Alexa Just Got an AI Makeover

Alexa was due for an upgrade, and now it has gotten one. This week, Amazon held its annual media event where it debuted a slate of new hardware, software, and services. The company reserved the spot at center stage for Alexa, the voice assistant powering all of Amazon’s smart home ambitions. Researchers at the company have given Alexa a technological upgrade that enables it to be more competitive in the ChatGPT era. Alexa can now speak more naturally, hold a conversation without as many awkward interactions, and even make its responses sound more emotionally nuanced.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Will Knight joins us to talk about how Alexa is becoming more agile as a conversationalist. Will spoke to Amazon executives about their machine intelligence work, their training models, and how the company is riding the wave of excitement around generative artificial intelligence.

Show Notes

Read Will’s report on Alexa’s latest upgrade. Read our roundup of everything Amazon announced at Wednesday’s media event.

Recommendations

Will recommends Auto-GPT, a tool that turns ChatGPT into an autonomous agent that manages all the boring parts of your life. Mike recommends the book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy. Lauren recommends the episode of WIRED’s Have a Nice Future Podcast where journalist Paul Tough talks about college in the US and the future of higher education.

Will Knight can be found on Twitter @willknight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

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Lauren Goode: When was the last time you used an Alexa gadget?

Michael Calore: I would say it was a couple of weeks ago with my Sonos.

Lauren Goode: Ah, right, the old Sonos Alexa integration.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: What did you ask it?

Michael Calore: I asked it to play KCRW, my favorite NPR station.

Lauren Goode: And how did Alexa respond?

Michael Calore: It gave me exactly what I was asking for, which was kind of shocking.

Lauren Goode: Huh. Well, what if I told you that Alexa is now entering the gen AI chat?

Michael Calore: I would say I'm not surprised, but also it fills me with a lot of questions like, are hallucinations going to start coming out of my speaker now?

Lauren Goode: I'm sorry. I don't understand your query.

Michael Calore: Oh, boy.

Lauren Goode: Let me make something up for you though.

Michael Calore: Oh, boy.

Lauren Goode: We should talk about this.

Michael Calore: Let's do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by WIRED senior writer Will Knight, who is Zooming from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Will, welcome back to the Lab.

Will Knight: Hello. Thanks for having me back.

Lauren Goode: So, Will, I have to pull this one quote from your recent WIRED story, just to start us off. Rohit Prasad, who leads AI development at Amazon, told you this week, "If I ask Alexa how the Red Sox are doing and they have just lost, it will come back with an empathetic tone." OK. One, Will, this is the most Massachusetts statement ever. I'm glad you're our roving reporter on the ground there in the land of Massachusetts people. Two, it pretty much sums up the major makeover that Alexa is getting. So, tell us about this, what happened at Amazon's annual product event earlier this week?

Will Knight: Yeah, OK. They announced that, as you mentioned, Alexa is going to be using generative AI, one of these large language models, which we've heard so much about, that go into ChatGPT. Amazon's been kind of quiet on the language model front, but it turns out they've been working on putting this into Alexa, which is, as you also say, kind of an obvious step. In a time when we've got ChatGPT that can do all these amazing things, having voice assistants that only respond to one or two commands is kind of lame. So now Alexa will try and do much more complex back and forth and they're trying to build things on top of that, like the intonation related to the Red Sox, who I have to confess, I don't know if they lost all one.

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Lauren Goode: Are you a Red Sox fan?

Will Knight: I mean, legally I am because I'm in Boston. I think you have to be.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough.

Will Knight: I have no idea.

Lauren Goode: Were you a Red Sox fan when you were growing up in the UK?

Will Knight: Absolutely not.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough.

Will Knight: I followed cricket, which is very … let's not get into that.

Michael Calore: So one of the interesting things that I think Amazon showed off this week is that Alexa can now have conversations in a more natural way. Like you mentioned, there's going to be more back and forth with the speaker. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Will Knight: Yeah, so one of the things that language models enable is they give computers this ability to handle conversation language in so much more of a sophisticated way. Alexa can now answer much more complex questions, open-ended questions, also engage in a bit of back and forth so they don't have to keep saying Alexa. It will know when you've half finished a sentence or wait for you hopefully. A lot of this is to do with this magic of the advances in language models. It just really is a big quantum leap in the ability of computers to use language. Yeah, the idea and when they showed all these demos, these canned demos of Alexa coming up with poems and stories and doing what seemed like quite impressive conversation with people, and the question is how well that works in real life. I'm excited for when it's released and we have some of the bloopers and weird things that Alexa comes up with.

Lauren Goode: Mike, you brought up a good point earlier, which is that some of these text-based responses we're getting from generative AI apps are very wordy and we don't necessarily want that when we're using our voice to talk to a computer. I'm wondering, Will, if Amazon said anything about that, how they're maybe reframing or rephrasing answers that are generative.

Will Knight: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: But still to make them succinct and do the thing that you're asking it to do?

Will Knight: Yeah, so I asked Rohit Prasad about this and he confirmed that they are doing some of the training that comes after building one of these large language models oriented toward this kind of interaction. When ChatGPT is built, they have all this interaction that has people say, "This is a good answer, this is a bad answer," and so Amazon is doing its own version of that, but tailored towards whether it's a good answer through a voice speaker. That will include making sure that answers are more succinct hopefully, because yeah, I mean, you don't want to have Alexa rambling on for four or five minutes with every answer. It will try to do it much more succinctly. I mean, the fun thing with generative AI is you can't really predict what it's going to do entirely. There probably will be some instances where Alexa goes on for four minutes.

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Lauren Goode: I love how Will has a great sense of adventure. The fun thing is we have no idea what this artificial general intelligence is going to do to our humanity. It's super fun.

Will Knight: Embrace the chaos.

Lauren Goode: What is Amazon training these models on? How much of this is reinforcement learning from human feedback, from all of the existing queries in their database from us talking to Alexa all the time?

Will Knight: Yeah, that's a huge part of it. That is a big part of what they're bringing to this, is all the training data they will already have from interactions with people which they can tailor to then feed to a model, try and get it to refine its answers to be better.

Michael Calore: Yeah. This is something that listeners may not know. Every time you ask Alexa a question, a recording of you asking that question is held on to by Amazon, maybe not every time, but you can assume that everything you say to your smart speaker, that your smart speaker responds to, is something that is being stored by Amazon. You can go into your settings in your Amazon account and you can see all of those recordings. You could delete all of them if you would not like Amazon to hold onto them and use them to train Alexa to be better. But if you don't do anything, then you should know, if you don't already, that everything that you say to your smart speaker that it actually responds to is being saved and logged. Will, these updates are coming to Alexa everywhere that Alexa lives, which is in smart speakers made by Amazon and other companies that they've partnered with. It's also coming to the devices that Amazon makes that have cameras in them, the smart hubs, the smart home screens, the things that can see you when you're talking to Alexa. Amazon's doing some interesting things with the camera to power the interactions. Can you tell us about that?

Will Knight: Yeah, so they're using very primitive body language whether you're looking at the camera and seem to be looking, waiting for a response to help guide whether it's going to jump in with an answer, or wait for you to finish something, or to know that the conversation's finished. I think it is interesting because ChatGPT is really powerful, but it's just a text interface. We interact with it through text, which is very powerful, but there's a huge amount of human interaction which happens through voice, as we're doing now, or face-to-face over Zoom or whatever. Teaching machines to be better at that is important in terms of, I guess making these machines smarter and more capable. I think it also raises some really fascinating questions to me in terms of whether you can make machines that are more convincing to people, more persuasive, all those sorts of things is what they're sort of just starting to dabble in here. Maybe you can make a machine that's going to really engage people and keep their attention for a lot of time or even recommend things that will be in a very convincing way.

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Lauren Goode: Will, on the business side, last year, layoffs reportedly hit the Amazon Alexa team pretty hard and now their devices chief, Dave Limp, is on his way out the door and Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay is reportedly taking over. How is the Alexa team actually fairing?

Will Knight: That's a great question. I mean, based on the news of the layoffs and Dave Limp leaving, I would've said this is a shakeup as a part of Amazon maybe not feeling that they were doing as well as could be expected in this sort of generative AI era, but clearly they've been working on this stuff. I don't know, I find it a little difficult to kind of gauge exactly how well they're doing.

Lauren Goode: It seems hard to gauge how much Alexa is actually making the company money. Clearly the research and development around products like this cost a lot of money. Then there are infrastructure costs and obviously talent and things like that and then the whole idea of Alexa is that eventually it has ads, right? Or you are using third-party apps, where there's some kind of financial transaction that's happening, like you call an Uber from your Alexa or something, but we don't actually know how much money Alexa has made. Correct?

Will Knight: Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, in theory they sort of were, in launching Alexa 10 years ago, inventing this new computer interface that was going to change everything. But I don't know, in the last several years it seems like voice interfaces haven't changed things massively or haven't gone any further. So yeah, I mean, that's a great question and I suppose this does offer an opportunity for them to try and capture more of the market and build voice interfaces that are going to have more of people's attention, more opportunities for things like ads and selling products eventually.

Lauren Goode: So our future is not only generative, it's filled with even more ads.

Will Knight: Maybe also not even ads, just subtle ways that Alexa will mention we might be interested in something and then talk us into buying it.

Lauren Goode: Right. All right, let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about how generative AI Alexa is going to stand up to some of the other generative assistants that are out there.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: In the tech journalism world, we sometimes refer to this time period as silly season or tech timber. I don't love that name, but it's true. This is what we say because of all the product announcements that companies put out at this time of year, they want to get ahead of the holiday season and make sure they're hitting those ship goals for the fourth quarter of the year. But this year it might as well be called generative AI season because of all of the new AI tools that tech companies are releasing. Will, we just talked about Amazon Alexa getting infused with generative AI, but Amazon is months behind competitors in terms of releasing this, even if the underlying technology itself isn't necessarily behind. What advantages do companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, even Apple have right now over Amazon?

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Will Knight: Well, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google have a big advantage in that they've very clearly built the biggest models that are out there. We don't know how big the model and powerful the model Amazon has is. Then those companies also have a lot more training data specifically designed to improving the performance of that model, which I don't think Amazon really has a lot of data around simple voice interactions, so maybe it has an edge in some of that, but when it comes to the raw power of these models, I don't think it is likely to be anything like OpenAI or Google's.

Michael Calore: I think one advantage Amazon does have is that its interface is almost entirely spoken, right? It's a natural conversation interface. It's not a, type something into a box and get a written response. It does feel like a natural step that what comes next is that all of the chatbots that are text-based are going to start talking.

Will Knight: Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's going to be something that everybody will look to do. What's most amazing perhaps about ChatGPT in some ways is its ability to mimic human communication, even though it's written form, but there's so much communication that involves the way we speak, body language and those sorts of things. It makes sense to try and expand the capabilities of these chatbots this way. That also does have the potential to maybe improve the intelligence and making marks of these bots if that's measured by how good they are at convincing us that they're intelligent, which they would do if they have better ability to mimic human expression and emotion and things like that. I think that can be also seen as part of this. What I think is, we're going to see as more multimodal AI in that use of imagery, use of audio video. They've fed these models all the text there is on the internet, so what they're probably going to do next is feed them all of the YouTube and all of the audio we can find, those sorts of things. It's an interesting kind of question whether you need that. The way that biological intelligence often uses a lot of that sort of input to learn. It's possible that could lead to some improvements in machine intelligence. Again, in quotes.

Lauren Goode: Here's a fun anecdote. I think you guys both know that one of my pet peeves, if we'll call it that with consumer tech products, is when you just get served up all of these random memories that you'd rather not see or weren't thinking about for years. This happened recently with Amazon. Amazon said, here's a reminder of memories in your Amazon Cloud, and I thought to myself, "I don't think I've ever stored photos in Amazon's cloud. What is this?" Clicked through. First of all, thank God it wasn't spam. You could have just ended up going down some weird rabbit hole. Anyway, click through and there were photos there from when I reviewed the Amazon Echo Look camera in I think 2017. Do you guys remember this camera?

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Michael Calore: This is the one that judges your outfit and tells you what clothes to buy.

Lauren Goode: Yes. Yes, Amazon has a stockpile of full-body images of me wearing different clothes and it was, yes, it was giving thumbs up and thumbs down and rating things based on weather and geographic data and all this weird stuff.

Michael Calore: It's serving this to you as memories?

Lauren Goode: As a memory.

Michael Calore: Oh, no.

Lauren Goode: But also it made me think, oh my gosh, Amazon still has all of this data in its cloud that I haven't deleted because I was reviewing that for my previous publication and it was a weird little product, and it's just a good reminder, I think, a reminder that some memories are forever and Amazon may in fact train its AI on them.

Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.

Will Knight: I once went to a conference, a weird little machine learning conference in Canada where there was a whole track about machine learning for fashion that was all sponsored by Amazon. A lot of it was trying to predict what the next fashion would be so they could start making stuff. I think probably some researcher’s working on that. We had camera as well.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. So Amazon and others are just hoovering up our body data, our body language data, and to Will's point, probably sucking up YouTube videos and other things that show how people move because the next iteration of this might be some kind of generative product that mimics our body language or responds to our body language.

Michael Calore: Yeah, I've actually been really curious about that, because with all of these voice assistants, the things that the companies are doing with them are leading toward mimicking human personality traits and conversational ticks that convey emotion and that convey some sort of empathy with the person that they're speaking to. This is sort of troubling to me, and I'm curious to know what you think about this, Will, but it seems to me like a cold and unfeeling voice speaking to you is one thing, but a warm and inviting and empathetic voice that fits into the tone of the conversation is something else entirely for these engineers to build.

Will Knight: Yeah, I think that's really troubling. I think arguably they shouldn't build these things to mimic people at all. They shouldn't be anthropomorphic because one, they're not. I mean, it's inherently kind of misleading. It's also, you see with ChatGPT, you can design that to convince people. It's actually been trained to try and convince people that its answers are good even when it's lying. You can have systems that will be very convincing, compelling. They can train them to do that, to mimic this stuff, and we are really hardwired to respond to it. I think that's a really troubling direction, because you can see how companies could misuse that to try and persuade people or to manipulate them. Yeah, I just think there's no reason why you can't design. I mean, I know there are some researchers who are trying to design interfaces that do offer up real intelligence, but they try and really distinguish it from being a human intelligence, which yeah, I think it's concerning. I really think that one of the things you'll see is these language models being used as part of this kind of advertising industrial complex, which is just, I mean, just makes so much sense just as you can do reinforcement learning with human feedback to get good answers, you could do it around whether it persuades someone that they should click buy or add to cart on a product. There's no way that people who are inside a company like Amazon wouldn't be thinking about that. How do you mimic a very effective human salesperson?

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Lauren Goode: Some of our listeners have probably read Steven Levy's story for us about OpenAI. It's a great feature. It's also our cover story this month, so everyone should go read it. But Sam Altman says at some point in the story that he envisioned a future in which we would have these physical or humanoid robots that are able to move and do things. Then eventually there would be these many steps. We'd get to some kind of general artificial intelligence in computers, but actually the opposite is happening. We're starting now with this crazy level of artificial intelligence that's very humanlike and maybe working our way up to something that is not amorphous, but actually has a physical form.

Michael Calore: Yes, it's a smart speaker that sits on your counter. There's a physical form.

Lauren Goode: Right. It's a tube, it's a puck, it's a $50 puck, but it's got you on AI.

Michael Calore: I do feel like we should mention that Alexa and other voice assistants are really good for accessibility for people that maybe can't do traditional types of input that we all take for granted and speech is the easiest way for them to communicate with the computer. In that regard, there's a new feature in iOS 17 called Personal Voice, where you can actually make your iPhone talk like you. Have either of you tried this?

Lauren Goode: No.

Will Knight: No.

Lauren Goode: Wait, how do I do this? Should we do this live? How do I do it?

Michael Calore: Oh, well, unfortunately we can't do it live, but it's a feature in the accessibility settings. It's called Personal Voice.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: You read a series of phrases. It's just like all the other personal AI voice clone systems. You read a bunch of phrases, it takes about 15 to 30 minutes to read all of them, and then you set it down and it processes your voice and it can take as long as a couple of days, because a lot of people are doing it right now. It takes a lot of processing power.

Lauren Goode: Hold on, I'm creating a personal voice with my iPhone right now. It says, "Record the phrase." Oh, OK. I have to record it.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: I'm creating a personal voice with my iPhone.

Michael Calore: It's going to ask you to do that for the next 30 minutes.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: We can just let the tape roll if you want, and you can just do it right here on the show.

Lauren Goode: It says … you know what? I just tried that, Mike, and it said I had high background noise. Try to find a quieter location. I think you really messed that up for me. Current sound levels are how it may impact my personal voice quality. You are affecting my personal voice quality. All right, we're going to do this later.

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Will Knight: I've heard a few companies who track scams and phishing talking about voice cloning being used to mimic an executive at a company or something, who then calls up and tells somebody to transfer money. But I'm not sure why you would want Siri to have your own voice. That sounds very weird to me. I don't like hearing my own voice. I don't want it telling me things.

Michael Calore: Yeah, it's a tool for narcissists.

Lauren Goode: No, I could actually see it being useful for the opposite. What if you are not the narcissist in your dynamic? What if you just programmed personal voice to say, "Hey, how are you doing?" And you have a friend or that family member who you've just given them a prompt and they go. You can just set your personal voice, ask them, and then they go off and you go, I don't know, chop tomatoes or whatever it is, your potatoes.

Will Knight: Maybe that's down the line, so eventually you'll just say, "OK, Siri, when somebody calls, just have a conversation. When grandma calls, just have a conversation for half an hour and fill her in on what I've been up to." Then you don't have to worry about it yourself. You'll do it all.

Lauren Goode: Oh. Why does grandma always get a bad rap? I wish my grandma would call.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: She's dead. If she called, that would be remarkable. It's OK, gen AI is going to solve all of this. All right, Will, thank you so much for this recap of Amazon's news and your insights into Amazon's generative AI future. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back with our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Will, what's your very human recommendation this week?

Will Knight: Oh, it's actually the opposite of the very human recommendation and continuing the theme of sort of embracing the chaos of generative AI. I thought I'd recommend this program called Auto-GPT, which I've been playing with, which is, you basically install it on your computer and it will do tasks, it uses ChatGPT to figure out how to do things. It's kind of like a small maniac intern that will do things for you. I will tell it, “Please go and find the contact information of a CEO,” and it'll run off to the internet, do a bunch of searches, and surprisingly come back, it'll say, "What I figured out is this name, now I'm going to go and look for his email address. I found this one. I'm going to go verify it," and then come back and do all these different things. It will also occasionally just go into insane infinite loops where it's saying, "I don't know how to do it, so I'm just going to keep searching and I don't know how to do that. So I'll search that as well." Or it'll start doing mad things on your computer. I think it's the future of computing, but at the moment it's slightly mad, but I enjoy it. With the disclaimer that we're not responsible for damaging anybody's computer, I recommend playing with Auto-GPT or similar.

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Lauren Goode: Who makes this?

Will Knight: This is an open source project just built on top of ChatGPT, or GPT-4. But this is something that OpenAI and Google and others are looking to do. This week Google announced that it was connecting Bard, its version, its ChatGPT rival, to some apps. You can say, "Find all the recent emails about this and write me a document about it," or add stuff to my … I'm not sure you can add things to your calendar, but you're starting to do stuff with apps. I think that's really the future of where this is heading. It's going to be a completely new computer interface, but I am just embracing the raw half-built Linux version that runs a mark. It's quite fun.

Lauren Goode: Excellent.

Michael Calore: And also can exist outside of G Suite, which just makes it so much more fun.

Will Knight: Yes. Yes.

Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: I would like to recommend a book. It is a book that I just finished reading yesterday. It's called No Meat Required, and it's by the food writer Alicia Kennedy. I've spoken about Alicia Kennedy on the show before. I believe I recommended her Substack. I was looking forward to the book. It is quite good. It's a book about where the food system in the world that we live in has gone wrong. Basically, a lot of the ecological problems and moral quandaries that we face as a society can be linked back to our food system and particularly industrial factory farming of animals, industrial agriculture, and industrial animal agriculture. These big systems, which are driven by capitalism and driven by greed, are destroying the planet and they're making us unhealthy individuals. They're also putting us into moral tight spots. The book traces the history of these systems and traces the history of other types of eating, like plant-based eating, indigenous gastronomy, small community farms, and looks at how they can coexist. But it does call for the end of industrialized agriculture and industrialized factory farming, which heartened me. It made me feel good to read that. Anyway, it's a great book. It's very wide-ranging. It's not the kind of book that you're going to be able to give to a meat eater and the meat eater will say, "Oh no, I now see the error of my ways and I will stop eating meat forever." In fact, the thing that I like about it the most is that it really calls for, "If you're going to be an omnivore, you should be more conscientious about your food intake and what you eat and how much meat you eat." Really, that's what it's trying to do. It's trying to show us that the future forward for the environment and for the economy and for the good of all people on the planet is that we all just eat less meat and that we stop supporting those systems, which are making us eat more meat. I really liked it. I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who are thinking that I'm a dirty hippie and you're absolutely right. I am a dirty hippie and I firmly believe in all of these things that I'm saying. It does come with that caveat, but if you are a vegetarian or if you're just a conscientious omnivore, I think you'll love the book.

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Lauren Goode: And tell us the name again.

Michael Calore: It's called No Meat Required.

Lauren Goode: No Meat Required.

Michael Calore: By Alicia Kennedy.

Lauren Goode: Great.

Michael Calore: Yeah, it turned me off of tech burgers like Beyond and Impossible.

Lauren Goode: Oh, yeah? And why is that?

Michael Calore: Well, because those companies have a lot of VC funding and they're interested in making a bunch of money. They're aiming to solve a problem that was caused by capitalism and their solution is more capitalism and that's a bad thing. You should just eat more regular veggie burgers made of rice and grains and beets and things like that.

Lauren Goode: And beans.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Cool.

Will Knight: One solution. I have a cat that catches a lot of large animals, including rabbits, and it has occurred to me that that might be a way to sustain oneself off the land. Also…

Lauren Goode: Your cat is ferocious.

Will Knight: He was terrified. Well, I often discussed with my 7-year old how large she would need to be before she tried to eat me. I think maybe just two and a half times the size.

Michael Calore: That's a great thought experiment.

Lauren Goode: Oh. Leona. Yeah.

Michael Calore: Lauren, what's your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation this week is a little bit of a shameless plug. My other podcast for WIRED, Have a Nice Future. This week we talked to the journalist Paul Tough, who has written several books about education and the conversation that he had this week with my cohost, Gideon Litchfield, was specifically about higher education college in the US, why it has gotten so expensive, and why young people have sort of a negative sentiment right now about college, or at least a lower positive sentiment than they would've had a decade ago. It's a really interesting conversation about where the US has gone wrong with college and what we can do to fix it. I enjoyed listening, even though it's my own podcast, I enjoyed listening to Gideon's conversation with Paul, and I think other people might find it interesting as well. That is my recommendation.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: All right, that's our show. Will, thanks so much for joining us.

Will Knight: Thanks for having me.

Lauren Goode: Alexa, thanks for joining us. Smart as always. Thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. We're still there. I guess I should start calling it X. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now, and we'll be back next week.

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