Nicole Lazzaro and Jon Radoff talk about Emotion, Fun, Creativity and Augmented Reality

Speaker 1: For the Metaverse, it's really important to keep in mind the emotion component of what we're of how people respond to the systems that we make as we as we create this. Because otherwise, it's just going to be a very mechanical, I click to get rewarded. I'm watching how many views I've got and and that's and that's not nearly as inspiring as being able to explore a fire temple or figure out an escape room in 1889 Paris in a cafe. There's some fun things that we can do in the Metaverse.

Narrator: In this fireside chat about the Metaverse, Jon Radoff sits down with Nicole Lazaro to discuss

Nicole Lazzaro: emotion, fun and augmented reality. Nicole is a world-renowned game researcher, designer and speaker

Narrator: who makes games more fun. She discovered the four keys to fun in 2004, which she used to design the iPhone's first accelerometer game in 2007, Tilt World. Let's jump into this conversation.

Nicole Lazzaro: Nicole, so awesome to have you here. Oh, great to be here, John. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, I've known Nicole for years, but in the last few months, I guess, we've been in some really amazing talks on Clubhouse, which by the way, I think of Clubhouse as part of the Metaverse, it's just another place. We can be together in virtual space. It's just not graphical, but we're there, we're minds in a place and we're present and having conversations that feel pretty spatial, frankly. So I've really, really enjoyed the conversations we've had. Nicole has had some amazing things to say about AR and VR and emotion and neuroscience. And I just really wanted to have you on building the Metaverse so we could talk about all that stuff. Nicole, so awesome. You know, maybe just as a way to jump into the subject, your early research was around the neuroscience of emotion and you related that to games. So I thought we could begin there because as we digitize more and more of our lives and dematerialize more and more of our lives, what are some of the things that in the Metaverse people should be thinking about in terms of what can we learn from the emotion of games, how to provoke emotions within games, storytelling within games and applying it to games and all this other Metaverse stuff that we have been talking about.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's wonderful. And a big topic. I do, as you know, I do a lot of consulting for number of different leaders in the space for games and for non-games too. And if you want to think about the Metaverse as a game, I think it's a really appropriate, very appropriate because it's really this transition that we're going in. If you think about where the web is, web, sort of like the three eyes, web 1.0 was all about information access and retrieval and sharing stuff like that. Web 2.0 was a little bit more interactive, so we could interact with that information in a much more meaningful way, so software as a service, etc. And then Web 3 was what we're going into now with the Metaverse. It's really all about immersion. It's about becoming multiple layers of experience all coming together and carrying that experience across different experiences or across different vendors. So that's what there's a universe in a sense and a meta universe, meaning that we can move from experience to experience or from university, university, universe. And inside each one, just like Clubhouse can be very immersive in a very much a world and of itself because the, although as you said, it's a graphical, you know, very 2D, but it's live and you walk down the hallway, walking scrolling down the hallway in Clubhouse, it's really like walking down the street, right? It's really walking down the street in

Nicole Lazzaro: it's no crash, right? In their Metaverse. But what I did to, you know, if you think about,

Speaker 1: so if this is immersion, if Web 3.0 is about immersion, then what is more immersive, you know, what is the most immersive tech that we have? Well, that has to be games, right? It has to be games. And so that's where, you know, that's where I come in because I'm the leading expert on the emotions that people feel and the things that they do in games. So, you know, a couple decades ago, I did some pioneering research on tracking emotion expressions on the face using Paula Homes spatial action coding. And I was able to determine and prove that scientifically prove that we actually did, players did experience a wide range of emotions as the result of play that these action emotion pairs. It was at the time, it was baked into the AI for the Sims, inspired IBM Watson's emotion analytics. And then it's led to something you've probably all heard of, which is called gamification. So it's one of the kind of the founding researchers that, you know, spawned that movement of like, okay, play is important. Play is something that we can do in our, we can inspire, use games to inspire different, you know, different interactions to make software, you know, more meaningful and, you know, engaging and more and more fun.

Nicole Lazzaro: I love that you said gamification. I want to spend a little bit of time on that. I love that you mentioned it. I hate the word gamification actually. Maybe it's just me, but because I feel like people really misuse the term. And I'll just tell you my own take on it in the way that I've tried to help people think about it, which is if you want to gamify an experience then great. Here's what that means to me. And I love you to argue with me or disagree or agree or whatever, but it means actually providing a player with aspiration, with a roadmap of things that they care about, of emotional storytelling. Think that would be gamification, not like a point or leaderboard system, which is a fine tool that you can include in your design. Like, don't not include it if that's good for your mechanics, but that's sort of what people, I think, they felt like they could get the easy win by adding a point system and that would be gamification. And what I've tried to tell people is, no, that is not gamification. That's just a point system.

Speaker 1: Right, right, right. What happened is that, you know, implementing and in the rush to, you know, found gamification companies, and I much prefer the word gamify or make playful some other language, right? Because it sounds cheap. And what I do is really heartfelt and very intrinsic. And so those mechanics you talk about were probably the most obvious and extrinsic external to a game system, you know, that you can get. And so it was really just a surface wash of, you know, we heard a white washing was a sort of game washing. Well, which is take, leaderboards will take points, we'll put badges in there too, throw those all in, and then we'll make the experience better. Well, it wasn't really actually about making the bit experience better. It was all about driving the KPIs and get people to, you know, come back again and again. But that's a, with intrinsic, extrinsic reward, I have a, you know, I have a degree in psychology from Stanford. And extrinsic rewards are really, they are, they are what like sound, they're external. They're not really valuable in and of themselves. And what happens if you're, it's actually very difficult to get to design extrinsic motivators that motivate for a long, a long period of time. So yeah, I'm definitely in that boat of not liking the term gaffation because there's so much more two games that really, you know, makes us, makes us human. You know, I've got that model, you know, the four keys to fun. And everything you spoke about with, you know, badges and points and stuff like that, that all goes into the fourth key, which is what I call a serious fun. And, but that's really about, you know, creating, if you really look at it, it's not about points and badges. That kind of play, people play for four reasons. They play for novelty. They play for challenge. They play for friendship and they play for meaning. And the fourth key is all about meaning. So the badges and the points are all supposed to document something that was valuable. So people play in that, in that persona is, it's, they play to change themselves and the order to change the world. And so if you just give points and badges, not so great, if you allow people to design a, a Minecraft level that they can video and YouTube and then share with their friends or do and roblox, you know, build a room, build an escape room and then invite their friends over, that room exists, you know, outside of the play, if you will. And so that has a lot of serious fun and you don't need points or badges. Plus, like in our work, we've done, we've did, we did like over 40 projects for play first, the creators of Diner Dash. And what we found in our research over time is that like roughly 10% of players, like only 10% of players even play for points, especially in like the casual thing. It's all, there's all these other things that are, you know, that need to get, need to get captured. Well, that, that's the opportunity. It's the opportunity to, to capture and to get, you know, to get these different, different feelings. And if a game, basically best selling games tended to have, we call it the four keys to fun or the four keys to engagement when I use it for my non-game clients. Is that, you know, we have these, these four reasons to play and, you know, I can, you know, it sort of looks like this, looks like a little clover leaf. And, you know, you go, you go around the, you go around the loop. So curiosity, it's the hook that pulls you in, that's for, you know, for easy fun. And then, and then, like dribbling a basketball, it's fun just because or drive the race track back, it's where explore, create. And then we have a hard fun challenge and mastery. And so this, this type of fun here is all about having a goal and obstacles and strategies. So you feel frustrated until you feel fierre, which is the feeling of, you know, the feeling of a victory, right? People fence all about the social interaction. And that doesn't come with badges or points. And people play more for that than the other four keys combined. There's more emotional mechanics in there than the other three keys. And so what we want is we want a game experience, even if it's a not a game, you know, even if we're gamifying a spreadsheet or we're gamifying a, you know, if we're giving you a task manager, which I would love to do because it's really bad out there. What's being, what's being, what's being promoted. But you want to have the balance because people will move between those, each time you move between one activity to the other activity, then you feel refreshed. So going into the metaverse, I think we don't need to gamify the metaverse. We don't need more like one of my biggest fears is we don't need more of more operant conditioning, you know, the stuff that BF Skinner belongs to. Right, right? And it's about, yeah, the Skinner box. And it's about, you know, rewarding, it's about, you know, changing people's behavior by, you know, these intermittent reward response loops and scheduling reward payments and stuff like that. But again, that's all going down to points and badges where, you know, just you and I talking on clubhouse is rewarding in and

Nicole Lazzaro: of itself. Yeah, well, so for people that might be watching who are not game designers or have a psychology degree, maybe they haven't really thought about that about intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards system. So what we were just talking about was, you know, the extrinsic rewards are something

Nicole Lazzaro: that comes from outside of you. Like, you know, if you get paid for a job, then, you know, your

Nicole Lazzaro: salary is an extrinsic reward. Intrinsic is what comes from inside you. Would you say that I,

Speaker 1: I gave kind of a reason? Yeah, definitely. Extrinsic means it's artificial and applied, right? It's outside. And with games, what happens is that when you win the feeling of fero, like, yes, you punch the sky. It's a great feeling, but it fades very quickly. So it goes up and then it goes down. So what happens is the serious fun comes in and catches you a little bit. And so it gives you some points and some badges and whatever. But in like a row blocks a rec room, the world is there, right? It's there. It remains there after the victory, affiliate finishing it out, right? And so that naturally, you know, stays, you know, stays with you and, you know, and extends. Yeah. So with the four keys, what it allows you to do is it allows you to take X, you know, intrinsic, they're all very intrinsic mechanics to create these different different types of emotions, because they're just fun to do. It's fun. Easy fun is like, for example, easy fun is the bubble wrap of game design. It's just fun, you know, to, you know, not use bubble wrap for what it's supposed to do, but just pop the bubbles. It's just fun all on its own. So you can add these intrinsically fun and rewarding experiences or interactions into your virtual worlds. And that makes it much, you know, much more

Nicole Lazzaro: enjoyable and people will get a lot more value out of it. Not doing that really risks the idea where

Speaker 1: the metaverse is simply, you know, a place where I'm going to go and live inside, you know, someone else's, you know, some large corporations investment. And they're just going to try and monetize us as much as they as much as they can. But if it's intrinsically valuable, then it's, then you're going to want to stay there because you're getting value out of that conversation. It's helping you with your, with your work or your goal. And then it's got this really cool thing that you started us off with, John, which is we're, we're getting this metaverse that arrives in the interest and the metaverse right at the same time that we're getting the rise in the creator economy. And so that's going to be really, really interesting. We're already seeing some traditionally, you know, free-to-play platforms, you know, in social media, kind of starting to reward, you know, and reward their creators. And now I think there's a really amazing opportunity because of so much needs to get created. I think there's really interesting for people, opportunity for people to have their, you know, full-time vocations, you know, come out of, you know, working in the metaverse. Or it could be that we all go into UBI, you know, universal basic income and everybody pursues their passion projects with, you know, family and friends. And you might not, you might not agree with me on that. But it's a rather interesting, interesting possibility, consider like where do we go? Because the, we all know, the internet changed everything, right? It disrupted every, every business and continues to do so. Even VC finance, right? It's getting interrupted by the freely available info on Twitter now. So everything's getting disrupted. And the metaverse is going to be, you know, yet that one more, yep, that one more step, especially with crypto being able to document and preserve and lock in certain events. And that's going to be, that's going to be a very big gain changeer

Nicole Lazzaro: already and will, more so in the future. Yeah. Okay. We're going to, we'll definitely return to

Nicole Lazzaro: create our economy stuff in a moment because there's an area where I'd love to explore the distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic and intrinsic rewards for sure, because I think that there's a lot of different cases to look at there. But just before we, we get onto that subject, you're a neuroscientist. I want to talk a little bit about the neuroscience behind this stuff. I've looked into it to a little, and maybe I'm getting into dangerous territory for myself here to even try to talk about this stuff. But I think it's interesting to think about how this isn't just some sort of like hypothetical model that people came up with because they were designing games. Like, there's a lot of real fundamental science behind a lot of these systems. So when I think about like those quick hit Skinnerbox type systems where I'm playing the slot machine and I get rewarded because it's on a variable reward schedule, that's like the dopamine system. And what I've come to understand about dopamine and educate me correctly if I'm off on any of this, it sort of can motivate short-term behavior change, but not necessarily really long-term meaningful change, whereas it's

Nicole Lazzaro: those serotonin systems around friendship and meaning, expression, identity that actually creates

Nicole Lazzaro: transformative or long-term change. I just think that's interesting to think that it's actually based in like chemical and biological systems that we've evolved with.

Speaker 1: Definitely. And that's certainly I share your passion for understanding the different, different, yeah, the different mechanisms. I actually gave a talk, so we years ago, a go called, you know, the Forkies to Happiness, I believe, in which I talk about a model called dose. You know, you need to get your daily dose of these very positive emotions or neurotransmitters. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually toasting. I can say toasting. Yeah, serotonin and endorphins. And so, you know, this is a way to gamify your life. If you could just gamify your life, you know, plant activities around this for neurochemicals is a way. But I think let's let's take the beast in the room is certainly dopamine because that's the one that gets the most the most screen time. And I think it's also it's also often, you know, very misunderstood misunderstood, which is a shame. The dopamine is what's released just prior to like as you're reaching for a goal, like if you're reaching really high to grab that last, you know, red berry or something like that, dopamine, basically marshals all of your resources to so you can put in that extra effort to achieve that goal. And so when we get the intermittent, you know, responses and we, you know, start scheduling rewards and stuff like that, you increase, you definitely do increase dopamine.

Nicole Lazzaro: But dopamine itself doesn't necessarily feel good. You crash and then you want, you want more,

Speaker 1: right? And so you get this pattern of like a craving, but a craving feeling is not the same as just had an amazing time. I'm going to bring my buddies and let's go do this. Right. It's a different, it's a different feeling on the, on the inside. So that's an interesting thing. And so like it, you know, it's what's definitely used in the slot machines in Vegas. And they've got lots of regulation in Vegas on what you can and can't do in a slot machine because of that. And so we will get a lot of regulation in the metaverse if we, you know, only do these sorts of things or do too much of them. Anyway, but I like to think that as you don't, you want to, you want to be playing because it's fun. You want to play because you are getting closer to your friends, as you mentioned, you want to play because it's valuable. You're learning, learning is a great motivator as well because it feels really good to, to most people, it feels really good to master something, to learn something new. Those are a little bit harder than, you know, pushing a button to feel good type of, or push a button to, you know, get the reward or push a button to roll the, the dice or push a button to get the loot box or gotcha mechanics, which, you know, as you know,

Nicole Lazzaro: are getting regulated because of, because of those reasons. But you mentioned, so then after dopamine,

Speaker 1: so dopamine is fine, but it's only part of the puzzle and it really, in and of itself, it's all about, you know, getting to that goal. And what can happen is you were right, it is it attenuates over time. So extrinsic rewards like points and badges will go, the effect of it goes down just like, just like an addiction, you know, just, you have to get, you have to get a higher dose in order to get that same buzz or that hit. And so you have to add novelty and, you know, some kind of sense of progression in the, in the rewards, in the extrinsic rewards, a map that you go through is a much more intrinsic kind of a reward system than, than a lot of badging systems. But if you, if you give them, if you give them that, you have to get sort of like with world of warcraft, they start with copper coins and then silver coins and then gold coins and then platinum coins, you know, you have to get, or in a, you know, in a, you know, in Pokemon Go, you get more and more different, you know, kind of, different kind of Pokemon to catch. You have to have a constant feed of novelty to have the, have the same effect. So the, it needs to seem like it's going higher, progressing higher and then also needs to be novel in some way to keep getting the dopamine,

Nicole Lazzaro: out of the dopamine hit. Yeah. And I think a takeaway for people who are watching this, though, is to hear that, understand that these are real systems in our brain that can affect behavior. But just over focusing on that dopamine system, that quick reward, the variable reward schedules and stuff, it's not really enough to create most really interesting experiences. You mentioned like Pokemon or my, one of my favorite games, Magic the Gathering. Yeah. So winning Magic the Gathering might be part of that system, but the creativity of these card collecting games where I get to sit down and look through my collection, appreciate it, come up with a unique way of trying to win, where I'm really injecting my own creativity. That's a whole different system. Closer to this intrinsic motivation. Definitely. Definitely. I'm getting expressed myself.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you get to express yourself and you get to create new strategy. So you have, and you can roleplay too because of the card and the university. There's some storytelling. So you've got easy fun storytelling. You've also got the hard fun of challenging mastery and strategy of building

Nicole Lazzaro: that deck and the creativity and coming up with new strategy is a very important thing to get people

Speaker 1: to, to have people continue to go up, you know, up and up and up, not just more monsters, less, less points, less time or something like that. You need new kinds of situations to, to induce that. Study was done many years ago where a, you know, kids like to draw in a kindergarten teacher set, you rewarded kids by, you know, giving them candy and, you know, for drawing and so levels of drawing went up, you know. And then, and then they were, the teacher stopped rewarding drawing with candy. And then as you expect them out of drawing, went down the classroom, but they actually, what it was interesting is that not only did they go down, but it actually, the level of drawing went down below the level at which it started with. So the adding met an extrinsic motivator and then the removal of that extrinsic remotivator actually demotivated, changed like what people were, what the kids were actually doing. So when we think about our systems, that's a big, you know, it's a big red flag, why why we need more than extrinsic systems. So the, let's go there. It's a

Nicole Lazzaro: good way to get around that. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, let's go there with the creator economy stuff. Yeah. So I talked to, Raf Koster in a previous version of this actually the one we launched it, we talked about the creator economy because a big part of my conceptualization of the metaverse is that we're seeing a huge rise in the number of creators that kind of parallels what happened with the web. So when you were going through your three eyes and there was like the informational stage of the internet, a big part of the creator economy for that was just letting people publish this transaction. So similarly, we're now seeing a lot of tools and creativity platforms for doing

Nicole Lazzaro: the same thing, but around immersive and real time, presence applications where people are actually

Nicole Lazzaro: in the environment of some kind. And he made an interesting point that I don't think is, is like way off or anything, which is, well, it's about creativity, but is it really maybe more about monetizing creativity, which comes back to the heart of this extrinsic versus intrinsic stuff. It comes back to what you were talking about earlier, which was new ways of monetizing content creativity, whether it's blockchain and NFTs or a closed environment like a roadblocks, which has its own approach to that. So I guess that's just sort of a wide ranging subject, but what are your thoughts there on how does the presence of a payment system, for example, alter, I don't know, the purity of the creation process, like would my kids approach this world much differently? Like, they play Minecraft, they make stuff in Minecraft, they're not doing it with an aspiration for profit as far as I know, they just want to make cool looking towns and castles, but if I told them that they could earn a bunch of money doing this, they might do something else. What are your thoughts

Speaker 1: on this? I think that the, well, the creator economy is here to stay, regardless of what anybody pretty much regardless of what anybody does. It's because people, you know, people like, people hate being bored, that was one of the first things I found in my research, people hate being bored. It's shocking, I know, but important to remember, people do not like to be bored and that explains

Nicole Lazzaro: so much as well. I can't just climb me all the time. There you go.

Speaker 1: Board name is one of the primary motivators for play. So, spot on. With the creator economy, what we have happening now is just super fascinating. To many of your points, what we've got going on is that we have people, you know, for the first time being able to make the tools have gotten so accessible. We have real-time engines, aka game engines happening, right? And they've gotten so, so good, you know, so good and other tools on top of that are similar to them, real-time tools, that you don't need to cut, you don't need to cut, so low code or no code authoring system needs to talk about it in the days and multimedia. A level to create like a whole world that your friends could come in and you can do stuff with. What's really new on top of that now is that you can, like, I've been doing a lot of work with Snap. I have the new, you know, I'm trying out the new Snap Spectacles and stuff, right? And I saw I'm in D'Alan Studio, which is the development environment a lot. And they've got, they have all of these layers. You can go in from like no coding experience at all and practically no art experience at all and just like go up and make your own experience, right? So the creator economy isn't just, you know, so like, yeah, we have that big step for going from, like, I'm just reading about the web or watching YouTube videos too. I made a room with my friends in Roblox or RecRoom or something like that or Manticore. And but in between, there's amazing number of other other layers and in between they've got some really interesting kind of the creator economy, the entertainment economy, the experience economy. You actually have an in-between set of creators that are making, that are actually making stuff for tools for other people to create. And then that's I think a really good way to think about what AR lenses are all about, whether it's the Snap lens or, you know, Spark AR or, you know, Adobe's arrow, is that we're, you know, creating, you know, an experience or the ability for an experience. And then you put that tool like on your face or on your dog or, you know, in your, I'm making some games in your room. And you would end record a video that you can then share with your friends. So it's tools for other creators. That happened before and it was a game called The Sims way long ago. And the original first Sims, you know, what percentage of content do you know what percentage of the content in The Sims, first one, VO was made by EA Maxis, Maxis Studio?

Nicole Lazzaro: I don't know, but it must have been a vanishingly small percentage because I had so many friends who are in The Sims at the time doing like rock concert DJ rooms to you name it, the A-Made, and we're inviting people in.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so about only about 30% of the content for The Sims was made by The Sims. 70% of the content. So we think of a large, you know, triangle. 70% of the content was made by other creators. So they had, yeah, they had 10 sort of roughly 10 beta websites. Will Wright does this amazing. And his team has been amazing, you know, with Roxy and with that Clark Rurt and stuff like that. They did an amazing job. And there were these layers. You could just play the game as the bottom layer of the pyramid. And then you could, you know, make content, you know, for others to download, as long as you didn't charge it. And then you had stores, people host and stores or websites

Nicole Lazzaro: for which you could download the content, right? So you get all of these different, you get all

Speaker 1: these different layers of creativity. So that's a creator economy and was an enormous driver for Sims. In any game like Beat Saber, for example, in the XR space, has a creator layer. It's called a mod. You know, Call of Duty, all of these, you know, first person shooters with the hardcore games have them. And then, you know, more casual games have them as well. So it's not that we just come to a place to play, you know, like the game, dream by, you know, dream on the PlayStation. You can actually, you know, make your own games. And so I think a lot of people are expecting to, you know, get more, you know, more and more, more, more, more creative, more input. But you did bring up a good topic, which I

Nicole Lazzaro: should, I should mention, touch on is like, which is like the value exchange. And again, that's

Speaker 1: again, series fun. And we're doing a lot of this, you know, neuroscience, because I'm, I'm building an emotion engine for, you know, for our game quality, an AI for our game followed by rabbit. And what's interesting about the emotions around money and value is that, you know, money and friendship don't mix very well. And so there are some emotions around money that can also like, if I get paid to create, or am I creating for just, you know, just, you know, for just, you know, personal expression. So that can really, that can really, really mess with things. If you think about money is, is a way, it's really about being able to store and exchange value at its heart, for the basic tool that money is. And so we're going to see, even if it's not money, if it's not fiat currency, if it could be a cryptocurrency, or it could be something else that gets exchanged. But I'm able to, you know, create something of value. And then I can store that value, exchange that value. And then I can use that to, you know, interact with other people or, you know, other businesses and services. So I think there's a lot of different wrinkles to that. And I think that more than just simply, you know, just paying everybody, well, first of all, more than paid, people just paying everybody in likes and in retweets and stuff like that, which is what's happening with a lot of creators, right? Social media, you know, you don't, you go to a social media platform, like a Facebook or a Twitter, there's nothing or Instagram. There's nothing happening or TikTok. There's nothing happening unless creators are there doing stuff. And right now they're working for likes and eyeballs and views and stuff like that. But they're, you know, as these tools get better or as the creator economy grows, there's going to be more competition for a top talent. And so some sort of new reward system is going to, it's going to be in place. We saw it like real early days with Twitter, for example, when they designed,

Nicole Lazzaro: the, when they added the score under your name, you have two scores, you know, the number of

Speaker 1: followers and the number you follow and they're different. And when they introduce that, those, that feature, it really affected what kinds of things people were doing the Twitter.

Nicole Lazzaro: Because they wanted to maximize the score. Yeah. And so yeah, so I think that there's going to be

Speaker 1: some really interesting things to happen. And if we design it well, we can, you know, for 20, I've run my business for like 29 years and our mission's always been to, you know, unlock human potential and improve quality of life through play. And, you know, I think there's some amazing opportunities. If we think about what is intrinsically invaluable and intrinsically fun, and we all play to invent our future selves. So it's not simply just the experience, but it's the, how does the experience change us for the person that wakes up, you know, in my bed tomorrow, right? How, how is she going to be doing in her day better because of what I did today?

Nicole Lazzaro: It's super interesting to think about everything that you just said and added back to the earlier conversation around no code and low code tools and the fact that a lot of these creative aspirations are just getting more accessible to people. Because if I look at the Sims, the Sims made it relatively easy to make this content. And what it meant was that people could just make new kinds of experiences for which there wouldn't have been any market for before. Like a lot of these experiences that people then ended up having that were social or whatever in the Sims,

Nicole Lazzaro: you couldn't have shipped a game that just did that, right? So on the one hand, we are

Nicole Lazzaro: lowering the barrier to entry significantly through tools that like game designers, game makers, any kind of experienced creator get online. And on the one end of this market, that means there's a whole group of people that are now going to be able to make a living from it, right? So they're going to earn a living from making this content for the consumption by other people who really couldn't have participated in this market before. But also in another aspect of this market, you are being very disruptive and allowing people to make whole new types of experience for which there was no market that existed before as well as just giving them a stage to do it creatively and

Nicole Lazzaro: have fun because in the past, if you had to learn a whole tool chain and learn how to do,

Nicole Lazzaro: I don't know, you know, C++ programming and matrix math to create your 3D experience, it would have taken so much time that you probably had to make a profit from it before you could ever entertain it. Now people are going into rec room and roadblocks and hopefully more in the open web in the future using OpenXR and whatnot. They're just going to make this stuff for fun as well. To me, it seems like there's a whole continuum in this market.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you think it's a world in a sense or an economy that's a happier place, if you have, and then I'm obviously American and I'm obviously from, you know, I believe in individuality and freedom of expression and, you know, the ability, social mobility. And so a metaverse that allows for those kind, you know, that embeddits, those sorts of values would allow someone, no matter what their background is, you know, they would be able to hopefully have access to the equipment. So there is that big hurdle there where they have to have access to a laptop of some kind, but they could express themselves and do stuff and do well and work really hard and they could get something that is very popular and then could somehow benefit from that popularity to meet their basic needs, you know, food and clothing and shelter. That's a very, very, very, that's a very interesting view of the metaverse that I prefer. There are other darker views of the metaverse, though, too, where you could get people

Nicole Lazzaro: and the way to do it is through operant conditioning, to get people to, you know, work and build

Speaker 1: the platform for free and work for for likes and for, you know, and for retweets and that sort of thing or we, you know, we shares or something like that and then not earn any money from it, not have the ability to be the starving artist and essentially it continues the tradition of a starving artist as opposed to someone who could be, you know, their own, you know, their own thing. And what we're seeing with NFTs now, which is great, is that, you know, visual artists can finally, or it seems like finally, be able to break out of the system and be part of a new system that is where they could, you know, sell their, sell their visual work and then even earn commissions on future sales of that work, too, through some smart contracts. So there are multiple ways that this could go down and I think it's up to all of us to figure, just do some thinking about what kind of future do we want to have for ourselves and for our children. As we get these interoperable, you know, essentially interoperable websites that are 3D and currency systems and stuff like that that are also interoperable. In a deeper way than just hosting a YouTube video, you know, being able to embed a YouTube video or a PayPal, you know, account, we're kind of interoperable in Web2. Web3.0 is going to be a lot more interoperable. And what do we want that to be? What do we want

Nicole Lazzaro: that to be like? Really fantastic point. And so a lot of people are talking about the idea of play to earn games and in a play to earn game like Axi Infinity, there's a group of people that are doing things like power leveling characters and investing in characters and then selling the characters back. And in some cases, people are making a decent amount of money doing it, sometimes a multiple of the living wage where they are. And I think the mistake people make when they approach that market is to not understand a lot of the things you were just talking about. There will no doubt be gold farming and power leveling as an industry and people do that. And and frankly, I think it's fine that that spurs innovation in new types of games that are built around those economies. But later earn is going to increasingly mean not just power leveling a character, but storytelling contributions or someone designs fashion for your avatar to wear or they're the dungeon master. So it's going to become a lot more about expression and creativity and participating in really dynamic worlds. And to me, that's sort of the really interesting direction that that play to earn is going to end up having. Well, if we go, if we go all the way

Speaker 1: to universal basic income, if we go all that way, and with 90% of the world's good being manufactured by 10% of the population, which may happen in 10 years, what are we going to do with our time filled with AI and stuff like that, taking care of a lot of our basics. But if we

Nicole Lazzaro: think about where we want to go, is it a place that encourages freedom of expression?

Speaker 1: It's sort of like I get hired a lot by companies to sort of put the human face on emerging tech. And how can we get things systems that actually inherently reward people or inherently not just motivate them, but help them be more creative, more productive, more, make them better decisions, think outside the box in some really interesting ways. Those systems can all be designed outside of operant conditioning. And I think that's that's kind of the future that I want to live in. And so being able to express and become popular is one thing. So we have this rise of the influencer economy, right? But we also could have the ability to just interact and connect with each other. So we were talking a little bit about what are augmented reality and how does that play into the metaverse. And I think what we're looking at is does this experience take away, take advantage of depths because something like that, is it alive? Can people live their experience alive? But does it change the world around you? Does it give you tools to imagine or improve your well-being? Does this experience bring you

Nicole Lazzaro: closer to other people that you love, right? And does the experience expand your mind to new

Speaker 1: dimensions and new realities? These kinds of things, in addition to be able to stand up on a stage and be able to or host a room or do that, what is it doing on the interpersonal level? I think is really, really important because it in our work, like with Will with Followed White Rabbit, you can actually through these experiences, like I was just doing over the weekend, it's like, whoa, what did I, what did I just see? Because it can't happen in real life, right? It can't happen in real life. And what does that mean? And you get this feeling of like full-body wonder, you know, like I had as a kid, it was all about creating Wonderland. And I grew up overseas, riding camels, climbing pyramids, I was in the Middle East, exploring fire temples, in real life. And I've always wanted to go back, one of the reasons I'm so into emotions, and now XR and the Metaverse is we can actually use this technology to recreate that full-body wonder we had as a kid, which is all about what Followed White Rabbit is about revisiting these places that I experiences that I had as a kid, and you know, give that, you know, as a gift to the players, people who are, you know, playing the game who come in, and then allow that to, you know,

Nicole Lazzaro: them to share those emotions with their friends. So for the Metaverse, it's really important to

Speaker 1: keep in mind the emotion component of what, of what we're, of how people respond to the systems that we make as we, as we create this. Because otherwise, it's just going to be a very mechanical, I click to get rewarded, I'm watching how many views I've got, and that's not nearly as inspiring as being able to explore a fire temple or figure out an escape room, and, you know, in 1889 Paris, in a cafe, you know, there's some fun things that we can do in the Metaverse.

Nicole Lazzaro: To me, you're getting at the very heart of really, you know, what it is to be human, actually. So

Nicole Lazzaro: not everything we do through our lives needs to have some sort of like starkly instrumental value to it, meaning I do something to make a little bit more money or make something a little bit more efficient. Those are totally fine things to do, participate in the economy and do good things and, and create value, all wonderful things and many, many people, including myself, derive a lot of joy from, from the work we do. So it's not to say that that's unimportant either, but to say that that's all there is to me, one of the mistakes people make in processing this world, whether it's like, I don't know, Chinese regulatory authorities calling games spiritual opium, or people who just look at all this stuff as a waste of time, like, isn't this actually what is important, like connecting to other people, expressing ourselves, using our imagination, like that to me is the most human thing that we've got to ourselves. Yeah, and it gets, you know, the spirit of play.

Speaker 1: You know, if you look at, you know, before and after a certain age, right, before there's just an amazing, you know, cornucopia of possibilities and imagination and things to do. And then you kind of in Western society anyway, or in specifically America, and I have experienced in many different cultures, right, living in different cultures, it's that we get it beat out of us, yet to be an adult, right? That's changing, fortunately, a little bit anyway. So we're allowed to play a little bit more, but those that natural inherent joy-ness of noodling around of, you know, design thinking has a big, you know, you know, brainstorming rules and stuff like that to encourage play. And that can happen, like inside, inside of the tools that we use, or inside these metaverses, these worlds that we're creating. It's just, it's just, when I see like you, when I see an effort by, you know, a major company where they have this big product announcement, and they've just pretty much replicated the real world, you know, room with the avatars and the whiteboards and stuff like that. And they haven't really added anything, you know, part of me dies inside, because if it's virtual, you can do other things, right? Let's fix something that's broken, you know, let's fix the thing that are broken with, you know, as a real world, let's fix those things. And, or, you know, provide some event, because it does, it does take something to put, you know, a headset on it does take, and so we want to be assured, I'm getting more out of the system than, you know, then I have to, then I have to put in. And, you know, there's so many things that are getting, you know, and this is what we're helping our other companies with, is, you know, how do we imagine really new applications for this technology that can, you know, revolutionize, you know, creativity and be something like, oh, wow, I really want to get, you know, into that, into that metaverse, because of all of these different, you know, all these different things come out. We don't need to be paid for everything, and payment is good, and monitor, you know, we're living in, you know, money 1.0, and which replaced, you know, we're not all corn farmers, like I was in Wilhucco, Mexico, and everybody at one point in time, farmed corn, because that's what you did, and you had to eat, and you had a corn bank, you put all the corn in a community corn bank, and they, you know, they would keep track, and they would charge the reverse interest, because the corn would, would rot, and animals would eat it and stuff. So, so money is good, because then it meant like, oh, well, I could be a barber, I could be a waiver, I could do other things, I could go to the city, I could like, again, you know, create value and store it, and then exchange it for other things, so that was awesome. Well, just like the, the trucking industry, you know, trumped the, the, the, the, the railroad industry, just like, you know, a horse and buggy isn't nearly the same thing as a Tesla, you know, there's a design evolution, money is going to do the same thing, and we're kind of in that, you know, if you think about a horse and buggy, between a horse and buggy and a, and a Tesla or a Prius, you know, you have this awkward, you know, horseless carriage stage, where it's neither, you know, it's neither a car, nor, nor a carriage, you know, is that that, and so that's kind of where we're in, you know, for, for money, for the metaverse, for everything, and we need to figure out like, well, what's new and what really works, for people, what adds a lot of value, and that's, and that's what we need to do for these game systems that are part of, that'll be part of the metaverse, you know, going forward.

Nicole Lazzaro: Yeah, and I think that's something people don't fully understand in terms of the impact of things like

Nicole Lazzaro: smart contracts, blockchain, and why this stuff is actually very relevant in terms of thinking about

Nicole Lazzaro: the metaverse, if we think of the metaverse as the next generation of the internet around immersive activities and interoperability and all that stuff. So this isn't just about, you know, crypto-brows trading and flipping the next thing, like it actually is a pretty fundamental evolution of the capabilities of the internet, right? So in those first two eyes that you are describing, it's about information exchange through websites, and the internet was built around decentralized information exchange. That's what the world's like. That's what the domain name

Nicole Lazzaro: says. The idea of being able to exchange value and program around it is a huge change that I

Nicole Lazzaro: think very few people actually fully understand the implication of that, because look at the entire economy that we've built around nothing more than information exchange when you get down to it. Now we're talking about value exchange, and in the world today, if you want to do a value exchange

Nicole Lazzaro: on a programmatic basis, well, there are in fact certain big financial institutions that will let

Nicole Lazzaro: you kind of into a little parts of it and latch onto a piece, and if you ask permission nicely

Nicole Lazzaro: enough and do the right things, they'll let you participate in it. But it's sort of like, I don't

Nicole Lazzaro: know, the America Online version of the internet for years ago, which is like you could be in the America Online ecosystem, and you'd get to do a few things. And in fact, there's advantages and benefits to it. But with decentralized value exchange, where two applications can be programmed to transmit value to each other, it allows a whole ecosystem of software to now get created that cooperates and creates all these little Lego blocks, creates new kinds of assets, whether it's an NFT representing the art you were talking about earlier, or a game item, or a generative stuff. Like I think it's really important for people to understand that value exchange is a fundamental like primitive property of the internet is going to really rewrite a lot of stuff

Nicole Lazzaro: on the internet, but also just in society. Oh, completely. There'll be new use cases, I think,

Speaker 1: to put a human side on that on what you just said, which I totally agree, is there going to be new things that people can do and people can build and people can can, can people join and people can join. A smart contract is a really key part of all of this as well as a decentralized ledger, which is a dock, which documents what happened, the transactions that happened. But with a smart contract, it allows, for the first time, it really allows something that I've been talking about for almost going on a couple decades now, which is if your credit card had a plug-in like the Firefox browser, and what would those plug-ins do? As I use the credit card, other things could happen. So I could get more points or more fund a local charity by spending my money locally than if I put it up onto an online thing. So that's an example of a smart contract, you know, plug-in or whatever. But money, the dollar bill, or whatever you want, or whatever kind of currency you have, depending on where you're coming from, this planet. If it had a plug-in, if it tracked where it was or how it was used or something happened, there's so many use cases. So, and again, it can be like an artist can get residual sales on their song or their visuals or their video art, but other things can happen too. So I can, you know, build any transaction that happens within a one-mile radius, funds a new park, you know, for my local community, or we plant trees, or when I buy something that has an eco, some sort of eco score lower than this, I actually created debit in my, you know, carbon score, whatever that might be. So there might be some really interesting things that could happen in the way that, which, or we could have like multiple people have to do something and come together to make something happen. So money can be, you know, more than just a number on a ledger. It could actually, the motion of money, the velocity and acceleration can all be inputs as a game designer, speaking as a game planner, could to rethink and create an economy that could be, you know, more fair for everyone. It could be an economy that is more eco-conscious for everyone. It could educate us. It could entertain us more. You know, there's a lot of different things that could happen. Once money gets smart. Yeah. And for people who are

Nicole Lazzaro: super concerned about the ecological impact of some of the underlying technologies for blockchains that we're talking about, this isn't, we don't have the time to get into like a deep, deep blockchain discussion, but know that there is a lot of technologies that are no longer hypothetical. There's proof of stake platforms like Salana and the ETH 2.0, of course, is coming, but the layer two solutions for Ethereum, like they're doing that now. So we're already seeing very, very low energy utilization, very low cost of transactions, smart contract networks. And keep the pressure on so that we get

Speaker 1: better. But I think it's a great conversation to have, but it isn't a, I don't think it, I think we can to your point. We can get better. We can do better. And we're already making progress on the eco. Thanks. And I'm glad that's brought up early in the evolution of this technology as opposed

Nicole Lazzaro: to 10 years from now when it would be pretty locked in. Now you brought up augmented reality a couple

Nicole Lazzaro: of times. You showed off your snap spectacles there. They're self-contained. It's just, it's just

Speaker 1: like wild. There's no wires. There's no wires. There's no phone. Yeah. You know, a lot of the other solutions like Magic Leap or Enreal, they wire to a puck or to a phone. And the Facebook stories, you know, are great, but there's no augmented. So I'm actually, I can actually see. And it's just the most crazy thing is that I put them on. And then I, I can see an interact, like I'm on my laptop here. And I can see and interact with a hologram, like right in front of me. So I can actually make, I can interact with it. I can play my little game or whatever it is, right? And then I can go into flat screen and I just like reach forward. And then I now in Lens Studio, which is, you know, in my, on my laptop in 2D. And I make some changes. And then I hit, you know, send. And then it goes into my last, I don't even take them off. And now I get the updated version. And now I play with the hologram to like that setting or do I want to go back the other one? I want to go back the other one. And then I go back into Lens Studio and go back. That's crazy. That's crazy. It's like what? You're actually able to, you know, like edit in 3D and like look at stuff in 3D, like write as you're, as you're working. Yeah. With VR, you know, you had to put it put on the headset. And then, you know, then you take the headset off or like, are you trying to balance it on your eyebrows, you know, you know, you just like, do that. And then you go down, right? Yeah. So yeah, Josh, totally

Nicole Lazzaro: throw some B-roll in here showing the amazing AR experiences that you can have with, with spectacles. Because I think it'll help people understand even what AR means. Because I think to a lot of people in the world, AR is still like Pokemon Go and like looking through it and seeing a character in the environment. And I guess that's not AR, but it's that's one. That's one. That's one.

Speaker 1: But like, you know, is it going to, you know, how could it be used to improve your well-being? How could it be used to express yourself? How could it be used in a game? There's lots of the new things that are happening up. And with platforms like Snapchat, there is, you know, so it's all about, you know, everybody in Snapchat knows and is very sophisticated about AR. They call them lenses. You know, they don't think of it as AR. But yeah, then you put it up and now I've got flower eyes or now I put it up and now I'm, you know, changed my gender or now I'm a tree or a potato or whatever it happened to be. The lenses are getting quite sophisticated. They actually, you can actually change your clothes now and you can actually body segments so they can like put, you can put a 3D rigged 3D, you can actually put a 3D avatar on top of you. You can actually erase your face or erase your whole head and like have no head. There's amazing. And then they've got, you know, some really interesting stuff they're doing with hands as well. I've seen some hand, there's some really nice hand tracking stuff. We're having a lot of fun with that part for sure.

Nicole Lazzaro: And this is relating back again to what we're talking about earlier in the metaverse in terms of expressing yourself and really being emancipatory, we want to talk about some of the stuff that this really can do for humans, like just emancipating you from whatever your identity is. If you want to try a different one or just experiment with different identities, being able to express yourself in new ways, like that's one of the potential applications of this technology that I that I think is super interesting. What what excites you about AR and what's what's coming? What do you think the technology is going to be like over the next, I don't know, 10 years? It's amazing.

Speaker 1: Yeah, 10 years is pretty far out. 10 years we're going to be like, yeah, it's going to be like here persistent. We're definitely not going to be flat screen. We're going to be holograms talking to each other. And it won't feel and I can actually like reach out, we can actually shake hands and it'll feel like that that we actually shook real hands. That's 10 years away from now. But, you know, I think what we've got is we've got already with these headworn stuff, especially with with things like snap spectacles, the next gen spectacles is that like I might one of my early lenses was I you walk by a post office box, you know, in the US and then we had the California elections in September. And so I did a lens where if you saw if it saw the lens saw post box, they would say reminder November, September 14th, you know, vote here and little ballot was going into the you pointed at the mailbox and go in there. So we could have lots of stuff that's happening just in the real world all around us. I've got these other set of lenses that are becoming out soon. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but you know, stay tuned in my account along that line. And then, of course, there's entertainment. So with these these games like with with Follow the White Rabbit, for example, we have it's a mystery adventure about a magician who's been a charlatan all his life until one day his magic actually works and the rabbit disappears. So you go chasing this rabbit through all these different, you know, dimensions, dimensions through time and space and stuff like that. And that's perfect for, you know, augmented reality for sure. And we get and then on the eco side, I designed the first iPhone game, you know, you can only play on the iPhone, that's, you know, tiltwilded you see behind me. And I'm really looking forward to making some lenses, some AR experiences that are all about, you know, greenify this, you know, make this more, you know, what did this look like in the Jurassic area? You know, what did, if we were to plant trees on the street, what would happen? Those kinds of lenses can help you imagine a future, which is really, which is really cool as well. As well as we'll do, we're doing some like, yeah, and so there's also like really great opportunities for like meditation and mindfulness as well. As well as just having, you know, fun, you know, hanging out with your, hanging out with your friends either virtually or in real life and having a shared experience. Like I really like Casta, R, I mean, I tilt five,

Nicole Lazzaro: tilt five, they're coming out pretty soon. And that's AR as well. And so you and I can sit in front

Speaker 1: of a board or look at a coffee table and we see a 3D game on that flat coffee table and we can play

Nicole Lazzaro: with that projection together in real time. Yeah, no, that's awesome. Josh, Q up the tilt five video for sure there. That's a really interesting use case that I think everybody can relate to,

Nicole Lazzaro: which is playing a word game or a card game. Yeah, and there is the assumption that like a lot,

Speaker 1: at the very beginning, people were, you know, rather cautious about, you know, the iPhone. They said, oh, that no one's going to be able to read the screen that small. This is in 2007. No one's going to use it very much, you know, because there's just such a different form factor from, you know, that this was such a different form factor from the laptop. Well, you know, when you look at, you know, well, we're here, we've got the iPhone, here we got this, you know, this is a very different form factor, you know, than this. It's like, you know, but we can probably come up with

Nicole Lazzaro: stuff that's going to work on, you know, on here. And so I think that that's going to be, I'm very

Speaker 1: bullish about what could, what could happen, what we can put on, you know, these kinds of lenses, the form factor for an all in one, you know, not too heavy, you know, not too heavy, you know, sunglasses experience where I can actually see things in 3D around me. It's really, it's really, really great. It really, really works. And I think we're going to get a lot of different types of applications. In addition to, you know, makeovers and that sort of thing that we see already in one studio on snap, there's just, there's going to be a lot more stuff. There's definitely going to be a

Nicole Lazzaro: lot more stuff that's happening. Yeah, and I'd love people who are watching just to imagine a little bit about what it means for the technology to both become always on so that I mean, we don't have the battery life yet. I think it's, oh yeah, yeah, I heard it. But, but someday you'll be able to wear a prescription lens or something or the equivalent of prescription lens because it'll

Nicole Lazzaro: just correct it. Yeah, no Joe is working on that. Yeah, but you, you'll be able to wear something

Nicole Lazzaro: very comfortable all day long. And that's one access to technology will go along. But also just

Nicole Lazzaro: the fact that it becomes ubiquitous at some point. In the same way that a mobile phone became

Nicole Lazzaro: ubiquitous and the battery life was sufficient to last all day long, actually opened up a lot of applications just because of the ubiquity and the long life that will also happen with glasses. And it won't just be transporting Pokemon go to sunglasses. It'll actually be a whole new class of things, a lot of which we can't even really dream of today because it'll start to get invented as people just discover what they can do with this stuff. But I think to me, one of the really interesting things is not just adding information to the environment when people talk about augmenting reality, they often use that as a synonym, I think, for just add stuff. And then, of course, they get worried about like, is this just can be advertising all over the place like some

Speaker 1: extra hyper hyper reality nightmare by KG or something like that. Yeah, but it's also about

Nicole Lazzaro: being able to choreate how you interpret the environment. It'll be about AI helping to interpret the environment, find the mailboxes like you did and do the little public policy. PSA. But also it could be anything you imagine, an example I give because I hike out in the wilderness a lot is like, I would love to know when there's like a rare plant around me so that I could see it and check it out. And if I had some AI that could actually be recognizing that data stream in real time and then I've curated for that information, that's just one example of a type of more pull-based application as opposed to pushing a whole bunch of enhancements or added data to my view field. And I just think there's going to be a huge, huge number of things that transform the whole way we experience the world once the battery life is there. Spectacles is really cool because it seems like they're actually really close to it other than just, you know, you can't do it for that long. So it limits the number of applications that are practical. Well, I think it's a really smart move

Speaker 1: on their part to get it in the hands of creators, you know, getting creator economy and like it are creativity and inspiration from outside, which is just exactly what I love working with everyone, you know, at Snap and other creators, but what they're doing, it's just gets so inspired. I think that it's one of the things, so like how can we imagine the future? And I do a lot of work with clients, you know, from EA and to Disney to, you know, about what the future to IBM, like what is what would the future look like? And an important thing for that is to look at the biases that come from the horse and buggy stage, right, from the earlier stages. And the, a lot of use cases come from information, have that kind of information retrieval for the A for ARs, like, okay, well, I'm in the world and now I can retrieve information. So it's coming into my field of view of the information about what I see, right? But when I use the word immersion, so it was information, which, you know, it was basically about information, about interaction,

Nicole Lazzaro: and then this, this version of the web is about immersion. It's immersion, you know, in, in the data, and that the computing is actually being immersed as well. And so when my CGI character can go over and turn on a real world light switch, that's, that's immersion, that's immersion, that's

Nicole Lazzaro: there we go. Wow. Okay, well, we've given people an awful lot to think about here. We've covered AR, emotion, blockchain. There's so much more to cover. How can people learn more about your work, where they can they find you on the internet, Nicole, if they want to read more. Yeah, certainly.

Speaker 1: If you want to know more about, you know, putting, you know, putting a human face on emerging tech, emotion, emotion AI, and creating, creating the next great, you know, next great experience. You can find me on Twitter, so Nicole, at Nicole Lazaro on Twitter, you can find me at xcodesign.com. And the four keys to fun is 4k2f.com is a short code. It's also on the ziodesigncom.com website. And I'm also on medium. So I have a blog and medium, which has got a number of different articles, one on the four keys to engagement for the metaverse. And it's always, you can always just google my name. I've got a lot of, I do give a number of talks every year. Most recently, I gave one on UX for holograms at the esteemed ACM Bay Kai. And then I will be giving another talk on usability for holograms at a w e next month in, yeah, in November, in November. So check that, check out that as well.

Nicole Lazzaro: Okay, awesome. And down there in the description, we will include all the links to everything. You just described so people can easily find it if you didn't get that while Nicole is going over.

Speaker 1: And playwhiterabbit.com is where you can find the game to playwhiterabbit.com.

Nicole Lazzaro: Nice. Okay, we'll include that also. And by the way, subscribe to this channel because we talk to really brilliant people like Nicole who have a vision for the future and the metaverse and building all this stuff from all kinds of really interesting backgrounds. And you'll be able to see more of these just by subscribing down below to this channel. And of course, I have my blog building the metaverse. You can find that on medium where I talk about this. I've got my Twitter feed. Again, we'll include links to all this stuff. But if this is the stuff that interests you, these are some of the people that you're going to want to follow. And I try to showcase it and share some of the friends that I've made out in the metaverse because I think they're super smart and have really interesting views on this stuff that you would really benefit from listening to and watching. And I hope you come away with some real inspiration from this talk. I know that I just want to go back and build the metaverse myself at my company, be mobile after this to help more people get online, create more stuff. So thanks so much for being here Nicole. I'm really grateful for the time you've spent. This has been so awesome to have this conversation with you and all these subjects.

Speaker 1: All right. Thank you so much, John. It's been a pleasure being here and go out everybody and be excellent. Let's definitely build a metaverse. Let's build a metaverse that we all want to love.

Nicole Lazzaro: We all want to live and play and have fun. That's a great way to end it. Be excellent to one another.

Nicole Lazzaro: That's the metaverse. All right. Thanks everybody.