What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

Elizabeth Lopatto recently wrote about Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word AI manifesto in her piece, "Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live." Today, she joins guest host David Imel and senior wearables reviewer Victoria Song for a freewheeling discussion about what happens when we let AI make decisions for us. Further reading: Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live Dyson made a camera-equipped toothbrush that flosses for you Markiplier is now GoPro’s biggest shareholder GoPro has been acquired and is getting into ‘defense, government, robotics and aerospace’ John Ternus is now the CEO of Apple Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of things that hopefully make you feel alive. I'm David Amel. A few weeks ago, Liz Lapato wrote an article that really stuck with me. It was titled "Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Understand How to Live." And it came right after Zuckerberg's 6,500-word AI manifesto called "The Future Is For Everyone." He tried to make the case that everyone will have their own personal AI agent that will help you do things, I guess. But Liz has made the case that those are the things that actually make life worth living in the first place. I was having a very long conversation about this with my good friend V Song while I was on the airplane a few weeks ago.

• 0:44David Pierce?

  And like any group of 30-somethings, we just stopped and said, "Wait, we should just record a podcast." Because our conversations are so interesting.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  They are.

• 0:53David Pierce?

  They're so interesting. So today, we're talking to Liz Lapato, author of said article, and V Song, author of the text that she sent me in reply to my thoughts about said article, about what it means to be human and why so much of Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto feels so very hollow. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 1, 2026. Today, Dyson unveiled the $499 Camera Jet Electric Toothbrush, which uses an integrated camera in the brush head to detect gaps between your teeth. Dyson said that an AI algorithm detects when to blast those gaps with mouthwash, which will effectively take care of flossing for you.

• 1:36David Pierce?

  The toothbrush also pairs with an app to give you a livestream of the inside of your mouth, so you can see where it's most effective to brush. This is one of those products that nobody really needs, but everyone kind of wants, including me. Youtuber Mark Replier has acquired 8.5% of GoPro, making him the biggest individual shareholder in the company. The news comes just a couple of days after he published a sponsored review of the newly released GoPro Mission 1 ILS camera. This morning, GoPro entered into an agreement to merge with Starman Optical, Inc., a privately held optical photonics company. And finally, today is John Ternus's first day as the CEO of Apple, ending a 15-year tenure for Tim Cook.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  Ternus marked the occasion by tweeting a simple "hello" on Twitter with no capitalization. Ternus was previously the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, so we'll be waiting to see if he makes hardware a key point for the company moving forward. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 1, 2026.

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• 3:46David Pierce?

  So Liz Lapato, Victoria Song, thank you for coming to The Vergecast. I appreciate you guys taking the time.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I love philosophical conversations in which we go like, "Why are we doing this to ourselves?"

• 3:58David Pierce?

  Yes, yes. I wanted to bring you both on so we could talk about this. Liz, you're obviously a very prolific writer here at The Verge. I like everything that you write. Everyone likes everything that you write. But this article really stuck with me. I just want to see, can you identify the key point that Zuck was trying to make with this "The Future Is For Everyone" manifesto?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he was writing in opposition to, you know, some of the stuff that's been coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic, where they're saying, "Oh, AI is going to replace your job and it's going to like, you know, totally disrupt your life, but you know, it's going to be worth it because it's such a big advance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And people hate AI now because, you know, you say that in public, the investors get excited, but everybody who has a job is like, "I'm sorry, you're building what?" And so, you know, there is this like, pretty intense backlash that is mostly being expressed against data centers for right now. But, you know, AI is increasingly less popular. Like, every time there's a survey that comes out, it is less popular.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  And I think that a lot of it isn't just that, you know, it's being discussed as this thing that's going to ruin your life, but I think that doesn't help.

• 5:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, in this manifesto, he kind of establishes a bunch of core ideas that he thinks AI will help everyone with. They're all a little bit outlandish, and you specifically honed in on a couple of them, but I do want to go in on like, most of the main ones that he brought up. The first one being that everyone will have new tools to express their ideas.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Christ almighty, we already have tools to express our ideas, Liz. Like, dude.

• 5:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. In what new ways are we going to have new tools to express our ideas?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  You know, I gotta say, that one isn't as stupid to me as some of the ones that are coming up.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 5:54David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like, if you have ideas, there are already a lot of ways to express them. And like, I can certainly imagine, like, if you're trying to storyboard something, but you can't draw, like, if you're a director, you know? That might be helpful, to have something that can draw for you, so that you have a storyboard, so everybody can visualize your shot, right?

• 6:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Like, I can imagine this. I'm not saying it's a good use of AI, I'm just saying I can imagine it.

• 6:18David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  The thing that I find, this is like, sort of the thing about this, is that most people don't have a lot of ideas that they aren't already expressing. You know, like, I have been sort of keeping an eye on, like, the vibe coding stuff that, you know, people have been doing in our audience and sort of more broadly. And it's a lot of people making productivity tools. And I'm like...

• 6:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  That's such a funny...

• 6:44David Pierce?

  That's a great point.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Such a funny thing, because I've read a blog, oh, like, a couple of years back, I was like, "Why is there no one productivity app that like, does everything that I need?" And I realized, it's just a journal. It's just a journal that I write and like, design in my own way, because everyone's brain works a little bit differently, so you need different things. And I like, I've never been particularly into templates

• 7:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  for how to do my productivity and whatnot. And then as soon as I ditched all the productivity apps, my productivity went way up, because I could customize it to my own needs. And so, like, I could understand vibe coding your own productivity app to do what you need it to do, because the, like, the templates that are already out there don't work for you. But it's also just kind of, like, yeah, I don't know, you could buy a notebook.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I would say that this is not exactly tools for expressing your ideas. These are tools for organizing your ideas to then have ideas with and do things with those ideas. But to your point, Liz, like, it doesn't seem like people are having a lot of unique ideas that they want to be doing things with in the first place.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  That's right. And like, you know, V, as somebody else who is a member of the Notebook Society, I just am going to put in a plug for paper. Not only because, you know, you can customize it however you want, but also because there's a fair amount of research that shows physically writing stuff down makes it easier for you to remember. So even if you don't have the notebook with you, you're more likely to recall its contents.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  It's 100% true, too. Like, I was going through a period where I was reading books and then really struggling to remember what it was that I had read. And so, I started like, an active reading journal, where after I read a book, or after I read like, a certain section of it, I'll just go sit down and be like, "What happened during the section I read?" And I'll write that down, and go like, "What themes were expressed? And what did I find interesting?" And it's like, not like, a super long thing where I'm writing pages upon pages upon pages of it. It's just like, four or five sentences of what I just read. And now I have like, really great recall for the books that I've read and the themes that were expressed. And like, my in-laws were commenting, like, "How do you remember everything that you read in those books?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  I read like, books too, and I can't remember shit." And it's like, just physically writing a sentence down and like, having to do the act of that work, it really does help you stay sharp. And that's a thing that I worry about with this concept of like, AI helping you as an everyday tool for everything, because you're just offloading your cognitive thinking, in a way that

• 9:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  makes you less sharp. Or like, that's how I've experienced it, so...

• 9:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:33David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, there's a lot of these different things that he says everyone's going to have access to. I want to touch on one more right before we get to Liz's main points, because there were two in particular that Liz kind of like, focuses on in this article. But I really quick want to just address this "everyone will have the tools to create new businesses" one, because I found this very funny as well. To all these billionaires' points, they're like, "Oh, everyone's going to have access to these things." But if everyone can just start up a business, then the amount of players in the market are nearly infinite. And so, how are you actually going to sell anything to anybody? Like, what is a business in this case? You know?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Slop. It's just the business of sounding slop.

• 10:13David Pierce?

  Slop business, yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Well, I also want to say something. I recognize that like, I'm the staff weirdo in many ways, but like... I don't want to make a business. Like, I just don't want to do it.

• 10:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  I have a job because I don't want to think about accounting. And I don't want to have to hire my own libel lawyer. And I don't, like, there are all of these things that go into making a business that you have to think about and that you would, you know, with AI, I guess, program somehow.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  But, but I just, that's not what my goal is in life, you know? I want to write things. I want to write things that are meaningful. And the more time I can spend doing that, the better. And one easy way for me to do that is to have a job where all I do is write. And, you know, somebody else takes care of the business stuff, so I never have to think about it. Like, these, you know, these, some of these things is just like, yeah, everybody does have a tool, tools to make, I don't know, AI music now. But like, most of us want to listen to musicians. Most of us are excited about listening to real human beings. Like, it's not that, like, I have been stopped from having some kind of musical career

• 11:28Speaker 04

  because I, like, can't really sing. I want, you know, I want to listen to, like, Mariah Carey because she has a remarkable voice. And so, like, you know, there are, there are these things where it's just like, okay, but like, I don't care. Like, I don't care about this.

• 11:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think this kind of pushes us into like, the, the primary part of this article that I really wanted to talk about. And there are two core paragraphs that you wrote that I think really made me think a lot about that. What you're saying right now, when I'm reading a book, or listening to music, or watching a movie, I'm not just consuming a resource, I am experiencing other people's minds. That is something that I, that I, I read that and I just was thinking like, yeah, that's the entire reason that we consume other people's work, why we make our own work. Why would we consume something that is just generated? When we could actually feel connected to somebody who is trying to express a feeling or thought through a form of art?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  It's also the effort that gets communicated through that form of art. Like, I, I'm, like, I was super obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo's You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. There's that, one of the lines that she writes, like, if loving me means crying on the curb at LAX, I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less. And I'm like, yah! That just hit in such a way.

• 12:51David Pierce?

  What the robot would not cry on the curb at LAX.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  A robot's not gonna cry on the curb at LAX because her relationship, like, broke down. It's just not, because anytime you talk to one of these chatbots, and I've talked to a lot of AI chatbots and companions for this site, it's just, um, kind of a filtered reflection of you. So if you're talking to yourself in a mirror, but it's all, like, there, there's an artifice that gets really apparent after a bit. Of how it's just sort of like, oh, yeah, I need to engage you more, so I'm gonna end everything with a question.

• 13:27David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  So it's just, I don't know, like, there's something about knowing that she actually probably cried on the curb at LAX.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  That makes that song really hit with a lot of people.

• 13:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  It's just, yeah.

• 13:41David Pierce?

  Liz, did you have, like, a specific thing you were thinking about when you wrote that? Was there, like, a, a song you were thinking of? Or like, something that you were, I don't know?

• 13:51Speaker 04

  I was actually, um, I was thinking about something that happened in 2020. So during the pandemic, when, you know, everything was bad, um, and we were all feeling pretty bad. I went back and reread a bunch of stuff, um, that I loved when I was a teenager, a bunch of Terry Pratchett novels.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  And, you know, they're not, like, challenging in the way that Moby Dick is challenging, right? Like, you're not, like, it's, it's not high art.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  But what Terry Pratchett is, and what I wanted then, is just good company. And like, every single one of those books is just guaranteed good company. Like, something that, you're in the company of someone who is kind, and who is generous, and who is funny, and who is, like, making jokes about Shakespeare, or like, writing books that are jokes about Shakespeare. And that really was part of what got me through sort of a difficult period, was having, um, that kind of company.

• 14:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think that that point about good company, it's kind of the, similarly to the experiencing other people's minds, right? Like, the fact that you use the word company. It's like, they're not in the room with you, but they did transfer their emotions and their feelings and their minds onto a page, which then feels like you're in the room with them.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It's transformative.

• 15:11David Pierce?

  It's transformative, yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It's good art.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  And, and why would I want to just read a book about, written by a robot who?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's like a robot can't live, right? A robot can't experience, like, I think sometimes we read books, or we listen to music, or we experience art to kind of find, uh, like, a connection, or like, to use Liz's words, company, and a feeling that we're trying to express ourselves, right? And an AI who has not experienced loss, an AI who has not experienced grief, who can't understand what it means to, like, feel some of the, the darkest, deepest things. Like, when my mom was dying, I read a book called Crying in H Mart. And that's by Michelle Zoner, who is also known as Japanese Breakfast. She's half Korean, uh, half American.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And it was like, uh, her experience of losing her mom was a singular experience. But there were things in it that was echoing the impending loss of my mother.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Which I don't think if I went to an AI and I was like, hey, write a memoir of a Korean-American and what H Mart and Korean food mean when you're losing a mother who is the only source of that Korean food that you have, and what it means to go sit and cry in an H Mart. And then also, like, have something poignant about chronic illness, and like, being a daughter, and what it means to be, like, lost in a creative process, to process that, like, what are they gonna come up with?

• 16:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Like, and like, if I, I have done these experiments to kind of, like, see, write, like, me in the style of that. And it's always just such a empty feeling in it. Because it's not, like, the AI is not sitting there thinking about the word, or thinking about the emotion, and what is the perfect way to express how that loss hits. And when I read that book, and I, like, I, I just sobbed for like, two hours, because I was like, oh, this is, there's no one in my life currently who can, like, sit with me in that moment, but this person I don't know has gone through something similar. And it kind of served as a source of comfort and company in a time where I felt really isolated.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And I think that's honestly the biggest argument against AI-generated writing that I've seen. Like, just, like, how is a thing that can't experience going to provide that company and comfort for someone? Because AI, like, it can't experience good stuff, but it also can't experience bad stuff because it can't experience anything.

• 17:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  So, eh, that's how I feel about that.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  And maybe this is just, uh, again, a particular way in which I interact with, with art. But, um, if I really like somebody, um, I will read, or watch, or listen to their entire body of work.

• 18:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  And the joy of doing that, and again, I'm gonna use Terry Pratchett as an example, is you see someone getting the hang of it, you know? Like, often, especially with Terry Pratchett, it's a pretty good example. Like, his first two books, like, you can see what's coming, but he hasn't quite figured out his style. And then he gets better at it, and then he gets better at it. And then there it is, the trademark style that, like, everybody knows and loves. And watching that develop is such a joy to me. Like, I love that. And you can see it with, you know, with artists, like, arguably with Olivia Rodrigo, as she's like, you know, still developing. I recently saw, uh, I went down to LA for this, actually.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  I saw, um, a retrospective, um, called Overshare.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  And it is this artist, Sophie Kalla's, work from, like, 1970 through now. And not only do you get this sense of, um, you know, how she is personally developing, you also get a sense of what was going on in each sort of period of time. So anyway, Sophie Kalla has this, like, this incredible, you know, arc. And a lot of her, um, her work is particularly resonant to those of us who are familiar with the internet. She was oversharing before we were all oversharing.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  And one of the pieces there, um, is a, a piece she did of her mother dying. And it is a video camera set up next to her mother's bed. And- It's, you know, not just the video. There's more than just the video that goes into that, especially in the context of this exhibit of everything this artist has done in her life. Because, you know, in some of the, the, the stuff around the video, you realize that her mom was like a little mad that she hadn't been the center of attention in Sophie's art.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  So like, this was like her last chance to make her mom like the centerpiece. So there are all these sort of things that occur around art that I think are also interesting and relevant because again, you're dealing with a person.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think this might be part of the reason why, and we've talked about this on the show before, people are more mad that they've been deceived than they are that this AI stuff is being created.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I think it's because it's the effort, right? Like, I read this book, 4,000 Weeks or something about that, and it's about how we spend time. And an average person has about 4,000 weeks of being alive. And one of the things-

• 20:50David Pierce?

  You didn't have to tell me that.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Whatever. But it's, it's just like, it was an interesting book because there was a line that stood out to me where he was like, you know, inconvenience is the effort. And that's what makes things truly valuable. So I find this like cognitive dissonance when I hear these, like, tech execs like Zucker were being like, things will be easier, things will be so much more convenient. When we go to these like tech keynote events where they're talking about how AI is going to help you plan a block party, for some reason, they're really into this idea that it's going to help you plan a party. And Liz, I think you get into this in the, in your piece where you're, where it's just like, okay, well, father wants to bake, like, give a gift to their daughter, AI, tell me what thing to do. And instead of putting the effort in of going like, what does my daughter like?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  What is my, what would make her happy is like, hmm, recipe that maybe small child would like.

• 21:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And it's sort of like, well, the betrayal that you feel is that, oh, you didn't put any effort into it.

• 21:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  You didn't take the time. You didn't inconvenience yourself, inconvenienced yourself in any way. And in some, like, tangible form, making things so convenient just means, oh, you didn't put any effort into it. You didn't think about me at all. And I recently saw the 10th anniversary of Train to Busan, which is an amazing movie, amazing zombie movie, if you like zombie stuff. But it's a Korean movie and there's this scene in it where the father, they're establishing, he's like really busy, he doesn't really spend time with his little daughter. And he's like, ah, crap, it's her birthday. And he asks someone else, which in my mind is like asking a chatbot, like, what do kids like these days? And he gives her the gift and she looks at it and it's like a Wii. And she looks at it and he's like, well, you don't like WIs?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And she just looks at the Wii he gave her for the last, you know, gift giving occasion. And he's like, oh. And, and the conceit there is that she feels that way and she feels unloved and she feels devalued because he didn't put that effort.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  He didn't put the, he put like the facsimile of an effort into it. So I was watching that movie and I was like, oh, for, I didn't really put two and two together at the time. I was like, oh, that's, that's what AI makes me feel like sometimes. When I find out that something was made by AI, it's like, oh, you didn't put the-

• 23:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  You didn't put the blood, sweat and tears into it, you just generated it.

• 23:07David Pierce?

  That's a very good analogy.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Like, ugh.

• 23:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was a quote in here that was so good, I wrote it down in my notes. Love is not just a feeling, it's a way of paying attention. And that's a, it's a very condensed version of what you just said.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yes, it is, it is.

• 23:19David Pierce?

  But it's such a good point, you know?

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• 25:33David Pierce?

  I remember when I was a kid, I had a friend whose dad was like the regional manager for Best Buy. So he was so busy, he was working 80 hours a week. He paid no attention to his kid, but for every birthday, it was like, here's the most expensive thing at Best Buy and I'll go have fun.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  And it was like, that's not, that's not what love is. And if, if that's what AI is doing, you know, it's like, here's the most surplus of anything you could ever have. But there's no, there's nothing that is targeted at you because you are not paying attention to what the person actually cares about.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  It's also sometimes love is not giving you what you want, it's giving you what you need, right? And I don't know that AI has the wisdom or the discernment to give you what you need, ever.

• 26:19David Pierce?

  Also very true.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  It's, I think it's fine at giving you what you want, but is it going to sit there and be like, hey, so I see that you're wanting a lot of this, but I think you need to step away. And on my beat, that's kind of one of the reasons I really have not resonated with AI health in any capacity, because sometimes what you need in terms of health is to step away. Sometimes what you need in health is to get a kick in the butt by someone who loves you and means well. And so it's like, AI can't love you. Hmm, I, I should hope that's obvious, but I've also gone to AI dating pop-ups for this site and it's not. So, yeah.

• 26:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, maybe a dumb analogy, and I want to get into like Liz's thoughts on this. But it's like when you're playing Animal Crossing.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  And there's the ability to time skip. And you can just time skip and then have all the fruits and then pay off your house. And you're like, wait, where's the game?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, where's the game?

• 27:14David Pierce?

  That was the game.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  I guess the thing that I, I think about, I enjoy giving people gifts, by the way. That's, that's part of the reason why I was sort of affronted by the idea that someone would do it for me. Because part of the pleasure of it for me, and this is how I give gifts, this is like not a secret, is I think about what the person really likes. And then I get a version of it that is extravagant or expensive that they would never get for themselves, you know, that they would, they would never justify to themselves.

• 27:42David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  And I think that's just a really good way to give gifts to people, you know? Like, here is something that you love, but a much better version. It's like, it's a simple hack. If you guys want to use it, feel free. But it, it is, it requires you to sit and think about, what does this person like? And what, you know, what would they be interested in but never really be able to justify to themselves? Like, what is a treat to this person? And in doing that, I think you've come to understand people a lot better. And that's part of what's satisfying about giving that gift.

• 28:21David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  So, you know, there's an example that Mark Zuckerberg uses in this, in this post about baking with his daughter, you know, and his daughter is really into baking, so he used AI to get a recipe. And like, you know, I guess you could do that.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Like, that's, that's a thing you can do. You're still spending time with your daughter, you know, while you bake. That's true. That's real.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  But, you know, like, I, I can't speak for anybody else's family, but my family has like a, um, like a laminated binder with my grandmother's recipes in them. And AI is never going to give me that. And that's, that's just, it isn't.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  And so like, I keep thinking like, well, what about like, are there family recipes that you could pass down? That would give you a connection to someone who isn't here anymore? Because like, you know, um, that is a really profound way of staying in touch, not merely with like, the family members you already have like with you, but people who are gone. And telling stories about them. Or like, if you're not good at baking, but you want to express interest in your daughter's hobby, it might be fun to do something that is difficult and catastrophic. And the two of you have a fun time failing together.

• 29:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, fail upwards.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, or like, um, you know, it might be interesting to think about like, where, where are her skills right now? And what can I do that will complement them or add to them? Like, there are so many ways that you can approach, like, hanging out with your kid. That mean quality time thinking about your kid. And that AI won't give you.

• 30:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. And, and to that point of being bad, like, that's, that, that was the other kind of primary idea in this piece that I really resonated with was the idea that the point of hobbies is not to be good at the hobby. Like, when I, well, I'm terrible at guitar, but I still go play in the park. Because I enjoy the process of, I don't know, I don't even see myself getting better. But maybe every couple of weeks, I'm like, oh, I can play this now. And I didn't used to be able to play that. And if you can just be instantly good at anything, like, what is, it's the same thing as the Animal Crossing analogy. It's like, where the journey is how we experience joy. So why skip it?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Like, being, I, I see people say this a lot, though, like, they want to sound polished, or they want to look polished, or they want to be good already. But everyone who you think is good already, and it comes easy to them, they've put in the work. I picked up cross stitching this year. And it's not a hard entry into the fiber arts. Almost anybody can cross stitch. It's, it's pretty, but there are, there are little things that would bother me. I'm like, oh, my thread is twisted. How do I do this? And the, the really nice thing is that I ended, I have a friend who's like, super into cross stitching. And in my journey of finding tips, finding which tapestry needles work best with which Ada, and like, what tools are there? I actually got closer with my friend. And like, it was a new thing that we could share together.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And it was something that I could have a friend teach me. And it was, it was like, really lovely. And so now I'm, I'm super into cross stitch, a little grandma hobby of mine. It's a, it's a lovely little thing to learn. And I don't know, it's, I, I do think struggle is necessary in the human condition. Because, I don't know, they, these, these tech execs, they're always like, things will be so much easier. And then you'll have time. It'll take care of the stuff that you don't want to. What do you do with the time? Right? What are you supposed to do with the time? And I, I suspect the answer is more work. So, like, the, the promise is like, oh, the time you get back, you'll do spending on the things and the people you love. What are you supposed to do?

• 32:17David Pierce?

  But then they're also pitching that the time you spend on the people you love, you're also just generating.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  You're just offloading that to, so what are we doing?

• 32:25David Pierce?

  So what do you do at all?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  What do we do at all at that point?

• 32:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  I think there's also, you know, a couple of things here. Like, I started rock climbing about a year ago. And I'm never gonna be as good at it as somebody who started when they were a kid. Right? Like, it's just, that's just true. I enjoy that there's no pressure on me to be good at it. Like, I, I just like physically doing it, you know? I like that, like, I'm probably never going to do any especially challenging route. Like, I'm never gonna have it like, uh, a world-recognized achievement in this sport. I'm, I'm just like, and I, I say rock climbing specifically because you need to take breaks, because it's like, pretty tough. And so you spend time bullshitting with the people you're climbing with. And that's really fun.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  It's one of the reasons I really like it, is that it is a social sport. And, um, I, again, like, you know, I, I recognize that AI can't really do your physical activity for you. But I, I think about like, all of the other things that are like that, where the point isn't that you're gonna be good. The point is just that you're doing it. And like, maybe having fun with, you know, some people along the way. And like, you know, I, I think about the number of people who make friends. I, I mean, I'm one of them. I made friends by taking a bridge class. I learned how to play bridge, uh, last year. And I now have a standing bridge game with some very cool people.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And like, I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't actually physically gone to a bridge club and gone to these classes and met these people and spent time with them. And so like, these things are sort of like entwined, I think. Because I know there's a lot of talk about how lonely people are and how few friends people have. And like, that's real, and it's sad. And, um, you don't fix it by staying inside with a computer. You fix it by going and doing something that is new and maybe a little scary, and then meeting some people and going back again and again and again, until you start to get to know some of these people.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  And you're like, oh, like, we really get along. This, this person is my friend now. And that's like, again, you know, a little bit of a slow process. But it's also like, pretty cool. Like, you really just have to keep showing up to the same place over and over again. And sooner or later, you're going to make a friend.

• 35:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  It's, it's definitely that Animal Crossing skip thing. Where I think there is like, this devaluation of discomfort and, um, bad, like, this propensity to want to run away from bad feelings. Because I've done the thing where it's like, oh, I have to go and I have to meet new people. I'm a socially awkward turtle. I'm not gonna have a good time. And someone might not like me and I, uh, and if I avoided that, then I'm never gonna get to the point where, like Liz said, where you make a friend and you learn bridge. And you, you, you just kind of have to embrace the negative feeling that people might not like you. It might not be the right fit. And then you have to start over again. And it's, it's awful.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And I think that's what attracts some people to AI, because it's like, oh, that's easy. There's no, there's no friction. There's a negative feeling. And I get kind of a ghost of what I was looking for. It's easier for me. And I don't discount that it's scary. Like, Lord knows, I've had white hair from having to talk to people, despite being a journalist, right? Part of the reason actually why I became a journalist was because it was gonna force me to talk to people. And like, get out of my shell. Like, the first time I had to do a cold call, I had to go to the bathroom afterwards and just like, breathe into a paper bag. Because I had that much social anxiety.

• 36:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  But by doing that for a decade, by talking to people, I've gotten like, really out of my shell. And like, I'm goofy on the Vergecast or whatnot, but me 15 years ago, I was a really shy wallflower. And challenging myself over a 15-year period, I've made a lot more new friends. I've learned how to talk to people. But I'm not saying that was without difficulty. There was a lot of tears, like, kind of associated with that.

• 36:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  That, um, like, I understand not wanting to go through that and seeing an easier path. But like, when you get to the end of having suffered, you just feel so much more appreciative. And I'm not saying it's, it is hard. It is hard. And like, there are a lot of negative, uh, experiences associated with that. But it is sort of one of those things where if the process is easy, the reward is kind of cheap. And if the process is hard, or at least challenging, you don't have to like, go climb Mount Everest as your first mountain. You can like, choose a smaller hill and do it in baby steps and whatnot. But like, when you do that, you just feel like, wow, I get it.

• 37:24David Pierce?

  And there has to be some friction to have the benefit from it, right? Like, I, I was mentioning to some friends recently, so I have no cooking skills whatsoever. I pretty much make the same food, like, I don't know, every day. Because it's cheap and easy, and I have not put the effort into actually getting better. So I mentioned to some friends recently, like, I kind of want to go take like, a group cooking class. Like, oh, you can just learn that on YouTube. And I was like. This is where I was like, yeah, but I want to like do it with other people and be bad and like learn hands-on and be told that I'm doing it wrong or whatever, because that's where the value comes from for me. And also, the forced effort and the forced friction is what actually makes it stick in my head.

• 38:09David Pierce?

  Because if I just watch YouTube, I'm like not really consuming the information correctly. If I'm not doing it live while I am like being told the steps, you know? I don't know. It's like, I actually want there to be a little more friction in a lot of things in my life, because I know that they will bring me more value.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Friction-maxing.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  Friction-maxing, you know? We've all probably gone through random, short or long depressive episodes of in our life. And the things that have brought me out of that are trying hard to do things that are difficult and then realizing like, oh, I'm getting a lot of personal value out of this thing that is like hard for me. So recently, I've been like, oh, I want to go take guitar classes. I want to take cooking classes. I want to do this and this and this. And that will probably bankrupt me because everything's expensive.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  That's the only, that's the one thing. Doing the YouTube video or doing it is cheaper than the classes. But you want to pay people for that.

• 39:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, you want to, yeah. And maybe that's what I'll do with my time after an AI runs my business for me.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  So that's the other piece of this, right? Like, you know, separately from the fact that I think if we're going to talk about AI in a way that like makes any sense, we need to talk about it with specific goals in mind and specific uses in mind.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  I also think that like you never can really get away from the fact that we're all still people and that the social part of this really, really matters.

• 39:33David Pierce?

  And it also doesn't help that a lot of the companies that are building these AI platforms and whatever are also telling us it's going to kill us, also telling us it's going to solve all disease. I think what got lost in the current conversation and why the sentiment towards AI has gotten so, so, so, so negative is that AI is just a, it's an extrapolation of what we used to call big data, what we used to call machine learning. And it just is better at handling more information because of this attention mechanism. And if we had kept using it for those reasons and the things that we were doing it for, because I remember a time when every Google I/O, every big conference was like, wow, incredible things that we can do with this now as a tool.

• 40:18David Pierce?

  And now, the things that these tech leaders are talking about is replacing the things that actually make us care about living our lives.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:25David Pierce?

  That is the thing that they need to shift. They need to shift that viewpoint, because otherwise, like, what are we doing?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Do they just want us to be the adults in Wally? Just on these like automated, like shades, lounges, just consuming things? But then it's just like, they do, right?

• 40:43David Pierce?

  They do.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  They're like actively going, that's us, that's what we want you to be. But like, you watch Wally and you're like, oh, no, that's depicted as bad.

• 40:51David Pierce?

  That's the bad part of the movie.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  That's depicted as bad.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So.

• 40:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  What are we doing? What are we doing, guys? What are we doing?

• 40:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, guys, I love this. Unfortunately, in the words of David Pierce, we are way over.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  But Liz, thank you so much for coming on and V, so thank you for coming on.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I loved this.

• 41:10David Pierce?

  I'm glad that we had to got to have a long text conversation. And now that we got to have an extremely long on-air conversation, because that's even better. All right, well, that's it for The Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and to get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brendan Kiefer, and Travis Larchek. We'll see you next time.

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