Podcast appearances and mentions of Andrew Mason

In the second hour of The Dan Jacobs Show, Dan breaks down more of the Broncos Stadium news and speculation.  We then welcome Andrew Mason on to the program live from Atlanta where the Rockies are playing the Braves.  Dan finishes up the hour debating with the text line and the producer whether it’s better to have the stadium Downtown or by the airport. 

Its an Easy like Sunday morning edition of the Dan Jacobs show! Andrew Mason joins the show! What are his thoughts on the disaster known as the Colorado Rockies? Is there ANY hope for this team in the next few years? What are his big takeaways from OTA’s and have we learned anything or do we still new more time with this group? We revisit our conversation with Josh Dover! We read your texts and get ready for the Dan Jacobs show big meet up!

In hour 2 of The Drive, Zach and Phil react to David Adelman’s introductory press conference after being named the official head coach of the Nuggets. Is there room to grow for Nuggets young players and is Adelman the man to maximize them? How does the Nuggets roster construction compare to the teams that are still in the NBA playoffs?  Zach shares his problem with Josh Kroenke not admitting the Nuggets have a culture problem. Can the Nuggets replicate what the Warriors were able to do in 2022, winning the championship? Today’s “Three Count” features Andrew Mason’s idea for a standard for retiring Broncos jerseys, the chances that Demarius Thomas makes it into Canton as a hall of famer, and the Thunder and Pacers taking commanding 3-1 leads in the conference finals. What trend do all but one of the Broncos newest draft class members have in common?

It’s an easy like Sunday Morning edition of the Dan Jacobs Show! Dan is back from his trip to Nashville and has a big range of sports to cover! He is joined by DenverSports.com’s Andrew Mason to break down the NFL Draft. How did the Broncos get to their decisions with their picks. How does Mase feel about Shedeur being drafted in the fifth round. Even if teams were down on Shedeur does his slip make sense? What direction are the Broncos moving in going into training camp? Dan reacts to all of that to end the first hour.

In the 3rd hour, Dover and Cecil recapped what the Rockies have done so far this season before their home opener today. The fellas previewed what the Rockies can do the rest of the season. Andrew Mason joined the show to discuss what the Rockies should do with Kris Bryant. The guys broke down another mock draft and gave an update of the CU Pro Day. 

Lester Kiewit speaks to Andrew Mason, the founder of Workplacefundi, about a symposium hosted by the City of Cape Town. The Smart and Future Facilities Management Symposium focused on how to use cutting edge technology and workplace innovation to improve efficiencies which can be implemented at municipal level.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris and Andrew discuss the complexities and evolutions of developing mobile applications using Hotwire Native with guest Joe Masilotti. The conversation delves into the history, challenges, and features of Hotwire, highlighting its origins from Turbolinks to Hotwire Native. Joe shares insights from his upcoming book, which aims to guide Rails developers through building iOS and Android applications. They cover a range of topics, including authentication, push notifications, and the benefits of keeping most logic on the server. Joe also explains his writing process, and the practicalities of maintaining the book, given the ever-evolving nature of software dependencies. Hit download now to hear more!Links:Jason Charnes XChris Oliver XAndrew Mason XJoe Masilotti WebsiteJoe Masilotti YouTubeHotwire NativeHotwire Native for Rails Developers-Build Native Mobile Apps Using Your Server by Joe MasilottiHoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Jason Charnes X/Twitter Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth kick off the fourth hour expanding on Stink’s Telestrator Tuesday segment, discussing the execution in the Broncos run game and wondering if it should give them pause over the offensive line. Stoke gets to dig into his Broncos leftovers, sharing his concerns with the constant shifting personnel, the Broncos shrinking in the moment, and what Bo needs to work on in the offseason. The guys are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to get his take on where the Broncos must upgrade this offseason and how that can help the play calling. Mike, Stink, and Stoke preach patience in the pocket for Bo this offseason, the Deion to Dallas connection, and a little Nuggets nugget to finish today’s show.

In hour 2 of The Drive, Zach and Phil continue their conversation on the Broncos running backs and Javonte Williams lack of explosive plays. The guys don’t expect to see Javonte back in a Broncos uniform next season and Phil shares the story about being told he would not be returning to the Broncos in 2020. We pivot to Bo Nix and when Zach and Phil knew he was “the guy”. We hear from Sean Payton and his thoughts on Bo Nix being able to avoid sacks at the collegiate and NFL level. Today’s “Three Count: includes the history between NFL referee Bill Vinovich, Sean Payton and the Broncos, Bradley Beal being open to getting traded to the Nuggets, and the Avs continuing their run with a win vs the defending champion, Florida Panthers. DenverSports.com’s senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss if the Broncos are already Bo Nix’s team, what Nix still has to improve on during the offseason, and how Vance Joseph will fare with head coaching opportunities.

In the final hour, Dover and Cecil heard from Courtland Sutton and Patrick Surtain on when they knew Bo Nix was the answer at QB for the Broncos. Andrew Mason joined the show to give some insight on the refs for the Broncos playoff game against the Bills. How has Sean Payton gotten the most out of Marvin Mims? The fellas ended the show reacting to the Raiders firing Antonio Pierce. Could Deion Sanders leave CU for the Raiders? 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil take a deep dive into the Broncos pivotal game tonight. Will the Broncos officially punch their ticket to the postseason with a win? DenverSports.com’s Senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss Mase’s expectations for Bo Nix tonight, the Broncos struggles in the first quarter, and how the Broncos will rotate their running backs tonight. Will tonight be a high or low scoring game? Will we see the Broncos revert back to a Bo Nix’s rushing game that we saw earlier this season? Will the Broncos have a running back run for 50 yards tonight? We wrap up the show with the guys 5 predictions for tonight’s pivotal Thursday Night Football matchup, including their winning picks. Will the Broncos secure their first playoff bid for the first time in a long time?

In the 2nd hour, Dover and Cecil broke down the Broncos' playoff chances if they lose against the Chargers. Cecil explained how the Broncos can't let the Chargers hang around late in the game tomorrow night. Andrew Mason joined the show to explain why Bo Nix didn't the best game against the Colts. Dover explained why he's not fully ready to give up on Michael Porter Jr. yet. 

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth set the table with their favorite topics of the morning like the young corners, the white slot receiver club, and the Travis Hunter story. It’s time to have that debate, which Broncos defender is better? Pat Surtain II or has Nik Bonitto surpassed PS2 as the best player on the strong Broncos defense. Out Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, joins the show to take the guys through the Broncos’ improbably win over the Colts by the numbers. Mike, Mark, and Stoke finish today’s show venting about the transfer portal.

What will the Broncos game look like in the second quarter on Sunday against the Colts? Can the Broncos shut down both Anthony Richarson and Jonathan Taylor? We check in with our senior Broncos writer Andrew Mason courtesy of Matheus Fine Watches. The Nuggets are back tonight, but will Jamal Murray be?

In this episode, Chris catches up with guest Jason Meller, CEO and founder of Kolide. Today, Jason shares exciting news about Kolide, a startup focused on device security, which was recently acquired by 1Password. He delves into the history of Kolide, its growth, and its acquisition by 1Password. Jason also talks about the technical aspects of Kolide's product, the importance of behavioral science in security, and the transition to working with 1Password. The conversation touches on scaling challenges, the hiring process, and Rails' influence on their development practices. Chris talks about his contribution by discussing improvements in the Getting Started Guide for Rails 8 and the significance of the Rails Foundation. Jason emphasizes the value of aligning with Rails principles and the importance of contributing back to the community. Hit downloadnow to hear more!HoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Jason Charnes X/Twitter Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth set the table with their favorite sound bites of the morning like what Sean Payton can take away from the big time win. They give their evaluation of Bo Nix’s performance. The guys are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to go over some breaking news from the Hall of Fame and his takeaways from the Broncos’ primetime win. Mike, Mark, and Stoke finish today’s show with their favorite throws from a confident Bo.

In this episode, Jason, Chris, and Andrew catch up with Vini Stock, who works on the Ruby developer experience team at Shopify. They discuss recent advancements in Ruby LSP, including ERB support, the addition of the Copilot Agent, and improvements to the indexing of Ruby code. Vinny shares insights into the complexities of maintaining and advancing a language server and talks about potential future enhancements for the Ruby ecosystem. They also delve into the challenges and possibilities of modern developer tooling and the importance of community contributions. Hit download now!HoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Jason Charnes X/Twitter Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter

John Davis and Brandon Stokley set the table with the news of Greg Dulcich being cut loose by the Broncos. John, Stoke, and Mark Schlereth Hit the Hardwood where they take the Nuggets and Michael Malone to task after being thrashed by the Knicks and especially after Jamal Murray spilled the beans about their LA trip. They are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, who gives us some insight into Riley Moss’s injury, Bo’s OROY chances, and the thinking behind the Thursday Night Football flex. John, Stoke, and Stink finish today’s show with Sean Payton’s Coach of the Year chances.

In the final hour, Dover and Cecil were joined by Andrew Mason as he discussed what Marvin Mims' could be for the Broncos moving forward. Who is the real Broncos #2 receiver moving forward? The fellas recapped their Prop Predictions with Chicken Fingers. Closing out the show, the guys gave their thoughts on the Ava' horrific loss to Tampa Bay. 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil analyze the Broncos playoff probability after their win over Atlanta. Would Phil rather the Broncos make the playoffs or Bo Nix wins the rookie of the year award? Does being 100% sure about Bo going into next season mean more than the Broncos ending their playoff drought? We hear from Sean Payton on tampering expectations for Bo Nix as well as Collin Cowherd advocating for Payton to be in the mix for the NFL’s coach of the year. DenverSports.com’s Senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss to growth of Bo Nix this season, the dominance of the Broncos defense, and the future of Garrett Bolles with the Broncos. What are Mase’s thoughts on Mike Shanahan’s Hall of Fame chances this year? We wrap up the show with DenverSports.com’s Will Petersen joining the show to discuss the importance of the Broncos gaining playoff experience this season.

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth set the table with their favorite topics of the morning like Gerogiev's mental straight jacket, the player's hatred of in-season honors, and Stephen A's take on Coach Prime. They discuss the oddness of Syracuse's coach, a Georgia player rooting for the wrong team, and a head coach that's destined for unemployment. Our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, hops on the show to tell us which team has the best media catering before the guys play the numbers game. Mike, Mark, and Stoke finish today's show cringing at Alex Forsyth's fail compilation. 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil ask if Coach Prime will be up for the coach of the year award. Zach speaks to how graceful Prime has been this season after “getting punched in the face” last season. Who would be Prime’s competition for the award? DenverSports.com’s Senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss his takeaways from the Broncos gut-wrenching loss, if the Broncos will make a change at offensive line, and how impressive Nik Bonitto has been this season. Did Bo Nix outplay Patrick Mahomes this past Sunday? How important will the Broncos and Falcons game be for the Broncos legitimacy and playoff hopes? DenverSports.com and host of the Mile High Hockey podcast, Will Petersen joins the show to discuss the Broncos playoff probability. We wrap up the show with Will’s thoughts on Val Nichushkin’s return to the Avs.

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth set the table with their favorite topics of the morning, talking about the upcoming NFL trade deadline. Stink and Stoke give us their top RB trade targets on the heels of Stink's Telestrator Tuesday. The guys Hit the Hardwood, recapping the Nuggets' win over the Raptors feeaturing a lot of the nuggets' young players. they are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to sort through the key numbers from the Broncos' loss to the Ravens. Mike, Mark, and Stoke argue how much a loss really contributes to the team's effort for their next game to close out the show. 

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth set the table with their favorite subjects like the Nuggets' win last night, Sean Payton's treatment of Troy Franklin, and the different breed of fans in New York. Stink and Stoke tell a 9am listener why they're wrong about the Nuggets' window before the guys discuss Jokic's chances for a 4th MVP. The guys are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to check his confidence level in the Sean Payton regime before they all play the numbers game. Mike, Mark, and Stoke finish the show with the latter telling us why Thanksgiving is overrated. 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach asks if Phil and Broncos Country would take a guaranteed 1-2 record over their next 3 games. Phil gets fired up and says why he’s rolling the dice on the Broncos next three games. We revisit a conversation from before the season. Will the Broncos break through with a 1,000-yard runner, 1,000-yard receiver, 4,000-yard passer or a double-digit sacker? We reevaluate which Broncos are most likely to accomplish these feats. DenverSports.com’s Broncos senior writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss the Broncos potential moves at the trade deadline, how Bo Nix will fare against a better defense in Baltimore, and grading Bo Nix at the “halfway” mark of the season. We wrap up the show with an update on the Altitude TV dilemma and a representative of theirs apologizing for the mishap for last night’s Nuggets game. What did Zach and Phil learn in Denver sports today?

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music).Today's guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature flag that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast:The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them. This was one of the first demos that people built with voice models + RAG + GPT models, but it was always a glorified speech-to-text. Raiza and Usama took a very different approach:* Make it conversational: when you listen to a NotebookLM audio there are a ton of micro-interjections (Steven Johnson calls them disfluencies) like “Oh really?” or “Totally”, as well as pauses and “uh…”, like you would expect in a real conversation. These are not generated by the LLM in the transcript, but they are built into the the audio model. See ~28:00 in the pod for more details. * Listeners love tension: if two people are always in agreement on everything, it's not super interesting. They tuned the model to generate flowing conversations that mirror the tone and rhythm of human speech. They did not confirm this, but many suspect the 2 year old SoundStorm paper is related to this model.* Generating new insights: because the hosts' goal is not to summarize, but to entertain, it comes up with funny metaphors and comparisons that actually help expand on the content rather than just paraphrasing like most models do. We have had listeners make podcasts out of our podcasts, like this one.This is different than your average SOTA-chasing, MMLU-driven model buildooor. Putting product and AI engineering in the same room, having them build evals together, and understanding what the goal is lets you get these unique results. The 5 rules for AI PMsWe always focus on AI Engineers, but this episode had a ton of AI PM nuggets as well, which we wanted to collect as NotebookLM is one of the most successful products in the AI space:1. Less is more: the first version of the product had 0 customization options. All you could do is give it source documents, and then press a button to generate. Most users don't know what “temperature” or “top-k” are, so you're often taking the magic away by adding more options in the UI. Since recording they added a few, like a system prompt, but those were features that users were “hacking in”, as Simon Willison highlighted in his blog post.2. Use Real-Time Feedback: they built a community of 65,000 users on Discord that is constantly reporting issues and giving feedback; sometimes they noticed server downtime even before the Google internal monitoring did. Getting real time pings > aggregating user data when doing initial iterations. 3. Embrace Non-Determinism: AI outputs variability is a feature, not a bug. Rather than limiting the outputs from the get-go, build toggles that you can turn on/off with feature flags as the feedback starts to roll in.4. Curate with Taste: if you try your product and it sucks, you don't need more data to confirm it. Just scrap that and iterate again. This is even easier for a product like this; if you start listening to one of the podcasts and turn it off after 10 seconds, it's never a good sign. 5. Stay Hands-On: It's hard to build taste if you don't experiment. Trying out all your competitors products as well as unrelated tools really helps you understand what users are seeing in market, and how to improve on it.Chapters00:00 Introductions01:39 From Project Tailwind to NotebookLM09:25 Learning from 65,000 Discord members12:15 How NotebookLM works18:00 Working with Steven Johnson23:00 How to prioritize features25:13 Structuring the data pipelines29:50 How to eval34:34 Steering the podcast outputs37:51 Defining speakers personalities39:04 How do you make audio engaging?45:47 Humor is AGI51:38 Designing for non-determinism53:35 API when?55:05 Multilingual support and dialect considerations57:50 Managing system prompts and feature requests01:00:58 Future of NotebookLM01:04:59 Podcasts for your codebase01:07:16 Plans for real-time chat01:08:27 Wrap upShow Notes* Notebook LM* AI Test Kitchen* Nicholas Carlini* Steven Johnson* Wealth of Nations* Histories of Mysteries by Andrej Karpathy* chicken.pdf Threads* Area 120* Raiza Martin* Usama Bin ShafqatTranscriptNotebookLM [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space. It's great to be here, I'm a long time listener and fan, they've had some great guests on this show before. Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests. I mean a huge thank you to Swyx and Alessio for the invite, thanks for having us on the show. Yeah really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast. Yeah, I mean we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive. Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot. There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh? Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least. The short version is we'll keep learning and getting better for you. 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 bringing you even better options in the future. Stay curious.Alessio [00:00:52]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:01:01]: Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Raiza, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat.Raiza [00:01:10]: Yes.Swyx [00:01:10]: Okay, welcome.Raiza [00:01:12]: Hello, thank you for having us.Swyx [00:01:14]: So AI podcasters meet human podcasters, always fun. Congrats on the success of Notebook LM. I mean, how does it feel?Raiza [00:01:22]: It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.Swyx [00:01:29]: Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. You know, what is your path into the sort of Google AI org? Or maybe, actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.Raiza [00:01:39]: I can start. My name is Raisa. I lead the Notebook LM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just, like, try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is, really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like, at every time that I changed orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like, specifically, like, in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like, this is, like, super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm, like, a very zero-to-one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm, like, a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that, and then I worked on, like, zero-to-one features inside of payments, and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again where I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs, and I was like, oh, darn. Like, there's definitely, like—Alessio [00:02:48]: They got you again.Raiza [00:02:49]: They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years, and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with, you know, the recent success of Notebook LM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.Usama [00:03:02]: Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center supply chain planning stuff. Google has, like, the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore. But I sort of wanted to do, like, more zero-to-one building and landed a role there. We were trying to build, like, a creator commerce platform called Kaya. It launched briefly a couple years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And, like, over the last few years, like, the focus just got a lot clearer. Like, we were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, you know, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal. Really, really landed.Swyx [00:03:53]: Let's talk about the brief history of Notebook LM. You had a tweet, which is very helpful for doing research. May 2023, during Google I.O., you announced Project Tailwind.Raiza [00:04:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:03]: So today is October 2024. So you joined October 2022?Raiza [00:04:09]: Actually, I used to lead AI Test Kitchen. And this was actually, I think, not I.O. 2023. I.O. 2022 is when we launched AI Test Kitchen, or announced it. And I don't know if you remember it.Swyx [00:04:23]: That's how you, like, had the basic prototype for Gemini.Raiza [00:04:26]: Yes, yes, exactly. Lambda.Swyx [00:04:28]: Gave beta access to people.Raiza [00:04:29]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember, I was like, wow, this is crazy. We're going to launch an LLM into the wild. And that was the first project that I was working on at Google. But at the same time, my manager at the time, Josh, he was like, hey, I want you to really think about, like, what real products would we build that are not just demos of the technology? That was in October of 2022. I was sitting next to an engineer that was working on a project called Talk to Small Corpus. His name was Adam. And the idea of Talk to Small Corpus is basically using LLM to talk to your data. And at the time, I was like, wait, there's some, like, really practical things that you can build here. And just a little bit of background, like, I was an adult learner. Like, I went to college while I was working a full-time job. And the first thing I thought was, like, this would have really helped me with my studying, right? Like, if I could just, like, talk to a textbook, especially, like, when I was tired after work, that would have been huge. We took a lot of, like, the Talk to Small Corpus prototypes, and I showed it to a lot of, like, college students, particularly, like, adult learners. They were like, yes, like, I get it, right? Like, I didn't even have to explain it to them. And we just continued to iterate the prototype from there to the point where we actually got a slot as part of the I.O. demo in 23.Swyx [00:05:42]: And Corpus, was it a textbook? Oh, my gosh.Raiza [00:05:45]: Yeah. It's funny. Actually, when he explained the project to me, he was like, talk to Small Corpus. It was like, talk to a small corpse?Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah, nobody says Corpus.Raiza [00:06:00]: It was like, a small corpse? This is not AI. Yeah, yeah. And it really was just, like, a way for us to describe the amount of data that we thought, like, it could be good for.Swyx [00:06:02]: Yeah, but even then, you're still, like, doing rag stuff. Because, you know, the context length back then was probably, like, 2K, 4K.Raiza [00:06:08]: Yeah, it was basically rag.Raiza [00:06:09]: That was essentially what it was.Raiza [00:06:10]: And I remember, I was like, we were building the prototypes. And at the same time, I think, like, the rest of the world was. Right? We were seeing all of these, like, chat with PDF stuff come up. And I was like, come on, we gotta go. Like, we have to, like, push this out into the world. I think if there was anything, I wish we would have launched sooner because I wanted to learn faster. But I think, like, we netted out pretty well.Alessio [00:06:30]: Was the initial product just text-to-speech? Or were you also doing kind of, like, synthesizing of the content, refining it? Or were you just helping people read through it?Raiza [00:06:40]: Before we did the I.O. announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was, summarize the thing. Right?Raiza [00:06:53]: Summarize the document.Raiza [00:06:54]: And it was, like, half like a test and half just like, oh, I know the content. I want to see how well it does this. So it was part of the first thing that we launched. It was called Project Tailwind back then. It was just Q&A, so you could chat with the doc just through text, and it would automatically generate a summary as well. I'm not sure if we had it back then.Raiza [00:07:12]: I think we did.Raiza [00:07:12]: It would also generate the key topics in your document, and it could support up to, like, 10 documents. So it wasn't just, like, a single doc.Alessio [00:07:20]: And then the I.O. demo went well, I guess. And then what was the discussion from there to where we are today? Is there any, maybe, intermediate step of the product that people missed between this was launch or?Raiza [00:07:33]: It was interesting because every step of the way, I think we hit, like, some pretty critical milestones. So I think from the initial demo, I think there was so much excitement of, like, wow, what is this thing that Google is launching? And so we capitalized on that. We built the wait list. That's actually when we also launched the Discord server, which has been huge for us because for us in particular, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be able to launch features and get feedback ASAP. Like, the moment somebody tries it, like, I want to hear what they think right now, and I want to ask follow-up questions. And the Discord has just been so great for that. But then we basically took the feedback from I.O., we continued to refine the product.Raiza [00:08:12]: So we added more features.Raiza [00:08:13]: We added sort of, like, the ability to save notes, write notes. We generate follow-up questions. So there's a bunch of stuff in the product that shows, like, a lot of that research. But it was really the rolling out of things. Like, we removed the wait list, so rolled out to all of the United States. We rolled out to over 200 countries and territories. We started supporting more languages, both in the UI and, like, the actual source stuff. We experienced, like, in terms of milestones, there was, like, an explosion of, like, users in Japan. This was super interesting in terms of just, like, unexpected. Like, people would write to us and they would be like, this is amazing. I have to read all of these rules in English, but I can chat in Japanese. It's like, oh, wow. That's true, right? Like, with LLMs, you kind of get this natural, it translates the content for you. And you can ask in your sort of preferred mode. And I think that's not just, like, a language thing, too. I think there's, like, I do this test with Wealth of Nations all the time because it's, like, a pretty complicated text to read. The Evan Smith classic.Swyx [00:09:11]: It's, like, 400 pages or something.Raiza [00:09:12]: Yeah. But I like this test because I'm, like, asking, like, Normie, you know, plain speak. And then it summarizes really well for me. It sort of adapts to my tone.Swyx [00:09:22]: Very capitalist.Raiza [00:09:25]: Very on brand.Swyx [00:09:25]: I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people. Yeah.Raiza [00:09:29]: Crazy.Swyx [00:09:29]: Just, like, for one project within Google. It's not, like, it's not labs. It's just Notebook LM.Raiza [00:09:35]: Just Notebook LM.Swyx [00:09:36]: What do you learn from the community?Raiza [00:09:39]: I think that the Discord is really great for hearing about a couple of things.Raiza [00:09:43]: One, when things are going wrong. I think, honestly, like, our fastest way that we've been able to find out if, like, the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being, like, it saysRaiza [00:09:53]: system unable to answer.Raiza [00:09:54]: Anybody else getting this?Raiza [00:09:56]: And I'm, like, all right, let's go.Raiza [00:09:58]: And it actually catches it a lot faster than, like, our own monitoring does.Raiza [00:10:01]: It's, like, that's been really cool. So, thank you.Swyx [00:10:03]: Canceled eat a dog.Raiza [00:10:05]: So, thank you to everybody. Please keep reporting it. I think the second thing is really the use cases.Raiza [00:10:10]: I think when we put it out there, I was, like, hey, I have a hunch of how people will use it, but, like, to actually hear about, you know, not just the context of, like, the use of Notebook LM, but, like, what is this person's life like? Why do they care about using this tool?Raiza [00:10:23]: Especially people who actually have trouble using it, but they keep pushing.Raiza [00:10:27]: Like, that's just so critical to understand what was so motivating, right?Raiza [00:10:31]: Like, what was your problem that was, like, so worth solving? So, that's, like, a second thing.Raiza [00:10:34]: The third thing is also just hearing sort of, like, when we have wins and when we don't have wins because there's actually a lot of functionality where I'm, like, hmm, IRaiza [00:10:42]: don't know if that landed super well or if that was actually super critical.Raiza [00:10:45]: As part of having this sort of small project, right, I want to be able to unlaunch things, too. So, it's not just about just, like, rolling things out and testing it and being, like, wow, now we have, like, 99 features. Like, hopefully we get to a place where it's, like, there's just a really strong core feature set and the things that aren't as great, we can just unlaunch.Swyx [00:11:02]: What have you unlaunched? I have to ask.Raiza [00:11:04]: I'm in the process of unlaunching some stuff, but, for example, we had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it and it was, like, a very complicated piece of our architecture and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the context of new features. So, we were, like, okay, let's do a 50-50 sunset of this thing and see if anybody complains.Raiza [00:11:28]: And so far, nobody has.Swyx [00:11:29]: Is there, like, a feature flagging paradigm inside of your architecture that lets you feature flag these things easily?Raiza [00:11:36]: Yes, and actually...Raiza [00:11:37]: What is it called?Swyx [00:11:38]: Like, I love feature flagging.Raiza [00:11:40]: You mean, like, in terms of just, like, being able to expose things to users?Swyx [00:11:42]: Yeah, as a PM. Like, this is your number one tool, right?Raiza [00:11:44]: Yeah, yeah.Swyx [00:11:45]: Let's try this out. All right, if it works, roll it out. If it doesn't, roll it back, you know?Raiza [00:11:49]: Yeah, I mean, we just run Mendel experiments for the most part. And, actually, I don't know if you saw it, but on Twitter, somebody was able to get around our flags and they enabled all the experiments.Raiza [00:11:58]: They were, like, check out what the Notebook LM team is cooking.Raiza [00:12:02]: I was, like, oh!Raiza [00:12:03]: And I was at lunch with the rest of the team and I was, like, I was eating. I was, like, guys, guys, Magic Draft League!Raiza [00:12:10]: They were, like, oh, no!Raiza [00:12:12]: I was, like, okay, just finish eating and then let's go figure out what to do.Raiza [00:12:15]: Yeah.Alessio [00:12:15]: I think a post-mortem would be fun, but I don't think we need to do it on the podcast now. Can we just talk about what's behind the magic? So, I think everybody has questions, hypotheses about what models power it. I know you might not be able to share everything, but can you just get people very basic? How do you take the data and put it in the model? What text model you use? What's the text-to-speech kind of, like, jump between the two? Sure.Raiza [00:12:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:12:42]: I was going to say, SRaiza, he manually does all the podcasts.Raiza [00:12:46]: Oh, thank you.Usama [00:12:46]: Really fast. You're very fast, yeah.Raiza [00:12:48]: Both of the voices at once.Usama [00:12:51]: Voice actor.Raiza [00:12:52]: Good, good.Usama [00:12:52]: Yeah, so, for a bit of background, we were building this thing sort of outside Notebook LM to begin with. Like, just the idea is, like, content transformation, right? Like, we can do different modalities. Like, everyone knows that. Everyone's been poking at it. But, like, how do you make it really useful? And, like, one of the ways we thought was, like, okay, like, you maybe, like, you know, people learn better when they're hearing things. But TTS exists, and you can, like, narrate whatever's on screen. But you want to absorb it the same way. So, like, that's where we sort of started out into the realm of, like, maybe we try, like, you know, two people are having a conversation kind of format. We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in Notebook, right? Like, Notebook was sort of, we built this demo out independently, tried out, like, a few different sort of sources. The main idea was, like, go from some sort of sources and transform it into a listenable, engaging audio format. And then through that process, we, like, unlocked a bunch more sort of learnings. Like, for example, in a sense, like, you're not prompting the model as much because, like, the information density is getting unrolled by the model prompting itself, in a sense. Because there's two speakers, and they're both technically, like, AI personas, right? That have different angles of looking at things. And, like, they'll have a discussion about it. And that sort of, we realized that's kind of what was making it riveting, in a sense. Like, you care about what comes next, even if you've read the material already. Because, like, people say they get new insights on their own journals or books or whatever. Like, anything that they've written themselves. So, yeah, from a modeling perspective, like, it's, like Reiza said earlier, like, we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So, they're always cooking up new techniques to, like, get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So, we sort of, like, generally put those things together in a way that we could reliably produce the audio.Raiza [00:14:52]: I would add, like, there's something really nuanced, I think, about sort of the evolution of, like, the utility of text-to-speech. Where, if it's just reading an actual text response, and I've done this several times. I do it all the time with, like, reading my text messages. Or, like, sometimes I'm trying to read, like, a really dense paper, but I'm trying to do actual work. I'll have it, like, read out the screen. There is something really robotic about it that is not engaging. And it's really hard to consume content in that way. And it's never been really effective. Like, particularly for me, where I'm, like, hey, it's actually just, like, it's fine for, like, short stuff. Like, texting, but even that, it's, like, not that great. So, I think the frontier of experimentation here was really thinking about there is a transform that needs to happen in between whatever.Raiza [00:15:38]: Here's, like, my resume, right?Raiza [00:15:39]: Or here's, like, a 100-page slide deck or something. There is a transform that needs to happen that is inherently editorial. And I think this is where, like, that two-person persona, right, dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of, like, brings the content to life in a way that's, like, not robotic. And I think that's, like, where the magic is, is, like, you don't actually know what's going to happen when you press generate.Raiza [00:16:08]: You know, for better or for worse.Raiza [00:16:09]: Like, to the extent that, like, people are, like, no, I actually want it to be more predictable now. Like, I want to be able to tell them. But I think that initial, like, wow was because you didn't know, right? When you upload your resume, what's it about to say about you? And I think I've seen enough of these where I'm, like, oh, it gave you good vibes, right? Like, you knew it was going to say, like, something really cool. As we start to shape this product, I think we want to try to preserve as much of that wow as much as we can. Because I do think, like, exposing, like, all the knobs and, like, the dials, like, we've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, hey, is that, like, the actual thing?Raiza [00:16:43]: Is that the thing that people really want?Alessio [00:16:45]: Have you found differences in having one model just generate the conversation and then using text-to-speech to kind of fake two people? Or, like, are you actually using two different kind of system prompts to, like, have a conversation step-by-step? I'm always curious, like, if persona system prompts make a big difference? Or, like, you just put in one prompt and then you just let it run?Usama [00:17:05]: I guess, like, generally we use a lot of inference, as you can tell with, like, the spinning thing takes a while. So, yeah, there's definitely, like, a bunch of different things happening under the hood. We've tried both approaches and they have their, sort of, drawbacks and benefits. I think that that idea of, like, questioning, like, the two different personas, like, persists throughout, like, whatever approach we try. It's like, there's a bit of, like, imperfection in there. Like, we had to really lean into the fact that, like, to build something that's engaging, like, it needs to be somewhat human and it needs to be just not a chatbot. Like, that was sort of, like, what we need to diverge from. It's like, you know, most chatbots will just narrate the same kind of answer, like, given the same sources, for the most part, which is ridiculous. So, yeah, there's, like, experimentation there under the hood, like, with the model to, like, make sure that it's spitting out, like, different takes and different personas and different, sort of, prompting each other is, like, a good analogy, I guess.Swyx [00:18:00]: Yeah, I think Steven Johnson, I think he's on your team. I don't know what his role is. He seems like chief dreamer, writer.Raiza [00:18:08]: Yeah, I mean, I can comment on Steven. So, Steven joined, actually, in the very early days, I think before it was even a fully funded project. And I remember when he joined, I was like, Steven Johnson's going to be on my team? You know, and for folks who don't know him, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author of, like, 14 books. He has a PBS show. He's, like, incredibly smart, just, like, a true, sort of, celebrity by himself. And then he joined Google, and he was like, I want to come here, and I want to build the thing that I've always dreamed of, which is a tool to help me think. I was like, a what? Like, a tool to help you think? I was like, what do you need help with? Like, you seem to be doing great on your own. And, you know, he would describe this to me, and I would watch his flow. And aside from, like, providing a lot of inspiration, to be honest, like, when I watched Steven work, I was like, oh, nobody works like this, right? Like, this is what makes him special. Like, he is such a dedicated, like, researcher and journalist, and he's so thorough, he's so smart. And then I had this realization of, like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to, like, everyday people that could really benefit from this. Like, just watching him work, I was like, oh, I could definitely use, like, a mini-Steven, like, doing work for me. Like, that would make me a better PM. And then I thought very quickly about, like, the adjacent roles that could use sort of this, like, research and analysis tool. And so, aside from being, you know, chief dreamer, Steven also represents, like, a super workflow that I think all of us, like, if we had access to a tool like it, would just inherently, like, make us better.Swyx [00:19:46]: Did you make him express his thoughts while he worked, or you just silently watched him, or how does this work?Raiza [00:19:52]: Oh, now you're making me admit it. But yes, I did just silently watch him.Swyx [00:19:57]: This is a part of the PM toolkit, right? They give user interviews and all that.Raiza [00:20:00]: Yeah, I mean, I did interview him, but I noticed, like, if I interviewed him, it was different than if I just watched him. And I did the same thing with students all the time. Like, I followed a lot of students around. I watched them study. I would ask them, like, oh, how do you feel now, right?Raiza [00:20:15]: Or why did you do that? Like, what made you do that, actually?Raiza [00:20:18]: Or why are you upset about, like, this particular thing? Why are you cranky about this particular topic? And it was very similar, I think, for Steven, especially because he was describing, he was in the middle of writing a book. And he would describe, like, oh, you know, here's how I research things, and here's how I keep my notes. Oh, and here's how I do it. And it was really, he was doing this sort of, like, self-questioning, right? Like, now we talk about, like, chain of, you know, reasoning or thought, reflection.Raiza [00:20:44]: And I was like, oh, he's the OG.Raiza [00:20:46]: Like, I watched him do it in real time. I was like, that's, like, L-O-M right there. And to be able to bring sort of that expertise in a way that was, like, you know, maybe, like, costly inference-wise, but really have, like, that ability inside of a tool that was, like, for starters, free inside of NotebookLM, it was good to learn whether or not people really did find use out of it.Swyx [00:21:05]: So did he just commit to using NotebookLM for everything, or did you just model his existing workflow?Raiza [00:21:12]: Both, right?Raiza [00:21:12]: Like, in the beginning, there was no product for him to use. And so he just kept describing the thing that he wanted. And then eventually, like, we started building the thing. And then I would start watching him use it. One of the things that I love about Steven is he uses the product in ways where it kind of does it, but doesn't quite. Like, he's always using it at, like, the absolute max limit of this thing. But the way that he describes it is so full of promise, where he's like, I can see it going here. And all I have to do is sort of, like, meet him there and sort of pressure test whether or not, you know, everyday people want it. And we just have to build it.Swyx [00:21:47]: I would say OpenAI has a pretty similar person, Andrew Mason, I think his name is. It's very similar, like, just from the writing world and using it as a tool for thought to shape Chachabitty. I don't think that people who use AI tools to their limit are common. I'm looking at my NotebookLM now. I've got two sources. You have a little, like, source limit thing. And my bar is over here, you know, and it stretches across the whole thing. I'm like, did he fill it up?Raiza [00:22:09]: Yes, and he has, like, a higher limit than others, I think. He fills it up.Raiza [00:22:14]: Oh, yeah.Raiza [00:22:14]: Like, I don't think Steven even has a limit, actually.Swyx [00:22:17]: And he has Notes, Google Drive stuff, PDFs, MP3, whatever.Raiza [00:22:22]: Yes, and one of my favorite demos, he just did this recently, is he has actually PDFs of, like, handwritten Marie Curie notes. I see.Swyx [00:22:29]: So you're doing image recognition as well. Yeah, it does support it today.Raiza [00:22:32]: So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it.Raiza [00:22:36]: But his demo is just, like, super powerful.Raiza [00:22:37]: He's like, okay, here's Marie Curie's notes. And it's like, here's how I'm using it to analyze it. And I'm using it for, like, this thing that I'm writing.Raiza [00:22:44]: And that's really compelling.Raiza [00:22:45]: It's like the everyday person doesn't think of these applications. And I think even, like, when I listen to Steven's demo, I see the gap. I see how Steven got there, but I don't see how I could without him. And so there's a lot of work still for us to build of, like, hey, how do I bring that magic down to, like, zero work? Because I look at all the steps that he had to take in order to do it, and I'm like, okay, that's product work for us, right? Like, that's just onboarding.Alessio [00:23:09]: And so from an engineering perspective, people come to you and it's like, hey, I need to use this handwritten notes from Marie Curie from hundreds of years ago. How do you think about adding support for, like, data sources and then maybe any fun stories and, like, supporting more esoteric types of inputs?Raiza [00:23:25]: So I think about the product in three ways, right? So there's the sources, the source input. There's, like, the capabilities of, like, what you could do with those sources. And then there's the third space, which is how do you output it into the world? Like, how do you put it back out there? There's a lot of really basic sources that we don't support still, right? I think there's sort of, like, the handwritten notes stuff is one, but even basic things like DocX or, like, PowerPoint, right? Like, these are the things that people, everyday people are like, hey, my professor actually gave me everything in DocX. Can you support that? And then just, like, basic stuff, like images and PDFs combined with text. Like, there's just a really long roadmap for sources that I think we just have to work on.Raiza [00:24:04]: So that's, like, a big piece of it.Raiza [00:24:05]: On the output side, and I think this is, like, one of the most interesting things that we learned really early on, is, sure, there's, like, the Q&A analysis stuff, which is like, hey, when did this thing launch? Okay, you found it in the slide deck. Here's the answer. But most of the time, the reason why people ask those questions is because they're trying to make something new. And so when, actually, when some of those early features leaked, like, a lot of the features we're experimenting with are the output types. And so you can imagine that people care a lot about the resources that they're putting into NotebookLM because they're trying to create something new. So I think equally as important as, like, the source inputs are the outputs that we're helping people to create. And really, like, you know, shortly on the roadmap, we're thinking about how do we help people use NotebookLM to distribute knowledge? And that's, like, one of the most compelling use cases is, like, shared notebooks. It's, like, a way to share knowledge. How do we help people take sources and, like, one-click new documents out of it, right? And I think that's something that people think is, like, oh, yeah, of course, right? Like, one push a document. But what does it mean to do it right? Like, to do it in your style, in your brand, right?Raiza [00:25:08]: To follow your guidelines, stuff like that.Raiza [00:25:09]: So I think there's a lot of work, like, on both sides of that equation.Raiza [00:25:13]: Interesting.Swyx [00:25:13]: Any comments on the engineering side of things?Usama [00:25:16]: So, yeah, like I said, I was mostly working on building the text to audio, which kind of lives as a separate engineering pipeline, almost, that we then put into NotebookLM. But I think there's probably tons of NotebookLM engineering war stories on dealing with sources. And so I don't work too closely with engineers directly. But I think a lot of it does come down to, like, Gemini's native understanding of images really well with the latest generation.Raiza [00:25:39]: Yeah, I think on the engineering and modeling side, I think we are a really good example of a team that's put a product out there, and we're getting a lot of feedback from the users, and we return the data to the modeling team, right? To the extent that we say, hey, actually, you know what people are uploading, but we can't really support super well?Raiza [00:25:56]: Text plus image, right?Raiza [00:25:57]: Especially to the extent that, like, NotebookLM can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each. Like, you're not going to be able to jam all of that into, like, the context window. So how do we do multimodal embeddings with that? There's really, like, a lot of things that we have to solve that are almost there, but not quite there yet.Alessio [00:26:16]: On then turning it into audio, I think one of the best things is it has so many of the human... Does that happen in the text generation that then becomes audio? Or is that a part of, like, the audio model that transforms the text?Usama [00:26:27]: It's a bit of both, I would say. The audio model is definitely trying to mimic, like, certain human intonations and, like, sort of natural, like, breathing and pauses and, like, laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating, like, the text, we also have to sort of give signals on, like, where those things maybe would make sense.Alessio [00:26:45]: And on the input side, instead of having a transcript versus having the audio, like, can you take some of the emotions out of it, too? If I'm giving, like, for example, when we did the recaps of our podcast, we can either give audio of the pod or we can give a diarized transcription of it. But, like, the transcription doesn't have some of the, you know, voice kind of, like, things.Raiza [00:27:05]: Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:27:05]: Do you reconstruct that when people upload audio or how does that work?Raiza [00:27:09]: So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that, like, we don't transcribe, like, the emotion from that as a source. But when you do upload a text file and it has a lot of, like, that annotation, I think that there is some ability for it to be reused in, like, the audio output, right? But I think it will still contextualize it in the deep dive format. So I think that's something that's, like, particularly important is, like, hey, today we only have one format.Raiza [00:27:37]: It's deep dive.Raiza [00:27:38]: It's meant to be a pretty general overview and it is pretty peppy.Raiza [00:27:42]: It's just very upbeat.Raiza [00:27:43]: It's very enthusiastic, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Even if you had, like, a sad topic, I think they would find a way to be, like, silver lining, though.Raiza [00:27:50]: Really?Raiza [00:27:51]: Yeah.Raiza [00:27:51]: We're having a good chat.Raiza [00:27:54]: Yeah, that's awesome.Swyx [00:27:54]: One of the ways, many, many, many ways that deep dive went viral is people saying, like, if you want to feel good about yourself, just drop in your LinkedIn. Any other, like, favorite use cases that you saw from people discovering things in social media?Raiza [00:28:08]: I mean, there's so many funny ones and I love the funny ones.Raiza [00:28:11]: I think because I'm always relieved when I watch them. I'm like, haha, that was funny and not scary. It's great.Raiza [00:28:17]: There was another one that was interesting, which was a startup founder putting their landing page and being like, all right, let's test whether or not, like, the value prop is coming through. And I was like, wow, that's right.Raiza [00:28:26]: That's smart.Usama [00:28:27]: Yeah.Raiza [00:28:28]: And then I saw a couple of other people following up on that, too.Raiza [00:28:32]: Yeah.Swyx [00:28:32]: I put my about page in there and, like, yeah, if there are things that I'm not comfortable with, I should remove it. You know, so that it can pick it up. Right.Usama [00:28:39]: I think that the personal hype machine was, like, a pretty viral one. I think, like, people uploaded their dreams and, like, some people, like, keep sort of dream journals and it, like, would sort of comment on those and, like, it was therapeutic. I didn't see those.Raiza [00:28:54]: Those are good. I hear from Googlers all the time, especially because we launched it internally first. And I think we launched it during the, you know, the Q3 sort of, like, check-in cycle. So all Googlers have to write notes about, like, hey, you know, what'd you do in Q3? And what Googlers were doing is they would write, you know, whatever they accomplished in Q3 and then they would create an audio overview. And these people they didn't know would just ping me and be like, wow, I feel really good, like, going into a meeting with my manager.Raiza [00:29:25]: And I was like, good, good, good, good. You really did that, right?Usama [00:29:29]: I think another cool one is just, like, any Wikipedia article. Yeah. Like, you drop it in and it's just, like, suddenly, like, the best sort of summary overview.Raiza [00:29:38]: I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like, he has now a Spotify channel called Histories of Mysteries, which is basically, like, he just took, like, interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.Swyx [00:29:50]: Yeah, he became a podcaster overnight.Raiza [00:29:52]: Yeah.Raiza [00:29:53]: I'm here for it. I fully support him.Raiza [00:29:55]: I'm racking up the listens for him.Swyx [00:29:58]: Honestly, it's useful even without the audio. You know, I feel like the audio does add an element to it, but I always want, you know, paired audio and text. And it's just amazing to see what people are organically discovering. I feel like it's because you laid the groundwork with NotebookLM and then you came in and added the sort of TTS portion and made it so good, so human, which is weird. Like, it's this engineering process of humans. Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Do you have evals?Raiza [00:30:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:30:23]: Yes.Raiza [00:30:24]: What? Potatoes for chefs.Swyx [00:30:27]: What is that? What do you mean, potatoes?Raiza [00:30:29]: Oh, sorry.Raiza [00:30:29]: Sorry. We were joking with this, like, a couple of weeks ago. We were doing, like, side-by-sides. But, like, Raiza sent me the file and it was literally called Potatoes for Chefs. And I was like, you know, my job is really serious, but you have to laugh a little bit. Like, the title of the file is, like, Potatoes for Chefs.Swyx [00:30:47]: Is it like a training document for chefs?Usama [00:30:50]: It's just a side-by-side for, like, two different kind of audio transcripts.Swyx [00:30:54]: The question is really, like, as you iterate, the typical engineering advice is you establish some kind of test or benchmark. You're at, like, 30 percent. You want to get it up to 90, right?Raiza [00:31:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:05]: What does that look like for making something sound human and interesting and voice?Usama [00:31:11]: We have the sort of formal eval process as well. But I think, like, for this particular project, we maybe took a slightly different route to begin with. Like, there was a lot of just within the team listening sessions. A lot of, like, sort of, like... Dogfooding.Raiza [00:31:23]: Yeah.Usama [00:31:23]: Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages.Raiza [00:32:02]: I think you just have to be really opinionated.Raiza [00:32:05]: I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product.Raiza [00:32:12]: Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right?Raiza [00:32:15]: Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.Swyx [00:32:43]: Was the sound model done and frozen before you started doing all this? Or are you also saying, hey, we need to improve the sound model as well? Both.Usama [00:32:51]: Yeah, we were making improvements on the audio and just, like, generating the transcript as well. I think another weird thing here was, like, we needed to be entertaining. And that's much harder to quantify than some of the other benchmarks that you can make for, like, you know, Sweebench or get better at this math.Swyx [00:33:10]: Do you just have people rate one to five or, you know, or just thumbs up and down?Usama [00:33:14]: For the formal rater evals, we have sort of like a Likert scale and, like, a bunch of different dimensions there. But we had to sort of break down what makes it entertaining into, like, a bunch of different factors. But I think the team stage of that was more critical. It was like, we need to make sure that, like, what is making it fun and engaging? Like, we dialed that as far as it goes. And while we're making other changes that are necessary, like, obviously, they shouldn't make stuff up or, you know, be insensitive.Raiza [00:33:41]: Hallucinations. Safety.Swyx [00:33:42]: Other safety things.Raiza [00:33:43]: Right.Swyx [00:33:43]: Like a bunch of safety stuff.Raiza [00:33:45]: Yeah, exactly.Usama [00:33:45]: So, like, with all of that and, like, also just, you know, following sort of a coherent narrative and structure is really important. But, like, with all of this, we really had to make sure that that central tenet of being entertaining and engaging and something you actually want to listen to. It just doesn't go away, which takes, like, a lot of just active listening time because you're closest to the prompts, the model and everything.Swyx [00:34:07]: I think sometimes the difficulty is because we're dealing with non-deterministic models, sometimes you just got a bad roll of the dice and it's always on the distribution that you could get something bad. Basically, how many do you, like, do ten runs at a time? And then how do you get rid of the non-determinism?Raiza [00:34:23]: Right.Usama [00:34:23]: Yeah, that's bad luck.Raiza [00:34:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah.Usama [00:34:26]: I mean, there still will be, like, bad audio overviews. There's, like, a bunch of them that happens. Do you mean for, like, the raider? For raiders, right?Swyx [00:34:34]: Like, what if that one person just got, like, a really bad rating? You actually had a great prompt, you actually had a great model, great weights, whatever. And you just, you had a bad output.Usama [00:34:42]: Like, and that's okay, right?Raiza [00:34:44]: I actually think, like, the way that these are constructed, if you think about, like, the different types of controls that the user has, right? Like, what can the user do today to affect it?Usama [00:34:54]: We push a button.Raiza [00:34:55]: You just push a button.Swyx [00:34:56]: I have tried to prompt engineer by changing the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:34:59]: Changing the title, people have found out.Raiza [00:35:02]: Yeah.Raiza [00:35:02]: The title of the notebook, people have found out. You can add show notes, right? You can get them to think, like, the show has changed. Someone changed the language of the output. Changing the language of the output. Like, those are less well-tested because we focused on, like, this one aspect. So it did change the way that we sort of think about quality as well, right? So it's like, quality is on the dimensions of entertainment, of course, like, consistency, groundedness. But in general, does it follow the structure of the deep dive? And I think when we talk about, like, non-determinism, it's like, well, as long as it follows, like, the structure of the deep dive, right? It sort of inherently meets all those other qualities. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to ship something with confidence to the extent that it's like, I know it's going to make a deep dive. It's going to make a good deep dive. Whether or not the person likes it, I don't know. But as we expand to new formats, as we open up controls, I think that's where it gets really much harder. Even with the show notes, right? Like, people don't know what they're going to get when they do that. And we see that already where it's like, this is going to be a lot harder to validate in terms of quality, where now we'll get a greater distribution. Whereas I don't think we really got, like, varied distribution because of, like, that pre-process that Raiza was talking about. And also because of the way that we'd constrain, like, what were we measuring for? Literally, just like, is it a deep dive?Swyx [00:36:18]: And you determine what a deep dive is. Yeah. Everything needs a PM. Yeah, I have, this is very similar to something I've been thinking about for AI products in general. There's always like a chief tastemaker. And for Notebook LM, it seems like it's a combination of you and Steven.Raiza [00:36:31]: Well, okay.Raiza [00:36:32]: I want to take a step back.Swyx [00:36:33]: And Raiza, I mean, presumably for the voice stuff.Raiza [00:36:35]: Raiza's like the head chef, right? Of, like, deep dive, I think. Potatoes.Raiza [00:36:40]: Of potatoes.Raiza [00:36:41]: And I say this because I think even though we are already a very opinionated team, and Steven, for sure, very opinionated, I think of the audio generations, like, Raiza was the most opinionated, right? And we all, like, would say, like, hey, I remember, like, one of the first ones he sent me.Raiza [00:36:57]: I was like, oh, I feel like they should introduce themselves. I feel like they should say a title. But then, like, we would catch things, like, maybe they shouldn't say their names.Raiza [00:37:04]: Yeah, they don't say their names.Usama [00:37:05]: That was a Steven catch, like, not give them names.Raiza [00:37:08]: So stuff like that is, like, we all injected, like, a little bit of just, like, hey, here's, like, my take on, like, how a podcast should be, right? And I think, like, if you're a person who, like, regularly listens to podcasts, there's probably some collective preference there that's generic enough that you can standardize into, like, the deep dive format. But, yeah, it's the new formats where I think, like, oh, that's the next test. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:30]: I've tried to make a clone, by the way. Of course, everyone did. Yeah. Everyone in AI was like, oh, no, this is so easy. I'll just take a TTS model. Obviously, our models are not as good as yours, but I tried to inject a consistent character backstory, like, age, identity, where they work, where they went to school, what their hobbies are. Then it just, the models try to bring it in too much.Raiza [00:37:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:49]: I don't know if you tried this.Raiza [00:37:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:51]: So then I'm like, okay, like, how do I define a personality? But it doesn't keep coming up every single time. Yeah.Raiza [00:37:58]: I mean, we have, like, a really, really good, like, character designer on our team.Raiza [00:38:02]: What?Swyx [00:38:03]: Like a D&D person?Raiza [00:38:05]: Just to say, like, we, just like we had to be opinionated about the format, we had to be opinionated about who are those two people talking.Raiza [00:38:11]: Okay.Raiza [00:38:12]: Right.Raiza [00:38:12]: And then to the extent that, like, you can design the format, you should be able to design the people as well.Raiza [00:38:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:18]: I would love, like, a, you know, like when you play Baldur's Gate, like, you roll, you roll like 17 on Charisma and like, it's like what race they are. I don't know.Raiza [00:38:27]: I recently, actually, I was just talking about character select screens.Raiza [00:38:30]: Yeah. I was like, I love that, right.Raiza [00:38:32]: And I was like, maybe there's something to be learned there because, like, people have fallen in love with the deep dive as a, as a format, as a technology, but also as just like those two personas.Raiza [00:38:44]: Now, when you hear a deep dive and you've heard them, you're like, I know those two.Raiza [00:38:48]: Right.Raiza [00:38:48]: And people, it's so funny when I, when people are trying to find out their names, like, it's a, it's a worthy task.Raiza [00:38:54]: It's a worthy goal.Raiza [00:38:55]: I know what you're doing. But the next step here is to sort of introduce, like, is this like what people want?Raiza [00:39:00]: People want to sort of edit the personas or do they just want more of them?Swyx [00:39:04]: I'm sure you're getting a lot of opinions and they all, they all conflict with each other. Before we move on, I have to ask, because we're kind of on this topic. How do you make audio engaging? Because it's useful, not just for deep dive, but also for us as podcasters. What is, what does engaging mean? If you could break it down for us, that'd be great.Usama [00:39:22]: I mean, I can try. Like, don't, don't claim to be an expert at all.Swyx [00:39:26]: So I'll give you some, like variation in tone and speed. You know, there's this sort of writing advice where, you know, this sentence is five words. This sentence is three, that kind of advice where you, where you vary things, you have excitement, you have laughter, all that stuff. But I'd be curious how else you break down.Usama [00:39:42]: So there's the basics, like obviously structure that can't be meandering, right? Like there needs to be sort of a, an ultimate goal that the voices are trying to get to, human or artificial. I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information. For example, like as you listen to a story unfold, like you're going to learn more and more about it. And audio that maybe becomes even more important because like you actually don't have the ability to just like skim to the end of something. You're driving or something like you're going to be hooked because like there's, and that's how like, that's how a lot of podcasts work. Like maybe not interviews necessarily, but a lot of true crime, a lot of entertainment in general. There's just like a gradual unrolling of information. And that also like sort of goes back to the content transformation aspect of it. Like maybe you are going from, let's say the Wikipedia article of like one of the History of Mysteries, maybe episodes. Like the Wikipedia article is going to state out the information very differently. It's like, here's what happened would probably be in the very first paragraph. And one approach we could have done is like maybe a person's just narrating that thing. And maybe that would work for like a certain audience. Or I guess that's how I would picture like a standard history lesson to unfold. But like, because we're trying to put it in this two-person dialogue format, like there, we inject like the fact that, you know, there's, you don't give everything at first. And then you set up like differing opinions of the same topic or the same, like maybe you seize on a topic and go deeper into it and then try to bring yourself back out of it and go back to the main narrative. So that's, that's mostly from like the setting up the script perspective. And then the audio, I was saying earlier, it's trying to be as close to just human speech as possible. I think was the, what we found success with so far.Raiza [00:41:40]: Yeah. Like with interjections, right?Raiza [00:41:41]: Like I think like when you listen to two people talk, there's a lot of like, yeah, yeah, right. And then there's like a lot of like that questioning, like, oh yeah, really?Raiza [00:41:49]: What did you think?Swyx [00:41:50]: I noticed that. That's great.Raiza [00:41:52]: Totally.Usama [00:41:54]: Exactly.Swyx [00:41:55]: My question is, do you pull in speech experts to do this? Or did you just come up with it yourselves? You can be like, okay, talk to a whole bunch of fiction writers to, to make things engaging or comedy writers or whatever, stand up comedy, right? They have to make audio engaging, but audio as well. Like there's professional fields of studying where people do this for a living, but us as AI engineers are just making this up as we go.Raiza [00:42:19]: I mean, it's a great idea, but you definitely didn't.Raiza [00:42:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:24]: My guess is you didn't.Raiza [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:26]: There's a, there's a certain field of authority that people have. They're like, oh, like you can't do this because you don't have any experience like making engaging audio. But that's what you literally did.Raiza [00:42:35]: Right.Usama [00:42:35]: I mean, I was literally chatting with someone at Google earlier today about how some people think that like you need a linguistics person in the room for like making a good chatbot. But that's not actually true because like this person went to school for linguistics. And according to him, he's an engineer now. According to him, like most of his classmates were not actually good at language. Like they knew how to analyze language and like sort of the mathematical patterns and rhythms and language. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were going to be eloquent at like while speaking or writing. So I think, yeah, a lot of we haven't invested in specialists in audio format yet, but maybe that would.Raiza [00:43:13]: I think it's like super interesting because I think there is like a very human question of like what makes something interesting. And there's like a very deep question of like what is it, right? Like what is the quality that we are all looking for? Is it does somebody have to be funny? Does something have to be entertaining? Does something have to be straight to the point? And I think when you try to distill that, this is the interesting thing I think about our experiment, about this particular launch is first, we only launched one format. And so we sort of had to squeeze everything we believed about what an interesting thing is into one package. And as a result of it, I think we learned it's like, hey, interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting, right? It's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting.Raiza [00:43:59]: It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting.Raiza [00:44:02]: Spell strawberry, right?Raiza [00:44:04]: This is like the fun that like people have with it. But like that's not the LLM being interesting.Raiza [00:44:08]: That's you just like kind of giving it your own flavor. But it's like, what does it mean to sort of flip it on its head and say, no, you be interesting now, right? Like you give the chatbot the opportunity to do it. And this is not a chatbot per se. It is like just the audio. And it's like the texture, I think, that really brings it to life. And it's like the things that we've described here, which is like, okay, now I have to like lead you down a path of information about like this commercialization deck.Raiza [00:44:36]: It's like, how do you do that?Raiza [00:44:38]: To be able to successfully do it, I do think that you need experts. I think we'll engage with experts like down the road, but I think it will have to be in the context of, well, what's the next thing we're building, right? It's like, what am I trying to change here? What do I fundamentally believe needs to be improved? And I think there's still like a lot more studying that we have to do in terms of like, well, what are people actually using this for? And we're just in such early days. Like it hasn't even been a month. Two, three weeks.Usama [00:45:05]: Three weeks.Raiza [00:45:06]: Yeah, yeah.Usama [00:45:07]: I think one other element to that is the fact that you're bringing your own sources to it. Like it's your stuff. Like, you know this somewhat well, or you care to know about this. So like that, I think, changed the equation on its head as well. It's like your sources and someone's telling you about it. So like you care about how that dynamic is, but you just care for it to be good enough to be entertaining. Because ultimately they're talking about your mortgage deed or whatever.Swyx [00:45:33]: So it's interesting just from the topic itself. Even taking out all the agreements and the hiding of the slow reveal. I mean, there's a baseline, maybe.Usama [00:45:42]: Like if it was like too drab. Like if someone was reading it off, like, you know, that's like the absolute worst.Raiza [00:45:46]: But like...Swyx [00:45:47]: Do you prompt for humor? That's a tough one, right?Raiza [00:45:51]: I think it's more of a generic way to bring humor out if possible. I think humor is actually one of the hardest things. Yeah.Raiza [00:46:00]: But I don't know if you saw...Raiza [00:46:00]: That is AGI.Swyx [00:46:01]: Humor is AGI.Raiza [00:46:02]: Yeah, but did you see the chicken one?Raiza [00:46:03]: No.Raiza [00:46:04]: Okay. If you haven't heard it... We'll splice it in here.Swyx [00:46:06]: Okay.Raiza [00:46:07]: Yeah.Raiza [00:46:07]: There is a video on Threads. I think it was by Martino Wong. And it's a PDF.Raiza [00:46:16]: Welcome to your deep dive for today. Oh, yeah. Get ready for a fun one. Buckle up. Because we are diving into... Chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. You got that right. By Doug Zonker. Now. And yes, you heard that title correctly. Titles. Our listener today submitted this paper. Yeah, they're going to need our help. And I can totally see why. Absolutely. It's dense. It's baffling. It's a lot. And it's packed with more chicken than a KFC buffet. What? That's hilarious.Raiza [00:46:48]: That's so funny. So it's like stuff like that, that's like truly delightful, truly surprising.Raiza [00:46:53]: But it's like we didn't tell it to be funny.Usama [00:46:55]: Humor is contextual also. Like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.Alessio [00:47:04]: I think the thing about ad-generated content, if we look at YouTube, like we do videos on YouTube and it's like, you know, a lot of people like screaming in the thumbnails to get clicks. There's like everybody, there's kind of like a meta of like what you need to do to get clicks. But I think in your product, there's no actual creator on the other side investing the time. So you can actually generate a type of content that is maybe not universally appealing, you know, at a much, yeah, exactly. I think that's the most interesting thing. It's like, well, is there a way for like, take Mr.Raiza [00:47:36]: Beast, right?Alessio [00:47:36]: It's like Mr. Beast optimizes videos to reach the biggest audience and like the most clicks. But what if every video could be kind of like regenerated to be closer to your taste, you know, when you watch it?Raiza [00:47:48]: I think that's kind of the promise of AI that I think we are just like touching on, which is, I think every time I've gotten information from somebody, they have delivered it to me in their preferred method, right?Raiza [00:47:59]: Like if somebody gives me a PDF, it's a PDF.Raiza [00:48:01]: Somebody gives me a hundred slide deck, that is the format in which I'm going to read it. But I think we are now living in the era where transformations are really possible, which is, look, like I don't want to read your hundred slide deck, but I'll listen to a 16 minute audio overview on the drive home. And that, that I think is, is really novel. And that is, is paving the way in a way that like maybe we wanted, but didn'tRaiza [00:48:24]: expect.Raiza [00:48:25]: Where I also think you're listening to a lot of content that normally wouldn't have had content made about it. Like I watched this TikTok where this woman uploaded her diary from 2004.Raiza [00:48:36]: For sure, right?Raiza [00:48:36]: Like nobody was goin

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Jason, and guest Seth Tucker dive deep into discussions about tech, programming, and AI developments. They explore topics like managing complex software systems, the challenges and benefits of using AI to enhance productivity, and reflections on legacy systems. Seth also shares insights on the open-source Amber Framework, his work on AI projects, an app he created called llamero, and some thoughts on the evolution of programming. You'll also hear some personal stories that include woodworking, old tools, and even Costco hotdogs. Hit download now to hear more!Seth Tucker on GitHubLlameroHoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Jason Charnes X/Twitter Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter

In hour 3 of The Drive, Zach and Phil are joined by DenverSports.com Senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason. Mase discusses the Broncos injury report, the Broncos running game opening up the passing game, and Devaughn Vele. Will the New Orleans crowd have any effect on Bo Nix and the Bronco offense? Will tonight be a Bo Nix breakout game? We look back at Sean Payton’s history of prime-time games. Phil shares a story from the only other time Payton started a rookie QB during a prime-time game but playing for the other team. Zach asks Phil and the listeners, what would qualify as a breakout game for Bo Nix. How many passing yards? How many touchdowns? And how many total points for the Broncos? DenverSports.com’s James Merilatt joins the show to discuss who deserves the blame for the Broncos offensive struggles, the Saints terrible defense, and the Broncos playmakers.

Descript CEO and founder Andrew Mason joins Lightspeed Partner and Host Michael Mignano on the podcast to talk about the future of content creation with AI tools. Michael and Andrew talk about the evolution of Descript as an AI product designed for podcast and video creators, navigating a world of synthetic content, and Descript's new features including Descript Rooms and Underlord. Andrew talks about raising a $50 Million Series C led by OpenAI Startup Fund and how seeing an early version of ChatGPT inspired confidence in Descript's foundational vision and goal to simplify media production.   Episode Chapters (00:00) Introduction(00:09) Introducing Descript Rooms(01:10) Descript's Versatility with Media Creation(04:22) Social Clips and Longform Content(07:15) Craft and Control in AI in Content Creation(13:16) Descript AI Tools, OpenAI, and ChatGPT(17:30) Multimodality and Improving Quality(26:17) Trust and Adoption of AI Features(29:29) Detour and Groupon(37:31) Closing Thoughts Stay in touch: ⁠www.lsvp.com⁠ X: ⁠https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/⁠ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: ⁠generativenow.co⁠ Email: generativenow@lsvp.com The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. For more details please see ⁠lsvp.com/legal⁠.

In this episode, Chris and Andrew welcome David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) todiscuss the release of Rails 8, starting with a recap of the Rails World Toronto conference. DHH shares insights on the growing Rails community, the challenges of planning large-scale conferences, and Rails' philosophy of staying independent from venture capital. They dive into developer ergonomics in Rails 8, new deployment and notification tools like Kamal, Action Notifier, House (MD), and Propshaft, and upcoming features like ActiveRecord Search. The episode also covers accessibility improvements, Rails' approach to frontend frameworks, and DHH's long-term vision for the platform. Hit download now to hear more!HoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Jason Charnes X/Twitter Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter

In the 2nd hour, Dover and Cecil heard from Deion Sanders on if he's noticed people changing their tune after their win over UCF. Andrew Mason joined the show to explain why the Broncos brought back Cameron Fleming. How impressed is Mase with the Broncos' secondary? The guys previewed tonight's Avs game against Vegas. The fellas reacted to the latest news of a number of Broncos having really good chances of winning some big-time awards this year. 

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth start the fourth hour with a clarification on their analysis of Bo. Stink gets his chance to give Stoke some grief about the Wallen cringe entrance. The guys are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to go through his numbers article after the Broncos' big win over the Raiders. Mike, Stoke, and Stink give their quick takes on the best sound bites we could find. 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil breakdown the Broncos playoff probability. What would a win on Sunday vs the Chargers mean for their playoff chances? The new projections have the Broncos at a 9-8 season, would the guys take that record, or would they risk going for a better record? Although the Broncos offense has had struggles, how much credit does Sean Payton deserve for the overall success of the team? DenverSports.com’s Broncos writer, Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss the spat between Bo Nix and Sean Payton, Troy Franklin, and Greg Dulcich. We wrap up the show with what the guys learned today in Denver sports. What does a win on Sunday vs the Chargers mean for the Broncos season? Now that we know that Derek Carr will miss time, should the Broncos be expected to win their Thursday Night Football matchup vs the Saints in two weeks?

In the 2nd hour, Josh and James discussed how the Broncos can rotate their RBs this week against the Jets and moving forward. Andrew Mason joined the show live from West Virginia to breakdown what he's seen from the Broncos practice today. How well has Riley Moss played this year? The guys heard from Michael Malone on how he wants his Nuggets team to be better in 3-point shooting this season. The fellas heard from Deion Sanders on the improvement of the Buffs' run game.

In hour 2 of The Drive, Zach and Phil take a deep dive into today’s Nuggets media day. Can the Nuggets and Nikola Jokic win another title and cement Jokic as an NBA all-time great? Who will the 5th starter be for the Nuggets and is it actually an “open competition”? Will Peyton Watson take a leap and be a key rotational player this season? Today’s “Three Count” includes Jarrett Stidham’s ranking among back-up quarterbacks in the NFL, Richard Sherman taking a shot at Travis Hunter as a wide receiver, and Broncos legend John Elway on the Masked Singer. DenverSports.com’s Andrew Mason joins the show live from West Virginia to discuss the significance of Alex Singleton’s injury, who will step into Singleton's starting position, and Javonte Williams’ role this upcoming weekend.

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth start the fourth hour going over the reviews for Stink and Stoke’s Telestrator Tuesday breakdowns. Stink and Stoke looked over the defense and they break down the keys to their success. The guys are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to go through his numbers article to get an in-depth look at the Broncos’ first win. The guys chat about some more serious stories before they dig into some leftovers from the Broncos’ win over the Bucs.

Exploring the Creator Economy Shift and the Rise of Descript with Andrew MasonIn this episode, we delve into the significant shift towards the creator economy, discussing how over 200 million creators are reshaping marketing on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Our special guest, Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript, provides insights into this trend and shares the journey of Descript, an innovative audio and video editing tool. Learn about the origins, development, and unique features of Descript, including its AI capabilities branded as Underlord, and the newly launched Rooms for remote recording. Andrew also offers valuable advice for aspiring creators and discusses the future direction of Descript, emphasizing the importance of craft in an AI-driven content creation landscape.This is one of the first podcast episodes recorded with Descript's new virtual studio offering called Rooms coupled combined with Descript's Underlord AI editing tools.00:00 Introduction to the Creator Economy00:34 Meet Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript00:55 The Evolution of Descript02:37 Descript's Impact on Content Creation04:04 Marketing Strategies and Product Growth09:15 AI Integration and Innovations14:56 Descript's New Features: Rooms and More20:48 Future of the Creator Economy23:27 Advice for Aspiring Creators24:30 Conclusion and Upcoming FeaturesSend us a Text Message, give feedback on the episode, suggest a guest or topic Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast website to see all our episodes.Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast on YouTube Remarkable Marketing Podcast Highlights on InstagramEric Eden on LinkedIn

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil take a deep dive into the Broncos. What improvements are the guys looking for in week 3? How can the Broncos lean into the trend around the NFL of running the ball against these deep defensive looks? The guys react to ESPN’s Mel Kiper’s suggestion that the NFL should outlaw 2 deep safeties. DenverSports.com’s Andrew Mason joins the show live after an afternoon in the Broncos locker room to discuss what he learned today, the Broncos running game, and much more. Will the Broncos offense lean into going up tempo? We wrap up the show with what Zach and Phil learned today. When are we expecting a Gabe Landeskog return?

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth start the fourth hour discussing the performance of rookie QB’s across the league. Stink’s Telestrator Tuesday takes aim at the Broncos’ offensive line and their downright offensie performance blocking for Bo and the running backs. They are joined byu our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to get his takes on the OL after McGlinchey’s injury and the simplification of the offense before they all dig into his numbers article. The guys have one last discussion about simplifying the offense on the way out. 

Mike Evans, Brandon Stokley, and Mark Schlereth enter the fourth hour talking about the CU fight song controversy. They tell a few of our9am listeners why they're wrong about Shedeur's prospects in the NFL on this Wednesday. They are joined by our Senior Broncos Writer, Andrew Mason, to go through the key numbers from week one in Seattle. They finish the show with a few more "Tell Me Why I'm Wrong's". 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil break down what the Broncos can fix before week 2. Will the Broncos offense be bale to take the burden off their defense? We listen to Sean Payton’s comments from today as the Broncos prepare for the Steelers. What did Payton have to say about potentially facing his QB from last season, Russell Wilson? DenverSports.com’s Andrew Mason joins the show to discuss what he learned from Quinn Meinerz, Garrett Bolles availability this weekend, and much more. We wrap up the show with DenverSports.com’s Will Petersen and discussing the 9/11 anniversary and the potential of facing Russell Wilson this weekend.

In hour 4 of Stokley and Josh, Cecil is in for Stoke.  Your nicknames keep rolling in and so do the laughs.  Is Bo Nix getting a pass from Sean Payton?  Andrew Mason joins the show to take a deeper look into the debut of Bo Nix.  Do the Broncos have a solution in the running game?  

Andrew Mason was a 27-year-old with a degree in music when he co-founded one of the fastest growing companies of all time: Groupon. Its deep discounts on everything from sushi rolls to plastic surgery soon became a ubiquitous part of life in cities across the world. In 2011, just three years after launching, Groupon had the largest internet IPO since Google, with a valuation of $12.7 billion.But people began to complain that Andrew was not up to the role of CEO: he was quirky and unpredictable, and unable to navigate the company's rocket-ship growth and the surge of copycats that threatened it. Soon, Groupon's revenue slumped, and Andrew was fired from the company he'd started. But like many of the best entrepreneurs, he learned from his failure. Today, Andrew runs a new startup, an audio and video editing platform called Descript. In fact, we use Descript to make this show! This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei.Edited by Neva Grant, with research from Kathrine Sypher. Our audio engineers were Maggie Luthar and Robert Rodriguez.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at hibt@id.wondery.com. Sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the 2nd hour, Stokley and Josh discussed which Broncos have the most pressure on them this year. Josh explained why Courtland Sutton needs to prove that last year wasn't a fluke year. What local sports team has the most pressure this upcoming year? Andrew Mason joined the show to preview Sunday's game for the Broncos. The guys reported to the latest reports of Michael Malone and the front office not seeing eye to eye. What's taking so long on Jamal Murray's extension? 

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil breakdown how Sean Payton will factor into the Broncos win total this year. Will Payton be sharper in play calling, game management, and more this season? How can the Broncos have a better red zone efficiency this season? Phil voices his concern of Sean Payton having a built-in excuse to not win this season. Our Senior Broncos writer, Andrew Mason, joins the show to discuss where the Broncos can upgrade from last year, how Zach Allen can be successful, and which Bronco needs to prove themselves most this year. We wrap up the show with the guys previewing tonight’s kick off to the NFL season. Who do the guys have? Patrick Mahomes the Chiefs or Lamar Jackson and the Ravens?

In this episode of the Plant Cunning Podcast, we are honored to have Andrew Mason, a Vedic alchemist and practitioner of Ayurveda and astrology. Andrew discusses his newly published book 'Rasa Shastra,' which serves as a comprehensive textbook on Indian alchemy. The conversation dives into the intricacies of Rasa Shastra, the purification of minerals and metals, and their applications in Ayurvedic medicine. Andrew shares fascinating stories about his journey into this ancient practice, from his initial encounter with Ayurveda to his intensive study in Sri Lanka. Listeners will learn about the elaborate processes involved in preparing remedies, including the purification of mercury, and the significance of different elements like gemstones, animal products, and toxic plants in alchemy. Throughout the episode, Andrew provides valuable insights into the purpose and benefits of Rasa Shastra, the importance of purification, and how these potent remedies can be applied today. Whether you're an advanced practitioner of Ayurveda or a curious newcomer, this episode is rich with information and detailed visual descriptions first-hand. Don't miss this enthralling exploration of ancient Indian alchemy on the Plant Cunning Podcast. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/plantcunning/support

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil discuss what they will be looking for in the Broncos and Packers joint practice tomorrow. Will the Broncos have a wakeup call when they face a top tier team in Green Bay? Can Tim Patrick pop in practice?  Andrew Mason, our DenverSports.com’s Broncos insider, joins the show to breakdown Troy Franklin, how the Broncos will approach the final preseason game, and much more. We wrap up the show with a discussion on Jamal Murray working out at the Nuggets facility. At what point should we be concerned that his extension isn’t signed? We also have an update on Devaughn Vele and his apparent injury from today.

In hour 4 of The Drive, Zach and Phil break down the Broncos ongoing quarterback competition. What did the guy’s see from each of the QB’s? Should we want to see more turnovers from the Broncos QB’s? Andrew Mason, our Broncos insider, joins the show to share what he’s seen from the Broncos, Devaughn Vele, the QB’s, and much more. We shift to the story on CU and the defamatory stance the writer has against the Buffs. We have conflicting reports on the legitimacy behind the story, does the truth lie somewhere between the article and the naysayers? Will Petersen, of DenverSports.com, joins the show to discuss what he saw at Broncos training camp and Justin Simmons visiting NFL teams.

In hour 4 of The Drive, dives into the unofficial movement in the Broncos QB competition. Was Zach Wilson running with the 3rd stringers for back-to-back days a sign of things to come? Zach questions why Bo Nix can’t get more reps at practice. Andrew Mason, our DenverSports.com Broncos’ insider joins the show to share his thoughts on Broncos camp today. Is Bo to blame for a slow day from the offense while he’s out there? We pivot to a video of CU’s Travis Hunter expressing that he would like to play for the Broncos, is this a real possibility for the upcoming draft? DenverSports.com’s Will Petersen joins the show to share what he learned from Broncos’ training camp today.

This week I'm happy to welcome fellow podcaster and host of The ProGuide Podcast, Andrew Mason back to the show to discuss current trends and themes within the vast productivity space. Andrew and I discuss how being aware of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can significantly impact our happiness and self-improvement. We explore various factors like chronotype and personality types that contribute to understanding oneself and the importance of seeking feedback from trusted individuals to uncover blind spots. In addition, Andrew and I share some of our struggles with procrastination and self-acceptance, shedding light on how internal conflicts can lead to self-sabotage. Andrew introduces the concept of separating actions from identity to help fulfill aspirational roles through positive behaviors. We also emphasize clearing mental clutter through techniques like "brain dumping" and digital mind mapping to free up mental space before concluding with a discussion on the value of intentional engagement with information and tasks, and the importance of slowing down to process data meaningfully. ______________________________________ Related Episodes: Andrew's Previous Appearance Interviewing Erik on the Show ______________________________________ Connect with Andrew: Podcast Twitter ______________________________________ Connect with Erik: LinkedIn  Facebook  Instagram  ______________________________________ This Podcast is Powered By: Descript Descript 101 Castmagic Ecamm Podpage Rodecaster Pro Top Productivity Books List ______________________________________ Make sure to support the show by checking out the sponsors! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices