When I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg in his office last week for an hour-long conversation, I wondered if he was less excited about his vision of the metaverse than he was a year ago.

For one thing, Facebook is in a very different place than when it was renamed Meta. Its user growth is slower than ever and its revenue is declining for the first time. Meta’s share price has dropped a staggering 60 percent this year. Low-priority projects across the company are being canceled and hiring has been frozen. Meanwhile, it’s losing billions a year building hardware and software for the metaverse, and managers are having trouble convincing even their own employees to use its flagship VR platform, Horizon Worlds.

During our interview, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the long term…