Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.
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Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Voloshin. My prediction for 2026 was that this would be the year of the robot, the year that physical AI entered our homes, workplaces, maybe even our bloodstream. Our guest today, Joanna Stern, was way ahead of me. On January 1st, 2025, she handed over her entire life for the next 365 days to AI and robots.
She took Waymos on vacation, let AI answer emails, diagnosed her children's praying mantis. She even brought her AI therapist into her human therapist's office and also had AI confirm that she, Joanna, was in fact human.
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Chapter 2: What led Joanna Stern to experiment with AI in her daily life?
Yes. Like I did say, OK, this week there was a week in January. This is it. Like, let's go all in. We're ready to do the year. Everything's going to be responded using AI. All my emails, all my texts and the auto texts and auto emails back are comical. And, you know, I have to say. Some of this is improved now, but some of it isn't. Like a year later, Gmail's responses sometimes are baffling.
It's like, this is a company that knows everything about me. You have every email I've ever sent. Why would I call my mom by her last name? Like Mrs. Stern, why would I ever respond to that email that way, right? And so the example you're talking about is at Apple Intelligence on my iPhone, my wife said, can you please come down here and make the kids lunch? And it said, sorry, no, I'm busy.
Right. Like grounds for divorce.
That's your fantasy life. Right.
It's like AI wants to say the things you can't, but you can't say those things. So, yes, there were limits that I put in place, but I really did try to have AI touch these parts of our lives from health care to transportation to work, education, relationships, education. beyond therapy, as you mentioned, and see where this is going to intersect and where it's not going to intersect.
You know, I loved about the book, especially was, you know, it feels like tech media is somewhat bifurcated between like, you know, the Try Guys, like the tech consumer technology testing, and then the like, people who interact with the tech overlords.
And this is the first book I've read where you, I mean, it's amazingly, you do it in an amazingly graceful way, but you sort of outline this influence you've had with like healthcare technology. And then you say, so I called Bill Gates and then published a transcript of, you know, two pages of that conversation. And you have a similar moment with Sam Altman, like,
How did you kind of think about navigating between the kind of the takeover lords and the person who lives in the world they're building?
Yeah, I mean, and there's so many great books coming out or out now about these tech overlords and how important it is to know about the people steering this revolution, because if we don't have a sense into their humanity, well, gosh, we're kind of screwed. So I wanted to thread that through a little bit, but I didn't want to do those books, right?
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Chapter 3: How did AI help Joanna diagnose her son's praying mantis?
I mean, that's more expensive than going to like the Twina Center.
That's true. But I think you can expense it for this job. So you can go expense your massage, which is, you know, I couldn't do that. I was writing a book on my own dollars. But, you know, for work, you should go get this massage.
Did you tell it exactly what you wanted or did it just look into your soul and tell you what you wanted?
No, so it's like, it actually functions, they describe it as like sort of the Netflix of massages. So when you lay down on this table, there's a screen and you pick which massage you want and you answer a few questions, but it's really all based on what you've told it, what parts of the body you want to massage.
And so where I talk about in this chapter is that for me, I have a very bad lower back problem, like very right above the butt, like, you know, even in there, like in the glute area. And I'm always irritated there. And it just massaged there for like 25 minutes, which is not something a human does. Right. Right.
It's not like I talk about that, like this robot was obsessed with my butt and massaging my butt. But on the flip side, it was exactly what I needed. And a human was never going to do that because that would be really awkward for a human to do.
Right.
Right. Right. Right. When we're asking, oh, you know, where could robots or AI be better than humans? Well, then we have to compare to how the output would be for a human. And so in this case, it actually ended up being not cut and dry. There was things that the robot massage was really good at. See, massaging my butt. And then other things that a human massage therapist just does a lot better.
The hot towels at the end.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Joanna face while using AI for personal tasks?
I have, yeah.
Yeah.
I had a very funny experience with a Waymo because I was in San Francisco with one of my colleagues who... who I adore, but who has a much more optimistic and gregarious nature than me, which meant two things. One, he'd organized for us to stay in a hotel in the Tenderloin, and two, he thought it would be a good opportunity for us to try a Waymo when we had to get to a meeting.
And so it turns out that Waymos don't like stopping in the Tenderloin. And so we were in the middle of the tenderloin banging on the windows of this Waymo that wouldn't let us in. And we did get an Uber and we were 30 minutes late for our meeting. So that was my first less than magical experience with a Waymo. That's really interesting. Yeah, I got in and it worked.
And obviously, it's a remarkable experience. And for listeners who don't know, Tenderloin is a district of San Francisco that has a lot of unhoused people. And I think Waymo, for whatever reason, maybe it's hard-coded or there are people in the streets or whatever it is, it would not accept us as passengers.
And certainly, if you called Waymo, I don't think they would tell you, yeah, we don't open the Dakar door in the Tenderloin. But I think... Seeing a Waymo or even a self-driving experience from the younger generation, you sit on the edge. I don't want to assume, but when you did it, probably maybe a few minutes, right? And then you kind of get over it, right?
By maybe your second or third ride, you're like, all right, this is normal. And my wife is like... quite nervous about drivers and she was very nervous. And so we went... We do the family vacation in the book to go to Phoenix and we only do Waymo rides. But my kids immediately just warm up to it. They don't care at all. They're like... This is normal.
My four-year-old fell asleep in the car within two minutes of us being in the Waymo, right? And this is just, I think, going to be their comfort level with this type of technology where machines are making significant decisions in their lives and they're just like, okay.
Yeah, I mean, the question of what's real is obviously very interesting and also a theme of your book. I mean, one of the things that starts to kind of come through in the book is like, what's human and what's not, right? And so I want to get more into that. But first, I think, which is kind of builds up to this is the three way between your real therapist, your AI therapist and yourself.
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