How I Indirectly Directed a NotebookLM Podcast

One challenge of using Notebook LM podcasts is that you can’t direct them; it picks-up on what it thinks are your key points/themes and simply directs them. This works pretty well, but not perfectly.

Last night, I was thinking: Could I direct this through a discussion of arguments in a basic Main Point, Rebuttal, Response to Rebuttal format that is common in most academic debate formats?

ChatGPT does this well, even dating back to the now retired ChatGPT3.5 version.

Could I do this with NotebookLM in a more thorough manner? It appears so.

This is what I did.

First, I took a large research file I had on carbon taxes, something debaters are researching and debating about, and I uploaded it to Gemini. I tried Gemini because it’s a large file (around 250,000 tokens) and Gemini will accept a large context window.