Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of extremely mild, very hot takes.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am Christmas shopping.

I have my whole list.

I'm very organized this year.

I have all the people that I need.

I know roughly what I'm getting them.

I had like a big self-brandstorm of ideas.

But do you know what I discovered?

For me, at least, the single hardest thing to buy is like a big self-brainstorm of ideas, but do you know what I discovered? For me, at least,

the single hardest thing to buy is like a pretty good $20 gift. The things for like Secret Santa parties or colleagues at work or just this like list of people in the world you need

to get something, but you don't know them well enough

to really get something like super personal and also it might be weird if you did.

And you don't want to spend a ton of money.

I think this is why I end up both like giving and receiving a lot of Starbucks gift cards

every year.

It's just a pretty universally useful thing that people like. But I don't want to

do that so much anymore. I just don't know what else to do. I'm sort of lost on this idea of

like, what is a good $20, relatively safe and universally liked gift to give? If you have the

answer, I want to know. Please tell me,

sincerely, you will make everything about my holiday planning for forever better and easier. So get

at me. Anyway, this episode is the first in a two-part series we're doing about 2025. It's the end

of 2024. We're doing some looking back on this show, but we thought it would also be fun to spend some time looking forward.

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