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

22:44And it was telling me I was great at so many things, which obviously I am. But, you know, it was really so sycophantic, 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 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.

23:21Ryan Hawk: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 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 helps build skills, relational skills that are necessary for us to progress and to improve, get better, to build confidence. And if you can 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.

24:02Ryan Hawk: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 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 have always made journalism a team sport. It's like I've never liked just being a columnist.

24:39I 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. 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, 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'll praise them and I want to do team get-togethers and do things. It's like, I don't want to do that with my AI agents. It's like, what do they do with team AI agent offsite?

25:11Ryan Hawk:What about when you took, I'm with you. What about when you took your AI therapist in to meet with your real therapist? Well, as you know, the AI therapist got a little bit threatened and shut itself down. What was it? Ash is the name. So I guess it was. 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 into, 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.

25:50And 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 admitted 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, 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.

26:13Ryan Hawk:What did your real therapist, Veronica, 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 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, Ryan, I understand that you feel that way. What was another time in your life you felt that way?

26:49It's just very scripted in that sense.

26:53Ryan Hawk: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 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?

27:29And 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 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.

28:02But 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, not 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 chatbots, but have to abide by certain rules. And they're working on this at academic institutions, they're working at this in the medical field to get AI-powered therapists or mental health.

28:42Ryan Hawk: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.

29:24Ryan Hawk: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, the MyCharts, the Epic systems, 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. It's interesting. Okay, that was 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 job bot from ChatGPT about what you should do with your life if you should quit your job.

30:11Ryan Hawk: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? Yeah, 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 pushed myself, did new things, always wanted to reinvent myself.

30:48in 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, you know, I kept asking people, what do you think I should do?

31:24And 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 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. Do I leave? Do I have enough safety?

32:00Have 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 own company and I'm capable of going out and being a media entrepreneur.

32:35And of course, it comes back with a really positive, like, you can do this. And it wasn't the answer 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.

33:08And 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. Or the human can't listen to this at 4 a.m. You know, even last night I was up at like 4 a.m. I was like, I'm just going to 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.

33:30Ryan Hawk: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've 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.

34:09Ryan Hawk: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 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.

34:46I mean, I do reread everything I write multiple times, but there's this past 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 that I'm going to do in Aspen next week. 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.

35:22But 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. but maybe it works for other people and they are they're going to have to make that decision

35:59Ryan Hawk: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 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.

36:37Ryan Hawk: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 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. Then if it's just perfectly scripted robots talking.

37:17Totally. 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.

37:34Ryan Hawk: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 want a human. I want a human like reading with emotion, even though the ARs are trained to like show emotion. 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? 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, at least what I've listened to, do that.

38:06Ryan Hawk:I'm like, no, I'll go and suffer through those three days in the studio of doing it myself. 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. Maybe you're not thinking through that work, though it's 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 AI makes mistakes and then it kind of gaslights you and it's like, no, no, it's right.

38:44I 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, can I count? Am I the idiot here? And even though they have fixed some of the counting 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 are still so many little places it can get things wrong.

39:23And in big places it can get things wrong.

39:25Ryan Hawk:Yeah. I was doing an interview on, I was the guest on the podcast and the person interviewing me talked about like my military service. I was like, no, No, no, no, no, no. I have never served, I played college football. I did not, I was on the military. I've referenced military people because I've interviewed them and I 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.

39:59Ryan Hawk:And yet they assumed that that was accurate. Like, whoa, that's not good. You could just go with it, you know? 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. Because then there I will continue to think it, you know? And so like it just spiral. 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 push back. What happened? How was that time interviewing Sam Altman?

40:31Ryan Hawk:Who is, for those that don't know, CEO of OpenAI, which is ChatGPT? Yeah, I think for me, you know, 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 because I'd been using ChatGPT so much 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.

41:12And 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 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.

41:47Ryan Hawk: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 chatbots 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.

42:28Ryan Hawk:You know? Yeah. 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 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 with college students, I've talked to them, it is so normal for them to use these tools. and certainly the professors and teachers are trying to, right?

43:07Ryan Hawk:It's 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 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?

43:48They 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 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. Even for me at my small business, it's like, no, you are going to be using this. You're going to have parameters around how you're using it.

44:18But 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've 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?

44:52It'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 always like marathon runners are insane. Like they just want to run. It's 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 going to make a decision. I'm going to do harder work right now.

45:23I'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.

45:28Ryan Hawk:When it comes to writing, how do you use it? 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. So you'll upload your first draft, rough draft, and then see the edits it makes. Does it throw in a bunch of em dashes and talking in threes? 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.

45:59Like 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 way. 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.

46:34That'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.

46:47Ryan Hawk:I think that's the optimal way to do it. And you're not having it do your first draft. after you're having it clean up some stuff. 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. That voiceover needs to be shorter.

47:17Ryan Hawk: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 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'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.

47:52Ryan Hawk:For a person like that, what are a few things, let's say they're currently like, they don't really use AI, they maybe go to chat GPT 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? 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.

48:30And 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 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.

49:04Or 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 asked, 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 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.

49:42and 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 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.

50:12Or I asked for that itinerary. I'm going to go use that right now.

50:16Ryan Hawk: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? Honestly, right now, I will 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, you know, maybe some big milestone around YouTube subscribers or revenue or just community that's really engaged.

50:56I have a lot of hopes and dreams about how to build this media company. And so I hope that is what we can celebrate.

51:03Ryan Hawk:How's it going so far with the company? Was ChatGPT right? 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'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. It just goes to the testament of the people I've hired and that we work together really well.

51:35you know 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 uh i just need like a little nap maybe

51:47Ryan Hawk:i can celebrate a nap only 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. I would too. 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. I tried to create my own AI leadership coach. It's fine. It's okay. It's okay. I mean, it's not bad at times, but yeah, I want a human too. 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.

52:27Ryan Hawk:I'm with you. 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. Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

52:44Ryan Hawk: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, 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 is 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.

53:29Ryan Hawk: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. 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.

54:23Ryan Hawk: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. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.