How to Use AI to Get Instant Takeaways from a Podcast or Video

Plus 3 steps to systematically streamline any time-consuming task with AI

Dear subscribers,

We’ve all been there. You come across a great podcast or video packed with valuable insights. You save it to watch it later, only to never find the time.

So today, I want to share how you can use AI to get instant takeaways and quotes from long podcasts and videos in seconds instead of hours.

This workflow saves me 5+ hours a week and is also a great example of how I use AI to streamline any time-consuming task. Let’s walk through these 3 steps:

1. Recognize the problem

2. Do lazy AI prompting

3. Craft a proper prompt

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Recognize the problem

Long podcasts and videos are one of the best ways to:

1. Learn from experts (e.g., Andrej Karpathy on how LLMs work)

2. Research a company before a job interview (e.g., Roblox’s RDC 2024 keynote)

3. Understand someone’s POV before you talk to them (e.g., for my podcast prep)

But I simply don’t have time to consume more than 1-2 episodes a week.

Whenever I find myself thinking "I wish I had more time for this" — that's my cue to explore an AI solution.

I start by doing lazy prompting.

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Do lazy AI prompting

YouTube is the #1 platform for both videos and podcasts. Luckily, YouTube makes it easy for you to copy the full transcript by simply tapping the transcript button in the video’s description and copying the text:

I then paste the transcript into Claude with this prompt:

<transcript>
Paste transcript here
</transcript>

Please list the insights from this video in 20+ nested bullets organized with clear section headers. Include actual quotes where relevant that are 2-3 sentences each.

Here’s what AI’s output looks like for Andrej Karpathy’s LLM video:

As much as I love this hack, Andrej’s video is worth watching in full

So instead of watching an hour-long video, I can now get the insights in 30 seconds.

From here, I can dive deeper by:

1. Asking follow-up questions about specific topics

2. Pasting in another transcript to find common themes

This is how I consume 90% of long-form YouTube content these days.

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Craft a proper prompt

Of course, the prompt that I shared above breaks all of my prompt writing rules such as including examples, using chain of thought, and more.

If I find myself using the same lazy AI prompts often, that’s my cue to write a proper one.

But there’s a lazy way to write a proper prompt too. 🙂 Here’s how I do it in 3 steps: