Page ID: Page 219365267025 If You Use AI for Work, You Need a Second Brain
If You Use AI for Work, You Need a Second Brain
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Ep. 436
The number one trend in AI right now is the rise of AI second brains—personal operating systems designed to accelerate careers and make work smarter, not harder.
Kieran dives into how building your own AI second brain can transform personal productivity, decision-making, and the way you learn. Learn more on how AI second brains store and retrieve knowledge, the core building blocks for setting one up, and why continuous information ingestion helps your personal system compound intelligence over time.
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Andrej Karpathy https://karpathy.ai/
Obsidian https://obsidian.md/
Tiago Forte https://www.youtube.com/@TiagoForte
Notion https://www.notion.com/
Brian Halligan https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhalligan
Claude https://claude.ai/
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the number one trend in ai right now is the rise of the ai second brains people build in personal operating systems from themselves which are helping them to do better in their jobs and accelerate their careers in this episode i'm gonna give you the quick introduction into what the ai second brain is and actually give you a demo of my ai second brain so you can figure out if it's something you want to build for yourself and i will give you some tips on how to get started when andre he posted about building an l wiki all the way back in april it got twenty million views on x and ever since then he has set off the number one craze in ai today something is really happen in tech the smartest people are racing to build personal ai systems that remember everything they know and today i'm gonna show you why that's happening give you the best and most simple explanation of what the ai brain is and give you a demo of my personal ai brain so you can see how this could work for your life and to optimize your entire job okay so what's going on in the past couple of months there has been a pattern that has merged and it's really not just for ai geek like myself or just ai developers it's people running real companies making real decision ceos founders across the board it is the ai second brain so andre path the former director of ai tel he's the c founder former c cofounder founder of open now at ant ent build what he called an ll wiki so this was his explanation where you would have a simple folder where you could drop sources of information into that folder the ai would read it all and it would build a little wiki and anytime you talk to the ai it could act us that wiki so you give it some real intelligence you give it some persistent memory at its kind of most basic level this is what he did he had a raw folder and inside that folder you could drop lots of information the ai would process that information and would create a wiki for itself as l m wiki kind of extrapolate in all of the intelligence or knowledge you would need to know and anytime he talk to his ai assistant it has access to that knowledge and so you're continually talking to your ai assistant and it's getting smarter and smarter over time it's gathering more and more knowledge over time this is not just confined to people like andre k there was a really good post from brian hall the former ceo and founder of hotspot obviously no brian really well and he built he had an x thread where he talked about hal wait who is this that's how i told you about him before but he's sort of my assistant clone second brain kyle is actually a real step up in terms of ai second brains he has built an ai agent that will not just have access to all of the things that brian has access here but can actually run his day it sends emails it organized organizes projects it goes to zoom meetings i hear it is here looking like a terminator i'm not sure what brian decided to make his look like a terminator but there it is it's on the meeting and can talk to you and participate in that meeting brine system is actually pretty wild it's giving me some inspiration for my v two of the second brain that i'm building and i covered it on my subs here this is a little graphic of of what brian has built so it reads a bunch of information your gmail and your calendar your drive again granola all of the information it needs and then it has a core brain it has memory it has tools that i can use like web research can do a bunch of different things can join a meeting and then produces things for brian very similar to to my brain and an example that i'm gonna show you that mine's not cool enough to join meetings just yet it is getting in there if you're enjoying this episode and you want all of the resources you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code to get them all delivered to your inbox another well known influencer tia forte you might know him he literally built a book called the second brain now originally that was a note system he actually was doing that with a bunch of post notes now he has retrofitted and re released that as a course on how you can create an ai second brain and this goes this goes on and on and on there is just a ton of momentum around jason le of sas he built an ai version of himself so here's jason and this was kind of more their traditional version of a brain where it captures all of the intelligence that jason knows then you can say should i use a saas product or an ai agent and then it will research all of those things that jason knows and give you some answers now i think this is like this is kind of the original product that where people were build and around second brains which is it would scrape all your external data and then kinda create a version of you and answer questions like you i think what i'm gonna get into is like the much more interesting version of second brain where it really becomes your personal operating system that's what i'm fascinated by i'm not as fascinated by ai that kind of acts like you online because it's retrieved all of the information so why is this becoming so popular so quickly of course it takes someone like andrew k to showcase different things that are possible with ai we're still really in the infancy of how we use and understand ai the idea of a second brain is not new it is something that we have all dreamt about that's why forte pays books you sold over five hundred thousand copies of the book a second brain before that people tried wiki they try notion they try tried all different types of things to kind of keep notes and jot down what you've learned and put it into a system that makes it easy to retrieve and the problem is that nobody does that no one really maintains it it decay your system goes out a date it's it's too problematic it takes too much effort again to showcase this is not a new concept the actual concept isn't you in nine in the nineteen eighties rey dal actually started writing down every decision he made and the reason behind it rey dal is an in incredibly famous investor and and founder of bridge water the investment firm over and over decades zap became his principal system it was really a cod repository of how he thinks and when you employees join they could study it and they could really learn pretty rapidly from how ray dal thought and made decisions and any decisions that someone wanted to make in the company they could cross reference it against what would ray do in this situation and it worked right but it also required decades of manual effort and a whole team to maintain it and he could do that because he runs a hundred and fifty billion dollar fund so a lot easier for someone like that to maintain it but for the ordinary person much much harder so what changed is really ai has removed the maintenance to ingest and enrich and keep track of all of the knowledge and intelligence you're gathering or across your lifetime and all of the different jobs that you do the ai reads rights organizers links and retrieves it does all of that things and the other thing that happened is ai context windows started to get big enough to be able to do this agents got capable enough tools like cloud code made it easy to point to a folder make real sense of it so you have contact vendors get bigger agents get more it's more capable that are reasoning and you have tools like cloud c and cloud code and codecs that could basically attach itself to a folder and start to make real sense of how all of these things should work when a buyer ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not and hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you can show up even more but that isn't the best thing about having an ai second brain it's not just can i ingest all of this information can i keep track of it can i build links between it so the ai knows that this thing is related to another thing is that over time it compounds and it gets much much more intelligence anyone i talk to talks about the same feeling it's like have an inversion of yourself that never forgets things and gets smarter over time like if you were ingest all of the information that you come across in a day to day basis remembering it and able to reuse it you're just gonna be much much smarter and so if you are a marketing leader running a team or a founder running a business it is a place to keep all the intelligence you gain through the years of work what worked what hasn't worked while you made certain decisions why certain things were successful it's all of that context and it lives there in your ai second brain it combines the more that you use it get so much more smarter and then anytime you're using your ai assistant your ai assistant has access to that intelligence and can use it to actually help you do the things you want to do let me give you a quick hit on some of the things to think about that other people may not be talking about when you are reading about ai second brains online you're probably reading a lot bad should i use ob cdn or should i use notion or should i use google docs well there's a couple of other things that i would just point out that are good notes to take if you are truly interested in building an ai second brain that really helps you that becomes the personal operating system for how you do work right it's really your personal operating system for how you do work a lot of people think of it as just storage and search right what most people are building is jumping everything into a folder you can search notes with ai you call it a second grade and the knowledge really decay over time right it doesn't stay up to date it's not dynamic it's not learning over time the hard part really is the retrieval and evolution and i'm gonna show you how this looks in my demo the reason you would want to build a second brain is not for storage and search you can really do that through a cloud project you can point it at a bunch of docs you can query those stocks and it's pretty good at doing that the reason you build a second brain is because the ai is being enriched over time with the things that you're learning across your teams across your work and it's able to connect ideas that you have never thought of yourself it's able to actually look at contradiction in that you're making are across the work that you do it's always up to date and i'm gonna show you how that works it it enrich reaches every single day and has the latest information and it really is a great system for telling you where ideas and decisions and things like that originated from well first thing i would say is people people probably are not talking about the value of the ai second brain as much in terms of being the retrieval and how it compounds over time and the second part is really interested in that i'm talking really about your personal os how it is map to all of the work that you do but there's also the concept that there is a team brain where you want your team connected to the same system of intelligence you wanna connected it to the same quote unquote brain because all of those learnings all of the things that you're capturing are as applicable to your colleague as they are to you and then obviously there is a company or brain like that is really how companies will likely differentiate themselves and have leverage in the future in that they their raw intelligence of the company the things that the company know and i figured out that no one else has is really their asset that they can plug and play into ai assistance and bring to life and so the hard thing that no one has figured out and i've spent a lot of time talking to people in this space is how do you build a system that easily helps you navigate between your personal brain your team brain and your company brain so there are two interesting concepts to consider when you are building your own ai second brain and that you want it to be really good at ensuring it keeps up to date with the latest information that it's really gathering real intelligence and knows how to make connections across all of the things that's learning that it's able to provide strategic insights and show you where contradiction are being made across all of the things that it's capturing and that i would start with my personal brain and then if you are get really into this you're gonna start to figure out hey how do i build something for my team and my company so let's get into a quick demo now this is a prototype because i can't show my second brain right now because it really has access to everything and i could not figure out a way to show it to you all what i disclose in a lot of information that i don't want to put on a youtube channel so instead i've replicated it with fake data and luckily the ai tools are pretty great at doing that but i can show it to you so you can see concepts and start to like figure out how this works now the cool thing is the ai second brain is mapped to how you want to work so when you are going to create it it can be customized for how you want to work so this would be an example where i come in and i can see today what are important things for me i like to look at any kind of blockers across my different teams decisions that are still open it tells me how many projects is tracking and then it's gonna start to giving me ranked priorities right so anything that's a blocker hey this is high urgency tells me why tells me who's dependent upon this and what should be my action and i can tell the ai to take this action so you know first of all comes in gives me a quick overview of like where am i my personal operating system what has happening in my life again this can be as customized as you want you can add all of your personal stuff in here that is capturing from google that i need to go to the shops all of these things i'm specifically focus on a work version but then it will come in i'll look at the different projects i'm tracking right so i may have a variety of different projects if you're a marketer you might be ingesting in what the ai search team is doing what the pay marketing team is doing what the content team is doing and so it's integrating all of that information and figuring out how to make sense of it so in this example i have these projects that are being synthesized and included in my ai second brain the reality is for my brain second brain it has everything everything that is applicable to me then we have carp wiki and so what it's doing is over time learning different concepts and then creating wiki files for them if it doesn't forget them so it may pick up over time that hey like this concept of an internal ais so you can actually have an ai agent help your sales team do prospect and book meetings all of these different things they keep coming up and so i'm going to start building wiki pages for them to make sure we store this intelligence and install what we're learning about that concept so that's the l wiki for your agent your pricing strategy your partner program whatever it may be it starts to ingest it into this wiki and build singular files for it i will say that in the synthetic data i've used it's used some of the most born examples of all time so that's on me i just told it to use synthetic go to market data i should have actually told it to use interest in projects so you can see here it will pull in a bunch of information build a wiki so the thing to know here is you have to like set it up in terms of how to route stuff into the second brain so i will tell that i always wanna keep track of experiments for a singular project i always wanna keep track of blockers i always wanna know what open decisions there are and it's basically understands who are the different stakeholders that are related to this core project who are the cross team dependencies it figures out what are all the documents that are applicable to this update so like where am i grab all of this information from build you a little knowledge graph so pretty cool right so how is it caption all of this well we run ingest and so this again is a prototype but this is how it really works it will basically go through all of those sources that you've connected slack docs everything and because it has route and logic because in the files i tell it what to look for and it then starts to understand where to update those was different things and so it's keeping remember we talked about the second brain to can knowledge gets old over time this is how you keep it really current i just run ingest it captures every for me across every singular file across every singular comm channel that's applicable to me and then starts to write it to the proper files so i think the main thing i would say here is the second brain can be customized to how you work right this is somewhat how i work you may work very differently and that's what it's kind of really interesting about the second brand is it's a very personal operating model it's basically going to be very much based upon how you work so why would you build this i think the main thing is a when you have an ai second brain if you're using ai assistance and tools you are connecting them to your second brain and it's compounded over time if you think about that in ingest command the more i learn the better the system gets the more i use the system the more knowledge it's acquiring whereas most people are connecting to cloud or open ai and starting from scratch each and every time that is the number one reason to use it so how do you get started right i'm gonna give you the quick starter pack and then my recommendation is just to get the transcript of this youtube video and give it the cloud code and build out a plan for you and so what do people have there's some core billing blocks the first one is a vault right it's just a folder of plain text files ob epsilon is a tool that most folks are using it's free but it can be any folder on your desktop with markdown files in it and that's where your knowledge lives and that's what the ai system is right into whereas it's learning things it has to right to a knowledge vault and that's your personal knowledge vault an ai that can read the knowledge vault as the second building block so i use cloud code you can use codecs you can use cloud desktop with mc connections to your different files right you just need a tool an ai assistant that can actually connect to that vault then your third part is you really just need two basic folders you need one where you can store things and then you need one where you can write that intelligence from the stuff that you're storing into your wiki folder what you're going to need to create is the route and logic what do you want to be ai to look for in all those files you may say hey look for blockers look for updated experiments look for decisions that were made look for places where people seem to be struggling to hit their goals look for places where people seem to have real clear articulation on the opportunities that they believe can help accelerate the business you can basically put in some right and logic and so when the ai assistant reads from the raw folder and takes all of that information it understands what to look for and then update into your wiki then you need to get into the habit of continually updating it because it gets better the more that you use it and the connections what are you gonna connect it to so you basically where are you gonna to read that information putting things in a raw folder is the most basic level i just put a bunch of files in there and it reads from those files but then it can connect your slack it can connect to your google docs it can connect to all different forms of comm and docs and basically auto ingest those things and then whisk them into your vault so again you have a knowledge vault you have an ai system that can read that vault you have a place where you can store data that you want to enrich into the wiki and then eventually you have connectors that go and grab information from elsewhere and actually auto pop plates it into the wiki and so that is your ai second brain and if you want to go and start to build one simply take this transcript put it into cloud and start to ask it to build one for you and go back and forth to build one in your style and you too can join the community the ai second brainer hope you enjoyed this episode and see you on the next one let me tell you about a great podcast demand decode from the team at b a b website and demand generation agency comes demand decode the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional b2b marketing tactics hosts dan and phil deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine whether you're struggling with linkedin ads that aren't converting want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation or need to optimize your conversion rates demand decode gives you strategies that work today tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll help you become a better b2b marketer they recently did a great episode titled how to fix the ai inconsistency problem wrecking your go to market listen to demand decode wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history recalls port tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot 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