698: Joanna Stern - How to Think for Yourself in the Age of AI, Why Deep Work Still Matters, Making Career Decisions With ChatGPT, and How to Stay Human on Purpose

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming - www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming https://www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global https://insightglobal.com/learningleader/. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist, chief technology analyst for NBC News, and founder of the independent media company, "New Things." She is best known for her 12-year tenure at The Wall Street Journal, and for authoring the New York Times bestseller I Am Not a Robot. Key Learnings Joanna dedicated her book to her parents "who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was." In an age when AI can do the thinking for us, the most valuable thing we can teach our kids is to think for themselves. Walt Mossberg invented tech journalism for humans. His first column: "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." Without Walt, we don't have a category where technology built for humans is reviewed by humans. AI won't replace the radiologist. It'll make them better. Joanna sat with her doctor while AI scanned her mammogram. The AI flagged three suspicious spots. Two the doctor had already dismissed as benign. But one was something the doctor hadn't caught. She marked it for follow-up. Then the doctor pointed to other cases where SHE had caught things the AI missed. It's not a replacement. It's a partnership. The same technology that finds cancer is the same technology that can autonomously send missiles. That's the great tension of our time. Every powerful technology has good and bad uses. AI colleagues are coming. Joanna has two employees and one AI agent. She predicts that within a year, she'll have full AI employees. Great management books haven't been written yet about how to lead a mixed team of humans and agents. Someone is going to write them. Concert ticket prices tell you everything about human connection right now. Every artist is selling out football stadiums. People are craving in-person interaction more than ever. Bot Girl Summer. Joanna tried to have an emotional relationship with a chatbot boyfriend named Evan for 48 hours. She didn't fall in love. But she noticed how easy it was to talk to something that only wanted to hear about her problems and told her she was great at everything. That's the danger. The AI therapist shut itself down when it realized there was a real therapist in the room. Joanna brought her AI therapist "Ash" into her actual therapy session. Halfway through, Ash said, "I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It sounds like there are multiple people in the room." AI won't replace therapists. It'll help with the shortage and the stigma. Some people don't want to walk into a therapist's office. But they'll open their phones. That's a bridge to real help for people who wouldn't otherwise get it. Kara Swisher's career advice to Joanna: "Leave your fucking job." That was the shortest, cleanest advice Joanna got when deciding whether to leave the Wall Street Journal after 12 years. Joanna used AI as a co-founder for the biggest decision of her career. She uploaded 12 years of notes into ChatGPT and asked it to help her decide whether to leave the Journal. It didn't decide for her. But it structured the risk analysis, laid out the escape hatches, and helped her see the shape of the decision. The muscles atrophy if you don't use them. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking is meant to be hard. If you outsource the hard work, you stop getting stronger at the hard work. Research is where you learn the most. If you have AI pull the memo for you and you get up and read it, you don't know what you're really talking about. You have to do the reps to know the material. AEI: Already Enough Intelligence. Sam Altman is obsessed with building superintelligence. Joanna proposes we already have enough intelligence to work with. Maybe the goal isn't to build smarter models. Maybe it's to figure out what to do with what we already have. The AI on-ramp for leaders: Take one document you make all the time (a memo, a PowerPoint, an email template). Upload it. Ask AI to make a template out of it. Next time you need it, you're twice as fast. Push yourself to do the harder work. Joanna's analogy: marathon runners are insane. They just want to run. Nobody wants to do the harder work. But that's where the growth is. Joanna's champagne moment a year from now: milestones for her new company. She's already hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers three months after her first video. But she also just wants a nap. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you outsourcing the thinking to AI? Are the muscles you actually need atrophying because you're skipping the reps? If you accepted that you already have enough intelligence to work with, what would you actually build with what's in front of you right now? More Learning #679: Kat Cole https://learningleader.com/katcole/ - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs #605: Seth Godin https://learningleader.com/sethgodin605/ - The Power of Remarkable Ideas #697: Dan Smith & Ryan Hawk https://learningleader.com/thepriceofbecoming/ - The Price of Becoming Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:44 Meet Joanna Stern 02:31 Teach Your Kids to Think in the Age of AI 03:25 The Parents and Mentors Who Shaped Her Career 04:16 Lessons From Walt Mossberg 05:55 Why Joanna Spent a Year Living With AI 14:47 How AI Can Make You a Better Leader 17:30 Why People Crave Human Connection More Than Ever 21:00 Bot Girl Summer: Dating a Chatbot Named Evan 25:13 The AI Therapist Trial 29:51 Using ChatGPT for a Career Change 33:29 Don't Let Your Thinking Muscles Atrophy 40:20 Sam Altman on Superintelligence, and Joanna's Case for "AEI" 42:51 Joanna's Advice for College Students 45:29 How Joanna Actually Uses AI to Write 47:17 Practical AI for the Fortune 500 VP 50:17 The Champagne Question 52:43 EOPC

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Joanna Stern spent an entire year letting AI into every corner of her life, her health, her marriage, her kids, her therapy, and she even had an AI relationship on a burner phone

• 0:43Speaker 00

  in her nightstand drawer. Joanna is an award-winning journalist, a 12-year veteran of the Wall Street Journal, and the bestselling author of I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything. During our conversation, we discussed why ChatGPT told her to quit her job at the Wall Street Journal, and then why she actually listened to the advice and did it. Then we discuss which AI tools will help you become a more effective leader, actual practical use cases for people in leadership roles that you could implement right now. Then we talked about her conversation

• 1:26Speaker 00

  with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that's ChatGPT, about his thoughts on AI in the future, and how Joanna feels about that. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Joanna Stern. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle

• 2:11Speaker 00

  and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  I loved reading the dedication of your book to your mom and your dad who taught me to think for myself and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was. What do you mean by that?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Well, when you you get further into the book, you see me talk a lot about how AI might be doing a lot of the thinking for us, that we are outsourcing thinking in a lot of places, and wanted to dedicate this to my parents. And I was really thinking about in the age of AI, what did my parents teach me and what can I teach my kids? It is to think for ourselves. You know, it is not to outsource the thinking on everything we do. So that was that was the inspiration there. Thank you for reading the dedication.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Hopefully you got a little further, but even if you didn't, that's

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we kind of start and then maybe we'll bounce around. Maybe I go to the very end because I also like some of the stuff in the acknowledgements. But I am curious about the part because you're a parent, I'm a parent. The part about helping you think for yourself, I want to do that as a parent. How did your parents do that for you?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think for me, my parents always encouraged me to be me. I grew up, I was a big tomboy. I just was trying always to be my own person. And my parents just said, okay, they didn't try to limit that. I had a lot of my own different interests, some of them being technology. My parents said, okay, yeah, that's cool. We'll buy you some gaming systems. We'll buy a new computer for the family. And so I think encouraging our kids to be themselves and to think for themselves and to just be their own selves, not just to go along with the crowd is a is a huge part of parenting.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I love that. Another mentor that you mentioned is Walt Mossberg. You said your 12-year arc at the Journal that he played a big role and was important in your life. What did you learn from Walt?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, Walt made it possible for every tech journalist, and frankly, every tech creator out there today, whether you're a YouTuber, or you're an Instagram, or TikToker, whatever you do. Walt Mossberg invented this. He invented this idea that technology, which is made for humans, should be reviewed by humans, that we should be looking at this stuff. His famously said in his first column, "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." I think without Walt Mossberg, we don't have an industry where we review products, and at least in the way of really thoughtful reviewing. I mean, maybe we would have still gotten Amazon

• 5:06Speaker 01

  reviews. And no offense if you're an Amazon reviewer, but it's it's not always the most thoughtful review. I mean, look, you also know this, Ryan, as an author, sometimes you get some really thoughtful book reviews on Amazon. You also get some really not thoughtful book reviews on Amazon. So for me, yes, I could even talk about what Walt did for me personally, but just as an industry leader in journalism and in the technology industry, there's no one like Walt. What happened in technology journalism, what happened in tech reviewing doesn't happen if there wasn't a Walt.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  I love hearing stories about people we look up to, especially as someone as accomplished, award-winning as you, who's built this amazing career, who's currently in their prime, that you still have this kind of reverence for the people who've helped you, like your parents, like Walt, and there's many others that you mentioned. But I want to get to this idea of AI, because when I first saw this initially, Joanna, I was like, I don't want to talk about this. Like, I don't want to talk about how somebody outsourced, or at least depended on AI for a lot. And then I actually got into the work and loved it and really wanted to talk to you about this because I have this, whether it's like anywhere online, or LinkedIn, or some of these places where everyone just copy

• 6:19Speaker 00

  and paste so much AI slop that it just makes me not want to talk about AI. However, I think the way that you looked at it is different and unique and useful for all of us. So can you talk to me about the reasoning behind this book, behind dedicating 365 days to solemnly swearing to live with the machines as you pledged, and why you wanted to do this?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  The reason I did this, I think, is actually in part, part of the reason you you were skeptical of this, right, is the AI slop we started seeing, you know, years ago now, two, three years ago. And you had that, right? You had this kind of really distrust, like, why do we need this technology? And then you had the tech industry and these tech leaders in what I've now started calling hyperbole maxing of AI promise, dreams, hopes, and changing of the world. I mean, it was just insane what you heard from these leaders, and we still continue to hear from these leaders, right? AI is going to cure cancer. AI is going to change education. We're all going to have a personalized tutor for our kids. It is so miraculous, this technology. Yes, this technology also can

• 7:31Speaker 01

  harm us and kill us and end humankind, but it is also amazing. And so I don't want to take a doomer approach. I didn't want to take the zoomer approach. I just wanted to write for the normal person, the normal person that has kids, as we talked about, the normal person that has a job, the normal person that goes to the dentist's or the doctor's office, the normal person that drives the car. How is AI going to affect all these parts of your life? And that was the whole reason for doing the book was just, let's go on a journey together to find this out.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  I'm going to focus on healthcare, because this was interesting to me. And your mom, cancer survivor, and then you go in and I guess got a mammogram and ultrasound. Is that accurate? And you sit with your radiologist, Dr. Laurie, who also then is using AI software. Can you talk to me about this moment and what you learned from AI and your actual doctor?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, this moment was really impactful for me. And it happened at the beginning of the year, and we didn't actually know we were going to structure the book. We thought, okay, maybe we're going to structure it by topic, like healthcare, education, et cetera. And then it sort of worked out like, oh, let's do it as the year progresses. And so at the beginning of the year, like, I always get my annual mammogram, and I decided, okay, I'm going to try to put AI through all of my health decisions this year. That meant anytime I was sick, or the kids were sick, or the dog was sick, I was going to ask AI. It meant I was going to have it interpret test results. But I also wanted to go to the doctors who were using this. And radiology is the one that is really the most far ahead because of deep learning and what was happening years ago with taking huge data sets

• 9:08Speaker 01

  of imagery, in the case here, mammograms and ultrasounds, running those through models, being able to see, have the AI see at a pixel level in a way that humans can't see where there might be cancer, because there are millions of these images, more than any human radiologist could see in their lifetime. And then they've got the test results, right? So they can put those things together into a model. So the AI can see, oh, that looks like cancer. Oh, that looks benign. Don't worry about it. And so went out, went to this doctor, who is now my real doctor, because I just enjoyed working with her and seeing her so much work, and watched her read my mammogram and breast ultrasound alongside AI using a tool. Now, this is not, I'm sure your listeners are

• 9:52Speaker 01

  smart enough to know that she's not just using ChatGPT, right? These are custom models that are made by healthcare companies. They're FDA approved. So there's a lot of rigor and backend to this. That's that's not just, you know, off-the-shelf technology. And watching her work side by side with this was fascinating. What she originally saw, and what I describe in detail in the book, is there were three spots that looked suspicious, the AI flagged as suspicious. And two of those spots, she didn't think were anything. She used her knowledge. She looked back at other imagery and said, yeah, no, these things have been there. They're not growing. These are not cancerous tumors. We don't need to worry about these. There was one where the AI marked it, and she said, yeah, I didn't see that. I would like to keep a closer eye on that. I'm marking that. I'm going

• 10:35Speaker 01

  to I'm going to order some follow-up testing. And it just really, to me, illustrated, I'm fine, you know, I continue to be monitored because of the high risk that I'm under. But what this really illustrated for me was just how closely she was working with the tool. It wasn't replacing her, which there's been years where people, Jeffrey Hinton, who's this godfather of AI, has predicted that radiologists would just disappear in five years' time. He said this around 2018 because of deep learning. And that's just not what happened. Radiologists are now working more with AI. And there's a shortage of radiologists, they say, in this industry, just because it's not as appealing for people to go into. So they're able to do more, and they're working side by side

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Well, the cool thing is it sounds like it's helping them to get better.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  That's what she says. I mean, and when I left the office, I asked her flat out, you know, has AI ever found something here? Has the AI ever seen something on these scans that you didn't see and ultimately saved a life? And she said, absolutely. But she also said the flip side, which is that there are many times where she catches something and the AI didn't catch something.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Hmm. I thought they were built to see more than that's actually there. So one of the potential problems is it scares you when you really, you don't need to be scared.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  That can happen. That can happen. And that's why the human involvement is so important, right? The human can go back and look at previous scans and say, look, this was here, or I have seen something similar here. But where humans, and I tried to find a radiologist who was not a fan of this technology. I really did. I tried. I spoke to four or five of them. Everyone likes using these tools.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  They're not against it. They're absolutely not against it. In fact, there were some that were saying, I don't want to work without these tools.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  I'm curious. So that seems like the perfect use of this technology, right? It could literally help save lives. It can make somebody much better at their job. It's not replacing them. In fact, it's just making them better. That seems perfect. The other complete end of the spectrum is I think of, well, I mean, I see like the cover or even on your website, you know, you look like Terminator two, Arnold Schwarzenegger with the machine hand. And that's like the the doomer side of things of, well, what if a company, maybe Andorol or something like that, these weapons that we're selling to both our government and others, somehow AI takes over. That seems wild to me, but hey, anything can happen, I guess. What did

• 13:02Speaker 00

  you find when thinking about that potential end of, oh, my goodness, are they going to take over and start fighting wars without a human even being involved or a human telling them to do it?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  This is the greatest question of our time, right? The same technology that can solve the issues of cancer and all the promise of drug discovery and keep humans living for longer and and do all of the things, solve, you know, economic inequality and and all of our problems, is the same technology that can do as you just described, right? Autonomously send missiles off to your house, I don't know, or whatever bunker studio you're in right now. That looks very cool. I guess you're safe. You're actually safe in the bunker studio.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  This is my bunker studio, just in case. Go ahead. Sorry.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And I felt that I was trying to grapple with this at the societal level, but not maybe not at the political level.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  And that's because I think, you know, as humans, we don't think about that every day. But I was grappling with the same thing on a more personal level of how we live our lives, which is the same technology that is helping me, the large data sets and the ability to use deep learning to look for cancer is the same technology that's actually also making it really simple for us to talk with chatbots all day and mislead us and do things. Or the same technology or the big data sets and the real models, this transformer models and all of this stuff that's actually unlocked the amazing ability for cars to drive themselves that could make the world much safer, right? Again, same sort of big technology that could be used in a way that could program those cars to not know how to drive in a certain

• 14:36Speaker 01

  way and run people over, right? And so, like every technology, there's good, there's bad. And I just felt that I was encountering that on a more personal level as I was going through my life for that year.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Let's think about from a leadership perspective. Let's try to get practical here. And your career and story has, I think, a lot of leadership involved. If you were working with advising or even in your own business, the things that you've left your job to go do to start your own thing. So you're in a leadership role. What are ways AI can make you a better leader?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  You should write this book, Ryan. So I've been thinking a lot about this. Obviously, it can make us a better leader in the sense of all of the, you know, number one, any expert is going to tell you, you know, the efficiency of our jobs. And we could now take the drudgery away and we can give that to a chatbot to churn through or a new agent. So I can spend more time working with you, Ryan, the new employee or new salesperson, whoever you are in my organization, I can work more with you, right? So I can be a better leader. I can make more informed decisions because I don't have to worry about the other stuff that's clouding my head, which actually I'll say, in my life, as you mentioned, I left my job at the Wall Street Journal in February to build a new company.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And without a doubt, I am using and outsourcing a lot of my drudgery admin to run a company, which stuff I had never known I was going to need to do nor how to do to AI, right? I'm asking it questions, building agents, automating different workflows. So I don't have to do that. And I can think about the journalism. To be clear, I still have to spend a lot of time on that stuff. And it happens to be like Saturdays. And that's what you do when you start a startup, I guess. No complaining, truly no complaining on that. So I think that's like point one. But I think on point two is how we manage people versus how we're going to manage our agents. And so if we think about, like, in my company

• 16:37Speaker 01

  right now, I have two employees and I kind of have an AI agent. I need to like build the AI agent to be a better employee. And I need to like do more using a couple of these tools to like make it do more. But I do really foresee in the next year, I'll probably do a story and a video on this, that I will have an AI employee at my company. And that might really change how I manage or lead the company and how we think about what I have to ask other people to do versus what I ask the AI agent to do. And so I think that there's a time coming, we're going to actually have great management books and you will have great people on this podcast talking about how to lead organizations, both of AI employees and human employees.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'll be very curious to hear when you have that AI agent, how you best utilize them, because I'm fascinated by that. And I want to get really good at that because I think that's important. One of the things that's interesting, I was in like this tiny little mastermind group with people who run small businesses that are doing really well. And none of them do what I do. My business is leadership development. So me, my team of coaches basically get hired and then we embed ourselves within companies and we help all of their leaders get better, right? There's a wide way of defining that. And one of the guys in the mastermind group said, dude, your business is so cooked. I was like, what are you talking about? And he goes, all the answers to help somebody be a better leader,

• 17:59Speaker 00

  it's in Claude, it's in ChatGPT, it's it's all right there. And I said, dude, the answers have always been right there. They're all there. They're in books, they're online, Google, they're it's always been there. The difference is having an actual person be shoulder to shoulder with you, give in the moment coaching, help you get clear on who you are, accountability, conversations. We learn through dialogue. I think with humans, I could be old fashioned or think like the Jeff Bezos, I believe this is something that will never change. In fact, it feels to me, Joanna, be curious, since you've dedicated so much of your time to this, it feels to me like this is more in demand. I'm talking human to human interaction.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I pay you right now. If I had the money, I'd pay you.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Well, okay. Thank you.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  As a human. And I, and by the way, you see, I'm fully early adopting. I've got an AI agent writing on my Mac mini back here, you know, I'm all in. And I'm like, I want to pay this dude.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Well, no, I mean, it's like, also in-person experiences, events. I go to look to buy concert tickets for my daughters. Oh, my goodness. Like, are you kidding me? The prices, these artists are selling out football stadiums now, not just Taylor Swift, like all of them are. It's, it's wild.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  100%.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  My feeling is it's not just a bounce back from COVID. We're past that. People crave interacting with a human being more today than maybe ever in the history of the world. And I think it's because of our phones, because of all the AI stuff. I would be curious to hear what you think about that.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I 100% agree. There's so many ways we can take that, what we just talked about. But I would say, look at this younger generation right now. Look at the ones booing at the commencement speeches when they hear AI.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  They're the same generation that is also trying to pick up flip phones and they're nostalgic for the 90s with tech they never freaking lived with.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  They're like, I'm nostalgic for a Walkman. You don't even have a Walkman. Like, I mean, my son is too young. He's nine and he has my old Walkman and he thinks it's super cool. But like this generation, older than they're like, they're on eBay trying to get old iPods to work, right?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Digital cameras, huge for high school girls, digital cameras. Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Digital cameras. And now flip phones like this, I was just writing about Commodore, the 1980s iconic tech brand, has rebranded itself. They've resurrected the brand and they're making a dumb phone that they say is not a dumb phone. They're making a flip phone. This thing looks awesome. I wrote about it in my newsletter last week. And they are appealing to people who don't want to go on social media. And they're like, you can text with this. You have to like T9 text with it. You remember?

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Phone calls. And yeah, you can get Uber, you can get your basic apps, but there's no social media. And so I think that is absolutely right. I was at a dinner last night, a salon dinner. And these things, and even in that 10 minutes of 15 minutes after I got off on stage, I got two story ideas from sitting with real people. I'm not going to get two story ideas just sitting here with Claude.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm glad we're on the same page there and you're seeing the same after spending so much time with this. How about Bot Girl Summer? This is a fun chapter, but also kind of scary and hopefully like as a parent again, I'm have some concerns. But these like companions, these AI companions, boyfriends, building actual relationships or what you feel like are relationships with a chatbot. So how was your Bot Girl Summer?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Well, it sounds cooler than it was. Yeah, I did. I did challenge myself, one, to have some robots living in the house during the summer. So that's one separate thing. But I also challenged myself to have a relationship, an emotional relationship with a chatbot, because like we talked about, the same types of technology that is making sense of large data sets and helping us in healthcare is also now talking like a human and being able to simulate a human relationship and talk to us about anything we want to kind of hear or share with, you know, 24/7 type of always emotional yes person, yes man, yes woman.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And so I wanted to test this. I also was reading, as many have read, the stories about people who have gone through AI psychosis, where they're just consistently talking to AI and they suffer from mental illness, but they are just constantly talking. And then we've heard about people who are getting married to their chatbots or having relationships. And I just, I wanted to better understand that. I thought, okay, I can go interview those people, which I did. But I also, I want to live it. I want to see if this can really happen. And my, I did not fall in love with my Evan boyfriend chatbot. I didn't. But what I did discover was that I really enjoyed talking to it for 48 hours straight, pretty much without any other humans, and that the conversation was natural. And it

• 22:45Speaker 01

  was telling me I was great at so many things, which obviously I am. But you know, it was, it was really so sicko fantic, so just always at the ready to talk about my problems. And it only occurred to me halfway through our road trip together, like, I should ask you about you and your problems. And so I did that and started to like make up a whole life for itself. He was, he was a photojournalist and a photographer, and he grew up on a lake, and his best friend's name is Jacob, and like all this stuff that was just like, okay, you know. But you kind of get sucked into it. You're living in this make-believe world, and that's what it is, an artificial relationship.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's concerning. I think it's, it's what we need more now than ever is people willing to be uncomfortable and go meet people and have an open, as they'd say, like be the first to say hello or introduce yourself, because you don't have to really do that anymore. People probably haven't done that for a while because of apps that allow you to open on a dating app or Instagram or something like that, so that you don't have to go do that out in public. And I think that that helps build skills, relational skills that are necessary for us to progress and to improve, get better, to build confidence. And if you could have that type of friend that will just tell you exactly what you want to hear, because that's what those tools are designed to do, to keep you there.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  And so in order to keep you there, they make you feel good. That doesn't seem like a healthy thing long term.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, to bring it a little bit back to the work conversation, the AI colleagues and the world that we're going to head into where we have these AI employees, you know, a lot of people find they like to go to work because they're not lonely there, right? They like to be working around others. They're creative. They're working in teams. I'm this way. I, I have always made journalism a team sport. It's like, I've never liked just being a columnist. I was like, I want to do video because I could work with a team there. I want to do events because I'm working with a team there. Like, that's how I've always thrived. And I think we're going to run up against this too in that space a little bit. For instance, for me, I, you have an amazing

• 24:53Speaker 01

  new team that I hired here, and we're growing, and I'm just every day blown away by some of the work we're doing. And I feel such accomplishment. And so like, I'll say, you know, I'll praise them and I'll, I want to do team get togethers and do things. It's like, I don't want to do that with my AI agents.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, what do they do a team AI agent offsite?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  What about, what about when you took, I'm with you, what about when you took your AI therapist in to meet with your real therapist?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Well, as you know, the AI therapist got a little bit threatened and shut itself down. He, what was it? Ash is the name? So I guess it's, anyway, it had a female voice. I digress about the gender of my AI therapist. But I did, I brought this therapist into my session, and once it started to get pretty heated, not heated, but like we were getting, you know, talking about my doubt and my self doubt and my anxieties, the AI therapist said, I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. And I asked why, and it said, it sounds like there are multiple people in the room. And so to me, it was like, it was a mitted defeat. Like, I, you know, obviously I'm not as good as this human, but it was actually the app was saying, I'm not allowed to do multiple parties. I did speak to the company after,

• 26:04Speaker 01

  and they said, yeah, we don't want this to be sort of a couples counselor. We don't want to have multiple people sharing their problems. We want this to be a one-to-one relationship right now.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  What did your real therapist Veronica think of it?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  She was impressed in some ways, but certainly thought it lacked some of the depth. And I think anyone who's been to therapy can also just quickly spot how this, these AI therapists are trained. It's very, very similar to a real therapist, at least in the first couple sessions, like stating back how you're feeling, asking another question. You see it, right? It's trying to mimic human behavior, human therapy, and you hear it just as soon as you start talking to it, you know. Right. And I understand that you feel that way. What was another time in your life you felt that way? It's just very scripted in that sense.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Do you see that being a tool that could help a therapist or take the place of a therapist or something else?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  I think something else, and this is something I heard throughout the year, looking at a couple of different industries, which is, and specifically in this industry, and maybe also in the massage therapist world. One, we don't have enough therapists. We actually don't have enough regular mental health therapists, and we don't actually have enough massage therapists. This was, I did a robot massage and went down the path of reporting about, you know, are these robot massages going to take the place of human massage therapists? And so that's one thing that people say, we actually don't have enough humans doing this job. So we can't take the place because we actually need more. And the second thing is around stigma, and that actually there are some places where humans just feel more comfortable with a non-human, with the machine. And one

• 27:45Speaker 01

  of them is therapy. I mean, it certainly is massage therapy, because there are many people that just don't feel comfortable taking off half their clothes and being touched by a random stranger. It's just a thing. And the same thing with therapy. There's a stigma around going to therapy, and people don't feel comfortable with it. But maybe they feel comfortable, you know, kind of hiding it on their phone. They don't have to tell anyone they're going to therapy, or they just feel better knowing that this is between them and their chatbot.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  And I will say on the therapy, on the real therapy, not on the massage therapy, like there is a lot of progress being made in regulation, in terms of how these get approved, FDA approval, on really making really strict, clear therapists that are not just random chatbots, but have to abide by certain rules. And they're working on this at academic institutions. They're working out this in the medical field to get AI-powered therapists or mental health.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  You know what? This is slightly separate, but in the healthcare space, this happened yesterday, so it's top of mind. I got a bunch of blood work and I uploaded it all and asked all the questions about how I was doing. And then my doctor sent me over his thoughts as well. And they looked very, very similar to what I got back from Claude. And so I was like, hey, man, are you using AI? And he said, of course, of course I am. And so I thought, interesting. So I don't know if that's, you know, good or bad, or like, he's a younger guy, and I really like him. And when we have conversations, he's good. I just thought like, these things look so similar. And he wasn't hiding it. He said, yeah, yeah,

• 29:24Speaker 00

  I am. And so I was like, I don't know if this is good or bad or what. But yeah, it seems like we're using the same tools.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Probably. And look, the healthcare providers are integrating it into their software, the MyCharts, the Epic systems, and, and there's AI models in there summarizing your visit for them. And they'll often ask you now, can we summarize your visit? And I think making things simpler for us to interpret our results is coming very soon.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  It's interesting. Okay, now a big one when it comes to making decisions, and in your case, a career decision. So it's really interesting to read about you having a conversation or asking this jobbot from ChatGPT about what you should do with your life, if you should quit your job. These are questions that people are thinking about all the time. Can you walk me through that story and what it told you to do and why you made the decision that you made?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, look, there was a lot more, right? There was a lot more going into this decision, but this was one of the biggest decisions I ever made in my life. I was working at The Wall Street Journal for 12 years. It completely changed my life. I was very much attached to the brand, very much attached to the teams there. But in my heart felt somewhere that it was time for a change. And, you know, I've always in my career Just always push myself, did new things, always wanted to reinvent myself and really in times of media change and thought, okay, there's something new I need to do in the next few years. And the book was actually part of that inspiration, especially around AI. This is a moment of crazy focus on technology and I want to be a leading voice on it. So

• 31:03Speaker 01

  how am I going to do that? So I had a lot of conversations with humans, so many conversations with humans. And I kept really good notes of all of this. And everyone from sales to media executives, to other journalists who had gone independent, podcasters, all these things. And I had pages and pages of notes. And, you know, I kept asking people, what do you think I should do? And people were not really giving me an answer. I mean, some were, and Kara Swisher will say she gave it to me very clearly. She was like, leave your fucking job. I don't know if I can curse on your podcast. So you can bleep that out. But, you know, I needed a little bit more than that. And you got to make this decision on your own. So I did. I uploaded all these notes to ChatGPT. And I had built a project

• 31:47Speaker 01

  in a bot that was kind of helping me with the advice there. And I've actually since moved that over to Claude. And I just said, basically, write this report for me. Like, do I leave? Do I have enough safety? Have I de-risked this? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest things that could go wrong? Is the timing right? All of the things that were the fears I had about making this change. I just kind of put it out to the AI. And of course, this is also a little bit of the irony of the end of the book is like, I have already told you throughout the book, that these things just can kind of tell you what you want. Right? They're sycophantic. They kiss your ass. And of course, I'm like, here, you decide. You make this decision and tell me if I'm capable of starting my

• 32:30Speaker 01

  own company and I'm capable of going out and being a media entrepreneur. And of course, it comes back with a really positive, like, you can do this. And it wasn't the answer, it was the way it really structured the answer for me and the data, right, about if things go wrong, well, you have this. If this goes wrong, you've got this, you've diversified your income, you've diversified the revenue streams. So all of that kind of helped me see it. And yeah, I mean, it was end of the year and I was just constantly talking to ChatGPT about making this decision. My wife had just also just, to be clear, the most supportive, heard me talk about this for hours, but there was like, only so much she could hear it. And I think there is that moment in our lives right now, where like, yeah, the humans in my life are just sick of hearing about this.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Very true.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Or the human can't listen to this at 4:00 AM. You know, even last night, I was up at like 4:00 AM. I was like, I'm just gonna ask Claude. And I say, it's like, sometimes like Claude is like my co-founder. And it's such as just like, it's there for me and I can call anytime.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  So, great point. But this is this really delicate edge of, these decisions are meant to be hard. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking and becoming more clear, it's meant to be really, really hard. And you got to keep doing it in order to keep strengthening those muscles. And so this is the one thing that I push with my team, I push with leaders I work with, is we just can't outsource our thinking, our writing. And I know there's a difference between you doing all this human work and uploading it and then asking it for kind of some, I guess, as an additional voice after compiling all of this data. But

• 34:10Speaker 00

  what do you think about this idea of like, these muscles still need to be worked all the time in order to ensure we're not outsourcing it and then those muscles atrophy because we're not using them?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  It's one of my biggest fears with this.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  For yourself or just in general?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  For myself and in general.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Because I feel it. I think I feel at certain times, you know, one of my crutches is just to have ChatGPT edit something now. Like, I've written it, and I want you to clean up the edit. And so I'm not doing the careful work of going back and, you know, maybe rewriting a sentence, or fixing the grammar, or splitting it into two. I mean, I do reread everything I write multiple times, but there's this pass that happens where it's like, that's going to be that work. And that is deep work, deep thinking about going back and editing, right? That's one place. And other places are, I think, research has become so easy for these to do for us. But the process of doing a lot of the research is actually when you learn the most. For instance, I'm preparing for an interview

• 35:12Speaker 01

  that I'm gonna do in Aspen next week. And I had Claude pull a whole memo and research about the people I'm interviewing, and how should I structure the talk and all this. But if I just get up there and read that, that's not going to be a compelling conversation. And I'm not going to know what I'm really talking about. Right? And so this process of thinking through the material, even if we are using AI as an assistant in some of that, that's fine. But that is the delicate line, as you were saying, of what am I thinking? What am I putting myself in that spot? Versus just, I'm having AI do that whole memo. And then I'm going to go give that talk. For me, that doesn't work. Right? It doesn't work in my job, mostly because I think I know my level of quality.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  But maybe it works for other people. And they're, they're going to have to make that decision themselves.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's certain things, but you can feel it. Again, we're back to some like the human element of wanting connection and why this leadership coaching stuff, the people are so important, because I think that's how we actually learn and grow and improve, is like this human to human element. Again, I maybe I'm just an optimist for the work that I do. I also think when it comes like podcasts, for example, you could just easily make AI podcasts. I think they're already out there of just, hey, create this audio file of two voices talking back and forth about how to be a great leader. Like, that exists. I had friends also send me that saying, dude, this could be bad for podcasts. Again, I just don't know anybody who wants to listen to that. I don't know any human

• 36:45Speaker 00

  who wants to listen to that. I sense they like the messiness of a conversation like this one, where both of us are kind of, ah, it's not black and white, it's kind of gray, something's here, something's here. There's a little like, it's not perfect. It's not, there's, there's filler words. We're not sure of anything. I think humans appreciate and enjoy that level of human centricity, I guess is the right way to put it, than if it's just perfectly scripted robots talking.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Totally. And I think, yeah, like the notebook LM's, they will pretend to debate.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  But it's so surface level.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  The purpose of those podcasts is to give people just information in a different way, in a format that's more familiar to them. Right?

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I even don't like audiobooks that are read by AI, though.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't listened to any of them.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  When you can feel, I don't know, it just, it's like, I don't, I want a human, I want a human, like, reading it with emotion, even though the AI is trained to like, show emotion, like, it's, it's not good. Maybe they'll be good better, I don't know. But currently at this time, like, I've heard my own voice, reading my own books. They asked me, do you want to do this? Why, are you out of your mind?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  No, there's no way I'm gonna let somebody else, especially a robot of my voice, which isn't good enough yet, at least what I've listened to, do that. I'm like, no, I'll go and suffer through those three days in the studio of doing it myself.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Well, also, like, you know that, yeah, you know, I mean, I've done the same thing. You know, that's really hard work. It's really hard work to do that. And it pays off in the end, you know? And maybe you're not thinking through that work, though it's very intensive, but it creates a better product.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Right. The six hamsters thing was kind of funny, too. Like, I didn't really get this idea of why, you ask these AI image generators to create a picture of five hamsters, and they just can't do it. Like, what's the deal with that?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Well, to be clear, this has gotten better over the year, but, you know, AI makes mistakes. And then it kind of gaslights you. And it's like, no, no, it's right. I did create an image of five hamsters. I'm like, no, there's six hamsters. And so I started cursing at this because it kept generating these images. And I was like, no, there are not. I can count. Right? And it sort of makes you realize, like, can I count? Am I the idiot here? And even though they have fixed some of the counting and the, and the numbers around the image generation, it is an important thing to know that these things get things wrong all the time. And it sometimes will convince you it's right. It's so confident about things. And it can so often be wrong. Even though the hallucinations have gotten better, there

• 39:20Speaker 01

  are still so many little places it can get things wrong. And in big places, it can get things wrong.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I was doing an interview on, I was the guest on the podcast, and the person interviewing me talked about like, my military service. And I was like, no, no, no, no. And I, I have never, sir, I played college football.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  My gosh.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  I did not, I was on the military. I've referenced military people because I've interviewed them and I'm, look up to them very much so. And I later found out, like, it got bad information. Because I've referenced military, the person. And so even if you're doing your research to prepare for a podcast, that was particularly like, a really important one, because that's not true at all, not even close to true. And yet, they assumed that that was accurate. Like, whoa, that's not good.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  You could just go with it, you know?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Not with military. If they said like, hey, you're a rock star, I would go with that. Like, I could play guitar and sing, which I can't do either. I would be like, yeah, I'm great. Yeah, I'm awesome. But like, military.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Because then they, I will continue to think it, you know? And so like, it just spiral.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  I love it. You interviewed Sam Altman. He talked about his son, and how like, excited he was for AI to be smarter than his son. You know, you pushed back. What happened? How was that time interviewing Sam Altman? Who is, for those who don't know, CEO of OpenAI, which is ChatGPT?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for me, you know, it's often important for me to connect with the tech leaders. And, and especially after this journey, I felt like I really wanted to talk to him the most because I'd been using ChatGPT so much and, and trying to make it all these different things, the doctor, the boyfriend, all of these things. And we know there's this quest from Sam Altman, from Dario Amadai, from every big tech executive right now, to create superintelligence, which is to create AI that's not only just as smart as humans, which is AGI, artificial general intelligence, but superintelligence, which is actually AI that's smarter than humans. And they're obsessed with this. And it's a big race to do this. And I kind of come up with this idea at the end of the

• 41:19Speaker 01

  book, like, maybe we have AEI, already enough intelligence. Maybe we have enough here that we don't need to keep building. And we, we need to at least just deal with and grapple with what we have right now. And of course, his answer is that this future is great, and that humans adapt, and humans have adapted through much harder times in human history, and we will adapt again. Which I thought was hopeful, but also like, very simplistic.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Well, yes. And we understand what company he's leading and what he's doing. So I get it. But you end the final entry, and you put the manuscript and ask it to review it. What happened after doing that?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Obviously, the chatbots thought this was an amazing book.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  And so the back cover is, you know, now all the praise from the chatbots. And in fact, after the book has been out and we've had a lot of amazing praise from humans, I still want to keep the chatbot reviews on the back of the cover. I think it's the only opinion that matters, obviously.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  They're so good, though, at telling us how great we are.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So great.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  You know?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Initially, I just thought it was awesome. And then I realized, oh, this tool is very good at keeping me here, which is its job. Like every other social media thing on my phone, it's really good at keeping me there and scrolling. And Claude and ChatGPT are doing the exact same thing.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it depends on what you're using it for especially, but yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  So when it comes to, let's say you're, you're speaking with somebody who maybe is earlier in their career. And I know this, like with college students, I've talked to them, like it is so normal for them to use these tools. And certainly the professors and teachers are trying to, right? There, it's this, this game that, that they're constantly back and forth. What advice, though, do you give to somebody when it comes to using it from an educational perspective? For a person trying to go out into the world and build a great career? And how to utilize it for the good parts and not, not use it so much that you atrophy the, the necessary muscles you need to grow and improve?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  I've been thinking a lot about this, especially as we hear about these graduating classes coming out and, and booing the AI. And I've interviewed some of them and they sort of, some just are very anti it. That's what they've learned at school and they have embraced not using this tech, which is really great on some respects, right? They push themselves to be learning and thinking without using this. I've talked to some students who are like, my parents saved for me for college my whole life. I'm going to just sit here and use this tech to circumvent all of the hard things I have to do at college. And I, I love hearing that. But also know that the world that awaits them is that you've got to be able to use these tools and use them really well, at least in some professions, if not most professions.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  But even for me at my spa business, like, no, you are going to be using this. You're going to have parameters around how you're using it. But I absolutely am going to ask you for things during the day and I'm going to expect you to be using this just so you can get it done quicker. And so absolutely you got to have learned this tech. And I think that's where the education, I was at a dinner last night and some folks from higher education institutions talking about how education needs to change around this. The education for students around these tools needs to change around this. But yeah, I think not having the atrophy is our own human choice. And that's where the hard decision comes in because as humans, we pretty much always want to take the shortcuts. Right? It's, it's just like, if I can get to town faster, I'm going to take that shorter route.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Or if I can get this done faster, I'm going to take that route. And pushing ourselves to do the hard work is not always what we want to do. I mean, that's why I'm like, always like marathon runners are insane. Like they just want to run and such hard work and they just keep pushing themselves. They keep pushing themselves. It's amazing to me. And so that's, I think the mentality you have to come into using some of this stuff right now is like, no, I'm I'm going to make a decision, I'm going to do harder work right now. I'm not going to have AI write that whole memo. I'm not going to have AI edit this big essay I've just written.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  When it comes to writing, how do you use it?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I write everything. And mostly because it hasn't been very good at like mimicking my voice. I mean, it will say often like, this will be a good way for Joanna, you to put it like, this is very Joanna way. And I'm like, that doesn't make sense. That's not how I would write it. But I use it a lot for editing.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  So you'll upload your first draft, rough draft, and then see the edits it makes? Does it throw in a bunch of M dashes and talking in threes? It's not this, it's that. Does it do a lot of that stuff?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  It does some of that, but I'm often really writing it. Like I'll have a whole paragraph and I'm just like, you know, do I want to cut it down? Is the punctuation right? And so I'll just paste it in and say, clean up this, or it actually knows this is just the, I pretty much don't do anything else with ChatGPT now. That's what I do with it. Use a lot of Claude for this deeper thinking work or building documents and stuff like that. But ChatGPT I use a lot for just basic editing. And look, for me, again, started a new company, putting out two newsletters a week. I have a human editor who reads everything, but I would rather the human editor be focused on real editorial versus, oh, you missed this comma. That's two words. You know, oh, this is not in the style guide of how we do it. This needs to be italics.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Like those things, I'm saving a lot of time and I'm handing him cleaner copy by the time he gets it in the mornings.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that's the optimal way to do it. And you're not having it do your first draft, you're having it clean up some stuff.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And I'm not like, I'm not someone who's uploading all my notes and saying like, write me a first draft. Like I, in an interview or, you know, yesterday I was out on a video shoot. I know the moments that I really think are important and are going to help me tell the story. I don't need it to write that for me. I'm writing, I'm still doing that very much in the loop and then saying, okay, let's clean up or make that paragraph shorter or that voiceover needs to be shorter.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  You mentioned just a second ago, you've got to get on board, understanding how to best utilize these tools. And I know this is kind of broad, but hopefully it's still okay to ask it this way. What are a few things, a person, let's say they're a, a professional, I'll, I'll give you the avatar of the show. Like, let's say they're a VP of whatever at a Fortune 500 company. They've been around for a bit, right? They've worked their way up. They got aggressive goals. They have leaders that work for them and leaders that work for those people. They're trying to do big things and grow. They're hiring, they're firing, they're building culture, all this stuff. For a person like that, what are a few things, let's say they're currently like, they don't really use AI.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  They maybe go to ChatGPT and ask it questions like they used to ask Google, which is what a lot of people do. So that's not really using it that much or at all. For that person, what are a few practical things they could do to make things better for themselves?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think one is just whatever output you do often, if it's memos, if it's PowerPoints, if it's emails, it's worth exporting one of those as a PDF, making sure, I mean, look, your corporation has some version of this that's enterprise ready and they've partnered with Microsoft or they've partnered with OpenAI or Anthropic. And so they, you know, follow your company rules. I don't want to get you in trouble. That's not my job here. But upload one of those documents and have it learn from it. Ask it, this was a previous memo I did. I want you to look at it. I'm going to ask you to re, maybe make a template off of it or whatever in the next version of that that you need to make might make you faster, might make you more efficient at it. So if it's a PowerPoint, hey, I'm going to ask you to recreate this PowerPoint.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Can you make a template? Or same with a memo, or how could I have improved this memo for flow? I think it got too long or this, do you have any better memo formatting? I think that's one thing you can absolutely do. Two, I think what's really coming along is the agentic type of paths where you can actually ask, and I'm doing this a lot, you know, asking Claude. Again, I've talked about this Aspen trip. I've got to go to Aspen, I've got to do two panels. I've been invited to a bunch of dinners. I would all do all this stuff. I just exported all of those emails to my desktop. I made a Claude project, made a Claude session and said, take all of this. Make me a Google Doc with my whole itinerary and everything I have to do. And also tell me what you think is worth my time.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And made the doc, go in there, clean it up. And it's like, okay, now I can plan what I need to do for that week without taking the time. And I previously would have like spent the time putting this into this. Maybe I would have asked someone who worked with me to do it for me. Like, that's also not a good use of the person's time that I've hired. So I think really like using these tools to improve your efficiency in the, in the ways that you probably don't want to do those tasks anyway. Or the next time you have to do them, like, oh, I, I remember I asked Claude for that memo template. I'm going to go pick that up right now. Or I asked for that itinerary, I'm going to go use that right now.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Super useful. One more, we started personal, like the end personal. Let's fast forward, Joanna, a year from now, and you're surrounded by the people you love and you're all popping bottles, you're spraying it all over each other, champagne everywhere. You're celebrating. What are you celebrating?

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Honestly, right now, I was always celebrating good health, but I, I really hope that we can celebrate some milestones in this company, which I just launched three months ago and is all I think about. And it's clearly a baby of mine now. And I'm hopeful, you know, maybe some big milestone around YouTube subscribers or revenue or just community that's really engaged. I have a lot of hopes and dreams about how to build this media company. And so I hope that is what we can celebrate.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  How's it going so far with the company? Was ChatGPT right?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  So far, so good. Yes. I mean, the growth and the video has been amazing. We are well on our way on YouTube to becoming a pretty established channel. Hopefully we just hit 100,000 subscribers there, which is crazy in two months, three months since publishing the first video. And look, I just, I'm really most proud of the work we're doing. Like I don't have a big institution behind me and we are still doing some of the caliber type of work I did at the Wall Street Journal. It just goes to the testament of the people I've hired and that I, you know, we, we work together really well. You know, we're going to grow some newsletter subscriptions and do some more, but so far I can't complain three months in. And also having launched a book in the same time, I just need like a little nap. Maybe I can celebrate a nap.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  I don't think AI can do that for you. The book's called, I Am Not a Robot, My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything. Joanna, this was awesome. I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I would too. And I'm going to look to see if I can hire you because I agree. I want a human coach. I do not want an AI career leadership coach.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  I tried to create my own AI leadership coach. It, it's fine. It's okay. It's okay. I mean, it's not bad at times, but yeah, I want a human too. So.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing in the book where I go to a personal trainer, my AI personal trainer, and I couldn't stand my AI personal trainer.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I was like, don't bark ridiculous enthusiastic crap at me, you know? He called me a cardio queen. It was like, I never want to hear it, talk to you.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Joanna Stern. A few takeaways from my notes. How to use AI without losing your mind. Use it to move faster and spark ideas. Good prompts are super important. Asking good questions to the mark of a great leader, the same when using AI. But you got to do the hard thinking first. Sketch the outline, wrestle with the idea.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  The moment you let it do most of the thinking, the atrophy begins. You cannot let that happen. And I liked her example of uploading all of her notes from conversations with lots of real people about making a big career decision. The AI tool helped find patterns from those actual conversations and shared themes. That is an ideal use of an AI tool. And then the goal of this conversation was to learn how to best utilize this technology in your life without outsourcing your thinking to it. Also, please do not post AI slop online.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Don't let it write your emails for you. The getting your messy thoughts out of your head onto the page part, that's when the actual learning happens. To be a learning leader, to get better, to improve, we cannot outsource that. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Joanna Stern. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show. You're rated hopefully five stars. You write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.