How I Use Obsidian + Claude Code to Run My Life

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
This is Obsidian. And Obsidian is this little tool that people are using as their second brain. But what's really cool about it is they're pairing it with Claude Code, and they're getting crazy results out of it. It's literally a game changer. Now, I've been slow to adopt Obsidian, because to me, it's been a little daunting to look at. So I had my friend Vin, and he clearly explains what Obsidian is, how to use it with Claude Code, how to set up these commands that really drive the most out of Claude and all the LLMs. And it's an incredible episode, like a really game changing episode, because I think that people who understand how to use Obsidian and how to use Claude Code together, they're going to be able to live happier, healthier and wealthier lives. Why? Because it gives incredible ideas to you on tap. So I know that the people that stick around to the end of this episode, I think that for a lot of them, it's going to absolutely change how they use AI and it's going to be a super impactful way because you're going to get better ideas at the right time, the right moment and it's going to make you happier, healthier and wealthier. Enjoy the episode. I've got my dear friend, Vin, also known as Internet Vin, on the podcast. I literally begged him to come on. I begged him, I begged this man to come on. And to teach us a very specific thing, Vin, by the end of this podcast episode, what are people gonna learn?

**Vin** (1:41)
I want you to have an understanding of how you can use Claude Code and Obsidian as a thinking partner. I want you to have an understanding of how you can stop having to explain things to agents over and over again and just pass specific files in. And I want you to understand how you can use Obsidian and Claude Code to notice things about the way you think that you would not have noticed on your own without these tools.

**Greg Isenberg** (2:04)
All right, from your lips to God's ears, let's get into it.

**Vin** (2:09)
OK, so first is like, what is Claude Code? So Claude Code is this like agent that you can use in a command line interface. So it's just basically this tool you can use that can control your computer and you can use it through natural language, right? So I can say, make a file on my desktop that says, hello Greg in plain text, right? And it's gonna go and do this. That's really cool. That's something that's new. That wasn't possible before. Before this, I had to go to the desktop, open some text editor and then like create that file, right? And now this file is on my desktop. So I can say, open the file. There we go. Hello Greg. That's crazy, right?
Now, what's interesting about this is if you have this agent that can like control and do things on your computer, that means that whatever you can describe to it, like it can start to do. And so when you, if you describe a project to it, or you get into these long conversations with an agent, it can do more and more complex things. The more information it has, the more complex things it can do. But the problem is that if you have to, let's say, you know, like I write some super long description about a particular project, or I have like an hour conversation with this agent about a particular project, it's like, I don't want to have to create a new session to explain that all. I don't want to have to explain that over and over and over again. A lot of people are using like Claude or ChatGPT on the web, and it has things like memory, but you can't like control, you don't know what's in that memory, right? You don't know what it knows and what it doesn't know. And so there needs to be some way of like, you know, passing information into these agents that is easier and faster. And the better information you can give it, and the faster the information you can give it, the more stuff it can do for you, and the better, the faster you can delegate to it. Okay? So now, even if I, let's say, let's say I had like, you know, let's say I wrote like a big project description here, right? Create a file that describes, you know, a project about a to-do list app that is very minimally designed and reads from all of my calendar and my messages and Slack and interprets it into a task list of tasks that it thinks that I should do. I don't know. Some idea, right? So now, this is a file that could be on my desktop. And what I can do when I use Claude Code is I can reference that file and pass it in whenever I want.