Modern Wisdom - #231 - Ali Abdaal - How To Learn & Remember Anything, Fast

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello podcast listeners, welcome back. My guest today is none other than Ali Abdahl. He is a huge time YouTuber. Cambridge med students now turned productivity guru, and we linked up after having circled each other like two dear about to fence. Circleed each other for a while, finally sat down. I got him on the show to discuss about as timeless and evergreen a skill as you could hope to learn. How to learn and remember anything fast. Consuming, retaining and deploying information

literally is a superpower, especially in the 21st century. We don't have jobs for life anymore. We now have jobs for half a decade or a decade, and then you need to retrain, re-get new skills. Many of you may be going back to studying, university is just reopened now, perhaps after the terror of COVID this year, you're looking to change career or just make yourself more competitive in the job market. All of that requires you to be able to synthesize and then re-remember all of the information that you have consumed. Ali takes us through such a wonderful, simple and robust framework for how you can improve your ability to study and retain information. This really is a great run through. There's a lot of references here to other books

and other podcasts that you can go and listen to if you want to really deepen your understanding of this. But Ali definitely is worth his salt. His YouTube channel is phenomenal and if you enjoy what he gives us today, I implore you to go and check that out. We've also developed a bit of a bromance behind the scenes, so you very well may see a collaboration in future on either his or my or both channels so stay tuned for that. But for now it's time to learn how to hear a British accent on the end of like a productivity or like a you know, a just like any kind of podcast because like all of the ones I listen to, they're just so overwhelmingly American that when I when I hear a Brit it's like oh, because like all of the ones I listen to, it is so overwhelmingly American

that when I hear a Brit, it's like, oh, it's one of my boys. That's my people. This is my people here. Who do you listen to? Oh, like all of the things I'm sure you do, started out with Tim Ferris and then in the funimstreet. And I've got like 80 on my podcast, library thing,

which is, you know, now, swelling. I 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 Riteer. These are all, like, white American dudes, so, a bit of variety in my podcast diet. 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? I know of him through his website and stuff, but I haven't spoken to him personally. For nominal 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. Yeah, man. This is like my specialist subject. If he was a lost obstacle, take off. What was it like mastermind? 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 still be. You reckon? Yeah, that's the only thing I actually know anything about, but apart from that, studying is another specialist interest. Got you. So, where do we begin? People are now just about arriving back to university, perhaps we 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? 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. 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 you 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, 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 about this, that show that when learning is effortful, it's better. Despite all of that evidence, most teachers are still focused 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 the monics. 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. 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. 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 the stimulus for growth and then that's the stimulus for growth

and then that's the stimulus for those connections to form so that it becomes slightly easier the next time around. What else do most people get wrong about learning? So a few things there, 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 to do anything So there's been this whole swath of studies about learning and studying and memorization done on college and university students The other things that really make a difference are And this is probably you know apart from the fact that learning needs to be at

football, 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 author's 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, 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, this is so counterintuitive. We kind of think of in, 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 or summarizing things with the book brains and in trying to retrieve stuff, that is what's forming the connections. Whereas

when we're just reading things or rereading things 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- I'm just getting the book. Yeah. And there is some evidence as well that the emotional component of it is identical

across 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 the stuff. I know what's going on. It's exactly the same feeling as if you try and recall something completely from memory 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 stash, does help you learn it. It's familiarity, masquerading, as comprehension. Exactly, yeah, that's the way it's going. Great, great. I had Pete A. 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 to 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 Pete is fantastic on it. And from that, the one sentence summary of Make It Stick is, memorization comes from repeated recall, not repeated exposure. Oh, that's a good phrase, and you just start stealing that. That's fine, man. You can note it down at 145 words per minute on your mechanical keyboard. It's going to make

too much noise though on the recording, not so I worry about it. You can see on your mechanical keyboard. It's going to make you much noise though, on the recording, that's what I worry about. And you considered a silenced keyboard. Yeah, occasionally I switched to my Apple Magic keyboard, which is a little bit more quiet, if I'm doing my commanding, and I'm having to switch the windows on the fly. Because that's a bit obnoxious. Yeah, it is.

OK, 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?

I'd say next, the third principle that I was talking about is one that's called space repetition and this is again something that Peter Brown talks about in the book. The idea of space 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 incident he reads them. There's no such thing as a photographic memory. What he's doing is that he's just revising, he's repeating 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 wants 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 on your university felt this way, that oh, if I don't get it first time, I must be an idiot. And the idea of space repetition is that it combats the forgetting curve. So back in the 1800s, there was this dude called Ebinghouse, 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 subject by testing ourselves on it and then by looking it up 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. 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're younger that you're never really going to forget it. And that's because accidentally you've had this space for 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're never going to 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 space 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 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 off of getting curved to be quite shallow. And hopefully the stuff goes into a long-term memory. 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 space repetition softwares out there. That's a lot of kind

of root, very much brute force memorization. What about if I'm trying to do something that's a little bit more fluffy, sort of philosophical concept, or literature, comprehension, stuff like that? In theory, this should work for everything. At least, so in Make It's 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 by chemical pathways for medical school.

It is sort of hockey players competing in tournaments, it's business people working 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 a 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.

How generalists thrive in a specialized world. Also a past modern wisdom guest just after that book came out. So if you want to get on David X, being Epstein, go back modern wisdom. I think he was around about maybe in the sort of late 70s, something like that. So this is what I've done every episode up until now, Ali has just been a prelude to this one,

and this is the pit, that's a 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 space repetition. Are we on any more principles or should we start to move into some more strategic stuff now? 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 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 in 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 At that point, you switch completely and do a different exercise. And as soon as they're on the verge 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 mastery sensation that, oh yeah, I know what I'm doing on the dawn. But when you have that feeling, you're not really learning anymore. 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 syncos tan.

trigonometry and Pythagoras theorem in syncos tan. 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 and therefore we're maximizing our learning and minimizing the time we have to take to learn it. 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? Yeah, I think that's where the balancing act is because whatever you're studying, there is a level of time you have to put into really engage with the material to kind of really

get the hang of it. And that's the tricky part. The thing that I do is that as soon as I start feeling that feeling of, oh, OK, I'm quite enjoying this, at that point I switch tasks. So the interleaving and the discomfort, the interleaving is the tool with which you force the discomfort into the learning process almost. Yes, if the learning process itself isn't uncomfortable enough where you actually are. You're already eating them out 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 hatred for relation works. Then I'm like, okay, let's add in some hematology to the mixture, just spice things up and make it a bit more interesting for my brain. 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 Vanguard of trying to hardcore brute force learning. Yeah, it's one of cram as much stuff into your memories possible. 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 going to sit down. What happens? You're outside of 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? Okay, cool. So I think kind of the environment is kind of important. I used to think I could work in my room. I've now realized that I'm much prefer to work in libraries. And if I could, I would actually go to libraries every day where I have to write scripts for YouTube videos as well, but the whole lockdown thing is putting a bit of a bum on that. 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 evidence that 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. That's interesting. 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 Ring 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. Do you think you would be able to request upon entry into an exam the fact that I need to take one air pod in with me. Look, I promise it's not the answers playing here. It's just the two towers battle theme track. I don't really, just like really get you pumped up.

I'm giving it a little speed. I'm tempted to have that. OK, so we've got ourselves into a location which is potentially similar. Lots of wood, perhaps. Lots of oak around if you're in the red breake. Oh, yeah, I've got the red breake. 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. Can you say if somewhere bourgeois, that's what we want. Exactly, you know, someplace fancy. Some place where you can really get into it and think, oh yeah, this is what being a student is about. Yeah.

Ancient furniture, that's what it's about. Yeah. Okay, so we've gone somewhere that's similar. I also totally agree the fact that my bedroom's 30 square meters 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. Thiago 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? So we've done that. What else are you doing? What's next? 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 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 have never been a fan of this method because firstly, it's an exercise in procrastination. We all know it 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 spend another day doing this and so it takes up another day. I think also it's generally very optimistic. It 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 full-zaren 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. 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 study 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, 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 space repetition and the concept that I want to be doing the hardest of first, what topic should I cover in this

next hour or so. And I'll just repeat that process for as many hours as I'm doing, studying for. And over time, that means that my topics thing becomes green across the board, but it's sort of looks like 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 bank for buck 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. That's like aggregated space repetition as well as individual space 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 our 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. Yeah, more or less. I'd be like, okay, which three topics I'm going to do today. I'm going to do, I don't know, this bit of cardiology, this bit of hematology, and I'll try and memorize

the crep cycle from biochemistry, for example. Got you. What you've used on caffeine is a studying tool. Oh, I love it. I think it's great. Pretty reasonable evidence for it. Very little evidence about down sides. I've always been a fan. Medaphonil or anything more spicy or exotic? I've never really tried any of thoseaphanil or anything more spicy or exotic? I've never really tried any of those. At university, there was a strict like

no no policy about it. And I had a performance in Hansing Drugs, and it came rich. You saw what they were doing. Yeah, that's surprising. I had a friend who tried Modaphanil 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. Yeah, don't get yourself struck off, man. Yeah, it wouldn't be a good look. I posted today on my Instagram story, AlfaBrain, from Onit, and I've been using AlfaBrain. It's edit days, so today I've edited and uploaded four

episodes, which is like, yeah, it's a serious, serious day. It's audio only, my video guy looks after video, so it's not quite the challenge that you make him up against, but still, a serious day of full graph. So that and a can of knuckle, a caffeinated can of knuckle, and that for me puts me in a really, really nice headspace. But the number of people who are so keen, I appreciate the messages that I get,

but everyone's looking for that edge in a pill form or in a canned form or in a powdered form. As opposed to, dude, you really should just learn space for repetition or dude, you really should just understand what pomadoro's are focused like, workers. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're in the... I strongly suspect that drugs and no tropics and stuff, it's not actually going to be the thing that moved the needle. The thing that moved the needle is testing yourself more and spacing it out and into

the needle. And maybe if you're operating at the upper echelons of everything where every single minute percentage of optimization is necessary, then maybe you can look into those. But so we're all still rereading our texts and making notes and thinking, it's going to be helpful. There's a long way to go before we need to enhance our performance in that sense. We sing from the same hem sheet here, mate. So we're there. We know what we're going to do.

Sitting down, are you doing it in blocks? Partly. So if I'm working with friends, we'll pomodoro together. to do sitting down, are you doing it in blocks? 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 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,

and 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 to get it for 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And then so in the 25 minutes, we'd be doing our thing. 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 to, you know, get the broad brush strokes 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 Pomodoro is really great for when you're studying with friends. 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 just give them 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. 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 realize that, or at least students do well, realize 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 a different mode here. The mode isn't, I'm going to learn this body of work and hope some of it comes up. I'm going to see what's come up in every exam paper

that they've published for the last like 20 years. 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, starting to understand the subject is fine. But if we care about optimizing a performance

on an external test, which may or may not be useful, then it's about 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.

So you would actually become your own examiner? 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, and 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.

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, 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? They're like, little mini tests that you would do? 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, a 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 non-fiction. Because what you want to do is you want to get an outline, a skeleton structure in your head of 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 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, and 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 different topics within nerves? And then you think, okay, there's actually only five topics within nerves. There's 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 a big picture and understanding the skeleton structure, and then when it comes to hanging details on that, 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 notions or use the toggle feature So I would write a question and hide the answer underneath the toggle or just screenshot the answer for a pdf for 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 spend a little bit of time crafting the question for my future self And once I've crafted it and I've got the 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. Give us an example of a question that

you might write yourself in a subsequent answer. Sure, I may open up my notion. I can actually screen-show with you if you'd like, after this is going to be on a video. Yeah, if that's a fellow work. So first time for everything, video guide 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. 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 it came to the context of understanding information 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? Thank you, Ali. I tell you what. And I have you here. If I can just have you here, do my intros and outros every week, that would be wonderful. That sounds dreamy. Anyway, so let's take pathology for example. You can see here that I've got 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 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, hypnosis, coilocosis, and something else that I can't remember. Ah, hypnosis, carrier Xs, and carrier Lysis, nucleus shrinking down, breaking up in nucleus into pieces, and breaking down of those pieces into bits. And so, like, I haven't just written the notes.

Like a student who hasn't learned 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 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, liquid-factive gangrenous. Oh, come on.

I don't know if you're internet-slipping. I don't know if you're looking for. Ah, shit, yes, I should have known that. Liquid-factive, fat, fibrenoid, casey, is gangrenous and chirulative. 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 seventh 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 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. 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. So is there anything before we move on to said apps and tools? Is there anything else to sort of book end with regards to the note taking question making process? Yeah, I think just to emphasize that the more I study for for these exams, the more I realize that still looking at your still looking at Ali, and not at your lovely face and lovely lighting. Oh, that's cancelled the screen share, so you can see my lovely face. There we go.

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 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 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 control effort in the lecture notes. I'll be like, whoa, that's such a low tech solution to the same problem.

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 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 better 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. The tether is difficult to cut, right?

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 in the effects. Right. Yeah. If I double, if I do this one in pink, that means I'm really, really, really going to remember. Yeah. Pink's the pink's the proper shit. If I double, if I do this one in pink, that means I'm really, really, really, really going to remember. Pink's the pink's the proper shit. So 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?

Yeah, I think it works less good for things like maths and physics, which are more skills based on applying principles and using your brain. It works very well for things like medicine, which is purely about root 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 load the questions, figure out where you went wrong. And hopefully over time your brain

will become good at spotting the patterns that you need to understood. So into the, the the bullets in the magazine of the rifle that you're firing at this exam, one of the, what are the individual bullets that you're using? anything on your phone, anything on your computer. Yeah, probably. I sometimes think about this, that if I could go through Med School and I only had 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 Anky plus spider diagrams, you can actually memorize and understand and learn every single thing in medical school to just like a stupidly high level.

What are you using to spider diagrams? Oh, pen and paper. Oh, right. Okay. Real, real, real old school. Real old school pen and paper, or if you want to want to want to be fancy about it, notability, iPad Pro, Apple pencil, paper like screen protector, not sponsored unfortunately. But I honestly still for spider diagrams, I just use pen and paper. Why is, why do you like this spider diagrams just to visualize how concepts fit together? 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 we're the 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 things, certain things are always at certain parts of the page, that's yet another visual queue 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, OK, let's look at all these topics. So let's try and subcategorize them as much as possible.

So OK, hematology can broadly be split up into three things. Blood clotting, anemia, and cancer. And so, OK, cool. Now, everything within blood clotting, anemia, and cancer. 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 amalgensis, and within, or is it 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 Hanoch's online pop-ra or some rogue disease like idiopathic from Beside the Peanick Pop-ra 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.

That's another David Epsteinism, right? Where he talks about being birds in the sky and frogs in the mud. Says that you... Yeah, absolutely. I love that analogy. 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. Oh, okay, cool. how to nail Anki. Oh, okay, cool, how to nail Anki. Anki's a flashcard app. You wanna 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 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 slash remember this and I could do with a flash card, you just write a flash card 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. Over time, as you keep up with your daily reviews, all of this information that's in your, 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. 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 space 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?

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. Why don't you give us your protocol? Let's say that you're in the depths of revision time. Yeah. How do you ensure that the body, the mind, is primed for taking in information? 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. 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. 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 view energy. Like, what do you think? The myelin sheets that your brain is relying on and made up of mountain view energy and pickled onion monster munch. Yeah, it's probably not entirely good for the myelin. But yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I've complicated too much. Recently from listening to Dave Asprey and I think, and Eli sent it a tweet the other day about all of the different tech users 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 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 arm 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 Let me once we finish man. I'm gonna link you in with the guys from raw optics Matt Beruka 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. Amazing. And they've got prescription varieties because I do wear glasses. So they can 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 just throwing a pair of optics. These are the day ones, and I've got the night ones over by bed. Why do you have day ones? Oh yeah. So 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 the turbo non-sklasses. Okay. The ones that just scream in cell. How have I had that phrase since

my last lads hang out? I know, yeah, me neither, me neither, but it's just it's one that came up and it 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. 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 really weird. Like every single day I sent 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 8 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. I think, I said, Naval, Ravakant'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 mill. And all that you do 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. What about stable sleep and wake pattern? Do you also try and commit to that? Revision at the same time? Do you find that easy as a routine? Yeah. When I was in the depth of exam preparation, I would have quite a strict bedtime thing in that. 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 8, have breakfast and then go to the library and get into the library by half past 8. And I'd be essentially being the library from half past 8 up until like 10, 11pm, only sort of leaving to take food and to toilet breaks. That was like my hardcore exam revision period. 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? 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 locked myself up by myself and said, right, I need never really struggled with. I think partly because I always study with my friends, I think if I 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 it was fun, because I was just hanging out with my friends and in our five minute Pomodoro breaks would be sharing memes and stuff, I never really experienced any signs of burnout.

So I'm not really very good on commenting on that. That's an interesting one. The group revision, I imagine, is very, very dependent on getting the right group, because if you have one bad apple, who is sharing memes 30 minutes into a pomadoro, if you have one, is fucked. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where you do kind of need to rule with an iron fist. It's like, is that the rule of pomsock? Yeah, that's the rule of pomsock. It's like, the pom is sacred,

the pom has to happen. And 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 it, make the system work, but everyone is grateful for it in the end. I get it. Which is, I guess, I suppose what a dictator would also say, but it's for the good of the people, but in January, it's for the good of the people.

I love it. I think we've got a really nice sort of overview there, learning, remembering stuff. To finish up, we've got, 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. Ah, 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, it 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 bullake to set up and take down. And so even 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 bullake to sit down and film a video because I know it would take half an hour to actually set up all the equipment. But a couple weeks ago, I think it was last week, I decided

I was going to get a handyman in Cambridge handyman.co.uk or something like that. To just sealing 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, 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 going 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 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 ceiling mounted retractable overhead rig, or I can just do this, and it's fine. And so every time, like now, I'm very... because 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, what I'm trying to do now is figure out, anytime I feel a sense of, 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. So that's one thing. The other thing is I recently got this Herman Miller sale chair. I've been lasting after Herman Miller's

Miller chair for the last 10 years and my mum 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 that's fine. And then when the guy came to deliver it, it was like one of the Herman Miller like ergonomics specialists and stuff. And so I ended up having a chat with him and he was giving me some tips and how to set it up and The main takeaway was that apparently well what he recommends is that you have the arm rests of the chair just above your desk and Not so like before my desk was fairly high and now I've sort of lowered it a lot because it's a stunning desk and

Now when I sit down I have like a really good ergonomic position, which is just something I hadn't even considered before. And now 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 and standing mode or when using any other kind of setup. So this is another area where I'm thinking, oh, this ergonomic thing is pretty legit. I've got this like rest palm rest for my keyboard the other day, which makes it more comfortable to type and means my wrists are in a less flexed position normally. So that's the sort of stuff I'm thinking about in terms of modern productivity. 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 new tropics. I think based on the content that comes off your YouTube channel, the thousand pound share and the the the wrist optimizing, like a resting thing when you type in 140 words per minute, that's you kind of need that right? That makes a difference. It just feels a lot nicer and 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. 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 favour. 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 there was just in the back of your mind, there was always that, you can't sleep. There's cat videos on YouTube, and then you roll over and it's there, and the cat videos are there and then three hours later, it's 3 a.m. and you hate yourself. You hate yourself, the core of your being. Yeah, and the only thing I have on my bedside table, I caved I think two years ago and got one of those Dyson desk fans that look nice and 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 any time I get to the point where I can't sleep, I'll just start 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 when I 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. And with the Oasis you can read in the bath and just drop it in. Drop it in. Yeah, feel free to drop it in the bath. You read with the paper white in the bath as well. It's never, never drop it in. But now I know I can drop it in. 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.

Oh, okay. E-readers are fine. This one out in my newsletter, if anyone was read the three-minute Monday news that of this week, it was talking about the, I'd said, by a Kindle, it's the easiest way to make reading, if you want to get into reading a little bit more, it's the easiest way to make it frictionless again. And don't be concerned about reading on a night time, the study that I've seen, one

study here for enough, but like the evidence suggests that it doesn't impact your sick melatonin-approach. So read away, man. Fuck the warm light. Go white light. Go old. Maybe I should switch to paper white now. Paper white.

That's why you're studying to include in my review videos. Oasis versus paper white. Yeah, on the, on the Kindle note, the Kindle is one of the three things that I say is that genuinely life-changing piece of tech. Kindle being number one, air pods being number two, just because it reduces the friction to listening to our own. You are amongst friends here, Ali. You are amongst subscription to audible being number three just because it reduces the friction to listening to your friends here you are in the description to audible being number three because subscription to audible is absolutely it's the if I could only subscribe to one thing it would be a subscription to audible 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 it's like you are he are little Jonathan, little Sophie, his, his, his,

your Kindle, his, your all the full subscription and a fair of air pod pros. There you go. Oh, yeah. Those are my three live-changing, live-changing pieces of tech. I love it, man. What would mine be? I think mine would almost definitely be air pods cost per hour used. I think my would almost definitely be AirPods cost per hour used. They are by far significantly more than even my phone. Yeah. The best thing that I've bought. Probably a sunrise alarm clock. Oh, interesting.

Makes a fairly big to the guy at the bottom down there. Yeah, I actually had one of those. I ended up throwing it away because, well, giving it away, I caught it wrong. Because I just didn't really use it. 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 arms 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, I message, etc, etc. 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. So it makes your phone essentially redundant. So yeah, I think it would be,

it would be probably sunrise alarm clock, Airpods, oh, automatic car, drive an automatic. What's that car really? Dude, manual cars, don't tell me you drive automatic car. Driving automatic. That's not a car really. Dude, manual cars. Don't tell me you drive manual car. No, I've been driving manual car for the last like eight years. Bro, has your life not been completely changed by not having to use the left hand side

of your body? No, it really hasn't. I've really, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, we were going so well, we've done it. I've heard about this. We've done it. I've been thinking that has my life actually changed by not needing to change a gear, but changing gear was such a second nature thing. I didn't even notice I was doing it. Maybe, maybe in Cambridge,

there's just not enough nose to tail traffic. I did, do you know how flamingos sleep like one half of their body at a time? So you can put, you can be a Flamingo with an automatic car. You are a Flamingo. Okay. 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, I'm going to get the full upgrade of... Oh no, I didn't get any upgrades, but they still have autopilot when you're in traffic, so I just turned that on so I don't have to think. Do you get the full upgrade of? Oh no, I didn't get any upgrades, but they still have autopilot when you're in traffic, so it's brilliant. No way.

Yeah. 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 super charged stations, like every 20 kilometers, and it was a lot of kind of big open driving. But the integrations and stuff like that are sick. So, yeah, man, look, we, I feel that 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 you stuff? Sure. So probably my YouTube channel is the main place. So if you just search Ali Ubdahl on YouTube, APD. and I'll have links to podcast, newsletter, Instagram, the Horser Bank.