David Pearce

speaker

14,416 appearances 53 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 18 Sep

David Pearce’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 53 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 20.

Appearances

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The Vergecast · Pixel 11 and Pixel Watch 5: Our first impressions | The Vergecast Livestream · 12 Aug 2026 podcast

That's true. voice-verified

Um, judging by the fact that V is holding one of these, I suspect reviews of these are gonna come soon. voice-verified

We'll be back on the show talking about all of these when the reviews drop. voice-verified

V has Trevor Noah to go hang out with, Neli has to, I don't know, go be fancy somewhere with fancy people. voice-verified

Uh, I have to go pick up my kid at preschool. voice-verified

So we all gotta go get out of here. voice-verified

Thank you to Travis, our producer. voice-verified

Thank you to Eric and Denise for getting all this done. voice-verified

Thank you to everybody who made all this happen, including fixing our audio problems. voice-verified

Thanks to all of you for watching. voice-verified

Watching and listening, hanging in here with us this long. voice-verified

We will see you back on the show, regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. voice-verified

Neilai, take a set. voice-verified

The Vergecast · Lessons from the very first chatbot · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of If-Then Statements. I'm your friend, David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about chatbots, specifically the very first chatbot from the 1960s. It was called Eliza, and the way to think about it is basically as a very simple back-and-forth experience that you might have with a computer. One of the first instantiations of Eliza was this thing called Doctor, which would play therapist for you, and it would ask you how you were doing, and you would respond, and you'd say, I'm having a bad day. voice-verified

and it would go through and look for specific keywords and ways that you responded and respond back to you. And it was able to carry on a pretty functional conversation. It remembered things about you, it could ask questions, it could move things along, it could make connections. It wasn't very sophisticated, just a few hundred lines of code, but it worked. It was so effective that it convinced a lot of people that there had to be a human on the other end. voice-verified

It was a fascinating product made by some fascinating people. And a group of academics and researchers and writers recently has excavated all of the source code of ELISA. And they've written a book called Inventing ELISA about where it came from, who created it, and the lessons it might have for us in the current world of AI. Because, spoiler alert, there are a lot of them. And the way that we think about computers really hasn't changed that much since the 1960s. voice-verified

It's going to be very fun. I'm really excited to dig into it. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 11th, 2026. Have you ever wondered why your Amazon emails are so unhelpful? They just say, like, your wireless accessory is confirmed instead of giving you anything useful or specific. voice-verified

Well, Divergence Miyasato wondered too, and she found out that it's all about AI data. Basically, if Amazon puts your orders in the email, suddenly Gmail knows what you're buying, which means Gemini can do a better job of steering you to stuff you like on Google Shopping. Amazon says it's also about privacy and convenience, but this is a company that is also fighting perplexity and others to keep AI agents from taking over any of your shopping experience. voice-verified

because it's very important to Amazon that you go to amazon.com and accidentally click on a bunch of barely labeled ads. That's the business. voice-verified

Meanwhile, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has reportedly decided to move his company out of California if the state's attorney general refuses to settle the antitrust case challenging Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. This is all obviously a threat. The case isn't set to go to court until next March, and Paramount will start owing shareholders about $7 million a day this October. Ellison would very much like to not spend that money. voice-verified

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