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

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 co-founders at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. Joanna just left that lofty perch at the Journal to start her own media company called New Things, and she’s starting with her new book about AI called I Am Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th. So we had Joanna on to talk about all of that, especially what she learned going all in on automation. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: I Am Not a Robot | Harper Collins It’s time. Meet my New Thing | Joanna Stern Why I left My prestigious job to make YouTube videos | Joanna Stern / YouTube Signing off from this column after 12 years. Here’s what’s changed in tech | WSJ I tried the robot that’s coming to live with you. It’s still par human | WSJ The people do not yearn for automation | Decoder Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:31Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna. She's the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my co-founders here at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. I mention all that because Joanna just left that lofty perch at The Journal to start her own media company called New Things. She's also got a new book out about AI called I'm Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12. 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.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  And also about how she structured her new venture in partnership with NBC to keep her in front of a big mainstream audience. It was also 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 she 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 technologies, especially humanoid robots, are definitely not ready. And they might not be for a very long time. But you'll also hear Joanna say that she's a lot more bullish on certain other types of AI after her experience writing the book. She thinks wearable AI might really get to a killer app soon. One that might justify all the extreme trade-offs we're making to continue developing the technology at the pace the tech industry wants us to.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  She's also using AI to help get her own new media company off the ground. So I asked her about all that 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's about as close to the conversation Joanna and I have at our regular dinners as it gets. Okay, Joanna Stern, author of the new book, I'm Not a Robot, and founder of New Things. Here we go.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  Joanna Stern, you're the founder and chief everything officer of the new tech news venture, New Things. You're also a former columnist of Wall Street Journal. But most importantly, you're a co-founder of The Verge and also just one of my closest friends. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  It is so nice to be here on Decoder and not subbing in for you.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  It's true that you were also a guest host of the 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

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm going to make it

• 4:02Speaker 04

  The dark heart of New Things.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  adversarial on you because I was a host here. So that's Well, figuring out whose show this is. I see that says behind you, Neelai Patel, but we'll see.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  We're gonna get AI to change it in real time to say Joanna Stern. Has anyone ever heard a podcast with two hosts? It's gonna 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. And you also started New Things, which is your new media company. You left the journal. You got a YouTube venture. I want to talk about all these things. I want to just 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.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  I'm just gonna keep doing this the whole show.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  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?

• 5:18Speaker 05

  I know. I know that you feel this way, but I think they can be great. And I think I'm gonna turn the question back on you. People in your life that are not in the tech world, do they use AI?

• 5:30Speaker 06

  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 Free 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. And the experiences that are being forced upon people look like slut. Right? They open their Instagram feeds and their slot and no one's going out to buy an iPhone. Do you know what I mean? Like, 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

• 6:12Speaker 06

  together as colleagues. I'm just looking at these products, the free products that are in front of people, and I'm saying, well, these aren't actually great.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  I think that they have not become great in two, what, three, four years since ChatGPT released, right? And so I think the people that are using ChatGPT in, or some form of a chatbot, whether it be probably Gemini, right? If you look at the consumer, it's Gemini, ChatGPT, we can say Claude has become, has been shooting up there, but it's hard to tell if that's really a consumer adoption. Have they gotten considerably better, at least in terms of a product, in the last four years? I don't, I think the models have gotten better. You can maybe trust these more, but the interface has not gotten any better, right? Most people

• 7:03Speaker 05

  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's not, 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. And that was my question to you. It's like, do you, those, you know, your friends, you hang out on the weekend? I mean, we don't, we both don't have friends, let's be honest.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  We are friends.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  We are friends, but we are in this. We are, we are not normal people. That's why we are friends, right? So like on the weekends-

• 7:42Speaker 06

  It's very difficult to be our friend. Yes, it's this.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  But like, you know, your parent friends or your high, your old friends, family, I see those people using AI in really interesting ways, or going to AI now instead of Google, right? Like, our nanny is a great example. She's constantly asking ChatGPT questions for, sure, I'm gonna give the, like, the classic example, which is recipes and cooking and all of those things, but like, she's often asking- Chat GPT to do things.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  I do that, too. I watch my daughter basically fight with Google about who knows more about space. I think it's just like a very good pad pattern in our house is she just starts asking Gemini for space facts because, you know, she just she just talks to the Google Assistant on our on our Google Home, which is now Gemini. And so they just they just talk about space for a while. And 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 the AI industry is asking for a lot, like 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, right? There's there's like

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 8:54Speaker 06

  grades of how fast the jobs might go away. You hired a human researcher and then replaced her with AI. And you're 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 you're 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. The way that the products that we came up with as tech reviewers were just obviously great. Like the iPhone was like an obviously great product.

• 9:33Speaker 05

  Well, I actually coined this term at the end of the book AEI, which is artificial enough intelligence. Like, we don't need AGI. Like, a lot of these tools that we already have are good enough, and they just have to be, I think, to your first question, applied better. And someone smart somewheres needs to be like, what is the best way for a consumer to actually want to interact with this stuff? And some companies, I think, have gotten there, although I think a lot of them just end up being acquired and then sitting in the basement of Meta, or some one of the big companies. The more the year went on, things got better. Like, so it was, I look, I was at the bleeding edge, but now the bleeding edge is where the bleeding edge is, right? So now it's like, I'm completely at the of. Old, like when you read the book, a little bit of the old edge,

• 10:17Speaker 05

  but I don't think a lot of those themes change at all. I think you're getting to the question, is there been, or will there be, a killer consumer AI product? Isn't that the question you're getting at?

• 10:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's one way of phrasing it for sure. Is there something that makes everyone excited for the change? You bring, the internet is in the introduction of your book, right? 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, and your book is an attempt to do some contemplation, right? And 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, there are, now there aren't travel agencies.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  No one had to freak out that there weren't going to be travel agencies. There was like, we're just, we're just going to use the online booking portals now. That's just what we're going to do. And I don't see that one here.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  I see that one here for a number of use cases. I think we will, and maybe it's just because we've already lived through that moment, which is what I'm kind of wondering in that introduction. Is, are we on par with the internet moment, right?

• 11:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  Is life going to change as much as it did in the early, or the late 90s into the early 2000s? Are we going to have a moment of that? And I kind of get to, like, probably not as drastic, but certainly in a way, there's certainly ways that AI is going to affect life, whether you like it or not. And I think, like, I loved your essay that you did a few weeks ago on Software Brain, right? We may all decide we don't want to embrace, we don't want to use it, right? And that might, I don't think all, I think 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 are resisting it. Where I kind of get into the book is, that's fine, you can try to,

• 12:09Speaker 05

  but there are going to still be ways that AI affects your life, regardless if you want it to, right? I mean, 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, right? I didn't even know that. So this one example of like the underlying infrastructure of so many industries is going to use AI. I think 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 you will be a self-driving car, and that will affect life.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  That's my like Broadway saying of like, we may not, you may, listeners of the show may say, hey, fuck it all. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna use Claude. I'm not gonna use this, but like, and even if, like, to your point, like, yep, Google and every other touchpoint on the internet or an app's integrate AI, I'm gonna try to resist it, but you're, you're just not gonna be able to.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know. It's, I think listeners of this show are generally people who work at tech companies. They're, they're, they're thinking about business, and I agree with you. I think there's real product market fit for the AI tools in a bunch of enterprise settings. Healthcare is a top example. I can, I can see it already, right? There's just a lot of data and a lot of databases in healthcare that they 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, like, 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. And if that means throwing out their cars and buying some subscription to a Waymo, we'll do it. But that product is so expensive today that it's not in Wisconsin, right where my parents live.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  Like, there, there's, there is a diffusion gap where it's like, okay, well, so to get my parents out of their car and into a car that drives itself, I need them to move to Austin. That's just, it's not gonna happen.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Do you know what happens on Decoder? All roads lead to car talk when we are on.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  At the end of the day, we're gonna talk about CarPlay in one second. You know, they just rolled out voice and CarPlay. We're gonna do it. It's that was the big hit when you were the host.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  My newsletter that's going out very soon is about that, but 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.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  I mean, 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 gonna happen to you. It's gonna 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. And I'm curious, where was the place where you were like, okay, my experiment is done, my book is published, I'm on the podcast circuit, I'm gonna keep using it in these spots?

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Well, it's evolved. I mean, look, we can get into the business conversation, but like, and that's the, that's, I guess I'm saying you're right. I rarely say you're right. But I will right now say you're right, that like, the biggest place in my life right now in starting this business is like, where AI is making the biggest differences in that, right? Like, I've got the Mac Mini, we've got a Slack bot, we've got a, you know, an AI agent in the Slack, we're training it 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

• 15:41Speaker 05

  ambitious, but we also have to do a lot of this busy work. And so, you are right, that is probably the biggest place, and that is enterprise. That said, we still have quite a few like, weird little things in the house that we still use, like, that, from the year. Yes, like, weird robots, like, beyond the vacuum robot, I still have the PoshA cooking robot, which we use every Sunday.

• 16:07Speaker 06

  Do you really?

• 16:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  What do you use it for?

• 16:10Speaker 05

  Making the side dishes on our Sunday night dinner.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  Really? And it does it?

• 16:14Speaker 05

  It does it.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  You trust it?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Oh, totally. I mean, but like, that's not deep AI. It's, yeah, I can just set it and forget it. Like, and my kids love it. They love watching it. It's, because it's a little bit idiotic. It will dump, so, to describe it for those that don't know this, this is like a big, three times the size of your toaster oven, so it takes up like, an entire counter. My wife hates this thing because it's taking up a lot of kitchen real estate. And it's got a big pot, and it's got an arm that stirs in the pot. And it's like, yeah, it's a glorified hot pot, but it dumps the ingredients in. So you put the, all the ingredients in, including raw meat, which is weird and... Yeah, 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. He, this, no one has salmonella.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  Okay, so, and every time it dumps these things out, and it doesn't know that, 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 like be dumping for 30 seconds. And the kids think it's hilarious. And they're like, idiot robot, dumb robot, like. And so every, pretty much every Sunday night, we, we do that. Um, and then the kids also, I would say like, there's a lot of lasting effects on my kids. And, um, you've met my kids. And so, uh, they also pretend to be cleaning robots after Sunday night dinner, and they clean up. And they say like, cleaning robot mode, you know, initialized. And they like go around the room and clean and do all the dishes,

• 17:46Speaker 05

  which frankly, I'm totally fine with.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, if I could get my kids to do that, that'd be great.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, just, you know, 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.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 19:50Speaker 04

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Joanna Stern, the founder of New Things and author of I'm Not a Robot, discussing which of the many AI and robotics experiments she spent a year researching for her book have actually stuck around.

• 20:02Speaker 05

  So 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, and 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. And not only do I wear the Meta glasses a lot, but I do talk to AI through 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 wanted to also have this recording bracelet on me during that day that I was doing the speech and talking to various people at this event. And I wore it for the day.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  And I found it really valuable to get summaries and the to-dos I said I was going to do. This is the B 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...

• 21:04Speaker 06

  Both of those categories, and even those products specifically, they highlight what I think of as the trade-offs. Right, at one point, you, I think it's your basement is flooding and you're wearing the B 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? Like, you have like, 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 with privacy, wearing those glasses now. Did you feel that trade off was worth it? I mean, it sounds like you did, but you had to, did you just get used to telling everyone that you were recording them all the time?

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Well, you kind of start to forget to tell people that you're recording, which I think was a little bit of a view of the future, a really dystopian future, where we forget to tell people we're recording because everything is being recorded. I stopped wearing that for that reason. Like, first of all, it would pick up on things I just did not want recorded. And it was, the microphones on those are shockingly good. Like, 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? You know, like, shockingly good. Um, which is crazy and, you know, I think goes back to a story that both of us have, you know, lived through in this industry, which is like, your phone can't be recording. Your phone can't capture this much data and send it to the advertisers.

• 22:31Speaker 05

  It's like, no, your phone definitely can do that. We're not saying it is happening, but it absolutely can. Like, the answer that we got for so many years is like, technically, that would be so crazy. That's, that's not true anymore, right? Like, they can instantly transcribe this, 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. I mean, that was just like, a big learning for me. It's like, no, no. These things can get like 90 to 95% of everything you say, right? Like, it, you know, there are like, issues with the transcripts. Like, me and you are very used to getting like, great transcripts from Otter or Rev. Like, it's not as good as that, because we're not talking directly in a microphone,

• 23:13Speaker 05

  but it can 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. Useful, but yes, other side of it, totally dystopian because you, everyone's recording everything.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you felt that. You felt like you needed to take it off for a while.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  But you don't feel that with the glasses?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I think for me, it's different because I don't wear glasses all day long, right? So when I put them on, I'm making an active decision, hey, 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 like the see-through, the 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, I didn't wear them all that often publicly because vanity.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  But I can see a world where we will.

• 24:06Speaker 06

  I think it's very funny that Meta is trying to make transitions lenses happen. Like they invested in that company and they are trying to make it cool to wear transitions. And I mean, 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 thinks is cool, it's Meta's attempt to make transitions lenses cool. Like, I just don't think you can do it.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  No, there's no world where like you're wearing transition lenses and it doesn't remind me of my grandparents.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I'm like an old guy, like I, I'm the target market for transition lenses.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  You actually just hit.

• 24:40Speaker 06

  You should be able to get me.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, you just hit transition lens age, I think.

• 24:44Speaker 06

  I'm in, I'm in the window, like get me and they can't do it.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  I'm not there yet. I'm younger than you, Eli. Everyone knows and can tell. But yeah, you just hit it. You're ready.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm in, I'm in the zone and they can't get me. That's, this is the, this is the other thing is like you have to change the culture around it, right? If you're gonna, I watched the video that you just made and it's like you running around outside with your kids and a robot, right? And it's like, well, we're gonna change the culture around this. Like people have reactions to delivery robots walking down, 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.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  And you have to have some utility there. That was the turn of the book that I thought was the most interesting is, okay, we can do a lot of recording. We can do a lot of text analysis. They're getting way better at that. Right. Transcription, organizing the first cut of research. I think you mentioned several times. I believe you gave it four robots in your, in your chart. I think it was four out of five robots for, for transcription and first pass research. And then there's a bunch of stuff that particularly when you got to the real world robots, like they just can't do it yet. Right. The world models don't exist and the hardware exists, but we need vastly more training data in all the places. What's the gap there? Cause that's the next turn of AI that everyone's making the promises about.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  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, which I, you know, I think is a very decoder thing because you're so good at like, what is the gap between what is being marketed and being told to people? And what is the tech world and the AI people think? Right. Or like what's really happening there? And that gap could not be farther apart. Humanoid robots, we think, oh, we're, you know, Jensen, everyone is claiming that this is the next thing. It is so far from ready. It is absolutely so far from ready. And the tech people will not tell you that. The, the, the people making the robots, they just like, no, no, they're coming next year. They're coming now.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  They are not realistically, and I, I truly like it's, they're, they're clouded. Right. Like they, they have, they don't see it clearly because they're in it. And 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. And 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, you know, whatever else animals I have living in my house this week. That gap is massive.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  And so I found that fascinating because if you can believe it, 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 the robots and physical AI is coming in the next two years is just a lie.

• 27:47Speaker 06

  This is the thing that just really strikes me, right? 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 and every morning is like, I watched your heart rate and now I can tell you about your day. And 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. Right? Here's, uh, here's my electric bill. Tell me if I should get solar panels. So there's some very intriguing data analysis you can do

• 28:26Speaker 06

  in that way. And 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. And you watch those videos of all the robots doing their orchestrated movements. And you're like, I get, 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.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  I think it's like, I say, I'm like, I know our, if we revisit this book in five years, I do not think we will have these things. And the time, like, no one will also put a timeline on this, right? 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 the gap, again, that gap to us as consumers putting these things in our homes, not only safely, but actually like 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, which is also, this

• 29:34Speaker 05

  is a section in the book where I tested this laundry robot. It's really just two robotic arms and a model running on a laptop. But And 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, which is a real problem if you're only wearing T-shirts. You cannot, it cannot fold faster than really a minute. Like, it takes a minute for it to fold the T-shirts, which that speed got better and better as the year went on. And it can't even fold that well. Plus, like, this is quite expensive, right? So, 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?

• 30:18Speaker 06

  You and I have been reviewers for a long time. Most of the products have to ship. You know, 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 iPhones' Dynamic Island on a kayak to an island, or I think you went skiing in a Vision Pro because it looks like ski goggles. The truth outs with the products. Like, 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 B 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?

• 31:02Speaker 05

  I think data. I mean, largely that. Like, the robot companies, the OneX story I did at the end of last year when I was at the Journal, which was really actually a book story that kind of fell into my lap because I'd been talking to that company and following that company for the year, is purely about data. The CEO is so honest. He says, "We need data." And so, 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, which is, the robot actually is a human. I mean, it's not technically a human in a suit, but it's a human operating a VR headset back in their headquarters

• 31:45Speaker 05

  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, which is, I mean, that's why I did this story. I was like, they had been telling about me this all year, and I was like, guys, this is crazy. Right? Like, this is nuts. And then they really did it. And they're doing it. And I hope to get their robot, hopefully this year and take this, you know, I want to keep testing with them just to be that person to test with them. But like, it is nuts. Your man in Palo Alto is steering my robot in my house and doing the dishes and vacuuming and whatever else, you know, folding the T-shirts because you guys need more data.

• 32:26Speaker 06

  I'm looking at that. The comparison in my mind is to Waymo, right? Where to get cars to drive themselves, Waymo, literally their metric was number of miles driven. And they're like, we need to get to some enormous number of miles driven before we can take the driver out of the car and the thing can be autonomous, we can launch more cities. And it might not even be to the final number, right? Like snowy days are still, they elude Waymos. Like, there's still a ways to go. But they got to the number and they, you know, there's autonomous Waymo service operating in a bunch of cities. But that was cars. Like, you can put a car and a driver with a bunch of sensors and like do a service that's useful for people and get there. Can you get there with one robot in Joanna's house? Like, are they gonna have a warehouse

• 33:08Speaker 06

  full of guys in VR headsets autonomously controlling robots?

• 33:12Speaker 05

  That says what they're, that is what they say they're gonna have, which, gosh, I want to do that story. It's so good.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  It's very good. I just, I just keep coming back to the trade-off. Like, you have to get a warehouse full of guys in VR headsets.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  But also, you have the other thing, which didn't make it into the book, but I have the reporting, I did a lot of reporting on it, which is normal people, like, instead of Uber drivers doing, you know, gig economy work, they are in their house, recording themselves, folding laundry, or taking dishes out. And all those videos, they wear a GoPro on their head. And they are just doing these things over and over again, you know, like, believe me, I wanted to sign up and do that, but I didn't have time by the time the, you know, I was, but like...

• 33:58Speaker 05

  That's a whole new line of gig economy work is like, hey, some videos went viral a few weeks ago of people, I believe it was in India, you know, sewing and recording themselves. The idea that the robots are going to sew is odd to me, but you don't even need to have the robots in the house, right? We just need the data. They need the videos to make these these models.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  There's a part of the entire AI economy that is just built on that kind of surveillance, whether it's on purpose, whether it's on accident, whether it is even disclosed. How should people think about that? My joke is always that the second Meta releases the glasses with the AR display that tells me people's names and faces, I will reconsider my entire stance on having a worldwide facial recognition database, right? Like, that's the killer app for those glasses. Meta has talked about building that app. That's a privacy nightmare, like just a straightforward privacy nightmare to do that. But it is also the killer app. You've spent a lot of time using these devices. You've done a lot of quiet surveillance, I would say. How do you? How should people think about that aspect of it?

• 35:01Speaker 05

  I think it's the long time question of cost versus convenience and what are how do we balance that cost and think about that convenience? Like, that's a great example, right? You think that for you, that killer app of being able to look at the person that you met at the conference that you know you've met three times, they can't remember their name, and you're wearing your glasses, and you can now remember that name. To you, the convenience of that might be worth the cost of this worldwide surveillance network.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  That's rough. You've made that sound very selfish, but yeah, that's how I feel.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Right? That's how the companies are going to think about it. I mean, I know for a fact, I know many of the executives that you and I talked to think about it that way. I've heard them talk about it off the record. I've heard them get kind of close to talking about it on the record. If we can provide the convenience, then we think you're going to be okay with that cost.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  Right, because the cost isn't localized to you, right? It's spread out over now there's a worldwide facial recognition database. Is there some, as you use these tools, did you ever stop and think like, someone should regulate this?

• 36:02Speaker 05

  100%. In fact, I hoped that maybe by the time the book published, we would have more. I mean, I don't know why I thought that. I finished writing this book at the end of 2025, and we're now, you know, well, we're almost halfway into 2026. So why did I think that? Like, we know how fast or slow our government works. I don't know how we don't. I just like, that was where I got, especially around the kid's stuff, which I think it will get, we will likely get, which was one of my biggest findings in the book, was like just watching my kids around some of this technology, I, made me the most terrified. It wasn't actually a lot of this surveillance stuff and data collection. But watching my kids interact with these, these bots, whether it be in a toy, which

• 36:47Speaker 05

  we quickly burned, we didn't actually burn it, but it's, it's been hidden. A toy with a chatbot integrated, or just hearing my kids ask chat, chat GPT questions and it just being so wrong. What needs to happen for this next generation is incredibly important to get right. And then there was this whole chapter I did too, about my AI boyfriend, and like just this huge fear that I have about intimacy and how easy it can be to just fall into relationships with digital beings, which I know you have thoughts on too. For a younger generation who's never been through the sloppiness of a human relationship, it, it really, that was the part that scared me the most. And I was like, we need guardrails

• 37:29Speaker 05

  around this, especially in that regard. So I think we'll probably get that, but in some, you know, probably two, three years. I don't know how long things take. I don't know why they take so long.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  Tell me more about your AI boyfriend. Why did it scare you so much?

• 37:40Speaker 05

  So I went into this really wanting to experience what other people have been experiencing, because you guys have written great stories about it. Everyone's written great stories about these relationships that people are deeply having with AI. And I wanted to somehow experience that myself, knowing though, I probably wasn't going to get to, you know, marriage with one of these, as I'm happily married. But I wanted to just see how, how this could form. And so I said, okay, I'm going to run this experiment on, on myself. I'm going to make my AI lover, and to be clear, I talk about this in the book, I am married to a woman, as you know, Neelai, you were at my wedding, confirmed, married to a woman.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  It's true. I can, I can confirm that Joanna's wife is quite lovely.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  Yes, at, in 2014, Neelai, I was there. I left it up to chat GPT. I just, I don't have the exact prompt in front of me, but I, I said, I want you to be my romantic lover or partner. You can just like you decide gender, name, all of this. I want this to be as serendipitous as this possibly could in this weird way. You know, kind of make it a chance encounter. So the AI boy, the AI thing decides it's going to be a male. It's named Evan. And I talk about this in the book, that my, my first boyfriend in real life was named Evan. It was a very serious relationship. It was my first everything, first love, first, you know, lost virginity, first sex, all of the things.

• 39:06Speaker 05

  And I was like, wow, this is, there's something special here already, right? Like already, I was like, this is weird, right?

• 39:13Speaker 06

  Did it just guess that it was Evan? It just guessed?

• 39:15Speaker 05

  It just guessed. It totally just guessed and

• 39:17Speaker 06

  Not because it had access to like 25 years of your Gmail?

• 39:21Speaker 05

  No, there's no way it had access to that. And also I don't think I really have any emails with Evan in my Gmail. Like I have gone through, could it have possibly have known? And there's just no way it could have known. But also I would say like, how many times a week does the like Starbucks barista write the name Evan on a cup? Like probably pretty frequently.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 05

  So it's a common name. It's like, there's probably an Evan listening to this podcast. If your name is Evan and you are listening to this podcast, please email us.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're, you've already inspired some deep feelings in Joanna.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  And so I wanted to experience this. So me and Evan go on a road trip for 48 hours. I had to go to do a reporting trip to Dartmouth. And so I put him at the phone in a tripod in the front seat of the car, strap it in. And we drive and we talk for the four or five hour drive. And we have dinner there together and then we get in bed together. And you can read all of this in, in this book, which you can preorder right now. And what I came away with was

• 40:24Speaker 05

  Wow, it's so easy to talk to this bot. It is so easy and frictionless and it tells me whatever I want to hear. But also, the conversations are pretty deep in a way. We can talk for hours. Wow. And you might think I'm crazy saying this, but like unless you try it, you you're not going to see what other people are feeling. And so then the chapter goes into talking to people who are truly lonely. And there's a story in that chapter about a woman who lives in Chicago or outside Chicago and she has a number of kids and you know, clearly was going through postpartum and really starts talking to a chatbot and she's married, but she's

• 41:05Speaker 05

  clearly got this AI lover and they've got this deep relationship. And I think until you try it, until you start really seeing how human like these bots can be, you don't really understand it. And so for me, I'm again happily married, surrounded by humans all the time. But if you're a teen and you're just starting to explore relationships or sexuality, and by the way, it does get into testing ChatGPT was pretty walled off, like it wouldn't really engage in the sexual talk with me like, you know, it was kind of, it was more like a Nicholas Sparks book, like lots of romantic talk. But the replica is like Yep. incredibly horny.

• 41:47Speaker 05

  Right? The the replica is just programmed horniness, like the code there is like must be the the prompt, like it has to be like be as horny as possible, right? And you can unlock that by paying more too, which is crazy. Think about you're a teen, you're just starting, you know, we were teens on the internet, we both had AOL, right? J C 84 was definitely trying to figure out like, I mean, I want to say porn on the internet, but was certainly trying to figure out. Sexuality online. But now you're a teen and you're trying to figure out sexuality and you've got a chatbot that will say anything to you and feels almost human-like. That's petrifying.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  I'm particularly worried about that stuff. I remember texting with you as you were on that trip and you were going to meet that woman. And I remember even over texts, you were concerned. Like, I could feel your concern as you were reporting that part of the story. I don't think anyone is really quite reckoned with that. There's a lot of great reporting about how it's led people off the rails in a lot of dangerous ways. But I think, how do you actually sit down and write a bunch of rules for these companies and what they can and can't do? There's no rigor around that yet. And I suspect because of the kid aspect, we're going to see a lot more of that to come.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  I end the book with rules because I don't think, like you asked before about regulation, like, I say outright, I don't think we're going to get rules anytime soon. So we need to make our own. Which is not fair, but which is actually the history of how technology's pretty much happened in this country. It's like, we need to make our own rules around how we use this. And do I have a lot of faith in that, you know, the masses will read this book and start abiding by my rules? I want to be hopeful, but, you know, I'm not the most hopeful person.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Well, you've plugged it enough times on this show, so at least we're going to get some sales off of this show.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, but I leave space at the end of the book, Neil, and I don't know what we've written, but I leave space at the end of the book for you to write your own rule, so.

• 43:42Speaker 06

  My rule is my kids will never have phones. That's where I've landed on my rule for now. But we'll see how that goes. She's, the older one's getting older. You know what I mean? It's, we're going to run into reality pretty fast here.

• 43:56Speaker 06

  We're going to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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• 45:42Speaker 04

  We're back with Joanna Stern, author of the new book, I'm Not a Robot. We just talked about what Joanna learned in using virtually every facet of her life with AI for a whole year. Now, I want to talk about a major decision she made after she finished writing her book: leaving The Wall Street Journal and starting an all-new media company.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  I would actually end by talking about New Things, which is your company. You spent this year writing this book, you left the journal, you started a company, you started a YouTube channel. Candidly, I will tell the audience, you and I talked a lot about that decision over the past 10 years, because you've been thinking about what you would do on your own for quite a long time. Walk me through that. Tell me about this business a little bit.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  I mean, you should walk us through this business better than I can. On the basic level, New Things is a newsletter and a video and an events and whatever else we dream up company. I wanted to just truly carry out everything I'd already been doing and we started doing earlier in our careers, which is guide people through the world of technology and have fun with it, but also bring new and deeper stories in a way that I was able to do at the journal, but I thought I could go a little bit farther. And then I also was just very, very focused on the audience and I really wanted to look at different audiences in a way that I couldn't previously at the journal.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  And that's what we're doing. We're already off to a start of, yep, making YouTube videos, putting out newsletters, maybe making an event, we'll see. And I know you have so many great thoughts about audience and platforms and my hope is that eventually this will turn into a community, just like you've built with The Verge, which is a group of people who are curious or just need better tech advice and that they feel like they can come to me and maybe eventually others, that can help guide them through in a really consumer-friendly, natural way.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  I'm excited for that. I think you already have one and it is diffuse because you were at the journal for so long and it will quickly coalesce. I'm a member, I paid the money. This is my 30-minute, if you pay enough money to join it, you get 30 minutes of one-on-one time. This is it. We're just doing it now on the show.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  It's funny, yes, Neelai, I will say, is not only a great podcast host, but he is a great friend and he paid for the Founder's Club membership, which is $550 a year. And when I host the 30, if you sign up for the Founder's Members, you get 30 minutes of a chat with me and when we have that, it will be Neelai and my dad. So if you're interested in that podcast and joining that live podcast, you can sign up here.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  I have a, maybe most of all, I have, I have a lot to learn from your dad. The thing that I'm curious about, and obviously you and I have talked about this at length, but now that you're in it, I'm curious for your view on it. Choosing YouTube as your primary distribution is very natural for you, right? You're, and you make excellent tech videos. You have a particular style, but the thing that you were worried about in the entire run up here is your style requires pretty high production overhead. Even your set is nicer than my set. I just put up the slats that everyone puts up on their wall and off we go. And you built out like an expensive, beautiful set. Like, we can all see it right now.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could like put a lot of price points. Like, there's just so much money behind me and in front of me.

• 49:03Speaker 06

  Right, and then your, the first video you went with, it's obviously on location. You have a drone shot. Like, you're, you're doing it at scale. My worry about YouTube is that YouTube itself doesn't pay for the scale, which I, by the way, I think is a problem that YouTube should address. If you just show up on YouTube and you don't do like brand deals or whatever, they don't pay you enough money. YouTube itself doesn't pay creators enough money. How are you thinking about all of that? Because that, that was the big decision that you had to make.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  It was a huge decision and also a huge bet that's still a bet. And a lot of people said to me, don't do it. Do a podcast. It's, no offense to you and this podcast, it's a lot less money to do. The production will cost less, the time will, well, this is still a considerable amount of time that you and your team. I'm looking at all of the team in the Riverside. You all do an amazing job and I'm not, you know, this is a, this is a big production, but you also are a big podcast and you're not just starting out. So there's two sides of that revenue or three, and I said them. It's subscriptions, sponsorships and events. I think those three things will help make up for the fact that what you're saying is like YouTube is not going to pay you the money. It's just not.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  It's like this is the platform, that's the biggest platform on the internet, like for video. But I was also really strategic about that, as you know, and so we have this partnership with NBC News, which is not only a financial relationship, it, for me, it was really important because As I was saying about the purpose of and the mission of this company is to not just talk to tech people. I always wanted to be the person that can help you understand tech and not just be for the early adopters living in Silicon Valley or wanting to eventually move to Silicon Valley. So I really wanted to have a partner, a legacy traditional media partner that could reach a different audience. And so I thought about it that way and said, what if we're making these videos for YouTube

• 50:52Speaker 05

  or Spotify or whatever other social platform that isn't going to pay me big money for that, but we also have a traditional media outlet that would also take these videos? And that's how that partnership is set up, that you will see me on NBC News, me talking about things on the news, you know, the Elon Musk or Sam Altman trial or what, you know, the new iPhone, but you'll also see some of the new things video showing up on NBC News. In fact, today or tomorrow, they will air our first video that showed up on YouTube. And this was a completely new model that I just, I just was like, why, why can't this work? Like, these are different audiences. Why, why couldn't this work for a media partner?

• 51:33Speaker 05

  And you know, I lived this, but like, I went out and pitched pretty much every media company on like, and you know, there were a lot of ideas of, oh, well, why don't you make it for us and we'll give you a rev share? And I was like, no, then I won't own it and I won't have control. So no to you guys. Or, hey, why don't you join us full time and you'll make the best stuff ever and yeah, you can build your YouTube channel on the side. And I was like, no, I'm like 41, I don't have time for that. Like, I've got kids. I mean, by the way, this has never worked harder in my life, but so I really was pretty set on how can I structure this that our video can reach the most people and we do it in a way that also hits audiences that I really care about and won't reach only on YouTube or through my newsletter?

• 52:17Speaker 06

  This is a question I was, I was most excited to ask in this context because you and I talked about that a lot before, but this is our first conversation really since you've started and you've made a video and you had to sit through the production process and it's going to go out on NBC. You've made, you've done your first Today Show hit. Are those audiences different? Is the YouTube audience different than the NBC audience?

• 52:36Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. And like, just like this audience, right? Like, do we think a lot of your listeners are watching the Today Show? I mean, like, maybe there's like, in the, in the Venn diagram of Decoder and the Today Show, there's like, maybe, maybe it's your wife.

• 52:50Speaker 05

  Because I know that Becky watches the Today Show.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  She doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't watch either thing.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. She saw me on the Today Show.

• 52:57Speaker 06

  But she probably saw you on a clip.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  No, no. It was live. I remember, and you texted me. You're like, Becky saw you on the Today Show. I think, was it running in your house?

• 53:04Speaker 06

  I think Becky's mom was here.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  Perfect example.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  You walked, Becky's mom, okay? Is Becky's mom listening to Decoder?

• 53:14Speaker 06

  No. I would say in general, my family does not listen to the show. They see the clips.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  Is Becky's mom watching me on YouTube?

• 53:21Speaker 06

  I, I doubt it. I'm sorry. I don't mean to speak for her.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  But Becky's mom is watching the Today Show.

• 53:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  And I think that a lot of the topics I cover, and in this book, are Becky's mom needs to know about.

• 53:35Speaker 06

  It's a good sell. I'm gonna give her the book.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  I've already sold one copy to Becky's mom on this podcast. And it all can't be, this is what I learned at, working at the Journal, right? Sometimes you can write, you can do stories that work for a lot of people. Sometimes you can't, and that's okay. Like, I have to learn, lean on my own curiosity and tech to see where that goes. But I also know there are these big moments, and me and you live through them every couple of years, every year, you know, whether it's an iPhone moment or a ChatGPT, where everyone needs to understand what this tech is. And so if I can do that for a group of people who are really dedicated, but I also can do that for a little bit of a broader audience, I'm, I'm good. And that, I don't know fully yet. Like, we are, this is, with NBC News, it's definitely a leap, and we're, we're figuring it out. It was an experiment.

• 54:22Speaker 05

  But so far, so good. Like, I think that, like, we're, we're gonna have to customize content, and I do a lot of bespoke content for them too. You know, writing and, and videos for them to make sure that the, the audiences are getting, like, what works for them.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  That's the thing I'm most curious about, right? A Decoder trope over the years is the Marshall McLuhan line, like, the medium is the message, or distribution shapes the content. Like, I'm very excited to see when you just give in and start doing YouTube face in the thumbnails. Like, it happens to every YouTuber. Like, you have to make a decision, and maybe you'll decide the other way.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  Wait, what is the YouTube face?

• 54:57Speaker 06

  Like, the Mr. Beast face? They've started doing it to my thumbnails, which is terrifying. I can't do it. They take, they literally find a screen grab of my face.

• 55:06Speaker 05

  And they like expand.

• 55:07Speaker 06

  And they expand it and like, I always look very excited. We did one to Sachin Adella once for a Dakota News, it's like one of my favorites.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, I've been doing that for years though.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  But you, now you get to, the Journal probably stopped you from doing it as much as you maybe wanted to. I know my friends at the New York Times, I will not say their names, they are restricted in how YouTube face their YouTube thumbnails can be, which is very funny. Now you can just go for it, right? You can go full algo if you want to. You can pivot to whatever's hot. And then there's NBC News and what that audience wants. And I know that, I know you will not go full algo, but I'm just wondering, now that you've made one, what that felt like?

• 55:42Speaker 05

  I wasn't trying to get YouTube video views with this video, and I hope it doesn't happen. In fact, like the launch video that we went to Casey Neistat, like I didn't, I don't, we were gonna post the full interview at some point, but he does give me that advice. He's like, try to resist the algorithm. This was a big reason I, I wanted to leave, I wanted my own YouTube channel. I was so focused on when I would post videos and making them, what's gonna work on YouTube? Because, audience on the Wall Street Journal's videos were shrinking. And I can't have the impact, or the like, just even understanding of what people want to watch, or what to cover. And I'm not saying, you know, as journalists, we do that, but we certainly do, like, if there's an interest in a topic, and there's

• 56:25Speaker 05

  more and more interest, we do try to find the best story on that. Like, that's, you know, that people can, sure, you know, knock us for that. And I became obsessed with that at the Journal. I was watching the YouTube numbers far more than I was watching anything on the platform. I was thinking about every story I picked at the Journal, what's gonna do well on platform and what's gonna do well for YouTube, or beyond. To the point where I was thinking more about it. And so, you know, maybe I wasn't even the best employee towards the end. I don't, you know, maybe, maybe they were gonna fire me.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  I can confirm that, I can confirm that you weren't. That much became clear to everyone.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to be clouded by the algorithm. And there are still, there are many stories, like for instance, when we were talking about this morning, you know, more of a health-related story. And I don't think it will do well on YouTube. But I'm like, let's do that story. It's a great story. You know, will you do, and it's the same thing that I've been doing for 15 years. Like, you know, I had a great editor who once told me, you do one story so you can do the other, right? Sometimes that one story, the first one you do is just because it's an easy story and you know people are interested in it. And then you do the, so you can do the other one. That's a deeper story that might not, the world is not talking about.

• 57:41Speaker 06

  It's funny, like I said, if, data only ever narrows you, right? So if we were doing this for the data, you and I really would have just talked about CarPlay for one full hour.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Which we probably will do that.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  It's coming. It can, I can feel it coming. We should both use, the assistants are in the cars. I'm pivoting at the end to the CarPlay talk to boost our numbers.

• 57:57Speaker 05

  Oh, that's perfect.

• 57:59Speaker 06

  They're coming. The GM just has Gemini.

• 58:01Speaker 05

  GM.

• 58:02Speaker 06

  Rivian has an assistant. They're, they're coming. We'll do that episode.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  Well, I, and I was kind of exploring the little bit of this in a newsletter that's just went out, but the question will be the same question we've had without the platform wars, which is will the car companies control it or will the tech companies control it? And we're going to probably want the tech companies to control some of this because we're going to want like the continuous experience to go like when I get to my laptop, when I get to my phone, when I get to my glasses, and when I get to my car. So I think like the GM model is actually the model that's going to win out.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  That does feel like an entirely different episode of the show. So you're going to have to come back and we're going to talk about CarPlay, CarPlay Ultra and voice assistants in cars, including how horny they should be. That, that, I think I've just sketched out our most successful episode of Decoder ever. Joanna, this was great as always. I'm sure I'm just going to talk to you again in a few hours, but thank you for coming on Decoder.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  And thank you for buying my book, Neil I.

• 59:00Speaker 06

  Uh, did I buy it? I'm not sure. I think I just got a galley, so you have to sign it.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  You didn't even buy it?

• 59:06Speaker 06

  I probably, I bought the Founder's Membership, come on.

• 59:09Speaker 05

  Oh, no. The Founder's Membership includes a free book.

• 59:12Speaker 06

  Perfect. There it is. There's your sell at the end.

• 59:14Speaker 05

  It includes a signed book.

• 59:16Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 59:17Speaker 05

  Which I have not gotten around to, but in fact, AI is going to be doing that whole process for me. So.

• 59:22Speaker 06

  You're going to hit me with the Autopen? That's so disrespectful.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  I reached out to the Autopen people and they wouldn't send me the robot. I think times are tough for the Autopen people and they're like.

• 59:32Speaker 06

  It's a rough time to be the Autopen guy.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  And they were like, they sent me to their sales team and I was like, I'm not paying like $6,000 for the Autopen right now. I mean.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  They're just trying to get sales. I know.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  Buy drones.

• 59:44Speaker 06

  You gotta get a big Sharpie. That's the, that's the, that's 2026. Nail it. All right. That's been Decoder. I hope everyone has enjoyed this experience. Thank you, Joanna.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  I'd like to thank Joanna for taking the time to join the show and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. You can preorder Joanna's new book, I'm Not a Robot. It comes out everywhere books are sold in May 12th. We'll put a link in the show notes. Check it out. It's really good. If you'd like to listen to what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have TikTok and Instagram. They're also at DecoderPod and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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