Christian B. B. Houmann's Newsletter
Posts
PodNotes: podcast notes made easy & Learning from giants

PodNotes: podcast notes made easy & Learning from giants

July 10, 2022

View this email in your browser

Hey there.

I hope you've had a great week.

I am happy to announce that, after a busy exam period, I have finished my bachelors degree.

During this period, I managed to finish a few books. I'll share the notes in the coming weeks, as I finish processing them.Please bear with me as I catch up on all the exciting things I want to share with you.

I also had some ideas.One of them has already come to fruition, and I'm thrilled to be able to share it with you today.

PodNotes: How I'm making Obsidian the best podcast app

Podcasts can be an incredible resource for learning and insights, but they are annoyingly hard to write notes on.

That's why I made PodNotes.

This Obsidian plugin is built to make it easier to write notes on podcasts.How exactly? By building a podcast player in your notes app.

Here are some of the nice things that it can do so far:

It can be used anywhere: both on your computer and your mobile device.
It saves your progress on podcast episodes.
It helps you save podcasts via search (of the iTunes library).

But here's what really excites me:You can use plugins like QuickAdd or Templater to create notes and capture insights on the podcast you're listening to.

This is done through an API. Don't worry, I've already made all this for QuickAdd, so you can just set it up for yourself and get right to using it.

With these, you can easily create notes from the podcast episode you're listening to.And you can also capture timestamps.Even better, the timestamps can be linked at the given time, so you can click the link and PodNotes plays from there.

The whole thing is still a work in progress, but it's progressing rapidly, and I'm already finding it very useful for podcast listening and notes myself.I hope you will find it useful, too!

I've made a website dedicated to documenting the plugin. On there, you'll find a demo of me showing some of the things you can do with it... and how to set it all up for yourself.

Over the coming weeks, I'll also work on updating some of my other plugins. So stay tuned for updates there, too!Demo of PodNotes 👇

PodNotes demo. Taking notes on a podcast.

Awesome find: Founders podcast

If you want the greatest cheat-code for life: stand upon the shoulders of giants.Learn from those who came before you.Make friends with the eminent dead.

This is what countless greats have done. And they'll tell you:

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

— Sir Isaac Newton

My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.

This is one of Charlie Munger's prescriptions for misery from his Harvard School Commencement Speech. You can find a transcript here.

There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time.

— Marc Andreessen

And this is why I was so excited when I found David Senra's Founders Podcast.I've binge-listened to quite a few episodes, and the quality has been very high. I learned a ton from them.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Please do note that these are not the full episodes. This is a paid podcast, and the links are only for preview episodes.This is the first podcast I have ever paid for.

My endorsement is not sponsored: I have never even spoken to David.But I have found an enormous amount of value in David's work, hence my recommendation.

Quote

Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

— Tim Ferriss

Forward

Read Later with Instapaper