What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of things that hopefully make you feel alive.

I'm David Amal.

A few weeks ago, Liz Lopato 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 6500 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.

And like any group of 30 some things, we just stopped and said, wait, we should just record

a podcast because our conversations are so interesting.

They are.

We're so interesting.

Hey, we're talking to Liz Lopato, 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.

The toothbrush also pairs with an app to give you a live stream 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.

Robert Markerplier 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 Turner says first day as the CEO of Apple, ending a 15-year

tenure for Tim Cook.

Thomas marked the occasion by tweeting a simple hello on Twitter with no capitalization.

Turner's 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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So, Liz of Hado, Victoria Song.

Thank you for coming to the verge cast.

I appreciate you guys taking the time.

Well, thank you.

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

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 Zach was trying to make with this,

the future is for everyone manifesto?

Yeah.

I think he was writing an opposition to some of the stuff that's been coming out of open

AI and anthropic.

We're there saying, oh, AI's going to replace your job and it's going to totally disrupt

your life.

But it's going to be worth it because it's such a big advance, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And people hate AI now because you say that in public, the investors get excited.

But everybody who has a job is like, I'm sorry, you're building what?

So there is this pretty intense backlash that is mostly being expressed against data

centers for right now.

But AI is increasingly less popular.

Every time there's a survey that comes out, it is less popular.

And I think that a lot of it isn't just that it's being discussed as this thing that's

going to ruin your life, but I think that doesn't help.

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 it 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.

Christel and Mighty, we already have tools to express ideas with like, I didn't.

Yeah.

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

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

up.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's fair.

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?

Like, yeah, I can imagine this.

I'm not saying it's a good use of AI.

I'm just saying I can imagine it.

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.

Like, yeah, that's such a funny.

That's a great point.

Such a funny thing because I've heard a blog, oh, like a couple years back, I was like,

why is there no one productivity app that like it 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 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.

Yeah.

And I would say that this is not exactly tools for expressing your idea of this.

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 within the first place.

That's right.

And like, you know, be 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.

It's 100% true too.

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.

I'm going, 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 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?

Like books too and I can't remember shit.

And it's like it 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 makes

you less sharp.

Or like that's that's how I've experienced it.

So yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So 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 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?

What is a business in this case?

Slop.

It's just the business of selling slop.

Slop business.

Yeah.

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.

Like 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.

Yeah.

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 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.

Yeah.

I think this kind of pushes us into like 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'm experiencing other people's minds.

That is something that I, that I, why I read that and I just was thinking like, yeah, that's

the entire reason that we consume other people's work while we make our own work.

Why would we consume something that is just generated when we could actually feel connected

to somebody who was trying to express a feeling or thought through a form of art?

It's also the effort that gets communicated through that form of art.

Like I'm like, I was super obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo's.

You seem pretty sad for a girl's cell in love.

There's that one of the lines that she was 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, yeah, that just hit in such a way.

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

The 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 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

artist 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.

So it's just, I don't know.

There's something about knowing that she actually probably cried on the curb at LAX.

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

Yeah.

It's just, yeah.

Liz, did you have like a specific thing you were thinking about when you wrote that?

Was there like a song you were thinking of or like something that you were, I don't

know.

I was actually, I was thinking about something that happened in 2020.

So during the pandemic, when, you know, everything was bad and we were all feeling pretty bad.

I went back and reread a bunch of stuff that I loved when I was a teenager, a bunch of

Terry Pratchett novels.

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.

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 that

kind of company.

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.

It's transformative.

It's transformative.

Yeah.

It's good art.

And why would I want to just read a book about that written by a robot who was 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 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 darkest deepest things like when my

mom was dying, I read a book called Crying in Age Mart.

And that's by Michelle's honor who is also known as Japanese breakfast.

She's half Korean, half American.

And it was like 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, 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 age mark 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 age mark.

And then also like it has something boignant 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

going to come up with?

Like 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 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.

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.

So that's how I also.

And maybe this is just again, a particular way in which I interact with art.

But if I really like somebody, I will read or watch or listen to their entire bottom

of work.

Yeah.

And the joy of doing that, and again, I'm going to 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 because 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, I went down to LA for this actually.

I saw a retrospective called Overshare.

And it is this artist, Sophie Callas, work from like 1970 through now.

And not only do you get this sense of, 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 Calla has this like, this incredible, you know, arc.

And a lot of her, her work is particularly resonant to those of us who are familiar with

the internet.

She was oversharing before we were all oversharing.

And one of the pieces there is a piece she did of her mother dying.

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 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.

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.

Yeah.

And I think this might be part of the reason why, and we've talked about this on a show

before, people are more mad that they've been deceived than they are that this AI stuff

is being created.

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, you might not have to tell me that.

Whatever.

But 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, inconveniences 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 Zuckerberg

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 it was 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.

Hey, tell me what to do.

And instead of putting the effort in of going like, what does my daughter like?

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

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

effort into it.

Right.

You didn't take the time.

You didn't inconvenience yourself.

Inconvenience 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 trained 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 she's like crap.

It's her birthday.

And he asks someone else, which in my mind is like asking a chap, like what are kids

like these days?

And he gives her the gift.

And she looks at it.

And it's like a wee.

And she looks at it.

And he's like, what?

You don't like we's and she just looks at the wee he gave her for the last.

You know, gift giving occasion.

And he's like, oh, and then the conceit there is that she feels that way.

And she feels unloved and she feels devalued because he didn't put that effort.

He didn't put the, he put like the fact similarly 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.

Oh, that's, that's what AI makes me feel like sometimes.

Yeah.

When I find out that something was made by AI, it's like, oh, you didn't put the,

right.

You didn't put the blood sweat and tears into it.

You just generated it.

That's a very good analogy.

Like, yeah, there was a quote in here that was so good.

I wrote it down on 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.

Yes, it is.

It is.

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

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I remember when I was a kid, I had a friend whose dad was 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.

Now go have fun.

Yeah.

And it was like, that's not.

That's not what love is.

And if that's what AI is doing, 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're not paying attention

to what the person actually cares about.

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.

Also very true.

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 and 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, I can't love you.

I should hope that's obvious, but I've also gone to AI.

I'm not going to be able to do AI dating popups for this site and it's not.

So yeah, yeah, maybe a dominogee and I want to get into like Liz's thoughts on this,

but it's like when you're playing Animal Crossing.

Yeah.

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?

Yeah, where's the game?

That was the game.

I guess the thing that I think about, I enjoy giving people gifts by the way.

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.

They would never justify to themselves.

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 requires

you to sit and think about what does this person like and what would they be interested

in but never really be able to justify to themselves?

What is a treat to this person?

And in doing that, I think you come to understand people a lot better.

That's part of what's satisfying about giving my gift.

So there's an example that Mark Zuckerberg uses in this post about baking with his daughter

and his daughter is really into baking so he used AI to get a recipe.

And I guess you can do that.

That's a thing you can do.

You're still spending time with your daughter while you bake.

That's true, that's real.

But you know, like I can't speak for anybody else's family, but my family has like a laminated

binder with my grandmother's recipes in them.

And AI is never going to give me that.

And that's just, it isn't.

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, 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

have a fun time sailing together.

Right?

Yeah.

Fail upwards.

Yeah.

Or like, you know, it might be interesting to think about like where are her skills right

now?

And what can I do that will compliment 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.

Yeah.

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'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 weeks I'm like, oh, I

can play this now and I didn't used to be able to play that.

If you can just be instantly good at anything, like what is it's the same thing as the animal

crossing analogy.

Yeah.

It's like where the journey is how we experience joy.

It's so why skip it.

Like being 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 art.

It's almost anybody can cross stitch.

It's pretty, but there are little things that would bother me.

I was like, oh, my throat is twisted.

How do I do this?

And the really nice thing is that I ended up, 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.

Like there was a new thing that we could share together and it was something that I could

have a friend teach me and it was like really lovely.

And so now I'm super into cross stitch, a little grandma of mine.

It's a lovely little thing to learn and I don't know.

I do think struggle is necessary in the human condition because I don't know.

These tech execs are always like things will be so much easier and then you'll have time.

And it will take care of the stuff that you don't want to do.

What do you do at the time?

What are you supposed to do at the time?

And I suspect the answer is more work.

So 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?

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

also just generating.

So you're just uploading that to, so what do we do at all?

What do we do at all at that point?

I think there's also a couple of things here.

I started rock climbing about a year ago and I'm never going to be as good at it as

somebody who started when they were a kid.

That's just true.

I enjoy that there's no pressure on me to be good at it.

I just like physically doing it.

I like that I'm probably never going to do any especially challenging route.

I'm never going to have it like a world recognized achievement in this sport.

I'm just like, and 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.

That's one of the reasons I really like it is that it is a social sport.

And again, like, you know, I recognize that AI can't really do your physical activity

for you.

But I think about like all of the other things that are like that where the point isn't

that you're going to 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 think about the number of people who make friends.

I mean, I'm one of them.

I made friends by taking a bridge class.

I learned how to play bridge last year.

And I now have a standing bridge game with some very cool people.

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 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 and you're like, oh, like we really get along.

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 front.

Yes.

It's definitely that animal crossing skip thing.

I think there is like this devaluation of discomfort and bad, like this propensity to

want to run away from bad feelings because I've done the thing where it's like, I have

to go and I have to meet new people.

I'm a socially awkward turtle.

I'm not going to have a good time.

And someone might not like me and I, and if I avoided that, then I'm never going to

get to the point where like Liz said, where you make a friend and you learn, and 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 I have to start over again.

And it's, it's awful.

And I think that's what attracts some people to AI because it's like, oh, that's easy.

There's no friction.

There's no friction.

There's no friction.

There's no 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 going to force

me to talk to people.

Oh, okay.

I had to get out of my shell.

Like the first time I had to do a call, I had to go to the bathroom afterwards and just

like breathe into a paper bag because I had that much social anxiety.

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 vergecaster whatnot.

But me 15 years ago, I was a really shy wallflower.

And challenging myself over a 15 year period of middle, hot, 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.

That 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 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 choose a smaller hill and do it in baby steps and whatnot.

But like when you do that, you just feel like wow, you get it.

And there has to be some friction to have the benefit from it, right?

Like 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 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 and a lot of things in my

life because I know that they will bring me more value.

Fiction maxing.

Fiction maxing, you know, we've all probably gone through random short or long depressive

episodes of 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.

That's the only, that's the one thing.

Doing the YouTube video or doing that is cheaper than the classes, but you want to pay people

for that.

Yeah, you want to.

Yeah.

And maybe that's what I'll do with my time after an AI runs my business for me.

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.

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.

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, it's an, it's an, it's an, 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 owe, every big conference was like, wow, incredible

things that we can do with this now as a tool.

And now the things that these tech leaders are talking about is replacing the things that

actually make us care about living our lives.

Yeah.

That is the thing that they need to shift.

They need to shift to that viewpoint because otherwise like what are we doing?

Do they just want us to be the, the adults in Wally just on these like automated like

shades, laws just just consuming things because it's just like, they do, right?

They do.

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, that's, that's the bad part

of the movie.

I picked it as bad.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

What are we doing?

What are we doing guys?

What are we doing?

Yeah.

Well, guys, I love this.

Unfortunately, in the words of David Pierce, we are way over.

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

I love this.

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 Verge cast.

Let's know what you think, call the hotline 866-111 or email Vergecast at theverge.com.

It is for 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, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larcek.

We'll see you next time.

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