When I first wrote about how The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi lines up with my business philosophy, I explained the comparison in a LinkedIn article. It was typical of my LinkedIn articles: an easy read with a useful business lesson. Then I heard about Google’s NotebookLM, a free AI tool that turns written material into a “dynamic conversation,” and figured, why not? It’s free. Worst case, I waste a few minutes. Best case, maybe it spits out something cool.
Well, the first run? Total dud. It turned my article into a bland book review—yawn—completely missing the point that I was making actual comparisons between Musashi’s swordplay strategy and modern business.
AI isn’t an all-in-one solution. But you can set it up to solve certain problems. In this case, I created a custom ChatGPT by loading up lots of articles in my voice. Now I could use it as a digital collaborator to help me save time on some mundane writing tasks. I used it to rewrite the article in third person (because apparently the NotebookLM AI likes a little distance) and made sure my name was front and center in the revised version. This would allow NotebookLM to interpret more accurately and give me the results I wanted.
Next, NotebookLM told me to save it as a PDF, load it into the “Studio” feature, and promised me an “audio Deep Dive” between two people. Sounded fancy. I saved my (now third-person) article as a PDF, hit “Generate,” and waited about ten minutes.
The result? Surprisingly good. It delivered an audio file with a natural two-person conversation that nailed my key ideas but made it sound more off-the-cuff, more relatable, like two smart people actually talking it out instead of a lecture. It brought the material to life in a way I didn’t expect.
It also allowed me to reformat my information in audio learning modality, to make it easier for audio learners to hear and absorb my message.
Moral of the story: AI isn’t just a toy for tech nerds anymore. It’s a real tool you can use to share your ideas in fresher, smarter ways. If you’re serious about making your content work harder, developing thought leadership, and using audio formats for internal training and communication…NotebookLM is worth a test drive.
Here’s an example of what it created. Be sure to compare it to my LinkedIn article.