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

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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?

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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