The Metaverse: How Mark Zuckerberg Lied To The World
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, claiming that it was now a "Metaverse company," throwing the entire tech industry into one of its most specious hype cycles. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the tech industry wasted nearly two years chasing a concept that nobody could define, burning billions of dollars on an idea that would cost thousands of people their jobs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:06.4 | Cool Zone Media. |
| 0:08.5 | Welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:10.1 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:15.5 | Better Offline. Today's episode is about how one man tricked the entire tech industry into burning billions of dollars based on nothing. |
| 0:30.7 | You may remember a time in 2021 when everybody was talking about the Metaverse, the so-called successor to the internet that was used |
| 0:38.2 | by Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook, taking the heat off of a name associated with abusing |
| 0:42.7 | its customers and misusing their data. |
| 0:45.9 | It was meant to be a completely digital world we lived in. |
| 0:48.8 | Oh, maybe it was a VR space that we socialized in. |
| 0:52.5 | Was it a VR space we worked in? |
| 0:55.0 | Was it a virtual world? |
| 0:56.5 | Wasn't there something to do with crypto? |
| 0:58.8 | If you're finding all of this confusing, we have something in common. |
| 1:03.0 | We need to go back to 2021 to really work out what the hell went on, though. |
| 1:09.8 | Interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for The Virgin July 2021, |
| 1:13.4 | Casey Newton referred to the Metaverse as a maximalist-interconnected set of experiences |
| 1:18.3 | straight out of sci-fi. |
| 1:20.5 | Again, that means nothing, but nevertheless, that's what he chose to publish. |
| 1:25.5 | A few months later, when renaming the company Facebook to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg referred |
| 1:30.6 | to the Metaverse as a more immersive, embodied internet where you're in the experience, |
... |
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