Ethan Kay: AI, Commonplace Books, and Information Management
- Cecelia Stokes
- Sep 30
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 6
Season 3 Episode 2
Guest Name: Ethan Kay
Interviewer Names: Joshua Calhoun and Sarah Marty
Recorded on Date: June 17, 2025
“I think [AI] is a tool that has features. And some of those features are very, very poorly suited to human psychology. And some of them are very well suited towards human psychology. But it's an amazingly powerful tool if you can get the human psychology right.” - Ethan Kay
In this episode, we reunited with Holding History alum and commonplace book enthusiast Ethan Kay to talk about how to leverage AI for personal knowledge management (PKM) systems. Ethan is currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI where he focuses on AI-native search and answer experiences in ChatGPT. Before that, he worked at Google as a Senior Staff Software Engineer advancing AI in Google Search, as well as developing cellular network planning and shared RF spectrum. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with six majors spanning math, physics, astrophysics, English literature, philosophy, and political science.
The conversation winds between how different technologies augment and create our personal archives. As Ethan shares his own practices and advice for how to utilize LLMs to enhance learning or store knowledge, the question arises: what will happen to physical, material media like books? The answer from this Silicon Valley Badger turns out to be more hopeful than you might expect.
For a deeper dive into commonplace books (the original PKM), check out the Real Commonplace Books series on the Holding History blog, written by UW alums Liam Beran and Libby Markgraf, especially the final installment of that series, for which they interviewed Ethan Kay! Still want to know more about commonplace books? Read Adam Hooks’ How to Read like a Renaissance Reader and Tiago Forte’s Commonplace Books: Creative Note-Taking Through History.
You can find a transcript of this episode here:
Wherever you find the Holding History Podcast, please like, subscribe, and provide feedback. Use the comment section below, or contact us at holdinghistory@wisc.edu with questions or suggestions. Thanks for listening!
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