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Alex, what up? Can you hear me? I am in the metaverse and I have lost Alex. Alex, where'd you go?
I just invited you to a party. It said you accepted, but I don't see you in this party. I'm wearing a Quest 2, a virtual reality headset made by Meta. Big goggles, essentially, that block out my apartment around me. Instead, everywhere I turn, I see a virtual mansion. And you can see out into this amazing 360 panoramic vista of, like, Red Rock Mountains. Great place for a party. If only Alex would accept my invite.
Sorry, I'm updating my software. I am not in the metaverse. I am sitting by an outlet in my apartment watching a software update load on my quest. Oh, I heard something. Alex, are you at the party now? Alex? I'm behind you. Oh, Jesus. That was kind of creepy. Okay. Oh, hey, what's up?
What Shireen is looking at right now is a legless cartoon version of me with a little too much of a beard. There aren't a lot of options for facial hair in virtual reality yet. It's lo-fi. Think Sims. But this is a major piece of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse bet. A bet he sunk an unbelievable amount of money into. $10 billion in 2021 alone. So you may be wondering, what exactly is Mark Zuckerberg thinking?
We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We'll be able to feel present, like we're right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are. We'll be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways. That's his hope, at least, as he describes it at the Connect conference in 2021.
Zuckerberg believes the metaverse is the future, that we will eventually be living our lives in sleek, photorealistic, virtual and augmented reality. If you're familiar with Ready Player One, you get the idea. People come to the Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be. This sci-fi vision that doesn't fully exist yet, it's what Zuckerberg has staked the future of his company on. Because he has to.
Zuckerberg may run one of the most profitable business empires in the world, but it's losing relevance. Facebook, not cool. Going all in on the metaverse is Zuckerberg's attempt to lead the next era of technology. It's ambitious. It's risky. And if it succeeds, meta will have more power than ever before. This is Land of the Giants. Today in our season finale, what Zuckerberg wants for our future and the chances he'll pull it off.
Let's start with a simple question. What is the metaverse? Describing this idea right now is kind of like if you were in the 1980s trying to describe the internet. We should certainly think of it as a continuation. I think there's this tendency among many to understand the metaverse as a...
new thing. I often use the term successor to the internet. Matthew Ball is a prominent tech investor and metaverse believer. He wrote a series of influential essays on the metaverse, essays that Zuckerberg has said helped shape his own thinking. The metaverse may be a successor to the internet, but it's not a new idea. This is a concept that popped up in cyberpunk literature, most famously in the dystopian novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. Technologists have thought about how to build it ever since.
As far as how the metaverse works... Ball told us, think about the internet we experience now. It's a network of pages. Fox.com, Facebook, Twitter. So navigating the internet is basically jumping from page to page, all in 2D. The metaverse is exactly like that, but it's 3D. If you ever played Super Mario 64 and you envision Mario jumping into paintings...
That would be another effective analogy. Because you're not navigating pages in the metaverse. You're jumping between virtual worlds. Right now, this idea already exists in gaming. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, they all offer alternate worlds where people can hang out as avatars. But people play these games on their computers or smartphones. In a full-fledged metaverse future, you'd use a different, more immersive device, like a virtual reality headset.
There are several VR headsets on the market now. We used Meta's Quest 2 earlier. These headsets fully immerse you in digital space, blocking out the outside world. But as Zuckerberg sees it, the metaverse's true potential will be unlocked by augmented reality glasses. AR glasses are a much more futuristic technology. They will allow you to overlay the virtual world over your physical one as you move through your day.
A melding of the metaverse and reality. Zuckerberg's bet is that by the end of this decade, AR glasses will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones, and you'll be able to do incredible things with them. Imagine your best friend is at a concert somewhere across the world. What if you could be there with her? This is from Zuckerberg's Connect keynote in October 2021, where he announced the rebrand to meta and offered an imagined metaverse future with the help of CGI. Yo. Hi, Zuckerberg.
What you're hearing is two friends at a concert, but one is a hologram she dialed in with her AR glasses. And since her friend is also wearing a pair, they can dance together.
In the metaverse, you'll be able to teleport not just to any place, but any time as well. In ancient Rome, imagine standing on the streets, hearing the sounds, visiting the markets to get a sense of the rhythm of life. Zuckerberg's promise is that socializing, entertainment, education, it can all get even better and more accessible in the metaverse, where you practically have magic at your disposal.
But this is obviously not yet a reality. So what exactly does exist of Zuckerberg's metaverse? Horizon is the social platform that we're building for people to create and interact in the metaverse. If the metaverse is the 3D successor to the internet, you can think of Horizon as the 3D successor to Facebook.
It's where Zuckerberg hopes you'll do most of your metaverse socializing, gaming, and even working. Meta launched Horizon for the Quest in December 2021. By two months later in February, about 300,000 people were using it every month. On a recent evening, with our Quest headsets on, we decided to check Horizon out for ourselves. Here we go.
Entering Horizon, is what it says. Think of Horizon as Roblox meets The Sims, but in 3D. Anyone can build a virtual world from scratch for people to visit. We decided to visit a virtual comedy club. Okay, here we go. This is, uh, it's nighttime. There's stars in the sky, some palm trees. Welcome.
Right now, Horizon looks pretty cartoony. It's like we've been dropped into an establishing shot of a Simpsons episode facing a three-story building with a sign, the Soapstone Comedy Club. Looks like there's about almost 20 people in here. And by people, I mean 20 legless avatars who can't yet have facial expressions. Hi. Hello. Hello.
It was awkward to get anyone's attention. There's a spatial audio feature in Horizon that means you hear people better the closer you get, like in real life. But you can't walk casually up to people. No legs. So you end up just sort of jerking over, zooming your lump of a body into their faces. Hi, what's your name? What are we doing here? Hi, my name's Swade. I'm just in VR. This was the only conversation I managed to have with Swade.
Are you a comedian or do you stand up yourself? I'm not a comedian. I like to think of myself as a comedian, but I'm not a comedian. Right about here, I noticed another avatar hovering nearby. Except they weren't saying anything. So I wasn't sure if they were trying to join the conversation. Pretty difficult to read social cues. Hi. Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. What do you like about the soapstone? Me? Yeah.
Yeah, or either one of you. Swade, can you still hear me? Yeah, yeah, I can still hear you. Effortless social interaction. And then, did I get kicked off? Not the smoothest journey into the metaverse, but there was something very 90s internet chat room about Horizon as a social space. The few people I encountered were eager to talk and trying to help. It was rudimentary, messy, but also kind of earnest.
I could see myself more likely to go up to virtual strangers and make new friends in this metaverse comedy club than I would in a real life one.
It's hard to describe because in some ways if you see a video of people in Horizon or in another experience like that, it's like, oh, that's like a stylized avatar and it looks like cartoony and I don't get it. This is Vishal Shah. He oversees the team's building Horizon at Meta. Shah told us that the most interesting uses of Horizon are things like the Soapstone Comedy Club, simple social gatherings. Sometimes people even gather to not talk to each other. That could be something as interesting as like a meditation room, like...
You wouldn't think a place that is just quiet would be interesting in VR, but it is because you still get that sense of being with other people. It's why people go and meditate together in a group as opposed to necessarily just doing it alone. Shaw's point is that virtual reality in the metaverse, even in its cartoonish early state, is more lifelike and visceral than a 2D screen.
You can feel other people's presence around you more intensely than on a computer or mobile phone. You can even give them a high five. Which brings up another kind of question. And this is something I asked a couple people I was able to talk to in Horizon. In this 3D embodied internet, did people ever get weird?
There's mostly people who are like super... Just trolls. Getting in your face. But it could get ugly. They told me right before I arrived, someone had used a racial slur. Yeah, someone just got kicked out of here for that actually like five minutes ago. Yeah. So basically it's on everyone in the room to kick people out if they're not acting right? Yeah, because they have a vote system. Oh, it's a vote system.
You can report another user in Horizon if you think how they're behaving violates one of the company's rules for VR, like the one it has against hate speech. Meta does have the power to suspend users, but that process takes time, and it doesn't always work. So instead, people are creating and enforcing their own world-specific rules, and then voting the misbehaving users out, like what happened in the Soapstone Comedy Club. This
This is something anyone can set up for their world and horizon. But moderating the metaverse, it's not just about what people say.
This is what Catherine Alejandra Cross studies. She's a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, specializing in the ethics of VR worlds. When you have a virtual space where you are inhabiting the avatar, not just watching it on a screen, but physically inhabiting it, there are a set of affordances available to you if you wish to cause mischief.
that involve touch, that involve pressing into a personal space, that involve using certain gestures in ways that perhaps might not have been intended. In short, the metaverse takes online harassment up a notch. Because you're not just watching your avatar like in a video game, you are embodying it. You experience what your avatar experiences. This is something Meta has had to reckon with already.
In November 2021, before Horizon was even open to the public, a beta tester reported that she had been virtually groped by another user. She said it wasn't the first time she'd been sexually harassed in virtual reality. In a post she wrote in an official Horizon Facebook group for beta testers, she requested a fix: a personal bubble for Horizon avatars to prevent unwanted contact in the future.
A couple months later, Meta rolled out exactly that kind of feature. Here's Vishal Shah. We made a change to Horizon called the personal boundary. And the idea was that for everyone, by default, you would have a four-foot kind of personal boundary around you so that people couldn't come up right next to you.
Shaw says this approach of giving people control is key to ensuring safety in the metaverse. What kind of superpowers can we give people so that in the experience they're having, they can have real control? Muting someone, blocking someone, you know, wouldn't you love to be able to have that in the physical world if someone was irritating you? And we can give you those superpowers in these virtual worlds.
Meta knows how this looks. The company that's had a rocky experience with public trust already faltering in this new frontier. It says it's catching the unintended consequences in the metaverse much more quickly than it did with traditional social media. But given the history of the internet, how could the company not see this kind of abuse coming in VR? Of all companies, Meta should know by now, people don't always show up to social spaces with the best intentions.
As Cross puts it: This should not be a beta test issue, frankly. We've watched Facebook, now Meta, make this kind of mistake again and again. This inability to predict quickly enough how things could go wrong. It's the same kind of mistake that brought Zuckerberg to Capitol Hill in 2018.
It's easy to see how Meta could repeat its mistakes of the past.
And Zuckerberg's imagined metaverse, the merging of the physical with the digital, that presents a whole new set of big thorny problems. Wearable devices will capture all kinds of sensitive information about your body down to your gaze. And when anyone has the power to display virtual objects over the real world, how could that be abused? Is Zuckerberg ready to take on this responsibility? That all depends on if the metaverse even catches on.
And if it does, will Zuckerberg's platform be the winner? After the break, the fight among the tech giants for the metaverse and why Zuckerberg has the most to lose.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.
When I was meeting virtual strangers at the Soapstone Comedy Club in Horizon, something all too familiar happened. You sound like you're not that old. How old are you? Thirteen. Thirteen, yeah. Yeah, I've noticed that there's a lot of kids in here. There's a lot of kids. That younger generation Zuckerberg is struggling to capture the attention of on Facebook and Instagram...
Guess where a lot of them are? We are seeing the youngest generation spend an awful lot of time in virtual reality worlds today. We talked to Alex Schultz recently. He's Meta's CMO and head of analytics. To be clear, Horizon users are supposed to be at least 18 under Meta's rules. But kids are still getting in. Every time I use VR, I run into young teens who should definitely not be interacting with strangers unsupervised.
It's actually a problem Meta and other companies in VR are trying to fix. But the fact that young people are excited about VR, it could also be seen as a proof of concept to Meta. Teens are always the first to the next technological shift. And many of them seem to be saying the 3D internet is it. Look, I mean, there's a hell of a lot of data that says the metaverse is real. You've got hundreds of millions of people spending time in...
three-dimensional worlds, whether you're looking at Minecraft, whether you're looking at Roblox, whether you're looking at Fortnite. And people in those worlds are spending tremendous amounts of time socializing, not just gaming. To Meta, this is a signal that the metaverse will eventually take off with a broader user base. But here's the thing. It's not just that Zuckerberg wants to own the next Facebook for the metaverse. He's trying to build something much, much bigger.
Tech investor Matthew Ball again. I know you've written, as have others, about the idea that among Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook was the only one that did not have a mainstream operating system. Maybe you remember this from our second episode. Zuckerberg has always wanted his company to be more than a set of apps. He's wanted to be like Bill Gates, overseeing a platform.
Think of Microsoft. It makes computers, but also the software that runs on those computers. This kind of deep integration, Zuckerberg has never had it in the era of mobile phones. Instead, he's had to live under the thumb of other giants, namely Apple. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
Apple doesn't directly compete with Zuckerberg in social media, but a whole lot of people reach Facebook and Instagram through Apple products, through iPhones, which means Apple wields serious power over Meta. This year alone, they're going to see $10 billion in cash flow impact because of the decisions made by one of their top competitors. In April 2021, Apple introduced a simple prompt for iPhone users: ask app not to track.
It gave people a quick way to stop Facebook and Instagram from collecting their user data. But without that data, Meta can't sell personalized ads as easily. Meta estimated that iPhone owners tapping yes to this new prompt cost the company $10 billion in 2021. Apple has this power because it owns the platform. Alex Schultz told us pretty directly that Meta's not about to let that happen again. We're really trying to get ahead of the platform shift.
and be fundamentally part of the set of companies that are going to help define that next platform of computing. And yes, what happened with mobile definitely does inform that and is something we think about.
So this time around, Meta wants to own the device, the Metaverse equivalent of the iPhone. But creating that kind of device is the greatest challenge ahead. Virtual reality headsets are clunky. The hardware needed to experience the Metaverse in a compelling way, it's just not ready. Academic Catherine Alejandra Cross again.
What is standing in the way right now overwhelmingly is the interface technology. It remains esoteric for a lot of people. The metaverse will only truly take off with a device as portable and useful as the iPhone.
And it's not just Zuckerberg who has an idea of what that device will be. We've always said that AR is a core technology. And it's a technology I get super excited about. And I think it's profound. That's Apple CEO Tim Cook in November 2021, speaking at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. So this will be the holy grail of the future, the iPhone of the metaverse. A sleek, lightweight pair of high-tech glasses that meld your physical and virtual worlds.
Augmented reality, it's the only thing Apple and Meta seem to agree on. And the race is underway for who can build the better device. Whoever wins essentially wins the metaverse. The new platform war is on. I think it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be a competitor for us, not just as a product.
This is audio obtained by The Verge. It's Zuckerberg speaking in the summer of 2022 in an internal Q&A for employees. To translate that moment, it's Zuckerberg saying straight up that Apple is Meta's arch nemesis and a very formidable one. Let's start with the first thing Zuckerberg said he's competing with Apple on, product.
must have top-of-the-line hardware, otherwise known as Apple's entire thing. You know, Apple has really carved out quite a good position for themselves, and that's why they're, I think, the most valuable company in the world, or maybe one of the couple of most valuable companies in the world. But I just don't think that the future is written here yet for the metaverse. At least for now, Meta does dominate the hardware of the metaverse. That headset Quest?
It sold more units than Xbox in 2021. It has an estimated 90% market share of VR headsets. But that's because no one is competing at Meta's scale in VR. Apple hasn't even put anything out yet, though it has spent years working on its own headset and is widely expected to announce it by early 2023. Zuckerberg's plan to compete? For one, Meta's devices will be cheaper.
Meta's Quest 2 are cheaper than comparable VR headsets on the market. So intentionally making headsets cheap, not a bad strategy for Zuckerberg, knowing how Apple does price its devices at the higher end. But luxury isn't the only Apple philosophy Zuckerberg is trying to offer an alternative to.
There's also how Apple has wielded its power over its mobile ecosystem. Apple exerts a lot of control over how its devices can be used.
Apps have to be downloaded from its app store, and it takes a 30% cut of purchases people make through those apps. This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that kind of by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating, that they build a better consumer experience. Zuckerberg says he wants to play nicely with others, to, unlike Apple, let you download apps outside of his app store.
and to eventually let you bring your avatars and virtual goods between apps. Meta is working to create a system for standardizing technologies in the metaverse alongside companies like Microsoft and Epic Games. Apple is notably absent from that group. So that's the philosophical showdown.
But there's one last hurdle for Meta. It's a big one. And Apple's already put down a marker on it: trust. Think about it. If you're going to purchase a device that takes in truly personal information about you — your eye movements, facial expressions, maybe one day even your brain signals — which company's product are you going to choose? The one made by the company formerly known as Facebook, rife with scandals about how it handles user data? Or Apple?
which aggressively brands itself as the privacy company. Though even that question jumps a few steps ahead. It assumes the technology for the metaverse and all its fantasy will exist, and that even if it does exist, the people will want to use it. I mean, virtual reality has been a white whale that has been chased since the 80s. Meta's first true pair of AR glasses are still years away. And you may remember another giant tried to launch a pair already, Google.
And all Google Glass became was a punchline. There's just been a number of successive efforts at trying to make fetch happen with this. I think that this current generation is probably the best effort that we've seen. But my personal jury is still out. I don't know if it's going to happen. Alex Schultz argues that the last big technological shift, the mobile phone era, felt like this. Something that people doubted and doubted until it arrived in full swing.
I actually see it as like mobile because for many years mobile was seen as a toy for teenagers, just like virtual reality is today when people look at Roblox or Minecraft or Fortnite. Every year through my career until about 2012, it was going to be the year of mobile. Like I remember at eBay in 2004, like we were talking about mobile being the future. And yet it was eight years from then before everyone woke up and went, oh,
Man, probably 2010 was the year of mobile and we missed it. So what are the signals to watch out for? That the metaverse is taking hold? We asked Catherine Cross that question. One is a user base measured in the high millions or tens of millions. That milestone is reached and announced, right? You know, 10 million concurrent users in Horizon Worlds. Watch for the kind of exponential growth that Facebook saw in its earliest years.
That would signal to me that there's some there there. Right now, there isn't. The user base is still tiny compared to Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram. And Zuckerberg's investment? Enormous. Almost as big as his conviction that all this is going to work. Putting together this episode, we thought a lot about a moment at the end of our interview with Mike Schreffer. This is the former CTO of Meta who joined the company in 2008.
Now he's a senior fellow spending time on executive recruiting. I asked him how he convinces young, bright engineers to take their talents to meta. We are one of the few now, maybe only, sort of founder-engineer-led companies. His answer? Zuckerberg. And specifically, his all-in bet on the metaverse. When you look at Mark's bet on the metaverse and what we're doing, that started eight years ago.
When a VR headset was $2,500 and required like re-retrofitting my room in order to work at all. That's around when Zuckerberg made his first big metaverse purchase: Oculus, the VR headset manufacturer. He bought it in 2014 for $2 billion. And now I can walk into a Best Buy and grab a Quest 2 and walk out and use it in five minutes. To Schreffer, this is the thing that separates Meta from the other giants: Zuckerberg's history of seeing around the right corners.
You could also call it an enduring paranoia about any challenge to his power. We're really good at spotting sort of where the technological trends should and are going and how do we invest into them and build into them to build the future. And I think that if you think about 10 years from now, do you think we will be doing this podcast in some sort of VR/AR system? Good chance. You can hear something in Shreveport. It's the kind of excitement you hear in early videos about Facebook.
The sheer belief that it was going to change the world for good because of Zuckerberg's vision. I don't know when it's going to happen. It'll happen in my lifetime. And this is what Meta is doing, you know, irregardless of the turmoil that's happening right now in financial markets and others, because we are led by someone who cares about the next 10 years more than the next quarter.
We've talked a lot about Mark Zuckerberg and his unique power this season. How for nearly two decades, he has reshaped the way we communicate.
As he did with bringing social media to billions of people, Zuckerberg is now pushing his company towards yet another audacious goal.
He wants to invent not just the future of how we connect, but how we experience the world around us, how we perceive reality itself. You've heard this over the course of the series. Even when he's mocked, even when people complain, Zuckerberg's instinct is to trust his gut. It's gotten him far. Far enough to spend billions and billions on a future that may never arrive.
Special thanks this week to Courtney Cogburn and Ethan Zuckerman. We also want to mention our colleagues from across Vox Media who've helped us bring you this season. Thanks to Brandon Santos, Brian LaBombard, Marty Moe, Ode White, Nilay Patel, Lauren Katz, Esther Cohen, Darian Mucha, and Jamila Various. Land of the Giants, the Facebook Meta Disruption, is a production of Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. We've been working with you for a long time.
We've had an incredible team this season. Thank you to our senior producer, Megan Cunane. Oluwakemi Oladesui is our producer. Production support from Cynthia Betubiza. Jolie Myers is our editor. Richard Seema is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Samantha Altman is Vox's editorial director of Recode and Science.
Jake Castronakis is deputy editor of The Verge. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Heath. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it and click the plus sign in your podcast app so you don't miss our upcoming season. ♪
