Use the Internet Better: The Tools and Tactics You Need with Steph Smith
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Most of us think we know how to search for information online, but imagine being able to find exactly what you're looking for faster and more effectively than ever before. Today, I'm joined by my friend, Steph Smith, who is the best I know at uncovering valuable insights hidden in plain sight. From browser extensions to niche search engines to leveraging data from online communities, we are going to show you how to take your online research to the next level.

If you've ever wanted to make smarter decisions or discover more of the web's hidden gems, this episode is going to transform the way you explore the internet. I'm Chris Hutchins, and if you enjoy this, please share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Now let's get into it right after this.

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So I think the premise that most people get wrong is that they operate the same way online as they do in person, right? So if they have an idea in real life, they think, oh, this is a great idea. Let me go tell my friends. That's totally normal and probably best practice. But the difference, the delta that we now have access to online is just a crazy amount of data. And I think even

Even though this sounds really simplistic, people don't think to use the data. So let me give you a couple examples that maybe frame this. Instead of thinking that your idea is the best, why aren't you in a subreddit seeing what the most upvoted posts are over the last month, the last year, etc., all time? Why aren't you seeing if people are actually searching for that thing all the time?

on Google, on other search engines, why aren't you seeing if people are buying something if you think it's a good business idea? Or if you want to buy something for your own purposes, why aren't you going into the reviews and actually using quantitative data to see

what you should be purchasing. And so really what I'm getting at is a lot of people don't use any data. And if they do, they also tend to use survey data, which is skewed for many reasons. People are familiar with that. But if you frame their survey data, which I think is not good, there's a whole lot more search data, which I think is much better, both in terms of scale and the fact that people are actually searching it on their own terms, not being asked a question. And then there's a third bucket, which is sales data.

you could actually argue even better because people aren't just searching for something or curious about it, but they're actually putting their money where their ideas are. And so that's the very baseline thing that I think people get wrong when they're thinking through things online. Again, simple as it sounds, they're just not using the data that's accessible to them. And I'll add one more concept that I think people miss, which is that

Even the people who do think to use data are often actually going and actively seeking out data. And the thing those people miss, even though they're further ahead than the average, is that they're not using any passive tools. So how can you use a passive tool that as you're kind of exploring the web, just doing your thing, we all spend hours a day online. Can you use anything passively to kind of alert you? Hey, there's a lot of search volume for this. Hey, this thing is trending up. Hey, someone mentioned you on Reddit.

Things like that, I think, are the extra layer that even people who know there's all this data online don't really adhere to. Yeah. I obviously love finding deals. You know this very well about me. But when it comes to browser extensions, there's all these amazing browser extensions that are very passive. And we're going to get to tools. But one example is when you're on Amazon, I think...

I think it's the Keepa extension. It's just like, hey, here's the price history of this product. And sometimes you're like, wow, this product has been $27 every day the last year. And then it spiked on two days to $40. And today it's 40. Chances are, if I wait three days, the price is going to go down. You don't even have to look for that data. There are ways that you could just surface it. So I wonder if one of the places to start is just what's the tool stack that you set up before you do any research? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And your point about browser extensions is perfect. Your browser is like your entry point into this digital universe, right? It is like your car or your rocket ship. And most people just take the default and never do anything with it.

And we're not just talking about research. Think about all the wonderful browser extensions that have become really big businesses like Grammarly, which helps you actually supercharge your writing. Think about Honey, which gives you coupons or deals real time. So again, you don't have to think about it. You actually are alerted to the

to these things. Think about something like Keywords Everywhere that shows you the search volume for things that you're looking at. So give me a search query, anything that's top of mind for you. Small travel camera. Okay, so...

This is the kind of query it's perfect because someone would actually look up and not really think, hey, let me get some data on this or let me think through its relevance. And so you can automatically already see the search volume for this thing. But if I do something, just to give you an example, hard kombucha, I love this one because you can see over time how this has changed. So if I look at all time, you can see over the last like five years, this has gone up quite a bit. And the reason I always share this one is because

This was actually a trend that I was alerted to because I was in San Diego. I wanted to buy hard kombucha. I Googled it. And again, passively, I was alerted that, hey, this is a growing thing that you may be interested in. You can also see a bunch of secondary keywords or things that people also search.

And again, this is just one example of where you don't have to do anything, but you are alerted of whether something's growing, is it more interesting? How many people actually care about this thing? And by the way, this is an extension that you can enable for Amazon, you can enable it for Etsy and YouTube, really on tons of sites that you use natively. Other examples are things like SimilarWeb. So again, if you're curious and you're just visiting different sites, it can alert you on the traffic volume of that site.

Another one that I use, or I'll kind of group these two, are Ghostery and Wappalizer. So Ghostery is actually like a privacy-first tool, but on any website, it'll kind of tell you what advertising pixels are running, the analytics. It'll block things for you if you'd like. Wappalizer is less privacy-focused, but instead it's telling you the build process.

of a particular site. And many people might think, why would I care about this? If you actually want to immerse yourself more in this digital world, one of the biggest gaps for most people is that they just have no idea how the web works. And so WebValizer is a cool tool where you can see basically the technology behind any

website? I was looking at mine and not all of these are relevant to kind of doing research, but I'll share a couple also. So Keepa was one I use anytime I'm on Amazon. You mentioned Honey. Capital One, the Eno extension, if you have a Capital One card, it will generate unique cards every time you're anywhere. Points Path is a cool browser extension that if you're looking on Google Flights,

It'll just search the award mileage prices for all the flights. So it overlays like this United flight is actually 12,000 miles. It's a better deal with points. It layers this information into where you already are. I've talked about library extension a lot. It tells you like, does the local library have this book? And do they have it on an ebook available right now? So you're like, oh, I want this book. Within 30 seconds, you could just boom. Now you've got that book. One other one that's kind of passive.

is I've used change detection.io. But there are a few other ones. I think distill is one. Some of them also have a cloud component. And they'll monitor websites for changes. And they'll alert you. Yep. Usually it's free. If you get alerted by the extension, like all the work is happening locally. They usually charge money if you want them to do it in the cloud. But there are some products when I'm like, some websites say, hey, alert me when this is in stock. But some don't. And they're

And there was a Patreon that I wanted to join because they had this private Slack group and there were only a limited number of members. So it was sold out. So I just like said, hey, monitor this. And when this button changes, alert me. I literally got an email, went to website, signed up five minutes later, sold out. And so I find that there's usually a browser extension for just about every single use case. And they add a ton of value to your search.

Yeah, exactly. And by the way, we're talking about browser extensions, but there are tons of non-browser extensions that also kind of automate or passively monitor things for you. One that I like is called Syphon, S-Y-F-T-E-N, because it crawls Reddit, it crawls Hacker News, Twitter. You can even set it up to crawl different Slack communities or Facebook groups, Lobsters or Dev.to, like some of the more niche sites. And you don't want to put a

super common keyword, but you can, let's say, put your name. I used to do this where I just wanted to know anytime anyone was referencing StephSmith.io, which is my website, right? And anytime someone linked to something on my website, I'm passively notified. You know, sometimes it's them just sharing an article. I can chime in and say, hey, thanks for sharing. Maybe someone has a question like, hey, I saw this person learn to code. Like, is this realistic? I can jump in there and answer the question. So I think just generally, it's not

human nature per se to think, let me think through all the things I want to be notified of. And again, you need to be careful of that. But these bots are hugely helpful if you do have specific things, like you said, price changes, website changes that you care about. I was going to say, let's jump into where you're doing searches. But I noticed that you're using Chrome and I really like Arc. I'm curious if you've tried Arc and how you feel about which browser you're using. You know what? I think that

There's like a group of technologies. I think browsers are one and information management is another where I think in most cases there's like an 80-20 and most will work. You know what I mean? Like as long as you've got a browser that will allow you to do extensions, I think you're like 80% of the way there. I've played around with Arc a little bit and really it's just like for

friction that's prevented me from switching. But I've heard really good things. And the same thing is true. Like a bunch of people see the way that I interface with the Internet and they're like, oh, you must be using Obsidian. You must be using Roam. And I'm like, no, I'm actually still using Evernote. Because again, it's just like friction to switch. And what's the 80-20 that allows you to aggregate information effectively? Yeah. And I guess the other thing, whether it's Chrome or Arc, 50% of my ability to

browse the internet more efficiently is probably just using keyboard shortcuts. Yes. Understanding various features that a browser might have, like...

window management for me, the ability to open a second window and I'll just like jump it to the right of the screen and then move it around. I use an app on the Mac called Rectangle to do this. It saves so much time just being able to like efficiently know here's how to open a tab. Here's how to switch between tabs. Here's how to like jump to the URL line and here's how to copy it. All that stuff, I would say, yeah.

There's probably a YouTube video that I don't know that will teach you all the common shortcuts, but spending time to learn them is maybe the most time-saving thing when it comes to research that you can do. Totally. I mean, using the same analogy that this is your rocket ship, I totally agree that people learning shortcuts, which sounds really silly or gimmicky in some sense, is not. It's

It is absolutely something people should learn. The way that I can navigate a browser window, navigate the tabs and switch between them. I also have a few extensions, like there's one called TextPlays, which allows you for anything that you kind of repeatedly use, you can create a shortcut for that. By the way, in many cases can also set up shortcuts locally on your Mac, for example. You can say, oh, I want this series of characters to equate to this action. If I use Superhuman a lot, I think there are so many ways that you can

Just modify your environment to work for you. Another one I use sometimes is one tab. If you're the kind of person like you or I, Chris, we have a lot of tabs open. Instead of having a bazillion open at all times, you can organize them. You can close them all at one time and save them as a group. So yeah, there's kind of endless modifications, but I do think shortcuts are actually important.

on the whole underrated. - And some of them aren't even keyboard shortcuts. I use like Google has docs.new, sheets.new, slides.new as URLs. If you just go to your browser and go to docs.new, it will open up a brand new Google Doc, which normally would take going to Drive, clicking the plus button, clicking the Google Doc,

And so it's like very, very quick to jump between things if you don't know how to paste without formatting, which like, honestly, I don't even know if I could tell you how to do it. Command shift V. It's like command option V or command option shift V. Or take a screenshot that's pasteable. It's command shift four.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Depending if you want to paste it or not. But see, knowing those things, and it's kind of funny, like you said, we just know them intuitively. But even I see people when they're trying to switch between tabs going for their mouse. It's like you should know that when you're in a tab to just be able to swap between them, open up a new tab, close something. Those are all shortcuts.

And I learned this originally in consulting because at least the place I worked was like, we're going to teach you not to use a mouse, which again, seems kind of silly, but actually helps you accelerate the way that you're able to navigate the web. Okay. So that's kind of the operating setup you have. Where are you going when you're doing research?

I think the average person is doing all of their research on Google. And I'm curious how different that is when you're trying to find something. Yes, you're absolutely correct. Google is incredibly good at sending you the kind of data that you need. Meaning, you know, if anyone's ever looked something up on Google and its location, they send you to maps, right? If you clearly want an image of a celebrity, they send you to Google Images, right?

However, I think the same way that Google is good at that, people should be more mindful of the kind of information that they're looking for because there's often better search engines that will deliver the information. So a very simple example of this is Google itself has something called dataset search. So if you're actually looking for data instead of, you know, a listicle or some sort of long form article on something,

You should be going to datasetsearch.research.google.com. It basically has aggregated a bunch of different sources that it kind of knows are data-based. It's funny, I just searched water quality in California.

And it's like, here is the water quality data from the California Open Data Set. Exactly what you need. Here are all the stations, lab results. Kind of wild. Yeah. I just looked up nuclear. Something really, really broad here. And you can see it's finding hundreds of data sets here. I can scroll down, but I can also adjust the usage rates. So if...

commercials allowed, the download format. Maybe I'm specifically just looking for a CSV. Was it updated recently? The provider. Maybe I'm specifically looking for, yeah, like a government database or something like that. Is it free, et cetera. So this is really helpful where, again, if you think about what a search engine is, Google is the most broad search engine. It's excellent, but

It's having to parse a bunch of things for you, and it's not set up for specific use cases. However, if you're able to start with a search engine where it knows what you're looking for, in this case, data, it's actually oriented around that, right? That's why you have these filters here. Similarly, you can find search engines for other sets of data. So one example is Reddit, right? Those are community forum posts. And so instead of looking at everything

everything on the web again through something like Google, you can use something like GigaBrain. So GigaBrain specifically is integrated into Reddit. It uses AI to parse related queries or related posts and comments. And so you can just in natural language go to GigaBrain the same way that you would Google and type a question.

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Let me see if I've got this right, because I would say 30% of my searches on Google are probably like some search query followed by site colon reddit.com. What I'm hearing is that I'm doing it the old way. I'm like my parents doing their Reddit searches like the bad way and that there's actually a site to do it 10 times more efficiently. Yeah. So two things actually on that. So you can use a site called reddital.com.

reddit.com and this basically is exactly what you're already doing with that modified query on Google. So if I look up water quality, like you said, I can search this and it's only going to return posts that exist on Reddit. So again, this is like the one-to-one of what you're doing. But if I paste this, how good...

is the water quality in California. So instead, I'm asking in natural language in something like GigaBrain this question, and it's finding relevant posts, scanned 862 comments. And then it's a little bit different from just giving you the 10 links, for example, in Reddital or Google. Instead, it's showing you the sources of where it's found its data, and then it's giving you a TLDR

here, it's sourcing kind of like perplexity where these answers in the TLDR are coming from. And instead of linking out to a Google page, it's always going to link out to a specific Reddit post or comment. And then you can look up follow-up questions. This is amazing. And then you can look through the specific source threads as well. Because in some cases, you're

it's going to pull a post with like one upvote. You probably don't want to put much stock into that, but you can see, for example, this one has 96 upvotes. This one has 42. You can go into the specific posts if you want as well. We didn't really mention why Reddit, like we mentioned what it is, but I find that

There are certain things that when you search are just so flooded with often paid editorial for things that it's like almost impossible to navigate. And so if I'm looking for like restaurant recommendations in a city, I find that Reddit is like a

fantastic place to get it. I feel like the people that are there are probably more similar to me than the people who are leaving reviews on TripAdvisor. And so I just did a search on GigaBrain for best croissant in Paris because I remember searching for like the best pastries. It basically just did the research that I would have done already. So I am disappointed in myself for not knowing about this, but thankful that I do now.

Yeah, and it looks like they also have a Chrome extension, which I haven't tried. But what you called out is actually so important because everyone treats all the data that exists online as identical, right? Just as

blob of information. However, to your point, there's actually pretty fundamental differences between, let's say, all of the content that people can just put up freely on Google, which is great, and Google's going to index it, and it's using its own algorithm to determine what is relevant or worthy of ranking. But Reddit has moderators. And so that's like an interesting spin, which maybe I think is a little underrated in the sense that

You're not going to have people advertising on Reddit. I mean, it exists on the platform, but on the post itself. You have these moderators taking away things that are spam. You have a self-policing community, which will say, no, this is wrong. Right. I disagree. I will downvote this.

And those mechanics actually really matter depending on the information that you're looking for. Like you're saying recommendations, I think this is actually a much better data set than something like broadly on Google, which is highly gamified. Even beyond restaurant recommendations, like product reviews. Like if you're trying to find like

What's the best vacuum? I've gotten to the point that it's like either Reddit or Wirecutter and everything in between. I'm like, I don't trust that this article of the 10 best vacuums and they break it into 10 categories of like best small vacuum, best vacuum for dog owners. I feel like every single thing on that page is totally...

totally paid and just probably at this point now the entire article is generated with some LLM that's just like write me an article that sells these 10 vacuums. I totally agree because it's just like the incentives of each platform and that's another thing that I think is like a meta if anyone's going to take away from this is like

every platform is different. The way that people act on Twitter is different from Reddit, which is different from all the information indexed by Google because of the incentives on those platforms. And so depending on what you're looking for, you maybe should use a Reddit in some cases. Maybe in other cases, you're actually using Twitter and you're using their advanced search to look at what your favorite creators are saying and looking at their top posts or see if they've actually mentioned a product before. But you should kind of stop and think

think about what am I trying to get from this? What platform is most suitable? And today there's all these tools that will basically index information from at least the hundred biggest sites out there. Yeah, YouTube's another one where if I'm trying to figure out like how to set something up on a camera I just bought,

Trying to find an article seems to always lead me to some complicated forum or a user manual. And then I search YouTube and it's like a video that's two minutes long of someone being like, here's how I did the thing you're trying to do. And I'm like, so true. So I feel like just figuring out what you're looking for. Like, am I looking for someone to explain how to do something? YouTube seems to be great. Am I looking for people to debate what's the best? Reddit seems to be great. And am I just looking for factual information? Google's pretty good.

Let me give you one other example of how it really matters what platform you're using in terms of getting better results. So something that you pinged me about earlier was electric bikes. I love my electric bike. And I did research on this years ago. And candidly, it was really haphazard. It was like using Google, kind of like you're saying, wondering what to trust.

I'm seeing all these brands. I'm seeing reviews online. But one site I've been using a lot more, more for framing a question, is this new AI search engine called Globe Explorer. The reason I like it is because it's highly visual. So all I searched here is electric bike brands. You can see it up top. And what it's done is basically grouped

the information in a helpful way where I can parse it almost like guiding me through the problem. It's saying, okay, so you clearly want to buy an electric bike. Here are the major brands, but let me group them. There's premium brands, there's mid-range brands, there's budget brands. There's also emerging brands, as you can see down here, and there's niche segments, there's different

regions around the world that you might care about. Oh, by the way, if you haven't done your research, there's also folding bikes. Is that something you might be interested in? There's cargo bikes. And you can go into each of these. It gives you pictures as well. But let's say I was interested in folding bikes like, oh, do I want off-road capable? Do I want retro inspired? And so it's almost like, again, guiding me through the problem of

Which to me, this visual nature and also kind of like the hierarchical subdivisions are so much more helpful than a Google, for example, which is just going to give me 10 blue links.

Which, again, we don't know how much we can trust what's in those links, but it's not framed in any sort of helpful way. Yeah. So for anyone interested, what electric bike did you end up with? I ended up with the RadRunner. It's funny because that was the default for us. A friend of mine's like, get a RadPower bike. And I was like, OK, we didn't end up getting one. But I was worried that I would go through like 20 hours of the most ridiculous research and end up back with, no, you should get the thing that you thought you should get in the first place. Exactly. But I mean, I think that's the idea, though, right? Like sometimes...

If you use a tool like this, it'll actually just remind you that

you don't want to go down the rabbit hole, right? There's way more than you could ever parse. And so it actually just helps you think through the problem in a more simplistic way. Okay, do I want premium, mid-range, or budget? I'm just going to decide that, right? And then within that, you can see the five brands. And then maybe you just make a call. I'm just going to choose this one. I'm going to do a quick Google search, make sure the reviews are okay, and move forward with it. That is a much easier process than, again,

starting with the 10 blue links and just getting overwhelmed and not knowing even how to approach the question. Yeah. And then I think

As you decide what you're looking for, you might come across other sites that are like a great source that we're not going to go to all the niche ones. As an example, Baby Gear Lab, I think it was, is a site that rates car seats. And I just remember when I found that, I was like, oh, they're doing their own testing, their own everything. It just felt like now I have a site for if I'm looking for this one thing that I found that I can trust and

And so you might be able to reverse that and do like a Reddit or GigaBrain search for like, what sites can I trust for this? And then find the site where the reviews aren't 100% paid reviews.

Exactly. And ultimately, what we're getting at is broad search engines work for broad things. But the more information that you need, or the more you need to deviate from the average or the incentives of the average, that's when some of these tools really come in handy. Yeah. So everything we've talked about, we probably could have mostly done three or four years ago. And then in the last few years, we've had this massive influx of different LLM tools. I'm curious how

any of the chat GPT perplexity, et cetera, have replaced a lot of this type of searching for you? So I would say it's helped in some cases.

So if I think about how do I use, let's say, a chat GPT, it's certainly for idea generation. It often isn't the last place I look. Again, I still think of something like a broad search engine like chat GPT or perplexity as the starting point. So it's almost like an ideation engine. In some cases, it helps me understand things, right? So they'll explain it to me like I'm five or sometimes in a character. That's helpful as well. One thing that I think is underrated for many of these LLMs is the ability to take

really messy information, whether it's your notes, whether it's a spreadsheet that you haven't perfectly set up and just clean it up for you. So again, I think it's like really good for that base layer, at least the broad LLMs. But again, I think that where

the LLMs get really interesting are when they're more curated or people have used the APIs for more curated action. So for example, there are sites like PodEngine, which use the ChatGBT API or the OpenAI API and basically have transcribed

a ton of podcasts allow you to index and search through them by keyword or by host or by subject matter. And so that's an example of where I think it's actually depending on what you're looking to do a lot more helpful than the broad based LLMs. Yeah, I tend to think that LLM searches and I'll say chat GPT, but I don't necessarily mean only chat GPT is good when

you can very quickly validate something. So for example, right before we started, I noticed that the camera that's sitting over my shoulder, this one, I was trying to focus on the screen and it was focusing on some tracking thing instead of the focus. And I just went to ChatGPT and I was like, hey, I have this Sony a6400. I can't figure out how to do this. And it's like, go to the camera menu, go to the touch operation setting and do this. If it's wrong, I'll know that. But I've also had times where it's really bad if...

if you are expecting comprehensive, I did an episode on there were like 55 ways to earn more points in miles without spending more. And I put the transcript in ChatGPT. I was like, how many ways are there listed in the transcript? And it was like, we found seven. And I was like, you missed so many. And so it's...

It's great for ideating for, hey, give me some ideas. Help me write this thing. Help me make a list of four sites to check out. What's a great option for this? But I find that if you want a comprehensive result, I haven't found a way to use it

that I feel confident. Yeah, I agree with that. I think of it as, like you said, the starting point in many cases, but definitely not the end point. There are some examples, like when I was in Japan recently, I found it really helpful. If we were in a specific city, chat GPT, tell me the five things that are specific to this city, not even locations, but like snacks or unique things that I should try while I'm here for the limited 24 hours I am. It can be helpful for that because there's no right answer where there's like

some right answers and you don't need to get all of them. But I do think, again, where AI is becoming more interesting is when it's tailored. So another example is ConsenSys is an app or a website that uses AI to parse academic papers, right? So this is a case where there's just like endless information out there. If I were to ask you, for example, Chris, if you think blue light blockers are legitimate, do you think they're actually the kind of product that

people should be using. If you Googled that, I don't think I would trust the results at all, right? My understanding, by the way, is no, but.

Exactly. I mean, I agree. And so if you use something like consensus, though, it's basically indexing the top cited papers around that particular subject matter. The thing I like about that tool in particular is it has a consensus meter. And so it's not definitively saying yes or no, but it helps you gauge, do scientists mostly agree with this? Do scientists mostly disagree with this? And then similar to perplexity and GigaBrain, it'll link out to the relevant papers that it's using to...

the consensus meter. Just like Google, ChatGPT is broad. It'll work for broad use cases. As soon as you want something more specific, you're going to need a tool that's built around that kind of information. Yeah. I just did that search on consensus, which I've never seen before. And it's like, studies suggest that blue light blocking glasses may reduce subjective sleep onset latency and awakenings, but do not significantly improve objective sleep measures or visual performance. ConsensusMeter,

consensus meter, 23% yes, 31% possibly, 46% no. I guess we were right. Yeah. And I've definitely used the consensus meter in cases where it's like 100% yes or like 87% no. So again, it's a helpful gauge. And I just love how some of these tools are, again, even just the UI is ever so slightly different because it's oriented around what you're trying to learn, which is not like 10 blue links. In this case, it's a gauge. I want a meter for how people think about this.

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I just want to thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I don't know how much you've played with Notebook LM, which Google released, but...

I'm hopeful that this is kind of what the future looks like. It's a little limited now for anyone not familiar. It basically takes Google's kind of Gemini AI LLM search tool, but lets you specify specific sources. So you can say, let's say I was going to do an interview with Steph Smith, which we're doing now. And I was like, oh, take these seven YouTube videos, take her website, take the product she sells, and then take my notes and

along with all the other knowledge you have, but focus on that and draft me some questions to ask her. I did not use that for this because I went down the notebook LM rabbit hole after prepping for our conversation, but I was really impressed. I don't know what your take is.

I haven't played around with it enough to have an opinion, but the premise is incredible as in not just notebook LM, but for the longest time. And this is not me throwing shade at anyone in particular, but people have been using this term second brain. Right. And in many cases, what I've found is the tooling out there is actually more a wait and

on most people. They spend more time organizing information, like making sure it's in the right notebook, like having folders that they don't use and then need to clean up later. But this idea of AI being able to ingest information with a specific context window that you've defined and do something with it, so be proactive and actually support your endeavors, is new.

for most people, right? And so I think the whole premise of Notebook LM, there's other tools like Cubby or even some of the stuff that like ChatGPT is doing.

And there's tons of products trying to figure this out. Like there's MEM and I'm sure all of the other tools like Obsidian are also integrating AI. But I'm excited for the day where you really do have a second brain working for you. Yeah. Right now it can't tie in with everything. It's mostly Google Docs, PDFs, websites, and YouTube videos. But once it can look at all of your notes, all of your emails, all of your documents you've stored and really kind of help there, it's pretty cool. I was

I was talking to a friend who placed an order for something and like an hour later decided he wanted to cancel it and they hadn't shipped it. And they were like, sorry, we don't allow cancellations. And he was like, how would a pro do this? And he had the PDF of a book about negotiation. He uploaded the PDF to notebook LM, copied the text from the email and their response and was like, help me push back and try to get a refund. And the data source was using everything you now know about this book,

And they like generated a response. He sent it to them and they were like, you know what? We're willing to do a refund this time. And so you can obviously just use ChatGPT and say, hey, help me out.

help me get a refund. But he was like, I want to use the tactics from this book. And so the more you can actually specify, hey, help me find a car seat, but only look at Wirecutter and Baby Gear Lab and Reddit, you know, like the future of being like, I don't want these results. I do want these sources craft what I care about the opinions I have. I just feel like we're going to have a really amazing set of tools. I don't know, six, 12, 24 months.

And by the way, my ask for the people building the tools is we talked about browser extensions earlier. And the reason that we love them being that they're passive, meaning they provide value when you don't ask. I think that's also one of the key missing features, you could say, or ways of operating for many of these information-based tools is that, you know, if I think about when I forget to use, let's say, a chat GPT, it's just because I

forget, right? There's friction for me to pull it up and think, oh, this would be a good tool for this. And many people still haven't updated their workflows for the very same reason. But

someday, I don't know how soon it is, you're hopefully going to have the kind of tool that pops up and says, hey, like you forgot to do this. Or hey, I noticed you have this thing on your calendar tomorrow. I've already gone through and created your prep document or whatever it might be. And right now, so many things require so much active thought to then go pull up a specific website or tool, collect the information that you think you need the tool to have, input it in, find the right prompt. And that's

That's okay. Like, I think we all still should be thinking critically about the actions we're taking. What I'm describing is actually, in my mind, more of a second brain, right? Which is proactively doing things for you. And I need you to know what I was writing in Slack and in my email and what's on my calendar and in my texts. And right now they're so siloed that the only way it works is if I basically take all my texts and dump them into the same place that I dump all this stuff in. And it's pretty tough.

I see a future, but it'll be interesting to see how much Slack is willing to let someone else look at the information or Google is willing to let someone else view the information. If you're an Android user, I'd be pretty optimistic that Google's got my email, my calendar, my text messages on my phone. I feel like there's a lot going on there that could be super interesting. Yeah, I know there's at least some cohort of listeners who are like, yeah, this is like perfect surveillance. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think the trade-off here is do I want to give up all my information? And I probably err on the sure, but I guarantee someone listening is like, you are crazy. Are you the kind of person who's like...

Yeah, Facebook have all my information. I'd prefer better ads versus turning that off. Yeah, I mean, I don't really care. I prefer no ads, right? But if they're going to show me ads, I'd rather them be relevant for some companies. I feel like there are probably companies that are smaller than a Facebook or a Google where I'd prefer them not to have information. But I don't know if I actively turn those things off.

You? Yes. But again, this is one of those cases where I have to be so proactive about it. I think every single one of these websites, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, you can go in and you can say, hey, I don't want you targeting me based on these things. Or Facebook used to have a thing. You used to be able to go to a URL and it would tell you the number of third party websites with pixels that were sending Facebook data on you from different

their website, as in your web habits or patterns. And the number that I had when I saw this was 1,200. 1,200 third-party sites. And of course, I know they're probably sending limited information and just what kinds of websites I'm going to, etc. But you could turn that off. And so whenever I am aware of those things, I do turn them off. Yeah. I remember I used to work at this company called Simple Geo. And I

Yeah.

Based on the data we know, we feel like we can, within a 70% chance, predict where any person will be at any given point in time because we've seen where they've been the last year. And granted, that's like, okay, well, you're usually at home at night and you're usually at work during the day. It's not like it could necessarily predict everything. But it's like, well, we know you go to the grocery store on Saturday. It was pretty crazy. So I feel like if someone could really...

make that easier, that'd be an interesting product for anyone who wants to go build it. You know, maybe I should just do an episode and go down the rabbit hole of what are all the things you can turn off. Did you see there was like a big article recently where automakers sold driver's data for shockingly low amounts of money is one of the headlines.

GM, Honda, Hyundai all sold data to Verisk. So I do think it's worthwhile to compile a list of those things that you can control. But there's this whole spiral, right? If you go down the rabbit hole where you're like, oh, actually, just if I buy a car, they're selling my location data to companies like the ones you mentioned. Yeah, it's like, do I have to manually write them a letter to opt me out? Or how does this work? And we've talked about all these searches. I'm going to reverse it to a search that I've done a lot.

which is probably relevant to what we're saying. Anytime I was trying to recruit a candidate or get a job or make a connection, I'd be like, oh, I want to email this person. And there's no database of everyone's email address. But I found that there are certain tactics you can use to try to find this information. And I'll follow up with how you can remove it also, because I've tried to hide and both use

But if you just search the internet for an email address in quotes on Google, like it will show you if that email address has been posted anywhere. You're like, oh, I really want to reach out to someone. Let's try. Does...

Steph at Steph Smith work. Oh, great. Now I know that person's email. If they're at a company, you know, you search for different variations of first last first dot last last first initial that works. There are a bunch of browser extensions. One of them's like Lucia, which basically will just somehow give you someone's email address and phone number from their LinkedIn page.

There's other ones like Hunter, I think, is another one. Yep. There's a ton of these. Another little one is if you take someone's email address and you go to Gmail and you put it in the two, it will populate with their Google profile if that email's there. So you could validate, does that photo look like that person? Yeah.

And unfortunately, it's just not that difficult to find emails. Surprisingly, I think finding addresses and phone numbers might actually be even easier than emails, though, for the purpose of like business, I'm not going to show up at someone's house, right? Like the email is more relevant to me. But I remember a while back, I

especially when we were starting this podcast, I was like, I would prefer not to have all of my personal information all over the internet. Like Tim Ferriss has written publicly about some crazy people doing crazy things. And so if you just Google yourself, like first name, last name, and like the city you live in, or your street address, you would be shocked at how many people doing that their address is just right there in the search results. And

And you can go to lengths to remove that information. Most of it is that there are these companies that are probably not too dissimilar to the companies automakers are selling data to that solely exist to broker in personal information. And so I actually went through the process myself of...

okay, let's go to each one of them. So I searched my name, searched my address and city. And I went to the website of like some data broker website. And I was like, please remove this listing. And some of them are like, upload a picture of your driver's license and like prove that this is you. Someone on GitHub had a list of all of them. And there's like hundreds of them. It's not like, you know, 10 data brokers. So I spent about 15 hours on this. And then I gave up and I was like, let's just search online for companies that do this automatically. And

And there are a handful of them. I asked around. Most of the people I knew that were either executives at a company or more high profile used Delete Me. And I just reached out to them. And I was like, Hey, I'm going to use this product. By the way, I also have a podcast. Do you want to work with us? And so we've been doing it for a couple years. And you get this report. And it's like,

every single quarter that I look or six months, however often I get it, I'm like, there are still things popping up. I don't know who's selling my information, but it is constantly happening. And it's like whack-a-mole. But going back to all this AI stuff, I am terrified that someone is going to take my voice and like call my family, pretend to be me, use the information about, oh, I know, you know, your son lives at this address and this is his social security number and all this stuff. You know, I want to be

at the least amount of risk for that, mostly for the safety of family. Like I don't need my parents getting phone calls thinking it's me. You know, my wife and I were talking and she's like,

If someone called my mom and was like, your daughter's in the hospital, like I have her driver's license and her address, but I can't find her insurance card and the surgery costs money. Can we get a credit card? What would happen in that circumstance? So yeah, delete me has been one that I've used for, I don't know, three years. I bought it for all my parents, for my family. Like every Christmas, I'm like, do you want a present? Or can I just keep buying you delete me because I want to keep you safe. So that's funny. It's one of those gifts where you're kind of like, I'm making a statement with this, you know? Yes.

Yeah, I recently with the social security breach and all of the other breaches that have happened over the years have definitely frozen my credit, used a bunch of these tools to make sure I'm hopefully not on these sites. But like you said, it is very much whack-a-mole. And with AI, it just feels like we are definitely approaching that future where it's like,

there's the good guy AIs basically trying to reverse the damage of the bad guy AIs. And you kind of need the technology on your side because certainly the attackers are using it. You need it on the defense side too. Yeah, I did an episode 78, if you want to go back and listen, where I basically made my action list of like, here are all the things I'm doing. I'll share one that's

that is pretty wild that both could be a benefit to you, but also could be a secret source of your information. And so you can scrub all of your information from data broker sites. I mentioned Delete Me. Just full disclosure, they are a sponsor of the podcast. Just so anyone listening, this is like they are a sponsor only after I reached out to them and they'd never sponsored a podcast before. And I was like, hey, I love your product. Can we work together? So allthehacks.com slash Delete Me, 20% off.

Love the product. But another source of information is the unclaimed money database. And so any state you live in, you can go search and you might have money owed to you. All you have to do is search by the name and they actually display in most states your address. And so we were walking around our neighborhood and there was this house that wasn't a very large house, but it always had a black suburban outside of it with like two people. And so we're like, someone important lives in this house.

And I was looking online, trying to figure out who lived there. And I couldn't find it out. I was like, they did a good job. You know, they scrubbed their information. But then I went to the unclaimed money database and I searched by address. And sure enough, there were a bunch of listings of names. And I just Googled those names. And one of them was a very like prominent founder of a tech company. And, you know, I was like,

Well, that's probably who lives here. So fortunately, we had a friend of a friend. I reached out to them and was like, just so you know, you're clearly trying to be extra cautious. You have 24-7 security in front of your house.

but I figured out who you are and where you live in about five minutes on the internet. So you might want to close that up. Oh, wow. I know. Well, that's what's so crazy about this whole digital world, which relates to what we were saying earlier about just like your browsers or spaceship in this crazy world that definitely exists and that tons of people have access to. And it often doesn't feel that way sometimes. But the reason I'm bringing this back up is because

Like you said, people will take all of these precautions, take all of these steps to learn skills in the real world and act like the digital world is just this like, who cares, you know?

It's just this fun thing that I happen to spend time on. But it's equally real in a way. And it's so interesting, the dismissiveness sometimes around like, okay, I'll have 50 security cameras around my home, but then not take the time to figure out your own digital security. It's kind of wild to me. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, I've accepted that if someone really wants to, they can probably get anything. But the more you can make yourself not a target for someone like...

buys a batch of 100,000 social security numbers and try to fish from their family members. And they just search online. They're like, wow, 10,000 of them are really easy targets. 80,000 are pretty easy targets. And then 10,000 of them, there's all their data that's scrubbed from all these places and it's going to be hard. Let's just go after the 90,000. I accept that there is risk for all of us. But if I could just make myself not the easy target, then I'm hopeful that I'll be not targeted.

But it's so true that you make the same trade-offs in real life. You do certain things so that you are not a target in real life, right? You don't walk by yourself super late at night. You don't walk around and like waving your iPhone in the air saying, hey, I'm a billionaire, right? You don't do those things. And I'm not saying that people do that quite the same online. But my point is most of the time people don't take the steps to be less of a target in the same way that they do in person. Yeah. Okay.

Let's pivot back from privacy and security because I think it's important, but I'm curious about a few things that we didn't get to. So doing research online, how do you validate sources? Because we talked about people can do whatever they want on the internet. Like it's open. You can write anything. How do you make sure that the information you're finding is real and is not something you shouldn't be trusting? Yeah. So I think part of it is,

What we talked about earlier around where am I getting information and for what purpose, right? Because not everything needs to be from an academic paper. But in a case you do actually want to lean on something that's been rigorously tested, maybe you go to a consensus or maybe in some cases you go to a Reddit or GigaBrain, right? And you try to

Look for, again, pieces of information that suit the particular kind of data that you're looking to get. So that's one thing. I think the other thing that, again, is underutilized is the fact that compared to in person where, let's say, you walk up to a stranger or even a group of three friends, you kind of trust their perspective, even though it's, you know, N of three perspective.

One of the most useful mechanisms you can use online is the fact that you can see what has been highly upvoted, what has been highly vetted, liked, reshared, etc. And so I think actually that's something underrated on many social platforms, whether it be Reddit, whether it be Twitter. I think Community Notes is great as well because something is

up for public scrutiny, which it isn't necessarily in something like a Google. If someone posts an article on Google and then they just go and they hire an SEO agency and they get a bunch of backlinks, like that is a gamified way of getting credibility. You can't really do that on something like a Reddit or a Twitter, right? Like you're going to be vetted in the public square. And so that's another thing that I often do look for. And then there are certain search engines, we've already kind of touched on them, that are

designed for specific things, right? So like, for example, the whole world of supplements is really fraught, right? There's specific search engines for that. There's examined. I think there's another one called Pilser. I don't really operate in the world of supplements, but I'm just using that as an example. If you are looking for high quality information, again, don't use the mass, super broad search engine that is easily gamified to deliver you information. The

The final thing I'll just say is like with everything that I just shared, I shared different kinds of data. And I do think people should be cross-referencing depending on what you're looking for. If it's high stakes, don't just look on Reddit, look on other social platforms, look on Google, go find a data set, you know, use the variety of information that you have access to. As people say, I think it's a little overused, but do your own research. You know, one of the things that I find the internet is really good for

Obviously, there are places that are anonymous, but a lot of places aren't. So when you meet someone and they say, oh, let me tell you all about what it's like to go to Japan in the winter. You have no idea if they've even been to Japan, how many times. But on the Internet, if they're on Reddit, you can go see what are they also posting around? And you're like, wow, yeah, I'm in the Japan forum and someone's giving Japan advice. And 99% of the thing they're talking about is in a punk rock forum. Maybe that's not their area of expertise, but you can also do it on Facebook.

websites like Forbes, which by the way, maybe Forbes won't love this, but there are a lot of like contributing authors on Forbes. And I've gotten so many emails from people that are like, hey, for $150, I'll include you in a list or I'll write an article about you. And so you can kind of click on the authors of all of these articles anywhere and be like, what do they typically write? I remember doing this one time on someone who was reviewing very kindly, like a fintech product. And

And then I looked at their profile. Everything they've done is just a glowing review of even competitive products. It's like they've never said a negative thing. And it's like, I'm not sure this person is taking their job with a critical eye. And so it is nice that you could Google what is their background? What have they written before? I think it's Muckrack. Is Muckrack the place where you can look at everything everyone's written across all sites? Oh, yes. Yeah. Muckrack for journalists and PR. Yep. I thought they used to have a place...

where you could find a person and what they've written. We just went to Iceland and funny enough, our guide is a guy named Brandon Presser. He wrote The Lonely Planet for Iceland. Like he knows everything there is to know about Iceland. And I'm looking at his profile and it's like, as seen on Medium, New York Times, Yahoo Life, Bloomberg, MSN. And he's like, oh, a lot of the things he's written are on Iceland. So if you just happen to see him write a tweet and you're like, this sounds good, but does he really know anything about Iceland?

Turns out he does. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why people are increasingly gravitating toward individuals that they have over time established trust with, because let's just be real. Other than a few bright spots, most of these search engines, because they've gotten so big, there's an incentive for people to gamify them. And so it's not to say that something on Google is bad.

bad or inaccurate. But like you're saying, it's worth taking the extra steps to just justify, is this someone I trust? Because let me just say, without calling anyone out in particular, I have definitely seen contributors who

are shady. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. One thing we didn't talk about, we're collecting all this information when we're doing research, when we're trying to find stuff. Where do you put it all? Right? Like we talked about this concept of a second brain. Tiago's been on the show and he's written a book about it. I feel like everyone I know, even the hyper optimized, it's still like, I've got some notes. I've got some Google docs. Like I've got some bookmarks. Have you found anything that makes sense?

storing the information that you're learning and finding easier? So on the tool side, I'll say that I find quite a few of them very similar. As in, I do think some, let's say like Evernote was maybe one of the earlier information management tools, and then you have Notion, and then you have some more sophisticated tools. And I think

There's one for everyone. But I've seen people who are highly productive with information management use Apple Notes, literally physically writing down a Post-it note and treating it like a Kanban board. So I think to me, the tools in this case, again, coming back to what I said before, aren't necessarily the solution. But what I will say is that I think something that I believe Tiago talks about as well is what most people don't take the time to do is to just

orient their quote second brain into things that they know they're going to need or care about later. Let me give you an example. Something that I

pay attention to a lot or statistics that I think matter in terms of what's to come. So I'm not even talking about niche trends, but for example, like when I tweeted about yesterday, I was like, there's less than 10 members of Congress that are engineers. I think that's really interesting and says something a lot bigger about the world that we live in than meets the eye or the one that kind of

spun me onto this trend was the one that people often referred to with Bezos. Like he saw way back before he started Amazon that the internet was growing at such a rapid clip that he was like, okay, this really means something about the way that our world is changing. And therefore I'm going to start this digital bookstore. So I collect those and share them over time. But

Coming back to your question, in order for me to do that effectively, I have to know that is the kind of information of a specific format that I'm looking for. And so I have a note for that and I have my brain kind of passively as I'm looking through things, not just like willy nilly being like, this is interesting. Let me throw it in here. This is interesting. Let me bookmark it.

It's specifically looking for that kind of information of that format. So what that means is then when I'm operating around the web, again, like just meandering around this crazy place, I'm filtering myself, which means that my quote, second brain, which again, Evernote notion, you can use whatever tool you want, is organized in a way that I don't have to go back and clean it up and wonder like, what am I going to do with all this information? I have everything.

a project, a mandate of what I'm looking for and how it's going to be used later. Yeah. I find that once you figure out how you're going to use the information, it becomes so much easier. So a couple of examples, I send a newsletter every Saturday and throughout the week, I'm collecting all the things that I want to share on Saturday. So

somebody launches a new credit card with an amazing deal or their points are on sale from Hilton or like whatever it is, there's a lot of travel and miles stuff. There's also business stuff. Like I watched a show and it was amazing. I want to put it in. Now that I know what I want to do, I create a place that's easy to manage that. So for me, that's a database in Notion. And,

And there's this Notion browser extension that is not the Notion browser extension. It's another one called Save to Notion. And by default, every time I hit the keyboard shortcut, it pops up and it just puts that page as an item in our database of things we're going to share on Saturday. Because I know where it's going to go, it's very easy. I have...

bookmark folders in Arc for different projects. Like one is YouTube, one is newsletter growth. And anytime I find something, instead of trying to do that now, I will put it in that place for a later time. And then once I'm done with that project, I can just delete the folder. Another big one that's really helped for me, this is an Arc extension. I will share the link to Arc, the mobile app,

And one of the features they have is when you share anything on iOS to the Arc app in like the share sheet where you hit the share button, it will put it as a tab on your computer the next time you go into your browser. So whenever I get to my browser, I'm like, oh, here are the seven websites that you wanted to look at when you were on your phone but chose to look at later.

And sometimes the Notion app also, if I'm already sure I just want to put it in the newsletter on Saturday, I can share it to Notion.

And that sharing process will let you pick a database you want to share it to. So you can actually just share it directly in the place. But it's because I'm like, I know what I want to do with the thing. And I think that's where it really matters. Like if I'm collecting, what are the best swim classes on the peninsula in the Bay Area? It's like now I've decided I want to collect them all so I can go make a Notion page, a Google Doc or whatever. And I know where to put it. But if you don't know where you're going to put it, then you're just amassing a bunch of iOS notes. Yeah.

And for that, I kind of like the idea of having one app that is like your disorganized app so that you can try to, like you would in your inbox, delete it or move it. I say this works better in theory than in practice, but like I regularly go through iOS notes and I'm like, I'm either going to delete them or I'm going to go put them somewhere to use them so that I can kind of process them. But if I looked right now, the number of notes I have is probably a lot. Okay. I

I have a solution for you. I actually think this is one of the most underrated things that I've only started to deploy over the last year or so, which is expiry. Like,

everything in the world expires right and we expire as humans food expires things that are digital don't expire on their own which is a pro and a con but in this case i think to your point there's things that you don't need to add an expiry to because they're really critical but there is this everyone's got it this stream of information articles they should have read podcasts they should have listened to random notes or quotes from friends that maybe are important maybe not and

And so I have a template that I use in Notion where you can add things. It's basically like a to-do list. And then you can set your own functionality so that the to-do list expires or any entry expires automatically.

if it has not been removed or deleted or checked off by a certain point. I think this is the most simple idea, but something that has actually helped me a lot because I am the kind of person, I think like many others who are like, I don't want to get rid of this or like maybe this is important. But the like enforced expiry, I think is very helpful to just be like, if I didn't get to it, it wasn't that important.

I'm really surprised that you don't like ARK or haven't gone into it because they have this concept. It's very controversial. If you have a tab and that tab has not been engaged with in, you can specify between 12 hours and 30 days.

It's gone. And they do not have an option for never. They have this built in and they've made the design decision of like, you cannot keep it. Now they have a whole thing that's kind of like bookmarks. They're called pin tabs. You can move something there if you're like, I really know I want this forever. But your default tab space, it's just gone. No, I was going to say that alone because I did not know that was a feature. I'm convinced. Like I'm going to switch over this afternoon because I do think that's underrated.

We talked a lot about things that kind of anyone doing consumer research can use to make that more efficient. But I know there's another area that you kind of go deep on, which is around business ideas and internet trends. Can you talk a little bit about the high level of that research and kind of what you've put together for people who want to go deeper? Yeah. So Internet Pipes is the product that I use to aggregate all of this information. And to your point,

It can kind of be used in different ways. It can be used if you're just someone who happens to use the web and wants to do that a little more efficiently. But it also can be for someone who wants to create content and wants to leverage all the information online or create a business. And so it's kind of structured where it shows you how to go through that process of like exploring and then generating ideas and then validating them and then figuring out what else is out there, evaluating them. And so there's like

over 100 tools that I share in internet pipes. But I would just say the key thing that people should take away is that

Today, in 2024, there is data or a tool built for just about anything. There's tools like Import Yeti, where you can literally look at what companies exist and where their suppliers are or who their suppliers are, the breakdown of the kind of products that they're shipping into the country. There are tools like Harper's Index, which is more so a report than a tool, but you can see every single month for like decades, they have aggregated

almost like survey information on key questions that matter to that time. So in this case, like September or October 2024, and you can go back in time and see how people's opinions have changed.

I talked about some of the academic paper tools. There's a really interesting one called Research Rabbit. There's tools like AppMagic where you can see all of the different apps that are making money or not making money, the largest ones across different categories. And if you think about how big the app store, like that is a really meaningful data set. So there's so many tools, but the idea is that most people, I think, interface with the web

with just a few, the biggest ones, ChatGPT, Google. And what really people should be taking away is that there are just so many tools out there that will help you understand what people are doing, thinking, what they care about, what they're scared of, what they're buying, all the actions that we now take online. And by the way, that's only going to increase as in the way that we engage with the world is becoming more and more digital. So those data sets are being built up

even more so. And so five years from now, there's going to be even more sites that are that kind of meta layer that's trying to make sense of what people do online. Yeah, I was in Iceland last week. And one of the guys that was there on the trip was like, I quit my thing. And I'm going to go figure out what's next. And I want to explore all this stuff. And he's like, I'm going to go home and I'm signing up for internet pipes. I was like, Oh, I'm recording a podcast. We're

with Steph next week. And I was like, maybe you should wait a week because she'll probably have some kind of offer for everyone here. I don't know if that's the case, but I figured I'd ask and I told him I'd let him know. Yeah, we can totally spin one up. I'll spin up a code right now. We can just do all the hacks. Great. Yeah. So if people go to internetpipes.com, when they get there, there will be a special code for everyone in all the hacks. Awesome. And one tool, you might already have this, but I didn't mention it earlier.

And I've actually used it so much recently that I thought I'd flag and it's webscraper.io. And they have this Chrome extension. And with the Chrome extension, it's free. And anytime you're on a website that you want to just collect the information, but it's not on one page or it's like not structured the right way, they will grab it all. And you kind of have to...

program it. And if you don't know how, you can literally go, hey, ChatGPT, help me program this. You can watch their tutorials. Let's say there's something where there's like 12 pages of 25 things on a page. And when you click into each one, there's some information. And I remember a long time ago doing this in a much less automated

automated way. But when we were looking at wedding venues, there was a website that had all these wedding venues, but they had no filtering and searching, but they had all the information. They had like all the ones in Northern California, what the cost was and whether they were indoor or outdoor, but you couldn't search or filter. So you could use this tool and say, Hey, go through every page, click the next button to collect them all, but click on each link while you're on them and download this and put it in a table. And then let me export the CSV all for free so I can do it myself.

And take this little bit of a pause so you don't hit rate limits on a website for blocking you. And I've used this tool a lot. And so whenever you see a data set on the internet that you're like, I want it, obviously not to go resell, but for personal use, WebScraper.io, the extension is so good.

Yeah, I use one that's very similar called Browse.ai, but it's just another example of where like web scraping, let's say five, 10 years ago was just so much harder. I think most people would be surprised if they haven't tried these themselves at just how intuitive like their UI and actually being able to be like, yep, I want this field and this field. And like you said, click this button the same way that ChatGPT is natural language. This is like natural UI, right? Where just anyone can intuit it.

And what do you think the difference someone might experience is from like, I just use Google to I've now listened to this whole episode and I'm going to change the way I use the internet. How would you describe that difference? Yeah, we've gone through a bunch of tools. If you can just learn a few things as you're navigating the web, one of them being you

You should use passive tools as much as you can, right? So this is like the easy win. If you can set up a few browser extensions, if you can set up a few things that are monitoring the things that you care about online, that's easy. That's making these bots work for you so that you don't have to be as intentional or active to think, oh, I need to go look this up or I need this information at this time. So that's the easy thing that anyone can literally just take 30 minutes after listening to this and book

bookmark time to go and implement the right browser extensions to set up the right tools so that your, again, your spaceship toward navigating the web is set up so it's just, let's say, 30% better than it was before. The other thing is just of the tools that we've mentioned today, pick a few, spend 10 minutes on each of them, figure out which ones are actually maybe useful for your kind of future research.

And just have them bookmarked, like literally have a folder in your browser that says, this is my like go-to research checklist. It could be consensus if you care about academic papers. It could be GigaBrain if you care about Reddit. It could be some sort of advanced search query if you care about Twitter. So you can have these that are your checklist as you're going through things. And then I've talked about this before, but just the meta of being aware that like

there's just so much out there. And so I can't cover all of the different niches that people care about, but take the extra time to see, is there a search engine for the field that I'm in? Is there a website that's, as you said, kind of curating

real good reviews for a subject matter that I care about. A lot of the time these things exist, but most people just don't take that extra tiny bit of time to actually locate. And they don't always have the best SEO. So like they might not show up when you're searching for the car seat, but they might show up if you search for best unbiased car seat review site on Reddit. Exactly. So it's kind of like anything where if people just take a little bit of extra time ahead of

to think through like what am I trying to do here and do I have the resources to do that well instead of just starting is like just a slight modification to the way that most people operate online but I think would get them much better results. If people really take a second to reflect on

the number of hours, the percentage of their life that they spend online, let's say something like a third, a fifth, and that most people don't even spend an hour thinking about how to optimize that. To me, that's crazy. And so if people just take a few steps like the ones we talked about today, I think they're going to be so much better set up to actually navigate the web and that, let's say, third of their life that they're spending online. Love it.

Okay, we talked about internet pipes. Where else can people go if they want to go further down this rabbit hole? So I tweet a lot about a lot of this stuff. So my handle is StephSmithIO. My website is

stephsmith.io. And yeah, I think that's the best place to start. I also have a personal podcast where we go over kind of like this podcast instead of all the hacks. It's called The Shit You Don't Learn in School. So it's not so much research based, but just all the things that I honestly feel like people should have spent more time with and that for some reason is not in our curriculum, but actually help us live better, more productive lives. I love it. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been awesome. Thanks, Chris.

That episode was so much fun. I really hope you enjoyed it. Two quick reminders. Steph did set up the code AllTheHacks for a massive discount on internet pipes for all of you. And I talked a lot about Delete.me, which is the product I use, love, and pay for that helps remove all of your personal data on the web. And you can get 20% off Delete.me for you and your family at AllTheHacks.com slash Delete.me.

All right, that's it for this week. Email is podcast at allthehacks.com. I will see you next week.