Over the last few decades, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on personal and professional development programs (e.g., Tony Robbins, Flow Research Collective, Learning Strategies, Jay Abraham). Some arrived as CD box sets. Some were hosted on third-party websites that are difficult to access (or no longer exist).
And that’s what sucks.
These programs were packed with knowledge I paid hard-earned money for, but it’s difficult or impossible to access the information on demand. At least once a month (and sometimes weekly), I refer people to these resources, but it’s hard to quickly pull up the exact CD, track, and minute/second where the quote is from.
Want to recall Jim Loehr’s 15-second recovery ritual from a Memory Optimizer disc? Your options: re-listen to 7 hours of CDs, or trust a 15-year-old memory.
There’s no search. No way to cite a passage. No way to hand a chapter to an AI assistant and ask, “What was that quote from Caroline Myss about a nation’s collective self-esteem?”
A $2,000 course I own outright is LESS useful to me than a random blog post that shows up in a 5-second Google search.
Again, that sucks.
Finally, I want to go further than search. I want this knowledge to be pluggable in my AI tools. I want it all in markdown files where it can be linked, searched, quoted, and pulled into context when I’m working on something related. Everything stuck in audio just… sits there.
Again, that sucks.
So I fixed this. I used AI to run the following pipeline for courses I bought as CDs or through online portals.
Transcribe (verbatim with timestamps)
Distill (down to an executive summary per file)
Vault (in my Obsidian for easy search/read)
Connect (into all my AI tools as needed)
This all happens with a local speech-to-text (free, private, runs on my Mac) and AI agents doing the distillation; the first program took an afternoon, including building the pipeline. Every program after that took one command. 9 programs and 55 hours of audio later, my “dead” course library is roughly 430 searchable notes.
It’s magic. I have another 200-300 hours worth of material to go through, but I can already yank a quote out of thin air in seconds, something that would have taken me 15-30 minutes of digging before.
And if you want a skill file to get started, here’s a generic one to adapt with your AI Agent of choice.