Scott H Young | Ultralearning

Scott H Young 0:00 What I'm trying to focus people on is not so much, okay, what is your schedule, because that's really just up to you, it is what are you doing when you are trying to learn. And that's where I think the Ultralearning approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches, both to formal schooling and to self-education, is that, um, a lot of people just the way they're approaching it. So my, my critique is not, you know, yeah, if you only have 10 minutes to work on Spanish a day-

Narrator 0:24 (laughs)

Scott H Young 0:24 ... 10 minutes is enough.

Narrator 0:25 (laughs) .

Scott H Young 0:25 It's just what are you doing with those 10 minutes? And similarly with programming or with learning Excel or with, you know, enhancing a career skill or what have you, it's all about, um, what are you doing with that time? So that's what we'll talk about in the book. If, if you get it and you read through it and you're worried, you know what, I don't have a lot of time to spend learning, you'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it. Because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lives. (air whooshing)

Chris Williamson 0:58 I am joined by none other than Scott H. Young. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott H Young 1:02 Oh, it's great to be here. Great to be talking to you.

Chris Williamson 1:04 I'm really excited to go through what we are, uh, discussing today, which is Ultralearning.

Scott H Young 1:11 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 1:11 None other than-

Scott H Young 1:12 Ultralearning.

Chris Williamson 1:12 Oh.

Scott H Young 1:13 We both, we both have copies today. There you go. (laughs)

Narrator 1:14 (laughs)

Scott H Young 1:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:14 We both have copies. Have you read it? Have you read it? It's really good. Um, so for the, uh, for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, would you be able to give us a little bit of a background to you, please?

Scott H Young 1:24 Sure. So I've been, uh, writing about learning and psychology and self-improvement for my, for my website for over a decade now. And for a big chunk of that, I spent my time focusing on learning and how do you learn things, particularly outside of school and including the kinds of skills schools don't teach. And part of this book was just me sort of documenting a little bit of my journey and all the really interesting people I've met who have taken on really interesting, challenging self-education projects. And in the process, really discovering how applicable this is to people who, you know, they don't want to do something really crazy, they just want to get a better job or they want to learn a language for their next trip, or they just want to be good at something that's gonna make them feel confident and enjoy their lives.

Chris Williamson 2:07 You did something, speaking of crazy things, you did something pretty crazy a few years ago, didn't you?

Scott H Young 2:14 Uh, well, which, which thing are you talking about? I'd like to know.

Chris Williamson 2:15 The MIT... We'll start with the MIT thing.

Scott H Young 2:18 (laughs) All right. All right. Sure, sure. So, um, this was, this was more than a few years ago now, actually, um, um-

Chris Williamson 2:25 Eight, eight years is it? Eight?

Scott H Young 2:25 I'm thinking back. Yeah, eight years ago, I believe, uh, I did the MIT Challenge. So this was a, a project that I did after I graduated from university. And so I'll give a little bit of a backstory just so that, just to make it so you can understand why I would try to do something like this.

Chris Williamson 2:39 (laughs)

Scott H Young 2:39 But I, uh, I went to university and I had studied business. And I had kind of gone into that thinking, "Well, I want to own my own business. I want to be an entrepreneur, therefore I should study business." And I only learned after a number of years (laughs) in school that what business school mostly is about is how do you be a good middle manager in a large company. It's not really telling you how to start a business. It's like, "Here's how you can be VP of whatever in blah, blah, blah Corp." And so I graduated with this idea that, "Oh, I shouldn't have picked this. I should have majored in something else." Now, I did enjoy my time at university, but it was something of a I don't really want to go back and, and do more studying and do more of that experience. And so, um, uh, the big thing that I had been considering as an alternative when I was going into school was computer science, because computer science, you learn how to program, you learn how to make things, like the whole world is run on technology now. So even if you're not a coder, you still kind of need to understand computer science a little bit to sort of succeed, particularly as an entrepreneur online, which is where I was wanting to head with my career. And so, uh, I was thinking, "Well, should I go back to school? Should I go back for another four years?" And that didn't seem very appealing. And around that time, I stumbled upon some classes put on by MIT. So they have a bunch of their classes where they record the whole lectures, they put all the materials, throw it up online, anyone can access it. You can access it right now. It's MIT... So I think it's ocw.mit.edu but if you just google MIT OpenCourseWare, you'll find, you know, hundreds of classes. And so when I found one of these classes, I took it and I was like, "You know what? This is better than most of the classes I took in school, like the ones that I paid money for." So I, I, I took one of these classes and I thought, "This is great." And I was... did a little tinkering around. I was like, "You know what? Maybe you couldn't just take a class, maybe you could take all the classes that you would need for a degree." So this, this sort of piqued my curiosity because I was looking around and it didn't seem like anyone had tried to do this before. I don't know, maybe there's someone who did it and it is escaped my attention. But I couldn't, I couldn't find anyone who tried to do this before and I thought, "Why has no one tried to do this before?" And so I dug through and I spent about six months researching and putting it together. And obviously doing it this way where you're just doing it online self-study with courses is a bit different than being an actual MIT student. But with a few, like, I would say not too big alterations, you can learn pretty much close to the whole curriculum that an MIT student would do. So this kind of got me excited and, uh, uh, as I was going through it, I realized that once you get outside of the school, once you sort of, you stop having due dates for assignments, you have to go to this lecture hall for your exam, you have to show up to this on time, I could watch videos and you could watch them faster, speed through the parts where they're rambling, you know, slow down, re-watch parts that are, um, confusing to you, that you could actually do it even faster than when I was in university. So this sort of led to this idea, okay, well, what if I tried something a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more challenging for myself? And so I, I set this goal, this MIT Challenge to do this project over one year rather than the, the sort of typical four. Uh, I mean, I didn't take the summer off, but still, like, uh, over 12 months. And so that was sort of the first little project I did, and that kind of led me to doing some other projects and led me to meeting a lot of people who have done cool projects and that's sort of how we, how I got to this, this book Ultralearning, because I think it has a lot of implications for other people.

Chris Williamson 6:02 I don't think that you can class doing a four-year MIT computer programming course in one year as a little project.

Scott H Young 6:09 (laughs) (coughs) Well, I mean, there are people who I covered in the book that have accomplished projects much larger than that. Uh, one of the people that I, I thought his story was fascinating was Eric Barone, who he basically, about the same time I started the MIT Challenge, worked for five years straight building his own video game. And I've done that a little bit. I did, I played around with that a little bit when I was in high school into video games and stuff. I think the average person does not really appreciate how multi-talented you need to be to create your own video game. You need to be good at music. So most people can maybe play the piano, never mind compose original music in multiple instruments. You need to be able to do art, you need to be able to do programming, you need to be like game design, you need to be able to do... There's like even within those things, there's multiple subspecialties that typically require a team of people. So he worked on this for five years, had to completely learn tons of skills from scratch. The game he released, Stardew Valley, ended up becoming a massive hit and made him a millionaire pretty much overnight. So I think in, in comparison to some of these people, I feel like my projects are little, but-

Chris Williamson 7:10 Yeah.

Scott H Young 7:10 ... I know obviously it's a little bit of a relative comparison.

Chris Williamson 7:13 Yeah, you're totally right. It's big fish, little pond, little fish, big pond-

Scott H Young 7:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:16 ... as soon as you start to delve into-

Scott H Young 7:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:19 ... into this world of ultra-learners, I guess. Um, so-

Scott H Young 7:22 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:22 ... going back, going back to the MIT project-

Scott H Young 7:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:24 ... how many hours were you spending learning per week?

Scott H Young 7:27 So definitely when I started there was a... Well, obviously I'd picked a fairly ambitious deadline for myself. I was a little anxious I wouldn't be able to meet it and I wanted to really, um, go a little bit faster than, uh, what was strictly necessary. So-

Chris Williamson 7:40 Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 7:41 ... there are 33 classes that would have been made up the degree, um, with some minor substitutions, but roughly the same amount of credit hours. And I did 32 of those in that one year. I did one, one of the classes before as sort of a test. And so I started off with like, uh, basically the pace of about a class a week as I was going through it-

Chris Williamson 7:59 (laughs)

Scott H Young 7:59 ... because that's what I wanted to do. But if you do the, if you do the math in your head, 32 classes, um, 52 weeks in a year, 32 classes. So that's actually a little too fast. So I did that for the first, I think maybe the first nine or ten, I did it in roughly a week. Uh, one or two of them, I did a little bit longer. And then it was like, "Okay, this is working, let's slow it down a little bit." So one of the problems with doing one class in a row, which I would not recommend to the average person, this was just sort of an artifact of how I did my project, is that it kind of makes it cramming. It's easier to forget things if you learn it over a short period of time. So I switched to doing it so that I would be doing like three to five classes in parallel over like a couple of months. And so that was how I did the rest of the classes, um, is sort of over that a little bit more delayed pace. So in the beginning it was, it was actually a pretty intense schedule, probably about 50 to 60 hours a week, but then later on it was probably a little under full time, maybe 35 to 40. So not a trivial amount, mind you. I, I don't want to-

Chris Williamson 8:54 (laughs)

Scott H Young 8:54 I don't want to be like saying that, "Oh, that's easy. I could do that." But if you think about how much time you spend when you go to university, not to mention that you're giving up four years of your salary, not to mention that you're probably paying tuition that you are, you know, taking out student loans, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the, the way I did that project was a lot less onerous than getting an actual degree. So it sounds kind of, you know, I think it sounds a little weird, but I think when you consider the status quo, I think that's the thing that maybe we should be questioning

Scott H Young 9:23 a little more.

Chris Williamson 9:23 Yeah, there's a reframing going on here, isn't there? It definitely is, as I-

Scott H Young 9:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:27 ... read through Ultralearning, it, it, it just strikes such a question about the current education system. And I think we can probably, we can probably get onto that a little bit later and we can riff-

Scott H Young 9:39 Sure.

Chris Williamson 9:39 ... we can riff on the fact that education maybe doesn't necessarily work for everyone. Also, I know that (clears throat) some of the listeners and some of the guys behind the Modern Wisdom Project and the team will be thinking that your experience with your degree sounds very familiar. And it is verbatim what I would have said about mine. Went to Newcastle University, did a business management degree because I thought that if I did a business management degree, I would learn how to run a business. Because if I run a business-

Scott H Young 10:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:02 ... I'll be rich and (coughs) I'll make passive income and I do this, that and the other. Um, and I, I, it was-

Scott H Young 10:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:09 ... I started my business while I was at uni. So I'm, I sat down next to my-

Scott H Young 10:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:13 ... business partner, my future then to be business partner at my first ever seminar and now 13 years later, we're, we're still together. Haven't got rid of each other yet. And um-

Scott H Young 10:22 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 10:24 ... uh, what I was seeing was this contrast between what I was experiencing in the real world of business-

Scott H Young 10:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:28 ... and what I was learning. And-

Scott H Young 10:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:30 ... I was immediately ... Maybe some people more typically would, uh, find the, uh, lack of directness from learning to application when they eventually get into the job market. For me-

Scott H Young 10:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:43 ... for me, I was becoming disenchanted with education as I was going through it, which was like an especially-

Scott H Young 10:50 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:51 ... like brutal realization. And then I went on to do a master's in international marketing, not because I wanted to, but because I thought this is so transactional and easy that I, for the sake of one more year of commitment-

Scott H Young 11:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:04 ... I might as well crack it out. And then once that was done, I was at the end of academics. And I think a lot of people, a lot of the listeners may think the same that you've done this... You know, with my year in industry and my, um, master's degree, I was in full time education for over 17 years. Full time education, like that was it.

Scott H Young 11:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:25 From like the age of five until the age of 23. Like, there we go.

Scott H Young 11:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:30 Like that, that's your, that's your job. So the fact ... And, and then, whereas now my ... I'm 31 years old and my passion is to learn new shit all the time, but somehow the education system had managed to beat that out of me. So I can see-

Scott H Young 11:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:44 ... I can see your desire to do it and, and other stuff. So before we get into the format and some of the awesome stories in Ultralearning, could you run us through some of the other projects that you did, like your portraits, your portrait drawing and stuff like that?

Scott H Young 11:56 Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. So, um-So I've done a couple other projects, like public projects. I think, like, like you, I'm always learning things. It's just, I don't always try to do them up so that I'm trying to document everything and-

Chris Williamson 12:09 Yeah.

Scott H Young 12:09 ... and post it online so for, for people to see. The, the MIT Challenge was the first big one that I did like that. I did another one a little bit after that, um, and this kinda goes to how I got into doing this. So when I was in university, I spent a year, uh, studying abroad in France so it was an exchange opportunity. And like a lot of people who go to another country and are gonna be there for a long time, you get this idea of like, "Oh, I can learn another language and I can come back and I'll be fluent in French and, you know, I'll be so impressive and everything." And I had this-

Chris Williamson 12:37 Speak to all of the foreign exchange girls and all that sort of stuff.

Scott H Young 12:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott H Young 12:40 Right? And so I had this idea in my head and I went to France and a funny thing happened. Uh, all the people around me just spoke English all the time. So all my friends spoke English, including the French ones.

Chris Williamson 12:52 (laughs)

Scott H Young 12:52 And it was getting really frustrating. It was, it was. It was getting really frustrating because I had been expecting, oh, I'm gonna be learning French really well and I'm, you know, studying at home and, like, I've also got my other business classes and stuff to do and I'm just sorta like, "Well, what gives?" You know? Like I'd try to speak to people in French and they're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. I'll ... But, like, you don't speak very well and I'm gonna speak to you in English." And, and it was frustrating and, and so it was around this time that I met a very interesting guy who I talk about in the book, Benny Lewis. And Benny Lewis, um... Well, I should just preface this with saying that, like, like most people who are in this situation where you, you go and you think you're doing something and is that I thought to myself, "Well, maybe I just don't have enough time." Like maybe actually learning another language, you know, what, what made me think I could do it in a year? Maybe it would take, like, five, 10 years and, and I just didn't have enough time. And I met this guy, Benny Lewis, who does it in three months. Now I mean, I'm not saying he's fluent after three months. That's sort of his kind of goal, but it's more an aspiration than saying he d- achieves it every time. But the thing that struck me was just how radically different his approach was because for me, I'm going there and being like, "Ooh, I hope that they accept me speaking French." (laughs) He's just like diving right into conversations, he's speaking from the very first day, he's getting tons of practice in and, and achieving quite a bit in a three-month period of time. So seeing that contrast was one of the main motivators for me to do the MIT Challenge, was just this kind of... It was a little bit of that, you know, uh, what, what is it? The Matrix, you know, taking whatever the pill moment is-

Chris Williamson 14:18 The red pill. You're gonna be the red pill.

Scott H Young 14:19 ... where you're sorta like, "Oh, this is..." Yeah, this is, like, different from, "Oh, maybe I don't have to do this the way that everyone else is doing it." And, and I, of course, I applied it to computer science there, but obviously, that example stuck in my mind. I was thinking about, you know, language learning and about, "Oh man, if I had just done it that way from the start, maybe things would have been different." And so around that time, I had a roommate and he was planning on going to a master's and he wanted to do some travel and so we started getting to talking and I was telling him about this. And I was like, "You know what? What if we went to try to learn languages?" And he was a little skeptical. He's like, "Well, I don't know about that. Like, that sounds kinda hard." (laughs) And this kinda thing, but I, I think I persuaded him and we ended up doing this project, uh, that I called The Year Without English where it was basically we would go to four different countries, Spain, Brazil, China, and South Korea, with the idea that we wouldn't speak English in those countries. I mean, we weren't perfect in every country, particularly in Asia, but that was the motivation, that you land day one, we speak only in that language to each other. Everyone we meet, we speak in that language. We're not like, "Oh, I don't know whether I'm ready yet to speak Spanish." It was day one going with that.

Chris Williamson 15:22 Learn or die. (laughs)

Scott H Young 15:23 And the funny thing... Yeah, and the funny thing was, is that although when I describe this to other people, 'cause I've, I've seen the reaction when I describe this project to other people. They're like, "Oh my god, I could never do that."

Chris Williamson 15:34 Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 15:34 The funny thing was, it was way easier than my time in France. So the kinda irony is, is that the staying at home, being in that bubble of English speakers, not being in immersion and really trying to learn French was harder than just, you know, ripping the Band-Aid off, going straight into immersion from day one and doing that process. So we did that project which, uh, you know, even my friend who was really skeptical in the beginning, he can speak those languages too and he, we went through and did those four countries. And, uh, I've done some other projects since, like you mentioned, the drawing the portraits and I did one recently in learning, um, quantum mechanics and I've done some others for cognitive science and things like that. But it's always for me just trying to... What's the assumption that everyone has about how you have to do things that if you break, you're able to get better results? And, and that's sorta what I wanted to try to cover in this, in this book is give people that kinda mindset.

Chris Williamson 16:23 Well, I mean, you've definitely got some non-typical results there, I think, learning four languages in the space of a year. What fluency did you get to with, with them?

Scott H Young 16:32 So I will say this. Defining fluency is really fraught because I find that for people, especially people who are, um, you know, not fluent in a lot of languages, that there's kind of two assumptions they have to deal with. One, the one assumption is, uh, this is comes from a story where I told someone this story and they said, like, "So do you think you could ask for, like, you could probably ask for directions in, like, a taxi?" And I was like, "Well, that's actually really easy." Like I, I could, I could give you that in half an hour in almost any language. Like, there's very little to that. That's not really a difficult task. On the other hand, there's people who think you're 100% fluent, like you're completely bilingual-

Chris Williamson 17:07 Yeah.

Scott H Young 17:07 ... and this kind of thing and obviously, that's not the case either. The way I would like to qualify it is what we were able to do rather than some particular language exam. So in, uh, the, uh, the Spanish and, um, Portuguese, we were able to make friends, we had an active social life, we were living in the language. We could go to, like, you know, restaurants, do whatever we needed to do in the countries. It probably would've been wr- like Spanish would've been maybe on the cusp of be- being able to study in it, but maybe a little bit more work would've been required to get to that level of technical understanding. For the Asian languages, they're obviously just harder. There's more new vocabulary to learn, they're more different, um, so you have to spend more time learning them.But in Chinese, I feel like we got fairly well. For those of you who are or have some background in this, um, uh, the level I reached, I wrote the, what's called the HSK4 exam. So China puts on four diff- or sorry, they put on, um, language exams that are divided into six categories. And so at the time, I wrote and passed the, uh, level four, which is considered to be kind of a- an intermediate level exam. But it can give you a sense of four out of six. It's a little bit hard to explain if you don't know-

Chris Williamson 18:17 Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 18:18 ... what the six levels mean, but it can give you kind of a, a broad qualitative sense. Korean, we were a little bit weaker on, mostly just because doing four languages in a row, we were getting a little burnt out. But I feel like, um, even there, we were able to get to a level where again, like, going to restaurants and talking to people and making friends and having conversations is just, it's a little bit more limited. You got to pull out the dictionary a little bit more often.

Chris Williamson 18:41 Yeah. I think for most people when they think about languages, competence to just go day to day is what most people would aim for.

Scott H Young 18:49 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:49 I don't think many people want to be able to write War and Peace in, like, Korean.

Scott H Young 18:52 Right. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:53 They just, they just want, they just want to, want to be able to say, "What's the, what's the best dish here? What's your phone number? Like, what, where's good to go for evening drinks?" And blah, blah, blah. Like, they just want to get around, right? That's probably the, the normal layperson's desire for it. Um, but what's ridiculous is I did, uh, two years of a half GCSE at Spanish-

Scott H Young 19:13 Hm.

Chris Williamson 19:13 ... and, and fa- (laughs) and didn't far, got, got a D, which is like (laughs) so lame, um, at school.

Scott H Young 19:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:21 And now, like, outside of mi amor Chris, it's like, wha- like, that and, and some-

Scott H Young 19:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:27 ... some stuff I've picked up whilst partying in Ibiza, like that's- (laughs)

Scott H Young 19:30 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:30 Like, I've, I've almost completely forgotten it. So to hear that you were able to achieve-

Scott H Young 19:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:35 ... competency in four languages in a year will be a, a big surprise to a lot of people.

Scott H Young 19:41 Well, so that's the thing. I feel like when I, w- before I did this, so again, my experience from France that I thought, like, even learning a language conversationally in a year I thought was very fast. Like, I thought, "Well, you know what? Maybe it just can't be done." And after, like, doing the research for this book, I find that, like, kind of the, the critique some insiders have is not that, you know, not that it can't be done, but to the level of fluency that I'm thinking right now, it's just kind of like, "Well yeah, of course you could do that." (laughs) So there's a lot, like it's, it's actually lots of people do it. So it's not even really, oh, you need to be some kind of genius to do this. It's just do you have the right approach? And that's really what I try to talk about in the book, um, you know, particularly directness is one of the things we talk about. Because I think the way they teach languages in school, I don't really want to fault language educators because often they're trying to get the students to do the right thing. The problem is just the assumptions of how classrooms work make it very hard to break out of it. If a teacher says, "Okay, well, you need to practice this at home," and then they don't do that-

Chris Williamson 20:40 Yeah.

Scott H Young 20:40 ... I can't really fault the teacher. But at the same time, I can kind of fault the paradigm of going to a class and the way students think is, "I should do a little bit of homework on piece of paper and that should be enough." Whereas the immersive approach, which by the way you don't need to be in the country to do that. If you want to do that, there are services like, um, um, like italki.com and LiveMocha where you can jump on and have conversations with people around the world. If you get language partners, it's free. And so this is something you can totally do. You can even, you know, have a, if you have a spouse or someone who's interested in learning the language too, you could have a little, "Okay, at home we just speak in this language and practice with each other." So it's, I don't want to make this idea that like, well, you have to go on some special full-time immersion project to do this. It's just about thinking critically about how you want to acquire those skills. And I mean, languages are just one example.

Chris Williamson 21:29 Yeah.

Scott H Young 21:30 Particularly.

Chris Williamson 21:30 So one of the things that might be going through a number of people's heads at the moment before we get into the-

Scott H Young 21:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 21:35 ... specific strategies of ultralearning-

Scott H Young 21:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:38 ... itself, one of the things would be, "Well, I can't dedicate 50, 60 hours a week or 40 hours a week-"

Scott H Young 21:45 (laughs) Yeah, yeah, of course.

Chris Williamson 21:45 "... to doing computer programming. I can't, like, just drop my life and, like, blast, blast off to Spain with my, with my mate for a bit." So-

Scott H Young 21:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:54 ... their concern might be the, um, amount of time dedication to that. But I'm pretty certain having read the book that the time that you put towards something doesn't actually need to be that, that, uh, ruthless. You can still get, elicit-

Scott H Young 22:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:10 ... some pretty strong effects with a lower time investment.

Scott H Young 22:14 So you, what you're saying is exactly right. So I kind of define the ultralearning approach in my book as, uh, aggressive self-directed learning. And I think a mistake, and it's, it's a common one because when you want to talk about dramatic stories, those are probably gonna be someone who did something in a short period of time, right? Like, that's just sort of what makes for a more interesting story. And that necessarily is going to lean towards people who are doing it full time. So that, that is a lot of the stories that I have in the book. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And I think one mistake to draw from that is, "Oh, me being able to learn Spanish full time is critical." Or, "Me being able to, you know, I'd like to learn computer programming but I can't really put in more than two hours a week on it and, you know, so this doesn't apply to me." But what I'm trying to focus people on is not so much, okay, what is your schedule? Because that's really just up to you. Is what are you doing when you are trying to learn? And that's where I think the ultralearning approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches, both to formal schooling and to self education is that, um, a lot of people just the way they're approaching it. So my, my critique is not, you know, yeah, if you only have 10 minutes to work on Spanish a day-

Chris Williamson 23:20 (laughs)

Scott H Young 23:20 ... 10 minutes is enough. It's just what are you doing with those 10 minutes? And similarly with programming or with learning Excel or with, you know, enhancing a career skill or what have you. It's all about, um, what are you doing with that time? So that's what we'll talk about in the book. If, if you get it and you read through it and you're worried, you know what, I don't have a lot of time to spend learning, you'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have, but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lives.

Chris Williamson 23:50 Yeah,

Chris Williamson 23:51 we are. So we've danced around it for long enough. We, we're going to talk-

Scott H Young 23:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:55 ... aggressive self-directed learning, which is an ultralearning-

Scott H Young 23:58 Sure.

Chris Williamson 23:59 ... project. Where do we start?

Scott H Young 24:01 So the first step is to figure out what you want to learn and I think that, that sounds like a trivial step. And for some people maybe, you know, you've really wanted to learn guitar or painting or French for a long time, so you kind of already know what you wanna learn. But for a lot of people, it's not that they wanna learn something particular, but they wanna get some outcome in their life. So they wanna get in shape or they wanna start a business or they want to get a promotion or they want to do... They wanna do something else and learning is how you get at it. And so the starting point is to figure out, well, what is the skill that you actually wanna learn? So there's lots of different ways you can go about it. I have different techniques in the book for kind of eliciting ways to figure it out. One of the ways I really like is what I call the expert interview method. So basically if you want to, let's say, improve your career, a good idea is to get some idea of what skill you might wanna learn. So okay, I'm an engineer and what, what if I improve my public speaking ability? And then you talk to some people that have the job you, y- that you want or that have already accomplished what you want and you just sort of ask them, "Hey, what do you think about if I did this kind of project or got better at this?" Now, I do think it's okay to learn something and then realize, oh, that wasn't exactly what I needed. That's sort of part of the learning process. But part of what I talk about in Ultralearning is the process of thinking about why do you wanna learn what you wanna learn is not just an issue of, well then I might learn the wrong thing. But even if you, um, even if you decide what you want to learn, like you wanna learn French, thinking about how you're going to use that French can be really informative for how you should actually practice it. Because I would have a completely different set of recommendations for learning languages if your goal was to learn, like, ancient Greek or something, to read classics. Like it, it's... You're not gonna be trying to have conversations with people in ancient Greeks, Greek at like parties and stuff. Um, you're gonna be approaching it in a different way. So thinking about why you want to learn something and what's the situation you want to apply it in, um, is so critical. So that's another principle I talk about in the book, uh, directness, which is essentially that, uh, 100 years of educational psychology research shows us that transferring skills from one domain to another is really hard to do. Uh, and it only usually happens once we're near a level of mastery. So at a beginning standpoint, it's very difficult. And so the Ultralearning approach and what I talk about in the book is always to try to fine-tune how you're practicing it so that it more matches the situation where you want to apply it. And, uh, this has a lot of profound impact because if you choose the wrong way to practice it, you can spend hundreds of hours learning something and then be like, "Oh, this isn't actually very useful." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:30 Yeah. I think a lot of people will potentially spend quite a bit of time thinking about what it is that they want to learn. And I know certainly that I get stuck in that, um, paralysis by analysis or the, the pla-

Scott H Young 26:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:44 ... the planner's dilemma as me and some of the guys-

Scott H Young 26:47 Right.

Chris Williamson 26:47 ... have come up with in the Modern Wisdom group, um, that the, the terror or the understanding that compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world-

Scott H Young 26:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:56 ... is a little bit of a blessing and a curse.

Scott H Young 26:58 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:58 Because if you... You're always terrified, well, if I take the wrong fork in the road, think about all of the missing compounding interest that I'm going to lose out on (laughs) like-

Scott H Young 27:05 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:05 And you're like, "Oh, hang on a second, man. Like you're not doing anything." So choosing something-

Scott H Young 27:10 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:10 ... and also-

Scott H Young 27:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:12 ... I know that you'll, that you'll talk about this, but an Ultralearning project based on my understanding of it, the skills that you learn from one will make all subsequent ones more easy. The fact that-

Scott H Young 27:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:22 ... there are particular cadences, there's the strategies, there's simply the art of like a massive amount of recall, which is probably (laughs) gonna be in like every Ultralearning project and like progressive overload on strengthening a muscle, the second time that you periodize your strength training, you will have greased the groove from the first one and will pick up some skills more easily.

Scott H Young 27:45 So that's one of the things that I, I try to talk about in the book is that, you know, you could, you could read this book, but reading the book is just the starting point because even though I've tried my very best to try to break down the core ideas and what I've learned from doing this, there's a lot you have to learn from experience. And that's again, kind of this directness idea in the book is that just reading about something does not necessarily make you good at it. And so what I'm hoping to give people is sort of a roadmap, but obviously they have to, you know, start driving their car along it. And so for, for me, when I'm giving people suggestions for Ultralearning projects is don't sweat too much about which ones you pick for right off the bat. Pick a short one, doesn't have to be crazy ambitious. Pick something you'd like to learn because you're gonna start to find these things, um, like what you said. You, you were talking about cadences and rhythms, but lots of things like, "Oh, this is the difficulty with this. This is the thing that you really have to pay attention to," versus, "Oh no, actually I was spending a lot of time with this. That's actually not a problem. I don't need to worry about that." Not to mention there's a lot involved with the self-motivation angle. So a big skill you'll learn is just like you said, how do you pull the trigger on projects? How do you design them so that you actually can finish them? You know, so many people come to me and they, they tell me, "Oh, you know what? I'd really like to do this, but everything I start, like I start learning guitar, two weeks later, I give it up. I start learning French, I give it up. I start doing this, I give it up." And a big part of this process is, okay, let's get through one complete very like even if it's a small project so you can be like, "Ah, this is start to finish how it works." And then you can just iterate and repeat. So a lot of what you're learning when you do these projects is not just the approach to learning guitar or French, but how do I have this lens, this eye for viewing all the things in my life and how do I accomplish them and finish them and, and break down things that I don't know how to do right now?

Chris Williamson 29:30 Yeah. So would you potentially suggest that people aim towards one which is slightly less, uh, ambitious than trying to do a four-year degree in one year? (laughs)

Scott H Young 29:41 (laughs) Yeah, that, that project... But I mean, that project was my first kind of public project, but I think I kind of came to it after taking a lot of smaller projects as well. So I wouldn't recommend doing something crazy ambitious unless you have, like, you look back at your track record and like, "Well, maybe I haven't done an Ultralearning project, but I've, you know, started my own company and done this, this and..."

Chris Williamson 30:00 Yeah. You've got a consistent... Yeah.

Scott H Young 30:01 There's some people... Yeah.Some people have that, but if you don't feel like you have that, don't feel like this concept isn't for you. That's I guess my, the point I'm saying, that you can break it down to something very small. So one of the things I often recommend is, you know, pick a goal that you can, that is really bite-sized. It, it seems kind of contrary to the idea of ultralearning, but, you know, "I wanna learn enough Spanish for my upcoming trip to Madrid so that I can, you know, order tapas at a restaurant," is a perfectly fine, you know, month-long project to do on the side, you know, after work, before your vacation. That's totally fine.

Chris Williamson 30:31 Yeah.

Scott H Young 30:32 So don't think that they all have to be these big dramatic projects. But when you start speaking in Spanish in Madrid, maybe you'll think, "Hey, you know, maybe I can-"

Chris Williamson 30:39 And keep this going.

Scott H Young 30:39 ... "be fluent in this one. Maybe I could do something bigger." Right, exactly.

Chris Williamson 30:42 Got you.

Chris Williamson 30:43 So we've chosen our project.

Scott H Young 30:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:45 The listeners have decided what it's going to be. They haven't waited around for too long, they've not obsessed over it. They've got their project. Where are they going next?

Scott H Young 30:53 So the next thing to do is to look at what is the actual mechanism you're going to use to learn it. That sounds a little abstract, but I think it's something that we often don't think about because when you're in a classroom, the teacher's like, "Okay, here's the textbook. You know, sit and listen to me talk for a while. Go do your homework and then you'll pass the exam." And maybe there's a little bit of thought to like how should I study this, but there isn't that much choice. You've just been told what to do. And that's so ingrained in our thinking that very few of us like when I talk to them about learning a language, for instance, and they're like, "Well, where, where do you go to study it?" Like the concept of learning it on your own with just sort of like random resources seems kind of impossible to them. And languages are just one example. Like programming or, you know, any other skill you could think of, a lot of people are like, "Well, I need to go into some kind of formal process." And for some, that might be the best way of doing it. But what I usually recommend is doing a little bit of research ahead of time so you can figure out, okay, what are all the materials that I could use for this? If it's a popular skill, there's likely many. So it could be a book you wanna use as a guide. It could be a, an online course. It could be an app. It could be something that you wanna use as a resource. If it's a, if popular skill, again, programming languages are good examples, there might be many resources. You might wanna jot some of them down. The next thing I like to look at is not thinking in terms of the material you're using, but what is the actual activity of learning? Because a lot of people think the activity of learning is, you know, picking up a book and, and flipping through it like this. But really what the activity of learning is, is some kind of practice. And that's true even for book learning subjects. Even if you're, you know, learning about... I had a guy who was, I was helping with who was learning military history and we decided, you know, his practice activity was gonna be to write like some essays or some book reviews of some of these things 'cause he was taking these ideas and then he had to synthesize it and make it into a format so he could have a conversation with people about it. And so focusing on that practice activity is a really important piece because a lot of us just take the material, okay, I'll flip through it and then be like, oh, I'm not very good at this, right? So thinking about the practice material is, is very important. And then once you get into the project, then there's a lot more tweaks you can make and then you can start looking at, okay, feedback. What kind of feedback am I getting? How do I have to turn that little dial? Um, drills, like how can I break apart this more complicated skill to get good at some of the components? Certain skills have like a natural pattern to them. Uh, languages for instance, it's very easy to get hung up on not having enough vocabulary. So once you're in the process of learning it, you're actually speaking with other people, you may want to inject more vocabulary so you can speak better or, or practice grammar if it's, if it's tripping you up. So there's lots of little things you can do once you get started. And, and the way I like to see it about, the way I wrote it in the book is that the nine principles of ultralearning are like these little dials that you can kind of twist so that you're kind of like, oh, this is a little off. And as you do more of them, you get a better feel of like, mm, this is why this isn't working. This dial is turned to, how can I turn it over to where it needs to be? So that would be my advice for, for people who are getting started.

Chris Williamson 33:49 Yeah. You give a, a proposed ratio of planning to work-

Scott H Young 33:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:54 ... uh, I think in advance of a project. And certainly we've been talking a lot recently on this podcast about the difference between strategy and execution. And I, I know one of the problems with executing is the fact that, uh, by strategizing, you don't ever need to actually meet the real world with whatever it is that you're trying to do.

Scott H Young 34:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:14 And your dreams... You're much sooner going to forgo the potential of failure in place of never starting at all.

Scott H Young 34:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:24 Um, that's one of the reasons. Also actually you have to put your money where your mouth is, get off your ass and do something. So-

Scott H Young 34:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:29 ... yeah, I think what I, what I particularly liked was the, um, prescription for not getting bogged down in the planning period. That planning is important and that revisiting the-

Scott H Young 34:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:41 ... and reassessing your learning method is important, but probably less important than just getting started-

Scott H Young 34:48 Right.

Chris Williamson 34:48 ... just doing whatever the project is.

Scott H Young 34:51 Well, the way I like to see it is that the planning you're doing is a little bit like packing for a trip. So you wanna make sure that you got enough in your trip so that you get there and you're like, "Oh no, I don't have my passport or I don't have this," and then the trip's ruined and then you're not doing anything. But at the same time, you could be that person that, you know, brings every single thing from their house in their suitcase and they're lugging it along and, and then they're not able to actually flexibly cope with things in the real world. Like when you're on a vacation, you can buy things in that country. So if you don't have sunscreen, you can probably get it there or something like that.

Chris Williamson 35:19 Yeah.

Scott H Young 35:20 So to continue that metaphor, the way I like to think about it is that the longer and more ambitious your project is, the more time you should spend on planning because... For two reasons. One is just the preparation part, but the other reason is just psychologically you need to commit to it. So one of the things that I found very valuable about the MIT challenge was doing this research ahead of time, and so I spent about six months part time doing some research. And the reason I found it very valuable is that it started to get me in the mental headspace of like, okay, this is what it's gonna be like for a year. This is what I'm gonna have to do. This is how I'm gonna have to think about it. Whereas if I just said on Monday, okay, next Monday I'm doing this, I would not have psychologically prepared enough so that when it starts and things get difficult, I'm like, okay, no, I, you know-

Chris Williamson 36:01 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 36:01 ... to continue the travel metaphor, I'm going home. I don't like this.

Chris Williamson 36:04 Yeah.

Scott H Young 36:04 So...There is a balancing point. I suggest what I call the 10% rule, which is that for, uh, projects you spend about 10% of the total time you expect doing some preparation. Now, again, it really depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to do something smaller, like we were talking about some smaller projects, those are probably best off just getting started with them and then changing your approach while you're doing them. I've done that in projects before. So I mentioned, um, doing this portrait drawing challenge and so I had kind of this approach that I used for like the first two weeks and then I'm like, "All right, I can get about this good but I can't get any better with this. Uh, I need to find something else." You know, hit the brakes, did some more research, found okay, actually there's this different method that I can use and I, I took a little course and learned that method and like, oh, okay, this actually works a lot better. And so you might find that when you're learning as well, that you're doing things and then you're kind of like, oh, this doesn't seem to be getting me where I thought it was gonna go and now I need to read- readjust. So I talk a lot about this sort of like balance between what I call learning and meta-learning. So the learning is the actual thing you're trying to do, you're acquiring knowledge, you're, you're getting information about what you're trying to learn. And the meta-learning, meta of course, uh, refers to when things are kind of about themselves so meta-learning would be learning about learning. And so for, uh, the meta-learning is the kind of understanding how learning in this subject works. So how do you learn a language? How do you learn programming? How do you get good at salsa dancing or public speaking or taekwondo or whatever it is? And that kind of meta-approach there's sort of an oscillation between what you're doing to actually learn the skill and then what are you doing to try to understand that same process so you can note inefficiencies and find, uh, things you can improve in it.

Chris Williamson 37:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:44 One of the things that I think a lot of people may be thinking at, at home is-

Scott H Young 37:49 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 37:49 ... well, like I haven't been to school for ages or I was never a good learner, I was never academic or whatever it might be. Obviously there are-

Scott H Young 37:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:57 ... there are some people out there whose skill acquisition naturally is, uh, pretty rapid. But also-

Scott H Young 38:05 Right.

Chris Williamson 38:05 ... there's, there's, uh, some commonalities between them. What was the story? Was it the Scottish physicist lady? This, uh, Scottish scientist?

Scott H Young 38:17 Mary Somerville?

Chris Williamson 38:18 Yeah. Yeah. Can we-

Scott H Young 38:19 Yes.

Chris Williamson 38:19 Can we hear the story about her 'cause I loved that?

Scott H Young 38:23 Yeah. So Mary Somerville, um, I, I cover her in the chapter on focus and I really loved her biography because she's, um, not the most famous person, like a lot of people perhaps haven't heard of her, but she's quite an accomplished woman in terms of science, um, I think her biggest accomplishment was sort of a translation and expansion of, um, Laplace's, uh, uh, Celestial Mechanics, which was kind of like the follow on to Newton's Principia Mathematica. So very advanced stuff, lots of calculus, lots of like advanced physics for, um, you know, this was the, this was the cutting edge in the 18th century. But the interesting thing about her story is that, you know, she grew up in kind of a poor household in Scotland and she was a woman and so in that time period, you know, she didn't have a choice about like, you know, pursuing science professionally. And so she kind of had to make do with the fact that, you know, people would come over and be like, "Okay, I've come to visit you now. Drop whatever you're doing-"

Chris Williamson 39:16 (laughs)

Scott H Young 39:16 "... and come spend some time with me." Or, or you know, there's a story I really like where she was, uh, you know, she's raising children and she's talking to some colleague who was like convinces her to study botany so she spends the morning studying botany while she's breastfeeding her child.

Chris Williamson 39:29 (laughs)

Scott H Young 39:29 And then there's these kind of little tidbits of her life of just showing dedication to, to learning things. But at the same time, and I mean, it's hard to peer into this because obviously when someone's super accomplished and then they're being modest there's a little bit, you kind of doubt how, um, how modest it is or how much false modesty there is. But you read her biography and there's so many examples of her doubting her own capacity and her like, "Well, like I couldn't, I didn't think I would be able to ever learn a language." And then she learns like six or something like that. So there's a lot of little-

Chris Williamson 39:58 She said she had bad focus, didn't she? She said that she was-

Scott H Young 40:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:00 ... like super distracted.

Scott H Young 40:01 Had bad memory, yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:02 Bad memory. That was it.

Scott H Young 40:03 Yeah, yeah. She had a bad memory. Well the, I picked her as an example for this chapter on focus just because she, uh, she was, um, you know, in this situation where it's not conducive to focus. You know, like you, you think about Albert Einstein or, you know, in, in the quiet patent clerk formulating, uh, his theory of relativity. Whereas this is a woman who, you know, she's got four kids, has got people coming by and she's got to take care of the house and, you know, do all of that kind of stuff. And people aren't taking her seriously (laughs) , or a lot of people aren't. And so you, you don't really have the ability to just, okay, I'm dedicating myself to this. So I wanted to pick her as an example for focus just because it's just sort of a, to show that, you know, so much of what we think of as focus is a kind of choice about what to do rather than simply, you know, being in a log cabin somewhere isolated from the world.

Chris Williamson 40:52 Yeah. I, uh, I absolutely loved that, that story. It's the same as-

Scott H Young 40:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 40:57 ... the Stuart McGill podcast that I did recently where there was a guy who shattered his sacrum and his L5, like just obliterated two of his vertebrae, um, and he was a world record, uh, squat holder. And he said-

Scott H Young 41:11 Geez.

Chris Williamson 41:12 ... "Once I get pain free, I want to go back and break my squat record." And there's like the radiologists have seen his MRI just it, it just looks like a bomb's gone off in his back.

Scott H Young 41:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:20 And they're like, "Look man, you're gonna be lucky to be walking again." And then sure enough, three and a bit years later he goes back, breaks his squat record. And I think that framing-

Scott H Young 41:29 Wow.

Chris Williamson 41:29 ... that contrast effect similar to, um, Somerville's story that you've just given us-

Scott H Young 41:34 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:34 ... there or, uh, Brian Carroll, the power lifter that I'm talking about now-

Scott H Young 41:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:38 ... it, it frames people's own, um, excuses in a really harsh light of day and I think it's so, it's so important for people like me as well, right? Like I make-

Scott H Young 41:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:49 ... I make all the, all the excuses in the world. Uh, I interviewed, uh, we had Peter C. Brown make it stick. We had him on a-

Scott H Young 41:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:55 ... year ago and even-

Scott H Young 41:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:57 ... even hearing, look, you can employ these ef- these, um, by the way if you're listening and you're a recent subscriber you may have missed it, Peter Brown is cited on the back of Ultralearning actually I think, um, as one of the, one of the guys that's helped to, uh, formulate your ideas for this and it's a fantastic episode.

Scott H Young 42:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:13 I'll link it in the show notes below if you want to go back and check it out. But, um, yeah, like I was listening to him say, "Look, there's a formula."... for, you know, repeated exposure is not the key, repeated, uh, recall is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all this stuff. And I'm still telling myself this story about, "Oh, yeah, but-"

Scott H Young 42:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:30 ... "you know, like, I'm tired," or, "I've got this," or this, that and the other. And then there's Mary Somerville, like, uh, baking-

Scott H Young 42:36 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 42:36 ... baking, baking a cake whilst breastfeeding a child, whilst rewriting, like, one of the most difficult things in all of physics-

Scott H Young 42:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:42 ... whilst being, like, under the feet of the kind of, uh, I guess typical, uh, route that women in the 18th, 1800s are supposed to take and all this sort of stuff.

Scott H Young 42:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:54 So what I'm saying is, to the listeners at home, your excuses are probably not as strong as hers. So undertake this for a learning project.

Scott H Young 43:02 (laughs) Well, you know what? I, I, I would take an even... I would take perhaps a softer take, but I, I know from talking to a lot of people that they've had bad experiences in school and they associate school with learning. So when you tell them this is gonna be a big book about learning, it just brings up all this trauma, right?

Chris Williamson 43:16 (laughs)

Scott H Young 43:16 So they have this, like, that nightmare of like, "Oh my God, I've got the exam and I'm not prepared and so I'm not-"

Chris Williamson 43:21 Yeah.

Scott H Young 43:22 ... "doing it." And so one of the things I wanted to talk about, and this is sort of an interesting thing that I, I've had with the people who've read sort of some of the earlier copies, is they come back to me and say, "Hey, you know what? Like, I don't see myself as an ultra learner, but when, when you're talking about this, that," and this, that, I was like, "You know what? I did that for this thing that I got," you know, "I, I did that when I was learning photography," or, or, "when I was, you know, trying to start my business," or, "when I was..." you know, it could be something completely unacademic and they, they're like, "Yeah, but I was doing that." And so the thing I wanna point out is that learning is not school. School is... I don't think there's anything wrong with school and I've learned a lot of subjects that, you know, you could study academically and I think that's great, but when we think about learning, school is just a really narrow aspect of it. So if you weren't good at that narrow aspect, if you, you know, weren't top of your class and you feel bad about it, there are so many other things that you can learn, so many other things that you are learning all the time, things that you're spending time trying to figure out, trying to get better at, trying to improve, that I think understanding the process of learning is really understanding the process of this kind of mental self-improvement. So anything that you want to understand better, get better at, is gonna be through learning. And so this is really what I wanted to try to write the book about, is not to, you know, shame people for not using the right studying approaches or not to make you feel bad because you don't see yourself as a, as an ultra learner, but to point out, "You know that thing that you did in the past that went well? This is why it worked and this is how you can do those kind of things in the future." So that's what I've been trying to do with this book is... And I'm, I'm hoping that when people read it they're gonna see parallels in their own life and just know how to apply that more consistently for the future.

Chris Williamson 44:58 What other strategies have we got? We've got directness, which is a, uh, similarity between the thing you are learning and the outcome that you want to achieve, or the way that you are practicing and the outcome that you want to achieve-

Scott H Young 45:09 Right.

Chris Williamson 45:09 ... on the other side. We've got... We've talked about drilling, which as an analogy I was explaining to someone the other day, is the equivalent in CrossFit of-

Scott H Young 45:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:19 ... looking at each of the lifts individually or working on your pull-up technique and then your, um, your direct learning would be doing a MetCon, doing a workout-

Scott H Young 45:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:29 ... doing what, what, what, what's on the whiteboard. So you drill down-

Scott H Young 45:31 Correct.

Chris Williamson 45:31 ... looking at the specific elements. Um, I'll tell you one of the... in fact two of the, two of my most favorite models which have come out of this. We're big fans of mental models on the podcast.

Scott H Young 45:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:41 And one of them was the, uh, r- rate determining step?

Scott H Young 45:47 Rate-limiting step, yes, yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:49 Rate-limiting step and the other one-

Scott H Young 45:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:50 ... is judgment of learning.

Scott H Young 45:52 Yes, yes.

Chris Williamson 45:53 I love-

Scott H Young 45:53 Okay, so-

Chris Williamson 45:54 I love both of those. Let's talk about them.

Scott H Young 45:56 Happy, happy to jump in. So the, the rate-limiting step is actually a concept from chemical reactions. So a, a lot of times when you have a chemical reaction you have like some molecule here and some molecule there and they like bang into each other and, and they like separate off and you get a different molecule, and often there's more than one step. So for a lot of chemical reactions you're putting the big stuff in a big vat of liquid and, and there's one thing that leads to another thing that reacts to another thing that reacts to another thing, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the concepts, um, from chemistry which I think is really interesting for this process is that sometimes one of those steps is a bottleneck. So it happens way slower or with more energy or more difficultly than, than the other steps and that will be the step that governs the rate of the reaction. So if you can speed up that step, everything else gets faster. So I'm kind of creating an analogy this to learning because sometimes, and this doesn't have to be thinking about things in terms of happening sequentially, but just you can imagine that there are components to the thing that you're doing and one of those will be the thing that governs your overall performance. So the analogy I used, uh, again from language learning was that very often vocabulary is the rate-limiting step, because vocabulary is that if you could just improve your vocabulary, assuming again, uh, not... this is not always the case, but if you're practicing and you're using directness and you're, you're speaking it a lot, if you could just triple your vocabulary, you would be much more fluent than you are right now.

Chris Williamson 47:18 Yeah.

Scott H Young 47:19 That, that, that's just obviously true. So then you can start to say, "Okay, how do I get that vocabulary?" Um, another example could be, uh, you know, if you're talking about mathematics for instance, it could be that understanding, having a really good intuition of one of the core concepts is the thing slowing you down. Or it could be something technical, it could be that you're not doing your algebra correctly, you sometimes make mistakes and that's why you're slowing it down. So rate-limiting step is one of the things that I talk about when you should be keeping an eye for, for drills is like is there one thing that like really if you can get better at this one thing, you'll get better at all the things? And then the other thing I like to look at is what I call cognitive components. So when you are trying to practice a complete skill, like think about driving your car. This is a good example. So when you're driving a car, you're doing a lot of things. You have to have your foot on the accelerator pedal, you have to move it over to brake occasionally, you have to be steering, you have to have your signals, you have to check your mirrors, you have to make sure cars aren't coming at you, make, make sure pedestrians aren't running across the road. You have to make sure that, you know, all the little bells and whistles on your car are like not, you know, saying the engine's on fire and this kind of thing.... and when you start, that feels completely overwhelming, like it- there's so much stuff happening. And so what y- what you can do when you're learning is y- you can often, like, try to focus on one of these elements at a time. Now, obviously as a car, if you just focus on the accelerator pedal, you're gonna crash really easily, but for a lot of other skills, that's not necessary. You can just focus on doing that. So if you're drawing a picture, you could focus on just putting the lines in the right place rather than worrying about the shading at the same time, or if you are working on public speaking, you could just focus on, you know, how is my pacing? Am I going too fast or too slow? And the reason for doing it this way, and there's different ways of splicing apart skills, is that very often the limit to improvement is that when there's so many things going on, it's hard to get better at any one aspect because your mental resources are kind of spread over everything. And so what the sort of deliberate practice approach, or the approach that I talk about in that chapter, is slicing things down so that you can focus on these sort of smaller elements and that there's different ways for doing that for different skills.

Chris Williamson 49:19 Yeah. Moving on to the judgment of learning things. So this is-

Scott H Young 49:21 Right.

Chris Williamson 49:22 ... uh, it's actually not a massive, uh, section in the book. It's only a couple of paragraphs.

Scott H Young 49:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:28 But like, fuck me, it really sideswiped me.

Scott H Young 49:32 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:32 Honestly, Scott, I'm telling you, man, like I was reading it and I was like-

Scott H Young 49:35 Right.

Chris Williamson 49:35 ... that's, that's me right there. There's an asymmetry between how you feel learning is going and how learning's actually going and it's reflected in the data as well, isn't it? At least in the short term.

Scott H Young 49:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:47 And I was just like... So I- my company, we run club nights, right? We have-

Scott H Young 49:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:51 ... about 400 students that work for us. 18 to 21, they're at university doing, some doing difficult degrees, some of them doing less difficult degrees.

Scott H Young 49:58 Right.

Chris Williamson 49:58 But all of them learning, right? And there's, our office gets used like a, um, a private library, typical to a lot of universities. Uh, any uni students that are listening, join a promotions company that has the nicest and most convenient office that you can, become an event manager, they'll give you a key, and then you can just go in and learn in there instead of going into the library. That's, I think, the life hack that a lot of our-

Scott H Young 50:21 Mm-hmm. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:21 ... a lot of our event managers have decided to use.

Scott H Young 50:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:24 Uh, but yeah, I look at their learning strategies and some of the guys are, are, are using a review method and some of the guys are using a recall method. Would you be able to, uh, just take us through judgment of learning for a second?

Scott H Young 50:34 Sure. So I'll, I'll speak about specifically this judgment of learning finding. So this is, um, research, uh, done by Jeffrey Karpicke and Janel Blunt. I believe Janel Blunt was, um, uh, I think it's Karpicke is the lead researcher on that. And he has done a lot of work on the testing effect and, uh, what he calls retrieval. And this is, uh, similar to what you were talking about with the make it stick, that essentially, um, this was a very interesting study. I just thought this result was fascinating.

Chris Williamson 51:00 It's awesome.

Scott H Young 51:00 But they, they took students and they broke them up into different groups and assigned them different studying techniques. So this, students didn't choose what studying technique they were using, they were assigned it. And so I believe the four groups were, one of them was, uh, they reviewed the material once, so meaning like reading it over. The other one, they reviewed it multiple times, and then there was one that was concept mapping, and then the final one was what's called free recall where basically you have a blank piece of paper and you just try to write down everything you remember. So it's not like a, it's not like a test or a prompt, it's just, okay, what do you remember from that? And interestingly, they didn't ask the students which one did they think did do better out of these four, but what they did ask the students is how well do you think you learned the information? So that was the question to them. So they've given them a technique and they said, "How well do you learn the information?" And what was interesting is that the students who did review, repeated review thought that they learned the material the best, and the students who did free recall thought that they learned the material the worst. And when you actually test them, it does the complete opposite. That th- those who do the free recall do above and beyond the best, um, compared to, uh, repeated review. And so the reason, uh, the sort of explanation for this proposed by Karpicke and Blunt and, and other researchers is what you were calling this judgment of learning, is that we don't actually have the ability to peer into our mind and see that there's information stored there. Instead, we use a certain proxy signal to try to guess how well we've learned something, and one of these is considered the fluency of the information. So when you're doing repeated review, you're seeing it a lot and that processing feels easier and easier. So each time you review it, you're like, "Oh yeah, yeah. I remember this, I remember this, I remember this." And that's convincing you that you understand it very well. Now, the free recall people, when you put a blank piece of paper and you try to recall, like I'll give this as an exercise, okay? After this podcast is done, or you can just pause it right now, try to recall what we talked about so far in this podcast. You'll be surprised. You'll be like, "Oh wow, actually it's really hard to remember a lot of things."

Chris Williamson 52:56 Yeah. There's the-

Scott H Young 52:57 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 52:57 ... thing, there was the directness-

Scott H Young 52:58 So yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:58 ... and then he went to Spain and then... (laughs)

Scott H Young 53:01 (laughs) so maybe they can jot down a few things, but the thing is, is that's really hard to do. And so when you're doing this really hard thing, you're like, "Oh wow, I actually don't know this at all." And so your judgment of how much you learned is much lower. However, the act of trying to recall it makes your memories much better. So there's a bit of a paradox here that when you think that you've learned something really well because you can process it really fluently is actually when you don't have it memorized and when you are doing free recall and you're like, "Oh my god, this is so difficult," that's when you're really learning it. And this I think was just sort of a very small slice, but really, um, uh, really typical of the whole ultralearning idea is that something that feels nice and easy and comfortable is actually a lot less effective than the thing where, oh wow, this is frustrating and difficult and hard and, um, and challenging for me, but you're actually gonna learn much faster. So there's this kind of paradox of learning there.

Chris Williamson 53:54 It's the same, especially going back to the CrossFit analogy, the, the strong guys in the gym will continue to work on strength because it, it makes them feel good. They have a degree of fluency in that.

Scott H Young 54:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:05 And they feel, oh, I'm progressing now. Well, yes you are, but you're deficient in this particular area and if you were to work on that instead, your overall game would improve. And the same thing goes for this. I think I'm right in saying that, um, it's actually matched in someone's ability to, uh...... take tests immediately after review. I think in the super, super short term, review is more effective, like very-

Scott H Young 54:31 Right.

Chris Williamson 54:32 ... like hours or maybe even less than hours. Minutes.

Scott H Young 54:34 So, um, I don't know, I don't know the exact timeframe that they did this study. There's been different studies on this. But generally when you show someone something... So the, the basic idea is really easy to understand. Um, if I were to... Like, imagine that there's no delay. Imagine that I, like, put a word on the screen. Let's say the word is dog.

Chris Williamson 54:51 Yeah.

Scott H Young 54:51 And then it's just like, "What was that word?" Well, you're gonna know it for sure, right?

Chris Williamson 54:54 Yeah.

Scott H Young 54:55 Um, however, if, if I say, you know... Like, you read dog, like, you know, 10 minutes ago and then I said, "What was that word?" Maybe you would have forgotten it by now if I just asked you to recall it. Because if you didn't recall it successfully, you don't know what the word is.

Chris Williamson 55:08 Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 55:09 So there is a sense in which review can be a little better in the short term and, um, it's just that we don't really... I guess what, I would put it this way, that our intuitions about how we process information don't actually say a lot about how well we're going to remember information in the future. Eh, e- you all have experienced this when you go to a party and someone tells you their name and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I know that name."

Chris Williamson 55:31 (laughs)

Scott H Young 55:31 And then two seconds later you're like, "Oh my god, what was this person's name?"

Chris Williamson 55:35 (laughs)

Scott H Young 55:35 And so it's, it's when this person tells you their name, it's like, "Oh, yeah, Steve. Oh, that makes sense. I won't forget that."

Chris Williamson 55:41 Yeah.

Scott H Young 55:41 And then five seconds later you forget it. And the reason why is because when he said Steve, you're like, "Yeah, that's a normal name that people have."

Chris Williamson 55:49 Yeah.

Scott H Young 55:49 And e- you were processing it fluently, so you're like, "Oh, okay, I know that." But then when it's two minutes later and you have to be like, "Oh, this guy. What's his name?"

Chris Williamson 55:56 Yeah.

Scott H Young 55:57 You forget it. And it's not just... I'm not here to criticize people for doing this. This is human nature and so I do this the same way. I also forget people's names at parties. The thing is, is that you need to understand this when you're approaching learning projects, when you're learning things like languages or medicine or things which require a lot of, um, memorization or things that have a lot of memory because if you are not approaching it right, you're gonna put in a lot of effort that's just gonna go to waste because it's not actually gonna be, um, stored for recall later.

Chris Williamson 56:24 Introduce yourself at parties as something very memorable.

Scott H Young 56:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:28 Like Xavier or like-

Scott H Young 56:31 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:31 ... yeah, like some, some really exotic name that's never got ... You know someone's gonna be ...

Scott H Young 56:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:35 No, no one's gonna be, "Oh, that's a normal name." I'm like, "Fuck me. Remember Xavier from last night?" Um, but-

Scott H Young 56:39 Right.

Chris Williamson 56:40 Uh, yeah, so moving on-

Scott H Young 56:41 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:41 Moving on to ... Where are we up to now? Like retrieval, I guess? We're kind of in and around there.

Scott H Young 56:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:45 And I guess for a lot of people when they think about learning, they think about memorization, right? They think about, like-

Scott H Young 56:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:51 ... school, remembering formulas for chemistry-

Scott H Young 56:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:54 ... remembering, like, algebraic equations or, um, you know, even in our business degrees, like who was it-

Scott H Young 57:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:01 ... that came up with the scientific management method and stuff? And you're talking about Henry Ford-

Scott H Young 57:05 Yes.

Chris Williamson 57:05 ... from like 100 years ago-

Scott H Young 57:06 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:06 ... and stuff

Chris Williamson 57:07 like that. Um, but r- you know, retrieval, and especially for me, I'm particularly interested in this. Retrieval is learning something or even comprehending it, but then not being able to recall it, is essentially the same as not knowing it. Like if you can't ever-

Scott H Young 57:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:22 ... recall it (laughs) like you've, you're wrecked. So-

Scott H Young 57:25 So, uh, yeah. I was just gonna say on this, uh, point about retrieval. Uh, the perfect sort of illustration of why the ability to retrieve things matters, and i- indeed, not to say the ability to memorize things better matters, but the ability to have knowledge inside your head, so I'll, I'll put it that way, is that in the last 20, 30 years, essentially all human knowledge has been put on the internet, that you can search with the right type into Google in about five to ten seconds, right? But the average person is not 30,000 times as smart as they were in, like, the '60s and so that itself should be an illustration that just merely having the ability to look something up when you need it is not enough to be smart. (laughs) You need to have more.

Chris Williamson 58:06 Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's such an interesting, uh, comment on what most people would consider as knowledge, right? There's a recent, uh, uh, the listeners will know what I'm about to say. Naval Ravikant was on Joe Rogan recently and it is by far one of my favorite podcasts of 2019.

Scott H Young 58:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:23 And in that he talks about people having a simulacrum of intelligence which is just recall. And he's like, "Nobody needs that anymore. Nobody needs to have just recall." He's like, "We have the internet for that. What we need is understanding, comprehension, the ability to link-"

Scott H Young 58:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:36 "... multiple different concepts together." Um, if you haven't already, I'll link you once we, once we've finished the podcast.

Scott H Young 58:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:42 It is an absolute game changer. But yeah, looking at specific tactics for recall, what were the ones which you yourself found to be most useful, or what works best with your particular style of ultra learning?

Scott H Young 58:54 So, um, just, just before I jump into that, one of the reasons, I just wanna bring this up 'cause I thought it was interesting, that, um, retrieval is one of the principles I had, and originally when I was writing this book I kind of thought, well, retrieval is just one of the other ideas. So retrieval is just feedback, that, you know, you just get feedback and therefore, you know, if you try to retrieve things because you're getting feedback, feedback is good.

Chris Williamson 59:14 Mm-hmm.

Scott H Young 59:15 Or retrieval is just directness, that when you do a test if you practice doing something like the test, it's similar to the test and that's why you learn it. And the thing that I found really funny is that re- retrieval is actually a separate thing. There is a separate idea there that is important that is not related to those ideas directly at least, and that was why I wanted to include it. And so the first thing I wanna point out is that a lot of the research on retrieval seems to be done with the kind of memorization tasks that you might loathe, but just because they're easier to study in an experimental setting. So lists of words or matching questions. There has been retrieval stuff on more complicated things, but again, the more complicated it gets the harder it is to study. There might be more confounding effects. So psychologists tend to prefer simple memorization things. However, it's my belief, and I'm stretching a little bit beyond, uh, what the research says exactly, is that retrieval is really a process of all skills. So even though a lot of the research is about like how do you recall a foreign language word when you hear it spoken, it's really a process of everything that you do. And what it is, when you think of retrieval, it is, I'm in a particular situation where there is some kind of cue from the environment. So that could be I'm speaking to someone in another language and I need to communicate something. Or it could be, you know, I'm writing a program and I need to solve this particular problem. Or it could be, you know, I'm dancing and I want to be able to do this kind of turn, or something like this.... and there is a cue in the environment and you need to be able to access this sort of pattern that's stored in your head for dealing with that situation appropriately. And the challenge is that often that cha- that pattern will be stored somewhere but it's not linked to the cue in your mind so this sort of path between where the trigger point is and where the cue is, is not linked together. And so you have the knowledge but you can't use it. And so I talk about, in the book, a lot of different tactics you can use for retrieval but the easiest one is just to practice retrieving things. So when you are doing things, don't have the book open. Put the book closed and try to recall it. Um, you know, when I was reading the, when I was doing the research for this book, I had a bunch of, uh, journal articles, I've got a big binder stack on top of my bookshelf now of journal articles. And once I was sort of discovering this stuff, I was like, "You know what I should do? I should just start writing down what did I learn from this journal article on a blank piece of paper at the end of them." So I got all these blank pieces of paper inserted in between. So this is really easy to do, this free recall stuff, and it really helps you solidify your knowledge. For more specific topics, there's more specific strategies. So flashcards are a good thing to do if you have to learn paired associations. So like an English word and its Spanish word or like some medical term and what it means or, or things like that you can do really well with flashcards. Um, so there's lots of different strategies. I think the thing I want to leave your listeners with right now is just the idea that if you want to be able to perform in a particular situation, you have to actually practice retrieving not just reviewing.

Chris Williamson 1:02:01 Yes. Absolutely. Again, to sing the songs of-

Scott H Young 1:02:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:05 ... uh, Peter C. Brown, the Make It Stick episode, it will be in the show notes below-

Scott H Young 1:02:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:08 ... if you, if you feel like you have a, uh, a particular difficulty with retrieval, Peter's approach for that and spaced repetition were big, uh, uh, fans of Anki on here-

Scott H Young 1:02:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:20 ... and other s- similar spaced repetition flashcard programs. Uh, one of the co-hosts is a doctor who's just completed his medical degree so he's like, he's j-

Scott H Young 1:02:27 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:27 ... he's got Anki just coming out of his, like, eyebrows. He's got Anki growing-

Scott H Young 1:02:31 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:02:31 ... like on the back of his head. Um, so yeah, we've gone, we've gone through retrieval. What are some of the-

Scott H Young 1:02:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:36 ... other principles of ultralearning that you think people, uh, should be aware of?

Scott H Young 1:02:43 Well, so there's, uh, one that I cover in the book which I call intuition, which is really the idea that you're talking about when you were talking about this Naval podcast, which is that people don't need to just have memorized facts these days because if you were like, "What's the capital of Hungary?" I can go up, look that up and Budapest comes up, right? So there is a sense in which a lot of the brute memorization of factual details is a little overrated nowadays. I- I'm not gonna go so far as to say that memorization or remembering things is all as bad and this is why, is that when I was doing the research on intuition, one of the things that was kind of surprising to me is that the question of what does it mean to understand something is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears. Um, there is a really interesting experiment which is called the illusion of explanatory depth. I have it in the book but basically the idea is, um, do you know how a bicycle works? And most people would say, "Oh, yeah. I know how a bicycle works."

Chris Williamson 1:03:40 (laughs)

Scott H Young 1:03:40 And then I say, "Can you draw one?" And the funny thing is is they've done this as a study and they show people trying to draw a bicycle and I don't mean like some, you know, photorealistic rendering. I'm just talking about like do you know where the chains connect and like where the pedals go and stuff? And you see some of these drawings and it's like completely nonfunctional bicycles.

Chris Williamson 1:03:59 (laughs)

Scott H Young 1:03:59 Like the chain connects with the tires and like the pedals are over here and like it's rigid. There's no like handles. So it's in the book. You can look at some of the, um, the diagrams that are, that are from that actual study in there. But the thing that's really important is that why do people get that wrong? Why do people think, oh, I could draw a bicycle and then they can't? And the reason why is that when we're talking about factual knowledge, again this is this judgment of learning, it's really easy to self-assess yourself. So you can say what's the capital of France? And if Paris doesn't immediately come into your mind or something else comes into your mind, well, it's not London, right? Then you just don't know it and you can say, "No, I don't know." Whereas if I say, "Do you understand how a bicycle works?" There, there is a lot of nuance to that.

Chris Williamson 1:04:41 (laughs)

Scott H Young 1:04:41 Like you could understand how to ride a bicycle. You could understand that bicycles are things people ride on streets. But maybe you couldn't draw a bicycle. Maybe you couldn't repair a bicycle. Maybe you couldn't, you know, explain how the gear mechanism works on a bicycle. So the idea here is that understandings are, are quite a slippery concept and when I was doing this research and, uh, looking in particular the story for that chapter was for Richard Feynman, is that a lot of what his sort of magical intuition is, is really actually a lot of stored patterns in math and physics. Not just memorized things but things that he was actively using and working with all the time. And