YouSaid · the spoken record

Tiago Forte

lines on the record: 36
first: 2023-08-31
most recent: 2023-08-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A complicated thing for them to do, but obviously they have 100 other product decisions, but I think that era of personalization Using your past work is coming, and I'm very excited for it.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You made a really good point there about agencies. Been reached out to by a number of short form video agencies where they say, Oh, you looked at your TikToks and we think they could be better. Here's an example of how we improved it. And I look at it. And I'm like, I've seen 10 other people on TikTok with this exact same style of editing. UF templates. You can just copy and paste for everyone. And it probably works to some extent, but then people start to notice, right? They start to see the edges of it. And so, if you can actually have. Something like this, where it learns your preferences, right? Like the fact that mid journey doesn't remember the images that I like and their settings to recommend those kinds of settings for the future is very annoying.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because they actively punish, I would say the active. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They punish it. They don't want you to do it. And so You actually want to create native stuff for each of those platforms for the people who want to spend time on those platforms because that's what's going to get rewarded. But now You're like not creating one article. You're trying to create like 10 assets off of each idea, which is a huge. Time suck. And so it's interesting to think too, like. Would it look like if you had This kind of Content assistant. You Not only on all of your writing and stuff, but on your preferred format for short and long form videos and Train on your voice so that you can immediately create. A podcast from your articles and all these things. So that you can be this like. Hyper distributed idea person.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An idea and you can turn it into one of those forms something that's trained on you should be able to help you produce those other forms of your work to help that idea reach the most people possible. And we're seeing something. Potential for that, which is Like platforms. Aren't really letting you use them as funnels anymore. Early internet marketing with social media tends Years ago, or whatever Your Facebook and your Twitter Whatever we're all to drive. Traffic back to your site. Where you could get email signups or sales or whatnot. And it's way harder to do that now. It's really”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This interesting element or world that we're getting into the valuable thing is the ideas, but everybody receives ideas in different ways. For example, one thing I... Realized about myself at some point is that I have a very hard time processing auditory information. I don't remember it. It just doesn't really imprint for me. But when I read things, they stick with me really well. And so if I read a book, I can remember a ton from it. But if I listen to an audiobook, I don't remember anything. And some people prefer the like spunkier, punchy Twitter thread style. Some people prefer the long-form essay style. Some people would prefer short form video of the idea, right? And so if you have”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a pretty magical thought, too. But I love that idea of it helping you become the TEDx better version of yourself as opposed to what it does now, where it basically just like raises the floor for everyone.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's really magical about that is the more you write or have written or the more you do, the more useful the tool becomes and the more powerful you become. ChatGPT is a very, or really any of these is a very democratic tool right now in the sense that everyone has access to the same quality of recommendations. But if you have your own private custom model that's been trained on everything you've ever done in your style of writing and really you writing at your best. Because I think everybody who writes has had this experience of they sit down and they're just on fire and they bang out an article in 30 or 60 minutes and at the end of it they're like, whoa, like that was sick, right? Like who wrote that almost in your sad when you don't get that feeling because you know it can be better, you can be really on it, but you can't have it all the time, right? You could theoretically train it on your best work and then have it help you configure anything you're writing to emulate you at your best.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my dream tool would just be a blank page where as you start writing, words get underlined or sentences get underlined. Very subtly. So it's not going to interrupt your flow, but it's there as a little note. And then whenever you want to take a break, you can go back and hover over it and it'll pop up and show you the stuff that you've written about or done or said in the past that might be related to what you're talking about right there. And then you can surf through it at your leisure and all that's just being done on the fly as you write without you having to interrupt yourself or without being interrupted.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's actually pretty hard to get a ton of value out of it for the parts of writing that you're good at. But if it can actually surface stuff for you to use, right? Like if it can handle some of that search for you and whatnot so that you can produce a lot more, produce faster, right? Like that starts to get pretty interesting.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally impressed or maybe like annoyed sometimes where there's this feeling of oh, I already wrote this article three years ago and I kind of like forgot and now I'm rewriting the same article. That would just be so powerful because you don't have to try to remember the surface level of everything you've stored. It's handling that for you and just feeding you back things that are yours Because there's definitely going to be this phase, I think, at least for a while of AI helping to enhance high performing creators, right? Like if you look at GPT-4's writing, it's better than 90% of people, probably 95 or 98% of people, but it's way worse than the good writers.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It can look at every single sentence of what you're doing and say, oh, you actually wrote an article about this six years ago. Like, I forget about articles I've written all the time, right? Like somebody will say, oh, I really love that article or they'll send me links, something like, oh my God, I wrote that.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say it turns your note taking tool from a means to surface known unknowns. So, you know, right now I can say I know that I know this thing, but I don't remember it exactly. I know that I have notes from what your food ate, but I don't remember what this note was. I will go find it. It does that very well. But with this, it could provide you with your unknown unknowns.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I'm pretty sure we can actually already do that with the tools that are available on the market. Yeah, nobody's just created a consumer side version of it. That's like literally a second brain, right? That's literally. Your previous thoughts and work and effort being processed by this external cognitive entity and then fed back to your like current working mind or whatever to enhance what you're trying to do without you having to go look for it. And that would be incredible. That would be so useful. I would use that nonstop every day.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theoretically, any note taking app should be able to offer that. I'd pay like $1,000 or more for this, very happily, where I could just say, okay, here are my notes from four or five hundred books now, thousands of articles, every little idea I've written down over the last 10, 15 years. Here's all of it. I just want you to index it and then as I start writing. Just give me a little like pop ups along the side, or when I ask for them, give me a little pop-ups that say, Oh, you had this idea, oh, this idea from this book, or this idea from this article or whatever, like, these are all relevant to what you're doing right now.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Podcast transcripts into a GPT embed model, and then you can just query it with anything you want to know, and it feeds you back Huberman's answers from podcasts.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, I think the next big utility. A note taking tool that offers custom GPT or whatever embeds as a service for your knowledge graph. Because I've seen people do it. Dan Schipper has that great project he did where he put all of Andrew Huberman's.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the useful things were reading the book and capturing the highlights and then being able to search for it. And it kind of like stops there.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unimportant other things, but they still must be. Totally. I mean, the number of times I had this experience of writing an article and then I think like I feel like I've seen this or I've felt this idea somewhere before and then I look over at my bookshelf and one or two books pop out that remind me of what I'm talking about and then I go into my note taking tool and surface my highlights from those books. And then I like immediately have a quotation that I might have saved 10 years ago from a book that I can use in the piece that I can reference. Like that's so useful.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, this is so circular. Or everybody's had the experience of maybe not everybody's had this experience. Weird people like me have had this experience of getting a bunch of things done and then looking in your task manager and being annoyed that you didn't put those things in there first.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just hardwired in me. There's this part of my brain that likes moving things around and putting them in a satisfying order. And like, that's what I'm getting out of these tools.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I do think that there is this big element of the other thing they're delivering is fun, right? And we don't like to admit that the reason we read productivity books or watch motivational YouTubes or stuff is because it's fun and makes us feel good. And that's part of what they're delivering too. Like it's fun to organize your stuff, right? And I had this really funny experience our older daughter's almost two now. And one of her favorite hobbies is to just organize random things like opening the pantry and like pulling stuff out and like moving it from one container to the other or taking all the mixing bowls and like sacking them in the correct sizes. And I'm watching her do this and I go, oh.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Yeah, and there are obviously exceptions and things, but I make this analogy all the time that 99.9% of the best books ever written were written on a typewriter or by hand. Like, if you think that you need a good writing app to write your book, you're just wrong, it's just not true.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benefits from it, right? That one, I think, is probably just not true, right? Like Andy, he had this great tweet where he was like, you know, for all of the influencers talking about personal knowledge management and note-taking in those things, remarkably few of them have written a great book or one an Emmy or an Oscar or like actually done anything that incredible with their knowledge management systems. The main use case seems to be talking about your knowledge management system. And I think that he was kind of like brutally honest or brutally correct about it. Like I looked at that tweet and I was like, wow, I feel very seen right now.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it might be more of a false promise issue. Because I think if you look at, say, the notion marketing or the Evernote marketing, they advertise themselves as a wiki, as a digital... Filing cabinet, and they do those things very well. They allow you to collect and organize information. And I think the false promise that many of us believe or have botten into or whatever is that if you organize information, you will write better articles, you will make more money, you will be happier, you will get all of these.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a few people reach out to me over the last week or two because Evernote's shutting down their US office and a lot of people are migrating out of Evernote and they said, hey, I need to migrate all of my stuff into a new tool. What do you recommend? I said, well, don't migrate anything. Just like start using a new tool. And then for the next three months, see which pieces of information you end up needing. And then go migrate them. But what you will probably find is that you can delete 95 to 99% of everything you have and never feel that pain for the rest of your life.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas with a much more like widespread hyperlength knowledge craft style, you can kind of just like slap 10 different relationships onto it. And you'll probably be able to find it again in the future.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Layers of folders, and Yeah, a little bit more like that. And the thing that I liked about it, too, was any hierarchical file system requires very deliberate placement of each piece of information. You have to think about it a lot where you put it. It might not seem like you do, but you kind of do because you're saying, okay, in 10 years, if I don't know I need this piece of information, how do I accidentally refind it?”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where very few things in these tools are actually useful for improving the creative output, which is I think what you're really optimizing for by using them, search is very useful and the capture is very useful. And I do think that these bi-directional relationships between bits of information are super useful as well so that you can Log a few connections on something as long as it's connected to two or three other things in your second brain or whatever you want to call it, it will be very easy to resurface it later, much easier than if you have to pick an arbitrary folder to put it into, at least for me.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could also do tags and stuff, but the tags felt clunky. And so, what was exciting to me about Rome when I saw it was it introduced more of a like knowledge graph. I think they might have invented that or popularized it for note-taking tools, right? Which is really, I think, how we think about things, right? Like that's more of how our brain works. Our brain isn't a filing cabinet. It's very messy. It's very interconnected. And it felt like it fit that much better for me. And that's what made me so excited about it. And I think made so many other people excited about it. We kind of take for granted if you're getting into knowledge management today, almost every tool has this, right? The notion very quickly adopted this same interconnected backlink structure that Rome popularized.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny because this all happened at an interesting time where I had gone through Thiago Forte's building a second brain a couple of years before. And when I went through it, I was having these conversations with him about how much I hated Evernote because it really forced you into this hierarchical way of organizing your information. And so you had a folder for home or whatever, and then you're putting your notes about your house in there. And you have a folder for books and you're putting all your book notes in there. Much every piece of knowledge should live in multiple places”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I had spent more time reading more books instead of continuing to hyper optimize my highlights from the books I had already read.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it's really the searching, the indexing, and the collecting that are very helpful. But pretty much all the other features often get in the way or become distractions or give you the sense of photoactivity, right? Like, oh, I'm doing all of these. I'm organizing my knowledge. You probably should be writing or playing with your kids or doing something else. But expanding on that, the thing that's really been helpful is the actual reading the books, right?”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 or 13, 14 years now of taking notes from the books that I'm reading. And so I used to do this on Kindle. Now I do it on physical books and use read-wise to extract the highlights. But the medium that I organize those highlights in doesn't seem to matter because I had them in text files at one point. I had them in Evernote. I had them in Notion. I had them in Rome. Like I've moved them around. I've lost a lot of the formatting and additional annotations so many times that it almost doesn't matter.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question because I'm not sure that I could honestly say all of the effort has delivered a compensatory amount of value in the sense that even as a kid, I very much enjoyed finding interesting bits of knowledge and then sharing them with people or trying to explain them. And so almost like this kind of digital magpie I enjoy just collecting shiny bits of information to the extent that it's helped with writing Most of it hasn't. The only thing that I could say definitely has really helped is a habit that I've had for”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just got very lucky that I was super early on it was using it before a lot of other people. And I think it was one of the first people with a small to medium-sized audience who talked about it. And then I think that helps people with much larger audiences pick it up.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some point, I just got interested in it. I think at one point, I adopted the belief as many do that the more I learned about productivity and the more knowledge I collected, the more financially successful or happy or whatever I would be and ended up going very hard down that track because a lot of people do once they get that idea in their head. And something with the tools just clicked very well for me where something about the way I was using it wasn't as immediately intuitive to people's. And then in particular with Rome, for those who remember that it was really like a mania, I think.”
2023-08-31 · a16z Podcast · A True Second Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source