In our first two-guest episode, Alan chats with Axon Park founder & CEO Taylor Freeman, along with Jacki Morie from his board of advisors, about the limitless applications of XR technologies to tectonically reshape whole industries from the ground up. Everything from education, to healthcare, to even the nature of global economy can be improved and democratized within digital space.

Alan: Today's guest is a good

friend of mine, Taylor Freeman, from Axon Park and formerly of

UploadVR. Taylor is a serial founder in the media and immersive

technology space. He's been focused on growing and supporting the

virtual reality industry since early 2014 at UploadVR, where he

established coworking spaces in L.A. and San Francisco that have been

home to over 150 VR and AI startups. He's posted over 500 events all

focused on XR, trained thousands of students on XR development, and

worked with companies like Google and Ideo to train their development

teams. He's reached over 200 million people online through

UploadVR.com, the VR industry's leading news outlet. Taylor was

awarded Forbes Top 30 Under 30 for his work in building the VR

industry. He recently taught the first in-VR class at M.I.T., and

recently started a new company called Axon Park, focusing on using

immersive technology to power the next generation of higher

education. Taylor is dedicated to equalizing access to education

using XR and artificial intelligence. I'm really excited to introduce

Taylor -- and his advisor, Jacki Morie -- to the show. Jacki and

Taylor from Axon Park; if you want to learn more, visit axonpark.com.

Taylor and Jacki, welcome to the show.

Taylor: Thanks so much, Alan.

Thanks for having us.

Jacki: Yeah, thank you.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

I don't even know where to begin. You've done so much in this

industry. Maybe we can just start with a recap of where the

industry's been from your standpoint and where we are right now and

where it's going, kind of in the general gist of things. Then we'll

get more into the work you guys are doing it Axon Park.

Taylor: Sure, thank you. And

Jacki, maybe if you want to speak to sort of the history of VR --

Jacki has been an early pioneer in the VR industry for over 30 years

now, if I'm not mistaken.

Jacki: Somewhere along those

lines, yes.

Alan: Wow, incredible.

Jacki: It's interesting, in

terms of education. Really, virtual reality was started to service

training for all kinds of activities, such as NASA astronauts who

would have to remotely control things on the space station. Or the

military, and looking at how immersive a technology could enhance the

training that the military people were getting. So those two areas

were very early in setting the pace for virtual reality as a learning

mechanism.

Alan: You know, one of the

people that I had the honor of meeting was Evelyn Miralles from NASA.

Jacki: Oh yes.

Alan: It's really incredible to

learn how long they've been working on this technology. This is not

the world where it woke up to virtual/augmented reality when Facebook

bought Oculus for 3-billion dollars. This work has been going on for

many, many years in research labs in universities, and in

corporations where it just wasn't available to the public. It was

just something they were working on, because it does hold such a

tremendous value.

Jacki: Right. It was about 1965

when this first started, and I call that the first wave. The second

wave was in the mid '80s, when we had NASA and more activity by the

military and