The main reason why we can’t have cool books like Llull’s anymore?

A lot of thanks goes to Petrus Ramus and the sycophants in Congress who still get their jollies perpetuating his garbage ideology.

A sick and enthusiasm-draining approach to learning that reduces knowledge down to stick figures when we could all be learning from radiant images and engaging scenarios.

Make no mistake. The threat is real, and these politicians are the same people REFUSING to bring the online platforms down to earth.

Instead, these are the “officials” practically screaming:

"Let's grind the human attention span to the point that all they'll watch – when not being forced to read our humdrum textbooks – is ads on MicroYouToppledByPutinTok!"

Here’s something else HUMOROUS to know about this very boring man, the man who literally fathered in so many of the problems we face today.

Ramus’ nickname was Paginarius, or the “Page Man”.

Why did they call him “Page Man”?

Because instead of using memory techniques to help with his speeches, “Page Man” just read word-for-word from his own books.

He didn’t even employ the reductive diagrams he insisted everyone else use! What kind of sick fuck is that? Here I thought the medieval
Executioner Franz was the most evil.

The story gets worse!

By some strange stroke of fate, two things happened:

Not only did Ramus influence people in the universities to completely change how they printed books. He seduced “sheeple” like the King of France and other rulers to adopt his “educational reforms.”

Even though Ramus was apparently really boring to listen to in person, he wrote fairly well. And it’s thanks to his profuse, picture-free, “Page man” graphomania that education was badly ruined.

So boring and so irritating were his educational “innovations,” he was eventually murdered. He got off easy. 

Now to the clues to Ramus’ death.

One of Shakespeare’s pals Christopher Marlowe, wrote a play featuring the death of Ramus. It’s called The Massacre at Paris. 

(There’s probably an alternate universe where I celebrate every morning with a thank you to the memory gods and goddesses for The Massacre at Paris being written!)

In this play, the characters kill Ramus because he hoisted a “unica methodus” upon the readers of his time.

That means, “one method.” Ramus tried to organize all knowledge by using bland and boring diagrams. No mind opening illustrations or deeply engaging stories. He was not hugged enough as a child. This is known.

Worse, Ramus thought he was improving ancient textbooks, like the collected works of Aristotle. That book is sometimes called The Organon.

Whereas Aristotle’s collected works used to be cool and looked like this:

Make no mistake...

Petrus Ramus murdered this wonderful and engaging tradition of information display.

To this day, when we read Aristotle, his philosophy is presented as a wall of text with yet more mini-walls of text in the margins:

Brutal, right?

No wonder so many people find Aristotle hard to comprehend in today’s world!

So get this:

To drive it all home…

Just before Ramus is stabbed to death in Marlowe’s play, Ramus says:

I knew the Organon to be confusde,

And I reduc'd it into better forme.

Well, to put it bluntly…

Ramus’ attackers disagreed that old Mr. Snooty Boots had made Aristotle better. 

In fact, it was the Duke of Anjou who says: 

Never was there anyone so full of pride. Kill him!

And so they did. Both in this play and in real life.

Not to mention a bunch of people who took pains to ILLUSTRATE his death…

Starting with him cowering inside a room with only WALLS OF TEXT and a (way too young) manservant to protect him.

I like this final illustration the best.

It inspired the moniker “Mr. Snooty Boots” I used above because clearly that Nietzsche-looking dude with the proto-Klingon polearm made Ramus take off his boots first.

Either way, goodbye Ramus.

Except… not goodbye…

Strangely, Ramus’ bizarre method of “reducing knowledge into better form” survived.

Even though his wicked ways have clearly made the presentation of knowledge much, much worse.

And it’s still bad, and we all know that the current paradigm of education is sinking lower and lower every single day. 

That’s not cool.

And rarely are today’s textbooks any fun.

They’re certainly nothing like reading comic books.

Sadly, there are still a lot of people like Ramus walking around.

Okay, maybe they don’t keep knives besides their boring textbooks like he did, but…

The Ramus clones are still publishing in scholarly journals that influence how teachers run their classrooms. They lobby governments to influence how contemporary textbooks get made.

Worse...

They stomp on fun each and every chance they get because they’ve got quotas to fill and more charts and diagrams to produce… self-referential pap they use to fill their coffers with more funding based on your tax dollars.

Yes, they are using your money to destroy future minds!

And I have been tirelessly helping people deal with the crushing weight of their tedious junk for more than a decade.

Actually, that’s just counting my work with the Magnetic Memory Method.

For ten years before that I was toiling away as a professor within their system, doing my best to bring light into the darkness with a different way of teaching.

For example, when I taught Film Studies, we didn’t only sit in the lecture and listen to me talk for hours on end. We went out and actually shot movies. Then we edited them. Then we distributed them. My students lived and breathed what they were learning.

As if they were in a story. 

Problem is…

I realized that all I’ve been doing still isn’t enough.

I’m sorry, but for all my toil, I still haven’t been helping enough people survive the crimes of the past and the present and I’ve been telling you about.

Make no mistake, when I see someone like Putin rattling his saber, I think about Ramus.

Seriously:

That dude is the consequence of the broken education systems around the world, as is every other politician like him (and there are a lot).

Look, I’m not trying to posture like some Jordan Peterson fanboy by picking up “the heaviest cross I can bear.”

I just know that if I don’t do more, these crimes will persist into the future.

So here’s what I’ve done…

You’ve probably heard about the Memory Palace technique before.

I’ve certainly been shouting about it from the top of the Internet’s mountains at the top of my lungs.

There are many ways to use the technique, and one of my favorites involves treating your memory as if it’s a kind of “theatre.”

Now, partly I got this idea from a cool dude named Giulio Camillo.

He shared his ideas of how to create such a theatre of memory with blueprints like this:

Another Renaissance memory master named Robert Fludd offered similar concepts.

Go ahead and feast your eyes on this one:

Problem is…

All that stuff is too hard!

And hardly anyone goes to theaters to see plays anymore.

I almost never use movie theaters as Memory Palaces either… although sometimes I do. They can be useful when the context is right.

Anyhow, I thought it would be cool to update this concept.

And that’s why I built this for you:

I call it “Cafe Mnemonic.”

It’s where cool, interesting and fun learners meet to practice memory techniques and learn in a completely new way.

In a contemporary way.

Based on the things you and I need to learn and understand in the here and now.

So we don’t wind up repeating the crimes of the past.

Would you like to come inside?If so, here’s what’s up…

Okay, so this is going to sound kind of weird but…

1.I was literally dying for a break from all the work I’ve been doing over the past decade.

Almost without pause I’d been reading either memory science, memory training books or things related to running an epic business online in my battle against people like Ramus.

So I went to the bookstore intent on finding a novel that would give me such much needed downtime.

Little did I know that the book I chose would kick off a chain of events that have made me work harder than ever before.

(In a good way, of course.)

It’s kind of spooky, but when I was in the bookstore in Brisbane, a Michael Connelly book called The Poet almost seemed to push itself into my hands.

So I took it home and read it.

I was totally blown away. Soon I was back at the store to get some more of his books.

About halfway through the second book, I thought it would be really fun to write a novel myself.

And that’s the first reason.

2. The first attempt was a weird story called “The Author.” I made a mistake too.

I wrote it by hand and after typing up about 20,000 words… I figured it was just not good enough to continue.

That’s when I got started on a book called Flyboy.

Three pages into the story, the whole thing slammed into my head.

Not just one book. But an entire series.

And I realized that I needed to write these books not for myself. Not to take a rest. And certainly not for mere amusement.

I realized that I needed to write these books for you.

3. About a year prior to all this, I had interviewed a guy named Martin Faulks for my YouTube channel.

I must have been in a sour mood that day because when he mentioned Sherlock Holmes, I said that we should never association the great memory tradition with murder.

What a schmuck I am sometimes!

After all, so many people have gotten interested in memory techniques thanks to Sherlock Holmes and Hannibal Lecter. And here I was doing what I practice so hard not to do in my personal life: Not judge.

But the reality is that we do judge things.

Even the Buddha judged things. He was the one who said after all, “Expectation is the fastest path to suffering.”

If that isn’t casting judgment, I don’t know what is.

The point is, I realized that I needed to address whatever led me to say such a snotty thing to my podcast guest.

I don’t think it was jealousy or envy for the successes of books based on Sherlock Holmes or Hannibal Lecter.

I really don’t know what it was.

And I don’t think it matters.

But it is one of the reasons I wrote this book.

4. I’ve been an educator for a long time.

Before I started teaching memory online ten years ago, I’d already spent ten years as a Film Studies professor.

For eleven years prior to that, I’d been a student in university.

And I always found ways to make even the most boring textbooks interesting to me.

Partly, that’s a result of my education. From day one in university, I learned all about the real reason Plato has stood the test of time:

It’s the stories he told.

So all of this stuff just kind of snapped together.And I’ve been writing up a storm and designing games ever since.

But unlike Plato and Ramon Llull, my stories are accompanied by games.

They’re 3-dimensional.

And I’m confident they’re going to change your life.

5. It’s pretty obvious that we learn from stories. That's why I've been telling the story of Simonides of Ceos since the very beginning of my career as a memory instructor.

In case you don’t know it, he was the guy who survived the earthquake that destroyed a banquet hall where he was giving a speech.

He could tell the authorities the names of each and every person because he’d memorized them all based on their locations.

Anyhow, I was thinking of his life story when my friend Olly Richards launched his Story Learning series. And I was pretty inspired by all of it.

But, specifically for memory, I remembered my favorite books when I was a kid.

Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Remember those?

They were so cool because they gave your brain a bit of exercise. But more importantly, they gave you ownership over how the story turns out.And responsibility.

Which leads us to…

6. How fun would it be if people could see a time-strapped detective suffering brain fog and yet still managing to fit memory techniques into his day?

And how cool would it be if he accomplishes some major feats in each and every book… leading ultimately to complete mental mastery?

Even as the world decays into darkness around him?

So I designed a complete series of 8 books. The plan is this:

Flyboy: The detective learns to remember names and passcodes.

Book Two (Forthcoming): Chemistry equations and symbols (and also how to hold the details of a secret identity)

Book Three (Forthcoming): Complicated procedures, like card magic. And also mastering the Hand Memory Palace.

Book Four (Forthcoming): Medical terms, anatomy and biology.

Book Five (Forthcoming): Poetry and math, including hard concepts like infinity and recursion.

Book Six (Forthcoming): Music.

Book Seven (Forthcoming): Scripture and quotes.

Book Eight (Forthcoming): Dates, times, recovering lost autobiographical memories and programming languages.

In these books, you’ll enjoy not just Sherlock-esque descriptions of what the detective accomplishes.But in an exciting way, you’ll learn how he does it. And it’s all based on how memory techniques really work.

Nothing outlandish.

It’s like Andy Weir’s The Martian. Hard SF where all the plot details are based on real science, yet never boring.

7. There’s another guy from the past I haven’t told you about.

His name was Giordano Bruno and he was burned at the stake.

Unlike Ramus, who I think was definitely killed for taking the life out of education…

Bruno was… complicated.

And the more I read Bruno’s stuff…

… the more I feel that he probably wrote his memory improvement books for teachers.

I mean, On the Shadows of the Ideas is a compelling title. And it comes packed with cool memory devices like these memory wheels:

But half of Bruno’s most popular work involves a spiritual philosophy. And the memory training part really doesn’t seem intended to teach the techniques. It seems more like an advanced manual for people who already use them and want to teach them to others.

Plus, you can see that he’s split hairs between Llull and Ramus. He’s given us an image, but it’s a highly schematic one.

Anyhow, most people struggling through Bruno’s memory improvement books don’t know that Bruno also wrote plays. And in those plays, he taught the memory techniques in the clearest and plainest language you can imagine – for his era.

I’ll bet that tons of people learned the techniques that way.

Not from the memory manuals he wrote for his peers. And that’s because he wrote stories that made sense in his era.

And I just knew that if I also created stories for you that make sense in ours, we’d be able to learn like Plato, Llull, Bruno and even Shakespeare shared with us so many wonderful lessons about how to learn and lead a great life.

Plus, I have Detective Williams using memory techniques the way we do in today’s world. Zany, crazy images that you get to experience as you read. You’ll literally be doing the techniques along with him, exercising your mind and building your skills.

So all those things have been kicking around in my head for years, and now that the first novel is done and the first game has been designed, it’s time to pull the proverbial trigger.

Which leads us to a most important question…

So I sat down and with cameras circling us like sharks in the water, the timer started.

After two minutes of memorizing as many playing cards as we could (it felt like 2 seconds), we entered the recall round.

The way this particular competition worked, Dave and I both memorized the same order of cards.

Then, we switched turns naming them. Whoever made the first mistake was out and you get points for each correctly named card.

I went first, and before I even named the first card, Dave tried to “psych” me out.

“Can I take your point?” he said, leaning in close to unnerve me.

“Hell no,” I said. “Queen of Clubs.”

And on we went.

Long story short, Dave’s charity won.

But here’s what’s really cool.

Even though I was in really bad shape, and Dave’s “psych out” move did unnerve me…

Like the detective in my story eventually learns to do…

I found deep inner calm.

I named every single card I’d memorized and made zero mistakes.

Even better:

Dave Farrow has two Guinness World Records for this stuff.

As butchered as I was with jetlag, a hangover and arthritis flares, I memorized half as much as he did. With 100% accuracy.

This experience taught me so much about memory techniques and just what a powerful skill I’d been practicing and teaching while traveling the world.

In addition to inspiring me to finally give up booze forever (even though I could clearly memorize very well after hitting rock bottom), Dave gave me a couple of valuable things.

He gave me a tournament manual that I haven’t referred to, but is probably another reason I came up with the idea for this game.

But he also gave me experience as a judge, which provided some of the most interesting insights I’ve ever had.

Finally, he shared with me the secrets of how he doubled the amount I had memorized during the competition.

But other than that one experience and what it proved to me about memorizing against the clock and an “enemy”...

I find training for memory competitions just isn’t my thing.

I’m interested in training to memorize information that is useful in everyday life.

And so Memory Detective changes that, but also a few other things.

That’s another thing that has always made me uninterested in memory competitions. 

A few people get to win while the majority stand around praising the winners.Look, no shade to the memory competitions. They are for who they are for. 

But that kind of activity just isn’t for me, and I’ve heard from hundreds of people that they don’t want to compete either. But they do want a community and a set of activities that are fun and help you learn.

So in my game, I’ve designed it so that everyone wins.

Or maybe another way to think about it is how my favorite crime genre writer has his character Harry Bosch say, “Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts.”

So sure, there will be prizes for those who really go to town.

Including an extra set of points for those who can solve some of the puzzles I've embedded in Flyboy. 

(You'll get all the details after you register so you can... choose your own adventure.)

But apart from the clues above, I’m keeping all of the top prizes secret, insider knowledge.

For whom?

For those who sign up to play the game and enter the Memory Detective world I’m creating for you.

Now listen:

You will not be put on the spot like I was when I competed. You won’t have to prove your worth to save your skin or ever risk feeling embarrassed.

No, not because I’m exercising some kind of “politically correct” agenda. I write transgressive murder mysteries filled with wild and zany images, remember? With titles like Flyboy and Vitamin X.

I just want a learning experience where you can sit back and enjoy the ride, or get as deeply involved as you like. A game where you truly get to choose your own adventure.

On the flipside, if you’re just in it for a cash prize or want to come in with your fists already swinging so you can win some Ramus-looking title that strokes your ego…

That’s not what this is.

Though, rest assured: You will experience the same level of intrigue, deep involvement and excitement that comes from competitive sport. And you’ll experience total success.

That’s because this game is about truth, justice and honor. It’s about doing the right thing with your memory.

Why?

Because in the world of Memory Detective, forgetting is a crime.

As is letting yourself be led around by your ego.

How Long Will This Take?

Everyone can and should read novels at their own speed.

The game itself takes place on November 5th over approximately 90 minutes. If you want to hang around for the after-party, it's best to budget your time accordingly. We often hang out for hours talking about memory techniques, and other things, like philosophy.

What if I can't be there for the live game?

That's okay. You can play the game on your own by watching the replay. As long as you just let it play, it will have the same "under the gun" feel of the live game and you can use the self-testing element just the same.

You're also getting the book and all related materials, so it's win-win either way. But it takes a bit of "Know Thyself" to determine whether or not you want the live version or the replay version. I personally wouldn't make it a matter of one or the other and suggest you just get involved in any way that you can. This is the future of learning and practicing memory techniques and getting in early has its perks (introductory pricing being just one of them.)

What if this doesn't work for me?

This is a good question, but technically a non-issue when it comes to this game. So long as you participate in either the live game or the replay, you will be getting multiple levels of memory workout.

And if you are using the Magnetic Memory Method, my formal memory training has worked for everyone who has given it their honest best to use the techniques.

Notice that word: use.

Memory techniques do work. There's no question about it and no one has time enough to read all of the scientific literature, historical material and memory competition records that demonstrate their validity beyond question.

The real question is whether or not you are going to put the memory techniques into use.

And since this is kind of like "police academy" for new Memory Detectives, that's what you're signing up to do.

So sign up for the game and give me your best, or you'll be giving me twenty pushups.

Just kidding! All you have to do is show up and have fun. The process will take care of the rest.

How are the materials delivered?

You're getting access to the book in audio, PDF and Epub format through my online portal.

If you already have one of my online products, it will be added to your MMM Masterclass training area.

Everything will be explained by email, including a link to my Magnetic Zoom Room where we'll be playing the first game.

And...

SPOILER ALERT!

Detective Williams will be picking you up from Cafe Mnemonic (where else?). You'll be there, brushing up on your memory techniques with your personal memory mentor, Jerome. (The guy with the dog in the Cafe Mnemonic picture above.) 

What's the difference between this and every other memory improvement course?

Simple: 

This is not a course.

It's an entirely new way to learn through story and play.

This sounds great for kids? Can they come?

Sorry, this an adult-oriented learning experience.

That said, once you start using memory techniques, you'll be part of the League of Extraordinary Parents that have come out of the Magnetic Memory Method Family.

Learn to use the techniques yourself, show them to your kids and they won't be able to resist wanting to learn them from you.

I'll say that again:

You.

Their best possible teacher.

I have mild cognitive impairment. Will playing this game help me?

Getting involved in the game will give you some memory exercise and greater exposure to people who use the techniques. This might inspire you to educate yourself further about how to use them effectively when revisiting the other memory programs you already have.

I’m fully confident it will help all people, but ultimately, the only way to know is to play and enjoy some fun along the way.

What happens during the game?

There will be a crime to solve.

You will use memory techniques as part of solving it. But you will also enjoy what is call "passive memory exercise."

This means that you can use memory techniques (active memory exercise), or just sit back and remember as much as you can without using mnemonics to encode during the game (passive memory exercise). The level of memory exercise is up to you.

Either way, you will earn points based on how well you demonstrate your understanding of the memory techniques you learn through the novel and while we're playing the game.

Just go ahead and try it.

Seriously. There's no fluff. 

No dancing around or gymnastics. 

Just deeply immersive memory training.

Like the world has never seen before.

So please...

Join me in taking a stand against the "Masters of Monotony" so learning can finally be fun again.