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
• (31:56) - Searching the negative space
• (33:56) - The adjacent possible: custom software for everyone
• (37:01) - NotebookLM for nonprofits and small organizations
• (39:06) - Tens of thousands of quotes, 25 years of forgetting
• (40:56) - "It's cognitive uploading"