Steven Johnson dreamed of building the ultimate research assistant. Now he's doing just that at Google, where he's the co-founder and editorial director of NotebookLM.
It's one of the most interesting AI products out there. It radically changes how we learn, research, and remember — and the "notebook" itself is becoming a standard unit of knowledge across Google, rolling out in more and more places where AI needs to reference a body of sources.
In this episode, the author of _Where Good Ideas Come From_ explains how AI is making him a better researcher and writer — and why tools like NotebookLM are so powerful when you're trying to make new connections, remember what you've already found, and figure out what's missing.
There's a lot of fear right now that AI is making us dumber. That by relying on it too much, we're engaging in "cognitive offloading" and stunting our learning. That's a real risk, especially in schools.
But Steven says we should also be talking about what you can gain from AI — and the power of something he calls "cognitive uploading."
Resources: * Google NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/ * Steven Johnson: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/
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(00:00) - If you are interested in truly understanding something, this is the greatest time to be alive
(01:25) - Steven's controversial NYT piece and the cold call from Google Labs
(02:55) - Who NotebookLM's power users are
(04:40) - The notebook as a new format for knowledge
(06:20) - Featured notebooks: earnings reports, Shakespeare, and Dungeons & Dragons
(11:00) - Writing a book about the Gold Rush with NotebookLM
(13:20) - Four weeks of research in 14 minutes
(16:30) - Following serendipitous connections through the source material
(17:50) - Cognitive offloading and the illusion of understanding
(21:00) - How Steven actually writes with AI
(24:30) - Paragraph by paragraph: a new kind of writing
(26:55) - Do readers need to know AI helped write it?
(28:55) - Where good ideas come from in the age of AI
(31:00) - Searching the negative space
(33:00) - The adjacent possible: custom software for everyone
(36:05) - NotebookLM for nonprofits and small organizations
(38:10) - Tens of thousands of quotes, 25 years of forgetting
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