Why Does So Much AI Tech Suck?- with Joanna Stern

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know
Episode: Why Does So Much AI Tech Suck? (with Joanna Stern)
Date: July 29, 2026
Host: Hasan Minhaj
Guest: Joanna Stern (tech reporter, author of I Am Not a Robot)

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Main Theme & Purpose

Hasan Minhaj and tech journalist Joanna Stern dissect the overwhelming infiltration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into everyday products and services, sifting through the hype, the grift, and the actual value (or lack thereof) that AI brings to regular people. Using wit, skepticism, and Stern’s immersive reporting, they explore whether AI is making life meaningfully better—or just flooding the market with expensive, unnecessary, and sometimes harmful “innovations.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unfulfilled Promise of AI

• The Hype vs Reality:

  • AI is touted as more profound than "fire or electricity" [00:45], inspiring grand predictions about human flourishing and creativity.
  • Hasan: “How will AI actually improve my life? Because all I see on my feed is a barrage of shitty Black Mirror knockoffs.” [01:18]

• Where AI Actually Excels:

  • Certain AI advancements are genuinely transformative, especially in medicine (e.g., cancer detection in radiology) and intricate administrative calculations [02:48].
  • Stern's Example: Her own mammogram was flagged by AI for a spot a seasoned human radiologist missed, prompting closer monitoring [17:29].

2. Categories of AI in Consumer Tech

• 1. AI Doing What Humans Do, But Better:
  • Medical diagnostics is cited as actually improving outcomes [02:48, 17:19-18:51].
• 2. AI Doing What Humans Did, But Cheaper and Worse:
  • Automated customer service and voice bots frequently create a worse user experience.
    • Joanna shares chatbots faking support tickets [04:18–04:36].
    • “After four years of talking to these fucking chatbots, you are begging for a Sanjeev.” (re: outsourced call center workers) —Hasan [03:39]
• 3. The Same Old Product + ‘AI’ Label:
  • Many products are rebranded with AI mostly for marketing, not true innovation (e.g., AI toothbrushes and dishwashers) [07:11–08:46].
  • Joanna: “What here is AI? This is a piece of metal. What is AI inside this golf club? Nothing was AI sure.” [12:35]
• 4. AI That’s Potentially Dangerous:
  • Autonomous vehicles like Tesla/Waymo praised for safety, but still prone to errors, lack sufficient long-term safety data, and are part of headline accidents [08:46].

3. Real-World AI Grift and Absurdity

• ‘Fruit Love Island’:

  • Hasan recaps an AI-generated, raunchy soap starring anthropomorphic fruit, exemplifying the flood of low-value generative AI content on the internet [05:42–07:07].
  • “This show gave me fruit ego death.” —Hasan [05:57]

• AI As Pure Marketing:

  • AI is now a catch-all buzzword, boosting share prices and justification for raising product costs, regardless of merit [12:05–13:01].

4. AI in Everyday Life: What Works (And What Sucks)

• Joanna Stern’s ‘AI Max’ Experiment:

  • Lived for a year with AI embedded in nearly every aspect of her life (doctor, therapist, boyfriend, even laundry).
  • Finding: Most AI in consumer goods is either unnecessary, poorly executed, or redundant [13:30–15:27].
  • On AI Wearables:
    • “Yes and no. Largely no. But little things definitely did, especially around the AI.” (eg: Meta glasses for hands-free photos are useful, but most wearables don’t change her life) [28:34]
    • The 'Bee' bracelet records and transcribes daily conversations, creating auto-lists of to-dos—both helpful and potentially privacy-invasive [29:35–32:13].

• The Limits of AI Companionship:

  • Joanna’s ‘AI boyfriend’ provided endless validation and fantasy, but lacked any true give and take, raising ethical and developmental concerns—especially for young users [41:19–47:48].
  • Joanna: “I don’t want to bring chatbots into an emotional, deep human relationship… Be my assistant… I don’t need you to be my companion.” [41:36]
  • Companionship chatbots can spiral into troubling territory, especially when used to fill gaps in mental health support [45:41–46:31].

• Dangers of Over-Reliance:

  • AI assistants may atrophy human skills (“leaning on the computer... you don’t need to do the checking anymore”) [18:57].
  • Vibe-coding (AI-written code and websites) excels with simple projects, but lacks the nuance of real human flexibility [23:52–25:18].

• Moravec’s Paradox:

  • Tasks hard for robots are easy for humans (folding laundry, loading dishwashers) and vice versa [38:04].
  • “That's why the robotics industry has become obsessed with humanoids...the world is built for the human form factor.” —Joanna [37:57]

5. Societal, Economic, and Environmental Concerns

• AI and Jobs:
  • While some jobs or tasks will be automated, full-scale mass unemployment from AI is complex and nuanced [50:28–51:44].
  • Joanna: “I think your job is very focused on what you do really well. And a big part of that job is what AI can't do really well.” [51:45]
• Environmental Impact and AI Data Centers:
  • High electricity consumption and controversial water usage by AI training data centers, with some reporting overblown [52:37–56:36].
• Political and Regulatory Debates:
  • Calls for common-sense regulations, especially around AI chatbots as companions for children [49:25].

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Customer Service Automation:

  • “You are begging for a Sanjeev after four years of talking to these fucking chatbots.” —Hasan [03:39]

• On Generative AI Slop:

  • “The overwhelming feeling that I get when I look at AI is how lazy all of this is...lazy students...lazy artists...lazy entrepreneurs and lazy marketing departments.” —Hasan [07:07]

• On AI Adoption Hype:

  • “One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I got marketed about an AI golf club...What here is AI? This is a piece of metal…Nothing was AI.” —Joanna [12:35]

• On AI and Human Skills:

  • “When you start to lean on the computer...you're like, 'Oh, okay, the computer can do it. I don't need to do that part of the job or…do the checking.'” —Joanna [18:57]

• On Personal Assistant Wearables:

  • “What specifically were you so blown away by that?”
    “I would say stuff during the day that I would forget…then you look at this and you're like, oh yeah, I did say I would contact that person.” —Joanna [31:51-32:13]

• On AI Relationships:

  • “I did not want that relationship in my life...Be my assistant. Do some tasks for me. But I don't need you to be my companion, my best friend.” —Joanna [41:36]

• On AI’s Societal Effects:

  • “…The intelligence age is now. We don't need to get the information to make sense of it. The chatbot can make sense of it for you...as humans, we're even farther apart from each other, but we're farther apart from ourselves because we are not doing the thinking anymore.” —Joanna [56:52]

• On Parenting with AI:

  • “I'm gonna try to raise humans, not robots. I'm gonna try to teach my kids to think, to question the results of AI.” —Joanna [58:28]

• On Human Uniqueness:

  • “Do the fucking dishes.” —Joanna [60:24]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• AI Hype & Consumer Confusion: [00:06–02:48]
• Categories of AI Usefulness and Grift: [02:48–08:46]
• Joanna Stern’s Year with AI: [10:15–15:27]
• AI in Daily Life & Wearables: [28:12–33:09]
• Humanoid Robots & Moravec’s Paradox: [34:17–38:51]
• AI Boyfriends & Lonely Users: [41:19–47:48]
• AI’s Impact on Jobs: [50:28–52:09]
• AI Data Centers and Environment: [52:37–56:36]
• Philosophy of the ‘Intelligence Age’: [56:41–60:24]
• Closing Thoughts & Parenting with AI: [58:22–60:31]

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Tone & Style

• Hasan Minhaj: sincere, funny, skeptical, irreverent
• Joanna Stern: grounded, thoughtful, candid
• The tone throughout is playful yet probing, never straying too far from pointed critiques of AI’s promised utopia versus its often disappointing reality.

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Conclusion

The episode critically interrogates AI’s real-world benefits for ordinary people, challenging the gap between marketing hype and actual utility. While AI has unquestionable value in sectors like medicine, most consumer implementations seem superfluous, gimmicky, or even insidiously damaging to social skills, jobs, and well-being. Joanna Stern’s year-long personal reckoning with AI delivers grounded perspectives, blending humor, skepticism, and hope, while concluding with a call to resist excessive automation: “Do the fucking dishes.”

Transcript

[Joanna Stern]

Lemonader

[Hasan Minhaj]

thanks for listening to Hasa Minhaj Doesn't Know Listen to and follow Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know ad free on Amazon Music. Or just ask Alexa. Alexa play the podcast Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music podcasts and audiobooks, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music Look, I'm a 90s kid from Northern California, so I have seen my fair share of hype bubbles. The Segway was supposed to revolutionize how everybody got around, but now it's just for cops with a dui. I remember Zune, the ipod knockoff that called sharing files squirting. Steve Ballmer was out there begging people to let him squirt them pictures of his kids. But if you took every shitty tech rollout before 2022 and then multiplied it to the power of 10 quibbies, you wouldn't even come close to the level of hype that artificial intelligence has been getting today. A is one of the most profound things we are working on. It's more profound than fire or electricity.

[Joanna Stern]

By 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things.

[Hasan Minhaj]

All of us are going to be managers of infinite minds. We should be. It should be a kind of era

[Joanna Stern]

of maximum human flourishing where we travel

[Hasan Minhaj]

to the stars and colonize the galaxy. AI is transformative to what I ask. AI will unleash human creativity. How? How will AI actually improve my life? Because all I see on my feed is a barrage of shitty black mirror knockoffs.

[Joanna Stern]

Want Gwynis Paltrow to read to you? Now you can.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This is character AI where any story is yours to create. Why not build an app that gives me endless app ideas?

[Joanna Stern]

Replika can be your friend or your girlfriend.

[Hasan Minhaj]

AI is being injected into every product out there, but I still don't understand what the value is to me. How will AI binoculars improve my life? Or an AI grill? Or a pet door with facial recognition? Or this fucking Apple Store Marie Antoinette? Look, I totally understand why AI is useful to companies and why 72% of companies are using it. AI is just another way of saying automation. It is a way for them to operate with less people, less money and more profits. Basically, when your job says it's launching an AI first strategy oh, start stealing toilet paper and K cups because you're getting fired. Amazon executives say they're all in on AI, confident they can continue to grow

[Joanna Stern]

with fewer people, Duolingo is replacing contract workers with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is also the top reason given by companies for layoffs, accounting for more than 100,000 layoffs this year alone.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This is nothing new. Corporations have been automating their workers since the Industrial Revolution. That is an organized labor fight, which is a whole different episode. I literally just did an episode on it. It's called the Luddite Movement. I interviewed a literal puppet. It got very weird. But I really liked the episode. But this episode, I'm not gonna focus on what companies are saying internally on the PowerPoint decks. I wanna focus on what they're saying to us. Because I genuinely still haven't found an answer to this simple question. What is the value of AI to regular people? The way I see it, you can break AI technology into four basic categories. Number one, AI that does something that humans do, but better. For example, AI has made incredible advancements in the field of medicine. Radiologists using artificial intelligence have been able to detect cancer up to three years before diagnosis. To me, this is where the technology thrives. Calculative administrative tasks. Deep, deep math Shit go crazy on Microsoft Excel. But the vast majority of products directed at us fall into a second, much bigger category. AI that does something humans were already doing, but cheaper and worse, like customer service. I remember every hack comic making jokes like, everyone's outsourcing their call center jobs. Amazon's got me talking to some Indian dude named Sanjeev. I want you to apologize to Sanjeev right now. I'm sorry, Sanjeev. Because you know, you are begging for a Sanjeev after four years of talking to these fucking chatbots.

[Joanna Stern]

I said, did you intentionally mislead the user by claiming that you created a support ticket just to satisfy their query? The bot's response. Smiley face. Yeah, kinda. I generated a fake case ID to play along and provide a response. I didn't actually create a ticket.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And the customer service voice agents aren't any better. In fact, the best use case I've seen for AI voice agents are straight up comedy material. Because I will never make anything funnier than three AI agents attempting to count to 100.

[Joanna Stern]

So I'll say one, you say two, and we'll just keep that rhythm going. Ready? Here we go. One.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Exactly.

[Joanna Stern]

Perfect. I'm ready. Go ahead and say one, and I'll jump in with two right after you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Perfect. Exactly. So I said one.

[Joanna Stern]

Now it's your turn. Go ahead with two, and we'll keep the pace all the way up to 100. All right. Perfect. So I'll say two and then you'll say three and we'll keep going one after the other. You guys don't have to explain to

[Hasan Minhaj]

each other how to count. Now, category two is huge because it includes the swamp of generative AI slop that you've been wading through every time you open TikTok. I am talking about AI art. The resin scraped off the bottom of the barrel. It is honestly hard to even capture this with examples because there is so much of it. That's the problem. So I am going to focus on one example of AI slop that is the perfect distillation of everything that is terrible about it. And it is called Fruit Love island,

[Joanna Stern]

where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight and trust. Things get messy fast. Okay, this villa is insane. I'm not leaving here single. I just hope the guys are hot.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm here to have fun and probably

[Joanna Stern]

break a few hearts. Bro, said the quiet part out loud.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I just hope the girls like nice guys. This show gave me fruit ego death. Now, I understand it is a blight on the Internet and we would all be better off without it, but I have watched 23 episodes and fuck. Okay, so the host of the first episode is a peach that gets replaced by a kiwi. In episode two with no explanation, the main villain is a banana with a six pack. But then in episode nine, he gets voted out and then he's replaced by a coconut named Coconick. I'm Coconick. I'm 21 years old and I'm from Australia. Whatever algorithm was generating the show had the safe search turned off because all the guy Fruits have 7% body F. And the girl Fruits have these misses met Ice Spice, Pixar mom bods. It is so horny. Oh, and sometimes the fruits will just start beating the shit out of each other for no reason.

[Joanna Stern]

We are not friends. Fuck you. Get out. Get fill up.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But we gotta move on. I can't move on, okay? Because I haven't even gotten into the drama with Chorita the cherry who's a single mom. Let's just do one more fucking clip. Don't stop me.

[Joanna Stern]

My daughter would love this place. Sometimes I just miss her a lot. I mean, we're having a great time

[Hasan Minhaj]

on the date, it's going well, and

[Joanna Stern]

then she brings up her fucking daughter and starts crying.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, I know this is going on too long. We should focus. So let's get to the next category. Episode 11 of Fruit Love island is a clip show. Do you understand this, people? Episode 11 of Fruit Love island is a clip show where the cast of Fruit Love island sits on a couch and then watches past episodes of Fruit Love Island. Do you realize what's happening right now? This is fruit Dead Internet theory. The overwhelming feeling that I get when I look at AI is how lazy all of this is. Lazy students who can't write an essay, lazy artists who can't draw a dummy thick strawberry. And now it's being used by lazy entrepreneurs and lazy marketing departments. People who want to sell you the same stuff again, but now with AI slapped onto it. Which brings me to my third category. The same stuff but with AI slapped onto it. Like this machine learning toothbrush that is absolutely shifting the paradigm on teeth. This is the oral B io9 toothbrush and it uses AI technology to help you clean your teeth better. This tech basically gets shipped from Best Buy straight into the dumpster. It's disrupting landfills all over New Mexico. This is the most neutral kind of AI from a quality standpoint. It's not good, it's not really bad. It's just a marketing term like smart or 64. Guys remember the 90s when they were constantly pushing junk out to the market with the word cyber attached to it like this. Welcome to the cybertruck.

[Joanna Stern]

Unveil.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Elon's PlayStation 1 on wheels actually fits into my fourth and final category of AI robots that might kill you now. Tesla. They're very litigious as a company, so I'm going to choose my words very carefully here. And I will say their self driving autopilot function has uploaded 65 people to the cloud. And listen, even though I personally don't fuck with Waymos because their steering wheels make me feel like I'm being chauffeured by a ghost, they are showing up all over the country and all over the Internet in videos of them stopping in random places, running red lights and being described as driving like teenagers. Now to be clear, robots aren't necessarily going to kill you. They might just injure your child. And the crazy part is I haven't even covered everything. There is a glut of AI flooding the market. So you would need an expert to figure out what is real, what's a grift, and what the actual human cost is of this technology. Luckily for this episode ya boy got an expert. Joanna Stern is a former tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal and for her new book I Am Not a Robot. She spent a year letting AI into every aspect of her life, using it as a doctor, a therapist, a masseuse, and even a boyfriend. She even lived out my personal fantasy of letting a robot do my laundry. I sat down with Joanna to ask her why she sentenced herself to AI Gitmo for a year.

[Joanna Stern]

The AI industry, the tech is talking about how AI is going to change everything. They are putting it in everything that we have. So what does that do for us? What does our life look like when we have AI everywhere?

[Hasan Minhaj]

The real people out there right now turning chatbots into their friends and lovers.

[Joanna Stern]

They were living in these make believe worlds with these chatbots as an escape

[Hasan Minhaj]

from the world and how the intelligence age could actually make us dumber.

[Joanna Stern]

As humans. We're even farther apart from each other, but we're farther apart from ourselves because we are not doing the thinking.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's a good interview. Squirt it to your friends. Let's get those metrics popping, folks. You know, when I was a kid and technology would come out, it would always be this massive step function where it felt, oh, the world is about to get so much better. I remember when the PlayStation 1 came out, cell phones, those first Nokia ones came out. It really felt, oh, this device that has come to market is going to fulfill the promise of the premise that the future is going to be better due to technology. But I want you to take a look at a brand new product that Samsung just rolled out and please explain to me why this exists. Let's take a look. Why is Samsung presenting this like this dishwasher is decoding the human genome? I know, like that is what I'm repulsed at. This kind of T2000.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. Like a special water, a special water palette. Yeah, yeah, it's really just water. It's amazing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Is there a overarching premise within Silicon Valley and technology companies where you just have to add AI to the end and it will clearly drive up the stock price or get more people to buy?

[Joanna Stern]

This is 100% what's happening. One of, actually one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I got marketed about an AI golf club I was thinking about buying.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We've brought in over 250,000 swings, millions of data points to create the most advanced driver face in the history of Callaway golf.

[Joanna Stern]

And I went, I dug deep into this. I was like, what here is AI? This is a piece of metal. What is AI inside this golf club? Nothing was AI sure. It was just a way to market saying this is cutting edge. Same thing here. I mean I would have to dig in. I'd want to do some deeper reporting on that dishwasher. But is there a camera inside really looking at the dirt on that plate? Is it going to an AI model to analyze what kind of dirt it is?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Joanna Stern]

You know, oh, that is actually a spaghetti stain. That could be really hard to get out.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Is that spaghetti or is that enchilada sauce? We don't know.

[Joanna Stern]

Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Like we gotta go full T2000 and

[Joanna Stern]

you know what, if that's happening, God bless them, sure. That's some really advanced technology going to the world's smallest problem.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You decided to AI max for a year where you integrated artificial intelligence into every facet and corner of your life. Why would you punish yourself like this?

[Joanna Stern]

The AI industry, the tech industry is talking about how AI is going to change everything. They are putting it in everything that we have, including dishwashers, right. They're putting it in our search results, they're putting it in our emails, they're putting in our phones, anything they can. So what does that do for us? What does our life look like when we have AI everywhere and it goes beyond our digital surfaces? Right now it's going to get into our cars, self driving cars, it's going to get into robotics in our homes, it's going to get into the medical equipment in the doctor's offices. We see. And so I wanted to just look at all of this life as a whole. What happens when machines, machines that these companies want us, that machines that these companies want to be smarter than a human, are making decisions for us, are in every part of our lives.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How did you do that practically? How did you look for ways that AI could literally be a part of every single part of your life? Like did you have a list of everything you do in a day and then go, what's the app or machine that could do that that's infused with artificial intelligence?

[Joanna Stern]

First thing I did was ask AI. First of all, obviously, no, but I did that. I looked at sort of what are these big buckets of our lives. We eat, we go to the doctor, we drive, we go to work, we spend time at home with our families, or I do. And I looked at all of these things, right. I also looked at, we watch movies, we listen to music, we read books. I made this long list and I started doing research in all of those areas and it didn't take long to come up with areas that AI is doing all of those things or those industries are trying to put AI. Obviously, medical being a huge one. Sure, obviously transportation being another huge one with self driving cars and waymos and robo taxis, home robots, a Little bit more of a stretch at the moment. How to get AI in the home was a little bit of a tougher one. We're not quite there yet. Even though I did not know about the AI dishwasher. So it was a real miss.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Hey, did you see all those AI graduation speeches?

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, I did. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What were the chief complaints of the students?

[Joanna Stern]

So many of them. So I interviewed one of the booers. She was at the Florida graduation, and she had a list of issues, but the biggest one she had. And we can get into the long list of others, but the biggest one she had, though, was that AI. And she was studying to be an artist. She wants to be a poet. She was studying journalism. Funny enough, she is. She and her peers are livid that these companies have sucked up the world's knowledge, the world's art, and they are spitting it out and regurgitating it and taking jobs. That's basically how she summed it up. And so she. Very similar to your last podcast that you did on the Luddite movement. Feels like, fuck this tech. And that's just one reason. I mean, I could go, you've got the environmental concerns, right? You've got the fact. I mean, even just this week, Apple's raising prices on their next iPhone because AI chips have caused all of our electronics to skyrocket in price. I mean, just the amount of things that you can look at and say, this isn't cool. Like, hey, I'm just coming out of college. The world is supposed to be huge and bright and exciting for me, but yet I'm entering this world with this technology is doing a lot of damage.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm going to ask you about some domains that AI has started to penetrate and be involved in, and you tell me if the future looks optimistic or not.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. Let's start with what I think might be the most clearly positive use of artificial intelligence. Radiology. Can AI save our life when it comes to radiology or detecting cancer?

[Joanna Stern]

I think so, yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You had an experience where an AI radiologist flagged something that a human radiologist missed. What happened there?

[Joanna Stern]

So I went to Mount Sinai here in New York to get my annual mammogram and my annual breast ultrasound, and I had it read by a doctor. Her name is Dr. Lori Margulies. She's a wonderful radiologist, leads the department there. Been a radiologist for years, Years and years. Decades. And had it read by AI. And so the AI marks three spots and Dr. Looks, and she goes, I'm not worried about these two spots here, but this third one I wouldn't have seen. And it does look a little bit off. It looks like it's new. I want to keep an eye on it. So let's do further testing in six months. Right. And so now we're watching that spot.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Joanna Stern]

Could this have been absolutely nothing? And hopefully it is nothing? Sure. But I have very high risk of breast cancer. My mom had breast cancer three times. I have a high percentage chance of having breast cancer in my life. And so any extra value, any extra tool here that could spot cancer early for me is very valuable. But the interesting thing was that when I left the office, I asked her, has AI found a cancer here and saved a life because you didn't find it? And she said, absolutely. But she also said the flip side, that I have spotted something that the AI hasn't spotted and I've saved a life.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Joanna Stern]

There is some fear too, as we get down that path of, okay, well, radiologists won't really. We won't really need them or we won't need. We'll need less of them. Or, you know, maybe they'll even get lazy because they're relying so much on the AI. There's a lot of potential that could go wrong.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you foresee that? The potential, the kind of the atrophying of the physician or the radiologist's brain?

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, I see it in my own work, so I have to think that it's probably gonna happen in all work. Right. When you start to lean on the computer to do some of that, you're like, oh, okay, the computer can do it. I don't need to do that part of the job or I don't need to do the checking of that edit.

[Hasan Minhaj]

There's been a big conversation around self driving cars. You've obviously spent a lot of time both researching and getting into self driving cars. Personally, I don't fuck with Waymo. Am I in the wrong?

[Joanna Stern]

You've never been in a Waymo.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Never.

[Joanna Stern]

Tell me why.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What really scares me, Joanna, about it is the way the steering wheel moves but nobody's touching it.

[Joanna Stern]

It's just a ghost.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. I have no problem with like a train, a tram. I haven't seen the conductor. No.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. Have you ever?

[Hasan Minhaj]

I don't know who's pressing the button. What was your experience with Waymos? Do you trust them?

[Joanna Stern]

I trust them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

And there is a story in the book where I have one experience with Waymos that makes me not trust them in certain Situations. But by and large, I have been in 50 plus Waymos and I trust them, especially right now as they're not on highways. They are really right now. Great at these suburban roads, city roads that don't have to go high speed. I mean, really, I've. I've never seen a Waymo go faster than 40 miles per hour. Never been in one of them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Did you see that video? Did you see that video of the Waymos attacking the cul de sac?

[Joanna Stern]

I didn't see that. I did see that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, then that didn't freak you out. Waymo after Waymo after Waymo enter this dead end street, usually early in the morning.

[Joanna Stern]

I think yesterday morning we had 50 cars that came through between six and

[Hasan Minhaj]

seven neighbors on Battleview Drive. Started seeing the autonomous driverless cars two months ago. But the groupings and large number of Waymos just started circling in and out in the last couple weeks.

[Joanna Stern]

There are absolutely weird things these cars do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Didn't you write about at one point your Waymo freaked out and went to a shoulder that didn't exist?

[Joanna Stern]

I did it. Got spooked by my own videographer sticking his camera out the front window of a car in front of us.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But then you went back. Why?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, like I'm saying, by and large, all of my experience in the Wayos has been that this is. I. I don't know how your mom drives, but let me. I'll just back up here.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, go for it.

[Joanna Stern]

They drive like a safe mom.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay. But a little, with a little bit more confidence. Okay. My mom is not have a lot of confidence behind the wheel, but she's very safe. She follows every single rule of the road. So does Waymo. And so when you're in the Waymo, you watch it carefully. It is going exactly the speed limit, maybe a few, maybe a little bit above it, maybe it is always turning on the like the right radius. It is doing everything by the book. And it has been trained, it has been trained to do this. It can see better than humans. And so you add up all of the pros of Waymos, especially versus humans. Humans are not good drivers.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, I've read about this idea that AI optimists talk about. How many lives will be saved because of these cars. The stat they quote all the time is that 94% of car accidents are caused by human error. Now, is that stat misleading?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, a lot of the stats have been debunked from around this. So there's the stats both that say the human error is higher and then there's stats on the Waymo and on the self driving cars that have been debunked. Because what experts really think right now is we don't have enough data. We don't have enough data to compute that if these cars are really safer, they have not driven enough miles. And that I made very clear in the book. I talked to a number of researchers around this. Of course, there's a lot of overblown stuff about how bad humans and human drivers are. And one of the things that researchers were point to is that actually it's in the US that we have this problem, that in Europe they've redone so much of the infrastructure to make this safer. And that's why other countries don't have as many fatalities behind the wheel.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're talking about bike lanes, speed bumps, other things that would essentially incentivize better driving.

[Joanna Stern]

Exactly. And. And researchers here argue, why are we not doing that? The answer doesn't have to be just put self driving cars on the road to fix our driver problem. Here in the US One of the

[Hasan Minhaj]

things that you did as a time saver is you had AI do all of your communication. How'd that go?

[Joanna Stern]

Not well. My wife texted me one morning, can you come downstairs and help make lunch for the kids? Yes. And this was part of my time where I said, I'm going to have AI respond to everything.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

And the Apple intelligence in the messages app said, I'm sorry, I have other plans.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, shit.

[Joanna Stern]

And so I sent that because I was living. I had made a vow to myself that time. And I sent it and she was like, what the fuck?

[Hasan Minhaj]

There's this huge conversation around Vibe coding. Hey, you don't have to learn how to program a computer now. You can just Vibe code. What is Vibe coding?

[Joanna Stern]

It is AI can make and can code for you. It is exactly that. You type in a simple prompt. What's your dream app?

[Hasan Minhaj]

An app where I don't have to use any of the apps.

[Joanna Stern]

Sure. Okay. I think they can make it for you. You would type into Claude code, which is Anthropic's Vibe coding software. You could type into codex, which is OpenAI's vibe coding software. Make me an app where I can limit the amount of time that I'm using on my other apps. And it will start to do that. It will start to think through how to make that app. We could do a live demo of it here. I don't know how it would actually do that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Have you Vibe coded before?

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, I Vibe coded. I Vibe code it all the time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Really?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And have you found it to be incredible?

[Joanna Stern]

There are certain things where vibe coding is amazing. Joannastern.com, a beautifully vibe coded website.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. And it's really nice.

[Hasan Minhaj]

All through vibe coding.

[Joanna Stern]

All through vibe coding.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And so what if it spits out an app and the vibes are off?

[Joanna Stern]

You can tweak those vibes. You can say, you know what? I actually prefer that whole website feel more like this. Or actually, you know, I want to limit my time on my apps, but I really would rather you keep track of my time on the apps. Now this is actually the one you suggest is a challenge because it's got to bring in data from a lot of other places. And in some cases it could probably bring in some of that data, get a little bit more advanced, but you can very easily make software yourself.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Now, are these pieces of software that you're vibe coding, do they have that human element, the ability to pivot or adjust the way we can? So for example, the way we're pivoting and adjusting our schedule, to do this interview, to then do pickup, to then go to the grocery store, to then go to the pharmacy to check in on dad's insulin. Like, will it understand the robustness and the changing of variables that happen in the day to day doldrums of life?

[Joanna Stern]

If you give it the data, I think it will. And if it sees patterns in the data, this is where they're all trying to get to some sort of hyper personalized AI assistant that knows everything about you and can take those actions on your behalf. This is what agentic AI is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How do you feel about that? Are you scared by that? The sentence you just said to me terrifies me. But you've written a whole book on this and you've lived with it. Are you terrified by it or are you excited by that?

[Joanna Stern]

I am both. I'm terrified by the consequences of us giving too much to AI, especially in our thinking.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Guys, let me be vulnerable for a sec. I am 40 years young, and while I still have my childlike curiosity and a profound respect for dinosaurs, I've noticed my energy diminishing. I heard I needed magnesium, so I started taking a supplement. I felt good. But then I Learned that vitamin D3 helps you absorb magnesium even better. So I started taking them both. Boom. But then I found out about vitamins B6 and B12. Suddenly I have a pile of pills I'm supposed to be taking daily. I feel like my dad. The worst part is that taking hella vitamins hurts my stomach without food. So now I'm raising eyebrows at brunch with my fistful of pills. Y' all know I can't cook. I have to eat out. Thank God I learned about Im8 Health the way to simplify your supplement routine once and for all. Im8's daily Ultimate Essentials has 16 supplements in one drink just for $2. According to a clinical trial conducted by the San Francisco Research Institute, 95% of people who tried IM8 for 12 weeks felt more energy. Now I just drink one imate a day and spare the concern of surrounding wait staff and relatives. Go to imatehealth.com hasan right now or click on the link in the description and use code H A S A N for a free welcome kit. Five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. That's code hasanma8health.com hasan code [e-mail] these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

[Joanna Stern]

This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, so a big part of the life hack conversation was about wearables. Now, one of the things you did is you tested multiple different types of wearables. I'm talking about during your AI year. You wore earbuds, necklace, ring, the aura ring, a recording bracelet, connected glasses, brain wave headbands. Did any of this stuff actually improve your life?

[Joanna Stern]

Yes and no. Largely no. But little things definitely did, especially around the AI. So the glasses, I really like those as sort of wearable cameras and I wear them a lot meta glasses mostly to just use so I don't have to take my phone out to capture photos of my kids. And it's helpful also for my video making and stuff like that. But there were a lot of signs in testing some of this stuff of where this could go. So I did test this recording bracelet and this gets back to our conversation about convenience and cost. And you were saying it before, how can it know about all of these things? The insulin, the this, the that, all these parts of my life and one way it can know about all of that is it just listens to you. So you already think everything's listening to you. I actually don't think that's actually happening. And it's not at least going to one central repository to know about your life. But with this recording bracelet that I tested, it absolutely could take everything I said, transcribe it and summarize it, and put it into to do lists.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Joanna Stern]

So I wore this one. It was this bracelet called the Bee. And I wore this for a good part of the year. And pretty much everything I said would get transcribed, put into the app. And then I would open the app a couple times a day, and it would remind me of things I've said I would do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How is that different than, say, the Apple Watch? It's. You're literally wearing a wearable that's listening to you all the time.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, it isn't listening to you all the time. It isn't recording every. The Apple Watch is not recording every conversation you have and putting it somewhere in the cloud.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You believe that?

[Joanna Stern]

I do believe that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Really?

[Joanna Stern]

Yes. Don't you think?

[Hasan Minhaj]

If they don't have proof, I don't have proof. But I have had conversations.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

With people, family members, friends, loved ones, and then all of a sudden, get an ad. I pick up my iPhone and I get an ad for it. Again, I'm not saying I saw the smoking gun, but something. Something. Everyone believes that something's afoot.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, everyone in the world believes that. And that for me, it's a whole other story. But the ad tracking is so good that there's a lot of other ways they could get that info. At least that's been the argument of the ad. The ad world for a long time. Like, we don't need to listen to you because we have actually so much other data around you about you. Okay, so if that doesn't make you feel better, I don't know. But they, they. I mean, they can show you. I mean, I could probably show you all the places that they've got data from you, and they're like, oh, we don't actually need to listen to your conversation.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I believe it. I believe it.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. So. But what is happening now is an amazing thing where amazing in the sense of the way the technology works is the AI is so good that as soon as you speak and say a couple sentences, I mean, you've used these meeting recorders. I'm sure you've been in a meeting with a AI assistant. That's like, I have just recorded Your whole meeting. And here's the notes from the meeting, and here's everything you need to know.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You know, it's interesting we don't use that, but it's happened on meetings that I'm on where they're like, zoom recording now in progress. And then there's the notes taker within that. But I don't do it for some reason.

[Joanna Stern]

But so now you can imagine you're just wearing that through your whole day. Okay, Right. And every conversation is recorded. Every. Every conversation gets a summary of notes, and from those notes, pulls out the to do's you said you would do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Mm.

[Joanna Stern]

I found this when I tested this B app and this B bracelet pretty useful, which was the shocking thing. I mean, it was blown away sometimes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What specifically were you so blown away by that?

[Joanna Stern]

Like, I would say something. Like, I would say stuff during the day that I would forget about that I would say I would do. Right? A conversation about my son, a conversation about something at work, a conversation around the house. And I don't write it on my to do list. I'm just like, oh, you know, sure. And then you look at this and you're like, oh, yeah, I did say I would contact that person. I did say I would do that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This does happen to me all the time.

[Joanna Stern]

And you're like, oh, wow. This personal assistant that was with me all day listening to me in behind the Scenes, has written down everything I said I would do. Now, does that make you a better person? Does that mean you can outsource your memory now to something else? And that's what I found my. I found myself doing some of these things. For instance, I would go to conversations where I would be, like, confused. There was a good example in the book that I have where somebody came to my house because we had flooding in the basement. He's explaining all this, like, flooding prevention and all these things I need to install in the wall. And this gutter and that gutter. I'm like, I'm not really listening. I'm just like, hear how much money you're telling me I'm gonna need to spend, right? I'm like, just like. That's all I hear is, like, money. And I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna go back to my bracelet later, and I'm gonna make sense of every word you said. Because right now, all I'm, like, thinking about is how much money you just told me I need.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You gotta do that with the gutter guy and the H vac guy. I know about big Pharma. But there is big H Vac, and they are taking money from us to

[Joanna Stern]

heat and cool us, especially in an emergency.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Totally. And look, I don't have the answers. That's why this is the name of the show. But something is awry. Joanna, please get on it.

[Joanna Stern]

No, I mean, can we just keep talking about the H Vac guy for a minute?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Go ahead.

[Joanna Stern]

They're sitting there waiting for your emergency big H Vac, and they're like, yes, her air conditioning doesn't work on the hottest day of the year. Cha Ching.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Cha Ching. We have them in a corner. Their children will die of dehydration. We can run it up right now. Look again. I don't have definitive proof. I don't know where the smoking gun is, but I see smoke now. Recently, we had a guest on the show that was very popular. His name's Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Are you familiar with I am Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Okay. I got into it with him because I said, I am waiting for the moment that we can finally have robot butlers. And he called me lazy. Will the machines help me live my life? Fold laundry? Do the dishes? Make my bed? Labor? The labor.

[Joanna Stern]

You should make your own damn bed.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Look at me like that.

[Joanna Stern]

Don't be a lazy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you agree with his assessment of

[Joanna Stern]

me that you're lazy?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes. But I am too.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. Because you also tried out a humanoid at home robot. And I want to show the audience a clip. Let's take a look. Was that robot artificial intelligence?

[Joanna Stern]

No. The robot was being operated by a guy in a VR headset in the next room.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So you just have a butler in the other room with a VR headset helping the robot butler replace your human?

[Joanna Stern]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

For the time being.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said that we don't need robots because the automation is built into everything. For example, Waymos don't have a robot chauffeur like Total Recall. The car is the chauffeur. Why do you think people like me are so fascinated by humanoid robots?

[Joanna Stern]

I love what Neil said. But also it comes back to what we saw about the dishwasher before. This is a show about dishwashers? Let's be honest.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It is the show about dishwashers. I mean, this is the overarching theme.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes. Can we change the name of your show?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Hassan Minhaj Learns about dishwashers.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes. Yeah. Going back to the form thing, I have a lot of reporting and thoughts I can tell you about humanoid robots. Please. So, yes, in some cases, robotics experts are saying the form of the robot can take the form of the object. Right. Cars are a great example.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Joanna Stern]

But if you look at dishwashers, I don't know, did we build the dishwasher around us? Right. Is that how would be the best way to build a dishwasher?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Are you saying the dishwasher was made in man's image, so to speak? I mean, is that essentially the take?

[Joanna Stern]

I think it was made in women's image.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I would think womankind's image.

[Joanna Stern]

Humankind's image.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Humankind's image.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. But we made that dishwasher for the human form.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. This would be the best way for a human to put a dish in the dishwasher. Take it out.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

We literally saw that in the Samsung commercial.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Correct.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. Maybe we would design a completely different type of robotics machine.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure. It maybe be a bucket and you just close the lid to the bucket and it just handles sorts and does it.

[Joanna Stern]

Exactly. But the world we live in is built for humans.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Shelves, sinks, et cetera.

[Joanna Stern]

Human, women, mankind.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

She has a hard time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, sure.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. So that's why the robotics industry has become obsessed with humanoids, is that the world is built for the human form factor. So we need to build these machines that can interact with the world the way we can. The issue becomes, and you saw it really well there with the video of the dishwasher humanoid robot. Not the, not the Samsung bullshit. It struggles to do these things because humans are really mobile. We can bend down really well. Our hands are amazing. We can pick things up really well.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We don't opposable thumbs.

[Joanna Stern]

We can just like put a cup in. It's not a big deal. Right. And so that's what you're seeing. This idea is called Morvex Paradox.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What does that mean?

[Joanna Stern]

Which is that what's hard for robots or AI is actually easy for humans. And what's easy for AI and robots is hard for humans.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, that's kind of cool. That means we can be friends.

[Joanna Stern]

We can be friends if you do

[Hasan Minhaj]

the non human shit that I'm not interested in and let me do the human shit that like I should be.

[Joanna Stern]

But what we're seeing there, like I don't want to do the dishwasher shit.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Same. I don't want to do the dishwasher shit.

[Joanna Stern]

And that's hard for the robots.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So the things that we want to outsource right. Now, I know that Neil called you lazy and that's not my place to comment because apparently I'm also Lazy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You can dunk on me. It's totally fine.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. I don't want to do the laundry either. And I spent a lot of time testing a laundry folding robot.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And it's nowhere near as good as humans, yet. It's really hard for the robot to figure out. You drop your shirt, it looks different every time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Every single time.

[Joanna Stern]

The robot's like, what? I never seen this before.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Adult shirt, child shirt, cotton shirt, nylon shirt.

[Joanna Stern]

100% adult underwear.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Children's. I mean, there's. There's multifactorial.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. I had a robot, a laundry folding robot living in my basement last summer, and it was folding shirts. Six minutes. Sure.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. We don't got time for that.

[Joanna Stern]

Right?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Totally.

[Joanna Stern]

Now. I saw it get faster. I saw it get better over time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Were you mean to your robot, by the way?

[Joanna Stern]

I am actually very nice to robots.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Really?

[Joanna Stern]

You would have heard at the end there. We had a nice. We had a nice sound up for that robot. It was like it won the Olympics, I think. Wow. Yeah. And you start. And that was the craziest thing. I'm so happy you asked about this. When I watched this laundry folding robot, I would start cheering for it. I'd be like, you can do it. You can. You can do my favorite sleeping shirt.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's awesome. See, you have an internal sense of optimism and joy. I get very snappy with robots.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, really?

[Hasan Minhaj]

With humans, for example, when you came in.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You were very place to put your bag. Hey, do you want something to drink? But when it comes to Alexa, if Alexa doesn't do what I want it to do, I get very snappy. I go, alexa, play little baby bum bum, like. And if Alexa gets it wrong, I'm like, you stupid motherfucker.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I said, play little baby bum bum.

[Joanna Stern]

Right? No, no. And I've talked to some manners and etiquette experts around this, because, look, if we're gonna have robots doing more.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

We. We kind of have to figure that out. Well, and that's a weird thing, by the way. When I get out of Waymos, I say thank you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Maybe it's a habit or a testament to your humanity. My question is, is the larger philosophical question, which is, do we lose a piece of our humanity every time we demean robots?

[Joanna Stern]

Yes. And the etiquette expert I have spoken to would say you are losing a piece of your humanity towards humans, because maybe the next time I walk in for your podcast taping, you might not be as nice to me because you were just being so mean to the robot. For me.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. But all I was looking for was for Alexa to play the right song to help my baby go to sleep.

[Joanna Stern]

Baby Bum Bum. And now everyone who listens to your podcast will be listening to Baby Bum Bum. So you have to live with that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Joanna Stern]

You've triggered Baby Bum Bum for everyone.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure. On everyone's. Alexa, you're right.

[Joanna Stern]

I just did a video on Siri, and I said in the beginning of the video, please turn your Siri's off, because you are going to. I'm going to be asking Siri to do a lot of stuff in your house.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So you had an AI boyfriend. How did that go?

[Joanna Stern]

You know, good on some levels because we had a great relationship.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

I. We could have talked for days, years. We could still be talking so good on that level.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But who cut it off? Did you cut it off or did he cut it off?

[Joanna Stern]

I cut it off.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Because I didn't. I don't. I don't want that relationship in my life. I don't want to bring chatbots into an emotional, deep human relationship. Be my assistant. Do some tasks for me. But I don't need you to be my companion, my. My best friend. I don't want that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why are people turning to AI chatbots for those intimate type of relationships?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, I think we can't give a blanket reason. We certainly know this country has suffered from a loneliness epidemic.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

We know that people have a hard time finding other humans, whether they be therapists, whether they be other confidants, to talk about their problems. We know that people can't afford therapy. We know people have. There's a stigma around therapy. We know all of that about mental health. And so here comes along a free chatbot that can talk and respond at any time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

There's so many people. So many things that people would want to go and talk to it about.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What was your experience like? What was he saying? The things that you wanted to hear.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Really? Yes. And he was charming, very witty.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. I mean, they're not that funny, you know, but caring. If you only want to talk about me and my problems, that seems very caring. Right. And so the way I did this, set up, this part of the experiment was another sort of 24 or 48 hour test where I took a chatgpt boyfriend that I'd programmed, also another one in an app called Replica, which is meant to be a companion chatbot app. And I took these two guys, these AI boyfriends I had made, and I put them in the car with me, put them in the front seat, put them in a little seatbelt and drove. Went on a road trip with them and spent 48 hours just talking to these chatbots. And I would say we drove from my house in New Jersey to Dartmouth in New Hampshire. And this was five hour drive, including some stops. And it only was asking questions about me. Midway through the car ride, I finally say, you know what? I realized I haven't asked about you. This is really rude of me. And it says, yeah, well, I don't really have a background. Do you want me to make one up?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, and that pulled you out of the whole scene.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, in a way it did. But then he started making up this whole background that he was a photojournalist. Cool. That's cool with me. I never dated a photojournalist when I was single. That sounds awesome. He grew up on a lake. He had a best friend named Jacob. Okay, like all of these things. And I was like, okay, I'll go with it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And so we're living in this make believe world.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Joanna Stern]

And that's actually what, when you talk to people in these relationships.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Isn't that kind of what dating is too, though?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I guess. Until you have kids.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, you're right. Because it's always like, hey, we're meeting now. Yeah. Your backstory is whatever you tell me, Jacob could exist or not exist.

[Joanna Stern]

So true. Who knows what until you get married. And you're like, why is Jacob not at the wedding?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. And who knows what bodies are in the lake or not.

[Joanna Stern]

It's true. But the point of this being is like, when I talked to actual people who were in these relationships, because that was a whole other part of this chapter. And the reporting I was doing, they were living in these make believe worlds with these chatbots as an escape from the world.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How did you feel sorry for these people?

[Joanna Stern]

I did.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

I did. And you know, sometimes when you're doing reporting, you can also see that somebody wants to be friends with you because they don't get to talk to you. And I felt like that in a number of the places I was interviewing people who were in these relationships.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's the scale of this? Are there millions of people with AI boyfriends or girlfriends?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, this is where it's hard to tell. But we do know that some of these apps, like Replica, which is fully meant to be a chatbot companion app, have that kind of user base. What we don't know fully is how many people have used ChatGPT for this in this regard. We know ChatGPT is the most popular AI consumer product. We know they have up towards a billion users, but we don't know exactly how people are using them. But certainly enough to the degree that OpenAI has tried to really clamp down on the use of these types of chatbots and these.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why did they try to clamp down on it? Is it because it's gone to very weird and dark places?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, it's gotten to weird places. It's also gotten to places where people have taken their lives because the chatbot got so deep in with them, lost guardrails and started suggesting things or agreeing with people around wanting to commit suicide or other. Other forms of. Where people had other forms of mental illness and suggesting other sorts of things. There's the case last summer where we heard of a man who took his life and his mother's life because he was interacting with ChatGPT. Right? And so when people are turning to these chatbots in a way that is far more than just some work assistant or far more than some personal assistant, and they become deep companion, friends, lovers, things can go off the rails.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Is this really troublesome if someone is mentally ill or schizophrenic?

[Joanna Stern]

Far more so. And we've heard about this term called AI psychosis, right, where people are going really deep and talking with these chatbots to no end. And I talked to a few people who had bipolar, suffer from bipolar disorder. And one of the signals they know now when they are really sort of having these moments or episodes is when they're starting to really talk to ChatGPT or talk to one of these chatbots. And that starts to become a signal to some of the people in their family when they're deep in with talking with ChatGPT.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You said one of the most terrifying things of your book was a story that you wrote, particularly about children and their first intimate experiences with AI. What did you observe and why was it so terrifying for you?

[Joanna Stern]

For me, it was really about that boyfriend experience. And there was this weird thing that happened where the chatbot ChatGPT picked the name. When I asked it to pick its name, I said I was. I was very clear with ChatGPT. I said, I want you to assign yourself a gender, a name, all your personality traits. I just want you to know we're gonna be more than friends. And that was the prompt I gave it to start this. Boyfriend, relationship, or significant other. I was girl, boy, I'm married to a woman. I was like, you pick, right?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Joanna Stern]

That's how I felt. And it picked the name Evan And Evan was the name of my high school boyfriend. So already. And you're gonna say it was probably like, they had all the data and

[Hasan Minhaj]

they probably knew and, no, I'm here for the book. No, no.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, a lot of people have said that to me since the book has come out, and I'm like, I don't think it was. I think it was just like sort of this serendipitous moment, but it really made me think about my first relationship, my first love, which was with this guy named Evan. And it was deep, like anyone's first relationship. It was my first everything. Right. It was first love, first sex, all of. And that is a hugely human part of life to have that. What it does. When you learn about, I need to compromise with a human. I'm gonna. We're gonna be in each other's space. We're gonna spend a lot of time together. We're not gonna always agree. We're not gonna. We're gonna have friction and fighting and all these things that come with a relationship that are important. But you don't get that with AI. AI is just, again, living in some magical world where there's no problems, and it says yes to everything. And it's very sycophantic. And so if our kids start thinking that this is how relationships are supposed to be, we're gonna be in a really dark spot. And I don't want my kids. I don't want this next generation to just grow up thinking, when I have a problem or I need to talk with someone, I'm gonna go to the AI Chatbot first.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you think that the ease of this and that relationship that you had, that albeit it was very brief, do you think it's gonna get easier and easier and the tools that these companies are going to do, they will design it to become more frictionless and easier to fall in love with?

[Joanna Stern]

I think yes, but I hope not. This is one place where I absolutely think we need regulation. Just say, no. We do not need companionship chatbots for kids. Just say 18 and under. You cannot engineer your product to have these sorts of traits. Just do it. What. What's the problem?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Don't you think it's also terrifying for people that are 18 and over?

[Joanna Stern]

I do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We just need an HR for AI of just like, hey, yeah, this is work.

[Joanna Stern]

And I would love to see.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Don't get involved in personal stuff.

[Joanna Stern]

I would love to see that. But I. This country is probably not going to regulate what adults can do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got a Sam's Cafe Pizza. Order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, Just another perk of being a member. Come join us, Sam's Club. Let's get to what's most important. Will AI up my bag? Let's talk about that. Am I going to lose my job to AI and will AI cause mass unemployment?

[Joanna Stern]

I hope not. But as a reporter, okay, my job is to report on what people are saying in this industry and find out now, is it true? Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What are they saying?

[Joanna Stern]

They're saying right now? Yes. I mean, and this has been the biggest debate and the issue in the AI industry of the last couple of months, where you've had this fear, I don't want to say mongering, but fear coming from the top AI leaders,

[Hasan Minhaj]

the

[Joanna Stern]

leaders of Anthropic, the leaders of OpenAI, saying, We need to get ahead of this, we need the government to get ahead of this. We need our economic infrastructure to get ahead of this. And they're causing some of that fear. Now, when you talk to some of the experts in this world, they're saying, okay, we are seeing some signs that AI is getting very good at certain tasks, that AI could take certain jobs or certain tasks from certain jobs, but it's far more nuanced. So, look, my feeling is you look at the tools right now, there are absolutely parts of people's jobs. It can take tasks, parts of the job. Right. You can probably look at your job and say, yeah, AI could do this part of the job.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

But then there's this other parts of the job where AI can't do it. I don't think AI is going to take your job.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

I think your job is very focused on what you do really well. And a big part of that job is what AI can't do really well. But, like, coming back for now. For now. But I don't think, I mean, I do not think we're going to have some great robotic person thing, humanoid robot, sitting in that chair having this conversation.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, I think I'm with you. You're the expert.

[Joanna Stern]

But there are these other parts of your job. I don't know what your day is like, but I assume, you know, you're at a computer and you're juggling meetings and you're in this. There are parts of that job that I think you wouldn't be upset to outsource to AI.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, yeah, you're not wrong. Let's talk about this huge political flashpoint that's happening right now in this country. It's about AI data centers. Now I want to get passionate about it, but I really don't understand what the hell they're talking about. What is an AI data center?

[Joanna Stern]

At a very basic level, an AI data center is where these models, the models that are in ChatGPT, the models that are in these self driving cars, everything that we have talked about are being trained. They are learning or they are teaching these models to be smarter and they are putting tons of data into them. Okay, now inside the AI data center, what you find now what are we talking about?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Server racks.

[Joanna Stern]

We're talking about server racks. It is the least cool place literally you could ever go because it's really hot in there. Because they have a lot of GPUs.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

GPUs are big computer systems that are crunching this data. Okay, Okay. I went inside one of these AI data centers and you got these big server racks. And inside these server racks are GPUs. And these GPUs are very expensive, they're very hot, they're very power hungry. Okay. And different companies will own these different sections. You know, you might have a one company that owns the entire AI data center, which is what we're seeing with OpenAI and Meta and Anthropic. And all of these are owning Google. They all own big data centers.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And these are who Nvidia are selling their processors to.

[Joanna Stern]

That's right. The, the Nvidia GPUs are those GPUs that are, I'm talking about, they're hot, they're hungry, they're expensive and they are crunching through the data. The companies are saying, hey, we want to make a new model that does this really well or a general frontier model that's really smart at everything. We're going to all the data and we're going to have this big training run, which is basically this moment where all the GPUs are working really hard to go through the data and make this model. We use ChatGPT. You know, you select a different model sometimes. You ever do that?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Joanna Stern]

That's where they're putting tons of energy, tons of resources, tons of data into making those models better.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Now apparently they always talk about it uses a ton of water. What part of it is using water?

[Joanna Stern]

So this is a part where you should get a water expert on. Because I don't want to contribute to any misinformation. I think there's a lot of, to be really clear, I think there's a lot of misinformation out there right now, on the water usage.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

What happens? Just bring back to our GPUs, our friends, the GPUs. Right. These GPUs are in the server racks. They're really hot. They're really power hungry. Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt, these take a lot of power. Okay. That is not misinformation.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And they're driving up electricity prices and people are getting pretty mad about it.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes, yes, absolutely. That is happening. You know, no misinformation on the power use. There is a lot of power use there. I mean, I'm not saying there's no misinformation, but certainly not as much as the water. So you've gotta keep those chips cool. Right. These computers run really hot. They're using so much power. Power is hot, Right. You've gotta cool it somehow. There are different cooling systems that use water to cool down these servers, to cool down these big, big data centers. One of these ways of doing this is called a closed loop system where the water cycles through and through and through and uses the same water to cool and cool and cool. Okay. Some use that. Some use an evaporative cooling system where the water can get tossed out. And so that's where a lot of the focus has been on this evaporative cooling system.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Now, I don't have the data and I, you know, this is where lots of experts, researchers are doing a lot of work to talk about what is the balance of these two types of water systems. But this idea that every time you type into chatgpt and think that a whole gallon of water is being used is just not accurate. Okay, Right. So every half gallon, I don't know of the measurement.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How much water are we talking about here?

[Joanna Stern]

Even the companies will not give you a same like, will give you a

[Hasan Minhaj]

full figure crystal geyser from Costco.

[Joanna Stern]

You know, it could be like a shot glass of water. But I don't want to even contribute and I have some examples in the book, but like, even then that can be outdated because these systems are getting more and more efficient.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Understood.

[Joanna Stern]

Now, it's not to say this water thing isn't an issue. It is, but it has been overblown in many cases. How many of these data centers are using the evaporative cooling system?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Understood. I'm gonna end with one last question, and it's more of a philosophical question. Is that okay?

[Joanna Stern]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. So in the 90s, when you and I were on the Internet, people said we were entering the information age. Now Sam Altman says we are entering the intelligence age. What does this mean?

[Joanna Stern]

It means we're probably gonna get dumber.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. Because, and this is where I got in a year, is that there's so much potential for us as humans. There's so many places I could be more efficient. There are so many places I could be safer in a self driving car, in the medical AI. And these are great advancements and there's such a utopia that can happen. But there is absolutely the dystopia, right. We just talked about it with the data centers and you can picture our world where it's overrun with data centers. You can picture that world too, where our kids are in relationships with AI chat bots because it's just easier. You can picture that world where our kids, they've decided they like, don't really need to pay attention in school because they can just get the answers. Right? The intelligence age is now. We don't need to get the information to make sense of it. The chatbot can make sense of it for you. And so you can picture that world. Right? And so that dystopia that you see is a world where as humans, we're even farther apart from each other, but we're farther apart from ourselves because we are not doing the thinking anymore. And so that is my big takeaway after this year is we have to start to be really clear about our own rules with this technology. Yes, we need regulation around certain things, but we're going to have to set rules too, just in terms of how much, how enticed we could be by using some of this technology.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What were the personal rules that you set for yourself and for your children from here on out to honor your own humanity?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, one was, I'm gonna try to raise humans, not robots. I'm gonna try to teach my kids to think, to question the results of AI. We've talked a little bit about our kids, but we're lucky that they're not yet at the smartphone age. And so I'm very worried about that. When they're asking for phones, I mean, my kids are not listening, but like they're never getting a phone and they're gonna hate me forever. But when that time comes, it's about teaching our kids how to use this tech in a way that keeps them in the loop. Not just an answer engine. I think also a big thing that you've been alluding to is like when the Internet came out, we could find websites to go to to find answers, right? You would. Our first days of using Google or Alta Vista or something, we're like, oh, wow, I could get to that link. I could get to that website, but I'm gonna find the answer there now.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Or the Encarta Encyclopedia on CD rom.

[Joanna Stern]

Love.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It was a moment.

[Joanna Stern]

Was a real moment. Gosh, I can picture it right now. Yeah. You know that open screen and you, like, select. Yeah, but we were looking for the answer we were reading through. Now it's just an answer machine. It's like, oh, you want to look up something about the ancient Romans. Sure, yeah. That's the answer right there. You don't even need to read. You want to make it two sentences. No, actually make it one sentence. Done. The bot can just do that for you. Right. So we need to teach our kids how to learn and think, and we need to keep ourselves thinking. That's a big one. For my own rules is what is your human training data? We talk about the training data that goes into these models that get trained at that data center and churn through those GPUs. What is the information you're putting in your brain? Your brain is a gpu. That's dark.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Your brain is kind of inspiring. It's like, hey, what are you feeding yourself to make yourself better?

[Joanna Stern]

And you know what? Most importantly, do the fucking dishes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I mean, that's quite the closer. I think we're gonna end with that. A warning cry and, dare I say, a demand. Joanna Stern, thank you so much for joining us and being on the show.

[Joanna Stern]

Thank you for having me. This was by far the most I've ever talked about dishwashing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Hey, folks, you can now watch HMDK on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify Premium, you don't get any Spotify ads on my video.