#411 Ed Cooke - Memory & The Future of Human Intelligence
Real Talk with Zuby
Zuby
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zuby is joined by world memory champion, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Mind Max Ed Cooke. Ed shares his unexpected journey from a three-month hospital stay at 18 to competing at the World Memory Championships and teaching a journalist to become a US memory champion in under a year. The conversation explores how memory techniques work, why memory and imagination are the same thing, and how the outsourcing of cognition to smartphones and AI poses a serious threat to human intelligence. They also discuss how to remember names, the memory palace technique, language learning, and Ed's new platform Mind Max — built to nurture human genius in the age of AI.
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:34) Hospital stay changed everything
(06:38) Discovering world memory championships
(08:08) Teaching a champion in a year
(13:31) Is human memory declining?
(15:22) Outsourcing cognition to AI
(20:55) How to remember names
(29:14) Memory techniques & Memrise
(34:32) Memory equals imagination
(43:05) Building Mind Max
(50:26) The memory palace explained
(57:54) Human cognition in 2046
(1:01:18) Outro
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's up ladies and gentlemen? Welcome back to Real Talk with Zubi. We've got a brilliant episode for you here today. |
| 0:06.8 | We are going to be talking to someone who knows a lot about the mind and memory. He is a world memory champion. He's an entrepreneur and the co-founder of MindMax. And this is Ed Cook. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:20.2 | Thanks so much for having me on Zubi. |
| 0:21.5 | Awesome. |
| 0:22.0 | Ed, I've done a brief intro there, |
| 0:23.4 | but for my audience who don't know who you are, |
| 0:25.5 | please introduce yourself. |
| 0:27.2 | So I'm Ed, and I became fascinated with mine quite early in in life and through a kind of curious incident |
| 0:40.3 | when I was 18 wound up in hospital and wound up getting really into memory techniques. |
| 0:47.3 | And so I was stuck in hospital for three months, I had this random illness. And it, um, um, it introduced me through |
| 0:55.8 | a book to the, to the arts of memory, which became a kind of defining interest of mind. So I kind |
| 1:01.0 | of trained up in memory. Simultaneously, I was studying cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, |
| 1:05.7 | still very interested in the mind, but wound up, as you mentioned, competing in the world, |
| 1:09.5 | memory championships. And, um, I'm really kind of exploring all the ways in which you can take your mind to the next level. |
| 1:15.5 | After that, I founded a language learning app called Memorize, which grew to, you know, tremendous |
| 1:20.9 | scale. |
| 1:21.6 | I think we reached 80 million people, one of the big language learning apps of the 2010s. |
| 1:27.1 | And, yeah, now I'm on a new adventure with MyMax. |
| 1:30.2 | And trying to kind of create a tool which can leverage AI to amplify human genius in the age of AI |
| 1:37.6 | when there were a lot of forces pushing us in a different direction. |
| 1:41.2 | I hear that. |
| 1:42.3 | So most people, when they're stuck in hospital, they don't |
... |
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