Productivity Expert: How To Finally Stay Productive: Ali Abdaal
Guests: Ali
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go, but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do when I arrive is open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. Because on any given day, if I'm recording let's say hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
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Ali Abdaal. He is a creator, he is an entrepreneur who came first at Cambridge, and he is a productivity expert. The way that I define productivity is just kind of using my time well and working on things that are meaningful to me and optimizing for happiness. I feel unproductive when I know there is something I want to do and I am not doing the thing because I'm scrolling Instagram.
Procrastination is a problem with getting started. And so the key to overcoming procrastination is that little nudge at the start towards actually getting started. There are a few hacks. The one that I use all the time is the two-minute rule. Two minutes is all you need to change your life.
The way I try to remind myself of this point of "I am enough" is thinking and really trying to internalize that the journey is more important than the destination. We do need a destination, but really, am I enjoying myself day-to-day? Am I kind of living the dream, as it were, day-to-day, and not so much worrying about the goal at the end of it?
Productivity. Procrastination. Two things that all people aspiring to success, or really aspiring to get anything done, often struggle with. Today we're going to try and solve that problem.
Today I'm joined by Ali Abdaal. He is a creator on YouTube with millions and millions of subscribers. He is an entrepreneur. He's a Cambridge graduate who came first at Cambridge and he is a productivity expert. And honestly, he's read more books than anyone I think I've ever met on the subject, but generally about how to become the best version of yourself.
This conversation isn't just about productivity and procrastination. It ends up twisting and turning through a bunch of different topics like relationships, friendships, the meaning of life, and happiness. But what else would you expect from this podcast? You're going to enjoy this conversation. Ali is an incredibly intelligent, intellectual, compassionate, self-aware individual. And he's able to talk in a way that simplifies complex ideas for people like me and you.
So without further ado, my name is Steven Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
I really start here with all my guests because I think it's so foundational to everything that they then say thereafter: getting a bit of context as to who you are, where you came from, and the environment in which Ali was created.
Interesting question. Okay. So I was born in Karachi in Pakistan in 1994, so I'm 27 now. And when I was two years old, my mom and dad divorced and my mom moved us to Lesotho in Southern Africa. It's a country most people haven't heard of. It's surrounded by South Africa, landlocked by South Africa. And we were there for about five or six years growing up.
At that point, my mom really valued education. She was working as a doctor and she knew the educational opportunities in Lesotho were not great. And so we made a plan to move to the UK. And so we came to the UK in 2003. She started working here as a doctor. And we moved around a little bit in different areas in the UK.
And it was really in secondary school that I did in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, where I discovered kind of entrepreneurship and the internet and computers and stuff. And basically all throughout school, I'd be the kid getting decent grades and everything like that, but the thing I would look forward to was going home so that I could do some more coding or tinker on some websites or try and shill my services as a freelance graphic designer or something for five or ten dollars here and there.
And I was making a little bit of money. I lied about my age on PayPal. I pretended I was 18 when I was actually like 13. And I was getting like five or ten dollars from these small businesses here and there and thinking, "Oh my God, I'm making money on the internet. This is incredible."
And then as I went through school, me and my friends, we were all quite interested in the entrepreneurship stuff. We were doing well in school and I was like, "Oh, it would be cool to go to Oxford or Cambridge. It would be cool to do medicine." But really my passion at the time was going home and tinkering with websites. And so that was kind of the environment that I grew up in. Then when I went to university, thankfully I got a place for medicine at Cambridge, which was a great, awesome experience.
Just on that point there. So you were tinkering on websites and loving it. That's the thing you were running home from school to do. But then you go for medicine. What was the driving force behind you deciding not to do the tinkering on websites for a living and going and doing medicine? I mean, you said there that your mother was a doctor.
Yeah, so I think when you grow up in the sort of environment that I did, whereby parents are doctors, all of my mom's friends were doctors, everyone we knew had doctor parents... there are so few viable careers where you think, "What are my job options in life?" Well, it's either doctor or lawyer or engineer. Like, it's literally just those three. And you don't even realize that other jobs even exist. Not in a way where the parents are telling you this consciously, but more like just the narrative that you absorb from the people you're around is that I could be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer.
And so that was always in the back of my mind that, "Oh, it would be cool to be a doctor one day." And when I was around 16, I...
Can I ask why?
I think because doctor seemed like a prestigious thing. And I remember even when I was like six and seven, when people used to ask me what I would want to be when I was older, I used to say either a neurosurgeon or a gastroenterologist. Not even knowing what that meant, but just like a big word that would make me feel cool, and then the adults that I would speak to would be like, "Oh, hello, fancy."
So that in and of itself, where does prestige exist? One would assume that it exists in the mind of others. Like, do you know what I mean? So that's why I was asking. If you had said to me, "I really want to save people's lives," then I'd be like, "Okay, that's the voice inside." But when it's like status...
It was very much status and prestige. And that's the thing that I think about to this day, a lot about, like, now that I've taken a break from medicine. Often if I'm having conversations with my mom, she'll try and talk me back into doing medicine again. One of her bargaining chips on that front is, "Oh, but think about the prestige. Medicine has a certain prestige around it that being a YouTuber doesn't." And that's always like, that side of me that's like, "Well, I want to carve my own path. I don't care about status and prestige." And then there's the other half where it's still like a narrative going through my life that I need to optimize for this sort of old-world prestige.
Instead of happiness.
Instead of happiness, yeah. Which is bizarre, isn't it?
It's completely bizarre. Yeah, this is a strange cultural thing as well, largely. I think with my mom, she dropped out of school when she was seven years old. So doctor, lawyer, anything with prestige was the correct answer. Maybe that's because, and this is me just guessing out loud, when you're an immigrant family, one of the actual biggest predictors of happiness was financial security. And being a doctor offers that.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Where with our parents' generation, especially as immigrants, seeing other people who are happy correlated with other people who had like a big house and nice cars and were going on holidays, which equals financial success, equals "those people did well in their traditional career of banking or medicine or engineering or law." And the narrative of someone like you—entrepreneur, social media, big company—it just wasn't really a thing in our parents' generation.
And you said there like going on holidays and stuff, but I think if I go back to the village in Nigeria where my mom's from, having a good job was actually like survival. It was like being able to eat. It was like much lower things on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was just being able to survive. And then not having a job and an education was like pain from food, no healthcare, no education. Whereas in the Western world when you grow up here, yeah, it means Lamborghini and holidays and stuff. So you take that decision anyway, driven by an external narrative to go and become a doctor.
External, I think there was also partly an internal narrative. And I'm not sure how much of this is me just bullshitting myself, but when I was 16, I made a conscious decision: do I want to do computer science and do the tinkering with websites thing, or do I want to do medicine?
And what I reasoned at the time was two things. Number one, medicine is six years at university; computer science is only three. Everyone says university is great, ergo, six years is better than three years, therefore medicine makes sense.
But the other thing that I thought was that it would be more interesting for my life to be a doctor who knows how to code than to be a coder who knows how to code. And it was really that decision where I realized, okay, why don't I do medicine, keep the coding website stuff on the side, so that I can eventually do some kind of tech startup thing related to medicine? And then medicine becomes a side hustle in a way, before I had the terminology of the phrase "side hustle." And so it ended up not quite working out that way, but certainly from my first year of med school onwards, I knew that I was not going to be a doctor full-time. I was going to do medicine for fun and I was going to make money on the side through a tech startup or something like that.
And did you try a tech startup?
A little bit. So in my second year of uni, I started a company that helped other kids get into med school. So that was like in-person courses. But then eventually because me and my brother knew how to code, we turned this into a software online question bank for the different med school admissions programs. And so that was a sort of subscription billing Software as a Service kind of product, which was the closest I got to a tech startup. I dabbled with a few like medical tech things. I used to do freelance app design and web design for med-tech startups while I was at uni. But when the YouTube channel started and that really started taking off, I sort of realized that the thing I actually want to do is teaching rather than coding.
And then something you talk about in your book is kind of reflecting on your life and figuring out what are your values, what is the thing that you have that intrinsic motivation for. And for me, I always had that intrinsic motivation for business-type stuff and also for teaching. I used to do tutoring from the age of 13 up until now. And those were the times where I felt most alive, in a way, where I was teaching someone else. And the nice thing about being a YouTuber is that it's just teaching at scale. And so I think I found that thing that drives me intrinsically. So now tech startup is sort of a backup option if the YouTube channel fails, if I get struck off the medical register, I can probably start a tech startup.
I always find it a little bit weird that someone would just go on YouTube and make a video. Do you know what I mean? Like that first time when you hear about these big YouTubers starting, whether it's like True Geordie, who I've spoken to here, or Alfie Deyes, who I think became one of the biggest YouTubers in the country... that first decision to record yourself, usually in your bedroom on a shit camera talking to nobody, is a little bit weird. Do you know what I mean? So how did it start for you?
It started for me, so I harbored dreams of being a YouTuber since about 2009. Because I used to follow people like Kurt Schneider and Sam Tsui, who were kind of YouTube cover artists. They would produce covers of popular songs and those covers were amazing. They filmed them beautifully, arranged them beautifully.
And I had a few friends who were really good at singing. And I fancied myself—I was quite into math, I liked the idea of playing multiple musical instruments. So I thought, I want to be the sort of YouTuber where I can play along to songs and my friends who are actually good at singing can sing along to those songs. And that's the sort of YouTuber I want to be. And so I sort of had a few stop-starty moments over those next 10 years, kind of trying and failing at this.
But ultimately the reason I became a YouTuber was because it was content marketing for my medical school admissions business, where I was helping people get into med school, teaching them how to do well in these exams. And no one was really creating decent content for free on the internet about those exams. There were these kind of corporations creating boring, corporate-looking stuff. And I saw that gap in the market.
I was like, great, if I can create these sort of tutorials on YouTube, content marketing, people will watch my tutorials for free, and if they like me enough, they'll sign up to the course. And that's why I started speaking to a camera in my bedroom. It was like, "Alright guys, here are some tips for section one of the BMAT. You know, section one is all about critical thinking, there's 60 minutes and 35 questions, and here's how you do it." And I was so familiar with that stuff, having taught it for five years, that that started to do reasonably okay early on. In the days where I had like 51 subscribers, 52, refreshing the YouTube app every day to be like, "Oh my God, I've got another view!" And then it sort of morphed from there.
Was there a tipping point where you thought, "Fuck, this is going to be bigger than the thing that I intended this to support?"
Yeah, that tipping point was my first video that went viral. And it was a video about how to study for exams. And this was one of those weird things that I look back on. When I started YouTube in June of 2017, I knew that I wanted to make this video—the "how to study for exams evidence-based tips"—at some point further down the line.
It was a topic that I'd researched extensively. People would come to me asking for help on how to study for their exams. There's actually a whole body of psychological research on this that we just don't get taught in school around what are the actually most effective ways to learn. And so I knew I wanted to make a video about this.
But I knew that I wanted that to be like my 100th video rather than my first video, because I knew nothing about cameras or editing or anything, and I reasoned it would take me 100 videos of being bad at it before I could make a video that was actually good. And I thought to myself, "Okay, I really want to put everything into this 100th video so that this video can potentially go big."
And that's kind of what ended up happening. I think it was my 81st video or something rather than my 100th. But that video went viral. I had like 4,000 subscribers before, just sort of slowly building up. And then over the next few weeks, it just exploded up to like 20,000, 25,000. And I was getting all these comments from people who knew me in real life being like, "Oh, I've seen your video. I didn't realize you were a YouTuber." And that was the tipping point which started that exponential growth trajectory that you talk about in the compounding chapter.
So there's two things there. First, because you mentioned compounding there, what have you learned from your experience on YouTube about the importance of consistency? And also, from what typically happens with viral videos, it's so impossibly hard to predict the outcome, right?
So a lot of people on YouTube will make videos called "how to make a viral video" and in marketing it's all like, "here is the secret sauce, here are the secret principles." But in reality, you can only guess a couple of principles, but the outcome is hard to predict. So what have you learned about consistency, but then also being able to predict the outcome?
When I was listening to your compounding chapter, I just found myself nodding along like an absolute maniac to everything you were saying. I think it applies so much to YouTube. These days I teach people how to be part-time YouTubers. And the thing I say is that if you make one video every week for two years, then I 100% guarantee it will change your life.
I can't put any numbers on it; I can't tell you you'll have 100,000 subscribers or how much money you'll be making. But I can 100% guarantee it will change your life, at the very least in terms of the skills and the experience and the contacts and the friends you're going to make through that process. But you have to put out one video a week and you have to do it for at least two years.
Can I just ask on that point there? What is it that would make someone do that? Because I mean, that's like, "clean the floor every day for two years and I promise you it'll work out for you." People don't seem to be able to do those kinds of things without some kind of intrinsic driver. So I'm curious because you could say that to a million people, you could broadcast that through a tannoy, and 95% plus will still fail. So what is it that makes people do the work without a guarantee of outcome?
Yeah, I think again, I feel this is a bit of a cop-out because this is stuff that you talk about: enjoying the process. And this is kind of the theme of the book that I'm writing around how it's actually quite hard to show up week after week, not see any results, not see the views and the subscribers going up particularly quickly.
But the thing that makes it bearable, the thing that makes it fun, is actually just enjoying the process and shifting away from outcome-oriented goals like a certain number of views, a certain number of subscribers, and more towards goals that are 100% within our control. Like, "I just want to make two videos a week, and if I'm happy with a video, then it goes out."
And in fact, even if I'm not happy with the video, it goes out anyway. And everyone I know who has succeeded on YouTube has had that kind of attitude at some point. "I just have to get that video out every Tuesday without fail. It's not an option, it's going to get done." And you know, like you say when we talk about compounding, that video on day one isn't going to do anything. The video on day two or day three or day 24 is not going to do anything. But you find when you're on day 300 and day 600 that actually, all of this stuff has been compounding very, very slowly, and then the results happen really, really slowly and then all at once as soon as you just get that one video that goes viral.
That is, I think, the chapter where I talk about the eighth wonder of the world. With Warren Buffett and my dog Pablo being the opposing investor. And I genuinely think I learned that lesson when I wrote the book. When I look back on my life and I thought about all the things that had compounded in my favor.
Whether it was like my—honestly, I'm going to be completely fact with you—my teeth. I had some problems with my teeth and I thought, "Do you know why?" And I probably reference it in the book... I hadn't been brushing one of my teeth properly. And it never mattered today or tomorrow, the day after, but there I was in that dentist chair having my teeth pulled out. And then my Instagram was the same, my health and fitness at the moment is the same, my business was the same. And it just goes to show that it's not those key critical big decisions we make to drop out; it's that compounding small, almost irrelevant decisions.
But people don't... because I heard you started working out?
I did, yeah.
And then you stopped?
No, so I've had a personal trainer now for the last eight months or so.
There you go, amazing.
And I've been going on and off with the workout thing since the age of 18 and never done it properly until I got a personal trainer. Where now I'm having to show up, I'm paying someone 30 quid an hour to basically just be with me while I'm doing stuff. And that has been the thing that's given me the most results.
So I think whatever I find in my life for things that I actually care about, where I'm like, "Okay, I actually care about becoming a happy, sexy millionaire or whatever," let me try and figure out ways that will remove my own need for discipline and willpower from that equation and instead get an accountability buddy or get a coach or pay a friend 100 quid if I don't do the thing. This was what my brother and I did when we were trying to motivate ourselves. I was doing songwriting; he was doing stand-up comedy. We were like, "Right, if we don't do this every Thursday for half an hour, we're going to pay each other 50 quid."
Things like that to remove the choice, the motivation, the willpower, the discipline... the more of that can be outsourced to someone else or removed completely, the more I find I actually get stuff done. And then I don't have to worry about it because I'm like, "Okay, this is taken care of. I just show up."
I guess you're moving the motivation. As opposed to removing it, you're moving it to another pact. Nir Eyal refers to it as what you've described there: a financial pact. Where now your motivation is to not lose 50 quid. Because that is a greater motivating force than you have within yourself to work out. That's interesting. Is that sustainable?
No, it's not.
Okay.
This is all the stuff that I'm researching for the book at the moment. And you talk about this as well: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. And the way that I think of it when I think back on my life is that everything that I've done sustainably has been because of intrinsic motivation. I've genuinely enjoyed the thing.
But you can genuinely enjoy a thing and still find it really hard to get started. And I think that's where the biggest procrastination comes in for all of us, where it's actually just showing up to the gym—that's the hard part. Once you're there, it's kind of easy. It's writing those first 10 words, because once you've started writing the first 10, it's kind of easier to enjoy the process of writing the rest of them.
And so the way I think about it is to get over that hump of procrastination, that activation energy to get started... at that point, I will use every tool in my arsenal to just get me to do the thing for two minutes. Because I think once you do the thing for two minutes, it becomes so much easier to actually enjoy the process and sustain it.
And you're so right when it comes to procrastination. That getting started point... I've again just learned this from podcast guests that I've had. Nir Eyal again, I refer to him, he said to me one day on this podcast, "People procrastinate usually because there's a great deal of psychological discomfort surrounding starting the task."
And a lot of the time, especially with the gym or even an essay, that psychological discomfort is like you don't have the answers. So "I don't know how to use the machines at the gym" or "I don't actually, I don't feel competent enough to even write this essay, so I'm just going to do the fucking dishes." Like, "I'm going to hoover the whole house and anyone else's house that needs hoovering today."
Exactly.
You made a video about procrastination, didn't you?
Yeah, yeah.
Break that down for me. What's in the video?
So the video's called "How to Stop Procrastinating," right? Yeah. So the way I think about procrastination, basically procrastination is a problem with getting started. Kind of this law of inertia, Newton's First Law, that if something is at rest it will continue to stay at rest, but if something's moving it will continue to move without needing an external force.
And so the key to overcoming procrastination is that little nudge at the start towards actually getting started. And all of the techniques around that in the whole psychology research around this is just around making it as easy as possible. So reduce all of the friction to doing it. If you want to learn the guitar, then have the guitar by your sofa rather than in the wardrobe where you're never going to see it, and if it's out of sight, it's out of mind, you're never going to do it.
There's like the external environmental friction towards doing the thing, but then there's also the internal friction. It's like those narratives that we tell ourselves that the psychological discomfort of going to the gym, that "I don't want to see how other people are going to see me," the even having the wrong sort of goal. Like if my goal in writing the book is "Oh, I really want to hit the New York Times bestseller list," then it's really, really hard to bring myself to write anything because now every single word I have to write has to be a New York Times bestselling word.
Whereas if the goal is "To be honest, I just want to write a book I'm proud of that's fun to write," that's actually within my control and it becomes so much easier to get started and doing the thing. So to overcome procrastination, we need to eliminate external friction, i.e., the environmental stuff. We need to try our best to get rid of the internal friction, like the emotional side of it, the mindset, the perfectionism, the fear, the discomfort.
And then if we still need help, there are a few hacks. The one that I use all the time is the two-minute rule, which is where I will genuinely convince myself I'm only going to do it for two minutes. And if I want, I'm allowed to stop after the two minutes because two minutes is better than nothing. But like 95% of the time, I decide to continue because two minutes is all you need to change your life.
That two-minute thing is fascinating to me because one of the things that I see as another psychological barrier to starting is people view the challenge as Mount Everest. Whereas if they viewed it as just moving one pebble at a time, it becomes such a simple task. And I get this a lot when entrepreneurs ask me, they say, "Steve, I want to start a business. Where do I start?" And you can hear in the question that they see it as moving Mount Everest.
And I'm like, "Well, today all you have to do is think of a name. Just think of like 50 names, make a short list of names. And then we'll revisit it tomorrow. And then tomorrow maybe think of, you know, go and check if the website's available. And then we'll revisit it the day after." And when it becomes that, and when it becomes sort of really small, itemized, one small step at a time, and you're not having to get from step zero to a thousand immediately, it becomes so, you know, the psychological discomfort fades away, it feels achievable. And that your two-minute rule is doing a similar thing where it's saying, "Well, today I only have to do just open the Word document and write the title and then we're done." You know? So that's fascinating.
Yeah, I mean just to your point there. Have you come across the blog "Wait But Why"?
No.
Oh, it's incredible. You should definitely interview Tim Urban when you're in America.
Oh, I genuinely yesterday went on his Instagram and sent him a DM.
Oh, great! Yeah, he's awesome. Any podcast he's ever been on, I've been like, "Oh, this is so sick." He has a great blog post series about overcoming procrastination. And the way he refers to that point you just made is that there are lots of tasks that are very vague and "icky." And you have to be able to "un-icky-fy" a task.
And something like "start a business" is icky. Something like "learn to code" is icky because, like, what the hell does that even mean? Like, where do you even start? Whereas "brainstorm 10 ideas for a name and pick one of them" is a very clearly defined next action step. And so I get this with students all the time where people are like, "Oh, I don't have the motivation to study for my chemistry exam." And it's like, "What's on your to-do list? Study for my chemistry exam."
Pfft, that's never going to happen. "Read chapter one and answer questions four to five" are a reasonable thing, a reasonably defined next action step. And so what I do is anytime I find myself procrastinating from something, I think, "Okay, am I procrastinating because I actually, the task is too icky? I don't know what I have to do?" Because once I know what I have to do, I can then do it for two minutes and it gets done.
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You know, people talk about how they'll put on their to-do list "clean house." And it'll sit on a to-do list... "clean house," that's a big thing. And it'll sit on your to-do list for like, I don't know, two weeks, whatever. But if you do, if you time block and write in your... this is what I do on the weekends. Because so Monday to Friday, my schedule is ran by the meetings and things I have to do. So I'm a slave to the calendar.
Saturday and Sunday come around, I wake up, I'm like, "Okay." I'm like, "What the fuck, how does this thing work?" It's like... yeah, I'm like it's empty. I've got loads of things I know I could be doing right now, but nothing, no one telling me what to do in a life of mine where I'm told what to do every five minutes.
So I time block on the weekend, which means "clean house" would become "at 11:00 till 12:00, I clean the kitchen." Because then it's like time-sensitive and task-specific. And that's been an absolute game-changer for me. And I also think in the era of working from home, where people are sat at home and they have tasks they have to complete...
Oh, it's like we prefaced this because that's literally like the three-part structure of my book, which I've just been having in my head for the last few weeks. Step one is: how do we beat the procrastination, how do we get started with doing the thing? And part two of the book is: how do we sustain, how do we actually keep on going doing the thing?
And there's just so... in terms of mindset, the thing that I find that actually moves the needle is focusing on trying to make it fun. And I really like that word "fun." I think there's something about the word fun that is so like childish, but also fully speaks to... like, fun basically means intrinsic motivation. Like something is sufficiently enjoyable that you do it for its own sake rather than for the fact that you've got a sponsor helping you or you've got a deadline or things like that.
There's one story in particular that I often come back to and that's like sometime last year. I was working at the hospital, it was pandemic season, etc., etc. And I'd gotten to the end of like a 13-hour long shift and I was just about to go home. And the nurse said to me, "Oh, Ali, can you put a cannula in this patient? Her IV line is tissue-ed and she needs fluids overnight."
And my heart kind of sank. I was like, "Oh no." Like, if the nurse wasn't able to put the cannula in, that means this is a patient with difficult veins, it means it's going to be hard to put this in. And I sort of had this mindset of like, "Alright then, fine," and sort of grudgingly took out the cannula, got all the equipment in a tray.
And I like, as I was doing this, there was a patient in the bay next door where they were just talking to a family member or something and saying, "Oh, you know, this hospital's been amazing, everyone is so nice, and what a pleasure it is, you know, freaking love the NHS" kind of vibes. And I realized that in that moment, I was not being like a good model internally for what I want the NHS to be and what I want a good doctor to be.
And there's something that Seth Godin, who I've been following for a while, says, which is that it's the difference between "have to" and "get to." And so I was considering it as like, "Oh, I have to put in this cannula." And I remembered that blog post I read from Seth Godin where he said, "Instead of thinking of 'have to,' think of it as 'get to'."
And I realized, "Oh, I get to put in this cannula. I get to make a difference in this patient's life and give her fluids overnight so that she's not going to dehydrate because of her morning sickness." And just that mindset shift immediately made me feel so much better about it. And I was like, "Ah, I get to do this. Who cares if I've been working for 13 hours? This is fun, this is privilege, this is cool." And I put it in and we had a nice chat and I felt really great about it afterwards.
And now that... and so that's one of the mindset things that I just always come back to if I'm finding myself not enjoying something, and therefore my focus goes, I get distracted, I procrastinate. Instead of thinking "I have to do this," I think "I get to do this."
It's like a gratitude shift.
Yeah, it's like your chapter three or whatever where it's talking about gratitude.
And we so quickly fall out of gratitude when we become used to... yeah, so easy to do. When we become like used to the privilege of our life, used to the privilege of our jobs, of our relationships, of our kids, of our dog. We think, "Well, you know," and because... and the Stoic people talk about this. I think I probably talk about this in the book as well, because these are just clearly the only ideas I have, I put them all in there... about how they used to do that like hedonic adaptation exercises to literally take the things out of their life that they really value just to remind themselves of what they had. And it kind of seems like, yeah, gratitude is a very important thing. Have you got like a defined gratitude practice that you do? Like gratitude journaling or that kind of stuff?
So the gratitude journaling thing takes place in the notes of my phone, where sometimes I feel the need to remind myself of what I'm really, really grateful for. I think I do have a bias towards feeling grateful all the time. I really just get overwhelmed sometimes with like... I'll have like a little flash, you probably get this when you think, "What the fuck is this?" Like, you know what I mean?
Like what the fuck, especially now that I'm on Dragon's Den and that was a real vision of mine from when I was like 12 years old. I'm like, "Oh my God." And I said this in my show the other day, I said on stage in the Diary of a CEO live, I said to the audience, I said like, "I think everybody in this room is living a life that you once dreamed of living, but you don't, you're not even happy about it because present you... well, yeah, present you has told you that future you will be even happier when you get to somewhere else."
But like this is it! This was the fucking dream! And look at you living it as your, you know, doctors and lawyers and you've got the job at that brand you always wanted to work for, this is it. And I have to do that to myself sometimes because, yeah, because if not, you'll never get there. If your happiness is always existing, as I say in the book, if it always lives somewhere in the future behind some goal or the attainment of some task or whatever, it always will be there. And that was certainly the case for me.
And from what I read about you where you were talking about like outcomes and not being too attached to the outcomes, sounds like it might have been similar.
Yeah, very much so. I have to remind myself on a daily basis as well, to kind of be grateful for all of the things. Sometimes, like if I'm in the habit of doing like a morning journal, I'll write down a list of three things, and it's often simple things like, you know, this cup of coffee in my hand, or Angus, or like my housemate and just like this nice chat that we had. And I think like for me, if I don't remind myself, I always just think in kind of "hustle mode" of like, "Alright cool, onto the next thing, onto the next thing, onto the next thing."
But like it was pretty cool yesterday. Like, we went on a tour of Gymshark HQ up north. And I was just thinking that I can't believe this is my job. Like, I get to do this for work. This is absolutely sick. And even now being here, like, sitting here talking to you is what I get to do for work. And if like, I don't know, 18-year-old me were to imagine being in this position now, I'd just been like, "Oh my God, this is the dream."
Have you come across a guy called Brandon Sanderson?
No.
He's an author. He wrote... he's my favorite author. He does these incredible like fantasy novels, Stormlight Archive, huge, huge series. In it, there's like a phrase that I always come back to around this point. There's this like order of knights, they're called the Knights Radiant, and they have like their charter, their ideals. And their first ideal is "Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination."
And it's that final bit of "journey before destination" that I remind myself of on basically a daily basis where it's, it's kind of like Miley Cyrus's thing of "It's the climb." It's not about how fast I get there, it ain't about what's waiting on the other side, it's the climb. And the way I try to remind myself of this point of "I am enough" is thinking and really trying to internalize that the journey is more important than the destination.
And I think we do need a destination. Like, the fact that I want to, I don't know, write this book or whatever, like that's a destination. But now that I've got that destination of like, "Cool, this is the direction I want to go," at that point in a dream world I would just forget about that, and now that I'm on the journey, I would enjoy the journey on its own merit. Because, you know, as you know, once you if you set a goal, you hit the goal, it's like, well, happiness... the joy from that lasts about five seconds and then it feels like nothing. Even sometimes it doesn't feel like anything at all even for those five seconds.
And so what I've been realizing a lot recently is that yes, we're, I don't know, expanding the team and moving to an office in London and like hiring people and bloody-blah-blah-blah, but really, like, am I enjoying myself day-to-day? And am I kind of living the dream, as it were, day-to-day, and not so much worrying about the goal at the end of it?
One thing that you talk about as well is... I think it was in either chapter 19 or 20, it was around this thing of ambition versus insecurity. Is this thing that you think you want to do, is it coming from within or is it coming from outside of you? And you talk about values, like living in alignment with your values. Do you have any... how do you figure out what your values are?
It's a really interesting thing. I think one of the best indicators of what your values are are from how you feel. That's maybe the most fundamental human stimuli we have, which is how something makes us feel.
Slight tangent, and I was talking to someone about this yesterday. In the world we live in, and as the social media connected from birth generation, we don't understand what our actual true intrinsic values are very easily. Because even if... and this is kind of a controversial topic, but who cares. Even charity. We all think we're charitable human beings. We're not. And if you've only got to look back at human history to understand that our morals are highly influenced by what society's doing at the time.
Because if you go back 150 years, I would have been a slave, potentially, right? My family certainly would have been in Africa. Like they would have had a high chance of being slaves. And at the time, my slave master was not a bad person. He was a good person. You know, morally sound... and now obviously that's viewed as being an awful thing.
And it's the same within like the LGBTQ+ community. That at one time, that was just everyone knew believed that being in a same-sex relationship was a terrible thing, an evil thing in some religious writings. Now we all accept it to be... How can our morals have changed? Society has changed. The force that's telling us what's right and wrong, what's good and bad, what's valued and what isn't has changed. That's the only change that's happened.
So I do believe deeply that a lot of our values unavoidably come from our willingness to survive by taking up the values of the communities we live in. However, when it comes to your personal values, however they've been shaped—usually from your parents or early experiences—I just go on based on how things make me feel.
And that seems to be the only indicator I have of what's true for me and what's not. If I'm alone and I watch a video of a baby suffering or crying and it makes me sad when no one's around and I'm not having to tweet about my feelings to the world, then I would assume that that is, you know... You said about learning, and sorry, teaching. You've got enjoyment from that. You've always got... I would assume that's one of your sort of professional values or something you value professionally.
Yeah, I've been on a whole quest across the internet over the last few months to try and answer this question of how do you figure out what your values are. There's this like program with a life coach that I even did, which is like just finishing up, where one of the exercises was to go back to your childhood and think about, kind of on a scale of minus 10 to plus 10—minus being really bad and plus being really good—like what were the most salient experiences of your childhood?
And I was like, okay, this sounds like BS, but alright, let me engage with this process. And then I made this list of all these things, these salient memories from childhood: like, you know, that time when my brother new-gamed my Pokémon Blue and I lost my 146 Pokémon and how that felt, and that time when whatever.
And the facilitator was like, "Okay, let's try and tease out like what this might tell you about some of your values." And I was kind of surprised that a lot of the stuff that came out of that, if I think about "Is this a core value that I live by/I want to live by?", the answer was yes. And I was surprised by how much of those experiences where when I was under 10 years old shaped maybe the values that I've got right now.
And so when I think about my values, it's things like... I think primarily for me right now it's freedom and autonomy. Which is why I think I've got this whole drive to be financially independent, to work medicine part-time rather than full-time, to have be in control of my own schedule. Things like togetherness and kind of working with other people has always been a really fun thing for me. Whether I was in school or university, studying with friends is just always more fun than studying on my own. And that wasn't true of for everyone, but it was certainly true for me.
Teaching on that list... helping other people in a way, but like I've got friends for example who run charities and they genuinely feel in their hearts if there is suffering in the world. And I don't genuinely feel in my heart when there's suffering in the world. But I know intellectually that I should care about this thing and so I will act in a way that makes me care about the thing and like donate 10% of my money to charity every year and all this all this stuff. But I won't actually feel it.
But when I think about how I feel, it's like teaching other people rather than saving saving lives is the impact that I care about having. And when I realized this I was like, "Oh, okay, this explains why I actually don't really care that much about medicine. Like I much prefer teaching medical students than actually practicing as a doctor." And realizing that teaching is more of a value for me than saving lives, for example, I was like, "Okay, cool, this this makes sense. I can now get on board with that and not feel bad about it."
The other point is that I've never cared about, really, I've really never cared about finding out what my values are. Because and this is probably goes back to how I answered that question because the stimuli that I have to decide all of these things is like how does it make me feel. And I think if you have a good quitting framework, then you will quickly move in the direction of your values much faster than others will.
Quitting framework?
Yeah, like if you have a good... like quitting framework, or you're very good at quitting, then you'll actually... so if you're good at conducting experiments and then quitting, it's like rapid AB testing, right? And you can I think, I think the answer really to finding out who you are and what your values are and getting your place to a life that you really love is try something. I always say to young people, "Increase the amount of experiments you're doing and quit faster."
So you go and get a job, you're like, "Okay, I hate this, this boss is a dick because we don't have any freedom here or autonomy. I hate that part. I love the fashion part, but I just hate this environment because of this, this, and this." Quit. Go and find a job where you have the bit you liked and some new factors. And then you go, "Okay, well I love that bit, I actually loved being a manager here, I'm going to keep the fashion piece, I love the autonomy of being able to work from home or whatever." Quit, move on, next job.
And I think that's what I've done in my life is I never knew what my values were, but I went in the direction of... I started out in call centers. Knew I loved building things and being an entrepreneur in sales. Moved in that direction, quit the call center jobs, did about 15 of them. Start my own business, parts of business I really don't like... don't want to do those parts, don't do them, I still don't do them.
And I'm like, "This is the part within this bit, within business, that I love doing, within this industry." And I never was intentional about that. There was no plan. It was this rapid... increase the experiments you're doing and quit as fast as you possibly can. And then you end up I think in a life that you're... but quitting is easier said than done. I have to say, it would be remiss if I didn't say, all of this is underpinned by a huge confidence in self. And the fact when I do quit I don't need a plan and that I'll be fine. A lot of people don't have that part, so they hold themselves in a miserable situation because it's a certain one.
Yeah, no, I like... like when I read that bit of the book, the quitting framework, I was sort of retrospectively applying decisions I've made to quit to that thing of like "suck and hard." And I was like, "Oh, okay, this actually makes a lot of sense." There was one decision that my mom still haunts me about, which was about a year ago I decided that, "You know what? I want to take my medical career seriously and I want to move to America to do medicine."
I had a few friends who were there, it seemed like an adventure and it seemed cool. But to move to America from the UK to do medicine, you have to take this like ridiculously hard exam called the USMLE and it's basically like relearning all of medical school but at like, you know, a ridiculous level of detail, more so than we have in the UK.
And so I started off preparing for this. And I realized that this is actually really hard. And the thing that I reasoned in my mind was: I could do this, but the reward is really not worth it. Like, you get to the end of it, I'd spoken to some doctors working in America, they were like, "Yeah, you make 400k a year and you're working a lot and you're going through this four years of grueling residency program." And in my mind it was like, okay, it's hard and the outcome is not worth it, therefore I'm just going to quit.
That is the worst place to be in life: doing hard struggle for nothing.
Yeah. But then when I have conversations with my mom, it's like, "Oh well, you quit because you're a quitter. Like, the fact that you found it hard mean like you only quit because it was hard." And it's like, "No, I didn't only quit because it was hard. I also crucially quit because it was like the reward was not going to be worth it." But I didn't quite have the terminology to express that until I read it in your book.
Well, I didn't either! And it was again, that's why I have to specify that that's not the framework I've made my decisions through for my whole life. In hindsight, I'm a very logical sort of first-principle thinker and that's why I'm able to arrive at peace when I make these massive life decisions. Because it's like, oh, logically there was no alternative. There was no alternative. I'm not going to do something that's hard and not worth it. What kind of insanity is that?
I am someone that will do something that's hard and worth it. I'm not... and I'm not someone that's going to quit every time something sucks. I am someone that is going to try and change it if it's worth it and if I believe it's possible to change. Me and my girlfriend have an argument and I go, "This sucks," and fucking walk out the door... that's not who I am. I will try and fight for something if it's worth it and if I believe it's changeable. And so logically I think that framework is robust. I think it's solid.
You talk a lot about time management. Managing one's time. You've made a lot of videos about the topic. What have been some of the other sort of tips or tricks that you've adopted that have helped you manage your time better? We talked about time blocking and breaking your vague to-do list tasks down into specific ones. Is there anything else that comes to mind?
Yeah, there's one... I've read a bunch of books around productivity and stuff. There's one called "Make Time" by these chaps called Jake and John. And there's a tip in there which I genuinely use every day. It's just called the "daily highlight." Where it's similar to Gary Keller's thing of "the one thing": what is the one thing you want to do today?
And then it's like I define that in the morning. Okay, what's the one thing I want to do today? Record this podcast with you. What's the one thing I want to do tomorrow? Finish sample chapter for the book proposal. And then I'll stick a slot in the calendar for it, and then the thing will get done.
And on days where I actually do the daily highlight thing—I have about a 50% success rate with actually thinking about it in the morning—I always just get more done. And I feel at the end of the day, "Oh, I've made progress because I've done that one thing that was most important." And on the days where I don't, I find that, "Oh, I've got these 18 things to do on my to-do list, oh, can't be bothered. Got this iMessage coming from this person who wants an intro to that person."
Whereas when I know what that one thing is, I'm like, "Okay, cool, all I have to do is just get that one thing done today." I sometimes think that if I did this more often, if for 365 days I actually just did the one thing that's most important each day, I'd be making so much progress and having so much fun. And then I think to myself, "Why don't I actually just do this every day?" But that's one of my main ones.
That's life as well. And you, when you talked about the tipping point in your career where you blew up, you were talking about you made that video about how to study. And I guess the premise of that video was teaching people how to learn better. You've read a lot of books. As it relates to learning, outside of studying just more generally, what tools have you adopted? Because you're even, you know, you've read my book and you remember everything, it seems. What trips and tips and tricks have you learned about how to learn better?
So essentially the main one is that we learn by testing ourselves rather than by consuming more stuff. Which is a bit counter-intuitive. Like when it comes to... if we if we think about like studying and then we can kind of broaden it out. Like if it comes to studying, we think that to learn more stuff I need to get more information into my brain.
But what all the evidence says is that no, to learn more stuff, you actually just need to read it once and then you have to try your best to get it out of your brain. And that feels hard and it feels tough and it feels like, "Ugh, I'm an idiot, I don't know enough." But that "desirable difficulty" is what allegedly creates the neuronal connections in our brain to make us actually learn something.
And so it's similar to working out: progressive overload. When it's heavy and when it feels hard is when your muscles are actually growing because you've got the stimulus for growth. Equally when it comes to learning anything, when it feels hard is when there is a stimulus for the neurons to grow, or words to that effect.
And so when it comes to studying, if anyone is sort of listening to this, has exams coming up and they are worried about their grades, the answer is that they're just not testing themselves enough. The more you test yourself, the better grades you'll get. And this therefore applies also to every other thing that we're trying to learn.
So, you know, if I'm learning... I was learning how to play "You've Got a Friend in Me" on the guitar the other day. And if I'm just playing through the first two verses of it that I know already, I'm not learning anything. But as soon as I try doing the thing that feels hard, at that point it's like the harder it feels, the more I'm learning. And then we sleep and then the connections get solidified.
So that's kind of the main concept: basically test yourself more, whatever that thing is. And the second big one in the research is spaced repetition: that anything we learn, whether it's a fact for an exam or a song on the guitar, our memory for it will exponentially decay over time. And the way to make it go into a long-term memory, whatever the skill is, is to interrupt the forgetting curve at spaced intervals. So maybe you would practice the song on day one, you'd practice it again on day two, then on day five, then on day 25, then on day 105. And as the intervals lengthen, that is the sort of thing that gets this how to play the song or this fact about medicine or whatever into our long-term memory. And most things around learning can basically be summed up by those two things: active recall, i.e., test yourself, and spaced repetition, i.e., space it out over time.
Interesting. People are really fascinated by productivity, aren't they?
They are, yeah. I think I heard you say about like when you put the word productivity in your content, it seems to perform better.
Yeah. I often think about this. Like, so to me, productivity... I think to a lot of people productivity just means efficiency and creating economic output. The way that I define productivity is just kind of using my time well and working on things that are meaningful to me and optimizing for happiness.
And so to me, this conversation is productive. Hanging out with friends is productive. I was playing PlayStation last night for a couple of hours; that to me was productive because I was intentionally doing it because I wanted to take a break from writing. It's when I feel unproductive when I know there is something I want to do and I am not doing the thing because I'm scrolling Instagram. That to me is unproductive.
You're not being intentional with your time.
Exactly, yeah. But I think on the internet these days, people use productivity as economic output and the whole like, "Oh, I want to be more productive." It's... I think partly it's a virtue signaling thing to some degree as well. Yeah, partly it's a virtue signaling thing. I think it's also like a self-flagellating thing in a way, whereby I often see comments on my videos where it's like, "Productive day in my life," which I'm kind of doing tongue-in-cheek just because it's funny... where people are like, "Oh my God, I watch these videos just to make myself feel bad."
And I'm like, "Oh wow, okay. A, this is mostly a joke, like I hope you realize this, but B, that's kind of sad that that comment has got so many upvotes." "Oh, I feel so... I feel like such a waste man when I watch one of Ali Abdaal's videos." And I think there is that like perverse sense of people getting pleasure out of the story they're telling themselves that they are non-productive or that they are a chronic procrastinator. And to see someone who doesn't, who is on the surface seemingly so productive, makes you kind of feel bad about yourself.
I wonder if it's similar to... like if I look at my Instagram Explore page, about a year ago it used to be bikini models. These days it's the dudes with six-pack abs. And I look at that and there is a part of me that gets pleasure out of like flagellating myself and then like, "Why don't I look like that yet?" And I wonder to what extent that's like a thing in the world of productivity.
That is fascinating. Because I mean, that would be driven by the antithesis of that. That's got to be driven by a culture where productivity and "I'm getting so much done so I'm going to be successful and rich and a millionaire and this is... I'm in stealth mode building this massive business and I've been up all night, look at me it's 4:00 AM and I'm still working." That's driving one end of the spectrum, which is making productivity and being productive an aspiration for this generation. And on the other end, that's I mean that's why again, the desire to be productive is driven so high and your videos do so well on that topic.
And then you have the counter-movement as you always do where it's like, "I am such a procrastinator" and then all the memes, which bang just as hard because there's been this desire created in culture to be, you know, super productive. Or even as it relates to like weight and fitness, like everyone wants to look so good and then the memes of people sat there with a pot noodle on their belly like resting like with their like running shoes on will also bang just as hard.
But yeah, it's just a very relevant thing in our culture, which is quite strange, that incessant desire to be productive. I think there's actually a rising counter-culture which is about being okay with not being productive.
Yeah, no, exactly. I am having to pepper that into my videos a lot more these days. Because I kind of thought it was so obvious that it doesn't need to be stated that, obviously, you know, don't be... don't seek economic output and productivity at the expense of other things that are more important, like health and relationships. But clearly that's not a thing that is obvious, and so I'm now having to caveat a lot of my productivity advice with like, "Look, guys, let's just define productivity as, you know, meaning and fulfillment and stuff, rather than pure economic output."
And it's okay to be intentional and say, "I don't want to do anything today," if that was your intention. "I want to just do fuck all." Like, and I think that's the nuance that's required in all of that.
You talked about relationships at the start of this podcast. You said you... I think you alluded to the fact that you hadn't had much luck there when we were talking about knowing you're enough. What's going on?
Yeah, this is a real problem. So, there's a few like narratives that I've bought into subconsciously. One of those narratives is that I am like a weedy nerd kid, the the kid that I was when I was 12 years old and getting slightly bullied in school and getting grades and stuff but like not really having anything, not being valuable as a human being beyond the fact that I was generating A-stars in exams. That's like one side of it. There's another side but I'd love to hear your take on the...
What's the other side?
The other side is, if we're keeping it real, it's like I think it's around masculinity and what it means to be a man. And if one were to hypothetically read wikiHow articles on how to get girls or even the vast literature on the topic, there is a big thing of women are attracted to men... like, you know, someone who is a man, someone who leads, someone who's like alpha, those sorts of things.
And I think my kind of default way of being is very not that. And like my idea of fun is singing Disney songs and playing board games until 2:00 o'clock in the morning with a pizza takeaway, rather than something that a more like macho-alpha type person would be. And so on the one hand there's that thing of "just be yourself," "be your authentic self," etc., etc., and a girl will like that for who you are. And on the other side it's the thing of "you will objectively get more success with women" (in inverted commas) if you sort of are more of that alpha-type personality.
Please, here's the problem you have. On the that particular point before we move on, because I'd love to hear what you were going on to say, but you were... it sounded like you were saying "Do I be myself and dance around listening to Disney, even though it might return a lower quantity of smoking hot potential partners? Or the alternative to that is: do I be a masculine guy and like act outside of self to generate more smoking hot partners?"
The issue you have is you've just got to zoom out and you've got to think about the outcome of both approaches and how sustainable both approaches are. All you can be is yourself for a long period of time. Okay. And if you want long-term results, that's the only option you have.
Of course you can act as something you're not and pretend you don't like Disney and not play board games and stuff, and you might meet the wrong person for a short amount of time. Because—and it will be a short amount of time—because that relationship will capitulate the minute they find out who you actually are.
And this is, you know, yeah, this is this is always for me the answer is: you have to be yourself, you have no choice in that. You do have a choice in being able to kill some of those confidence issues, which might be self-sabotaging at key points in the relationship where it turns into insecurity and results in jealousy and... you know, if you're coming into relationship thinking "Why the fuck is this person with me?" the chance of you exhibiting jealous behavior and controlling behavior and manipulative behavior and insecure behavior and "Where are you? Why haven't you... why haven't you texted me back fast enough?" is is high.
And for me that will put undue pressure on something that might have worked otherwise. So go ahead and work on the the confidence issues, but never, ever dare change who you are. Like, the things you intrinsic... do not change those. Do not try and act outside of those because that is that will lead to really short-term results and you don't actually want to be with anyone for 50 years that doesn't want to dance and listen to Disney movies with you. You don't actually want to.
Society's telling you you want smoking hot, but you don't actually want that. You won't return joy on that. You'll return status from walking in with a smoking hot model that has no brain, but you won't return joy in the long term. And that is the goal, that's the North Star. Does that make sense?
It does, yeah. On the note of being yourself, the thing that I feel... I feel a contradiction is that on the one side there's kind of "be yourself" and on the other side there's like "choose yourself." And what I worry about is: what if this person who I am, i.e., the kind of nice guy who like enjoys Disney and board games and stuff, that's a result of accidental experiences that I haven't really chosen for myself? And should I instead be thinking, "Okay, who's the sort of person I want to be?" Although having said that, I don't want to be anyone who doesn't sing along to Disney songs because they're just great.
There you go. And you sing along to Disney songs not because you're now being forced, because you enjoy it. It makes you feel... you fucking love it, yeah, it's so good. There you go. So that's part of the answer to a lot of the things we've discussed before, which is going in the direction of the things that make you feel good. Don't suppress the things that make you feel good because then you'll feel shit. So if that makes you feel good, that is in as far as I'm concerned, you've "explored and exploited" as you say, and you and you've found something you enjoy and don't sacrifice that for what? For a pretty woman to be stood next to you? That is not enjoy... that, trust me, will not be enjoyment. That'll be status. That'll be extrinsic approval, which is very different from internal fulfillment.
So I would never disregard those things. However, you can, as I've done over the last year and a half, say, "You know what? When I look at my values and who I I actually want to be internally, my health... this is what I've done... is so foundational to everything." And I really managed to almost like hypnotize myself somehow into knowing that me being in good shape and me being someone that goes to the gym every day and prioritizes that, my health is my first foundation, is in line with my happiness.
The change in my life, the thing that's put me in the best shape of my life ever, was before, as I've said on this podcast, me working out was all about women. The minute it became not about women, it stuck. Because for so many reasons... the minute I enjoyed the process and I removed wanting six-pack, and I basically don't have any gym goals now whatsoever... my goal is to go every day. It stuck. It became intrinsic, it was for me. And now I go every single day and the minute we finish this conversation, my PT is waiting for me. I went yesterday, the day before, I'll go the day tomorrow, every day. I don't care. I'm not doing it for anyone else. So it sticks.
Interesting.
That's why your relationship will fail if you're with someone that you you're with for external reasons. It won't stick.
Okay. Yeah, this makes a lot of sense.
Content. Content. Yeah, you make a lot of content. And you must have come to learn a lot about humans and psychology from all these videos you make. You tinker around with the titles and the thumbnails and you've become such a big YouTuber. You've got millions of subscribers from a very iterative process of I guess really understanding what humans will respond to and what they want, what their desires are. What would you give me as an advice for how to make, if I'm a listener, a really great content that people will care about? It's a broad question, but there you go.
I think it's about hooking them in with the promise of something simple and quick. And if you stop at that point, that is I think where the kind of sort of course scammers and marketing gurus and stuff were maybe 20 years ago. It's hooking them in with a simple and quick promise, but then delivering on the nuance of it that I think people are caring about more than ever now.
And so like, one thing that we've iterated with over time is, you know, often the success of a video will depend on how clickbait the title is. And there's no getting around that. We've never found that a title that's less clickbait does better. I did a video called "How Writing Online Changed My Life." It absolutely bombed. Just changed the title: "How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire." Pfft, suddenly absolutely exploded.
People love that like, "Oh, this is a quick solution, this is a quick path to this this goal that I want," hence your title of "Happy Sexy Millionaire." But we've also found that on videos where I think, "Oh, let's dumb the message down, let's just kind of do a quick five-point listicle without any examples" because people just want the dopamine hit of advice that sounds reasonable but they can't action... those videos haven't done as well.
Like people click on them but then they don't stay watching. And the videos we've found that do the best is: you make a promise at the start and then you deliver on the nuance throughout the whole thing. And actually people, at least in my audience and I suspect in yours and anyone listening, actually do want depth and nuance, not just a sort of surface-level two-minute long thing that you would have seen on YouTube circa 2005. And I think you do a pretty great job of that as...
Yeah, I'm learning. I'm continuing to learn. YouTube's a bit of a new medium for me, so it was good to get that perspective.
You also... you're very sort of self-aware and honest. I think you wrote something about why you're failing, which is a... I think you wrote a piece which was detailing why you think you're failing in life.
I think I have this issue where I often feel like what I'm currently doing is not "good enough." Because, you know, we're leaving money on the table, or because our team is inexperienced, or because I suck at being a manager, or I suck at being a leader. And although I am learning to improve in in all of those things, I sometimes feel that, oh, but it's it's not fast enough.
And I think that's where the comparison stuff comes in because when my peer group was kind of just my friends in medical school and I was doing the YouTube stuff and then I was kind of the only one in the pack doing the thing... and so it was like, oh, anything goes, like I'm not comparing myself to anyone. Now that I am sort of a bigger name on YouTube, the sorts of people I compare myself to now are kind of other YouTubers with millions of subscribers. The population for comparison changes.
And I find that the more I compare, the less good I feel about the stuff that I've done. And to get around that, I try to just, a, not compare at all and, b, also think "journey before destination" and all the all of the mindset stuff, but it's easier said than done. And I still feel internally like right now we're not using money in the company like efficiently enough, we're not hiring fast enough, we're not doing this fast enough, we're not doing that fast enough.
Do you think you'll ever get to a point where that stops? Because I tell you what... yeah, what's it been like for you? Well, I mean no, I was just going to say, for... let's just I mean one way to look at it is: Ali five years ago, or when you first started... if you had shown him a picture of you now, what would he have said?
That's pretty cool.
But I mean like, if when you made those first couple of videos, you'd gone, "You're going to have 2 million subscribers on YouTube. You're going to have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram."
I would have had a stroke. You would have had a fucking stroke. You'd be like, "There's no way. There's no fucking way that's me." Yeah. And here you are!
§02Transcript — part 2
This is what I was alluding to earlier. It's like past version of yourself told you you'd be happy when you got here. But you're not! Because you're not fully satisfied because there's a future version of yourself that is saying you'll be happy when you get here. And it just never fucking stops.
It never stops, does it? It seems to... at least on the outside that you've done a good job of kind of, I mean obviously you're like particularly successful, but like being okay with that level of success and not trying to get to the next level for what whatever that looks like.
I think so. I think so more than a lot of people I speak to. I think there's... I mean there's still elements in me that are like, "I can do more and I can, I can, I can take on bigger challenges in my life." But I'm definitely, definitely now detached from thinking it will have any impact on the things that matter. It won't make me happier, won't make me more fulfilled, won't make me anything at all. I'll be doing it probably for either the wrong reasons, like just more money therefore I can get private jets instead of business class... or because... well, this is not a wrong reason but just for the challenge of it. Or because, or thirdly, because I want to solve a problem in the world.
As opposed to believing that it will make, it will kill my imposter syndrome or it will make me feel more, you know, enough. I definitely know that I'm enough. Okay, I definitely know that much. And I know that nothing's going to change that positive or negative.
Yeah, that's good. That's a good place to be.
Yeah, well I better because I said it in the book, didn't I? How do you think about money? It's a question that you often ask your guests, that I I really want to ask you because, yeah, obviously you are rich. And but there are there are more levels of rich beyond what you currently are. So like...
And there always will be.
And as you meet people as I as I've met people who are kind of levels of rich above me, where then then I start thinking, "Oh, maybe it would be nice to be able to afford to fly first class everywhere. That would be pretty cool." And then I think, I wonder if that would increase my quality of life? And and I know there's that those you know diminishing returns for money and stuff, but you know first class versus... I wonder?
Oh, no. Yeah, how do you think about that? I mean, so I want to have enough money in my life that I don't have to do anything that costs time that I don't need to spend on things that I don't get joy from doing. So like an airport is a great example. This is why I think I want a private jet. Because when you go to the airport, you could spend three hours just checking in and getting onto the onto the plane, and that's three hours that I'd much rather doing something I enjoy doing with my life.
And as I talk about in chapter 19 of Happy Sexy Millionaire, time is all we have. I refer to these five 500,000 chips we have and we get to, you know, that's how many free hours the average human being gets in their life. I would like to have more of those chips deployable against things that I really enjoy doing and creating memories with people I love, not standing in an airport queue for three hours.
So if money is going to solve that problem for me, then money does matter. It's not going to make me exponentially happier. Like the queue isn't making me miserable. No, it's not going to move the needle but... Yeah, but I'd like to make more memories in my life with with my niece and my dog, you know, and with my partner. So that that is my view on money at this stage. Convenience, less time wasted. That's literally it. That's literally it. It offers me nothing else. Okay. Yeah. What what do you think of money?
I think... I think convenience is a big thing for me. Like, I also have that thing of money is useful insofar as it helps me buy back my time, which I can then use to deploy against things that I care about.
But then, as I kind of get exposed to more like rich people and see like the lives that they're living and like you know this idea of thinking about moving to London, where like I've been living in my flat that me and my brother have a mortgage for in Cambridge for the last three years with a lodger and therefore it's returning 16% a year because I'm not paying rent, bloody-blah. Now I'm moving to London where it's like I actually can't afford to buy a place in London. Like, I could afford to rent a place in London. But it's like, I could rent for 1,000 a month or 2,000 or three or four.
Oh, you know, those places that are 8,000 a month are pretty good. I wonder what it would be, you know, can I afford just spend 8,000 a month on a place that's slightly nicer, that's a little bit more central? What am I optimizing for? Well if I get a place in King's Cross, it's easier for friends to come visit, therefore I can make more memories, therefore increase happiness that way.
And the money thing just sort of... I feel like those those numbers keep on going up because, you know, then you could be like, "Well, having a yacht would be pretty cool because then I can invite friends on board and then we can do like jet skiing and stuff. Having a private jet would be really cool because then I can like fly wherever I want and save my three hours of time and take my friends out on a trip." Having enough money that I'd be able to fly friends over to visit me would be sick for my personal happiness.
And I don't know, I feel like the more I think about this, the more I start to invent justifications for trying to make more money for the sake of of happiness and and fulfillment and stuff, beyond the 75,000 a year that the studies will tell us leads to diminishing returns.
I think the key thing there, and what what I said in my answer, is that I don't think it'll make me happier. Because I'm already I think at... I don't think missing the airport queue will actually make me happier. I don't think it will because in fortunately, well fortunately, fortunately, I'm at a point where I don't think I could be happier. Okay, yeah, no.
Like I could definitely have less thing less annoyances in my life, but fundamentally I don't think I could be happier than this. Or more fulfilled or like comfortable than this. So me killing the queue by getting a jet is is removing an annoyance and increasing the the yeah how intentional I am with my time. It means it's not going to move the needle. Yeah. Okay. It's not going to move the needle. Like, you know, and if this place where we are now, which is my home, I live upstairs, if it was two times bigger, would I be happier? No. No, I wouldn't be. No.
But, you know, I'll probably get a place two times bigger because, I don't know, then I can have bigger parties and maybe that will be a more enjoyable memory at some point. But I don't I have... this is the key thing, is I had to at some point in my life realize, like not buy into the bullshit justification, or I'd live my life running running in that direction constantly and I say all the things I said like, "it's not going to make me happier."
And if I still want it, then I think... then I'm at a... then it's okay for me to buy it.
Yeah, I kind of have have similar things. So often I will like buy something... you know, I bought one of those 6,000 pound Pro Display XDRs with the thousand pound stand that Apple sell the other day just because it... No one knows what that is. It's like a ridiculously expensive monitor that Apple sell for like professionals. And I really didn't need it, but I was like, "It would be kind of cool to have on my desk." And I knew there was zero way it was going to make me any happier. I was like, "It's just it's kind of cool."
And my housemate was like, "Oh, your your monitor's arrived. How do you feel?" I was like, just even even contemplating how I feel as a result of the fact that this monitor arrived is just kind of a bit baffling to me because obviously it doesn't make any difference to my day-to-day happiness. It was just something kind of cool that I could buy as a business expense and I thought, kind of, why not?
And I think when I was younger, I used to look forward to purchases more. Like, you know, ordered a PlayStation game, oh, I'm tracking the delivery waiting for it to arrive. And now it's just it's just kind of things. And and the way I often describe it to people is—which probably sounds a bit arrogant—it's like I feel like my happiness is a 10 out of 10 right now and I really can't imagine that changing. But it's still kind of cool to spend money on the things that I want to spend money on if it's like tech or camera gear or something. Yeah, something yeah something I care about.
Yeah, I completely agree now. And I I actually don't think I'm a very flashy person. Right now I don't own a car, at this exact moment. I don't have like designer watches or anything, and typically if I make a purchase, it's based in utility, but it's really nice. And that's kind of what you're describing with your monitor. So like, I travel a lot, so a suitcase... oh, I'll get a really nice one. Yeah, but I don't need a Rolex because let's be fucking honest, no one uses it to tell the time anymore. So that would be purely about signaling and status.
I don't really buy designer clothes at all. I don't really think I have any designer clothes clothes. I don't really... I mean I have a lot might I have a nice pair of boots or something, but typically it's like... I mean, this is like a Topman t-shirt I'm wearing from ASOS, these are Topman jeans... Fits pretty well. Yeah, they just like utility and fit and matter seem to matter more than insecurity-driven purchases.
There's one mental model that I often think of, which is that if if you were the only person in the world, would you still buy the thing? And I think when it comes to like new Apple products, yes, I would. Because it like, I can do I can do my work better on a nicer MacBook or on a on a nicer screen. But yeah, certainly I probably wouldn't get an Apple Watch if I was the only person on earth. Because I think the utility of that is more signaling and more about like "This is the sort of identity I want to portray to other people" than it is about the fact that having an Apple Watch for me, given that I'm not into running, is is actually useful.
You've read a lot of books, mental models about mental models and various other things. What are some of the the key principles or key mental models that have had the biggest impact on your life? There's so many I can imagine that it's quite hard to...
Yeah, I think one of the main ones is is this thing about the the money diminishing returns curve. About like beyond about 50 to 70k depending on what study you look at, money doesn't buy more happiness. And I often have to remind myself of that when I get into this cycle of the pursuit of more stuff.
One of the things—I wouldn't really call it a mental model—but one of the the things I often come back to is, oh, I think you talk about it in the book as well, the five regrets of the dying. Oh yeah. And I have those written on the top of my to-do list on my daily daily to-do list template.
That's a that's a that's a good one. What what is that? For anybody that doesn't know?
Oh yeah, so there there was this like palliative care nurse or someone who interviewed...
Bronnie Ware.
That's the one.
She messaged me on Instagram when I... no way... when I one time I like didn't tag her Instagram so she's like, "Oh yeah, thank you so much for the post, could you tag?" But yeah, Bronnie Ware, she's amazing.
Bronnie, yeah. So she wrote a book called "The Regrets of the Dying" or "The Top Regrets of the Dying" where she interviewed like hundreds of people who were on their deathbed asking them what are your regrets. And some of the really common ones were "I wish I'd lived a a life true to myself rather than what others expected of me," "I wish I'd worked less hard," "I wish I'd spent more time more time with friends and family." Can you remember what what the other ones are?
I, do you know what, I only focus on the first one. Yeah, because she was like, "This was the most common regret of the dying: I wish I had lived a life true to myself and not what others expected of me." Following your intrinsic motivation rather than status, prestige, external factors.
Exactly. It sounds like the other ones are all actually just offshoots of that. Yeah, and people as they're about to die must have this amazing retrospective clarity over their what they did and didn't do right, what did and didn't matter. It didn't matter that that girl in playground said my hair was shit or this comment on Instagram.
And that retrospective clarity... because I say this in the book as well, this is about the... I talk about how I don't think anybody believes they're going to die. Yep. And those people know they're going to die. Yep. So they have that like it's all, all the bullshit just fades away and they go, "I just want one more day with my son."
Yeah. But also it's it's not quite the same as the whole "live every day as if it as if it were your last." Like there's that that balance there. How do you how do you think about that balance?
Yeah, I mean so that's actually like fundamentally bad advice because if I were to live today like it was my last, I would probably be doing self-destructive things. Like, they're going to be self-destructive, financially I'd be blowing all my money, you know... so or something like that.
But the merit in that that I see is being very conscious about the use of your time, I guess, and what you're deciding to do. If you if today were your last, you'd be able to cut through the bullshit that doesn't matter. And so let's say if this life were your last, live every life like it was your last, would be a better thing. That season of life. You'd really focus on what matters.
You know, you've talked about such a diverse range of topics on your YouTube channel. And really about like help, you know, helping people as, you know, as the teacher you are, become better at what they're trying to achieve. You've talked about productivity, mindset, finance, and all of these things. What are what are the things that you see in young people today that you think they most need to solve and understand about, let's say, hmm, about mindset in order to get to that point where they are living a fulfilled life?
And I say this to you because I know how many how many books you've read. Thinking specifically here about like young people and you're seeing them in the comment section, you're seeing the problems that they're trying to solve in their life.
I think the main one that I see is a mindset that work has to be suffering and that like working hard is like a bad thing. And that what it looks like if you're if you're striving for something is that it looks like pain. This is very much the mindset I had going into medical school where it's like, "Oh, I'm now a first-year medical student at Cambridge University. This is this is supposed to be hard, you know, let's get all my big textbooks out, let's like spend ages in the library," you know, pulling all-nighters thinking it's a badge of honor because this is what work looks like and it looks hard.
And in my from my second year onwards where I realized hang on, you know the thing Tim Ferriss often says: "what would this look like if it were easy?" I think if more young people accepted that work doesn't have to be suffering, it can actually be easy and fun and you can have it all provided you find ways to make it fun and optimize for the things that are enjoyable, that will solve a lot of kind of problems when it comes to the things people often ask me about, which is motivation, procrastination, burnout, and and all that jazz.
I think another kind of underrated tip, which the toxic productivity people would would would crucify me for, is that I think everyone kind of... like if you want to if you want to live a life on your own terms, then you do have to solve the money problem. Because we all need to make money. We all need to have that like in board games we call it a... we you call it as an economic engine.
You always have to figure out: are you going to sell sheep? Are you going to get wood? Are you going to get oat? Are you going to get hay? Like, what is your economic engine going to be? And I think the sooner the sooner that can be ticked as a box, or the more aligned the economic engine can be with the thing you actually find fun, the more you can do that thing of living life on your terms.
Because what I never want to be in the position of is where, you know, that thing of, "Well, I just got to work the nine-to-five so I so I can enjoy the five-to-nine." Because that's like 80,000 hours of our lives, 80,000 chips out of the 500,000 that we're squandering away just to survive.
And obviously there's it's it's that so much easier said than done, and a large amount of being able to take that money box, being able to build that economic engine, is based on kind of privilege and where you've grown up and circumstances and all that stuff. But I guess kind of from where you're sitting, you never had that sort of privilege growing up and you kind of succeeded despite it.
And yeah, it's just that that thing of accepting... I think a lot of a lot of young people, especially like the Gen Z the Gen Z folks these days, are in that mindset of "I care about impact, I don't care about money." And I think it's very hard to have to live a fulfilled life if you're not like act if you think in that way because then it's like, oh, I'm not going to talk about money, it's weird if people talk about money on the internet, etc., etc. So those would be kind of two things that I would love to implant into young people's brains.
Yeah, that's really interesting. There's been this absolute groundswell over the last couple of years of... I think millennials are guilty of it too... just all of them want to change the world. And they don't really have a plan or have a specific route to changing the world or having an impact but they just want to lead with that, which sounds to me a lot like virtue signaling.
Because I think the people that end up changing the world are very specific about what they're going to do and it's very passion-driven... it's very like specific passion-driven. So they'll say, you know, someone that does actually want to change the world won't actually start with the end in mind. They'll start with "I want to study medicine so I can understand cancer," and they'll change the world. Not the Gen Z that says, "I want to, I want to change the world" or "I want to have a big impact." And you go, "What do you want to impact?" And they go, "The world." How? Don't ask too many questions. I want to have...
Then that for me, whenever I see that in my DMs or when a kid comes up to me when I've been speaking on stage or something, "I want to be a public speaker." I go, "What do you want to talk about?" They're like, "Uh..." Go and have go and live a life worth talking about. Like, go and have an experience. Go, like, go through some shit and then the consequence is you're a public speaker. I had no intention of ever being a public speaker. It's a consequence of of having some create a life where I had some shit to talk about, you know. And I think younger generations have that the wrong way round. They're so obsessed about "Oh, it wouldn't be great to create an impact."
Have you have you come across effective altruism?
No, I don't think so.
Yeah, so it's like this movement, this community that talks about how doing good in the world and like having an impact is actually like scientifically measurable and can be done in evidence-based kind of ways. And so they, you know, there's a a few like charities and programs tied to that. One of them is GiveWell, and they do an evidence-based analysis of the charities in the world to figure out what is the most bang for your buck, what's the what's the highest ROI on money donated in terms of lives saved or some other outcome measures.
And you find that it's some pretty rogue charities that that come out on top here. For example, the Against Malaria Foundation. On average it costs somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds to buy enough malaria nets to statistically be able to literally save a life. And that's like a lot cheaper than most people would think.
And if someone were to say to you now, "Steve, you can donate three grand and you literally save a life," you'd be like, "Oh, great, here's three grand." And and so the idea behind effective altruism is that given that that like you can actually measure the impact of charities.
And where I was going with this is that you can therefore measure the impact of a career and relate it kind of to money if you need to. So they've done an an analysis of what being a doctor is like. And in the Western developed world, a doctor will save around seven lives throughout the course of their entire career. And this is not taking into account the fact that if I wasn't a doctor, the next the next person would have gotten into medical school and been a doctor in my place because in the UK we have more people applying to medicine than there are places.
If you are the only doctor in, I don't know, Sub-Saharan Africa or in a in a country or something and then you stop being a doctor, that obviously has a big impact. But most of the people listening to this are not in that position. And so the way that I think of impact is in terms of counterfactual impact, i.e., what is my impact compared to if I didn't if I didn't exist, if I wasn't doing my thing.
And I often will see comments on videos from people being like, "Oh, you're a you're a sell-out for leaving medicine in the middle of a pandemic to like, I don't know, make YouTube videos or something, something BS like that." And I'm like, "Yeah, I can I can see why that's the narrative that you're telling yourself. But actually, I'm not special as a doctor. Like, I have no unique value to add as a doctor two years fresh out of med school. Anyone basically who has gone through medical training in the UK—it's pretty good medical training—could do as good a job, if not better, than I can being a doctor."
But where I have counterfactual impact, where I am kind of unique in the impact I'm providing, is in the fact that I have a YouTube channel that teaches people and inspires people stuff. And if the kind of the DMs and stuff are anything to go by, you know, people would be like, "Oh my God, I got into medical school because of your videos. I was from this background where no one ever applied to medicine, no one thought about going to Oxbridge, and I got there, you know, in part thanks to your videos, thank you so much." And I feel like the impact I can have on the world by creating content on the internet and speaking to a camera in my bedroom is arguably greater than the impact I would have kind of just being a doctor. Not that there's anything wrong with just being a doctor, of course.
Did you hear that, mom? Are you listening?
At least that's what I try and tell myself.
You'd say that to her. We'll we'll snippet that. We'll send it to her as a video and we'll just email it to her and say, "Mom, have you seen this? I just stumbled across this." No, but I completely get that and I think I think, yeah, I think and it's funny because me being selfish in my life has been the thing that's allowed me to help way more people.
Developing my own thinking, my own skills, my own ability to do this stuff has been the thing able to create a platform in which I can help more. And I spoke to a monk, or I think it was a monk, about this when I got to ask this world-famous monk. He was doing this massive talk in New York. My one question was: "Am I selfish for having spent the last five years of my life growing wealth and developing myself and my skills? Should I have run off to Africa and started trying to, you know, save one life at a time?"
And his response to me was that you can't pour out for others that which you don't have yourself. So he likened it to a bottle and said you have to fill the bottle to to be able to pour out into other people's glasses. So by filling your bottle, as long as you are being, you know, you're doing good with your full bottle, then that's an incredibly noble thing to be doing.
Yeah, there's something that Naval Ravikant says as well, which is that if you want to have an impact, then you want to get rich and you want to get famous as well. Because people who are rich and famous just have more impact than people who are not, because you can just deploy more capital and social capital towards the things that you care about to make more of an impact. So optimizing for wealth and fame when you're young and while building skills, while having fun, I think, you know, there are worse things.
Chamath talks about that as well. Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah, is that his name? Palihapitiya. He always on stage says that wealth allows you to impose your opinion and viewpoint on the world. So he says, "Who would you rather having all the money? Some like rich Russian oligarch who has 75 yachts, or me, who has a desire to, you know, like Elon, like take us make us multi-planetary and and cause solve the carbon problem?" And so with resources, you can impose your world view, of good or bad I guess, on the world. And that is impact.
Maybe we're just trying to make excuses for wanting to be rich as fuck. To justify... happy sexy millionaire is good for the world. Yeah, exactly. No, but to be fair, even this podcast, like this podcast was very expensive. It's very expensive to run. The equipment's very expensive. And this has been enabled, the people we're reaching now that are listening to this, it has been purely enabled by by the five years of selfishness in me building a business for myself. I do this again, as I said, I don't even know if we make a profit, I haven't really looked to be honest from this podcast necessarily, but I do it because of the huge enjoyment it gives me and the impact that we see in the comment section and the messages we get. And that, that makes me feel really good.
Have you have you come across a book called "The Elephant in the Brain"?
No, I don't think so.
Oh, this is like a whole, it's like really well-written. It's like all of the studies around what drives human behavior. And the main thesis of the book is that we're all ultimately selfish, a lot of the stuff we do is for signaling, but there is like a PR secretary in our heads that convinces even us that our motives for doing something are not selfish and they are in fact altruistic.
And there's a quote from apparently from J.P. Morgan which is that a man always has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason. And so whenever people ask me, "Why do you do YouTube?", it's always that, right... do I want to say it's because I enjoy helping people and like making content that inspires? Or the real reason, which because it, you know, social status, prestige, money, etc., etc., I like being recognized in the street, it's kind of cool... I mean, I think it's a bit of both.
And that's fine because that's the truth. Yeah, and it's the truth for everyone. There'll be someone sat at home thinking, "No, no, no, I give five pounds to a homeless person, I'm purely doing it because I want to give the money." I'm sure you want to, but the reason why is because it might make you feel good, right? Or because it might make you look good.
And if you think I'm wrong, all you've got to do is go back in history. Whereas once upon a time, your family members with very similar genetics to you might have been whipping black people. Like, and you and you wouldn't have thought that was a morally bad thing to do. Society is heavily controlling what we think is good, right, noble, virtuous. And as soon as we can admit that, I think we can actually create a better world that is vacant of this like virtue signaling, "what's the right hashtag to use, what am I meant to say, who am I meant to be for others." I think it's a form of liberation to admit that to yourself.
Yeah, I think that's really good. There's a there's a phrase that a blogger friend of mine uses called "servant hedonism," which is that you like by serving others and optimizing for serving others at when you're making decisions in your life, you are in fact kind of making yourself more hedonic, more more happy. And that is actually a reasonable... and as long as you can admit that to yourself, there's that's a pretty reasonable way of living life.
Listen, thank you for your time, Ali.
Thank you, it's been great fun.
Yeah, lots of fun. And you're such a diverse character, and that's really why I wanted to speak to you because you have such a wealth of knowledge across multiple sectors and industries and topics and themes. And I find that... and that comes from your curiosity, I can tell. You're deeply curious, I can tell, you know. And therefore you this is again also why I think you've done so well in as a content creator who is an educator and a teacher because you are your curiosity has sent you in search of answering complex questions that a lot of people don't actually have the the time or the skill to know how to answer. And then your ability to break those conclusions down in ways that people understand that aren't alienating, that aren't too big words for me, Timothy in my bedroom that doesn't didn't go to Cambridge, is a real skill. And it's also testament to the fact that you actually understand the things you're talking about because being able to simplify as we know, simplify complex ideas is the is the best evidence that someone understands those ideas. So...
Oh, thank you. That's that's very kind of you to say. And incredibly gracious to have me on. Your book had a big impact on me. The the mental models and their decision making, the the chips stuff with time... genuinely has changed decisions that I've made in my life. So thank you for that. And if anyone's listening to this who hasn't read the book, would would recommend the audiobook in particular, which is narrated by you.
Yes. Yeah. And you've got a book coming soon, haven't you?
Two years from now.
Two years from now. Yeah. Well I'm excited... I'll reach out to you to promo that closer to the time.
We'll have you back on when you're ready. Thank you so much, Ali, appreciate you.
Thank you.
(Podcast music plays) The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go, but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do when I arrive is open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. Because on any given day, if I'm recording let's say hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a nice to have; it is absolutely business mission-critical. So, when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
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When your cat is acting weird-er. Or your dog is being loud-er. Your turtle moves slow-er. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirsti-er. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsi-er. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for pets. This is Cave. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.
When your cat is acting weird-er. Or your dog is being loud-er. Your turtle moves slow-er. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirsti-er. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsi-er. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for pets. This is Cave. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.