How Worried Should We Be About AI? Talking Tech with Joanna Stern

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Mo News podcast. I'm Oshwannu Nuu. I'm really excited about today's guest, a special edition. We have Joanna Stern on. She's a tech columnist from the Wall Street Journal. What I love about Joanna is she is able to translate what all these trillion dollar big tech companies, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon are doing for the average consumer. She covers their big picture plans, their products, and she also does some really interesting investigations. She recently conducted an investigation into how thieves are stealing your iPhone password, immediately locking you out and effectively taking over your life, stealing potentially tens of thousands of dollars or more from you. It's a really compelling series. It's something we talk about in this edition as well as all the various trends in the tech industry. As we spoke, it was a very big week for artificial intelligence. What week isn't these days? So we delved into all things AI, how she sees it going. She's done some of her own reporting into what's real, what to be scared of, what not to be scared of, at least for now. We also discussed the latest at Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook. She also turned the tables in this conversation on me as a reporter asking me a few questions about how we're using social media at Mo News these days. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. But before we get started here, a reminder to consider joining Mo News Premium for early access to podcast episodes like this one. It was available last week on the members only podcast account. By joining, you also get access to a private Instagram account. It is a way to support what we're doing here at Mo News to keep doing what we're doing and also expand our offerings and offer more original reporting. It's also just a way to support independent journalism, which we know is so important in these days. So you get extra access and know you're supporting the growth of what we're doing here at Mo News. A reminder, you can get it for just $7 a month or $70 a year. That is two free months if you join annually. There's also a lifetime subscription available. So you can check them all out right now at Mo.News slash premium again, Mo.News slash premium. All right, with all that said, here's today's conversation. It was so great to have Joanna Stern here with us. She's the senior personal technology columnist over at the Wall Street Journal. She's an Emmy Award winner who has spent the better part of two decades now covering gadgets, apps, all the things intended to make our lives easier. You might recognize her from CNBC. And then she's been covering this industry for a while now. Joanna, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. So I want to begin, I mean, there's so much to talk about in this world, as you know, I imagine even trying to figure out what you should be covering on a daily basis is overwhelming. It's not good right now. And I can't imagine it's going to get any easier. The thing I'm obsessed with and so many people are obsessed with right now is artificial intelligence. You've been reporting extensively on it. And some have compared it, I think actually Sam Altman from Chet GPT in the hearing this week said, you know, it's like the printing press. It's Gutenberg's printing press for civilization. It's hard to even get your head around something like that. There are some who are totally optimistic. There are many more who have some doom and gloom views of this. Where do things stand if we can kind of begin at 10,000 feet on AI right now? I think that's a good summary, really, is you've got the people who believe that the world could end if this gets into the wrong hands or develops too quickly and we don't have the right rules and regulations on it. And then you've got, and it's not to say these are all separate people. A lot of these people seem to have both viewpoints. And then the other viewpoint is that this is going to be the best thing to happen to humankind and it is going to make us more creative. It's going to free us up from doing the drudgery of certain things and that this is just fundamentally going to change how we communicate, live, work, all the things that technology has touched in our lives. And we mentioned Altman and the testimony on the Hill earlier this week and I think it's really interesting to watch that through the lens of also the last 10 years and what we've seen with technologists and big tech going to sort of Washington and trying to explain their tech and trying to really reckon with the fact that we didn't have and we still don't have rules and regulations even around our own privacy in this country. And so there's so many things that are colliding right now around policy tech and AI just seems to be at that really like to me it's like what's so interesting is how it's sparking all of these things that we've been looking at for the last decade or more. Yeah, when I found remarkable and you've got a sense of this during the testimony of Altman and you heard some of the senators say we screwed up when it came to social media. We didn't understand it, we didn't regulate and frankly our knee jerk in Washington is to get out of the way when it comes to technology, let them do their thing and it came in the era of move fast and break things. Do we tribute that to Zuckerberg? Does he get credit for that? Yeah, and they broke things and the concern is can we allow that to happen again? What do you, you know, having watched, I mean it was A hearing, right, but the AI conversation is sort of bubbling up. Do we get the sense, do you get the sense based on your reporting that Washington will not let that happen again, that they actually intend to regulate here, set some rules around this new world. I get that sense, but I really get the sense which I really believe was more interesting, the sort of underlying current of that hearing was that I get the sense that they want to understand this better. And I think those of us in the tech industry that would watch these hearings when Zuckerberg would go or Jack Dorsey and it just became sort of this laughing stock of like, do people in Washington not know how to turn on a computer? Do they not know how Wi-Fi works? Like, I think we all will remember like the infamous Zuckerberg, like just saying like we sell ads, Senator, right? This is how our business works. Like, there was so much education going on at those, at those, but it was also like very contentious and I don't really quite, it was just like, it was so hard to, it was a train wreck, right? It was just so hard to watch some of those versus like what's happening here and you really got a sense of what they want to understand. And also this is a very difficult type of technology to understand. There are so many different parts of this from the large language models to how the interfaces are created to the different apps that are built off of different models. And I get the sense that yes, they're serious, but also like they're very serious, it seems to me on education and understanding. How do you explain it to people who aren't in technology world when they say, okay, explain what AI is and its implications? How do you explain it to grandma? I think the simplest way is that computers are becoming more like humans in the way we talk to them in the way that they understand the world and in the way that they work. Right, a big concern is there were some stories about this a few months ago about AI becoming sentient, right? The idea that they can learn on their own and effectively move beyond whatever they were programmed to do. Yep. And even though chat, GPT and these large language models, people will say they're not sentient, they're not that it can feel like that to a user, especially for those that don't necessarily understand what's happening in the background of how this is predicting words or how it's predicting based on large language or data sets. And I really think ultimately this is the kind of technology that many people will may never understand. They'll just know like a computer made that or a computer wrote that and it doesn't really look like a computer wrote that. It looks like a human wrote that and this generation that's coming up now with all of this is probably just going to be like, yeah, computers can write like we do. So you made a point recently and I'm going to link to this in the show notes of testing out various scenarios when it comes to AI, cloning your voice, cloning you visually, and seeing what you can get away with, seeing where it actually genuinely confused people and seeing where AI still has a ways to go. What did you learn through that process? I did kind of two parts of this. There's the video clone which I worked with this company called Synthasia that makes video AI avatars and so I went to their studios. I shot a lot of video with them. They then used that as training data. They ran it through their systems and their models and out came me. It really looks like a still version of me that talks and has some light gesturing. You have people who really should go like watch this version of me because then I don't have to describe me as a robot basically. And that thing, it's crazy how good it looks but it also isn't crazy enough to fool people yet. It's very clear when you watch me, AI me, it's not me. So that's the video side. And then I created some voice clones using Synthasia created a voice clone of me too to match with my video avatar and I did spend two hours in the recording studio and they used all that as the data to create the voice clone. But then I also used 11 labs which is just an AI tool website. You can go to their site, you can upload old clips of yourself, MP3s and within seconds, truly like under a minute it created my voice clone. And that clone sounded really good. That was so surprisingly good that that was the biggest takeaway which was that this stuff is going to get good really fast and it's going to get really accessible to people. I think that was the biggest takeaway. It was this like this 11 labs tool. You can go to it right now, upload this podcast with your voice and it's going to create your clone. Have you tried it yet? I have not. You should. There's plenty of audio of you, right? Go do it. Go do it after the show and you're going to be like wow. And then play it for your family and that's what I did. I started playing my voice clone. I called my sister up and had my voice clone and at first she was like Joanna was that you? And then she started to realize that my voice clone wasn't really like taking any breaths and was talking kind of fast and she's like this sounds like a recording. It doesn't sound like you. Same thing happened to my dad. Actually happened to have a meeting that day scheduled with Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat and I played my, I, in the middle I decided okay, one of the questions I'll have my voice clone ask and he didn't flinch. He just like responded. And then the biggest thing was I played the voice clone. I used my voice clone to see if it would get through my Chase Bank biometric, the voice biometrics and it did. It worked perfectly fine. Like when the voice biometric cue starts and they say, say your name and address, I played my voice biometric voice or sorry, I played my, my AI voice and it passed with flying colors. They put me right through the customer service. It was amazing. So all of that is really just to say like, gosh, this stuff is like very accessible. Anyone on this podcast and listening to this podcast can go play around with this right now and it's good. It's getting really good. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's, that's the fundamental, that's the, you know, major question right now is, can it be used for good and how do we ensure that the bad people out there, you know, for lack of a better term, don't do major harm to, you know, individuals. And then society writ large with this technology. And this week is a perfect example of an example of good being announced by Apple with this kind of technology. They announced a tool that, and I don't have the name of the tool in front of me, but it's going to be an accessibility tool. And it's for people who can't speak well and may not have the voice or vocal capacity to do these things, may be injured, have some sorts of physical issues. And they're going to have a tool in the future versions of iOS where you'll be able to read some text and it's going to make a synthetic voice and you'll be able to play that text to speech basically for people. They can make phone calls. And so that's an example of this being really good tech and accessible. And in fact, I think the way Apple's engineering is really safe and thinks about the voice is going to be stored on the device. You'll have to read something specific. So somebody else wouldn't be able to create that clone for you. Right. And in the moment, a lot of safeguards around it. And I think that's what we're going to need, right? Just responsible ways of introducing these products. You know what I find interesting, I mean, you've been following this industry for a while, but that at least Sam Altman, a chat sheet, BT, literally went before Congress and said, please regulate us. Here are some ideas for an agency you can create rules you can create, especially when it comes to don't create AI that's going rogue. We actually tried to make the case that Google and Microsoft having basically control over the industry or at least dominating right now is a positive thing because it's less smaller companies that the government will have to deal with. How unique is that? An industry coming, a major CEO coming to Capitol Hill and saying, please make rules for us. We've seen it in social media, right? So Zuckerberg and team has been asking for a long time for privacy rules and regulation and basically pointing the finger and saying, you guys get your act together, right? We don't want to be making our own rules. And that's understandable, right? They don't want. And I think also looking back at what's happened with social media around the Cambridge Analytica stuff and these companies don't want to be in a place where something bad happens under their watch because they didn't have the right rules and regulations in place and then they're being hauled up in courts and all to say, hey, you didn't follow, you didn't do this. And they're like, well, we didn't know what the rules were. I mean, certainly it's not that black and white, but seems to me like, especially as these companies are building and trying to figure out how this all should be police, like they don't want to be writing their own rules. And they look to the government bodies, especially of other countries that have been far ahead of the US on privacy regulation, on data usage to say, hey, look, they've done it. They're protecting their constituents and their consumers. Well, I wanted to get to that because one of the examples is the European Union that they've been on top of privacy issues. They've been talking to social media. In fact, they're already trying to pass legislation on AI, the Italians, I think, last month we're among the countries that are like, whoa, freeze everything at chat GPT. Let's get to the bottom of this. What is it about Europe? I mean, it's interesting because you have the Chinese and the US that are sort of breaking ground technology. And it's typically the Europeans who are like, everyone take a deep breath. Let's create some rules around this. It's funny from going to some of these other countries. I went to Barcelona in February to the Mobile World Congress mobile show and honestly very little was about mobile so much people talking about AI, even though they were showing their phones and cars and stuff like that. And just like the awareness and how they seem so ahead on certain topics, I interviewed the digital minister of Spain. They have digital ministers. They have digital ministers. And I've made her title might not be that, but I think it is that it was it was definitely like some fancy digital title. It's like a CTO of the country. And she was so eloquently just so well spoken and about everything from deep fakes to digital twins to the way 5G needs to be rolled out. And now certainly we have those people in this country, but it really just she was talking through the legislation. She was talking through, especially on the privacy end and GDPR. And these are just things our countries is that we have not had. We just have not had that. One of the questions and it appears that AI feels different than the metaverse. But one of the questions I have is, you know, we there was all this talk last couple years of metaverse, metaverse, metaverse. And it feels like, I mean, you know, this full well is someone who's been living this world that, okay, there was a lot of hype and as far as its actual impact and roll out our society that is not there yet. And I don't know if it's ever going to be there. AI is different though. AI feels different. I'll tell you why, because AI impacts our real world, right? It impacts how we are working, how we're using different tech tools and it integrates right into the tech tools we're using. I mean, just seeing the explosion of companies and apps on our phones now plug into chat GPT or the way it's intersecting into our search engines, whether it be Bing or Google, this is in the stuff we're using. The metaverse was a tough sell because, hey, I mean, you were talking right now, we're not in the real world, but like, we're kind of in the real world. It's like, I'm fine that you don't look like an avatar. I think you look great. You know, I kind of, yeah, there's my AI avatar, but like, what's the sell, right? Like, how is that help? And I just wrote a column yesterday about Apple's entry, about the expected entry that Apple's going to be in making this mixed reality headset. And the idea that when you look back at Apple's different products, there was a real purpose to a lot of them, except for one, which I'll talk about, but like music, right? iPod changed the music industry. It made it easier to get music on the go. This was a really clunky thing, but we knew people had Walkmans, people had CD players, people wanted to listen to music on the go, right? iPhone. People had phones. People had foot phones. People wanted to talk on the phone. They wanted a text. They sure they didn't have apps yet, but like, we could see where it was going, right? Windows Mobile was a piece of crap. But like, we could see that this could be cool computer in our pocket. Okay, Apple Watch, you know, it found its purpose. You wear an Apple Watch? I don't. You know, I considered buying one for several years. And to be honest with you, as somebody who is so plugged in all the time, the idea of having one more device. Like, I just feel like my anxiety level would have just gone beyond. So I haven't and I feel okay about it. Yeah. And I think, look, that's like it. I think the case of the Apple Watch, like, you don't need this thing. You may want it, right? You may want it to work out. You may want to track your fitness or get your notifications or whatnot. But like, you don't need it. And I think that's the biggest question with these headsets was I just took you through like a history of Apple. I'm sorry for the long run. No, no, I think that's very helpful. That's very helpful in, you know, explaining why certain things work and certain things don't. And like, here we are. Apple's going to release a headset, very similar, you know, better, I'm sure, design and all these things to what the metaQuest does and Zuckerberg's projects do. But why? Like, what is it going to do for us in our lives that like, we really want or we will make it better? One of them seems to be this idea of video calling and more life like video calling and whether it'll be FaceTime or avatars or whatnot. And that's certainly futuristic. But what is the thing? What is the thing that like makes us want to go to the quote unquote metaverse? Which Apple will definitely never say the word metaverse. I interviewed two executives at TechLive. I think you were there. And like, they just said, like I said, fill in the blank metaverse. So they was like, I think Craig Federighi or no, it was Greg Jazviak who's head of marketing there. It's just said, a word will never use. Right? It was very clear. Like, we will never use this word. It is dumb. And I think that's what just happened with the metaverse just became this like kind of crazy thing. But also like to the point of like digital worlds, things like Roblox or really like really any multiplayer or games. And that's real and that's great stuff. And it will continue. I just don't think everyone's putting on headsets to go to the metaverse. Yeah, it appears or, you know, it feels like there's some niche opportunity to use them, especially in the kind of video game environment, et cetera. But beyond that, especially coming out of a couple of years of the pandemic, et cetera, we were already remote. The idea of living our lives perpetually in a virtual, you know, world, we were all pining to get back to the real world and people again. So you mentioned though, and I just want to finish the AI conversation, you mentioned AI and search engines to our knowledge right now. How will AI and I know this has been concerned for Google, how does AI help search? It opens the idea of everything being a blue link, right? That when we search, we're going to have to then click and we're going to have to go find the information for ourselves. I think that's the simplest way that it does help us, right? That in some perfect world, we search, we ask the question. And then there it is, the information at the top. By the way, I say perfect world, but like it's not a perfect world for many people. There's a huge industry, including my industry of journalism and probably your industry as well, obviously of people finding your stuff that they find it through Google and they hopefully can figure out the way to blend the two. But yeah, I think it's this idea that, hey, there's an inf, this all-knowing computer and we type in what we want and the answer is just there and then we get some, maybe some small citations of where that information comes from, but we don't have to go digging through 10, 15 links to get the info. Especially in recent years as Google's been making all this money off of advertising. And so the, what you're searching for, you're not necessarily getting the answer as quickly as you once were. At least that's the knock on them. It is, it is. I will say, I've been using BARD and some of these, being to a degree, I kind of go back and forth on using these two and sometimes it's just easier right now to get the link. If I'm looking for some basic thing that I know I just want to go to that site or I want to find the phone number, if I want to answer some question or as I'm doing research, sometimes it's easier to get the links. And of course, that's what they're saying. It's like there's both options. So we talked a bit about Metaverse and takes me to a couple of the companies I want to talk about beginning with Meta. Literally, the bet they made, the Microsoft work made was I'm going to literally change the name of my company, to Meta as part of this. They've made a lot of bets over there. A number of them have not worked out. Their big one is the Metaverse. What is the state of things? I mean, there have been a number of headlines in recent months about the cutbacks at Meta. The future of Facebook, Instagram, competing with TikTok, etc. What is the state of things over there, especially given the bet they've made on the Metaverse? Well, I think the Metaverse is like this partially on the side. There's those two bodies of stuff right now for Meta. There's the core social media app business, which, and even there's around that, as you were mentioning, you were talking about the TikTok. This is the TikTok-ization, that's my new word. TikTok-izing, am I saying it right? TikTok-izing. Let's go TikTok-izing Instagram. TikTok-izing, I like that. I can say it. TikTok-izing Instagram and even Facebook. There's that. They've also done quite a bit there to strengthen the business because of the issues they had with ad targeting and the response they had with Apple. They've done a lot in the last year to strengthen that part of the business. That's that. They've also obviously had significant cutbacks and layoffs in the last year or over the last six months to get the business, as I think Zuckerberg says, back to the core of what it is and cut the fat, basically. The Metaverse stuff, it just seems like that's the longer term bet for him. He just really feels like, I think he puts on those glasses. He sees some future where we all have them. Again, talked a little bit about this in this column this week about the technical reasons and the technical roadblocks to get from the VR helmet, as I call them, nerd helmets right now, to get from nerd helmet to eyeglasses, literally, for Apple be eyeglasses. The experts I speak to say, that's a 10-year process. It's a long time away that they'll have the batteries, the silicon, the optics to get to these really small glasses that we all wear around and we look up and see maps and see messages. That might be a mainstream thing. Apple and Meta have honestly set themselves up on a competing course. I think we're going to see. I think it's going to be set up on this competing course for the next decade of if this is the next computing platform. AI is integrated into it. AI will be everywhere. The hardware is just far off. I think Zuckerberg really, really sees that this is going to happen and he wants to be the player there. It's not right now. They've had to cut back. They just seem to have cut back on some of their ambitions there because right now it's the suck on the money. They came in an era in the last couple of years where they were experimenting in a lot of places. I was part of their bulletin experiment, their substack competitor. By the way, that wasn't insignificant some of money they spent on that but they were placing all these, he was literally putting stacks of chips and betting on lots of different numbers. Now they're really trying to go back to their base. Obviously part of that is, the brunt of that is social media is ensuring that Facebook is here for the long term. That Instagram is here for the long term. They've stood various competitors. They were not able to buy. They've tried to destroy. Snap is certainly one of those cases. Another facing TikTok, the challenge from TikTok. When it comes to TikTok, there's this ongoing conversation in Washington. State capitals are now having them. Other global capitals are having them about the ban on TikTok. Where do things stand right now as you've been reporting on TikTok and this ongoing question to ban or not to ban? Well, ban or not to ban. To me, it's like, how are you going to ban? Even if you decide you're going to ban, how are you doing it? That's really the biggest question because some big national ban, okay, fine. I can see the tech companies getting together. They've got to do this. They figure out how to ban. But like these ad hoc bans that are happening at state levels and different districts, it's a mess. How are you banning? This makes no sense. So this Montana thing, it seems like they are saying their responsibility is also on TikTok to uphold the ban. But it's not clear who is responsible for the ban. It seems to be the app stores. That's also a technical thing. How do you make sure just the people in this state don't use TikTok and then don't go to another state and download TikTok and bring it back to your state? The technical questions around it are, I think, even bigger than some of these policy questions. When it comes to the TikTok relationship with the Chinese government, what do we know? Because that seems to be at the core here of the concern about TikTok, vis-a-vis all these other apps that are collecting our information and we're using on a daily basis. Yeah, the main difference is that it's a Chinese company. It's that simple, the company is a Chinese company. It is owned by people in China and the only real assurance that we have as we've heard in these hearings that they are not using data is their word for it. I think that is what's so frightening to lawmakers and frightening to the citizens of the United States. Where is this data going? Would there be propaganda coming through this service and influencing people in ways we're not aware of? Is the data being used to target? Is there data on an individual basis that is going to people and being used in nefarious ways? There's so many questions that TikTok has answered and says, no, no, no. We sort of have to take their word for it, which is why there was this big move and continues to be this big move to have the data moved out to make the data owned by a US company or under the guidance of a US company. This would be all American user data of TikTok would be housed domestically in the US and not abroad. That's one of the compromises that TikTok is offered here. Yes, and I believe they're, I'm not, you may know better than me as where they stand now on some of these negotiations, but there was like, there was the move that, okay, that will be good, but then there was the move from the vitamin administration that this isn't good enough and we want more that we fully want TikTok to be sold off to a different company that is American owned. But back to your question, like how concerned should users be? I really think that's something that users have to just grapple with as they use the app. I've been wanting to write a little bit about this, which is just, you get so sucked into the app, the algorithm itself has been something I've written about for a few years now about understanding this algorithm, how it gets to know you so well, how it really, really just sucks you into whatever topic that you have not even conveyed to the way that you're interested in. And I just think as users, we need to pick our heads up and really have more of a discerning eye on what it, what we see there, especially around times of elections and all these moments, but really always. Like, there's so many things I see there, I'm like, I don't think that was true. I don't, you know, like that just looked so, like even just like random photos and funny thing, I'm like, I don't think so, you know, someone falling off of a trampoline or something. Like, I'm like, it looks so fake. Or maybe it isn't. And then you watch, I just think, you know, because I've tried to report things from a user's perspective and I just think the more we can take a moment and stop it, we look at those feeds, the better. I mean, I take pride in the fact, you know, having worked in our industry in journalism and news, like one of our roles is to, you know, confirm what's true and what's not. And there have been a number where I've been on the verge of, like, oh, yeah, this is crazy. I need to tell people, wait a second, wait a second. And to expect that of everybody is a challenge. And it comes at a time where people have lost trust in institutions and lost trust. And so they are being like, well, this guy said X is happening and I'll get these questions all the time. Well, can you confirm that? I'm like, yeah, who is this person who you're getting information from? I've never heard of them before. What are the resources? And I, that fundamentally, the idea of not only misinformation, but disinformation, right? And I think that's the core issue here with the Chinese is like they have a government interest in sewing chaos within the US and they have larger goals. And I guess the question is, how do you balance that against our First Amendment rights and the fact that like, there's this really cool, enjoyable app that makes me happy. And there are so, those are so rare these days in social media, right? To come away from your experience with an app, actually feeling okay. But that might be your experience where there's also a lot of data and stuff to show like, this is having a negative effect on people who get into these algorithms and feeds full of depressing content, hateful content. And there's questions around that, certainly, and how the algorithm drives people. Yeah, I just think the ban stuff is just like, it's almost such a joke. Some of these points when you see this office is banning it. I mean, I did some reporting a few months back about some of the government offices that are banning it. And it's like, the biggest way they really are banning is they're just telling people take it off your phone. Yeah. There's no firewall. There's no, sure, they can block it at the Wi-Fi network level at the office. But they can't really do much more than that other than unless they are controlled devices from the companies or from the governments. But a lot of people bring their own devices to work. And so they're just probably still using TikTok. And if that's what even the people are saying on the campuses they banned, the students are like, okay, sure, I won't use your Wi-Fi network. No problem. I'll get my TikTok on Verizon. Right. I mean, there's so many opt-outs, whether it's a virtual private network or some other way to get them. I mean, that's the challenge with the Montana band and all these other bands. You mentioned the algorithm though. And obviously they haven't revealed too much about the algorithm. But what have you learned? Why is the, what makes the TikTok algorithm so different from say, you know, the Instagram algorithm? What are they doing or what are you gleaned about? What is unique about it? Why is it so good? Well, and I was just actually, so I don't know if it was recent TED talk, but I did see the CEO of TikTok talking about a little bit about it, giving a sense that if somebody likes, I don't want to paraphrase, but I will a little bit. But like if somebody watches and likes video one, two and three, and then likes video six, and then somebody, another person watches one, two, three and likes video five, then they may show video five and six to the other person. Right. So there's a lot about the groupings of how the same audience likes things, right? The lookalike audience type of paradigm there. The thing that made TikTok so different is just this experience that you don't sign up for the app or most people do, but you go into the app, you don't follow people, right? I don't, I don't follow you on TikTok, but you're, I probably get one of your TikTok videos, right? Just because the algorithm knows that I might like news content and I might like something from you and then more people that are like me like you. And then it's sort of picking up about these cues from these audiences. Like one of the biggest things for me was like a few years ago, I watched like one video about power washing. And then I started getting all these funny power washing videos and I was super into it, right? And it like new obviously by the length of the time I watched and my interaction with it. And then like it kind of went away like it knew like she's not with it anymore. She's not super into that. And it gives you something else and it's just that, that fully algorithmic based way of feeding info that isn't based on much more than the cues you give it from watching. We did a big investigation into this a few years ago and it really was about watch time and the groupings of that and they don't need more info. They don't need to know who I follow. They don't need me to put in a list of interests like Facebook and Instagram did. And obviously Instagram's moved to that with Reels. I think Reels has gotten really good. I'm not pun intended. I think they've gotten really good. Like I've now that feed. I'm seeing a lot of stuff I like. It's definitely like knows I'm a parent and news. I'm going to like funny mom and dad videos. It knows I like tech. You heard that Mark Zuckerberg Adam-Missary. You guys, you guys have gotten to join us feed. Have they gotten in your feed? Gradually they gotten better. I mean, there's certainly things where I'm like, oh, you guys should have known I've been over that for a week. But I think over time, I mean, there's the ongoing joke that, you know, I've asked our audience, like, you know, how are you getting your stuff? And then there's people who get it on TikTok. And then people are like, okay. And then I get it on Reels a week after it's trending on TikTok. Yeah. And then the people who are like, I watched it on YouTube two weeks after it was on TikTok and a week after it was on Reels. So I mean, eventually the trending stuff gets everywhere. It's just a matter of what platform you're watching it on. But you post to both, right? I try my best. I mean, the challenge is it's sort of, and you know, this is like an independent creator or journalist, et cetera. Like, well, I got a post on Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram. And we are Instagram first. So like getting into TikTok, but honestly, Tik Instagram, I know a certain video if I post it, that there's going to be a certain number of views associated with it. TikTok is a black hole where something gets 3 million views and another one gets 1,100. I'm like, from the same congressional hearing. I know. Wow. Like there's no method to it sometimes. Okay. I'm in the conversation. I'm the interviewer now because I prefer to be. Okay. So we're in this moment as journalists where Twitter may be crumbling. We're not sure everyone, like I think most of us have like one foot still in the crumbling building because we don't want to leave it in case they do rebuild it and it turns out to be good. And hey, we've had our followers here, but like means that we have to sort of look at other platforms. I know you have a bigger Instagram following. You've had that, but like, where are your, where's your focus now? So honestly, as a creator, my focus is, and I've talked to a few people about this, is ensuring that we're not putting all our eggs or not in the meta basket, right? And by the way, or in the TikTok basket that ultimately, and this goes institutionally, you know, right? I spent years at CBS as like, you know, we were jealous of BuzzFeed, which had figured out and cracked the Facebook algorithm and like they were crushing it. You know, our IP BuzzFeed news in the last month. And ultimately on an institutional level, and now as an individual creator level, we've realized at any given moment, any given day, they can turn it off. They can change it. Yep. And if your entire livelihood and following is on one of these third party apps, your sucks. It sucks. And you're, you're, you're making a very risky bet because we all know that at some point it'll end or the audience will age out and you don't know much about your audience. They own it all, right? And so my focus recently has been building out a podcast, building out my own newsletter, building out a website, building out my own base to be able to get to know my audience. So I am able to go to the next place with them, right? But like, okay, so when you're, you've got your newsletter, you got your podcast, like where are you promoting? Like your first stop. First stop. Well, it's still Instagram. That's the top of my funnel because that's where I started and that's where I built the foundation. Yeah. And you know, and I like the story element, you know, one of the, one of the things about Instagram is the Instagram stories is the last place in social media where you can do something chronologically and not algorithmically. Right. And as a storyteller, that's what we do. It's like, I want to be able to tell you in order a UCD. That's a smart point. Yeah. And that's why I like, I pray. And I'll DM, Miserie, I'm like, you're not changing. You're not messing with it, are you? Because I, I, I would say, no, no, not for now, no, but have you tried out this new feature we have channels? Have you tried out this other feature? Have you tried out this third feature? But that's the thing, like the, it, and this is a good piece to write at some point, but like Instagram has become like windows. Yeah. Like it's like windows. It's not Vista. It's not that bad. It's like windows. It's seven. Like, this is from my past life of being a lot. But that was the knock, that was the knock on Facebook. If you have played with Facebook Blue app recently and you go into it, you're like, oh my God, there are 57 options and 30th and whatever I never tried before. It's overwhelming. You can't find anything. Yeah. No, you can't find anything. And that's okay. And, and then once your second stop, sorry. Is it TikTok? And I mean, right now, I mean, you asked me now in May of 2023, frankly, Joanna, it's YouTube. You know, I feel like just looking at the data, looking at how people are consuming news and information that I have not spent enough time building out my YouTube presence. I'm creating more and more video content, even the podcast stuff. We're doing that video. And you know, my focus right now is like continuing to maintain and grow Instagram, but really build that YouTube. And YouTube, by the way, as a creator, has more established monetization opportunities. TikTok to me, like I would love to be able to do it. But again, it's like, how many channels can I do in a great way? And again, and not all content can be replicated. Like you need to, you know, you need to build content. Yeah, tweak it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Custom to the platform. But you mentioned the burning building that is Twitter and that's something we didn't get to speak to. And so I'll flip it back to you with a question. So Twitter last year at this time was a $44 billion company bought by Elon Musk. He takes it over in the fall. He's now six months in. He was named a new CEO. I don't know. The estimates are that it's worth half of what it was when he bought it. Advertisers have left. I wanted to play devil's advocate on the hate on Elon got in the fall, right? I was like, listen, the man had test, you know, he's figured out Tesla. He's figured out SpaceX. He's not going to light a $44 billion purchase on fire. Did he? But don't worry, Linda Yacarino is coming in and she's going to save the burning. She's a firefighter. Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting to watch. And that's why I was sort of going with asking you about all these different places, like all the Twitter clones, right? And meta's expected to come out with a Twitter clone too, because like it does feel one thing that you're talking like you've got tiktok, you got Instagram, like these are all very visual platforms, like you need to have photos and you have video and like you're like, it's best if you look good on those, right? Like you want to have a good face for Instagram, but like the beauty of Twitter is the words and links and there's been masted on and there's blue sky now and there's post and all of these other sort of competing upstarts or decentralized things, which have a lot of appeal in the way they're decentralized, but going and starting fresh and also gathering the world's top leaders and politicians and celebrities and sports people and tech journalists. I don't know, you know, all the people that are on Twitter to get them to go to someplace else. It's just, I don't know how likely it is. Right. So it's like everyone keeps, it's why like Twitter's still a thing. Like it's certainly not a thing, obviously. I guess the question is what happened, right? So was it just, was there a strategy there that we're not aware of? Is it that we just can't see the light that there is a vision here and a year from now, the people who are his allies and you know, I'll be like, see, I knew what I was doing. No, I don't think so. It's my opinion that the Linda, that the yacharito hire is a signal that the strategy to go after the Twitter blue subscriptions is just a fail because it is so clear that the user base of Twitter is not going to be converted into subscribers, at least not with any substantial product improvement and switching off blue checkmarks to pay for them or switching off SMS messaging or two factor SMS is not a reason to go and pay. And I think that just was a strategy at some point, obviously it was a strategy, like he put all the eggs into that and it pissed off people and it became a huge PR disaster. And simultaneously also destroying a lot of your ad relationships because of what's happening. And to me, this is all just sort of a save of the ad business. Yeah. So yacharito who overstiding something like $13 billion in ads at NBC coming in to basically reset things to the pre-Elon era and make it an advertising based company advertising based revenue company again. Yeah, with the giant challenge of free speech and less moderation and that fire. So yeah, it's still a fire. Still a fire and she's put on her helmet and we'll see how she does with it. Your focus, you're dealing a lot with trying to explain and I want to end here Joanna, personal technology columnist, you're trying to explain these big products and how they're applicable to our lives. And we sit here midway through 2023, AI is the conversation, meta is still a sort of a thing with new Apple goggles. What are you most excited about in the coming months? What should consumers be on the lookout for either as far as specific devices or what just larger trend lines that you'd be looking at? There's so much going on and it's hard for me right now to pick. If you could just tell me what to pick and I've gotten to a point in my career, I sort of missed the early days of journalism where I would get assigned a story because then at least someone would just tell me what to pick. Right. It's like, all right, so let's start with Apple. Is Apple have anything coming out that we should be excited? I mean, by the way, I speak to you on a MacBook, I have an iPhone, like I'm fully Apple-fied. They have me for life. What's next? I am excited about the headset thing because I think that it is such an uncharted territory as we talked about for Apple. Like, will this work for them? Will they be able to come up with a reason for us to put on these nerd helmets? Can they make them not a nerd helmet? I'm interested in that. I don't think the masses are interested in that. This is going to be an expensive device and it's definitely going to be aimed at. Developers, early adopters at first and that's just not going to be a huge mainstream appeal, which I tried to talk to normal people and I hope that I can cover it a little bit, but I assume it won't be the biggest focal point for me. And then I just backed your question. I want to cover AI in a way that I think is really accessible and as we talked about here, these tools that you can use right now, the 11 labs, the video clone stuff, the chat GPTs, the Bings, these are all accessible to people right now and just helping people understand how they work and what are the fears on them. I want to keep doing that but I want to do it in a way that is unique and doesn't totally bring fear to people. And I also think it's important for me as I've tried to over the last couple of years, bring a closer line from the top ranks of these organizations and interviewing the top people in these organizations, the CEOs, the people work, the CTOs and bring the user's perspective, ask the questions on behalf of the users to them. I think that's something I can try to keep doing, especially in these confusing areas of AI and new products. How do you get a good sense of what the average consumers, the average users want to know? How do you kind of take the pulse? I'd say data traffic but also my inbox is really a place where I get to hear directly from readers and in fact my biggest story of the year which has been this investigation into these iPhones that are being stolen and pass codes that are being stolen and completely upending people's digital lives and financial lives came from my inbox. It came from readers reaching out to me and saying, hey, I had my phone stolen and then I had all my money stolen and then I can't get back into my Apple account. That was a story that came in my inbox, a user, a reader and I went on a long journey with Nicole Nguyen who's a columnist here too and we've been investigating that. Still, some of the best stuff just comes from users and if I get another, I think one of the biggest problems in tech is account recovery. People can't get back into their accounts. There's no customer service for them. It's another thing. These are things I hear from the users. These are things that I feel set me apart from just being like, okay, let's cover the new thing. How does Apple respond to that? Apple, they've got a statement. They have an issue. They have an issue and update yet to solve for. Not yet. Okay. Not yet. There's two parts of that that I really hope they solve. One is the ability of just using your passcode. If I had your passcode right now, I could easily change your Apple ID password and lock you out of your Apple ID and Apple account forever. You would cry if I did that. Most people cry. It's like I'm joke, but also like it's so sad. I heard a call from another person yesterday. So much of our lives, it's our entire livelihood is in these books. Yeah. I saw from somebody yesterday, a 24 year old, his phone was stolen in New York. He read the article. He just wanted someone to talk to. I was here and I listened to his story for 20 minutes and I said, I'm really sorry. I have nothing to offer you. I do not think Apple will let you back into your account right now. So I hope they can make a change to the way, how easy it is to change that Apple ID and also make it easier for people who had their phone stolen and had this setting turned on to get back into their accounts. While we're on this subject, what is the thing everyone listening to? This can do to ensure this doesn't happen to them. They can use a stronger passcode. So if you have a four digit passcode and if it is the same four digits, I don't want to talk to you ever. That is a bad thing. Just joking. I want to talk to everybody. Right. But if your passcode is two, two, two, two. Yeah. Or one, two, three, four, no. Stop putting your passcode in in public. Even I am like now on the train today. I was waiting for the train. Face ID failed. I was like, no, I'm not going to do it. I was, you know, I'm very paranoid. I've been working on this story for a long time. And then you can go through a number of steps to just, well, I don't want to walk people through right here, but you can find my article and then you can turn on screen time with these parental controls and that will sort of block out the ability to make changes on your phone if you did have your passcode. Got it. All right. So we'll link to your story in the show notes for those who are curious about how to prevent the worst from happening to them. Joanna, I appreciate you taking the time today. So much happening in this space. So hope to have you back again in the future. And thanks for trying to stay on top of all of it for us. Thank you for having me. And thanks for being my social media tutor and manager now. You're going to find out you're going to be managing my Instagram account deal. I'm on it. But I'm going to need your, I'm going to need your iPhone passcode first so I can get into the, get into the account. All right. I want to thank Joanna again for that great conversation. We will definitely have her back on this podcast. You can check out all her coverage over at the Wall Street Journal, W S J dot com, though you will need a subscription to access most of it. Her Twitter handle is at Joanna Stern, J O A N N A Stern and same also over on Instagram. And before we go here, a reminder to consider joining Mo news premium for early access to podcast episodes like this one was available over on the members only podcast last week. And you will access extra content over on our members only Instagram account as well as the podcast speed is a way to support what we're doing here at Mo news, help us sustain what we're doing and help us grow what we're doing and just support independent journalism. I would be so grateful to all of you if you'd consider joining for just one month, it's $7 a month or $70 a year. That is two free months with the annual membership. So grateful if you'd consider joining, you can head over to mo.news slash premium again, mo.news slash premium. Thanks again to everyone for listening today. I'll see you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye.