Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain

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May 13, 2026

Noah Brier, founder and AI strategist who builds AI workflows, explains running Claude Code on an Obsidian vault as a personal second brain. He walks through a phone-first deep-work setup, a thinking-agent that reads and logs insights, and the nuts-and-bolts of running Claude Code from a home server tied to Obsidian.

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AI's Reading Power Often Beats Its Writing

Claude Code as a reader is often more valuable than as a writer for everyday thinking.
Noah runs Claude Code on his Obsidian vault so the model can read thousands of markdown notes and surface relevant research instantly.

Grok Voice Mode Outperformed Other Voice AIs

Grok's voice mode stood out to Noah for being smarter and better at tool calling than other voice AIs.
He used Grok during long drives and found it explained complex topics (e.g., self-attention) clearly while calling external tools effectively.

I Researched For Hours Using Voice AI In The Car

Noah spent a five-hour drive researching with Grok via Bluetooth, using the car as focused time to do deep work.
He connected Grok to his phone and treated the session like a personalized audio research seminar.

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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.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

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