Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future

Support for this episode comes from Snapdragon. Laptops are meant for mobility, but the constant search for an outlet can really tie you down. You can break free from outlets with PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite processors, offering up to 22 hours of battery life. Imagine working freely wherever life takes you, without the worry of running out of power. That's true mobility. Learn more at snapdragon.com slash laptops. Snapdragon branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and or its subsidiaries. Battery life varies significantly based on device, settings, usage, and other factors. Support for this show comes from MongoDB. You're a developer who wants to innovate. Instead, you're stuck fixing bottlenecks and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It's a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers. MongoDB is ACID-compliant, enterprise-ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com slash build. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Hank Green. I'm a science guy. I help run an educational media company called Complexly, and I'm also a big fan of this podcast. I am not, however, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, but Nilay Patel is, and Decoder is Nilay's show about big ideas and other problems. One of those problems is that one of the best possible guests for Decoder is unfortunately also the host of Decoder. So while we get to hear a lot of Nilay's thoughts on a lot of this stuff, when I listen to this podcast, I often think, man, I would like to hear Nilay interviewed on his own podcast. And so I went onto threads, and I made that joke, and Nilay responded, let's do it. And so now, this is it. We are doing it. Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he is gonna revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people's platforms, Nilay has built something very rare in the year 2024, a website that publishes content and isn't behind a paywall, yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is the Verge structured? The tables have turned. You'll also hear Nilay try to convince me that the Fediverse isn't just happening, but that it's also gonna be important, and that we should be paying attention to it, and that it is going to make the internet better. And I think I maybe even got a Fediverse-related Verge scoop in here. One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just like a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet, that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And then Nilay told me, no, that's wrong. It's not people who are doing that. It's the systems that deliver that content to people, a distinction that I'm gonna be thinking about for a long, long time. He won't say it, of course, so I will. Nilay is a defining voice of this very bizarre moment in the history of media, and his leadership and strategy have proved that content can win, especially when you stop chasing every shiny object that platforms place in front of you and think instead about your audience first. All right, Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. Let's do it. ["The Verge"] Nilay Patel, you are editor-in-chief of The Verge and co-founder of The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast and, of course, host of Decoder most days, but this one, Nilay, welcome to Decoder. This is terrifying. I wanna be very clear to the audience. I'm in peril. That's how this feels. It's funny, when I first proposed this, you were like, this is amazing because it's so much harder to host than to be interviewed, and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna have to do a bunch of work on this, whereas when you interviewed me, I just showed up. Now you're just showing up. Now you get to feel, though. You get to feel what it's like. Literally, on my way into the studio, I thought to myself, how do I make decisions? What's our org chart? Well, get ready, because those questions are coming. I'm super excited about this. It's very cool. It's very cool that we get to do this. You think a lot and have a lot of good ideas and talk to a lot of people about, I think, things that are very present suddenly, more present now than they have been. The internet, it feels like it's been tossed up out of the air and we could see it all fall down and see where it lands a little bit. It's an election year. That's awful. I hate those, and there's just a lot of reasons to be thinking about the kinds of things you think about right now, so I'm really glad to get to talk to you, but let's start about you being the person who runs the last website on Earth, because you say things all the time and then you don't explain them, which I love, but now I've got you, and so you have to explain to me why The Verge is quote-unquote the last website on Earth. That's a little bit of a joke. It's 50% a joke. I'm aware that there are other websites. What I specifically mean is we were founded in a boom time of websites. We were founded in 2011. We started talking at the site in 2010. We remain part of a venture-backed digital media startup. There were a lot of those back then. We had a lot of competition in 2011, meaningful, like we were scared of them competition. Read Write Web existed, and we tried to beat them every day. TechCrunch was a very different kind of publication back then. We tried to beat them all the time, and I really respect the people I competed against. I came up at Engadget competing ferociously against the people at Gizmodo, and we became first rivals and then really good friends out of that competition. Some of those sites still exist. Some of them are still doing great work. Some of them still have great people, but that moment when there was a ferocious rush of energy and money and attention into websites has obviously faded, right? We're not making those the same way we used to anymore, and then I look at my peer group, and so many of them are gone, and that's, so that to me, there's like a, it's that. It's all the things that the people and the properties that I used to wake up in fear of, many of them are radically different than they used to be, and we're still here, and that feels strange to me. It feels strange. You won, and it's like, oh, I don't actually, it turns out that when you're put into the arena and you're the last man standing, there's just a lot of carnage around, which isn't that much of a triumph. It feels like it hurts a little bit. It's weird to be us, our age, and hear that the word website feels almost anachronistic. It feels of another era. The way I think about it is that I don't have anyone else's algorithm to think about, and that is really important to me, but then I look at all of the most important creators and the most influential members of the new media, and what they are is so successful that they have transcended algorithms on other people's platforms. So I'll just point to Marques Brownlee, who I think is an amazing reviewer and great tech YouTuber. He has transcended the YouTube algorithm, and that has afforded him a kind of success that I think a lot of people are frankly jealous of. Sometimes I'm jealous of it, but I never think about YouTube, and I'm very happy with never really thinking about YouTube in that way. I think there's a tension there where that's what the website affords you if you can build an audience for the website, but building an audience for a website is almost impossible. Right. You have also said that you are going to revolutionize the media with blog posts. This is a similar sentence in that we are also referring to an anachronistic thing almost in the form of blog posts, but we're going to move forward by moving backward a little bit somehow. What do you mean when you say that? I'm gonna make you explain yourself. I say we're gonna revolutionize the media with blog posts all the time. You do. That is a joke that we started making about our redesign on TheVerge.com, where we added these things called Quick Posts that just let us post more frequently, and it is all tied to that notion of just fighting back against the pressures of an algorithm. The platform world. Yeah, and the last platform on the web of any scale or influence is Google Search, and so over time, webpages have become dramatically optimized for Google Search, and that means the kinds of things people write about, the containers that we write in, are mostly designed to be optimized for Google Search. They're not designed for, I need to just quickly tell you about this and move on, and our little insight was, well, what if we just don't do that? What if we only write for the people who come directly to our website instead of the people who find our articles through Search or Google Discover or whatever other Google platforms are in the world, and so we just made these little blog posts, and the idea was, if you just come to our website one more time a day, because there's one more thing to look at that you'll like, we will be fine, and I think if you look around the media landscape right now, we did that a year or so ago, more and more people are starting to realize, oh, we should just make the websites more valuable, and the easiest way to make the websites more valuable is to have our talented people make more stories, and not just more stories, but openly have more fun on the website. Business Insider is doing that, Semaphore is doing that in other ways, and that's what I mean is like, oh, if you start writing for other people, which is the heart of what a blog post really is, like it's you trying to entertain yourself and trying to entertain just a handful of other people, you're gonna go really much farther than trying to satisfy the robot. It does feel like there was a time like when blog posts were first a thing, when it was very sort of like, I have a blog, this is me, and I have this relationship with my audience, and there was a lot of like, you know, there was snark, and there was creativity, and I see this tossed in with Stuff at the Verge today, that that influence still sort of like comes through. It feels like, and like I struggle with this as a YouTuber, and you know, like this sort of transcending the algorithm kind of thing, it feels like the way to do that is to have a community, not just like numbers, not just views, not just impressions, but like humans who you have a relationship with somehow. How do you imagine those people? Let me answer that question two different ways. You're touching on something that we talk about a lot. People might've heard Casey Newton get at this in the last time he was on the show. It's pretty easy to get traffic in the world. You can go on TikTok today and get some traffic and get some views. It is really hard to build an audience, and I think a lot of the destruction we see in the media community right now is no one built an audience. They try to get traffic, and then they try to sell that traffic, and they assume the traffic would last forever. The platforms have no incentives to let you keep having traffic forever, and they absolutely do not have incentive for you to have so much audience that you get leverage over the platforms, such that they might have to pay you a higher rate. This seems very destructive. It seems very destructive to the media ecosystem. Like that thing that you just articulated there doesn't seem like a little deal. It seems like a big deal. I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realize that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators. And yeah, I'm curious for your read on sort of the number of YouTubers that you see kind of retiring or taking a step back. It just feels like eventually you hit a point where like there's nothing left here for me. It's just me. I have to just extract more from myself and put it on this platform every day to succeed. And that stops being valuable. Whereas I think if you were able to build a company or a brand or an institution, at the end of that, you're like, well, I made this. And maybe I could sell it. Maybe I could just let some other people run it. Maybe it stands for something. Maybe we'd shut it down and everyone could talk about how much they missed it. But it's more than you. And I think the platforms are not organized economically to ever allow that to happen, because that is expensive. And you can replace individuals all the time. Yeah, you can. And also, it seems like people have an easier time trusting individuals now than trusting larger brands. So it's sort of- Oh, I totally disagree with that. Wait, I think that's like your platform build. I totally disagree with that. Like in the biggest, most serious ways that I can possibly think of. The platforms are designed to create that idea and reinforce it. They want that to be true. They want to say people don't trust brands, they trust people. And that the brands stand for nothing. And that's because when you shove a brand into the same incentive structure as a group of individuals, an infinite supply of teenagers who will work for free, the brands debase themselves. And now the brands are worth nothing. But you know what? Like all the celebrities still wanna be on the cover of magazines. Like they want the validation that the big brand, the institution can provide. And there's a reason for that. Because the brand stands for more than just an individual opinion. Or at least at its best it does. There are a lot of problems with that. My little blog that people now think of as an institution started out in opposition to big magazines. We were the upstarts. And so I feel that tension all the time. But I think the idea that people trust people more than brands is a creation of the algorithmic media environment. It is not the natural result of people getting smarter or becoming savvier media consumers. That's just the water we're in. I'm gonna stare at my ceiling tonight and think about this. Cause I've never heard anyone even make the case that that is. And I get it. The Verge is a collective, right? It's a group of individuals who all make something together. And that means when we go to play on a platform that is organized around someone talking to you, like a TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts or whatever, it's a different person every time that stands in for this other thing. But if you look at the cover of Vogue this month, it's like all of the Vogue legends, like all the icons. And like Oprah is in the center of that picture. And it's all of these supermodels around Oprah. And it's like, no TikToker can create that moment. Only an institution can create that moment. And the moment has to provide value back to all of those people, right? You're on the cover of Vogue with all these other people. So interesting. Well, where does that come from? That doesn't come from any individual. That comes from Vogue being Vogue. And Vogue is like making it work kind of in a way that a lot of magazines aren't. But before we get to magazines, as I want to talk about that, this is a good time to ask Nealai, how is the Verge structured? The Verge is structured. I love this so much, it's great. This is tough. I have like a real answer and then a philosophical answer. Are you ready for this? I'm glad you're ready for the question. I had to think about this a lot. We are structured in two ways. There are two organizing principles of Verge. We're structured by topics. We have desks. We have a policy desk. We have a transportation desk. We have a reviews department. That's like topic expertise. Subject matter expertise is one set of organizing principles. Then we're also structured by format, right? So we have like a news team. We have a features team. Reviews, I think, bridges the gap, right? You need to be a subject matter expert in laptops and then reviews are a particular kind of format. So those are kind of the two ways and we have teams that kind of address each of those buckets. And they all work together and we try to make sure our team is constantly moving across formats and desks because I think we're at our best when the things collide. But the real way that we're organized is by cadence. What? And that is actually like a very difficult thing to explain and you can't actually say that out loud. What do you mean, cadence? So our news team operates in 20 minute increments. They wake up, the news hits, it goes on a website, they're done, they move on to the next thing. If you want a piece of analysis or you've got a scoop and you need to build it out, we call those reports. That's like a day or a couple of days. A feature might take a year. A review might take a week and a half. A video might take two months. So we have all these systems that kind of organize those cadences of work so that they can get the appropriate amount of focus. They can also be finished because the hardest thing is to finish what you're working on and be like, okay, we're publishing it now. And so for the news team, everything is always finished. It's finished before it started. The news has occurred. For the features team, it's like, is it done? Have we done everything we need to do? Did we set the deadline? Did the people respond? Has it gone through legal review? There's all these things that prevent you from being finished. So we try to give things space to be finished on their timeline and you can really see how, if you just stare at the structure of the Verge long enough, you can see how it's mostly organized around those cadences and then all the other things just allow sort of like-minded people to work together. How many people are those people? I think right now we're about 50. I might be wrong about that, actually. We're hiring, so I don't know. We have some people coming in, so we're growing in fits and starts again, which is exciting. That is exciting. Has the things been good since the redesign? I love the redesign. It was very exciting. My first day, I was like, this is just like on the edge of being too weird, where my brain isn't quite sure what to do, but on the first day, I feel like I know how to use this website, and on the 10th day, I'm like, I know how to use this website. We definitely changed too much too fast. We dialed it back a little bit and now we're starting to reintroduce some of those other changes, but the core piece of it, which is, are we making our own website the most valuable place that we work, has been wildly successful, to the point where I'm sometimes like, we're doing too many QuickPosts. We should make longer things again. I think that's a good sign, because my number one goal, and remember, this is pre-Elon. My number one goal was, boy, I'd like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts our equipment. I should be asking that question of myself. Why am I writing in the text box that pays money to Elon and Mark and not my text box? Why do we all work for free? Look, we want to talk about the platform era in media. Why do we all work for free? Everybody's insisting. I don't know the answer to that question. We can't shut up about how our work has value, but then we can't stop giving it away for free. Yeah, fuck you, pay me, he typed furiously for free into another box. It's very confusing, and there's a lot of reasons. If you just sit back and think about why, there's a million reasons why. One, the software is nicer to use than most CMSs. It doesn't, you can just pick one. Name a company that makes a CMS. Is this as fun to use as Twitter? And the answer is no, flatly no. Even the one we have now for QuickPost is not as fun to use as Twitter was in its heyday. Will this immediately bring me the dopamine hit of immediate feedback? No. I just want my little cookie, and my little cookie is people being mean to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, will someone just tell, will someone willfully misinterpret this joke? Let's find out. The answer is yes. Is there like a fake revenue source, like a creator fund here, that will make me believe that there's, like of course. It's possible. Are there people here who are actually making real money? Right, which on YouTube in particular, I think is like, YouTube has figured out monetization in a way that feels healthiest and most stable. But there's also the haves and have-nots. And I think that YouTube loves having the haves because it provides the infinite incentive to the have-nots. None of that is true on a regular media company's website. None of that, if you started a WordPress site tomorrow, none of that would be true about your WordPress site. But the first instinct was, let's at least make it easier to publish. Like let's at least remove the barriers to entry to getting on the website. And then we can do comments, and then we can think about how we can distribute in different ways. So that is working. Like my team is happier. We did not know that the Twitter thing would happen, but the Twitter thing happened, and our desire to publish in the boxes we controlled went up as a group. And then on top of it, our audience saw that we were having fun. Yeah. And once you are having fun anywhere on the internet, people sort of gravitate to you. And so the traffic has gone up. We need to take a quick break. When we come back, Nilay and I discuss how to build an audience in the age of platforms and also how The Verge actually makes money. Support for today's show comes from Wondery and their podcast, Business Wars. In just a few years, Ozempic has gone from diabetes drug to a global phenomenon. But behind the miracle claims, another battle is raging. The demand is exploding. Supply can't keep up. And as drug maker Novo Nordisk scrambles up to produce more, its rival Eli Lilly is racing to take the crown. Meanwhile, a darker market is emerging. Shady online sellers are offering cheap, unregulated knockoffs. And now millions are injecting mystery vials with no FDA oversight. In their latest season, Business Wars is diving into Ozempic and the billion. Can they close the supply gap before one bad vial destroys everything? Follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Snapdragon. Now boarding flight 247, Eglips. Maria? Hi, I'm almost to my gate. Yep, I'm flying home for the holiday. You need me to hop on a client call right now? Uh, sure. I mean, yes, yes. Not a problem. Uh, give me one sec. I'll grab my laptop. Mom, hi, I really can't talk. No, mom, I have to get on a call with a client. Yes, the scary one. I love you too. Okay, bye. Bye. Come on. Open. Open. Okay. Good morning. Yes. Hi, everyone. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Did the battery just die? When you're on the go, you need a PC that can actually keep up with you. Where is my charger? These powered by Snapdragon X-Series processors provide multi-day battery life, so that you decide when you're finished, not your PC. Snapdragon, less plug time, more go time. Learn more at snapdragon.com slash laptops. Battery life varies significantly based on device, settings, usage, and other factors. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own, plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. This is Hank Green, guest host of Decoder, and we're back with The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about building audiences on the internet and how to turn that into a profitable business. That goes back to the conversation we were having before about audience, and how do you imagine those people, like who are they in your head, and how do you feel like you understand them? This is a huge thing for me. I think about it all the time. My mission statement is that The Verge is a website about how technology makes people feel. We've kind of narrowed it down. We've had headier ones. We have ones that were designed for advertisers. We've had ones that are like, we're about the future. Over time, it's like, oh no, we're just about how this makes you feel. It is a very emotional website about cell phones. That means we can be expansive. It means we can validate the fact that people are having emotional experiences with their technology. One of the things I say all the time is I can go up to anyone in the world and ask them about their phone, and they will tell me a story because they have an emotional relationship with this piece of technology that mediates almost all of their other relationships. There's something they love. There's something they're frustrated about. There's something they wish was better. If you can ask them the right questions, everyone has a story to tell you about their phone. That is a pretty massive set of things to think about. I think of our audience as people who want to feel those feelings. They want to love things. They want to dislike things. They want to be passionate about these objects, these screens that literally mediate almost everything else that happens in our lives. I think we poke at that pretty hard all the time. We're never punished for thinking too hard about things. That to me is the surest sign that we've at least found a group of people that are stable, that over time can grow, because it's kind of fun to be smart. I think people latch on to that, and they evangelize how they feel to their friends, and then the audience grows again and again. I feel like telling Hank Green it's fun to be smart is one of the funniest things I could possibly do. I truly do not have to convince you of that idea. It turns out I do agree with this, and also that it's a great principle from which to build an audience, because of course you get the audience that you build for. Lots of ways to have lots of different audiences, but it's always better if you're building an audience that you actually like hanging out with. Your Apple Vision Pro coverage, I'm a guy who doesn't care at all about the Apple Vision Pro. Maybe I should, but I did care about how much y'all cared about it. Just this sort of college dorm room, I can't believe we've just spent this much time thinking about the difference between a six and a seven kind of coverage of the Apple Vision Pro. I don't care about this piece of tech at all, but I care about these doofs. They're great. I think that you're doing that in a really good way. Once you have that audience and you have this website, how do you turn, at The Verge, that into money? We are very precious about how we turn things into money. I think this has helped us, it has almost entirely helped us. It has hurt us in one particular way, which is we don't make as much money as influencers do. I can talk about why that is. I just said no to such an expensive brand deal. I was so mad. My assistant was like, it's okay, Hank. I'm like, it's not okay. I can't believe I'm doing this. We say no to all of them. This is the real hard thing. The main way we make money is we sell advertising. Senator, we sell ads. We sell display ads on our website, banners, and boxes. We have some ideas on how to make those experiences better. We sell ads on the podcast. I don't read them, which is not as lucrative as if I did read them. We sell ads. We have YouTube pre-roll. There's sponsored content on the website. It's big disclosures, but there's advertiser content on our website. All the ways that media companies make money, except the way that individual creators make a lot of money, which is directly making the brand deals for our talent. I don't read the podcast ads. Most podcasters just read the ads. We will not stop a YouTube video in the middle and let any of our journalists do the brand read or whatever. We have somebody else who does that, which is Andrew Melanzac. He's great. He's part of our advertising team. He does them. He's very good at them. That's great. But someone else does them. We just maintain and enforce this distance between our work as journalists and what advertisers would like us to say. I think that is, again, many YouTubers are very, very successful. They make a lot of money. I don't begrudge anybody their businesses. Go be successful. I'm proud of you all. We won't do it because we are so protective of the journalism that we make. I worry, honestly, that the audience doesn't care anymore. Yeah. We're just like, whatever. The audience, it just assumes that we're bought and paid for left and right, and we're like, no. I think they do. I think they do, and I think they know. The thing I just said no to, it was because they wanted me to ... It was a food product and they wanted me to be a person who knows about the world being like, this is good for you. That's not my job. That's not who I am. I don't know anything about whether this is good for you or not, and also, it's not. Food is food. That's not the business that we need to be in, convincing people that one snack food is better than another. Just eat the Doritos, everybody. It's snacks. It's really interesting. That, to me, what do those brands want? They want people to advocate for them, and they can buy it at scale on a lot of platforms for wild amounts of money, and they can't buy it from us. The fact that we are not for sale, I think is ... I'm pretty sure this is a bad thing. The fact that we are not for sale is increasingly an anachronism. I think it's our competitive advantage, right, because I get to yell loudly, we're not for sale, but it is increasingly an anachronism. Do you get affiliate fees for reviews? Yeah, so we have a commerce operation that's sort of over there, and so we review things. That is all editorially independent of what happens on the commerce side of things, and then that team adds affiliate links to buying guides and things like that, and that provides us some revenue, but that is walled off in a meaningful way from what our reviewers do all day. So if something makes us more money in affiliate sales, our reviewers are not incentivized by that. They barely know it. The one place where it gets a little muddy, and I hope people understand why this is muddy, is deals coverage. Our audience wants to know, is this a good deal? Here are some deals that are happening. Are they good deals? And then we have to evaluate that, and so the person you want to evaluate it at is closer to editorial than not. You want an objective judgment of, is this a good deal? But then you get affiliate fees on that. That's where I think it gets the muddiest, but overall we try to stay as precious and unscathed by the commercial aspect of our business as we can. Yeah, untainted. Does The Verge make money? The Verge makes money. We've been around for over a decade. We're the last website on Earth. Do you think about that a lot? Do you have conversations a lot about the P&L and et cetera? We do. I think in my roles at Iron Chief, it is incumbent on me to make sure that one, we have an audience. The audience is happy with us. We're invested in places where we think audience is growing or there's impact, and that we are growing responsibly. I have a publisher. Her name is Helen Havlak. Helen used to be our engagement editor, and then she was our editorial director. She was my number one deputy. I would go off into the company and have meetings, and then I would come back and ask Helen what to do. Then I would just go to the meeting and do whatever Helen said. Eventually, I was like, this is stupid. You should just be my boss. Yeah. Helen is our publisher. Above her is our group publisher, Chris Grant, who is the founder of Polygon. He and I have worked together for years upon years. The three of us spend a lot of time just thinking about our business and where we're investing and how it works, but the split is that I'm in charge of editorial and creative, and Helen is in charge of our business. It's a website that makes money. It's amazing. It's awesome. Yeah. Look, I think fundamentally, the idea that we have a website that makes money is weird. It is weird. Revolutionary. I will say we operate inside of a company called Vox Media that also makes money and is also in the turmoil of the digital media business, but overall, compared to its peers, has managed to weather the storm. A huge part of that is the company is founded on community and is founded on product, like building web products, and that is resilient. You are a busy guy. What do you do? You host several podcasts. You just launched a new, a second Verge, a second Decoder of the Week. Second episode of Decoder, yeah. Yeah. So you've got that going on. You've got a lot of people to manage. You're a dad. You've got many, many things. I have a classic Decoder question, but in two parts for you. How do you make decisions at The Verge, but also how do you make decisions at Nilay Patel? I really workshopped this answer, and the answer is panic. Pure panic. I use that, too. That's one of my favorite ways. Yeah. I am optimized around speed, that fundamentally, the crisper you are in making a decision, the faster that decision can be proven to be wrong, and then you know a lot, so you get to remake the decision. There's one thing that makes that different for me than I think other people in other kinds of jobs. There's a bunch of decisions we make as an organization every single day, minute to minute, that don't get to be unmade. We publish a news story, and it's wrong. We don't get to unmake that decision. We have to issue a correction and put it at the bottom of the story. We write a headline. It's really not great for us to write and rewrite headlines. There's a whole bunch of instinct and taste and hard-fought experience just about making the product we make every day, that we still have to do it really fast. The core value of a newsroom, especially news on my cars, is speed. We still have to win every day, all the time, but we have to be fast. But next to that, and so I just want to bracket that set of editorial decision-making, because that is a group product. A lot of us make those decisions all together all the time, and we are very aware of the stakes of getting some of that stuff wrong. But then there's everything else. Should we spend money on going on this thing? It's like, yeah, we should. Let's go. Let's see what happens. Get a story out of it. How many podcasts am I going to do today? There's only so many I can do. Because you've got to be in a lot of meetings, but you also have to be in a lot of podcasts, which are like meetings, but hopefully more fun. I wish more of my meetings were like podcasts. Everyone desperately trying to be a little bit more entertaining than they usually are. That would be great. I actually am really bad at context switching. So a big part of my decision-making process is to stack up modes of operation. So I'll be in meeting mode for four hours. I need an hour, basically, to turn that off and go into individual contributor podcast host mode. So I really try to make, for lack of a better word, talent moments, where I have to be on and performing for an audience, and then manager moments, where I have to navigate meeting world and make a bunch of decisions and evaluate trade-offs. All of that is a different part of my brain, and I try to not switch between those modes very often. I try to stay really focused. But fundamentally, when you ask me how I make decisions, it's usually I know the stakes of any decision that we're making, because we've been running The Verge for a very long time, and the people around me know the stakes of most of our decisions. And then it's, can we make the decision quickly, and importantly, can that decision stay made? Because we can make a decision, and then it has to bounce somewhere else, and someone else has to think about it, and that's when a decision gets unmade, and that's when the chaos sets in. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But when you're figuring out how to prioritize your own time, when somebody says, it'd be better for The Verge if Decoder had a second episode a week, how do you say, yeah, that one, yes, is worth more of my time being spent on this, but not some other, of the many other cool things you could be doing that would generate revenue and also be exciting for you? Yeah. The second episode of Decoder, it's weird when you do a podcast. Podcasts are forever projects. They don't end unless you are telling a tidy story, right? You just make one a week for the rest of your life. It's like YouTube, yeah. Yeah. It's like, they're just forever projects. So I have always, with Decoder in the back of my head, had one end state, which is we should do enough of these and ask the same questions enough times so that we can do a book, right? And then we can put together a book that's helpful, that's full of advice about how companies work- Print! And how decisions are made. It's print again. And then that would be a useful artifact of the time we all spent making the show. And we kind of got to a place where we're starting to talk about that. I don't know that we're going to do anything with it, but we were able to at least talk about it, which is fascinating. And then we're like, oh, there's more Decoder we can make now that we've achieved the goal of the show exists, it has a format, there are some questions we ask people, people want to be on the show. When you start a new podcast, you have to basically beg people to be on it. Now we have a lot of incoming, which is really useful and good, and I hope it continues. Although there's still people we want to go get, so we still go ask. But the first version of Decoder is sort of running itself. And then it's like, oh, but there's other stuff we want to talk about that does not lend itself to an hour-long interview with a CEO. There's lots of stuff that is happening in this world that we can talk about and explain that it's actually hard to find a not-self-interested CEO to talk about. AI and copyright law, I can go talk to a lot of CEOs, they are all self-interested. We actually want to take a step back and help people understand that. Talk to Robert Kinsel about it, I'm sure he'll have a really diverse, nuanced perspective. I'm sure Sam Altman has a strong point of view on whether AI and copyright law are compatible. We just were like, the stories we want to do are a little more expansive than this box. We can do a shorter one, we can figure out how to make that efficient. And that will actually let us put more Verge reporters on the show, it'll let us put more friends of the show on the show. And it'll let us, when we do our audience surveys, the audience is like, we like it when Nealey explains things, like actual feedback we get. So it'll let us deliver some more of what the audience wants. And that is, to me, a good use of my time, because it serves my team, it lets my team come address the audience on the show, and it serves the audience. The most useful advice I've ever been given about time management was from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. I was in the back of a car with him one time, we were going from one thing to another, and he was telling me about all the things he'd done that day. He'd gone for a run, he went to an investor meeting, we were doing this interview, he was going to open a story, he was going to have a, and I was like, how do you do all these things? And he looked at me very seriously, and he said, it's your time, you have to be selfish about it. And I was like, oh shit, like the master of the universe just told me to have better time management. And I hold on to that very dearly. You can only do the things, you only have so much time, you can only do the things you really want to do. And all the other stuff is kind of noisy, and if it's important, it'll come back around. We got to take a quick break. We'll be back to discuss the big shifts Nealey is seeing on the web, The Verge's AI policy, and what he thinks is exciting about the Fediverse. Not a problem. Uh, give me one sec, I'll grab my laptop. Mom, hi, I really can't talk. No, mom, I have to get on a call with a client. Yes, the scary one. I love you too. Okay, bye. Bye. Come on, open. Open. Okay. Good morning! Yes, hi everyone. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. Did the battery just die? When you're on the go, you need a PC that can actually keep up with you. Where is my charger? PCs powered by Snapdragon X-Series processors provide multi-day battery life. So that you decide when you're finished, not your PC. Snapdragon. Less plug time, more go time. Learn more at snapdragon.com slash laptops. Battery life varies significantly based on device, settings, usage, and other factors. Support for this show comes from Adobe, who are introducing the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio, now with AI-powered PDF spaces. Look, I'm sure when I say PDF, you have a very specific thing in mind. And I'm guessing it's an email attachment. Certainly not a dynamic asset that can help elevate your business. But Adobe Acrobat is changing that. It's time to do more with PDFs than you ever thought possible. Need AI to turn 100 pages of market research into 5 insights with a click? Do that with Acrobat. Need templates for a sales proposal that'll close that deal? Do that with Acrobat. Need an AI specialist to tailor the tone of your market report to sound real smart in real time? Do that with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. It's time to reimagine and rethink what a PDF can actually do. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. That's adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Support for Decoder comes from Superhuman. AI promises a lot. But in practice, it often ends up being yet another tab you have to keep track of, slowing you down. I don't know about you, but I need fewer tabs and apps in my life, not more. Say hello to Superhuman, the AI productivity sweep that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With Grammarly, Mail, and Coda working together, you get proactive help across your workflow from writing to preparing for meetings, presentations, and so much more. Unlike chatbots that live in separate windows, Superhuman's AI is in the apps and tabs where you already are, like your email, docs, and everywhere you work. Think of Superhuman as your AI dream team. Proactively helping you go from to-do to done faster. Superhuman knows what you might need and offers suggestions. It guides you in the moment, so you sound like your best self and stay focused on what matters. It doesn't make you Superhuman. were. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. That's superhuman.com slash podcast. We're back talking with The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about the state of the web and whether I should go all in on the Fediverse. It definitely feels like this is a time when everything is a big mess. So we've got sudden layoffs at all kinds of newspapers. Google seems to be worse than it used to be. AI is maybe going to take over from search someday. YouTube isn't a hegemon anymore. Twitter twittered. The Fediverse might happen. I think it's like exciting. Do you think that all of this like space is going to create like new sunlight reaching ground and like new things will happen? And what do you think those new things might be? I do. What I worry about is that there's not a ton of random money sitting around. Like there there were at certain times. There have been in other times. But yeah, let me make the case for the green shoots. We were founded in a particular moment where two things. There was a confluence of two things. One, you might remember the millennial media moment was big. Millennials killed things left and right. Showed up. They entered the workforce. I'm like on the tail end of Gen X. So I myself think of myself as Gen X. But yeah, one year younger than me. You're a millennial. Sorry, everybody. I think we're exactly the same age. Yeah. Yeah. But you remember that? Millennials are killing everything. Like all the gardens burned to the ground across America. Like nothing was safe because their habits were different. It was huge generational shift. New people were entering the workforce. They were young. They were going to do something different than their parents were going to do. And you could see, okay, a bunch of money is moving because these people have different tastes. At the same time, that was when the mobile phone had arrived. The smartphone had arrived. You're in the first flush of like the LTE era of the internet, basically. And so you have a new audience with new habits in a new distribution format. Right. And that distribution format really looked like social networks. And you just saw a bunch of media companies spring up to meet that moment. And a bunch of other companies spring up to meet that moment. And so the idea that you have an audience shift and a technology shift is very powerful. I think we see that again right now. Like very clearly I see that right now. You have a Gen Z audience. You have a millennial audience that is in a Gen X audience and a boomer audience is pretty sick of the internet as it is today. Like they're over it. Like these platforms, to borrow the phrase from Cory Doctorow, is being insidified. Like left and right, people are looking for something else. And then you have Gen Z, which is actually another new generation, has habits yet to form. And then I think you do see some of these technology shifts elsewhere. I do think you see some of the action around the Fediverse and decentralized social networks and the collapse of Twitter. And there's just opportunity to build new kinds of products for audiences that are looking for something new or haven't yet formed their habits. And that is just a very powerful moment that reminds me of the moment that we were founded in. Now, is there a bunch of VC money floating around to make that bet again? Yeah, maybe there's sunlight, but there's no fertilizer. Yeah. And to be fair, the VC money that started the BuzzFeeds and the other, it's not like they had great returns. Like it's not like it was a great bet. Like we didn't we didn't create a bunch of lasting millennial media institutions. We might have created but one or two. And I might accidentally run one of them. And that's weird. Like, I don't think that should be the case. Right. That should not. That's not right. Yeah. I think you're better at strategy than you think you are or than you're willing to take credit for. We are just stubborn about being about one thing. Right. That that is our only secret. We care a lot. We work really hard. That's those are basics. But then we have been very stubborn that like the verge has a has an identity and we're not going to get moved off the ball too much. It's the same for every YouTuber is great. The algorithm comes and goes and buffets people in different directions. But the ones who have had lasting success on any platform are the ones who are pretty true to themselves. And that, I think, is just a universal media lesson. Does the verge have an AI policy? I'm the only person I know who has published a written copy on the website. Oh, everyone refuses to be outraged about it. This thing should go viral because the editor in chief of The Verge published a post half written by AI. And if I could just get the outrage viral traffic, we'd be doing the next episode of this on a boat. Hank, get mad. Yeah, I'll get mad. It's I wrote. I wrote a article that said everyone should just buy a brother laser printer. And then to try to game Google, I let chat GPT like fill out the back half of the thing with like filler text. Google was not very happy about it. We did sell a lot of printers. That's a true interest. Commerce team told me we moved a bunch of printers that day. Wow. It briefly ranked very highly in Google. They were equally not happy about. But yeah, we don't. We're in a mess. This is a mess, man. Like the web is in trouble. It's real bad. If you got to have fun, you got to have fun while it burns down. So that was my fun. It was an art project of a printer post. If it costs 50 cents to fill the entire web up with crap. Yeah. The entire web will be filled with crap. I am glad I'm not Google right now. They seem troubled. But yeah, so that's the only AI copy that's been on our site so far. I think our policy straightforwardly is we don't lie to people. Yeah. I'm not saying we're never. We actually, because of the phones we reviewed and the things we've done, we've certainly now published photos that have been edited by AI just to show people, like, look at this photo edited by AI. I'm sure over time there will be more elements of that stuff. But our policy very succinctly is like, do not lie to people. So, yeah, if you're doing something, tell the people that you're doing it. And I think our audience wants us to push the boundary and just like just showing what the tools can do. But we are very, you know, we're very precious. We're going to disclose everything. And like largely what we sell here is people like this is where the people are. And we're going to stay pretty focused on that. So the Fediverse excites me because I don't understand it. I understand that the technology idea that like my posts can be seen on different platforms because they're all part of a standard protocol and that like my follower graph can follow me and my bio can populate on other places. But I don't know what it means. Like, I don't know what gets created in that space. And I don't think anybody does. I think like if you change social media in this way, what happens? A lot of people seem to be like, if you change it in this way, things will get better. But I also remember feeling that way about everything so far that I remember back when, you know, like Twitter was going to save the world and like social media was going to bring us all together. Can you convince me that the Fediverse will be better if it actually happens? I can try. I don't know that I can make the case that it will be 100 percent better. I can make. Well, no. Yeah. One percent better. I can make a one percent better case. Not worse. I got that one's easy. I got one percent. So the real answer is between one and 100. I can do one. So, you know, there's this phrase that people in media who think about media, like say all the time, content is king. Right. Everyone like, yeah, like people like pop out of dark corners to say this to you. If you ever hint that content isn't king, someone's like, no, content is king. And it's just this like. Mantra, like people just say it like people, the audience will go wherever the content is, no matter what. And you kind of take one step back and you're like, well, distribution is really important. And in fact, the lesson of the Internet is that the distribution has an outsized impact on what content gets made. Yeah. And discovery like I like, I don't really know the difference between discovery and distribution, but I think like they may now be the same thing. Oh, yeah, I completely agree. So the YouTube algorithm wants something and YouTubers deliver that to the algorithm. I'll give you another example that I think about all the time. I love the band New Order. The 12 inch single, when they made it possible to make vinyl records that were 12 inches with one song on them, New Order was like, here's Blue Monday. We made it for you. It's very long because they just the distribution medium, like the format literally allowed them to make that song. YouTube is like that. All these platforms are like that in some way. YouTube, depending on how you think about it, to get a second pre-roll slot on a YouTube video, it has to be so long. And YouTube will be like, no, that's not how it works. But like every YouTuber is like, yeah, it has to be so like and there's a push and pull between what the platform says about itself and what the people who create for the platform. Suddenly, all my videos are going to be eight minutes long. Right. And YouTube will probably listen to this and tell one of us that that's not right. But it's like YouTubers like, you know, it's eight minutes long. Like, yeah, there's a there's a number and it gets what it wants. And that recommendation algorithm is the distribution for people for a lot. And they push things into boxes. And that means I think the content isn't king on the Internet. Like the distribution actually just creates the work or creates the pressures that forces all the work to be the same. And I think over time, that's what drives the audiences away. Right. So there's a real change in how these platforms work, where over time they just become more and more the same thing. And the creators become more and more the same. And that's a little exhausting. In every place where you see open distribution, you see a huge variety of creators and content. Podcasts have basically open distribution like RSS feeds, podcaster distributor RSS feeds. That means people kind of own their distribution. There's a vast array of podcast creators. There's a vast array of podcast formats. They don't all sound like the beginning of YouTube videos or whatever. I hate to keep picking on YouTube. It's just you can pick any algorithmic platform and it's the same. Like tick tockers are more the same than different. Right. Podcasters are more different than the same. The Web is distributed largely by through websites and through RSS. There's a huge variety of websites and the way websites look. But then you see the algorithmic search pressure push web design kind of all under the same box. Newsletters distributed by email open distribution. The newsletter economy is full of a huge variety of creators doing a huge variety of things. They're more different than the same. So all I see with the Fediverse is, oh, this is going to open social distribution up a little bit. It's going to allow us to control our distribution networks. It's going to say, I'm not on Twitter, but people on Twitter can follow my website and I can go promote that follow anywhere I want in different ways and build an audience outside of the pressures of the algorithm. To me, just that that ability to try is one percent better. That's exciting, actually. Should I be a Fediverse person? Should I be on the Fediverse somehow? What and what would what should I do there? I think just poke at it. OK, I think you should start a massive account and you can follow a pixel Fed account on it. And you're like, that's weird. I followed this account from the service. It looks like Instagram. It's like a driverless car. It's like a car that's driving. So without a person in the field, it's weird. It's strange. Yeah. And they're like, well, how how would I reshape society around this? You're like, I don't know. Many, many questions to be answered along the way. But just that first action, like I am on a Web site that looks like Instagram and I can follow a creator that posts something that looks like tweets on this thing and I can open yet another app and log into both of them and it will just like show me everything. It is mind expanding in one particular kind of way because the commercial Internet has never allowed you to do these things. Blue Sky, which is a different kind of decentralized service, they just opened up. Anybody can go sign up for it now. They have their own decentralization protocol called the AT protocol. Their idea is that there should be a marketplace for algorithms that you can show up. You can look at the firehose of content. You can say, I'm going to buy an algorithm that shows me only posts about Santa Claus and it's going to do it's going to go do the work for you. That's it's a huge idea that is completely unproven, but it's more exciting than, OK, here's another billionaire who's going to prattle on about free speech and then eventually like betray you. If you're me and you run a big Web site and you are thinking like, how can I redistribute this Web site? Like, how can I reach people more directly? My brain is like lit up like you should be able to follow me at the verge dot com and see all my quick posts in your threads account when threads federates. That's a big deal, like a really big deal, especially if we can find ways to monetize that in a way that feels good. That's a really big deal. How would you monetize it? We got to invent some stuff. I have a very enlightened CEO, Jim Benkoff, and he's allowing me to poke at some ideas about those things. Like, what does new distribution look like in the Fediverse? And then, you know, our company has like a giant sports property. And, you know, what hasn't left yet is sports Twitter. So I'm going to poke at it with the verge and we're like lightly exploring it. But I think there's opportunity there to build new kinds of media products that is like really exciting. And like you just have to do the first thing, which is you have to be on one server and follow someone on another server and be like, oh, that worked. And then your brain starts exploding. I don't. Yeah, but my brain hasn't exploded with a monetization idea yet. I'm very curious about that. So I'll just watch you do it, I guess. Well, and the thing is, like the dollars are leaving Twitter, right? So, yeah, there's there's just a pool of money that used to be getting spent on Twitter that who knows where it's going to go. Right. And if you can just make it kind of like easier and safer and less Nazi filled to spend money on our website, like maybe there's something there. We have to actually build it. You know, we did one test of, you know, we have QuickPost. We did one test where we sold a QuickPost as an ad. It was very manual. They sold it to Apple, which is really cool and like neat. You know, and Apple did an experiment. They bought a new kind of ad with us. Great. That's not my side of the house, but it was a test and everybody liked it. Right. Like our audience is like, oh, this is a better ad than everyone clapped. Yeah. It's like, oh, we invented a new ad thing that feels good in this place. Yeah. And you know, there's there you can just like put some pieces together and be like, oh, this makes sense to me. And I would rather be in the sort of like market competition side of things than like the spin the wheel of what billionaire do you trust today? In my history of making stuff on the Internet, it has seemed like every time a company has said, hello, we'd like you to make fewer decisions and we will make the decisions for you. The people say, yes, give me that. And I don't like this, but I wonder if we will look back and think like, ah, that was a weird moment in history. Or if this is like a path that we are on and we will just keep on heading down it until no one ever makes any content decisions at all, except for whether I mean, TikTok is almost already all the way like this, except for whether to keep watching. And and all that. So the only data that the platform needs to continue to serve you things that will keep you infinitely satiated. One very trite saying that I repeat a lot is that data can only tell you about the past. OK, it is a perfect window into the past. It is an absolutely useless view into the future. Maybe it will help you make a smarter bet, but it will not tell you what is going to happen in the future, especially when it comes to people on the Internet. Like it just won't. And especially when it comes to art and creativity, it absolutely is useless in that case. Like the famous William Goldman saying is that the secret truth of Hollywood is like nobody knows what they're doing. It's true. There's a reason it's a saying. There's a reason it's a cliche. I'm not sure if that's 100 percent the saying, but it's close enough. No one knows what they're doing, so I don't even know what I'm doing. I think the idea that you can like algorithmically perfect a feed by just looking at all the data will actually drive people to an intense amount of boredom and we'll just go try something else. I also think young people reflexively and to their great credit, just reject everything their parents did. They just throw it out the window and then they do it again 10 years later and pretend they invented it, which is great. And I think a very important cycle of creativity. But I think that danger is overblown because it requires a level of mathematical certainty that is not reflected anywhere in reality. OK, with that in mind, I want to read you something that you said on threads. Oh, no. Which is amazing. It's no, it's good. It's it. You are confirming yourself. Another reason we're mourning these magazines. This is about Sports Illustrated being shut down is because the media that has replaced them is clout chasing algorithmic garbage, not anything that has aspirations of being bigger than whatever metrics a platform gives them. Of course, there is a new Sports Illustrated. It's Barstool Sports. It is weightless and empty and the best case scenario for a media company built to succeed on platforms. Firstly, God damn boy. Call call the burn unit. Second, though, this is this is going to make me feel like it comes out of left field. You're talking about moving like let's have websites, let's have distributed, let's not have platforms. This feels a little bit like like one step away from saying maybe print has a future. And maybe like like it could be something new again. Do you think print could be something new again? Maybe I work at a company that runs a legendary print magazine in New York magazine. We've published a Verge stories in collaboration with New York and had them on the cover of that magazine. And boy, does that make everybody excited. Boy, is that just the coolest feeling in the world? And, you know, yeah, it is not a normal media company where the weirdo tech website gets to go talk to the legendary print magazine and say, hey, do you want to work together on a big story? And by the way, we'd love to put on a cover and the legendary print magazine is like dope, like let's run. And so all of my credit to David Haskell and the people at New York who are like open to this idea, like that is not that is an impossibility almost everywhere else. Even for two print magazines to collaborate like that for us to do is amazing. And like I love the company I work at, but it's really cool when it happens. It's just it's the coolest when it happens. And so I do think there's some amount of people would like to buy atoms, not just bits, you know, and the atoms are really meaningful to them. So there's I don't know what kind of future that is. I don't know that we're going to do a print magazine anytime soon, but like what does that represent? It represents well, somebody cared enough to print this picture and like mail a piece of paper to everybody around and the care is really validating for the people who get to be on the covers or whatever. And that validation is really important. That's not really what I was getting at in that in that Threads post, though. What I was getting at there is. It just made me think about it. Yeah, it made me think about it. But yeah, go hit me. What I was getting at there is Sports Illustrated, its aspiration was to be a chronicle of culture. Right. It was to. Was. What? What? Not anymore, but was right. Like the great magazines, the great print magazines, the great media brands, they had aspirations that were bigger than their revenue, that were bigger than their view counts. It was. Did we make an impact? Did we move the culture? Is this the thing everybody's talking about? Is this the magazine cover that maybe it sold the most on the newsstands, but it was the most striking and evocative? I get, you know, I judge the ASME Awards, the National Magazine Awards, and, you know, the people in those rooms, they still talk about impact. They still talk about what makes a great magazine. And that's like an art form that is discussed. And that's inspiring. Right. Like people really care about like packaging and design and all that stuff. Barstool Sports, whatever you want to think about Barstool Sports is it has an editorial point of view. It absolutely does. It has a main character every single day. Absolutely does. But it is defined by its metrics. Its aspiration is to have the most views. Its aspiration as an organization is to get the most traffic. And they think that way. You can see it comes through in the work they make because nothing is designed to be so big that it overcomes the view count. And I think that I think that's empty. I think that's why people are sad that something like Sports Illustrated that used to stand for all that stuff is in decline and it feels like there's no replacement. There should be a replacement. Media brands should die over time. There should be new ones. I think that's a healthy cycle. But all the new ones are either individual creators who are getting burned out by the dozen or they are media brands that are designed mostly to be optimized for platform distribution and never stand for anything much bigger. That effort and that care is actually what ends up differentiating you in a sort of non-commoditized market and the platforms around commoditization. And that maybe maybe that is more so the tension than individuals versus brands. But when you have a brand you try to differentiate. And our company, at least in its history, has tried to differentiate on quality, which is more expensive. Yeah. Yep. We're going to be fine. We're going to we're going to save the media with blog posts. It's going to be great. You're going to save the media with blog posts with the last website on earth. And I and keep keep saying weird things. I gave I've given those stickers have ended up on some very powerful laptops, which is very funny Well, I'm very impressed by what y'all are doing at the verge and I'm Honored frankly that you gave me the opportunity to be a one-time host so that you could be interviewed I'm very worried one of the fired by the way I want to be very clear the chances of me being fired are very high and this might be the last thing I ever do All right. Well in that case, it'll go down in history. Yeah, you want to raise the stakes right at the end of the podcast Neelai Patel, thank you for being on decoder. Thank you for agreeing to this ridiculous idea. I appreciate it I'd like to thank Neelai for taking the time to speak with me and for letting me take the reins of decoder for a moment And thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it and it wasn't too weird It was a lot of fun for me If you're looking for more of what I'm up to you can find me by searching Hank green on the internet I'm on threads fairly actively at Hank green Also, apparently all of the verge people are there now and a bunch of tech reporters and that's mostly why I'm there So if meta wants to thank anyone They're the ones making it happen over there as far as I'm concerned My youtube channel that I had with my brother is it vlog brothers on YouTube? We have a podcast called dear Hank and John and if you want to hear my science trivia game show podcast That's called SciShow tangent You can listen to that wherever there are podcasts if you have big ideas on what the decoder team should cover or who they should Have on the show. They would love your feedback. You can email them at decoder at the verge comm They really do read every email or you can hit up Neelai on threads. He's at reckless 1280 They also have a tick tock. You can check it out at decoder pod If you like decoder, please share this with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts And if you really love this show and give that five-star review, I give it a five-star review. Maybe I didn't yet Let's do it right now you and me. Let's pop open that app and give it a five-star review. Are you doing it? I'm doing it right now. Here it goes open and Click on those three little dots on Spotify and click on rate show and there I'm doing it five stars five stars For decoder decoder is a production of the verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network Today's episode is produced by Kate Cox and Nick stat and was edited by Callie, right? Thank you to all of them for helping me through the process the decoder music, of course by brick master cylinder. See you next time Support for this show comes from Amazon ads There's a lot of folksy wisdom out there regarding advertising truisms things that people like to say But that's not the same thing as hard data Luckily Amazon ads just released a study that challenges what we thought we knew about electronics shoppers Remember when popular opinion assumed everyone bought headphones out of necessity turns out only 54% do the rest They're impulse buying or chasing the latest new product launch for brands This means rethinking their approach to reaching customers throughout their purchase journey from building awareness To capturing those crucial purchase moments ready to rethink your strategy head to advertising dot amazon.com To learn more that's advertising dot amazon.com Support for this show comes from Amazon ads every business owner has been there You put a significant amount of money into an ad buy and then wonder did those ads actually have an effect? Luckily, there's omni-channel metrics from Amazon ads Omni-channel metrics helps advertisers understand how their Amazon ads campaigns drive sales both on and beyond Amazon while Campaigns are still mid-flight OCM measures performance across streaming TV video audio and display helping you understand What's driving results across the full funnel using Amazon shopper panel data plus third-party signals? You'll be able to see beyond Amazon product sales units sold and ROAS Whether customers buy on Amazon or at a brick-and-mortar store, you'll understand the full impact of your campaigns measure Comprehensive sales impact to better understand purchase behavior and drive greater efficiency effectiveness and ROI Tired of guessing where your ads are actually driving sales Capture the full impact of your media spend with Amazon ads omni-channel metrics head to advertising dot amazon.com To learn more that's advertising dot amazon.com You