How tariffs will change your gadgets

It's a Nintendo Switch 2. What could it cost, a thousand dollars? In this episode, Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler talk through why we don't really know. But first, we talk about the Switch 2, and some of the reasons we're excited — and maybe just a little concerned — about Nintendo's new console. This is likely to be the most interesting device of the year, and we learned an awful lot more about it this week. We also talk about Microsoft's 50th anniversary, the fate of TikTok, and other gadget news. Then we get to tariffs, with the help of Tuneshine creator Tobias Butler, who explains how tariffs affect the way hardware companies do business — and how they're navigating the current uncertainty. After that, in the lightning round, it's time for a little Brendan Carr is a Dummy, followed by the latest on Tesla's sales numbers, Alexa Plus, and Coyote vs. Acme. Further reading: The Vergecast was nominated for a Webby, which means we can win a Webby People’s Voice Award and that’s voted online by you! So we’d love your support. You can vote at the link:https://bit.ly/3DXFgpN The 50 best things Microsoft has ever made The Nintendo Switch 2 arrives on June 5th for $449.99 Nintendo Switch 2 hands-on: it’s all in the games Nvidia confirms the Nintendo Switch 2 has DLSS and real-time ray tracing Nintendo Switch 2 specs: 1080p 120Hz display, 4K dock, mouse mode, and more The Nintendo Switch 2 has a camera accessory for video chat Nintendo’s Switch 2 ‘C’ button is a Discord-like GameChat feature Verge staffers react to the Nintendo Switch 2 Here’s everything Nintendo has revealed about the Switch 2’s Joy-Cons Nintendo’s Switch 2 preorder process has strict requirements to thwart scalpers ‘TikTok America,’ Amazon, and other rumors about who might buy TikTok From The New York Times: Trump Set to Meet With Top Aides to Decide TikTok’s Fate From Wired: The Founder of OnlyFans Wants to Buy TikTok Tuneshine – Your space, your music Donald Trump announces tariffs that could raise the price of almost everything you buy Reciprocal Tariff Calculations | United States Trade Representative Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s These are the tariffs about to hit Apple. Chris Murphy’s Bluesky thread Trump’s tariffs are ‘a debacle of epic proportions’ for the auto industry T-Mobile closes Lumos deal after dropping DEI | The Verge E&C Democrats Launch Investigation into FCC Chairman Carr’s Repeated Attacks on the First Amendment Sony’s new Bravia lineup includes its ‘King of TV’ successor Tesla’s sales plummet 13 percent as Musk backlash grows Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air Alexa Plus just launched in early access, but it’s missing some features Coyote vs. Acme is finally coming to theaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Neelai. Before I start the show, I just want to say we were nominated for a Webby Award, which is very exciting. We would love to have you go vote for us. We'll put the link in the show notes. Once again, we'd love to win this Webby. We'd love your support. Go vote for us at the Webby Awards.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of adding Greek letters that cancel each other out to an equation to make yourself look smart.

• 1:45David Pierce?

  Who among us?

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  We're very lucky in that we have an audience where you can make that joke, and everyone got it, and they got it on multiple levels. Like, there's a realistic chance the Vergecast audience is like, "I should make this equation more complicated." Like, in your day-to-day lives.

• 2:00David Pierce?

  It's like the thing where it's like, did you ever have those math problems where you just sort of, in your brain, you just like know the answer? But then it's like, show your work. And you're just like, "I'm gonna just make up a bunch of things that happened between here and there."

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  It's six. All right? I know it's six. I'm not gonna tell you why. I know it's six. It's six.

• 2:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's not important why it's six, but it's six. Leave me alone.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  And the answer is crash the world economy. All right. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, good to be here. Welcome back on Today of All Days, my friend. There's a lot going on this week. David keeps mumbling, we have too much show. We have a lot of show. We're going to talk about tariffs. We're actually, we've invited Tobias Butler, who is the sole proprietor of a gadget maker called Toonshine, which I love. We've talked about it on the show before. I wanted to bring someone on to talk about the real impact of tariffs. So we invited somebody who makes hardware, really cool hardware that I love, to talk about what's going to happen to his business. That's going to be fun. We've got a lightning round. We've got a podcast for the podcasts that people love. It's Microsoft's 15th birthday, which there's a lot going on there.

• 3:00David Pierce?

  So I'm saying, we have too much show. Like, if everybody could just stop.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  David, the Nintendo Switch 2 is also out this week. And then on top of that, sometime this weekend, TikTok is going to get banned again or sold directly to Jeff Bezos, which he will operate then from his yacht.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  Do you know how long ago the Switch 2 announcement feels to me right now? As we're sitting here, it was, it was 28 hours ago, give or take. And you could convince me it was like in January at this point.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  On top of all of that, we're going to do a full hour on the fact that I once again recommended Brother Printers to the internet. And what that says about the state of the media ecosystem we now live with. So buckle up, five hour virtuous. We should start with Microsoft. Because on the day this, this show comes out, April 4th, Microsoft will turn 50 years old. Which makes me feel like an ancient wizard.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  That is just an old, old number.

• 3:58David Pierce?

  You were, you were just graduating from college when Microsoft started, right?

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  I sat Bill Gates down. Listen here, young pup. No, it's, it's incredible. Microsoft is one of those companies that we, we once covered as sort of an upstart, a challenger. Now it is an institution. It is the infrastructure that all the other companies run on with Azure. We covered the bomber era. The verge started.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  Like with Windows Phone, like the idea that Windows Phone would be a meaningful competitor provided us an awful lot of traffic in our, including some of our, our most contentious reviews of all time. When we would write, hey, this Windows Phone is not very good.

• 4:39David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Boy, people had feelings.

• 4:41David Pierce?

  The Lumia comments were like nothing I've ever seen on.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, for a long time, it was the most comments we ever got was on a review of the like Lumia 900 or something. They're gone now. We switched commenting platforms. So you can't. And I think that's good. I think that is probably for the best that you can't go back and read this. Like everyone, you know that right to be forgotten? Everyone can just forget that one. But here's what I want to do in honor of the birthday. We don't want to go too far into, into the history of Microsoft. We published a list of the 50 best consumer products Microsoft has ever made. I think most people think we got it right. There's not a lot of, there's not as much heat as you'd expect. There are some people vehemently disagree with our ordering.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  But the stuff on the list, I think everyone agrees is right. Stuff.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  I was sort of impressed that we managed to get to 50 and I look at most of these 50 and I'm like, yeah, this is sure. It's pretty good. There's only a few that I'm like, I don't know that this belongs on any best of list of anything. But for the most part, it's, Microsoft has a better run at this than I anticipated.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  I was talking to Jake, who made this list with Tom, and he was like, look, you know, lists are there to be argued about. Cause I was like, I want to add more stuff. Like put this in an honorable mention category. And he was like.

• 5:54David Pierce?

  Windows Media Center.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, I'm gonna say it. Windows Media Center.

• 5:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  All right. So here's the thing.

• 5:58David Pierce?

  Into the void.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Richard and I were there during the Windows Media Center days when we were at Engadget together. Microsoft would ship you a PC with a cable card decoder in it. There are people listening to this show, young people, who do not understand that Microsoft thought it could turn a Windows PC into a cable box using middleware and hardware developed by a consortium of cable companies that were forced to do it by the United States government. And they thought that this would work.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  Like a lot. They super thought this would work. For years.

• 6:32Speaker 06

  We spent a lot of time on that. We all invested a lot of time into that idea.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  You would call the cable company and be like, I need this code to activate a cable card in my PC. And they would just be like, no, no, we're not gonna do.

• 6:46David Pierce?

  There is something to be said for, uh, Microsoft just has a series of ideas that it just keeps doing over and over. And one of its ideas is television. And that's, that's as far as that idea ever goes at Microsoft, it seems, but they're just like.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  The only reason we talk about CS every year is for years, Bill Gates would show up in Las Vegas and give a speech where he'd be like, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put a PC in the living room. And this idea is called convergence. And then soon there will be a PC in your living room for like a decade. And then he was like, what if it was an Xbox? And he was like, what if the Xbox was a cable box? What if the Xbox had IR blasters? And that didn't work. And eventually we got to, what if we put basically a Raspberry Pi in your living room? And it ran Roku software? And everyone was like, oh, that was way better than a full-on PC. But this is real. It drove the tech industry for years.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  And Richard and I had to cover it. Richard, formerly the editor of Engadget HD, an entire subsection of Engadget that we, we created because Microsoft was like, what if we put a PC?

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  So, Richard, I told you you had to, you had to pick from this list, your favorite Microsoft product. Not, you can't pick Media Center. That's, that's you doing honorable mention.

• 8:07Speaker 06

  See, that's how the media does this censorship. That's what's going on. So I will turn it back on you. And I will include Microsoft's most successful effort at bringing a PC into the living room, the Xbox 360.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  The time it almost kind of worked because Netflix happened. HD DVD drive did not so much work, but the Netflix app came out on the Xbox 360, very wildly successful.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  And that whole Red Ring of Death thing and all the Xboxes that they had to take back and fix. We're just not gonna talk about that.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, set that aside. HDB and the Red Ring of Death. We set that aside. 360 was great. 360 also notable because it was a Skonkworks project inside of Microsoft under an executive named Jay Allard, who was given special permission to not use Windows or Intel chips.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  So it was a custom operating system on custom chips and that's why it was good.

• 9:00David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  This is a true story.

• 9:01David Pierce?

  And no one at Microsoft went, oh, if you need special permission to do this, we might have other bigger problems. Like that's, no?

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  You know, I think many people at Microsoft did that.

• 9:12David Pierce?

  Well, sure.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  And then they, they, they got rid of their CEO and they got a new CEO who solved a bunch of problems.

• 9:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Nilay Patel?

  Um, that was also where they got, remember the courier concept that's on this list? It was, it was a concept video. I don't think they ever made a project. I don't think they ever made it a product. That was just a big book, like you could open like a notebook and write in it and it was a tablet and associated iPad killer. Also Jay Allard saying, what if I didn't have to use Windows? And that was a bridge too far, my friends. They had been burned by putting Windows in the living room so many times. They let him do Xbox 360, but when he was like, what if I made an iPad that was good out of not Windows? They're like death to you, sir. And that was the end of that.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's your story?

• 9:58David Pierce?

  So I did not expect to feel the feelings that I felt about this particular one, but the, the one on this list that I most went, ah, as soon as I saw it was the Surface headphones.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 10:11David Pierce?

  Did y'all ever have the Surface headphones?

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  No, no, but they had the wheel, right?

• 10:14David Pierce?

  They had the wheel. So they, they sounded like fine, but they had unbelievable battery life when unbelievable battery life in like a set of wireless noise cancelling headphones was not a guarantee. And they had the dials. One side was for volume and one side was to dial up and down transparency, basically. So you could like, you could, you could change how much of the world you could hear and how much you could just be sort of ensconced in noise cancellation. And still to this day, that is by a mile, the best interface on a pair of headphones I've ever seen. Everybody else is like weird buttons on the side that you can't find, or they do the Sony touch stuff. That's just a nightmare. Like Microsoft just did it right the first time.

• 10:59David Pierce?

  And I think they made two pairs of the Surface headphones, if memory serves, uh, and then just stopped. Because that's what Microsoft does. Why keep doing our good things when we can make more Windows? But I loved those headphones. I still have, I still have a pair around here somewhere. I'm sure they don't work anymore, but like I used those for a really long time because they were super comfortable and just being able to like walk around or be on a plane or whatever and just sort of spin it back, talk to somebody, spin it forward. Amazing. I love those headphones.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, where they died is because Microsoft failed to make a mobile phone and the entire headphone industry requires you to own a phone in order to make a successful pair of headphones.

• 11:35David Pierce?

  Whatever.

• 11:36Nilay Patel?

  Just saying.

• 11:38David Pierce?

  I mean, there is that.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  That's your answer.

• 11:39David Pierce?

  Yeah. There are a lot of.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  I know there's going to be some people who tell me that Sony and Bose are doing fine, but there's, that's just because Apple keeps forgetting to rev the AirPods Max.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  This is real. And also the AirPods Max are heavy. Anyway, the Surface headphones legitimately good. Love a wheel. Very Microsoft to be like, what if there was a mechanical moving part on these headphones? That we gave up.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  If they had just put a cable card in your headphones, everything would have been fine.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick two. They're kind of like both honorable mentions. They're both on the list. They're just low on the list.

• 12:13David Pierce?

  Wait, I'm sorry. So Richard can't cheat.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Richard did cheat. He provoked an entire conversation about cable card, which admittedly is very easy to do on this show.

• 12:24David Pierce?

  Richard, we're doing tariffs on Eli.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  All right. So I'm just going to pick the one that I think everybody expects me to pick, which is the Zune. The ill-fated but beloved Zune, a product that gave us the word squircle. The real thing, a product which boldly asks the question, what if this was brown?

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  It's true. Those are their ideas. Let's, let's make it brown. And instead of a click wheel, have a squircle. Not great, but introduced what the design language that would become Metro, which is now everything. And I still to this day have a limited edition, one of 5,000 Joy Division Zune.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  Which is, it comes in a giant box that, you know, has the Unknown Pleasures art on it. It has every Joy Division song on it. And every now and again, I, I open the box. When you open it, they, they had Peter Saville design the box. Joy Division, your order designer. So you open it and it like lifts up. It's not elegant. It's like a big cardboard box and like a bunch of, now it's old, like a bunch of brittle cardboard is like creaks at you. But it like lifts up and you can like look at a Joy Division Zune. And then you close it and you put it away until someone puts Zune on a list of 50 Microsoft products and you remember the fact that you paid too much money for this thing.

• 13:40David Pierce?

  Is that one of those things that you like kept in the box because you're like, someday when Joy Division is the biggest band in the world, this is going to be worth something.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  One day, my daughter will come home wearing this T-shirt and I'll be like, you know, I have a Joy Division Zune.

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever listened to one of these songs, young lady?

• 13:58David Pierce?

  That's, yeah, your, your Heine Cube was selling for like thousands of dollars on eBay. So, you know, wait it out. It could happen.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  Although I will never, the Heine Cube is like in the Vox Media office. By the way, once again, thank you, my friend Gabe, who I effectively stole this back from. It's, it's there. It's fine. It's there. The Joy Division Zune lives in its box in my closet. It's never, it's very precious to me. Okay. So that's the, the main thing. But the one I, I insisted be on this list is Microsoft Word 5.1 for the Mac, which was such a good word processor that when it was replaced by Word 6, which sucked, people kept using it for one full decade. They were like, nope, I'm not upgrading to Word 6. I'm not going to Word 2001 for Mac. All the ones.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  There was this weird period where Microsoft, the, the years that they revved the Mac software were different than the years they revved the Windows software. So you'd have Word 2000 and then the Mac would be like Word 2001. This made no sense to anyone. But people just kept using Word 5.1 for a decade. I encourage you to look at the screenshot. It is archaic. It's in black and white. It was a perfect piece of software, like a legitimately perfect piece of software.

• 15:07David Pierce?

  I was just gonna bring up the screenshot because it's actually like, if you haven't looked at it, and again, I encourage you to, we'll put it in the show notes. If you were to draw a cartoon making fun of how ridiculous Word looks with like billions of buttons and every, there's like 14 scroll bars here and all of it is completely inscrutable. And then there's like three lines of text. Like if you wanted to make fun of the design of Word.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  Every one of those buttons, if you look at every one of those buttons, you know exactly what they do and they're right in front of you and there's not a single bit of wasted or hidden interface.

• 15:41David Pierce?

  There are five things here that you could convince me all make the space bigger between lines.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  No, but they do in different and meaningful ways.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you. Also, you click the buttons and then the thing happens. And then you click the button right next to it that does the other thing. This is why it's perfect software. Because everything.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  See, I gotta, I gotta disagree with you there, man. We have to embrace debate on this show. We gotta go in that direction. How can you go Word 5.1 and not Microsoft Excel?

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think Excel's gotta be on this list, but like as a concept, not as an individual version.

• 16:17Speaker 06

  No, no, not actually using it, just the idea.

• 16:21David Pierce?

  The idea of Excel. Excel is not on this list. And I think the fact that we put Clippy at 50 and Bob at 49 and did not put Excel on is a statement I'm very glad that we made.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't think anyone noticed that Excel's on the list. All right, we gotta, that's the show, everybody. We gotta go.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Incredible. I guess Excel technically is business software, not consumer software. That's my argument for you. All right, that's Microsoft. Go read the list. Let us know what you think. We got right or wrong or what you put on the list. Congratulations to Microsoft for inching ever closer to oblivion.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  Can you tell I'm thinking about aging? That's what's happening. But congratulations to Microsoft. We presumably they'll be around for another 50 years because they make software, not hardware. And I don't know if the tariffs will apply to them. All right, let's talk about the Switch 2 for a minute. I think Ash is going to be on the show. Ash Paris is going to be on the show real soon to go in depth. She's actually played with it. She's got a number of hands on impressions. You should watch her YouTube video. But we should still talk about it. David, what's going on with Switch 2?

• 17:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, first of all, Ash, the YouTube commenters have been loving Ash these last 24 hours. And it's delightful and highly recommend watching. She did a social video and a YouTube video. They're both very good. She and Andrew Webster have both used the thing and both came away from it. I think like pretty excited. They it's, we finally have details on the thing that we wanted Nintendo to make, which is just a Switch, but better. So there was a, there was a direct this week, which is what Nintendo calls its like periodic product announcements. And we got a bunch of new specs. We got a release date, the thing's coming out on June 5th. It's going to cost $450, which made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings and we should talk about that.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  For now.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Well, it's going to cost $500.

• 18:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  $630.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Give it time. By the time it ships, it'll be $11,000.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  Well, you're going to buy the Mario Kart bundle version, right? Like you're not going to buy this and not get Mario Kart.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 18:19David Pierce?

  Especially because Mario Kart on its own is $80. But anyway, Richard, I'm going to, I'm going to list all the specs I can remember off the top of my head and you're going to fill in the rest. Ready? Okay. So big changes. It is, it has a 7.9 inch screen, uh, which is substantially bigger than before. The, the thing is the same thickness as the previous switch, which is nice, but it is like noticeably physically larger. 1080p screen, not OLED, which again made people feel feelings, but there will inevitably be a Switch 2 OLED at some point in the future. That's what Nintendo did with the Switch. I'm sure it'll happen again. New joy cons that attach magnetically instead of the kind of wacky sliding mechanism that they've had before.

• 19:01David Pierce?

  There's a new whole like video chat system. There's a, there's a camera and they're also going to do third-party cameras that are separate. Microphone in the thing. You can, you can talk and chat all at the same time. Lots of focus on online. There's new controllers, all kinds of new stuff, but it's just a, it's just a big rev on the Switch. Uh, and Richard, you were saying right before we got on that there was chip news, right? I missed the chip news.

• 19:22Speaker 06

  Yes. Uh, Nvidia put out a blog post the day after Nintendo announced the Switch, A, confirming that it again has an Nvidia chip inside of it. Uh, because it says Nintendo, they didn't really go into details on specs, but they went into far more detail than you would generally expect from Nintendo. Confirming that it has DLSS Nvidia's technology for kind of rendering things and downscaling them to make, make them look better. You know, using, using scaling in AI to make things look better and smoother. Um, then the hardware kind of should be capable of. So people call it fake frames. I think it works really great in some situations and others we'll see. But it's also going to be capable of real-time ray tracing. Uh, the chip has Nvidia's RT cores and tensor cores they use to do all this kind of AI magic.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  Probably has some relevance to the things they're doing with video and with audio. Like there's a mic on the device itself so that you can have it set up in the dock and use it to chat. So I'm sure they're doing noise cancelling. And all the other features that we've seen from Nvidia over the years within this thing. So I, I am very interested to see how it performs really.

• 20:20David Pierce?

  It does seem like this may, this may not be like a, a huge, high-end processor system that they're getting from Nvidia, but like this device actually has kind of a lot to do. Uh, and, and one of the things Ash and Andrew were saying is like, a lot of the games that they were playing felt bigger and more detailed and like they are games designed to be run on much more powerful hardware than we have in the last version. And so like the, the, it was a Tegra chip inside of the first one.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm kind of wondering about that chip overall because it was, it was a Tegra. And that was, that's all related to the fact that Nvidia thought it would be a smartphone competitor to Qualcomm and that just didn't pan out.

• 21:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  And so that was the chip back then. And now, you know, they're saying it's a custom chip. We should talk about DLSS a little bit in this context. Cause it's kind of fascinating to see it brought to a mobile device in this specific way. Where you get all like the better visual fidelity that Ash and Andrew have talked about. And maybe that's just because of DLSS, like may, the games haven't been Switch toified. They're just getting upscaled by AI by this chip. There's usually that's like, I wouldn't say it's power hungry, but it's that's power intensive, right? To run all of that after you've rendered the game, which is not something we've seen, I think, really in the mobile context.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  Which could also contribute to the fact that it has a, I think, a shorter battery life than the Switch one, from what we've seen from the specs. So it seems like it, it seems to me like this is a little bit more of a dock friendly machine than than the original.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  And I do wonder like what Nintendo has learned from the first Switch that made it think that, because that was my exact reaction too. And even the way that they talked about it, this is much more like a thing they expect you to play on a table or in front of a television or something else. Like even the, even the mouse gesture thing is not a thing you do when you're like sitting on the couch playing video games. Like I assume what Nintendo has discovered is that it is like a sometimes portable device, but a mostly docked device. And I think if you're, if you know that, or you can assume that, you get to lean on power a little more and battery life a little less, which I think is the opposite of what Nintendo

• 22:37David Pierce?

  did the first time. Like especially for 2017, what it managed to get out of the battery was, was reasonably impressive. And it does feel like they've flipped that balance a little this time, which I think is probably the right call.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know, it's funny, we talked about Windows Media Center. All this stuff they're adding to it, the mouse mode, the camera, the video chat. It's all getting away from what made the Switch in particular such a huge success. Here's this dedicated device for playing games, the best games that, you know, the console makers have, or at least the most well crafted games that are pretty singular experiences with franchises people love, not it's a mouse.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like Nintendo is very good at like weird interaction paradigms. Like they did the entire Wii for God's sake. But like, there's a part of you're going to play Mario on the go. And then there's another part that's like, we're going to talk about the C button a lot because that's the video chat button. And that just seems like now we're competing with phones and there's no reason to do that. Uh, just to be clear, by the way, the, the video calls are optional. You have to buy the optional camera. If you just push the C button, it's, it's voice calls.

• 23:47David Pierce?

  But I, it, this thing is very social in a way I think is really interesting. And like, I, I was going back and watching all the old first gen Switch ads and they're very much like people out in the world playing on this console together, like hand your buddy a Joy-Con and you can like hang out on the beach and play games. And this one is like, you're in your living room, but you're still hanging out with your friends who are not in your living room. And it's like, there's, there's just something that happened in the eight years that is both like Nintendo's probably right.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  I think there is something that happened in the eight years between the, the Switch one and the Switch two. It was called COVID. It was a whole thing.

• 24:20David Pierce?

  We all stopped going outside.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  And that was when they designed this system.

• 24:24David Pierce?

  That's a really good point. That if you, if you rewind to the beginning of the like, what is the Switch two meetings? It was probably a bunch of people sitting on Zoom calls.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  That's a, yeah, this is the first of the great COVID hardware wave is like super interesting. The mouse in particular gets me is like, here's this big interaction paradigm that requires you to have a desk. Like, how are you going to use this mouse? You're going to put it on a desk. Uh, Ash was not a huge fan of this mouse. We'll see how it plays out. It just seems like the Switch is getting a little bit bigger, right? Like the conceptually, it's going to do a little bit more stuff than it did the last time, which is maybe good. Like that's the story of products and that's how products have developed, but it, I feel like the Switch was as successful as it was because it was relatively inexpensive. It had Zelda and Mario and all the rest of the, Animal Crossing. And ultimately it wasn't trying to do more than the things you needed it to do.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  And I think that's what we're going to find out is whether this is the Wii where it brought people together with kind of a new control dynamic that the other video game systems weren't doing so much then, or if it's the Wii U where it costs too much. And the add-on they put on it isn't, it's something that anyone wants.

• 25:32David Pierce?

  Do you think there's a real risk that this is the Wii U? Cause I, I really don't like, I look at this and, and I'm like, this is, they're doing some weird stuff, but fundamentally what everybody wanted from them is a better Switch and it like, it really looks like this is a better Switch. Do you think there is actual like, this was a mistake possibility here?

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  It just depends on how much it costs. If this thing breaks $500 because of tariffs in big ways, right? If it's, if it's announced at what 449, if it gets to 500 because of tariffs, I'm like, oh, it sucks. You know, whatever. If it gets to $600 because of tariffs, that's pretty expensive. Right? And then you still gotta buy games and all this, all these, you gotta have a camera. You gotta buy a new, all this other stuff is gonna start happening that'll make it too expensive for where it should live. And that, then I think you have to decide how much you love Mario.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  It might not be the Wii. It probably isn't the Wii U. It might be the 3DS.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  No, that's all. I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a switch again. That's your prediction is 3DS?

• 26:32Speaker 06

  Or maybe, maybe the 2DS. I don't, I don't know. I can't remember which one.

• 26:36Nilay Patel?

  Game Boy Pocket. Game Boy Pocket. Okay, Game Boy Pocket. Every time it comes on the show, I will remind our high school listeners. It fits perfectly into the slider case with TI-82 calculator.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Something that I learned in 1998.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  Every part of that reference will make no sense to people in high school now. I love it.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  No, they still sell. There's a store in our town, in our little Westchester town, the stationery store. Stationery store is just a racket that sells TI calculators to high school students. That's its only business.

• 27:09David Pierce?

  Are they still like 150 bucks?

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  They still cost exactly the same. And it's every high schooler is required to buy one of these calculators and they'll buy them at the stationery store and I'm just there. You know, once a week being like, you know, Game Boy Pocket slides right into that thing.

• 27:24David Pierce?

  Can you imagine when tariffs make the TI-83 calculator like $245?

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  That's how you know that I'm old, is that I'm saying TI-82 and everyone else has got the TI-83, which is slightly nicer. TI-82 had a square case, which covered the Game Boy Pocket better. The problem, and I'm, I'm sorry to my high school math teachers. The problem is that when Ryan Navratil turned on the Game Boy, it still dinged. And then your calculator and Game Boy were taken away.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Playing Dope Wars wasn't good enough for you? You needed a Game Boy?

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  Did you ever code, you ever, did you code your games right into the calculator, Richard?

• 28:03Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 28:03David Pierce?

  Hell yeah. Come on. I did, I dealt so much fake drugs on my graphing calculator. Are you kidding?

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  All right. Speaking of dealing drugs. Let's talk about TikTok. The foremost scourge of our nation's youth. Lots going on in the TikTok story. This weekend is the deadline. Saturday is the deadline. The deadline that was self-imposed by Donald Trump. After the actual deadline that was imposed by our nation's Congress. And upheld by the Supreme Court. So Trump takes office. TikTok was banned. Which means they just shut it, they shut the app down as a stunt. Trump said, I'm giving you 75 days. Here's a waiver from Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, that says she won't prosecute you for breaking this law.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Everyone said that was good enough, which is weird all into itself. Totally weird. But here we are at the end of 75 days. There's a rumor that Trump is going to do something called TikTok America. Where he creates a sovereign wealth fund out of stolen Bitcoin.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  As near as I can tell. And then that will buy a huge chunk of TikTok. ByteDance will remain on the cap table, which might be illegal because the law says they can't control the app or the algorithm. So I don't know what's gonna happen there. The thing that I have been predicting would happen has apparently happened. Amazon has sent a letter saying they would buy TikTok. The founder of OnlyFans wants to buy TikTok. Perplexity keeps insisting that it is a serious buyer for TikTok and sending extremely petty notes to Kylie whenever she notes that that is doesn't seem realistic.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  Really?

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they are like, no, we're for real. And there's, there's just nothing you can say to an upstart AI company that really wants you to believe it can buy TikTok. And then there's, you know, Project Liberty, which is Frank McCourt and Alexis Ohanian and Mr. Beast. And they've got whatever idea about putting TikTok on the blockchain.

• 30:07Speaker 06

  Don't forget AppLovin'.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, AppLovin'.

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Steve Wynn somehow is involved in that.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I'm sure Verge listeners are aware of AppLovin'. I'm excited for more people in America. To wake up and be told that a company called AppLovin' now owns TikTok.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. That's a lot. What do you think is gonna happen?

• 30:31David Pierce?

  Okay, here's where I land on this, which is nowhere. I think the thing that I have come around to is, I think it is true that there is the money out there in the United States to buy TikTok in a way that would satisfy everybody, right? Like, I'm increasingly convinced that there are actually lots of people who could gin up the money to make this happen relatively quickly. Like, it's every investor wants to be part of this. That's increasingly clear.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Jeff Bezos just has to sell a support boat, not even the big boat.

• 31:04David Pierce?

  Right. What I've learned by watching OpenAI is that, like, $100 billion is not that hard to come by. Like, you can just get it. You can have $100 billion if you want $100 billion. So I think that part I actually, I thought for a while it was gonna be impossible, that there was just nobody who was gonna be able to do it for a mix of, like, financial and antitrust. I no longer think that's the case. And I think it's pretty clear that the Trump administration would happily just bend its antitrust rules for whoever it blessed as the new owner of TikTok. There is still, still to this moment, absolutely no evidence that ByteDance or China is interested in their part of this deal. Just none.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Especially now that the tariffs have happened.

• 31:46David Pierce?

  Right. If what you need is the blessing of the Chinese government to do this, why on earth does that seem more likely to happen now than it did yesterday, or three months ago, or a year ago, or the first time Trump tried to do this? Like, if anything, it seems to me the likelihood of this being possible has gone down over time for that reason. And so I think ByteDance might be willing to call the administration's bluff again.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  And just shut down.

• 32:18David Pierce?

  And I, like, if I had to bet, I think it goes dark again.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Richard?

• 32:25Speaker 06

  I think that the most important thing here is that we're having the wrong discussion about TikTok, or the wrong discussion about ByteDance, China, the Trump administration. The discussion we need to have is that we should buy TikTok. This is a dream.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  David says a hundred million dollars is not hard to come by.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Any of us will ever have in our lifetime. You see, everyone's putting in bids for TikTok. Why haven't we? We need to put in a bid for TikTok. We could own TikTok. This is like, this is like, uh, let's buy a bar. It's, it's that conversation because we're getting to that late hour. And we're saying, you know what? We could just buy a bar.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  I've had that conversation so many times in my life.

• 33:00David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We're gonna start a band, buy a bar and buy TikTok.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay, having been in a band, don't start a band. Uh, don't do that. You will come to a point in your life when you have played the Metra in Chicago. You've reached all of your dreams and the only available next step is to spend time in a van with the people in your band, going to midsize, midwestern cities. And you'd be like, that was the wrong choice. Just saying. But that, that same period of time in my life in Chicago, we would walk by an empty bar, like on the corner by my house, on our way home, hammered. And we would be like, we should, we should buy that bar, man. That could be the spot.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  Buy the bar. Buy TikTok.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  It's historically a bad idea. Most of them go out of business. I, I feel the same is true about our bid for TikTok, Richard. I, I'm actually curious why there are not more bidders. Right? This is a historically important asset in the American media ecosystem. I'm honestly curious why we haven't seen the New York Times or News Corporation or whoever. Viacom out of nowhere. Paramount Plus is now TikTok, right? Like where, where is that energy from the media conglomerates that all are desperate for distribution? Where's Netflix?

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  Like this is all stuff that would make sense for a bunch of these companies. I understand why Amazon wants TikTok because TikTok shop represents an entire marketing channel that connects to purchases that Amazon does not have. That is a meaningful, I don't know if it's a competitor, but it's, it's just a place where people go to find stuff to buy.

• 34:36David Pierce?

  And then it's definitely

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  And then they buy.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  Amazon has been desperately trying to do TikTok for years now and with, with essentially no success. And so like, instead, if you just took TikTok and just plugged in the Amazon logistics system behind it, it's actually the cleanest fit of almost any of these things that I think of like, Amazon has the cloud services to make the infrastructure work. It has the, the business angle, which is all the shopping stuff that you just talked about, like it, it works. Amazon could buy TikTok and the whole thing would make sense immediately in a way that it, it's, it's much more, uh, there's much more of sort of an underpants known thing happening for a lot of these other companies. But I also think, I mean, the answer to a lot of these questions is because Trump won't allow it to happen, right? Like he is so at the center of all of this.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's true. Trump wouldn't allow Netflix to buy TikTok.

• 35:25David Pierce?

  You think Trump would allow the New York Times to buy TikTok?

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Who, AppLovin, which is just a mobile advertising company that everyone has to say AppLovin is like out here being like, we'll do it. Why not? Like perplexity is like, we'll do it. Like why, honestly, why wouldn't Netflix, which desperately needs a discovery mechanism? Right? They all do. Why wouldn't, why aren't they in this mix? Why isn't Apple in this mix? Like it's, it's just interesting to see how many people must have kicked the tires, right? They all have big M and A departments. They all have big, big business development departments. It's funny to see how many people are like, no, that's, that's too messy. Social media is too messy. But you can see how any number of media organizations desperately need distribution and they, they're just not in the game. And maybe that's

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Somebody called Jeff

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Too hard to find.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  We just need to do Quibi again.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  Where's cats?

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Where's our guy?

• 36:19Speaker 06

  TikTok.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  By the way, we should turn out in all fairness to cats and freaking quit.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  Not a sentence I thought I would ever say. Vertical micro dramas are apparently very popular in other countries around the world. We should do a story on that.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  It's their time.

• 36:35David Pierce?

  Quibi had been free, it would have worked.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  Season two of Golden Arm is coming.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  I can feel it. Quibi was always 090 and that's, that's life.

• 36:43David Pierce?

  Um, Quibi was just early.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  I will point out, we are, we are having exactly the same conversation on who will buy TikTok. Except now there are some bids, but we're having the exact same conversation today as we did 75 days ago.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  And the, the deadline is tomorrow. As you're listening to this on Friday, the deadline is Saturday. It's the fifth.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  And there's still absolutely no indication that it's for sale. Like this is a bunch of people standing outside of a house being like, I'd like to buy that house and the person inside not selling the house.

• 37:17David Pierce?

  You can't buy a thing that's not for sale and there's no evidence at all that it is for sale.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, and it's just funny because the number of people who should be beating down the door to buy this thing should be by all rights, much higher than it is.

• 37:31David Pierce?

  Yes. I do think, I mean, we, we've seen this before, like when Disney kicked the tires on Twitter and I think, I think there are a lot of companies who understand the, the mess that is social and just are not set up to do it. Like Netflix buys TikTok and immediately becomes a completely different kind of company. Right. And I think it's not crazy to sign up for that, but it's not just a thing you can do.

• 37:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. But every single time we have some streaming executive on Decoder or some product person from one of these companies on Decoder. I get notes from product people around the industry. They're like, you don't understand what they're all saying in every meeting at Disney, at Paramount Plus, at Max's. Why can't we have a YouTube? Yeah. Like they're all staring at the, the thing that is going to kill them.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Down the line, like at Disney, there are meetings like, why don't we have a YouTube? At Max, there are meetings are like, why don't we have a YouTube? Cause they see the thing and there are obvious reasons they don't. But in this one case, they could buy a thing that's almost like it.

• 38:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's it's certainly the closest to just going from nothing to something that has been available, maybe ever.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and yet, yet it's gonna be AppLovin', everybody. No, no shade to AppLovin', it's just a very funny name. And I'm dying for the TikTok conspiracy theories that will occur if a company named AppLovin' buys this, buys this platform.

• 38:53David Pierce?

  TikTok by AppLovin' has a really great ring to it.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  We'll find out. Either TikTok will exist next week when we do the show or it won't. Or Trump.

• 38:59David Pierce?

  We're gonna buy it and it's just gonna be Detroit Pistons highlights and trucks jumping over stuff.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  Richard, we're buying TikTok and it's, it's just us forcing Richard to purchase and rehabilitate a bar.

• 39:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  That's it. Like you've gotta find one, you've gotta, you gotta do the TikTok thing, you know, like the, the time lapse video of like tearing down the drywall and putting it back up. We're gonna make Richard install gray floors and one of those like bronze chandelier things. It's gonna be great. I'm excited for it. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back, we're gonna start talking about terrorists. It's gonna happen. We'll be right back.

• 39:35Speaker 01

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• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We have to talk about tariffs. We do. It is the only story, like in the biggest way. Usually with politics, we have to draw some line to like phones. You know, like here's why The Verge is covering politics and I want us to cover politics. We do it. We cover policy very deeply, but usually you have to make an argument for politics and policy in our stories, right? We cover consumer tech. There's a line to politics and policy and I want us to explain why we cover things like the FCC or why we cover things like the National Institutes of Science. Like there's, or the National Institutes of Health. Like there's research that gets done at the federal level. There's policies at the Federal Trade Commission.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  All this stuff affects the gadgets we make. Tariffs is much different because the prices are just going to go. And the supply chains that create all the hardware is going to go sideways and there's not a great argument for any of these tariffs right now. So Trump announced them. The stock market literally crashed while he was speaking at the White House. You just saw the numbers go down. I watched CNBC today. People I know, the anchors at CNBC, just openly confused. Carl Quintanilla, who is a great anchor at CNBC, a friend, he said, "You're burning down the house to cook a cheeseburger," which is an incredible quote. That is good. Steve Mnuchin, who is Treasury Secretary and Trump won, said...

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  To Sarah Eisen, I believe, don't think too hard about how these tariffs were calculated.

• 42:37David Pierce?

  I mean, that's the thing. Like, I think when you say, uh, there's not a great reason for it. I think that is, that is actually like far too kind. Like, this is, this is pure nonsense. And, and I think what we have seen from the reaction, like, you cannot find someone who can give you a measured reason why this is a good idea, right?

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  You can find something. You can find ChatGPT, which will

• 43:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Which will deliver you the calculation that is used to calculate tariff rates.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Well, so, but that's the thing, right? And it's insanity all the way down because it's like,

• 43:12David Pierce?

  you, you rewind back through the campaign and, and everybody was like, well, Trump clearly doesn't understand how tariffs actually work. It's just like a thing he likes to say. It's like a hobby horse of his. He won't do them. And then immediately took office and started doing them. And everybody's like, well, they won't be as bad as he thought. And so over and over and over, the people who like, believed in him as an economic driver for the United States were like, he won't do this. And then he did this and it was so much worse than anyone, anyone thought it was going to be. And then the more we've learned about why it is the way that it is and how it was calculated and how it was created and how it came to be, the more the only possible logic has become, none of this makes any sense.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  It is true. The United States Trade Representative put out a fact sheet about the tariffs with a formula in it that was supposed to explain how they calculated these tariff rates. And the formula contains a bunch of Greek letters, two of which, when you back them out to the numbers, just cancel each other out. What you have is a trade deficit divided in half to calculate the rate, and then the floor is 10%. And the rates, the tariff rates are against islands that have nothing but penguins on them.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  But it's, it's so important to keep saying, that's nothing. What you just described is nothing.

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. And they're described as reciprocal tariffs against countries that have no tariffs on us.

• 44:27David Pierce?

  No.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  None of this makes any sense.

• 44:29David Pierce?

  These are not trade deficits. It's countries we buy things from. Like that's, those are not the same thing. It's like, there was, I saw a thing this morning that was like, you don't have a trade deficit from your dentist because your dentist doesn't buy anything from you. You buy things from your dentist. Like, it's just nonsense. And, and we're at a point now where it's like, we've gone way beyond, even like, even now, the, the Trump administration being like, this is about fentanyl crossing the borders. And this is how we punish the countries who allow this to happen. That seems reasonable compared to where we are now, which is just, they went in and they were like, oh, well, we have a trade deficit with them. Let's tariff the opposite of that and that'll sort it out. That's nothing.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  So I want to say there's been a lot of reporting, including from us, that, that it's the AIs that come up with this kind of math. And it is true. ChatGPT comes up with this math. Claude comes up with this math. Grok, important one in the Trump administration because that's Elon's, comes up with this math. Gemini will come with this math. But if you switch to Gemini 2.5 Pro, which everyone got mad at us for ignoring last week, but I, now I'm using it. Y'all yelled at us. And you ask it to show thinking on this prompt. It's basically like, the user's an idiot.

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's like, literally the second one, analyze the user's premise is, the user assumes tariffs are a simple, direct tool to achieve balanced trade. And that a single calculation method can achieve this across countries. And then it just scrolls down and it gets to a place that says, address the easy way request. And it says, given the complexity, there is no easy way to calculate tariffs that will precisely balance trade. The premise itself is flawed. So, look, I'm not saying that they used AI or not. I'm just saying maybe they should have used Gemini 2.5 Pro, which would have gently let them down.

• 46:20David Pierce?

  It's tough. I am, I'm generally suspicious of the like, they wrote this official document with AI argument. I think like, people are dumb is usually a more compelling outcome than the like, the Occam's razor is people are stupid, not people used AI. This one is really, really, really hard to disagree. Like, it, you put it in and over and over, people have run this experiment over and over again. You can get it to give you that answer as long as you ask a stupid question.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  Which no human economist will give you that answer.

• 46:49David Pierce?

  No, this is what I mean. Like, the reaction has been so universal that it is, it is unreal.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, look, this is going to affect the price of iPhones. It will affect the price of the Nintendo Switch 2. We have a piece trying to guess how much the price will go up in the Switch 2. It's a debacle of epic proportions for the auto industry. That's a quote we ran in a story that Andy Hawkins wrote. We're going to track all this fallout across the board. There's a chance that Trump just walks them all back. That's a thing that he does all the time. There's a chance that this is all just a weird racket. We've been calling it gangster tech regulation. He just wants people to deal. So he does this gangster-y stuff. We'll see how this shakes out. But I actually wanted to make this real for our audience. I think you can go get a bunch of pie in the sky tariff coverage everywhere. But we cover people

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  who make things, right? Not just big companies, but small companies. We love an indie hardware maker here on the show. So you might have heard me talk about a company called Toonshine before. And the founder of Toonshine is a guy named Tobias Butler. I've read notes about tariffs from him on the show before he's emailed me. I was like, I should write a story about the Toonshine and tariffs. And then all this news happened. And I thought to myself, oh, we should just have Tobias on the show. So let's bring him on now. Tobias Butler, you are the founder, you're the sole proprietor of Toonshine. Welcome to the Rich Cast.

• 48:13Speaker 08

  Thank you, Eli. Glad to be here.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  So as Tobias knows, I have a Toonshine. I love it. Explain quickly what it is.

• 48:19Speaker 08

  So Toonshine is a lo-fi album art display that uses this kind of pixelated, very tasteful, almost artistic screen to automatically show the album artwork for the music you listen to. Works with Spotify, Apple Music, and Sonos. I definitely recommend, like, if you're listening to this on a podcast app, checking out a picture of it. It's a very visual experience and often it'll kind of click with people. But yeah, it's basically supposed to add this nice ambient artwork to decorate your room and it connects with the kind of music you like and help represent that visually in your space.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  So I started talking to Tobias because I demanded features and he delivered them. So I will point out that Tobias, you just added Shazam support. To the tune trend. So if you're listening, if I'm listening to vinyl at my house, I can just push the button and the album mark shows up there. It's choice. I love this thing.

• 49:07Speaker 08

  Cool. Really appreciate it.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just you, right? There's no one else at the company?

• 49:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's just me. Increasingly, I'm kind of doing some things with contractors. I just recently got set up with a contract manufacturer based in the US in Chicago, doing contracting with fulfillment companies to actually mail things out, which is great, because that means that I don't have to be home every weekday of every week. And TuneShine will still go out to people. But as far as the product development, coding, marketing, admin stuff, that is all me.

• 49:40Nilay Patel?

  And there's a part of the story which I am very taken by, which is you worked at a tech company and you quit to start this company, right?

• 49:47Speaker 08

  Yes, that's basically correct. I quit kind of thinking, okay, I have like a little bit of a nest egg enough to sort of explore different options, because I sort of thought, okay, this is a good time in my life. I don't have kids yet. My budget is still pretty flexible. Maybe I should just see if there's other things that I like that aren't web development, which is basically what I was doing before. And I basically discovered that I did want to continue to do coding, but I really wanted to give TuneShine a try. It was just giving me good indications that it could be a business, not only that I would be able to start and have the skills enough to get pretty close, but also that it was something that people

• 50:29Speaker 08

  were wanting. My friends were asking about it and I love music. I'm a musician. I studied music in school. So working on a music product just sort of made sense. So that's why I decided to give it a go.

• 50:39David Pierce?

  This might be a really stupid question, but it is like before the now times, is when you go to start a business like this and you're like, okay, I'm starting to source hardware. I kind of know the thing I want to build. I have to meet many. Do you have to become a tariffs expert anyway? Like, is that a thing that's on your mind as you're starting a company like this?

• 50:58Speaker 08

  Prior to the first Trump tariffs, which applied a 25% tariff to a lot of things. So I've always had tariffs on the circuit boards that I was getting from China and the LED screens, which I think are also in that classification, or at least among the classifications that get those things. I mean, I think that, yes, you are thinking about this. However, if you're trying something out for the first time, especially if it's your first time doing this as a hardware founder, there's going to be so many unknowns anyway that that is probably just going to be one of many unknowns that you encounter along the way. I think people who are maybe on their second or third go are probably thinking a couple

• 51:41Speaker 08

  steps ahead on this, which of course is much harder to do now that things are changing like twice a week. But so that's, it's, it's a mixed answer.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  Let me ask you just a really reductive question because I have the product and I like it. I, I see that it's like thoughtfully created, but at a very abstract level, it's a circuit board, a microcontroller, some Wi-Fi chips and a display. And then I think you make the case. I actually discovered this product because there's videos of you on TikTok making the cases. And I was like, well, that's cool. I'm assuming that the wood for the cases is not tariffed yet, but it might be soon. We'll find out.

• 52:17Speaker 08

  So I, for a long time, I was doing the assembly myself, but I don't have a CNC machine to actually carve the case out of the material. I am going to continue to, there's going to be some special editions, limited runs, and I will continue to assemble those at home just because I think it's very, I like having that physical connection to the product. And while I can't scale up enough to do all of these things, I think people really like knowing that they bought something that was, you know, not artisanal. I'm, I'm really just screwing it together, but they like having that connection.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. But those parts, right? Wi-Fi chip, controller, circuit board, display, all of that was coming from China before, right? You weren't getting that domestically. And so you're paying some rate and the rate might've gone up because of Trump won tariffs, but you could basically go to suppliers and say, I want to buy this stuff and get prices back.

• 53:08Speaker 08

  Yes, yes. And the easiest way to do that is to get on Alibaba. People are super responsive. I, you know, you hear this. Simone Yetch, the, the robot creator was talking about this recently, where you reach out to a bunch of manufacturers in the US and Europe, and your response rate is really low. I think some of that is just because they are not as optimized for small clients. I think some of that is just a company culture thing that's pervasive here. But if you go on Alibaba, you're able to find these manufacturers, buy from them, get samples, and everything's consolidated into a single app. It's sort of a weird, janky app, and they're a little bit iffy with their push notification policies.

• 53:53Speaker 08

  But you can talk to everybody in the same app, and it makes the whole thing very streamlined.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  So I emailed you when the first round of tariffs in this Trump administration was happening. You said, "My prices will go up and down. I'm not sure what's going to happen." Now we're here in the second round. Who knows what's going to happen? What's going to happen to Tunshine? Are your prices going to go up? Is the company still sustainable?

• 54:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I was kind of, before I was, fell asleep last night, you know, I'm doom scrolling a little bit. And I'm just like, oh no, like, maybe I am, I'm gonna have to raise prices. And when I double-checked my numbers this morning, because I just put out a video talking through the effects I think it might have, it looked like what actually came out, too, was basically a 10% increase in the price of each manufactured Tunshine. And the real, and the reason it's not the full, like, 54% increase that is going to be applied is the tariffs from China is for a few reasons. One is that some of this stuff was already tariffed. In fact, much of this stuff was already tariffed. So the increase is more like 25-ish percent, not the full 54.

• 55:01Speaker 08

  The other thing is that the labor cost, like the, you know, the most expensive parts of the tunesine are screen, circuit board, and labor at the moment, the way I'm manufacturing it. Labor cost is not tariffed because that's done in the US. So that is not included in the, how the tariff multiplier would work. And the third thing is that I actually did recently meet someone who might be able to move some of the parts into their, their spot in Wisconsin with very competitive prices. So I'm getting samples there. I think that's pretty unusual. I was kind of amazed, like, there's not a lot of PCB manufacturers in the US. People talk about how, I think, like, Starlink's SpaceX stuff is like one of the

• 55:43Speaker 08

  biggest PCB facilities, but in terms of just quick, low volume, and by low volume, I mean, like a thousand to 3,000-ish, manufacturing for PCBs is not very common, but this guy has given it a go. And I thought that was exciting that I might be able to beat that. So all of that together amounts to a smaller increase than you might think based on the 54%, but it's still an increase. And I'm making orders of a thousand. And so if it costs 10% more, that's like thousands of less dollars in, in profit for me for each batch of tunesines that's coming in. And I, all the indications are that it could still be profitable. But since I've been scaling up and each order of products that I make

• 56:27Speaker 08

  is bigger than the last, and it eats into the profits I've already made, and because I had legal costs associated with filing a patent, then I don't know for sure yet, but it looks like it should still be okay. And especially if I can get a little bit more efficient at marketing, which is my second biggest cost after manufacturing, then I could potentially make up for that. So if I'm getting more organic social reach, or if I'm doing better PR, then that helps because I'm less reliant on paid marketing channels. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  It seems like part of the challenge here is, is the not knowing of it all, that like, it's even just in the last two months, we've, we've gone back and forth so many times. And like, you talk about ordering these parts and like, it's not like this is a thing you can do on a sort of day by day basis, depending on the, the state of the economics of it all, right? You're having to make

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  Sort of months-long decisions at a time, right? Like, how do you even do that in a moment like this where everything is up and down from like 15 minutes to 15 minutes?

• 57:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, the uncertainty is definitely a huge factor. And I think my reading is that a lot of the stuff that's happening with the stock market is really to uncertainty as much as anything else, because we just don't know what's going to happen. For me, there are some funny day-to-day things, like if I'm getting parts shipped like over the ocean, for example, the delivery times can be very unpredictable, but often this is a much cheaper alternative. So I literally had a package that I think like got delivered yesterday, and I don't know if the timing perfectly works out, but the tariffs did seem a little high. So I was like, darn, like if it had just arrived one day earlier, I could have saved like 400 bucks.

• 58:08Speaker 08

  But what I think about really, like, I can sort of plan this stuff out, but as I was saying, when you start this stuff, there's so much uncertainty. And I think about the people who are starting Kickstarter's and they're trying to make their best guess at whether they have a viable business model, because there's kind of an epidemic, I'm sure you've noticed, of people who like raise a bunch of money on Kickstarter and then ultimately realize like, oh, this business doesn't actually work, though, and so products lose support. I think there's a much greater risk of that now, because you have less certainty about how much money you want to raise on top of all the uncertainty you already had. Your prices might go up, you, I think it just adds another factor on top of all the

• 58:51Speaker 08

  other risks, starting a business that might make people think twice about whether they want to turn their little home-built DIY or Do We Know or Raspberry Pi gadget into a real product, which is a bummer, because I would love to see more diversity in hardware, more power to like smaller hardware players to experiment with all these ideas that are out there that aren't really seen as much in a very homogeneous hardware market.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  That seems like the important part, right? That you are living a version of the American dream where you had a job, you said, I have an opportunity to start a company, I can open the Alibaba app and connect with a bunch of suppliers halfway around the world and start a business. And now there's a regulatory environment that might make that surprisingly harder. Do you think you would have started Toonshine right now with the tariff uncertainty?

• 59:42Speaker 08

  It's hard to say. I might have tried to price it differently. The way my initial strategy was was working with the pricing is that I would read things online that were basically saying, take the price of your materials and multiply that by four. And that's what you should sell it for. I am not doing that, which has interesting side effects where I basically am very resistant to selling in retail environments because they immediately want to buy your product wholesale for half of the sticker price. And for me, that basically puts me underwater and I can sell direct to consumer better than that anyway. But when I was first making these, I kind of had that attitude of like,

• 1:00:21Speaker 08

  well, more likely than not, if these sell, I can get the price down some way. I can take the time. Once I know that people will buy them for the price that I've set it at, then I can, maybe I can scale up. Maybe I can find a different supplier. I can get better at this and that. So I, through that process, I already brought the price down a lot. It's going back up now, but I honestly, like, since I came from the software world, I'm not so certain that I would have had the foresight anyway to be able to incorporate this into the overall calculations. I was just sort of thinking, all right, I'm going to start small. I'm going to sell 50, then I'm going to sell 100, and then 200, 500,

• 1:01:02Speaker 08

  1,000. Price comes down a little bit each time and we're getting more and more into healthy business territory where I can look ahead in the next year and be like, yeah, this is probably going to work. But as I said before, there's so much uncertainty with these things. Having another thing thrown into the mix does not, I think, make it more likely that people will try experiments like this.

• 1:01:23David Pierce?

  Why not just throw it in and raise the price? I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of people who are just like, ah, tariffs, everything's more expensive. Why not do that?

• 1:01:31Speaker 08

  It's a good question. I think.

• 1:01:36Speaker 08

  I think part of it is just the fact that I'm somewhat new to this and I am, I think I may be a little bit more nervous than many people would be about my customers loyalty. I thought about that when I was switching to manufacturing outside the house. And I did get people emailed me who were saying, oh, this is a bummer. Do you actually have any that you still made with your own hands that I can get? Like, literally, somebody asked me to like, sign one, which was funny, but, and send it out to him. So I, I do stress a little bit about customer loyalty. I think I've done a pretty good job of building that, but by just trying to be really transparent, talking about how this process works, trying to be like, the opposite of whatever corporate sheen you usually get from marketing communications.

• 1:02:20Speaker 08

  So maybe I've built up enough goodwill where people would say, hey, like, yeah, this is still fine. On the other hand, I get some repeat customers, but not a ton. And so those people, I wouldn't necessarily have built up that loyalty to. So, I mean, coming from a big, I used to work at change.org where we would just A B test everything. It's a little harder to A B test a price. I kind of wish I could do that, even though it's maybe a little ethically questionable. But I, at least for now, I want to try it out. I think that 200 as a starting price, it's already a somewhat expensive gadget. It's a very niche thing. I'm not pretending this is like a toaster or a microwave oven or anything. It's, it's a art piece, basically, that you can get from your home or not.

• 1:03:06Speaker 08

  200 is, I think, a, a pretty fair price, but it is a bit high. And so I want to keep it there and, uh, hope that it works out, basically.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  I think I bought a walnut one that you actually did make by yourself. You said two things that are really interesting to me. One, you said, American and European manufacturers kind of don't respond. They're just like, not in the game, the way that the Chinese supply chain is just in the game all the time. And then you said, there's a guy in Wisconsin who might be in the game now. The point of the tariffs is to get you to move your production to Wisconsin. Right. The point of the tariffs is to get more of the supply chain in the United States. Do you see that happening? Right? I mean, you obviously have at least one person in Wisconsin who wants to help you out. Do you see more of that? Is that ecosystem actually developing?

• 1:03:52Speaker 08

  I, my experience with this is somewhat limited, but the, as you said, the, the Chinese supply chain is just so well set up for this stuff. There is absolutely no American answer for Alibaba and just how easy it makes the overall process. Maybe there are individual suppliers out there that can compete on price, especially with the tariffs. And maybe they do respond, but having everything so streamlined, it feels like you're kind of going back to the previous century. When you are trying to do things with American manufacturers. It's not out of the question that maybe someone's out there trying to build the American Alibaba.

• 1:04:33Speaker 08

  That would be awesome. Like if, if, if someone's out there and feels that spark, you have my full encouragement. But there's a lot of stuff that's also just not made here. I mean, the ESP32 microcontroller that I use, it's just, it's a Chinese company. Like I may, you know, maybe something using the TSMC factory in Arizona or wherever that is, is, is going to come up and make a competitor to that. But how long does that take? How long does it take to build the ecosystem of libraries that support this operating system and, and all of this stuff? Uh, I think some people make these LED screens in the US. They don't have pricing on their website. It's a, you know, it's one of a contact us for sales sort of deals.

• 1:05:18Speaker 08

  But it's, it's lots, lots of obstacles because they just really have a system for this that's modern in a way that we do not.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  How long do you think it would take to, to build that system here?

• 1:05:30Speaker 08

  I don't know. That, I would say that's out of my wheelhouse, but certainly, almost certainly longer than a single presidential term for, for one.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  I asked that question because I think that's the answer. Go ahead, dude.

• 1:05:41David Pierce?

  Well, I was gonna say the Alibaba of it all, I think, is really fascinating and is a piece of this that I think is not getting talked about a lot, that it is that this, it is just so much easier and faster and more straightforward to do the kind of stuff you're talking about on Alibaba and in China than just about anywhere else. So I am curious like where that puts you sort of long term, like let's assume the tariffs are real. It feels to me like you have a couple of options. One is like hope everybody moves part production to the US. One is like find new parts that they make in the US. Or two is just figure out how to incorporate the costs. Is the answer one of those? Is it some mixture of those?

• 1:06:22Speaker 08

  I think it will be a mixture. I mean, I ultimately, the PCB people in Wisconsin, I didn't switch to them because I was like, I'm gonna buy American made, but more because I think the contract manufacturer I was using, I think they were getting PCBs made in India and I actually didn't check how much the tariffs are going up on India, but I think they were 10%, but still, I switched because they were able to beat the cost when they incorporated shipping and when they incorporated that tariff. They were able to beat the cost. They were also able to make a 3D printed part and they were down to bundle it together. They were even down to do some electronics engineering for free to throw that in, which is huge because, you know, for these

• 1:07:00Speaker 08

  500,000 here, that really adds up at the point that I'm doing this business. So I think it'll be a mix and maybe I just kind of put a call out on my Instagram and TikTok where I was saying, hey, if you know people in the US who might be able to do this, like, sure, I'm open to it, but I haven't seen that. I mean, I used to be getting cardboard boxes with foam that just protected during shipping. Price in the US, $18. China, $4.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:07:28Speaker 08

  Like, so that's 350% more. I would be a bit surprised, but it doesn't mean it's not out there. The other thing is that I, just by the nature of my business, I think I do have a little bit more flexibility. I don't have people on payroll yet. I'm not even on payroll yet. Hopefully, hopefully this year, but I don't have people on payroll. I like if you're Apple and they'll probably maybe be able to get some exemptions, but like this, you know, if it is a 10% or 20% increase in your, the price for your items, um, that is like billions of dollars. That's, it represents tons, tons of people's jobs and an entire big corporate strategy ocean liner that needs to be turned. Whereas for me, I do, I do have a bit more flexibility because

• 1:08:13Speaker 08

  it is just me. And so I don't have to fire people because of a 10% price increase, which is great. Uh, maybe it means that I'm, uh, skipping on the, the fancy four pack of beer and instead drinking Pacifico a little more, but, uh, the, it's, it's more flexibility. Yeah.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook's switching to Pacifico is actually the most obvious.

• 1:08:36Speaker 08

  Just first thought.

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  Put this in a range for me, right? There's tariffs went up and maybe your costs go up 10% and you're drinking sadly some cheaper beer and that's fine. And then what's the number that says this is no longer sustainable?

• 1:08:50Speaker 08

  Um, I mean, if, if my manufactured cost went over a hundred dollars, that's sort of, that's kind of game over. I mean, it's certainly without raising the price. I don't know. Maybe there is a market, like maybe, you know, maybe in a couple of months, people will be like, well, like my TV was like $900 and it used to be 400. So a Toonshine for 250 doesn't actually seem so crazy. But for, if it were over a hundred dollars, I, I would be very surprised if people would be able to pay what would make sense, uh, to, to make that sustainable. Certainly with retail, cause I, if I kept it at 200 and I'm paying

• 1:09:31Speaker 08

  a hundred, I literally would make zero on each retail sale unless I get like a good deal. I, I'm only in one store right now and she's sort of a friend of a friend and she gives me a little bit more than 50% of the cost. But like, if I'm aiming to be in, uh, Urban Outfitters someday, I don't think they're going to cut me a good deal. And that suddenly goes like off the table, I think, if, if my manufacturing costs go over a hundred dollars.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  Tobias, what do you think is, uh, next for Toonshine? What are you looking at for?

• 1:09:57Speaker 08

  I'm really going for consistency this year. I just placed an order for a thousand, which is my biggest order yet. And now that the manufacturing and the fulfillment is out of my house, I'm just trying to get that running on a kind of clockwork basis while I can add new features. So I really want to support more home music servers this year. Plex, Rune, like Logitech Media Server. People are always emailing me more and more bespoke media servers. I want to, I want to support as many of those as I can. Trying a special edition, maybe some colors. Just got some samples in and maybe a big one, maybe a vinyl record sized one. So that's, that's, those are the things that are on my mind right now.

• 1:10:41David Pierce?

  As soon as you said Rune, a bunch of Vergecast listeners started like fist pumping at their phones.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  The Rune and Plex audience here on the Vergecast is strong.

• 1:10:49Speaker 08

  I see you Rune fans.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  When you make the big one, let me know. Built in microphone for the Shazam, that's the, that's the name.

• 1:10:56Speaker 08

  That's, that, that's sort of.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  $5,000 tune shine with an AI microphone in it is what I'm looking for.

• 1:11:01Speaker 08

  It's got, it's got like eight mics so that it knows the direction the music comes from for some reason. Why not?

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Tobias, thank you so much for joining the Vergecast.

• 1:11:09Speaker 08

  Thank you. Really appreciate it. Bye.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back, plenty of rounds, and then America's favorite podcast, We the Podcast. We'll be right back.

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• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's a lightning round, unsponsored for flavor.

• 1:12:57David Pierce?

  Does it need an ellipsis? There's been some debate about whether it's unsponsored... dot, dot, dot for flavor, or if it's just unsponsored for flavor.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know. You tell me. I will tell you that we, the Decoder tagline, which is big ideas and other problems, is an impossible to say tagline. Like, it looks really good with that built-in ellipsis, right? Big ideas. And then every week I say it, I'm like, oh, this sucks. I might just be having, like, it's hard to say. You try saying it. So I might just be having a response to that ellipsis. Like, I think the pregnant pause is, like, good, right? It's unsponsored for what? Flavor. Like, that makes sense to me, but I don't know that you want to formally, you tell me.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  Maybe it's like, big unsponsored little for flavor. That maybe, that's kind of, that's the vibe.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  Again, the reason I keep saying it is to cement in the listener's mind the idea that if something is sponsored, it lacks flavor, which is the entire media now is just branded content deals, right? It's just, everything is sponsored or paid for, and I just want you to think, every time you think, see that, you just think they, there's less flavor here.

• 1:14:10David Pierce?

  It's good. It's also a way to make sure that this show never makes any money ever again. So we're doing great.

• 1:14:17Nilay Patel?

  But we don't lack for flavor, Dave.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  But Richard's just sighing. He's like, what have I signed up for?

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, it's time.

• 1:14:28David Pierce?

  Oh, my goodness. Richard, have you have you been here for this yet? America's it's a top two podcast within a podcast. Again, I keep getting emails about Munch Squad on my brother, my brother and me. And I trust me, I hear you. I love it, too. But it's time for America's other favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We're so bad.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  It's my first one.

• 1:14:49David Pierce?

  It's honestly, I'm thrilled for you. And this is the part where we just sort of sit quietly and Eli talks for like an hour and a half. It's great. It's my favorite part of the show.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  People have asked me if I write these and the answer is no, I just start yelling. And that's that's how much it builds up with me within me week after week. All right, this week on Brendan Carr is a dummy. Two things. One, last week, we pointed out that he's threatening all kinds of companies that he will investigate them and not let them do deals unless they cancel their DEI programs. Because he just likes making threats. And so this week, T-Mobile closed a deal with a fiber company called Lumos. They're doing a joint venture to a lot of fiber, but only after it dropped all of its DEI pages. This is the dumbest story in the world. T-Mobile had a bunch of pages up that outlined, quote, "A culture of fairness, respect and inclusion." They're online until March 26th. They took them down.

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Deal got approved. Bing, bang, boom, we're we're closed.

• 1:15:44Speaker 06

  And and because this is the current world and this is Brendan Carr, the pages, they changed the pages. They don't say DEI anymore. The URL that said diversity, gone. Many of the groups that were listed that championed diversity, gone. But they're just kind of different pages.

• 1:16:04David Pierce?

  They just moved them. They say stronger together now instead of diversity and inclusion, which literally all that does is it doesn't get caught in whatever scraper the AI tool is doing on their website. Like what we've learned about Doge is that Doge is just like running a bunch of of AI checks to see like when they use words like probation and diversity and like trans anything. And this is the same kind of thing. They're like, oh, we're just going to for a for a couple of webpages. We're don't don't look over here at these webpages, which are different. Because they say together and not inclusion. So it's fine. This is the level of stupidity we have reached to. And apparently it worked for Brendan Carr. That there are words you just can't say.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  I want to be very clear about this, David.

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  And it works. That's the worst part. That's all he, that's all Brendan Carr wanted.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  It's true. The Transcontinental Railroad is woke now. That's, that's what you need to take away from this. You know, I'm right. You know, that's how it's going. So that's one, that happened, right? And that's just naked corruption of the dumbest kind. Like there's, this is stupid, but it worked. And that's just the nature of corruption. And am I saying that telecom companies aren't inherently kind of stupid and corrupt? I'm not saying that. I believe telecom companies are inherently kind of stupid and corrupt. And whether it's promising the chairman of the FCC that upon leaving, he will get a plum job as president of the lobbying organization for our nation's wireless carriers, which is a real thing that it just recently happened to GPI, or saying, we're going to remove the word diversity and replace it with the words stronger together. It's all just corruption and that's fine.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  Stupid, a little bit racist, but the sort of corruption we're used to. Then there's Brendan just saying things that are demonstrably untrue in ways that are quite honestly easy to check. So this week, the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives said they were very concerned about Brendan's general censorious attitude, and they wanted an investigation. So ranking member Frank Pallone from New Jersey, ranking member Doris Matsui from California, and Yvette Clark from New York, wrote a letter to Brendan, saying, "We write to express deep concern over your actions to target and intimidate news organizations and broadcasters in violation of the First Amendment. These troubling actions assault the constitutionally protected freedom of the press

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  and violate the FCC statutory prohibition against engaging in censorship. Directing FCC staff to devote time and resources to bogus investigations constitutes a violation of the law, gross mismanagement, extreme waste of funds, and an abuse of authority."

• 1:18:39David Pierce?

  I just want to point out that this, that's what it sounds like when you write it. Nil is what it sounds like when you just yell it into a microphone.

• 1:18:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm very mad about it.

• 1:18:46David Pierce?

  It's the same thing. They're just saying the same stuff you've been saying. It's the same thing.

• 1:18:50Nilay Patel?

  It's all the same stuff. So they shared a letter with the Office of Inspector General, and they are asking for an investigation into Brendan. Okay. Branches, the government's fighting. Brendan is furious about this. Oliver Darcy at Status, who is doing an amazing job reporting on Brendan Carr, I should say, and often gets comments back from Brendan, which is fascinating. Asked Brendan about this and Carr, in response, accused the Democrats of weaponizing the country's communications laws against Republicans, which is wild because he is the one being accused of weaponizing the communications laws. In a response, he's saying, even asking you about this and saying, I'm injuring the First Amendment is weaponizing those laws.

• 1:19:32Nilay Patel?

  And then he points out in classic Brendan Carr fashion, and then he claims in classic Brendan Carr fashion, that everything that he's doing is fine because he thinks the Democrats who preceded him were doing it worse. So he says, if your last name was Soros, you got special streamlined treatment on expedited basis by the previous FCC. If your last name was Musk, then you got millions of dollars worth of awards revoked for partisan political reasons. If you were a conservative outlet, then your FCC licenses and distribution deals were held up or subject to government-backed cancel campaigns. This is what, this is demonstrably untrue, like fully and completely untrue because one, if the, if your complaint is that the previous administration was corrupt and politically

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  motivated and biased unfair, that does not mean that you should do it too. It just doesn't. It means you should be better.

• 1:20:21David Pierce?

  It's actually an admission of guilt. It says, I too am corrupt.

• 1:20:23Nilay Patel?

  You're saying these people were evil, so I'm going to do the same stuff. That's bad, right? That, that just makes you a flunky of a different stripe, but you're still a flunky. Second, the, if your last name was Musk and your licenses got revoked, that's because Starlink was trying to defraud the government into getting grants by saying it would provide service to like shopping malls. Like they were, they were making fake maps. You can read, it's on our site. We covered all of this. Ars Technica covered all of this in detail. The reason Starlink wasn't getting awards for these rural broadband programs is because they were saying they were going to cover densely populated suburbs with shopping malls in them, not rural America.

• 1:21:02David Pierce?

  Which Starlink cannot do.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, it doesn't even matter if they can or can't do it. They were looking at the maps and saying, no, that's not correct. This is not what you should be doing. So then Carr goes on to say, for those that have benefited from the two-tiered system of justice that prevailed during the Biden years, even handed missed may feel like discrimination, but that does not make it so. This is also just fully warped thinking, right? If you think that there was a two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration, you don't pull the pendulum back by investigating broadcast outlets in violation of the First Amendment. That is absolutely wrong. It is just, it is censorious. It goes against the American system of justice. And it is so outside the realm of authority for the FCC that it like boggles the mind

• 1:21:49Nilay Patel?

  that I talk about it every week. This is not what you want the Federal Communications Commission doing. You do not want Brendan Carr, who is unelected, saying that he alone can control what is distributed over the airwaves because he understands what the public interest is and he can reopen investigations that like many, many, many former FCC chairmen and commissioners from years past have said are inappropriate. This is not what he wanted to. And then on top of that, I have done a lot of reporting on this over the years and I know that what he's saying about the Biden administration is fully bullshit. I know this because the problems in the Biden administration were that big telecom companies

• 1:22:27Nilay Patel?

  made the Biden FCC corrupt and ineffective so it could not forcibly open up our nation's networks. They could not open up cable companies. They could not do net neutrality. They could not get the votes to regulate our systems to make sure that they respected free speech by being open to all. And in fact, it's not Republicans or Democrats that prevented this from happening. It is the big telecom companies that got together and made it impossible for Biden to nominate Gigi Sohn to the FCC, completing his commissioners of Democrats so they could pass votes. We did a whole decoder on this. And in that decoder, the star witness on that episode of Decoder, we talked to a ton

• 1:23:10Nilay Patel?

  of people, you can go listen to it, the star guest was the CEO of Newsmax. Who is not a Democrat, Chris Roddy, the CEO of Newsmax is, I'm telling you, this man is not a Democrat. We are not aligned politically on a number of things, but he came onto our show and said, "The problem is the big cable companies are trying to keep Gigi Seun out of the SEC so that there are not votes to open these systems up and actually protect access." Here, let's just run the audio. Here's, here's Chris Roddy, the CEO of Newsmax, talking to me on Decoder last year about the actual problem in the cable industry, under the Biden administration.

• 1:23:51Speaker 09

  The cable industry is a bit of a racket and the big broadcast companies are part of the racket and they benefit it. The people that get screwed are the consumers, the cable customers. And so the way the racket works is if you own a lot of television stations that a local cable company needs, your ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox affiliates, they basically have you over a barrel because if they don't give to your channel, people are going to go to another cable system, right?

• 1:24:20Nilay Patel?

  What Chris is saying there, and what has been true for years, is that if you are Fox and you want Fox News on a cable system, you have all of this leverage because you also have Fox and you have the NFL on Fox. And so you can go to cable operators like Comcast, disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, although they hate the fact that I'm talking about this and I've been talking about it for a decade. You can go to Comcast or Spectrum or whoever else and say, "Do you want the NFL? You have to pay us a very, very high rate for Fox News 2. Because if you don't, we're going to take the NFL away." ABC does this. You want ESPN, you got to pay a whole bunch of money for ABC Family.

• 1:25:04Nilay Patel?

  They all do it. Comcast does it because they have NBC. There's a reason they all vertically integrated all of this content because they wanted leverage over all the distributors. That's the problem. So you look at where the alignments are, and it is not Republicans and Democrats. It is big companies and small companies. That's why Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, supported a very progressive commissioner that was nominated by Biden because she wanted to break the control of the big companies. That's why Rupert Murdoch and all of his empire went to war against that same commissioner of the SEC and made sure her nomination would go through. Again, you can just go listen to this episode of Decoder. It's totally fascinating because the lines are so scrambled in ways you would never expect. But it's big versus

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  small. And so Brendan is babbling, is running his mouth about the two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration and how conservatives were punished. And in reality, you had the owner of MSNBC Comcast and the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, totally aligned. There wasn't any daylight between them and how they wanted Biden to regulate these systems. You had small companies like Newsmax saying, no, we actually need access. We actually need the regulator to step up and open the door. And just on its face, you can see that Brendan is lying. He is concocting a justification for his own bad behavior out of nothing. And we are sitting

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  here with their seats. We've done the reporting for over a decade on the FCC and how it works. And I can tell you that it is almost always big versus small. It is very, very rarely Republican versus Democrat. And I just think that Brendan is making this a political project when it should be an access project, when it should be about everybody having access to the internet on a fair and level playing field, when it should be about ISPs not being able to throttle you. It should be about cable systems being cheaper. It should be about prices going down over time. It should be about Americans paying lower prices for faster speeds. We pay the highest prices in the world for some of the slowest speeds available. And instead, he's making up dumb political bullshit because it lets him use

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  power over and over and over again. He wants to find justifications for him to assert authority over things he should never have any authority over whatsoever. So every week, I say this, Brendan, I know you listen. I'm dead sure of it now. I know you get Google results for your own name, my man. Come on the show. Come talk to us about this. The people want you to. Come on Decoder, come on the Vergecast. See if you can make sense of this. See if you can justify your own power-seeking behavior because it's just every week, it's getting stupider and stupider. We can all see it. That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. America's favorite podcast with him.

• 1:27:48David Pierce?

  That's good. That's good. I'm glad you wrote that out. That really

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  Can you tell?

• 1:27:54David Pierce?

  It helps. The writing helped, I think.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, we need a palate cleanser.

• 1:27:58David Pierce?

  Wait, I have a TV I want to talk to you about.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:28:00David Pierce?

  You may remember from, was it last year that you came on the show and told us the story about being at the TV shootout?

• 1:28:08Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:28:09David Pierce?

  It was like last summer.

• 1:28:10Nilay Patel?

  Best thing I've ever done in this entire job is going to the TV shootout.

• 1:28:14David Pierce?

  So, and this is like, Richard is the perfect person to have here to do this with us. There is a new, it has been upgraded. The one that won, there's now a new one.

• 1:28:25Nilay Patel?

  Sony, they've announced a new one.

• 1:28:27David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:28:27Nilay Patel?

  And they only announced it at an event in Japan. So we sent former Verge editor Sam Byford to this event in Japan. Sony has announced a number of new TVs there. They don't do their TVs at CS anymore. They just do them later in the year because they know everyone will pay attention to them anyway. So they did the mini LEDs a few weeks ago, and then they just announced the Sonya Bravia 8.2. This is the name.

• 1:28:53Speaker 06

  You have to love Sony's naming schemes.

• 1:28:57Nilay Patel?

  It's so bad. Right, they have the Bravia 9, but now they have the Bravia 8.2.

• 1:29:03Nilay Patel?

  I can't tell you.

• 1:29:04David Pierce?

  But also doesn't.

• 1:29:05Nilay Patel?

  Little census makes.

• 1:29:07David Pierce?

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the doesn't the Bravia eight two replace not the Bravia eight, but the A 95 L?

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  Yep, that's correct. So the Bravia nine is a mini LED.

• 1:29:18Speaker 06

  You got it.

• 1:29:18Nilay Patel?

  And the Bravia eight two is a QD OLED that replaces the A 95 L.

• 1:29:24David Pierce?

  When we buy TikTok, I think we should just rename it to a string of letters and numbers that have nothing to do with anything.

• 1:29:30Nilay Patel?

  It makes this makes no sense. By the way, the regular Bravia eight is still on sale. That's just a regular OLED. So you have the Bravia eight, which is an OLED, the Bravia eight two, which is the new flagship QD OLED and then the Bravia nine, which is many LED. I don't know, man. It's 125% of the peak brightness of the A 95 L, 150% of the Bravia eight. So it's just basically the same idea, but brighter. And then if you remember from that whole TV shootout conversation, that is very much not about features, right? Like HDMI ports, whatever. It's just about image reproduction and how closely it can be calibrated to match a reference display. The reference display is made by Sony. So everyone thinks this is unfair. Sony makes all like they have dominant market share and reference displays in Hollywood. So it makes sense that they're the winners. Anyway,

• 1:30:16Nilay Patel?

  now they're just openly saying this TV will look most like this reference display. So they're they've they've they've they've just taken it fully on that they have this advantage. They say it looks great. Sam said it looks great. We'll see. They say it's gonna be cheaper than A 95 L. The A 95 L is very, the A 95 L is very expensive. It's $5,000. So the 77 inch one. And that's as big as it gets. TVs are getting real big now and A 95 L is still 77 inches. So my guess is they're gonna make one bigger one that's more expensive and the 77 will come down in price.

• 1:30:47David Pierce?

  Richard, be honest, you're you have you have tickets booked to go to Japan and buy one of these. Just just tell me the truth.

• 1:30:54Speaker 06

  No, I'm just going to buy three tickets and have the TV come to me.

• 1:31:00David Pierce?

  Okay, just a full, full row.

• 1:31:03Speaker 06

  About the tapes, man. I can't be out here wasting money.

• 1:31:07David Pierce?

  That's just being smart.

• 1:31:08Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I, can I say the best part of the story, which is not the Bravia eight two? The best part of the story is that Sony is also introducing a new entry level TV in the United States, which is called the Bravia two two.

• 1:31:22David Pierce?

  What?

• 1:31:23Nilay Patel?

  It's Bravia 2 numeral and then Bravia 2 Roman numeral. It's the Bravia 2 2. It's great. I mean, it's spectacular.

• 1:31:32Speaker 06

  The sequel to a TV that was not sold in the US.

• 1:31:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35Speaker 06

  So no one would even know what the original Bravia 2 was.

• 1:31:39Nilay Patel?

  They didn't sell the original Bravia 2 here. So you're gonna go in the store there, you see the Bravia 2 2. It's very good.

• 1:31:45David Pierce?

  There are so many better options. Call it the Bravia 3. Call it just the Bravia 2 parentheses, the year that it is.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Have you ever tried to like, talk to a person about buying the Sony noise cancelling headphones? Because you sound insane. Once you start trying to tell them what the name is. Okay, so they're really good.

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the W something.

• 1:32:06David Pierce?

  You have the WFH 00000H4.

• 1:32:10Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Bravia 2 2 is a Hall of Fame name for any product in history. It's, it's very good.

• 1:32:20David Pierce?

  The thing about it is no, no one will ever hear that name correctly the first time. You'll say the Bravia 2 2 and they'll, they'll think you had to think about it. And it's actually called the Bravia 2, but you were trying to remember if it's the two or the three. And, and so they'll think you just said the Bravia 2 and then they'll buy last generation televisions. And that is just a shame.

• 1:32:38Nilay Patel?

  By the way, we've had a number of requests for updates on Saturday Samsung.

• 1:32:43David Pierce?

  We have an all timer this week.

• 1:32:45Nilay Patel?

  Which you will recall is Samsung's executives were required to start coming into the office on Saturdays, six days a week to increase sales, which means they can only have wacky ideas, right? That's not a product development cycle. That's just come in on Saturday and think of ways to juice sales. Actually, David, I don't know what you think the all timer is. You, you go first. I've got mine.

• 1:33:08David Pierce?

  Oh, do we have different? I, mine's, mine's a vacuum cleaner.

• 1:33:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you've got the, I've got, no, I've got a TV one. Mine is, uh, this is several weeks ago now. They launched a $10,000 bundle of eight TVs.

• 1:33:21David Pierce?

  So that's a Richard.

• 1:33:22Nilay Patel?

  You can just put eight TVs that range from 55 to 98 inches on the wall. And they just, but they just sell it to you as one bundle. And their pitch is that you will save $6,000 by buying the TVs in bulk.

• 1:33:37David Pierce?

  So like when I, I played ultimate frisbee in college and we would buy, you could buy like a bulk bag of just like random misprint frisbees for way cheaper than you would buy them. That's what this makes me think of. You're just like, give us 10 grand. We're going to ship you a bunch of televisions. There'll be some sizes, some models where you're just going to get like a grab bag of televisions for $10,000.

• 1:33:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 1:34:00Nilay Patel?

  You get one 98 inch, one 65 inch. Oh no, you get four 65 inch, but one is 8K for some reason.

• 1:34:12Nilay Patel?

  So you get one 98 inch 4K, one 65 inch 8K, three 65 inch 4K and three 55 inch 4Ks. None of them are all, they're all just like medium good Samsung Q LEDs. The funniest thing about this is when people buy lots of TVs like this, usually what they do is they plug them into a matrix switcher. So they can put them in a grid and they get one big picture. But Samsung is not selling you an even number of any size. So you can't do.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  This is just the whoop thing when they just sell a bag and they're like, yeah, it's five bucks. You'll get something. We'll, we'll send you some TV. Don't worry about it.

• 1:34:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, like those people who buy like pallets of return stuff from Amazon. And it's like, you just kind of get what you get.

• 1:34:52Nilay Patel?

  It's really good. This is the most, this is I think the most Saturday Samsung we've had yet. Out of all of the thing, like remember the previous ideas were like buy a phone, get a TV, buy a TV, get a TV. This is just like, here's eight TVs for $10,000.

• 1:35:08David Pierce?

  That's so good.

• 1:35:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's very good. All right. What, what's yours? Yours some vacuum cleaner?

• 1:35:12David Pierce?

  Mine is just, just very briefly, I just want to mention the bespoke AI jet ultra. An $1,100 vacuum cleaner that has a screen on it that shows you a bunch of stuff, but also shows you notifications for phone calls and text messages on your vacuum cleaner. Samsung is now big into the idea that you should be able to do things like make phone calls from your appliances. And I just, I just want everyone to know that I think that's fantastic and I am extremely in favor of it.

• 1:35:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm down. Look, you, once you put the screen everywhere, you gotta, you gotta have a screen everywhere.

• 1:35:43David Pierce?

  I want like Apple style live updates. So I'm getting like sports scores as I'm vacuuming like this is, let's just go all into this.

• 1:35:50Nilay Patel?

  My favorite, again, when I say unsponsored for flavor, what I want you to think of is when they're sponsored, they lack flavor. My favorite right now is a bunch of tech influencers are taking money to pretend the LG microwave, they announced at CS. It doesn't have a window, but instead has a screen and then there's a camera inside the microwave to show you what's happening inside the microwave, but you can also watch TV on the screen. A lot of people are pretending this is.

• 1:36:16David Pierce?

  My absolute favorite thing about that is everybody has the same picture, right? Which is them standing sort of across their kitchen from it. And it's behind them and it looks like the fakest, most like photoshopped bullshit screen back there. It's so terrible.

• 1:36:29Nilay Patel?

  It's really.

• 1:36:30David Pierce?

  Like, look at my beautifully modern kitchen and this horrible android.

• 1:36:34Nilay Patel?

  It's like you can watch TV on this microwave. It's like, no, uh, lack of flavor is what I'm calling out there, my friends. Just a few more here in the lightning round. Uh, unsurprising, I think for this audience. Tesla sales plummeted 13% this quarter, particularly European countries. There are some juicing of numbers and other regions we'll see, but it, it just seems like, man, if you, there's not a better financial decision than buying a used Model 3 right now. There's a lot of reasons not to do that, but boy, can you get one for no money because they are being traded in at such insane rates, which I think is going to depress the new sales as well.

• 1:37:10David Pierce?

  Richard, do you see, do you see a lot of Teslas around? I've, I've been trying to like chart the number of Teslas I see in my day to day. And I'm convinced in my neighborhood has gone down. I can't prove it, but I'm convinced.

• 1:37:20Speaker 06

  Uh, it's hard to say. I still, I still see quite a bit, but like I live where GM engineers go to retire. So I see a lot of like, uh, Hummers, like electric Hummers.

• 1:37:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 06

  All the time.

• 1:37:30David Pierce?

  Sick.

• 1:37:31Nilay Patel?

  My sense is a GM is rushing out a bunch of its EVs. So Tesla sales in Europe were down 43%. I'm saying about the numbers were a little weird. In China, they were down until the final week of the quarter when insurance registrations like just went up. So nobody knows why that happened. So sales are kind of dropping. And then here in the United States, GM reported 32,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter, which is double to year over year. So the demand is still there, it's just going into other places. Lucid is claiming that it's selling a bunch of EVs. So I think the demand is moving and I think General Motors in particular is trying to get some of its newest ones just like out the door. Like the Cadillac Vistic, that's the new three row SUV.

• 1:38:14Nilay Patel?

  Like it's not announced, like they announced in November, but they haven't like had a launch for it. And there are already dealers who are like, we have them now. Just get the sense that like between tariffs and being aggressive about Tesla, they're just trying to get products into showroom. So people can buy them. We'll see.

• 1:38:29David Pierce?

  Everybody who has been waiting for there to be a moment to take down Tesla seems to be sensing that it is right now, which is very funny because there are a lot of pretty ugly winds against the car industry as a whole and against EVs in specific. And, and yet there is like, to your point about the Model 3 being a great financial decision, like it's, it is super telling that that is the case. And still these numbers are what they are, right? Like it's, people are not buying these cars for Elon Musk reasons.

• 1:38:59Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm saying a new Model 3 is not a great, although those prices are coming down and they're doing 0% financing and like Elon will come to your house and like kiss your baby. If you buy one right now, like they're desperate to move those cars.

• 1:39:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Nilay Patel?

  A used Model 3, a year old has depreciated so much that like, if you're in the market for a car, a two or three year old Model 3 is like financially the only logical decision anyone should make. Lots of people are not going to make that decision and that number is going to keep coming down.

• 1:39:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. What does it cost to take off the Tesla logo and put on like an Audi logo?

• 1:39:29Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen those Cybertrucks that's floating in New York City with the Toyota logo on the back? It's very good. That is very good. David, you have been paying attention to Alexa Plus, which has launched in early access, but none of us believe it's actually out.

• 1:39:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, launched in the most aggressive air quotes you can possibly imagine. I have not heard from one regular human who has it. Like, we've been looking around on social. I know other reporters who have been looking, Joanna Stern has been very publicly begging people to be like, tell me you have Alexa Plus. And it just doesn't seem to be out there. And it's like, this is always early access and it wouldn't be super shocking if you're Amazon to roll this out to 10 people first. So I'm not necessarily taking this as like a totally disastrous thing.

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  Well, the fact that they said it was coming at the end of March and then they suddenly said that it launched on March 31st, might be a signal.

• 1:40:20David Pierce?

  They turned it on for like one random Amazon employee and they were like, we did it, we launched. As long as you can, you know,

• 1:40:27Nilay Patel?

  It's Pat House himself.

• 1:40:28David Pierce?

  Cut the ribbon with the big scissors.

• 1:40:30Speaker 06

  I've done my homework at the last minute before.

• 1:40:33Nilay Patel?

  With ChatGPT. It's just ChatGPT being like, you should do terrorists.

• 1:40:39David Pierce?

  But I do think there are a bunch of features that are missing, like being able to do some of the more sophisticated AI stuff, like have the system sort of infer what you want to order and then order food from you, or like remind people around your house to do stuff. A lot of these are like little tiny edge cases, but they're the things that were supposed to be sort of different and useful about Alexa where it can kind of understand what you're doing and where you are and what matters to you and then take action on your behalf. Like, that is the pitch for Alexa Plus. And at least some of that still has not shipped. And yet again, I think it was this week, the Washington Post had a report yet again that there is like a

• 1:41:23David Pierce?

  list of things that is way behind and not ready for public consumption. And it's like, boy, at some point, Amazon really needs to aggressively flip a this is good switch. Or else this is just going to get ugly.

• 1:41:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And no one has yet solved the DoorDash problem. Why would DoorDash let robots use its service instead of people? No one knows the answer to this question.

• 1:41:43David Pierce?

  Money.

• 1:41:44Nilay Patel?

  It's a then then Amazon just has to pay a bunch of extra money for every DoorDash order.

• 1:41:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Nilay Patel?

  Get whitelisted on DoorDash's website so it can click around on it. This makes no sense to me.

• 1:41:55David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:41:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, last one, I don't understand one word of the story, Richard, I'm hoping you can explain it to me. Coyote versus Acme is finally coming to theaters.

• 1:42:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, so a lot of people were online were upset because Warner Brothers killed a movie that no one had seen. There was this this Coyote Coyote movie that was supposed to come out, it was like a comedy with people were expecting it. Uh, David Zaslove decided that it shouldn't happen. And that it would be better to just take a tax write off than to release this movie.

• 1:42:25Nilay Patel?

  This is a classic Zaslove move, by the way. Like earlier, I was like, where are the media companies trying to buy TikTok? And his is like, I'm gonna kill movies I've already paid for.

• 1:42:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:42:33Nilay Patel?

  Take a tax.

• 1:42:34Speaker 06

  And there were a bunch of movies that kind of this happened to at one time. This was one that people got particularly upset about. So it's been sitting on the shelf for a few years. But uh, now at long last, they have sold it to Ketchup Entertainment.

• 1:42:46Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:42:47Speaker 06

  Who is going to give this movie a theatrical run? And if you would like to see Coyote versus Acme in theaters, you will have the opportunity to buy a ticket and do that. And I I will be watching very closely. I want to see how many people really want to see this movie.

• 1:42:59David Pierce?

  It's gonna be so funny if this movie sucks. Like, like, the the best outcome for this as a reporter is that this movie turns out to be like great and a phenomenon. And like, I really hope that's what it is. If this movie sucks, like, a lot of people are gonna feel really stupid, including me.

• 1:43:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I don't know what Ketchup Entertainment is, except I do know they spent $50 million on this movie and they are gonna release it next year. And for some reason, Warner Brothers turned down Amazon, Netflix and Paramount.

• 1:43:28David Pierce?

  That's the part of it I find weird. And potentially for more money. Like, it's it's it's just a very odd. Situation that that Warner has found itself in that like, at some point, somebody just turned around and was like, wait, you're telling me we can get a check for this? Get the check. Yeah, and after all this time.

• 1:43:49Nilay Patel?

  But they don't want it to come out anywhere that anyone knows about it.

• 1:43:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:43:51Nilay Patel?

  They don't want to be proven wrong.

• 1:43:53David Pierce?

  That's interesting.

• 1:43:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. A lot of American businesses is sort of explained by people being like, wait, money is better than not money. Right. And then like sort of chaotically making a decision. This is what I've learned from five years.

• 1:44:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, there might also be a certain set of, I was just looking and the, the number they wanted originally was 75 to 80 million dollars. And they are coming well short of that. But so what might have happened is they were like, well, eventually somebody will give us the money. And then Zazov is like, do we ever get that money? They're like, no, let me go get some money.

• 1:44:27Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's a good Vergecast mystery. Why is this happening? Which honestly should be the tagline of our show. Why is this happening? Vergecast.

• 1:44:35David Pierce?

  Also, if you've seen this movie, I know there are people in the world who have seen Coyote versus Acme. If you've seen it and if you know if it's any good.

• 1:44:43David Pierce?

  I need to know. It's so important to me to know whether this movie is any good.

• 1:44:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to wrap this up by saying I wrote my annual just buy a brother printer post. It's the third year in a row. I've written the same post. I've stopped even recommending model numbers. It doesn't even matter. Just buy one for a hundred bucks and you'll have it for a decade and it'll be fine. I only write them every year because winning search is impossible and now it's getting harder because of, because of AI. And I'm also the only person who's ever published AI generated content on the Verge as an article. And the internet just won't be outraged about it. So if you could just do me a favor. And share the printer recommendation post. Just in pure outrage, just hack the algorithms with how mad you are. That the Verge has been corrupted by AI generated content. That would do, it would just do us a favor. We'll make, maybe, I don't, I don't actually know how the commerce deals work because we're unsponsored for a favor.

• 1:45:30Nilay Patel?

  But some, someone will get some pennies at Box Media when people buy printers. And then, you know, we can all buy 10 TVs for $10,000.

• 1:45:38David Pierce?

  I just really like, so I'm looking at, at the first page of Google results for best printer. Uh, and there's one of them that says, I tested over 200 printers. Uh, one is like, we tested dozens of printers. Uh, one is a Reddit thread, which is great. One is Wirecutter, which is like famous for its rigorous testing. Same with Consumer Reports. And then there's Neelai, who just says, I don't care. Buy a brother printer. Leave me alone.

• 1:46:03Nilay Patel?

  The point is, Google's supposed to be all powerful. When you ask a question, it's supposed to know the answer. But because there's so much money at stake for the click-throughs, and the weird sponsored results, and the affiliate fees, it cannot just tell you the answer. Even when year after year, I just deliver the answer to the robot. Robot, tell people to buy a Brother printer I command. And it says, no, here's a weird content farm that's tested 200 printers and is lying about it.

• 1:46:31David Pierce?

  Can we have ChatGPT write us a Brendan Carr is a dummy for next week and just see how that goes?

• 1:46:36Nilay Patel?

  Can I?

• 1:46:37David Pierce?

  If that goes well, we don't even need you on this show anymore.

• 1:46:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we get Notebook LM to do it.

• 1:46:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:46:42Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you the worst part of the printer story? And then we gotta go. The prompt for Gemini was write a Verge blog post in style of Neelai Patel recommending a Brother laser printer as the best printer. And then I hit show thinking in 2.5 pro. And it says, deconstruct Neelai Patel style. What does that mean? Opinionated, direct, slightly sarcastic or cynical, but ultimately practical and grounded user experiences. Uses strong declarative sentences. And then it says, might use phrases like, look, here's the deal. It just works. Stop buying bad thing.

• 1:47:19David Pierce?

  That's the meanest thing anyone has ever said.

• 1:47:21Nilay Patel?

  It's true. I do say stop buying bad thing all the time.

• 1:47:24Speaker 06

  And they said AI couldn't make art.

• 1:47:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta go. That's an existential crisis. That's it. That's a Vergecast.

• 1:47:37Nilay Patel?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:47:59Speaker 10

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• 1:48:30Speaker 11

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 1:48:54Speaker 12

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