[JonathanFly]

>But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?

A randomly selected NotebookLM podcast is probably not substantial enough on its own. But with human curation, a carefully prompted and cherry-picked NotebookLM podcast could be pretty good.

Or without curation, I would use this on a long drive where audio was the only option to get a quick survey of a bunch of material.