# The **epic** story of Markdown
6/15/202635 min
Markdown is a system for writing that makes it readable to both humans and computers. It's all about the symbols. You use - to make a list, * for emphasis, ** for even more emphasis. Brackets and parentheses turn into links. Once you know Markdown, you might begin to think in Markdown. Right now it is absolutely everywhere: people are maintaining their Claude.MD files for conversing with AI bots, and writing their notes in Markdown editors like Obsidian. So where did Markdown come from? It came from John Gruber. John joins the show, along with Anil Dash, to tell the story of where Markdown came from and how it took over the world. Further reading: The Markdown spec How Markdown took over the world Gruber on Apple Notes Markdown support 9to5mac: iOS 26 to bring new features for Messages, CarPlay, and more Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[upbeat music] 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 gonna talk about Markdown. Now, Markdown is probably very familiar to you if you're, like, a deep nerd about note-taking apps like I am, and may be a word you've never even heard of otherwise. If you're in that latter group, don't worry, we're gonna, we're gonna 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, if you're writing words and you wanna 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. Mar- Markdown is a, 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." Uh, 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 Claude.md file, the MD stands for Markdown. It's a way