I've launched a podcast! Well, kind of...
I am of a certain age that means I knew life before the interwebs.
Cutting edge technology in my childhood was a wee bell on a 45 record telling me it was time to turn the page of the accompanying book. (The Ugly Duckling, The Legend of Finn McCool!)
But over the years I have been, not an early adopter, but certainly an early majority adopter of new innovations, followed by an evangelism on their behalf.
The number of people I have shared my story with about buying my first ever US stock market share, on my phone, on the backseat of the bus, on the way to work, because Nat Fergusson had finally convinced me it was dead easy. And she was right!
That first stock was Tesla and the bus was the #14.
Whilst Tesla hasn't been an easy hold for many reasons, one beginning with E being the main culprit, nevertheless it started a love affair with DIY portfolio management, one that still excites me as recently as 3am Saturday morning. (buying the inevitable Tesla dip, post a Tesla product event..not financial advice!)
One of my Abletech colleagues is founder and director Nigel.
Nigel is an early adopter and the world so needs people like Nigel.
As he was leaving one night, we did our usual "solve the problems of the world in 5 mins" chat, within which he mentioned Google's NotebookLM.
Nigel's 3 word description of NotebookLM "it's just amazing". This was enough to pique some interest.
We had just had a heavy run of RFPs where each was different enough to require different write ups for the company profile and approach. As painful as it often is, with each new RFP we do end up with new assets. The challenge of course is how to catalogue, tag and summarise them to ensure we don't lose them and can re-use it all.
Faced with the labourious task of having to make sense of and catalog our genius, the delivery team decided to have a wee crack using NotebookLM.
So we loaded in 3 RFPs, asked some questions and boom, within seconds, out came some beautifully summarised notebooks, each with citations back to the source documents.
Buoyed with excitement, we loaded a few more in to answer a few more questions about ourselves and more nuggets of gold came to the surface. All our own words, but beautifully summarised, cataloged and all with citations.
I cannot begin to explain the time this has saved and how friggin beautifully organised it all is.
Fast forward to Saturday arvo. I was in the sun room at home supping on a beer of danger. I happened across an article by Mike "MOD" O'Donnell about the huge popularity of NotebookLM, especially the podcast feature. Its actual title is "Google kills the podcast industry as the world stampedes to NotebookLM | The Post ".
He was talking about the rapid uptake of NotebookLM, especially with peeps creating podcasts. A simple loading of text based content can result in a Podcast that has two "hosts" talking about the content.
So curious as I loaded my Linkedin post from a few weeks ago in, I waited 5 mins max and boom, a podcast was delivered with my Linkedin post the theme of the conversation.
Knowing it's made up didn't dim the excitement of having my thoughts and theories spoken back to me - it was a weird kind of ego trip to be honest!
But, they got a few things wrong:
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I wasn't young when I became a junior BA - it was my second career
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I didn't go to university - my highest formal educational achievement is the certificate I got at Stratford Primary School for the 50 meters flutterboard
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I had to listen twice to understand they were referring to Te Awanui Reeder
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And don't get me started on the mangling of very basic Te Reo
And it was a wee but cringey as they attempted humour in that very American way.
Whilst I'm sure I can edit the factual errors, if I don't, will these become the interwebs source of truth about me? Do I really want to be represented by two made up people, just because I find myself interesting and funny, will others, why is the word Māorii such a challenge still to such amazing technology.
But still - it was fascinating and the way it was able to create a conversation and interpret my post was, as Nigel said, just amazing.
The speed is just mind boggling.
For all of Elon's very many faults, he is right in that technology should be giving us time back.
But as MOD says in his article, this is another example of a fascinating but slippery slope we are needing to make sense of.
So have a listen if you are so inclined - no pressure!
Me... I'm off to list with Spotify!
