Summary: Zettlekasten, note taking and personalising knowledge through note taking. Make sure you support the podcast though Patreon to help grow the podcast. https://www.patreon.com/thinkinglikeagenius Facebook Messenger link - for cool updates! https://m.me/thinkinglikeagenius Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/thinkinglikeagenius Twitter - https://twitter.com/ThinkingLikeAG Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.co.uk/thinkinggenius/ Follow us on socials and make sure you share the love. Lance Wantenaar The books https://amzn.to/2T4STaV - The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb https://amzn.to/2GCO9UQ - Ant-fragile by Nassim Taleb https://amzn.to/2yAWa8b - Beginning of infinity , David Deutsch ----------------- Podcast intro and shoutout ------------- HappySeller85 and Frank Derko Today I'm talking with Zettelkasten and website creators Sascha Fast and Christian Tietze. Who also created The Archive software which is part of this interview on the podcast. I want to find out more about Zettelkasten and the method and it is a note taking method to document and store notes for long term and obviously using a faster and easier search capability. It is the proverbial index card for the digital age at the moment. This is Mac only piece of software and it allows as I said for easier light no taking method and also for a faster easier search capability. Welcome to the thinking like a genius podcast. My name is Lance Wantenaar and I've got two distinguished guests with me today. 00:02:01 Creators of a lovely little program called the archive and the website is called Zettelkasten . I am going to let both Christian and Sasha introduce themselves because they can do a much better job that I could hope to do and we'll find out a bit more about Zettelkasten what it is and how it works. And also some of the interesting insights that they've got. Thanks Lance.We totally botched the segway . Thanks for inviting us. I'm Christian and I'm the developer of the archive. I'm doing the coding stuff the Zettelkasten project Yeah and I've been doing this this whole thing with Sascha for about seven or eight years now. Yeah so a bunch of years too many. You could say take up of the program grown since you first started with it. Can you rephrase the question. And. Has it. Has it become more and more popular as people became a lot more aware of your site and what you were doing. How did it I know it starts at or from both of you while you were studying and you you started developing the software out of a requirement for note taking and basically documenting your studies and your learning so has it grown organically what's your site the success criteria with the software who are successful and what success really I think the issue with the question is a bit of upside down because we didn't think of software first but thought about the methods because the Zettelkasten method can be realized on manifested with next to every text editor or even with paper. And we both came in and studied in Bielefeld, Luhmann was based in Bielefeld and is famous or is basically the godfather of Zettelkasten principle. And we experimented with a whole lot of software which all work to an extent and then later on the software came and is tailored to that set of Zettelkasten method. Now for the uninitiated Can you please explain the principles of Zettelkasten . What made you decide to start looking at a technology solution for it. I think the most distinguished principle of the Zettelkssaten method is that it's mostly organic. Many solutions let's say either being a software solution or system of organizing knowledge work are more hierarchical or mechanical. That means come with a bunch of categories and sort them sort your notes in so to say all you have like many software you have your folders or folder like structures and such and the Zettelkasten method allows for organic growth. So structure and something similar to fights and tags and therefore just grow out and the total cost method allows allows you to grasp them so you don't need to control it all but the Zetteelkasten method will do it for you. It's kind of a high level explanation I think. And I think in more specific is that you applied it and set it up correctly you just have to think and write and the system will take off the structure for you basically OK so the the structure of how it functions. 00:05:44 I notice that you've got certain ways of starting each note that you create. So it's got a date and time stamp structure to it. Do you have your own way of adding to that index method to clarify it. Or do you rely more on just the normal or the automated date and time stamp that it generates any and the action should be replicated. 00:06:15 So this is this one of the reasons we chose the timestamp for the unique identifier the unique identifier is just a bunch of string I mean that gives the zettel a one note specific address so you can point to its stable solution for the future and the timestamp allows to do it even manually all the automation comes next because if you rely too much on optimization you will become very much trapped in. So if the software does too much for you then you will become dependent. And if the software will not be continued or let's say even you if you switch your operating system then you will you have problems of because of the dependency and therefore most of the automated things are are kind of shortcuts for things that you could do anyhow. 00:07:13 I've started using a Zettelkasten to migrate content over to it and the the principles are fairly straightforward because it's very easy to use is very clean and is very simplified in the way that I can start structuring the notes that I've got. So what are the basic tips that you would give to people that you would suggest to people when they start using it. What are the. They're the basic principles in actually making use of it and getting the most out of the software to structure their content. 00:07:51 One thing that I like to point out to people all the time whether they ask stuff on the forums in the comment section on our blogs via email. A lot of the tips often boil down to don't overthink it. 00:08:04 In the beginning you know just just start. Just write your first let's say 100 notes and then you get a feel for it for for what you're doing. And if you are just creating a second noe in your whole life and tried to optimize the method and overthink it over analyze it. Then you will as the phrase goes be paralyzed because you can't step out of the analyzation step. You just try to to figure out what the truth is. While the truth really is doing things combining things I'd like to say. Playing with the notes that you end up with and try to try to have some some fun with the note taking because if you if you don't enjoy what you do at all. If it's a car then well you want stick to it and then it doesn't matter how how great the method is. 00:08:56 In principle yeah there's a couple of things which I find really quite interesting in the blog. When I was reading through it I noticed you talking about the concept of bread crumbs in your archive and can you just explain that a bit more for me. Bread Crumbs. Can you recall where you found this concept. It was one of your blog posts were you doing search for midwifery and the term I'm probably going to pronounce as . Yeah it's one of the very old old posts which you were searching or looking for some content and you were both looking for the same term of more or less at the same time. An argument from earlier this year. Yeah. Okay so yeah the bread crumb idea there was I mean for context Sascha and I were trying to figure out something. I don't I don't remember the details yet but we we both looked for some term in our note archives Hebammenkunst. Oh what in English Mirotic. Yeah what's it in how to pronounce it in English midwifery . Yes yes that's the English term. Yeah. Where was I. 00:10:18 Yeah so we were looking for this term and it didn't didn't remember what what we came up with in the past like four years ago and so we both searched for this this very specific technical term and then one of my notes said Sascha and I were looking for this specific note another term midwifery like four years ago and it was a term itself the search term that I use midwifery in this case didn't occur in the rest of the note so I left it there because a knew or expected myself to think in the same stupid is stupid trains of thought again in the future and wanted to give myself a clue or a hint when looking for stuff so the bread crumbs idea it really is if you write a note and keep it concise and atomic as we call it then you might still want to help your future self find the note to some extent and assigning tags is one such method. One way to implement this idea to help yourself find the note later and leaving breadcrumbs here really means use the words or combination of words that may be similar that you will look up in the future even if it's not the proper technical term if it's if it's the way you think about the topic. That's probably more important to recover the note later. 00:11:42 You're dealing with a lot of contextual. You need to understand or try and put in as much contextual information in it that makes sense for you to make it easier for you to find it in the future. That's one thing. Just think of the fairy tale Hansel and Gretl use. The breadcrumbs to find back. 00:12:01 And yeah this is exactly what Christian used because the I think the basic situation was that I wasn't able to come up with it and then research together and the actual other the situation a couple of weeks ago was basically the same. 00:12:17 I wasn't able to remember and Christian told me that five years ago I wasn't able to remember but you read I wrote down why I wasn't able to remember and think I think a good illustration would be to think or to compare to how the brain works because in the brain there's a concert or in neuro new law. OK the brain science thingy is just a concept that's called depth of processing or level of processing area that means if the more you process an information the better your record will be. For example if you just repeats a certain vocabulary like a hundred times then you have one kind of processing so it's just repetition. But for example if you want to translate plants to plants in Germany. But when you use the word plant as a German speaker in an English sentence you add another layer of processing because of usage and the more you process information and contextualize it the better you will be. Recall this this concept and the reason why this is is because you're using more entrance points to this to this concept so you don't rely on strong connection because of repetition but also can go an indirect route. It's a kind of similar concept to what it is. It's a. Little like like this acronyms. If you if a string I try to remember like the bones in your hand and then you make them make a saying which with the first letters corresponding with the first letters of the bone. Yeah in the Zettlekast No00:14:09Finally comes translating the transformation if you the activation part is some mechanically activated for example through the search. So what Christian searched was some bunch of words and the areas in the archive that got activated which means you recall that the other list that is that you can see in the search results and the more paths you have to one note that you can find and the more meaningful path the better you can recall that information. For example I searched or I remember that concept through midwifery real Translation is something like How to Slowly process a thought via speaking or something like that. 00:15:01 So Christian was able to access this thing through speaking thinking let's say and midwifery midwifery was an association that was really old and really idiosyncratic because what it is based on a misunderstanding or a mis recall of mine and therefore he'd increase the depth of processing or the level of processing through a misunderstanding. And that is yeah. And that's how basically improved recall can work in the in the zetteelkasten method because the more you increase the depth of processing the more entrance points you have to the truth some concepts and the better you can let us in a practical sense use your search function. 00:15:52 Reminds me of some concepts which I've been researching and basically when the brain starts developing knowledge it uses various methods of picking out highlights and what you will get is that it'll do. It will use pattern recognition to identify common pieces of information or repeated pieces of information and then what it does it's structures and knowledge depending on the patterns that it identifies. 00:16:19 So then what you do what you've got is like for example you've got a chair and in chair you've got various examples of a chair you've got you know a high chair you've got a stool you've got just a footstool or you've got a settee or a couch they all fall under the group descriptive word of chair but they all linked in various ways because of the structure and the function that the chair has00:16:50So if somebody says you go and have a seat you know they they're the inference is to a chair and you can see from the general shapes that you'll be sitting either on it on a kitchen chair or it'll be if it's in a lounge it'll be on a you know get a big soft bag or it'll be on a settee or something else. So now what you've got is you've got a descriptive word of chair you've got multiple examples of that which you can reference because it's based on a function. 00:17:25 Now what you have is that you can structure that under something else which is called furniture. Furniture includes tables chairs foot stools various other piece of information. 00:17:38 And that gives you a conceptualized usage of all of the furniture pieces within a room. Now what the Zettlekast method way that you're talking about the contextual information is that the more you've got context the more you've got although you've got random pieces of information like chair table side table or anything else of that nature they all fall under the group or the contextual term of furniture and that falls that can be described as part of a room. So now what you've got is you've got conceptualized examples of information but within that you've got pieces of singular descriptive terms but each one has got a function. Now you've the way that the brain works is that you've got these chunks of information that add groups together to make the processing easier. And it ties them together based on context or relationship00:18:34So the more you've got a relationship between the pieces of information the more you've got context of the usage of that information as a whole. So let's take midwifery for example you know midwives he deals with the medical profession. It also deals with somebody assisting with birth which means you also got pregnancy in that you've got after care for say breastfeeding or post post births after care you've got also the pre and post-natal care. So you've got a whole structure of knowledge which all can fall under the midwife ry functional word as a whole. So conceptually you've got a bunch of contextual information which is all encapsulated within that word and the structure which develops out of that.00:19:25Does that make sense. Yes OK. 00:19:28 So that's why I think the the whole concept you talk about having context and tags and making conceptualize and making sure it's contextual is so valuable because it makes information a lot more personal to the person who's actually writing the notes which is why it's so important to process the information and make it relevant to you. I think that's the other thing that which is quite important is the relevance of the information to the person actually creating the the notes and the Zettle's. 00:20:00 I think one member of our forum pointed out the difference that it makes if you work like that. 00:20:07 He said every time he set up in knowledge information system the it got more difficult the more he used it the more information and the more knowledge he accumulated the more difficult it was to use. And once he started with a zettlekaste method he was surprised that it got easier to use the more information and the more knowledge he fed to his archive. And I think this is because of the same mechanics that underlie those metaphors now functional metaphor in language or my metaphor of how the brain works. That's the underlying mechanic that that makes the system become better the bigger it is. And that could be an underlying mechanic that makes the system worse the bigger it is. And normally on the systems I encountered in my past were exactly are the latter. They got worse the bigger they got the same it got just bloated and you couldn't use some functions of software. So an example would be having to rely heavily on keywords. The more you use the bigger the keyword gets and the bigger the keyword gets the less meaning you've got. For example would search in my archive for nutrition. I would get thousands of thousands of notes back and basically meaningless for me to search for this keyword. But if I don't rely on it or use a better approach to tagging not in a useful sense but in the in the spirit of the zettlekaste method you basically reduce the amount to very small amount of very meaningful notes and therefore the mechanic of zettltekasten allows you to be better with time and I think that's the big important thing you want to be improve with more complexity and not worsen the problem with more complexity. 00:22:02 One idea that I think is part of the original introductory post on a Web site where we talk about Luhmann and what Zettlekasten is and how we use it and how it is a partner in communication in these things. I think part of that post is the bottleneck in Luhmann paper based archive and note taking was the entry of new notes and part of this is because he had to type in. I think in the beginning he type but the stuff you find online is all handwritten. So there is a lot of you know handwriting takes takes time and that's one part of the bottleneck and the other part of the bottleneck is that to find out where to put links to and where you want to where you want to edit all notes to link to this new one that you're drafting at the moment. You have to search and browse through your archive and have to read things. This all takes time and there was a bottleneck or one bottleneck of the method because you was so productive with his ninety thousands of notes but all this took a lot of time and that's a different kind of bottleneck than let's say if you don't don't find anything meaningful. So even though I would argue that that this part of this kind of bottleneck is not really that stressful because you interact with your archive and you find out new things and you it's a different feeling than then. Then if you don't have a clue if the system gets in the way of the archive not the application that be developed but the note archive that I'm speaking of. If you're note archive is hindering you to make sense of things to find existing stuff because the search isn't powerful to create new notes because it takes so much time. If all this gets in the way that's frustrating but if the real bottleneck is engaging with your archive and making meaningful connections that's a I would say fruitful kind of work and then you learn something while you work and that's a think I would presume. Part of why it's not frustrating and while it feels good if the archive grows instead of you getting worse and cluttered. 00:24:14I've tried over the years using various services to take notes and collect my writings together.I've used Onenote for for quite a while but I still sometimes feel that it's not as functional as I wanted to be. I've not looked at how interconnected it is although you can link from one to the other. I've not played around with that level of integration is it as it is and the other thing that I find is that it becomes a very big application. It's very heavy and I quite like Archive because it's it's quite light is very text base is very very fast and the way that it functions which makes life a bit easier because Onenote can be a very very big archiving method. Although I've kept with it for such a long time and I've got a lot of information in there it does become quite bloated. For me it it's very much a learning curve. Using the archive but I'm finding out as I become more comfortable on developing my own method of building it out and getting the best out of it00:25:22I think there's there's merit in using applications like Onenote because you if you have the input devices necessary you can you can draw next to textual content and keep more engaging notes. Let's say more into what you would do on paper if you scribble and not just write down outlines or text which is well you're pretty boring in the end and makes recall arguably harder. Like notes you take let's say during lectures visualizations and graphs in the statistics or something like that. The window in which your notes with images. That's useful to quickly capture thoughts but in the end you would have to let's call it. You would have to serialize these images to text to make them findable because in the end stuff that you search for is text based and Onenote I think. For example it's great to replicate parts of what paper can do and to take notes and keep folders of multimedia or mixed media stuff but I can hardly imagine how it would will scale if you have a thousand notes and a thousand notes isn't that much in the end. It's you can get to a thousand notes in a couple of weeks if that's all you do with everything. What did I say weeks wait months when all you do for let's say you get your bachelor's degree is studying and taking notes then then you get to a thousand pretty quickly but yeah in one note I mean just try to imagine having a thousand notes in one not even if the application would launch instantly and if there's no lag and loading time and delay. How would you link things. Would you link an image to a note with your link in text to two part of the note where an image is because the image is interesting and the mixed media content also means that on a single canvas you have multiple points on multiple things that that can be potentially relevant for future use then not atomic or split up properly and not reusable. So I don't know how Onenote would scale. 00:27:34 It's okay I just find that the searching is not as accurate as what I wanted to be and I sometimes have to look for the information manually which is which is bit of a problem although you can get a certain amount of image search back out of it.00:27:51I don't always find that I get the information that I that I want I have to specifically know some of the terms out of recordings and some of them. Sometimes it doesn't get contextual information right. So it's it's okay. I mean it. Now I think it's a big library for me. What I'll do over time is probably move it over to the archive so I can actually start building that out and start using that lot more and a lot more relevant way. The other thing I wanted to talk about with you both is the most intriguing article that I read about is the barbell method of reading. I found that quite a fascinating article. Can you tell me a bit more how you came about this method and what have you learned from the whole process. Have you developed this even further. 00:28:42 I didn't came up with it upfront but rather developed out of just interacting with my zettlekasten and the barbell method as I have borrowed the name from Nassim Taleb the author of anti fragile and a bunch of other very good books. This barbell method refers to a specific form of interacting in an uncertain environment so you rephrase you can can vary in the field but you basically invest your time mostly in very safe endeavors and a small fraction of time you invest your yourself in very high risk but high reward endeavours. For example in investing it would be that you invest 90 percent in real estate and 10 percent in venture capitalism or something like that. And in reading or knowledge work you are pretty much confronted with a similar problem because it's highly uncertain. 00:29:46 If a book is good or not or if any text or any information material is useful or not and therefore you should invest your time 90 percent approximately in very safe endeavors and the barbell method allows for that so in the first step of reading you will read for example a book quite fast and just mark interesting or promising paragraphs and then you will read a second time but only the mark paragraph. So you invest most of the time in paragraphs of the book that you already read and evaluate it as interesting or relevant or promising and therefore you skew your time to be invested and more relevant more interesting and more useful amount of text and that just comes naturally with the archive because the process of processing a book for example would be that you read it and mark all the interesting things and then I do it chronologically. 00:30:51 Christian has approach or is written on an approach that is more divorce more pre processing before you fill your archive but I just opened the book from page one and then go through the passages and write down notes and connect them as they go.00:31:10And therefore I naturally use the barbell method of reading because I only invest more much time in understanding and processing parts of the book. If I had already decided that is that this paragraph a useful and I think it's similar to my my approach to literature in general because I'm next to always read books that are recommended I don't read books that are that I came up out of the blue and mostly books that are recommended by people that I got recommended or that are recommended to me. For example I read classics because they're recommended very very much to to very many people and therefore it's a safe it's a safe bet because time is valuable and time is very spare. 00:32:04 And because my life is very short as all of our lives are very short I make sure that I read a lot. That is very useful and very few new stuff. 00:32:16 So to say so you're using a 80/20 principle. Yeah. And actually educating yourself. Yes. Seen a lot more people talk about the way that the approach where the actually first take a look at the book. Take a look at the index of the chapters and how the book is structured the information that's structured and whether it's relevant to you then as you said skim through the book and then start picking out specific areas we specifically want to focus on because you're looking for specific contextual relevant information to you that you can make use of and then extracting that information out of the book based on that making the information contextual by taking notes and trying to structure the information in your own brain and how is relevant to you using the principle of the midwivery is making it all contextual and see how it fits you and how you can relate that to some other knowledge that you that you have which is an interesting approach to have. I'm depending on the books I have I still tend to do a full read depending on the book that I'm reading some of the books I will skip around but it's a skill to develop because you you so used to wanting to read the whole thing because you've been you say taught this is how you read a book which is something you've got to unlearn 00:33:43 Yeah and the ratio and how how you came up with a process that's been really apply the barbell method of reading depends very much on your reading ability if you're a very very fast reader you have more leeway so to say in just reading a book for example if you have learned reading in early age preschool for example then you have much more organic way of reading which has both strengths and weaknesses but if you have this on your side you can many times read the book very very fast and you can read I think and it depends of course which kind of books you read in my experience the Americans have a very very fluffy way of writing books because it's very rich and anecdotes that illustrate stuff and make it more entertaining dilute the bit of informational content. So if I read for example in American book then I know that each chapter begins with the story and I can read in story mode like a switch that you turn like in comparison when you read a novel you will read very differently than you read a non-fiction book. And so for example in American non-fiction book I go into story reading mode in the beginning of the chapter and plow very very fast through first pages and then I will slow down for example and then a couple of reading techniques that you already mentioned like first reading the table of contents and understanding the structure of the chapters and so on and so forth that will allow the assessment how much time you will invest and that is basically the barbell method. It's like a high level thinking approach on reading that you try to make don't seek for novelty so much. 00:35:39 I think that is a piece of wisdom from Nassim Taleb because novelty is mostly garbage and time proven things are mostly good. So focus a lot of time proven things even if it's your only your own time proven a piece of information. 00:35:57 That's a really difficult thing to achieve because the brain actually loves novelty. It's you almost fighting against biology in certain respects because people know nowadays was all the devices available like phones social media everything else. The whole reason why it's so engaging is because of the novelty factor and the dopamine that reward that you get from actually having novel information flow in all the time so it's it's actually getting out of that habit of seeking novelty all the time and trying to retrain yourself to actually seek for novelty of information or connections out of the knowledge that you're gaining. I think that's probably where you need to change your focus a bit instead of looking for new information look for new connections of information that's a that's a good way of actually refocusing yourself to be able to use a novelty factor in the information that you reading which is known. 00:36:56 Do you happen to have experienced this change of focus in the change of the stuff you enjoy when you work with reading material recently and do you recall all that happened. 00:37:07 Yes. For example one of the areas which I've looked into as part of the whole looking into brain learning and connections and also how the brain processes information. One of the areas that I looked into was the connection of the vagus nerve and perception. You could say sensory perception and also how ties to your health because the vagus nerve is really important to health and also having a healthy clear brain and actually dealing with brain fog. So nutrition is very important because that determines how healthy you are as a person and what the impact is on the brain because of the connection or the vagus nerve into your your organs the areas where you you actually dealing with digestion. So if you end up having a poor diet or poor nutrition then that has direct impact on how you feel you are capable to focus. For example a really easy example is a hangover hangover is basically brain fog self-inflicted. So what happens is you wake up you feel dehydrated you feel slow you feel lethargic you're not feeling well you need energy. So the only way to correct that is to basically drink more water eat something which is going to energize you and eat something which is going to help you feel better. 00:38:32 So soon as your body starts regenerating and recovering then suddenly what happens is your brain your head clears up because you you actually processing the toxins see actually getting rid of you could say the excess of that you had the night before and as your body starts recovering then what happens you start waking up. Now you can add in other stimulants like coffee and cigarettes but they're not really ideal. I don't have a problem with really good coffee because I actually drink quite a lot of coffee. But if you rely on that as a method of getting you woken up and started then what happens you start becoming dependent on it and you create a dependency habit where if you improve your nutrition overall and they actually limit that impact on yourself it means that you have less of an impact on your cognitive function capability now where it becomes really interesting is that I hadn't realized just how important the vagus nerve in getting the messages between your organs and also the brain and also the impact on the brain. And this whole discovery of tying nutrition to an impact on your cognitive ability now makes it a lot more relevant to me because it verifies the value of having really good nutrition. There is an age old saying when it comes to exercises that you can't out train a bad diet. So if you want to recover well you want to build muscle. You want to improve. You need to have good nutrition. That's why the top sportsman and high performance athletes when you look at what they do they've got nutritionists they've got physiotherapists they've got psychologists they've got all these people that are working on actually improving their function as a person. But if you have all of that and then you have a really bad diet it doesn't matter how much good the other people are doing the person's engine the energy source is so bad that they can't cope with the extra demands that are being put on them. So if you take a look at people like Formula One drivers all of these high demand sports they can't have bad nutrition because it has a direct impact on their performance not just physical performance but also your speed of processing your cognitive ability of all of the other things that you have to deal with on a day to day basis. And if your nutrition is bad it also has other effects on your your fight or flight system which is integrity linked to your vagus nerve. Now these systems all interrelated and all pendant on each other they're not independent. Your brain isn't independent of your body just as well as your your body is not independent of your brain. Even though sometimes it does feel like it. There are certain times when I do feel like I've got two very separate entities but that's just the nature of the game and that's just for me how these although they look like disparate pieces of information they've got a very real connection on your ability to be able to function and to function and use all of the. You could say advanced capabilities and the really high performance capabilities that you have within the brain lucky we regular folks have fitness YouTubers right. 00:41:54 Yeah yeah I had I rely on a lot of those channels sometimes quite heavily. You get some interesting information if you select the ones that you want to focus on. 00:42:05 You can get some good value out of them but it's been quite interesting because one of the areas that I also looked at and I think I saw you mentioned in one of the articles are writing about health and cholesterol was actually looking how the body actually uses cholesterol and how the cholesterol is a cycle through the body through the various organs and how various things tie into each other and why people have got this incorrect perception that cholesterol is bad in actual effect. Cholesterol isn't bad cholesterol is a really normal integrative process of the way that the body manages energy within the body. The interesting thing is that the brain because cholesterol cannot pass into the brain because a blood brain barrier it has to actually create its own cholesterol for its own energy usage and that is how your brain actually generate energy for itself is that it has to produces itself but it relies on good quality nutrition to be able to create consistent and a healthy source of energy. And that's why the better your nutrition the better you can actually have your brain function for yourself. So it's a it's a really complex integrated system which I hadn't realized the gaps in my information about how the body was actually using it. And that brought taken me down a number of other avenues and they all contextual because now that you understand the importance of the one you realize how it affects all of your other function capabilities because if you go back to vagus nerve the vagus nerve is used in a number of ways because it determines how you cope on many levels. 00:43:49 If you're relaxed you in a very creative focused social engaged and active way of thinking where if you're sitting in a slightly stressed in a situation you then start triggering your stress responses which are you fight to flight mechanism which means that your focus changes from being open and creative and relaxed to being more focused a lot more narrower in your and your attention. And it means that you can lose some of your you could say creative input and actually dealing with things in a slightly better way and actually looking for those disparate connections when you're doing things because if you're in a stress situation with normally means is that you've become really really focused on fixing a problem. And unless you know the physiology of it unless you understand the physiology but you won't understand why you actually thinking that way or why you're reacting that way which is where I've tried to pick out these you could say common patterns of information to actually understand them better. Now that I understand those parts of the story it means that I get a lot more value out of the information that I'm learning is because I try and put myself in a more relaxed state to allow me to use some of the other parts or more creative parts of my brain.00:45:06Sounds like you're beyond the usual mind over body adage. 00:45:11 Yeah yeah yeah. I've I tend to get a bit analytical about things so it's one of the things which I think frustrates a lot of people about me. Certainly some friends that I have seemed to voice their opinion about that I'm sure. Seeing as you either coders and professional students you probably go down the road of being very analytical and also breaking down things into its Nth degree to make sense of it all. Do you tend to do that. Yes. And I'm pretty much annoying my surroundings with it. 00:45:47 Yeah I can I can now confirm that I'm not alone I'm not alone. 00:45:57 Funny thing is this is actually how Christian I met. We met through the university and the first things we talked about was the zettlekasten method and dealing with knowledge work which we did perhaps only because we had no other person to talk with to the same extent and you know loneliness makes you less picky in the end. 00:46:21 Yeah. No. What. What's the saying necessity is the mother of all invention. I wonder what the invention is in this case to me. First all a beautiful friendship. There you go. There you go. 00:46:33 You never know what could happen. Yeah. Especially with me. What are the areas also looked at. 00:46:43 Which I found really quite interesting. Or is your three layers of evidence that you wrote about that. I had some really interesting insights into you. You mentioned Nassim Taleb talking about the fallacy of extrapolated inference. If you're looking at the one part of the article is talking about interpretation of descriptions and also patterns of information. I've tied that back to something which David Deutsch was talking about in one of his books that he read or that he wrote or the concept that he had is that the an idea to have a long term value. 00:47:23 It has to have reach. 00:47:25 I hope I recall correctly is that his principle behind that is that if you actually take a look at the idea itself if you are to try and unpick the idea and take apart you could say any of the subjective part of the idea. 00:47:42 Does it cause the actual core idea to change and break down because it's not supported by solid enough. 00:47:50 You could say evidence if it doesn't change enough. If if the core ideas still functions in itself. Once you've unpicked it from some of the subjective you could say surrounding evidence and some of the smaller supporting ideas then it means that the ideas reach and that kind of comes back to concept of his fallacy of extrapolated inference because there is a big problem especially when it comes to viral part of media and social media is that you very quickly have this extrapolated inference from something which is completely incorrect. 00:48:29 And I found that really interesting that you. 00:48:31That was a really valid idea that I got out of that or concept that I got out of that I think it's the structures you can have summarized in the habit of jumping to conclusions. Yeah this is I think a more common way to phrase the phenomenon that underlies both of the things that Nassim Taleb concept of robust phenomena and fragile theories and your extrapolate. I can recall the phrase used but what you used. 00:49:07 Yeah I found one thing that you said particularly well interesting and irritating. That was the part I'm not familiar with the book you cited but the thing about picking an idea apart and doesn't change by picking it apart or by analyzing it. Something like that. Yeah. That what you meant . Yeah I wonder what this means in practice. I mean if someone utters something interesting and do some kind of interpretation in your head that you take note of for example to take this back to knowledge work and the central casting method and then you were inspired we can say to write down what you just wrote down right. No. 00:49:50 I wonder what what kind of objective measure. 00:49:54 Do you need to say that that the idea changed and that you maybe let's do it differently. Is this a bad thing if you don't have the objective truth. 00:50:05 What an idea entails when you talk to someone and pick out some part of it only I think it's more about if you are to look at some of the blog posts that you've got and zettlekasten the whole idea is it's kind of like taking for example how can I have a really good example of where that falls apart. OK In the last number of years people have had a dramatic change in their views on fat and the impact on health people. People used to go down the road of based on on some research done in the 60s and how it was presented and how that's been unpicked is that basically fat is bad for your health. 00:50:54 There's really a saturated fat is really actually quite bad for your health. And that drove a lot of you could say business and interest in developing low fat products and various and proclaiming that it's good for your health. And then over the years people started investigating whether that is really valid and whether that is true that fat is actually bad for your health. And I actually started looking at the supporting research and all of the inferences and the conclusions which were drawn out of that and started taking them apart. And what happened is that the when the core idea was actually analyzed and actually researched re-evaluated it started falling apart. So that's the concept of where these ideas reach started falling down is because when you actually started investigating the supporting elements of the argument it started showing up cracks in the core concept which meant people started re-evaluating it. Now when you start looking at the underlying research and what people are finding out is that no that research wasn't really wasn't it really correct and it's changed a lot of people's perception of whether fat is actually bad for you. And there's a lot of really interesting research which has come out which has highlighted a different change in perspective. Now that's also falls into something else where people have this concept of when you start talking people about the cholesterol. People normally infer that cholesterol is bad for you and that's normally tied to high fat diet or eating loads of fat but that's because it's been you could say initially supported by various people and by researchers and by dogma you could say and now you have something which is called the continued influence which still impacts people's perceptions of that whole core concept is because it was regularly repeated in the news and very source of information through various health articles and presentations. And that perception has not changed enough to get to a point where people are actually questioning it on a on a regular basis. And that's where awareness and very source of information can actually incorrectly skew people's opinions of information which is why I started looking at the actual primary articles. I think it was mentioned in one of your blog posts instead of just looking at the secondary articles that everybody talks about start looking at the primary of articles. What's the source of the information which takes me back to something else which I've seen recently is where a lot of research is actually being re-examined to see if the how relevant it is to the actual conclusion drawn. I think it's been quite prevalent in the psychology fields where they reexamining a lot of inference is based on some of the initial research which is done. I think the marshmallow experiment is a is a prime example where they say that if you've got more self-discipline it'll infer that you'll have more success. But what they actually found is that when you actually break down the population of the research that they applied they two types of participants you had children or participants from you could say a more stable house was more higher mean income which meant that they were less inclined to deal with shortages in you could say food and then they also had some of the participants from areas which were which had less economic free income or were were low on the economic scale which meant their approach to food was I need to eat something now because I might not have it later which means that your primary driver when it comes to that experiment is completely different. It doesn't determines the success it just determines the primary driver when it comes to how they perceive their needs and how their needs are determined by some of the historical environment by their background environment. So that that's a way that the whole concept of the ideas has got reach is you could say exemplified in some of the conclusions and some of the re-evaluation of research and conclusions drawn from that. 00:55:24 I think I would change the word reach for time stable. The more time stable an idea can become the better it is in the task to reasoning behind the barbell method of reading it. 00:55:37 Yeah it comes down to time as the ultimate variable. Yeah. It's very very valid point. So what's next for you guys. 00:55:49 So a lot on the list for me to development to the archive for example but the belt and the road map there's the zettlekasten method course because writing a book in English is just too much trouble of both of us and because especially for me not so very good English. 00:56:09 I'm not sure who's suffering most when they're the editor and proofreader. 00:56:17 But yeah. So preparing presentation slides and doing the video course where you have more leeway and can improvise more on the spot and stuff like that. 00:56:26 I think that's that's the reason behind doing this in video form. As soon as possible I think that's the best I can get. 00:56:39 And then lots lots of applications that turn to the method of writing based on your notes that you putting in zettlekasten lots to come many years of work left. 00:56:51 That's really good because the thing you've got a lot of really valuable knowledge and there's some really interesting articles in here and it's it's good to see it you've got so many people that have participated and posted their own reviews and how they using it. Yeah and some of it we integrate is so you've got a really fantastic site and I see you've also got some YouTube live feeds that you do in live stream events that you do. 00:57:20 Yeah very very unregulated. More like two years ago it was more an experiment I think in hindsight it was like an idea and we wrote it but we didn't follow through. I think we focused more on the on the grid. 00:57:36 So to say yeah the fluffy fluffy presentation stuff no Lance could I bounce a question back to you that you regularly get from let's say newcomers to the method. Yeah. One thing that pops up from time to time is the question what is zettlekasten . And of course such and I have some conception and some idea how we could explain this but what what would you say is zettlekasten the way I perceive zettlekasten is you could say digitize form of index cards. 00:58:11 It's taking published knowledge personalizing it contextualizing it making it relevant to yourself and then making a note of it and then finding ways of using that relevant information for your own purposes. That's how I view zettlekasten. zettlekastem is also seen as a process of note taking and structuring your knowledge to make it usable to yourself because a big problem is that there's so many sources of information. And although I've looked at index cards and yes they are fine. I can type something a lot faster than I can write and my handwriting is terrible but the last thing I want to do is sit and squint at a card to try and figure it out so for me zettlekasten makes sense because I can read what I'm writing instead of trying to figure out what I'm writing. That's how I see zettlekasten is basically digital index cards and what is for you. 00:59:07 The main differentiator to other methods are two other approaches because I can. 00:59:14 1 It's searchable and 2 It's simple and straightforward. Life is complicated as it is the more the simpler the method is the simpler I can make it work for me. The more use I can have out of something. 00:59:28 If something is too complicated and it takes too long to learn and to get involved and integrate into your life people just won't use it. So the simpler and faster and easier something is the better it is for everybody. And it comes down to basically understanding the brain and how the brain functions. The brain tends to go for the easiest method tries to build in shortcuts if things get too complicated. You overload your working capacity and you basically you then just default to whatever's easiest and the easiest isn't always the right decision or the right process or the right thing to do. 01:00:05 For me zettlekasten and if it fits into that method of being easy simple and flexible then it has value to me as a person. 01:00:18 I mean on the upside and the spectrum would be people from do you know the outline of software dot com forums No. 01:00:27 I don't know how old it is. It looks like it's straight from the 90s and nobody ever needed to update the software. I don't know how they deal with spam because apparently the moderator doesn't have to do much according to its own information that I gather but. They're a dedicated bunch of people who talk about outlining software first and foremost but then we'll expand into all the other related things like producing texts taking notes and they came up with the term I think they came up with. I don't know if it's borrowed from somebody else. They call themselves crimpers and CRIMP It's an acronym. I don't recall what it stands for but these crimpers as they call themselves try out all the methods and all the software all the time. If something new comes out they're hooked. They're interested they try it and they spend so much time experimenting with stuff and you said that the brain tries to find interesting things and novelty yet. Yeah. That's either you could go the simple route make the tool as simple as possible and deal with novelty of information. I would say or you just experiment with all the new tools and the shiny new stuff that comes out every week and you don't get to the actual work and don't enjoy the work. In the end because you're just switching tools all the time so that's something to take care of. 01:01:55 Yeah I've just found that over time if there's too much then you don't end up using it more and more. I'm looking at reducing as much as possible and getting as much value as possible and focusing on getting really efficient with key bits of software and key ways of dealing with information. And for me it's the less is more. I'm not a young man anymore so my whole focus on life is to simplify as much as possible and to get as much as possible out of what I do and get as much benefit as possible out of what I do. 01:02:32 That could be in my opinion that could be a difficulty for a zettlekasten method because it's quite simple in the action. 01:02:41 There are some methods so to say or routines how to set up your workflow that that add a bit to it but in reality it's just too fast too fast to be learned. And then you have actually do the work and have no issue in learning something new or to discovering some hidden feature or something like that and I think it's it's a bit of detriment that could be perceived not as sexy but more like raw and you're like in a very very direct and efficient way.01:03:20Yes. Full stop. 01:03:23 It kind of reminds me of a really good analogy 10 years ago when Microsoft was managed by Steve Ballmer. He was absolutely vitriolic about Linux and calling Linux cancer and you know being very anti Linux and every good we had drugs. Yeah I find it really interesting that that whole perception has changed because if you take a look at Windows and Linux systems Unix systems were specifically designed for hardware with very low spec very low hardware requirements but they used a lot of small commands that they could chain together pipe together to get a really big compound effect out of it. 01:04:13 And it doesn't mean that a Unix system is less functional than a Windows system because obviously Windows systems have changed quite a lot on their backs you come down to the realization that you don't have to have all these windows and everything else you can have a really barebones system that actually functions a lot better and there's a lot of scripting and command line which has come back in which is actually enhanced the functionality of the operating system but that they had to change that perception because they thought everything was going to be windows and managed and they actually forgot the power of scripting and connecting various tools together to actually give you a result. So I like the approach of you could say the Unix approach or Linux approach where you've got a bunch of small commands really simple clean functional pieces of tools which put them together and now suddenly what you've got is a really powerful tool and that's my approach is everything else that I try and do. I take a look at what what is the simple basic building blocks of each one. Break it down into its core components and then put it together you've got something fantastic and that's the same thing. Do it the way I look at information. I try to look at information that ways try to look at the core concepts and the core concepts are really functional and do what they want. You put them together you get something fantastic It's like baking a cake. Yeah a cake. Yes. The end result is fantastic. But if you don't understand the core basic components if you don't use the core basic components then it doesn't matter. The end result is it's always going to be rubbish because you don't know how to use the simple clean component. That's how I see it. If it's a tool is easy to use simple to use and I can add value to it by using it in the correct way. 01:06:01 Then to me it's worth a lot more than then something that really complex I truly like the metaphor because if you read recipes and there's like instruction to add for X nobody in their right mind would think oh well I'll just take the bowl take the whole egg with it Shell and throw it in as fast as I can and then you know ingredient added finished you have to crack it open first but that's all that you have to acquire through hard chewing. 01:06:30 Yeah I like that all right making a cake. I'll check some eggs in it. Throw a bottle of milk or a quarter of milk in it. 01:06:38 It looks like ingredients for a cake. Yeah certainly makes a mess of your baking. 01:06:44 No I'm not really inclined to try this but it bit intrigued to have somebody else do this and report. 01:06:52 Excellent. Sascha Christian. Thanks a lot for your time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you both. Yeah. Thanks for inviting us. I'm looking forward to your video lessons if they are anything like your writing it's definitely going to be something to take hold of them and be part of. When do you hope to have something usable that you'll unleash on the world. Yeah this lifetime. 01:07:23 Can't get any more specific.Yes I specifically I failed a lot on timelines and therefore I don't think it's honest to give a date and they hope but we will keep you posted on the website. 01:07:38 Definitely do that. I'll carry on reading your blog and taking part and definitely try and learn as much as possible. Make use of the archive. Thanks. Thank you very much for a really wonderful tool and I wish you all the very best. Thanks a lot. Take care. Support the show.
