0:02

All Zone Media. Welcome

0:04

to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron.

0:19

Today's episode is about how one man tricked

0:21

the entire tech industry into burning

0:23

billions of dollars based on nothing.

0:26

You may remember a time in twenty twenty one

0:28

when everybody was talking about the metaverse,

0:31

the so called successor to the Internet that

0:33

was used by Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook,

0:36

taking the heat off of a name associated with abusing

0:38

its customers and misusing their data. It

0:41

was meant to be a completely digital world

0:43

we lived in. Oh, maybe it was

0:45

a VR space that we socialized in. Was

0:48

it VR space we worked in? Was

0:51

it a virtual world? Wasn't there something to do with

0:53

crypto? If you're finding

0:55

all of this confusing, we have something in

0:57

common. We need to

0:59

go back to twenty twenty one to really

1:01

work out what the hell went on though. Interviewing

1:06

Mark Zuckerberg for The Virgin July twenty

1:08

twenty one, Casey Newton referred

1:10

to the metaverse as a maximalist, interconnected

1:13

set of experiences straight out of sci

1:15

fi. Again, that means

1:17

nothing, but nevertheless that's what he

1:19

chose to publish a few months

1:21

later when renaming the company

1:23

Facebook to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg

1:26

referred to the metaverse as a more

1:28

immersive, embodied Internet

1:31

where you're in the experience, not just

1:33

looking at it. In the multiple

1:35

interviews he's given since, Zuckerberg has

1:37

spent thousands of words vaguely suggesting

1:39

the metavers is everything from a chat room

1:42

to virtual reality to and I

1:44

quote, a hybrid between the social platforms

1:47

that we see today, but in an environment

1:49

where you're embodied in it. In

1:51

fact, at one point, Mark Zuckerberg said

1:54

that Meta would transition from being seen

1:56

as a social media company to being

1:58

a metaverse company or

2:00

without ever saying really what the metaverse

2:02

was, and his

2:05

descriptions veered from saying it was a

2:07

social network to a virtual reality

2:09

game to something that was part of web

2:11

three, which was a term used by cryptocurrency

2:14

con artists to sell you some sort of

2:16

decentralized blockchain based thing

2:19

in reality metas metaverse was far

2:21

more boring. They would only ever

2:24

release two mediocre virtual reality

2:26

experiences for their Quest and Oculus

2:28

headsets, one for socializing

2:30

called Horizon Worlds and another for work

2:32

called Inventively Horizon Workrooms.

2:35

You all kind of felt like a con. Yeah,

2:38

The media in the tech industry crystallized around

2:40

it with this strange, frenzied excitement.

2:44

Look, at the time, I

2:46

didn't know you. You weren't listening to this podcast,

2:49

But if you felt like you were being

2:51

swindled, you should have been. Believe

2:54

your ears, believe your eyes.

2:57

Mark Zuckerberg renamed a trillion dollar

2:59

company and hyped an idea that he

3:01

could not describe, and

3:04

then he sent the entire tech ecosystem

3:06

into a year's long panic attack that resulted

3:08

in billions of dollars being wasted

3:11

on non existent ideas. At

3:14

the time, I was one of the lone voices

3:16

to crying the made up metaverse. I was screaming

3:19

into the void that despite all of this press,

3:22

all of this hype, nobody, not

3:25

the journalists, not the investors, not

3:27

Mark Zuckerberg, could actually describe

3:30

what the metaverse was. Zuckerberg

3:33

would go on to burn tens of billions of

3:35

dollars investing in research and development

3:38

allegedly building the metaverse, and

3:40

multiple startups would claim that they'd now

3:42

entered the metaverse, only to end

3:45

up ditching the idea. Toward the end of twenty twenty

3:47

two and early twenty twenty three, as interest

3:49

rates tightened and tech stocks began to

3:51

suffer, eventually entering what Zuckerberg

3:53

would call the Year of Efficiency,

3:56

which was code for laying off thousands

3:59

of people and refocusing meta

4:01

on artificial intelligence after seeing

4:03

how well chated GPT was doing.

4:06

I've always been an anti metaverse,

4:09

mostly because nobody could tell me what it

4:11

was. In fact, in May twenty twenty

4:13

three, I wrote a piece of Business Insider declaring

4:16

the metaverse dead, something which pissed off Tim

4:18

Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games the

4:20

developers Fortnite, who then quote

4:22

tweeted it with this kind of sarcastic indignation.

4:26

I will now attempt to do Tim Sweeney's voice.

4:28

The metaverse is dead, wrote Sweeney, who

4:31

was definitely not upset with me. Let's organize

4:33

an online wake so that we six hundred

4:35

million monthly active users in Fortnite,

4:37

Minecraft, Roadblocks, PUBG, Sandbox

4:40

and Vrchack and morn it's passing together in real

4:42

time three D. I think that's how he

4:44

sounds. Look Tim,

4:47

you're wrong. I'm right. The metaverse was

4:49

dead, and by metaverse I mean

4:51

the ugly, butchered, usurious

4:53

scam perpetuated in public

4:56

where companies like Epic slapped

4:58

a new logo on something old and tried

5:00

to claim it was the future. What

5:02

Sweeney is describing are actually

5:05

video games, video games that have existed

5:07

for upwards of a decade that were never

5:09

once referred to as part of the metaverse,

5:12

despite this being a nineties term

5:14

from a book. And it's just ridiculous

5:17

because these people never use this

5:19

term before until

5:21

it helped them sell crap to investors.

5:24

Whether or not the metaverse may actually

5:26

exist one day is immaterial to

5:28

the fact that this was one of the largest and most

5:31

conspicuous cons I've ever seen,

5:34

and nobody has been held

5:36

accountable. Nevertheless,

5:39

the metaverse does actually mean something.

5:41

It's just kind of a pain in the ass to explain.

5:45

Even for the truest of metaverse believers,

5:48

it isn't really an easy thing to define. In

5:50

twenty twenty two, I, of my own volition,

5:53

for whatever reason, decided

5:55

to travel to Santa Clara, California,

5:57

to attend the Augmented World Expo,

6:00

a tech conference about mixed and virtual reality

6:02

and of course, now the metaverse. This

6:05

conference has existed for quite a long time.

6:07

I had been before, but before

6:10

it was around things that existed like AR

6:12

and V are augmented reality, meaning

6:14

that something you put over your face, perhaps

6:17

like the Vision pro or VR, like the

6:19

Oculus headsets and Quest headsets. The

6:21

meta was already selling without mentioning the metaverse.

6:25

And I remember, despite spending days

6:27

surrounded by people discussing the metaverse, talking

6:29

about the metaverse, walking around boots that

6:31

said Metaverse on them, trying products

6:34

that were apparently the metaverse,

6:37

and having dreary conversations

6:39

about what the metaverse could be, I

6:42

couldn't get a consistent or

6:44

compelling definition of what

6:46

a metaverse actually was. Okay,

6:50

let me get it a go, though. Depending

6:52

on the person, the metaverse is a virtual

6:54

space where you live, or

6:56

it's a video game, or it's a virtual

6:58

reality experience, or it's a filter on

7:01

your camera that makes you look like a dog. This

7:03

is how varied the media's

7:05

description was of what the metaverse

7:08

was. It was basically anything that

7:10

involved the real world being kind

7:12

of masked by digital things. If

7:15

you watched Mark Zuckerberg's October twenty

7:17

twenty one video, you might believe

7:20

it's a virtual world that encompasses

7:22

your senses, a fully

7:24

sensory experience that the kinds you'd find

7:27

in Ernest Klein's horrible book Ready

7:29

Player One. Now you may

7:31

be thinking, Heed, that's not

7:33

technically possible, and you'd be completely

7:36

and utterly right. The conceptual

7:38

ambiguity, of course, and the fact that

7:40

a lot of the stuff people were talking about just

7:43

wasn't possible and still isn't today, didn't

7:45

stop many, many companies

7:48

from cashing in, raising hundreds

7:50

of millions of dollars from investors to build

7:52

products that did not and probably

7:55

could not exist in

7:57

an industry called the metaverse that

8:00

nobody, not the investors, not the

8:02

founders, could actually describe.

8:05

Let me give you some examples. Bud

8:08

they're a company that raised over sixty

8:10

million dollars that, according to tech Crunch,

8:13

did so to create a metaverse for

8:15

gen z to play and interact with each

8:17

other. I've downloaded

8:19

Bud. I've looked at what Bud is. They

8:22

don't mention the metaverse anymore. It's

8:24

actually a micro transaction riddled iPhone

8:27

app that lets you visit other people's

8:29

very generic looking spaces. I

8:32

used to review massively multiplayer

8:34

online RPGs like World

8:36

Warcraft and things like that. I've

8:38

seen one hundred million of these things.

8:41

Versions of what Bud does have

8:43

existed for a long long

8:46

time. Then there's another

8:48

company Trip that's tripp

8:51

because why name things normally.

8:54

They raised twenty six point three

8:56

million dollars to create apps that and I

8:59

quote power mindful metaverse

9:01

and said metaverse is community

9:04

driven. In practice, it's a virtual

9:06

reality app that shows you these weird,

9:08

trippy visions that you

9:10

would imagine seeing in a PSA for

9:13

drug abuse in the nineties. They

9:15

cost ten twenty dollars.

9:18

It's very strange that this company

9:20

raised that much money and nobody has

9:22

done the due diligence to actually follow up

9:24

with them and ask them what the

9:26

hell the metaverse was and why it justified

9:28

these massive valuations. Each

9:31

one of these pablum filled multimillion

9:33

dollar metaverse companies was

9:36

incapable of describing themselves outside

9:39

of using concussion grade buzzwords.

9:42

They had good reason to though. If

9:44

they used real words that meant

9:46

things, you might catch

9:48

on, and indeed they're very stupid investors

9:51

might catch on that they were trying to sell

9:53

you things that already existed. And

9:55

I think that that is really at the heart

9:58

of the metaverse boom and

10:00

why everyone is so so

10:02

vague about the definition of the

10:04

metaverse because being

10:07

specific reveals that it's a huge

10:09

con used by the tech industry

10:11

to pretend that they're innovating for

10:15

starters. For any definition

10:17

of the metaverse to make sense or

10:19

to have any actual value, you really

10:22

have to remove gaming entirely

10:24

from the conversation. Otherwise you're kind

10:26

of cheating. If you're

10:28

going to consider Fortnite or Rodeblocks

10:31

quote the metaverse, you kind

10:33

of have to consider World of Warcraft

10:35

and ultimre Online or any other

10:37

avatar based game that's ever existed

10:40

part of the metaverse. At which point,

10:43

isn't the metaverse just

10:45

chat rooms? Isn't the metaverse

10:49

just computer games? If

10:52

that's the case, how is this

10:54

a multi trillion dollar industry? The

10:57

metaverse isn't the future If it's just different

11:00

iterations of talking to people using

11:02

a digital avatar, that's

11:04

the actual present. Sure, maybe

11:06

it's worth a trillion dollars or three trillion

11:09

dollars, or however much the video

11:11

game industry is, but

11:13

that's a ridiculous way of looking at

11:15

this. If the metaverse exists

11:18

in the way they say it, does it

11:20

already existed decades ago. What's

11:24

interesting about this is, despite

11:26

all of the conversation about the metaverse

11:28

being this giant, interconnected

11:30

world where people can get together

11:33

and they don't look like themselves, maybe it's

11:35

pseudonymous, despite

11:38

all of that rosy McKinsey

11:41

grade bullshit. There's been

11:44

worries about the massively multiplayer online

11:46

RPG industry, which is World

11:48

of Warcraft and its ILK, declining

11:50

for quite a while. In fact,

11:53

it has been slowing down, overtaken

11:56

by a number of different free to play games

11:58

on phones and consoles. It's still

12:00

going though, there are still tens of millions

12:02

of players playing these games. But

12:04

if you're saying the metaverse is talking to friends

12:07

on Fortnite, then really

12:09

Twitter and Blue Sky are the metaverse too,

12:12

because I talk to friends on there all

12:14

the time, and some of them have pictures

12:16

that aren't of their actual faces. And

12:19

that's the thing. If your

12:21

definition of the metaverse is whatever's

12:23

useful at the time, you're just

12:25

a politician. You're not a software

12:28

developer, you're not a tech founder.

12:30

You're a fucking liar. In

12:33

early twenty twenty two, people were calling microsoft

12:36

seventy five billion dollar acquisition

12:38

of Call of Duty and World of warcraft

12:40

developer Activision Blizzard quote metaverse

12:43

related. Now,

12:45

this was really frustrating because

12:47

it's kind of like saying that piss is a competitor

12:49

to diet coke because both of them are liquids.

12:52

You can't just say something is like

12:54

the other thing because you want

12:56

it to be that way, You actually have to prove

12:58

it. The existence of

13:00

interaction in a virtual world wasn't

13:02

the metaverse before, but it got termed

13:05

as such because and really only

13:07

because billions of dollars got

13:09

invested in the metaverse and they needed something

13:12

anything to point at and say, look,

13:14

look this exists, this is real. It worked

13:16

before. Please don't ask too many more

13:18

questions. Tim Sweeney of Epic's

13:21

argument, the one I previously

13:23

referred to that the metaverse isn't dead because

13:26

people play Roadblocks or Fortnite

13:29

only makes sense if you define the metaverse

13:31

in the broadest way possible, And

13:34

it's an argument that I hate to say kind

13:36

of has some weight considering the definitional

13:39

fuzziness of the metaverse. But

13:41

that also allows people who back the

13:43

metaverse to point to literally anything and call

13:45

it the metaverse and then use that as

13:48

proof that the metaverse is destined for greatness?

13:51

Is I messaged the metaverse was

13:54

rc the earliest chat room

13:56

function of the Internet. The metaverse

14:00

was aim aol instant messenger

14:02

was that the metaverse? What

14:21

the hell is the metaverse? It

14:23

just all kind of feels

14:26

like bullshit. Fortnite

14:28

and Roadblocks have succeeded, not because they're both

14:30

enjoyable spaces to hang out in, but because

14:32

they're accessible. They're easy to play.

14:34

You don't need a convoluted tutorial.

14:37

Your friends can tell you how to play, or you can just

14:39

work it out, as kind of demonstrated

14:41

by their extremely young demographics. Now,

14:44

it's kind of hard to find verifiable age

14:46

data for these titles, but one

14:48

survey published in twenty twenty one said

14:50

that the ten to twenty age

14:53

group has the highest percentage of people that have played

14:55

a proto metaverse game, which

14:57

includes titles like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roadblocks.

15:00

Now you may hear stats like that and think,

15:03

gee whiz, this might be the future. This

15:05

is the present. This shit has existed for

15:07

five to ten years. Anyone telling

15:10

you the metaversus the future is just

15:12

trying to pretend they were part of the past. Laugh

15:14

in their faces and give them the Finger, and

15:17

I fully disagree that Fortnite

15:19

is a space for hanging out. It's

15:22

a game. It's a game that's simple

15:24

enough to play that you can play around in it

15:26

and have a conversation, and

15:29

if you weren't playing it, you'd probably call the

15:31

people or FaceTime them or some

15:33

other form of thing. There

15:35

were some spurious articles around the time

15:37

of the metaverse about Fortnite being the new

15:40

place where kids hang out and play

15:42

together. And what piss me

15:44

off about that is the same thing

15:46

that pisses me off about the metaverse in general.

15:49

In the kids have been playing video games

15:51

online a while, they've been using headsets

15:53

a while. These

15:56

things already existed, and Mark

15:58

Zuckerberg and his cronies satch in

16:00

a della of Microsoft. As I'll get to Tim

16:03

Sweeney of Epic, all of these people

16:05

trying to claim that this was the future

16:07

and that they were part of it. They were doing

16:09

so to pump up their stock values, to

16:12

make it easier to sell their stock. In a case of

16:14

Epic, It's all quite laughable

16:16

and it's extremely cynical. Now.

16:20

Fortnite, of course, had a concert

16:22

in it from performer Travis

16:24

Scott, and when I say

16:26

it's a concert, I kind of mean it's

16:29

this weirdly rendered three D version

16:31

of Travis Scott looks like an Xbox

16:33

three sixty game, and it was performed

16:35

to twelve point three million players

16:37

at once. It was defined as

16:39

a breakthrough moment for the metaverse and

16:41

allegedly was a demonstration of its potential

16:44

in the entertainment space. Except

16:47

that's really just an online game, an

16:49

online game with instances, because

16:51

you didn't have twelve point three million people

16:53

in one place, you had groups

16:56

of them, in the same way that Fortnite

16:58

did the announcement of a new Star Wars

17:00

movie involving a plot point that you

17:03

needed to make sense of the third New Star

17:05

Wars movie. It's quite messy. But in both

17:07

of these cases, these were just three D

17:09

art exhibits. Watching this live

17:12

kind of had no point to it. You weren't interacting

17:14

with Travis Scott, you weren't flipping

17:16

off the Emperor. I guess you could, but it didn't do anything.

17:19

These were just rolling demos where you

17:21

happened to be surrounded by other people who

17:23

didn't know what the hell to do with themselves. These

17:26

things, these experiences

17:29

are immersive in the same way that most video

17:31

games are. You focused

17:33

on a point and you're not really doing anything

17:36

else, and past that it's

17:38

just fucking drab. This

17:40

is the future. Going

17:43

through a weird warp hole to watch

17:45

Travis Scott with a bunch of people jumping

17:47

up and down trying to work out what the hell

17:49

they're doing there. This is

17:51

the future. This is

17:54

the meta us. Being able to

17:56

watch weird stuff fly around you in a video

17:58

game. Cool,

18:00

I guess, kind of feels

18:02

like the present, though, kind

18:04

of feels like shit. And

18:07

the problem was that the majority of these metaverse

18:09

companies just seemed totally lost

18:11

as far as what the metaverse

18:13

was and why a consumer should

18:16

use it and in many cases how they

18:18

should use it. Yeah. In twenty

18:20

twenty one and twenty twenty two, these companies

18:22

got billions of dollars of funding by

18:24

slapping metaverse or decentralized

18:27

on everything. Decentralized in

18:29

this case referring to using

18:31

a blockchain decentralized to

18:34

do a thing usually worse. This

18:37

is how companies like sky Mavis's

18:39

Axieinfinity raised one hundred

18:42

and fifty two million dollars at a three

18:44

billion dollar valuation for

18:46

a cryptocurrency powered browser based

18:49

Pokemon clone that costs hundreds

18:51

of dollars to play. And

18:53

then they invented a new kind of loan shark

18:55

where people would loan you the money

18:58

to buy your axi to start the game, and

19:00

then you'd be some kind of servant for them.

19:03

They then got hacked by North Korea. This

19:05

will be a future episode. Don't worry. Companies

19:08

like Skymavis are not the only ones. This

19:11

metaverse boom started in October

19:13

twenty twenty one, which was the thick of the

19:16

post lockdown cryptocurrency boom,

19:18

and they took advantage of the metaverse's

19:20

general fuzziness to con

19:23

people into investing in more cryptocurrency

19:25

bullshit. The blockchain

19:28

and the associated Ponzi scheme nonsense

19:30

that followed was a recurring theme

19:32

within many of the first metaverse companies.

19:35

Non Fungible Tokens nftss

19:37

you might know them, were essentially

19:39

a mechanism that claimed to demonstrate

19:42

ownership of a digital asset, and

19:44

they were touted as a way to handle virtual

19:46

real estate. During this metaverse boom,

19:49

there were tons of articles about

19:51

this, claiming that people were selling

19:53

fifty million dollars of metaverse real

19:55

estate. Nobody cares

19:58

anymore. It's all disappeared. And

20:00

indeed, many other metaverse companies were

20:02

also decentralized quote web three

20:04

businesses a spurious name for

20:06

decentralized blockchain software that barely

20:09

worked. And these

20:11

companies just printed money, no

20:13

literally, they minted their own cryptocurrencies,

20:16

which they then put metaverse on

20:18

top of, which conned retail investors

20:20

into purchasing these things, things like virtual

20:23

land and virtual homes and virtual items

20:25

to put in their virtual homes. This

20:27

all sounded stupid at the time, Yeah,

20:30

places like The New York Times and The Wall Street

20:32

Journal were doing whole articles about how

20:35

important it was. In

20:37

reality, the metaverse

20:39

was a cynical con that helped rich people

20:41

get richer at times

20:44

off the back of retail investors that still

20:46

believed that cryptocurrency was meaningful

20:49

and would never crash again. Yet

20:52

the entire tech industry worked

20:54

to proliferate the term metaverse in

20:56

a way that kind of echoes

20:59

the empty height pseeing around artificial

21:01

intelligence today, and

21:03

it kind of operated in the same way

21:06

too. They took a technology

21:08

that already existed, and then

21:10

they massively overstated what it could do

21:12

in the future. And I haven't

21:14

even got to Meta or the general

21:16

state of virtual and mixed reality.

21:19

Nowhere was the con more on, I

21:21

guess, until it wasn't than at one

21:24

hack away where I believe Mark Zuckerberg

21:26

lives. In early February twenty

21:28

twenty three, The Wall Street Journal pointed

21:30

to Meta's healthy Q four numbers, where

21:32

its stock price jump by twenty percent,

21:35

thereby reinstating its membership in the

21:37

club of companies with a market capitalization

21:39

over one trillion dollars, as proof

21:41

that Meta had and I quote, finally

21:43

figured out how to sell the Metaverse. The

21:46

journal pointed to Meta's Reality Lab's

21:48

division, which houses the company's Metaverse

21:50

efforts, which made over one billion

21:53

dollars in revenue for the first time, driven

21:55

primarily by healthy holiday sales

21:57

of Meta's Quest three virtual reality headset.

22:00

That was the big sign that the Metaverse

22:02

was fine, except it wasn't.

22:06

That's a fortieth of Meta's

22:08

forty billion dollar Q four revenue.

22:11

It's also roughly a sick of

22:13

the amount of money that Reality Labs burned,

22:16

with the unit making a four point sixty five

22:19

billion dollar loss, which was its highest

22:21

on record, and

22:23

in the case of virtual reality, in general,

22:26

it's still a very early stage technology.

22:29

Most headsets, including the latest Oculus

22:31

in Quest devices, which Meta of course

22:33

makes, are still uncomfortable, clunky,

22:36

and still buggy, more so than the

22:38

Vision Pro. They're not immersive,

22:40

and they routinely make people feel a kind

22:42

of physical sickness, which is

22:44

not ideal. A Metas

22:47

flagship metaverse title, Horizon

22:49

Worlds is still ugly and

22:51

awkward, and nobody uses

22:54

it. Multiple articles have now

22:56

come up where people just can't find other

22:58

people to meet in Metas

23:00

metaverse. It's all so confusing,

23:05

and Horizon is so obviously

23:07

inferior to Zoom or Microsoft Teams

23:10

or any other form of modern communication that

23:12

the only reason to use it is to be

23:15

upset or get sick or

23:17

nauseate your colleagues, which I can do

23:19

for free using my webcam over Zoom.

23:22

And of course Meta obviously knows this,

23:25

because in early twenty twenty three, linked

23:27

documents obtained by the verges Alex

23:30

Heath revealed that only one in ten Horizon

23:32

World's users returned after trying the

23:34

title for the first time since

23:37

it's launch. Horizon Worlds and I reiterate

23:40

this is the flagship metaverse title

23:43

from the world's most vocal metaverse

23:45

company called Meta, that renamed

23:47

itself to Meta Because of the Metaverse,

23:50

Horison Worlds has continued to share its

23:53

monthly active users to the point where it

23:55

just kind of feels like a mass market open grave.

23:59

Nobody is there. It's worse

24:02

than an empty more because you can kind of see what people

24:04

would buy there. It's just

24:06

negative space. And

24:09

all of this is just a stunning fall

24:11

from grace, considering the capital, both

24:14

reputational and monetary, that

24:16

Zuckerberg pumped into it. When

24:19

Mark Zuckerberg announced in twenty twenty one that

24:21

Facebook would rebrand to Meta, he

24:23

claimed that the metaverse would be the future

24:25

of the Internet. The glitzy,

24:28

spurious promotional video that he used

24:30

alongside the name change described

24:33

this future where we'd be able to interact seamlessly

24:35

in virtual worlds. Users would make eye

24:37

contact and feel like they were in the room together.

24:41

The metaverse offered people the chance to

24:43

engage in an immersive experience. And

24:45

this was what Mark Zuckerberg promised.

24:48

And these are bold claims that are of

24:50

course totally unfulfilled, and

24:53

I'd argue they're never going to be A

24:56

functional business proposition requires

24:58

a few things to thrive and grow. First

25:00

of all, a clear use case, then

25:02

a target audience, and then of course

25:05

the willingness of customers to adopt the product.

25:08

Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the metaverse

25:11

as a vision that spans many companies

25:13

and claimed it was the successor to the mobile

25:15

Internet, Yet

25:18

he failed to articulate basic

25:20

business problems that the metaverse would address.

25:24

Absolutely nothing underpinned

25:26

Mark Zuckerberg's promises about

25:28

the metaverse, and it's still

25:30

as ill defined then as it is now. And

25:33

yet executives and investors decided that

25:35

it just didn't matter that the metaverse didn't

25:37

mean anything, because of course money

25:40

could be made.

25:42

Microsoft CEO Sachynadella would say

25:44

at the company's twenty twenty one Ignite conference

25:47

that he and I quote could not overstate

25:49

how much of a breakthrough the metaverse

25:52

was for his company, the industry, and

25:54

of course the world. As mentioned

25:56

earlier, Microsoft's seventy five

25:58

point four billion dollar acquisition of Activision

26:01

Blizzard was described by Microsoft

26:03

in interviews as a metaverse play

26:06

rather than a major player in the gaming sphere, acquiring

26:08

some of the world's most beloved and profitable franchises

26:11

like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk,

26:14

World of Warcraft, Diabloau,

26:16

and many others created by Activision

26:18

Blizzard. Roadblocks,

26:21

an online platform that I mentioned earlier one

26:23

of the most popular with kids in the

26:25

world right now, up there with Fortnite,

26:27

has existed since two thousand and four, but

26:30

rode the Metaverse hypewave to take

26:32

itself public. Their

26:34

IPO raised at a forty one

26:36

billion dollar valuation. At

26:39

the time of writing this script, its

26:41

market cap is now twenty seven point six

26:43

to three billion, a far cry from its debut

26:46

and a fraction of its pandemic era peak,

26:48

when the company was worth seventy eight billion

26:50

dollars. Important note about Roadblocks,

26:52

by the way, they've never made a profit.

26:55

Kind of a big problem in the business

26:57

industry.

27:08

Even businesses that seem to have very little

27:10

to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart

27:13

joined the Metaverse by creating a Roadblocks experience

27:15

that they would eventually shut down less than a year later.

27:18

Disney created their own Metaverse division

27:20

in early twenty twenty two, only to lay

27:22

them all off in March twenty twenty three.

27:25

In twenty twenty four, Disney would then invest

27:27

one and a half billion dollars into metaverse

27:29

lovers epic games. You know the makers

27:32

of Fortnite and I quote. They did so

27:34

to collaborate on an all new games

27:36

and entertainment universe that will further expand

27:38

the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences.

27:42

In epics Fortnite, the word

27:44

metaverse is never used. In

27:48

twenty twenty two, the consulting firm Gartner

27:50

claimed that twenty five percent of people would spend

27:52

at least an hour a day in the metaverse

27:54

by twenty twenty six. A

27:57

year later, they changed their tune,

28:00

publishing a document that described in stark

28:02

detail both consumer and business apathy

28:04

toward the metaverse, as well as

28:06

its fundamental technological limitations,

28:08

which it said couldn't be remedied in

28:11

the short term. At least, Gartner

28:13

wasn't alone. The Wall Street Journal

28:15

said the metaverse could change the way we work

28:17

forever. The global consulting

28:19

firm McKinsey predicted that the metaverse

28:22

could generate up to five trillion

28:24

dollars in value by twenty thirty,

28:26

adding that around a ninety percent of

28:29

business leaders expected the metaverse

28:31

to positively impact their industry

28:33

within five to ten years, not to

28:35

be outdone. City put out a massive

28:37

report that declared the metaverse would be a

28:39

thirteen trillion dollar opportunity

28:42

by twenty thirty. I

28:44

must be clear, most of these reports

28:46

are bullshit. Most of them are based

28:48

on them just guessing. They will fudge

28:51

these numbers to mess with you. They are

28:53

lying to you. If you see a McKinsey

28:55

or Garner report and it's quoting

28:58

an X Y Y using

29:01

a thirteen trillion by twenty thirty,

29:04

laugh it up, walk away. They

29:06

are fucking with you. They're doing this to

29:08

con investors and by proxy you.

29:12

And despite all of this hype, the

29:14

why was always absent from the discussions

29:17

of the metaversus potential, particularly

29:19

when talking about anything that wasn't a video game.

29:22

While I failed to see the distinction between an MMRPG

29:25

like World of Warcraft or EverQuest and

29:27

a so called metaverse game like Roadblocks

29:30

or Fortnite, I can kind of begrudgingly

29:32

concede that a virtual workplace is conceptually

29:34

distinct enough to have its own name. That

29:37

doesn't mean it's a good idea or worthwhile.

29:40

Though in many respects,

29:43

all of this metaversal hype illustrates

29:46

a detachment of the c suite

29:48

from the people who actually do work. The

29:50

fact that both sach In A. Della of Microsoft

29:53

and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believed

29:55

or would have had you believe that ordinary

29:57

office workers want to hold meetings in virtual

29:59

rooms rooms were wearing a VR headset

30:02

strongly suggests they haven't met a person in

30:04

quite some time. Billions,

30:07

literally billions of dollars could

30:10

have been saved by Mark Zuckerberg

30:12

asking one of his programmers or one of

30:14

his ad salespeople if they wanted

30:16

to go work in a kind of low rent copy of

30:18

Second Life that sucked even more, and

30:21

then they would have said no, Zukia

30:23

mental, except we all know

30:25

the truth. Mark Zuckerberg didn't

30:28

give a shit about anyone actually using

30:30

this. He needed some air cover

30:32

to get over Facebook's grizzly history,

30:35

and he knew that the media and investors would

30:37

drink down whatever slop he had prepared for them.

30:41

I'm not sure if you remember. In twenty twenty

30:43

one and twenty twenty two, money

30:45

was much easier to find. Consumer

30:48

spending was up, every stock was up,

30:50

everything was selling. Everyone I knew

30:52

was doing pretty well, unlike twenty twenty

30:55

three, when everyone kind of crashed back down to Earth.

30:58

I actually think the metaverse com would gone

31:00

a lot longer had the zero interest

31:02

free economy, which I'll attack

31:04

in a later episode, not fallen apart.

31:08

In short, though, there was a time

31:10

when investors, in particularly venture

31:13

capitalists, could get money at

31:15

much much lower rates, one might even say

31:17

zero percent. Sadly,

31:20

reality would come for the markets

31:23

and in turn would kill investors'

31:25

spurious dreams of the metaverse.

31:28

Early twenty twenty three was a rough

31:31

time for everybody. Microsoft

31:34

shuttered its virtual workspace platform

31:36

all Space VR in January twenty twenty three,

31:39

and then laid off the one hundred people who worked

31:41

at the Industrial Metaverse team at Microsoft.

31:44

They then made a series of cuts to its HoloLens

31:46

team, which was their augmented reality

31:49

glasses thing that most people have kind of

31:51

forgotten about. In September twenty

31:53

twenty three, mister Metaverse himself,

31:55

Tim Sweeney, and Epic would lay off eight hundred

31:57

and thirty people, attributing it to there

32:00

and I quote unrealistic metaverse

32:02

ambitions. Several months after my

32:04

article, I should add the billions

32:07

of dollars invested around this half baked

32:09

concept that to thousands if not tens

32:11

of thousands losing their jobs,

32:14

and the meta versus savior would

32:16

also be the one to ultimately kill it. Metas

32:19

Mark Zuckerberg would declare in a

32:22

March company update that Meta's single

32:24

largest investment would be advancing artificial

32:27

intelligence and building it into every one of their

32:29

products. Metas chief technology

32:31

officer Andrew bos Bosworth

32:33

told CNBC in April twenty twenty three that

32:35

he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's

32:38

chief product officer Chris Cox, were

32:40

now spending most of their time on artificial

32:43

intelligence. The company

32:45

even stopped pitching the metaverse to its advertisers,

32:48

despite spending more than one hundred billion dollars

32:50

in research and development on its mission to be

32:52

and I quote metaverse first. While

32:55

Mark Zuckerberg sometimes suggests the metaverse

32:58

isn't dead by limply telling you that they developing

33:00

things to their headsets and that people are making

33:02

games for the quest, the writing's

33:04

on the wall. Metas done with the

33:06

metaverse. I don't

33:08

believe for a second that

33:11

Mark Zuckerberg ever really had any interest

33:13

in it either, because he never seemed

33:15

to be able to define the metaverse beyond

33:17

a slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars

33:20

and cumbasson hardware. The metaverse

33:22

was a means to an increased share price rather

33:25

than any real vision for the future

33:27

or the future of human interaction, and

33:30

Mark Zuckerberg used his outsized wealth

33:32

and power to get the whold of the tech industry

33:34

in a good portion of the American business world

33:37

in line behind him and

33:39

behind this half baked con The

33:43

fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped

33:45

away from the metaverse is a fairly damning

33:47

indictment of everyone who followed him

33:49

and anyone who still considers him a

33:51

visionary tech leader. It should also

33:53

be the cause for some serious reflection

33:56

amongst the venture capital community, which

33:58

recklessly followed Mark Zuckerberg into

34:00

blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle

34:03

founded on the flimsiest possible

34:05

press release language. In a just

34:07

world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as

34:09

CEO of Meta, Yet in the real world

34:12

this is literally impossible due to the

34:14

corporate structure of the company. Zuckerberg

34:18

misled everyone, burned billions of dollars,

34:20

convinced an industry of followers to submit

34:23

to this stupid obsession, and then killed

34:25

it the second that another idea started to

34:27

interest Wall Street. There's no reason

34:30

that the man who has overseen the layoffs of

34:32

tens of thousands of people should run

34:34

a major company, And there is no

34:36

future for meta with Mark Zuckerberg

34:38

at the helm. Mark my words,

34:41

it will stagnate. The

34:43

tim has come for online advertising

34:45

and for Facebook's only way of making money,

34:48

and then it will die and follow metaverse

34:50

into the grave that Mark Zuckerberg dug it. While

34:53

the idea of virtual worlds or collective

34:56

online experiences may live on in some form

34:58

and actually exists already, the Capital

35:00

M metaverse is quite dead, and

35:03

its death should be remembered as arguably

35:05

one of the most historic failures

35:07

in tech history, an historic

35:10

global con that contributed to

35:12

society's mistrust of the tech industry

35:14

at large. The metaverse

35:17

has always bothered me. It bothered me back

35:19

in twenty twenty one, and it bothers me today.

35:22

It was so clearly specious.

35:25

Reporters talking to Mark Zuckerberg ate

35:27

up this slop and indeed helped him

35:30

fill in the gaps when he clearly had

35:32

not thought about this concept much further than

35:34

he needed to. To give a corporate demonstration

35:36

of nothing. The Metaverse

35:38

is an example of media's

35:41

weakness when it comes to the powerful. These

35:43

people have to be treated with suspicion

35:46

when they can't fill in the gaps. You shouldn't

35:48

fill them in for them. In fact, you should

35:50

push them further and further

35:52

and further. Every interview

35:55

with Mark Zuckerberg should be uncomfortable,

35:57

it should be inhospitable. Right

36:00

now, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell

36:02

the vision that Meta is an artificial

36:04

intelligence company. Multiple

36:06

reporters have talked to him about this, and

36:09

I'm calling upon members of the media to

36:11

stop giving him interviews like this. It's

36:14

time to push back. It's time to

36:16

push back on people like Mark Zuckerberg

36:18

that cannot tell the truth, that cannot

36:20

reveal their actual agendas.

36:24

If we people speaking into microphones,

36:26

into people speaking to the powerful, into

36:28

people who have to know this industry and tell other

36:30

people about it. If our job involves

36:33

talking to these powerful, ultra

36:35

rich, ultra influential men,

36:38

our real job is to ask them questions

36:42

that are simple, like, hey, man,

36:44

you renamed your company. You renamed

36:47

it because of this one thing? What is

36:49

that? What does it mean?

36:52

And when they fail to give a cogent answer.

36:55

The response should be venom.

36:57

It should be discussed. It

37:00

should be perhaps not an obscenity,

37:02

but something adjacent to one. There

37:05

is no space to give people like Mark

37:07

Zuckerberg further power.

37:10

They don't need further fuel, they

37:12

already have it. The metaverse

37:14

was a creation of Mark Zuckerberg's

37:17

power, that he could say one vague thing

37:19

and billions of dollars would follow as

37:22

a result. We must criticize these people.

37:25

We must do so loudly and proudly

37:28

and aggressively. Thank

37:38

you for listening to Better Offline. The editor

37:40

and composer of the Better Offline theme song is

37:42

Matasowski. You can check out more

37:44

of his music and audio projects at Matasowski

37:46

dot com, M A T T O.

37:49

S O w Ski

37:51

dot com. You can email me at easy

37:53

at Better offline dot com, or check out

37:55

Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter

37:58

and more links to this podcast. Thank you how

38:00

much for listening. Better

38:02

Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.

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