As indicated at the beginning of the previous post about making coffee, the post was mounted, definitely tongue-in-cheek, as a result of a podcast created by Google NotebookLM about a previous blog post I’d mounted about making yoghurt muffins.
As part of the initial vision I had when I started to mount the post about making coffee, it was a foregone conclusion that a new podcast be generated as a result. As such, my brother and I tried to make podcasts about the post using Google’s NotebookLM Podcast Generator.
I had a few objectives about how the podcast should be structured:
- There should be a bent that both the post as well as the podcast were inspired by the previous podcast on yoghurt muffins;
- There was a hope that the new podcast would be somewhat (read I had an expectation of it being “sufficiently”) self-aware, including that the previous podcast was created “by the same hosts”, and therefore, that “the hosts” would at an obvious juncture make a comment to the effect of “In a previous podcast, we jovially suggested that the blog post author create another blog post about making morning coffee, and whaddya know, they did!”;
- When supplying Google NotebookLM with source material, I entered an expressed expectation that there be a certain incredulity on the parts of the “hosts” that, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that I followed up on the jovial suggestion that I make such a blog post in the original podcast (at about 3:49), as well as the previous two points.
Unfortunately, the results were less than satisfactory.
- The first podcast that was created, using the original yoghurt muffins post as one of several pieces of source material, seemed to focus more on the post on the yoghurt muffins than the post on making coffee;
- Said first podcast generally seemed to rehash the podcast on the yoghurt muffins, often word for word or at least re-phrasings;
- Throughout several of the podcasts that were created, there seemed to be lot more of what I will call psychobabble that came through multiple times, analyzing myself, and went on tangents on how to look at things differently in life — comments which, in general terms, were not fully inaccurate, but which were general human nature and not really what we were looking for. Ultimately there were increasing departures from the content, even ignoring the meta and self-referential parts.
- The podcasts became increasingly long, one being at least 15 minutes long.
Ultimately, NotebookLM seemed unable — perhaps by design or a known lack thereof, and certainly at what would constitute a cursory glance — to handle levity, self-awareness, and meta conversations / commentary.
Anyway, here is the podcast I settled on after a few tries and was frustrated with the general results; it at least does discuss somewhat the meta nature of the post, as well as just barely enough of the coffee part when taken at face value.
Sigh. (Meaning, I guess that if I want a podcast creator that does what I want, I should find out if such exists. Or, I dunno, make a real life podcast myself.)