If you’re ever looking for a wingman, consider Fort Worth resident Ronnie White. Thanks to the man’s impressive cerebrum, he can recall women’s names and phone numbers like nobody’s business. (It’s probably not his business, anyway.) The dude is superhuman, which is why he got to appear on the two-hour special Superhuman last Monday night on FOX. The primetime game show featured host Kal Penn, a guest panel including former boxer and human ear connoisseur Mike Tyson, and a wide assortment of contestants with unique abilities. Each had an extraordinary skill related to memory, hearing, taste, touch, smell, or sight. At the end of the show, the studio audience selected a winner to receive the $100,000 grand prize.
White doesn’t normally use his power of memory to recall chicks. The U.S. Navy veteran, who served in Afghanistan in 2007, has memorized the names of every one of the 2,300 soldiers who have died in that country –– in the order of their deaths. He now travels across the country hauling a large, multi-paneled, 52-foot erasable wallboard that he uses to write down the names to ensure they are not forgotten.
“It takes me 11 hours to write out all 2,300 names,” he said. “It took me a year to memorize them.”
On Monday night’s special, however, he was challenged with meeting 15 women and remembering their names, phone numbers, and a specific fact about each of them. Most guys can’t even remember where they put the matchbook with the phone number written on it.
“I was worried it might come across as too cheesy, but it was the challenge [producers] gave me,” he said.
White creates videos and e-books to train others to be super-rememberers. In fact, he might be too good of a teacher. The game show’s big winner on Monday, California resident Luis Angel, had previously studied White’s instructional videos. Angel met about 100 audience members before the show and was later able to remember the names and hometowns of five of them picked at random. Static can’t even remember to take a multi-vitamin after lunch.
White was disappointed to lose, and he didn’t get a date with one of the 15 models who participated in his segment. Still, he had a good time.
“It was great to be a part of it,” he said. “I got the challenge right, and it was hard.”
