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Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of asterisks and underlines. I'm your friend David Pearce and today on the show, we're going to talk about Markdown. Now, markdown is probably very familiar to you. If you're like a deep nerd about note taking apps like I am and maybe a word you've never even heard of. Otherwise, if you're in that latter group, don't worry, we're going to, we're going to get into it. The way to understand Markdown is basically as a way of writing text that both a computer and a human can understand. So if you're writing words and you want to bold something, right, rather than go to, you know, file and format and bold, you just put two asterisks at the beginning and at the end of the word and that tells the computer that this is bold. Markdown is a language that computers understand and know how to translate into other things. It also just looks like emphasis, right? So when you're reading it, you see a word with two asterisks on either side and you go, oh, that's emphasis. You can do underlines. For underlines, you can write a link in a specific way so that it can be read by markdown. So you can see the title of the link and, and then the URL of the link itself. It's a way of writing text that both computers and humans can understand. It's a very powerful thing and it is absolutely everywhere. All of a sudden, all of these note taking apps are using it. Obsidian is a very popular one that lets you write in markdown and everything is stored on your computer as markdown files, which are basically again just annotated text files. This is also kind of the lingua franca of the AI industry right now when you make a Claude MD file, the MD stands for markdown. It's a way of writing for the computer that is simp and straightforward and that lots of people understand. Markdown is not just an inherent thing of computers. It was created, it was created by a person. And that person is Jon Gruber, who you might also know as the writer of the blog Daring Fireball. John's going to come on the show, as is Anil Dash, who is a longtime tech executive, was around in the early days of Markdown and really has seen it grow up into the standard it has become. We're going to talk about where markdown came from, why it's so important that this thing became a crucial part of the way that we write text on computers and where we go from here. The conversation is very nerdy. I will just warn you in advance, but I had a really good time and I think you will too. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, June 15, 2026. Fox announced that it's buying Roku in a deal valued at $22 billion. If this deal goes through, it's always a big if. The mishmash of stuff in the combined company would include all of Fox's TV networks, Tubi, Roku streaming devices, its smart TV software, and the Roku channel. Fox says the plan is to keep Roku as the sort of ubiquitous Switzerland of the streaming industry that it has been. But of course that's what everybody always says and nobody ever means it. In particular, I'm fascinated to see what comes of Tubi and the Roku Channel, which would combine to be a very big and very powerful free streaming service. The big news all weekend was the US Government's bid to shut down Fable, the new super powerful AI model Anthropic, released last week. The government said it was blocking its use by foreign nationals, which turns out to be such a complicated thing to enact that it works as an overall ban. It's not entirely clear that the government can actually do this, but Anthropic did in fact shut off the model. There's so much we still don't know here. Fable is basically the same model as Mythos, which Anthropic said was too dangerous to release a couple of months ago, only with some guardrails. Is it actually a security risk? Who bypassed the guardrails? What happens when they do? Who raised the alarm here? Is this just another string strange turn in the fight between Anthropic and the US Government over who gets to decide how AI gets used? Like I said, lots of questions. Finally, the Verge's Don Preston reviewed the Honor Magic V6, a foldable phone that accomplishes three very important things. It has a battery that lasts two days, it has genuinely good ratings for dust and water resistance, and it is the thinnest foldable phone we've seen yet. It's still $2,000, which means you probably won't buy or ever even see it. But there are good things coming in phone calls. You can read more about all of this@theverge.com that's 90 seconds on the verge for Monday, June 15th. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow.
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Yes, and finally I'm here for the thing that will go on my tombstone.
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I think that's right. And we're going to talk about that also here. Anil Dash, you did not invent Markdown, but you have front row once you're
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when it was created.
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That's exactly right. So I think strangely I want to talk about a very long time ago and I want to talk about right now. And those are sort of the two Markdown stories that I'm particularly fascinated by. But for folks who don't know the origin story, John, let's go all the way back to like the early aughts and sort of baby blogger John Gruber tell us just the brief story of where Markdown came from.
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I went to College in the 90s. I have a computer science degree and graduated in 96 and then was doing freelance graphic design work rather than programming. But with a background in programming and being that age and being a graphic designer, what did I do? I built websites, right? It was sort of the perfect confluence of skills and interests. At least then knew HTML.
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It was a lot easier.
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It's intertwined with the what's the origins of Daring Fireball. But I had this inkling to start daring fireball like 98, 99 or something. Some kind of blog because I wrote I was a writer. Finally August 2002 is when I started the site. During the year of 2002 there was this. This is where anil comes into play. There was the, well, what do I use? What's the CMS I'm going to use? Do I build my own? Which I could have done, I still could do, or use one of the things that's out there. And at the time, like, WordPress didn't exist yet and I probably wouldn't have used it anyway, but Movable Type just came out, like the year before or something.
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Immediately took over the blogging world.
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Right.
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Like, Movable Type at this time was sort of the one you choose if you're going to choose one.
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Yeah. And I'd more or less ruled out every other option for a cms. And I was like, I gotta build my own. And then Movable Type was like, close enough. And it's like, ooh. And it's like, I know that if I built my own, it would take 10 times longer than I thought it would. But that meant every single post that I wrote on Daring Fireball was written in HTML. And I paste HTML into the field for the body of the article. Within a year, I'd really gotten the shits of that.
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I can imagine.
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Yeah, I just, you know, I knew it. It wasn't the fact that I didn't know it, it's that I didn't like writing it. And so I'd had this series of scripts that was getting ever more complicated on my local machine, where I could write in like a proto markdown and then turn it into HTML at the end and then paste that into Movable Type. But it turns out I do a lot of editing after I post, you know, so having transferring to HTML and then all subsequent edits have to be in HTML. So I was like, I need to write something like this. And then Dean, who's no longer with us@textism.com came out with the thing called textile in 2001, 2002, I don't know, somewhere before Markdown. And I thought about using Textile and I didn't like it enough. And one of Anil's colleagues at Six Apart, a guy named Brad Choate.
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Six Apart was the company that made Movable Type that content, right?
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Yes, from the company that made Movable Type did the Textile plugin for Movable Type. And it was complicated because the original was in PHP and needed to be in Pearl from Movable Type. And I knew Brad, and I started sending Brad and Dean sort of suggestions because they were changing some things. And then Dean said to me, this is very important. It was like a seminal moment. And I knew Dean and he was really, really a fan of Daring Fireball. And I was a huge fan of textism. Huge influence on what Daring Fireball still is to this day. And Dean just wrote back to me and said something to the effect, I have the email somewhere, but it's something to the effect of, these are great ideas, but you should just make your own thing. So then I made my own thing.
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There are, like, two competing ideas about what Markdown was supposed to be. And one was like, I want to write something where I can easily type all the characters I need in order to make it readable to the computer. And there was another one that was like, I want to make something that is computer language, but that is readable to humans.
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No, that was an overriding goal. And I think truly differentiated Markdown from everything else in this sphere was not focusing on the authorship and the type ability. Even though all the characters are ASCII characters. There's, you know, and I really thought about it because I'm so max centric. And it's easy to type certain characters, like option eight to get a real bullet character. There's a bunch of easily typed Unicode characters that I thought about putting in the syntax, and I was like, nah, I should just stick to the ASCII ones. But the readability was more important to me than the write ability that it should be that maybe the overriding goal of it is you should be able to print it out in Markdown format and hand it to somebody who's never heard of Markdown, never used a command line, and they can just read it, and they would totally understand what you mean, that they'd pick that up very quickly, like, oh, I get it. These are the words you think are italics. The readability was more important. And it was, A, I thought that was missing in all the other ones, and B, it just. It was driven by the fact that the whole reason I wanted to make it is that HTML was so hard to edit. Right. And it's like, once I had it written, it's like optimizing for readability. You read something over and over again. You only type the characters once.
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Yeah, I think it's one of the most important reasons it took off. Right. So to John's point, we'd made this tool movable type that was being used by, at that time, Gawker and Huffington Post, all of the big blogs, right. And none of those folks liked HTML. So you had like two or three people in the office who were like, they really knew HTML and everybody else was kind of like, enduring it. And when we talk about, like, literally to put a image in a post, right? So they'd be writing about, like, you know, Britney Spears was caught at this club doing this, which was like, half the stories in Gawker at the time. And then to put in an image, they're like, this is miserable. And then what was really important too, was like, when they wrote the posted Markdown, the other person didn't even have to know it was Markdown, right? It was literally what they would have written in an email. And like, that, like, they said that explicitly. They're like, oh, this is, like, normal. And, like, we don't feel like nerds when we see this. And so that became the default. And that actually was different than textile. Like, I really just like, John, like, all of us were such huge fans of Dean. Like, he was just one of those super influential early folks that, um, you know, we were all just, like, kind of in awe of him. Like, he could do it all right, and code and whatever. And. And so, like, I wanted, like, to be like, I did a bunch of posts in textile because I was like, I want to be like Dean, you know, and then I was like, but it doesn't. It just doesn't. Like, it's not how people write, you know, And. And so I got to see. So I was in charge of people making plugins, basically. And so, like, we were trying to launch. When you make a platform, you want people to make plugins. And we were really the first tool that had plugins. And so it was like a dream to be like, here's John. And everybody already loved Daring Firebolt. Here's John making this thing, and here's Dean make, you know, a version of Dean's thing. And so you're like, what an embarrassment of riches to have these things that people actually want to use. But it was not even close right out of the gate that people were just using Markdown because they could type something that looked like what they were already writing. They were kind of like, I already know this one, or at least I know two thirds of it. And then they told us explicitly, like, this works like I work.
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So, Anil, I do want to know about the John being John part of this, because I went back and found John, the first post you wrote, basically sort of launching Markdown to the world. And it just starts with, I've written a tech HTML formatting tool called Markdown, which is now available for download, which gives real, like, OpenAI saying. ChatGPT is a research preview. Vibes. It's like, hi, I've done this thing that is going to become utterly ubiquitous on the Internet. So here it is. You can have it, I guess. But, um. But, Anil, do you. Do you remember this as like, was this like a seismic moment on the Internet? Like, Jon Gruber has made a markup language?
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No, but it didn't have to be. Right. So I think it's hard to explain how different, like what we used to call it, the blogosphere, like, how different blogs were in social media world. There, like, there was a sense that everybody read every blog every day. Then, like, that sounds right and like, that sounds like an insane thing to say, but. But I think there was a couple of things that were different. One, like, people had RSS readers, so you could kind of keep a track of a lot of stuff, and not everybody updated every day, so you just could see all the updates. It was kind of like, you know, if you had, like, when everybody, like when Twitter was still Twitter, and you could kind of read all the updates from everybody at a time. And I think the other thing was there was a. A tool that a researcher named Cameron Marlowe had made called Blogdex, and links would float up to the top when they were popular. And so even if you weren't, like, if somebody had not been a regular reader of John's blog, if a bunch of people had linked to his post, it would sort of surface up and there would only be 10 or 15, maybe 20 links that were popular today across all blogs. And also, I think another thing that's really kind of impossible to imagine. There was not that much going on in tech, right? Like, there wasn't, like, here's 50 new phones and, you know, cameras and whatever launching every day. Like, it was just like the things that normal people made who were like, good hackers was the most interesting things going on in tech. And, you know, that was the other reason that you were following what an individual developer was making is it was way cooler. I mean, because again, like, you were talking about, like, what is Yahoo doing? You know, what is Cisco doing? Like, there was no way that was cooler than what John was doing.
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But the other thing Anil hit on was that the stuff in tech that was going on was blogging itself. And so that's what we wrote about. And it sounds navel gazy, but. But it wasn't, because it really was some of the most interesting stuff going on.
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The spirit of everybody was building building blocks for everybody else, right? And like, that's very, very different than the environment now. Everything was open, like so almost everything everybody was assuming was going to be open source was going to be, you know, sort of clone and copy. I think the only thing that kind of has that feeling these days is maybe like mcp, right, where people are building things that are kind of interoperable between each other. And you know, when we say blocks, like it sounds very sort of like retrograde, but it's, it is a superset of everything we consider social media today, right? So everything that would be Instagram and everything that would be TikTok and everything that would be WordPress. But like all those things together would all be under this heading. And also when people were building a fundamental component, yeah, it could be markdown, but also somebody might be inventing podcasting right at this time and somebody might be, you know, inventing like so fundamental formats were things that an individual person was capable of creating in a way that would spread now to what, like a billion users, right? So like the kinds of things that, so, so that thing that like a guy, and you know, John's a remarkable guy, but like a guy can make a thing. And then you could imagine, like, I think we could extrapolate, maybe millions of people might use it. I don't think maybe like a billion people are going to use this. But, but, yeah, but you couldn't. It wasn't ridiculous at all to be like, I might make a thing and a couple million people might use it. And so like that's so unfathomable, I think in the current era. But it was intuitive at that sense that that might, you know, at that stage that that might happen. So I think that was, that was such a addictive, you know, feeling when you're creating.
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Yeah, I keep seeing celebrities posts me in the 90s versus now while the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off boot cut jeans. Time creeps up on us so slowly you don't see it until suddenly you do. Same thing goes for your bills. A dollar here, an uptick there. It's a slow burn until one day you realize the price you're paying now is way higher than when you signed up. But AT T Mobile customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and ATT over the past five years. And with T Mobile on their experience plans, you get a five year price guarantee, so you know exactly what your planned price will be for the next five years. So at least that's one thing that won't change over time. I can't guarantee you'll still look good with frosted tips, but T Mobile can give you a clear guarantee on your wireless plan.
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the US and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
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You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. That's that's a lot of progress.
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The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR, PBS and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling, in a certain light, makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president. Last month, a reporter asked Trump extent was he thinking about Americans finances when he negotiated with Iran. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one what's he doing? Coming up on Today, explained from Vox.
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Hasan Piker has blown up in recent years.
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After the 2024 election, the popular leftist
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Twitch streamer became a go to voice for the Democratic Party.
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But Piker's glow up has angered a
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section of Democrats who are growing louder in voice.
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Hasan Piker is anti American. He is bigoted, he's anti Semitic, and he is deeply misogynistic. So in March, a Democratic group called
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Third Way published an op ed in the Wall Street Journal's Opinion section saying, quote, democrats are too cozy with Hasan Piker.
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He is such an extremist that it will only do damage to Democrats and hurt their chances of beating right wing populism.
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Now, Piker is controversial, no doubt, but is he toxic?
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I don't think this helps Republicans at all. I think as a matter of fact, Third Way's brand of politics has helped Republicans.
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Their attitude has been to constantly concede
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on culture or issues to the Republican Party and never focus on economic populism.
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I'm Estad Herndon and this is America. Actually, catch us Every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Seth Matlins My new show, Create or Destroy Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but the hr IR pricing or design and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking and reimagining how businesses grow or don't, for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show, it's a marketing show.
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Creator destroys the show that argues they've
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always been the same thing from the Vox Media podcast network. And the wisdom is company new episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.
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A
So, okay, so let's, let's jump ahead a bunch here because I think like, fairly quickly Markdown becomes sort of ubiquitous.
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I am curious, I'm going to disagree there.
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Oh, really?
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It was a year's.
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It was a slow burn for a while.
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It actually took off from 2004 till like 2010 was very slow and actually very disappointing to me. Like, I thought, I'm convinced. I was like, this is the fucking shit. I'm like, I can't go back. I can't believe more people aren't using this. And then it did, I noticed it just slowed.
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I have a concrete example. So we did, you know, Stack Overflow, I knew the founding team and I was on the board and stack launched in 08, I think, and it was controversial that it supported Markdown, right? Because it was like, really that there was a really strong argument. And I think Jeff Atwood, one of the co founders, had been like, we should do Markdown so they can do fancy formatted answers on. Stack Overflow is the most popular community for coders to answer each other's questions.
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A group of people who in theory would love to write, they're all coders, right?
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And so, like, they should know this thing and it's really easy and they might want to use HTML in their answers and all these kinds of things. So it seems like a straight down the middle, you know, suggestion. And still there was a lot of debate, well, are people going to know or are they going to. Are they going to do too much HTML, like all these kinds of things? And of course, like, it ended up being wildly popular. People used it all the time, but it was still a controversial thing. And then, you know, I think GitHub was the year after. And it was also the same thing where, like, it was not a gimme that they were going to do it. And then of course, both of those sites ended up adding, you know, other flavors or whatever, extensions to it and all this stuff.
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GitHub was a huge one. It was like a change. Yeah, because. And because they kind of said, hey, if you're using GitHub and you're going to write something in text, it's going to be in GitHub flavored markdown and whether you like it or not. And they didn't really ask opinions. And then that kind of forced the technical minded people who I think just basically had the mindset of I know HTML, I don't need a baby language in front of HTML. And they don't. I didn't either. It's not that you need it, it's that once you start using it, you're not going to want to go back. It really is one of those things where you have to use it for a while before you see the appeal. Whereas before you use it and you see this is the markdown and this is the HTML that it will generate, you're like, yeah, I get it, but I don't need that. I could just write the htm. But then you start using it and you're like, oh, I can never go back. And that's what GitHub kind of did. And it put it in the heads of technical people and then they became the, what do you call it? The evangelists for it.
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Yeah. So, but John, that, that turn you just described, where the technical people get into it, start using it, love it and become the evangelists takes a really sort of weird, unexpected turn. And I think I went back and found a blog post you wrote almost exactly a year ago when Apple Notes got Markdown support. And this. I think one of the questions I was going to ask you is like, what is the moment where you're like, you know, hey, look Ma, I made it like we did. I feel like I don't know how you beat Apple Notes now lets you write in Markdown for your particular.
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Firstly, let you write in Markdown. And I don't think it should. That's the thing. I'm. Now I've gone from. There's like the three stages of Markdown. For me, the creator of Markdown is this. There's a third of its life at this point where I really felt like it wasn't popular enough. Then there's the middle third where I'm like, ah, finally it's like the people who should be using Markdown are using it and it's in the places where it should be available. This is great. But the last third of its life has been the. I'm like, where's the break? This is too much. This is being exposed to people who should have a WYSIWYG thing in front of them.
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Yeah. Okay, so this is what I'm getting at. And I think maybe Google Docs is a cleaner example of like, you can write a Google Doc in Markdown. Now, it's weird and bad and I don't think suggest doing it, but you can do it. But simultaneously this thing has happened where a bunch of, a bunch of companies have said rather than pure wysiwyg like you, you, you, you press the button to make it bold. We're going to let you do the carrots to make it or we're gonna let you do the asterisk to make it bold. But also Markdown Editor has become a thing. And, and there's there was this whole slew of new text editing documents where it was like, actually the whole point is to expose the formatting structure in front of people. And I sort of see the idea behind that. Like, I use Obsidian, which is one of the better known market markdown editors for everything. And their whole idea is this stuff should be readable by lots of apps. We want to build files that aren't proprietary. Like, I get all of it. I feel like there's something about that that would drive you in particular just completely insane that like, this is just not what Markdown was supposed to be.
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Yeah, basically. I mean, I like it and there's a fine line between it. Right. Like, and for example, when I made Markdown, there was no syntax coloring for. Was meant to be self evident in a text editor with no syntax coloring, just the asterisks and the brackets and the braces, they all speak for themselves. It still kind of does work that way. But then with syntax coloring, it's a little better and with syntax styling, it's even better. It's nice when your editor actually does italicize the text between the asterisks. It's nice, but it still is a monospaced font and you delete the asterisks and it deletes the italics. There's a line that gets crossed where it's more of a fundamentally WYSIWYG product. And yet you're typing these characters, but then there's like a view mode and an edit mode and the view mode makes them go away. And it's like, no, you've gone too far. And that's. You're exactly. Now it's exactly the sort of product that Markdown, the other thing Markdown was meant as an answer to was in addition to Writing raw HTML. There were the pre markdown WYSIWYG HTML editors. And they sounded great, right? It's like, oh, you just hit command I and you get italics text. But the problem was, how do you go back to the end of an italicized word and you want to add in word. But no, I don't want it to be italics anymore. I want the italics to end. What do I do? Where's the thing? And that's where having little punctuation characters that you can just delete. Either it's there or it's not. And you delete it and then the italics stops. So I think what Apple did with Apple Notes is actually great, where they didn't turn it into a markdown editor where you type markdown, but what they've done is let you copy markdown out or export as markdown, which is great. I think that's actually very appropriate for Apple Notes. I'm now, like I said, put the brakes on this. Don't expose it to people. People should have. The Apple Notes app should just be wysiwyg, where you just say italics header and it's an actual menu item.
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Anil, what do you think of that?
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You know, I want to pick whatever torments John the most, you know, like, I think, like, the punishment that he deserves. So, like, the thing John was talking about, like, the early, you know, visual HTML editors, those are all like the web version of like, you know, Microsoft Word. You move the image and the whole document blows up. Like they were doing the same thing on the web. And so this was sort of the solution to that. But I think, you know, intrinsically, like, a good design is one that precludes people from being able to do the worst things. Like, it sort of saves them from that, like, the. The most nightmarish, you know, situation. And I, I think that's one of the reasons that that markdown has sort of persevered. Like, it's really hard, even with all the different flavors and variants and whatever to make a markdown document that doesn't just ultimately work.
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Well. I go back and forth on this because I think philosophically there's an argument to be made that just everyone should learn Markdown because A, it's not that hard teaching a lot, and B, it solves, it solves a certain set of. Like, I just, I am forever struck by the number of people who still don't know the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.
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Right?
- [28:43]
A
And like, it is, it is undeniably faster to write markdown than to go looking for the italics button every time you need the italics button. So to me, it's like there's an argument you made that actually what you invented is the most efficient way to do it, even more efficient than wysiwyg, and there are still a lot of really broken WYSIWYG editors out there. The other part of me is like, well, actually, everybody should just fix their stupid WYSIWYG editors, and this is not a problem that should exist at all. But I am like, I don't know, John, do you have a sort of aversion to the idea of this being like a language people that everyday people should learn and know? Does that feel like a bridge too far to you?
- [29:23]
B
No, but I don't think it should be required. Right. And the thing that I'm proudest of and the thing that I think I've been proven right about, and it skips over some controversy in the middle, is I've never seen it. I'm the creator of what I would consider the canonical markdown, or I don't know what you want to call it, but, like, the official. And I don't. I stopped dicking around with it. I don't add new features. I'm not saying I never will, but I haven't in decades. I think a lot of other people, if they saw it as a more of a technical thing, they would have been offended by all the various flavors that came out. But I have always been of the opinion, let a thousand markdowns bloom and that it's not a syntax or a language per se, but a convention for writing plain text. It's taking the, you know, plain text is the technical standard, and there were a bunch of conventions. And the thing that I'm happiest about isn't that Markdown particularly is so popular. It's that the various hundred different ways of italicizing something in plain text, I had strong opinions about those since, like, the early 90s. And I thought everybody should do it my way and use the asterisks. And then I thought the second best way is the underscores. But all the other ways people would use the tildes for that, people would use slashes for italics. And I'm like, I wish people would do it my way. And that's really what Markdown has done, is that everybody now, when they decorate plain text, they do it my way. And it's a convention more than a syntax. And all of the popular flavors of Markdown all follow the main conventions. I Had to write the original. It's not even a parser, but the original series of regular expressions that turns markdown into HTML. And I was ruthless on myself by only making it what I wanted to see and write, no matter how hard it was for me to make it the conversion. But really, ultimately, it's a convention or a series of conventions for how you do things. And those conventions are like, everywhere now. But that's the thing. That's all we ever have.
- [31:32]
C
The spec is like ego. The web is just a bunch of things we're hoping works this way. Nobody ever follows the spec. The web is all just a bunch of things we slap together. And this is the thing that works the way people work and recognize that from the beginning. So you never had the ego to pretend, oh, I'm going to write this technical spec and everybody's going to follow it. You're like, I hope they like the way I use things. And maybe we will all do it this way. And I think the fact that it worked the way people work is why it took off.
- [31:59]
A
Yeah, I love that. All right, real quick, since we all have to go here, I'm curious how it feels then that that kind of convention and that that sort of the thing you built is now the, like, official language of every AI tool everywhere on Earth. Like, this is the most mainstream in a certain way that markdown files have ever been.
- [32:15]
B
Right.
- [32:15]
A
People are out here writing Claude MD files for themselves all the time. I guess. A, did you get a phone call about this? And B, how do we. How do we feel about this sort of next turn in the markdown story?
- [32:25]
B
No phone call and unfortunately no royalty check.
- [32:29]
A
That may be the real bummer here.
- [32:33]
B
I guess it's surprising. And I get. And I'll get more once this episode comes out.
- [32:40]
C
Sure.
- [32:40]
B
And I welcome it. I do. I've gotten hundreds, hundreds of emails and DMs over the last, especially the last six months or so from people saying exactly what you just said there, David, how does it feel that it's like the lingua franca of this huge, new, groundbreaking, breakthrough technology? Weird. A little gratifying. And while I don't profess to be an expert on LLMs, I understand them well enough that I'm not surprised, because they're pattern matching and pattern predicting based on a corpus of. At least in their ability to emit markdown, forget about image and video generation, but a corpus of text that was produced for humans to read. So LLMs consume text, trying to match patterns the way humans do, and so the fact, going back to your question that I tried, my number one priority for Markdown was to make it readable, is that it is. And readable to someone who doesn't even know what Markdown is is exactly how LLMs parse text like that. They can parse noisily written text. Somebody can just bang away in a Facebook text input field that doesn't support anything like formatting and just use weird punctuation characters to sort of fake underlines or something. And LLMs will parse that. Well, that's what Markdown is. So of course LLMs really like it. And they like sending it too, because it's lightweight and fast and it's like just little characters. It's not complicated. So, for example, somebody did some studies. It's much better at LLMs, I think to this day are still better at emitting Markdown than they are at JSON, because JSON has very persnickety rules, like a JSON file. You get a character wrong and then the whole file is bad. Markdown. If you forget to end an italics run, who gives a crap, right? Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's still good. And so LLM's making one little tiny mistake or something in the Markdown. They admit it's still fine, right? So that forgiving nature that is forgiving for humans also works for LLMs. But it is, it's. It's kind of amazing because I certainly never envisioned it. I just wanted to blog and have a good format for my writing. Really.
- [35:04]
C
I'm less forgiving than John. I think Sam Altman should send John
- [35:07]
B
$100 million, just give or take.
- [35:11]
A
I couldn't agree more. But I am, I am real, I am curious real quick and you know, before we have to go here is, does this feel like a good direction for like technology and the web that Markdown is becoming ever more ubiquitous this way?
- [35:22]
C
I think so. Especially because it's showing a new generation of creators and coders that what actually makes the web move forward is what individuals create, right? And I think the more they take that lesson away and they're like the guy who writes about Apple made this, right? And if they sort of get that lesson in the back of their head and hear these kinds of stories, and they're like, the thing that we all use wasn't made by one of these giant trillion dollar companies. That is actually the most important thing that they can sort of learn from it, not just using the format, but like, maybe they could make one of these specs too. One of these formats, too. I. I think that actually like being in the back of their head and being like, how come I would never learn that? Like, there will be people who got, you know, the. The good degree from Stanford that were never taught where the format that they use comes from. And maybe that should raise some questions for them about the history they were told about how the whole industry works. That's a really good thing.
- [36:14]
A
Yeah, I love that. All right, we gotta get outta here. Thank you both for being here.
- [36:17]
B
This is.
- [36:17]
A
This is very fun. This is, like, we could talk. We're gonna come back and just, like, litigate, which does one asterisk and which does two. But that's. We'll do that another time. Thank you both for being here. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to John and Anil for being here. And thank you, as always, for listening. As always, if you want to send us emails, you can always email us vergcastheverge.com if you want to call in with some questions or thoughts or feedback. 866 Verge 11 is the hotline. Find me on social. Find us anywhere on the Verge. We're not hard to get in touch with, and we absolutely love hearing from you about everything. Also, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe it gets you ad free versions of all of our podcasts, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters, including my newsletter installer, which selfishly, I think is very good. It gets you all of our coverage of Markdown and everything else. Theverge.com software subscribe and make sure we get to keep doing all of this. Thank you to everybody who subscribes. We appreciate you. The vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locasio. We will see you tomorrow. Rock and roll. Formula 1. So hot right now.
- [37:28]
B
It's like if traitors in succession had a baby on wheels.
- [37:32]
A
Teams lying, drivers beefing, celebrities everywhere.
- [37:38]
C
And scandals.
- [37:39]
B
Lots of scandals.
- [37:41]
A
So we made a show about it, the Red Flags podcast, where we recap races and break down all the latest F1 headlines.
- [37:48]
B
But no nerdy tech talk.
- [37:50]
A
We only cover the stuff you want to hear about. Yeah, and the only thing hotter than the drivers are our takes.
- [37:56]
B
And now we're doing it on Vox.
- [37:59]
A
Oh, we're so legit now. We're basically thought leaders.
- [38:03]
B
TED Talk incoming, and we do a
- [38:06]
A
podcast with Gunter Steiner called Venka Hours.
- [38:09]
B
I still can't believe that's true.
- [38:11]
A
Well, believe it. There is so much for the beautiful Vox Media audience to enjoy. So come check out the Red Flags podcast Every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.