Max Tani:
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals Podcast from us here at Semafor Media, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I’m Max Tani. I’m the media editor here at Semafor, and with me as always from across the office is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, how much of your life have you turned over to AI?

Ben Smith:
Increasing amounts, honestly. I spent a couple hours the other day talking to Claude about a book I’m working on. The more I can turn over to AI, the better.

Max Tani:
What did Claude have to say about your book? Also, do people know about your book? Do our listeners know about your book? You’re writing a book about Steve Bannon.

Ben Smith:
It’s mostly a secret though.

Max Tani:
Oh, it’s mostly a secret.

Ben Smith:
I don’t want to go into it.

Max Tani:
Oh, okay. But you just-

Ben Smith:
It’s between me and Claude, really.

Max Tani:
But you did tell Claude someone somewhere has that information now, presumably.

Ben Smith:
It’s true. Dario, please don’t tell.

Max Tani:
Well, the reason why I asked that question is because our guest this week, Joanna Stern, actually turned over her life to artificial intelligence, at least in part for a new book that she is working on called I Am Not A Robot. Joanna was previously a tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal where she made very funny videos and wrote very funny stories about tech and about phones and about AI and pretty much every way in which technology has interacted with our lives in a major consumer way over the last 10 or so years. And she recently left The Journal to strike out on her own. She has a new media project called New Things with Joanna Stern, tech journalism for humans who like fun. Ben, have you been following Joanna’s work? Have you seen her videos? Personally, I really enjoyed the video that she did at the end of last year where she tried to jailbreak a vending machine run by Claude in the Wall Street Journal office.

Ben Smith:
Joanna’s, I think, one of the real stars of a long line of tech journalism where you just try to break everything and have fun with it. She had one of those humanoid robots around her house, I think for one of her last Journal videos that I very much enjoyed. But no, she’s really one of the iconic tech journalists and probably one of the people who actually understands more and has thought more, has talked to executives more about consumer digital technology, consumer tech than anybody else.

Max Tani:
So Ben, Joanna, obviously interesting, funny person who’s gone viral for a lot of this stuff, but why are we talking to her right now? Why do we want to have her on the show this week?

Ben Smith:
I have a dual agenda. One is I do think she’s living this very contemporary media career where she real starred The Journal and yet decided to go out on her own and then immediately strike some kind of contributor deal with NBC, but I guess on her own terms, and I do want to talk to her a bit about her career. And then of course, I want to talk to her about the technology. I think she has insight into how people are using and thinking about AI. And also, I want to ask her about one of the things that I’m most obsessed with, which is for how long is the phone going to be the main distribution device for our work, for media, for what most of us do.

Max Tani:
What does that mean for Semafor if we’re on borrowed time with the phone?

Ben Smith:
It’s going to be all your favorite word, Max. It’s going to be all convenings.

Max Tani:
Oh, yes. Great. Many, many more convenings. Well, we have to take a short break, but we’ll be right back with Joanna Stern after this.

Ben Smith:
Joanna, why can’t we see your mic?

Joanna Stern:
I’m anti-mic showing. I think we don’t need to all show our mics. For decades, TV hosts have not needed giant mics in front of their faces. We have the technology to have great audio without a giant mic in our face. And so, when I was designing my new home studio, which I’m debuting on this show, exclusive.

Max Tani:
We appreciate that. Thank you.

Joanna Stern:
Are you going to run this with a giant exclusive?

Max Tani:
Yes.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Max Tani:
Yes. First look at Joanna Stern, new studio.

Joanna Stern:
I said, no mic in frame, mic up here. And so, there’s a mounted mic above me.

Ben Smith:
I’m a little obsessed with this. Why does everybody, and now including Jake Tapper, have giant mics in front of them? Why do I have a giant mic in front of me? I could be using a lav. What’s going on here?

Joanna Stern:
This is a podcast. And so, I think it’s okay that you guys have giant mics. I did not come on your podcast to criticize your podcast.

Ben Smith:
But they’re basically just here as an asthma aesthetic purposes.

Joanna Stern:
They’re props.

Ben Smith:
They’re props. This thing isn’t even plugged into anything. Joanna, thank you so much for coming on seriously at a fascinating moment in your career.

Joanna Stern:
I’m so happy to be here debuting my studio.

Ben Smith:
And I guess honestly, I’m very eager to talk to you about your book and about the questions of consumer technology that you spent most of your career working on, but wanted to start just asking you about where you are and about your own thinking as a real star at a great institution, the Wall Street Journal, who at some point chooses to quit and go out on our own. What is the calculus there? What makes you do that?

Joanna Stern:
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and it’s hard. It’s really hard to make this decision. And I did not know for a long time if I would make this decision. There were so many things I loved about working at the Wall Street Journal. And there were so many things that I thought I’m never going to be able to leave this. But then there were so many things that I also saw happening in media, places like you guys included, that I was jealous of, building something around me, building other parts of my brand, so to speak, that you can do at a legacy media organization, but can either, let’s be honest, can take a really long time with a really slow infrastructure and you’re not, two, not going to necessarily reap all of the financial benefits. And so, those were two really big parts of the calculus here.

Max Tani:
For the people who listen to our show who might not know what the economics look like of this, talk a little bit about the money piece of it. What are the financial benefits that you’re leaving on the table? Is it like subscription type of stuff that you’re doing? Is it like YouTube ad revenue split money that you’ll be getting? What’s the actual money that’s being left on the table? What is the financial component?

Joanna Stern:
You mean that I left on the table at The Journal or that-

Max Tani:
Yeah, that you left on the table at The Journal that you can get now that you’re in the independent journalism creator space.

Joanna Stern:
Right. I mean, look, first of all, it’s a complete bet. Right now, $0. So I’m betting on myself and as I wrote in a LinkedIn post, the saying betting on yourself sounds really good on a podcast or at LinkedIn, but it feels horrible in the middle of the night. It feels so terrible at 4:00 AM where you’re like, “Oh wow, everyone’s really excited about this thing I’m doing, but I’ve also made $0 at it yet and that’s not great.” So the potential of this, to get back to your question about what it can be is all those things, right? Subscriptions and many places are warming up to the idea of doing revenue shares with their… If you’re at a legacy organization or have a different deal where they will do revenue share, that can be one option. So you don’t necessarily leave that on the table, but these would be my subscribers and I’d like to take all of that money. That sounds great.
And so, you do that math and you’re like, “Well, okay, maybe I could have a bigger audience if I stay someplace like the Wall Street Journal, but maybe I can still build a substantial audience and make more of that money if I go do it on my own.” So those are one way to weigh the two things. Rev share around video and sponsorship is another one. Events is a big one that I think you guys know a lot about at your company where you think, okay, we can do smaller size events where… And I love doing events. I love hosting and coming up with events. I could do that at a big place and it could take a lot of time and a lot of energy and huge marketing budgets and huge teams to make this giant event. Or maybe I can make some smaller events and benefit in a similar way and maybe make more money.

Max Tani:
Well, the first thing to learn about being in the events business is that we don’t call them events. We call them convenings. So just-

Ben Smith:
Max has a real being as bonded about this fact, but it’s just reality.

Max Tani:
No, I don’t. I have drank the Kool-Aid. I’m all about calling anything that’s a gathering of individuals a convening.

Ben Smith:
Three or more people, it’s a convening.

Max Tani:
Yes, for sales purposes. But actually, let’s just take a step back. Joanna, what’s your New Thing going to look like? Because I think that a lot of our audience is probably familiar with some of your consumer reviews and some of the stuff that feels like almost like, and I mean this in a positive way, the stunt type of stuff that you’ve done where, for example, I loved the video that you did at the end of last year where you tried to essentially jailbreak the Claude programmed vending machine in your office and got it to order fish, like live fish and to give away an Xbox or PS5 for free, things like that. It was amazing. But what’s the New Thing going to look like?

Joanna Stern:
Still stunts. We should probably brainstorm here on this podcast some good stunts that I can line up in the next few months. For me, I want to keep doing what I’ve always done, which is, and I’ll say this is the mission of the New Things. This is what I’m calling it. People kept saying, “What’s the New Thing?” And I was like, “Actually, that’s just the name. We’re going to try to make it the name as the New Thing.” So the New Things, and then it made sense too. I cover new things and we’ll still talk about some old things. There’s some fun stuff I want to do around old things, but my mission is the same as it’s always been, which is to help people and guide people through this complicated world of technology. Feels like right now, that’s a really important moment to do this with the AI at everywhere. And that’s what the book I wrote that comes out in May is all about. It’s called I’m Not A Robot. And it’s about my 2025, my year trying to use AI in as many parts of my life as possible.
But the mission of this company is just to do it in different mediums, help people cover the latest and greatest of consumer tech, but do it through the lens for humans, humans that like to have fun, because I do think that fun in tech journalism is a lot, it’s not a loss form, but few are having fun at this. And do that in different mediums. We’ll do a newsletter, we’ll do a lot of video, eventually events, and maybe a podcast where I do need a big mic in front of my face.

Ben Smith:
So you say that you’re not a robot. However, in starting a new media company as an independent person in 2026, are you not a robot? How much of what this company is going to be is shaped by AI tools that are available that might not have been available a year ago?

Joanna Stern:
AI is my co-founder, is my truth. Look, the book was definitely, for me, an inspiration to go and do this. As you know, Ben, I had been thinking about doing this for a while. And then I went out, got this book deal because I really wanted to tell this story about where’s AI coming in all parts of our lives. And so, sold the book and then decided, okay, I’m really going to go full throttle at this book and spent a lot of last year doing it, but realized I was using AI to make a lot of the mundane or boring parts of the book process a lot easier and more efficient. You know about all these mundane tasks that go like planning and not the actual researching, but which things am I going to go after? What companies am I going to talk to?
The reaching out, so many little things that I just was able to do in such a shorter amount of time if I hadn’t had Claude and my book bots, as I call them in the book, doing some of this work for me. And also, I then just was also building a small business around the book. I was hiring fact-checkers and I was hiring an illustrator and I was hiring a designer and all of these things. And I was like, “I am managing a project here that is on a very small scale, a very small business.” And that gave me a lot of faith in myself to be able to do that. And also, yes, AI helped with writing some contracts and doing some things too that I was like, “Okay, maybe I can do this and maybe I can do it with this assistance a little bit quicker and more efficiently.”

Max Tani:
So thinking about the book itself, my understanding is you turned over a lot of your life to AI. What did you find to be most illuminating? What did you find to be most alarming? What was that experience like?

Joanna Stern:
So you’ll see that I did draw lines, because if I had given my life over to AI completely, I would be divorced, homeless, things would have been destroyed. And so, I needed to continue to live a decent life. And so, certain things were not outsourced. But to answer Max, your question about, well, what was most surprising was actually how big of a theme my kids ended up being in this book because I brought everything home because I wasn’t really at the. The months that I was not, I was at The Journal all year and I was doing a lot of work, but a lot of the book stuff was happening in my house. And I live in a house with my wife and my two sons. They’re four and eight. At the time, they were three and seven. And so much of it inundated them.
And so, I started to see a lot of the future through their eyes. They’re obviously obsessed with robots and every single thing they hope now is a robot. And actually next week, we’re having an actual humanoid come to the house and they’re so excited and they’re getting out of school early. I’m the best parent in the world. We went on a vacation to Phoenix. This was called our Waymo fun vacation. It was just we only took Waymos for the week. And if you have young kids, you actually know this is miserable because you have to keep putting in the car seat a million times.
So I think that was one of the most surprising things and the themes of the book is that I started to see what life is going to look like for my kids where they’re no longer the smartest. We are no longer the smartest beings on earth, that AI is smarter than us, but also that just so much of tech is infiltrated into parts of their lives from driving to education to healthcare and seeing it, they just accept it. They now, rest in peace Sora, but they got very used to seeing AI generated video and they’re very, very quick to say, “That’s AI generated. That’s not real.” So just seeing a lot of the impact of all of those things on that generation was really surprising.

Ben Smith:
You said before, AI is your co-founder. What does that mean?

Joanna Stern:
It’s not really true. Also, by the way, I just hired a producer. His name is David Hall and he’s been my producer for a few years now, video producer and-

Ben Smith:
Person?

Joanna Stern:
Person, real person, real man, real background. We do a human test on him every so often because he does work really hard and does really good work, but I cannot imagine making this company without him. So let’s just put that aside. He is a creative partner and every morning and every day we’re talking to each other all the time right now. So I cannot imagine doing it without him. But on the other hand, there is all of this work, as you guys know from building a company, that is just tedious. And people don’t tell you too. You need to get insurance, but you need to get three quotes of insurance or two quotes of insurance, and you need all this different types of insurance.
And so, yeah, I just usually all day, every day, have a Claude agent, whether it be in Claude code or just Claude, working on stuff like that for me, finding me people to contact, helping me sort out certain things and doing that kind of work. I don’t want to say it’s all being done by AI because there’s a lot that I have to spend at the end of my days doing, but it is certainly doing 80% of what I think I would’ve been doing before.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, that’s pretty good. Our CFO is on vacation this week and I could just tell him like, “Don’t come back.”

Joanna Stern:
I hope one day I’ll have a CFO, but asking Claude questions about how I should spend money right now is probably not the best idea.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, it is just such an amazing moment. I was in San Francisco last week and you always get the sense of like, okay, they’re living in the future there and had dinner with a guy spending between, he told me between $10,000 and $25,000 a week on tokens because he’s running so many different processes, having it power so many different parts of his life, it’s in his bank account, it’s in his email. I mean, yeah, fascinating.

Joanna Stern:
I mean, to bring it full circle to the book and AI and leaving my job, the end of the book, which I didn’t know was going to be this, is me asking ChatGPT if I should quit The Journal. And then I can say this because I sat with you as a human and you definitely did not give me that advice.

Ben Smith:
I mean, I think my goal was certainly that you should come to Semafor.

Joanna Stern:
I just pick on that because I remember coming away with that meeting with some really good ideas, but you also did not tell me what to do. I met with so many people over the last years to tell them what I was thinking about doing. Should I do this? And people give you ideas, but they do not tell you what to do. Humans do not tell you what to do because if you did tell me what to do and it really went wrong, you’d feel really bad, but ChatGPT just fully told me what to do.

Ben Smith:
Told you to quit?

Joanna Stern:
Told me to quit. I uploaded all this information, all my notes, maybe some notes from our meeting. It’s hard to say. I’m not looking at the notes right now.

Ben Smith:
And it was like, this is a slam dunk, easy decision you got to get out of there.

Joanna Stern:
Exactly.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. It’s funny because I think I probably would’ve said that, but felt like it was socially inappropriate. So there you go.

Joanna Stern:
Right? And I say it, I didn’t know the book was going to, that’s what was going to happen to me at the end of the year that was going to make that decision. But it felt like the one big decision where I actually did trust AI because I like knew it in my gut. Well, I actually say in the book, people kept saying, every human kept being like, “Trust your gut, trust your gut. You know what to do.” And it’s like, no, I think I say in the book, “My gut just wants a burrito. My gut doesn’t know what to do right now. I’m too overridden with anxiety, but it doesn’t have anxiety.”

Ben Smith:
And I guess just to come back to the choice you made to leave, I think of The Journal as an institution that has, like all these big institutions, historically treats its journalists as kind of cogs in a big machine, but certainly is thinking really hard about these challenges, is moving things around it, is trying to sort of develop a talent center or something and trying to engage with this new very individual personality, creator, brand centric moment in the business. And when I saw that you were leaving, I thought like, oh, maybe this isn’t fixable. Maybe it’s going to be a really hard time for these big institutions. That’s like a pretty forward-looking one that’s trying to do well and ChatGPT is still telling you it’s a total slam dunk to leave.

Joanna Stern:
Yeah. And this was something I said on the way out to many people there is that I really think the next Joanna Sterns need to be coming up through The Journal or these other institutions. I had 12 years there and won many awards and did lots of great work and worked with amazing people and learned so much. And if we don’t have that pipeline, I think a lot about this now, where’s that pipeline of journalists going to start? I think for me, it was really just time and plates. I’ve been there for 12 years. It’s a great moment to try this in media. There’s the AI tools, there’s the economy, the path has been paved by others. I’m certainly not the first to do this. Kara Swisher’s been yelling at me to do this now for like five years.

Ben Smith:
Kara does not actually have the reticence that many of us have about telling other people what to do.

Joanna Stern:
That’s so true. That’s so true. She’s the one person I didn’t call because I knew exactly what she would say. And in fact, she listened to her on this podcast, probably I listened to that podcast two or three times because I thought what she said on this podcast was so good. I think that was last summer.

Max Tani:
All of our listeners should listen to Joanna and listen to every one of our episodes two or three times.

Joanna Stern:
Or just go back to that one with Kara if you’re considering doing something on your own. Because she was honest. She said too, I remember not everyone has what it takes to do it. And it was a very good episode.

Max Tani:
We have a lot more that we want to get to with Joanna, but we have to take a short break, so we’ll be right back after this.

Ben Smith:
You’ve obviously spent the last 12 years covering consumer tech, talking to the people who build it, thinking really hard about it. And the thing that I am and that I think the media needs to be most obsessed with in a way is like, is where is media going to live and be consumed? Obviously for the last decade, it’s been the phone and it’s been the iPhone and its descendants and it’s been this, what is this like three by seven screen or whatever. And there are now people making a serious run at the phone. There are glasses, there’s whatever OpenAI is doing, there’s voice. And I guess I’m curious what you see as the trajectory of the smartphone or are we going to, for the 20 years from now, are we all going to be staring at these things all day? How is that going to change?

Joanna Stern:
Well, I think it’s appropriate too that we’re taping this on April 1st, which is the 50th anniversary of Apple because this is the big question everyone has for Apple right now. Is this what’s going to happen post iPhone? What’s the future of the company? I mean, first of all, I think that everything will continue to connect to the phone, that the phone will just be this central portal that has these accessories that connect to it because that’s where the strongest… It’s such a mature device now where the battery life, the connectivity, all of the sensors we need to power these other things, these other peripherals, I just think the phone is going to continue to be that hub. And that obviously positions someone like Apple to be in the best place because whether it’s the earbuds or their glasses or some other weird wearable that we, a pin or something that’s going to connect nicely to a device like a phone.
I talked about this a lot in the book too, and I wore a bracelet all year that recorded everything I said. This was called the Bee bracelet and it records everything and it takes the audio, it transcribes it using AI, and then it throws out the audio so you can’t listen back to the conversations. And then it takes those transcripts and it makes summaries of your day and it gives you like to-dos based on what you had said you were going to do during the day. And it’s crazy. When you first start wearing this, you don’t realize how many things you say you’re going to do or you talk about during the day that you don’t remember. So it’s really like outsourcing your memory to this device on your wrist, a surveillance device, to be clear.

Max Tani:
Did you learn anything about yourself through that process where you’re like, “Oh my God, I say this X thing all the time.”

Joanna Stern:
Well, I curse 15 times a day on average. I learned that.

Max Tani:
That feels fine to me, I think.

Joanna Stern:
I know. I was impressed.

Max Tani:
Is that explicit? It feels fine. Yeah. There’s a lot of hours in the day.

Joanna Stern:
But then actually it’s funny because I asked it this, you can ask it, “Give me a sense of when I do curse.” And it gives you a breakdown. It’s like, “Often you curse at technology when it doesn’t work. Often you’ll curse to an excitement like, ‘Oh, fuck, that’s awesome.’” But I really do think that kind of device is where we’re headed, is something that’s listening, that we’re able to talk to these agents or these assistants throughout the day. I think in the car, that was another big place where I now talk to AI a lot. I always say often new things don’t always replace the old thing. We still have laptops, we still have desktop computers. Obviously, many old things went that way. We don’t have MP3 players anymore. We don’t have GPS devices, but I think that these things are just going to live hand in hand with the smartphone.
And I think it’s going to be difficult, though I think there will be success for the companies like the Metas or the OpenAIs that don’t control the full stack, that don’t control the phone and the devices. But look, I love the Meta Ray-Bans. I wear them every weekend to record my kids and ask AI questions in the glasses. They work pretty well with my iPhone.

Ben Smith:
What do you think OpenAI is building?

Joanna Stern:
Well, they’re building a few things. I think there’s certainly got to be wearing, building some sort of wearable. I mean, there’s a lot of reporting showing that they’re building something that’s more going to be a desktop speaker at first, which makes sense. We can talk to… They probably see a lot of data. People are talking to ChatGPT in the kitchen or people are talking to ChatGPT in the bathroom or when they’re trying to get ready or do something. So I think that device makes sense, but I also think that there’s just no way there isn’t a wearable in the works, something that we bring with us and go into the world.

Max Tani:
What do these changes mean for us in the media business? Where do you think that that’s going? Where do you think this drift away from the screen of your phone to other surfaces? What does that mean for someone such as a 33-year-old media journalist who wants to be employed making media for the next 30 years? Where’s that headed?

Joanna Stern:
I just heard a brag that you’re 33. That’s all I heard.

Max Tani:
That’s good. I’m glad that that’s considered a brag.

Joanna Stern:
What was the rest of the question?

Max Tani:
Well, 33 is around the age too where it stops being impressive that you’re… That’s like a regular age to have a career such as mine. So it’s less impressive these days.

Joanna Stern:
True.

Max Tani:
But seriously though, where do you think that the changes in technology, what do you think that that means for the media business?

Joanna Stern:
I worry about it because I know in my own life now that… Take the car example. Sometimes when I’m driving and I’ve been doing a lot of driving to and from the city or to video shoots, a lot of that time used to be me listening to podcasts and it still is. I still listen to your podcast in the car, but some of that time is now I’m talking to ChatGPT or I’m talking to Claude. And I’m getting information through there that is not attributed to any specific outlet. I’m talking about the interview I’m about to go do and I’m not clicking to a link to say, “Oh yeah, that’s an interview so-and-so did with Semafor before. That’s an interview that so-and-so did with NBC News, but it’s just all compiled for me and I don’t know the actual truth source of that.”
So I think just the reality is we’re all going to be grappling with the time. The time that people have to consume media and they’re listening or talking to their AI friend, boyfriend, research assistant, and they’re not listening to media that we make or watching media that we make.

Ben Smith:
I guess, and maybe this is wishful thinking, but I guess I can squint and see a future where you’re not carrying a phone around where glass does some of that, where maybe there’s screens all over the place and even you’re carrying something that is a screen, but it’s not the primary device. I’ve found those Meta glasses pretty impressive, the next generation with the little screens inside. And I hate having a phone. I would love to be liberated from the phone. And so, I’m looking for that, but then that makes me really nervous about what media is. Obviously, storytelling’s not going away and great stories, fiction or nonfiction and great journalists and creators aren’t going away, but what surface that stuff lives on in 15, 20 years, I have no idea.

Joanna Stern:
But I think also so much of this is, like you said, it ties back to the phone and then can people find the true source of that information is my biggest problem because the person… I was been in two meetings lately where people, “Oh, with our agent, you can take your favorite podcast and make a summary and then you can listen to it in the morning.” It’s like, okay, well, where’s the true… When am I going to see the real source of that podcast and that information?

Max Tani:
I think that also gets at, and this was something that maybe I was reading an Ezra Klein piece in the Times about this the other day. This gets at the idea of people who are using Claude for writing or whatever. They’re not soaking in the information. Summarizing a podcast in two to three minutes, you’re not really getting that much. You might’ve gleaned the actual information, but you haven’t spent the time seeping in it and thinking about the things that they’re talking about and working through the thought processes. I feel like that in some ways defeats the point. I’m bearish when it comes to podcast summarization. Though mass podcast summarization as a tool for us as journalists is actually amazing. We’ve been working on something like that here, this report that hopefully will be generated by AI where it listens to 100 podcasts a day and says things that are trends that are coming up or figures that are emerging in a lot of places. I’m really excited for something like that.
But summarizing an individual podcast instead of spending time with the ideas in that podcast, I think is… I don’t know about it. I don’t just say that as someone with a podcast that I hope that people listen to all of. What’s a piece of technology that’s excited you the most over the last six months?

Joanna Stern:
Look, I’ve become obsessed with humanoid robots. I think you’re going to see a lot more coverage of me with humanoid robots because one, I think there’s so much hype about it that’s just not living up to the hype. And two, it’s a fascinating and fun space because these things are doing crazy stuff all the time. So the neo robot that I did a piece on it, I think it was in November, so we’re not at the six months, but it was super fun. I mean, seeing a humanoid robot that’s supposed to do these things and you watching it fail, but also seeing how endearing it can be. And I’ve spent a lot of time with robots this year and I’m constantly cheering on the robots, which is a weird thing. And when the robot can’t fold the laundry, I’m like, “You can do it. Come on, you can do it.”

Ben Smith:
So do you think these things are going to succeed commercially just because people love them?

Joanna Stern:
No, because they’re going to be way too expensive. And so, if you can’t afford it and it does nothing for… I mean, let’s say it’s really expensive and it does nothing for you, you’re not going to be like, “Oh, isn’t it so funny that my robot can’t do shit.” That’s not how we are built as consumers, but I think they’ll continue to laugh at them.

Max Tani:
Yes, it was fun to laugh at the robot spending five minutes trying to close the dishwasher.

Joanna Stern:
And that was just like, I left that story shooting that and I was so excited. I was just like, “I cannot wait to tell this story.” And it had been a decade, I think, since I had felt that way. So that’s just exciting. This is why I keep doing what I do. It’s like, you never know when you’re going to see something that’s so crazy and you’re going to want to tell people about what you saw.

Max Tani:
What was the scariest piece of technology that you’ve seen in the last… Let’s open the aperture a little bit in the last year.

Joanna Stern:
My AI boyfriend in the book, you can meet my AI boyfriend in the book. But the fact that I had these deep conversations with this not thing was really scary to me.

Ben Smith:
Was this on chat or on one of these other platforms?

Joanna Stern:
I tested a number of them, but I really was able to get to a deeper connection with Chat. With ChatGPT, I was able to really program it to be like it had a personality and emotions and all these things. You’ll read about, I don’t want to spoil the book, but we will. But please buy the book, everyone, I Am Not A Robot out May 12th.

Ben Smith:
People should obviously buy the book. Yes. I am not a robot.

Joanna Stern:
I tried Replica and Replica just gets super horny super fast. So they are built for that. There’s those and then I wanted something deeper. And so, where I get with this deep relationship deep, we went on a vacation or a two-night vacation together, me and my boyfriend, which is really just an iPhone on a tripod in a car seat with me, is that you can really form conversation and have deep conversations with this. And so, that was petrifying to me. Not me because I am really happily married. And as soon as I got home from that trip, put the phone away and said, I never want to talk to this boyfriend again. But I’m very, very scared for the next generation. When there’s no friction in a relationship and you just can talk to something for hours and hours, that’s really scary to me.

Ben Smith:
And people talk about AI psychosis. Did you feel like you got a taste of it for yourself? Did you feel like on the edge of being crazy?

Joanna Stern:
I didn’t feel, because I knew what it was, but I talk about this in that chapter, and I did talk to people in that same chapter who had gone through AI psychosis. I felt that I saw what could happen. I really related to people who have gone through it because you realize after you’ve spent so many hours, you’re like, “I’ve just spent four-hour drive talking to this. ” And it was fine. It listened better than any human I would ever be in a car with for four hours. That’s terrifying.

Ben Smith:
Joanna, thanks so much for joining us. Listeners can go find Joanna’s new book, I Am Not A Robot out May 12th and find her on the internet at thenewthings.com.

Joanna Stern:
Thank you guys so much for having me.

Ben Smith:
Thanks, Joanna.

Joanna Stern:
And allowing me not to have my mic in front of my face.

Ben Smith:
It’s great. Great to see your face.

Max Tani:
It is a cleaner shot, that’s for sure.

Ben Smith:
So Max, I think Joanna and I actually disagreed on this one point that she thinks the phone is basically going to be pretty resilient. You’ll be able to reach your fans on the phone for many, many years to come. And I’m sort of maybe rooting for a more dramatic radical change. What do you think?

Max Tani:
I feel a little bit like I can’t visualize what an alternative is because whatever it is, it’s some wearable technology. And I think that the phone still is the best vehicle for doing all the things that we want to do in media whenever or engage with media and communication at any time, whether that is watch something or listen to something or whatever else anyone might do, use your flashlight for something. And I just don’t see a world in which glasses or anything like that, we’re just not close quite yet in that same way. And so, I feel like I lean more towards Joanna, though I also totally agree with you that I would love to be liberated from constantly looking down at my phone. One of our favorite guests, Jonah Weiner from Blackbird’s Spyplane has talked a little bit about how looking at your phone is like one of the least cool things that you can do anywhere. And so, we spend so much time.
If you’re at a restaurant by yourself and you’re looking at your phone, it’s like actually much sadder than just like looking around or reading a book or whatever it might be. Well, I feel personally attacked by that.
Well, I mean, no, but I think it’s more of a statement of we’re all doing it constantly. We’re all also engaged and engrossed in our phones and it is so good, but it is sad when you see a group of people at a table and they’re all just staring at their phones. There’s something deeply depressing about it even if you’re one of those individuals and it’s kind of fun in the moment.

Ben Smith:
I look forward to the era when everyone is vaguely looking at each other and then you realize that actually they’re just looking at something on the last-

Max Tani:
Oh, my God. I don’t know if that’s any better. Ben, what do you think that that future looks like then when it comes to media? I think that regardless of whether or not our phones are going anywhere over the next 10 years, I do think that it’s true that people are going to have more time to engage in media and they might be doing it in different ways. What I took away from this episode is how much and how easy it will be to spend a lot of time talking to AI agents. Right now, I still use AI mostly in the most rudimentary way, which is as a better search engine. It’s still much better at that than standard search engine. But people like Joanna and others in the business world are obviously using it in much more complex ways, either to do work or to engage with in a social way. What do you think all of that means for us here in the media business and for you as someone who has to steer a media company over the next, I think probably at least 10 years, maybe 10 years?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I hope so.

Max Tani:
I hope so too.

Ben Smith:
Because I find it pretty exciting because I think it’s like lowered in some ways the cost of production and the cost of entry and the cost of doing weird, ambitious, creative stuff journalistically or creatively. And yet at the same time, I think we’re going to have to be so nimble about where that stuff lives and how we reach people with it. Whether it’s like our app’s going to be a thing. I think the answer to that is like an emphatic maybe. You have short video, you have video of different production qualities, you have email, which is obviously very important to us right now. And I think I’m not concerned that our audience or the audience isn’t going to want great journalism and to hear from sophisticated journalists, but I think we have to be really nimble and agnostic about what surface that’s on. And I find that actually pretty interesting, but it’s also obviously unsettling.

Max Tani:
Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals Podcast from us here at Semafor Media. Unless, of course, you had this podcast summarized and are looking at it as a two or three bullet point thing on a screen somewhere, in which case shame on you. This show is produced by Manny Fidel with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Daniel Hoeft, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kuhr. Our engineer is the excellent Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Steve Bohn. Our public editor is Claude, of course, who could, I guess, baby be your boyfriend. That’s what Joanna is writing about in her new book. It’s very scary stuff to me. I still don’t support that. I feel very negatively about that.

Ben Smith:
Subscribe on YouTube. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Simple and clean.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.