Nintendo's Switch 2 is here — sort of
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Welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of additional USB ports. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Epitel is doing some fancy journalism thing today that I don't totally understand, so he's not here. Richard Lawler's here. Hi, Richard. Hey, how you doing? We do not do fancy journalism things here. That's Neil's job. We're just here to talk about Nintendo. Ash Parrish is here. Hi, Ash. Hi. And Andrew Webster is here. Hi, Andrew.

Hello. Andrew Tuerfels, the last time you were on camera was the last time there was a Nintendo Switch. That is correct. 2017 in New York. How does it feel to be back? I'm here.

I'll take it. So there's a lot of stuff to talk about today. The TikTok ban either is or is not going to happen. And literally no one knows and everybody changes their mind every five minutes. There's a bunch of Sonos news, a whole bunch of policy and politics stuff happening as the Biden administration comes to a close and the Trump administration comes to a start. But we have to start with the Nintendo Switch, which after...

I don't know, months, Andrew, of you sort of waking up every morning wondering if today was going to be the day that the Switch 2 came out finally exists.

Ish, kind of. Andrew, just explain what we know and learned about the Switch today. I mean, pretty much what you said. It exists. We have a three-minute video that shows it's a real thing and a press release that tells us that it's a real thing, but we know nothing else. It's bigger. They won't say what size the screen is. The Joy-Con are slightly different.

How? I don't know. They attach differently. That's pretty much it. It is like the Switch 2 in every way that if you had sat down and been like, what might the Switch 2 be? You would have come up with basically this, right? Yeah. It's like that old Allergy clip where he's like, I always thought they should make a PlayStation, but better. And then they came up with the PlayStation 2. It's that, but Nintendo did it.

Ash, Andrew and I have been talking forever about how this is like roughly what we wanted out of the Switch. Is this what you wanted out of the Switch? I don't want anything out of them. I just accept what they give me because there's no way to anticipate and there's definitely no way to demand of them. So like I'm pleased. This is exactly what I expect because I had no expectations. But we can say at least one potential thing is that there's a new Mario Kart.

We did get a brief glimpse of what looks to be a new Mario Kart. It looks like it might support more racers than normal, which might hint at some increased multiplayer capacity. So that's cool. But it's all, you know, caveated heavily with might and could.

Yeah. And that's actually like a bigger deal than it sounds because like there hasn't been a new Mario Kart since the Wii U technically, even though Mario Kart's the Switch's best selling game. It's a port. So they haven't like done a brand new one in a very long time. Yeah. So can I just run down the list of the things that we think we learned from this trailer? And you guys tell me what I missed. So like you said, bigger screen, smaller bezels, Joy-Cons are black and bigger.

And some of the triggers are bigger. There's a new button somewhere on the thing. There's also a new port on the top next to the headphone jack. Is that it? Yeah, that sounds correct. And then some like little tiny design tweaks. Yeah. The kickstand looks a little different. Oh yeah, the kickstand. I will say the fact that there is like a good kickstand.

seemingly better kickstand that does more than one thing seems very exciting. The kickstand on my Switch is trash and does not hold it at a usable angle and makes me angry every single time. Yeah, honestly, the OLED version is like good for its screen, but the improved kickstand makes it like the best version of the Switch for that reason. So is there anything else? Did I miss anything on the list of like things we actually learned from this trailer?

I'm trying to go over the video trailer in my head to make sure. The dracons seem to connect just slightly differently. Yeah, so they don't slide down anymore. They kind of like slot in and there's like a little...

uh port or ping protrusion that they kind of hook into um oh also some people online being worried about that that that might be like a thing that can break i mean there there's that concern but from what it looks like it doesn't look like it sticks out far enough to be breakable unless you like really want to get your fingers in there and break it deliberately oh another thing that you did potentially miss is that the the

the Joy-Cons might have like some kind of cool mouse functionality because in the video we saw them like snap to their little covers and then like zoom around like it was a mouse. So that might be also something new to expect. I saw people saying that at the beginning.

And I went back through the video and I was like, what in the holy hell is everybody talking about? I cannot see where this thing is acting like a mouse. But there's that moment where it's like they're sort of on their edge, like scooting around the table. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. And like at first glance, it might look like, oh, this is just like a cool affectation to show off the controllers. But it actually might belie something functional. Yeah.

Yeah, and that's because there was leaks before saying it's going to have mouse stuff. I think if we didn't have those, no one would put that together. What was that before, though? Do we want a pointer on the Switch? So I heard from people who are discussing this that it could potentially lead to things where we could see more 3DS games on the Switch, and that's how it interacts somehow, maybe possibly. Not sure, but...

That's an idea that people are spitballing. Yeah. And you also think of all the PC games that are like portable now because of the Steam Deck. And it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it's been a long time since there's been a new Mario Paint. I mean, I do wonder how many of those things are now sort of due for a rev. Because I went back and I watched the original game.

trailer to the first switch from 2017 which is like vibes wise the complete opposite yeah the one that we got today like that one is pure lifestyle video right it's like it's all like people running around hanging out with each other and like there's a party on a rooftop and then a bunch of people who are like playing multiplayer games and they're like diagramming

like a soccer plays or something that had for reasons. But they were like trying to get you to understand, like, here is what this thing is for and all the different ways you can use it on an airplane and all this stuff. This one was just pure. Like we took the thing and we changed the size and shape of it.

The end, which is probably true, but it does make me think like, OK, if you're not going to blow people's mind with some like new idea about hardware, maybe maybe the games push is going to have to be bigger, that they're going to have to reinvent some of that stuff for this in order to make this feel as exciting as a new console rev might be. Does it have to be they sell a million a billion switches anyway? Yeah. With no changes.

And they didn't do anything with like, there was no switch pro. We got an OLED, which was just like a bigger, brighter screen, but we did like, we didn't have any like real console refreshes for the switch and it still sold like gangbusters. There's no need to reinvent the wheel with this. Nintendo knows that. Yeah. This video is just like, we won, like we figured it out. Like what else is there to do? Um,

And like even, I don't know, I'd be surprised if when they do the game reveal stuff, there's a lot of stuff that's like exclusive exclusive because they still have like 150 million Switches out there and people want to buy games for it. So I think there's going to be like, in the same way that like with the PS5 and Xbox series, whatever, it's been like a long transition period to getting games that only play on there. I think it's going to be similar to the Switch too. And speaking of that, there was some...

slightly vague information about how games are going to work on this thing. Right. Because the last bit of news we got, if I'm remembering this correctly, was on election night in the United States when they just dropped this thing about games being backward compatible. But then it sounds like the trailer puts a little bit of an asterisk on that.

Yeah, they said some they will be able to play physical and digital copies of games from the original Switch, but not everything would transfer over. And they did haven't given us an idea of what games won't. But we can imagine at least some things like the Nintendo Labo stuff like that's not going to be compatible. Yeah.

I can't think of anything else, but that one's the foremost in my mind. Like, those really, really, really weird gimmicky Nintendo Switch games probably won't pour over. Right. But I will say, the thing that made me worried, and maybe I'm worrying about this for no reason, is that what that might mean is that anybody who makes a Switch game has to do something in order to support the Switch 2, that there is some, like...

I don't know what, like when Apple introduces a new screen size, you have to like go in and it's not a ton of work, but it is some work to like make it work on the new thing that maybe it was going to be like that and not just sort of pure out of the box backward compatibility. I think it's entirely the controllers is my guess. Like Labo is designed specifically for those tinier versions of the Joy-Con to fit in. So there's no way to make it work with the bigger one. I think like,

Ring Fit Adventure might be a similar one because it has an accessory that like it fits snugly in there. You can't put a bigger one in there. I think it's just those weird oddball ones. I mean, we'll like we'll find out soon, but there's always I think with every Nintendo platform, there's always like one or two of those like

we made something weird and now it doesn't work. But the backwards compatibility thing, I think it'll be those ones. Which I think is fine. Like, I don't know that Labo backwards compatibility is like a thing I'm super concerned about for the next version of the Switch. I mean, maybe the better screen will make Zelda and VR slightly less nauseous. Who knows? Counts for something, I suppose. Yeah, so the only game we saw at all was this...

potentially new Mario Kart. We'll see what that turns out to be. Did it surprise any of you guys that we didn't see more games? I sort of assumed we'd see more games. I mean, we didn't see any games hardly for the first one. We saw a glimpse of Breath of the Wild and Skyrim of all games, and that was it. So this isn't...

Too far off the mark where we have one fewer game and the second game was like a game that Bethesda has been trotting out for the last 20 years. So I don't think we're missing much. Why does Nintendo do this like this? I was thinking about the cadence of this right before we were getting on and it's like, okay, Nintendo puts out a video and then says we're going to have more to share at a direct in April.

three full months from now, and then there's going to be a bunch of hands-on stuff, and then it's launching for some price at some time in the future this year. Like, no other company launches a product like this. What, like, Andrew, I grant that trying to understand Nintendo as a company is insane and no one should try to do it, but what is going on here? Why would Nintendo? This one is, like, very simple. Like, the answer is the Wii U. Like, when that was announced...

no one knew what this was. Literally, I remember writing the breaking news post and I was like, "Is this a Wii accessory? Is this a new console?" Nobody knew. Oh, interesting. The messaging around that was so confusing and it was a massive flop after... How do you mess up after the Wii? That was a huge breakthrough console, right?

So, like, whatever you say about Nintendo, like, they have become very good and precise at messaging. And so they are doing it in stages so you don't mess things up. Like, the first message is just like, you know, you guys are safe. We didn't mess it up. We just made a bigger Wii or a bigger Switch. And then they get into the other stuff after. They, like, I think they're just very...

certain that like there's of what they want to say and they want to make sure it gets out clearly. So if that's true, it seems to me the one thing Nintendo whiffed on is not saying something about the processor, like looking at our comments and looking at social and looking all and like even my own reaction is like the main thing I want to know is if this thing is more powerful because it needs to be. And the switch was like it wasn't

underpowered when it came out, but it wasn't powerful when it came out. And it has like since gotten sort of pathetic in a certain way, like as a raw horsepower thing. And overwhelmingly, like what people seem to have wanted to know is like, is this thing going to be more powerful? Is it going to be able to run the kinds of games that I want? Is it going to be able to run like new kinds of games over time? And yeah,

we'll get the answer to that in two and a half months. And maybe it doesn't matter because it's a new switch and everybody's going to buy it anyway, Richard, like you were saying, but it does feel like that's the biggest detail that we still don't know anything about. But again, that's just like clouding their message. I think, um,

I think you look at like the PS5 Pro reveal and they have like Mark Cerny talking about whatever teraflops are. And like no normal person knows what that video is saying. And anyone who's complaining about not knowing the specs is a person who's still going to buy a new Switch anyways. Like, I think that is like the thing. In the same way that the original video was like all about vibes, like this is it. It's just they want, they don't want to tell you everything. They want to tell you the most important thing, which is...

It's the switch and bigger like that's it. Well, that's the thing. It's like the and there were a bunch of folks in our comments who were like this is like a passive aggressive launch video, which I didn't immediately read it as. But there is kind of something to that where Nintendo is like, yeah,

dumbasses, Switch 2, whatever. Leave us alone. Here it is. And like, there is a little bit to that where it's like, we don't have to tell you anything. It's a Switch 2. You'll buy it. Shut up. Not only will you buy it, you'll buy several of these. You own more than one. You know it. We know it. Everyone knows it. We don't have to tell you how powerful it is. And really, I'm not sure if how powerful it is matters that much because they don't need that much horsepower to be a slightly better Fortnite machine.

Like they need a little bit, but, but only a little. And it's, it's, I think at this point, nobody's playing Fortnite on the switch. Well, we need to get Charles on here. You know what? Some of my teammates would, would disagree. Not enough, not a lot, but yeah. Um,

Part of the thing that makes Nintendo Nintendo is the fact that they are very good at doing more with less. And I don't think I want to see them change that anyway by building a better mousetrap or a more powerful mousetrap anyway. So we can wait for them to reveal all of the specs. The only thing that's of concern to me is the fact that, you know, can we play games like Kingdom Hearts and not have to do it via cloud streaming? Because that was not a great feeling at all. So as long as it can take care of that,

I'm okay. Yeah. Like to be clear, like that stuff is important. It's just not the important thing, which is the first message they want to be out there. And what is that message other than just, yes, the switch to exists. That's it. It's the number two. That's it. That's the message. I did see somebody, uh, I think it was Brian Crescente who wrote a thing who was like,

weird he had a lot of feelings about the fact that it was called the switch 2 and not the super switch or anything else and he was saying it was the first time ever that nintendo has just done like the numeral after the console which i thought was sort of fascinating and it's like there's a bunch of like galaxy brain theories you can have about nintendo as a company here uh and andrew you have some of those and i'd like to hear them but uh

I don't know. There is there is part of me that is like this console is both exactly what I wanted and maybe less imaginative than you would expect from a company like Nintendo right now. Well, can you if you imagine like them calling it the Super Switch or the Switch Advance or something like that? I feel like that muddles the message more than just calling it the Switch 2, because unlike, you know, PlayStation or whatever, like we know like this.

The Switch is like a family console, right? And so you've got a lot of grandmas and grandpas and people who don't know what video games are buying these consoles for their kids or even for themselves and muddying it by calling it like a Super Switch or a Switch Advance or some other kind of name kind of messes with that. I'm sorry, I'm trying not to curse. And just calling it simply the Switch 2 clearly informs those kinds of buyers that, okay, this is the next step. It's like the opposite of the DS, which I feel like by the end of it had like 800...

that were totally indiscernible from one another. Yeah, you had the 3DS and the 2DS and, you know... XL. Yeah. So you had no idea if you were like a layman, for lack of a better term, like, okay, what does what? Is this an advancement? Is this like a same thing, but, you know, with more bells and whistles? Keep it simple, stupid. Yeah, I think you just need to look at like...

Xbox's naming scheme to see like how badly that can go. Yeah. It's like 100%. You mean going from Xbox to 360 to one doesn't that that's not that's not simple. That doesn't make sense to you. Listen, anyone who's ever tried to put series X slash S in a headline absolutely despises this naming scheme.

Yeah, I mean, that's fair. And the PlayStation thing, like we made a PlayStation, but better. And that's called the PlayStation. Like it does kind of work. That's that's fair. And Andrew, you also made the case that I think is right, that this is like just an incredible flex from Nintendo that they're like, yeah, this thing we did almost a decade ago, like we crushed it. And you suckers are like still trying to catch up to this thing that we did forever ago. And so we're just going to kick it and continue to win because we're

we are a thousand miles ahead of where everyone else has been this entire time. Yeah. And like everything about the way they did this too, even like not pre-announcing it, like Nintendo usually is like, you know, on Wednesday, we're going to have a direct and we're going to announce blah, blah, blah. And they give some information. This was like, nope, it's 8am on a Thursday. Here's our new console. So it's like, they know like people will pay attention no matter what. Yeah. Richard, what do you make of this thing? Is this

Is this everything you wanted it to be? How does it work with the Alarmo? Maybe that's what the USB port is for. When I know the answer to that question, I'll have my answer for you. But I mean, otherwise, yeah, you know, it's a Switch. It will continue to switch things. And I thought that it was interesting, especially when you look back at the original video for the first Switch.

that the actual joint, the actual kickstand is better now. So you can actually use it to do the things that they advertised the first one to do. So maybe an admission of some mistakes, but yes, that overall their, their viewpoint, that their angle, that the, the way that they're going, they're saying this is right. Yeah. I don't know. There, there is a thing where it's like, this is, this is the equivalent of like the iPhone 12 to 13, where they're just like, we made everything a little better. We've been working on the things that you work on and,

And now here's some new ones. And I can't decide how much of me is bummed that Nintendo didn't do something insane and weird and potentially bad because I think that's like fun and interesting versus assuming the specs are what I think that they are. Like when I look at my switch, my I have this like gross yellow switch from 2017 that I still use.

And literally all I want out of it is a faster Wi-Fi chip. Like the Wi-Fi on my Switch is trash. And if they would just make it fast Wi-Fi so that my pings would go down in the games I play online, I would be perfectly happy with this console. And so I'm torn between like I wish they had done more and also like I'm super, super glad they didn't do more. And like Wii U-ify the Switch and make it worse. There's still time.

I mean, there's a lot of breathing room between now and April 2nd for them to show, you know, go crazy with it. So, I mean, don't count them out. What crazy is there to do, though? It's the Switch 2. They're like, yeah, we finished this thing years ago. It's Nintendo. They have ways of surprising. Like, we have no idea what's in store for us. Kind of like what Andrew has written about on The Verge about, like, I've given up trying to predict what Nintendo will do. They still have that element of, you know, the ability to surprise.

Yeah, I do think the surprise things will be not directly tied to the console. It'll be like we're using this in some weird way in like a Labo-like project. Because that's like, you know, doing it, making it a core part of the console is like,

a huge risk, which they don't want to take, obviously. But you know, if no one buys some weird ass cardboard device, you know, they're still experimenting, but it's not like a big loss. So I think they're still going to take weird swings because that's who they are. But I think it's just not baked into the hardware. And I feel like the last decade of big swings in gaming sort of teaches us that that's the right approach, right? I feel like every time

And Microsoft just can't help itself from doing this. But every time somebody has a big bonkers idea that they like build into the console in a really meaningful way, it goes sideways, right? Microsoft is like, we're going to reinvent entertainment through the Xbox. And everybody's like, no, thank you. And then they're like, the Kinect is now bundled in and everybody's like, no, thank you.

Whereas like the PlayStation has just continued to be like, it's mostly about playing games with a controller sitting on your couch. If you want some other stuff, here's some other stuff that we'll sell you. Here's VR and here's move. And here's all these other things. If you want those things terrific, but fundamentally we're just building a thing to hold in your hands and play games.

that has continued to be the thing that works. And I feel like even with the first switch, what Nintendo has done is essentially build a pretty straightforward thing and an escalating series of insane accessories. Even like the gimmicks that they had initially, like no one uses them. I don't know if you guys remember when like the switch was announced and they were testing it like HD rumble was like a big thing and they were like showing executives like listening to ice cubes. You could tell how many ice cubes were falling into something by the vibrations.

And that's like a relatively minor gimmick and didn't end up, you know, they enforce every developer to put that in their games. And so it didn't screw things up. But like, that's the kind of thing I think we're going to see is like stuff that you can ignore if, if you need to. Street fast is coming back. Get ready. That's what, that's what the buttons for. Picto chat. I want picto chat back. What was picto chat from the DS? Oh yeah. Yeah.

That was fun. I don't know if you want PictoChat in 2025 now. It was simpler times when we had PictoChat.

So what, Andrew, your long national nightmare of having to follow the Switch 2 launch is not over. What is the next kind of drumbeat here? Well, we'll see. I mean, they said they're going to talk about it in April, but I've also been hearing there may be like a gaming direct, games focused direct in February. So...

There's going to be more beats to this and they will probably be dropped on us on a random evening of importance for American politics. Yeah, I mean, there's one of those coming up on Monday. So like it might happen. That's when the price is coming. Right. What do you guys think the price is going to be? Let's let's make some educated guesses here. What do we think this thing is going to cost? If it costs more than $400, I'll be surprised.

What was the original switch when it came out? 300. Okay. And the OLED was 350. Like the 400, 450, that's it. And even 450 sounds wrong in my ears. In my, yeah, to me. 450 feels like a lot. Yeah, it does. But I guess we have no way of knowing unless we know the specs on it because 450 absolutely might be a justified price depending on what's in that thing. But-

400 has to be, I mean, Nintendo's a, they're not like, you know, a PlayStation or an Xbox where they can show you the big shiny box and charge you like 600 bucks for it because, you know, it's a family company and they, they work with families that have budgets and they don't want to, you know, they want to, they don't want to price people out like their core audience of people out. So it's gotta be, you know, of course adjusted for inflation and the costs of like computer chips and things like that, but it still have to be affordable and,

So it's probably gonna be 400 bucks. Richard, you're making a face that makes me think you're about to be like, it's a thousand dollars. That's what the Switch 2 Pro will be. I think the Switch 2, like maybe they'll just keep it at 300 or 350. That would be incredible. I think one of the questions I have is like, is the Switch going to, is the original Switch just going to kind of disappear? I expected it won't. They'll keep selling it and sell them side by side, at least for a while. And how long is it until we get games that are only for the Switch 2?

Or do they have reduced capabilities if you're playing on the Switch or if you have someone like that in your party or something like that? That's probably the, I think the bigger question is how quickly does your old Switch get deprecated? I like how all of Richard's answers relate to his Apex Legends squad. That's the most important thing. Don't take this away from me, Nintendo.

Andrew, what about you? What do you think? I've been trying to convert into American dollars. I do think it'll be like less than $400 because the whole point of them having the lower specs is because they find the cheapest older technology to squeeze into these things. So if you're not going to do that, then what's the point? You may as well put out a powerful device if you're going to go for a higher price. So the whole point of...

Cheaping out on there is like to pass that on to consumers. So it's gotta be some 400. If this thing stays at 299 or whatever, it's that's going to be pretty spectacular. They're going to do that and then put the switch down to like a super cheap price purely so they can beat the PS2. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. In terms of lifetime sales, that's what's going to happen. They just like, they, they want the, they want the victory even one teeny tiny margin at a time. Yeah.

I think if you put like the original Switch down to like a very cheap price, it's still going to move a ton. Yeah. I mean, truly other than, well, okay, I have two grapes with my Switch and thank you for coming to my TED talk about the things I hate about my seven-year-old Switch. One is that I lost the cable for the dock and I can't find another power cable for the dock that makes it work. So it's just useless now because it only works with the one stupid cable and I don't want to buy a whole nother dock just for the one stupid cable. And the other one,

is the Wi-Fi chip. Just simple things. And then people have had issues with the Joy-Cons over the years. I think they're fine, but I know a lot of people are much more sophisticated controller users than I am who are very curious about how these Joy-Cons are going to work. I just feel like there's all these little tiny things that if Nintendo would just do those and change nothing else...

I will be a very happy owner of somewhere between one and six Switch 2s. We'll see what colors they come up with and if they release like a special Wind Waker edition because that one is going to sell like hotcakes. Do we think there's going to be another like huge earth shattering game that comes with it? I mean, like we got Breath of the Wild with...

the switch is mario kart gonna be that thing for the switch too like is that just where we're headed it could be mario kart could be the pokemon because that's like a huge launch title pokemon uh what the hell is it called legends yeah i think either of those is that's like a launch title for sure those are best-selling games um i love metroid but that's not like a system seller for for a launch um

So either one of those, you're good. Probably a new 3D Mario. Yes, that's true. Yeah. But even that doesn't feel quite as big as... Pokemon feels like the only one that's kind of at the level of Zelda in terms of culture-shaking release. I feel like Mario occupies that space as well. You think? A terrible movie made a billion dollars. I mean, that's fair.

Other people who aren't you liked that movie, I will say. I haven't had to watch it as many times as me. Did you like it the first time you saw it? It was fine. It was inoffensive. Now you're just increasingly mad at the song Peaches every time you hear it. Is that what's happening? Pretty much.

Fair enough. Anything else on the Switch? We're still in this place where this thing has launched and we still don't know all that much about it. Let's talk about DLSS. Let's do it. Let's get into it. Let's not. I hope the Switch 2 cartridges taste better. Do you? No. Let's talk about that. That was a joke. We do not endorse child endangerment here. Please don't put those in your mouth.

Richard, you can have 20 seconds to talk about DLSS and then we're taking a break. Here you go. Ready? Go. AI in graphics processing is very important. It could be really relevant to the games that we play on our Switch 2s. It is the number one factor that I'm waiting to hear more about. Thank you. There we go. All right. We're going to take a break. Ash and Andrew, thank you guys for being here. Unfortunately for both of you, we're going to have to clearly do this a bunch more times before it launches. But for now, thank you both. Richard, stick around. We'll be back. We're going to talk TikTok. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hi, Addie. Hi. Our resident Red Note expert, as it turns out, was just teaching us how to pronounce the correct name of everybody's favorite new TikTok competitor. Do you want to give us a lesson here on what it's actually called? I need to caveat this that I am not Chinese and I have not spoken Chinese for a very long time. My impression is Xiao Hong Shu. Okay. Richard, how do you feel about that? Xiao Hong Shu?

I'm getting there. I feel like I'm getting, I'll have it by next week. I'll be a star on that. The first Xiao is little and then Hong is red and then Shu, which is book. This app is literally called Little Red Book. I believe so, yeah. I think the US government is going to love that.

possible that you know there's a better colloquial translation this is what we've come to so okay the the scene setting i just want to do here real quick before we get into it is uh the the potential tiktok ban is now two days away as you're hearing this three days away as we're recording it uh we did a whole thing with lauren finer on tuesday show talking about what might happen and then it feels like a hundred new possibilities appeared since tuesday about what might happen so uh

I want to talk through some of the things that have come up, some of the things we think might be happening and the deep hilarity of what everyone has done in response to the impending TikTok ban.

But let me just start by throwing out some of the like possible outcomes that seem to have arisen over the last few days. And we can talk a little bit about them. Uh, outcome number one, I would say probably most likely in terms of actual things that might happen is some kind of delay in the ban. Uh,

Senator Ed Markey introduced something or said he was going to introduce something that would give it a 270 day extension to either divest or be banned. There was was it Trump was going to do an executive order that was going to delay it by 60 or 90 days. Yeah, he's floated one at least. OK, so a lot of ideas in the area that like.

We're just going to kick the can down the road a little bit. Addie, does that strike you as like a real plausible outcome here? Well, there was always the option of kicking the can down the road 90 days if there is a deal in place. And depending on the definition of what a deal is, I think that's kind of where people are leaning is we're just going to give them time to figure this out. It seems pretty unlikely to me that they're going to pass a whole new law in what, like three days? Yeah.

I mean, there's some other stuff going on in the political universe, too. So I think you're probably right on that. This is the thing that I don't understand, though, is like, can anyone actually do this stuff? Because there's like, there's the ban on Sunday, and then there's Inauguration Day on Monday, and then...

Something will happen and TikTok will be back. Like there's there's rumors that TikTok is going to go away just for a day and then potentially come back. Like, I just don't know how to handicap the realistic possibility of any of this right now. Some of it depends on what the Supreme Court does. And unfortunately, we have been frantically waiting for a ruling for decades.

several days now. But part of the question is, OK, so the rule here is it's either banned or they have to, ByteDance has to divest it. And the question of what divestiture means, like what can actually satisfy that requirement, is a little bit of an open question. I think the thing that Trump really wants and that a lot of people really want is the idea that they can just switch a little bit of ownership around and maybe shuffle the board a bit.

in a way that satisfies the Chinese government and the ruling for divestiture. And then nothing necessarily changes that much, but it comes under the ownership of someone American. And the Chinese government doesn't feel like it's lost the TikTok algorithm or like it's gotten strong-armed.

And then at that point, if there are disagreements, you still get to have this three month delay in which they could hammer them out. What would that in theory look like if it's if it's basically so the number I've heard at least is that this the bar for foreign ownership under this bill is I think it's 20 percent ownership. Yeah. So in theory, all all ByteDance would have to do is find a way to lower its ownership.

ownership stake under 20% and then everything would be okay? Is that the idea here? I think that's a thing that could happen and could be logical. It is possible that you could still then have questions about, all right, but does ByteDance still potentially have some kind of backdoor? But at the very least, that does seem like it has some kind of reasonable standard in the law that, yeah, you just reduce the

The dependence. That just doesn't make any sense to me because again, like if the...

Big argument we're having here is about national security and access to data. Like, you know what buys you the back door is 20%. Like, whether you have 49% or 20% or 99%, like, you're still going to have the admin login, right? Richard, like, am I insane here that it feels like this solves nothing if this is an actual thing we're going to do? Would you give a 20% owner an admin login? Yeah. No, no, no. You're a minority owner. No admin login for you. And they've already done some things like the project text is moving the data around.

It sounds like we've got this group project that's due on Sunday and no one has done the work. You got the Chinese government, they're not picking up the phone. You got one of these students that's already checked out, Biden. He's on his way out. This is not his grave. You got someone coming in, but they're not going to be here before the due date.

And Congress and the Supreme Court just haven't done it. I really wish I had a clever way to build on this analogy. But the things that complicate that are that, A, nobody wants to finish the project. Everybody's sick of this. Trump doesn't want TikTok to shut down on his watch. Biden, as far as we can tell, there's some level of buyer's remorse in the administration is maybe trying to find a way to delay it.

And then the Chinese government and ByteDance, obviously, before the ban, they're going to give you the most apocalyptic pronouncement ever. They're not going to say, oh, yeah, no, it's fine. We're in talks with all these other guys. They're going to just wait until the last minute to see if they can hammer on a deal. Yeah, I mean, to that end, there was a report going around. I forget exactly what I thought, that one possible outcome is that TikTok will just kind of performatively go away forever.

just like pull the plug more aggressively than it even needs to on the 19th, just to prove how bad it would be if TikTok was gone. Because I think a lot of people have been talking about the idea that what might happen is it might just sort of slowly degrade over time, that people who have it on their phones will be able to continue to use it. But that actually what might happen is TikTok will just be like, oh, you want to see TikTok gone? TikTok's gone. Suck on that. And it'll just be

sort of it'll it'll just make everybody miss it a little bit for 24 hours and then we'll come back on inauguration day with with Shu Shu the CEO sitting on the day I said inauguration day with Trump like there's a version of that that actually makes a lot of sense to me that TikTok is going to be like oh you want to ban us check this out just as a flex that both makes political sense and it might kind of be necessary because hosting services also have to work with

I have to cease working with ByteDance and Oracle hosts a bunch of American data. So it's possible that you're going to see that no matter what. Yeah. So are we really at a point where like.

Just none of this makes sense and anything could happen. I guess we might get a real answer if and when we hear from the Supreme Court, which I would say we're all sort of surprised has taken this long to issue any kind of pronouncement about how it feels. I think not everyone is surprised, but it is definitely very annoying and not people's first choice. This is also all ignoring that.

Obviously, I say this in a way where it's bad, but to me, much like by far funniest option, which is the law goes into effect and Trump says he's not going to enforce it. And then he has all of the app stores have to play chicken and like see if they're going to go with these rules. So which based on Supreme Court arguments, it sounds like that's still a pretty huge risk for them.

But that is still an outcome that people have not completely ruled out. Yeah. Can you just game that out a little bit? We talked about this with Lauren a little on Tuesday, too. But it does seem like this question of if if Trump puts out an executive order on day one saying I'm not going to enforce this law for some period of time.

In theory, everyone could just go terrific and resume business as normal and TikTok continues. But there seems to be this sort of extant pressure on all of the players that exist even outside of that. Can you just explain like what

What the tension is there for those companies? There are a few different tensions. The first tension is that it is very risky to trust Trump's loyalty on a thing and that this creates a lot of leverage to if you make him mad, let him do something that's going to hurt you very badly. There is also the chance that the administration could be held in contempt of court if they have gotten an explicit order to enforce this law and they just refuse to.

And then there's also the chance that even if they say they're not going to enforce it, the platforms and the app stores say, yeah, this is just too big a risk. It doesn't matter what you say. We're kicking them off. Richard, what would you do if if I'm who in this? You're Google. You're Sundar Pichai and you're sitting there in front of the TikTok is in the app store switch. What are you doing? I'm replacing it with YouTube shorts. Yeah.

Just every time someone searches TikTok, it just instantly takes you to YouTube shorts. The thing is that I love is that Google legitimately has the power technically to just do that. Like if you Google TikTok, it's like, nevermind, you wanted YouTube shorts, right? There's only YouTube shorts now. TikTok never existed. You didn't even, TikTok was a figment of your imagination. There has only ever been YouTube shorts. Speaking of YouTube shorts, this comes back to our favorite app, Red Note slash Little Red Book. Uh,

One of the funniest things that has happened this week is a lot of people, rather than leave TikTok for...

quote unquote, more stable places like Instagram or YouTube Shorts, these other platforms that have just basically relentlessly copied TikTok for several years. People have instead gone the other way and found more Chinese apps, Red Note and Lemonade being, I would say, the big two. Addy, can you explain what these apps are and how this is happening like this? OK, so Lemonade and Red Note are both there.

Chinese apps that present, in theory, basically all of the same risks as TikTok. Lemonade is owned by ByteDance, the same parent company as TikTok. And I feel like at this point right now, there's a little bit of it's kind of a free for all. People are just this is summer break. Everybody's experimenting. And that if TikTok were long term banned, then we would see people say, I need to make money. I'm going to go to these platforms, even though I find them boring and they annoy me.

So I don't know what the long term future would be. But yeah, the short term future is that people have gone to just the exact same thing and possibly to some level just to actively spite Trump.

The people who passed this law. Oh, I mean, I think it's I think it's extremely just to spite those people. I mean, the like goodbye to my Chinese spy thing has been has become rampant on TikTok and everybody is making fun of it by going to these apps. Like, what was the thing I saw today? Duolingo is booming and suddenly tons of people are wanting to learn Mandarin in order to be on these apps. Like,

This bit has now gone so far that I'm like, at what point is this not a bit? And at what point is everybody just going to excitedly start using Chinese social media apps? I think we're there. I think we're at the point where it has stopped being a bit. I mean, people went over to this app, Xiao Hongshu. I'm going to get there. I'm going to get the pronunciation right.

Just so I can get my following up. They found out that Cardi B has been there for years posting. Yes. The weird thing about it is that unlike the other apps, they don't separate their Chinese and American audience or Chinese and international audiences. So you suddenly have these people talking directly to people from China in a way that they probably never have. And there's something there. I don't know how long it will last, if it will be banned too or what might happen. But something has happened.

Also, American companies apparently cannot make good algorithms. Yeah, I will say I have continued to be flummoxed by this fact that like it is clearly true that there is something about TikTok that neither YouTube nor Instagram has replicated, despite both being desperate to replicate TikTok. Like they're just nakedly trying to do TikTok. They're not even trying to do like their own versions of TikTok. They're just trying to do TikTok. And still, yeah.

nothing has been able to quite do it. And to your point, Richard, people are flooding to these other apps and being like, yes, this gives me the same thing. And it is like, what have these Chinese companies, in particular ByteDance, which just keeps making identical looking apps under different names, apparently, they've just figured out some turn in the system here that no one else has figured out or is willing to do or something.

And it's just very strange to me. Like somebody, Adam Masseri should be able to just turn the dial to full TikTok. And they should have just known how to do this by now. And yet they can't.

Yeah. I mean, have you used Instagram Reels? Like sometimes I'll get stuff that I like, but sometimes it'll show me like something absolutely horrible that makes me never want to open that app again. And TikTok has that problem much less. I will say YouTube is the one that really gets me. YouTube is the one that I hate the most and frustrates me the most because YouTube, no service on the internet has as much good declarative information about what I want as

than YouTube. I have clicked on so many things on YouTube on purpose for 15 years. I have been like, I would like to watch this video for 20 minutes. Like it should have my interests nailed. And like YouTube music is actually very good as a result of that because you turn on YouTube music and it just looks at everything you've ever watched and listened to on YouTube before and suddenly starts giving you recommendations. So the like the cold start problem there is solved and it's awesome.

And yet shorts is nonsense. Like it doesn't make any sense to me that it's like you, YouTube knows me or should know me better than any service on the internet. And it cannot figure out which short to recommend to me. And like,

And TikTok is just like, do you want to watch new girl clips? And I'm like, sure, I'll watch new girl clips. Like, great, let's do it. YouTube cannot do that. And it drives me nuts. And Eddie, I want to know what you think about this, but I think that the saying goodbye to my Chinese spy taps into my personal conspiracy theory about TikTok that I've always had, which is that, and also about a lot of AI things, is that it's not AI, it's just a guy named Al, and that there's a lot more human curation behind the scenes. And that's why it's so good, is because you're kind of tapping into these cues of content that

And there's just someone saying, oh yeah, that's a good video. I'll put it at the top. And that's why you keep getting good videos. That's my guess. And whatever it is, it would be great if someone else could figure it out because someone needs to know that I want to see 1980s car ads. And that's the only thing I want to see. And if you just show me that, I'll never close the app ever again.

But, Eddie, what do you think? I unfortunately cannot speak to the actual algorithmic changes here. I know that for a long time, TikTok did really push to be sort of the shiny, happy place on the Internet, which sometimes produced weird, very bad effects. Like it would demote content from people who seemed likely to be bullied, which was, say, LGBT people. But it's possible that it's just optimizing for a different metric than TikTok.

say, Instagram, which is constantly dialing up and down things like political content and news and can't seem to figure out what it's going for. At least that's meta in general. So I can't tell if it's that it's badly tuned or if it's tuned in a way that has sort of different business logic and that just produces less of a certain thing. Or possibly that the user base itself ended up

producing a thing and the network effects kind of snowballed that. I do think there's something to that last part in particular that I think TikTok got kind of a last mover advantage that by being able to just show up from scratch and build something, especially in kind of the like it blew up in the US, especially during the pandemic when everything was weird and everybody just wanted like an escape and dance challenges suddenly make sense that I think

In the same way that if you had just like in 2019 and 2020, just flooded Instagram with dance challenges, a lot of people actually would have hated it. But on TikTok, because it was new and different and people hadn't really experienced it yet, it felt good. And so I think like to some extent on Instagram and on other places, you're trying to like, you have to unlearn some things before you can relearn some things. Whereas TikTok just got to show up and do things differently. And I think that actually really worked to its,

benefit. But then again, I keep coming back to this idea that everyone has decided that TikTok is the best at it. So just go do that. Like, just piss off all the Instagram users for three days and then they will decide that they love it because everybody hates Reels. And the only thing anybody says about Reels is that it is just old TikToks. And so it's like you don't have anything to lose. Just throw the thing away and make it TikTok and it'll probably work. Throwing out the rulebook had some advantages. And I think

Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I opened up TikTok. I was kind of bored and it immediately diagnosed me with ADHD in a way that should not do. It's bad. It should not diagnose medical conditions like that. It was correct. Yeah.

And Instagram Reels doesn't really do that. And I'm just like, you could probably do a little bit more to figure out who your users are. Yeah. You have enough data. Yeah, it's just sitting there. So, okay, we should talk about one other possible TikTok outcome before we fully throw up our hands and just wait for somebody to tell us what's happening, which is the Elon Musk of it all. Richard, can you make this make sense to me? There has been some...

sort of loose reporting that maybe what will happen is Elon Musk will save TikTok? Well, in one of the possibilities that Adi has mentioned is that

by dance could divest, that they could own less of TikTok. So someone would need to own more, someone who has a lot of money and who can get a lot of money because TikTok is unquestionably worth a lot. So who can get a lot of money in a hurry to buy a social media site? Elon Musk, who is much loved in China. Elon Musk, who might be able to be influenced by the Chinese government because he needs to sell cars in the country and they control that and also the resources in the country to make those cars. Elon Musk.

Fits a lot. I mean, I don't know if he checks all of the boxes, but he does check a lot of them. Also, the box of being tied specifically to the Trump administration, which has made China hawkishness a big deal. It's as close as you can come to selling part of your company to the United States as you can kind of get right now is selling it to Elon Musk. Do we think this is a real possibility? Adi, if you were to like handicap this on the list of possible outcomes, do you think this is like X absorbs TikTok is a is a real thing that might happen?

I might phrase it as TikTok absorbs X, but I think it's not impossible. You know he'd rename it X, though. It would be called like X video. And everybody would be like, oh, I'm an X video right now. I mean, once all the porn sites get banned, X videos will be up for sale again.

Yeah, no, I think that for a while there was a lot of noise about how the Chinese government absolutely was going to refuse. But given all the reports now, it certainly doesn't seem impossible. It seems like a terrible idea. Like, I hate the idea that this might happen, which makes it potentially likely that it's going to happen. Like, Richard, to your point, no, like...

I think one of the two things really that I have seen as total impediments to this are TikTok is enormously expensive and China is not interested in selling. And I do think it's possible that Elon Musk is the only person capable of solving both of those problems. He has clearly an infinite ability to raise money and also, like you were just explaining, is as palatable to the Chinese government as any person in the United States for a variety of reasons.

It fits. I don't like it, but it kind of fits. Well, I guess I'll see you guys on Xiaohongshu.

I'm interested in it because I think it will be the absolute purest test of inertia you could possibly devise. That TikTok is just so notoriously moderated. That is the thing that defines it. And it also it is a place that tends to try to at least, I think, focus on positivity ostensibly. That is the absolute opposite of what Elon Musk is interested in. It is a thing that is notably full of silos and you're trying to

just split people up into the perfect thing for them as much as possible. And X has now become a thing that just feeds you Elon tweets. They're just kind of polar opposites to each other. And it seems to be not really just a business decision on Musk's part. It's a thing that he just genuinely thinks social media should be. And I'm very curious how the TikTok community would react to that. Yeah, I mean, I keep coming back to I made the ship of Theseus comparison on Tuesday's show, too. But there is something

To me, this real thing where like there is no version of TikTok that gets divested that still to me feels like TikTok. And so it's like the upside is it would continue to be TikTok. It would have a lot of users. It might be called X videos, but it would the people wouldn't have to go somewhere else. And like you said, that's a very powerful thing. But like.

I don't know. It turns out people are willing to go somewhere else. The number of people who just randomly signed up for an app with literally a Chinese name in the American App Store. Like, it actually turns out maybe the inertia is not nearly as strong as anybody thought that when people need somewhere to go, they'll go. I don't want to overdetermine that given just how big TikTok is. And of course, some people are going to jump ship.

But I do. Yeah, it does seem like other platforms say X have meaningfully lost some number of users and that that definitely can happen. Yeah, I mean, it is. I think the X thing is actually a really interesting comparison there because like we've talked about this a lot where there was the there was the big boom on Mastodon that slowed down and then there was the big boom on threads that continues to happen. But.

now threads is weird. And there's now, there's been a big boom on blue sky and blue sky is like meaningful and, and large now, but is still a tiny fraction of the size of threads, which is still a fraction of the size of X. And so maybe for Elon Musk, what you've learned is I, you can weather these storms because they end up being really vocal and maybe not that sticky over time. I think one thing that gets really tricky there is what happens to CapCut in really any of these scenarios, because, you know,

in a way that's maybe different from all other kinds of social platforms. The way that you make the videos really influences the videos that are on the platform and the people who want to use the app. And having a video editor that a lot of people like to use and find easy to use to make really high quality videos has been a huge part of TikTok's appeal.

So that's kind of just another question that has to be asked. And in the case of something like X or something like that, that's not really the issue. Everyone can type into the box the same way that they did before. But if something happens to the editor just as much as the algorithm, that's a problem. Right. And on the flip side, that combination of things might make TikTok harder to copy than anything else. Like you could sort of peel away each of the pieces that makes it work, right?

But as long as it has that collection of things, it's going to be harder to copy TikTok than it is to just like, in theory, all you need is a bunch of people and text boxes and you can beat X at its own game. Like that's essentially what Threads has been trying to do. TikTok has a larger collection of things that are hard to beat. Yeah, there are also just sort of symbiotic aspects.

Like they've tried to move into book publishing based on the popularity of BookTok, which is not like a killer app. It's not going to destroy it, but it does mean there's just a lot of stuff going on here. For sure. All right. Well, this is like...

God help us. We're going to do this again next week, I'm sure. But before we go to a break, Addy, can we talk about the other Supreme Court thing that happened this week? We can. You spent, I would say, an unusual amount of your week listening to Supreme Court live streams. This is not a normal thing you spend most of your time doing.

The court is definitely Sunday before a group project mode right now. Yeah. So, OK, so it was this was the porn trial. Can you explain what's going on here? All right. So this is the trial called Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. And the idea is that Texas passed this law that's very similar to a lot of other state laws that says that if a site has more than a third of adult content,

then it needs to age gate its platform in a way that is more rigorous than like clicking a box that says I'm 18. And in Texas's case, it also has to put up these warnings that

Porn destroys your health, which is not scientifically proven that causes addiction and harms minors and all that. That's just a thing you can say if you want to, I guess. Sure. So this was then taken up to the court. A district court blocked it, said, look, there are all kinds of problems with making people hand over identifying information before they go and look at sensitive content, especially during a period where Texas is, say, cracking down on LGBT people.

And then the Fifth Circuit, which is where law goes to die, said, no, this is fine. We're going to apply just the lowest standard for considering speech. Not literally the lowest standard, but an unusually low standard for considering whether this is going to chill speech, which means, OK, we're good. Let this happen. It happened. And then.

After that, it has gone to the Supreme Court. It was argued yesterday. It is probably not even remotely close to over, but we got a pretty broad section of questions about it. So what is the free speech argument here? I think age verification is the kind of thing that has come up a bunch of different times in a bunch of different.

you know, cases around the legal world recently. But why is this a free speech debate at all? So this has come up a few times. It has primarily during the late 90s and early aughts, which is that

If you put a burden on people to access something that is speech related, that burden has to have a compelling interest and it has to be sort of the thing that's really the best solution, that there can't be a sort of more narrow, less onerous system. And a lot of the argument for

making age verification unconstitutional is, first of all, it's just a barrier to access speech for children and adults alike. It adds this process to get to something that is legal and that is protected by the First Amendment. The other issue is there really has never been an age verification system that is both rigorous enough that it's not trivial to circumvent and not pretty

producing something that creates a pretty significant security and privacy risk. Right. I feel like the one end of that spectrum is like the things on the alcohol web pages where they're just like, enter your birthday and you just enter like, I was born in 1931. And it's like terrific and lets you in. It's like we have satisfied something here, but we're not actually accomplishing anything. All the way to the flip side of like, you can make these things very secure, but then they cause all kinds of other problems.

Right. The sort of worst case scenario is you put your government issued ID into a system and it permanently links you with something that you don't want people to see. A list of all the porn you watch, you mean? Yeah. And then everything gets hacked. And then the exact details of your viewing of adult video is out there for everyone to see. This is not how most age verification systems work at this point. They have added in more safeguards, but we still don't have...

a really great solution. And anyway, back to 20 years ago, the thing they determined at that point was the internet as it stands then

You have the better option of content filtering, that it is possible for you to prevent children from accessing porn on your computer by putting a filter on it. And that means we are not going to go this extra higher step of burdening everybody, including adults, with a system that creates privacy and security risks. And now it's been 20 years and we're considering this again. So is the question now...

Does that still work? Like, is that still the right approach? The content filtering thing? Like, is that is that again the question? Is that a better way? The the question before the Supreme Court at this point was actually what standard do you apply to evaluate whether this chill speech, which is known as scrutiny? It's one of those where they're like, we're not even arguing the case. We're just arguing the case about the case. And it's just like we're just going to lawyer it all the way down.

It's kind of a little bit in between, which is that, yeah, that's the question is whether we send this back and say you have to decide this based on a different standard. But there were also a lot of questions that were about the broader issue of, all right, well, has the internet changed? Has age verification changed? Is there a compelling enough interest in protecting children from adult content that we should reconsider this? It was a hearing that I think doesn't

necessarily provide a clear picture of what's going to happen next. Well, that sounds like every tech related hearing anyone has had in the last several years. So I'm glad we're making a lot of progress in just kind of arguing around the edges without actually talking about the real things going on for people. With the exception of TikTok, which after that, everyone was like, oh, TikTok, TikTok is screwed. That's fair. That is very fair. So you actually make the case that these two cases are somewhat coincidental.

connected to each other, that you can kind of draw a line between the Pornhub hearing and the TikTok hearing. Can you explain the connection there? I think this is not necessarily the biggest issue in either of these, but in both cases, what you're doing is pitting two government interests against each other. In TikTok, you've got, there is this national security risk. The Chinese government could harvest everybody's data or

push covert propaganda. And we're going to pit this against the speech rights of a company that operates in the United States and a bunch of people who are using that platform for speech. So it's national security versus speech. Then

In FSC v. Paxton, you've got this issue of, all right, there is a compelling state interest in protecting minors. If you run a store, you can't sell Playboy to a minor in like a brick and mortar outlet. Okay, we're going to try to apply the same thing to the internet because there is just such a clear risk for minors accessing adult content. And we're going to weigh that against A.

everybody else's rights. As we've talked about so many times in this show, we're at a moment politically where it feels like if you want to get

Any kind of broad agreement about technology, you have to either yell about children or yell about China. And it's very funny that we are just kind of simultaneously doing both of those things in the Supreme Court right now. It just feels like we've we've hit a nexus of something. Children and national security are, yeah, clear. The classic we're going to change speech law. Yeah, I think we're also just at a moment where the First Amendment has just produced a lot of side effects that make everybody mad. And a lot of them are legitimately really frustrating.

And so there's this sort of if the law you made led you here, what use is the law idea going around? Right. And yeah, and it is I mean, and you've you've written about this a few times that the question underneath all of it is like, how important is the First Amendment? Right. And it's like, are we are we ready to

start tearing it down piece by piece in order to solve some of these other problems? Or is the First Amendment worth these other problems? And we're looking at Europe right now, which is passing a bunch of tech regulation and obviously has a different speech framework. And there are things there that I think that I would say have not worked out great. But we're also looking at this and saying the Internet could be different. And I think there are people for whom that's appealing. Fair. So

I think we have a pretty clear sense of how the Supreme Court was leaning with the TikTok stuff. We're still infuriatingly waiting on them to issue some actual information. But I feel like everybody came out of that hearing pretty aligned on where it seemed like the winds were blowing. What's your sense with the Pornhub stuff?

I really don't know. We talked to several people and they were like, we really don't necessarily know. I do think that so one of the things that came out of this was this quote everybody kind of dumped on, which was that Justice Alito says, all right, so one of the covered companies here is Pornhub, right? Or one of the covered platforms. All

All right. So if you go on Pornhub, do you have essays on there? Do you have the equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.? And everyone was like, Alito, what are you doing? Do you have any idea how Pornhub works? And I think that was actually, I think that's the wrong read of it. I think that maybe I am wrong on this, but I don't think really for a minute that he genuinely thinks this thing is...

has a bunch of intellectual value. And I think there was just this really running through line of we are going to prove that anything that is porn on the Internet is worthless and that it should not have speech protections. It is obviously just harmful.

harmful to kids, you're making this argument that it's going to hurt sexual health sites or educational content or things that are artistic. And no, we're saying, no, it doesn't have gore of at all. I read Pornhub for the articles is really it's like that was your you put that in in one of the stories and it is the best sentence that has been on the first dot com this week. I was very proud of that moment. And there is they the lawyer did raise the point that there is like sexual health content. There is funnily enough, a woman whose deal is that she just does things

video essays and like teaches things and makes money off it. Apparently the rev share on Pornhub is very good. Yeah. The economics. Maybe that's where TikTok will go. Go do that. Pornhub.com slash TikTok. Make it happen. This could do it. Richard, what do you think about Pornhub? Just in general. What are your thoughts? I'm going to talk about free speech. An app that you can use where you can see what it's like without the First Amendment. It's called Xiaohu Shu. You should try it out.

A lot of people on there who can talk to you about the Constitution and why they don't use it. Yeah, say hello to your Chinese spy while you're there. All right, we've got to take one more break. Addy, thank you for joining us. Richard, we're going to come back and we're going to blow through some news because, holy God, is there a lot going on this week. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from 1Password.

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All right, we're back.

There's more policy stuff. Let me just read you some headlines. Joe Biden signs executive order to speed AI data center reconstruction. U.S. finalizes rule to effectively ban Chinese vehicles. FTC sues John Deere, which is not a sentence I expected to read this week. There's some DJI stuff and controversy going on. I don't want to talk about it.

and politics anymore. There's like, there's a lot of this to come for the next few weeks. Richard, do you care about any of that at this moment? Or can we just like move on to more fun gadgety things? Remember drones? Just saying. Remember drones? Remember drones? I feel the same way about drones and 3D printers where like for years, everybody was like, everybody's going to have one of these. And it's like, probably not though. Seems unlikely. I was at CES and there were a bunch of people who were like, it's time for the second coming of the at-home 3D printer for mainstream users. And I was like, okay.

best of luck with that friends and they're the thing they were showing off was like six feet tall and like four thousand dollars and it's like i don't think this is the one y'all uh but anyway all right let's talk about sonos uh because i actually think in the in the gadget world this was probably the biggest and both most surprising and most unsurprising thing that happened this week uh what happened this week richard uh their ceo stepped down and some other executives left

Full house cleaning at Sonos, basically. It turns out that releasing an app update that doesn't work when your whole thing is giving people a system that works when they want it to work is bad and means that a lot of the leaders of your company have to leave. Yeah. So, okay. So Patrick Spence, the CEO, is out. Tom Conrad, who is, I would argue, one of the most sort of quietly fascinating people in tech. He has just been like at every...

weird inflection point in the tech industry over the years. Can I just quickly read you a list of some of the places that Tom Conrad has worked over the years? Hit me. He was at Pandora for 10 years in the middle of like the crazy online music revolution. He was the VP of product at Snapchat. He was the chief product officer at Quibi for all of Quibi's life. Yeah, Quibi, everybody's favorite

number one streaming service, and now was the director of the board at Sonos for a while and is now the interim CEO. But according to the memos we've seen and the changes that are being made, sure seems like he is not acting like an interim CEO. So Tom Conrad, just like guy around the tech industry when weird things are happening. Very interesting. Real Jeff Teague of tech execs. It's exactly right.

Who knows if he's as good a podcaster as Jeff Teague, though? Tom Conrad, if you ever want to come on the Verge cast and tell war stories about your time in the NBA, let us know. We're ready. But yeah, so the chief product officer also leaving. I think the chief commercial officer, I believe, was her title, also leaving the company. Big, huge changes at Sonos. This feels...

both like maybe the right thing given what has happened to Sonos, but also like not a good sign that this company is like, it's one thing to say we made a mistake. I think it's, it's pretty obvious now that Sonos got kind of way out over its skis. They were like, we need new things to do and new ways to make money as a public company. So they decided to make headphones and they were like, we're going to get into the TV space and had all these big ideas about expansions when actually what they should have done is just kept making really good speakers that people liked. And, um,

You can see how the next thing to do is kind of retrench. But I think in many cases you can do that without turning over all of the leadership of your company. This just seems like not a great sign for what is happening and what is maybe to come from Sonos at this point. It feels like it usually doesn't work out well. But yeah, so they had to get those headphones out, just had to release these Sonos Acer headphones. So they kind of had to change all of their technology and

I mean, as I understand, I'm one of the few people, I think, who doesn't own a Sonos system. But it's always seemed like Sonos sells multi-room audio that costs a little too much, but it works. Yeah. Is that... No, I think that's exactly right. And for years, it was the only thing like it. That it was like, it was too expensive, probably by...

I don't know, 40 or 50%, right? It was like you could get a speaker that sounded just as good for somewhere in the range of half the price. But then if you wanted a bunch of them and you wanted it to make sense and work with the apps that you used, there just wasn't anything like it. And then Google started building a system like it and then they got into that whole lawsuit about it. And Amazon's audio systems got better and then you can just like cast audio around and like Bluetooth speakers work fine. And so we're at a point now where the idea of...

Sonos' basic thing, I think, is a little less special than it once was. But still, until this app fiasco, Sonos was still better at this than everybody else. And it feels like...

over the last 12 months in order to ship headphones that I never ever hear anyone talk about and have never once seen in the wild just burned all of its goodwill. And I think I'm at the point now where like, I wouldn't consider Sonos to be the thing that just works. Even though like my Sonos system still works great. I have zero problems with it. I never used the Sonos app, which is I think part of it. But like,

we're sort of at a point both where with all this product stuff and now with all of this change, it's like Sonos feels unstable, like existentially in a way that I think is sometimes very hard to come back from. I think that the takeaway that I'm getting from this is that that reputation is something that's worth a lot to people, that that's what people were paying for is that they knew Sonos was the one that they could buy and it would probably work pretty well. And if it didn't work, you know, you could probably get somebody to make it work for you.

And so many of these other tech companies, yeah. I mean, okay, so Google's getting into multi-room audio. Apple is sort of in speakers, but neither of them are very serious about it. It's just a side business for them. For Sonos, it's their business. They care. They want to make the experience good for you. But then it was the one thing. It was the one thing that they had that their competitors really couldn't buy, even with all of their tech billions. And they seem to have squandered it. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think...

it's maybe not impossible to get it back, but it's going to take a lot of work. And there are a lot of like long time Sonos users. One of the things that Sonos had going for it, like the company's greatest problem was nobody needed to upgrade their Sonos stuff because it was so good. And I think there are a lot of people now who are feeling pretty burned by that relationship and getting that back is going to be a real challenge. Anyway, this is a lightning round.

As you can tell already, we're going very quickly to this. Let's see a few more. We got some information about the supposed slim iPhone 17, which might be called the iPhone 17 Air. Richard, I hate this. I hate it. That's it. That's all I have to tell you. Speaking of companies that are very successful and need to build a new product for some reason to sell something else, here comes a slim iPhone that you didn't ask for. I think some of the rumors have been that this could replace the Plus model.

That was big, but still with the lower specs. So I think based on the rumors that we've heard is that this is something that would be have a design that looks a lot different than the current than the regular iPhones and iPhone pros. It maybe wouldn't have quite as high of the specs as the pro, but it would probably be more expensive. It'll be very slim when you when you take it out of your pocket and you're somewhere people will know you've got the iPhone Air if that's if that's the name.

It's something that they can do. It's something new. And I think that's a real issue for Apple and for really these other companies and also Samsung, who is rumored to be about to debut a slim phone as well. Because, of course, if Apple has one, so will Samsung. How do you sell an iPhone when everyone has an iPhone? And the iPhone that they have is pretty good. Apple intelligence does not seem to move the needle on that. No.

What do you do next? And the answer is maybe make one that looks a lot different so that people can say, I have the new one. So I agree with that. And I think the Mark Gurman first reported this for Bloomberg. And the thing that he said is this is a step in the direction of doing foldables, right? You basically take two thin ones and fold it. And that's how you get a foldable iPhone and iPad that works. That I find compelling. Sure.

I think if you were to make a list of how do you make the iPhone better, I honestly believe make it thinner is like not in the top 25. Like no one thinks their iPhone is too thick and everybody puts their iPhone in a case. So you're going to take your slim iPhone. You're going to put it in a case that is going to make it a thicker and be not show off the supposed sexiness slimness of the thing. It just doesn't.

doesn't make any sense to me. Like, this just feels like it's purely a thing you're doing because you can. And that's fine. Like, if Apple was like, look, we made the iPhone 17,

It's thinner than ever before. I'd be like, neat, thinner than before. But to take this out of the lineup and brand it as its own new thing, I just think is absurd. Like, I don't care. And my real issue is this portends a future in which the iPhone Air Pro Max is a thing that exists. And I cannot. No, it's coming. I can't do it. If that phone exists, I'm switching to Android just on principle. Yeah.

I will not. I will not live in a world where the iPhone Air Pro Max exists. And we've heard it at every single iPhone reveal event that they've ever had. Whenever they reveal one, whenever they release one, they always say that it's thinner. Maybe it's a little thinner. Maybe it's a lot thinner. And...

There are a certain number of people who say, I just want an iPhone that lasts two days on a charge. I don't want the iPhone here. I just want the iPhone two days. I don't have to plug it in for two days. Make all the other parts smaller. Make the battery bigger. Change nothing else. And you will, you will, like you want an upgrade super cycle. I honestly believe that's how you get it. Like everyone with an iPhone that is older than, let's say, two models would upgrade to that.

It feels like, oh, you'll go from your battery lasting until 4 p.m. to three days. Like, boom, that's that's the upgrade. That's the thing. Like on the third day, like you get through the two days, you go to sleep, you wake up and it still has charge. Yeah. Like at at work on day three is when you charge your phone like sold.

That's the thing. And for some reason, phone companies refuse to test this theory. It drives me nuts. - They just won't do it. - No, they're just like, "It has to be thinner." I'm like, "It doesn't, it just doesn't. Like my phone is thin enough. I'm so sure of that fact."

And if you make it thinner, people just put bigger cases on it because they'll think it's more fragile. And so they'll go buy OtterBoxes for it and will be nowhere. This drives me absolutely insane. The problem is that Apple is actually owned by big OtterBox. It's a great conspiracy. That's what's going on here. It's like the big short, but phone cases. I've never actually seen the big short. It's the mortgage-backed securities of the tech industry. It's just phone cases. Yes.

$200 phone cases that don't do anything. It's actually not the worst metaphor, but I can't. We can't even do that. There's some Tubi news this week. I know you love Tubi news, Richard. One thing people always say to me is Richard seems like a Tubi guy.

I never once used it, but I like it. Well, I think there's a decent chance you're going to in a few weeks for the first time, because the news this week was that Super Bowl 59, it's 59 this year, right, is going to be streaming for free on Tubi, which I actually think is a pretty big deal because Tubi is a free streaming service that doesn't even require you to have an account.

Like it's one of the fast channel ones and its whole thing is it's a big sort of scale-based advertising-based platform. So you can just like Google a show and click on it on Google and start watching the show. And I noticed that happens a surprising amount with things that I want to watch. It turns out they're on Tubi. They're like, yeah, you can watch it for free right now. Oh, thanks. Tubi's library, if you think kind of like B-list shows and below...

Tubi has as good a library as anybody. And especially if you really love three generations ago, the shows our parents grew up watching are all over Tubi. They're there. The ones that you think are nowhere, turns out they have them. There was this movie that I saw the other day, Baby Assassins. It's on Tubi. It's a great Japanese movie. If you love action, do it. I did not watch it on Tubi, but it is there. Totally. And I should say, actually, I got one thing wrong. You will need an account to watch Tubi.

Super Bowl on Tubi. I just caught this looking this up right now, which is very interesting because part of Tubi's whole thing is that you don't need an account. And we talked about this a little bit earlier

in a thing we're doing on the Verge cast on Tuesday about Venue. But Fox, which owns Tubi, doesn't have a premium streaming service of its own. And one very compelling thing to do when you have the Super Bowl is try and use it to get people to sign up for your streaming service because it is the Super Bowl. And that's a very good thing to do. So...

Fox doesn't have that move. There's no like Fox Plus that they can try to get you to pay 10 bucks for and then forget about and keep doing like Comcast can do with NBC and Peacock or CBS can do with Paramount Plus.

So Tubi is the move, but they can't charge you for Tubi. So this is clearly just a like, they're making a big play just to get people into this ecosystem, which is really interesting. Well, the last time Fox had the Super Bowl, they ran an ad where Tubi took over the stream and people, it like ripped over the screen and made it seem like you were watching Tubi instead of watching the Super Bowl. Oh, that's right. That's the one where like the interface came up, right? And everybody was like, what is suddenly controlling my smart TV? Yes. Such a good idea. So they really are using this to promote Tubi and...

It's there. Of course, you could use an antenna, which you have. I'm sure you do. I'm sure everyone has an antenna to watch free TV. But if you don't, then there's two Bs. Yeah. A...

antennas are great. I didn't get one for a very long time. Cause I was like, this is probably complicated. It turns out it's not, you can buy it on Amazon and set it up in like a minute and a half. And it's a super good idea and it works way better than you think. Uh, it's very ugly and you have to stick it to your window most of the time. Uh, but works super well, but also, yeah, I think, uh, it's going to be really interesting to see how to be does with this, because I'm willing to bet that, uh, to be a, a service that is not necessarily known for having like destination appointment viewing. Uh,

is going to have some traffic spikes that it has never really reckoned with before. And during that, during the Super Bowl, is a bold strategy. So we'll see. All right, a couple more that we should get to. Explain to me what's going on with Drake. I confess to you I have avoided following this thing because it's just a bunch of shenanigans. But there were new shenanigans this week. What is Drake doing now?

So you may have heard that Kendrick Lamar made a song about Drake last year in which he accused him of some things that you probably don't want to be accused of. Kendrick Lamar won the beef, right? Like we all agree that they were beefing and Kendrick Lamar sort of resoundingly defeated Drake. Well, Kendrick Lamar had a free concert in LA where he was dancing on stage with NBA players as they all called Drake a pedophile. So yeah, I think so. I think that is what winning looks like, Jed.

by most definitions yeah but drake and kendrick lamar are on the same label um universal music group and drake has turned his ire toward the label um spotify to some extent and others and so he had filed this legal petition a couple of months ago

kind of looking for information, saying and accusing the label of certain things that they were doing illegal things to promote the Not Like Us song by Kendrick, payola to DJs and people to put it on playlists, using bots to drive up the view numbers on YouTube and the streaming numbers on Spotify. And so now he has, he pulled one legal petition that was against UMG and Spotify and filed a federal lawsuit

uh against umg um saying that the song is defamatory number one that it's not true the accusations in are not true and that universal knows they're not true because otherwise they wouldn't be in business with him or they could have just called him and asked him if they're true which he would say that they are not that's quite a phone call like hey kendrick's about to put out a song we have some questions for you

And accusing them of doing all these things to promote it, claiming that this was done to kind of affect their negotiations with him on his record deal and to affect negotiations with Kendrick on his record deal and that they would have all of these things. But now, yeah, there is a lawsuit in federal court over a rap beef saying that the song is defamatory, which if you make a diss track about someone, it probably is defamatory. If it isn't, you did it wrong. Yeah.

But, you know, legally, I don't know what that means for the future of this lawsuit. But I find it interesting that he's not it's not like he's suing Kendrick or anything. He's suing specifically Universal, claiming that they did all of these these things that would be probably illegal to promote the track. Also, things that people believe labels do to promote songs. Yeah. The idea of like using bots to juice plays and payola and all that stuff is like.

Those are the kinds of things that are kind of open secrets in a lot of parts of the music industry. I have no evidence on this particular one or UMG or whatever, but like it is a thing that happens and people talk about it pretty openly as a thing that happens. And that is what Drake's lawsuit says. I guess we're kind of going to see where that goes. But curiously, you know, he's not suing Spotify or iHeartRadio who had been named in the previous kind of things that he put out.

Or at least not yet. This lawsuit is just against his like, who he is still signed to. I would ask you if this was like a Streisand effect thing where all he was doing was making it bigger, but I feel like Not Like Us does not need that. That song has platformed itself pretty successfully, I would say.

All right, one more, and then we're going to get out of here. Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos' rocket company, successfully launched New Glenn, its big rocket. I think that was on, was that today, Thursday? That was today. That was Thursday morning. Super early this morning. It's been delayed a bit. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, Monday morning was the first attempt, but it has now launched, and parts of it went into orbit.

This seems like a big deal, right? For a couple of reasons. One, because this company has had a lot of money and a lot of, I would say, almosts and kind of falsish starts over the years. They've been at this for like a decade. But then also because if this continues, Blue Origin becomes real competition to SpaceX, right?

for kind of the first time. Like SpaceX is still pretty far ahead in all of this and has been doing this for a very long time and is very good at this. But the idea of just there being another company meaningfully in this race seems pretty interesting to me. Particularly as they're trying to do the reusable rocket thing that SpaceX does and that others don't yet. Even the ESA just started launching a new rocket, but it doesn't have the reusable boosters and stuff like that because that really helps you get the price down on the launches, which is

key to SpaceX's business model. And right now for all of these companies, and there are a lot of companies that are interested in launching stuff into orbit, Starlink, SpaceX, Starlink being one of them, but also many others, including Jeff Bezos, his own Amazon and the Kuiper satellite, internet satellite constellation that they're trying to build. You need to be able to launch stuff a lot.

And to get it up there and having reusable rockets that work is a big part of it. Doing work that they want to do for NASA is a big part of having these reusable rockets. Going to the moon,

As Elon Musk says that he wants to go to Mars, if you can get there. But you got to have it. And they have had so many delays. I think this was supposed to be launched in 2020, but now it has launched. It mostly worked. They didn't get the rocket return, but I think that was kind of a secondary goal. And so they're going to try that on future flights. Yeah, it again kind of illustrates how far behind...

they really are, but also how much progress they've made that like it's I forget this occasionally. And it's nice to be reminded that just launching a rocket into space is

It's very hard and kind of a big deal when you can do it from scratch. There's a lot more to do. The landing thing is hard. SpaceX is out here, like catching it with chopsticks. Like there's a lot of work left to do to catch up to what SpaceX is up to. But this is, this is a huge step. And I think the more I've talked to people in the kind of private space industry, the more, the more I get the sense that there's a real kind of rising tide moment happening where a lot of,

people are leaving SpaceX who know how to do this stuff and they're starting new companies and there's more stuff being done and the technology is becoming more kind of commoditized and available. And like the acceleration of the competition in this space might start to happen pretty fast in the same way that like Tesla had a commanding lead for a long time. And then everybody kind of all at once, in part because of a lot of people who left Tesla also learned how to make electric cars, that there's a real sense that the same thing is going to start to happen in the kind of private commercial space industry.

Which I think is very cool. Just as somebody who really likes watching two hour long launch videos like the one that Blue Origin put out today, I would just like more of those. That's all I need. And it's all controlled by the same few tech billionaires slash oligarchs. Yeah, they all have the same plan. It's get a lot of money and then launch internet into space. Sure. It's fine. It is what it is. It's what I'd do. I mean, it kind of is, right? Like at some point you have so much money. What are you going to do except launch rockets?

Or do the other Bezos thing, which is like, what if I made a clock that lasts forever? And like, perfect rich guy brain. Like that, that's it, Jeff. You did rich guy brain. Crush it. Bill Gates is like, what if I cured all diseases? And Jeff Bezos is like, clock that goes always. All right, Jeff. Godspeed, my friend. All right, Richard, we have gone way over. It's time for us to go. Thank you for being here.

This has been a delight. Nilay is no longer invited back to this show. He's off being fancy and he can stay off being fancy as far as I'm concerned. There's so much more to happen. I'm so tired. It's middle of January. The TikTok ban may or may not happen on Sunday. Inauguration is on Monday. There's all kinds of news and tech stuff. There's like I learned recently I live in D.C. and all the tech CEOs are here like partying around the inauguration.

which is bizarre in ways that I'm not really prepared to reckon with. A lot's happening. We have a show on Tuesday that I will just tell everybody we have mostly already recorded because it's a holiday weekend, so we want to give people some time off. We'll have some updates. We're going to talk a lot more about this next week and the week after, and God help us forever and ever. But for now, Richard, thank you. Thank you as always. That's The Verge, guys. Rock and roll.

And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.