The Bizarre Condiment Hiding In Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse Video

When Mark Zuckerberg went on Facebook October 28 with a live video to explain how he was going to subsume us all into the collective borg — er, enrich all of our lives by bringing social media into 3D virtual reality — attentive viewers might have noticed something unusual on a bookshelf.

A brown bottle stands like a bookend on the shelf at an oblique angle to the camera, so the viewer can't really make out what it is. But Zuckerberg fans know: It can only be Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce.

You can find crafty edits on YouTube that have made a meme out of a barbecue livestream Zuckerberg did years ago from his backyard. The videos exaggerate Zuckerberg's professed fondness for Sweet Baby Ray's, to humorous effect. And it is funny when barbecue master Zuckerberg says in these meme videos, in his robotic way, "We have just applied the Sweet Baby Rays." In one 19-second edit from the barbecue livestream, posted to Twitter, Zuckerberg says "Sweet Baby Ray's" 11 times.

When Twitter spotted a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce hidden among photographs and matching beige books on Mark Zuckerberg's bookshelves during his October 28 metaverse video, some people were perplexed. A condiment on a bookshelf, probably 400 yards from the nearest kitchen? "It's unopened," Twitter user @StarCrashr pointed out. "This guy keeps a bottle of spicy ketchup in his living room, and not because he forgot to put it away after eating his chicken nuggets."

"Sometimes you just need a quick swig of Sweet Baby Ray's while looking at family photos," @TimBarnes451 tweeted.

Others realized that someone must have programmed Zuckerberg to display a sense of humor. Either that or — and this sounds far-fetched — Zuckerberg could be a human being with an actual sense of humor. Twitter user @vinestime figured out what was probably going on with the Sweet Baby Ray's. "After seeing this it makes me think he's just acknowledging this meme," they tweeted.

Zuckerberg's video wasn't about barbecue sauce, of course, it was about his company renaming itself Meta, and how in five to 10 years we'll be interacting in his virtual metaverse that will feel a lot more real than "just looking at a grid of faces on a screen." (Ouch, Zoom.) It's all a little mind-boggling, as Zuckerberg said we'll be able to bring things from the physical world with us into the metaverse. In that case, we trust he'll figure out how to upload the taste of Sweet Baby Ray's.