The Art of Manliness · The Art of Manliness

The Mental Skills for Becoming an Everyday Genius

March 24, 2026·49 min·4 clips

A memory champion explains how witnessing his grandmother's Alzheimer's drove him to master ancient memory techniques.

1. Art of Manliness host Brett McKay interviews Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion and author of 'Everyday Genius,' about training intelligence as a skill. 2. Dellis is returning guest — he previously appeared on episode 546 to discuss memory sport — and this conversation expands from memory to a broader set of cognitive skills. 3. The episode's thesis is that abilities associated with genius — great memory, mental math, creative insight — are trainable skills, not fixed traits, and anyone can develop them. 4. Dellis explains that memory competitions test competitors on shuffled decks of cards, 500-digit numbers, name-and-face packets, and poems, with no advantage for prior knowledge — only technique and practice. 5. He was drawn to memory sport after watching his grandmother's Alzheimer's progression take her in 2009, which made him determined to actively train his own memory. 6. Dellis defines genius as 'a trained relationship with your mind combined with broad working knowledge of the world,' distinguishing it from intelligence, which he frames as raw cognitive capacity. 7. He argues that pedagogy's shift away from rote memorization in favor of 'critical thinking' is a mistake because you cannot think critically without information to think with — he compares it to telling a child to build with blocks but giving them none. 8. On the ChatGPT question, Dellis argues that memory matters not just for practical reasons but because delegating cognition to AI erodes the human agency he sees as constitutive of being human. 9. The SEE-Link-Go framework breaks memorization into three steps: See (convert information into vivid, emotional, multi-sensory images), Link (attach images to spatial locations you already know), and Go (decide how long to retain the information). 10. For a grocery list of milk, broccoli, and bread, Dellis demonstrates rating a plain 'glass of milk' as a 5 out of 10 and a 'cow spraying filthy milk across your front door' as close to a 10 for shock and emotional value. 11. McKay shares his own application: when parking at an airport, he assigns the section letter a vivid image (Section B = bread filling the car) so he can retrieve the location on return. 12. On reading speed, Dellis reframes 'speed reading' as 'focused reading' to avoid the association with programs claiming tens of thousands of words per minute, which he calls of dubious value. 13. He identifies backtracking — re-reading lines because attention wandered — as a major drag on reading speed, and recommends using a finger or pen as a physical guide to keep eyes moving forward. 14. On studying, Dellis endorses active recall (attempting to pull information from memory rather than passively re-reading) and spaced repetition (spreading review sessions over time to flatten the forgetting curve) as the core effective techniques. 15. He cites the forgetting curve and notes that each review session reduces how much is lost, eventually nearly leveling the curve — and explains this is precisely why cramming fails. 16. Dellis introduces 'number sense' as a comfortable, flexible relationship with numbers that is shaped by early education and can be rebuilt in adulthood through deliberate practice. 17. He teaches a two-step mental shortcut for miles-to-kilometers conversion: add half the original to itself (×1.5), then add 10 percent of the original for a close approximation of the true ×1.6 multiplier. 18. The episode has an educational interview structure with McKay drawing out step-by-step explanations and contributing his own examples to validate the techniques. 19. Listeners who want practical, immediately applicable techniques for memory, reading retention, and mental math will find this episode dense with usable material. 20. Those expecting deep neuroscience, peer-reviewed citations, or academic rigor will find the approach more practical and anecdote-driven than research-heavy.

As heard by us

A clear, practical case for reading with focus, recall, and a pace that fits the material.

This single-episode review frames reading speed as a matter of judgment, not a finish-line metric. It makes room for the obvious but often ignored truth that different pages ask for different treatment: lighter material can move briskly, technical study may need a slower hand,…

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Want to read faster without treating every book like a race against the clock?

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