Everything you’ve always wondered about The Vergecast

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26:12All 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. First one is from John Paul. Hi, this is Jean-Paul, and I have a couple of questions for the meta episode you guys have said is 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?

26:46How 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. I wish you all could see the smile on Eli's face right now. This is going to be the longest Verge cast of all time. Your children have grown up to hoist you on your own vitard. That is the phrase. It's like, oh no, I did it to myself. Let's just do it in a row. So the first question is, how is the Verge structured?

27:17Yeah, I think the Verge is structured. It's like a high-performance Montessori. Like my goal for the Verge is everyone just does whatever they want, and it's awesome. So we are structured to enable that. And that's like a very top-blind thing. But basically, we have desks, right? We have a reviews desk. We have a policy desk. We have a creator's desk. That ladders into just very top-blind subjects. Like Jake Castronakis is our tech editor. It's basically by subject matter expertise is how we are structured. And you can look at our mass set. You can see how that goes. Then next to that, we have audio and video, which is a format.

27:52So then we have like a format-specific division, basically. And that's because the tools and the processes and the cadences of that work are different than the newsroom and text. Those are the two sort of axes that I think about is our features program runs on like a year-long cadence. And so they are thinking on very different timelines than our news team. And so in the formats, we have to manage different cadences. And then we need to make sure that we have subject matter expertise through all of that. And that is like, you might surmise that I enjoy messing with our org chart because those things are intention.

28:28So we are just always kind of like rebalancing how that works and thinking about it. But those are the two things just operationally that we have to manage. Like how long it takes to make something and then how much you need to know to make the thing. And like where that knowledge should get concentrated and then how those timelines should be managed. Alex, you're the person who spends all of your days like making all of that work. Yeah, Alex is the actual managing editor. Yeah, I was like, I've memorized the org chart. I can list every single person 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.

29:02Does that structure make sense to you? Like, you're sort of operating that structure day to day. Does his description feel right to you? Yeah, yeah, it does. I think like having different mediums is really, they function totally differently, right? Like, like how the ideation works, how the timeline to get things up works is totally, totally different. So you kind of need a little bit of separation there. But then you also have to make sure they overlap enough and they communicate enough that like, good conversations are happening. And you don't have like, somebody writing a story and somebody doing a podcast that they are the exact same thing, doing them in parallel without talking to each other.

29:37And so this is especially hard remote. Yeah, I would say. 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 a staff writer that reports up to them and get those details. So it kind of like trickles down like that. And it works really well. Yeah, I think. my goal is that again everyone just does whatever they want there's a moment about a year into a new verge reporter's tenure where like they learn how to play the piano and they're like i can just do anything and that's like that's all that structure is designed for that for that moment to happen because that's the best yeah 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 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.

30:41And, 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. Because like things keep happening. And you can be reactive to it forever. And that works. and you have to do that. But also there's other stuff we want to do that isn't just run as fast as the news cycle all the time. Well, I'll give you one very specific example that I think Virchast listeners will deeply understand.

31:15News and reviews operate on different timelines. Like they just do. To review a product well, you have to just fall into it. Like you have to pay attention to it for a significant period of time and then you can like put out a good product review. That takes longer than writing the news. However, we have competitors that have solved this problem by totally divorcing their news and reviews operations. The reviewers never write news. The news reporters never write reviews. And what you get is a bunch of reporters who have never used the products, who just don't understand the products, and a bunch of reviewers who are writing reviews as though the news is not happening.

31:52And we talk about this. We've talked about this since the beginning of The Verge. We see these other places that do this. We don't ever want to do that. The problem is that as you get bigger and you want to review more things and write more news, There's a reason that they split those things up. There's a totally rational, explainable, deeply understandable reason why you would pull those teams apart because they need to run in different directions and different timelines. We're just insistent about smashing them together so that our reviews read as though they take place on the same planet as everyone lives on.

32:23and 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 after a while you're like, oh, this is the problem that I've signed up to manage forever. Like the job is actually just this problem. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. And I think you've kind of halfway answered this already, but Jean-Paul did ask about how you make decisions, which is the decoder question. So answer the damn decoder question, Eli.

32:53So if you listen to Decoder and you listen to people and I say this question, some people are not prepared for it, which is very funny. Like just immediately the funniest thing to me. Like, how do you not know this is coming? And then there's like four or five variations. And I am very much on the Amazon end of that variation, which is you just need to divide up your decisions into things that you can quickly undo and have low stakes and things that have high stakes. And you need to make the low stakes decisions as fast as you can and be ultra decisive about them. That's the one way door and two way door strategy, right?

33:22That's that's how they talk about it. Yeah, or it's a type A and type B decision, or type 1 and type 2. And I always forget which one's which. But yeah, there's the two-way door. You can just go back and do it again. And then there's the like, oh, this isn't existentially important. And so I try really hard to make everyone's chagrin. I'm like, we should just do this all the time. But I think that's really important for a newsroom. I think the challenge is for a newsroom, a thing like a headline or an image choice, like those are actually one-way doors. You don't get to go back. Your credibility is on the line.

33:50And so you have to build a set of instincts about that stuff that I think is just hard fought and you need a lot of scar tissue. But we are very blessed to have a large group of people that has honestly worked together for a very long time comparatively to any media organization. And so I think there's sort of a collective intelligence about what The Verge is that allows us to make those decisions very quickly. Do you want to say anything about The Verge's relationship with Vox before we skip on to our next person? We're a pirate ship. I don't know what they do. Here we go. It's a very honest, and our CEO has said this, like for us, our audience moves faster.

34:25It'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 is younger than us. We have been given the opportunity to run as fast as we want in the directions that we want to run it, and that's honestly great. And speaking of one of those changes, here's our next voicemail from Austin. Hey, Vergecast. This is Austin from Seattle. I got a question. What has the emotional journey been like while y 'all transition to WordPress? Thanks. Hope to hear from you. This is why I love Vergecast people, right?

34:57Like 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 we feeling? I feel joy. I feel nothing but joy. 100 percent yeah like chorus is exceptional right it's it's an exceptional cms um i've used a lot of cms's there was one where you couldn't use that i used where you couldn't use the same image twice so 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.

35:42That's where I first started. That was my very first website that I went and put on the web and blogged on was a WordPress site. And I'm excited to go back there. To be clear, it's joy because we haven't yet gone on the first date. We're just looking forward to it. Yeah. It's like the anticipation. We're like, ooh, what's going to happen? But 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?

36:14It 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 in WordPress already. And so I'm just excited about that. I'm excited about being able to trade on an ecosystem, like a huge software development ecosystem, and instead point our development resources at user experiences. because ultimately the media stopped trying to compete with platforms and user experience. I think that's take a look around and we should try. So like that's that's where the joy comes from is, oh, why is our development effort pointed at a database and a word processor?

36:51Solve the problems worth solving. We should build user experiences. 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.

37:20Right. But I do think being open to like the entirety of the WordPress ecosystem is going to be super, super cool. There's all kinds of stuff we can do. And we haven't even talked about Activity Club yet. Oh, we're getting to that. Don't you worry. The last question is just four hours of Neelai ranting about Activity Club. So don't worry. All right, let's get to our next one, which comes from Charlotte. Hi, my name is Charlotte. You guys talk a lot about other journalists and other publications such as TechCrunch. And it seems like people move from the verge to TechCrunch, et cetera, all over.

37:52What'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. They're our enemy. We don't collaborate. Yeah. David's moved around the most. Yeah. So you should answer this one. I think it's hard to explain, but really easy in practice. Like I both love a lot of the people who work at a lot of other publications and absolutely earnestly want to kick their ass to every story all the time. And I understand that there is like cognitive dissonance there, but it's just true. And I think part of it is also like this part of journalism is relatively small.

38:34Like even the way that we think about tech, everybody covers tech now. It's all over the place. It's huge in a way that like in 2011, it was not right. Like the world of people who cared about tech the way that we do was much smaller than it's still pretty small now. like there are a lot of people who cover these companies as big businesses there are a lot of people who cover them from like varying different perspectives but in this space of like people who cover technology as technology it's very small and having like a bunch of other nerds around to talk about this stuff with is just always fun and there's so much to do in this space that i feel like i probably feel less competitive than i should sometimes but at the same time like we We just see each other all the time in a way that you don't in a lot of businesses, right?

39:19Like 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.

39:49I want to be clear, we are soaked in blood. We are smiling and blood drips down our fangs. It wasn't us, no, it was the larger, but it's true that our early competitive set has been winnowed way, way, way down. And that, you know, I don't love that. Actually, we talk a lot about needing great competitors because that's what keeps us sharp. And respecting your great competitors and being friendly with them does not negate the fact that you feel competitive with them in big ways. I would say this, the power of The Verge over the past decade has been its graduating classes. We've graduated a lot of people out into a lot of publications, most notably Bloomberg.

40:32And now Bloomberg is just like Verge Midtown. It's just a bunch of people we know. And so that's great. Like I like being the place where people get good and 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.

41:02But we call them expats. Like they're still a verge. There's a lot of power in this world. I always joke with David that I have a theory of true power. And it's like, by the end of this, we will just run every publication. That's the goal. Yeah, that's 100 % it. Yeah, the Verge diaspora is an extremely cool and increasingly powerful group of people. It's pretty awesome. The editor of Wired, by the way, is a Verge expat. I just want to put that out there in the world. We're taking over. It's what we do. That's like a... Katie's great. And that has nothing to do with her Verge history. She's just great.

41:34Right. If you had told us in 2011 that that would be the direction, I would have never believed you. Yeah. All right. Next one. This is an email we got from Paul that says, I think the casual reader of The Verge might assume the staff are all very heavy tech users, constantly scrolling and getting notifications from a multitude of apps, upgrading to 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.

42:03I'm curious what views the rest of the team has that may be counterintuitive for people who spend so much time thinking, writing, and talking about tech. I guess what I'm asking is who is the biggest Luddite at The Verge? Which, A, is a very good question. And, B, I think the sort of underlying question here is basically, like, are you still a bunch of tech nerds who just love tech all the time? Wait, can I reject the premise of this question? Sure. Is that allowed? I mean, I love you for listening and I love you for asking. I appreciate that you're asking. I just don't think I agree with the premise that being a heavy user of tech requires you to have your notifications on.

42:35Okay. Yeah. Right? Like, 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 people think of as tech products, like just provide that to you. Like a nonstop flood of garbage. And like I would say that the power user move is to use the tools in the way that these companies do not want you to use them and turn them all off.

43:15And then only take what you want. And what I want is for HomeKit adaptive lighting to be compatible with matter. which it is not at this time. You're a simple man of simple needs. It's not. It's really brutal. You can disagree with me. I think that's totally fair. But I think there's a thing in there, right, which is like, are you a Luddite because you don't have all your notifications turned on? And it's like, no, I just don't need people to interrupt me. I'm busy. I'll take information on my terms, and I'm in the news. So my terms are I want a lot of it. I just want to be focused. Most of these platforms, like Elon Musk is just like mask off with Twitter, right?

43:51He's like, my focus is keeping you on the platform. I'm taking the headlines away. And it's like, oh, I don't care about what you think. Like, I'm turning off your notifications. You can't have me. That, to me, feels like more of a power user move. Like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everyone's going to disagree with me. But I would just, that's the turn I would make. I think you're right. Like, I think the power user move is to figure out which bits you actually want to use and use them and incorporate them into your life in a really satisfying way. And I would say the majority of the staff does that.

44:20Not everybody has the newest phone or the newest laptop, but they have figured out a workflow that is deeply, profoundly nerdy and made that work. And I think that's kind of like the core of the verge is finding those solutions that work for you. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have every single app constantly filtering things in or you have to be like, like for the longest time, I thought the real tech nerd was the person who mastered rain meter on windows. Like that was it for me. And I think that is like, there's definitely tech nerdery to it, but it's not like the only part.

44:57And everybody's a different type of tech nerd. I know people who are super into phones and have no idea what matter, like how to use matter, what the process there is. And I have friends who are super into their home theater systems to an alarming degree. And they have like a six year old phone. Everybody's got a different kind of love of tech. I do think there was a long period of tech where there were like a small number of things to be really into. And so it was like, I mean, you rewind whatever 40 years and the only thing to be into was like PCs, right? So you were just like, and then we got, you know, it expanded a little and then there were like phones and everybody's really into phones.

45:32And now it's like, if you want to be super weirdly into some line of tech, there are a billion to choose from. And I feel like what's been fun about The Verge is watching everybody sort of pick their thing, right? It's like being really into movies. You end up sort of picking a thing that you care about more than everybody else and want to talk to everybody else about it, even though they don't care. And that's The Verge with tech. We all have things that no one else cares about that we do. And that's the prerequisite of working here. Like I said, everyone's just doing whatever they want. Yeah.

46:03Yeah, no, I will talk your face off about building. I need to build a new home theater rig for the new house. 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. At this point, Dolby is like, come to the office. Just come here. By the way, can I just answer the question? It's Liz Lopato. It's the biggest Luddite. Oh, 100%. Friend of the Verge, Brian Merchant, who has written for us. We've extorted his previous books. He's got a new book out, by the way, about the history of Luddites and what they were actually after.

46:33and it's like mind-blowing. When the book comes out, we'll like have him on or something. It's great. All right. One more before we take a break. This is from Will. Get ready. Hey, this is Will in San Diego. A two-part question. Is Nilay a cool boss and does he give nice back rubs? All right. Thank you. Well, it's 2023, sir. No bosses should have given back rubs. Legally, we cannot answer that second question. I'm out here being like, I don't know if I can watch Pump Up the Volume with these people. I will say we got this question a lot, which makes me think we should actually try to answer it.

47:08The back rubs question? 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 one we actually got a lot. So Alex, I think we should attempt to answer this as earnestly and honestly as possible. While I'm here? While Neelai is here. Well, Neelai's about to not be a very good boss, I'll tell you that. Neelai's an exceptional boss. 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.

47:40No, I'm like, you should just drink at home. So you're safe. Yeah. Neela 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. Yeah, it's literally the definition of the cool mom from Mean Girls. I just want to be clear. That too. That too. I think the way I always 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 this is true in all things. Bored Neelai is a dangerous Neelai.

48:20This is why we get worried when Neelai is like on a flight with no Wi-Fi. Like bad things happen when Neelai has five hours to sit and think by himself. The ideas are always great that come out of those flights. There's always a Google Doc. It's terrifying. but I think to me one of the things that is like fun about having you as my boss Nealai 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's 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 Nealai 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 Neal as your boss.

49:02It's chaos. This is horrible. This is like having someone write your resume in front of you. I cannot tell you how much I dislike this. Neal, do you think you're a good boss? Cool boss. Cool boss. I'm definitely a cool boss. 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 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.

49:36David's going to tell me to fuck off. Like, it's fine. And we have a lot of people on our staff who've been with us for a long time who are very confident in telling me what to do. And that's great. And I love them and cherish them. what I am always thinking about is the youngest most junior person on our staff and how far along they are on the road to playing the piano and being able to do whatever they want and if they are unsure or they are unclear or they are not confident like we the whole organization is fucked up the culture is fucked up I don't know if that's like the right measure I don't know if I should measure like page views instead or like whatever but that's that's the thing I've been focused on and 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 right 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 i just want the verge to be a place where i would want to work you know and like there's not a lot of places that like as evidenced by the fact that i've been here for a decade not a lot of places i want to work that's it that's what i don't know i don't know if that's right answer this is horrible i want to die is really the answer i'm like full body cringing all right we have a couple more quick ones let's take a break we're gonna do the last couple and then we'll get out of here.

50:45We'll be right back.

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53:16All right, we're back. Next question. Tell us the top worst 10 things about Neelai. No, let's we're going to we're going to hard pivot away from that, too. we have two, I think, sort of bigger picture questions about how we think about tech and The Verge and the future. So we're going to do those before we get out of here. Here's the first one from Santiago. Hey, 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.

53:53Love the show. Thanks for everything. I included this question because this is literally a conversation we have been having internally about how we think about tech now. Like I look back to 2011 and, 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 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?

54:25Yeah, 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 and about it gets 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.

54:56And like there's a 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 do we do anything good with it? Is anything good happened? Is there a robot surgery? And I think that is the side that the rest of the media has focused on. And obviously we've 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.

55:25And 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 like our show, our audience. That's why it's big because there's actually way more people out there that want to spend their time deeply thinking about these things than not.

56:02You 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 weedy. And it's like, no, actually you can walk up to any person on earth and ask them about their phone and they will tell you something deeply nerdy. Like it is an absolute unifier that this technology exists and people have emotional relationships with it. And you can take it seriously.

56:34So 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, cool boy, do I have thoughts? But the flip side of it is like, well, people, a lot of people have to work really, really hard to make these things and we should not take it for granted. And that like just in and of itself is like, to me is still a hopeful idea. Alex, one of the things you and I talk about, I feel like half our Slack DMs are, we're covering this cool thing that exists. And like AI is actually the perfect example of this right now.

57:05It's like this cool new thing that exists that, you know, open AI just launched dolly three 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 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 Do you feel like you and we have cracked that yet?

57:39I 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, meditated something awful once six years ago and continue on.

58:13Right. 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, 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, from audiences.

58:47But 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, and it doesn't go into like super villain land, then, 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 I cannot wait. Neil, I will never have to use software again because of AI. Software is the worst. That's the new verge. No software coverage. No, I think that's right. And I think like to the point about, you know, it's fun to be smart is like being alive right now means holding a lot of competing ideas in your head about what's good and what's bad and what's safe and what's problematic and how much you should care about your privacy versus all the cool stuff that exists.

59:33Like the goal, I think, is just to engage all of that as honestly as we can, rather than like try to pretend it's all one or all the other, or just ignore it all and talk about stock prices, right? That's one really easy shortcut to a lot of this is when the stock goes up, it's good. And when the stock goes down, it's bad. And that's a really handy way to cover tech that I think just like ignores what it's like to be a person in the world. And I think just coming into everything acknowledging that it's all kind of a mess is a thing the verge is really good at and makes it like it's it's why it's fun to be engaged with this stuff every day because it doesn't get less messy it just gets messy in new ways which is really fun yeah did 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 horrible review of a Sirius XM radio or something.

1:00:28The CEO of the company stops and is like, you trashed my stock price on the floor of CES. On the floor of CES, Walt Mossberg looks at him dead in the eye and says, I don't give a fuck about your stock price. Hell yeah. I just held this in my heart the entire time. I like that a lot. All right. We have one more and then we're going to get out of here. The last question we have comes from Kevin. Hey, this is Kevin McGree from beautiful Winona, Minnesota. and I've been an active reader of The Verge since around November 1st, 2011. He's 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?

1:01:05Well, I'm here to announce. This is where you rant about ActivityPub. Is this where I rant about ActivityPub for four hours? Yeah, yeah. Okay. My plan for our site is to federate our content and to be more natively integrated with whatever new class of social networks that exist. I have no idea how any of this is going to work. You can see the loose beginnings of how it might work on our site. You can see that people have built hacks to make it happen. I love it. The Verge.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.

1:01:41What 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 you could just follow gadgets and get a stream of gadget news on our homepage? I don't know if any of that's going to work. I just think we have to build cooler user experiences for people in media and not just be a supplier of cheap, undifferentiated content to Elon Musk. Maybe this is not the most insane business proposition in the world, by the way. If you go anywhere else, 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?

1:02:12like anyone else in the world knows the answer to that question. Media executives are like, I don't know. I think we should give our shit away for free. And I just don't know why that is. Like our industry just like has no self-esteem. So I would like the verge to lead the way and having some confident ideas on like, how do we build stuff that's cool? How do we compete in like software in addition to having really, really good work that is like has journalistic ethics and all the other stuff. Yeah, that's kind of my big idea. I've, again, no idea how this will work. We have to build a lot of it.

1:02:44We 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. Yeah, I think we've entered this place where like the media industry has spent the last 15 years basically playing everybody else's game in the social world where it was like you 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.

1:03:17And so he's going to make it very hard for you to leave his platform. but and elon is just like a very convenient villain this is what's happening to everybody right like google is less interested in sending you stuff everybody is doing that now and so this idea of like i think the the thing you're going to see from a lot of media organizations is like how do we build a place you want to be which i think is is correct and then the the thing that we're also going to try to figure out how to do on top of that is how to like be out in the rest of the internet in a way that makes sense and isn't just like a devil's bargain with facebook which I think I have no idea what it looks like but I think it's gonna be very cool 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.

1:04:13Like, 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 the ecosystem. A lot of which is like linking to other people, right? Like our homepage is very much designed to link to other great work, to embed other great work on other platforms. I want to put some focus on that as much as like, we're going to I mean, we are always going to make beautiful reviews and investigations and write news fat.

1:04:46But 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. The New York Times won't even link to other. They're like, oh, another. Someone else wrote this? How dare you? And we're just not going to be that. We want to be the thing that connects all kinds of smart people together. Alex, any thoughts? What's on your mind for the next 12 years? No, I think you guys are exactly right. Like media is 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.

1:05:27And 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, like I'm excited about the next couple of years, even though I'm sure it's going to be kind of a hellscape for other people. 12 years from now on your brain machine implant that is screwed into your head. We'll be there. I don't know what it's going to look like, but we'll be there.

1:05:58We'll be there. All right. We got to go. Thank you both for doing this. Thanks to everyone who's sending questions. This was very fun. Yeah, this was really fun. I mean, there was one part of it that was horrible. The rest of it was fun. coming up next week, everybody's ratings on Eli as the host of the Vergecast. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, weird ideas about microphones we should have, or frankly, anything else you want to know, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Send us all your questions.

1:06:31We're going to keep answering Vergey questions over time. I'm sure this will not be the last time, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilay, 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.

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