This was one of the most fun conversations I've had on Building the Metaverse: I spoke with Lucas Wilson about music. Lucas Wilson is CEO of Supersphere, which produces immersive VR experiences for music. He's worked with major artists including Billy Eilish, Angels & Airwaves, Kid Cudi, Chance the Rapper, Steve Aoki, Major Lazer, Wiz Khalifa, Offset & Friends, Post Malone and Paul McCartney.

In this conversation, we spoke about how musicians are innovating in the metaverse: we cover live performance in AR and VR--including some of the performances that have happened in Roblox and Fortnite; the Web3 connection to music including NFTs, the signing of Kingship (band based on Bored Apes Yacht Club), Grimes and Artificial Intelligence; the challenges of syncing multiple artists on the internet... and how music can bring us all together in new ways in immersive experiences we've never had.

Diversity & Inclusion--making a more equitable future for everyone to contribute to the metaverse--is the focus of this conversation with Trinidad Hermida. She was the head of Diversity and Inclusion for Niantic, the creators of Pokemon Go. Trinidad is now running her own consulting firm that advises game and technology companies how to bring "equity through empathy" into their organizations. We discussed many of the barriers that underrepresented people find when getting involved in the game industry (as well as technology, more broadly) as well as the reasons why companies ought to rise to the challenge and build bridges to these communities. We also get into Web3 and DAOs and why the newness, community-orientation and lack of institutional barriers may open up more opportunities to people of all backgrounds.

Nicole Lazzaro is a neuroscientist, a leading expert on emotion in games, gamification, and augmented reality. In this episode Jon and Nicole discuss how we can apply the learnings from emotion in games (such as Nicole's "4 Keys 2 Fun" model) to the metaverse, as well as Nicole's work within augmented reality.

James Zhang is the CEO of Concept Art House, which recently sold a Frank Miller NFT for $840K and raised over $25M to expand their business. In this episode of Building the Metaverse, Jon and James talk about the creator economy for NFTs, dispel some common misconceptions, and review the opportunity for artists and collectors.

Evo Heyning talk about intelligent ecosystems, virtual beings, artificial intelligence, AIs--as well as avatars, creativity and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

In this episode of Building the Metaverse, Jon has a conversation with game designer, entrepreneur and neuroscientist Amy Jo Kim.  This episode focused on game development; this is a key episode to listen to if you're a game developer, but also helpful if you're building any metaverse application inspired by gaming. We discuss the solo-to-social trend; the "games as economies" trend, the technologists-to-artists trend, and the "community first" game development trend. A few games we talk about include Axie Infinity, Roblox and Undertale.

Raph Koster is a legendary game designer behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In this episode, we discuss the metaverse, virtual worlds, governance, game economies, creativity and everything in between.

I discuss the creative platforms like Unity, Roblox and Unreal that are being used to construct the metaverse--and delve into the history of creative technologies overall.

What will you do in the metaverse? I discuss applications including games, esports, social activities, shopping, real estate, travel, education, training, fitness, live music, volumetric live-streaming and immersive theater.

This episode covers the major trends that are shaping the metaverse: digital identity (the mainstream adoption of virtual personas and items); the competition between open standards and closed platforms; artificial intelligence; cybernetics (AR, VR, neural, brain-computer interfaces); blockchain; low code and no code platforms; simulating reality; distributed networks.