How do I turn a YouTube video or podcast into a newsletter with AI?

Give the video link to Gemini with a prompt you only write once, and you have a newsletter in minutes. I built one on my phone in about five minutes, sitting at home, to show a neighbor with a coaching business why he should have a newsletter. He didn't have one. Now he had a draft.

Which AI should I use for a YouTube video?

Start with Gemini. You paste the YouTube link and it reads the video, no transcript needed. My guess is that's because Google owns both Gemini and YouTube, so it can do something the others can't.

My prompt for that first demo was as simple as it gets: turn this YouTube video into a killer newsletter, plus the link. For a tighter version, ask for a short breakdown of the episode with the three highlights and a call to action. It works from the link alone, and it's basically instant.

For podcasts and calls, work from the transcript. I upload transcripts to a custom GPT built for exactly this job.

How do I write a prompt I can reuse every time?

Have the AI write it. I told an AI to create me a killer prompt for writing the newsletter, then went back and forth with it for 20 to 30 minutes. The prompt is crazy long. I never have to write it again.

"The output in 20 minutes of creating the prompt is incredible. And now I can just use it every single time."

The tweaks that made mine better:

• Kill the timestamps. Nobody reading an email needs them.
• Open with an overview. Two to four sentences on what the episode is about.
• Make sections optional. Resources and links only go in if they're valuable. If none came up, it's fine to drop that section.
• Pick a format on purpose. A one-sentence smart brevity brief, three bullet points on the most interesting moments, or a full newsletter with sections. Same video, very different output depending on the prompt.

What does my own podcast newsletter look like?

Mostly recordings. My interviews have no prep. I just chat with people for about an hour. The transcripts go into a custom GPT that returns the top three takeaways and action steps.

Then I share a few interesting articles and put a funny meme at the end. When there's no guest, I talk into my camera for 30 minutes about random ideas and lessons I've learned recently. You don't have to wait on somebody to interview.

The production around it is the annoying part: posting the recording to Spotify and YouTube, writing the description with a custom GPT, finding the guest's photo, making the thumbnail. Every little thing is easy, but it's about 25 steps. That's a VA's job.

Can it run with no human at all?

Technically, yes. The automation I sketched in May 2025: every time a YouTube video gets posted, n8n grabs the link, runs it through a custom GPT on how to write a newsletter, pastes the result into Ghost and sends it from Ghost. Zero human interaction, if that's what you want.

On my demo issue, the only things I did by hand were copy-paste, the logo and the link image. Whether you should skip the human read entirely is a different question. My take is in should you send an AI-written newsletter without reading it.

Who else could use this?

Anyone who already records. Two hours after recording a podcast episode, I caught myself asking why I wasn't sending a newsletter after every episode, with the video link and some content about it below. That's just AI reading the transcript and making it interesting.

Experts are the other big one. Do an hour-long Zoom with an expert every other week, ask about everything interesting they did and learned, and run the transcript through the same kind of custom GPT. That's their newsletter. Plenty of people want to learn from them, and the expert can make real money on the back end from whatever they offer readers who want more. I also see an opening in doing newsletters for YouTubers who don't know any of this is possible.