Innovations in Media: Steven Johnson, NotebookLM and collaborating on discovery

Steven Johnson is a prolific and thought-provoking creator of books, podcasts and TV series on technology, history and science. He’s also spent the last four years as a Google employee, helping shape the remarkable NotebookLM AI platform. 

I first learned of Johnson by reading his illuminating book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World.” The book, like most all of his projects, deeply examines a topic with immense curiosity, relentlessly pursuing the who, what, when, where, why and how. 

I later enjoyed his terrific PBS series “How We Got to Now,” a history of innovation. 

Steven Johnson's "Adjacent Possible"Put perhaps most notably, I was thrilled to learn he’s been editorial director and a chief architect of NotebookLM, Google’s “AI-powered research assistant and virtual note-taking app.” The “LM” in the platform name stands for “language model,” a probabilistic AI model that builds sentences by predicting words based on the context of preceding text.

As touted by Google, “Unlike standard AI chatbots that draw on vast, sometimes inaccurate internet knowledge, NotebookLM is designed to base all its answers, summaries, and insights solely on the specific documents and media you upload.” 

NotebookLM truly is remarkable, and I’ve been using it for a variety of projects and tasks, including my own book project. It’s remarkably efficient in helping me find quotes or sources in hundreds of pages of text, PDFs, audio files or other sources, all of which I’ve walled off into my own private notebook, or digital sandbox. 

What I want to highlight today, however, is how Johnson is bringing NotebookLM to the forefront of his latest writing project, a five-part serialized essay called “Planet of the Barbarians.” The 15,000-word series — “a declassified history of the first civilizations” — is being published for paid subscribers via Johnson’s “Adjacent Possible” Substack. 

Johnson's NotebookLM dashboard for "Planet of the Barbarians"Along with the essay, Johnson will make available his accompanying NotebookLM version that includes the essay, additional source material including books, academic papers and related information. By making his Notebook available, Johnson is handing the keys over to readers to ask their own questions, explore alternative theories and otherwise leverage Johnson’s groundwork for their own personal interests. 

I think this is a wonderful test on many levels. It will:

• Highlight the power of NotebookLM to help authors create in new ways. 

• Help authors leverage and extend their work by letting collaborators create their own research branches within specifically defined notebooks.

• Build and strengthen reader affinity with individual authors who share their work collaboratively.

• Give authors new ways to monetize their research by restricting notebook access to paying subscribers.

• And ultimately, more broadly share the wealth of wisdom and innovation. 

Are there downsides? Sure. Opening up one’s Notebook risks exposing how the sausage is made. Thinly sourced or weakly reviewed Notebooks could expose which authors are lazy in their research. Smart readers could use an author’s own Notebook to poke huge holes in poorly constructed arguments. Thankfully, confident and curious writers like Johnson are leading the way to navigate those questions, ethically, transparently and responsibly.