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Monthly Favourites #9 - Ali Abdaal

2019-05-31 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 10:31 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Productivity and time) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: His medical past

In Monthly Favourites for May 2019, Ali recommends John Carreyrou's Bad Blood on the startup Theranos, the Invest Like the Best podcast's episodes with Eugene Wei and Tim Urban, Tiago Forte's blog Praxis and its post Building a Second Brain, which has changed his own productivity system, and the board game Avalon.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Monthly Favourites for May 2019: a book, a blog post, a podcast and a board game

00:00:21 — Book: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, and a new giveaway

  • ★★★ Ali calls John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood absolutely amazing. — 00:00:21
  • ★★ Bad Blood, subtitled "Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup", tells the story of Theranos, a startup that aimed to revolutionise blood testing and claimed its small home boxes could run hundreds of blood tests on a finger-prick sample. — 00:00:21
  • ★★ Over about ten years Theranos defrauded investors of billions of dollars because its technology did not quite work and it was, more or less, selling a lie; Bad Blood tells that story and how the company was eventually found out. — 00:00:21
  • ★★ Ali rarely reads nonfiction outside self-help and entrepreneurship, but tried Bad Blood after people recommended it, among them Bill Gates, who said he could not put the thriller down, and is glad he did. — 00:00:51
  • ★★ Ali says Bad Blood does not feel like a nonfiction book, which he thinks of as boring or factual: it could have been a fictional thriller and been just as entertaining. — 00:01:20
  • ★★ On his surgical placement Ali gets up at half past six and usually goes to bed by 10:30 or 11 for seven or eight hours' sleep, but in the three or four days he read Bad Blood he stayed up until about 3 a.m. every night because he could not put it down. — 00:01:20
  • ★★ Ali says anyone at all interested in a thriller about Silicon Valley startups and billionaires should definitely get Bad Blood. — 00:01:20
  • ★★ Ali gives away his copy of Bad Blood: viewers comment anything below, and in next month's (June 2019) Monthly Favourites video he will pick a winner at random and mail them the book with a little message from him at the front. — 00:01:50
  • ★ Ali read Bad Blood on his Kindle; the paper copy he shows was bought on Amazon Prime only to show in the video. — 00:01:50 · Kindle, Amazon

00:02:17 — Podcast: Invest Like the Best, with Eugene Wei and Tim Urban

  • ★★★ Ali calls the podcast Invest Like the Best, which he recently started listening to, "a bit of a crap name" but a really good podcast. — 00:02:17
  • ★★ Invest Like the Best is run by Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who runs his own asset management firm and interviews people, some of them professional investors, on investing and how they value companies. — 00:02:17
  • ★★ The Invest Like the Best episodes Ali enjoyed most were interviews with people outside investing; this month (May 2019) he listened to those with Eugene Wei and Tim Urban. — 00:02:17
  • ★★ Eugene Wei worked at Amazon and other tech companies and is now a tech blogger and journalist; a couple of weeks ago he wrote the long article "Status as a Service", which Ali calls very interesting. — 00:02:47 · Amazon
  • ★★ Eugene Wei (quoted): In "Status as a Service", Eugene Wei argues that the success of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat rests on humans being status-seeking monkeys who maximise their social capital as efficiently as they can, which also explains how people behave on them. — 00:02:47 · Facebook, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali recommends the Invest Like the Best episode with Eugene Wei, which ranges over a wide range of topics. — 00:03:45
  • ★★★ Ali says Tim Urban's blog Wait But Why is probably the single blog he would recommend if you could follow only one blog on the internet. — 00:03:45
  • ★★ Ali says Tim Urban has an incredible array of articles, from life advice to breakdowns such as how Elon Musk's companies fit into his wider vision, and a TED talk on motivation and procrastination that people find particularly helpful. — 00:03:45
  • ★★ Ali recommends the Invest Like the Best episode with Tim Urban, in which Urban breaks down how he researches and creates his content. — 00:04:14
  • ★★ Ali recently discovered the podcast Invest Like the Best, and it is now part of his weekly podcast listening. — 00:04:43
  • ★★ Ali found Tiago Forte's blog a few months ago: he thought he was a productivity nerd, but Forte takes it "to the next level times 10", with productivity tricks, systems, mindsets and hacks for dealing with work and responsibilities. — 00:04:43 · Tiago Forte

00:04:47 — Blog: Tiago Forte's Praxis and Building a Second Brain

  • ★★ Tiago Forte (quoted): In his blog post Building a Second Brain, the post that got Ali into his blog, Tiago Forte describes using apps to organise all the inputs of his life, such as news articles, books and to-do lists, to process them, and to turn them into content for his blog. — 00:05:22 · Building a Second Brain, second brain, Tiago Forte
  • ★★★ Tiago Forte (quoted): To remember what you read, Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain says to keep an app such as Evernote as a second brain: summarise and distil what you read to its essence, put it in, and review it semi-regularly to build a treasure trove of knowledge. — 00:05:51 · Building a Second Brain, second brain, Evernote, Tiago Forte
  • ★★ After Building a Second Brain led him through the rest of Tiago Forte's website, Ali changed his own productivity systems: he has watered Forte's ideas down to fit his life and is experimenting with them over the coming weeks and months. — 00:05:51 · Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain, second brain
  • ★★ Ali hopes to make more videos on how he has incorporated Tiago Forte's teachings into his own productivity system. (hedged) — 00:06:21 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★ Ali says you should definitely check out Tiago Forte's website, Forte Labs, and its blog, Praxis. — 00:06:21 · Tiago Forte

00:06:47 — Physical product: the board game Avalon; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali calls the board game Avalon one of his favourite board games of all time, one that has given him and his friends endless hours of joy. — 00:06:47
  • ★★ Ali and his friends discovered Avalon in their final year of medical school: in the last months before finals the medical students he lived with gathered in his room almost every night at about 11 p.m., ordered pizza or drinks and played until two or three in the morning. — 00:06:47
  • ★★ Avalon shares the premise of Mafia and Werewolf: there are good guys and bad guys, the bad guys know who the bad guys are and the good guys know nothing, so players talk, manipulate and read body language to win. — 00:07:17
  • ★★ Ali likes that Avalon is not a board game in the traditional sense: its focus is the conversations, lies and truths between people, which make for drama and heated discussions among friends. — 00:07:59
  • ★ Ali has lost his voice after singing lots of karaoke at a stag night over the weekend. — 00:07:59
  • ★★ Avalon suits five to ten players, adventurers in the world of King Arthur who go on five missions of different sizes: the bad guys try to fail the missions and the good guys to make them succeed. — 00:08:28
  • ★★ In Avalon, Merlin is a good guy who knows who the bad guys are and must influence the game slyly, because if the bad guys find out who Merlin is they automatically win. — 00:08:57
  • ★★ Since graduating, Ali and his friends still play Avalon whenever they gather: after their second graduation ceremony a few months ago everyone came back to his place and played for about four hours. — 00:09:34
  • ★★★ Ali says anyone with a group of five to ten friends should definitely get Avalon, and guarantees it will add tons of fun to their life. — 00:10:03

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Avalon · Bad Blood · Invest Like the Best · Praxis · Tiago Forte

Also: People: Bill Gates · Elon Musk · Eugene Wei · John Carreyrou · Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Tim Urban

Works: Building a Second Brain · Status as a Service · Wait But Why

Organizations: Amazon · Facebook · Forte Labs · Instagram · Snapchat · Theranos

Concepts: second brain

Places: Silicon Valley

Products: Evernote · Kindle

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