In episode 469 of The Armen Show, I talk through some of the ways I’m using AI and other new tools in 2026, and what becomes possible when these technologies are applied to years of accumulated information, projects, and experience.
One of the main examples is my journal archive. I’ve been keeping electronic journals going back more than a decade, with my more recent material in Notion. Until recently, there was no practical way I was going to reread hundreds or thousands of entries and systematically extract patterns from them. Now AI can go through years of journals and help identify what actually worked, what repeatedly didn’t work, which projects remained open-ended, which people and places kept appearing, and what conditions were associated with making real progress.
That changes the value of keeping information. Saving something is useful, but saving it and then being able to analyze it years later is much more powerful.
I also get into the growing role of AI agents and tools that can increasingly do the searching, sorting, organizing, and analysis themselves. Rather than learning elaborate ways of communicating with computers, the longer-term direction should be toward systems that understand ordinary communication and handle more of the intermediate work for us.
Another example is research organization. I’ve been moving papers into Zotero, where PDFs, titles, authors, metadata, and collections become much easier to navigate. Having a well-organized body of research changes what you can do with it later. The same principle applies to journals, computer files, books, podcast episodes, and other collections: once there is enough accumulated material and enough structure around it, the collection itself becomes a resource for future work.
A broader theme running through the episode is compounding. A small improvement in how you organize information, use technology, communicate, or structure your work can save time or create opportunities later. Then the next improvement builds on that one. Over months and years, those differences can become substantial.
Toward the end of the episode, I look at a few research ideas as well, including the illusion of moral decline, which is the recurring tendency for people to believe society has become less moral even though generations have repeatedly reported the same decline, and the related tendency to remember the music, culture, and experiences of earlier periods of our own lives as unusually good.
The larger question is what we can do now that we simply could not do before. The technology already available in 2026 creates an unusually large opportunity to revisit old information, organize existing work, discover patterns, and spend more time on the things that actually matter.
Topics
Using AI to analyze years of personal journals
Finding patterns in what works and what doesn’t
ChatGPT, Notion AI, and agentic tools
Organizing research papers with Zotero
The compounding effect of better systems
Why trying new technology matters
Building useful collections of work over time
The illusion of moral decline
Why people often think the past was better
Timestamps
00:00 – Episode 469: Technology in 2026 01:25 – Why AI Is a Huge Opportunity Right Now 02:35 – Using AI to Analyze Six Years of Journals 03:03 – What My Journals Revealed About What Works 04:20 – Why Open-Ended Projects Often Fail 05:16 – Finding People and Priorities in Your Past Notes 06:38 – Why Saving Information Isn’t Enough 07:15 – Why I Like Comprehensive Books 08:17 – When Unfinished Projects Come Back Around 08:54 – Finding the Best Research Papers With AI 10:18 – Why Research Takes Years to Become Practical 11:01 – My Concept-by-Concept Thinking Style 12:48 – Why AI Agents Are Growing So Fast 13:45 – AI Should Eventually Understand Normal Communication 14:32 – Why Defend Work You Never Wanted to Do? 15:24 – Why the Public Reaction to AI Has Been So Mixed 16:16 – Trying New Tools and Features 18:42 – Inside My AI Journal Analysis 20:10 – Using AI to Organize Messy Computer Files 21:59 – How Small Improvements Compound 23:27 – Spending More Time on What Actually Matters 24:24 – Building a 13-Year Journal Corpus 25:31 – Using Zotero to Organize Research Papers 26:30 – How Zotero Organizes PDFs and Metadata 27:24 – The Hidden Cost of Extrinsic Goals 28:27 – Why the Best Papers, Articles, and Books Matter 29:12 – AI Daily Briefs and Personal Assistants 30:41 – Riverside and Building a Body of Work 31:37 – Why a Large Body of Work Creates New Possibilities 34:00 – The Illusion of Moral Decline 36:11 – Why We Think the Music of Our Youth Was Better 37:39 – Closing Thoughts on AI and Technology
