Sources · Personal source · export guide
Export Google Takeout into a private AI brain
Takeout is the densest archive you can request: contacts, calendar, Maps places and visits, search history, YouTube, Chrome bookmarks. Here is which parts to export, and what a brain does with them.
What a Google Takeout export holds — and what the brain makes of it
Most people take out everything and get a multi-gigabyte mess. The brain builder needs a specific set: Contacts (the canonical people list), Calendar (events, with who you met), Maps (your saved, labelled and reviewed places), Location History / Timeline (where you actually went), My Activity (search and ads), YouTube (subscriptions, watch and search history) and Chrome (bookmarks). Gmail, raw GPS pings, Fit, Drive and Keep are excluded by design — the brain reports them as skipped rather than reading them.
What comes out is a brain with a map. Every saved pin, every visited place and every photo spot becomes a place note with a city and a country, so a travel plan can start from the cities you saved and never went to. Calendar attendees become people, matched by name with your LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends. Search history and the ads profile become the mirror layer — what Google thinks you want.
Google’s newer on-device Timeline format is read too: visited places are named by the nearest saved place, and your home and work are skipped.
Get the export
How to export your Google Takeout data
The exact clicks, as they are today. Platforms move menus; the engine’s source docs are updated when they do.
- 01
takeout.google.com → Deselect all
- 02
Select Contacts, Calendar, Maps (your places), Saved, Location History / Timeline, My Activity, Chrome, YouTube, Google Photos
- 03
Export once — large exports arrive as several "Takeout N" zips over hours–days; drop them all in together
- 04
Drop the archive on Google Takeout in Studio’s Sources — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.
Then, next month
An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.
Then ask it
What you can ask a brain built from Google Takeout
Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.
- Which cities have I saved places in but never visited?
- Who did I meet most often last year, according to my calendar?
- What was I searching for the month before I changed jobs?
- Which restaurants did I rate five stars, and in which city?
limitLarge Takeouts arrive as several numbered zips over hours or days — drop them all in together; a half-set builds a half-map.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Does it read my Gmail? No. Gmail is excluded by design and reported as skipped. (A company brain can read an mbox for headers only — never the mail itself — through the separate Email source.)
Is my raw location history uploaded anywhere? Nothing is uploaded. Raw GPS pings are not read at all; only named visits and saved places become notes, and the build runs with zero network calls.
What if I only export YouTube? That works too — the YouTube slice has its own guide. The Google Takeout source is for the contacts-calendar-places core.
Start
Your Google Takeout export already exists. Turn it into a brain.
Free and open source. Start with John’s demo brain while your export arrives.
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