The Podcast Browser

Podcast with Sara Wheeler about her book Jan Morris. Discusses Jan Morris’s life and work – reporting the Everest conquest, travel writing, and insights into post-war history, and her male-to-female transition. @frdhpodcast thepodcastbrowser.com/sara-wheeler-j…

@stevenbjohnson Congratulations. Notebook has been part of my canon for a while now. There is no other software that I have loved so much.

I have some news. But first a little backstory. Almost exactly four years ago, I drove down to Mountain View for my first day as a Google employee. I was fifty-four years old, and somehow had managed to avoid ever having a proper job over that entire period, other than a few startups that I had founded in my twenties and thirties. At that point Google Labs, which had just been formed a few months earlier, was headquartered in a fairly anonymous looking suburban office park off 101, closer to Office Space than Silicon Valley on the Mike Judge spectrum. And as it happened, my first day at Google was a Monday in the summer of 2022, which meant COVID-era work from home policies were still the default, and the office was absolutely deserted. But I’d been set up with a badge and a computer and I had to schedule a phone call with tech support to get my account in order, and so I grabbed one of the empty cubicles and sat down to work through the problems I was having getting into the system. I remember feeling a definite sense of dread in that moment, sitting there in the silence, thinking: have I made a terrible mistake? And then—and I swear to god this actually happened—the silence was interrupted by a lonely robot rolling its way across the carpet past my borrowed desk. Before the end of the summer, though, an inspiring cast of characters began to populate the office, and by October a small group of us had built a prototype of an AI-first tool for thought that my colleague Adam codenamed Tailwind. About six months later, after @joshwoodward previewed Tailwind at I/O for the first time, we set about to give our little experiment a proper name. We had some branding consultants spend an afternoon with the team; we ideated and free associated and placed our post-it notes on the whiteboard, but all the names that they came back with were too impressionistic, too evocative — they didn’t sound like iconic Google names: Maps, Docs, Meet. Because I’d written so much about the history of journals and commonplace books, I had always been partial to simply calling it Notebook. There was something about that framing that just made sense: a notebook is the place where we capture information that we want to remember, where we gather our thoughts. It gives us a dedicated space for thinking, where new connections happen, where we can trace the evolution of our own ideas. And it had a simplicity that fit the Google house style. But we were far too experimental and unproven to take on a name like Google Notebook—remember we had exactly zero actual users at this point—and so we found ourselves a bit stuck: too early-stage for a proper grownup name, but ill-inclined to adopt a name that didn’t sound like the classic Google brands. But at the time there happened to be another Labs experiment that had just launched called MusicLM, and so at some point in late May of 2023 it occurred to me that we could borrow that convention for our embryonic product, and call it NotebookLM. It wasn’t the most elegant name you could imagine, but it had a certain logic to it: we were building a notebook reinvented for the age of language models, after all. I wrote an email to a few folks proposing the idea and included the caveat that if the product ever took off, and Google wanted to elevate us into the canon, we could drop the LM and just be Notebook. And so that’s the news. Three years and somewhere near a billion notebooks later, we are finally ditching the LM. @Gemini_Notebook

Podcast with Joel Mokyr about his book Two Paths to Prosperity. Discusses how Europe’s culture, concept of progress, and corporations versus China’s clans led to divergence in their historical development. thepodcastbrowser.com/joel-mokyr-two…

🚨 New paper in iScience: "Ecological not social factors explain brain size in cephalopods" In 2017, we published the Cultural Brain Hypothesis, a model of human brain evolution. It made an unexpected prediction: non-social animals could evolve big brains too, if their ecology was rich enough. 1/

Podcast with Kevin Rudd about his book On Xi Jinping. Explains Xi’s ideology and the forces that shaped it, his ambitions for China and strategy for achieving them, and what Xi thinks of the United States and Trump. @ezraklein @MrKRudd thepodcastbrowser.com/kevin-rudd-on-…

Podcast with John Campbell & Tarun Ramadorai about their book Fixed. Discusses how the financial system profits from individual mistakes. Advocates for simpler financial products and robust regulation over solely consumer education to combat inequality. thepodcastbrowser.com/john-campbell-…

Podcast with Roger Crowley about his book Spice. Discusses how Europe’s quest for nutmeg and cloves led Portugal and Spain to establish global maritime empires, fostering brutal colonialism and igniting the world's first truly globalised economy. thepodcastbrowser.com/roger-crowley-…

Podcast with Jeffrey Rosen about his book The Pursuit of Liberty. Discusses how Hamilton and Jefferson's clashing ideologies on federal power, democracy, and liberty continue to influence American governance. @RosenJeffrey @kerathink thepodcastbrowser.com/jeffrey-rosen-…

Podcast with Janet Browne about her book Darwin: A Biography. Discusses how Darwin's Beagle voyage and Lyell's geology shaped his theory, his work on varied species, the Wallace collaboration, and his views on plant and animal intelligence. @ManyMindsPod thepodcastbrowser.com/janet-browne-d…

Podcast with Gregory Clark about his books A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises. Argues culture drives productivity gaps; surname data shows mobility flat since 1300, favoring humble policy. @thinkingclasses thepodcastbrowser.com/gregory-clark-…

Podcast with Olivier Hein about his book Mother of the World. Discusses Turkmenistan's hidden history – a crossroads of empires, birthplace of Zoroastrianism, and home to ancient civilisations. @BookReviewsAsia thepodcastbrowser.com/olivier-hein-m…

Podcast with John Mandrola about his Substack essay Bravery (and Humility) is Needed to do Proper Medical Science. Discusses the need for medical conservatism, citing the example of common surgeries that are no better than sham. @EconTalker @drjohnm thepodcastbrowser.com/john-mandrola-…

@MHReddell Americans like their "no taxation without representation", but I quite like the reverse. Why shouldn't tax-paying residents get a vote? And wasn't it ridiculous in covid times that we paid to bring non-tax-paying citizens back here, only for them to leave again later?

A (very) rare NZ First policy I support (strongly). When I looked at the issue a few years ago (see link in reply) NZ’s current approach was v unusual internationally. rnz.co.nz/news/politics/…

Podcast with Wayne Bartlett about his book Thunderbolt of the North. Discusses the life of Harald Hardrada, who fought his way from Norway to Byzantium, to Sicily, and shook the medieval world before meeting his end at Stamford Bridge in 1066. @HistoryHit thepodcastbrowser.com/wayne-bartlett…

Podcast with Robert Wright about his book The God Test. Discusses how AI's rapid evolution mirrors humanity's development, posing profound questions about intelligence, collaboration, and the future of our species. @NextBigIdeaClub @robertwrighter thepodcastbrowser.com/robert-wright-…

Podcast with Helen Pearson about her book Beyond Belief. Discusses the evolution of randomised controlled trials & meta-analyses. Highlights how rigorous evidence can inform decision-making across medicine, social policy, policing, education, & parenting. thepodcastbrowser.com/helen-pearson-…

Podcast with Frank Cottrell Boyce about his book A British Childhood. Examines how digital platforms and austerity have transformed childhood, eroding storytelling and agency. Advocates for reading aloud as crucial for development and bonding. thepodcastbrowser.com/frank-cottrell…

Podcast with Malala Yousafzai about her book Finding My Way. Discusses her journey from Nobel Prize-winning activist to adult, navigating Oxford, marriage, and advocacy while revealing her honest self beyond public perception. @Malala @howtoacademy thepodcastbrowser.com/malala-yousafz…

Podcast with Danielle Crittenden about her book Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable. Discusses her experience grieving the loss of her adult daughter. @jposhaughnessy @DCrittenden1 thepodcastbrowser.com/danielle-critt…

Podcast with Philip Auerswald about his book A Phone Is a Cow. Discusses how mobile phones became a productive asset for the poor in Bangladesh, and how much of human progress is inevitable, versus the result of remarkable individuals. @EconTalker thepodcastbrowser.com/philip-auerswa…