#1106 Tiago Forte On How To Build A Second Brain

Tiago Forte is the CEO of Forte Labs and author of the book "Building A Second Brain". In this conversation, we discuss various productivity hacks, the best note taking process, information overload, instant access to information you already learned, and using these strategies to unlock your full creative potential. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Amberdata provides the critical data infrastructure enabling financial institutions to participate in the digital asset class. We deliver comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Download our Digital Asset Data Guide at https://www.amberdata.io/pomp ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Tiago Forte is the CEO of Forte Labs and also the author of a brand new book called Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. In this conversation, we talk about building a second brain, various productivity hacks, why so much information in the world may not actually be a good thing, how you can unlock that creativity, why having instant access to information that you've already learned is incredibly important, and what the second brain can do for you. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tiago, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, find us on Twitter and let us

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  know what did you like, what did you not like, what did you agree with, and what did you disagree with? We really enjoy the discussion after these conversations. Alright, let's get in this episode with Tiago. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang bang. I'm here with Tiago. I first came around to this idea of building a second brain, and when I saw it, I thought it had something to do with robotics or automation. I was like, oh, of course, they're gonna take brain computer interfaces, and they're gonna put them in our brains, and we're all gonna be cyborgs running around. And then I clicked,

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

  and realized that, no, this was much more about productivity, note-taking, and kind of systemized organization, which in some ways is almost more interesting for the average person. How did you come around to realizing that this was going to be something that you personally needed? Because I think that you used the system, and now you're out teaching other people how exactly they can do this.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you know, the term second brain came much later. But years before I had that, that term, that name, it was a medical condition. It was a debilitating pain and tension in my throat, in my neck. That started one day when I was 22, out of the blue. There was no cause, no reason that I could ever determine. And it just slowly got worse over weeks, months, and then years. Ultimately, leading to like this all-consuming pain. That was just like the darkest, hardest period of my life. And so I first started taking notes because I was seeing all these doctors and all these different specialists, and they were telling me all these different things, sometimes contradictory. Sometimes things that I had to go research and learn about.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Sometimes things I had to try, right, like little experiments. The medication I was taking actually affected my cognition and my memory. So like this is the crazy thing about your body. The very moment that I needed to intake and make sense of all this information, my mind was at its lowest point. It was this contradiction. And so I just had to externalize. I had to offload all of those notes, all of those, all of that data to first paper. And then paper got unmanageable. I had a stack like this thick. I started doing it on the computer. And over a long period of time, I started using that same system of note-taking for my studies, to do my writing, to manage my productivity, and eventually to start a business.

• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So what's fascinating to me about this whole thing is there's a lot of science that I've read. If you write things down, you will remember them better, right? Which if you're reading, you take notes, there's better recall, there's better memory. But I don't think that you're actually going through this process, helping people build these systems so that they can remember the information. It seems more of that you want to build a second brain or a database full of the information that means you don't have to actually remember it and therefore you can query it later? Is that like a fair way to think about that?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so memory is the gateway.

• 4:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Memory is just the entry point because, and it's a great entry point because we have just terrible memories as humans. That is one of the things that, that computers do already so much better than we can ever do, right? Like what can the human brain remember? Like five to seven digits of a phone number at most? And so you start there, you offload, I mean, just details, your calendar. How useful is it to have a calendar? Your to do list, your notes from meetings and from calls, your notes on books. It's like a simple, like, external storage medium. But, once you start doing that, that's just the beginning. Because, once you've offloaded, weird things start to happen. Like, for example, you can notice patterns. When all that information is outside of your brain, you can look at it.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  You can evaluate it, you can think about it, you can share it with others, get their feedback. You can move it around, you can annotate it, you can add images. And eventually, it starts with memory, but it becomes a creativity enhancer, productivity enhancer. Gives you insights, gives you profound revelations. Like, when you can see your life, the data that makes up your life in external form, you can't help but have insights about who you are and what you want.

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's David Allen. I saw a quote in one of your pieces where he said, "Your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them." And I thought that was such like a powerful quote, because really, we don't think of the brain as having two different functions.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Most people, you said, "Hey, what's your brain for?" They're like, "Thinking."

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But actually, your brain is the computer that holds all of the information and memory that you have. And so, do you see a, kind of an unlock, by being able to kind of kick out all of the memory and information-saving capacity to the second brain? Does that free up, kind of, your original brain for more creativity, more thinking, more idea generation?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  I absolutely think it does. I think it's, unlock is the, I think I might have that in the subtitle, the word unlock. It's like, it's this interesting thing where, you know, I'm in the world of like, you could call it self-help, advice, self-improvement. And there's so much good advice out there, on anything, anything you want to improve. Your health, you know, your relationships, the way you think, your money. Endless advice, and much of it is quite good. But it's like, the average person is so underwater. They have so little bandwidth. There's like no bandwidth left. You can't even make a change. You can't even adjust how you're doing things if you are at 110% capacity. So one way I think of it is like to make any change in any aspect of your life, it has to start with offloading.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  You need to put something out of your brain just to free up the space, like you said, to just like reflect, to just think, to just have ideas. Until you do that, you are, you know, you're underwater and you really can't consider new options.

• 7:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So it feels like, uh, I'm starting to better understand this a little bit. There's like outside of your brain, there's just this flood of information. You're just constantly bombarded with all this information. Then, right now, people are doom scrolling or, or, uh, reading as much as they can. Every article, everything, they, they just want as much information as possible. But then they have to keep that in their brain and that's what's almost like clogging up and you don't have time to stop, think, do all the stuff. So really what you're saying is like, hey, yes, there's all this information available and even if you want to read it, just go ahead and keep kind of storing it away in the second brain and then use the brain that you have right now to think.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:39Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of that information kind of onslaught that we all face every single day, uh, should people be consuming all of that? Or do you actually think part of it is like, if you just kind of sidestep or avoid all of that, that actually helps on the idea generation creativity and kind of brain processing, uh, if you will?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great question. So I think, so from all the information we're consuming, there's always a signal in the noise, right? There's no way the, by some estimates, 30 gigabytes of content that you're consuming, that you're exposed to each day, there's no way that's all equally valuable. There is, I, I often use the rule of thumb, 1%. There's the 1% of all that information that has the most value. So first of all, it takes some discernment. You have to think about, like, when you listen to, say, a two-hour podcast, what are the few quotes, the few ideas, the few recommendations that actually directly apply to your life now? But once you've done that, that thinking, to discern what that is, just save it. Always be saving the one percent and very quickly, like in a matter of days or weeks,

• 8:45Speaker 02

  you're going to look at, it's almost this like library of knowledge. It's like a portfolio of thinking that you've done that is totally unique to you. Not one human being on the planet has that same collection. And then you have a source to draw from to create whatever you're creating. Instead of doing what I think a lot of people do, which is terrifying, sitting at a blank page of blank screen and trying to come up with a good idea, which is the recipe to, to get nowhere.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I do feel like the more content you consume, the more ideas you have. So I always joke, people will ask me, hey, you just tweeted like 20 times in like two hours, like, what's going on? I'm usually reading, right? Like, I'm consuming information. Now, it's not a reading kind of garbage, or I've seen you talk about like fast information is the equivalent of fast food.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, pretty bad for your brain, pretty bad for your body. This is higher quality information, at least supposedly, somebody put it in a book, the book got published, right? It's popular in many cases. And so what it does is then it triggers thoughts for myself. So how do you kind of balance between like, avoid all information versus like, do you just seek out the most important or highest quality information? Like, kind of what's your day-to-day kind of information consumption habits look like?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one way to measure that is how many notes I take. I actually calculated this because I've been doing this for over 10 years. I just went in and count, you know, tells you how many notes you have divided by, you know, 10 years. And I take, on average, over a long period of time, 2.1 notes per day.

• 10:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Now, 2.1 notes, how many over a decade? We are talking about probably 5,000, 6,000, almost 10,000, maybe, right?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  I think it would, I think it might approach or exceed 10,000, but then I also delete them. So I'm at, I'm at a little over 7,000 currently.

• 10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Why do you delete notes that you've taken?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  So this is the interesting thing is even of the notes that you decide, oh, like, how often in the moment, you know, you're watching some video or whatever and you're like, oh, this is so good. And then you come back later, you're like, actually, that was like clickbait. That sounded good in the moment. It sounded like so, so wise. But then when you just think about it for like five seconds, you're like, that actually doesn't mean anything. It's like completely empty. Notes give you that feedback mechanism. So usually, once a week, approximately, maybe sometimes once every two weeks, I'll go in, look at the notes I've taken, which at two notes per day would be, what, 14 notes every week, or 28 every two weeks. That's a fine, that's a reasonable number. When I say a note, I don't mean like hundreds or thousands of words. It could be one quote, it could be one photo, it could

• 11:22Speaker 02

  be one thought, or a few bullet points. They're very short, they're snippets. Once I do that, it's a feedback mechanism, because I see what actually stands the test of time, which then goes, and I delete them if they're not useful. That feeds back into what I choose to consume in the first place. Because I just, I have data. I know what ends up being useful over the long term. And how that plays out is I tend to read more books, tend to read more old books, tend to read books or other sources on fields that are not my own. I tend to, more and more, I find myself going towards obscure sources. I find if I just consume all the same bestselling whatever that all my peers are consuming, I tend to have the same ideas. So I actually have a, I have a subreddit that I started called Obscure

• 12:06Speaker 02

  PDFs. If someone wants to know, like, specifically what I recommend reading, you can look it up, has a few thousand members. And it's like, have you ever like been passed like a PDF by a friend? It looks like it's from like the 1970s, it's like photocopied, it's like from some like Department of Defense research team that no one has ever heard of. That tends to be the best stuff. Because it stood the test of time by being passed as a PDF from person to person. Those are the kind of stuff, kind of things I like these days.

• 12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you're reading what we'll call high quality information, you know, day in and day out, I guess the first question is just like, how many hours a day, right? You have a business, you have a family, you do all these other things, like, are we talking an hour a day? Do you carve out like six hours a day on your calendar and you just sit down, you just read, and everyone's jealous of you? Like, how do you actually interact on an hour basis?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. Not much at all. Especially these days, you know.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  A few years ago, I think there was one year I read like fifty books in a year. Which was like my high watermark, but I don't even know if I recommend that. I was just like force-feeding myself. You know, when I think back, how much of those books do I really remember? It's relatively little. These days, you know, I have a team, like you said, a family, a household. Probably at most, an hour a day. Across podcasts, which I listen to like when I'm walking the dog, like multitasking, right? Like walking the dog, washing dishes, driving in the cars, podcasts. If I get a little reading done, like thirty minutes of reading in the evening, it's like kind of a miracle. And then, of course, like during my workday, like I'll just catch little snippets of different, you know, kinds of content.

• 13:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The other piece of this is when you're reading, what is your process? So I've told a story before that I used to do everything audiobooks. Like, and I was obsessed and two acts and like, you know, game on. And I, somebody gave me a physical book, it was very hard for me to read, my eyes hurt, I couldn't concentrate. Like, I was just like, oh, this is bad. So I've only been reading physical books this year for the most part. And one, I found like a renewed sense of really enjoying reading, for whatever reason. And then two is while I read, I sit and if I see something I like, I highlight it. And I just keep reading. And then when I'm done with the book, I'll go back and I've got a couple of little tips and tricks that I'll try to actually extract those highlights from the book.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And then try to compile, right now it's very rudimentary notes, but aspirations to make it much better. What is your process when you're reading a book or obscure PDF or anything like that?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's pretty simple, similar to yours. I think that one of the main principles is I really try to separate reading from note-taking.

• 14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Like, there's some advice out there to read with a notebook right there. And so you read a passage and then you like write it in your own words, or you like reflect on it, or you write down a passage that you want to save. There's very limited circumstances, say like if I'm reading like, I don't know, a scientific paper where I'll do that. But usually, it's so important that I get that enjoyment. That enjoyment is what makes us sustainable. You're not gonna do anything that you don't enjoy for very long. And so the key to making it enjoyable is to stay in flow for me. And so that means that the most that I do is make a highlight, like a digital highlight. I'm usually reading digital books either on my Kindle, which I carry with me everywhere. I have one right here on the corner of the desk. Or if I don't have my Kindle, I can read the Kindle app on my iPad or even my phone.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  You know, like half the time I'm on my phone, like everyone else, I'm reading books. It's kind of like amazing that you can synchronize your progress among all these different devices. And then I use a service called Readwise. Do you know Readwise?

• 15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I've heard of it. I use a different one, but I think they're the same.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Readwise is an essential. I mean, it's so crucial crucial crucial to all this because it just works in the background. I never have to think about it, mess with it. I don't have to go in and sync anything. It just listens or sort of detects any highlight I make, not just in eBooks, by the way. eBooks on any device, but articles, like blog posts, online articles. And then it extracts just that text while keeping track of the location and which book it's from or which article it's from, saves it in my notes, which I use Evernote. And so I basically have through no additional effort besides just reading and highlighting this compendium of like several hundred books, every single little passage and idea that I've found interesting.

• 16:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you said you carry Kindle everywhere you go. Why?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  So I, for a long time, for years, I would just read on the Kindle app on my iPad. I find since the start of COVID, my, and also that coincided with having my first kid with my wife Lauren, my attention span, having Twitter on the same device makes it not viable for me anymore.

• 17:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you're carrying it and you'll kind of try to steal a couple of minutes here and there where you can read. And so having it with you always means that you're kind of ready to go.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. I need the dedicated reading environment that doesn't have Twitter on it, helps that it's black and white. There's no color. There's no fancy graphics. And I think the key is like, I like to measure how many seconds does it take you to continue where you left off, right? A phone is fast. Look at it, unlock, you know, swipe up, go over to the app, open, and you're there. But a Kindle is even faster. You just hit that one button, it says loading, and you're back to the exact point that you left off. That's important.

• 17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you highlight in the Kindle, will Readwise pull it into your notes? Or do you need to take it from Kindle and input?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  No, it's totally automatic.

• 17:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Within a few minutes of any highlight that I make, it just appears magically in my notes.

• 17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty incredible.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think of the notes app, you mentioned you used Evernote. There's, I'm gonna say a million, I don't know, maybe less, maybe there's actually more than a million note-taking apps at this point. Why Evernote? Because that's one that's been around for actually a really long time. It's not one of the newer ones. Is it just institutional kind of debt of having used it for a long time?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Partially.

• 18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is there something that, in your opinion, it works better for you than maybe other platforms?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is one of the very controversial topics in the second brain community.

• 18:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting, okay.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  It's very controversial. So you're right, there's so many. I mean, and this is, this is, it's an opportunity, but it's kind of a problem. You know, there's at least, at least a dozen major contenders that are like, kind of check all the boxes that you can, you can pick from. Besides Evernote, you know, Notion, newer ones like Obsidian, Rome, ones made by the big tech companies, Microsoft OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, they're all options.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  A couple of reasons that I use Evernote are just like you said, legacy. Like, they were really the first note-taking app to use this term second brain, actually. I should credit them for that. It was the first note-taking app that wasn't just, oh, a little grocery list, a few bullet points, your to-do list. It was like, no, you're creating a lifelong treasury of knowledge. They were the first ones to have that long-term perspective. I've been with them for 10 years. So at this point, it's like, I will for sure move at some point because there tends to be these generations, like, a whole new wave of technology comes along. But an interesting result of the second brain thing that I, that I often find is because we're linking all these different apps together, we're routing data from one to the other.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  You have to kind of be not at the forefront of technology. You know, like when a new kind of technology, let's say TikTok comes out. You can't, if you, to do what I'm describing, things have to be mature. You know, apps have to talk to each other, they have to use standard formats. There has to be some stability and predictability. So I often joke that I like to be 10 years behind the forefront. Right? So Evernote, you know, 10 years ago was the popular app. Probably in three to five years, I'll adopt kind of the new generation. But I like to stay on platforms, basically to sum it up, that are mature, stable and predictable.

• 20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you are in Evernote, what are you doing in there? Right? So are you just writing words and each kind of node is separate from each other? Or are you actually connecting them in some way? Is there something that you're optimizing for search? Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you could do. And we don't have enough time for you to explain kind of the entire system. But give people an understanding of like, if I write on a piece of paper, that's a dumb note. Right? Like, these are like smarter notes just by nature of being in technology. But how do you think about the structure of the nodes that you're taking?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's different ways you can approach this. I really like to think of it in terms of projects. There's been periods where I, you know, I went in and I kind of nerded out about structure, about organization, created all these links, these beautiful data graphs, you know, these deep hierarchies of sub, sub, sub and sub folders. And over time, just because I've been doing this so long, that stuff tends to pass away. Like, that stuff, you're excited about it for a few months and then you kind of like get over it. And so I really just think about like, what am I trying to achieve? What is the information that I need at my fingertips to achieve that? And then I will use some like linking, tagging, adding even links to the web, some annotations, some even tables and kind of more sophisticated features.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  But the way that I hold myself accountable to like actually being productive, not just like making it like a fun little game and hobby, is to focus on the execution, the completion of projects.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When you mention having information at your fingertips for something you're working on, when do you say, "I need a piece of information," and you go to Google versus, "I need a piece of information," and you go to your notes? Like, that, to me, is at the most basic difference. It's like content or information that's out there versus things that are in my notes. Like, what derives where you go when you're actually working on something?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  It's a fantastic question. And honestly, sometimes people become overzealous with this, and they try to recreate Google or recreate Wikipedia. You shouldn't do that.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. In a way, a good question to ask is the second brain is for the jobs that Google and Wikipedia can't do. So as a simple example, if you want to know a fact, like, straight-up facts, what is the population of France? That's Google's job. Like, you can find that in a fraction of a second. Any answer, if you have a simple question, it has a simple answer. What Google can't do, what Wikipedia can't do, is more subtle questions, questions that are unique to you, questions that don't have predefined answers or even predefined questions. One way to think of it is like, search on the web is very top-down. You have a thing you're looking for. You may not know exactly how to word it. You may do, like, several searches in a row, but you have some sense of where you're going.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  You're, like, drilling down from something you're trying to find to the answer. Your second brain is bottom-up. So you're saving things there that, I always say, "Don't use your logical mind." That's for Google. Pay attention to what resonates with you, what moves you. What makes the, like, physical sensations are the best indicator. What makes the hair stand up on your arm? What makes your pupils dilate? What makes your sense of time slow down? What makes your heart beat differently? It's like, what those things are is your body, your intuition, telling you, "Hey, I'm reading this passage, and it's sparking something subconscious in me that I can't quite put my finger on." That's the best thing to save. Because over time, if you save those things...

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I don't know how to explain it, except that patterns emerge. Insights emerge out of the collection of things that you're saving that you would never guess. You could never search for on Google because it's unique to you. And that's your competitive advantage over time.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you do with those insights? Because I think that that's definitely true. If you're taking a bunch of notes, you'll start to connect things. What do you do with them?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Make projects out of them.

• 24:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  So this is a common misconception is projects, as I define them, can be top down or bottom up. Sometimes your boss says, hey, you need to do this. That's a top down, it's just being given to you. But often, projects are bottom up, they emerge. Like, most of my writing happens this way. I don't have like a queue of like the next 10 things I'm going to write on the blog. That'd be so boring to just like churn them out. Instead, I just look at my life, I pay attention to signals and patterns. And then it's kind of like when I start getting excited about something, you know, and that feeling of like you're you're discovering something and then you start to notice it everywhere. You start to see examples and everything you look at. That, to me, sparks a project, which is, a project can simply, many of my projects are, just be a piece of writing.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  You know, something that I'm, I'm sitting down and synthesizing all these diverse thoughts. I think the important thing is to get it out into the world.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you mentioned earlier that you spend a lot of time reading things that are older. And I've seen you talk about this idea of relevance decay, which I think is a fascinating concept. Explain what that means and why is it so important in today's day and age when you kind of have that information overload that's happening with maybe things that are, you know, a high degree of relevance decay?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So I think one of the most useful metaphors for information is food. There's many, many parallels to food. And we can talk about that separately if you want, but one of the interesting implications, if you accept that analogy, is that information is perishable. Information has a shelf life. It's not commonly understood. We think of information as, as sort of timeless. Oh, let me just stash this, these gigabytes of data on my hard drive. It's there forever until, you know, the world ends and it gets destroyed, but not really. Information, pretty much all information, has a, it has a time limit, right? It has a period in which it's relevant, a period in which it's not widely known, right? Like, once, that's the other thing with Google.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Anything you can access on Google cannot be the source of your competitive advantage because everyone else has access to it by definition. So what that, this, this idea that information decays, it goes bad, what that gives you...

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Is the impulse to put it out there. And this is where Twitter comes into play, writing online, right? Like, like, sometimes I'll talk to people, they're like, I've been doing research for three years on this topic. Oh, cool. What have you published? What have you shared? No, no, no, I'm just compiling the world's greatest research database. And it's just like, no, you're not. Until you test it, you validate it, you actually see what the public, or not even the public, one other person has to say, you don't know if any of that information is, is useful.

• 26:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It's also a magnet. Like, I do think there's a lot of folks who, I don't want to tell people my ideas because somebody's going to take it. Like, like, that whole mentality, pretty well disputed at this point. But for these people who maybe are obsessive or perfectionist, and they're like, I'm gonna write something, but I want it to be perfect.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of what they start to understand is when you put something out, you're actually like putting bait in the water, right? And then guess what happens? All the people who are interested in that bait, they just come flying, right? And they find you. And so in some way, one of the fastest ways to learn is to put more and more information out into the world. And then you will attract certain types of people who you can learn from, you can get up to speed, they can make recommendations, like, and you're off to the races.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. You can think of a second brain as just a preparation for that. You know, like, some people have some hesitation, understandably, to just go straight on Twitter and just like input their direct thoughts. It helps to have just one stage of sort of like curation. You know, like, do a brainstorm of 10 ideas and then tweet or otherwise share one or two, like the best ones. So in a way, like, a second brain is like for recovering perfectionists who need a little bit of preparation. But I still always encourage them, get those ideas out into the world as soon as possible.

• 28:04Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned earlier that you're part of the self-help group, um, group, I don't know, industry, whatever you want to call it. I would have said that you're part of the productivity, uh, group or industry. Those two things may be the same or they may not. How do, is there a difference between those? Or is one like a subcategory of another? Does it even matter?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so self-help is like the least charitable version.

• 28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  But it's all the same. I mean, what is the difference? Productivity advice, business advice, entrepreneurship advice? In every case, someone, a self, is trying to help themselves. But I kind of like using self-help just to be a little provocative, like, like, let's reclaim that term. Like, this is, this is kind of like one of my, one of my bones to pick is like, yeah, okay, some self-help is scammy, some of it is, is not very useful, but like, it's people trying to help themselves. Like, let's not, let's not be down on that. Like, that's one of the most admirable, you know, qualities there are. So I'm, I'm kind of on a personal mission to reclaim the self-help name.

• 29:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I love, I love that. I love that. What are some of the other productivity hacks that you have, right? Whether they're actual hacks or they're things that you do? If you kind of think through your day, what are some of the things that you've done where you're like, these really unlocked my productivity or my potential?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, they tend to, to sort of all be, it's interesting, it's like, you can think of your second brain as the place where you implement all the productivity hacks. Right? Most productivity hacks, they're trying to get you to, to make your first brain, your biological mind, work differently. That is so hard. It's so hard to just decide, okay, brain, change. You pretty much just think the way you think. You are the way you are. Like, sorry. But that's very different with your second brain. You can change things. You can go in completely reorganize it. You can go and implement entire new strategies, new tactics, far more easily. Your second brain essentially is far more malleable than your first brain. So, you know, I'll just give a few examples. Things like morning journaling.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  You know, many people do this, millions of people, but I do it in my second brain, in my notes, so that I can revisit it. Most people don't have their, their journaling, which to me is like these kind of profound personal insights in a place that it can be searched, it can be revisited. Things like always keeping my to-do list outside of my head. Keep that somewhere outside, right? Like a, like a notepad or a digital note. Things like always saving my highlights when reading. Things like collecting feedback that I get from people that I respect and saving it somewhere. I tend to, like, in a funny way, self-help is about optimizing your first brain. I don't want to optimize my first brain. I just want to be like a kid. I just want to be free and roam around and do stupid stuff

• 30:50Speaker 02

  and just, and just follow my curiosities and desires. I don't want to optimize this, you know? But there's certain responsibilities and things I have to get done, so I optimized my second brain, so my first brain doesn't have to be.

• 31:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when you do like the journaling and you go back, what are you looking for?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Patterns like, like think about, here's an interesting thought experiment. So what you're doing right now, your interests, your pursuits, how far back, when you look in the past, did they start? When was the first little glimmer that that was going to be interesting for you? Do you have any sense of that?

• 31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no clue.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  So usually-

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't even remember yesterday.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  That's why you need a journal, right? So, so most people say years. It's like, you know, I was interested in, you know, I don't know, you know, cryptocurrency way back in 2013 or whatever. I only finally got into it in 2018, but usually there's these little clues way, way early on. I think journaling is a way of detecting those kind of emergent interests sooner, which obviously, I mean, in the case of crypto, like if you just noticed that you were interested in that a little bit earlier, there were huge benefits. It's self-awareness. It's basically system, it's a systemized way of being more self-aware.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:49Anthony Pompliano?

  That's A L T O I R A dot com slash pomp. Start investing today. These systems, when you actually look at them, what are the downsides? Like the productivity gains, the unlocking of creativity, the memory and kind of information recall, like all that, it's so obvious, right? Are there downsides?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  There's pitfalls, I would say.

• 34:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Depending on how you do it. So, yeah, so some pitfalls. One is getting obsessed with which app you use. You wouldn't believe, people spend months, years trying to decide which software to use.

• 34:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's very tribal. You know, like the Notion fans, Notion is one of the apps that people use. They're like, they're like antithetical. They're like the enemies of like the Rome tribe, which is like against the Evernote tribe. Like people get like, there's serious flame wars.

• 34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it sounds like crypto.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's very similar, which kind of points to another, another pitfall. It becomes an ideology sometimes, which app or even which technique, which philosophy. Some people swear by links. Oh, no, you have to have the more links, the better. Some people swear by tags, other people by folders. Some people insist that it has to be top down and planned. Other people insist it has to be bottom up and emergent. There's all these different schools of thought. One thing I'm trying to do personally is like be this like ecumenical, like let's gather all the churches, bring them together and actually.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  See that we have common ground. You know, my book is Platform Agnostic. People have used, I think, something upwards of thirty different apps to implement what I teach, which to me shows there are some common principles. And it's not like the biggest decision in the world, which app you use.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Do all of the apps use text as like a basic, like that is one commonality is that you can write text in all of them?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  You can write text in all of them, but there's two big groups, the tech-centric ones and the imagery-centric ones.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  They tend to be quite distinct.

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that difference a little bit more.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  So, all the ones I've mentioned are text, Rome, Obsidian, Notion, Simple Note, OneNote, Google Keep. They're just specialized to text. But then there's this whole other school of thought that has largely arisen around the iPad and the Apple pencil. So there's one called Mila Note that is the same thing, but largely used by designers. There's notability, like ones where you actually open a canvas and draw. That's very different from like importing little, you know, snippets of text.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And they consider like drawing notes because you're, in essence, drawing what you're thinking about, what you're looking at. And so if you're visual and artistic, which I am not, then that could be quite helpful compared to just the text-based.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's almost like there's a spectrum of like notebooks with lines over here to sketchbooks. Think about a sketchbook. That's just the digital version of a sketchbook.

• 36:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it's fascinating because it gets back to like how people learn a little bit.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like there's a connection between how you learn and maybe how you take notes, because in some way, notes are you teaching your future self?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like,

• 36:56Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. What do you think?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  I've, in the book, I say it's communicating with your future self, but I like what you just said better. That's an improvement. It's teaching.

• 37:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Communicating, yeah. Because I guess what you're really doing is you're like leaving information that your future self will discover. And what you're hoping is that it will trigger either a memory, an insight, or something like that.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. You're teaching, you're preparing, you are, you're enriching your future life by the notes you're taking now. Absolutely.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a difference between physically writing them down versus typing them? Do we know, is there any studies or anything of whether one's better or the other for like retention? Or how we think about that?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  There are. Most, almost all the studies say that paper note taking is superior.

• 37:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  I take major issue with this, though.

• 37:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  It's like anytime there's a paradigm shift, like even like in science. The new thing is not mature enough to be studied. It's not mature enough to even know what it's for, right? So all these studies are taking for granted that the paper style of note taking is better. And then they're evaluating the two based on those criteria. It's absurd. Right? So like, like one example is they say writing words or writing notes in your own words is superior for recall and retention. Versus say copying and pasting them into digital notes. Okay? In isolation, of course, that's true. But it depends what you do with those highlights. If they become part of a bigger creative workflow. Where you are not just rereading them, but revisiting them, remixing them, improving them.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  And having them become part of creative projects, I think that's superior. It's just kind of hard to study that whole, that whole workflow.

• 38:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, because they're basically just saying like, if you put it on physical paper, you're going to have to write. Letter by letter, every single word, you're gonna have, you know, kind of the sketched into your brain.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Versus if you're just copying and pasting, you didn't actually write word for word.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And therefore it was a shortcut, which then they believe is inferior.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And in isolation, that's true, but it's missing the bigger context.

• 38:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I wonder if I was reading a book, a physical book, I highlighted something. And then at the end, I went and I typed word for word what the highlights were. If that would have the same retention as if I wrote it by hand.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Could be.

• 39:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, so rather than copy and paste, if I actually typed out the notes.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  It could be.

• 39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's pretty similar, right?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. It's, so this is the other thing. It's not either or. Nothing in this world is either or. You can, I mean, OCR, Optical Character Recognition, is so good. Even your handwriting, your messy handwriting, you can take a photo of with one of these note-taking apps, and it will capture what you've written. So like, I do both kinds of note-taking, depending on the situation. There's some clear situations, paper is superior. Other situations, digital is superior. I really just try to use them both.

• 39:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you're going through your day, obviously, we talk about reading, taking notes. You talked about a journal. Are there other things that you write down? You mentioned a to-do list. What, how do you operate with a to-do list?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  It's what David Allen called open loops. Often, most of the time, the things you have to do just arise like at the most random times. Like, you're in the elevator, you know, you're in the shower, you're driving in the car. So I just try to have a place, and I use actually a dedicated app for this called a task manager, like a digital to-do list app, to just write those things down. And then, once a week, I go back and actually decide which of those things actually needs to get done.

• 40:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're just writing down the ideas as they come to you in this digital task manager? Is that the name of the one you use?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  It's called Things.

• 40:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Things? Very, very apt name. And so, as you're writing these down, you actually wait till the end of the week to go look? Or will you every morning wake up and say, hey, what do I have to do today?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I followed David Allen, who you mentioned, has really been my prime inspiration. My whole career started teaching his system, actually. It's called GTD, Getting Things Done. I just follow exactly his recommendations. Write it down when it occurs to you, so you don't forget it. And then, yes. So the interesting thing is, you know, when an idea arises, it's not clear what it is. In the moment, it's just, it's just a brain fart. It's just something that popped into your head. So you write it down, and then later, you come back to it with some more distance, some more objectivity. It could become a task. It could become a note. It could become something to send to someone. It could become just an idea for the future. It's like, it's very powerful to separate the capturing of something from the deciding what to do with it.

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. See, the things that I usually randomly get outside of maybe like, you know, business ideas or things that I would put in the idea category, usually I'm like, oh shit, I gotta do X. And I've tried a lot of things from, oh, remember, newsflash doesn't work, to is email myself and then I go to my inbox and it's serving as like, there's there to do. Not great, because then sometimes it's more complex or whatever. To actually, the number one thing that I've seen work is a physical note card. And I just write down at the beginning of every day, whatever wasn't done from the note card yesterday. And then throughout the

• 42:06Anthony Pompliano?

  day, I just write down on the note card, anything that pops up, and I try to cross things off.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  The problem is you can lose the note card, you can leave it somewhere, right? You can leave it at home, get to the office, like, oh shit, where's the note card? Like, it's not as great. And so maybe the digital, you know, kind of note card form is, you know, something like these apps that are better. But I don't know if I could write things down and then wait till the end of the week, only because the things I'm probably writing down on the to do list are like, more day to day actionable.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So what are you writing down on your kind of to do list?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I capture it all. And then that once a week, approximately once a week, I'll make like a this week list, things I want to get done this week. But I can also just add something directly to the this week list or today list. It's not like I have to rigidly follow each step. Often, I'll go days just interacting with that this week list, adding things, removing things, editing things. What the weekly ritual is, is a sort of backup plan. It's like a safety net. If there's anything that completely fell through the cracks, I know at least once a week, more or less, I'll sort of revisit it. But what you described is perfect. I think people really over engineer this. Like, what matters is that things get done. What doesn't matter is the way it looks, the way it's organized,

• 43:24Speaker 02

  how structured it is with, you know, the colors, all that kind of stuff is just, is just minor.

• 43:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, now we're gonna dig into the real stuff. You have a team of people that you work with. Can they add things to your to do list without you having to do it?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Although, wait, there's a caveat.

• 43:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  So we use, so my personal to do list is in things. And things is totally designed for individual use. In fact, there's no sharing feature. You can't, even if you wanted to, you can't share or be shared with. It's almost like a silo, right? Which means I have to, I have to consciously decide whether something goes on that list. But we have a team task management app that we use called ClickUp. That's the one for the team. And that is managed by my head of operations because she really has this incredible, you know, architected system in there. I try to never go in there. I try to avoid it at all costs. But things can be assigned to me.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  So if someone tags me, and often, you know, the most junior person in the company, often they need something from me. It's understandable. So they'll just tag me. I will get an email notification saying this person has assigned this to you. But then I can, I can add that in the way that makes sense to me, right? Like often they'll be asking for a decision, but in order to make that decision, I have to do three things. So then I'll put those three things on my to do list. Then when I'm done, I'll just, I can actually reply to the email and say done. And in the system in the cloud, it will, it will mark that off as done without me having to go in and do that.

• 44:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So it's, it's pretty interesting where like they can essentially tag you. It then gets assigned. You do what you want with it. And then when you're done, you can let the system and that person know.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you think of kind of note taking or building a second brain, you have built one for yourself over a decade, which is pretty incredible. Do you do it for the team?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Each person has their own path.

• 45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  It's something I really emphasize. So like, we're in the field of knowledge management, right? It's sort of the academic discipline. In the past, knowledge management was only done by companies or teams. Because they're the only ones who cared. Like, no individual really had enough volume of information consumption that they needed something like this. So over just the past like 10 years, it's gone from a corporate team thing to an individualistic thing. And in companies and organizations, it was very top down. You know, some consultant would come in, hey, everyone, we're now doing a knowledge sharing initiative. You must all share your knowledge, input your knowledge into this wiki.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Which, if you think about it, is a very draconian thing to do. Like, that's not empowering. That's, in fact, you could even think of that as like taking away people's power. Right? Like, it's up to them whether they want to share their knowledge. Like, your employer doesn't own every single idea in your head. They don't. They're buying your time, not your entire, you know, expertise. And so I resist, in our company and even in our clients, I resist any top-down, like, setting a policy. Instead, each person should be trained and supported to create the system that works for them. And they look so different. Some people have like five notes in Apple Notes, that serves them perfectly. Other people have like 10,000 nodes in Rome, and that serves them perfectly. It has to match your personality.

• 46:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I'll buy that. Inside of large organizations, they have wikis and all sorts of like the institutional knowledge. And I think the thought process is if somebody new joins, they don't have to go around and talk to every single person who's ever worked at this company to get a bunch of this information. And in the large companies I'm thinking of, the wikis could be as simple as like, you know, how to change your health benefits. Or it could be how to add up or subtract something from the product, right? You know, very, very specific things that you're going to need in this job. They also can be more documentation of historical decisions. Hey, we did this, this is why we did it. And we're going to revisit in two years to see, you know, was it a good decision or not, or whatever.

• 47:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you guys have any sort of like company knowledge management? So if you don't build a second brain for the company, like, what do you do? So when new members of the team join or get on-boarded, where do they go?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  That's a great point. So, I would say there is a role for, you could call it corporate knowledge management, or group knowledge management, or shared knowledge management. It's those use cases that you said. Documentation, checklists, references, need-to-know, background, sometimes technical information.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  So in a way, the same way we asked, okay, what jobs does Google do? Let's not try to replicate those. I would say, what jobs does the corporate wiki, the company wiki do? Do use that for exactly the things you described.

• 48:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  But then, think about the limitations of that, right? All the kinds of information you mentioned are like very explicit. They're very structured. They need to be structured for people to make sense of them, right? Like, no one can make sense of your random, like, half-formed thoughts and like bullet points. It needs to be quite formal in order to be understandable by a group. The second brain is for everything else. For knowledge that is tacit, knowledge that you maybe can't even fully put into words. Knowledge that is subtle, knowledge that is emergent, knowledge that is private, knowledge that is specific to your job, right? That maybe no one else needs to know. So to answer your question, we have SOPs, which stands for standard operating procedures. We're kind of fanatics about them. Everything that has to be done more than once or more than a few times.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  How to publish a blog post, how to organize a local meetup, how to run one of our class sessions, how to book an interview, how to send an invoice, has a very detailed step-by-step checklist.

• 49:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So take, I don't know, how to book an interview, right? What it would be in a document like that? Like, literally step-by-step, like, get the person's email address, use this template on the email, follow up after two days if they don't respond, like, that level of detail?

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's funny, I'm not sure these days exactly what's on it because I haven't looked at it in so long. But, um, so it tends to be in checklist format because we're interested in the outcome, the actions, right? But it tends to be not the exact steps because many of the specific steps are obvious. You could say like, turn on your computer, open the browser, like, come on.

• 49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're doing that, you may have hired the wrong person.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. You have to like assume a certain level of competence.

• 50:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do you check the checklist if your computer's not on also, right?

• 50:07Speaker 02

  True, you have to plug it in. You have to wake up and put on clothes.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  But what tends to be documented there is things we've learned.

• 50:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  You know, like in interview, I have learned so many little preferences. I like to be in this sort of conversational format, not that one. I like to do it in the morning, not the afternoon. I like to be in informal clothes, not some buttoned up suit. Like, basically every mistake I've made becomes a little note in the SOP so that we don't lose that. You know, that is basically institutional knowledge that I don't want to have to remember in my first brain. And my assistant can just go there, note every single one of my preferences, and just execute it.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you work with your assistant? I'm always fascinated by people who are highly productive, especially somebody like you who you think about productivity, knowledge management, all of this stuff. What is the kind of day-to-day interactions look like?

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's see.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  It's pretty informal. In fact, our whole, when people join our company, they're often very surprised how informal it is. I think they see sort of my public persona, which is all productivity and checklist and all these things, and they think that that's who I am or something like, you know, I'm like following a checklist to brush my teeth. I'm not like that. In fact, the reason I want a second brain that is pretty intentional and organized is so the rest of my life doesn't have to be, like I said. So it's quite informal. And I kind of think it's much like most people who have assistants work with their assistants, with maybe the one difference that everything is documented. So like, half the communication, not only between me and my assistant, but on the whole team, is just sharing links. And they're links to notes.

• 51:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Constantly, constantly.

• 51:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Give me an example.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if someone, so last night I organized a local meetup of followers here in Miami. That is not yet an SOP because I don't do it often enough. I wanted my assistant to just handle that like a week ago, so I just said... Please, Victoria, can you organize a local meetup? I just needed to tell her like three inputs. You know, in Miami, Tuesday night, some sort of restaurant where we can get food. And then I just sent a link, which was from my personal notes, no shared space. My checklist that I followed in the past of how to organize a meetup. And she just had a couple of follow up questions. And then the last thing I asked her to do was, okay, this seems to be something that we're doing more often. The last thing you do, please, basically migrate this from Tiago's personal notes to the team database.

• 52:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. And so when she's going through that process, what happens if she does something that works that's not in the notes? Or vice versa, she does something that's in the notes and it doesn't work? Do you actively try to like upgrade or improve the steps and kind of processes? Or is it more of a, I violated the system, like an alarm goes off and like, yeah, like trouble?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  No, no one gets in trouble. No one gets in trouble. I think that's important because we're all just learning. Like you said, notes are learning. It's learning across time in a systematic way. I'm very interested in like learning theory, learning psychology. The two biggest ways to stop all learning is to introduce guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are the very antithesis of good learning. So no one gets in trouble. It's just a learning opportunity. In fact, this is another thing that people are surprised by when they join the company. That is a big part of our culture that they often have to unlearn from other places they've worked. When we make a mistake, I'm happy.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  As long as, you know, it wasn't like pure negligence, like pure just didn't even try. We, I just assume we did our best or whoever did it did their best. As long as we can document the learning, and this is the answer to your question. Like, people, people in our team are just know that I'm constantly saying, people are, in collaboration in general, people are saying these little interesting tidbits, often in passing.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  They'll be like, oh yeah, we always find, no, no, no, no, or we, we should never do, no, no, no. I'm always saying, hey, what you just said, that was good, write it down.

• 54:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So you spend a lot of your time almost trying to reinforce the write down the insight?

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yes, a culture of documentation. You would think that our company adopts that more than any, but it's, it's not natural, I think, for humans to const- It's almost like, I try to live like the guy in Memento. Every time I have an idea, I might remember it. It may come up again, but I just assume that like tomorrow morning, my memory is going to be wiped. And actually, back to my story of my health condition, one of the medications that I took had like severe short-term memory loss as one of the side effects.

• 54:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, like if we talked today, I wouldn't remember that we talked tomorrow. Like, almost literally wiping my memory. And so I had like a window into this. I had like a, an experience of what this is like. When you expect nothing to be remembered, the second it occurs to you, you are reaching for a pen to write it down. It just becomes a lifestyle.

• 55:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you just got reinforced over time? You, you mentioned that you're interested in learning theory. Well, eh, eh, tell me more about that space.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's largely academic. I mean, our business is an online course business. We have one product mostly, uh, which is a three-week intensive program and a year-long membership that people can join. And so, I mean, I'm immersed in learning, theory, teaching, theory, uh, educational, theory, and practice, not just theory, uh, all day long. Uh, I find it's one of these, it's like everything is learning now, right? Like, like, can you say when you're learning and when you're not? Like, in your dreams, you're learning. One of the functions of dreams is learning. You are literally learning every minute you are alive. So I don't see learning and education as this like little niche. Oh, this thing I did for four years in college.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  I see it as kind of just like how to live effectively as a human being and learn from your experiences.

• 56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And learning theory itself is trying to get at like, what's the best way to learn? And are there any insights or takeaways that you've had as you've studied some of that literature?

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  As you learned about learning?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Took notes on taking notes. So many things. There's so many counterintuitive things.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Like what?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  I mean, one that's that's becoming more and more known is the role of emotions. Emotions are just central to learning. Even in subjects that are technical, very left brained, engineering, it's all emotional learning.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  The importance of collaboration, you know? Social learning is not this like one special kind of learning. All learning is inherently social. There's actually research that even in the privacy of your mind, the way you actually digest concepts is basically to have one voice, like one personality in your head, teach it to the other one.

• 57:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  You're having this, how often do you, does it feel like you're having a conversation in your head? Right? It's like even in the privacy of our heads, we are social learners.

• 57:14Anthony Pompliano?

  See, you can say that and people won't think you're weird. If I said, oh, I'm talking to myself in my head, people are like, oh, Pom's gone crazy. So I'll let you take that. But I do think it's always funny to me, like when you're thinking, you're really talking to yourself. Right? And there is this element of a social aspect to it, I think, for sure.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, those are a couple. I mean, we can get into this, but it's like basically the opposite of what universities do.

• 57:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, largely.

• 57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  In what way? Like, what are some of the biggest differences that you see? Or maybe the mistakes that the universities are making?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, it's everything, everything from, you know, the time gap between when you learn something and when you put it into practice. For universities, it's unless you're like performing an experiment in the lab, it's years. You won't find out like, you know, especially in fast moving fields like marketing. I took a marketing class in college. I didn't discover for about six years that it was not useful.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Everything to, I mean, this focus on individualism. It's wild that all our learning is done solo. You can't look at, I mean, of course, you can't look at anyone's test. You can't borrow from anyone's essay. You can't get help. You know, at the most, you can do a study group, but it's kind of like frowned upon. And then you step out into the professional world. Everything is collaborative. You don't do anything by yourself. All you're doing is looking at other people's work and borrowing bits and pieces and models.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  What else?

• 58:48Speaker 02

  I mean, not having skin in the game. Like, there's a lot of evidence that your personal degree of risk. What is the skin you have in the game? Which relates to your emotions, you know? Are you actually putting something on the line? Has a huge impact on your learning. There's even things like, like, this is one of the most kind of politically incorrect things. Which is, there's one paper, I found like a research study on this. That for true learning to happen, there has to be an external shock.

• 59:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  There has to be, like, the existing belief system that you have, which is really what you're trying to change. You always have some existing understanding. It is so resistant to change. It will not yield to any external influence unless there is a shock. Like, an actual destabilization. Which is so politically incorrect. Like, like, think about how we design schools. Everything's safe, comfortable, safe spaces, don't say anything, trigger warnings. Everything is made completely safe. And we're completely ignoring that we, as humans, we basically don't change until our environment becomes like destabilized, for lack of a better term.

• 59:59Anthony Pompliano?

  What are, like, a type of external shock that would increase learning?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so there's definitely, you know, good kinds of shock.

• 1:00:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's what I'm getting at, is like, I, when I hear that, I'm like, oh, like, should, should we, like, play really loud noises? Or something like, that's maybe the watered-down version versus like, you know, like, I don't know, if you hit people while they're learning? Do they learn fast? Like, give me some examples.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, there's definitely ways you should do it. What's interesting is the parts of our brain and our body that have to do with risk. When we take, say, a social risk, from the perspective of our body physiologically, it's as if we're taking a physical risk.

• 1:00:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Like, our body responds the same, whether we're putting an idea on Twitter that we're not sure about, or like, fighting a lion. Maybe, maybe a difference in degree, but, um, and so, it often comes down to that. Like, the course that I teach, we do a live. There's no, there's no like, show up and watch videos on a website. That's no skin in the game. You join a Zoom call, we ask you, turn on your camera, unmute your mic, talk, share, reflect back what you just learned to real human beings, like, right after you learned it. People are so terrified by this. You would think I'm asking them to like, jump over, you know, jump over the Grand Canyon. They will not do it. They are so scared of saying one word in front of a group. But then the minute they do, it's like, ah, ah!

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  There's this huge relief, and they always tell us that that was the most transformative moment.

• 1:01:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It's so fascinating how many people still don't like doing that stuff.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  They're terrified.

• 1:01:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And is it because they're scared they're gonna make a mistake, they're gonna sound dumb, they, uh, they don't know the subject matter? Like, what do you find is the thing that is driving that fear?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  I think all the above. Every bit of training in our educational career is what? Don't make mistakes, don't ta- like, don't take risks. Why would you ever take a risk in your, in, not just your, your educational career, your professional career? We have risk, like, like, bred out of us from kindergarten. As if, like, I call this the lie of professionalism. This is like, one of my, one of my bones to pick, is like, I talk to professionals that have stellar careers. They've worked at the most prestigious companies, they've had the most prestigious titles. They had this idea that if they just never make a mistake, they will have this incredible trajectory of success, they'll have the life of their dreams, all the goals they want to achieve, the money they want to make.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  That has never been true and is becoming less and less true. You have to take a risk of some kind, or else you're just not, you're not gonna have those things.

• 1:02:37Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:03:21Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:49Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:05:03Anthony Pompliano?

  The people who take risk kind of self-select, right? They have a higher appetite for risk, obviously.

• 1:05:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But we could really like kind of fuck people up if we force them to take risk super early on.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the points in life that now I'm in my 30s, a lot of our friends and things that they're starting to have kids and think about where do we want to live? And like do all these different things. I was talking to a woman yesterday and she recently moved from another major city. I don't want to give any identifiable information from another major city to Miami. And she works tangential, like kind of in a service industry to the tech industry. And her husband works at a pretty large tech company. And she had her entire life, the goal to reach a certain point within the organization she was in. And she reached it. And her husband had a goal professionally and he reached it.

• 1:06:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And they were relatively young still. And all of a sudden, her company called her and said, would you like to move to Miami? And she was like, no. And they're like, well, you're going to have all this more responsibility. And they laid out the opportunity. And she was like, that is pretty attractive. So she went to her husband and she was like, this is the opportunity. Like, what do you think? And his first reaction was like, why would we disrupt and risk our life? We've gotten like, we dreamed of getting to this position and we got it. Right? And it was really interesting to talk to her, kind of go through the different details.

• 1:06:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Because ultimately, what ended up happening is it took not just a single decision point. It took time for them to both get comfortable with, okay, we aren't necessarily giving up a lot in terms of the professional goals we've achieved. Yes, we like where we live, but maybe we'll like this other place more. Like, there was a mind shift, a mindset shift that they had to go through to actually look at it as a potential another step in the journey that they were trying to accomplish. Rather than a step backwards or a sidestep or something like that.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So it was pretty interesting to kind of see like, risk almost when presented was a very abrasive thing.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Anthony Pompliano?

  But then they were able to essentially just say, no, actually, maybe this is just a bigger opportunity and we need to look at it a different way.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  I think taking risks is what makes you feel alive. And you know, sometimes when I talk about this, people think what I'm referring to is entrepreneurship. I'm not. That is just one of a thousand ways to take risks. Think about talking to a stranger. Like sometimes, like I'm an introvert, I'm kind of scared of strangers. But I've had some conversations with just random people at bus stops and cafes that just blew my mind, opened me up to a whole different point of view. Think about the risk of moving to a different country. I've lived in, I've lived in a few different countries. Those are my most precious experiences, basically.

• 1:08:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Which one's your favorite?

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Brazil.

• 1:08:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Brazil?

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What was that like?

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  My family's from Brazil, so I'm kind of biased.

• 1:08:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that experience like? You were born in the United States and then moved there?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  I've spent probably like 20% of my life in Brazil.

• 1:08:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  A big chunk of it. We'd go there like every year since I was born.

• 1:08:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just a parallel reality. It's the opposite of American culture. It's like having a black and white, two parallel realities that every time one starts to get unbearable or annoying, or I just don't like it, I can just like switch into the other.

• 1:08:38Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty cool. Another way, you, you mentioned talking to strangers, like I think a lot about people who ask questions, right? And over the years, I've gotten very comfortable asking like really dumb questions, but like I learned that way. And I remember, I'll give you an example.

• 1:08:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, my wife had, our daughter was in the hospital and I remember I went to the like nurses station and I was very out of my element, right? I'm in a hospital, like I did not have a baby, now I have a baby. Like, like this was like a pretty jarring thing and, but I was nervous because I was like, I don't want to screw up.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so I remember I went to the nurses station and I was trying to kind of break the ice a little bit. So I was like, who's the LeBron James of swaddling? And the nurses were like, what? And I was like, who is the world's greatest? Right? And I don't want to get in the debate of who's the best hospital player in the world, but I figured they probably knew LeBron, right? And so I was like, who's LeBron James Swatling? They're like, oh, we'll be there in a minute. So a woman shows up and like, she pretty much to me was LeBron James Swatling. But while she was doing it, I asked her, why'd you do that? Why'd you do that? Like, what about this? Like, oh, does it work this way? You know, how did you take the towel and do this, whatever? And I probably learned more in that, you know, 10 minute experience than watching 100 YouTube

• 1:10:01Anthony Pompliano?

  videos, right? And so, yes, I was joking around and like, trying to be funny or whatever, but just literally asking like, hey, I don't know how to do this. Like, who can help me? It actually seemed easier in a moment where I was like outside of my element versus if I was sitting with a colleague and I'm like, shit, I don't know how to do this. People, I think, get the protective a little bit of their intelligence, their productivity, their position in the company. Like, it's actually easier in the hospital scenario than it would be like, you're in a meeting at work for somebody to just turn like, hey, I don't know how to do this. Can you show me?

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Seriously. No, that's a great example. Risk, uncertainty, it's, it's present in every moment. Like even in conversations, I'm here with my, my little brother. We're 10 years apart. I brought him to Miami, little vacation. And, you know, often your family members, you think you've talked about everything. It's like kind of awkward silence, like, okay, well, what do we talk about? And we were at dinner a couple nights ago and I just had this idea, hey, I could mention, insert sensitive subject about the family, politics. And I could feel the fear. What is this going to bring up? Like, this is one of those things we don't talk about. But like, it was such a unique situation, you know? We're here on a trip, just the two of us, which has never happened. And I was just, I could feel the fear, like, no, I don't want to just play it safe, make

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  small talk, talk about the food, the weather, anything. But I took that little risk. Hey, like Marco, what do you think about X? We sat there for two hours, unpacked this entire chapter of our family's life. It was the most meaningful conversation I've had with him in years.

• 1:11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  It was a risk.

• 1:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And do you feel like in those scenarios, you've just learned, just jump every time? Or do you still catch yourself sometimes being like, ah, it's a risk actually that I should avoid?

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  You know, by, by my nature, I'm like, this is the thing. You always teach the thing you need, right? You, you learn and master the thing that you don't have originally. By nature, I am like, people don't believe me when I say this, but I am the most risk averse, conservative, socially fearful, introverted, just person you've ever met. That is the like, the opposite. As a kid, if you saw me, I was like, head in the book. Don't talk to anyone. Don't go anywhere. Don't do anything new. I was just in my own little world. I, I basically had to like, develop this.

• 1:12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  By, by like you said, forcing myself to do it.

• 1:12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Talk to me about asking questions. I've seen you talk about open questions. Um, what, what is an open question?

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is one of people's favorite parts of the, of my book, actually. So I talked about projects, which is kind of a top down concept. I'm going to create and execute a project. But sometimes you, you don't even know what you're trying to do or find well enough to make it a project, or maybe you just don't have the time. And so one of the big questions I help people answer is like, like, in, in some sense, the most important question with a second brain is like, why? Why am I gonna do all this? Right? It takes time. It takes energy. What is the purpose? And so one of the exercises that I have them do in my course is make a list of your open questions. What are the long-term recurring questions that you find yourself asking?

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  And I, the, the key thing here is to not have them start with do or did or is, which are like yes or no questions. Have them start with how or what?

• 1:13:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  How or what questions cannot be answered yes or no. They require an explanation, some context. And so by making this list, saving it, you know, pin it there to the top of your second brain. And then every time you're out in the world and you notice something that could potentially answer one of your open questions. Write it down. That's like your filter. What in the world will help me make progress on my open questions?

• 1:13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it, it's such a, a simple thing, but so powerful, right? If executed correctly.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:13:54Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you wrote this book, Building a Second Brain, A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. That's the title and subtitle, but my favorite part is just at the top. Remember everything, achieve anything.

• 1:14:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's ultimately what everyone wants to do, right? Is they wanna remember everything and achieve anything. Talk to me about actually the process for writing the book.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, this has been, I mean, it was a four-year project.

• 1:14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  For four years?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yep, from very beginning to end was four years.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  What do you wanna, what do you wanna get into?

• 1:14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did it take four years?

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Great question, yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  So that's largely typical. Typical might be like two to three years. The reasons it took four were a combination of the pandemic, moving. Right at the start of the pandemic, we moved from Mexico City to the US. Also bought a house, had a kid, and basically started a life, got married in that time. So it's basically life and then also the fact that I was continuing to run the business. So I didn't have the luxury of like going off and just writing a book. It was like manage all your usual stuff and also write the book. But, uh,

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  yeah, really just from, so I was synthesizing really five years of teaching this course into book form. It was just reviewing a lot of notes, a lot of sources, a lot of research, a lot of iterations.

• 1:15:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So the book is interesting because I just opened up to a random page. And in two pages, there's everything from highlighting 2.0, the progressive summarization technique, which is like a very specific thing. It comes with a graphic and like shows you exactly what to do, right? And kind of how to build layers and do all this stuff. But also, on the other page, it's how the brain stops time. And it talks about stranger side effects of intense fear, is time dilation, the parent slowing down of time, survivors of life and death situations, often reported that things seem to take longer to happen, etc. And so this book is, can be very practical. It can be very academic and kind of everything in between it almost feels.

• 1:16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that intentional? Or is that just kind of how you think about the building of the second brain? Is it actually takes somewhat different and extreme ends of a spectrum? And it both are needed to be able to do this successfully?

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  I think it's both.

• 1:16:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  It's definitely both. Creating a system of knowledge management, which is what a second brain is, I think is inherently eclectic. Like, that's what you're doing. You're just collecting little chunks, little bits and pieces from papers you read, books you read, podcasts you listen to, from all sorts of different fields, from different industries, from different eras. There's no way that the thing that ends up at the end of that is not super diverse and eclectic. But I think my approach to it is also eclectic, from a combination of being multicultural, multilingual. You know, my dad is from the Philippines, my mom is from Brazil, and we live in the United States. So this is kind of like inherent to my life. But also, it's like, we're creating something new here.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  Previous generations of humans, they had things like commonplace books, they took notes. But never before, just like now, did people have to create centralized databases for their knowledge. That's like a new thing. So there's not like, you can't like go to a university, hey, where's the personal knowledge management department? And just like ask them. It is a fusion, it's an intersection of many different fields, which is why I think it comes out that way.

• 1:17:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It also, I love the idea that it's personal to you, right? Like, that to me feels like the most important part here is, I know some people, wearable stuff is like a good example. I have friends who wear like six different things. They got the Oura ring, they got the whoop, they got the watch, they got the matcha, like, they got it all, right? They're ready to rock and roll. I know other friends who are probably more like me. I wear an Apple Watch and I like to be able to tell the time. And also, it tracks things kind of passively in the background, right? Which is all I need. But then what do people do with the data? I'm always fascinated with. And so, I literally have friends who build spreadsheets and they track things and like, they are data nerds.

• 1:18:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And then like every once in a while, I'll look at the data. Maybe the most I interact with is actually like the Apple Watch notifications that get sent to me. Right. And yells at me like, hey, are you dead? Right. Like, why are you not moving? But, but that seems a lot like the second brain concept, right? Some people will be very, very deep into the details. They'll go and they'll read everything every day and they'll go and they'll search and do all stuff. And other people may actually just do it as a way to learn an inputting process and then search, you know, randomly when they need stuff.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that pretty much the same thing?

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  So it's funny you mention that because one of my main sources of inspiration, which is mentioned in the book, is what's called the Quantified Self Movement, which is what you just described, this whole thing of measuring, analyzing data about yourself. There was a period for a few years when I lived in San Francisco, I was like deep in that community. I would give talks and presentations. I would like go to the, I went to the yearly conference. I was like a card carrying member of the Quantified Self Movement, which is, you know, measuring your nutrition, your exercise, your sleep, all these things. But it's funny because after several years, several years of that, it's like, it's funny, it's like, yeah, you see all this data and you're like, do I actually understand myself better? And not really.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  What you always take away though, is it is the process of tracking it that gives you the benefits. There's no like, you don't see like one number like, now I understand, like my whole life, no. But there's still value in just the, it's like the, the personal experience of tracking automatically gives you self-awareness. And so what I took away from that is, you know, building a second brain is not very like data-ish. It's not very quantitative. I'm more like on the artist's side of the spectrum than the engineer, right? But similarly, you are self-documenting, self-tracking, self-analyzing. But you're doing it in a more free-form intuitive way with words and images and metaphors and stories, rather than like a spreadsheet.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  But it is definitely very related.

• 1:20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it, I never actually thought about the, the comparison there, but it is pretty, pretty interesting. Where, where can we send people to find the book and also to, to look at the course that you guys provide?

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  They can find everything at buildingasecondbrain.com. We have all the places you can buy the book, which is available in bookstores, libraries, pretty much everywhere, on its way to being translated to 20 different languages.

• 1:20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  They can find the course, which is now a year-long membership. They can find our podcast, if they just want little bite-sized episodes, our blog, a bunch of free resources, the whole second brain universe is at buildingasecondbrain.com.

• 1:20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. And then where are you on social media that people can find you?

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  I am at Forte Labs, which is the name of the company that produces all this. That's F-O-R-T-E-L-A-B-S. ForteLabs.com, Forte Labs on Twitter, pretty much Instagram, pretty much everywhere.

• 1:20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I really enjoyed this. I feel like you are kind of at the forefront of something that's going to become more important over time. And as we were talking, I was thinking to myself, like, today, we find it so fascinating that somebody goes on an archaeological dig and they discover some, you know, crazy remnants of some, you know, historical land. In some way, the second brain is the remnants of a person's life, right? And while there might not be archaeologists that go and find them, it is pretty interesting to kind of see people build these out. And as technology improves, I bet you there's going to be some pretty

• 1:21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  interesting things that people are going to be able to do with this.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't be more excited. It's, I think it's the beginning of a big wave.

• 1:21:49Anthony Pompliano?

  That is the best place to be. All right. Thank you so much. We'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  Really appreciate it.

• 1:21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand-new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.