The Second Brain System That Broke My Brain (In the Best Way)

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. I have Big announcement to make today. It is that I am reeling on a cocktail of dopamine and adrenaline after discovering how to build a second brain with AI that is safe and secure and not tethered to any one chatbot. That is my announcement, and I want to go through this entire story. I wrote about it to my email list, but I thought, you know what, I'm going to do a whole podcast episode on this because it's one of those things that I think you're going to need to hear a couple times before it starts to really sink in if you're not techie. I want to start with the problem, and the problem with AI today is persistent memory, context, and security. That's actually 3 problems. With ChatGPT, there is pretty good memory persistent across your entire account if you're on the higher plans, but I've noticed that chat GPT is always looking at what I most recently talked about, and so it's probably a little bit of a stretch to say that it's got true persistent memory. The second thing is context, and in my original Second Brain class, we— I talked about the context that you can provide in a chat, the context that you can provide in a project, in a GPT, in the general memory settings, but again, it's limited and you have to create the context, paste in the context, text, all of that. The third problem is the way that you are tied to one particular chatbot. And as the big companies have been growing, we've got Grok, we've got Gemini, we've got Claude, we've got OpenAI. And if you start building a second brain in one of those services, you are, your data is hosted on their servers in their cloud. And if you decide you want to switch, it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. And for example, Claude has really changed the game, and I've wanted to move to Claude for a while, but I've got so much built up in Chat, it's been very difficult to move. Those are the problems. Now, a couple days ago, uh, maybe yesterday, can't even remember now, Anthropic, the owners of Claude, made an announcement that their brand new model, Claude Mythos, was so powerful and dangerous that they would never release it to the public. Now, that's a big statement because that means that there are a small number of people at Anthropic, in the government, that have access to an AI that is far more powerful than anyone else, which has its own problems. And I'm not going to get into the political ramifications of that. However, if you go on X or you go on Reddit or you go anywhere where a lot of these coders and developers hang out, they are sounding the alarm that all software is hackable by Mythos. In fact, Mythos found bugs inside of 27-year-old software that was considered some of the most secure software building firewalls, and it found vulnerabilities. All of our data is at risk. And this feels pretty stressful if you're trying to build a second brain in a tool like ChatGPT. Like, what if OpenAI decides to, you know, fund the government destroying other civilizations with nuclear weapons, and you don't want to be on there, but you've got all your data there, right? You know, and— or what if it just goes obsolete? There's another AI that's like way better, and now you're stuck in a chatbot that's obsolete, right? That is the issue with the second brain. On X, about a week ago, there was a guy, his name is Karpathy or Karpathy. I don't really know how to pronounce it. Anyway, he's in the developer world and he wrote this article that went viral all about building a second brain. And I thought, oh, that's cool. I, I did the same thing. And I read the article and understood probably 30% of it because he's a coder. And so he's using Cloud Code and he's talking about Markdown files and he's talking about this tool called Obsidian. And I was just like, I was like, not quite getting it. And I also have never used Claude Code. I don't understand commands, terminals, any of that stuff. So I was like, okay, this is like way too complex for the average normal non-coder. But I could tell by the way it was going viral, by the way people were reacting, that I, it, I owed it to myself to try to understand what he was talking about because I understood the power of the second brain from all of my work. I just, I was running into these obstacles. It took me about 2 days. I broke it all down. I spent a long time trying to, you know, understand the terminology. But once I understood what was truly going on, I am telling you, I had this like flood of adrenaline and dopamine, both, because the realization of all the problems that this would solve and the power of a persistent memory in context over time was like blowing my mind. I am going to do a workshop on this because even listening to this podcast, you may not quite understand it. I'm going to be doing it in two places. Number one, if you're my private client, if you are in the Digital Insiders, you will get— I will do this for you. Number two, if you are in FG Society, I will be hosting a workshop there as well. And FG Society is $67 a month. It's really not even that expensive. You can go to fg-society.com and sign up there, but I'm going to explain it. So if you are super techie and you can follow along, you could probably just go and do this yourself. The first thing you need to know is there is a tool called Obsidian, and Obsidian is basically an Apple Notes on steroids. And you open it up just like you do in Apple Notes. You take notes just like you do on Apple Notes. It's the same experience. Okay. Very pretty interface. And the difference between Apple Notes and Obsidian is in how it is saving those notes. I don't even know how Apple Notes saves their notes. I don't know what it is, but in Obsidian, every single note is being saved in a folder that you choose on your physical computer as a Markdown file. And a Markdown file is a plain text file. It's very lightweight. Every single computer on the planet can read text files. Every AI tool can easily read text files, and they are probably like the, the best, most lightweight way to save information. Okay. And they're not very pretty when you open up the, the Markdown files, like on their own, they're kind of just like, they look a little like old school. But when you're looking at them in Obsidian, they look beautiful. They look like Apple Notes. And so every note, Obsidian note becomes a text file. Likewise, every text file that gets put in that folder is automatically readable in Obsidian with this beautiful interface. Okay. And that's important to remember here as we start to build the second brain. Now let's go on to the folders. The folder section inside of Obsidian really matters now. It depends on how you're using note-taking for you. I have 4 folders. It is personal life, work, animals, and faith. Okay. You don't wanna make a bajillion folders. The less folders, the better, more macro, the better. And you're gonna put 3 subfolders inside of each of these, a raw, a wiki, and an output. Okay. Now let's start with the raw. The raw folder is your brain dump. That's where you put everything. So every time you open up Obsidian and you take a note, you put it in the raw folder. So if I'm taking notes on my podcast episode, I'm putting it in the raw folder under my work. If I'm ranting and raving about, you know, what my llamas did, I'm going to take those notes and I'm going to put it in the raw folder inside my animals. Folder. Okay? No organizing, no cleaning, no renaming files, nothing. It's just taking notes. Whatever you do in Apple Notes or Google Keep or Evernote, uh, does anyone use Evernote anymore? You're just doing it here. Now the second folder is called the Wiki folder, and this is the part that broke my brain. Once you've got stuff in Raw, you can use Claude Cowork Now, other people use Claude Code, but again, that's command-driven. I like Claude Cowork because I don't know commands. And you point Claude Cowork at that folder, okay? Because that folder is living on your computer. And it says raw under, it says work and raw, and then all your files, okay? You're going to point Claude Cowork at that folder, and you're going to say, read everything in here and build me a wiki. Now, a wiki is basically like Wikipedia, okay? You look something up. It's an article, it's highlighted, it's clickable, and every time you click on a link, it goes to a different wiki page. It's not one long document, it's pages that are short that are connected to each other. It becomes essentially a web of organized information. Claude is going to read all those messy raw notes. It's going to find patterns and topics, and it's going to build a bunch of wikis. Depending on how much information. Okay. So one page per topic, basically. And it's going to also link up the pages with keywords. And Claude is going to build that wiki. You're not going to build it. You're not going to maintain it. And you're not going to read it. And that is the part that was like, oh my goodness, this wiki is not for you. The wiki is for the AI. Claude is looking at your raw folder and it's building organized versions of your raw thinking in wikis so that it can read them quickly, understand your frameworks, understand your history, understand your patterns, and create persistent context and memory across every chat session because of these wikis. Okay? Again, The raw folder is all your notes. Think Apple Notes. The wiki folder is where the AI is going to build wiki pages that are organizing your thoughts. And then you have that third folder, which is the output. This is the merged brain. When I go into Claude Cowork, I'm going to say, hey, go into my wiki folder, read everything there, and then I want you to help me build 5 presentation ideas for my mastermind. Please make that file in the outputs. Now what's happening is, or maybe I wouldn't even say that yet. Maybe I would talk back and forth with it. It would come up with ideas and whatever we end up with, I would say, now make that a file in the output folder. The output folder is what my brain and the AI brain came up with together. And if it makes an MD file, a text file in the output folder, it's immediately readable on Obsidian as a beautiful note. Okay. No more copying and pasting. No more, where did I put that? And what's going to happen is it's going to compound over time because those saved outputs are ultimately the gold. And you could even ask Claude, you could point to the outputs folder and say, hey, I want you to look at all of these outputs and I want you to go and update the wikis so that they're even better. The system is going to get smarter every single time you use it. And you will always know in your Obsidian, raw is what your brain came up with, wiki is the AI's version of your organized thoughts, and the output is what you build together. And there's also a feature in Obsidian called the daily note. And basically you just click a button and it's like, it puts the date and then you can write everything. So if you don't even want to deal with the folder structure that I talked about, you can just hit the daily note, put everything you're going to think in that day, and at the end of the day, ask Claude to take that daily note and organize it into raw files in each of your folders if you want to. Your only job is to just write things down and then the AI does everything else. And if you've already made the connections of why this is so awesome, Congratulations. You now hopefully have a dopamine and adrenaline flood as well. But here are the primary reasons why this is so powerful. You own every single file on your device forever. No company can take it, change it, or hold it hostage. It'll work with any AI agent. Claude Cowork right now is the big one, but whatever gets built next, you can use it. It's all your knowledge base, your local knowledge base. The AI is going to maintain the wiki for you. You do not have to do it. The more you feed it, the smarter it gets. It compounds. And every single AI session that you're using with Cowork is going to load your context, your frameworks, and your history, and you will never have to explain yourself from scratch again. Your best thinking is going to stop disappearing, and it'll also be able to make connections that you probably can't make. It's 100% private. It's off the cloud. And if Claude disappears tomorrow, you're going to just point your vault at whatever comes next. It's the easiest readable file in the world. The two things you need are an Obsidian account, which is free, and Claude Cowork, which is $20 a month. Some people work on multiple devices, right? I do. There is a $5 a month subscription with Obsidian. Where if you are working on, let's say, your iMac and you are updating and the files are getting updated, it will sync over to your other device. So that folder structure on that local device is up to date as well. And this sync has end-to-end encryption. Obsidian can't even read your files. All right. That's it. Two tools, three folders inside of each of your main life, life arenas. A system that compounds forever, completely private. If you want to go through this step by step, again, there are two ways that you can do it. Number one is to become my private client, because every time I come up with something or I learn something, I teach it to them. The second thing is you can join FG Society at fg-society.com. It's $67 a month. I will be doing an Obsidian Cloud Cowork workshop in there. Chat soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.