Instagram is TikTok now, BeReal is everywhere, and the Vergecast Hotline is back

02:30 - The Verge's David Pierce talks with deputy editor Alex Heath about how Meta is pivoting Facebook and Instagram away from your friends and more towards short form video from creators. Mark Zuckerberg braces Meta employees for 'intense period' Facebook is changing its algorithm to take on TikTok, leaked memo reveals Adam Mosseri confirms it: Instagram is over Instagram is making almost all videos Reels and will show them to way more people Facebook doubles down on algorithms in the main feed Facebook puts news on the back burner as it continues to push video and creators Listen to Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption 24:04 - Casey Newton chats with David about the social media app BeReal, and whether it's able to succeed among social media titans. Why BeReal is breaking out 40:55 - The Vergecast Hotline is back! Experts at The Verge answer your tech questions. Call our Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311). Email us at [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. Find us on Twitter: Alex Heath is @alexeheath Casey Newton is @caseynewton Monica Chin is @mcsquared96 Dan Seifert is @dcseifert Becca Farsace is @BeccaFarsace David Pierce is @pierce 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of front and rear cameras. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am standing outside watering my grass because my wife and I bought a house a year ago and the thing that nobody tells you when you buy a house is that you are apparently required by law to spend all of your time and money and energy thinking about your grass. It's not my favorite, so if smart sprinklers are a thing, or if you have some good ideas about how to fix my grass, please let me know. Anyway, we have a super fun show today. We're going to talk with Alex Heath about why Facebook and Instagram seem to be turning into TikTok, and then we're going to talk to Casey Newton about Be Real, an app that thinks maybe it can be the social network that Facebook and Instagram no longer are. Then, we're going to take some more of your questions on the Vergecast hotline because they've been super fun to hear. We love your questions. Thanks for sending them

• 0:47David Pierce?

  in. All that is coming in just a second, but first I have to finish watering the grass because according to the internet, if you don't water it for 15 minutes, your grass will die and your life will be ruined and everything will be horrible. Anyway, this is The Vergecast. See you in a second.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Let's talk about Kylie Jenner. Kylie, who is obviously an enormously powerful person on the internet, posted to her Instagram stories this simple post on Monday. It was black text on a white background. It says in all caps, "Make Instagram Instagram Again." Then underneath, it says, "Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, everyone." The post is actually a repost from the account Illumitati, and Kylie's addition was to put "please" at the bottom. But this post kind of struck a chord with Kylie, and then actually Kim Kardashian, and all of their hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram. Because the thing is, Instagram kind of is turning into TikTok. It's all-in on reels. It's making the interface more about full-screen scrolling video.

• 3:23David Pierce?

  It's showing you less stuff from your friends and more from creators you've never heard of.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Neil Appertal. I'm David Pierce. And I'm Alex Cranz. We are the hosts of the Vergecast of the flagship.

• 3:33David Pierce?

  And by the way, that seems to be entirely on purpose. Here is Adam Mosseri, who's the head of Instagram at Meta, responding, I assume, to Kylie by saying, you know, tough noogies.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing. So we're going to have to lean into that shift.

• 3:52David Pierce?

  Facebook, by the way, is trending in the same direction. It even split the news feed into a feed off to the side with your friends, and then a main feed full of AI-driven content. On one hand, all of this makes sense. TikTok is big. People like it. Meta tends to copy things people like. So there you have it. But Facebook and Instagram are both huge smash-hit businesses and products. So why are they running away from what's worked for so long? Alex Heath is a deputy editor at The Verge, and he's been reporting on this for a long time. So I wanted to have him on to talk about it. But before we jump in, you should also know, if you are at all interested in Meta, that Alex is currently hosting a season of our podcast, Land of the Giants, all about Meta's history and future, and it's excellent. Land of the Giants, anywhere you find podcasts, and we'll put it in the

• 4:37David Pierce?

  show notes, too. Anyway, hi, Alex.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  Your entire life is Meta right now, and I'm very sorry to make you talk about Meta even more, but thank you for agreeing to do this. Someday, you will not have to talk about Meta all day, every day, and that will be a good day.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  One day, David, one day.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  So the thing I really want to talk about here is there's obviously a lot of stuff going on in Meta land, and you're working on Land of the Giants. You just did this big feature. Meta earnings are this week. There's just like a lot going on. So we can talk about all that stuff. But the thing I really want to talk about is the relentless TikTok-ification of everything. When did reels become the thing for Facebook? It went from like a video format to like existentially important to Meta. Like, when did that happen?

• 5:19Speaker 04

  I would say as a format, so short, looping, goofy videos as a format became a serious thing for Facebook and Instagram about a year ago. But I would say that the more profound change that's happened in the last six-ish months has to do with how those reels and videos are shown to you, which is really about actually competing with TikTok beyond just the format.

• 5:42David Pierce?

  So is it as simple as, like, Mark Zuckerberg opened TikTok one day and was like, "This is very good. We have to steal it"? That's kind of been the company's move for a long time. Is there more to it than that here?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I interviewed the head of the Facebook app, Tom Allison, on the site about this about a month ago. And what he told me, and I think this is partly true, I think there's more to it, but I think they kind of underestimated, kind of as an understatement, how social the format that is TikTok can be. I think when TikTok first came on the scene in a big way, people saw it as like a YouTube competitor, and it certainly is, right? YouTube has Shorts, which is its version of TikTok. But in reality, when you actually, you know, use TikTok and observe the changes they're making, they are trying to build a social network on top of these videos, a social graph, which is just industry speak

• 6:34Speaker 04

  for getting your friends, you know, on there and you following them and getting that network effect going. And I think Facebook observed that happening with a lot of changes TikTok was making. They added a Friends tab, for example, right? Next to the For You tab. And I think that really scared them because it shows that you could potentially, you know, latch on a proper, traditional social network on top of this just attention vacuum that is TikTok.

• 7:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, I've, I've come to see this race as basically like TikTok and Facebook see the, both see the other one as an existential threat, which I think is super hilarious. But the funniest part to me is like TikTok clearly has decided that ultimately there is massive value in being the place that your friends hang out, right? And it's like, it's all well and good to be a really cool entertainment app, but like what people want to do is talk to their friends about the stuff that they're watching. And so it was like, okay, what seems to have happened, at least inside of TikTok, is they saw Instagram in particular, but also Facebook just like ape this format. And they're like, well, this is already where your friends are. So that could be a real problem for us because that's where your friends hang out. Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have sort of run away from the idea that your friends are the most important thing, that like, it's good that

• 7:46David Pierce?

  they're there. But like, even going back to your interview with Tom, which I was just reading in, in prepping for this, it's like, he keeps trying to connect it back to friends. But that just seems sort of less and less important that like, your friends being on the platform doesn't matter quite as much as you being on the platform. Which is ultimately all that they care about. Like, is there a middle ground here that either one of them is ever gonna find even?

• 8:08Speaker 04

  I think they're trying to figure it out. You know, I've had employees at Facebook tell me, you know, we're we are kind of this Frankenstein app right now. We're trying to decide if we are going to be TikTok or we're going to also be Discord, right? Which is this push they're doing with this new groups interface and they're still keeping that in Facebook, right? That's a huge part of Facebook and it's unique to Facebook still. And yeah, it's this very interesting idea of like, do friends and family in a traditional feed make sense anymore? And I think Facebook has decided that they don't and it's not working. So I'm not sure if it's more of just an acknowledgement of trends and how TikTok has shown that AI can really show you more relevant content than whatever your,

• 8:50Speaker 04

  you know, high school friend you don't talk to anymore or your crazy uncle posts? Or is it really that the concept of the feed that Facebook, you know, pioneered at engagement based feed just isn't something people want anymore? As a way to communicate, I think they've realized that they need to seed that ground, the feed to entertainment. They call it the discovery engine, which is just this idea that our AI is going to just be showing you stuff in the feed based on what we think you want, which is what TikTok is, right? That's really the power of TikTok is this incredible AI that learns about you. You know, when doing Land of the Giants, we have a whole episode on this. We interviewed a creator who's on Instagram and also on TikTok. And she was saying when she got on TikTok, it made her realize she was gay because of the way it was showing her videos.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And now she's engaged to a woman and it just like learned that about her in a way that she told us like she didn't even fully know about herself yet. So it's just this incredibly powerful new way of thinking about how content is shown to people and how it shapes people. And I think Facebook sees a lot of opportunity there, both in just terms of like engagement, because it's like, I mean, TikTok to me is like the closest thing to like a digital drug, right? It's just like my wife and I, when we're sitting, you know, on the couch at night, we're on TikTok on our phones. We're like, we always like look at each other afterwards and like, well, it fell into the vortex, right? It's like 40 minutes later and you've just been like mindlessly scrolling through videos. And so that's very Facebook, right? That idea. So it's also that, but yeah, it's there's a lot here.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  It's just like also just getting away from what they've been known for. And I don't think they've fully grappled with that yet.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel you on the vortex, by the way. I have now reached a point where like, the only time I like reliably read for pleasure is like right before bed. And now instead, I watch somewhere between like 30 and 100 minutes of TikTok before I go to sleep.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Same.

• 10:36David Pierce?

  It's like not a good lifestyle, but this is where we are.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  You know, you may not, you may go, oh, come on, like TikTok is not competing with Facebook. Like they're very different things, but they're really, these companies look at it as like time sucking. It's like, how much time can we get out of your day? You only have so many waking hours. Most people still watch a lot of TV at night. So you're competing with that. You're competing with video games. Right? Netflix is competing with Fortnite and that's really what they're competing with. And TikTok, the best way I just, I can describe it is just, it's this time attention vacuum that's just eating the world. Facebook is very paranoid whenever that happens. Right? And so it's different in that sense from Snap where it was just like, oh, this is, you know, with stories, it's lowering the pressure, you know, it's something that young people like. That's certainly the case here to a degree in terms of young people liking it.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  But I would say TikTok is a much larger threat than Snap was with stories.

• 11:26David Pierce?

  So the like big philosophical thing that seems to have happened to Facebook that I think is really fascinating is it seems to have just like given up on the idea of your friends as like an organizing principle. It made it all this way on the idea that like your friends are interesting by definition because they're your friends. And it was like the meaningful social interactions thing was supposed to be the fix to all of their problems to like, go back to friends and they've pivoted away from news a million times and back towards your friends. And it's like friends, friends, friends. And it's hard to not read the sort of TikTok-ification of Facebook and Instagram of just like a total 180 away from that organizing principle. Am I overstating that the way I think about it?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  I think you're right. They'll say and have told me that it's more nuanced than that, of course, and that this is in line with what they do. I do think it's a huge departure. Previously, the feed was optimizing for engagement among like your social graph, right? And now it's going to be optimized around some kind of nebulous, unknowable AI that they're building. And there's just a lot of implications to that. I think what they see is that people want to share this content, these, these videos over. Private messaging and that's been a huge thing for them for the last few years. And so they're bringing Messenger back into Facebook after, you know, infamously splitting it many years ago. Because they want people, I mean, if you think about with TikTok, you know, you send a video to someone in an inbox, you know, in your inbox.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  And then you you chat about it, or I do the real life version of this with my wife all the time. We just like show each other TikToks all the time, right? If we weren't physically together, we would be sending it that way.

• 12:57David Pierce?

  Same.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  And so they see that behavior and they're wanting to bring that into the app. They still have groups and stuff, but I think the feed as an organizing principle of your friends and family as a concept is over. I think that era really is over and it's, I don't know if it's just like, just the times are a-changing or if it's really more an indictment of like the Facebook ethos and the Facebook like approach to this over the last decade and what that's wrought. Because clearly people don't want to use this anymore, right? They've found a new kind of feed they like.

• 13:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, and also like not to put too fine a point on it, but Facebook is not notoriously great at content recommendations. Like it's

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:33David Pierce?

  It's been able to hide behind a lot of things over the years by being like, well, your friend posted it, so we're going to show it to you. It's their fault if you don't like it. Now Facebook is like signing itself up for this gigantic world of hurt over time.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  I think so. And I mean, you already see some scrutiny on TikTok, but nowhere near to the degree of Facebook because the company's, you know, a black box. It's based in China, but I would say, look at the Depp-Herd trial, the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. And like how TikTok shaped the online discourse and view of that trial. And when I was on TikTok, I was just getting nonstop videos of, you know, TikTokers slamming Heard. And I didn't, I didn't ask to see it. I didn't like, I don't know what about me, you know, told the algorithm that I would be sympathetic to this viewer. I was interested in it, but I sure saw a lot of it and I know it looks like a lot of other people did too. And yeah, there's a lot of power in that and you know, I, I shouldn't be probably preemptively teasing things.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  But you know, in Land of the Giants, in an episode that's coming up, we actually interviewed Nick Clegg, who's the president of policy and, you know, global affairs at Meta. Former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK. And so he's over kind of all of the reactions to this and kind of the responsibility in this area. He said to us something super striking, which was like, you know, we're basically going to be doing what Francis Haugen, the whistleblower accused us of doing, but we weren't doing at the time, which is really just like putting our thumb on the scale. Right. And you're right that that has been the fallback they've used since the creation of the company is that, yes, like we are responsible on the edges, you know, we'll turn off political group recommendations ahead of the presidential election because we know that can be weaponized to get people into, you know, radical ideas.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  But, you know, at the end of the day, like you pick who you follow. And this time they're going the opposite direction. And I don't know if they have a real grasp of what that means and the significance of it. And we should note that this is coming as, you know, a lot of lawmakers around the world are trying to decide, how do we regulate these companies, these, these recommendation AI based social media platforms? And I think even more scrutiny is going to turn to what the algorithm shows when the algorithm becomes front and center. So I think we're going to expect to see a lot of that in the coming years.

• 15:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the idea that lawmakers are going to look at Tik Tok and be like, well, this is a confusing company that we can't really control. And then they're going to look at Facebook and be like, this is a really confusing company that we can control. It's not going to go so well for Facebook, I wouldn't think. But the Facebook Instagram split here is really interesting to me because on the one hand, I feel like there would be a very easy case to make to say, if we're just, we're going to like, keep doing Facebook things on Facebook, right? It's like not growing slightly smaller, whatever, but like almost three billion people use it. It's humongous. It's going to keep printing money for a very long time. And then use Instagram as the like, let's press this into all the other stuff. And that's kind of what it looked like for a while, like Reels was on Instagram first. They've pushed really hard with shopping on Instagram. It was like, if you're gonna just build a Tik Tok clone, Instagram seems like the much more natural place.

• 16:30David Pierce?

  But more and more of that stuff is rolling back into like the big blue app. How do you see the difference between those two things? Is there a difference between the two anymore?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  I think over time, there is increasingly not as much of a difference and that will continue.

• 16:42David Pierce?

  That seems so weird.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Well, it's just a different approach to product. I think when the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp were still at the company, the apps had decidedly different point of views. And what you're seeing is just the imprint of a singular point of view across multiple, multi-billion user products, which is like, not really a point of view. That's my thesis that I've come to on Meta, doing this podcast, in terms of how they design products, is that, and I don't mean that to like, you know, if there's people who work there listening, I'm not meaning to say that like, people there don't have a point of view, but their view is really just a reflection of like, what the engagement flavor of the day is, right? It's not really like, we think society should go this way. You know, the newsfeed was that, and there arguably hasn't been much original since then,

• 17:29Speaker 04

  right? It's been a reaction to the trend of the day. And so there's a concern internally that they're doing that again, but in an even more profound way with TikTok. And going back to the Instagram, Facebook comparison, Instagram is the tip of the spear here because it has a younger user base, right? We've, I and others have done reporting about how Facebook is Boomer Town. Everyone kind of knows that, just anecdotally. But Facebook still makes the most of Meta's money in terms of ads. So the reason things happen slower there is because there's just more at stake, even though it's this kind of decaying social graph. But yeah, they're gonna look the same. I mean, they're gonna basically, you know, you're gonna open Instagram, you're gonna open Facebook, and you're just gonna see a ton of reels, and they're gonna be recommended to you by AI, and you'll be able to say, I don't want to see this, but honestly, like, you're not gonna

• 18:14Speaker 04

  have a lot of control. We should note, though, that like, this Facebook redesign that's putting reels front and center, and Instagram has done this too. They have these chronological friend tabs now. So they're, they're not totally giving up on the social graph. They're just like, it's not the default anymore. And as, if there's anything I've learned about reporting on like, these large tech companies, it's that like, people only use the defaults. So they've clearly made the choice for, for people, whether they want to say that or not. But they will say, hey, we still have a chronological tab for your friends and your crazy uncle over here. You just gotta go find it.

• 18:46David Pierce?

  Right. It's like, one of my favorite things on the internet is to watch people discover that like, Twitter has a chronological feed if you want it, and that there's the following page on TikTok, where you can just swipe over and it'll only show you stuff you follow. It's like, yes, those things exist. Does anyone find them or use them? Doesn't really seem like it. Which is, you know, it is, it is what it is. It's fine. But I think to the point about not having a point of view, one of the things that drives me kind of nuts about Meta is that like, as a person who is interested in good products, I really want to just like relentlessly make fun of Meta for only ever copying anybody. But the thing is like, it always works. Like it, it has historically gone super, super well for them to just do what everybody else is doing and like groups, as far as I can tell, is huge.

• 19:26David Pierce?

  Marketplace is huge. There's like all these little things inside of Facebook in particular that you're like, this is sort of a boring, uninteresting thing, but then they're like, what's up? We have three billion users. Like this thing's going to work. Does this feel different than any of those in a sense? Like the bet is obviously bigger, but is there any reason to think Meta can't just brute force its way into smash hit the same way it has?

• 19:48Speaker 04

  I think if they can't get the AI piece done right, and Zuckerberg has said that it will take them potentially up to two years to rebuild their AI to even have line of sight to competing with TikTok effectively. I wrote that in a story on the site called Meta's Meltdown this week that everyone should check out. Yeah, I think if they don't get that right, then this doesn't work. And they feel that pressure tremendously. They're reorganizing the company around this new discovery engine concept, which is really just TikTok. So they have to get that right. But yeah, you're pointing out something important, which is that these copying attempts they do, they normally do work. And I think that's just a lesson in network effects, which is something that Zuckerberg understands and has been ruthless about more than any other founder of any other social media company I've ever covered.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Which is just that if you can get and maintain enough people in a network, it's really just like you have this attention box. And you're constantly just trying to add new things into the box to keep people in the box. Right? And your box gets bigger and bigger over time because it's full of people. And that's really what they're doing. And so, yeah, their greatest mote is network effects. As long as they can keep that going, they should be okay. They can keep spinning plates enough and making enough money. But you're right that this feels, it feels different. It feels more precarious. And I would say that's also because like the rest of the market, the stock price is down 55% from last year. So they're dealing with a lot of morale issues and they've got to kind of buck up and get through this period and it's going to be a tough one.

• 21:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's talk about the moral issues for a minute before I let you go, actually. Because like you're saying, you've been reporting on what's going on inside of Meta for a long time now. And it seems like you've stumbled on this great tension where Mark Zuckerberg is like, we know what the future looks like. Like, step one, it's Reels. Step two, it's like something, something messaging. That one seems sort of increasingly nebulous to me, but like, people want to do messaging and we will figure out how to make money on that, seems to be step two. And then step three, somewhere between like five and 50 years from now, is the Metaverse. And he's like, at least from what I can tell, like, pretty resolute and pretty consistent that like those are the three next beats of the company. But it seems like increasingly, there are a lot of people inside who are like, A, this is not the company I thought I was coming to work for. And B, I'm not sure the world is going where you think it is.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there is real concern among employees that this direction the company is going in and may not be the right one. That what we just talked about, that these values and these ideas that Facebook has stood for, you know, potentially being eroded to compete with TikTok, may not be the best move in the long term, that they may just be chasing a fad. Zuckerberg clearly doesn't think that. He's been pretty prescient on when things are just more than a fad, when they're actually important, right? So like the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, for example, people thought were ludicrously high price tags at the time, turned out to be great, great moves. But yeah, confidence and leadership is, you know, statistically at an all time low internally. And they hired basically an entire company remotely in a pandemic when they had very lax, you know, performance review processes.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  And yeah, there's just this remarkable all hands call that Zuck did a few weeks ago that we report on in this, this feature that we published this week, um, that you and I worked on, where he just rails on them, like saying, hey, like, I know that we had to be, you know, we had to adjust to the pandemic, but look, like, we've got to buckle up. We've got to like work hard again. I need people available for meetings in the middle of the day. Like, you know, just like basic stuff that I think a lot of CEOs are thinking, but because he's the emperor god king of Facebook, he can just, you know, say. And said, you know, quote, like, realistically, there's a lot of people at the company who just probably shouldn't be here, which is just kind of a crazy thing to hear from your CEO when.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  You're looking down this protracted, messy push to try to like compete with this huge new threat. And also like the market has crashed and your options are underwater. So there's just a lot going on and he's got to contend with employees who are doubting him. And then they've got to contend with a CEO who wants them to work harder, right? And to like buckle up. So yeah, it's good. It's gonna be an interesting, you know, I always am like, when am I gonna stop covering this company? When am I gonna move on and change beats? And every time I'm like, gosh, well, it's gonna, it's gonna be interesting, actually. And I do think this is gonna be a really interesting period, but we'll see.

• 24:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, and I think your point about him being the god emperor is exactly right, right? Cause he's like, there are a lot of companies that say a lot of big, grandiose things and have a lot of thoughts. And would love to sort of pontificate about the future of the world. And then for a lot of reasons, most of which have to do with like quarterly shareholder numbers, they move really slowly. Whereas now it seems increasingly like Zuckerberg is like, burn the ships. Bunch of you get out of here, like it's, it's time to push and whatever that takes, however ugly it gets. There's nothing you can do about it to stop me. So here we go. And it just feels like whatever's about to happen, it's going to be even crazier.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  They can't afford to move slowly. I think that's been his message. He's going to be kind of tightening his grip on the company and is just getting even more involved. And he already was super involved. So this is Zuck's company for better or worse. And he thinks that they can pull through this. I really do believe that. But there's a lot of unknowns there. And like I said, I think this AI piece, we haven't even talked about the metaverse really, but you know, none of that's gonna matter. He won't be able to fund the metaverse if they can't solve this AI piece is really kind of how he's framed it.

• 25:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like, let's figure out how to show people cool videos and then we'll worry about legs in the metaverse, right? Like that's one, one thing at a time here, Mark. All right, Alex, we should let you go. You have more podcasting to do. Everybody go read Alex's story, go listen to Land of the Giants. We're gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back to talk about BeReal, which is easily gonna be bigger than Facebook in three months. We'll be right back.

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• 26:37David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So after talking about Meta and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and the relentless content, entertainment, future of everything, I'm left wondering where on the internet I'm supposed to actually hang out with my friends and do stuff just with people I know and care about. That's still a thing people want, so where do we do it? BeReal is an app that came along at kind of the perfect time to maybe be just that. Casey Newton, who is a contributing editor at The Verge and also writes the excellent Platformer newsletter, is both the person I know who uses the app most aggressively and the one who recently wrote a great piece about the app. So I brought him in to see if BeReal is actually the future of social networking, whatever social networking even means now. Hi, Casey.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  Hey, David.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  I'm very happy you're here. We were gonna talk just about your Zoom setup, but we'll come back to that another day. But there's a lot going on. It's very impressive.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 27:31David Pierce?

  So I just finished talking to Alex Heath about the inevitable TikTok-ification of Facebook and Instagram. And I wanted to talk to you about the app that is definitely for sure guaranteed the next big thing in social media. It's gonna be huge. It's the next Facebook, or at least so says Casey Newton, which is of course BeReal. What is BeReal for everyone who has never tried it? What is BeReal?

• 27:55Speaker 06

  BeReal is an app that encourages you to share photos with your close friends. And the way that it works is that, once a day, at a random time, you will get a notification that says it's time to be real. And you have two minutes from the time that you get that notification to take a picture. When you take that picture, it actually takes two pictures. It takes one with the selfie cam and one with the rear-facing camera, and sort of gives a two-picture description of whatever you happen to be doing in the moment. And the idea is that by sending it at a random time, giving you a short amount of time to do it, they're discouraging you from making your life look beautiful and glamorous, and they're encouraging you to instead be real.

• 28:40David Pierce?

  It took me three days to remember that it was also gonna take a picture of my face. And so my first three BeReals are like, whatever boring thing I was looking at, because it was always some boring thing. And then just my quadruple-chinned face as I'm taking a photo. It's really, it's some of the best social media content I've ever created. I'm pretty excited about it.

• 29:00Speaker 06

  I mean, one of the fascinating things about this app is that, like, basically, all of the posts are bad. Like, at least within my network of friends. You know, now, I'm older probably than the median BeReal user. And maybe if you're in college, you know, at a random time during the day, you're out on the green, or you're, you know, at the library, or you're at a party. You're doing something that seems really cool and dramatic. All of the BeReals that I see are people, like, sitting in office chairs or laying on couches.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  This is the life that we lead. Basically, as soon as you graduate college, you're 150,000 years old. And that's just what happens. This is just life. So you and I have been doing this for a long time. And we've both covered a million-billion apps that it seemed like everybody was downloading for one day, and then everybody promptly forgot about. But it does feel like something different is happening here. I can't say for sure that, like, BeReal is gonna be the thing. And I think if I was gonna make the case in the other direction, I would say it's probably not gonna be the thing for very long. But it does feel like something different is going on here than, like, your average flash-in-the-pan social app. Does it feel that way to you, too?

• 30:03Speaker 06

  Maybe, you know, I have this like pop-up restaurant theory of social networks, which is like every restaurant is basically the same, but sometimes a pop-up will open up in your neighborhood and all of the foodies start going there and they've just kind of remixed the ingredients a little bit. And for like two weeks, all everyone wants to talk about is this restaurant. And I think social networks kind of work the same way, where on one hand, you're just sharing photos with your friends. You had a million ways to do that before BeReal. You'll have a million ways to do that after BeReal, but they've cracked something kind of novel about it that makes it seem really appealing. And we'll see, you know, how much they can build around that novelty. Now, in terms of the timing, though, I do think it's interesting because it's happening against the larger backdrop

• 30:48Speaker 06

  of Facebook and Instagram, which have been the go-to photo-sharing places for a long time, kind of getting out of that business a little bit. They're sort of, you know, it's as it sounds like you discussed with Alex, going 100 miles an hour, trying to turn themselves into TikTok, which is not about your friends. It's just about whatever will hold your attention. And so I think an interesting question is, is there actually a new market opportunity for somebody who just wants to come along and help you connect with your friends?

• 31:14David Pierce?

  I loved your pop-up restaurant comparison, but there's one part of it that is like very good that I think you're ignoring, which is that pop-up restaurants are usually like kind of gross, where it's like, part of the appeal is that they're like, we just like found a bunch of chairs in an elementary school and we're just like serving the food from a hot plate in the alley and then your food is $95. And it's like, that's new social networks. They're like, it doesn't really work. The camera kind of sucks. It takes 11 tries to upload and you can't find your friends. It took me one whole day to find you on BeReal and I'm still not convinced I've ever actually sent you a friend request. But it's still the same sort of thing. There's just like something there that you're like, this is like fun and cool and edgy.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  It's true. And you raise an important point, which is that the app itself is bad just on like the level of the technical software. You know, I was chatting with an engineer about this last week after I wrote this piece and he was saying, you know, think about the technical challenge of building an app that has to work for millions of people simultaneously within a two-minute Window and then not again for 24 hours. It's like a weird kind of tech stack that you have to build for that. That so as a result, you know, if, if anybody listens to this, decides to go give be real a chance. Your, your first experience of trying to upload a be real is that it's not going to work. You're going to get the notification, you're going to be excited, you're going to be like, okay, cool. It's time to take a photo of myself on the couch. And then you're going to open the app and then the camera is not going to open. And you're going to think that you're doing it wrong.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  It's like, no, that's actually the be real experience is that it's not going to work. And you're going to have to force quit and then you reopen. And now guess what? You've only got 60 seconds to take that damn photo. And it's so broken. And yet, for some reason, three weeks later, I'm still doing it.

• 32:50David Pierce?

  The timeliness thing about it is one of the things that I think is really interesting, which is the like, we've discovered this a bunch of different times and a bunch of different ways that it was like, the HQ trivia thing was really exciting because it was, everybody was doing it at the same time. And everybody was like in bars on HQ trivia and that was cool for five minutes. And then like Wordle was every 24 hours and that was cool for five minutes. And be real seems to have made that even smaller, right? Now there's this like two minute window where it's like everyone on the app has to do their thing. Is this, is this just like a mechanic that eventually everybody's going to figure out where like Tik Tok is like, it's Tik Tok in time and like six months from now, that's how it's going to like, why hasn't this gotten bigger yet? I guess is my other question.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  It's a good question. I mean, you know, I think that in six months, if be real is still a thing, then yes, you will get the, it's Instagram o'clock notification on your phone. And that's how you'll know that Facebook is, is feeling some heat.

• 33:40David Pierce?

  You have two minutes to buy shoes on Instagram.

• 33:45Speaker 06

  That's so funny because I actually think that's where this is going. It's like Instagram is just going to become a flash sales app for influencers.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 33:53Speaker 06

  With like branded reels from Mountain Dew and like, that's the future. It seems so grim to me. But you raise another good point, which is like, can someone figure out a sustainable way to do the equivalent of appointment television on the smartphone? Like HQ trivia was appointment television. Wordle isn't quite appointment internet, but it's related, right? Cause there's sort of only one per day and it refreshes every day at the same time. And then, yeah, be real. Kind of also has that dynamic of, okay, like you now have an appointment with your phone, but the appointment comes at random. So I do think that like if a social app is just a way of remixing different ingredients, it's clear that time is one of those ingredients.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  And we're probably a little bit earlier in the evolution of these apps when it comes to how people are using that ingredient.

• 34:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. So that's why the app I've been thinking about a lot in the course of thinking about Be Real is Clubhouse for exactly the same reason. Cause like Clubhouse, there was a moment where the synchronicity of Clubhouse was the magic of Clubhouse. And then pretty quickly, people were like, well, I miss it, but I still want to listen to it. And so Clubhouse is like, okay, well, we're gonna, we're gonna make it so you can access recordings. And then it's like, it's like three steps later, you've just become a podcast app. Part of me wonders like, there are moves left for Be Real before it just becomes Instagram. Cause the other thing is like, I would assume that an app like this eventually gets big enough that you get tired of everyone looking bad and gross and boring and showing you nothing, that like, the appeal of it just disappears unless they find another thing. And then it's like, the third thing they just find is just going to be

• 35:30David Pierce?

  Instagram. So it's like, I don't know, if you're, if you're running Be Real, like, do you have a sense of where they can even go here?

• 35:36Speaker 06

  I was sort of chatting about that, like with, with an investor last week, cause I was kind of like, what is the actual business here? Like, doesn't seem like a great place to build an ads business and people are only looking at it for like 10 seconds a day. And, you know, this investor speculated that maybe they would go into subscriptions, you know, for various things. So one, one thing about Be Real is you can post outside the two minute window. It's just your post gets marked late. And so my joke for a subscription is you, if you pay, you can just post late, but it looks like it was on time. That could be a thing. But I don't know, like, like this is why social networks are one of the worst businesses to be in, because you have to continually pull a rabbit out of a hat, right? Like, if you're building Google Docs,

• 36:19Speaker 06

  like Google Docs is still going to work basically the same in 10 years. People are going to type and they're going to share whatever they type with other people. And like, you can count on that still being valuable. If you're Be Real, no one is probably going to want to take photos this way and look at photos this way in 10 years. And so you probably have six months, actually, to figure out the next thing. The company that has been the best at this over the past 10 years is actually Snapchat. Right? Snapchat started with ephemeral messages. That got them a decent amount of the way, but it couldn't get them to the finish line. So then they had to invent stories and the stories were incredibly popular. Right? They also invented like face filters along the way and really sort of popularized those. So they've kind of continuously been able to figure out essentially new novelties that have captured our attention, but also their stock is down like 70% this year.

• 37:03Speaker 06

  They have to go pull another rabbit out of a hat. They, they made a drone hoping that that's the next thing. Right? So I, I point them out because they're a company that's very good at doing this and they are still having a terrible year. And it's not at all clear to us at this moment that BeReal is going to be good at that. But I, what I will say is like in six months, if they haven't shipped like a, a new kind of mechanic, a new kind of creative tool, then I would assume that this app is, is not long for this world.

• 37:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. And they're not talking to anybody, right? Like they're trying to be quiet and cool and not like overstay their welcome yet.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, uh, that's my sense. I think that they may be getting ready to be a little bit more chatty this fall and, uh, and I'm hopeful that I can kind of talk to them then. The, the one thing that I've heard is that apparently the founder really hates the ads model and so does not want to go down that route.

• 37:48David Pierce?

  Well, that's good because notoriously that's the only way any social media platform has ever made a dollar. So that should go really great. I'm glad you brought up Snapchat because I kept thinking about Snapchat in reading your story about BeReal because it's like, there, there was a thing that you said that I thought was really interesting. Uh, and I actually, I'm just, I'm going to quote you to yourself, which is going to be weird. You wrote that BeReal is also nostalgic in the way that every new social network is nostalgic, yearning for a time when only your closest friends were on it, when you felt free to be a little more authentically yourself. So I totally buy that theory. And I think a big part of why people run to an app like BeReal is just that it's not the apps they already have. Like people are desperate for something that feels like Facebook felt 15 years ago. And that is like long gone or that like Instagram felt at the very beginning and that is long gone.

• 38:33David Pierce?

  And so I think that idea to me is, is really interesting and I think will keep causing people to try stuff like this. And then I look at it and it's like, okay, what should be the answer here? And the answer is just Snapchat. It's like the fact that Snapchat has not figured out how to crack this thing where it's like, hey, do you want most of the fun and features of Instagram without all the grossness? Come to Snapchat is just, I don't even have a question. It's just mind blowing to me that Snapchat has not figured this out yet because it's just sitting there for it.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  I have a theory and it's that like 90% of the opportunity that you just described has been captured by group chats, right? Like, I think group texts have taken over the world. People like three or four years ago, people started predicting this, that it sort of felt like things were moving to group texts. And man, is that my experience? Like, for me, it's like all day long. You know, it's like four different group texts are just like popping off. People are sharing memes. People are talking about what happened this weekend, what's happening next weekend. That's where people are putting the photos. That is kind of where the heat is in consumer social. And it's so boring because it's in like iMessage and like, you know, the Android equivalent. And so if you're a consumer social company like BeReal, that's actually super frustrating because there's very little you

• 39:44Speaker 06

  can do to improve on the group chat, right? Like, the most amazing thing about a group chat, by the way, you don't have to follow anyone. You don't have to send a request. You just either message those people or you don't. And like on BeReal, I've already gotten requests from people that like, I barely know, I worked with you eight years ago, you want to be in my BeReal, right? That's how you ruin a feed, right? Is you invite all those people in, the feed becomes less relevant, you move on with your life. Whereas like a group chat, it's like my group chat is, you know, it's people I went to college with. It's like people who live in my neighborhood. Those chats are sort of always going to be relevant because no one is in them who doesn't belong.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I guess that's true. And the only influencer in your group chats then is just Casey texting you platformer links every day, basically, just being like, please sign up for my newsletter. Love, Casey.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, and my, you know, my merch store.

• 40:36David Pierce?

  The group chat thing makes total sense to me. And I also, it makes me wonder then, if everybody else is going to chase this like pushback to privacy thing. Because it's like BeReal is going to do the thing where it's like, it has the close friends circle, right? Which is like what Instagram and all them have done too, where they're like, okay, instead of sharing this to everybody, share this to the 12 people you actually give a crap about. And I think that like, I've been talking to folks about this for a couple of years now, is the, the sort of like recompressing of everybody's social network back to their actual social network. And it does feel like the Facebooks of the world, it's just never going to happen. It's like too much work and they don't want to do it. But that the ones who, if you can actually get back to like remapping people's social networks in an actual human way, maybe there's something interesting there.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I mean, again, though, I just think that group chats are how they compress, like how we figured out what your real social network is, it's people who have your phone number. Like, you know, my phone number cannot be searched and it cannot be followed. Like, you either have it or you don't. And if you have it, you're gonna message me, but probably only in really specific circumstances. Like, weirdly, we all have a much better sense of when to text someone, I think, than when to comment on an Instagram post. You know, there's, for some reason, it just seems like we have a much better sense of what group texts are for. And because we're so much better at using them, that is where all of the energy is. It just feels kind of like ergonomic with how we actually relate to each other.

• 42:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that's why Discord is so successful right now. It is the closest thing to like, the like, logical extreme of group chats is like Discord is the closest thing we have. And it's a mess in all the ways that it should be. But I think you're right. It resonates with people in a way that like, what do I post to theoretically billions of people doesn't actually resonate to any human anywhere.

• 42:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Discord is really interesting in the sense that I see it as quite different from my core social network, which again is people who have my phone number. But it's constrained in interesting ways. It's built around my interests. I'm not going to be in a Discord server unless I've got some pretty like idiosyncratic passion, whether it's a particular video game, or in my case, an NFT scam that I'm running. And like, it's a place that you want to go to sort of feel a little bit of that chaos, but also like, you know what you're there to talk about, and so you talk about that thing. You know, obviously, there are other products that do that, like Facebook Groups exists. But Discord seems to have like, captured the moment. And I think the moment, it feels

• 43:04Speaker 06

  very real time. And that's something that Discord is very good at.

• 43:08David Pierce?

  Casey, thank you. We're gonna take a break, and then we're gonna come back and answer a whole bunch of Verge questions from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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• 44:45David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So a couple of weeks ago, we asked you to call the new Vergecast hotline, 866 VERGE11. Don't forget it. And ask us all your burning tech questions. We figured we'd answer a few of them a month. We thought we'd get like a trickle of good ones. It was going to be a fun little thing. Instead, we got a ton of great questions. Thank you so much for sending them all in. They've been so much fun to listen to and work on answering and figure out all the stuff we can do with them. So since we have so many, we're going to do another round of hotline questions. And who knows, if they keep coming, maybe we'll do this more often than I thought. So let's get to a few of our favorites today, starting with a question from Jackson.

• 45:24Speaker 08

  Hello, I'm Jackson. I've been using a 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro as my primary laptop. I love the way it performs and it just feels amazing to use. However, I've been using boot camp a lot and I found that I kind of like Windows more than macOS. I don't know how many people are this way, but I want to leave the macOS ecosystem. Now, I don't want to miss the amazing build quality that Apple puts in their products. So what Windows laptops would you recommend in the US that I guess feel like a MacBook? Thanks, guys.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  Okay, so this is the kind of question we don't get often about laptops. Usually, Windows people like Windows computers and Mac people like Mac computers, but this is somebody who wants to switch. So Monica Chin, who is obviously the expert, is going to come in and answer it. Hi, Monica.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 46:07David Pierce?

  This is kind of a fun one, right? We don't normally get people who want a Mac-y Windows computer. Let's just like, should I buy a Mac or should I buy a PC? But they're like, I have a Mac, I want something that's like a Mac, but I want it to run Windows. Is there something out there for Jackson? What do we have?

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the obvious answer would be the Dell XPS 15. In terms of, you know, what's the best build quality out there that's not Apple? You're looking at an XPS. Those are beautifully built. And in terms of feeling like a MacBook, I would say those feel a lot like using a MacBook or they'll feel as close as you can come to the MacBook. And Dell's XPS line is really about, I think, as close to looking and feeling like a MacBook as you can get in like the mainstream US Windows sphere. It's going to have similar screen quality as well. It's a fairly similar weight to like today's Apple options. I think you will have a good experience with it. There's one sort of main downside. I guess there are two. XPSs in general get very, very hot in a way that some Apple computers do,

• 47:04Speaker 02

  but generally you will not find many laptops that get as hot as XPSs, as XPI do, even in like among like Intel, Apple machines. XPSs are very hot and very loud. And for many people, they're worth it, but that is going to be one difference that you're going to see between the XPS 15 and the 16-inch MacBook Pro. And the other thing... Is that you are not going to see as much battery life. The other thing about the XPS 15 famously, and this has been true of the XPS 15 for years and years, is that its battery life is just not quite as good as Apple's MacBook's Pro battery is. That's especially true now with the M1 Pro, MacBook Pro. I mean, that thing just lasts forever, but even compared to the 2019 one, you are probably not going to see as long of a lifespan. So if that's something that's really important to you and that is a deal breaker, another

• 47:49Speaker 02

  place you could look is at HP. HP has the NV line and the Spectre line, especially the ones with Ryzen inside. Those are very good. They are not going to feel necessarily as much like MacBooks, Spectres and NVs. HP devices in general sort of have their own, like really more unique look and feel than a lot of other stuff on the market, but they are really well-built. They are gorgeous computers and you will not see the same heat or the same battery life compromise from those. The third place that you might consider looking is if you really want something that looks and feels exactly like a MacBook, what you want to look at is Huawei's Mate Book Pro.

• 48:24David Pierce?

  I knew that's what you were going to say.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Now, the issue with this is it's not really sold in the US, so you will, you know, if you're in another country where it is sold, that is what I would go for. But US, specifically about US, you will have to, you know, do some, some finagling to get one. If you feel like really doing some, you know, hopping on, spending an afternoon on, you know, international resellers and stuff like that, the Mate Book feels exactly like a MacBook. It looks exactly like it. It is engineered to look and feel exactly like a MacBook and that is going to be like an identical use experience. But if you just want like something you can actually, you know, just click order on the website, then I would go for XPS.

• 48:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, you, you really cannot overstate the extent to which the Mate Pad is just a MacBook that runs Windows.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  They really succeeded. It's a clone.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  My guess was that the first thing you were going to say is the XPS 15. So let's, let's spend just a second longer on that. I think you can still buy the most recent two generations of the XPS, and I'm assuming the one to buy is like the most recent one, right? Like people, if you buy, I feel like standard advice is like, it's, it's at least my advice now is like, if you're going to buy a laptop, buy one that's going to last you as long as possible because you're not going to need a new one for a while. So just buy the best one you can afford. But then it seems like the biggest question is these run the 12 generation Intel chips, which is good, but there's the i7 and the i9. And if, if I'm coming from a 16-inch MacBook Pro, I'm used to like some, some real power. Is it worth the i9 upgrade for people, do you think?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I don't think so, unless you're someone who knows you need an i9. Because my most recent review was of the i7 model. That was already so hot and the battery life was already like so much less than I wanted it to be, that I really just worry about the chassis's ability to keep an i9 cool. Now, again, there might be some people who they're just using it on their desk all day. Really doesn't matter whether it's blowing its fans out all day. In that case, maybe you do want an i9, but I think for most people, you probably want to go for the i7.

• 50:18David Pierce?

  Okay, so we have Dell, we have HP, and we have the crazy, wacky Huaweis. What about like pure battery life? If there's something I want on battery life and I don't want the Dell, is the move to go HP? I feel like the Spectre is a pretty strong second option.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  These days, you want to go something with Ryzen. So the Spectre, the Envy with Ryzen in them, if you can find one from this generation or last generation, I think both be good options. The LG Gram, you know, generally has very good battery life. If you have bottomless pockets and you really just want to spend... Today's business laptops have crazy, crazy battery life. Like many of the ThinkPads that are coming out now will last a while. Dell Latitudes will last forever. Like I think our last one lasted like 17, 18 hours, like some insane amount of time like that. Asus's ExpertBooks famously last around that long as well. So if you really are looking for the longest possible battery life in the Windows sphere that you can, and you have lots and lots of money, or you have a company that's paying for you,

• 51:17Speaker 02

  then look at the top business laptops, because those things never die.

• 51:21David Pierce?

  All right, awesome. Jackson, I hope we've helped. Monica, thank you. This is awesome.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 51:26David Pierce?

  All right, let's move on. Next up, we have a question from Ashley.

• 51:30Speaker 09

  Hey, Vergecast, Ashley here from Los Angeles. I've been a Google Photos user since the original Pixel days, and for the most part, it's been a really great tool for storing and sharing photos. But the videos are an entirely different story. Even with a gigabit Wi-Fi connection, videos stored in original quality and clouds playback in like criminally low quality, like 240p. I've used it on Androids, iPhones, iPads, et cetera. All are bad, especially when trying to cast it to a Chromecast. So I guess my question is, how can YouTube videos play back almost instantly in 4K while my crowd videos look like Minecraft figures? And is Google Photos still a good option? Thank you.

• 52:07David Pierce?

  Okay, first of all, this is an exceptionally well-asked question. And I think I've also wondered about Google Drive, because all my stuff is in Google Drive, and I put videos in there, and I'm like, "Google makes the YouTube player. Why isn't this better?" Dan Seifert hopefully hasn't answered this question. Hi, Dan.

• 52:21Speaker 10

  Hello. I hope I have an answer. Ashley, I feel your pain. I deal with this myself as a Google Photos user. It's also not, you know, a loan to Google Photos. Apple's iCloud Photos has the exact same problem. Like David just mentioned, Google Drive has kind of the same problem. And I think I'm gonna split this up into two answers.

• 52:38David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 52:38Speaker 10

  One, we're gonna try and figure out why YouTube is better. And then two, maybe we have some suggestions.

• 52:43David Pierce?

  Ooh, I like it. Okay.

• 52:44Speaker 10

  So why does YouTube stream immediately? Great question. And I think it really comes down to priorities and resources. And basically, YouTube's goal is to stream video. It's like what they do. They host video, they stream it, they throw a lot of cloud resources at it, they throw a lot of servers at it, they throw a lot of compression algorithms and things like that at it that make it work really well. And frankly, our lovely Google Photos libraries probably don't get that kind of prioritization

• 53:10David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 53:10Speaker 10

  and treatment when it comes to Google's servers that are just serving the video to us. So yeah, it comes back really choppy. It's super frustrating when I'm trying to like Chromecast the video of my kid's recital to the TV, and it's like Minecraft figures like you described, which was really apt.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  That was pretty good. So wait, so basically what you're saying is it's like, if you're YouTube, you have lots of incentive to make basically every video on YouTube like readily, quickly available? Because there are like billions of people who might be looking for it. But on Google Photos, I guess the theory would be like, what are the chances that you're gonna be watching one of your videos at any given moment? So there's just way less of a reason for Google to make that stuff sort of easily accessible to you?

• 53:50Speaker 10

  Yeah. If you look at Google's businesses as well, YouTube is just an enormous business.

• 53:55David Pierce?

  Oh, sure.

• 53:55Speaker 10

  And they make money by streaming videos. They don't really make money by streaming your Google Photos back. You might pay for some cloud storage and like, you know, you are coming out of pocket on it, but like ultimately, Google Photos is a pretty small consideration in Google's grand spectrum of business arms. So it's unfortunate. It's a little frustrating.

• 54:13David Pierce?

  Okay, so that's that. Is there a better option out there?

• 54:15Speaker 10

  Well, you know, you asked if Google Photos is still good. And I think Google Photos actually is still really good for a lot of things. It's really great for backing up your images and videos automatically. It's good to have them off your device. If your device goes and finds its way to the bottom of a lake, all your photos and videos are safe. It may take a while to get them downloaded, but they're there. You didn't lose them. So I really think Google Photos is actually a really great service for that respect. It's great for viewing images. There's a lot of like really fun, intelligent features for organizing them. You know, you can organize by face, by date, by location. The one thing that I like Google Photos does is it sends me little like, I take a bunch of photos of my kids and then I get a little, little gif in my notification that it automatically made.

• 54:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 54:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, those are all great things. And so I think for those purposes, it's really great to keep using Google Photos. There isn't a ton of other options for a cloud-based storage service that's going to solve this problem. Like I mentioned earlier, Apple's iCloud Photos, which is very similar to Google Photos, has the exact same problem. When you try to AirPlay something from the cloud to your Apple TV or whatever, it plays back pretty choppy. The real only answer here that I think I can say would solve this is to use a local storage system or a Synology or a NAS where you've got your photos and your videos backed up to hard drives in a box. And then they connect to the internet and they let you stream to an app on your phone or you can Chromecast it to your TV or AirPlay it to your TV there.

• 55:37Speaker 10

  And you can usually access any of that anywhere you have an internet connection. And that's going to more directly use that gigabit internet bandwidth that you pay for, that you mentioned that you have. That's going to use that much more directly and be able to serve those to you faster, higher quality, better original quality 4K. So I know Synology has an app that allows you to do this. Plex is another option.

• 55:58David Pierce?

  I was gonna say somewhere Alex Cranz is screaming the word Plex.

• 56:01Speaker 10

  Oh, she's just yelling Plex across the internets at us. That, you know, it allows you to stream your locally stored video to your TV very easily and at higher quality. The downside of all this, of course, is it costs money. You have to buy the boxes, you have to buy the drives and you have to set it all up. And then you have to remember to actually put your videos on it. And so the thing that Google Photos does really nicely You don't have to worry about any of it. It just happens automatically. You're going to lose a lot of that with this kind of setup. But if you really want to be able to stream your videos, if you're visiting relatives or something like that, and you want to be able to share videos quickly and at the best quality, I think this is going to be giving you the best results.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  I like it. I'm gonna throw one more option at you. I'm curious. I had not thought of this until just now, but what if you just had a private YouTube channel? Just have a channel, make all your videos private, upload your stuff straight to YouTube. Like, would that work?

• 56:51Speaker 10

  I actually thought of that as well when I was researching this and coming up with an answer to this question. I think that that could be an option.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 56:57Speaker 10

  I'm a little reticent about it, just because it's so easy to accidentally not make it private. And so like, you're putting it on YouTube and like, you can have a private YouTube account. You can have unlisted videos and things like that. Do I want to put a bunch of like, private family videos on YouTube? That maybe if I hit a toggle wrong, they're suddenly public on the internet? Oh, I don't know. Maybe if you're comfortable with that, if you're confident that you are not going to mess that up, then that is another option. And then you would get the benefit of YouTube's cloud services and streaming services and buffering and all that fun stuff where things should play back much faster.

• 57:33David Pierce?

  Okay, but you are, it is true. On YouTube, you are permanently one very missable toggle away from showing your video to 2 billion people.

• 57:42Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 57:43David Pierce?

  Which is a dangerous game. All right. I feel better. This sucks, but we've helped. So thank you. Appreciate it, Dan.

• 57:49Speaker 10

  I hope so. Thank you, Ashley.

• 57:50David Pierce?

  All right. Next up, we have a question from Nick about printers.

• 57:55Speaker 11

  Hey, Virgus, my name is Nick. I'm from Colorado. I'm calling to ask a question about wireless printers. My wife and I have a HP NV5000 series that's on the fritz, and I need to replace it with something that's maybe a little bit more efficient on ink. Thanks for help.

• 58:11David Pierce?

  Okay, I love this question for a bunch of reasons. One, because we've gotten questions like this a lot on the hotline. Everybody has printer troubles. And two, because there's just this like, deep sadness in Nick's voice as he has to deal with his printer that really resonates with me. So Liam, our producer, is probably the best positioned person to answer this question. Liam, hello. Thank you for doing this.

• 58:32Speaker 12

  Hey, David. Yeah, I don't know that I'm the best position, but I- I did have a chance to ask a lot of our writers and editors. And the truth is, nobody really wants to be responsible for saying what I have to say.

• 58:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, the answer is just printers are bad and you're gonna be unhappy, right? Like, this is just where we are.

• 58:48Speaker 12

  Unfortunately, that is the case. So, you know, a boiled down version of what I would say about printers. You've got two options and they're both trade offs. If you want a reliable printer that's gonna last you for several years and, you know, print wirelessly every time you click the print button, you have to get a laser printer. Both HP and Brother make great laser printers that reliably print over a wireless connection. But when you go print a photo on them, it's gonna look pretty lousy. Great for text and documents and stuff like that, printing, you know, your boarding pass or whatever. But photos are gonna look like junk. So I would suggest having photos printed like at your local drugstore or wherever they do photo printing. However, if photo printing is the main reason you want to print,

• 59:33Speaker 12

  you can get yourself an inkjet printer that will print a beautiful photo. Just don't expect it to last very long. Kind of think of it as a disposable product. You're gonna have it for a couple of years and then you're gonna have to replace it, like Nick's talking about with his NV series from HP. HP still makes the NV series. It still prints a great photo. Epson also makes a great line of cheap inkjet printers. But, you know, just lower your expectations. You're not gonna have it very long.

• 59:59David Pierce?

  For me, for most people, the answer seems to be like what you're talking about, like buy a relatively cheap laser printer and then outsource all the hard stuff to something else. Like, the real hack here is print at work as much as you can, I feel like, right? Like steal from your office printer as often as possible. But like, I brought a crappy Brother printer that I basically just used to print out like concert tickets and like parking passes for my neighborhood. And it has served me beautifully for that reason. And it flickers the power every time it turns on and is like definitely a piece of junk, but it like it, it prints in black and white when I need it to print in black and white. And it feels like that's about all you can expect.

• 1:00:34Speaker 12

  Yep, that's exactly what I do. I've got a cheap HP laser printer. It also makes my lights flicker, not sure why, but it works every time. And, you know, when I need something that looks nice. I'd just go somewhere else.

• 1:00:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I should say, we got, like I said, a bunch of versions of this question, including one that asked basically, why are all printers bad? And why is no one trying to solve this problem? And I have been obsessed with that question ever since, especially the why is no one trying to solve this problem? So stick around on the Vergecast because this is a question we're gonna spend some time digging into. All right, Liam, thank you. I feel like we've been sort of helpful, so I'll take that. All right, next up, we have a question about Google Duplex of all things.

• 1:01:15Speaker 13

  Hi, my name is Kanaya Minster. And I've been wondering, whatever happened to Google Duplex? Like, they announced it and then no one really talked about it ever again. Is it real? Do people use it? Is it good? Thanks, I guess, bye.

• 1:01:30David Pierce?

  Well, I'm very sorry, but I couldn't figure out what your name was from the recording. So just know that I love you anyway. I actually wound up doing a bunch of research on this question because I found it fascinating. So I'm just gonna answer this one myself. Google Duplex still exists. It's actually available in a bunch of places, but that's a very, like, complicated question. Technically, Google Duplex, according to Google, is available in 49 states in the US. I think Louisiana is the outlier because of some weird law. But basically, there's like duplex, the technology, which Google is super invested in. It's sort of Google's catch-all term for like, technology that automates taking tedious steps to do things. So like, technically, there is a food ordering version of duplex that is actually just like a sort of automated system on the web.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  There's also a thing you can buy movie tickets. So what everybody knows duplex to be is the way that you make restaurant reservations, right? And it'll actually call on your behalf. And now there's a bunch of ways that they're using duplex to like, call a business to have them update their listing in Google Maps. So it's just sort of anything that is like many steps and probably very tedious, that's what duplex aims to solve. And Google is still very much invested in that and rolling it out lots of new places. The like, we will call people on your behalf thing? I think Google is trying to make people forget about that being a thing. It's just kind of creepy and Google is working really hard to make things not creepy and this idea-

• 1:02:55David Pierce?

  That like a robot might call your business, ask you questions, just has like an undeniable creep factor to it. So Google, I think, is trying to find ways to make this stuff like purely automated using duplex and then like involve the AI in bits and pieces when it has to to talk to a human just to do the last bit of it. But like, when you start to see Google doing more work to, I don't know, may help people reset their passwords, that's duplex. And help people go through like wacky phone trees to get useful information or the thing where you have to talk to an automated chatbot that goes through 50 steps before you get to a person. That's duplex. So I think the stuff that they announced still exists and the tech is still very much around at Google.

• 1:03:39David Pierce?

  But this idea that you can use a robot to call to make you a reservation at a restaurant for dinner tonight. I actually tried to get duplex to work on my phone for like an hour today and I could not find a restaurant that seemed to support it. So I think that feature is either dead or dying or just sort of being ignored. But you're going to see technically duplex things inside of Google Assistant more and more often. If I find a place to order reservations or if you know of one, please let me know. I would be fascinated to see how restaurants are still responding to that a couple of years later. All right. And next up, and I think this is the last one we're going to do today, we have a photography question from Rohan.

• 1:04:18Speaker 14

  Hi, my name is Rohan and the question that I like to feed answers. How does someone who really knows nothing about professional photography or videography get it into hobby? I know a fair amount from taking photos with my smartphone or like a basic camera, but I just can't tell the difference between some of these lenses on DSLR, SLR cameras. So if you could help break that down for me, I'd really appreciate it.

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  Okay, for all things photography, Becca Farsaci is my favorite person at The Verge to talk to. So Becca, hi, welcome.

• 1:04:45Speaker 15

  Hello, it is me, your bud Becca.

• 1:04:47David Pierce?

  So I read this question as like, I have taken some photos with my phone and I'm ready to step up, but I don't know exactly how because I start looking at focal lengths and f-stops and all my lenses cost a billion dollars and I don't even know where to begin. You are a person who has used all the f-stops and all the focal lengths. So like, as a good place to start upgrading from smartphone photography, where would you send our friend Rohan?

• 1:05:11Speaker 15

  Yeah, David, you know, the funny thing is, is that I still look at f-stops and money and numbers and get equally as confused when thinking about cameras.

• 1:05:19David Pierce?

  It never goes away.

• 1:05:20Speaker 15

  It never gets better. That's actually my first piece of advice. You're always gonna be too broke and too confused, but that does not mean that you cannot be the Annie Leibowitz of your dreams. So what I would say is, first, figure out how much money you actually want to spend. And I would say, don't go into debt and also, don't think that you're gonna make your money back on your camera by using your camera. Spend what you can. Take it the best thing that you can. But also know that in a month, if you're not using your camera, you can resell it and you can return it at any time. Next, you've got a couple of options. You've got two main options here when looking at cameras. You've got an APS-C sensor and you've got a full-frame sensor, mostly. There's others out there,

• 1:06:03Speaker 15

  but predominantly, that's what you're gonna see. APS-C is a little bit smaller, which means that the camera's usually lighter, smaller, and they're cheaper. But, that sensor has what's called a crop factor, which means that any lens you put on it is gonna be cropped 1.5, I think it's 1.6 times in. So, for example, on a full-frame camera, which has a bigger sensor, if you have a 35mm lens and I take a photo of you, I might get your shoulders and the top of your head in it. If I put that same, or if I put a 35mm lens on an APS-C camera, I might just get your head. So if you want really wide-angle shots, you might want a full-frame camera.

• 1:06:41David Pierce?

  Right. This is why buying a 35mm lens does not actually always mean you're buying a 35mm lens, which is again, why the f-stops and focal lengths never actually make any sense.

• 1:06:51Speaker 15

  Next, you know that you want, I don't know, a smaller, lighter, cheaper camera. You went with the APS-C camera. Lenses, just buy the damn kit lens. It might feel like defeat, but I guarantee it will be a zoom and therefore you'll be able to play with it a bunch and it will alleviate the question of what lens do I get? Just buy the kit lens. I bought an A7C when it first came out. I just bought the kit lens and I know a lot about lenses. I just bought the kit lens.

• 1:07:17David Pierce?

  And coming from a smartphone, we should say, that's going to be already like a massive improvement in both the stuff you can do and how good it looks. Like, it would be one thing if you're like, I've been shooting, you know, on a Fujifilm mirrorless thing for a bunch of years. I really want to step up. It's like, no. Coming from your iPhone to the kit lens on a Sony A7C is going to like blow your mind into several pieces. So that's a very good place to start.

• 1:07:38Speaker 15

  And then overall, just make sure that you're also buying a camera that you can actually put different lenses on. Buy an interchangeable lens system. Because if you buy a point and shoot, you're honestly not too far away from the phone that you have in your pocket, right? So just buy a camera that you can put different lenses on. Therefore, down the line, you can also upgrade it. You could put really fancy, expensive lenses on it that are even going to blow your mind more, or you're going to think, why did I spend that much money?

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  What is the second lens? My recommendation, if you're going to buy a second lens, is to buy like a really low f-stop portrait lens. Like get an f-1.8 50mm thing and just go nuts on your favorite macro shots. But you're shaking your head like that's terrible advice. What would you say?

• 1:08:18Speaker 15

  No, I think it's awesome. Here's why. If you have a lot of depth of field, which is what a f-stop at like f-1.8 will give you, it just makes you feel like such a professional.

• 1:08:30David Pierce?

  It's so fancy.

• 1:08:31Speaker 15

  It's so fancy. And listen, I've been doing this forever and that, that stuff still looks fancy to me. Now, of course, the real fanciness is when you can take a beautiful photo at like f-22 and make it look really elegant. But yes, get that 50mm that has like an f-1.4 and, and just feel like a baller for a bit. And then when you're over that, go on eBay, sell it and get, I would say, hear me out. Like a nice wide angle. I love a wide angle. But what we're getting at here is that eventually in using your little zoom kit lens, you're going to realize that you either like really tight shots or you like really wide shots. And then your next lens will probably be a better wide angle or tight lens.

• 1:09:12David Pierce?

  Okay, so before I let you go, the next thing is, everybody who buys one of these cameras then turns the thing on and goes, "Oh, God, what are all these buttons? What do I do?" And it's like, maybe the correct advice is just like, put it in auto and shoot with it until you decide to like, go read a bunch of photography blogs. But like, what's your like, first time you turn it on, here's how you should use it, go-to advice?

• 1:09:34Speaker 15

  I would say, turn it on, type in youtube.com, hit enter, and then type your camera name in. The three main nozzles that you can turn on a camera are your aperture, your shutter speed, and your ISO. There is great YouTube tutorials that will explain exactly what each one of those are, and I'm not going to do that here today, but you should go watch those three tutorials. Because those are like, three nozzles that you can turn to get the perfect water temperature for your photos. Not going to get too deep into it, but watch tutorials on those, and then figure out how to change those three things on your camera. And I know you're going to say something about some shutter speed.

• 1:10:15David Pierce?

  No, you made fun of me for giving this advice already, so I'm not, I'm not even going to do it. It's fine. Apparently, this is my only story.

• 1:10:21Speaker 15

  Every time I see you, you tell me this.

• 1:10:22David Pierce?

  The two times, Becca, two times.

• 1:10:25Speaker 15

  I know, we should hang out more. I'd love to hear it more, honestly.

• 1:10:29David Pierce?

  No, there are two pieces of advice that I've gotten from people who are good at photography. One was to turn it on, put your shutter speed at 1 over 125, which means the shutter flashes in 1 one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second, which means you're never going to get blurry photos, and just let the camera deal with everything else. The other one is to start with your camera in aperture priority mode, because like you were talking about with the blur, that's a really easy one to understand how changing the aperture and the f-stop on your camera actually changes the photos. So if you want to just like goof around and understand, that is one like, ultra simple way to figure out what an f-stop means, is just point your camera at a thing and take 10 different pictures of it with 10 different f-stops in aperture priority, and let the camera manage around it, and you will like, instantly start to understand how it works.

• 1:11:12Speaker 15

  And what you touched on, like, like, taking a photo at every different aperture and seeing how it changes, that's what I do with ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I'll do that same exercise. I'll do like 10 photos at 10 different f-stops, 10 different shutter speeds, so on and so forth. And then I'll bring them to my computer and I'll look at them side by side. And that is the best way to understand the difference between these things. The best exercise.

• 1:11:38David Pierce?

  I like it. Okay, so just because I want to start a flame war and then let you go, Canon, Nikon, or Sony, which one's best? Go.

• 1:11:43Speaker 15

  Ooh, I love. Okay, the Nikon Z9 blew my mind.

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:11:50Speaker 15

  I loved it. And I think a lot of us out there had our doubts about Nikon because they kind of took their time stepping into the mirrorless world. But the Z9 is big in charge, and it is so beautiful and so fun to shoot with. That being said, I shoot Sony most of the time because the autofocus is just so good. Oh, my God. And it just locks onto people's eyes. And I could go on and on. But I was very impressed with Nikon, so I had to mention the Z9.

• 1:12:20David Pierce?

  Well, if you like Nikon or Canon, she's Becca Farsaci at Twitter, and you should send her all of your feelings about why Sony is bad and Nikon or Canon is better.

• 1:12:27Speaker 15

  Please do.

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  Thank you, Becca. Appreciate it.

• 1:12:30Speaker 15

  Yes, anytime.

• 1:12:34David Pierce?

  That's it for The Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage on everything we talked about at theverge.com. And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Alex is Alex E. Heath, Casey is Casey Newton, Monica is McSquared96, Dan is DCSeefert, Becca is Becca Farsaci, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or weird ideas about social networks that we should all be using, hit us up at [email protected]. We all get those emails. Alex, Neelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about earnings,

• 1:13:16David Pierce?

  Joe Biden Zoom setup, the hottest new thing in chargers, and a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:13:31Speaker 16

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