Here's Why Mark Zuckerberg Snuck Sweet Baby Rays Into His Meta Speech

What the f*ck is up with the Zuck? Aside from everything going on with Facebook right now, anytime we see Zuckerberg in the news he’s doing something weird that leaves people scratching their heads in confusion. Last spring, he donned a full face slathered in sunscreen while surfing in Hawaii then made the entire internet cringe when he celebrated July 4th by flying an American Flag while riding an electric surfboard. Now he’s inexplicably snuck a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce into his presentation for the Facebook name-change pivot, Meta.

At least there is no water involved in this one. But on its face, it seems even more absurd than a rich dude trying to avoid too many UV rays.

Seriously, just what the hell is going on here? Why the bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce? Why is it on a bookshelf and what does he think it says to us about him? How did it get there and better yet, who put it there? This would be coffee-cup-in-the-final-season-of-Game of Thrones-levels of carelessness, so I refuse to believe it’s an oversight. I’d like to think someone pointed it out to him and he simply replied, “I’m going to answer you the same way I’ve answered my wife for the last nine years of our marriage: ‘The Baby Ray’s stays.'”

Alas, the answer isn’t quite that fun. According to some internet sleuthing, it appears that Zuckerberg’s love for Sweet Baby Ray’s goes deep and was first revealed in an early Facebook Live presentation where, according to this Ceros article that chronicles the whole thing, he uttered the word “meats” about 13 times in a single video and name-dropped the sauce constantly.

Of course, this was given the meme treatment.

Also, who could forget this summer bop, which is the coolest thing the Zuck has ever been involved in, even if it wasn’t intentional.

That means that the Baby Ray’s bottle is actually an example of him being meta in a presentation about Meta, which itself is an anagram for meat. Our minds would be blown if this didn’t seem like a shallow attempt at making the internet forget Facebook’s role in public polarization. Here is how the rest of the internet took the ploy: