this email is for people that listen to podcasts, only.
i have something for you
Hi, I’m Sari Azout, the founder of sublime.app —the personal knowledge management tool of my dreams. This is our weekly inspiration email, where we share ideas that will ignite your spirit, as well as occasional behind the scenes of building Sublime.
If you listen to podcasts and wish you could remember the good parts, we made something.
It’s called Podcast Magic. Just take a screenshot when something hits. We’ll turn it into a searchable, savable insight.
Below are some examples from a recent favorite — Anjan Katta (founder of Daylight Computer) on The Dialectic (one of my fave new podcasts)
These vids + transcripts were captured with just a screenshot on my phone.
On modernity’s optimization of means but confusion of goals
None of these guys have any idea what they're doing. The machine is running the show. There's a famous line where it's like humanity is like the sex organs of the machines. It's like all these people are the sex organs of the machines and they don't even know it. And they think they're cool. So I became obsessed with the idea that all the propaganda I've been taught this whole time of like tech is amazing and it saves the world. And like no they have no idea what they doing. The simplest of questions: Make the world a better place, what does that mean? What direction: GDP? Lives saved? Happiness? How? When? Where? And then you quickly realize, like, they have no idea. So I've said this a lot of times, but it was so powerful for me to capture this, which is Einstein says, what characterizes the modern age is optimization of means, yet confusion of goals. Optimization of means yet confusion of goals and that's what I felt all of tech and computing in silicon valley was it was brilliant people endlessly optimizing means but not really clear about the goals which begs the question who's like really in the driver's seat or is there no adult in the room and so my reaction was to sort of reject it all and go for the opposite.
On mixed-use computing and shitting where you eat
It went from being the sort of the immaculate conception in the beginning of this beautiful dynamic interactive medium to then coming down to being this practical set of tools to then slowly over time becoming a bundling of more and more and more and more tools which then has the emergent property of being a messy medium and then you shit where you eat, where you start adding entertainment and consumption to it. Very different cognitive modalities, right? There's like, we build our spaces where the kitchen is different than the office and the office is different than the living room or entertainment room. Like all of society is built around don't shit where you eat, right? And in computing, in computing we completely forget. No one puts the kitchen and the toilet in the same place.
On Silicon Valley’s lost essence
Ultimately, if you are an entrepreneur, you're getting into it because you have a want or a vision or a need or an opinion for the way the world should be. You're trying to bend things. It's a thing that's uninevitable. And to me, the opposite of things being uninevitable is a real estate agent. If you don't sell that house, it is completely inevitable. Somebody else will do it. Sort of pure efficient market. So there's the term additionality. And so it felt to me like Silicon Valley lost the essence of what it was to the world, which is additionality.
On AI as judgment-free learning
When you have a personal tutor, you have one or two standard deviations improvement and performance just from that individualized, personalized back and forth. And one of the ways AI could be even better, which I don't think people really explicitly talk about is with a tutor, if you don't understand something, by the time you ask it for the third or fourth time, you start to feel embarrassed that like you're annoying him. You don't feel the same cognitive disambition with AI. You can ask it 10 times, 12 times. You're not wasting its time. Those subtle psychological dynamics are so profound.
If you're a Sublime Premium member — or a Premium subscriber to this newsletter — get early access to Podcast Magic below.