Auto-generated AI podcasts have arrived

Plus: Shell Game on the Pivot podcast, a dream review Down Under, and a shout in The New Yorker

This week, AI voice advancements begin to overtake scenes from Season One. But first, some show news: Shell Game and AI Evan keep appearing in new places together, popping up to talk about living that Florida Life (TM). In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore tackled the question of artificial voices joining our world, name-checking the show along the way (“riveting”—one for the movie poster). In The Saturday Paper in Australia, we got the kind of dream review (semi-paywalled) that’s rare in the podcast landscape. The writer, Louisa Lim, approached the show curiously and critically at length—and even… interactively, calling up the AI to talk to it. She found the show “jaw-droppingly good,” noting that “there’s a strange gap between knowing something is possible and hearing it for yourself.” AI Evan and I also made another appearance Down Under, on Australian public radio’s Sunday Extra (they, too, called the AI Evan line, and had it record radio promos for the episode). I had some great extended conversations about all things Shell Game on a pair of AI-themed podcasts, Untangled with Charley Johnson and The Gradient with Daniel Bashir, attached to a couple of the best AI newsletters out there.

Last week, I stopped in—for once without my AI doppelegänger—to talk with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, on the Pivot podcast. We chatted about, among other things, how AI voice agents are more advanced than many people realize. How they’re going to start showing up—including as podcast hosts—perhaps sooner than we’re ready for.

Well, just days later, here they are. Over the last week, the popularity of a Google AI project called NotebookLM has started to take off, fueled primarily by its ability to produce AI-host-on-AI-host podcasts about any document you give it. Google describes NotebookLM as a way “to help you make sense of complex information,” pitched initially towards researchers and journalist types. (Journalist and author Steven Johnson is the editorial director of the project.) The podcast generation feature is staggeringly simple: You upload a document to one of your “notebooks,” click a button, and a few seconds or minutes later NotebookLM produces what it calls a “deep dive”: a podcast episode featuring two AI hosts summarizing and discussing the contents of the document.

A Shell Game listener, Arlo Devlin-Brown, had actually put me onto NotebookLM’s podcasting ability a few weeks back. (Thanks Arlo!) He’d generated a “deep dive” by feeding it the transcript of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s recent press conference about cutting interest rates. This feels like precisely the kind of digest-a-dense-document use case the NotebookLM creators had in mind. Here’s his result, which takes the form of one AI sort of… quizzing the other one about the press conference: