AW + AI: #001

A new mini-series of Anthony’s learnings and work in progress with AI

Welcome to the first edition of a new series about my experiences in AI.

Before you get all, “not another newsletter on AI,” this is more of a public lab notebook.

I want to look back on my progress; a blog is a great way to do that. I practiced this many years ago, but haven’t done it lately.

Full disclosure: I jumped into AI back in January. So, I’m not starting from zero.

An added benefit of sharing is to help people with similar intersections as me: non-coder, former corporate ladder climber, entrepreneur, 45+ year old, curious human. While being a student, I can be a teacher.

AI isn’t going anywhere. I might as well experiment and share what I learn.

First up on the list, I want to share a not-so-new tool that I’ve been using recently: NotebookLM by Google.

My Experiments

Note: Gemini, LLM by Google, supports the backend of this tool.

Experiment #1: Test drive with my LinkedIn Profile

I intentionally chose public links and documents for my current experiments. I still need to dive into how they use the data and settings I can control.

Here’s the audio summary it generated. Some people are call it a podcast, but I’ll let other people worry about its name. For now, at least with my LinkedIn profile, it’s like a cool hype track. Or, I could share it with someone to learn more about me.

The breakdown of the standard capabilities is:

• Summary
• “Chat” with the platform to explore the source documents
• FAQ
• Study Guide
• Table of Contents
• Briefing Document
• Timeline
• The above mentioned audio summary

NotebookLM uses the source documents and links you upload to generate the above outputs.

Experiment #2: Research for Mental Health & Climate Change

I’m a mental wealth strategist. On the business side, I help entrepreneurs and career professionals align their work with their lives to overcome burnout, imposter syndrome, and other mental health challenges, and create lives with meaning and successful work. To do that, I need to stay on top of trends that impact mental health.

I wanted to learn about the connections between mental health and climate change for this next experiment. This time, the source documents I used included 3 PDFs (350+ pages) and 8 links from the World Health Organization and the United Nations.

This amount of data would have taken me 8+ hours to read and synthesize. With NotebookLM, it took less than 30 minutes, including searching for the documents and links.

From the initial run, I could get the key points and summary. A few things I liked most about this platform were the study guide to test my knowledge and all the responses cited back to the sources I uploaded. The latter will be helpful as I dive deeper into the material to add a layer of synthesizing based on my lived experiences and intuition.

Here’s the audio summary it generated, customized for the target audience of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

Here’s a short screen recording to give you an overview including a chat that cites the sources and saves the chat response as a note.

Interesting notes:

• I dig the audio summary, aka “podcast”, because it taps into another way I learn.
• As always, be mindful about how the platforms use your data and address privacy.
• Google is launching NotebookLM Business, which will have more enhanced features.
• Perplexity recently launched Spaces, which is similar to the capabilities of NotebookLM, but I think it will be more beneficial for me, especially as I work on future research projects.
• None of the systems are perfect, but it’s better to learn what they do now than have a steep learning curve in the future.

Let’s Connect

• Share this newsletter with a friend.
• ​Book a 1:1 Session to integrate AI into your personal or work life
• Connect with me on LinkedIn, where I share my insights and reflections on business, culture, and mental wealth.
• Book me for your speaking at events, workshops, or 1-on-1 sessions.

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