The Vergecast - Everything you’ve always wondered about The Vergecast

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz dedicate the show to talk about their feelings. The crew answer a bunch of questions from listeners about The Vergecast, The Verge website, and the future of it all. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently in, I believe it's called Murphy Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee. We just had a long weekend of family time and Dolly Parton-related shenanigans. And at one point, I drank blueberry, blackberry wine, which I have a lot of thoughts about. But now we're headed home. And that means it's about to be flight number two for our 10-month-old. Flight number one actually went pretty well, which I assume means this one is going to be a total disaster. So to anyone who's listening who may have been on this flight with us, just know that I'm very sorry.

Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up. We've asked over the last few weeks people to send us questions about the verge and the verge cast. And you've sent in some awesome ones. Thanks to everybody who called the hotline and everybody who sent us emails, we got questions about how we run the verge cast, how we think about the stuff that we cover, what gear we use, what Neli is like as a boss. Spoiler alert, the worst. But we'll get to that. It's a super fun show.

It's a weirdly odd thing to spend. all this time talking about yourself. It was kind of a fun exercise for the three of us to do, along with Liam and Andrew our producer. So again, thanks to everybody who sent in questions. This is super fun. All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I got to go get on this plane.

Wish me luck and maybe even more so wish luck to everyone sitting within six rows of us. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobbled together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by

describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Welcome back. All right. I made it home. Flight went pretty well thanks to some well-timed PB&J sandwiches. is I picked up a cold along the way, but we're here. I'm in the studio. Nealai and Alex are here with me. Let's get into it. Nealai Patel, hello. Hello. Alex Kranz, hello. Hi. This is the day we talk about the Verge cast, which we never normally do. We're not obsessed with ourselves or our own podcast at all. But today, people ask us questions about the show, about the Verge. We got an alarming number of questions asking if Neelai is a good boss, which we're going to come around to. I don't know what people think or what to make of that, but we got that question a number of times.

So we're going to come to that. But basically, just so you guys know, I have set this up in such a way that we got a bunch of questions about the Vergecast, which we're going to answer. Then we're going to take a break. Then we got a bunch of questions about the verge, which we're going to answer. And then we got a bunch of questions about just like our feelings about the future. So I figured that's a good thing to end on. That's good. So we'll end with that.

So let's just dive right in. You guys ready? Let's do this. Yeah. All right. The first one we have. This one's from Alex. Neil, I's a good boss.

Alex from Falls Church, Virginia. I want to say I love Virchast. I love Decoder. I've learned a lot from you all and laughed along with you all. And what I want to know is David Pierce has said a few times, or there have been jokes about how much David Pierce hates Dakota. And I wanted to know, does David Pierce actually hate Decoder? Is this a running joke? Did I miss something in an early podcast about this?

So I just am curious about the history about how and why David Pierce hates Decoder. Thanks very much. I look forward to hearing your response. I want to know the answer to this question, too. The beauty of this is this will be quick because, yes, I absolutely hate Decoder. No, I love Decoder. And actually, a thing we have talked about a bunch recently is how to sort of bring our podcasts closer together and do more stuff together.

Like, Neelai, I'm curious from your perspective, I don't hate Decoder, But I think one of the funny challenges of Decoder and the Vergecasts is that you are on both of them. Yeah. And I know for a fact that you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what goes where on our many, many two podcasts. So I think the ongoing question for me is like, how do these two shows differ from each other, especially given the fact that one of the hosts is the same person? So the top line is a Decoder is a business show. And the Vergecast is a product show, a tech product show.

That is not actually a good guideline. Everything is the same thing on our shows. Yeah. Like, on Decoder, I ask people what the products they make. I think that's the most important and interesting and illuminating way to get to the heart of, like, what an executive does. Like, if you're an executive in a show on Decoder and you can't talk about your products, like I know a lot about you as an executive.

Yes. On the flip side, and I think this is actually more important. It's funny that David jokes about how much she hates Decoder. We have only recently talked about bringing those shows together. And I actually recently said to David that I had been waiting for someone else to have idea. Because if I did it, then I'm just munging everything together. And when David came back and we were expanding the Vergecast, I wanted to make sure the Vergecast had a lot of space to grow into the next version of itself, especially with David hosting the second episode. I think that's done.

I don't know, David, you tell me, but it was your idea the other day when you said that to me. So I think that process is done. And I do think we should, we can start talking about the interviews on Decoder more, running those clips more. Like using that the same way that we use the other journalism on a site to enhance this show because it's it's right there. I don't think there's any particular reason that they need to be so far apart except you tell me I think the character I play in Decoder is a little different than the character I am on the Verchcast which is much more like myself you know on Decoder it's it's it's a game it's a game that executives can try to win which is are you good at your job I do like every time I start a decoder episode and I hear you doing the

intro I'm like oh it's business nilai like it's it's like grown up nilai is the one who runs Decoder and Bonkers Neely is the one we get on the Vergecast. It's great. Yeah. Decoder Neely wears a tie. But yeah, I think I just think we've hit a pretty natural point in the evolution of both of these shows where there's no reason to keep them apart. I think it's very funny to have fake beef and we'll keep doing that forever. I do hate Decoder, just to be very clear. Decoder is the worst. Okay. So that's, yeah, that's a good run. I think in general, like, as we grow our podcast universe, the big question for me is like, how do you do all that in a way that is cool, but also

like rewards people for listening to everything. Because the thing that I hate, and there are podcasts out there that I will not name that do this, is like they have shows that are essentially just like compilations of other shows and so you're like the more I engage with you, the less it feels like it's worth my time. And what I really don't want to do is that where it's like if you've listened Decoder and then you listen to the Vergecast, it's just like Decoder again or vice versa. I think that's very bad. But if we can find ways to put those things together that like make sense and are good,

I'm all for it. Also, the point is to, like, grow, right? Like, not in a rapacious, capitalistic way. But it's, like, find new audiences and, like, be of service to them. And if we're all, if we just make more Vergecast or it's all decoder, we're actually not going to grow. Like, the things need to be different so they can go attract different groups of people. And that's always just sort of on my mind.

Like, are we just making more of the same thing? Or are we actually making different products for different customers? That's, like, the most decoder thing I've ever said. I'm going to quit. Neil, I just put the tie on as he was saying. All right. let's get to the next one. This is an email from James, which I'm using as kind of a proxy for a bunch of emails we got all on roughly the same subject. James says over time, there have been a number of

comments about Neli using an SLR for his webcam, but I don't think he's ever given the details of that setup and how he runs it. I'd love to know more of those details as I'm thinking about how I might set up a better remote setup at home than just me sitting in front of my computer. And the question we've gotten from a bunch of people is just how, what gear do you use when you sit down to record the podcast? They've asked this. question about all three of us. Neely, I think you talk about it the most. And also you have that weird camera that hangs down in front of your computer. So you've gotten it the most. So why don't you start? Just like you're in the studio right now. But when you're at home,

you also just moved. So you're rethinking this. What is what is the Neely Patel home studio setup like right now? Yeah. First, I want to point out that David and Alex have gone through just an incredible array of camera setups. Oh yeah. Just the most overcomplicated, overthinking software dependent. That's accurate. Like at one point Alex Tran's like, you know, what, I'm going to hinge my career on Sony software. It's a real choice that she attempted to make. I'm still here, though. It's true. We've survived. I'm just saying in the background of me doing the dumbest thing, they're like overthinking. So my setup is super dumb. I am rethinking it because we just moved and I've got some new dedicated space to monkey with. But it is Sony's

ZV-1s. I use them both as the webcam for my meeting camera at work and as a camera for the podcast setup. So it's a ZV-1. They're mounted on arms. They're fed into HDMI capture cards. That's it. And I turn them on. And it is a hardware solution that looks good. Other than being expensive, that sounds like a pretty straightforward setup. Yeah. What I want to get to is a setup at home that looks as much like the look that we have in the studio. So it's not jarring to the audience, depending on where I am. This is much more of a big deal for Decoder

because we're subject to other people's schedules. So I just want to make it look like, no matter where I am or where we're doing a show, the look is the same. So that's kind of on my mind as I build out my new space. But sort of as a pandemic panic purchase, like I need a webcam that looks good. The ZV one was perfect in its moment.

And now they're on to the ZV2. I bet you could find UCV-1s for cheap, but there's a bunch of Sony menus you've got to dig through and settings and da-da-da-da-da-da. It is not happy doing this all the time. Sometimes it overheats and you got to put it in different amounts. Whatever. You can get into a place where it just reliably serves as a webcam when you turn it on. And all of that is hardware and not software. And I cannot convince these two to stop using software.

Yeah. All right, Alex, go. What's yours? Okay. The one I'm currently using, Bulletproof, for the last two weeks. weeks so far is the Insta 360 Link. Oh, yeah. This is very popular in our reviews team.

Yeah, Liam sent it to me because my last camera was the Opal C1, and it kept overheating and turning off during the recordings, which was the theme for all of my cameras this far. So we'll see how the Insta 360 link does. But the Sony imaging webcam was my original, and it was plugging into a Sony A73, and it did not do the job very well. The combination of old camera bad software is really just... It was really bad. Well, then I got like, I, like, heater was on to me and he was like, just go get a cord.

And I got a cable. But unfortunately, it still would overheat constantly because the Sony A7-3 is not meant to be on continuously shooting for an hour at a time. So, yeah, now I'm on that. And I rock a 7 or an SM7B, sure, Mike. Just the old standard. It's very fancy. It used to run into a Motu M2, but there was a terrible buzz periodically that no one could figure out why it started or would stop.

And her audio producer said, stop it and sent me a scarlet. They sent you the other entry-level interface that no one likes. Alex has steadfastly refused to stop using her stupid hardware and software so many times over the last 12 months. We're like, Alex, stop using the weird invidia thing. And she's like, no, I want to use the weird invidivitia thing. It should work, damn it? It should work. By the way, what I'll tell you, if you go out to buy a USB to HTML capture card, you think they're all the same.

So you will instinctively refuse to pay for a name brand. You will go on Amazon and be like, I can spend $20 in the name brand one or I could spend $7 on the Alphabet soup brand. And there's a difference. I just promise you there's a difference. Once you're like find yourself troubleshooting like one USB dongle for three weeks, you're like, I should have just spent this month. My time is worth infinitely more than $23.

And I'm not telling you that that happened to me. I'm just, I'm warning you against an outcome. Hasn't happened to anyone on this show. Do you guys ever feel like it's a miracle we actually successfully make a podcast? My setup is actually very similar to Alex's. I think I've been through an even longer series of insane webcam ideas. I also had an Opel for a long time. And then I got so annoyed with the Opel.

I went back to the Logitech, C9, 20s. that everybody has. It doesn't look very good, but it works really well. I had a long run of using my phone as my webcam with the Camo app, which is wonderful. The only downside of it. Which was hilarious because we couldn't text David. He couldn't use his phone while we were podcasting. Which is on one hand, like, useful that it forced me to pay attention to meetings more, which was good. But the other part is like you're just constantly rigging up and derriggering your webcam, which is very annoying. But it looked really good, worked super well. So if you just have a second phone lying around, that's a great idea.

But yeah, I'm also now on the Insta 360. It works fine. I occasionally accidentally turn on the auto tracking and it just follows me around my room, which creeps me out. That's the best part. Other than that, no complaints. It works pretty well. Webcams are not as good as they should be, is my overarching takeaway. You just buy a Sony ZV1.

You put it on and on. You mount the arm at about eye level and you look down the barrel and everyone's like, what magic are you doing? And it's like, I spent $500. That's the magic. Yeah. So do you have it in front of your computer screen? So I have two setups because I need to have physical distance between podcasting mode and work mode. So I've got the 2015 on Mac, which is the podcast rig. And on that one, the arm comes down over in front of the screen. So I can have my notes behind the camera, but then I can just look down the barrel of the lens.

Because it's a 27 inch screen, you can kind of just like make it all work. And then on the sort of like the zoom setup, I've got my delightful. Samsung Curve TV off to the side. It is actually great for this purpose. And the camera is on an arm. And it's right in the middle of that display. Got it. So I'm kind of just like always looking. It looks like I'm looking at people. And then I have my laptop there. And that, I don't know if that is, I don't know if that's going to persist. That was like a, I made it during the pandemic and I convinced myself it was good. I mean, it works, except for whenever there's someone directly behind your camera. Yeah. And you're like, I got everybody. And I forget the one person in the Zoom square. If you're listening to this, the Google Meet team is listening to this. Make it so I can block out the middle square so I can put the camera in front of it. Like the free space on the bingo card. Just leave one square blank. All right, let's move on. This one, we're just going to do because we get this all the time.

And we should answer it on the show again. This is an email we got from George that says, it's been a while since I heard why you all don't do chapters. Figured I'd see if you all are using the same reason. If it's not possible with your current contract, are you all considering moving to another service? Please let me know who I should be directing my inquiry to, and I would bug them.

People are so mad that we don't have chapters in the audio version of this podcast. Liam, our lead producer, Liam, do you want to come answer this question? I'd like you to answer this question. The answer is that we use Megaphone, a product owned by Spotify. I think a vast majority of large publishers use them because it allows us to manage our advertising inventory effectively. Unfortunately, it does not support chapters. is crazy and something we've talked to them about many times. And we are promised that it is coming soon.

But thus far, we have not gotten that future. That answer is both true and complete and fills me with rage. Surprising that Spotify is not a terrific place to listen to podcasts. Who would have thunk? Yeah, I just wanted to get that out of the way. It is real. We would like to do it. Chapters are great.

They're so good. And I wish we had them. And someday we will. And that will be a great day. All right, let's move on the next one. We have a question from Dennis. Dennis's question is, ever since the last redesign of the Vergecast, I was wondering if you could tell us more about the new jingle. I really dig it, and maybe you could give some insights into the process of creating this. Also, if you could publish a full version somewhere, I could really see myself listening to it on its own.

Nelai, you really led this to you want to talk about the jingle. So we were just rethinking how everything looked, and we'd been using the same theme, which I believe Josh Topolski just made on his computer in 2011. And it's great. We love it. We should use it again. Classic Vergecast theme. One thing about things people like is if you take them away for a lot and you bring them back, people get really excited. So I'm always thinking about that with our logos, with our themes, all that stuff. But you've got to refresh and update and we're launching the second episode. And sometimes the stuff you make just can't get big enough. Like we didn't have enough stems. We didn't have enough bits and bobs to extend the show the way we needed to. So we went out to Breakmaster Cylinder,

who also did the decoder theme, and it was amazingly fun working with them. And the only note I will give is we did a bunch of rounds. It's built on the old theme, so you can hear that's the same pieces of music. And I just kept giving notes that I wanted it to sound more like Fascination Street by the Cure. And at some point, Breakmaster's Sunderer was like,

oh, I get it, you want a rock song, and I keep making hip-hop songs. And that was the heavens burst open, and then we had the theme. But the real piece of it, the real important part of it was we needed something that was much more flexible so we can make all the new kinds of shows that we were setting out to make. So speaking of that particular reboot, another question we got was from Raphael and essentially

says, I love the new art formats and especially sound design the podcast got. It's easy to relate it to David's comeback, but I think it would be interesting to hear from you how that went if you have any other plans coming and your thoughts and feelings in general, which is a very vague question, but I think generally it's like we're at some point decided like we're going to reboot the Vergecast a bit. And the sort of impetus for that happened before I got here. So like rewind, I don't know, 18 months. We'd been doing this show for 11 years at the time. What was the conversation like that it was like, let's change what this thing is a bit? Well, there are two things. One, Dieter had just left. So there was a big conversation about like, how will we do this? Will Neil and I just rant about

USPC for one hour a week. Will that, is that an acceptable show? Will that make us any money? Is that a good use of time? The answer is no, I think very obviously no. And so when I went to see if David wanted to come back to the verge, the thing I said was host the verge cast. Like, it is a big property. People care about it a lot. It needs a lot of focused attention from someone who gets it. And David was like, yes. And then five minutes later, he showed up. So that was like a big part of it was like, if you're going to change the host, you're going to change the show. The other part of it, which is the business part of it, is that the show is successful.

And so our company wants more of it all the time, just an infinite amount of VurchCast. And, you know, the dynamic there, the tension there is, I don't think everybody, like, I don't think the audience wants an infinite amount of Vurchedcast. So it has to be really good, and we have to, like, put a boundary on how much we're going to do

because there's, you know, our effort has to be sustained. So I think that's it. Like, I think we're at a moment where we have the Friday show, which is, like, loose. And I think David once called them, like, the DVD.

liner notes of The Verge. Yeah. And it's like really good. And then we have the Wednesday show, which is much more focused and narrative. And I think that is a really good dynamic between those two episodes. I can see a world in which we do something every day. I just don't know how to do it. Like literally logistically.

Yeah. It's like the bits and bobs of like who will go where, when. We used to do it. We used to 90 seconds on the verge. I remember this. That required us all to be very young and mostly understanding. married and have no children. And hammered.

Like also it required like an infinite amount of booze to pull that off all the time. And some very dedicated people who are like fully in startup mode. If we want to do that again, I suspect we should. I think we just have to build some systems. And I don't know that that should be the verge cast. But that's like I'm saying all this stuff. I think we've all talked about it loosely. This is as specific as we have ever been about this idea.

Like where could we go? Alex, you kind of came into the Vergecast in the middle of that transition, right? What was that like? It was kind of exciting and also alarming and terrifying, mainly to, like, come in with Nilai and Dieter who are really, really, really good at this. And I think, like, 90% of my early episodes, I don't say anything because I'm just watching them and, like, studying them the whole time. No, no one understands that this is a test.

It's like, you have to talk. And if you don't talk, and then it's not going to work. And then it would be like, oh, God. I got to talk. I got to say something. And so like trying to figure that out, trying to figure out like, what are the things I want to talk about on the show and make kind of part of my character on the show. It was a lot of work. And it was a lot of like thinking about it and talking with theater about it and figuring it all out. And then David came. And I was like, David, hello. Guide me. And it was great. And I screwed everything up for you again. Yeah. Yeah. You ruined everything. So thanks a lot. I think the way you describe it, at least from my perspective in the eye, is pretty much about right. It was like, we want more Vergecast. Come do it. And I got a text from. Dieter on my first day who was like, you know, good luck if you ruin the Vergecast, I'll kill you. Like in those words in that order is what he said. And I sincerely hope I have not ruined the verge cast. I'm trying very hard to ruin it every single day, but I don't think we've gotten

quite there yet. Success is right on the edge of ruining it. Oh yeah. That's the thing about this show that no one quite understands. Agreed. All right. We have one more about the Vergecast and then we're going to take a break. This is from Ben and it's my favorite voicemail we've gotten recently. recently. Hey, this is Dan. Not really a question. Just want to let Neil I know that pop up the volume is currently streaming on Max. All right.

Have a nice day. It's all you need to know that first cast. It's very important information. So I think that we should do like a watch party of this movie. The problem is that the movie was made a while ago. There are topless people in it. There are some ideas in it that maybe don't hold up. I would love to do this while it's party.

I just think we all have to sign contracts agreeing that we know what we're getting into together before we begin. But I promise you, the scene and pump up the volume where Christian Slater is driving around in his girlfriend's Jeep, broadcasting a pirate radio station while the FCC chases him in little vans, that is as clear a statement of the editorial mission of the verge as I can give you. That is what we do here. There you go. That's all you need to know. And if somebody would like to remake that scene playing the Vergecast as the underlying audio and send that to me, it would make us great happy. Virgast, verge.com. All right, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do some Virgier questions.

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That's upw-w-R-K.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. So the second category of questions we got was about like the verge in general. And Nelai, I think in particular, a bunch of these are more for you as, you know, the boss. But we got a bunch of good ones. So let's just dive in. The first one is from John Paul. Hi, this is Jean Paul. And I have a couple of questions for the meta episodes. You guys have said this coming up. First question, can you tell me how the verge is structured for someone who likes org chart so much? What's the org chart look like? And why did you set it up that way? Also, what's the verge of relationship with Vox?

How is it structured within the larger organization? Also, similar question. You run a pretty big newsroom and you make lots of decisions. Can you tell me how you make decisions? What's your decision-maker framework? These questions might sound a little familiar. Looking forward to hearing your answers. Bye.

I wish you all could see the smile on me last face right now. This is going to be the longest broadcast of all time. Your children have grown up to hoist you on your own guitar. That is the phrase. It's like, oh, no, I did it to myself. Let's just do it in Earth. So the first question is how is the verge structured? Yeah, I think the Verge is structured.

It's like a high performance Montessori. Like my goal for the Verge is everyone just does whatever they want and it's awesome. So we are structured to enable that. And that's like a very top-blind thing. But basically we have desks, right? We have a reviews desk. We have a policy desk. We have a creator's desk.

That ladders into just very top-blind subjects like Jake Castranakis is our tech. editor. It's basically by subject matter expertise is how we are structured. And you can look at our mass set. You can see how that goes. Then next to that, we have audio and video, which is a format. So then we have like a format specific division, basically. And that's because the tools and the processes and the cadences of that work are different than the newsroom and text. Those are the two sort of axes that I think about is our features program runs on like a year-long cadence. and so they are thinking on very different timelines than our news team. And so in the formats, we have to manage different cadences.

And then we need to make sure that we have subject matter expertise through all of that. And that is like, you might surmise that I enjoy messing with our org chart because those things are intention. So we are just always kind of like rebalancing how that works and thinking about it. But those are the two things just operationally that we have to manage. Like how long it takes to make something and then how much you need to know. to make the thing and like where that knowledge should get concentrated and then how those timelines should be managed. Alex, you're the person who spends all of your days like making all of that work. Yeah, Alex is the actual managing editor. Yeah, I was like, I've memorized the org chart. I can

list every single person at who they report to at the verge. I don't know if I should have that information in my head, but there it is. Does that structure make sense to you? Like, you're sort of operating that structure day to day. Does that, does his description feel right to you? Yeah, yeah, it does. I think, like, having different mediums is really, they function totally differently, right? Like, like how the ideation works, how the timeline to get things up works is totally, totally different. So you kind of need a little bit of separation there. But then you also have to make sure they overlap enough and they communicate enough that, like, good conversations are happening. And you don't have like somebody writing a story and somebody doing a podcast that they are the exact same thing, doing them in parallel without talking to each other. And so this is especially hard. I would say. Yeah. So it's like constant, constant communication. But yeah, I think it makes sense.

And it's helpful to like, like I have like the big like the deputy editors and I go talk to the deputy editors and figure things out. But then I also know, okay, I can drill down. I can go to down to a desk editor. I can go down to staff writer that reports up to them and get those details. So it kind of like trickles down like that. And it works really well. Yeah. I think.

My goal is that, again, everyone just does whatever they want. There's a moment about a year end. to a new Virge reporter's tenure where like they learn how to play the piano and they're like, I can just do anything. And that's like, all that structure is designed for that, for that moment to happen because that's the best. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the like eternal struggle of the verge in every organization is how to like that overlap you're talking about Alex, where it's like, how do we how do we do we do really great stuff at like the speed of the news business? And also how do we like, when do you take the moment where it's like, okay, I'm going to go disappear for six

months and do this story, even though there's constant news all the time. And Nilai, your immediate instinct is always just like news, run faster, run faster, run faster, in so many ways. And it's really good in some ways, but it's also like, as the verge has gotten bigger, figuring out how to do that and do all the other stuff we have to do at the different speeds at which they happen is like every newsroom's kind of constant struggle. Because like things keep happening. Yeah. And you can be reactive to it forever. And that works and you have to do that. But also there's other stuff we want to do that isn't just run as fast as the news cycle all the time. Well, I'll give you one very specific example that I think for a chat listeners will

deeply understand. News and reviews operate on different timelines. Like, they just do. To review a product well, you have to just fall into it. Like, you have to pay attention to it for a significant period of time. And then you can, like, put out a good product review. That takes longer than writing the news. However, we have competitors that have solved this problem by totally divorcing their news

and reviews operations. The reviewers never write news, the news reporters never write reviews. And what you get is a bunch of reporters who have never used the products, who just don't understand the products, and a bunch of reviewers who are writing reviews as though the news is not happening. And we talk about this. We've talked about this since the beginning of the verge. Like, we see these other places that do this.

We don't ever want to do that. The problem is that as you get bigger and you want to review more things and write more news, There's a reason that they split those things up. There's a totally rational, explainable, deeply understandable reason why you would pull those teams apart. Because they need to run in different directions and different timelines. We're just insistent about smashing them together so that our reviews read as though they take place on the same planet as everyone lives on. And our news reporters understand that you can't just assume that tech companies can make every decision perfectly because they're actually using their products. and they're aware of the tradeoffs that are inherent to, like, building any product.

And that, I think, is, that's what we do here. But after a while, you're like, oh, this is the problem that I've signed up to manage forever. Like, the job is actually just this problem. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. And I think you've kind of halfway answered this already, but Jean-Paul did ask about how you make decisions, which is the decoder question. So answer the damn decoder question, Eli. So if you listen to decoder and you listen to people and ask this question, some people are not prepared for it, which is very funny.

Like, just immediately the funniest thing to me. Like, how do you not know this is coming? And then there's like four or five variations, and I am very much on the Amazon end of that variation, which is you just need to divide up your decisions into things that you can quickly undo and have low stakes and things that have high stakes. And you need to make the low stakes decisions as fast as you can and be ultra decisive about them. That's the one-way door and two-way door strategy, right? That's how they talk about it. Yeah, or type A and type B or type 1 and type 2.

And I always forget which one's which. But yeah, there's the two-way door. You can just go back and do it again. And then there's the like, oh, this isn't existentially important. And so I try really hard to make as to everyone's chagrin. I'm like, we should just do this all the time. But I think that's really important for a newsroom. I think the challenge is for a newsroom, a thing like a headline or an image choice.

Like those are actually one-way doors. You don't get to go back. Your credibility is on the line. So you have to build a set of instincts about that stuff that I think is just hard fought. And you need a lot of scar tissue. But we are very blessed to have a large group of people. that has honestly worked together for a very long time, comparatively to any media organization.

And so I think there's sort of a collective intelligence about what the verge is that allows us to make those decisions very quickly. Do you want to say anything about the verges relationship with Vox before we skip on to our next person? We're a pirate ship. I don't know what they do. Here we go. It's a very honest.

And our CEO has said this. Like, for us, our audience moves faster. It's a tech audience. It moves faster than a general news audience or whatever. our audience is younger than everybody else. This is a true thing. I think only probably on singer of us. We have been given the opportunity to run as fast as we want in directions that we want to run it.

And that's honestly great. And speaking of one of those changes, here's our next voicemail from Austin. Hey, Vergecast. This is Austin from Seattle. I got a question. What has the emotional journey been like while y'all transitioned to WordPress? Thanks. Hope to hear from you.

This is why I love Vergecast people, right? Like, they understand that this is an emotional. emotional journey. And it has been one. How do you guys feel about it? This hasn't happened yet. It's still very new, but we know it's happening. Y'all have been on chorus a lot longer than I have.

How are we feeling? I feel joy. I feel nothing but joy. 100%. Yeah. Like chorus is exceptional, right? It's an exceptional CMS. I've used a lot of CMSes.

There was one where you couldn't use that I used where you couldn't use the same image twice. Like ever? You would have to like ever. So you have to like upload it flipped or like slightly cropped. It was so dumb. That was horrible. And of course it's been really, really great. But I'm excited for WordPress.

Like that's where I first started. That was like my very first website that I went and put it on the web and blogged on was a WordPress site. And I'm excited to go back there. To be clear, it's joy because like we haven't yet gone on the first date. We're just looking forward to it, you know? Yeah. It's like the anticipation. We're like, ooh, what's going to happen?

But like fundamentally, a lot of ideas that we have are bottlenecked by the limitations of having to build our own proprietary software. So there's a lot of things I want to do. For example, clicking more stories at the bottom of our homepage, that should just infinite scroll, right? It should obviously just infinite scroll. We either have to re-architect our own CMS and its API to enable that or a million people have solved this problem WordPress already. And so I'm just excited about that. I'm excited about being able to trade on an ecosystem, like a huge software development ecosystem, and instead point our development resources at user experiences.

Because ultimately, the media stopped trying to compete with platforms and user experience. I think that's take a look around. And we should try. So, like, that's where the joy comes from is, oh, why is our development effort pointed at a database and a word processor? Solved the problems worth solving. We should build user experiences. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think everyone I've talked to is like deeply nervous because we're a bunch of nerds who are like extremely attuned to the user experience of the products that we use. And like we just got an email that we're about to switch to the new Slack and everyone is terrified. And so there's like a lot of that energy in the WordPress transition too that it's like we're all sort of used to the good and bad things about chorus, which is a very good piece of software we've been on it for a very long time. Like it's the devil you know and the devil you don't. Right. But I do think being open to like the entirety of the WordPress ecosystem.

is going to be super, super cool. There's all kinds of stuff we can do. We haven't even talked about Activity Pub yet. Oh, we're getting to that. Don't you worry. The last question is just four hours of me like ranting about Activity Pub. So don't worry.

All right, let's get to our next one, which comes from Charlotte. Hi, my name is Charlotte. You guys talk a lot about other journalists and other publications, such as TechCrunch. And it seems like people move from the verge to TechCrunch, etc., all over. What's it like being friends with your

competitors and how do you kind of balance that work and having to compete with them and also still being friends and collaborating. Thanks. Bye. There are enemy. We don't collaborate. Yeah. David's moved around the most. Yeah. So you should answer this one. I think it's hard to explain but really easy in practice. Like I both love a lot of the people who work at a lot of other publications and absolutely earnestly want to kick their ass to every story all the time. And I understand that there is like cognitive dissonance there, but it's just true. And I think part of it is also like this part of journalism is relatively small. Like even the way that we think about tech, everybody covers tech now. It's all over the place. It's huge in a way that like in 2011 it was not.

Right. Like the world of people who cared about tech the way that we do was much smaller than. It's still pretty small now. Like there are a lot of people who cover these companies as big businesses. There are a lot of people who cover them from like varying different perspectives. But in this space of like people who cover technology as technology, it's very small. And having like a bunch of other nerds around to talk about this stuff with is just always fun. And there's so much to do in this space that I feel like I probably feel less competitive than I should sometimes. But at the same time, like we just see each other all the time in a way that you don't in a lot of businesses.

Right. Like when companies do investor events, they don't have like hundreds of reporters. that they make stand in a room for hours drinking coffee before they go see the like quarterly earnings be unveiled. But we do that. We see all these people at Apple events. We see them all at Google events. We see them a bunch of times a year.

And we're just all talking about the same stuff every day. So it's like natural, I think, that you build a real like kinship with these people. And there's only like six publications. So we've all worked together at one point or another. Yeah. We've killed most of the others. I want to be clear. We are soaked in blood.

We are smiling. blood drips down our fangs. It wasn't us, no. It was the larger, but it's true that our early competitive set has been winnowed way, way, way down. And that, you know, I don't love that.

Actually, we talk a lot about needing great competitors because that's what keeps us sharp. And respecting your great competitors and being friendly with them does not negate the fact that you feel competitive with them, like in, in, like, big ways. I would say this, like, the power of the verge over the past decade.

has been it's graduating classes. Like, we've graduated a lot of people out into a lot of publications, most notably Bloomberg. And now, like, Bloomberg is just like Verge Midtown. When you just go, it's just a bunch of people we know. And so, like, that's great. Like, I like being the place where people get good, you know, and, like, can go on and do other things.

I like being the place where when our competitor publications look for leadership, and that's, like, the thing I like graduating out. I like graduating out senior people and editors and leaders. I think that's just a good cycle. Like the earlier question was like, the main thing I think about is our culture. Like that's what the culture develops. And then obviously all those people are still very friendly with us. But we call them expats.

Like, they're still a verge. There's a lot of power in this world. I always joke with David that I have a theory of true power. And it's like, by the end of this, we will just run every publication. That's the goal. Yeah. That's 100%. Yeah.

The verge diaspora is a like extremely cool and increasingly powerful group of people. It's pretty awesome. The editor of Wired, by the way, is a Virge X-Fat. I just want to put that out there in the world. We're taking over. It's what we do. That's like a great. And Katie's great.

That has nothing to do with her VIRG history. She's just great. If you had told us in 2011 that that would be the direction, I would have never believed you. Yeah. All right. Next one. This is an email we got from Paul that says, I think the casual reader, the Verge might assume the staff are all very heavy tech users, constantly scrolling and getting notifications from all tovap apps, upgrading the flip phones and MacBooks frequently. but listening to the show, it seems like quite the opposite.

Neli has mentioned he blocks almost on notifications from his phone and that he removed apps with endless feeds. David mentioned before becoming a father that he wanted to avoid becoming a tech dad. I'm curious what views the rest of the team has that may be counterintuitive for people who spend so much time thinking, writing and talking about tech. I guess what I'm asking is who is the biggest Luddite at the verge, which A is a very good question. And B, I think the sort of underlying question here is basically like, are you still a bunch of tech nerds who just love tech all the time? Wait, can I reject the premise of this? question. Sure. Is that allowed? I mean, I love you for listening and I love you for asking. I appreciate that you're asking. I just don't think I agree with the premise that being a heavy user of tech

requires you to have your notifications on. Okay. Yeah. Right. Like, I think that this is actually a thing that gets conflated, like, quite a bit. Like, I'm an intense user of technology. I will, I spent my train ride to the office today reading about matter, adaptive lighting upgrades. Like, That's where I'm at in life. What I am selfish about and when I'm not a heavy user of is like unfiltered garbage information. And like mostly what people think of as tech products, like just provide that to you. Like a nonstop flood of garbage. And like I would say that the power user move is to use the tools in the way that these companies do not want you to use them and turn them all off and then only take what you want.

And what I want is for HomeKit Adaptive lighting to be compatible with matter, which is not at this time. You're a simple man of simple needs. It's not. It's really brutal. You can disagree with me. I think that's totally fair. But I think there's a thing in there, right, which is like, are you a Luddite because you don't have all your notifications turned on? And it's like, no, I just don't need people to interrupt me. I'm busy.

You know, like I'll take information on my terms, you know, and I'm in the news. So my terms are I want a lot of it. I just want to be focused. Most of these platforms, like, Elon Musk is just like mask off with Twitter, right? He's like, my focus is keeping you on the platform. I'm taking the headlines away. And it's like, oh, I don't care about what you think. Like, I'll, I'm turning off your notifications.

You can't have me. That, to me, feels like more of a power user move. Like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everyone's going to disagree with me. But I would just, that's the turn I would make. I think you're right. Like, I think the power user move is to figure out which bits you actually want to use and use them and incorporate them into your life.

a really, like, satisfying way. And I would say the majority of the staff does that. Like, not everybody has the newest phone or the newest laptop, but they have figured out a workflow that is deeply, profoundly nerdy and made that work. And I think that's kind of like the core of the verge is finding those solutions that work for you. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have every single app constantly filtering things in, or you have to be like, Like for the longest time, I thought the real tech nerd was the person who mastered Rain Meter on Windows. Like, that was it for me. And I think that is, like, there's definitely tech nerdery to it, but it's not like the only part.

And everybody's a different type of tech nerd. I know people who are super into phones and have no idea what matter, like how to use matter, what the process there is. And I have friends who are super into their home theater systems to an alarming degree. and they have like a six-year-old phone. Everybody's got a different kind of love of tech. I do think there was a long period of tech where there were like a small number of things to be really into. And so it was like, I mean, you rewind whatever 40 years and the only thing to be into was like PCs, right? So you were just like, and then we got, you know, it expanded a little and then there were like phones and everybody's really into phones.

And now it's like if you want to be super weirdly into some line of tech, there are a billion to choose from. And I feel like what's been fun about the verge is watching everybody sort of pick their thing, right? It's like being really into movies. You end up sort of picking a thing that you care about more than everybody else and want to talk to everybody else about even though they don't care. And like that's the verge with tech. We all have things that no one else cares about that we do. And that's the prerequisite of working here. Like I said, everyone's just doing whatever they want.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, I will talk your face off about building. I need to build a new home theater rig for the new house. Yeah, every time Nilai brings up Dolby Atmos, that's when I just like turn off my microphone and walk away for a few minutes of the podcast. At this point, Dolby is like, come to the office. Just come here. By the way, but can I just answer the question direct? It's Liz Lapato is the biggest Luddite. Oh, 100%.

Friend of the Verge, Brian Merchant, who has written for us. We've excerpted his previous books. He's got a new book out, by the way, about the history of Luddites and what they were actually after. And it's like mind blowing. When the book comes out, we'll like have them on or something. It's great. All right. One more before we take a break. This is from Will. Get ready. Hey, this is Will in San Diego. A two-part question. Is Neli a cool boss?

And does he give nice back rubs? All right. Thank you. Well, it's 2023, sir. No boss is so given backrubs. Legally, we cannot answer that second question. I'm out here being like, I don't know if I can pump up the volume with these people. I will say, we got this question a lot, which makes me think we should actually try to answer it.

The back rubs question? the backgrows question. Will's the only one who wondered about the backcrops. Will, whatever that says about you, we'll come back to that. But the is Nelai a good boss question is when we actually got a lot. So Alex, I think we should attempt to answer this as earnestly and honestly as possible. While I'm here. While Nelai is here. We're going to, this is. Well, Nelai is about to not be a very good boss? I'll tell you that. Nealai is an exceptional boss. I will say, the question was not, is he a good boss? Is he a cool boss? Suttly. We did get good boss, but I like cool boss is a question more. No, I'm like, you should, you should just drink at home, so you're safe.

Yeah, Neela and I've had like meetings about stuff while having a drink. It's great. Like, who doesn't love a drinking working meeting? It's wonderful. I think that's the definition of a cool boss. That's literally the definition of the cool mom from mean girls. I just want to be clear. That too. That too. I think the way I always described Neelai as a boss is that if you want to be as chaotic as Nilai wants you to be, he is the best boss in the world. If Nilai gets bored, it's a problem. So then this is true in all things. Bored Nelai is a dangerous Nelai. This is why we get worried when Nelai is like on a flight with no Wi-Fi. Like bad things happen when when Nelai has five hours to sit and think by himself. The ideas are always great that come out

of those flights. There's always a Google Doc. It's terrifying. But I think to me one of the things that is like fun about having you as my boss, Nelai, is that you're like forever trying to to do bigger, weirder, different things. Like, I have worked at places that are very much like, here is what we do, and our job is to keep doing it. And I understand why that's good and valuable, and it has just, like, never been what, like, excites me day to day to just, like, keep doing my job every day.

And I feel like every three weeks, Neelai shows up and is like, what if we just did everything super differently, just to see what happens. And that's like, it is never boring with Nealai as your boss. It's chaos. This is horrible. This is like having someone write your resume in front of you. I cannot tell you how much I dislike this. Neil, do you think you're a good boss?

Cool boss. Cool boss. I'm definitely cool boss. Yeah. Which means drunk. I just want to be clear. Which means lightly sauced. I've been watching a lot of madmen clips on TikTok.

I've got a lot of picked up a bunch of ideas. I don't know. I try really hard to be a good boss. Some days I'm much worse than other days. The only thing that I can measure that against is how confident our most junior people are. Like, I don't worry about David. David's going to tell me to fuck off. Like, it's fine.

And we have a lot of people on our staff who've been with us for a long time who are very confident in telling me what to do. And that's great. And I love them and cherish them. What I am always thinking about is the youngest, most junior person on our staff and how far along they are on the road to playing the piano and being able to do whatever they want. And if they are unsure or they are unclear or they are not confident, like we, the whole organization is fucked up.

The culture is fucked up. I don't know if that's like the right measure. I don't know if I should measure like page views instead or like whatever, but that's that's the thing I've been focused on. And the reason I'm always trying to blow everything up and I really am always trying to blow everything up is like the media industry is a disaster. So we should probably try to invent a new one. And again, we've been given the license to go try to do it. And along the way, you've got to, I just want to be a place where I would want to work, you know. And like there's not a lot of places that, like, as evidenced by the fact that I've been here for a decade, not a lot of places I want to work.

That's it. That's what. I don't know. I don't know if that's right answer. This is horrible. I want to die. It's really the answer. I'm like full body cringing. All right. We have a couple more quick ones. Let's take a break. We're going to do the last couple and then we'll get out of here. We'll grab back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn hiring pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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Tell us the top worst 10 things about Neelai. I suppose. No, let's, we're going to hard pivot away from that too. We have two, I think, sort of bigger picture questions about how we think about tech and the verge and the future. So we're going to do those before we get out of here. Here's the first one from Santiago. Hey, Virch Team. This is Santiago from Orlando. I want to ask, how has your role and editorial stand shifted from the start of the verge to today as we're more conscious of the possibility

for technology misuse? And how have you seen your coverage on AI evolve as the product is more broadly used and becomes more integrated in everyday technology? Love the show. Thanks for everything. I included this question because this is literally a conversation we have been having internally about how we think about tech now. Like, I look back to 2011 and, and, And Nelai, a thing you used to always say is one of the things we do at the verge is we pedal hope, that like the world can get better and technology is part of that and that one of the things we do is try to point people at what a better world looks like. Does that hold 12 years later with everything we know about what technology is and does and all the bad things we've seen in the last 12 years? Yeah, I think so. I think we saw hope.

Fundamentally, we report on other people working really hard, right? I mean, the phone gets, well, hopefully the phone gets a little thicker and the battery. I think it's longer. But, you know, the phone gets thinner, the screens get bigger, they get brighter. The networks get faster to what effect, who knows. But that dynamic, right, that I'm describing is a lot of people have to work really hard to put capabilities into the world and to give you new tools. I think that is good. The most important thing is that that is a positive feedback loop that, like, we invent things and we try hard.

And, like, there's an earnestness to that that I never want to lose side of. The other side of it is, well, we made 5G networks and we spent a lot of money and why. Do we do anything good with it? Is anything good happened? Is there a robot surgery? And I think that is the side that the rest of the media has focused on. And obviously, we've layered a lot of that into our coverage, too, especially with social networks and things like that. It's weird that it is easier and faster to lie than ever before.

Should we have built those capabilities? Should we have stopped ourselves? Maybe. And those are societal questions. So I think in 2011, that was our thesis, right? Like, oh, the world, because of phones in particular, the world is on the cusp of a massive change. We should have a publication that, like, technology is culture, tech culture. The whole thing, all that stuff we said over a decade ago is now everything.

Everyone gets it. And so our differentiation, I think, is not taking it for granted. The other line I always use is it's fun to be smart. You know, like we spend a lot of time just like thinking about stuff. Like our show, our audience, that's why it's big. Because there's actually way more people out there that want to spend their time deeply thinking about these things than not. You know, I would say that when I think about our differentiation in the media landscape, a lot of people take it for granted. They just take it for granted that these are problems or these are tradeoffs or you can come to other solutions or even that it is fun to be smart about them.

That being it's like too nerdy or too weird. It's like, no, actually, you can walk up to any person on earth and ask them about their phone and they will tell you something deeply nerdy. Like it is an absolute unifier that this technology exists and people have emotional relationships with it. and you can take it seriously. So I think it's, you know, many things have happened since we launched The Verge. Many things continue to happen. AI is, when I say it's easier to lie than ever before, pooh, boy, do I have thoughts?

But the flip side of it is like, well, people, a lot of people have to work really, really hard to make these things and we should not take it for granted. And that, like, just in and of itself is like, to me is still a hopeful idea. Alex, one of the things you and I talk about, I feel like half our Slack DMs are, we're covering this cool thing that exists. And like AI is actually the perfect example of this right now. It's like this cool new thing that exists that, you know, Open AI just launched Dolly 3 and look at all the wild stuff you can do. How many paragraphs do I have to write about all the awful things that can be used here?

Does every story about AI need to mostly be about the bad possibilities and the side effects and the things we haven't had? When we cover meta, do we need to relitigate all the bad things that meta has done over the years? Like, how do you talk about this stuff in a way that is both? both hopeful and realistic and honest and self-aware. Like, do you feel like you and we have cracked that yet? I think it kind of hinges on the fact that one, we care about this stuff and we're really passionate about it. And our readers are passionate about it.

Our writers are passionate about it. And we're covering it every day. Like, if you're only covering AI once a year, then you really do have to relitigate things because your audience may not be familiar with it. But our audience is typically pretty familiar with what's going on. So we don't need to be like, oh, remember that time, like rehash everything that meta's done that's awful. We all know they've done a lot of awful stuff. We can spend a line being like, hey, by the way, medited

something awful once six years ago and continue on, right? Like, like, we can, we don't have to re-educate people. And I think that's something that a lot of publications, like, can kind of fall into the trap of wanting to relitigate things, wanting to really focus on the crummy stuff. And the crummy stuff is crummy, and we need to talk about it. We need to write about it. We need to write about it. But there's also really useful things and beneficial things. And I think what we see with AI is kind of similar to what we saw with deep fakes, where there was a lot of panic around deep fakes because, oh, my God, it's going to change everything. And yeah, it does change things. And it does demand better literacy from audiences. But at the same time, it does a lot of really cool stuff. It enables a lot of really fun stuff. And as long as you find that balance and remember that and it doesn't go into like supervillain land, then it's fine. A.I. is a little. little trickier because it is so easy to lie with AI, but it does a lot of really cool stuff. Like, one day, I'm not going to have to schedule all my meetings. AI will do it for me, and I cannot wait.

Neil, I will never have to use software again because of AI. Software is the worst. Hardware only. That's the new verge. No, software coverage. No, I think that's right. And I think, like, to the point about, you know, it's fun to be smart is, like, being alive right now means holding a lot of competing ideas in your head about what's good and what's bad

and what's safe and what's problematic and how much you should care about your privacy versus all the cool stuff that exists. The goal, I think, is just to engage all of that as honestly as we can rather than like try to pretend it's all one or all the other. Or just ignore it all and talk about stock prices, right? That's one really easy shortcut to a lot of this is when the stock goes up, it's good and when the stock goes down, it's bad. And that's a really handy way to cover tech that I think just like ignores what it's like to be a person in the world. And I think just coming into everything acknowledging that it's all kind of a, mess is a thing the Verge is really good at and makes it like it's it's why it's fun to be engaged with this stuff every day because it doesn't get less messy it just gets messy in new

ways which is really fun yeah do i tell you my favorite at walt musberg sorry not that i experienced i have a favorite one's that i experience but just in the legend of walt mossberg there's a i believe it's a wired profile of him just like moving through cES and you just written some like horrible review of like a serious xm radio or something and the CEO of the company stops and it's like you trashed my stock price like on the floor of c s and on the floor of c s walton mousberg looks at him dead in the eye and says i don't give a fuck about your stock price hell yeah i just like i've held this in my heart the entire time i like that a lot um all right we have one more and then we're going to get out of here the last question we have comes from kevin hey this is kevin mcgree from

beautiful winona minnesota and i've been an active uh reader of the verge since around November 1st, 2011. He has been around for a long time doing great things. And I guess my real big question for everybody on the Vergecast when you're talking about hot takes and hot questions is what is your next? Well, I'm here to announce. This is where he ran it's about activity pub. Is this where I ran about activity pub for four hours? Yeah, yeah.

Okay. My plan for our site is to federate our content and to be more natively integrated with whatever new class of social networks that exist. I have no idea how any of this is going to work. You can see the loose beginnings of how it might work on our site. You can see that people have built hacks to make it happen. I love it. The verge of that space is great. Don't bother that guy too much.

Don't overload his server. But you can see how we're building towards. And then you can see things like, well, we've got a one column story stream. What if we had two of them? What if we had three of them? What if you could follow our writers in the column? Or topics. What if you could just follow gadgets and get a stream of gadget news on our homepage?

I don't know if any of that's going to work. I just think we have to build cooler user experiences for people in media and not just be a supplier of cheap, undifferentiated content to Elon Musk. Maybe this is not like the most insane business proposition in the world, by the way, if you like go anywhere else, like, what should you do? Should you have a relationship with your customer? Or should you give your shit away for free to the richest man on earth? Like anyone else in the world knows the answer to that question. Media executives are like, I don't know. I think we should give our shit away for free.

And I just don't know why that is. Like our industry just like no has no self-esteem. So I would like the verge to lead the way and having some confident ideas on like, how do we build stuff that's cool? How do we compete in like software in addition to having really, really good work that is like has journalistic ethics and all the other stuff? Yeah, that's kind of my big idea. I've again, no idea how this will work. We have to build a lot of it. We have to invent a bunch of it.

But again, we've been given the license to do it, which I think is a pretty incredible position to be. Yeah, I think we've entered this place where, like, the media industry has spent the last 15 years basically playing everybody else's game in the social world where it was like you, you play somebody's game, you get free traffic, you lightly monetize that traffic seems sort of like victory for a minute. And we are coming out of that game in a pretty real way. Like, just the fact that Twitter is now not showing headlines on link cards. Like, Elon Musk does not want you to leave his platform. And so he's going to make it very hard for you to leave his platform. But Elon is just like a very convenient villain. This is what's happening to everybody, right? Like Google is less interested in sending you stuff. Everybody is doing that now. And so this idea of like, I think the thing you're going to see from a lot of media organizations is like how do we build a place you want to be, which I think is correct. And then the thing that we're also going to try to figure out how to do on top of that is how to like be out in the rest of the internet in a way that makes sense and isn't just like a devil's bargain with Facebook.

which I have no idea what it looks like, but I think it's going to be very cool. I'll connect that. There was an earlier question about how things were changed since the beginning. In the beginning, we were just like Pipsqueaks. Like, I was at this last Apple event. I think I said this on the show earlier. Like, I was at this last Apple event, and like the Cambrian explosion of, like, TikTok rigs just, like, blew my mind. Like, people inventing things to make videos fast that we would have just never seen before.

And the way that some of those folks were talking to me, like, I love it when people call me the legacy media. Like, say it again. Like, I love it. Thank you for calling me the winner. I'll take it all day long. But the thing that has changed is like our role in the ecosystem has changed. And so we should build a product that is reflective of that role in the ecosystem, a lot of which is like linking to other people. Right.

Like our homepage is very much designed to link to other great work, to embed other great work on other platforms. I want to put some focus on that as much as like we're going to, I mean, we are always going to make beautiful reviews and investigations and write news fat. But I think that piece of it where we're a utility and we're a trusted part of an ecosystem, most publishers have just gotten away. Like, the New York Times won't even link to other, like, they're like, another, someone else wrote this? How dare you? And like, we're just not going to be that, right? We want to be the thing that connects all kinds of smart people together. Alex, any thoughts last?

What's on your mind for the next 12 years? No, I think you guys are exactly right. Like media's in a weird kind of crisis point. And finding a way to establish yourself and not have to like constantly go and pay homage to all of these big social media platforms is really, really important. And it's the way you survive and it's way you stay independent. And it's the way you actually cover what you want to cover and not what some algorithm you don't have any control over thinks needs to be covered. And I think that's what we need to do at the verge. And that's what we do at the verge.

So I'm really excited about it. It's a great. I'm excited about the next couple of years, even though I'm sure it's going to be kind of a hellscape for other people. 12 years from now on your brain machine implant that is screwed into your head, we'll be there. I don't know what it's going to look like. We'll be there. We'll be there. All right, we've got to go.

Thank you both for doing this. Thanks to everyone who's sending questions. This is very fun. Yes, it was really fun. I mean, there's one part of it that was horrible. The rest of it was fun. Coming up next week, everybody's ratings on Eli as the host of the podcast. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, weird ideas about microphones we should have, or frankly, anything else you want to know. You can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. Send us all your questions. We're going to keep answering Vergey questions over time. I'm sure this will not be the last time. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Nilai, Alex and I will be back on Friday.

to talk about matter 1.2, weird internet standards about how to post on the internet, and much more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.