Oh my goodness… Jason Calacanis (whose podcasts I listen to regularly) pulling together the creators of my two favorite AI tools Gamma and NotebookLM, to discuss my favorite topic — productivity and creativity in the age of such powerful AI tools.
This like new years gift to me (I just love nerding out).
Taking a deep breath.
Below are my top takeaways.
This Week in Startups
AI makes you more creative, AI Roundtable with Steven Johnson and Grant Lee | E2231 - This Week in Startups
We keep hearing about how AI is killing our ability to think, filling our media with slop, and ruining our kids’ ability to learn. It seems the internet is filled with negative sentiment about the future AI is bringing. Jason is joined by Grant Lee, CEO and co-founder of Gamma, as well as Steven Johnson, editorial director of NotebookLM to tackle these questions on today’s AI roundtable! Grant and Steven break down how they are using AI to push forward their own productivity as well as their t
Steven Johnson makes a provocative claim: tools like Gamma and NotebookLM aren't making us less original; they're making us more original. At first glance, that might seem counterintuitive.
My initial thought was, "Doesn't that just lead to mediocrity?" If these tools draw on the "average" of human knowledge, how can they foster originality? But the paradox lies in their ability to unblock thinking, offer a thousand alternative ideas, and pinpoint blindspots that we might otherwise miss. Before, exploring and testing ideas often meant reaching out to others – a slower, more cumbersome process. Now, a powerful AI can serve as a relentless sparring partner, accelerating the initial stages of creative thought.
It reminds me of a fascinating tidbit I heard on the Hard Fork podcast. One of the hosts mentioned their new productivity system as a writer: using Capacities (a tool I hadn't heard of before) to store "flakes" of ideas – perhaps something like, "We're in an AI bubble." Then, daily, the software randomly spits these flakes back, which is often enough to inspire new thoughts and connections in the writer. It's a simple yet powerful example of how even a basic AI-assisted system can spark human creativity, showing the surprising ways the human mind can react to prompts.
A perfect illustration of this augmentation comes from Gamma's own CEO, Grant, who describes using NotebookLM to turn their private Slack community into a structured, queryable "map" of user feedback. This isn't about the AI replacing human insight, but rather making a massive volume of qualitative data accessible and actionable.
- Gamma exports the entire chat history from its power‑user Slack workspace and loads it into NotebookLM. It's a manual export/import flow, not a tight integration, but as Grant put it, “not the craziest thing.”
- Once the data is in, the team uses NotebookLM to categorize feedback, build personas, and identify which pain points belong to specific user types.
- NotebookLM allows them to ask targeted questions, such as: which value propositions truly matter for a given persona, and whether a proposed feature would genuinely "move the needle" for that segment.
- Grant emphasizes that this process gives Gamma an unprecedented ability to learn and synthesize large volumes of qualitative input in ways that “weren’t possible before.” Raw chatter is transformed into a tangible map, guiding them to explore more deeply and strategically. This isn't outsourcing strategy to AI; it's using AI to organize information so humans can derive strategy more effectively.
The discussion also highlights a crucial point: why some knowledge workers find immense value in these tools, while others struggle to cross the chasm. The consensus is that it boils down to the depth of exploration. Simply asking Gamma, NotebookLM, or ChatGPT for a "one-shot" final product rarely yields true value. Power users aren't looking for a quick fix; they're diving deep into conversations, exploring ideas, porting those explorations into tools like Gamma to generate content, and then iterating on that content. It’s still a lot of work, but these tools allow us to skip the mundane, tedious, and boring steps that don't inherently add value to the creative or strategic process.
Instead of outsourcing your thinking to models, you use them to form "scaffolds" of decisions, play out various scenarios, and think through consequences. This provides a significantly richer dataset for human decision-making. AI takes on the "chore" – the time-consuming, repetitive tasks – freeing the human brain to focus on higher-level, more important work. Steven Johnson, for instance, used AI to build chronologies for his book, a task that previously took weeks to complete manually. Similarly, generating comprehensive bibliographies, once a monumental undertaking, can now be done with remarkable efficiency.
This, then, is the best time to be alive if you are truly driven to learn, understand, and make better decisions. These tools amplify our potential. Conversely, if you're only looking to create the "illusion" of understanding, this is also the best time to be alive – but only until your colleagues inevitably figure out that you don't really understand. True augmentation lies in the collaboration, where AI empowers human intelligence, not substitutes for it.
Beyond the Hype: How AI Tools Like Gamma and NotebookLM Are Augmenting Human Intelligence