Connecting Ideas: Bureaucracy and Transformers

From time to time, we will republish episodes that you might have missed. This episode originally aired in September 2025.

Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen.
He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone.

We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off. 

Dan and Noah get into:

The nuts and bolts of the Claude Code-Obsidian setup: Noah set up Claude Code on top of his Obsidian root directory, and he walked me through how he uses it to prep for an upcoming speech—creating a project folder, pulling in relevant research from his notes, saving transcripts from chats with other LLMs, and generating daily progress updates.

The “thinking partner” that lives inside Noah’s second brain: Noah points out that in the hype around AI’s ability to write, the fact that it can read is overlooked. That’s why he has an agent inside Claude Code with strict guardrails to stay in “thinking mode.” It logs his questions, tracks insights, and catches him up on research if he returns to a project after a few days away.

How Noah does deep work on his phone: Noah rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian vault in it—and then runs Claude Code on top. Noah says that being able to think, write, research, and ship code from his phone has fundamentally changed the way he works.

This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about who wants to learn how to use Claude Code to build a true second brain.

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Timestamps: 

00:00:52 - Introduction 
00:02:10 - How you can do deep work on your phone 
00:05:30 - Why Noah thinks Grok has the best voice AI 
00:11:11 - The nuts and bolts of Noah's Claude Code-Obsidian setup 
00:26:05 - Using an agent in Claude Code as a "thinking partner"
 00:30:23 - Noah's Thomas' English Muffin theory of AI 
00:39:47 - The white space still left to explore in AI 
00:48:44 - How Noah is preparing his kids for AI 
01:00:06 - How he brought his Claude Code setup to mobile

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Noah Brier: ⁠https://www.noahbrier.com/⁠, ⁠Noah Brier (@heyitsnoah) / X⁠
Alephic, his AI strategy consultancy: ⁠alephic.com⁠ 
The conference he leads about marketing and AI: ⁠http://BRXND.AI⁠ 
A newsletter he writes about AI: ⁠newsletter.brxnd.ai⁠  
The declassified relic from World War II they talk about: ⁠https://www.alephic.com/sabotage
The apps Noah used to set up Claude Code on his phone: ⁠Termius⁠, ⁠Tailscale⁠