 Thank you all for coming to our 10th, oh I'm knee-lined by the way. Sorry, I'm supposed to say that instead of says I. Thank you all for coming to On The Verge, our 10th birthday party. And the first of what we hope is many events to come. We're going to have a lot of fun tonight. We've got Joanna, we've got David, we've got Dieter. We've got a party downstairs, we've got more party to come. Tomorrow we've got a great day of talks and demos. We're going to make some news tomorrow, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm also excited about seeing all of you in person. It means a lot that you're here. The Verge is a community. It's like a weird thing for a tech site to say. But we met a lot of you already downstairs. A lot of people have come up to me and said I've been reading you since I was in middle school, which... It's good, I'm glad we were here to poison your minds from the very beginning. Two things I want to say. One, almost the entire Verge team is here, apart from our international team, who we miss very much. There are people here that we've hired in the past year that I've never met in person. So I'd like to meet you. We have a very special team. The Verge is like an art project at scale. It's just a... Our office is like a high performance Montessori. So it's very special. Please hang out with our team. They love talking to you, they love seeing you. And I'm very grateful that they're all here. And I want to thank all of you. Like I said, we've had a lot of people who've been with us for 10 years. We do not take this for granted. I remember when the Verge didn't exist. Deer and Joanna and David, I all remember when the Verge didn't exist. We do not take for granted that we have an audience of people that's like, yes, do a holiday podcast about HDMI specifications. Go ask other people in the media. That's like an unusual situation. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here. Thank you for being with us. We're going to keep going. It's not the end. It's a site about the future. We've got more to come. But I just wanted to say very sincerely thank you to all of you for being with us. Okay, let's bring out Dieter Bohn, Joanna Stern, David Pierce. You stay over there. Okay. There are so many of you. There are a lot of them. This is way different than doing this on Zoom. We freak out. Bear with us. So you might remember us, Neil and Dieter, on the podcast. Joanna is one of our founders. She is now the senior personal tech columnist at Wall Street Journal. She replaced Walt Mossberg. This is a big deal. And there's David. David is like employee number one at The Verge. He's a huge part of our early stories. Can I just say there's another way to say that, which is I was the first person who didn't get to be a founder. There's a bunch of ways we could describe that, I think. All right. Well, we'll just leave that alone. That's what we're going to do. We made a little video to introduce David and Joanna. Can we run that? Oh, no. Hey, guys. It's Joanna from The Verge. I'm world record holder and American sweetheart, David Pierce. And I'm here with the Idea Center A720. This is a cane. It's a cane you walk around with like normal. The Nook tablet. She's Snapchatting. I'm a special guest. But actually, back to the Bluetooth toothbrush. What in God's name is that? I want to do as much of this as I can without having to get a license. You're technically stalking. You do love me, right? I love you. Really nice to meet you. Thank you. That was the best moment of my life. I just want to point out, immediately after that happened, Joanna broke up with me in the Las Vegas airport chilies too, which I will never forgive you for. She was like, I met Bieber on leaving The Verge. I've been with Justin Bieber ever since. So we want to, we're going to do some news. We got a lot to talk about. But I want to start with the two of you. You guys were with us from the beginning. What are some early memories of doing The Verge with us? My first memory is hiring David Pierce. That was your first memory is hiring me? Alive. And then immediately leaving as soon as you hired me. A huge mistake. I got to go. I think, I mean, we had this small office. It was on 18th Street. You guys remember that? And I think it's just like so representative of how big The Verge ended up getting. But we were in this tiny office on 18th Street. We put together the IKEA furniture, the desks. And my desk wobbled all the time because I had two monitors on it. And I just think we were three or four people in that office with random gadgets in the corner. And we had that little like photo studio set up that was just a bunch of books on a table. Yeah. For the photo studio. Yeah. We faked all of you out for about five years. We're like, look at how beautiful The Verge is. And it was like a tiny, it was like six books in a row. And then our podcast was in the corner. And everyone in the office had to be quiet while we were podcasting. For like two and a half hours. And we were like, we're just going to talk for a while, but you can't talk. And the wooden floors were so loud. Like you would have to tiptoe in. But I remember actually we made our first like video. We had two amazing video producers, Billy and Jordan. And I remember the first time we made like, sort of put like, we did a motion track shot in the corner. And we were like, holy crap, this looks amazing. But really like if you step back, it was really just this tiny little set in that office. And we would like lean out the window to get photos of things. My memory of that office is that the bathroom was directly in the center of it. Yeah. So you just, and people would like go into the bathroom to make phone calls because there was nowhere else to go. And people would go into the bathroom to do bathroom things. And then would come out and you'd be like, maybe you should have done that like somewhere else. We all got very close very fast. We run a real company now. We have an HR department. In case you're wondering. We figured it out. Okay. I have here a list of headlines that all of us wrote. Oh, no, these are lines from reviews. I'm sorry. Our producers have gone through the reviews that the four of us wrote in our time at The Verge. And they have just taken out sentences. So I'm going to read them. And I want to see if you can guess who wrote. And if you in the audience are there, call us. By all means, guess. But no Googling. You just yell our names. This is all a trick for you to yell our names. Okay. Here's the first one. Why does Motorola hate convenient power buttons? It's one of the two of you. I think it's Dieter. Yeah. I do get angry about power. Joanna Stern. Wow. What did I write? That was your Droid Zyboard review. Oh, my God. The Droid Zyboard. Another thing I remember at that office is I wanted to put the Droid Zyboard, remind me, two tablets. Yep. Two tablets made in partnership with Motorola and Verizon. Yep. With a ridiculous name. And I wanted to put it on a skateboard. Yeah. Zyboard on a skateboard. Obviously. Yeah. And I tried to, like, zoom it down the office, that rickety office, and they both just, like, fell flat on their face. Yeah. They didn't break. I've broken many gadgets in that office and in my lifetime. But this combination of ideas, this is the brain that has revolutionized the Wall Street Journal video operations. Yes. And you hear Zyboard and you're like, we need a skateboard right now. He's like, I need a number of mimes, a giant stadium, it's an iPhone review. And the journal's like, yeah, weed. Yeah. Here's the money. We're doing it. Here's the money. Go. Okay. Oh, no. Quote, first I have questions. How do I Shake Shake? Is this a full body wiggle situation or a light jazz hands? It's one of them. It's got to be David. It's got to be David. Like, everyone got it right away. All right. For what? What? What was that from? Yeah. Review. No, this is just an article he wrote. It has to be from CES. Please stop making me shake shake my smartphone. Actually, that's just from its text. Oh, because shaking new socks. There were so many times my first couple of years, like, especially at CES, where, like, the directive from the two of you would be like, go find weird things and write about them, and don't come back until you found 10 of them. Yeah. There was an epidemic of people trying to get us to shake smartphones. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we had to take it seriously. Didn't like it. We had to be like, no, this meeting is very important. Shaking is the future. You're definitely doing a good job. Okay. I asked my wife if the blank was worth the pain of not having TV for three days. Yes, it was worth it. Yeah. Yes. Something about it was a TVO review. Yep. The extent to which Becky has been a good sport about Neelight Gadget reviews is like, it's bad. Becky is the star of the verge over the first 10 years. Becky has, she's only written one post. The highest page views per post. Because her Samsung TV review went viral. Having the AV Club aggregate your wife's review of a TV that is actually a review of you. I do not recommend this experience. Okay. Does she ever hold that over you? She's like, I'm better than you at being a lawyer and I'm better than you at being a gadget blogger. Wow. I mean, she doesn't say it. And she's like, also, I'm our daughter's favorite. It's great. No, it's fine. It's what marriage is. It's great. I don't regret anything. The hardware is still beautiful and the new organs provide a faster experience. But we're not sure at $50 more than the Kindle Fire blank has got what it takes to fight Amazon on the content front. I wrote that. I'm pretty sure. I slipped that organs line. I love organs. Tell me about the organs. She reviewed the Nook tablet. All right. I wrote that, right? What does organs have to do with it? The organs of the Nook tablet. Yeah, the organs of the Nook. Okay. Okay. You know. No one's buying it, Joe. Did I write it though? Four hundred and fifty people here are like, organs, don't do it again. You killed the Nook single-handedly. All right. Hurry up, future. Hurry the hell up. All right. Here's the last one. Eric Schmidt, in a fit of what turned out to be insanity, declared shortly before CS that Google TV would be on a majority of new TVs by the summer. That sounds like me, Eli. No, it was David. That was me? Yeah. I'm not going to remember this. That's a good line. Go me. You reviewed something called the Sony NSZ-GS7. Oh, that thing. Who doesn't remember the GS7? Still use it every day. My God. Can we talk about that for like 20 minutes, because I have feelings about the Sony NSZ-GS7. Oh, yeah. Was that the thing with the remote and the- The big giant keyboard remote? And it was like Google TV was going to change the world? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I just want, this was a very weird moment. This half of the room was like, yeah. This half of the room, ice cold. I don't know how you self-selected, but like, left half go to the bar together. You have something to discuss. Like, row for the win on this side. Okay. It would not be the Vergecast if we didn't do news. And so we're thinking about how we would do news on the show. We don't want to talk about news today. And we're looking through our feed. This is true. We never did Vergecast 69. It does not exist. Was this intentional? Yeah, we're like 10 years from now. We're going to light the nerds up in purple and do it. So we never did Vergecast 69. So we pulled the headlines from March 2012, 2013. Put up the wheel. Oh, no. That wheel, I've never seen it before. And also I didn't let them study. And Joanne is pissed at me that I didn't let them study. Oh, this worked. Let's testify in eBook price fixing case. So as you all know, the iPad destroyed the candle. Simpler times. It was like the last time he was made to testify. If you don't remember this, when they announced the iPad, Steve Jobs confidently told Walt Mossberg at the event, he was caught on candid video, the prices for iBooks and Amazon books would be the same. This triggered a government investigation into Apple, which had colluded with the five biggest publishers in the world, culminating in this headline, and all of us, of course, using iBooks to this day. Apple lost this case. They were the monopolist in eBooks. My memory of this case is they basically just went into court and they were like, no, you did it. And Apple was like, yeah. It's just like another book monopoly they should probably look at. OK, spin the wheel. Oh, no. I was hoping for ROPE E3. Wow. There's like some burned Metro PCS stands up. Again, mostly the left side of the room. I feel like that's like the Deater side. The headline is FCC approves T-Mobile merger with Metro PCS. Yes. It's the beginning or acquisition or whatever. So a weird thing about being 10 years old is that we both predate and post-date the John Ledger era. The Verge is older than one ledger. So what struck me on this is like we now live in the age of 5G, which Joanna, you love. We won the race. I hate 5G. She's like, yeah. How many people are actually using 5G on their phones? It's over there. What is going on over there? How many people? I just want to say, by the way, this is our side of the audience. That's your side. So go these people. How many people are doing things that they wouldn't have done because they have 5G? Has anyone here done a robot surgery with a 5G T-Mobile? All right. That's the last gimmick. Someone just ominously yelled tonight. Very terrifying. Oh, very good. Very good. Okay. Anyway, the point of that headline, which is a crazy thing about, that happened early, early on the Verge. That created the T-Mobile that has pushed the entire industry ahead. And it was like a boring trade headline. And if only we'd known. But so they got MetroPCS and they got a bunch of Spectrum because AT&T tried to buy them and failed. And so then they had to give them a bunch of stuff and the T-Mobile used that to make John Lodger Batman. Yeah. That's proving my theory that the only antitrust policy this country needs is to prohibit AT&T from buying things. It'll work. Spin the wheel. Yeah. Wait, these two next to each other is brutal. This is like the best news and the worst news of the year. For those listening later on, the headline is Google Reader Shuts Down. Yeah. And we will now spend the rest of the episode talking about RSS. Welcome. We did it for Dieter. This was like a momentous, in retrospect, this is a huge deal. Yep. Okay. I have a lot of theories about this. Yeah. Because I had a Google person tell me one time, just like straight up, do you think if anyone used Google Reader, we would have shut it down? And I did not have a good comeback to that. And I think the problem was every journalist used it. And that's not a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. And I miss Google Reader every single day. And everyone else that I'm like, remember Google Reader is like, no. Facebook tells me where stories are. And I'm like, that's why the world is dying. That worked out great for everybody, didn't it? Yeah. Super good. I was about to say, I think Google Reader became Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. But now Google Reader is kind of sketchy back. They're definitely trying to bring it back. They have the news feed thing that's definitely, they're never going to call it Reader, but it's going to be Reader again. No, but this is Google's entire problem. They're like, that beloved name that you loved, we're actually going to call it Hangouts. And then we're going to change it into Google Reader. What if we call it Chrome Browse? It doesn't make it. Just use the good names. All right. Do we have any Google Reader fans? It's like the Verge team is here. Yeah. That's right. This side again. This side. They love Google Reader. 5G. The riot nerds over here and then like Robo surgery dude over here. Back of the room, you need an identity. Spin the wheel. Oh. Wow. Wow. Whoa. The chill in the room, just I'm remembering that somebody to listen to this later is. Pull over in your car and just start sighing. Intel in discussions to make Apple chips. This is a real thing. I think we didn't do this episode because it was cursed. Could you imagine this Verge cast? Like we'd done it in real time. We were so young and naive. We had no idea. This is a fun- Wait, wait. Explain the context of this story. So 2013, Apple was still, it just done, we launched the iPhone 4S. Right. And iPad. They were in the iPad. So they just done the A-series chips. Yep. And so at this time, they were on their second A-series chips and it was a question who would manufacture them. And so there's always the rumors that Intel had split out the manufacturing. The spoiler is that it didn't work. It didn't happen. And Apple just put out its own laptop chips, which appeared to be very good. But okay, so that was, you have to wonder at that time, Apple was thinking further ahead about what they were going to do with their Silicon and how they were thinking, you know, maybe we're not going to have this Intel partnership at all. Yeah. Well also at that time, people were still seriously believing Intel could make a mobile chip worth a damn. Right. That's right. Including Intel. Because that was still the time where they were trying to make Atom chips for phones. Yep. You could get Atom chips for phones. Did you bring a netbook with you? You could go get a TIO map if you want. I was going to say, do you remember that like one phone that it came with? It was like Intel and Firefox OS and they were like, this is the future. I don't think the phone ever saw its way off a show floor, off of like a CES or a... Yeah. Nego. I'm just saying names of things that we were making seriously. Nego. Intel. There was Mamo and there was, this is compelling radio and even more compelling stage show. Believe it. To answer your question, I did not bring a netbook today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. We're adding to the programming tomorrow. Joanna will demo and it's just EPS. What thing do we believe today that is as naive as believing Intel could win in phones in 2012, 2013? Pixel. Wow. Someone just yelled Pixel. Yep. I'll take it. It was the happy side of the room. Yeah. That's the dark lining to that cloud. What do you think, Dieter? I mean, it's possible. Yeah. I don't know where that chip is going. Yeah. We got to see how the phone does. When we were downstairs hanging out with people, there's a lot of people here at Pixel 6s. Go find them. It's fascinating. They're around. They're around. All right. A couple more spins. If we don't get to scissor vodka, we're doing it anyway. Just so you know. It's torture. This is you. This is your fault. I was like, David, buy a Wii U. You're like, no. The headline is Wii U sales slump. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my career. I was very right about the Wii U. All right. We have one more spin, and then we're going to take some questions for a few minutes. If you got them, you can go line up. There's a microphone over there. Yeah, both sides. Left and right. Both sides. Can I just say the thing about the Wii U is they made a Wii and they made a Nintendo Switch. They had great ideas, and then they put them together and ruined the whole thing. Yeah. It's incredible. Do you buy an OLED Switch? No. Are you going to? But my Switch, the battery on my current Switch lasts like nine minutes now. You turn it on, the game loads. It's like Zelda, and then it dies. I need to buy a new one. I just haven't been outside in a year and a half. Who needs portable consoles? Very good. All right. One more spin. Oh, Joanna. Wow. I'm trying to read from the screen. Released in an hour. This is your moment, Jess. This was my moment. BB-10, BlackBerry 10 phones. I guarantee you Joanna wrote this story. I didn't. I don't think I worked at The Verge on this. I don't care. You came back. I came back. I wrote this story. I had so much hope. I'm telling you this episode of the show is cursed. Everything that came up was like, this is dead. It's dying. Dead. Or exciting thing announced that we now know died. BB-10 is one of those things, they were trying to reboot the company. I can't even remember the name of the CEO at the time. Dieter, you know it. Thorsten. Thorsten. Yes. Thorsten Heinz? Heinz, yeah. Heinz. Right. I interviewed him. Steven Elob. I remember. I remember him. I was thinking him in my mind. I saw a picture of Steven Elob as the CEO of BlackBerry. Lazaridis hadn't been, he wasn't totally gone yet. That was the transition, I believe. One of the things in that early moment where I was like, oh, we might be on to something with The Verge, is that we would write about these platforms, and we would write about the CEOs, and we'd be like, BB-10 seems done. The CEOs would definitely read the coverage, and they'd be like, no, we're in it. One time we wrote about Windows Phone. Do you remember this? I remember everything we wrote on Windows Phone. Steven Elob's family got personally mad at me that I had tarnished his good name. That wasn't me. You ruined the economy of Finland by yourself. That is your fault. I just said it was on fire. The big thing with BB-10, there was no Android apps on that, right? They did not have Android apps on that. It wasn't hard to port, I don't think. They had a decent interface. They had a couple good ideas. Right. But the whole thing with that... They had that unified messaging box. Yeah, they had the unified inbox. Every home screen you swipe over to the left, and there's a bunch of junk. On the iPhone, you can choose your own junk, and then on Android phones, you get whatever junk they give you. On BB-10, it was your inbox. It was unified. It was a good idea. It was such a good idea. It didn't go anywhere. Didn't that come on the Storm, which was the phone that actually clicked when you clicked it? Was that later? No, that was earlier. They did have a full touchscreen version, and then they had a version with a keyboard. The biggest thing I'm trying to remember is what was in the App Store? Very little. That was the problem. Twitter. Okay. I like that Joanna was Blackberry. I need to really put myself... You were the Blackberry stan on our team. Joanna was my last friend on BBM by like five years. I'm still on BBM. I'm still there now. But yeah, no, I remember I was so excited to review the phones, and then I remember just zero happening with the phones after. I think what's interesting, Dieter's got his hands freeing documentary out, so it was a very exciting room premiere tomorrow. You know how we always talk about how all the ideas in phones are lifted from web OS? None of the ideas are lifted from BB-10. No one was like, oh, we should raise that idea. Okay. Do we have questions? Do we have people? Are you going to do it? Feel free. There we go. Oh, here we come. I said get up early. All right. This question is for... Wow, we're just in it. Yeah, I'm doing it. Yo, what's up? What's your name? Where are you from? My name is Ken. I'm from over there. Okay. On this side of the room. Yeah. The good side. Yeah. What is one job that you had before the verge that oddly shaped you into the person you are today? That's for all of you. We're going heat. David Pierce, you can go first. Well, I mean, the actual answer to that question is I interned for David Pogue when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times because I emailed him and was like, I'm home for winter break. I have nothing to do. Your job seems interesting. Can I come clean up your house? And he let me. I was like, I'm going to go to Indiana because she played a fairy in one of his videos. I have a link I will send to anyone who would like to do that. And that was... It was all over from there. Jo? I would actually say that the verge prepared me for my jobs after because for me, the verge... I carry with me so much that I learned from the people I worked with at the verge. These two, specifically this one who I always try to keep working with, but then he leaves me. And I think that the experience of working with that team and getting the experience of just being so deep into the tech has had just paved the way for me. Well, I mean, before the verge, I had found an Android central and I had more stuff. But I guess the thing that shaped me was I bombed out of grad school. I was going to be a PhD in English lit and study semiotics and I learned that it's possible to care a lot about things that other people don't care about, but still find a way to make it interesting. And it's way harder with semiotics than it is with tech. And so that was my training. Also it's okay to bomb out of grad school. This side of the room found its identity. They're all emailing their moms right now. I had a tech support job in college. And all of you thought I was going to say lawyer. No, that was just I got to get out of that. Don't do that. Drop out of that school if you're in it. No, I had a tech support job in college where I worked in the basement library and I realized no one, everyone cared about getting the thing done, but no one cared that I knew how to fix it. And that gap between how it works and what it does is all I think about all the time. We take it for granted. Okay, this side of the room. Guys, my name is Rob from Seattle. Burning question of mine for a while. Nilay and Dieter, what's the story behind your Twitter handles? Oh no, Dieter, Dieter's like, Dieter dropped out of grad school. Remember I mentioned I went to grad school for semiotics? Go ahead. Yeah, it's a cool word and I was early. And now I fend off weirdos who want to buy it on a weekly basis. That's it. That's the whole story. We believe that language is created by humans and we make it up as we go and it is one of our superpowers and so I made up a word. Thanks. Who here? Hey guys, Neil from Brooklyn. So we just went through 10 years ago what you were writing about, reading about. What do you want to be reading and writing about 10 years from now? Facebook drama. Joanna, go ahead and take this one. What'd you say? Facebook drama. Oh god. Blackberry. That'd be great. This room could kickstart a new Blackberry together. That's what we should accomplish at the end of this party. I would say more seriously, every company is tired of what it's doing right now. It's just a weird theme. Apple's like, we're going to do health and Facebook's like, we're going to rebrand our company. Every company seems bored. I think that's a really rich place for other kinds of, like big companies are bad at doing things as you noticed. And it's a rich space for other people to invent other kinds of things. So I'm hoping that we spend more time writing about new companies and new competition instead of the set that we have been for some time. I also hope, I think one of the big things that I went back and listened to a 2011 podcast I did with Neelai and Josh and I was reviewing at the time a Suess transformer laptop tablet thing. And it was like a really new idea at the time. I said on the podcast, no, I think like Apple's going to do this kind of thing. And Neelai, I wrote down the quote on my phone, but he was basically like, they're not going to make keyboard docs. That's not a thing that Apple's going to do. And I think like the, in 10 years from now, we're still talking about ideas about what other companies are doing and other companies should be doing and predicting or thinking about the pieces that can form the future or form the gadgets of the future. I think we'll still be in a good place. Yeah. I think Joanna came prepared with a dunk from a 2011 podcast. Over here. My name's Harlan. You got to pull that mic down. This is all right. My name's Harlan and I was curious, like it's been a lot of reflecting on how important the app store was for the iPhone to be a success. And before the app store, like the Cydia store and like other jailbroken, sorry. I was wondering if you think it's worth revisiting the Cydia store and the apps before the app store. Maybe. I mean, that was just another app store. If they had been successful, they would have just been the app store. I think like we will see what happens with all this litigation, but ultimately they're your phones. Like I think I feel that very deeply. Like I paid a lot of money for this phone. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. And the world seems not organized in that way, but having one other competitor is just a recipe for the same. Like AT&T and Verizon are not competitive. They're like friends, right? Like one raises prices, the other one raises price. Like I think we need more than that. What do you think? I think so too. All right. Over here. Hi, my name is James from the stage left side of the audience. We're going to end up, we're going to like leave with like t-shirts. Like, oh, that's great. I've been listening to the Vergecast since the beginning, back when it was a video podcast, hashtag bring back the video podcast. You guys did at one point a like explain the inside baseball memes of the verge and the verge cast, but one that I never had answered. And I think you guys actually may have answered it tonight, but I've always wanted to know what is with the joke of being broken up with by Joanna Stern in a Chili's tube. You were, I feel like it's your story to tell if you can do it without crying. So we should not actually break up. Joanna and I are very close. Let's say that. We should definitely be clear about that. We should be very clear about that. We're very close. We're very good friends. Startups are very hard, right? So the verge was a startup and Joanna told me she was leaving the verge after CES. Fine. All that's fine. After CES in a Chili's is like an emotionally devastating ruinous thing to do to another person. In an airport Chili's. The airport Chili's. Right. Like, it's fine. Go have your career. I get at the Wall Street. Great. You're like, I'm going to find you at your lowest post at the worst place in America. And I'm like, I'm leaving your startup that we started together. That's my version. Not only like it wasn't a Chili's, it was a Chili's too. And it was over breakfast at Chili's. It was a very hard moment for me. And then we got on a plane together. It was a very hard moment for me. And clearly very hard for Neelai. But we were not in fact really dating. Let's be clear. No, not at all. I went to Neelai's wedding and Neelai came to my wedding. Yeah. But it's funnier to say it that way. Once a year on Twitter. And then the text would be like, I tweeted the thing again. Over here. Hi. Ajay Adijari. I am, well was one of the moderators at the verge. So at Polygon. So yeah. Shout out to Eric Bergeron and Sean McElroy. So Eric's in the audience right now. But what I wanted to ask is two questions. So should people read the comments and should people that actually, you know, try to complain about Section 230 actually have to read the comments? Because I, every single day I hear about people complain about Section 230 and I'm like, as a moderator, none of you actually fundamentally understand what Section 230 is. Yes and super yes. Ted Cruz read the verge comments. Yeah. That's what I got for you. I will say this. You know, we have had forums. We turn them off. We turn them on again. We turn off the, we do all the stuff. We are, we haven't, we're not ready. We are redesigning our website. It will come out next year. We have huge ideas and we have big ideas to make our community stuff better. Because I, again, it's strange that the verge is that the audience feels like a community, right? The thing I would say is it's a big thing that feels small and I want to make it keep feeling small and the way to do that is to make our comments good, which is easier said than done. So I keep an eye on us. But I will, if I talk to Ted, I'll be like, this dude AJ, got something to say to you. Yeah. I think we should send our moderators to Congress. Honestly, like if any congressional member, especially Cory Brooker, since he's a New Jersey rep and I'm in New Jersey, wants to learn from a moderator, you can hit me up. I'm on Twitter. Kyrie Ellison. That's great. All right. I think we can do one or two more. Over here. Verge mobile show or an uncut verge cast feed? Are you ever going to do it? What would a verge mobile show be that our show isn't? Yeah. I mean, all we talk about is phones. That's like a complicated. I just haven't heard Dieter say greetings mobile accomplishers in so long. When I host the Tuesday shows, I start with it sometimes. I know, but it's not the same. They're not mobile accomplishers. And we're doing this live right now. It's useful. We have an audience. It's fun. We are very convinced that editing our show makes us sound smarter. When we turned off the video feed, our downloads went way up. People like our show better when we are not being idiots on video. We're very good at video. Our video team is here. We made a documentary with them. I'm just pretty convinced that I have a face for radio. So I'm going to just stick with that. All right. One more over here. Hey, y'all. My name is Conrad from San Francisco. Just wanted to ask, with LG out of the picture, who do you think is the next to make super weird phones that no one wants to buy? Pixel. Oh, my God. Pixel. Brutal. TCL wants to be the next LG, which is like the saddest ambition ever. But yeah, if I had to guess, I'd say if TCL can actually pull off some of the prototypes that they've been working on, they're going to make the next weird phones. What do you think? You love weird phones. I love weird phones. You just got misty about BB10 for like a while. I miss weird phones. HTC. I miss some weird phones from them, too. Yeah. I know we had an entire running riff about the HTC Bacon. Or the HTC Rime. Which is like our first big scoop at the this is my next. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have it. I think TCL is a good answer. Right now no one else wants to get into phones. Maybe Google. I think that might just be Google. Maybe real. Should we do one more, didier? Sure. Thanks, y'all. Hey, guys. Zach from Long Island. So I, like many iPhone users, am locked into iMessage. I was thinking about it of like what would it take for Apple to bring iMessage to Android. And I think that, you know, they would want in on the money. So what do you think of iMessage coming to Android but it being a paid monthly service? What do you think the cost would be? And would you do it? The answer is no. Because they would not make as much money. It would have to be $1,000 a year. It would have to be the cost of an iPhone and everything else that you pay for on your iPhone. That's true. It would have to be like $2,000 a year. Yeah. And you would have to pay for Arcade Plus and News Plus. Weirdly, I'm sitting here being like I'd probably pay that. Sorry. I answered that really quickly. You guys, I think about it a lot. I don't think Apple is bringing iMessage to Android unless, like, the full power of the United States government is deployed against them. Like, Tim Cook is like it's the military. Like, I'm just sending. The Army is going to the spaceship and they're going to make iMessage via Android. And Tim Cook would be like, I don't know, we have a lot of money. We're going to buy an Army. Let's see how this goes. But if you go to Dieter's Twitter feed today, he had like four impossible tips for bringing iMessage. Yeah, no, it's very difficult. Including rubber banding your two phones together. Yeah. So I just want to call out two things. One, someone just screamed RCS at us. It's a virtual. It was this side of the audience. Your side really picking it up recently. That side was just whispering amongst themselves and this side delivered. Second, what we are referring to is Casey Neistat today was like, man, I want an Android phone. Can't get rid of iMessage. And Dieter was like, here's my plan. And Casey replies with, that seems complicated. This is like customized everything he's ever owned. I think it involves running a server in your house. You need to have a Mac that's running all the time. And there are a couple different apps that will basically forward your iMessages to your Android phone. So Dieter reviews a lot of phones. Three now and again in hardware season, I'm like, I'd like to send Dieter a text message. And I don't get it. And I'm like, Dieter, did you get my text? And he's literally like, iMessage. Because it doesn't turn off. But I have good news. If you're an Android user, the same disappearing text problems hits RCS now, too. Everybody wins. All right. We got to RCS. I feel like we have to end it here. It's only sideways from here. I got a no-ran riff. I want to say thank you to all of you for coming. I want to say thank you to Joanna and David for joining us on the stage. It is crazy that we're able to throw this party. At one point, Joanna did throw water. I'm very sorry. I said I was sorry, Tim. Okay. Joanna's very sorry. I'm not really. She's not sorry. We appreciate you. We've got a great party. All the stuff downstairs. All the stuff tomorrow. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. You did it. The mic does not work sometimes. Yeah. It's when you turn your head away. Sorry, production staff. Okay. So that was the Vergecast that's going out on the feed. Like I said, escalating series of gimmicks. We want to do something special with this group here live. So I want to bring out Yandra Wintersoul. She is the first female memory world champion. Hi. Hello. I cannot believe we agreed to do this. Yandra, you have memorized 50 gadgets. I think so. I hope so. In like the last 20 minutes. Could you just give us like the very short, like what's your methodology for memorizing 50 gadgets? Wait, stop. Let me explain what I mean. Our executive at RTC took 50 photos, most of which David took, like early on. The books. And we're going to put them up here and we have to guess what they are. But somehow you have memorized what all of them are already. I hope so. I did as best as I could backstage as you saw me being in trance, trying to be in focus and we'll see. It was intense. Huh? It was intense. She was like wearing headphones and like staring at gadgets. Yeah, I listened to a lot of Drake. What's the secret? What's your? Listening to a lot of Drake and just one song on repeat and just making fun stories. I'll explain when we see the pictures for sure. All right. I'm going to push this clicker and we're going to look at a photo of a gadget. If you can guess what it is. Oh. What's that, Jo? It's not on the screen, Joanna. It's like is the answer down there? Does anyone know? It is a very, very early tablet. Is that a Nook? It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. I think it's a JuJu. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Wow. I think it's a JuJu 2010. Yeah. 1360. You didn't get that. No. I can't remember. You destroyed this company single-handedly. I would have gotten it if it had the interface on it. This is a trick. All right. Next one. Anybody know? You can't just yell HTC. That's going to be like a 90 degree angle. 90 degrees angle. A 90 degree angle. It's a Jetson. It's a Jetson. You can't just yell HTC, that's going to be like 90% of the answers. Is that sidekick? No. Non-LG Double Play 2011, and I think it has specs of, I want to say 480 by 320. Yeah. How? Whoever asked the question about weird phones is right, we need to bring these back. Okay. Oh, I know what this is. Chompy! Chompy. Okay, people know the Chompy apparently. We are familiar with this phenomenon from 2009, I want to say. Oh, sorry, I make mistakes. 2080, 320 by 240 as it says on the screen. Man, I had a Chompy. That's way too big a screen to be 320 by 240. That's all wrong. Also, Poitam's not doing anything useful. That was the best the Chompy ever got. This is what Chompy is. We've got to update Linux for the rest of your life. Oh boy, Joe. Come on, you've got to get this one. Yeah, HTC Evo 3D. Yeah. Nailed it. Oh, look at those specs. I'm pretty sure one of our editors put this on our list of best gadgets of the decade. I have no idea if they're joking or not. Oh, yeah, this is my baby. This is the HTC Rime. It must have been 2010. 2011. Yeah, there he is. I want to explain this though for a second because does anyone remember this phone? What was the thing supposed to... Oh, Yasha does. You're the only one who gets it. This was a phone designed for women. Oh, nice. And that little dongle there was a dongle before what we call now dongles. And this was designed... It went into the headphone jack and it would be strung outside of your purse. So you could keep your phone in your purse and if it rang, you would know. Because it would glow. Yes, that thing would glow. I still have this phone at home. I take it out to remember. This idea, of course, rocked the world. All of us have glowing Rime dongles. Ooh. My mom had this phone and I was very cool when I stole it to school one day. Oh, wow. That was a good story. There you go. Do you remember the screen resolution? Oh, people got it. Yeah, iPhone 3GS. This one is 2009. And I believe it's 480 by 320. Nice. Very good. Oh, yes. Not big fans. I don't think I worked there still on this. Did you review this? I know what this is. I know what it is, but I think you reviewed it. Maybe. What is it? I didn't review it. It's the Microsoft band. Band? The Microsoft band? It's the Microsoft band. There's just a lot of murmurs in the audience. Sorry, this is the Microsoft band. All right, Joanna, we got it. Yes, 2015. Because I wasn't there. You reviewed it. What is your method for remembering what this thing is? I was trying to think of a geeky band I saw in 2015. And then I make a little story with the 320 by 106. So that's like a magician. So it became even geekier. And they're just like, yeah, Microsoft band. And that's how I memorize it. This is a band that's like product placed by Microsoft band. There's more thought put into that. Is that what happened? Yeah. It's amazing how accurate that's. Yeah. Oh, God. This is a pono, right? Isn't this a pono? Somebody did a fist bump for this. I remember this because Neil Young came on the broadcast and yelled at me. It's like a personal trauma memory. What year? What resolution? It was high resolution. This is a pono player 2014. And it's got a resolution of I want to say 640 by 480. Nice. Wow, Dieter. I mean, that's... I would like everyone who just cheered to prove that they own one of these. But that's like a new one. Wait, did someone just like... There you go. So, I guess the question is like, is this the first one? It's got to be the first one. Yeah, yeah. Can you see the part where it breaks and you bend it a little bit? I was looking for the notch, but it's hidden. Can you see the part where Dieter single-handedly canceled the product? Do you know the dates and the resolution? Oh, I mean, it would have been 2018 and the resolution... It was a twitchy one because it was such a small screen in the front. That's how you know it's the first generation. So, it's Samsung Galaxy Fold because it folds, smart branding. 2019, I want to say 1536 by 2152. Wow. Again, I want to point out that you started memorizing these maybe 45 minutes ago. Like after I got my makeup done. And we were like, what's she doing over there? The answer was preparing to school us. All right. Happy, at least. It's cheating because it says the name on it. Mixed crowd. What is it? Is it a Dell? What do you got? It's the red phone. It is the red phone. A lot of people here are like having the emotional journey. It was called something else. It was like the red hydrogen. Oh, wow. That's it. Red hydrogen one, 2018. Let's see. 2560 by 1440. That's got to be right. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty spectacular. Still the biggest phone I've ever used. We've gone over. We'll do a couple more. What is this? Oh, come on. Oh, come on. Oh, my God. Go ahead, Dieter. That gives me a clue as to which one it is. This is Dieter's heart. He knows it. Not that one. That is the HP Touchpad. I do not know the resolution. And the year would have had to have been 2011? Yeah. 2011, 1024 by 768. Okay. Yeah. This one is very funny because it was the first time a company had an all-hands call, and we live-blogged it because Dieter was on the call. I was on the all-hands call. They were not happy about it. They were very unhappy. In fact, during the all-hands call, the CEO, Meg Whitman, was taking questions. Meg Whitman, who later started Quibi, was taking questions, and somebody got up to the microphone and said, hey, what do you think about this is my next live-blogging this call right now? I do not appreciate that. And Meg Whitman was like, what is this is my next? Ten years from now, they will not be around. Joe? Yeah. And in here. You have got to identify it exactly. I mean, I do not remember any of the specs of this thing. She got it. Go ahead, yeah. Blackberry Priv 2015. The Priv. 2560. By 1440. Oh. You guys want to do one more? Let's see what the next one is, and then we will call it. Speaking of gadgets. Why is everyone looking at me on this one? Yeah, everybody. It is the Microsoft Kin. It is the worst version of the Kin, the one that actually got released to customers because the good one got cancelled. Sorry, good one? There was a good one, and then they ruined it and put out a bad one, I promise. This is another product that we destroyed before it launched. What year is it? 2009? 2010. 320 by 240, I think. Yeah. So this is very good. But I do not know if you remember this. We had this at Engadget, and they announced it, and this was Microsoft's app, and Josh DePaulsi wrote an editorial about how bad it was, and then they cancelled it. And I was like, oh, we have way more power than we deserve. All right, Anjana, thank you so much. That was amazing. That was really fun. I do not know how she does that. That was amazing. Literally, she came in, she was like, hi, and we were like, did you already memorize them? And she was like, oh, I figured it out. Do you realize how much better at our jobs we would be if we could do that? If I could remember people's names, I would be the most powerful human being on the planet. I am saying. I am telling you, it is a real thing. I want to thank all of you for coming. Thank you for sticking with us. We have so much tomorrow. Dieter is going to premiere his movie. We have got Alex, he is going to interview folks from Snapchat, a Snap influencer. Ashley is going to interview the CEO of Clubhouse. We have got a Metaverse panel where Facebook is going to reveal its new name. No. Maybe. There is just a lot going on tomorrow, and right now, there is a party downstairs. We are going to be hanging out with everybody. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming to our party. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.