How AI Almost Led To This Tech Reporter’s Divorce - The Story
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
What happens when you let technology take over your life? Joanna Stern (Fmr. Wall Street Journal / New Things) found out. She spent all of 2025 letting the robots in: Waymos, AI therapists, robot massagers, assistant researcher agents…
During that yearlong experiment, Joanna Stern chronicled her findings in a new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything. She speaks to Oz about letting AI diagnose her son’s praying mantis, sending Bill Gates her health log, and how she sees AI impacting the job market.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshin. 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. |
| 0:30.8 | 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 |
| 0:41.2 | AI and robots. She took Waymos on vacation, let AI answer emails, diagnose her children's praying |
| 0:48.6 | mantis. She even brought her AI therapist into her human therapist's office, and also had AI confirm |
| 0:55.6 | that she, Joanna, was in fact human. |
| 0:58.8 | After more than 10 years at the Wall Street Journal interviewing the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff |
| 1:02.6 | Bezos, Dario Amadeh along the way, Joanna recently became chief technology correspondent at NBC |
| 1:08.1 | News, launched her own business called New Things, and wrote a fantastic |
| 1:12.5 | book called I Am Not a Robot, My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything, which is out now. Welcome, Joanna. |
| 1:20.3 | Thank you for having me, and thank you for, what an intro. What an introduction. |
| 1:24.1 | I wrote that. I can actually tell AI didn't write that. |
| 1:29.0 | How could you tell? |
| 1:30.8 | Well, there was some real details from the book in there that I know AI doesn't know about yet, |
| 1:35.8 | praying mantis especially. |
| 1:37.5 | So I'm very impressed, very nice writing. |
| 1:41.1 | We have to get into everything in the book, but start with the praying mantis because I think that was my favorite moment in the book. Yeah, so I have two sons that you learn that very quickly in the book. I have a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, or they were three and seven at the time of the book, and they knew about my experiment here. I was going to use AI in as many parts of life as possible, which meant that pretty |
| 2:00.9 | much every question they asked me, I'm asking AI. And if you have small kids, you know, they ask a lot |
| 2:06.6 | of random questions about things in the world. And so last summer, my oldest son, Noah, was very, |
| 2:14.2 | he's always been very interested in bugs and nature. And so he had found a praying |
| 2:19.6 | mantis outside. And he wanted, he adopted it, made it a pet. And as a great parent, I embraced this. |
... |
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