The Vergecast - Vergecast Live @ On The Verge 2021

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn are joined by Verge alums Joanna Stern and David Pierce live on stage at The Verge's 10th anniversary party. Stories discussed from "Episode 69" Tim Cook must testify in ebook price fixing case FCC approves T-Mo/MetroPCS merger Google Reader shuts down Intel in discussions to make Apple chips Wii U sales slump Release date announced for first BB10 phones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody, it's Nilai. As you may have heard, we had our big 10-year birthday party on the Verge in New York City this past month, and we did a live Verge cast there with Joanna Stern and David Pierce. I want to say thank you to everyone who came out. We got to meet so many of you, and I especially want to say thank you to those of you who've been with us from the start. It was amazing to meet so many of you who'd been listening to us for 10 years at this party. But today, November 1st, is the actual 10th anniversary of the verge. It's here. And there's a There is a whole bunch of stuff on the site for you to check out today and for the rest of the week about the past 10 years and what we think is happening in the next 10. Here on the Vergecast feed, we're going to share the recording from our live Vergecast at On the Verge. For those of you who couldn't make it. Dieter and I talked to Joanna Stern and David DP2 Pierce on stage. We played some games. We revisited some old headlines from Vergecast 69, the missing episode. And we did some audience Q&A.

I think you've been listening to the Vergecast for a long time. You're going to really like it. I do want to apologize for some of the audio. It was live. It was our first day, and it's a little rough, but we're going to get through it. Thanks again to everyone for listening to us over the past 10 years. It's incredible to know we've had people listening to us since they were teenagers. We're very sorry.

You can get over it, but stick with us. We have a lot of stuff planned for the Vergecast coming up, so stay tuned for that. Okay, here's The Vergecast Live, it on the Verge. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble 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. Prompt 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 Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar 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. All of these handsome nerds. Ah, you're beautiful. Thank you all for coming to On the Verge, our 10th, Burge. birthday party, and the first of what we hope is many events to come. We're going to have a lot of fun tonight. We've got Joanna. We've got David. Deeter. We've got a party downstairs. We've got more party to come. Tomorrow we've got a great day of talks and demos. We're going to make some news tomorrow, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm also excited about seeing all of you in person. It means a lot

that you're here. The Virgin is a community. It's like a weird thing for a tech site to say. But we met a lot of you already downstairs. A lot of people have come up to me in some. I've been reading you since I was in middle school, which is good. I'm glad we were here to poison your minds from the very beginning. Two things I want to say. One, almost the entire Verge team is here, apart from our international team, who we miss very much. There are people here that we've hired in the past year that I've never met in person, so I'd like to meet you.

We have a very special team. The Verge is like an art project at scale. Our office is like a high-performance Montessori. So it's very special. Please hang out with our team. I love talking to you, love seeing you. And I'm very grateful that they're all here. And I want to thank all of you, like I said,

we've had a lot of people who've been with us for 10 years. We do not take this for granted. I remember when the verge didn't exist. Dieter and Joanna and David, I all remember when the verge didn't exist. We do not take for granted that we have an audience of people that's like, yes, do a holiday podcast about HDMI specifications. Go ask other people in the media.

That's like an unusual situation. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here. Thank you for being with us. We're going to keep going. It's not the end. It's a sight about the future. We got more to come. But I just wanted to say very sincerely thank you to all of you for being with us.

Okay. Let's bring out Deiderbone, Joanna Stern, David Pierce. Where are that? Yeah, you stay over there. Let's go over there. Okay. There are so many of you. There are a lot of them.

This is way different than doing this on Zoom. I'm just, we like, freak out. Like, bear with it. So you might remember. us, Neil and Deidert, the guy's podcast for a week. Joanna is one of our founders. She is now the senior personal tech columnist, Walshie Journal.

She replaced Walt Mossford. This is a big deal. And there's David. David is like employee number one at the verge. She's a huge part of our early stories. Can I just say there's another way to say that, which is that was the first person who didn't get to be a founder. So there's like, there's a bunch of ways we could describe. that, I think. All right, well, we'll just leave that alone. That's what we're going to do.

We made a little video to introduce David and Joanna. Can we run that? Oh, no. Hey, guys, it's Joanna from The Verge. I'm world record holder, an American sweetheart, David Pierce. And I'm here with the Idea Center A720. This is a cane, that's a cane you walk around with, like normal. The Nook tablet. She's Snapchating. I'm a special guest. But actually, back to the Bluetooth toothbrush. What in God's name is that? I want to do as much of this. as I can without having me get a license. You're technically stalking. You do love me, right?

Really nice to meet you. Thank you. That was the best moment in my life. I just want to point out, immediately after that happened, Joanna broke up with me in the Las Vegas airport Chili's 2, which I will never forgive you for. She was like, I met Bieber on leaving the verge. I've been with Justin Bieber ever since. So we want to, we're going to do some news.

We've got a lot to talk about, but I want to start with the two of you guys were with us from the beginning. What are you some early memories of doing the verge with us? My first memory is hiring David Pierce. That was your first memory is hiring me? And then immediately leaving as soon as you hired me. Like huge mistake, I got to go. I think, I mean, we had this small office. It was on 18th Street. You guys remember that? And I think it's just like so representative of how the, how big the verge ended up getting. But we were in this tiny office on 18th Street. We put together. the IKEA furniture, the desks.

And my desk wobbled all the time because I had two monitors on it. And I just think we were three or four people in that office with random gadgets in the corner. And we had that little, like, photo studio setup that was just a bunch of books on a table. Yeah.

For the photos studio. Yeah, we faked all of you out for about five years. We're like, look at how beautiful the verges. And it was like a tiny. It was like six books in a row. And then our podcast. podcast was in the corner and everyone in the office had to be quiet while we were podcast. For like two and a half hours.

And we were like, we're just going to talk for a while, but you can't talk. And the wooden floors were so loud. Like you would have to tiptoe in. But I remember actually we made our first like video. We had two amazing video producers, Billy and Jordan. And I remember the first time we made like, we did a motion track shot in the corner and we were like, holy crap, this looks. amazing, but really, like, if you step back, it was really just this tiny little set

in that office. And we would, like, lean out the window to get photos of things. My memory of that office is that the bathroom was directly in the center of it. Yeah. So, you just, any, like, and people would like go into the bathroom to make phone calls, because there was nowhere else to go.

And people would go into the bathroom to do bathroom things, and then would come out, and you'd be, like, maybe you should have done that, like, somewhere else. It's just, we all got very close, very fast. We run a real company now. We have an HR department in case you want to. We figured it out. Okay.

I have here a list of headlines that all of us wrote. No, no, these are lines from reviews. I'm sorry. Our producers have gone through the reviews that the four of us wrote in our time at the verge. And they have just taken out sentences. So I'm going to read them. And I want to see if you can guess who wrote. And if you in the audience are there, by all means, guess.

But no Googling. You just yell our names. This is all a trick for you. to yell our names. Okay, here's the first one. Why does Motorola hate convenient power buttons? It's one of the two of you. I think it's Dieter. Yeah. I do get angry about power. Joanna Stern. Wow. That was your droid zyboard review. Oh my God, the droid zyborg. Oh, another thing I remember at that office is I wanted to put the droid zyborg, remind me, I don't know, it was two tablets. Yep. Two tablets made in partnership with Motorola and Verizon. Yep. With a ridiculous name. And I

wanted to put it on a skateboard. Yeah, Zybor on a skateboard. Yeah, and I tried to, like, zoom it down the office, that rickety office, and they both just like fell flat on their face. They didn't break. I've broken many gadgets in that office and in my lifetime. This combination of ideas, this is the brain that has revolutionized the Wall Street Journal video operators.

And you hear Zibord, and you're like, we need a skateboard right now. He's like, I need a number of mimes, a giant stadium. It's an iPhone review. And the journal's like, yeah, weed. Yeah, here's the money. Here you go. Okay. Oh, no.

Quote, first I have questions. How do I shake, shake? Is this a full body wiggle situation or a light jazz hands? It's one of that. It's got to be David. It's got it right away. All right. For what?

What was that from? Review? No, this is just an article he wrote. That has to be CESA. Please stop making me shake, shake. Actually, that's just from its text. Oh, because shake that do sucks. There were so many times my...

many times my first couple of years, especially at CES, where the directive from the two of you would be like, go find weird things and write about them, and don't come back until you found ten of them. Yeah. There was an epidemic of people trying to get us to shake smartphones. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we had to take it seriously.

Didn't like it. We had to be like, no, this meeting is very important. Shaking is the future. You're definitely doing good job. Okay. I asked my wife if the blank was worth the pain of not having TV for three days. Yes, it was worth it. Yeah.

Yes. Something about... It was a TiVo review. Yep. The extent to which Becky has been a good sport about Nilai Gadgett reviews is like... It's bad. Becky is the star of the verge over the first 10 years.

It's true. Becky has... Because she's only written one post. The highest page views per post. Because her Samsung TV review went viral. Having the AV Club aggregate your wife's review of a TV that is actually an review of you.

I do not recommend this experience. Does she ever hold that over you? She's like, I'm better than you at being a lawyer and I'm better than you of being a gadget blogger. Wow. I mean, she doesn't say it. It's like, and she's like, also I'm our daughter's favorite.

It's great. No, it's fine. It's what marriage is. It's great. I don't regret anything. The hardware is still beautiful and the new organs provide a faster experience. I don't know, man. But we're not sure at $50 more than the Kindle Fire, Blank has got what it takes to fight Amazon on the content front.

I wrote that, I'm pretty sure. Jan is like, I slipped that organs line. I love organs. I love organs. Tell me about the organs. She reviewed the Nook tablet. Did I write that? I wrote that, right?

The organs of the Nook. Yeah, the organs of the Nook. Okay. You know. No one's buying it, Joe. Did I write it them? 450 people here are like, organs. Don't do it again.

You killed the Nune. No, single-handedly. All right. Hurry up, future. Hurry the hell up. All right, here's the last one. Eric Schmidt, in a fit of what turned out to be insanity, declared shortly before CS that Google TV would be on a majority of new TVs by the summer.

That sounds like me, Eli. Now it's David. That was me? He flipped you up. You don't even remember. That's a good line. You reviewed something called the Sony. NSZ GS-7.

Oh, that thing. Who doesn't remember the G-S-S-S-7? Actually, I mean, we talk about that for like 20 minutes because I have feelings about the Sony NSZ-G-S-7. Oh, yeah, was that the thing with the remote and the big giant keyboard remote?

And it was like Google TV was going to change the world. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I just want, this is a very weird moment. This half of the room was like, yeah. This half of the room, ice cold. I don't know how you self-selected. But like, left-half wedding.

It's like a go to the bar together. You have something to discuss. Like, robo for the win on this side. Okay. It would not be the Vergecast if we didn't do news. And so we're thinking about how we would do news on the show. We don't want to talk about news on it. When we're looking through our feed, this is true.

We never did Vergecast 69. It does not exist. Was this intentional? Yeah, was that? Yeah, we're like 10 years from now. Okay. We're going to light the nerds up in purple and do it. So we never did Vergecast 69.

So we pulled the headlines from March 2012, 2013. Somewhere in there. Put up the wheel. Oh, no. That wheel. We've never seen it before. And also I didn't let them study, and Joanna is pissed at me that I didn't let them study. Oh.

Oh, this worked. Must testify an e-book price-fixing case. Yes. So, as you all know, the iPad destroyed the candle. It's like the last time he was made it to testify. If you don't remember this, when they announced the iPad, Steve Jobs confidently told Walt Mossberg at the event, he was caught on a candid video,

the prices for iBooks and Amazon Books would be the same. This triggered a government investigation into Apple, which had colluded with the five biggest publishers in the world, culminating in this headline, and all of us, of course, using iBooks to this day. Apple lost this case. They did. They were the Appleist in e-books, which is,

My memory of this case is they basically just went into court, and they were like, no, you did it. And Apple was like, yeah. It seems like another book monopoly they should probably look at. Okay, spin the wheel. I was hoping for Roku 3. Oh, no. Wow.

There's like some burn in Metro PCS stands up in. The headline is FCC approves T-Mobile merger with Metro PCS. Yes. Yeah. For acquisition or whatever. So a weird thing about being 10 years old is that we both predate and post-date the John Ledger era. The Virgin is older than one ledger.

So what struck me on this is like we now live in the age of 5G, which Joanna, you love. We won the race. I hate 5G. How many people are actually using 5G on their phones? It's over there. What is going on over there?

How many people? I just want to say, by the way, this is our side of the audience. That's your side. So go these people. How many people are you? doing things that they wouldn't have done because they have 5G. Has anyone here done a robot surgery with a 5G T-Mobile? All right.

That's the last gimmick for tonight, right? Someone just ominously yelled tonight. Very terrifying. Okay. Anyway, the point of that headline, which is crazy thing about, that happened early, early on the verge. That created the T-Mobile that is like pushed the. entire industry ahead. And it was like a boring trade headline.

And if only we'd know. But so they got Metro PCS and they got a bunch of spectrum because AT&T tried to buy them and failed. And so then they had to give them a bunch of stuff and the T-Mobile used that to make John Lodger Batman. Yeah. That's proving my theory that the only antitrust policy this country needs is to prohibit AT&T from buying things. It'll work.

Spin the wheel. Wait, these two next to each other is brutal. This is like the best news and the work. First news of the year. For those listening later on, the headline is Google Reader shuts down. Yeah. And we'll spend the rest of the episode talking about RSS. Welcome.

Yes. We did it for Deeter. This was like a momentous, in retrospect, this is a huge deal. Yep. Okay, I have a lot of theories about this. Yeah. Because I had a Google person tell me one time just like straight up, do you think if anyone used Google Reader, we would have shut it down?

And I did not have a good comeback to that. And I think the problem was every journalist used it, and that's not a lot of people. Yeah. And, like, I miss Google Reader every single day, and everyone else that I'm like, remember Google Reader is like, no. They're like, Facebook tells me where stories are. And I'm like, that's why the world is dying. That worked out great for everybody, didn't it?

Yeah. I was about to say, I think Google Reader became Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. But now Google Reader is, like, kind of sketchy back. They're definitely trying to bring it back. They have the, like, news feed thing that's definitely, they're never going to call it Reader, but it's going to be Reader again. No, but this is Google's entire problem. They're like, that beloved name that you loved, we're actually going to call it Hangouts.

And then we're going to change that. And a Google Reader? What if we call it Chrome Brow? Like, it doesn't make it, just use the good names. All right. Do we have any Google Reader fans? It's like the Verge team is here. Yeah.

That's right. This side again. This side. They love Google Reader. Yeah, we got the riot nerds over here and then like Robo surgery dude over here. Back of the room, you got a, you need an identity. Spin the wheel. Oh.

Oh. Wow. Intel in discussions to make apple chips. The chill in the room. I remember somebody to listen to this later is. Pull over in your car and just start sighing. Pull over the car. This is a real thing

I think we didn't do this episode because it was cursed Could you imagine this Vergecast We'd done it in real time We were so young and naive We had no idea This is a fun Wait, explain the context of this story

So 2013 Apple was still We launched for the iPhone 4S Right And iPad They were And the iPad So they had just done

the A-series chips. Yep. And so at this time, they were on their second A-series chips, and it was a question who would manufacture them. And so there's always the rumors that Intel had split out the manufacturing. But the spoiler is that it didn't work. It didn't happen. And Apple just put out its own laptop chips, which appeared to be very good.

But, okay, so that was, you have to wonder if at that time, Apple was thinking further ahead about what they were going to do with their silicon and how they were thinking, you know, maybe we're not going to have this Intel partnership at all. Yeah. Yeah. Well, also at that time, people were still seriously believing Intel could make a mobile chip worth a damned.

Right. Including Intel. Because that was still the time where they were trying to make atom chips for phones. Yep, you could get atom chips for phones. Did you bring a netbook with you? You could go get a TIO map if you want. I was going to say, do you remember that, like, one phone that it came with,

like, it was like Intel and Firefox OS. And they were like, this is the future. And I don't think the phone ever, like, saw its way off a show floor, off of like a CES or a, yeah. Nigo. I'm just saying name for things that we were made to be seriously. There was MMO and there was, this is compelling radio and even more compelling stage show.

Believe it. To answer your question, I did not bring in that book today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. We're adding to the programming tomorrow. It's your animal demo and AISUS EPC. What thing do we believe today that is as naive as believing Intel could win in phones in 2012, 2013.

Wow. Someone just yelled Pixel. It was the happy side of the room. Yeah. That's the dark lining to that cloud. What do you think, Deeter? I mean, it's possible, yeah. I don't know where that ship is going.

We've got to see how the phone does. When we were downstairs, hanging out of people, there's a lot of people here at Pixel Sixes. Go find them. It's like fascinating. They're around. They're around. All right.

A couple more spins. If we don't get to Cisor Vodka, but we're doing it anyway. Just to you. The headline is, Wii U sales slump. It's torture. This is you. This is your fault. I was like, David, buy a Wii U.

And you're like, no. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my career. I was very right about the Wii. All right. We have to have one more spin, and then we're going to take some questions for a few minutes. Can I just say the thing about the Wii is they made a Wii and they made a Nintendo Switch, both great ideas, and then they put them together and ruin the whole thing. Yeah.

It's incredible. But then they went to. Do you buy an OLED Switch? No. But my switch, the battery on my current switch, lasts like nine minutes now. You turn it on, the game loads. It's like, Zelda, and then it dies. And so, yeah, I need to buy a new one.

I just haven't been outside in a year and a half. Like, who needs portable console? Very good. All right, one more spin. Oh, Juliana. I'm trying to read from... This is your moment, Jeff. This was my moment.

BB 10, Blackberry 10 phones. I guarantee you, Joanna wrote this story. I didn't. I don't think I worked at the verge when this story. I don't care. You came back. I came back. I wrote this story. I had so much hope. I'm telling you that this episode of this show was cursed. Everything that came up was like, this is dead.

Dead. Dead. It's dying. Or exciting thing announced that we now know died. And like BB10 is one of those things. They were trying to reboot the company. I can't even remember the name of the CEO. at the time. Deeter, you know it. Thurston. Thorson. Yeah. Yes. Thorson Hines. Hines.

Right, I interviewed him with. Stephen Eelope. I remember. Right, right. That was a different bad CEO. Yeah. I was thinking him in my mind, though. Like I saw a picture of Steve Elob as the CEO of BlackBerry. Lasreys hadn't been, he wasn't like totally gone yet.

That was like the transition, I believe. Yeah. We were, one of the things in that early moment where I was like, oh, we might be on to something with the verge, is that we would write about these platforms, and we would write about the CEOs, and we'd be like, the EB-10 seems done,

and then the CEOs would definitely read the coverage, and they'd be like, no, we're in it. And one time we wrote out of Windows phone, you remember this? And I was like, Stevie E-Boh-Ops. I remember everything we wrote on Windows phone. And, like, Stephen E-Bopp's family got personally mad at me that I had, like, tarnished his good name. And I was like, I didn't, that wasn't me.

It was, you ruined the, economy of Finland by yourself. That is your fault. Like, I just said it was on fire. The big thing with BB10, there was no Android apps on that, right? They did not have Android apps on that, no.

It wasn't hard to port, I don't think. But they had a decent interface. They had a couple good ideas. Right, but the whole thing. You had that unified messaging box. Yeah, they had the unified inbox. It was like, you know, like, every home screen, you swipe over to the left and there's like a bunch of junk.

Yeah. And like on the iPhone, you can choose your own junk and then on Android phone do you get whatever junk they give you. On BB10, it was your inbox and it was unified and it was like a good idea. Such a good idea. And then, you know, didn't go anywhere. Didn't that, didn't even on the storm, which was the phone that actually clicked when you clicked it? Was that, was that later? No, that was earlier. They have like a full touchscreen version. Okay. And then they had version of keyboard. Okay. And the, and the biggest thing I'm trying to remember is what were that, what was in the app store?

Very little. Yeah. That was the problem. Yeah. Okay. was like Blackberry, like I need to really put myself. You were the Blackberry stand on our team. Joanna was my last friend on BBM by like five years. I'm still on B&M. I'm still there now. But yeah, no, I remember, I was so excited to review the phones, and then I remember just zero happening with the phones after.

I think what's interesting, you know, Dieter's got his handspring documentary on so it was a very exciting room for me tomorrow. But you know how we always talk about how all the ideas and phones are lifted from WebOS? none of the ideas are lifted from BB 10. No one was like, oh, we should rate that idea. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay. Does we have questions? We have people. Are you going to do it? Feel free.

There we go. Oh, here we come. Yeah. I said get up early. All right. All right. This question is for... Wow, we're just in it.

Yeah, I'm doing it. Yeah. What's up? My name's Ken. I'm from over there. Okay. On this side of the room. Yeah.

And a good side. Yeah. What is one job that you had before the verge that oddly shaped you into the person you are today? That's for all of you. We're going deep. David Pierce. You can go first. Well, I mean, the actual answer to that question is I interned for David Pogue when he was the tech columnist of the New York Times.

Because I emailed him and was like, I'm home for winter. her break, I have nothing to do. Your job seems interesting. Can I come, like, clean up your house? And he let me, and that's how I met Joanna, because she played a fairy in one of his videos. I have a link I will send to anyone who would like to do it. And that was, it was all over from there. I would actually say that the Verge prepared me for my jobs after, because for me, the Verge, like, I carry with me so much that I learned from the people I worked with at the Verge. These two. specifically this one, who I always try to keep working with, but then he leaves me. And I think that the experience of working with that team and getting the experience of just being so deep into the tech

has had just paved the way for me. Well, I mean, before The Verge, I had found an Android Central and I had more much stuff. But I guess the thing that shaped me was I bombed out at grad school. I was going to be a PhD in English Lit and studied semiotics. And I learned that it's possible to care a lot about things. that other people don't care about but still find a way to make it interesting. And it's way harder with semi-addocks that it is with tech. And so that was my training.

Also, it's okay to bomb out of grad school. Yeah. This side of the room found its identity. They're all emailing their moms right now. I had a tech support job in college. I know all of you thought I was going to say, lawyer. No, that was just, I got to get out of that. Don't do that. Drop out of that school if you're in it.

No, I had a tech support job in college where I worked in the basement of the library. I worked in the basement of the library, and I realized no one, everyone cared about getting the thing done, but no one cared that I knew how to fix it. Right? And that gap between how it works and what it does is like all I think about all the time. Like, we take it for granted. Okay, this other room. Guys, my name is Rob from Seattle. Burning question of mine for a while.

Neely and Dieter, what's the story behind your Twitter handles? Oh, no, Dieter, Dieter's like, Dieter dropped out of grad school. Remember why I mentioned I went to grad school for semiotics? Go ahead. Yeah, it's a cool word, and I was early. And now I fend off weirdos who want to buy it on a weekly basis. Yeah. That's it.

That's the whole story. I believe that language is created by humans, and we make it up as we go. And it is one of our superpowers, and so I made up a word. Thanks. Hey, guys. Neil from Brooklyn. So we just went through 10 years ago what you were writing about, reading about. What do you want to be reading and writing about?

10 years from now. Facebook drama. Joanna, go ahead and take this one. What'd you say? Facebook drama. Oh, God. Blackberry. That'd be great.

This room could kickstart a new Blackberry together. Yeah. That's what we should accomplish at the end of this party. I would say more seriously, right? Like, every company is, like, tired of what it's doing right now. Which is just a weird theme. Apple's like, we're going to do health.

And Facebook's like, we're going to rebrand our company. Like, every company seems bored. I think that's a really. rich place for other kinds of, like big companies are bad at doing things, I've noticed. And it's a rich space for other people to invent other kinds of things. So I'm hoping that we spend more time writing about new companies, a new competition, instead of the set that we have been for some time. One of the big things that I went back and listened to a 2011 podcast I did with Neli and Josh, and I was reviewing at the time a Sousse Transformer laptop tablet thing.

And it was like a really new idea. I said on the podcast, no, I think, like, Apple's going to do this kind of thing. And Eli, I wrote down the quote of my phone, but he was basically like, they're not going to make keyboard docs. It's not a thing that Apple's going to do. And I think, like, in 10 years from now, we're still talking about ideas about what other companies you're doing and other companies should be doing and predicting or thinking about the pieces that can form the future

or form the gadgets of the future, I think we'll still be in a good place. Yeah. I think Joanna came prepared. with a dunk from a 2011 podcast. Over here. My name's Harlan, and I was curious, like, it's been a lot of reflecting on how important the app store was for the iPhone to be a success. And before the App Store, like the Citia Store and, like, other jailbroken, I was wondering if you think it's worth revisiting the Citia Store and the apps before the App Store. Maybe. I mean, it's just another app store. If they had been successful, they would have just

the App Store. I think like, we will see what happens with all this litigation, but ultimately they're your phones. Like, I think I feel that very deeply. Like, I paid a lot of money for this phone. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. And the world seems not organized in that way. But having one other competitor is just a recipe for the same. Like, 18-Team Verizon are not competitive. They're like friends. Right, like, one raises the price is the other one raised the price. I think we need more than that. What do you think? No, I think so too. All right. Over here. My name is James from the stage left side of the audience.

We're going to end up. We're going to leave with like T-shirts. Like, oh, it's great. I've been listening to the Vergecast since the beginning, back when it was a video podcast, hashtag bring back the video podcast. You guys did at one point a, like, explain the inside baseball memes of the Verge and the Verge cast. But one that I never had answered, and I think you guys actually may have answered it tonight. But I've always wanted to know what is with the joke of being.

broken up with by Joanna Stern in a Chili's tube. You were, I feel like it's your story to tell. If you can do it without crying. I should break up. Jane are very close. We should definitely be clear about that. We should be very clear about that. We're very close.

We're very good friends. Startups are very hard. So The Verge was a startup, and Joanna told me she was leaving the Verge after CES. Fine. All that's fine. after CES in a Chili's is like an emotionally devastating, ruinous thing to do to another. In an airport, Chile's on the way out. Right, like, it's fine.

Go have your career. I get it. The Wall Street. Great. You're like, I'm going to find you at your lowest post at the worst place in America. And I'm like, I'm leaving your startup that we started together. That's my version. Not only like, it wasn't a Chili's, it was a Chili's 2.

And it was over breakfast at Chili's. It was a very hard moment for me. And then we got on the plane together. It was a very hard moment for me and clearly very hard for Neelai. We were not in fact really dating. Let's be clear. No, not at all.

I went to Neelai's wedding. Neil came to my wedding. Yeah, but it's funny to say it that way, once a year on Twitter. And then to text her and be like, I tweeted the thing again. Over here. Hi.

A.j. Adjari. I am, well, was one of the moderators at the verge, so at Polygon. So, yeah, shout out to Eric Bergerin and Sean McElroy. So Eric's in the audience right now. But what I wanted to ask is two questions. So should people read the comments and should people that actually, you know, try to complain about Section 230 actually have to read the comments? Because I, every single day I hear about people complain about Section 230,

and I'm like, as a moderator, none of you have, actually fundamentally understand what actually 230 is. Great. Yes and super yes. Ted Cruz read the verge comments. Yeah, that's what I got for you. I will say this.

You know, we have had forums. We turn them off. We turn them on again. We turn it off the, we do it all the stuff. We are, we haven't, we're not ready. We are redesigning our website. We'll come out next year. We have huge ideas.

And we have big ideas to make our community stuff better. because I again it's strange that the verge is that the audience feels like a community right the thing I would say is it's a big thing that feels small and I want to make it keep feeling small and the way to do that is to make our comments good which is easier said than done so I keep an eye on us but I will if I talk to Ted dude AJ got something to say to yeah it'd be great if we just sent our moderators to Congress honestly like if any congressional member especially Corey Brooker since he's a New Jersey rep and I'm in New Jersey wants to learn from a moderator you can hit me up I'm on Twitter. Carrie Ellsett. That's great. All right. I think we can do one or two more over here. Virg Mobile show or an uncut Vergecast feed.

Are you ever going to do it? What would have a version mobile show be that our show isn't? Yeah. All we talk about is phones. That's like a complicated... I just haven't heard Dieter say greetings mobile accomplishers. It's so long. When I host the Tuesday shows, I start with it sometimes.

I know, but it's not the same. They're not mobile accomplishers. And we're doing this live right now. It's useful. We have an audience. It's fun. We are very convinced that editing our show makes us sound smarter. And that like making it, when we turned off the video feed, our downloads went way up. Like, people like our show better when we are not being idiots on video. We're very good a video. Our video team is here. We're like, made a documentary with them. I'm just pretty convinced that I have a face for radio. So I'm going to just like stick with that.

All right. One more over here. Hey, all. My name's Conrad from San Francisco. Just wanted to ask, with LG out of the picture, who do you think is the next to make super weird phones that no one wants to buy? Ooh. Brutal. TCL wants to be the next LG, which is like the saddest ambition ever. But yeah, if I had to guess, I'd say if TCL can actually pull off some of the

prototypes that they've been working on, they're going to make the next weird phones. What do you think? You love weird phones. I love weird phones. You just got misty about BB10 for like a while. I miss weird phones. HTC. I miss some weird phones from them too. Yeah. I know we had an entire running riff about the HTC Bacon. Or the HTC rhyme, which is like our first big scoop at the, this is my next.

Yeah, I don't have it. I think TCL is a good answer right now. No one else wants to get into phones. Maybe Google. I think that might just be Google. I'd be real. Hey, guys, Zach from Long Island. So I, like many iPhone users, am locked into I message. And I was thinking about it of like, what would it take for Apple to bring iMessage to Android? And I think that, you know, they would want in on the money. So what do you think of iMessage coming to Android but it being a paid monthly service? What do you think the cost would be?

And would you do it? The answer is no, because they would not make as much money. It would have to be $1,000 a year. It would have to be the cost of an iPhone. and everything else that you pay for on your iPhone. That's true. It'd have to be like $2,000 a year. Yeah.

Add in Arcade Plus and News Plus. Weirdly, I'm sitting here being like, I'd probably pay that. Sorry, I answered that really quickly. No, it's totally that. I think that's right answer. I don't think Apple is bringing our message to Android unless the full power of the United States government is deployed against them.

Like, it's the military. Like, I'm just sending. The Army is going to the spaceship and they're going to make a guy on a Android. And Tim Cook would be like, I don't know, we have a lot of money, we're going to buy an army. Let's see how this goes. But yeah.

But if you go to Dieter's Twitter feed today, he had like four impossible tips for bringing Yeah, no, it's very difficult. Including rubber banding your two phones together. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I just want to call it two things. One, someone just screamed RCS at us.

It's a verge cast now. It was this side of the audience. Your side really picking it up recently. That side was just whispering and amongst themselves, and this side, delivered. Second, what we are referring to is Casey and I-Stat today was like, man, I want an Android phone, can't get rid of my message. And Dieter was like, here's my plan.

And Casey replies with, that seems complicated. This is a man who's like customized everything he's ever owned. I think it involves running a server in your house. You need to have a Mac that's running all the time. And there are a couple different apps that will basically forward your I messages to your Android phone. So Deeter reviews a lot of phone. every now and again in like hardware season.

I'm like, I'd like to send Dieter a text message. And I don't get it. And I'm like, Didier do you get my text? And he's literally like, I message. Yeah. Because it doesn't turn off. But I have good news. If you're an Android user, the same disappearing text problems hits RCS now too.

That's great. Everybody wins. All right, we got to RCS. I feel like we have to end it here. It's only sideways from here. I got an O-R-R-R-R-R-Riff. I want to say thank you to all of you. for coming. I want to say thank you to

Joanna and David for joining us on the stage. It is crazy that we're able to throw this party. At one point, Joanna did throw water. I'm very sorry. I said I was sorry, Tim. Okay, Joanna's very sorry. I'm not really. She's not sorry. We appreciate you. We've got a great party, all the stuff downstairs, all the stuff

tomorrow. That's it. That's for our chest. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. You did it. Mike does not.