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

- Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show.

“Presented by Insight Global, I am your host, Ryan Hawke.”

Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleiter.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes, go to learningleiter.com now. Onto the night'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 in her nightstand drawer. Joanna is an award-winning journalist, a 12 year veteran of the Wall Street Journal

and the best selling author of I am not a robot. My year using AI to do almost everything. During our conversation, we discussed. Why chat GPT over 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 and leadership roles that you can implement right now. Then we talked about her conversation with Sam Altman,

the CEO of OpenAI, that's chat GPT, 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 was 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”

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That's InsightGlobal.com/learningleader. I love reading the dedication of your book to your mom and your dad who taught me to think for myself and the AI's robots and machines that may be wonder if I really was.

What do you mean by that? Well, when 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

when 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. It is not to outsource the thinking on everything we do.

So that was the inspiration there. Thank you for reading the dedication. We go, of course, you're-- Hopefully you got a little further, but even if you didn't, that's--

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 acknowledgments. But I am curious about the part

because your 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?

“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, OK, they didn't try to limit that. I had a lot of my own different interests. Some of them being technology. My parents said, OK, 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 huge part of parenting.

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

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 an Instagram or TikTok or 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

I mean, maybe we would have still gotten Amazon reviews.

“And no offense if you're an Amazon reviewer, but it's not always”

the most thoughtful review. I mean, look, you also know this right. It's an offer. 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 lot. I love hearing stories about people. We look up to especially as someone

is 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 joined, I was like, I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to talk about how somebody outsource or at least dependent 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 and paste so much AI slob that it just makes me not want to talk about AI.

“However, I think the way that you look that it is different”

and unique and useful for all of us. So can you talk to me about the reason behind this book behind dedicating 365 days to solemnly swearing, to live with the machines as you pledge, and why you want to do this?

The reason I did this, I think is actually in part of the reason you were skeptical of this, right? Is the AI slob we started seeing years ago now, two, three years ago, and yet that, right? 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 hyperbally 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 harm us and kill us

and human kind, but it is also amazing.

And so I don't want to take a doomer approach. I want to take the doomer 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 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. I'm going to focus on health care, 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. Lori, who also then is using AI software. Can you talk to me about this moment in what you learned from AI and your actual doctor?

Yeah, this moment was really impactful for me. And it happened at the beginning of the year, and we didn't actually know where we were going to structure the book. We thought, OK, 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, I always get my annual mammogram.

And I decided, OK, I'm going to try to put AI through all of my health decisions this year. That meant any time I was sick, or the kids were sick, or the dog was sick, I was going to ask AI. And then 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 of imagery in the case here,

mammograms and ultrasound, running those through models, being able to see they have the AIC 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 radiologists could see in their lifetime,

and then they've got the test results. 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 when 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 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 back end to this.

And watching her work side by side with this was fascinating.

What she originally saw on what I described in detail in the book is there were three spots that look suspicious. The AI flag is 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.

But 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 to order some follow-up testing.

And it just really to me illustrated. I continue to be monitored because of the high risk that I'm under, but this really illustrated for me was just how closely she was working with the tool. It wasn't replacing her, which there

has been years where people, Jeffrey Hinton, who's this Godfather of AI, has predicted that radiologists would just disappear in five years to 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 appealing for people to go into it. So they're able to do more and they're working side-by-side

with this tool. Well, the cool thing is it sounds like it's helping them get better. 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 an ultimately saved alive?

And she said, absolutely. But she also said the flip side, which is that there are many times where she catches something, and AI didn't catch something. I thought they were built to see more than it's actually there. So one of the potential problems is it scares you

when you really don't need to be scared. 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. Yeah. They're not against it.

They're absolutely not against it. In fact, there were some of those things. I don't want to work without these tools. I'm curious, so that seems like the perfect use of this technology. 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 see the cover, or even on your website, you have Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the machine hand. And that's like the doomer side of things.

“Well, what if a company may be an enroll 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 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? 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 do all of the things, self-economic inequality, 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 own out,

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. This is my bunker studio just in case I could go ahead, sorry.

And I felt that I was trying to grapple with this, at the societal level, but not even at the political level. That's because I think 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 chat bots 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 way and run people over, right?

And so like every technology, there's good, there's bad. And I just found that I was encountering that on a more personal level as I was going to my life for that year. - Let's think about from a leadership perspective,

let's try to get practical here,

“and your career and story has a, I think,”

a lot of leadership involved. If you were working with advising or even in your own business and the things that you've left your job to go do to start your own things so your in a leadership role,

You should write this book, right? So I've been thinking a lot about this.

“Obviously it can make us a better leader”

in the sense of all of the number one any experts are going to tell you, the efficiency of our jobs. And we could now take the drudgery away and we could give that to a chatbot to turn through

or a new agent. So I can spend more time working with you, right? 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 other stuff that's clouting my head.

Which actually I'll say in my life, as you mentioned, I left my job at the Wall Street Journal and February to build a new company. And without a doubt, I am using an outsourcing a lot of my drudgery admin to run a company,

which stuff I had never known I was going to need to do

or how to do to AI, right? I'm asking 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 up, 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 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 in a video on this that I will have an AI employee at my company. And that might really change how I manage or leave the company and how we think about when 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.

Yeah. I'll be very curious to hear when you have that AI agent, how you best utilize them, because I'm fascinated with 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 it goes, all the answers to help somebody

be a better leader, it's in Claude. It's in chatGP, 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, it's always been there. The difference is having an actual person be shorter to shorter 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, Joe, I ought to be curious since you've dedicated so much to your time this. It feels to me like this is more in demand. I'm talking human to human interaction. I pay you right now if I had the money, I pay you.

Well, okay, thank you. Thank you. And by the way, you see, I'm fully early adopting. I've got a AI agent writing on my Mac mini back here. You know, I'm all in and I'm like, I don't pay this, dude.

Well, no, I mean, it's like also in person experiences events, I go to look through my concert tickets for my daughters. Oh, my goodness, 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 why my, my feeling is it's not just a bounceback 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. 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. 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 live with.

Yes. Yeah, like I'm nostalgic for a walk man. I didn't even have a walk man. I mean, my son is too young. He's nine and he has my old walk man

and he thinks it's super cool. But like this generation older than them, they're like, they're on eBay trying to get old iPods

Digital cameras, huge for high school girls. Digital cameras, yeah. Digital cameras. And now flip phones, like this, I was just writing about Commodore,

the 90s iconic tech brand has rebranded itself. They've resurrected the brand and they've making a dumb phone that they say is not a dumb phone, they're making a flip phone. This thing looks awesome.

It wrote about a minute is later 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 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. I mean, these things in 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. - 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 a 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 chat bot.

So how was your bot girl summer? - 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 the chat bot, because like we talked about the same types of technology that is making sense of large data sets and helping us in healthcare.

It's 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 24/7 type of always emotional,

yes person, yes man, yes woman. And so I wanted to test this. I also was reading as 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 chat bots or having relationships. And I just, I wanted to better understand that.

I thought I could 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 I, I did not fall in love with my Evan Boyfriend chat bot, 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 was telling me, I was great at so many things, which obviously I am.

But you know, it was really so psychophantic.

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 a photojournalist and defatographer and he grew up on a lake and his best friend's name was 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.”

- Yeah, that's concerning. I think 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 been there 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 on public.

And I think that that was build skills, relational skills, that are necessary for us to progress and to improve, get better, to build confidence. And if you're gonna have that type of friend that will just tell you exactly what you wanna hear

'cause that's what those tools are designed to do. They keep you there and so in order to keep you there they make you feel good. That doesn't seem like a healthy thing long term. - 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 gonna head into where we have to say 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 have always made journalism a team sport.

It's like I've never like just being a columnist. I'm like I wanna do video 'cause I could work with a team there. I wanna do events 'cause I'm working with a team there. That's how I've always thrived.

“And I think we're gonna run up against this too”

in that space a little bit. For instance, for me, I, you have an amazing 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 I like I'll set, you know, I'll praise them and I wanna do team get together and do things. I was like, I don't wanna do that with my AI agents.

It's like, what do they do with team AI agent off site?

“- What about when you took Ag, I'm with you.”

What about when you took your AI therapist into meet with your real therapist? - Well, as you know, the AI therapist got a little bit threatened and shut itself down. He, it, it was ashes in the name, so I guess this,

anyway, that a female voice, I digress about the gender of my AI therapist. But I did, I brought this therapist into my session and what's it started to get pretty heated? Not heated, but like we're getting it, you know,

I'm talking about my doubt and myself doubt and my anxiety's, 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 midded defeat. Like, 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 and they said,

yeah, we don't want this to be sort of a couple's counselor. We don't want to have multiple people sharing their problems. We want this to be a one to one relationship right now. What did your real therapist thronica think of it? - 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 AI therapist or trained, it's very, very similar to a real therapist,

at least in first couple's 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 at you, Ryan, I understand that you feel that way.

Well, what was another time in your life, you felt that way? It's just very scripted in that sense. - Do you see that being a tool that could help a therapist or take the place of a therapist or something else? - 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 a regular mental health therapist. 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 massage

that's gonna take the place of human massage therapists. And so that's one thing of people who say, we don't 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 non-human, with the machine. And one of them is therapy. I mean, it certainly is massage therapy

because there are many people that just don't feel comfortable taking off the 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. And I will say on the therapy, on the real therapy, on the massage therapy,

there's a lot of progress being made in regulation in terms of how these get approved FBA approval on really making really strict, clear therapists, that are not just random chat bots, 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. - 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 good or bad or like a easy 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, 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. - Probably, and look, the healthcare providers are integrating it into their software.

So my charts, the epic systems, and there's AI models in there summarizing your visit for them. And then I often ask, "You know, can we summarize your visit?" And I think making things simpler for us to interpret our results is coming very soon.

- It's interesting. Okay, that'll a big one when it comes to making decisions in your case a career decision. So it's really interesting to read about you having a conversation

“or asking this job bot from chatGPT about what you should do”

with your life if you should quit your job.

Can you walk me through that story and what it told you to do and why you made the decision that you made? - 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 I've always in my career just always pushed myself

to 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 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 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 Care 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 believe that out. But you know, I need it 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 in a bot

that was kind of helping me with the advice there, and I've actually since moved out over to Claude.

And I just said, basically, write this report for me.

But 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 psycho-fantict, I kiss your ass. And of course, I'm like, here, you decide. You make this decision, and tell me if I am capable of starting my own company, and I am 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, but so 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 put out 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 Chad Gbt 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, we're like, how the humans in my life are just sick of hearing about this. - Thank you.

- Or the human can't listen to this at 4 a.m. You know, even last night, I was at that, like, 4 a.m. So I'm just gonna ask Claude. And I say it's like sometimes like, Claude is like, my co-founder, and it's just like, it's there for me,

and I can call anytime. - 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 gotta keep doing it in order to keep strengthening those muscles. And so this is the one thing that I push with my team. My 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, then asking it for some, I guess as an additional voice, after compiling all of this data.

But 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?”

- It's one of my biggest fears with this. - For yourself or just in general? - For myself and in general. - Okay. - Because I feel it.

I think I feel it certain times. So you know, what am I at crutches is just to have chat UBT 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 re-read everything I write in multiple times, but there's this past that happens where it's like, that's gonna 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

And I had Claude pull a whole memo and research

about the people I'm interviewing, how should I structure the talk and all this? But if I just get up there and read that, that's not gonna be a compelling conversation. And I'm not gonna 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 when am I thinking, what am I putting myself in that spot?

Versus, just I'm having AI do that home memo, and then I'm gonna go give that talk. For me, that doesn't work, right? It doesn't work in my job, mostly 'cause I think I know my level of quality, but maybe it works for other people.

And they're gonna have to make that decision themselves. - 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 there are already out there

of just to 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 sent me that sync, too. 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 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 filler words. We're not sure of that anything. I think humans appreciate and enjoy that level of human

electricity, I guess, is the right way to put it. Then if it's just perfectly scripted robots talking. Totally. And I think, yeah, like the notebook LMs,

“they will pretend to debate, but it's so surface level.”

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? I even don't like audio books that are read by AI, though. Yeah, I haven't listened to any of them.

When you can feel, I don't know. It's like, I don't, I want a human. I want a human reading with emotion, even though the AI is a train, like show a motion, like 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? Am I, are you out of your mind? Yeah, of course.

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

Or, like, you know that, yeah, 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, and maybe you're not thinking through that work, though, this very intensive,

but it creates a better product. Right. The six hamsters thing was kind of funny, too. Like, I didn't really get this idea of why you asked 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? Well, to be clear, this has gotten better over the year. But, you know, AI makes mistakes, and then it kind of gasped like see what it's like, no, no.

It's right. I did create an image of five hamsters. And 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 a can I count? Am I the idiot here?

And even though they have fixed some of the counting and then 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't so often be wrong. Even though the hallucinations have gotten better,

there are still so many little places that they can get things wrong. And in big places, it can get things wrong. Yeah, I was doing an interview on, I was the guest in the podcast

and the person interviewing me talked about like my military service, I was like, no, no, no, no, no.

I have never served, I played college for college.

I did not, I was on the military. I've referenced military people because I've interviewed them and I'm looked up to them very much. So in that 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

'cause 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. You could just go with it, you know?

And it's true, it's true. It's true, it's true. And you know, rock star, I would go with that. Like, I could play guitar and sing, which I can't do either.

Yeah, I'm awesome, but like military.

Because I'm there, I will continue to think it. You know, and so like, it just spirals. I love it. You interviewed Sam Altman. He talked about his son and how like excited it 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 Open AI,

which is Chad GBT? Yeah, I think for me, it's often important for me to connect with the tech leaders and especially after this journey, I felt like I really wanted to talk to him the most

'cause I've been using Chad GBT so much and trying to make it all these different things, the doctor, the boyfriend, all these things. And we know there's this quest from Sam Altman, from Dario and the Dye, from every big tech executive

right now to create super intelligence, which is to create AI that's not only just as smart as human, which is AGI artificial general intelligence, but super intelligence, which is actually AI that's smarter than humans.

And they're obsessed with this and this is a big race to do this. And I kind of come up with this idea at the end of the book like maybe we have A.E.I already enough intelligence. Maybe we have enough here that we don't need to keep building.

I mean, we need to at least just deal with and grapple with what we have right now. And of course, his answers to this future's 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. 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?

- Obviously, the chatbot thought this was an amazing book.

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 cover.

“I think it's the only opinion that matters, obviously.”

- They're so good, though, at telling us how great we are. - So great. - You know? - Yeah.

- And initially, I just thought it was awesome. And then I realized, oh, this tool is very good. It 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 clawed and chatGBT are doing the exact same thing. - Yeah, yeah, I think it depends on what you're using it for especially, but yeah. - So when it comes to, let's say you're speaking with somebody who maybe is earlier in their career.

And I know this is 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 write this game 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 use it so much

“that you atrophy the necessary muscles you need to grow”

and improve? - I've been thinking a lot about this, especially as we hear about these graduating classes coming out and booing, 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, talk to some students.

You're 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 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 professors, but even for me at my small business, it's like, no, you are going to be using us. We were 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 learn 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 just like, if I can get to town faster, I'm going to take that shorter route. 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, oh, it's like marathon runners”

are insane. Like, they just want to run. It's such hard work and they just keep pushing themselves. Like, keep pushing themselves.

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 going to make a decision. I'm going to do harder work right now. I'm not going to have a, I write that whole memo.

I'm not going to have a, I edit this big essay. I've just written. What it comes to writing, how do you use it? I write everything. And mostly because it hasn't been very good at mimicking my voice.

I mean, it will say often, like, this will be a good way for Joanna. You would have 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.

So you'll upload your first draft, rough draft.

And then see you with the edits it makes.

“Does it throw in a bunch of endaches and talking in three?”

Is it's not this? It's that. Does it do a lot of that stuff? 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, I pretty much

don't do anything else, which actually be teen. Now that's what I do with it. These are a lot of Claude for this deeper thinking work or building documents and stuff like that. But Chad, should be TIE use a lot for just basic editing.

And look, for me, again, started a new company, putting out two new letters 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. 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. Yeah, I think that's the optimal way to do it.

And you're not having it to your first draft.

You're having it clean up some-- 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. And I'm writing, I'm still doing that very much in the loop and then saying, OK, let's clean up or make that paragraph shorter or that voiceover needs to be shorter.

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 OK to ask it this way.

What are a few things a person who let's say they're a professional-- I'll give you the avatar of the show. Let's say they're a VP of whatever at a Fortune 500 company. They've been around for a bit, right? They work 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. They may be able to chat GPT and ask it questions like they use 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, whatever a few practical things, they could do to make things better for themselves. 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 partnered with Microsoft or they've partnered with OpenAI or Anthropics. And so they follow your company rules. I don't want to get you in trouble with 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 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. 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 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-- asking Claude, again, I've talked about this aspen trip. I've got to go to ask, but I've got to do two panels.

I've been invited to a bunch of dinners. I'll do all this stuff. I just exported all 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. And made the doc, go in there, clean it up. And it's like, OK, now I can plan what I need to do for that week. Without taking the time, and I previously

would have spent the time putting this into this, maybe I would have asked someone who worked with me to do it for me. That's also not a good use of the person's time that I've hired. So I think really using these tools to improve your efficiency.

And 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 remember I asked Claude for that memo template. I'm going to go pick that up right now. Or I asked for that itinerary.

It's super useful.

One more we started personal like the end personal.

Let's fast forward. Join a year from now. And you're surrounded by the people you love. And you're all poppin' bottles. You're spraying it all over each other, champagne, everywhere.

You're celebrating. What are you celebrating?

“Honestly, right now, I always celebrate good health.”

But I really hope that we can celebrate some milestones in this company, which I just launched three months ago. And it's all I think about. And it's clearly a baby of mine now. And I'm hopeful, 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.

How's it going so far with the company? Was Chad GBT right? So far so good.

Yes, I mean, the growth on 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'm really most proud of the work we're doing.

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, which just goes to the testament of the people I've hired, and that we work together really well. We could 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 a little nap. Maybe I can celebrate a nap. Only AI can do that for you.

The books called I am not a robot. My year using AI to do almost everything, Joanne, and this was awesome. I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. 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, a leadership coach. I tried to create my own AI leadership coach. It's fine, it's okay. It's okay.

It's not bad at times, but yeah, I want a human too. So, yeah, I mean, it's the same thing in the book, where I go to a personal trainer, an AI personal trainer, and I couldn't stand my AI personal trainer. I was like, don't bark ridiculous.

It was the plastic crap at me, you know. He called me a cardio queen.

It was like, I never want to hear it.

I thought you would love it. Awesome, thank you so much, appreciate it. Thank you. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast.

Well, if you are sent me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com, 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.

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 conversation 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. 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's 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 podcast,

and you subscribe to the show. And 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 in a daily basis.

And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much, talking to you. Okay, wait. (upbeat music)