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Oct. 25, 2024

EP 481: Preservation in the Post-Information Age with Sari Azout

EP 481: Preservation in the Post-Information Age with Sari Azout

Stop me if you've heard this before: we're overloaded and overwhelmed by information. There's more content than you could ever hope to consume. More scientific theories, philosophical concepts, and art forms than you could ever hope to engage with.

Enter personal knowledge management (PKM). It's a modern term for an ancient practice—how one collects, preserves, and utilizes knowledge worth remembering. In this episode, I speak with Sari Azout, the founder of Sublime, an app for personal knowledge management (but that description truly doesn't do it justice). We talk about the philosophy behind the product and how that plays out in the product's design.

Plus, I dive into how Sari's PKM philosophy is part of a long lineage of practices people have used to remember what's worth preserving.

Footnotes:

Every new episode is published in essay form at WhatWorks.FYI!

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Chapters

00:00 - How I keep track of ideas and information

02:56 - Meet Sari Azout, founder of Sublime

04:30 - Information age versus post-information age

06:55 - Information overload is an ancient problem

08:05 - Commonplace books

11:20 - Commonplace books contain a central tension

12:12 - We shape our tools and then they shape us

16:24 - Where the cool stuff is really happening

17:40 - John Locke's commonplace system

19:52 - A tool for creativity rather than productivity

23:33 - Single-player mode versus multiplayer mode

27:05 - The promise of preservation