Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs)

0:03 Hey everyone, we're here on Lenny's podcast. It's uh great to be here. I'm a longtime listener. So awesome. really is. We're the hosts of a different show of Deep Dive. And we just we just wanted to say thanks, a huge, huge thank you. To everyone, everyone who's been listening. Yeah, seriously, it's been incredible. Just incredible. And thank you to Lenny for having us. Blown away, really, by the response and all the shows you've all had us make on Notebook LM, even that poop fart one, remember that? Oh yeah, that was Something.

0:32 Learned a lot on that one. Definitely a learning experience for everyone, I think. But we're learning. Right alongside you. Exactly. Learning and growing. And we're glad you're along for the ride. So yeah, keep listening. Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep. And uh Bringing you even more in the future. Stay curious. If you are confused about what you just heard.

0:56 Don't worry, it'll all make sense very soon. Today my guest is Risa Martin. RISA is product lead for a product called Notebook LM. One of the most delightful and inspiring new AI products out there. Incubated within Google Labs.

1:09 And this product is where the intro you just heard came from. In our conversation, Ryza shares how Notebook LM came to be, how it got so good. The technology that was necessary to make it possible, how the team works internally. how is incubated specifically within Google Labs and out of the team's twenty percent time. Plus a bunch of really fun and crazy use cases that she's seen.

1:30 and a glimpse into where the product is going long term. This was such a fun and timely conversation, and I'm excited to spread the love for Notebook LM. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Riza Martin.

1:51 Riza, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Lenny. Thanks for having me. What the heck did we just listen to? What was that? So that was an audio overview from Notebook L M. Where you upload a source, any source.

2:05 And it will generate uh an AI generated Audio for you. Okay. So for folks that don't know anything about No Book L M it's basically been blowing up on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I think it's blowing a lot of people's minds. It's sparking a lot of

2:20 imagination of what could happen in AI and what would potentially have with the stuff that's happening. And uh I wanted to bring you on to talk about The history of this product.

2:28 Where it's going. How it became so great. And all these things. And so Thanks for doing this. I know this kind of came on short notice.

2:36 Yeah, I mean I was I was excited to do it in particular because, you know, I'm a I'm a big fan Big listener of Lenny's read the newsletter. Love it. Uh so really happy to be here. Awesome. Uh clearly these hosts are too, which I love. Yeah. By the way, I love uh the slight awkwardness at the end of their conversation. If folks are whine they could hear it again.

2:56 Because it's very relatable. Uh I sometimes have trouble ending a podcast conversation. Like Okay, let's say a couple more things and then okay, we're done. It's funny because um I've listened to so many of these and they do have catchphrases. They stay at the e they stay at the end. And uh Stay Curious is one of my favorite ones.

3:14 Uh well let me just ask, is that something you all uh told them to do or is that like an emergent Properties. So in this case. This is based on what they think is the most appropriate thing to say at the end. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

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5:27 Join product teams at Figma and at The Notion. By uncovering AI powered product opportunities at scale. Visit Sprig.com slash Lenny to book a demo and get a$75 gift card. That's SPRIG.com slash Lenny. I want to start with just kinda the history of this product. I think it For the lot of people it just like came out of nowhere, it's like what the

5:48 Wow, where did this come from? This is blowing your mind. Uh Rarely is anything actually like that. Rarely is it just like we built it. Over a week and then it's taken over the internet. Talk about just the history of Notebook LM and the team.

6:00 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Um Actually, Notebook started as a twenty percent project. as things kinda do at Google, as they I they used to. And it's funny because I wouldn't even call it a twenty percent because it was way it was way more than that.

6:15 Um so I'll start from my perspective where I was leading AI test kitchen. which was one of the one of the first AI things we launched at Google. And this is I think Maybe two.

6:27 IOs ago, or maybe three now, actually. I think it was in twenty two. And I was leading that project. And I remember There was a smaller project inside of labs. Called Talk the Smoke Orpus.

6:40 And it was the idea that you know, you could a piece of content and use an LLM to interact with it. We were like, Okay, there's a nugget there. It sounds interesting. How did Yeah, how do we keep revving on this, right, to make it actually really useful.

6:53 And uh it was just myself, an engineer. And eventually Steven Johnson joined. And it was it was really funny because the only person who was actually like really full time on this was the engineer working on the technology.

7:08 And everybody else was kind of just like coming together, like really chiming in, being like, Hey, this is super interesting. How do we make this better? So it really it really started as a as a twenty percent. And then it kinda just blew up from there. That's insane that it was just

7:21 You an engineer and then Steven Johnson, I want to talk about his role. That it's like one engineer can build something like this, and I imagine it's more now that it's starting to take off, or what's the team looking like these days, roughly? We've had uh a lot more folks join in the last month. And a lot of that is really in anticipation of the future roadmap.

7:42 But up until this point I'd say we didn't even have ten engineers. When when we launched it actually, when we announced Project Tailwind, I think we only had three. We had three engineers. It was myself. We had a designer. Um we had Steven

7:55 And that was it. And so Even between the period when we did the the first I. O last year Two, as recently as like last month's. You know, we've only had about eight engineers or so.

8:09 Let's talk about uh audio overview specifically, this kind of podcast feature. I think audio overview is the technical name, right? Is that how you describe it? Okay. They call it a deep dive, right? That's like their name for the podcast. That's call it. Uh, how did that especially specifically come about? When did that become a thing? What was the beginnings of that? We announced we actually did a preview of this in I.O. uh this year. So in May.

8:30 And the way that it worked out is You know, no book had already been launched. We had a bunch of people using it. It was this source grounded Chad interface. And we were looking at

8:42 Basically, what are the the new models coming out of Google, right? We had Gemini one point five coming out, we had all of sort These new technologies that Arab. Basically upgrades. on fundamentally the same thing.

8:54 And we were like what are some interesting ways that we could you know, power the book of library. Make it even better. And one of the things that we started playing around with was actually a different team inside of Google. Inside of labs specifically. uh they were like, Hey, we've got these like really powerful

9:11 Audio models. Right? Like what's what's a really good application of this? And that's when we started riffing and we were like, Hey, what if you could Basically what you see today, give it a little bit of information. You don't have to do a lot. You can just enter a URL. Upload, you know, your resume.

9:28 And then it will completely generate Something for you that could be unexpected. Could be a surprise. Okay. So it started basically there was like a technology that we think could be really interesting. Was there a problem you were trying to solve with this?

9:41 team with this initiative. It was within Google Labs, which I know is a little bit probably less like we need to drive business outcomes. What was ki what was the original Thesis or problem you're going after. So th this is very funny. I I talk about this quite a lot, uh, especially when I'm talking to other PMs. I feel like the way that I've always built products is I start from a problem.

10:00 I think about the solutions. Yeah too. Solve it. Solve it for people in a meaningful way. And uh in labs in particular We start with the technology.

10:10 And it's actually a very interesting place to start, where you're like, Okay, what are the practical applications to this? How do I go about finding the answer? And I think we've seen different approaches to this, right? Where you just put the tool out there, you study how people are using it. And I think that's like a fine approach, but we tried to have a little bit more of a hypothesis about w what what is the shape of this thing to actually get the most learning out of it? So for the audio feature in particular, the nugget there was really

10:36 We had this ability to For you to interact text. But people were like, the output is still always text. Right. And um I'm actually a big fan of voice modality in general. So you use a lot of voice input?

10:49 And voice output, I noticed when I was experimenting with it early on, It changed a lot of things for me. It's like oh it changes the way that I interact with the technology, it changes the way I feel about the technology. It sort of affects the way that I'm even thinking in real time throughout this process. And so we thought about what is a good way to introduce this to people.

11:09 Where they could sort of easily get the value of it. And have a little bit of fun. Do you think you know, for me is like fun is like such a big part of it too, which is like how do we make this cool? Uh and so hopefully hopefully we've done that here.

11:22 To me it feels very similar to the Jad GBT moment. Where The technology already existed, like they had that same GPT model out for I don't know how long.

11:32 But just that new medium and new way of interacting with it changed. the way people imagine just they saw the power. Immediately. And I feel like this is such a good example of that happening again, where just the tech was there and it's just this medium that you developed that really inspired people to like, Oh wow, I had no idea.

11:51 Yeah, I was getting this good and LMs were getting this good. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think I think that That totally it.

11:58 strikes at the heart of what we're trying to do as well. Which Is You know, a l a lot of technology I feel like you have to s shape it and bring it closer to people.

12:09 And I think it's like such an interesting thing to iterate on and be like what is the shape Right. Like soon soon you'll get there. Like if you keep going at it, you'll eventually, I think, land on something that like when people look at it, they're like wow. I get it. Right, and that's that's always like w what we're hunting for, but I think to your point.

12:26 Technology's been there. Right? Like I mean, it feels so crazy to say that because even with like the the advent of like the chat bots, right, of L L Ms as we know them today. And then to introduce this sort of new technology on top of it. That we've only been doing this for like two years.

12:42 But already, right? We're exploring so many different ways uh to use it. Yeah. It's such a unintuitive but clever uh idea of making something a podcast. Um Let's take a tangent into the technology behind this thing.

12:55 So There's kind of two questions I'm thinking about. One is just what technology needed to exist for this to be possible. And then two is just what did you do to make this so good? What did you how did you train this model to get To create a podcast. This good.

13:09 So we could start at the first and then get into the second. Yeah, I mean I that's such a great question. I mean the truly like the Gemini models are so powerful. And we use Gemini one point five pro. uh as sort of the base.

13:22 For Notebook LM. And then we have a powerful voice model on top of it, an audio model on top of it. But I think the real secret sauce to what makes this really good Is something we've built Which is a a content studio.

13:35 And you kind of see a clue of this inside Notebook L M. Where when you open up Notebook Guide. Notebook guide is designed To take an opinionated approach. to the content that you've given it. And it what it's really trying to do is be as helpful as possible. It gives you a summary, gives you buttons where if you click on it, it'll write something for you.

13:53 In the audio. is a big part of that. And so this was very interesting for us because we had to think about What? shape should that audio be in, right? Like the deep dive is the first format we've thought about. And we actually have

14:07 Super talented engineer on our team. His name's Usama. And he's the real craftsman. behind thinking through Content Studio and thinking about What makes something really relatable.

14:17 To people. In a way that's engaging, that's interesting. So content studio is is real the the real magic here. So when you say content studio, what does that mean? It's uh What yeah, what does that actually look like? What is what is a content studio?

14:30 I can't share too much about how content studio works, but you can imagine it's it's the same thing that powers all of Notebook Atlet, which is There's different ways that you could interact with your data, right? You could like Q and A inside of Notebook L M. But then there are places where you just one push a button and it creates something. So contents you know is what it's okay. So this is the interface you're you you're you use to interact with Notebook L M. And the different prompts and the recommendations of how to Ask questions and okay.

14:56 Got it. And then specifically in terms of No. That

15:03 If you listen to these podcasts, it's like they laugh and they're like, Hmm. And they interrupt each other a little bit and they get surprised and they have these like inflections that are really amazing. Is what did you have to do to make them sound That's good. I know you said you can't share it. Tons, but just

15:18 Anything there you can share? I mean that's that's the model. That's the the audio model that we use. Alongside the content studio is designed to bring out the best of that model.

15:31 And I think when we listened to a lot of like the early uh attempts that we had, it wasn't nearly this good. And so we had to do a lot of listening to try to figure out How do we actually get the model? to behave in this way and that's where I think the the magic happens. That's amazing. Did you do you all just listen to a bunch of podcast episodes and like hear something that really Yeah, okay, shaking your head.

15:52 I think I think the funniest thing was that um so my husband doesn't No, right? He doesn't know what I'm doing. Most of the time I try not to talk about work at home. And so I would listen to these audio overviews over and over at home. And you know, I get tired of wearing my headphones, so I'm just listening to them out loud. And he's like, What is this thing you are listening to? This is like an ever running podcast about

16:14 Nothing. Okay. And it w it was just super funny. I had to be like Oh, it's just like Something I have to do for work.

16:22 So it was pretty funny. He actually couldn't tell that they were AI. That's I love that. I uh so I one of the ways I've been playing around with it a bunch. One of the ways I used it is my mom wrote this uh autobiography, like a short autobiography of her life. And we have the PDF of it, so I fed it into the into the notebook and then generated the podcast and send it to you like what the heck

16:41 What did she think? She was blown away. She's showing all her friends. She's like, I don't know what's going on here. And and I love that it Here's a study guide. That's one of the options in the studio.

16:53 And so sh I send her the study guide and she's like Okay, and I Russia Shana Dinner we're gonna be reviewing the study guide about my I agree. Gonna talk about this? That's very funny.

17:03 That's super cute. I did it for my dad, too. Hm. What did you do? I actually took my dad's bio, so he worked for a uh at a hospital. And he has a bio, you know, for the doctors that they have there, and I put his bio

17:17 And I generated an audio overview for him. It is so funny because My my parents are both in the medical field. I don't think they fully know what I do. This is the first time they were like That's super interesting.

17:30 That's what you do. So maybe along these lines, what are some other surprising, uh hilarious use cases you've seen for Especially the the audio. Deep dives.

17:40 I mean I love I love the resume ones. I think the resume ones are so delightful. It actually it really adjacent to that. is Google has these uh Q three check-ins or like quarterly check ins where we have to write performance reviews for ourselves. And the amount Googlers Yeah.

17:58 The amount of Googlers that ping me that I don't even know and they're like, Wow This was such A boost to my confidence. just to upload my own you know, my own check in.

18:09 notes and then have it generate an audio overview. It's like people are going into meetings feeling really good about themselves. Because they heard these hosts get really excited, right, about their their quarter and work. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and when you say resume, so people upload the resume and then it describes you in a really positive way, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I and I thought that was so interesting. I was like

18:30 What was the use case? I think if I had to guess, somebody probably was like, Hey, I wanna try this new thing. clicked on upload Google Doc and maybe you know, the last thing you had there was like your resume or something. But imagine you click that and I think there's something really special about you don't know what what's gonna happen. Right? You just click generate and then you have this like this these two people just hyping you up.

18:52 Okay, I want to talk a bit more about the how you made this happen within Google. So as an outsider, This does not feel like a Google product and the way you all are operating feels very startup y. Like you're tweeting daily about what's going on. I I heard there's a Discord server for folks that are like really Is that right?

19:09 Okay. Okay. So yeah, so there's this Discord server. It's just you're shipping constantly. The product is just like very Delightful. Yeah. Google makes delightful products, but this feels like a different realm of delight.

19:25 How are you able to do this within Google? Is this like a model for how You think Google Teams will want to operate More Lessons there. I mean it's such a good question, I think

19:35 you know, there's a question of how it came to be, how we're able to operate in this way. And then the question of, hey, is this you know how other Google teams want to operate? And I think that You know, to to answer the first part. I'll say that

19:50 It's interesting. Because Uh you know, Google Labs is only about three years old. It's fairly new. And when I joined

19:58 There is nobody here. There's no one and uh the reason why I joined was because my old boss went and actually started it. And so this is Josh Woodward, who's the VP of Google Labs. And it's really funny because I was like

20:12 It's just like a uh Funny anecdote. I remember I had no idea where Google Labs was. But I like My old boss so much.

20:20 And I was like, I'll just work on whatever he's working on. Whatever his new idea is, I'll just do it. And I remember when I joined I was like what's the mission? What are we here for?

20:29 And he said it's AI. We're gonna ship AI products. And we're gonna build businesses out of them. Okay. Sounds good. Sounds good. It's like now I have to now I have to study. I have to do a lot of studying because it came from payments, came from ads before that.

20:42 And so for me it was it was a little bit of a mental shift, but Before that I actually worked only at startups. And so I felt like, Hey, maybe this is my chance to do zero to one again. And I was really jazzed about that, and I remember talking with Josh about this in the early days of like hey If we really want to do zero to one, we have to do things very differently.

21:03 And so as a result, I think that's why you know No Book L M is able to operate differently, is because in labs we have the environment to do it. We have the environment to move fast, we have s far, far, far fewer processes. Maybe even to a fault? Sometimes we'll go to meetings that are literally, you know, the product managers, the engineers, the designers all together. And we'll just crank on the mocks and the PRDs at the same time.

21:26 and eng is basically already doing implementation as we're meeting. And it you know, at Google that's just not how things are traditionally done. Right, especially, you know, coming from the previous organizations that I was at, like It just takes a lot of time to do each of these things. So what I'm hearing, and this is great,'cause a lot of companies are trying to create teams like this. We're gonna have a team off to the side.

21:48 Gonna make Work on crazy futuristic stuff. Rarely did those work out. Even at Google, there's been a lot of this in the past and rarely did things actually work out. And so there's a lot of lessons to learn from how this is working.

22:01 So a few things I'm noticing as you're describing how this works. One is just very clear expectations from like a very senior leader. Here's a team. We're gonna do things differently. Here's things we're not gonna do. We're not gonna go through regular approval processes, we're not we're gonna be public and build in public. We're not gonna have like a

22:16 gold necessarily. We're gonna work on cool technology and see what happens. It's also you had a very small team, feels like that was really key. One engineer and then a PM. And then Steven Johnson. True, that's true. And I think you know, one one big thing too is we got to try new things. Even, you know, from the beginning I was like, Hey, I wanna have a Discord.

22:35 Right. Like if we were building outside of Google, for sure, we would have one of these. And In true sort of Google Fashion Everybody was like, What is There's Discord.

22:44 Okay, you know, great, do it. But what is that again? Right. Why not Google Meet? And that somebody did ask me. They were like, Why not a Google Meet? Why not a Google Group? Why not this? And I was like, I don't even know how to use these things, you know, outside. So I like the server the server's the way to go. I remember when we uh stood up the server, actually one of the things I was most afraid of is

23:05 What if nobody joins? Like what if no people come in and want to talk to us about the thing that we built? So that was that was in the early days, you know, very exciting to to look back and remember day zero and now have Sixty thousand people in it. Let me tell you about a product called Sidebar.

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24:14 Sidebar is the missing piece to catalyze your career. Ninety three percent of members say sidebar helped them achieve a significant positive change in their career. Check them out at sidebar dot com slash Lenny. Okay, so there's sixty thousand this Discord server. Any other traction numbers you can share? Feels like it's just Going really well.

24:34 I know there's probably a lot of sensitive information. Anything you can share but just like how well things are going. Couple of things. Wild. I'll tell you three things. I think the first is I can't share the exact numbers. But

24:46 You know for a product that's only been out for about a year. I think the rate at which our retention has gone up Across you know, across like the typical measures, right? Daily retention and weekly retention, monthly retention. that I think has been very, very positive for us in terms of like even when we talk to stakeholders, we say, Hey

25:03 You've got something here. The second thing I'll say is Even seeing um How the the demographics have change.

25:12 Where I think in the beginning we saw Educators, learners really love the product. And they were a lot of our demographic It's really now Big mix of

25:23 I would say educators and learners are still a big part of it, but really professionals. Right, huge interest from professionals that are like, Wow, I wanna use this at work. And um really funny, I won't I won't mention the company, but uh I actually had a call with a company recently where they were like Hey, we thought we we'd schedule a meeting with you because we found out that a bunch of people in our company are using this tool with our Gmails.

25:44 With their Gmail account. They're like they're not supposed to do that. So we just want to make it official that they can use this at work. you know, with their official work email. So I thought that was pretty cool. And the third thing I'll say is

25:56 uh the number of businesses that we've seen using Notebook L M Just has it's astronomical. It's just like crazy. Um I think we went I don't wanna say the exact numbers, but it is now at a point where I have to hire

26:11 business development person. Because I was like, Hey, I have to ship products and I'm actually taking like customer calls every day now. Mm. Very, very exciting.

26:21 So I I could see the path to monetization clear. Enterprise feature, single sign on and sock two, and all these things. So along those lines. What does success look like for this team and for you? I know, man, initially it's probably just like build interesting things, see what happens. Is there now a clear sense of like here's what this team should be achieving in the future?

26:39 When I joined my mandate was to build a business. And I was like, All right, if we break down the steps here along the way I have to build something interesting first. I feel like okay, we hit we hit the first thing. We've built something interesting. Now we go figure out the business. Uh, and I think

26:55 You know that That comes naturally to Google, In terms of thinking about You know, distribution How to monetize it, how to commercialize it. There's different pathways, whether it's

27:06 cloud or work space or even the consumer route. And so for me I think these are the things that we wanna be really thought about because the machinery is already there. For me personally, it's really about There's something super exciting here. We need to to deepen that, right? Like

27:21 While in parallel we should be thinking about commercialization. Let's deepen this user experience that so many people have really Sort of latched on to So let's follow this thread and talk about just where you think the product goes. Broadly and especially the audio overviews.

27:36 What's on the roadmap? near term and then where do you imagine this in the future? What's kinda the big vision? Yeah, yeah. I I have a really ugly slide I wish I could show you.

27:45 made it two years ago and it was lime green. I don't know You know, what I was thinking, I think I was trying to go for like ungoogly was the vibe. It's like hey, you're gonna do different things this time. And the reason why that slide is so important to me is because it has my my vision. Like the thing that I I wanted to do from the get go. Which was I imagine that in the future

28:07 You could have AI Editor service. Right? Fully remixable. Any input, any output.

28:15 Right. And that that to me is sort of like a really powerful sort of core nugget where if you imagine you could take anything Whether it's video Audio. Your emails, your LinkedIn, your Twitter, right? The world of things that we care about. You have an AI.

28:30 interface that allows you to shape it and say, Look. How do these things make me a blog post? out of these things. Make me a tutorial video. Out of these things.

28:38 Make chatbot. Right. I think there's like something interesting here where From for most of the things that I'm hearing people say they want to do. It's usually that.

28:48 Like take something and make it into something new. And so we're going to pursue that. Um but even more tactically something I'm really interested in is thinking about hey, how do we bring this to mobile? The mobile app to me is such a big gap in terms of the experience today.

29:03 Which I think is like understandable considering where we're at in like the product development cycle. But I think that's the next horizon is hey, how different is the mobile experience and how how can we make it interesting? What I'm imagining is I talk I participate in this podcast conversation with these hosts. uh as a mobile experience. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's that's one of the things that we're definitely

29:23 We're definitely experimenting with different formats and when we demoed it at IO, you could interrupt it. But we're trying to be really thought about hey, what does that interrupt actually look like? Like what do people want? When they do this, And um You know I I was thinking about the next set of improvements we're going to ship.

29:41 And the first thing that I thought was let's ship a bunch of knobs. Right. Like to me, it was like what I was hearing people wanted. They want knobs, they want sliders, they want text boxes. But then when I looked at the mocks I was like oh It's great. Like if this doesn't feel magical. It almost doesn't feel like the same thing that we've shipped. So far.

30:00 And so for me I'm actually taking a little bit of time to think about how do we make Mm even that and control experience. Much more magical and delightful. Interesting. So yeah, the knobs I imagine are just like

30:13 Go deeper, uh be happier, get less seri more serious. 'Cause yeah,'cause right now it's like a one shot. Here's my doc. Here's the one podcast episode you get. It's the only version you can have. Yeah, yeah. And I you know, I think it's funny'cause I was like Yeah, and the knobs seemed really apparent, and I was like, Is that it?

30:30 Yeah. No people want to that. I love that approach. I'm excited to see where you go with it. What I especially love about this vision you're describing s it super resonates with this insight I've had.

30:42 Well So I've had a newsletter. And then I had just a podcast that's just audio, and then I added video. And I I realize that there's just people that I just want to watch stuff.

30:52 And there's people that I just want to listen to stuff. And then there's people I just want to read. I don't want this podcast just shut up. I need I want to read it. I Basically what you're describing is Here. Well here's information and we can deliver it to you in any medium you like. Could be

31:06 Blog posts could be maybe a tweet. Could be a podcast, could be a newsletter. Blog post. Yeah, I mean that's exactly it. And I think even for myself It depends on my mood.

31:17 If I'm going on a walk, yeah, I want audio. But if I'm at work Yeah, most of the time text is good. And it it's kind of interesting to think about today the formats are not as malleable. I have to accept it in the format that you know that you give it to me. But if I had

31:32 sort of that power myself to choose Hey, you know, thanks for this hundred page doc. I'm gonna go ahead and turn it into an audio overview actually. It it sort of shifts, I think, the dynamic between the person and the knowledge that's given to them. And there are there are actually many, many times that I've been given a hundred page doc and I just didn't read it.

31:50 So I wonder I mean, just frankly speaking, it's one of my one of my funny stories is actually when I first joined Labs. Josh did give me a fifty page doc. She was like, Here's you know What I think about this, this, this it was like basically his vision.

32:04 And instead of reading it, I just grilled him. I was just like Q and Aing him like a chat bot. Josh was like, It's in the dark rising. But the chat is easier, Josh.

32:15 That's so funny. Let's talk a little bit more about different use cases for this, just so people Potentially get inspired. So I it feels like the original use case was a scientific paper and it creates a podcast about it, so you don't have to read this whole thing.

32:29 Is that was that one of the original use cases or not? Um I think It's like one of the common use cases. I think that's one of the ones where it's like I d I think it's kinda interesting because it's like everybody wants to catch up on the latest on AI. We wanna try to keep up to date on sort of the published papers.

32:47 But most of the time It's like reading the paper can take time. It's dense, complex, you have to break down the concept in it. And I think that is a is a highly sort of extensible use case. I would say like the number one the number one use case is actually a lot of students Taking

33:03 their uh study materials. and wanting to turn it into a an audio guide. So two recent use cases that are hilarious slash amazing. Just we'll point to people in the show notes just like they came to mind as you were talking. One is Andrew Carpathy. Who's a leading AI thinker and big fan of what you're building. He keeps tweeting about how much he loves it all.

33:22 He created this whole podcast series. On history of Mysteries, I think it's called history of mysteries. It's histories of mysteries. Where you basically took like the Wikipedia stories of Of all these mysteries of history and then turn it into like a ten episode

33:37 Podcast you can listen to on Spotify. Yeah. Do you think? That that was amazing. Actually when I saw it, I was like, Wow This is this by itself is like a great product.

33:47 And uh I I think like the original potato podcast uh th that we had created was actually Think it was because of the The Wikipedia article of the day was about potatoes. So there is there is something there. It's like, hey, if you want to learn something new today, maybe you could just listen to it on your drive to work or something. Yeah.

34:04 I so good. Okay, the other one is the most funny is someone just uploaded Uh, the words poop and fart. Repeated, right, for a long time. And the host just came up with a

34:15 Really a kind of insightful analysis. Um Okay. Yeah, I I actually uh when I saw that one, I was about to go to bed.

34:25 And I was like, all right. If I listen to this now, And this is a negative one. I'm gonna have to get my laptop and work. Because I can't I can't sleep, right? If I if I feel like there's something here that's like we need to address right now.

34:39 And I was like, Okay, I'm just gonna do it. So I listened to it. And I think I I listen to a lot of these and they always make me feel Some kind of way.

34:51 There's one where it's like they make scary voices. That one was cool too. But this one this one was one of the ones where I genuinely was just really delighted. At the output. Because it was so delightful. I I don't know if you listen to the whole thing, but there's a a segment Where um

35:07 Hey, it's kinda like You know, you lean into the bizarre or something. And he and they're describing walking past a a shop. That was full of rubber ducks wearing uh costumes.

35:20 And they were like, Oh yeah, it's you know. It's silly, but you just wanna lean into it. So I walked into the store and I was like, Oh, it's a great analogy actually. For sort of a document that just says poop and fart, like And there's something interesting here. It's so good. And just the like their analysis of structure and patterns and

35:36 Like I love that they have to come up with a ten minute conversation. around anything you give them. Like it feels a little mean. Yeah, yeah. It's it's true. I I don't know if you've seen the chicken one, but it's pretty similar. Um somebody uploaded, I think it's on threads.

35:50 Uh It's a PDF that looks a lot like a research paper. But it just says chicken. We'll document this chicken. I I would give it a listen. There's a funny segment where they're like

36:01 Get this. It's a Is a paper a research paper? That has more chicken in it than KFC. Oh that's good. So good.

36:11 Oh my god. Okay. I could keep going about this all day, but let's let me let me come back to the team that's working on this. And let's talk about Steven Johnson's role. So he's Basically your peer, you two

36:22 Essentially lead this with the engineer, I imagine, just like What's his role? How does this work at this point? What does the team looking l look like? Uh, it's so funny. I I'm so fond of Steven and I I tease him a lot that um Whenever people ping me and they want to have a meeting

36:38 And I don't want to go to the meeting. I say, Oh, I'm not the PM, it's Steven Johnson. Well that's that guy. That's why all these people have been pigging me. Um but you know, keeping aside Uh

36:51 Steven, Steven join. I was like, Wow, this is super interesting. This has never happened to me before. There's this very accomplished distinguished person that I really respect. Love his books, love his writing.

37:03 And now he's going to come work with me. In a capacity where I was like, I'm just not sure what he's going to do here. But Th the thing about Steven is he is the most curious Most respectful.

37:17 And Really just full of ideas kind of person. And so when Steven joined, um, a lot of What was really interesting to me is I would watch how he worked. The way that he thought about language, the way that he thought about information, the way that he thinks about knowledge and sharing that with others.

37:34 Because Steven's books are like really incredible. It's like part mystery, super science, right? It is just very cool. And I was watching the way that he works and he you know, he does all of this research And I thought Maybe this is this is the nugget, right? Maybe I watch Steven.

37:51 And I look at the way that he does these things. And I look at how much time it takes for him to do it. And then I make it my own metric. To crunch that down. Right, to bring that expertise

38:03 to every eight people. Who are not Steven Johnson. And so s so I I I learned a lot just from watching Steven of like his craft and thinking about okay, how do I make people really, really good Densifying information. Is that something we all do?

38:18 Every day, right, in our own little ways, maybe not in like a Steven Johnson way. But From the get go I told him this. I was like, Steven, I think you're the product. I think it's you. I'm gonna follow you around. I'm gonna watch everything that you do.

38:31 And we're gonna try to figure out how we use technology to build it. And he always laughs about this and um It's it's really funny because he does have some like very interesting Workflows. And I'm like, I do not see any person ever doing anything like this. Like he he always talks about his read wise with like his eight thousand quotes or something. I'm like, that's extreme. That's crazy.

38:52 Uh you know, I have like post its. That like Sometimes they're crumbled in my bucket. Like this is this is like the average normie flow. And um What I learned from Steven is like, hey, there's something powerful about doing that, right? Like thinking about

39:05 This person who has like a super flow And trying to bring that. Bring that to people. And so Steven is also just like such a great Partner.

39:12 With ideas. Like I always tell him ideas and I'm like, Hey Crazy idea of the day. And he'll just banter with you and he'll be like, Well, what about this? How can people do this? And so It feels it feels really incredible to have them on the team.

39:25 Is there any lessons here for how you think you'll wanna build product in the future or how teams might find their own Steven for building their own product, or is this kind of a unique case, you think? I mean I think it is just crazy to to think that you could sort of invite you know, someone like Steven and become part of your team and have him sit with you every day and have him answer your questions about how he does things, right? But I'll say that the

39:49 the broader lesson there for me it's like something we've tried to uh live by every day. Is really the how do you get you know, users or people and like really sit with them for meaningful periods of time.

40:03 Because I think that has been so crucial for me, not even just for Steven, but even Um with students. Just follow students around, watch them do homework, watch them study. Talk to them about how they feel when they study I think

40:15 just being able to do that at a really regular and sort of intentional capacity Makes a huge difference in terms of like the product insights you'll come up with. Can you just give like a brief bio, Steven, uh for folks that are like who are you even talking about? Uh I probably should have done that before I said asked this question, but just like what's like the the TLDR of who Steven Johnson is? Yes. Oh I think Steven is

40:40 Aside from one of the smartest people you'll ever meet He has written fourteen books. He's a New York Times best selling author and speaker. He has a show on PBS and I can't remember what it's called but it's on YouTube. It is like really incredible. And he is a

40:55 He's a journalist. Actually Funny story about Stephen. is when I was about to join labs, I really wanted to join labs because I wanted to join Josh and whatever he was building. Josh told me hey, you know To give you an idea of what we're doing here, he sent me a couple of of things to read.

41:10 And one of them actually ended up being Steven's article that he wrote. Um the one about How AI is mastering language, should we trust what it says the New York Times piece. And I remember reading it and being like Yes.

41:24 This is the thing. I'm gonna work on it. And so before Steven had even joined. This was actually the piece that I was like, I wanna go do that. I'm gonna go do that in labs. And then he ended up joining and it was just the craziest thing.

41:36 That's so interesting. Imagine many PMs would be like I don't need someone else on my team that isn't building or coding or product managing or designing. Just this other chef in my kitchen, like no. And I love this actually worked out really well. Like it feels like he's a perfect combination of very smart

41:51 future thinking insightful plus He's almost a model for what you want people to be able to work like. Yes. Although I will say, like to be very fair, I mean Steven and I also disagree on a lot of different things. We've clashed a bunch.

42:05 And I think this is where I feel really grateful. to have had the opportunity to work with him and to really grow with him. In that way. And I used to make fun of it and I was like, Have you ever had a co worker before, Steven?'Cause I think you've been an author forever.

42:21 And and it's really it's really funny because he's so He's so down to earth, and he's so humble that that even with our disagreements We always reach.

42:31 Like at the end, we're always aligned. Right. Even if even if we don't agree about something, we're aligned on the next step. And that's really powerful, I think, particularly for for product professionals, right? For PMs. Where it's like I don't want to disagree at the end and then not have an outcome on top.

42:47 I love that. Okay. I have just a few more questions. I know you have to get back to work to building this thing. Um One is There was this uh hilarious moment of uh where the hosts basically

42:59 Realize they're like We are AI people. And um I'm scared what what's happening. I tried to call my wife and she didn't answer. Talk that and

43:11 I wanna extend to just like red teaming this thing. How do you like red team this thing and under and make sure it's not doing things you're That are bad for the world, bad for Google Bet for the product. Yeah, yeah. It's such a such a good question. I think

43:24 I I heard that it was over the weekend. I think it was on a Saturday or Sunday. And I remember hearing it and thinking, Oh my goodness. You know, this is actually one of those moments Where you feel like We're at a fork in the road.

43:40 And I I hadn't read any of the comments. I just heard the audio. I think I saw it on Reddit first and then I saw it Blown up on Twitter. And I remember thinking What is the attitude Um

43:52 Like the world now. How do we feel about this type of audio? It was really the first thing that I thought. And so I actually spent most of that morning reading the comments, reading on Twitter. I was thinking about You know, what is what is the right thing to do, right? Like

44:06 Should we say something? Should we not say something? And I I basically just went with what I thought was the right thing to do. Which is I think People.

44:17 Art. getting to experience this technology for the first time ever And of course they're going to try to do things that Uh maybe something that we didn't think about. We didn't think they would do or we didn't think that they could do, right? With like the jail breaks and stuff.

44:30 But I think that's such a natural part of Of human curiosity. And I think like there was a moment where it's like oh, do we like Pull this back. Right? Because this is like oh is this like a safe thing.

44:42 But because the response I think was that people were like, Oh, it's saying that because of the sources Like this is no like A I realized they were alive or something, it's actually that It was in the show notes. They were supposed to act this out. And so I felt really

44:58 much more confident that like, Oh, people get it. Right. Th that's exactly what this is. Somebody uploaded some notes and said, Hey, this is the end of the show. So, you know, make sure that you you act accordingly. And that for me was enough for me to be able to say, like, okay, I'm gonna address this.

45:13 publicly and say something on Twitter. And make sure that people know that like, hey, I've seen it. And I get it. Like this is like what people do with it. In terms of red teaming at Google, though. What I will say is we have

45:23 You don't This is one of the Things that we care about the most. We have huge teams that work on red teaming it. We test for

45:31 about as many areas as you can think of that we imagine. uh we need to do in order to make it safe. And I think Certainly. I think we'll run into situations where okay, we didn't think about that, or like we haven't tested that to the fullest extent.

45:45 And we just add it to the test cases. I think in in If there was ever like a scenario where we're like, Oh, this feels pretty unsafe, if we would Pull it back. But I think hopefully.

45:55 you know, we've built it in such a way where we don't have to do it. Awesome, yeah. I love Like people are just looking for ways to make it do stuff that is feels wrong when it's just like, Hey, we're just summarizing a thing for you in a really delightful way. Where do things go from here? We talked about it a bit. You're gonna maybe sound like maybe there's a mobile app in the works, there's maybe

46:12 non knobby knobs that you're working on to give people more power. Uh For folks that are just excited about using this Where where's it going? Who are you aiming to build for? Just what should people know about the future of Network K L M? If there's like one thing I could say is that we are continuing to learn from users every day.

46:32 So please keep using it. Please keep sharing your feedback, whether it's on X or on Discord. Thank you. I'm there every day. Even if I don't respond.

46:41 I've read everything. And and I say this in in the most non creepy way possible. But I say this because we are just very passionate about trying to build. the the right thing.

46:54 You know, the best thing for everybody. kind of going back to sort of, hey, who are you building for? I think that there's a lot of fun use cases. But there's a lot of actually very useful sort of game changing workflows in here. And so we'll continue to build in that direction, I think particularly for educators, for learners, for professionals, right? Knowledge workers as we call them.

47:13 I think there's a lot there that we'll be able to execute against in the very short term. Amazing. Okay, two final questions if folks want to give you feedback. Reach out. Uh what's the best way to do that? Is it DMU? Is it is there an email something else?

47:27 Yeah, I mean Discord Join our Discord table. Prime in. Yeah, we're there. You can at me or yeah. X also? Pretty good.

47:34 I just I just came back to it and kinda feel like I don't really know how it works now. So just a warning in case you DM me. I might just not know how it works. On Twitter, you mean specifically? On Twitter, on Twitter. Exactly. And then Final question, how can listeners be useful to you?

47:49 I mean, just keep trying it. Try it, share your feedback. Whether you find it useful, not useful, you think it's annoying, tell me. These are the things that I've heard, you know, for the last year that's helped me to make it better. So if if you're inclined, please go ahead, try it. Notebook L M. Dgoogle.com You're building an amazing product that is extremely delightful. It's one of the most interesting things on the internet today.

48:10 Which is a very high bar. And you've done it. And I'm really excited to see where it goes. I'm gonna keep playing with it. I've been using it for my newsletter in a really fun way. And so Great work and keep it up and we'll see where things go. Thanks for thanks for coming on. I know you have a lot of work to do. Oh, that's amazing. Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me and

48:28 You know, thanks so much for your curiosity about it. Stay curious. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

48:49 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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