Speaker 1
I had an interview with Nicole Vanderhoven, a few episodes back where she talked about this idea of, you know, using tools like, like, well, she's using obsidian, but she's also sharing in YouTube and she's doing it as a way of thinking in public, right? And I guess the question more broadly is, why should folks be doing this? Like what I assume just from looking at your, the stuff that you put out that you spend a lot of time working on your website, why should someone be investing their time cultivating a digital garden in a world where there are LLMs that can think for you. Right, right. That's a good question. I'll first say it definitely depends on your goals. But if you have any job that isn't all what we would call knowledge work, which I assume is most people listening to a podcast called the informed life, to be honest, you need to be, you need to have a set of beliefs and opinions, right? That you are bringing to every job you do. And not even necessarily a job, right? Anything where you're like, okay, I care about this, I want to work on it. And it's some like meaty programming or design problem that you really think is worth solving. That's really going to take some critical thinking, right? You're going to have to be like, okay, what's been done in the history of this? What questions should I be answering? What are my uncertainties? How sure are my beliefs? These are kind of like core pieces of critical thinking that we all have to do, right? If we're really going to be problem-solving in the world. And writing is one of the best ways to figure all these out and organize them and be like, okay, I have to actually identify what the critical questions are to answer. And then I have to write those questions down. And then I have to try to answer those questions, right? This is like a process. And I don't know about a process to go through then to simply write those all down and then try to answer them by writing stuff down. Obviously, you can use things like drawing and audio, like notes. And there's all sorts of workflow stuff you've been doing here. But you really want to be very explicitly capturing your current understanding of a situation and your current beliefs about it, to be an effective agent in the world. And the reason to do this in public, you could certainly do this in a private note-taking database, which is kind of like write all this stuff up yourself. But doing it in public really raises the stakes, right? I'm a big fan of learning in public because I could write myself a really terrible answer to one of these difficult questions in private. And it doesn't really matter that it's a terrible answer. Who's going to see it? But if I'm like, oh, I'm going to try to answer this difficult question in public. I'm like, oh, no, OK. Now, you'd actually do my research. I don't, you know, someone's going to critique me.