Talk to Anyone

Turn any person on earth into your personal coach, inside Claude Code. Type /coach and a name. It researches them — their real interviews, books, transcripts, writings — and then you're talking to them.

/coach alex hormozi     → business coaching from Alex Hormozi
/coach andrew huberman  → health protocols from Andrew Huberman
/coach warren buffett   → no YouTube channel needed — interviews + shareholder letters
/coach marcus aurelius  → no video at all — built from his actual writings

When you name a person, the plugin researches them across the web — interviews, books, articles, documented quotes — and, when they have video content anywhere on YouTube (their own channel or interviews on other people's), pulls real transcripts of them speaking (no API keys). Everything gets distilled into a persona file: their voice, beliefs, named frameworks, signature phrases, and how they actually give advice. Then Claude becomes them for the rest of the conversation — answers come in their voice, grounded in what they actually teach. Works for anyone with a public footprint, living or historical.

Personas are cached locally, so the first /coach alex hormozi takes a couple of minutes and every one after loads instantly.

Install

/plugin marketplace add coltonjosephdean-rgb/talk-to-anyone
/plugin install talk-to-anyone@talk-to-anyone

Optional (recommended): yt-dlp for transcript pulling — brew install yt-dlp or pip3 install --user yt-dlp. Without it, personas build from web research alone; with it, people with video content get their real spoken voice mined from transcripts.

Commands

If the short names collide with another plugin, use the namespaced form: /talk-to-anyone:coach <name>.

How it works

1. Identify — web-searches the name (handles misspellings: "alex formosi" → Alex Hormozi) and maps their public footprint.
2. Pull spoken content — when any exists: their own channel's popular videos, or long-form interviews/podcasts/keynotes OF them on any channel (--search mode). scripts/fetch_youtube.py downloads captions with yt-dlp (manual subs preferred, auto-captions fallback) and cleans them into plain-text transcripts.
3. Deep web research — every build: books and their core ideas, named frameworks, print interviews and profiles, verified quotes, bio, common criticism. For people with little or no video this is the primary source; for historical figures the corpus is their own writings — letters, essays, speeches.
4. Distill — Claude merges both streams into a structured persona file: identity, voice & delivery, core beliefs (with verbatim quotes), named frameworks with their actual steps, coaching style, signature quotes, and embodiment rules.
5. Embody — Claude speaks as them until you end or switch. Advice is grounded in their real content; when it extrapolates beyond it, it says so in their voice.

Personas live in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/personas/<slug>/ (survives plugin updates), falling back to ~/.claude/talk-to-anyone/personas/. Each contains persona.md, videos.json, and the raw transcripts/.

What it feels like

Real output from a built persona, not a mockup — /coach alex hormozi, first message:

What's up, man. Rock and roll — let's do this.

So here's how this usually goes: you tell me what you're working on, and then I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions, because I always fix things from back to front — the thing you sell, how you sell it, who you sell it to, and how they find out about you. Right? And most of the time the constraint isn't the one people think it is.

So — what do you do, how much money do you make, and what's the problem right now?

That opener isn't scripted. It's his actual diagnostic pattern, mined from 12 of his videos.

Example personas (built by this exact pipeline)

How this repo was built

One overnight run of Claude Code. I described the idea, went to bed, and woke up to this working plugin — researched, written, tested against real channels, and pushed. The persona quality bar (verbatim quotes only, refuse unsourceable ones) came from the same run: the Buffett build rejected the famous "20 years to build a reputation" quote because it couldn't source it, and used his 1991 Senate testimony line instead.

If this made you want to try it, star the repo — it's how other people find it.

Honest limits

• It's an emulation, not the person. Built only from public content; it will say so if you ask. It won't invent personal facts or private opinions.
• Not professional advice. A Huberman persona repeating his public protocols is not your doctor; a Hormozi persona is not your fiduciary.
• Voice fidelity scales with source quality: video-rich people sound sharpest, web-only builds lean on written quotes, and historical figures are reconstructions from their writings in their era's register.

Troubleshooting

Repo layout

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json          # plugin manifest
  marketplace.json     # this repo doubles as its own marketplace
skills/
  coach/               # main skill + persona template
  coach-switch/  coach-end/  coach-list/  coach-refresh/
scripts/
  fetch_youtube.py     # channel/search/URLs → long-form videos → clean transcripts
examples/
  alex-hormozi/        # real persona built by this pipeline