Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited Joe Rogan’s podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. It was a three-hour conversation about virtual reality, social media censorship, and American politics.

During the conversation, Zuckerberg said that running the company is “not that much fun”:

I wake up in the morning, look at my phone to get a million messages … It’s almost like every day you wake up and you’re like punched in the stomach.

Many of the company’s problems in recent years have been related to moderation. Facebook has been criticized for things related to fraud in the presidential election, “Brexit” and the spread of misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. And, of course, it was Zuckerberg who had to respond to all such cases. According to him, the company has spent a considerable amount on the fight against disinformation.

“I think we spend $5 billion a year… on all this community integrity work,” comments Zuckerberg.

It is much more interesting for Zuckerberg to engage in the development of virtual worlds. The company is investing a lot of money and energy into this project, so it has a lot of expectations.

You can probably tell when we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the future of building this whole technology roadmap to give people this realistic sense of presence, it’s like, that’s what I’m here to do.

Mark says that the level of immersion in the process of interaction in virtual reality is “at the level of Playstation and Xbox”, and he himself imagines a future where people will even use virtual reality helmets in coffee shops. He also believes that many things will be replaced by holograms in the future.

We could deal hologram cards to each other, and we could play poker, and you could have a poker night where some of your friends are, and some of them could be holograms.

As noted in Vice, Zuckerberg may not like it, but there should still be moderation in virtual worlds. Examples of problems in Metaverse are not far to seek. Meanwhile, in the fight against competitors, Facebook is losing users and profit.

You can listen to the full recording of the podcast at this link.