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hey Dan hey Scott how you doing good how are you doing man good so um thanks thanks for meeting this is uh this is cool yeah I after you contacted me after you make after
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you commented on that on that video um I checked out a couple I haven't looked I haven't actually watched all your videos yet but I've kind of got them queued up um and I talked about you in the um in
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the last Saturday's session of the book club and um and in that uh in that one we are reading um picketty's new book um
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brief history of equality so it's not really about the note-taking although occasionally it is um we we did actually read um Swanky Aaron's book together
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um and uh and and people had you know kind of different um different takes on it um yeah absolutely yeah I mean you know that that book is I think
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you know I've got issues with some of the the details and implementations because I've had to like reverse engineer lumens actual you know system and and do it the hard way and spend many many months and a lot of my time at
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doing that however on the good news is I don't know it's it seems like just a great introductory book it's short simple and it's kind of like inspiring so it gets people it's kind of like the the uh I would say
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well maybe there's a better way of saying this but like the gateway drug into the world of Knowledge Management and all you know knowledge development note-taking it's um you know there's no diagrams so it's a little vague and a
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lot of people can misinterpret what he says but you know it gets people I think really it introduces them to this this whole world of oh I wonder if there's a way to like rethink how I'm actually
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consuming information right extracting it turning into knowledge and developing it yeah right so yeah yeah I agree it was um yeah I think he I think he sort of you know kind of over promised a little
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bit and under under delivered a little bit um but but I do think it's a good I do think that it's actually kind of an interesting it is an interesting gateway drug or an interesting way in
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um you know that some of the people in the actually several of the people in the uh book club new you or knew of you um I don't know that you know anybody any of them personally Chris Aldrich
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um like oh yeah you know the most familiar to you yeah yeah and and he's yeah that guy is uh brilliant if you want to know the the ins and outs and deep history of note taking note-taking and even Beyond commonplace books going
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back to the 15th century yeah and it was it's kind of interesting because the first book that we read together um back last it must have been last spring it's been about nine months a year that we've been doing this was
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um the Graber wengro book The Dawn of everything and so we were you know kind of looking at the distant past and so that you know gave us an opportunity to talk about you know other you know like
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braiding sweet grass and other you know other kinds of um things that got into the ways that people you know sort of trained their brains uh to do things and you know so Chris had a lot to contribute about you
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know memory palaces and you know oh yeah you know the way that that especially pre-literate societies uh did that that kind of stuff um but um yeah it was it was very it was
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interesting um for me because I um actually kind of wrote my um I wrote my my dissertation
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um about uh but less than 10 years ago I guess it seems like it seems like a hell of a long time um I guess it was only it was actually really only about I finished it only about five six years ago
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um and I had been uh when I and I had and I had been off of the um had been kind of away from the research um for four or five years really I had
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done a bunch of research around 2012 and then I had sort of let it sit uh till 2016 and then I had kind of a wake-up call and I said well maybe I should finish this thing and uh so I went back
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to all of that stuff and so I had that you know kind of cold files issue you know where yeah you know you kind of had to like reignite what is called like a reverberation yeah
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uh and you know there's kind of like this interplay where you know notes notes are essentially for the most part especially in um you know the analog medium they act as cues that kind of
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trigger on a whole line of other thoughts which really helps like the writing process oh nice you gotta not gotta got a cat I got two office cats though yeah that's one of them that's the one that likes to
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play catch but I've got these I actually have this pile I just got Amazon just delivered me a bunch of note cards nice uh two two trying to get out so like 2 000 cards and
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two of these things that I'm going to start with yeah I've got a bunch of those did you get a four by six inch or three by five I got three by five because I'm yeah I'm trying to keep my um
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I think I I kind of think of the paragraph As sort of the basic unit of thought but I like my um I like my topic sentences of the
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paragraphs to be what's on the cards and I like them to be you know to be kind of um kind of succinct and then I can you know and then I can layer on um evidence and and data and stuff and that's one of the things actually that
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has been um a little bit challenging for me with the tools that I've been especially the the digital tools I mean I used Rome research for a little while then I kind
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of jumped over to um to obsidian and I was um and I liked Rome actually for the daily note thing I liked sort of that that practice of you know do it right in
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the morning you know things and um and actually I'm I'm Alpha Testing a new app that um there's always a new one yeah that's always that's that's very
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focused towards that calendar um and that and that was the thing actually that really kind of never worked that well for me was um sort of connecting my Vault to my
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to my Outlook Calendar or to my time um you know I use time to kind of keep track of my track of what I'm doing all day long um and and that sort of thing um and I'm not I'm not a hundred percent
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kind of sold on that idea that it all has to be integrated and you know and and PKM has to be part of GTD and it all yeah exactly a happy family um but when I went back you know after
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like four or five years of sort of not looking at the stuff that I had I had Gavin I gathered tons and tons it was a it was a um an American history um dissertation about the about the
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early 19th century and about actually peppermint Farmers across the the interest East and into the Midwest um over several Generations um yeah and these were digital uh and they were all digital and they were all
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in um and they were all in Tinderbox actually okay so yeah you know so I had tried and I had tried using and I had I had you know conversed um via email with
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Mark Bernstein um about Tinderbox and I found Tinder I found Tinderbox to be super super steep learning curve um and you know and something that I never really kind of became a power user
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if I did manage to get you know all of my primary sources all I I read you know thousands of letters and you know and transcribed them and took the you know took the meat and put them in these
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notes uh so I had them all kind of queued up but then it there wasn't really any output capability right so I you know and I played around with storyscape actually for a little while because I
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was also thinking about you know sort of writing non-linear fiction um and even storiescape I didn't think you know although it did have all of that um all that ebook and HTML kind of capability
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didn't really seem you know and and I was too cheap to buy example you know ebooks um that were only you know it could only be looked at in that um in that format I
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think at the time uh and so I I'm still fascinated with the idea of a non-linear kind of a walk through you know a idea space although I do also
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I think have to sort of accept the fact that a monograph is 99 of the time uh path a one-dimensional path through a
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forest of ideas right and and so that's that's sort of kind of the metaphor that's in my head about this is that my you know my knowledge is this Forest um there are a whole lot of trees that that you won't touch as you walk this
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particular path but the ones that you do you know you will touch sort of in the arbitrary order that I tell you to because of the way that I designed a path um yeah and and that's what people want
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they want the the linear path that you know that you create for them um which is an interesting thing is Lumen you know Nicholas Lumen you know the creator of uh you know zettel costs and always said it's like you know if
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you're looking for linearity um you know this is not something like you should not look to me like his books are you know notorious it it's for being challenging where it's like you know the
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one benefit you know he says is you can start anywhere but also the negative side is that if you're new to his material and his ideas you really can't start anywhere there's no linear
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integration to the concepts but once you kind of grasp it and this is what you know he was Unapologetic in doing it this way um you know you can really start anywhere in his books anywhere and you
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know any chapter um have you read the history of society or the what he called the the Society of society in German um yes I have the both volumes I haven't you know I've I've uh perused them or I
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guess not perused them but I would I would say skim them you know and yes they're they're they are drenched in uh pedantic academic you know 1960s 70s and
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80s German Academia and unapologetically um impenetrable you know for the common public you know and he he did that on purpose too because he was packing in a lot of you could call them seemingly
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radical ideas you know he his his theory of society was an anti-humanist theory of society or an anti-human meaning uh humans are not the center of society
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they are you know one um element communication is an actual you know and like the core element of society and like you know the people are um people are just one agent an actor in
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it and so you know he didn't want to so are you saying that that his his idea was that we are like bees in the hive and the hive is more important than the bees um yeah like and then there's this um this
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other aspect of uh communication is a core aspect of it and uh communication is like a almost like its own actor and entity and he wanted to be able to you
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know apply his theory of society to like um where it's it's not just about the current times in people like he wanted his you know theory of society essentially was influenced and stems
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from us you know you know is systems theory and he kind of Applied systems theory and cybernetics and even uh some biology type of uh models and
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conventions like Auto piusis which is an interesting one which is where an organism um and he he got influenced by this um South American
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um uh set of biologists that introduced this really interesting research wherein like a system a light form an organism and it's observed in biography can essentially recreate itself and he
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applied you know so he's applied a lot of these um you know if you're reading it and he says you know and very plainly in there I I propose an anti-humanistic view of
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society you know his goal was for not the general public and critics to be able to like read him like he wanted to be have like a a very high bar for how to interpret him because he didn't want
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to be you know accessed by the common critics public and and misinterpreted and so I think that that plus obviously
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at the in the German and I I guess it still is like this the German academic climate at the time it's a badge of honor if someone reads your work or any academics read your work and they are utterly befuddled and
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confused and it takes them two or three reads to understand what you're trying to say yeah I agree I think that back to Kant right yes yes so I think what we're getting at like you know we're kind of getting in the weeds here but what we're
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getting at is a lot of people are like you know they they get attracted to this whole idea of settle costan because of the whole um I would say like you know Authority
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bias and hey there's this you know um uh mysterious amazingly intellectual brilliant you know German sociologist that wrote 70 books prolific I wrote 70 books and 600
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you know peer-reviewed Publications in 30 years and so the first question is how do you do this and then you know you look in oh there's the zettle costume method but when you dig a Little Deeper like you have like I have and you read
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lumen's actual output his work it is you know very dense and confusing and the next question becomes which a lot of people don't get to it's like wait why do I actually want to you know implement
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this type of system if it will make my writing insanely complex and confusing for the general public that you know the common reader and the answer to that and it's what we're kind of talking about and is you know he deliberately chose to
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be hard to access and hard to decipher uh you know partly because of the German academic climate and also he was almost this Carnival ask you know trollish kind of character that you know would have a
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smirk on his face of uh you know saying seemingly contradictory paradoxical uh things and uh you know like creating a um you know a theory of society that is anti-human you know humanist or
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anti-human uh you know humans are but what he means by that humans aren't at the center but anyway yeah we're uh we're already down the whole the Lumen Trail but uh yeah that's that's one yeah
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interesting I think I think that I think that's I think people do get confused about that right because they hear that you know that his writing was sort of impenetrable you know first first
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they're impressed with his with the fact that he was so prolific right and they're like I want that right and then they hear well his writing was impenetrable and a lot of people hated it right A lot of people thought you
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know this guy's a shitty writer and the one thing really doesn't have to do with the other right the writing style and the and the ability to you know to generate ideas and to you know and to
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read and process information and you know and get it ready for output you know I'm not concerned with the style right and I you know I have the same I have I have a similar issue with a lot of academic historians that don't you
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know that write for peers and not for the public right so I have you know kind of a side project of of trying to communicate history in a way that is engaging and relevant to the
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general public um and that has and that and there is a lot of writing style you know and and uh and and the language and diction and you
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know and all of that that goes into that but a whole separate I mean that's that's a whole that's another project so I don't I don't really worry that much about
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his about Luman style I actually I I interlibrary loaned the books they came you know during the semester I was very busy I glanced at them and I had them on my shelf until they were due and then I
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thought should I should I renew them or should I just do it another time and I decided to do it another time so you know when I retire I'll I'll read I'll read Luman but in the meantime um one of the things and and I I did
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write a list of things and I maybe want to ask you these questions out of order um one of the things that Luman promised in the 1981 um you know communicating with slip
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boxes and that uh you know and that Schmidt and krajewski seemed also to be kind of doubling down on that that potential and even Aaron's did right was this sort of emergent property of the
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slipbox right that it would become a conversation partner and um and just and actually just last week we were talking about in the in the book club we were talking about whether that means it's better than having an actual partner and
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I think I think I recall Luman actually at one point said it's not as good as actually having somebody to talk to who knows you but a lot of times we don't and so this is the next best thing
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um but my question I'm taking a long time getting to it is have you had that experience have you had that moment where this where there's you know the the slipbox has produced or shown you a
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connection that you had sort of forgotten about or that you weren't aware of yeah and um yeah let's let's talk about this I call this I would call this like the second mind no I don't call it necessarily it's just the second
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brain and there's a reason because how Lumi called it the second memory and he also called it his alter ego or even in his notes when he was preparing his paper on it um he called it ghost in the box like
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zeit in you know uh the costan or something um but yeah let's let's jump into this and then um I would like I looked at your questions as well and um you know maybe I can give them after this like a
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brief little background of you know this crazy Journey that I've been on for the past year and a half of you know reverse engineering lumens actual analog subtle costing and building it out like behind
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me and I can you know share with you my journey in in that but um yeah why don't we just why don't we jump into straight these the the question of uh of have I had that come conversation partner and
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emerge and so the the one important thing I would like to State and say is that you know I I went on the similar Journey like a lot of your um readers went through it sounds like with the how to take smart notes by
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zonke Aarons um I was introduced to Sankey Aaron's when I purchased you know one of those um you know uh expensive six week long cohort courses around you know PKM and
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you know I got value out of that but what the most one of the most valuable things I got out of that was it turned me on to sanke Aaron's book which I had heard about in Googled you know zettel custom even before that and you know I I
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got to I landed on like settle cost and de you know that website and you know what I read was oh you know the Zero costume was created by German bureaucrat you know and workaholic named Nicholas
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Lumen and I'm like I stopped there and I was like okay I don't really care about you know becoming a bureaucrat that sounds that's not in my life goals and my vision you know um at this point and
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um we'll talk about that there here in a second but you know my my uh my vision was not to become a German bureaucrat sociologist so I just forgot about it yeah but then I then I came across you know the how to take smart notes and I
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read that in maybe three or four days and I took deep notes on it I was like wow this is fascinating I actually understand or what I thought I understood was um you know how Nicholas lumen's system actually worked you know
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the whole concept of uh fleeting notes he called them project notes as well there's literature notes and permanent notes uh what I discovered and then you know if after reading that I was like you know he had once innocuous sentence
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in there like um you know you can start and try the analog way which is you start with you know one and then the next note is one dash one and then 1-1a and then you know he kind of gave this whole sample sequence and I've later
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actually discovered that that explanation is wrong like Lumen did not he actually started with some rough I call them fuzzy category is what Pinker would say but some rough top level branches or categories but um anyway
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he turned me on to um actually trying the analog zettel costume and it was very soon after that that I was like oh my God this is and
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this is by the way this is after I had created uh a thousand notes or at least files in obsidian created spent three months you know creating and applying the best practices of everything I
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learned in the PKM course um and I was you know of of at first of course taken by obsidian taken really by the app the red app is a beautiful app it's Snappy it's fast
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um but what I was left with was and my goal was to kind of um synthesize and Link together my interests which revolves around
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um my background is in marketing and copywriting and creating stories that really inspire people and to you know help motivate people in um around products and services you know that I believe in and so I spent my you know
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career doing that in copywriting essentially but I was looking to synthesize my readings across psychology philosophy you know marketing creating movements inspiring people and there's a
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lot of commonalities and themes across those subjects and so that's how I you know ended up finding obsidian after um you know trying a bunch every tool no demand you know I've gone everything you
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can name you know like I've first used I think Evernote early on and it's you know Beginnings in 2008 you know I've used Trello Excel has actually been a pretty good PKM tool believe it or not
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for linking things um but anyway so after after of trying obsidian and being like okay after you know three and a half months of just spending a lot of time and creating you
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know a thousand notes applying I would call it it's a perfect vehicle at least you know if you want to major in the minor like I was I restructured and refactored my whole directory scheme and everything like multiple times you know
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got lost with the shortcuts hockey CSS loved it right but then when I started in the analog way and actually developing it I was like oh my God this is this is how it's supposed to work and
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um one of the things that I've always loved and found with the the analog medium is you know taking notes and writing notes out by hand explaining it pen to paper in your own words and that
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kind of distraction free environment allows me to really and allows a lot of people I think to deeply process knowledge and information so they can I call it neuro imprinting stamping it onto your mind
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um and so once I but you know I always ran into problems with the the analog medium of being able to actually find my notes like I've you know tried commonplace books bullet journals
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um I had for 15 years three by five inch uh you know no cards using them but it was organized by book author or topic right so Stacks and stacks and you know boxes but I could never really find it
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the each individual thought or idea easily yeah and the analog zettel constant really really saw solved that problem for me now what I later discovered after starting this journey
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is sanke arens got a lot of the things that he describes in his book wrong and for instance the one idea per note card is wrong Lumen frequently you know
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he created thought streams or streams of thoughts that would Branch across many cards and you know there would be sub components in the thoughts that you can like you know insert and stuff like that and so I essentially you know got to
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this point this is about like two months into trying the analog because that'll cost him the version um being inspired by sanke arens that I was like you know what like if I'm gonna go this deep on it I should actually
00:26:07
learn how it really works and see what the primary sources are so that turned me on to you know the three primary sources the First Source and the best source is the digitized online archive
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of Nicholas lumens actual Zero costume at the University yeah yep yep and so I started I started there and what I did is this is a seemingly kind of crazy thing to do is the first collection you
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know he's got two zetel Costins which are note boxes right the first collection has been largely transcribed into text you know German text so what I would what I did this is for like I
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don't know a few weeks is I would go into his online archive I would um you know go to the each individual card I would then translate it to English and then I would write out by
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hand his actual note cards in English and the numbers you know to actually understand how it flowed and how it worked um you know and some of some of the stuff like that I thought he did
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um I was right about and but some of the stuff that I thought he you know he did from Reading orange I was uh wrong about and there I've I've discovered that orange you know um uh you know Orbitz is
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very vague which is fine you know he was kind of kind of get people to move along and just get him started right I think I think Aaron's main sources were Schmidt produced yes
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um yes definitely Schmidt yeah I I don't know if I but yeah maybe you know better than me I didn't see a kurjewski but I wasn't looking for Oh Marcus wasn't he he wrote another one of those um one
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other one of those articles that I um you know about a year ago um and I think he may have been kind of was it in forgetting machines or
00:28:00
not I'm not sure yeah it was yeah yeah um yeah that that was a that was a good I discovered that much later on um and actually that's kind of how I think how I found you as I like searched
00:28:13
krajewski you know and I found your video I was like oh this is like you know very Niche but this is awesome I had just read it and it's it's enjoyable to after you go deep on something and read it to like you know hear someone else talking about it and summarizing it
00:28:26
and your video was just awesome you know thank you it's like some people yeah and and one of the things that I fact that I think is really brilliant about what you're doing is
00:28:38
that you actually went to the Luman archive and you're actually you know and you and you actually didn't take anybody's word for it but but did it did it yourself and experienced it yourself
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and I think that that adds a ton of value um so I'm I'm really curious to hear more about yeah the things but the things the things that you discovered that were not actually described
00:29:03
accurately yeah well here and I'm finally getting sorry like I've gone down these rabbit holes but I think it's it's very necessary pretext to to um what I'm getting at which is the
00:29:14
second source that I went to was um was Nicholas lumen's paper that he wrote about the zetel costan and it's called communication with Note boxes right
00:29:26
yep and um and so when I went through that and that that's a like like lumens writings are it's a dense read that took me like almost like almost a month honestly and it's only maybe like if you print it out maybe six or seven pages
00:29:40
you know depending on the font size but every sentence you have to parse so I spent time going deep on every sentence which kind of narrow imprinted what he was really seeing on my mind and in that paper that's where you really discover
00:29:53
what Lumen was actually talking about and what he said you know he calls it you know like the title of his paper is communication with Note boxes and I don't really remember in in uh Orange's
00:30:05
book it didn't talk about a lot of the elements that came out of the paper communication is a huge element and variable that Lumen talks about um Randomness and surprises is another
00:30:18
huge concept that he talks about and goes really deep on comparison like comparing ideas and that is really what the practice of you know the settle cost enforces you to do whenever you have a
00:30:31
new idea you are forced to then compare that idea with your already created set of ideas in your zettel costume to find the closest comparable Associated nearest neighbor
00:30:42
for it to fit next to or under right so it re-exercises your mind to be like okay what does this remind me of um it creates you know Association so this whole thing is an associative chain
00:30:55
right which also I didn't really find in obsidian obsidian is kind of like their remote associations and you're not necessarily forced to find you can find like the concept in the I you know the
00:31:08
journal concept and Link it to them or create tags for it but with the analogs that'll cost and you're forced to actually find the closest nearest neighbor in that line of thought and Link it to it um all right so that's another idea and
00:31:21
then um the other thing was you know he talks about Lumen talks about in his paper how it is a um you know a communication partner it is his second memory who he can
00:31:32
communicate with and it is his alter ego and um that's one of the things in if you browse his notes when he was preparing that paper and talking about what the settle costume was
00:31:46
he talks about how he doesn't have enough uh Reese there's not enough uh of a research budget or academic funding for him to have an assistant so you know the thing that he always
00:31:58
relied upon was he's like I don't need an assistant you know employees are too expensive I'm just going to use my subtle cost and that's my communication partner Theory Theory of Everything time 30 years budget zero yep so the the
00:32:12
question is is have I experienced this and I call it I I went deep into lumen's word that he used to describe this alter ego and second mind and ghost in the box and I I call it I call it the second
00:32:24
mind and um you know it's it's not like a a second brain is kind of like the um the convention used by uh you know building a second brain Forte and that's more getting things done productivity
00:32:37
and this is not a second brain this is actually a second mind it is your second self your past self um who you essentially can communicate with and have like this uh
00:32:49
it's it's an internal dialogue so when you're going through your notes written in your own handwriting um seeing you know different types of even I've got like note cards no card
00:33:02
sizes I've even got like three by five inch cards that are like lime green that I remember using and you know when I was in college this is back like you know 10 15 years ago right and so what that does
00:33:14
is that creates and engages this almost like this internal dialogue and this external context around your thoughts so you're like oh wow that's crazy that I had that thought back then you know I kind of remember where I was at the time
00:33:26
right and this essentially acts as a cue which you see it in your own writing to create this second mind in this almost conversation experience and this internal dialogue that goes along when you're reviewing your notes and my point
00:33:41
is I have not found that in the digital you know in obsidian or the digital um realm of PKM and you know part of the reason is that like you know you you see your life in your
00:33:54
past self you know uh in that card it took you a ton of time because you had to sit down and deliberately right by hand um and then what it also does is you can you know I don't know like with obsidian
00:34:08
and at least with me I'm like I come across old ideas I'm like did I actually write that and with this is like you can you actually know hey I wrote that and this is in my wording right and
00:34:19
um and so you know from that angle it creates like yet another um uh uh uh instantiation of that kind of like internal conversation that you have yeah
00:34:32
um and so yeah this has this actually I I have to I I hate to admit it but this has been my my archive and you know
00:34:46
and Spotlight has been you know although although I would like there to be a a better tool it has been um I mean that that's that's kind of
00:35:00
that's still sort of the major thing right I still you know I have you know probably four terabytes of on there and you know and so you know and I
00:35:13
haven't you know I've been putting things into the yeah but right and generally you know it's kind of weird because you know like I I did I said I sort of claimed that I
00:35:25
think the the paragraph is is sort of the basic unit of thought that doesn't tend to be the way I write I tend to write these law you know these thousand to fifteen hundred two thousand word essays
00:35:40
um that are kind of you know and that came from you know I've been like journaling forever and you know just sort of writing you know morning notes and daily notes and journal entries and blog posts and you know since
00:35:53
I think I've been blogging since like 1999. um I used to be in the I used to be in high tech before I was before I went back to grad school um but um
00:36:05
what I've the thing that has been difficult in obsidian for me has been you know I've jammed all of this stuff in got this beautiful looking you know chart view um graph yeah bubble graphs yeah the
00:36:19
graph view I love that you know I like that I like the cut I like the connections there isn't really a way to sort of have have a a split screen thing where you can follow
00:36:33
the connections particularly easy so maybe that's a you know maybe that's technology that they'll develop later but but that is that is kind of what I'm looking for because I'm at the point now where I'm you know I'm ready to get some stuff
00:36:47
out right the output where I'm I'm looking for I'm looking for an an easier way to the output and that's you know and and so when I when I
00:37:00
wrote my dissertation like I said I had all these notes in Tinderbox and little things that looked like you know three by five cards on my screen but then I cut and paste those into the actual
00:37:13
things that really look like cards in um scrivener right got those they've got the you know they've got the view that looks like a nested outline then I've got the other view that looks like a bunch of cards that you can drag around and all of that
00:37:27
um and that kind of struck I mean that that was the way that I actually did it because I thought of you know my my you know my dissertation well it's got to be 300 pages long my average paragraph is about
00:37:40
you know two-thirds of a page that means I need you know 500 paragraphs right exactly so I need 500 of those little cards right and so that was that was like an easy uh you know kind of an easy thing and then I could edit you know I
00:37:53
could say well okay I'm saying upset enough about that I need to move on um but so that's one of the things that I don't feel like I'm getting right now and and it may
00:38:04
also be yeah again the you know that I'm not good enough as a as a as an obsidian power user right you know sometimes I talk to Eleanor and it's like oh crap you know
00:38:16
this is too much um and I don't I'm not really that I'm not really that interested in being on the Discord and talking about the you know the the new latest yeah you you don't want to be a professional notetaker you want to actually be a uh
00:38:30
you know be a writer and create knowledge that well yeah and and at one point in my life you you know I was uh you know I was a you know a Unix system administrator and
00:38:42
I was you know and I was you know I knew how to code in C and C plus plus but that was a long long time ago and I don't know how to do that stuff anymore and I don't really want to you know I don't you don't want a major in the
00:38:52
minor you want to you want to do what you want to create you know you want to become you don't want to be a note-taking machine you want to be a writing machine you want to be a you know a knowledge machine you want to um you know create
00:39:05
uh you want to create uh you know you want to do you want to have a system to do research and then you want to have a way to easily have it uh you know create output yeah yeah if you on my on my
00:39:17
channel there's a way I it's funny is I um uh you'll see there's like a um uh videos there's a few videos that it's how to write a book using an analog settle costume and for a long time so
00:39:31
um I so to backtrack I've been working on a book explaining this and going into like the Deep theoretical knowledge and basically a book on uh creating an analog zettel costume I created uh the term and I started calling it an
00:39:45
anti-net because I thought that sounded cooler than continuing to call it an analog zettel costume okay and an antinet then has you know developed its own acronym um the anti you know it's
00:39:56
analog numeric Alpha card addresses you know there's like the starting with the numbers and then ending in an alpha character and then tree because each one branches down a tree index and it's a network of that but it's also you know a
00:40:10
double entender jab at the uh you know the the the overly Digital World in the internet so it sounds like anti-internet right a little bit too wondering about that I was like yeah how
00:40:22
anti the you know the network all right and and are there some Network effects you know that you you know that you are taking advantage of and you know and are there some things that uh because I'm not you know I'm I'm I'm not
00:40:38
feeling like I'm a member of you know and and and to their credit obsidian didn't you know go quite as cultish as Ron did um but uh but you know but I I don't
00:40:52
feel I don't feel like I have to you know only use obscene I think there there might be some things that obsidian might still do for me but I'm really really curious about this idea of
00:41:04
um and I actually did um that I designed a course for for faculty in my state system where I co-designed and I and I Mo I um I ran the course on uh retrieval
00:41:17
practice and so a lot of the stuff that you're saying about you know sort of building these these you know these mental Hooks and you know and you know and the fact that you know that what in in retrieval practice they call it desirable difficulty right where you
00:41:29
have to you know you have to take the time to to do the work of you know physically writing something out um I can you know and and and and and and Aaron's
00:41:40
I think was aware I mean as I was reading that and and I read it twice um it did seem to me that he was aware of retrieval practice because he's using excuse me a lot of that terminology you know and kind of a way that seemed very
00:41:53
familiar to me but um but it didn't yeah but but it did it did also seem to be you know kind of missing that output end right that he he sort of waved his hands at some you know at some
00:42:06
things and sort of and sort of double down on some of the you know some of the promises and the claims that that Luman and Schmidt had made about you know how these insights you know how the how the slipbox becomes greater than the sum of
00:42:18
the parts yeah how these insights are kind of formed um where I'm actually going with it right now this month is I have I actually have a writing handbook that um that my my father
00:42:32
who was an English teacher when I was a kid and then he became a lecturer at um UC Davis and um and he was a lecturer not a um you know he got his PhD there
00:42:43
but then in complit and they stayed and you know he didn't go the tenure track so he taught all of the um all the survey courses and that you know all of the you know the the Ancients the you know the medievals the
00:42:57
moderns you know all of the canonical literature and that was kind of really what he he liked to do but he wrote this you know this writing handbook because the students didn't know how to write and he and he just um
00:43:09
donated it to to Davis and they you know they ran it off at the copy shop and sold it to students for like a dollar 75 or something um and when he retired I
00:43:20
took it over and I actually used it for I started using it for my students when I was a grad student and then I use it here at my job in Bemidji and I thought well okay what if I and I added and he
00:43:33
had done it specifically for the Humanities right for for writing essays about literature and I had added kind of a social sciences thing with examples you know social science writing
00:43:44
um and then I was thinking well if I revised it now it's been about I don't know five or ten years since I've been out there um then I could add this note-taking thing because it's that that's sort of the thing that's assumed right he talked
00:43:58
a little bit about you know when you're you know when you're taking notes when you're highlighting these are the things to you know to sort of look for but then it was always very open-ended right and so so I was thinking well you know
00:44:12
maybe I'll add a piece that you know that includes you know some different examples that that won't you know that I don't I don't want to require my students and actually it's kind of funny because I I introduced one student um
00:44:25
who was working on her her senior thesis to obsidian and she went crazy with it we're having a thunderstorm here yeah there you go and uh and and so she she just she had a blast
00:44:40
with it and I I made a I made a video with her about you know her and and it told her some things right that she wouldn't have seen otherwise and so I thought that was kind of a nice moment um and then I had another um another thesis student I said you
00:44:53
know how are you organizing and she said oh I've just got cards and I go you know and I get a I get a room you know I get a study room at the library with a big table and I just put them down and I move them around and you know yeah oh my God take a picture of that next time you
00:45:06
do that because yeah that's that's exactly what I did organizing my uh my book um and then you could file it I filed it and um you know my subtle costume and um
00:45:18
yeah there's something I mean so what you described is you kind of did that same thing with the scrivener you essentially like used no cards to kind of outline the book and I used my you know my physical desk and I created um
00:45:31
you know three by five inch cards that had then card links to the specific areas in my anti-det you know essentially that like that I wanted to to pull from and those sections emerged
00:45:44
you know into this like I would call this emergent way unplanned way right then then I went through after I kind of finished I was like I spent about six months researching and then you know
00:45:56
then kind of going back and creating the main sections and then when you when you uh when you're doing this you create kind of like little topic sub topics within within the main branch that you're working on and then I put you
00:46:09
know the subtopics on three by five inch cards with the links in them and then rearranged it all on my you know one big table over there right and created like a bunch of columns questions watched
00:46:22
that video where you had them we had them yeah yeah yeah and then just worked column by column chapter by chapter and you know it's just something about that you know it seems just so um you know it's just the elementary
00:46:34
process but it just works and uh that's something that you know that works worked for me for me and do in uh when I went came time to writing and um yeah I mean the the the thing that I've
00:46:48
experienced from this the analog settle costume is that you know the the writing experience so you know there's there's a few phases there's the when Lumen would read a book
00:46:59
he had a vertical you know four by six inch card essentially and he would write you know vertically very concise page number and then the concise idea and then after his reading session you know he would go through and be like okay
00:47:13
which ones do I want to actually develop into main four by you know four by six inch cards and write as right by hand as if I'm writing and explaining and putting it into my uh research paper or
00:47:26
you know or yeah essentially a research paper you know because a lot of that's the moment when it becomes the writing you're writing either for your future self or your writing for or
00:47:37
for and for an external audience yes yeah exactly and um you know one of the things that people kind of Overlook is if if you if you you know factor in and calculate like you know 600 research
00:47:51
papers over the span that he wrote he was writing a you know one he was every month he was working on between one or two research papers at a time and so he would take on these publication requests
00:48:04
which essentially served as his you know main essentially you know small milestones and small projects which then each of those small pieces and sections and lines of thoughts that he would create from that would end up and create
00:48:18
like a cohesive much bigger you know book and that's how he was able to kind of take this you know that material and then be like oh you know what like I have enough for a book right here in this junk now I'm gonna like take all the the content and knowledge that I
00:48:30
have been essentially Unearthed from reading and and from creating This research paper product projects into a book um and so yeah that's that's so he would he would read you know with a I call him
00:48:42
bib cards bibliography cards you know on the front he in horizontal he had organized by author last name on the back he had those very brief um bib notes or you know brief observation notes and then he would take them
00:48:55
and he would create main notes out of them the main four by six inch cards and then you know the way that he would find it every single card he had in the top right corner he had a you know that numeric Alpha card address I call it
00:49:08
numeric Alpha because it always started with a number and it just it also fit my acronym scheme of the internet and uh and so and then he would you know kind of develop the thought and it's like
00:49:20
that's the knowledge development process um right there and you know things things would then emerge so in my experience writing you know I would you know I would take this like the sixth
00:49:32
the thick set of uh you know main cards put them next to my desk and begin writing and what I'm writing I'm like I'm starting kind of like writing word for word but then I would like have to like re-understand what what I you know
00:49:44
what what I actually wrote and what I the meaning I interpreted so then I would while I'm writing into my you know word editor right I'm I'm kind of rehabbing that conversation
00:49:56
re-understanding my old second mind my past self but also doing that is like just writing word for word is boring so you're also having fun with it and you know you're you're adding more material you're concise you're consolidating
00:50:09
things you're making things a lot clearer so that by the time that you know your readers actually read your material it's been taking taken through a you know it's been multiple processes
00:50:21
so it's like a multi-processed and a lot of people they just you know they sit down on a blank screen and they you know writer's block and by the time they hit the publish button um you know their thoughts haven't really been that deeply processed so
00:50:34
you're not you know putting something out there that is even worth necessarily reading in the first place when you do this you're like you know the material that you are you're writing have also stemmed from it not just to commit
00:50:47
you're not just having a communication with yourself experience with yourself you're having a communication experience during that time you're reading a communication experience with the author and this is something that Mortimer Adler talks
00:50:59
about in his book called how to read a book he calls you know reading a book and reading an author as a communication experience so you're conversing not only with that author but also all of the people and you know that have
00:51:12
communicated with that author right with that author and it's like this line so you're kind of continuing this deep thought dialogue and um carrying it forth so anyway that's another unique
00:51:24
workflow that I just haven't experienced myself using you know obsidian digital and yeah and I think I think that Aaron's tries to get there with you know
00:51:36
this idea of literature notes and permanent notes but but I think actually I like I prefer the way that you've described it actually as bib cards and bib notes and then moving on to main
00:51:48
notes because one of the things things that that I tend to do is and for the longest time actually I resisted using any type of automation
00:52:01
you know and then finally I relented and I let read wise sweep my highlights into obsidian and then you know and I put and they go in a separate folder and then I would you know I would kind of process
00:52:13
those so I've got all you know I would have all of these notes from you know something like um Fool by Randomness right and you know and you know it or even or even worse you know
00:52:26
anti-fragile right where you know where where he's going you know he's drawing from and it's like oh yeah I remember that from um from uh uh what's his name uh economy oh yeah
00:52:38
yeah you know because he's channeling Kahneman and so uh so I you know so I would notice these things um I think the problem I think actually the thing
00:52:50
I think that was probably what I should say is I think that was probably a mistake doing the The Sweep because then I had too much right and then I've got this really long over selection yeah
00:53:02
I've got this really long set of reading notes that you know can go on you know for a couple thousand words excuse me I'm just gonna close this window yeah don't worry a little quieter um
00:53:18
and um and yeah and and so then then the challenge was okay which of these ideas do I really care about you know and and so that transition I think from the bib
00:53:32
notes to the the main notes and probably you're right having them and maybe I will get some four by six Cuts because be kind of tight on the back of one of these but um but even you know four by six even
00:53:45
having just you know four inches to write you know maybe one two lines about each um about each idea would be a valuable discipline
00:53:56
yeah I think what I found is what it forces is the um forces you to be very concise with the ideas and you don't want to get bogged down by reading it also forces you because it's it's easy a
00:54:09
lot easier I used to read you know Kindle and have a ton of Kindle highlights and anything that like I was trying to concentrate on even um you know I would highlight and then I would be inundated with highlights and I'm like wait which one's really important so what what kind of forces
00:54:22
you to do is like you know it's um it forces you to not fall into the over selection you want to select less you want to extract less from the books you are reading and then you want you want
00:54:35
to even develop less from those extractions because it forces you to like you know only focus on really the key core ideas that really fit into what you're actually working on right
00:54:47
um because you know like it enrages how how many notes he took from each book but like even if even if books had like you know 30 bib notes on them you know 30 observations and individual entries
00:55:00
with the page number um if you if you look at if you look at you know he had like 15 000 bib cards in his second settle costan and um if you do the ratio is is
00:55:12
for every book and for every bib card um you know he only created about four you know three or four main notes so that's a lot of people think oh if I'm
00:55:23
going to create 30 you know 30 little brief observations 30 different page numbers I'm gonna have to actually create main permanent notes out of every single one of those 30. it's like you don't like on average you created only
00:55:35
four four you know main notes essentially you know that further this idea of course you can yeah use those other ones examples of that main idea
00:55:47
that are exactly in the book yeah so so he goes from 15 000 bib notes to about 90 000 main notes I think he had like 60
00:56:00
000 or something 67 000 I believe it was uh yeah that's about four four and a half to one then yeah 67 000 I believe I have like his
00:56:14
um yeah something like that um so yeah that's that's another thing is you know oh wow that's funny you're um YouTube just notified me of your video
00:56:25
on making mistakes in analog zettel costume oh yeah yeah I recorded that one yesterday yeah that's funny right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah in that one because a lot of people have they get you know scared
00:56:37
about oh I need to like perfectly plan it especially with the the branches and the the numbers the fixed numbers you know it's like people are like I I used the academic disciplines accidentally
00:56:50
disciplinary fields and like the wikipedias outline just as like a rough fuzzy category is like a a Str like an outline structure you know like um and that's something Lumen used as well like he had his he had 11 top level
00:57:02
categories for a second settle costume you know that were very specific on his you know Theory of Everything for society right you know like you know one would be like functional functionalism
00:57:14
you know and they went up to the branches went up to four numbers so they didn't he didn't just start at random like one two three four you know he had like a a very rough yeah that makes more
00:57:26
sense um I if the last time I tried very very briefly to do to do something with cards I started with one and then I wasn't sure if I should go to two or should it be one a and then
00:57:39
yeah that was that was a little bit too much friction yeah yeah I mean it and he he went up to four digits so he would have like you know like one one three four was
00:57:51
you know his ideology so it's like one three four slash one was like definition of ideology one one three four slash two was you know ideology in you know
00:58:02
economy and like you know so he would kind of broke it up like that and you know so when he wrote One it actually maps to one thousand he just didn't want to bother writing one thousand you know he would just do one but that was like
00:58:15
the top level category um yeah so yeah and and it does seem like the uh and I and I think I noticed it in one of your videos the two
00:58:27
kind of index cards one of the one of the things you know one of the um kind of perennial conversations that we've been having in this book club when we do talk about
00:58:40
um about obsidian and and um and note taking uh systems is that idea of you know top down or bottom up um you know map content you know or is
00:58:53
that too you know is that too notiony is that too pre-arranged you know and have a folder for everything before you even know what you're going to put in it kind of thing yeah um yeah those are kind of like the the
00:59:05
the buzzwords that I would say make more sense in the digital realm and you know like yeah that that whole school of thought and conventions like the map of content and all of that um and I'm trying to like
00:59:19
explain it within like the analog realm of uh kind of how that that works and you know it's essentially like you think of like the you know the the
00:59:31
main box the set of box the cards as like your own tree think of it like as your own tree of knowledge you know that kind of going back that's like one of the the oldest metaphors that I think people keep going back to like I think
00:59:43
you have an Aristotle you know went back to his like you know mapping knowledge and using a metaphor as like a tree tree structure so think of like the the you know your main box as your tree of
00:59:56
knowledge each individual leaf on your tree is a note card and you know each individual uh position of each Leaf has like you know its own uh address right
01:00:08
and it's not like it's a hierarchy you know like the leaf on like the top Branch isn't more important than leaf on the bottom Branch it's just the location it's the coordinates that that's what the numeric Alpha card addresses are
01:00:20
it's just the coordinates the latitude longitude of the location of where it's at on the tree right so you can kind of know and be like Oh I'm gonna you know go up to the top the top Branch I know is like this you know social sciences
01:00:31
branch and you know history branch and I'm going to continue to follow along and I can kind of continue to move along the number of sequences to kind of find things but um above that if and if you want to do
01:00:45
that you can do that that's a kind of like exploring your tree of knowledge one by one by moving along the branches but the um if you are thinking oh like uh you know um you know peppermint like the key word
01:00:59
peppermint the map the separate map onto your tree and like the location um that's what the index is you know so that's that's where the the index I've been in one of these you know my top box right here you know
01:01:13
and it's just a C it's just alphabetized based on keyword keyword yeah and the keywords there's that I think of so I would have peppermint and I would go to peppermint
01:01:30
P you know you look it up I'll just show you like an example of like one um here's like in in P I have like population you know like and I I've
01:01:42
created this is something Lumen didn't do but I create like individual note cards for each big key term like so I can alphabetize it so that's population and then geography you know and I have that card address and that's like my Geo
01:01:54
coordinate like so population of China population geography cities two two three six right so you would say peppermint and then and then you just pull in that box and go to like you know
01:02:07
let's say it's two two three six and then when you follow two two three six you can follow that all the way down and that whole line of thought around peppermint and which you know like peppermint for your
01:02:19
thesis right which there's probably you know 15 different subtopics within that and within that subtopics you know you can continue branching down and getting and so when you write that way you're almost writing it's almost like imagine
01:02:31
imagine if it instead of imagine if obsidian wasn't like a bunch of atomic notes you know but one just massive document with bullet points and nested bullet points that's like essentially
01:02:43
what you know that that branch is and your job anytime you want to add a new piece of knowledge is to add it under you know or after the nearest most similar bullet point which is the thought you know that I think is going
01:02:57
to be the key to this whole discipline that's the thing that that's the thing that's really kind of resonating with me and and kind of echoing the most in this conversation is as something that I'm not doing that would that would make my
01:03:11
process more successful his you know is actually sitting with you know not you know not okay I've got you know I've got this book and I gotta
01:03:23
get these notes out of it and get them all onto cards and jam the Cards into a drawer um but rather that you know I want to sit with this you know when it gets when it
01:03:35
goes from the bib no to being a main note then I have to actually ask myself what's the closest Connection in that's in the Box already yeah how can I continue that line of thought of what
01:03:48
I've already started working on and established that way that makes it ten times easier when you get down to the output the writing phase you just grab this like
01:04:00
um continually developed line of thought from you know 15 different books and sources right that are just like that you know when someone reads that output or like how in the hell did you like write this assemble this you're like
01:04:13
you're you're coming up with this like long depth string of knowledge and idea that's supported by 15 different that that you're relating in here where it's from 15 different books or sources um you know and um yeah that's that's
01:04:26
the that's the thing you don't want to be left to do that which I think that's what obsidian kind of the workflow kind of does is they're like okay just create this like inner interlinked set of ideas but um when it comes time to the writing
01:04:39
the paper then you're left with like action actually creating that continuous line of thought you know and that's difficult that's hard and it becomes kind of random and arbitrary and I think that was that was one of the things that
01:04:52
um you know in the book club when we're reading you know we're reading errands you know we got to the part where he's talking about um uh what's his name uh Malcolm McLean and the and the container you know oh
01:05:03
yeah yeah and I and I I teach you know in in one of my modern world theory when I when I talk about globalism I actually talk about Malcolm McLean and you know in the containers it comes from that book The Box right that came out a few
01:05:15
years ago and you know and so well and so in the first place Aarons gets the story kind of wrong but in the second place it's sort of like where you know where did this come from yeah yeah he's kind of pulling from a bunch of
01:05:28
random right it was it wasn't there you know it was in there and he jammed it together sort of after the fact because Lumen didn't use his notes weren't weren't you know just containers necessarily a perfect Atomic pieces
01:05:41
right like the um I think the human mind and thoughts are a little bit more complex than that you know it's like yeah the the atomicity he said one note per idea that's a myth you know and a lot of people get hung up on that and
01:05:54
okay yeah like what like when I I got that whole idea of atomic design it's taken shape and taken hold of like the web developers and UI ux people like like
01:06:07
the concept kind of came from that space where people started they're like here's a a UI ux framework called Atomic design where an atom you know is a uh or text
01:06:20
as a button and a container is you know or text is uh sorry text is an atom a container is an atom when you combine both you created a molecule called a button and then when you combine that molecule with like you know
01:06:32
an input box that creates a you know a search molecule and then that's like an organelle and people get like all crazy with like all this stuff and you're like wait abstracting away you're like what are you what are you doing and that's
01:06:45
kind of what I think the atomic um is captured no takers um yeah yeah so I think going back too is is you're like how anti are you I'm actually not a ludite you know like I uh
01:06:59
I I use I do I use zotero frequently especially for writing you know like I I didn't write you know that's like I for thinking it a lot of people get carried away and I this at least this is what I found there was no one out there
01:07:12
actually showing and teaching people how to do the analog settle costume you know a year and a half ago when I was on this journey I had to like I had to you know reverse engineer it the hard way and spend like a year of my life you know thankfully yeah I mean yeah it's really
01:07:26
gonna pay off because I think you've got something really unique here because the only I mean the until I you know I started watching you know YouTube videos of people you know in the PKM space you know the only time
01:07:39
I had heard the word zettel costume was I think Beck tench had said it in the context of trying to use Tinderbox as a Zeno costume tool um but um yeah it I think I think there
01:07:52
is I mean I I think that that you have sort of gotten your hooks into some of these these details that get missed and and when they get missed
01:08:06
it is detrimental to you know to the user who's trying to you know trying to pull together some stuff and you know and not really show off the beauty of their you know their graph view but
01:08:20
rather uh which you know and I love watching the graphene build and you know so that's what I'm talking about yeah I'm talking about myself here uh but but I actually get something out of it on the
01:08:31
other end so I think this is um yeah so I think I think it really launches something and I'm I'm excited to you know kind of watch you continue to develop it yeah thank you yeah and and um you know what I would say there
01:08:44
is and for you and your your audience is like I've got a few people and they've they're on you know YouTube um they've created like some YouTube videos of it is I think the main thing is to experiment and try the analog
01:08:58
version in lumens precise workflow yourself so that then you can understand okay this is what I'm actually trying to do or create an obsidian you know if you decide to go back digital and you know or you know create whatever
01:09:11
um workflow that you want you know but I think too many people don't they don't ever try the analog version of zettel costume and then they you know it's it's
01:09:24
uh then then they're left without kind of like a the core foundational idea of what it's supposed to be like you know so that they they then get lost and with all the bells and whistles that obsidian has to offer and believe me it's endless
01:09:36
you know all the community plugins and all that stuff like yeah man I I spent so many times it was I mean it's fun you know it's like it's a great app and and
01:09:47
it's fast and you know but at the same time you're like I hit a point where I was like wait what I well I've just created a bunch of information but no actual knowledge and I'm much further
01:10:00
away than I was hoping to be with my project so um yeah and yeah cool so I'm looking at this thing you know and I've been looking at it on your videos too you've got one two three four by four so you
01:10:14
got 16 and two on top so how many notes you got in there I you know I haven't counted them um and not all of them are completely full either
01:10:25
and also like I have like I like I mentioned is I have a you know a few boxes that are that are not integrated that don't have like the you know card addresses integrated into them so I
01:10:38
haven't really backwards compatibilized my you know three three by five inch cards that I've gotten you know that it took for like 10 to 15 years yeah but um yeah I'll show you the
01:10:51
um the the main one this is the one that I used to write my antinet zettel costume book and you know I spent six months you know reading researching creating the the main notes right and then three
01:11:05
months writing and the insane thing is this is what like a lot of people have said is that you know those three months I wrote 190 000 words it's like depending on like the whatever the size you know it's like 600
01:11:19
pages right and so yeah so I did experience firsthand you know what what Schmidt says and it's as advertised how to actually become a publication and a writing machine and I
01:11:31
saw it because you know so this is kind of like the um you know the the main main types of uh cards and stuff um so
01:11:45
um so now how your main notes how [Music] multi-threaded or or how
01:11:58
useful in different contexts do you expect them to be um yeah so I have you know this is within the branch this that whole kind of cabinet is the 4214 which is in like
01:12:12
information science and uh and it started out as the settle costume because like information science and related to um you know subtle costs and then you know over time it became like the
01:12:24
anti-net anti-net book right um but you know within that there's a bunch of different ideas and like for instance I have like this one you know not not all of them are you know I call
01:12:36
them reflection notes reflection notes are kind of like um notes that you write for um for an actual audience some are like me reading and then kind of what I call reformulation notes like reformulating
01:12:49
and creating a formula of it so that's this one is on perception versus perspective right and so what you know and then like you know the note after this so that's
01:13:00
uh as you can see like yep yep okay then the note after that is three a three a b slash two a so I'm kind of this is like a variation
01:13:13
expansion right yeah where I go into the the etymology like per sapere which means to thoroughly and fully understand and interpret that's what perception is where perspective is to observe and to
01:13:26
spectate and you know then you know so I'm going into this stuff and so here's where I'm going with this example right I just this I just randomly pulled this out of this this section right and then
01:13:39
here's here's me actually thinking through it more by creating a diagram you can see there's like some white out of perspective right perspective is like where you are your XYZ coordinates where
01:13:51
you are positioned in space your perspective of what you see and then your perception is how you actually interpret what you see so different people can have different perspectives and their perceptions and their own you
01:14:04
know or they can have the same perspective in different perceptions right and and so so this this forms kind of like a core aspect in uh you know one of the
01:14:15
theoretical chapters of my book about how you know this this whole anti-net settle constant thing it um changes your you know you get a bunch of different uh
01:14:27
perspectives locked and stamped in time that then when you go back you can then rewrite based on a new perception that you had in your most recent readings and you know it kind of like locks out of
01:14:39
time now the question is okay that's within the context of me writing about zetokas and the zettle costume book now when I go to my index over here right if I look up perspective or perception right and I later want to write about
01:14:53
that which I have you know like it's it's in here somewhere right if I look it up I then see yeah here it is yeah and it points me there so this is
01:15:07
perception cool right and then it points me versus perception definition in like other different contexts so then I can write a whole you know peace
01:15:20
um book even chapter on the concept of perspective perception and to use all the knowledge I created within this book right um or within this line of work related to the other lines of works like I have
01:15:34
perspective and memory and learning you know um and these are all in like the same like General Branch but you can see how I can then um you know link it and kind of create
01:15:46
it all together and use this little this this line of thought and the creativity happens when you have all these chunks of knowledge put it on your desk rewrite it have the recommunication experience you know rewriting it into your editor
01:15:59
using it it's just so much there's just so much benefits of having it tactile laid out on your desk so that you know this one section this one thought you know knowledge session that I had like a
01:16:10
year ago then creates a huge section not only in my book but like you know further sections forever so you can see kind of the compound effect right and that's that's kind of how it works and
01:16:22
it the reason why that's good is that I'm only surfacing and only having like the most important pieces of knowledge related to perspective and that's where a lot of people are like oh what about
01:16:35
digital search how can you find anything it's like I don't want to be able to I don't want to search perspective in obsidian and find you know 88 different um uh search results that have the term perspective in it because it's going to
01:16:49
drown out the actual good the important stuff that I'm looking for I think you're I think you're right about that I think that the I I put in one of my obsidy involves I put that thing at the
01:17:01
bottom as a plug-in that'll tell you all your linked mentions and your unlinked mentions and that is I think potentially counterproductive I think I think that you're really on to
01:17:15
something with this idea of the index card and and on making it a regular part of your practice whenever you're writing a card to say okay this should go on the perspective or the
01:17:25
perception index card yeah in the index yeah it's all it's like a second layer map you know like and um yeah do the top yeah to the top level card which is yeah which is exactly what
01:17:41
you want and does seem to be very I mean it does honestly seem to be very true to the Luman process um which I think is uh
01:17:53
yeah again and I'm not and I'm not that you know sort of religious about about you know doing what Luman did but I do think
01:18:07
that it worked and so you know so I should have a good reason not to right if I'm if I'm going to say well I'm going to use this you know and I don't think that an adequate reason is only um you know is because this particular
01:18:21
digital tool allows me and initially I think there was um there was a lot of excitement about the idea that uh that we you know that we would be able to avoid we'd be able
01:18:35
to get more more benefit for Less work but I I'm not I'm not feeling that anymore so I think I think you've accomplished your mission here
01:18:50
yeah no I mean um I it's it's it's I think I think the people the people um that I see um they've never tried out or questioned
01:19:03
and never tried the analog you know and I think that's that's something okay try building it out first don't necessarily commit to doing it long term but then just take what you kind of learn from that and Implement into the workflow you
01:19:15
know of obsidian because you know there's also a lot of people they're the number one thing they're resisting is like the sunk cost policy of like you know they've got you know thousands tens of thousands like let's say of digital
01:19:28
notes and they're like okay so you know here we are coming along Scott saying that you know that sucks and that's irrelevant you know it's like no I'm not necessarily saying that you know I mean I am but I'm not no I'm just kidding but
01:19:42
um I I do think that that the the uh you know when I switched yeah I have a thousand notes locked in obsidian um a lot of this I haven't missed them though you know it's like that's the thing and um yeah yeah well I you know I
01:19:57
think that that's that's um you know that maybe there's a place you know maybe there's a place in between where the big note the elaborated note can be
01:20:12
in obsidian or can be in you know can be you know can be on this drive you know you know some type of other forming in a word processing format or in a you know or in a spreadsheet or in a you know
01:20:25
um I mean because again you know sort of the transcribed um letter or whatever um you know so so then maybe the the
01:20:39
citation and you know the bibliographic part and the high level takeaways from that you know go on a bib card um maybe not the whole thing you know maybe I you know maybe that's the that's this Mo you know this moment of
01:20:53
translation from you know this is the actual text to this is uh because a lot of my stuff a lot of my data is um I mean both in historiography you know you gotta you gotta deal with you know
01:21:06
what other people have said in the past uh and then especially in primary sources right um you have to you have to reflect them accurately but then you also have to explain them to the reader and interpret
01:21:21
them and and contextualize them and put and make them part of a narrative or an argument to that so I think there is a place for you know probably both of those things to exist um and I don't think I don't think I'm
01:21:34
gonna start um one of the things I'm doing for my I'm changing up the way I do my my uh US History survey this fall I'm gonna actually do it's a three day a week class where we
01:21:46
meet for about an hour and I used to do lecture lecture discussion and now I think I'm going to do lecture I'm still there's still going to be you know they're still going to interact with sort of the facts and a lecture kind of a format but then
01:21:59
I'm gonna lean real heavily on primary sources so they actually hear the voices of the people you know who lived at the time you know both the elite people and then the you know the non Elites and the you know and the the dissenting voices
01:22:12
and so um so I'm gonna do much more of that so I'm transcribing um and I'm doing luckily I'm doing us one this semester so it's all stuff that you know all the primary sources are out of copyright
01:22:24
even if they were published right so I can find them I can you know I can put them into a form that the students can read them um I'm actually making videos where I where I read them you know for the YouTube crowd
01:22:36
um and then um and then I have to I still have to you know kind of contextualize them and explain them and you know and make them so that I think certainly I mean that's what these
01:22:50
actually that's what this little stack of cards right here is is the uh you know not only yeah which ones I'm using but what I'm kind of saying about them so yeah yeah let's um yeah I think that's I think I'm going to
01:23:03
try this out and you know and I don't want to take I don't want to take too much more of your time today but I would like to you know kind of maybe try this out for a while and then you know kind of connect back with you and um
01:23:15
you know and I'll be and I'll continue watching you know what you're doing is because YouTube yeah sounds good yeah there's the um I think the anatomy of the anti-net settle cost and is a good video that gives you an overview
01:23:28
um I have the uh the like Hitchhiker's Guide to the antinet settle costume on my um my Twitter profile and you know the first half of that is uh kind of the
01:23:41
theory and the prep and like mindset stuff so you don't I mean a and I I've uh it's it's a lot you know at the first half so don't get hung too hung up on the first half right but
01:23:53
halfway through I have the okay take out your take out the note card write this down on it and just follow those steps and you'll have it you know there's essentially three main boxes there's the index box you know the main box which
01:24:07
are those main notes and then the bid box which is the bibliography notes and um and yeah you know the whole process starts with the big big cards and then extracting that creating main cards and then you know uh creating the index
01:24:20
terms to point to the that main card to that card address and um yeah that's how it works you know um don't want to get you don't want to get index fatigue early on you don't want to create an index entry for every single card uh
01:24:33
because it's gonna just take way too long but like the main kind of subtopics you know in that Branch you uh yeah yeah well and actually maybe you know maybe in a few weeks once I've got some you
01:24:45
know we can meet again because then the the other thing that I what I would like to explore with you a little bit is the review process right you know and I'll look for I'll look for you know for videos on your on
01:24:58
your um your channel as well about that but what that's another thing yeah you know that I'm sort of curious about because I haven't honestly I haven't developed a great weekly review you know kind of thing
01:25:10
just in in sort of um in sort of GTD terms either so this is a this is a thing that a project for me for the next semester I guess but you know but that that you know that process
01:25:22
you know seeing how you do that and sort of um I mean do you have an inbox they go right here's the other important thing is well I in earlier on you you won't have to do
01:25:39
this as much like when you're first creating like your first maybe week but what I do now when I get you know like extract like some of the basic observation notes onto the bib card
01:25:50
um before I actually write out the main card and create the main note right um is I will figure out where it's going to go so it forces me to review in my main box and review the line of thought
01:26:03
and be like okay I'm gonna put it you know it says I find I have you know four two one four slash one a I'm gonna be like I'm gonna put this at four two one four slash one a slash one and kind of continue that line of thought
01:26:16
um that stuff and so you're doing your review before you actually write out the the main card and um you know why you're doing it yeah because when I used to when I used to just create like you know the main cards and then try to figure
01:26:27
out after that where it goes it's you're just creating a pile of homework for yourself and and believe it or not you don't to do that you know you don't want to like create 15 cards that you have to then file and then what happens is when you go
01:26:40
back to like file and you're like wait I've already pretty much that's redundant I already kind of said that you know so it's like that's why you don't want to write out the main card before you find out where it's going to go yeah um cool cool yeah protein thank you Pro
01:26:54
tip yeah I'm just blitzing you with all this analog knowledge stuff so yeah good good good luck I I um yeah you know I created a YouTube channel just for the moment you know it's kind of a rabbit
01:27:06
hole it's like a spaghetti code essentially right to learn this thing um I'm you know I have the book that that is in editing phase right now and then I'm simulating like how I would say half my time is spent you know pushing
01:27:19
that along and editing that and the other half of my time is trying to um create a course in a very clear linear step-by-step method you know to teach people this this whole you know
01:27:31
this whole system essentially and so yeah but this is this is this is so I mean this is really valuable stuff so I uh yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this
01:27:43
into a video and I'll put it on my my um Channel and you know so hopefully so I mean a lot of like I said a lot of people who are you know kind of power um users you know who are book club members and stuff um already knew you
01:27:56
but um you know hopefully this will get you you know a little bit more yeah because I do I do think I have um it's kind of weird I I have people in strange places a lot of people in the UK and a
01:28:08
lot of people in India for some reason um and it may be because I occasionally say say things about um East Asian history that they appreciate like that yeah like that the
01:28:20
Aryan invasion was a manslaughter or something like that yeah yeah they all glum onto that and then they stay for the for the other stuff sometimes yeah that's awesome yeah yeah um well yeah I enjoy your stuff and
01:28:31
enjoy your channel you know and um and uh you know I guess I I uh I I um even the history stuff I'll brush up on that and try to try to read that but yeah I hope uh I hope what I've shared helps
01:28:45
you out and look forward to hearing about your journey I'm willing to hop on anytime and yeah so thanks a lot cool thanks very much Scott all right Dan talk to you later man take care all right all right bye
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