Our biggest stories and favorite things of 2024

24:38And it's fun because you get to, you know, rib your friends about not knowing history. I don't know anything. Yeah, I feel like I'd be good until about the dates that you said, and then it would all fall apart. For me, it's like the things where people talk about something that happened in like the Roman Empire. And I'm like, oh, that was like the 1450s, right? And they're like, that was 16 BC. I'm always like, all right, cool. The amount of time it took me to think on, I got a Pompeii card. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that was far back. But I don't know how - There's a thousand years, I would believe.

25:11It was pretty, yeah. Yeah, a lot of people make fun of me for that one. Turns out it was a really long time ago. That should be enough. Like, you should get a half point for just being like, it was before the Beatles. That's all. I knew it was before. You get the point. I knew it was before the Beatles. That was all I needed to know. That's pretty good. Game's called Chronology. Chronology. Highly recommended for a chill, fun board game night. I like it. All right, Jake. Thank you as always. Cool. Talk to you later. Next up on the list, Justine Kalma, our senior science reporter. Justine, hello.

25:43Hello. Oh. Coming to us from the control room of one of our podcast studios. Yes. I love this. All right. So we gave you some homework. The first thing you had to do was come with your story of the year. What was the story of the year? Well, that for me was a no-brainer. It was definitely the U.S. presidential election. Well, the outcome of the elections. This is what I'm losing sleep over leading up to next year. I mean, it just changes. It affects everything, right? For me on the science desk, I'm an environmental reporter. And so there are literally studies out there around how much more pollution we can expect with this next administration, how much more that's going to warm the planet.

26:25We cover life in the future. And so, you know, we're looking at a hotter future, all kinds of fallout. And, you know, across all of the deaths that we cover, I do a lot of work with the policy team. Over the past year, we were covering some major Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court has been absolutely made over with Trump's previous appointees. That's made it more difficult. Some of those Supreme Court decisions have made it more difficult to regulate industry. So, you know, that has wide reaching effects. And so I that for me is the story of the year going into next year. Is there anything on your mind on that front right now other than just sort of sheer abject screaming and rage all the time?

27:14I feel like we're in a moment now where we're like we as reporters and also just like we as people are going to have to figure out like how to talk about this stuff other than just what sometimes feels like directionless screaming all the time. Like what what's on your mind as you're thinking about kind of the stories inside of this that you're thinking about over the next year or so? One thing that's going to be really interesting to watch is what happens at the state and local level. You know, in the past, that has been where people have counteracted what's going on at the federal level, made progress when there's been inaction at the national level.

27:53And so it'll be really interesting to see what comes out of that sort of local organizing moving forward. And then another interesting place to watch, which is like very divisive in the environmental community, but surprisingly super bipartisan, is going to be nuclear energy. I was going to ask you about this. Okay. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, if you're looking at just my beat on The Verge, I think one of the biggest stories has been this. Is it too soon to say nuclear renaissance? It's probably too soon. But there's anything renaissance is like overkill, right? But there's been a whole lot of interest in nuclear energy, particularly from tech companies looking for electricity for energy-hungry data centers.

28:46You know, this is a growing issue with AI. We saw a slew of nuclear energy deals from Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Yeah, Three Mile Island is coming back. Like, what a weird version of the timeline here. So they say we'll have to watch and see. But but yes, but, you know, Trump has been supportive of nuclear energy in the past. It's gotten bipartisan support. If you look at Trump's pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, he is a fossil fuel executive, CEO of a fracking company, but also sits on the board of a nuclear energy company with Sam Altman. So that'll be really interesting to see that company is developing advanced nuclear reactors.

29:33I don't know. We'll have to see what happens. Yeah. I feel like with a lot of that stuff, I always get tripped up trying to figure out how long these things take. Because on the one hand, we have these like super pressing issues. And the Three Mile Island guy was basically saying like, we're ready. Let's spin this back up and go back to work. Everything's going to be terrific. And then you hear about all these projects that are, you know, we're talking about like 2040 deadlines for things and like God only knows where we'll be by 2040. Is this stuff going to start to become sort of meaningfully real next year, do you think?

30:07No. Okay. I think we may see more deals, but the earliest projections that I've seen for the first advanced nuclear reactors coming online are going to be probably the early 2030s. And so it's going to be a while before we see these new technologies. And to be clear, those are next generation nuclear reactors that have not been deployed in the U.S. yet. You know, they still need to get all of the regulatory approvals and everything. Not to mention the costs because both traditional, like old school nuclear reactors, the big plants that we have today, they're really expensive to build. These next generation technologies are supposed to be smaller and cheaper, but projects have also run into rising costs too.

30:58So yeah, so that's why a lot of this stuff is still up in the air. You have all of the regulatory and permitting delays, and then you have everything that's going on when it comes to making this actually an affordable source of energy. Got it. Okay. And I would say it doesn't seem like the regulatory state is going to get more efficient and effective in the very near future. So I would not say my hopes are super high. But hey, we'll take it. Yeah, yeah. We'll see what this efficiency task force does. I mean, it could just be like, go ahead, do whatever you want. I mean, fair. That would be it would go faster than short.

31:30Yeah, it would go faster. All right. What was your favorite new thing of the year? Okay, so I have to plug, I'm a really big documentary fan. I just, I love nonfiction, but I had to plug this documentary that is still in theaters called Nurse Unseen. It's about Filipino nurses. I'm Filipino, my mom is a nurse. And, you know, at the Emmys this year, you saw the host talk about how ER went like 15 seasons without ever having a Filipino nurse. If you go into almost any hospital medical establishment, you're bound to find a lot of Filipino nurses. And so this documentary goes into the whole history of that, why there's been a pipeline of nurses coming to the U.S.

32:16from the Philippines since really World War II. The Philippines was the U.S. territory. But it also just talks about it really focuses on how these nurses were on the front lines during the pandemic. And so I just think it really gives voice to a community that's been overlooked and has just done a lot for our health care system. So that was one of my favorite documentaries of the year. That's a really good one. And I'm hoping that it's streaming soon. I was just about to ask. It's still in theaters right now? It's still in theaters. I have heard that they're, well, I don't know. I don't want to give anything away.

32:49I'm hoping that it's streaming soon. Fair enough. Fair enough. We'll track it down in a theater. I love a documentary on the big screen, by the way. It's like, it's sort of an unusual thing. It feels like, this is going to sound less like a compliment than I mean it, but it feels like school in like the best possible way to sit in a, especially in like a little tiny like art house thing. I went to a jazz documentary. Like, frankly, I don't care about jazz, but like I just sat in a room with a bunch of people who were like, I want to spend two hours learning about jazz. And it was delightful. And I'm like, I give me more of those moments of like sitting in a lecture hall watching something really interesting together.

33:22Like, I kind of miss those days. It's good stuff. Well, OK, I'll say my guilty pleasure this year is I did go to a cat film festival in New York City. A cat film festival. Yeah, which is exactly how it sounds. It's like basically your Instagram or TikTok reel full of cat videos, but on a big screen. But you don't go for the videos. You go for the community. And all of the people who love cats as much as you do. and like all of the like cute kids that are having a great time and it's just, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. You go to documentaries and yeah, those kinds of screenings to just be with your people.

33:59That's fantastic. It's like a fake or it's like a backwards way of having a cat convention. I love that very much. They're like, we're going to pretend this is a movie, but it's just so a bunch of cat people can hang out with each other. It's going to be fun. I think, yeah, I think that film festival is on tour as well. Unbelievable idea. I have no notes on that. All right. Did you have one more pick for us? What else is on your list? Okay. Well, okay. I did pick one other documentary that I also saw in theaters, but it's also streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. It's called Sugarcane. It premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival this year.

34:35It's a really important watch. It's a tough one as well. It's about an investigation into abuse at an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada after they found unmarked graves. It was created by an advocate who is actually a source that I've interviewed in the past. He's an environmental justice advocate, but his dad went to the school. And it's a really powerful story, too, about healing and his relationship with his dad and how they move forward. So that was another pick for me. That's a really good one. I feel like we're in this funny moment of, like, there are so many great documentaries out there.

35:22And my list of ones to watch now is so infuriatingly long that I just, I have to, like, I need to cancel all of my streaming services except for the documentary ones. for like six months and just catch up on documentaries. And it's going to be great. Very excited about it. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Justine, thank you so much. Appreciate you doing this. Yeah, thanks. Oh, sorry. The other thing for the non-tech thing, I forgot, was our 2004 package was incredible this year. Like, it just brought me back to high school. And even just our talking about making that happen was just so much fun.

35:59Like, all of us on the Verge staff, like combing through our pictures, trying to find them from 2004 and discovering that they've all vanished and then seeing the story that came out of that was awesome. The first run of people's pictures from 2004 was pretty spectacular. Everybody seemed to have like one photo from that year and it's always incredibly embarrassing and just terrific. Loved it very much. Yeah, all of my 2004 photos are just like me wearing two popped collars and like a puka shell necklace. It was not like a cool time in my history, I wouldn't say. Oh, my God. Yeah, I can see that so clearly.

36:39Well, that's the meanest thing you've ever said to me, Justine. No, no, that was, I mean, who didn't have a puka shell necklace, right? Listen, I got out of it. That's all I can say. There you go. It took too long to get out of it. Is it back yet? I'm like, all that stuff is coming back, right? I'm just waiting till I see the high school students rocking it again. I assume so. I have two nephews in high school right now and neither of them are wearing pukas, but like frosted tips, I think, are starting to come back. So like it's coming. The pukas are coming. It's a terrifying thought. I'm like I'm seeing my friends post pictures on social media and I can't tell if it's them or their children.

37:17Because they're dressed like how my friends dressed in like middle school and high school. So, you know. It's real. It's real. It's terrifying. But it is real. It's real. All right. Sweet. Thank you for doing this. All right. This was really fun. Thanks so much. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back with more folks from The Verge sharing more of their biggest and favorite stuff of the year. We'll be right back.

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41:11Nothing. Just a blank page with a blinking cursor. Asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. All right, we're back. Let's just keep rolling. Next up, Viren Pavich, our supervising producer on our video team. Viren, hello. Hello. You told us before we started recording that you didn't prepare at all. So this is going to go really great or really terribly. And either way, I'm very excited. It's going to go great. I feel good about it. I'm always underprepared for everything that we do. Just underpromise and overdeliver. That's the Viren story.

41:56It usually ends up pretty good. So, you know, let's try it out. I'm into it. So thing number one was the story of the year. What's your story of the year? I'm immediately coming with a curveball here. I'm going to pick a video of the year. I am a supervising producer at The Verge. So I feel like I can pick a video. Is that okay? Can I break the rules here? Yeah, you can pick whatever you want. Okay. For video of the year, I have to go with the Vision Pro review because it was just one of those classic Verge reviews that was just way overproduced in a short period of time. It was a whole team just working together late into the night.

42:40The script that Nilay delivered came in incredibly late and was incredibly good. It was just one read, and it was like, this is amazing. The only problem is it's currently 35 minutes long. We're going to have to cut like a third of it out, which we did. But it was such a strong script. It was really good. And then just, you know, it was a new product category for Apple. A lot of eyes on it. Yeah, it just felt like I love the hustle. I love the time crunch. I love embargoes. I love all that stuff. It is exhausting, but it was a very exciting time of the year. And it was like very much at the beginning of 2024.

43:18And it feels like, I don't know, it feels like it was either like two days ago or like seven years ago. I can't decide. Yeah, I hear that. I feel like if we had been talking in February, like what are going to be the, you know, technology stories of the year for 2024? I feel like we all would have picked the Vision Pro to be one of them. And our video was very good. The Vision Pro, less good. And I think that what we've seen in the 10 months since that thing came out at this point is it kind of feels like it just died. I don't know. Does anyone you know talk about or care about the Vision Pro anymore?

43:57No, there's always like a moment on threads maybe when somebody who has the Vision Pro is like, hey, this cool thing came out. You should look at it. And I see a screen recording. I'm like, oh, that's great. Move on. But like two weeks ago, the ultra-wide monitor support came out. People are excited about this. Yeah. Looks pretty sick. Like pairing it with a Mac Mini and having that workspace, incredibly amazing. You will still need a monitor. It's not like you can just live in Vision Pro and like fully commit yourself into it. I did use it, you know, during our testing period and everything. And that was the thing that I actually enjoyed the most, just external monitor, using it as just like an extra monitor, like leaning into a Lightroom photo, right?

44:53Or like just getting closer to it and doing some like brushes and coloring and everything did actually feel incredibly fun. Like, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I don't know if I can do it for hours and hours and hours. But being in the Vision Pro, like, virtual monitor, using it, that was, like, that was, for me, the best use case for it. I do wish, like, Apple Pencil gets some kind of support there. Because it takes you away when you have to, like, go back to keyboard and mouse sort of thing. You know, like, it's just, it's like, oh, okay, I'm still using kind of a similar input here. even though the feature is good.

45:33So I wish there was more there to do, even just zooming in or doing more stuff with it. So that was a good use case. So I do understand why people are very excited by the ultra wide monitor. But yeah, the price is just too extreme for anyone to buy this and use it. But it's impressive and it's just too expensive. Yeah, I could not agree more. And the improvement is increasingly far away, it seems like. The solutions to this problem seem like they keep slipping out. But let's move on. Thing number two, your favorite new thing of the year. It's the vision pro? No, I'm kidding. Totally good twist.

46:17Yeah, by the way. All right, I struggle with this one a little bit because there are like two things. One also came out a long time ago, or at least it was announced a long time ago. It's the Fuji X106. Yep. I figured that might be your answer. I know. I'm so predictable. The thing about it is that, you know, I've had the X100, I don't know, second or third generation, a long time ago, and decided to get rid of it, and I've been missing it ever since. So when this one came out, I was still a little hesitant, like, do I really need to spend money on yet another camera? and I did it. It took eight months for it to get delivered.

47:01So I just got it like last month, right? It was like - Eight months? Oh, wow. Yeah, I ordered on like the day that it came out. Yeah, we talked about it on this show, how you were like in the middle of talking yourself into buying it. Oh my God, that is very true. I forgot. Look at this. What a beautiful first circle. So I've only been using it for a little bit and I've had a couple of trips, a couple of work trips, and it's just like, oh yeah, this is my favorite thing. I just love this camera so much. I've been also reviewing some bigger cameras and they're like that difference between hey, a tiny little 35mm camera and a big full-frame camera.

47:38It's like, I still love this little tiny camera so much. So that's probably my pick. I'm also incredibly indecisive person. Okay. What was your other one? Just give me 10 seconds on your honorable mention here. Kino app. Ooh, the Halide video one, right? Yeah. Okay. Like, you know, I did the iPhone review in tandem with Nealide this year, and it was kind of the first time, a little bit of disclaimer, my personal phone was like a 13 Pro. It didn't have any of the fancy recording features. So it was like, oh, now I have ProRes, now I have Apple Log. Wow, ProRes is like so huge, I can't work with this.

48:21So Keno was the option that had the HEVC files. Use that. The LUTs that they have built in are really good. I like Tyler Stallman's LUT the most. It's just really nice. I've been using it a lot more. So finally, I have an action button. It is programmed to open Keno. I use an iPhone as a camera a lot more this year than ever before. That's a good one. I like that. All right. Last thing. your favorite non-tech thing of the year. This can be anything you want. It just can't be tech. This was tough. Liam was helping me out because I did ask him like ahead of time. We just walked away from a meeting and I was like, do you know what I should do?

49:03He's like, I don't know. It can be anything. Like maybe you got good at making coffee. In fact, yes, I did get a coffee machine. Did you? Yeah. So that's one of the things. The other one is, yeah, it's good to step away from our tech bubble. We're all in our tech bubble. And the way that I do it recently is this magazine called Mountain Gazette. It is absolutely massive. And I do mean like physically, it's just like a big magazine. Okay, sure. But yeah, it's all about outdoorsy stuff. It's all about like, well, it depends on the season, but skiing, snowboarding, just being outdoors. It used to be a magazine a long, long time ago.

49:42And someone who lives up in Tahoe area, he decided to buy the brand back and now he's making this really beautifully crafted magazine. And I feel like, I don't know, I am a print person. So I do like print products and it just feels nice to kick back, open it up, look at some beautiful photography and read about stuff that I really like, which is skiing and snowboarding. I love that. You know what I was thinking about the other day? I haven't bought a coffee table book in a million years because it just feels like those don't exist anymore. A, we should make one. I agree. Yeah, we should. But B, like magazine as coffee table book is kind of an incredible idea.

50:29Just like give me a big giant thing I can bring into my house. I think that would be it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I got into. That's good. These are good answers. What coffee machine did you buy? Tell me that and then I'll let you go. It is a, it's one of the Breville ones that has a grinder on top and a milk thing onto the side. Oh, the whole, you got the whole pipeline going now. Yes. Once you, once a milk frother becomes part of your coffee experience, there's just no going back. Yeah. Life is better and it will never go back. Yeah, it is very nice, but I did struggle at first.

51:04It took a while to figure out like, all right, what are you going to do here? I went through many beans and bags of coffee, and I'm like, great. I spent$16 on these beans, and I've got three cups of coffee. This is bullshit. I'm going to go back to my Nespresso pots. No, but I finally figured it out. There's a lot of coffee shops in the neighborhood that I really like. And every time I visit New York, I go to a few of them as well. I'm like, I need those beans. So yeah, I really became a little bit of a snob, but not an annoying snob. But welcome, because, again, there is no going back. It costs a fortune, and it takes forever, but it is worth it.

51:45I still think it costs less than buying coffee anywhere else, so. Viren, thank you as always. Appreciate it. See ya. Next up on my list, Kylie Robison, our senior AI reporter. Kylie, hello. Hello. How you feeling? You sound like you got a winter cold thing going on. How you holding up? I sound like shit. That's okay. You can say it. Yeah, I have a little bit of a cold, but I'm happy to be here. Good. All right. Well, we won't keep you long. Let's just blast through this. Cool. So I'm just going to preface this with someone else already picked AI as the story of the year. So you can pick it if you want to, but just know that you'll be copying Jake.

52:25All that said, what's your story of the year? It's going to be just a common theme of billionaire crybabies. Sorry, guys, but that's true. The common theme of the year, all I'm thinking about is Jeff Bezos stomping his feet, Elon stomping his feet, Sam stomping his feet, Sam Altman. And lots of billionaires stomping their feet over issues and wanting their way and less regulation. That's the common theme of the year, for sure, whether it's AI or, you know, energy or, you know, what have you, hardware. Or American politics. American politics. There are, like, several childish billionaires who seem to just be everywhere doing everything all the time.

53:10They're making popular podcasts now. It's like, just leave us, let us have this one. Yeah, you put a tariff on straight men podcasts under mics, put a tariff 200%. That's a good idea. But yeah, I think that's probably something we're going to continue seeing. I feel like with the incoming Trump administration, that's something that's only going to strengthen is billionaires saying, you know, let's be chill. Be chill with my products, my company. Please, you like iPhones, right? Come on, man. So that was the theme of this year. And I think we're just going to continue seeing that. Do you think it's going to be that?

53:47Or do you think the billionaires are now going to be like, we've won. Let's go away. Like hide. Not even hide, but like at some point it's like they did it, right? Like they got everything they wanted and now go enjoy all of your money in yachts or whatever. Interesting. I think they're still going to have to argue with Trump. Again, these tariffs are so weird. And Elon has his ear. And that's something I'm thinking a lot about because I was reading the OpenAI Elon lawsuit. And to me, it reads like, you know, I have the incoming president's ear and look, they're being anti-competitive. And, you know, so I think these people, if Elon's on Trump's side, these people are still going to have to like, you know, kiss up, if that makes sense.

54:32True. Or on the flip side, they get to start pointing at their enemies from inside of the White House. Exactly. And picking fights that way. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, that's not the most uplifting one I've heard. But unfortunately, I think you can describe a lot of what's happening in the world to that small group of people. Yeah, I'm sort of delirious on Sudafed. And that is, of course, the first thing that came to mind. It's just... Love it. All right. What was your favorite new tech thing of the year? It was Stardew Valley. Ooh, okay. It's very, like, whenever I say that, they're like, people are like, oh, I played that in COVID.

55:07Like, why are you playing it now? The new update just came out for the Switch, which means I get different colored cats and all sorts of new ways to explore the town. But yeah, that cozy comfort games. I have a very cozy comfort house. I just love Stardew Valley. Can you just explain Stardew Valley to me? I've never played it. Of course. And I feel like everyone describes it in a way that almost never makes any sense. Wow. Everybody says very nice things like you just said, but you just were like, now I have different colored cats. And that's like the explanation for why this game is better. Explain this to me.

55:44Teach me about Stardew Valley. Do you know what Animal Crossing is? I do. Animal Crossing with combat. Oh, that is very compelling. Yeah, it's really fun. That's a good case. Yeah, you get to like beat up monsters and caves and, you know, like you have to grind really hard for resources, almost like a Minecraft situation. You have to grant for these resources, and then you get to make your cool little farm. You get to marry someone in the game. I just did an interview with somebody for The Verge that is yet to come out, but they said that they were really into Stardew. And the first thing we ask each other is, who did you marry?

56:17Mine is Harvey. He's the doctor, the town's doctor. Thanks. Good for you. Yeah. Actually, V asked me that when I first started at The Verge. She said, who did you marry in Stardew? I can't remember. Is this like a personality test? Do you think? Can you tell a lot about somebody? Exactly. Who they marry in Stardew? Okay. Interesting. But yeah, there was a new update. You can sink ungodly amounts of hours into it because it is so fun and chill and cozy comfort games. I really have developed an affinity for games that are pointless in the best way. Like for forever, all the games I liked were games where you work up to the big boss and then you beat the big boss and then the game is over.

56:53right like that was what i always played and i would encounter games like stardew or even like animal crossing or minecraft and these games and i would just be like what's the point of this game and it took me so long to wrap my head around the idea that the point of the game is just to play the game and it's like it's fun to play the game and that's actually enough and there's a real like it's the friends we made along the way kind of vibe to these games that i have like really come to appreciate in the last couple of years. Totally. Animal Crossing was a bit too pointless for me. Like, I was getting too fidgety with that one.

57:25But Stardew has, like, you know, stuff to work towards, like goals and quests, which I really appreciate. I restarted Skyrim this year, too, which is, like, another pointless time sink from 2011. But you gotta love it. Yeah, I agree. I've also recently gone back all in on the Switch. Nice. And it's gonna be Stardew time. Good choice. Hell yeah. I have this old yellow original Switch. Wow. The battery is trash. Wow. But the games are awesome. I don't care. It's amazing. I hear we might be getting another Switch next year, but they've said that every year for many years. Honestly, it's getting to the point now where like every one of these Nintendo head fakes is, A, a little funnier than the last.

58:05Because it's a very, very funny thing that Nintendo is doing where everybody wants a Switch and they're like, just kidding. We did a museum and an alarm clock and a music app. Fucking A. Very funny. but also just release the damn switch please. I do. I would like to have it in my house. Like give me one and then keep doing these funny jokes. Right, exactly. That's fine. As long as I'm in on it. Just give, just you and me, just the two of us. Perfect. Not Andrew Webster because he doesn't want one at all and doesn't spend all his time thinking about this. Perfect. All right, last thing. Your favorite non-tech thing of the year.

58:39My favorite non-tech thing has been, oh, it's going to sound so lame because I wrote it down and now it sounds more lame on a podcast. Curated playlists and fresh flowers. That's all you need in life is a nice little playlist. I made one for November because I've been traveling so much. I was in New York seeing you guys. I went on another reporting trip out of the state and I'm going to Texas for Thanksgiving break. And you need a playlist for that. And then getting to share that with everyone you like is a good time. So a little playlist to get you through and validation from your friends about it.

59:15What's your playlisting process? Do you like spend hours? Oh, no. Okay. No, no. Purely vibes based. The one that I have right now is called Nonstop November. And it's mostly like indie. You know who Suki Waterhouse is? Yeah, lots of Suki Waterhouse, you know, sad, fun, autumn vibes. Yeah, Nonstop November. Just what I'm looping, basically. Like, I am addicted to these songs, and I need them in a playlist. And here is, you know, 100 songs that are just like that one. It's sort of my playlist vibe. And Fresh Flowers, they're cheap. They make you happy. I have a vase next to my front door and then one on my desk, so I get to flex it in my What's on Your Desk series.

1:00:03But yeah, they're simple. They make you happy. That's all you need is music and Fresh Flowers. Do you have a favorite kind of flower? Or is it just whatever they're selling at the bodega? Oh, wow. The bodega. The bodega. Okay. You're going to move to New York. You have to learn the word bodega, Kylie. That's true. That's true. We're just starting this now. Vergecasters, if you have a sublet with fresh tulips, yeah, it's tulips. I think that they're really pretty and then they open slowly and yeah. I love this for you. Thank you. It's just a cozy fall full of fresh flowers. This sounds so nice.

1:00:36I know. It is. And it's pouring rain here and I have a slight cold and that's okay. And I'll play my cozy games. I'll write my, you know, weird AI stories about billionaires. It's a good time. You're like one oversized thing of soup away from being like a rom-com character right now. Oh my God. And that's what we should all aspire to, I think. Wow. You're like, you're at the beginning of a Christmas movie. It's what's happening right now. It's going to be amazing. I would hope that, you know, in the Christmas movies, you don't have the winter cold. They leave that out for some reason. This is true.

1:01:06Once you come out of that, then everything's better. Obviously. Awesome. Kylie, feel better. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Moving on. Barbara Krasnoff, Reviews Editor. Here we go. Barbara, hello. Hey there. Okay. We gave you some homework. Let's do your story of the year first. Let's start there. What was your story of the year? Well, actually, it's two or more stories of the year. It's the election coverage that we had. I was especially impressed by Addy's The Pragmatist Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election. I mean, I read that about five times. It gave more information about what the candidates had done in the past and what they were saying now about various important issues.

1:01:51I just wanted to sort of print it out and mail it to everybody I knew. And then, of course, Neelay's essay, Vote for Donald Trump is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles. I mean, you got to mention that. I mean, that was just amazing. Probably the best headline we ran this year. I don't know how you topped that as a headline. I honestly don't. I certainly couldn't. And I wouldn't have had the guts to put it up either. So I'm very glad that our editor-in-chief did. So those were my favorites for the year. Those are good ones. I agree with all of those. What was your tech thing of the year? I found this, of all three pieces of homework we all had to do, I found this to be by far the hardest.

1:02:30What was yours? Well, I bought myself a little Steam Deck. It's not brand new. Yeah, I'll show it to you. I've got it unplugged right now because I was playing with some stuff. But, you know, there it is. I love it. The Steam Deck has, I think, everyone at The Verge, I think, has had a Steam Deck at one point or another. I think it's very good. Yeah, and I love playing with it. What are you doing with it? What's on the board right now? Well, nothing because it's unplugged. Not a great sign for the stream deck, I have to tell you, the fact that it's unplugged. Not a great sign. Well, that's because I was moving it from computer to computer.

1:03:07But I basically use it for very quick... answers to things. So that's cool. and just to get places from one to the other. My problem is I do not have a smart home. So I can't use it for the really sexy things that Jen uses it for, for example. But also I just like playing with it. I like playing with different things and I'm going to play with it some more. What fun stuff have you discovered? Even things that haven't stuck. I feel like I'm with you just in the sense that having a bunch of buttons in front of me is just endlessly fun. And I will find a bunch of wildly unproductive things to do with them just because it's fun to press buttons.

1:03:47Well, I've been trying to attach it to my Chromecast. Ooh, that's good. I haven't done it yet, but that's my next project. Because at home, well, we have just the one TV. And what we tend to do is we run these constantly, this background stuff on birds in various interesting places or cute kittens because it gets the blood pressure down. And what I want to do is to be able to just press a button and have the cute kittens pop up on the TV. So that's my next project. That is an extremely good idea. I have been spending all year trying to figure out how to more quickly play a specific set of YouTube videos.

1:04:31My problem is I have a toddler who, between 3 ,000 and 12 ,000 times a day, just stares at me and demands Moana. and I've like mapped the shortcut button on the Roku remote to get there. I've done a bunch of stuff. I've tried to figure out like, you know, all these macros that will do it. I love the idea of just having a button that is just like play the happy video and then he can do it himself. Just play the video. And also because we are unfortunately a Google Voice household and sometimes that just does not work. And I'd much rather just press a button and have Netflix or whatever come up than have to try to say it or have to do it the really old-fashioned way and do it on the remote.

1:05:18So that's where I am right now. I like that a lot. Can I give you one other tip as a person I know who has to also use Slack all day? Using the Stream Deck to change my Slack status has been wonderful and also has made me a better coworker because I now reliably change my Slack status. So just to have a thing that's like, I have one that's like a BRB with the little hanging BRB sign. And I just have a button on it that I can press on the stream deck and it puts me up at BRB for 60 minutes. Oh, that's perfect. Game changer. That is perfect. Thank you. I will definitely take that into consideration.

1:05:52Happy to help. All right, what's your other thing? Non-tech thing. Totally non-tech thing is googly eyes. See this? That's so good. And the reason is, basically when we had our meeting, I had been to the office for like a year and so when we had our meeting I was sitting around at one of the stations and one of our colleagues basically said I have this bag full of googly eyes does anyone want any and I said sure I'll take a couple and I stuck it to the back of my phone and it's the most relaxing thing that I anytime I get like tense or upset or whatever I just look at these really wide, sympathetic, googly eyes, and I go, oh, things aren't too bad.

1:06:41So that's my totally favorite non-tech thing for right now. It does make your phone feel much nicer. Like, I feel like I like your phone more than I like most phones now. Well, yeah, look. I mean, look at this poor, cute little thing. I basically, for those who are looking, I've got a dark blue backing on my Pixel 6. And the two little eyes against the dark blue backing. It's just looking at you wide, almost like kitten eyes, you know, and saying, hi, I love you. You're nice. It's adorable. And they're like almost perfectly aligned, but just slightly. It's great. I'm a big fan. But there's a real googly eyes thing happening in our newsroom now that I love very much.

1:07:23V song on our team. I know instead of getting the new Mac mini, just put googly eyes on her old Mac mini to make herself feel better about it. And that seems to have worked very well for her. V is the one who gave me these. So there you go. She's starting a trend here. Googly eyes, all the things. Do you now look around your house being like, what else can I googly eyes? I feel like a bag of googly eyes makes someone very dangerous. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, I'm looking on Amazon or someplace. I'm going to get a bag of those so that I can not only use them on things here, but so I can carry them with me.

1:07:52So if I meet somebody who's like not in a good way, I'll just hand them a couple of googly eyes. That's so good. Just hand them two googly eyes and walk away with no explanation. I feel like people would instantly understand what you meant. I love it. I think so. That's really good. All right, Barbara, thank you very much. All right, very good. All right, we're going to take one more break. And then we have a couple more people to talk to you about all the favorite and biggest stuff from the year. Be right back.

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1:10:46All right, we're back. Up next, Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and the author of the very good command line newsletter. Alex Heath, hello. Hi. You have an AI background, and you just alerted us to the Riverside Mac app, and this is the greatest day of my life. So I just, all of my answers before have changed. My thing of the year is that Riverside, which we use to record this podcast, now has a desktop app, and everything will be wonderful. Happy Thanksgiving, David. Seriously, this is what we do here. All right, so we gave you some homework. What was your story of the year? it's a theme and i'm calling it the ai rat race which is just this idea that all of the big tech companies and open ai anthropic have just been trying to one-up each other all year long with all of these announcements to a kind of petty hilarious degree and i expect that to only continue next year but this year really felt like it ratcheted up quite a bit and apologies if others have said something along these lines, but I don't think you can seriously say there was a bigger story in tech this year than that.

1:11:55I agree. And I actually think I like that way of thinking about it too, that what we've had is this incredibly high stakes, expensive game of teeny tiny one-upsmanship all year. Everybody's just doing 5 % better than everybody else every three weeks all year and spending ungodly amounts of money. Yeah, and it all blurs together and you reflect back on the year and it's like, I guess ChatGPT is a little better to use. Cloud is better. Like all of these things feel better, but I haven't felt the kind of aha early iPhone moment this year. It's just felt very kind of constantly iterative. We like skipped straight to the iPhone 14 era of AI.

1:12:42Yeah. So you said you think it's going to continue next year. Yeah. Do you think so? Like there's another case to be made that like we're hitting sort of a slowdown with these models. Maybe there's like a bubble that's going to burst. Maybe everybody is going to finally like take a deep breath and start to ask real questions about AI. You don't think any of that's coming? Oh, David, it's like you're reading my newsletter before it even comes out. It will have come out by this time. There you go. No, that is actually an interesting point. There is this concept in AI called the scaling wall that seems to be hitting everyone in the face, which is just this idea that everyone thought that new models would get dramatically smarter the more compute and money you threw into training them.

1:13:28And that's turning out now to not be the case. So I and others have reported that Google and others are seeing diminishing returns from training their next kind of frontier models. And the consensus seems to be that that's okay, because there's a lot of work that needs to be done with just building good experiences around the models that exist today. and agents are a thing i think we're going to be hearing a lot more about next year which are basically llms that do things on your behalf that can chain together multiple actions take over a desktop interface or a phone or something like that and you can achieve agents with the models that exist today it's all the magic is done in post training and what happens after you've trained one of these large models.

1:14:18And the scaling wall seems to be applying to training new models, but not necessarily improving the ones that exist today. That's fair. Do you think the leaderboard has changed this year? Like, as we look at who is winning this race, it's been a wild game of kind of leapfrog. But looking back, do you feel like we're in a different spot than we were 12 months ago? I think it's hard to say with a straight face that anyone other than OpenAI is the winner right now. I would say OpenAI, especially with its O1 reasoning model release, is still kind of ahead of where the puck is going. Everyone is going to be doing, I say reasoning with air quotes, reasoning models next year.

1:15:04I will say it does feel like Meta has significantly moved up the leaderboard this year with Llama and the excitement around it and the adoption of it. But Gemini seems to be doing okay. I think Google's happy with it, but wishes that more businesses were using it. Anthropic is killing it on the business side on just being accessible through every cloud provider. And OpenAI is the big consumer bet that ChatGPT is going to be the next Google or the next Facebook. It kind of has to be to justify OpenAI's insane valuation. So it's a lot of the same players. They all kind of constantly move up and down.

1:15:42That's why I call it a rat race. But going into the new year, going into December, and I caveat all this with saying a year ago, my Thanksgiving was ruined because Sam Altman got suddenly fired from OpenAI. I guess in that sense, an awful lot has changed in 12 months. And I and Neil, I was at, I think, Disneyland, and we were just constantly calling each other while he was in between rides trying to confirm reporting that we had all week long on the verge. So, you know, who knows what could happen? The industry moves very fast. But as of right now, it feels like OpenEye still has a little bit of an edge, but that edge is rapidly dulling, which is interesting.

1:16:19Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right, next thing on the list, your favorite tech thing of the year. This is not, it's not Riverside for Mac, though. I am also very happy about this. It's another app that, you know, I just think a lot of AI apps aren't very good. But there's this one I've found that I use on my Mac all day long called Granola. and it's a meeting note-taking app. It gets around wiretapping laws by not actually recording your calls, but what it does is it runs a hyper-miniaturized LLM live while you're on a Google Meet, a Zoom, whatever, FaceTime call and transcribes it in real time. So it doesn't save the audio file or let you listen to it after, but it gives you a transcript and then it has been kind of post-trained to really focus on summarizing in an actionable way how you would want to see notes from a meeting, almost like you've got a personal assistant that's in the meeting with you.

1:17:18I've been using it for our editor calls, for interviews, and it's got a pretty nice interface and it's fairly well integrated into macOS. So that's my pick. It's like a simple, actually useful application of AI in a work. kind of setting. Does the action items thing actually work? I feel like we've gotten to the point where the transcription stuff on a lot of these services is very fast and very good. But I'm so skeptical of the thing where it's like, we're going to tell you the three most important things that happened in this meeting. Does Granola actually do pretty well? Yeah. It's pretty good.

1:17:52And it recognizes voices and it knows how to make distinctions. And, you know, it gives me like next steps after a meeting based on how we talked about it. You know, like, for example, like really long ones where a lot is said. It's actually pretty helpful at breaking all of that down. You know, it's not perfect, but it's definitely the best I've used in this context. And it's got a bunch of like integrations with other apps. Like you can drop a summary straight into Slack or your email app or something like that. So they're continuing to build on it. And I'm pretty bullish on it as a product, honestly, just because it's a very good niche application of AI.

1:18:28Yeah, that's pretty cool, actually. What about non-tech things i went to japan um this summer uh slash fall and i'm just gonna pick alcohol you know that kind of sums up um my my year anyway i thought you were gonna just pick japan but i like just picking alcohol just as much that's pretty good yeah yeah i mean japan is awesome but i i fell in love with shochu in japan which is like uh it's not sake it's not soju it's like like a higher ABV, almost like whiskey, clear, very easy to drink, earthy, smoky Japanese spirit. And I want to find more of it in the States. But yeah, anytime I see shochu now, I order it immediately.

1:19:14How easy is it to find in the States? You know, I thought it would be easier. I'm in L.A., and so it's a little bit easier here. We have a lot of Japanese people in really good restaurants that are Japanese in L.A., But it's harder to find when I travel. But yeah, shochu, it's good. All right. And strong. I'm going to have to try this. I very briefly, a couple of years ago during the pandemic, was like, I'm going to get into Japanese whiskey. It's so good, man. It's so good. But it's such a different world of booze that I just, I eventually was like, I'm going to go back to learning about like Kentucky bourbon because that's as much as I can handle right now.

1:19:54I'm from Kentucky. We can have a whole convo about bourbon at some point. We'll have to do that sometime. I like it. All right, Alex, thank you as always. Appreciate it. Thanks, man. All right, last but certainly not least, Ash Parrish, The Verge's video games reporter. Here we go. Ash, hello. Hi. It's been a minute. We haven't done this in a while. You need to come on the show more often. I think the last time I was on, I was talking about Tears of the Kingdom, maybe? I think that's right. We also talked about GTA 6 like 100 years ago. We did? I don't remember that one. Because there was like that weird leak that happened forever ago.

1:20:29Okay, I do remember that, but I don't remember being on The Verge cast about it. You were. It was great. We had a terrific time. I enjoyed every second of it. So we gave you some homework. What was the story of the year for you? So the story of the year for me, I'm going to do something a little bit different, and I'm going to choose a story from my beat, which is video games, which isn't necessarily like the biggest story for The Verge overall, because it's like a tech website, and there are a lot more important things happening in the tech world than what's going on in the world of video games.

1:20:58But I have like two buckets for biggest story of the year on my beat. I've got like the actual, factual, this is objectively the biggest story, and then the biggest story like to me personally. So the biggest story, objectual, actual, factual, is the Switch 2 and GTA 6. They are these like almost oppressive figures looming in the distance that is like slowly coming towards the video game industry. And when it hits, it's going to be this like massive event. And both of those things are supposed to happen next year. Like Nintendo is not, you know, they're being coy about exactly when, but they're saying we are definitely, definitely going to announce the Switch successor sometime before the end of Q1 2025.

1:21:47And it's just been like a constant, not deluge, but Nintendo feels like with everything that they're doing now, it's like we're clearing the books. We are getting everything off of our plate, just clearing the runway for when this massive story hits. And so that's on the hardware side. And on the software side, you have GTA 6, which is probably going to be the biggest video game release in our lifetimes. I don't know how else to explain it. But it's just this GTA 6 is just this massive, crazy, insanely popular thing that has been hyped up possibly too much. Hopefully Rockstar can deliver on not their promises, but at least the idea that people have in their head for what this video game is supposed to be.

1:22:42Well, so let me actually pause on that because this is a thing that I have been wondering about a lot recently, which is, A, it's sort of wild that the two biggest things in video games right now are things that don't exist yet. And I think you're absolutely right that they have been the stories of the year all year despite not existing. And there's a lot of existential questions you could ask about games as a result. But I do wonder, after all of this, is it even possible for these two things to live up to the hype? Yes. You think? I do. Okay, good. Nintendo is Nintendo. Yes, they've had some stinkers, like with the Wii U and things like that in the past.

1:23:21But I think no matter what it is, no matter what it does, it will be big because it's Nintendo. Like, Nintendo had that Alarmo thing out, which was this little, you know, chintzy alarm clock that was just like nothing. And it sold out within seconds, okay? And that's true. It's just an alarm clock that plays like Nintendo beeps and boops. People want it because of who makes it. And that's exactly the case for both of those things. It's a rock star game. It's a Nintendo system. No matter what the kind of quality it is, it's still going to sell like gangbusters. May not perform the way that the bookkeepers want them to perform if they are lower quality, but it's still going to be like the massive, massive million dollar, million copy thing, selling thing.

1:24:08Okay. I just, like, I don't know. I feel like we've been burned, especially on the game side, by these huge things that just turned out to be even slightly worse than we expected. And it becomes this whole giant catastrophe. And it's like, if GTA 6 does what, like, Cyberpunk 2077 did, the world will collapse in on itself. Yeah. And I think maybe I'm just hardening myself against that possibility as somebody who's very excited about this game. I understand that. You know, we haven't seen very much of GTA 6 outside of a trailer and leaked materials. Rockstar hasn't really told us all that much about what the game is.

1:24:52We haven't really seen official gameplay yet. So we actually have no idea what to expect from them. And I think that's probably smart on there. and to kind of like manage expectations. Like you can't get mad at us for something about this because we never actually told you what this thing was. We just said it was GTA 6. We gave you the trailer. We put it out there. We didn't tell you to expect this, this, this, this, or this. We just, you know, did our thing and put it out there. But, you know, I don't know. You're right in that there have been these big, huge releases that have been kind of underwhelming.

1:25:26But I don't know. Like I said, doesn't matter what kind of quality it is because it's Rockstar, because it says GTA 6 on the box, it's going to sell 10 billion copies. Yeah, fair enough. All right, I believe you. Okay, so those are the big stories. What's the one nearest and dearest to your heart? So the thing that is important to me that I think is like my personal big story for the year is the story of the video game industry layoffs and the rise of Gamergate 2.0, as it were. we are in the second year of this like trend of studios being shut down of massive massive massive amounts of people being laid off we're really going to start feeling it I believe in 2025 there was Embracer Group put out with their with their earnings statement maybe a couple weeks ago stating that you know we've got this dried up release pipeline without really qualifying that with the fact that we closed like six different studios and laid off over a thousand of our employees.

1:26:28And like, if you don't have people working for you anymore because you close everything down and fire everybody, yeah, of course your production pipeline is going to suffer and you're not going to have games out that are going to make the money that you need to appease your shareholders. Like, we're starting to see the knock-on effects of this layoff last two years, like really starting to hurt and pinch these big corporations because now they have nothing to show for it. They laid off everybody. They closed these studios. And now they have no product anymore because there's nobody around to make it.

1:26:58On the other end of that, you've got this rising culture war thing within video games where people are trying to attribute the problems of the video game industry with the layoffs and the closures and games failing with the idea that it's minorities and people of color's fault, which is absolutely patently absurd. Yeah, we're just doing this again somehow. Yeah, pretty much. We're doing this again. And these people, you know, they have nothing interesting to say. They're not really paying attention to facts. They're just really upset that the culture of storytelling in video games, both like on the screen and in the development room, is shifting away from trying to appeal to, I'm going to use extremely heavy quotes because it's not true, traditional gamers, which have always been straight, cis, heterosexual, white men.

1:27:51and into this more diverse tapestry where we're making stories that appeal to people of color, LGBTQ people, disabled folks. And we're starting to see development rooms also reflect that diversity as well. And, you know, people can't handle change like that. And they get really mad and they start getting mad at people for the wrong reasons. And it's important to me that these stories get covered so we can understand why they're happening and why it is not true. We can counteract their narratives that like, oh, this game failed because it was woke, you know, which is ridiculous. And then this woke game that was really, really good succeeded because actually it wasn't woke, which is another like the other side of that argument.

1:28:38Right. The Democrat secretly Republican. Exactly. Yeah. Somehow it just like, do you ever look at this industry and you're like, oh, it just is all the same. Like, how many times in history is it like Grand Theft Auto, Nintendo is doing a thing, and everybody is losing their minds and mad and we're kind of doing Gamergate. Like, it just, this is just the cycle. We're just doing it all over again. I think the problem with that is specific to the video game industry is that we do not have the kind of, like, institutional memory that other industries have because of the way that the industry is currently working in terms of journalism and in terms of having a dedicated group of people that are covering these kinds of issues, but we fire them all the next day.

1:29:25It's really, really hard to keep a job in video games journalism right now. And because of that, because it is so hard to maintain a steady job and because these kinds of reportings doesn't necessarily move the needle, like top 10 ways you can get the most out of your switch or, you know, that kind of shit. We don't have the institutional memory, say, the way, I don't know, movies do or any other kind of like cultural thing because everybody's gone. They have to move on and go somewhere else so they can make money and pay their bills and not, you know, be destitute. Totally. All right. Well, these are good things.

1:30:02And again, we need you need to come on the show more often. This is all. You know where I, you know, where I metaphorically live. Why do now? We were talking about this before. Sure, I do now. This is great news. All right, let's keep going through this. So the next thing was your favorite new thing of the year. And for most people, we've been making them say tech. But if you want to do, like, you know, games are tech enough. So if you want to do games, we can do games, tech, whatever you want. The tech thing, it's not necessarily this year, but it came out late enough last year where I think it counts.

1:30:31Kind of like that window where this movie came out in 2024, but it's not eligible for the Oscars until the next year. It's that. It's the PlayStation Portal. Oh, my God. You're the PlayStation Portal fan? The one that's out there? I am the one PlayStation Portal fan now because of the recent news that PlayStation Portal will now let you stream games from the cloud. Before that, like, I already appreciated the device because it allowed me to play my PlayStation games on the couch and still be in the same room with my husband and we can, like, watch TV or do whatever. and I appreciate that. Like I like, I don't like being sequestered or taking away like the living room television from him.

1:31:10So like, you know, because I have to do this thing because I am literally working, you know, he can't watch, you know, whatever silly thing that he wants to watch. And so that kind of, that makes it easier for me. But the big thing is that that kind of like breaks open this device and now makes it kind of like a must own for like anybody who has a PlayStation 5 is the idea that now you can stream games without the need of being tethered to a PlayStation 5 because it's going to let you stream cloud games. If you've got a PlayStation Premium Plus membership, I don't remember exactly how that works.

1:31:42But yeah, that makes it like, okay, now this is on the level of the Steam Deck. Maybe not the same technical heavy lifting specs as a Steam Deck may have, but definitely the utility that I think is going to make it like, okay, this is something that I need to own now. That's really good. That's fair. And I have to say, I'm also personally very excited about this because the portal is such a lovely little thing. They made a nice object and they just hamstrung it in such a stupid way. So it's nice to see it actually start to do the thing it should have been doing all along. Correct. Correct. Now, if we can make it such that it doesn't drop the connection because I can't wire my PlayStation where it is, where I have it.

1:32:23So we can beef up the way that it streams from the PlayStation. and so I don't have to like reconnect every, you know, couple minutes. Then we'll be like cooking with gas. But until then, you know what? I can live with this. All right, I'll buy it. I love it. All right, and then last thing, your non-tech thing of the year. I think you might already know what the answer to that question is. It's my new corgi puppy, Boo. His real name is Boocephalus because I named him after my favorite historical horse, Alexander the Great's horse, Boocephalus, but we call him Boo for short. Do you call him Boocephalus when you're mad at him?

1:33:01Like, is that when you're like, you know, sternly talking to him? You know, I haven't yet, but I think that might be a thing that happens. Okay, because I feel like that's a, like, if I heard someone yelling that at the dog park, like, whew, that's serious stuff. When you hear someone yelling at the dog park, you're like, that is the biggest nerd that I've ever seen in my life. Also that. Also that. But yeah, he's a three-month-old corgi who loves chewing on feet, and he's trying to chew on mine now. because he's teething. And he is absolutely a shit monster, but I love him to death. So that is my favorite non-tech thing of the year.

1:33:34I love it. So three months, he's just a terror. He's just, he is just a destroyer of worlds. He's a toe-chewing terror, that's for sure. But then he like sleeps on top of your head and you're like, all right, we're cool. Everything's fine. Pretty much, yeah. I love this. Then, yeah, then he makes this little noise when he's like yawning or something like that. And it's so, so dang cute. He is very cute. There are a bunch of dog animals dedicated Slack channels at The Verge and Vox Media in general. And like, it's not so much that you've like won those channels with Boo, but like you did it. It's like pretty hard to compete with Boo's situation right now.

1:34:12Yeah, you know, that's the goal. He's doing good work. All right. Ash, thank you as always. It was great to have you. Come back soon. We have, I think, a lot of stuff to talk about in 2025. So we will definitely have a lot of stuff to talk about in 2025 for sure. All right, we'll see you then. Thanks. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to all of the Verge staff who came on the show for coming on the show, for doing your homework, for talking us through all your favorite stuff. There is lots more on all this stuff, all the stories of the year, all of our favorite things, lots of it at theverge.com.

1:34:45I'll put as much as I can in the show notes, but I trust that you will tell me all of the things that I forgot to put in the show notes. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, and again, particularly if you have questions that you want us to talk about on The Verge Cast, about The Verge Cast, and about The Verge, and about the future of media, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. I want to hear all your thoughts, all your questions, all your ideas, everything. Lots of fun stuff to come in the next couple of weeks, including big thoughts about the future of media.

1:35:16It's going to be great. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Tuesday to talk about some fun van lifey things and some microphones. Then we'll be back on Friday to talk about the news. It all just keeps happening, friends. We're winding towards the holidays, so we're going to get into some year-end stuff here pretty soon. But Lord knows the AI news isn't going to stop just because it's Thanksgiving. If you're in the U.S., I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you have an awesome weekend.

1:35:47We will see you on Tuesday. Rock and roll.

1:36:16The Limu Emu They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.