This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Back in 2008, I started listening to a podcast called The Memory Palace by my friend Nate DeMayo.

It's a history show, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

Each episode wrapped a little-known piece of history inside one of Nate's poetic essays.

His stories have an uncanny ability to weave together facts and insight to help us imagine the real lives of historical figures and to call to mind forgotten moments from the past.

In fact, the Mary Palace is one of the early inspirations for 99% invisible.

And now, after 15 plus years of making his podcast, Nate has a new book out called, you guessed it, the Memory Palace.

It's an anthology of some of his best stories from the show, plus a few new ones. We're going to

play two of those stories in a little bit. But first, I talk with Nate about making his podcast and writing his book.

So you opened the book with this line.

Something moved me once.

And then you go on to describe all the ways that little bits of information have cut through the deluge of media that we're bombarded with every day.

Why did you open the book this way?

I think that that first line that you read, that something moved me once, I trust the being

moved. It's fundamental to what I do with the memory palace, but I think it's also fundamental of the

way that I am. I think that at some point, as a younger person, I really became fascinated with the question of why do I remember this thing?

Like, why out of all the days of one summer in 1989 when I was a young kid, is this the trip to the ice cream store that I remember?

And some of that is just this simple and to me kind of like lovely notion of we only remember memorable

things. Like we only remember the thing that kind of like snaps us out of our just sort of like

normal day-to-day experience and grabs our attention. And so the question that I sort of asked

myself over and over again when I'm writing these stories, but also just in my life in general is like, why was this the thing that caught my eye?

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