A YouTube Hack

TL;DR: It’s an extension called Glasp

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I love YouTube. Who doesn’t?

I use it to research and learn about many topics I care about: Health, Work, Money, Love/Relationships, Hobbies and Spirituality.

And yes, for the occasional entertainment too 🙂

Here’s the challenge: I open YouTube to research a topic. I find and watch a video on the topic. And then watch another one. And another. Very soon, my “research” has consumed more than an hour. But I haven’t moved the needle on the actual task I need to finish.

The YouTube algorithm is optimized for increasing our screen time. And it’s very good at it.

What to do?

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2 options:

1. Go cold turkey. No more YouTube. Period. But, this is not practical. YouTube is a goldmine. Would be foolish not to use it as a tool for getting better.
2. Start a timer for getting out of it after X minutes. Or use a blocker app (like RescueTime or Freedom) that will lock you out of YouTube. I’ve tried this and it’s useful. But it doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes, I want to override the tool.

What I need is to be able to use YouTube with flexibility, but not get sucked into it.

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The solution? I’ve been using Glasp for a while now and I love it. It’s a Chrome/Safari extension (should work on Edge as well).

It’s a simple extension: It pulls the transcript of the video and asks ChatGPT to summarize the video. ChatGPT is fast and does a great job.

This is useful in multiple ways:

• There’s much less temptation to watch more videos because it opens up a new tab for ChatGPT.
• Once I’m done reading the summary, I can decide whether I need to watch the video to learn more or not. In many cases, I don’t need to, because I can just keep chatting and asking more questions, about whatever I’m curious about, and GPT gives me amazing answers every single time – directly from the YouTube transcript.
• It’s also *much* faster. I find myself getting whatever I need from a 20min video in less than 5 minutes.

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AI is the most transformative tech that we’ve ever seen. And it’s just beginning. Faster your seatbelts. It’s gonna be a helluva ride :).

Bonus: There’s a bunch of other YouTube extensions as well, that you can find here (search for “YouTube”)