All right.

Introduction

So who's heard of second brain? Just quick hands up if you have. Great. Good to hear

it's getting out. All right.

What a “Second Brain” Is (and Why It Matters)

So yeah, basically second brain is how, you know, Andre Carpaffi introduced the idea that we can all get probably 10 times more use out of AI and Claude and ChatGPT and these wonderful things we pay for.

So I've built second brains for most different things that I do running different businesses that I run or my hobby, which is just investing in stocks or or even I've put some good YouTube videos out about spirit sales. So anyone selling gins to pubs, you know,

and how they would have a second brain, which does a lot of their work. So this one is going to be about stocks and actually sort of the setup and how it all works and how it can be applied to anything you do in your life.

The Core Setup: Claude Code + Obsidian

So the first thing is that you're going to move from the chat tab to the code tab. the last time I used the chat tab to be honest everything I do is in the code tab and it's not not just for code, which is great.

so with Claude I mean I just use Claude I don't really use the other ones cost 15 pounds a month that's the first thing to know if you're into the free subscriptions you if you want to do this sort of stuff you're gonna have to pay a little bit more it's worth it it really is so I can't remember

And then, yeah, so the basic idea is you have Claude Code here on the left, Obsidian here on the right, and basically they're just engaging with each other.

So Claude Code is where you specify your plugin. So it's sort of your skills, it's your tasks, it's what you want, like the actions you want to happen. You sort of turn them into a plug -in and then it becomes a role you could say

So it might be researching something, It might be preparing a report. It might be analyzing a transcript. It could be whatever you want all these different actions

Obsidian as Your Private, Auditable Memory

And then it's just reading writing searching Obsidian, which is just your memory It's where all of your texts and files and everything lives, right? So if you're making YouTube videos, it could be where your transcripts are. It's if you're managing contracts it could be where all of your contracts live as pdfs maybe right it's just

a vault of knowledge and that vault of knowledge just makes sure that your ai knows what you want and where to get stuff from it's pretty handy so the idea is it's just gonna read and write to a

vault you can see your knowledge vault grows over time you own it it's on your laptop no other big big tech American company owns your knowledge vault. It just sits there on your laptop in plain text.

That's beautiful. And then it grows over time.

It's auditable. You can just open it and go, why did you give me this stupid answer? Oh, it says this in my knowledge vault.

And it's plain files on a laptop. It's private. No one else can access it. It's not even on the internet.

Speed, Token Efficiency, and the MCP Question

It's fast and it's incredibly token efficient. So if you've heard all of these

people talking about mcp servers basically mcp servers are just really token inefficient ways of just doing what you could do with plain text on your laptop they have their place but if you just want to you know basically create a lot of value do a lot of actions using your information very quickly you probably don't need mcp servers you can probably do it with all of the information

Skills and Plugins: Making AI Reliable and Repeatable

which claude is reading and writing from on your laptop and it's reliable because it's running the same skills every time a skills uh a skill is just um a prompt like a long prompt could be a very long prompt if you get claude to write a really long detailed one which does whatever task you want and it's just repeating the same skill every time which means that it's reliable it's doing the

same thing every time and claude updates itself so you can tell it when something is broken in your skill and it needs to change so i'm going to give some examples of that as well and um yeah

basically claude is building all of this for you you're just telling it in plain text it builds the plugin it builds the vault and it updates the plugin it updates the vault it's doing all of this for you don't need to be technical and it is pretty straightforward so like basically with

my stocks like we just you know it just gives me ideas it researches things and it stops me from from making stupid decisions. It seems to be working. It might not work forever, but we'll see.

Inside the Knowledge Vault

So now we're gonna go into the vault. So this is what a vault looks like, right?

So you can see here that we have like a nice visual of basically all of my knowledge, right? Which sits here and I can say, I wanna look at different themes.

So this is visualizing the links. So obviously Claude is creating all of these links for me between all of my data in the vault it does all of this itself and you can see the structure of

Collecting Sources Fast: Web Clipping and PDFs

my vault so you can see um clippings is a really interesting one so whenever i'm on the internet i use a chrome plugin called uh obsidian web clipper and i just click clip and it just dumps

it in my vault and then i might ask claude because i did this with uh spacex it was ipoing and then And basically, I put a 60 -page PDF out, a 60 -page presentation. I wasn't going to read it. So I just click clip, put it in here, tell me about it.

Like tell, you know, and then you use my plugin to sort of go, okay, like actually, am I going to lose a lot of money here? Or, you know, does it seem like a sensible thing? So I just dump all of these in here. And then it becomes useful things that Claude can then engage with.

so you know if you're doing transcripts or if you're doing uh marketing assets you can dump anything you want in there easily from the internet even competitor stuff i don't know so if your competitor launches something or they write an article you can just click clip put it in there and then you can analyze it and then yeah this is my structure basically it sort of runs

From Themes to Industries to Companies (Stock Research Structure)

from feces so i like to just have ideas about where the world is going to go so some of them are space some of them are ai some of them are energy related and then it will just map it out into industries for me and then it will map it out into companies for me and then it will just sort of just dive into sort of different things and just say you know this is uh what we think and this is my recommendation and it follows whatever methodology i'm interested in so that's

what um this is doing i mean it's pretty straightforward you can open any of these up and they're just going to produce reports right so it's just writing all of these really interesting things, getting information from whatever API that you're interested in, putting links in, saying where it exists in the supply chain. So it's just quite a cool thing you can do.

And this is how it's evolved. So that's the vault.

How It Works in Practice in Claude Code

Then if we actually look at what this looks like in Claude code, you can sort of see, I'm just chatting to Claude here, right?

I'm saying, look, SpaceX just went public. Like, what do you think? What do you think the thesis is?

it gives me different ideas as to what it thinks the thesis should be and then i say let's go for all three of them combined why not and then basically it lets me map the industry out so then it says look like you know this is just an example right so you can see all of these

Slash Commands in Action: Industry Maps and Company Profiles

forward slashes so like forward slash industry map is what i give it i'm just that's a skill right in my plugin so then i'm sort of saying forward slash industry map space launch so then what it's going to do is it's going to follow my skill to then map that industry out and find all the companies and what's interesting and and that sort of stuff and then it just maps it out it puts

it in sort of like nice mermaid js which actually gives you nice graphs in in obsidian gives me ideas and then i'll do come forward slash company profile right so it's just this is like the

the evolution it's basically you can say i want a plugin that's going to map through my day of work and it can have different skills that you uh engage with uh to basically do your job or do your work or do whatever you're looking to do so this is a good an example where it's gotten to a

point where it's now researching a business based on its industry map based on a thesis it came up with and then it's reading and writing so you can see basically here it's updating a file right so this is it looks like code but it's just text it's just making a report and you don't really need to understand what any of it means because it's just doing it in the background and then

it's just giving you ideas right so that's what it looks like in claude code and then you know the idea of just engaging with it so that you are it is building your second brain for you again this isn't a technical thing at all it's just reading and writing and building these plugins

Maintaining the System: Updating and Debugging Skills

for you so here's just an example of the other day where like i've got a claude code skill called find new it goes on to reddit it goes on to twitter it goes on to different blogs and it just finds what people are talking about and it just you know finds interesting opportunities for

me and yesterday they found out that reddit is now blocking like anonymous json access so then then that's not my problem. That's Claude's problem, right?

So then I tell it, can you debug it? Cool.

Like then it's just sort of saying, you know, you've got to then create an application on Reddit. Can't really be bothered. Sounds painful. Maybe we should just drop Reddit. Great.

So I tell it to go find other sources. So then it goes, here's other sources. And I'm like, these sound cool.

Now you tell me which ones we need to go for. So I say add all five to the skill. Why not?

so then you can see it's just updating its own skill file right so it's updating its own skill file and then it is testing itself um because i don't really want to test it i think it should just test itself and then i just run find new again and then it creates the actual

um report for me so it's pretty straightforward it just something that you chat with in plain plain English, and it just go you go back and forth with it. And it basically builds itself.

Let Claude Write to the Vault (Instead of Manual Editing)

And it can be tempting to look at Obsidian and go, okay, this is easy. I'm just going to like add this paragraph here.

But it's always better to just tell Claude to add the paragraph or add tell Claude to do things because it creates the links easily, it creates the tables easily, it creates the graphs easily. So yeah, I just sort of live in that.

Then yeah, so

Other Models and “Code Tab” vs “Chat”

So, now, can you use ChatGPT or Gemini instead of Claude? Yeah, you can.

I don't really know what they're... I think ChatGPT, they call it Codex. You can use Codex.

Probably has the same sort of reading and writing from Markdown that Claude has. Gemini probably has something similar.

Why This Beats Chat: Instructions, Memory, and Auditability

What's the difference between using this and chat?

Well, most of the people I speak to who have tried using AI and have gotten nowhere with it is because they just sort of complained that it's not doing what they tell it to do and it's not following instructions and it's doing stuff unreliably and this is one way that I found to stop that it is reliable because it is reading and writing from your information and it's following some very detailed prepared instructions every time and it's updating these instructions as as you tell it to if you want better skills. So yes, I found it significantly better than using chat

because I don't really know what it means when Claude Chat is telling me there's memory and then it's answering as if there is no memory and I can't really tell it why or understand why it's working, but this you can audit it and you can go in and you can go, oh, that's why you just gave me a stupid answer.

When MCP Servers Make Sense (and When Markdown Wins)

So now the fun one of MCP servers. well they're great like so you can use uh google drive notion uh all of these other tools which uh store files and um you know store your information but the biggest difficulty is

plain text on your laptop is really fast and really token efficient if you just use it plain markdown in obsidian so you're going to get faster results probably better it's going to be able to search across your entire vault much faster and it's going to use way less tokens so

using mcp servers has its place right for a lot of businesses which already run on google drive and notion and excel like it can be great but in terms of for a lot of what you're trying to do if you can just strip it all the way back down to markdown and text do it because it's way more

Who This Is For (Use Cases) + A Quick Capture Tip

token efficient way faster and it's just better um so yeah who else can use it so product owners uh transcripts like you know user interview transcripts problems solutions assessing whether your product is you know on the right track uh sales prospecting analyzing sales calls generating reports all these sorts of things so i've got a youtube video for spirit sales teams

because i used to work in spirits uh marketing so content content strategy optimization connecting to youtube instagram all that sort of stuff and probably most other jobs um and then one easy tip

Turning Conversations into Vault Knowledge via Transcription

is actually um in order to basically have it analyze every conversation you have just use the voice memos app on your phone uh if you have an iphone it records everything and then adobe podcast is completely free it will transcribe everything detect speakers and just you can drop it straight into your Knowledge Vault.

How to Set It Up (Simple Steps)

So then how do you do it? Very simple. Download Cloud Desktop, download Obsidian, create a folder on your laptop. That's what you're going to work inside.

Navigate to the folder in Cloud Code. Then describe what you want.

I often start with the plugin, well, I start with the Vault structure often and I say here's how I think my information should be organized. Then describe the plugin that you want.

So, the different skills, the different tasks you want to happen, have all of that happen in plan mode, approve the plan, and then just keep telling it where it's wrong. Just keep going, look, like, you know, this skill's not great. Actually, maybe we should, like, change the vault structure. Maybe we should change the properties in the vault. You just sort of iterate.

And then it gets to a point, hopefully, where it's good and it helps you. So, that's it, really. That's everything. how's time there we go

great timing uh fantastic really helpful i'm going to follow that one um questions and please use the microphone if possible because we're recording for the website

Q&A

Automation Tools: Co-work vs n8n vs Claude Code

hiya um so obviously we talked about my youtube channel and how i kind of pull transcripts and whatnot but um right now whenever i'm building skills i do tend to use co -work but you said outright just no i'm just curious is there any benefit in using co -work or should you just use

co -cloud um so um like for quite a long time before this ai stuff was a thing like i was using na10 uh which is like a great tool for uh automating things you know on a schedule uh connecting with different platforms and then you know they introduced the the ai bits as well and it's a lot personally for co -work i find na10 is significantly better

because um it also has like a webhook receiver which is incredibly useful for like customer support tickets or stuff where you want it to respond uh and not just run on a particular schedule so i never got into co -work because i was already using na10 and it's just better

uh to be honest um but then where claude code is just much more useful is for me is just because um i don't mind doing a forward slash and typing three characters and just letting it run for you know a few minutes or an hour like it's um it doesn't like it's it's something where i like to feel involved with it and i like to see it working and i like to see the output so um i've

I've just never really had the need for co -work. And I think a lot of software developers that I know are pretty similar in the sense

that they like to give it a task and then sort of watch it complete the task and then watch the output. So yeah, I don't have a task to give co -work, but I'm sure maybe other people do.

It's just not that useful for me. It was great. Thank you very much.

My co -founder today found that Apple voice memos are currently now doing full transcripts, so you can skip the bit with taking it through to Apple Podcasts. That's it.

Balancing Vault Knowledge vs Live Internet Search

I'm interested in the balance of future queries to Claude, the balance of where the information is coming from. problem so why would it go to your vault above and beyond the entire up -to -date internet and do a fresh search and how do you balance the information coming in in future um yeah so i'll give you an

example is um so um i do a lot of like so i build software right um so i've got like customers and those customers uh i have transcripts with them maybe one customer i might have 10 transcripts with them right so that's information related to that customer lots of information related to that customer of conversations i've had with them in the past so then when i run a claude code

skill it knows that it can only get information from about my past conversations that customer by going to that customer your proprietary chat i can understand that but when you're talking about your um stock research on spacex for instance that feels like you wouldn't want to limit yeah Yeah.

So I don't necessarily limit it, but from what I've found, especially with earnings calls transcripts, so basically companies have to report earnings every quarter. And basically

the transcripts from the earnings calls are actually far more interesting than anything else because people say things on these calls that they wouldn't put in a presentation, right? It's just

kind of how these things go and um basically if you can force uh claude to review the transcript it will review the transcript whereas if you allow it to go onto the internet it probably won't

um so i prefer to web clip the transcript and then say um you know this company just reported earnings um let's look at the transcript and see if there's anything meaningful in here which is is going to impact the price um so i that's kind of one one example uh but there are quite a few

How Much Vault Structure to Design Up Front

yeah yeah and the final follow -on just and how much time do you put into the structure because i've seen quite a lot of chat about people approaching the structure of these vaults in different ways so how much do you let claude do that versus how much do you dictate what the

structure of the vault should look like um the structure i would say my structures are very simple right in terms of like i just have an idea as to what i think would make a good investment like i like to find supply chains and say you know if robots suddenly become incredibly popular how does that map all the way down to materials in a mine right because you know there's these

sort of inter relationships between these companies and i find that that's something that I find incredibly useful. So I structure my vault based on that. I guided it towards that.

It's a very simple structure. It just kind of goes thesis, industry map, company. People can do much more complicated ones. But it sort of depends, I guess, how much time

you want to spend in it. I don't really want to spend that much time. This is kind of a hobby for me. Like, I just kind of enjoy chatting with it

and then it telling me when I'm being an idiot. it um but yeah it's something which you can evolve with over time and you can get it to change the

Visualisation, Links, and How They Help Navigation

structure at any point great one more question one more uh it's just a quick one really could you just touch on the um the graphic visualization aspects of this um yeah so what do you want to

touch on um i've used i've used geffi in the past um i guess a first question would be to what extent does this visualization inform your analysis your questions are you are you looking at this and then sort of feeding it back can you just expand a touch on it so um the

visualization is kind of more just cool to look at it's not it's not actually like that useful but what it's doing is it's mostly showing you um the links right so if i click into like like semiconductors right you can see all of these links and these links for me I just find

them useful like if I'm going all right I'm interested in semiconductors it will create all of these links for you and if it like when you think about like it's just creating these because it's Claude doing it I'm not spending hours creating these reports of all these links it just makes it easy to sort of like click through things and just sort of go you know

know what like i'm interested in clicking into this company and then seeing where they sit in sort of upstream and downstream supply chain right it's the links are just useful for me because i'm interested in the supply chains because i think that's a useful thing to for me to invest

my money based on um but it could be you know in my uh business it might be links between companies and employees and features, maybe feature requests, I don't know, but like, it's basically just really useful

for Claude to be able to navigate the vaults using these links as well. Because I get the impression, and I don't necessarily know this

because I didn't build Claude myself, that the links in Obsidian make it a lot easier for Claude to just follow and navigate information that it might need when it's giving you a response.

and it seems to be pretty efficient at that um so most of yeah all of my experience with this is just kind of i do it and i see and then i'm like okay cool that worked and then that's kind

Conclusion and Next Steps

of it so yeah amazing um how good is claude as a stock broker stock picker i mean it's been good for me uh and i can't you can't uh it's not fine none of this is financial advice so like you know know it's just a hobby like i just i'm interested in this stuff so i built a second brain for it

Getting the Template: Free GitHub Download

and if you guys are interested build your own second brains and this is actually free on my github you can actually just download it so you can download this whole claude code and second brain setup with all this information in it on my github free of charge