💭 in your head · nothing to type
Take a rough count: how many hours of video are sitting in your "watch later" right now? A playlist of talks, a couple of lectures, something a friend sent with "you have to see this."
Now honestly: how much of it will you actually watch?
Picture a different deal. Same evening, same videos — but instead of a screen you have a digest. The key claims, the places where speakers disagree, and next to every claim a link to the exact spot where it was said. Not a retelling of who-knows-what, but a map with coordinates.
💭 in your head · nothing to type
Notice what changed in that picture. It is not "someone watched it for me" — it is that every claim got an address.
You cannot ask a retelling "where did you get that?" A digest with addresses can take the question: click and check. Take the gap between "I was told" and "here is the spot where it was said". It is the same source-checking habit you met in module 0.
Weigh it up: which of your postponed videos would you check first?
This module runs in reverse order. You get a working notebook within 15 minutes of practice (the unit itself takes about nine minutes to read). Then "how it works" plus "where it lies" come in the next units. That is the honest order: arguing with a tool is worth doing after it is in your hands.
The unit's tool is NotebookLM (notebooklm.google): the free tier is enough, no payment needed. It is not a chat. The notebook answers only from the sources you put into it, and attaches a citation linking into the source for every claim.
No notebook? Not a blocker: the same prompts work in any chat that accepts file attachments. Citations will not be clickable, so you verify by searching the text — slower, but the principle holds.
1. Open the notebook pack — three ready-made packs. Take the first one: "A playlist instead of an evening of watching."
2. Create a notebook and add sources. Three to five videos from your "watch later" — one link each. The notebook reads subtitles, not video: a clip without subtitles stays an empty source (this matters — unit 3 comes back to it).
3. Ask your first question — not "summarize," but the one from the prompt kit: "Where do these videos disagree with each other?" Disagreements beat summaries: a summary averages, a disagreement shows you where to think for yourself.