Voice notes I sent to a friend
- (Transcribed via Superwhisper, which btw they’ve made this way too expensive, I asked Claude “I got superwhisper (which I think just wraps OpenAI’s whisper model) for 250 lifetime, wondering if there are cheaper offerings” yesterday, it gave good options!)
Voicenote 1 - A Level challenge videos
At the gym, I had some ideas. You know that video I sent you — the one I made about “I’m going to learn business in a week”1 or “see how much I can learn”? The problem with that framing is: what’s the outcome? What’s the output I’d share in the video after a week? It’d be “yeah, I made a bunch of flashcards and I now know XYZ that I didn’t know before.” Cool. Maybe I could link to my website to show the flashcards, or link to an essay where I write up what I’ve learned. It’s fine. It kind of depends on who the video is for. If it’s just signal for potential hires or clients, it could work — just to show I’m a guy who’s passionate about learning stuff as an adult and is good at it. But still, hard to verify.
So I was aware it needed a more compelling shape. I’ve just been talking to Claude about it, and the shape that came up — oh man, it made me tearful to read. It’s so perfect. It’s crazy.
So, where my passion for learning came from: a few years after sixth form, I realised, shit, I really wish I'd done different A-levels. Those four subjects you do for the final two years before uni — man, if I’d done maths, things would have been different. Knowing in the contingent way things happened, it’s all fine. If I went back in time as that teenager, I wouldn’t have picked maths — I had internally coherent reasons for choosing what I chose. It’s all good. But I’ve always been like, man, if only I’d done maths. It’s completely locked me out of technical roles. Similarly programming, but that wasn’t even taught at school, and I would have loved it. Same with economics and business studies. A few things that would have been quite different.
So I thought: what if I make a video of learning one of these and passing the exam? It turns out you can actually pay as an adult to sit the exam and get a legit A-level. I don’t know if I’d do that or if I’d just do a past paper, but there’s something compelling from a video point of view about “I’ve spent 600 quid on this fucking exam, let’s see if I pass it.” My claim is that I’m a smart 29-year-old who’s spent years learning how to learn, so this should be easy as fuck — I should definitely get an A*, and I shouldn’t be humiliated by any 18-year-olds beating me.
There are really good stakes there. It’s kind of a fun video — can I beat a load of 18-year-olds? — a bit ironic, like yeah, you’d better fucking get an A.* But it also has this genuine, legit life story behind it: for years I’d wished I’d done this. I've always felt like I missed my chance with maths. And how the fuck do you learn maths outside of school? It seems so hard. Surely you need a teacher, etc.
So if I could make a video of actually passing A-level maths — there’s such an enormous well there. It’s almost a massive block, an inciting trauma. It led me to choose an undergrad I ended up not liking and not using, and then a master’s I don’t use and was kind of bullshit. So to go back and reclaim it — I’m going to do the fucking maths A-level, I’m really scared, but I’m going to do it — yeah. I feel so excited about this.
I’m thinking the first video could be: can I pass the A-level in business studies? Because I think that’ll be much easier than maths. So the first video isn't a multi-month thing — maybe one month to learn. I assume it’s just a textbook, make a load of flashcards.
Yeah, I feel really excited about that. That’s thing number one.
It feels cool because I started with that video idea of “I’m going to learn business studies,” and this feels like a similar thing, but more likely to be popular. Obviously Americans and Canadians won’t know what A-levels are, but it’s still more of a thing — can this legit adult pass the exam? There’s something else here too: there are a lot of learning YouTubers, but they just talk about the tools — they don’t talk about what they’ve actually learned. I think that’s a big missing part of the market. Is any of this stuff actually useful, or are you just bullshitting and using tools without it changing your life? So at the very least, passing an exam — which is a known, legible thing — and then I could go on to do university-level stuff.
I was thinking maybe I should just skip straight to university-level, because I’m an adult, so stuff for teenagers should be pretty easy. But there’s something more emotionally potent about the A-levels — especially the maths one. I’ve always regretted not doing it.
Anyway, I’ll stop talking now. But that’s the first one.
And then the second one I’m excited about is…
Voicenote 2 - cothinker videos
I’m really excited about this one as well. I think this is genius.
So, you know how you and I did co-thinking for two weeks and it was really good? Yeah — I want to do it again with my friend Delia, who’s moving to Israel halfway through this week and said she really needs help making money ASAP. She was an investment banker, and I don’t know what her plans are.
So what I want to do is actually make a video of the entire arc — and she’s agreed to it. I’ll record the Zoom meetings we have. This might even be a private video — I might just send it to potential clients if I do cold outreach. Like: “Hey, I’m Alex, I do this co-thinking thing, here’s the website — but actually, here’s a 10-minute YouTube video that’s well produced and shows the arc of a two-week thing.”
It starts with me being like, “Hey, I’m doing my co-thinking thing, and doing it with my friend Delia. I don’t know what her problem is at the moment or what she wants help with, but we’ll find out.” Then it’s a little clip from the start of the call — recorded on Zoom — she’s like blah blah, and I’m like, “So what’s going on? What are we going to work on?” We talk about it a bit, and then the video shows the arc of the two weeks: the unlocks, what we do, all that. At the end of the two weeks, we talk about how it went. And then maybe there's a two-week or one-month follow-up — “Yeah, was it actually useful?” — and hopefully she’s like, “This is crazy, I definitely wouldn’t have got to XYZ without all the co-thinking we did together.”
It’s so freaking great. I’m so excited. She’s agreed to do it, so let’s see.
It feels like a really nice win-win: she gets two weeks of free help, and I get a cool video out of it as an experiment. If it’s going well early on, I could make another one with a different person just to have a different angle — or this could be all I need.
Yeah, I feel really pleased. Holy shit, I have so much creative energy at the moment. It’s awesome. Feels fucking cool.
Voicenote 3 - doing all the A Levels
Another thing about the A-level idea: I could collect them all. It could be a whole video series. I don’t know how many there are, but there are definitely others — history, geography… I did English literature, psychology, and chemistry as my three. What was the fourth one? There was another one.2 Anyway — so maybe there’s like 12. I could get them all, and then move on from there.
Because this is my whole thing: I really want to be well-educated, but it’s quite daunting to know what to learn, and in what order. So it feels really awesome to go back to where it all began and be like, I’m just going to learn all this shit, and then go from there. And I’m actually getting educated.
It’s such an awesome win-win. Rare, cool videos — I think — and I’m getting to learn a bunch, and getting over my own sadness that I missed out on this stuff the first time around. It feels very unique. And then I can go on to do university-level stuff and be learning in public.
Yeah — this is cool. This is cool shit. I think this is fucking genius. Wow.
Footnotes
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Link to unlisted vid here - https://youtu.be/4EUuGsVSMVA ↩
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Biology! ↩