Joanna Stern is PROBABLY Not a Robot

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: Joanna Stern is PROBABLY Not a Robot

Date: May 26, 2026
Host: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)
Guest: Joanna Stern
Co-hosts/Panel: Ellis Hamburger

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Overview

In this engaging episode, tech journalist Joanna Stern joins Marques Brownlee in person to discuss her new book, I Am Not a Robot, her new media venture, the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, consumer technology, the rapid development of humanoid robots, and the realities of going independent in the tech media industry. The episode is filled with insightful anecdotes, playful banter, reflective takes on AI, practical gadget talk, and, naturally, some strong opinions about laundry robots, humanoid futures, and the infamous Apple Magic Mouse.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Introduction & Setting (01:00–02:28)

• Joanna and Marques reflect on being "the two most powerful people in New Jersey tech media" and the joys of in-person podcasting.
• Joanna introduces her new book, I Am Not a Robot, and the challenge of selling a book with poor SEO thanks to CAPTCHA overlords.

Notable Quotes:

• Joanna: “If Apple doesn't provide me a large language model to talk to, in a way, I don't care.” (01:00)
• Marques: “It's just more personal. It's more fun.” (01:36)

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2. About the Book: I Am Not a Robot (02:34–07:32)

• Joanna details the project: a year of integrating AI into as much of her life as possible—not just chatbots, but self-driving cars, humanoid robots, healthcare and more.
• She emphasizes the difference between consumer-facing AI and “traditional” deep learning.
• Mentions her new media company, New Things (thenewthings.com).

Notable Quotes:

• “This is about my year trying to use AI in as many parts of my life as possible.” (02:53) – Joanna
• "It's not just generative AI, it's not just chatbots, we get into self-driving cars, humanoid robots, medical AI..." (03:24) – Joanna

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3. Apple’s New CEO and Product-Driven Leadership (04:03–07:14)

• Discussion on John Ternus replacing Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO, emphasizing the difference between operational and product-focused leadership.
• Reflections on interviewing Tim Cook, and how new AI company founders are more connected to the “product” than Big Tech CEOs.

Notable Quotes:

• “We love products. That's our focus. Tim Cook is kind of... he likes products. ...he loves using products to make money.” (04:34) – Joanna

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4. Living with AI: The Reality Test (07:14–11:32)

• Joanna describes her book as a snapshot of a pivotal moment, mirroring the 1990s Internet boom.
• AI is already pervasive in daily life—medical diagnostics, self-driving cars—even if consumers are unaware.
• She avoids focusing on LLM model names in the book due to rapid industry change.
• Discussion of the rapid (and overwhelming) pace of AI product updates and the futility of comparison reviews.

Notable Quotes:

• "AI is already in your life. There's just no way you're going to be able to say no to it." (12:00) – Joanna
• "If I went full throttle, I would be divorced and I would have lost everything that was important to me." (09:04) – Joanna

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5. Examples of AI in Unexpected Places (11:32–16:05)

• AI is used in radiology—Joanna’s mammogram story drives home how AI quietly influences healthcare.
• Self-driving Waymo cars are spreading to the NYC/NJ area, raising questions about adapting to local driving culture.
• Humorous debate over who deserves “#1 New Jersey tech reporter” status.

Memorable Moment:

• Discovering Waymo cars in New Jersey: “I'm a little scared about Waymos on New Jersey highways.” (14:19) – Joanna

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6. The Social Impact and Tradeoff of AI (16:05–24:47)

• The analogy between the Internet transformation and AI: are we living through a comparable revolution?
• Joanna wants the book to reach not only tech enthusiasts, but people less comfortable with tech, to demystify AI’s daily impact.
• Pros (efficiency, medical insight) vs cons (job displacement, privacy, chatbot mayhem) – with no easy verdict.

Notable Quotes:

• “There is a very good chance this is totally worse and has far more negative consequences than any other technology.” (20:24) – Joanna
• “Job displacement is real.” (21:16) – Joanna

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7. The Future Beyond Smartphones: Devices, Wearables, and Memory Augmentation (24:47–29:49)

• Can AI‐wearables (e.g. memory-bracelets or smart glasses) replace or augment the smartphone?
• Debate over utility vs. privacy tradeoff: how much of our lives will we allow to be passively recorded?
• Marques and Joanna try out the “B” bracelet (records and summarizes conversations).
• Marques suggests that the more convenience we get, the less privacy; every company will draw this line differently.

Notable Quotes:

• “It's basically another brain in a way. I'm outsourcing my memory.” (25:04) – Joanna
• “The more convenience you get, the less privacy you get.” (28:04) – Marques

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8. Apple, AI, and the Race for Intuitive Voice Assistants (29:49–32:29)

• Frustration with Siri’s persistent mediocrity: “It is 2026. Why do I have to ask five different ways and have to perfectly explain [to Siri]?” (31:06) – Joanna
• Natural language interactions are getting better with competitors, but Apple’s reticence on AI may become a hardware-centric advantage.

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9. AI Wearables—The Ultimate Pin Review (32:29–36:44)

• Joanna gives Marques a “Verified Human” pin as a tongue-in-cheek wearable (a dig at earlier failed "AI pin" products).
• Lighthearted debate about verifying humanity and bleeding for science.

Memorable Moment:

• Marques: “Battery life seems infinite.” (34:22)
• Joanna: “If you poke yourself and see if you bleed, that could be simulated. I mean, I could simulate that.” (33:17)

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10. Humanoid Robots: Promise vs Reality (39:00–51:49)

• Both express deep fascination, skepticism, and humor about humanoid robots’ current struggle to do basic tasks—especially laundry folding.
• Are multipurpose humanoids the future, or will specialized robots (like vacuums or factory arms) dominate?
• The “uncanny valley” problem is real; current robots are more spectacle than assistance.
• Joanna’s hands-on testing of folding robots exposes the complexity of replicating simple human tasks in machines.

Notable Quotes:

• “Why not create a robot that doesn't have arms, that folds laundry a different way?” (44:19) – Joanna
• “For the things that are like small, mundane tasks, like, I don't want to clean… That’s all it needs to be. The single-use robot thing… gets stronger and stronger in my head every time I think about it.” (45:50) – Marques
• “There’s this idea of Moravec’s paradox: things that are really simple for humans are really hard for robots.” (44:23) – Joanna

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11. Going Independent as a Media Creator (52:20–57:56)

• Joanna discusses the shift from legacy outlets like WSJ to independent YouTube and newsletter-based publishing.
• Motivation: more control, direct audience connection, freedom to experiment.
• Acknowledges the heavier workload (“octopus analogy”) but values the creative flexibility.

Notable Quotes:

• Joanna: “I wanted control over the audience. I wanted control over what we do… [now] I just don’t have to ask permission to do certain things.” (54:50 & 55:11)

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12. Content Strategy and Adapting to the Times (57:56–59:22)

• The landscape is oversaturated with AI coverage, but curious, practical, and narrative-driven tech journalism remains key for broader audiences.
• Short-form and “mid-length” content is on the rise, blending attention span demands and depth.

Memorable Moment:

• Marques and Joanna trade gifts: a pin for content strategy advice.

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13. Rapid Fire Tech Preferences & The Great Mouse Debate (61:25–64:09)

• Joanna confesses to loving the Apple Magic Mouse—so much so she owns two.
• Debate over the mouse’s ergonomics, the necessity of updating it, and Apple’s new CEO’s possible priorities.
• Also covers: desktop vs laptop, browsers used (Chrome, Edge, Comet, Arc), Notion vs pen-and-paper for tasks, and phone preferences.

Notable Quotes:

• “I love the scrolly feel. Like the clicky part.” (62:05) – Joanna
• “If they could just…move the port.” (64:09) – Marques

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14. Typing Challenge & The Kids Don’t Type (70:01–74:56)

• Joanna attempts the recurring “type the alphabet” leaderboard challenge (final time: 9.3 seconds, between Brandon and David Blaine).
• Reflection on how kids today don’t learn to type, navigate files, or even “Google things” anymore—the impact of speech-input and AI.

Notable Quote:

• “I think we proved that I'm a human. On the pin.” (74:03) – Joanna

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On AI saturation:
  “There might be too much AI coverage. How do I figure out how to put those pieces together in stories that are still interesting to people?... I don't want to only be AI YouTube.” (56:37) – Joanna

• On folding robots:
  “I found myself cheering this robot in my basement. ...You can do it. You can fold my T-shirt in under 10 minutes.” (44:19) – Joanna

• On the uncanny valley:
  “It is fun… but it's also a little bit creepy when we anthropomorphize things that are clearly not human.” (40:33) – Marques

• On passive memory augmentation:
  “I'm outsourcing my memory. I don't need to remember what we did here. ... it's basically another brain in a way.” (25:04) – Joanna

• On the tradeoff of data and privacy:
  “The more convenience you get, the less privacy you get.” (28:04) – Marques

• On media independence:
  “I just wanted the freedom to do even more stuff and weirder stuff.” (54:50) – Joanna

• On technology cycles:
  “We have this long history of tech where things don’t get replaced. They just... get augmented. And our focus shifts.” (24:01) – Joanna

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Timestamps & Segment Highlights

• 01:00 – Kicking off, book intro, New Jersey tech pride
• 02:34 – Book pitch: living with AI for a year
• 04:03 – Apple’s new CEO and culture shift
• 07:14 – What integrating AI into everything looks like
• 11:32 – AI quietly infiltrating healthcare & self-driving anecdotes
• 16:05 – Will AI be as transformative as the Internet?
• 19:08 – Will you buy my Book, “NanoBanana Nerd”?
• 20:24 – Trade-off: AI’s potential dangers
• 24:47 – The post-smartphone question and wearable tech
• 28:04 – Debating privacy vs convenience in passive AIs
• 31:06 – Siri’s shortcomings and Apple’s AI reluctance
• 32:39 – “Verified Human” pin review & human detection jokes
• 39:00 – Humanoid robots: near useless, but captivating
• 44:19 – Laundry folding robots and Moravec’s paradox
• 52:20 – Growing a creator business after WSJ
• 56:37 – Not wanting to be “yet another AI YouTube” channel
• 61:25 – Rapid fire tech questions (Magic Mouse, browsers, phones)
• 70:01 – Typing challenge: Joanna vs the leaderboard
• 74:03 – “Proved I’m a human” (pin & Turing test joke)

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Tone & Vibe

• Personal, playful, and relatable.
• A blend of expert tech analysis and grounded, consumer-focused reflection.
• A balance of optimism and critical skepticism, especially around AI and robotics hype.
• Deep respect and camaraderie between Marques and Joanna, with plenty of friendly roasting (especially around the Magic Mouse).
• Geeky, but always with an eye on real-world, everyday impact.

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Useful Links

• Joanna Stern’s new book: I Am Not a Robot
• New Things Media
• Joanna’s YouTube Channel: Joanna Stern
• Waveform Podcast

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how AI is reshaping daily life—from subtle influences in our healthcare to the big consumer splashes (and flops) of personal robotics and wearables. Joanne Stern’s pragmatic, hands-on approach, paired with Marques’ signature skeptical optimism, make this a wide-ranging yet grounded look at both what’s real and what’s still hype in the world of consumer tech, AI, and independent media. And yes, if you care about laundry robots… this is your jam.

Transcript

[Marques Brownlee]

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[Joanna Stern]

If Apple doesn't provide me a large language model to talk to, in a way, I don't care.

[Marques Brownlee]

It took me like half an hour to watch the video because I kept pausing it and laughing so much.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm a little scared about Waymos on New Jersey highways.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's a different type of driver.

[Joanna Stern]

They say AI is going to change healthcare. What does that really mean? AI is gonna change our streets, our highways. What does that really mean? Oh, we're gonna get humanoid robots in our homes that are just gonna change our lives forever. What does that really mean?

[Marques Brownlee]

Joanna, thank you for Jo on the way from a podcast. Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

All the way here in Kearney, New

[Marques Brownlee]

Jersey, which is really fun.

[Joanna Stern]

It's away from my house.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Well, we like having people in person on the podcast more than virtual because it's just more personal. It's more fun.

[Joanna Stern]

We're right here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

You know what? The two most powerful people in New Jersey tech media are in this room.

[Marques Brownlee]

I am willing to accept that. Do you think there's anyone else in New Jersey? I haven't thought about that actually. I'm not really sure.

[Joanna Stern]

There's gotta be other tech media. We know there's a lot of important

[Marques Brownlee]

media people in New Jersey tech media. I don't know certain people where they're from, but I'm just going to go ahead and accept the credit.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm pretty sure it's just us.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm willing to take it.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean there's a lot of others and we are the top is what I'm saying here.

[Marques Brownlee]

I like it. I like the Confidence. We should talk a little bit about tech because there's, there's a bunch going on. We have your book here in front of us. We're also going to talk about this. I'm really excited about.

[Joanna Stern]

My new way of promoting the book

[Marques Brownlee]

is just, it's just holding it up to your face during the entire podcast.

[Joanna Stern]

All the podcast editors very angry.

[Marques Brownlee]

I like the.

[Joanna Stern]

The block it.

[Marques Brownlee]

We were just talking about the COVID by the way, the title is very. And the colors and the shapes. And I have to talk to you about humanoid robots as well.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, I would love to.

[Marques Brownlee]

I have so many takes.

[Joanna Stern]

I know you do.

[Marques Brownlee]

They sometimes get me in trouble. But I'd love to hear your takes.

[Joanna Stern]

I love your takes. And they're mostly right. So. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Perfect. So tell me about this book. It's called I am not a robot. What is.

[Joanna Stern]

What is by here? Using AI to do almost everything. You can search that all. You really just have to search I am not a robot. But Joanna Stern. Because if you search I'm not a robot, then you just get captchas and it's a disaster. Great idea for the name of a book. Not actually a great idea. When you go to sell the book for SEO. Yeah. It's a terrible SEO captcha situation. Yeah. This is about my year trying to use AI in as many parts of my life as possible. And that's my pitch. Go buy the book.

[Marques Brownlee]

Giving it a shot, being optimistic, open to it. Being either awesome or terrible. Just fully, fully immersing yourself.

[Joanna Stern]

Fully immersing myself. And I don't define AI as just generative AI. It's not just chatbots. You've got self driving cars in here, humanoid robots, healthcare. Tons of different applications of what one was called deep learning, but now everyone just calls AI or chatbots or generative AI.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, there's neural nets, there's all sorts of things. It's just all artificial intelligence.

[Joanna Stern]

Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

All the time.

[Joanna Stern]

Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

Awesome.

[Joanna Stern]

Not only do I have a book out, I have a new media company which we know we're going to talk about, but it's called New Things and you can go to thenewthings.com or look at these sound effects.

[Marques Brownlee]

We got a sound effect.

[Joanna Stern]

Or you can go to my YouTube channel. Joanna Stern.

[Marques Brownlee]

Perfect. We'll link everything below so people can find it first. We can talk. Actually, there's a little bit of tech news that we haven't talked about a ton yet on the podcast, which is Apple's new CEO. That's a fun one. What do you think about you feel

[Joanna Stern]

like you haven't talked about that a lot on this podcast?

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, we have talked about it, but I haven't gotten other people's thoughts outside of the podcast. And now I'm excited to start doing

[Joanna Stern]

that because I've been listening to this podcast in my car and I'm pretty sure you've done a lot of coverage of this.

[Marques Brownlee]

We did have a lot of optimistic musings about the future of Apple. And do you agree with our thoughts on John Ternus being the new CEO, the product guy?

[Joanna Stern]

I do, I do. I think, look, we love products. That's our focus. Tim Cook is kind of, he likes products. I think we say he's not the product guy, but he's like, he likes them.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. He likes using the products to be good at his job of making the company really good.

[Joanna Stern]

He loves using products to make money.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes, exactly.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. Yeah, we do too. But we also just love using the products. Like even if someone told me you're not going to make money using this tech product, I would love to still use it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And I think it's. I love your guys. Optimism. I'm optimistic. I think it just means that the most senior leader at the company is going to be able to talk a little bit more thoughtfully about these products, why they made these decisions, what goes into it. You and me have both met Tim Cook over the years and he's great to talk to. He clearly loves Apple. He loves the products they're making.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

This isn't going to get like deep into the products.

[Marques Brownlee]

You've interviewed a bunch of Apple execs over the years. And I get, I mean, you've talked to Tim. Do you ever talk to him about products or. It's more just like global company vision, big picture stuff. That's usually what he's good at.

[Joanna Stern]

It feels like that's where the conversation usually goes. Right. I've watched your interviews with him too.

[Marques Brownlee]

With the CEO?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, with the CEO. But there are other companies where I would say, what's a good example of.

[Marques Brownlee]

I mean, I talk to YouTube CEO in the weeds of the products all the time. I haven't done an interview with him in a while on camera, but we did do one and that was very product focused, I think in general, just when I talk on camera about stuff, I'm trying to connect it to the viewer and that is through the products that we're both using. We have experiences with the products. We think there are things that are great about it. We think there are things that could be better about it then the competition unveils some shortcomings and we get to compare and contrast. That's what's fun to me, I feel like.

[Joanna Stern]

Actually what's really interesting is that right now in the tech industry, the closest CEOs to the products are the AI companies because they're the founders.

[Marques Brownlee]

True. Yeah. Right, yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Like you've got the Microsoft's, you've got the Amazons, you've got Apple. And they're not the founders anymore. Right, right. And they're not, they're, they're making these big decisions about cloud infrastructure and all the things that are not the consumer product. But when you go and talk to the Darios or the Sam Altmans of the world right now, they're also really deep still into the product that they helped create.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So you have these conversations. Look, there are plenty of conversations these guys are having right now. Right. They're on the circuit and everyone is talking to them. But if you're a person like me or you, you can get really good conversation around the products because they're in it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Also, there's a lot of AI in your book on actually give us the 10,000 foot view of how you used AI for an entire year. Well, you had the day, but also the entire year in the book. How did that go? What happened? You don't have to spoil everything, but how did it go?

[Joanna Stern]

Ooh, it went, it went. That's the top. That's the big answer.

[Marques Brownlee]

It happened.

[Joanna Stern]

Look, there seemed to be a moment last year, 2025, even end of 2024, where there were so many new products coming out that had AI in them. And there were all these grand proclamations being made by these CEOs saying AI is going to change our lives. It's going to be amazing. And I was like, why don't we just try to live that and see if that's true? And can I live five years into the future and see what these people are talking about using today's technology and not giving people a perfect view? Right. Because the models have been getting better, the products have kind of been getting better and see what life is like? And I tried. A big thing that I think is different about this book versus any other AI Book is, first of all, it's meant for consumers, the people who are using this stuff. It's not just generative AI, it's not just chatbots, we get into self driving cars, there's humanoid robots, there's medical AI. And I wanted to look at all these parts of life and say, okay, they say, AI is going to change health care. What does that really mean? AI is going to change our streets, our highways. What does that really mean? Oh, we're going to get humanoid robots in our homes that are just going to change our lives forever. What does that really mean? It actually means nothing because they're really not ready. Agreed. And the book is done by the year. I wrote this in 2025. It starts in winter of 2025, New Year's Day. And I just tried to, throughout the year, use AI as much as possible. I do want to say there were places where I couldn't use AI. I say in the beginning of this book, if I went full throttle, I would be divorced and I would have lost everything that was important to me.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wow.

[Joanna Stern]

So I used that in a tempered way. Right. Like, I wanted to still be a human and a good parent and a good spouse and all of these things. But I really. Yeah, I mean, name it. I tried it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. There's so many interesting things in that. Like, I. First, I've wanted. There's a video I've wanted to do because back in the day I did a Google versus Siri versus Alexa video. And now it feels like the modern version of that would be to do GPT versus Gemini versus whatever other perplexity. All the best ones, Claude. But every time I think about trying to do that, I always feel like there's some massive update around the corner that as soon as I put out my video, it would be out of date. I don't know if I can make that video or if it's even worth making because it's not useful anymore. How do you feel about those comparisons? There's no one model that seems to forever be number one. It feels like it's not a useful comparison.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. I think that would be a tough video for you to do. Like, you would have a very short shelf life and you would hear from a lot of people saying, like, I just switched to Gemini. Oh, I just switched to this, like, every week it's different. And I'm very clear in this book to say I never actually mention model names. Maybe there's one or two places where I mentioned 4o or something like that, but I really. Cause I knew that if, you know, writing a book, you only want to do for a day.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean. Or apparently successful authors don't want it to be sold for just a day. I'm not really. I don't know yet. I don't Know if I'm going to be a successful author. But I think the themes of it. Right. So if I was using an image generator. Right. I knew that wasn't going away. Yes. There's some examples in this, like, where the image generator just like completely gaslights me and keeps saying like, I was generating a picture for my son of five hamsters. And it kept being like, yeah, no, there's five hamsters in this image. And be like, no, there's six hamsters in this image. You know, and then they'd be like, no, no, look, I did it again. And then it'd be like seven hamsters. And some stuff like that has gotten better. But yeah, thematically I really tried to just stay on that and not be mentioning specific models because if I had, like at the time, I don't know, GPT would have been the best. And then, you know, today people believe Claude or Gemini or, you know, Gemini is probably getting updated in a few weeks at IO.

[Marques Brownlee]

Exactly.

[Joanna Stern]

We can't say.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So to your point, AI is a lot more than just the chatbots. There's the self driving cars, there's the medical breakthroughs, there's all kinds of stuff. What was the most surprising thing that you maybe found in looking at all these different things? Because the word AI now it's, it includes a lot of things we used to call, what do we call it before there was like the, the machine learning. Yeah, machine learning, exactly. Or even neuralinks or whatever, all the other stuff. What do you, what are you surprised by?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, there's a lot of surprising moments in the book, just in terms of my usage. I think one of the big messages that I want people to know in this book, and I think maybe your viewers already know it or listeners already know it, but there are so many places right now where we hear about this hate of AI. You might hear it from your friends or from your listeners or viewers. And the truth is AI is already in your life. There's just no way you're going to be able to say no to it. Right. And you've made this point before, like about the image processing and the AI and the algorithms that go into so many different things, but I think even broader and deeper than that. For instance, one example is I have a big chapter in here about AI reading my mammogram and I sought that out. But many are going to get their X rays or mammograms or ultrasounds and they're already being read by AI. There is a radiologist behind the scenes Using AI to say, actually that looks like cancer. So that was one thing that I didn't really realize, how ingrained it was already in parts of our lives that we don't think about. I think even like self driving cars, we know they're in specific cities, but that AI is affecting your life because your car is driving next to it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I saw Waymo out here the other day, which I thought was insane. Yeah, it was like right around the corner and I saw that they're starting to test in New York City and I'm a little worried about that for them actually.

[Joanna Stern]

Mostly this is making me mad because now you are the top New Jersey tech reporter.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh really? I mean I tested Waymo's in Austin and I tested the robo taxis in Austin. That's the only place I've ever ridden in a fully self driving taxi service.

[Joanna Stern]

Really?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And then I heard that they were bringing it to New York City and I thought, that sounds bold. And then I saw one and I thought, oh, that's.

[Joanna Stern]

Did you see it in New York or in New Jersey?

[Marques Brownlee]

I saw it right here on this block in New Jersey.

[Joanna Stern]

Really?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So it must have been somebody coming from New Jersey Tech.

[Joanna Stern]

New Jersey reporter. This is insane.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Is this breaking in New Jersey 1

[Joanna Stern]

or whatever it is you. I'm so jealous of the job you're about to get there.

[Marques Brownlee]

So they're out here?

[Joanna Stern]

No, I had no idea they were in New Jersey. I knew they were like in Brooklyn and they've been testing them around the city. Wow. And you're sure it was Waymo?

[Marques Brownlee]

It was definitely Waymo. Yeah. And I saw that because I recognized the headline that I had just seen and I'm like, oh, okay, confirmed. It's true because I see one here, probably dropping someone off at the helicopter tours or something like that.

[Joanna Stern]

Interesting.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I'm a little, I'm a little

[Joanna Stern]

scared about Waymos on New Jersey highways.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's a different type of driver that you have to deal with. And I feel like in each one of these cities the self driving car, I guess something people don't always talk about is it has to assimilate to the driving style. So in California, these big multi lane highways, all this stuff. And then of course the neighborhoods, well, paved roads, usually nothing too insane. At least from the footage I see Austin, similar stuff, slightly different intersection types. You come to New York and New Jersey and the way taxi drivers drive, the way Uber drivers drive, the way people on scooters fly past you and bicycles in the bike lane and Jug handles in New Jersey and all roundabouts and all these other crazy things. I'm curious, I'm curious how it handles that stuff.

[Joanna Stern]

So I in the book go to Phoenix and go with my whole family. I have two sons and my wife. We went to Phoenix for spring break. We called it our Waymo fun vacation. And we went there for a week and we took about 40 waymos and I had been in them in different cities, but I really felt like I got. When you're really in one city and you, you can pick up all of the little things the cars do.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

You really feel like you're starting to understand that driving style.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. The city specific driving style is fascinating. And I wonder. Yeah. Cars all have to talk to each other and get better at driving in each place. So if a Waymo starts to move, because this is the thing, if you're a Waymo in New York and then you do a drop off in New Jersey and then you pick someone up and they want to go to South Jersey and then Philly and now you're a Philly Waymo now what is that like?

[Joanna Stern]

This is so many years away, but I would say in five years something like that could be. Could happen.

[Marques Brownlee]

You have the book here. You decided to write a book. I'm curious about the decision to write a book in the first place because you have this long history of. You've been obviously you've done podcasting, you've done writing for your website, you've done video stuff. Why the book and why now for a book?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, it's a really good question. Why did I do this book? As I am exhausted from being talking about this book.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's made you think about it more.

[Joanna Stern]

I should ask my bot version of myself why I did this book. I thought this was going to be a moment in time. The beginning of this book. I talk about the Internet and this IDEA that in 1995, let's say, were you even born?

[Marques Brownlee]

I was two years old, right? Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I had a feeling. I was in fifth grade. I wasn't that much older than you. I mean, a little bit. Like if someone in 1995 came up to you as two year old Marques and you were like, I can't even speak.

[Marques Brownlee]

Hi. Yeah, I only know three words

[Joanna Stern]

and told you everything you do is gonna be on the Internet, right. You're gonna shop on the Internet, your mail's gonna be on the Internet. All these parts of your life are gonna be going through a computer. You would've been like, hell no.

[Marques Brownlee]

People of the time certainly didn't believe it, let alone want it.

[Joanna Stern]

Right?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

You'd just be like, no. And then if you told them, actually 10 years after that, it's all gonna be on a little screen that you put in your pocket. And then they told two year old Marques, you're gonna review those screens, you're gonna be pumped. You'll be like, you're gonna be a famous reviewer of little rectangles in screen rectangles. You've been like, okay, I want to be an astronaut, mommy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So my point is that with the book, I thought everyone keeps saying we're at this moment where AI is going to make that change. It feels like it's good to have this piece that will stand the test of time to either be completely wrong or completely right.

[Marques Brownlee]

So this is the moment in time where we are. There is spectacular

[Joanna Stern]

spec.

[Marques Brownlee]

Hmm. Speculating speculation. Speculation.

[Joanna Stern]

I can't edit that out.

[Marques Brownlee]

Spectacular speculation. Yes. That's about whether or not this is the future, basically. And we're all living in the time where, okay, we know the world as it is. We know the search engines, we know the structures of the Internet, we know how we sort of switch on and switch off. But this AI thing is gonna change everything. And we're all skeptical.

[Joanna Stern]

What if we. And this is the premise of the book. What if machines are a part of every part of the fabric of our lives? Yeah, every part. Just like the Internet became. But now machines that have smarts, that are smarter than humans, these people say, are gonna change our lives.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So look, I'm covering that every day and you are too, and it's gonna seep into. But I thought maybe a book form would be good. And also, I'll be honest, like, I really want to hit a different audience with this book.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. What is the. How is this audience different than your normal, like, video audience?

[Joanna Stern]

I am here talking to your audience and I hope they will read the book or I'm really hoping that your audience will tell someone in their life where they're like, you know, your audience, like, heard us debating if you should do that video on Gemini and Claude and they started getting mad like, no. In their head.

[Marques Brownlee]

They were like, no, man weed for 5.7.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, exactly. 5.7. 5.5 with the image manager. Better than this, you know, Nano Banana

[Marques Brownlee]

sentence that didn't exist a year ago.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. Nano Banana is better than my five point whatever I want them to tell their person in their life that isn't super deep in. You should go read this book because it summarizes and gives you a really good understanding of what AI could do for you. Okay, yeah, I do also want. Let me look at this person. Nanobanana Nerd. I want you to also buy the book, but you could buy it for a friend.

[Marques Brownlee]

There is a lot of. I guess there's the two versions of the way people think about this future. I always have my own nuanced version of this, which maybe we'll get to. But there is clearly a lot of positive use of artificial intelligence, especially in things like pattern recognition, like in the medical field. Like we talk about, oh, it'll look at this mri, It'll look at this tons and tons of data in a way that a human can't and find a pattern. And maybe that actually means something that we didn't know about before. So there's a ton of upside, but then there's also a bunch of downside. And you hear stories about this all the time, about the chatbots talking crazy to people about all sorts of other negative things. How do you think about the positive versus negative trade off of all of our lives being filled with artificial intelligence?

[Joanna Stern]

I wish that I had a better answer at the end of this book. I mean, you should still read the whole book. And spoiler alert, I don't have a better answer at the end, but you should still read the whole book. Even you, Nana Banana Friend. Similar to any other tech tool. And I know you've made this point in your videos. There's gonna be good and bad. And so, like, there is a very good chance this is totally worse and has far more negative consequences than any other technology. Like, I feel like I sound like Sam Altman sitting here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, but.

[Joanna Stern]

But I need to learn how to do like, a great Sam Altman impression. Like, he thinks so thoughtfully off to the side. You know, you study people when you interview them.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah, yeah. We always watch a bunch of interviews of other things they've talked about before, and then you realize they're going to do the same thing.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, it's like, looks up really hard,

[Marques Brownlee]

does a few calculations, and then tells

[Joanna Stern]

you the good news. The job displacement is real. And people, right now, I mean, I just started this new media company and the amount of incoming I have from young people out of college who just can't get a job because they feel like AI has taken over these basic tasks. Whether it's video editing, whether it's design writing, that feels real. And people are furious about it. And they're like, why do we need

[Marques Brownlee]

this Technology, it's hard to answer now, and that's the point of being in this moment in time. I have my nuanced take, which I say it kind of relates back to smartphones. I saw the time before smartphones where I was playing around with the VHS camcorder and there was a bunch of different tech. And then smartphones came along, and they brought all these different technologies into this one supercomputer in your pocket, and it's gotten really, really, really good. And also it's sort of slowed down in improvement. I have a hard time picturing a post smartphone world, meaning we've moved on from this form factor of the rectangle in your pocket to something else. A lot of these big tech companies are trying to prepare themselves for a post smartphone world. What if it's a glasses thing? What if it's a computer on your face? So they're all trying that stuff, but I personally still have a hard time imagining that the smartphone isn't the center of that universe. Do you have a hard time with that, or do you feel like we could just move on from smartphones?

[Joanna Stern]

I have a picture at the end of the book. Bring it back to the book. Okay. Can we get a tight shot of that?

[Marques Brownlee]

So for audio listeners, there's a then, a now and a soon is exactly what I was talking about. The then is someone sitting down in front of a computer with a tower PC. The now is just holding the supercomputer in your pocket. And the soon is this girl with some cool glasses on, which are you.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which is clearly smart.

[Joanna Stern]

That super cool, smart girl.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And that's the soon. That's the soon.

[Joanna Stern]

That's the soon.

[Marques Brownlee]

Post smartphone.

[Joanna Stern]

Post smartphone.

[Marques Brownlee]

Not alongside the smartphone.

[Joanna Stern]

Alongside. You know what? Actually, we need to revise the illustration. In addition, number two, the phone is in her pocket.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Or in her purse or, you know, it's sitting in the car or something. It's close by.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Because the phone powers this. And one of the reasons I. Well, if you read all of this text here, it basically says, we went through this, but we didn't lose these other things. Right. I mean, we don't. Well, actually, I was just by your desk. You do still have, like, a giant tower.

[Marques Brownlee]

Maybe not for long. But I do.

[Joanna Stern]

Maybe not for long, but yeah, sure. You're gonna get, like a Neo. It's gonna power everything you do. We still have these, right? So we have this long history of tech where things don't get replaced. They just. We get added.

[Marques Brownlee]

Get augmented.

[Joanna Stern]

Augmented. And Our focus shifts, right? I mean certainly the smartphone and this idea that the smartphone will be replaced. I totally am with you. This is. I can't see it. Like the devices keep getting more perfect.

[Marques Brownlee]

It knows everything about us. It fits in our pockets, we get to put it down and then pick it up, which I think is actually something we don't think about a lot, but it's super important. And then there's obviously all the thoughts about how often do you pick it up, how often do you put it down. But the face computer, maybe there's a world where you use the face computer a lot and you use your phone a bit less because it's more convenient. You take photos and videos with it, maybe you talk to it, but you then check the rectangle in your pocket a little bit less. But that's still the thing that has all the power, all of the best compute, all of the best form factor. So I just, I don't know what's it going away.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay, so in the book I write a lot about the wearables and this is perfect segue. So we'll talk about this one. Did you ever try this out?

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[Joanna Stern]

This was the B. This is the B.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay. Amazon actually ended up buying it.

[Marques Brownlee]

It looks kind of like a Fitbit.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. The hardware's unremarkable, it's fine. But this I wore for most of the year. And it has a microphone and it records everything you do. Right now I press the button and green means this is recording. And so everything that's being said goes to Amazon's cloud. They transcribe it, they pull it back down, they get rid of the audio and then I get a summary of our conversation and it also gives me to do's about our conversation. So if I've told you like Marques, I'm going to apply to be the end the New Jersey one. TECH REPORTER one. Yeah, I don't.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is it top three?

[Joanna Stern]

I actually meant that it's the channel name. I don't know, is there a New Jersey TV network?

[Marques Brownlee]

There might be, yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Anyway, this will all be in there and it will say you need to go apply to be the New Jersey number one tech correspondent. Right. Everything from this conversation will have been summarized by AI and it will give me this crazy to do list, a detailed to do list and you can keep this on all day. And it happens. It's basically another brain in a way. Right. I'm outsourcing my memory. I don't need to remember what we did here. I don't have to actively go and put that in my to do list.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah. We were just talking about this was it last episode. They were talking about this. Of. I already sorta augment part of my brain in a way where I've just given up on remembering certain things. And I use. Well, right now it's a task app and I just something I have to do. I immediately take out my phone and I open the task app and I write it down just to make sure I don't forget, because my memory is not perfect. And everyone is willing to draw the line in the sand in a slightly different place about how much they're willing to augment or offset. Offset their own brain. When you're going all in on everything, do you feel like it's making you. I guess we thought about this as, like, less smart or less useful?

[Joanna Stern]

Less human.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, less human. Does that feel bad to, like, not use your brain as much or is it convenient? And then you can do all sorts of other random stuff you didn't think about before.

[Joanna Stern]

There are moments where you're like, oh, don't worry about it. My bracelet. Got it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Like, I don't have to worry about that.

[Marques Brownlee]

And that's nice. Kind of.

[Joanna Stern]

That's nice. Kind of. Right. Cause there are certain times where, you know, you're missing things. There's, of course, the flip side where it's like, I don't want to record everything. I don't want to live in my own surveillance state.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And what I need to remember to do is not that important. It's like, change the water filter in my house.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. But if it's unimportant, I'm going to forget.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, that was one of the findings in here, is that I say, like, especially to my wife, like, I say, I'm going to do all these things and I never do them or don't. It's not. I don't ever really do them. But also, I just don't have. I don't remember to do them. Right. And so I think this idea of some passive computing that is on us but works hand in hand with the smartphone is coming. I mean, and. Well, I'm going to do something next because I want to get your take, but I know how you felt about many of these devices.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. I'm willing to give them a shot. This is my thing. And I know that the main trade off that I think I think the most about and probably a lot of people watching think about is the trade off between the data and the privacy and the convenience, and it's almost like a sliding scale. The more convenience you get, the less privacy you get. If you're going to have it remember everything you said and give you a summary of it, it has to listen to a lot of what you're saying and it's going to be super convenient because it gives you that back in functionality. And so how far do you want to slide that? You know what? I'll let it listen to everything. I'll let it see everything through my face cameras and I'll let it hear everything through the microphones and then I'll be the most productive human ever alive. Or the other side of that, which is I just want it once in a while, just remember one or two things and that's fine.

[Joanna Stern]

And I think that's going to be the calculation going on at every tech company, right. At Apple, at Amazon, at Google. If we're not providing a great tool and utility, people are not going to deal with the privacy trade off. Right. So the glasses, I think are a great example right now. Not a lot of people don't trust the meta glasses, but there's a good enough utility there, especially on the camera front. Right. That we're willing to put these cameras on our face in. I mean, I use them in specific situations. Right. Places I wouldn't want to be holding my phone. And so there's a good enough utility there and a good enough benefit. But once you start, I don't know, always recording or always having those glasses on, what is the benefit? You need to prove that. And that's the conversations that I'm sure Meta Apple, et cetera, are having about what is the features that we can build in here to make that privacy trade off work.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah. Every company has to find a different place for that line in the sand. That is also one of my. I guess it's more, it's less of a theory, but it's kind of proving out, which is that Apple is not winning the AI race, but because they've basically not competed at all, it's come around the other side where people like that about them and they can focus on being the hardware that we run the AI stuff on at some point. But they have had a focus for a long time on the privacy and because of that they do not offer as much convenience. C. Siri, Apple intelligence, et cetera.

[Joanna Stern]

I actually don't mind on the Apple intelligence stuff. I think you're totally right. If Apple doesn't provide me a large language model to talk to in a way I don't care. But Siri is so atrocious. It is so terrible. It's pretty bad that it can't do the basic things that were really been promised. And I talk to Siri all the time.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, what other choices? I'm like, using CarPlay. I mean, we have. You probably have deep thoughts on this, but it's just a different podcast. Let's cut it there. Or, like, I need Siri to just play a song or tell me some basic information in the car or use

[Marques Brownlee]

my HomePod stuff that doesn't require a ton of data and information and stuff.

[Joanna Stern]

I tell this story all the time. Every morning, I just want Siri to play NPR News in my bathroom while I'm just washing my face and putting on my makeup. Why do I have to ask five different ways and have to perfectly explain the name of the podcast? And, like, that is insane.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

It is 2026.

[Marques Brownlee]

So we had to, growing up, learn how to Google search, which was, oh, you kind of use certain words in a certain order, and then you will find what you need. And as they got better, it became less important to know those skills. The AI is kind of the same way. Like, you have to learn how to prompt it, you have to learn how to ask it to get a certain result. But after a while, they should be good enough that you don't. You should just use natural language, and it should just know conversational AI.

[Joanna Stern]

We have the very basics on all of the other chatbots now.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And look, Apple's gonna do this. They're gonna do it this year. But I'm with you. Like, you don't need to give me a chatbot that knows everything, but just please, like, one that can easily play NPR in the morning or just tell me the weather or, you know, just. Just some of the really basic things. Like, we got timers. Right. I'm fine. Like, I spent a lot of time yelling at Apple about that. We got the timers.

[Marques Brownlee]

Finally got timers.

[Joanna Stern]

I don't mean to be really selfish and spoiled and say I'm very thankful for the timers. Apple.

[Marques Brownlee]

Multiple timers.

[Joanna Stern]

Multiple timers. Right? But now we need a little bit more.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Yeah. Powered by.

[Joanna Stern]

Jenna. I wanted to bring this to you on the podcast. I think it's going to be the hottest AI wearable of the year.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. The hottest AI wearable of the year. Ah.

[Joanna Stern]

It's a pin.

[Marques Brownlee]

It is a pin.

[Joanna Stern]

And I know you've had feelings about pins, tech pins.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, this pin is probably better than the Other tech pin?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, this is why I brought this. I wanted a review, I wanted the Marques review of the product that I made.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, so it just has some text on it, it says verified human. I am not a robot. Now I didn't have to do anything to earn this pin and prove that I'm a human. This is like a trust basis. Like you believe that I'm a human.

[Joanna Stern]

I've spent a few minutes with you today. I feel feel like you're a human. But one way I was gonna have you test it is that if you poke yourself and see if you bleed,

[Marques Brownlee]

that could be simulated. I mean I could simulate that. You're saying I passed the Turing test?

[Joanna Stern]

Let's see, let's see if there's blood.

[Marques Brownlee]

So far so, so far so good.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Avemark has the blood update last week,

[Marques Brownlee]

so yeah, that was a pretty solid show.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, I saw that room back there. I was worried about that room.

[Marques Brownlee]

They had to get that blood.

[Joanna Stern]

Has any other guest made you bleed on this show?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, no, we haven't beta tested the like making me bleed live yet, but I feel like it would do a pretty good job. I mean I would bleed for sure.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay, well then you guys have really advanced Marques bot here to amazing potential.

[Marques Brownlee]

We have to make. Yeah, yeah. The back room is full of a bunch of like non working prototypes that are kind of just like sparking and it's a whole thing back there.

[Joanna Stern]

What else are your other impressions of this pin? Look, it's been really rough for other pin makers out there and this review means a lot to me.

[Marques Brownlee]

So the other pin that I think you're referring to also has the word human. Yes, with an extra letter or something I think, but it says human on it. That one had a bunch of other claims of things that it said it could do. This one, I don't know think there are any claims of things that it should do. It should just verify that I am a human.

[Joanna Stern]

Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which importantly should mean that if I'm a robot, I should not be able to wear this. Like a humanoid robot should not be able.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, good point.

[Marques Brownlee]

To like don a pin we can take that into. So maybe some security steps in there.

[Joanna Stern]

This is a decent review.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

How about the battery life?

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, it seems like it'll never turn off, which is really nice. The tech that lasts forever is. And this should last a really long time is underrated in my opinion.

[Joanna Stern]

Wow. This means I almost could cry. This is a huge.

[Marques Brownlee]

I've worn like, like two or three. You know how the Swag you get at tech events, you always get a pin. Yeah, like that. This.

[Joanna Stern]

Wait, what?

[Marques Brownlee]

That's all I know. You don't get the like little apple pin.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, the apple pin.

[Marques Brownlee]

Like WWDC or like random. And we used to make a pin too. Like this. This feels like right in line with like the nicest.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, I really modeled these after. I mean, again, you might be a little. No, I don't think you're too young. Do you ever go to TGIF Fridays where they had like all the flair?

[Marques Brownlee]

Of course, yeah. My birthday was. I was born on a Friday.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, really?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And so I used to go to Fridays on my birthday every year, even if it wasn't a Friday, just somewhere in New Jersey, wherever I was.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. I loved cj and they're like not around that much anymore.

[Marques Brownlee]

They're. Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, I get it.

[Joanna Stern]

Can't. That sampler was amazing.

[Marques Brownlee]

The breadsticks went crazy.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

But yeah, this is. This is a solid one.

[Joanna Stern]

Truly one of the best samplers. Okay. Yeah. It means so much.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I don't know how every tech exists.

[Marques Brownlee]

It seems like you have a bunch.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, I mean, it's free for you.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, thank you.

[Joanna Stern]

Actually, the promotion we ran for the pre order was that you had to pre order the book and I'd send you a free pin.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Which the shipping on the PIN was more than the pin.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that's what we learned when shipping our PIN as well is we had to figure out the PIN economics.

[Joanna Stern]

But if you two want the. We had to get like a quote. I'm gonna have to put your quote on the PIN review page. I know that's gonna cost a lot.

[Marques Brownlee]

Battery life seems infinite.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, battery life seems infinite. If you would like to get this Marques approved pin, you just have to pre order and then you go to joannastern.com and get your pin. Now you know, although I'm frightened because I'm actually like doing. Well, my AI agent deals with all the orders and sometimes it messes up and it's a mess.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm sure it'll do great for this. Okay. On the bottom.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Is that true you have an AI agent doing all of the backend on your.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, on the pin.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Oh, just the pin.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, I mean also it built my website and everything, but. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Whoa.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. It's actually beautiful website. I have to say that.

[Marques Brownlee]

I believe that I believe. Yeah. Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

But no, if you submit a form or you email, the AI agent puts it into the spreadsheet and then sends an Email to my publisher to say there's a new pin order.

[Matt Buchel]

Hey, I'm Matt Buchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your for your page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called that Sounds like a Lot. As in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read through headlines and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what? I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it. Every Friday I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor.

[Marques Brownlee]

They go, feminism has gone too far. You go, why? Cause the Sadie Hawkins dance happened?

[Matt Buchel]

Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparingly. I just kind of hang out and try to do something.

[Joanna Stern]

You're the one with a charmed life.

[Matt Buchel]

Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs, we're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio. So yes, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, you can. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

[Joanna Stern]

Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, comedian and best selling author Chelsea Handler gifts her tips on independence and aging gracefully. I would argue that 50, now that I am 50 and I understand life more than I did when I was 30 or 40 is that you get so much more wisdom and you get so much more experience that you actually feel like you're beginning again. Check out Pretty Tough new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app

[Marques Brownlee]

Was the biggest cybersecurity risk in America, built by software companies.

[Joanna Stern]

Software manufacturers have been allowed to develop and deliver flawed, defective, insecure software because they've prioritized speed to market and convenience all over security.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm John Finer. And I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Jen Easterly, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, joins

[Ellis Hamburger]

us on the podcast.

[Marques Brownlee]

The episode's out now. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get Your podcasts. There's a little humanoid robot at the bottom of the pin. How do you feel about humanoid robots?

[Joanna Stern]

I have so many thoughts. It's a whole other podcast.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, it's this podcast. It's this waveform. This is the one.

[Joanna Stern]

I really want them. It's weird because I feel like I'm really excited about this category because I've lived through so many new tech gadgets and hardware and this is one that we've all seen for so long. We've seen it in cartoons and we've seen it in movies and there's always this promise. And so now we see them. They're really being made by these companies or Tesla or Chinese companies, which is my recent YouTube video. And we want them to work.

[Marques Brownlee]

Mm.

[Joanna Stern]

But they don't.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes, I know.

[Joanna Stern]

You also have thoughts of, like, why is this form? Like, is this the right form? Yeah, but I don't even care. It's cool and it's so fun.

[Marques Brownlee]

I do think it's fun. I have this thing. So like you said, I don't know that this will be the most efficient form for a functional multipurpose robot. Let's say it's in your home or something like that. You just want it in your home and it does things like laundry and puts the dishes away and cleans stuff or whatever. Having it be an upright, bipedal, ten fingered thing with eyes and head and stuff. It's like, it is fun. And you do get that Jetsons feel. Or the futuristic C3PO is a tall one. Right. In Star Wars. It's cool, but it's also a little bit creepy when we anthropomorphize things that are clearly not human. Almost like an animatronic friend. And it has to get through that. What's the valley called? Uncanny valley. Uncanny. It has to get through that uncanny valley of being a little creepy before it gets to being really nice. And I don't know if I'm willing to deal with that.

[Joanna Stern]

I have spoken to so many. I spoke to a lot of robotics experts for the book. And there's definitely this. There's a two sides. There are the people that say we should have custom single utility robots that do the things that you're talking about and are really good at them. Right. And then there's a side that the world is built for humans. This is the form factor. This is what we look like.

[Marques Brownlee]

I've been thinking about this a lot, so I agree with that. I also think that we as humans built the world around all of the shortcomings of the human form and we can do better.

[Joanna Stern]

Literally short, like we can't even reach things, our arms don't extend.

[Marques Brownlee]

Driving is the perfect example for this. Right. So you have a car, let's say it's not a self driving car. You could theoretically have a human, a humanoid robot, sit in the driver's seat of your car and hold the steering wheel and press the pedal and drive it. That's one version of this solution. Now you have an operated car from a robot, but it still has the same blind spots. It still only has a set of eyes on the front. It still only has the reaction time of things that it can see and hear. Or your car is covered in sensors, covers all the blind spots. It has this neural link that maps all this information together, can see way further around all the sides of the car and has instantaneous response and doesn't have to move through the steering wheel and the pedal. And it's a much better self driving car operated by a robot in that case. So even though, yes, we did design the car form around the human, I think that is actually a limitation that we can do better by designing the single use robots. So, yeah, the world may not look the way it does in many years if we have a bunch of really good robots instead of the world built the way it is.

[Joanna Stern]

I love that idea. And I think you see it really clearly in the book when I, I don't know if anyone in the world knows as much about laundry folding robots as I do.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, how many CES laundry folding robots have you talked to?

[Joanna Stern]

I have talked to so many. I've also had a laundry folding robot in my house.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wow.

[Joanna Stern]

And the interesting thing about the laundry folding robots, talking about ces, there are those demos where it doesn't use hands. Right. The shirt goes through a different way. It goes through a conveyor belt, it folds, does these things what the humanoid companies want to do. And even some other startups that are doing some wacky things with laundry folding, they want to give it hands.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And the hands, they want to train it on thousands of hours of folding.

[Marques Brownlee]

Right.

[Joanna Stern]

So I had this, this robot in my house and it's just two robotic arms, but it doesn't have, it's like clenching. I keep doing this, like that's how they look. Right. They're like the grabs in like the, you know, in the arcade where it comes down and the claw that you don't get the free thing, which is

[Marques Brownlee]

actually, it's probably better for folding things kind Of. But like, some things.

[Joanna Stern]

Some things, yeah, there was a lot of. I learned so much about the complication of folding laundry. It's really simple for us, right? And there's this idea of Morvak's paradox, where things that are really simple for humans are really hard for robots, and things that are really hard for robots are really simple for humans. This robot, it struggles so much to fold because it doesn't have the hands. It doesn't have all of the right moves. Like when the, the shirt falls, it doesn't quite know it because every time a shirt falls, it looks different. Right. It doesn't know where the arms are. It doesn't know where the neck is. It could also only fold T shirts, which is a problem, you know, for, you know, if you only wore T shirts, it's a problem for people.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Sorry. We just had this argument last week on the podcast about how. Just about how garments, the nature of fabric and garments are so complex that I have no faith that an ML model is anywhere close to understanding how they work.

[Joanna Stern]

And that's what was proven by this. And so now you have millions of dollars going into solving a problem of folding garments that are trying to simulate the human way of doing it. Right. And I found myself cheering this robot in my basement. It was two giant arms hooked up to a big laptop. It's got all these things, and I'm like, standing in my basement like, you can do it. You can fold my T shirt in under 10 minutes. You know, like, why not create a robot that doesn't have arms, that folds laundry a different way? And which we know some companies are doing.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah. This is the. And I remember, like talking in the Tesla factory about there are things that they have humans do that robots simply can't do. Like when they have to connect like a hose for some system to another one, it just sort of dangles and the robot just misses. It doesn't, like, is trying to calculate the position, has no idea what to do. The human just grabs it, grabs it, connects it and it's fine. So there are definitely things that are probably forever going to be better for humans, but yeah, for the things that are like small, mundane tasks, like, I don't want to clean. Like we have robot vacuums. They aren't a human. It's just a thing that rolls around on the ground that's perfect. That's all it needs to be pretty good. The single use robot thing, I think that gets stronger and stronger in my head every time I think about it.

[Joanna Stern]

And I think for certain tasks, it's going to make sense for sure. Driving. Right. That one's already here. It took a long time for us to get here. But a lot of these other single tasks that we want in our homes, it hurts just so hard. I mean, like the dishwasher. I know. You know, the scene of the Neo robot went viral, of it doing the dishwasher.

[Marques Brownlee]

Struggling, Struggle.

[Joanna Stern]

Right. I mean, because that's like a very hu. Like the dishwasher was built for a human.

[Marques Brownlee]

I was laughing at your video for like, it took me like half an hour to watch the video. Cause I kept pausing it and laughing so much. Cause it was really. It was tough. I'm like thinking about it and it's fine that it's slow because I'm not doing it. So it can just happen in the background. But just watching the robot, like just try to bend over at the window,

[Joanna Stern]

I thought it was when we were filming it. I mean, I was like, you know, you know, you're live in this moment. And I was like yelling at my producer, David, come over here. Like, you know, we can't miss this. It might fall. Gotta get from. Like, I thought it was gonna fall into the dishwasher, you know, and it was.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And last week we posted a first video, one of my first videos on my own YouTube channel. Marques, I'm really trying to live in your.

[Marques Brownlee]

We have a soundboard.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm aware you have a soundboard. I'm surprised we haven't used it more here. It's very impressive. Soundboard.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I got you.

[Marques Brownlee]

Grok.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Context, please.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a new one.

[Joanna Stern]

That's a new one.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a brand new one.

[Joanna Stern]

Where was it going? Oh, so I wanted to do this story on these Chinese robots. The Unitree G1 that you see going viral everywhere on the Internet.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. How is that?

[Joanna Stern]

Well, video is doing pretty well, but most people are angry that I'm really talking about the fact that they're all coming from China. I mean, the thing that I wanted to talk about there was that we're letting these Chinese robots into the US and we're so worried about Chinese EVs and we're so worried about Chinese phones, but yet we're like, oh, let's let these giant humanoid robots that are 80 pounds and can do kung fu come into America. That seems odd. And it's a really interesting exploration of why China is obviously ahead of the US on manufacturing these, because they're ahead of us on everything, on manufacturing in terms of electronics. But what was Just funny you should watch that one, too. It's like the robot can't do anything. I mean, it can do some things. It can dance, which my kids love, and it can do kung fu, which my kids love. But other than that, it just, like, sat in my house doing nothing.

[Marques Brownlee]

It can do choreographed things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is what I've seen about a lot of the AI promises is there's so much training left to do and there's so much learning left to do by the robots that we're sort of selling the promise of the future.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I made the humanoid robot bet that there would not be a single humanoid robot shipped to a customer in 2026 that can do all the autonomous things.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, it can't.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah. That's the big.

[Joanna Stern]

That's part one. You're wrong. I think they will ship.

[Marques Brownlee]

They will ship it.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Do you think the One X is going to get shipped?

[Joanna Stern]

I think that they will ship it to Select Few. I don't think that I will be.

[Marques Brownlee]

But it won't do all the things.

[Joanna Stern]

I don't think Marquez is going to be Select Few.

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[Joanna Stern]

Let's say this. If I get New Jersey packed.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

New Jersey tech media packed right here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

If one of us gets the One X, we have to go. We have to share a New Jersey 100%.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. You're welcome to try to ask it to do whatever you want.

[Joanna Stern]

You're welcome to come to my house.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And sit with it in the car. It sounds like you want your humanoid to ride.

[Marques Brownlee]

To drive your car. It's gonna be really bad at that.

[Joanna Stern]

We will shut down the town for that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

And so I think they will. To answer your question, Alice, I think they will ship them autonomous. Zero chance. No way. Maybe it does one thing autonomously, which is like, open the door.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

It won't do that. Maybe it will do one task autonomously.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Yeah. We had a.

[Joanna Stern]

Actually, that's what we will do. You can control my One X from here in your VR headset.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah. I'll just start doing the dishes. Yeah. Through the headset with the handle. Yeah, That'll be great. We had a Amazon Astrobot here for like, two or three, maybe longer, three or four years.

[Ellis Hamburger]

No, it's still here.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's still here. That's so unfortunate. It's just unplugged the poor thing.

[Joanna Stern]

I had one, too, in my house.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, really?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So you're aware of how bad it is at most things? Like, it would sort of just roam around being A security camera, which I guess is technically a successful. It does what it says it will, but all the other things it's supposed to be able to do, it would not be very good at. And then it would just kind of trip over things and get stuck on wires. It was this little robot, big wheels.

[Joanna Stern]

It was just like a lex on wheels to like play music.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. That's the closest we've gotten so far. Which.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. And the whole idea of like it would take the drink to the, to the. Get like to the other room.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Made no sense to me because, like, it couldn't grab the drink.

[Marques Brownlee]

A person would have to be in both rooms.

[Joanna Stern]

Right.

[Marques Brownlee]

At which point you could just ask the person.

[Joanna Stern]

Right, right. Which. Yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Made it a tough sell.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So, yeah, I do. I tend to think we are quite far from the humanoid robot future. But I'm curious to see how that plays out. If it'll be humanoid robots or if I'll be proven right, vindicated. It'll just be a bunch of specialized, smaller, really efficient, hyper adapted robots for individual tasks everywhere. Your dishwasher will just have an arm

[Joanna Stern]

or the humanoids will just be in factories and industrial settings.

[Marques Brownlee]

Even that I don't think needs to be humanoid because even those are like, connect this hose, like put the door on the car. At this point it's just an arm. Like we have this robot arm in the studio which we've put a camera on and we can teach it to do things. But in this factory, it doesn't have to learn anything. It just has to grab the windshield and put it on the car, grab the next windshield. Doesn't have to be shaped like a C3PO.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I guess. And that's the argument that Amazon's made too. Right. They've got millions of robots and they're not humanoids.

[Marques Brownlee]

We'll see. I'm very curious. All right, I have another question about just going independent as a media person. Because you've done now writing and video as part of like the Verge and Wall Street Journal and having your own YouTube channel. How does that differ? Like, what was the choice to go independent and how does it compare to being a part of a larger structured corporation? It's like 30 questions.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, no, look, I'm only four weeks in. Well, I'm two months, three months in. But we just launched the YouTube channel. We just did that last week. Two weeks ago. Which, boy, I'm seeing on day one. Really making. It's a lot of work. You've been working hard here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah. It is. You know, video production is one of those things where you probably heard my octopus analogy. You end up wanting to do the video stuff, but there's a ton of stuff around the video stuff that you also have to do now, which is, you know, the behind the scenes, the inbox, the accounting, the bookkeeping, the insurance, all that stuff.

[Joanna Stern]

I underestimated that, people told me, but I really underestimated that work, so. But now I'm finally getting past some of that where I can actually get back to the content. I mean, I'm launching a book in the middle of all this, which do not recommend. But one of the reasons I did do this was because this book was coming out. I was gonna be on things like this, and I wanted to be able to talk about the new thing. So it's called the New Thing. It's called the New Things. Go subscribe. Joanna Stern is the YouTube channel, but a lot of it, like, truly inspired by people like you. For so long, I had been publishing to YouTube, and I became really obsessed with videos on YouTube, you know, a few years ago at the Wall Street Journal, because I started realizing this is where the audience is. Right. The Wall Street Journal is made. The audience is amazing, but they're older, they have more money. And I felt in many ways I was not being as accessible to all the other people in the world that want to know about tech. And so I started focusing a lot on my YouTube videos at the Journal, and those would appear on the Wall Street Journal's website, too. But I was really looking at the data on YouTube and more and more I wanted control over that. I wanted control over the audience. I wanted control over what we do. Because, you know, you have editors, and editors are amazing. And I still have some editors that I hired and are working with at the new thing, But I just wanted the freedom to do even more stuff and weirder stuff.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Even weirder than what you are already. Some of your. I really like a lot of the interesting video idea concepts that you came up with and decided to pull off at the Wall Street Journal. I wonder what even weirder looks like. What is your favorite weird idea to do?

[Joanna Stern]

I don't know if it's even weirder, but, like, I just don't have to ask permission to do certain things.

[Marques Brownlee]

Totally.

[Joanna Stern]

You know.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And you get to sort of experiment with what works because it connects with the audience, but also just what you want to do and just to see if it works.

[Joanna Stern]

Right.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. What was the process for coming up with ideas for that audience? Maybe there's a little bit of a different audience for the new thing versus the journal. But how do you come up with an idea of what makes a good video?

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, for me, it's just curiosity. Like, if I have a question about something like this book. What does the world look like when AI is everywhere? Okay, let's go out and answer that question. Let me go and report that out. Let me go talk to people. Let me go test it. I mean, I think the major overlap that both of us have is that we test things. We don't just go and talk to the companies making it. We wait for us to be able to use a lot of this. And so I want that to be a guiding principle of my coverage forever. I think the. The tough thing about tech is, like, it's all overlapping now in so many ways. Right. So if I want to not, you know, I was like, oh, I mean, I don't want to talk about AI, which is not what I want to do. But I think that there might be too much AI coverage. How do I figure out how to put those pieces together in stories that are still interesting to people? Because people can be very oversaturated right now with YouTube, AI YouTube. And that's. I don't want to only be AI YouTube. I really don't. I don't want to be just, you know, every day, like, here's 10 prompts that you can do to.

[Marques Brownlee]

That channel is already out there.

[Joanna Stern]

That channel's already out there. So I think my guiding principle is, like, things that I'm curious about, things that are going to affect our lives with tech and not be super technical, but be technical enough that I can still talk to the people who love tech, but also with the same thing with this book, the people in our lives that are still curious. We all use phones, we all use tech. How do I help make your life better and explain something to you? Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Do you have a big project idea or a big video idea that you haven't done yet that you think you could now pull off? Or is it all top secret?

[Joanna Stern]

We need a little bit more time to get up and running.

[Marques Brownlee]

Right now.

[Joanna Stern]

It's just like get through the book launch.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes.

[Joanna Stern]

Which is get through wwdc.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. June.

[Joanna Stern]

Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

IO I'm feeling September is going to be very busy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Usually ends up being a little chaotic.

[Joanna Stern]

Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So, like, you know.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Kind of think of a. I've talked about this as, like, this we have the waves of, like, the off season, the on season. Like, September will Be on. October will be on and then you'll have like post ces. January is a nice little resting period, not sort of lick your wounds, reset a little bit. Yeah. This year it was like Samsung pushed back a little bit. It just kind of kept happening. But you can sort of think of random new ideas and fun stuff you want to try that isn't.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, I have a lot of those ideas. It's just figuring out the flow. I mean, I could talk, pick your brain on for hours, how you manage all of the different things and channel. And I'm also writing a newsletter. So like that's Twice weekly newsletter, YouTube videos, shorts, events, all of those things. And how do you think about it all cohesively?

[Marques Brownlee]

I tend to go down the rabbit hole of that often, like content strategy. And I don't have a newsletter and I'm not also doing a book tour. So I'm mostly just focused on the content strategy for me is like long form versus short form. Or now short, long form. That's actually something that's a meta. In my head, three to five minute long form videos kind of died in the last four or five years. And why do they die? Everyone's optimizing for a long watch time, but people want to watch short videos.

[Joanna Stern]

Casey Neistat was talking to me about this and he said, Marques is doing this. Well, yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

I mean, I was doing long shorts, which were kind of weird, but I want to do shorts.

[Joanna Stern]

But you just have an idea and like, you know what, people might want to hear me on this. And it doesn't have to be 10 minutes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Exactly. Yeah, I think that, I think we need more of that. Okay, so there's a thought for the world Thought Free. Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I gave you a free pen.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And I gave you a free content strategy idea.

[Joanna Stern]

Amazing.

[Matt Buchel]

Where exactly do US China relations stand?

[Marques Brownlee]

The Chinese side came in feeling as if they had figured out how to work both with and against Trump. He was inclined to try to create moments of crisis, and then if they stood up to him, they were almost uniquely capable of making him back down.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm Preet Bharara and this week Evan

[Marques Brownlee]

Osnos of the New Yorker joins me to discuss the Trump Xi summit, which he reported on from Beijing.

[Joanna Stern]

The episode is out now.

[Marques Brownlee]

Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet.

[Joanna Stern]

Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Danielle Robay]

This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're joined by Danielle Robay, the journalist Forbes called the queen of questions and the host behind Reese Witherspoon's book club podcast and her own show question everything. We're exploring a skill that can transform your career, relationships and bank account Knowing how to ask the right questions, Danielle breaks down the art of getting real answers in professional settings, from coffee chats to to career pivots and shares the money conversations we should all be having but aren't. Get ready for hard hitting advice on defining success beyond the dollar signs, asking better money questions with partners and friends and the mindset shifts that separate people who stay stuck from people who keep growing. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF.

[Marques Brownlee]

For basically two decades, the experience of using the Internet hasn't changed. Which is to say, when you want to do something, you go to goog, you type some words, you hit enter, and then you click on some links. But now Google in particular is really eager to change that. This week on the Vergecast, we're talking about all of the news from I O Google's big developer conference, including the ways in which it is going to change search completely and forever. All that plus what a Google book actually is on the Vergecast. Wherever you get podcasts. All right, I got a couple rapid fire questions for you.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh gosh.

[Marques Brownlee]

Feel free to take.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, it's about the magic mouse.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm gonna throw one in there about the magic mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

I have two of them.

[Marques Brownlee]

This isn't your mouse of choice, is it?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, it is.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, maybe this isn't rapid fire.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, everyone is.

[Marques Brownlee]

Explain yourself.

[Joanna Stern]

Everyone is rolling their eyes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Explain yourself. You intentionally use and it sounds like you have two. So you bought another magic mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, yeah, because when I'm charging, I like to have them in and out.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's now, you know, you could just get one mouse and just. Right. Like you could just keep using it while it's charging.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I love the scrolly feel. Like the clicky part. I like it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. Have you.

[Joanna Stern]

Have I tried other mouses?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

No. Never. Never.

[Marques Brownlee]

But do you not like the other mouse?

[Joanna Stern]

I'm only using the magic mouse. In fact, in 1995, when you were two years old and I had my first computer, I had a prototype of the magic mouse.

[Marques Brownlee]

They've always had Jony.

[Joanna Stern]

I've sent it to me.

[Marques Brownlee]

They've had bad mice for a long time. Actually, I unboxed some of Those old iMac G3s and the mouse even from those times was notably unique.

[Joanna Stern]

The see through the plastic see through ones. Yeah, it's an awesome mouse.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's an awesome mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean it's just cool looking. I don't know.

[Marques Brownlee]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Insane Mousetrase. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Desktop or laptop person?

[Joanna Stern]

Am I gonna be canceled for the magic mouse stuff?

[Marques Brownlee]

Should we edit this out? No, we have. I'm not gonna name names, but we have people who work here.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's me and Michael also. We like the magic mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

I knew that. We shared a bond. Except for this whole basketball thing that you're always talking about.

[Marques Brownlee]

Just something about the magic mouse that brings out. Yeah, I just get mad for no reason.

[Joanna Stern]

Maybe John Ternus is the first thing he's gonna do.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yo, that's actually huge. Wait, he has to know the magic mouse is bad. He's a product guy. He has to know the magic mouse is bad.

[Joanna Stern]

Marques, please talk into the mic.

[Marques Brownlee]

Tim Cook.

[Joanna Stern]

I was like, podcast alert, Podcast alert here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Did you see that? You've seen the clip where I asked Tim Cook about the magic mouse and he's like, we make a mouse like that. He hasn't thought about that in years. Tim Cook.

[Joanna Stern]

Wait, no, I haven't seen the Turnus one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, I haven't asked him about it, but I know that he knows. He knows the magic mouse is bad.

[Joanna Stern]

Of course he knows it, because he also has two. And this is exactly what he does.

[Marques Brownlee]

He takes over at Apple.

[Joanna Stern]

I don't know if that's true. That's not. I have not reported that out. Please. As a reporter, I will confirm that. Actually, Apple PR will not.

[Marques Brownlee]

September 1st, when he becomes the new CEO. I'm starting a countdown timer to when Apple releases a good mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Because there's a lot of stuff I want Apple to make that's maybe at the top of my list.

[Joanna Stern]

And honestly, I'm fine with that mouse just having a port someplace else.

[Marques Brownlee]

That would be a really nice start.

[Joanna Stern]

Right?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

I mean, Alice agrees.

[Marques Brownlee]

Even if that's the only change they make. Even if it's still an ergonomic nightmare. Just move the port. Okay.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Do you have hands?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

How is it an ergonomic nightmare?

[Joanna Stern]

Because it's raised.

[Marques Brownlee]

I have a hand that is maybe three times the size of the hand they designed it for.

[Ellis Hamburger]

That's true. So what if they just made Magic Mouse xl?

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah. What if they made Magic Mouse?

[Marques Brownlee]

That would solve one of the critical issues.

[Joanna Stern]

Ultra.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah. Magic Mouse Studio. That would solve one of the two horrible things about the magic mouse.

[Joanna Stern]

If they could just $27,000 to get that mouse. What, would you buy it?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, I would just use an MX Master, which is just fine.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Marcus, if you spend an extra $600. It has wheels.

[Marques Brownlee]

All right, I'm in. No magic stainless steel.

[Joanna Stern]

It's little feet.

[Marques Brownlee]

It just walks around with little feet. Little scurry like this and a tail.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm pretty sure John Ternus is listening and taking these hands.

[Marques Brownlee]

He's got it. John. If you just watch this part of the podcast. Magic mouse, too, please. You can do wonders.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay. Rapid fire Laptop.

[Marques Brownlee]

Laptop or desktop?

[Joanna Stern]

Laptop os.

[Marques Brownlee]

Laptop always. Okay. No desktop at all.

[Joanna Stern]

I have a Mac mini running stuff, but totally.

[Marques Brownlee]

What browser do you use? Are you an AI browser person or are you a regular browser person?

[Joanna Stern]

I have a lot of browsers right now. Chrome, Vertical Tabs. I know you have a lot of feelings on that.

[Marques Brownlee]

I like Chrome.

[Joanna Stern]

I like Chrome. I've heard a lot about ARC on this podcast. I don't know what those.

[Marques Brownlee]

I guess ARC is nice. ARC is not the AI browser, but it is the beautiful, functional browser that a lot of us like. But then there's like, the Perplexity Comet.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I've been using Comet a lot. Okay. Yeah, I've been using Comet a lot. Here's the true story. I used Microsoft Edge for a long time on a Mac. I know it hurts people. It hurts when they say it, but they had this great feature called collections, which everyone else ripped off. But you could group your tabs or you could group your shortcuts together. And it was amazing. Especially, like, when I was working on, like, I'd be working on a project like the book, and I'd have 10 documents and 10 different things, and I just wanted them in one collection.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, like a tab group.

[Joanna Stern]

It's a tab group, but it's saved.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, okay. So, okay. It's persistent.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, it's like a bookmarks manager, but it was better than that.

[Marques Brownlee]

And then every other browser was like, we'll add that. And then you were like, finally, no more Edge.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I don't.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Can I share a quick. I've never met someone else who uses Perplexity comment? I don't use it anymore. But I wanted to share the last time I used Perplexity Comet, which was me asking it to search. I gave it a bunch of things that I was making a mood board, and I was like, can you go and collect these images for me? And I gave it this big list of everything I was looking for, and it's like, go out and find these images. And it came back and it found me 20 images. And I was like, that's fantastic.

[Joanna Stern]

And I was like, pictures of the magic mouse.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sure. For this story.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It could totally be. But then I asked it. Okay, now here's an updated version of the list. Go out and find images. And it said, I don't have the ability to find images.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

And I spent an hour where it was just like, I can't do this, Ellis. I don't have image ability.

[Joanna Stern]

You're like, you did it in this chat.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Are the images you found me. And then I was just like, I deleted off my computer.

[Joanna Stern]

I was like, I use Comet a lot in the book because it became like a reporting assistant where I could say, write to this company, see if they're willing to do an interview about this. And it could just do that in the browser. Yeah, Comet's good. And I'm. I'm testing personal computer by Perplexity now, which is pretty good too.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Ok, I'll redownload it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay. Sorry. These are not Rapid Fire Task app

[Marques Brownlee]

or Pen and paper.

[Joanna Stern]

Both.

[Marques Brownlee]

Both.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Like, how do you use what to

[Joanna Stern]

use when I'm doing something? Like, if I like a day of video publishing, I have like a lot of things to do or column or whatever I have going that day. I have like lots of tasks that I need to do at the moment. They're like immediate tasks. And I write those on a paper on my desk. But then I have this crazy notion to do list thing that I've made. It's really not great. Do you use notion for to dos?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, not for to dos. We use it for project management for like a per video basis.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, so do we. Well, we started doing that and then I just. Cause I was like, oh, I'm already here. Let me try to use the AI to build a to do list thing. And it did a pretty good job. But. Cause I'm also doing meeting notes in there. So I'm doing a lot in there right now. But that has a big list and that's like further. It's like stuff I need to do for the day, but it's not like I need to do it this hour.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. That's a. Yeah. Good distinction. All right. I haven't used a pen and paper in years.

[Joanna Stern]

I think since 1992, basically.

[Marques Brownlee]

Phone in your pocket right now?

[Joanna Stern]

No, it's in my backpack on the side.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, which one is it?

[Joanna Stern]

It's iPhone 17 Pro.

[Marques Brownlee]

If you had to use a different phone, which one would you pick?

[Joanna Stern]

IPhone 17 Pro.

[Marques Brownlee]

Max, that's a good answer. What if you couldn't use. What if you couldn't use any Pro? What if you couldn't use any iPhone.

[Joanna Stern]

Samsung Galaxy. No. I'd probably do a Pixel. I don't know. I have been trying to. I have been playing around with a lot of the Android foldable phones.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

My issue. And I'm sure I'm gonna have the same issue with the foldable iPhone. It's very big for me.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Well, it's interesting the way they're trying to. Allegedly. Allegedly. It's gonna be like this much smaller passport style and then wider. So it could be smaller and fit in your pocket better than the current Pro.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, I just do a lot of texting on the fly when I'm commuting and stuff like that. And then it's like, okay, I'm putting it in my pocket. It's too big. And then I love being able to open it up and do much more with the bigger screen. But I don't take advantage of that in that many scenarios. And I think I would more if I actually had a smaller footprint.

[Marques Brownlee]

Interesting. Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

How fast can you type the Alphabet?

[Joanna Stern]

Like, I don't know, 90 words? I don't know, 80 words per second.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is this your keyboard of choice? So it's a bit of a tradition around here for our guests on Waveform to simply type A through Z, capital or A as fast as they can. It doesn't matter. We have a leaderboard. No pressure. You'll have three tries. And we also offer any of these fine, beautiful keyboards over here if you'd like. I don't know if you typically write

[Joanna Stern]

on if I win.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, if you want to get a faster score, if you type faster on any of these keyboards, we can swap it out.

[Joanna Stern]

No, I think I can do it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, boy.

[Marques Brownlee]

No pressure. I'm going to point my microphone. You just so the way this works. So before you take your three attempts, the way this works is as soon as you type the letter A, it starts counting, and you just go A, B, C, D, E. If you miss a letter, you still have to hit that letter, and then that's how you get all the way through Z.

[Joanna Stern]

Can I tell you something else? Okay. No, no, I'm going to. I can do this. I can do this.

[Marques Brownlee]

You got this. The first one, you'll just figure out how it works, and then the next two, you'll. You'll lock in.

[Joanna Stern]

All right. Ready?

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm ready.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, you have to press it. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

You got your first.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes.

[Marques Brownlee]

First rodeo. So now you've seen it.

[Joanna Stern]

10.5.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. I won't tell you the scores unless you want to hear them, but I

[Joanna Stern]

see it says best time, right under five.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, no, no. That's because I did it earlier. But you have two more shots.

[Joanna Stern]

You did it earlier?

[Marques Brownlee]

I just did it to make sure it worked. But we have a leaderboard of everyone who's ever been on the podcast and

[Joanna Stern]

how well, you're at the top or you're there at 5.

[Marques Brownlee]

So I know at least my official time might be slower than that. I don't remember. They'll find the leaderboard, but you got extra shots to get even faster.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay. All right. Yeah, we go again.

[Marques Brownlee]

Go for.

[Joanna Stern]

I want to go again. I've restarted. Okay, wait, how do I restart?

[Marques Brownlee]

I think you hit enter and it restarts.

[Joanna Stern]

Okay, got it. All right. Yeah. Sound effects. Go. I'm going again.

[Marques Brownlee]

Go.

[Joanna Stern]

Is that how it works?

[Marques Brownlee]

I think, yeah, just send it. Just send it into. Until you get to see.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, so much slower this time. I was doing better when I wasn't looking at the.

[Marques Brownlee]

Are you like home road just, like banging keys or are you trying to, like.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm trying to touch type, but I'm like.

[Marques Brownlee]

Then I realize some of them are in weird places.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, you realize you skip a letter and then you're like, oh, I hit that. Like, that's what's.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, you gotta make sure.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm like, oh, I've moved on. And it's like, oh, no. Like, you didn't get.

[Marques Brownlee]

You know, it could be. Yeah, yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

Cause like, I should just be looking at the screen and touch typing without looking at the keyboard.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that's high difficulty. All right.

[Joanna Stern]

Also, you know, this is making me realize my kids don't know how to type. I have an 8 year old who does not know how to type.

[Marques Brownlee]

What about on a phone screen?

[Joanna Stern]

On a phone screen, kind of. But. Or on an iPad. But, like, mostly they just do voice.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, that is.

[Joanna Stern]

And I'm really upset about it. And I'm gonna start working with him on Saturdays on typing.

[Marques Brownlee]

Cause something we talked about is something that, quote, kids these days don't know anymore. They don't really have to know file structure or how that files are even a thing. And they also don't really have to know how to Google things. And I guess they don't really have to know how to type very much.

[Joanna Stern]

No. Wow. I mean, they know how to type. Like, they know. They know how to type emojis.

[Marques Brownlee]

Of course that's important because you can't just say, well, you could say the emoji, but you got to really find the perfect one.

[Joanna Stern]

All right. One More time.

[Marques Brownlee]

Go for it.

[Joanna Stern]

It's very embarrassing. Okay, I beat my time there. 9.3.

[Marques Brownlee]

9.3. Lock it in.

[Joanna Stern]

All right. I feel like if I did this a few more times I would be way better.

[Marques Brownlee]

Totally. I think that's usually.

[Joanna Stern]

I think we proved that I'm a human. On the pin.

[Marques Brownlee]

On the. Yeah, exactly. That's very important. Do you want to know leaderboard scores or do you still.

[Joanna Stern]

Yes, I do. Okay, is there anyone good on the leaderboard?

[Marques Brownlee]

It's in Slack, I think. I'll tell you who's around you in your time. Let's see. I got a DM from Adam. Boom. Okay, your 9.3 is exactly in between our own cinematographer Brandon and David Blaine.

[Joanna Stern]

Wow.

[Marques Brownlee]

Right. Nestled right in between those two.

[Joanna Stern]

David Blaine doesn't have magic tricks to be faster.

[Marques Brownlee]

He was also like, I'm gonna be super slow. And then he got faster and faster as he went. So there it is.

[Joanna Stern]

Well, that, I mean, I feel like I would also. Okay, tell me what you are. What?

[Marques Brownlee]

It's that five. I ended up. This is the whole leaderboard.

[Joanna Stern]

Cleo's at 4.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

That's amazing.

[Marques Brownlee]

Tom Scott had a 3.5. Insane. Some people are just insanely fast typists.

[Ellis Hamburger]

But didn't, didn't Tom Scott do it on like his Dell laptop?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it was like, like his keyboard was the loudest thing.

[Joanna Stern]

I'm coming back and I'm going to practice. This is not good.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's good. No, that's perfect.

[Joanna Stern]

I would really love to come back with the 1x robot and.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, maybe they'll type.

[Joanna Stern]

I don't know.

[Marques Brownlee]

Let's see how fast they can type. Joanna, thanks for coming on. Thanks for talking to me. And I'm going to point people towards watching your videos and reading this book because I think it's all, it's all very interesting.

[Joanna Stern]

People need to talk about the best AI wearable in the world.

[Marques Brownlee]

And of course, well, they can get their hands on this wearable if they get the book, of course.

[Joanna Stern]

That's right.

[Marques Brownlee]

And they can subscribe.

[Joanna Stern]

I noticed you stopped wearing it.

[Marques Brownlee]

I can't. I feel bad lying.

[Joanna Stern]

Uh huh. You can't put it on?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, I just, it would imply that.

[Joanna Stern]

Oh, you feel bad lying that you're icy. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Joanna Stern]

So true.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, I'll get Marques to wear it.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, you should get.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'll give him the pin.

[Joanna Stern]

Get the real Marques to wear it. And I so appreciate that Marques bot for you being so honest here.

[Marques Brownlee]

I appreciate the pin. I will you know what we should

[Joanna Stern]

really do as a test? Can you fold your T shirts?

[Marques Brownlee]

I can't fold anything. Yeah. No, I just kind of have clothes.

[Joanna Stern]

Can you fold laundry?

[Marques Brownlee]

I haven't fold. No, actually. Genuinely? No. I can put stuff on hangers sometimes, but, yeah, I avoid the folding stuff.

[Joanna Stern]

Yeah, we should test that. It would really be. It's. That's the Turing Test.

[Marques Brownlee]

Me versus CES robot. That actually is basically the Turing Test. The captcha means nothing anymore. It's fold.

[Joanna Stern]

But if humans can fold the laundry. You're human.

[Marques Brownlee]

There it is. Now we know.

[Joanna Stern]

Great.

[Marques Brownlee]

We'll have you back on at some point. Thanks again, and see you soon.

[Joanna Stern]

Good thing I recorded this all on my bee bracelet.

[Marques Brownlee]

Nice.