The Verge's flagship tech show, publishing several times a week, plus the Version History spinoff that takes one dead gadget and reconstructs how it got made and why it stopped mattering.
This is a news show, so an episode is a reaction to the week it was recorded in. The back catalog ages faster than almost anything else you could pick up, and a 2025 episode about a phone launch tells you very little in 2026. The entry points worth your time are the ones that explain a thing rather than react to one.
In order. If you only listen to one, make it the first.
John Gruber explains that he built Markdown in 2004 because he hated hand-editing HTML on Daring Fireball, particularly when revising a post after publishing. A format now used by GitHub, Apple Notes and most of the AI industry came out of one person's irritation with his own blog.
Kate Klonick's argument is that the EU e-privacy directive never asked for banners at all. Industry lawyers converged on them as the safe compliance answer, and that reading calcified even after regulators said in advisory opinions that banners were not required.
The two-decade deal where publishers handed Google their content in exchange for traffic is coming apart. The hosts pin it on Google tying AI crawling to search crawling, so a publisher who blocks one loses the other, and walk through which outlets have started blocking anyway.
David Pierce argues history will judge Google Glass more kindly than 2013 did, tracking it from Babak Parviz's work inside Google X through the privacy backlash to the smart glasses everyone is shipping now.
Two Canadians founded Easy Zapper in 1999 to kill the coffee table full of remotes. Their first device put the screen at the bottom and could pull TV listings off the internet, roughly a decade before the smartphone made the whole ambition redundant.
Which is the real problem with "where do I start" lists. Each episode above links to its summary on this site, free and without an account, so you can find out which of the five is worth your evening before committing to any of them.
Most of the archive, honestly. Anything named after a product launch, a keynote reaction or a livestream is a snapshot of one week and will not repay a listen a year later. The durable material is Version History and the single-topic explainers.
The back-catalog problem is the same problem as the queue problem. Listening to summaries instead of full episodes and fitting long shows into a commute cover two other pieces of it.