(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)
Here's the review at the end
Find photo software that syncs your photos to your devices for back up. Delete most of the photos you take (except those that spark a memory)
When you're doing something memorable, have some time without the phone to fully experience it. You'll create a sensory memory which is good to pair with photos
Spend time going through photos and relive the experiences
Gain perspective that things which were big deals at the time are not problems now, so don't stress over things happening now