Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How to Enhance Your Memory (and Never Forget) | Gabriel Wyner

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Gabriel Wyner, a polyglot, former opera singer, bestselling author of Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It, and founder of the Fluent Forever app, the most funded app in crowdfunding history.Gabe graduated summa cum laude in 2007 from the University of Southern California with dual degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Vocal Arts Performance, and was awarded the Renaissance Scholar’s prize for excellence in unrelated disciplines.Following graduation, Gabe moved to Europe to pursue triple Master’s degrees in Opera, Lieder, and Voice where found himself quickly needing to learn various new languages as his studies took him from country to country. Gabe began to apply his analytical and engineering talents to developing a system that rapidly builds fluency and in 2012 published a viral article about his groundbreaking formula to fluency, which garnered a publishing offer within two hours.Now, Gabe is fluent in eight languages and teaches tens of thousands of people around the world using his unique language-learning method through The Fluent Forever App.I was curious to learn how Gabe has mastered a skill that many people find incredibly difficult, but this conversation isn’t just about how to learn a new language – it’s about Gabe’s unique frameworks for learning, how to make memories stick, and why, in his opinion, we’ve been taught the wrong way._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I'm excited to welcome Gabe Weiner. As our guest to this episode, Gabe is the author of the national bestseller, Fluent Forever, How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It. And Gabe is fluent in eight languages himself and now teaches tens of thousands of people across the planet using his unique language learning method through the Fluent Forever app. Gabe, I'm stoked to have you here. I'm stoked to be here.

Yeah, I've loved your story and how you've come to be in the position that you're in. And especially because what you've come to understand is something that many of us, meaning me, find really hard to learn language. And so I just want to explore to you, you know, what you've come to understand about learning itself, certainly about learning a language and then the insights that you've gathered. I mean, there's a lot to cover. There is. All right. And so just at the top, like, thank you for being with us. And then maybe we start with you. You had a terrible experience learning languages in high school. Can you just kind of bring us into that fold? Sure. So my background originally was, I guess my language learning stuff started in elementary school. I went through like seven, seven, eight years of Hebrew.

I now know 10 words of Hebrew. That's a lot of years for not a lot of words. And that was upsetting. And so I tried again in high school and junior high with Russian, spent five and a half years working on Russian. I got really good grades i had really good teachers um i i won a silver medal in the russian olympiad that is like like uh olympiad thing where you walk in you try to memorize a bunch of phrases and impress some judges i left that thing knowing like 50 words of russian plus a memorized like epic poem for kids i didn't speak russian i i don't i don't know i mean that's that was where i left it i was just

like i don't know how this works how is it that i can do well ostensibly in a course but not learn a language at the end of it why did i show up here in the first place? Like, was this just to get a grade? I kind of wanted to learn Russian by the end of that. And the conclusion I landed on was I must be really bad at languages. I must be good at tests and bad at languages. And so that was my context kind of coming into this whole language learning world. Yeah. And that is something that I find myself in is I sign up for a course or I sign up for something. And I see my son is 14. I see it in his life as well, is that there's training to pass the test, right?

And then there's training to really learn. And I understand it. You know, I understand it in my life. I know in professional sports that those that stay disciplined in training to really deeply understand something is far better than just training for the competition. So, okay. So we're connected on that. Before we go into like the insights on best practices that you've come to learn about

learning, let's stay on language for just a minute. Are there two types of languages or are there more? Tell me more about what you mean by the question. And so I'm a student here, so I don't really know. But I think that there's languages that seem to sound somewhat familiar, like the romance languages, right? They sound familiar. And then there's languages that seem to be more consonant driven, where it's more about

the way that you hold your mouth and the way that something sounds as opposed to a set of unique words that point to some symbols. And so I don't know, I'm trying to not lead you down a path, but I'll pause there and I'll explain more if I need to. No, no, no. I follow now. The amount of variation that you're looking at when you're trying to pick up a new language is immense. So I would say there's many, many, many categories of languages. I think there's ways of differentiating them mostly based on difficulty. And those difficulties can come from a lot of different places. So the best data that

I've seen on this ends up being about English speakers learning other stuff. And ideally, that other stuff is stuff that is relevant to the US military. Surprise, that's where all the data is and where all the money is um and so there are these uh lists from the foreign service institute that you know they're training all of our spies and diplomats and things like that um where they've really come down to the science of this language is this hard for this english speaker and this language is in another category so they have levels one two and three and level one is the romance set. Level two are things that tend to have a new alphabet. They tend to have enough new grammar and vocabulary that isn't just romance derived

that it's like, okay, there's some new challenges here. So those will be things like Hebrew and Russian and Greek. Hungarian actually fits in that category, even though Hungarian has this reputation for being super, super hard. It's in the same category as Russian and Greek and the rest. And level two languages take twice as long for an English speaker to learn. Just twice as many hours. And I've seen this. I've experienced this. They really do feel twice as hard.

But they're not twice as hard because the language itself is intrinsically hard. They're hard because there's just less shared data between that language and English. And then level three is one step further removed. These are things like Japanese and Mandarin and Arabic actually, which is oddly twice as hard as Hebrew. And level three languages are twice as hard as level two and four times as hard as level one. Okay. All right. Perfect. Got it. So if we start with big concepts now, just for a moment, and some of the big concepts, I'm trying to map these to learning anything and we're using language as the craft.

And so if you were to start with the big rocks, where do you start for learning something new? Language learning is a great example of the thing you're trying to do, which is to say, what happens when you want to get data into someone's head, period. That's the actual only question you have to answer with language.

People think of language as this kind of magical, brutally hard thing. And when you really dig down, what it ends up being is, it is just the challenge of there's a lot of outside my head i need to get it in my head and so when you're dealing with that then the biggest rock of all is well what is a memory period just how do we form memories what are those things what is the the mechanism we use to build memories and so uh for me that is that is hebb's law that is the like for for your your

listeners who are not not familiar with donald hebb stuff from 1950s like this is a psychologist 1950s figuring out how it is that you build memories and he basically says neurons that fire together wire together he's like the classic like you know it rhymes it's a beautiful law it sounds great but basically it's i'm four years old my parents bake a cookie they put it in front of my face and i see a round brown disc and i smell a thing and the the visual stimulus in my brain of seeing this brown brown disc is not the cookie the smell is not the cookie. But the fact that that visual stimulus is active at the same time as my scent is active, and they're both stimulating things at the same time, now they're both active at the same time. And so they link together and

suddenly I have this association, which is my memory. And if my parents at the same time is saying, hey, you want a cookie, then now the sound of this word, this cookie thing is now active. My ears are responding to it at the same time as I'm seeing it and I'm smelling it. And so now those are all active. And then maybe I taste it around the same time. And I'm like, oh, that feels good. And now I have a good feeling. And now that feeling is linked to this concept of cookie and the smell of cookie and the sound of cookie and so those associations that is a memory that's that's what memories are it's just things are active at the same time and and maybe there's enough emotional content to make your brain think it's important and so it double underlines the thing and it's like oh yeah let's let's really network things these things together in a lasting way and that is a memory and so that's that's how it works for the case of one word uh if you

are in like a math class and someone's like one plus one equals two then you see these symbols and someone is saying them out loud and maybe someone holds an apple and another apple and then two apples next to each other and you're like like, okay, now I'm associating all of these things together. Like they're all just memories. They're all stuff is active at the same time. And your brain knows that when that happens, link that together, we're probably going to need that again in the future.

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That's linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal. For two full months for free, terms and conditions apply. Fighting Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly,

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I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. So how much of, do you dive into memory and coding with

emotionally charged experiences? Uh, it's, it's most of what I do. I mean, it's, it's, it's the good stuff. Um, if you can give some emotional context to things you're learning, you, you basically double it in terms of how quickly you pull it in and how long you retain it. And so for something as annoying as language learning, when you're talking about, I have thousands of bits of information, I need them to stick, you skipping over an advantage that could double your learning speed is going to add years to your process. Why do that? Okay, so can you make it concrete and give a clear example? I like to talk about it in the framework of,

well, it depends on how far you want to go in terms of frameworks. I love frameworks. Let's do frameworks then. Okay. The framework I live in is levels of processing. So this is a framework from the 1970s uh where basically they they they came up with this list of words that are simple you know bear apple pear like stuff like that um and they stuck a bunch of college students in a

room and basically quizzed them on these words at random um by putting a question in front of each one they were like how many p's in the word bear uh does bear you know how many letters are in the word apple things like that so they would ask some set of questions that are all about the spelling of the word and they'd ask another set of questions about the sound of the word so they asked like does bear rhyme with pear does student rhyme with pear things like that um they had a third level of questions that asked about the concept itself. You know, is a student furry? Is a bear furry? Is a pizza furry?

And then they would ask things that had personal or emotional content to it. So they would ask, you know, is a bear scary? Is a student scary? They do this a lot with adjectives. You know, are you red? Are you sad? Are you big? You know, some kind of personal connection to this thing. Then they distract the students for a little while. Then they'd ask them, then they give them a surprise memory test. Here's a blank sheet of paper. Write down all the words we asked you about. Did we ask you about bears? Students would just tell me everything we asked you a question about.

And what they found is that if you ask about the spelling of a word, you basically don't remember. They remembered like 15% of those words. Spelling is not an interesting thing. It doesn't matter how concrete and interesting the word is. It matters the question. How deeply did you process that word when we asked you about it? If they asked you about the sound of the word, now it actually, you retain more, you process it more deeply. You didn't just think about some letters, you stuck them together and you made a sound out of it.

And so when you asked, does bear rhyme with pear, you remember about 30% of those words. So you're doubling of how much you remember. When you ask about the concept, another doubling, now you're remembering about 60% of the words. How many legs are on an apple? And you're like, oh, suddenly I'm thinking about the fact that apples have no legs. Now I'm thinking about the thing itself.

And then when they asked about the personal connection, this emotional content, that's the deepest you can process something. You're not just thinking about, you know, is a bear scary? I'm not thinking about, you know, four letters. Like, no, that's irrelevant. I don't care about the four letters. I don't care about the fact that it sounds like pear, although I do need to process that while I'm reading that question.

So the sound of bear is active. But then I'm thinking, oh, this is an animal. And oh, this is an animal that has like, is big and has claws. But like, maybe I think they're furry and friendly. And I kind of like bears. And I think they're cute. And like my associates with bears or teddy bears or whatever whatever and so you have a whole journey to go through as you come up with what the hell this thing is and that's activating everything and so those memories

are stored 50 to 100 more strongly than just than even the concept ones so like that's where that's the framework i'm always living in is how do i get to level four for anything like how do i avoid living in level two which is where most language learning sticks it's where most people have problems is you know the the german word for cookies keksa i'm not thinking of delicious keksa i'm thinking of cookie keksa, cookie keksa. I'm trying to match the sounds of two words. But if I'm like, you know, what's your favorite keksa? And I'm like, oh my God, no, I had that in Salzburg and it was like so good. And it had like strawberry jam in it,

like all these pieces. And that's keksa for me. Suddenly that has meat to it, that sticks. And so, yeah, this emotional content is everything in terms of what our brains decide to throw away and what they don't. I'm imagining that's what you built your app around. It's what I built. Yes, it's what I built the method around.

It's what I built the app around. It's what I built the coaching around. Everything I do is getting up to levels three and four of that level of processing framework. Does this hold true if I'm trying to remember or memorize a data set that is not language, which is like the seven principles of something? Is that, would you say like whatever that list of seven is, instead of trying to memorize the words on the page, if there's seven sentences that I'm trying to be able to present to a group later, how would you help me encode those seven? So the typical way to cheat this stuff, there's a cheat path to level three.

There's not a quick cheat to level four. The cheat to level three is imagery. There's no way to look at a picture of a bear and have the first thought come to your mind four letters, or that has one P in it. You just don't. Imagery is, it's why we memorize images so, so, so well. There's like piles of fun, scary, like clockwork horn style tests on this kind of thing. But you have to think of what the concept is when you look at an image. And as it turns out, when you pair images with words or with sentences, those are actually retained better than the image alone. There's an example I have in my book where I have this box with lines radiating

out of it. I say apples are delicious under that box. There's no connection between those two things. They have nothing to do with each other. But when you see those two things together, your brain wants there to be a connection. You don't like disorder like that of just randomness. And so you start thinking like, well, I don't know, is that the smell of the apples coming out of the box? Is that the deliciousness? Is this a bad picture of what delicious looks like? Like what the hell is he doing here? I don't like this and that dislike or that discomfort with the the desync between what you're seeing in the picture what you're seeing in the words uh is it of itself memorable so if you have you know seven principles

that you're trying to get someone to you're trying to remember so you can recite them later um you coming up with an image that can connect with those principles, it's better if it connects than if it doesn't, although we just said doesn't even works too. So I don't know if I have a principle of like, it's important to have emotional content so you can remember something. Let's say that's one of your principles.

You coming up with, well, what is emotion to you? Maybe it's the tragedy mask, the tragedy comedy mask from theater. And you're like, that thing, that's my first principle I want to remember is talking about the importance of this emotional content. And you linking that image of this tragedy comedy mask with that first principle and saying, this is the symbol I'm going to use for emotional content's important for memory. Got it. You use that and you, you can do things in terms of like, there's all sorts of fun, demonic things you can do in terms of being like, I'm going to put that in a certain space in my

house or something like that. Um, that what is that called Einstein's house or something like that? Memory path, which is, um, this was in moonwalking with einstein it's yeah it's it's the it's pretty good i like i mean it's a fabulous book i love that book um yeah building the house scaffolding around memory palace yeah memory palace right yep look i can't remember it but i remember the concept but i don't remember the actual things but so uh shorthanding this, is this useful in building capacity to speak a language, the same type of memory process? And we should explain that for just a moment. But before we get into the nuances of the Memory Palace, is that useful for languages as well? So, yes and no. I have, I played with memory palaces.

I want to say back in like 2010 to 2012, I was really, really digging into memory palaces because they're amazing. Our ability for imagery, for memorizing imagery is really only rivaled with our ability to, for spatial memory. And memory palaces are a way to completely get past really all limits

in terms of the human ability to only hold about like five to seven things in your head um there's a great great example that you can do with people very very quickly where you basically say okay let's get you a grocery list of 30 items where there's no you have no chance of remembering this list because your working memory is five to seven items long period. You don't get to have extensions on your working memory. And then you, you tell someone, okay, picture your childhood house, picture your current house. Where do you live right now? And you're like on the front door, your first item on your grocery list is oranges. And so I want you to take an orange. I want you to crush it over the door handle and just, just juice the orange on your door handle and open the door.

And then in the doorway, I want you to take the milk and i'm gonna smash it on the floor just stomp all over it and make a mess of them and you just keep walking through and destroying things in your house and you do this like 15 times in a row and then you ask them to recite the grocery list from front to back or back to front and they can do it easily instantly no. No gaps in it at all. And I tried to see are there limits to this thing for myself because I was just fascinated by this concept. It's cool that you can just kind of instantly go around the fact that your working memory has limits. I ended up memorizing the birth and death dates and names of I think 120 classical music composers. I located them all around I was living in Vienna

at the time I was an opera singer at the time and I thought it would it'd be a handy trick to be able to just kind of instantly pop out the date birth and death dates of like any of these composers that composed an opera ever ever um and I found that like yeah I absolutely could do that and it's it's very doable uh and there's no limits therefore, surely I should be able to use this for language learning. And I failed. What I found was that with languages, well, with memory palaces, what you're really doing, the reason why they work so well is that you're building a kind of perfect filing cabinet. The reason you can remember your entire list and your grocery list example is that that orange is not touching the milk. It's literally spatially separated from the milk. The orange is

on the door. The milk is in the doorway. And so you've built these walls between each thing and they never interfere with each other and they're all perfectly filed away. And it's a beautiful filing system. and when you're learning a language uh what what i've seen people do in terms of memory palaces is they will build a filing system for i'm going to learn all the all the words starting in the letter c in alphabetical order and then i'm going to go through all the words starting in the letter d in alphabetical order and they just memorize the dictionary and the problem with that is that now you've separated all of your words from each other dog and cat are in different worlds

from each other and therefore they don't reassociate in our lane whenever anyone who's listening to this your word dog is connected to animal and pet and cat and tail and paw and all that stuff. And your word cat is connected to all these things. And childhood and laughter. Yes. Bathing, like whatever, like there's a there's a long string of things that is. Yeah. OK, that.

And so these filing cabinet, these filing systems that are so good because they separate concepts fall apart because they separate concepts okay when it comes to language but there's a there's a way a workaround that i found a year ago um which is learning languages in vr uh what i found is that uh if you talk about themes in virtual space. Is this level four? Is themes level four? No. I'm just saying a theme. I'm going to talk about travel.

Okay. And I'm going to talk about travel in a place where I have created an airplane. And I've created an airport. And I'm going to go talk about travel in this airport. And then next week, I'm going to talk about my home, which is still in this VR space, but it's 30 feet that way. I built my house. You're adding the next level of imagination to an immersive experience. And then you're using the manipulation, I say that benevolently, to help them encode using emotional stimulus, contextual stimulus, wrapped in a way where

they're immersed in it. So you're going to encode at a deeper level as opposed to something that is disparate, staying on the surface and disconnected. Yeah. All of that, plus a little bit of the idea that if you had infinite money and infinite resources and somehow you could convince people to build you things left and right, then yes, you could have a day of class where your first day is here in this room and your next day is over there in that room.

And then you have infinite rooms that you get to go in, but we don't have infinite rooms. But in virtual space, you do. And so there's a workaround basically for the idea that real estate is infinite if it's digital that allows you to walk through a house that basically has infinite rooms in it where you really can walk through and so you don't run out of space like you would if you were trying to locate things inside your childhood home or locate things

inside of your own house you have this playground that can go on forever. And so virtual space is this weird side like thing that I was exploring last year that I found was pretty remarkable in terms of using memory palaces and lining them up with language learning. But that is a cheat code for getting around the fact that memory palaces usually will add in too many walls to actually prevent you and will prevent you from using it usefully for a language in language okay so this was the the memory pal no we were talking about a shortened path between getting to level three in language and level five there was a gap so this was this mechanism um that you're talking about is um memory houses are are it's their own

little thing and and i feel like are kind of like a side special thing that's right so the four levels we're really talking about is it oh there's only three there's not five yeah okay so is it imagery or is it personal is is really the question can you can you jump to the concepts the bear has four legs or can you jump to I'm afraid of bears? And those are the two that I think are the most interesting. There is the cheat code to getting to the bear has four legs is using imagery. I think that's where we got off onto memory palaces because you can overlap imagery and stuff there. But the personal connection front is there are techniques for that, but there's no cheat

codes. You actually have to delve into your own memories. What do I think of bears? What are my experiences with bears, et cetera. And so there's, there's prompts, there's ways that you can condition yourself to regularly go back and be like, no, what do I feel about this topic that will make you think about the personal connections and delve into that level four. But there's no quick, immediate fixes like imagery where imagery will immediately bump you into that, that level four. But there's no quick immediate fixes like imagery,

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mastery listeners 20 off just head to felixgray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. So that also holds true in other skill development, like learning a sports skill or guitar or anything else where there's some folks will just use guitar for a moment that they're watching somebody play it and they're trying to hit the chords. And then there's the next layer, which is this really deep embodied focus, which is nauseatingly difficult to stay in. It's hard to do. And that's why it's actually, because it's so rare and special, not many people can do it at that deep mastery way that that ends up scaffolding and laying foundations and infusing across

pillars to be able to make something more accessible from different routes. And when you can do that, learning takes place in a whole different way. And I think, I think from, for me, I need to start from a mechanical way when I'm learning a new skill, but then as quickly as I can get to the level four that you're talking about, which is deeply embodying it using imagination and adding feeling or emotion to it, I get the accelerant there as well. So that's really cool. So you're seeing that in actual physical skill acquisition as well. That right that's fascinating i wasn't sure how

much of this stuff sort of bridges that gap yeah and it's like so it's physical as well as like let's say it's watching film or studying something that is related to the craft but not actually the doing of the craft that same there when you when folks let's say that they're watching film, you know, self-scouting or opponent scouting in sport, and they're breaking down something in film and they pause and they use their mind after, let's say they watch something three or four times to try to get the essence of what's taking place. And they pause and they talk about it with somebody that's kind of like from level one is just watching it and making sense. Level two is verbalizing it and explaining it to somebody or asking what they saw and

having that dialogue or conversation. And then level three is that plus and or I should say closing their eyes and really feeling from the inside out that you're doing that skill and what it would take to actually make that happen at a later time. And so it takes longer to do this type of learning. It's not shorter, but it's more efficient because you could watch film for 20 minutes, let's say,

or read a book for 20 minutes and okay, it goes in you're efficient with time, but not efficient with learning so if you took 35 minutes but you added the layers that i'm just talking about it's encoded longer you don't have to go back and read that chapter again or read that thing again because and i think that's i wanted to see if that's what you're doing in your method have something similar or please don't be backed into saying yes or no, but like, no, sure. Yeah. In my case, what I'm trying to do is figure out where are the efficiency gains that you can get, knowing that this is a long-term process that, that really is going to take you

some, some hours that you're going to need to put in hours to really get, get to where you want to go. And so if there's something I can do that saves me 10 of my time even if it's annoying even if i don't like it whatever then i'm going to do it if there's something that uh if i can put in an hour of prep work that saves me 10 hours of time later on let's go do that prep work so a lot of my approach is is it's from an engineering angle it's just that was my background. Originally I was a mechanical engineer. It was where I really started. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. We got opera singer slipped in here.

We got mechanical engineer slipped in and we've got. Those are my two. I only got it. That's it. That's only the two. Well, now you got to, but you're like a master linguist as well. And you know, so it's cool, man. This is like, I love it because you're coming at it from multiple disciplines. And I do want to understand, I cut you off on, you know, the mechanical engineering, but I do want to understand how that and the language of music has influenced your understanding of your methodology. And then we'll just dive further into the methodology, if you will.

Sure, of course. So how did those, tell me more about where you're going with the mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering, the main, like that was my, I was always a science kid. That's my thing. I was a science nerd when I was growing up. I wanted to be a nuclear engineer. Like it was just like engineering, engineering, engineering. That's the only thing I cared about. Opera was this weird side thing that I just felt like I enjoyed skills acquisition. And one of the fun things about learning how to sing is that you as an organism get better from week to week. It's not this thing outside of you. And that feels good. And so that was addictive. And I just got addicted to it. I thought, cool, I want to keep doing this. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I love this. Let's pull on this thread a little bit more. I've never heard anyone say what you just said, but I felt that my whole life. So stay here for a minute. What does that mean that I love the way it felt to get better? The idea of walking into a voice lesson where your first week you can sing eight notes and then someone says hey why don't you try to like sing in your nose like a witch and you're like that's weird but okay and they're like just practice you know singing a scale

like you're a witch for a week you're like this is a weird like magical thinking like you're a witch for a week. You're like, this is a weird, like, magical thinking thing you're trying to get me to do. But sure, I'll do it. I'm paying you to tell me what to do. Guess I should do the things you're telling me to do. And you show up the next week. And now you can you can sing 12 notes instead of the eight. Then you think, well, that's weird. And then they tell you to do a different thing. And then the next week, you can sing 14 notes. And then the next week, you can sing 18 notes, and some of them are kind of low. And then you can start learning how to sing louder and bit like, there's, there's a, I think there's, there's steady progress that I think, sometimes people get addicted to in the gym, where they're able to lift more weight each time, but they don't necessarily, I think that that can

give some people a feeling of progress, but also it's, it's such incremental progress over such a long time that it doesn't necessarily feel super rewarding. But if one day you can lift one weight and then the next day you like grew three more arms and you can lift three different weights at the same time, like that would feel very like super accomplished to be like, wow, I just grew another pair of arms. And that was my experience in singing. It was like from a week to week basis, I felt like I was gaining new abilities, like some sort of character in an RPG. And, and that is neat. You don't get to feel like a, I don't know, superhero in many contexts of gaining powers.

It's cool. Yeah. I, I, I relate. I definitely, I think a lot of people in our community relate getting better is cool right yeah like okay and and then the other thing is like but when you're getting better you know as opposed to getting better at getting better like seeing a piece of artwork that you're perfecting or getting better but when it's inside of you yeah that all right that's awesome okay so there's a hoarding thing to it. There's a, no one can take this away. It's literally inside my neck. Try it and get it away from me. Like there's, there's something to that, that, that I'm sure is.

I don't know. I do think so. Like, but it goes away. Like how well do you, do you sing it? Do you sing often? I no longer sitting. I, that, that career burnt me out so hard that I, I I'm afraid of karaoke. Hold on. You can't say that to a sport and performance psychologist. You can't just drop that in there like that. I mean, I said

it. It's been said. I'm not ignoring this. Okay, good. Because we're talking about learning and there's an emotional component to it. So what happened? So you were all in on music. I mean, at what level did you sing? I spent 10 years pursuing an opera career. I got a master's in the thing. I pursued work. I moved to Europe to go pursue a career in opera. I did the thing. You were in. I was in. All right, what happened? Most of my friends were there, and many of my friends are still there. The opera career is, I would say, one of the most brutal that I have ever heard of, in the sense that I think if I were a ballet dancer, which is another brutal career, then there would be one job for every hundred qualified people, which is scary and brutal.

And if I hit the age of, let's say, 23, and I had not yet made it, whatever that means, then I would know everyone around me would be telling me like, hey, you didn't make it. It's time to go figure out the next step in your life and go do something else. And I would be 23 years old and I'd be sad, but I'd be in a position to go do that thing.

The idea of going back to college or something like that, or pursuing another career path, very doable. Opera is exactly the same, except that number instead of being 23 years old is 40. And if you're 40 and suddenly someone's like hey you know that thing you've been doing your entire life you didn't make it time to start over on something else that sucks that's the opera career did you chip all? I continued going into opera partly because that was just, that was the path that I was on. And so, yes, and I don't, I don't like to do things partially or hedge my bets.

So yes. And also opera was this beautiful excuse to learn languages left and right, which was the thing that I really loved doing. Oh, interesting. There's not a lot of careers that will give you an excuse to put that I really loved doing. Oh, interesting. There's not a lot of careers that will give you an excuse to put that much time into language. There's CIA agent and there's opera singer. Gabe, there's the unlock for you. Where it is. Okay. So yeah, this is the unlock. Okay. So you love learning. Yes. Okay. You went to a good school, USC, our producer, Alex Wood. Elite athlete, played there, also went to USC.

So that's fun. But so you love learning. You've got your systems thinker. You like things that make sense and have some order and structure to it. You also have an artistic way about you that you're like, hey, listen, if I can express this logic and sequence and systems thinking into an art and it's reinvesting back in me and I like the community and this feels good, I'm getting a double win. You know what? I'm going to double down, but I'm going to keep going to school. I'm not going to go kind of the frontier offbeat and pathway to see if I can wrangle my way into the inner circle of opera.

You said, okay, I'm going to go the disciplined, more conservative approach. And then what was sitting right underneath was the love of language. So it's the love of learning morphed into the love of language wrapped in music and arts. Yes. And then, and then, and you being the instrument. So this really is all about you. But what you did is that you went all in, but you had the origins of a parachute.

And that was to return back to systems thinking and language. And so here you are now, unless you're in a full crisis and you're like, listen, I really hate everything I've done. You know, like the system thinking. No, no. I don't. I believe that. There it is. Like that's the unlock. Systems thinking, the love of learning.

It happens to be language. It's also an internal process. And if you took those three things, you could probably go and do just about anything you want in your life with purpose and meaning and joy and, and, um, have the occupational hazard of getting lost in the thing that you're doing and forget to turn the stove off or turn the stove on to eat, whatever it might be. So, okay. I get why you're good at what you do. Um, and I also would dare to say that you, um, you felt the real pain of not being good enough at something to stay the path. How does that part, Gabe, factor into your mission? What is your purpose? Let me not make an assumption. Well, I think there's two pieces. I think there's a piece of just how it'd be

beautiful to land in the world. And I think there's a separate thing of just my own personal passion. So like how it'd be beautiful to land in the world is I've spent all this time failing to learn languages. And then I spent a bunch of time succeeding at this thing. Other people should get the same opportunity. When I built this method, it was too hard to use for most people. It involved learning a bunch of computer skills and pulling on all these free apps online and assembling them in a certain way that's kind of annoying. And so a lot of people got excited about the prospect of, wait, I'm actually

capable of learning a language, but then dropped it the moment they started seeing, ah, but it takes all these steps. I think I don't have time for this. And so the idea of being able to come out in the world and say, okay, well, yeah, that was a lot of work, but what if, what about this? What if you just plugged into this thing? You just did the things we told you to, and then you spoke French next year. How about that? I want that to exist. That does exist now, but I want that to exist at like broad scale. I want, I want people to know about it. I want it to be this idea of just, oh yeah, yeah. I want that. You want French? Cool. Just go to do this thing and it'll fix it for you. Oh, sorry. Keep going. So that's, is that purpose?

That's the, the impact that I'd love to have on the world. That's different than like the passion chunk of it. So hold on, let's say before we go to passion, what's the, what's the, what's the impact? The impact is that there is a thing out there that people know exists that will fix their language learning problem for them in a year. Got it. Okay. And if they are better at the language that they want to learn, what then? Then they can go learn a second language if they want, or they're done.

I don't need them to stay on with something that they don't need anymore. I would like people to be able to check the box and say, I wanted to speak French all my life. I signed up on this thing. I now speak French. The end. I'm done with that thing. I speak it. I'm happy with it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And cozy earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate

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I know that there's no easy answer here. How long? How long does it take? No, no, no. There is an easy answer to that thing. Give me, how much time are you putting in on a daily basis? I'm putting in, oh, I like, here's your math. Okay, good. I'm putting in every day, 15 minutes. Two years for French. That's too long. I need, I need like three months. What do I have to do besides like landing in France? I mean, you need more time per day. Okay. So what do I need? Two hours. If you put it in an hour a day, I give you six, six months. An hour a day is six months. Yeah. Okay. And there's obviously some variants. I think that I've got like, I don't know. I'm probably like, just like the average person that says this and you're like, no, that's

not true. But I feel like I've got a block. My wife speaks four languages. I speak like slang, English, you know, and some science, but it's obviously all English. And then I can get by, by recognizing a handful of things in a kitchen, you know, in Spanish, but like, so I don't know. I just feel like I just get stuck at this point that it does not encode properly. And I, I want to feel through language, the culture that my wife as a first language has embraced. I think I need you,

Gabe. This is a crisis for me. Okay. These are fixable problems. I mean, the language learning is not special. Language learning is a particularly difficult thing because it's a large data set, but it's not special. I would say the one thing that is special about language versus any other skill acquisition, really any other data acquisition effort, just I need this information in, is the pronunciation thing that you harped on right in the beginning. It's the idea, there's an example I often talk about where Finikeipäugéip is the Hungarian word for camera. And by the time I got to, no, no, that's the whole point. Say it again for fun.

Like, what did you just say? That's the whole point, is by the end of that sentence, it's gone. It's gone. You don't even hold on to it long enough to get to the end of one sentence. It's finikeip asugéip. And you count one, two, and poof, it's gone. It's like a magic trick. Craziness.

And why is that? Whereas if I were to say the Martian word for cameras, mognogbog, you got it. I got it. Easy. Mognogbog. Well, it sounded like something that, like, I don't know. There was an alliteration to it.

Migbokboop, boop. Still fine. Still fine. Like you still can keep these things. It's not just the rhyming. And it's because it's composed of sounds that are from English. I see. And in terms of like people talk about language learning,

they have this feeling that you have. They have the feeling that I had. I had that same feeling of just being like, I have a block. This isn't for me. So this is a completely normal human experience. Gabe, I don't think you understand it. I don't. You're like master. I do.

I do. I did. Listen, you know the language of math. You know the language of expressive arts. You know the eight other verbal languages. I don't know if you remember what it's like to be me where i'm like i do remember it i do because i okay here's me when i'm 18 here's me when i'm 20 actually me when i'm 20 is i sign up for this opera degree because i'm like screw it this will

be fun and then they told me you you know you need to learn four languages for that right and my response is oh shit i'm bad at languages it was the one subject that really screwed me i spent i did really really well in math and i did really really well in physics and all these things i'm good at learning stuff but languages that's the one thing that i could not achieve i spent 12 years and i got nothing in russian and nothing in hebrew i suck at that thing. And now you're telling me I have to learn four of them. Oh, shit.

That's where I was at when I was 20. Okay. I remember that feeling. I think it sounds similar to the one you're talking about. Is it not? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Okay. All right. So like, I have that one. I know that one. Okay. But it is a fixable thing. I think we have these beliefs that we all kind of walk around with this myth in our culture that like it's because I'm an adult. It's that if only my parents had given me whatever Spanish when I was four years old, it all would have been better. But then I grew up and I hit this age and the age was seven or the age was 12 or just we pick a random number and the age was some number where I lost my ability to learn a language. And now I have this block and I'm going to have this block for the rest of my life.

And there's some people who don't have the block, but I have the block and I'm screwed. That's what we believe as a group. Yeah. And there is a sensitive window where language acquisition is easier, right? No. Come on. I've been taught that my whole life. I know. We've all been taught this bullshit. It's not true. French kid, your average four-year-old French kid, and they're correcting your French and it's way better than yours.

In fact, yours kind of sucks and theirs is fluent. Obviously, the kid learns better French than you did. So obviously, kids are better than adults, but that kid has 15,000 hours of French exposure. And in your college class, you got about 150 to 300, depending upon how much of that class was taught in English versus in French. You're saying time under belts is more important than the formation of the brain structures that are kind of just sponging up. I'm not just saying that. I'm saying that you trying to make comparisons based on a hundredfold difference in time is a useless data set the moment you make a comparison of

fair things you say okay what about the adult that has 500 hours of exposure because they really did a real class and then the kid who's been transplanted to spain because they had their parents moved and after they were verbal so this is a three-year-old kid. They moved to Spain. They have 500 hours exposure. Who wins? And you find that the adult wins every single time. Adults are faster at learning languages.

We are better at information processing. We have more things to reference. When someone says, you know, perro is the word for dog. And, you know, here's the, here's a rule that says that everything that ends in O is masculine. Some three-year-old kid's not going to understand what the hell that means. Gabe, stop. You're giving me hope. Don't be doing this to me. Cause I might just be picking up a new app to, you know, like, don't be doing this to me. Cause I'll tell you what I was doing for a while is I picked up one of the apps and then a coach and I on a professional team, every, um, we play every Sunday. And, um, sometimes there's buses on

Saturdays, you know, to and from, and sometimes there's buses on Sundays. And, um, if we're traveling, you know, uh, to the airplane. And so we were competing our asses off and that was our day, you know, and like, we do a little bit every day, we'd see where our ranking was against each other. And then we compete. And I don't remember a damn thing of course not and and but i did it i mean i did it for 12 weeks 16 weeks yes i don't remember a damn thing no so like you're saying why would you do it what were you doing what was the activity you were doing i was in one of those i was in i was in a platform and i was i don't know saying words back. You were memorizing sounds at the second level of processing is what you were doing. It's what all of us do.

You're sitting there being like, perro is the word for dog. And at no moment are you thinking of this four-legged thing. At no moment are you relating that to the word gato, cat. At no moment are you actually thinking about what any of the words mean. And so your brain is actively purging everything you're doing here. The level of processing thing is not actually about what helps you remember things. It's actually about what is your brain actively doing to make you forget? Because if you walk through a grocery store and you memorized every single brand of deodorant there, you would go

nuts. And if you listen to a podcast and you memorized every single word that was said during this hour long thing, you would also go nuts. We encounter so much information in our lives. We are, we are immersed in information even more so now because of all this cell phone stuff and everything like that. And our brains are rebelling against that. We don't need this much information and levels of processing is how it makes the choices as to what gets to stay and what gets what gets thrown out actively with violence and so when you're sitting there with an app being like perro is the word for dog your brain is like fuck you i don't care about that that means nothing to me whereas if you take a different experience of you go to your local mexican restaurant and someone's like hey you should try the jamaica and you drink this this

purple liquid or this this beautiful looking drink and it tastes like flowers and it's good and at the end of it you're like that that was refreshing jesus like okay you have no problem remembering jamaica three years later your ability to remember words is not about you know can you can you play with an app it's like you you can remember words you do all the damn time it's just you don't do it when you're trying to be artificial about it and memorize copies of information. What does perro equals dog do for you? Why do you care? Your brain certainly doesn't. And so it's purging that shit. Whereas Jamaica, that's new. That's interesting. Yeah, I want that. I need that. It's so true. As an N of one, me, I was in Greece for a world of Congress. And so the first time I got exposed to this little licorice tasting alcohol, I was like, what is this? Oh, it's Uzo. Uzo. I've never heard this word. Uzo? Try it. You're going to love it. Like, here's the bottle. Like, try this one and try this Uzo and try that Uzo. But before you know it, like I had way too much Uzo. But you never forget it. So I really appreciate what you're saying. And then with even a more sensitive way, what you said

when I was doing my research on you, one of the things you said, if you want to learn a language efficiently, then you need to give that language life. Yeah. Okay. All right. Can you take your practices, your method, and that insight, and can you also apply it to one of the most fearful things for people, which is public speaking. And instead of remembering the words that you want to say, would you suggest, and this is what I do is there's three things I want to hit. So of course, correct me. Maybe you can help me make this method better. There's three things in every talk that I want to hit. I memorize an opening and I have a sense of the close I want to get to, right? So there's the, the, I'm just trying to memorize, um, the, the first in the three things and

then, uh, leave it open for the clothes. And I'm trying to understand what all my preparation, what is the feeling I want to feel as I say certain words and what is the way that I want to translate some ideas and then stories unfold and kind of it maps together for me. But there's, it's quite simple in, in my memory, if you will. So how, how do you, um, take your methodology and impose it for somebody trying to learn how to do a public, you know, speaking thing, which is so terrifying to so many. Sure. Yeah. You said this is going to be kind of hard because we dig and this is a big dig. Uh, yeah, this is, this is so terrifying to so many. Sure. Yeah. You said this is going to be kind of hard because we dig,

and this is a big dig. Yeah. This is, this is cool. Let's go. I'll deviate from my method and then I'll come back to my method. In terms of, this is more opera stuff than it is, than it is method. And then we'll see whether there's method overlaps. If, if I were attempting to prepare like like an opera aria which is just another kind of public speaking just with more layers the way that i would go about that is by starting at the end i would figure out what my closer is which it sounds

like is what you're kind of doing um but then i would go 10 seconds before my closer and i would say hey can i get the last let's say my would say, hey, can I get the last, let's say my closer is 30 seconds long. Can I get the last 40 seconds in a way that at least gives me the framework of what I want? At least the content. Can I cover that kind of content? Once I get those last 40 seconds, can I get the last 50 seconds?

Can I get the last minute? Can I get the last two minutes, et cetera? And so what I'm training myself to do is I know how to get to the end. I know how to keep getting better at getting to the end in terms of the rough framework, the content. And once I've done that, I've added three minutes and I've done four minutes to the end, you know, whatever. And I've gotten all the way from, I can get from the beginning to the end and I have the content in my head and I know the path so well because I've now done it 50 times in terms of continuing to get to where I want to go, then I'll start working backwards again. And I'll say,

well, what do I want to feel in those last 30 seconds? How do I want to deliver that? What do I want my mouth to do? What do I want my body to do? And I might just do the vocal inflection part and I'll be like, what do I want my mouth to do? And I'll do the last 30 seconds or the last 60 seconds, last 90 seconds until I get to the beginning. And then I'm like, okay, cool. Now that, now that layer is on top of the content layer. Can I add in what I want my body to do? How do I want to just gesture things like that? And so that was my systems approach for, for dealing with opera arias was always that. And it built memories in a way that got from where i started which is the scary part you're just like i'm on a stage do i even know what the next

damn word is like shit uh to wait i know how to get all the way to the end and then there's clapping um i think the only go on yeah are you familiar with reverse chaining this is back chaining for me yeah so i think it's the same thing yeah Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the method you use. That's cool. Yeah. Okay. So, so maybe for folks, so there's good science that you're leveraging. That's cool. Can you make it available? Like, why do you start with the end? Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth.

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For me, if the end is the most rehearsed bit, then me understanding the final destination allows me to feel comfortable getting there. But I feel like there's, I haven't seen a good scientific, like, no, this is why this thing works. I haven't found that thing yet. And I think you may have, so I'm curious about it. Well, I don't, I'll need to go back to some of the original research here. I remember the methodology as a, as a, as an approach, but let's just use a golf swing as a, as a, um, as an approach, but let's just use a golf swing as a, as a example is that many people will start when they're doing their instruction, um, gripping the ball foot placement

over the ball, and then they'll take their, they'll take their swing back. And then, you know, then they might tell someone to freeze there and kind of get a snapshot of the way it feels inside their body and then swing through and then maybe hold at the end, you know, at the, um, at the four rotation. And so what reverse chaining would, uh, chaining would do is you would actually start in the end position and you'd say, this is where you want your body to get to. And then the coach might say, it take the club in your hands and your hips and say, it's not here. It's not here. Kind of moving you around a little bit and saying it and then go and say, go right back to where we were.

And then so you go right back to that place and you say, that's it. Hold this. Feel this. Close your eyes. Okay, good. Now just now really allow this thing to be the target. Okay, great. Beautiful.

And then you start over and you say, okay, just stand over, over the ball, like where you want to stand. And I just want you to close your eyes, start at the back in your, in your mind now, and slowly move through reverse, if you will, the, the movements that would allow you to be at a certain place over the ball. So your seat, you're starting with like the club over your, over your shoulder. And as you're swinging back, you're some point seeing the ball, you know, um, lifting off of the club head, but it's all reversed order. And then when you get to like, you're standing over the ball, you're just seeing the ball and the club head just touching for the first time. And then you're going all the way to now the new end, which is the fullback.

So, and that's just in your mind and you take your time and you do it slow. And it's just a different way to get into it with the keeping the end in mind. I do the same stuff with pronunciation. Oh, you do? Yeah. Like it's, this is, this is training for muscle memory. And some of these cases, like there's for me, the memory, like language is, there's three chunks of it. There's the main body of it, which is just data in your head, which we've been talking about this whole time. Then there's one chunk, which is ear training, which is, can I hear the fenugreek as you

gave garbage, which is solvable. There's some research on just how to solve that in a couple of weeks. And then there's this third chunk, which is, okay, I can hear it. I know the information information but can i get the thing out of my mouth can i get my tongue to cooperate and that last piece that's all about reverse chaining it's just if you have some awful word like like to flinch in russian which has like 7 000 consonants in a row then like that's too much but you can say new and then you can say gnu and then you can say ognu and then rognu and then drognu and then vzdrok like you can just build it up and if you keep knowing if your if your mouth keeps remembering

where it lands then you can build up a very complicated set of actions in your mouth using this exact technique that you're talking about for golf i love it oh It's so good when science plays over. Yeah, that is really cool. Hold on. Alex is here, our producer, and he was a kicker at USC. Would you ever do that same thing, start in reverse order? So you'd start where your leg was hooked all the way at the end and then back.

Would that ever be a strategy? Yeah, we started a lot with the finish. And yeah, where your shoulders should be, where your hips should end up. Yep. And then mental imagery would come in. That's pretty cool. There you go. Okay.

Nice. All right. Yeah, that is nice, isn't it? Okay. So listen, this is awesome. Thank you. What are a couple of takeaways that I and we as a community can get better at doing to either enhance memory or be a better learner in life. Some things that have been materially important in your life to help you learn and get

better. And you want that to cover general learning or you want that to be language in particular? Yeah, wherever you go. Language is cool. Yeah, language is cool. For language, for me, I would say takeaway one is if you can't hear it, you can't remember it. And so you spending literally one or two weeks in the beginning focusing on ear training and just starting to learn how to hear all these crazy new sounds in the language you want, that is going to unlock you in ways that nothing else can't and that's where you have to start that's not a middle thing it's not an end thing it's a start thing that would be takeaway one that's that's the one barrier that language is different from from anything else it's just there is a thing where if you can't hear it you're screwed so

fix that first that um the second thing second big takeaway is going to be this levels of processing idea it's it's live in a space where you are learning from images not translations and ideally you're learning from images that resonate with from your life that you're not learning perro is the word for dog but you're learning perro is picture of your own dog that you care about and that the word dog never enters into the equation at all. It's literally just perro equals, oh, that's Norbert. That. Frankly, I'll stick with those two takeaways. That's enough. I mean, we can keep going. I can give you 700 of them, but like working memory. Cool. Stick with two. Yeah. And so working memory,

you know, there's a science underneath of it as well, which is there's certain things you can do to like from a nutritional standpoint, from a recovery and sleep standpoint to be able to help you learn better. Like for a small example, nirvanic acid and omega three and myelinization, right. And oleic acid. So let's just take omegas, nirvanic, and oleic acid. Certainly, myelinization and omega are part of the myelin. I'm sorry. Omegas are part of the substrate of the sheath that creates myelin across our nerve fibers. And that essentially looks like white matter in the brain. And if we don't have the right base substrate, we don't myelinate.

And myelinate is part of that neuroscience of the stuff that fires together, wires together. Well, if you don't have the right piping or the coating of the piping, the wiring just is like really this slow and diffuse and unpowerful type of firing. And so they don't really wire well. So there's other things that we could play with as well. So anyways, we don't need to take that any further, but what do you listen to? Like, do you listen to music or do you have podcasts that you listen to or audiobooks or like if you want to if you want to learn something new besides kind of um you know

pulling up your app and i'm going to make sure there's a good link for uh what's the website fluent dash forever.com yep fluent dash forever.com and um that's where the folks can study your method and get your application. And I think you have a free trial in there. There is, yes, there's a free trial. And I think specifically about that free trial, we designed it to basically be the lessons of the book condensed into 14 days.

So it's less like try the first 14 days of the rest of your life that you owe to us and give us your firstborn son and more. Let's give you a basis so that you can become a better learner forever in 14 days. And then you can decide to keep with us or not. But like at the end of those 14 days, you're a better learner, period. And I've been kind of, I've become really, really proud of that trial. That thing, that thing builds better students, better learners, period. Oh, I love it. All right. I have not, this is not like a,

any sort of paid endorsement. I haven't tried your stuff. I read about you and I was like, I want to understand better. And so I am going to go check out your work from that perspective. And so listen, thank you, Gabe. I appreciate you. And I can't, I can't leave this conversation without asking something that has been obvious. I'm looking at you. Your doors, they're showing up on my camera like a maroon red. They are. Your glasses are like a maroon red.

Yes. And your fingernails are like a maroon red. They are. What do you got going on over there? I really like red. Yes, you do. And so, like, is that your color? That's my color. Yes.

Tell me this doesn't have anything to do with the Trojans, the USC Trojans. This has nothing to do with the Trojans. Oh God. I was going to say, listen, we've got some serious psychoanalysis to do here. No, it has nothing to do with the Trojans. Okay. Where's it come from? I mean, it just, it feels like me. It's a, it's a me thing. I don't know. I've identified with that to something to some degree so interesting and then okay you know i'm gonna ask tell me about the nose ring

i mean i don't know if there's a lot to tell about the nose ring there's yeah so why why why that choice and there's no critique it's like no no no i mean yeah why why did you get that i i think it's sort of an outgrowth of burner culture and things like that just i'm in subcultures that are that are that seem to have a lot of nose rings and i've i've dug it so yeah that showed up in 2018 burning culture meaning burning man yeah yeah there you go and that showed up at 2018. Maybe I got this in 2016. Is that what you said? Yeah. No, no, no. I've had this actually since 2015, I want to say. So is this a shadow side that is less shadow? You know, like because you're kind of, it's some sort of symbol to the countercultures that you are interested in? I would say so. Yeah. I think sort of starting

from 2014 forward, I like 2013 was me going through a big divorce and like moving from Vienna to LA and no longer being a singer and starting to write my book and starting to start this company and all these things. And there's a big change, huge, huge shift in my life in all sorts of ways. And yeah, I think there was an idea of here are these shadow pieces of myself, let's go embrace those things. So yeah. Okay. Do you feel more at home with yourself with the public hinting at something different than what most people would do with themselves? absolutely um i think the idea of i think also partly some of the things that nose ring like the nose ring particular things like that are now like having painted nails and things does is uh it makes it really really i don't pass as non-queer. I don't pass as non-queer. I don't pass as like a standard,

like cishet male, like, oh, there's another, there's another guy. There is an immediate, like there's something up with that guy. And it tends to be associated with queer culture. That's interesting. Cause I was, I was going to, I was going to ask if the countercultures that you were talking about were sexually charged in any way, if there's some sort of that counterculture. And then I held it back cause I felt insensitive as I was asking, but that was my, that was what I was curious about. But so, so this is you saying, uh, yeah, I just, I want to be a little, I feel different and I want to express that. Yeah.

And yeah, it's, it helps people sort of not misidentify me as normal. I don't know. So are you, so does that mean that you identify as being queer? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. I'd like appreciate the, your to um express the parts of you that have like a hint to something i just i i really appreciate it dude it's a pleasure seeing being

seen yeah oh how about that okay good so uh last question how often do you feel seen um how often do i feel seen gosh um often enough uh i would say like not all the time but often enough i feel like i've surrounded myself with enough people that that i feel like see me as i am that i get some of that reinforcement is enough to address my needs it's so important it is you know and to do the internal work to have the courage to be vulnerable enough to speak truth and to be okay if it's not received sure like to me this is like i didn't expect we're gonna have this type of level gym but that's not me neither this is this is the good shit, isn't it? Yeah.

That's the good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, listen, I appreciate you. Thank you. And I'm definitely going to check out your methods and I'm stoked to introduce you to our community. So thank you.

I appreciate it. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify.

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