AI makes you more creative, AI Roundtable with Steven Johnson and Grant Lee | E2231

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.2 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Gusto - https://www.gusto.com/twist

Lemon IO - https://lemon.io/twist

Quo - http://quo.com/TWiST

Today’s show:

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 teams. Both say that AI makes you more creative! Steven points out that it helped him write his books by having AI do the “chore work” while he got to focus on the valuable insights and higher level thinking.

One valuable tip was that AI can be used to uncover customer insights in a new medium. Steven and Grant both put customer feedback into an LLM, allowed them to have high level conversations with their whole user base about what features and products they each enjoy. If that isn’t creative, then what is?

Learn about all this and more in today’s roundtable!

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introducing Steven Johnson and Grant Lee!

(10:12) Gusto: Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at https://www.gusto.com/twist

(11:28) How Jason and the TWiST team uses NotebookLM

(12:37) Will AI replace lawyers in startups and VC? Should they?

(16:08) How the Gamma team uses AI understand their consumers

(19:43) Lemon.io: Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://lemon.io/twist

(22:38) How the Google team uses AI to “talk” to their whole user base.

(24:45) Is AI replicating our brains and consciousness?

(28:18) The ways that AI is changing how companies process information.

(30:39) Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at http://quo.com/TWiST

(31:43) Jason thinks groupchats are the modern coffee shop for interesting ideas!

(32:48) Why Steven thinks AI makes creatives MORE ORIGINAL

(40:02) HALF of US adults think AI makes you less creative

(43:20) Grant defends using AI for doing research + making business decisions

(45:28) Superforecasting — How to think about your thinking

(53:00) Is education going back to blue books and oral exams?

(56:30) Jevons Paradox and How AI will increase jobs for all!

(59:50) Edison put whale hunters out of business but brought in electricians and movie industry

(1:02:36) Jason coaches his employees to 10x themselves with AI tools to push value

(1:05:54) Jason’s call to join the AI revolution

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Thank you to our partners:

(19:43) Lemon.io: Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://lemon.io/twist

(30:39) Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at http://quo.com/TWiST

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a group of people that you've been talking to, Stephen, that are resisting it, creative
0:05.0	specifically. And maybe we could unpack why you think some folks are saying, I don't want to
0:11.5	introduce anything digital here. What had been striking for me in the last couple of weeks
0:16.3	just over the break was I had a couple of those conversations with like, you know, younger 20-somethings
0:21.6	who were just out of school who were talking this way about AI.
0:24.6	I had this fascinating conversation with a friend of mine who's a novelist who's older,
0:27.6	but is a novelist and she's actually kind of receptive to using AI.
0:32.6	But at some point I said to her, it's like, I'm convinced that these tools make me a more original writer and thinker.
0:40.1	That doesn't make sense to me.
0:41.3	Like, that seems like a category mistake.
0:42.9	If you're drawing upon something that is like the average of human knowledge, like that should make you less original if you're using it.
0:48.6	This Week in Startups is brought to you by Quo.
0:51.5	Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and
0:56.2	thread all in one place. Try it for free at Quo.com slash twist. Lemon.I.O. Get 15% off your first
1:04.7	four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built
1:12.9	specifically for small business and startups try gusto today and get three months free at
1:19.0	gustow.com slash twist i'm a real-time strategy guy so i love love like Command and Conquer, Age Empires, what was the other one, StarCraft 2, all that stuff. Man, that's my favorite. What about you, Grant? What do you play? I mean, honestly, these days, the game is chasing kids around and playing Mario Kart for the thousandth time. Because that's all they're into. But the last time you had a choice, what did you play? It's been a while, actually. I don't know. I mean, I'm back to like a casual game on your phone. Like, Halo is like the last time I've been like super consumed. But that's, yeah, that's ages ago. You seem like a first person shooter type guy. Most non-opan entrepreneurs fall into one of two camps. They're
2:02.7	either real-time strategy, right? That's like an Elon Musk. Or they just go full first-person shooter.
2:10.1	That's like a Palmer Lucky, like, you know, a certain type of entrepreneur. It's just going to go straight
2:16.0	for the jug. That's that's that's an
2:19.2	episode right there. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It is January 7th,
2:24.6	2026. We're back. And just a little soft launch here in 26. I decided for my own entertainment and
	...

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