The Scott Scheper Podcast

The Only Two Components of Zettelkasten You Can Digitize without Destroying Its Magic

August 09, 2021 Scott Scheper Episode 202
The Scott Scheper Podcast
The Only Two Components of Zettelkasten You Can Digitize without Destroying Its Magic
Show Notes Transcript

The Only Two Components of Zettelkasten You Can Digitize without Destroying Its Magic

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Speaker 1
[00:02]
Hey what's up and welcome back to another episode of the daily scratch after today's episode is number two oh two yes two hundred and two that is two hundred and two days in a row that I've been publishing in shipping something out every single day. It started with a writing piece a daily writing piece that I have yet to port over to the public Relman published on my website and then it. Transitioned into creating these podcasts which were essentially just streams of consciousness as a joke I mean quite frankly I frickin. 

[00:40]
I started the first several episodes just shooting straight from the gut straight from the hip and like quite literally. Talked about everything from well like copy writing mass persuasion to. Literally dating a stripper and well we're gonna continue on this circuitous wonderful audit journey together into episode two. Zero two and today's episode. Is coming to you straight from Little Italy San Diego California on a Monday at six fifty five post meridian. 

[01:22]
And. What I've been doing lately and. The verdict is still out if we are going to continue to do this but. I am. Testing various show formats in various. Formats and modes in which I publish something every single day and it's a tricky Venn diagram that you have to get just right because. On one hand it's tempting to just produce and ship out what you are. The best stat which for me at least is. Copy writing and. Producing content in the written form. 

[02:09]
I've gotten better certainly in the spoken word form and. Hello it's quite enjoyable honestly you don't expend as many brain cycles as you normally would when you're trying to prepare a piece for a writing and. For the majority of the day I spend my time doing just that meeting. Spending a lot of time investing brain cycles in crafting deep thoughts in. Copy and writing and. I don't want to experience burnout by. Forcing myself to. Ship every single day and spend the brain cycles on doing exactly that. 

[02:58]
I would rather give you the. Tidbits and the actual valuable content that I am in the midst of working on. And give it to you in the spoken format. Because I enjoy it and I think you will get a lot of value out of it as well because most of the content you hear out there in the podcast world is just a bunch of jerk offs verbal diary ng. In dialogue across. A desk to one another talking about their latest book or. Whatever project they're working on. 

[03:36]
This format on the other hand is going to be more like a more entertaining version of audible wherein you will hear snippets of content delivered to you every single day that are so good that they are going to end up. For probably about ninety six percent of the time cases and it looked don't hold me to that because well quite frankly I don't want you to believe anything I say. I'm just kidding but seriously of. But I foresee at least eighty percent to ninety six percent of the content that I share ending up in some publication that I create like a book or. 

[04:22]
Who knows but something wherein I will at least be able to. Okay to keep the lights on. And donate every single. Bit of profit to causes that are underfunded and that ought to be funded more. Things like wealthy Niklas Luhmann digital archive project and that nonprofit organization. I intend to donate the funds in profit to that end hell. I think more of the earth's and humanity's resources need to be devoted to becoming a multi planetary species and. 

[05:08]
Getting on the SpaceX train. And helping Ilan mosque in whatever way imaginable to get to Mars and even. The object basis investing in space exploration and that's the new frontier. So anyway. I'm not a charity I need to actually producing create and well donate to causes that I believe in so. That is why also that if I well you know quite frankly if I publish this work I will likely just make the digital version as freely available and widely accessible as possible and. 

[05:55]
You know if if if I ruled the world then if a publisher had an issue with that and they can go fuck themselves. But. I would at least like to get the content the material into the hands of the people that I could help and for the additional formats for the additional. The types of involvement engagement in tools and. Blah blah blah physical stuff then yeah sure the loop there will be a price tag. So without meandering. Prelude I'm gonna jump into what I started yesterday which was laying out for you the cold hard truth that if women were alive today. 

[06:46]
There is. No way of knowing whether he would. D. Fully analog. But we can tell. From the signs of his keyword index in which he experimented with implementing it N. type written format that he may have played around with a hybrid digital format of his anti net. And if you're just tuning in internet is the preferred term for new card box or a. A new card tree like structure that has fixed ID is assigned to every single card wherein they can be linked. 

[07:35]
And anti net is the working title and the acronym. Means either an analog thinking internet or an analog. Three an analog notecard treaty. Idea network. You choose. The bottom line is it focuses on analog knowledge management no taking building your mind and creating genius level work. So let's jump into it you see in brief it's feasible to imagine that lumen. Would use digital tools today for certain aspects of his anti net or at least experiment with digital tools. 

[08:21]
And. The key point is that. He would only use the noncritical. Aspects digitally. Meeting the non critical aspects in the creation of thought the development of thought the ability to think on paper with your hand. It's something that digital will never replace period end of story. Things which could be ported to digital without. The major implications on. Negatively affecting one's anti net actually becoming a second behind almost like a second. 

[09:09]
Doppelganger in your head. That. In those tools those aspects of your internet our number one the index ended number two of the bibliography. Meeting it's feasible. That. You could still create a second mind. With also having eight digital index and a digital bibliography. Yet the trade offs. Are not yet known. And speaking on behalf of myself and my own internet which I've named him Stewie. A. K. my doppelganger. And what's interesting is looming referred to his. 

[10:05]
Anti net as a sort of doppelganger a communication partner and naturally he used that term and maybe not even in the. Word and meaning that we English speaking Americans used to use it in a. Well Joko serious. Form of. Referring to an evil twin. But with my internet a case to a. I use an analog index and of course an analog main. Anti net. No card tree. But I do use a digital bibliography. And. I do not foresee. At least. Moving. From my analog index to the digital index. 

[11:06]
But I could foresee shifting from the digital bibliography and testing out. D. analog version of a bibliography. But. Let me tell you why it that I do not foresee ever switching from an analog index which is you know your way of navigating your own mind and your your own map it's your it's basically an index organized by. You know out alphanumeric. The characters. And allows you to navigate your treat your mind to treat your tree of thoughts. And I don't foresee myself moving. 

[11:47]
From analog to digital for my index for two reasons. The first reason is that well it's a pain in the ass already to have to navigate back and forth between the computer for my bibliography items and. My anti net plus from a. Metaphysical aspect there's this air is then part of me that just. Would gain more peace of mind knowing that everything is in. My anti net my one. Mass structure of. Four by six inch boxes compiled and piled on top of each other. 

[12:33]
And. Well designed part of me intends to experiment with the analog bibliography as. It may force me to actually slow down and take my time to deeply gain familiarity with a text in a book because you actually have to invest in writing down and getting familiar with all the details required to create a bibliography for it. And. I think that this is an interesting aspect opposed to just hopping around the weapon using so Tero which is a reference manager and browser extensions to just basically become a hyperactive archive. 

[13:17]
Rafting machine that NO archives way too many things that you'll never read I mean we already do enough of that in life. So. Let me back up and tell you why even I elected to use a digital bibliography in the first place. You see it stems from how I learned this at all costs than in the first place. Which quite frankly it started with. Trying to go to the main website I believe it's the subtle Costin dot D. E. and I try to follow their instructions and information on total cost and then it was. 

[13:59]
Quite frankly piss poor and. Even now. Now that I even know what that'll cost it is I go back and I'm like it's just just it's disheartening to know that not only are so many people being instructed. In a confusing manner but they are also being instructed in a completely wrong manner that is not even subtle cost and it will it it is not zero cost in in the sense that it will not create. A second mind for you to come up with genius level level insights. 

[14:35]
It is. Especially if his instructions and information are instructions for how to create yet another repository of digital files that you'll. Forget about. They're all in a week from now. So. The reason that I use a digital bibliography in the first place. Is. That I learned to settle costs then from. The sad website but also I mainly learned it. When I began reading. Some K. are in this book how to take sparknotes. Which. Essentially it's not settle costume but is more of an a Renzi in denomination of note taking kind of like how the Mormons credit on offshoot of well Christianity which created an offshoot if it was. 

[15:40]
Of. Essentially some evangelical branch of Christianity which. Read it off was an offshoot of Protestant which is an offshoot of Catholic which isn't you know essentially an offshoot of well the early one hundred years of Christianity which was. Unknown and kind of ambiguous. And which was then of course an offshoot of Judaism so. Think of some K. R. ends almost like. The Mormons. And I I hate you know I'm I don't mean to deride him too harshly because his book is at least fifty to eighty percent of it is great okay. 

[16:29]
And he meant well. But. It's essentially like saying. That Mormons or Jews. And that is not the case. What are in's believes in what he cited as that'll cost in. Is. The latter day saints version of Judaism and Judaism. The intrinsic origin form of creating a second mind is what looming created with that'll cost in. And so. After our ends when I was reading his book. Outlined lumen system in the gospel of notes according to our ins he says that's well he summarize it what by saying that that's it that's all the system S. 

[17:23]
but actually the system is even simpler than this. Because as we know quote we have. We now have software that makes it much easier to build your own settle costs and thereby basically. Eliminating all of the potential that a reader could actually. Stumble into the benefits of well he's eliminated that. And R. ins continues that quote we don't need to manually add numbers on notes or cut out paper as lumen had to. And he says that in his book on page twenty. 

[18:06]
And then in the section of our ends his book detailing that. Basically here is everything that you need to have. In order to build a subtle costume he outlines for tools needed to build a publication machine. An anti net. And by the way I use internet in subtle Costin interchangeably and the reason is because anti net. Is a bit more truer version and representation of Nicolas lumens. Our system and settle costume has been bastardized and sodomized and plagiarized by. 

[18:49]
Digital work flow warriors and hot kia homies in. Well. Text editing junkies that have transformed to settle crossing into something which it is not. So. Anyway our ends details that. The four things that you need to create a anti net. It is number one something to write with and right on number two a reference management system A. K. A. a bibliography. Number three a slip box which. Is another term for note card box. And the reason it's called the slip boxes because in Europe their paper standards. 

[19:40]
Are not four by six no carts but roughly four by six. Slips of eighty six paper so they don't column notes account slips like slip a slip of paper. And then for the poor thing you need is an editor like software editor for writing. In publishing. Now he concludes that more is unnecessary. You get less is impossible. Quote. But here's where he's wrong. You see. Actually. Less is possible. And ironically it is also more. Not only that it is necessary. 

[20:30]
It is necessary in order for you to build a second behind. So he claims that more than four tools is unnecessary and less is impossible but. That's false is the all you need to get started. Is a pen. And no carts. Yeah that's the physical items you need. The most important item you need. And I know this sounds trite and cheesy but you need will power any need attitude. That you will never. Ever ever given and that you will keep going because. Settle Costin and internet and writing and thinking takes a large amount of. 

[21:21]
Brain energy and it takes a lot of commitment it takes time. So. Bottom line on the physical items you don't need for things. And. The thing that. R. N.'s classifies as his first item is something to write with and something to write on. So. Using his. Well. Categorization method. The only thing physically that you need to start a at an anti net. Is. One thing. Stressed. Something. That you can write with and right on. And so I guess I'll consider that one thing. 

[22:22]
Maybe two. And in paper that's the bottom line. You also need attitude and you also need knowledge. So. Tomorrow I'm gonna get into. The. A little bit more in depth of why I actually even have. A bibliography. That is digital in the first place. And. It may surprise you. In fact. I know it will surprise you. I know it will surprise you to know this. When you learn what caused me to create a digital. Bibliography. You will immediately understand why. 

[23:24]
And my friend that's it for today's episode all shared more with you tomorrow and will continue going down this rabbit hole into the world of creating genius level work and building your own internet to do it. So that is it today but I must. First advise you as always to. Always remember to stay crispy my friend. And. Know that Scott Schepper we'll be here for you tomorrow. And he is currently signing off on a Monday. At seven eighteen. Post meridian from Little Italy San Diago. 

[24:11]
Peace and see you tomorrow.
[24:13]