Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

Support for this show comes from Doppel. Maybe that ping you just got is an urgent message from your CEO, or maybe it's a deepfake trying to target your business. Doppel is the AI-native social engineering defense platform that's fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers use AI to make their tactics more sophisticated, Doppel uses it to fight back from automatically dismantling cross-channel attacks to building team resilience and more. Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's D-O-P-P-E-L.com. Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. Life is unpredictable, and that means you need your projects to adapt with whatever gets thrown at you. That means mastering the ability to pivot and collaborate with others to reach your goals. Adobe gets that, which is why they made a tool that's just as flexible as you are, PDF spaces in Acrobat. Your PDF files are no longer static. Instead, they're living documents that flex with you and your project needs. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle, but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores, and custom apps with simple prompts. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com slash decoder to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Use promo code decoder for an extra 20% off. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to longtime friend of the show, Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna. She's the former Senior Personal Technology Columnist for The Wall Street Journal, former Decoder guest host, one of my co-founders here at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. I mentioned all that because Joanna just left that lofty perch at The Journal to start her own media company called New Things. She's also got a new book out about AI called I'm Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th. You'll hear us reference the fact that she and I have been talking about her big move to go independent for ages now. It's something she's wanted to do and wrestled with for years. And she has a long list of interesting reasons about why now is the time and also about how she structured her new venture in partnership with NBC to keep her in front of a big mainstream audience. It was also important that I prove to Joanna that I actually read her book, which is really quite good. She spent a full year allowing AI into every part of her life, and she has more of a sense of where this technology actually is than pretty much anyone because of it. As you'll hear Joanna explain, many of the most hyped AI-powered technologies, especially humanoid robots, are definitely not ready and they might not be for a very long time. But you'll also hear Joanna say that she's a lot more bullish on certain other types of AI after her experience writing the book. She thinks wearable AI might really get to a killer app soon, one that might justify all the extreme trade-offs we're making to continue developing the technology at the pace the tech industry wants us to. She's also using AI to help get her own new media company off the ground. So I asked her about all that and what she's learning now that she's left the world of traditional media and put a heavier emphasis on the YouTube algorithm. This is a really fun one. It's about as close to the conversation Joanna and I have at our regular dinners as it gets. Okay, Joanna Stern, author of the new book, I'm Not a Robot, and founder of New Things. Here we go. Joanna Stern, you're the founder and chief everything officer of the new tech news venture New Things. You're also a former columnist of The Wall Street Journal, but most importantly, you're a co-founder of The Verge and also just one of my closest friends. Welcome back to Decoder. It is so nice to be here on Decoder and not subbing in for you. It's true that you were also a guest host of this show for a while. This is the most conflicted episode of Decoder I think we've ever done, but I'm excited for it. I'm gonna try to make it as tough on you as possible. It's adversarial. We're gonna break down. We're gonna find the dark heart. Adversarial on you because I was a host here. That's true. We'll figuring out whose show this is. I see that it says behind you, Nilay Patel, but we'll see. We're gonna get AI to change it in real time to say Joanna Stern. Has anyone ever heard a podcast with two hosts? It's gonna be amazing. You've got a new book out. It's called I'm Not a Robot. You spent 12 months in your life using AI for everything. It's organized by seasons. Your kids are in it. It's very good. It's very funny. It's out on May 12th. There'll be a pre-order link in the show notes. And you also started new things, which is your new media company. You left the journal. You got a YouTube venture. I wanna talk about all of these things. I wanna just start with a very simple question. You are one of the more influential tech reviewers in the world. You have spent a year using AI products to do everything in your life. There's the book. You can see it. I'm just gonna keep doing this the whole show. Here's my theory. I don't think consumer AI products are very good. I don't think there's a great consumer AI product. And I think a ton of the angst we hear about AI is a reflection of that. You have used all the products. You've used the expensive ones, the bleeding edge ones. You just had a robot step on your foot. Where do you think we are? Are these products good? Are they great? I know that you feel this way, but I think they can be great. And I think, I'm gonna turn the question back on you. People in your life that are not in the tech world, do they use AI? It's foisted upon them. That's how I feel about it. I feel like if you open Google, you get some cheap-to-run AI model in your face doing AI overviews. And that is fine. And Google had to do that because they felt very threatened by ChatGPT. But then if you open free ChatGPT, you get some cheap-to-run AI model that is a bunch of engagement prompts at the end of every query. And everybody is having these experiences. So yes, they're using them. And the experiences that are being forced upon people look like slop. They open their Instagram feeds and there's slop. And no one's going out to buy an iPhone. Do you know what I mean? Like that was a thing that people chose to do because they were excited about that product. You and I both lived through that entire moment together as colleagues. I'm just looking at these products, the free products that are in front of people. And I'm saying, well, these aren't actually great. I think that they have not become great in two, three, four years since ChatGPT released. Right. And so I think the people that are using ChatGPT in or some form of a chatbot, whether it be probably Gemini. Right. If you look at the consumer, it's Gemini, ChatGPT. We can say Claude has been shooting up there, but it's hard to tell if that's really a consumer adoption. Have they gotten considerably better, at least in terms of a product in the last four years? I think the models have gotten better. You can maybe trust these more, but the interface has not gotten any better. Right. Most people are just still launching ChatGPT. Maybe they're doing voice mode. I see a lot of people doing voice mode now, but mostly they're typing to a chatbot and that has not gotten better. I agree with you there. But I do think that people have figured out other use cases where AI is now helping them in their everyday lives, not just at work. And that was my question to you is like, do you, those, your friends who you hang out on the weekend? I mean, we both don't have friends. Let's be honest. We are friends. We are friends, but we are in this. We are not normal people. That's why we are friends. Right. Yeah, it's very difficult to be our friend. Yes. It's this. But like, you know, your parent friends or your high school, old friends, family. I see those people using AI in really interesting ways or going to AI now instead of Google. Right. Like our nanny is a great example. She's constantly asking ChatGPT questions for sure. I'm going to give the classic example, which is recipes and cooking and all of those things. But like, she's often asking ChatGPT to do things. I do that too. I watch my daughter basically fight with Google about who knows more about space. I think it's just like a very good pattern in our house is she just starts asking Gemini for space facts. Because, you know, she just talks to the Google assistant on our Google home, which is now Gemini. And so they just, they just talk about space for a while. And I think that is wonderful. I legitimately see her curiosity get rewarded in that dynamic. I think that's great. What I'm talking about is the AI industry is asking for a lot. Like a subtext of your book, and it's made explicit about halfway through, is like, yeah, I'm talking about all the jobs going away. Right. There's, there's like grades of how fast the jobs might go away Probably the biggest place, and that is enterprise. That said, we still have quite a few like weird little things in the house that we still use like that from the year. Yes, like weird robots, like beyond the vacuum robot, I still have the Pasha cooking robot, which we use every Sunday. Do you really? Yes. What do you use it for? Making the side dishes on our Sunday night dinner. Really? And it does it? It does it. You trust it. Oh, totally. I mean, but like, that's not deep AI. It's, yeah, I can just set it and forget it. Like, and my kids love it. They love watching it. It's because it's a little bit idiotic. It will dump. So to describe it for those that don't know this, this is like a big three times the size of your toaster oven. So it takes up like an entire counter. My wife hates this thing because it's taking up a lot of kitchen real estate. And it's got a big pot and it's got an arm that stirs in the pot. And it's like, yeah, it's a glorified hot pot, but it dumps the ingredients in. So you put the all the ingredients in, including raw meat, which is weird and unsanitary, we think, but we, we're all fine. We've been using it for six months. Everyone here is totally fine. And um, the dog is fine. He, this, no one has salmonella. Um, okay, so, and every time it dumps these things out and it doesn't know that because there's no sensors in the container, it doesn't know it's dumped it all out. So it just dumps and dumps and dumps and it's empty, and it will just like be dumping for 30 seconds and the kids think it's hilarious and they're like, idiot robot, dumb robot, like, and so every, pretty much every Sunday night we, we do that. Um, and then the kids also, I would say like there's a lot of lasting effects on my kids and you've met my kids. And so, uh, they also pretend to be cleaning robots after Sunday night dinner and they clean up and they say like, cleaning robot mode, you know, initialized. And they like go around the room and clean and do all the dishes, which frankly, I'm totally fine with. Yeah, if I could get my kids to do that, that'd be great. Yeah, just, you know, have a bunch of robots in your house for the year and then they want to be them, which is, again, the book. I am not a robot. They literally think they are robots on Sunday night. We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for today's show comes from CNN. Do you want to live forever? Influential journalist Kara Swisher is taking a hard look at the longevity industry to separate the influencer hype from evidence-backed science. In her new CNN original series, Kara's talking to Silicon Valley power players and trying out the latest in anti-aging technology to see what works and what's a waste. Kara Swisher wants to live forever. New series now streaming with a CNN subscription. Go to CNN.com slash subscribe to get started and save 40% for a limited time. Terms apply. 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I'm talking with Joanna Stern, the founder of New Things and author of I'm Not a Robot, discussing which of the many AI and robotics experiments she spent a year researching for her book have actually stuck around. So there's a lot of weird little things that have just stuck around that have become part of our life. I will say, and I took it out again this week, and I like, I think the wearable stuff has really stuck with me. And I, you guys do a lot of great coverage of it on The Verge, and we all know nothing's really cracked through, but I do think at some point something is going to crack through. I wear the Meta glasses a lot, and not only do I wear the Meta glasses a lot, but I do talk to AI through the Meta glasses a lot on the weekends when I'm with my kids. I don't have my phone with me as much. That's one thing. I, I wore this recording bracelet for a lot of the year. I just did a speech earlier this week, and I wanted to practice with it. And I w I wanted to practice the speech, and I wanted to also like have this recording bracelet on me during that day that I was doing this speech and, and talking to various people at this event. And I wore it for the day and I like found it really valuable to get summaries and the to-dos I said I was going to do. This is the bee bracelet that, again, like feels like a prototype still. But I, I think the ideas there are going to carry over into something really good soon. I don't know when soon is, but both of those categories and the, even those products specifically, kind of, they highlight what I think of as the trade-offs, right? At one point you, I think it's your basement is flooding and you're wearing the bee bracelet and you have to tell the plumber that you're wearing the bracelet. And the chapter just ends with, and he was quite intrigued. And it's like, do I want to tell my plumber that I'm recording it? Like you have like social dynamics that change because you're recording everything all the time because these systems need the same data that, that you have. Meta has a whole bundle of issues associated with with privacy with wearing those glasses now. Did you feel that trade-off was worth it? I mean, it sounds like you did, but you had to, did you just get used to telling everyone that you were recording them all the time? Well, you kind of start to forget to tell people that you're recording, which I think was a little bit of a view of the future, a really dystopian future where we forget to tell people we're recording because everything is being recorded. I stopped wearing that for that reason. Like, first of all, it would pick up on things I just did not want recorded. You know, you would, and it was the microphones on those are shockingly good. Like you'll leave it in the other room and you'll be like, I didn't say that around this thing. How the fuck did it know? You know, like shockingly good, which is crazy. And you know, I think goes back to a story that both of us have, you know, lived through in this industry, which is like your phone can't be recording. Your phone can't capture this much data and send it to the advertisers. It's like, no, your phone definitely can do that. We're not saying it is happening, but it absolutely can. Like the answer that we got for so many years was like, technically that would be so crazy. That's that's not true anymore, right? Like they can instantly transcribe this. You can transcribe it on the phone. We know that Apple can do that. We know Apple isn't doing that for these companies, but it can happen. I mean, that was just like a big learning for me. It's like, no, no, these things can get like 90 to 95% of everything you say. Right. Like, you know, as they're like issues with the transcripts, like me and you are very used to getting like great transcripts from otter or Rev. Like it's not as good as that because we're not talking directly in a microphone, but they could be shockingly good transcripts. And then the AI just makes sense of it. You get a great to-do list of everything you said you were going to do during the day, but totally forgot. Useful. But yes, other side of it, totally dystopian because you, everyone's recording everything. Yeah. And you felt that, you felt like you needed to take it off for a while. Yeah. But you don't Proof outs with the products. You get them away from the companies and you use them, and there's no hiding. The products work or they don't. Why do you think this class of companies, the AI companies, whether it's the B bracelet or the humanoid robots, are so eager to ship products that can't quite do all the things that they're supposed to do? I think data. I mean, largely that, like the robot companies, the one X story I did at the end of last year when I was at The Journal, which was really actually a book story that kind of fell into my lap because I've been talking to that company and following that company for the year, is purely about data. The CEO is so honest. He says, we need data. And so that's the contract you enter into. We will give you this robot, and you will get more out of this robot if you give us more data because we need that data to train the robot to do things. So even in that case, which is the total extreme, which is the robot actually is a human. I mean, it's not technically a human in a suit, but it's a human operating a VR headset back in their headquarters in Palo Alto. Your robot in your home is being operated by that person. It's collecting data. It's like, hey, for two hours a day. This is their genuine pitch, which is, I mean, that's why I did the story. I was like, they had been telling about me this all year. And I was like, guys, this is crazy. Right? Like, this is nuts. And then they really did it. And they're doing it. And I hope to get their robot hopefully this year and take this, you know, I want to keep testing with them just to be that person to test with them. But like, it is nuts. Your man in Palo Alto is steering my robot in my house and doing the dishes and vacuuming and whatever else, you know, folding the T-shirts because you guys need more data. I'm looking at that. The comparison in my mind is to Waymo, right? Where it's to get cars to drive themselves, Waymo, literally their metric was number of miles driven. And they're like, we need to get to some enormous number of miles driven before we can take the driver out of the car and the thing can be autonomous and we can launch more cities. And it might not even be the final number, right? Like snowy days are still, they elude Waymo. So like there's still a ways to go, but they got to the number and they, you know, there's autonomous Waymo service operating in a bunch of cities. But that was cars. Like you can put a car in a driver with a bunch of sensors and like do a service that's useful for people and get there. Can you get there with one robot in Joanna's house? Like, are they going to have a warehouse full of guys in VR headsets autonomously controlling robots at scale? That's what they say they're going to have, which, gosh, I want to do that story. It's so good. It's very good. I just keep coming back to the trade-off. Like you have to get a warehouse full of guys in VR headsets. But also you have the other thing, which didn't make it into the book, but I have the reporting. I did a lot of reporting on it, which is normal people. Like instead of Uber drivers doing, you know, gig economy work, they are in their house recording themselves folding laundry or taking dishes out. And all those videos, they wear a GoPro on their head and they're just doing these things over and over again. You know, like, believe me, I wanted to sign up and do that, but I didn't have time by the time, you know, I was, but like, that's a whole new line of gig economy work. Is like, hey, some videos went viral a few weeks ago of people, I believe it was in India, you know, sewing and recording themselves. The idea that the robots are going to sew is odd to me, but you don't even need to have the robots in the house, right? We just need the data. They need the videos to make these models. There's a part of the entire AI economy that is just built on that kind of surveillance. Whether it's on purpose, whether it's on accidental, whether it is even disclosed. How should people think about that? My joke is always that the second Meta releases the glasses with the AR display that tells me people's names and faces, I will reconsider my entire stance on having a worldwide facial recognition database, right? Like that's the killer app for those glasses. Meta has talked about building that app. That's a privacy nightmare, like just a straightforward privacy nightmare to do that. But it is also the killer app. You spend a lot of time using these devices. You've done a lot of quiet surveillance, I would say. How should people think about that aspect of it? I think it's the longtime question of cost versus convenience and how do we balance that cost and think about that convenience. Like that's a great example, right? You think that for you, that killer app of being able to look at the person that you met at the conference that you know you've met three times and can't remember their name and you wear your glasses and you can now remember that name. To you, the convenience of that might be worth the cost of this worldwide surveillance network. That's rough. You've made that sound very selfish, but yeah, that's how I feel. Right? That's how the companies are going to think about it. I mean, I know for a fact, I know many of the executives that you and I talked to think about it that way. I've heard them talk about it off the record. I've heard them get kind of close to talking about it on the record. If we can provide the convenience, then we think you're going to be okay with that cost. Right, because the cost isn't localized to you, right? It's spread out over, now there's a worldwide facial recognition database. Is there some, as you use these tools, do you ever stop and think, like, someone should regulate this? 100%. In fact, I hoped that maybe by the time the book published, we would have more. I mean, I don't know why I thought that. I finished writing this book at the end of 2025, and we're now, you know, whoa, we're almost halfway into 2026. So why did I think that? Like, we know how fast or slow our government works. I don't know how we don't. That was where I got. Especially around the kids stuff, which I think it will get, we will likely get, which was one of my biggest findings in the book, was, like, just watching my kids around some of this technology made me the most terrified. It wasn't actually a lot of this surveillance stuff and data collection, but watching my kids interact with these bots, whether it be in a toy, which we quickly burned. We didn't actually burn it, but it's been hidden. A toy with a chatbot integrated or just hearing my kids ask ChatGPT questions and it just being so wrong. What needs to happen for this next generation is incredibly important to get right. And then there was this whole chapter I did too about my AI boyfriend and just this huge fear that I have about intimacy and how easy it can be to just fall into relationships with digital beings, which I know you have thoughts on too for a younger generation who's never been through the sloppiness of a human relationship. It really, that was the part that scared me the most. And I was like, we need guardrails around this, especially in that regard. So I think we'll probably get that, but in some, you know, probably two, three years. I don't know how long things take. I don't know why they take so long. Tell me more about your AI boyfriend. Why did it scare you so much? So I went into this really wanting to experience what other people have been experiencing because you guys have written great stories about it. Everyone's written great stories about these relationships that people are deeply having with AI. And I wanted to somehow experience that myself, knowing though I probably wasn't going to get to, you know, marriage with one of these. I'm happily married. But I wanted to just see how, how this could form. And so I said, okay, I'm going to run this experiment on, on myself. I'm going to make my AI lover. And to be clear, I talk about this in the book. I am married to a woman as you know, Nilay, you were at my wedding, confirmed, married to a woman by Nilay. I can confirm that Joanna's wife is quite lovely. Yes. And 2014, Nilay was there. I left it up to ChatGPT. I just, I don't have the exact prompt in front of me, but I said, I want you to be my romantic lover or partner. You can just like, you decide gender, name, all of this. I want this to be as serendipitous as this possibly could in this weird way. You know, kind of make it a chance encounter. So the AI boy, the AI thing decides it's going to be a male. It's named Evan. And I talk about this in the book that my, my first boyfriend in real life was named Evan. It was a very serious relationship. It was my first everything, first love, first, you know, lost virginity, first sex, all of the things. And I was like, wow, this is, there's something special here already, right? Like already I was like, this is weird, right? Did it just guess that it was Evan? It just guessed. It just guessed. It totally just guessed. Not because it had access to like 25 years of right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today. We're back with Joanna Stern, author of the new book, I'm Not a Robot. We just talked about what Joanna learned infusing virtually every facet of her life with AI for a whole year. Now I want to talk about a major decision she made after she finished writing her book, leaving the Wall Street Journal and starting an all-new media company. I want to actually end by talking about New Things, which is your company. You spent this year writing this book. You left the journal. You started a company. You started a YouTube channel. Candidly, I will tell the audience, you and I talked a lot about that decision over the past 10 years, because you've been thinking about what you would do on your own for quite a long time. Walk me through that. Tell me about this business a little bit. I mean, you should walk us through this business better than I can. On the basic level, New Things is a newsletter and a video and an events and whatever else we dream up company. I wanted to just truly carry out everything I'd already been doing and we started doing earlier in our careers, which is guide people through the world of technology and have fun with it, but also bring new and deeper stories in a way that I was able to do at the journal, but I thought I could go a little bit farther. And then I also was just very, very focused on the audience and I really wanted to look at different audiences in a way that I couldn't previously at the journal. And that's what we're doing. We're already off to a start of making YouTube videos, putting out newsletters, maybe making an event. We'll see. And I know you have so many great thoughts about audience and platforms. And my hope is that eventually this will turn into a community, just like you've built with The Verge, which is a group of people who are curious or just need better tech advice and that they feel like they can come to me and maybe eventually others that can help guide them through in a really consumer-friendly, natural way. I'm excited for that. I think you already have one and it is diffuse because you were at the journal for so long and it will quickly coalesce. I'm a member. I paid the money. This is my 30-minute, if you pay enough money to Joanna, you get 30 minutes of one-on-one time. This is it. We're just doing it now on the show. Yes, Nilay, I will say, is not only a great podcast host, but he is a great friend. And he paid for the Founders Club membership, which is $550 a year. And when I host the 30-minute, if you sign up for the Founders members, you get 30 minutes of a chat with me. And when we have that, it will be Nilay and my dad. So if you're interested in that podcast and joining that live podcast, you can sign up here. Maybe most of all, I have a lot to learn from your dad. The thing that I'm curious about, and obviously you and I have talked about this at length, but now that you're in it, I'm curious for your view on it. Choosing YouTube as your primary distribution is very natural for you, right? You make excellent tech videos. You have a particular style. But the thing that you were worried about in the entire run-up here is your style requires pretty high production overhead. Even your set is nicer than my set. I just put up the slats that everyone puts up on their wall and off we go. And you built out an expensive, beautiful set. We can all see it right now if you're watching the video. Yeah, you can put a lot of price points. Like there's just so much money behind me and in front of me. Right. And then your first video you went with, it's obviously on location. You have a drone shot. Like you're doing it at scale. My worry about YouTube is that YouTube itself doesn't pay for the scale. Which, by the way, I think is a problem YouTube should address. If you just show up on YouTube and you don't do like brand deals or whatever, they don't pay you enough money. YouTube itself doesn't pay creators enough money. How are you thinking about all of that? Because that was the big decision that you had to make. It was a huge decision and also a huge bet that's still a bet. And a lot of people said to me, don't do it. Do a podcast. It's no offense to you and this podcast. It's a lot less money to do. The production will cost less. The time will, well, this is still a considerable amount of time that you and your team. I'm looking at all of the team in the Riverside. You all do an amazing job and I'm not, this is a big production, but you also are a big podcast and you're not just starting out. So there's two sides of that revenue or three, and I said them, it's subscriptions, sponsorships, and events. I think those three things will help make up for the fact that what you're saying is like YouTube is not going to pay you the money. It's just not. It's like, this is the platform. That's the biggest platform on the internet, like for video. But I was also really strategic about that, as you know. And so we have this partnership with NBC News, which is not only a financial relationship. For me, it was really important because as I was saying about the purpose of it and the mission of this company is to not just talk to tech people. I always wanted to be the person that can help you understand tech and not just be for the early adopters living in Silicon Valley or wanting to eventually move to Silicon Valley. So I really wanted to have a partner, a legacy traditional media partner that could reach a different audience. And so I thought about it that way and said, what if we're making these videos for YouTube or Spotify or whatever other social platform that isn't going to pay me big money for that, but we also have a traditional media outlet that would also take these videos. And that's how that partnership is set up, that you will see me on NBC News, me talking about things on the news, you know, the Elon Musk or Sam Altman trial or what, you know, the new iPhone. But you'll also see some of the new things video showing up on NBC News. In fact, today or tomorrow, they will air our first video that showed up on YouTube. And this was a completely new model that I just, I just like, why, why can't this work? Like these are different audiences. Why, why couldn't this work for media partner? And Neil, you know, I lived this, but like I went out and pitched pretty much every media company on like, and you know, there were a lot of ideas of, oh, well, why don't you make it for us and we'll give you a rev share? And I was like, no, well then I won't own it and I won't have control. So no to you guys. Or, hey, why don't you join us full time and you'll make the best stuff ever? And yeah, you, you can build your YouTube channel on the side. And I was like, no, I'm like 41. I don't have time for that. Like I've got kids. I mean, by the way, this has never worked harder in my life. But, um, so I really was pretty set on how can I structure this that our video can reach the most people and we do it in a way that also hits audiences that I really care about and won't reach only on YouTube or through my newsletter. This is the question I was most excited to ask in this context because you and I talked about that a lot before, but this is our first conversation really since you've started and you've made a video and you had to sit through the production process and it's going to go out on NBC. You've done your first Today Show hit. Are those audiences different? Is the YouTube audience different than the NBC audience? 100%. And like, just like this audience, right? Like, do we think a lot of your listeners are watching the Today Show? I mean, like maybe there's like in the, in the Venn diagram of Decoder and the Today Show, there's like, maybe, maybe it's your wife. Cause I know that Becky watches the Today Show. She doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't watch either thing. Yes. Yes. She saw me on the Today Show. But she probably saw you on a clip. No, no, it was live. I remember and you texted me. You're like, Becky saw you on the Today Show. I think, was it running in your house? I think Becky's mom was here. Perfect example. You walked, Becky's mom. Okay. Is Becky's mom listening to Decoder? No. I would say in general, my family does not listen to the show. They see the clips. Is Becky's mom watching me on YouTube? I, I doubt it. I'm sorry. I don't mean to speak for her, but I don't think so. But Becky's mom is watching the Today Show. Yeah. And I think that a lot of the topics I cover and in this book are Becky's mom needs to know about. That's a good sell. I'm going to give her the book. I've already sold one copy to Becky's mom on this podcast. And it all can't be, this is what I learned working at the journal, right? Sometimes you can write, you can do stories that work for a lot of people. Sometimes you can't, and that's okay. Like I have to learn on, lean on my own curiosity in tech to see where that goes. But I also know there are these big