How I Analyzed 500 Hours of Podcasts in Just 2 Minutes (And Saved Months of Listening)
The Problem: Too Much Content, Not Enough Time
There’s so much great content out there—especially podcasts with successful entrepreneurs, athletes, scientists, and leaders. But let’s be real: who has the time to listen to it all?
500 hours of podcasts would take nearly a year to finish if you listen for just 1–2 hours a day. That’s a lot of time, and not every episode is packed with value.
I wanted a faster way to decide which podcasts were worth my time and which I could skip. So, I used two tools—Hexofy and Hexomatic—to analyze all 500 hours, pull out the key lessons, books, and takeaways, and prioritize what to listen to. The setup took just 2 minutes, and Hexomatic did the hard work in about 4 hours.
The Solution: Using Hexofy and Hexomatic
To process 500 hours of content efficiently, I turned to two powerful tools: Hexofy and Hexomatic. Here’s how I did it:
Step 1: Extracting Podcast URLs with Hexofy
The first step was to gather the URLs for the podcast episodes I wanted to analyze. This was made super simple with Hexofy:
I opened the youtube videos list of my favorite podcast (you will probably guess when reading the summary).
I scrolled down to ensure all episodes were loaded on the page.
I clicked the Hexofy browser extension and extracted all the video URLs into a Google Sheet.
This process took seconds and gave me a complete, organized list of the podcast episodes to analyze.
Step 2: Scraping Transcripts and Analyzing with Hexomatic
With the list of URLs ready, I moved on to Hexomatic for the heavy lifting. Here’s what I did:
I created a workflow in Hexomatic and uploaded my list of URLs.
I added the YouTube Transcript Scraper to extract the transcripts for all episodes.
I added ChatGPT automation with a custom prompt to analyze and summarize the transcripts of each video and then added again ChatGPT automation to analyze and summarize the results into one.
I clicked "Run," and that was it!
Setting this up took just 2 minutes, and Hexomatic processed everything in about 4 hours while I went about my day.
Second ChatGPT Prompt to create the final summary:
“Using the following summaries of multiple podcasts, create a single, consolidated summary. Focus on: Recurring Themes: Identify common topics or lessons that appear across multiple podcasts (e.g., discipline, resilience, innovation). Key Insights: Highlight the most impactful pieces of advice, strategies, or ideas shared by the speakers. Unique Takeaways: Include any standout or one-of-a-kind insights that are not repeated elsewhere. Actionable Recommendations: Summarize practical steps or advice that listeners can apply in their personal or professional lives. Top Resources or Books: Combine all recommended resources (e.g., books, tools, frameworks) into a unified list, removing duplicates. Structure the global summary clearly, starting with an overview of the most frequent themes, followed by insights, unique takeaways, actionable recommendations, and the combined resource list.”
The problem with Hexofy is that it doesn't handle pagination and most podcast lists are paginated. And the Hexofy team doesn't want to update it to manage pagination. The tool is barely unusable to me due to this limitation.