Anthony Metivier

**Rick Rubin** (0:02)
Tetragrammaton.

**Anthony Metivier** (0:25)
I often think of the David Lynch Lost Highway movie where Bill Pullman says, I like to remember things the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened. And then that's naturally what happens when we tell these stories. But as I remember it anyway, I was dealing with a very bad clinical depression while I was doing my PhD.
And rather than do anything destructive, I wound up at the campus one day. David Blaine was all the rage. And in this deep dark winter, there's a place at York University campus called York Lanes, where inside they kind of protect you from the Canadian winter with what looks like a street, a city street inside and it's nice and warm. And these guys came and did street magic to me. And this revived an old interest that I had when I was a kid in magic. And so I went home and I was watching videos and I stumbled across what's called the Holy Grail of magic, which is any card at any number where the spectator could name a card and name a number and it'll be there. But the deck has to be memorized. And I thought there's no way I can do this. I can't even read a sentence of this dense philosophy that I'm responsible for. But I tried it anyway and lo and behold, I memorized a deck of cards and I thought instantly, if I can memorize a deck of cards, I can get back into this. It just gave me this weird light in my head too. And later I found out there's research that actually people have done that confirms this. And it's throughout the tradition, the sense of light that comes from practicing with memory for quite a lot of people. Yeah, I just had the confidence to keep going and I didn't drop up and I didn't do anything destructive to myself and I passed. And then I just used memory techniques privately for a certain portion of my career. And after a research grant I had and a teaching grant ended, I wound up back home in Canada and I was working, doing curriculum for a after school school where parents send their kids when they're concerned that the public school system isn't doing enough for them.
And I wasn't even teaching, but a teacher didn't show up one day.
And the person who owned the school asked me if I could stand in. And I taught the stuff to the kids and I said, you know, that's it. What do you guys want to do now? And they said, we don't know. You're the teacher. And I said, let's learn how to say the alphabet backwards. And then after that, we got into some card memorization and I showed them how to memorize words and stuff. And they said, could you write that down? And I did. And the Kindle Goldmine was going on at that time. And I put it up on Amazon not thinking a thing about it. But a friend of mine said, hey, have you seen your book? And I was like, no, it's like ranking in the best sellers in like one and one and really category three.

**Rick Rubin** (2:54)
That's amazing.

**Anthony Metivier** (2:55)
It was just luck of the draw, I guess. I mean, I was looking at different ideas of how I was going to become a business person, but I was way off in completely different ideas. And this memory thing just really hit. And I saw that. And then, oh, there's a lot of adventure there with stubbornness of not really wanting to be an entrepreneur or anything like that and not wanting to run an email list properly. I was just emailing at some point 700 people a day, copy and pasting in doses of 12 or whatever, that wouldn't get flagged by these email systems at the time. And then finally, I paid to get one of these systems to email people. Anyway, it just went over there and I delayed getting a website probably way too long because it wasn't anything I planned for.

**Rick Rubin** (3:33)
When did YouTube start for you?

**Anthony Metivier** (3:36)
It had started when I learned memory techniques and that was part of what had enabled it. This would have been 2003, I guess, when I discovered the techniques. So YouTube was a thing.

**Rick Rubin** (3:46)
When did you start posting videos?

**Anthony Metivier** (3:49)
Well, that was one of my other business ideas that I was originally working on. That would have been around 2011-ish because I had been a film studies professor, and another lucky weird thing that was happening to me is that there was a student who was a cinematographer and he was like, Man, you've got to get your stuff on YouTube. I was not in a healthy space or I was just, I was not really enabled by anything to understand that that would have been the best thing I could have ever done, is have him use a professional camera to put my stuff on YouTube. But I heard it later and then when I was back in Canada, I'd written some books about screenwriting because he had gotten me a gig as a story consultant, and I actually worked on a couple of projects, one of which I even have my name in credits, which I never dreamed in my life was ever going to happen, and I wasn't able to visit the set. It was just a weird thing. I was getting a couple of gigs to consult on stories, and then I was documenting going to the set as the guy who was script doctor on this thing, and that was on my YouTube channel, that still is. Then I was giving these lectures about really noodly, to lose analysis of film and their own analysis of film, and it's still there, it still sits there, and I look really awkward, I mean, it almost looks like a Twin Peaks episode because it was in outside of Vancouver, and there's this pine wall behind me, and some of them I've got a Videodrome poster behind me, and I did a whole Department of Cronenberg Studies playlist or whatever.