He Opened It In The Car
I have so many stories…
Long Island, NY. I am driving to North Shore Studios, a place that had put genuine names on the map, and I have an aspiring DJ in my backseat who I have never met before today.
Let me back up.
We had been connected through TKO.
Timothy K. Olphie.
A man who was instrumental in the formation of Public Enemy and who never got the full recognition that contribution deserved. His name meant something. When his network opened a door, you walked through it. So when our producer said he had a connection, a DJ coming up through TKO’s world, someone who could bring the right energy to this session, we listened.
We paid to send a FedEx package to this kid weeks before. Music. The vibe. Everything he needed to walk into that studio with some understanding of what we were trying to build. We paid for his train ticket from Philadelphia. We did everything right on our end.
He opened the FedEx package in my backseat.
On the way there.
The Machine Behind the Man
I watched it happen in the rearview mirror. He was not a bad person. He had real talent. He was a young guy coming up, probably excited to be in the car, probably doing his best with whatever he had been told about this session, which I suspect was not much. He was not the problem.
The problem was the machine that put him there.
Our producer had a gift. He could make a network play look like an opportunity. He could use a name like TKO’s to open a room, send someone from his circle to fill the seat, and walk away having spent your money to put his people to work. I was young enough not to see it coming. I was angry enough in that car to consider dropping the kid back at the train station and blowing the whole thing up.
I did not.
I went with what I had. We got through the session on instinct and goodwill and the particular grace that sometimes shows up when everything else has already gone sideways.
It did not change what I knew the moment I saw that FedEx package come open in my backseat. We were cooked before we walked in.
I have laughed about it for thirty years. But I never stopped thinking about what it meant. If I am being honest, I have been the kid in the backseat too. More than once.
Preparation Is Protection
Here is what it meant.
Preparation is not just about being ready for the meeting. Sometimes it is protection from the meeting. If I had been able to pull together everything publicly available about that producer, his history, his methods, the pattern of how he moved through his network, I might have seen what was coming before we spent a dollar on postage.
That is what NotebookLM does. And it is free. And it exists right now.
How to Actually Use It
Before any meeting that matters, gather every piece of public information available on the people you are walking in to see. Their company website. A podcast interview. A press release. A news article from the last ninety days. If they are public, pull an earnings call transcript. Drop all of it into a NotebookLM notebook.
Then do not ask it to summarize. A summary is what the person in your backseat opening your FedEx package thinks preparation looks like.
Ask it real questions.
What is this person’s pattern?
What do they say about themselves publicly and where do the gaps appear?
What has changed recently and why does that matter for this conversation?
What does the story they are telling not quite add up to?
The AI gives you raw material. You bring the judgment. That combination is what 1992 me needed in that car and did not have.
The Three Questions Test
After the NotebookLM session, close the laptop. Take twenty minutes. Write three questions you actually want to ask in that room. Real ones. The kind that only exist if you did the reading.
If you cannot write three real questions, go deeper. If you can, you are ready. Not because you memorized facts. Because you are actually curious. And because this time, you did the work before you got in the car.
Dee Dah Mee Tree was not a bad guy. He had talent. He deserved better than to be a chess piece in someone else’s game.
So did we.
The Tools
NotebookLM: notebooklm.google.com. Free. Upload documents, paste links, drop in text. Ask it questions like you are talking to a smart research assistant.
Check their socials. Read their last three posts. Look at who they tag and who tags them back. Five minutes of real looking tells you more than an hour of being told.
If you do not know how to research the people you are walking in to meet, that is not a skills gap. That is a respect gap. You are telling the room you did not care enough to look. And rooms remember that.
Do not take anyone’s word for who someone is. Not a producer’s. Not a partner’s. Not a friend’s. The people who earn trust are the ones who did the reading before they needed to. Everyone else is opening FedEx packages in the backseat.
Do the work before you get in the car. Every time.
V➤ Nobody who ever got played wished they had trusted more.