CW 1110 FBF: Improving Memory & Concentration With David Farrow Creator Of The ‘Millionaire Memory’ Program
7 Dec 2025 · 25 min
David Farrow, a Guinness World Records memory holder, shares techniques for remembering names, faces, and information. He memorized 59 decks of cards in sequence and combines ancient mnemonics with neuroscience to improve focus and concentration.
Questions this episode answers
Episode 190.
59 decks (3,068 cards in total).
Memory Makes Money.
Chapters
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Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman and this is episode number 190. 190. Wow. It's been a lot of episodes behind us and we've got a lot to come. So as you know if you're a regular listener that every 10th show we take a break and we do a non financial topic. We spend all of the rest of the time talking about how to earn money in the Internet marketing business or a home based business and how to create wealth through the most historically proven wealth creator income property. But today we will take a break and we will talk about how to improve your memory before we get into the show. We have memory expert David Farrow with us today. Before we get into that, wanted to just mention a couple quick things. Be sure to register. And by the way, a lot of people have registered. This is probably the earliest we've had registrations at least in this kind of these kind of numbers for any event. But it's our upcoming not till March Meet the Masters event and that will be in early March of 2011. Meet the Masters, that'll be a three day event, totally new format and I think you'll like it. And the early bird pricing is incredibly inexpensive right now. So it's only $347. Maybe that's why we're getting so many people to register so early, because that early bird pricing is pretty darn good at the end of the day when we finally sell these tickets, at the end they will be about 15.
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My pleasure to welcome Dave Farrow to the show. This guy is amazing and he's going to talk about that all important thing that I know we can all be better at, and that is memory. If you want to improve your memory, this show is for you. Sure. You've been in the position, as I have many times where you meet someone and then you instantly forget their name and it drives you crazy. Well, Dave Farrow is the current Guinness record holder in this area and he went on live with Regis and Kathy and memorized the entire studio audience. You'll learn some good stuff here and it will just help you be more effective in many, many areas of life. Dave, we're glad to have you on the show. Welcome.
Hey, thanks very much for having me on the show. Hey, I want to ask you a quick question here. What if there was one overlooked skill that everyone was overlooking and it was something that could be learned in as little as a weekend and have financial dividends that pay off year after year after year, and it's something that you could change very quickly and it could pay off financially and it would actually be good for your health and you can learn it in a very short period of time. What would you say if somebody went up to you and you knew of a skill like that? Would you want to learn it?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Very important skill.
Well, you're in the right place because that skill is memory and that kind of gets people's goats sometimes. People will fight me on this a little bit. They think, oh, memory is not a skill. It's something you're born with. You're genetically predisposed to having a good memory. That is all not true. It is all a skill. If you find somebody who is good with their memory, even if they don't know it, they're doing things in their head that you're not doing. And I can show you in just a few minutes how to more than triple your memory. We're going to do this live on the air, but what I focus on and specialize in is how that applies to real money. Now today I wrote a book called Memory Makes Money, actually all about the face to face transactions as well as all the other areas that memory affects your bottom line. I think it's something your listeners will be very interested in.
Absolutely. I remember when I went to this memory class many years ago and the guy was Telling me, picture that person with a funny hat on that reminds you of their name. And I don't know if that's your technique, I don't know your technique, but it does work.
I've heard of things like that in the past.
Right.
And what I want to tell you is I am the next generation and I've got a lot of respect for some of these old masters that have went before me. But they were using what is a very specialized form of mentalism that's done on stage that impresses audiences with memory techniques. However, they did not have the benefit of modern science, my friend. And what we have discovered in just the last five years about how the brain works has completely rewritten the memory world and the memory code. And I'm the only one who's actually found this amazing discovery between ancient mentalism and modern neuroscience. I actually started off, I have a science background. I have a biotech company that I founded. You can actually look me up on the US Patent and trademark website. You can see my biotech invention patent filing there. If anybody wants to double check everything.
Fantastic.
But just before I get into letting you know who I am and who I am and what I bring to the table, there's some people out there that basically repackage some old mnemonics techniques. That's kind of the basics, that's where a lot of people start. But I go a lot farther beyond that in actually the only person in the last couple hundred years to actually invent brand new memory techniques. And I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but if I didn't say it, nobody would. Right?
Yeah. No, we want to hear this. That's definitely good. And I bet you. Although I don't know, but I have a feeling you're going to say that the reason we've advanced so much in the last five years is the fmri. And we can really see how, how the mind works in real time now. It's just amazing.
Yep. Then he's of course referring to the functional magnetic resonance imaging device, which allows us to not only see the brain itself, but also see the blood flowing in the brain, which scientists have found out is actually in many cases more important than knowing what cells are being activated is what cells are actually getting blood flow and oxygen.
Fantastic. Well, teach us memory 2.0 then. We're all anxious to hear about it.
There's actually a great speaker actually that taught me this, that no one's going to to you unless they first know you. So let me just give a minute to let people know exactly who I am and why, you know, where I've come from and why I'm so passionate about this. And I've seen this change lives. As you said, I'm in the Guinness Book of World Records. I developed this system and found this connection, and I knew that I had to kind of get people's attention, so I decided to go after the Guinness World Record. Once I developed this, I realized that I had something that was far better than anything else that was currently being marketed. And I really wanted people to know about it. So I went after the most difficult memory feed in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records. It is memorizing decks of playing cards all shuffled together. And that is because there's numbers and suits in a random order, they're shuffled for you. You only get to see them once. So there's zero repetition. Not a lot of people know about that, that feature. And then you have to recall them with near perfect recall. You have to get. You can only get 0.5% wrong or you lose the entire thing. No matter how well you do, if you get 0.6, you lost it. And I waiting up till the very end. Just so anybody's listening here. So you know how many decks of cards I memorized? I didn't memorize two or three or five. I memorized 59 decks. Playing cards.
That's unbelievable. So 59 times 52 cards.
Yeah, 3,068 cards in total. It's like it's a stack of cards that would go up to. If you're just sitting them in packets, probably up to about your waist, depending on how tall you are, I guess. But it's a ginormous number of cards. It's a huge amount. And I saw them all only once. And then I recalled them live on the Discovery Channel for all to see. And you're allowed to get a few wrong. But I actually only got one card wrong. And I'm not taking it personally. Deck 17, card number 45. But I'm not taking it personally at all. And what I want to make it clear to people is I've also done demonstrations, like I'm a keynote speaker. So I've got in front of audiences. And I'm one of the few who gets in front of the audience and can memorize the names of everybody in the audience and recall them, you know, just before I speak. And what I want to tell you is that this is a learned skill, of course, to get up to my level, where you're doing it like 200 people. Then it takes practice and takes a lot of. A lot of practice. But one of the things that I specialize in is getting people to that level right away, very quickly. So you mentioned kind of a memory course back in the day. And I've asked people before, whenever I've heard things like that, I always go up to them and I say, do you remember who they were? Now, if you do, don't say their name, just for privacy, but do you remember who the speaker was at all?
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Well, most of the time when I hear that, I hear people say, oh, I don't remember who the speaker was. And it's kind of ironic because they're a memory guy, but you don't remember who they are.
Right.
One of the things that we've done is we're using memory techniques in branding, and this is something that your listeners will be very interested in. We're going to get into a technique where everybody listening, by the way, during this podcast, you're going to more than triple your memory, and it's going to be, according to a modern test for memory that's used at Harvard and other places. But before we do that, I want to talk to you a little bit about how this really applies to sales and marketing. Make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
So what I did was I thought, okay, I'm a memory guy. I know a little bit about how the brain works in a way that even top psychologists don't understand. So let's see if we can apply this to sales and marketing, because I'm running a business as well. What we found is if we can create an image that really connects to the person in a way that they'll remember that image and it's interesting and it stands out, then they're going to be much more likely to look you up and purchase from you. And the results are absolutely incredible. I'll give you one simple example. We changed our brand. I was just millionaire. Memory. We're still doing that in some areas. We're selling that in an infomercial in South Africa, for example, and a few other places. But when I changed my name to Faro Memory, which is my last name, F A R R O W. You'd think that would be tougher. But what I do is I get up on stage and I say, hey, what if everybody in this room, what if I was such a good memory expert, I could get you to remember my name in two seconds and you'd remember it for years? Names is the toughest thing, right? Everybody nods. I'LL get you to remember my name and business name, which happens to be the same thing.
For years. And it just takes two seconds and they go, oh no, there's no way we could do that. And then I put on this little costume hat, this, this Egyptian pharaoh hat that you alluded to because you saw the Egyptian hats at the conference we were at. And everybody laughs, everybody breaks up laughing, but it's that simple thing. Now you can talk about things like that and you can talk about costumes, but when you do it right, it makes a brand that people remember. And the biggest mistake that people make is that when they're making their own branding is they rely on slogans and one liners. That's useful for positioning, but it's not the same as branding. Basically, the small business owner, which I assume the majority of people listening to the podcast are.
It'S not anybody's surprise that we're dealing with a more limited budget than say Coca Cola or Microsoft or McDonald's.
Not quite that big.
There you go. But the average person though, when they're trying to run their business, they're doing advertising, they're trying to do ads that are more similar to Coca Coca Cola, McDonald's or Microsoft, they're basically trying to run a slogan based ad that is very pretty, but it's not eye catching. It doesn't get people's attention and it also doesn't. It's not memorable. So one of the first things we get people to do is get rid of slogans. Just stop using slogans entirely. Focus on the image of some sort. Even if it's an image that you just associate to your brand, we usually suggest it be a play on your name or something because you're going to have this image for a long time. But even if it's just an image that you associate with your brand, like say you like eagles, so you use an eagle or something like that, then that we found is what makes the phone ring off the hook. People pay so much attention to that and they remember that for ages.
So what you're probably getting to here, I would think, is that people are visual and it's easier to remember something visual in image than it is a bunch of words. Right?
Well, and in a way, a picture says a thousand words. But yeah, what we know with neurology, even people who are more auditory minded, they process those auditory things with the visual parts of the brain. So even if you have a slogan, if you combine it with an image that describes the slogan, you know, I've seen A lot of companies that will use a helping hand, you know, one hand coming from the top helping a hand that's coming from the bottom. When their slogan or their slogan has something to do with the word caring or being considerate or compassionate or something. So that's an image that backs up the words that you're using. So you can use that as well. But. But really what you want to do is paint an image in the mind's eye. Because generally speaking, our brains are still the same basic primitive minds that were out in plains hunting and foraging for food. So when it comes to terms that are more literary, more abstract terms that you're talking to people about, those don't stick in the mind. And our brains are just not really well designed to handle them. We're well designed to handle an image. If we're. If we're in the forest and we see a tree that's fallen over, we know something pushed it over, and we pay attention to that. So that's what our brains are geared towards, and that's what works. Even in our modern age, we still have that same brain. Does that make sense?
Yep, absolutely. How can we use this in terms of remembering important things? I'm always forgetting where my keys are. I'm forgetting people's names, and I don't want to do this. I'm sure everybody listening shares that. Those same experiences that I do.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I talked about how some of the techniques we use are similar to traditional memory techniques. But here's where we've gone a step further. Normally, these techniques would take months and even years to practice and master before someone would be able to use them. And the average person just doesn't have that ability to have that type of time commitment into this. I think that's fair to say anybody listening right now does not want to practice this for months if there was another option. So what I've dedicated a lot of my work to is making this so that people can get the same result in a fraction of the time. So names is a great example. You know, you can think of a pharaoh hat for Pharaoh, or you can think of a wave for Dave or something like that, and that's all fine and good, but when you come up with, you know, like, I met somebody just yesterday named Okechuku or Shanice or even, you know.
Or Petrovsky or Petrovich or something like that, when you get more complex names, then they tend to go in one ear and out the other very quickly because your brain has more difficulty making an image. So for someone like Mike, you can think of a microphone, but what do you think of for Sharifa or Raffia, which doesn't instantaneously make an image? Well, I worked on this problem for a long time, and what I came up with was a way to break down any name into syllables. And there's actually not that many syllables out there. There's only so many letters in the Alphabet. There's only, like, 10 basic consonant sounds and five vowels. There's only so many combinations, and not all of those combinations are even used. But we found some common syllables that are used in everyday names all around the world. And what we do is we focus on knowing how to link those up. And then when you come across a name, you can break it up into syllables and instantly make a very funny, interesting image in the back of your mind's eye that just pops into your head and helps you remember the entire name. So, for example, my friend Okechuku, you wouldn't have to, you know, try to think of something that rhymes with the whole thing, and that's a real name. It's actually from Nigeria. We're not making anything up here. There's some names that are, you know, complex out there. So for ok, that's actually a common phonetic in Africa and that we use the OK Corral for chewing, for chew. We have teeth. And if you want to go one step further, normally your brain would fill in the blanks. But if you want to handle the coo, there's actually a lot of different ones you can do for that. You can think of a raccoon or you can think of. I actually use a dove that's cooing. So you make a few of these images for the phonetics, and we take you through step by step, how to do it. But then all you have to do is imagine a big smiling mouse at the OK Corral, and all of a sudden, you remember the guy's name. And before you were completely dumbfounded, it would have been impossible to memorize his name. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Just a reminder. You're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday.
What I can't help but thinking, though, Dave, is how do I remember all those other images now? I mean, you're saying that the brain does remember images, and a picture says a thousand words, type idea a minute ago. And I agree with you there. But, gosh, if you go to networking.
You think you're gonna be overwhel.
Yeah, right, Exactly.
You switch over to you, you're gonna go crazy. You're gonna wake up at 3 o' clock in the morning going, I can't think anymore. I got a comic book in my head. Well, actually, that was what I thought when I first started this. I was like, I'm gonna be having crazy images in my head forever. But the really interesting thing that we've discovered about the brain is that when we do these right, what happens is you activate a series of cells. People might have been familiar with these cells called the reticular activating system. And when it comes to memory, we call it the reticular activating filter. But what happens is when we do this right, we figured out a few more accurate ways to activate these cells than even traditional memory techniques when you start getting into the more advanced stuff. But basically what these cells do is they choose what goes into your long term memory. So you have a choice. You can either repeat something 100, maybe a thousand times and then these cells will choose it simply by repetition, or you can come up with one of these images and the cells will choose it and instantaneously. Now here's the cool thing though. Once you come up with the image, you'll remember the image. Maybe the first two or three times you remember the information, and then after that you'll just remember the information and you won't remember the image at all. The image will fade completely and the information will stay. It is just a tool to get it past that barrier of the brain, to make those cells single it out and go, oh, that bit of information is important. I'm going to pull that aside. So we use this constantly. Now one of the things that your listeners would really be interested in is you talk about getting Internet businesses and other businesses going. And I have to tell you that there's always a learning curve on these things. And this is the one thing that people do not expect is that they wonder why they're having difficulty with this. But most of the people that you may be talking to, they haven't been to college for years. They haven't really sat down and studied a curriculum for a long time. It's a real challenge and it's something that people underestimate. They start to get depressed because they think there's something wrong with them, that they're losing their memory or something. And it's simply because you just, you know, you've had a regular job, you've known how to do that job, so you haven't had to use your memory for a long time. So you have that challenge. But using these techniques, when you start to use it regularly, what happens is your brain wakes up and you get the brain that you had when you were in your 20s or teens, that sharp, always on the ball brain, and you're able to absorb information like a sponge instead of like a sieve. And it just stays. You just soak up the information much more easily. I can give you a few tips on studying one of the neurological things that we discovered that I actually developed to overcome my adhd. So we actually help people overcome ADHD all the time, and it's included in our program. Actually, the ADHD program is part of the memory program because we found they complimented each other so much. Even if you don't have adhd, you still want to focus better, in other words.
Right, right. And after you talk about that, you have a whole bunch of things that you really address that are interesting. Five things in your home that are killing your memory. How to become.
That are killing your memory.
Yeah, right, right. And how to become that incredibly valuable employee. Cut your risk of Alzheimer's. Whole bunch of things. So tell us about that.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I'll finish this one first. But yeah, there is techniques that we have that we call it becoming recession proof. We're starting to come out of the recession, so we might change that brand a little bit. But in essence, we've had people that have been selected when everyone around them is being fired because they've distinguished themselves because of their memory. I mean, in essence, I mean, really, if you think about it, how else could you possibly distinguish yourself? I mean, we're not living in a world where the person who can lift the heaviest rocks is considered the best. You know what I mean? We live in a world of the brain. The people who are the smart ones, they're the ones who get the jobs, they're the ones who get the promotions. But it's not always smarts. It's distinguishing yourself as brighter than the rest. It's being the shining apple in the barrel, so to speak. So actually, getting back to the focus technique, even if you don't have adhd, of course, this is something that can be very useful to you if you've ever lost focus on a project, typed out a sentence and backspaced over half of it. We call it a type of focus bursts. But really, if you're familiar with exercise, it's kind of like an interval training exercise. In essence, if you tried to sit down and study something for four hours, just put yourself in that mindset right now you want to really master this whole issue. You want to master copywriting, for example. That will take you hours and hours and hours. Or you want to master a particular technical skill set. Or in your field, you want to be a better expert so that you can sell your info products better or something like that. You know, you want to sit down for four hours and study something. After the first 15 minutes your brain is going to shut off almost completely. It's not your fault. It is sheer biology. Your brain is not designed to be in a very high focus state for very long.
Thank you for listening to the Creating wealth show. This is Jason Hartman, your host and we appreciate you following the show. We have many, many episodes, hundreds of episodes, and some of these, the older episodes have been archived and placed in our Members section and that applies to this one. So we include a sample that's about 25 minutes long. And then for the rest of the show you can go to our members section@jasonhartman.com Many of the other shows are still in their full length complete version. However, some of the shows like this one are in our Members section where you can hear the show in its entirety. And again, you just need to go to Jason hartman.com and you can get the full show there in the Members section. Plus a whole bunch of other great members benefits and resources, whether it be documents, forms, contracts, articles, other video and audio content. Just a great resource. So be sure to join as a member@jasonhartman.com and thanks again for listening to the Creating Wealth Show.
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