I've known about you for ages you know and I knew about you as the bestseller author from day one that I that I knew you what are the topics like we don't agree on this video is going to be titled why Scott H young is a fraud and then it's going to be like know purp approval on that Scott young is a international best-selling author you might have heard of some of his books like Ultra learning which has been bought millions of times I've got a copy of it myself and this is the guy that knows his learning science apparently people have been asking Scott about his opinion of me and my work and one of my students shared an email interaction that he had with Scott we sends him my report on learning and then Scott was kind of critiquing parts of the research on it and being like yeah I don't know so I was like Scott I think you and I need to have a chat and Scott replied bring it on let's do it and this video is how that conversation went down now by the way this is essentially like two nerds nerding out so it does get a little bit technical if not into that then this video is not going to be for you but a lot of you guys seem to really like the indepth technical discussion so hope you like this one too I've been meaning to talk to you for a while because I tend to be like most of my reading is like trying to like have you know 400 books that are like kind of academic that it's like okay I need to read this so I'm always sort of like reading that as opposed to necessarily always keeping up with like what other people like myself are doing like who are kind of popularizing it or or disseminating it and so um I was getting all these emails like what do you think about Justin Su saying this or saying that and I always just say well I don't know that much about Justin so like I'm not like here to like adjudicate on it but I think it was um yeah know one reader sent it to me and then he sent me your uh report on learning and I thought well I should finally read some of this guy people keep sending me emails should read I'm amazed that I was actually on your radar cuz the thing is like I I first read your book um Ultra learning specifically I think I read it like three three or four years ago or something something like that and I remember um reading it and then being like oh this is actually this is actually like a good book cuz there's a lot of books no like no seriously because there actually like there's a lot of books on learning out there that I just think are like like they like they didn't really get it like you know like it's not really it's either way too like isolated or it doesn't really look at it kind of more holistically or it's um sometimes just wrong like just plainly like and I'm happy to talk with someone like when when the reader of mine sent me your uh report on learning um like it was true that okay well this guy actually has read a lot of research because that's not always true I feel like I don't want to being named names I don't like to like start with people but there are people in the learning space who like I don't know what they're reading they're not reading research like like there's a lot of stuff where it's like w I don't know about that I don't know about that so I feel like you're you're a conscientious and thoughtful person I don't know H like there's probably some stuff we agree with some stuff we disagree with and like we have different perspectives but I think um at least there's like the same you know we've read some of the same things we've thought about some of the same things as opposed to like you know you can talk to people who uh like learning especially is a topic that's you can kind of take it in a romantic Direction and so there's like people who write about it where there don't have any knowledge of any of the cognitive psychology educational psychology any of the like empirical results and you know they're saying things which are like you know maybe that's true but it's like totally divorced from any kind of um yeah thing there so I think there's a basically I think there's a deep reservoir of things that overlap that we've read that you know the basis of an opinion the basis of a conversation we could have yeah yeah definitely and I yeah you know you're not naming names but like I can think of a lot of those those instances I mean I think how I see myself is that like I'm in a position where I can spend a lot of time reading through the research and then I can spend a lot of time practicing and applying and really coaching it for people a lot of people have experience I think but their experience is through like I went and did a seminar I did a workshop at a Consulting and it's it's it's like a it's a cross-sectional view of what's Happening whereas I really find a lot of value in the longitudinal data of taking a group of Learners and following them very intimately for not just a couple weeks but like years even to see what is the impact and then where are all the permutations of the advice that I'm giving and kind of refining it that way so I mean we were just talking about how like people coming from different perspectives and stuff and I think uh my sort of starting point was very much like from the personal experience angle so when I was in university I was studying and and finding like experimenting on myself of like productivity strategies and these kind of things and there's some things that I think I probably got right when I was doing things and there's other things that like I've now learned well you know that kind of works sometimes but maybe it's not the best advice and so I've changed my mind about things and then um you know I did a bunch of big learning projects in my early 20s which were basically the way that I established my career which weren't research based but they were again me trying to take on kind of experiments and you know things that were hopefully interesting and useful to the audience and then it sort of was starting with doing the research for my book that I was going beyond the surface level of right doing reasing research and then I've got another book that's going to be coming out in May and I mean that one was like you know hundreds of books hundreds of papers like it was like years of just like reading research and so I feel like I've come around that way but I think I've come from a perspective where um you know I don't I don't kind of like trying to arrive at the stage being like well I know everything and you should listen to me I feel like I probably have the perspective of like well I have a track record for a long time period where I've been obsessed with this so hopefully I know something but I I prefer to have like discussions about it than just take the mantle of authority over it you know there's just really no substitute for you know if you want to know a topic like reading 150 books on there's no real way around that I mean you can definitely I've got a targeted goal I need to like know the abstract the executive summary but it's it's you know it's it's doing that work that I think um makes a big difference and so but there's still further I think there's still lots of places that I can drill deeper and and I think as well you know I I tend to be kind of eclectic in my interest so yeah and I totally agree like I like to read widely because I just think it gives you a more accurate perspective of the true State and I think there are a lot of gaps in one school of thought that actually filled from another school of of thought which on that note I want to dive into different schools of thought a little bit more so just yeah like just dropping straight into stuff that's like super technical so the stuff that I tend to read around is more like looking around how uh constructivist models of learning uh which are traditionally more first of all more like pedagogically focused and a lot more instruction focused and tend to be based more around Psych ology um how that integrates together with more cognitivist perspectives um and and the two previously like they didn't really mix too well like cognitive schools of thought like the big people there like John swall for example with cognitive load Theory like the cognitive school of thought is all about like how does the brain work like how how does learning work at a cognitive level like at a process level and how does that you know relate to all of these different things and link to all these different psychological theories and recently people have actually really been trying to bring them together to be like yes we've got these psychological Frameworks and theories and ways that we construct learning which is the constructivist argument but then the cognitivist perspective is like well these are the processes that allow that learning to be constructed in the first place and so I'm really interested in that interplay and all the research that surrounds that I'm really not super into the pedagogical aspect of it I just personally find it less interesting but also because I work directly with students so my goal is like let's assume you have a crap teacher let's assume you have a you know under resource School whatever it is like how do we make that work for you yeah I well I I think you and I have similar interests because I I mean my driving motivation was for wanting to learn better was myself like this is something that I care about I want to know how to do it better and you know everything that is kind of I've been doing has flown from that goal now I obviously care about giving good advice to people not just this works for me so I'm going to stick with it but it's a different goal than someone whose aim is to teach students or even more so to teach students that maybe don't even want to learn the thing that you're trying to teach them and like there's a lot of I think Real World um educational constraints that uh impinge on some of the goals so one of the things I find really frustrating about a lot of educational psychology is that there's a lot of emphasis on okay given that this is what we want to teach kids what is an efficient way to do that but there's a lot less emphasis on the well what is it exactly we should be teaching because other than like reading and writing and arithmetic which we all pretty much agree are important to be functional adults there's just huge uncertainty over like what are the actual knowledges and skills that effective people use in practice and so I remember reading um I forget which book it was but they were talking about how like uh the the idea of cognitive task analysis which is this sort of approach where you figure out what experts what knowledge they're actually using um and you can use this to deconstruct pedagogy so you can you know figure out if a surgeon is doing a surgery figure out what is the information that you actually need to know to do it so that you can optimize the teaching process which uh tends to be pretty bad in practice is usually like the see one do one teach one which I mean well it's not a you know there's worse ways you could do it but it's hardly like from a scientific basis of like this is the exact background knowledge this is exact like we do this and don't do this and pay attention to this and this so you know as a result we probably could be teaching surgeries better than we are right now but the issue is that like this kind of super specialized approach of doing cognitive task analysis to figure out what is the knowledge and skill component of uh real world work is essentially missing and so you have a lot of academics um who you know write books I'm thinking of uh I'm thinking of like Ed H and stuff who are writing books about like what every American should know and there's a lot of research on like the role of background knowledge and reading comprehension and this kind of stuff but I think like he's he's a little bit of an outlier in there that is even suggesting like well what is the actual content that that should be taught like what are the things that people should know and so my interest in learning is very much related to this process of how do you uh figure out what you should be learning because I think that's a huge part of it which in in a lot of educational psychology it's just like well the assumption is that the student will be will know these facts or or even you can look at these psychology experiments where they're just like the the information is really arbitrary and they're just really trying to identify a mechanism so I think you know um you and I probably have similar interest there because we're more student focused we're more like in the role of the learner what should you do I tend to be a little bit not super educationally focused period just because I feel like most of the people who come to me most of the people are learning from me are not actual like traditional students I do have some college students I do have some some high school students but a lot of people are like you know I want to be a better programmer in my job what should I be doing right and and I think that's a different question than like how do I pass this particular programming exam where like you know this is the curriculum and how do I get a good grade um so you know there's there's a lot of interesting kind of philosophical questions about that as well you know yeah well like when I first met the the program that I run it was mainly initially addressed for students but yeah like now if I look at the stats like 40% of all of our members are just professionals like they're graduates they managers CEOs they they entrepreneurs they're programmers or um or or they're like working full-time and not only are they learning on the job but they're also thinking um how do I work full-time and study full-time like if they're going back to UNI or doing a career swap or something yeah doing like a getting their CPA or you know whatever you yeah and I and I do agree that there's one thing that you said in Ultra learning which I um I think it might have been like actually just at the very beginning was just like the idea that you know like the modern world is there's like a there's like just too much to learn like there's too much going on it's constantly changing like the value of knowledge and just knowing things is just diminishing and it's more about like the value of being able to know what to learn and then being able to learn that even without having like clear specific guidance which I guess is the whole premise behind that self-directed learning approach well I think you know and and you you mentioned John sw's work so I I mean I've corresponded with John sweller and I think he's uh a very interesting thinker and I think he's one of these people that like he also bet on a really unpopular idea that's recently become more popular so it's like you think of the academic world is like stock picking or something as you pick an idea that's like not in fashion and so like the 1980s when he's like talking about like well we should be doing work examples and like this is right after new and Simon published human problem solving and like literally everyone like I'm reading you open up these um edited volumes and there's like chapters on physics where it's sort of like it's well known that like you know physics experts don't learn physics through lectures they like this was just such a such and so he's saying like no no no this is how you like so I I appreciate him I like him as a bit of an iconic class he's a little bit he definitely his beliefs range in like the more extreme Direction like he he adopts like on a sliding skill of like it's between zero and 10 he's like nine or 10 for a lot of beliefs he's definitely but he's useful for that purpose of like it's always good to be able to present like the pure version of an idea uh even if it's just a like you believe in something a bit more moderate just because it makes clear what what the actual ideology is and so I think um you know people who are of the Jean SW vay are looking at classroom context looking at the information that we have to impart students and they're saying okay well like this is the most efficient way to do it and I you know I I kind of agree that for like a lot of skills the seek for gangan the instruction direct instruction is actually probably an efficient way to do it especially for people who are you know you're not dealing with extremely motivated students you're not dealing with students that um have a lot of background ability uh the you know the secret Alman like if there's a problem with the teaching look at how it was taught not the student is like not how anyone thinks about teaching everyone thinks oh the problem is the student was too dumb they couldn't understand it and so I think there's a lot of value to that approach but the thing that I realize when I'm like writing my book is that this is essentially aert as advice to you because like if the assumption is well I want the best possible teacher who's going to break it down to me to the every single step it's like well those resources actually don't exist like outside of like phonics instruction and a few specialized skills like there are no di curriculums for doing these kinds of things so I think my interest is like I kind of am naturally pulled in the constructivist kind of Paradigm Simply Be simply because you're forced to like if you are the learner and you're designing your own project which I'm not going to make any claims about that being more or less effective than a a patient teacher who will explain to you exactly what to do but more just the people I talk to they're trying to learn a skill and they have very minimal access to teachers or they only have a few fixed resources or they only have a few things and so the question is how do you make those choices intelligently and so I think just you and I are focused on the student themselves you you you naturally get pulled into um pedagogic techniques that lean constructivist just because well who are you giving the advice to you're not giving it to the teacher you're giving it to the student and so self-explanations for instance like that's a that's a you know technique that I'm a I'm really big um fan of and the critiques of self-explanations are well maybe the teacher should give the explanation but if the teacher's not giving the explanation the alternative is self-explanation or I don't know what like that's not even the point I mean you don't even want like spontaneous self-explanation as a generative tool of learning is so powerful like you don't even want the teacher to give you the explanation I think and what you're talking about I think is a really um like it's a really on point I think criticism of cognitivism because I started like uh I started learning about things from a constructivist perspective I I think everyone kind of starts from because that's more common one and then I kind of went like I swung the other way to you know cognitivist and then now I'm kind of like Landing in the The Mixing ground in the middle and one of the criticisms I personally have of like ism is that there's very very very little in cognitivist research that is aimed at the learner like it's all instructional design and how like recently educational psychology r large too you know like even even constructivist teaching advice is like you want to be the uh what is it the sage on the side not the what is not guide on the side not the sage on the stage guide on the side not the sage on the stage screw it up but like but like these kind of things are aimed at teachers and I think um you know like as I said I tend I'm more on the cognitive side I think than maybe uh you are although I tend to not draw the distinction between cognitivism and constructivism I would draw maybe between like uh instructional ISM versus constructivism because I think cogn uh uh constructivism is a cognitive theory like this is something that was it's not a behavioristic theory right like it's definitely something that comes out of well people are making these sort of comp Lex mental representations in their heads and they are creating them and like so you know I think um there's different schools within that but I think pretty much anyone who's doing research now is some kind of cognitive thinker like I mean I guess you can say like the people who are like the I don't know you can say like the Gan Lees or the uh Barber rofs or like the you know some of those people are like explicitly anti- cognitivist but I think they they tend to be more on the like the the periphery you know the the anthropologists and um philosophers and stuff but I mean most people are doing research are the question is how much instructional support should you give what should you be giving when should you be giving it I think these are open questions I mean I'm really interested in also work like um like Manu kapur's uh productive failure um you know because he like he's like the kind of guy who gets in uh fights with John sweller because he's like well no but if you if you let people do this kind of constructivist uh explor in the problem space on their own first and then you explain the sort of correct method they understand it better my point of view from the from the students perspective is more like what are the kind of basic ingredients that you need to learn things and I think you need to for most skills you need to have some kind of um some kind of examples to learn from so you can see sort of like what are productive methods what are ways to do things that are effective and then you need to do a lot of practice and that tends to involve like trying to sort out okay what works in what situations why does it work um so I think you end up having to do both of those things yeah one of the angles that I often take on on this like just even broader topic is I kind of think that in most schools and probably in most classes the quality of teaching isn't the best that it could be you know based on all the research but I sort of think like we're reaching a point where it's it's probably not the main bottleneck anymore like I think General pedagogical principles that are relatively widely followed like they're probably good enough for someone to learn well from if they knew how to take that information and work with it in the right way and so I have a lot of focus on like okay you've got some people that could receive the worst type of instruction and the worst no examples no whatever like essentially just purely learning independently and they they can develop very deep expertise uh you know have great memory all of these things being incredibly efficient learner and you've got someone else that might struggle even if they have what is considered like best practice teaching which you know whatever that means and so I sort of think about it from like the perspective that well what is going on inside the inside the head of that student that's able to just make it work for them like how are they manipulating and processing that information and how are they able to navigate learning explore it in an effective way um to to get to a spontaneous self-explanation that's meaningful like inquiry based learning I think is a really really good example of this where there's a lot of uh good proponents for inquiry based learning and the theory has a lot kind of going for it but honestly the execution of inquiry based learning and the implementation and the lack of guidance it like really cripples it I mean when you look at these like metaanalytical level studies on inquiry based learning it's like does it even have an effect and there's like so much instructional um variation and dependency and like it depends on and the facilitator and intrinsic motivation issues and all of that and it's like yeah you know inquiry based learning purely as just a theory there is a lot of Merit to it yeah but like if we're if we're constantly looking at like what's the perfect perfect way to guide the teacher to like control the cognitive process of every single student inside the classroom I just sort of think that's not even really viable like that's not even conceptually seems realistic yeah so I think what you're saying is probably correct like I think there's a lot of Vari in how these principles are implemented and like this is the thing that I also am finding frustrating as I get deeper is that you start to realize that like once you get a few basic uh building blocks in the nuances of like the the student the curriculum the like the specifics really start to matter and so advice that you do X in this situation and Y in the other situation it starts to be less clear it's not just well do this like do flashcards for instance it's knowing exactly which flash cards you make which things should be done with flash cards which things shouldn't be done with flash cards but like and that's hard to explain to people without having a mental model of how the learning process works like um you know like flash cards is an example that I think is very interesting because even within language learning which is one of I think the like early language learning one of the clearest the clearest cases where flash cards could be beneficial like I would I would not I basically don't use it if I'm like learning like physics or something like I I don't think it's that useful for that but but language learning we have to memorize a lot of vocabulary it's like at least a tool that it makes sense in that context but even there there's a lot of factors that determine whether it's effective and so sometimes I'll give people advice like oh you want to do flash cards and then they'll be emailing me their specific flash cards and you're kind of like no don't don't do that because you're GNA have this problem so like an example someone was um someone was like kind of an intermediate level of English their background language was French and they were uh showing me examples of Flash cards they were making for learning English and the issue they were having is like okay you can do flash cards where you're going from the um uh so I I'll say from your from your native language to the target language um so in this case this person is trying to learn English so they have French on one side they're going to English and the idea is that this person was trying to learn more and more sophisticated vocabulary so you're starting to get into an area where there's now synonyms for words that you have and the issue is that like from a zero context flag card where you do like I want to do uh like the word red I'm going to use English for both of them so it makes sense but I'm going to do red and then I can say like Crimson Vermillion Scarlet like all these words that also mean red they don't exactly mean the same thing but you know they basically mean red and you know you have to pick up the context for youing like flash cards are a bad way to learn synonyms like that because you're essentially doing this like like you know from memory studies that if you're trying to do a single input and have multiple different responses that's like the the highest level of negative transfer that's the highest level of interference you know um even the behaviorist back like osgod had this whole transfer surface and it was like that was like the lowest point like the hardest point where you're having the most difficulty learning like I was trying to tell them you know what I probably like there's maybe a creative way to use flash cards to get around this problem but to me it's just like at that point don't use flash cards right like if you're trying to have more expressive writing where you're using more vocabulary I mean do these little essay assignments get someone to grade and then like you know you can set up constraints where you like they just like highlight some words and say like use a different word in this context or try a different word like that's how I as a writer build up a large vocabulary that I can produce is by writing and trying to avoid using the same word for the same concept you try to like you know that if you read any highbrow writing that's what they're going to do they're going to use synonyms and so like this is an example where like a technique flash cards it works but then you you you move it outside of its Central par parody Dynamic context and it it just now it's no longer useful for you yeah and I think that you know what you said about nuances like I like to think of myself as a Nuance guy like I think that the new the details that's where the the the power is and um like one of the things that I see really often is when you don't understand the Nuance you don't understand the conditions necessary to make something work like you don't understand the the win criteria and if you think the only win criteria is that you used the technique and then you don't win which statistically speaking is just a majority of people like the only people that can not know the win criteria use a technique and still make it work are the people who have such a high level of deep processing that they can probably just use any technique and they will just somehow be able to make it work for them and these are the people that will like post their tips on Tik Tok and and and you know they'll say like hey this is the technique I use you know I'm like this top student just do what I do and you've got like millions of people that that their only understanding is based on the fact that okay this top student did this it worked for them I don't know anything else about like how to make it work I'm just going to use it and they fully commit to it and if they don't do it then the only logical conclusion from this sphere of understanding is I'm just an idiot like I'm not smart enough I'm not capable and I see that like literally like every single day I have students that have been almost trained to believe that they are stupid yeah because of the fact that they don't understand the nuance and so I try to like unpack the Nuance a lot but again like the algorithm punishes it like when I make YouTube videos that go too much into the detail and the Nuance it's like people are like I don't want that I want the quick tip and then if I make the quick tip it's just like well this isn't detailed enough and then so almost I feel like really social media in general is it's actually a very I know a lot of people say like YouTube's a great source of learning and I do agree like generally speaking but at the same time I really think it is not when you what you're trying to learn is not what you expect it to be like I think if you're trying to learn like quantum physics you's going be a l to learn there but think a lot of people learning to be pryle tips they just want like yeah the 30- second Tik Tok and if it's not that then they're kind of put off by it and I think it it makes it really hard to actually deliver like well I think this is just a tragedy of expertise for anything and you know like if you think about like a physicist right I mean like there's this famous study that like what what the physicists were doing differently when they would see the physics problems is they can categorize it based on deep principles novices by and large can't do that not only because they don't know the Deep principles but because they don't have like this kind of abstract mental representation of like physics and like okay well in this kind of problem this is going to be the invariant and then these are the things that are going to change and you know you're not able to think of it that way so you just say oh it's a pulley one how did I do pulley ones before this is a ramp one how do you do ramp ones and it's easy to like mock the people are saying pulley ones and ramp ones but it's just because their their knowledge of the problem domain is weak enough that that's the only input they have they only have knowledge about like that py example or a ramp example and so in a similar way I think it's like that with learning um I mean obviously learning is not scientific in the way that physics is so that like you don't have like a guaranteed canonical right answer but there's ideas like again this this idea of you know using the flashcards in an expert-like way would be sort of to understand okay hey um these are the kind of situations where this is going to be effective these are going to be the kind of situations where I'm going to run into certain problems and maybe the problems are so big that it's not worth doing and also you know for for me like as a practical matter when I was learning Spanish I didn't use flashcards at all when I was learning manner in Chinese I use so many flashcards even with the you know same starting from scratch conditions you're using different things but it's because like we can go to John SP they have cognitive load that like if you hear a Spanish word and you can pick it out of Contex text and understand it and remember it oh creativity is a creativ it's like okay I can remember that you know once you have the phology there you don't need to do a lot of flashcards it's actually better to just do reading because you're getting the context as well whereas if you know you you walk up to a Chinese person and you say something they send something back to you and it's not even like you couldn't even write it down on your phone what they said to you because you you just cannot process the The Sounds yet you can't like I have no idea what they said then like yeah grinding flashcards is going to help you build some of that base and so yeah it's a comprehensive comprehensible input you need this deeper concept of cognitive load Theory and the kind of idea that like you know of chunking and the idea that like you know the amount of mental bandwidth it takes depends on sort of how much prior experience you have with certain knowledge types and that it changes the efficacy of like isolating drills versus you know more kind of like contextualized practice and and similarly you know I used to give advice like I think I also started a little bit more on a constructivist Direction but like my earliest advice viice was using things like well you want to be using like analogies and metaphors to understand things because if you're learning abstract domains that is genuinely very useful and it is how really smart people process it but the problem is that I would give this advice to students and they're real beginners in a domain and the analogies they come up with don't make any sense and it's like well but that doesn't match the idea at all that's just like picking up some superficial element and so I had made the same mistake that you know if you're teaching physics to people you're like well don't see the ramp or the pulley see that it you know a problem of um uh a problem of conservation of energy and the idea is just that like recognizing um the sort of principles based approach or the analogy requires you to already have some kind of like understanding and so how do you bootstrap that understanding and so I think the you know what works in learning for advice to students as well as what works in advice to teaching just because there are so many factors so many mental models that you would need to like tailor the advice to that situation then I mean you know yeah we can study like really hard-coded curricula like does Phonics work better than balance literacy or whatever but I mean for most questions that are not that well studied uh like you you kind of have to do the principled approach but the only way you can learn the principles is to have like lots of examples lots of experience and so it's hard for people who are like I just want some tips to pass the next exam to give them advice um because there's so many things you don't know about their situation that would necessarily affect what's the correct approach right and I think that comes down to the idea like some people have these deep processing habits and patterns of thinking that they used to and that they're comfortable with and a lot of that comes down to partly we know now that a lot of that has to do with genetics and a lot of that has to do with their Early Childhood experiences and um we like we know that based on that some people just have the ability to like form these connections and build these schemas in a way that is easier and more effective and then some people don't and then the question is well like how do we train the people that don't to get to the point where they find it you know easier and they may not ever get to the level where they are like an apex like genius um but you know most people probably everyone can um improve on that which is a seg way to like something that I want to go through like I want to find what are the topics like we don't agree on because we we clearly agree on a lot of things and I I want to I want to find things like that we potentially don't agree on I think that's going to be a really interesting discussion in general like i' really just want to get your perspective yeah like I think think you know again because we're talking about like it's very hard to speak in generality so I mean I could I could make a broad statement like I think maybe I'm more a fan of direct instruction than maybe you are like you talk about your sympathy for inquiry based learning I think I'm more on the direct instruction camp but oh actually no I I'm really a DI guy actually I'm more di than I I I have a problem I like inquiry based learning as a as a starting framework to think about the learner's role in The Learning process and the self-directed aspect of it and what inquiry can do for aiding construction but I'm a really like negative believer in the the conventional ways that inquiry based learning is actually implemented and thought about I think di is like frankly Superior to inquiry based learning in almost all situations in like especially in like a pedagogical framework like in terms of actually teaching this to teachers that can actually then like pull it off yeah I think inquir based learning can be really powerful for a learner to understand some of the principles of and then use it as a springboard so one of the things that I actually teach is like I say okay well how do you gain the skills to first of all like gain more inquiry about a topic right just to learn to be more inquisitive and then how does exploring that like exploring the question open up to exploring more about a topic and seeing different perspectives and then how can then you use that information to construct the model yeah that that you feel is like a good overall framework that you can scaffold off of and then how do you update that scaffold over time as you then gain more information so it's fundamentally like a lot of people would look at that and be like that's a you know pretty like purist inquiry based kind of kind of approach to it whereas actually no one talks about inquiry based learning from like a self-regulated learn a self-explaining a mental model kind of perspective it's just like here's a problem let's all try to solve the problem what do you want to learn like it's just so General yeah yeah I mean I don't know but I think I try to avoid a lot of like pedagogically focused talks just because my own experience is distant from that I mean you are even spending a lot more time coaching individual students I do have cohorts of students who go through my courses so I'm getting feedback but I have done some like private coaching programs but it's not my like bread and butter and so most of most of my interest again goes back to this real selfish pursuit of like you know I'm interested in learning things what would be the right way to learn something and so like using the language learning example I've now done a couple of them and it's sort of like what would be the right way to do that what was the problem with how I did that the last time and like what would I do next in the in in the future so I don't know I'm not sure uh it's hard to know what our exact points of disagreement would be on because again like you know you can speak in generalities of like I'm team di I'm team Constructors or whatever but then you get boiled down to like okay this is the exact situation this is what the goal is what are we like what what would be the best way to achieve that goal um you know those concrete things of where you're applying the principles I think some of the things that I've shifted in my my viewpoint over time is that I tend to feel like uh I'm more Pro knowledge and memory than maybe I was before I used to have this kind of dis stronger distinction between like things you memorize and things you understand and my feeling now about understanding because understanding is a real slippery concept right like it's easy to say whether someone remembers something but what does it mean to say someone understand something and it's it's like one of those questions that once you start asking you start digging and you start digging um you get to interesting places and so my current kind of like mental model of understanding uh which is itself a kind of mental model is is really heavily influenced by uh Walter kinch's um construction integration theory of reading comprehension and basically his idea is that like what we're doing when we understand something is you're constructing some kind of situation model of what well like in his case of what you're reading you're constructing some kind of situational model and what they've learned from reading comprehension studies is that you're um to to do that process to understand something you're combining what you extract from the text with knowledge you already have from somewhere else and it can come from different places but it's that Fusion of knowledge you already have and knowledge you're gaining in the text to construct a representation that like it's not explicitly in the text like so much stuff is implied you have to know these other things in order for that to make sense and so the idea here is that like to really understand things fluently and expertly you have to have this huge knowledge base now it doesn't mean that you should be like drilling it with flash cards like flash cards are really good for a kind of like fluent associative memory between two things but really just reading a lot is a good way to build up these mental models and like drilling deeper into questions and you know if you read a book read the rebuttal for the book to figure out why the people thought the first theory was wrong like that's going to help you really understand it better like people who are experts they just know so many things that when you know you're talking about psychology and you talk to someone who's been in the field for like 50 years they're just sort of like oh yeah well that's this idea that so and so had that's related to this and this and you're kind of like how do they know all this but it's because you know the just the layers of layers of repeated like constructing the situation model of this of this of this it just becomes all Associated and fluent and so I think um for a lot of people the reason they struggle is because of that background knowledge deficit the cognitive load is super high they can't construct a situation model because they don't actually have all the information they need to construct the situation model and so they naturally gravitate towards like well I'm going to memorize this because there's no situation model they don't understand it but it's not correct to say that like well the problem is that they need to understand not memorize the problem is that well they don't have the memories that weren't supplied in the class they don't have the background knowledge that would be needed to do that so I think I don't know how that Vibes with with what you're doing but I think that's a a factor in learning that you know especially outside of that like here's the material what's the best way to study it but like here's your life what's the best way to be smart that I I think has was underrated by me and I've come to appreciate more and more just like you get understanding by having background knowledge that is not present in the thing that the explanation you're reading you know this is only comprehensible if you know some of the things that we're talking about like you know yeah yeah I think my my um listeners will probably find it pretty comprehensible cuz I I talk about these things there a CLE things IED to um add to like um the idea that um you know people that people that have expertise they read a lot yeah um and and that's completely true like they are interested they're intrinsically motivated like they've read they yeah like read widely they read deeply um and the thing that I'd add on to that is like the other ingredient is that they they think deeply about it as well the reason I add that on is because like I've got a a whole cohort of like PhD students or Master students that you know like they they read a lot like they honestly read a lot like a lot a lot and sometimes I just think like it's kind of pointless like what what is um limiting you right now is not the fact that you don't have enough input coming in is that like the way that you're thinking about that input is like far too superficial like they could read a rebuttal but essentially what they've said is like here's one argument and then this is the rebuttal like they're still just thinking about it in terms of like I understand this one I've now understood this one like it's still very superficial and so if you ask them like kind of a higher roic question around it like okay what do you think the implication of that rebuttal is for future research or like based on this interplay like what do you think is the research Gap or what do you think is like an assumption that was made by this that wasn't covered in the rebuttal but maybe that rebuttal like maybe indicates and they're not able to engage in that because they haven't actually done that kind of deeper more comparative thinking so one of the things that I often I'm like a really big proponent of and it's it's in a way like a recurring theme among my videos and and and the the techniques that I teach is whenever you're taking in any information like um there's this quote by some someone who I can't remember but they basically say like memory is a residue of thought and understanding that's yeah that's right yeah yeah willing willing him that's right yeah and um I I like that quote I think like understanding is the same like memory and understanding are residues of thought and so when we think about it that way it's like so what are the thoughts that create better memory and better and deeper levels of understanding um so one of the models that I often reference you know pretty pretty often not that I fully agree with it as Bloom's revised taxonomy yeah which has that kind of hierarchical um framework I'm pretty sure everyone that's watching my channel probably knows about it because I talk about it so much but I don't often talk about what the limitations of blooms is are like blooms is extremely hierarchical and the common way of looking at blooms is like you have to start at the bottom and work your way to the top and I think there's a lot of research in the last like 10 years that shows that that's that's really not the way that learning works authentically like authentically people are moving up and down that framework all the time and within a certain concept like it's not like you have one level and that's that's it like you can have like it's it's it it doesn't work that way and so applying that idea that memory and understanding is a resid residue of thought one of the things that I strongly encourage is whenever you take information in just try to operate at that higher order so that you are trying to simplify trying to apply trying to compare find trend similarities uh create analogies um evaluate the accuracy and significance of everything that you're taking in so that when things come in you're able to chunk it so that the more you read it is not I think most people like the more they read the more overwhelmed they're getting like there's a proportional relationship between the amount of information they take in versus the amount of um overwhelm and and cognitive overload they they suffer from and I think a big part of that is because their information processing is not allow allowing them to create a model and a schema that is chunked and well organized as they are reading and then that eventually gets to the point where like you know you've read like 50 articles but you honestly just are like you know you like lost the will to live by now because you just you don't know what's going on anymore like you don't even know any like you know even less about it because of the fact that you know too much and it there's nowhere for it to um sort of sit yeah it's a good point you're raising I think my perspective on it and this is sort of a more Global Perspective I have on learning generally is that I tend to come from a kind of school of thought of like maybe more pragmatism or like functionalism like that learning is always learning for something and so I tended like you know there was I made a big chapter kind of about this in um in my book where I talk about directness where but it was basically this idea that like it's hard to learn for something if you don't know what you're learning for so like for me I feel like the biggest thing that helps me think more deeply when I'm doing reading and to not have it be that where I just like well here's the reading list and I got to go through it is is like I have a very active goal like there's a very strong purpose it's got like I'm not reading anything for no reason I'm always reading it for a reason and the reason um filters how I'm processing it and what's interesting is that like I don't tend to think of it so much of like well there's just a hierarchy of better and worse thinking it's rather that what I attend to is going to be influenced by that and so I've even had books where I've read it under a certain frame of mind where I'm trying to get something out of it or trying to understand it or trying to resolve a particular question and I read it and then I come back to the book like a couple years later from a completely different reference point it's like a different book it's like I'm reading I'm like oh this is the thing that I was like you know so you can cycle back that way and so for me like because I'm a writer because a lot of what I'm reading is going to end up in my writing I mean uh I don't remember the the person who said this but they made the comment like they were also a writer and they made the comment of like um when they read books they're reading it so that they can do like a book review and it's like if I'm not going to write a book review like if I'm reading it I'm like this doesn't Merit a book review then there's no point even reading the book and I just but I kind of like that like a review is not always your goal because a review itself is a kind of summarization it's a simplification often my goal is to like get an answer to a particular question like you know what is what do the leading experts think is this or what is what is the issue with this or what is like what is the boundary of this idea or this kind of thing and so it doesn't have to be for a review but I think the gold directedness of what I'm doing when I'm uh reading I think forces that deeper processing because every time I'm going to a text I'm reading it because like even if the because was like well you need to understand this idea because you don't understand this idea to make sense of something else like even if it's like as broad as that so I think this idea of like being able to construct a goal that's going to guide your processing when you're doing something um is a certain sense of skill that you have to acquire because in so many classroom contexts uh the goal is really well specified um up front and so when you're you know again you have this like I have this reading list but you know I can't tell you how many times I talk to students where I'm sort of like they're learning something I'm like well what are going to be the kind of questions you get on the exam and they just like blank face or just they just like I have no idea and it's like well then I can't help you you know if you have no idea what you're possibly going to be using it for then I mean any possible thing might be the right thing to focus on if you know if they're asking you to memorize the page widths of every single page then like that should be the thing you're paying attention to you know yeah no I I I love that I want to um share a little like kind of experience that I've had with my coaching and I want to get your um thoughts on it just it directly Builds on it a lot of the time when especially when I work with actually not just students I mean definitely I see it more with students and one of the good things about professionals is that usually what they're learning like it is fundamentally very go directed like it's um you could almost say it's somewhat utilitarian like how how they're learning um so there's that go Direction and lens in the first place but there are also a lot of situations where I'm thinking like ca CFA CPA examinations where like their course materials are going to test them on things that aren't necessarily related to their daily work because they're not actually in that department or uh medical like doctors entering into training training programs specializations where they have to learn like really detailed pathophysiology of things or like cyto kind Pathways which they honestly don't care about because like they're just operating and but they need that for their um their exam and obviously for students that are in these curriculums what I find is that there is a difference between what we cerebrally understand as being relevant and purposeful MH um and and and relevance that is actually significant enough that from a cognitive perspective it does actually allow us to encode that information more effectively so for example there will be a lot of students that say well I know that they're going to ask me these types of questions in the exam but when they consume that information it's still not more meaningful in a way because it hasn't actually created any more of a model like it it it is not more significant it doesn't feel more relevant it's kind of like a label of relevance like someone has just said you need to know it because you need to know it and so they still struggle like from a cognitive perspective with actually holding on to that information and so an angle that I look at it from is like yes we all know that learning is easier when it's more relevant how can we create that kind of same level of clear personal relevance even when objectively speaking it actually just is not that personally relevant like that high school student that yeah well I think I think I just sorry I'm interrupting a little bit but I think it's it's not to say that my process is like uh I like like sometimes I'll read a paper where it's like I'm just trying to get X from it like you know if I'm if I know I'm citing something that I've like I've already kind of read a summary of the research but I like I need to know exactly how they did the experiment so that I can write it up or something like okay I'm G to like skim right to the methods and I'm going to reread that part yeah but that's not usually how I'm doing it usually it's more from an operation of like uh it is a bit broader because in order to have that level of gold directedness you have to have a very clear picture of like what it is you're trying to learn in advance of learning it which is it's sort of a catch 22 like if you already knew exactly what you were looking for you wouldn't need to look for it you'd have found it right yeah and so yeah I think usually when I'm reading is is from a a little bit more of a perspective of like um this is important this is going to fit into uh sort of like my model of how things work or how things work in this domain in this sort of area and my goal of the reading is usually to be able to try to like again it's this is too broad a goal but the goal is sort of more like okay if I were to teach this uh as like a lecture like a course like I'm GNA have to give a class on this topic uh could I do it and so like there's a little bit more of a when I'm reading it like we don't know I don't understand why did you do this right because because I'm in my go directedness I know that I'm doing that whereas if it's sort of like no I'm just trying to get the information on page you know eight or something maybe I'm not going to do that so uh I mean I'm being a little handwavy here but I think you know again this writerly habit of you know if I'm reading a book that I think is important I'm like I'm gonna do a review of this book and I have that in the back of my head when I'm reading it changes the reading experience because it's sort of like well okay what like even in the back of my head you're like kind of doing a draft of article of like okay well I'm going to have to talk about this am I going to talk about this and this or is this a diversion or and like am I going to talk about this how am I going to explain this like how like he spent you know or the author spent 20 Pages talking about this what's the essence of it or what's the point that's interesting and um and I mean that colors how I do it too because I'm also thinking of like what's going to be interesting what can I simplify that's a but that's what I'm saying about the task specificity that I talk to doctoral students for instance or I talk to researchers and they often read papers in a very uh I had one uh reader write to me about how like he was criticizing me for being uh for reading things with an like overly uh what's the word being like overly like credible about how these people are doing things like I am reading this and just sort of like well this is what the paper said and I'm just reporting it whereas his comment was that like the whole academic process or the whole thing that he is being like inculcated is to read things adversar like read things to be like this is the mistake they made this is the experiment that would actually prove it or this is what but to me it's not that one is right or one is wrong but just the sort of the end purpose of the the reading activity in his case is to produce a new paper that is going to contribute compete you know verify like do something in the academic literature I'm not producing academic literature my job is to kind of like well this is what the people who were the experts like I I understood what they said and I'm reporting on it now I might not believe a paper I might not like I'm well I'm not going to report on this I think this is false but it's uh it's from a different mindset and so I think again the difficulty of like a lot of students um is is that these goals are uh it's it's difficult to get someone to get these goals I think if they don't already have them and I think that is one of the like the strongest reasons why people like U you know John sweller and stuff are kind of skeptical of it because the PE the teachers that are trying to like well we want to inculcate like curiosity and passion and then you meet actual students and the majority of them in the classroom are like when's recess or like and it's you know it's like okay maybe that's a little idealistic but for you and I who are coaching people who presumably care about learning and want to learn better um I do think there's some time thinking about like how much the orienting activity how much the what is this for what am I looking at um even if it's not like a very conscious explicit process of like this is my note-taking strategy um just a way of like this is a way of reading this because I know this is what I'm going to be using it for later and trying to select those goals in a way that um is good for more purposes yeah yeah no I absolutely agree and and I think the orientating kind of activity the priming aspect of it was like incredibly powerful for helping people to build that um build the the mental model another thing that I'd add on to that is like I think something that that shouldn't be overlooked or underestimated is the impact that someone's just prior habits of learning can have on their experience of cons of taking in that information like someone who is used to being very goal orientated with their reading when you say when you instruct them like be even more goal orientated or like think of different types of goals or you know like they know how to do that whereas what give you an example like I recently got back from India and I did some Workshop tours and work with some of the universities there like thousands and I've got actually just a large cohort of students in India to begin with and when I work with some of the students there like there is actually like an ingrained culture where the learning is just by roote and repetition yeah like it it's actually just it's it's not just like oh it just happens like that is actually the standard advice given by a lot of places and if you don't do it that way like it's actually almost like frowned upon and and you sort of sort of as like an outcast or like you know you're crazy not not to do that and when I give these students instructions that for you know some other students it might be like very F like hey think about like why you might need to learn this here's some example exam questions like how you might be tested and even if we break it down like notice how this question it tests you on just like a fact but then this one really wants you to like compare the ideas and dissect it and like we go through that and then we say okay now I want you to read with that in mind knowing that that's how you need to apply your knowledge and then they read it like they still cannot actually form the model because they have just so little experience and so they don't have those habits and one of the things that I'm really interested in is like well what's the process when you take that type of student like what's the process where you slowly get them used to actually building that like actually what you said before like you need to have a certain level of background knowledge um to really make sense of things I think there's another thing like you need to have a certain level of background experience and skill at thinking in certain ways to be able to think in more variations of those ways well I want to I want to touch on a thing you said about um about being in India and having the uh like the lot the students very used to memorizing things by wrot and and that being very much in the culture and I know you uh also know about um I think it's David Gary who does the biological primary and secondary information and stuff but to me I think you know this is why I like the anthropologists even though they're often quite frankly kind of crazy when they're suggesting things that are just like you know the mind doesn't exist it's just culture right but but I the reason I like it is because you know if if you are working in like a psychology lab and you're testing these like you know like like sweller probably was like Australian junior high students or whatever you're getting this really narrow slice of humanity and no no disrespect to him that's just what you're doing whereas if you go to different cultures I think the the big lesson of anthropology is just like how different people are like how much cultural variation there is and that's even with the fact that like you know since uh you know since like the spread of Imperial whatever we've actually homogenized to c a considerable extent like you know ancient China was a lot more different from ancient Europe than modern China is right like C J ping wears a suit but I think the the thing that we kind of are missing is like how particular our environment is like how particular it is that we go to school for you know 16 years that like almost none of our ancestors did that like that we do tests and that we write them and that we read and like how many culturally specific institutions there are and so I think you know there's some claims about um Like Flint flect and intelligence as just simply being that just that like as we've increased education literacy and all these kind of things and nutrition and whatnot um there's been a like that to get a good IQ score you have to understand how tests work and you have to be motivated to do well on a test that's under time pressure and that if you're a hund gatherer in the serengetti just none of those things even make sense to you so like you're going to do poorly on that but it has nothing to do with your like innate cognitive faculties and so I think it was uh I think it was Barbara rogov who had some studies where was finding that like um I think it was in Mexico but she just found that people in these cultures were better at learning um without instructions like they were better learning just from observation so it would in this sort of apprenticeship kind of mode where like the the children would learn how to do some kind of household task without the adults ever explaining how to do it just by watching and that the children like paid attention more whereas Western children through schooling through kind of our culture were just expected to be told how to do it and they weren't paying attention quite as much on how to do that and I think it's relevant like what you're talking about the like maybe Indian Western distinction that I mean if you go back in Indian culture like memorizing The Vedas was like was the central scholarly activity like you go 4,000 years of like memorizing the words verbatim philology grammar like then entire culture was based on this kind of like this having an enormous significance of like not just understanding the concept but knowing the words exactly right which maybe is not there like I don't know you know the Iliad or whatever there was some bards who were memorizing poems in ancient Greece but I mean it doesn't necessarily have a caral eror here so I think you know culture has just an enormous influence on things and so I think for good and bad I I feel like when you talk to um when you talk to like again to use the Indian example like maybe there are some situations where Indian students are maybe overly relying on memorization like you know I've talked to Indian students where they get kind of frustrated because they're like well I could I can't use your tactic because they're expecting me to produce the definition of X verbatim on the exam and it's like well if you need it verbatim then flashcards and memorizing is the correct thing to do but I mean there's also a reason why like in the United States I think most of the people who have won spelling bees have come from India because they have this culture of of like this pedagogy this that's related to that and I think there's cultural differences here and I think it's just like you know so many of these background assumptions we have are embedded in the culture I think in Western culture there's probably like almost a romantic assumption about learning that like a lot of influence of rouso and dwey and this kind of stuff like you know when people talk about these like oh well the school where you just d real knowledge into these kids heads and there's no room for creativity and freedom I'm like like that wasn't the school that I went to I mean they they did did so little memorization uh like like you know they were like oh kids hate that they're never going to learn you know we did art projects and presentations and like that's what I remember Growing Up So in some ways like this this Mythos against like what traditional schooling is is like well it hasn't been like that for you know maybe ever but like even like hundreds of years it's been lots of influence of that so I think the culture impact is very important and so when you're getting into a a particular intellectual tradition or a particular like culture you know like like the adversarial mode of reading research um that is a higher order thinking ability but it is also very much a cultural trait it's very much a style that's uh that's imparted by being in a community where someone says well what the real like you you see this whenever you hear researchers say like the first thing to look at is the method section well the only reason to read the method section is because you're looking to figure out what's wrong with the paper rather than trying to understand what they were proposing right like it's a very much a strategy that's built around this is the goal of doing the research is to uh is like this intellectual chess game where you're trying to out with the opponents and and you know similarly to like like we should teach children to think like historians and like weigh evidence and like most kids aren't going to do that nor should they be but that is something that you need to do if you're a historian like that's what you should be doing is is doing that so I think the cultural attitude is important so when people talk about you know uh sweller these kind of people or they're talking about the biological primary secondary um I think part of the thing that's maybe missing from that is just like you know a lot more of it secondary maybe than we than we think like a lot more of like stuff that is taken for granted of like schools and these kind of things this really is secondary like it is something that just if you weren't in that environment you wouldn't learn yeah definitely and like the background knowledge that you you just accumulate from being in a certain Co like um you know we see this a lot when we look at studies around like International students and just just just crosscultural like people that have actually literally gone to another culture and like there's massive um adaptation problems that they have from having like the context of a previous coach's expectations and norms and background knowledge and and cultural you know capital and things and then going into a new one and like they have perfectly the right like cognitive abilities but like they just they don't understand like what is this coach's context of how they want that to be outputed yeah I think it's an important realization to make and um often it only happens in those situations where like you go into a radically different Scholastic or intellectual culture and then you realize oh wait no the way that I've been thinking about it doesn't work here and I'm struggling and I have to adapt and I have to like make explicit maybe all of the norms and rules that these people just picked up through osmosis you know I want to tie this back to sort of one of the themes we were about earlier which is just around the idea that I want to make sure that like to put on your words like it's not inert for the for the for the learner so it's like I mean just in your view like what are what are the things that kind of make the biggest difference for someone who like they don't have that background context they don't have these prior habits they are struggling they are putting you know often a lot of work a lot of effort a lot of time um a lot of sacrifice and that effort is not being met with either consistent or um proportional rewards because they can't just be like okay well I'm just going to take like a three-year pilgrimage across the world to like explore these and then like you know dedicate read like 50 articles you know like I don't know I think I think my main this this is not like the most snazzy practical tip but my main advice that I tend to give people and I think it's very important because I think the motivational uh component of wanting to stick with something that's difficult is what people really struggle with with and I think one of the things that is like a real broad General lesson of of cognitive science of psychology is just how much um gaining more experience and having more like background knowledge incre like decreases the difficulty of doing a lot of these tasks and so like I think the it's a it's a kind of Faith you almost have to have and some people get it through just having like enormous success experiences in their youth and and whatnot but other people I think maybe you just have to take it as an article of faith that like the thing that you're finding really difficult that is is really hard that as you keep building the components as so like as I said like you know for background knowledge you're reading more of the things you're understanding more of the things for like procedural skills like math and whatnot you're drilling more of the component skills you're um understanding more of the component Concepts you're adding to your bag of tricks of like well I can make this move to solve this integral and I can make that move to solve this trigonometry problem that for like skills like languages and things like this that like the the individual chunks the perceptual pieces of like how many little bits it's broken up into are going to slowly cohere over time that as you build this it's going to get easier and easier and so I think this is a very difficult thing to believe in the moment that when you're in the process of learning something I think there is a sense that like you take it as granted as fixed and uh so I think maybe the thing that I would shout from the rooftops that I feel like I've learned personally and that is you know abundantly verified by cognitive science is just how much the individual transforms as they're on the Continuum of expertise that like you are the same person you are not any smarter there's no upgrade to your mental Hardware but by the end of the process uh you know you can speak a language fluently and produce long complicated sentences when before you could like barely like make a single utterance or you can quickly see how to solve a really diffult math problem when you know before you're like still like struggling to do the algebra or you know even just like a topic like okay I want to learn Neuroscience or PhD level economics or whatever and you're you open up the paper and you're like oh my God I don't understand anything and then it's just sort of like okay I take this little piece I figure out what this definition means I look it up I try to explain it I get a textbook I read this again like this process of digging deeper you're building building the foundation and eventually you just you read it and you're like like the person is the expert you're just like oh that's what they did wrong in the method section you know like that that's become used so I think there's lots of tactics and lots of things that we could talk about and certainly your work has been trying to navigate and accelerate that process but I think just believing that that process exists I think is hard for people so I think that's you know if there's any if there's anything that I would just like you know want to put the hand on the shoulder and say it would be that yeah yeah no I I I I fully agree and I I would actually say that um like you are actually upgrading your Hardware as well I mean you know because of how neuroplasticity works like at the end of the process like that transformation like you are actually like that that is it's a transformation it's not transient like you once you get that like everything you learn in that domain coming forward like it becomes easier and easier I love the fact that you said it because um there's something that I talk about all the time is I I call it order control because a lot of people are really fixed on thinking I need to learn everything in the same order it is presented to me I need to start at the beginning I need to end at the end I need go line by line I need to go par you know one chapter at a time and I need to understand everything in each paragraph before I move on to the next one like that's what they understand that's what you know sometimes they've been trained and and taught us the right way but actually you know I always say like if the text that you were given if the thing that you're learning from just happened to be starting from a point that was just more personally relevant and easier for you to understand you would just do it in that order and find it easier to understand so it's like don't don't assume that the information that's given to you and the way it's presented is like this is the only way to learn it if building those little blocks is what it takes and find the block that you feel that you can build and as you continue to build those blocks like things will get easier and that paragraph that previously you're like banging your head over for like 15 minutes trying to understand you take a little bit of a detour and you come back to that paragraph later and and and now it's like 15 seconds like oh just it just makes sense because you've got so many more so much more background knowledge like background knowledge is not just like three years of like a dis just we layer that so I I like I personally really love the fact that that's the message that you decided to land on because I just think it really holds back a lot of people like and and it actually even affects them like emotionally because of the fact that they just think like learning is this impossible task it has always felt impossible they've never been good enough and like no matter how much effort they put in it just never seems to really translate it's like well it it it just it does translate but actually just how you try to translate it in the order and how you build it like yeah yeah there there has to be a little you know a level of Faith there definitely I love it but I I've loved the conversation it's been it's been awesome um I think it's a good kind of place to wrap things off scott did you have anything else that you wanted to kind of remark or add on or comment on at all if you enjoyed listening to us talk I It Be by all means check out my website Scott hen.com and uh and my book Ultra learning um I have another book coming out in May get better at anything so that'll also a lot of these conversations are a little you know from being immersed in the research for three years so you'll probably see Illusions to that if you're if you're getting that book in May and um and just uh you know it was great to talk to you Justin because I know we had been like orbiting uh similar spheres for a while and uh not having bumped into each other it was great to to talk to someone who's similarly passionated and opinionated about these topics yeah no it's been awesome thanks for your time cuz I've know I've known about you for ages you know and I knew about you as the bestseller author from day one that I that I knew you so it's oh thank it's awesome to have this have this conversation but yeah that's um yeah it's amazing thank you so much oh thank [Music] you [Music]