How A Surf School Founder Inspires Smarter AI Content With NotebookLM

I didn’t expect a surf trip on the coast of El Salvador to turn into one of the clearest business lessons I’ve seen all year, but that’s exactly what happened. I’m down here for an AI conference, I extend my stay, and I end up watching a surf instructor teach with total presence. The instructor is also the owner, Alex Naboa, and seeing him operate in his element makes me ask the question that hits every founder sooner or later: did I design my work around where I actually shine?

Alex’s project is called Surfing Your Fears, and the name isn’t a gimmick. He’s lived the reality behind it through years of building a life during uncertainty, serving his community, and pushing through fear when it wasn’t optional. We talk about how the ocean mirrors your life, why reactions in the water look a lot like reactions in business and family, and how community becomes part of the “lineup” you earn your place in. His story stretches from scraping by with simple jobs to creating programs like free English schools, water projects, and surf therapy that helps people process trauma.

Then I switch gears and demonstrate a practical AI workflow: how I take our messy, rambling interview and use NotebookLM as a grounded content engine. I walk through the Sources approach, why “gold in, gold out” actually matters for accuracy, and the kinds of assets you can generate fast: an infographic story arc, graphic-novel style quote boards, slide-style deep dives, reports, and even a founder profile article ready for a website or magazine. If you want a repeatable system for AI content repurposing, podcast marketing assets, and high-stakes communication prep, you’ll get it here.

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Transcript

El Salvador Setting And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:05

You might notice I'm in a different location. I'm in El Salvador. I've been here for a couple of weeks and um came down here for a conference. Um I'll show you in a moment. The conference on AI. The conference on AI in El Salvador, you may ask. Well, it's a country that is um lurching ahead of many other countries. And we'll we'll talk about that maybe in another episode. But today I wanted to talk about um, I had an excellent interview. So in my uh visit here, I decided I'm gonna stay a little bit longer and go see some other parts of the country. And I went down to the coast in El Salvador, it's a famous uh area for surfing. It's got great waves and a great um, just a uh a good place to hang out. And I stayed at a little place called um Incencia Nativa or Native Essence, and I'm probably killing the name of that, but but I'll get there. So I'm I'm sitting there and um enjoying it, and there's a search school going on, and I'm watching the I'm watching the guy, the teacher, it turns out to be the owner of the place, teaching his class, and he's in his element. And I I was observing a businessman operating in his what every business person probably desires is to have a business built around your passion, and you could just see that he he was in his best place. He it was uh cool to see the students, it was to cool to see uh him teaching and coaching the environment, uh everything that was uh going on was like uh I was um I was just sitting there asking myself, you know, have I done the same thing in my business, right? It's like have you have you built your business around where you really um shine? And Alex um had done that and it was obvious. And so I I ended up interviewing him. And so, why am I talking about it on this? I took that interview and I put it into Notebook LM as a demonstration of a great way to use uh Notebook LM to produce content from um from messy notes or information. So imagine imagine you have a business. So how does it apply to you? Imagine you have a business and you're interviewing someone that's used your services. This is a great example of extracting what they they think and what they're saying, and then putting it into notebook LM and then um producing uh assets that I'm gonna show you. So let's give you a backstory on uh Alex and his surf school called uh surfing your fears. So he owns a hotel, and that's where the surfers stay. It's got a restaurant, it's got a pool, it's got a patio, you can see the river, you can see the ocean, and it's just a wonderful place to hang out, which I took advantage of. And um, I don't I'm not a surfer, but it's like it it was it was um impressive to see a business being run by someone in their zone. This is Alex, Alex Naboa. Um I you may later start to refer him as supernova Alex, but anyway, I enjoyed talking with Alex. I sat down for an interview, and uh what I did is I pulled out um I pulled that interview, and today I'm gonna show you some of the uh things that um came out of the interview. Super cool. So, again, let me clumsily share my screen. Here we go. You can do it, Steve. You can do this. This am I doing that? Yes, share your screen. All right, we're gonna share the window of this. Here we go. And we're sharing. You know, after so many episodes, you'd think that I'd get this down. So here we go. So we're in notebook LM. And if you've been following me, you know that this is a place where you can you can put in information. You know, in relation to my AI conference, there was a couple of points that were really emphasized. And you know, in the example of El Salvador, they're they're preparing a future for their country and theirs their people to be the center of artificial intelligence. And um, and so they're building a system around that so they have plenty of energy, they have plenty of technology, and that they own all of their intellectual property, so to speak. Imagine a nation having this massive amount of intellectual property, and so that the example of notebook LM is here's a place where you you park your information. Okay, you're putting in the information you approve into the sources area. And if you've uh been following me, I've showed you this. But in Notebook LM, when you pop in, you add a sources area. This is where you add your sources, meaning that when you ask the chatbot to do something here, your your your um your AI chatbot, then it's not running outside unless you tell it to. It's not running outside on the internet, it's only pulling from your sources that you put in. So, therefore, what you're doing is you're making sure that the output that of the assets that you generate, this is like having a whole marketing team over here that any of these outputs they're going to be informed by your inputs and so gold in, gold out. And then over here is where you can have all sorts of conversations and interrogate your information, create more concentrated pieces, and then in a way put them over here. But in this case, what I put in was here's the interview. This is just a recording that we that Alex and I sat for a time uh yesterday, actually, and we had them about a 20-30 minute conversation. So the source guide shows the uh essence of what we discussed. This is the actual notes of what went on, and so it's messy, rambling, and uh we went off on some uh explored some areas and came back and then wrapped up, but it's just a conversation, okay? And and then I took a uh I asked Grok in this case, I put in that information and asked it to make me a source guide um around the conversation, and so it created more of a structured um output with the intent of what I wanted to come from that interview, and so I brought that in as a source itself as well, and then um I brought in their website, and so their website I'll show you here. This is his surfing website, and it's called surfing your fears. And obviously, if you're out in the water, you're gonna have some fears, but you know, Alex is this uh business person, and I was sitting there talking with him, and you know, running your own business, whether you're um you know a sole proprietor or you're running a team or you're leading a team, you know, you have waves of unexpected things that are happening in your business, and basically you have to surf your fears. And I just thought, man, this is excellent. Uh, what what Alex is uh the philosophy that he's um exploring here is applicable to every business, but I thought it was super interesting. He has a very uh interesting story, so let's get back to the story. So, you know, I asked for for this, imagines now. I have a 20-minute conversation, and I want to give you the essence of that conversation. And so, first of all, when I use Notebook LM, here's how to think about it. You know, we're we our eyes are designed, a picture is worth a thousand words, and our eyes are very powerful, and so we want to bring in a lot of information all of a sudden and get the gist of what's going on. And an infographic is an amazing piece to accomplish. You can take a whole story and quickly distill it down into a pictogram. That's what an infographic is, basically a pictogram. Imagine back in the day wasn't called a pictogram, it was called a cave painting, right? And so here we have the essence of uh Alex's story, and so he's here he is on uh uh the English native essence, and he's turns out that their property when they're working on it's on indigenous land, and he named it this because he was honoring what used to be um this point, he's on a river where this fresh water comes into the ocean, and so uh imagine a community, what does it need? It needs it needs fresh water and it needs a place to fish, and so this is the actual intersection point of where a community uh was built. He um skipped university several times. He wanted to surf, he wanted to um just surf, and so he ended up um you know cooking hamburgers to fund his life, turns flipped that into serving his community. So he established free English schools, water projects, kids' uh kitchen clubs. Then about three years ago, he started um a surf school, and so it's basically a there, it's like therapies using surf school as a tool to help clients face fear and process trauma. And his philosophy is ocean mirrors your life. Alex teaches that reflections, reactions in the water reflect one's behavior in business and in family. So personal passion, community, impact, and then um surf therapy. And so imagine, imagine how easy that is to use Notebook LM. If you notice here, it honors the rules of story, set it up here. Who's where do we begin and who's our hero in this story? And then here's the journey and where we end up. Next, when you're wanting to communicate information, a comic book. Now, this is when you were a kid, you spent time in comic books, right? And comic books are a way to take and collapse, and now we have a series of infographics, if you will. So the the prompt I used on this was to generate eight powerful shareable quotes with one-sentence explanations of why each matters in a graphic novel style. And so this built a beautiful storyboard of the Asentia Nativia story. And you can see that, you know, for 24 years, Alex just didn't just build a business in El Salvador, he survived gang violence, earned uh unearthed indigenous history beneath his feet, and discovered that the ocean teaches everything society forgets. He had a burger stand he called uh Oasis, and uh, from a hammock dwelling surfer to the founder of a surf therapy movement, um, he talked about there, you know, up in the mountains, there's all these um um relics of the past. And so true wealth isn't found in relentless expansion, but in grounding yourself in the fundamental native essence of humanity. So here's here's a businessman that understands that your why, why you do something, needs to be reflected in um how you show up and operate in your business. And so he he calls, you know, he's honoring his past with the name of his business. Then his um, you know, he here's a businessman, but he didn't want to be in the corporate world, he wanted to be connected with the ocean, and so he didn't set out to build a business, he set out to surf every day for the rest of his life. But when you organize your life around your deepest passion rather than societal expectations, purpose naturally evolves into a sustainable livelihood. Man, I love that. And it was coming out in the interview, and so his story was, you know, like, hey, I just um I went and learned how to cook. He took some, he he went and he worked in some hotels, he took um, he took um culinary school training so that he could just, you know, his plan was to be able to cook burgers no matter what country he was in. That was how he was going to pay for his skirts, uh, surfing. But what did it turn out to be? He stayed even during gang violence and developed ways for the local kids to apply themselves instead of get caught up in the violence that was happening. And then um from that, from that demonstration of his engagement in his community, it ended up that's why he and he the main reason that he was able to purchase the place that uh is his business now from someone in the community. They wanted it to go to someone who cared about the community, and there he was demonstrating it every day for years. And now he's he's teaching people this would that would be my face if I was out there on the surfboard, but he's teaching people how to face their fears, and it ties back to his story of having to deal with the um um the gangs, they would come and try to extort uh money out of him every month. And you know, what when I heard his story, I could see that is why it's called surfing your fears. That's why he's demonstrating how he had to learn to operate in life, and then he was able to apply it to how people show up in and um uh learn to take advantage of all the waves that we get hit with. So it's it's pretty it's awesome how his um program shows up in his therapy. And the students I watched the students, they all to a person come back inspired from being out on the ocean with him. You know, this is an example, you know. He was building an environment of safety for the kids in his community when the outside environment was dangerous. Notebook LM does beautiful, and you don't need to be a storyteller, you need to capture, you need to capture what's inside people's head, you need to recognize it and pull that gold out. And notebook LM organizes it in a beautiful way that helps you communicate in a visual storytelling way, and so Alex is I just um I was really inspired by this. You know, and you meaningful progress requires facing the full impact of your fears head on rather than trying to effortly effortlessly float above them. So now it's the story's wrapping up. He didn't do it for the money, he did it because he was a junkie for the waves and the people. So here's his um, you know, this is how his philosophy comes out. You know, the waves are uncontrollable, and that's your external market, sudden crisis is unpredictable life events in the paddle. That's the friction. You got to do the work, the daily operational grind and necessity of confronting resistance head on. You know, I watch people go out in the waves and they have to they have to paddle on top of their surfboard into oncoming waves to get to the place where they can surf the waves. And so they have to do all this work and go through these multiple uh um assaults from the waves to get out there, and then then you do catch a wave, and then they wipe out. So we've all wiped out in many ways in our lives, and it impacts us, and so then the lineup. I thought this was really cool. A lineup that ties it with community, and so that's your social dynamics, earning respect and finding your rightful place in a complex ecosystem. The lineup, I guess when you go out and you wait to catch that wave, you finally made it through all of this and you're ready to catch a wave. There's an etiquette they follow out there that's in a kind of a community of those who did what went through all those things, and now they're kind of hanging out and bonding. That's the lineup. And so then a natural call to action. Isn't that cool? The other things that it you know, I asked it produce was a uh deep dive. That's a uh put the link to this. It's a really great discussion about the uh conversation in depth. So when you're walking in, you're taking this information. Let's say you have a um you have a high value, how high stake conversation coming up. You know, you can walk people in to the details after you win their um approval or the brain's approval to stay and pay attention. So an infographic quickly says, here's what we're going to cover, and the brain says, Yeah, this is good. I can see where we're going here, stick around. The these are more detailed specifics of that main infographic in the story arc, right? So each slide goes through more specificity, more specifics of each uh stop in the story, and then um this deep dive. This deep dive is like really powerful, and so it's a it's a this one turns into almost a 20-minute discussion of the specifics, but in a story outline. So the um we'll put this in there and you can listen to it. It's really excellent. And it outlines, you know, more concepts, more depth, but we're having to ask our end user's brain to hang around and uh invest this time that's valuable, and this is how you win approval of the brain. And then I asked it to all right, so um, in in this, when you go, when you use this, you see these reports. These reports can give you, take that content that you put it, remember, our sources, and produce many variations that you need: a study guide, a blog post, a briefing doc. And then it'll even go through and give you other suggested outputs. And right now it's generating suggestions, so like a business strategy blueprint from Alex's framework, or a methodology white paper, or a cultural heritage uh narrative, or a philosophical introduction. So you can get many outputs from one input, so gold in and all these variations of gold out. In this case, what I wanted to do was I asked it to uh write a 700-word founder profile article titled From Hammock to Healing. And it's a 24 year blueprint for community and confidence suitable for a website or a magazine. And so this is what this is what um it put out. So imagine being able to take this now. You could copy it, download it, and then use it in any way that you want. So, what are we doing? We're taking it, uh, we're collecting information from a conversation, from a video, from a website, and we're organizing it into a way, putting it into a tool that is fine-tuned to honor the rules of story which your brain craves, and then produce an output that is beautiful, and you can influence the uh perspective of this output by your prompts. Okay, so beautiful stuff, beautiful story that I just stumbled into, and I mean, I'm really um I was really I was really glad that I went there and met Alex and got to observe him working in his zone is very inspirational. I think it's inspirational for any business person to figure out a way to design your business or your your job or whatever you're you are as far as leading and needing to use um notebook lm to help you communicate better. But it's like design your system, and it wasn't easy for him. He had to stand up, he had you know, he called himself uh the black sheep, you know, he had to pick his own way and pay his own way, so to speak, and face a lot of fears, but man, it just um bubbled out into his his um philosophy, and I could see it in his students. So, all right, so what did we learn today? Go out and capture some great content, bring it in here and put it into your sources, and then uh think about the perspective you want to emphasize, and then put it in your your prompts when you bring it in here. You can get a video overview, audio, slide decks, mind maps, flashcards, infographics. You get these assets to help you win in high-stakes communications or um wanting to present something very inspirational that you ran across, and in my case, it did in El Salvador. All right, AI Made Simple. Use that QR code, reach out, let me know if I can help you do this. Like and subscribe. We'll see you on another episode of AI Made Simple. And that's a wrap.