Give Me 13 Minutes. I'll Teach You 80% of NotebookLM

If you've been meaning to try out Google's Notebook LM, but haven't yet, here are three reasons to consider it over other tools. Number one, you want to process and make sense of all the information that's out there, whether

that's research papers, meeting notes, or hours of video content. Number two,

you want to create a focused environment that only uses your sources. Number

three, you want to investigate existing sources and get answers with fewer hallucinations. If that sounds like you,

hallucinations. If that sounds like you, Notebook LM could be a great tool. And

in this video, I'll help you get caught up and teach you everything about it that you need to know. I'm Nick Milo, and I help you create a digital home for your best thinking, a personal idea verse of your notes and insights, no

matter the app or ecosystem. So, let's

open Notebook LM. If you don't have a notebook yet, you can create one here.

If you do, you can simply select the notebook you'd like, up to 100 notebooks, which are basically your subjects or research areas. So, once

you're in a notebook, you'll see three panels here. On the left, you build your

panels here. On the left, you build your knowledge base with sources. In the

middle, you chat with those sources. And

then on the right, in the studio, you create outputs from those sources. This

matches the arc loop. Add, relate,

communicate. So, let's go through each area. Starting with adding sources. You

area. Starting with adding sources. You

can add almost anything as a source. You

can upload items, PDFs, documents, YouTube video URLs, websites, and even audio files, and notebook will add them in. Or you can get anything from your

in. Or you can get anything from your existing Google Drive account, Google Docs, Slides, Google Sheets. Whatever

you add in here is the only content that Notebook LM will reference. Those

sources and nothing else. As of today, you can add 50 sources with up to 25 million words combined. That's a huge amount of words and content that you can

add. But what about privacy? Notebook LM

add. But what about privacy? Notebook LM

is something that's been created by a team at Google and it has promised that anything that you add in here or anything in the chat conversation window that goes back and forth, all of that is

not used for training. So your data is safe. Well, as far as any tool that is,

safe. Well, as far as any tool that is, it's as safe as let's say a Google Docs or Gmail. So, if we put Notebook LM on a

or Gmail. So, if we put Notebook LM on a slider from zero data security to 100% private, I'd put it around here, which is for me in the acceptable range. So,

now you can start adding documents to your notebook, the videos, whatever is going to be helpful for your research.

And you don't even necessarily need to preassemble all of your sources because there's a deep research feature here that goes out and finds the articles and sources based on what you've defined.

Definitely do a quick check on those before you add them in, but it can be very helpful as you round out your perspective. And the chat window matches

perspective. And the chat window matches the relate phase of the arc loop. It's

the messy middle. This is where most of the action is going to happen. This is

just like any other chat model. But

here's the big difference. If we ask it something, the answers that notebook gives are based only on the documents that you've provided. So you can ask it anything and it'll use the Google AI

Gemini model and it'll answer and give you justifications based on what you've inputed. And what you'll notice is every

inputed. And what you'll notice is every single answer includes these little numbers, these citations that link back to the exact spot in your source documents that the answer is drawing

from. And this alone makes Notebook LM

from. And this alone makes Notebook LM quite special because if you've ever done any work with AI trying to research something, you're looking through responses that sound super confident, but then you don't have an easy way to

cross reference where that confidence is coming from. And sometimes it's totally

coming from. And sometimes it's totally off base. Sometimes it's just

off base. Sometimes it's just hallucinating up things that don't even exist.

That's not the case in Notebook LM. You

can click on a citation and see exactly where it came from. You can read the context and make sure that AI didn't misinterpret or generalize incorrectly as you dig deeper into the source

material itself. Okay, before we go any

material itself. Okay, before we go any deeper, there are a few crucial tips that will save you massive headaches down the road. So, when you get a response that you want to keep, you can actually click save to note. That way

you can refind or review the best ideas that you want to explore. And this is kind of cool. Sometimes you will even want to take that source and add it to

your library of sources. So just click convert to source over here and it will add it to the sources that you're referencing. Tip number two, turn

referencing. Tip number two, turn sources on or off. In your list of sources on the left, you can use these check boxes to control which sources the AI draws from when you're asking

questions. This lets you get more

questions. This lets you get more targeted answers and this is especially useful if you have a large notebook with tons of information. That way both the AI can work more effectively and then you know too that you're getting more

relevant answers. Tip number three, add

relevant answers. Tip number three, add a source text directly. Now if

something's blocking a source from being added, you can always work around that by just copying and pasting the sources text and then directly put that into Notebook LM. No, it's not as convenient,

Notebook LM. No, it's not as convenient, but not everything gets uploaded perfectly. Most things will, but you

perfectly. Most things will, but you just want to be ready if that happens.

Tip number four, rename your sources. A

lot of time, the default name is not that clear, or you just want to change the source once you review it by saying why it's important to you or what it contains. This will keep things cleaned

contains. This will keep things cleaned up and everything focused, especially so you can go back to the earlier tip and remember when you want to toggle something on or off. Tip number five, combine your sources when needed. If

you're researching something really complex and you have a tremendous amount of sources, you might quickly hit the 50 source limit. So, what you want to do is

source limit. So, what you want to do is review a few of those existing sources, summarize what you learn, and then go over here and save to note, then do a

convert to source, and remove the originals. Now, you've got more space

originals. Now, you've got more space for new documents, and you've removed the ones that you've investigated already. Tip number six, customize the

already. Tip number six, customize the personality. go over up to the right and

personality. go over up to the right and click on the icon configure notebook.

You can configure your AI personality to change the chat style. So if you want to define a custom role for it, like hey be a friendly onboarding specialist or hey be a marketing expert, you totally can

tailor its responses to fit for what you're looking for in that moment. Tip

number seven, the mobile app. There's an

app that you can use to check out your notebooks on the go. And the main benefit of this is that you can use it as a way to quickly add new sources to your notebook that you find whenever you're online on your phone, you're

scrolling on Twitter X, you're back on YouTube, or wherever else you find new ideas when you're away from your computer. Tip number eight, share

computer. Tip number eight, share notebooks. So now, if you go to the

notebooks. So now, if you go to the upper right, the share button, your notebook can be shared with other people to get them up to speed on your perspective or research. In fact, if you'd like to access one of these shared

notebooks to start playing around, chatting with Notebook LM right now, or you just want to learn more about what we cover on this channel, we just put together a public notebook which you can check out and dive into. Pulls in

multiple sources, multiple hours of my most popular YouTube recordings mixed in with thirdparty online reviews and commentary, all into a free chat interface around the linking your

thinking methodology. You can get access

thinking methodology. You can get access here or by clicking in the link in the description below. Before we move on to

description below. Before we move on to the third section of the notebook LM interface, I want to share a couple quick gotchas and mistakes that can trip people up. The first mistake is

people up. The first mistake is uploading too many unrelated files into a single notebook. When you combine too many sources, especially if you leave them all checked on at once, it creates

confusion and it will weaken the AI's response. Instead, figure out the big

response. Instead, figure out the big picture topic that you're trying to investigate. then be ready to break that

investigate. then be ready to break that down into individual notebooks. There's

no harm in creating more than one and oftentimes there's actually a lot of help in having multiple distinct notebooks. But the second mistake is

notebooks. But the second mistake is even bigger and that's thinking of notebook LM as your creative partner.

It's not. Remember that notebook LM's main personality is to be a hyperliteral diligent researcher. And that's great

diligent researcher. And that's great because it's less likely to make things up and it's more willing to say I don't know. But the trade-off is that it's not

know. But the trade-off is that it's not going to be very creative or do a lot of brainstorming by design. Notebook LM

helps with what comes before the creative leap, which happens a lot better in other tools. In just a little bit, I'll talk more about how to transition from Notebook LM to those other tools later in this video. But in

the meantime, let's look at the next section, the studio. Now, this matches the communicate phase of the arc loop where the messier parts of the sensemaking process finally get

converted into tangible artifacts that can be referenced or shared. Things like

AI overviews where you can generate an AI podcast where two hosts have a conversation about your sources. This is

pretty cool. Now, kind of gimmicky, but definitely very cool and it's nice to use once or twice. Next, you'll have video overviews. It takes a minute, but

video overviews. It takes a minute, but it creates a full narrated explainer video with custom visuals and narration.

Basically, this is a presentation for you to get up to speed fast on a topic or to share with someone else. I mean,

look at this. You can create infographics, slide decks, mind maps, which I personally find quite fun because you can click on any node in the mind map that you find interesting and then just start a new chat about that

specific subtopic. And finally, you have

specific subtopic. And finally, you have reports, flashcards, quizzes, which are obviously going to be very helpful if you're a student or if you're doing any kind of studying for an exam or

credential or maybe just to get reaclimated to your own research if you leave it for a while, which always happens and now you have to come back to it months later. All right, now these are all interesting and fun, but here's

the reality. Notebook LM is best as a

the reality. Notebook LM is best as a rapid research space for ideas. It's a

great complement to our synthesizer archetype. This is us trying to make

archetype. This is us trying to make connections and get up to speed across a bunch of different topics, especially if there's a massive body of work that we need to get caught up on. But for me, and I would recommend for many of us,

it's less about having it create outputs, which it's cool, but it's of limited value because that's not how we convert any of the knowledge into our own wisdom. It's more about discovering

own wisdom. It's more about discovering the sources and questions that are most interesting and then using that as a bunch of jumping off points that will then catalyze our own work usually in

different tools. And I'd like to cover

different tools. And I'd like to cover that next. Okay. As you know, I'm a big

that next. Okay. As you know, I'm a big fan of Obsidian. So, you might be wondering where or how does Notebook LM actually fit into my main thinking

system, my primary idea versus Obsidian where all my thinking lives. So the way I do this is I think of notebook LM as an optimal research and distillation layer that sometimes sits in front of my

idea verse. So if I'm investigating a

idea verse. So if I'm investigating a new area of thinking, I can create a new notebook, I'll throw in a few YouTube videos, some articles, and I'll let notebook LM get oriented. Then once it's ready, I'll ask questions like, okay,

what what's the main idea here? What

about this concept? When did the sources disagree? What should I be aware of?

disagree? What should I be aware of?

It's like going to the library, if you can remember those, and pulling 10 huge books and then just have someone speedread it for you in a minute. And

now you can ask that person what they remember. And you can ask them about

remember. And you can ask them about specific concepts or ideas and it will give you summaries and will give you what they think are distillations of concepts. It's not perfect, but it's

concepts. It's not perfect, but it's great because they're going to reference their sources. Then you can click on

their sources. Then you can click on those sources and then you can dive deeper into the material yourself. So

it's an amazing way to get a shape of a topic. It's a depth map and immediately

topic. It's a depth map and immediately you can kind of get the contours of the terrain all in this way. And then that can help guide and shape what paths you start to walk down. And that's kind of

exciting. But here's the thing. After

exciting. But here's the thing. After

I've played around a little bit and I've gotten the shape of the topic, I'll basically always retire the notebook and I'll manually transfer whatever I want, my best insights into obsidian into my

ace system. In the atlas, I put

ace system. In the atlas, I put knowledgebased details, the stuff that I want to keep long-term. It's like

evergreen insights and knowledge. In

efforts, that's where I'll put stuff that's related to an active project or a really big effort. Then in the middle in calendar, I'll log what I researched, what I took away, and I'll have a living

timebased artifact that I can always return to and remember, hey, when did I go over all that material? This is

crucial because this way I'm never just generating a bunch of AI content that just gets dumped into Obsidian automatically. This process of rewriting

automatically. This process of rewriting and connecting it in my existing notes, it forces me to do the work and the play of connecting new ideas into my bigger

picture and understanding of the topic.

What this means for me in my workflow is more time in the sources and chat area of Notebook LM and far less time in the studio. Because for me, Notebook LM is

studio. Because for me, Notebook LM is pure synthesizer mode, rapid orientation, rapid learning, rapid factchecking. And for me, having that

factchecking. And for me, having that separation and distinction between Notebook LM and then the main place, my idea versus Obsidian, that really makes all the difference. So, if you want to

jump into one now and ask it questions right now and get a sense of what this is all about, you can scan here or check the link below and dig into the public notebook that we've set up for you to

experiment with. And if you want to

experiment with. And if you want to learn how and why Obsidian has become the world's best companion for combining AI, if you so choose, with your own knowledge, then check out this video next.