Summer Fridays: How to get your sense of wonder back (w/ Nate DiMeo) (re-release)

Nate DiMeo, creator of the long-running podcast The Memory Palace, started the show because he noticed something strange about how he experienced the past. He was fascinated by memory itself—how a dream and a real event live in his head in exactly the same way, and how his grandparents' stories somehow took up residence in his own imagination. That observation became the engine of his work: a history show that is "much more about feelings and wonder than it is about facts," even though it is factual.

Wonder as a kind of presence

For DiMeo, wonder is not a vague emotion. It is a specific experience: a moment when something from the past "reaches out of the past here and touches you." He describes it as something that "snaps you into presence"—that cuts through the "whirr and sputter" of daily life and makes you feel, genuinely, that the people in the story were once alive. That sounds simple, but DiMeo argues it is actually profound. The past lives in our imagination, not in archives. And when a fact or anecdote "glints and catches your eye" and connects with something already rolling around in your head—a trauma, a question, a feeling about your own father—you have learned something about your present by pairing it with the past.

How to find the stories that matter