ZD 25.17: NotebookLM Grows Up
NotebookLM was already great and it got even better.
Factories are hard to bring back; trade war swords have two edges. Speaking with animals; building AI workflows. Decoding dopamine; fickle youth waves. Crunk music and life razors. NotebookLM has become more amazing.
The Distilled Spirit
Manufacturing and Trade
🏭 14 Difficulties Bringing Factories Back (Molson Hart)
Molson Hart leads manufacturing operations. He enumerates fourteen ways it is going to be very hard to bring it back to the US, all tariffs aside. Not that this move will re-shore jobs for manly men.
📈 Fracking Manufacturing ()
Made in America needs a 10x leap to be successful. What if we transformed manufacturing with software, AI and automation?
🐟 Lessons from The Cod Wars ()
The UK engaged Iceland over cod fishing rights on three occasions over the last fifty years. Despite economic and military superiority they came off the worse for wear.
⚔ Double Edged Trade War Swords ()
There is no such thing as escalation dominance in a trade war even though both sides believe they have escalation dominance.
Wide World of AI
🐬 Look Who’s Talking Now ()
Man has long dreamed of talking to animals. AI is starting to make this more of a reality.
🚘 Waymos Crash Less than Humans (ArsTechnica)
Driverless taxis get in measurably less crashes and are cheaper to insure, at least according to Waymo.
👫 AI Friends are OK Sometimes ()
Friendship has been declining in recent years. AI companionship can be a helpful way in counteracting that trend. After all, man has been talking to his pet since man had pets1. How different is talking to a chatbot than talking to your pup?
AI You Can Use
🏫 The Silent Classroom ()
Class Discords are falling silent as students rely upon AI.
🏇 ChatGPT’s Faster Horse Problem ()
Before the car, people wanted a faster horse. Henry Ford thought he knew better. Could AI be on a similar trajectory? And what does that mean for you?
🔨 Building AI Workflows ( )
Seven lessons learned from the front lines of building up AI native workflows. Learning to automate the little things in an automated manner saves a ton of time and effort.
Social Studies
⚗ Dopamine Decoded ()
Dopamine has got a bad rap. Here are seven lessons on understanding it better.
🦍 Why AWS Crashed Crypto ()
The front and back ends of many crypto exchanges run exclusively on AWS, leading to some abject failures in cases where the cloud taketh.
😷 The COVID Divide ()
COVID has scrambled some generational definitions. There are actually two Gen Zs. Voters under 21 skew right.
🧮 The Youth are Fickle ()
The youth have shifted to the right, but maybe not as hard and fast as it might have seemed in November. Current events seem to be pulling them leftwards.
Life and Music
🪒 The Life Razor ()
Your life razor is the answer to the question about what kind of person you want to be. Of how you want to live and be remembered.
💃 When Did People Stop Dancing in the Club (Vox)
People have stopped dancing on the dancefloor. Learn about what some clubs are doing to take the space back from the mobile phones.
🥤 The History of Crunk Music ()
SNOBHOP traces Crunk music from its beginnings through its peak and on to the modern day version. Ready to tear the club up?
NotebookLM Deep Dive
Google’s NotebookLM was a great product when we last explored it. It has improved measurably since, transitioning from lab experiment to full-blown, enterprise-ready project suitable for your knowledge management needs. It does a lot more than just make funny podcasts.
NotebookLM is a Google tool that lets you build interactive notebooks around collections of documents, videos, presentations, or web links. It was designed as a writer’s tool with the help of best-selling author Steven Johnson. Google built a slick interface that uses AI to make this collection of source materials feel like an interactive notebook. You can do things like ask for various summarizations and re-organizations of information within your sources. You can generate a two-person podcast about the source material with the click of a button. It is truly magical for the right jobs.
Major Improvements
Under the hood, Google Gemini has gotten better. It understands some more source types, and the paid versions can work with very large libraries of materials. The user interface has been dramatically overhauled, brought into the Gemini look and feel. Sharing and overall quality of life have improved.
Beyond the skin, there are a lot of new functions. The add note feature lets you create a note you can save, allowing you to add your own thoughts. The output of your chats can also be saved as notes. Being able to just paste text into a note is another convenient feature. And all of these notes can be added back as sources, effectively allowing you to inject content into the long-running context of the notebook.
The flagship audio overview feature has got a lot of investment. Google likes it enough it has ported it to other tools; you can now generate audio overviews in Gemini itself. Inside of NotebookLM, the podcasts have some important new features. First, you can direct the conversation, opening up a world of interesting possibilities such as roasting your own Substack. More fun is the studio feature where you can participate in the production of said podcast, directing the conversation in real time. It still feels a little unnatural but it is pretty uncanny how it can flow when you get it right.
The new Mind Map feature generates a visual layout of information from selected sources. It is pretty limited at this time — the tool will generate somewhat flat map of the information in the selected sources. There is little in the way of configurability. In the current form it is a great source exploration tool. Hopefully the same configurability lands in this as is landing in podcast generation. Editing would be an awesome touch as well.
Last but not least, the Discover Sources functionality was just added — Google makes it easy to search for links and add them to your notebook. It is convenient, but it probably is more fluff than actual utility. You have been able to add your own links for some time, this just adds a layer of convenience.
The Price of Progress
NotebookLM has grown and moved out of the lab; it is now a real Google product. There is good news in many ways. Paid versions, which are known as NotebookLM Plus, include better privacy, making the product more useful in some contexts. The paid versions give you more — many, many more sources and the ability to generate more audio overviews. The limit of 50 chat queries per day is fairly low as well. It is a bit of a hamstrung product, if you are using it seriously you will likely need to pay directly for it.
The shift from the lab to the real Google product also cost the project some stellar leadership. NotebookLM product manager Raiza Martin left Google at the end of 2024, taking key parts of the team with her to a new venture. Steven Johnson seems to still be involved on some level. While progress has not stopped, we are now beholden to a faceless Google product manager to carry the ball forward.
Which Version to Get? Where Can I Get It?
NotebookLM has two versions — the base version, known as NotebookLM, and the paid version known as NotebookLM Plus. For features, the base plan comes with 100 notebooks, each of them can have 50 sources. For usage, you can have 50 chats a day and generate 3 audio overviews. Plus steps up to 500 notebooks with 300 sources each. You can query chat 500 times per day and perform 20 audio generations.
You can upgrade to Plus in a few ways. On the individual level, it comes with the $20 per month Gemini advanced subscription. If your company is a Google Workspace shop, the $15 per month standard tier gets you into the premium NotebookLM seat. If your workplace is stuck on Outlook fear not, NotebookLM Plus can be had through Google Cloud Platform for $9 per month.
Use NotebookLM like a Pro
Ok, I still can’t wrap my head around it. Where can I just get a good video explanation of the product?
Jeff Su is a Google product expert. His video tutorial is a great place to get started, the NotebookLM basics and the step-by-step workflow sections are the place to start. For more depth, look at second brain enthusiast Tiago Forte’s guide to NotebookLM 2.0.
How can I use it for work or school?
NotebookLM is an amazing thing for many kinds of work. Because it sticks to its sources and does not hallucinate like other AI tools it can be used in places where you need a bit more precision.
One interesting use is to use it to explore and repurpose your own content. Using the mindmap to do this is an interesting technique. For this publication, I keep a notebook that includes every edition and use it for lots of tasks. It is an amazing tool to keep a solo creator honest.
You can keep a Res Gestae notebook compiling your accomplishments. You can use this for writing whatever review documentation you need to generate or for helping to craft things like resumes.
Creating a notebook per client or project and sharing it across your workspace is a great way to give everyone an interactive knowledgebase at their fingertips.
Finally — if you have to do contract review, the audio overview is actually amazing. For instance, you can quickly generate a spoken summary highlighting key clauses, risks, and obligations, helping you understand the general structure and potential pitfalls before engaging in a detailed legal analysis. You can even use the custom instructions to coach it to focus on specific parts if necessary. Great for a first pass to understand the deal before you do a real review with a real lawyer.
Last and certainly not least, NotebookLM is a great tool for learning about a subject.
suggests how to learn complex topics 10x faster using the tool.How can I use it at home?
You can use NotebookLM at home to keep an interactive manual, with sources comprising all the manuals and guides your house comes with. Add some notes about maintenance issues and contact numbers for your vendors, and you have a very useful tool to manage your home. You could imagine doing a similar thing for other things one might need to manage such as a pet or a child.
A more entertaining use of the tool is to manage your vacations. If you add all of the information such as your reservations, your itinerary or other plans. You can add information about different sites and activities to support it. Then you can use it to guide you on your trip and to act as a reference for your plans.
Like many other AI tools, NotebookLM is useful for self-help. AI Maker shows you how to use NotebookLM to unlock patterns in your journal entries.
Do you have any idea what is on the roadmap?
NotebookLM features are coming to other Google products. For example, Gemini now has the ability to do audio overviews of uploaded documents. Their news app has a beta daily podcast feature that needs some love before it is ready for broader distribution.
There has been no news coming from the team, though there are pretty strong rumors a mobile app is in the works.
So no app quite yet. How can I work around that?
You can save NotebookLM as an app on your phone or computer even if google has not yet made an app.
In Chrome there should be a little computer icon in the address bar. Click it to install, and NotebookLM will now appear as a separate app even though it is just Chrome. Alt-tabbing directly to your notebook is game changing.
On your phone, save the page to your home screen for an app-like experience.
Worth the Investment?
NotebookLM is a solid investment for many professionals. It is a powerful platform for learners and creators, and handy for a lot of mundane uses. At the very least, the podcasts can add entertainment value to many situations. It is worth the free price of entry for that function alone. If you need the enhanced resource space and more frequent uses, the plus SKU is worth investing in.
Musical Coda
The Look
Western civilization might be collapsing, but someone on Reddit mapped a timeline of every star wars story in order so at least we have that.
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I never, ever talk to my dog like she is a human. Never.
Thanks for the s/o! And loved this piece. Notebook LM has become a key part of interview+conversation theme tracking for our startup...