Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Asterisks and Underlines.

I'm your friend David Pierce 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 no 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

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 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 claw.md.m.D. 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. Markdown 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 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 15th, 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

...