The Vergecast - The TikTok ban, and what comes next

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

In five days, TikTok as we know it could be finished in the US. The Verge's Lauren Feiner joins the show to discuss last week's Supreme Court arguments over the ban, why things don't look good for TikTok, and what's likely to happen in the next five days. After that, Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor talks about the state of the gadget inventor, and what it means to be part of the creator economy in 2025. Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about magic-link logins, and why passwords remain such a disaster. Further reading: TikTok’s last stand: Supreme Court weighs ban as deadline looms TikTok still seems headed for a ban after its Supreme Court arguments What it will take for TikTok to survive in the US Kickstarter is adding the ability to collect money indefinitely Kickstarter’s CEO on why he doesn’t think the company will only do crowdfunding forever Passkeys might really kill passwords Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of crowdfunded socks. I'm your friend David Pierce, and it is 5.30 in the morning, and I am in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport on my way home from CES. It's really fun CES this year, actually. It wasn't like the newsiest or splashiest CES of all time, but AI was everywhere, even though no one knows what to do with AI. There were tons of wearables. The health tech I actually thought was really interesting. Pool robots, for some reason, were absolutely everywhere. I don't, know how much interesting technology there is in the pool robot space. If you're into that, let me know. I'd love to hear it.

But they were absolutely everywhere. Super fun show. And by the way, thank you to everybody who came out to our live Vergecasts at CES. It was super fun just to get to hang out with all of you and talk about tech and CES and all of our feelings about everything. We're going to do more shows like that too. So if you miss this one, keep an eye out because we want to do more live stuff. It's just fun getting to do this with all of you guys.

For now, we have some CES adjacent stuff to talk about, I would say. We're going to do two things on today's show. First, we're going to talk to Lauren Finer about the TikTok ban and the looming changes coming at meta and basically the huge social landscape change that feels like it's coming potentially like in the next few days and weeks. It's going to be a really interesting moment in this space, and we're going to talk about it.

Then I'm going to talk to Everett Taylor, who's the CEO of Kickstarter, Kickstarter was at CES last week, but I talked to Everett right before CES about what it means to be Kickstarter right now. I just spent the week talking to startups who are desperately trying to figure out how to make and ship and get products in front of people. And he had some really interesting thoughts on what it means to be a tech creator right now and what it means to make products in 2025 and how this landscape is changing for people who just want to be out there making things and selling them to people. really interesting talking to him about it. I've had sort of mixed feelings about Kickstarter for the whole time I've been covering tech,

and it was fun to process that with some of them. We also have a really fun question from the Vergecast hotline. Lots to get to you this week. It's going to be a really fun show. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just, while I was doing this, walked completely the wrong direction from my gate, and now I have to turn around and not miss my flight.

This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to,

but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it

on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. All right. Let's get into this. So today, if you're listening to this on Tuesday, is January 14th. On January 19th, we will hit the deadline imposed by a bill that says either TikTok has to be divested from bite dance or will be banned in the United States. It's actually not

exactly that simple. And we're going to talk about the ways in which it's not exactly that simple. But it is kind of that simple. TikTok, as we know it, as the thing that you use now, either will or will not still be here in five days. And I think we are getting an increasingly clear sense of which of those two things might actually happen, especially after the bill that originally banned TikTok and would do so on January 19th, was argued in front of the Supreme Court.

We have new information, we have a sense of what's going to happen. I don't think it looks great for TikTok. But let's get into all of what's to come. Lauren Finer has been covering all of this for us and is having an extremely chill beginning to 2025, and she's here now to help us walk through all of it. Lauren Feiner, welcome back. Thanks for having me.

Just a super chill way to start the year, I would say. Totally, very, very normal. And it's just going to keep happening. You're going to be on this show a lot in the next few months, so I'm really sorry in advance. Looking forward to it. So let's just rewind the TikTok story very slightly. I mostly want to talk about kind of where we are now

and what's happening in the next week, but give me the sort of Cliff Notes version of how we ended up in the Supreme Court last Friday. Yeah. So if we want to start from like the very beginning, we got to go back a few years to when Donald Trump was president the first time. And he tried to do a TikTok ban through an executive order. That ends up getting shot down in the court because of some kind of legal reasons. Then, you know, everyone kind of forgets about it. There's a committee of in the federal government that's looking into a possible sale or what could be done to mitigate the risks that.

they see of TikTok being owned by a China-based parent company bite dance. But all things considered, everyone kind of forgets that this is happening and we don't really hear that much about it. Then go back to last year and all of a sudden we see all of this momentum around a bill that could ban TikTok. And there'd been things like this before, but none of them have really caught on. And all of a sudden, this one is just like rocketing with support. And we end up seeing a vote, an overwhelming vote in the House to pass this bill after lawmakers got briefed on classified information. And then we see it kind of quickly move through the Senate. And we see broad bipartisan support for this bill. And President Biden quickly signs it into law. So that starts the clock on this ban deadline, which is now January 19th. So that's where we were at. And then, TikTok all along has been fighting this. They've given ByteDance, their parent company has given no indication that they actually would be interested in selling the app. Meanwhile, we've seen

a few kind of people come out of the woodwork saying we would love to buy the app, but it's still not clear that it is for sale or that China would allow it to be for sale, even if BikeDance wanted it to be. And that ends up landing us in the Supreme Court. First, the case went to the D.C. court, which had exclusive jurisdiction per the text of the law, to see this. And they decided, a three-judge panel decided, all three judges said that this is a constitutional law. It does not violate the First Amendment, even though it could result in the ousting of a speech platform. Then TikTok appeals the ruling. We end up in the Supreme Court. And that's where we were on Friday when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this case.

Okay. And it's, I would say it had been barreling toward the Supreme Court kind of from day one, right? Like we, I remember talking about this when the law was first even being debated, that it was like, this is going to end up in front of the Supreme Court in one way or another. So this is kind of, this is the capstone we had been waiting for for months. Exactly. This was a long time coming. This was always going to be a fight between two really fundamental interests of the U.S. government, which are national security and free expression. So this was always kind of barreling toward this place. Okay. And it seems like one of the things that happened a lot in the arguments on Friday

was the question of, is this even a thing about free speech? Which surprised me, and it seemed like surprised some people, that that was even up for debate about, are we even having a conversation about free speech. Walk me through that a little bit. Yeah, I think I honestly wasn't surprised by that framing that we saw by a lot of the justices, because if you just look directly at the text of the law as it's written, it's written to talk about the foreign adversary control of a social media app. So, you know, in the text of the law, it doesn't say anything about speech, about, like, who says what or, you know, what kinds of speech is allowed. It's purely about who is allowed to own a social media app. And, you know, we have like foreign ownership rules over, you know,

certain kinds of other kinds of media. So it's not a wholly different concept, but, you know, obviously no law like this has ever really gotten to this point before. But then how do you square that with the fact that simultaneously, in terms of, Congress and elsewhere, we've been endlessly litigating propaganda on TikTok and the kinds of things that people are seeing. And there were huge arguments. And there's been some suggestion that one of the things that people got in this infamous briefing last year was about pro-Palestine posts on TikTok and the way that the algorithm is shaping public opinion. Like, I understand that it's not in the law, but it feels like if you're looking at this, we have to be talking about content a little bit, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely all things that the court will be thinking about. I think, you know, part of what seems to mitigate that, at least during the arguments for some of the justices, might be that there's both, there's kind of these like two justifications that the government has given for this law, which is both the fear that China could somehow influence bite dance to alter the algorithm that TikTok rely. on to push a certain narrative to American users. And I think a lot of lawmakers saw the very pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as an example of what could be done, whether or not that was actually coming from China or not. And obviously, you know, there's plenty of reasons why, you know, more content might be skewed one way or another on a certain platform based on who's there or whatever. But I think that was an example to them of if China wanted. to use this for nefarious reasons to say, you know, to push like anti-Taiwan content or something

like that, I think that was an example to them of how it might be used. So I think there's that and then there's also the second reasoning that I think might be even more compelling to the Supreme Court about data security. And that is something that I think is less, touches speech a little bit less than, you know, talking about like propaganda and, you you know, how an algorithm could be used to push that kind of content. Okay. Yeah, I do think it seemed interesting. Even just watching the live stream,

this is the most closely I've ever paid attention to a Supreme Court thing. And they do a good job of just kind of calling bullshit on everybody, which is sort of fun that it's like everybody comes up for their turn being told their liars by the nine justices, which is a dynamic. I actually really appreciate it. But it was, there was a certain sense in which the TikTok lawyers come up, they're like, okay, this is about free speech. And they're like, not really. And then the government lawyers come up and they're like, this is about corporate ownership? And they're like, is it?

It's just, it's kind of mind bending. But I guess the idea here is they're just poking at everybody, trying to figure out what makes the most sense to them. Right. Exactly. And I think you hear them kind of asking questions where they're prodding, like, what are the outer bounds of this? If we were to write something like this, what would that mean or how would we do this? So that's a good, sorry, I don't mean interrupt, but you just brought up the thing I want to talk about that I was going to forget about, which is Jeff Bezos, who kept coming up in, I think, the way that you're describing. What, how, why, why did poor Jeff Bezos keep getting pulled into this whole thing? Oh, yeah. Okay.

So Bezos kept being brought up by, in these arguments, as kind of an analogy because obviously Bezos, founder of Amazon, who also now owns the Washington Post. you know, I think what they were using him as kind of a foil or like what would happen if like, you know, there was some kind of influence on this owner of a U.S.-based media company by a foreign adversary. And how is that any different from the ownership structure that we see with TikTok? Like, for example, at one point they talked about what if the Chinese government, had like kidnapped Bezos's children and held them hostage so that he would print propaganda. Like how is that any different than, you know, a media company that's owned by a foreign adversary versus like one that's being and having a lot of influence by foreign adversary through perhaps nefarious means? What is the point of that analogy? Like what's in the, I think it was, was it Sonia Sotomayor who brought that up? I think it was. whoever, whichever justice it was, what is the point of that analogy in this case, do you think?

I think the idea is that, you know, I think there's this question of what's the kind of like the starting point of the influence and the negative influence that Congress wants to root out. Like, is it this like foreign ownership or is it, you know, this influence that could happen on even an American company through some other means? So I think it's kind of trying to find where is that line. Okay. And then I guess as a result, what is the government's role in that moment, right? Like at what point is the government supposed to get involved here seems to be one of the open questions? Right, right. And like who is allowed to print propaganda because of what influence?

And, you know, I think those are kind of the main questions there. Okay. That makes sense. So it seemed like coming out of these arguments, the odds of TikTok winning, and we should talk about what winning means, but the odds of TikTok winning seemed to go down in a lot of people's minds. Was that your read, too? That was my read. I think, you know, I think the only justice who stood out to me as potentially on TikTok side was Justice Scorsuch who seemed to have concerns about, you know, the evidence. in this case and just, you know, I think a lot of the big questions that TikTok has brought up here,

but I don't think we saw a clear, you know, vote of support for TikTok from any of the other justices. I think it's possible they get some more on their side, but I think it was, you know, less clear there. And I think my feeling was that the questioning was harder on TikTok or seemed to be that their thinking was more in line with the U.S. government. But of course, you know, it can be hard to say because they're always talking in hypotheticals and aren't completely tipping their hands. Right. Yeah, I mean, I keep coming back to this question of how real versus theoretical the threat actually is. And it seems like we are still very much in this place of China could do things and TikTok could do things and the algorithm could be doing things. And the most real piece of it, I think, seems to be the data. collection piece. And I wonder if that's why the lawyers continue to focus on it, because that is

one thing that is definitely happening and is provably happening is that TikTok and by extension, bite dance, and by extension, potentially the Chinese government are collecting vast quantities of data about whatever it is, like almost 200 million people in the United States. That seems bad, sure. But I still, I'm so hung up on this thing that like, I think it was in the spring that a bunch of, a bunch of people in Congress got a briefing. that was classified about something, some threat the TikTok posed, and then they came out of that briefing

and voted 50 to zero to ban it. Right? So, like, that seems bad. And then it passed through the house, it passed through this. Like, everybody who has seen something appears to come out on the other side saying, this is a problem.

We have to get rid of TikTok. But we have never been told what that something is, what was in the briefing, what we actually know. And at this point, even the Supreme Court and these lawyers seem to be, arguing mostly in theory as opposed to about like the real stuff that is really happening on the ground right now. Did I miss anything? Are there concrete things going on that we're talking about now that we haven't been in the past?

Or are we still kind of just talking about what TikTok might be? I mean, I think that's true as far as we're publicly aware. I think, you know, we don't really know what was said behind closed doors was sort of classified information. the government does possess. So I don't think we can say for sure that they're not aware of any actual ongoing or, you know, past action that the Chinese government has taken with regards to TikTok. But, you know, I think the way that it's been discussed from people who've seen the information at least doesn't seem to me that there was necessarily that kind of thing going on, although, you know, hard to say, you know, maybe they just can't even allude to it.

Right. But I think it at least seems like their U.S. intelligence officials feel like there is enough possibility there or access for the Chinese government to potentially gain to bite dance and thereby to TikTok and American users that they feel like it's a sufficient enough threat to guard against. And I think maybe feel that why should we wait for an attack to happen to take actions against it? Right. Yeah. And I'm so conflicted on that line of thinking. And it does feel like it underpins a lot of this where it goes back to the what are we even arguing about question. Right. And I think there is either something that we're arguing about that we the public don't yet know about or we are arguing in theory. And it feels it feels very different to me, which one of those it turns out to be. And I'm not sure we're ever going to know. that drives me insane. Yeah. But so the other thing that kept coming up is the question of basically why hasn't TikTok just sold yet?

Like why even go through all of this hassle? Just let somebody write you a check for many tens of billions of dollars and move on with your life. And I think TikTok's argument seems to be that it's not actually that simple, that actually selling isn't really an option. Can you explain that a little bit? What is the argument that selling is not only not a good idea, but sort of impossible? Yeah.

So I think even before that, I would say, you know, any business that's in active litigation, they're not going to want to kind of give the court a sense that, you know, a sale is possible, that, you know, what the government wants them to do, they're going to be able to just do easily. That's fair. If they could just go take the money, they have every reason to not tell you they can do that. That is fair. Right. I think it's in TikTok and bite dance's interest to exhaust every legal route before they really pursue a sale. At the same time, I think TikTok's argument is that this is really not super feasible to just separate from bite dance. There's so much like code intermixed that we're relying on this algorithm, you know, just to extract is like really an arduous task.

It's not as simple as just like, you know, cutting off at one point. So I think that's probably true. You know, a lot of this is like years of technology being built. and I don't think it's going to be that simple just to separate. At the same time, I think another part of the argument is just that China won't sell the app. And I think that's something that the DC circuit said, well, that's not our problem. And, you know, I think basically China is able to block the sale if they want to. They are able to, they consider the algorithm and export.

So they could definitely clamp down on that and say, bite dance, you can. cannot sell this algorithm. Beyond that, you know, groups like Project Liberty are interested in just buying the app without the algorithm, which would mean like, you know, the underlying platform, the user base, the content, things like that. But even then, China could kind of exert its influence on bite dance and say, you can't do that. And, you know, an expert in, you know, kind of China business told me that this is something that might be in the country's interest to hang on to TikTok, both because they have markets in other parts of the country where TikTok could still be active. And they also might be betting, hey, you know, someday maybe TikTok will be allowed back in the U.S.

And then we want to be the ones able to capitalize on that. Yeah, it's a really interesting sort of parallel universe. I don't think it's going to happen. it seems very unlikely to me that TikTok changes hands in some meaningful way in the next five days. I could be wrong. I sort of hope I'm wrong because I think it'll be fascinating to see what that looks like. But one of the things that one of the lawyers is saying in those arguments is that even if you allow TikTok to be sold or exchange hands in some way, it completely changes what TikTok is, which is the thing I find absolutely true. That seems right to me that right under new owners with a new team, with a new code base, you have a thing that looks like TikTok,

but is in every real practical way, not TikTok. And I think the question of what that would look like is just as a person who is interested in products and how we interact with technology, I find that so fascinating because it's never really happened before that like, what if you took the thing everyone cared about and just like chip of thesesed it

and just like changed all the parts, would it still be TikTok? I think the answer is no, but it would be really interesting to find out. But I do find that argument that even if you, if you sort of keep a thing called TikTok alive but change everything about it, it kills TikTok. I kind of think that's right. That feels right to me.

Yeah, I think it's hard to say. I think there is a huge benefit of having 170 million American users on the app already that can't be discounted and all the content that already exists. I mean, that's a lot to work with. Even if you don't have, you know, this like secret sauce algorithm. that FightDance has come up with. I think, you know, I could see how it might be possible to overlay another algorithm in here that is able to do something pretty good. Yeah. No, again, like, this is sort of the future I'm hoping for because I think it would just be fascinating. I would just love to see all of that play out, but I don't think it's going to happen. What do you think is going to happen here?

Like, we have five days from when this episode publishes to the January 19th deadline of some kind. And it seems like to me, the two most likely possibilities are that either the Supreme Court issues some kind of stay. The ban is a day before the Trump inauguration, and it seems reasonably logical that the Supreme Court might say, we're just going to let the next administration decide what it wants to do with this. Or some kind of mix of those things will happen that, like, and you raise this possibility in a story you wrote about it, that like the ban. might happen, but then Trump might come in and decide not to care, but then that has some weird implications. Like, what is your sense of fast forward seven days from now? What do you think's going on? Yeah. So, I mean, my best educated guess is that the ban does go into effect on January 19th, the Supreme Court, lets it happen. And then Trump gets inaugurated the next day. Perhaps he instructs

his DOJ not to enforce it. But probably, Google and Apple still follow it because, as was pointed out in oral arguments, there's a five-year statute of limitation on this law. So if those companies break the law now, they could still be prosecuted for it later on unless, you know, they're able to argue that we were doing this under the, you know, promise that we wouldn't be prosecuted and perhaps they'll win that argument, but it is still risky for those companies. is. And the two sort of practical pieces of the ban, if I have this right, are app stores can't host

the app. So that's like what you're saying where Google and Apple come in. And I think they get fined for every person who downloads the app after the 19th is the idea. Yeah, they get fined $5,000 per user that accesses the app. So that really adds up. Yeah. So, okay, so the theory then is even if you make it through the four years, some new president comes in in four years and says,

Just kidding, I'm going to enforce all four years of $5,000 per person fines. Right. Or Trump gets mad at Tim Cook or Sundup for Chai. Oh, sure. And then he just holds this over his... Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Although, you know, I think, again, what came up during oral arguments is perhaps they'd have some sort of due process claim to say, you know, we were operating under this promise of non-enforcement. And maybe they would win that. But again, risky, given how much they have at stake. in penalties. Okay. Yeah. So best case scenario, that's a giant mess. And then the other sort of practical side of it is U.S. providers are banned from hosting TikTok in any sort of

meaningful way, right? So it's not like illegal to use TikTok after January 19th. It's just that essentially everyone who provides TikTok to you is no longer allowed to. So it has the effect of a ban, but like it's it's not against the law to have TikTok on your phone after January 19th, right? Exactly. And the app is a just going to like poof and disappear from your phone, it'll still be there. Just if you haven't downloaded it, you won't be able to. And if you have downloaded it, it's probably within a few weeks, months, we don't really know. We'll just start to degrade to a point that it becomes basically unusable. Yeah, I think anyone who has ever like had an old iPad and like app by app,

it just sort of stops working because they don't update anymore because they don't get the security updates or whatever. Like that's what'll happen to TikTok. And it'll be sometime, yeah, in the, in the weeks or months afterwards, like every individual feature will just start to break. And then there won't be any more videos. And then that'll just be the end. So, okay, so you think something, something this will happen on January 19th. What do you think happens on, say, January 21st?

Well, we'll stop for an inauguration day because, you know, there's a whole thing that's got to happen. What's your read on what might happen after that? What is kind of the betting favorite for, you know, the week after? I mean, I think it's possible that Trump then does instruct his DOJ not to enforce the law. And then that just, you know, because at least for him, that would give him a chance to say, look, I tried to save TikTok. And if Apple and Google don't want to let you have it, then that's on them. So I think it's possible we see something like that.

and then it's on those companies to decide what risk they're willing to take, I don't know that they're going to be willing to stick their necks out for another company, one with which Google, for example, competes with directly through YouTube shorts. So I think we will see some form of a ban. I think after that point, maybe we see some discussions about a deal. I think maybe Trump, instead of trying to get the deal, not to enforce the law, tries to use it as leverage to extract some kind of deal to end up making TikTok in compliance with the law. But like we were discussing earlier, I think it seems unlikely that

China would actually be willing to sell the app. And that's really the bottom line is it's up to China to decide to sell it. And I think that's a big part of why we haven't seen a sale up to this point. Right. Right. And do you think if you were to tell 12 months ago you that this is the that we've landed on January 14th of 2025, would you have been surprised? I would have been surprised. Yeah, I guess that would have been before this bill was even introduced, I'm pretty sure. I would have been surprised, mostly because not much happens to, you know, to the point of being introduced into law and, you know, going to the Supreme Court in tech policy. You know, we've tried to get much more, you know, basic things passed in tech policy, like privacy legislation, you know,

basic privacy protections. And that has been just held up in Congress for years and years and years. And somehow they were able to get, you know, hundreds of lawmakers behind this law in very short order. And we're now at the point that the Supreme Court is about to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on it, basically. Yeah. If you've trained. me on one thing in the time that I've known you, it's that the speed of this is insane. Yeah. Like, A, the fact that it happened, that it managed to go through this whole process in a relatively

bipartisan way is remarkable given what happens to the tech. But also the fact that we did it in essentially like eight months is just unheard of. Like it's, yeah. And given the fact that we had tried this before and it failed and everybody was mad for a long time, but kind of nothing happened. And then just all of a sudden, like, poof, out of nowhere. and it just runs through this whole process in eight months and might actually finish on January 19th is just procedurally wild. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is extremely unusual for tech policy, for Congress in general. It's very much unprecedented.

Yeah. All right. Before I let you go, let's just talk for five minutes about meta. Sure. We talked a little bit about this on the show last week in Vegas. The moderation changes the company's been making. Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and had a lot of thoughts about it. masculinity. We'll leave that to the side. I think there are a couple of stories we wrote that are very good that I'll put in the show notes that you should go read. But I'm particularly curious for you as a person covering like politics and policy, what do you make of all of these moves that are making? This is happening right before we inaugurate a new president, a new administration is about to come in. What are you seeing in the politicking of all of this? Yeah. So I think I kind of separated into two buckets. in my mind. The first bucket is like, what normally happens when there's a change in administration and businesses realize, all right, we got to figure out how we're going to deal with this for the next four years. So, you know, I think things like having Joel Kaplan take over a lot of their policy operations makes sense. I think that's a very kind of standard move to kind of have someone

who's more in line with the current administration lead your policy office. I also put the everybody donating to the inauguration fund in that same bucket. Totally. You can be cynical about that all you want and you can be mad that companies don't live out their values, whatever. But like that is the most straightforward transactional we would like to be in a room with the new president more often move and every company is going to do it. Right.

I think no one's going to none of these companies are going to just say, you know what, on principle, we're going to sit this one out. I don't think that's really in any of their interests. They want to have a seat at the table. They want to have a good starting point. And, you know, I don't think it's that big of a deal to them to donate a million dollars to these like multibillion dollar corporations. So I think, yeah, that's definitely in the same bucket to me. And I think there's also the fact that Elon Musk is right in Trump's ear. And I think they realize if we're not at the table, then the only person they're hearing from in tech is Elon Musk. And do we want to go along with all the policies that only he is. representing to Trump. So I think they all know, like, we need to, we need to be in play here. And I think a lot of the moves are about that. I think there's also, you know, things like the end of fact-checking

at meta seems like something that maybe Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do for a while. And this is, you know, a good way for him to do it while also kind of gaining some points with Trump. Then I think there's like this other bucket where it's, you know, things that are really geared at Trump in particular, you know, this full Republican sweep across the government that we're going to see take over. And I think, you know, it's a recognition that the times have changed. We have to really change how we go about things. And also maybe perhaps a sense from within Zuckerberg himself that he's felt like we've gone too far or, you know, this isn't the way that I want to run this company. I think we've always seen him kind of say he doesn't want to be the speech police. He doesn't want to decide what's right and wrong.

And I think we've seen that impulse take different iterations, whether it's the oversight board or something else. And now we're seeing it take shape with him trying to not involve fact checkers and to really loosen speech policies on his platforms. And I think the fact checking, again, I think seems like something he wanted to do for a long time. I think the changes to, you know, what sort of speech is allowed on meta platforms is probably like the more overall impactful thing because there's just going to be a wider range of the kinds of speech that you're going to see on those platforms that I think a lot of users probably won't want to see. Yeah, I think one version of his thinking, he being Mark Zuckerberg, that I actually find, if not good, then at least, sort of reasonable is that I think he has spent a long time learning that trying to be out front of speech policy is a total waste of time. That caring about this stuff politically is all downside. And it has gained him nothing. And I think after four years of fighting with the Biden administration

about all the bad things that are happening on meta platforms, he is now just like, you know what, screw it. Like I don't care. There is now a president who doesn't care. Why on earth would I continue to fight this fight. All it does is cause me pain. And I think A, that is a perfectly reasonable place for him to have landed. And B, I think that sucks. Right. Like, that is a real problem for a lot of people on a lot of platforms. But I also kind of understand how he got there. And it, like, it says a lot about our political environment that both of those things can be true at the same time. But I do wonder, like, are we just at a point now where we're just going to stop talking about speech policy because it's just a total waste of everybody's time and energy.

I think that's highly possible. It feels so bleak to say out loud, but I honestly feel like that's where we are. No, I think so. I think, you know, we went from this world of like, you know, oh, social media platforms are so new and, you know, it's just the Wild West and everyone says whatever they want. And then realizing, okay, well, we can't get advertisers on here if we just have actual Nazis here and people don't want to see that stuff. and I think, you know, we went through kind of a big reckoning where we went a lot in the other direction. And then I think the companies realized, oh, actually by actively doing something around speech policies, we're getting a lot of flack because we're both being told we're not going far enough and we're being told we're going too far. And so we can't win. And so I think this is kind of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg throwing up his hand saying like, all right, you know, more than half

country voted for Trump this time. And, you know, whatever. Like, let's like not do something instead of doing something and we'll still get yelled at either way. Right. Yeah. How much do you think this is about Mark Zuckerberg in particular? Because, you know, a lot has been made of Trump's prognostications about throwing Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life. And there has obviously been some tension here. But then on the flip side, I agree with you that watching him sit there with Joe Rogan, it felt like he was unloading a bunch of stuff that has been sitting on his chest for a very long time.

So I guess this is sort of an impossible question to answer, but to what extent do you think this is him playing politics with a new president versus like freed by a new president to just say the things he already believed? And I'm sure it's some of both. Yeah, I definitely think it's both. I think, you know, if you're threatened by Donald Trump with being thrown in jail, you know,

he says a lot of things and maybe he's not actually going to try to do that but maybe he will and I think you would want to get on his good side so I'd imagine that's a factor in his thinking at the same time I think from a lot of recent interviews that

Mark Zuckerberg has done I think there's the sense that he's like sick of apologizing and he's like sick of having always been the bad guy and you know having to try to do the right thing and everyone yells at him no matter what So I think it seems like it is somewhat a personal change in thinking of like, well, I can't please everyone. So let me please the person who has the most power here for the next four years.

Right. Just to be clear, we don't feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg. No. Having to have spent all this time apologizing for the thing that you build, I don't feel that bad. Sorry, buddy. But yeah. And what I wonder is how much fallout that is going to have, right? Because he is like, we are in a moment where it is now really easy to say the things that people have been saying quietly for years loudly. And I think we're starting to see those policies start to shift and we're starting to see that the like forced culture shift back to some things that had started to change but now are being unwound again. And the question of like, is this just Mark, is this just meta or is there a broader sort of Silicon Valley? cultural change coming and all of that, to me, is like one of the big questions of the next few months. And I got the sense, even just talking to folks after that Rogan podcast that, like, I think we're going to look back at that as a moment where like it, somebody said the quiet parts really, really, really, really loud and got away with it.

And now here we are. Yeah. I mean, I think we've definitely seen this culture shift in Silicon Valley. And I think there's always been maybe some underpinning of that and kind of this more libertarian slant that. you know, Silicon Valley tech people have tended to have for a long time. At the same time, I think you always have to look at like what's going to go on with the actual businesses. And if you look at Meta's business, you know, to tie back to the TikTok thing, if TikTok is banned, meta is going to be like almost the only game in town for like these short form videos. Obviously,

there's also YouTube shorts. But, you know, that's a, TikTok is a huge competitor. And then you think about their meta is also involved in a anti-monopoly suit from the FTC. And, you know, part of the thinking behind that is that, you know, meta has become so big and stayed so big because they're one of the only places to go and they've made that. They've made sure that's the case. Those are the allegations that the FTC would have. So I think, you know, are people really going to leave Facebook and Instagram if they just... disagree with these policies. Some might, but probably not enough to really warrant Zuckerberg, you know, doing another 180 on his thinking here. Yeah. Historically speaking, the answer is no.

Some people leave very loudly and most people don't. Exactly. And I think more and more people are getting more and more willing to make that small trade in favor of some of these other things, like hoping that Trump will not try and break your company up, which is a real thing that's sitting in front of Mark Zuckerberg. Exactly. I just want to say that if the end of 2020, is I have to use Instagram Reels exclusively, then this sucks. I want any outcome that does not end with me having to use Instagram Reels. That's all I want. Yeah, I mean, if the end of 2025 is anything like the end of 2024,

I think we don't know what's going to happen this year. Yeah, that's very real. All right, Lauren, thank you as always. I suspect we are going to do this oh so many times. And I suspect at some point you and I are going to be in a court group together this year, and I'm very much looking forward to it. Can't wait. All right.

See ya. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk Kickstarter. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1.1.1. month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. So I was at CES last week, and one of the things that you see at CES is just an infinite supply of new ideas about technology. You also see an infinite supply of copycat ideas about new technology. One of the amazing things about CES is how quickly you see ideas percolate. Somebody invents a thing and then it just spreads like wildfire among every other company

because things are mostly easy to make now. And I think that's fascinating. But to me, it's the new stuff that I think is most interesting. You see so many booze that are just one person standing there with a thing that they made. And they're there to show it to people, but also to try to get funding and to try to make partnerships. And it is very much a trade show in that sense. And so much of what we see in the world comes from like a person standing at a booth with a thing that they made. And those are the people, Kickstarter, has always tried to help. Kickstarter has been around for many years now and has gotten lots of interesting products off the ground.

There's a decent chance that a lot of gadgets that you use start on Kickstarter. The aura ring, I think, was a Kickstarter. Pebble was a Kickstarter. Lots of things have grown really huge out of Kickstarter. But Kickstarter still feels to me, at least, sort of sketchy. It's a platform not for buying things, but for sort of hopefully flinging your money at something on the off chance that you get money back. And I don't know what that means in this world that we're in now, especially in a world where the TikTok shop has made it so easy for everybody to sell everything and has changed the way that people find and discover and shop for products. Instagram is doing something very similar.

And then you have things like Etsy and Wayfair and all these places. If you want to sell something, you're sort of spoiled for. choice. So what does Kickstarter do in this world? What can Kickstarter do for people that it never has before and that no one else is doing now? So Everett Taylor has been the CEO of Kickstarter for a couple of years and has been thinking about all of these questions. And so after spending a week running around looking at weird ideas about the future of technology and people who made things and want to know what to do with them, I just wanted to know what do those people need? How do we help those people? How do people's new ideas get out in the world?

So that's what everyone and I talked about. But the first question I asked him was basically just, in the year 2025, what is Kickstarter? Listen, to me, Kickstarter plays such a special role within the world and the creator economy. I think, you know, we were using the word creator before a lot of people even saw themselves as creators and entrepreneurs. And I think Kickstarter has been consistent in its ability to be a platform that for new ideas, new innovation, creativity. But we've expanded so much beyond what people originally thought Kickstarter was. A lot of times when you thought about Kickstarter to pass, it was like, hey, if I don't have the money, I don't have the resources to create something new or bring something new into the world, then I go to Kickstarter. Kickstarter has evolved to the point where now we still have.

have tons of creators who need to get the money to get things off the ground. But as the company has evolved, now we have, you know, billion dollar multinational corporations, big tech companies, big creators that are well established that values the community and the millions of people within the Kickstarter community where it's like, hey, if you want to launch anything new. No matter where you are in your career, where you are in the life cycle as a creator or entrepreneur or as a business, Kickstarter is a valuable community because we have such incredible backers that want to just support new things. And I think what's beautiful about Kickstarter, especially over the past couple of years, is that we've evolved past just a crowdfunding platform.

We're building new products and features, new business lines to support creators throughout the entire life cycle of, you know, their creator journey or their, their entrepreneurial journey. So it's not just about, hey, you know, before I was like, hey, I'm going to raise some money on Kickstarter. And then it was like, good luck. Now Kickstarter is building this ecosystem of products, features, and services that help you throughout the entire life cycle as a creator. So, okay, I was going to get to this later, but you just brought up one of the things that I most wanted to talk about, which is that shift from, like, I've made a thing and I need some money to make more of them to big established companies launching stuff on Kickstarter.

And candidly, I've always wondered if that's a thing Kickstarter, like, secretly hates that it like breaks the vibe of the platform for like a multinational corporation to come show up and try to crowd fund something. Yeah. But there is something about that that continues to work for these companies. And I've never been able to put my finger on exactly why. And even as we cover it, it's a challenge because like it is that whole gamut of things and it's like, okay, here is a product that's being launched. It could be either like a

dude who made a thing with a 3D printer and now wants to figure out how to go make millions of them. Yeah. But it could also be a company that's done this 20 times and it's perfectly reputable and this thing is going to launch no matter what happens. And I think trying to figure out how Kickstarter sort of can be all of those things is, it has just always been tricky for me as somebody like covering these gadgets and talking about them. Can Kickstarter be all those things to all those people? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think, first of all, I will say this. When larger creators or larger companies with larger audiences come onto the platform,

like it just brings eyes and attention to other things that's on the platform. It grows the community. And so, yes, is there always going to be a subset of people, like, you know, a vocal minority that's like, hey, I don't like that L'Oreal just drops something on Kickstarter or whatever, which they dropped something very awesome. But yes, we're going to continue to have that, right? But the numbers don't lie. The data doesn't lie. Them coming to the platform actually helps smaller creators tremendously

because of the visibility that it brings to the platform and to other projects that are currently on the platform. So we see an uptick for other projects when those big creators or those big companies come to the platform. So it's actually helpful. And the one thing that I think is beautiful, about our community specifically for design and technology and new innovation, they're less attached to, or they tend to be less attached to who is doing it and more about what it is.

Like they just want the coolest, newest, most innovative thing. They're not so tied to who that person is, which is a little bit different when you get to categories like film and music and more creative categories, right? And so to me, I think we can serve both because we have an audience of people that just want really, really cool products, right, at the end of day. It's really interesting. Yeah. And I think one of the questions I think Kickstarter has always tried to reckon with is do we treat these things like sort of transactional businesses or do we treat them like content creators, right? Because like I think it's a really complicated balance, right?

Because on the one hand, it's like I buy, I pre-order a cooler. I expect that cooler to ship to my house, right? That's a pretty straightforward transaction that we're all used to all the time. But if I back a creator that I like, the thing that I ask for in return is more squishy and nebulous. Like, if they don't make anything that's probably bad, but I don't expect complete control and specificity over what they're going to make. So, like, that relationship is just really different. But it also sounds like the way you're saying, the way you're saying, seeing it, maybe it's not that different, that maybe even if I'm buying the cooler and I expect

the cooler to ship to my house, there is still some of that like content creator personality relationship stuff going on. Yeah, I think it depends on the person. David, I think you're a very rational, sensible human being. And so you're looking at it that way where there's other people that come, you know, we talk about this all the time at Kickstarter. When you pledge on Kickstarter, it says right there in bold. Kickstarter is not a store, meaning that, hey, this, we're not guarantee,

guarantee you're going to get this product. We're not guaranteeing you're going to get something that you, like, you know, even close to maybe what you, what you thought you were going to get. This stuff is hard, especially for first time creators and things like that. Over 90% of creators actually do fulfill.

I'm very happy about that. I'm very proud of that number. But it doesn't always happen, right? There's unforeseen things that happen. all the time with creators and entrepreneurs. And so I think there are some backers who are like very just like almost like e-commerce shoppers. Like I see a thing.

I see a product. I want it. I don't care if it's John or Sue or whoever doing it. I don't care about the backstory. I just want that product. And then you have some backers who are like really emotionally invested in that creator, their story, what they're trying to do. I love those backers.

by the way, because that is, I think that's what special about Kickstarter, that, that emotional connection that you have to somebody because doing something new or putting some new out, into the world is a very brave thing to do. And I think those people that emotionally connect to that, I think that's a very beautiful thing. But we have some people like that. And then we also have some people who just want the product. Neither are wrong, right? But there's just two different experiences on the platform. Well, I agree that neither are wrong. but it does seem like on some level you have to pick one, right? Because like you said, you know, 90% of creators ship is both a very high number and a very low number,

kind of all the same time, right? Like if Samsung only shipped 90% of the stuff that they launched, like, that'd be, that's a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and I do feel like I think a thing that I've noticed over the years is I think Kickstarter has gone out of its way to act less and less like a shopping mall. But is that, has that been deliberate on your side? Like if you had to pick one of those two approaches, it seems like you're much happier on the side of like be part of a community working on something together rather than show

up by a thing and don't check on it until it appears at your house in some months. Yeah, but that's because I'm like an empath, and I'm a pro-emipathy person. Sure. Like at the end of the day, I'm an entrepreneur myself. I'm a creator myself. So I understand everything that goes into it. all the unforeseen things that can potentially happen that can derail you. And so for me, I just have that level of empathy and understanding.

There's some projects that don't deliver for a year, sometimes two years, right? Like these things happen. And then you have some more experienced creators who are like, they're cranking these things out like clockwork, right? Like they already have the manufacturing down pat. They know what they're doing, et cetera, et cetera. They'll launch a Kickstarter and will literally release the, product that next week, right? So there's different types of creators on the platform, but I do think what makes Kickstarter fundamentally different from, you know, an Amazon or someone else like that in

e-commerce is that these are people who are genuinely trying to get an idea out there. And I do think that emotional connection in that sense of community in coming together is really special. And I think that's why also the bigger corporations still like to launch. on Kickstarter because the people are so passionate and they'll give you that feedback and they'll be real with you. And they'll also, if they feel very happy with what you do, they will be advocates for that product and that brand. I think it first starts with the creator. I know we just talked about the whole thing about like, you know, there are people that treat it more like e-commerce, but I think it always starts with the creator man. Like the creator, their story, their passion,

their drive, how people resonate with their story and whatever they're trying to produce, but also who they are as a person. I tell people all the time, Kickstarter is no cakewalk. Like, people will come on the platform and fail because they think, oh, I just put a project on Kickstarter, and then people are just going to give me money. No, you got to have a true go-to-market strategy. You got to have a plan. You got to have great storytelling.

Okay. So if you're thinking about it that way, right? if you're sort of putting the creator at the center of it, you can, I can sort of imagine a world where very quickly you're like, okay, well, the thing we have to do is build like a content platform for those creators

to make things outside of being sort of specifically project-based. And then it's like two more very small steps and now you're TikTok, right? Like it's like, because this is where everybody has landed, right? Everybody else that is in this space has come at it from the opposite direction, which is we have given creators a place to build an audience. and then we've given those creators ways to sell stuff. And I think in a lot of ways,

that path has sort of ruined those platforms. Like the TikTok shop, at least in my own experience, has made TikTok essentially unusable. It is, I mean, it is. It's like, it's a shopping mall now, and that's fine for what it is, but it is, that is, it is like unrecognizable from what TikTok was before the shop existed.

Yeah. But it works. And so what I wonder for you as the CEO is, like, you've built the second half of that equation already. And I can imagine there's a lot of pressure and good reasons potentially, but also maybe psychotic reasons given the competitive landscape to go the other way and basically be like, okay, how do we become a like creator first platform and do vertical video and like make a thing that gives us all of the power of a creator audience on Kickstarter?

Like is that a path that makes sense? that where you're headed? I mean, well, a couple of things that it makes Kickstarter unique. Number one, we're not a publicly traded company, right? We're a private and we're a public benefit corporation. And so some of these things that these, you know, larger tech companies, the pressure of them to make, you know, billions and billions of more revenue, they're always under pressure. We got to get the stock price up. We got to do this. We got to do that. Kickstarter doesn't have that, right? Like, Kickstarter was profitable in year two of its existence, and we've continued to scale and become bigger and more successful. But we've done things our way.

And we've done things without the pressures of a feeling like we needed to monetize everything. I'm trying to do the things that are the most genuinely impactful to our audience. In my first couple years here, I've been hyper-focused on giving creators, the tools, the products, and the services that they've been asking for Kickstarter for years. So even before even getting to anything like that, we still have a long road. And also, sometimes you've got to understand where your bread is buttered, man, and be really, really great at what you do.

With that being said, one of the things that we're hyper-focused on this year is also backer development, right, and in developing better products and features for our backers. We've been very focused on creators, but now we're like, how can we create a more engaging, sticky experience for backers on the platform? So I'm more focused on that than necessarily, you know, trying to turn Kickstarter into a TikTok, like, you know, a vertical platform or anything like that. There's definitely a world in which Kickstarter could sort of choose to be more actively involved in the,

like, here's how to help. you make stuff process and printing services for people wanting to make content and like that kind of thing. Is that, is that interesting to you? Like, is that a space you think Kickstarter has stuff to do? That's more interesting to me than Kickstarter becoming like TikTok. Okay. To me personally, I think platforms like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and all of that have always played a role in Kickstarter, right, in terms of how people market. We now have our own marketing services, performance marketing services called Kickstarter Performance, which is like chilling it,

where we're utilizing those platforms. So those platforms are always going to be more important. But what can we uniquely do? Like, we try to go out there and be better than TikTok. That's really, really hard to do, right? Yes. But I think we could be potentially the best at white glove service with manufacturing and stuff like that.

Like, that could be something that we could do. I'm not saying that's what we're going to do, but that's something that we know uniquely. our creators need that they might not be able to get elsewhere. Instead of focusing on competing with people at what they absolutely do best, I'd rather focus on what Kickstarter absolutely does best, and then filling the gaps for our creators where they need it. Okay.

Yeah, what are those gaps? I mean, you see it a lot, and I would assume it varies pretty widely in terms of what folks need. But, like, you know, you mentioned wanting to do the stuff, creators have been asking for for years. Like, what's your sense of what's at the top of that list? One of them we're doing or we're about to launch, and that's a pledge manager in post-campaign tools, right?

So, you know, before it was like, you raise money on Kickstarter, and then it was like, congrats, here's your $50,000. Good luck. Go out into the world, you know? And now, you know, we're launching these post-campaign tools. Last year, we launched late pledges, which now allows you to, if you raise $50,000,

but hey, you might have another few hundred people that you might raise another $20,000 over another week if you had it, right? And so now you have late pledges. Now you're going to have pledge management, CRM, all of those things to help you, you know, your taxes, shipping, et cetera, et cetera. So helping people fill the gaps of that post-campaign process, which is going to be extremely important. We're going to have, you know, add-ons and cross-sells and all different.

types of things after a Kickstarter is over that a lot of these entrepreneurs and creators need that we've never been able to provide for them, which I'm really, really excited about. And that's already, we have someone in data right now, and that's going to be rolling out early part of this year, which we're really, really excited for. The other thing on the other side is pre-launch, right? So we revamped a lot of our pre-launch this past year, but there's so many more things that creators need before actually launch. a Kickstarter. To be honest,

depending on what you do before a Kickstarter, we'll determine how successful your Kickstarter even will be, right? So what can we do more in that pre-launch process of filling those gaps, supporting creators,

helping them set realistic goals, maybe it's some of the manufacturing stuff, all of these things, making sure that they have the right pricing, et cetera, et cetera, A-B testing. There's a lot of things that we could be doing on the pre-launch side that we're currently not doing that I think that we can provide for creators. And so I think the first steps is pre-launch and post-campaign and continuing to build

out a suite of tools and services for creators on both sides. So then you have this kind of loop where it's like pre-launch, Kickstarter, post-campaign, and then come back to pre-launch and continue to launch products. Okay. You're kind of confirming a thing I've always suspected about Kickstarter, which is that the people who aren't like, you know, large companies using it as a kind of marketing pre-sell platform, many of these people are like just people who made a thing. Yeah. Don't know, haven't run businesses like this, don't know how to manage large quantities of money like this. They're just like, I made a thing and I think people might like it.

And they get some money, right? And I think the idea of like needing money to do that stuff is part of it. But it is, I think, maybe a smaller slice of the, like, how to actually successfully accomplish your goals pie than anyone would like it to be. And all the rest of the stuff is, like, less sexy to talk about and less sort of creative and beautiful and artsy. But it's like, that's the stuff that falls apart. And I found this with the tech folks. It's not because the thing didn't work. It's because they couldn't figure out how to ship it.

Like, over and over, it's that kind of stuff that falls apart. It's that piece. And now you have these big content creators that have an audience where they can go and, Kickstarter today and raise four or five, 10 million or whatever it is, but do they even have the tools and resources to actually make the thing happen, right? And do it

successfully. And so those are the gaps that we see that we're trying to fill and I think we're doing a good job this far. You mentioned AI and I want to, I was, I'm going to forget to talk about it if I don't bring you back up now. I think, like, I'm a CES right now. You're going to be at CES this week. Literally all anyone

wants to talk about is AI. And what you're saying is, right, that, like, some companies are doing interesting things and other companies are just doing old things and calling them AI. And that just is where it is, and that's fine. But I think the potential of AI within a Kickstarter universe is super interesting, right? Like, if AI is everything it is cracked up to be, and, like, spoiler alert, it isn't. But if it is, it's going to make a lot of things easier for people. It's going to make it easier to design things.

It's going to make it easier to build things. It's going to make it easier to do your taxes. It's going to make it easier to do all the legal paperwork around this stuff. And so I can imagine a world in which you're baking a lot of that stuff into Kickstarter itself to say, like, these are tools that can automate and simplify some of this stuff. And, you know, everybody talks about democratizing everything. Like, AI could do some of that, right? Like, if I don't have to write code in order to be able to do a project I want to do, like the gap. between I have an idea and I can sell that idea to people might get much smaller.

It also might just be a bunch of snake oil nonsense and may not come to anything. But where you're, like you said, you're a company that doesn't have to chase anything that looks like growth just for the sake of something that looks like growth. But where's your head with AI stuff right now? Yeah. First I want to say is that, listen, I'm pro technology. I'm pro the advancement of technology. I know that you can't just sit there and be scared and fearful of technology.

With that being said, I think there's something powerful and beautiful about human-made work and creativity. And Kickstarter wants to be at the forefront of supporting that, right? Supporting creators first and foremost before we even touch AI. And we want to make sure that the creators on our platform feel support. by the work that they do. I see some platforms that are completely just, I mean, I just saw meta as like creating fake AI influencers. And it's like, dude, do you realize that this is taking away from the hardworking

influencers and creators on your platform and why they use it? And you already know where they're going with it. It's like if they can build these creators and make money off of them themselves, but that's hurting your audience. we will never do anything that's going to hurt our community, right? And so we want to make sure there's so many people, so many comic book creators and artists and musicians that are hard at work to create things without the use of AI.

And so we want to make sure that we're protecting those people and protecting their hard work first and foremost. If there are ways where we can incorporate AI to help make their lives easier or make creators more successful on the platform, I'm 100% open to exploring that, but I don't want to go too far where it's hurting our community. That line's going to get really blurry, though.

If it's not happening already, it's going to happen soon that you're going to get musicians who want to kickstart an album of AI-generated music. Oh, yeah. And it can right now. They just have to be honest

that they've used AI and what they're doing. We have an AI policy, and we just ask that, hey, if you use it, AI, just say that you used AI, right? And then if you are using other people's work through AI,

identify those people and compensate those people when you can. Okay. Yeah, but I, like, does that, is there a risk in that for Kickstarter? Like, the, we talk about this all the time at the verge, the idea that, like, the internet is just going to be flooded with AI content.

You open up, like, if I'm just wanting to kickstart a new album of AI-generated music every day on Kickstarter, that's not going to work, but it's going to make the platform worse. And so I wonder, like, if you get to a point where 80% of the stuff on Kickstarter

is not interesting to most people because it's AI-generated, how that changes Kickstarter. I think at the end of the day, our community does a great job of, like, kind of pointing out what is interesting and what's not. I think if someone came on today and tried to do a bunch of music,

that was AI generated, they wouldn't be that successful. And they're not going to continue to do that. I think the good thing about Kickstarter is that it almost polices itself in a sense, right? Like, if the community isn't for it or supports it, you'll know because you're not getting anything for it. And so I'm very open to see how things evolve. I'm not someone that lives in the black or the white. I very much live in the gray.

I just understand right now that human, made things in human made work and creativity is at the core of what we do today. And I do understand the power of AI and how that could be supportive to creators implementing that and what they do. But we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of what really makes Kickstarter special at the end of today. Okay. This might be a stupid realization to be having this far into this conversation. But it also strikes me that starting the whole thing with an exchange of money changes the dynamic in a really, useful way. Like I think I think about the AI music that's suddenly all over Spotify and nobody really likes it. I wouldn't like nobody's seeking it out. It's not super popular. But there's so much of it that at

volume it still works. Right. Like if if I can I can put out so much music that hardly any of it has to be successful in order for it to still be an in aggregate success for me. But that's a totally different relationship than you have paid me for a thing. And I feel like there's, I can't imagine the path to get to that kind of success when first you have to pay me for a thing. And what I said before, yes, we do have people that are very much like, hey, I am just getting a thing. They're thinking they're by. We never use the words buy, right? We don't see ourselves as a marketplace in that way that are using that.

But still at the core, the majority of our audience is wanting to support creators, new things, new products. there is this like emotional component to it to it. And so I think people who want to behave in that way on the platform are not going to find a lot of success. Okay. All right. Last thing, and then we'll let you go. I've kept you long time here. What do you tell creators about how to talk to their audience that way?

Because I think every bad experience I hear about that somebody has on Kickstarter is about being ghosted in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah. Like the experience of I backed a thing and it didn't work. Yep. Is frustrating. But I backed a thing and then they disappeared is worse and feels bad. And like that's the thing that breaks the thing.

And so, yeah, I mean, I assume this is a thing you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about. But I am curious, like, as you talk to these folks who are wanting to build that relationship, what do you tell them? Well, first and foremost, they know what they're doing, right? Like, these are adults, these are creators, these are entrepreneurs. And what I'm very excited about, and we already started rolling it out, is we're going after these potentially fraudulent creators or these ghosting creators. Never in Kickstarter's history have we done that. We've kind of had this like, hey, Kickstarter's not a store.

There's no guarantee that you're going to get the thing. I was compared to the chat GPT thing where it's like, chat GPT might lie to you. And it's like a total abdication of responsibility to say that. 100%. And to me, I just like, listen, David, I stand on business, man. And like, I come from South Side Richmond. I'm all about holding people accountable and making sure that we do the right thing. So this year, we're rolling out new things where we're going to be going after these creators. We're going to be banning them from the platform. We're going to be communicating back to their backers, letting them know that we're holding them accountable. We're going to be putting people

in collections going after the money to get it back for our backers. Like, we're not playing any more games anymore. And so, yes, we can go and go to every creator and be like, hey, make sure you're communicating with your audience, do the right thing. But we both know that people that aren't trying to do the right thing is going to ignore that. The one place where I do find empathy and, like, where we need to help more creators are those, like, first-time creators that they failed and they're, like, under the

weight of failure, right? And I don't want to go after them. I just want to make sure they get to the point where they can at least communicate that to their audience. I think that's going to be so important because there are some creators that just under the weight of the pressure, they're not trying to go, but they have that social anxiety of like, I don't know what to do. And I really empathize with that, but they still have to go and communicate with that audience. And so the balance of helping those creators, but also actually going after the creators that are being fraudulent. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the folks who give it a real try and then just kind of admit defeat, I think you're right that Kickstarter is unusual as a place in that it has a lot of space for those people. Yeah. Like that is a thing that is part of the system. It's the people who just take your money and run. That that's the threat to everybody, I think. I want to say that that very, very, very rarely happens. I would say most of the time it is people who, under the weight of pressure, just don't feel like that they can, you know, say what happened or what went wrong and all of those things.

And, you know, we understand that. But we're here to support people. And that's part of the backer work that we're doing, regaining trust within that backer network of saying, hey, we're actually going after those guys. That's why I was so excited that you brought it up, people I can't, wait. Yeah, it's time to go to work. All right. I should let you go, but thank you for doing this. This is so much fun. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much, David. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question for the podcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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We love all of your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week, but I have some ideas about how to do even more than that. This year, we're also working on some big stuff that started as hotline questions. Please keep hitting up the hotline with all of your weirdest questions. It's my favorite thing. This week's question is about passwords,

or I guess more specifically not passwords. Listen to this. Hi, David slash Virgcast. My name is John in New York. And I have a question about sort of related to the verge creating a subscription and more about sign-ins on websites. A lot of websites I feel like these days do prompt you to sign in via a link in an email. I sort of understand that, but what is the reason websites are moving, it seems like, in that direction more, is it because people can't do passwords properly?

It seems like a lot of websites are just removing the ability to do passwords at all. Is that the way of the future? Just wondering what the process there is. Okay, so this question actually sent me down a really interesting rabbit hole. I frankly hate Magic Links as a login mechanism. Basically, the way Magic Links work, if you don't know, is you go to log into something, you type in your username and you hit submit. And instead of popping up another field that's like, hey, what's your password?

It says, you know, we've sent you an email, go click on the link in your email. So you go, you open your email, you get an email from whoever you're trying to log into that says, click this link to finish your login or something like that. You click that link and then it opens up to the thing that you were reading. This is, in theory, fine, right? I think that that idea works. And I'll tell you the reason people do it, just to directly answer the question,

the reason for Magic Links is because they are better than passwords. I think everything is better than passwords. And one thing that we've seen over time is there is a big push away from, if I run a website storing your passwords. I just don't want them anymore. The folks at 404 Media wrote a really great post about this a couple of weeks ago about why they use magic links. And the thrust of it is essentially,

we don't want your passwords. Because as soon as you store somebody's passwords, you become a security risk. And because most people have bad password hygiene, they reuse passwords, they use bad passwords. If I leak your password to my website, there is a surprisingly good chance that what actually happened is I just leaked

the password to your email and your bank account and everything else. So essentially, what a lot of companies are starting to say is just we do not want your password. We don't want your data at all. This is a thing you hear from a lot of privacy-based companies, like Duck. DotGo has been saying this for years, is their privacy policy is just to not have any data at all.

Because the less you collect, the fewer risks there are for that data. And passwords, I think, are the number one security vector there. And so that is one big reason to use Magic Links. It offloads all of the worry about security to just, as long as my, email address is secure, which is my job as a person, it will work. This system stays secure as long as my email stays secure. And I think for us as people, that's a reasonable trade, right? Like, it is just true that if your email address gets compromised, you're hosed. I hate to put it in quite those terms. But if you do one single thing on earth that is good for you on the internet, it is have a complicated and two-factor-backed

and unique password for your email. That's just do it or else you are just on borrowed time until something truly terrible happens. Okay, so anyway, the upside of Magic Links is that it offloads a lot of that process. The downside of Magic Links is that it's kind of crappy user experience, right? So in a certain world, like if I'm sitting at my computer, for instance, and it's easy for me to switch from the tab of the website

to the tab of my email. That's relatively simple, right? And then I click the link and it opens the same thing in another tab, and I'm back to where I was. That's slightly annoying just because it's a bunch of tab switching and clicking, and it opens in another tab. So now I have two tabs of the same thing, one where I'm not logged in and one where I am.

That's slightly messy, but is, I would say broadly fine. Where this really breaks down, for me, at least as a user, is on mobile, right? where I log into something, I go to my email, which involves usually, you know, closing and opening another app or opening the multitasking thing and you swipe for a while. That takes a minute. And then clicking the link. And then when I click that link, God only knows where it goes. This is the problem, right?

On mobile, especially on iOS, which is just awful about this. You have in-app browsers. You have Safari, which a lot of apps just want to open by default. And then you have whatever you've picked is your default browser. So when you are in a place reading an article and you want to log in and read that article, you get the Magic Link and it may or may not open in the place where you were originally reading that article. This is a platform mess and it is everyone's fault, especially Apple's for the way that it handles

web browsers. But what it means is that you're just not in the place that you expect to be and logged in in the places you expect to be logged in. I have a theory that lots of people who hate subscriptions. One thing we've heard, frankly, on the verge is that staying logged in is a challenge. And a lot of that comes from the fact that when you use a browser on iOS, again, in particular, you're actually using several different kinds of browsers that do not talk to each other. You're not just using, like, the iPhone browser.

Sometimes you're in Safari. Sometimes you might be in Chrome. Sometimes you're in an in-app browser. Sometimes you're in-app browser. It's a mess. My one thing, by the way, is try your very best not to use in-app browsers. Set the browser you want as the default and then get in the habit of like pressing the button and saying open in default browser. It is annoying to do that extra step every time you open a web page, but it makes all the login and magic linky stuff a little bit easier.

So all of this is to say, I've been asking around a little bit and I don't think anyone agrees that magic links are perfect. There's no sort of magically great thing about them, but they do work. Right? You probably have access to your email just about everywhere. There's a chance that you have access to email more places than you have access to your passwords. Most people, again, have bad password hygines and have them written down on a sticky note on their desk. There's a good chance your email is more accessible to you than the list of passwords that you have. It also means things like when you're on a new device that you've never used before, you can use the magic link and still be relatively secure without risks of things like, you know, keyboard capture and all that stuff. It's a better, simpler system with fewer problems than just asking people to type in their password all the time. All of that is true. But when I talk to people about this,

they say what we should have is something more like pass keys. Pass keys are really interesting, and we've talked about them a bunch on the show, but pass keys basically intercept this whole system and just let you declare yourself to a way, website with yourself. You use the ByronBestruck security on your phone to log into websites. I would argue that is the correct answer and that is absolutely how it should work. None of these systems are perfect, but they're very good and I think they're great. You can also solve a lot of

these problems by just having good password hygiene, right? Like if you have a password manager, you can solve some of this problem, particularly the user experience part of the problem, by just having these things auto fill themselves more easily. Then you don't have to know your passwords. You can have your passwords everywhere. It doesn't solve the specific security risks of just inputting passwords, which are an inherent security risk. But if you have, you know, unique, complicated passwords across every website that you use, the worries about a specific one being leaked at least go down. There are, I should also say, tradeoffs to the Magic Link thing with security. One other thing you see is the codes that people get sent in emails or the codes that you can

get sent by text message, like six-digit code that you use to log into stuff. Those are also better than asking people to input passwords, but they take time to. SMS in particular has its own security risks. You run the risk of having issues if you have service problems. Look, none of these systems are perfect. This is the thing I keep hearing from people is like, oh, we really should have solved passwords by now. And pass keys are probably the closest thing we've ever come up with to solving passwords.

but for right now we have this big kind of mealy mess of different ways to do better than having you just type your password into a text field. And everybody agrees that that is the single worst thing you can possibly do. So Magic Links, they're not great. They're not anybody's favorite thing, but they are definitely unequivocally better than making people type in their passwords. And for that reason alone, I will keep using them. I will get annoyed every time I have to use them on 404.

and other places, but I will keep using them. I hope that helps. Passwords are a mess is essentially where it lands. None of this is good. Use pass keys when you can. All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening.

There's lots more on everything we talked about at the verge.com. We're covering all of the run-up to the will-day, won't-tay TikTok ban really aggressively. So keep it locked on the website. I think there's a lot left to happen in the next five days. Keep it locked. Let us know what you think. I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on whether it should be banned, shouldn't be banned. I know this is the thing we've been talking about for literally years at this point, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. And I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions on everything. Email us, Virgcast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11. We absolutely love hearing from you. We are going to do even more hotline stuff in 2025 than we did last year. So please keep all of your questions coming. This show is produced by Liam James, Willpore, and Eric Gomez.

Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably the TikTok fan, plus everything going on at Meta, all of the open AI stuff, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and more.