Mark Wickersham walks through Google's NotebookLM, a free tool that ingests documents, videos, and audio files to help with learning and planning. He shows how he built a notebook for his Value Pricing Academy, uploading up to 50 items to generate strategy ideas and follow-up prompts using the tool's large context window.
One of the strengths of Google and they have their Gemini product, Google's strength is that they have much, much bigger context windows, which means we can feed larger documents, which is great if we've got things like a big business plan. And they brought out a tool back in July of 2023, which until recently almost nobody really heard about. It was in beta, hasn't been talked about a lot until I noticed that social media YouTube exploded in October of 2024 with this particular tool. You may have heard of it, it's called NotebookLM. It's a Google tool, NotebookLM and it's really powerful. It's great for this type of work which we're talking about today. And it's free at the moment. It's become talked about because they introduced some new features in the last few weeks. During the course of October, early November, they built in new features making it really, really powerful. So what is NotebookLM? Well, it's essentially you create notebooks and notebooks. You then feed with context and then you can ask questions. Go and search on Google for NotebookLM and Go and get yourself an account. It's free. I suspect as it's getting more and more popular, Google will charge for it. At some point in time I guess they will probably do the same as ChatGPT. They'll still probably keep a free account, but they may end up having a paid for account for premium features. I don't know, I don't know what Google's strategy is with this but as at today you can get all the features for free, so why wouldn't you? And so if what we can do with it, and there's lots of use cases, it's great for learning. It's great for learning. One of the things that you can do is I was recently learning about behavioral economics and which I'm a big fan of and I was fascinated by the teachings of one of the leading marketers called Rory Sutherland. And Rory Sutherland has on his YouTube channel or on various YouTube channels there are lots of amazing presentations, interviews, podcasts with Roy Sutherland. Very often they're over an hour long. And so if I wanted to research and learn more about his approach to behavioral economics and marketing, I would have to watch hours and hours of YouTube videos. But with Google LM you can just upload the link to them and that then becomes context and then you can ask questions about it. So I grabbed half a dozen great YouTube videos, all about an hour or more long. I put them into a notebook and then I could go and.
Have a conversation, ask questions about the content by viewing the chat, and then I can save those chat messages as little notebooks. So I have a notebook about for example, he talks about Uber and how their marketing is so clever and what we can do to learn from Uber. I have a prompt with five practical ways that accounting firms could use the teachings of Roy Sutherland to help with marketing in their firm. So that's an example of we can use it for learning stuff.
But let's get back into the context of today. It's great for strategic thinking. I have one called the Value Pricing Academy. It's a notebook and it's one that I've been using for my strategic thinking over the last few weeks. And here's some things about NotebookLM. So when you start a brand new notebook, you can think of it as building a custom GPT, but really fast, you just start a brand new notebook and the first thing you do is, is you feed it sources information. And just like ChatGPT, you can drag in documents, you can drag in PDFs, for example text files, markdown audio files like MP3. You can also attach Google documents if you use Google. I don't, I'm an Apple user. But you could, you can also attach links to websites and you can also attach YouTube videos. So there's lots of different types of information that you can give it and you can feed. And here's the interesting two points thinking about the way weaknesses of Chat GPT. You can upload up to 50 pieces of information. So plenty of information. You can upload 50 documents or 50 documents, YouTube videos, websites, whatever. And you also, because of the context window they can be long documents like for example an hour long YouTube video which if you were to get the transcription you would see it's a very long transcription. So what I did for Value Pricing Academy is I uploaded the business plan, the customer Personas, the features and benefits and I also uploaded five of our websites, our website and then pages for the Value Pricing Academy and so on. And then I can go in and I can start a chat and just like ChatGPT, I can ask it a question, any question I like and it will give me the answers based upon the context that I've given it. So if I said, if I said a chat like give me, I don't give me three strategies for growing the business, then I wouldn't need to give it. I can keep the prompts really simple because it's now going to go, it's got all that context, it's got the information about the business and it's going to go and do exactly that. It's going to give me some ideas and it's going to give me. It always gives you the links to where it's got the information from, so citations. You can always. It'll tell you which of the documents, the informations, if it's using source information. And then just like with ChatGPT, we can then.
Add further prompts. We could take idea number one and we could say, tell me more about idea number one. Let me know how I could use that particular idea.
So that's NotebookLM. I love it for strategic planning because of the fact it's so quick and easy to create a notebook. It's so easy to add documents. We can add up to 50 documents. We've got so much context. So my recommendation to you is grab yourself an account while it's free. I can't promise it will always be free, but grab that upload, start a notebook for your firm, drag in some strategic documents and start having a conversation with it and seeing what it comes up with.
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