Unleash Your Creativity, A Custom Podcast in Minutes, AI and Critical Thinking
Leverage–April 14, 2025
So it’s the middle of April and it’s still snowing here outside Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome to New England ❄️
I hope everyone is well. As ever, the tech and AI world is moving a breakneck pace and this past week has been packed with developments.
Read on for two high-leverage tools and a rundown on the biggest recent news and research that will impact your life as a knowledge worker in 2025.
An AI-Powered Graphic Design Team
It’s been a while since I’ve found a tool that excites me as much as Typeset.
Typeset is a web app for creating visual content like slide decks, e-books, social and media posts. It leverages AI to assist with various aspects of the design and layout, which:
saves a ton of time
empowers you to create compelling visuals without graphic design and layout skills
Typeset is sort of like if Canva and iA Presenter had a baby. I adore both of these tools as well, and still use them (especially Canva), but Typeset stands out for its ability to help you quickly create compelling visuals at scale.
In Typeset you simply type (or paste) in text content and the AI-powered tool immediately creates a bunch of layouts for you to review and work with. It regenerates the options after each change you make, adjusting things as you go.
Adding images from stock sites like Unsplash (or Getty on the Pro plan) is directly integrated into the app and super smooth. Exporting to various file formats and layout sizes is easy.
There is a lot more as well—I’ve been using it for about a week and have only scratched the surface of its capabilities. One example: I created the banner image at the top of this post in Typeset.
What I love most about Typeset is the sense of confidence and energy it creates in me. I’ve noticed that with Typeset in my toolkit ideas blossom instead of wither.
I find myself excited to create instead of overwhelmed at all the work of turning my idea into something tangible. Typeset makes creating these visuals fun.
It’s like having an enthusiastic, fast-working team of graphic designers on demand, ready to collaborate on creating your next project.
A Custom Podcast on Any Topic In Minutes
In 1940 Winston Churchill wrote to his war cabinet:
To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.
This is as true in 2025 as it was in 1940—as knowledge workers we’re constantly trying to read and digest all kinds of documents.
Google just created an incredible tool to help with this problem—it’s called Audio Overviews and it lives in the Gemini chatbot app.
With Audio Overviews it’s as if you have a crack podcast team on call 24/7, including researchers, hosts, and producers.
Here’s how it works:
you upload a document (e.g. a long report, a scientific paper, annoying email chain, etc.)
wait a couple of minutes
Gemini creates custom podcast in which the co-hosts talk through the key points from the document
This is not AI text-to-voice transcription. The resulting audio is not simply a reading of the document. It is a bespoke discussion, including interpretation and breakdown of the document’s content.
The voices are natural-sounding. I find the banter engaging. I actually enjoy listening.
Curious how this actually sounds?
Keep reading—I include an example below with the rundown of the recent Microsoft/Carnegie Mellon paper AI and critical thinking.
The Impact of AI on Critical Thinking
Should we be worried about skill atrophy when using AI?
This is certainly a question worth considering. One data point comes from a recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research, entitled The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.
I find the title of the paper somewhat misleading. The title seems to imply that AI use caused a reduction in critical thinking and confidence in survey participants. I don’t think the content of the paper supports this.
The main finding of the paper, which I find very interesting, is that one’s inherent level of self-confidence directly correlates to the level of critical thinking one applies to a task (vs. offloading the critical thinking to an AI).
In other words, when someone has a high degree of confidence in their ability to perform a task, they will apply more critical thinking than if they have lower self-confidence.
They may still engage an AI tool to help with the work, but they will apply critical thinking to the way they use the tool, how they interact with it, and how they verify the results.
The paper also discusses how the availability of AI tools can shift where humans apply their skills in the work process:
Specifically, for recall and comprehension, the focus shifts from information gathering to information verification. For application, the emphasis shifts from problem-solving to AI response integration. Lastly, for analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, effort shifts from task execution to task stewardship.
As an entrepreneur and business owner, this sounds a lot like the transition one goes through during one’s career—growing from more of a “doer” role to a role in which delegation, management, and leadership are the essential skills.
In other words, AI is enabling knowledge workers to move higher up the value chain—creating leverage that previously required managing a team of people.
Speaking of leverage, how about creating a custom podcast to discuss the content of this paper?
The old way:
hire a researcher to read the paper and create show notes
hire the “talent”—a couple of co-hosts—to present the findings
hire a producer to record, edit, and create the final product
wait several days at least for all of this to get done
The new way:
upload the paper to Gemini
click “Generate Audio Overview”.
wait 1-2 minutes
click the play button
Want an example? Here’s the 7-minute podcast episode Gemini created for me about this Microsoft/Carnegie Mellon paper.
Top AI News
Still reading? Cool! Here’s a quick summary of some recent AI news that will impact life as a knowledge worker.
Google released Deep Research with Gemini 2.5 Pro for free.
Google also announced Firebase Studio, a web-based “vibe coding” platform that I expect will help unlock all kinds of custom app development.
Wordpress released an AI-powered site builder, aimed at helping businesses create better websites faster and easier.
Google and author Lee Boonstra released a white paper on prompt engineering. While highly technical in parts, there are some gems for getting better results out of LLMs.
That’s it for this week!
I hope you found this helpful and I’d love to hear your feedback. Anything stand out as particularly great? Anything you could do without? Please let me know!