How To Use YouTube Videos in NotebookLM Better than 99% of People

Lots of people add YouTube videos into Notebook LM every single day. But unless you understand everything that you can do with them inside of your notebooks, you're probably only using a quarter of Notebook LM's potential. So today, I'm going to show you how to get the most out of Notebook LM when it comes to YouTube videos. This all starts with how

you add YouTube videos into your notebooks. I've created a new notebook here called Google AI where I want to explore different Google AI tools like Notebook LM and Gemini. The built-in method of adding a YouTube video is to click here where it says add sources, click on the YouTube logo, and you can paste in different YouTube URLs. So, you can come over to YouTube, copy down any of these links, and then go ahead and paste them in. But obviously, this method isn't optimized. You have to go back and forth between YouTube and Notebook LM, copying links and pasting them over. So, to fix that, I recommend you download this Chrome extension called YouTube to Notebook LM. I don't have any affiliation with them and it is completely free to use. I'll have a link for it in the description down below. And once that's added, anytime you come to a YouTube video like this one right here, underneath it, you'll see this button that says notebook LM. If you click on this, you'll see the option to either add it to a new notebook or an existing notebook. You can choose the notebook you want to add it to. That will then add it. Open up the notebook and you'll see that new source over here on the left. So, let me go through and add a few more videos. I'll go back to here. Let's find this video right here, which is also about Notebook LM. Click on the button again, and I'll select Google AI again. And so now both of those sources have now been added. Once

you have some videos inside your notebook, what most people don't realize is that you can actually click on that video and it'll bring up this side panel right here. At the top will be a summary of the video. Scrolling down further, you can see the actual video itself and watch it directly inside of here. And scrolling down even more, you can see the entire transcript for the video. Coming back up to the summary, let's say there's a topic in here that you want to explore a little bit further. Notebook LM gives you some suggestions on what you can explore by clicking any of these buttons. So, let's say I want to learn more about the cinematic video overviews that are available in Notebook LM. I can click on this. That will then bring it over to the chat and these will find connections between this video and other sources you have in this notebook about the same topic. But let's take things up

a level with your notebooks. I'm going to show you how you can basically clone any YouTuber into Notebook LM. So here I've created a new notebook called Paul Jipsky because I'm going to clone myself. Coming back over here to YouTube. If there's a YouTuber that you like and you want to clone them inside of Notebook LM, just come to one of their videos and underneath it, click on their name. That will then bring you over to their channel. Click on the tab that says videos. And if you have the YouTube to Notebook LM Chrome extension added, then up here on the top right, you'll see a notebook LM button. Go ahead and click on that. Click on choose notebook. I'll select the one for me. Now you see that it is adding the sources. And notice this, it is adding all of them. I'm not 100% sure if it's every single one, but it is quite a lot. And so we're going to give this a few minutes to actually finish up because there are a lot of videos. Next, come to the middle section where the chat is and click on this icon at the top to configure your notebook. This will allow you to define the conversational goal, style, and role of the notebook chat. Click on custom and I suggest you put in a prompt that's similar to this. Analyze the provided transcripts to identify the primary speaker and YouTuber. You are now that person. Adopt their name, persona, and exact signature tone of voice. And then it tells it to basically help you with any questions that it has. I'll have this prompt available for you in the description down below. Then go ahead and click on save. Now this notebook has taken on the role of your favorite YouTuber. So, I can ask it something like, "What AI tools do you recommend for the average person? " And I'll say, "I think this response pretty much nailed it. " The top recommendation is an app called Whisper Flow, which is an AI dictation tool. I made a video about that recently saying that I use it pretty much like over a hundred times a day. Then we have Google Gemini, Perplexity, Notebook LM. All top AI tools that I tell a lot of people are some of the best to use for beginners and for the average person. So, I think this pretty accurately represents what I would actually recommend if someone were to ask me what AI tools I recommend for the average person. Here's another example. Recently, I made this video all about a new notebook LM feature called cinematic videos. Inside that video, I talked about how not everyone's going to have access to it yet. So, coming over to the chat, I asked it, why don't I have access to Notebook LM cinematic videos yet? And here it accurately points out using the transcript for my video that it's only available to people that have a Google AI Ultra account for now. But just like I say in the video, hang tight because this is likely to come out for all users very soon. So I think this is a really great way to pick the brain of your favorite YouTuber and get them to answer questions for you.

What I suggest you do next is if you have a large number of videos inside your notebook like I do, I suggest you create a video directory. Come right into the chat and tell it this. Create a list of all the videos inside this notebook along with a one-s sentence summary of each video. All right, so that did get a little bit stuck probably because I have so many sources. So I reduced the number of sources down and this is what it comes up with. Scroll down to the bottom and click on save to note. And then you'll see that note over here on the right. Clicking on that, you now have a directory of all of the videos that you selected when you actually ran that report. And you can click on any of these. So this video is like 10 ways to build a side hustle. Here is a synopsis of it. And if I actually want to find that video, click right here and it'll open up here on the left. And I'm kind of glad that actually happened because that reminds me of something else that I wanted to bring to your attention about YouTube videos inside of Notebook LM because

don't forget that you don't have to have every single source selected when you are chatting with the notebook. You can just select some of the sources or even just one of the videos and just chat with that single video. Now, without a

doubt, one of the most powerful features of Notebook LM are audio overviews. So, you definitely want to be taking full advantage of them. If you don't know how these work, when you select any of your sources, let's say I just select these three sources, and you can come over to audio overview, and it will basically create a podcast episode for you about the information that was covered in the sources that you have selected. And inside of here, you can define exactly what that podcast will sound like. So, it can be a deep dive, a brief, critique, or a debate. And you can even add in a more detailed prompt in here. And that will then create for you over here on the right the podcast or audio overview as they call it. And this is a really great way to take any video or channel or playlist and to turn it into an audio podcast that you can then listen to on the go. But if you really

want to level up your audio overviews and really your entire Notebook LM experience, I suggest you try out this Chrome extension. It's called Cortex. I'll have a link for it in the description down below. Now, full disclosure, I do not own this Chrome extension. I'm not the developer of it. I am an affiliate for them and I let them use one of my past reviews of Cortex because uh again, I just think it's a great little tool um that I'm happy to support. So, if you want to sign up for it, my affiliate link is down below, but you don't have to use that. Anyway, once you add that Chrome extension, this will change the way that Notebook LM looks. First of all, in the top left, you get all of this search functionality up here. But more importantly for audio overviews, they have this really cool feature. So if you click on the Chrome extension and click on manage notebooks, that will then open up Cortex. And this is kind of an entire dashboard that they've created for you. And over here on the left, you can add a podcast feed. So if you click on plus, I'll call this one Paul's third podcast feed. Click on create. And if I click on that now, so here's my podcast feed. And I can come over to the artifacts tab up here. This will show you all the different artifacts that were created. In other words, anything that was created over here on the right will appear in here. Here we can see one right here, one of my audio overviews. And if I click on this button right here, this will allow me to add this audio overview to my podcast feed. So we see that being added. Then for any of these you can create an RSS feed. So coming into my main one right here, you see RSS. So this is an actual RSS link. I can take that link and put it into Apple podcast. So then anytime I add a podcast to this feed, it's automatically going to be downloaded to Apple Podcast on my phone on my watch so I can listen wherever I go. and notebook LM actually and sorry Cortex just added a new update called automations and using this I can create a automation where anytime an audio overview is generated then it will automatically be added to your podcast feed of choice. So I think you begin to see the workflow here. You add videos into Notebook LM. You generate an audio overview. Then automatically that is going to be added to your podcast feed which then syncs up with a podcast app on your phone. So anything you generate inside of Notebook LM will basically automatically be generated to your phone for you. Pretty cool. And finally, make

sure of course that you are taking advantage of everything that Studio offers. You could turn any of your imported videos into infographics or slide decks. But another really powerful and overlooked one are mind maps because those will show you the connections between all of your different videos. So

now you know how to actually get the most out of YouTube videos inside of Notebook LM. Whether you're pulling insights from a single video or studying an entire channel, there's a lot more to this than most people realize. If you want to see even more ways to level up your Notebook LM game, make sure to check out this video right here. That's my complete course that covers everything that you can do inside of Notebook LM. So, if you want to master it, this is the video to watch. Click there and I'll see you over there in just one second.