Markdown as a Universal Convention

Hello and welcome to the Virtcast, the flagship podcast of asterisks and Underlines. I'm your friend David Peerce, and today on the show we're going to talk about markarkdown Now, markdown is probably very familiar to you if you're like a deep nerd about no taking apps like I am, and maybe a word you've never even heard of otherwise If you're in that ladder group, Don't worry're 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 and understand So if you're writing words and you want to bold something, Rather than go to, you, file and format and bold 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, o, 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 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 markarkdown 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 frranca of the AI industry right now When you make a claw. Md file, the MD stands for markdown. It's a way of writing for the computer that is simple and straightforward and that lots of people understand. Lackdown is not just an inherent thing of computers. It was created. It was created by a person And that person is John Gruber, who you might also know as the writer of the Bog Daring Fireball John's going to come on the show, as is Emeil Dash, who is a long timee 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 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 ninety seconds on the Vverge for Monday, june fifteenth, twenty twenty six. Fox announced that it's buying Rku in a deal valued at twenty two billion dollars 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, Tubie, Roku streaming devices, its smart TV software and the Roko 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 Anthropics 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 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 Vires Don Preston reviewed the Honor Magic V six, a foldable phone that accomplishes three very important things It has battery the last 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 two thousand dollars, which means you probably won't buy or ever even see it There are good things coming in forals You can read more about all of this at the Vverge. com That's ninety seconds on the verge for Monday, june fifteenth Support for the show comes from serervice Now. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways Service now turns that chaos into control With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done and what it's about to do, so you stay in control To put AI to work for people, visit serviceNow. com I think I want to raise girls who are nice. Girls who are nice are pliable and do what other people tell them so that they can be liked. This week on Project Swagger, the incredible Shanda Rhimes. I felt really overwhelmed after Grace was a giant hit. And then I thought like, well, how am I supposed to do this again? We talk about motherhood, confidence, knowing your worth and adding tax. If you go in already thinking to yourself, I have to take a deal, I have to make this deal, you've already lost Listen now at Project Swagger. Let's talk Text Files, joining me now, John Gruber, who you've been on the show many times, but never as the inventor of Markdown Welcome to Versecast Yes, And finally, I'm here for the thing that will go on my tombstone. I think that's right. and we're going to talk about that. Also here, A Neil Dash, you did not invent Mark Down But you got seeat when it was created. 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 as and sort of baby blogger John Gruber. Tell us just the brief story of where Markdown came from. went to college in the nineties, had a computer science degree and graduated in ninety six and then was doing freelance graphic design work rather than programming, but with a background in programming and being that age 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 It was a lot easier. And I had, you know, it gets it's intertwined with the what's the origins of Daring Fireball. But I had this inkling to start Daring Fireball like ninety eight, ninety nine or something, you know, some kind of blog. because I wrote, it was a writer Finally, august two thousand two is when I started the site. During the year of two thousand two there was this, this is where A Neil 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 the year before something K of immediately took over the blogging world, right? Like Movable type at this time was sort of the one you choose if you're going to choose one Yeah, and I' more or less ruled out every other option for a CMS And I was like, I've got to I got to build my own And then movable type was like close enough. and it's like, oh And it's like, I know that if I built my own, it would take ten 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 paced HTML into the field for the body of the article. Within a year, I'd really gotten the shits of that. I can imagine. ye 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 Allen, who's no longer with us at textism dot com came out with a thing called teextile U two thousand one, two thousand two, I don't know. four markown. And I thought about using textile and I didn't like it enough And uh One of E Neil's colleagues at Six Apart, a guy named Brad Chate Six aart the company that made movable type, that content made. 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, it needed to be in Perl for movable type. 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 teextism. 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 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 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 typeability. Even though all the characters are asy characters, there's, you know, and I really thought about it because I'm so mac centric and it's easy to type you know, certain charac 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, Noah, I should just stick to the asky ones. The readability was more important to me than the writeability. 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 pick that up very quickly. Like, o, 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 Yeah. I think it's one of the most important reasons it took off, right? So to sort of John's point, we made this tool, you know, moable type that was being used by you know, at that time, Dalker and Huffington Post and like all of the big blogs, right And none of those folks liked HTML. like so you had like two or three people in the office who were like they 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 be writing about like, you know, Brittney Spears was caught at this club doing this which was like half the storyies in Goker at the time And then to put it an image, they're like, this is miserable And And then what was really important too was like when they wereote the posted markdown The other person didn't even have to know was markarked on It was literally what they would had have written in an email. and like that like they said that explicitly. they're like, oh, this is like normal We don't feel like nerds when we see this. And so that became the default. and that actually was different than textile. likeike I really Just like John, all of us were such huge fans of Dean. L he was just one of those super influential early folks that m, 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 plugs. 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 Darry Firebol, 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 like what an embarrassment of rich is 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 looks 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 and then they told you explicitly like this works like I work A Neil, 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 basasically sort of launching Markdown to the world. And it just starts with, I've written a text tech, HTML formatting tool called Markdown, which is now available for download, which gives real like open AI saying ChatBT is are research preview vibes. It's like, hi, I've done this thing that is going to become utterly ubiquitous on the interternet. Id say here it is, you can have it, I guess But Anneil, do do you remember this as like was this like a seismic moment on the internet? Like John Gruber has made a markup language? 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 the blogphere, like how different blogs were in social media world there There was a sense that everybody read every blog every day then. like that sound right? And that sounds like an insane thing to say. But I think there was a couple of things are different. One, like people had RS readers so you could kind of keep 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 tool that a researcher named Cameron Marlow had made called blog deecks. 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 ten or fifteen, maybe twenty 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 Like there wasn't like here's fifty new phones and, you know, cameras and whatever launching every day. Like it was just like 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 Ciskco doing? Like there was no way that was cooler than what John was doing. But the other thing with and Nil hit on was The stuff and tech that was going on was blogging itself And so that's what we wrote about. And it sounds navvel gazy, but it wasn't because it really was some of the most interesting stuff going on. The spirit of everybody was building building blocks for everybody else, right? And like that's very, very different in the environment now. Everything was open. so almost everything everybody was assuming was going to be open source was going to be, you know sort of clone and copied. I think the only thing that kind of has that feeling these days is maybe like MCP R where people are building things are kind of interoperable between each other And you know, when we say blocks, like it sounds very sort of like retrogr, but it It is a superet 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 And also when people were building a fundamental component, yeah, it could be markedown, 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 s 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 we'd be like a billion people are going to use. but yeah, but you couldn't it wasn't ridiculous at all to be like I might make a thing and a couple of 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 you know, feeling when you're creating Yeah I keep seeing celebrities posts, me in the nineties versus now. Well 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 TMobile, customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and AT andT over the past five years And with TMobile 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 You can't guarantee you'll still look good with frosted tips, but TMobile can give you a clear guarantee on your wireless plan. Lower bills based on AirS six billing snapshs from Q three hundred twenty one to Q four hundred twenty five compared to average AT andT and Vorizon bills comparison exclusive discounts credits and optional charg. price guarantee on talk teas andata exclusions like Texas and Visa apppply see Tmbile dot com. I'm Seth Mattlins. My new show, Creator 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, CEO's, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building breaking, 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 Crreator destroys the show that argues they've always been the same thing Fox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdom is Com New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. So okay, so let's, let' Jump ahead a bunch here because I think Fairly quickly, Mdown becomes sort of ubiquitous. I am curious. I''t disagree there. I really was a years It was an for a while It actually took off in from two thousand four to like twenty ten was very slow and actually very disappointing to me Okay like I thought I'm like convinced. I was like, this is the fucking shit. I' I can't go back I like I can't believe more people aren't using this. And then it did, I noticice it just I have a concrete example So we did, you know, SAack oververflow. I knew the founding team and I was on the board. and stack launched in zero eight, I think And it was controversial that it supported Markown. Right Be it was like really that there was a really strong argument and I think Jeff Atwood, one of the co foundounders had been like we should do markown so they can do fancy formatted answers on you know, Sacrflow is the most popular, you know, community for coders to answer each other's questions. Th are people who in theory would love to write an. They're all coders. Right. 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 they going are they going do too much HTML? like all these kinds of things And of course, like it ended up being wildly popular and 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 gimmy 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 things GitHub was a huge one. It was like a in fact time change. 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 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 Right? And they don't, right? 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 HTML. 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 made it put it in the heads of technical people and then they became the, uh What do you call it? the evangelists for it? Yeah So but John, that turn you just described where the technical people get into it, start using it, love it and become the evangelists. U. 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 nototes got markdown support. U 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 my 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 part particular let 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 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 putting I'm like, where's the break? This is too much This is being exposed to people who should have a whizzy wig thing in front of me Yeah Okay so that this is what I'm getting at. And I think maybe Google Docs is a cleaner example of like you can you can write a Google Doc in Markdown now. It's weird and bad and I don't suggest doing it, but you can do it. But simultaneously this thing has happened where a bch of a bunch of companies have said Rather than pure wizzy wig, like you press the button to make it bold, we're going to let you do the carrots to make it or we're going to let you do the aerisk to make it bold Also, markdown editor has become a thing And 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 aren't proprietary.ike 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 Woodmark D was supposed to be Yeah, basically. I mean, I like it and there's a fine line between it, right? L and for example, when I made Markdown, there was no syntax coloring for it, right? And It was meant to be self evident in a text editor with no syntax coloring, just the asterisks and the ets and the braces, they all speak for themselves. and 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. Like 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 whizzy wig 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 you've gone too far. And that's you'reactly 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 markarkdown Wizzy wig HTML editors and they were They sounded great, right? It's like, oh, it just you just hit command Ii 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 a 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 aiz markarkdown editor where you type markarkdown. But what they've done is let you copy markarkdown out or export as markarkdown which is great. I think that's actually very appropriate for Apple Notes. I'm now the like I said, the put the brakes on this. Don't expose it to people. People should have the Apple Notes app should just be Wizzywig where you just say Italics, header And it's an actual menu item But Neil, what do you think of that? 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 I think John was talking about like the early u, 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 the most nightmares, you know, situation. And I think that's one of the reasons that that Marken has sort of persevered. Like it's really hard evenven with all the different flavors and variants and whatever to make a markdown document that doesn't just ultimately work Well, I go back and forth on this because I think phhilosophically There's an argument to be made that just everyone should learn markarkdown because A, it's not that hard. Thingves It solves a certain set of problems, right? Like I just I am forever struck by the number of people who still don't know the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, right? And like it is undeniably faster right 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 to me that actually what you invented is the most efficient way to do it, even more efficient than Wizzywig And there are still a lot of really broken Wizzy wig editors out there. The other part of me is like, well, actually everybody should just fix their stupid wizzywigeters. 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 like everyday people should learn and know Does that feel like a brach too far to you No, but I don't think it should be required. 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 But like the official and don't I stopp dicking around with it. I don't add new features. I'm not saying I never will, but I haven't. 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 it Italicizing something in plain text I had strong opinions about those since like the early nineties 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, peopleople would use the tildas for that. peopleople 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 conventional more than a syntax. 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 That's the thing and that's That's all we ever have, right? A spec is like ego, right? The web is just a bunch of things we're hoping works this way. Nobody ever follows a spec. The web is all just a bunch of things we slap together and like this is the thing that works the way people work. And recognize that from the beginning. So you never had the ego to pretend, I'm going to write this technical spec and everybody's going to follow it. Be 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 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 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, right? People are out here writing claw. md files for themselves all the time. I guess A, did you get a phone call about this and how do we feel about this sort of next turn in the Markdown story No phone call and unfortunately no royalty check That's that may be the real bummer here Uh I guess it's like it's surprising. and I get and I'll get more once this episode comes out, sure. 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. Like how does it feel that it's like the lingua Francoca 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 there Pattern matching and pattern predicting based on a corpus of att 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 goingo 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 under fake underlines or something And LLMs will parse that. Well, that's what Markdown is. So of course, LLMs really like it. 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 U they do someomebody did some studies there it's much better at at LLMs I think to this day are still better at emitting markdown than they are at JSON because JSON has very pers snickety rules like a JSON file, you get a character wrong and then the whole filees back 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 a 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 kind of amazing because I certainly never envisioned it. I just wanted to blog and have a good format for my writing Ret I'm less forgiving than John. I think Sam Alt mentioned San and John a hundred million dollars. Give or take. I couldn't agree more. But I am real I am curious real quick anyil before we have to go here, is does this feel like a good direction for technology in the web that Markdown is becoming ever more ubiquitous this way? 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 R. 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 is actually the most important thing that they can sort of learn from not just using the format, but like maybe they could make one of these specs to one of these formats too. Um, I think that actually like being in the back of their head and be like, how come I would never learned that? Like there would be people who got you know, the good degree from Stanford that we're 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. I love that.. All right. We gott to get out of here. Thank you both for being here. This is very fun. This is like we could talk we're going to 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 Neil for being here and thank you as always for listening As always, if you want to send us emails, you can always email us Virgecast at the Vverge. com. If you want tona call in with some questions or thoughts or feedback, eight six six Verge one one 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 Also, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to the Verge, The Vverge. com slash 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 I think is very good