? And then I just think to myself, well, just let's just let him cut himself. And so then he'll learn. And it's that same thing, right? Obviously, I don't want him to cut himself badly I wouldn't send him out in traffic to realize he could get hit by a car if he didn't look both ways but to allow them to experience that pain so they can learn it firsthand seems to be

the only way you can sometimes teach boys. Oh absolutely I remember that recalls an exact incident on our oldest boy we're out at a restaurant and he's I don't remember his age he was pretty, but he kept going after the pepper, trying to open it up and fiddle with it. And my wife put it back a couple times on him, and he said, let him have it, let him have it. So he has the pepper. A few minutes later he throws up,

and then the waiter comes in, oh, your little boy is sick. We're like, yeah, we better do carry out. But then my son, he still loves to tell that story because never since that day has he eaten pepper. Very good. Hey, I wanna do a little shout out right now for Halo. Halo.com Matt Fradd. There's a link in the description below for people to learn more about it. Have you heard of Halo? You don't have an iPhone, so you probably would never have heard of it. Halo is a Catholic prayer and meditation app, and it can lead you through examinations of conscience,

with the Rosary. I know this summer they've got like book reading clubs where they'll. Work from saints are being read they have sleep stories they have all sorts of things so people could check out hello h a l l o w dot com slash Matt Fred. The reason I'm telling you to go to the link as opposed to just downloading it is if you go to the link and then sign up that way, you'll get three months for free. So you can try it and decide whether or not you want to continue with it. It's actually really, really good. Super sophisticated. So there you go. Thank you for letting me do an advert. Well, I love the sense that too, because I also, you know, technology can be the sharpest possible two-edged sword, right? You can lead us to so much that's so bad, but also so much that's so good. So to use that kind of technology for a purpose like that is just wonderful.

I take August offline every year. So I don't touch a phone. I actually give my phone away, give my computer away. And so it's funny, though, I don't know what this is. Right before August shows up, I feel this anxiety when I think about it. Even just talking about it now, I'm feeling anxious. And I think it might have something to do with the Stockholm syndrome, but I'm not sure. Oh, that could be.

Yeah, it's a frightening thing just to give it all up for a month. But it's also a very liberating thing. And I find, speaking of memory, that I'm actually able like last year, I sat down and memorized a poem for the first time in my life, partly because I had nothing else to do, because my life is so distracted by YouTube and things like this. But I also my wife was shocked, like she was sitting like, how did you do that? You know, oh, I'm very impressed.

Now, maybe I should get out of trial. I like the sound of that. In small ways, I try to to do that, to minimalize some distractions a little bit. Well, that calls to mind too, something similar. I remember reading, there was an Italian Cardinal years ago and when he was addressing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the gift of counsel, of being able, listening to the Holy Spirit.

And he said when young people would come to him, counsel, he'd say, do two things. He said, don't watch television for a year. And this is before there were cell phones and all that, so wow. So the second thing, this might be, was don't be anxious. Don't worry about your future. So this is like they're the age you're trying to decide,

what am I gonna do with my life? And he said if they would come back to them, the ones that actually did it, they say the hardest part was not being anxious. But that general idea there of sometimes purposely, unplugging ourselves can be a wonderful thing. You had to lead in all kinds of growth of who knows what growth in prayer. You can use these memory techniques.

You all of a sudden find your time self having more time for your family. You know, like Sundays, I'll be sitting there in front of the internet. I think how much time has gone by now? There's my wife sitting in the other room. How long have I ignored her? You know, so for some things like that too, like I even have my wife got me a little egg timer, so sometimes I'll even actually set that thing. It looks like a little egg.

That's a really good idea. Then when it's ringing, I'm like, okay, too long for that. Shut down. Go live life. Yeah. Being constantly bombarded, it's just fragments your interior life and you're all scattered in a thousand different thoughts and a thousand different directions. And I wonder if you have any comment on this. It seems to me that the phone is both the cause and relief of our personal anxiety. So it's a relief, right? In some ways. So if I get into an elevator with somebody who I really, really don't want to have a small chat with

or if I'm standing in a coffee line and I feel like an idiot just standing there and I feel awkward, maybe I don't. But if you did feel that way while picking up your phone and looking at it, it soothes you. There's a sense in which it relieves your anxiety or if you're bored and you find something stimulating, this is a relieves your anxiety. But then it's also very much the cause of it, too, because now you feel the need to see if somebody's texted you who you've maybe accidentally not responded to. And what will they think if they think you're ignoring them?

And maybe there's an email you don't know. Who knows? You better check. So for me, it's been easier to do long periods of without it entirely than trying to moderate it. I mean, I do that as well. So I I lost my someone actually stole my dumb phone. It was in a wallet. So I think they stole it. They had the credit card. So I wouldn't have intentionally stolen.

Nobody would do that. Jokes on them suckers. But so I've blocked the internet on my iPhone. So there's no way I can access the internet. But I'll, you know, so I'll do things like that. But I find those long periods of time are really helpful. Yeah. I like the sounds. I don't like like now I'm traveling. So I have my wife's phone and even she, she mainly just emails and, and our texts, it doesn't need an email. We just text and talk. And I use it for the directions feature if I'm not driving because I hate to get lost. So I get anxious if I don't have it if I'm not driving in an unfamiliar area. But yeah, but that anxiety producing aspect too. I mean, some

people have done, I don't remember the exact number, but people, you know, check their phone dozens and dozens of times a day. And it's using that behavioral principle of intermittent reinforcement. When what does that mean principle of intermittent reinforcement when. What does that mean intermittent reinforcement? Okay. It's like the one arm bandits in the gaming machine. Yes. And I don't know how it is here, but where I am, central Illinois, Springfield, virtually every corner now, they have these machines, restaurants, gas stations, they're everywhere.

Terrible. But the principle of intermittent reinforcement is, you know, basically reinforcement is, you know, we tend to do things more often if we were rewarded or reinforced or rewarded when we do them. But with things that are intermittently reinforced, you never know exactly when you're going to get that reward. And they say when you never know when it's coming, that's when you're actually most likely to do the behavior most often,

like the slot machines. Ah, it didn't work these last 24 times, but hey, lucky number 25, you know, boom. And then once in a while, you'll get that. And I even heard that food manufacturers did this with some form of one of the chips, where for people who really like spicy stuff, they engineer a bag of chips

that only a certain percentage of them were spicy and you couldn't tell by looking at them. So you'd have to keep eating and eating until you get the lucky winner, you know, and get your spicy chip. So some people said the phones kind of work this way because yeah, I mean, I'll do it myself. Sometimes I'll look and say, Hey, did I get any messages or intimate? And most of the time there's nothing interesting there, but every once in a while, Hey, oh yeah, I'm glad I saw that. And even if that happens just every once in a while, it's enough to keep you looking. And you think about how like YouTube is programmed

to, to put things in front of you that you're going to want to see you looking and you think about how like YouTube is programmed to To put things in front of you that you're going to want to see way more than you're getting email. So YouTube works because it knows what you want more than what you think you want So you can subscribe to a channel like pints with Aquinas But YouTube knows whether you want to see pints with Aquinas or not if you do it'll show it to you But if you're subscribed, but you don't really want to see pints with Aquinas, YouTube's algorithm learns that and doesn't show you my videos anymore. That's scary, isn't it? No, exactly.

Now I've seen it exactly myself. Like if I'm on my computer, I find interesting things I might subscribe. But usually at the time of the day, when I wind down with my little old fashion and some pork rinds or pistachios or some cheese, I'll turn on my television set and access YouTube through that set and I can see that one is totally geared towards what I've been watching. So what first shows up I see Pints with Aquinas and I see all these strongman shows and I see arm wrestling and I see some particular news channels. Sky News Australia is one they happen to find interesting.

They seem more interested in American politics. Yeah, yeah. Australian politics. And I don't know if you know this, Matt, they have this wonderful accent. Yes, they do. It's delightful. I just can't get enough of it.

But yeah, exactly what you're saying. I have a personal question for you, if you don't mind. How old are you? Oh gosh, I should have did a mnemonic for that. If I did, I would call that a cheat, which would be six and one, 61. 61. Okay, so here's the personal question.

What's it like since you've put in so much effort and virtuously, so in developing both your mind and your body, what's it like for you as you age? I presume you're not as strong as you were when you were 35. I presume you're not as sharp as you were when you were 25 What's that like for you? And and what do you think that will be like as you grow older? Because presumably you're not going to maintain that level of Yeah, and that's a question. Of course. It's very very dear to me because but it's so at first I was very pessimistic when I was young There'd be some 40 year old guy

in the gym, like, hey look at that, that guy's 40 and he's still lifting a barbell, you know? But I found later that the age at which you automatically decline, people started realizing, well it's not quite so. It's not really 40. I remember for a long time thinking it's 55. So when I was a putcher, 55, I'm gonna do my last hurrah. I'm gonna squat and deadlift real heavy and everything,

you know? But then when I turned 60 last year, I Deadlifted 410 pounds for five repetitions. I thought hey, I'm pretty pleased with this But when I was 22, I could do that for more than a dozen right, so so yeah, even though you can retain a lot of your strength with age if you if you keep training and and if You start even doing resistance training of some kind, even if you're already older when you start, like even an 80 year old, their muscles can still respond, but they have ageing joints and things supporting them. But anyway, anyway, I found that I try to minimize the loss with age. I still have pretty good strength, but no, it's not what it used to be. But I'm happy with that. I kind of enjoy where I am now. So if I go on a new exercise,

I keep records, and I'm always comparing what I did last time not to I don't go To back to my old 1982 workbook notebook and say hey, wait a minute a few hundred pounds down You know, I look at the compared to myself to how I was before but overall it's been good My strength is still good kind of surprised me I wasn't expecting to be able to be this strong at this age and yet, you know certain times I look down Hey, my biceps are still kind of big but I've noticed some sagging skin there and you know really there's absolutely nothing I can do about that you know I can try to make my arms bigger to stretch it back out but to do that I'm gonna get fat you know so so

for a time why would there be because you're intentionally putting on more weight muscle right if I intentionally put on more weight a portion of it's going to be fat and even that increased leverage will make me stronger. Like right now I weigh I think 199 pounds and a couple years ago I was regularly over 220. But I realized, I did a lot of research on some metabolic syndrome and diabetes and things like that and one of the warning signs actually is a waist over 40 inches for a man and I realized when I was that heavy, my waist was over 40 inches. So even though I was very strong, it wasn't really good for health. So I reduced there. So I cut back on just

eating everything I saw. And at that time, I was taking the supplement creatine in a high dose. I stopped doing that. I actually 16 months ago went on something more similar to what they call now the Paleo diet or keto or low carb high fat, even almost not completely, but partially carnivore. So what are you doing now? What is today or yesterday or tomorrow going to look like? Yeah. Well, it started last February that I switched my diet when I realized I was just too heavy. It wasn't healthy. So the main things I did were eliminate sugar and Jump foods are just refined foods, you know stuff that comes in a box like crackers and chips and things like that Grains almost no refined grains. So though I will eat the small amounts of like this They call these Ezekiel bread this sprouted breads things like that. I'll do a little bit and I do you know small amounts of berries

this sprouted breads, things like that I'll do a little bit. And I do small amounts of berries, vegetables, I'll do like maybe a once in a while potato or sweet potato, but just a half. But basically, my carbohydrates are low. For me, probably 50, 60 grams a day. Almost very few fake foods, mostly just real foods. So I eat a lot of meat, I eat fish and salmon and scallops and shrimp and lots of eggs.

I drink milk, but I drink this ultra- milk, the tyrone protein and lower in sugar. So anyway, when I did that within a few months, I went from a 220 pounds to 190. Wow. A few months later, I decided I wanted to rebuild a little bit because of my interest in body building, weight thing. I want to be a little bit stronger again. So I let my weight go now to a maximum of 200 and I just feel so much better. My blood pressure dropped by like

Almost 30 points my waistline went down at one point by like five and a half inches So what's the main factor you would attribute that for like that was the sugar the grains? For me. Yeah for me in our case. I would say it was the simple carbohydrates So sugar number one and grains number two and by by grains I mean like I, even though I love it, I almost never eat pasta. I love pizza but actually I scrape it off the crust even though it's not the ideal food at that point. But yeah, I find it pretty easy to give that up once I allowed myself to eat stuff like eggs and steak and more seafood and nuts. I love pistachios and peanuts and I do some protein shakes that have whey or casein protein with peanut butter and milk and stuff. But for me in particular, it had a

drastic effect, the drastically reducing the artificial foods, kind of trying to eat more foods as God made them rather than as a man manufactured them. What about other sweeteners like honey or maple syrup or monk fruit? Have you done any look in looked looked in any of that? Yeah, because you know, actually I do have a bit of a sweet tooth. Me too. So I do. The main ones I use are monk fruit and stevia.

And like I usually have like one or two old fashions today, whiskey or brandy old fashions. And I used to do like the sugar syrup and I'd throw in the cherry, or these special cherries that come from Italy, the Luxardo's I think, you know. But anyway, I made a sugar-free version, but I'll either use a little bit of stevia or a little bit of monk fruit, and then just the bitters and the alcohol and water.

But did you do any research into monk fruit over stevia or honey, that sort of thing? We have honeybees at home, and we just pulled over 20 pounds from the vives. Oh, and I know honey. I know that it's like, of course, anything in nutrition, you can get a million different opinions. But I know that the paleo approach, looking like what we probably ate a long, long, long time ago, that honey was one of those natural things. It's out there in nature. Now, we probably weren't having it as a huge proportion of

the daily diet, because you had to fight off the bees and the bears, you know? But yeah, personally, honey myself, I mean, once in a while I'll enjoy it as a special treat. It's just not my own daily staple, but like my wife is more lax than me. She's more naturally to be thin, so she has much more leeway.

So she loves honey in her tea, or I'll make her tea with lemon, lemon juice and honey. But, and I try to stay away, I don't use too much like saccharin or aspartame or anything, not necessarily. It's horrible. But I prefer the sweeteners that are closer to nature, such as honey is completely natural. And then, you know, things like monk fruit or stevia are a little closer. It's a good idea because it can get overwhelming when you look at

everybody's opinion on what to eat, what not to eat. It's incredibly overwhelming. You think, well, but I think most people would agree that you just cut out sugars. That's probably a good idea. Or cut out artificial sugar. Cut out, cut out refined foods or. Yeah, exactly.

Even just kind of really limiting or getting rid of grains. Although I guess there's gonna be another kind of pendulum swing and that'll be all we're eating soon. Yeah, even for me, like I went like over a year without virtually any grains. And I thought, well, I kind of pendulum swing and that'll be all we're eating soon. Yeah, even for me, like I went like over a year without virtually any grains and I thought, well I kind of miss that that high quality sprouted grain with my eggs. So I said, okay, I'm going to set that one piece on some days.

I'm going to put Irish butter all over it. Oh my gosh. So that kind of thing is good. But but yeah, and you know, I will mention I write books about everything. So I do have a new book coming out on this topic called You Are That Temple. That's the dietary research and stuff I've been doing the last couple years.

But yeah, I've read everything, and there's a million different opinions there, but, and they often attack like the guidelines we've been given over the last 50 or 60 years, like the food pyramid, to base our diet on carbohydrate. When maybe it should just be a little bit more limited. But even then, even in the original US dietary guidelines from like the 1977 committee under McGovern, the 1980 USDA guidelines, even there, they did say to be aware of excess sugar.

It just wasn't really heavily stressed. But even too, if you read all these different diets out there, I mean, eat low carbs, eat high carbs, eat high carbs, you know, eat all meat, make it vegan. Even there, most of them do tend to agree you shouldn't overdo it on sugar. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good advice. If you're out there and you're like, I'm overwhelmed with one thing I can do, just don't have any sugar. Just cut it all out.

Yeah, because everybody does not need it. This is my 10th week I've been doing this thing where it's like, no sugar. I haven't had whiskey in 10 weeks. Oh, I really does not need it. This is my 10th week I've been doing this thing where it's like, no sugar. I haven't had whiskey in 10 weeks. Oh, I really would like some whiskey. Oh goodness. Even just a refined grain for the, for the whiskey is really good. Yeah. I'm just choosing to just cut out high alcohol content for the last. So I've had, I will have some wine sometimes and things like that, but.

Yeah. And the first thing to go for me was beer. Because I could just physically feel the bloating. I hate beer. We're just tiny little bit of whiskey. I know my show is called Pines of the Aquinas, but I can't drink beer without feeling gross. I love the flavor. I'll admit that. Although I tell you, a good stout in the winter. I could probably do that. Exactly the same here. That's my favorite. Stouts and porters.

So old fashioned though. When did you get into them? Trying to think. Just a couple of years ago, and I have an old weightlifting buddy who's also a whiskey buddy now, And we just both got across, so they just really enjoy the flavor. And they're relatively low calorie when it's just, the whiskey is the only source of nutrient in there. But I might have one a day. And sometimes I do what they call the Wisconsin version

where you use brandy instead of whiskey. I do like the flavor of brandy. Yeah, but I don't overdo it. Cause I did a one day tally of my diet just for this new book I'm writing., but I don't overdo it. Cause like I did a one day like tally of my diet just for this new book I'm writing. Cause I normally don't keep close track, but I just tally the protein, the fat, the carbs. And I realized at that point, boy,

about 10% of my daily calories were coming from alcohol. So I don't like the sounds of that. What about intermittent fasting? Like I haven't eaten today. I feel great. I usually eat around noon or three. Yeah. But I feel terrific when-

Kind of on the same page there, somewhat. Now, I have eaten today, early in the hotel, really early in the morning. I had just some eggs and sausages, then I had a protein drink that was low carbohydrate, but then I won't eat again to maybe supper tonight. So I did recently too discover the benefits of the intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating. So my main approach was

I go to bed early. I'm early to bed very early to rise. Me too. So I usually stop eating at 5 30 pm That's when I've had my supper and I usually have like a protein drink or a protein yogurt or something afterwards And then I wake up early in the morning, maybe four or something go to the gym at about six Before then I have nothing but coffee or I might do the a bullet version. I might put a little bit of butter or coconut oil or something in it. And then usually my first meal of the day then is after my workout at maybe, that depends, 7 38, 39 a.m. or something. So I've had at least 14, 16 hours or something. And just in the last few weeks I've experimented then with skipping lunch. I used to still do a lunch too, but now I mainly, I have an

after-workout breakfast and then I'm Most days I go now until supper and yeah, and I feel better and I gave a talk last weekend I had breakfast like six or seven hours before and before I started eating this way. It's like Oh, I'm gonna have a blood sugar crash. I have to eat something an hour before I go talk, you know But now say no, I felt sharper. It's the opposite isn't it? It is it is the opposite body you learn how to burn fat for fuel I'll probably get something to eat after this interview and I'll feel sleepy immediately, but I feel completely wired. And that's probably because of the three double shots of espresso I've had. But no, that's good stuff too. I have a hard time giving up coffee.

Yeah, I'm just not going to listen. I'm just going to choose to ignore whatever statistics someone may offer to demonize coffee. You know, those people are out there, but they shouldn't be able to be online or vote. No, I mean, I'm usually not for censorship, but maybe. That's right. But actually last week I did just in the radio, just local radio driving at the gym, the latest study, this is the positive benefits of coffee.

Oh yes, turn that up. At least three cups a day, at least three cups a day, and said like, you're less likely to get, I don't remember if it was Alzheimer's or something. But then it even said, well, then people who put sugar in their coffee had an even greater protective effect. Like, oh, I don't like that part. But you know, all these individual studies.

It's so hard, isn't it? You have to look at the whole body of evidence to really begin to make sense of it. But I think overall, I'm not too worried about reasonable intake of coffee. I mean, for me, reasonable is usually less than five cups a day. Yeah. Yeah. I find if I stopped drinking coffee around one or the latest three, I'm usually good.

I'm usually usually between one and two p.m. is my last cup of the day. Yeah, I do find if I have it later, though, it can interfere with my sleep. Shane asks, and thanks for being a supporter on local, Shane, you beautiful bugger. He says, how close, if at all, is memory tied to intelligence? In other words, does a good memory typically coincide with higher intelligence? Oh, now that's a very interesting question, because even back in the days of Aristotle

and St. Albert and all them, sometimes they argue that no, not necessarily. Sometimes the people can really retain things very well, aren't so sharp at figuring things out all their own. But one thing I did for years in neuropsych was to do psychological tests on people. We did actual intelligence tests, the famous Wechsler IQ test, sort of the gold standard. Wechsler also came out with, they had a memory scale. It was a whole series of different tests for your verbal and visual memory. And for most people, you're going to have some strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. Like, oh, you're really good at

verbal reasoning. You're not quite so strong at visual memory. You know, so everybody has their own profile. But for the most part, in most people, they tend to hang together. They tend to be more similar. And to give you a real extreme case where they can be different, I tested a man when I was going through my internship that had uncontrollable seizures,

and they actually did a brain surgery where they removed some tissue in his hippocampus, the left hemisphere of his brain. And he had worked as an attorney, very, very bright man. I tested his IQ after the surgery, and it was 125, which means the top fifth percentile, 95% of the population are gonna get below that. And they used to say 125 is like the average,

like for an MD or a PhD or someone who chooses to go along in that school, that's pretty normal for a most highly educated person. He still had that IQ. And yet I give him these memory scales, the verbal scale of the Wechsler and the visual. In the verbal, he's almost a total washout. Like in one test, it's a different test. It's not part of the Wechsler, but we give like a 15 word list. I say like dog, chair, table. I give you 15 words and I say, okay, tell me back as many as you can remember and you tell me back, right? And we do this eight times with people and most people start building up, they get a learning curve, you know, they do

more and more. And this guy, even though he had an IQ of 125, he can never get past a total of nine words and a lot of people will get 13, 14, 50. But here's the real telling thing. Half an hour later, just out of the blue, we say, hey, remember that memory word list we did a half an hour ago? Can you give me some of those words? And most people can still give you almost all of them

because they did it eight times, remember that repetition? Well, this guy gives me a flat out zero. And I tell people that's the second worst performance I ever saw. Well, how's that second? He did remember that we did some kind of word test. I tested another man who didn't even remember he had some kind of major electrical shock. Yeah. But anyway, the same guy who bottoms out on verbal memory on the visual memory tests, his memory is absolutely normal. In fact, it's above normal. It's like his IQ. It hung with it. It's a top few percentile. So how can that be in his case? Well,

for the vast majority of people, even left-handers like I am, the left half of your brain is more dominant for verbal information, language, and so forth. The right tends to be dominant for visual spatial processing. So this man's surgery just took out the tissue that's highly involved in verbal processing, but his highly intact visual processing was still there. So he was still real strong on verbal visual memory. So the fun thing about him, my mentor knew I was into these techniques. He said, hey, why don't you train this guy? So we tried the memory palace with him and he went from remembering zero words out of nine, you know,

without any technique, to working up to 11 after only three trials instead of eight. He kind of got bored and said, let's do something else. So he only had three trials. He works up to 11 words, but then in a half an hour later, he remembers nine of those 11 because we had showed him how to encode this verbal information in the visual form where he was super strong. So I went on and on, but I would just say again, for most people, memory is probably, just gonna more likely not, it's gonna be somewhat similar to your other thinking

abilities, language, intelligence, and so on. But there's huge individual differences. There's some people can be real strong in certain areas and not others, or real strong in particular kinds of memory, but not others. Verbal versus visual, short term versus long term. There's also something that I tend to be kind of weak at. They call retrospective memory as

remembering things that have happened in the past. Prospective memory is trying to remember something you're supposed to do in the future, like oh, what am I supposed to bring home from the store for my wife? You know, so unless I've used a memory technique, sometimes I'm like the next person. Forget those things you're supposed to do. You mentioned IQ tests. I've never taken one.

What's your opinion of them and how helpful are they or how accurate are they? Yeah, the IQ test. Now, I worked for 32 years in disability adjudication for Social Security, where we determined if people were disabled or not, unable to work, for kids if they were unable to function at an age-appropriate level. And we did a lot of cases where IQ testing

was a component of it. When at that time we called it the condition mental retardation, trying to remember there's a new word for it now, intellectual deficiency, something along those lines. So the tests themselves have some value in predicting academic success and predicting work success.

And if I remember right, the correlation was something like 0.50. So if they were totally worthless, zero correlation, hey, this guy got a high score on a test, but he does horrible in school. And if it was a perfect correlation, it'd be 100 know or 1.0 oh yeah the higher your IQ the better you do in school the better you do on the job but IQ tests were somewhere in the middle so so basically they tended for most people to have some

useful information but they're they're not telling you everything about you like you know I said that that one man still had an IQ of 125 but he couldn't work because his visual, his verbal memory from new learning was so impaired, and that's not something the IQ test itself tests. So I would just say for most people in IQ tests, yeah, they can give you some information, but there's a range of error there.

You might get a little bit different score. What's the best IQ test out there? I'm sure if I went to Google, there'd be a billion free ones. Well, yeah, well, for psychologists, you know, and this is one that's administered by a psychologist. It's called the man named David Wexler invented these, the Wexler scales, and they have ones for children. They have different versions like the Wexler R for revised and in two and three, I don't mean I'm sure what number we're up to now

because they didn't keep up because they don't practice now, but like multiple, multiple editions because every so many years they have to do new norms to find out the people living now how do they perform on like there is a short-term memory test like how many digits you can recall so they have to do new norms well what can 30 year olds now do compared to what they could do in 1950s they're always having to revise these tests but i say they can be fairly helpful um but there's other correlates there. Like I know, you know, Mensa, the high IQ society, they have like an IQ cut off of 130. You can go get a formal test from a psychologist

and it'll release in the past. They would also take like your SAT or ACT scores, the aptitude tests you take for going into college, because that used to correlate fairly strongly with IQ. But then all this gets kind of readjusted people start studying for those exams You know, so it's not really measuring native ability. But one other use i'll say for a thing about the IQ test the younger a child is The less accurate that number is going to predict how they're going to be as an adult

So the younger the child the more unstable the more likelihood So just if you have a young child they get a you know, fairly low or average iq That doesn't mean necessarily they're going to stay there, you know, it might improve But at the extremes if the iq comes out at a very low level at least, you know When I was in the field the iq of 70 was like the break off for for The highest level of mental retardation. Okay, even for the kids if the score tends to be very very low And if it's considered a valid score, there's not some other reason to explain why they did so poorly, then they usually are fairly accurate predictors when they're kind of at the extreme.

Okay. Dr. Vost, we had some people in chat earlier who were asking if who were asking if the memory kind of palace seems to be very visual and very visually oriented. So they were asking, it's kind of a buzzword a little bit, but for people with anaphasia, people who don't have the ability to kind of conjure up visual images in their mind, if you've had any experience with that. Wow. Is that a thing people? That's amazing when you get into the way the brain operates almost everything is a potential thing Yeah, we can have some specific weaknesses. So yeah for some of those rare

cases there there are people who will vary in their strength and the ability to form mental imagery and some could be almost even Almost unable to do it all it's gonna very very Greatly at the other extreme. It's going to vary very greatly. At the other extreme, there's this guy, Alexander Luria, who was a great Russian neuropsychologist. He wrote a book called The Mind of a Nemanist, a memory expert. This guy who kind of by nature had an almost perfect memory.

He developed some of these techniques like the palace on his own without reading about them. But his memory is almost flawless because almost whatever he saw and almost instantly turned into an image. And in his case, unlike me, said he could go back to lists years ago and repeat them again without brushing up.

So I will just say that's on a spectrum. There can be some people who have this extreme. You know, Jimmy Aiken, I'm pretty sure he's like that. That he remembers almost everything he reads. Trent Horn has something like that ability. Oh right. Yeah. So some people remember what part of the page he read that thing on. That's exactly right. What a bastard. They dare. They, you know, we're by the sweat of our brow, trying to remember 10 things about Peter.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, and some people have more that by nature and even, you know, sometimes they will do a contest between people with naturally powerful memories and people who are just like experts in these strategies. And usually the strategists will outperform them. But if you take a person who already has that powerful memory by nature and then they get into this stuff, oh my gosh. Doesn't that become unstoppable?

We really watch out. But yeah, but I would say for a person who has very, you know, difficulty with the imagery, it would be interesting. I've never tested a person with that extreme condition myself imagery, it would be interesting, I've never tested a person with that extreme condition myself, but it'd be interesting to see if they could apply this method when you have the actual pictures,

because it's not purely visual, we're doing both, right? We're also using verbal puns, like our steel chandelier, we pictured that, but just the very, the word steel, S-T-E-L, is gonna trigger S-T-E-A-L

when you're thinking in terms of commandments. That should work for anybody, even if you can't form the image of the steel chandelier. So a person with trouble using imagery, yeah, they might want to play with techniques like this adapted to their own particular strengths and weaknesses. Okay, question from Skyler G. He says, I've always written down a schedule and things I need to remember since high school and I think it's negatively impacting my memory. How do I increase the ability to recall things and remember small things? So first of all, do you think that's even

true that writing down a list of things or your schedule for the day is negatively impacting people's memories? Well, I always go back to the ancients and of course Plato talks about this. Wait, does he? What does he say? Yeah, yeah. And I think the ancients. And of course, Plato talks about this. Wait, does he? What does he say? Yeah, yeah. And I think it's through a story of Socrates that he's the ancient Egyptian gods now.

And there's a god who's the pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and another god who invents all this stuff, like our Daedalus in the Greek mythology. He comes up, he says, hey, I've invented this new thing, and it's called writing. And we actually, it's higher than this, I guess you write things down. It's a really wonderful thing, you know. And then then the chief god there says, yeah, I see, you know, you've given us a lot of good stuff, he said, but are you sure this isn't really an aid toward forgetting,

an aid toward destroying our memory? Because now we'll no longer have to have it in our heads. We can rely on this outside thing. So that has been a concern for a long, long time, for thousands of years. And I would say it's just a matter, you know, well, another thing, if memory is a part of prudence, then it's like a virtue. And one of the aspects of the moral of cardinal virtues is, you know, it's kind of that golden mean or finding the right middle. And I'd say that using the right way written tools can be helpful.

And for the particular tasks, tools can be helpful and for the particular tasks they can be helpful. So sometimes, yeah, especially for that prospective memory or doing things in the future, if I don't know for certain there's no way I'm going to forget this, I'll write it down myself or put it on an electronic calendar or something. So I say that in itself is not necessarily a problem, but if for a questioner wanted to try this, what you could do, maybe just go like a week in advance and form a mnemonic based on the days of the week, which could be easy because you know Monday, named after the moon, in a way, moon day,

Tuesday's harder, I think that was one of the ancient goddesses. So Wednesday was Woden's day or Odin, you know, anybody who's watched the Marvel movies can picture Odin with his eye patch and all that Thursday Thor's day, you know Whatever, but just try make a little mnemonic scheme of the days of the week and for next week Find out what you've got to do And put it down there on on that particular day of the week the image for what you've got to do Oh, I've got to give a presentation to my office on Thursday so you're going to picture yourself with Thor and you're going to give presents to your co-workers. Presentation,

Thor's Day. But you can do that. And if you need to pinpoint particular times, you can tie it into an image of the clock or you can use our number letter conversion thing. So if you- That just seems way more complicated than writing the bloody thing down on a piece of paper. That's the thing. That's the thing. It is. It is. That's why myself, I don't normally do this. Do you use a schedule? Yeah. Oh, yeah. For prospective memory. There's another concept called meta memory. It's your awareness of your own memory abilities, your own strengths and weaknesses. And one of the things is, when can I rely on my memory? And when would I be better off

just writing the darn thing down? Or saying, I'm reminding tomorrow morning first thing I gotta do this or that. So yeah, so it's all part of that. I say these techniques are like arrows in our quiver. I said, but you don't always need to pull out a crossbow bolt with this stuff when a spongy little nerf arrow will get the job done.

So I would say the act of using the schedule itself, I wouldn't worry too much about that. That's probably not going to destroy your memory, especially if you do purposely practice some other memory methods for stuff that might prove more practical or helpful. Do you have any other opinions on scheduling, especially as a psychologist and somebody who's worked with memory? Because I find, like I use this here, this is the full focus planner by Michael Hyatt, you know, every week you kind of you list out what's coming up, the top three main objectives for the week, every day the top three things that

you're getting done, you review the week, it just sort of helps me to see the week as it were. Oh, no, no, no, I think that's very, very excellent. And when I was at the Alzheimer's Center, I didn't do too much just myself, the social workers and other people that would intervene with the family members or the person with Alzheimer's, they would, one of the things you're gonna do, remember we talked about that internalization

of psychological processes, kind of the peak is when everything's in your head. But it's easiest and we start best with things that are outside of us. So here's this external aid. So for, especially for people losing their memories, like yeah, you gotta get these external things, things they can actually look at or pictures.

And even for just, you know, any of us as we're adults, when we have so many things to do, I find the scheduler very, very useful myself. You know, being a workout nut, I use a compromise here. I do record everything in a workout book, but in a little bit of a nod to memory, I don't bring the book with me to the gym or in my garage if I'm working on a home. I do it when I get home because of that short space I can always remember what I did. But if I didn't write it down, I might go to do the same exercise next week and say, well, shoot, what did I do next time?

Well, I don't know. I didn't pay that close attention, but oh, there it is. So for me, I find different kinds of scheduling books very, very helpful. Yes, it's definitely don't want't look on this as an either or thing The Mary should just be no this little extra extra thing. We might want to try when the situation seems right for very good Well, we got your links to all of your books in the description Is there anywhere else people can go to learn more about you do you online blogging or something? Well, I have a little website just dr. Vos calm just dr

Vost calm and I will say it's not the most up-to-date But there's a little contact box at the bottom and if someone were to write something I'll respond. Oh terrific. All right well thanks so much for taking the time to be on the show. Anything else you wanted to get out there or we've probably said it all. This is probably the longest interview you've ever done. Oh my gosh I haven't even looked at my watch so I have no clue.

I'll just say I knew you guys would enjoy this because we are both you know spiritual sons of St. Thomas Aquinas who talked about just about everything everything so first class relic of Thomas Aquinas right there. Oh Glorious yes Russian Orthodox priest gave it to me Through somebody yeah, bless him. I actually said to Scott Hahn when I moved here I was very audaciously looking for a first-class relic of Thomas and I said, do you know anybody who'd be willing to? Give me a first-class relic. Thomas. And I said, do you know anybody who'd be willing to give me a first-class relic? I mean, you got to ask, right? Thomas Aquinas.

And he said, I wouldn't trust the man who did it. I wouldn't respect the man who would give it away. That's right. They may take generosity beyond the mean. Yes, exactly. Yeah. What would that be? Generosity, wastefulness? Yeah. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, that's good. God bless you. Thank you. Thanks, Neil.