2min chapter

People of AI cover image

NotebookLM with Steven Johnson and Raiza Martin

People of AI

CHAPTER

The Intersection of Writing and Technology: A Personal Journey

This chapter delves into the speaker's evolution as a writer and their exploration of software tools that facilitate creativity. Through reflections on early inspirations and current favorites, they highlight the interplay between physical and digital environments in enhancing the writing process.

00:00
Speaker 4
So I would not hear from you. It's amazing.
Speaker 1
So it's been a really interesting journey to this product and to Google and to working with Raisa. So most of my career I spent as a writer working on largely writing books and then at various points doing podcasts and TV shows, largely about the history of ideas and innovation. But throughout that process, I was always really interested in the tools that I was using to write the books and to research the books and to kind of share ideas with my collaborators when I was working on the TV shows and so on. And so from an early age, I I think this really goes back to college for me. Like in the late 80s, I got obsessed with this program that Apple released called HyperCard. And I had this vision of like organizing all my notes for my classes using this software that never really went anywhere. But I kind of like lost a semester trying to get this software to work because I thought if I could just do this, then I will be able to think more interesting ideas and keep track of everything in a better way. So like for some weird kind of nerdy reason, I've always had this interest in how can software help us like think more clearly or make more creative associations and so on. And so as I got older and as my kind of career developed as a writer, I developed a little bit of a kind of side hustle writing about the tools that I was using. And so I wrote a number of pieces and blog posts over the years. I started using a tool called Devon Think, and I used a wonderful writing tool called Scrivener. And I would write these little posts, occasionally I would write for the Times Magazine and the Times Book Review, actually, about how I was using software to help me write. And then in a book I wrote called Where Good Ideas Come From, I talked about that kind of at length, which is this idea like, okay, we have certain environments that are really conducive to good thinking in the real world. Maybe there are certain software environments that are conducive to like more creative thinking. And what would those look like?

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