Good morning everybody. Good morning TikTok. So Notebook LM, what is it? I'll show you what it looks like. If you've never seen it before, you can find it very easily. Just Google Notebook LM, and you'll be able to access it using your Google account. You'll need a Gmail account to log in. It is free.

I think if you have paid access to Gemini, you maybe get some more usage. I've never hit any limits in it with either my personal account or my paid business account, so I think it might just be free. Do not quote me on that. I actually looked to find out if there's a way to pay for it or if there's any limitations and I could not find it.

The Three Panels

This is what it looks like. You're gonna have three basic panels when you create a new notebook. On the left, Sources. In the middle, Chat. And on the right, Studio. Basically think of this as your inputs on the left hand side (the sources), and on the right hand side studio - those are your outputs.

Why NotebookLM is Different

The great thing about Notebook LM, and I think this goes unappreciated, is what it's doing - which is very unlike ChatGPT, very unlike Claude, very unlike Gemini - is Notebook LM is allowing you to bring your own sources and it's going to do all of its work based on those sources.

When you open up a new notebook, the first thing it asks is, okay, add sources. You can add sources from websites. You can give it a list of URLs. You can add sources directly from YouTube, because this is a Google product - you can add a YouTube video and it will pull the transcript and the information from that video. You can also pull in documents from Google Drive.

Or you can drop in your own sources: PDF, text, markdown, audio (it can listen to audio), doc, various image files - even webP which is always causing chaos. So you can pull the sources in and Notebook LM is going to be able to see and hear them, not just read them. It's gonna be able to work multimodal. Very, very cool.

Quality In, Quality Out

If we are studying or we want to teach a subject, it is a very good tool for anything to do with knowledge, acquiring knowledge, or passing knowledge onto other people.

Personally what I recommend doing is going and finding high quality sources yourself. Whatever you want to learn about, go and find the best websites, go and find the best YouTube videos, review them yourself, and then bring them into Notebook LM.

If you just bring in as much information as possible, that is not necessarily gonna be the best way to use Notebook LM. You want to curate, because we can add a huge amount of stuff - we can add 50 sources per notebook, and I think we can add 25 million words per notebook as well. That is a lot.

However, if we do that, it's really not that much different from just using ChatGPT or from using Claude or from using Gemini. The really excellent part about Notebook LM is if we feed in high quality sources, it's gonna provide all of its answers, all of its chat, all of its studio outputs based on that high quality input that we've given it.

Garbage in, garbage out is extremely relevant with Notebook LM.

Studio Outputs

What is much more exciting than this chat mode is Studio. We can create the presentation. We can generate an audio podcast. We can create a video explainer. We can make mind maps, we can make various types of reports - briefing docs, study guides, blog posts. Or you can put in your own requirements: strategic memos, implementation concept, explainer, feature breakdown. We can create flashcards, we can create quizzes, we can create an infographic, slide deck, and data tables.

The Audio Podcast Feature

This has created a 17 minute long podcast. There were two voices - a male and a female voice - and they have a dialogue. They will talk about whatever topic you have given them, whatever topic you want to learn about. They will have a two person conversation about that topic.

If you need to listen to be able to learn, then this is a fantastic way for you to learn. You can also download it and then take it on the go with you to allow you to continue to learn.

They've done something else which is really interesting - they have an interactive mode with their audio, so you can jump in as the guest on their podcast.

Active Learning

If you are learning a subject, it's not generally enough for you to just read and consume the information - you need to actively test yourself. So we can do that. We have flashcards so we can use this. We have a quiz. So again, a way to cement and solidify our learning.

All of this and its utility depends on how you learn. We all learn differently. I learn primarily through visuals. Others need to listen to things. Others need to be more kinetic and kind of try things. And then all of us can be supported by things like flashcards and quizzes, because that's forcing us to not just have the knowledge passively, but to actively apply it.

The Feynman Technique

I want to talk a little bit about Feynman. Richard Feynman was a physicist, but also talked a lot about education. You can use Notebook to study for yourself, absolutely. But what I would recommend is going on to the next step - when you have learned a topic, go ahead and teach it to others.

You can do that very easily using Notebook LM because you can now put together slide decks like this and then do exactly what I am doing, which is hop onto camera and record yourself going through a slide deck.

I think this is a really good way for you to cement your own learning and create content that is gonna help other people. You can post it up onto YouTube, you can post it up onto social media and start to build up a following around what you do.

You are basically learning and mastering the topic yourself, but also forcing yourself up to that high level by teaching it to other people. That is the Feynman technique. And at the same time, you can build an audience around what it is you are learning, because other people are going to want to learn with you.

Notebook LM just makes it so easy to do and very few people are using it in that way. I sat down this morning and I was like, "Oh, what am I gonna do my live on? There's not much AI news right now. Oh, I know - I'll just throw together a quick presentation about Notebook LM and show people what it can do and why they should be checking it out."

That would not have been possible a couple of months ago because I wouldn't have been able to create beautiful slides like this. So it's a huge opportunity if you want to create content, if you want to educate people, and if you want to do that whilst you are learning a new topic as well. Very, very cool.