How To Build The ULTIMATE AI Second Brain (Obsidian + Claude Code)

This AI second brain will help you get more work done than you ever thought possible. And I want to show you how to set it up in the next 5 minutes. And then we can dive deep. I'll show you every single tip I found to help you unlock its maximum power. And dad gum it is it powerful.

Because here's what it helped me do in the last 45 days alone, including building a sick web app that I launched yesterday and has real paying users all without any prior software experience. It is insane.

You see, by taking the agentic AI power of Claude and then combining it with the storage structure and note-taking power of Obsidian, you essentially unlock a 200 IQ employee who knows exactly what you need done, can help you do it, and then can do it while you sleep.

And the reason my AI second brain works so well is because it's a two-layered system. So the first layer is all about AI helping you think. The AI brain is trained to be the general of an army. So, it helps you strategize, it helps you plan your goals, it helps you see where you want to go and figure out what is the plan to actually get there.

And then the second layer is full of AI soldiers. And so, they're programmed specifically to help you with each task that you've already decided you need to do to hit your goals, which gives you essentially an AI digital army at your command, which sounds insane, but if you'll just watch along, I'll try to prove to you its power.

So, let's go set this up for yourself. So, let's talk about how this works so that you can use this to the best of your ability. And the first layer of this two-layer system is all about strategy and storage. It's simply to answer the question, what do we do? So, you have these goals, these dreams, these ambitions, but you don't really know what you have to do to get there. That's what this layer solves.

And we have Claude in this layer as a thinking partner. You can see my little Einstein Claude representation here. But normally Claude isn't very good as a thinking partner because he doesn't have context about you. He doesn't have your notes, your goals, your journals, like what's going on in your life. And this layer solves that problem.

So his entire role, like I said, is a thinking partner. You and Claude are acting as the general of an army. So just like it's hard for a general to command an army when they're on the front line, the same thing is true of you and Claude. In this layer, you're not trying to do a bunch of stuff. You're trying to figure out what are the right things you should do in the next layer. And that's the secret.

And we do that by you and him sharing context. So your notes on your books, videos, courses, etc. Your journals, your calendar, your long-term goals, your reviews. So like, are you actually making progress towards those goals? And then ultimately your projects, which is that next layer.

And so how does Claude actually act as a thinking partner? Well, Claude has given us these cool things called claude.md. It sounds complicated and crazy, but it's simply just instructions for Claude in a folder. So, every folder that you open up that you're going to work on with Claude, if you type out a claude.md file, you can tell him what his instructions are in that folder. And if you want a full guide on this and just how to use Claude for the first time, I made a full co-workass which includes all this stuff. So check that out in the top right hand corner if you're brand new.

But like I said, it's very simple. It's just instructions. And so in this folder, um, you'll see with my setup, it'll actually do this for you. But I just want to explain kind of what's actually there. It's just so Claude knows who you are, what you're trying to do, what his rules are, and your strengths and weaknesses and kind of your goals. And so that's what his instructions are in here. He knows that he's a thinking partner. He's not supposed to be doing. He's supposed to be helping you decide what to do.

And also we can give Claude some skills and commands. As the two skills that I've given Claude after you set it up is just new project. And so he interviews you to help you make new projects. So those new second layers. And then also we have weekly update. So he, he'll interview you and he'll update everything across the brain that has to be updated. That way he always has fresh and recent context.

Now, what's the point of this? Like, what's the value in having this layer? Here it is. It's because you get clear goals. You have a clear plan to actually hit those goals, which means your thinking is clean, clear, and dangerous. And also, as a bonus, you can easily recall information. So, this is what people normally like base their whole second brain around, which is important, but not near as important as this actual strategy to accomplishing what you want in life. But you also can recall information. So, because Claude has access to all of your books, videos, goals, journals, calendar, you can ask him questions about anything in your life and he knows he can go find it. So, super cool.

So, let me show you what this layer actually looks like in Obsidian and we'll go on to layer 2. So, this is what a layer 1 actually looks like inside of Obsidian. This is my real second brain layer 1. So, as you can see here, I have the claw.md. So Claude knows who I am, what his purpose is, what my purpose is, and how it can help me in this folder, which is really cool. Also, he has my goals in a file here. And here we have all that shared context that I talked about just a second ago. We have my notes. And so, as you can see here, it's got all my notes from my books, which you can use a plugin called Read Wise to like do this automatically, or you can just have Claude read your Kindle notes, which is cool. It has course notes, my video notes. I've got my journals, my chess moves, which you guys will see later on, is basically just my long-term strategy journal. Claude helping me decide where should I focus my time. That's the whole value of this.

Then we have my projects. So, you can see this is that second layer. We'll talk about this in a second, but he has access to all of it. So, he can see across all my projects. And that's where some of the value comes in. He's not just boxed into one. He can see across all of them. He's the general of my army. Then we have reviews, which you guys will have weekly, um, monthly, quarterly, and yearly, but I just had a template for now. I don't really do reviews that much. And then we have skills. These are the skills that you set up that Claude can use in this first layer. Like I said, this is just an overview. We'll go into depth later. Also, we have Claude inside of this first layer. So, I can ask him stuff about literally anything. Um, which we'll show you guys examples in a bit, but this is cool. You also learn how to set up this plugin.

Let's look at the second layer. So, welcome to layer two. This is the project layer. So in the first layer we answer the question, what do we do? In this layer we answer, how do we do it and then we go do it. So this is where the value actually comes into your life. You actually start solving problems.

And so the way that these this layer works is you open up Claude and Obsidian inside of a specific project folder. So inside of your meta layer, which houses everything, you have all your projects here. You open up just the project. And in here, Claude has a very specific task. He is supposed to be your digital employee. And so the instructions for Claude are a little bit different. In here, we want him to know what is the project, what is the goal, what is his role in helping us hit that goal. And basically like what's what's entailed in actually doing this system. And I'll give you guys tons of examples. Um, and this will set it up for you. It'll like my plugin will set this up for you itself. So you don't have to really know, but I just want to show you kind of what's involved.

And also in this project, Claude has specific skills and commands just for this project, which is so cool. And so every project is very simple. It's just the outputs that you want. And so like what are you actually trying to achieve? For example, this YouTube video is an output in my main channel system, which I'll show you guys in detail later. The inputs would be my ideas for the videos. The process folder would be how Claude helps me do the research, come up with the title, the thumbnail, the actual content of the video, and the feedback would be the metrics of the video, your guys's comments, and my own thoughts. And so Claude in this folder just helps me make YouTube videos. He's not worried about all that other stuff. And that's where the value comes into play. And then obviously, you have multiple different projects for all that you want to accomplish in your life. And Claude has different skills and commands for each project.

So, like I said, don't get overwhelmed. I'm going to show you guys all this live. I just wanted to give you this. If you need help, come back and watch this over and over again. I promise it is worth it and it's free.

So, yeah, let's actually take a look real quick at what is Obsidian. So, if you don't know what Obsidian is, it's very simple. It's just a way to view folders and files. That's it. It's nothing crazy. As you can see on the left-hand side, this is the Mac Finder. So, this is Mac's natural way to view files. Here's Obsidian in that same folder. It's the same exact folder, but Obsidian just gives you the option to have plugins, to have Claude inside of Obsidian, to actually be able to view the files and edit them while you're still seeing the folder on the left. So, that's all it is. It's nothing scary. It's just a folder viewer on steroids where you can customize it, make it look whatever you want. It's It's really cool.

And if you ever wonder like what about VS Code or what about anti-gravity, these are all pretty much the same things. So VS Code is kind of like Obsidian but for coders. So it has plugins and it's set up more for editing code whereas Obsidian is more for editing like knowledge work, you know, writing and notes and stuff like that. But you can do the same thing across all of them. They're just different ways to view files and folders. So yeah, no need to get too far in the weeds there. But this is the same folder literally opened up in each individual plugin or each individual app. So same thing, just different ways to view the files.

Okay, so here's what the second layer looks like inside of of Obsidian, what we just went over. So if you look in your meta layer, you have projects. Now, the second layer is when we open up Obsidian in one of these projects specifically. So I'm going to go down here. I'm going to click this. I'm going to go to manage vaults. I'm going to open folder as a vault. And so if I do this, here is my actual KJOS folder. I go to projects and then I can open up any of these projects as their own vault. So I'm going to open up my main channel and I'll pull it up right here. So here is my main channel project. And so this is layer 2. I'm now working specifically on making YouTube videos. And Claude knows this because of his claw.md. Like I said, I'll show you guys how to set up all of this almost automatically, but I just want to kind of give you an overview.

So in here, he has his own skills. He has his own narration logs. He has his own like um process. Like it just keeps it super super clean. And I have Claude right here on the side. And so I can create a new chat and I can ask him to, you know, summarize this idea, to run skills, to literally help me do everything I do with content. And that's why it's so dang powerful.

All right, let's go over how to set this bad boy up for yourself as quick and painless as possible. First thing I want you to do is come over here to claude.com and you're going to download the Claude desktop app. Um, if you want a full guide on this, it's in my co-workass. I go over all the settings, all that good stuff, but I'll leave it out this time. Go check that out in the top right corner. But all you're going to do is you're going to download this app for Mac, Windows, wherever you want it.

Next, you're going to download Obsidian. So, come to the second link in the description or whatever link it is. Download Obsidian for whatever platform you have. And now, all we're going to do is we're going to come over to my free school. Completely free. No strings attached. This is just the safest way for you guys to get this stuff. Come to classroom. Go to start here. Go to YouTube resources. You're going to download the KJOS template. You're just going to click on it. You're going to click download. Or you can click this in the top right corner. And you will safely get my exact template folder. That's all it is. Just a folder.

And so once you've got that, we will actually drag this to the desktop here in zero seconds. There we go. Now I'm going to extract here. So I'm going to open this with um the unarch. That's what I use. There we go. KJ template one. Now all I want you to do is to rename this to whatever you're going to call your second brain. So we'll just say KJ's AI brain. There we go.

And now we need a couple more things. This is going to sound a little complicated, but I promise it's really not that bad. I have no coding experience. It it just looks a little weird for those of us who haven't done this before. What we want is we want to install Claude code into our terminal so that we can put it inside of our Obsidian. So all you're going to do is you're going to figure out, you know, which software system you have or operating system. You're going to copy whichever command is yours. So I'm going to copy it here. And then I'm going to open up the terminal. So the terminal looks scary, but I promise it's really not that bad. And I'm just going to paste what that told me right here. And then you're probably going to have to wait a second for it to actually download. And then I'll come back when it's actually done.

All right, so it's saying Claude code is successfully installed. If you want to check this, you can just type in Claude and hit enter. And it's going to ask you if you trust it, and I do. So, I'm going to run. And there we go. Now I have Claude inside of my terminal. You can do all the same functionality as the actual app. It just looks a little bit different. It's more for coders, but I'll show you how we're going to use it to empower us as just normal workers.

Now, what I want you to do is we can minimize this for a second. I want you to run Obsidian. Now, what I want you to do is open folder as a vault. Like I said, Obsidian is just a cool way to view folders. It's that simple, but it's really powerful because of just how cool it is. We're going to click open, and I'm going to choose this brand new folder that we titled from the template. So, KJ's AI brain. I'm going to open that up. I'm going to hit trust. This just gives you all of my plugins automatically. And the setup that I like to run with. And now we have the actual second brain right here. And I've given you guys a few things. I've given you guys a setup guide in case you want to just um follow along in written steps or if you get lost somewhere and you want to just, you know, see the actual guide. I've given you all of that here. So, pretty cool.

Now, you've got everything in here, but as you can see, there's nothing in the cloud. MD. So, your instructions haven't been written. And that's because the only way this brain is powerful is if it's specific to you. My personalized brain won't help you that much. My structure will, but now we have to personalize it to you.

So, how we're going to do that is we have to get Claude in our Obsidian. Now, this is completely optional. You can just run the Claude app and you can select the KJ's AI brain as your project. If you want to learn how to do that, I have a whole co-workass. All you do there is you just open up the brain in the app and then you can use Obsidian and look on your other monitor and use Claude. But this has really transformed my workflow by getting Claude in the actual Obsidian. And so now I don't have to open a bunch of Clauds and get them confused. I just open up the projects that I'm running and Claude is right there in each one. So let's go over how to do that.

Now once again, I this is going to sound a little bit scary. I promise it's not that bad. So, all we do is we come back up and there should be a link in the description for this Claudian plugin. So, all you're going to do is you're going to copy that link to the GitHub, which is basically just like a way for people to download folders. Then, you're going to open up the terminal again. And so, if you closed it out, type Claude get him back up. And we're going to say, um, let's see. Hey Claude, I want to install this Obsidian plugin. Can you check this repo and make sure that it's clean of any kind of um bad stuff? And then if it is clean, let's install it. So, this repo at the time of me recording this is completely clean and um it works great for me. Like I use it for all my stuff, but it could be compromised in the future. So, just to be safe, I would always ask it to like, hey, is this clean? And so, I'm going to do that. I'm going to pull back up this link and I'm going to copy it again. We're going to come back to Claude. We're going to paste it. Now, we're going to let him do his thing. So, the first thing he should do is actually go through and make sure there's nothing bad inside of it. So, he'll do that now. And then he will ask for permission to basically go and install all the different things. So, let's go ahead and do that. Also, Claude will ask you a bunch of questions if it can proceed. So, just like glance over it, make sure it's not doing anything crazy, and just say yes.

Okay. So Claude has just reviewed the plugin and it has no issues found. So pretty cool there. And so let's install it. I'm just going to say yes. Okay. So I have multiple vaults and I'm going to tell it which one to install it in. So I'm going to say KJ's AI brain, please. And so that's what you want to do. You want to just tell it whichever whatever you named your folder, you want to tell it install it there. Okay. Successful. Claudian is now installed. It installed all the things that it needed. It's also giving us the steps to actually set this up in Obsidian, which I'll show you guys in a second.

Now, we're going to minimize that in case we need it later. Let's come back to our Obsidian and let's get this thing underway. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to um restart Obsidian just to make sure that the plugin is all good to go. So, I'll open it back up. Now, we want to get Claudian on this right-hand side. And as we can see, he's already here, which is dope. But in case he's not, what I want you guys to do is to come over here to um community plugins. You want to hit refresh until you see Claudian. Then you want to enable it and then go to settings. And you can change all kind of settings. I want you guys to take a second and go through here. So I'm going to tell him to call me KJ. Um, yeah, you can just personalize this to whatever you want. Most of it I don't touch. I'll be completely honest. Yeah.

Now I'm going to see if he's actually here in live. So say, "Yo, what's going on?" Um, let's see. Nice. And so if this doesn't work for you, just screenshot whatever error you're getting. Um, put that into a Claude chat in the app and just ask it to help you. Mainly, you'll probably just have to restart Obsidian or but you guys can figure it out with Claude. That's the whole power of AI. Just use it to help you. And over here, you can see this is to start a new conversation. And so, it'll clean that chat. This is to open up another tab. So, now I have two conversations. And you can open up. You can change how many of these you can allow at a time, but you shouldn't need more than three, guys. I mean, this is already crazy to be able to do this. And so, I'm going to right-click and close those. This just already attaches whatever you're working in to Claude. You can just exit that out. And it doesn't really matter either way.

So, let's see if this is working. If we come down here, you can change which model you're using. I'm going to go for Opus, but if you guys only have the $20 plan, probably go with Sonnet. I'm going to change the effort to medium because it's not that big of a deal. And the last setting is this yolo mode. So yolo mode basically means that it bypasses all permissions. It won't ask before touching things. If you want it to ask, just leave it on safe mode. I honestly trust it, so I'm going for yolo.

So all you have to do now, and this is inside of the setup guide if you guys want to to know, is to say run the brain setup skill in the '05 skills folder. So, I'm just going to like, you know, copy this because I'm lazy and we will do that. Cool. So, it found the skill inside of this folder and it's going to set it up for us. And if you guys are wondering how are these skills different from the actual downloaded Claude skills and they're pretty much the same thing. I just prefer to have my skills as just markdown files inside of my projects. That way, my team can run the same skills without having to download them. I don't get all of them confused on which Claude is where. I just keep them all right here. And so if you it actually it's cool too because you can edit the skills just way easier. And so it's the same exact thing is actually making a skill. You just tell it where to go to run it.

Okay. So during this setup, as you can see, Claude is now asking me questions and it's going to set up everything for me. So this will take probably 5 minutes or so. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and answer all these questions and then I'll scroll through. I'll talk about it and we'll see what Claude actually sets up.

All right, so I answered the first question and it's kind of summarizing what it captured. And now let's go for round two. What do you want Claude to do? So in this one, um, keep it kind of simple. Just tell him that he's there to help you think, but you can kind of answer these however you want. And so let me do that real quick.

Okay, so I shot Claude off the answer to round two. Also, if you guys want to know what voice-to-speech tool I use, it's called Super Whisper. Um, I'll probably put a link in the description. I'm not like sponsored or anything, but it's like five bucks a month. There's even a free version, but I just use the $5 one. All right, so um round three, boundaries. How should Claude communicate with you? I'm going to be blunt and direct. Round three. Um, okay, any kind of add-on. So here I like to keep it simple. I would just say um any file that you create, tag it with that parentheses C and don't edit any of my writings or notes without asking first, please.

Okay, round four, strengths and weaknesses. I'm going to keep this kind of simple here. I am pretty good at at building things, solving problems, and making content about it. But sometimes I get caught up in trying to perfect stuff when I need to just put it out and get something out there that's actually going to help people. Um, also, I want you to just try to poke holes in my thinking and make sure that I'm I'm thinking on the right track. Sometimes I'm a little bit too optimistic. Um, so sue me. All right. Uh, it's way better to be a wrong optimist than a right pessimist. I'll say that though, guys. I can attest to that.

Okay, so round five, goals and current progress. Okay, here you just want to talk about your goals. I'm just going to keep this super simple because my other one's more in depth, but um I want to basically make amazing content that helps people and then build a software that helps them even more. So, my content leads them to my incredible software where they can get a free trial, fall in love with it, and then u pay for the service. All right. So, I would normally go much more in depth, but once again, I don't want to make this a 40-minute video. Um, just for you guys hearing my life story. Can you give me some more numbers and time? So, it's already being blunt and direct. I'll talk about how uh I can fill this in later. So, for the sake of the video.

Okay. So, round six, current projects. We don't have any projects yet, and you won't either if you're just now setting this up. So, you can just say, I will set them up here in a little bit. So, do that, and then we'll actually go into setting up the projects. is a whole different skill. So, pretty cool. Now, what Claude is doing is he is generating that claude.md for you. So, if we look over here to the claude, it's not filled in yet, but you can see him going through and filling in all those sections that we talked about in the video where we went over how this stuff works. So, I'm just going to say dope. Let's do it. I don't know if he understands what dope means. I guess he does. Look at that. Boom. The power of AI.

So, now your Claude is filled in. you're ready to go and it's time to actually set up our first project. So, what I want to encourage you guys to do is take a section uh take some time and fill in the goals on your own. So, I left this empty on purpose. I want you to just be honest with Claude and uh and give him where where you're trying to go, what you're trying to do. Because what I don't want you to do is to let the robot decide your fate. That's not what AI is for. AI is to help us achieve what God has already put on our hearts. the vision God has given you, the the passions, start there on your own outside of Claude. Give that to him and let him help you achieve it, but don't let him determine your destiny. Okay? Um, at least that's what I suggest in my personal opinion. Okay?

So, the next thing we're going to do is let's actually run a new project skill. So, we're going to do is we're going to come back to Claude and I'm going to say, "All right, Claude, let's run the new project skill. Let's set up my first project." Dope. He is reading the skill and now he's going to ask us some questions. So, I'm going to say app or I can just call this finances. Okay. Now, he's asking me what is this project? I want to set up a simple system where I can give you all of my bank statements and then we can basically submit a financial report for myself to see where I'm spending money, how I can save money, and uh just what happened financially that that past month. All right, cool. He says, "What does shipped look like?" So, I would love to have a system where I can drop in all of my statements and reports. We also spend some time figuring out what is a good budget for me every month based on like where I'm at in my life. And then we can get a report back of what I did well that month and what I need to work on next month. And I want to be able to see it in a way that's that's super clean. Who else is involved? I'm going to say no one. What's the process? Um, I think I should be able to get my own bank statements, drop the PDFs in a folder for you, then you process them based on a predetermined kind of budget that we set up beforehand. So, the first things we'll probably have to do is actually set up that budget and research what would be good for me and my stage of life. and then you give me a report back and then we can have another skill or something that analyzes over the months like what things I need to work on on a macro scale. Okay, cool. So, that might be a little bit too complicated to start with, but uh we'll let him rock with it. So, set up the budget, drop statements, process and categorize, monthly report, and then analysis. Dope. Wow, he nailed that. Um, we can worry about that as we go. Let's just kind of set up the project for now. You see how crazy this is, guys? I mean, you can start solving massive problems in your life right here, just off the rip, which is insane.

So, now what Claude's going to do is he's going to take this project template that we've set up and he's going to create this project right before our eyes. So, you can see he's just created the folder finances. Now, he's created all of the folders, everything. So in here you can see kind of the inputs, the process and the outputs. You can see like the system. So if we need to like write any, I don't know, lines of code or whatever, he'll put that in there. If we build any skills for this project, we'll put it in the '05 skills. The cloud MD is done. It's all here. So now he has his role in this project, which is epic. It's so sick. And you can update this as you go along, but uh it's just a way for you guys to start literally full projects right there.

And so now that this project is done, how do we actually go work in it, I'm going to show you two things. I'm going to show you how to actually change the template and I'm going to show you how to open up in the second layer. So let's go do that right now. So all you want to do is click on this thing down here. here. So, KJ's second brain. Go to manage vaults and you're going to open folder as a vault. So, we're going to do that. We're going to go into our main kind of uh brain here. So, KJ's AI brain. We're going to go to projects and we're going to open up that project as its own file. So, what I'm going to do first, I'm going to open up the project template. Um, I probably should have showed you guys this earlier, but this is pretty simple. If you want to change the appearance or how anything works, all you have to do is open up the project template and change it in there. So, I can change the colors. Let's say that I want to go for, I don't know, I want to go for a cool orange. I can do that. It changes the buttons. Um, you can change the theme. I'm not going to show you guys how to do the themes. I It's kind of a waste of time. I just I just work. But you can change plugins, change themes, and that way if you like a certain setup of plugins, let's say you want to add the calendar plugin or daily notes plugin, you can do that on the template. And now every time you make a new project with the Claude skill in the first layer, it'll copy over all that stuff. So you don't have to waste all that time setting up all your things. So pretty cool.

But now back on track, we will go to manage vaults again. We'll open folder as a vault. We'll choose finances and we will hit trust. And boom. There we go. And so if we look at this now, we are working inside that second layer. So I just showed you how Claude made all of these things in the kind of the meta thing. All we did was open up straight into that finances project. And now we have Claude who doesn't know about all that stuff we just yapped about. All he cares about is getting our finances done. Oh, it's so sick. Like it seems simple in hindsight, but like this change is everything. So now Claude only cares about his role right here. He's a soldier. He's going to get this job done. And so you can work with him right here. Like I said, we can start new conversations. Um, it's just awesome, guys. It's just awesome. And I'll show you guys all of my like use the things that I actually do every day in my life with this setup. But u yeah, this should be the setup. I don't think I'm missing anything. If I am, then let me know in the comments.

Also, one of the things that I've included is every time Claude creates a skill, he's supposed to put it inside of this '05 skills folder. You don't have to do this. You can just put it into your like entire Claude. So that way, no matter where you're at in the Claude app, on uh, you know, your phone on in Obsidian and Claude Code, it has the skill everywhere. But in my experience, I only want the finance skill in my finance project. And so that's why I did it this way. But if you do have a skill that you use across all things, just tell Claude, "Hey, install this skill across my like global Claude and he'll do that." And if he does that by accident anyway, you just tell him, "Hey Claude, don't install this across in your actual skills. Put it inside the '05 skills folder." So yeah, I'll show you guys examples of that here coming up. But that is the setup. If you have any questions, let me know. Let's get into the actual juicy use cases.

So, a quick but very powerful bonus tip before we get into the actual use cases. I use this a ton. This is how to use your second brain from your phone. Wherever the heck you're at, you have full access. This is kind of nuts. All you want to do is download the desktop app and sign into Claude. You're going to click on co-work. Then, if you look on this left-hand side, you will see a dispatch tab. You're going to click that. I like to check keep awake. Um, give it full computer use, bypass permissions, all that good stuff. Um, and yeah, now what we're going to do is you can, this is already working as is, but it can be a little bit glitchy. So, what I find to work very well is just telling it from the start that I want it to use an existing folder, and I give it the link to that folder. So, this is my the name of your second brain. This is what I do. And I tell it to set that as your permanent workspace from here on. So, I'm going to fire that off. And hopefully, he should understand that. And it'll it'll ask for access to that folder. So, here we go. I'm gonna say allow. And now we should be good to use our second brain from anywhere.

So, let me go ahead and try this right now with the video idea. And I'm on dispatch on my phone. So, you want to go to your phone and you want to click the dispatch button and see now you I can see this exact combo that's happening on my computer. And so, let's just let's just try this. Let's say I'm walking down the street and I have a sick idea. All right, Claude, I have a video idea that I want you to save in my um second channel project in the video ideas folder. And this idea is basically just teaching people how to use Dispatch to capture insane video ideas to basically 10x their creativity because an idea never slips through the cracks. Okay, cool. So, I'm going to shoot that off for my daily channel. Shout out to those of you guys who watch my daily videos about AI. Now, we'll take a look at the computer. It just shot this from my phone. And so the idea of this is if you leave your computer on, you have full access to your second brain like entirely from anywhere in the world. So it says on it save that idea. So now we're going to actually check the second brain and see if it worked. Okay. So if we come into my second channel folder, we can see in the video cards in the ideas section, we now have dispatch capture video as ideas. It was saved today and it followed the instructions of how I want my ideas saved. If you guys wonder how I upload every day, this is how Dispatch is awesome. But I will warn you, dispatch is pretty freaking glitchy. And so I would get the whole thing kind of working on your computer. And once it's working, you can use that same process on your phone all the time, but you the initial setup is a little bit janky. But that being said, extremely powerful. You can control your entire computer and claim your second brain from anywhere in the world on your phone.

So, the last bonus tip I want to give you guys when it comes to setting this stuff up and leveraging this brain is how to sync it between your team. So, how to have multiple people in one second brain and it syncs all the time. So, this is what's called Obsidian Sync. I think it's like yeah, it's like four bucks a month. I think every single person needs to have that. Um, yeah, it's it's cheap and if you have a team, obviously that's incredibly worth it. So, once you sign up to that, all you do is you want to open back up Obsidian. And so this is my signal app obsidian project. This is what I share between the team. And so all we want to do is come over here to settings. You will see this um core plugin called sync. And so you want to turn that on. Then you can go to the settings of sync on the left. And you will choose a remote vault. So whenever you purchase the Obsidian Sync, you'll be able to set up different vaults. And so I've already created a new vault called Signal. All I'm going to do is add my team members right here by clicking this sharing button. and sending in their emails with their Obsidian accounts. And then I just connect every vault to it. So once they have this, they do the same thing on their end and they just connect to this vault they've been invited to. We will click continue and I have to put in my password which you guys will never know. Then I will hit start syncing. And now it will be synced. But a very important tip that I want to share with you guys is to if you want sync all file types. And so because we're doing code here, I'm syncing our entire like app design and structure with my team. And so I want to sync over everything possible, the HTML files, all that good stuff. And so you can do that here. And you can also pick which folders to exclude from your team that don't get synced. So very simple there. And you should be good to go. Now my entire team, if you see down here, I'll move this over here. You see this little green check mark? That means it is fully synced. So everything I've done has synced across their computers. You can also add your phones to the synced um vaults. It's insane.

So, that's it for the setup. Let's actually go look at how I use all this stuff. And now it's time for the best part. How I actually use this second brain structure in my real life to create businesses, create value, and make money, and just have the absolute best time ever. So, starting off with my app, I've worked for the last two months on this app, and I've used this structure to build everything you're about to see. So, I'm going to show you guys this is not just kind of a local little for fun app. I actually have paying users on this. It is legit. I've dreamt of of making this. So, I'm going to show you guys how it works and uh yeah, show you how I made it.

So, all you do is log in with this. I'm probably going to leak my emails. There we go. And I'm going to create a brand new project in Signal. So, all this is is basically YouTube 2.0. I took everything that I liked about YouTube and I improved on it and I got rid of everything I hated. So, it's literally just for hyperlearning. It's not for seeing a bunch of shorts, a bunch of garbage. Um, but I'll just show you guys how it works. So, let's just say we're going to learn cloud code. So, I just type new project. Go in here. Here's what I'm going to learn. I want to learn cloud code. This is actually how I learned how to do the lighting and this recording. Everything you see in this video, I probably learned through Signal, which is nuts. And I want to learn cloud code to automate my business. Any other goals that I have? Let's see. What about building websites? Cool. We'll start there and I'll hit continue. Now, I'm just going to answer, "What do I know?" I'm going to say, "I know the basics." And like I said, guys, everything you're about to see here was built through this structure, which is insane. And now, Signal is going to go out and find the videos that match my goals and bring them to me in a way that's so much easier than freaking YouTube. And just like that, I have a brand new batch of videos so I can go through. So, I'm going to say, you know what? I think I want to watch this. I think I want to watch this. this and let's check out um let's see this looks good. Oh, that looks great. Perfect. I can actually sort this by um let's go for views. Just the highest views. Okay, dope. We'll add that Nick course in there. Mastery Cloud Code. Awesome. Then I'll go, you know what? I want to change this a bit. I want to add in different goals. Maybe I have different roadblocks. Um, I can add in prior knowledge to make sure that it's finding the right stuff. I can go to filters and I'll be like, you know what, I only want to watch videos that are, you know, 20 to 60 minutes plus. Views, I want it to be over 100K. And these need to be recent. And so, let's do in the past month. I'm going to hit apply and re refresh. And that's actually some pretty strict criteria. So, we see if anything actually matches that. And just like that, it's brought to us some of these banger videos matching our criteria. I'll be like, you know what? I like this one. That looks cool. Let's do it. Then I will actually, you know what? Let's get rid of these filters and I want to try something else. So, let's do apply and refresh. And now I want to actually search for something specific. So, maybe I have a project going on, but I'm like, you know what, this isn't necessarily cloud code, but I want to research this one thing about websites. So, then all I'm going to do is I'm going to type that

In for this specific topic for just a one-off search. So, how to design landing pages, I'm going to fire that off. And now I can stay in my cloud code project, which is here to help me build websites. But I can do one little specific search just to find any any kind of good stuff out there that we can add to our project and then go back to the main project. So, just like that, I've got perfect landing page design in 5 minutes. That is such a sick video. Uh, Figma, I don't really care about that. The anatomy of Hikberry landing page. Dope. The million-dollar landing page. Dope. So now I've added all these signal in there. I can just hit X and I'm right back into my main project. So crazy.

Now, how you actually consume these videos? You go to your signal, and I'm like, you know what? Um, this is pretty cool. I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. But you can see that it tells you which videos it thinks are more signal for your goal. So, these contain more value for you versus these are getting lower and lower and lower, and then it processes them as you add them, which is pretty cool. And so, I'm going to sort these. Actually, I'm just leave them sorted by highest signal. And then I'm going to play through and uh watch the videos. And before you even watch the videos, you can select which parts you want to skip. So maybe I already know how to do components or how to fill in a website or how to do pre-built components. I can now skip these and it will only play the ones that I've already selected, which is awesome. And if you don't have a video that's all signal, so let's go back to the project. Let's say we pick one of these videos. It will go ahead and tell you which ones you don't think you want. So design trees, PRDs, I'm going to skip those and I'm just going to go, you know what? Boom. Let's watch the video.

And so it starts it right there. You can actually type notes in here. So I'm going do like notes. And uh, yeah, you can create different tabs in your notes. I know I'm getting like carried away, but guys, I mean, I've dreamed of being able to build this kind of stuff. And now I can only thanks to AI. Uh, so it's it's crazy. Now, we also have controls for the player. So you can hit start. Um, you can play it, you can skip around, you can increase the actual um time that the video is playing. You can go up and down so without leaving the notepads. It's incredible. The summary is down here. You can chat with uh a signal bot which has actually watched the video before you and it will even give you some questions. You can answer any questions you can ask it. Uh, then you can export your notes for Obsidian, Markdown, Notion. It's so crazy. Then whenever you're done, you just go to the next video. So it's cool. And then you can go back to your project here. You can go to your project notes. You can see all your notes. You can go to different projects. So, here's the project that I use to research for this exact video you're watching. Here's how I'm learning YouTube lighting. It's awesome. And you can archive videos in your Signal and kind of after you watch them, they'll be in here later if you ever want to come back and check them out again. Incredible.

All right, so getting back on track here is the Signal app project. So, it all starts with the inputs. So, I have ideas, the entire ideas for the app and their features. I just will throw them into the project. So the development board, so me and my um co-founder, my developer with me, we have a board which basically allows us to um we have a blo a board plugin, sorry, which allows us to implement all these changes on a board in Obsidian. And I use Claude dispatch to add ideas if I'm not at my computer. And then in the process, I will go into Claude in my Obsidian and I will have him give me different designs and features for me to test. So every single thing that you saw on that app, it was designed me and Cloud Coat, which is crazy crazy. I would just ask it, you know what, give me an ad button or make these cards look a little bit, I don't know, sexier, like figure it out. And then I would test it out. And then I would um put the actual spec to go live on the website in my Obsidian, which is synced with my co-founder, my developer. And then he uses cloud code, multiple instances of cloud code to actually design the spec into the live site, which you just saw. And that gives us the output, which is an improved app. And uh, we make money from it, which is awesome as well. And the feedback for this system is basically just user feedback. It's metrics. It's also um like here's me giving Caden some feedback from using it myself daily. And then uh, yeah, I'll show you guys what this looks like inside of Obsidian. This is the actual like system and and everything. So here's the real signal app project. So I have folders for different parts of the application. So for onboarding, finding, watching, capturing, etc. I have a folder called app design where I've designed all the features you see. So here's the shipped features. Here's the fonts that I tested out. Here's all the old stuff. Um, a big queue of changes. So super cool. Also, we have outputs. This is where I actually will test the features that I'm designing. And so if we look here for the um add click border test, you will see this is where I tested out what the borders looked like. So I would test it out on different thumbnails. This was all done by Claude in this project, which is insane. Here's the Claude MD, which basically just tells it, hey, you were helping KJ and Kaden actually think through and design this app, but you're not going to code it into the website. Cadence Claude's going to do that. And so mine knows that it's only here to help me design and test the actual code in in HTML files. So pretty crazy. Here's the folder structure, all that good stuff. I won't show you our development board because we have some secret stuff coming, but that's where it is. Yeah.

Let's go on to the next use case, which is probably a little bit more applicable to you guys. All right, so this is my project for my email marketing client. And so every single month I write these marketing emails which gets his list to actually book sales calls with him and his team and uh they pay me very kindly for this. So the emails u have been very nice to them and they continue paying. So that is awesome. Make around 2K a month from these emails and I've already made an entire free course on this in my school. So I'm not going to go in depth because I've already done it. But basically the way it works is I have a skill which gives me email ideas based on my client, his context and then also based on his short form content and also on just news and stuff like this. Um, and I've I given you guys these skills in the school so don't worry. And then once I have an idea, I'll add my thoughts and it will run the, you know, valuable insight email skill or the sales email skill and then it will give me a rough draft and I'll tell it kind of what the call to action is. So, where are we going to take them? What's the goal of the email? And then it will actually write it. I will review it and also a sub agent will review it and then I make the finishing touches and I ship it. So, like I said, check out the free course on this completely free. I go over how to make the skills, how to do the ingredients for the skills, all that stuff, but little bit too deep for this video.

Okay, so now moving on to the main YouTube channel, how I made the video you're watching right now. Let's go over how this all works. So, it starts out with an input. So I'll have an idea for a video. So like I'll build something cool and I'll think you know what I want to show this to my audience i.e. this second brain. I will then either add it to my ideas folder or I will use dispatch to add it from my phone to my folder. And you can see here we start with the video ideas. And here I just have a bunch of random ideas that I'm going to um flesh out and maybe use. Then what I'll do is I will use Vid IQ plus AI to validate the idea and packaging with demand. Basically, I'll see is there actually people searching for what I want to make. Is there demand for it? And then I will use my app to find, watch, and take notes on every top competitor's video. And I don't say that lightly, guys. Uh, here's the actual project from this video that you're seeing right now. I went through and watched every video I could possibly find. There's some in my archive as well on just second brains. And so I've I've deleted a lot of them, but every single video I went through and watched, which was crazy. And Signal helped me find them almost immediately and watched them super fast. So yeah, another Signal plug. And then here's where it gets even cooler. I then used one of my skills inside of this project to analyze the successful packaging, the elements, the keywords, the titles, everything. So here's actually what that skill looks like. So first, it gives me all of my direct competitors. So these are the videos on second brains. Then it gives me some packaging from similar stuff. So this might be videos about Obsidian or Claude individually. So not direct competitors to what I'm doing, but they might have good thumbnail ideas. Then it gives me the keyword analysis. So what are the sweet spot keywords? What has the lowest competition but the highest amount of search traffic? So there they go. There's how what I used for the title. Um, and then it gives me some more keyword stuff. Then it gives me the best keywords for the title and so what does well in the title, which is cool. Then it gives me good title structures. And then it compares all the thumbnail elements. So it tells me here's what's a good thing to use in the thumbnail. Then it ranks my competitor's titles. And then it gives me fire title ideas. So if you're looking at this, I probably used something very similar to this title. Um, yeah, it's just pretty crazy. This thing is really good. And then it just gives me a thumbnail review checklist. And also, I forgot to mention, it gives me all the tags for my videos um automatically. So, I don't even have to like write the tags out anymore. I can just copy and paste it straight into the YouTube thing. So, pretty crazy.

So, from there, what do I do? Well, I create the body content with Claude. So, he's helping me write out these videos that you're seeing right now. He's not actually writing them, but I'm asking him his thoughts. How do I structure stuff? What sounds good in the intro? What do I include? What do I not include? I made a video about on my second channel of how I actually do this if you want to see me do it live. So, yeah, pretty cool. Then my Obsidian is synced with my editor, Caleb. Shout out to you. I love you. My BFF forever. He uses Claude to help edit the videos. And so all the little like pauses and cuts, he uses AI to just do that so that he can focus on the sick intros. So, shout out to Caleb. And then I upload the video using the titles, the thumbnails, the elements and tags that Claude gave me. And uh, yeah, it makes for some pretty insane videos. And just in the like time it took me to make this mural, it this video went from like 68,000 to 83,000 in like a day, which is just nuts. And then the feedback from these videos are the metrics, um my personal thoughts, the lessons that I find from Signal. So I improved the lighting between last video and this video using Signal. That's how I learned all this stuff in like a day. And now I'll show you guys what that looks like inside of Obsidian.

All right. So now you guys are seeing my main channel Obsidian project. So here's my video's ideas. This is the inputs. Here's the videos in process. And so here's the actual AI second brain video you're watching right now. Here's where I did the title, the thumbnails, the intro, um the link to the muro, the body content. Here's how I I use Claude to help me write the setup guide, to help me write the different layers, to help me um do the research. So, this HTML is what I showed you guys earlier. And uh, yeah, it's incredible. And then here's my uploaded bids. So, the co-workass, here's the iteration log. So, here's what I wanted to do better from the last video. So, that's my my iteration. Um, the system is basically any scripts that um it uses to like do all these skills. And then you can see kind of the packaging research skill right here that it uses. And uh, yeah, Claude knows that he is there to help me ship more videos. He knows the folder structure, the skills, all that good stuff. And that's kind of that. And then this is synced with my editor Caleb's Obsidian. So he has this exact project in his second brain, which is insane. So yeah, let's move on to the next use case.

And so here is my KJ daily YouTube channel. So, in the past like I don't know 30 days or so, been gaining like 20,000 views, gained a bunch more subs, and I'm back to making daily videos, which is epic. So, the way that this works is a little bit different from the main channel. These videos are a lot more like just me documenting my life and sharing what I'm learning in a way that helps me improve my speaking, my ideation, all those things. And so, this is where I use Dispatch the most. So, I'll have random ideas and then I will use Dispatch to add those to my video ideas folder. the way that I want them added. So Claude knows that I don't want no slop. It follows my exact framework for how it's supposed to capture them, which I'll show you guys. Then Claude uses my title skill to create five titles based on how I title my videos. So it does it really well for me, which is cool. Then it captures also like the main essence of the idea and it does, you know, like where it came from, the date, all that good stuff. Then I record them using this streaming setup that I learned from Claude. So Claude helped me set up this camera, find the software, the lighting, all of it. Crazy. And then what happens is AI will actually find me 10 thumbnail pictures from the video file. So it saves the video file into the footage folder and then it will pull 10 pictures from every single video I record. Then all I do is drop in that picture into Photoshop, change the text, give it back to Claude, and he uploads all of it. So he does the upload, the title, he has the description, he schedules them one day apart, and uh all using the upload vids skill, which is just sick. And that's allowed me for the first time to do like over 40 days straight of daily videos. And I'm not slowing down anytime soon. And it's growing this second channel and creating like an an awesome little community we have on that second channel. So pretty pretty cool daily videos and the feedback from these are once again learning a lot of lessons from the Signal app. My personal thoughts on how to improve and the coolest part about this is this gives me insane iteration on skills that I wouldn't get to practice as much with this main channel. So I'm able to practice my speaking, my body language, the lighting recording, all these little things over and over again thanks to this system, thanks to Claude. And so Claude knows inside of this system, um, it's very simple. He just knows like, hey, you're here to help KJ get daily videos out. Here's how you title the videos. Here's how you save the things from dispatch. All that good stuff. And so, yeah, it's super super sick.

So, moving on to the very last use case. All right, this is my simplest yet extremely valuable and useful use case. And so, I coach a couple business owners. I consult them on how to use AI in their businesses. extremely valuable for them and me because they get to automate a lot of their business without having to know all this stuff that I've had to learn the hard way. I'm able to teach it to them quickly. And so in here, I manage these clients that I'm working with, these business owners. I have my templates for my call notes, my templates for my school header, um the system, then I have just the skills that I'm making. So right now, it's very clean, bare bones, but Claude knows inside of here, he's just here to help me do a better job of consulting with these one-on-one clients, and it keeps everything nice and clean. So, I'll show you kind of what that looks like. Inside one of my clients folder will we just started actually today, which is exciting. Um, I have the call notes template which I can just copy and then fill in immediately after a call. And then I have an example of what one of these calls looks like. And so here, let me actually zoom in a little bit. Um, it's just goals for the month of working together for this first month, the call agenda, the post call notes, and then the recording links. And then I actually post the transcript, which is sick, from Loom straight into here. And then it gonna we have to get some timestamps to actually make the school um recording. So what I do is I just come in here and I'll be like, you know what, Claude, let's let's do this. Let's start a new conversation. Can you use the skill in the skills folder to add timestamps to this call note? And so now what Claude is doing is he is using this skill and he's going to actually create all of these timestamps for me right here that I can copy straight into the school, send to my client and they feel like, you know what, this guy actually cares and he's making things super valuable for me.

All right, and just like that, it is generating the timestamps for us. Boom. There we go. So now all I have to do is literally copy and paste all this into the school. So we'll open that up right now. And so if I go in here to where I host all my, you know, one-on-one recordings for my clients, I go in here to Wills and I can just paste all of that in here. And look at how valuable this is for him. He has the recording, all these good timestamps, and all the notes from the call just like that in his own personal little um course inside of my school, which is sick. So yeah, guys, super simple, but also really valuable and adds a lot of value to my service as I help these business owners. So yeah, let's go finish this up with my bonus tips and I'll send you guys on your way to go make some amazing stuff with the second brain.

All right, if you watched this far into the video, I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I thank you and I want to hopefully bless you with these bonus tips that not many people talk about when it comes to AI. This should help you actually use this technology to provide value to the market, solve your own problems. And so number one is simply this. The market only cares about outputs, not processes. And this can go both ways. And so if you have clients who want this result and you use AI to automate the entire process, guess what? You can still charge the high price without doing any of the work. That's the power of where AI comes in. But the biggest danger that I see with most people, even myself, is we like to automate things and it feels so good. It feels so cool. But then the output gets just gets bad. So people will automate their thumbnails, automate their scripting, but the quality doesn't stay high. It just turns into slop. And the market doesn't care how little effort you put into something or how automated it was if the output is bad. No one wants another bad vibecoded app. They want a great output. And that's what you have to use AI for. And so part of the process is knowing what to automate and what not to automate. And so if you automate something and the quality drops hard, you probably shouldn't automate it yet. Until you can automate it and the quality stay high, then you should probably do it yourself and automate a different part of the process where the quality doesn't drop off. And the real value for being legit here is by outsourcing everything that doesn't really matter to AI so that you can focus on the things that do matter. So the thumbnail for this video I spent like eight hours on all manually, but AI did the research so that I could actually spend that much time designing the dang thing. And so that's really the secret is getting your time back. So then you can apply your human creativity and judgment to more valuable parts of the process.

Number two, the value is in the personalization. You guys have been given this very clean, basic structure for how to do this, but you've got to personalize it to your life, to your business. If you just take my things and try to do it like me, you're not going to be as good as me because you're not me. And vice versa, me for you. I can't just steal your skills and all your things. And so, don't watch all these videos about use cases and downloading all these other people's skills. Go make your own. That's when it becomes really valuable to you, to your business, to your family and friends.

Number three, AI is a skill. Learning how to use this technology comes with so many little quirks and nuances, and no one has 10,000 hours in it yet, which is awesome. The field is wide open. But the best way to learn is not by watching these videos. Maybe watch watch, you know, one of these once, but then go do it. So, don't sit here and watch this video over and over again. Don't go look for other videos. Stop what you're doing. Go test out everything you've just learned because those are the people that are going to get that are going to get ahead quickly. Those who are actually talking with the robots, learning how they think, learning how to collaborate, and gaining the skill of AI. I see it from like working with different business owners. The ones who are the best at AI have just been using it longer. It's that simple. You just need time in the game.

And number four, last but not least, have fun. This is one of the coolest times to be alive. I'm serious. Besides being in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive or besides maybe like the internet, this is awesome. Like, this is brand new. This is going to change the entire world. And some people are like all doom and gloom about it. But hey, that's in God's hands. All I know is that this stuff is really cool and it's so much fun. And so, start with having fun. Don't try to like conquer the whole world with AI. Just have a fun project. Try to make it and see what happens. You have an idea for an app, do it. See what see what happens, you know? Just just have fun. It's awesome. It's awesome.

So, I hope you guys enjoyed. I love you all. Thank you all for watching these videos. If you know someone who this could benefit, please share it with them. You know, add value to their life. If you found value from this, and hopefully I'll see you guys inside of the Signal app. See you guys inside of the school soon. And yeah, take care.