Smash Notes
What would you learn if you took notes on the best podcasts?
The guys at Podcast Notes take notes on the best podcasts on the planet as a business and I thought it would be interesting to interview them about all the things they have learned. Check it out for a good synthesis of the best knowledge being produced at the moment.
Notes
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Matt Miller is the head of content for Podcast Notes and the nature of his work enables him to work remote from anywhere, at any time. He can work from a coffee shop in the morning, explore a new destination in the afternoon, and then settle back into a coffee shop to do more work. Remote work allows Matt to have a job and an interesting lifestyle too!
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Matt thoroughly enjoyed being a digital nomad because he says that if he’s home in New York, it’s difficult for him to focus on other things besides work. Being in another country offers other things to explore and do when he takes a break, which provides a nice work-life balance for him.
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Matt really wanted to takes notes on podcasts and realized that Yoni had already started a site for that. Since they had a mutual interest, it made sense to work together.
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At this time, it is solely based on Matt's interests. As it turns out, there are many others who are into self-help and development podcasts, too.
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The old title of this note asks how a podcast changes your life. At this moment on Crazy Wisdom, Matt of Podcast Notes is talking about sleep. Sleep podcasts had already pushed him to focus on sleep for about a year. About a week after he got back, he stopped using an alarm. He says he had used one his whole life, that alarms are useful, and that he is lucky he can now wake without one. What he is finding is that on days he does not wake to an alarm, he sleeps nine or nine and a half hours.
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He tracks his sleep with an Oura Ring. He says that if he doesn’t wake up with an alarm, he’ll sleep for nine or nine and a half hours. When he would set an alarm and sleep for eight hours, he wonders if he's missing out on that extra hour or hour and a half of sleep, and about the damage it causes in the long-term.
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There are a some things that Matt has changed in his life after listening to podcasts. One is that he stopped drinking tap water and will only drink spring water. He also works at a standing desk, and he feels a lot better when working at one.
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Matt says that the theme of Gupta's podcasts are to look for the truth of whatever situation you're in. Everything that Kapil says makes you want to second guess and rethink things in the world.
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Asked for a favorite, Matt of Podcast Notes names Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, on The Tim Ferriss Show. Stanton was number two on Matt's own top-ten list for 2018, but Matt now calls that story number one and says everyone should hear it. He also singles out Dr. Matthew Walker's first appearance on Joe Rogan, about why sleep matters, as a podcast of the year. He adds Naval Ravikant's Periscope sessions, especially a June talk through the How to Get Rich tweetstorm, and another just before Ravikant started a short podcast series. Matt warns that some of the glow is just recency, because the latest thing you heard feels bigger than it is.
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Listening can be time consuming and can sometimes be hard to glean all of the key points. Reading can allow someone to move through content more quickly. Writing about content can help cement information.
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On Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop tells Matt of Podcast Notes about studies of school learning. Ordinary methods, reading and writing and the rest, were compared with a third method: one student and one tutor. The tutored students far outperformed the others. Alsop connects that to the forgetting curve. About 90 percent of what we learn is gone within four days, but a test just before the memory fades strengthens it, so the next fade takes about eight days, and longer after that. Matt agrees that one-on-one is when learning actually sticks.
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On Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop asks the Podcast Notes team whether they will start using technology, because other people are already building tools that do similar work. Matt says they mostly take the site month by month, sometimes week by week. His point is that opportunities show up without a plan. He would not have predicted, six months earlier, that Alsop would invite them on, and he does not know where this conversation will lead. He says they focus on letting things play out. He still calls the podcast business young, growing, and worth being part of.
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Matt tells Stewart Alsop, on Crazy Wisdom, that podcasting is still young and growing. The trend he notices is shorter shows, and a move toward clips. Naval Ravikant was releasing short audio clips from a longer conversation. Listeners and hosts were also posting a short clip on Twitter to pull people into the full episode. Matt says a show can be released as clips, and that Overcast had just added a way to chop out a segment and send it to a friend. He had also heard strong shows that ran only five minutes, or ten to twelve. His summary is clips, and shorter podcasts overall.
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Stewart heard about a study stating that about 22% of Americans know what a podcast is, which is incredibly surprising to Matt. He would have suspected at least 50% of people would know of them. He views this as room for the podcast world to grow.
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Casey said that if you don’t know what you want to do in life, spend as much time as you can doing something you absolutely f*cking hate.
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Matt Miller, head of content at Podcast Notes, tells Stewart Alsop that creators need the ability to set aside long blocks of focus. Real work does not happen in 30-minute scraps. Once you are in flow, stopping to do something else means you pay the warmup again before you are back. Miller says he can sit down in a coffee shop and start at once, while other people need 10 or 15 minutes, and he is unsure whether that is practice, the kind of work, or a trait you arrive with. He thinks it might be trainable. Alsop agrees that half an hour is a hard window in which to make anything.
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Matt describes it as totally losing yourself, any idea of the self. When you are doing your work, you don’t exist. Only the work exists. He says that if you listen to any of Kapil Gupta’s podcasts, you’ll understand.
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Stewart Alsop tells the Podcast Notes team, on Crazy Wisdom, that they are unusually good at turning a podcast into writing, and that they would have something powerful if they could do the same thing out loud. Matt says second- and third-tier celebrities on Twitter are easier to reach than five years ago, often by a direct message. Alsop says that surprised him. He has cold-contacted guests mostly on Twitter and sometimes on Facebook, about 70 percent said yes, and he has not needed his Silicon Valley network. He is not making money yet. He quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb on cocktail parties and black swans, and says a podcast is now that party, recorded.
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Matt has noticed that Type A people tend to be introverts. Stewart agrees with him and says that a lot of CEOs in Silicon Valley are introverts.
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One point is from Brandon Stanton’s interview, “If nothing mattered but how I was spending my time, what would I be doing? What would be most nourishing for me in any given moment?” The other is, “When you create one opportunity for yourself, oftentimes, that opportunity will create more opportunities.”
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