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

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

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 [e-mail], 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

Welcome to the Virchcast, 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 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 in a second. 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.

Prompt 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. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. 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 Illumetati, and Kylie's edition 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. It's showing you less stuff from your friends and more from creators you've never heard of. And by the way, that seems to be entirely on purpose. Here is Adam Maseri, who's the head of Instagram at Meta, responding, I assume, to Kylie, by saying, you know, tough nuggies.

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. 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 do you find podcasts, and we'll put it in the show notes too. Anyway, hi Alex. Hi. Your entire life is meta right now, and I'm very sorry to make you talk about meta. It's 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. One day, David, one day. 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 like, really. relentless TikTokification 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? 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. 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? 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 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 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 4U 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. Yeah, 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 they're there. But like even going back to your interview with Tom, which I was just reading 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 has ever going to find even. I think they're trying to figure it out. You know, I've had employees at Facebook tell me, you know, we're 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 group's 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, 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, in 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. 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 where like we always like look at each other afterwards. We're 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, there's a lot here. 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. 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 sleep.

Same. It's, like, not a good lifestyle. But this is where we are. You know, you may not, you may go, well, come on, like, TikTok is not competing with Facebook. Like, they're very different things. But they're really, these companies look at it is, 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 can, I can describe it is just this time, attention vacuum that's just eating the world. And 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. But I would say TikTok is a much larger threat than Snap was with stories.

So the big philosophical thing that seems to have happened to Facebook that I think is really fascinating is it seems to have just 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 TikTokification 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? 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,

knowable 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 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 and then 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. Same. 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 change in 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 found a new kind of feed they like. 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, right. 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. 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 a black box. It's based in China. But I would say look at the Depp-Heard 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 herd. 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 view or 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 shouldn't be probably preemptively teasing things. 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 their responsibility in this area. And he said to us something super striking, which was like, you know, we're basically going to be doing what Francis Howgan, 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. 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 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 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. Yeah, I think the idea that lawmakers are going to look at TikTok 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. 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 going to just build a TikTok clone, Instagram seems like the much more natural place. 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? I think over time there is increasingly not as much of a difference and that will continue. That seems so weird. 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 news feed was that. And there arguably

hasn't been much original since then, 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 sphere here because it has a younger user base, right? 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 going to look the same. I mean, they're going to basically, you know, you're going to open Instagram, you're going to open Facebook,

and you're just going to see a ton of reels. And they're going to 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 going to have a lot of control. We should note, though, that, like, this Facebook redesign that's putting Reels front 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, uh, tech companies, it's that like people only use the defaults. So they've clearly made the choice for four 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 got to go find it. 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 and 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 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. 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? 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, 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 moat 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. Yeah, let's talk about the morale 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 reals. 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. It 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. 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 in 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. 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 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 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 of 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, you know, you're looking down this, you know, 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, you know, contend with employees who are doubting him. And then they've got to intend with a CEO who wants them to work harder, right? And to, like, buckle up. So yeah, it's going to be an interesting, you know, I always am like, when am I going to stop covering this company? When am I going to move on and change beats? And every time I'm like, gosh, well, it's It's going to be interesting, actually. And I do think this is going to be a really interesting period,

but we'll see. Yeah, I mean, and I think your point about him being the God emperor is exactly right, right? Because 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. 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 going to 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. 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 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 going to take a break and then we're going to come back to talk about Be Real, which is easily going to be bigger than Facebook in three months. 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.

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And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. 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? Be Real 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 platform or 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 Be Real is actually the future of social networking, whatever social networking even means now. Hi, Casey. Hey, David. I'm very happy you're here. We were going to 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. Thank you. So I just finished talking to Alex Heath about the inevitable TikTokification of Facebook and Instagram. And I wanted to talk to you about the app that, you know, is definitely for sure guaranteed the next big thing in social media. It's going to be huge. It's the next Facebook, or at least, you know, so says Casey Newton, which is, of course, Be Real. What is Be Real for the everyone who has never tried it? What is Be Real? 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. It took me three days to remember that it was also going to take a picture of my face. And so my first three be reels are like whatever boring thing I was looking at, because it was always some boring thing. And then just my like 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. 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 front, you know, now I'm older probably than the median Be Real user. And maybe if you're in college, you know, at a random time during the day, you're, 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 be reels that I see are people like sitting in office chairs or laying on couches. 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, be real is going to be the thing.

And I think if I was going to make the case near the direction, I would say it's probably not going to 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? It may be. You know, I have this like pop up restaurant theory of social networks, which is like every restaurant is basically the same, but sometimes 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 Be Real. You'll have a million ways to do that after Be Real. But they've cracked something kind of novel about it that makes it seem really appealing. And we'll see 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 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. it. They're sort of, you know, as it sounds like you discuss 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? I love 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 that 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 Be Real. 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. 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 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. So as a result, you know, if anybody listens to this decides to go, give Be Real a chance. Your first experience of trying to upload a B-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. And it's like, no, that's actually the B-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. The timeliness thing about it is one of the things. things that I think is really interesting, which is the like, we've discovered this a bunch of different times in 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 word all 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 TikTok is like, it's TikTok 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 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 a clock notification on your

phone and that's how you'll know that Facebook is is feeling some heat you have two minutes to buy shoes on Instagram go 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 influence Yes. 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? Because 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. And we're probably a little bit earlier in the evolution of these apps when it comes to how people are using that ingredient. 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.

because 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 missed it, but I still want to listen to it. And so Clubhouse is like, okay, well, we're going to 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. Because 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 Instagram. So it's like, I don't know. If you're running Be Real, like do you have a sense of where they can even go here? I was sort of chatting about that

like with an investor last week because I was kind of like, what is the actual business here? Like doesn't seem like a great place to build an ads business. If 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 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 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 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, 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 being 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. They have to go pull another rabbit out of a hat. They made a drone hoping that that's the next thing, right? So 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 Be Real is going to be real.

going to be good at that. But what I will say is, like, in six months, if they haven't shipped, like, 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. 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. Yeah, that's my sense. I think that they may be getting ready to be a little bit more chatty this fall. And I'm hopeful that I can kind of talk to them then. 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. 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 Be Real because it's like there was a thing that you said that I thought was really interesting. And I actually, I'm just, I'm going to quote you to yourself, which is going to be weird. You wrote that Be Real 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 part of why people run to an app like be real 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. And so I think that idea to me is really interesting. And I think we'll 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. It's 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.

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. 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 or 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, be real.

That's actually super frustrating because there's very little you 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 Be Real, 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 Be Real, 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. 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. Yeah. And my merch store. Right. 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 push back to privacy thing. Because it's like, be real. 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 to 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 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, social networks in an actual human way, maybe there's something interesting there. Yeah. 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 going to 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 techs 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. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that's why Discord is so successful right now. It is the closest thing to like,

the 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? 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 interest. I'm not going to be in a Discord server unless I've got some pretty 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 exist.

But Discord seems to have, like, capture the moment. And I think the moment, it feels very real time. And that's something that Discord is very good at. Casey, thank you. We're going to take a break. And then we're going to come back. and answer a whole bunch of verge questions from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. So a couple of weeks ago, we asked you to call the new Vergecast hotline, 866 Verge 1-1, 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. 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 U.S. that, I guess, feel like a MacBook? Thanks, guys.

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.

Hello. This is kind of a fun one, right? We don't normally get people who want a Mackey 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?

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 is 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, but generally you will not find many laptops that get as hot as XPSs as XPI do, even 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. 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, you are probably not going to see as long a lifespan. So if that's something that's really important to and that is a deal breaker, another place you could look is at HP. HP has the NV line and the Spector line, especially the ones with Ryzen inside. Those are very good. They're 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 Matebook Pro. I knew that's what you're going to say. 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 you ask specifically about US, you will have to do some finagling to get one.

If you feel like really doing something, you know, hopping on spending an afternoon on, you know, international resaleers and stuff like that, the Maitbook feels exactly like a MacBook. It looks exactly like good. 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. Yeah, you really cannot overstate the extent.

which the mate pad is just a MacBook that runs Windows. They really succeeded. It's a clone. My guess was that the first thing you were going to say is the XPS 15. So 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 at least my advice now. It's 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 I'm coming from a 16-inch MacBook Pro, I'm used to like some real power. Is it worth the I-9 upgrade for people, do you think? I don't think so, unless you're someone who knows you need an I-9,

because my most recent review was of the I-7 model. That was already so hot, and the battery I already like so much less than I wanted it to be that I really just worry about the chassis's ability to keep an I-9 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 I-9, but I think for most people you probably want to go for the I-7. Okay, so we have Dell, we have HP, and we have the crazy, wacky Wawa's. 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 Spector is a pretty strong second option.

These days you want to go something with Ryzen. So the Spector, the envy with 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 is a 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 like think pads that are coming out now will last 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. Aitius's expert books 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, then look at the top business laptops because those things never die. All right. Awesome. Jackson, I hope we've helped. Monica, thank you. This is awesome. Thank you very much. All right. Let's move on. Next up, we have a question from Ashley. 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 video is an entirely different story. Even with a gigabit Wi-Fi connection, videos stored in original quality and cloud playback in like criminally low quality, like 240P. I've used it on Android, 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. 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 Seafurt hopefully hasn't answered its question. Hi, Dan. 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, alone 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 going to split this up into two answers. One, we're going to try and figure out why YouTube is better. And then two, maybe we have some suggestions. Oh, I like it. Okay. 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 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 kids recital to the TV. And it's like Minecraft figures like you described, which was really apt. That was pretty good.

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 going to 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? Yeah.

If you look at Google's businesses as well, YouTube is just an enormous business. Oh, sure. 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. Okay. So that's that. Is there a better option out there? Well, you know, you asked if Google Photos is still a little? 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. Yeah, it's fun. 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. 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. 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

mention 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. I was going to say somewhere Alex Cranes is screaming the word Plex. Oh, she's just yelling Plex across the internet's at us that, you know, it allows you to stream your locally stored video to your TV very easily and a 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 is you don't have to worry about anything. 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. I like it. I'm going to 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? I actually thought of that as well when I was researching this and coming up with an answer this question. I think that that could be an option. Okay. I'm a little reticent about it just because

it's so easy to accidentally not make it private. And so like you were 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 or suddenly public on the internet? 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. Okay. But you are, it is true. On YouTube, you are permanently one very missable toggle away from show. showing your video to 2 billion people. Yes. Which is a dangerous game. All right.

I feel better. This sucks, but we've helped. So thank you. Appreciate it, Dan. I hope so. Thank you, Ashley. All right. Next up, we have a question from Nick about printers.

Hey, Vergecast. My name is Nick. I'm from Colorado. I'm calling to ask a question about wireless printers. My wife and I have a HPNV-5,000 series that's on the fritz, and I need to replace it with something that's maybe a little bit more efficient on Inc. Thanks for help. 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 position person to answer this question. Liam, hello. Thank you for doing this. Hey, David.

Yeah, I don't know that I'm the best position, but 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. Yeah, the answer is just printers are bad and you're going to be unhappy, right? Like, this is just where we are. 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 tradeoffs.

If you want a reliable printer that's going to 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 going to look pretty lousy. Great for text and documents and stuff like that, printing your boarding pass or whatever, but photos are going to 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,

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 going to have it for a couple of years, and then you're going to have to replace it, like Nick's talking about with his NB 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 going to have it very long. 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 prints in black and white when I need it to print black and white. And it feels like that's about all you can expect.

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 just go somewhere else. Yeah, I think that's right.

And I should say, we got a, 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 verge cast because this is a question we're going to 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. Hi, my name is Kanan and 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. 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 going to 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 U.S. 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. 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. 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 that like a robot might call your business and 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, 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 chat bot 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, 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. Hi, my name is Rohan. And the question that I like to free answers, how does someone who really knows nothing about professional photography or videography get it into the 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 really appreciate it. Okay. For all things, photography, Becca Farsachi is my favorite person at the verge to talk to. So Becca, hi, welcome. Hello, it is me. You're Bud Beka. 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? 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. It never goes away. It never gets better. That's actually my first piece of advice. You're always going to 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 going to make your money back on your camera by using your camera. Spend what you can to get 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 got two main options here when looking at cameras. You got an APSC sensor and you got a full frame sensor, mostly. There's others out there, but predominantly that's what you're going to see. The APSC is a little bit smaller, which means that the camera is 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 going to be

cropped 1.5, I think it's 1.6 times in. So, for example, on a full frame camera, which has that bigger sensor, if you have a 35 millimeter lens, and I take a full-frey, you know, photo of you, I might get your shoulders in the top of your head in it. If I put that same, or if I put a 35 millimeter lens on an APSC camera, I might just get your head. So if you want really wide angle shots, you might want a full frame camera. Right. This is why buying a 35 millimeter lens does not actually always mean you're buying a 35 millimeter lens, which is again, why the F stops and focal lengths never actually make any sense. Next, you know that you want, I don't know, a smaller, lighter, cheaper camera. You went with the APSC.

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. 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. It would be one thing if you're like, I've been shooting, you know, on a on a Fuji film 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. And then overall, just make sure that you're also buying a camera that you can actually put different lenses on by 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? 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 50-millimeter 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? No, I think it's awesome. Here's why, if you have a lot of depth of field, which is what I've stopped at like F1.8 will give you. It just makes you feel like such a professional. It's so fancy. It's so fancy. And listen, I've been doing this forever and that stuff still looks fancy to me. Now, of course, the real fanciness is when you can take a beautiful photo at like F22 and make it look really elegant.

But yes, get that 50 millimeter that has like an F1.4 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. 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. 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. I'm 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. No, you made fun of me for giving this advice already. So I'm not even going to do it. It's fine. Apparently this is my only story. Every time I see you, you tell me this. The two times, Becca, two times. I know. We should hang out more.

I'd love to hear it more, honestly. 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 one over 125, which means the shutter flashes in one, 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 change. the aperture and the F-stop on your camera actually changes the photos.

So if you want to just 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. And what you touched on, like, taking a photo at every different aperture and seeing how it changes, that's what I do with ISO, shutter speed, and appurts. 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. I like it. Okay. So just because I want to start a flame warrant and then let you go, Canon, Nikon or Sony, which one's best? Go. Ooh, I love. Okay, the Nikon Z9 blew my mind. Okay. 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. Well, if you like Nikon or Canon, she's Becca Farsagia, Twitter, and you should send her all of your feelings about why Sony is bad and Nikon or Canon is better. Please do. Thank you, Becca. I appreciate it. Yes, anytime. 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 is Casey Newton. Monica is MC squared 96. Dan is DC Sefert. Becca is Becca Farsachi, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive

producer and Brooke Minters 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 Vergecast at the verge.com. We all get those emails. Alex, Nelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about earnings, Joe Biden's Zoom set up, the hottest new thing in Chargers, and a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.