Nathaniel Whittemore

Now for this, we actually did deep research in two different places.

I used the deep research feature that is directly in Gemini, but where the real power came from was Notebook LM.

With Notebook LM, you can go find and integrate dozens and dozens of sources about any topic that you're interested in.

You can give it your own sources, which can be anything from uploaded files to websites to YouTube videos to access to a Google Drive folder, or you can have it help you go get new resources from the web with either a fast research or a deep research mode.

For each of the five notebooks I created for what would become the five videos, I used the deep research feature to go get the set of sources that we would pull from to actually craft the final content.

Now, you might remember that Notebook LM first started to break out at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 because of its audio overview feature.

You could take a bunch of sources, or even just one source, like a big, dense AI research paper, and with a single click, turn it into a podcast where two hosts talked about it with all of the affectations of your favorite conversational podcast.

And while this is the type of feature that could become a novelty fast, part of the reason that I think it was so sticky is that it's actually just kind of a good way to absorb information.

And so for people who are trying to learn about new topics, it became a useful tool in the arsenal.

Now, since then, however, Notebook LM has continued to push new features and capabilities.

In particular, the increased capability set around visual generation has made a huge difference in what you can do with Notebook LM.

As we started to get both the text rendering capabilities, as well as the reason over image capabilities of the nano banana models, that opened up new features like infographics, as well as slide decks.

And one of the things that many people found, especially with the infographics, is that because you can curate such a bigger set of sources, the infographics that get produced by Notebook LM are often much better and more factually dense than even the versions produced in the regular Gemini app.

Also taking advantage of those capabilities are the slide deck builder in Notebook LM, which as of February, you can edit on a slide-by-slide basis, which some folks like ClickHealth's Simon Smith called a death blow for many AI presentation generators.

Still, the feature that I was focused on for this particular project, and frankly, the thing that made my long-standing idea of a faceless YouTube channel actually at least a little bit viable, even despite everything else I have going on, was that at the beginning of March, Notebook LM added what they called cinematic video overviews.

As they describe it in the app, these are rich, immersive experiences that can unpack the complex ideas of your sources through engaging visuals and storytelling.

It was those cinematic videos that would be the substance of our YouTube channel.

And so we built notebooks for our five topics.

There was the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo's dramatic flight to Confab with the King of Naples,

Brunelleschi's Dome, a marvel of architecture, science, and art that pretty much no one at his time could understand.