If you haven’t heard it, you’re going to be amazed. If you have heard it, you’re going to get frustrated by the repetition and odd sounds as the voices are switched back and forth in a pretty good facsimile of a podcast. But let’s look at some numbers.

My NotebookLM Deep Dive Numbers

First up is the audiobook podcast of my novel The One and the Zero. These numbers include some non-NotebookLM posts, and an audience has already been established for this content. The NotebookLM Deep Dives offer a new perspective. And new traffic.

Next we have Cloud Pilots, my podcast on everything cloud and ai related. This channel also has a historical audience, starting with my own exploration and definition of AI Hallucination in the summer of 2023. Again, the NotebookLM content adds a ton more content into my channel. AND, the meta idea of AI’s commenting on a book about AI is a bit absurd. But that’s where we are.

Here’s a brand new podcast (hyper-soul) exploring a science fiction novel and world-building project I’ve been working on for several years. This is a brand new podcast. The first six episodes took me about an hour to produce. As the chapters go along, notice how the AIs begin referring to other chapters and guessing at where the story is going.

Another pure NotebookLM channel. This one a tangent from my single dad blog The Whole Parent and a little fantasy I went on called the Deep Space Divorce Saga. Net-new content from articles on relationships, dating, and divorce. The audience on the website is providing some lift as well. And the blog has a traditional podcast hosted on Podbean. (Might be time to move it all to YouTube.)

Finally, here is my main site, the single dad blog The Whole Parent. This is a new podcast channel for “discussions” of the writing on the blog about relationships, dating, and divorce. Note how the hosts discuss their own relationship experiences. WTF?

Let’s do some quick math on these numbers.

Today I’ve added five new podcasts to the Whole Parent Discussions, as this is the blog that can provide some income from time to time.

The Big Takeaway

AI Podcasts have arrived. Humans are going to be hard-pressed by this value proposition. They are good. They are nearly free. And they will get better. How are you harnessing AI in your content creation?

NotebookLM works best with deep and expansive content. If the content is not good the podcast will be short and unsweet.

The hosts appear realistic. They interrupt. They repeat. They lie.

In the relationship-related podcasts,
they begin to talk about their experience.
Their partners. Their love languages.
All 100% synthetic. Not real.

In the AI-related podcast,t I am constantly amazed by how much the AIs add to the conversation using their external resources and “insights.” Do they have insights? A book on AI, critiqued by AI, and sounding the call for more regulation and ethics. Okay.

How To Harness NotebookLM

You can point NotebookLM to anything you can copy and paste, any blog post, any PDF.  And you can experiment with the “settings” before you generate the audio version. I have been able to give them better banter for the intro and outro.

I see these podcasts as weapons against the bad content out there. I’ve been building an overall subscriber following on YouTube and now I see how success in one area and lead to success in different areas. My big podcast can reference and refer people to the AI podcasts.

The AH-HA Moment

It was a podcast I haven’t released that blew my mind. I’ll share the simple version. I wrote something about my rescue cats, new in my life, and equated them to my two kids. Here’s the closing line of the chapter of the book, “fear*god.”

My daughter and I express our happiness and connection with purrs. My son has no purr.

The notebookLM podcast on this chapter starts with a definition of purr that got the hairs perking up on my arm as I listened. By the end I was crying. That’s a bit of a reach for me. AI is not creative, but what is this? How can an AI generate emotional content without understanding human emotions and having none of its own?

Wow.

I’ll check-in with some updates as I have more data on how the long-tail of these ai-generated podcasts do. I’m just now linking them back to the source. At the moment, the YouTube environment is fairly closed. These episodes are not generating traffic back to the original source sites. YET. I’m on it. I’ll let you know what I find.

John McElhenney — LinkedIn