 So email is dead. It's dead. It's being viciously, horribly murdered right now. And you wrote a story about it. Tell me about the story you wrote about it. Well, I wrote a story about this app called Slack, which is kind of like an AOL chat room from 15 years ago, but with all your colleagues in it, but has as good of a search as Gmail. And what it can do is replace the way you talk to your colleagues, but also all the emails you've been sending around your office and all the GIFs and all the weird stuff and everything like that. Okay, but isn't that like every chat app ever? Haven't they all tried to do this? Like AOL chat rooms tried to do this. I guess it was like my middle school friends, not my colleagues, but like what's different about Slack? Yeah, but like none of them have succeeded in doing any good multi-platform apps with like any indexing or search or anything like Gmail at all. And they also have support for like every attachment you've ever sent me, I can be like all the weird cool GIFs that Dave has ever sent me, I can see them all inside of one pane. Or let's say we're working on an article together, which we do sometimes. An article. I could see all those things together and search for them, whereas like man, how much time do you spend going through your email trying to find the right conversation? But this is all assuming that you're like pretty descriptive. You know, we're writers after all, but I still have trouble searching for things sometimes. True. I think that's a problem with both email and Slack. I guess Slack is better than like the janky subject lines. I always just write like hey in email subject lines, which is horrible when you're trying to search for something. Yeah, but here's the other crazy part. It's like if you're using Gmail or something like that, not only does it feel really sluggish in general, this is real time, so it's like chat, but it's also like you can plug in all these things that used to clog up your inbox with notifications. Like let's say there's a new bug report that somebody files. Let's say there's a new notification from Twitter that somebody followed at Verge. A lot of people, a lot of developers especially, have like a gazillion notifications for all that stuff. Now you pipe them in through Slack and it's all in one thing and you can search for it and there's even a Slack bot that can show you whatever you want. Jurassic Park pictures, pictures of a nili on a boat, whatever you want. Those are actually the only two things. Yeah. So that's good. That's fine. I'm happy. So who is Slack killing email for? So it's killing email surprisingly for enterprises, which is like a super hard market to get into, but companies like Adobe and eBay and PayPal are using Slack to talk to each other. The weird thing though is that it's not like the whole company is using it. It's like smaller teams within the company are using Slack and they're talking to each other on this thing. And they're still emailing like some people outside the company, but I think the point that we're getting to is where we need to be, where the way I talk to my friends might be on Facebook or WhatsApp or iMessage. The way I talk to people at work is on Slack. The way I talk to my family is through some other app that's like a little more family oriented. And I think that's the point we're getting to. The point is like email has no context. It's just text with like these big chunky attachments and the phone app probably sucks and doesn't let you search for what you're looking for. And let's say somebody joins your company, they start a new email address, they get a new at the verge email address, they're starting from blank slate. With Slack, you get an address and you can search for anything over the whole history of everything that you guys talked about. So you think we're done with this thing where it's like I have one service that communicates with everything because that's all email is good for, right? It sucks, but I can definitely email you. I know that for sure for everyone on earth. Do we not need that anymore? It's always going to be there. Just like phone numbers or something like that are always going to be there in some shape, form or another. Even if it's 50 years, we're not using phone numbers or anything like that. It's almost like you'd have it set up so that if somebody does decide to call you, it'll just forward through to your Snapchat call or whatever it is. And I think that's the big idea is that we're finding better ways to communicate and email I think is going to be around for a long time. I mean the Slack CEO admits that this is how we still talk to people outside the company, but for small teams, I think that having a chat slash email real time chat thing AOL altogether is a really good solution. So basically just Snapchat me or Slack me or DM me or pick anything just please for the love of God, stop emailing me. Yes.
 So email is dead. It's dead. It's being viciously, horribly murdered right now. And you wrote
 a story about it. Tell me about the story you wrote about it.
 Well, I wrote a story about this app called Slack, which is kind of like an AOL chat room
 from 15 years ago, but with all your colleagues in it, but has as good of a search as Gmail.
 And what it can do is replace the way you talk to your colleagues, but also all the
 emails you've been sending around your office and all the GIFs and all the weird stuff and
 everything like that.
 Okay, but isn't that like every chat app ever? Haven't they all tried to do this?
 Like AOL chat rooms tried to do this. I guess it was like my middle school friends, not
 my colleagues, but like what's different about Slack?
 Yeah, but like none of them have succeeded in doing any good multi-platform apps with
 like any indexing or search or anything like Gmail at all. And they also have support for
 like every attachment you've ever sent me, I can be like all the weird cool GIFs that
 Dave has ever sent me, I can see them all inside of one pane. Or let's say we're working
 on an article together, which we do sometimes.
 An article.
 I could see all those things together and search for them, whereas like man, how much
 time do you spend going through your email trying to find the right conversation? But
 this is all assuming that you're like pretty descriptive. You know, we're writers after
 all, but I still have trouble searching for things sometimes.
 True.
 I think that's a problem with both email and Slack.
 I guess Slack is better than like the janky subject lines. I always just write like hey
 in email subject lines, which is horrible when you're trying to search for something.
 Yeah, but here's the other crazy part. It's like if you're using Gmail or something like
 that, not only does it feel really sluggish in general, this is real time, so it's like
 chat, but it's also like you can plug in all these things that used to clog up your inbox
 with notifications. Like let's say there's a new bug report that somebody files. Let's
 say there's a new notification from Twitter that somebody followed at Verge. A lot of
 people, a lot of developers especially, have like a gazillion notifications for all that
 stuff. Now you pipe them in through Slack and it's all in one thing and you can search
 for it and there's even a Slack bot that can show you whatever you want. Jurassic Park
 pictures, pictures of a nili on a boat, whatever you want.
 Those are actually the only two things.
 Yeah.
 So that's good. That's fine. I'm happy. So who is Slack killing email for?
 So it's killing email surprisingly for enterprises, which is like a super hard market to get into,
 but companies like Adobe and eBay and PayPal are using Slack to talk to each other. The
 weird thing though is that it's not like the whole company is using it. It's like smaller
 teams within the company are using Slack and they're talking to each other on this thing.
 And they're still emailing like some people outside the company, but I think the point
 that we're getting to is where we need to be, where the way I talk to my friends might
 be on Facebook or WhatsApp or iMessage. The way I talk to people at work is on Slack.
 The way I talk to my family is through some other app that's like a little more family
 oriented. And I think that's the point we're getting to. The point is like email has no
 context. It's just text with like these big chunky attachments and the phone app probably
 sucks and doesn't let you search for what you're looking for. And let's say somebody
 joins your company, they start a new email address, they get a new at the verge email
 address, they're starting from blank slate. With Slack, you get an address and you can
 search for anything over the whole history of everything that you guys talked about.
 So you think we're done with this thing where it's like I have one service that communicates
 with everything because that's all email is good for, right? It sucks, but I can definitely
 email you. I know that for sure for everyone on earth. Do we not need that anymore?
 It's always going to be there. Just like phone numbers or something like that are always
 going to be there in some shape, form or another. Even if it's 50 years, we're not using phone
 numbers or anything like that. It's almost like you'd have it set up so that if somebody
 does decide to call you, it'll just forward through to your Snapchat call or whatever it
 is. And I think that's the big idea is that we're finding better ways to communicate and
 email I think is going to be around for a long time. I mean the Slack CEO admits that
 this is how we still talk to people outside the company, but for small teams, I think
 that having a chat slash email real time chat thing AOL altogether is a really good solution.
 So basically just Snapchat me or Slack me or DM me or pick anything just please for
 the love of God, stop emailing me.
 Yes.