LG: Mike, what side do you like about this?
MC: It is the part where you go in and out.
LG: I wish I could argue, but I can’t. I agree, with all my heart. Well, thanks to this podcast, can we just go in a little bit?
MC: All right. Let me put on my Oculus glasses and I’ll be there.
LG: All right. It’s on.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays.]
LG: Hey, everyone. Welcome to metaverse. I mean, welcome to Gadget Lab. I have Lauren Goode. I am a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I’m Michael Calore. I am the editor-in-chief of WIRED.
LG: We are also included in the metaverse by WIRED’s lead author, Arielle Pardes, who comes with us from, where are you, Arielle?
Arielle Pardes: Does it matter in 2021 where we are, if we are all in trouble?
LG: No, you can live anywhere right now. You can live in the woods. You can stay in Oakland. You can live in Nazareth.
AP: Let’s just say I’m in the middle of Mark Zuckerberg’s mind.
LG: Well, we’re talking about Facebook again. If you haven’t updated your article this week, there are plenty of stories from Facebook. They had their annual programming meeting held on Thursday. We saw a pile of new features that should help manufacturers create elements of this metaverse concept. We heard a little bit about Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of what the metaverse would look like. And we heard about the Facebook name change. I don’t know if we should call Facebook right now. Arielle, what should we call Facebook? Tell us about it.
AP: A company formerly known as Facebook is now called Meta as a metaverse, as a metastasizing cancer, as the AOC wrote today. This should show that the company is not a social media company. It is not just the media. Not just Instagram. It’s a company. And that’s all about metaverse.
LG: Put it back a bit, because earlier this week, Facebook reiterated its findings for the third quarter and talked about how it could cut another top line on one of its segments, right? So there are all these things and different sections of Facebook, tell us how it works and how it will end.
AP: The Facebook you know right now, which Facebook sometimes calls the app family, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, things like that, will now be broken into this section that calls the software family. On the other hand, it has a new feature called Facebook real labs, which is a new home for all its metaverse-related features and whatever the future of the computer looks like.