Yeah, the wife was really impressed, both with me naming the mode and also hearing some of the stuff he said later in the video; when my wife and I go on walks, I get babbling about guitar, and some of the stuff I've been talking about was essentially the same idea as what he talks about in video (mainly the stuff about the technical exercises "rotting the brain").

I seem to have a pretty good ear, but I couldn't by any stretch of the imagination recognize "any scale". I've been working on modes a lot lately, but also in the video, Satriani used Lydian as an example. Once you're familiar with how that mode sounds, its pretty easy to recognize. Satriani breaks into a really beautiful Lydian riff/sequence in his song "Cryin". That's what got me interested in that mode. After that (and this is fairly recent) I started learning and playing all the modes, just in one key and one position, just to get a feel for how they sound. I did as he suggested (there's another video of his where he suggests the same thing) and wrote out the sequence of each mode (W W H W W W H etc...) and thought about what each mode meant to me personally.

Thanks again for posting that!