It’s an incredible time to be alive, especially getting to watch the advances of AI in various fields. While I realize that there’s probably a sizeable percentage of this audience that thinks AI is the opposite of progress, I want to introduce you to a tool that you might find useful. It’s called NotebookLM by Google, and it’s free for you to start using today. You can create notebooks and fill them with source material of all kinds: links, videos, PDFs, pasted text, and other docs. The AI will then digest all the material and you’ll be able to interact with it in a chat, ask questions about it, ask it to summarize things, etc. But the most magical and impressive thing about it is that you can ask it to generate an audio conversation, podcast-style, about the material. A man and a woman will have a down to earth, natural sounding discussion about the content, and you can listen to it and learn some of the main points of what you didn’t have time to read. Perhaps there’s a 100-page thesis you don’t have time to read. Drop it into NotebookLM, and then listen to a 15 minute conversation about it while you wash the dishes or go for a run. If you haven’t heard a demo of this, prepare yourself for a level of realism that you’ve never encountered before. While it’s not perfect, and many of you may never use it and think it’s gimmicky, for a nascent technology, it’s an incredible demonstration of what possibilities the future might hold. Keep in mind that this is the worst this tech will ever get. What you’re about to hear is a series of conversations I generated based on source material from my research on the Reina Valera Spanish Bible translation. This was a fun experiment for me during my paternity leave after the birth of our new baby boy.