Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians
In a new five-part series, a declassified history of the first civilizations.
We’re ringing in the new year here at Adjacent Possible with some exciting developments.
Starting next Monday, I’m going to publish a five-part essay called Planet Of The Barbarians that will be available to paid subscribers. (There’s more detail on the subject matter below, but suffice to say if you enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel or Sapiens, you’ll find it interesting.) I’ll release it in serial fashion over the next month or two. The full text will be somewhere on the order of 15,000 words -- longer than any magazine article I’ve ever published, but significantly shorter than a full-length book. It’s actually a great length for a nonfiction piece, the kind of mid-sized deep dive that once thrived in the age of the pamphlet or the standalone monograph, but which the modern economy of 800-word op-eds and 300-page hardcovers has rendered nearly extinct.
Paid subscribers will be able to read the full five-part series, but there will be an additional perk that was not possible in the heyday of the pamphleteers: a NotebookLM version of the project that includes the essay text, along with additional source material, including key quotes from the books that influenced my thinking, original scholarly papers, and related reading from my own catalog. You won’t just be able to read the essay itself; you’ll be able to ask your own questions, explore aspects that I might have overlooked. And as we’ve done with our Featured Notebooks, I’ll curate a collection of Studio artifacts to present the ideas in other formats: audio overviews, slide decks, quizzes, and more.
Publishing new work that is only available for paid subscribers is long overdue for those of you who have been supporting Adjacent Possible since it launched in 2021. Because so many of my posts have revolved around my work on NotebookLM, I’ve been reluctant to put anything behind a paywall here over the past few years. But I also want non-paying subscribers to experience what this new format can generate, so I’m going to create a shared notebook for the previously paywalled “Designing A Workflow For Thinking” series that I published here between 2021 and 2022 that will be available to everyone. I’ll talk more about that in a subsequent post.
I think this is actually a really interesting model that I hope other authors will explore: publishing a polished long-form piece alongside a bundle of related knowledge that allows readers to explore and adapt the entire package themselves, thanks to the explanatory and multimodal transformations that AI now makes possible. If this goes well, I think it might be a new recurring structure for my longer-form writing, alongside magazine articles and full-length books. I like it as well because it suggests a model where AI platforms like NotebookLM actually give authors and publishers new revenue-generating products that help their readers engage more deeply with their work.
If nothing else, it will be an interesting exploration into the adjacent possible of writing in the age of AI that you all can help me navigate. For now, here’s an introduction to the new series, with a bit of the backstory about how I came to write it....
For the last ten years or so, one of the constants of my intellectual life has been an informal set of email threads (and occasional text messages) with three old friends that I’ve known since grade school or before. It’s been a persistent—if somewhat spiky—conversation: we’ll chat at irregular intervals, sharing interesting links to things we’ve read or written, and then some topic will catch fire and we’ll write twenty long emails to each other in the space of a week. At times, it can feel like an impromptu, asynchronous book club conversation that gets triggered by one of us reading a new work that captures our imagination. At other points, the threads just emerge spontaneously out of our shared interests. There are a handful of enduring disagreements and more than a few Groundhog Day moments where it seems like we are just replaying debates that we’ve had multiple times before. But in general I’ve found it to be one of the most generative idea spaces in my life: a place where I can work out new theories or explore topics that I might not feel equipped to opine on in a more public forum.
Many of those conversations, as you might imagine, have been oriented towards the future: when the Apple Vision Pro came out, we had a long debate about the future of spatial interfaces; books like Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Abundance prompted discussions about state capacity and Universal Basic Income; and of course the future of AI—its impact on the labor market, the possibility of sentient machines—has been a constant obsession even before I started working on NotebookLM. But just as many of the threads have debated the distant past, particularly the transition between our ancestral evolutionary environment of nomadic hunter-gatherers and the emergence of “modern” institutions like agriculture, cities, capital, and writing. An early trigger for this—almost a decade ago—had been the publication of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which my friends had read enthusiastically, but which I had found underwhelming. In part I was disappointed with Sapiens because I had just published my book Wonderland, which argued for a foundational role for delight-driven curiosity in the human story that Harari had largely ignored. (My irritation with Harari may have also had something to do with the fact that he had sold approximately one billion more copies of his book than I had of mine.) The dawn-of-civilization theme remained active in our threads over the next few years; one member of the group was working on an inventive thesis about the origins of capital that often brought us back to the Bronze Age, and I was writing my book about longevity, Extra Life, which had a long section about the devastating impact that the adoption of agriculture had on human lifespan.
And then sometime in 2021, I read James C. Scott’s revisionist account of the transition to the agrarian state, Against The Grain. It was one of those rare books reorders your mental map of the past, in large part because Scott is such an adept synthesizer of recent discoveries about the actual sequence that led to the formation of the first cities and states. Compared to Harari’s more familiar account in Sapiens, Against The Grain seemed to me to offer a more original and provocative narrative—while at the same time managing to do a much more responsible job of acknowledging the foundational work of other researchers.
Inspired by our long-running debate over the origins of capital and cities, and by my enthusiasm for the framework Scott proposed, I decided to jot down an overview of how I had come to understand the history of that period, drawing heavily from the ideas I’d absorbed from Against The Grain. I worked at it sporadically for a few weeks, ultimately ending up with a few thousand words of semi-shorthand notes—a truly “brief history” of the birth of agriculture and states—that I wrote entirely for the purpose of sharing with my three friends.
And then I completely forgot about it.
Fast forward about four years. It’s after dinner a few months ago and I’m putting in some time on a long-term project of mine: trying to convert as much as possible of my past personal writing/note-taking so that I have an comprehensive collection of my thinking over the years in a single notebook at NotebookLM. I’ve already got the full text of all my books, all my blog posts and Adjacent Possible essays in a notebook—accompanied by all the quotations I’ve highlighted in books going back to about 1998. But I’m constantly trying to add to that corpus, to capture the full history of my interests in that one notebook. And so I’d decided to take on the surprisingly challenging project of exporting my old Apple Notes to a format that NotebookLM could read. A few days before, a random conversation with a seat-mate on a flight to California had turned me onto an app called Exporter that let you convert Notes to a collection of markdown files, which was an important first step. And so now I was going through those exported notes, trying to figure out the best way to concatenate them into a longer document so I didn’t have to dump 500 short notes as sources in my notebook.
And that’s when I stumbled on my “brief history of civilization” note, which had been just sitting there gathering dust for years. I’d never even managed to send it to my three friends. As I skimmed it, it was obvious that the ideas were still very rough, and the descriptions almost too abbreviated even for our private chat. And I had read a few books in the interim—like Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything—that suggested some obvious additions to my write-up. But the main thing that jumped into my mind reading this rough outline was that something had fundamentally changed since I had written it in 2021: I could now explore—and even share—these ideas using NotebookLM. I could take my shorthand description of the birth of agriculture and trigger Deep Research queries off of each paragraph to expand or fact-check the argument; I could add all the passages I’d highlighted from Harari, Scott, Graeber and others to the notebook to help me turn these rough notes into something more professional, with direct quotes and citations. I didn’t want to write an entire book on the topic, but it seemed like a wonderful theme for a multi-part essay here at Adjacent Possible. And because we now have public notebooks, I could share not only the essays with Adjacent Possible subscribers, but also the notebook itself, the bundle of knowledge that I’d collected in my investigations.
But then something even more remarkable happened: as I started to do some exploratory research, branching off of some of my favorite sections of Against The Grain, I ended up stumbling across a remarkable story of archeological detective work, kind of a cross between Indiana Jones and a Tom Clancy thriller, a discovery that radically transformed the tidy narrative of agricultural transformation that Sapiens had presented—and that suggested a tantalizing, science-based link to the Biblical origin story of the Garden of Eden. The transition to agriculture was even more provocative than I had thought in my first reading of Against The Grain, and amazingly it involved everything from Cold-War-era spy technology to Al Gore’s early crusade against global warming.
I’ll be sending out the first installment later this week, with a preview for all subscribers. In the meantime, I’ve asked NotebookLM to create a short visual pitch for the series, using our new Slide Decks feature. Enjoy!
