Pod Insights The Vergecast Our biggest stories and favorite things of 2024 About this episode 2024 is almost over, somehow. So we gathered a bunch of our Verge colleagues and told them each to tell us three things from the year: the biggest story, their favorite new tech thing, and their favorite new non-tech thing. We got a collection of big stories, cool gadgets, great movies, and more good stuff from the year that was.
We're also planning a special episode for Tuesday, December 10th, all about The Verge and The Vergecast. So if you have questions about how we work, what we cover, why we talk about copyright law so much, or what Nilay is actually like to work with every day, tell us! Call 866-VERGE11, or email [email protected] , and we'll answer as many as we can on the 10th. Thanks in advance!
Further reading:
Jay Peters:
Story of the year: Google is a monopoly
New thing of the year: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Non-tech thing of the year: XOXO Field Notes notebooks
Jake Kastrenakes:
Story of the year: All things AI
New thing of the year: The Wiim Ultra amp
Non-tech thing of the year: Chronoloy
Justine Calma
Story of the year: The US election, and the rise of nuclear power
New thing of the year: Nurse Unseen
Non-tech thing of the year: Sugarcane
Vjeran Pavic:
Story of the year: The Apple Vision Pro
New thing of the year: The Fujifilm X100VI and the Kino app
Non-tech thing of the year: Mountain Gazette
Kylie Robison:
Story of the year: Billionaire crybabies
New thing of the year: Stardew Valley
Non-tech thing of the year: Curated playlists
Barbara Krasnoff:
Story of the year: The US election
New thing of the year: The Elgato Stream Deck
Non-tech thing of the year: Googly eyes
Alex Heath:
Story of the year: The AI rat race
New thing of the year: Granola
Non-tech thing of the year: Shochu
Ash Parrish:
Story of the year: Grand Theft Auto VI and the Nintendo Switch 2, and more industry layoffs
New thing of the year: The Playstation Portal
Non-tech thing of the year: Bucephalus the puppy
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Transcript 18,406 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Cozy Games. I'm your friend David Pierce and I just bought a bunch of pens. So we've been talking a lot about notebooks and stuff on this show over the last few weeks. We're actually going to talk a little bit more about it on this show. But a thing that I should admit that I don't talk about a lot here on The Vergecast or in life is that on the side of being like a digital note-taking lunatic, I'm also kind of a notebook lunatic. I go through these phases every once in a while where I'm like, okay, I'm going to become a notebook guy. I spend too much time on my phone. My phone is really useful, but what I need is just when I'm going to write things down, I'm going to do it on pen and paper. It's going to be great. Love it. I always forget that the real problem is that my handwriting is awful and that my
0:47 David Pierce? hand hurts when I write too much. So I just buy a bunch of notebooks and I'm like, this will fix it. So I have like old like five-star school notebooks. I have, I have a bunch of like Moleskine knockoffs. I have an actual Moleskine. I have this thing called the tote book from a company called Studio Neat that I really like. I have one that I bought at Staples. This one is my journal from high school in which I wrote a bunch of poetry to my girlfriend that no one is ever allowed to read. But the thing that I've realized most is that A, I need a notebook that is with me most of the time. So what I usually end up doing is getting like a little field notes thing that can just sort of live in my pocket. But the main thing is I need pens, like a million pens. I don't want to spend any money on pens.
1:32 David Pierce? So I went on Amazon and I bought these. They're called the Pilot Precise V5 RT. I think I found them from a wire cutter review that was like, these are good pens that you don't have to press super hard on. So I bought 12 of them and my plan is just to put them everywhere, like one in the car, one in my backpack, one at my desk, one upstairs, one next to the bed. And then the goal is just to like always have a pen within reach. I try to carry a pen around, but I find I'm pretty good at having my notebook with me, but terrible at having my pen with me. So I'm going with like an infinite pens situation. It's gonna be great, and I'm gonna write in notebooks more often. Anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about today. It's a holiday week, at least here in the US, it's Thanksgiving.
2:14 David Pierce? So instead of normal newsy Vergecast on a week where there's not really any news, we figured we'd do something slightly different. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna talk to a bunch of different folks on our staff about some of the biggest stories of the year. The most important things that they worked on, the most important things that we covered, their favorite new thing that happened this year that had nothing to do with any of the stuff that we covered. It's just fun to talk to our staff and get to know them and what they're into and what they're interested in. And we've done this before on the show, and I had a great time doing it, and y'all seemed to like it, too. So we invited a bunch of people back and talked to them about some of their favorite and some of the biggest things from 2024. All that is coming up in just a second. We got a bunch of people to get to, lots of stuff.
2:57 David Pierce? If you're on like a long drive this weekend, lots of stuff for you to listen to, lots of fun Verge staff to hang out with. All that's coming up. But first, I really, I have to go distribute this mountain of pens all over my house and then systematically lose them one by one until I have to buy 12 more pens. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
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4:44 David Pierce? Welcome back. All right, before we get into it, one tiny piece of housekeeping. So on December 10th, two Tuesdays from now, we're going to do a whole episode about The Vergecast and The Verge. We've done this before and it was really fun. And basically, I want all of your questions about how The Verge works, how The Vergecast works, what we're doing, what we're thinking, what we're planning for the future, all of it. Also, if you have thoughts on what we should be doing but aren't, I want to hear those too. Send them all our way. You can either call the hotline, 866-VERGE11, or email [email protected] . Send us all your questions. December 10th, we're going to do that episode. It's going to be really fun. All right, let's get into it. So, we gave a bunch of folks on our staff very small bits of homework.
5:27 David Pierce? Basically, come with what you think is the story of the year, your favorite tech thing of the year, and your favorite new non-tech thing of the year. All these things are very broad deliberately because we figured people would interpret them differently and come with different ideas about what makes for a story of the year and what constitutes new tech thing of the year. Everybody came with delightfully different and interesting answers. And I think we're going to get a swath of basically all the things The Verge cares about, kind of all in one place, plus just a sense of some of our favorite new stuff. All right, we have eight people to go through. Let's do this. First up, Jay Peters, news editor on our team. Jay Peters, hello.
6:10 Speaker 05 Hi, David. How are you?
6:11 David Pierce? I'm good. We are not going to talk about this for too long, but you're here on wired ear pods that you just bought. And this is not going to factor into our discussion, but I just want to say congratulations on your wired ear pods.
6:23 Speaker 05 Thank you.
6:24 David Pierce? The best headphones on earth for $20.
6:26 Speaker 05 Yes, thank you. I am plugging them directly into my MacBook Air. Someday I'll upgrade from my iPhone 12 mini. And guess what? They'll plug straight into those two. It'll be fantastic. I can't wait.
6:36 David Pierce? Honestly, like, all the cool kids wear wired headphones again, and I get it. It's like, I was on a train the other day, and I accidentally spent 20 minutes trying to connect my Mac to someone else's Bose headphones instead of my Bose headphones. And I was like, oh, I have the cable. And I plugged it in, and it was fine. It's just, it's, life is better this way. All right, so we gave you some homework. Let's start with story of the year. What was your story of the year?
7:01 Speaker 05 The story of the year to me is Google being ruled a monopolist. I think this is huge because depending on what happens as a result of that ruling, including a potential breakup of the company, different pieces, like, it could fundamentally transform the way we use the internet, how we search for things, and like, what the defaults on our phones are. I think this could be really, really, really massive in ways that we just don't even understand yet, because we don't know what the end result's gonna be.
7:33 David Pierce? I like this one. And I also feel like the fun thing about this story is... You might be correct this year and next year and the year after that and the year after that and the year after that and then it might be nothing, which is why this story is so much fun because it is it is either, I think you're right, these like single most consequential thing happening in tech, or it is going to be awful lot of hand wringing and nonsense and lawyer fees and ultimately amount to nothing.
8:01 Speaker 05 Yep.
8:02 David Pierce? What if you if you were a betting man, which one would you pick of those two outcomes?
8:06 Speaker 05 Um, I'm gonna say a little bit closer to the big deal end versus the nothing end. Cause to me, it seems like kinda likely that the government's gonna say, Google can't make the default deals, especially like the one in the iPhone that has made it, you know, the pervasive mobile search on iPhone. And so like, I think that it's just gonna have an absolutely massive change down the line.
8:30 David Pierce? Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think I was reading something the other day about the all the ways in which this trial and the Microsoft trial from 25 years ago are just scarily similar in the way that they're going.
8:43 Speaker 05 Oh, interesting. Yeah.
8:44 David Pierce? And that one's a really fun case because what ultimately happened was not that much. But while Microsoft was so focused on it, the internet happened and this company called Google like did a bunch of smart things that Microsoft didn't have time or energy or attention to do. And just the existence of that crazy thing screwed up Microsoft and changed the internet.
9:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:08 David Pierce? And I think if you if especially if you're a believer that AI is as big a deal as people say.
9:12 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
9:13 David Pierce? We're sitting in the middle of that again.
9:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, it it seems like the AI companies, I don't see like a direct like, oh, this is obviously the next Google type thing. But like, it seems like there there's something in that everybody is starting to realize that maybe Google isn't the only option. And that could have very large ramifications in how we use tech every single day.
9:35 David Pierce? I I'm with you. Are you using any of the AI search engines, by the way?
9:39 Speaker 05 No, I so far have not been a huge fan of them. But I think it's also time for me to explore them a little bit more.
9:48 David Pierce? I feel the same way. There's something in the muscle memory of it that has just been much harder for me to change than I expected.
9:56 Speaker 05 And that might just be because of my like day to day work of like. Writing news as fast as possible all the time, like.
10:04 David Pierce? Yeah, we like Google stuff for a living.
10:05 Speaker 05 Yeah. I have like really specific ways that I find this information that I know that it works 95% of the time. That like other search engines may not be strictly built for my use case, but that might also not be true. Or there might be ways that I can use those things that I haven't tried yet.
10:23 David Pierce? Yeah. All right. What's your new thing of the year? Presumably it's not a search engine. What's your new thing?
10:27 Speaker 05 I would say my favorite new thing is a game I played this year. It was Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I say this as a huge fan of the original PlayStation game. I loved the remake. And so I had really high expectations going into this one and it totally exceeded them. It's like this just giant RPG. You're hanging out with your friends, these characters that like, you know, I've followed and, you know, fallen in love with and various, you know, for various reasons, uh, playing the games forever. And I thought Square Enix just totally delivered on this really incredible, huge, ambitious RPG. I also have a very special memory in that I played so much of it in the middle of the night while my new child was sleeping on me.
11:05 Speaker 05 So like, I have this like kind of really cool attachment with like what that game represented, uh, in addition to the time of my life that I'm in right now.
11:13 David Pierce? The genre of video games you can play with a sleeping child on top of you is a, is a special, special thing.
11:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:20 David Pierce? Okay. I have never had the occasion to do this to somebody on this podcast and I'm going to make you do this right now.
11:25 Speaker 05 Okay.
11:25 David Pierce? I have never played one second of Final Fantasy in my entire life.
11:29 Speaker 05 Okay.
11:30 David Pierce? Not for any good reason. It's just never happened.
11:32 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:33 David Pierce? So can you, can you give me like the, the 60 second case for someone who has never played Final Fantasy to get into specifically Final Fantasy VII Rebirth?
11:43 Speaker 05 Um, well, I wouldn't start with rebirth specifically because it's part two of a three-part giant story. You should start with.
11:50 David Pierce? Oh, see now I'm just tired already.
11:51 Speaker 05 I know, but you should, I know.
11:53 David Pierce? This is the problem with these games.
11:54 Speaker 05 I've already spent so much time in it that I had to see it all the way through. If you're gonna start, start with Remake, which I think it captures everything that people loved about the original, on the original PlayStation, brings it up to, what would you call, you know, modern graphics and modern gameplay standards. And they clearly know the source material very well, and they know that people really, they really love it, and they really treat it with like, care and expanding it in ways that are very interesting and still feel very true to the source material. But also have some kind of new, interesting spins on the story that everybody's very familiar with from the original game into this new stuff.
12:34 Speaker 05 So like, it's long, you know, as a parent, I don't know if you're able to find 53 hours to dig into that, but like, if you really want something to like, settle into and just dig into, it's awesome. And it's really fun to play, too.
12:48 David Pierce? Is it the kind of game you can play in long stints or short stints? Can you play 20 minutes of Final Fantasy at a time?
12:56 Speaker 05 Yes, I would, I would argue so, if only because that's a muscle I've had to develop since having a kid. Just in general, is like, understanding that not every session is gonna be like, two hours on the couch at the end of a workday. It's like, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there. And I think you can do it in that there's always like, either like, little quests to be doing, or you can, you know, advance farther along, along whatever main story path that you're doing. And you can play it on Steam Deck, which, I don't know if you have a Steam Deck, but I love my Steam Deck. It's fantastic thing for if you have a kid and you just need to play a game somewhere around the house where you have time, I think you can do it.
13:32 David Pierce? Alright, I love it. Alright, last thing. Favorite non-tech thing of the year?
13:36 Speaker 05 Well, the sentimental choice is my new child, obviously, but if I-
13:39 David Pierce? No, that doesn't count.
13:42 Speaker 05 But if I had to pick, if I had to pick something else, I got a pack of Field Notes notebooks from attending the XOXO conference in, the final one in Portland this year. This is like a special brand that they made just for the show. And normally I've not ever cared about Field Notes, but I actually started like, using them a bunch, and I think they're awesome. They're very pocketable. I like the little grid on the ones that I got here, just very nice for sketching random stuff. And I find that like- I'm finding that writing to do lists or outlining stories just with pen and paper and no computer has been like a really great thing for my brain to process stuff.
14:25 Speaker 05 And it's something I've done just way more than I ever expected. Like, I thought as a new parent, I'd be like, okay, super locked in on all my tech stuff. I gotta be super zeroed in on that. But sometimes just sketching in a notebook at the end of the day has been a really, really good way to get a handle on things.
14:40 David Pierce? I love that. I think Field Notes, I have always struggled with because, like you said, they are the exact right size. Like, as notebooks go, it is the thing I want. But I have never figured out how to, like, hold it in my hand correctly to write in it.
14:56 Speaker 05 Let's see.
14:57 David Pierce? Because it's just, it's just not quite rigid enough.
14:59 Speaker 05 Yes.
15:00 David Pierce? And, and there's something, I end up vacillating between these, like, giant, super sturdy notebooks that are, like, really easy to write on in any circumstance, and these, like, teeny tiny ones that fit in my pocket. And I love a Field Notes. They make great stuff. But there is, there is something about it that is like, I just occasionally find it annoying to write in, and it drives me crazy.
15:20 Speaker 05 What I think I found is I do like the, your hand is the, is the back, like, it's the support for everything. But I'm also not doing a ton of extensive journaling. It's like, oh, I'll dash off a sentence here, or I'll write some bullets here. And that, I think, makes it so, like, if I had to sit down and write, if I was sketching out a novel on this, this would not be my favorite place to do it. But for, for taking notes or thinking through ideas, and, you know, I'll write a sentence, I'll sit on something and think about it, write another sentence, it's been really perfect for me. So I would recommend it for, for that.
15:54 David Pierce? That's really good.
15:55 Speaker 05 Use case.
15:56 David Pierce? I love that. Yeah, Field Notes for the win. There's like an entire corner of old head bloggers who just got very excited hearing you say that.
16:02 Speaker 05 I'm sure, yes.
16:03 David Pierce? Awesome. Jay, thank you as always, appreciate it.
16:05 Speaker 05 Thanks, David.
16:06 David Pierce? Okay, moving on. Next up, Jake Kastrenakes, The Verge's executive editor.
16:12 David Pierce? Jake, hello.
16:13 Speaker 06 Thanks for having me.
16:14 David Pierce? The sweater game with you is always very strong. Most people will not be able to see this, but the sweater game is very strong with Jake, all the time.
16:21 Speaker 06 Can I tell you, Thomas Ricker, when he came from the Netherlands?
16:24 David Pierce? Oh, my God, spectacular.
16:26 Speaker 06 That's, the Europeans know what they're doing.
16:28 David Pierce? Thomas, at one point, was wearing a sweater that I thought was very good, and then he put a scarf on over the sweater. And I was like, God, it's even better. And then he put a jacket on over the scarf and the sweater that was even better and tied the whole thing. It was the most incredible thing I've ever.
16:39 Speaker 06 We're hopeless in comparison.
16:41 David Pierce? Truly, truly. All right, Jake, we gave you some homework. What's your story of the year?
16:45 Speaker 06 Okay, I hate to be that guy. I really do, I really do, but I have to tell you, it's AI.
16:52 David Pierce? Okay.
16:53 Speaker 06 Listen, it's okay, it's the obvious one, it's the obvious one, but, um, look, we came from a year where AI is the most hopelessly overhyped, uh, technology all year, nonstop. And I hate to be the person, but I think AI is actually good. Not necessarily for humanity. I don't want to say that, but, but, um, just fundamentally, on a product level, I can punch a button on my phone and have a conversation with, I don't, I don't know what it is.
17:27 David Pierce? It's best not to think about it.
17:28 Speaker 06 It can diagnose the problem with my air conditioning system, right? I, I don't know how to do that myself.
17:35 David Pierce? Can I, can I tell you my own story, just from the other day? So, uh, it's open enrollment time at Vox Media. We're all doing our benefits. I had to decide whether we wanted to do my health insurance that we get, or my wife's health insurance through her job. And I looked at the summary of benefits document for like, I swear to God, hours. And my eyes glazed over, I couldn't remember which was which, the, the words. I uploaded the two documents to Notebook LM and was just like, which one's better, given what I think is coming for the next year? And laid out a couple of things, and it told me the answer and it was correct. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. In a minute and a half, it was just like, it was like, here is all the information you need about which insurance to pick. And I was like, oh, I had the same thought you did. I was like, oh, AI is good now. I take it back.
18:20 Speaker 06 There's the thing, everybody has that moment eventually, and it's like. I don't know that this is going to completely revolutionize the world, at least as it is right now. But there are these small moments where it's like, that just saved me 10 minutes of Googling. Right? It's not 100% correct, but like, it got me in the ballpark. And that's actually what I need right now.
18:39 David Pierce? I totally agree. I had somebody a while ago tell me that if you just look at AI as the world's most powerful summarization machine, that is both a much smaller vision for it and also really cool and full of neat things that it can do. And I like, I've been thinking about that ever since. And it's like, that, there is a lot you can do there. And that's actually a thing it's good at.
18:59 Speaker 06 I, I think we have these maybe impossibly high standards for AI. And look, like, I, it's our job to hold these companies to those high standards. That's fine. I'm going to keep demanding that they make these things better. But if you told me, you know, a year or two ago, that I can on hand have somebody who will, you know, give me a ballpark correct answer or do math for me or, or, you know, write something for me and it'll be like reasonably good. That would seem impossible. And I think reasonably good is still pretty impressive. Again, problems abound. I will be the first to admit that.
19:37 David Pierce? Right.
19:39 Speaker 06 But these things exploded. They are suddenly in everything. I do not know if people are actually using them in most of these places. But I have a suspicion that a lot of these very minor, small use cases, just writing stuff better, summarizing stuff, is going to become second nature for people very quickly.
19:59 David Pierce? Yeah, totally. And I think 2025 is, I hope, the year where
20:05 David Pierce? the like, high-minded rhetoric gets a little closer to the actual reality. Like, the tech is going to get a little better, but also everybody just needs to calm down about it for a minute.
20:14 Speaker 06 Everybody needs to calm down a bit. And Nvidia is worth like $500 trillion or something. I, I don't. Don't quote me on that one exactly, but.
20:24 David Pierce? Snot investment advice.
20:25 Speaker 06 Some, something feels a little off there. Like it's cool technology, but like, yeah, people need to chill out a little bit.
20:32 David Pierce? Yeah. It's not God just yet.
20:34 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:35 David Pierce? But maybe, you know, we'll do this again in 12 months. Who knows? Uh, all right. What's your next one? Your, your favorite new thing of the year?
20:40 Speaker 06 Favorite new thing of the year? I'm cheating a little bit because this is from end of last year. I bought it this year. Um, but I want to hype up the Weem Amp.
20:50 Speaker 06 This is, if you are a psycho like me, who has a bookshelf speaker system, right? You don't have an all in one, right? No soundbar. Uh, you didn't just buy some powered speakers. You have speakers that need to be powered by an amp, that need different input sources fed into them. Um, you've probably gone through the absolute madness and chaos of having a bunch of different parts and pieces. You need the amp, you need the streamer, you need the phono amp, you know, all these different things. The Weem Amp says, hey, I know it's all, it sounds better if you get 500 different things and come and, and stack them all together.
21:31 Speaker 06 What if we just skip all that? It's, it's just going to put everything in one. It's $300, sounds reasonably good. And it does all the things that I, I hate that all these fancy sound system parts do not do. It automatically turns on and off. It doesn't get flaming hot in my cabinet.
21:53 Speaker 06 It streams things. It switches inputs automatically. My TV can control it. It's great. I love it.
22:00 David Pierce? I cannot describe to you how convincing a pitch that just was. Uh, I think about my parents all the time who bought this like as tall as me set of speakers when I was a kid. And they still have it. And all the other parts of their system that they had, that, you know, the CD player and the FM radio, all that stuff is a million years old and long dead, but the speakers still sounded amazing. And they have spent all this time trying to figure out, the speakers are just sitting in the basement and they're like, well, what do we? Do with these because again, like you said, it's do I rebuild a room full of stuff? I'm gonna literally, I'm going to buy this for my parents for Christmas and it's going to blow their minds.
22:36 Speaker 06 I'm telling you, it is, it is, as somebody who has done it over and over again, it is not worth rebuilding. Like all these separate items and stringing them together. It is such a hassle. The sound is not that much better. Don't come for me. You know, just give into the simplicity, you know, your speakers are still going to sound great. And this has basically nearly everything a sound system needs with the one exception of a mono input. It doesn't have that. That's a bummer. So you do need a separate amp for that. But otherwise it can stream Chromecast, it can stream AirPlay.
23:12 Speaker 06 I don't know. It can hook up to your TV. It's great.
23:15 David Pierce? I love it. All right. Well, last thing, favorite non-tech thing of the year.
23:18 Speaker 06 Favorite non-tech thing of the year? This is a, again, not from this year, I'm cheating, but for me personally.
23:25 David Pierce? Yeah, new to you, it counts.
23:27 Speaker 06 This is, this is a new to me thing. I found a card game that has been a, a hit of all of the board game nights I have been to. It is super simple. I think as I've gotten older, I have strayed from the games where they take like two and a half hours to play and you need to read an instruction manual for an hour beforehand. The game is called Chronology. It is super simple. I love it. And basically it's a deck of cards. And each card has an event and a year on it. And everybody starts out with one year, right? And somebody's going to read you another one. And so in front of you, you might have something that says,
24:05 Speaker 06 "Apple Computers is founded" and it says 1976. That's what happened, right? Okay. So now it's your turn, David, and I'm going to read you the next card. And it says, "LBJ becomes president after JFK's assassination." And you have to say, did this happen before or after?
24:21 David Pierce? Before.
24:22 Speaker 06 Before, easy. Okay. Not too bad. But now you've got two cards down, right? You've got 1976, 1963. So I say, "The Beatles appear on Ed Sullivan." What, was that before, after, or in between? Now it gets complicated because you're like, hmm. Sixties.
24:38 David Pierce? It was in between.
24:39 Speaker 06 Was in between, it was nineteen sixty-four. Right, and it is fun.
24:42 David Pierce? That is very fun.
24:43 Speaker 06 Super easy to learn, super fast party game, and it's fun because you get to, you know, rib your friends about not knowing history. I don't know anything.
24:51 David Pierce? Yeah, I feel like I'd be, I'd be good until about the dates that you said, and then it would all fall apart. For me, it's like the things where people talk about something that happened in like the Roman Empire. And I'm like, oh, that was like the fourteen fifties, right? And they're like, that was sixteen B.C. I'm always like, alright, cool.
25:08 Speaker 06 The amount of time it took me to think on, I, I got a Pompeii card, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that was, that was far back, but I don't know how.
25:17 David Pierce? There's a thousand years, I would believe.
25:18 Speaker 06 It was, it was pretty, yeah. Yeah, a lot of people made fun of it for that one. Turns out it was a really long time ago.
25:25 David Pierce? That should be enough. Like, you should get a half point for just being like, it was, it was before the Beatles.
25:30 Speaker 06 I knew it was, I knew it was, you get the point. I knew it was before the Beatles. That was all I needed to know.
25:35 David Pierce? That's pretty good. Game's called Chronology?
25:36 Speaker 06 Chronology, um, highly recommended for chill fun board game night.
25:41 David Pierce? I like it. Alright, Jake, thank you as always.
25:44 Speaker 06 Cool. Talk to you later.
25:45 David Pierce? Next up on the list, Justine Calma, our senior science reporter. Justine, hello.
25:51 Speaker 07 Hello.
25:52 David Pierce? Coming to us from the control room of one of our podcast studios.
25:56 Speaker 07 Yes.
25:57 David Pierce? I love this. Alright, so we gave you some homework. The first thing you had to do was come with your story of the year. What was the story of the year?
26:05 Speaker 07 Well, that for me was a no-brainer. It was definitely the US presidential election. Well, the outcome of the elections. This is, you know, this is what I'm losing sleep over, leading up to next year. I mean, it just changes. It, it affects everything, right? For me, on the science desk, I'm an environmental reporter, and so there are literally studies out there around how much more pollution we can expect with this next administration, how much more that's gonna warm the planet, we cover life in the future. And so, you know, we're looking at a hotter future. Um, all kinds of fallout and you know, across all of the desks that we cover, I do a lot of work with the policy team.
26:47 Speaker 07 Over the past year, we were covering some major Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court has been absolutely made over with Trump's previous appointees. That's made it more difficult. Some of those Supreme Court decisions have made it more difficult to regulate industry. So you know, that has wide reaching effects. And so I, that for me is the story of the year going into next year.
27:13 David Pierce? Is there anything on your mind on that front right now, other than just sort of sheer abject screaming and rage all the time? I feel like we're in a moment now where, where like we as reporters and also just like we as people are going to have to figure out like how to talk about this stuff other than just what sometimes feels like directionless screaming all the time. Like what, what's on your minds as you're thinking about kind of the, the stories inside of this that you're thinking about over the next year or so?
27:45 Speaker 07 One thing that's going to be really interesting to watch is what happens at the state and local level. You know, in the past, that has been where people have counteracted. What's going on at the federal level, made progress when there's been inaction at the national level. And so it'll be really interesting to see what comes out of that sort of local organizing moving forward. And then another interesting place to watch, um, which is like very divisive in the environmental community, but surprisingly super bipartisan is going to be, uh, nuclear energy.
28:23 David Pierce? I was going to ask you about this.
28:25 Speaker 07 Yeah, exactly. So I mean, if you're looking at just my beat on the verge, I think one of the biggest stories has been this, is it too soon to say nuclear renaissance? It's probably too soon, but there's. Anything Renaissance is like overkill, right? But yeah, but there's been a whole lot of interest in nuclear energy, particularly from tech companies looking for electricity for energy hungry data centers. You know, this is a growing issue with AI. We saw a slew of nuclear energy deals from Amazon, Google, Microsoft.
29:05 David Pierce? Yeah, Three Mile Island is coming back. Like, what a, what a weird version of the timeline here.
29:10 Speaker 07 So they say we'll have to watch and see. But, uh, but yes, but you know, Trump has been supportive of nuclear energy in the past. It's gotten bipartisan support. If you look at Trump's pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, he is a fossil fuel executive, CEO of a fracking company, but also sits on the board of a nuclear energy company with Sam Altman. So that'll be really interesting to see. That company is developing advanced nuclear reactors. I don't know, we'll, we'll have to see what happens.
29:43 David Pierce? Yeah, I feel like with, with a lot of that stuff, I always get tripped up trying to figure out how long these things take. Because on the one hand, we have these like super pressing issues. And the, there were the Three Mile Island guy was basically saying like, we're ready, let's spin this back up and go back to work. Everything's going to be terrific. And then you hear about all these projects that are, you know, we're, we're talking about like 2040 deadlines for things. And like, God only knows where we'll be by 2040. Is this stuff gonna start to become sort of meaningfully real next year, do you think?
30:15 Speaker 07 No.
30:16 David Pierce? Okay.
30:17 Speaker 07 I think we, I think we may see more deals, but the earliest projections that I've seen for the first advanced nuclear reactors coming online are going to be probably the early 2030s. And so it's going to be a while before we see these, um, these new technologies. And to be clear, those are next generation nuclear reactors that have not been deployed in the US yet. You know, they still need to get all of the regulatory approvals and everything. Not to mention. The costs because both British, like old school nuclear reactors, the, the big plants that we, we have today, they're really expensive to build this.
30:58 Speaker 07 These next generation technologies are supposed to be smaller and cheaper, but projects have also run into rising costs too. So yeah, so that's why a lot of this stuff is still up in the air. You have all of the regulatory and permitting delays and then you have everything that's going on when it comes to making this actually an affordable source of energy.
31:20 David Pierce? Got it. Okay. And I would say it doesn't seem like the regulatory state is going to get more efficient and effective in, in the very near future. So I would not say my hopes are super high, but hey, we'll, we'll take it.
31:30 Speaker 07 Yeah, yeah, we'll see what this efficiency task force does. I mean, it could just be like, go ahead, do whatever you want.
31:35 David Pierce? I mean, fair, that would, it would go faster than sure.
31:38 Speaker 07 Yeah.
31:38 David Pierce? It would go faster. All right. What was your favorite new thing of the year?
31:44 Speaker 07 Okay. So I have to plug, I, I'm a really big documentary fan. I just, I love nonfiction, but I had to plug this documentary that is still in theaters called Nurse Unseen. It's about Filipino nurses. I, I'm Filipino, my mom is a nurse and you know, at the Emmys this year, you saw the host talk about how ER went like 15 seasons without ever having a Filipino nurse. If you go into almost any hospital, medical establishment, you're bound to find a lot of Filipino nurses. And so this documentary goes into the whole history of that, why there's been a pipeline of nurses coming to the US from the Philippines since really World War II, the Philippines was the US territory.
32:28 Speaker 07 But it also just talks about, it really focuses on how these nurses were on the front lines during the pandemic. And so I just think it really gives voice to a community that's been overlooked and has just done a lot for our healthcare system. So that was one of my favorite documentaries of, of the year.
32:47 David Pierce? That's a really good one.
32:48 Speaker 07 That it's streaming soon.
32:49 David Pierce? I was just about to ask, it's still, it's still in theaters right now?
32:52 Speaker 07 It's still in theaters. I have heard that they're, well, I don't know, I don't want to give anything away. I'm hoping that it's streaming soon.
32:58 David Pierce? Fair enough, fair enough. Well, we'll, we'll track it down in a theater. I love a documentary on the big screen, by the way. It's like, it's sort of an unusual thing. It feels like. This is gonna sound less like a compliment than I mean it, but it feels like school in like the best possible way to sit in a, especially in like a little tiny like art house thing. I went to a jazz documentary, like frankly, I don't care about jazz, but like I just sat in a room with a bunch of people who were like, I want to spend two hours learning about jazz and it was delightful. And I like, I'm like, I give me more of those moments of like sitting in a lecture hall, watching something really interesting together. Like, I kind of miss those days. It's good stuff.
33:32 Speaker 07 Well, okay, I'll say my guilty pleasure this year is I did go to a cat film festival in New York City.
33:38 David Pierce? A cat film festival?
33:39 Speaker 07 Yeah, which is exactly how it sounds. It's like basically your Instagram or TikTok reel full of cat videos, but on a big screen. But you don't go for the videos, you go for the community and all of the people who love cats as much as you do and like all of the like cute kids that are having a great time. And it's just, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. You, you go to documentaries and um, yeah, those kinds of screenings to just be with your people.
34:07 David Pierce? That's fantastic. It's like a, it's like a fake or it's like a backwards way of having a cat convention. I love that very much. They're like, we're gonna pretend this is a movie, but it's just so a bunch of cat people can hang out with each other. It's gonna be fun.
34:18 Speaker 07 I think, yeah, I think that film festival is on tour as well.
34:23 David Pierce? Unbelievable idea. I have, I have no notes on that. All right. Did you have one more pick for us? What, what else is on your list?
34:29 Speaker 07 Um, okay. Well, okay. I did pick one other documentary that, that I also saw in theaters, but it's also streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. It's called Sugarcane. It premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival this year. It's a really important watch. It's a, it's a tough one as well. It, it's about an investigation into abuse at an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada after they found unmarked graves. It was created by an advocate who was actually a source that I've interviewed in the past. He's an environmental justice advocate, but he, um, his dad went to the school.
35:11 Speaker 07 And it's a really powerful story too about healing and um, his relationship with his dad and how they move forward. Um, so that was another, another pick for me.
35:22 David Pierce? That's a really good one. Uh, I feel like we're in this funny moment of like, there are so many great documentaries out there and my list of ones to watch now is so infuriatingly long.
35:36 David Pierce? That I just, I have to like, I need to cancel all of my streaming services except for the documentary ones for like six months and just catch up on documentaries. And it's gonna be great. Very excited about it.
35:45 Speaker 07 Yeah.
35:46 David Pierce? Yeah. Awesome. All right. Justine, thank you so much. Appreciate you doing this.
35:49 Speaker 07 Yeah, thanks. Oh, sorry. The other thing for the non-tech thing, I forgot, was um, our 2004 package was incredible this year. Like, just, it just brought me back to high school and even just our talking about making that happen was just so much fun. Like, all of us on the Verge staff, like, combing through our pictures, trying to find them from 2004 and discovering that they've all vanished and then seeing the story that came out of that was, was awesome.
36:17 David Pierce? The first run of people's pictures from 2004 was pretty spectacular. Everybody seemed to have like, one photo from that year and it's always incredibly embarrassing and it just terrific. Loved it very much.
36:30 Speaker 07 I loved it.
36:32 David Pierce? Yeah, all of my 2004 photos are just like me wearing two popped collars and like a puka shell necklace. It was not, not like a cool time in my history, I wouldn't say.
36:41 Speaker 07 Oh my god, yeah, I can see that so clearly.
36:44 David Pierce? Well, that's the meanest thing you've ever said to me, Justine.
36:49 Speaker 07 No, no, that was, I mean, who didn't have a puka shell necklace, right?
36:56 David Pierce? Listen, I got out of it. That's all I can say. It took too long to get out of it.
37:00 Speaker 07 Is it back yet? I'm like, all that stuff is coming back, right? I'm just waiting till I see the high school students rocking it again.
37:06 David Pierce? I assume so. My, I have two nephews in high school right now and neither of them are wearing pukas but like frosted tips, I think are starting to come back. So like, it's, it's coming. The pukas are coming. It's, it's a terrifying thought.
37:18 Speaker 07 I'm like, I'm seeing my friends posts, uh, pictures on social media and I can't tell if it's them or their children. Because they're dressed, they're dressed like how my friends dressed in like middle school and high school. So, you know.
37:31 David Pierce? It's real. It's real. It's terrifying. But it is, it is real. It's real. All right. Sweet. Thank you for doing this.
37:37 Speaker 07 All right.
37:37 David Pierce? This was really fun.
37:38 Speaker 07 Thanks so much.
37:39 David Pierce? All right. We gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back with more folks from The Verge sharing more of their biggest and favorite stuff of the year. We'll be right back.
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39:53 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's just keep rolling. Next up, Viren Pavich, our supervising producer on our video team. Viren, hello.
40:01 Speaker 10 Hello.
40:02 David Pierce? You told us before we started recording that you didn't prepare at all. So this is going to go really great, or really terribly. And either way, I'm very excited.
40:09 Speaker 10 It's gonna go great.
40:11 David Pierce? I feel good about it.
40:12 Speaker 10 I'm always underprepared for everything that we do, so.
40:16 David Pierce? Underpromise and overdeliver. That's the Viren story.
40:19 Speaker 10 It usually ends up pretty good. So, you know, uh, let's try it out.
40:24 David Pierce? I'm into it. So, thing number one was the story of the year. What's your story of the year?
40:28 Speaker 10 Uh, I'm immediately coming with a curveball here. I'm gonna pick a video of the year. I am a supervising producer at The Verge, so I feel like, I feel like I can pick a video. Is that okay? Can I break the rules here?
40:40 David Pierce? Yeah, you can pick whatever you want.
40:41 Speaker 10 Okay. For video of the year, I have to go with the Vision Pro review, because it was just like one of those like classic Verge reviews that was just like way overproduced in a short period of time. It was a whole team just working together like late into the night. Uh, the script that Neel I delivered came in incredibly late and was incredibly good. It was just like one read and I was like, this is amazing. The only problem is it's currently 35 minutes long. We're gonna have to cut like a third of it out, which we did. But it was such a strong script. Uh, it was really good. And then just, you know, it was a new, new product category for Apple.
41:26 Speaker 10 A lot of eyes on it. Yeah, it just felt like, I love the hustle. I love the time crunch. I love embargoes. I love all that stuff. It is exhausting, but um, it was a very exciting time of the year. And it was like very much at the beginning of 2024 and it feels like. I don't know. It feels like it was either like two days ago or like seven years ago. I can't decide.
41:47 David Pierce? Yeah, I hear that. I feel like if if we had been talking in February, like what are going to be the, you know, technology stories of the year for 2024, I feel like we all would have picked the Vision Pro to be one of them. And uh, our video was very good. The Vision Pro, less good. Uh, and I think that what we've seen in the 10 months since that thing came out at this point is it kind of feels like it just died. I don't know. Like, does anyone you know, talk about or care about the Vision Pro anymore?
42:20 Speaker 10 No, there's always like a moment on threads, maybe when somebody who has the Vision Pro is like, hey, this cool thing came out. You should look at it. And I see a screen recording. I'm like, oh, that's great. Move on. Uh, but like, like two weeks ago, the ultra wide monitor support came out.
42:39 David Pierce? People are excited about this. Yeah.
42:41 Speaker 10 Looks pretty sick. Like pairing it with a Mac Mini and having that like that workspace incredibly amazing. You will still need a monitor. It's not like you can just live in Vision Pro and like fully commit yourself into it. I did use it, you know, during our testing period and and everything. And that was the thing that I actually enjoyed the most, just external monitor, using it as just like an extra monitor, like leaning into a Lightroom photo, right? Or like just getting closer to it and doing some like brushes and coloring and everything.
43:22 Speaker 10 Did actually feel incredibly fun. Like I thoroughly enjoyed that. I don't know if I can do it for hours and hours and hours. But being in the Vision Pro, like virtual monitor, using it, that was like, that was for me the the best use case for it. I do wish like Apple Pencil gets some kind of support there. Cause it does, it takes you away when you have to like go back to keyboard and mouse sort of thing, you know, like it's just, it's like, oh, okay. I'm still using kind of a similar input here, even though the. Like the feature is good. So I wish there was like more there to do, even just like zooming in or like doing more stuff with it. So that was like a good use case. So I do do understand
44:04 Speaker 10 why people are very excited by the ultra wide monitor. But yeah, the price is just too extreme for anyone to like buy this and use it. But you know, it's, it's impressive and it's just too expensive.
44:19 David Pierce? Yeah, I could not agree more. And the improvement is increasingly far away. It seems like like the the solutions to this problem seem like they keep slipping out. But let's move on. No thing. Number two, your favorite new thing of the year.
44:35 Speaker 10 It's the vision. No, kidding.
44:38 David Pierce? How to a good twist.
44:40 Speaker 10 Yeah. By the way, all right, I struggle with this one a little bit because there are like two things. One also came out a long time ago, or at least it was announced a long time ago. It's the Fuji X 106.
44:53 David Pierce? Yep. I figured that might be your answer.
44:56 Speaker 10 I know I'm so predictable. The thing about it is that, you know, I've had the X 100, I don't know, a second or third generation, a long time ago, and decided to get rid of it. And I've been missing it ever since. So when this one came out, I was still a little hesitant, like, God, do I really have to spend money on yet another camera? And I did it. It took eight months for it to get delivered. So I just got it like last month.
45:25 David Pierce? Eight months? Oh, wow.
45:26 Speaker 10 Yeah, I order I order on like, the day that it came out.
45:30 David Pierce? Yeah, we talked about it on this show. You were like in the middle of talking yourself into buying it.
45:36 Speaker 10 Oh, my God, that is very true. I forgot. I look at this. What a beautiful first circle. So I've only been using it for a little bit. And I've had a couple of trips, couple of work trips, and it's just like, oh, yeah, the this is this is my favorite thing. Like, I just love this camera so much. I've been also reviewing some bigger cameras. And they're like that difference between like, hey, it's hiding a little 35 millimeter camera and a big full frame camera. It's like.
46:03 Speaker 10 I still love this little tiny camera so much. So that was, that's probably my pick. I'm also like incredibly like indecisive person, so.
46:12 David Pierce? Okay, what was your other one? Just give me, give me 10 seconds on the, on your honorable mention here.
46:16 Speaker 10 Uh, Kino app.
46:18 David Pierce? Ooh, the Halide video one, right?
46:21 Speaker 10 Yeah.
46:21 David Pierce? Okay.
46:22 Speaker 10 Like, you know, I did the iPhone review in tandem with Neil I this year and it was kind of the first time. A little bit disclaimer, I, my first, my, my, my personal phone was like a 13 Pro. It didn't have any of the fancy recording features. So it was like, oh, now I have ProRes, now I have Apple Log. Wow, ProRes is like so huge, I can work with this. So Kino was the option that had the, you know, H E V C files. Use that, uh, the LUTs that they have built in are really good. I like Tyler Stallman's LUT the most. It's just really nice. I've been using it a lot more, so finally I have an action button. It is programmed to open Kino.
47:05 Speaker 10 I use an iPhone as a camera a lot more this year than ever before.
47:10 David Pierce? That's a good one. I like that. All right, last thing, your favorite non-tech thing of the year. This can be any, anything you want, it just can't be tech.
47:18 Speaker 10 This was tough. Liam was helping me out because, because I did ask him like ahead of time. We just walked away from a meeting and I was like, do you know what I should do? He's like, I don't know, it can be anything. Like maybe you got good at making coffee. In fact, yes, I did get a coffee machine. Yeah, so that's one of the things. The other one is, um, yeah, it's good to step away from our tech bubble. We're all in our tech bubble and the way that I do it recently is this magazine called Mounting Gazette. It is absolutely massive and I do mean like physically, it's just like a, a big magazine.
47:50 David Pierce? Okay, sure.
47:51 Speaker 10 But yeah, it's all about outdoorsy stuff. It's all about like, well, it depends on the season, but skiing, snowboarding, just being outdoors. It is, uh, it used to be a magazine a long, long time ago. And someone who lives up in Tahoe area, he decided to buy the brand back. And now he's making this really beautifully crafted magazine. And I feel like, I don't know, I'm, I am a print person, so I do like print products. And it just feels nice to kick back, open it up, look at some, uh, beautiful photography and read about.
48:32 Speaker 10 Stuff that I really like, which is skiing and snowboarding, so.
48:35 David Pierce? I love that. You know what I was thinking about the other day? I haven't bought a coffee table book in a million years because it just feels like those don't exist anymore. A, we should make one. I agree. Uh, but B, like, magazine as coffee table book is kind of an incredible idea. Just like, give me a big giant thing I can bring into my house.
48:55 Speaker 10 I think that would be it. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I don't know. I got into.
49:00 David Pierce? That's good. These are good answers. What's the, what coffee machine did you buy? Tell me that and then I'll let you go.
49:04 Speaker 10 It is a, it's one of the Breville ones that has a grinder on top and a milk thing on to the side.
49:12 David Pierce? Oh, the whole, you got the whole pipeline going now.
49:15 Speaker 10 Yes.
49:15 David Pierce? Once you, once a milk frother becomes part of your coffee experience, there's just no going back.
49:20 Speaker 10 Yeah.
49:20 David Pierce? Life is better and it will never go back.
49:23 Speaker 10 Yeah, it is very nice, but I did struggle at first. It took a while to like figure out like, all right, what are you all going to do here? I like went through many like bags, like beans and bags of coffee. And I'm like, great. I spent like $16 on these beans. And I've got like three cups of coffee. This is bullshit. I'm going to go back to my Nespresso pot. No, but I finally figured it out. And I, there's a lot of coffee shops in the neighborhood that I really like. And every time I like, if it was in New York, I go to a few of them as well. I'm like, I need those beans. So yeah, I really became a little bit of a snob, but not, not an annoying snob.
49:59 David Pierce? But welcome because again, there is no going back. It costs a fortune and it takes forever. But it is, it is worth it.
50:08 Speaker 10 I still think it costs less than buying coffee anywhere else. So.
50:12 David Pierce? Ziren, thank you as always. Appreciate it.
50:15 Speaker 10 See ya.
50:16 David Pierce? Next up on my list, Kylie Robinson, our senior AI reporter. Kylie, hello.
50:22 Speaker 11 Hello.
50:23 David Pierce? How you feeling? You sound like you got a, a winter cold thing going on. How you holding up?
50:27 Speaker 11 I sound like shit. That's okay. You can say it. Um, yeah, I have a little bit of a cold, but I'm happy to be here.
50:32 David Pierce? Good. All right. Well, we won't keep you long. Let's just, let's just blast through this. So. I'm just going to preface this with someone else already picked AI as the story of the year. So you can pick it if you want to, but just know that you'll be copying Jake. All that said, what's your story of the year?
50:50 Speaker 11 It's going to be just a common theme of billionaire crybabies.
50:56 Speaker 11 Sorry, guys, but that's true. Like, the common theme of the year, all I'm thinking about is Jeff Bezos stomping his feet, Elon stomping his feet, Sam stomping his feet, Sam Altman. Lots of billionaires stomping their feet over issues and wanting their way and less regulation. That's the common theme of the year, for sure, whether it's AI or, you know, energy or, you know, what have you, hardware.
51:23 David Pierce? Or American politics. Like, it really is, there are like several childish billionaires who seem to just be everywhere doing everything all the time. They're making popular podcasts now. It's like, just leave us, let us have this one.
51:37 Speaker 11 Yeah, you put a tariff on straight men podcasts, under mics, put a tariff, 200%.
51:44 David Pierce? That's a good idea.
51:46 Speaker 11 But yeah, I think that's probably something we're going to continue seeing. I feel like with the incoming Trump administration, that's something that's only going to strengthen is billionaires saying, you know, let's, let's be chill, be chill with my products, my company. Please, you like, you like iPhones, right? Come on, man. So that was the theme of this year, and I think we're just going to continue seeing that.
52:08 David Pierce? Do you think it's going to be that, or do you think the billionaires are now going to be like, we've won, let's go away?
52:16 Speaker 11 Like, hide, like be.
52:17 David Pierce? Not even hide, but like, at some point, it's like, they did it, right? Like, they got everything they wanted, and now go enjoy all of your money and yachts or whatever.
52:28 Speaker 11 Hmm, interesting. I think they're still going to have to argue with Trump again. These tariffs are so weird, and Elon has his ear, and that's something I'm thinking a lot about, because I was reading the OpenAI Elon lawsuit, and to me, it reads like, you know, I have the incoming president's ear, and look, they're being anti-competitive, and you know, so I think these people. If Elon's on Trump's side, these people are still gonna have to like, you know, kiss up, if that makes sense.
52:54 David Pierce? True, or in the, on the flip side, they get to start pointing at their enemies from inside of the White House and picking fights that way.
53:02 Speaker 11 Exactly.
53:03 David Pierce? Okay, well, that's not the most uplifting one I've heard, but unfortunately, I think you can, you can describe a lot of what's happening in the world to that small group of people.
53:11 Speaker 11 Yeah, I'm sort of delirious on Sudafed, and that is, of course, the first thing that came to mind. It's just, it is what it is.
53:18 David Pierce? Uh, all right, what was your favorite new tech thing of the year?
53:22 Speaker 11 Um, it was Stardew Valley.
53:24 David Pierce? Ooh, okay.
53:26 Speaker 11 Um, it's very, like, whenever I say that, they're like, people are like, oh, I played that in COVID. Like, why are you playing it now? Uh, the new update just came out for the Switch, which means I get different colored cats and all sorts of new ways to explore, um, the town. But yeah, that cozy comfort games, uh, I have a very cozy comfort house. Uh, I just love Stardew Valley, it's.
53:48 David Pierce? Can you just explain Stardew Valley to me? I've never played it.
53:51 Speaker 11 Of course.
53:52 David Pierce? And I feel like everyone describes it in a way that almost never makes any sense.
53:57 Speaker 11 Wow.
53:57 David Pierce? Uh, everybody says very nice things, like you just said, but the, the, you just were like, now I have different colored cats, and that's like the explanation for why this game is better. Explain this to me. Teach me about Stardew Valley.
54:08 Speaker 11 Do you know what Animal Crossing is?
54:09 David Pierce? I do.
54:10 Speaker 11 Animal Crossing with combat.
54:12 David Pierce? Oh, that is very compelling.
54:13 Speaker 11 Yeah, it's really fun.
54:14 David Pierce? That's a good case.
54:16 Speaker 11 Yeah, you get to like beat up monsters and caves and, you know, like, you have to grind really hard for resources, almost like a Minecraft situation. To grind for these resources and then you get to make like your cool little farm. Um, you get to marry someone in the game. Um, I just did an interview with somebody for The Verge that is yet to come out, but they said that they were really into Stardew, and the first thing we asked each other is, who did you marry? Um, mine is Harvey, he's the doctor, the town's doctor.
54:42 David Pierce? Thanks, good for you.
54:43 Speaker 11 Yeah, actually, uh, V asked me that when I first started at The Verge. She said, who did you marry in Stardew? I can't remember.
54:48 David Pierce? Is this like a personality test? Do you think like, can you tell a lot about somebody if somebody they marry in Stardew? Okay, interesting.
54:54 Speaker 11 But yeah, there was a new update, uh, you can sink ungodly amounts of hours into it because it is so fun and chill and yeah, cozy comfort games.
55:02 David Pierce? I really have developed an affinity for games that are like pointless in the best way. Uh, like for, for forever. All the games I liked were like games where you work up to the big boss and then you beat the big boss and then the game is over, right?
55:16 Speaker 11 Hell yeah.
55:16 David Pierce? That was what I always played and. I would encounter games like Stardew, or even like Animal Crossing, or Minecraft in these games, and I would just be like, what's the point of this game? And it took me so long to wrap my head around the idea that the point of the game is just to play the game, and it's like, it's fun to play the game, and that's actually enough. And there's a real, like, it's the friends we made along the way kind of vibe to these games that I have like, really come to appreciate in the last couple of years.
55:43 Speaker 11 Totally. Animal Crossing was a bit too pointless for me. Like, I was getting too vidgety with that one. But Stardew has, like, you know, stuff to work towards, like, goals and quests, which I really appreciate. I restarted Skyrim this year, too, which is like, another pointless time sync from 2011, but you gotta love it.
56:02 David Pierce? I, yeah, I agree. I've also recently gone back all in on the Switch.
56:07 Speaker 11 Nice.
56:07 David Pierce? And it's gonna be Stardew time.
56:08 Speaker 11 Good choice. Hell, yeah.
56:09 David Pierce? I have this old, yellow, original Switch.
56:13 Speaker 11 Wow.
56:13 David Pierce? The battery is trash.
56:14 Speaker 11 Wow.
56:15 David Pierce? But the games are awesome. I don't care. It's amazing. I love it.
56:17 Speaker 11 I hear we might be getting another Switch next year, but they've said that every year for many years.
56:21 David Pierce? Honestly, it's getting to the point now where like, every one of these Nintendo head fakes is, A, a little funnier than the last, because it's a very, very funny thing that Nintendo is doing, where everybody wants a Switch, and they're like, just kidding, we did a museum, and an alarm clock, and a music app.
56:35 Speaker 11 Fucking A.
56:36 David Pierce? Like, very funny. But also, just release the damn Switch, please.
56:40 Speaker 11 Give me the Switch.
56:40 David Pierce? I do, I would like to have it in my house. Like, give me one, and then keep doing these funny jokes, and I'm in.
56:45 Speaker 11 Right, exactly.
56:46 David Pierce? That's fine.
56:47 Speaker 11 As long as I'm in on it, yeah.
56:48 David Pierce? Just give, just you and me. Just the two of us.
56:50 Speaker 11 Perfect.
56:51 David Pierce? Not Andrew Webster, because he, he doesn't want one at all, and doesn't spend all his time thinking about this.
56:57 Speaker 11 Perfect.
56:58 David Pierce? All right, last thing. Your favorite non-tech thing of the year?
57:01 Speaker 11 My favorite non-tech thing has been, oh, it's gonna sound so lame, because I wrote it down, and now it sounds more lame on a podcast. Curated playlists and fresh flowers. That's all you need in life, is a nice little playlist. I made one for November, because I've been traveling so much. I was in New York seeing you guys. I went on another reporting trip out of the state, and I'm going to Texas for Thanksgiving break, and you need a playlist for that. And then getting to share that with everyone you like is a good time. So, a little playlist to get you through, and validation from your friends about it.
57:37 David Pierce? What's your playlisting process? Do you like, spend hours?
57:40 Speaker 11 Oh, no.
57:41 David Pierce? Okay.
57:41 Speaker 11 No, no. Purely vibes-based. The one that I have right now is called Nonstop November. And it's mostly like, indeed, you know who Sukie Waterhouse is?
57:53 David Pierce? Mm-hmm.
57:53 Speaker 11 Yeah, lots of Sukie Waterhouse, you know, sad, fun, autumn vibes. Yeah, Nonstop November, just, just what I'm looping, basically. Like, I am addicted to these songs and I need them in a playlist. And here is, you know, a hundred songs that are just like that one. Is sort of my playlist vibe. And fresh flowers, they're cheap, they make you happy. I have a vase next to my front door and then one on my desk. So I get to flex it in my What's on Your Desk series. But yeah, they're, they're simple, they make you happy. That's all you need is music and fresh flowers.
58:31 David Pierce? Do you have a favorite kind of flower? Or is it just whatever, whatever they're selling at the bodega?
58:36 Speaker 11 Oh, wow, the bodega, the bodega, okay.
58:39 David Pierce? You're gonna move to New York, you have to learn the word bodega, Kylie.
58:41 Speaker 11 That's true, that's true.
58:43 David Pierce? We're just starting this now.
58:44 Speaker 11 Vergecasters, if you have a sublet with fresh tulips. Yeah, it's, it's tulips. I think that they're really pretty and then they open slowly and yeah.
58:54 David Pierce? I love this for you.
58:55 Speaker 11 Thank you.
58:55 David Pierce? It's just a cozy fall full of fresh flowers. This sounds so nice.
58:59 Speaker 11 I know, it is. And it's pouring rain here and I have a slight cold and that's okay. And I'll play my cozy games, I'll write my, you know, weird AI stories about billionaires. It's a good time.
59:08 David Pierce? You're like one oversized thing of soup away from being like a rom-com character right now.
59:14 Speaker 11 Oh, my god.
59:15 David Pierce? And that's, that's what we should all aspire to, I think.
59:17 Speaker 11 Wow.
59:18 David Pierce? You're like, you're at the beginning of a Christmas movie. Is what's happening right now. It's gonna be amazing.
59:23 Speaker 11 I would hope that, you know, in the Christmas movies, you don't have the winter cold. They, they leave that out for some reason.
59:28 David Pierce? This is true. Once you come out of that and then, then everything's better.
59:31 Speaker 11 Obviously.
59:32 David Pierce? Awesome. Kylie, feel better, thank you.
59:34 Speaker 11 Thank you.
59:36 David Pierce? All right, moving on. Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor. Here we go. Barbara, hello.
59:42 Speaker 12 Hey there.
59:43 David Pierce? Okay, we gave you some homework. Let's do your story of the year first. Let's start there. What was your story of the year?
59:49 Speaker 12 Well, actually, it's two or more stories of the year. It's the election coverage that we had.
59:56 Speaker 12 I was especially impressed by Addy's The Pragmatist's Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election. I mean, I read that about five times. It gave more information about what the candidates had done in the past and what they were saying now about various important issues. I just wanted to sort of print it out and mail it to everybody I knew. And then, of course, Neil's essay, Vote for Donald Trump is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles. I mean, you've, you gotta mention that. I mean, that, that was just amazing.
1:00:28 David Pierce? Probably the best headline we ran this year. I don't know how you topped that as a headline.
1:00:31 Speaker 12 I, I honestly don't. I certainly couldn't, and I wouldn't have had, I wouldn't have had the guts to, to have put it up either. So I'm very glad that our editor in chief did. So those were my favorites for the year.
1:00:43 David Pierce? Those are good ones. I agree with all of those. What was your tech thing of the year? I found this, of all three pieces of homework we all had to do, I found this to be by far the hardest. What was, what was yours?
1:00:54 Speaker 12 Well, I bought myself a little Steam Deck. It's, it's not brand new. Yeah, I'll show it to you. I forgot it unplugged right now because I was playing with some stuff, but you know, there it is.
1:01:05 David Pierce? I love it. The Stream Deck has, I think, everyone at The Verge, I think, has had a Stream Deck at one point or another. I think it's very good.
1:01:12 Speaker 12 Yeah, and I love playing with it.
1:01:14 David Pierce? What are you doing with it? What's, what's on the, what's on the board right now?
1:01:18 Speaker 12 Well, nothing because it's unplugged, but um.
1:01:21 David Pierce? Not a great sign for the Stream Deck, I have to tell you. The fact that it's unplugged.
1:01:25 Speaker 12 Not a great sign. Well, that's because I was moving it from computer to computer. But I basically use it for very quick.
1:01:34 Speaker 12 Answers to things. So that's cool. And just to get places from one to the other. My problem is I do not have a smart home. So I can't use it for the really sexy things that Jen uses it for, for example.
1:01:48 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:01:49 Speaker 12 Um, but also I just like playing with it. I like playing with different things and I'm going to play with it some more.
1:01:55 David Pierce? What, what fun stuff have you discovered? Even things that haven't stuck. I feel like I'm with you, just in the sense that having a bunch of buttons in front of me is just endlessly fun. And I will find a bunch of wildly unproductive things to do with them just because it's fun to press buttons.
1:02:10 Speaker 12 Well, I've been trying to attach it to my Chromecast.
1:02:13 David Pierce? Ooh, that's good.
1:02:14 Speaker 12 I haven't done it yet, but that's my next project. Because at home, well, we have just the one TV. And what we tend to do is we run these constantly, this background stuff on birds in various interesting places. Or cute kittens, because it gets the, the blood pressure down. And what I want to do is to be able to just press a button and have the cute kittens pop up on the TV. So that's, that's my next project.
1:02:43 David Pierce? That is an extremely good idea. I have been spending all year trying to figure out how to more quickly play a specific set of YouTube videos. My problem is I have a toddler who between three and 12,000 times a day, just stares at me and demands, Moana. And I've like mapped the shortcut button on the Roku remote to get there. I've done a bunch of stuff. I've tried to figure out like, you know, all these macros that will do it. I love the idea of just having a button that is just like, play the happy video. And then he can do it himself. Just play the video.
1:03:20 Speaker 12 And also because we are, we are unfortunately a Google Voice household. And sometimes that just does not work. And I'd much rather just press a button and have Netflix or whatever come up than have to try to say it. Or have to do it the really old fashioned way and do it on the remote. So that's where I am right now.
1:03:42 David Pierce? I like that a lot. Can I give you one other tip? As a, as a person I know who has to also use Slack all day. Using the Stream Deck to change my Slack status has been wonderful and also has made me a better coworker because I now reliably change my Slack status. So just to have a thing that's like, I have one that's like a BRB with the little hanging BRB sign. And I just have a button on it that I can press on the Stream Deck and it puts me up at BRB for 60 minutes.
1:04:08 Speaker 12 Oh, that's perfect.
1:04:09 David Pierce? Game changer.
1:04:10 Speaker 12 That is perfect. Thank you. I will definitely take that into consideration.
1:04:14 David Pierce? Happy to help. All right. What's your other thing? Non-tech thing?
1:04:17 Speaker 12 Totally non-tech thing is googly eyes. See this?
1:04:22 David Pierce? That's so good.
1:04:24 Speaker 12 And the reason is, basically when we had our meeting, I hadn't been to the office for like a year. And so when we had our meeting, I was sitting around at one of the stations. And one of our colleagues basically said, I have this bag full of googly eyes. Does anyone want any? And I said, sure, I'll take a couple. And I stuck it to the back of my phone. And it's the most relaxing thing that I, anytime I get like tense or upset or whatever, I just look at these, these really wide sympathetic googly eyes and I go, oh, things aren't too bad. So that's my totally favorite non-tech thing for right now.
1:05:06 David Pierce? It does make your phone feel much nicer. Like, I feel like I like your phone more than I like most phones now.
1:05:11 Speaker 12 Well, yeah, look, I mean, look at this poor cute little thing. I basically, for those who are looking, I've got a dark blue backing on my Pixel 6. And they're two little eyes against the dark blue backing. It's just, just looking at you wide, almost like kitten eyes, you know? And saying, hi, I love you. You're nice.
1:05:34 David Pierce? It's adorable. And they're like almost perfectly aligned, but just slightly, it's great. I'm a big fan. There's a real googly eyes thing happening in our newsroom now that I love very much. V Song on our team, I know, instead of getting the new Mac Mini, just put googly eyes on her old Mac Mini to make herself feel better about it. And that seems to have worked very well for her.
1:05:54 Speaker 12 Who gave me these, so.
1:05:55 David Pierce? There you go. She's starting a trend here. Googly eyes, all the things. Do you now look around your house being like, what else can I googly eyes? I feel like a bag of googly eyes makes someone very dangerous.
1:06:04 Speaker 12 Oh, oh, yeah. Well, yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, I'm looking on Amazon or someplace. I'm going to get a bag of those so that I can not only use them on things here, but so I can carry them with me. So if I meet somebody who's like not in a good way, I'll just hand them a couple of googly eyes.
1:06:19 David Pierce? That's so good. Just, just hand them two googly eyes and walk away with no explanation. I feel like people would instantly understand, but you bet. I love it.
1:06:27 Speaker 12 I think so.
1:06:28 David Pierce? That's really good. All right, Barbara, thank you very much.
1:06:31 Speaker 12 All right, very good.
1:06:33 David Pierce? All right, we gotta take one more break and then we have a couple more people to talk to about all the favorite and biggest stuff from the air. Be right back.
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1:09:15 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Up next, Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and the author of the very good Command Line Newsletter. Alex Heath, hello.
1:09:24 Speaker 14 Hi.
1:09:25 David Pierce? You have an AI background, and you just alerted us to the Riverside Mac app, and this is the greatest day of my life. So I just, all of my answers before have changed. My thing of the year is that Riverside, which we use to record this podcast, now has a desktop app, and everything will be wonderful.
1:09:40 Speaker 14 Happy Thanksgiving, David.
1:09:41 David Pierce? Seriously, this is what we do here. All right, so we gave you some homework. What was your story of the year?
1:09:48 Speaker 14 It's a theme, and I'm calling it the AI Rat Race, which is just this idea that all of the big tech companies and OpenAI, Anthropic, have just been trying to one-up each other all year long with all of these announcements to a kind of petty hilarious degree. And I expect that to only continue next year, but this year really felt like it ratcheted up quite a bit. And apologies if others have said something along these lines, but that's, I just, I don't think you can, like, seriously say there was a bigger story in tech this year than that.
1:10:24 David Pierce? I agree, and I actually think, I like that way of thinking about it, too, that what we've had is this, like, incredibly high stakes, expensive game of, like, teeny tiny one-upsmanship all year.
1:10:35 Speaker 14 Yeah.
1:10:35 David Pierce? Everybody's just doing 5% better than everybody else every three weeks all year and spending ungodly amounts of money.
1:10:43 Speaker 14 Yeah, and it's and it all blurs together and you reflect back on the year and it's like, I guess chat GPT is a little better to use, Claude is better, like all of these things feel better. But I haven't felt the kind of aha early iPhone moment this year. It's just felt very kind of constantly iterative.
1:11:07 David Pierce? Yeah, we like skipped straight to the iPhone 14 era of AI. So you you said you think it's going to continue next year.
1:11:15 Speaker 14 Yeah.
1:11:16 David Pierce? Do you think so? Like, there there's another case to be made that like, we're hitting sort of a slowdown with these models. Maybe there's like a bubble that's going to burst. Maybe everybody is going to finally like take a deep breath and start to ask real questions about AI. You don't think any of that's coming?
1:11:32 Speaker 14 Oh, David, it's like you're reading my newsletter before it even comes out. It will have come out by this time.
1:11:38 David Pierce? There you go.
1:11:39 Speaker 14 No, that is actually an interesting point. There is this concept in AI called the scaling wall that seems to be hitting everyone in the face, which is just this idea that everyone thought that new models would get dramatically smarter the more compute and money you threw into training them. And that's turning out now to not be the case. So I and others have reported that Google and others are seeing diminishing returns from training their next kind of frontier models. And the consensus seems to be that that's okay, because there's a lot of work that needs to be done with just building good experiences around the models that exist today.
1:12:21 Speaker 14 And agents are a thing I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about next year, which are basically LLMs that do things on your behalf that can chain together multiple actions, take over a desktop interface or a phone or something like that. And you can achieve agents with the models that exist today. It's all, the magic is done in post-training and what happens after you've trained one of these. Large models and the scaling wall seems to be applying to to training new models, but not necessarily improving the ones that exist today.
1:12:55 David Pierce? That's fair. Do you think the leaderboard has changed this year? Like as we look at who is winning this race? It's been a wild game of kind of leapfrog, but looking back, do you feel like we're in a different spot than we were 12 months ago?
1:13:11 Speaker 14 I think it's hard to say with a straight face that anyone other than OpenAI is the winner right now. I would say OpenAI, especially with its O1 reasoning model release, is still kind of ahead of where the puck is going. Everyone is going to be doing, I say reasoning with air quotes, reasoning models next year. I will say it does feel like Meta has significantly moved up the leaderboard this year with with Llama and the excitement around it and the adoption of it. Gemini seems to be doing okay. I think Google's happy with it, but wishes that more businesses were using it. Anthropic is killing it on the business side on you're just being
1:13:53 Speaker 14 accessible through every cloud provider. And OpenAI is the big consumer, but you know that that ChatGPT is going to be the next Google or the next Facebook. It kind of has to be to justify OpenAI's insane valuation. So it's a lot of the same players. They all kind of constantly move up and down. That's why I call it a rat race. But going into the new year, going into December, and I caveat all this with saying a year ago, my Thanksgiving was ruined because Sam Altman got suddenly fired from OpenAI.
1:14:24 David Pierce? I guess in that sense, an awful lot has changed in 12 months.
1:14:27 Speaker 14 And I and Neel I was at, I think Disneyland, and we were just constantly calling each other while he was in between rides, trying to confirm reporting that we had all week long on the verge. So, you know, who knows what could happen? The AI industry moves very fast. But as of right now, feels like OpenAI still has a little bit of an edge, but that edge is rapidly dulling, which is interesting.
1:14:48 David Pierce? Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right. Next thing on the list, your favorite tech thing of the year.
1:14:53 Speaker 14 This is not, it's not Riverside for Mac, though. I am also very happy about this. It's another app that, you know, I just think a lot of AI apps aren't very good, but there's this one I've found that I use on my Mac all day long called granola. And it's a meeting note-taking app. It gets around wiretapping laws by not actually recording your calls, but what it does is it runs a hyper-minitrized LLM live while you're on a Google Meet, a Zoom, whatever, FaceTime call, and transcribes it in real time. So it doesn't save the audio file or let you listen to it after, but it gives you a transcript. And then it has been kind of post-trained to really focus on summarizing,
1:15:38 Speaker 14 summarizing in an actionable way how you would want to see notes from a meeting, almost like you've got a personal assistant that's like in the meeting with you. I've been using it for like our editor calls, for interviews.
1:15:52 Speaker 14 And it's got, you know, a pretty nice interface and it's fairly well-integrated into, into macOS. So that's my pick. It's like a simple, actually useful application of AI in a work kind of setting.
1:16:06 David Pierce? Does the action items thing actually work? I feel like the, we've gotten to the point where the transcription stuff on a lot of these services is very fast and very good. But I'm, I'm so skeptical of the thing where it's like, we're going to tell you the three most important things that happened in this meeting. Does Granola actually do it pretty well?
1:16:20 Speaker 14 Yeah, it's pretty good. And it recognizes voices and it knows how to make distinctions. And, you know, it gives me like next steps after a meeting, uh, based on how we talked about it, you know, like, for example, like really long ones where a lot is said, it's actually pretty helpful at breaking all of that down. You know, it's not perfect, but it's definitely the best I've used, um, in this context. And then it's got a bunch of like integrations with other apps. Like you can drop a summary straight into Slack or your email app or something like that. So they're, they're, they're continuing to build on it and I'm, I'm pretty bullish on it as a product, honestly, just because it's, it's a very good niche application of, of AI.
1:16:57 David Pierce? Yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty cool, actually. Uh, what about non-tech things?
1:17:02 Speaker 14 I went to Japan um this summer uh fall and I'm just gonna pick alcohol. You know, that kind of sums up um my my year anyway.
1:17:13 David Pierce? I thought you were gonna just pick Japan, but I like just picking alcohol ju- just as much. That's pretty good. Yeah.
1:17:18 Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, Japan is awesome, but I I fell in love with Shochu in Japan, which is like uh it's not sake. It's not soju. It's like a higher ABV, almost like whiskey.
1:17:30 Speaker 14 Clear, very easy to drink, earthy, smoky, Japanese spirit. And I want to find more of it in the States, but yeah, anytime I see Shochu now, I I order it immediately.
1:17:43 David Pierce? How easy is it to find in the States?
1:17:45 Speaker 14 You know, I thought it would be easier. It's it's I'm in LA um and it's so it's a little bit easier here. We we just we have a lot of Japanese people in really good restaurants uh that are Japanese in LA. But um it's harder to find when I travel. But yeah, Shochu, it's it's good.
1:18:03 David Pierce? All right.
1:18:03 Speaker 14 And strong.
1:18:03 David Pierce? I have to try this. I very briefly a couple of years ago during the pandemic was like, I'm gonna get into Japanese whiskey. And it it was it's so good, but it was it's such a different world of booze that I just I eventually was like, I'm gonna go back to learning about like Kentucky bourbon, because that's that's as much as I can handle right now.
1:18:22 Speaker 14 I'm from Kentucky. I can we can have a whole convo about bourbon at some point.
1:18:25 David Pierce? We'll have to do that sometime. I like it. All right, Alex, thank you as always. Appreciate it.
1:18:30 Speaker 14 Thanks, man.
1:18:31 David Pierce? All right, last but certainly not least, Ash Parrish, The Verge's video games reporter. Here we go. Ash, hello.
1:18:39 Speaker 15 Hi.
1:18:40 David Pierce? It's been a minute. We haven't done this in a while. You need to come on the show more often.
1:18:44 Speaker 15 I think the last time I was on, I was talking about Tears of the Kingdom, maybe?
1:18:48 David Pierce? That's right. We also talked about GTA VI like a hundred years ago.
1:18:53 Speaker 15 We did? I don't remember that one.
1:18:54 David Pierce? Because there was like that weird leak that happened forever ago.
1:18:58 Speaker 15 Okay, I do remember that, but I don't remember being on The Vergecast about it.
1:19:01 David Pierce? You were. It was great. We had a terrific time. I enjoyed every second of it. Uh, so we gave you some homework. What was the story of the year for you?
1:19:10 Speaker 15 So the story of the year for me, I'm gonna do something a little bit different and I'm gonna choose a story from my beat, which is video games, which isn't necessarily like the biggest story for the verge overall because
1:19:21 David Pierce? No, I love it.
1:19:21 Speaker 15 It's like a tech website and there are a lot more important things happening in the tech world than what's going on in the world of video games. But I have like two buckets for biggest story of the year on my beat. I've got like the actual factual, this is objectively the biggest story and then the biggest story like to me personally.
1:19:39 David Pierce? Okay.
1:19:39 Speaker 15 So the biggest story, objectual, actual factual, is the Switch 2 and GTA 6. They are these like almost oppressive figures looming in the distance that is like slowly coming towards the video game industry. And when it hits, it's gonna be this like massive event. And both of those things are supposed to happen next year. Like Nintendo is not, you know, they're being coy about exactly when, but they're saying, we are definitely, definitely going to announce the Switch successor sometime before the end of Q1 2025. And that's, and it's just been like a constant, like not deluge, but like Nintendo feels
1:20:22 Speaker 15 like with everything that they're doing now, it's like we're clearing the books, we are getting everything off of our plate, just clearing the runway for when this massive story hits. And so that's on the hardware side. And on the software side, you have GTA 6, which is probably going to be the biggest video game release in our lifetimes. I don't know how else to explain it. Um, it's just this GTA 6 is just this massive, crazy, insanely popular thing that has been hyped up, um, possibly too much.
1:21:01 Speaker 15 Hopefully Rockstar can deliver on, um, not their promises, but at least the idea or that people have in their head for what this video game is supposed to be.
1:21:11 David Pierce? Well, so let me, let me actually pause on that because
1:21:13 Speaker 15 Yeah.
1:21:13 David Pierce? This is a, a thing that I have been wondering about a lot recently, which is, A, it's sort of wild that the two biggest things in video games right now are things that don't exist yet. And I think you're absolutely right that they have like been the stories of the year all year despite not existing. And there's like a lot of existential questions you could ask about games as a result. But I do wonder, after all of this, Is it even possible for these two things to live up to the hype?
1:21:41 Speaker 15 Yes.
1:21:42 David Pierce? You think?
1:21:42 Speaker 15 I do.
1:21:43 David Pierce? Okay, good.
1:21:44 Speaker 15 Nintendo is Nintendo. Yes, they've had some stinkers like with the Wii U and, and things like that in the past. But I think no matter what it is, no matter what it does, it will be big because it's Nintendo. Like Nintendo had that Alarmo thing out, like it's, which was just like little, you know, chintzy, alarm clock that was just like nothing and it sold out within seconds. Okay? And it's just an alarm clock that plays like Nintendo beeps and boops. People want it because of who makes it. And that's exactly the case for both of those things. It's a Rockstar game. It's a Nintendo system. No matter what the kind of quality it is, it's still going to sell like gangbusters.
1:22:26 Speaker 15 May not perform the way that the bookkeepers want them to perform if they are lower quality, but it's still going to be like the massive, massive million dollar, million copy thing selling thing.
1:22:37 David Pierce? Okay. I just like, I don't know. I feel like we, we've been burned, especially on this, on the game side, by these huge things that just turned out to be even slightly worse than we expected. And it, it becomes this whole giant catastrophe. And it's like, if, if GTA 6 does what like Cyberpunk 2077 did, the world will collapse in on itself.
1:23:00 Speaker 15 Yeah.
1:23:01 David Pierce? And I'm, I think maybe I'm just hardening myself against that possibility as somebody who's very excited about this game.
1:23:07 Speaker 15 I understand that. I, you know, we haven't seen very much of GTA 6 outside of a trailer and leaked materials. Rockstar hasn't really told us all that much about what the game is. We haven't really seen official gameplay yet. So we, we actually have no idea what to expect from them. And I think that's probably smart on their end to kind of like manage expectations. Like you can't get mad at us for something about this because we never actually told you what this thing was. We just said it was GTA 6. We gave you the trailer. We put, put it out there. We didn't tell you to expect this, this, this, this, or this. We just, you know, did our thing and put it out there. But you know, I don't know, you're right in that there have been these big, huge releases
1:23:52 Speaker 15 that have been kind of underwhelming. But I don't know, like I said, doesn't matter what kind of quality it is because it's rock star, because it says GTA 6 on the box, it's gonna sell 10 billion copies.
1:24:05 David Pierce? Yeah, fair enough. All right, I believe you. Okay, so those are the big stories. What's the one nearest and dearest to your heart?
1:24:11 Speaker 15 So the thing that is important to me, that I think is like my personal big story for the year, is the story of the video game industry layoffs and the rise of Gamergate 2.0, as it were. We are in the second year of this like trend of studios being shut down, of massive and massive, massive amounts of people being laid off. We're really gonna start feeling it, I believe, in 2025. There was, Embracer Group put out, went there with their earnings statement, maybe a couple weeks ago, stating that, you know, we've got this dried up release pipeline, without really qualifying that with the fact that we closed like six different studios and laid off over
1:24:55 Speaker 15 a thousand of our employees. And like, if you don't have people working for you anymore because you close everything down and fire everybody, yeah, of course, your production pipeline is gonna suffer and you're not gonna have games out that are gonna make the money that you need to appease your shareholders. Like, we're starting to see the knock-on effects of this like, this layoff last two years, like really starting to hurt and pinch these big corporations because now they have nothing to show for it. They laid off everybody, they closed these studios, and now they have no product anymore because there's nobody around to make it. On the other end of that, you've got this rising culture war thing within video games where people are trying to attribute the problems of the video game industry with
1:25:40 Speaker 15 the layoffs and the closures and all, and like, you know, games failing with the idea that it's minorities and people of colors fault, which is absolutely patently absurd.
1:25:49 David Pierce? Yeah, we're just doing this again somehow.
1:25:52 Speaker 15 Yeah, pretty much. We're doing this again. And these people, you know, they have nothing interesting to say, they're not really paying attention to facts, they're just really upset that the culture of storytelling in video games, both like on the screen and in the development room, is shifting away from trying to appeal to...
1:26:13 Speaker 15 I'm gonna use extremely heavy quotes because it's not true. Traditional gamers, which have always been straight cis hetero sexual white men, and into this more diverse tapestry where we're making stories that appeal to people of color, LGBTQ people, disabled folks, and we're starting to see development rooms also reflect that diversity as well. And, you know, people can't handle change like that and they get really mad and they start getting mad at people for the wrong reasons. And it's important to me that these stories get covered so we can understand why they're happening and why it is not true. We can counteract their narratives that like, oh, this game failed because it was woke, you know? Which is ridiculous.
1:26:58 Speaker 15 And then this woke game that was really, really good succeeded because actually it wasn't woke. That, which is very funny, another, like the other side of that argument.
1:27:06 David Pierce? Right, the Democrat secretly Republican.
1:27:09 Speaker 15 Exactly.
1:27:10 David Pierce? Yeah. Somehow it just, like, do you ever look at this industry and you're like, oh, it just is all the same? Like, how many times in history is it like Grand Theft Auto, Nintendo is doing a thing and everybody is losing their minds and mad and we're kind of doing Gamergate? Like, it just, this is just the cycle. We're just doing it all over again.
1:27:29 Speaker 15 I think the, the problem with that is specific to the video game industry is that we do not have the kind of, um, like institutional memory that, um, other industries have because of the way that the industry is currently working in terms of journalism and in terms of like, you know, having a dedicated group of people that are covering these kinds of issues, but we fire them all the next day. Like, it's really, really hard to keep a job in video games journalism right now. And that, and because of that, because it is so hard to, you know, maintain a steady job and because the, these kinds of reportings doesn't necessarily move the needle like, top 10 ways you can get the most out of your Switch or, you know, that kind of shit.
1:28:13 David Pierce? Right.
1:28:13 Speaker 15 We don't have the institutional memory, say, the way, I don't know, movies do or any other kind of like cultural. Thing because everybody's gone. They have to move on and go somewhere else so they can make money and pay their bills and not, you know, be destitute.
1:28:28 David Pierce? Totally. All right. Well, these are good things. And again, we, you need to come on the show more often. This is all.
1:28:34 Speaker 15 You know where I, you know where I metaphorically live.
1:28:37 David Pierce? Why do now? We were talking about this before. I do now. This is great news. All right. Let's, let's keep going through this. So the next thing was your favorite new thing of the year. And for most people, we've been making them say tech. But if you want to do, like, you know, games are tech enough. So if you want to do games, we can do games, tech, whatever you want.
1:28:54 Speaker 15 The tech thing, it's not necessarily this year, but it came out late enough last year where I think it counts. Kind of like that window where this movie came out in 2024, but it's not eligible for the Oscars until the next year. It's that. It's the PlayStation Portal.
1:29:09 David Pierce? Oh, my God. You're the PlayStation Portal fan? The one that's out there?
1:29:13 Speaker 15 I am the one PlayStation Portal fan now because of the recent news that PlayStation Portal will now let you stream games from the cloud. Before that, like, I already appreciated the device because it allowed me to play my PlayStation games on the couch and still be in the same room with my husband and we can like, watch TV or do whatever. And I appreciate that. Like, I like, I don't like being sequestered or taking away like the living room television from him. So like, you know, because I have to do this thing because I am literally working, you know, he can't watch, you know, whatever silly thing that he wants to watch. And so that kind of, that makes it easier for me. But the big thing is that that kind of like breaks open this device and now makes it kind of like a must own for like, anybody who has a PlayStation 5 is the idea that now you
1:29:58 Speaker 15 can stream games without the need of being tethered to a PlayStation 5 because it's going to let you stream cloud games. If you've got a PlayStation Premium Plus membership, I don't remember exactly how that works. But yeah, that, that makes it like, okay, now this is on the level of the Steam Deck. Maybe not the same technical, heavy lifting specs as a Steam Deck may have, but definitely the utility that I think is going to make it like, okay, this is, this is something that I need to, that I need to own now.
1:30:27 David Pierce? That's really good. That's fair. And I, I have to say, I'm also personally very excited about this because the portal is such a like lovely little thing. Like they made a nice object and they just hamstrung it in such a stupid way. So it's like, it's nice to see it actually start to do the thing it should have been doing all along.
1:30:43 Speaker 15 Correct, correct. Now, if we can make it such that, you know, it doesn't drop the connection because I can't wire my PlayStation where it is, like where I have it, like, so we can like beef up the way that it, you know, streams from the PlayStation and so I don't have to like reconnect every, you know, couple minutes, then we'll, we'll be like cooking with gas. But until then, you know what? I can live with this.
1:31:06 David Pierce? All right. I'll buy it. I love it. All right. And then last thing, your, your non-tech thing of the year.
1:31:11 Speaker 15 I think you might already know what the answer to that question is. It's my new corgi puppy Boo. His, his real name is Bussephalus because I named him after my favorite historical horse, Alexander the Great's horse, Bussephalus, but we call him Boo for short.
1:31:28 David Pierce? Do you call him Bussephalus when you're mad at him? Like, is that when you're like, you know, sternly talking to him?
1:31:33 Speaker 15 You know, I haven't yet, but I think that might be a thing that happens.
1:31:36 David Pierce? Okay. Cause I feel like that's a, like, if I heard someone yelling that at the dog park, like, oof, that's serious stuff.
1:31:41 Speaker 15 When you hear someone yelling at the dog park, you're like, that is the biggest nerd that I have ever seen in my life.
1:31:47 David Pierce? Also that.
1:31:49 Speaker 15 But yeah, he's a, he's a three-month-old corgi who loves chewing on feet and he's trying to chew on mine now because he's teething and he is absolutely shit monster, but I love him to death. So that is my favorite non-tech thing of the year.
1:32:03 David Pierce? I love it. So three months, he's just a terror. He's just, he is just a destroyer of worlds.
1:32:08 Speaker 15 He's a toe-chewing terror, that's for sure.
1:32:11 David Pierce? But then he like sleeps on top of your head and you're like, all right, we're cool. Everything's fine.
1:32:14 Speaker 15 Pretty much, yeah.
1:32:15 David Pierce? I love this.
1:32:16 Speaker 15 Yeah. Then he makes his little ow noise when he's like yawning or something like that. And it's so, so dang cute.
1:32:23 David Pierce? He is very cute. There are a bunch of dog dedicated Slack channels at The Verge and Vox Media in general. And like, it's not so much that you've like won those channels with Boo, but like, you, you, you did it. It's like pretty hard to compete with, with Boo's situation right now.
1:32:41 Speaker 15 Yeah, that, you know, that's the goal.
1:32:44 David Pierce? He's doing good work. All right, Ash, thank you as always. It was great to have you. Come back soon. We have, I think, a lot of stuff to talk about in 2025.
1:32:52 Speaker 15 We will definitely have a lot of stuff to talk about in 2025, for sure.
1:32:56 David Pierce? All right, we'll see you then.
1:32:57 Speaker 15 Thanks.
1:32:59 David Pierce? All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to all of The Verge staff who came on the show, for coming on the show, for doing your homework, for talking us through all your favorite stuff. There is lots more on all this stuff, all the stories of the year, all of our favorite things, lots of it at theverge.com. I'll put as much as I can in the show notes, but I trust that you will tell me all of the things that I forgot to put in the show notes. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, and again, particularly if you have questions that you want us to talk about on The Vergecast, about The Vergecast, and about The Verge, and about the future of media, you can always email us at [email protected] , call the hotline 866-VERGE11. I want to hear all your thoughts, all your questions, all your ideas, everything.
1:33:41 David Pierce? Lots of fun stuff to come in the next couple of weeks, including big thoughts about the future of media. It's gonna be great. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Tuesday to talk about some fun, Van Life-y things and some microphones. Then we'll be back on Friday to talk about the news. It all just keeps happening, friends. We're winding towards the holidays, so we're gonna get into some year-end stuff here pretty soon. But lord knows the AI news isn't gonna stop just because it's Thanksgiving. If you're in the US, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you have an awesome weekend. We will see you on Tuesday. Rock and roll.
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