What the Past can Teach Us (w/ Nate DiMeo) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

You're watching How to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show, we're talking about the past. Specifically, how do you really engage with stories from the past? How do you find wonder and lessons and insight in times long ago? Today's guest, Nate Deo, host of The Memory Palace and author of the book The Memory Palace, is someone who is so good at this. I think that he has insights in a way that almost no one else does about how to tell a really rich, engaging story about a person who's no longer alive. How do you make us relate and see and be entertained by the past, but also find wonder and joy and beauty? And what does that mean about finding meaning in the world today that we're living in

right now? Hi, I'm Nate Deo. I am I produce the Memory Palace podcast and I am the author of the Memory Palace, true short stories of the past. How do you think about conveying a deeper meaning and connection to the past that's not really about dates or even necessarily facts as much as it is about the narrative and the emotions? Yeah, I think that it really comes down to this sort of initial urge I had to start the podcast at all. Like all these years ago, um I noticed that I had become something of a history buff without wanting to claim that title. You know what I mean? there was something about history buff that sounded a little bit dadcore, even as like a middle-aged dad. Um, it still doesn't quite match up and some of it is just, you know, by necessity of like how where I spend my time. Like I am not, you know, sort of on the couch with the History Channel. It's like I mostly am reading history on the clock, but I love movies and I love novels and I love poetry and I love music. And I discovered that when I was a younger person that I was really starting to find a lot of what I loved in those things um in like on museum tours and on like tours of historic homes. Often I found that historic stuff, historic stories, you know, walking around some historic site or whatnot sort of matched up and broadened, you know, something that I was already fascinated with, which was just simply memory. You know, I starting as a young kid became very fascinated with the way that memory worked, you know, um a dream I would have would be in my head, the images from that dream would be in my head in the same way that the images in my head of like things that actually happened to me that I realized that one was real and one was not. And when I tried to recall it through my imagination, um they were kind of the same thing. And I also noticed the same thing in these formative experiences of listening to my parents and my grandparents tell stories about their past. I was noticing that their memories, the things that they were sharing with me kind of like lived in my own head. And there was some real magic in that. The idea that the past, no matter how true it is, no matter that we can, you know, dig up the bones and and read through the diaries and or even watch the videos of things that happened in the past, no matter how real they are, where they live is in our imagination. There's really been this abiding fascination that, you know, that exists in the memory palace and that I try to articulate. And the easiest way to kind of say it is that this is a history show that is much more about feelings and wonder than it is about facts, even though it is factual. What is wonder for you? What does that mean? Because I think it's a really important piece of my experience of listening to the memory palace. Let's take it this way that, you know, it's not hard to find out stuff about the past. Like it's easier all the time. You know, a if you want to look something up, you can just Google it. if you want to find out what happened in, you know, 1952 in Indiana or whatever. And it's not difficult for me as a professional to like think of like find things that might someday be a story. But I learned really early on um that in that chaos, in like the all the tabs you have open and all of the stuff that is coming into your feed or all of the facts that you might encounter when you're on a historic home tour or all the things that you might learn about Lewis and Clark in a 7-hour Ken Burns document Lewis and Clark, there's going to be something in there if you're lucky that steps out and moves you where suddenly things crystallize where it connects deeply with something that is in you. whether it has triggered some trauma or whether it you know factors into um you know something you've already been like rolling around in your head and it helps crystallize that and to me those moments when something kind of reaches out of the past here and touches you know I never thought to define it before but what wonder is something that snaps you into presence you know it's something that like takes you out of the kind of wor and sputter of the dayto-day um and moves you where you have learned something about your present because it's just matched up with something paired with something in the past like oh in learning this thing about Dwight Eisenhower I've actually learned something about my dad or something like that I am trying to find the things that move me and then trying to find ways to move other people and share that experience of wonder connection share that moment when I really do understand that the people in the past are real people that's when wonder can kind of step into the room I guess you would say it it's

so interesting because I spent a lot of time in the course of my career but also especially in the past year thinking about how to express and how to think about like finding the thing that is funny, the little seed of a comedy piece. And it's really cool to talk about this with you because in addition to the incredible work that you do as uh writer and uh producer and uh the author of Memory Palace, you also have written for comedy shows. You've written for um Parks and Rex. So, you know about this as like a professional piece of comedy, too. How do you be really present so that you can find the odd little detail, the thing that is like a tiny bit off that's the start of something funny, the either the observation or the emotion or just the the weird little bit. And it actually sounds like that little grit that turns into the pearl is the same thing that you're looking for when you're finding historical stories as well. Yeah, I think that that's true. I think that the process for finding stories, you know, whether they're in the book or whether they're on the show is kind of the same thing all the time, which is, you know, I am just, you know, professionally open to history stuff, right? And so I am paying attention to it when an interesting thing like comes into my feed, you know, or I'm reading in a novel or some larger work that there's the strange detail that just kind of jumps out at you. Then there's this giant list and it might be dozens and dozens long of, you know, of small things like uh that the first elephant arrived in the United States in 1803 or whatever. Is that a real fact? Uh I'm not sure about the date, but it is a fact, you know. Okay. Yeah, at some point it did, you know, and so there'll be this list of things that, you know, just kind of sits there. Um and sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, what am I going to do for this episode that's coming up? " And I will look at that list and there might be dozens and dozens of things that at one point like said, "Oh, that's cool. " Um, but they won't mean anything to me. Like I will say that elephant thing is ridiculous. Like who cares about the elephant thing? Um, and so what often I'm doing is I am waiting for this factoid, this scenario, this person's biography to allow me to articulate something about the present. you know, this story about uh meeting, you know, about the first elephant, you know, um might allow me to just kind of explore something that is about like what it meant, you know, for the person that brought the elephant to have an elephant to be, you know, why did they choose to bring this creature, you know, all across the world, you know, uh when they are bringing this Indian elephant to the United States, like what are they not doing? loading their cargo hold with? What is the economic calculation of like okay I could have brought this all this tea but instead I'm going to bring this elephant like what's the like let's take this thing seriously not only do you find a story you'd find something with characters and motivations and stuff like that but you start to find you know resonant things and one of the themes that comes up over and over again but one of the things I'm just always interested in is the way that uh novelty wears off. It becomes this kind of mundane thing in the same way that your phone, you know, when you first learn how to make a bit emmoji, you're like, "Oh, cool. I'm going to Bit Emoji. " And then after a while, not only do you not care, after a while, you feel kind of dumb for even having done it. And so, you know, so over and over again, like, you know, it's not just that these are historical stories, and they are, but they are stories um about the past and they are stories about the wonder of like living with the past and living through time, living with time. I don't want to get too, you know, uh, high fallutin and philosophical about this, but I do think that it's interesting to think about like these kind of virtues that your work embodies, right? Like there there's this pursuit of meaning, but there's also this like question of wonder and how long wonder can last and how we can bring it into our life. And then obviously curiosity is a really big piece too that you can really have empathy for the people of the past, people who aren't even around now, who aren't related to you in any way, but that you can really think like what would they be feeling? What would they what would their experience be like if they are on this boat with the first elephant traveling across the ocean? Yeah. Um that's a cool thing. And I I've heard someone say before that one of the um the purposes of fiction or maybe not the purpose but the benefit of fiction is that it's a way that you can build empathy, right? Like you experience the world through the eyes of a different person. you experience the ex, you know, the daily life of someone who lives 500 years ago or 500 years in the future or on a different planet and you can feel what it would be like to be them. And you're doing the same thing, but it's with real people and with real events. Yeah. I mean, I like, you know, I think one of the reasons why I'm excited to be on this podcast is that I think that there is something about just doing the memory palace as a way that allows me to live better. I basically have a story, you know, a new story every couple of weeks. That's basically the rhythm of my life for the past many years. And I find that it is personally useful to pause and to engage with the past and engage with like the lives of people that have beginnings and middles and ends like just to like to remember things that I find useful like I find it useful to remember that we're all going to die that our time is short you know. I find it useful to, you know, to see what someone was able to make of their time or to like see that like the ways in which their life was constricted in a way that mine might not be. Not just to feel sort of lucky. It's more just to like be snapped into presence in the present. That like our present moment is historical. That um that the lives that we get to live like the lives that the people before us, you know, are contingent upon the technologies that we use are contingent upon, you know, the cultural mores, like the jobs that are available, you know, whether you're able to afford a home, you know, down to like who might be attracted to us. you know, the most intimate of things, like what we smell like, what is in the air we breathe are historical. And I find that over and over again, it is useful not like partially in sort of like a yolo way, like let me just remember that this that time is short. Um, but also just like to like be able to like have this, you know, kind of turn on this kind of like empathy engine and really like, you know, try to put myself in someone else's shoes or to wear my own shoes and walk around in a different time and just kind of look around and see what's changing on. There's also something that I'm curious about for you personally, which is you have a lot of really dedicated fans and people who are passionate about the sound of your voice. So, I wonder what the feeling is um to kind of have a level of celebrity that lets you to be in some ways a real genuine celebrity and in other ways have the anonymity on the street where as long as you don't speak no one's going to recognize you. Um and have you ever been recognized by your voice and what does that feel like? Um I have not like I think you might be overestimating uh how big this how big a celebrity is or how big the show is. But that said, I also um as a person who like listens to a lot of podcasts and you know really like I'm well aware of the strangeness um of the parasocial relationship. But I also say that I'm not sure that anyone's life has ever been improved by knowing what the people on the radio look like. Um so it is a personal challenge. Like there have been dark times in which like someone on Twitter will say like do yourself a favor and never find out what Nate Maya looks like. And I don't know what that means. You know, it's like that kind of thing. It's hard. Well, I think

there's something really cool about the idea that you have this public presence, right? Like there's the memory palace Nate Deo and he has a slightly different voice uh angle on the universe, maybe less like looking for the joke and less upbeat. Um, how does knowing that there are these kind of two versions of you, one of which would probably be much easier for future historians or people looking back to find and to access, how does that change the way that you think about the people and the subjects that you talk about to know that, you know, they may very well have a similar split that you do? Yeah. I mean, that's like that is like so core to just like who I am and how I approach the world. There's a thing in my audio book that only exists in the audio book that is about Scott Carpenter, the astronaut, you know, who is famous for spending about six hours in space one day in 1962, and it's a little bit about his life afterwards and the things that he chose to do like while other people chose to continue to fight to like go to the moon. um you know while his buddies from the space program are like doing that and or being fedded in the White House yet again or have another ticker tape parade you know he had this dream of exploring the ocean and so and which he was sure was going to be just as big of a deal and so he went and became a part of the sea lab thing and lived under the water for you know 100 days or something like that when you start to really think about him in his totality and start to think about these other dreams that he had you know some that are failed and some that aren't I often do wonder what it what is like after people do the thing that they're known for like what was their what was the next 30 years after they invented that thing like what other inventions did they try to invent like what was it like to live with the knowledge that like oh one time I walked on the moon and now I'm just a guy I'm very interested in that and part of it is like because that's a kind of thing that like I try to figure out for myself all the time like what is it like to be you know an artist have an audience what will happen if the audience goes away like who will I be then or whatever like those are just I I'm sure I write those stories because I'm interested in it. Life is always more complex than we think of like than the stories tell us. Like there is life beyond the story that I want to hint that there's even life beyond the story that I'm telling you. There's a lot that I relate to in everything you're saying, especially because I think just like even on paper, right? Like

middle-aged Los Angeles dad, podcaster, and also TV writer, comedy person. I'm like, okay, there's a lot we have in common. But I think that pretty much anyone can relate to this idea of trying to figure out what your thing is going to be. Yeah. What you're going to be remembered for. What whether you're building towards something, whether you've already had the thing and you're trying to figure out what's next. Um a person who I've become really good friends with who we've actually talked we've interviewed on the show is this um swimmer Moren Kornfeld. She's 103 years old. She still competes and when she competes every single time she sets a new record, right? People call her Mighty Mo. Um, but the thing that is most amazing to me is that Mighty Mo didn't start swimming really until she was in her 60s. So like when she passes, she's going to have this incredible, you know, all these awards and accolades written about in her obituary. And that is a piece of her life that just like didn't exist for the first 60 years. And when I think about that for myself, right, because I sometimes get into this like, am I ever going to do anything or like have I done the thing or what? Sure. What would the thing be? We all do. Yeah. It's fascinating to think that here's this person who I know who and love and think is amazing and her thing. I'm still like 30 years away from her thing maybe. You know, it's it interesting to think about the when you have that perspective on the past even from the present as well. Well, there's a um there's a story that that's actually a pretty good illustration of kind of like my whole deal and some of the things we've been talking about. So, um, some years ago, I was at, um, I was in Santa Barbara for a wedding. Um, and walked across the street to the hotel bar, um, in Santa Barbara, beautiful old hotel bar. On the wall of this old bar from the 1920s or 30s, there are pictures of all the celebrities from Hollywood that used to drive up to Santa Barbara and go to this hotel and hang out at this bar. And

among, you know, all of the familiar faces, the Humphrey Bogarts, etc., there is this really lovely photo of this woman kind of like in a bathing suit. And I misread it and it says Florence Chadwick and I think that she's the first woman to swim across the English Channel. I'm like, "Oh, that's pretty cool. " And so I put that in like a notebook and put it on my notes app that this will go on the list at some point. Maybe I'll do something about the first woman who swims across the English Channel. So at some point I look back to that and I'm like, "Oh, she's not the first woman to do it. She's the second. " And then I'm like, "There's no story in the second woman to swim across the English Channel. " And it sits there on my list for a really long time until eventually I realize what this story can be about for me because what I realize is that what's interesting to me is that she swam to the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Like what's going on there? And it turns out that she was she would kind of do that like like show up in town and she'd you know like someone might pay her to like to come to promote the hotel like go swim to the Channel Islands and back and put you up. And suddenly like this becomes a story that intrigues me because it's about like building a life around these passions that you have. And suddenly the story of Florence Chadwick, the second woman to swim across the English Channel becomes this story about this dedicated woman who has this dream and this goal. And isn't it lovely that she that this dream that she has at seven she achieves at 31 or something like that. But then it what it really comes about is her life after which she spent sort of like swimming any channel that needed crossing. She would swim these channels that like no one had swam across but were like lesser channels or she'd become the first woman to do it or the first person to do it in the opposite direction. And she just built this kind of like life and career like from channel to channel like each to diminishing fanfare you know it's like she had done this big thing and sometimes she fails and sometimes she doesn't and so it becomes this story I become start become very moved by this person who is on some level trying to do what I'm trying to do which is to like move from story to story. It's like to try to like, you know, seek these, you know, seek these new achievements and like seek this like new beauty and meaning in my life. And we're just, you know, she's doing it, you know, island to island and I'm trying to do it story to story. But what it really becomes about is I'm merely using the past and using this person's story to figure out something about myself and then find a way to articulate it in a way that you two might connect. for someone who's listening and they're like, I wish that I could do something similar. How do you build that muscle of creativity to get that little photo that you saw and then to start pulling deeper threads out of it? And I don't necessarily mean to make a public work, but just to enrich your own life, maybe. How do you build that muscle of being curious as an adult? Because I think kids are really good at this and a lot of adults uh are not. They see that photo and they go, "Huh, lady that swam. Interesting. " And then they never think about it again. Some of it is like sort of a self-nowledge question, you know, and it's about sort of like knowing kind of like who you are and what you're interested in and then like leaning into it and developing it. But that is also not so simple. And like that's like that starts, you know, uh that starts maybe for me it started earlier than most or something like that because like I do actually think that is a thing about me. I feel like I' I've been very self- interrogating for a very long time. But we are what we pay attention to. Mhm. Like care about and pay attention to what you care about. You know, 10 poets walk into the same garden, you know, uh they're going to come up with a bunch of different things because one person is really into flowers and soil and one person really is to like the way that light plays, you know, through the leaves. And we are each unique in our own way that like our attentional lens like is truly definitional to like our character. It comes from trauma. It comes from epiphany. It comes from a million different things. It comes from the way that our brains happen to work that like I happen to like see color in a different way that someone else might and therefore like certain things are more appealing. Like who knows? But it is like part of the cultivating the curiosity begins sort of with yourself and it begins like start to pay attention to like what you are noticing like what is it like within your Tik Tok feed like what are the things that like you really wanted to turn to your like boyfriend later that night and be like oh man I saw this incredible thing about this like otter. This otter like lives in this crazy way. Like what is it about that otter? What's why is that the thing? when you start to like kind of understand like a little bit about of like the patterns and the themes that kind of keep recurring like there's art to be made there, you know, but it starts with just noticing what you pay attention to and noticing what tickles your brain and stuff like that. It's interesting to also think about this in light of modern technology. I mean, you brought up Tik Tok and I think social media is a really big thing and I just want to say I wouldn't have a career if

it wasn't for new technologies, right? like it's not like podcasting existed 100 years ago. So, I'm grateful that there are new weird technologies that people have invented and that it has allowed uh people like you and me to have uh a way to reach people. Um at the same time, you know, some of the ways that technologies are optimized are to get our attention. And so, I feel myself when I am more on my phone and the goal is not to be not on my phone. That's not my goal. But when I am like binging let's say whatever that means I feel that my uh attention muscles get a little weaker then it's harder to pay uh to pay slow quiet attention for people especially young people right who are dealing with AI with misinformation with um just this whole attention economy how can you allow yourself the space to think about the present and the past while not becoming some sort of you know I want to say leite but I actually feel like you're going to have some sort of really interesting historical revelation about what the lates were actually like. So how without the late in the way I mean it like I could go on and on about like my own sort of relationship with technology and I constantly end up taking Instagram off my phone because I actually feel like it's also not feeding me stuff that's very exciting like the algorithm just doesn't work very well. The for me personally the key is that what actually bothers me is algorithmic thinking. That's the thing. Like I don't mind like if someone is curating stuff and they're firing it at me a lot of times like there's joy in that. There's joy in a DJ. there's joy in someone's letter box, you know, feed. Um, but it is the fact that like the algorithm like is steering you towards things artificially, you know, because if the memory palace is interested in anything, um, it is what are the what is the life that is lived between the story plot points and what the algorithm does on some level is it is only plot points. It is only like these are two songs that people have said are fantastic and we're going to put them back to back and they might be fantastic but if you're only following a chain of songs that people thought are fantastic then you are never going to hear the in between songs that might mean more to you. And so the thing that bothers me about the Instagram algorithm or the Spotify algorithm or any of them, it's not that they're feeding you interesting things because they probably are and they probably are interesting, but it is what life are you missing out on um by only being led in those directions. If the memory palace were algorithmic, then we would not find Florence Chadwick.

I've had the experience a few times where I've worked on a project for a long time and it kind of felt like that was my thing and then for whatever reason either it ended or I decided to move on from it and it's a really strange feeling. I think I'm really lucky that I've um been together with my wife for long enough that she has known me through a few of those so she can always remind me like this thing is you created this, it didn't create you. That's the way that it went. You're bigger than the thing. And I would as a fan and uh of your work, I'm not in any way trying to suggest that you should move on from the memory palace, but I wonder how you um how you personally deal with that as someone who does and has many other talents as well. How do you um how do you personally find that line between um here is me, Nate Deo, and here is me, the person who makes the memory palace. Um, the truth of the matter is like I think that like when I was in my 20s, it was in like, you know, a band that literally no one knows that like, you know, was like got to open up for our favorite bands for like a year and a half in Providence. But it was this wonderful thing like to be in this band. You loved it. It was like a number of different things I was attempting to achieve a bunch like it was a great lesson to like to meet some of your heroes and like realize that they're just people. Like all these things were very important to me. But there was a point where the band broke up because bands break up. And there was just a sort of moment in my life where I was like, "Well, what do you do next? " And um I like kind of came up with like a methodology that really helped me, which was just that like I was like, "Listen, like let me really think about what I love about doing this thing about being in this band. Like I like making art. I love hanging out with my friends. I love the possibility that we might travel. I love having working really hard on something and then having it go out into the world like performing the show. And I'm like, is there a way without just getting some other band to like achieve some of those things? And I started to find over time that a lot of those things were embodied in public radio. Like I could travel, I could make these little beautiful things that I, you know, could like fuss over and then it's just over, you know, and I could collaborate. And there were just a number of different things. But I kind of like set this idea that like you have a flashlight, you shine it out front and like you go in this direction and anything outside of this flashlight, you can't do it because it's out there in the darkness. But you just have to cast a wide enough beam and start walking. And hopefully, you know, if you set your goal straight, like anything that happens within that beam is probably going to be pretty cool and might like lead you to that next thing. At some point I stumbled onto the format of the memory palace that there was like that I'd always been interested in small things and pop songwriting and um always been interested like always wanted to have something where I could move from thing to thing and not have to be an expert in anything and like get to know a lot of different stuff. And at some point I realized that I had achieved that for as small as it was that it was kind of like writing songs that like whether you repeat the chorus twice or whatever like it becomes a fundamentally different thing even though it's just a thing with a 44 beat that lasts between two and a half and 5 minutes and I was doing the same thing but like I it was infinitely reconfigurable in the same way that like that people are still writing songs different ways to talk about you know romantic love. The past is a big enough subject um and the format is flexible enough. It is sort of like a vessel that is capacious enough to hold whatever I pour into it and like whatever I want to talk about. Um I mean I'm sure at some point I'll do it less frequently or it will wax and wayne but there is a version where I'm doing some version of the memory palace whether it's in some different format or in some different form. Um, you know, we are who we pay attention to and and I don't think I'm gonna, you know, change what I'm that much about what I pay attention to. Well, Nate Mayo, thank you so much for being on the show. This was seriously a fantastic conversation. I'm so glad we were able to do it. So happy to be here.