LG: We’ve been talking a lot about Facebook lately, and I’m just wondering if maybe it’s time to relax.
MC: You must not twist my arm.
LG: Here’s something but. I can’t promise we are not talking about Metaverse either, but maybe a little different.
MC: Should I say get out of the Metaverse or something?
LG: Yeah, it’s good. We’ll get to that.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays.]
LG: Hello, all of you. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I have Lauren Goode. I am a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I’m Michael Calore editor-in-chief at WIRED.
LG: And we’ve been hooked this week by WIRED editor-in-chief Steven Levy. Steven, thank you for coming with us.
Steven Levi: Cheerfully.
LG: Your profile on Zoom seems interesting. It is the shape of fallen leaves. Where are you?
SL: Well, that’s where I’m not, it’s nice to see it from my home in Western Massachusetts, but right now I’m in Palo Alto.
LG: I understand. OK. What about Metaverse and Berkshires?
SL: Yes.
LG: OK. That’s why there have been a lot of Metaverse talks recently, in addition to this podcast. But we promise we will benefit you, Facebook, sorry, Meta has been giving this idea of real-life scenarios where you are tied to the head and just cut off the opportunity to get to the real world. But you need to have this in-depth knowledge of this computer. Some experts however, see this as a very long step or a little dystopian and we want to offer a different view of this hyper futuristic world. So take Snap for example, yes. The creator of Snapchat messages is missing, the company is also making real virtual reality. And then after the show, we hear from Bobby Murphy, co-founder and technical director of Snap, who I spoke to earlier this week.
But another person with a strong opinion on Metaverse is Niantic CEO, John Hanke. You may know Niantic as the company that makes Pokemon GO, but Hanke’s vision of a cohesive world is very different from what Mark Zuckerberg has put there. And Hanke has no problem saying what he sees as flaws in Facebook’s metadata control plans. And Steven, you spoke with John Hanke from Niantic about an article on WIRED.com this week, and it will appear in our December issue. So tell us a little bit about what his vision is for the hyper futuristic augmented world.
SL: Correct. He set the price down against Metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg pointed out. He actually did a blog post a few weeks ago, saying Metaverse is dystopian. His vision is not that we will cut off all our power and go to a world of self-belief. Have our meetings in some fake place, have we all been put on our headphones. He says, I have no desire to have a meeting, to be a photographer in a place that looks like a Tahitian artist. Instead his focus with Metaverse will be the digital layer on top of us physically. Now his story is that he founded a company called Keyhole, surprisingly aided by the CIA, but it made satellite images. He was later hired by Google who bought his company and helped create Google Maps.
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