Thomas Frank

A major problem with using LLMs to learn things:

Me: "A is true, therefore B is false, right?"

LLM: "Right! Here's a ton of detail to confirm your belief."

Me: "Actually, A is false; B is true."

LLM: "Exactly right! Here's more detail to confirm that belief."

A lot of content is made by extremely online people, who observe the behavior of other extremely online people and assume that's how everyone is.

It's very easy to let your worldview be shaped by a small number of people who are very good at getting attention on phones

I want to start a Midwest emo band and call the first album Munchies at Menards

Guilty.

Are you saying I shouldn't have bought all these Beanie Babies

I am so disappointed that the song Evanescence made for the Devil May Cry Netflix series does not contain the lyric, "I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with light"

I think Pantheon might be my favorite show now. It's grounded, relatable, yet packed with a ton of heady ideas and tech.

It's easy to rewatch and really rewards doing so. Light on action, and good when it happens.

Probably my strongest recommendation right now if you like sci-fi.

Definitely still kicking around, deep in idea territory. I have at least 20 other videos I want to do first 😅

I’m not super familiar with how they monetized prior - did they have managed services they offered?

IMO Sync - especially in the context of multi-player - has got to be a very compelling paid offering for team/corporate use

3 and THUG are my two favorites, but I do think 3 deserves the remake first. I'm not sure how well THUG's story would be received by audiences today without some major reworks

I'd guess that Sync is paying the bills enough for them to see this decision as viable. (Perhaps Publish too, but I think Sync is a real must for a lot of folks)

Putting effort into helping yourself make your friends feel loved feels like a win to me!

As long as there isn't cat litter!

425lb x 5 today. 500 feels so close I can taste it.

What’s fire smart?

Yes, @thomasjfrank.com is the All-Knowing-Super-Senpai-Druid-YouTube-King-Yap-CEO

I need to paste the same links a lot – so I built a Keyboard Maestro macro that lets me bring up a list of them.

It's like TextExpander, but I can also apply transformations:

- Prepend "https://"
- Paste in all caps (useful for text layers in video edits)

Thanks for the recommendation! We're also about to put the full 10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades book online as well (It's already free, just only available in PDF/epub forms. We want to make it more like a doc site)

Very nice change to see! I'll have to play around and see if this makes them workable, though I still have doubts if they'll work with a dual Projects-Tasks db setup.

Overall, I think a big part of it is that Ali did it more successfully than anyone before him, providing a more visible model than ever – especially for folks with a similar background.

I was focused on college, specifically, until around 2016-2017. My perception is that Ali was as well, and started his shift toward more general content slightly later.

It's after Ali blew up that I noticed a ton of med school students/doctors doing this type of content. Not many before him.

Honestly, a huge chunk of modern productivity/lifestyle influencer culture has its roots on the circle of people who attended World Domination Summit events (Chris Guillebeau's event). E.g. Matt D'avella's start was working with The Minimalists, who were very close to that event

I should also that the modern crop of lifestyle/productivity influencers were heavily influenced by a circle of folks who wouldn't really be labeled "productivity" creators – Marie Forleo, Chris Guillebeau, Pat Flynn, Steve Kamb, the Minimalists, etc.

General productivity also really wasn't much of a space. There were two channels that did a lot of stuff before me – Art of Manliness, and another I can't remember the name of. Both stopped making videos.

...enjoyed getting nerdy about them and writing about them online. Still no money in the space.

When I got into YouTube, the only other people making study skills content were our friend Simon Clark and his friend Jamie Miles. Pretty much no one else.

From 2010 to 2013 I was just blogging – no YouTube. Very little, or no, money in the space.

I started to meet other bloggers my age, and I did find there were several med students.

My take, in that early 2010's lens: Med students are forced to adopt efficient study techniques, and some of them...

You had people like Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferriss, and Davey Asprey. They represented the sort of rugged-man/contrarian thinker archetype, doing weird experiments and writing about it.

And then you had the Stephen Covey/Brian Tracey types.

Finally Cal Newport, who had professor cred. No doctors.

It's been interesting to see the shift.

When I started College Info Geek in 2010, I was a sophomore in college. There were no productivity gurus on YouTube yet – but there were bloggers. At that time, none of them were med students or doctors AFAIK.

Adding Time Tracking - Ultimate Brain for Notion One of my main goals with Ultimate Brain is to turn it into a tool that helps me: In service of that goal, I’ve added time tracking features to my personal copy of the template. In this doc, I’ll show...

I'll have a video upon Thomas Frank Explains soon!

I've already published a written guide on adding it to Ultimate Brain: thomasjfrank.com/docs/ultimat...

Native time-tracking in @notion.com

This setup lets you track multiple sessions per task, and shows the total time you've worked across all of them.