Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host
Speaker 1: ed Zitron. Today's episode is about how one man tricked
Speaker 1: the entire tech industry into burning billions of dollars based
Speaker 1: on nothing. You may remember a time in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one when everybody was talking about the metaverse, the so
Speaker 1: called successor to the Internet that was used by Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg to rename Facebook, taking the heat off of a
Speaker 1: name associated with abusing its customers and misusing their data.
Speaker 1: It was meant to be a completely digital world we
Speaker 1: lived in. Oh, maybe it was a VR space that
Speaker 1: we socialized in. Was it VR space we worked in?
Speaker 1: Was it a virtual world? Wasn't there something to do
Speaker 1: with crypto? If you're finding all of this confusing, we
Speaker 1: have something in common. We need to go back to
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one to really work out what the hell
Speaker 1: went on though. Interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for The Virgin July
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, Casey Newton referred to the metaverse as
Speaker 1: a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci fi. Again,
Speaker 1: that means nothing, but nevertheless that's what he chose to
Speaker 1: publish a few months later when renaming the company Facebook
Speaker 1: to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg referred to the metaverse as a
Speaker 1: more immersive, embodied Internet where you're in the experience, not
Speaker 1: just looking at it. In the multiple interviews he's given since,
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg has spent thousands of words vaguely suggesting the metavers
Speaker 1: is everything from a chat room to virtual reality to
Speaker 1: and I quote, a hybrid between the social platforms that
Speaker 1: we see today, but in an environment where you're embodied
Speaker 1: in it. In fact, at one point, Mark Zuckerberg said
Speaker 1: that Meta would transition from being seen as a social
Speaker 1: media company to being a metaverse company or without ever
Speaker 1: saying really what the metaverse was, and his descriptions veered
Speaker 1: from saying it was a social network to a virtual
Speaker 1: reality game to something that was part of web three,
Speaker 1: which was a term used by cryptocurrency con artists to
Speaker 1: sell you some sort of decentralized blockchain based thing in
Speaker 1: reality metas metaverse was far more boring. They would only
Speaker 1: ever release two mediocre virtual reality experiences for their Quest
Speaker 1: and Oculus headsets, one for socializing called Horizon Worlds and
Speaker 1: another for work called Inventively Horizon Workrooms. You all kind
Speaker 1: of felt like a con. Yeah, The media in the
Speaker 1: tech industry crystallized around it with this strange, frenzied excitement. Look,
Speaker 1: at the time, I didn't know you. You weren't listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast, But if you felt like you were being swindled,
Speaker 1: you should have been. Believe your ears, believe your eyes.
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg renamed a trillion dollar company and hyped an
Speaker 1: idea that he could not describe, and then he sent
Speaker 1: the entire tech ecosystem into a year's long panic attack
Speaker 1: that resulted in billions of dollars being wasted on non
Speaker 1: existent ideas. At the time, I was one of the
Speaker 1: lone voices to crying the made up metaverse. I was
Speaker 1: screaming into the void that despite all of this press,
Speaker 1: all of this hype, nobody, not the journalists, not the investors,
Speaker 1: not Mark Zuckerberg, could actually describe what the metaverse was.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg would go on to burn tens of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars investing in research and development allegedly building the metaverse,
Speaker 1: and multiple startups would claim that they'd now entered the metaverse,
Speaker 1: only to end up ditching the idea. Toward the end
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two and early twenty twenty three, as
Speaker 1: interest rates tightened and tech stocks began to suffer, eventually
Speaker 1: entering what Zuckerberg would call the Year of Efficiency, which
Speaker 1: was code for laying off thousands of people and refocusing
Speaker 1: meta on artificial intelligence after seeing how well chated GPT
Speaker 1: was doing. I've always been an anti metaverse, mostly because nobody
Speaker 1: could tell me what it was. In fact, in May
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, I wrote a piece of Business Insider
Speaker 1: declaring the metaverse dead, something which pissed off Tim Sweeney,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Epic Games the developers Fortnite, who then
Speaker 1: quote tweeted it with this kind of sarcastic indignation. I
Speaker 1: will now attempt to do Tim Sweeney's voice. The metaverse
Speaker 1: is dead, wrote Sweeney, who was definitely not upset with me.
Speaker 1: Let's organize an online wake so that we six hundred
Speaker 1: million monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roadblocks, PUBG, Sandbox
Speaker 1: and Vrchack and morn it's passing together in real time
Speaker 1: three D. I think that's how he sounds. Look Tim,
Speaker 1: you're wrong. I'm right. The metaverse was dead, and by
Speaker 1: metaverse I mean the ugly, butchered, usurious scam perpetuated in
Speaker 1: public where companies like Epic slapped a new logo on
Speaker 1: something old and tried to claim it was the future.
Speaker 1: What Sweeney is describing are actually video games, video games
Speaker 1: that have existed for upwards of a decade that were
Speaker 1: never once referred to as part of the metaverse, despite
Speaker 1: this being a nineties term from a book. And it's
Speaker 1: just ridiculous because these people never use this term before
Speaker 1: until it helped them sell crap to investors. Whether or
Speaker 1: not the metaverse may actually exist one day is immaterial
Speaker 1: to the fact that this was one of the largest
Speaker 1: and most conspicuous cons I've ever seen, and nobody has
Speaker 1: been held accountable. Nevertheless, the metaverse does actually mean something.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of a pain in the ass to explain.
Speaker 1: Even for the truest of metaverse believers, it isn't really
Speaker 1: an easy thing to define. In twenty twenty two, I,
Speaker 1: of my own volition, for whatever reason, decided to travel
Speaker 1: to Santa Clara, California, to attend the Augmented World Expo,
Speaker 1: a tech conference about mixed and virtual reality and of course,
Speaker 1: now the metaverse. This conference has existed for quite a
Speaker 1: long time. I had been before, but before it was
Speaker 1: around things that existed like AR and V are augmented reality,
Speaker 1: meaning that something you put over your face, perhaps like
Speaker 1: the Vision pro or VR, like the Oculus headsets and
Speaker 1: Quest headsets. The meta was already selling without mentioning the metaverse.
Speaker 1: And I remember, despite spending days surrounded by people discussing
Speaker 1: the metaverse, talking about the metaverse, walking around boots that
Speaker 1: said Metaverse on them, trying products that were apparently the metaverse,
Speaker 1: and having dreary conversations about what the metaverse could be,
Speaker 1: I couldn't get a consistent or compelling definition of what
Speaker 1: a metaverse actually was. Okay, let me get it a go, though.
Speaker 1: Depending on the person, the metaverse is a virtual space
Speaker 1: where you live, or it's a video game, or it's
Speaker 1: a virtual reality experience, or it's a filter on your
Speaker 1: camera that makes you look like a dog. This is
Speaker 1: how varied the media's description was of what the metaverse was.
Speaker 1: It was basically anything that involved the real world being
Speaker 1: kind of masked by digital things. If you watched Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's October twenty twenty one video, you might believe it's
Speaker 1: a virtual world that encompasses your senses, a fully sensory
Speaker 1: experience that the kinds you'd find in Ernest Klein's horrible
Speaker 1: book Ready Player One. Now you may be thinking, Heed,
Speaker 1: that's not technically possible, and you'd be completely and utterly right.
Speaker 1: The conceptual ambiguity, of course, and the fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff people were talking about just wasn't
Speaker 1: possible and still isn't today, didn't stop many, many companies
Speaker 1: from cashing in, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from
Speaker 1: investors to build products that did not and probably could
Speaker 1: not exist in an industry called the metaverse that nobody,
Speaker 1: not the investors, not the founders, could actually describe. Let
Speaker 1: me give you some examples. Bud they're a company that
Speaker 1: raised over sixty million dollars that, according to tech Crunch,
Speaker 1: did so to create a metaverse for gen z to
Speaker 1: play and interact with each other. I've downloaded Bud. I've
Speaker 1: looked at what Bud is. They don't mention the metaverse anymore.
Speaker 1: It's actually a micro transaction riddled iPhone app that lets
Speaker 1: you visit other people's very generic looking spaces. I used
Speaker 1: to review massively multiplayer online RPGs like World Warcraft and
Speaker 1: things like that. I've seen one hundred million of these things.
Speaker 1: Versions of what Bud does have existed for a long
Speaker 1: long time. Then there's another company Trip that's tripp because
Speaker 1: why name things normally. They raised twenty six point three
Speaker 1: million dollars to create apps that and I quote power
Speaker 1: mindful metaverse and said metaverse is community driven. In practice,
Speaker 1: it's a virtual reality app that shows you these weird,
Speaker 1: trippy visions that you would imagine seeing in a PSA
Speaker 1: for drug abuse in the nineties. They cost ten twenty dollars.
Speaker 1: It's very strange that this company raised that much money
Speaker 1: and nobody has done the due diligence to actually follow
Speaker 1: up with them and ask them what the hell the
Speaker 1: metaverse was and why it justified these massive valuations. Each
Speaker 1: one of these pablum filled multimillion dollar metaverse companies was
Speaker 1: incapable of describing themselves outside of using concussion grade buzzwords.
Speaker 1: They had good reason to though. If they used real
Speaker 1: words that meant things, you might catch on, and indeed
Speaker 1: they're very stupid investors might catch on that they were
Speaker 1: trying to sell you things that already existed. And I
Speaker 1: think that that is really at the heart of the
Speaker 1: metaverse boom and why everyone is so so vague about
Speaker 1: the definition of the metaverse because being specific reveals that
Speaker 1: it's a huge con used by the tech industry to
Speaker 1: pretend that they're innovating for starters. For any definition of
Speaker 1: the metaverse to make sense or to have any actual value,
Speaker 1: you really have to remove gaming entirely from the conversation.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're kind of cheating. If you're going to consider
Speaker 1: Fortnite or Rodeblocks quote the metaverse, you kind of have
Speaker 1: to consider World of Warcraft and ultimre Online or any
Speaker 1: other avatar based game that's ever existed part of the metaverse.
Speaker 1: At which point, isn't the metaverse just chat rooms? Isn't
Speaker 1: the metaverse just computer games? If that's the case, how
Speaker 1: is this a multi trillion dollar industry? The metaverse isn't
Speaker 1: the future If it's just different iterations of talking to
Speaker 1: people using a digital avatar, that's the actual present. Sure,
Speaker 1: maybe it's worth a trillion dollars or three trillion dollars,
Speaker 1: or however much the video game industry is, but that's
Speaker 1: a ridiculous way of looking at this. If the metaverse
Speaker 1: exists in the way they say it, does it already
Speaker 1: existed decades ago. What's interesting about this is, despite all
Speaker 1: of the conversation about the metaverse being this giant, interconnected
Speaker 1: world where people can get together and they don't look
Speaker 1: like themselves, maybe it's pseudonymous, despite all of that rosy
Speaker 1: McKinsey grade bullshit. There's been worries about the massively multiplayer
Speaker 1: online RPG industry, which is World of Warcraft and its ILK,
Speaker 1: declining for quite a while. In fact, it has been
Speaker 1: slowing down, overtaken by a number of different free to
Speaker 1: play games on phones and consoles. It's still going though,
Speaker 1: there are still tens of millions of players playing these games.
Speaker 1: But if you're saying the metaverse is talking to friends
Speaker 1: on Fortnite, then really Twitter and Blue Sky are the
Speaker 1: metaverse too, because I talk to friends on there all
Speaker 1: the time, and some of them have pictures that aren't
Speaker 1: of their actual faces. And that's the thing. If your
Speaker 1: definition of the metaverse is whatever's useful at the time,
Speaker 1: you're just a politician. You're not a software developer, you're
Speaker 1: not a tech founder. You're a fucking liar. In early
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, people were calling microsoft seventy five billion
Speaker 1: dollar acquisition of Call of Duty and World of warcraft
Speaker 1: developer Activision Blizzard quote metaverse related. Now, this was really
Speaker 1: frustrating because it's kind of like saying that piss is
Speaker 1: a competitor to diet coke because both of them are liquids.
Speaker 1: You can't just say something is like the other thing
Speaker 1: because you want it to be that way, You actually
Speaker 1: have to prove it. The existence of interaction in a
Speaker 1: virtual world wasn't the metaverse before, but it got termed
Speaker 1: as such because and really only because billions of dollars
Speaker 1: got invested in the metaverse and they needed something anything
Speaker 1: to point at and say, look, look this exists, this
Speaker 1: is real. It worked before. Please don't ask too many
Speaker 1: more questions. Tim Sweeney of Epic's argument, the one I
Speaker 1: previously referred to that the metaverse isn't dead because people
Speaker 1: play Roadblocks or Fortnite only makes sense if you define
Speaker 1: the metaverse in the broadest way possible, And it's an
Speaker 1: argument that I hate to say kind of has some
Speaker 1: weight considering the definitional fuzziness of the metaverse. But that
Speaker 1: also allows people who back the metaverse to point to
Speaker 1: literally anything and call it the metaverse and then use
Speaker 1: that as proof that the metaverse is destined for greatness?
Speaker 1: Is I messaged the metaverse was rc the earliest chat
Speaker 1: room function of the Internet. The metaverse was aim aol
Speaker 1: instant messenger was that the metaverse? What the hell is
Speaker 1: the metaverse? It just all kind of feels like bullshit.
Speaker 1: Fortnite and Roadblocks have succeeded, not because they're both enjoyable
Speaker 1: spaces to hang out in, but because they're accessible. They're
Speaker 1: easy to play. You don't need a convoluted tutorial. Your
Speaker 1: friends can tell you how to play, or you can
Speaker 1: just work it out, as kind of demonstrated by their
Speaker 1: extremely young demographics. Now, it's kind of hard to find
Speaker 1: verifiable age data for these titles, but one survey published
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one said that the ten to twenty
Speaker 1: age group has the highest percentage of people that have
Speaker 1: played a proto metaverse game, which includes titles like Minecraft, Fortnite,
Speaker 1: and Roadblocks. Now you may hear stats like that and think,
Speaker 1: gee whiz, this might be the future. This is the present.
Speaker 1: This shit has existed for five to ten years. Anyone
Speaker 1: telling you the metaversus the future is just trying to
Speaker 1: pretend they were part of the past. Laugh in their
Speaker 1: faces and give them the Finger, and I fully disagree
Speaker 1: that Fortnite is a space for hanging out. It's a game.
Speaker 1: It's a game that's simple enough to play that you
Speaker 1: can play around in it and have a conversation, and
Speaker 1: if you weren't playing it, you'd probably call the people
Speaker 1: or FaceTime them or some other form of thing. There
Speaker 1: were some spurious articles around the time of the metaverse
Speaker 1: about Fortnite being the new place where kids hang out
Speaker 1: and play together. And what piss me off about that
Speaker 1: is the same thing that pisses me off about the
Speaker 1: metaverse in general. In the kids have been playing video
Speaker 1: games online a while, they've been using headsets a while.
Speaker 1: These things already existed, and Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies
Speaker 1: satch in a della of Microsoft. As I'll get to
Speaker 1: Tim Sweeney of Epic, all of these people trying to
Speaker 1: claim that this was the future and that they were
Speaker 1: part of it. They were doing so to pump up
Speaker 1: their stock values, to make it easier to sell their stock.
Speaker 1: In a case of Epic, It's all quite laughable and
Speaker 1: it's extremely cynical. Now. Fortnite, of course, had a concert
Speaker 1: in it from performer Travis Scott, and when I say
Speaker 1: it's a concert, I kind of mean it's this weirdly
Speaker 1: rendered three D version of Travis Scott looks like an
Speaker 1: Xbox three sixty game, and it was performed to twelve
Speaker 1: point three million players at once. It was defined as
Speaker 1: a breakthrough moment for the metaverse and allegedly was a
Speaker 1: demonstration of its potential in the entertainment space. Except that's
Speaker 1: really just an online game, an online game with instances,
Speaker 1: because you didn't have twelve point three million people in
Speaker 1: one place, you had groups of them, in the same
Speaker 1: way that Fortnite did the announcement of a new Star
Speaker 1: Wars movie involving a plot point that you needed to
Speaker 1: make sense of the third New Star Wars movie. It's
Speaker 1: quite messy. But in both of these cases, these were
Speaker 1: just three D art exhibits. Watching this live kind of
Speaker 1: had no point to it. You weren't interacting with Travis Scott,
Speaker 1: you weren't flipping off the Emperor. I guess you could,
Speaker 1: but it didn't do anything. These were just rolling demos
Speaker 1: where you happened to be surrounded by other people who
Speaker 1: didn't know what the hell to do with themselves. These things,
Speaker 1: these experiences are immersive in the same way that most
Speaker 1: video games are. You focused on a point and you're
Speaker 1: not really doing anything else, and past that it's just
Speaker 1: fucking drab. This is the future. Going through a weird
Speaker 1: warp hole to watch Travis Scott with a bunch of
Speaker 1: people jumping up and down trying to work out what
Speaker 1: the hell they're doing there. This is the future. This
Speaker 1: is the meta us. Being able to watch weird stuff
Speaker 1: fly around you in a video game. Cool, I guess,
Speaker 1: kind of feels like the present, though, kind of feels
Speaker 1: like shit. And the problem was that the majority of
Speaker 1: these metaverse companies just seemed totally lost as far as
Speaker 1: what the metaverse was and why a consumer should use
Speaker 1: it and in many cases how they should use it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, these companies
Speaker 1: got billions of dollars of funding by slapping metaverse or
Speaker 1: decentralized on everything. Decentralized in this case referring to using
Speaker 1: a blockchain decentralized to do a thing usually worse. This
Speaker 1: is how companies like sky Mavis's Axieinfinity raised one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty two million dollars at a three billion dollar
Speaker 1: valuation for a cryptocurrency powered browser based Pokemon clone that
Speaker 1: costs hundreds of dollars to play. And then they invented
Speaker 1: a new kind of loan shark where people would loan
Speaker 1: you the money to buy your axi to start the game,
Speaker 1: and then you'd be some kind of servant for them.
Speaker 1: They then got hacked by North Korea. This will be
Speaker 1: a future episode. Don't worry. Companies like Skymavis are not
Speaker 1: the only ones. This metaverse boom started in October twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, which was the thick of the post lockdown
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency boom, and they took advantage of the metaverse's general
Speaker 1: fuzziness to con people into investing in more cryptocurrency bullshit.
Speaker 1: The blockchain and the associated Ponzi scheme nonsense that followed
Speaker 1: was a recurring theme within many of the first metaverse companies.
Speaker 1: Non Fungible Tokens nftss you might know them, were essentially
Speaker 1: a mechanism that claimed to demonstrate ownership of a digital asset,
Speaker 1: and they were touted as a way to handle virtual
Speaker 1: real estate. During this metaverse boom, there were tons of
Speaker 1: articles about this, claiming that people were selling fifty million
Speaker 1: dollars of metaverse real estate. Nobody cares anymore. It's all disappeared.
Speaker 1: And indeed, many other metaverse companies were also decentralized quote
Speaker 1: web three businesses a spurious name for decentralized blockchain software
Speaker 1: that barely worked. And these companies just printed money, no literally,
Speaker 1: they minted their own cryptocurrencies, which they then put metaverse
Speaker 1: on top of, which conned retail investors into purchasing these things,
Speaker 1: things like virtual land and virtual homes and virtual items
Speaker 1: to put in their virtual homes. This all sounded stupid
Speaker 1: at the time, Yeah, places like The New York Times
Speaker 1: and The Wall Street Journal were doing whole articles about
Speaker 1: how important it was. In reality, the metaverse was a
Speaker 1: cynical con that helped rich people get richer at times
Speaker 1: off the back of retail investors that still believed that
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency was meaningful and would never crash again. Yet the
Speaker 1: entire tech industry worked to proliferate the term metaverse in
Speaker 1: a way that kind of echoes the empty height pseeing
Speaker 1: around artificial intelligence today, and it kind of operated in
Speaker 1: the same way too. They took a technology that already existed,
Speaker 1: and then they massively overstated what it could do in
Speaker 1: the future. And I haven't even got to Meta or
Speaker 1: the general state of virtual and mixed reality. Nowhere was
Speaker 1: the con more on, I guess, until it wasn't than
Speaker 1: at one hack away where I believe Mark Zuckerberg lives.
Speaker 1: In early February twenty twenty three, The Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: pointed to Meta's healthy Q four numbers, where its stock
Speaker 1: price jump by twenty percent, thereby reinstating its membership in
Speaker 1: the club of companies with a market capitalization over one
Speaker 1: trillion dollars, as proof that Meta had and I quote,
Speaker 1: finally figured out how to sell the Metaverse. The journal
Speaker 1: pointed to Meta's Reality Lab's division, which houses the company's
Speaker 1: Metaverse efforts, which made over one billion dollars in revenue
Speaker 1: for the first time, driven primarily by healthy holiday sales
Speaker 1: of Meta's Quest three virtual reality headset. That was the
Speaker 1: big sign that the Metaverse was fine, except it wasn't.
Speaker 1: That's a fortieth of Meta's forty billion dollar Q four revenue.
Speaker 1: It's also roughly a sick of the amount of money
Speaker 1: that Reality Labs burned, with the unit making a four
Speaker 1: point sixty five billion dollar loss, which was its highest
Speaker 1: on record, and in the case of virtual reality, in general,
Speaker 1: it's still a very early stage technology. Most headsets, including
Speaker 1: the latest Oculus in Quest devices, which Meta of course makes,
Speaker 1: are still uncomfortable, clunky, and still buggy, more so than
Speaker 1: the Vision Pro. They're not immersive, and they routinely make
Speaker 1: people feel a kind of physical sickness, which is not ideal.
Speaker 1: A Metas flagship metaverse title, Horizon Worlds is still ugly
Speaker 1: and awkward, and nobody uses it. Multiple articles have now
Speaker 1: come up where people just can't find other people to
Speaker 1: meet in Metas metaverse. It's all so confusing, and Horizon
Speaker 1: is so obviously inferior to Zoom or Microsoft Teams or
Speaker 1: any other form of modern communication that the only reason
Speaker 1: to use it is to be upset or get sick
Speaker 1: or nauseate your colleagues, which I can do for free
Speaker 1: using my webcam over Zoom. And of course Meta obviously
Speaker 1: knows this, because in early twenty twenty three, linked documents
Speaker 1: obtained by the verges Alex Heath revealed that only one
Speaker 1: in ten Horizon World's users returned after trying the title
Speaker 1: for the first time since it's launch. Horizon Worlds and
Speaker 1: I reiterate this is the flagship metaverse title from the
Speaker 1: world's most vocal metaverse company called Meta, that renamed itself
Speaker 1: to Meta Because of the Metaverse, Horison Worlds has continued
Speaker 1: to share its monthly active users to the point where
Speaker 1: it just kind of feels like a mass market open grave.
Speaker 1: Nobody is there. It's worse than an empty more because
Speaker 1: you can kind of see what people would buy there.
Speaker 1: It's just negative space. And all of this is just
Speaker 1: a stunning fall from grace, considering the capital, both reputational
Speaker 1: and monetary, that Zuckerberg pumped into it. When Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: announced in twenty twenty one that Facebook would rebrand to Meta,
Speaker 1: he claimed that the metaverse would be the future of
Speaker 1: the Internet. The glitzy, spurious promotional video that he used
Speaker 1: alongside the name change described this future where we'd be
Speaker 1: able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds. Users would make
Speaker 1: eye contact and feel like they were in the room together.
Speaker 1: The metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an
Speaker 1: immersive experience. And this was what Mark Zuckerberg promised. And
Speaker 1: these are bold claims that are of course totally unfulfilled,
Speaker 1: and I'd argue they're never going to be A functional
Speaker 1: business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow.
Speaker 1: First of all, a clear use case, then a target audience,
Speaker 1: and then of course the willingness of customers to adopt
Speaker 1: the product. Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the metaverse as a
Speaker 1: vision that spans many companies and claimed it was the
Speaker 1: successor to the mobile Internet, Yet he failed to articulate
Speaker 1: basic business problems that the metaverse would address. Absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: underpinned Mark Zuckerberg's promises about the metaverse, and it's still
Speaker 1: as ill defined then as it is now. And yet
Speaker 1: executives and investors decided that it just didn't matter that
Speaker 1: the metaverse didn't mean anything, because of course money could
Speaker 1: be made. Microsoft CEO Sachynadella would say at the company's
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one Ignite conference that he and I quote
Speaker 1: could not overstate how much of a breakthrough the metaverse
Speaker 1: was for his company, the industry, and of course the world.
Speaker 1: As mentioned earlier, Microsoft's seventy five point four billion dollar
Speaker 1: acquisition of Activision Blizzard was described by Microsoft in interviews
Speaker 1: as a metaverse play rather than a major player in
Speaker 1: the gaming sphere, acquiring some of the world's most beloved
Speaker 1: and profitable franchises like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft, Diabloau, and many others created by Activision Blizzard. Roadblocks,
Speaker 1: an online platform that I mentioned earlier one of the
Speaker 1: most popular with kids in the world right now, up
Speaker 1: there with Fortnite, has existed since two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: but rode the Metaverse hypewave to take itself public. Their
Speaker 1: IPO raised at a forty one billion dollar valuation. At
Speaker 1: the time of writing this script, its market cap is
Speaker 1: now twenty seven point six to three billion, a far
Speaker 1: cry from its debut and a fraction of its pandemic
Speaker 1: era peak, when the company was worth seventy eight billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Important note about Roadblocks, by the way, they've never made
Speaker 1: a profit. Kind of a big problem in the business industry.
Speaker 1: Even businesses that seem to have very little to do
Speaker 1: with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse by
Speaker 1: creating a Roadblocks experience that they would eventually shut down
Speaker 1: less than a year later. Disney created their own Metaverse
Speaker 1: division in early twenty twenty two, only to lay them
Speaker 1: all off in March twenty twenty three. In twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: Disney would then invest one and a half billion dollars
Speaker 1: into metaverse lovers epic games. You know the makers of
Speaker 1: Fortnite and I quote. They did so to collaborate on
Speaker 1: an all new games and entertainment universe that will further
Speaker 1: expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences. In
Speaker 1: epics Fortnite, the word metaverse is never used. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, the consulting firm Gartner claimed that twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of people would spend at least an hour a
Speaker 1: day in the metaverse by twenty twenty six. A year later,
Speaker 1: they changed their tune, publishing a document that described in
Speaker 1: stark detail both consumer and business apathy toward the metaverse,
Speaker 1: as well as its fundamental technological limitations, which it said
Speaker 1: couldn't be remedied in the short term. At least, Gartner
Speaker 1: wasn't alone. The Wall Street Journal said the metaverse could
Speaker 1: change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm
Speaker 1: McKinsey predicted that the metaverse could generate up to five
Speaker 1: trillion dollars in value by twenty thirty, adding that around
Speaker 1: a ninety percent of business leaders expected the metaverse to
Speaker 1: positively impact their industry within five to ten years, not
Speaker 1: to be outdone. City put out a massive report that
Speaker 1: declared the metaverse would be a thirteen trillion dollar opportunity
Speaker 1: by twenty thirty. I must be clear, most of these
Speaker 1: reports are bullshit. Most of them are based on them
Speaker 1: just guessing. They will fudge these numbers to mess with you.
Speaker 1: They are lying to you. If you see a McKinsey
Speaker 1: or Garner report and it's quoting an X Y Y
Speaker 1: using a thirteen trillion by twenty thirty, laugh it up,
Speaker 1: walk away. They are fucking with you. They're doing this
Speaker 1: to con investors and by proxy you. And despite all
Speaker 1: of this hype, the why was always absent from the
Speaker 1: discussions of the metaversus potential, particularly when talking about anything
Speaker 1: that wasn't a video game. While I failed to see
Speaker 1: the distinction between an MMRPG like World of Warcraft or
Speaker 1: EverQuest and a so called metaverse game like Roadblocks or Fortnite,
Speaker 1: I can kind of begrudgingly concede that a virtual workplace
Speaker 1: is conceptually distinct enough to have its own name. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's a good idea or worthwhile. Though in
Speaker 1: many respects, all of this metaversal hype illustrates a detachment
Speaker 1: of the c suite from the people who actually do work.
Speaker 1: The fact that both sach In A. Della of Microsoft
Speaker 1: and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believed or would have had
Speaker 1: you believe that ordinary office workers want to hold meetings
Speaker 1: in virtual rooms rooms were wearing a VR headset strongly
Speaker 1: suggests they haven't met a person in quite some time. Billions,
Speaker 1: literally billions of dollars could have been saved by Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg asking one of his programmers or one of his
Speaker 1: ad salespeople if they wanted to go work in a
Speaker 1: kind of low rent copy of Second Life that sucked
Speaker 1: even more, and then they would have said no, Zukia mental,
Speaker 1: except we all know the truth. Mark Zuckerberg didn't give
Speaker 1: a shit about anyone actually using this. He needed some
Speaker 1: air cover to get over Facebook's grizzly history, and he
Speaker 1: knew that the media and investors would drink down whatever
Speaker 1: slop he had prepared for them. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: you remember. In twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: money was much easier to find. Consumer spending was up,
Speaker 1: every stock was up, everything was selling. Everyone I knew
Speaker 1: was doing pretty well, unlike twenty twenty three, when everyone
Speaker 1: kind of crashed back down to Earth. I actually think
Speaker 1: the metaverse com would gone a lot longer had the
Speaker 1: zero interest free economy, which I'll attack in a later episode,
Speaker 1: not fallen apart. In short, though, there was a time
Speaker 1: when investors, in particularly venture capitalists, could get money at
Speaker 1: much much lower rates, one might even say zero percent. Sadly,
Speaker 1: reality would come for the markets and in turn would
Speaker 1: kill investors' spurious dreams of the metaverse. Early twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three was a rough time for everybody. Microsoft shuttered its
Speaker 1: virtual workspace platform all Space VR in January twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: and then laid off the one hundred people who worked
Speaker 1: at the Industrial Metaverse team at Microsoft. They then made
Speaker 1: a series of cuts to its HoloLens team, which was
Speaker 1: their augmented reality glasses thing that most people have kind
Speaker 1: of forgotten about. In September twenty twenty three, mister Metaverse himself,
Speaker 1: Tim Sweeney, and Epic would lay off eight hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty people, attributing it to there and I quote unrealistic
Speaker 1: metaverse ambitions. Several months after my article, I should add
Speaker 1: the billions of dollars invested around this half baked concept
Speaker 1: that to thousands if not tens of thousands losing their jobs,
Speaker 1: and the meta versus savior would also be the one
Speaker 1: to ultimately kill it. Metas Mark Zuckerberg would declare in
Speaker 1: a March company update that Meta's single largest investment would
Speaker 1: be advancing artificial intelligence and building it into every one
Speaker 1: of their products. Metas chief technology officer Andrew bos Bosworth
Speaker 1: told CNBC in April twenty twenty three that he, along
Speaker 1: with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's chief product officer Chris Cox,
Speaker 1: were now spending most of their time on artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: The company even stopped pitching the metaverse to its advertisers,
Speaker 1: despite spending more than one hundred billion dollars in research
Speaker 1: and development on its mission to be and I quote
Speaker 1: metaverse first. While Mark Zuckerberg sometimes suggests the metaverse isn't
Speaker 1: dead by limply telling you that they developing things to
Speaker 1: their headsets and that people are making games for the quest,
Speaker 1: the writing's on the wall. Metas done with the metaverse.
Speaker 1: I don't believe for a second that Mark Zuckerberg ever
Speaker 1: really had any interest in it either, because he never
Speaker 1: seemed to be able to define the metaverse beyond a
Speaker 1: slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars and cumbasson hardware. The metaverse
Speaker 1: was a means to an increased share price rather than
Speaker 1: any real vision for the future or the future of
Speaker 1: human interaction, and Mark Zuckerberg used his outsized wealth and
Speaker 1: power to get the whold of the tech industry in
Speaker 1: a good portion of the American business world in line
Speaker 1: behind him and behind this half baked con The fact
Speaker 1: that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the metaverse
Speaker 1: is a fairly damning indictment of everyone who followed him
Speaker 1: and anyone who still considers him a visionary tech leader.
Speaker 1: It should also be the cause for some serious reflection
Speaker 1: amongst the venture capital community, which recklessly followed Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded
Speaker 1: on the flimsiest possible press release language. In a just world,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta, Yet
Speaker 1: in the real world this is literally impossible due to
Speaker 1: the corporate structure of the company. Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned
Speaker 1: billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit
Speaker 1: to this stupid obsession, and then killed it the second
Speaker 1: that another idea started to interest Wall Street. There's no
Speaker 1: reason that the man who has overseen the layoffs of
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people should run a major company,
Speaker 1: And there is no future for meta with Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: at the helm. Mark my words, it will stagnate. The
Speaker 1: tim has come for online advertising and for Facebook's only
Speaker 1: way of making money, and then it will die and
Speaker 1: follow metaverse into the grave that Mark Zuckerberg dug it.
Speaker 1: While the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences
Speaker 1: may live on in some form and actually exists already,
Speaker 1: the Capital M metaverse is quite dead, and its death
Speaker 1: should be remembered as arguably one of the most historic
Speaker 1: failures in tech history, an historic global con that contributed
Speaker 1: to society's mistrust of the tech industry at large. The
Speaker 1: metaverse has always bothered me. It bothered me back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, and it bothers me today. It was
Speaker 1: so clearly specious. Reporters talking to Mark Zuckerberg ate up
Speaker 1: this slop and indeed helped him fill in the gaps
Speaker 1: when he clearly had not thought about this concept much
Speaker 1: further than he needed to. To give a corporate demonstration
Speaker 1: of nothing. The Metaverse is an example of media's weakness
Speaker 1: when it comes to the powerful. These people have to
Speaker 1: be treated with suspicion when they can't fill in the gaps.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't fill them in for them. In fact, you
Speaker 1: should push them further and further and further. Every interview
Speaker 1: with Mark Zuckerberg should be uncomfortable, it should be inhospitable.
Speaker 1: Right now, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell the vision
Speaker 1: that Meta is an artificial intelligence company. Multiple reporters have
Speaker 1: talked to him about this, and I'm calling upon members
Speaker 1: of the media to stop giving him interviews like this.
Speaker 1: It's time to push back. It's time to push back
Speaker 1: on people like Mark Zuckerberg that cannot tell the truth,
Speaker 1: that cannot reveal their actual agendas. If we people speaking
Speaker 1: into microphones, into people speaking to the powerful, into people
Speaker 1: who have to know this industry and tell other people
Speaker 1: about it. If our job involves talking to these powerful,
Speaker 1: ultra rich, ultra influential men, our real job is to
Speaker 1: ask them questions that are simple, like, hey, man, you
Speaker 1: renamed your company. You renamed it because of this one thing?
Speaker 1: What is that? What does it mean? And when they
Speaker 1: fail to give a cogent answer. The response should be venom.
Speaker 1: It should be discussed. It should be perhaps not an obscenity,
Speaker 1: but something adjacent to one. There is no space to
Speaker 1: give people like Mark Zuckerberg further power. They don't need
Speaker 1: further fuel, they already have it. The metaverse was a
Speaker 1: creation of Mark Zuckerberg's power, that he could say one
Speaker 1: vague thing and billions of dollars would follow as a result.
Speaker 1: We must criticize these people. We must do so loudly
Speaker 1: and proudly and aggressively. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 1: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 1: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 1: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 1: T O. S O w Ski dot com. You can
Speaker 1: email me at easy at Better offline dot com, or
Speaker 1: check out Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter
Speaker 1: and more links to this podcast. Thank you how much
Speaker 1: for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.