(bright upbeat music)
- July 17th,
2007.
(bright upbeat music continues)
Do you remember where you were that day?
What you were feeling?
What you were doing?
What you're up to that month?
I was in a little town in Wales taking
in these castle ruins, it's beautiful.
That experience left a mark on my brain
for sure.
(camera shutters)
What about December 13th, 2014?
What were you up to?
That was a less memorable experience for me,
but it was just a normal day at the house, Iz
was reading a book, Henry had a fever, he was sick.
We had put up Christmas decorations
and gone on a walk on the little trail
in front of our house.
Not a super memorable day.
Somewhere in your brain,
there is stored a memory of what happened
on those two days for you.
But it's probably impossible to dig it up.
You probably have no idea what you were doing
on July 17th, 2007.
Remembering this stuff is hard
because our brains aren't built for it.
Think of this circle
as what you're able to recall and actively think
about at any given moment.
You've got a few memories and pieces of information
that are really close by in case you need them.
Like when I asked you what your phone number is, you've got
that super close, nice and bright, easy to retrieve.
But when I ask you to remember the name
of your favorite school teacher,
you have to stretch a little bit,
but you're eventually able to retrieve it,
throw it into this little circle and remember it.
If I ask you to tell me when was the last time you saw
a hamster, you'll scan these bright memories
and you won't find it.
The last time you saw a hamster
is probably way out here lurking in some dark part
of your brain.
It's there, but it's totally unretrievable
and what's scary, is you don't even know
that you can't remember it.
You can't remember that you can't remember it.
You saw a hamster at some point,
but it's gone.
The vast majority of your life,
the thousands of days that you've spent on this Earth
are all out here with a few bright spots
for really important memories
that you can retrieve pretty easily,
like the first time you left the country,
or the day you met your significant
other, or that time you broke your wrist.
But most of this stuff is totally unretrievable,
which is totally fine.
You probably don't care to remember
that time you bumped your knee
on the door of your friend's apartment in 2015.
But what about that gathering
of friends that you had that same month,
where the conversation was flowing and the food was so good
and you felt alive and excited about life?
To me, that's worth remembering.
What was the best experience you had in April of 2011?
What made you happy that month?
You have no idea.
And maybe you don't care to know what happened
in April of 2011,
but I do.
(bright upbeat music)
I think it's travesty
that so much of our life is simply forgotten.
I want my memory to look more like this,
with the bright spots, not just being the memorable trips
I went on, but also the mundane experiences,
the things that happened to me years and years ago.
What if I could somehow remember simultaneously
the memorable stuff?
Like the first time I wandered
through Rio de Janeiro? (camera shutters)
And the mundane, but special stuff, like that time
we went to the park with Iz's parents
when Henry was two years old, back in 2015
and had like a really amazing day.
I had great conversation, Henry was in a good mood,
everyone was happy.
That was a special day.
And I wanna remember it.
I've been thinking about this predicament for many years
and developing processes, and workflows
and ways that I can use photos and video
to create a world, where I can easily retrieve memories.
(camera humming)
I wanna share with you some of the guiding principles
that I use, the workflows, the softwares,
the philosophies that I use to do this.
And hopefully, if you're interested, you can start
to construct a similar world of memories.
Solving this issue has to do with this.
You've got this amazing camera
with you at all times, but you've probably noticed
that the solution isn't just to take a bunch of photos.
The familiar situation is you take a bunch
of photos of things that you probably wanna remember
and then you have so many photos just sitting on your phone
and you don't really know what to do with them.
You never end up actually looking at them.
It's the great paradox of digital photography
and it's really easy to get out of control.
My approach to this involves photos,
but it does not involve just taking photos
of everything you want to remember.
Secondly, I have to say that my approach
to this is influenced by the research
that's been done on what happens to your brain
when you take a picture of something.
If you're walking along the cliff sides
of Lima, Peru, and you pull out your camera
to take a photo, something happens in your brain.
Your brain starts recording less
of the non-visual sensations around you.
So that bird that's hanging
out next to you, or the sound of the ocean, or the traffic,
or the breeze, the smell, the way you're feeling.
In short, the more immersive experience of being in a place.
Instead, your brain hones in on the visual aspects
of the scene.
So, a year later, if someone asks
you what Lima, Peru is like, you will probably
have a better visual memory of your experience there,
but you won't remember what you were feeling,
you won't remember the general experience.
You'll remember the thing that you took a photo of.
Okay, you're probably done hearing me talk
about the theory
behind how I do this and the broad research and all that.
Now let me show you how I actually do this.
The key to remembering your life is deleting photos.
Okay?
I'm gonna say that again.
The key to remembering your life is deleting photos.
The antithesis to remembering your life
is too many photos.
You take a lot of photos, many of them, you don't want.
Having them in your world
without you actually wanting
them will cause more stress than joy.
Get used to deleting photos often.
I haven't reviewed all of the many, many softwares
that exist out there for doing this sort of thing.
The one thing I can say is that you want a software
that when you take a photo with your phone,
it immediately uploads it to the internet
and downloads it to your computer.
So that any photo you add on your computer
or you take with your phone, you see them in both places.
I know Google Photos does this, Apple Photos
does this, Lightroom Mobile does this.
I'm sure it's becoming
more and more of just a standard feature
for all photo softwares, so it shouldn't be hard to find.
The reason you want to do this,
is because the first step to actually getting a handle
on your pictures, is having them in one central library.
And that's why I very strongly recommend using software,
that when you take a picture on your phone,
it shows up on your computer.
Instead of scrolling through Instagram or Facebook
for once during the day, scroll
through your own pictures and delete them.
In this process of deleting photos and making that a habit,
you get the first benefit of this system,
which is, you will be looking
at your photos more often.
You get to a new place, or you have a fun weekend somewhere
and you take a bunch of photos and videos of something
and you're like, "I don't really need that video.
"That was a cool video and it was a cool thing,
"but I don't necessarily need to remember that in 15 years,
"so get rid of it."
(bright upbeat music begins)
Like this.
I took this photo in Montreal, because I was like,
"Oh, I wanna remember the Lonely Planet guide
"that I was using and the way the trees looked."
No, and I didn't take one, I took a bunch.
Let's get rid of literally all of these.
Interviewing Hillary Clinton,
yes, definitely I want that photo.
That was a really cool day, I wanna remember that day.
I'll pick one and delete the others.
I don't need 10 pictures of Henry and Oliver
at the pediatrician.
Okay, so I'll go through.
That's a cute shot.
That's not, and I probably have 15.
That's not.
You relive the memories as you're deleting.
Okay.
As I'm deleting them here, it's deleting
them on my phone too,
so the clutter's just producing across both my devices.
Okay, so from that pediatrician day,
I've got four photos.
Are you starting to see how this works?
Actually, I've started to enjoy this process.
It seems like work,
but it's actually an effort that helps
you relive these memories
and reduce clutter at the same time.
If that photo doesn't do something
to your brain, chemistry, get rid of it.
If you're a photographer,
I'm gonna talk to you for a second.
If you're not a photographer, go get a drink of water,
because I'm about to use a bunch of jargon.
All right, photographer time.
Photographers are probably thinking,
"I need to edit my photos,
"I want to work with RAW photos."
Lightroom was the promise for us,
where they'd say, "No, you can have all
"of your photos organized and work
with them in RAWs, edit them in a robust software,
"but also see them on your phone."
It seemed like the promise,
and for the past six years,
I've been using Lightroom both to edit my photos
and to organize them and catalog them.
But as my photo library grew,
it started to get out of control.
Trying to manage RAW photos that are 40 to 50 megabytes
each, it's just insanity
when you have tens of thousands of photos.
Theoretically, Lightroom is the perfect software.
But in practice, as the catalog grows,
it starts to become less stable
and difficult to work with.
I recently had a catalog fail and all of that metadata
that was embedded into the catalog was lost.
The edits, the geo data, the keywords.
And that made me realize that I can't rely on a program,
a catalog file,
to have all of that really important information.
So I still use Lightroom to edit my photos,
but then I immediately export them as high-res JPEGs
with all of the metadata embedded
into it, including the geotag and everything.
And then I imported into Apple Photos as baked.
I call it baked, because I like that idea
of baking the RAW into a nice JPEG,
that's like three megabytes.
They share much quicker, you don't have to export anything.
I love Lightroom and I wish
that it could just be the perfect cure-all software,
but it's not.
All right, I'm done talking to just photographers.
Let's get back into this.
Just to remember the mantra so far, the key to remembering
your life is deleting photos.
Okay, so we've talked about the technology
and kind of the workflow.
What about when you're in a beautiful place?
What if you're in Porto, Portugal, which is one
of my favorite cities right now, by the way,
and it's sunset,
and you're in this beautiful place, and this view,
and you want to document it and remember the night
and the buzz in the air.
How do you document that place
and that memory in a way
that will help you relive it later on in your life?
Back to that research that we talked
about, when you're taking a picture of something,
you're making a little bit of a trade off.
You're enhancing your visual memory,
but you're sacrificing some of the other sensory memories
of the smell, and the vibe and the emotional experience
of being there. (soft upbeat music)
There is local music being played,
there's a smell of summer in the air.
There is just a vibe
of excitement and relaxation
that you can't capture with a camera.
(soft upbeat music)
It's amazing light,
I just wanna take a bunch of pictures.
And so, that's what we do at first.
We take a bunch of pictures.
But then comes the most important part.
After you've taken a bunch of pictures,
gotten it out of your system, put your camera away
and let your brain do the documenting.
(soft upbeat music continues)
You have that visual information saved in photos.
Now it's time for your brain to capture
the other sensory information,
the smell, the breeze, the sounds,
all of that experience that you can't get with a camera.
The photos you took will be put under a computer.
I'll delete probably 80 or 90%
of 'em, keep just 17 pictures from that night
of the hundreds I took and those photographs will serve
as a link, a gateway to that memory.
And it will hopefully spark
in my brain, all of that other sensory information
that I experienced that night.
(camera shuttering)
Okay, so now, it's time for what I say is the payoff
of all of this.
If you are intentional in your efforts
to cool down and delete photos,
and to be in moments when you're in moments,
and to let those sink into your brain
and to capture them as well,
if you do all of that intentional labor,
now you are in the amazing position to be able
to what I call, explore your memory.
(bright upbeat music)
To go back and to spark those moments
and those feelings again.
So, you can do this several ways,
you can do this a million ways.
But the way I choose to do it is to go into Apple Photos,
where I have all of my photos in one catalog
and to zoom out.
You can zoom out to years,
which is basically, you can see an entire map
of all of your photos year by year.
Pick a year.
2015, we went driving in Florida to look at some manatees.
Again, I'd totally forgotten about this experience
until right now.
Here we are, we go in, saw the manatees
and then we drove back.
And I remember our car broke down.
We were on the side of the road
for a bunch of hours waiting for a tow truck.
And there we are.
And I took a bunch of photos that night,
just because I had nothing to do and the light
was pretty cool.
I probably had a couple 100 photos,
just because I was bored,
but I only kept four photos of the breakdown.
And that's enough for me.
That image right there of the van broken down on the side
of the road is enough to spark that entire memory,
because it's so vivid and it captures
so much of that moment.
That shot mixed with Iz sitting there reading
a book by the light of her phone
in her swimsuit is enough to spark
that memory for me, and to help me relive
it, and to feel all those feelings again.
So that is effectively the general approach
to how I think about documenting my life.
It maybe seem simple, take photos and organize them.
But there's some foundational concepts
in there that I think people miss
out on that make a huge difference.
So to review, find a good photo software
that syncs your photos
to the internet and to your devices,
so you have a backup and you have them easily accessible
on both devices.
This will lead you
to deleting your photos, deleting, deleting.
Delete most of the photos you take.
Only keep the ones that spark a memory
or spark joy for you.
When you go on trips or you're in places
that you really want to remember,
have some camera free time.
Put the camera away and try to document
the experience with your brain only.
This, paired with intentional photographing
of that place, will later lead to more immersive memories
and a better way to relive those experiences
in a way that isn't just visual, but is sensory generally.
And finally, the payoff.
Don't forget
if you do all those other steps
to then explore your memories, spend time going
through those old photos
and remembering why you kept them,
trying to relive those experiences that you want to relive.
And this also helps you come to terms with the fact
that everything is temporary
and it passes away, and changes,
and that things that seem like a really big deal,
that are stressful now, probably won't be stressful
in 2 1/2 years when you're scrolling
through the photos from today.
(bright upbeat music)