How I Use Obsidian + Claude Code to Run My Life

23:28unknown host:yeah i think um for me it's really about there's there's two reasons that i think reflection is interesting and making notes a lot is interesting one is that it's great to be able to look back on them like for me now obviously i can use an agent but to for me to go back and see these notes and realizing that oh like i'm a person that's continually changing my skill is continually changing projects are continually evolving it's it's just amazing it's an amazing part of life to be able to reflect on how things are changing over time and how you are changing over time and how the world is changing over time.

24:03unknown host:But the other thing is that there's like a functional reason to a reason I like to make notes a lot is because that's how I generate ideas. When I like get, when I sit down on my computer and I write things down, that's where ideas come. For example, this thing I just wrote here, it's just a quick note. I'm just doing it in real time. I'm just making it up right now. But, um, by writing it out, I feel like I internalize it more and I like having good ideas. I like progressing. So because I like having good ideas and I like progressing, writing is how I do that. And so I think, um, to, you know, if you want to cultivate like a writing as a habit, I think first you have to, uh, connect it with the idea that this is how you progress and this is how you generate ideas.

24:45unknown host:And this is how you have form original ways of thinking. Um, the other thing I'll say is that writing right now is a big way of how you delegate things to agents. That's a whole new aspect of it. So if you can develop a writing habit, you have a lot more context that you can pass over to an agent, which then dramatically, I think, increases the amount of things you can delegate and the amount of things you can build. I hope that was a good answer.

25:15Vin:How does this relate to OpenClaw? Because if you think of OpenClaw, it's essentially at the best case an extension of you that could go and do things independently slash based on your guidance so how can you use commands obsidian and open claw and reflection harmoniously

25:46unknown host:yeah so I think if you look at like here's an example of one command that i do it's just like a schedule command um and so what i asked this thing to do is i said schedule i said can i take a meeting with greg eisenberg today at feb 20 at 2 p.m right and what this does is of course it can look at my calendar and stuff like that but it's also going to look through my daily notes it's going to look through what i care about and then it's going to give me some perspective so it says your day is stacked you're already recording on Greg's podcast this morning, followed by a team lunch outing and meeting with Peter and Vince.

26:23unknown host:Your Feb 17 notes show the Greg episode has been top of mind. The bulk has a dedicated Greg Eisenberg note. No, not a two. So the recommendation is no, not a 2 PM, but you might not need a separate meeting at all. Yeah, that's that's actually the correct answer. How does that relate to OpenClaw? Well, OpenClaw is this like autonomous agent that can go and do things if you set it up to do that. Like it can do things without you having to prompt it all the time. It can just go and make decisions and build things for you on your own. So now what OpenClaw can do is in the same way I just did this command, OpenClaw can do this on its own as well.

27:00unknown host:And it can go and read my vault, find connections, and then make decisions on behalf of me with like a deeper understanding of me. And now instead of like managing an agent or talking to another human about working on something, I just focus on managing this vault. This is like the new source. I just continually try and make it so that this vault has all of the information needed so that I can delegate to an agent and the agent can just pull from this vault source and make decisions. And if it's not making the right decisions, I'm changing something on the vault. I'm not necessarily working with the agent specifically.

27:37unknown host:Kind of, that's my speculation on that subject. I think it's very interesting.

27:43Vin:Yeah. I think one thing that worries me a little bit about it is if obsidian is really your second brain, giving open claw access to your second brain is scary.

27:57unknown host:Yeah. Scary. And I would say that is the fundamental, the weird element of this technology, I would say. And I have purposely given Obsidian, I mean, sorry, the Claude Code or any agent access to a lot of information. I've purposely done that because my relationship with this is I want to understand what these things are. And I want to understand what they're revealing about, you know, how our relationship with computers is changing. But it's weird. It's like you have to really think about how much information you're sharing with these agents and whether that's the right decision or not the right decision.

28:43unknown host:And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how privacy as a concept evolves and changes and what we fight for or don't fight for in the future of our society and our world. even with every one of these commands i had to create a new version of them a demo version so that it wouldn't reveal too much personal information while i'm on screen on this podcast and even then it's like a it's a toss-up you know i could type the demo version but who knows what's

29:11Vin:going to be shown on screen you know what other commands do you want to show um so there's

29:22unknown host:connect which is allowed it allows me to take two domains and connect them using the vaults link graph so i can just say i did one here and i just asked it to uh connect filmmaking and world building and so it goes through and it reads all these different files and then it can start to say okay let's let's connect these two concepts steps so notes and filmmaking uh notes and filmmaking's neighborhood so i was like 35 film watch lists my first meeting with toby notes in the world building neighborhood um the world building essay um new as a media company so these are different things i'm thinking about so bridge one the interview portal and the constructed world in filmmaking if i notice something specific and ask the question about it it would open a portal into a person's internal world which is often a vast universe of concepts and beliefs and visions it's a world building essay i want my blog to show you what i value what i believe what i worry about like a tomb from ancient egypt i want my blog to be a place that you dig up and examine long after i'm gone these are things that i've written and i can start to see how these ideas connect together bridge to always on documentary equals continuous world building always on documentary is a creative strategy where companies continuously narrativize their characters, pursuits, conflicts, and visions through documentary.

30:49unknown host:So these are like things that I'm writing about and it's showing me the ways in which these are connected. Um, I think this can get very interesting depending on the kinds of things that you're willing to connect together. You could get probably pretty crazy with it as well, depending on what you're writing about in your vault. I could connect like shawarma and startups if I wanted to, for example, and see the kind of connections that are coming between these things. Um, again, really interesting because all of this is happening super quickly and I don't need to explain any of this to an LLM. I can just type something like slash connect filmmaking world building.

31:26Vin:A lot of the examples you're using is personal reflection. How do you think about, for example, note-taking in meetings? Maybe you have Granola or Gemini Notes taking notes and sort of putting it into Obsidian? And by the way, when I say notes, those could be meetings that you're not even in. They could just be like, Tommy met with Vince and they had this meeting and I want to put it in here. How do you think about that?

32:05unknown host:So it's a really good question. So I think you can use these vaults however you want to use them in terms of like, you could put any text you want in here. If you want to put your granola meeting transcripts in here, you can put them in here and you have to just make sure you know maybe you're doing something like this right so you're just like meetings and then you're like okay these are this is you know project one and then every time you do a meeting um you take your granola notes and you just put them in here right so you're like meeting greg eisenberg vin plus vin and then you know that file is created now and you can just drop your trend you can just drop your meeting notes in here.

32:42unknown host:And now that's in the vault. And then you can pass that into the agent or the agent will discover it. Right. Especially if you start tagging, like, Oh, I'm going to tag this back to, you know, like my podcast or something there now it's connected. So now the, the, the agent, it has like more context and now it knows that this transcript is related to this other file. Great. Um, I think that's up to you. I think the way that you, the amount of information that you put in here is up to how you want to use the vault and how you want to delegate to things to agents. and maybe you even want to create different vaults for different purposes.

33:12unknown host:For me, for me, I use LLMs and agents as a way to increase my own level of understanding of subjects. So I use it for a lot of reflection and things like that. So I don't want an agent to write into the files. Like I could easily get it to do that. Like I could just say, like even here, I've asked it to write a description of some commands that I can talk about today, but I don't, I don't, I don't want it to make a file to do this because I want to control all the files in my obsidian vault because I always wanted to pull from what I think about things right not what it thinks about things and if it starts making its own files in this vault then I don't know like is like when it's finding these patterns is it finding patterns about things it's written or is it finding patterns about things I've written so I create a rule for myself which is like a strict separation between these things i only wanted to write things on the side here and then i will take that and and and write what i think um should be included right so yeah yeah go ahead no i was just gonna say like

34:18Vin:you know i could see the power of just using it for your own reflections i can also see the power of, you know, AI is really good at, you know, going out on the internet, finding information based on trends and stuff like that, distilling it in a way that you want and having that being put into your world is also interesting. Yes, totally.

34:46unknown host:I think that and also like, let's say if you asked the Obsidian, if you asked the Cloud code to go through your obsidian file and generate ideas which you know ideas for tools that you should build well then you can just like say okay cool if that's if i have an idea for a tool that i should build just generate a description of that and then just build the tool so exactly yeah i want to show this one so that it's like less on reflection like for example like you know

35:21Vin:I built this thing called ideabrowser.com and every single day we give this validated startup idea. Someone theoretically can go and grab that information, put it in an obsidian vault, and then based on that, help them build the actual thing, right? Totally, yes.

35:42unknown host:So I want to show you this because I think it'll take it out of the realm of reflection and into the realm of building, but the only issue is this takes a bit. So that's okay. Yeah. So the other thing is that with all of these, like with these commands, another pattern that I'm noticing is that they take a bit because it's reading so many files. And I would say that's a big difference between using Obsidian and like, or using cloud code with access to this Obsidian vault that I'm noticing is all of my requests are taking way longer. And it's just because it's reading so much more. So like, look at this one.

36:19unknown host:so this is ideas demo so i'll run a comprehensive ideas generation let me start by gathering vault structure and context in parallel and then if you look it's really interesting to see what it's doing right so it's like obsidian orphans right so it's it's it's like i guess orphans are like files that are on their own not connected to things right so that's interesting that it knows that obsidian dead ends obsidian resolved obsidian tag counts so it's just trying to it's trying to figure out like some connection between all these things um and then it says okay daily read so it's reading my daily notes then it found this file called new context which is new is this media company i'm working on then it's like read file the other stuff context that that's podcast the other thing i would say to you guys is i do manage um i write i create context files for projects that are pretty extensive i'll show you i i was i didn't know if i was gonna show this because it's very personal but like for the other stuff, look at this other stuff, working context, what shifted recently front loading profile by traveling to San Francisco, New York city to record guests.

37:27unknown host:This is super personal stuff, but what is the other stuff? The format core beliefs of the show. Research is the foundation solid. The best conversations feel like discovery solid, you know, here's the team that's working on it. And so what happens is this again, very personal, but this is context that it just pulled in. So now it knows who's working on my podcast. What are the, what are the recent hypothesis, hypotheses I'm exploring? And it just got that information. That's just like one of the things that did personal workflow context, super personal file, but it shows like, you know, like what my daily schedules is like, you know, things that I have to do like in my personal life so it's like pulling that how i like to work how i don't like to work personal agent infrastructure is another thing let's see what happens if i pull this up this is a project in which i want to take a step towards increasing my personal infrastructure workflow delegation however you want to describe it with agents understanding what it means to delegate to agents more and more implementation approach so this is like what i'm writing about the file about how I'm thinking about using agents personally.

38:43unknown host:And again, that's an example of one of the files it's reading. That's just one of them. So you saw like the other stuff, the personal workflow, and it's factoring that all in to this task I've asked it to do, which is generate ideas for me. Gathering data from your daily notes, calendar, and vault structure. This takes a moment since it's pulling from multiple sources. Again, one of the things with this is that it's just going through a lot of information, man, a lot of information. So it takes longer, you know, it's already been going for five minutes. Right. And so that's, that's something I'm noticing, but for me, that's what I want.

39:18unknown host:I want that. I want, I want a response from LLMs that is very, very contextual to the things that I'm writing about. And I think a lot, and I think that's how me and an agent can work best together where I just focus on continually noting that my the where I'm currently at in terms of the projects I'm working on and what my understanding is and what I find interesting I want to maintain that and make it as current and as deep as possible so whenever I'm talking to an agent it has the best representation at all times of who I am in that moment when I ask the agent for something yeah I mean that's the goal right that's the

39:56Vin:question that we all should be asking of ourselves which is yes does the agent have the most up-to-date information on the projects on my preferences and my dreams and my hopes and my goals um because you're it's only as good as the up-to-date version of that correct yes 100 the quality

40:18unknown host:the the quality of information that the agent has entirely determines what it can do for you right if it doesn't know a lot about you it's not going to be able to do a lot for you but if it knows a lot then it can it can it can do things for you that i think like even some of your in some it's kind of weird to say but i mean like that you don't even know about yourself in ways

40:40Vin:i mean it makes sense right because ultimately what this is doing like to distill it to its core it's connecting the dots yes obsidian and obsidian and clod code here are are connecting the dots now it's actually quite difficult as a as a business owner or just as a personal in our personal lives to connect the dots like why do people in a lot of ways go to you know coaches therapists yes um you know if you go to a therapist and you know you have someone who is you're doing most of the talking right think about it you're doing a lot of the reflection and the therapist and coach is sort of guiding you.

41:20Vin:That's what this is doing in a lot of ways. And I'm not saying, by the way, that don't go to your therapist, you know? But my point is it helps you uncover what are their dots and how you can connect them.

41:37unknown host:Yeah, absolutely. And for me, yeah, it's just really exciting. And yeah, it's just a crazy time with computers. So let's look at this. This thing finished. So this is an idea generation report. Vault relationship exploration. This is pretty extensive, right? Like to get an idea report, like I think this is really going to show how we can move. You move from reflection to something actionable. So structural highlights. So again, this is just obsidian stuff, right? Orphans worth noting. There's some defense technology stuff here. just a theme that's growing in Canada. Massive intellectual investment sitting in isolation.

42:23unknown host:Also orphan agentic software. So orphan just means these are files I haven't really linked. Random notes I just wrote once or something. Unresolved links that reveal latent interests. Hidden relationships. Again, all reflection stuff. Fine. What's working? Obsidian cloud code as a combined system is working for me. This is producing genuine breakthroughs in thinking and output. day per domain structure when enforced this is basically i started splitting my schedule where each day has a specific focus this is cool and this is very true the greg eisenberg episode as a forcing function it's compressing months of thinking about obsidian and agents into a clear thesis with demos very true you know coming on the show and doing this forced me to synthesize everything I knew and presented.

43:12unknown host:But here's where we're going to the actionable stuff. Tools to build. The slash graduate slash command. Daily note idea extractor. Based on daily notes are full of idea. Sorry. Daily notes are full of idea tags and interesting thinking that never gets developed. The vault has nine idea tags, but hundreds of undiscovered insights. Build a command that scans recent daily notes, identifies ideas, tagged or not, and prompts you to decide create a standalone note add to an existing file or dismiss this turns a daily note stream into a structured idea pipeline obsidian vault for new it says i just have to manage and set up a central obsidian vault for new what that means is in the same way that i'm creating this vault and it has all my ideas and my patterns and everything like that why would i not create one for my team where they like as a team we can go and ask this vault questions and we can all contribute to it here we go tools to start using what is this types for all external documents uh interesting a time blocking act that enforces day a time blocking app that enforces day per domain meaning since i'm trying to focus on one thing each day one aspect of my life it's saying why not create a time blocking app that forces you to do that interesting systems to implement one sentence in obsidian agent handles the rest this is literally the demo three version of the greg eisenberg eisenberg prep you're already imagining it the next step is to actually building it start small right schedule a call with person about topic this week in a daily note and have otis or clodbot or open claw pick it up and handle it so it's saying maybe you can delegate right from the note itself is how i'm interpreting that super interesting yeah just in inline delegation.

45:04unknown host:Like maybe that's even like a new UX pattern. I don't even know, right. That you could build into like these different tools, um, subjects to investigate Christopher Alexander's pattern language applied to digital spaces. Interesting. Um, black mountain college as a model for the stadium stadium is a physical space we have in Toronto authorless media as a concept, how shenzhen's hardware ecosystem actually works things to write and publish that'd be useful context architecture essay the computer as a place software book will become fashion what toronto theory actually is editorial thinking zine conversations to have this isn't these are real people aaron stadium workshop host about becoming an anchor of technical programming this This is a space we have in Toronto.

45:54unknown host:Tarun, again, another person. Program about making program the flagship series. Steph Ango, Obsidian CEO about the vault as a place. And so this is like, yeah, this is crazy. It's suggesting people I should meet, right? Top five high impact do now. Build the graduate command or do a manual weekly idea review.

46:18Vin:This is crazy, dude. This is actually crazy. like and the fact that it's in plain text and it just not be it's not there's no images it doesn't make it easy to read but i kind of like it because it's it's like dressed down you know what i mean

46:35unknown host:yeah i mean i like that aesthetic because i'm a nerd but you could just say you know you could you could just say obviously you could just say can you turn this into a beautiful readable html file that is on my desktop. This is hard to read and it's going to do that. Right. So, I mean, if you don't, that says, if you don't like that, just do it however you want to do it. You know what I mean? I like it like this and this kind of like this aesthetic. Um, but yeah, that's how you can move out of reflection. And of course, you know, of course we can also say like here, you know, if we don't, if we don't want to do this, uh, we could also say like it recommended that slash graduate command so i could just say build the slash graduate command

47:20Vin:right which is interesting and is that how you started building a lot of your commands like it it sort of it started suggesting and you're like just go build it well i started off actually

47:32unknown host:like building them myself like i'm like oh trying to think about commands myself but then yeah i said i started asking the agent like well wait a second what commands do you think would be interesting. And I just, and this might be useful. Another thing that I like to do is I like to move to like higher levels of abstraction when I'm using an LLM. What I mean by that is I could say like, Oh, make a command that, um, tells me what I should focus on each day. And that's, that's like, um, a command that I thought of. But when I, when I, another thing you can do is you can step back and I can say, based on my Obsidian vault and what you know about me, form an understanding of what you think my level of understanding, like where you think my skill level is in terms of a person and the projects that I'm working on.

48:22unknown host:And based on that, suggest the kinds of commands I should use that would take me from the level I'm at to a higher level, right? Get it to suggest the commands for me instead of me suggesting the commands and I could pick between them. So look at this. This was the agent's idea based on what it read in my vault, based on the notes I'm taking, right? So let's see what this is. Daily note idea extractor. Ideas, insights, and original thinking accumulate in detail in daily notes, but rarely graduate into standalone notes where they can compound through backlinks. This command scans recent daily notes, surfaces the best candidates, and helps decide what to promote into like an idea or something, right?

49:03unknown host:Sure. So this is how it's going to work. It scans all the recent daily notes. It cross-references with the existing vault. It presents candidates. It graduates selected ideas. If creating a new standalone note, create the note in the vault root. Write the note as a mini essay or working document that captures the core claim or question, context from the daily note where it originated, connections to other vaults, notes as backlinks. Now, all this stuff, like it captures the core claim or question, you might be looking at this and think like okay this is just the text that the agent generated and it is but also it hits differently for me because i know like i'm writing a lot about these things i know i know like even like the mini essay thing these are words that mean specific things to me which is just so it's just so crazy it's very contextual i know what it's talking about because i spend a lot of time in this tool and i spend a lot of time writing so yeah i created and it's going to create that command.

50:05Right? And it's like, that's nuts

50:08unknown host:because I'm just going about making notes and I have this parallel agent that is looking at my notes and giving me ideas on how I can prove my workflow, improve my life. And then not only can it just suggest it, it can just build the thing. And it's done. And we have it right here, slash graduate. I could just hit it. And it's going to run. It's crazy.

50:29Vin:If I'm open AI, or Anthropic, I'm buying Obsidian.

50:37Right?

50:38Vin:Because it's the missing link. Yeah, it's nuts. It's the missing link. The fact that there are people, like you've sold me on this, by the way. I've downloaded Obsidian. I think it's a free tool, right? Yes, it is. It's open sourced. I've downloaded it, but I have not created my vault because I wanted you, Vin, to take me through. I knew that this was going to be great. I knew that I would go through this. This actually exceeded my expectations. The fact, it makes no sense. It makes no sense. The fact that if you are serious about using LLMs to take your ideas and get the most out of them. If you're serious about building what people are calling a personal OS and you are not using a centralized note-taking tool like this that uses Markdown as the foundation, then you are not using LLMs properly.

51:47unknown host:Yeah, or at least not at the limit.

51:49Vin:Yeah, exactly. You're not getting the most out of it. You're not getting the most out of it. I think what's difficult about this is that it does require a lot of time to actually set it up properly. It requires, yeah, it takes a lot of time. And the UI is so daunting in the sense that it's a blank canvas. And it's not like, hey, you should write your preferences over here. or you kind of just have to come up with these ideas yourselves. Yes, but that's still so amazing, right?

52:31unknown host:Because I mean, even when we work with other humans, we have to find a way to explain things to them. And I just think it's so cool that now we can work with these agents and we still have to explain things to them, but we only need to explain them once. Because once we get it down into a file, we can always reference that file, that explanation of a project or a preference or anything. And it's always there and you can pass it in.

52:53Vin:Yeah. A file is like essentially a perfect memory.

52:57unknown host:Yes.

52:58Vin:Right? Human beings have memories, like we recall things.

53:01unknown host:Yes.

53:02Vin:But there's tons of studies that show that what we remember, in fact, is completely different than reality. For example, when we went and got that haircut in Mississauga, I could have thought that I had the best haircut. That's what my memory remembers. It was a great haircut. But who knows, it could have been the worst haircut I had ever gotten.

53:29Vin:Now, Obsidian, or whatever tool you end up using, if I had written, the memory, the file, the markdown file is perfect. so that when I link that or I recall it, it is going to give me a perfect data point. And the other thing about these files is that you hope, well, they're not biased basically. They're as biased as the human being is in terms of writing the reflections at that moment in time.

54:01unknown host:Yes. It's crazy, man. Yeah, it's just crazy. and there's all there's all of these different aspects to it there's the privacy of it and what that means there's the power of it the fact that now you can just work with these computers in natural language and just delegate to them um there's the fact that there's people like me that are that are using these tools and trying to figure out how to delegate stuff to agents in this way there's people that are like me that are even more hardcore in in different ways and and pushing them and i just think it's such a crazy time to be alive because i think we are potentially watching a fundamental shift in the human relationship to computers and it's just i'm just really happy to be alive while this is happening and i'm curious like how this is all

54:49Vin:going to unravel well what's cool about this is 99.99 percent of people are not going to spend the time to actually set up something like this and make it a part of their daily lives and the alpha so to speak is in terms of leading a more productive happier healthier better more money-making career is in in in using something like this with an llm i think so i'm not saying download obsidian today and i have no affiliation or whatever with them But I'm saying, it sounds like what we should all be doing. And I'm giving myself this advice. There's no excuse anymore for me not to be writing down

55:41unknown host:and reflecting into Markdown files.

55:44Vin:In a world where LLMs use Markdown files is the oxygen. People think tokens are the oxygen, but they're not. yes the markdown fires are the memories like think about what a human being is yes you know is a human being the the energy of a human being or is it the memories of it you know what we recall you know i mean that's like a philosophical question and maybe it's a bit of you know a bit of both but it's you know i think that there's something really really fascinating about md files as an underrated about them in order to to have a true computer experience in in today's day

56:36unknown host:and age yeah there's definitely something going on here some fundamental shift yeah it's awesome

56:42Vin:yeah and like i have bad my work you know i'm learning in real time right like and i i don't have the right vocabulary to even explain this.

56:49unknown host:Yes. And neither do I, man. Neither do I. I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure it out in real time. That's, that's why I think like, I know I show something and, and for me, I'll do something or I'll see something. And my friends are like, they kind of laugh because I'll just be sitting at my computer, just tripping out. And I think it's because I really like computers and I cannot believe that this is possible. I cannot believe that I can just be making notes on my computer like I have been since I was a kid. And then all of a sudden this agent can scan through it and build things because of it and, and like connect patterns that I could never see.

57:27unknown host:It's nuts, man. It's nuts. And, and at the root of it, you're right. It's just a collection of interrelated markdown files.

57:35Vin:Yeah. Cool, man. I appreciate you. I don't know if you can see my mind, but my mind is blown right now.

57:42unknown host:Thank God. Yeah. I wanted to do right by you. I also just like, I say this every time, man, but I'm just gonna keep always saying it to you all the time. I really, really, really, really appreciate everything that you do. I think your pattern recognition and your pattern matching is like, like really underrated. I think there's a lot of things that you do that I don't think it's difficult to see if you're not really paying attention. I just want to say like, thank you for, uh, for everything that you do. You're always putting on like new voices on your show i see it i really appreciate it and it's just been it's an honor to know you and yeah just

58:16Vin:thanks for the opportunity thanks for everything man i appreciate you vin you're a legend i'll include links for where to follow criminally under followed internet vin on on x on his youtube show podcast in the show notes and description you can go and check him out there uh people please play with some of these tools and let me know what you think. Let Vin know what you think. And Vin, I will beg you to come back on the show another time and I hope you come back on again.

58:54unknown host:For sure, man. Thank you.