Over the last half of a decade, meta has made an absolutely colossal investment into the

quote unquote metaverse, and it might finally be coming to an end as meta is starting to

focus more on AI and growth there.

And it feels like the metaverse was a dream of Zuckerberg's that never really materialize.

All of this has happened as roughly 1,500 employees from the Reality Labs Division are being laid off over at Facebook.

And there's a whole bunch of VR game studios that are getting shut down, according to a report over in the Wall Street Journal.

This is kind of like a dramatic moment, I think, for meta, which was just, you know, four years ago rebuilding its entire identity around the Metaverse and everything going on there. So today on the podcast, I want to break down where we are today, where we've come from and how we arrived at this moment, what's next? Because I think what's next is even more exciting than getting lost in the Metaverse for endless hours at a time. And I think it's probably a more optimistic view of the future.

But spoiler, it includes a lot of technology still being involved. So let's get into the podcast

today. Before we do, if you want to be able to build tools, if you're not a developer, I'm not

developer, I built a platform called AIbox.a.i, where you can vibe code AI tools. You explain

what you want to build. And our builder will automatically link together multiple AI models, put in prompts, and build a tool for you. So it automates the whole automation. You can then go use those and share those. If you want to check it out, it's a linked in the description. It is A.I.Box. Dot AI. All right. Let's get into the podcast. The first thing I want to say is I don't think

there's a lot of people crying right now over the metaverse, feeling like it is collapsing,

essentially. Back in 2021, Facebook rebranded themselves as meta, and they said, you know,

there's going to be this new era of virtual reality. It was definitely a big shift from basically focusing themselves on social media.

They're kind of like a new company.

It was like a big new marketing thing.

Part of the strategy hinged on, they kind of had this belief that Gen Z was going to

prefer to socialize inside of online games like Fortnite and Roblox instead of on sort

of feed-based apps like Instagram.

So, of course, they did this big name change thing.

And also this, the name change had another purpose, which basically was to distance them from,

they had a lot of years of reputational damage tied to Facebook.

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