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Monthly Favourites #3 - Ali Abdaal

2018-04-16 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 20:04 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books and reading (also: Relationships and personal life, YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Lesson from a book, Family

In his third Monthly Favourites video, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, recommends Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling paranormal romance series, Eric Barker's article on relationships as an exchange of bids, Matt D'Avella's YouTube channel and Anna Kendrick's autobiography Scrappy Little Nobody. He credits the bids idea with changing how he answers his mum, and Matt D'Avella's production value, content and consistency with inspiring his own channel.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The third Monthly Favourites and its four picks, a break from revision videos

  • ★★ Ali posts the third instalment of his Monthly Favourites series, sharing the books, podcasts and articles he discovered that month, as a break from his study and revision videos. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali recently learned that paranormal romance is a genre of its own and found he loves it; he had read Twilight years before. — 00:01:01
  • ★★ Ali likes the extra conflict, magic and better villains of paranormal romance, joking that a vampire is a more realistic threat than the knife-wielding ex in Fifty Shades of Grey. (playful) — 00:01:01

00:01:21 — Favourite book series: Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling paranormal romances

  • ★★ Ali likes that each book of Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series follows a different couple (Sasha and Lucas in the first, Faith and Vaughn in the second) within one wider story. — 00:01:52
  • ★★★ What Ali loves most about the Psy-Changeling series is that each book is its own love story ending when the couple gets together, so every new book brings back the exciting opening stages. — 00:02:21
  • ★★ Alain de Botton (quoted): Alain de Botton (as heard) argues that society's obsession with the opening stages of love stories in films and books leaves people hyper-romanticised, neglecting what comes later in a relationship. — 00:02:21 · Alain de Botton
  • ★★ Ali partly agrees that the media's focus on the opening stages of relationships is bad, but finds those stages by far the most exciting, which is what makes such romance books exciting to read. — 00:03:19
  • ★★ Ali started reading the Psy-Changeling books on his medical elective in 2017 and read about ten of them there because he could not put them down. — 00:03:19
  • ★★ The world of the Psy-Changeling series has three races: the psychic Psy, the changelings who can turn into animals, and ordinary humans. — 00:03:48
  • ★ In the Psy-Changeling series the Psy, whose minds are linked like a hive, have erased all emotion to keep from going mad, a state called Silence. — 00:04:21
  • ★★ The Psy-Changeling series runs to 16 books so far, set around a war between its three races. — 00:04:45
  • ★★★ Ali recommends the Psy-Changeling series for its meshwork of relationships, alliances and combat between the races. — 00:05:15
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Eric Barker's blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree; its newsletter is one of the few he actually opens and reads, for the value of its writing. — 00:05:15
  • ★★ Ali says Eric Barker writes on semi-clickbaity, semi-cliché topics, but the research behind his articles is really good. — 00:05:15

00:05:24 — Eric Barker's article on relationships as an exchange of bids, and answering his mum

  • ★★★ Eric Barker (quoted): Eric Barker's article on Barking Up the Wrong Tree presents relationships of every kind as an exchange of bids: one person makes a bid for attention and the other responds to it. — 00:05:55

    “relationships are essentially an exchange of bids”

  • ★★ Eric Barker (quoted): In Eric Barker's article, a bid for attention such as a remark on the weather can be accepted, rejected or ignored. — 00:06:44

  • ★★ Eric Barker (quoted): Eric Barker's article holds that the most successful relationships, friendships and marriages have the highest share of accepted bids, citing, Ali thinks, studies of long-married couples. (hedged) — 00:06:44
  • ★★ Ali used to think his mum's passing remarks while he worked on his laptop were said for the sake of it and needed no response. — 00:07:40 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★★ Since reading about relationships as an exchange of bids, Ali tries his best to respond to the remarks of people close to him, such as his mum and grandma, because that is how conversations happen. — 00:08:08 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Ali thinks people sometimes put less effort into relationships with their parents and others very close to them than with friends; friends he spoke to agreed. — 00:08:38
  • ★★ Ali suggests that anyone whose conversations with their parents follow the same formula, as with many teenagers, read Eric Barker's article on bids. — 00:09:02
  • ★★★ Ali tries not to worry whether others will find his Monthly Favourites picks interesting: at least he has shared them and they are out there, which he says is how creating works. — 00:09:29

00:10:04 — Matt D'Avella: starting from zero, production value, content and consistency

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella is a filmmaker best known for the Netflix documentary Minimalism. — 00:10:05
  • ★ Ali has not yet seen Minimalism and is saving it as his treat for the end of his exams. — 00:10:05
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella has started a YouTube channel with a podcast, The Ground Up Show, interviewing YouTubers, artists and musicians about how they got started. — 00:10:05
  • ★★★ Ali finds Matt D'Avella very inspirational because he started on YouTube with zero subscribers, a barrier to entry for many people and once for Ali himself. — 00:10:35
  • ★★ Ali used to think the best time to start on YouTube was around 2010, when there were few creators, and that YouTube is oversaturated now. — 00:10:35
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella films his podcasts from three camera angles and posts the hour-and-a-half episodes on YouTube as well as on the podcast. — 00:11:04
  • ★★ Inspired by Matt D'Avella, Ali would like to take his own channel towards filming in high quality. (hedged) — 00:11:33
  • ★★★ Ali says high production value is not necessary on YouTube: all you really need is a decent microphone, and you can film anything even with an iPhone. — 00:11:33
  • ★★ For his videos Ali sets up lighting, a microphone and a camera with a decent lens, and clears the background, such as taking down his Game of Thrones poster. — 00:12:03 · Game of Thrones
  • ★★★ Ali says Matt D'Avella followed a formula of good production value plus good content plus consistency, and his channel has exploded in popularity in the last two months. — 00:12:32
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella (quoted): Matt D'Avella says on his podcast that nothing is an overnight success: his YouTube results rest on more than ten years of work as a filmmaker. — 00:12:32
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Matt D'Avella's channel and podcasts as inspiration to anyone in a creative field, such as painting, drawing or poetry, who wants to get their work out but is unsure how. — 00:13:01

00:13:26 — Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody: acting, being a woman in the field, celebrity

  • ★★ In her autobiography Scrappy Little Nobody, Anna Kendrick tells of her childhood, moving to LA, auditioning as an actress and making it big with Pitch Perfect. — 00:13:28
  • ★★ Ali finds Anna Kendrick's account of the struggles of being a woman in acting really eye-opening. — 00:14:05
  • ★★ Anna Kendrick (quoted): Anna Kendrick writes that fans who call her nice have nothing to base it on but a brief interaction. — 00:15:08
  • ★★★ Anna Kendrick (quoted): Anna Kendrick writes that asserting yourself to fight for your rights costs you the label of nice, and that for women the opposite of nice is "bitch". — 00:15:08
  • ★★★ Anna Kendrick (quoted): Anna Kendrick writes that in her acting career 90% of the difficult people who made a fuss were men, yet 90% of those labelled difficult were women. — 00:15:34
  • ★★ Ali says many people dream of being a big YouTuber, himself included. — 00:16:28
  • ★ Anna Kendrick (quoted): Anna Kendrick describes struggling into her dress and shoes at the Oscars and being unable to walk all night. — 00:16:54
  • ★★ Ali says what the media shows of celebrity life is a packaged, airbrushed version of reality, with far more struggle, pain and drama behind the scenes. — 00:17:23
  • ★★ Ali calls Derren Brown's book Happy, in which Brown describes being a celebrity, a really good book. — 00:17:23
  • ★★ Ali says he will talk about Derren Brown's book Happy in another video because he absolutely loves it. — 00:17:23
  • ★★ Jack Gleeson, Joffrey in Game of Thrones, read an essay on being famous at the Oxford Union a few years ago, giving a damning indictment of fame. — 00:17:52 · Game of Thrones
  • ★★ Ali found Scrappy Little Nobody quite funny, very well written and very easy to follow. — 00:17:52
  • ★★★ Ali highly recommends Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody, an easy read he finished in a few hours on a plane. — 00:18:23

00:18:55 — Recap of the four picks and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Matt D'Avella

Also: Alain de Botton · Ali Abdaal's mother · Game of Thrones · University of Cambridge

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