Turn any YouTube Channel into your AI Mentor - Obsidian is the ultimate automation workbench for PKM

hey everyone it's jolt here happy New Year and welcome to visual PKM today's video is inspired by this problem that even though I have over 250 videos about obsidian exol draw and visual PKM on YouTube and I have over 400 detailed release notes on GitHub about each of the plug-in releases then you have a specific question it's extremely hard to find the answer I'm thinking of questions like this one that I receive on Discord on Twitter on YouTube in email you name it I get it all the time here's a typical question how can I

turn on that panel with pens and other functions on the right side of the screen and of course the person is referring to this panel right here and you need to know that you need to enable in plug in settings custom pens and you need to Long click on scripts in the obsidian tools panel to pin them here and then you have the right hand side panel which is super handy I use it a lot but how can you find the answer to such questions how can you find out of the 250 videos the one

that talks about this it's like looking for a needle in the Hast stack this is the problem that I'm going to to give you a solution for today so the video is built up like this first we're going to talk about the solution to this problem exactly but then as I was developing my solution I made it slightly more generic because what I was thinking is of course I'm going to have future releases and you will need to find help for that as well so I need to update it Etc I made it more gen

generic but as I did that that's when it dawned on me that what I've built is so much more powerful this is such a powerful PKM tool if you want to learn something if you want to engage in a topic that's on YouTube the solution that I'm going to show you is going to blow your mind away this is an amazing solution for an extremely broad range of use cases and it's super easy to implement and then finally all of this led me to something that I'm going to launch today this has been on my

mind for over a year now this is something I'm extremely passionate about and I think you and everyone who's in PKM and outside PKM should have this stick around and you'll find out what I'm launching so to make this video playful we're going to play with this puzzle and we already have the first two pieces we already talked about them so I have 250 YouTube videos and I have over 400 release notes the next piece of the puzzle is notebook LM and recently I've released multiple videos on Notebook LM first of all podcast from the

future that shows you how you can create or turn your notes into a podcast then in the two AI workflows video I talk about this workflow where you take a topic with multiple books and PDFs you drop it into notebook LM you create a an overview podcast you then mind map that podcast and use this as a thinking Loop to structure your understanding of a topic that you already otherwise know and are familiar of it and so I talk about this here and I show you a mind map that I created this way and finally

I use notebook LM in uh should you trust AI with your second brain and just if you're not familiar with notebook LM notebook LM is this cool tool from Google that you can drop documents into and you can as them here's a use case you can see I have lots of notebook LM notebooks already one use case I used it for recently was at work we were trying to understand what the eui ACT means for our company so I downloaded the PDF from the EU website I dropped it into notebook LM I created a short

podcast to get a 10minute overview about what this is about and then I was able to ask the document notebook LM specific questions about the AI act with targeted answers to my questions so my idea is that if I'm able to feed the 250 videos and the 400 release notes into notebook LM then bingo I can build a tool that you can ask about videos and release notes you can ask it about obsidian XC draw but there's a catch here actually there are two catches here catch number one is I need to get hold of

the YouTube transcripts so how can I get hold of the 250 transcripts that I have and then the second but is an even bigger issue notebook LM only allows you to add 505 Z resources and of course 250+ 400 is clearly greater than 50 so there is an issue of how can I somehow condense the 250 into 50 that I can then process with notebook LM so this is where the fourth piece of the puzzle comes here so I created two scripts I actually used Chad GPT to help me with this and it was pretty

fast process to create the scripts both of them use templat so this is the Vault that I was using to process all of these notes and I created these two scripts here one is to fetch video data the other is to generate markdown notes and here I'm using two plugins I'm using templator as the core plugin to run the script and I'm using AI for temp because the way I processed each of the video and let me just show you an example output so here's a video that I processed I processed it like this that

using CH GPT I also created a summary key takeaways and a formatted content but then under it I have the details from YouTube as well so I have the YouTube description and I have the timestamped transcript so here on the transcript I can click wherever and it takes me there in the video and so you can see this for each of my videos I have this here and also the formatted transcript as well has this link with the relevant Tim stamp so you can see there the YouTube Tim stamps so each of the paragraphs at

the end of the paragraph if you read this paragraph and it's interesting you can click on the Tim stamp and it takes you to the location in the video the reason I did this like this was also because I'm publishing all of this on the excal obsidian Vicki page so there's a link to the Vicki in the video description I'm adding a number of additional resources my old blog posts these videos so all the 200 plus videos are available with the full text and with the descriptions with the timestamps and with the entire transcript each

of them with the relevant links so these are all of course links that's what I want to show you that this is here a timestamped uh transcript so this is all available there but the point here that I want to highlight is I created these two scripts and the scripts Al also create me an output that I call quarterly so I decided to bundle videos into files based on each quarter because then uh that is clearly since my channel has is not that long it's only been going since 2021 I I only get a handful

of files and of course each of these files look like this that each video has a title and then under the video you can find all the data that I just showed you so here you can see that these were the videos that I published in this quarter and then I took these files and I fed them into notebook LM you can see here all of these files plus some additionals so let's see how this model would answer the question how can I turn that panel with pens and other functions on the right side of

the screen and let's keep fingers crossed that we get something meaningful so the panel there you go so the panel you're referring to is called the custom tools panel and it can be activated by toggling tray mode that's actually not correct go to menu toggle tray mode and and then no tray mode didn't do the trick for for me this panel has lots of buttons including pens and scripts and it is on the right side of the canvas so let's see indeed you do need to be persistent sometimes in asking but sometimes it answers very

well um it is not the tray mode how can I turn on custom pens okay so here go to obsidian settings non excal supported features and custom pens this is now we are on the right track what I want to show you here is if I click two it takes me to the place in the once you enable let's see where this takes me so this takes me moving on come to custom pens this is good so this now talks about in a video Let's see which video this is so I want to proceed this

is actually a good video so here I talk about the custom pens and how I turn it on but let's maybe take a look at another example of a question so here's a question that I received two days ago why can't I give properties to my excolo drawings which of course you can give properties so that's a misunderstanding let's see you're trying to you might have a couple of misunderstandings when you mentions are you referring to document properties like found in yl and document usually stored in yl format visual properties yeah and so I am

thinking of yaml properties how can I add them to excort lid raw this looks pretty relevant so it does talk about switching to markdown View mode and it also talks about some of the EXC colid draw specific document properties and it also takes you to this document properties file where you can see all of the different excital properties but also a good response here that explains to you where you can find that but there's a sad face there so the next piece in our puzzle is I created this notebook LM and I wanted to share

it publicly so I can give you a link you can log in and you can ask your questions unfortunately Google doesn't allow that but you can train your own model so let me show you how it's super easy in the video description I included a file and if you extract this then you will get a folder with the training files and all you need to do is you need to head over to notebook lm. goole.com if you don't yet have an account you need to create an account you need to click here create new and

all you need to do here is to take these files and drop them in here and indeed it was less than a minute we already have this here and you can start asking questions from notebook LM so let's move on what's the next piece in the puzzle and this is where my mind blew away because I realized that what I built is so much more than just for visual PKM I can download any YouTube site all the videos and all the transcripts and I can actually create a notebook LM and start to think about that

topic so if there's a there's a channel that you follow that's about the topic that you're interested in with the same script you can download all the transcripts you can create the documents and you can create the training data let me show you how this would work and also I'm going to have a link but you'll need to wait a little more in the video to find out how you can get the demo Vault uh the Vault that I'm going to share with you is going to be here in a zip file it's called the

YouTube downloader Vault and once I'm ready with that then I'm just going to copy this and I'm going to head over to my obsidian folder just going to paste it in here and now I'm going to head over to here manage ws and I'm going to open a new Vault and here I'm going to select the YouTube downloader Vault then obsidian starts it's going to ask you to trust and enable plugins once you're in here you need to do two settings first of all you need to go to AI for templator and you need to

add your API Keys the welcome screen will explain to you how to get your open a key as well as it will lead you to the the scripts folder to fch video data and here you need to provide the Google Cloud API key as well I'm going to paste it in here and here's a description of how you can get your own and once you've set up your API Keys you will need to clean up the data so this will come with the preconfigured data of my own YouTube channel but you can just simply uh

Delete all of these everything from the output folder you can just simply delete and also you don't need the miscellaneous uh files so this can be deleted as well so I've deleted everything by the way just a half sentence here that from a cost perspective processing my 250 videos and actually I processed this multiple times because I was also testing the process cost me a total of 50 cents 49 cents so this is dirt cheapap this is this is definitely money is not a blocker here and what I want to show you now is let's

download a YouTube channel and I thought a good channel to play with is Nicole Vander hovind's channel so what you need to do is you need to go to the channel homepage and you need to copy the channel link and then when you have the demo Vol you can press alt e or option e that's going to open the open templator model and here I need to click on fetch video data and I'm just going to replace this and add Nicole's channel here and it's going to start to run these are the videos that it's

downloading so each of these notes Here is a separate video and when it appears that's when it has downloaded the details the transcript and everything this is going to take couple of minutes depending on the channel this can be up to 10 minutes or more the download is ready and once we are ready with this then the this file appeared here called data and you're going to this message from obsidian that it's taking a long time because data is a super big file with all of the downloaded material you don't need to worry about the

data here it's just to show you that everything that was downloaded is here if you don't delete data then the next time you run the script it will first read the existing data and it won't download everything from YouTube again but only the missing pieces that's why the data is stored here and by the way you can download multiple channels into the same data they are going to live beautifully next to each other but once we're done with this we can run the generate markdown script so I'm going to press alt e you can choose

different GPT models I'm using GPT 40 mini because that's the lowest cost and for this purpose it does a great job all we need to do is just a bit of clean up because typically transcripts are not very well formatted so that's what I'm using it for and plus to create key takeaways and a summary and now we're going to download videos only for let's say from 1st of June this year I know Nicole over the past couple of month hasn't created videos so this is not going to be too many videos I think in

August she stopped but here you can see that we already have video files appearing so you can see here each of the files that are appearing you can see that since June she published five videos and these are the videos that she published this is the actual text of those videos I mean right now we are not going to dive deep into this but this is what we downloaded and here are the quarterly files as well for Q2 and Q3 and from here you can do exactly the same as what I showed you earlier if

I open this in Explorer or in finder then I can take the quarterly files and drop them into notebook LM and I can talk to notebook LM about this Channel and again you can combine multiple channels like this so if you're interested you can run the script even in the same Vault multiple times and then you can take all of those and drop them into notebook LM now one side comment I don't recommend doing this in your main Vault so what I did was I published these files to the obsidian xol of Vicki but before

that I actually processed the files here and when I was ready then I copied them over to my main Vault that I use for publishing uh to obsidian publish and that's what I recommend that you keep this Vault with the downloads separate and this takes us to the next puzzle piece or next two puzzle pieces in our Puzzle first one is about obsidian being a perfect workbench for such PKM projects and I cannot stress has this enough obsidian with the API with templator with data view with excal automate scripts and of course with the support

of models like CH GPT that help you create script obsidian is the ideal platform to do such projects I'm finding that my go-to tool for such automation is exclusively obsidian and I use it for many things this is one example but really every week There's a use case where I need to automate something or process some data it could be for work it could be for hobby it could be for my channel it could there are many cases just yesterday I downloaded all my old blog posts from blogger.com that I wanted to the commission anyway

and they are now available in obsidian publish and guess what how did I do it I did the whole process using obsidian and some scripts so obsidian is your operating system for PKM and it's so much more than just a notetaking tool if you learn how to use these features in obsidian it becomes this magic toolbox of powerful tools that you can use for PKM processes like this one that there's a YouTube channel you want to get the data you want to learn from it maybe you want to integrate some of these notes into your

own notes obsidian gives you the tools that this is really super easy it's handy it's easy it works and it's integrated with all your other notes so that's that's just for me an important takeaway from all of this that obsidian is the perfect tool for bkm tinkering or PKM Automation and then this takes us to the last piece in our puzzle and that's technov visual PKM I'm launching the technov visual PKM Community Check the link in the video description there's going to be a launch event EV it's free you can sign up for free and

it's going to be next week Saturday so that's the 11th of January Saturday it's going to be evening European Time which means it's going to be relatively early morning Australia New Zealand and it's going to be midday to afternoon in the US hopefully everyone finds their right time in Tokyo it's going to be 5: in the morning so it's borderline acceptable but unfortunately with a global time zone it's impossible to find the ideal time zone for everyone sign up for the kickoff session the launch session at the launch session we're going to look at this

workflow that I talked about today there are so many special cases so for example you have the data Json or the data file there if you would want to find out how many videos it contains or what's the earliest and the latest video or how many videos you have per quarter these are all good questions that are easy to find if you know how to ask the script the community is going to be a paid community so after this free event you will need to sign up for the community if you continue to be interested

it's it's I plan this to be an interactive Community where we talk about everything around PKM automation it can be excal draw scripts it can be data view it can be templator it can be AI for templator it can be any other Automation in and around obsidian the idea is you can bring your projects and we can work on that project together as a Community or you can come with questions you will have like-minded people who share information between each other and who work on these projects I think this is a an awesome Community I

really have high hopes for how this is going to work and this is not for the blackmailed Pros my idea is to make this into something that's approachable where you can really learn the basics of scripting and learn how you can use CH GPT and other tools to help you along the way it's actually not that difficult of course you need to have some basic command of the of of an understanding of scripting but it is not that hard so I encourage you to check out the launch session you can find the Link in the

video description and then sign up for the launch next Saturday when you sign up for the laun session you will get a link to download this demo W so you can already play with this downloader process and we can then have a conversation around it and hopefully I'll see you at the launch session and just to recap so what we covered today we started from this basic problem of how can I find relevant information about obsidian EXC colid draw from here we went to a more generic solution about how can I download YouTube videos and

how can I process them into meaningful files that led to the idea that you know what this can be used for any YouTube channel and finally this takes us to to technov visual PKM because obsidian is your ideal PKM automation workbench and if you learn the basics of how to use this workbench then obsidian opens up for you it is so much more than a not taking tool already exol dra transforms obsidian into this beautiful visual tool but then if you have the scripting skills it transforms it into this creative tool that you can use

to automate to use AI to to really do whatever you have in mind in terms of your notes in terms of interrogating data in terms of getting really more out of your PKM and that's all I had in store for you today I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you next week Saturday thank you