Curating high-quality info sources
July 2024
Reading books is no longer the most efficient way of upgrading your brain cache. And this is coming from a former ferocious bookworm.
There is a high quality info online now. Key examples of this would be Cohen’s long form essays [1], the more widely known Rachitsky’s essays [2], or NEA’s insights [3]. Some of them run their own newsletters to notify you when they publish new material.
In short, I’ve upgraded my way of consuming info from hoarding books- to creating a whole new email id to subscribe newsletters tied to dense long form essays. I use AI to get the key points from any new newsletters I subscribe to, and then assess which one is most worth reading. And in some cases, you can even reply to these “newsletter emails” and get in touch with the author, which is a nice touch.
Reducing latency time from the production of the material, to when it reaches your brain is the important thing. That’s not my opinion: if you want an edge over the average intellectually sound human, obsession with updating your database and applying those insights, makes all the difference.
To that end, the trend has been moving towards key info being uploaded to youtube- first. [4] Most times I watch videos on 2x speed. For longer videos: I pull up my tab for the youtube video transcriber, enter the link to the video, take the transcript, put it into Perplexity AI [5], and ask the AI to give me the key bullet points from the transcript. I then assess if it’s worth spending time watching the full video. [6]
In summary: books remain relevant for only very timeless topics (Philosophy) [7], long form essays online for deeper insights for a domain, youtube to witness the current landscape, select social media accounts to see latest updates in very specific domains of choice, and last: having access to authors/ originators of ideas to get to 0 latency.
These ways of updating your brain won’t stay relevant for long, and that’s the whole point. As times continue to change, you and I will have to update our ways of feeding our brain.
However, the key differentiator between those who succeed vs. those who don’t, is this— Information consumption vs. Taking action. That is a finer balancing act, and one that I think will be a problem for atleast a while longer.
Notes:
[4] I don’t feel strongly enough about any 1 youtube channel to recommend it, I look at a wide range.
[5] Perplexity is better than ChatGPT-4o for this because it’s less likely to fill in the summary with its own numbers and data.
[6] This may sound like a long process, but in reality, it takes a few short seconds + reduces time wasted watching a video that may have nothing good in it. The prompt I enter into perplexity AI is always the same: “Take this youtube transcript, and give me the key points discussed in the conversation in under 500 words. Focus on the unconventional insights.”
[7] I still go back to Dostoevsky in book form every now and then. I don’t include History in topics books can be used for, because history should (ideally) be consumed from multiple sources (including those online), not just 1 author’s recollection of events.
Thanks to Steve McLaughlin and Ankit Kukadia for reading drafts of this.