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Azeem Azhar is the kind of guy who loves both old-fashioned pens and advanced AI. It was a delight talking with him, not just because he’s a successful entrepreneur, author, and interviewer, but because we share quirky tech tastes. Azeem and his team publish Exponential View — a Substack with 140,000+ subscribers — about how tech is shaping our future. In our live conversation, we talked about Azeem’s AI — and analog — workflow. The discussion also touched on 18 sites, apps, and gadgets summarized below.📺 Watch the video for the full chat, or check the highlights and tool list below.🔎 On AI Research Beyond Google and WikipediaAzeem consistently tweaks how he figures out where tech is heading. Check his “Boom or Bubble” dashboard on whether the AI market is overheated for an example of his analysis.Key takeaway: Azeem’s research workflow has moved almost entirely away from traditional search:* Why he quit Google and Wikipedia. [16:20] “I spend virtually no time on Google searching for things, nothing on Wikipedia at all, not a moment now.” Instead, he surfaces what matters to him with AI searches and custom tools his team has developed.* Manus is his research assistant. Azeem and his team use Manus (a Chinese-founded AI startup recently acquired by Meta) the way you’d send a research assistant to “find color—go off and find the case studies, the anecdotes, the famous quotations.” The team runs queries overnight for 30-40 minutes each.* Shortwave helps with investor intel. This AI tool is superb for searching within your email. Azeem has 40 startup investments. To support founders, he uses Shortwave to search past email to help explore questions like, “How well are they sticking to their milestones? Have they changed the goalposts? Where do they seem to have problems where I can be helpful?” Azeem uses Shortwave to search across 15 years of Gmail messages.* Julius is a resource for data science. He uses this tool, which he’s invested in, as an AI number cruncher. [My post on Julius]🤖 How Azeem Uses AIAzeem set up custom instructions directing ChatGPT to aggressively challenge his assumptions: [6:41] “It can be quite exhausting… it’s like being constantly interrogated.” His follow-up? “I often have to copy the answer and put it into Claude and say, explain this to me like I’m a bright high schooler.” He considers Claude the best coding model and also uses it for text refinement. Bottom line: Azeem uses the two AI models sequentially to force himself to think deeper.Other AI Assistants* Gemini Pro Azeem builds interactive apps with Gemini. “I might explain what I’m looking for, have a discussion, then ask it to build the interactive platform app. Then I can play with the parameters.”* Perplexity Azeem’s go-to for “instant answers” when he doesn’t need deep research.* DeepSeek Azeem’s default for “good enough” queries to cut costs. “In general, it’s really good enough. And if on the occasion I don’t think it is, I can fire it out to one of the other models.”* Grok Azeem experiments with this occasionally as part of his testing.✒️ “I Dip the Pen in this Bottle of Ink”Azeem has a fountain pen without an internal ink cartridge. Why? [9:30] “If I am writing and every 10 or 15 words I have to stop to dip the pen in ink, I’m slowing myself down... In a world where I can move really quickly, I will slow myself down. I’ll get very haptic in the experience and look at what I’m writing and force myself to cross out mistakes, and feel frustrated about mistakes, so therefore slow my thinking down even more.” In a conversation about AI acceleration, Azeem deliberately builds in friction. 🎙️Voice and Writing Tools 🖊️ * Wispr Flow Azeem reads his handwritten notes aloud into Wispr Flow, editing in real-time as he speaks.* Kolo Tino Fountain Pen Azeem likes the feel of pen on paper and its deliberate pace.* Paper Republic Trifold Leather Journal Azeem’s folio holds three separate notebook inserts: “You can have one that’s just for your jotting of your to-do list and then others are for thinking time.”😰 Azeem: “Are You a Bit Stressed, Jeremy?” 😖In our recent conversation, Azeem teased me for repeatedly referencing resources for relaxation. “Are you a bit stressed? Because you’ve talked to me about your squeeze ball. You’ve talked to me about Headspace for meditating. You’ve talked to me about your CMY cube to chill you out. I don’t want to go all shrink on you, but there’s a little hint of intensity there.”Fair point. I do have a lot of calming tchotchkes on my desk. We both shared a bunch of tools we use, analog and digital, for coping with busy-ness and overwhelm. Below are three Azeem recommends: Focus & Wellness* Pzizz Azeem’s most-used app: “[The app’s] run time is probably 10 hours a week on average and has done for a decade.” He paid $50 for a lifetime subscription and uses it for naps, overnight flights, and jet lag recovery.* Oura ring Azeem uses this for health tracking, as have I, since I first wrote about it in 2021. * Lacrosse ball Azeem’s essential travel item: “A really hard lacrosse ball to put into your pressure points, like your glutes and your hip flexors, because you want to do that massage, especially once you’ve been on your second 10-hour flight in five days.”🎧 High-End Audio: Headphones and DJ Mixing Azeem tests headphones with “Sultans of Swing,” a song by Dire Straits, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as well as dance tracks. * Solitaire T Headphones Azeem travels with these for high-end sound with noise cancelling for long flights.* Beats Fit Pro His everyday choice.* DJ Studio Azeem uses this digital audio workstation to create DJ mixes while traveling.🌟 Notable Quotes * Azeem on the skyrocketing cost of cutting-edge AI: “All of this is expensive. I mean, we spend as a team, I would say probably between $350 and $500 per person per month.”* My take: we’re nearing a new digital divide. Free alternatives like Jan AI help (see my post), but if you use the best contemporary AI models, your bills add up fast.* Azeem on why no single AI company will “win” the market. "I haven't seen a strong reason to think that a network effect will emerge.” * His rationale: “If you get the unique data for clown makeup, and I get the unique data for vineyards in Italy, if I'm not interested in clowns, I'm not going to use your LLM.”* Azeem says OpenAI’s strategic dilemma, as reported by The Information, is whether to focus on power users or those who just want quick replies. * [29:23] “They have 1,000 researchers who have built amazing deep research tools, and most people just want to know which movie should I watch tonight, or draw my dad as if he was Spider-Man for his 70th birthday card.”* On accountability in the AI era: “We’ve essentially said to the team that we don’t have hallucinations at Exponential View because everything is owned by a person. If you copy and paste something out of an LLM that’s got a hallucination in it, that’s you saying it, that’s not the LLM saying it.”* On the swift pace of change: “I would think that 70% to 80% of my workflows today, the things that I do, are different to how I did them three months ago.”Thank you to Romaric Jannel, Abbey Algiers, Aysu Kececi, Ondrej Prostrednik, blaine wishart, and many others for tuning into the live video conversation with Azeem Azhar. You’re Invited! Join me next Wednesday, January 21 at 10am EST for Just Start Writing: Tools For Busy Creators In 2026, a free workshop I’m leading for Medium.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Discover a range of powerful AI tools that can transform your work process! Explore Notebook LM for summarizing notes and Claude for building custom apps. Learn how Granola captures meeting notes and Perplexity provides quick briefings. Gemini serves as a guided learning tutor, while Ideogram generates stunning visuals for your projects. Superhuman revolutionizes email efficiency, Craft enhances visual handouts, and Gamma easily converts documents into polished presentations. Plus, ChatGPT's new features for image generation and app integration will blow your mind!

Exploring AI in visuals, one host dives into Ideogram, a favorite image generator. Its automatic prompt improvements and four generated options make creativity seamless. Public galleries inspire remixing ideas, while accurate text in images saves time. Diverse style choices, from Pop Art to Surreal Collage, add flair to creations. The ease of customizing styles and including negative prompts for precision enhances usability. But he also discusses the competitive landscape and ethical concerns surrounding AI-generated imagery.

NotebookLM is the most useful free AI tool of 2025. It has twin superpowers. You can use it to find, analyze, and search through a collection of documents, notes, links, or files. You can then use NotebookLM to visualize your material as a slide deck, infographic, report — even an audio or video summary.How to set up a notebook* Pick a purpose. Start a new notebook for a work project or a learning goal. Examples: I created a notebook to organize materials for the new online bilingual MA program we’re developing at the CUNY Newmark Grad School of Journalism where I work. I also set up a notebook to learn more about Gustav Mahler, a composer I revere. I have numerous others for work and personal projects. * Find sources for your notebook. NotebookLM recently added a search panel to help you discover high-quality sources. You decide which, if any, of the suggested materials to add to your notebook. The “Fast Research” is quick and focused, unlike a generic Google search that returns hundreds of results, some of which have gamed the search engine system. * Fast Research surfaces 10 or so documents related to your topic in less than 30 seconds. You can ask it to find sources within your Google Drive, or from the Web. * The Deep Research prompt option in the same panel will more slowly gather many more sources. Tip: make your query as specific as possible to surface relevant, useful sources. Here’s an example of a concise, precise query I used. * Add your own materials. Upload files up to 200 MB and 500,000 words into your notebook. You can add:* Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets* PDFs, images (including photos of your handwritten notes), and Microsoft Word documents* YouTube links and audio, image, or video files (it extracts the transcript)* Website URLs (it extracts the text)No other AI tool I’ve used lets you compile as many different kinds of materials in a centralized AI workspace that’s easy to explore and build with.* Free accounts can create up to 100 notebooks, with 50 sources in each. On a free plan, you may run into limits when creating multimedia materials. You can run free 10 Deep Research queries a month. Students in the U.S. 18 or older can get pro access for free. * Pro accounts, which cost $20/month as part of Google AI Pro, can host 500 notebooks with 300 sources in each. They can run 20 Deep Research queries a day. Collaborate and shareNotebookLM now lets you collaborate as you would with Google Docs. You can choose to invite people as viewers or editors. Give them a full view of your sources and notes, or limit their access to the search/chat interface.You can also publish notebooks publicly. Here are some examples:* Trends in health, wealth and happiness by Our World in Data* How to build a life, from The Atlantic* Shakespeare’s Complete Plays* Parenting Advice for the Digital Age, by Jacqueline Nesi, PhD of Techno Sapiens* Earnings Reports for the World’s 50 Biggest Companies* Secrets of the Super Agers by Eric TopolExplore your materialsAs you add materials, NotebookLM analyzes them and suggests relevant questions. After I uploaded biographical material about Mahler, it suggested search queries — based on the source documents — about why he converted to Catholicism and what poetry collections inspired him. You can also ask any question on your mind or type in any kind of traditional search query.NotebookLM uses natural language processing to make sense of your documents. When you type in a query, the system understands what you’re looking for. When I queried about the death of Mahler’s loved ones, I didn’t have to mention their names or even their relationship to him — NotebookLM understood what I was asking. These exploratory searches are more powerful than old-fashioned keyword searches, which only work if an exact word combination appears in your document. NotebookLM makes it easy to run abstract queries as well, searching for moments of anger or surprise.Tip: target specific sources. You can use the checkboxes next to each source to limit your search to particular documents. This precision is handy when you want to search within a specific report or compare information across just two or three key documents.Visualize informationUse the Studio tab to create shareable reports, slides, graphics, and multimedia out of your notebook material. Unlike other AI tools, NotebookLM’s creations are grounded in your source documents — they don’t pull from the Web or generic training data. Because they draw only from your source material, the creations will change as you add more to your notebook, or if you mark only a subset of sources to be used.Create a mind map first to get an overview of the topics covered in a notebook. Then create the following elements to understand and share your material.InfographicsCreate polished visual summaries. Choose whether you want a landscape, portrait, or square image, and how simple or detailed it should be. Then type in an optional custom prompt to guide the design. You can include instructions about your preferred color palette, target audience, illustration style, and the kinds of numbers or facts to prioritize.A caveat: NotebookLM consistently produces clean, readable text. It’s mostly accurate, but I’ve encountered occasional errors. Here’s an example: Mahler’s age of death is wrong at the bottom of this NotebookLM infographic. Slide decksNotebookLM’s newest capability — generating slide decks — continues to surprise me. When I ask it to make slides summing up notebook material — it comes up with outstanding results, like this slide deck about Mahler. You can choose between detailed standalone slides, or simpler TED-style presenter slides meant to accompany a verbal presentation. As with the infographic tool, you can just press the slide deck button to let NotebookLM decide what to generate. But you’ll get something more relevant to you if you write a prompt to guide the visual style and subject matter focus. The slides include a small NotebookLM watermark in the bottom right corner.Below is an example of a slide deck about NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM. 👇A caveat: In my testing, the slides have been clean and visually engaging. They’re not perfect, though. A deck about our new bilingual journalism program, for example, included misleading AI-generated images of our faculty members. Video overviewsCreate a video summary of the material in your notebook. Think of it as an AI-narrated slide show. Fortunately, there’s no talking avatar. I like how these videos include facts, examples, quotes, and images pulled directly from your source documents. Choose between a brief video (1-2 minutes) or a longer explainer (often six to 10 minutes). You can’t specify the exact length. Tailor the approach to your viewers with a prompt. You can even specify a specific audience, whether board members of a charity you’re presenting to, or grandchildren new to your subject matter. Videos can take five to 10 minutes to generate. Free accounts can generate only a few videos, slide decks, or infographics per notebook before hitting a usage limit. When your video — or other creation — is ready, you can download and share it, or view it within your notebook. 📺 Here’s a video overview of NotebookLM I created with NotebookLMPodcastsNotebookLM’s audio overviews became Internet famous for their remarkably human-sounding conversations. When I played a clip for a group of students when this feature launched, they didn’t realize the speakers weren’t human. Example: Here’s a new “Deep Dive” audio piece I generated about NotebookLM for this post. * You can write a brief or detailed prompt to guide the style of the audio, and you can choose from multiple formats.* After a few minutes, the audio file is ready for you to download and share. * Tip: add an AI-generated label to this kind of audio or any other material you create with NotebookLM. That way people will know where it came from and won’t assume you created each detail from scratch. You can generate audio pieces from a subset of your documents or your full collection of sources. Here are the four kinds of audio you can generate, with an example of each:* Debate. Here’s an audio debate I prompted NotebookLM to create about which of its features are most useful.* Critique. Here’s a critique of NotebookLM I generated from 19 sources I added.* Brief summary. Here’s a 90-second audio overview. * Deep dive. Here’s a deep dive NotebookLM explainer. Text reportsIn addition to multimedia, you can generate custom reports. The reports tend to be around 2,000 to 3,000 words, or six to 12 pages. Here are example reports generated by NotebookLM: an advanced guide to NotebookLM and a guide to integrating NotebookLM in a newsroom. I’ve found the dozens of reports I’ve generated to be thorough enough to be useful for reference or learning. They also help point to sources worth exploring further. Try prompting NotebookLM to create the following kinds of reports:* Timelines: Organize chronological information * FAQs: Common questions and answers about your topic * Explainers: Break down complex concepts * Teaching guides: Useful if you’re an educator or lead workshops * Student handbooks: Supplemental resources * Critiques: Analysis of weaknesses or limitations in your sources * Debate reports: Multiple perspectives on controversial topicsFlashcards and quizzesWhen learning something new, create flashcards or quizzes with multiple-choice questions to test yourself. * Describe your level of understanding (e.g. “I’m new to this,” or “I’m a professional in this field, but I’m new to this framework,”).* Choose whether you want small or large number of questions or flashcards. * Specify concepts you want the quiz or flashcards to focus on. * You can also ask NotebookLM to focus on a particular source, like a certain link, PDF, or video you’ve uploaded. Example: Check out my NotebookLM flashcards. 5 Projects to Try1. Organize a work projectEach time you add a file, NotebookLM summarizes it. Its full text is then searchable with citations, so you know you’re not getting AI hallucinations. To assemble a useful notebook, gather relevant documents, including: * Plans, internal reports, or project memos* Links to relevant sites* Meeting recordings or transcripts * Important emails copied and pasted or saved as PDFs or docs * Background reports, company manuals, or competitive research Use your project notebook to: * Create summary reports or timelines to onboard new team members * Draft slide decks for internal meetings* Make infographics to visually summarize complex processes or workflows* Quickly find relevant quotes, stats, anecdotes, or examples* Refresh your memory when returning to the project later on2. Plan a tripI create travel notebooks to help me find relevant family activities and ideas for outings. I’ve done this before with Perplexity and other AI platforms, but I like the way NotebookLM lets me gather so many different kinds of inputs: links, videos, articles, and local guides—everything I might want to reference when planning weekend activities or hosting visitors. You can find these kinds of resources with a Google or Perplexity search, or do the whole process within NotebookLM. For travel planning, compile these materials: * Historical and cultural information * Entertainment guides and reviews * Restaurant recommendations * Local blog posts, event listings, or links to top attractionsThen ask NotebookLM to generate:* Itineraries* FAQs about your destination * Recommendations based on your budget or other constraints * Slide decks or infographics to share with your travel companions * Flashcards for learning key phrases if you’re traveling abroad * Quiz games to play at the airport while waiting in line3. Learn somethingHere’s a meta use-case: I created a notebook about NotebookLM to help me learn about its nooks and crannies. (Try the quiz about NotebookLM it created for me.) I made another one about “deliberative dialogue” to learn more about tactics for encouraging civil discourse between people who violently disagree. To build a learning notebook:* Upload relevant YouTube videos, articles, and course materials. * Use the “Add Sources” panel to add docs from your Google Drive or the Web. * Generate mind maps, quizzes, and flashcards to test your understanding.* Create audio guides to learn while exercising, cleaning, or commuting.* Prompt for timelines, FAQs, explainers, infographics, and slide decks tailored to your knowledge level and learning goals.Tip: break large documents into smaller piecesNotebookLM uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for search. That keeps it grounded in your material and avoids hallucination. But it also means that when asked to quickly search gigantic documents, NotebookLM may have the capacity to scour only a subset of your source material. To avoid searches that miss important material, consider breaking enormous documents into smaller pieces and narrowing your searches to specific sources or more precise subjects.4. Compile reference guides Build notebooks to help you handle recurring tasks. * Grant writing. Compile successful applications, guidelines, or evaluation criteria.* Social posts. Gather style guides, brand guidelines, and examples of past posts that have worked well for you or competitors. * Technical documentation. Assemble specs, organizational rules, or industry best practices.* Customer research. Add past surveys, interview transcripts, analytics reports, or testimonials. Tip: as a first step, strip names and emails from surveys or interviews to protect respondents’ privacy. 5. Manage home projectsCreate notebooks for life outside of work. NotebookLM is great for this because unlike other AI tools, it lets you input so many different kinds of sources with huge file sizes, whether you have videos, audio files, PDFs, your own handwritten notes, links to various sites, or Google Drive files. * Recipe collections and guides to various cooking techniques* Home improvement projects with how-to articles and product reviews* Hobby research for woodworking, guitar, photography, or gardeningWhy NotebookLM Stands Out 📍* Unlike AI assistants designed around an open-ended chat box, NotebookLM is structured around a more familiar paradigm: a searchable notebook. The closest parallels are Claude Projects or ChatGPT Projects, which allow you to organize documents in a folder that can inform AI queries on those services. Perplexity Spaces is also useful for organizing related search threads. But none of those can generate NotebookLM’s full range of outputs, and each draws on its own training data as well as your sources.* NotebookLM’s citation system means you can trust its search results, because you can see the cited section in your original document. And it’s unique in being able to generate everything from audio and video to reports, slides and infographics from your source materials. * Note: Citations aren’t provided within infographics, slide decks, video or audio overviews. If there are tidbits from those you want to trace back to a source, summarize the fact or detail in question in NotebookLM’s explore tab — the chat window — to ask for a citation.* The free tier is powerful enough for most people. And it keeps improving, adding significant new capabilities every couple of months. * The bottom line: if I were forced to recommend a single AI tool for many different kinds of readers, I’d pick NotebookLM. What do you use NotebookLM for? Add a comment 👇Read more from Wonder Tools about NotebookLM 👇 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Explore unconventional AI techniques with Alexandra Samuel as she shares bold strategies to enhance creativity and productivity. Discover how she transforms words into catchy tunes using Suno, creates a pitch automation system with Coda, and generates numerous Python scripts to streamline tasks. Dive into her unique relationship with AI as a coach, while tackling its quirks like excessive flattery. The lively discussion pushes boundaries and challenges perceptions of AI's role in our lives.

Discover the latest features in Google Docs that are elevating the writing experience. Learn how the 'Help Me Create' command compiles documents effortlessly using prompts. Get your writing read aloud with AI voices to catch awkward phrases. Track document views with a new activity dashboard for better collaboration. Explore colorful templates and gain insights into organizing your work with tabs. Plus, uncover alternatives like Coda and Scrivener for different writing needs!

Discover how your smartphone has become an AI powerhouse, enabling tasks from creating presentations to conducting deep research. ChatGPT's advanced voice mode and integrations let you analyze files and design visuals seamlessly. Explore Google’s Gemini with its innovative image generation and enhanced editing features. Learn about Claude's project-aware capabilities and Microsoft Copilot's contextual assistance for free. For those valuing privacy, options like Locally AI and Private LLM offer secure, no-login solutions for personalized AI help.

Discover how to download and run a free, private AI program on your computer without subscription fees. Learn quick installation tips for Jan, including selecting models and trying prompts. Jeremy explores the benefits of private AI tools—like cost savings and data privacy—while also addressing their limitations compared to commercial options. He highlights real-world use cases in health research and compares other alternatives like Misty and Anything LLM. Ideal for privacy-conscious users looking for effective AI solutions!

Explore how AI can transform your ideas into interactive apps without needing any coding skills. Learn to create flashcards, quizzes, and meditation timers through simple conversations. Discover how to visualize data and make engaging content that captivates users. Find fun ways to build games and specialized tools, while understanding the limitations of such technologies. Embrace the ease of iterating your creations and consider alternatives for more advanced features.

Discover how to nurture creativity in kids with hands-on resources that prioritize imagination over AI-generated content. Explore Scratch and ScratchJr for fun coding experiences, and program the Dash robot for interactive play. Uncover nature with the Seek app during family walks, and access thousands of free books through Libby for car rides. Learn about Khan Academy as a comprehensive learning tool and enjoy educational streaming via Kanopy. Dive into creative art activities and music with Chrome Music Lab, all aimed at raising curious and engaged children.