Everything you’ve always wondered about The Vergecast

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently in, I believe it's called Murphy Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee. We just had a long weekend of family time and Dolly Parton-related shenanigans and at one point I drank blueberry blackberry wine, which I have a lot of thoughts about. But now we're headed home and that means it's about to be flight number two for our 10-month-old. Flight number one actually went pretty well, which I assume means this one is going to be a total disaster. So to anyone who's listening who may have been on this flight with us, just know that I'm very sorry. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up. We've asked over the last few weeks, people to send us questions about The Verge and The Vergecast and you've sent in some awesome ones. Thanks to everybody who called the hotline and everybody who sent us emails.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  We got questions about how we run The Vergecast, how we think about the stuff that we cover, what gear we use, what Neelai is like as a boss. Spoiler alert, the worst, but we'll get to that. It's a super fun show. It's a weirdly odd thing to spend all this time talking about yourself. It was kind of a fun exercise for the three of us to do, along with Liam and Andrew, our producers. So again, thanks to everybody who sent in questions. This is super fun. All of that is coming up in just a sec, but first, I gotta go get on this plane. Wish me luck and maybe even more so, wish luck to everyone sitting within six rows of us. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 2:26David Pierce?

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

• 3:11David Pierce?

  about The Vergecast, which we're gonna answer. Then we're gonna take a break. Then we got a bunch of questions about The Verge, which we're gonna answer. And then we got a bunch of questions about just like our feelings about the future. So I figured that's a good thing to end on. That's good. So we'll end with that. So let's just dive right in. You guys ready? Let's do this. Yeah. All right, the first one we have, this one's from Alex. Neelai is a good boss.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Alex from Falls Church, Virginia. I want to say I love Vergecast. I love Decoder. I've learned a lot from you all and laughed along with you all. And what I want to know is David Pierce has said a few times, or there have been jokes about how much David Pierce hates Decoder. And I wanted to know, is this David Pierce actually hate Decoder? Is this a running joke? Did I miss something in an early podcast about this? So I just am curious about the history, about how and why David Pierce hates Decoder. Thanks very much. I look forward to hearing your response.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  I want to know the answer to this question, too. The beauty of this is this will be quick, because yes, I absolutely hate Decoder. No, I love Decoder. And actually, a thing we have talked about a bunch recently is how to sort of bring our podcasts closer together and do more stuff together. Like, Neelai, I'm curious, from your perspective, I don't hate Decoder, but I think one of the funny challenges of Decoder and The Vergecast is that you are on both of them.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:36David Pierce?

  And I know for a fact that you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what goes where on our many, many two podcasts. So I think the ongoing question for me is like, how do these two shows differ from each other, especially given the fact that one of the hosts is the same person?

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  The top line is that Decoder is a business show and The Vergecast is a product show, a tech product show. That is not actually a good guideline. Everything is the same thing on our show. Like, on Decoder, I ask people about the products they make. I think that's the most important and interesting and illuminating way to get to the heart of like what an executive does. Like, if you're an executive and show me Decoder and you can't talk about your products, like, I know a lot about you as an executive. On the flip side, and I think this is actually more important, it's funny that David jokes about how much he hates Decoder. We have only recently talked about bringing those shows together. And I actually recently said to David that I had been waiting for someone else to have that idea.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  Because if I did it, then I'm just munging everything together. And when David came back and we were expanding The Vergecast, I wanted to make sure The Vergecast had a lot of space to grow into the next version of itself, especially with David hosting the second episode. I think that's done. I don't know, David, you tell me. But it was your idea the other day when you said that to me. So I think that process is done. And I do think we should, we can start talking about the interviews on Decoder more, running those clips more, like, using that the same way that we use the other journalism on the site to enhance this show. Because it's right there. And I don't think there's any particular reason that they need to be so far apart, except you tell me, I think the character I play on Decoder is a little different than the character I am on The Vergecast, which is much more like myself.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, on Decoder, it's a game. It's a game that executives can try to win, which is, are you good at your job?

• 6:22David Pierce?

  I do like, every time I start a Decoder episode and I hear you doing the intro, I'm like, oh, it's business, Neelai. Like, it's like, grown-up Neelai is the one who runs Decoder and bonkers Neelai is the one we get on The Vergecast. It's great.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Decoder Neelai wears a tie.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, I think, I just think we've hit a pretty natural point in the evolution of both of these shows where there's no reason to keep them apart. I think it's very funny to have fake beef and we'll keep doing that forever.

• 6:48David Pierce?

  I do hate Decoder, just to be very clear.

• 6:50Alex Cranz?

  Decoder is the worst.

• 6:51David Pierce?

  Okay, so that's, yeah, that's a good one. I think in general, like, as we grow our podcast universe, the big question for me is like, how do you do all that in a way that is cool, but also like rewards people for listening to everything? Because the thing that I hate, and there are podcasts out there that I will not name that do this, is like, they have shows that are essentially just like compilations of other shows. And so you're like, the more I engage with you, the less it feels like it's worth my time. And what I really don't want to do is that, where it's like, if you've listened to Decoder, and then you listen to The Vergecast, it's just like Decoder again, or vice versa.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 7:23David Pierce?

  I think that's very bad. But if we can find ways to put those things together that like, make sense and are good, I'm all for it.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Also, the point is to like, grow, right? Like, not in a rapacious, capitalistic way, but it's like, find new audiences and like, be of service to them. And if we're all, if we just make more Vergecast, or it's all Decoder, we're actually not gonna grow. Like, the things need to be different so they can go attract different groups of people. And that, that's always just sort of on my mind. Like, are we just making more of the same thing? Or are we actually making different products for different customers? That's like, the most Decoder thing I've ever said. I'm gonna quit now.

• 7:56David Pierce?

  Neel, I just put the tie on as he was saying. All right, let's get to the next one. This is an email from James, which I'm using as kind of a proxy for a bunch of emails we got, all on roughly the same subject. James says, "Over time, there have been a number of comments about Neelai using an SLR for his webcam, but I don't think he's ever given the details of that setup and how he runs it. I'd love to know more of those details, as I'm thinking about how I might set up a better remote setup at home than just me sitting in front of my computer." And the question we've gotten from a bunch of people is just, how, what gear do you use when you sit down to record the podcast? They've asked this question about all three of us. Neelai, I think you talk about it the most, and also you have that weird camera that hangs down in front of your computer, so you've gotten it the most. So why don't you start? Just like, you're in the studio right now, but when

• 8:38David Pierce?

  you're at home, you also just moved, so you're rethinking this. What is, what is the Neelai Patel home studio setup like right now?

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, first, I want to point out that David and Alex have gone through just an incredible array of camera setups.

• 8:50David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  Just the most overcomplicated, overthinking.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Software-dependent.

• 8:56David Pierce?

  That's accurate.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, at one point, Alex trans like, you know what? I'm gonna hinge my career on Sony software. It's a real choice that she attempted to make.

• 9:04Alex Cranz?

  I'm still here, though.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  It's true. We've survived. I'm just saying, in the background of me doing the dumbest thing, they're like, oh, for thinking. So my setup is super dumb. I am rethinking it because we just moved and I've got some new dedicated space to monkey with. But it is Sony ZV1s. I use them both as the webcam for my meeting camera at work and as a camera for the podcast setup. So it's a ZV1. They're mounted on arms. They're fed into HDMI capture cards. That's it. And I turn them on and it is a hardware solution that looks good.

• 9:38David Pierce?

  Other than being expensive, that sounds like a pretty straightforward setup.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What I want to get to is a setup at home that looks as much like the look that we have in the studio. So it's not jarring to the audience, depending on where I am. This is much more of a big deal for Decoder because we're subject to other people's schedules. So I just want to make it look like, no matter where I am or where we're doing a show, the look is the same. So that's kind of on my mind as I build out my new space. But sort of as a pandemic panic purchase, like, I need a webcam that looks good. The ZV1 was perfect in its moment. And now they're on to the ZV2. I bet you can find ZV1s for cheap. But there's a bunch of Sony menus you gotta dig through and settings and da, da, da, da, da. It is not happy doing this all the time. Sometimes it overheats and you gotta put it in different months. Whatever.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  You can get it to a place where it just reliably serves as a webcam when you turn it on. And all of that is hardware and not software. And I cannot convince these two to stop using software.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, all right, Alex, go. What's yours?

• 10:41Alex Cranz?

  Okay, the one I'm currently using, bulletproof for the last two, two weeks so far, is the Insta360 Link.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, this is very popular in our reviews team.

• 10:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Liam sent it to me because my last camera was the Opel C1 and it kept overheating and turning off during the recordings, which was the theme for all of my cameras thus far. So we'll see how the Insta360 Link does. But the Sony, Sony Imaging Webcam was my original and it was. Plugging into a Sony A7 III and it did not, did not do the job very well.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  The combination of old camera, bad software is really just.

• 11:22Alex Cranz?

  It's really bad. Well, then I got like, I like, Dieter was on to me and he was like, just go get a cord. And I got a cable, but unfortunately it still would overheat constantly because the Sony A7 III is not meant to be on continuously shooting for an hour at a time. So yeah, now I'm on that and I rock a seven or an SM7B. Sure, Mike. Just the old standard. It's very fancy. It used to run into an Moto M2, but there was a terrible buzz periodically that no one could figure out why it started or would stop. And our audio producer said, stop it and sent me a Scarlett.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  They sent you the other entry level interface that no one likes.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Alex has steadfastly refused to stop using her stupid hardware and software so many times over the last 12 months. We're like, Alex, stop using the weird Nvidia thing. And she's like, no, I want to use the weird Nvidia thing.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  It should work, damn it.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  It should work. By the way, what I'll tell you, if you go out to buy a USB HDMI capture card, you think they're all the same. So you will instinctively refuse to pay for a name brand. You will go on Amazon and be like, I could spend $20 on the name brand one, or I could spend seven on the Alphabet Soup brand. And there's a difference. I just promise you, there's a difference. Once you're like, find yourself troubleshooting like one USB dongle for three weeks. You're like, oh, I should have just spent this month. My time is worth infinitely more than $23. And I'm not telling you that that happened to me. I'm just, I'm warning you against an outcome.

• 12:52Alex Cranz?

  Hasn't happened to anyone on this show.

• 12:55David Pierce?

  Do you ever feel like it's a miracle? We actually successfully make a podcast every week?

• 13:00David Pierce?

  My setup is actually very similar to Alex's. I think I've been through an even longer series of insane webcam ideas. I also had an Opal for a long time and then I got so annoyed with the Opal, I went back to the Logitech C920 that everybody has. It doesn't look very good, but it works really well. I had a long run of using my phone as my webcam with the Camo app, which is. Wonderful.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  Which was hilarious because we couldn't text David. We couldn't send, he couldn't use his phone while we were podcasting.

• 13:30David Pierce?

  Which is on one hand like useful, that it forced me to pay attention to meetings more, which was good. But the other part is like, you're just constantly rigging up and de-rigging your webcam, which is very annoying. But it looked really good, worked super well. So if you just like have a second phone lying around, that's a great idea. But yeah, I'm also now on the Insta 360. It works fine. I occasionally accidentally turn on the auto tracking and it just follows me around my room, which creeps me out. But

• 13:55Alex Cranz?

  It's the best part.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  Other than that, no complaints. It works pretty well. Webcams are not as good as they should be, is my overarching takeaway.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  You just buy a Sony ZV1, you put it on an arm, you mount the arm at about eye level and you look down the barrel and everyone's like, what magic are you doing? And it's like, I spent $500. That's the magic.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. So do you have it, you have it in front of your computer screen?

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  So I have two setups, because I need to have physical distance between podcasting mode and work mode. So I've got the 2015 iMac, which is the podcast rig. And on that one, the arm comes down over in front of the screen. So I can have my notes behind the camera, but then I can just like look down the barrel of the lens. And because it's a 27 inch screen, you can kind of just like make it all work. And then on the sort of like the zoom setup, I've got my delightful Samsung curved TV off to the side. It is actually great for this purpose and the camera is on an arm and it's right in the middle of that display.

• 14:50David Pierce?

  Got it.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  So I'm kind of just like always looking, it looks like I'm looking at people. And then I have my laptop there and that, I don't know if that is, I don't know if that's going to persist. That was like a, I made it during the pandemic and I convinced myself it was good.

• 15:03Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it works except for whenever there's someone directly behind your camera.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Alex Cranz?

  And you're like, I got everybody.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  And I forget the one person in the zoom square. If you're listening to this, the Google Meet team is listening to this, make it so I can block out the middle square so I can put the camera in front of it.

• 15:16David Pierce?

  Like the free space on the bingo card.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Just leave one square blank.

• 15:20David Pierce?

  All right, let's move on. This one, we're just gonna do because we get this all the time, and we should answer it on the show again. This is an email we got from George that says, "It's been a while since I heard why you all don't do chapters. Figured I'd see if you are using the same reason. If it's not possible with your current contract, are you all considering moving to another service? Please let me know who I should be directing my inquiry to, and I would bug them." People are so mad that we don't have chapters in the audio version of this podcast. Liam, our lead producer, Liam, do you want to come answer this question? I'd like you to answer this question.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  The answer is that we use Megaphone, a product owned by Spotify. I think a vast majority of large publishers use them because it allows us to manage our advertising inventory effectively. Unfortunately, it does not support chapters. It's crazy, and something we've talked to them about many times, and we were promised that it is coming soon. But thus far, we have not gotten that feature.

• 16:20David Pierce?

  That answer is both true and complete, and fills me with rage.

• 16:26David Pierce?

  Surprising that Spotify is not a terrific place to listen to podcasts. Who would have thunk? Yeah, that, I just wanted to get that out of the way. It is real. We would like to do it. Chapters are great. They're so good, and I wish we had them. And someday we will. And that will be, that will be a great day. All right, let's move on to the next one. We have a question from Dennis. Dennis's question is, "Ever since the last redesign of The Vergecast, I was wondering if you could tell us more about the new jingle. I really dig it, and maybe you could give some insights into the process of creating this. Also, if you could publish a full version somewhere, I could really see myself listening to it on its own." Neel, you really led this. You want to talk about the jingle?

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  So we were just rethinking how everything looked, and we'd been using the same theme, which I believe Josh Tepolsky just like made on his computer in 2011. And it's great. We love it. We should use it again. Classic Vergecast theme. One thing about things people like is if you take them away for a while and you bring them back, people get really excited. So I'm always thinking about that with our logos, with our themes, all that stuff. But you gotta refresh and update, and we are launching the second episode, and sometimes the stuff you make just isn't, can't get big enough. Like, we didn't have enough Stems. We didn't have enough like bits and bobs to extend the show the way we needed to. So we went out to Breakmaster Cylinder, who also did the Decoder theme and it was amazingly fun working with them. And we, the only note I will give is we did a bunch of rounds. We, it's built on the old theme.

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  So you can hear it's the same pieces of music. And I just kept giving notes that I wanted it to sound more like Fascination Street by The Cure. And at some point Breakmaster Cylinder was like, oh, I get it. You want a rock song and I keep making hip hop songs. And that was the, like the heavens burst open and then we had the theme. But the real piece of it, the real important part of it was we needed something that was much more flexible. So we can make all the new kinds of shows that we were setting out to make.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  So, uh, speaking of that particular reboot, another question we got was from Raphael and essentially says, I love the new art formats and especially sound design the podcast got. It's easy to relate it to David's comeback, but I think it would be interesting to hear from you how that went. If you have any other plans coming and your thoughts and feelings in general. Which is a very vague question, but I think generally it's like where we, at some point decided like, we're going to reboot the Vergecast a bit and the, the sort of impetus for that happened before I got here. So like rewind, I don't know, 18 months, we'd been doing this show for 11 years at the time. What was the conversation like that it was like, let's change what this thing is a bit?

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, there are two things. One, Dieter had just left. So there was a big conversation about like, how will we do this? Well, Neil, I just rant about USBC for one hour a week. Well, that, is that an acceptable show? Will that make us any money? Is that going to get you some time? The answer is no. I think very obviously no. And so when I went to see if David wanted to come back to the Verge, the thing I said was host the Vergecast. Like it is a big property. People care about it a lot. It needs a lot of focused attention from someone who gets it. And David was like, yes. And then five minutes later, he showed up. So that was like a big part of it was like, if you're going to change the host, you're going to change the show. The other part of it, which is the business part of it, is that the show is successful. And so our company

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  wants more of it all the time, just an infinite amount of Vergecast. And you know, the dynamic there, the tension there is I don't, I don't think everybody, like I don't think the audience wants an infinite amount of Vergecast. So it has to be really good. And we have to like, put a boundary on how much we're going to do. Cause there's, you know, our effort has to be sustained. So I think that's, that's it. Like, I think we're at a moment where we have the Friday show, which is like loose. And I think David once called them like the DVD liner notes of The Verge.

• 20:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

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

• 20:16David Pierce?

  Like literally logistically.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

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

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

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

• 20:58David Pierce?

  Alex, you kind of came into The Vergecast in the middle of that transition, right? What was that like?

• 21:05Alex Cranz?

  It was kind of exciting and also alarming and terrifying, mainly to like come in with Neelai and Dieter, who are really, really, really good at this. And I think like 90% of my early episodes, I don't say anything. Cause I'm just watching them and like studying them the whole time.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  No, no one understands that this is a test. It's like you have to talk. And if you don't talk, then they're not going to want to.

• 21:27Alex Cranz?

  And then it'd be like, oh God, I gotta talk. I gotta say something. And so like trying to figure that out, trying to figure out like, what are the things I want to talk about on the show and, and make kind of part of my character on the show. It was a lot of work and it was a lot of like thinking about it and, and talking with Dieter about it and, and figuring it all out. And then David came and I was like, David, hello. Guide me, and it was great.

• 21:46David Pierce?

  Then I screwed everything up for you again.

• 21:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, you ruined everything, so thanks a lot.

• 21:50David Pierce?

  I think the way you describe it, at least from my perspective, Neelai, is pretty much about right. It was like, we want more Vergecast, come do it. And I got a text from Dieter on my first day, who was like, you know, "Good luck. If you ruin the Vergecast, I'll kill you." Like, in those words, in that order, is what he said. And I sincerely hope I have not ruined the Vergecast. I'm trying very hard to ruin it every single day, but I don't think we've gotten quite there yet.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Success is right on the edge of ruining it.

• 22:16David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing about this show that no one quite understands.

• 22:19David Pierce?

  Agreed. All right, we have one more about the Vergecast, and then we're gonna take a break. This is from Ben, and it's my favorite voicemail we've gotten recently.

• 22:30Speaker 07

  Hey, this is Ben. Not really a question. Just want to let Neelai know that Pump Up the Volume is currently streaming on Max. All right, have a nice day.

• 22:40David Pierce?

  That's all you need to know about the Vergecast.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  That's very, it's very important information. So I think that we should do like a watch party of this movie. The problem is that the movie was made a while ago. There are topless people in it. There are some ideas in it that maybe don't hold up. I would love to do this watch party. I just think we all have to sign contracts agreeing that we know what we're getting into together before we begin. But I promise you, the scene in Pump Up the Volume where Christian Sliders is driving around in his girlfriend's Jeep, broadcasting a pirate radio station while the FCC chases him in little vans, that is as clear a statement of the editorial mission of The Verge as I can give you. That is what we do here.

• 23:22David Pierce?

  There you go. That's all you need to know. And if somebody would like to remake that scene, playing the Vergecast as the underlying audio, and send that to me, it would make us very happy. Vergecast, verge.com. All right, we're gonna take a break, and then we're gonna get back, and we're gonna do some Verge-er questions. We'll be right back.

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• 24:46David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So the second category of questions we got was about like The Verge in general. And Neelai, I think in particular, a bunch of these are more for you as, you know, the boss. But we got a bunch of good ones, so let's just dive in. The first one is from John Paul.

• 25:02Speaker 07

  Hi, this is John Paul, and I have a couple of questions for the meta-episode you guys have stated coming up. First question, can you tell me how The Verge is structured? For someone who likes org charts so much, what's the org chart look like? And why did you set it up that way? Also, what's The Verge's relationship with Vox? How is it structured within the larger organization? Also, similar question, you're in a pretty big newsroom and you make lots of decisions. Can you tell me how you make decisions? What's your decision-making framework? These questions might sound a little familiar. Looking forward to hearing your answers. Bye.

• 25:34David Pierce?

  I wish you all could see the smile on Neelai's face right now. This is gonna be the longest Verge cast of all time.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  Your children have grown up to hoist you on your own petard. That is the phrase. It's like, oh, no, I did it to myself.

• 25:46David Pierce?

  Let's just do it in reverse. So the first question is, how is the Verge structured?

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the Verge is structured. It's like a high-performance Montessori. Like, my goal for the Verge is everyone just does whatever they want, and it's awesome. So we are structured to enable that. And that's like a very top-line thing. But basically, we have desks, right? We have a reviews desk. We have a policy desk. We have a creators desk. That ladders into like just very top-line subjects. Like, Jake Kastranakis is our tech editor. It's basically by subject matter expertise is how we are structured. And you can look at our masthead, you can see how that goes. Then next to that, we have audio and video, which is a format. So then we have like a format-specific division, basically.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  And that's because the tools and the processes and the cadences of that work are different than the newsroom and text. Those are the two sort of axes that I think about is our features program runs on like a year-long cadence. And so they are thinking on very different timelines than our news team. And so in the formats, we had to manage different cadences. And then we need to make sure that we have subject matter expertise through all of that. And that is like, you might surmise that I enjoy messing with our org chart because those things are intention. So you're, I, we are just always kind of like rebalancing how that works and thinking about it. But those are the two things, just operationally, that we have to manage. Like, how long it takes to make something? And then how much you need to know to make the thing?

• 27:15Nilay Patel?

  And like where that knowledge should get concentrated? And then how those timelines should be managed?

• 27:19David Pierce?

  Alex, you're the person who spends all of your days like making all of that work.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Alex is the actual managing editor.

• 27:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, I was like, I've memorized the org chart. I can list every single person and who they report to at the Verge. I don't know if I should have that information in my head, but there it is.

• 27:36David Pierce?

  Does that structure make sense to you? Like, is you're sort of operating that structure day to day? Does that, does his description feel right to you?

• 27:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, it does. I think like having different mediums is really, they function totally differently, right? Like, like how the ideation works, how the timeline to get things up works is totally, totally different. So you kind of need a little bit of separation there. But then you also have to make sure they overlap enough and they communicate enough that like... Good conversations are happening and you don't have like somebody writing a story and somebody doing a podcast of the or the exact same thing, doing them in parallel without talking to each other. And so

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  This is especially hard remote, I would say.

• 28:13Alex Cranz?

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

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  My goal is that, again, everyone just does whatever they want. There's a moment about a year into a new Verge reporters tenure where like they learn how to play the piano and they're like, I can just do anything. And that's like, that's all that structure is designed for that, for that moment to happen. Cause that's the best.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think the, the like eternal struggle of the verge in every organization is how to like that overlap you're talking about, Alex, where it's like, how do we, how do we do really great stuff at like the speed of the news business? And also how do we like, when do you take the moment where it's like, okay, I'm going to go disappear for six months and do this story, even though there's constant news all the time. And Neelai, your immediate instinct is always just like news, run faster, run faster, run faster in so many ways. And it's really good in some ways, but it's also like, as the Verge has gotten bigger, figuring out how to do that and do all the other stuff we have to do at the different speeds at which they happen is like every newsroom's kind of constant struggle. Cause like things keep happening.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:32David Pierce?

  And, and you, you could be reactive to it forever and that works and you have to do that. But also there's other stuff we want to do that isn't just run as fast as the news cycle all the time.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll give you one very specific example that I think for a chess listeners will deeply understand. News and reviews operate on different timelines.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  Like they just do to review a product. Well, you have to just fall into it. Like you have to pay attention to it for a significant period of time and then you can like, put out a good product review. That takes longer than writing the news. However, we have competitors that have solved this problem by totally divorcing their news and reviews operations. The reviewers never write news, the news reporters never write reviews, and what you get is a bunch of reporters who have never used the products, who just don't understand the products, and a bunch of reviewers who have, who are writing reviews as though the news is not happening. And we talk about this. We've talked about this since the beginning of The Verge. Like, we see these other places that do this. We don't ever want to do that. The problem is that as you get bigger and you want to review

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  more things and write more news, there's a reason that they split those things up. Like, there's a totally rational, explainable, deeply understandable reason why you would pull those teams apart, because they need to run in different directions and different timelines. We're just insistent about smashing them together so that our reviews read as though they take place on the same planet as everyone lives on. And our news reporters understand that you can't just assume that tech companies can make every decision perfectly because they're actually using their products and they're aware of the trade-offs that are inherent to like building any product. And that, I think, is, that's what we do here. But it, after a while, you're like, oh, this is the problem that I have signed up to manage forever. Like, the job is actually just this problem.

• 31:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. And I think you've kind of halfway answered this already, but Jean-Paul did ask about how you make decisions, which is the Decoder question. So answer the damn Decoder question, Eli.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  So if you listen to Decoder and you listen to people answer this question, some people are not prepared for it, which is very funny. Like, just immediately the funniest thing to me. Like, how do you not know this is coming? And then there's like four or five variations, and I am very much on the Amazon end of that variation, which is, you just need to divide up your decisions into things that you can quickly undo and have low stakes and things that have high stakes. And you need to make the low-stakes decisions as fast as you can and be ultra decisive about them.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  That's the one-way door and two-way door strategy, right? That's how they talk about it?

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or it's a type A and type B, or type one and type two. And I always forget which one's which. But yeah, there's the two-way door. You can just go back and do it again. And then there's the like, oh, this isn't existentially important. And so I try really hard to make it to everyone's chagrin. I'm like, we should just do this all the time. But I think that's really important for a newsroom. I think the challenge is for a newsroom, a thing like a headline or an image choice. Like, those are actually one-way doors. You don't get to go back. Like, your credibility is on the line. So you have to build a set of instincts about that stuff that I think is just hard fought and you need a lot of scar tissue. But we are very blessed to have a large group of people that has honestly worked together for a very long time comparatively to any media organization.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  And so I think there's sort of a collective intelligence about what The Verge is that allows us to make those decisions very quickly.

• 32:46David Pierce?

  Do you want to say anything about The Verge's relationship with Vox before we skip on to our next person?

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  We're a pirate ship. I don't know what they do.

• 32:53David Pierce?

  Here we go.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  It's a very honest, and our CEO has said this, like, for us, our audience moves faster. It's a tech audience. It moves faster than a general news audience or whatever. Our audience is younger than everybody else. This is a true thing. I think only Polygon's younger than us. We have been given the opportunity to run as fast as we want in directions that we want to run it, and that's honestly great.

• 33:14David Pierce?

  And speaking of one of those changes, here's our next voicemail from Austin.

• 33:17Speaker 08

  Hey, Vergecast, this is Austin from Seattle. I got a question. What has the emotional journey been like while y'all transitioned to WordPress? Thanks. Hope to hear from you.

• 33:29David Pierce?

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

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  I feel joy. I feel nothing but joy.

• 33:46Alex Cranz?

  100%. Yeah, like Chorus is exceptional, right? It's it's an exceptional CMS. I've used a lot of CMSs. There was one where you couldn't use that I used where you couldn't use the same image twice.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Like ever?

• 34:01Alex Cranz?

  You would have to like ever. So you have to like upload it flipped or like slightly cropped. It was so dumb. That was horrible. And and and Chorus has been really, really great, but I'm excited for WordPress. Like, that's where I first started. That was like my very first website that I went and put on the web and and blogged on was a WordPress site. And and I'm excited to go back there.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, it's joy because like we haven't yet gone on the first date. We're just looking forward to it, you know?

• 34:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like the anticipation where, ooh, what's gonna happen?

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

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

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  And we should try. So like, that's that's where the joy comes from is, oh, why is our development effort pointed at a database and a word processor?

• 35:25David Pierce?

  Solve the problems worth solving.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  We should build user experiences.

• 35:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone I've talked to is like deeply nervous because we're a bunch of nerds who are like extremely attuned to the user experience of the products that we use. And like, we just got an email that we're about to switch to the new Slack and everyone's terrified. And so there's like a lot of that energy in the WordPress transition too, that it's like, we're all sort of used to the good and bad things about Chorus, which is a very good piece of software. We've been on it for a very long time. Like, it's the devil you know and the devil you don't, right? But I do think being open to like the entirety of the WordPress ecosystem is going to be super, super cool. And there's all kinds of stuff we can do.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  And we haven't even talked about activity pub yet.

• 36:04David Pierce?

  Oh, we're getting to that. Yeah, don't you worry. The last question is just four hours of Neel I ranting about activity pub. So don't worry. All right, let's get to our next one, which comes from Charlotte.

• 36:13Speaker 09

  Hi, my name is Charlotte. You guys talk a lot about other journalists and other publications such as TechCrunch, and it seems like people move from The Verge to TechCrunch, et cetera, all over. What's it like being friends with your competitors and how do you kind of balance that work and having to compete with them and also still being friends and collaborating? Thanks, bye.

• 36:38Alex Cranz?

  They're our enemy. We don't collaborate.

• 36:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, David's moved around the most.

• 36:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:43David Pierce?

  So you should answer this one. I think it's hard to explain but really easy in practice. Like, I both love a lot of the people who work at a lot of other publications and absolutely earnestly want to kick their ass to every story all the time. And I understand that there is like cognitive dissonance there, but it's just true. And I think part of it is also like this part of journalism is relatively small. Like, even the way that we think about tech. Everybody covers tech now. It's all over the place. It's huge in a way that like in 2011 it was not, right? Like, the world of people who cared about tech the way that we do is much smaller then. It's still pretty small now. Like, there are a lot of people who cover these companies as big businesses. There are a lot of people who cover them from like

• 37:26David Pierce?

  varying different perspectives, but in this space of like people who cover technology as technology, it's very small. And having like a bunch of other nerds around to talk about this stuff with is just always fun. And there's so much to do in this space that I feel like I probably feel less competitive than I should sometimes. But at the same time, like, we just see each other all the time in a way that you don't in a lot of businesses, right?

• 37:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Like, when companies do investor events, they don't have like hundreds of reporters that they make stand in a room for hours drinking coffee before they go see the like quarterly earnings be unveiled. But we do that. We see all these people at Apple events. We see them all. At Google events, we see them a bunch of times a year. And we're just all talking about the same stuff every day. So it's like, natural, I think, that you build a real like kinship with these people. And there's only like six publications, so we've all worked together at one point or another. Yeah, we've killed most of the others. I want to be clear. We are soaked in blood.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  We are smiling and blood drips down our fangs. It wasn't us, no, it was the larger me. But it's true that our early competitive set has been winnowed way, way, way down. And that, you know, I don't, I don't love that. Actually, we talk a lot about needing great competitors because that, that's what keeps us sharp. And respecting your great competitors and being friendly with them does not negate the fact that you feel competitive with them, like in, in like big ways. I would say this, like, the power of The Verge over the past decade has been its graduating classes. Like, we've graduated a lot of people out into a lot of publications, most notably Bloomberg. And now, like, Bloomberg is just like Verge Midtown. Like, you just go, it's just a bunch of people we know. And so, like, that's great.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I like being the place where people get good, you know, and like can go on and do other things. I like being the place where, when our competitor publications look for leadership, and that's like the thing I like graduating out, I like graduating out senior people and editors and leaders. I think that's just a good cycle. Like, the earlier question was like, the main thing I think about is our culture. Like, that's what the culture develops. And then, obviously, all those people are still very friendly with us, but we call them expats. Like, they're still, they're still The Verge. There's a lot of power in this world. I always joke with David that I have a theory of true power, and it's like, by the end of this, we will just run every publication. That's the goal.

• 39:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's 100% it.

• 39:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, the, the Verge diaspora is a, like, extremely cool and increasingly powerful group of people. It's pretty awesome.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  The editor of Wired, by the way, is a Verge expat. I just want to put that out there in the world.

• 40:00David Pierce?

  We're taking over. It's what we do.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's like a, and Katie's great, and she, that has nothing to do with her Verge history. She's just great. If you had told us in 2011 that that would be the direction, I would have never believed you.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right, next one. This is an email we got from Paul that says, "I think the casual reader at The Verge might assume the staff are all very heavy tech users, constantly scrolling and getting notifications from multitude of apps, upgrading the flip phones and MacBooks frequently, but listening to the show, it seems like quite the opposite. Neel has mentioned he blocks almost all notifications from his phone and that he removed apps with endless feeds. David mentioned before, becoming a father, that he wanted..." To avoid becoming a tech dad. I'm curious what views the rest of the team has that may be counterintuitive for people who spend so much time thinking, writing and talking about tech. I guess what I'm asking is who is the biggest Luddite at The Verge? Which A is a very good question and B, I think the the sort of underlying question here is basically like, are you still a bunch of tech nerds who just love tech all the time?

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I reject the premise of this question?

• 40:56David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  Is that allowed? I mean, I love you for listening and I love you for asking. I appreciate that you're asking. I I just don't think I agree with the premise that being a heavy user of tech requires you to have your notifications on.

• 41:08David Pierce?

  Okay, yeah.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, I I think that this is actually a thing that gets conflated like quite a bit. Like, I am an intense user of technology. I will, I spent my train ride to the office today reading about Matter Adaptive Lighting upgrades. Like, that's where I'm at in life, you know? What I am selfish about and what I'm not a heavy user of is like unfiltered garbage information. And like mostly what what people think of as tech products, like just provide that to you. Like a a nonstop flood of garbage. And like, I would say that the the power user move is to use the tools in the way that these companies do not want you to use them and turn them all off and then only take what you want. And what I want is for HomeKit Adaptive Lighting to be compatible with Matter.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  Which it is not at this time.

• 41:57David Pierce?

  You're a simple man of simple needs.

• 41:59Alex Cranz?

  It's not, it's really brutal.

• 42:01Nilay Patel?

  You can disagree with me. I think that's totally fair, but I think there's a, there's a thing in there, right? Which is like, are you a Luddite because you don't have all your notifications turned on? And it's like, no, I just, I just don't need people to interrupt me. I'm busy, you know, like, I'll take information at my terms, you know, and I'm in the news. So my terms are, I want a lot of it. I just want to be focused. Most of these platforms, like Elon Musk is just like masked off with Twitter, right? He's like, my focus is keeping you on the platform. I'm taking the headlines away. And it's like, oh, I don't. I don't care about what you think. Like, I'll, I'm turning off your notifications. You can't have me. That, to me, feels like more of a power user move. Like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everyone's gonna disagree with me, but that I would just, that's the turn I would make.

• 42:42Alex Cranz?

  I think you're right. Like, I think the power user move is to figure out which bits you actually wanna use and use them and incorporate them into your life in a really, like, satisfying way. And I would say the majority of the staff does that. Like, not everybody has the newest phone or their newest laptop, but they have figured out a workflow that is deeply, profoundly nerdy and made that work. And I think that's kinda like the core of The Verge is finding those solutions that work for you. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have every single app constantly filtering things in, or you have to be like, like, for the longest time, I thought the real tech nerd was the person who mastered Rain Meter on Windows.

• 43:24Alex Cranz?

  Like, that was it for me. And I think that is, like, there's definitely tech nerdery to it, but it's not like the only part. And everybody's a different type of tech nerd. I know people who are super into phones and have no idea what matter, like, how to use matter, what the process there is. And I have friends who are super into their home theater systems to an alarming degree, and they have like a six-year-old phone. Everybody's got a different kind of love of tech.

• 43:50David Pierce?

  I do think there was a long period of tech where there were like, a small number of things to be really into. And so it was like, I mean, you rewind whatever, 40 years, and the only thing to be into was like PCs, right? So you were just like, and then, and then we got, you know, it expanded a little, and then there were like phones, and everybody's really into phones. And now it's like, if you wanna be super weirdly into some line of tech, there are a billion to choose from. And I feel like what's been fun about The Verge is watching everybody sort of pick their thing, right? It's like, it's like being, it's like being really into movies. You end up sort of picking a thing that you care about more than everybody else and wanna talk to everybody else about it even though they don't care. And like, that's The Verge with tech. We all have things that no one else cares about that we do, and that's the prerequisite of working here.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  Like I said, everyone's just doing whatever they want. Yeah. Yeah, no, I will talk your face off about building. I need to build a new home theater, right, for the new house.

• 44:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, every time Neelai brings up Dolby Atmos, that's when I just like turn off my microphone and walk away for a few minutes of the podcast.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  At this point, Dolby is like, come to the office, just come here.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  By the way, but can I just answer the question right? It's Liz Lopato is the biggest Luddite.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, 100%.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  Friend of the verge, Brian Merchant, who has written for us, we've excerpted his previous books, he's got a new book out, by the way, about the history of Luddites and what they were actually after. And it's like, mind blowing. When the book comes out, we'll like have him on or something, it's great.

• 45:11David Pierce?

  All right, one more before we take a break. This is from Will, get ready.

• 45:15Speaker 08

  Hey, this is Will in San Diego. A two-part question, is Neelai a cool boss? And does he give nice back rubs? All right, thank you.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's 2023, sir. No bosses should have given back rubs.

• 45:29David Pierce?

  Legally, we cannot answer that second question.

• 45:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm out here being like, I don't know if I can watch pump up the volume with these people.

• 45:37David Pierce?

  I will say, we got this question a lot, which makes me think we should like actually try to answer it.

• 45:41Alex Cranz?

  The back rubs question?

• 45:42David Pierce?

  Not the back rubs question. Will's the only one who wondered about the back rubs. Will, whatever that says about you, we'll come back to that. But the is Neelai a good boss question is when we actually got a lot. So Alex, I think we should attempt to answer this as earnestly and honestly as possible.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  While I'm here?

• 45:58David Pierce?

  While Neelai is here. We're gonna, this is.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, Neil is about to not be a very good boss, I'll tell you that.

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  Neelai is an exceptional boss.

• 46:06David Pierce?

  I will say, the question was not, is he a good boss? It's, is he a cool boss? Subtly, we did get good boss, but I like cool boss as a question more.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm like, you should, you should just drink at home, so you're safe.

• 46:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Neelai and I have had like meetings about stuff while having a drink. It's great, like, who doesn't love a drinking, working meeting? It's wonderful. I think that's the definition of a cool boss.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's literally the definition of the cool mom from Mean Girls. I just want to be clear.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  That too, that too.

• 46:36David Pierce?

  I think the way I always describe Neelai as a boss is that if you want to be as chaotic as Neelai wants you to be, he is the best boss in the world. If Neelai gets bored, it's a problem. So, and this is true in all things. A bored Neelai is a dangerous Neelai. This is why we get worried when Neelai is like on a flight with no wifi. Like, bad things happen when Neelai has five hours to sit and think by himself.

• 47:01Alex Cranz?

  The ideas are always great that come out of those flights.

• 47:03David Pierce?

  There's always a Google Doc. It's terrifying. But I think, to me, one of the things that is like fun about having you as my boss, Neelai, is that you're like forever trying to do bigger, weirder, different things. Like, I have worked at places that are very much like, here is what we do, and our job is to keep doing it. And I understand why that's good and valuable, and it has just like never been what like excites me day to day to just like keep doing my job every day. And I feel like every three weeks, Neelai shows up and is like, what if we just did everything super differently, just to see what happens? And that's like, it is never boring with Neelai as your boss. It's chaos.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  This is horrible. This is like having someone write your resume in front of you. I cannot tell you how much I dislike this.

• 47:42David Pierce?

  Neelai, do you think you're a good boss?

• 47:43Alex Cranz?

  Cool boss, cool boss.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Cool. I'm definitely a cool boss.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  Which means drunk. I just want to be clear. Which means lightly sauced. I've been watching a lot of Mad Men clips on TikTok. I've got, I've picked up a bunch of ideas. I don't know. I try really hard to be a good boss. Some days I'm much worse than other days. The only thing that I can measure that against is how confident our most junior people are. Like, I don't worry about David. David's gonna tell me to fuck off. Like, it's fine. And we have a lot of people on our staff who've been with us for a long time, who are very confident in telling me what to do. And that's great. And I love them and cherish them. What I am always thinking about is the youngest, most junior person on our staff, and how far along they are on the road to playing the piano and being able to do whatever they want.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

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

• 49:14David Pierce?

  All right. We have a couple more quick ones. Let's take a break. We're going to do the last couple, and then we'll get out of here. We'll be right back.

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• 50:27David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Next question. Tell us the top worst 10 things about Neily as opposed to... No, we're gonna hard pivot away from that to... We have two, I think, sort of bigger picture questions about how we think about tech and The Verge and the future. So we're gonna do those before we get out of here. Here's the first one from Santiago.

• 50:46Speaker 10

  Hey, Verge team. This is Santiago from Orlando. I want to ask, how has your role and editorial stand shifted from the start of The Verge to today? As we're more conscious of the possibility for technology misuse? And how have you seen your coverage on AI evolve as the product is more broadly used? And becomes more integrated in everyday technology? Love the show. Thanks for everything.

• 51:06David Pierce?

  I included this question because this is literally a conversation we have been having internally about how we think about tech now. Like, I look back to 2011 and Nilay, a thing you used to always say is, one of the things we do at The Verge is we peddle hope. That like, the world can get better and technology is part of that. And that one of the things we do is try to point people at what a better world looks like. Does that hold 12 years later with everything we know about what technology is and does? And all the bad things we've seen in the last 12 years?

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think so. I think we still hope. Fundamentally, we report on other people working really hard. Right? I mean, that's... The phone gets... Well, hopefully, the phone gets a little thicker in the battery if it's longer. But, you know, the phone gets thinner, the screens get bigger, they get brighter. The networks get faster to what effect? Who knows? But that dynamic, right, that I'm describing is a lot of people have to work really hard to put capabilities into the world? And to give you new tools? I think that is good. I like, the most important thing is that is a positive feedback loop. That like, we invent things and we try hard. And like, there's an earnestness to that that I never want to lose sight of. The other side of it is, well, we made 5G networks and we spent a lot of money. And why? Did we do anything good with it? Has anything good happened? Is there a robot surgery?

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  And I think that is the side that the rest of the media has focused on. And obviously, we've layered a lot of that into our coverage too, especially with social networks and things like that. It's weird that it is easier and faster to lie than ever before. Should we have built those capabilities? Should we have stopped ourselves? Maybe. And those are societal questions. So I think in 2011, that was our thesis, right? Like, oh, the world, because of phones in particular, the world is on the cusp of a massive change. And we should have a publication that like... Technology is culture, tech culture, the whole thing, all that stuff we said over a decade ago is now everything. Everyone gets it. And so our differentiation, I think, is not taking it for granted. The other line I always use is it's fun to be smart. You know, like, we spend a lot of time just like thinking about stuff.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  Our show, our audience, that's why it's big, because there's actually way more people out there that want to spend their time deeply thinking about these things than not, you know? I would say that when I think about our differentiation in the media landscape, a lot of people take it for granted. They just take it for granted that these are problems, or these are trade-offs, or you can come to other solutions, or even that it is fun to be smart about them. That being, it's like too nerdy or too easy. It's like, no, actually, you can walk up to any person on earth and ask them about their phone, and they will tell you something deeply nerdy. Like, it is an absolute unifier that this technology exists and people have emotional relationships with it.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  And you can take it seriously. So I think it's, you know, many things have happened since we launched the verge. Many things continue to happen. AI is, when I say it's easier to lie than ever before, oh, boy, do I have thoughts. But the flip side of it is like, well, people, a lot of people have to work really, really hard to make these things, and we should not take it for granted. And that, like, just in and of itself is like, to me, is still a hopeful idea.

• 54:07David Pierce?

  Alex, one of the things you and I talk about, I feel like half our Slack DMs are, we're covering this cool thing that exists. And like, AI is actually the perfect example of this right now. It's like, this cool new thing that exists that, you know, OpenAI just launched Dolly 3 and look at all the wild stuff you can do. How many paragraphs do I have to write about all the awful things that can be used here? Does every story about AI need to mostly be about the bad possibilities and the side effects and the things we haven't had? When we cover Meta, do we need to relitigate all the bad things that Meta has done over the years? Like, how do you talk about this stuff in a way that is both like hopeful and realistic and honest and self-aware? Like, do you feel like you and we have cracked that yet?

• 54:50Alex Cranz?

  I think it kind of hinges on the fact that one, we care about this stuff and we're really passionate about it and our readers are passionate about it, our writers are passionate about it and we're covering it every day. Like if you're only covering AI once a year, then you really do have to relitigate things because your audience may not be familiar with it. But our audience is typically pretty familiar with what's going on. So we don't need to be like, oh, remember that time, like rehash everything that Meta's done that's awful. We all know they've done a lot of awful stuff. We can spend a line being like, hey, by the way, Meta did something awful once six years ago and continue on, right? Like, like we don't have to re-educate people. And I think that's something that a lot of publications like can kind of fall into the trap of wanting to relitigate things,

• 55:35Alex Cranz?

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

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  I cannot wait.

• 56:22David Pierce?

  Neil, I will never have to use software again because of AI.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  Software is the worst. Hardware only. That's the new Verge. No software coverage.

• 56:30David Pierce?

  No, I think that's right. And I think like to the point about, you know, it's fun to be smart is like being alive right now means holding a lot of competing ideas in your head about what's good and what's bad and what's safe and what's problematic and how much you should care about your privacy versus all the cool stuff that exists. Like the goal, I think, is just to engage all of that as honestly as we can, rather than like try to pretend it's all one or all the other, or just ignore it all and talk about stock prices, right? There's that's one really easy shortcut to a lot of this is when the stock goes up, it's good and when the stock Goes down, it's bad. And that's a really handy way to cover tech that I think just like ignores what it's like to be a person in the world. And I think just coming into everything, acknowledging that it's all kind of a mess is a thing the verge is really good at.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  And makes it like it's, it's why it's fun to be engaged with this stuff every day because it doesn't get less messy. It just gets messy in new ways, which is really fun.

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite Walt Mossberg story? Not that I experienced, I have a favorite ones that I experienced, but just in the legend of Walt Mossberg. There's a, I believe it's a wired profile of him just like moving through CES. And he had just written some like horrible review of like a Sirius XM radio or something. And the CEO of the company stops and is like, you trashed my stock price, like on the floor of CS. And on the floor of CS, Walt Mossberg looks at him dead in the eye and says, I don't give a fuck about your stock price.

• 57:48David Pierce?

  Hell yeah.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  I just like have held this in my heart the entire time.

• 57:51David Pierce?

  I like that a lot. Um, all right. We have one more and then we're going to get out of here. The last question we have comes from Kevin.

• 57:58Speaker 11

  Hey, this is Kevin McGree from beautiful Winona, Minnesota. And I've been an active reader of the verge since around November 1st, 2011. He has been around for a long time doing great things. And I guess my real big question for everybody on the verge cast. When you're talking about hot takes and hot questions is what is your next?

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm here to announce.

• 58:17David Pierce?

  This is where he rants about activity pub.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Is this where I ranted about activity pub for four hours?

• 58:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay. My, my plan for our site is to federate our content and to be more natively integrated with whatever new class of social networks that exist. I have no idea how any of this is going to work. You can see the loose beginnings of how it might work on our site. You can see that people have built hacks to make it happen. I love it. The verge shot space is great. Don't bother that guy too much. Don't overload his server, but you can see how we're building towards. And then you can see things like, well, we've got a one column story stream. What if we had two of them? What if we had three of them? What if you could follow our writers in the call? Or topics? What if, what if you could just follow gadgets and get a stream of gadget news on our homepage? I don't know if any of that's gonna work.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  I just think we have to build cooler user experiences for people in media and not just be a supplier of cheap, undifferentiated content to Elon Musk. Maybe this is not like the most insane business proposition in the world. By the way, if you like, go anywhere else, like, what should you do? Should you have a relationship with your customer? Or should you give your shit away for free to the richest man on earth? Like, anyone else in the world would know the answer to that question. Media executives are like, I don't know, I think we should give our shit away for free. And I just don't know why that is. Like, our industry's just like, no, has no self-esteem. So I would like to verge to, to lead the way in having some confident ideas on like, how do we build stuff that's cool? How do we compete in like, software in addition to having really, really good work?

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  That is like, has journalistic ethics and all the other stuff? Yeah, that's, that's kind of my, my big idea. I've, again, no idea how this will work. We have to build a lot of it. We have to invent a bunch of it. But again, we've been given the license to do it, which I think is a pretty incredible position to be in.

• 1:00:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think we, we've entered this place where like, the media industry has spent the last 15 years basically playing everybody else's game in the social world, where it's like, you, you, you play somebody's game, you get free traffic, you lightly monetize that traffic, seems sort of like victory for a minute. And we are coming out of that game in a pretty real way. Like, just the fact that Twitter is now not showing headlines on link cards, like Elon Musk does not want you to leave his platform, and so he's going to make it very hard for you to leave his platform.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  But, and Elon is just like a very convenient villain.

• 1:00:33David Pierce?

  This is what's happening to everybody, right? Like, Google is less interested in sending you stuff. Everybody is doing that now. And so, this idea of like, I think the, the thing you're gonna see from a lot of media organizations is like, how do we build a place you wanna be? Which I think is, is correct. And then the, the thing that we're also gonna try to figure out how to do on top of that is how to like, be out in the rest of the internet in a way that makes sense and isn't just like a devil's bargain with Facebook. Which I think, I have no idea what it looks like, but I think it's gonna be very cool.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  I'll connect that, you know, there's an earlier question about like how things have changed since the beginning. In the beginning, we were just like pipsqueaks. Like, I was at this last Apple event, I think I said this on the show earlier, like, I was at this last Apple event, and like, the Cambrian explosion of like TikTok rigs just like blew my mind. Like, people inventing things to make videos fast that we would have just never seen before. And the way that some of those folks were talking to me, like, I love it when people call me the legacy media. Like, say it again. You know, like, I love it. Uh, thank you for calling me the winner. I'll take it all day long. But the thing that has changed is like, our role in the ecosystem has changed. And so we should build a product that is reflective of that role in ecosystem, a lot of which is like linking to other people,

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:02:19David Pierce?

  Alex, any thoughts last, what's on your mind for the next 12 years?

• 1:02:23Alex Cranz?

  No, I think you guys are exactly right. Like, media's in a weird kind of crisis point, and finding a way to establish yourself and not have to, like, constantly go and pay homage to all of these big social media platforms is really, really important. And it's the way you survive, and it's the way you stay independent, and it's the way you actually cover what you want to cover and not what some algorithm you don't have any control over thinks needs to be covered. And I think that's what we need to do at The Verge, and that's what we do at The Verge. So I'm really excited about it. It's a great, I like, I'm excited about the next couple of years, even though I'm sure it's gonna be kind of a hellscape for other people.

• 1:03:00David Pierce?

  12 years from now, on your, on your brain machine implant that is screwed into your head, we'll be there. I don't know what it's gonna look like.

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  We'll be there.

• 1:03:09David Pierce?

  But we'll be there. All right, we gotta go. Thank you both for doing this. Thanks to everyone who's sending questions. This was very fun.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it was really fun. I mean, there was one part of it that was horrible. The rest of it was fun.

• 1:03:18David Pierce?

  Coming up next week, everybody's ratings on Neelai as the host of The Vergecast.

• 1:03:26Speaker 12

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, weird ideas about microphones we should have, or frankly, anything else you want to know, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. Send us all your questions. We're going to keep answering vergy questions over time, I'm sure. This will not be the last time, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Matter 1.2, weird internet standards about how to post on the internet, and much more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:04:12Speaker 13

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