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ali abdul he is a creator he is a entrepreneur who came first at cambridge
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and he is a productivity expert the way that i define productivity is just kind of using my time well and working on
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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
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doing the thing because i'm scrolling instagram procrastination is a problem with getting started and so the key to
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overcoming procrastination is that little nudge at the start towards actually getting started there are a few a few hacks the one that i use all the
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time is the the two minute rule two minutes is all you need to change your life the way i try and remind myself of this
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point of i i am enough is thinking and and really trying to internalize that the journey is more important than the
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destination we do need a destination but really like am i enjoying myself day to day and am i kind of
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living the dream as it were day to day and not and not so much worrying about the goal at the end of it
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[Music] productivity procrastination
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two things that all people aspiring to success or really aspiring to get anything done
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often struggle with today we're going to try and solve that problem today i'm joined by ali abdul he
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is a creator on youtube he's got millions and millions of subscribers he is a entrepreneur he's a cambridge
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graduate who came first at cambridge and he is a productivity expert and honestly
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he's read more books than anyone i think i've ever met on the subject but generally about how to become the best
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version of yourself this conversation isn't just about productivity and procrastination it ends
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up twisting and turning through a bunch of different topics like relationships and friendships and the meaning of life
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and happiness but what else would you expect from this podcast you're going to enjoy this conversation ali is an incredibly
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intelligent intellectual compassionate self-aware individual and he's able to
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talk in a way that simplifies complex ideas for people like me and you
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so without further ado my name is stephen bartlett and this is the dire river ceo
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i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music]
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i really start here with all my guests because i think it's so foundation foundational to everything that they then say they're after is getting a bit
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of context as to who you are where you came from and the environment in which ali was created
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oh interesting question okay so um i was born in karachi in pakistan in
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1994 so i'm 27 now and when i was two years old my mom and dad divorced and my mom moved us to
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lesotho in southern africa uh it's a country most people haven't heard of it's surrounded by south africa like
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landlocked by south africa and we were there for about five six years growing up uh at that point
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you know my mom really valued education she was working as a doctor and she knew the educational opportunities in southern africa in the suture were not
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great and so we made a plan to move to the uk until we came to the uk in 2003 she started working here as a doctor and
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we moved around a little bit in different areas in the uk and it was really in in secondary school uh that i
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did in south indonesia essex where i discovered kind of entrepreneurship
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under the internet and computers and stuff and basically all throughout school
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i'd be the kid getting like decent grades and everything like that but the thing i like i would i would look forward to going home so
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that i could do some more coding or tinker on some websites or try and show my services as a freelance graphic
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designer or something for five dollars here and there and i was making kind of you know a little bit of money i i lied
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about my age on paypal i pretended i was 18 when i was actually like 13 and i was getting like 5 10 from these small
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businesses uh 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 uh me and my
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friends we were all quite interested in the entrepreneurship stuff we were all we were doing like well in school and i was like oh it would be cool to go to
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oxford or cambridge would be cool to do medicine but really my passion at the time was
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going home and and tinkering with websites and so that was kind of the environment that i grew up in then when i went to
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university you know thankfully i got a place for medicine at cambridge which was great awesome experience just on that point there so you you were
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tinkering on websites and loving it that's the thing you were like running home from school to do yeah um but then
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you go for medicine what was the driving force behind you deciding not to do the tinkering on websites for a living and
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going and doing medicine i mean i you said that your mother was a doctor yeah so i think when you grow up in the sort
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of environment that i did whereby parents and doctors all of my mom's friends were doctors
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everyone we knew had like doctor parents there are so few viable careers where you think you know what am i what are my
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job options in life well it's either doctor or lawyer or engineer like it's literally just those three you don't even realize that other jobs even exist
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not in like a a way where the parents are telling you this consciously but more like just the
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narrative that you absorb from the people you're around is that i could be a doctor or engineer or a lawyer
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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
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yeah i think because doctor seemed like a prestigious thing
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and i think i 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
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neurosurgeon or a gastroenterologist not even knowing what that meant but it was just like a big word that would make me feel cool that oh yeah and then the
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adults that i would speak to would be like oh hello fancy so that in and of itself yeah where does
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prestige exist one would assume that it exists in the mind of others like do you know what i mean like so
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that's what i if you had said to me i really want to save people's lives i really had a real high desire to like
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save lives and then i'd be like okay that's the voice inside but when when it's like status then it was very much
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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
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break from medicine you know often if i'm if i'm having conversations with my mum
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the she'll try and talk me back into doing medicine again really and one of her kind of bargaining chips on that
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front is oh but think about the prestige you know medicine has a certain prestige around it that being a youtuber doesn't
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and that's always like oh you know it's that that side of me that's like well i want to carve my own path i don't i don't care about status and status and
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prestige and then there's the other half where it's still like a kind of a narrative going through my life that i
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need to optimize for like this sort of old world prestige instead of happiness instead of happiness yeah which is
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bizarre isn't it it's completely bizarre yeah this is a strange like it's a cultural thing as
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well largely i think with i think with you know my mom dropped out of school when she was seven years old
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so doctor lawyer anything with prestige was the correct answer yeah um
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maybe that's because this is me just guessing out loud when you come from when you're an immigrant family
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one of the actual biggest predictors of happiness was financial security and
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being a doctor i was like maybe yeah i think i think that's a big part of it where with my with uh with our parents
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generation especially especially as immigrants seeing other people who are happy correlated
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with other people who had like a big house and like nice cars and we're going on holidays equals financial success equals oh those
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people did well in their traditional career of banking or medicine or engineer or law and the narrative of like someone like
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you entrepreneur social media big company that it just didn't it just wasn't really a thing in our
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parents generation and you said they're like going on holidays but i think if in go back to my like the
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village in nigeria where my mom's from having a good job was actually like survival it was like being able to eat
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it was like much more just much lower things on maslow's hierarchy of needs it was just like being able to
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survive and that not having a job in an education was like pain from food
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no health care no education whereas as you say like in the western world when you grow up here yeah it
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means lamborghini and holiday and stuff but so you take that you take that decision
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anyway driven by your by an external narrative to go and become a doctor uh external i think
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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 decided i made a
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conscious decision do i want to do computer science and do the tinkering with websites thing or do i want to do medicine
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i think what i reasoned at the time was was two things number one medicine is six years
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at university computer science is only three everyone says university is great ergo six years is better than three years therefore medicine makes sense
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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
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a coder who knows how to code and it was like really that decision where i realized okay why don't i do
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medicine keep the coding website east kind of stuff on the side so that i can eventually do some kind of tech startup
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thing related to medicine and then medicine becomes a side hustle in a way before i had the terminology of the frey
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side hustle and so it ended up not quite working out that way but but certainly from my first year of med school onwards i knew that i
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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
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that and did you try tech startup uh a little bit so in my first year of uni uh
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second year of uni i started a company that helped other kids get into med school and then so that was like
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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
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med school admissions programs and so that would that was it sort of like you know subscription billing software as a service kind of product
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uh which was the closest i got to a tech startup i i dabbled with a few like medical tech things i used to do
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freelance app design and web design for med tech startups while i was when i was at uni but when the youtube channel
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started and that really started taking off i sort of realized that the thing i actually want to do is is
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teaching rather than coding um and then something something that you talk about
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in the 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
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and for me i always had that intrinsic motivation for business type stuff and also for teaching uh i used to do
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tutoring when i was like 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
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someone else um and the nice thing about being a youtuber is that it's just teaching at scale and so i think i found that thing
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that drives me intrinsically um that so now tech startup is sort of a oh backup option
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if youtube channel fails if i get struck off the medical register i can probably start a text startup or
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or words to that effect i always find it a little bit weird that someone would just like go on youtube and make a video
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you know what i mean like that when you hear about the first time where these big youtubers started whether it's like true geordi who i've spoken to here or
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alfie days who i think became like the biggest one of the biggest youtubers in the country like that first decision
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to record yourself usually in your bedroom on a [ __ ] camera talking to nobody yep is a little bit weird do you
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know what i mean how did it start for you it started for me so
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i i harbor dreams of being a youtuber since about 2009. why um because i used to follow uh people like coach schneider
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and sam tsui who were kind of youtube cover artists they would produce covers
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of popular songs and those covers were amazing like they filmed them beautifully arranged them beautifully and i had a few friends who
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are really good at singing and i fancy myself you know i was quite into maths i like the idea of playing multiple musical instruments so i thought i want
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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
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of youtuber i want to be and so i sort of had a few like sort of stop starting moments over the
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over those like next 10 years kind of trying and failing at this but ultimately the reason i became a
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youtuber was because it was content marketing for my medical school admissions business where i was helping people get into med
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school teaching them how to do well in these exams and no one was really creating decent content for free on the
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internet about those exams there was these kind of corporations creating boring corporate looking stuff
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um and i saw that gap in the market i was like great if i can create these sort of tutorials on youtube content
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marketing people will watch my tutorials free and if they like me enough they'll sign up to the course
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and that's why i started speaking to a camera in my bedroom it was like all right guys here are some tips for
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section one of the b-man you know section one is all about critical thinking the 60 minutes and 35 questions and bloody blind here's how you do it
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and i was so familiar with that stuff having taught it for five years um that that started to do reasonably okay early
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on in the days where i had like 51 subscribers 52 you know refreshing the youtube app every day to be like oh my god i've got another view
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um and it sort of morphed from there was there a tipping point where you thought [ __ ] this is gonna be
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bigger than the the thing that i intended this to support
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yeah that tipping point was my first video that went viral uh and it was a video about how to study
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for exams um this was one of those weird
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weird things that i look back on where when i started youtube it was in june of 2017.
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i knew that i wanted to make this video this sort of how to study for exams evidence-based tips at some point further down the line it was a topic
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that i'd researched extensively i like people would come to me asking for help on how to study for their exams there's
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actually a whole body of like psychological research on this that we just don't get taught in school around what are the actually most effective
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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
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first video because i knew that i knew nothing about cameras or editing or anything and i reasoned it would take me
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a hundred videos of being bad at it before i could make a video that was actually good and i thought to myself to myself okay i
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really want to put all my everything into this 100th video so that this video can potentially go big and that's kind
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of what ended up happening i think it was my 81st video or something rather than my 100th but that video went viral
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i i had like 4 000 subscribers before just sort of slowly building up and then over the next few weeks it just exploded
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up to like 20 000 25 000 um and i was getting all these comments from people who knew me in real life being like oh i've seen your video i
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didn't realize you're a youtuber and that was the tipping point um which really sort of started that
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exponential growth trajectory that kind of you talk about in the compounding chapter yeah yeah yeah about that again
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so there's two things there the first this i'll just do them in the order in which i i thought of them um
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okay because you mentioned compounding there what have you learned from your experience on youtube about the
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importance of of consistency um and also from what you kind of what
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typically happens with viral videos is just there's it's so impossibly hard to predict the outcome right so a lot of people say a
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lot of people on youtube will make videos called how to make a viral video and in marketing it's all like here are the secret sauce here are the secret
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principles but in reality you can only you can ha you can guess
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a couple of principles but the outcome is hard to predict so what have you learnt about consistency but then also being able to predict the
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outcome yeah uh when i was listening to your your compounding chapter i just found myself like nodding along like an absolute
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maniac to everything you were saying i think it applies so much to youtube uh these days i i teach people how to be
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part-time youtubers and the thing i say is that if you make one video every week for two
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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
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000 subscribers or how much money you'll be making but i can 100 guarantee it will change your life at the very least
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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
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video a week and you have to do it for at least two years um i just asked on that then on that point
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there what is it that will would make someone do that
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because i mean that's like [ __ ] clean the floor every day for
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two years and i promise you'll work out for you like people don't seem to be able to do those
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kinds of things without some kind of intrinsic driver so i'm like i'm curious because you could say that to a million
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people you could broadcast that through a tunnel and 95 plus will still fail
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so what is it that makes people from your your experience but also yeah from your own life makes them do the work
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without guarantee of outcome yeah i think again i i feel like there's a bit of a
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cop-out because this is stuff that you talk about uh like in enjoying the process and this is kind of the theme of the book that i'm writing around how
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you know it's actually quite hard to show up week after week not see any results and not see the views and the
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subscribers going up and stuff particularly quickly but the thing that makes it bearable the thing that makes it fun is actually
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enjoying the process and shifting away from outcome oriented goals like a certain number of views a certain number
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of subscribers and more towards goals that are 100 within our control like i just want to make two videos a
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week and if i'm happy with the 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
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succeeded on youtube has had that kind of attitude at some point i just have to get that video out every tuesday without
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fail it's not an option it's going to get done and you know like you say in when we talk when we talk about compounding
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that that video on day 1 isn't going to do anything the video on day 2 or day 3 or day 24 is not going to do anything
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but you find when you're on day 300 and day 600 oh actually all of this stuff has been compounding very very slowly and then
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the results happen really really really slowly and then all at once as soon as you just get that one video that that
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goes viral that is i think that's the chapter where i talk about the eighth wonder of the world yeah that's it with
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warren buffett and my dog pablo being the opposing investor and i genuinely i think i learned that lesson
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when i wrote the book when i look back on my life and i thought about all the things that compounded in my favor whether it was like my honestly it's
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going to be keeping facts with you my teeth had some problems with my teeth and i thought do you know why and i
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probably referenced this in the book like i i hadn't been brushing one of my teeth properly and it never mattered
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today or tomorrow the day after but there i was in that dentist's chair but having my teeth [ __ ] pulled out and then my instagram was the same
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um health and fitness at the moment the same my business was the same and it just goes to show that it's not those
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key critical big decisions we make to drop out it's that like yeah it's that the compounding small almost uh
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irrelevant decisions yeah but people don't they because i heard you started working out i did yeah and then you
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stopped uh oh so i've had a personal trainer now for the last kind of eight months there you go amazing and uh you
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know i've been 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
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having to show up i'm paying someone 30 quid an hour to basically just be with me while i'm doing stuff
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and that has been the thing that's given me the most results uh so
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i think whatever like i i find in my life for things for things that i actually care about where i'm like okay i
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actually care about becoming a happy sexy millionaire or whatever let me try and figure out ways that will
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remove my own need for discipline and willpower from that equation and instead get an accountability buddy
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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
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when we were trying to motivate ourselves i was doing songwriting he was doing stand-up comedy like right if we don't do this every thursday for half an
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hour we're going to pay each other 50 quid things like that to remove the choice the motivation the willpower the
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discipline that all the more of that can be outsourced to someone else or removed completely the more i find i actually get stuff done
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and then i don't have to worry about it cause i'm like okay this is taken care of i just show up i guess you're removing you're moving the mood as
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opposed to like removing it you're moving it to another pact like near il refers to it as what you've described as
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a financial pact where now your motivation is to not lose 50 quid it's like because that is that's a greater
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motivating force than you have within yourself to work out that's interesting is that sustainable
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no it's not it's not okay um this is all the stuff that i'm researching for the for for the book at
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the moment um and you talk about this as well like in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the way that i think of it when i
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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
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but you can genuinely enjoy a thing and still find it really hard to get started i think that's where the biggest
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procrastination comes in for all of us where it's actually just showing up to the gym that's the hard part like once you're there it's kind of easy it's
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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
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and so and so the way i think about it is to get over that like hump of procrastination that activation energy
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to get started at that point i will use every tool that in my arsenal to just
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just get me to do the thing for two minutes because i think once once you do the thing for two minutes it becomes so much easier to actually enjoy the
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process and and and sustain it and and you're so right when it comes to procrastination like that getting started point um i've again just learned
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this from podcast guests that i've had near aiella and i refer to him he he said to me one day on this podcast he was like people procrastinate usually
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because there's um a great deal of psychological discomfort surrounding starting the task
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and a lot of the time especially with a gym or even an essay that psychological discomfort is like you don't have the
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answers so i don't know how to use the machines at the gym or i don't actually have i don't feel competent enough to
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even write this essay so i'm just going to do the [ __ ] dishes yeah it's like i'm going to hoover the whole house and
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anyone else's house that needs hoovering today exactly um you you made a video about procrastination didn't you yeah
00:22:00
yeah break that down for me what's it what's in the video um so the video is called how to stop procrastinating right yeah um
00:22:08
so the the way thing about procrastination basically procrastination is a problem with
00:22:14
getting started um kind of this this law of inertia uh newton's first law that if
00:22:19
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
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overcoming procrastination is that little that little nudge at the start towards actually getting started
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and all of the techniques around that like in the whole like psychology research or research around this is just
00:22:37
around making make make it as easy as possible um so reduce all of the friction to doing it if you want to
00:22:43
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
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you're never going to do it there's like the external environmental friction towards doing the thing but
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then there's also the internal friction it's like those narratives that we tell ourselves the uh the psychological discomfort of going
00:23:01
to the gym that i don't want to see how other people are going to see me though even even having having the wrong sort
00:23:07
of goal like if my goal in writing the book is i already want to hit the new york times bestseller list
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then it's really really hard to bring myself to write anything because now every single word i have to write has to be in new york times best-selling word
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whereas if the goal is to be honest i just want to write a book i'm proud of that's fun to fun to write that's actually within my control and it
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becomes so much easier to get started at doing the thing um so to overcome procrastination we
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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
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the mindset the perfectionism the the fear the discomfort and then if we still need help there are
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a few a few hacks the one that i use all the time is the the two-minute rule which is where i will genuinely convince
00:23:48
myself i'm only gonna do it for two minutes uh and if i want i'm allowed to stop after the two minutes because two minutes is better than nothing but like
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95 percent of the time i decide to continue because two minutes is all you need to change your life yeah i should tweet that
00:24:00
that's good so yeah that's really good and i that two-minute thing is fascinating to me because i one of the things that um i see as another
00:24:06
psychological barrier to starting is people view it as like they view the challenge as mount everest whereas
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like they've got them i'll say it another way they view the challenge as moving mount everest and really if they viewed it as just like
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moving one pebble at a time it becomes such a simple task yeah and i get this a lot when entrepreneurs ask me they say
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steve i want to start a business where do i start and you can hear in the question that they see it as moving
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mount everest and i'm like well today all you have to do is think of a name
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just think of like 50 names make a short list of names and then we'll revisit it tomorrow and then tomorrow maybe think
00:24:40
of you know go and check if the website's available and then we'll revisit the day after yeah and when it becomes that and when it becomes sort of
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really small itemized one small step at a time and you're not having to get from
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stairs zero to a thousand immediately it becomes so you know the
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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've only
00:25:04
got to do just just if i can open the word document and write a title and then we're done you know and so that's fascinating what about
00:25:11
you we're going to see something else there yeah i mean i just just to your point there um have you have you come across the blog wait but why no oh it's
00:25:18
incredible you should definitely interview tim urban when you're in america oh i don't know i literally yesterday went on his instagram and sent
00:25:24
media oh great yeah he's awesome any podcast he's ever been on i've been like this is so sick uh he has a great blog
00:25:30
post series about overcoming procrastination and the way he refers to that that point you just made is that um
00:25:35
there are lots of tasks that are very like vague and icky and you have to be able to uniquify a
00:25:42
task uh and something like start a business is icky something like learn to code is icky because like what the hell
00:25:47
does that even mean like where do you even start whereas brainstorm 10 ideas for a name and pick one of them is a
00:25:53
very clearly defined next action step and so i get this with students all the time where people are like oh i don't
00:25:59
have the motivation to study for my chemistry exam it's like what's on your to-do list study for my chemistry exam that's never gonna happen read chapter
00:26:05
one and answer questions four to five are a reasonable thing a reasonably defined next action step
00:26:11
and so what i do is anytime i find myself procrastinating from something i think okay am i procrastinating because
00:26:16
i actually the task is too icky i 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
00:26:22
minutes and it gets done speaking about productivity um as you guys know i'm i'm the biggest fuel
00:26:29
consumer in the world and i have been for many many many years and i always get asked what my favorite heel products
00:26:35
are and i have them here in front of me the first product that i fell in love with with huel because it's nutritionally complete it tastes amazing
00:26:41
i have no time in my life but i also want don't want my diet to be compromised when my life gets really
00:26:47
really busy as it always has um ended up being um is this berry flavor ready to
00:26:53
drink cure that was where that was where my journey with heel began the next product that i fell in love with at huel
00:26:59
was the banana flavor ready to drink for me it just tastes better than the berry and i already think the berry tastes amazing funnily from speaking to huel a
00:27:07
lot of people's favorite flavor is the chocolate flavor i've never taken a huge liking to the
00:27:12
chocolate flavor but to be honest i don't really eat much chocolate in any facet of my life or drink it at all and now the product
00:27:20
which i have every single day without fail and probably because i'm in that phase where i'm working out every day
00:27:26
without exception and i want to make sure that my gains from working out whether it's becoming
00:27:32
more lean or becoming more strong are captured is the protein um here which
00:27:37
has just come out and as you can see if anyone thinks i'm bullshitting about how much i like heal this tub is basically
00:27:42
empty so huel if you're listening please can i have a top-up i will buy it don't worry um but honestly and i say this
00:27:48
with full honesty 100 honesty um i genuinely didn't like protein powders
00:27:54
before maybe i'm lazy not the type of guy that likes to mix things and this is my favorite flavor protein ever the
00:28:02
salted caramel heel which i talk about all the time they also have a ton of other flavors they're all actually on top of my fridge there but i'm starting
00:28:08
with this one i've basically finished it and then i'll work my way through the others and give you a little bit of a review on those i it's such as i always
00:28:15
say in this podcast it's such an honor to be able to talk about a product that you use many times a day i had the heel ready to drink this morning i'll have
00:28:21
this after my workout which is after this podcast and in terms of productivity optim um and operating at
00:28:27
your best then that is what huell is all about you know people talk about how they'll
00:28:32
put on their to-do list clean house and it'll sit on a to-do list and clean up that's a certain big thing
00:28:39
and it'll and that'll sit on your to-do list for like i don't know two weeks or whatever but if you do if you time block and write in your this is what i do on
00:28:45
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
00:28:52
the calendar saturday and sunday come around i wake up i'm like
00:28:58
okay i'm like what the [ __ ] how does this thing work yeah i'm like it's empty i've got loads
00:29:04
of things i know i could be doing right now but nothing no one telling me what to do in a in a life of mine where i'm
00:29:10
told what to do every five minutes um so i time block on the weekends which means clean house would become at 11
00:29:17
till 12 i clean the kitchen because then it's like time sensitive
00:29:22
and like task specific and that's that's been an absolute game changer for me
00:29:28
and i also think in the era of working from home yeah where you know people are sat at home they
00:29:33
have uh tasks they have to connect people always ask the question it's almost like we prefer this because like
00:29:39
this is literally like the the three part structure of my book which i've been like i just having in my head for the last last few weeks
00:29:44
where like step one is how do we beat the procrastination how do we get started with doing the thing and part
00:29:51
two of the book is how do we sustain how do we actually keep on going doing the thing and
00:29:57
uh there's just uh so in in in terms of mindset the thing that i found that actually moves the needle is
00:30:03
focusing on trying to make it fun and i really i really like that word fun like i think there's something about the word
00:30:09
fun that is so like childish but also fully speaks to like fun basically means
00:30:15
in intrinsic motivation like something is sufficiently enjoyable that you do it for its own sake rather than for the
00:30:20
fact that you've got a sponsored helping you or you've got a deadline or things like that um there's one
00:30:26
there's one story in particular that i i i often come back to and that's like
00:30:32
sometime last year i was i was working at the hospital it was pandemic season et cetera et cetera and i'd gotten to
00:30:38
the end of like a 13-hour long shift and i was just about to go home uh and the nurse said to me oh ali can you put a
00:30:44
candle in this patient her like iv line is tissued and she needs fluids overnight and my heart kind of sank i
00:30:50
was like oh no like if if the nurse wasn't able to put the cannula in that means there's a patient with difficult veins it means
00:30:55
it's going to be hard to put this in and i sort of had this mindset of like all right then fine
00:31:01
and sort of grudgingly took out the cannula and got all the equipment in a tray
00:31:06
and i like as as i was doing this i there was a patient in the bay next door where they were just like talking to a
00:31:12
family member or something and saying oh you know this hospital has been amazing everyone is so nice and what a pleasure
00:31:18
it is you know freaking love the nhs kind of vibes and i realized that in that moment i was
00:31:24
not being like a good model internally for what i want the nhs to be and what i want a good doctor to
00:31:30
be and there's something that seth godin who uh who i've been following for a while says which is that
00:31:35
it's the difference between have to and get to and so i was considering as like oh i have to put in this cannula and i
00:31:42
remembered that blog post i read from seth godin where he said instead of thinking of have to think of it as get to i realized oh i get to put in this
00:31:48
cannula i get to make a difference in this patient's lives and life and give her fluids overnight so that she's not
00:31:53
gonna dehydrate because of her morning sickness and just that mindset shift immediately
00:31:59
made me feel so much better about it and i was like oh i get to do this who cares if i've been working for 13 hours this is fun this is privileged this is cool
00:32:05
and i put it in and we had a nice chat and i felt really great about it afterwards and now like and so that's
00:32:11
one of the mindset things that i just always come back to if i'm finding myself not enjoying something and
00:32:16
therefore my focus goes i get distracted i procrastinate instead of thinking i have to do this i
00:32:21
think i get to do this it's like a gratitude shift yeah yeah it's like your chapter three or what was talking about gratitude
00:32:28
and we so quickly fall out of gratitude when we become so easy to do yeah when
00:32:34
we become like used to the privilege of our life used to the privilege of our jobs of our relationships of our kids of
00:32:39
our dog we we think well you know we and because and the stoic people talk about this i think i'll probably talk about
00:32:44
this in the book as well because these are just like clearly the only idea that i have put them all in there um how they used to do
00:32:49
that like hedonistic adaptation um exercises to literally take the things out of their life that they've
00:32:55
really valued just to remind themselves of what they had and it kind of seems like um
00:33:01
gratitude is a very important thing have you got like a defined gratitude practice that you do like gratitude
00:33:06
journaling or that kind of stuff so i the gratitude journaling thing um takes place in the notes of my phone
00:33:12
where sometimes i feel the need to remind myself of what i'm really really grateful for i think i do have a
00:33:19
a bias towards feeling grateful all the time i really just get overwhelmed sometimes with like i'll have like a little flash you'll
00:33:26
probably get this when you think what the [ __ ] is this yeah like you know like what the f especially now that i'm
00:33:31
on dragon's den and that was a real vision of mine when i was like 12 years old i'm like oh my this is and i said this in my show
00:33:38
the other day i said um i said on stage in the drive of a seo live i said that um i said to the audience i
00:33:43
said like i think everybody in this room is living a life that you once dreamed of living
00:33:49
but you don't you're not even happy about it because present you
00:33:54
well if present you has told you that future you will be even happier when you get to somewhere else but like this is
00:34:00
it this was the [ __ ] dream and look at you living it look at you as your you know doctors and lawyers and you've got
00:34:07
the job at that brand you always wanted to work for this is it um and i i have to do that to myself sometimes because
00:34:14
yeah um because if not you'll never get there if your happiness is always as i said in
00:34:19
the book if it always lives somewhere in the future behind some goal or at the attainment of some task or whatever it always will be there and that was
00:34:26
certainly the case for me and i from what i read about you where um
00:34:31
you were talking about like outcomes and not being to attach the outcomes sounds like it might have been
00:34:37
similar yeah yeah very much so um i i have to remind myself on a daily basis
00:34:42
as well um to kind of be be grateful for for all of the things um
00:34:48
sometimes like if i if if i'm in the habit of doing like a morning journal i'll like write down a list of three things and it's often simple things like
00:34:56
you know this cup of coffee in my hand or angus or like my housemate and just like you know this nice chat that we had
00:35:02
and i think like like for me if i don't remind myself i i always just think in kind of hustle
00:35:08
mode of like all right cool on to the next thing on to the next thing on to the next thing um but like it was it was pretty cool
00:35:14
yesterday like we we we went on a tour of gymshark hq up north and i was just thinking that i can't
00:35:20
believe this is this is my job like i get to do this for work this is absolutely sick and even now being here
00:35:25
like this is sitting here talking to you is what i get to do for work and if like
00:35:30
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 this is
00:35:35
the dream have you come across a guy called brandon sanderson nope uh he's an author he writes he's my favorite author he does
00:35:42
he's incredible like fantasy novels stormlight archive huge huge uh series
00:35:47
in it there's like a q a phrase that i always come back to around this point there's this like um order of knights
00:35:53
they're called the knights radiant and they have like their like charter their ideals and their first ideal is life
00:35:59
before death strength before weakness journey before destination and it's that final bit of journey before destination
00:36:05
that i remind myself of on a basically daily basis where it's it's kind of like miley cyrus thing
00:36:12
of it's the climb it's not about how fast i get there ain't about what's waiting on the other side it's the climb
00:36:17
and the way i try and i try and remind myself of this point of i i am enough is
00:36:23
thinking and and really trying to internalize that the journey is more important than the destination and i think
00:36:29
we do need a destination like you know the fact that i want to i don't know
00:36:34
write this book or whatever like that's 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
00:36:41
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
00:36:46
its own merit because you know as you know once you if you set a goal you hit the god it's like well happiness started the the joy from
00:36:53
that lasts about five seconds and then it feels like nothing even like sometimes it doesn't feel like
00:36:58
anything at all even even for those five seconds um and so what i've been realizing a lot recently is that
00:37:04
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
00:37:11
myself day to day and am i kind of living the dream as it were day to day and not
00:37:18
and not so much worrying about the goal at the end of it one thing that you they talk about as well um is
00:37:24
i think it was either 19 chapter chapter 19 and 20. it was around this thing of you can yeah ambition versus insecurity
00:37:30
is this thing that you think you want to do is it coming from within or is it coming from outside of you
00:37:36
and you talk about values like living in alignment with your values do you have any like how how do you
00:37:43
figure out what your values are it's a really interesting it's a really interesting um thing um i think
00:37:50
i think one of the the best indicators of what your values are are from how you feel that's maybe the most
00:37:57
um fundamental human stimuli we have which is how something makes us feel um
00:38:04
slight tangent and i was talking to someone about this yesterday
00:38:10
in the world we live in and as the social media connected from birth generation we don't understand what our
00:38:16
actual true intrinsic values are very easily because even if and this is kind
00:38:21
of a controversial topic but who cares even charity we all think we're charitable human beings
00:38:27
we're not and if you've only got to look back at human history to understand that our
00:38:32
morals are highly influenced by what society's doing at the time because if you go back 150
00:38:37
years i would have been a slave potentially right my family certainly would have in africa like they would
00:38:43
have had a high chance of being slaves and at the time my slave master was not a bad person he
00:38:49
was a good person you know morally sound per you know and and and now obviously that's viewed as being an
00:38:55
awful thing and it's the same within like the lgbtq tqq community that you know
00:39:02
at one time um that was just everyone knew that
00:39:07
believed that being in a same-sex relationship was a terrible thing an evil thing in some
00:39:13
religious um writings now we all accept it to be how can our morals of society has
00:39:19
changed the force that's telling us what's right and wrong what's good and bad what's valued and what you know has
00:39:25
changed that's the only change that's happened so i do believe deeply that a lot of our values um unavoidably come
00:39:30
from our willingness to survive by taking up the values of the communities we live in however when it comes to your personal
00:39:37
values however they've been shaped usually from your parents or early experiences i i
00:39:42
just go on based on how things make me feel and that seems to be the only indication i
00:39:48
have of what's what's true for me and what's not if i'm alone and i watch a video of a
00:39:54
baby um suffering or crying and it makes me sad
00:40:00
when no one's around yep and i'm not having to tweet about my feelings to the world then i would
00:40:05
assume that that is you know you said about learning and sorry teaching you've got enjoyment from that you've always
00:40:11
got i would assume that's one of your sort of professional values or something you value professionally yeah
00:40:17
i've been on a whole like uh quest across the internet over the last few months to try and answer this question of how do you figure out what your
00:40:23
values are um there's this like program with a life coach that i even did which is like just just finishing up where
00:40:29
um one of the exercises was to like go back to your childhood and
00:40:35
think about kind of on a scale of kind of minus 10 to plus 10 uh minus being really bad and
00:40:41
plus being pretty good like what were the most salient experiences of your childhood and i was like okay this sounds like bs
00:40:46
but all right let me engage with this process and then i i made this list of all these
00:40:52
things that these salient memories from childhood like you know that time when my brother new game to my pokemon blue and i lost my 146 pokemon and that how
00:40:58
how that felt and that time when whatever um and the facilitator was like okay let's try and tease out like what
00:41:05
this might tell you about some of your values i was kind of surprised that a lot of the stuff that came out of that
00:41:12
if i think about is this a core value that i live by i want to live by the answer was yes
00:41:17
and i was surprised by how much of those experiences where when i was under 10 years old shaped maybe
00:41:23
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
00:41:29
right now it's like freedom and autonomy which is why i think i've got this whole drive to be financially independent to
00:41:34
work medicine part-time rather than full-time to have be in control of my own schedule things like
00:41:40
togetherness and kind of working with other people has always been a really fun thing for me whether i was in school or university
00:41:45
studying with friends it's just always more fun than studying on my own and that wasn't true for everyone but it was certainly true for me um teaching on
00:41:52
that list kind of help helping other people in a way but like i've got i've got friends for
00:41:58
example who who run charities and they genuinely feel in their hearts
00:42:03
if there is suffering in the world and i don't genuinely feel in my heart when they're suffering in the world um
00:42:09
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
00:42:15
charity every year and all this all this stuff but i don't actually feel it um but when i think about how i feel it's
00:42:20
like teaching other people rather than saving saving lives is the impact that i care about having and when
00:42:26
i realized this i was like oh okay this explains why i actually don't really care that much about medicine like i'm i
00:42:32
prefer teaching medical students than actually practicing as a doctor and realizing that teaching is more of a value for me
00:42:39
than saving lives for example i was like okay cool this makes sense i can now get on board with that and not feel bad
00:42:44
about it the other point is that i've never cared about really i've really never
00:42:50
cared about finding out what my values are because and this is probably goes back to how i answered that question because
00:42:56
the stimuli that i have to decide all of these things is like um how does it make me feel and i think if you have a good quitting framework
00:43:03
then you will quickly move in the direction of your values um much faster than others will quitting framework yeah
00:43:08
like if you have a good a good uh like quitting framework oh yeah you're very good at quitting then you'll actually
00:43:15
you'll so if you're good at conducting experiments and then quitting like just a it's like rapid a b testing
00:43:21
right and you can i think i think the answer really to finding out who you are and what your values are and getting
00:43:26
your place to a life that you really love is try something i always say to young people increase the amount of
00:43:31
experiments you're doing and quit faster so you go and get a job you're like okay um i hate this this boss is a dick
00:43:37
because we didn'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 and this
00:43:43
quit go and find a job where you have the bit you liked and some new sort of
00:43:48
factors and then you go okay well i love that bit i actually love being a manager here i'm going to keep the fashion piece i love the autonomy of being able to
00:43:55
work from home or whatever quit move on next job you know and i think that's what i've done in my life is i never knew what my values were but
00:44:01
i went in the direction of um i started out in call centers
00:44:06
knew i loved building things bigger entrepreneurs sales moved in that direction quit the call center jobs did about 15 of them start
00:44:13
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
00:44:19
and i'm like this is the part within this bit within business that i love doing within this industry and i never
00:44:26
was intentional about that there was no plan it was this rapid increase experiments you're doing and quit as
00:44:31
fast as you possibly can um and then you end up i think in a life that you're but quitting is easier said
00:44:37
than done i have to say it would be remiss if i didn't say all of this is underpinned by huge confidence in self
00:44:45
and the fact when i do quit i don't need a plan and that off i'll be fine a lot of people don't have that part so they
00:44:52
hold themselves in a miserable situation because it's a certain one yeah you know i like uh like when i when i
00:45:00
read that bit of the book the the quitting framework i was sort of retrospectively applying decisions i've
00:45:05
made to quit to that that thing of like suck and hard i was like oh okay this actually makes a lot of sense um
00:45:11
there was one decision that my mum still haunts me about which was about about a year ago i decided that
00:45:18
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 over there it seemed like an
00:45:24
adventure and it seemed cool but to move to america from the uk to do medicine you have to take this like ridiculously
00:45:29
hard exam called the usmle and it's basically like relearning all of medical school uh but at like you know a
00:45:35
ridiculous level of detail more so than we have in the uk and so i started off preparing for this and i realized that
00:45:41
this is actually really hard and the thing that
00:45:46
i reasoned in my mind was i could do this it's but the reward is
00:45:52
really not worth it like you get to the end of it i've spoken to some doctors living working in america and i'm like yeah you make 400k a year and you're
00:45:58
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
00:46:05
it's hard and the outcome is not worth it yes therefore i'm just going to quit that's the worst place to be in life
00:46:10
doing harsh struggling for nothing yeah um but then when i have conversations
00:46:16
with my mom it's like oh well you quit because you're a quitter like the fact that you found it hard me like
00:46:21
you only quit because it was hard it's like no i didn't only quit because it was hard i also i also crucially quit
00:46:27
because it was like the the reward was not gonna be worth it but i i didn't quite have the terminology to express that until i read it in your book yeah
00:46:34
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
00:46:40
through for my whole life in hindsight what i'm a very logical sort of first principle thinker and that's why i'm
00:46:46
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
00:46:53
not going to do something that's hard and not worth it but what kind of insanity is that i am someone that will
00:46:59
do something that's hard and worth it i'm not and i'm i'm not someone that's going to quit every time something sucks
00:47:06
i am someone that's going to try and change it if it's worth it and if i think it's possible to change i mean my
00:47:11
white you know my girlfriend have an argument and i go this sucks and [ __ ] walk out the door that's not who i am i will try and fight for something if it's
00:47:17
worth it and if i believe it's changeable and so logically i think that framework is
00:47:23
robust i think it's solid you talk a lot about time management managing one's time you made a lot of
00:47:29
videos about the topic what would have been some of the other sort of um tips or tricks that you've
00:47:34
adopted that helped you manage your time better we talked about time blocking and um breaking your
00:47:40
vague to-do list tasks down into specific ones is there anything else that comes to mind yeah there's one um
00:47:46
i've i've read a bunch of books around productivity and stuff there's one called make time by these chaps called jake and john
00:47:54
and there's a tip in there which i genuinely use every day uh it's just it's called the daily highlight where
00:47:59
it's just similar to gary keller's thing of the one thing like what is the one thing you want to do today and then it's
00:48:06
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
00:48:12
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
00:48:17
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
00:48:23
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
00:48:30
i find that like oh i've got these 18 things doing my to-do list oh comedy book got this am i message coming from this person who wants to enter an intro
00:48:35
to that person whereas when i know what that one thing is i'm like okay cool all i have to do
00:48:41
is just get that one thing done today and i sometimes think that if i did this more often if for 365 days i actually
00:48:47
just did the one thing that's the most important each day i've been making so much progress i'll be having so much fun and then i think to myself why don't i
00:48:54
actually just do this every day um but that's that's one of my main ones that's life as well it's just
00:48:59
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
00:49:06
and i guess the premise of that video was teaching people how to learn better you've read a lot of books
00:49:12
as it relates to learning outside of studying just more generally what tools have you adopted because
00:49:17
you're some you even you know you've read my book and you remember all everything it seems what trips and tips and tricks have you learned about how to
00:49:23
learn better yeah um so essentially the main one is that we
00:49:30
learn by testing ourselves rather than by consuming more stuff
00:49:36
uh like we like in in which is a big country intuitive like when it comes to if we if we think about like studying
00:49:41
and then we can kind of broaden it out like if it comes to studying we think that to to learn more stuff i need to get more
00:49:47
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
00:49:53
your best to get it out of your brain and that feels hard and it feels tough and it feels like oh i'm an idiot i don't know enough but that that like
00:50:00
desirable difficulty is what allegedly creates the neuronal connections in our brain to make us actually learn something
00:50:06
um and so it's similar to working out like progressive overload when it's heavy and when it feels hard is when
00:50:11
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
00:50:17
there is a stimulus for the neurons to grow or words to that effect and so when it comes to studying
00:50:22
if anyone is sort of listening to this has exams coming up and they are worried about their grades
00:50:28
the the 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
00:50:34
also to every other thing that we're trying to learn so you know if i'm learning i was learning how to play
00:50:40
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
00:50:46
but as soon as i try doing the thing that feels hard at that point it's like it the the harder it feels the more i'm
00:50:52
learning and then and then we sleep and then the connections get solidified um so it's that that's kind of the main
00:50:57
concept basically test yourself more whatever that thing is and the second big one in the research is spaced repetition that
00:51:04
anything we learn whether it's a fact for an exam or a song on the guitar our memory for it will exponentially
00:51:10
decay over time and the way to make it go into a long-term memory whatever the skill is
00:51:15
is to interrupt the forgetting curve uh at spaced intervals so maybe you would lo you would practice the song on day
00:51:21
one you'd practice it again on day two then on day five then on day 25 and then day 105 and as the intervals lengthen
00:51:28
that is the sort of thing that gets this how to play the song or this fact about medicine or whatever into a long-term
00:51:34
memory and most things around learning can basically be summed up by those two things active recall i.e test yourself
00:51:40
and space repetition i.e space it out over time interesting people are really fascinated
00:51:45
by productivity aren't they they are yeah i think i heard you say about like when you put the word productivity in
00:51:50
your content it seems to perform better yeah i i often think about this like
00:51:58
so so to me productivity i think i think to a lot of people productivity just means efficiency and
00:52:03
creating economic output the way that i define productivity is just kind of using my time well and working on things
00:52:09
that are meaningful to me and optimizing for happiness and so to me this conversation is productive hanging out
00:52:14
with friends is productive i was playing playstation last night for a couple of hours that to me was productive because i was like
00:52:20
intentionally doing it because i wanted to take a break from writing um it's when i feel it's i i feel
00:52:25
unproductive when i know there is something i want to do and i am not doing the thing
00:52:30
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
00:52:38
people use productive as economic output and the whole like oh i want to be more productive it's a
00:52:44
i think partly it's a virtue signaling thing to some degree as well yeah
00:52:49
yeah partly it's a it's it's a version of a virtual signaling thing i think i think partly it's also like a self-flagellating thing in a way whereby
00:52:57
i often see comments on my videos where it's like a productive day in my life which i'm kind of doing tongue-in-cheek
00:53:02
just because it's funny where people are like oh my god i watch these videos just to make myself feel bad
00:53:08
and i'm like oh wow okay hey this is a this is mostly a joke like i hope you realize this but but but also
00:53:14
it's like that that's kind of sad that that comment has got so many upvotes where oh i feel so i feel like such a
00:53:19
waste man when i watch one of those videos and i think there is that like perverse sense of
00:53:25
people getting pleasure out of the story they're telling themselves that they are non-productive or that they are a
00:53:30
chronic procrastinator and to see someone who doesn't who is on the surface seemingly so
00:53:36
productive makes you kind of feel bad about yourself um i wonder if it's similar to like if i
00:53:42
look at my instagram explore page about a year ago it used to be bikini models these days the dudes with six-pack abs
00:53:48
and i look at that and there is a part of me that gets pleasure out of like flagellating myself and they're like why
00:53:54
don't i look like that yet and i wonder to what extent that's like a thing in the world of productivity
00:53:59
that is fascinating because i mean that would be driven by
00:54:04
the antithesis of that that's going to be driven by a culture where productivity and i'm getting so much done so i'm going to be
00:54:10
successful and rich in a millionaire and this is i'm in stealth mode building this massive business and i've been up
00:54:16
all night look at me it's 4 a.m and i'm still working that's driving one end of the spectrum which is making
00:54:21
productivity and being productive and aspiration for this generation and on the other end that's i mean
00:54:28
that's why again the desire to be productive is so high and your videos do so well on that topic
00:54:34
and then you have the counter movement as you always do where it's like i'm such a procrastinator and then all the
00:54:39
memes which bang just as hard because there's been this desire created in
00:54:44
culture to be you know super productive or even as it relates to like weight and fitness like
00:54:50
everyone wants to look so good and then the memes of people sat there with a pot noodle on their belly like resting like
00:54:55
with their like running shoes on will also bang just as hard yeah but yeah
00:55:00
it's just a very relevant thing in our culture which is quite quite strange that this incessant desire to be productive i think there's
00:55:06
actually there is a rising counterculture which is about being okay with not being produced yeah no exactly
00:55:13
i am i'm i'm having to pepper in a pepper that into my videos a lot more these days um
00:55:18
because i kind of thought it was it was so obvious that it doesn't need to be stated that obviously you know
00:55:24
don't be don't be don't seek economic output and productivity at the expense of other things that are more important
00:55:30
like health and relationships uh but clearly that's not a thing that is obvious and so i'm now
00:55:36
having to caveat a lot of my productivity advice with like a look guys let's just define productivity as
00:55:41
you know meaning and fulfillment and stuff rather than pure economic output and it's okay to be intentional and say i
00:55:47
don't do anything today if that was your intention i want to just do [ __ ] all like and i
00:55:53
think that's um that's the nuance that's required in all of that speaking of productivity one more
00:56:00
company i wanted to tell you about fiverr.com i mean if there was a company that's predicated on increasing your
00:56:05
productivity it is fiverr.com where you can outsource some of the tasks in your life that you do not want to do
00:56:11
professionally whether it's designing a website making a thumbnail editing a video anything you can get it
00:56:17
done on fiverr.com cost effectively and sometimes if we're talking about increasing productivity using someone
00:56:24
who's on another time zone which means work is still happening when you are asleep which extends the bandwidth of
00:56:29
the amount of hours you have towards your goals and this month we are using fiverr to redesign the thumbnails on our
00:56:36
second youtube channel a graphic designer we found there and i always use it whenever i have professional tasks
00:56:42
that i need handling that is fiverr with two rs.com slash ceo
00:56:49
you talked about relationships at the start of this podcast you said you said you you think you alluded to
00:56:54
the fact that you hadn't had much luck there when we were talking about knowing you're enough yeah
00:57:00
what's going on yeah this is a real problem um so there's a few like narratives that i've
00:57:06
bought into um subconsciously one of those narratives is that i am like a weedy nerd kid this like the
00:57:14
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 anything
00:57:20
uh not being valuable as a human being beyond the fact that i was generating a stars in exams
00:57:27
that's like one side of it there's another side but i i'd love to hear your take on what's the other side
00:57:32
the other side is um if we're if we're keeping it real it's like i think it's around
00:57:39
masculinity and what it means to be a man and if one if one were to hypothetically
00:57:45
read wikihow articles on how to get girls or even the vast literature on the topic um
00:57:51
there is a big thing of women are attracted to
00:57:56
men like you know people who are so someone who is a man someone who leads someone who's like alpha those sorts of
00:58:01
those those sorts of things and i think
00:58:07
my kind of default way of being is very not that and like my idea of fun is
00:58:12
singing disney songs and playing board games until two o'clock in the morning with the pizza takeaway rather than something that a more like macho alpha
00:58:18
type person person would be and so on the one hand there's that thing of just be yourself uh of be
00:58:25
authentic self etc etc and a girl will like that for who you are and on the other side it's the the thing
00:58:31
of you will objectively get more success with women in inverted commas if you
00:58:36
sort of are more of that alpha type personality here's the problem yeah please
00:58:43
on the on that particular point before we move on because i'd love to hear what you're going to say but um you were you
00:58:48
it sounded like you were saying do i be myself and dance around listening to disney um even though it might return a
00:58:54
lower quantity of smoking hot potential partners correct
00:59:00
um or the alternative to that is do i be masculine um guy and like act outside of self to
00:59:08
generate more smoking hot partners the issue you have is you just got to zoom out and you've
00:59:13
got to think about the outcome of both approaches and how sustainable both approaches are all you can be is yourself for a long
00:59:20
period of time and if you want long long term results that's the only option you have of
00:59:25
course you can act as something you're not and pretend you don't like disney and not listen playboard games and stuff
00:59:31
and you might meet the wrong person for a short amount of time because and it will be a short amount of
00:59:37
time because that relationship will capitulate the minute they find out who you actually are and this is there's you
00:59:44
know um yeah this is this is always for me the answer is you have to be yourself
00:59:50
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
00:59:58
points in the relationship where it turns into insecurity and results in jealousy and you know if you're coming
01:00:03
into relation to thinking why the [ __ ] is this person with me yeah the chance of you exhibiting jealous behavior and
01:00:08
controlling behavior and manipulative behavior and insecure behavior and where are you why are you here why haven't you texted me back fast enough and is is
01:00:15
high and for me that will put undue pressure on something that might have worked otherwise so go ahead and work on
01:00:21
the the confidence issues but never ever dare change who you are like the
01:00:28
things you intrinsic do not change those do not try and act outside of those because that is that will lead to really
01:00:34
short-term results and you don't actually want to be with anyone for 50 years that doesn't want to dance and
01:00:39
listen to disney movies with you you don't actually want to society's telling you want smoking art but you don't actually want that you'll
01:00:47
you won't return joy on that you'll you'll return status from walking in with a smoking hot
01:00:52
model that has no brain but you won't return joy in the long term and that is the goal that's the
01:00:57
north star does that make sense it does yeah um
01:01:03
on the note of being yourself the thing that uh the the thing that i
01:01:09
feel i feel i feel a contradiction is that on the one side there's there's kind of
01:01:14
be yourself and on the other side there's like choose yourself and
01:01:20
what i what i worry about is what if this person who i am i.e the kind of nice guy who like like enjoys disney and
01:01:26
board games and stuff that's a result of accidental experiences that i haven't really chosen for myself
01:01:32
and should i instead be thinking okay who's the sort of person i want to be
01:01:38
well then having having said that i don't want to be anyone who doesn't sing along disney songs because they're just great um
01:01:44
yeah and you sing along to disney songs not because you're now being forced because you enjoy it yeah it's genuinely fun it makes you feel free to love it
01:01:50
yeah it's so good there you go so that's 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
01:01:55
that make you feel good don't suppress things that make you feel good because then you'll feel [ __ ] so if that makes you feel good that is
01:02:01
in as far as i'm concerned you've explored and exploited as you say and you've and you've and you've found
01:02:06
something you enjoy and don't sacrifice that for what for a pretty woman to be stood next to
01:02:12
you yeah that's not in that that trust me will not be enjoyment that'll be status that'll be extrinsic approval right
01:02:18
which is very different from internal fulfillment so i would never disregard those things however
01:02:24
you can as i've done over the last year and a half say you know what it when i look at my values and who i i
01:02:30
actually want to be internally my health this is what i've done is so
01:02:35
foundational to everything and i really managed to almost like hypnotize myself somehow
01:02:41
um into knowing that me being in good shape and me being someone that goes to the gym every day and prioritizes that
01:02:47
my health is my first foundation is in line with my happiness the change in my life the thing that's
01:02:53
put me in the best shape of my life ever was before as i said in this podcast me
01:02:58
working out was all about women the minute it became not about women it stuck
01:03:04
because because um yeah for so many reasons i mean i enjoyed the process and i removed
01:03:10
wanting six-pack and i basically don't have any gym goals now whatsoever my goal is to go every day it stuck it
01:03:16
became intrinsic it was for me um and now i go every single day and the minute we finish this conversation my
01:03:22
pt's waiting for me and i went yesterday the day before i'll go the day tomorrow every day okay i don't care
01:03:29
i'm not doing it for anyone else so it sticks interesting that's why your relationship will fail
01:03:34
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
01:03:40
content yeah you make a lot of content and you've must have come to learn a lot about humans and psychology from
01:03:47
all these videos you make you tinker around with the titles and the thumbnails and um
01:03:54
and you've become such a big youtuber you've got millions of subscribers from a very iterative process of i guess really
01:04:00
understanding what humans will respond to and what they want what their desires are what would you give me as advice for
01:04:07
how to make if i'm a listener a really great content that people will care about
01:04:14
it's a broad question but there you go
01:04:19
i think it's about hooking them in with the promise of
01:04:25
something simple and quick and then and and if you stop at that point that
01:04:32
is i think where as kind of as sort of course scammers and
01:04:37
marketing gurus and stuff were maybe 20 years ago it's hooking them in with a simple and quick promise
01:04:42
but then delivering on the nuance of it that i think people are caring about
01:04:47
more than ever now and so like one thing that we've iterated with over
01:04:53
time is you know often the success of a video will depend on how clickbait the title is and
01:04:59
there's no getting around that we've never found that a title that's less clickbait uh does better i i did a video
01:05:04
called how writing online changed my life it absolutely bombed just changed
01:05:10
the title how writing online made me millionaire suddenly absolutely exploded people love that like oh this is a quick
01:05:16
solution uh this is a quick path to this um this this goal that i want hence your title of happy sexy millionaire
01:05:22
um but we've also found that on videos where i think oh let's let's dumb the message down let's just kind of do a
01:05:28
quick five-point listicle without any examples because people just want the dopamine hit of advice that sounds
01:05:34
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
01:05:39
and the videos we 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
01:05:45
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
01:05:52
surface level two minute long thing that you would have seen on youtube circa 2005.
01:05:58
um i think you did a pretty great job of that as yeah yeah i'm learning i'm
01:06:04
con you know continue to learn youtube's a bit of a new medium for me so it was good it's good to get that um
01:06:12
that perspective you you also um you're very in in sort of self-aware and honest i i
01:06:17
you wrote something about um why you're failing which is uh i think you wrote a piece which was
01:06:24
detailing why you think you're failing in life i think i have this issue where
01:06:30
i often feel like what i'm currently doing is not quite good enough
01:06:36
because you know we're leaving money on the table or because our team is inexperienced or
01:06:43
because i suck at being a manager or i suck at being a leader and although i'm learning to improve in in
01:06:49
all those things i sometimes feel that oh but it's it's it's not fast enough i think that's
01:06:54
where the comparison stuff comes in because when my peer group was
01:07:00
kind of just my friends in medical school and i was doing the youtube stuff and
01:07:06
then i was kind of the only one in the in the in the pack doing the thing and so it was like oh anything goes like i'm
01:07:11
not comparing myself to anyone now that i am sort of a bigger name on youtube
01:07:17
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
01:07:24
the more i compare the less good i feel about the stuff that i've done and so to get around that i try to just
01:07:30
a not compare at all and b also think journey before destination all the all of the mindset stuff but it's easier
01:07:36
said than done and i still feel internally like right now we're not using money in the company
01:07:42
like efficiently enough we're not hiring fast enough we're not doing this fast enough noting that fast enough um do you think you'll ever get to a point where
01:07:47
that stops hmm because i tell you what yeah what's it
01:07:53
been like for you well i mean no i was just to say let's just i mean one way to look at it is ali
01:07:59
five years ago when you first started if you had shown him a picture of younow
01:08:04
yeah what would he have said that's pretty cool yeah i mean like if you'd gone if when you made those first
01:08:10
couple of videos you've gone you're going to have two million subscribers on youtube you can have all hundreds of
01:08:16
thousands of followers on instagram that would have had a stroke you would have had a [ __ ] stroke
01:08:21
there's no way there's no [ __ ] way that's me yeah and here you are this is what i was
01:08:27
alluding to earlier it's like the past version of yourself told you'd be happy when you got here but you're not because like you're not
01:08:34
fully satisfied because there's a future version of yourself that's saying you'll be happy when you get here
01:08:39
and it just never stops never stops with it like it seems it seems like at least on the outside that you've done a good
01:08:44
job of kind of i mean obviously you're like particularly successful but like being okay with that level of success and not
01:08:51
trying to get to the the next level for whatever that looks like i think so i think so more
01:08:56
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
01:09:03
bigger challenges in my life but i'm definitely definitely now detached from thinking it will have any impact on
01:09:10
the things that matter won't make me happier would make me more fulfilled won't be anything at all yeah
01:09:15
i'll be doing it probably for either the wrong reasons yep like just
01:09:22
more money therefore i can get private jets instead of a business class or
01:09:27
because um this is not the wrong reason but just for the challenge of it yep
01:09:33
um all but or thirdly because i want to solve a problem in the world as opposed to believing that it will
01:09:38
make it will make me it'll kill my imposter syndrome or it'll make me feel more you know
01:09:43
enough i definitely know that i'm enough okay i definitely know that much and i
01:09:48
know that nothing's going to change that positive or negative yeah that's good it's a good place yeah well i better
01:09:54
because i said in the book do not so um how how do you think about money it's a question that you often ask you
01:09:59
guys that i really want to ask you because yeah obviously you are rich and
01:10:05
but there are there are more levels of rich beyond what you currently are so like they always will be and as you meet
01:10:11
people as as i've met people who are kind of levels of rich above me
01:10:17
where then then i start thinking oh maybe it would be nice to be able to afford to fly first class everywhere that'd be
01:10:23
pretty cool yeah and i think i wonder if that would increase my quality of life and i know there's that there's you know diminishing returns for money and stuff
01:10:29
sure 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
01:10:36
my life that i don't have to do anything that costs time
01:10:42
that i don't need to spend okay on things that i don't get joy from doing so like i basically want to have
01:10:48
so like an airport is a great example this is why i think i want a private jet because when i go to the airport you could spend three hours just checking in
01:10:55
and getting onto the onto the plane and that's three hours that i'd much rather doing something i enjoy doing with my
01:11:00
life um and as i talk about in chapter 19 of happy sexy millionaire time is what we have i refer to these 500 000
01:11:06
chips we have and we get to you know that's because that's how many free hours the average human being gets in their life i would like to have more of
01:11:13
those chips deployable against things that i really enjoy doing and creating memories with people i love not standing
01:11:19
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
01:11:25
going to make me exponentially happier like the queue isn't making me miserable it's not going to move the needle but yeah but i'd like to make more memories
01:11:31
in my life with with my niece and my dog you know yeah and with my partner so
01:11:37
that is my view on money at this stage okay um convenience uh less time wasted yeah
01:11:45
that's literally it that's literally it it offers me nothing else okay yeah
01:11:51
well what do you think of money i think
01:12:00
i think convenience is a big thing for me like i also have that thing of money is useful in so far as it helps me
01:12:06
buy back my time which i can then use to deploy against things that i care about but then
01:12:13
as i kind of get exposed to more like rich people and
01:12:18
see like the life that they're living and like you know this idea of thinking about moving to london
01:12:24
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
01:12:30
a year because i'm not paying rent bloody but 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
01:12:37
rent a place in london but it's like i could rent for a thousand a month or two thousand or three or four you know those places that are eight
01:12:43
thousand a month are pretty good i wonder what it would be you know can i afford to spend eight thousand a month on a place that's slightly nicer
01:12:49
that's a little bit more central what am i optimizing for if i forget a place in king's cross it's easier for friends to come visit therefore i can make more
01:12:55
memories there for increase happiness that way um and the money thing just sort of
01:13:00
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
01:13:06
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
01:13:12
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 happy and
01:13:20
i don't know i feel like the more i think about this the more i start to invent justifications for trying to make
01:13:25
more money yeah for the sake of happiness and fulfillment and stuff beyond the 75 000 a year that the
01:13:31
studies will tell us leads to diminishing returns i think the key thing there and what i've what i said in
01:13:36
my answer is that i don't think it will make me happier because i'm already i think at i don't think missing the
01:13:42
airport queue will actually make me happier yep i don't think it will because unfortunately unfortunately fortunately
01:13:48
i'm at a point where i don't think i could be happier okay yeah like i could definitely have less think less
01:13:53
annoyances in my life yeah but fundimentally i don't think i could be happier than this okay um or more
01:14:00
fulfilled or like comfortable than this so me killing the cue by getting a jet is um
01:14:07
is removing an annoyance and increasing the the yeah
01:14:12
how intentional i am with my extra two chips that you'll have it's not going to move the needle yeah okay it's not going to be the needle
01:14:19
and if this place was where we are now which is my home i live upstairs if it was two times bigger
01:14:25
would i be happier no no i wouldn't be no
01:14:31
okay but you know i'll probably get a place two times bigger yeah because i don't know
01:14:36
then i can have bigger parties and maybe that one's more people will be a more and more enjoyable memory at some point
01:14:41
but i don't i this is the key thing as i had to at some point in my life realize like not buy into the [ __ ]
01:14:47
justification or i'd live my life running running in that direction constantly and i say all the things it's not gonna
01:14:53
make me happier yep and if i still want it then i think um
01:14:59
then i'm then it's like it's okay for me to buy it's like yeah i kind of i kind of have have similar things so often
01:15:06
i will like buy something you know i bought one of those six thousand pound pro display
01:15:12
xdrs with the thousand pound stand that apple sell the other day just because no one knows what that is
01:15:17
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
01:15:23
cool to have on my desk and i knew there was zero way it was gonna make me any happier i was like oh
01:15:28
it's just it's just kind of cool and my housemate was like oh your your monitors arrived how do you feel i was like
01:15:34
like just even even contemplating how i feel as a result of the fact this monitor arrived just kind of a bit
01:15:39
baffling to me because obviously it doesn't make any difference to my day to happiness it was just something kind of cool that i could buy the business
01:15:45
expense and i thought why not i think when i was younger i used to look forward to purchases more
01:15:52
like you know ordered a playstation game when we're tracking the delivery waiting for it to arrive and i was just like
01:15:57
it's just it's just kind of things um and and the way i often describe it to people is that
01:16:03
maybe sounds a bit argument but 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
01:16:10
it's still kind of cool to spend money on the things that i want to spend money on yeah if it's like tech or camera gear
01:16:16
yeah something i care about yeah i completely agree now and i i actually don't think i'm a very um flashy person
01:16:23
right now i don't own a car at this exact moment um i don't have like designer watches or anything and
01:16:28
typically if i make a purchase it's based in utility but it's really nice yeah and that's kind of what you're describing with your monitor yeah so
01:16:34
like i travel a lot so a suitcase or get a really nice one yeah but i don't need a rolex because let's be [ __ ] honest
01:16:40
no one uses it to tell the time anymore so that would be purely about signaling and status
01:16:46
um i don't really buy designer clothes at all i don't really think i have any designer clothes clothes
01:16:52
i don't really i mean i have a nice pair of boots or something yeah but typically it's like i mean this
01:16:58
is like a top man t-shirt i'm wearing from asos these are top man jeans fits pretty well yeah these like utility and fit and matter seem to matter more than
01:17:04
um in security driven purchases this this one mental model that i think of which is that if if you were the only person
01:17:11
in the world would you still buy the thing um i think when it comes to like new apple products yes i would because
01:17:17
like i can do i can do my work better on a nicer macbook or on a nicer screen uh
01:17:22
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 signally and
01:17:29
more about like this is the sort of identity i want to portray to other people and then it is about the fact that having an apple watch for me given
01:17:35
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
01:17:41
things what are some of the key principles or key sort of mental models that have had the biggest impact on your
01:17:46
life oh um
01:17:51
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
01:17:57
money diminishing returns curve about like beyond about 50 to 70k depending on what study you look at money doesn't buy
01:18:02
more happiness i often have to like remind myself of that when i get into this cycle of
01:18:08
the pursuit of more stuff um one of the things i won't really call it mental model but one of the things i
01:18:14
often come back to is oh i think you talk about in the book as well uh five regrets of the dying oh yeah um and i
01:18:20
had have those written on the top of my to-do list on my daily to-do list template um that's that that's a good one
01:18:27
the other one is what is that for anybody that doesn't know oh yeah so there there was this like palliative care nurse or someone who
01:18:34
sorry brony ware that's why she messaged me on instagram oh no way when i don't one time i like didn't tag her instagram
01:18:40
so she's just like oh yeah thank you so much for the pose could you talk about yeah bro she's amazing brony yeah so she wrote a book called um the regrets of
01:18:46
the dying or the top regrets of the dying where she interviewed like hundreds of people who were on the deathbed asking them
01:18:51
what are your regrets um and some of the really common ones were i wish i'd lived a life true to
01:18:57
myself rather than what others expected of me uh i wish i'd worked less hard i wish i'd spend more time more time with
01:19:03
friends and family um can you remember what the other ones are like you know what i only focus on the first one yeah
01:19:09
because she was like she said this was the most common regret of the dying was i wish i had lived a lifetime to myself and not what others expected of me yeah
01:19:15
following your intrinsic motivation rather than status prestige external exactly yeah it sounds like the other
01:19:20
ones are all actually just yeah like offshoots of that yeah yeah and people as they're about to die must have this
01:19:27
amazing retrospective clarity over there what they did and didn't do right what didn't didn't matter it didn't matter
01:19:33
that that girl in playground said my hair was [ __ ] or this comment on instagram and that
01:19:39
retrospective clara because i i say this in the book as well this is about the i talk about how i don't think anybody
01:19:44
believes they're going to die yep and those people know they're going to die so they have that like it's all all the
01:19:51
[ __ ] just fades away and they go i just want one more day with my son yeah
01:19:56
but also it's it's it's not quite the same as the whole live every day as if it were you as if it were your last like there's that that balance there how do
01:20:03
you think about that balance yeah i mean so that's actually like fundamentally bad advice because if i were to live
01:20:09
today like it was my last i would probably be doing self-destructive things
01:20:14
like they're going to be self-destructive actually yeah yeah like financially i'd be blowing all my money like yeah so um
01:20:20
or something like that but the merit in that that i see is um
01:20:26
is living like life itself will come to an end um at some point um
01:20:33
which for me means being very conscious about the use of
01:20:39
uh your time i guess and what you're deciding to do if today were your last you'd be able to
01:20:46
cut through the [ __ ] that doesn't matter and so let's say if this life were your last live every life like it
01:20:51
was your last would be a better thing then in life yeah you'd really focus on what matters you know you've talked
01:20:57
about such a diverse range of topics on your youtube channel and really about like help you know
01:21:02
helping people as you know as the teacher you are become better at what they're trying to achieve you've talked about productivity
01:21:09
mindset um finance and all of these things what what are the what are the things that
01:21:16
you see in young people today that you think um they most need to solve and understand
01:21:22
about let's say about mindset in order to get to that point where they are
01:21:27
living a fulfilled life what are some of the you know and i say this to you because i know how
01:21:32
many how many how many books you've read thinking specifically here about like young people and you'll see you're
01:21:38
seeing them in the comments 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
01:21:44
that work has to be suffering and that
01:21:50
like working hard is like a bad thing and that
01:21:57
what it looks like if you're if you're striving for something is that it it looks like pain um
01:22:03
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
01:22:09
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
01:22:15
pulling all-nighters thinking it's a badge of honor because this is what work looks like and it looks hard and
01:22:21
in my from my second year onwards where i realized hang on like you know the thing tim ferriss often says like what would this look like if it were easy
01:22:28
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
01:22:35
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
01:22:41
problems when it comes to the things people often ask me about which is motivation procrastination burnout and
01:22:46
and all that jazz i think another kind of underrated tip which the toxic
01:22:52
productivity people would would crucify me for is that i think everyone kind of
01:22:58
like if you want to if you want to live a life on your own terms then you do have to solve the money
01:23:04
problem because we all need to make money we all need to have that like in in board games
01:23:09
we call it you you call it as an economic engine like if you if you want to win in a board game you always have to figure out
01:23:15
are you going to sell sheep are you going to get wood are you going to get owed are you going to get hey like what is your economic engine going to be
01:23:20
and i think the sooner a the sooner that can be ticked as a box or the more aligned the economic engine
01:23:27
can be with the thing you actually find fun uh the more you can do that thing of living life on your terms
01:23:33
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
01:23:39
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
01:23:44
that we're squandering away just to survive and obviously there's
01:23:50
it's it's that's so much easier said than done and a large amount of being able to take that money box being able
01:23:56
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 from
01:24:02
where you're sitting you never had that sort of privilege growing up and you kind of succeeded despite it and
01:24:11
yeah it's just that that thing of accepting i think a lot of a lot of young people especially like the gen c the the gen z
01:24:17
folks these days are in that mindset of i care about impact i don't care about
01:24:22
money i think it's very hard to live a fulfilled life if you're not like if if you think in that way because then
01:24:28
it's like oh i'm not gonna talk about money it's weird people talk about money on the internet et cetera et cetera so those would be kind of two things that i
01:24:34
would love to implant into young people's brains yeah that's a really interesting one there's been this were absolutely groundswell
01:24:40
over the last couple of years of i think millennials are guilty of it too just all of them want to change the world
01:24:47
and they don't really have a plan or have a specific route to
01:24:52
changing the world um or having an impact but they just want
01:24:57
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
01:25:04
they're going to do and it's very passion-driven it's very like specific passion-driven so they'll say
01:25:09
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
01:25:15
understand cancer and they'll change the world not the gen z that says i want to i want to change
01:25:21
the world or i want to have a big impact and you go what's your impact yeah they go
01:25:26
the world how do you ask too many questions i want to have that so for me whenever i
01:25:33
see that in my dms or when a kid comes up to me uh when i've been speaking on stage or something is i want to be a public
01:25:39
speaker i go what would you want to talk about it's like go and have go and live a life worth
01:25:45
talking about like go and have an experience go like go through some [ __ ] and then you'll the consequences you're
01:25:51
a public speaker i had no intention of ever being a public speaker there's a consequence of of having some creating a life where i
01:25:57
had some [ __ ] to talk about you know and i think younger generations have that the wrong way around they're so obsessed
01:26:02
about oh wouldn't it be great to create an impact but have you come across um effective
01:26:08
altruism no i'd like to see here yeah so it's like this um this movement this community that talks about how
01:26:14
um doing good in the world and like having an impact is actually like scientifically measurable and can be
01:26:21
done in evidence-based kind of ways and so they you know there's a few like
01:26:27
charities and um programs tied to that one of them is give well and they uh do
01:26:32
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
01:26:38
money donated in terms of lives saved or are some other outcome measures and you find that it's some pretty rogue
01:26:44
charities that that come out on top here for example the against malaria foundation um on average it costs somewhere between
01:26:50
two thousand and three thousand pounds to buy enough malaria nets to statistically be able to literally save
01:26:56
a life um and that's like a lot cheaper than most people would think and if someone
01:27:01
would say to you now you know steve you can donate three grand and you literally save a life you'll be like oh great have three guys um
01:27:08
and and so the idea behind effective altruism is that given that like like you can actually measure the impact of
01:27:14
charities um and where i was going with this is that you can therefore measure the impact of
01:27:19
a career and relate it kind of to money if you need to so they've done an analysis of what
01:27:24
being a doctor is like and in the western developed world uh a doctor will save around seven lives
01:27:31
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
01:27:37
the next person would have gone into medical school and been a doctor in my place because in the uk we have more people applying to medicine than there
01:27:43
are places if you are the only doctor in i don't know sub-saharan africa or
01:27:49
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
01:27:54
position and so the way that i think of impact is in terms of like counterfactual impact
01:27:59
i.e what is my impact compared to if i didn't if i didn't exist if i wasn't doing my thing
01:28:05
and i often will see comments on videos from people being like oh you're a you're a sellout for leaving
01:28:12
medicine in the middle of a pandemic to like i don't know make youtube videos something something bs like that
01:28:17
and i'm like yeah 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
01:28:24
add as a doctor two years fresh out of med school anyone basically who has gone through medical training in the uk because it's pretty good medical
01:28:30
training could do as good a job if not better uh than i can of being a doctor but where i have counterfactual impact
01:28:36
where i am kind of unique and the impact i'm providing is in the fact that i have a youtube channel that teaches people
01:28:41
and inspires people stuff and if for kind of the dms and stuff or anything to go by you know people be like oh my god i got into medical school
01:28:47
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
01:28:53
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
01:28:58
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
01:29:04
not that there's anything wrong with just being a doctor of course did you hear that mum are you listening
01:29:11
at least that's what i try and tell myself yeah you should say that to her we'll just we'll we'll snip it that yeah
01:29:17
yeah have you seen this i just uh stumbled across this no but i completely get that and i think um
01:29:22
i think yeah i think and it's funny because me being selfish in my life has been the thing
01:29:28
that's allowed me to help way more people developing my own thinking my own skills my own ability to do this stuff
01:29:33
has been the able to create a platform in which i can help more and i spoke to a monk or i think he was a monk about
01:29:40
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
01:29:45
selfish for having spent the last five years of my life growing wealth and developing myself and my skills um
01:29:52
should i have run off to africa and started trying to you know save one life at a time and his response
01:29:58
to me was that you can't pour out that for others that which you don't have yourself so he likened it to a bottle
01:30:04
and said you have to fill the bottle and to be able to pour out into other people's glasses so by filling your bottle as long as you are being um
01:30:11
you're doing good with your full bottle then that's a incredibly noble thing to be doing and
01:30:18
yeah that's something that um naval rovicon says as well which is that if you want to have an impact then you want
01:30:24
to get rich and you want to get famous as well because people who are rich and favors just have more impact than people who are not because you can just deploy
01:30:30
more capital and social capital towards the things that you care about to make more of an impact so optimizing for
01:30:35
wealth and fame when you're young and while building skills while having fun um
01:30:40
i think you know there are worse things chmath talks about that as well chamath papadea yeah said his name papadilla he
01:30:48
on stage says that wealth allows you to impose your opinion and viewpoint on the world so he says
01:30:54
who would you rather having all the money some like rich russian oligarch who has 75 yachts or me who has a desire
01:31:00
to um you know like elon like take us make us multi-planetary and and solve the carbon problem and so with
01:31:08
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
01:31:14
to make excuses for wanting to be really [ __ ] right to justify happy sexy millionaires good for
01:31:21
the world yeah exactly no no but to be fair even this podcast like this podcast was very expensive it's very expensive
01:31:26
to run the equipment's very expensive and this has been enabled the people we're reaching now that are listening to
01:31:31
this has been purely enabled by by the five years of selfishness and me building a business for myself i do this
01:31:38
as i said i don't even know if we make a profit i not really look to be honest from this podcast necessarily but um i
01:31:44
do it because of the huge enjoyment it gives me and the impact that we see in the comments section and the messages we get and that make that is such a selfish
01:31:51
thing for me it makes me feel really good have you come across a book called the elephant in the brain no oh this is like
01:31:57
a whole it's like really well written it's like all of the studies around what drives human behavior and the main
01:32:02
thesis of the book is that uh we're all ultimately selfish a lot of the stuff we do is for signaling but
01:32:10
there is like a pr secretary in our heads that convinces even us that our motives for doing something are not
01:32:17
selfish and they are in fact altruistic yeah um and there's a quote from apparently from jp morgan which is that
01:32:22
a man always has two reasons for doing something a good reason and the real reason
01:32:28
and so whenever people ask me why do you do youtube it's always that right do i want to say
01:32:33
it's because i enjoy helping people and like making content that inspires or the real reason which it because it
01:32:40
you know social status prestige money etc i like being recognized in the streets it's kind of cool
01:32:46
i mean i think it's a bit of both but and that's fine because that's the truth yeah
01:32:52
and it's the truth for everyone there'll be someone sat at home thinking no no when i give five pounds to him this person i'm purely doing it because
01:32:59
i want to give the money i'm sure you want to but the reason why is because it might make you feel good
01:33:06
right or because um it might make you look good and if you think i'm wrong
01:33:12
all you've got to do is go back in history whereas once upon a time your family members with with very
01:33:20
similar genetics to you might have been whipping black people yeah like and you
01:33:25
and you wouldn't have thought that was a morally bad thing to do society is heavily controlling what we
01:33:30
think is good right noble virtuous and as soon as we can admit that i think we can actually create a better world yeah
01:33:36
that is a vacant of this like virtue signaling what's the right hashtag to use what am i meant to say who am i
01:33:42
meant to be for others i think it's a form of liberation to admit that yourself yeah yeah i think
01:33:47
that's really good um there's a the there's a phrase that a blogger friend of mine uses called servant hedonism
01:33:53
which is that you like by serving others uh and and optimizing for serving others at when
01:34:00
you're making decisions in your life you're in fact kind of making yourself more hedonic more more more happy and
01:34:05
that is actually a reasonable and as long as you can admit that to yourself there's that's a pretty reasonable way
01:34:11
of living life listen thank you for your time ali thank you it's been a very long time yeah very lots of fun and you're such a diverse
01:34:17
character that's really why i wanted to speak to you because you have such a wealth of knowledge across multiple sex sectors and industries and topics and
01:34:25
themes and i find that um and that comes from your curiosity i can tell you're deeply curious i can tell you know
01:34:31
um 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
01:34:38
teacher because you are your curiosity has sent you in search of answering complex
01:34:43
questions that a lot of people don't actually have the um the time or the the skill to know how to answer and then
01:34:49
your ability to break those conclusions down in ways that people understand that aren't alienating that aren't too big
01:34:56
words for me timothy in my bedroom that doesn't didn't go to cambridge is a real skill
01:35:01
and it's also a 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
01:35:08
the best evidence that someone understands those ideas so thank you that's that's very kind of you to say um and we're incredibly gracious to have me
01:35:15
on your book had a big impact on me the the mental models in their decision making the the chip stuff with time
01:35:20
genuinely has changed decisions that i've made in my life um so thank you for that and if anyone's listening to this
01:35:26
who hasn't read the book would recommend the audiobook in particular which is narrated by you yes yeah
01:35:31
yeah and you've got a book coming soon haven't you uh two years from now so two years from now yeah i'll reach out to you to promote that closer to the time
01:35:37
we'll have you back on when you're ready yeah thank you so much i appreciate you thank you
01:35:43
[Music]
01:36:05
you
