Strangers showed us their Notes app. Here's what we learned.
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The note-taking applications on our phones are often where we go to jot down a quick reminder, a draft of a text message or a packing list. These simple text editors are there, on our phones, ready to document our fleeting thoughts.
But what do these notes from yesterday, or last month, or three years ago say about ourselves?
Post Reports co-host Elahe Izadi recently took on this question and asked strangers if she could look into their notes app. Host Colby Itkowitz chats with Elahe about what she learned from this little social experiment.
Today’s show was produced by Thomas Lu. It was mixed by Sam Bair and edited by Ariel Plotnick.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Colby. |
| 0:02.4 | Hi, La, hey. Look at you on the side of the table. |
| 0:05.1 | Yeah, I'm sitting in the guest spot and you're sitting in the host spot today. |
| 0:09.0 | I know. It's special. |
| 0:09.9 | But I'm going to start out by being the one to ask you a question, which is, would you open up your phone and tell me what is in your notes app? |
| 0:21.4 | Yeah, let's see. |
| 0:22.1 | I have a packing list for the beach from August. |
| 0:24.9 | Is there one in there that when you look at it now, you have no idea what it means anymore? |
| 0:29.5 | Someone named Joanna and her phone number. |
| 0:31.5 | Sorry, Joanna. |
| 0:32.2 | Sorry, Joanna. |
| 0:33.3 | I don't know who you are, but I have your phone number in my notes up and not. I barely didn't think she was important enough to save as a contact. So I put her number. You self-launched her just in the notes out. Sorry. I will do a call out for my seven-year-old because sometimes when she says something funny, I put it in. They go in here. What do you got? What do you got? Well, so she fancies herself a songwriter. And the other, she started writing a song. And the first line is, the odds aren't great, but the evens aren't perfect either. Okay. How good is that? That is very good. I was just like, wow, that is profound seven-year-old. |
| 1:13.8 | Recently, I sat down with my co-host, Ilaje Azadi, |
| 1:16.9 | to talk about a little piece of technology that helps us keep track of our lives. |
| 1:21.1 | The Notes app. |
| 1:23.0 | The Notes app is sort of like a digital diary, |
| 1:25.4 | and Elahe has been asking total strangers to open their phones and show her the private notes they write to themselves. |
| 1:31.8 | Because I have been testing out this little theory that, yes, you can get to know someone, some aspect of them if you look at their social media profiles, you know, like what they're putting out |
| 1:44.2 | on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever. But if you want the full story, the place to really |
| 1:52.2 | look is inside of their notes app. |
| 1:58.8 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 2:02.7 | I'm Colby Echowitz. It's Thursday, December 4th. |
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