Have our iPhones Eaten our Brains? Nelson Dellis on Hacks to Restore our Focus and Boost our Memory

Introduction: Defining Memory Genius
00:00 Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody, we've had some strange people on the show in the past, but we've never had a memory champion. And indeed, my guest today is not only a memory champion, he is a six-time USA memory champion, so he's a bit of a genius. And he's also the author of a new book called appropriately enough, Everyday Genius. Nelson Dellis teaches computer science at Skidmore College and he's joining us from upstate New York where he lives. Nelson, what does it mean to be a memory genius or a memory champion? What do you have to do?

00:54 Dellis: That's a great question. A lot of people don't know even that there are memory competitions, but basically to win the US Memory Championship—it's a full day event of memorizing all sorts of arguably useless information—numbers, playing cards, random unpublished poems, names and faces, list of words, things like that. And whoever can memorize the most in the given time the most accurately at the end of the day ends up being the US memory champion.

The Subjectivity of "Genius"
01:23 Keen: As I said, your new book is called Everyday Genius, but are memory champions geniuses?

01:31 Dellis: Right. I would say, you know, I don't think I am a genius, but I have been labeled that because of some memory feats that I've shown people who don't know what I'm actually doing in my mind. I think it's more of like a technique and a trick if you will, but the fact remains that I can remember the thing, you know, that I'm being tested on. So it actually is a genius memory, an exhibit of genius memory. So but I don't necessarily think that you have to be a genius. I think genius can come in all sorts of sizes. It's a very subjective term, honestly. And I think that's what I try to get to the heart of in the book: that anybody can be a genius. And anyone can exhibit genius-seeming skills. A lot of them can be learned and trained just like my memory was.

02:22 Keen: That sounds like soccer, American soccer for kids, everyone gets a medal. Isn't the whole point about being a genius is they're exceptional? There was only one Einstein. So if everyone's a genius, then they're no longer geniuses.

02:37 Dellis: Good point. Yeah, but and the question is like: why is Einstein a genius? Why is anybody that anybody says is a genius, a genius? I think there are clear geniuses out there, of course; these exceptional people with incredible intellect, creative geniuses, Steve Jobs, right, who came up with ideas that nobody else was coming up with. But they all have some level of genius, different abilities in different forms, but I think they're all things that we can tap into. And that's what I want to get to the heart of in this book: that with a bit of practice, with a bit of direction, we can all catch glimpses of that—and depending how far you want to go, I think a lot of it can be trained.

Controlling the "Thing Inside Our Skull"
03:25 Keen: I've always had a bit of a—and I'm certainly not an expert on this, if anything I'm the opposite of a genius, an idiot—but I've always had a bit of a zero-sum theory on our brain and what we have in it, and the less we have the better, Nelson. So I'm not sure whether stuffing your mind with all these memories is necessarily a good thing.

03:45 Dellis: I see what you're saying. And us memory competitors, when we're memorizing thousands of things—especially pointless things—yes, like what's the point there? But that's for the competitor's sake, you know, you have to have the interest to compete for that to be meaningful to you. I don't necessarily suggest that everything needs to be remembered. And I agree with you that, you know, for things to be memorable, you need to have—everything can't be remembered. Otherwise nothing special, nothing sticks out. But I think what's helpful is to have the techniques to have a better control of this thing that lives inside of our skull, right? Which I feel like a lot of people, especially memory is a great example, they feel like they don't have any control over memory. That they just have a bad memory, that things they want to hold onto slip away, things that they don't mean to hold onto stay. And they don't know why or how to have a better handle on that. And memory techniques is a way into that world where you can suddenly feel like you actually are the—in the driver's seat of your own memory. That you can choose, pick and choose if you'd like, what you'd like to stay there and for how long. I think that's really what it's about. It's not necessarily about "let me stuff everything I possibly can in there," but perhaps store the things that are meaningful to you and not forget them or lose them.

Complexity of the Brain
05:07 Keen: Yeah, I'm a world champion in forgetting. You've talked about this thing that living in our skull, our brains. We've done lots of shows on brains, very few on memory. But people have often suggested that the brain is the most complicated thing that they've seen, at least in the universe, and most brain scientists don't understand it. Is that your "understanding," Nelson, that the brain is too complex for us to understand?

05:39 Dellis: I definitely think it is this machine in our mind that is so complex and I don't know if we'll get to a point where we fully understand it. I mean, even if—and I'm not a neuroscientist, not a doctor—so what I talk about memory, I talk about it from the practical standpoint and actually how to use it and what actually works from the practical standpoint. But I've had experiences that perhaps kind of defy what a scientist might describe as possible or happening in the mind, when it comes to memory at least. And I dive into some other really interesting cognitive abilities in the book that defy all explanation, and I don't know if scientists could even begin to explain it currently or ever. But yeah, it's definitely a mystery. I don't know if it's something that we can figure out fully.

Personal Motivation: Alzheimer's Disease
06:40 Keen: Our brains may be mystical objects. How did you get into this whole memory thing? How did you start competing at the national level? My understanding is that it happened after experiencing or watching your grandmother struggle with Alzheimer's.

06:58 Dellis: That's right. My grandmother on my father's side, was the only grandmother I knew. She developed Alzheimer's near the end of her life, and I never lost anybody close to me, and so when she passed away, it really impacted me. And even watching her decline, it was a painful and difficult but also in-awe-inspiring thing to watch, that just to see how the mind is capable of becoming a shell of itself. In some cases she couldn't remember me and that was just wild to see. And so anyways, that led me down a rabbit hole to study memory and just read about it. I'd never heard of the memory competition, I didn't think that I would ever find myself in one, let alone win one. And picked up a former memory champion's audiobook with some practical techniques and I tried a few of them, they worked, and I was hooked. I wanted to further unlock this superpower that I suddenly realized was in me and that is in all of us, apparently. And the rest is kind of history. I didn't want to go down any other road at that point. I was hell-bent on maximizing my memory so that the same thing would never happen to me. That was my hope, right, is why I was spending so much time with this was to strengthen my own mind.

Brain Training and Alzheimer's Prevention
08:26 Keen: It's interesting. We've done some shows on Alzheimer's again, it's not really a hard science show, but it's a very important and interesting subject and becoming more and more prominent as people live older. What's your understanding of Alzheimer's? I mean, maybe you didn't know it back then when your grandmother got it, but what's your understanding of what Alzheimer's is, how we get it, and why becoming what you call an everyday genius—in other words doing these doing this exercise with your brain—can actually offset Alzheimer's?

09:02 Dellis: Yeah. I mean, it's very still kind of unclear what is the cause of Alzheimer's. And what are the kind of lifestyle environmental factors that play into those who get it, those who don't, those who get early onset? There seems to be some kind of genetic component to the early onset. But it seems increasingly more so that there is an environmental player in this disease, you know, the kind of foods you eat, the stress in your life, the amount of sleep through—

09:35 Keen: The podcast you appear on, Nelson.

09:38 Dellis: I'm sorry?

09:40 Keen: The podcast you appear on. That was a joke.

09:44 Dellis: Oh, sorry. Over my head, but okay.

09:48 Keen: Not a genius joke, I'm afraid.

09:50 Dellis: No, I guess that part I do not have—no, I usually can catch a joke, but that one, yeah, I got it now. But yes, ultimately what you do in your life potentially could cause you to go down that road. What it looks like though is that keeping your mind active plays a big part in that as well. You know, there was a study done on these British cab drivers where they—British cab drivers have to study for "The Knowledge," it's called, the test where they have to study the London maps, right? And those who were studying this intense examination, their hippocampus—the part of the brain that is involved with memory—grew in size. And those who weren't studying for it remained the same. And there's also some research out there that says that those who have larger than average hippocampi tend to not get Alzheimer's later in life. And so there is something about training the brain and working on kind of building those mental muscles that can help strengthen it against something like this. Do I know that for sure? Maybe I'm still destined to get Alzheimer's. But I have to think that the strengthening that I've done for my brain, the techniques and the tools and the habits that I've built—you know, a lot of these memory techniques I do them almost intuitively because I've trained them so much—that if I were to, you know, if I was at an age where I was supposed to get Alzheimer's but now there's this memory champion version at that age, I'd have to think that my techniques and skills would at least push that out. Who knows, maybe months, maybe even years. Maybe I never get it, I don't know. But I'd have to think that it would help.

Mental Longevity vs. Technological Lifespans
11:53 Keen: Yeah, I certainly hope you won't get Alzheimer's, I certainly hope I won't either. But in all this culture of longevity, as people live longer and longer and some people claim that we can live to 150 or 200... is there a certain point where the mind or the brain gets out of warranty? That it's been designed over hundreds of thousands, millions of years to last whatever it is, 70, 80, 90 years, and we can't really extend it—it's rather like expecting our iPhone to last 25 years?

12:29 Dellis: True. I feel like I'm on board with you there. But I feel like if you have a better trained mind, a better skilled mind, that maybe those 80-some years are equally as mentally spunky and alive, right? Perhaps there's less of a decline over those years and you can stay sharper for longer. You know, with memory techniques that I teach, it's one of these things that I've worked with all sorts of ages from as young as five years old—I teach my kids these techniques—to I'm currently working with a 90-year-old. And they can all do the same thing, you know? Maybe not at the start, but when I teach them these techniques, all our brains are wired to work like this. And with a bit of practice, you know, they can do some pretty impressive things that say most five-year-olds or 90-year-olds cannot do otherwise. So I don't know, it speaks a lot to what our brains are capable of and of course age matters, right? We slow down as we age, but I think there's still a lot of room to maximize our brain's potential even in later years.

The USA Memory Championship Experience
13:46 Keen: Tell me a bit more about this USA Memory Championship. How many people entered? Was it on television? Were there prizes? Were there judges? How was it determined? You won it six times. Did you win it six times in a row?

14:02 Dellis: All great questions. I did not win them all in a row. There was 2011, 2012, we don't talk about 2013—I made a mistake in the finals—but then I won 2014 and 2015, so back-to-back years there with a gap. And then I took a break and then I came back trying to win my fifth title, took a few years but I got it in 2021. I retired and then I came back for another round and won it in 2024. The competition itself has ranged up and down with popularity. As you can imagine, it's not the most attractive-sounding thing—who wants to go memorize things all day? But it is super fun in my opinion. But you know, there's been years where it's been very quiet, maybe 50 competitors. There's been other years where we had over 100 and it was televised and they did a whole special on it for the Discovery Channel. I think there was even a couple years before I competed where it was broadcast live like a sporting event on one of Mark Cuban's cable channels back in the day. Right now the last few years it's been streamed on YouTube from just to reach as many people as possible. So it's interesting, and sometimes there's spectators, sometimes there's not many, maybe—it really depends. And I think in general, when people watch a memory competition, I think people are just fascinated by the potential of the mind. It may not be the most exciting thing to watch, although they do a good job of making it kind of suspenseful and there's some kind of on-stage events that are fun to watch. But it's more about just like seeing what humans can do with their own minds.

Specific Events of the Competition
15:52 Keen: Yeah, I guess in a sense it's like a quiz, I mean it's like the spelling bee or something like that, isn't it?

15:59 Dellis: Yeah, it's kind of like that.

16:01 Keen: So what kind of—tell me the kind of information that you're required for these memory championships. Do they give you a phone book? I don't even know if phone books still exist, but what they do give you, some huge book that you're supposed to memorize?

16:16 Dellis: Yeah, so there's different events. There's one for numbers, so they give you five minutes and a single sheet of 500 digits—so just rows and rows and rows of numbers—and you have to memorize as many of them as you can in the timeframe and then recall them out, you write them by hand afterwards. Then you memorize a deck of cards, shuffled deck of cards, you memorize it as fast as you can. Some people do it in just under 12 seconds now, which is insane to know all that information backwards and forwards. Then they memorize names and faces, so they'll print out a packet of headshots with first and last names, just random people you've never seen before and you have to memorize those names in 15 minutes, as many as you can. Then they give you a poem, same idea—it's previously unpublished so you've never heard it before and you have 15 minutes to memorize the text in front of you—punctuation and capitalization, all that stuff. And then the top eight to 12—it depends on the year, sometimes they've changed the rules—those top competitors advance to an afternoon round of on-stage playoff kind of elimination rounds where they memorize words, they memorize—there's an event called tea party where some audience members come on stage and say, "My name is so-and-so, I was born this date, my phone number is such-and-such, here are my hobbies"—all sorts of information and you have to remember all of the people. And then the final event is it's whittled down to three competitors at that point, they have to memorize two packs of playing cards, 104 cards, and they go one by one reciting those cards and whoever makes mistakes is eliminated and the last man or female standing is the champ.

Relationship with Joshua Foer
18:13 Keen: I'm sure you're familiar with Joshua Foer's book on memory, in fact it was a bestseller, Moonwalking with Einstein, about his year-long journey into the world of competitive memory. Did you ever come across Foer, did you ever compete against him?

18:32 Dellis: Yeah, I didn't compete against him. He was in 2005, 2006, 2006 I believe was the year he won. I didn't show up until 2009 and 2010 and then 2011 was my first win. But the fun thing about his book is it came out the week I won my first championship in 2011. And he was at the event kind of promoting his book and so we got to chat and he's a super nice guy, we've kept in touch over the years. And at that time he was doing little book tours in the area and he told me straight up, he said, "Nelson, I don't do this stuff anymore, I don't do the memory training anymore, so if you wanted to pop into any of my things"—I was living in Boston at the time and he had an event so I showed up there and he made me do all the memory demos and I think we did another one in Miami where I lived a bit later. But he's a good friend of mine, he's a nice guy.

Influential Geniuses: Richard Feynman
19:40 Keen: But his book is more sort of cultural or investigative journalism, yours is more of a self-help book, is that fair?

19:49 Dellis: Yeah, that's totally fair. It's really practical tips: how to do this, how to do that, how to get better at this, some advice to figure this out and navigate this component of a genius ability. And I do tap into some little side stories about some famous or historically famous geniuses over in history.

20:13 Keen: Who are your favorite geniuses? Who are unusual geniuses or special geniuses rather than everyday geniuses?

20:25 Dellis: Yeah, I guess those ones are all very special geniuses. I'm a big fan of Richard Feynman. I grew up—the physicist—I studied physics and it's in large part from listening to some of his lectures. Not that I understood them at the time, but his Feynman lectures are such a masterclass in how he could teach. And to me I've always wanted to teach and share ideas with people and he did it so effectively with the most complicated matter—teaching statistical mechanics, quantum dynamics—he would just explain through metaphor and make it so understandable and he had a way with words there. And that's I think in part a true sign of someone with great intellect is someone who can explain the most complicated things to someone who doesn't necessarily understand or hasn't understood it yet.

Social Genius and Brain Health
21:28 Keen: Nelson, some of the stuff I've read on Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases of the mind suggest that a lot of the causes are solitariness. That if we could be more social, if we could talk to other people, then our minds would be healthier. Is the advice you give in Everyday Genius, is it a solitary kind of mental training or should we be sitting with others? Does that help us in terms of maintaining our intellectual—what you call our mental spunkiness?

22:04 Dellis: Yeah. For that, I'm on board with you. I even had a chapter in the book talking about social genius because you can think of a genius, someone who's super smart but maybe a bit awkward and quiet and tends to themselves and just lives in their own mind. But I think if you can really be broad in terms of your cognitive ability, that social interaction and being able to navigate that kind of genius is super important and can't be overlooked. So I have a whole chapter on how to converse and how to storytelling and how to interact with others so that you can become memorable and how others might see you as someone who's socially genius, someone who's great with people. I'm not necessarily that person, but I've had to learn over the years obviously because I'm very audience-facing because of what I do now. But that wasn't something that I was born with, it's something that I had to work on as well—I'm a very shy guy at heart. But I think it's super important to be able to interact with others. I think we all recognize that going through those periods of solitude in COVID times where we didn't interact with people—and if we did it was across a screen—and how damaging that was to a lot of our mental states. I always argue in my presentations about memory improvement that there's really four pillars of brain health: one is training or exercising your mind, keeping your mind active in some capacity; physical fitness—you want to keep your body healthy and fit, that pumps blood to your brain, which you need; diet—what you eat and feed; but then the last one is kind of one that turns a lot of heads, which is social interaction. And I think keeping interactions with people around you and having conversations and things that stimulate you both positively and negatively by interacting with others is a huge part of keeping your mind active. Even the argument for Alzheimer's sake, if you were to develop Alzheimer's and you have a strong network of people that are on your team, that's what you would need to stay alive, honestly, for longer. If you don't have those connections, who's going to help you, right?

Diet and Memory Hacks: Blueberries and Omega-3s
24:43 Keen: I've always heard Nelson—maybe this is again a bit of an old wives' tale so to speak—that blueberries are good in terms of your memory. If you eat a lot of blueberries... you mentioned that the third pillar of your argument for everyday genius is eating correctly, you've got to exercise, you've got to be social. Should we eat a lot of blueberries or what other sorts of foods help you? What did you train on before you won your USA Memory Champion? You're a six-time winner. Did you eat a lot of blueberries?

25:17 Dellis: I did. I love blueberries. Mostly for that—

25:20 Keen: They're very good, aren't they?

25:22 Dellis: They are delicious, yeah. And they're a super powerful antioxidant and that's mainly the benefit there, that it can reduce inflammation in the body and the mind, I feel.

25:32 Keen: I just ate some before this conversation. I think that's why I'm vaguely coherent still.

25:38 Dellis: In the early years when I was really—I had no other commitments—this was all I did is memorize and train for these competitions. I even had turned my business into this—I was a brand ambassador for some companies that were sponsoring me to train, right? I felt like I was living a true athlete, mental athlete lifestyle. So I could focus on all these things and I didn't drink six months before—not that I drink a lot, but no drops of alcohol before competition six months before. I had a lot of foods that were brain enhancing, one of the main ones that I fed my brain was DHA omega-3, which is a fatty acid found naturally in the brain. And I would take a lot of supplements, there's a lot of research on the benefits of DHA omega-3 for memory.

26:34 Keen: Is that a fish connected product or am I—?

26:38 Dellis: Yeah, I mean it's not the only source but you can—it's commonly received from say fish oil. A lot of people take fish oil as a supplement and you can often find, if you look at the labeling, that's DHA omega-3 or some kind of DHA—there are different kinds—but DHA omega-3 is kind of the most beneficial. But yeah, there's other sources of that, there's even foods infused with DHA omega-3.

27:06 Keen: Was there ever a fishy smell at this championship, would people—?

27:11 Dellis: I don't know, I can't speak for other competitors what they were doping, quote-unquote, themselves up with. But you know, maybe a couple burps here and there you heard, you smelled some fish, I don't know.

Perception of Memory Champions: Genius vs. "Freak"
27:24 Keen: The Foer book, Moonwalking with Einstein, touches on the sort of the freakiness of this. And I think he was sort of half-amused, half-horrified with the way in which he was treated as a kind of freak by some people for winning these competitions and spending hours and days and months training his mind to learn stuff that hadn't got any value apart from winning these competitions. Did you ever get concerned about being sort of treated like a freak as a kind of 21st-century version of a 19th-century circus performer?

28:02 Dellis: I wouldn't say I—I haven't had that experience where I was treated like a freak. Definitely the circus performer. I've had a lot of my close friends, you know, call me over when we're out together and be like, "Nelson, can you memorize this girl's phone number for me or memorize the credit card number"—

28:18 Keen: That's great, just because then you'll call her yourself.

28:21 Dellis: Yeah, I'm a good wingman. I'll put it like that. But no, never anything where they were like, "Oh my god, this is some sorcery, you're a freak." Always positive, you know? Oftentimes people are quick to say, "You may be able to do that, I can't." And they like to kind of categorize you as some kind of anomaly, even though my whole business is based on teaching people how to do this and everybody can do it. I just feel like a lot of people, if I tell you this is possible and that you can do what I can do, now you don't have an excuse, right? It's funny because one of the events I did with Josh Foer, you know, if you remember the book there was a chapter or two on a person named Daniel Tammet. Do you remember that?

29:13 Keen: No, but I have read the book. But anyway, go on.

29:16 Dellis: It was tucked away, you know, you may have not remembered it, it wasn't the focus. But he had Asperger's, he even had a Discovery Channel special on him. And in the episode they have him do mental calculations really fast, they have him learn Icelandic and go on live TV in just learning it in a week. And Josh talks about him because he claims that he can just visualize numbers—it's just natural to him. And it turns out that he was a former memory competition competitor with a different name and he had a whole memory business, he was a memory coach. So he's aware of memory techniques and he was teaching memory techniques. So the question is: was he actually telling the truth there? Was he using his memory naturally or actually using some of the tricks that we use? And Joshua Foer kind of presses on that. Anyways, we did an event and somebody showed up and during the Q&A kind of drilled him about that and he said, "What did you have against Daniel Tammet?" And he was so angry that Josh had written about him in that way. And it occurred to me that I think it's much easier to believe that there are people out there, maybe these isolated anomalies, these geniuses, and that it's unattainable versus anybody can do this and now it opens the door that you are the responsible person in this if you want to have it or not, right? And I've had that experience a lot where people are quicker to say, "Oh Nelson can do this because he's that and I'm not that." That's the closest maybe to freak I've experienced.

Technology's Impact: Mental Atrophy and AI
31:01 Keen: Not that I'm accusing you Nelson of course of being a freak. One person who is pretty freaky is Elon Musk. We did a show about him a few days ago, and there certainly seems to be something in—someone wrote a book about him suggesting he was, for better or worse, on the spectrum, that there was an element of autism about him. Do memory champions—is there a connection between memory and being on the spectrum, both in terms of maybe having a good or a bad memory or are they separate things?

31:33 Dellis: Personally I don't necessarily see a correlation. And if you survey the lists of competitors over the years—the top competitors, me included, versus the people who just come to see what's going on and don't do very well—I've never seen anybody that I would have labeled on the spectrum. Not that I necessarily have a radar for that, but you know, usually you can tell someone's a bit awkward and thinking differently. But I've never seen that. Everybody who competes in these competitions—the top people who win these competitions even—seem pretty normal to me. I mean, other than we like to spend hours of our time a day training this stuff. But I don't know if that's for me to make that call if someone's different than someone else. I like to think that I'm somewhat normal but also I like to feel that I'm unique, right? That I did something that not many people have done, which is train my ass off for a kind of quirky event.

32:46 Keen: Well, train your mind off, I don't know about your ass.

32:48 Dellis: That's right, yeah. There's a lot of sitting on your ass though, so.

32:51 Keen: I can imagine you probably have to go to the gym a lot as well, both literally and metaphorically. You teach computer science now at Skidmore, so you're all too familiar with the benefits and probably some of the problems associated with digital technology. There's a great debate going on these days about the social, cultural, intellectual benefits of the digital revolution. You mentioned phone numbers. When I was growing up, I could remember everyone's phone number. Now I don't even know my wife's, I barely know my own. When it comes to map reading, for example, we used to know how to read maps, now we just rely on our iPhone, we don't even have to think about these things. Is the digital revolution—is it contributing, I wouldn't say necessarily to Alzheimer's, but to poor mental health? Should we still remember people's phone numbers even if they're stored in our iPhone? Should we still know how to read a map?

33:57 Dellis: Yeah, I think it's playing a part in the decline of our capabilities, our mental capabilities. And yeah, I was more on the last few years of that phone number memorizing revolution—I had to do it, but not for very long until cellphones came along. And you could argue like: well, what's the point of memorizing phone numbers if they're all in this device? But sure, I mean there could be a day where everything shuts off and you have no access to that in a doomsday scenario, but what are the chances of that, right?

34:33 Keen: It's more—it's not so much that they could be valuable, it's just that we switch our minds off, we outsource our minds to our iPhone.

34:41 Dellis: We outsource our minds to this tech, right? So we don't have to do the heavy lifting anymore. And so our minds, wherever it's being replaced, is atrophying. Memory is a great example. We don't have to remember really much anymore because it's just a couple taps of our phone away. If we want the answer, we don't have to think about it. If we want a number, we don't have to think about it, it's right there. We can even now say to our AI assistant, "Hey call this person," and it'll do it for us. But I argue that there's two things happening here. One is our brains are atrophying, and who knows what that will look like as the years pass by and this gets more intense for our brain health—if there's going to be a rapid increase of cases of Alzheimer's or other things that we're not aware of. Who knows what that long-term effect is? But I think people are starting to feel the effects of relying on these tools more and more. People are struggling to be able to focus, people are struggling to even craft an email on their own because they've had AI tools do it for them, right? And yes, maybe they're being more productive, maybe they're getting a lot more business in, but at what cost, right? Maybe your brain health is going down the tube faster than we can anticipate. The other side of it is just this element of having your own cognitive agency, right? Like having control over your own mind and this human aspect of it all. If we're outsourcing that, like what is left, right? If we're not being our own creative selves or using our own memories, using our problem-solving abilities, then what are we doing? Now I think there needs to be—at least now we have the choice—where we can decide to use AI tools or tech tools, whatever, and to what extent we can use them. But that might not be our choice down the road, right? We may not have a choice at all. But for now we can. So what I suggest is, you know, I'm all for "au naturel," right? Like using your own intellect before anything. So I do memorize phone numbers. I always memorize phone numbers first. I'll eventually put them in my phone, but I always make it a challenge for me to actually memorize the number and hold it for at least 24 hours before I put it in my phone, right? I have the techniques and the tools to do that, to know that I won't lose it until then. But that's again something I trained. I try to remember everybody's name that I meet, I try to think about a problem before I now ask a tool for help, I try to be creative on my own before I try to get some inspiration from some tool. So I always think that there's some—and this is just me because I don't like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I'm losing a part of myself in the process of that.

Competing with AI and "AI Slop"
37:51 Keen: It's an interesting observation, especially someone who is teaching computer science. I mean the AI element is obviously on the horizon, it's at the door, it's maybe inside our doors now. AI already beats humans at chess, at go. Did you—as a memory genius, did you ever compete with AI? Were there ever memory competitions where humans went up against machines? Or is that absurd comparison because machines remember everything?

38:23 Dellis: Yeah, no that hasn't happened yet. I will say where it has kind of bumped heads with a lot of us memory athletes who do teach this is, yeah, you can ask a lot of AI tools to create mnemonics for you. So you as the person trying to come up with your own mnemonics can save a lot of time, right? You don't have to come up with them. But AI still is absolutely terrible at coming up with things that are actually memorable in my opinion. I haven't seen anything—

38:52 Keen: It's slop! I mean we even have a word for that, "AI slop," which is by definition forgettable.

38:59 Dellis: Right. There's just something about it that feels dead inside and lacks that element of human creativity. And who knows, I mean that could very well be fixed and it might be impossible to tell the difference one day. But I don't think so. That's my personal stance on that.

Memory Hacks for Names
39:23 Keen: It's all about remaining human, I think. Your Everyday Genius might be renamed Everyday Human. You've been very good-natured with my rather obnoxious questions, Nelson. So let's end with a couple of hacks. Your book is full of what at least your publisher calls "hacks" to boost your memory, focus, problem-solving, and much more. Everyone needs to of course buy your book, it's already you'll be pleased to know it's the number one release in memory improvement self-help on Amazon—I'm not sure how much competition you have in that area, but—

40:02 Dellis: I didn't know that, so that's great.

40:04 Keen: So you're a bestseller already, you're the top of the chart. But perhaps you might come up with a couple of hacks that anyone can do, even an idiot like myself.

40:15 Dellis: Sure. Yeah. I start the book off with some kind of fundamentals which have to do in my opinion with memory, reading, focus and attention, and learning deeper and learning for the long term. So I'll give your audience a really helpful tip on how to remember any name of any person you meet. I think that's a very practical, useful tool. And the way to approach that—and I dive into the basics of how to memorize anything in the book—but ultimately it's you gotta come up with a picture to represent the information, the name.

40:51 Keen: Is this the "memory palace" idea that I know Joshua Foer wrote about in his book?

40:57 Dellis: It the concept is in there. It's not specifically that, but the same principle—and you'll see why in a moment. But you know, you have this information, the name, which you might want to turn into something more memorable. So usually when you meet someone, they'll tell you their name, try to associate it to something that you know with that name. So if "Nelson" is an example, you might think "Nelson Mandela," you might think "Willie Nelson," you might think—

41:24 Keen: Or Admiral Nelson.

41:26 Dellis: "Admiral Nelson" for the Brits out there.

41:29 Keen: I actually saw Willie Nelson last year. He's 91 and he looks in very fine mental health.

41:35 Dellis: There you go, yeah.

41:37 Keen: So you could picture him. Or Prince Andrew, who of course was named after me—was born about 17 days later and I certainly have more hair than he does and more of a life I think these days.

41:49 Dellis: Yeah, exactly, right? So you could picture him. Or you could picture this—although I don't think any of us would really want to picture him, certainly before a meal or something.

42:01 Dellis: No, no, I don't think so. But anyways, now the goal is whatever your picture is you attach it or imagine it interacting with the person themselves in some memorable way—over-the-top, silly, absurd, exaggerated, grotesque—all these kinds of things are the things that we remember, right? So I might imagine drawing your hair in some kind of bizarre—

42:25 Keen: My poofy gray hair you're talking about.

42:27 Dellis: Yeah, exactly, the feature that I chose, right?

42:31 Keen: Although not everyone Nelson would agree it's gray, some people might think it's dark.

42:35 Dellis: That's true. That's—but that's, you know, in my mind I'm doing this process and this is how I interpret it and—

42:43 Keen: You certainly have less gray hair than me, that's for sure.

42:46 Dellis: Well, I don't know for how much longer but—

42:49 Keen: Especially after this interview, right?

42:51 Dellis: No, you're good. But anyways, so the idea is, right, so the next time I would see you I'd notice this kind of similar feature and then I'd see the image if I made it memorable enough kind of attached in my in my third eye, my mental vision there, and that would help me remember the name. You know, the crazier you can make the image or the connection the more likely it is to stick.

Closing Remarks
43:17 Keen: Well, there you have it. You're going to remember me next time you come on the show—I'm sure you've written a number of books, I'm sure there'll be some more books. The new book is called Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem-Solving, and Much More by Nelson Dellis, the six-time USA memory champion and many other things. Very interesting conversation, Nelson. I remember your name because of Admiral Nelson. And I'm going to go and eat some blueberries now to improve my mind. Thank you so much.

43:53 Dellis: Thank you Andrew, I appreciate it.

43:56 Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'm be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening in future. Thank you again.