Joanna Stern spent a year using AI to do (almost) everything: write her emails, analyze her medical records, text her wife, drive her around, and even fold her laundry. The result is her new book, I Am Not a Robot, which documents what she learned testing AI as a journalist, a parent, and a newly independent founder.

Joanna spent over a decade as a tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal before leaving to launch her own media outlet, New Things. She brought the same approach that's defined her career — hands-on, consumer-first testing of the technology itself — to her year-long experiment in living with AI.What she found was more nuanced than the hype: some of it works, some of it really doesn't, and some of it needs guardrails.

In this episode, Jessi and Joanna discuss:

Why the same AI technology that's transforming cancer detection is also upselling you at the dentist
The data privacy moves everyone should make right now, including the settings most people never touch
What happened when Joanna tried to let AI handle all her communications
Why robots are bad at folding clothes
How AI gave Joanna the confidence to leave a staff job and start a business
The emotional difference between work you make yourself and work a machine makes for you
What it means to raise kids in a world where the struggle of figuring things yourself might disappear entirely

Follow Jessi Hempel and Joanna Stern on LinkedIn.