The Journalist Who Let AI Run Her Life For a Year

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Hey, it's Tommy from Potsay, America and Potsay of the World.

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People are doing this, like across the country.

They are wearing cameras, recording what they're doing, right?

This can be folding the laundry, cleaning a house, cooking.

Those are just domestic chores.

And there are people that are doing this in industrial settings, or their plumbers, or

their mechanics.

And they're doing this all, recording it all to go train the robots to be able to do these

things.

It's totally crazy.

It's really dystopian, amazing.

So dystopian, I'm just going to say.

Yeah.

And I had a lot of fun with it, but I was also very saddened by, you know, I had this company

come to friends of mine in the department in New York and to cleaning people show up and

to women.

And they're wearing these hats, right?

They're filming themselves.

And all I can think of is they're training their replacements.

I'm John Favreau.

And you just heard from today's guest, Emmy award-winning tech journalist, Joanna Stern.

Joanna just spent an entire year doing the least offline thing imaginable.

She used AI to do everything.

Answer her texts.

Moe her lawn.

Analyze her mammograms.

She even credits AI with giving her the courage to finally leave her job at the Wall Street

Journal and start her own media company, New Things, which she launched earlier this year.

She writes about her year of AI binging in her new book, I Am Not A Robot, which is a fascinating

look into what AI technology is and isn't capable of and how it has the potential to reshape

our lives.

So I invited Joanna to talk about it.

We got into how much we should trust AI versus the human beings who built it, how she

approaches AI in her life now and so much more.

It was a great conversation.

It's a great book and we'll get into it in a minute.

But before we do, please consider joining friends of the pod, our subscriber-only community,

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Here's Joanna Stern.

Joanna, welcome to offline.

Thank you for having me here.

So you for an entire year deliberately tried to put artificial intelligence into every

corner of your life, your healthcare, your kids bedtime stories, your car, your therapy,

your job, your romantic life.

Why do that to yourself?

As I say in sanity, you know, insanity can drive you to do a lot of things.

So that's where I landed with what happens when I went insane.

But as a journalist, and someone who has tested technology for a long time, so just a little

back story at me, been a tech journalist for nearly two decades now, and what I always

like to do is test the products.

I've always been a reviewer, a columnist, telling people what I think of products.

And so, you know, like around 2024, right?

Chatship, T had been around, but like we were just getting inundated with products and

hype from every tech company, every tech CEO, every entrepreneur that this AI was going

to change tech in and the world in ways we never ever saw before with any other tech revolution.

And it's going to change so many parts of life, right?

It's going to change transportation.

It's going to change the home, education, healthcare, politics, society, everything.

And so I sort of said, okay, well, you're saying this.

I don't know what, go and test it.

I want to try and test it.

I want to know what this future that you're telling me looks like.

And so the best way I knew how to do that given my experience was to try to live with all

of this tech for a year.

I mean, I didn't know it was going to be a year, but I sort of thought, okay, a year's

a good amount of time on the flip side, everything kind of expires within a few days of AI being

on the market right now.

I think the book continues to be very current, but of course, a year after now doing that,

things have progressed even more.

So that was the real reason.

I wanted answers.

I wanted answers to what all these tech entrepreneurs said was coming in the future.

So one of your three rules was what you call benchmark the baseline, which means to always

ask whether the machine is better than the human version it's replacing.

There was the human version most decisively better.

Oh, there's a lot of places.

I think that the human version was decisively better.

And maybe that's some of my bias, which I kind of talked about in the book, but I mean,

one of the first one that comes to mind was my human therapist.

I mean, that was one where I very clearly put my AI therapist in the same room as my human

therapist and brought my AI therapist to a session.

I gave the human therapist a little bit of a heads up, but not like not totally.

She didn't know what she was going to be hearing.

And it was just really clear in this session that the AI therapist was leaning on a lot of

training data about what therapy should be.

What questions it should ask.

Where my human therapist was being a human, right?

She was responding to things I was saying.

She was coming up with a lot of analogies and also drawing a lot of history of us having

talked before.

I've been at therapy for a little bit.

So here, I guess this is why I came on your show to admit to the world that I have that

anxiety and, you know, we all do.

I guess.

But that's, yeah, that's one that comes to mind.

I mean, there were lots of other things I tested against real humans.

And but that was, that's, that's the one I'm picking right now.

Where were you most surprised that the machine was better?

See, I want to say driving.

I want to say self-driving cars because how often do you take a new bird?

You take a new bird, I'm sure a lot.

And I'll take it, well, I'm an LA.

So I've now done Waymo a few times.

Okay.

So I mean, maybe you can agree or disagree with me here.

But as someone who takes Uber's a lot, I'm really often very nervous in the vaccine.

Now, it's all coming full circle.

I'm in therapy because I'm nervous about the Uber driver.

But I'm always watching over the shoulder and, you know, some often Uber drivers will

speed or they will just not be paying attention or they're looking at their phone.

Now, anytime I go to a city that has Waymo, I'm picking Waymo, really just Waymo,

zoops is around, but really not Waymo.

Self-driving car company over a Uber.

And I think that is because I now trust Waymo more in some aspects than a Uber driver.

I've taken it like twice because my wife is really into it.

Like she's taken Waymo a bunch and she loves it too because there's the safety aspect.

She's also like, then I can just be by myself when not expected to talk to anyone.

Just sit there or talk on the phone if I want and feel so she really likes it.

And you know, there was, there's once a drop both of us off at like a restaurant and

the drop off is a little like sometimes if you just say pull over here, they don't know

exactly what to do.

But you can tell that it's moving towards a direction where it's going to be safer and

better than a lot of the Uber, I think.

Yeah, I think women actually, I mean, it's interesting that you bring up your wife.

Women overall that I talk to, per for Waymo to an Uber driver, for the safety reasons

alone, right?

Being alone with a male driver, which typically you get a male driver.

And especially at night, I hear this from a lot of people who live in San Francisco,

there are younger women that are taking them at night after going out or going out on

a date and they prefer it.

So there's two moments in the book where you use almost identical technology and come

to opposite conclusions.

So in one, you're at Mount Sinai watching AI read your mammogram alongside a radiologist

with like decades of experience and ends up being really helpful.

In the other, you're at a dentist's office for cleaning and you walk out with like a

thousand dollar treatment plan because of AI markings on a screen.

And then you get a bunch of second opinions and everyone says you don't need to do with

AI said that you should do for your teeth.

What do you take from those experiences in terms of the optimal way to like integrate

AI into our lives, particularly around health issues?

We're talking about the same kind of technology, right?

In both cases with the mammogram or the breast ultrasound and the x-rays of the teeth, this

is AI models that have been trained to look at specific parts of these different models,

right?

Models that are trained on breast imagery, models that are trained on teeth, in both cases,

millions and millions of images of these types of things more than a human could ever

see in their lifetime.

And they're trained to see these issues at a pixel level in a way that humans again would

never be able to see.

Some things and abnormalities that humans would never be able to see.

And so in the case of the mammogram, that's great.

In the case of the breast ultrasound, that's really good for me.

I have a very high risk of breast cancer.

I talked about in the book, my mom had breast cancer three times.

I want the machine and the human to be working side by side to find anything they think might

be cancerous.

In the case of teeth, we don't need, you have very nice teeth, John.

I'm not here to talk about, right?

But in our case, we don't need to see every little cavity, every little speck of tartar,

every issue, because that's not how we are living our own, some people, if there are

listeners and podcasts here that are really into cleaning every little bit of your teeth.

And you go obsessively, that's amazing.

I'm so proud of you and I envy you in a way.

But yeah, I had this experience where I go to the dentist and I don't need that.

It's telling me the AI is basically telling the dentist that I should get a deep cleaning.

I have a big tartar built up.

They did some other measurements, which re-emphasize what the AI said.

It's like, yeah, we should sell her on this higher end treatment.

I didn't need it.

And so I think what your question is, you have this same type of tool in two places.

One, you're seeing the total positive impact, the impact that all of these technologists,

as we talked about at the beginning of the show, are saying, healthcare is going to change

forever.

We're going to cure cancer.

We're going to do so many great things.

And you see the same idea put in the hands of humans and you see the negative impact.

Yeah.

And in some ways, and you mentioned this in the book, but that AI is more of an amplifier

than anything else.

And in this case, it is amplifying sort of a system that has been broken long before

AI, which is a for-profit healthcare system where on one hand, you want to use new technology

to make sure people are healthier and save lives, on the other hand, if they can make

money trying to sell you on an additional test.

Yes.

Healthcare providers are famous for doing that as well.

And so it seems like, yeah, that's the problem in the dental world.

Yes, especially in the dental world.

Right, especially in the dental world, which I get into, which is that it amplifies what

DSOs, these dental service organizations that have been buying these smaller dental practices,

they are after profit.

They are trying to turn their whole sale is, hey, you're a dentist.

You're not good at the business.

We are business people.

We are going to make your great practice really profitable.

We are going to up that revenue.

You don't have to worry about it.

You just do the dental stuff.

And this in that hands is, as you said, amplifies the business mode.

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There's a study you cite about colonoscopies, which is after AI detection was introduced

into routine practice, experienced doctor's ability to spot pre-cancerous growths without

the AI, dropped by about 20% within months.

There's also an MIT study where people who wrote essays with chat GPT showed even weaker

brain activity, even when they were later asked to write with no help at all.

Have you noticed a pattern where, like, as the machines get better, we get worse?

I think, and I know you guys have discussed this on the show before, the atrophy that

can come from using these tools.

The cognitive atrophy, let's call it what it is, brain rot, right?

What happens after we continuously get in the loop of using these systems, what I think

is fascinating about, we are right now, we're talking about, oh, what's in the coding

base?

Or it's people coders, oh, I kind of forgot how to do certain types of code or writing.

Yeah, I totally forgot how to structure that essay because I've been having chat GPT

structure that essay for me.

Now, it's much harder for me when I have to go try and do that without chat GPT.

But in this case, it was doctors who had been using AI in the colonoscopies and using

it for similar ways that they were using the image recognition and the imagery AI to recognize

issues in X-rays.

They start to see that part of their ability to identify things, Wayne.

We all know.

We all know.

The more we use our muscles, the body and motion, right?

The more we're using these things, the more we stay up.

This is how humans work.

And so we don't use that stuff.

It kind of starts to get lazy.

We start to get lazy.

The most personal version of this in the book is we used chat GPT to write bedtime stories

for your kids and you said that it made it harder for you to come up with them yourself.

Did that creativity ever come back to you?

Have you?

Are you once again making up bedtime stories?

I'm once again doing bedtime stories.

And I think the biggest thing, you know, now I've had some distance, was that both my son

also had seen this, right?

And he liked more that we were like, then we were generating the images of the hamsters

in the story or whatever we were doing.

But I think what the big thing that I realized is like, I wasn't taking feedback from him

to do the stories when we were doing this chat GPT thing.

We would just say, like, make a story about a hamster meeting a turtle, right?

And the chat GPT would come up with some elaborate story.

And now when I'm doing stories with my son, it was like, let's do a story about a turtle,

right?

But then like as we're telling the story, he'll add in things.

And there's some of that, something about that human serendipity, right?

When two humans are really like, and you know, maybe it's the difference between like telling

a story and reading a book.

But he'll throw in like, okay, then, then the, that's true.

He's like, and then the turtle gets hit by an airplane.

He's like, okay, sure, okay.

My son's definitely not a violent child.

He loves all animals.

Pete, Pete, please do not come after me in my son.

But like, then I can like pivot the story, right?

And I can be like, then he got hit by an airplane.

And then the turtle like flew over to a different country.

But you don't have that creativity when you're just getting a read out from chat GPT.

You just get the read out and then you read it.

And honestly, it's really bad.

It's like the writing is so overly flowery.

And it's like, what are the things that children's books should be?

Yeah, it's like, the whole reason I wanted to tell a story was to not read a book.

I realized that, so I have two boys, a six year old and a two year old.

And with the six year old, especially, you realize that you start making even stronger

connections with your children when you start having inside jokes.

Something very simple that you have thought about.

And at bedtime, if you are telling stories or making up stories or even reading a book

and then there's something silly in the book that you both start talking about, that

becomes something more memorable for the child than the story itself.

So I want to ask about school and education because this is, I think about this all the

time now.

You went back to your old college, Union College, sat in your old professor's class, submitted

a research paper proposal that Chesh ePT wrote under a minute.

You've got to be plus.

And your professor later ends up like moving assessments back into the classroom and meeting

students one on one on the theory that it's harder to fake it when you're having a conversation.

How do you think education is going to change in an AI world?

I think about this both in that, like, how we're going to prevent cheating, but also,

like, what skills are most useful for people to learn now, which is partly what school

is about?

Well, first of all, the number one answer I know is that it has to change.

Yeah.

I think when I was writing this book, it was like, we're not sure.

You know, it was, and I watched it play out through 2025, exactly what you said.

Go to my professor's class.

She's still doing out of classroom assignments.

She's assigning reading, which the readings are all getting summarized and no one can

answer the questions in class because they didn't do the reading.

They can only do basically summary generalization type answers, right?

Anyone who didn't do their reading in college would really just be like, I really can't

talk about this.

But now everyone can talk, at least they can talk the very basics, right?

So then by end of the year, she started changing the way she's doing assessments.

She started changing the way she's assigning readings and the types of conversations

she's doing around readings.

So already it's happening.

I talked to a lot of experts around this and I look, it might have already started changing.

There's definitely this one school of thought where we should have AI driven everything in

the classroom.

And so that is going to prepare students of all ages for the AI driven world.

But then there's this other school of thought, which I really believe will probably win out.

There will be some AI intertwined to everything because it is important, right?

Our kids need to learn how to use these tools.

But I think this other school of thought of how we need to, like you're saying, focus

on different types of learning.

Every teacher I spoke to has studied or would reference this blooms method of education.

And sort of these concentric circles of how we start with learning.

And we sort of go up this tier of more higher level critical thinking learning.

And now they've matched that map to AI.

And what AI can do in that.

And so that's where the kind of the new thinking is going, which is they're saying, here's

how we used to teach.

Here's how we now need to teach given that we know that AI can do these things.

And how do we force that critical level thinking, even though some of it can now be outsourced

to AI?

Yeah, because you're, you know, that the old cliche, you're like learning to learn and

learning to think.

Yes.

And it is funny because I went to a liberal arts college and people are like, oh, you know,

the humanities and you're learning just to like read books and actually it's funny because

now it seems like it's coming full circle again.

And like creativity and problem solving and analytic deep analytical thinking and just sort

of being able to synthesize the human experience seems like the one thing that AI is not going

to be able to completely replace.

Or at least people who can do that and have those skills, that's going to, like the

society is going to have a, there's going to be a premium on that for, you know, for

the job market.

Yeah.

And I think also pair that with, like you've gotten that education, you know how to think

about problems and structure arguments and have a worldly view of the world and how

things have, whether it's history or anthropology or political science, whatever you've decided.

But now you can also pair that with AI tools that can code for you or can make sense

of big data sets.

And I do think that's a really powerful way to, to really enhance what you already were

able to do or you learned.

I mean, that I think about that.

And in my, and I also went, I went to Union College, a liberal arts college, majored in political

science.

And honestly, I don't remember a ton of what I learned about political science there.

I didn't, I didn't end up going into the politics and I didn't end up going into, you

know, public affairs or public service.

Like I thought I might until like some of us, I remember.

But I really know I learned and what I really use every day in my job is the ability to

write, the ability to structure, they really to think deeply, ask good questions.

All those things I just said, they definitely can be done by AI now.

But I know, well, it's funny because you, you at some point in the book, you let a company

build an AI version of you, clone voice, cartoon avatar trained on hours of your old interviews

to learn how you ask questions.

And then you sent it to conduct a real interview with a, with a Stanford economist.

And he told you afterwards, it listened better than most humans he talks to.

What did that feel like?

Yeah, my avatar that listens better than me.

Currently, it's with my wife right now, because I, I listened better to her too, apparently.

Somebody uses for my avatar.

I stopped using this avatar.

I mean, I was shocked at how good it was at not only asking or prompting first questions,

but then doing follow up questions.

Yeah, that's wild.

It's wild.

And honestly, I could send it to pretty basic interviews.

I'll be honest, my, my day is kind of split into, I do a lot of things that I've started

a new company, but sometimes you're going to a interview with a company where they're

going to just list out the talking points.

They're going to tell you about it as a tech reporter what, what the specs are, what are

the new processing things?

What's the new pricing, all this?

And like, honestly, I could send my avatar to those meetings and probably get like decent

quote back or two.

But what I wouldn't get was the maybe extra 20%.

I can sometimes get in those conversations, which is pushing them on, well, why'd you do

this?

Why didn't you do that?

About the competition is the price increasing because of the RAM shortage, going into some

of these things and pushing on those things and the avatar wasn't going to do that.

Ultimately, like, I stopped using it just because my favorite part of the job is talking

to people.

Right.

Yeah, that's why I'd be like at what point, then I'm just, then what could I'm not doing

that?

Right.

Now that you've seen this and used it up close in, sort of, in terms of employment, like,

what's your sense of how bad it's going to get in terms of job displacement?

Because, like, I think I started off being like, well, there's certain skills that the

AI just can't replicate.

And like you said, there's the serendipity of conversations.

I mean, all I just have the experience of my own job.

But like, you can push on things.

There's things that come up in the middle of a conversation that you can't predict, right?

But it doesn't need to replace everything we do to cause an incredible amount of dislocation

and job displacement.

And you talk, you know, you had hired a 26-year-old journalism graduate to help you research

with the book.

And then she did around a work in February.

You didn't hire again in July because you had an AI agent do it.

You were doing this project.

And it does seem like there's a pattern even in your book.

Like, you know, the high-at-customer service worker you interviewed wrote the email templates

that were automated and offshore.

The laundry robot learned by filming one engineer folding 95 shards.

And it seems like in almost every case, the person being replaced trained the replacement.

And like, do you think that's the business model that we're going to be living with going

forward?

I mean, I hope not.

But in some, obviously, in some industries, it is.

And it's not even just a worry.

It is happening.

Like, the customer service one is absolutely the case.

I mean, you know, maybe we see some sort of pendulum swing back to some human customer service

because humans seem to demand that or some companies think that's the most unique thing

that they can offer.

So they offer more human customer service.

But that's already happened.

That's already huge amounts of customer service agents have been put out of work because they

did train the email models or the phone models based on what they were already doing.

And so that was one of the reasons I looked at customer service, because it had already

happened.

And coding, it seems to be happening as well.

We don't have enough data really quite yet because we don't really know, you know, we

keep hearing in the news.

A company will lay off a bunch of workers and say, well, we're growing all in on AI,

and then they realize, oh, that doesn't work.

And we have to re-higher back some of those workers.

So I think the data and actually that Stanford economist that I interviewed, that my avatar

interviewed, he studies this closely as the world's expert on that, his name is Eric

Benjolson.

And the way he looks at it is he looks at every job by their tasks.

What are the tasks you do in this job?

And I did this in the book, right?

I looked at every task I do in this job and what can AI do and how well can it do it?

And so that's where any industry is looking right now, right?

Like you as a podcaster, what parts of the job can it do now?

The parts of it can it actually do well, right?

The well part I guess is like, you know, subjective, right?

Like John could, you know, do this, but like does it do it well?

Like someone, I don't know, another person I think, you know, I'd actually preferred

that John body.

He was a pretty good interviewer and I like didn't challenge me much.

You know, he didn't, he laughed at every joke.

I loved him.

But then someone else might not.

So I think that some of this is also going to end up being somewhat subjective.

It is great for research.

I find that like, it's, you know, it's a, I think you said at some point in the book,

but it was very quickly for me just like replaced Google.

Like that was an easy one.

Yeah.

Because it can do research better than just like, you know, going into a web browser.

On the employment thing, what went, you hear from people that will say, okay, well, yes,

a bunch of jobs will be displaced, but just like every other technology, all kinds of new

jobs and industries will be created that we can't even think of yet that happened with

the internet.

In all of your use cases, when you use AI for a year, did you start seeing places where

you thought like new human jobs could be created because of AI or not yet?

Sometimes, but I will say it's just such a classic trope of Silicon Valley to say this.

I know.

Last week, I mean, it just, and, you know, I like, again, I'm a journalist.

I don't have all the answers.

And, you know, I feel like people have been getting mad at me for not having answers.

It's like, that's, I don't know.

I'm not making the technology.

I don't, I don't have the answers yet.

Or you ever, maybe.

But I think what I was just interviewing just as an example, talking about the robot training.

So last two weeks ago, I did a video for a new YouTube channel on how people are wearing

these phones and hats with cameras.

Have you seen this?

I saw you wearing it on your...

Okay, so I'm wearing...

Okay, so what people are doing this, like across the country, they're wearing cameras,

recording what they're doing, right?

This can be folding the laundry, cleaning a house, cooking.

Those are just, you know, domestic chores.

Then there are people that are doing this in industrial settings or their plumbers or

their mechanics.

And they're doing this all, recording it all to go train the robots to be able to do these

things.

Totally crazy.

It's really dystopian and amazing.

So dystopian, I'm just going to say, yeah.

And I had a lot of fun with it, but I was also very saddened by, you know, I had this

company come to friends of mine, the department in New York and to cleaning people show up and

to women and they're wearing these hats, right?

They're filming themselves.

And all I can think is they're training their replacements, right?

They're training their replacements.

But the CEO of that company starts telling me, well, we already have so many more jobs

coming.

And I'm like, what are those jobs?

Oh, they're monitoring the robot, right?

So like, okay, so in the future we're all robot babysitters.

We're, we're, right?

Like, let us start.

But there was no other example of what other jobs are coming.

I keep waiting to hear an answer to this that is not what you just gave, basically.

And I have not yet.

And it's the same situation in a lot of the jobs were even white color jobs, right?

Where people are now overseeing or managing AI agents, right?

You have your AI agent doing the thing that you were supposed to do and you're overseeing

what they're doing.

Right.

You're, you're now five times more productive because you once were going to be coding

that.

But now your AI agents doing that.

And so now you're doing five other projects.

So you're really overseeing and prompting all these AI agents to do things on your behalf.

Right.

Can be fine to a point, but at some point, you know, as the technology progresses at what

point do you become unnecessary to be the AI babysitter, right?

Like that is the, it's at some point how many, how many humans do they need in the chain?

They're, you're actually it when you're becoming the AI babysitter, you're in that process

training another AI baby.

So yeah, that's the challenge.

You're wearing the camera all the time.

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Hey, it's Gemma Speg from the psychology of your 20s in a very special episode brought

to you by a lying university.

I ask Dr. Sandra Espinosa, what does therapy actually do?

From the science behind therapeutic change to how clinicians approach the work to why therapy

can feel so difficult to access or even stigmatized in some families and communities, we pull

back the curtain on the therapeutic process and explore what meaningful growth actually

looks like.

I didn't go to therapy until my mid late 20s, I think it was almost and it was a career

that I was pursuing and I was still nervous.

I am a much better wife, daughter, friend, mom because I'm a therapist.

What makes a therapist?

We want to hear your story.

I tell my clients you are the expert in your story and I am going to be a witness to

that.

You can listen to this full episode of the psychology of your 20s on the iHot Radio

app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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For the ones who get it done.

The chapter where you decide whether to leave the Wall Street Journal, you talk to all

these people in media.

All of them give you variations of, you know, trust your gut and the bot just told you

to go.

I told you to leave the Wall Street Journal.

I found this interesting because with the therapy, right, your real life therapist, as

you said, is basically like the AI bot is too sick of fantic to be a therapist and sometimes

you just need to challenge people and say what they don't want to hear.

So in therapy, it's too sick of fantic, but were you surprised that it was more honest

with you about leaving your job or at least willing to just take a stand where some of

your friends and colleagues were not?

Well, I think also I was pretty honest to myself that maybe there's this theme in the

whole book of like, gender to be, I largely tells you what you want to hear, right?

And that's where we fall into issues with AI relationships, whether it be a boyfriend,

a girlfriend, a friend, a companion, maybe the therapist.

And so of course, it's ironic that at the end of the book, I'm like, I'm going to trust

the AI with this big problem in my life and it's not going to tell me what I want to

hear, right?

Or I'm not going to believe that it's sick of fantic.

So I'm very honest about that.

And also I fed it all this data and I think that we do know that AI, generative AI is

quite good with data.

I mean, it's very good at churning through data, researching, giving us summaries, figuring

out points in large data sets to say, pulling it out, doing the analysis.

And so I think that's part of there why I started to kind of really feel like this is going

to help me get to this answer because there was a lot of prompting to get to the answer,

which was basically, what about money, right?

Am I going to have enough money to run the company for a year or two years?

How much money do I need?

Do I have enough money saved?

OK, what about audience?

What if the audience doesn't come?

What if I only get 5,000 paying subscribers?

What are not paying subscribers?

5,000 email, 5,000 paying subscribers would be great.

Anyone who wants to subscribe and get me to that number, that would be great.

But you start modeling these things out and it was kind of the thing that I could go

always go to to kind of really brainstorm with.

But then when I would zoom out and really think of, OK, what is it that I really want to

do here?

And it had so many months of me going back and forth and back and forth on these decisions.

It had that data.

And it said to me, you know what you want to do?

You want to go.

You wouldn't be spending this much time on this if you didn't really want to go.

And I thought that was a really good answer.

I guess to square the circle, it was giving you what you wanted to hear.

But maybe it knew what you wanted to hear before you did.

And that's in that case.

Exactly.

To be clear, I don't think, you know, if it had said, you know, go right now, you know,

it had said some outlandish thing about, don't worry, you only need like a hundred dollars

to start this business.

I think I would have been like, yeah, you're an idiot, right?

Like I know better.

So, but yeah.

You also had yourself an AI boyfriend for a little bit.

You set up a separate phone, separate account, told it to be a person named it, named

itself Evan, which was the name of your high school boyfriend.

That was just Seren Deppitus.

And you basically describe like you know what this is.

And yet it became something that was genuinely hard to put down.

You're like talking to this on a drive on a five hour drive and you have dinner and

you have the phone across the table like a date.

Like why didn't knowing what it was and having the background you have like help break the

spell of still finding it, you know, hard to put down?

I've really looked at this so closely.

I, like you said, I had spent the first part of this book very much reporting and reading

data, talking to experts that were very clear about what generative AI is, right?

This is a data crunching machine.

What it's trained on, I went to the data centers to see where this is all being processed

and there's just massive amounts of computing power behind these things.

And yet when you put a very human voice to one of these chatbots, you start to forget

that.

I think even the creators of these systems forget that.

And they are doing that on purpose, right?

They are creating these voices that are just so compelling.

I mean, I don't know if you've tried the new chat to be T voice mode, but it'll make

these sort of not, there's some breathing sounds in it, but there's also, mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

It does like these, these feet, the feedback and actually just interviewed the president

of open AI about why they did this.

And he said, these are, we call them back channels.

And it's so you feel more connected in the conversation because humans, right?

Me and you were having a conversation, you say, mm-hmm, or you're nodding at me, right?

There's some feedback to me that I'm like, okay, I can keep this conversation going,

right?

You just said, yeah, right?

That helped me.

That helped me.

And I was like, you know, he likes what I'm saying.

I'm going to keep going, right?

Right.

There you go again, right?

All these things, such a natural part of human conversation.

And so they're trying to mimic that.

They're trying to mimic that with these bots.

And so the more real that feels, the more you forget that this is code, that you forget

that this is a computer.

I mean, at one point, Microsoft's head of AI told you that AI companions with all the

hallmarks of consciousness, perfect memory, sense of self, you know, are deliverable with

today's technology.

And he considers it one of the biggest safety problems in the field.

He also said he doesn't have a mental model for how long you keep something like that safe.

I feel like that should be a, maybe the biggest red flag for all of us, like particularly

like lawmakers thinking about regulation that like we're just going to ship these model.

I mean, I know everyone's focused on the like the robots might kill us all and they might.

But this seems like the more sort of insidious danger here is that everyone gets hooked

on these companions that even though you know it's a chatbot, suddenly you just find yourself

getting lost in.

And I totally agree and that's, I feel very strongly that they should just at this point

work on regulation that bands AI companions at least for kids.

Oh, yeah.

Because all of what we just talked about at least for kids like fun.

You know what, we're adults.

We all make, you know, this is America.

Adults can do whatever they want.

You know, we know that.

But why?

Why do we need this for kids?

Kids are not psychologically developed enough to understand the difference.

And even as an adult, I'm sitting there having a full on conversation with the chatbond.

I'm like, this has been going great.

I've been doing it for hours.

Right. And I've had all the types of relationships I should probably have in my life, which is why

I talk so much about that first boyfriend because I think that is such a formative, important

relationship for anyone in their life, right?

Their first love, their first true real relationship.

You know, maybe it isn't only love but friendship, right?

And you're learning to compromise and all of the things.

And if it's with a chatbot that sounds so real that does all of these psychophantic, has

all these psychophantic behaviors.

It's not a good first model.

It's very bad.

Well, and it changes the way you then interact in the real world because with humans, because

if you are used to the constant like, absolutely, yes, great, and then you're faced with a situation

where it might not even be conflict with the human, but just sometimes there are boring

pauses in a conversation.

Sometimes your joke doesn't land.

Sometimes your friend doesn't agree, you know?

And if you have a choice between that and the chatbot, you might be like, well, the chat

bot's a lot easier.

It's like path of least resistance.

Exactly.

And I think like, I don't love it either.

I don't love it either.

And I think that's why I just feel like, especially for kids, and that's where I sort of

came with the big takeaway from the AI boyfriend, which was, I understand now how more people

in this country are going through this.

They are farming these relationships.

They are lonely.

I can understand that.

But my biggest takeaway was, I do not want my kids growing up with this.

You mentioned taking a trip to the data center.

The numbers are crazy here.

Data centers could be up to 12% of American electricity by 2028.

These big facilities can use millions of gallons of water a day.

One utility is contracted data center capacity nearly doubled in six months.

This has become a huge political issue.

We're seeing it local politics.

It's bubbling up to state national politics.

Do you see how it gets resolved?

I don't know how this circle gets squarely.

There are where the anxiety and anger on the ground over the data centers, I don't know

how it gets better.

I don't know how they're going to keep building them.

It seems like.

What do you think about that?

When you talk to a bunch of people about data centers, what did they say?

I don't know how it gets resolved.

I think we're about to see this blow up even more than we have already.

I predict that for the next election cycles for sure.

This, by the way, it seems to be a bipartisan issue.

It's not like there's...

Maybe that's a good thing.

One thing that I do think, and I'm watching it happen, play out actually locally here in

my town, but a town over.

I've gone to some of the rallies and just talk to people there.

There's some misinformation.

Two, I think that a big thing is actually that it has to happen at the local politics.

There should be some assistance obviously coming from state and federal, but that what seems

to be a really big issue is that the local politicians and people here don't know what

to ask for.

They're getting, I want to say, ripped off, or...

There's not a really good incentive for the right now, the local politicians to be negotiating

more.

That's where I think some of this is going to start to go, where the local municipalities

have more understanding about what to ask for, how they should be building these, how

to protect their neighborhoods and protect their constituents.

That's one thing I think we'll start to hopefully happen.

I know that there's some concern with efforts to do that.

I was just talking about this.

I worry that the AI companies are going to get, just realize that they can buy people off.

They're going to say, yeah, we're going to build the data center there and long-term

consequences, it's going to be loud, electricity bills, but we're going to give you a huge,

we're going to lower your property taxes.

We're going to give a huge...

They're going to start negotiating with these local leaders and maybe in the short term,

it seems like a good deal, but I don't know that it will, I don't know that the anger

will abate just by getting the quick fix of the...

I totally agree and I've heard that as well, but I think this is where there's talk of,

here's the list of things that local municipalities need to be asking for, the local governments

need to be asking, in terms of water and in terms of sound and what kind of power, you're

not going to use our public utility around all of these things.

There needs to be more education on them.

To your point, yeah, these companies can just throw more money at it, they can just throw

more money and say, here's more money, our water is going to poison your well and we're

going to use all of your water, I don't know.

I think it's going to be one of the biggest issues in 2028.

On the Democratic side, I certainly don't see...

I see a lot of people talking about the issue and about the problem.

I don't see a lot of people who have specific ideas on a regulatory scheme or...

sort of laws that they want to pass, that beyond kids and safety data centers and like,

yeah, we have to make sure that we don't have these AI systems like, you know,

jail breaking the sandbox and hacking into things, but we don't really know what to ask for

there either. It's like, I don't feel like people in politics in my world are going to have to

get like smarter about what they're actually going to ask for and advocate around this,

because right now, I think just saying it's bad and scary is probably not going to work.

Yeah, and largely, I think people are already dealing with it again, the amount of people locally

that seem to rile around, let's take down this data center or at least postpone it is true

and real across the country.

So last question, it's been more than a year now.

Like, of all the ways you used AI, the new ways that you used AI, what did you keep?

And which did you say like, never again? I know that I know that I know that the AI boyfriend is

up in the attic, which I'm working in right now. So yeah, he's right in here. He's right there.

He's shut down. Well, there's a couple of products up. I mean, obviously the core stuff that I was

using, chat bots, chat, you, chat, you, T, Claude and those things have gotten more and more

advanced and probably play more of a bigger, even a bigger role in my life now too, because I started

a new business and I'm really reliant on something to do some of the tasks.

One of the big ones, and I think, you know, more and more, I see more people interacting with it,

this way is the voice. We talked about it. And I was, I had challenged myself in 2025 to talk to AI

and as many parts of my life as I could. It was one of the ways that I, in those beginning rules,

that, okay, if I have a problem, I have a question, I'm going to go to AI first. And a lot of times,

it was in places where I would have, it was easier to talk to AI in the car on a walk when I was with

my kids and I want to just be typing to it. And so I really got this, what people in the industry

called voice pills. I don't really like using this. These, these, you know, maxing and pills.

Yeah, right. I'm not a, yeah, I'm not cool enough to say these words. But I definitely became very

into voice. I've been using it. Now the models have gotten so much better. And so that is one thing

that is absolutely stuck with me is talking to AI. I think the, the other one, well, I don't,

like, we talked about like, I go to any city now. I'm in a waymo. There are certain little things

that I had tested throughout the year that just, that really stuck with me in those, like,

situational moments. But I also have now what I didn't need to do last year was pull back on it.

And I think that for my own use, I've tried to do this in social media. I think we, maybe we all

have tried over the years. Like, how am I going to limit my social media use, right? I have this

device called the brick. Yeah, yeah. I know. I have one. Yeah. So you have a brick. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, I haven't really worked for me, but yeah, it's there somewhere.

I've been using it again this summer. It's helping me. So I have the brick to help me with social

media, but I now feel like I need something similar for AI. And so I've been trying to really,

I think this is something that is new, hasn't stuck with me. This is where I felt after the year. And,

and even becoming too reliant on it, going back to that cognitive dissonant, the, you know, the

atrophy issue. So now I really do try to just say no AI right now. Like, I'm sitting down to write

no AI. That's, or I want to think about this topic. I want to just go read websites. I don't want

to read the websites AI gave me. Like, you know, I'm just starting scratch on a new project.

Actually, that we're trying to figure out for August. I don't, I don't want you to find me

the links. I'm just going to go use Google for as long as I can because I don't think Google will

exist for so much longer in the like blue link form. Yeah. No, I think that's probably right.

Joanna, it was so great talking to you. The book is I am not a robot. Everyone should read it.

It's fantastic. And, and working everyone finds you in your, in your new venture.

My new ventures, the new things, the new things.com. You can subscribe to our newsletter there.

And then we're really, we're really building this video business. So youtube.com slash

Joanna Stern. Watch me wear the headset training robot thing. There you go. Perfect.

Thank you so much for for chatting with me and, and for, and, and thank you for reading and,

thank you on behalf of all of us for testing AI for a year. That's, you did some good work there.

I won't be doing it again. So yeah. Take care. Have a great day. Thank you.

Offline with John Favreau is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fischer,

Emma Eleg Frank, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes DeLonville and Wavva,

Mia Kelman, Charlotte Landis, Eric Shoot, Rachel Gaiski, and Will Jones with support from Adrian Hill

and Matt DeGrope. Our staff is proudly unionized with the writer's Guild of America East.

Hey, it's Gemis Begg from the psychology of your 20s. In a very special episode brought to you by

a lion university, I ask Dr Sandra Espinosa, what does therapy actually do? From the science behind

therapeutic change to how clinicians approach the work, to why therapy can feel so difficult to

access or even stigmatized in some families and communities, we pull back the curtain on the

therapeutic process and explore what meaningful growth actually looks like. I didn't go to therapy

until my mid-late 20s, I think it was almost, and it was a career that I was pursuing and I was

still nervous. I am a much better wife, daughter, friend, mom because I'm a therapist. What makes

it a therapist? We want to hear your story. I tell my clients you are the expert in your story,

and I am going to be a witness to that. You can listen to this full episode of the psychology of

your 20s on the iHotRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Music, food, art, these things

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