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

Ali Abdaal 0:00 This is the single thing that makes the biggest difference in people's results for learning any- anything at all. And that is that we learn by testing ourselves, we don't learn by reading stuff. And this, again, it seem, is- is- is counterintuitive because when you tell people that they- they should test themselves on stuff, they'll say, "Oh, well, I- 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 gonna improve your learning. If you test yourself immediately after you learn something, that's gonna 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.

Chris Williamson 0:42 Ali, welcome to the show.

Ali Abdaal 0:44 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, uh, you know, (laughs) a, just like any kind of podcast 'cause, like, all of the ones I listen to are just so overwh- overwhelmingly American that when I- when I hear a Brit it's like, "Oh, it's one of my boys." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00 These are my people.

Ali Abdaal 1:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02 This is my people here. Who do you listen to?

Ali Abdaal 1:06 Oh, like all of the things I'm sure you do. Uh, started out with Tim Ferriss and then Farnam Street and I've got like 80 on my podcast, uh, library thing, which is, you know, now swelling. Um, I recently started listening to a lot of Dave Asprey as well 'cause I'm trying to get into the whole, like, hacking your health and- and all that stuff. Dabbled with a bit of Peter Attia. These are all, like, white American dudes though, so... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:29 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 1:29 Needs a bit of variety in my- in my podcast diet.

Chris Williamson 1:31 Yeah, I get that. I know that we're both mutual friends of Chris Sparks, Tiago Forte. Uh, have you been introduced to Taylor Pearson yet?

Ali Abdaal 1:39 Uh, I know of him through his website and stuff, but I haven't spoken to him personally.

Chris Williamson 1:42 Phenomenal writer.

Ali Abdaal 1:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:43 Like absolutely wonderful writer. Um, so today we are gonna be talking about how to learn and remember anything fast. This is right slap bang in your wheelhouse, I think.

Ali Abdaal 1:54 Yeah, man. This is like my specialist subject.

Chris Williamson 1:57 (laughs) If he- if he was a-

Ali Abdaal 1:58 This is what made my YouTube channel start to take off.

Chris Williamson 1:59 What was it, ma- like Mastermind? Was it-

Ali Abdaal 2:02 Oh yeah, do you... Uh, yeah, Mastermind. That, I- I'm not sure if that's still on, but I used to fantasize about going on- on the TV show. And at the time my specialist subject would've been the Harry Potter books.

Chris Williamson 2:13 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 2:13 And I still think it probably would s- it prob- probably would still be.

Chris Williamson 2:16 You reckon?

Ali Abdaal 2:17 Um, yeah, that's the only thing I actually know anything about. But apart from that, studying is another- another specialist interest.

Chris Williamson 2:25 Got you. So where do we

Chris Williamson 2:27 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-

Ali Abdaal 2:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 2:36 ... uh, looking to become, uh, 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?

Ali Abdaal 2:49 Yeah. (sighs) 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. Um, and it's- it's sort of, 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 are lifting weights that you can easily lift, you're not actually gonna make any gains. It's just gonna be a total waste of time. But it's when you start doing that progressive overload, when you start lifting weights that are- 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 gonna get more hench and you're gonna, you're gonna 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, uh, still focus on trying to make the content as convenient as possible for their students. Like, very well-meaning teachers who wanna 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- 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.

Chris Williamson 4:30 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- it's doing the work.

Ali Abdaal 4:42 Yeah, exactly. And it's- 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- 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 li- it's the exact opposite. Like if you are finding something hard, it's a lot more likely to stick because your brain is having to work harder. You're operating at your, 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 those connections to form so that it becomes slightly easier the next time around.

Chris Williamson 5:23 What else do most people get wrong about learning?

Ali Abdaal 5:26 Uh, so a few things. There- there- there have been some really cool studies about this where, um, because, uh, essentially college and university students are a great crop of people to do studies on because you can pay them like £3 and they'll happily kind of sign up to- to do anything.

Chris Williamson 5:41 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 5:41 So there's been this whole swath of studies about learning and studying and memorization done on college and university students. Um, the other things that really make a difference are, um, 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 any- anything at all. And that is that we learn by testing ourselves, we don't learn by reading stuff.And this is, again, it seem... is, is, is counterintuitive because when you tell people that they, they should test themselves and stuff, they'll say, "Oh, well, I, 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, 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 gonna improve your learning. If you test yourself immediately after you learn something, that's gonna 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. Um, we kind of think of in... we, we, 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 open, we're falling into that trap of thinking that familiarity is the same thing as understanding. Um, 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." Uh, maybe not. And again, there is-

Chris Williamson 7:38 Let me just get the book.

Ali Abdaal 7:39 Yeah. (laughs) And there is some evidence as well that the, the emotional component of it is identical across, ac- 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 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 re-vising, like revision, like going over stuff again is gonna 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.

Chris Williamson 8:26 It's familiarity masquerading as comprehension.

Ali Abdaal 8:29 Exactly. Yeah. That's, that's exactly what it is. Great way of phrasing it.

Chris Williamson 8:32 I had a, I had Peter C. Brown on the show.

Ali Abdaal 8:34 Oh.

Chris Williamson 8:34 He was like episode 19-

Ali Abdaal 8:36 Nice.

Chris Williamson 8:36 ... two and a half years ago.

Ali Abdaal 8:38 Old school. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:38 So anyone that's interested in this and wants to dig into Make It Stick, the book, is really accessible, super good read, um, 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, Peter's fantastic on it. Um, and from that, the one sentence summary of Make It Stick is memorization comes from repeated recall, not repeated exposure.

Ali Abdaal 9:07 Oh, that's a good phrase. I need to start stealing that. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:10 That's fine, man. F- you, you can note it down at 145 words per minute on your, on your mechanical keyboard, whatever it is.

Ali Abdaal 9:16 It's gonna make too much noise though, on the recording. (keys clacking) That's what I worry about when I'm doing podcasts.

Chris Williamson 9:19 Have you considered a silenced keyboard?

Ali Abdaal 9:21 Yeah, occasionally I switch to my Apple Magic keyboard, which is a little bit more quiet.

Chris Williamson 9:24 (laughs) Look at you.

Ali Abdaal 9:24 If I'm doing like a live stream and I'm having to switch windows on the fly 'cause (keys clacking) that's a bit, it's a bit obnoxious.

Chris Williamson 9:30 Yeah, it is. Um, okay, so we know that we need to lean into the discomfort. We also know that, um, 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, where do we go next?

Ali Abdaal 10:00 Um, 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, in the book. The idea of spaced repetition is, um, we've all had this experience where you learn something and then, or y- or, 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. Um, and again, when we... when, 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." Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, 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 rep- repetition is that it combats the forgetting curve. So back in the 1800s, there was this, this dude called Ebbinghaus who did, uh, a really weird experiment on himself whereby he made himself memorize a bunch of completely nonsense words, like completely made up words, uh, 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, uh, graphs, if anyone's f- familiar with those, whereby you lose the majority of it in the initial period, and then the forgetting's 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. Uh, 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 were younger that you're never really gonna 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 ne- and then you're never gonna 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 wanna space it out a bit more. So maybe a week later, and then maybe a month later, and then maybe six months later. Uh, 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 this stuff goes into our long-term memory.

Chris Williamson 13:07 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. Um, that's a lot of kind of rote bru- very much brute force memorization.

Ali Abdaal 13:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:26 What about if I'm trying to do something that's a little bit more fluffy, sort of philosophical concepts or, um, uh, literature comprehension, stuff like that?

Ali Abdaal 13:37 In theory, this should work for everything. Um, at least... So in, in, in Make It Stick, again referencing that book, they talk about a load of domains in which this s- 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 businesspeople 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, uh, Range by David Epstein where he talks about this basically in these exact terms. He says testing, spacing, and interleaving are, like, the three sort of primary things for learning any skill, whether it, whether it's, like, knowledge for a university subject or whether it's like tennis or golf or anything like that.

Chris Williamson 14:22 How Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World.

Ali Abdaal 14:24 Exactly, yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:24 Also a, also a past Modern Wisdom guest just after that book came out.

Ali Abdaal 14:27 Oh, wow.

Narrator 14:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:27 So if you wanna get on David Expein- Epstein, go back to Modern Wisdom. I think he was around about maybe in the sort of late '70s. Something like that. Um, 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-

Ali Abdaal 14:42 Fantastic, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:43 ... this is the fucking pinnacle right here. Um, so we've got the testing, the recall. We've got the, uh, fact that we need to lean into it. Um, 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, uh, more strate- strategic stuff now?

Ali Abdaal 15:02 Yeah, so I suppose the f- the final principle is one that Epstein talks about, which is interleaving. Uh, and interleaving is the idea that, um, we kind of wanna be operating, uh, in, i- in sort of our area, our, our zone of discomfort. So the example he gives in, uh, the, the example they give in Make It Stick I think is looking at hockey coaches. And, uh, 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, uh, you know, that mastery sensation that, "Oh, yeah. I know what I'm doing. I'm the Don." Uh, but when you, when you have that feeling, you, you're not really learning anymore. Uh, 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. Um, and so for example, uh, th- again, this isn't how traditional schooling is designed. If you're having, like, a maths lesson, you would do, I don't know, uh, (laughs) trigonometry and Pythagoras' theorem and sin, cos, tan, and you would do it i- 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 bl- 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, uh, and minimizing the time we have to take to learn it.

Chris Williamson 16:46 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?

Ali Abdaal 16:57 Yeah, I think that's, that's where the balancing act is, because whatever you're studying, there is a level of, uh, a level of time you have to put in to really engage with the material to kind of really get the hang of it. Um, 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. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:22 So the interleaving-

Ali Abdaal 17:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:23 ... and the discomfort are... The, the interleaving is the... It's the tool with which you force the discomfort into the learning process almost?

Ali Abdaal 17:33 Yes. If the learning process itself isn't disco- i- i- isn't uncomfortable enough where you're actually-

Chris Williamson 17:38 (laughs) Already. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 17:38 ... breaking the limit of your, of your think anyway.

Chris Williamson 17:40 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 17:40 Um, so for example, if I'm doing a completely new n- n- 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, 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 to spice things up and make it a bit more interesting for my brain."

Chris Williamson 17:59 I get it. I get it. Okay, so

Chris Williamson 18:03 where do we go next? Why don't we talk about, um, some practical stuff? Let's say that you're sitting down to do a session of learning anything. I, I think that med school actually is a really good example. And it's a... Y- you guys are like the, uh, the vanguard of trying to-... hardcore brute force learn shit. (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 18:22 Yeah, trying to cram as much stuff into your memory as possible.

Chris Williamson 18:24 Precisely. So talk us through. It's the morning, you've woken up, you've done your morning routine, um, 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, and what do you take with you and, and what do you sit down with?

Ali Abdaal 18:47 Okay, cool. Um, so I think kind of the environment is kind of important. Uh, w- I, I, I used to think I could work in my room. I've now realized that I much prefer to work in libraries. Uh, 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. Uh, but the whole lockdown thing is putting a, a bit of a, a bu- 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, uh, sort of optimization there.

Chris Williamson 19:32 That's interesting.

Ali Abdaal 19:33 Uh, so for example, that's partly why listening to music while studying is not considered very good, because you're probably not gonna be listening to music when you're being tested on the thing. Having said that, I still listen to music while I'm studying. Uh, I listen to instrumental tracks, uh, the theory being that instrumental stuff doesn't interfere with the phonological loop, which is a part of working memory. Um, I listen to instrumental t- tracks because it's just so much nicer when I've got the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in my noise-canceling headphones, and I'm quite happy to take the optimization hit, uh, if it means I'll enjoy myself a little bit more. Um, yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:03 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?

Ali Abdaal 20:09 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:09 "Look, I promise it's not the answers playing here. It's just the Two Towers battle theme track on repeat."

Ali Abdaal 20:15 Yeah, and that was just to, like, really get you pumped up. Uh, I'm, I'm sure people have attempted that. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:21 (laughs) You're walking in with a spear. (laughs) Okay, so, um, 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-

Ali Abdaal 20:30 Oh, yeah, it 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, oak maybe.

Chris Williamson 20:35 Get yourself somewhere bourgeois. That's what we want.

Ali Abdaal 20:37 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."

Chris Williamson 20:42 (laughs) Yeah. Ancient furniture, that's what it's about.

Ali Abdaal 20:47 Exactly, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:47 Um, okay, so we've gone somewhere that's similar. I, I also totally agree. The fact that my, uh, 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-

Ali Abdaal 21:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:03 ... I've got a TV that's behind me. Um, you should have locations that are, um, attached to a particular task. Tiago Forte would say the same. I know Chris Sparks would as well. Um, so we've done that. What, what else are you doing? What's next?

Ali Abdaal 21:17 Uh, essentially what's next is, uh, figuring out what to do for the day. Um, I have a strong theory about this, which is that you shouldn't figure out what you're gonna do in advance. And I think this is usually the way that students build up their revision timetables. It's like, uh, you know, you think, "Right, I've got three months until my A levels or whatever, and therefore I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna map out the syllabus for each of my subject, and I'm gonna figure out what I'm gonna 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. Uh, we all know, uh, when we try to make a r- 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. Uh, it, (laughs) 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 ver- quite far out in advance which topics you're gonna need to visit more often than which topics you're gonna most struggle with and, and stuff. That seems to be generally a fool's errand for me. So the way that I do it, I c- 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 gonna study what, I'll instead have a list of topics down the first column. If you imagine, like, a spreadsheet with a li- a li- 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?" Um, 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, 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 wanna be doing the harder stuff 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 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. Uh, 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 gonna 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." 'Cause you don't wanna get to the point where you're getting diminishing returns, uh, when it comes to the amount of time that you're putting in.

Chris Williamson 24:27 That's like, um, 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-

Ali Abdaal 24:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:42 ... um, 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-

Ali Abdaal 24:49 Yes. Exactly.

Chris Williamson 24:49 ... "Right, I'm, I'm, I'm going to use that." So someone might be really, really good at business law, but bad at criminal law, so you're-

Ali Abdaal 24:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:55 ... right, okay. And then within that you can drill down a little bit further. What's

Chris Williamson 24:59 your views, um ... Before we actually sit down, we've got our plan. I'm gonna 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.

Ali Abdaal 25:12 Yeah, more or less. I'd be like, "Okay, which three topics I'm, I'm, am I going today? I'm gonna 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."

Chris Williamson 25:22 Got you, got you. Um, what's your views on caffeine as a studying tool?

Ali Abdaal 25:25 Oh, I love it. I think it's great. Uh, s- pretty reasonable evidence for it, uh, v- very little evidence about d- downsides. I've always been a fan. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:34 Modafinil or anything more spicy or exotic?

Ali Abdaal 25:37 I've never really tried any of those. Um, at university there was a strict like no-no policy about it, and I h- I had a friend who tried-

Chris Williamson 25:43 What, like a performance enhancing drugs test at Cambridge? Is that what they were doing?

Ali Abdaal 25:47 Yes, that's surprising. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:48 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 25:49 Um, I, 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. Um, I think it might make for an interesting video, I just have to make sure it's legal and not, uh, 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, so ... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:14 Yeah, don't get yourself struck off, man. Um-

Ali Abdaal 26:16 Yeah, i- it wouldn't be a good look.

Chris Williamson 26:18 I, uh, I posted today on my Instagram story, um, Alpha Brain from Onnit. And I've been using Alpha Brain. It's edit days, so today-

Ali Abdaal 26:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:27 ... I've, uh, edited and uploaded four episodes, um-

Ali Abdaal 26:30 Damn. That's not bad.

Chris Williamson 26:30 ... which is like-

Ali Abdaal 26:30 Cool.

Chris Williamson 26:31 ... yeah, it's a serious, serious day. It's audio only, my video guy looks after video, so it's not-

Ali Abdaal 26:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:35 ... quite the, the challenge that you may come up against. But still, a serious day of full graft. Um, so that and a can of Nocco, a caffeinated can of Nocco. And that for me puts me in a really, really nice head space. But the number of people who are s- they're so keen. I appreciate the messages that I get, but everyone's looking for that edge in-

Ali Abdaal 26:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:55 ... the, in a pill form or in a, a, a canned form or in-

Ali Abdaal 26:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:59 ... a powdered form. Um, as opposed to, dude, you really should just learn spaced repetition, or dude, you really should just understand what pomodoros or focused, like work is.

Ali Abdaal 27:09 Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're in the ... Uh, yeah, I, I, I s- 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 s- spacing it out and interleaving.

Chris Williamson 27:27 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 27:27 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 f- s- you know ... We're all still re-reading our texts and making notes and thinking it's going to be helpful. Like, (laughs) there's a long way to go before we need to enhance our performance in that, in, in that sense.

Chris Williamson 27:47 We sing from the same hymn sheet here, mate. Uh, so we've ... we're, we're there, we've ... we know what we're going to do. Um, sitting down, are you doing it in blocks?

Ali Abdaal 27:56 Uh, partly. So if I'm working with friends, uh, we'll pomodoro together. Uh, so pomodoro method, 25 minutes on, five minutes off. Um, when I was at, 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, uh, dark, dark, dark mode libraries. Uh, and we would, uh, sort of tap on the table once when a pomodoro session was gonna 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. Uh, 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 together for 25 minutes on, five minutes off. Um, and then so in the 25 minutes we'd be d- 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 gonna screw around with stuff that I know is going to be pointless levels of detail. I'm gonna focus on the big picture and really try, 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 ... it's ... 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.

Chris Williamson 29:14 Cool. And what are you doing here? So you've got a textbook in front of you. Are you entering stuff into somewhere else where you can retest yourself? Is there a, a process that people can follow for this? Obviously they're ... 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, (laughs) in an exam-"

Ali Abdaal 29:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:35 "... in a few months' time. Good luck, guys."

Ali Abdaal 29:38 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, um, or at least students who do well realize that l- 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 op- operating in a different mode here. The mode isn't, "I'm going to learn this body of work and I hope some of it comes up." It's, "I'm gonna see what's come up in every exam paper, uh, that they've published for the last like 20 years. I'm gonna try and predict patterns of questions. I'm gonna figure out what, 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, uh, which may or may not be useful, then it's about, you know, thinking about how can I, 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, uh, but they're all kind of based around creating questions for yourself and testing yourself repeatedly over a very long period of time.

Chris Williamson 30:59 So, you would actually become your own examiner?

Ali Abdaal 31:02 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, uh, 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 be- 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.

Chris Williamson 31:33 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-

Ali Abdaal 31:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:41 ... they've been on a course for a day or something like that-

Ali Abdaal 31:43 Sure.

Chris Williamson 31:43 ... uh, and then they're like, "Right, I'm gonna go away and begin to even become familiar with this particular piece of work."

Ali Abdaal 31:50 Yep.

Chris Williamson 31:50 What happens in between that and the, and the proper retesting phase? Are there, like, little mini tests that you would do?

Ali Abdaal 31:56 Yeah, sort of. Um, so the, so step one is something I, I call scoping the subject, which is basically just get an overview of what is in, like, what is everything within the subject. Uh, so let's say you're studying, I don't know, human physiology, and it's, it's very easy kind of in week one of medical school to open up chapter one of your massive, uh, 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. Uh, because what you wanna do is you wanna 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 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, 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." Then 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, 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- at- at every level of detail, I start off with the big picture and understanding under- 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, 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. Um, 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.

Chris Williamson 34:06 Give us an example of a question that you might write yourself in a subsequent answer.

Ali Abdaal 34:11 Uh, sure. Let me open up my Notion. (makes typing noises) I can actually screenshot with you if you'd like, if this is gonna be on a video. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:18 Uh, yeah, if that's, if that'll work. It's a first time for everything. Video guy Dean's gonna be losing his mind here.

Ali Abdaal 34:24 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:24 All of the filters that he's put on your face are going to go crazy.

Ali Abdaal 34:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:27 Right. There we go.

Ali Abdaal 34:29 Uh, oh, I was actually taking notes from this book How to Take Smart Notes-

Chris Williamson 34:32 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 34:33 ... uh, which was actually about all of this, like, recall stuff, uh, and the power of testing and spacing when, when it came to the con- the, the context of understanding information from, from notes. But, so for example, h- here, I, 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?

Chris Williamson 34:51 Thank you. Ali, I tell you what-

Ali Abdaal 34:53 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:53 ... can I have you here? I, if I can just have you here doing my intros and outros every week, that would be wonderful.

Ali Abdaal 34:58 That sounds dreamy. Anyway, so let's, you know, 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, 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, pycnosis, choilocosis, and something else that I can't remember. Ugh, pycnosis, karyorrhexis, and karyolysis. Nucleus shrinking down, breaking up a nucleus into pieces and breaking down of those pieces into bits. Uh, and so, like, I haven't just written the notes. It... Like, a, a s- 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, 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... (sharp inhale) Ugh. Damn.

Chris Williamson 36:04 Come on, Ali. The internet's listening.

Ali Abdaal 36:05 I don't know the other four. (laughs) Uh... Ah, shit. Yes. I should have known that.

Chris Williamson 36:12 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 36:12 Liquefactive, 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.

Chris Williamson 36:27 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 36:28 I haven't done pathology in a while. Um, 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-

Chris Williamson 36:37 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 36:37 ... as, as I'm going through, every, everything I'm writing is, uh, 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."

Chris Williamson 36:49 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 36:49 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.

Chris Williamson 36:56 I'm so, so impressed with the changes. I went to uni in 2006 and finished my master's in, like, 2011. Um, and I'd never heard of Evernote. Uh, I, I doubt that Notion even existed back then. Anki might have been a thing, but I was doing two business degrees, that probably wouldn't have been-

Ali Abdaal 37:16 Mm.

Chris Williamson 37:16 ... super appropriate for me. And, um, now it feels like this particular studying method really has a wonderful sort of technological component to it, um, where people are having this learning style facilitated by some great, uh, apps and tools. Um, 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, uh, process?

Ali Abdaal 37:46 Yeah. I think just to emphasize that th- the more I study for, for these exams, the more I realize that-

Chris Williamson 37:52 Still looking at your, still looking at cell death, Ali, and not at your lovely face and lovely lighting, mate.

Ali Abdaal 37:56 Oh. Let's, let's cancel the screen share so you can see my lovely face.

Chris Williamson 37:59 There we go.

Ali Abdaal 37:59 Um... Yeah. The more I study for these exams, the more I realize that the writing of the question is probably the most important thing. Uh, I, I had a friend who was a couple 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 'cause (laughs) he, 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 do you deal with these questions?" 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 F it in the lecture notes." And I'd be like, "Whoa!" (laughs) "That's..."

Chris Williamson 38:42 Such a low tech solution to the same problem.

Ali Abdaal 38:46 Yeah. It just works so well. Um, 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, uh, saying, "What are the six types of necrosis?" and describe each of them in detail. And then I would've saved a lot of time when doing the studying, and I would've 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.

Chris Williamson 39:20 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 39:20 And I still haven't fully gotten away from that.

Chris Williamson 39:22 The, the, the tether is difficult to cut, right?

Ali Abdaal 39:25 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.

Chris Williamson 39:31 (laughs) yeah. If I, if I double... If I do this one in pink, that means I'm really, really gonna remember.

Ali Abdaal 39:36 Exactly, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 39:37 Pink's, pink's the, pink's the proper shit.

Ali Abdaal 39:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 39:40 Um, so bef- before we move on to the tools, are there any, uh, subjects or areas, um, that you think that this sort of approach that we're gonna go through, that we are going through, doesn't work for?

Ali Abdaal 39:51 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. Uh, 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.

Chris Williamson 40:24 Understood. So into the, the, the bullets in the magazine of the rifle that you're firing at this exam-

Ali Abdaal 40:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 40:31 ... what are the, what are the individual bullets that you're using? Anything on your phone? Anything on your computer?

Ali Abdaal 40:38 Yeah. Um, 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. I think with Anki plus spider diagrams, you can actually memorize or, and understand and learn every single thing in medical school, uh, to just, like, a, a stupidly high level.

Chris Williamson 41:09 What are you using for spider diagrams?

Ali Abdaal 41:10 Oh, pen and paper. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:12 Oh, right. Okay.

Ali Abdaal 41:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:14 Real, r- real, real old school.

Ali Abdaal 41:15 Real old school, pen and paper. Or if you wanna, wanna be fancy about it, Notability, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Paperlike screen protector. Um, not sponsored, unfortunately.

Chris Williamson 41:24 (laughs) yeah.

Ali Abdaal 41:24 But, and, like, honestly, still for spider diagrams, I just use pen and paper, 'cause it is-

Chris Williamson 41:29 Why, why do you like the spider diagrams? Just to visualize how concepts fit together?

Ali Abdaal 41:33 Exactly, yeah. Because something like Anki flashcards, uh, are very good at helping you memorize the detail, but they're very bad at helping you see the bigger picture. Uh, and wh- whereas with a spider diagram or a mind map, you have, like, the topic in the middle and then you s- you're forced to categorize it into different bits. And the fact that thing- certain things are always at certain parts of the page, that's yet another visual cue for you to recall that when, when you're tested on it. Um, 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 sub-categorize them as much as possible." So okay, hematology can broadly be split up into three things, uh, blood clotting, anemia, and, uh, 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 malignancies. And within... What was the third one? Uh, 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, uh, you know...... uh, understanding Henoch-Schonlein purpura or some rogue disease like idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, something like that. Uh, 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, cover all your bases.

Chris Williamson 42:53 That's another David Epstein-ism, right? Where he talks about being birds in the sky and frogs in the mud. Says that you-

Ali Abdaal 42:59 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love that analogy. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 43:02 ... by barbelling and having the extremes at both ends, the big-picture thinking and then the, the real detailed thinking. Um, so-

Ali Abdaal 43:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:09 ... give me your 60-second elevator pitch for how to, how to nail Anki.

Ali Abdaal 43:17 Oh, okay. Cool. How to nail Anki. Um, 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, uh, 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, any time 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. Um, over time, as you keep up with your daily reviews, all of this information that's in your fl- 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.

Chris Williamson 44:19 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, um, you guys, if it works for you, um, for a business degree, like thinking back to the way that I remembered stuff during a degree which really was a walk in the park, I made it so much harder than it needed to be.

Ali Abdaal 44:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:44 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. Um, so hopefully we'll have expedited a bunch of people's, uh, discomfort today. Um, what else have we not covered that is important

Chris Williamson 45:00 as a part of the learning and remembering anything fast framework?

Ali Abdaal 45:06 I think we've covered most of the basics. W- w- w- we haven't talked about things like sleep and exercise and food. Uh, I suspect you've covered that a lot on other episodes of your podcast.

Chris Williamson 45:16 Why don't you, um, give us your protocol? Let's say that you're in the, the depths of revision time.

Ali Abdaal 45:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:23 How do you ensure that the body, the mind is primed for, uh, for taking in information?

Ali Abdaal 45:30 Um, 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. Uh, and that (laughs) is actually most of what you need to do.

Chris Williamson 45:42 Man, how many students or even people doing a, a professional qualification, an MBA, you know, whatever it might be, the first thing to go is the food quality. It's the 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."

Ali Abdaal 46:00 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:01 Like, what do you think-

Ali Abdaal 46:03 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:04 ... the myelin sheaths-

Ali Abdaal 46:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:06 ... that your, that your brain is relying on are made up of Mountain Dew Energy and pickled onion Monster Munch?

Ali Abdaal 46:13 Yeah, it's probably not entirely good for the myelin. Um, but yeah. You know, I don't, I don't over-complicate it too much. Recently, from listening to Dave Asprey, and I think, uh, Nat Eliason 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, I do have blackout curtains in my room, which, which help. Um, I n- 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, any of the fancier stuff.

Chris Williamson 46:46 Let me... Once we've finished, man, I'm going to link you in with the guys from RA Optics, uh, Matt Maruca who's been on this show, the most advanced blue-blocking glasses on the planet. Um, I'll, uh, I'll loop you in with them because they are phenomenal.

Ali Abdaal 46:58 Oh, amazing. Have they got prescription varieties? Because I, I do wear glasses, so I've always-

Chris Williamson 47:01 So they can do, do... They can even do custom ones.

Ali Abdaal 47:03 Oh.

Chris Williamson 47:03 Um, it's insane. They're really, really fun. Uh, anyone that was interested in that, the light diet, go back and listen to it. It's like episode 189. Um, so yeah, I think certainly talking about sleep, like keeping your phone outside of your room, uh, making sure that you're not, uh... I'm just throwing a pair of RA Optics.

Ali Abdaal 47:19 Oh. Sexy.

Chris Williamson 47:19 So these are the, these are the day ones, and I've got the night ones over by bed. Um-

Ali Abdaal 47:22 Why do you have day ones?

Chris Williamson 47:23 Oh, yeah. So they're for if you're working, um, 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, the hardcore sort of what the guys in the Modern Wisdom Big Dick group called-

Ali Abdaal 47:36 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:37 ... the turbo nonce glasses. Um-

Ali Abdaal 47:39 Okay.

Chris Williamson 47:39 (laughs) The ones, the ones that just scream incel. Um-

Ali Abdaal 47:45 Haven't heard that phrase since my last lads hangout.

Chris Williamson 47:47 I know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 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.

Ali Abdaal 47:55 Okay.

Chris Williamson 47:55 Um, so yes, sleep, important, diet, important, don't miss meals. Uh, what else was in there? Exercise.

Ali Abdaal 48:03 Yeah, I kind of fail on the exercise front a little bit. I got a personal trainer recently. Uh, but I wa- 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 gonna turn off in the next like 10 seconds. So I thought, "You know what? I'm not gonna 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, I fell asleep and the next thing I knew it was 12 o'clock in the afternoon-

Chris Williamson 48:30 Fucked it.

Ali Abdaal 48:30 ... 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 (laughs) without an alarm."

Chris Williamson 48:38 (laughs) I think, uh, I'd say Naval Ravikant's a big proponent. He says that, um, you know that your life is in the right place when you're able to wake up without an alarm.

Ali Abdaal 48:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:48 But that's all well and good when you're the owner of AngelList and worth like several mil, and all that you do is, is think and make money all day, Naval. Uh-

Ali Abdaal 48:57 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 48:57 ... for, for those of us that have got a PT session at 10 o'clock in the morning, we probably need an alarm. Um-

Ali Abdaal 49:02 We need an alarm, yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:02 ... sleep, and what about s- sort of stable sleep and wake pattern? Do you also try and commit to that, like revision at the same sort of time? Do you find that's easy as a routine?

Ali Abdaal 49:10 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 11:00. Usually I'd be reading some extra book related to my exams from 11:00 until I fell asleep. And then I'd always wake up at 8:00, 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, 10:00, 11:00 PM, uh, only sort of leaving to take, uh, food and toilet breaks. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:39 So what if-

Ali Abdaal 49:39 That was like my hardcore exam revision period.

Chris Williamson 49:41 ... 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?

Ali Abdaal 49:50 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've been a lot harder. But because every day was fun because I was just hanging out with my friends and in our five-minute Pomodoro breaks we'd 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.

Chris Williamson 50:16 That's an interesting one. The, the group, um, the group revision, I imagine, is very, very dependent on getting the right group. Because if you have one bad apple who is-

Ali Abdaal 50:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:29 ... sharing, sharing memes 13 minutes into a Pomodoro-

Ali Abdaal 50:32 Exactly. Can't be helping that.

Chris Williamson 50:33 ... everyone is fucked.

Ali Abdaal 50:35 Yeah. I think it's one of... It's, it's one of those things where you do kind of need to rule with an iron fist.

Chris Williamson 50:41 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 50:41 Um, it's like-

Chris Williamson 50:43 Is that the ru- is that the rule of PomSoc?

Ali Abdaal 50:45 Yeah, that's the rule of PomSoc. It's like (laughs) the pom is sacred, the pom has to happen.

Chris Williamson 50:49 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 50:49 And I think a- at least among e- among everyone I knew, everyone appreciated it when someone was taking charge and just telling them, "No. Shut the fuck up. We're gonna 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, (laughs) to make it, make the system work. But everyone is grateful for it in the end.

Chris Williamson 51:09 I get it, man.

Ali Abdaal 51:09 Which is like, I guess, I suppose what a dictator would also say.

Chris Williamson 51:13 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 51:13 That it's for the good of the people. But it genuinely is for the good of the people. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:16 I love it. Um, I think we've got a really nice sort of overview there, learning, remembering stuff. Um, to finish

Chris Williamson 51:24 up, we've got... we can probably squeeze another 10 minutes in or so. What have you found over the last year or so which has changed the most, uh, to do with your productivity setup or that you've been the most impressed with, um, that you've added in or taken out or, or switched around with to do with your efficiency and productivity?

Ali Abdaal 51:45 Oh, interesting question. Okay, so two things come to mind. Number one is friction. Uh, I have this phrase which is that friction is the most powerful force in the universe. Uh, and when it's against us, we're not gonna do anything. And when it's in our favor, we're not gonna do bad things. Uh, friction in my context was that, uh, 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 ballache to set up and take down. And so, either my living room would just be a complete tip at all times because there'd be all these C-stands lying around with wires all over the place, or it would be such a ballache to sit down and film a video 'cause I kn- I would 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, like cambridgehandyman.co.uk or something like that-

Chris Williamson 52:34 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 52:34 ... uh, to just ceiling mount one of my lights. And now I have a kind of Aputure space light mounted above my desk where previously a C-stand would've 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, and then I'm good to go. Uh, earl- 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 m- like a ceiling mounted retractable overhead rig where I can just do this and it's fine." Um, and so every time, like, like now I'm very b- b- b- 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, and, and the stuff. But it... That almost certainly is the case. So really I'm... What I'm trying to do now is figure out any time I feel a sense of, "Ugh, 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? Uh, and often the answer is yes, I just have to get this thing to make something a little bit more convenient. That's one thing. The other thing is I recently got this Herman Miller Sayl chair. I've been lusting after Herman Millers ch- Miller chairs for the last 10 years and my mom always vetoed it. She was like, "No, you're not spending 1,000 pounds on a chair." Uh, but a f- a few months ago I ordered this one without telling her, so it was fine.

Chris Williamson 54:08 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 54:08 Um, 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 w- what he recommends is that you have the arm rests of the chair just above your desk. And n- 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 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, um, which makes it more comfortable to type and means my, my, my wrists are at, in a less flexed position normally. Uh, so that's the sort of stuff I'm thinking about in, in terms of (laughs) in terms of modern productivity.

Chris Williamson 55:09 It's interesting. I think we, 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 1,000 pound chair and the, the, the wrist optimizing-

Ali Abdaal 55:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:28 ... uh, uh, like rest thing. When you type at 140 words per minute, that's ... you kinda need that. Right? That-

Ali Abdaal 55:35 Yeah. That, that could be the difference.

Chris Williamson 55:35 ... that makes, that makes a difference.

Ali Abdaal 55:36 (laughs) It, 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 gonna be ROI positive.

Chris Williamson 55:47 Talking about the friction thing, I think that's a really interesting point. I've always been a, 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-

Ali Abdaal 55:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:57 ... 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. Um, 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, a, a wearable, um, 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, uh, 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-ha. And then you roll over-

Ali Abdaal 56:31 Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Williamson 56:31 ... and it's there, and the cat videos are there, and then three hours later, it's 3:00 AM, and you hate-

Ali Abdaal 56:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:35 ... yourself. You hate, you, you hate yourself, the core of your being.

Ali Abdaal 56:40 Yeah. These days, the, the only thing I have them on my bedside table, I, 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, any time I get to the point where I can't sleep, I'll just start reading on the Kindle. Uh, and recently, I, I actually got the Kindle Oasis. I'd been a Kindle Paperwhite 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? (laughs) I can make a, 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. Um, 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.

Chris Williamson 57:22 And with the Oasis, you can read in the bath and just drop it in. Drop it in.

Ali Abdaal 57:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:26 Feel free to drop it in the bath.

Ali Abdaal 57:28 I used to read with a Paperwhite in the bath as well and just never, never drop it in, but now I know I can drop it in. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:32 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 57:33 So, that's a good thing.

Chris Williamson 57:33 Um, interesting thing, I've got a study that I can send to you, uh, that compares the effect of e-readers versus tablets on melatonin production.

Ali Abdaal 57:41 Oh, okay.

Chris Williamson 57:41 Um, e-readers are fine. This went out in-

Ali Abdaal 57:44 No way. Interesting.

Chris Williamson 57:44 This went out in my newsletter. If anyone was ... uh, read the Three-Minute Monday newsletter this week, um, it was talking about the, the ... I'd said buy a 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.

Ali Abdaal 58:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:00 Um, and don't be concerned about reading on a nighttime.

Ali Abdaal 58:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:05 The study that I've seen, one study, yeah, fair enough, but like the evidence suggests that it doesn't impact your-

Ali Abdaal 58:12 Oh. Sick.

Chris Williamson 58:13 ... melatonin production. So read away, man. Fuck the warm light. Go white light.

Ali Abdaal 58:17 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:17 Go old school. Go-

Ali Abdaal 58:19 Maybe I should switch to Paperwhite now.

Chris Williamson 58:20 Paperwhite, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 58:20 That's a useful study to include in my review videos, Oasis versus Paperwhite.

Chris Williamson 58:24 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 58:24 Um, but yeah, on the, on the Kindle note, the Kindle is one of the three things that I say is a genuinely life-changing piece of tech. Kindle being number one, AirPods being number two, just because it reduces the friction to listening to audio books and podcasts.

Chris Williamson 58:35 You are amongst friends here, Ali. You are amongst friends.

Ali Abdaal 58:38 And then a subscription to Audible being number three-

Chris Williamson 58:40 (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 58:40 ... 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. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:46 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, uh, little Sophie. Here's, here's, here's your Kindle." (laughs)

Ali Abdaal 59:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:00 "Here's your Audible subscription and a pair of AirPod Pros. There you go."

Ali Abdaal 59:06 Oh, yeah. Th- th- those are my three life-changing, (laughs) life-changing pieces of tech.

Chris Williamson 59:10 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-

Ali Abdaal 59:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:22 ... now, um, the, the best thing that I've bought. Um, probably a sunrise alarm clock.

Ali Abdaal 59:28 Oh, interesting.

Chris Williamson 59:29 Um, makes, makes fairly ... it's the guy at the bottom down there. Um-

Ali Abdaal 59:33 Yeah. I actually had one of those. I ended up throwing it away because (laughs) or giving it away, I can't, I can't remember, 'cause I just didn't, didn't really use it.

Chris Williamson 59:38 Really? So just for me, I, I want to, uh ... I've got some fairly bad habits around my phone-

Ali Abdaal 59:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:44 ... um, as many other people that are listening might do. And, um, a way that I've found, the best way (laughs) 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. Um, use WhatsApp Web for messaging on desktop.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:02 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:02 And Instagram can also be used through desktop or you can download Flume, uh, which is a desktop app-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:08 ... 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.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:22 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:00:22 So it makes your phone essentially redundant. Um, so yeah, I think it would be ... it would be probably sunrise alarm clock, AirPods, oh, automatic car. Drive an automatic-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:37 Automatic car? Really?

Chris Williamson 1:00:38 Dude. Manual cars. Don't tell me you drive a manual car.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:41 ... no, I mean-

Chris Williamson 1:00:42 Oh, you've got Tesla. You just got Tesla.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:42 ... I've been, I've been driving a manual car for the last, like, (laughs) eight years.

Chris Williamson 1:00:46 Bro. And, uh, h- has your life not been completely changed by not having to use the left-hand side of your body?

Ali Abdaal 1:00:52 No, it really hasn't. (laughs) I've, I've, I've, I've, I've-

Chris Williamson 1:00:54 Ali, we were going so well. We'd done an hour-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:56 I also think about this. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:57 We'd done an-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:58 And 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.

Chris Williamson 1:01:06 Maybe, maybe in Cambridge there's just not enough nose-to-tail traffic. Uh, dude, d- you know how flamingos s- flamingos sleep, like, one half of their body at a time-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:16 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:01:16 ... so they can put... You can be a flamingo.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:18 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:18 With an automatic car, you are a flamingo.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:22 Okay. Um...

Chris Williamson 1:01:25 Oh, man.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:25 I'll have to test that a little bit more. I'll, I'll, 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 turn that on so I don't have to think when I'm in traffic.

Chris Williamson 1:01:35 Did you get the, the full upgrade of-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:37 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.

Chris Williamson 1:01:41 No way.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:42 That's cool, man. I'm excited to see what life in a, a Tesla in the UK is like. I spent a lot of time in America a couple of years ago-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:50 ... in a Th- Model 3 when it just came out. Um, but that was LA traffic, which is no-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:56 ... nose-to-tail on motorways. And then they've got Supercharger stations, like, every 20 kilometers.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:03 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:02:03 Um, and it was a lot of, kind of, big, open driving.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:06 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:02:06 Um, but the integrations and stuff like that are, are sick. So, uh, yeah, man. Look, we, uh, I, I feel like we could k- 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

Chris Williamson 1:02:20 through today, where should they go to check out more of your stuff?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:22 Uh, sure. Uh, so probably my YouTube channel is the main place, so if you just search Ali Abdaal on YouTube, A-B-D-A-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.

Chris Williamson 1:02:36 Dude, thank you so much for today.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:38 Good stuff. Thanks for having me on.

Chris Williamson 1:02:41 Love this. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Love this.