Building an Intelligence Engine — The Conversation Factory

I’m excited to share this rambling and wide ranging conversation with Srinivas Rao.

Srini is the host of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast, and has recorded over a thousand episodes with such luminaries as Danielle Laporte, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin and me! Srini describes his podcast as “If TEDTalks met Oprah”.

Srini has interviewed so many different types of folks, from bank robbers to billionaires. He also has a business degree from UC-Berkeley and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

We talk about podcast interviewing (meta, I know!) and we unpack a topic that’s close to both of our hearts: creative output.

One of my early podcast episodes was with Sara Holoubek, CEO of Innovation Systems consulting firm Luminary Labs. Sara introduced me to the idea of having what she called an “Intelligence Engine'' - a process by which organizations turn insights into action and action into opportunities, not just every so often, but consistently and regularly. It’s not a dissimilar idea from Jim Collins’ “Flywheel effect” in that, ideally, you tune up your engine often, and even upgrade it when you need to.

One of my core beliefs is that conversations exist at different scales, and that they act in similar ways at these different scales. I also might take the idea of a conversation too far…in that I feel that any iterative, adaptive cycle is, in essence, a conversation.

So, Sara’s Intelligence Engine is essential for a healthy, growing company’s conversation with the world - after all, intelligence at the product and/or organizational innovation level requires a consistent cycle of making or creating new things, testing or trying those things out and reflecting on how it went, ie, harvesting insights. That’s an innovation conversation, at scale.

That cycle is pretty much the same at the level of the individual. We all need to seek new input, make and try new things, and then reflect and inspect the results.

Serendipity Engine vs Intelligence Engines vs Curiosity Engines

As with organizational intelligence, individual intelligence engines need to have a balance of intention and wandering. We need to be actively seeking new insights and ideas that matter to us, while also being open and curious about the unexpected. So, having a curiosity engine, like my guest Glenn Fajardo suggested in our episode on connecting remote teams, is a powerful way to rev up your intelligence engine, for yourself, your team and your organization.

Managing the flow of input, insight, and output

If there is one key takeaway from this episode, it’s that the open/explore/close // diverge/emerge/converge ARC of our own intelligence conversation is input-insight-output.

Srinivas’ top tips for building your own personal intelligence engine:

Limit your Input
Diversify your input
Read books, not articles (they’ve digested complexity already!)
Use a networked tool to capture your smart notes (srivas recommends Mem.ai which I also use!)
Reflect and Connect dots regularly
Monotask to reduce the cognitive costs of task switching (check out my friends at Caveday and use the code 1STMONTHONE to get month of community-based monotasking support for $1 or use TRYACAVE21 to get your first cave free)

Support the Podcast and Get Insider Access

Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources

The Unmistakable Creative podcast

Sara Holoubek on Human Companies and Solving Problems that Matter

Three Systems Every Creator Needs to Build by Srinivas Rao

You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy

The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

Effortless Output in Roam course by Nat Eliason

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Maximize Your Output course by Srinivas Rao

Minute 6

Daniel Stillman:

Before we got started you were saying a lot of people are terrible interviewers, and I'm wondering what makes a terrible interview? And then maybe we can backtrack into what makes an amazing one.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, yeah, I think what makes a terrible interview is one where the person is not attuned to the guest or the questions or stilted, you can tell they just have a list of questions that they're going through. That's probably the worst thing is you just feel like you're answering a list of questions. They also don't do the research. I think there's this balancing act with research, people think I do more research than I do, but at most I will read somebody's webpage.

Of course every single person who writes a book, I read their book, that's my default policy, I'll cancel the interview if I haven't finished the book. And nobody ever gets mad about that, because it's, to me, the sign of respect. Plus it gives you a scaffolding to have a conversation. I think there's this also combination of not just the ability to ask good questions and show that you understand your subject, but there's a social component of this, right?

There's an energy exchange that a lot of people I think don't quite get, they think they can just press record and the conversation will be interesting, which it doesn't really work that way. I think the thing that I find is when people basically build questions off of the answers you're giving them, that's what I do, so I think scripting questions in advance is literally probably the worst thing that makes for a bad interview.

And the other, like I said, is that people will ask you questions when they should know all this. I had somebody once email me and say, "Hey, could you send us the questions you want us to ask?" And I was like, no, that's your fucking job, I'm being interviewed. And I'm like, are you serious? You want me to send you the questions that I want to be asked? Isn't that your job?

Minute 10

Daniel Stillman:

But some people do go to the script, and I think the best stuff happens, as you say, when you get off script. So, how do you get people to go off script?

Srinivas Rao:

Ask them things they've never been asked before. So, you've been a guest and you know that when I start a conversation, you're just like, "What the hell does this have to do with my work?" And so I always preface [inaudible 00:10:11], "Look, I'm going to ask you questions that seem like they have nothing to do with your work, but you'll see there's a method to my madness, we'll get there." And the reason for that is that human beings are hardwired to listen to stories.

Minute 14

Srinivas Rao:

If you have the same guest on every show saying the same things, listening to the same people, you're not really reaching an audience, you're kind of inside of this filter bubble or this sort of echo chamber which that's one of the reasons I constantly go out of my way to find people that you've never heard of because, one, I don't want to be exposed to the same bullshit over and over again, because that makes your worldview myopic and you can't be insightful and you can't have original insight if you have a myopic worldview or your content consumption is just the same old online marketing garbage

Minute 15

Daniel Stillman:

Well, so let's loop it back around because I think my impression is that your podcast is designed potentially to optimize for the same thing that I think I'm optimizing my podcast for, which is my own learning, my own insight and creating more creativity for myself as well. It sparks new ideas and new things for you. Is that a fair perception? From what I'm hearing you say.

Srinivas Rao:

That's spot on, if you think about it, I just told you I choose every guest based on what I'm curious about, so it's kind of like, I'll give you an example, I had a former guest, Amy Chan, who wrote this really great book called Breakup Bootcamp, which was all about the science of recovering from heartbreak. She shared something that she was doing with a friend who was a professional dominatrix. And I'm like, now that sounds fucking interesting. I want to talk to her. And she was amazing, she was wicked smart, and it was great because she shattered so many misperceptions that people might have had about sex work. She was valedictorian at her high school, went to UCLA on a full ride, Berkeley graduate school.

And it's like, what? That's not the path to professional dominatrix that most people would think. So, it was really cool to get to hear that kind of story because I think that that's the other thing, is that one of my goals really is to challenge people's perceptions of what certain people are like, because media is a powerful tool to shape both perception and misperception.

Minute 18

Srinivas Rao:

More About Srinivas

Srinivas Rao is a top branding and creativity keynote speaker, host of the podcast The Unmistakable Creative, and the bestselling author of The Art of Being Unmistakable. He has been the conference keynote speaker for The International Live Events Association, The Healthcare Design Expo, Catersource, and The International Association of Event Planners. He has also worked with corporations like Citibank, Meredith Corporation, and Bayer.

Full Transcript

Daniel Stillman:

Well, then I will officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory, Srinivas Rao, you really need no introduction, but maybe you do. How do you usually introduce yourself?

Srinivas Rao:

It's weird, I think people have this misperception that I'm more well known than I really am. I jokingly say I'm the most connected person that nobody has ever heard of. I think that I'm far more known because of my guests than for my own work, and so to sum it up, I'm the host of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you've been a guest, along with porn stars, bank robbers, drug dealers, performance psychologists, authors, entrepreneurs, artists, just people who I think are interesting. That's my default is to just choose based on whoever I'm curious about.

Srinivas Rao:

These days we have no shortage of people with pitches, but I am pretty adamant about the fact that I don't choose people based on fame or status or any of that, I choose people based on how interesting I think their story is, and it really comes down to everything is always done in service of two things, a listener and a story. Is this a story I want to tell? Is this a story that will benefit our listener in some way?

Daniel Stillman:

So, I think, man, the reason I thought it would be interesting to talk to you, to me the idea of having a creative conversation versus an interview, before we got started you were saying a lot of people are terrible interviewers, and I'm wondering what makes a terrible interview? And then maybe we can backtrack into what makes an amazing one.

Srinivas Rao:

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, it's so interesting because on one level, I was on a podcast recently where somebody sent some of the general questions they asked, and they were reflection prompts for me. On the one hand I was like, you want me to do work before I go in to do this interview? On the other hand, it gave me some room to think, but then there's this question of is it spontaneous versus not?

Srinivas Rao:

I never send anybody questions and even if I do, I don't ask them. I'll send them, and I'll be like, "Here's a few for you to think about, I'm probably not going to ask any of them." Because here's the thing, if you ask somebody questions they've answered 1,000 times, then they're going to say the same damn thing they've said every other show, so you basically don't get anything insightful. My goal is always, to me, I know the best compliment you could possibly get when you ask somebody in a question is when somebody says, "Nobody has ever asked me that before."

Srinivas Rao:

So, Kate Murphy wrote that amazing book, You're Not Listening, which I think is probably the bible for podcast hosts as far as I'm concerned. And the funny thing is if I wrote that book it would've been called Nobody Has Ever Asked Me That Before. That would be my title for a book about podcasts, but I have no interest in writing a book about podcasting.

Daniel Stillman:

Fair. Well, two things I heard that I think are really interesting is the list versus being responsive.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

And so that's basically a huge difference between what I would call a creative conversation or one that is dead.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, absolutely. You wouldn't go to a first date with a list of questions on a piece of paper, would you?

Daniel Stillman:

Well, some people do. Some people who get really nervous do, and I don't think they're great dates. But here's the flip side of this is I think that would maybe, I would say, make a creative conversation is when I've definitely interviewed people and certainly heard podcasts where people just go to the script. And so I think one part of it is the questions, and teeing up those softballs, like, "Tell us about your book," which is so general as to not be helpful. But some people do go to the script, and I think the best stuff happens, as you say, when you get off script. So, how do you get people to go off script?

Srinivas Rao:

And the other thing is that you can't answer any of those questions without telling a story. You can't just spout off the same old bullshit that you have on 1,000 other shows, it's part of why we turned down Gary Vaynerchuk as a podcast guest, because I was like, not going to happen unless he agrees to my terms. And the funny thing is, who the hell are you to dictate terms to Gary? I'm like, I'm Srini Rao, the host of The Unmistakable Creative, this is how we roll. You don't like it then go fuck yourself.

Srinivas Rao:

Honestly, I don't have anything personally against Gary Vaynerchuk, but the thing is he's just one of those people that I feel like says a lot of the same things on all the same shows, and it's like, not going to happen, not on our platform, I just won't allow that. And so I basically, I think somebody on our PR team, [inaudible 00:11:12] team, was like, "Hey, Gary wants to be on your show or he's expressed interest," and I was like, all right, great, here are the three conditions on which we'll have him on the show.

Srinivas Rao:

Every show is an hour, he has to listen to an episode beforehand, and, three, it cannot be about anything social media related, it has to be about his personal story because my audience could care less about anything social or tactics or marketing. And I think that is probably the last time I'll ever hear from Gary Vaynerchuk, which is fine because I don't feel like I'm missing anything. But that's the thing, it really comes down to asking questions that elicit stories.

Srinivas Rao:

Because the thing is, you don't want a question that somebody can give you a bullet point answer to, right? And the problem is that a lot of these professionals are media trained by a publicist, a publicist will be like, "Keep it short and sweet, stick to the talking points." When you've been on my show, my first instruction is do the exact opposite of whatever your publicist has told you. Because the problem is, publicists are trained to prep people for short form, 10 minute interviews on NBC or whatever, but this was a long form conversation.

Srinivas Rao:

And you need that freedom to go to different places. I'll have guests walk out on an interview, it's like an hour of therapy sometimes, what they'll tell me. Mainly, again, I'm asking questions that I genuinely am curious about, and that's the other thing, I think people, they mix up the idea of asking questions that they think are going to be valuable to listeners, and then questions they're genuinely curious about. And those two things are not mutually exclusive, in fact you're better off going with something you're curious about because that's going to come across.

Srinivas Rao:

Whereas if you ask this scripted list of questions, it just doesn't feel very genuine, it feels almost robotic. There are people who literally use the same questions for every show, and I'm like, then why the hell do you even do the interview? Why don't you just have the guest record their answers and you guys don't have the waste the time to be on air together?

Daniel Stillman:

Well, Tim Ferriss does do some shows like that. I find them a little less interesting, I think because there isn't that rhythm of a creative conversation, the energy between two people responding to each other.

Srinivas Rao:

Totally, yeah, that's one thing that I think is lacking from a lot of these conversations. Plus, at this point the interview based format where you just interview entrepreneurs or online personalities, I know this because I was so early to this, it's kind of saturated and that's the reality. People don't think about this from a business standpoint either if they're serious about it, it's like, okay, if you enjoy doing this and you have no outcome in mind then great, that's cool.

Srinivas Rao:

But if you're trying to compete with what is effectively the gigantic circle jerk, then you're really not going to have much traction, because you're not doing anything that is substantially different or unique from whatever else is out there. Because that's the thing, now you're making me think, I just had an article idea, the commoditization of interview based podcasts, because that's what's happened. It really has.

Srinivas Rao:

I remember people asked me when I grew a blog, the best thing that I ever did, my blog started to grow the day I stopped reading books about how to grow a blog. I stopped reading all online marketing, all social media books. And that was the best, that's when I finally started to have real insight.

Daniel Stillman:

Srinivas Rao:

And we don't really look beyond the surface of what we see. And so the result is copious amounts of bullshit. We literally had a guy who wrote a book called The Life Changing Science Of Detecting Bullshit. And the thing that really struck me as I was writing about this is that on a large enough scale, you can take popular platitudes, cliches, fad diets, and basically mistake bullshit for truth because enough people agree.

Srinivas Rao:

But the thing is that if you don't seek evidence to the contrary and you don't seek evidence that something is overwhelmingly true, then you're kind of just lying to yourself. You're just taking something at face value and that's half the problem with the way we consume content today. We're inside these walled gardens. The other thing is that context is something that really matters, you and I may have talked about this and I feel like I did talk to you about this, I feel like I can't stop talking about it, but it's true.

Srinivas Rao:

Context makes a big difference in terms of the results that you see people get, particularly with self help, context really matters because people leave out the context when they sell things, they leave out the context when they consume things, they leave out the context when they look at their role models. And it's kind of like, well, look, you're not going to get my results. I have certain skills that, honestly, and I also have certain advantages that you can never replicate. I got a 10 year head start on a massive cultural trend. And we don't talk about that stuff. That pisses me off beyond belief. This is why I always joke that my first book, Unmistakable-

Daniel Stillman:

Which pisses you off? I think I missed that.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, the fact that people make these blanket statements like everybody should start a podcast or these are the things you should do to become a millionaire. I'm like, yeah, okay, well, no, because the context matters. There's nothing everybody should do. And the problem is the fact that we believe that. I think that in one way people are like, maybe I'm not as inspiring, I think I've become much more realistic. And, honestly, the thing that one of the iTunes reviews that I was most proud of was like, "There's no fluff here, no feel good fluff." And that was, to me, the ultimate compliment because that's what so much of self improvement has become, is feel good fluff that doesn't actually lead to anything.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Well, so this goes, just to really highlight something for folks who might be listening to this conversation, to me, the ability to have a creative conversation with someone, to learn from them, to get insight from them, is for a purpose. And what is the purpose for you? The things that you are learning, that you're developing and growing, what is the output that you want to do with it?

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, that's a good question. Well, so the joke I've always said is if I could actually take all the advice of my podcast guests and apply it to my life, I would be a billionaire with six pack abs and a harem of super models.

Daniel Stillman:

I know, you would be a galaxy brain me.

Srinivas Rao:

No, think about it, I have probably the largest encyclopedia of random shit inside my head of probably anybody you know.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, and you can't and haven't acted on all of it, which is fascinating to me.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, some of it probably wouldn't make sense to act on, I always joke, if you want to rob a bank, become a porn star, or run for president, I can either tell you how or introduce you to somebody who could teach you.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. So, then what's it all for? Seriously.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, I think there is this love of learning, but to me more than anything it's to mix up other people's ingredients to diversify my perspective, because it takes us back to that whole myopic viewpoint thing, I think that Robert Greene gave me this metaphor once when we were talking about the concept of mastery. And he said the analogy is biodiversity. The more species that you have in the ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem will become.

Srinivas Rao:

And so the more diverse the set of people I interview is, the more diverse I'm going to be in my thinking, my ability to ask questions, and my ability to find new guests, and that is something I pride myself on is the fact that that's a very common comment is why do people listen to Unmistakable? It's because we have guests that you will honestly never find on any other show, because they're not famous, they don't have huge personal brands.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, we have all those people and it's funny because every time somebody introduces me and they kick off my intro by saying, "You've interviewed Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss," and I'm like, listen, those are the least interesting people. Seth is fantastic, I love Seth.

Daniel Stillman:

They are framed behind you, if you're listening at home, I love the...

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, so that's the thing, it's not that there's anything wrong with Seth, but you ask me, okay, so you see the other picture behind me on the wall, you may not know who that is, but Justine Musk, would I rather talk to Justine or... Everybody knows Elon, Justine is brilliant, there's so much wisdom inside that woman's head. Obviously she's had a front row seat to Elon in a way that none of us ever will, and she herself is absolutely one of the most thoughtful, brilliant and just poetic writers you'll ever come across.

Srinivas Rao:

She has a way of explaining things and understanding things that you're kind of like, wow, she's just wicked smart. And so I think that that's one thing that I look for is really, more than anything, to go out of my way to find these people that I'm curious about. More than anything it's I want a diversity of ideas in my idea ecosystem, so that I'm not just drawing from one well to come up with ideas, because you want what they call I guess in design thinking, this is probably more your forte than mine, but the reason this is fresh on my mind is I was going back through Tim Brown's book, but it's a diversion thinking, right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Srinivas Rao:

Where it really is a multidisciplinary way to give yourself an education I guess is the way that I think about it, because you'll pull these random ideas from conversations, and you don't even know how they'll affect you. That's interesting, I should try that. That's part of what drives it, the purpose really more than anything is to satisfy my curiosity, at the end of the day.

Daniel Stillman:

So, I think this is a really interesting segue, because we're zooming in and I always want to zoom out, because it's very clear that you do a lot of preparation for the conversation, and then there's all the stuff that happens during the conversation, the moves you make to make sure that you get somebody off script and don't just ask them a list, et cetera. And then now we're talking about all the stuff that happens after the conversation. And this is where I'm curious about the second brain mindset and the databasing of your insights, the idea that your ideas can start to have sex with each other.

Daniel Stillman:

And this is where I think maybe my pushback, we were talking about the benefit statement, the marketing of your second brain, and is it about keeping track? Is it about maximizing input, or output rather, but I think there's also this question of how they cross fertilize and cross multiply. And to me, I like the maximize output idea, because to me I want to be able to pull threads together and say, I was thinking about writing these three things, and you know what, they're actually just three chapters in one longer essay.

Srinivas Rao:

Right, you just gave me the subheader now.

Daniel Stillman:

So, what's the subheader?

Srinivas Rao:

Well, you gave me the update to the subheader, because somebody had said to me, and I literally took this word for word from our survey data, it was just like, build one trusted source where everything is, where you can basically connect your ideas together, come up with new ones, and manage everything without having to use 50,000 different apps.

Srinivas Rao:

But, yeah, here's the thing, part of the reason that I got into all of this is the very thing that we were just talking about. I wanted to be able to access the knowledge that is inside of my head from interviews, from books, and be able to actually put it into action, which this is great, you're actually giving me so much fodder for the copy now. I was trying to figure out how to explain why this was so important to me, but you just gave it to me, so thanks.

Daniel Stillman:

It's my pleasure, maybe you can explain it to me now.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, so the thing that if you look at the consumption habits that I have, one, I probably consume more content than the average person, particularly in terms of books. I don't listen to podcasts, I hardly ever read anything online. Every now and then, I've stopped reading Medium, I think Medium has pretty much just gone down the toilet as far as I'm concerned, there's really nothing good there anymore.

Srinivas Rao:

So, I read two blogs, I read Cal Newport and I read Seth Godin, that's about it. And then every now and then I'll come across an article or two, every now and then I read [inaudible 00:26:11] newsletter, because I'm subscribed to it. But for the most part, I don't consume very much. I do consume books, that's the primary thing that I consume is books. And I like some TV shows, but I don't even listen to podcasts, despite hosting one, I actually don't like them. I don't like listening to them. They're just not my preferred form of media consumption, which is kind of bizarre considering I make a living doing this.

Daniel Stillman:

It's not bizarre, it just makes you a hypocrite, [inaudible 00:26:39].

Srinivas Rao:

No, I honestly think that's been one of my biggest advantages in terms of being able to be insightful and original, because I have no idea what people are doing on their shows so I don't interview people that other people interview, I don't hear the questions they're asking, I remember somebody once told me, "You're interviewing this person, you should listen to the interview he did with this other person." I'm like, why the hell would I do that? I don't want to sound like that other person.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, sometimes I listen to one or two other interviews just so I can not ask those questions, to that point you were asking before.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, that is fair, right? And the thing is that I'm not worried about that ever because I know that I won't ask those questions at this point, that's never a concern for me because I already know that people don't ask the questions that I do.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. It's really interesting because you don't have the contexts, I'm guessing, in which people consume a podcast vary. It used to be the drive or commute, sometimes I'll listen to one where I'm folding laundry, but it's not everybody's context, some people just want to have silence or music while they're folding their laundry, or have someone else fold their laundry, I don't know how you live your life.

Srinivas Rao:

Ideally, yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

But so I guess the question is, and maybe this is the question of how do you digest a book? You have your second brain, you use Mem, right?

Srinivas Rao:

This is good, yeah, this is actually a good question. So, a lot of this was honestly changed in this year, it wasn't until this year that I got so refined about it, and credit where credit is due. So, first I took Nat Eliason's course called Effortless Output in Roam, because I wanted to understand it, and I hated the user interface of Roam. I was just like, I love this idea conceptually, but it's just clunky, it's ugly, I think it was really meant for academic research.

Daniel Stillman:

And just for people who don't have the context, Roam Research, some people rave about Roam, it's another databasing tool.

Srinivas Rao:

The function is phenomenal, but for me the user interface was a big issue, I just found it clunky and difficult to navigate. Even Cal Newport was like, "I use Roam, I don't think I use it well," and I felt the same way. So I basically took everything that I saw in Nat's course and I just said, all right, let me apply what he's taught me inside of Mem and see if I can replicate this conceptually. And so the thing that changed, the best way to explain this I think is in terms of studying for exams in college, because I think that that's a perfect way to really give you this jump off point for how I started to think about this.

Srinivas Rao:

There's a book called How To Take Smart Notes that a guy named Sönke Ahrens wrote, and that book is kind of a goldmine in terms of your ability to really draw insights from the content that you consume and to actually use it in a way that is useful. So, if you look at the average college student in terms of how they study, how they take notes, what do they do? They basically go to lectures, they try to copy down what the professor says, they do problem sets, they go to office hours, if you go to a gigantic school like Berkeley, you go to discussion sections where the TA explains the same stupid thing you learned in class and maybe you do more problem sets. And then so you kind of delude yourself into thinking you actually understand this idea.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, people highlight books, which is not how... You highlight it thinking, I now am letting myself know that this is important, therefore I will remember, but that's not how it works.

Srinivas Rao:

No, not at all. So, you took me to the next point, I remember at Berkeley sometimes you'd get these used textbooks, and somebody highlighted this entire fucking textbook, really? As if they're going to remember everything in the textbook.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Srinivas Rao:

And then I had certain friends who almost never went to class and got straight As, and it was just like, what the hell are these guys doing differently? And what I realized is that... So, if we go back to high school, this is a good [inaudible 00:30:44]. We can't exactly do this linearly, because the funny thing is, once you start to understand how this works, you'll realize it's not linear. So, you go back to high school, and my old roommate, [inaudible 00:30:55], was like, "You were a straight A student in high school." I was like, I'm Indian, of course I was a straight A student in high school, my parents would have disowned me if I wasn't.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, there are some Indians that have parents that just don't like them and make them cry.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, the reality is we're conditioned to do that, straight As were not a question around our house. Nobody congratulated you for that, it was like, why the hell did you get a B? That's it. And that was invaluable because...

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, that's the standing Asian parent joke. It's immigrant parents in general I think.

Srinivas Rao:

Totally, yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

It's like, come on.

Srinivas Rao:

You're Jewish, right? I hear that's pretty standard for Jewish people too.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, it's like, come on, you're just going to get an A and you should probably get a Masters degree, or what the hell are you doing with yourself?

Srinivas Rao:

And the A is basically the bare minimum, right? It's like this is the minimum standard of performance.

Daniel Stillman:

Yep.

Srinivas Rao:

And so, but here's the thing, you don't have to be smart to get good grades in high school. Any idiot can get good grades in high school if they're just semi organized, and does what the teacher says. Because all you're doing is largely memorizing and regurgitating, that's part of why we have such a fucked up education system, you don't want to get me started on all that. That rant is another podcast entirely.

Daniel Stillman:

Totally.

Srinivas Rao:

But the thing is that we don't actually learn, we memorize and we regurgitate, which anybody that can do that can get straight As in high school. But then you get to college, especially at a place like Berkeley, and the same thing that made you a straight A student in high school no longer works. Like I said, I only can understand this now 20 years later after being a C student at Berkeley, where you take an economics exam, so we go back to the whole thing of problem sets, highlighting and all that, right?

Srinivas Rao:

So, you think that you understand something, and then you go into an exam and it's presented to you in a context that you've never seen. And so suddenly, because you only understood it in the one context it was presented in, so suddenly, because you didn't elaborate on your understanding, which is critical. That's a big part of how to take notes. So, the premise of smart notes is that unlike your previous notes, people are like, isn't this really tedious and slow? And I'm like, yes, but don't you actually want to retain the knowledge that you've consumed and actually put it to use?

Srinivas Rao:

You'll get more out of doing this with one book than you would from reading 10 books and just underlining a bunch of crap and copying it and pasting it. This is not just copying and pasting books, and that's the thing, I used to do that as well. And so if you look at Ryan Holiday's note card system, that has effectively made him one of the most successful authors of his generation, a big part of it relies on elaboration of what you've consumed, and really looking at how it fits into the context of the work that you're doing.

Srinivas Rao:

And so the fundamental premise of smart notes, which basically [inaudible 00:33:58] Zettelkasten, which is a system that was invented by Niklas Luhmann, this German social scientist who wrote 58 books and published 500 papers in his life, is that instead of just copying what it is, he would make it a point to basically rewrite whatever insight he had in his own words and then link all those things together.

Srinivas Rao:

And now, with a modern day note taking [inaudible 00:34:22], and this is kind of hard to explain verbally because it's one of those things that when you see it visually it makes so much more sense, but inside of a note taking tool like Mem, you have this concept called bidirectional links, and bidirectional links are in a lot of ways, in numerous ways, the more you dive down this rabbit hole, the more you start to discover different ways of describing it. So, in a lot of ways it's kind of like Google's page rank but for your brain.

Srinivas Rao:

It shows you what keeps surfacing over and over again. But the other thing is that it allows you to have insight without taking immediate action on that insight. Sönke Ahrens had a really good way of putting this. He said, insight isn't something that you can plan for.

Srinivas Rao:

So you might be writing something, and while you're writing that one thing, you say, that sounds like a nice idea for a blog. But it's like, one sentence in one article is potentially another article in and of itself. And the thing is that you lose that idea because of the fact that you think I have to stop now and capture that idea. And that's where Mem comes in because you have bidirectional links and networked thinking.

Srinivas Rao:

The funny thing is that this is very counterintuitive. The irony is that we built all these tools to allow us to take notes, to organize information. And the irony of all of it is that they don't actually work the way our brain works. They're all designed to basically facilitate linear thinking. But anybody who has a brain knows that the brain is a network. It's not a hierarchy.

Srinivas Rao:

You have all these different dots that are connected inside, and that's what you do. It's not a coincidence Steve Jobs was like creativity is just connecting dots. Everything is just acting dots. And so what you're able to do as a byproduct of this is you start to connect dots between your ideas and you will quickly start to see that the more that you capture, the more you'll be able to create.

Srinivas Rao:

And so, if I showed you my own database right now, there's probably 5,000 notes in there, all of which are from books and other random thoughts. But the other thing is when you rewrite somebody else's insights in your own words, you'll also start to come up with your own insights that you didn't have before, just randomly, you'll be like, well, I didn't know that was going to happen. So you're basically feeding the ecosystem. There's a metaphor for this I can't quite... You're planting seeds is really what you're right. And you don't know when they'll bear fruit, and that's really why, the people who are prolific plant a lot of seeds.

Daniel Stillman:

So, I want to pull back and look at this arc that you've painted for us. If we're looking at the whole arc of the conversation of ingestion and output, I want to just paint it as it's a larger dialogue. And what I'm seeing is that you actually limit your diet. That's one thing that I heard you say is you're not doom scrolling on the feed. There's something about a book, which is it is a digested, synthesized piece of knowledge. Somebody's already done a lot of work to take all of this and dial it down. But then you're making that as a diversion point for yourself. You're limiting your input.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

Sorry, go ahead.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. Limit your input, diversify whatever content you're consuming and you maximize your output. Yeah. Steven Kotler put it well in his last book, The Art Of Impossible, he ROI on a book is far greater than the ROI on reading some stupid article. And not only that, if you think about retention, I can tell you all sorts of stuff from every book I've read. So, let's say I've been creating content on the internet for 10 years. I can tell you 10 articles off the top of my head and what they're about. So, just think about the amount that I've been exposed to versus my actual references. You want to talk to me about books? We can talk about that until you're blue in the face. That I wouldn't give you endless amounts of...

Daniel Stillman:

I think this might be one of Tim's questions, but I love this question too. What's the book you gift the most? Are there some books that you think, oh my God, everyone should just read these three books.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, it's funny because the book that I gifted the most probably in the last year and a half was The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. He did such an amazing job with that book. It's beautifully written. And once you start, it's funny, because every single person I've introduced the bullet journal to wonders how they ever lived without it.

Daniel Stillman:

I don't know if it was my dad who said this or it's just a famous saying, what the hand does the mind remembers.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

When I was in grad school and I had to study for a test, I made a mind map because I'm a mind mapper. I would just get a big piece of paper out and I would just make a map.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, so here's the other part of that. One of the things that you'll notice, and I've been making a point to do this and honestly it's a pain in the ass and it's not something that everybody has the patience to do, but I've started printing out my blog posts and then going in and then looking at them and then rewriting each section by hand, after I write a first draft, because what you'll find is that because you can type so fast, you might say, okay, I wrote something in three or four sentences and then you can condense it into one and you start to become much more concise and economical with your use of language, because you're forced to.

Daniel Stillman:

Or because the handwriting shifts how you write out the sentences.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel Stillman:

That's so interesting.

Srinivas Rao:

It changes everything. And I have atrocious handwriting, so it's really frustrating, but it makes a world of difference and every single writer I know who is an amazing writer, Ryan Holiday, Dani Shapiro, Amber Rae, all of them, two things, they all read physical books and they write by hand. And I think there's something to be said for that.

Daniel Stillman:

So, the flip side to limiting your input, and this is something I noticed when I was looking at your second brain landing page, is it seems like reflection is an absolute necessity. It's not like Evernote where I just highlight and I clip and it's, quote unquote, "saved and searchable," it is on me to reflect.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. That's largely what this whole smart note idea is about, is to reflect on the ideas that you have been exposed to and elaborate on them. So, I just published this article titled The 21 Life Lessons From 2021, which is just 21 things my podcast guests taught me this year. Each one is basically an expansion of some idea that I learned when I interviewed one of my guests. And what does that force me to do?

Srinivas Rao:

It forces me to take one little quote from that interview and basically derive as much insight from that one little nugget as I can, because that's one thing, we don't do that, typically it's like we just have... This is of the things why I think people who think podcast transcripts are useful are idiots. Personally, what are you going to get from that? Because if you're scanning through a transcript, you don't have any context. So, it makes no sense, you don't even know what you're looking for.

Daniel Stillman:

You're saying it's useless for, useless for whom?

Srinivas Rao:

For a person who just wants to, for the most part, for a person who could listen, for somebody who's hearing impaired, that's fair. They can't hear. In my mind, those people are justified in wanting to read a transcript because they can't hear. But for most people, if you're somebody who has perfectly good hearing and you're just going to scan through a transcript, you're not going to really get the gist of what's going on there because you don't have the context, I don't see how that would lead to any insight that's actually useful.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, yeah. That's interesting because I use is the transcript for myself.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

To redigest the interview.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, see, that's the difference, right? It's different because you did the interview.

Daniel Stillman:

I am different, it's true.

Srinivas Rao:

You know what to look for. Yeah. Well, trust me, I have all my transcripts inside of Mem now because I wanted to make sure that it would be easy to access them when I wrote this life lessons post. And the funny thing is putting together the basis of the article takes 10 minutes. It's really editing and arranging it and elaborating. That's where the real work happens, and that used to take me almost a month and a half. And now if I really wanted to, I could do it a day.

Daniel Stillman:

In what context do you feel like other folks who maybe aren't thought leadery, bloggy people, what is the average adult, the average thought worker, what does this look like for them? How do they judge success of this method, do you think?

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. So, the average person, it's not like they have any shortage of information they're dealing with either, right? Making notes, projects they're working on all sorts of stuff to move things forward. And so I think it's just a matter of, okay, yeah, you're not a creative, but you're a knowledge worker who works at a company.

Daniel Stillman:

And then you are indeed a creative, yeah.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, you have tasks to manage, there are things that you need to get done. All of which kind of use the same principles. You're just changing the backdrop, but it's not as though the principles don't still apply.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. And I feel like there was, somebody who I'm coaching took Tiago's goes course on this, I think you talk about this on your page as well. There's a difference between projects and tasks. And I think there's a third container.

Srinivas Rao:

So it's PARA basically, projects, areas, resources, and archives. So, areas are basically the things that are ongoing, so The Unmistakable Creative is not a project, it's an area because it's something I do daily, writing is an area. But if I'm writing a book, that's a project. So, a project is something by definition that has an end, a defined end date.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. So, everyone basically needs to be able to define for themselves what their elements of PARA are and then really control their input, be voracious and diverse, but controlled in terms of feeding those components of their PARA.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, exactly. So, you want to be deliberate about what you consume, not just sort of let me just... It's the sort of balancing act between being very deliberate, but also allowing your curiosity to guide you, but not in some different directions that you don't go, you go one mile in a thousand directions instead of a thousand in one.

Daniel Stillman:

You know, it's funny, the fear that's sparking in me, which I feel like would spark in everyone else is that this sounds like it takes time.

Srinivas Rao:

Of course it takes time.

Daniel Stillman:

Of course it does, it has value. And I feel like so many people...

Srinivas Rao:

What is worth doing that doesn't take time?

Daniel Stillman:

No, of course. I just feel like many people don't feel like they have control of their time.

Srinivas Rao:

I go back and forth on the time management complaint on the one hand I'm a single guy, I don't have kids who are screaming at me. And at the same time, these same people who bitch about all the things that are not enabling them to get the things they need to do done are also digging around on Facebook all day. So, you can't tell me, "I don't have time to do this thing because I have kids, but I can find an hour and a half a day to just doom scroll." It's like, all right, well then fine, yeah, your kids are a valid excuse, but you're lying to yourself when you... You're using them as a reasonable justification for not doing the thing you actually know you can do.

Srinivas Rao:

To me, when I hear this argument, I'm just like, none of you are are the President of the United States, none of you are Elon Musk. I promise you you're not as busy as you think. And I don't get that, in my mind, that argument is somewhat flawed that you don't have time. Everybody has 24 hours, find one. That's the other thing, you're right. This takes time. You're not going to get anything you want if you're not going to give something else up, in every area of your life, there's a trade off.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Do you feel like an hour a day is a reasonable investment in building a second brain that creates a...

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. Of course. I spend more time on all this stuff because it's my job, but yeah, an hour a day can potentially give you exponential results in comparison to the way that most people manage things now. I think that if you look, so typically one of the big causes of all these issues is perpetual mid task context shifts. I had to actually hop into my inboxes, I didn't have my link for my conversation with you, otherwise I would not have opened my email again until five o'clock. And again, I'm also a person who's ADD, so for me, this is 10 times worse than the average person. So, I have to go out of my way to do this. This is in a lot of ways out of necessity.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. Perpetual mid task interruptions. I feel like that is just...

Srinivas Rao:

That's the kiss of death.

Daniel Stillman:

It's the kiss of death. Well, there's a term in Sanskrit, [Sanskrit 00:47:50], the disease of existence. And I think perpetual mid task disruptions is another version of the disease of modern existence.

Srinivas Rao:

Absolutely.

Daniel Stillman:

Which is why monotasking is so powerful and so important.

Srinivas Rao:

Well, and that's one of the things that's really nice about a tool like Mem and this whole idea of a sort of central storehouse without having to ever leave it is that you can work on different types of tasks all within one app and not have to go to 50 different sources to get this thing that you need. Don't get me wrong, there are times when I still have to get out of it. Okay, I'm not saying...

Srinivas Rao:

That is literally what I'm trying to get towards. The founders of Mem and I were talking, I was like, guys, this is what I want. I want to never leave Mem all day if I can. I was like, I'm serious, I literally don't want to think about ever having to open another app for anything that involves writing, creating. And honestly, if I looked at my actual time tracking, you would probably see that I spend probably 80% of my day inside of Mem.

Daniel Stillman:

Which is why, and for anybody who's listening, an inbox is not a to-do list, because there is constant influx of somebody saying, "Hey, Srini, can you do this for me?" And I just started using a CRM for my business development, and I can write emails in it. And it's actually, when you talk about mid task disruptions, the fact that I can just be in a place where no email is coming in, it's just about me being clear about who do I need to talk to?

Srinivas Rao:

Well, you know that all the emails you ever get from me, I don't write any of those, they're all automated scripts on the backend. For you to be a guest on our podcast, the only conversation I ever have, the first time I talk to you, anything I did, the only request I... Now you're reminding me, this is something else I need to add into the automation, I need you to send me the book, but I think that that's actually going to be something... I'm just going to put that on the bottom of the we'd be glad to have you as a guest email now. Because I literally have had publicists forget to send me the book and I'm like, look, I'm not going to do this unless you send me the book, that's the way this goes. And no author gets mad when that happens, but their publicists are idiots. And that pisses me off.

Daniel Stillman:

You want me to give you a free $3 book?

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. It's like, yes, of course, because we're going to tell 1,000 people about it. And so that's the thing. So, a lot of this is, like I said, it's out of necessity, but yeah, we shouldn't be living in this world where... Cal Newport calls this a hyperactive hive mind workflow, this just ongoing unstructured, conversation about work without actually doing the work.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. And this is about having a structured, consistent dialogue between the things you want to know and learn about and yourself, to make sure you're learning what you need to know. And then the output of that conversation, whatever it is, hopefully insights for you, an article for someone else, it might be a report. It might be the next conversation. Srinivas, I want to respect your time. We're getting up to time. This went really fast because there's clearly too much to cover.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. This is a tough one to articulate. Tiago does such a better job articulating this than I do because he's lived and breathed it. I think it's really difficult to articulate network thinking verbally. Because even when I had Sönke Ahrens as a guest, [inaudible 00:51:22] understand conceptually in terms of taking smart notes was kind of... I struggled because I saw the value because I've experienced it. And that's one thing that is kind of weird about this. So, tools like Mem have what a term that I coined called the utility paradox. I don't know that I coined that term. Maybe somebody else did. And what I mean by that is you can't quite understand why they're useful until you use them enough. So, Twitter is a great example of utility paradox, right? Twitter seemed like the dumbest thing in the world when people first discovered it, it was like, why the hell do I want to hear what people had for lunch?

Srinivas Rao:

And then eventually you start to see that, wow, this is actually cool. And people have used Twitter in the ways the founders probably never envisioned they would. Nobody thought people would be using Twitter to topple democracies or dictatorships, well, maybe that was a Freudian slip, maybe I've said that a few too many times because I live in the United States. I realize I have made that slip three times in multiple conversations and I'm like, oh my God, what have I been reading that is making me say that? But you could use Twitter to topple a democracy too unfortunately.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Not for nothing, it almost happened.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should ask you? What haven't we talked about that we should talk about in our moments left together?

Srinivas Rao:

I don't know, I don't really know off the top of my head, I think we've covered a lot of interesting ground. I like the fact that this was kind of meandering.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Srinivas Rao:

It was very nice.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, I have resisted the structure that goes into building a second brain, but looking at your page about it, I'm actually really excited to get started. If people want to find you on the interwebs, is there any place particular they should go besides...

Srinivas Rao:

So, Unmistakable Creative is a podcast and then maximizeyouroutput.com is where you can find all my knowledge management work. I also have a YouTube channel for Mem if you just go to, I think it's called The Creative Life or something like that. I don't know what the name is. It's funny because I focus on the videos, I haven't even bothered with the rest of it. I don't spend much time thinking about the semantics other than the content.

Daniel Stillman:

But the course is out there, it's live, people can...

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah. The course is available. People can buy it, [inaudible 00:53:49], it's there.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. I'm excited. Mem sounds like a really interesting tool. It sounds like it's an investment to get it, as you said, jump started.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, it is, so that's the thing, part of the thing that's challenging is it's very counterintuitive because it goes against the linear way that you're used to organizing things.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Well, I'm grateful for the time, Srinivas, and my mind is expanded and I think it's something everyone needs to be able to manage the flow of input, insight, and output. And I think it's really, really key and crucial.

Srinivas Rao:

Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel Stillman:

Well then I'll call scene.