What You’ll Learn

Everyone on YouTube is telling you to build a “second brain” — Obsidian, Claude, Karpathy’s LLM wiki. They’re not wrong. But James argues that’s only two of four brains, and the two nobody talks about are the ones that actually matter for your business. In this session he lays out all four and shows you the third brain — the one that turns your knowledge into something you can get paid for.

By the end you’ll understand the difference between a private knowledge base and a public-facing one, how James built his third brain on WordPress and Pinecone, and three concrete ways to monetize it. You’ll also get a preview of the fourth brain — the one that lets a one-person business grow like a much bigger one.

The Setup: The Second Brain Everyone’s Chasing

The idea took off for good reason. Tiago Forte sold 400,000 copies of a book on building a second brain. Then Andrej Karpathy’s April idea — a wiki for a large language model, acting as a second brain — got 17 million views and reignited the whole conversation.

James did it himself: 700 YouTube videos, 700 transcripts, all turned into a personal wiki. It’s for him and for Claude, so he never has to re-explain himself when he works. He’s not knocking it — you should build one.

“You don’t get paid for what you know or what’s in the second brain. You get paid for what you can deliver to the people you’re actually trying to teach.”

The Problem: Your Second Brain Only Helps One Person

Here’s what the second-brain crowd leaves out. Your second brain sits on your local hard drive. It knows everything about you, it’s beautifully organized — and it helps exactly one person: you (plus Claude, when it reads your files).

If you’re in education — a teacher, a coach, a course creator sitting on years of curated material — that content isn’t personal. It’s business content. Its whole purpose is to transform the people paying you. Locked on your hard drive, it can’t do that job. To earn from it, you need to expose it.

The Four Brains, Explained

💡 In Plain English: think of it as four filing cabinets. One’s in your head, one’s in your closet, one’s in your shop window, and one’s a logbook of everything your staff did.

First brain — what you remember, plus Claude’s short-term memory. Most of it leaks away.

Second brain — the offloaded, static knowledge base you and Claude keep adding to and reading. Personal and private. This is the one everyone’s obsessed with.

Third brain — your knowledge turned outward. Not individual files or PDFs, but your context, frameworks, and curated content made available to your clients and to AI agents. This is the one that earns.

Fourth brain — your agents themselves. James runs 160-plus AI employees across four departments under a chief orchestrator, each leaving a trail of what worked, what didn’t, who they worked with, and which skills they used. That record is what lets a business grow geometrically. He’ll cover it in depth next time.

How James Built His Third Brain

His second brain lives in Obsidian — 700 video notes with key ideas, dates, topics, tags, and entities, plus those open-graph relationship maps. Great information, but customers never see it.

The third brain is where he exposes it. He uses WordPress as his content system with a public plugin called AI Engine. Anything he marks public gets pushed into a Pinecone database — a vector database. The difference matters: your wiki is text files that humans and LLMs read whole, but when a language model answers a question it pulls small chunks from a vector store. AI Engine takes everything public — posts, tutorials, community conversations, forum answers — breaks it into chunks, and stores it. The result is an external database of his expertise that agents and customers can reach.

You don’t need WordPress to do this. If your material lives in Notion, Airtable, or a second wiki of your outputs, you can publish that to an external third brain the same way. Pinecone even has a free tier to start. The only question to ask about any piece of content is: would this help someone who wants to learn my area of expertise? If yes, it belongs in the third brain.

Three Ways to Monetize Your Third Brain

1. A public chatbot. Point a chatbot at your context and it answers from your frameworks and ideas. Put it on your own site — and let other people embed it, so their audience gets your expertise too.

2. Feed the agents. By around 2027, a projected 80% of website visitors will be AI agents (worth verifying the figure yourself, but the direction is clear). Making your third brain available to agents becomes a free, powerful way to distribute your content.

3. License access. Put a gateway or an access key on your Pinecone database and sell access to a grouping of your context — monthly, or per query. In effect, you’re selling your context. James notes Claude can build any of these for you.

The Takeaway

First brain is what you remember. Second brain is your private, offloaded knowledge base. Third brain is that same expertise made public so clients and agents can use it — and pay for it. And the fourth brain, coming next, captures everything your AI employees do so the whole business compounds. If you want all four wired together, James’s campus operating system ships with a chief orchestrator, four departments, and 23 employees to start (up to 160 for a full one-person business) at trainingsites.io.

Teach — and let the agents do the rest.