Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on August 25th, despite the mockery aimed at Horizon Worlds, his company’s “Second Life” knockoff, to pitch the benefits of the “metaverse.”
Max Chafkin for Bloomberg News:
In addition to giving Rogan an early version of the company’s forthcoming headset, known as Project Cambria, Zuckerberg also used the interview to attempt a sort of personal rebranding designed, one assumes, to align with his decision to focus his attention on virtual and augmented reality. During his nearly three-hour interview with the comedian and mixed martial arts commentator, Zuckerberg—the classics geek and coding prodigy—presented himself, improbably, as a combat sports-obsessed gym rat. He referred to himself as a three-sport varsity athlete, proclaimed a newfound love of jujitsu (he’d hired one of Rogan’s friends as his coach), and, sounding not at all like a billionaire who’d adopted a hobby to impress a talk radio host, said that among his favorite pastimes was “just wrestling around with friends. It’s awesome.”
This was embarrassing, or it should have been…
But Zuckerberg hadn’t flown to Austin to tut-tut one of the most influential media figures in America. He was there to court Rogan’s mostly male fan base, estimated at around 11 million per episode. During the interview, the Facebook founder argued that VR and AR would revolutionize work, socialization, and exercise, and would displace other forms of entertainment, especially television. Zuckerberg said that, personally, he doesn’t watch TV, except for UFC bouts, because he considers the medium to be overly “passive,” as compared with social media. “You’re just sitting around in this beta state, consuming stuff,” he said.
MacDailyNews Take: Mark Zuckerberg is oh-so-original, as always:
I’ve spent enough time in entertainment now with Pixar… [to know] that people go to their television primarily to turn their brain off… The reason people want this stuff. They come home from a long day. They have dinner with their kids and they’re fighting and they get them into bed and they just want to turn their brain off for half an hour. Do you ever do that? I mean, I must admit I don’t watch much TV, but I can admit I will turn on the TV for a half hour, and it really does turn your brain off. People got to their TV to turn their brain off. People go to their PC to turn their brain on. These things aren’t going to be together, they perform completely separate functions. – Steve Jobs
To be crystal clear: Mark Zuckerberg is a scheming fraud, always has been, and his company is a societal cancer.
We use FaceBook as an RSS feed. Our CMS automatically reposts our article headlines and links them back to our website. That is our only interaction with Facebook and has been our only interaction with Facebook for years. We deleted our personal accounts [which we opened briefly only so we could understand the Facebook phenomenon] many years ago.
If you want to share photos and videos with friends, text them using Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iMessage service. You need to control your social networking, not cede it to a gatekeeper like Facebook. – MacDailyNews, March 19, 2018
As we’ve said many times: Delete Facebook.
Apple has the custom silicon. Apple has the installed base. Apple has the ecosystem. Apple has the services. Apple will have the profitable portion of the mixed-reality headset market. And then, a few years later, Apple will take the profitable portion of the smartglasses (AR) market, too.
And some people will slap their foreheads and lament, “I could’ve bought Apple shares under $140!” – MacDailyNews, May 24, 2022
Apple’s smartgoggles will be cool, but it’s the subsequent Apple smartglasses that will change the world. – MacDailyNews, July 11, 2022
Augmented Reality is going to change everything. — MacDailyNews, July 21, 2017
Someday, hopefully sooner than later, we’ll look back at holding up slabs of metal and glass to access AR as unbelievably quaint. — MacDailyNews, July 28, 2017
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