This podcast is an experiment with NotebookLM, Google’s “AI-powered research partner”. The platform allows users to upload research materials such as PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs and Google Slides and also performs searches on research topics. It then summarises this material using Google’s advanced multimodal AI systems and its Gemini AI assistant. It delivers its findings in novel ways that are not limited to text, including video, slide shows and an “Audio Overview” function. An affiliated project, Bureau of Race Neutrality, took it for a test drive through the topics of racism and racial capitalism in Germany using sources that included:
Cedric J. Robinson, 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill (first published 1983).
Cedric J. Robinson, 2016. The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, The University of North Caroline Press, Chapel Hill (first published 1980).
Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds) 2017. Futures of Black Radicalism, Verso, London & New York.
CLAIM, 2025. “Report on anti-Muslim Racism”, CLAIM gGmbH, Berlin.
Laila Abdul-Rahman, Hannah Espín Grau, Luise Klaus, Tobias Singelnstein, 2023. Gewalt im Amt: Übermäßige polizeiliche Gewaltanwendung und ihre Aufarbeitung (Police Use of Excessive Force in Germany), Forschungsprojekt KviAPol.
Generated text summaries are:
“Briefing Document: An Analysis of Racism, Discrimination, and State Violence in Germany” [PDF]
“Synthesis of Racial Capitalism, Black Radicalism, and the Critique of Western Order” [PDF]
This episode also include excerpts from the Bureau of Race Neutrality Berlin’s recently published sound piece, Antifascist Noise (2025) [Bandcamp].
You might have noticed that the last section uses a different voice? NotebookLM has limited features for non-subscription accounts, so the final chat summary used an AI generated text-to-speech voice from elevenlabs , named “Rachel”.
