Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

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My guest today is longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna: she is the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my cofounders here at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them The journalist and author of I Am Not a Robot on her year living with AI and starting a new media company. I mention that because Joanna just left that lofty perch at The Journal to start her own media company called New Things. She’s starting with her new book about AI, called I Am Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th. You’ll hear us reference the fact that she and I have been talking about her big move to go independent for ages now — it’s something she’s wanted to do and wrestled with for years, and she has a long list of interesting reasons about why now is the time. She’s also structured her new venture in partnership with NBC to keep her in front of a big mainstream audience. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. It was important that I prove to Joanna that I actually read her book, which is really quite good. She spent a full year allowing AI into every part of her life and has more of a sense of where this technology actually is than pretty much anyone because of it. As you’ll hear Joanna explain, many of the most hyped AI-powered gadgets — especially the humanoid robots — are definitely not ready, and they might not be for a very long time. But you’ll also hear Joanna say she’s a lot more bullish on certain types of AI after her experience writing her book. She thinks wearable AI might really get us to a killer app — one that might justify all the extreme tradeoffs we’re making to continue developing the technology at the pace the tech industry wants to. She’s also using AI to help get her new media company off the ground. So I asked her about that, too, and what she’s learning now that she’s left the world of traditional media and put a heavier emphasis on the YouTube algorithm. This is a really fun one — it is about as close to the actual conversation Joanna and I have at our regular dinners as it gets. Okay: Joanna Stern, author of the new book I Am Not a Robot and founder of New Things. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Joanna Stern, you’re the founder and chief everything officer of the new tech news venture New Things. You’re also a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, but most importantly, you’re a cofounder of The Verge and also just one of my closest friends. Welcome back to Decoder. It is so nice to be here on Decoder and not subbing in for you. [Laughs] It’s true that you were also a guest host of this show for a while. This is the most conflicted episode of Decoder I think we’ve ever done, but I’m excited for it. I’m going to try to make it as tough on you as possible, as adversarial. We’re going to break down, we’re going to find the dark heart of New Things. I’m going to make it adversarial on you because I was a host here. [Laughs] That’s true. We’re figuring out whose show this is. I see that it says behind you “Nilay Patel”, but we’ll see. We’re going to get AI to change it in real time to say “Joanna Stern”. Has anyone ever heard a podcast with two hosts? It’s going to be amazing. You’ve got a new book out. It’s called I’m Not a Robot. You spent 12 months in your life using AI for everything. It’s organized by seasons. Your kids are in it. It’s very good. It’s very funny. It’s out on May 12th. There’ll be a preorder link in the show notes. You also started New Things, which is your new media company. You left The Wall Street Journal, you’ve got a YouTube venture. I want to talk about all of these things. I want to start with a very simple question. You are one of the more influential tech reviewers in the world. You have spent a year using AI products to do everything in your life. There’s the book. You can see it. I’m just going to keep doing this the whole show. Here’s my theory. I don’t think consumer AI products are very good. I don’t think there’s a great consumer AI product, and I think a ton of the angst we hear about AI is a reflection of that. You have used all the products, you’ve used the expensive ones, the bleeding-edge ones. You just had a robot step on your foot. Where do you think we are? Are these products good? Are they great? I think they can be great. I know that you feel this way, but I think they can be great. I’m going to turn the question back on you. People in your life that are not in the tech world, do they use AI? It’s foisted upon them. That’s how I feel about it. I feel like if you open Google, you get some cheap-to-run AI model in your face doing AI Overviews, and that is fine. And Google had to do that because they felt very threatened by ChatGPT. But then, if you open the free version of ChatGPT, you get some cheap-to-run AI model that is a bunch of engagement prompts at the end of every query. And everybody is having these experiences. So yes, they’re using them, but I don’t know— AI is being forced upon them. And the experiences that are being forced upon people look like slop. They open their Instagram feeds and there’s slop. No one’s going out to buy an iPhone. Do you know what I mean? That was a thing that people chose to do because they were excited about that product. You and I both lived through that entire moment together as colleagues. I’m just looking at these products, the free products that are in front of people, and I’m saying, “These aren’t actually great.” I think that they have not become great in the three to four years since ChatGPT released. And so for the people that are using ChatGPT or some form of a chatbot, have they gotten considerably better, at least in terms of a product, in the last four years? If you look at the consumer, it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and we can say Claude has been shooting up there, but it’s hard to tell if that’s really a consumer adoption. I think the models have gotten better. You can maybe trust these more, but the interface has not gotten any better. Most people are just still launching ChatGPT. Maybe they’re doing voice mode. I see a lot of people doing voice mode now, but mostly they’re typing to a chatbot and that has not gotten better. I agree with you there. But I do think that people have figured out other use cases where AI is now helping them in their everyday lives, not just at work. That was my question to you: Are your friends, or the people you hang out with on the weekend... We both don’t have friends, let’s be honest. [Laughs] We are friends. We are friends, but we are in this. We are not normal people. That’s why we are friends, right? Yeah, it’s very difficult to be our friend. But your parent friends or your old friends or family, I see those people using AI in really interesting ways, or going to AI now instead of Google. Our nanny is a great example. She’s constantly asking ChatGPT questions. I’m going to give the classic example, which is recipes and cooking and all of those things, but she’s often asking ChatGPT to do things. I do that too. I watch my daughter basically fight with Google about who knows more about space. It’s a very good pattern in our house. She starts asking Gemini for space facts, because she just talks to the Google Assistant on our Google Home, which is now powered by Gemini. So they just talk about space for a while. I think that is wonderful. I legitimately see her curiosity get rewarded in that dynamic. I think that’s great. What I’m talking about is that the AI industry is asking for a lot. A subtext of your book, and it’s made explicit about halfway through, is like, “Yeah, I’m talking about all the jobs going away.” There are grades of how fast the jobs might go away. You hired a human researcher and then replaced her with AI. And you were like, “This is pretty much as good and it’s much cheaper than my human researcher.” And then I think, in a very cold turn, you went and interviewed the human researcher about how she felt about being replaced by AI. Very good. But that’s a lot to ask from everyone all the time. The whole book is about you using the bleeding edge of this stuff integrated in your life and your kids’ lives and your poor wife’s life. And I’m just wondering if there was a point where you’re like, “This is definitely good enough. This is great,” in the way that the products that we came up with as tech reviewers were just obviously great. The iPhone was an obviously great product. I actually coined this term at the end of the book, AEI, which stands for artificial enough intelligence. We don’t need AGI. A lot of these tools that we already have are good enough and they just have to be applied better. Someone smart somewhere needs to say, “What is the best way for a consumer to actually want to interact with this stuff?” Some companies I think have gotten there, though I think a lot of them just end up being acquired and then sitting in the basement of Meta or one of the big companies. The more the year went on, things got better. I was at the bleeding edge, but now the bleeding edge is where the bleeding edge is. So now, when you read the book, I’m at a little bit of the old edge, but I don’t think a lot of those themes change at all. I think you’re getting to the question, has there been or will there be a killer consumer AI product? Isn’t that the question you’re getting at? That’s one way of phrasing it for sure. Is there something that makes everyone excited for the change? The internet is in the introduction of your book. That everyone made these wild promises about the internet and then some of that stuff didn’t happen, but then it definitely did. We just all lived through it without any contemplation. Your book is an attempt to do some contemplation. I would just say the internet, especially when it came to smartphones, was just so obviously how everyone wanted to do everything, that all the costs along the way… Now there aren’t any travel agencies. No one had a freakout that there weren’t going to be travel agencies. They were like, “We’re just going to use the online booking portals now. It’s just what we’re going to do.” And I don’t see that one here. I see that one here for a number of use cases. Maybe it’s just because we’ve already lived through that moment, which is what I’m kind of wondering in that introduction — are we on par with the internet moment? Is life going to change as much as it did in the late ‘90s into the early 2000s? Are we going to have a moment of that? The answer I get to is that it probably won’t be as drastic, but there are ways that AI is going to affect life whether you like it or not. I loved your essay that you did a few weeks ago on software brain. We may all decide we don’t want to use it. We know already at this point a considerable number of people are going to use it, but we also know a lot of people hate AI right now and they’re resisting it. Where I get into the book is, that’s fine. You can try to, but there are going to still be ways that AI affects your life regardless of whether you want it to. The healthcare chapter is a perfect example of that. I go and get my mammogram read by AI. My radiologist is using AI side by side. Turns out my radiologist had already been doing that for a year. I didn’t even know that. That’s one example of how the underlying infrastructure of so many industries is going to use AI. Another great example of that in the book is the Waymo chapter. You may decide, “I never want to be in a Waymo. I never want to go in a self-driving car. I don’t want the machines, I don’t want the tech companies driving my car.” You are going to drive your own car, but next to you will be a self-driving car and that will affect life. That’s my broad thing of how listeners of this show may say, “Hey, fuck it all. I’m not going to use Claude. I’m not going to use this,” and even if, to your point, Google and every other touch point on the internet or in apps integrate AI, “I’m going to try to resist it,” but you’re just not going to be able to. I don’t know. I think listeners of this show are generally people who work at tech companies and they’re thinking about business. And I agree with you. I think there’s a real product-market fit for the AI tools in a bunch of enterprise settings. Healthcare is a top example. I can see it already. There’s just a lot of data in a lot of databases in healthcare that don’t talk to each other. Maybe AI can solve this problem. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks. There’s a lot of monitoring. You can see it. You can see how it will work. I think the car example is fascinating. The second I can get my parents cars that drive themselves, I will get them one. If that means throwing out their cars and buying some subscription to Waymo, we’ll do it. But that product is so expensive today that it’s not in Wisconsin, where my parents live. There is a diffusion gap where it’s like, “Well, so to get my parents out of their car and into a car that drives itself, I need them to move to Austin.” It’s not going to happen. Do you know what happens on Decoder? All roads lead to car talk when we are on. They do at the end of the day. We’re going to talk about CarPlay in one second. They just rolled out voicemail in CarPlay. We’re going to do it. That was a big hit when you were the host. My newsletter that’s going out very soon is about that.There’s really actually no deep mention of CarPlay in the book, but I think we should obviously shift this entire podcast to being a CarPlay podcast. The analytics tell us that you and I should only talk about CarPlay. That’s all the people want. The point I’m making is, you can see in these places where, yes, it’s just going to happen to you. It’s going to happen around you. I think I’m just thinking about your year where it was integrated in your family, where you used it for everything. I’m curious, where was the place where you thought, “Okay, my experiment is done. My book is published. I’m on the podcast circuit. I’m going to keep using it in these spots”? Well, it’s evolved. Look, we can get into the business conversation, and I guess I’m saying you’re right. I rarely say you’re right, but I will right now say you’re right that the biggest place in my life right now where AI is making a big difference is in starting this business. I’ve got the Mac Mini. We’ve got a Slack bot. We’ve got an AI agent in Slack that we’re training to do stuff for us. Everyone on the team, the very small team, is using AI because my number one thing was like, “I want you to optimize and be efficient in the things that you do not want to be doing, but I want you doing creative video editing. I want you pitching amazing stories. I want us to be ambitious, but we also have to do a lot of this busywork.” So you are right. That is probably the biggest place, and that is enterprise. That said, we still have quite a few weird little things in the house that we still use from the year. Yes, weird robots beyond the vacuum robot. I still have the Posha cooking robot, which we use every Sunday. Do you really? Yes. What do you use it for? Making the side dishes for our Sunday night dinner. Really? And it does it? It does it. You trust it? Oh, totally. But that’s not deep AI. It’s weird. Have you seen this? You guys have covered it. Yeah. You guys did a great job covering it at The Verge. I can just set it and forget it. And my kids love it. They love watching it because it’s a little bit idiotic. To describe it for those that don’t know this, this is three times the size of your toaster oven. It takes up an entire counter. My wife hates this thing because it’s taking up a lot of kitchen real estate. It’s got a big pot and it’s got an arm that stirs in the pot. It’s a glorified hot pot, but it dumps the ingredients in. So you put all the ingredients in, including raw meat, which is weird and unsanitary, we think, but we’re all fine. We’ve been using it for six months. Everyone here is totally fine and the dog is fine. No one has salmonella. Every time, it dumps these things out and it doesn’t know that it’s done this. Because there’s no sensors in the container, it doesn’t know it’s dumped it all out. So it just dumps and dumps and dumps and it’s empty and it will just be dumping for 30 seconds and the kids think it’s hilarious and they’re like, “Idiot robot, dumb robot.” Pretty much every Sunday night we do that. I would say there’s a lot of lasting effects on my kids, and you’ve met my kids. They also pretend to be cleaning robots after Sunday night dinner. That’s very fun. They clean up and they say things like, “Cleaning robot mode initialized.” And they go around the room and clean and do all the dishes, which frankly I’m totally fine with. If I could get my kids to do that, that’d be great. Just have a bunch of robots in your house for the year and then they want to be them, which is again, the book, I’m Not a Robot, they literally think they are robots on Sunday night. There’s a lot of weird little things that have just stuck around that have become part of our life. I will say, and I took it out again this week, that I think the wearable stuff has really stuck with me. And you guys do a lot of great coverage of it on The Verge and we all know nothing’s really cracked through, but I do think at some point something is going to crack through. I wear the Meta glasses a lot. Not only do I wear the Meta glasses a lot, but I talk to AI through the Meta glasses a lot on the weekends when I’m with my kids. I don’t have my phone with me as much. That’s one thing. I wore this recording bracelet for a lot of the year. I just did a speech earlier this week and I wanted to practice with it and I wanted to practice the speech, and I also wanted to have this recording bracelet on me during that day that I was doing this speech and talking to various people at this event. I wore it for the day and I found it really valuable to get summaries and the to-dos I said I was going to do. This is the Bee bracelet that, again, feels like a prototype still, but I think the ideas there are going to carry over into something really good soon. I don’t know when “soon” is, but soon. Both of those categories, and even those products specifically, highlight what I think of as “the trade-offs.” At one point, I think your basement is flooding and you’re wearing the Bee bracelet and you have to tell the plumber that you’re wearing the bracelet and the chapter just ends with, “And he was quite intrigued.” And it’s like, “Do I want to tell my plumber that I’m recording him?” You have social dynamics that change because you’re recording everything all the time, because these systems need the same data that you have. Meta has a whole bundle of issues associated with privacy with wearing those glasses now. Did you feel that trade-off was worth it? It sounds like you did. Did you just get used to telling everyone that you were recording them all the time? You start to forget to tell people that you’re recording, which I think was a little bit of a view of a really dystopian future where we forget to tell people we’re recording because everything is being recorded. I stopped wearing it for that reason. It would pick up on things I just did not want recorded. And the microphones on those are shockingly good. You’ll leave it in the other room and you’ll be like, “I didn’t say that around this thing. How the fuck did it know?” It’s shockingly good, which is crazy. It goes back to a story that both of us have lived through in this industry, which is the idea that your phone can’t be recording. Your phone can’t capture this much data and send it to the advertisers. It’s like, “No, your phone definitely can do that. We’re not saying it is happening, but it absolutely can.” The answer that we got for so many years is like, “Technically, that would be so crazy.” That’s not true anymore. They can instantly transcribe this, you can transcribe it on the phone. We know that Apple can do that. We know Apple isn’t doing that for these companies, but it can happen. That was just a big learning for me. These things can get 90 to 95 percent of everything you say. There are issues with the transcript. You and I are very used to getting great transcripts from Otter or Rev. It’s not as good as that because we’re not talking directly into a microphone, but they could be shockingly good transcripts. And then the AI just makes sense of it. You get a great to-do list of everything you said you were going to do during the day but totally forgot about. Useful, but yes, the other side of it is totally dystopian because everyone is recording everything. And you felt that. You felt like you needed to take it off for a while. Yeah. But you don’t feel that with the glasses? I think for me it’s different because I don’t wear glasses all day long, so when I put them on, I’m making an active decision. I’m putting my glasses on, either because it’s sunny outside or I want to have this AI on my body right now. I did wear the see-through, regular transparent lenses for a while, but I actually look like Garth from Wayne’s World when I put those glasses on, so I didn’t wear them all that often publicly, because vanity. But I can see a world where we will. I think it’s very funny that Meta is trying to make transition lenses happen. Ugh, they’re terrible. They invested in that company and they are trying to make it cool to wear transitions. If I had to point to one single example of the disconnect between what the tech industry thinks it can make cool and what regular people think is cool, it’s Meta’s attempt to make transition lenses cool. I just don’t think you can do it. No. And I appreciate it. There’s no world where you’re wearing transition lenses and it doesn’t remind me of my grandparents. And I’m an old guy. I’m the target market for transition lenses. You should be able to get me. You just hit transition lens age, I think. I’m in the window, and they can’t do it. I’m not there yet. I’m younger than you, Nilay, as everyone knows and can tell, but you just hit it. You’re ready. I’m in the zone and they can’t get me. This is the other thing. You have to change the culture around it. I watched the video that you just made and it’s you running around outside with your kids and a robot and it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to change the culture around this.” People have reactions to delivery robots driving down the street, and they don’t love them. They think they look dystopian. An actual bipedal robot moving around seems like yet another gigantic change, and you have to have some utility there. That was the turn in the book that I thought was the most interesting. We can do a lot of recording, we can do a lot of text analysis. They’re getting way better at transcription and organizing the first cut of research, I think you mentioned several times. I believe you gave AI four robots in your chart out of five for transcription and first-pass research. And then there’s a bunch of stuff that, particularly when you get to the real-world robots, they just can’t do it yet. The world models don’t exist. The hardware exists, but we need vastly more training data in all the places. What’s the gap there? Because that’s the next turn of AI that everyone is making the promises about. I loved this turn because I really went into this not knowing a ton about it and learned so much through talking to all these experts. And the gap I think is a very Decoder thing, because you’re so good at identifying the gap between what is being marketed and being told to people and what the tech world and the AI people think versus what’s really happening there. And that gap could not be farther apart. People like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang are claiming that humanoid robots are the next big thing. It is so far from ready. It is absolutely so far from ready. And the tech people will not tell you that. The people making the robots just say, “No, no, they’re coming next year. They’re coming now.” They are not, realistically. And truly, they’re clouded. They don’t see it clearly because they’re in it. Then you talk to the academics and you go and see these products and you’re like, “There’s just no way. There’s just no way, even if it was ready, that people would be letting some of these things into their homes right now.” That’s largely the data gap, which we can talk about — the fact that these robots don’t have enough data of doing real-world things, especially in the home, because the home is the hardest place to put a robot. It’s not a factory floor. Everything isn’t repeatable. Everything isn’t mapped out for it. Everything in your home changes, especially in a home with kids and a dog and whatever other animals I have living in my house this week. My son is getting a snake, which we’re going to feed to the robots when it comes time. That gap is massive. I found that fascinating because we’ve seen a lot of this all play out right now with generative AI. It is absolutely getting better. It’s here and it’s in our hands, but this idea that robots and physical AI are coming in the next two years is just a lie. This is the thing that just really strikes me, and you mentioned software brain. The demand on the software side of AI is to make yourself legible to the computer. Record everything, put all of your information in a database. My Whoop band every morning is like, “I watched your heart rate and now I can tell you about your day.” I don’t know if that’s true at all. I think it’s very entertaining, but there’s an idea that, at least in software, you can turn yourself into software or data such that an AI can talk to you about something: “Here’s my electric bill. Tell me if I should get solar panels.” There’s some very intriguing data analysis you can do in that way. Then you come to robots like physical AI, and it works for Amazon, where they have a warehouse and they can paint the lines on the floor and they can put all the bins in the right places. You watch those videos of all the robots doing their orchestrated movements and you’re like, “I understand this.” How am I going to get enough data ever to make a house with kids in it legible to a robot? It doesn’t even seem likely to me. If we ever revisit this book in five years, I do not think we will have these things. No one will also put a timeline on this. Even the academics are like, “We don’t know. We don’t know what will happen on AI progress with transformers and models and world models and all of these things. We don’t quite know how that progress is going to work.” They will tell you that it’s moving really fast, and it is getting rapidly better. But again, that gap to us as consumers putting these things in our homes, not only safely, but actually with real utility and benefit… Even if that thing can fold the laundry and do it in less than two minutes, and it can do more than just T-shirts. There is a section in the book where I tested this laundry robot and it’s really just two robotic arms and a model running on a laptop. It’s amazing because you’re like, “Oh wow, I can see the future in this, but it’s so far away.” It can only fold t-shirts.If you’re only wearing t-shirts, that is a real problem. It cannot fold faster than a minute. It takes a minute for it to fold the t-shirt. That speed got better and better as the year went on, but it can’t even fold that well. Plus, this is quite expensive. So it has all of these pain points. We’ve been reviewers for a long time. Who is recommending that? Who is signing up for all of those issues when they’re just like,“ Yeah, I can fold the T-shirts”? You and I have been reviewers for a long time. Most of the products have to ship. At the end of the day, that has always been, I think, the power of being a tech reviewer as opposed to just a tech reporter. We get the products, we review them. Your entire career is built on getting away from the briefing and taking the iPhone’s Dynamic Island on a kayak to an island or skiing in a Vision Pro because it looks like ski goggles. The truth outs with the products. You get them away from the companies and you use them and there’s no hiding. The products work or they don’t. Why do you think this class of companies, the AI companies, whether it’s the Bee bracelet or the humanoid robots, are so eager to ship products that can’t quite do all the things that they’re supposed to do? Data. I think data — largely that. With the 1X story I did at the end of last year when I was at the Journal, which was really actually a book story that fell into my lap because I had been talking to that company and following that company for the year, the thing about the robot companies is purely about data. The CEO is so honest. He says, “We need data.” That’s the contract you enter into. “We will give you this robot and you will get more out of this robot if you give us more data because we need that data to train the robot to do things.” So even in that case, which is the total extreme where the robot actually is a human — it’s not technically a human in a suit, but it’s a human operating a VR headset back in their headquarters in Palo Alto — your robot in your home is being operated by that person. It’s collecting data. It’s like, “Hey, for two hours a day...” This is their genuine pitch, and that’s why I did the story. They had been telling me about this all year and I was like, “Guys, this is crazy. This is nuts.” And then they really did it and they’re doing it and I hope to get their robot hopefully this year. I want to keep testing with them just to be that person to test with them. But it is nuts. Your man in Palo Alto is steering my robot in my