Doomed: Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse & Tommy Tallarico's Intellivison Amico.

i don't even have i i'm on a pc i'm using a controller and i'm just pressing the b button to talk oh okay how old are you how how old are you kid i'm 10 i'm 10. you probably shouldn't be on here i have like i literally have like a when you a wedding so we need okay [Laughter] [Music] yeah so the the metaverse to me today feels like the next frontier in social connection in much the same way that social networking did when i was getting started back in in 2004 and you know that's a big reason why we wanted to change the the brand of the company but i think increasingly it's going to be about building platforms and experiences that deliver this sense of presence like you're right there with another person a valley couple renews their vows but not in the way you're thinking 2 000 people attended but without anyone actually being there team 12's william pitts has the story the wedding venue was my laptop [Music] this is not your typical wedding while we're waiting for the technical difficulties two thousand people most of them don't even know the bride and groom all crammed into this tiny little wedding chapel in the sky or in the metaverse what better way than to expand our love to the metaverse beyond the realms of the regular universe like you're right there with another person but i think some of the experiences are starting to come together too so you know we've we've started to release horizon and you know work rooms and some of these experiences where you can feel like you're present with someone in a place um it's just pretty crazy to see how um how that's taking off and it's you know it's not just games you know games i think is the natural starting point but beyond that um we're starting to see at this point that social interaction and just hanging out is starting to become the the biggest way that people spend time on these platforms that kind of makes sense [Music] mark zuckerberg and tommy talarico have something in common in the year 2022 they're both trying to reinvent the nintendo wii i don't just mean this in the abstract sense of trying to recapture or i don't reproduce the success of the nintendo wii in very different ways they're grasping onto different memories of what made the nintendo wii great what made it new and different and innovative in its own time and they're presenting those frankly old and boring ideas as if they're new again in the year 2022. the metaverse the so called metaverse i liked it better the first time when it was called metopia and me plaza when it was the mii verse launched by nintendo and when i say i liked it better the first time i didn't like it at all admittedly it wasn't aimed at people like me and if you google around what was the response to uh nintendo launching its own strange cutesy social media platform and putting the word me and metopia and reverse on it what was the critical reaction at that time what people said was oh well it looks like nintendo is really just reinventing facebook they were taking facebook and adding these cutesy three-dimensional characters and little little bits and pieces of virtual reality interviews immersive experience this kind of crap oh but underneath it all it's the same thing as facebook here we are in the year 2022 and we can say that facebook is now ripping off that idea in its turn from the nintendo wii uh we talk a lot about innovation i follow the stock market they're all these experts like kathy wood one of her catchphrases is don't bet against innovation you know learn the lessons you double always invest in innovation always bet on innovation what really is innovative here what really is innovative about mark zuckerberg you know presenting the world with a product that nobody asked for that has no utility that has no function in my opinion has nearly zero entertainment value i'll come back to that but that also very fundamentally is not new when meta came out the metaverse right anyone could say look at metaverse look at vr chat what is new and different if you go back and look at vr chat when it first launched people said look at vr chat and look at the crap we already had for the me plaza nintendo wii what's really new here none of this was new and none of it was new fully 20 years ago now when you think about innovation when you think about just newness the sense of which thing is new or is different in my lifetime there has never been a new toilet there are new colors of toilet there are new styles of toilet their new decorative elements right but thomas crapper's invention the toilet has not changed during my lifetime there has been no innovation in the technology of the bathroom during my lifetime hey hey bet on innovation listen to kathy wood why don't you go out and take your life savings and invest in a company that's going to come with a fundamentally new and different innovative way to flush the toilet could have massive ecological benefits for the world but it hasn't happened this is the sense in which we have to distinguish what is innovation and what's merely decoration you know you can put out a toilet that looks different that's a different aesthetic appeal to it right you can take the nintendo wii you can take the build your own avatar system the me system from nintendo and you can aesthetically but are you actually producing something new and better and different for customers to use think about that word use for a minute if you made a list of the top five things you actually use your computer for the odds are i mean i don't know you the odds are number one is going to be word processing number two is going to be sending email you know like you can really sit down and look at what are the functions what are the uses you you put your computer to and now ask yourself those functions have they improved in the last 20 years are they fundamentally better are they fundamentally different now than they were 20 years ago or are we only talking about a kind of improvement that's equivalent to a different colored toilet a slightly shinier a slightly different shape to the toilet but when it really comes down to it the function hasn't improved and it hasn't changed classic one all right nice oh nice choice mark ready to shred even in the absence of innovation there is this very challenging question of what does it take to be the best mark zuckerberg has put up this footage of this video game that exists within the metaverse surfing is that the best surfing game of 2022 is it so much better than all the other surfing games that people are gonna phone up their friends and say dude dude you've got to try this you've got to spend the time you've got to spend the money you've got to clear all the other video games competing for your attention off of the shelf and you've you've got to get online and try mark zuckerberg's new metaverse surfing is it that good is it that much better you know it's not and it's strange to me that someone as experienced as tommy talarico or someone as experienced as mark zuckerberg would waltz into this incredibly crowded incredibly competitive corner of the creative arts of the money losing creative arts a field where you don't i need to break this to you most people who go into the ballet and the opera aren't doing it to get rich they get rich somewhere else and they lavish their money on the creative arts that's what's happening to video games in the 21st century they're going into that same well-established category of things that people waste money on that people support as an art form as a charity with no expectation of making money people like tommy talarico and zuckerberg both they seem to think it would be easy to do what nintendo does better so much better that people are gonna make an investment of hundreds of dollars and many hundreds of hours to come over and play their video games instead you can have competition in the arts in the absence of innovation painting the technology of paint on the canvas isn't going to change the way we share music the way we listen to music changes but there's a really important sense in which the human voice singing making a song that moves people emotionally the fundamental technology there it hasn't changed and it isn't gonna change you think you can get rich by clapping your hands together and singing to the beat do you think that's going to be easy like you're right there with another person but i think some of the experiences are starting to come together too so you know we've we've started to release horizon and you know work rooms and some of these experiences where you can feel like you're present with someone in a place tommy talarico i've spoken to him i interviewed him for more than an hour i had the only interview in which he came out and admitted that he's vegan i'm biased in his favor for that reason vegan to vegan i got reasons you know as a musician in many ways in many different levels i'm a fan of tommy talarico and i'm a supporter of his i hope his career goes well but he made the comparison to the we himself when talking about his project what do you want to do he has the misguided delusion that what made the we great was this controller this interface and i've got to tell you my honest opinion is that the wii was successful despite its controller despite this interface i think the wii was successful because of the same fundamental elements of classic gaming that haven't changed since the 1980s and a huge part of a success was the virtual console then people being able to legitimately pay for and buy emulated versions of games and play hold this sideways the same way they used a controller in the 1980s i think the real fundamentals of what makes a successful video game haven't changed and they they didn't change just because you know the wii had frankly some gimmicks that distracted from the underlying fundamentals of white systems but he looks at this and he's trying to reproduce and reinvent the wii reproduce the success of the wii in the year 2022 by putting out a new console that nobody's asked for and that doesn't make your life better in any way doesn't offer any kind of function or functionality that you can't get playing video games on the computer you already own or on a playstation 4 or whatever console you already own you know he's putting out something that's fundamentally a redundant piece of technology but it has this gimmicky interface this controller then he doesn't realize that what he's producing isn't really something it wasn't one of the advantages that we had but one of the disadvantages that it that it had to overcome mark zuckerberg i think he looks back at the success of the we and what he remembers is the weavers i'm sorry the miiverse the creation of these cutesy avatars the social media element and the way in which the nintendo wii took the fundamentals of social media that indeed facebook at one time was an innovator and you know facebook helped create all those norms and standards applications and and it added this cartoony 3d clown suit over it it took it and it made it look bright and inviting and did you okay and now he's trying to revive that aesthetic in the year 2022 but it's only an aesthetic there is no way in which it can be more efficient for me to take this 3d remote and point at a screen to draw a diagram right while i'm in a meeting with other people there's no way that can be more efficient than my taking a marker and writing on a piece of paper or am i taking a piece of chalk and drawing on a chalkboard like this technology in a boardroom meeting it can't compete with a thousands of year old piece of technology whether you think of that as a as a pencil a pen or a piece of chalk there is no way we can have 10 people sitting in 10 different rooms wearing an oculus 3d visual effect you know virtual reality headset eight people sitting wearing eight different headsets they can't see their hands they can't see the pencil they can't see a pad of paper they can't interact with anything in the actual room around them sitting using this kind of device a motion sensing device pointing and clicking and drawing diagrams and interacting with a simulated room this is not merely the case that you're producing a different color of toilet a different style of toilet and trying to pass that off as innovation when really it's it's just a fad it's just a fashion it's just an aesthetic there's no real improvement function you're actually producing something that is less functional less efficient than the technology we already have what mark zuckerberg is selling you here is it better or worse than having a meeting via skype i'm old enough to remember when skype came out and i'm old enough to remember what people's doubts about it were what everyone said was well you know there's this new gimmick skype but it's a time waster it's not any more effective than having a teleconference meeting there used to be people really set up they have a board room set up for teleconferencing you just wouldn't see the person you'd hear their voice but you'd have a serious meeting with people sitting around a room and a bunch of microphones that was the norm say well look this isn't really a step forward it's not really any better to use skype do you know what the difference was skype was cheaper that's how skype won at that time long distance phone calls were expensive prices come down partly because of competition from skype and everyone started using skype they said why should i pay a dollar a minute to do this by telephone i can do it for free via skype and then i can see your face well now here comes meta with all the inefficiencies of a vr headset cutting you off the real world all the inefficiencies of this kind of you know motion sensing point and click nonsense and no matter how great this technology is at detecting your facial expression and rendering it on this puppet that is always going to be worse than skype it's always getting worse than a video camera just recording and sharing what your facial expressions really are and that video camera it's always going to be worse than seeing someone talking to someone working with someone in real life the internet has transformed the way we share meanings but it still hasn't made the paper book obsolete what it's made up easier for us to do is to find the right book to buy the right book and have it delivered to our door you can look up the statistics people still read books they just don't waste time looking for them in a bookstore it was the bookstore that was the technology that was made obsolete right not the book ah see how that works now let's think really about what the functions are in our lives what it is we use computers for where there hasn't been any innovation in the last 20 years and let's think about how we can very fundamentally move forward i have learned to type in an embarrassingly long list of languages i used to type on a keyboard in burmese sinali's the language of myanmar the language of sri lanka thai laotian cambodian or kamai whatever you want to call it right for a very brief period of time i was typing in greek in hebrew japanese chinese and when i was young you know i can remember getting out the scissors and tape and you know put taking each letter and then gluing them onto the keys on the keyboard so i could see the language i was typing then soon enough you get past the point where you need that because you've got it you've got it memorized okay forming words and ideas through the technology of the keyboard that hasn't improved in 20 years and it hasn't improved in 100 years why because all of our innovation is being funneled into this kind of [ __ ] that in no way is actually improving the way we use technology in our day-to-day lives you