How To Learn & Remember Anything, Fast | Ali Abdaal | Modern Wisdom Podcast 231

Ali Abdaal is a Doctor and a YouTuber. The ability to consume and retain information quickly is one of the most important skills of the 21st century and yet very few of us actually understand the way our brains learn & remember. Expect to learn how to design your perfect study schedule, why discomfort is a good sign when studying, the golden rule of memory, Ali's best tools & apps to augment your learning, how to automate spaced repetition and much more... Sponsor: Get 20% discount on the best coffee in Britain with Uncommon Coffee’s entire range at http://uncommoncoffee.co.uk/ (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Follow Ali on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/Sepharoth64 Check out Ali's website - https://aliabdaal.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #learning #memory #aliabdaal - 00:00 Intro 02:27 First Principles of Strong Learning 18:02 Creating a Study Environment 24:59 Planning & Learning for Retention 40:24 Ali’s Main Study Tools 45:00 Optimal Lifestyle for Study 51:24 Rooting Out Friction for Productivity 1:02:20 Where to Find Ali - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ali Abdaal?

  This is the single thing that makes the biggest difference in people's results for learning anything at all. And that is that we learn by testing ourselves. We don't learn by reading stuff. And this is again, is counterintuitive because when you tell people that they should test themselves and stuff, they'll say, oh, well, I have to learn it first and then I can revise it and then I'll test myself for the exam. There's evidence that shows that if you test yourself even before you start learning something, that's going to improve your learning. If you test yourself immediately after you learn something, that's going to improve your learning. If the only thing you do after reading something is just test yourself once, that is better than reading the same thing four times or writing a summary of it or creating a mind map on it. All you have to do is just test yourself.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Ali, welcome to the show.

• 0:43Ali Abdaal?

  Thank you very much for having me. I was gonna say, it's always a bit strange to hear a British accent on the end of like a productivity or like a, you know, just like any kind of podcast, because like all of the ones I listen to, they're just so overwhelmingly American that when I hear a Brit, it's like, oh, he's one of my boys.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  This is my people. This is my people here. Who do you listen to?

• 1:05Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, like all of the things I'm sure you do. Started out with Tim Ferriss and then the Farnham Street. And I've got like 80 on my podcast library thing, which is, you know, now swelling. I've recently started listening to a lot of Dave Asprey as well, because I'm trying to get into the whole like hacking your health and all that stuff. Dabbled with a bit of Peter Attia. These are all like white American dudes, though, so. I need a bit of variety in my podcast diet.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that. I know that we're both mutual friends of Chris Sparks, Tiago Forte. Have you been introduced to Taylor Pearson yet?

• 1:39Ali Abdaal?

  I know of him through his website and stuff, but I haven't spoken to him personally.

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal writer, absolutely wonderful writer. So today, we're going to be talking about how to learn and remember anything fast. This is right slap bang in your wheelhouse, I think.

• 1:54Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, man. This is like my specialist subject. It made my YouTube channel start to take off.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  What was it, like Mastermind?

• 2:02Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, Mastermind. I'm not sure if that's still on, but I used to fantasize about going on the TV show. And at the time, my specialist subject would have been the Harry Potter books. And I still think it probably would, it probably would still be.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  You reckon?

• 2:19Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, that's the only thing I actually know anything about. But apart from that, studying is another specialist interest.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So where do we begin? People are now just about arriving back to university, perhaps. You have people who are maybe even venturing into a new career post-COVID or looking to become increasingly competitive in the job market. They want to be able to consume, retain, deploy information and learning and comprehension and all this stuff. Where do we even begin?

• 2:48Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say probably the main principle that everything else hinges on is that learning is supposed to be effortful. It's supposed to be hard.

• 3:04Ali Abdaal?

  And it's sort of like the analogy I sometimes use for my students is it's like when you're going to the gym, if you're lifting weights that you can easily lift, you're not actually going to make any gains, it's just going to be a total waste of time. But it's when you start doing that progressive overload, when you start lifting weights that are at the limit of what you're able to do, that gives your muscles the stimulus for growth. And then, you know, assuming you eat right and you sleep well, then you're going to get more hench and you're going to be able to lift more weight. And it's sort of somewhat equivalent for learning that the harder it feels to learn something, the more likely that information is to stick. And this is very counterintuitive, right? Because still to this day, despite all of the decades of research that have been done

• 3:46Ali Abdaal?

  about this, that show that when learning is effortful, it's better. Despite all of that evidence, most teachers still focus on trying to make the content as convenient as possible for their students, like very well-meaning teachers who want to sort of categorize things into nice syllabuses and create a nice presentation and give them mnemonics and essentially take all of the difficulty out of studying for the student, essentially give them this packaged up thing that they just have to learn. But in doing so, the thing that they're packaging up that the student just has to learn, it actually makes it a lot harder for them to learn because the student then is not putting in any of the effort themselves. And so they have to start finding weird ways to put effort into it. So that is probably principle number one that all of the rest of the kind of learning theory is based on.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  Don't expect it to be easy and almost lean into the discomfort a little bit that if you are finding something challenging to learn, that that's a signal that it's doing the work.

• 4:41Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's one of those things where, like, I feel like there are very few domains in life where conventional wisdom is directly opposite to what actually works. But certainly, when it comes to studying and learning, conventional wisdom is that we feel like we're stupid if what we have to learn is hard, if we're struggling through school, or if we're struggling to understand a concept, we think, oh, I must be dumb, I must not be doing this right. But in fact, it's the exact opposite. Like, if you're finding something hard, it's a lot more likely to stick because your brain is having to work harder, you're operating at the limit of your, I don't know, your muscles' potential, and then that's a stimulus for growth, and then that's a stimulus for those connections to form, so that it becomes slightly easier the next time around.

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  What else do most people get wrong about learning?

• 5:27Ali Abdaal?

  So, a few things. There have been some really cool studies about this where, because essentially, college and university students are a great crop of people to do studies on, because you can pay them like three pounds and they'll happily kind of sign up to do anything. There's been this whole swath of studies about learning and studying and memorization done on college and university students.

• 5:49Ali Abdaal?

  The other things that really make a difference are, and this is probably, you know, apart from the fact that learning needs to be effortful, this is the single thing that makes the biggest difference in people's results for learning anything at all. And that is that we learn by testing ourselves, we don't learn by reading stuff. And this is again, is counterintuitive, because when you tell people that they should test themselves and stuff, they'll say, oh, well, I have to learn it first, and then I can revise it, and then I'll test myself for the exam. And there's a really good book called Make It Stick, which is all about the science of successful learning. And the authors basically say right up front in the introduction that, look, if you're a student or any kind of learner, and you're not happy with the way your results are going,

• 6:34Ali Abdaal?

  chances are you're just not testing yourself enough. There's evidence that shows that if you test yourself even before you start learning something, that's going to improve your learning. If you test yourself immediately after you learn something, that's going to improve your learning. If the only thing you do after reading something is just test yourself once, that is better than reading the same thing four times, or writing a summary of it, or creating a mind map on it. All you have to do is just test yourself. And again, this is so counterintuitive. We kind of think of studying and learning as if it's a process of putting information into our brains. But in fact, it is the opposite. It's the process of getting information out of our brains. And in trying to retrieve stuff, that is what's forming the connections. Whereas when we're just reading things, or rereading things,

• 7:18Ali Abdaal?

  or summarizing things with the book open, we're falling into that trap of thinking that familiarity is the same thing as understanding. And you've probably seen this, I certainly get this a lot, where I've read something enough times where I think, oh yeah, obviously I know this. But then if you ask me, you know, can you actually explain it in your own words without looking at the book? I'd be like, oh, okay, maybe not. And again, there's Let me just get the book. Yeah. And there is some evidence as well that the emotional component of it is identical across both of these domains. So for example, if you were to read something that you've come across before, and you read through it and you think, oh yeah, I recognize this. It feels really good because you think, oh yeah, I know this stuff. I know what's going on. It's exactly the same feeling as if you try and recall something completely from memory,

• 8:02Ali Abdaal?

  and you get it right, and you think, oh, that's cool. And so because we're so used to rereading stuff and reviewing our notes, and we have this topic of revising as if revising, like revision, like going over stuff again is going to help. It feels good, it feels productive. But as all the studies show, and as everyone who's tried this in real life shows, rereading stuff doesn't actually help you learn it. Testing yourself on stuff does help you learn it.

• 8:25Chris Williamson?

  It's familiarity masquerading as comprehension.

• 8:28Ali Abdaal?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Great way of phrasing it.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  I had Peter C. Brown on the show. He was like, episode 19, two and a half years ago. So, anyone that's interested in this and wants to dig into Make It Stick, the book is really accessible, super good read. And a nice primer for that is, it's like back in the teens, please, please ignore everything about my hosting ability and my sound quality. But Peter's fantastic on it. And from that, the one sentence summary of Make It Stick is, memorization comes from repeated recall, not repeated exposure.

• 9:06Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, that's a good phrase. I need to start stealing that.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  That's fine, man. You can note it down at 145 words per minute on your mechanical keyboard.

• 9:15Ali Abdaal?

  I make too much noise though on the recording. That's what I worry about when I'm doing podcasts.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered a silenced keyboard?

• 9:20Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, occasionally I switch to my Apple Magic Keyboard, which is a little bit more quiet if I'm doing like a live stream and I'm having to switch windows on the fly. Because that's a bit, it's a bit obnoxious.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. Okay, so we know that we need to lean into the discomfort. We also know that just continuing to read. I mean, everyone knows, everyone that's listening has been that person or knows that person who's like the flashcard addict, who's got everything laid out in a million color coded, written and this, that and the other, but doesn't ever actually end up doing the testing. And what you're saying is that we need to focus on the recall, we need to focus on the testing. Those are two nice principles to start us off. Where do we go next?

• 10:00Ali Abdaal?

  I'd say next, the third principle that I always talk about is one that's called spaced repetition. And this is again, something that Peter Brown talks about in the book. The idea of spaced repetition is, we've all had this experience where you learn something and then, or you think you've understood a topic and you come back to it like a day or a week later and it's completely gone. And again, when this happens to us, if we're students, we often think, oh, I must be dumb, I must be thick because I'm not remembering this thing. And we'll look at the students around us and we'll say, oh, but Tom over there from Singapore, you know, he seems To memorize things as soon as he reads them. But what Tom from Singapore is actually doing is that he's not memorizing things the instant he reads them. There's no such thing as a photographic memory.

• 10:44Ali Abdaal?

  What he's doing is that he's just revising, he's, he's repeating the, the topic more than once. And I don't know when, I don't know how this came into the sort of mainstream where people think that you should just be able to recall something after coming across it once. It would be completely ridiculous in any other domain of life, like if you're learning a song on the piano, like obviously you have to practice it more than once to get it right. If you're trying to improve your tennis or squash swing, obviously you have to practice more than once. But we think for some reason, at least everyone I knew at university felt this way, that, oh, if I don't, if I don't get it first time, I must be an idiot. And the idea of spaced repetition is that it combats the forgetting curve. So back in the 1800s, there was this dude called Ebbinghaus,

• 11:26Ali Abdaal?

  who did a really weird experiment on himself whereby he made himself memorize a bunch of completely nonsense words, like completely made up words, not even the meaning, just to see how much he could brute force into his memory. And he plotted out how long it took him to forget each of these words as he memorized them. And he found that it was like one of those exponential decay, half-life-y graphs, if anyone's familiar with those, whereby you lose the majority of it in the initial period and then the forgetting kind of slows down. So this is the forgetting curve. And the idea is that if we repeat the, the subject by testing ourselves on it and then by looking it up if we, if we got it wrong, that takes us back up to 100% memory. But crucially, the more we do that, the slower this curve decays.

• 12:11Ali Abdaal?

  And so, for example, something like the capital of France is Paris. You've come across that fact enough times in your life through various means when you were younger, that you're never really going to forget it. And that's because accidentally you've had this spaced repetition thing applied to it. Whereas if someone told you the capital of, I don't know, some random country is some random city right now, you would forget it unless you came across that fact again and again and again. And when you come across it enough times, over a long period of time, it goes into your long-term memory and then you'll, and then you're never going to forget it. So the idea behind spaced repetition is that initially, when we learn something, We then want to repeat the testing of it fairly quickly, maybe a day or a few days later. And then, once we've done that, we want to space it out a bit more. So maybe a week later,

• 12:54Ali Abdaal?

  and then maybe a month later, and then maybe six months later. And so that's the spaced repetition aspect of it. And if we do that, we kind of get our forgetting curve to be quite shallow and hopefully the stuff goes into a long-term memory.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  Does that work for all types of learning? I can imagine your background as a med student, I know that we'll get into it soon, I'm sure, about Anki, which is one of the most popular spaced repetition softwares out there. That's a lot of kind of rote, very much brute force memorization.

• 13:24Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  What about if I'm trying to do something that's a little bit more fluffy, sort of philosophical concepts or literature comprehension, stuff like that?

• 13:36Ali Abdaal?

  In theory, this should work for everything. At least, so in Make It Take, again, referencing that book, they talk about a load of domains in which this sort of stuff applies. It isn't just for students trying to memorize biochemical pathways for medical school. It is sort of hockey players competing in tournaments. It's business people working in like, in the corporate world. In all of these different aspects of life where people have done studies, you see this pattern of testing being super important and spacing also being super important. There's another book called Range by David Epstein, where he talks about this, basically in those exact terms. He says, testing, spacing, and interleaving are like the three sort of primary things for learning any skill, whether it's like knowledge for a university subject, or whether it's like tennis or golf or anything like that.

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  How generalists thrive in a specialized world. Also, also a past Modern Wisdom guest just after that book came out. So if you want to get on David Epstein, go back Modern Wisdom. I think he was around about, maybe in the sort of late 70s, something like that.

• 14:35Chris Williamson?

  So this is, this is what I've done. Every episode up until now, Ali, has just been a prelude to this one. And this is the fucking pinnacle right here. So we've got the testing, the recall, we've got the fact that we need to lean into it, and we've got the fact that we need to do spaced repetition. Are we on any more principles, or should we start to move into some more strategic stuff now?

• 15:02Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, so I suppose the final principle is one that Epstein talks about, which is interleaving. And interleaving is the idea that we kind of want to be operating

• 15:12Ali Abdaal?

  In sort of our area, our zone of discomfort. So the example he gives in, the example they give in Make It Stick, I think, is looking at hockey coaches. And the way they found that this works best is you kind of train people and drill a particular exercise. But just as your players are on the verge of getting it and really leaning into it, at that point, you switch completely and do a different exercise. And as soon as they're on the verge of kind of getting the hang of that, you switch completely and do another exercise. And the idea behind this is that it's a bit annoying for the players because they're not experiencing that, you know, that mastery sensation that, oh, yeah, I know what I'm doing on the don. But when you, when you have that feeling, you, you're not really learning anymore.

• 15:55Ali Abdaal?

  And so the idea of interleaving is that you want to be doing lots of different things within a learning session or within a study session. And so, for example, again, this isn't how traditional schooling is designed. If you're having like a maths lesson, you would do, I don't know, trigonometry and Pythagoras theorem and synchostan. And you would do it in like a very specific order. And when you're doing exercises, you would kind of learn something and then you'll spend the rest of the lesson doing exercises about that thing that you learned. Where really, the only thing that's changing is just the numbers and the concept is the same. Whereas what the studies show is that if you have a, if you add a little bit more variety, so you kind of make them do a little bit of something, a little bit of something else, a little bit of something else, the brain is never quite allowed to be comfortable.

• 16:40Ali Abdaal?

  And therefore, we're maximizing our learning and minimizing the time we have to take to learn it.

• 16:45Chris Williamson?

  How do you ensure that you reach a particular threshold and you don't always keep selling yourself short so that you don't get any comprehension with anything?

• 16:56Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's where the balancing act is because whatever you're studying, there is a level of, a level of time you have to put in to really engage with the material to kind of really get the hang of it. And that's, that's the tricky part. The thing that I, the thing that I do is that As soon as I start feeling that feeling of, oh, okay, I'm quite enjoying this, at that point, I switch tasks.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  So the interleaving and the discomfort, the interleaving is the, it's the tool with which you force the discomfort into the learning process almost?

• 17:33Ali Abdaal?

  Yes, if the learning process itself isn't, isn't uncomfortable enough where you're actually breaking the limit of your thing anyway. So for example, if I'm doing a completely new, like a brand new topic and I'm really struggling to understand it, I won't bother doing the interleaving because it's hard enough. But as soon as I'm at the point where, okay, I understand cardiology, I understand how atrial fibrillation works, then I'm like, okay, let's, let's add in some hematology to the mixture, just, just spice things up and make it a bit more interesting for my brain.

• 17:59Chris Williamson?

  I get it, I get it, okay. So where do we go next? Why don't we talk about some practical stuff? Let's say that you're sitting down to do a session of learning anything. I think that med school actually is a really good example and it's a, you guys are like the, the vanguard of trying to hardcore brute force learn shit.

• 18:22Ali Abdaal?

  Trying to cram as much stuff into your memory as possible.

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  Precisely, so talk us through, it's the morning, you've woken up, you've done your morning routine and you think, right, I got some exams coming up at some point soon, or perhaps you've recently been introduced to a new area and you're gonna, you're gonna sit down. What, what happens? You're outside of the, the room where you're going to do your learning. Do you do it in your house? Do you go somewhere else? And what do you take with you and what do you sit down with?

• 18:47Ali Abdaal?

  Okay, cool. So I think kind of the environment is kind of important.

• 18:53Ali Abdaal?

  I, I used to think I could work in my room. I've now realized that I much prefer to work in libraries. And if I could, I would actually go to libraries every day where I have to like write, write scripts for YouTube videos as well. But the whole lockdown thing is putting a bit of a bummer on that. So I was always a big fan of leaving my room and going to the library and going to this external location so that in a way I could keep the work and studying separate. There's also some, some evidence that if you're, if you're studying something in an environment that is similar to the arena in which you'll be tested on it, then you get a few extra percentage points of sort of optimization there.

• 19:32Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 19:32Ali Abdaal?

  So for example, that's partly why listening to music while studying is not considered very good, because you're probably not going to be listening to music when you're being tested on the thing. Having said that, I still listen to music while I'm studying. I listen to instrumental tracks, the theory being that instrumental stuff doesn't interfere with the phonological loop, which is part of working memory. I listen to instrumental tracks because it's just so much nicer when I've got the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in my noise cancelling headphones and I'm quite happy to take the optimization hit if it means I'll enjoy myself a little bit more.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that you would be able to request upon entry into an exam, the fact that I need to take one AirPod in with me, look, I promise it's not the answers playing here, it's just the Two Towers Battle theme track on repeat?

• 20:15Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, just to really get you pumped up.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  You're walking in with a spear.

• 20:18Ali Abdaal?

  I'm sure people have attempted that.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've got ourselves into a location which is potentially similar, lots of wood perhaps, lots of oak around if you're in like some red brick.

• 20:29Ali Abdaal?

  Oh yeah, depends on how fancy the library is, to be honest. If it's one of those modern ones, there won't be much oak around, but if it's an old fashioned library, then sure.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  Get yourself somewhere bourgeois, that's what we want.

• 20:37Ali Abdaal?

  Exactly, you know, someplace fancy, someplace where you can really get into it and think, oh yeah, this is what being a student is about.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, ancient furniture, that's what it's about. Okay, so we've gone somewhere that's similar. I also totally agree, the fact that my bedroom's 30 square metres is the only reason that I choose to record here. I would much sooner do work and sleep in different places. It's also the reason why you shouldn't watch TV in bed, although I know I've got a TV that's behind me. You should have locations that are attached to a particular task. Tiago Forte would say the same, I know Chris Sparks would as well. So we've done that. What else are you doing? What's next?

• 21:15Ali Abdaal?

  Essentially, what's next is figuring out what to do for the day. I have a strong theory about this, which is that you shouldn't figure out what you're going to do in advance. And I think this is usually the way that students build up their revision timetables. It's like, you know, you think, right, I've got three months until my A levels or whatever, and therefore I'm going to sit down, I'm going to map out the syllabus for each of my subjects, and I'm going to figure out what I'm going to study each day. And in theory, if I stick to my plan, I will have covered everything twice by the time the exam rolls around. That's like the traditional way of approaching this. I've never been a fan of this method because firstly, it's an exercise in procrastination. We all know when we try to make a revision timetable is that it basically takes up the whole day, then you think it's not perfect. And so you think, oh, you know what, I just need to

• 22:00Ali Abdaal?

  spend another day doing this. And so it takes up another day. I think also... It's generally very optimistic.

• 22:08Ali Abdaal?

  You know, if you're the sort of person who can actually follow the plan that you set out three months ago, then fair enough. I'm definitely not that sort of person. I know very few people who actually would follow the plan exactly. And it's also kind of like trying to predict the future in that you're predicting quite far out in advance which topics you're going to need to visit more often than which topics you're going to most struggle with and stuff. That seems to be generally a false error for me. So the way that I do it, I call it the retrospective revision timetable, which is that instead of having a list of dates down one column and figuring out when I'm going to study what, I'll instead have a list of topics down the first column. If you imagine like a spreadsheet with a list of topics.

• 22:51Ali Abdaal?

  And then each day I will ask myself the question, if the exam were tomorrow, what topic would I be the most pissed off about? And I will study that topic. And then once I've studied that topic, I'll write the date next to the topic so that I've got this general idea of when I studied each topic. And I will also color code it based on how well I knew it based on my testing. So if it's red, it's I didn't know it at all. I need to do this very quickly. If it's green, it's like, okay, this is pretty good. I can wait a while before I revisit this. And so every day I look at my retrospective revision timetable and look at where the gaps are and where the red is. And think, okay, keeping in mind the concept of spaced repetition and the concept that I want to be doing the hardest stuff first, what topic should I cover in this next hour or so?

• 23:36Ali Abdaal?

  And I'll just repeat that process for as many hours as I'm doing the studying for. And over time, that means that my topics thing becomes green across the board. But it's, it sort of looks like a jagged, a jagged graph because often chapter one in a book is a lot easier than chapter 13 in a book. But when we, you know, quote, sit down and start studying, we often turn to chapter one just because it's easier than turning to chapter 13. And so some topics will be easier than others. But the point is that you're not basing what you're doing each day as a function of what the date is and what you predicted you were going to do three months in advance. You're basing it off of what is the most difficult topic right now? And if the exam were tomorrow, what would I be least happy about? Let me focus on that so that I'm again always operating at the slight level of discomfort and always maximizing my bang for buck.

• 24:21Ali Abdaal?

  Because you don't want to get to the point where you're getting diminishing returns when it comes to the amount of time that you're putting in.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  That's like aggregated spaced repetition as well as individual spaced repetition. Obviously with specifically again med school, you can see precisely like I didn't know this particular thing to do with cardiology. And then you're looking, you're kind of aggregating those out into topic areas that you're also kind of a bit more shit at and then thinking, right, I'm going to use that. So someone might be really, really good at business law, but bad at criminal law. So you're right, okay. And then within that you can drill down a little bit further. What's your views before we actually sit down? We've got a plan. I'm going to guess you would plan for the day. You wouldn't sit down at a desk and then say, right, what am I going to do today? You would at least know on the morning what was going to be done that day.

• 25:12Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, more or less. I'd be like, okay, which three topics am I going to do today? I'm going to do, I don't know, that this bit of cardiology, this bit of hematology, and I'll try and memorize the Krebs cycle from biochemistry, for example.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  Got you. What's your views on caffeine as a studying tool?

• 25:25Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, I love it. I think it's great.

• 25:28Ali Abdaal?

  Pretty reasonable evidence for it, very little evidence about downsides. I've always been a fan.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  Modafinil or anything more spicy or exotic?

• 25:36Ali Abdaal?

  I've never really tried any of those. At university, there was a strict like no, no policy about it. And I had a friend.

• 25:42Chris Williamson?

  Like a performance enhancing drug test at Cambridge. Is that what they were doing?

• 25:49Ali Abdaal?

  I had a friend who tried modafinil and he said that he ended up just sort of reading the same thing over and over again for about 16 hours. And that kind of put me off it. But recently I've started looking into it a little bit more and I'm keen to try it out. I think it might make for an interesting video. I just have to make sure it's legal and not against the requirements of the General Medical Council. That says anything you do that brings the profession into disrepute is grounds for getting struck off.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, don't get yourself struck off, man.

• 26:15Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, it wouldn't be a good look.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  I, I posted today on my Instagram story, AlphaBrain from Onnit. And I've been using AlphaBrain. It's edit days. So today I edited and uploaded four episodes, which is like, yeah, it's a serious, serious day. It's audio only, but my video guy looks after video. So it's not quite the challenge. That you make them up against, but still a serious day of full graft. So that and a can of Noco, a caffeinated can of Noco. And that for me puts me in a really, really nice headspace. But the number of people who are so, they're so keen. I appreciate the messages that I get, but everyone's looking for that edge in the, in a pill form or in a canned form or in a powdered form.

• 26:59Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to dude, you really should just learn spaced repetition or dude, you really should just understand what Pomodoro's or focused like work is.

• 27:09Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're in the.

• 27:13Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I, I, I strongly suspect that okay, sort of drugs and nootropics and stuff. It's not actually going to be the thing that, that moves the needle. The thing that, that moves the needle is testing yourself more and spacing it out and interleaving. And maybe if you're operating at sort of, you know, the upper echelons of, of everything, where every single minute percentage of optimization is necessary, then maybe you can look into those. But so, you know, we're all still rereading our texts and making notes and thinking it's going to be helpful. Like there's a long way to go before we need to enhance the performance in that, in that sense.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  We sing from the same hymn sheet here, mate. So we've, we're there, we've, we know what we're going to do. Sitting down, are you doing it in blocks?

• 27:56Ali Abdaal?

  Partly. So if I'm working with friends, we'll Pomodoro together. So Pomodoro method, 25 minutes on, five minutes off. When I was at university, I used to get a lot of my friends who were doing different subjects. We'd all sit in the same table at the library. This is one of those fancy, you know, mahogany, dark, dark, dark mode libraries. And we would sort of tap on the table once when a Pomodoro session was going to begin. And then we'd tap on it once when it ended. And then we'd do a double tap when our five minute break was over. And we called ourselves the Pomodoro Society, in which we turned into a WhatsApp group called PomSoc, which is still active to this day because we actually became pretty good friends over the course of exam terms, just by studying together for 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And then so in the 25 minutes, we'd be, we'd be doing our thing.

• 28:41Ali Abdaal?

  And 25 minutes is actually quite a short amount of time, especially when you're grappling with a new concept. And I quite like it because it forces you to do things a little bit more efficiently and think, okay, I've actually only got 25 minutes to try and understand this topic. I'm not going to screw around with stuff that I know is going to be pointless levels of detail. I'm going to focus on the big picture and really try and try to, you know, get the broad brushstrokes down initially and only worry about the details later. So that was what I personally used to use. These days, I'm usually studying on my own, so I don't need to use it as much. But I think Pomodora is really great for when you're studying with friends.

• 29:13Chris Williamson?

  Cool. And what are you doing here? So you've got textbook in front of you. Are you entering stuff into somewhere else, the way you can retest yourself? Is there a process that people can follow for this? Obviously, they just get given, they might have some example exam questions, but a lot of the time, you're just given a body of work and then said, some of this is going to occur in an exam in a few months' time. Good luck, guys.

• 29:37Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, so I think it really varies. And the way I think about it is I treat the exam as if it's a game. And I'm thinking about how I can game the exam. Because very quickly, students realise that, or at least students who do well realise that, learning the subject is not the same thing as doing well in the exam. And unfortunately, the education system and the testing system is designed to encourage us to game the exam, rather than to encourage us to understand and appreciate and learn the content. And so you're sort of operating in a different mode here. The mode isn't, I'm going to learn this body of work and hope some of it comes up. It's, I'm going to see what's come up in every exam paper that they've published for the last like 20 years.

• 30:22Ali Abdaal?

  I'm going to try and predict patterns of questions. I'm going to figure out what's coming up most often. And I'm going to then study for the purposes of doing well in the exam, rather than I'm going to study to understand the subject. I mean, studying to understand the subject is fine, but if we care about optimising a performance on an external test, which may or may not be useful, then it's about, you know, thinking about how can I game the exam? And then based on whether the exam is a multiple choice, or a short answer, or essays, the study tactics generally vary, but they're all kind of based around creating questions for yourself and testing yourself repeatedly over a very long period of time.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  So you would actually become your own examiner?

• 31:01Ali Abdaal?

  Exactly, yeah. And I would think, you know, if I were the examiner, what would I write an essay question on? And I would try and predict 20 essay questions that might come up that year, even though we only would have to write five of them in the exam. And then I can prepare answers for all 20 of them, so that when the exam rolls around, you know, I'm not going to get 100% of them right, but chances are, at least some of them, because I'm now so familiar with the subject and I've put myself into the shoes of the examiner, you know, chances are I will have prepared some of the stuff that they're going to ask me.

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  That seems a little bit further down the line from when you're perhaps first introduced to a topic, or perhaps you've sat down at a lecture, or let's say someone's doing continuous professional development, they've been on a course for a day or something like that. And then they're like, right, I'm going to go away and begin to even become familiar with this particular piece of work. What happens in between that and the proper retesting phase? Are there little mini tests that you would do?

• 31:56Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, sort of. So step one is something I call scoping the subject, which is basically just get an overview of what is in, like, what is everything within the subject. So let's say you're studying, I don't know, human physiology, and it's very easy, kind of in week one of medical school, to open up chapter one of your massive, huge ass physiology textbook and think, right, I'm going to start from chapter one. The problem with that is that it's just generally a bad way of reading anything nonfiction, because what you want to do is you want to get an outline, a skeleton structure in your head of what is, what is everything within this field? And then where is the thing that I specifically want to work on? And where does it fit into the bigger picture? So within human physiology, you

• 32:39Ali Abdaal?

  might be like, oh, actually, there's only really seven topics here. There's nerves, there's the heart, there's the lungs, the kidneys, digestion, endocrine, and thermoregulation. Seven topics within physiology. Every single thing that I need to know, learn fits into those seven topics. That becomes instantly a lot more manageable than thinking, I've got this 18,000 page physiology textbook to go through. And we're thinking, okay, let me start with chapter one nerves. What are the, what are the different topics within nerves? And then you think, okay, there's actually only five topics within nerves. There's this, this, this, and that. And conveniently, our lectures were organized into five. Great. Okay. So now that I know what the five topics are, let me look at lecture number one. And now, before I start reading lecture number one, let me make a list of all of the subheadings within lecture number one. So again, at every level of detail, I start off with the big

• 33:23Ali Abdaal?

  picture and understanding, understanding the skeleton structure. And then when it comes to hanging details on that, I'll, I'll be able to do that. And so yeah, step one would be scoping the subject. And then step two would be for me personally, as I'm going through the content, I'll be writing questions for myself. These days I use Notion, so I use the toggle feature. So I would write a question and hide the answer underneath the toggle or just screenshot the answer from a PDF or, you know, just assume I'll be able to look up the answer later. The answer is not the important part. The important part is the question. And so I'll, I'll spend a little bit of time crafting the question for my future self. And once I've crafted it and I've got this list of toggles, then I can, that is sort of my step by step process for going through anything that I'm trying to learn.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

  Give us an example of a question that you might write yourself and a subsequent answer.

• 34:10Ali Abdaal?

  Sure. Let me open up my Notion.

• 34:14Ali Abdaal?

  I can actually screenshot with you if you'd like, if this is going to be on a video.

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if that's, if that'll work. It's the first time for everything. Video guy Dean's going to be losing his mind here. All of the filters that he's put on your face are going to go crazy. Right, there we go.

• 34:29Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, I was actually taking notes from this book, How to Take Smart Notes, which was actually about all of this like recall stuff and the power of testing and spacing when, when it came to the, the context of understanding information from, from notes. But so for example, here, and I'll kind of describe it for people who are just listening to the podcast, although you should subscribe to the YouTube channel, am I right?

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, Ali. I tell you what, can I have you here? If I can just have you here doing my intros and outros every week, that would be wonderful.

• 34:58Ali Abdaal?

  That sounds dreamy. Anyway, so let's, yeah, let's take pathology for, for example. You can see here that I, I've got like headings for everything, like 1.1 growth adaptations, 1.2 cell injury, 1.3 cell death, 1.4 free radical injury. And then within that, I've got a load of toggles. So for example, within 1.3 cell death, the first toggle says, what are the three buzzwords for nucleus dying? And I think the answer is like pygnosis, coilocosis and something else that I can't remember. Ah, pygnosis, carrionexis and carriolysis, nucleus shrinking down, breaking up a nucleus into pieces and breaking down of those pieces into bits. And so like, I haven't just written the notes, like a

• 35:40Ali Abdaal?

  A student who hasn't learnt about effective studying techniques would just write down the notes. Whereas what I've done is I've put them within a toggle. Equally, I've got another one that says necrosis six types. And so when I, when I see that, I'm thinking, okay, I need to now spontaneously come up and recall all of the six different types of necrosis. So let's see if I can like liquefactive, gangrenous.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, come on, the internet's listening.

• 36:09Ali Abdaal?

  Ah shit, yes, I should have done that. Liquifactive, fat, fibrinoid, caseous, gangrenous and coagulative. And you can see over here that I've actually highlighted some of them in red. So those are the ones that I didn't know about last time I tested myself on this topic. And at the top, I've said, the last time I tested myself on this was the 7th of July. So that's quite a while ago. I haven't done pathology in a while. And I've just sort of roughly rated how good I was at doing the thing. And I said that I really sucked at the topic. So as, as I'm going through, every, everything I'm writing is nested within a toggle that asks me a question. And that makes it very easy for me to say, okay, I'm more shit at this, less shit at that, more shit at this. And then as I'm going through stuff, if I don't have a lot of time, I can focus on the reds. But if I have time, I'll just do the whole thing.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm so, so impressed with the changes. I went to uni in 2006 and finished my masters in like 2011. And I'd never heard of Evernote. I doubt that Notion even existed back then. Anki might have been a thing, but I was in two business degrees. That probably wouldn't have been super appropriate for me. And now it feels like this particular studying method really has a wonderful sort of technological component to it. Where people are having this learning style facilitated by some great apps and tools.

• 37:33Chris Williamson?

  So is there anything, before we move on to said apps and tools, is there anything else to sort of bookend with regards to the note-taking, question-making process?

• 37:46Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I think just to emphasize that the more I study for these exams, the more I realize that.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  Still looking at your, still looking at cell death, Ali, and not at your lovely face and lovely lighting.

• 37:55Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, let's, let's cancel the screen share so you can see my lovely face.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 38:00Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, the more I study for these exams, the more I realize that the writing of the question is probably the most important thing. I had a friend who was a couple of years below me and he ended up ranking like top three in, in the med school every year. And he never wrote any notes. All he did was just write hundreds and hundreds of questions for himself. And I would, I would see his Word document. He was, he was just using standard, standard Word documents because he couldn't be bothered to use something fancy like Notion. And it would just be a long list of questions. And I'd be like, how, how would you deal with this question? He would be like, yeah, I just go through the questions when I'm studying. And if I don't know the answer, I'll look, I'll either Google it or search for it on Wikipedia or just Ctrl F in the lecture notes. I'd be like, whoa, that's.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Such a low tech solution to the same problem.

• 38:45Ali Abdaal?

  It just works so well. And so, for example, I spent absolutely ages making these notes about six types of necrosis. But I could have just written a question for myself, saying, what are the six types of necrosis and describe each of them in detail? And then I would have saved a lot of time when doing the studying and I would have been focusing on doing the recall. So I think, yeah, the more we shift our focus towards writing questions and answering them, just the, the better we'll do, we'll do in our exams. Although, having said that, it's very hard to get away from the security blanket, which is writing notes and writing answers for the questions for ourselves. And I still haven't fully gotten away from that.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  The, the tether is difficult to cut, right?

• 39:24Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's hard to read a textbook without a highlighter in your hand, even though you know highlighting is totally pointless and ineffective.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If I, if I double, if I do this one in pink, that means I'm really, really going to remember. Pink's, pink's the, pink's the proper shit. So before, before we move on to the tools, are there any subjects or areas that you think that this sort of approach that we're going to go through, that we are going through, doesn't work for?

• 39:51Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I think it works less good for things like maths and physics, which are more skills-based and based on applying principles and using your brain. It works very well for things like medicine, which is purely about rote memorization. But I think even with maths and physics, what they've figured out is that the more problem sheets you do, the more questions you go through, the better you'll do. So there's a less of a memorization component to those subjects and much more of a just, you know, do loads of questions, figure out where you went wrong. And hopefully, over time, your brain will become good at spotting the patterns that you need to.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  Understood. So into the bullets in the magazine of the rifle that you're firing at this exam, what are the individual bullets that you're using? Anything on your phone, anything on your computer?

• 40:38Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, probably. I sometimes think about this, that if I could go through med school and I only had like, like the bare minimum of tools, I think it would be two things. I think firstly, it would be Anki. Anki is a flashcard app. And secondly, it would be spider diagrams. And I think with Anki plus spider diagrams, you can actually memorize and understand and learn every single thing in medical school to just like a stupidly high level.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  What are you using for spider diagrams?

• 41:10Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, pen and paper.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  Ah, right. Okay. Real, real, real old school.

• 41:14Ali Abdaal?

  Real old school, pen and paper, or if you want to be fancy about it, notability, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, paper-like screen protector, not sponsored, unfortunately. But honestly, still for spider diagrams, I just use pen and paper.

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  Why, why do you like the spider diagrams? Just to visualize how concepts fit together?

• 41:32Ali Abdaal?

  Exactly, yeah. Because something like Anki, flashcards are very good at helping you memorize the detail, but they're very bad at helping you see the bigger picture. And whereas with a spider diagram or a mind map, you have like the topic in the middle and then you're forced to categorize it into different bits. And the fact that certain things are always at certain parts of the page, that's yet another visual cue for you to recall that when you're tested on it. And so one thing that I always do is I try and fit the entire syllabus for every topic onto a single page. So within hematology, for example, I'll be like, okay, let's look at all these topics, let's try and subcategorize them as much as possible. So, okay, hematology can broadly be split up into three things: blood clotting, anemia, and cancer.

• 42:16Ali Abdaal?

  And so, okay, cool. Now, everything within blood clotting, well, it can be this or that. Now, within cancer, we've got these five different types of hematological malignancies. And within, what was the third one? Within anemia, we've got these three different types of anemia. And so this sort of spiders out from my central topic of hematology. And now, when it comes to something like, you know, understanding Henoch-Schonlein Pupra, or some rogue disease like idiopathic thrombocytopenic Pupra, or something like that. With flashcards, I'll know the details, but with my spider diagram, I'll know where it fits into the bigger picture. And between those two things, I think you basically cover all your bases.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  That's another David Epstein-ism, right? Where he talks about being birds in the sky and frogs in the mud, says that you-

• 42:59Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love that analogy.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  By barbelling and having the extremes at both ends, the big picture thinking and then the real detailed thinking. So, give me your 60-second elevator pitch for how to nail ANKI.

• 43:16Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, okay, cool. How to nail ANKI. ANKI is a flashcard app. You want to firstly, download it and set your appropriate settings by following any YouTube tutorial for the appropriate ANKI settings, because the default ones aren't very good. And then you create a deck, and a deck of flashcards, you can just kind of use one deck. You can use multiple decks if you want, but let's say you've just got one deck, which is for all of medicine. Now, anytime you come across something where you think, okay, I'm struggling to understand/remember this, and I could do with a flashcard, you just write a flashcard for yourself. You ask yourself the question, you put an answer, and you try and put as much information into the answer as possible, so that next time you come across it, you'll see the answer, but you'll also see the context around it. And you can screenshot from your textbook, or screenshot from Wikipedia, shove it into the flashcard.

• 44:00Ali Abdaal?

  Over time, as you keep up with your daily reviews, all of this information that's in your ANKI will just get uploaded to your brain by default, provided you just do it every day. And if you can commit to doing that, just doing ANKI a little bit every day and getting through your daily reviews, you will, I'll 100% guarantee all of the information in there is going to get uploaded to your brain.

• 44:19Chris Williamson?

  Every med student that I know uses Anki and that again, like to just sing the song of medical students having it having it a bit hard at university. You guys, if it works for you for a business degree, like thinking back to the way that I remembered stuff, doing a degree which really was a walk in the park. I made it so much harder than it needed to be, like so, so, so much harder than it needed to be. But again, like exposure to tools like Anki and concepts like spaced repetition, I hadn't sort of really had those. So hopefully we'll have expedited a bunch of people's discomfort today. What else have we not covered that is important as a part of the learning and remembering anything fast framework?

• 45:06Ali Abdaal?

  I think we've covered most of the basis. We haven't talked about things like sleep and exercise and food. I suspect you've covered that a lot on other episodes of your podcast.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Why don't you give us your protocol? Let's say that you're in the depths of revision time.

• 45:22Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  How do you ensure that the body, the mind is primed for taking in information?

• 45:30Ali Abdaal?

  I don't really have an elaborate thing for this. I just make sure I get between seven and eight hours of sleep every night and I make sure I don't skip meals. And that is actually most of what you need to do.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Man, how many students or even people doing a professional qualification, an MBA, you know, whatever it might be, the first thing to go is the food quality. It's a diet. It's I've spent all day in the library, back and forth to the vending machine, living on like four packs of Monster Munch and a Mountain Dew Energy. Like, what do you think? The Mylan sheaths that your, that your brain is relying on are made up of Mountain Dew Energy and pickled onion Monster Munch.

• 46:13Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, it's probably not entirely good for the mind in. But yeah, you know, I don't overcomplicate it too much. Recently, from listening to Dave Asprey and I think Nat Elison did a tweet the other day about all of the different tech he uses to hack his sleep. I started kind of looking into this a little bit more. I do have blackout curtains in my room, which help. I don't bring my phone into bed with me. I always have it across the room, so I'm forced to wake up in the morning to turn my alarm off. You know, just simple things like that. I haven't yet gone down the route of melatonin pills or light blocking glasses or any of the fancier stuff.

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  Let me, once we've finished, man, I'm going to link you in with the guys from Rar Optics, Matt Maruka, who's been on this show, the most advanced blue blocking glasses on the planet. I'll loop you in with them because they are phenomenal.

• 46:57Ali Abdaal?

  Amazing. Have they got prescription varieties? Because I do wear glasses, so I've always.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  They can do, they can even do custom ones. It's insane. They're really, really fun. Anyone that was interested in that, the light diet, go back and listen to it. It's episode 189. So yeah, I think certainly talking about sleep, like keeping your phone outside of your room, making sure that you're not, I'm just throwing a pair of optics. So these are the, these are the day ones and I've got the night ones over by bed.

• 47:22Ali Abdaal?

  Why do you have day ones?

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. So they're for if you were working during the day, but using an artificial screen. And then the red ones are the, you'll have seen them before. They're like the hardcore sort of what the guys in the Modern Wisdom Big Dick Group called the turbo nonce glasses.

• 47:38Ali Abdaal?

  Okay.

• 47:40Chris Williamson?

  The ones that just scream incel.

• 47:45Ali Abdaal?

  Haven't heard that phrase since my last lads hangout.

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me neither, me neither. But it's just, it's one that came up and it's stuck now for anyone that wears like hardcore blue blockers. So yes, sleep, important, diet, important, don't miss meals. What else was in there? Exercise.

• 48:02Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I kind of fail on the exercise front a little bit. I got a personal trainer recently, but I was meant to have a session with him yesterday, but I just overslept. It was, it was really weird. Like every single day I set my alarm, but as I was going to bed that night, my iPhone was like at 1% and it was like slowing down and I could sense it's going to turn off in the next like 10 seconds. So I thought, you know what? I'm not going to set the alarm. It's only midnight. I need to wake up at eight o'clock anyway. I'll just wake up naturally. And then I fell asleep and the next thing I knew it was 12 o'clock in the afternoon and I had my personal trainer session at 10. And I was just like, okay, I need to set an alarm. I cannot trust myself to actually wake up on time without an alarm.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  I think Naval Ravikant's a big proponent. He says that you know that your life is in the right place when you're able to wake up without an alarm. But that's all well and good when you're the owner of Angel List and worth like several mil and all that you do is is think and make money all day Naval. For those of us that have got a PT session at 10 o'clock in the morning, we probably need an alarm. Sleep, what about sort of stable sleep and wake pattern? Do you also try and commit to that? It's like revision at the same sort of time? Do you find that's as easy as a routine?

• 49:09Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, when I was in the depth of exam preparation, I would have quite a strict sort of bedtime thing in that I would always make sure I'm in bed by 11. Usually I'd be reading some extra book related to my exams from 11 until I fell asleep. And then I'd always wake up at eight, have breakfast and then go to the library and get into the library by half past eight. And I'd be essentially be in the library from half past eight up until like 10, 11pm, only sort of leaving to take food and toilet breaks. That was like my hardcore exam revision.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  What about burnout? You know, you start finding yourself bouncing off the limiter with stuff. How do you know when you're pushing too hard?

• 49:50Ali Abdaal?

  I don't know. This is something I've never really struggled with. I think partly because I always study with my friends. I think if I'd locked myself up by myself and said, right, I need to really optimize my productivity. I'm going to focus on studying by myself. It would have been a lot harder, but because every day was fun because of just hanging out with my friends and in our five minute Pomodoro breaks would be sharing like memes and stuff. I never really experienced any signs of burnout. So I'm not really very good on commenting on that.

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting one. The group, the group revision, I imagine is very, very dependent on getting the right group. Because if you have one bad apple who is sharing, sharing memes 13 minutes into a Pomodoro.

• 50:31Ali Abdaal?

  Exactly.

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  Everyone is fucked.

• 50:35Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I think it's one, it's one of those things where you do kind of need to rule with an iron fist.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  It's like, is that the rule, is that the rule of palm sock?

• 50:44Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, that's the rule of palm sock. It's like, the palm is sacred, the palm has to happen. I think. At least among everyone I knew, everyone appreciated it when someone was taking charge and just telling them, no, shut the fuck up. We're going to sit down and study for the next 25 minutes. And if anyone speaks, they're out of the room. Like, you need that level of autocracy to make the system work. But everyone is grateful for it in the end.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  I get it, man.

• 51:09Ali Abdaal?

  Which is like, I guess, I suppose what a dictator would also say, that it's for the good of the people. But genuinely, it's for the good of the people.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I think we've got a really nice sort of overview there. Learning, remembering stuff. To finish up, we've probably squeezed another 10 minutes in or so. What have you found over the last year or so, which has changed the most to do with your productivity setup, or that you've been the most impressed with, that you've added in, or taken out, or switched around with to do with your efficiency and productivity?

• 51:45Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, interesting question. Okay, so two things come to mind. Number one is friction. I have this phrase, which is that friction is the most powerful force in the universe. And when it's against us, we're not going to do anything. And when it's in our favor, we're not going to do bad things. Friction in my context was that for the last like three years since my YouTube channel started, I have been using kind of a light stand with like a soft box and all this sort of stuff, which is a real bullock to set up and take down. And so either my living room would just be a complete tip at all times, because the old DC stands lying around with wires all over the place, or it would be such a bullock to sit down and film a video, because I would know it would take half an hour to actually set up all the equipment. But a couple of weeks ago, I think it was last

• 52:27Ali Abdaal?

  week, I decided I was going to get a handyman in, like cambridgehandyman.co.uk or something like that, to just ceiling mount one of my lights. And now I have a kind of aperture space light mounted above my desk. Where previously a C stand would have gone from halfway down the living room across through the desk and just that one difference has made such a huge impact to my video making process because it's literally a case of I've got the remote control over here, I press the power button, I turn the light on and I've got the camera already ready to go. So then it's just a case of putting the microphone in place and then I'm good to go. Earlier today, I was thinking of doing an unboxing and again, I had to set up a C stand to get an overhead camera rig and I was thinking, okay, this is not sustainable

• 53:10Ali Abdaal?

  in the long term. I need to get like a wall, like a ceiling mounted retractable overhead rig or I can just do this and it's fine. And so every time like now, I'm very big because I think, I think even before I was quite attuned to friction, but I just hadn't considered that it would actually be ROI positive to spend 200 quid to hire a handyman to come and sort my ceiling mount out and this stuff. But that almost certainly is the case. So really, I'm what I'm trying to do now is figure out anytime I feel a sense of, ah, I don't want to do this. I sort of try and examine where is that feeling coming from and can I eliminate friction to get rid of that feeling? And often the answer is yes, I just have to get this thing to make something a little bit more convenient.

• 53:52Ali Abdaal?

  So that's one thing. The other thing is I recently got this Herman Miller sail chair. I've been lusting after Herman Miller's Miller chairs for the last 10 years and my mom always vetoed it. She was like, no, you're not spending a thousand pounds on a chair. But a few months ago, I ordered this one without telling her. So it was fine. And then when the guy came to deliver it, it was like one of the Herman Miller, like ergonomic specialists and stuff. And so I ended up having a chat with him and he was giving me some tips on how to set it up. And the main takeaway was that apparently what he recommends is that you have the armrests of the chair just above your desk. And so like before my desk was fairly high, now I've sort of lowered it a lot because it's a standing desk. And now when I sit down, I have like a really good ergonomic position, which is just something

• 54:37Ali Abdaal?

  I hadn't even considered before. And now over the last, over the last week or so, since I've had this, I actually haven't had any lower back pain, which I would always get when using my desk in standing mode or when using any other, any other kind of setup. So this is another area where I'm, I'm thinking, oh, this ergonomic thing is pretty legit. I got this like rest palm rest for my keyboard the other day, which makes it more comfortable to type and means my, my, my wrists are in a less flexed position normally. So that's the sort of stuff I'm thinking about in, in terms of, in terms of modern productivity.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting. I think we were talking earlier on, unless you're at the absolute peak tip of the spear zenith of your productivity, you probably don't need nootropics. I think based on the content that comes off your YouTube channel, the thousand pound chair and the wrist optimizing like a rest thing. When you type in 140 words per minute, that's you kind of need that, right?

• 55:34Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, that makes a difference. It just feels a lot nicer and it feels less painful at the end of the day. So I'm thinking, you know what? Any amount of money I can spend to make my life more pleasant in this regard is absolutely going to be ROI positive.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Talking about the friction thing, I think that's a really interesting point. I've always been a fan of the stacking the deck concept, which is that you want to make the things that you do want to do as easy as possible and the things that you don't want to do as hard as possible, stack the deck in your favor. So for instance, you're someone who has their phone over the far side of the room. I've had mine outside of my bedroom in the kitchen for like two and a half years and my sleep quality, I wasn't tracking it as closely as I am now with a wearable, but my sleep quality must have increased within two weeks by 10% because you always know, like you remember when you used to have your phone next to your bed and you, there was just in the back of your mind, there was always that you can't sleep. There's cat videos on YouTube. Ah, and then you roll

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  over and it's there and the cat videos are there. And then three hours later, it's 3am and you hate yourself. You hate, you hate yourself, the core of your being.

• 56:40Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah. These days, the only thing I have on my bedside table, I, I caved, I think two years ago and got one of those Dyson desk fans that look nice and are cool. So I always have the fan on and I have a Kindle on my bedside table. So if I get to the point where anytime I get to the point where I can't sleep, I'll just stop reading on the Kindle. And recently I actually got the Kindle Oasis. I'd been a Kindle paper white guy for the last like five years, but the Kindle Oasis is like five times more expensive, but it does have a warm light. And I was thinking, you know what? I can make a video review about this. Plus the warm light will be better for me in my sleep. So now I have the Kindle Oasis purely for that reason. And it's quite nice because now I will just read and then I'll find my eyes closing and then I'll just fall asleep, which is quite a nice place to be.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  And with the Oasis, you can read in the bath and just drop it in.

• 57:25Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah.

• 57:26Chris Williamson?

  Feel free to drop it in the bath.

• 57:27Ali Abdaal?

  I used to read with the paper white in the bath as well. I just never drop it in. But now I know I can drop it in.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Interesting thing. I've got a study that I can send to you that compares the effect of e-readers versus tablets on melatonin production.

• 57:40Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, okay.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  E-readers are fine. This one out in this one out in my newsletter. If anyone was, uh, read the three minute Monday newsletter this week, um, it was talking about the, I'd said by Kindle, it's the easiest way to make reading, if you want to get into reading a little bit more, um, it's the easiest way to make it frictionless again. And don't be concerned about reading on a nighttime. The study that I've seen, one study, yeah, fair enough, but like the evidence suggests that it doesn't impact your

• 58:11Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, sick.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  melatonin production. So read away, man. Fuck the warm light. Go white light. Go old school.

• 58:18Ali Abdaal?

  Maybe I should switch to paper white now. That's a useful study to include in my review videos, Oasis versus paper white. Yeah, on the, on the Kindle note, Kindle is one of the three things that I say is genuinely life-changing piece of tech. Kindle being number one, AirPods being number two, just because it reduces the friction to listening to

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  You are amongst friends here, Ali. You are amongst friends.

• 58:37Ali Abdaal?

  Subscription to Audible being number three, because a subscription to Audible is absolutely, it's the, if I could only subscribe to one thing, it would be a subscription to Audible.

• 58:45Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's like, um, you know, when people arrive in the world, like you're born and you should be issued with a starter pack. And it's like, here you are, little Jonathan, little Sophie, here's, here's, here's your Kindle, here's your Audible subscription and a pair of AirPod Pros. There you go.

• 59:05Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, yeah. Those are my three life-changing, life-changing pieces of tech.

• 59:10Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. What would mine be? I think mine would almost definitely be AirPods. Cost per hour used, they are by far significantly more than even my phone.

• 59:22Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  The best thing that I've bought, probably a sunrise alarm clock.

• 59:28Ali Abdaal?

  Interesting.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Makes a fairly bit to the guy at the bottom down there.

• 59:32Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah, I actually had one of those. I ended up throwing it away because, or giving it away. Because I just didn't really use it.

• 59:38Chris Williamson?

  Really? So just for me, I want to, I've got some fairly bad habits around my phone. As many of the people that are listening might do. And a way that I've found, the best way that I've found is to stack the deck by it not being near me. Like if my phone is out of arm's reach, then I can't use it. Use WhatsApp Web for messaging on desktop and Instagram can also be used through desktop. Or you can download Flume, which is a desktop app for Mac for Instagram. If you want to use that for uploading Twitter again, Facebook again, iMessage, et cetera, et cetera. Just do everything through your computer. And then if you've got AirPod Pros that have got always on Siri, you can just hey Siri, any of the shit that you needed to do through your phone in any case.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  So it makes your phone essentially redundant. So yeah, I think it would be, it would be probably sunrise alarm clock, AirPods.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, automatic car, drive an automatic.

• 1:00:37Ali Abdaal?

  A car, really?

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Dude, manual cars. Don't tell me you drive manual car.

• 1:00:41Ali Abdaal?

  No, I mean, I've been driving manual car for the last like eight years.

• 1:00:45Chris Williamson?

  Bro, has your life not been completely changed by not having to use the left hand side of your body?

• 1:00:51Ali Abdaal?

  No, it really hasn't.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  Ali, we were going so well. We'd done an hour.

• 1:00:56Ali Abdaal?

  About this. I've been thinking that, has my life actually changed by not needing to change gear? But changing gear was such a second nature thing. I didn't even notice I was doing it.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, maybe in Cambridge, there's just not enough nose to tail traffic. Dude, do you know how flamingos, flamingos sleep like one half of their body at a time? So they can put, you can be a flamingo. With an automatic car, you are a flamingo.

• 1:01:22Ali Abdaal?

  Okay.

• 1:01:24Ali Abdaal?

  Um, I'll have to test that a little bit more. I'll actively think about it a bit more now that you've mentioned it to be like, okay, is driving this actually making a difference? The autopilot is great for traffic, so I just turned that on. So I don't have to think when I'm in traffic.

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  Did you get the full upgrade of?

• 1:01:37Ali Abdaal?

  Oh, no, I didn't. I didn't get any upgrades, but they still have autopilot when you're in traffic. So it's pretty good.

• 1:01:41Chris Williamson?

  No way?

• 1:01:41Ali Abdaal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  That's cool, man. I'm excited to see what life in a Tesla in the UK is like. I spent a lot of time in America a couple of years ago in a Model 3 when it just came out. But that was LA traffic, which is nose to tail on motorways. And then they've got supercharger stations every 20 kilometers. And it was a lot of kind of big, open driving. But the integrations and stuff like that are sick. So, uh, yeah, man. Look, we, uh, I feel like we could keep on going on forever. And I'm sure that we'll have a reason to get you back on in future. But for the people who are interested in what we've gone through today, where should they go to check out more of your stuff?

• 1:02:22Ali Abdaal?

  Sure. So probably my YouTube channel is the main place. So if you just search Ali Abdaal on YouTube, A B D double A L, and you'll find it. Alternatively, you can go to my website, aliabdaal.com, and that'll have links to podcast, newsletter, Instagram, the whole shebang.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, thank you so much for today.

• 1:02:37Ali Abdaal?

  Good stuff. Thanks for having me on.