Unpacking Mark Zuckerbergs Midlife Crisis

For years, Mark Zuckerberg’s style could be summed up in a look: the hoodie. But now he has entered a new style era. One that involves gold chains and oversized tees of his own creation (with a little help from a high-end designer). In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we look into Zuckerberg’s style evolution, how it aligns with what is going on at Meta, and why you should care.

You can follow Michael Calore on Mastodon at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Threads and @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Welcome to Uncanny Valley, a show about people, power, and influence in Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode, I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry at WIRED.

Michael Calore: This is our very first episode. How does it feel? Everybody feel good?

Lauren Goode: I’m so excited.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m excited too.

Lauren Goode: We’re so thrilled. It’s like a human LinkedIn post. We’re so thrilled to announce our new podcast.

Zoë Schiffer: The hard launch of our new podcast.

Michael Calore: So there are a lot of places that we could go on our very first episode, but I think we should start with an individual. Has anybody seen Mark Zuckerberg lately?

Lauren Goode: Oh, have I ever.

Zoë Schiffer: How could you miss him?

Michael Calore: Yes. You can’t miss him. The CEO of Meta, one of the most important tech companies in the world, has been undergoing a very public style transformation. He’s got a whole new look. He’s wearing new clothes. He’s been working out. He’s been doing things with his hair. It’s a statement. And it has us all wondering, What is Mark Zuckerberg trying to say with this transformation and why is he doing it? OK. To get started, we have to go back to the year 2010 and the D8: All Things Digital conference where Mark Zuckerberg is on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Kara asks him a question about privacy.

Kara Swisher [archival audio]: Do you feel like you’re violating people’s privacy?

Michael Calore: And he really starts to sweat.

Mark Zuckerberg [archival audio]: It really went from this position very early on where we were just in this college dorm room to we moved out to California. It was a few friends and me-

Zoë Schiffer: And what’s interesting, Zuckerberg is presenting Facebook as this little old company, just a few of us, and it’s a project and it’s from a dorm room.

Michael Calore: Then we moved out to California.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. And then Zuckerberg says this thing that we’ve heard recently from other CEOs say, “If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve done things a little differently.”

Walt Mossberg [archival audio]: Before we move off this privacy thing and I thought that was a fascinating answer.

Kara Swisher [archival audio]: That’s OK. You want to take off the hoodie?

Michael Calore: Kara asks him if he wants to take off the hoodie and then remarks that there’s a group of young women in the audience who wish he would take off his hoodie. And he acts kind of sheepishly surprised.

Kara Swisher [archival audio]: Girls?

Mark Zuckerberg [archival audio]: Whoa. All right.

Kara Swisher [archival audio]: Sorry. That’s OK.

Lauren Goode: At this point, Zuckerberg is squirming in his seat. He’s looking away. It’s like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He wants to crawl out of his skin.

Michael Calore: Kara takes his hoodie and she shows it to the audience. And this moment is so cringe. But to fully understand it, we have to think about who Mark Zuckerberg was in our world in 2010 and what he represented and why there was so much attention being paid to his hoodie.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, according to him, he was the most famous millennial in the world at this point. But we really knew him as this Harvard dropout, this kind of genius kid who was building a product that was changing the world. At the time, Facebook was still really popular. Ultimately, his image was inextricably tied to Facebook’s image and the image of Silicon Valley more generally. He’s credited with cementing, if not creating, the kind of Silicon Valley uniform of a hoodie and jeans.

Lauren Goode: This was also before Facebook was a publicly traded company. They didn’t go public until 2012. Also at the time, there was this amazing confluence of events happening where the iPhone had come out in 2007, and that really revolutionized the smartphone and all of the sensors that come with a smartphone that enabled software makers to track us in new ways. Facebook, interestingly, at the time though, was seen as being somewhat “behind” on mobile because of the technology that they had built their mobile apps with, which was HTML5. They eventually got up to speed though, and then as we know, their mobile advertising business is doing just fine now.

Michael Calore: So how does the hoodie align with where Facebook is at this period in time?

Lauren Goode: Well, I think what Zoë said is right, which is that Facebook is still presenting itself as, I don’t know, a startup in a sense. And so there wasn’t a need to lead with a certain amount of professionalism at this point in time.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this was really the move fast and break things era. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were putting out a whole bunch of new features and asking for forgiveness, not permission. And they were facing a lot of backlash at this point because they had made a switch to the privacy settings public by default. So suddenly if you search someone’s name, a whole bunch of Facebook data would come up, data that that person probably thought was private when they put it on their Facebook profile.

Michael Calore: Well, Zuck with his hoodie became very much a symbol of that culture, that culture of “I’m building stuff. I’m at the forefront.” And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he was just always wearing a hoodie and it just became the shorthand for I’m the Silicon Valley hustle coder guy,

Zoë Schiffer: Right. And the way that it was kind of democratized throughout the tech industry was that companies would spend thousands if not millions of dollars on companies swag, like branded swag, that they would give out for free to all of their employees. One of the first companies I worked for gave everyone hoodies that said Nice SaaS on the lower back, like software as a service.

Lauren Goode: Oh my God.

Zoë Schiffer: And people wore that shit proudly on a Caltrain. So cringe.

Lauren Goode: Wasn’t there also this ethos at the time from some of the founders that the fewer decisions they had to make the better off everybody was, and one of those decisions was clothing?

Michael Calore: Yeah, this goes back to the myth. Well, maybe it’s not a myth, maybe it’s an actual story, maybe it’s apocryphal. But Albert Einstein would famously buy several suits that looked the same. He opens his closet and he doesn’t have to think about what to wear so that he can think about the bigger things. And if you can minimize all of your decision making, other than the most important things, then those decisions that you make about those important things will be sharper.

Lauren Goode: And then of course, Steve Jobs did it, with the black turtleneck.

Zoë Schiffer: Steve Jobs did it and Obama did it. I remember him talking about that.

Lauren Goode: Oh really?

Michael Calore: Yep.

Zoë Schiffer: In either a book or an interview.

Michael Calore: Yeah. So it’s been this philosophy that has sort of floated around in the Valley in places where people are powerful and they don’t want to have to think about their clothing, maybe because it’s inconvenient, who knows? And this is all before the sort of symbol of the hoodie and what it represents started to really change.

Lauren Goode: If we’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodie era and the message being, “I’m too busy building incredible products to care about what I look like,” I feel like this really took a turn during the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX scandal in 2022.

[Archival audio]: Sam Bankman-Fried, who once ran one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, has been found guilty of fraud and money laundering.

Lauren Goode: Basically no one looked like a bigger schlub. No one really epitomized, “I’m too busy being a genius to care about what I look like,” more than Sam Bankman-Fried. But then it turned out that he wasn’t just sloppy in terms of what he looked like and how he dressed. His entire company was really sloppy, and in fact, oh, it was a fraud. And so suddenly it’s not cool to look sloppy, it’s suspicious, it’s even dangerous, and it’s really embarrassing. It’s juvenile.

Michael Calore: So we’re obviously here to talk through Mark Zuckerberg’s transformation. Can you both identify when these changes actually started to happen?

Zoë Schiffer: For me, there was the hoodie era, which feels like a very distinct era, and is kind of epitomized with a Kara Swisher interview that we watched earlier. And then there’s the suit era. This really comes after the 2016 election. It’s more in like 2018 when Zuck is getting dragged before Congress and we suddenly see him looking like a capital a adult, and he does not look happy about it at all. But he’s wearing a well-fitted designer presumably suit to go before Congress and talk about all of the mistakes that Facebook had made and really own up to them. He was certainly taking it seriously and I think that that was symbolized with his clothes. He was swapping out the hoodie for a suit. He had a close cropped haircut. And he was saying, “I’m showing up. I’m dressed like you are supposed to dress on Capitol Hill. And I’m ready to talk about what we’ve done wrong and what we’re going to do different in the future.”

Lauren Goode: This is I feel like the start of the real recent transformation from high school nerd to cool guy. He has swapped out the ill-fitting jeans and hoodie for oversized shirts and gold chains. His hair has changed. It’s not close cropped. He’s got kind of long curls now and he looks like a freer more comfortable and I don’t know, more fashionable version of himself.

Zoë Schiffer: For me, I think that next shift happened with the rise of “quiet luxury,” which was perpetuated by the HBO show Succession, which I know all of us loved, devoured, yep. But it really started to take hold in Silicon Valley a little bit before then because I think what you had was all of these once young men, and some women, but let’s be real, a lot of men, many of them all of a sudden very wealthy from the rise of Web 2.0 and the mobile web, and they just started dressing a lot nicer. They started swapping the casual hoodie for the cashmere hoodie and the hard to get designer sneakers. This to me also coincided the commercialization of the internet in a new way. The internet really was no longer about the early days of anarchy and connectedness and techno-utopianism. It was about minting money. And that started to show through the clothes.

Michael Calore: Yeah. And you know what, this has been a lot. It’s been a pretty stark transformation.

Zoë Schiffer: Who among us hasn’t changed their style radically from 10, 15 years ago? But to watch him do it in public is so fascinating because it really does feel like at every stage he’s trying to say something very specific.

Michael Calore: In a nutshell, what was this transformation? From what to what?

Lauren Goode: I would sum it up as just millennial midlife internet crisis, encapsulated.

Michael Calore: OK.

Zoë Schiffer: It is so funny because he’s still wearing T-shirts occasionally, but suddenly the T-shirts are Brunello Cucinelli shirts. They’re really, really expensive T-shirts.

Lauren Goode: Right, exactly. They come from organically fed llamas in Peru who are named Bruno. There was a story last year about the rise of Loro Piana, which are these beautiful Italian cashmere sweaters. The story was in New York Magazine and they used an image of Zuckerberg in a really nice sweater as one of their header images. And Zuckerberg actually wrote to the writer to correct them and say, “Oh, I’m not wearing a Loro Piana in that instance. They’re Buck Mason, which are hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars.”

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. What are you talking? What’s the price point on those?

Lauren Goode: The Loro Piana sweaters? They’re like a thousand dollars and above.

Michael Calore: Yeah. I have seven of them.

Zoë Schiffer: Of course you do.

Michael Calore: I’m just kidding. I have zero.

Lauren Goode: It’s because you’re the director.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, like good, good journalism money.

Michael Calore: All right, so we’ve traced the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg’s style from the hoodie to his zaddy phase. My question is, who is Zuckerberg trying to speak to? What is he trying to say? And how does it fit into where Meta is headed as a company? We’ll have more on that after the break.

[Break]

Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So we’re all caught up with Mark Zuckerberg and his fashion choices, but what is Meta in its current form? Where’s the company at right now?

Lauren Goode: Well, I mean to start, you said it. It’s Meta. It’s no longer Facebook. The stock price has more than quadrupled over the last two and half years. It’s doing really, really well as a company. It’s going hard on AI, and it’s now a big player in that space, specifically with how artificial intelligence is used for advertising purposes. And Meta’s investing billions of dollars in reality labs to build a future that heavily features wearables.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that Meta has gotten its mojo back.

Lauren Goode: It has, and it’s also kind of walked back its earlier stance in terms of cracking down on election lies and misinformation. It has quietly started to allow way more speech than it did previously. And we’re seeing Mark Zuckerberg kind of subtly cozy up to Republican politicians like Donald Trump.

Zoë Schiffer: And we should also mention that Meta isn’t just big blue Facebook anymore. It’s a massive global corporation with lots of tentacles. It has WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world. It has Threads, which well over a hundred million users have signed up or been sucked into all over the past year.

Lauren Goode: We all know how you feel about that.

Zoë Schiffer: And then of course there’s Instagram.

Michael Calore: Never heard of it.

Zoë Schiffer: And I would say that if there is an area of Facebook, not necessarily from a business perspective but from a societal perspective, that has come under more scrutiny lately. It is Instagram and how people are a little bit concerned about the ways it could be impacting our mental health, particularly for young users.

Michael Calore: Even still, Instagram is cool, right?

Zoë Schiffer: We can’t stop looking at it.

Michael Calore: Right? Yeah. It’s the platform that everybody is doing.

Lauren Goode: Do we feel like it’s cool?

Michael Calore: I do.

Lauren Goode: I feel like, OK.

Michael Calore: Mostly just because I’m on it.

Lauren Goode: Maybe I’m not. So I’m like, no, it couldn’t be cool.

Michael Calore: But it is, like, going head-to-head with TikTok right now, and it’s in an interesting position. And I think the other thing that Meta is doing that is a big part of their business, or they’re hoping is a bigger part of their business, is the VR and AR play. The headsets, and particularly the Ray-Ban smart glasses. And I think the first part of that, the Ray-Ban part, really speaks to what we’re talking about, because if Zuckerberg is signing deals with fashion companies to sell cobranded products, then he also has to become a fashionable person.

Mark Zuckerberg [archival audio]: I started working with people to design some of my own clothes.

Zoë Schiffer: This is Mark Zuckerberg on the Acquired podcast this September, which he taped in front of a huge audience in the Chase Center here in San Francisco. He’s wearing one of his own concepts, a T-shirt that says pathei-mathos, learning through suffering.

Mark Zuckerberg [archival audio]: So I figure, look, we’re going to design eyewear, we’re going to design other stuff that people wear. Let’s get good at this.

Michael Calore: If he’s going to be selling fashion accessories, he has to look like he could wear fashion accessories. So is this all him? Is he going on Instagram late at night and shopping and picking out all of his own clothes or does he have people?

Lauren Goode: Well, it depends who you ask. So Mark Zuckerberg has actually said, and his comms team has said, that he mostly does shop on Instagram and that, while for big events he will work with a stylist or designer, most of these clothes he picks out himself. I have talked to celebrity stylists, people who work with the Biebers and other big A-list celebs. And they have said no way. He’s definitely working with a Hollywood celebrity stylist, and all of them do. All of these big tech CEOs are working with someone who is brand-image conscious and in charge of kind of shaping a transformation and a visual narrative for powerful people.

Michael Calore: And he’s influencing, right? He’s embracing his new role as an influencer in the fashion world. And he’s sending a message. So my question is, who’s the message for? Who is looking at Mark Zuckerberg’s drip photos and saying, “I want to be like that guy.” Who’s the target audience?

Zoë Schiffer: I think that this is really generational. If you look at some of the older tech founders, I think that they’re clearly influenced by the space race, and you can tell because of the billions of dollars that they’re investing into their hobbies, which happen to not be Greek T-shirts that say pathei-mathos. They’re rocket ships. But Zuckerberg really is the quintessential millennial. He’s influenced by the ’90s and pop culture and MTV and also, yes, the rise of the consumer internet, which he helped build. But all this also happens to be crucial, I think, to his business in terms of appealing to the next generation of internet users. He needs to appear cool to the younger kids who are on the internet, who are using his apps, who might be using TikTok, who he’s trying to lure over to Meta apps. And I think that he needs to appeal to their sense of self. Because that’s what the internet is to a lot of people now. It’s about the self

Michael Calore: That’s interesting. So he builds a product to help people define themselves and give themselves an identity, and he is also defining himself in giving himself an identity.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m not going to say that he’s single-handedly responsible for fueling our collective self-obsession, but he’s part of it.

Lauren Goode: But it does feel like this is Mark as a more authentic version of himself. I think one thing that didn’t really work before when he was in his sweaty kind of nervous era is that it seemed like he was trying to be someone he wasn’t. He was trying to be an adult before he was ready to be an adult. And there’s a certain freedom with which he holds himself now. He seems, like, happier. And even if I look at the way oversized tees and the chains and think it’s all a bit much, it does feel like that’s actually how he wants to dress. Mike, what do you think he’s trying to say?

Michael Calore: Well, I have a theory about what he’s trying to say, and it has to do with masculinity. I feel like the man just turned 40 this year. He’s in his 40th year. And he is really thinking about how he looks and how he is perceived. So a few years ago, he was doing all of the mixed martial arts training and getting buff, and it was all about fighting and proving that he’s really a man.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh yeah, yeah.

Michael Calore: “Really, truly, I really am a man.”

Zoë Schiffer: We didn’t even get into the whole killing-your-own-animals-for-meat era.

Michael Calore: Right, yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.

Michael Calore: He was hunting, and the only meat that he was eating was stuff that he had killed with his own bare hands, right? He’s like trying really hard to be a man, capital-M man. And I feel like you can do that and you can prove it to everybody except for yourself. There’s a search within that happens when you start to embrace your masculinity and you start to realize that you need to pay more attention to your body. And I think that’s what he’s going through. That’s what it looks like he’s going through anyway. I mean, I’m not inside his head, but I see him everywhere, and he looks like a guy who’s feeling himself.

Lauren Goode: OK. What do you think this says about his politics?

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, he said really clearly that he wants to be apolitical in this stage, and I think we can all be a little suspicious of whether that’s actually possible, given that the product that he’s building is inherently political. But I mean, in recent years, he gave millions of dollars of his own wealth to rebuild election infrastructure around the country. And then during the pandemic, right after this massive investment, Biden essentially blames him for the deaths of millions of Americans because Covid misinformation is spreading on his platforms. And I think that there’s been a certain amount of resentment. He’s like, “I’m not going to donate to these campaigns anymore because it gets me in hot water and people say I’m trying to sway the election, rig the election, and also I get no love from Democratic politicians whatsoever.”

Lauren Goode: He also say after there was that assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and Zuckerberg was in an interview with Emily Chang from Bloomberg TV and said, “The way that Trump reacted to that was badass.”

Zoë Schiffer: I see that as kind of cold calculation. Maybe he really does respect what Donald Trump did in that moment, but I think more likely he’s trying to cozy up to Republican politicians who we have to say are much more transactional in their relationship with Meta and with Facebook. They’re saying, “If you leave us alone, if you don’t moderate our speech, we’ll leave you alone.” And that’s a relationship he can’t really have with the Democratic side of the House.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, that tracks. And also, I do appreciate how we’re trying to do this deep dive into Mark Zuckerberg’s psyche. It’s fascinating. But I ultimately believe that this is, if not entirely about his business, it’s a reflection of it and where he wants the business to go. He is trying to compensate for something, and I do not mean in that midlife millennial internet crisis, maybe buy a sports car, design a sports car, way. I mean, this is about the future.

Michael Calore: He literally did design a sports car.

Zoë Schiffer: Of Meta. Yeah. I mean, Zuckerberg himself has expressed this recently. If you listen to interviews with him, he’ll say it outright. I happened to be at the SIGGRAPH conference in Denver this past summer where I was interviewing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and afterwards Zuckerberg was on stage with Jensen, and he said that when he looks at the next 10 to 15 years of what he wants to build at Meta, he wants to make sure that Meta is building fundamental technology, the technology that serves up the software experiences that people are having. Basically, he wants to be in control of the hardware. I think what happened with Apple in 2021 when Apple rolled out app tracking transparency, which gave users of the iPhone more options to opt out of ads, and that Facebook’s business temporarily took a hit. I think that really underscored for Zuckerberg that Facebook whiffed when it came to the smartphone several years ago. They lost control of that platform and he wants to have that control in the future. And this is all a manifestation, I think, of him trying to grab back that power.

Michael Calore: By looking powerful, by looking in charge.

Zoë Schiffer: By no longer apologizing for what he wants to do.

Michael Calore: I like it. And also, I got to say, I’m here for it. I love seeing Mark Zuckerberg actually looking fashionable and spending thousands of dollars on his wardrobe. I think it’s great.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, sure. If you have the money.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: But ultimately this is just Mark Zuckerberg’s world, and we are all living in it.

Michael Calore: So why should people care about this? I’d like to hear a one sentence take from each of you. Lauren.

Lauren Goode: I think that there’s a lot of style-washing happening here and that it’s important that we all still pay close attention to Meta’s policy decisions and broader strategy. Mike, what’s your take?

Michael Calore: I would say that we should expect to see a lot more wearables coming out of Meta. It’s not going to stop at just sunglasses. This is a setup. We’re getting a vision of what Mark wants to be, and he wants it to be a fashion company. And Zoë, what about you?

Zoë Schiffer: I think that Mark Zuckerberg being in a more lovable kind of cultural era while he’s simultaneously walking back crucial content moderation efforts and shying away from politics on Threads and cozying up to Trump is a really scary prospect.

Michael Calore: OK, we’ll be right back.

[Break]

Michael Calore: Do you know what time it is?

Zoë Schiffer: Time for lunch?

Michael Calore: Close. It’s tea time, because this is our new segment that we like to call Overheard in Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: Ooh, we’re spilling the tea.

Michael Calore: That’s right. We go around the room and we share what we hear. What’s the word on the street? What’s going on out there? Lauren, I know you’re very plugged in as a reporter here at WIRED and you must hear a lot of things that really get your wheels turning or knock your socks off. What have you overheard in Silicon Valley?

Lauren Goode: Well, for our inaugural segment of Overheard, I went to the fine app Blind.

Michael Calore: Ooh.

Lauren Goode: Blind is an app where employees can go to vent or ask for advice if they’re interviewing for jobs or run polls.

Michael Calore: And just gossip, gossip, gossip.

Lauren Goode: Lots of goss. Take everything with a grain of salt. People are posting anonymously. But I wanted to see what the latest tea was on Meta. Now you guys probably know Meta has been laying off lots of people, as have other tech companies over the past couple of years. They’re in their years of efficiency. Recently, Meta did a small number of layoffs, and some of those people were apparently fired for not using a per diem food credit. They were supposed to be ordering through Grubhub or something, not using them for the appropriate thing. They instead were going to Rite Aid to buy toothpaste for themselves or something. Apparently they were given a slap on the wrist and then a few months later were actually fired for it. So I went to Blind. I wanted to see what people were saying about this. And someone ran a poll about it. The last time that I checked more than 4,700 people had responded. And basically asked, “Do you feel that firing people for these policy violations, for using these $25 Grubhub credits for nonfood items are fair?” And perhaps not surprisingly, 54 percent of respondents said “not fair.”

Michael Calore: Only 54 percent?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, no, 38 percent said fair, which did surprise me.

Michael Calore: That is very surprising.

Zoë Schiffer: No love for their fellow employees.

Lauren Goode: And then 12.6 percent, I was like, are these people trolling? Said they hope to see more.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God.

Lauren Goode: I know. That’s evil.

Michael Calore: I mean—

Zoë Schiffer: Go work at X.

Michael Calore: Yeah, go work at X.

Lauren Goode: Be hardcore. That’s a plug for Zoë’s book.

Zoë Schiffer: Thank you.

Michael Calore: The concept of, “We’re going to fire you because you’re fulfilling your incorrect basic need with this credit that we’re giving you to fulfill your basic need. It’s just wild.

Lauren Goode: Right? I think the idea behind the $25 Grubhub credit is you’re working late, so here’s some food to keep you sustained while you continue to toil away at your desk. And someone says, “Well, I’m going to go to Rite Aid and buy toothpaste instead” or whatever, “or order toothpaste instead.” And maybe they’re eating—

Zoë Schiffer: Doesn’t seem like the toothpaste. We don’t know.

Lauren Goode: We don’t know. Doesn’t seem like a major or fireable infraction. But in fact, we don’t know the whole story. We don’t know if they were low performers or something else was going on, but this is what we know.

Michael Calore: Wow.

Lauren Goode: I mean, this is what Blind tells us. So it must be true.

Michael Calore: That half of the employees who responded to that question have a heart.

Lauren Goode: Exactly.

Michael Calore: OK. Zoë, what have you overheard in Silicon Valley?

Zoë Schiffer: Mine’s more of an overseen, if you will, but does the phrase “Juul money” mean anything to you guys?

Michael Calore: No.

Zoë Schiffer: OK.

Lauren Goode: No. Is it like a crypto thing?

Zoë Schiffer: No. OK. So Juul, the vaping company.

Michael Calore: Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the singer.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh yeah. We’re going to talk about music now. No, Juul the vaping company recently settled a class action lawsuit, and those payments have been hitting the bank accounts of Gen Z. And there’s a TikTok trend now where they’re posting what they’re going to do with all their Juul money. I mean, some of the payments are like $8,000, which—

Lauren Goode: What?

Michael Calore: Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: Which I don’t know how much Juul you needed to purchase to get that much money, but people are like, “I don’t know what to do. Should I invest it? Should I buy socks? Should I have a whole new wardrobe and look and feel?” But it’s been pretty funny to watch.

Michael Calore: Wow.

Lauren Goode: Did you buy Juul?

Zoë Schiffer: I absolutely did. And then at one point, I have a visceral memory of walking along Grand Avenue in Oakland and then throwing it in the trash impulsively because I was like, “I have to get this away from me. Take my Juul.” But I loved it for a short time.

Michael Calore: Have you gotten a check?

Zoë Schiffer: No check.

Michael Calore: You could throw that in the trash.

Zoë Schiffer: Damn it.

Michael Calore: Over in Oakland.

Zoë Schiffer: Not if it’s $8,000.

Lauren Goode: You can buy eight Loro Piana sweaters with that.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, it’s true. OK. Mike, what have you overheard?

Michael Calore: OK. So I found out very recently that the three people who I know in my life who actually purchased an Apple Vision Pro headset with their own money have all returned it.

Zoë Schiffer: Say it isn’t so.

Michael Calore: Yeah. So one person, Lauren, you bought one.

Lauren Goode: Called me out.

Michael Calore: I’m sorry.

Lauren Goode: Just for experimental sake.

Michael Calore: Yes. But still you bought one and then you returned it, so you count. There’s another person in my life who bought one and then kept it for about two months and then sold it to somebody. And I found out that the third person who I know who bought one has also sold it.

Lauren Goode: Did they sell them at a loss?

Michael Calore: Yes.

Zoë Schiffer: And Lauren will not be invited back to WWDC ever again.

Lauren Goode: No. I’m so sad. I got disinvited to WWDC and the iPhone event this year.

Michael Calore: And this is why. This is why.

Lauren Goode: I wonder if it’s because I ran a two-week experiment just sobbing in the Apple Vision Pro.

Michael Calore: Then wrote about it.

Zoë Schiffer: Couldn’t be that.

Lauren Goode: Could not be that. No.

Zoë Schiffer: Correlation, not causation.

Lauren Goode: So what was their reasoning?

Michael Calore: They just don’t use it because it’s not anything that they want in their lives. They thought they would be into it, but it was just boring and there wasn’t really much to do. And they felt silly looking at it every day knowing how much money they spent on it. So they gave it to somebody who, or sold it to somebody who, actually wanted it. Maybe that person will keep it. Who knows? But I think it really underscores the cool reception of the Apple Vision Pro. The fact that I only know three people who bought it. And I live in San Francisco, I live in the bubble, I’m here. And I only know three people who bought the thing? That to me was already surprising when I added that up. But the fact that all three of them just don’t own it anymore really tells you that it’s not a product that has a wide appeal. It is extremely expensive. There’s a lot of other things you could spend that money on. And I think that’s what people are learning.

Zoë Schiffer: Do you feel like it’s dead in the water though? Or is it just too early and maybe in a few years we’re going to see it really take off?

Michael Calore: No to the first question. Yes to the second.

Zoë Schiffer: OK.

Michael Calore: It’s not dead in the water. There was some news recently, I think from—The Information found out that Apple has stopped producing new Apple Vision Pro headsets because they have enough to satisfy demand right now.

Lauren Goode: Oh, that’s a bad sign.

Michael Calore: Yeah. However, I mean, I think they’re going to keep iterating on it and there will be more Apple Vision Pros and they’ll be cheaper and sooner or later the contents going to come. This is the big hope. How long did it take for the Meta Quest to become something that was mainstream, actually good, lot of great games for it. It took years, right?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Now I think Meta claims something like 60 percent of the virtual reality headset market. I mean, all of this comes back to Mark Zuckerberg laughing his way to the Meta reality labs in Seattle.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Laughing all the way.

Michael Calore: Yeah. So anyway, that’s what I overheard. I overheard that people just don’t want the Apple Vision Pro anymore. Sorry to say.

Lauren Goode: Whomp, whomp. Sorry, I’m not going to say whomp, whomp. Please invite me to WWDC.

Zoë Schiffer: You actually love it. You’re buying a new one as we speak. I can see her. She’s clicking purchase.

Michael Calore: Oh, right. Well, that’s our show. Thank you all for listening to our very first episode of Uncanny Valley. Next week we ask, was flex work all a lie? So be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss next week’s episode or more of our future episodes. And while you’re there, rate Uncanny Valley on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or suggestions for show topics, please write to UncannyValley@WIRED.com. We can’t wait to hear from you. Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Special thanks to Executive Producer Stephanie Kariuki. Conde Nast’s Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. We will be back next week. Thanks for listening.