Transcription
The average person consumes hundreds of hours of YouTube every year and remembers almost none of it. Not because they're not paying attention, but because there's nowhere for it to go. And that is going to change today.
So today, I'm building a system that fixes that permanently. Every video you watch, every article you read, and every important email that you receive captured, connected, and retrievable in seconds using Claude and Obsidian.
Now, the examples that you will see in this video involve an Indian stock broker application and some Hindi YouTube video. But don't let that throw you off. The stack works the same whether you are a developer in Berlin, a trader in New York, a lawyer in the UK, a student in Lagos, or a founder in Singapore. The tools are free. Setup takes just an afternoon. But once it is up and running, it compounds. It compounds your knowledge. Every week, your second brain gets even smarter. With that said, with this context set, let's start building it.
First, we need somewhere to store everything. And that's Obsidian. It's just a folder of markdown files on your machine. No cloud login, and you own the data. So head over to obsidian.md. Download it for whatever machine you are on. Then install it.
Now, once Obsidian is installed on your machine, double-click it to launch it. And let's create a new vault. I'm going to call it "Second Brain." And let's browse to a location. And so I'm going to put the vault inside my Google Drive folder, so we can just sync it automatically without any extra tools. Let's hit create. If I go back to my NVME SSD and to my Google Drive, I would see my "Second Brain" folder mentioned over here. Cool.
So now we need two plugins. So, in order to install a plugin into Obsidian, just hit this settings icon, go to community plugins, browse, and then look for "Terminal." Now we need a terminal inside Obsidian so that we would access Claude code from inside the terminal in Obsidian. Just hit install, enable this. Then look for another plugin called "YT Transcript." We need this plugin so that we could pull YouTube video transcripts into our vault.
All right. So now that we have got the plugins installed, it's time to bring in the elephant, that is Claude. So for that, let's open up the terminal that we just installed. Open this integrated terminal over here. Hit enter. And before we actually bring in Claude, let us test a few things. Let's see if Node is identified. `node -v`. And now let's just exit from the Node. Let's see if we can use Python. `python3 --version`. Okay. Yes. So Node and Python both are identified by this integrated terminal. And both of them are actually installed on my machine globally. Cool.
So now let's clear the terminal. Let's now make a call for Claude. Let's hit enter. Okay. So this is the traditional flow. Let's say yes to it. And yes, so I'm able to bring, bring in Claude over here. Let us see if I can move it on the side. No. Yeah. So I can bring it on the side. Uh, for now, let's just close the graph view. And this is where my files. I can view my files on this side. And this is where I can easily work with Claude.
With this said, the next step is actually to initialize Claude. Now, in order to do that, I'm going to ask Claude with some specific set of instructions. Cool. So let's have a look at that. So I'm going to say, "Initialize Claude.md in the vault root. You should do the following." And now I'm going to give it a very specific set of instructions. So you don't have to worry about this specific set of instructions. I'm going to put this in the free PDF. Link of which will be mentioned in the description. I'm going to hit enter. And it is kind of writing it now. And I can see a Claude file over here. So if we open that, here we, here we get it. So let me close all of this. And this is the file that we get. So we get "Second Brain," that is Claude instructions. And this is my vault structure. I've got a folder for YouTube, for emails, for Reddit posts, and for mapping all the contents. Every node must have a type, source, date consumed, topic, date consumed, and the topic. Now, whenever I paste on any content, create a structured note, check existing notes for related topics, add some wiki links to it, and save notes to the correct folder. This is what, in a nutshell, Claude is always supposed to do whenever I give it any content.
And now let's bring back the terminal again. And now I'm going to open Claude and I'm going to ask it to create the folder structure. And I believe it should do it. All right. So now I've got them. I've got a folder for emails, map of contents, Reddit, and YouTube. So everything is set up. Claude, Obsidian, and the vault. Now we need to fill it with some knowledge.
I have been meaning to watch some videos around trading on Zerodha, an Indian stock broker application, for a while now. Never got around to it because I knew I would forget it anyway. But that changes now. Let's add the first video to the vault.
Okay. So, this is the first video that I wanted to watch. I'm going to copy the video URL. Come back to Obsidian, to my YouTube folder. I'm going to add a new note and I'm going to call it "Zerodha + Claude AI." You know, just some initials of the video that I wanted to watch. And I'm going to put in that video URL. Now, I'm going to hit Command P on Obsidian. That will bring up this command palette. And I'm going to type "YT transcript." And it says "Insert YouTube transcript or get it from a URL." I'm going to hit this to this place. I'm going to put in this URL and I'm going to hit submit. This will get me the transcript for my video. Now, be it English, be it Hindi, or be it any language, I believe Claude will be able to process it equally well.
All right. So, next, I'm going to copy all of it and I'm going to paste it in this file over here. So, once I've copied it into my notes, I'm going to tell Claude, or ask Claude, that "Read the transcript in YouTube Zerodha Claude.ai ClaudeAI.md file. Summarize it into a structured vault note. Rewrite the file and add wiki links to related notes already in the vault." So, if I already had something in my vault, it will add a related notes to it or add some links to it.
All right. So, now you see that our file has been rewritten. Now we have got a type, we have got the source of the video, we have got the date that I consumed this, and the topics that are being talked about in this video. If we go further down, there is this entire summary of what the actual video talks about. If they are doing some setup, it is giving me that. What are the use cases that they have demonstrated? Tariff impact of Trump, sector and market cap allocation, everything that those guys have talked about in their podcast, in their video, everything here is mentioned in detail over here.
All right. There's one thing that it has that it is saying that it has done is there are no existing notes to link to. The wiki links are forward-looking anchors, ready to connect with those when those nodes are created. So now, practically, if I bring up another video source, if I add another transcript to this vault, Claude should be, or Obsidian should be able to establish some kind of linkage between these two videos.
All right. So, I'm going to add a couple of more videos to this YouTube folder and we'll see if, you know, Obsidian or Claude is able to establish some kind of linkage between them. All right. So I have added four videos into my vault. And if you look at each one of the MD files, you will see the same format for each one of them. All right.
So now let us try to figure out if it has actually established some linkage between these four videos that I've added. So if I click over here, which says "Open Graph View," I click that. Oh, pretty nice. So it has a been able to, you know, establish some kind of linkage between them. If you look closely, it's like it has established this linkage between MCP server. In some of the video, they must have talked about MCP server, Zerodha, finding a multibagger stock, how we can actually do it, and how these nodes are connected. So now I can leverage this information, this map that Claude or Obsidian has created for me, and I can get it to give me a concrete plan. But before that, I want to load it with the personal trades that I have done, for which I would have received emails in my inbox. Correct? Is there a way we could actually link our emails to this vault so that every time I do a trade, I'm able to supply or add that information to my vault so that Claude could become even more intelligent about my trading habits? Let's try to do that next.
All right. So now I am in this App Script from Google. Now, don't worry about the link. I'll put this link in the attached PDF. You can navigate from there. But this is a very important tool from Google. It lets you add your script, and then it's Google's job to run the script. So you can actually use the script to query your inbox and get or retrieve emails from there.
All right. The script again will be in the PDF, and you can copy it from there. There are a few important points over here that I would like to draw your attention on. First thing, we need a Google Drive folder ID. Now, this is my folder that we built on our machine and then we synced it to Google Drive. So I need the folder ID for this. So, in order to get that, just look at the URL, and this will be your folder ID. So over here, I have mentioned it that this is my folder ID. Then, whatever email it has processed, it is going to mark it with this label called "Obsidian Exported." Now, next thing is we need a few rules in order to retrieve emails. We'll have to set a few rules to get those emails. Now, because I'm doing it for Zerodha, I want to give it some history about what trades I've done. I have looked into my inbox and I figured out, okay, any email from Zerodha comes with this email ID. All right. So I've given it that. Then I also wanted this, and this NSE alerts to be into my inbox. And then anything explicitly that I mark as "star," that also should be imported into my vault. So these are the few rules that I've established over here.
Now, bring this script into your App Script project and hit save. Now, I have already saved it, so it's not showing me enabled, but you will have to save it over here. Now, once you have done this, you will see a function drop-down over here. "Export emails to Obsidian" is one of my functions. Okay. One more important thing over here is that if you hit this drop-down, you will see all the functions that are present in this script. One of them is "Backfill all email." Now, now this is crucial. So whatever trades you have done so far, it is going to also capture those emails. Right? But there's a little flaw in that. I'm going to tell you about that.
Now, if you look at, you are from India, you have been trading on Zerodha, you would know that we receive this contract note from Zerodha every time you do a trade. Now, if you open this, you will see that there is a PDF attached to this email. So the email does not really contain the required information that we need. But this is the PDF that actually contains that information, and it is password protected. So we can actually do some kind of automation in order to directly bring this PDF into our vault. But for now, I'll do this manually. And if you really want to see this automation, you can comment, and maybe, you know, if there are sufficient comments, I'll try to bring this on a video on YouTube. All right. Cool.
So, let's go back and come back to this project over here. And, you know, this much of the script will do our thing. Now, let's actually fire this function. And if everything goes well, we should probably see some emails coming up into our Google Drive folder and then gradually into our vault. Let's hit that and let's hit run. Now it is executing it. So it needs some authorization. I'm going to review the permissions. Just hit on "Go to untitled project" and save. Now it will ask you for the permission. I'm going to say "Select all" and hit continue. And we should see that execution has now started. And now, if this is running fine, I should actually see something in my. So yes, I have got this emails and I've got a folder inside that says "Zerodha." And yes, the Gmail is now finally populating emails into my inbox, or into this folder over here. So now, if I go back to my Obsidian, and if I go to my email Zerodha, I have got all the emails coming up over here. And they have simultaneously been started to come up into my mind map over here. So this is going to pull up a lot of information, a lot of emails that you have add, that you have received in your inbox. This is pretty insane, I believe.
Okay, for the purpose of this video, I'm going to stop the execution right now over here. This was just to show you how you can bring in emails. But most importantly, we need those contract notes. Right now, I'm going to download this, and behind the scenes, I'm going to, you know, remove the password from this PDF and bring a few more contract notes into my vault.
All right. So I have now added several PDFs into this new folder called "Contract Notes." And if you look over here, it is able to pull those contract notes into Obsidian. So all these are password-protected, right? So we will have to give Claude the password for them. Okay? Now, see, Obsidian is kept inside your machine. So all these emails, all these contract notes, they're not going to the cloud. It's all going to remain in your machine locally. However, Claude is definitely going to talk to the internet or the public web. So, just be cautious. Only experiment things you can afford. Just a word of caution.
So, now let's go back to that App Script. And so far, we have done this manually. But there is a way where we can actually establish some kind of trigger that this happens every hour or so. So, inside this function drop-down, you see another function called "Create Trigger." I hit that. What I have done is that this trigger is going to run every hour, one. Now, you can set it to every minute, or every, you know, 24 hours, or whatever your frequency might be. You can set that. Just select this "Create Trigger" and hit run again. Okay. So now it says "Execution started" and then "Execution completed." So now, every 1 hour, Claude is going to do this "Ongoing Sync" function. Now, if you look at this "Ongoing Sync" function, what it does is it exports my emails to Obsidian. All right. So I'll keep getting the emails into my Obsidian vault every hour. Pretty straightforward.
All right. So, now if we go back to Obsidian, I've got my contract notes, and I've got my emails, and I've got also got my YouTube video scripts. Now, if I look at the mind graph, several parts of it are not yet connected, but I see a closed graph over here. And let me zoom in a little. This is what we see now. Established. We have filled up Obsidian with a lot of knowledge as of now. All right.
So we added contract notes to Zerodha. Now, these are all password-protected files. So I need to tell Claude that this is the password to all these files. You open them and extract all that information and keep them in some markdown file so that it could help you in decision making. Cool. So I've got a prompt ready for that. There's a password in this prompt, which of course I'm not going to show you. So now you see it is installing this `PyPDF2` library in order to read those logged PDFs. So now, good. Let me now extract all the PDFs. So I'm going to say yes to all of it. And now, if you see, it is establishing these relationships between the contract notes and the email. Now, if you look at these lines, this was the contract note, and probably this was the email that, okay. So something just happened over here. It established one more linkage over here. So I believe this is working. Yeah, one more time. So I'll let it run for a little more while.
All right. So the processing has completed, and I can see that it has formed a few close nets over here. And it should also give me this "Trading Log.md" file. Yeah, this is it. All right. So this is all the summaries, all the trades that I've done from all the contract notes that I have given it. Now, this is pretty crucial data. Cool. Now, from this information, it has actually made a few observations. Okay. So I brought this Greenply on this August 2023 at this average sold, you know, on 2024, approximately 50% return. And all this information. Now, this is pretty insane amount of information that we have given it.
All right. So we have added a lot of knowledge into Obsidian, and the graph looks really intense. I understand that a lot of dots are still not connected, but we can keep adding information, and these dots will actually connect somewhere. Anyhow, this is the knowledge graph that we have got in Obsidian.
All right. Now it's time for the payoff. Let us now ask Claude some interesting questions about all the knowledge that we have added into it, and let's see what, what observations, what analysis it can do with that. So my first question of the evening is going to be this. What I've asked it: "Look across all my YouTube notes and trading log. What trading strategies have I been learning about? And do my actual trades reflect those strategies? What is the gap between what I'm learning and what I'm doing?" Let's see what analysis it could do. Now, it's taking a little while.
All right. So, Claude was able to synthesize all that information, compound it, and then give me this outcome. Now, it is a pretty detailed answer that it is able to figure out based on my emails, based on the trades I've done, based on the YouTube videos that I watch. You can read it. It's for my reading. I'll read it. This is the honest summary that you are learning a disciplined process-driven small midcap earnings strategy and currently executing a scattered mix of large-cap safety and across all these sectors and whatnot. So Claude was able to read across my YouTube notes, Reddit, email, and everything, and then returned me a very synthesized answer. Well, to be honest, if ever I had the chance to watch these videos, I would have watched them across several weeks, and there are strong chances that I wouldn't be able to connect them myself. But the system did it. So now, from next time, every time I watch a YouTube video, I read an article, I get an email, I can put that over here. I can bring it over here and compound to the knowledge.
Well, this was it for this video. I believe it was a pretty intense session. And if you liked it and would love to watch more of these kind of videos, I highly urge you to consider subscribing to my channel. The free PDF is in the description. You can download it from there. But don't forget to subscribe. All right, folks. Then this was it, and I'll see you in the next one.