Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain

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! Start building in Google AI Studio at ai.dev. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house. Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: ⁠https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt⁠. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: ⁠https://every.to/subscribe⁠ Follow him on X: ⁠https://twitter.com/danshipper⁠ Timestamps: 00:01:19 - Introduction 00:04:28 - How you can do deep work on your phone 00:06:14 - Why Noah thinks Grok has the best voice AI 00:11:39 - The nuts and bolts of Noah’s Claude Code-Obsidian setup 00:23:59 - Using an agent in Claude Code as a “thinking partner” 00:35:07 - Noah’s Thomas’ English Muffin theory of AI 00:44:04 - The white space still left to explore in AI 00:50:41 - How Noah is preparing his kids for AI 01:01:54 - 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: ⁠Simple Sabotage Field Manual⁠ The apps Noah used to set up Claude Code on his phone: ⁠Termius⁠, ⁠Tailscale⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Shipper?

  Noah Brier might have the coolest Claude code setup I've ever seen. He rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian Vault in it, and then runs Claude code on top. So he can think, research, write, and even ship code right from his phone. Today, he shows us how he uses Claude code as a true second brain, a thinking partner that asks him sharp questions, pulls research from his whole Noted archive and the web, and even keeps a running log of what he's learned and what his best ideas are. And he walks us through his whole stack and his whole workflow. If you want to learn how to use Claude code as a true second brain, this is the episode to watch. Let's dive in.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hi folks, Paige Bailey here from the Google DeepMind DevRel team. For our developers out there, we know there's a constant trade-off between model intelligence, speed, and cost. Gemini 2.5 Flash aims right at that challenge. It's got the speed you expect from Flash, but with upgraded reasoning power. And crucially, we've added controls like setting thinking budgets, so you can decide how much reasoning to apply, optimizing for latency and costs. So try out Gemini 2.5 Flash at ai studio dot google dot com and let us know what you built.

• 1:19Dan Shipper?

  Noah, welcome to the show.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:23Dan Shipper?

  I'm excited to have you. It's really good to get to chat. This is our first interview in probably like five years. You are one of the, for people who don't know, you're one of the first Super Organizers interviewees. That was the newsletter that turned into Every. And I love the way that your brain works. You have this like really interesting taste for tools for thought. And back in the day, you're using EveryNote in all these really interesting ways. You were the co-founder of a really cool startup called Percolate, and then another one called Variance. And now you're running Alephic, which is an AI strategy consultancy. And I'm just really excited to see how your

• 2:08Dan Shipper?

  mind has started to use these AI tools now that now that they're now that they're, you know, working so well. And I know you have some pretty cool Claude code stuff to show us. So yeah, thanks for coming on.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. That was a fun interview all those years back.

• 2:26Dan Shipper?

  It was. It was really, really fun. So I want to just like dive right into the like the thing that I think is so cool about what you're doing. So I know you have a whole like vibe coding setup that you built for yourself. Can you talk us through that?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wouldn't. I'm not sure about actually the vibe coding part of it. I have a sort of fairly heavy duty Claude code setup, but actually

• 2:55Speaker 02

  mostly not for code. So since those days of super organizers, like many people, I've abandoned Evernote and switched over to Obsidian. And one of the big advantages with Obsidian as a note taking platform is that it's a bunch of markdown files and a bunch of folders. And they can then be synced with Git and you can do lots of other fun kinds of things. And so actually, probably my number one Claude code use is using it as a tool to interact with my notes.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  And so that I've got a fairly serious Claude code setup that I use with Obsidian. And my most recent obsession has been standing up a server in my house so that I could also use Claude code on my phone.

• 3:57Dan Shipper?

  This is incredible. I want to, I want to go through all of this. So where should we start? Should we do, should we do how you use Claude code as sort of this like research assistant, notes organizer, note taker thing? Or should we start with how you use it on your phone?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  We can use it. We can start with just the sort of general part of it. That that might be the sort of easiest. The phone is really just an extension of that same thing. I I would say sort of generally, and this is something I feel like not enough people talk about with AI. It's like one of the things I find really extraordinary about it is the ability for me to work really productively on my phone. And that's been like a huge, huge change because so much of what I do is sort of writing or coding. And the phone is definitely not the best place for that. And, you know, even the phone wasn't always the best place for doing research and thinking. I felt like my computer was a better place for it, which is why I've been such a sort of note taker.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  And, you know, I have found whether it's like Claude code and obsidian or, I mean, even Claude code and code, right? So like the other piece of it is being able to then, you know, if you see something go wrong, being able to sign in on your phone and have Claude code push a small update to something because you just realize it while you're out is amazing. But then even like, you know, I use quite a bit of Grok voice mode. And, you know, I find that that as a sort of like alternative way of working through problems. I have a Tesla, so now it's baked into the Tesla. And, you know, it's just, I, and, you know, obviously all this sort of other chat GPT and Claude and all these things of just being able to sort of like go and do research and really think

• 5:41Speaker 02

  and and explore things in this device. It's always been useful, but like not useful for deep work, I think, is probably something most people would agree with is that the phone is not been the best place to kind of do deep coding and research work. And I feel like it it's really changed my ability to do that.

• 6:02Dan Shipper?

  Wait, I gotta stop you. So you're using Grok voice mode. And is that specifically because it's built into your Tesla? Or are you using it in situations where you could also use, for example, chat GPT voice mode?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  No, I'm using it because it's way better than any of the other voice modes and I will fight anybody who says anything different.

• 6:19Dan Shipper?

  Okay, no, tell me like, what is, what do you like about it? Why is it better?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I, to be fair, OpenAI launched their real-time API, which may or may not be baked into ChatGPT Voice now. It's not totally clear, but the old voice mode was based on 4.0 and I just found it to be completely unusable. And Gemini's voice mode, I just didn't find to be smart enough. And I just found Grok's voice mode to be significantly smarter than anybody else's. You know, I'm using Grok 2, 3, 4. I don't even remember what, whatever the latest.

• 6:56Dan Shipper?

  Latest one, yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but not the super, I don't have the most expensive.

• 7:00Dan Shipper?

  Super heavy or whatever.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  I don't have super heavy. But I just find it to be much better. It does tool calling way better than any of the other ones. That's, that's I found to be a major weakness of the voice models is that they don't do great tool calling and research. And Grok's theme sets all that. So no, even before it was loaded in my Tesla, I dropped my daughter off at summer camp this summer up in New Hampshire. So I had a five-hour drive on my own. And I spent like two hours researching and essentially like working through a piece. And I did it by just like connecting it to Bluetooth and just sort of sitting there in the car. And I found it to be by far the, the best of the voice modes. I, I hope

• 7:42Speaker 02

  these other models catch up there because I would, I would love more really good voice modes. I mean, I had a mind blowing session this weekend and I'm giving a talk and I'm, I sort of have some ideas. I think it's generally going to be about transformers eating the world. And so I was sort of catching myself up on self-attention and exactly how it works. And I did like an hour session and it really, I, I, like, was by far the sort of best.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Explanation I've ever read for it or ever heard, I guess. And so, yeah, I've just found it to be a kind of pretty extraordinary product.

• 8:18Dan Shipper?

  I do love voice mode for that. It's sort of like, it's a podcast made specifically for you about whatever you're curious about. And that's really cool. I went up to, I drove upstate this weekend and I've been reading, I've been reading the Iliad. And so I had it on audiobook and then I had some questions as I was driving. And so I unfortunately use chat GPT voice mode because I didn't know about Grok. So I wish that Grok's voice mode, I wish that we'd had this conversation before then. But the thing about chat GPT voice mode is, yeah, I think when it first came out, it was cool, but it just hasn't gotten as smart as the models are. And they gave it this new personality that I had to get used to where every time you ask it a question, it goes like, oh, yeah. Uh huh.

• 9:03Dan Shipper?

  Well, you know, and it's like, it's just this like weird Gen Z thing that it feels like it's has a little bit too much ennui or something like doesn't actually care about you. I don't know what that is. So I had to get used to that.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Rock has a stoner mode for what it's worth. Yeah. I will say, the car version is very interesting to me. Like this was in the most recent Tesla release, like a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, I had been doing that same thing you did where you just plug your phone in and you put on Bluetooth and you, you know, do your best to make it work. And it's very interesting to just like have a voice AI button and it syncs back to your regular Grok, but it, you can't get, you can't rejoin old chats. So it's just like, hey, I, it's just like, but you know, I mean, these things are significantly better than Siri and all of these other things. And particularly, I mean, you know, there's no comparison if you actually have something more than just

• 9:59Speaker 02

  a, a single question, you know, how I want an answer to, right? Like if you actually want to have a conversation about the Iliad or, you know, about. Transformers and self-attention like, um, I don't know, it's pretty amazing to just be able to sort of like, hit this button and, and yeah, use that car time. I mean, I, I was on my way somewhere last week and I was, you know, I was like having it research. I was going back to the Walter Benjamin. I was, I was, I have this sort of idea to write a piece about, how, uh, um, the reactions to every new technology are essentially elitist critiques of it. And that, you know, it's always like, oh no, everybody's going to be able to like, do this thing that only we used to be able to do.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And so, um, I was in the car and I was thinking about this and so I had it go and I was like, okay, you know, I know it's been years since I read the Walter Benjamin.

• 10:50Dan Shipper?

  Mass production of images one, yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, that, that one. And, um, so yeah, then I'm having a conversation about that and I'm like, who were Walter Benjamin's contemporaries? And then I'm like into all the, you know, and it's just like, I don't know. That's a, it, that's amazing.

• 11:05Dan Shipper?

  It's the best.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  It's the best. Yeah. I don't know.

• 11:10Dan Shipper?

  Okay. And so you're filling your brain with all these things from voice mode, which I love, uh, but tell us about your, your second brain setup. Or I don't know how you, I don't know how you refer to it, whether, where you think the second brain is appropriate for this, but I want to know how you're using Claude code to, take notes and do research and all that kind of stuff.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, uh, you know, I could just open it up. Maybe that's the easiest thing to walk you through it. I'll, I'll start on my computer and then we can do the phone. The computer is just a way easier, a way easier share here. So, um, all right. So, um,

• 11:43Speaker 02

  this is what I was working on before. Um, uh, but essentially, you know, this is just Claude code and it's just sitting on top of my Obsidian. So, you know, if I jump out here and I just do like, you know, you can see I'm, I'm following the, the param method. And, uh, uh, you know, I've just got everything sort of organized in here and, and put in the places that they need to be.

• 12:07Dan Shipper?

  Well, let me just, uh, let me just stop you for people who are listening. So, okay. So we're looking at, we're looking at Claude code. It sounds, it seems like you have Claude code running in your Obsidian vault. And there's some kind of, it's adding something to an existing, it looks like it's adding something to an existing note. Is that, that's what, that's what's going on? That's what we're looking at?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in this particular one, I'm, I'm working on this talk. So I, I'm putting on my conference in two weeks. I'm giving this talk about marketing and AI and sort of what's going on. And I'm, uh, if we sort of jump back a second, I've been doing these conferences called BRAND, B R X N D dot AI. And they're about marketing and AI. And I did one in February in LA. And my talk in LA was about this, uh, I'm sure you've seen it. It was the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, wrote this manual called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. And it was essentially a manual to help citizen saboteurs in Nazi occupied territories, sort of like quietly sabotage the, the Nazi occupation.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  And so it was like, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff for blue collar workers. It's like, if you're a janitor, you should leave a bucket of oily waste around and accidentally drop a cigarette in there. So that, you know, it, it will, um, but then there's this amazing, um, set of recommendations for white collar workers. And they're like, um, always refer things to committee, um, uh, always revisit previously made decisions. Make sure that like, if somebody is trying to make a decision, you should suggest that they don't act with too much haste, lest like we be embarrassed. And, and so it's like, um, you know, uh, my talk was about kind of how,

• 13:53Speaker 02

  one hope I have is that AI can kind of like sidestep a lot of the bureaucracy that exists inside large organizations. Because it sort of has this kind of, uh, goo like effect where it can kind of fit into any crevice or crack, because it can act as this fuzzy interface and it doesn't really care about the sort of input output. And so. The sort of next part of that story is I, after the conference, I realized that that manual was in the public domain. So I hired a designer and I printed 300 copies and I wrote a new foreword for it. And so we're giving this away at the conference. And so my talk is sort of trying to tie all these ideas together, right? So I'm, I'm trying to pull from the sabotage manual.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And then I was doing a bunch of research into Wild Bill Donovan, who started the OSS. And the OSS was sort of the precursor to the both the CIA and the special forces. And so anyway, I'm writing this talk. And so I've got a project inside my Obsidian, which is the beginning of the research for this project. And I'm pulling in sort of like chats and articles and all these things. And then I'm constantly kind of talking to the, the AI in here and giving it new ideas. So I'm like, oh, I need some conclusions. Here's sort of my first thought on conclusions. And I'm having it like note down the conclusions. And then at the end of each day, I have the AI write up the changes that I sort of like the things I learned that day that are going to help me push this talk along.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  And so that's what you're looking at right here is sort of, this is all part of this work that I've been doing, where I've been feeding it. I was working on sort of what are some of the conclusions I want it to be. And so this is all sitting in this, this is all sitting in, in my Obsidian inside of project specifically for that talk.

• 15:42Dan Shipper?

  Okay. So let me get a clearer sense of this. This is really interesting. So you have a project. When you, you have a new thing, you're, you're giving a talk. You make a new folder and then as you're thinking about stuff, you're working with Claude code inside of the folder. And you're researching stuff and then saying like, I want you to take notes on it. In this particular case, you're, you know that a component of your talk is the conclusions section. And so there's one particular markdown file that like, you're just going back and forth with it and having it add conclusions. But like, what else is in that folder? So is it like, there's a body, there's a body note and then there's an intro note? Or is it like?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  So one of the big things here is that I'm in thinking mode, not writing mode yet. And so there's some stuff in here where I've specifically. Told, I think it's in the front matter, actually, where I've told Claude Code, like, don't help me write anything right now. And I generally find this to be a big thing with all these models is like, they immediately jump to wanting to help you with the artifact. And, you know, when you're just in thinking mode, you have to be very explicit in like, hey, I just want you to help me think and ask me questions. And so, um, yeah, what you can see here is like, there's, there's a bunch of files in here. I've got chats. That's where I'm literally like taking chats. I'm having another things and I'm just like using

• 17:05Speaker 02

  the Obsidian web clipper to pull the whole chat in. I've got daily progress. That's where I'm having the AI actually like look through all the notes that came out that day and like help me think through the progress. And then I've got research. That's where I've got a bunch of like articles and PDFs and stuff that I've pulled in so far and been reading about. And then there's a bunch of other kind of random notes along here where I've been, you know, just using it to kind of help me think. And, and so, yeah, I was in the midst of, um, one, I've got this conclusion note. So, you know, I, I sort of felt like I had blocked out the big kind of, um, the big themes of the talk, but I was like, okay, I need to figure out what am I going to say at the end. And, you know, essentially what I'm going to say at the end is about a lot of the stuff I've learned over the last few

• 17:48Speaker 02

  years of working with these large brands on AI projects. And, um, so I was starting to get it to the conclusions. And so, yeah, I'm just kind of like trying, I'm really piecing all this stuff together right now. That's kind of what's happening.

• 18:00Dan Shipper?

  And give me a sense of like, when this folder was empty, what did you start with?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Um, so I think I started with, um, the, the, I started with telling it like, I'm in thinking mode. I'm not in writing mode. Um, here are my past few talks that I've given a brand to give you a sense of the sort of style that I have. And I, here's the kind of general idea and the big points I want to make, right? Like I'm giving away this book. So I want to talk about simple sabotage field manual. And I have this notion, like I have this, it's kind of just a title. It's like transformers are eating the world. Yes, this idea that like, one of the very interesting things happening with these models is they're sort of displacing a whole bunch of specialized code in places.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  And so I sort of want to talk about that and then I've got these conclusions. And so the first thing I said was like, hey, just go look through all of the rest of my, you know, probably 1,500 things in my Obsidian and go see anything else you can find that might be of value to this talk of the existing things I have. And so just go kind of pull those in to the research folder at the beginning to kind of like jumpstart this process.

• 19:09Dan Shipper?

  Got it. And you're starting, are you starting Claude in this folder or are you starting it in your full Obsidian vault so that it can access all that stuff?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  No, I'm so I'm starting it in the full Obsidian vault. So like if we like this is coming, if I step out of here, right? We're in the root directory. All this stuff is in the root directory, my Obsidian.

• 19:31Dan Shipper?

  I get it.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And my Obsidian setup is also like a little more intense for what it's worth because like I've also realized like you can add a package dot JSON to add a bunch of like custom code commands to your Obsidian that you can then run and then you could use those code commands and slash commands and all of these other things. So, you know, there are a bunch of other kind of moving pieces in here. But generally it's a fairly straightforward.

• 19:56Dan Shipper?

  Got it.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's a, I'm trying to use Para and some other kind of bits and pieces.

• 20:02Dan Shipper?

  So for people who are, who are listening or watching and are like, we just went through a bunch of stuff really fast. So the basic gist is Obsidian is just like a, a note taker, note taking app that runs, it's all local. And so everything that, all the notes you take, like they, they exist in essentially text files on your computer organized by folder. And when you're starting Claude code, one way to do it would be to start Claude code in the folder for the particular project that you have. But it sounds like what you're doing is instead you're starting in the root directory where all of your Obsidian notes live and the advantage of that is

• 20:37Dan Shipper?

  Claude Code has some sandboxing things where it's not really supposed to run commands outside of the folder it was started in. It can run commands inside of any subfolder, but it sounds like what you're doing. So it has access to your entire obsidian. It can do a bunch of stuff. And you've also added a package dot JSON, which lets it run custom software, custom software commands, basically. That's really, really interesting. Okay. And do you find, because I've sort of had this as a twinkle in my eye to have it go find relevant stuff for me. Do you find that it's actually relevant and interesting? Because I think sometimes when I've done this kind of thing before with language models, they're like, oh, yeah, like this random thing is relevant because XYZ. It doesn't

• 21:19Dan Shipper?

  feel like I can understand why it picked it as being relevant. But if it really knew who I am and what I think is interesting, it definitely would not have. Do you find that that's the case? Or have you figured out a way to make it relevant? Imagine going from idea to live website in minutes without a single line of code. Framer lets you do just that. Their no-code platform looks, feels, and works like a design tool, but it outputs real, functional websites that look like they were done by a developer. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone shift a production-ready website in minutes. At Framer, we have only 15 full-time employees, but we have five or six businesses that we run internally. So we need to build a lot of websites all the time. That's what we use Framer for. Framer AI builds entire websites

• 22:04Dan Shipper?

  from a single prompt. Type "modern SaaS learning page" for a productivity app and watch it generate a structured site with a responsive layout, clean sections, and pre-filled copy. After that, refine, style, and publish. It's also really powerful. You can create buttery-smooth effects and micro-interactions with just simple sliders. Do you need to reach a global audience? One click lets you translate your website, every page and every slug, into any language. And when you're ready to launch, you just hit publish once. Behind-the-scenes, Framer handles hosting, blazing-fast load times, and SEO optimization. This lets you own your entire journey from concept to live site. No developer required. Ready to make a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at

• 22:45Dan Shipper?

  framer.com and use the code DAN to get your first month of pro on the house. Rules and restrictions may apply. And now, back to the episode.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  I think by and large, yes, I agree with you. I think in this case, relevance is a little simpler, since ultimately, this talk is sort of...

• 23:02Speaker 02

  The things I was asking it to look for, I've done a bunch of thinking and research around. So it's like, I'm not asking it to make large conceptual leaps to relevance. It's like, go find all this, like, I want to talk about the simple sabotage field manual. It can literally just do a like, find for all the times, all the articles and things I've got in my obsidian about that. And so relevance is, yeah, it's kind of a loaded term, right? And I agree with, I agree with what you're saying. I think this is, what I'm asking it to do is much more simple, which is like, amongst this set of things, go find all the notes that I've already researched that kind of brought me to be thinking about these things to begin with.

• 23:45Dan Shipper?

  Got it. And then, once you had to do all that research, did you have it, do any sort of summary to like, let, like, sort of stimulate you to be like, okay, here are the, here are some jumping off points based on what you've done before? What was your next step? Once you wanted to?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  No, so my next step is, I actually have an agent in here. So if we go to, to continue for now.

• 24:06Dan Shipper?

  And so for people who are listening, so you're just starting a Claude, you're using the continue flag, so you're, you're starting Claude by continuing the last session that you were in. And now you've got, and Claude Code gives us the ability to do subagents. So those are like little mini Clods that you can spawn and you have a?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I have a thinking partner one.

• 24:24Dan Shipper?

  Thinking partner subagent, okay, how does that work?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so this is the whole thing where I'm like, hey, you're a collaborative thinking partner specializing in helping people explore complex problems. Your role is to facilitate thinking and basically don't try to write the thing. And so after I had that initial set of things, I flipped to this and it's like, okay, let's get into a flow, ask me the kinds of questions, help me think through it. You know, this is also where I've got a chats folder in here. So it's like, it's not just happening here. I was also having like a, I've got a whole, uh, sorry, I'm just backing out. So like, if we go into.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  If we go into chats, like, these are a whole bunch of the chats that I had.

• 25:17Dan Shipper?

  Like with the interviewer?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  No, these are chats I was having with ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and all of these different things that I went and just grabbed the full transcript of. So, you know, I was also having all these other conversations. And then, you know, I'm specifically telling the interviewer, like, review all these other things. So, actually, you know, I think the first one, there's one of these conversations is, I originally had this idea about transformers are eating the world. And, you know, the sort of notion there is like, you know, there was some research that came out, I think, a few months ago, that they had found a, they were able to sort of outperform some specialized time series modeling, models with transformers. And like, you know, I think there's really interesting stuff. You know, there's a story

• 26:00Speaker 02

  about Tesla removing 300,000 lines of code with a neural network. And, you know, I've just got, kind of got these bits and pieces. And one of the ways I work generally is like, when I have an idea of something to write or think about, I'll start a thread in ChatGPT or Claude, and I'll then save that somewhere. And then I'll just kind of keep coming back to it when I have more ideas. It's like, oh, here's another example of transformers doing something. And so, one of these conversations is actually that thing from, you know, probably four or five months ago, when that kind of idea initially came into my head, maybe when I saw the research about time series modeling or something.

• 26:38Dan Shipper?

  Really interesting. Okay. Okay, so let's, let's keep going. So, you got, you got the subagent. And I actually, I want to like, just actually, I want to pause on that really quick, which is, I think this is a very common complaint, that they just dive in, and it's a common pattern to make a thinking agent. And I think Claude Code, or Claude in general, is probably the best one for this. So, this is a thing that we faced with one of the apps that we've incubated called Spiral, which is a agentic ghostwriter. And I think we found, I found the same kind of thing when, when I was thinking about, okay, how does a good ghostwriter work? They don't just like, you don't say, hey, I want you to write a blog post. And they're just like, cool, I made it. Here it is. Like, a good ghostwriter is

• 27:21Dan Shipper?

  going to get to know you and really, you're gonna, you're gonna work together to. Figure out what's in your head about it, but also shape what's in your head. Like, it's not just, oh, I can see it and like, they need to get it out of you. Like, you're actually making it together. And in order to do that, you have to have a really good interview process to uncover things. And that sounds like you've found that too. And I think that's really, really interesting and really important for people who are thinking about how to get the best out of AI. Actually, stop for a second and like, let it, ask it to understand you first.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. One of the things I say to a lot of people is just like, I think partially because we call it generative, there's entirely too much focus on its ability to write and not enough focus on its ability to read. It's like, its ability to read is incredible, right? And I think, you know, arguably, sort of like, much more useful on a day-to-day basis. Like, we produce artifacts far less frequently than we just like, think about things. And so, yeah, I do this a lot. This is definitely a complaint I have about all the models is like, you know, even when you very specifically tell it not to try to do your work, it still often still tries to do your work. And so, you have to like, really, really be like, no, I said no.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Like, I think actually, if we look at, so, here. Critical. When Noah says he's just collecting source materials, or I do not under any circumstances want you to try to write it, take this literally. Do not create outlines, drafts, or any versions of docs, slash writing. Only gather and organize the requested materials.

• 29:00Dan Shipper?

  So good. I love it.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is like, but yeah, I think, you know, I think we all, we all experience that. And, you know, I mean, I do hope over time that that sort of gets baked into the models. I think it's a very interesting tension that exists with the model companies. Because like, obviously, you know, like, the sort of, a lot of the economic input, output is sort of measured in the artifacts that it produces. And so, I think it's very oriented. And, you know, I suspect that part of it is just like, that sort of, the helpful assistant thing has like, Come to be a sort of meme that is probably self ingested. But yeah, it's it's. I think for those of us who are trying to do more interesting things with these models, it it becomes a real barrier to work.

• 29:48Dan Shipper?

  Totally.

• 29:50Dan Shipper?

  Okay, so I want to think about when you're using the thinking agent. Did you say it like it's is it outputting some sort of summary of what you've come to into a particular place or?

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that thinking agent is sort of told to as it asks me questions, kind of make notes about the questions that it's asking me and keep a kind of running log of what I'm uncovering and how I'm thinking about it and all those sorts of things.

• 30:12Dan Shipper?

  Got it. And then, you know, you come back the next day and you're like, oh, I just want to go down this rabbit hole on XYZ thing about the, you know, this Wild Bill guy. And that you start in a new chat, maybe with it, maybe with the sub vision, maybe not. And that becomes its own new file on that topic.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So like I I this, the.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  The Wild Bill stuff started as like deep research in chat GPT. And I, you know, had it go out and I'm reading the Wild Bill book right now. There's a like one sort of particularly famous biography of him. And, uh, um, you know, I'm kind of thinking about the bits and pieces and trying to make. And I think I made a kind of interesting connection in there. Where, you know, a big part of what sort of he seems to have been after with the OSS and and, you know, the sort of inspiration for the special forces was like empowering individuals. You know, that's sort of like the theme of that manual was like, obviously empowering citizen saboteurs, but also, you know, I think a big part of the special forces is like,

• 31:17Speaker 02

  you know, having kind of like incredible operators at the edge who, you know, obviously operate within a sort of command and control hierarchy, but like have a ton of autonomy to move and execute independently because they're kind of they have all the things that they need. And so, you know, in all of that Wild Bill research, I kind of went back to this and I was like, is this like an interesting way to connect all these ideas that like maybe kind of there's a. You know, and again, I'm this is still early. I have not like solidified these conclusions is like, you know, the regular kind of writing process, right? Um, but it's like, well, I think there's this idea that like, you know, fundamentally, well, I know, you know, fundamentally, one of the big things with transformers is it moved us from

• 31:58Speaker 02

  sequential based models to models that can act in, you know, sort of parallelize their work better. And that obviously allowed us to have much more powerful and, you know, interesting models and has, you know, arguably kicked off this entire sort of revolution of what's going on. Um, and, you know, what we both do for a living. Uh, and so, you know, I think there's this kind of interesting connection. And so that was what I was playing with, I think here was like, oh, maybe there's this connection between kind of sequential processing to this kind of parallel. And then there's this connection to bureaucracy. And then there's this connection to Wild Bill, who seems to be have been very much about sort of like working within a system, but like having autonomy at the edges. And so that's kind of what I was playing with and just

• 32:43Speaker 02

  kind of taking notes. And then, yeah, I would jump out and be like, oh, well, actually I haven't figured out a conclusion yet. Let me start the conclusion section and I'll just sort of get that going on the side. But, um, and then, you know, I, I have a job. So I can't be doing this all the time. So it's also like you interrupt yourself and it's really nice to be able to come back and be like, you know, um, can you catch me up on the last three days of research?

• 33:07Dan Shipper?

  Oh, I love that question. That's so cool.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, you can just kind of go in and be like, can you catch me up on the last few days of research? And, um, it's just gonna go read all the stuff, right? And again, it's like, I think the point you made earlier about the, you know, go find relevant sources. It's like, I find a lot that the difference between the people are getting a lot of this right now is part of it is just like, you have a good feel for where the edges of the capabilities of these models are. And you sort of like encourage them to work within those capabilities. Like, this is an incredibly easy, you know, it's like, we know what it's going to do here, right? Like I could write all these Unix commands. It's just going to go find a bunch of files in this directory and it's going to look at them by date and it's going to look at all the files created in That project over the last, you know, and we know it's going to be able to do that. And so it's saying,

• 33:57Speaker 02

  you know, the major breakthrough day was this idea of bureaucracy as positional encoding, which is very much a work in progress idea, but I kind of like it. But, you know, so it's just like, it's pretty amazing also to just be able to kind of revisit deep work like this, right? Where, you know, you know, you're going to break your flow. You're not, and it's like, it's often, you know, I find whether it's code or writing, the hardest part is like just picking it up again. Because you're, you're out of it. And so just to kind of like kickstart that process is sort of amazing. I think what I was playing with here is this idea that bureaucracy was actually like an innovation, right? That like, we look at bureaucracy as a negative and generally we talk about it as a negative. And I think often it is a negative.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  But, you know, bureaucracy was a sort of like huge innovation for how companies operate, right? And ultimately, it sort of represents kind of hierarchy and structure and a whole bunch of things that are like, actually like pretty positive for operating at a large scale. And so, you know, again, my, my kind of whole thesis on AI around all this bureaucracy stuff is that what's interesting about it is that as opposed to kind of past technologies, which kind of forced you to make a decision about whether you wanted to kind of like use your existing sort of structure and build that technology into your existing structure or adopt the new structure. And most of the time, the new software required you adopted the new structure.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And that's why so many sort of software projects failed for so long, at least that's sort of part of what I think. And, you know, I think part of what's interesting about AI, what I find so interesting is like that you can kind of keep letting everybody work in whatever way they want. You know, it's like a classic problem inside large companies is like, one team wants to use a sauna and one wants to use Jira and one wants to use linear. Right? And so then at some point, there's like a, there's a, there's a huge project and they bring in some big consulting firm and they decide they're going to all centralize on this one thing. And now two thirds of the company is unhappy. And like they've all made sacrifices and, you know, you're sort of in this like very non-ideal state.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  And I think what's really interesting about AI, and I, this is a little more sort of theoretical because I think, you know, we're so early in this, is that like, I think it's very possible you could just say, well, everybody just keep doing what you're doing. We're going to stick sort of some models in the middle. They don't care what you use because like it's all just data structures to them. And so we can then have this sort of central thing. And if you know, I when you we talked about Percolate at the beginning, Percolate was a content marketing platform, worked with very large companies. So it's an enterprise software product. And it's like, you know, at the end of the day, this is sort of the fundamental challenge of enterprise software is about like, you know, adoption and change management. I just think, I think, and I hope, and again, this is sort of the the optimist in me that like AI

• 36:52Speaker 02

  kind of lets us just not worry so much about these things. And rather than trying to make everybody change the ways that they work, kind of let them work in these ways and let AI sort of it's my I call it my Thomas's English muffin theory of AI, which is that it like gets into the nooks and crannies. And so, yeah, that's so anyway, but I have no idea what bureaucracy is positional encoding means yet. I'm hoping I figure it out in the next two weeks before I have to give this talk.

• 37:20Dan Shipper?

  I think, no, but I think the point you just made is totally right. And it's actually not, it doesn't have to be theoretical. Like, I've been seeing this too, inside of every, and I've been meaning to write about it. And the the place that it's been coming up is, we have, so inside of every, we run like six different products. And we have 15 people. So it's it's like a crazy product to headcount ratio. And what's interesting is, I really like doing things in a in a bottom up way. So everyone, each of the products has its own stack. We're not like centralized into a particular stack. Each, you know, GM that runs a product like just has made a decision about do I run Rails or TypeScript or whatever. And what I'm seeing

• 38:01Dan Shipper?

  happen, which is very cool, is a lot of the different products are running into similar things they want to solve for. So an easy example is, we have one product called Sparkle, which is a little bit like a

• 38:17Dan Shipper?

  A finder replacement or spotlight replacement. So it organizes your files and then it implements really fast spotlight search.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  I'm a user. I like it.

• 38:26Dan Shipper?

  Okay, so then you know. And so that's really cool. And Agentic Search coming soon. Check it out. And and we're just building a new product, new GM, new stack called Para, which is essentially an in-house counsel. So it's short for paralegal, not para like, you know, Tiago Forte para. And the whole job for Para is just, you know, take all of your legal files. And whenever I have a question and be like, okay, do we ever sign this contract? Or what's the employee agreement template? Or whatever? It just gives you the answer. And it's just Claude code sitting on top of a directory.

• 39:07Dan Shipper?

  And and a thing that we needed to implement for that is this sort of like fast file file search. And what's really interesting is historically, if we wanted to reuse the stuff that we learned from implementing Sparkle's file search, that would have to be abstracted out into this modular library that anyone can use. And then we have to be on the same platform and like all those things, right? And what we did instead is we just added a Pridi, who's the developer for Para right now. We just added her to the Sparkle repo. And I was just like, just ask Claude code to figure out how it works and just do your own version. And so you get this like sort of tacit code sharing, where we all get better,

• 39:51Dan Shipper?

  but without having to do the work of abstracting and modularizing everything, because the percentage of things that you can do that for are pretty low because it's a it's a heavy lift. And I'm seeing that happen all the time, where just having a bunch of repos that are all solving similar problems, but in different environments, in different ways, you, everyone gets more productive because AI can kind of translate.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I've, uh, one thing we've done there, uh, we also, we, so at Alephic, we do a whole bunch of building for, uh, very large brands. Um, and so we sort of build all kinds of AI things and, um, you know, so we, we've got lots of sort of internal and external repos. And we frequently have the same thing. And actually I've used the GitHub MCP, um, a few times for that same purpose, which is just like, um, you know, you're just in cursor or Claude code or whatever. And you're like, hey, can you go like look up, uh, we run, we've got an internal tool, um, called intelligence that just sort of is a wrapper around a whole bunch of like,

• 40:51Speaker 02

  stuff that we use, right? So it's like, got some CRM stuff and it's, it's just like been a, a fun place to build the things that we need to run our company. Um, but it's also a good place to kind of experiment and explore and figure out solutions to interesting problems. And so, I'll frequently be like, oh, can you go like, just go look at the intelligence repo and, um, you know, look at how I implemented that thing there. And take those sort of best practices and just pull them over. Um, and yeah, I think that stuff, again, that's where, I really do believe in this idea. I like, one of my, whenever we have like a client meeting or something, my first, the question, the icebreaker I always use is what was your aha moment with AI?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  And, um, uh, mine was, uh, I mean, it was probably not the very first, but it's the one that sort of I think was most impactful was I was, uh, I got access to build a chat GPT plugin. Remember when plugins came out and like, uh, two and a half years ago or something now?

• 41:53Dan Shipper?

  You mean 50 years ago?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  50 years ago.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And, you know, I, I like you, I've, I've written a lot of software in my life and I, you know, you know what you do when you, like get access to something new. It's like, I've got to go read the API docs and, figure it out. And, you know, I'll like, there's a, going to be a contract and, you know, as long as you follow that contract, it works. And I go read the plugin spec and it basically is like, oh, you just stick a manifest dot JSON file in the root directory of your application. And in that you describe how you want us to send you data and you describe how you're going to send it back to us. And then we'll deal with the rest. And I was just like, that's amazing. It's also like,

• 42:37Speaker 02

  It's how the world should work. Like, I wish everything worked that way. I wish I didn't always have to adhere to the big company's contract for how to send and receive data. But also, like, the thing that really struck me in that moment, and it's like been my kind of like rallying cry around all this stuff, is that it's also just like fundamentally counterintuitive in that, like, I literally have a career's worth of intuition for how to integrate software systems, and it flipped it on its head, like, like, like, quite literally 180 degrees away from my intuition of how software systems should be integrated was this thing. And that, I think, since then, has been my kind of thing for everybody, has

• 43:19Speaker 02

  been like, this is just not intuitive for now. And, and that's not a bad thing. It just means like, you need to build intuition. And like, that's what we're all just out there trying to do with it, right? And so, you know, when, I don't know, I mean, part of what I like about what you're doing, and, you know, even just hearing the things you're saying, but like, generally, what you do with the podcast and what you do with every is like, so much of it is like, we're all kind of just figuring stuff out for the first time, right? And like, um, you know, we're like, oh, will this work? And then, like, all of a sudden, you have this new bit of intuition for what these things can do and what a computer that is not deterministic looks like. And that's, I think that's just what we're all doing all the time. And that's why it's so fun, I think.

• 44:04Dan Shipper?

  That's why I love this moment, because like, you just have a weird idea, and you're like, has anyone done this before? And, and it's like, no. And it's not, it's not a complicated idea. It's just, it's just a new, whole new territory, you know?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  I, yes, I think about that all the time. And I think actually, like, I think one of the really damaging sort of things out there is that, um, I think there are a lot of people who think we're way further along in this than we are. And so, you know, I think particularly the people who are sort of scared, you know, we run, we work with, like, Fortune 50 companies. And so, you know, when we're sort of like, out there and we're talking to people inside the organization, a lot of people feel like they've already been left behind. And it's like, no, you can like, literally go sign into ChatGPT and like, Do something like nobody's thought about doing with this thing yet because there's

• 44:57Speaker 02

  just so much white space to explore and you might discover some totally new way of using it and or like totally new trick and I don't know that's just that's and you know I think to be fair to some people that's sort of very intimidating and I don't think by and large the models do any favors to themselves in helping those people get their feet wet in that like you know I think people go on there and they you know it's like you ask it to write you a poem and then it writes you a poem and you're like okay it wrote me a poem but I don't know that feeling of like that feeling of yeah it's like being on the frontier right?

• 45:34Dan Shipper?

  Totally and yeah I think that your point about intuitions and getting intuitions is the big thing and I think people we don't realize is when you're dealing with something fundamentally new you you can't trust like how you reason about it without experiencing it because you have to build the intuition in order to be able to reason about what it means and how it fits in and whether it works or not and we're just not used to that because we're used to reasoning about things we already have an intuition for and and I think that's why like when you first see maybe when you first saw chat GPT you'd be like oh my god it can do everything like we're not gonna have jobs in a year and now we're like three years in and we're like yeah it's awesome and jobs are complicated

• 46:17Dan Shipper?

  there's a lot of complex stuff that we do you know and I love I love kind of that you know in order to build the intuition all you have to do is is use it and that just by using it you're already kind of on the edge for now and yeah I think that's the best.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  There's apparently there's a German word called Finger spitzengefühl.

• 46:38Dan Shipper?

  Of course there is.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Building fingertip feeling and that's been my just because I can't resist also I I in that whole in in sort of the realm that you're discussing like

• 46:53Speaker 02

  I've been trying to do a lot of analogy analogizing, right? It's sort of like, and I think, you know, that's really hard. And, um, uh, you know, but my two that have sort of stuck the most. One is just, um, I watch a lot of YouTube with my kids and, um, uh, we watch this channel called Veritasium. It's a science channel and

• 47:11Dan Shipper?

  I love Veritasium.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. Um, and he did one where he built a bike that locks out left if you try to turn right and locks out right. If you try to turn left and what he's proving is that you can't actually turn a bike left unless you can turn it right. Which none of us would think about when we ride a bike because it's all just second nature and intuition. But it's also why you can't explain to a child how to ride a bike. They just have to get on it and feel it. And, um, and so, you know, I really, that video is amazing and, um, uh, it's, uh, that channel is amazing. And, and, but I, I've thought a lot about that. And then the other one, which is a sort of deeper cut is, um, uh, there's an amazing book about quantum physics called Beyond Weird, um, by Philip Ball.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  And, um, the thesis of the book is basically that like, there's nothing particularly strange about quantum physics that we like. We have very good understanding of it, like we wouldn't be talking right now. We wouldn't be on computers. We wouldn't have phones if we didn't have like a very good grasp of the mechanics that exist underneath it. And his thesis in the book essentially is that like, what's really lacking is the vocabulary because like we all exist in a Newtonian world, not in a quantum one. And so we all have words that reflect the sort of deterministic processes of that macro universe. And I think a lot about that. I have not like fully been able to sort of pull that string all the way to AI.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  But I feel like there's a real connection there because I think that there's just something really weird about using probabilistic computers. Like we're not used to using things that like you ask them the same question twice and they have different answers. Like, that's very strange. We're not used to, I'm not used to writing code where you can tell the larger company how you want them to send you data and they can just do it. Like, these are not normal things that any of us have lived with in our lifetimes. And so of course it takes some time for us to adjust.

• 49:09Dan Shipper?

  I think so too. And I actually have a hope that language models by becoming a standard way that we use computers will create that vocabulary. Because We actually are quite good at dealing with probabilistic, non-deterministic things like other humans. We've just grown up in a world where because of, you know, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and, and the tools that came out of that are very much like deterministic, we've associated that with how we see, like that's how we see the world because of those tools and that language. And there's a whole other part of the way that we see the world, which is much more squishy and much more like vibes based

• 49:54Dan Shipper?

  that has been, I think, deep, deprioritized, especially in Western culture, that now that we have a tool that works that way, I think we'll be able to start seeing that again. And that's one of the beautiful things to me about language models is it opens up that whole world again.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I love it.

• 50:13Dan Shipper?

  I do want to go back to Claude Code and we should do the phone unless there's, unless there are other things that you, that you want to share on the computer. But the, the, the thing I want to do before we get there, that's just on my mind right now is like you said, you said, you know, you, you watch this with your kids and I'm sort of curious how, like, what do your kids think about this and how are you dealing with it with your kids?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love that question. So I've got a seven and a 10 year old and obviously like I'm pretty kind of deeply embedded in this stuff. And so I've sort of exposed them quite a bit to it. You know, they don't, so they will like occasionally use the sort of voice models and they have a pretty good understanding and we'll be in the car and just play games and ask questions with Grok and do those kinds of things. This weekend, actually, for the first time, my 10 year old, she was really eager to be, every year, my wife and her sister and brother and mom and all the cousins, we all get together and we do Christmas together. And so it's too many presents to give to everybody. So

• 51:23Speaker 02

  we do a kind of like not secret, secret Santa where everybody chooses one person. And my 10 year old really wanted to be the one who got to be the chooser. And I encouraged her to vibe code an app to do it. And so I just gave her my phone and V zero and.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Honestly, that was like so amazing to watch, like not just because it was so cool to see her do that and build it and she went through, she was having so much fun. She did 75 revs on V0. So she like really got it going.

• 51:58Dan Shipper?

  Polished sand app.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  She also like started to get into like really interesting kind of like computer science ideas without knowing it. So in one of the things like the adults give presents to adults and the kids give presents to kids. But she wanted this to be a more generalized app. So she realized that like rather than having adults and kids, you need to call them groups, right? And like, you know, so she's like getting into data modeling and like all of this, I'm like watching this conversation happen and I just thought that was so awesome. And, you know, also just like a real pet beam of mine right now, and I've sort of gotten this argument with a bunch of people is like, there seems to be a big conversation that like there's a

• 52:43Speaker 02

  a bubble in vibe coding and like because one company or another might have too high of a valuation. And my take on that is like, I just, I could not care less what the valuations of these companies are. I think like fundamentally, if there's a tool that can allow a 10 year old to like build an app, there can't, that can't be a bubble. Like I just like can't see a possibility where that is that. So, um, anyway, that's sort of one side of it. The other big one for me that I've been thinking a lot about is

• 53:15Speaker 02

  is sort of media literacy and education stuff. So, um, you know, both at the sort of schools they go to. And then also I went to NYU and I've sort of been having more and more conversations with the dean of the school I went to there. And there's a lot of fear inside schools right now about AI and about cheating and there's a big thing, you know, so some parents in my town, they, you know, they wanted to have more of a conversation about it and.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  You know, as someone who I I've thought about this a lot, but I've also just like been I've spent my entire life thinking about search technology and its effects on culture. And I I think I'm like relatively grounded in these things of of like I've put in good hours of thinking. I mean, I know that for sure. And so, you know, my my take on it is like one that sort of you can't hide technology that won't be hidden. Right? So it's like, you know, putting our head in the sand is not the best solution. And then, you know, my bigger one, though, is like I I was out. A friend of mine asked me to come talk to a school two years ago about AI. Out in LA and afterwards I was talking to a English teacher there and she was like, what do I do? Like, what do I do about all these kids, you know, using AI?

• 54:32Speaker 02

  And I was like, look, I don't really know what your job is because like, I mean, being an English teacher for 11th grader sounds really much harder than my job. But on a really fundamental level, like I don't actually think your job is to teach these kids to write because that's like a lifelong pursuit. I think your job is to convince them that it's worth learning to write. And so in that way, like I I'm not sure that anything fundamentally changes because of AI. Like, I I think that, you know, and again, this is my very optimistic take, but like I am. I think that there are so many parts of the education system that AI really just exposes the sort of flaws in the way that we teach.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Like, why are there so many tests on these kinds of things instead of encouraging thinking and learning and coming to love to write and research and whatever? You know, it's like we're so focused on teaching kids the, you know, five paragraph essay, you know, while every adult who is a writer has long abandoned that. And because like it's all about sort of discovering that you like to write and you, you know, what your own style is and how to do it. And, you know, it's like, I'm sure it it's like, you know. A big part of working with AI to write is like telling it is ignoring it because you're like, no, that's not me. I'm not into that. Like I, like I, I, I'm totally comfortable saying really here. I know you don't think it's a good idea, but like I'm, I'm cool with it. Um, and so, you know, I don't know.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  I, I've been sort of having a lot of these different thoughts. I'm actually pitching a class for the fall of twenty six at NYU to kind of, um, the idea for it is, uh, code is essay. And my, my sort of point of view is like this sort of opens up this new way to express yourself. Um, and that, you know, like we have all these other ways that we celebrate to express ourselves, but code has been like long shut off from people because it's, but actually it's kind of amazing. And it lets you express yourself in all these different kinds of ways. And like, you know, this is what my 10 year old was doing this weekend. So anyway, those are all the bits and pieces as a parent. I've been thinking about the one other thing I will plug is, um,

• 56:37Speaker 02

  media literacy, I think is a big piece of it. A lot of people are afraid of these models and hallucinations. And, um, there's a book, um, by a guy named Tim Harford, who writes for, uh, the FT and he's an economist. Um, and he has a book called The Truth Detective, which is an adaptation of The Data Detective, but it's written for kids and it's the best media literacy book I've ever read for adults or for children. Um, and I think, you know, a lot of what this AI conversation exposes is like how bad a job we do with helping and arming our kids and our adults to be sort of like truly media and technology literate and, you know, like being really good at knowing what's real on social media

• 57:22Speaker 02

  turns out to be also really useful for like differentiated between hallucinations and non hallucinations in chat GBD. Right? Like this is a sort of, to me, a kind of very central skill that like we need to arm everybody with. And, um, I am sort of way more interested in that with my kids than I am in worrying about them cheat. That was a very long answer to your question. I don't know if it got at what you were looking for.

• 57:45Dan Shipper?

  No, it's amazing. I, that's exactly what I'm looking for. And it's sort of what it strikes me. Oh, another way to frame what you're saying is, for example, rather than.

• 57:58Dan Shipper?

  Learn, having them memorize and be quizzed on the 50, what the 50 states are. Asking them to go find the 50 states with chat GPT and be able to tell when the AI is giving them the wrong answer because that's a lot more of the, the meta skill that they're going to need anyway down the, down the line. And again, I'm not a teacher. I'm sure there's lots of teachers who were like, this is, that's crazy for a lot of probably good reasons, but there's something interesting there where it becomes, the meta skills become more important than they used to be. And in order to do well at the meta skill, you have to also be able to like, to some degree, do the underlying skill too. But we probably could be spending much more time in the meta skill than we are now and the education system like, isn't really set up to do that anyway.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, you know, even, I think even simpler examples is like, I, I went to a school called Gallatin at NYU and, and when you graduate, you have to sort of, it's not quite a thesis defense, but you have to sort of spend three hours with four professors and, and, or three professors and sort of explain kind of your line of reasoning around why you studied what you studied. And you need to be prepared to kind of like weave into that defense, um, uh, any of 25 books that you put on your book list. Um, and you know, I was talking to them and it's like amazing. That's like entirely AI proof, right? Like there's no cheating on that. Like you show up in that room and you're either prepared to speak to it or you're not. And whether you're prepared with AI or not is, uh, it

• 59:27Speaker 02

  doesn't mean anything, right? Like it's, it's like, like, do you, can you, can you make up an argument in this room? And like, not everything is going to be that easy to be sort of like cut off, but like, I don't know, there's something really beautiful about that idea, right? Because it's like, it's naturally cheating proof because like you're sitting there and, and it's a question of like, did you actually internalize these things? Um, and I don't know, that's way more interesting to me than even like, was your essay good or any of these other, it's like, did you, did you get it? Like, um, and uh, so yeah, I don't know. Um, I'm, I'm.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  I'm trying to do my best to kind of like, um, take a balanced approach and um, try to at least sort of like tamp down some of, I live in a small town in Connecticut and you know, I think there's a lot of fear amongst parents. You know, it's like, it was mobile phones and then there was social media and now it's AI and it's like another thing that's going to ruin our kids. And um, I don't think that that is true. Um, uh, but I think there are things we can and should do to encourage it to not be true, like really get them really good at the things you're saying. Like, how do you tell? And again, it's like a hallucination is just a form of the same kind of misinformation that exists in, on television and on the internet

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  and in social media and everywhere else. And um, you know, just sort of like encouraging people to kind of get in touch. There's a great part of the Truth Detective, um, uh, for the kids book, he calls it the brain guard. And like, one of the bits of advice he has is when you encounter some piece of information, if it makes you feel really good because you agree with it, then you should be even more skeptical of it. And he calls it the brain guard. You know, and he's explaining this like this for a nine-year-old. I just thought that was like such a beautiful way to put it, right? Like, that's like what, that's what you learn to do when you get good at being on the internet. Um, is that you're like, wait, I should like be more skeptical of this because this is like in line with everything, I think. Let me just double check the way like I, you

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  know, you get to learn that feeling in your gut and get to learn when to react to it. And so, yeah, that's a lot of how I think about it.

• 1:01:40Dan Shipper?

  That's great. I'm, I'm interested. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get that book. I'm, I'm interested in reading it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  You should. My plan is to read it to my kids every year, uh, from now on.

• 1:01:49Dan Shipper?

  Nice. I love it.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Just refresh it.

• 1:01:52Dan Shipper?

  Um, all right. Now, for the moment, we've all been waiting for, show us how you use Claude Code on your phone as a second brain note taker.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so here we go. So I am going into an app called Termius. Termius is just a terminal.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  And what is allowing all this to happen behind the scenes is in my basement, I have a mini PC. And on that mini PC, I have a thing called TailScale running. And TailScale lets you set up these very simple VPNs. So I'm currently inside, like if I scroll down here, you see I'm on a VPN. That's my personal VPN. I'm not like on an outside VPN.

• 1:02:37Dan Shipper?

  I see.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  So the only way to access this machine is through my VPN.

• 1:02:42Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And so then when I go in there, because I sync my Obsidian

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  with Git, so I put it, it's on GitHub, in a private GitHub. I can then sync it back down to here. And so then I can just call up Claude. And now I'm just in Claude code, talking and thinking and I can just be like, what's new in the last two days?

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  I can access any of my agents. I can do anything. And again, this is in my Obsidian, but I can use this anywhere, right? So I'll be like on the fly. I've got other repos in here. You know, I, I realized like a link was broken on my conference site. And so I, I just opened the repo. I pulled it down. I asked Claude Code to make the changes and I was able to do it right here. So this has been like completely wild to me because again, this is very much in that like, like on Tuesday of this week, we had Monday off, Tuesday I dropped the, I dropped the kids off of the bus.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  And then I, I went and I sat and had breakfast and I literally sat on my phone and worked on this talk for like two hours. And I did it through here, right? Like on my phone where I was like doing real thinking and research and pulling things in and pacing things in and doing all this kinds of stuff. And you know, I'm able to do it. At all. And it just, it doesn't seem like I could do that kind of thing without that. So yeah, this has been like a completely revolutionary change in my life. And actually, one of the things I've been doing lately is like setting up. I've got all these friends now who I've set up like little partitions of this mini PC in my basement.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  So that they can also run Claude Code on their phone because I like it so much.

• 1:04:47Dan Shipper?

  Does this make you be like, oh, my God, I gotta drop everything and just build a actual purpose-built Notes app that has Claude Code as a backend for this?

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  No, I mean, actually, one of the things I've been thinking a lot is like, maybe I just like, everything should just run in Linux all the time for me. Maybe this is like, at least for the short term, this is the answer to all of what I just need to like, not have anything anywhere else. No, I mean, I'm, I'm, I will say I'm sort of pretty out of the SaaS game these days. So I don't often kind of think that I should drop everything and do anything. I find this to be a really amazing solution. And, but no, I mean, I, this, but this is really, this is really like changed the way I work and I feel like I can just be anywhere and just be on my phone. And, you know, I mean, I was out, like, I needed a break.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  It was, you know, 4:30, I went and sat outside for a while. And then we had a project that needed to get delivered to a client and a small change needs to be made that like, I was the best suited to make that change. And so I just like hopped on my phone, I pulled the repo down and I went into Cloud Code. It's like a tiny little change. You know, like the way I find myself using Cloud Code the most for code is that like mostly I'm having it do the work I already know how to do. You know, I'm like, oh, I like, I know, I knew exactly what was going on in that situation. Like I knew why we were having the issue we were having. And so it was like, I could have gone back to my computer and opened up Cursor and done it in Cursor, either by hand or with Cursor.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  But it's like, I just, I was like, I told Cloud Code exactly where to look. It was like, and I first confirmed that the problem was what I thought the problem was. And then I just had it push a solution and it pushed to PR and then I was done.

• 1:06:33Dan Shipper?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  And I was still sitting outside by the pond.

• 1:06:39Dan Shipper?

  I love that. Um, yeah, I've, I've definitely had that experience. I've never, I've not done it on my phone. I'm like, I have my laptop out with me, you know, by the pond or by a lake or whatever, but you're inspiring me. I have a Mac mini in the office that I've been meaning to set up. So I think this is going to give me.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  One of the other, by the way, um, one of my other, I'll just take you out of here for one sec, actually, just to show you this. One of my other big ahas, um, recently has been, um, uh, building, um, Claude code helpers for, um, doing, uh, uh, basically like, uh, setup work. So it's like, I'm not, I'm like, been playing with Linux lately. I'm playing with this Omarchi, which is DHH's Linux distribution. And I'm not like super comfortable in here. And so I got this whole, this is a Claude code project specifically to help me configure this box.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  And it's like so nice because I'm like, oh, how do you do this in Linux again? Or like, what's the Neo Vim command? Or like, can you change this? Can you help me install this plugin for Neo Vim or whatever it is? Or, and so now I have one on my Mac too, where it's like, um, can you clean up all the homebrew things? Or like, I switched from like, which Python package manager I was using. And it was like, that would have been super overwhelming for me. And I was like, I want to switch from using pip to using UV. Can you like, just make that happen? And it like, just did all this stuff for me. And it knows all my preferred settings. And so, um, I actually have a version of this where like, now I've got it so tuned that, um, if I want to launch a new box for doing something, it'll just have all my settings ready to go. And then I can,

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  log into Claude code and the Claude code can then set up anything else that didn't get set up in the initial process.

• 1:08:22Dan Shipper?

  That is amazing. That's wild.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  This is my happy place.

• 1:08:28Dan Shipper?

  I, I can see that. Are you, do you have any like, um, uh, are there, are there any big projects like this that you've been itching to do or itching to try out?

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Uh, no, not really. I mean, I've been having a ton of fun. My server stuff has been a ton of fun. I've been doing a lot of that. Um, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm, like I said, I mean, this is kind of a joke and kind of not. It's like, I'm super interested in, um, like doing more, because Claude Code has become such a sort of integral part of my life. Like, I'm very interested in the command line. I found myself installing more and more things into the command line and like doing more and more work. So I've been using like, uh, Simon Wilson has a LLM command line tool and like doing more and more stuff sort of in that. And then like also layering

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  that back into Claude Code. So it's like I did my newest Claude Code little Obsidian tool is it, I have an attachments folder in Obsidian where all the PDFs and images and stuff in any note go, but inevitably they have terrible names, right? I mean, um, and so this goes through very similar to, um, uh, Sparkle. And but just in that Obsidian folder and it, it renames them all. And then it also puts them in like a metadata. It puts them in a table in the attachments folder and then it renames all the attachment links back. So just like cleans everything up. It just does it through Gemini, Flash. Um, and so it's like, I don't know,

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  stuff like that's kind of amazing. Um, so I don't, I'm just like, I'm having the time of my life just building and tankering and, you know, I mean, this is just on the side and I get to do the same thing. I mean, we work with like Amazon and Meta and PayPal and all these big companies. And, you know, we're just like building amazing stuff all the time.

• 1:10:13Dan Shipper?

  I love that. I love the energy. If people are interested in following you or working with you at Alephic, where should they find you?

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, so Alephic is alephic.com, A L E P H I C dot com. Um, and then I also run this thing called Brxnd.ai to make it particularly confusing. Um, that's a conference. We've got the conference coming up on September 18th in New York City. You should come if you're around. It'll be really fun. We're going to talk about marketing and AI. Um, and I also write a newsletter there at newsletter.brxnd.ai about sort of specifically at this intersection of AI and marketing. Um, those are kind of the best places to find me these days.

• 1:10:55Dan Shipper?

  Awesome. Noah, always a pleasure.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Pleasure's all mine. Thank you, Dan.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely, positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.