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