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

**Ryan Hawk** (0:03)
Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. 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 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 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 can implement right now. And then we talked about her conversation 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.
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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?

**Joanna Stern** (2:44)
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.
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. Hopefully, you got a little further, but even if you didn't, that's great.

**Ryan Hawk** (3:20)
We start and then maybe we'll bounce around. Maybe I go to the very end because I also like some of the stuff and the acknowledgments. 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?

**Joanna Stern** (3:36)
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 huge part of parenting.

**Ryan Hawk** (4:15)
I love that. Another mentor that you mentioned is Walt Mossberg. You said at 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?

**Joanna Stern** (4:26)
Well, first of all, Walt made it possible for every tech journalist, frankly every tech creator out there today, whether you're a YouTuber or you're 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. He's 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. At least in the way of really thoughtful reviewing. 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.