Memos by Brian Swichkow

Don't Be Evil
"Don't Be Evil" is the first podcast-episode of the Everything They Know podcast, hosted by Ari Andersen. Ari opens with the frame that carries the series: Harari's Faustian bargain between humans...
This Will Change Everything
"This Will Change Everything" is the eighth podcast-episode of the Everything They Know podcast, hosted by Ari Andersen. Recorded in late March 2020, weeks into COVID-19 lockdown, this is a special...
While We Were Looking
"While We Were Looking Over There" is the second podcast-episode of the Everything They Know podcast, hosted by Ari Andersen. Ari opens on the ten-year whiplash from techno-optimism to a "society of...
Extraordinary Levels
"Extraordinary Levels of Specificity" is the fourth podcast-episode of the Everything They Know podcast, hosted by Ari Andersen. Ari opens with the rigged-poker frame — you're betting against a house...
Judy Estrin
Judy Estrin is an internet pioneer, Silicon Valley leader, technology entrepreneur, author of Closing the Innovation Gap, and CEO of JLabs. Since 1981, Estrin has co-founded over ten technology...
Everything They Know
Everything They Know is a podcast about how technology giants harvest behavioral data for profit, and how this Human Use of Human Beings destroys our society. It was launched on February 4, 2020....
Ignoring the Harm
Ignoring the harm is the pattern Judy Estrin identifies in industries whose incentives reward growth over consequence: executives rarely set out to do damage — they ignore early signals, dismiss...
Friction as a Good Thing
Friction as a good thing is Judy Estrin's counter-axiom to Silicon Valley's frictionless ideal: some level of resistance in systems and in daily life is healthy, and engineering all of it away makes...
Eric Yang (Junto)
Eric Yang is a social-media founder who left Vanderbilt University to build Junto, a nonprofit social network "founded in the spirit of authenticity." Junto was structured as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit —...
Sarah Miller (Economic Liberties)
Sarah Miller is an American antimonopoly advocate and the founding executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, described by The New York Times as "central to making the issue [of...
Matt Stoller
Matt Stoller is an American author and antimonopoly researcher, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and writer of BIG, a widely read newsletter on monopoly power and...
K. Krasnow Waterman
K. Krasnow Waterman is an American technology executive and lawyer, CEO of LawTechIntersect, LLC, and a woman-in-tech whose career spans three professions: managing large-scale technology at JPMorgan...
Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen is a British-American author, broadcaster, and internet entrepreneur, best known as one of the earliest and most persistent critics of Web 2.0's utopian promises. His 2007 book The Cult...
Open Systems Innovation
Open systems innovation is the design philosophy of the early internet era — succeeding by interconnecting diverse systems rather than owning every layer — under which value spreads broadly across an...
Hash
Hash is an ai-powered personal news-synthesis engine that reads every source you follow — RSS feeds, email newsletters, forwarded emails, Reddit, Hacker News — and delivers one personalized daily...
Smart Connections
Smart Connections is a free, open-source Obsidian plugin that adds semantic search to a vault using an embedding model that runs entirely on the user's device. Created by Brian Petro and first...
Obsidian Bases
Obsidian Bases is a core Obsidian plugin that renders the properties already stored in notes as filterable database views — tables, cards, lists, and maps — without moving any data out of Markdown....
Obsidian Headless
Obsidian Headless is the official command-line client for Obsidian Sync, released in February 2026, which keeps a vault current on a machine with no graphical application running. The client is...
Karpathy LLM Wiki Plugin
Karpathy LLM Wiki is an Obsidian community plugin that implements Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern inside a vault, compiling notes and PDFs into interlinked entity and concept pages without using...
How to Connect Your Obsidian Vault to Claude Code
If you've got an Obsidian vault full of notes and you're using Claude Code, the obvious question is: can Claude just read all of this? Yes. And it's easier than you'd think. The connection runs...