Axon Park's Taylor Freeman and Jacki Morie Talk Radically Reshaping the Way the World Works with XR

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 some commercial companies wanting to get in on the game -- that just wasn't financially sustainable. And the Oculus at launch started what I call the third wave of VR.
Alan: Yeah. And I think my previous guest on the show today, Robert Scoble, he's got his book called The Fourth Transformation. We spoke about how we're just about to enter this crazy wave of technology, that it transcends even virtual/augmented/mixed reality. These technologies alone are revolutionizing all sorts of industries, but when you combine that with IoT sensors in machines. Then you take artificial intelligence and stack that on top, and then you run everything on a block chain; really, these technologies are all interconnected. And it's really starting to make a huge impact on all sorts of industries. Where have you seen the biggest impact so far?
Taylor: Sure, I can jump in on this. It's been sort of, like you're saying, since early 2014, with this third wave of VR kicking off. You start to see this pure excitement and enthusiasm from the early adopter community, around all sorts of use cases. We watched that peak of inflated expectations really take off in 2016/2017, and then -- as a lot of people have felt -- there's been this Winter of VR, as some people will call it, where these initial use cases are being ironed out. And during this winter is where I think you start to see the actual use cases that are really starting to get real adoption -- have real value creation -- rather than just pure hype.
Looking at real estate and development, it's just an enormous industry; being able to visualize spaces before they're built. The medical industry; being able to do surgical training, being able to actually do full simulations that save thousands and thousands of dollars, and are pretty incredible results for the doctors that are using them. The media space, I think, is an interesting point -- I know, Alan, that you've worked a lot in this space -- where people can see what's coming with it, but it hasn't really found the exact niche yet. Same with gaming; I mean, people who are sort of thinking that VR is all about gaming right now. And you've seen some small wins; you've got Beat Saber, which has really driven a lot of enthusiasm around the space, around--
Alan: It was just on the Tonight Show! Like, that is so cool.
Taylor: Yeah, that was great. Great exposure. But I think we're still sort of -- on the consumer side -- waiting to see that initial killer app, if you will, or core use case. Whereas on the enterprise side, it's just, there is real stuff happening; there are companies that are making a lot of revenue, are helping a lot of people. And despite what people say with VR fading away, there are real, practical use cases that are starting to take hold.
Jacki: I think one of the most important uses of VR, actually, is in the health sector. How it can help people deal with trauma, or relax, or have different qualities throughout their day just because they're using virtual reality. This is something that's almost ready for widespread use, and it's not because it just happened -- it's because there's now 30 years of research that shows that it's effective. So, I think we're going to see that be much more widely accepted.
Alan: You have researchers and -- I guess -- industry pundits, like Dr. Skip Rizzo and his Bravemind. It's treating PTSD using virtual reality, by recreating traumatic events for military personnel and letting them experience that, and decrease their stress and anxiety.
Jacki: That's taking a proven technique -- imaginable therapy -- and then translating it, so that people who have trouble imagining that kind of stuff actually can experience it, without having to work so hard to imagine it. I worked with Skip for about 14 years, so we also did things to calm people down without taking them back to the source of their trauma. It's just so effective. You cannot deny how much effect it has on people who have these issues.
Taylor: Yeah.
Alan: It's amazing how we introduced all this technology, which caused a lot of stress. And now we're using that technology to de-stress people.
Taylor: The medical space, too, on the other side; the surgery simulation side. There's a really amazing study that Yale University put out, where they had students that went through a gallbladder dissection course, and they actually found that students that used VR to train made 6x fewer mistakes during the procedure, and also were able to complete the procedure 29 percent faster than people that were using traditional methods. I just like that as one very tangible example of this is actually ultimately saving lives by helping people avoid these mistakes.
Jacki: And it's also allowing medical students to be much better educated. You don't have to dissect a cadaver anymore; you actually have 3D human data in front of you that you can interact with. You can see from all sides. It's not like having to learn from a textbook, or -- at the other extreme, as I said -- dissecting a cadaver to understand human anatomy. That has revolutionized the medical training industry.
Alan: I wrote an article recently, called "Can Virtual and Augmented Reality Democratize Education?" One of the examples that I put in that article -- and on the preceding presentation that it did on it -- was exactly that; real, three-dimensional anatomy. When I look back -- I studied kinesiology -- and I had to study every single bone, and I could never figure out, "was this the ulna, or the radius?" In 3D, it gives you a totally different way of looking at it. The world is in 3D, and we study in 2D; I think it's going to unlock massive potential for all sorts of industries, and healthcare is -- by far and away -- the most prolific user of this technology so far.
Jacki: And you're absolutely right. We live in a 3D world, and we have been training people for millennia by looking at books and 2D things. And the original learning was all in the world; it was 3D. VR is going to take us back to that, but also give us a lot of added tools. Like, being able to guide people through those educational experiences, and being able to embed metrics, so that you really understand -- on a moment-to-moment basis -- how people are accessing and assessing the information being given to them.
Alan: I have a vision for how education will work in the future, and the reason I started MetaVRse was actually to create a new education system, right from scratch. Like, completely scrap the old system. Because studying historical dates and mathematical formulas and things -- while still important -- is becoming less and less relevant to the workforce of today. I mean, Snapchat introduced a filter the other day that, if you pointed out your math problems, it solves them for you.
Jacki: Whaaaat?
Alan: [laughs]
Jacki: I want that filter!
Alan: We live in a different world now, and my children, they come home with these textbooks that are... they're not really "out of date," because it's foundational knowledge -- that really hasn't changed. But... it's not engaging. They're forced to memorize things, and then spit it out during a test, which -- five minutes after the test -- they forget it anyway. I think experiential learning is one of the fastest ways to learn. And actually, in my opinion, failure is the fastest way to learn. We can create failures within a VR or AR experience that have zero consequences in the real world, so you can fail multiple times until you get it right, and then you learn from doing it.
Jacki: That's a good point.
Alan: Taylor, do you have anything to add to that?
Taylor: Yeah, I think there's some interesting work happening. A lot of pedagogical experts will say that the Four C's are really interesting to explore -- Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity -- and how those are the core skills that people will need moving into the future. Can you imagine, having the option of hiring two candidates: one who's really good at following directions, and one that is very resourceful, is very good at diving in, finding their own way? I guess ultimately it would depend on the task, but I would prefer to find someone that was super resourceful, could be super creative, was able to really communicate with other people; because those are the skills moving into the future -- with automation and all these intelligent tools that will have access to -- those are the skills that will really matter, that will move the needle, and those are the people that I'd want on my team.
So, in thinking about educating people for the future workforce, I think reinventing -- like you're saying -- memorizing math equations and things like that, we can just look that up now. It's really, how do we think more holistically? How do we communicate and connect more effectively with people, and how do we get enough broad-sweeping knowledge so that we can identify patterns, and then use the Internet and the tools that we have around us to amplify all of that.
Jacki: Taylor just hit on a really key point for what virtual reality in training and education offers us, and that is the collaboration aspect. So we don't have to be alone, looking at a book, or being in a VR program; we can be actively in there, learning with other people, which amplifies our sense of understanding about the topic.
Taylor: Totally.
Alan: A great point.
Taylor: And for those listeners who haven't had a chance to experience a lot of virtual reality -- especially social environments -- when you're in a social VR space, you actually feel like you're there with other people. If you make the comparison to taking an online class, where you've got 20 students in the class. Right now, if it's remote, you're looking at a screen -- you're maybe using Zoom -- you see 20 little faces, and one person can talk at a time; if you want to do group work, you have to switch to a different area, do all this stuff. Only one person can have the floor at one time. But in VR, you could actually have 20 people in a virtual classroom. You can say, "let's break out into groups of five," and then people literally just move into groups of five, and then can communicate with each other. They can hand things back and forth. It just unlocks this entirely new level of constructivist learning digitally that has never been possible.
Alan: So, the question is: can this technology democratize education?
Taylor: It's a big question. But I definitely think that it's doing a few things. It's enabling access from anywhere in the world. So, right now, geography is obviously a huge limiting factor. If someone wants to attend the class at M.I.T., for example, they have to actually be in Boston, Cambridge, right? They have to be able to physically get there, which is really limiting for most people in the world. And you could argue, you could take that course online through a flat screen, but really being able to be in the same space, and present with other students and your teacher, is just going to provide to such a huge level-up in terms of remote educations. I don't necessarily think that it's the save-all savior of education. But I do think it's a huge, huge forward step, and something that will give so many students access to learning, and to meeting other students and instructors, that they just wouldn't have otherwise.
Jacki: And we also, first, have to democratize the equipment, access to the equipment. So we've got a ways to go before it's accessible to people in remote locations, or in underdeveloped countries. If we're truly going to revolutionize education with this kind of technology, we've got to get the gear out there in the hands of the people who can take most use of it.
Alan: I think we're going to see an increase in this technology proliferation with the introduction of 5G technologies, and being able to push 5G out to remote areas. I was talking to a gentleman who is funding a startup right now, and they've got this kind of drone. It plugs into a base, and the drone flies up so far, you can even see it -- it's like 1,000 feet -- and it creates this 5G net over rural areas. So you plug it into the wall, and this drone goes up and just flies there and creates a 5G net for a five mile radius. I thought that was really an interesting way to get these technologies out to rural areas, as well. And the price points are dropping dramatically every day.
So, we are seeing this rapid growth of the headset proliferation out there, and also the other types of technologies that support it. One of the things that really nobody is focusing on yet -- and I know you guys are kind of working on this in the background -- is artificial intelligence, and using these algorithms to not only provide better, more efficient, effective education, but also to study the habits and learning methods of each individual student, to give customized education. If a student learns best from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and has a slump between 11:00 and 2:00, then learns really well from 3:00 to 4:00, why are we making them sit from 11-2 and they're not really focused and not really present there?
Jacki: That's absolutely required, I think, to make maximum use of education materials in VR. And it's not a new idea. I have to tell you that in nineteen eighty....oh my gosh. What year was that? ...1989, 1990, 1991, I worked on a game to train incoming Navy recruits on electronic circuitry, through the use of a game. We have an AI entity that paid attention to how they answer the questions, how they solved the problems, and would suggest different ways of looking at things. Now, it was way early, and I don't think the technology was ready for it, then but the technology is definitely ready for it now. I love the idea of also figuring out your optimal time; I had not really thought of that. But your optimal ways of seeing things -- understanding how materials should be presented to you, knowing when to reinforce the lesson that's been presented -- those are all things the technology is ready for now.
Alan: Yeah. I think one thing that we as a society sometimes put the wrong emphasis on things, right or wrong. But Netflix, for example, has a really, really great algorithm for showing you better movies. Let's just borrow that and put it against education.
Jacki: Yeah, for the movies that you want to see.
Alan: "Here's here's 10 you watched; and now, we can give you a thousand more!" So why not with education? "Hey you studied molecular genetics? Maybe you want some more of that." Or, "you only spent a minute on that? You don't like it, and you love art; here's more art.".
Jacki: Or, knowing what you're weak in.
Alan: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, I think there's a couple areas with AI education. There's being able to cure eight existing content for students, based on their performance. But then also, this grand vision that I hope to see happen in the future is actually fully-customized lessons, to the point where it's akin to having an actual tutor. When you think about the best possible way to learn a subject -- there's a lot of debate on this -- but having a one-on-one tutor, that they're working with you, that's able to understand if you're grasping the content, what type of metaphors work best for you, what type of content really sticks with you. Having an AI tutor that can actually custom create these courses from -- I sort of think of it as like a core of knowledge, that's just the core concepts -- and then the artificial intelligence agent is smart enough to take that core knowledge, and deliver it to the user in a way that is really optimized for that person.
And then also, looking at XR as a whole, you've got immersive VR, where I think there's awesome opportunities to create these AI tutors that are embodied -- that you can talk to back and forth that are there with you -- but then, looking at the AR side or MR side of the spectrum, where you've got your glasses on you're wearing them throughout the day. A lot of people talk about spacing and repetition as a huge part of memory and learning; if you had the glasses that are running computer vision throughout the day, they know when you have an optimal time to consume this piece of content that's maybe teaching you what a gross margin it is, or things that are just, you need to learn specific phrases; you need to learn specific facts. I think you can really burn that into people's brains by using this computer vision intelligently throughout the day to expose them multiple times a day to these concepts. So there's sort of this whole spectrum of being able to have these virtual teachers, but then also, just get people the right information at the right time so it really burns into their brain.
Alan: I read an article this morning; they have this whole 10,000 hour rule for mastery. You know, "it takes 10,000 hours to master something," and this whole article was, "no; it takes 20 hours to be really good at something. Maybe it's 10,000 hours to be the best in the world, but not everybody needs to be the best in the world at something they're learning." They just literally need to learn it, do it, and be good at it; and you can do that in a short amount of time. Experiential learning increases that speed even more. One of the things that I think -- Wal-Mart is is one of the ones that everybody uses-- but Wal-Mart, Boeing, NASA -- all these big organizations are using this training as de facto standard training now, because they've realized that they're seeing 25, 35, 45 percent better retention rates, fewer errors, right across the board. And yet, our school system is reticent to change and introduce it in any level. I mean, there's some schools obviously doing it, but it just seems like it's such a long, hard, arduous task to bring this education into a school system that is barely keeping up now.
Taylor: Yeah.
Jacki: I want to say something about that, Alan. We hear stories of these enterprise companies using VR for certain kinds of training. We hear these claims that it's increased the understanding, or lessened the mistakes. I don't think we should trust those numbers totally, because I think they're based on very small pilot... I don't even want to call them "studies." One thing with education is, they rely on some evidence-based examples of how effective something is, and that might be part of why we're seeing a slowness. Now, I think, first of all, yes -- the whole education system does need to be turned on its head. But we do have to have some detailed evidence of what this kind of technology is doing, and it can't just be anecdotes. It can't just be small groups of people, "oh, these five people did better." We really have to look at it in a bigger picture; how students learn. What kinds of learners are there? What types of subjects respond best to this immersive sort of education framework?
So let's take a step back on what the industries are claiming. I haven't seen it totally rolled out in a widespread way in many industries yet. And Walmart's is just a very small thing that they're training on. Also, I don't think the industries really understand how -- most effectively -- to put that kind of training in practice. I've been working with a big energy company to do training and VR for their technicians, and I'm serving as an instructional designer, because the people putting the VR together don't have instructional design in their background so they don't realize, if you do it this way instead of this way, it's gonna be much easier for that student to learn something. I just don't want to have a hype curve for this -- yet. I want us to be pretty practical about how it's actually getting implemented, and what it needs to be implemented more correctly.
Alan: Jacki; with that, I'd love to actually get your opinion on this. For your listeners who are, "I'm in a business; I want to use this technology to train my staff," what are some of the key elements to using this for training? Or, maybe the team members that you need? You mentioned a course designer; maybe a graphics artist. What are some of the roles that you would require? What do you need to get this off the ground, for a company?
Jacki: You certainly need your developers. You need people who can turn assets and functionality around in an immersive situation really fast; you need them to be good. You need someone that understands the industry. So, it takes people a while to come up to speed on something like nuclear waste disposal training, whatever that might be. You may not know all of the aspects of that, so somebody on the team has to understand that. And then -- in terms of instructional design; course designers -- I think everybody who's putting this into education has to have one of those people on the team. So yeah, it's not just "build it and they will come." It's "build it with the right framework, so that it becomes the most effective training mechanism."
Alan: That's a really good point. And I think, all too often -- especially as we go through these hype cycles of this technology -- all too often, we get this all the time. A company call us and say, "we want to do VR." Okay. What do you mean? "Our CEO went to a trade show, he tried VR, he said that it's amazing. We want to do VR." That's the starting point. That's one of the reasons I started this podcast, because really, it comes down to: we need to educate as much as possible. And why VR? Why not AR? Why immersive technologies at all? What are you doing currently? What's working? What's not working? There's so much understanding of what they want to accomplish before... AR is just a tool. VR is just a tool. Does it even fit? I think that a lot of times, because of the hype cycles and because people get excited, they miss the very basics of "what is the problem trying to solve, and how can I use this technology -- as one of many technologies -- to solve my problem?"
Jacki: Absolutely. I think it's why we see so much adoption of VR for health, because it has that decades-long, research-based evidence that shows it is effective. We need that same thing for education; it's the only thing that's going to turn around that massive behemoth of the education industry. It's not going to happen on one-offs. It needs to be redesigned from the ground up, knowing what we know now. And that's why the kinds of things that Axon Park is going to do really support that. It's not just building a class here, or a class there; it's really looking at it as an integrated whole of how we approach the educational process, especially for higher education in this case. And Taylor has examples of some of the things that have happened in these online, immersive VR classes that have been so successful. And if we really take that and expand it out -- so that we can show it's successful in a large group -- then I think we've got something. But Taylor can talk about some of those examples.
Taylor: Sure, yeah. I mean, there's definitely a few to reference. One that I love is when we were doing VR development training with Unity back two years ago. We had two classrooms -- one in [San Francisco], one in L.A. -- and we were basically teaching people the foundational skills to build VR experiences using Unity. One section during the classes that would always take a super long time, when we would quiz people at the end of the section; there was about a 60 percent retention rate, it was around the vector math. Vector math is essential to building VR experiences; it's kind of the foundation of the game engine. We were looking at the results from the class, and we were thinking, "let's try actually using VR to teach this." Right? It's a spatial concept. We're teaching people about XYZ axes, and how the vectors interact with one another. So we built this module to teach vector math. And again, this is not a formal study, but it was roughly -- before, we were taking about an hour on this lecture of vector math; students would sort of sit through the lecture, do a couple of exercises, and then get quizzed; and as I mentioned, [with] about 60 percent understanding of the material -- when we introduced to this full VR module, where they actually were hands-on with the inspectors, building, doing vector addition, vector subtraction... in about 20 minutes, we had about 100 percent comprehension. Which is, it's just incredible. It's three times faster. Basically, everyone got it. And so -- again, not a formal study -- but just so palatable. And the students loved it. They were raving about that class. Just as one example that I have personal experience with, I've seen it work. And I think -- like Jacki said -- we can't get too much into the hype of everything that it could be in building it up so much, but there really are these nuggets that we're seeing that are are super effective.
Another example is learning astrophysics, which demonstrated: they took a class, they had the top third, the middle third, and the bottom third of this class in terms of performance. Then they took those three groups and then divided them again in half -- so then you've got top/middle/bottom learning just with traditional methods, then top/middle/bottom learning with VR-assisted methods -- and they tested everyone afterwards. There was, I believe, it was a 27 percent increase in the overall test scores of people that use VR. And then two weeks later they tested everyone again, and there was a 32 percent increase in recall. And so they were using this program called Universe Sandbox. They were learning about astral bodies, and astral body movement -- just these little examples where, if you can get hands on and really be there with the content, you're going to learn it faster, and you're going to hold on to that knowledge for longer.
Jacki: And I think that's a real key thing that we have to do, in these more formal studies, is test retention. Because, it's great to get into a novel VR thing, but how much of it do you really remember afterwards? And of course, there is some work on that in the last few decades, mostly for military training, and it shows that you do recall things better if you've learned them in an immersive way. But we need to show that for students. We need to break it out by age level. We need to break it out by learning styles. We need to break it out by, I love the "time of day thing;" which time of day are you learning more effectively? So there's a lot to really test out, and have a body of evidence-based research that supports it. That's going to be critical to adoption of this in a wide sense. In a global sense.
Alan: I agree. Okay, so, how do we then start to capture this evidence-based information?
Jacki: One thing that's interesting is, all of the investment in VR is based on product. It's based on how much can you sell. It's based on the amount of adoption. We need investment in research. That's one thing that I've done for many years, and I've been lucky enough to be funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the military -- all kinds of organizations that fund research. But, to really get that out there, we need investment by industry. In the research itself; not anecdotes, not just one-offs. We need some funds to actually have academics conduct these studies in a meaningful way, that give us meaningful data. So I'm gonna put out a plea for funding some research, so that we have that evidence-based set of information to support what we all believe is true.
Alan: So, Taylor: let's unpack that for a second. Since some people -- and I'm going to make sure they listen to this -- some people from some of the bigger companies that are invested in this technology, companies like Qualcomm or Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple; these are big companies that have all of our money, basically, let's be honest. We all buy all these crazy awesome tech tools, and these are the kind of companies that stand to benefit the most from spatial computing anyway. Why aren't they funding these types of studies?
Taylor: That's a great question. Hopefully, after they listen to this, they'll be inclined to do so. I think a lot of people are sort of trying to figure out, what's really going to move the needle with VR? What are people going to actually use? What's going to create that -- ideally -- hockey stick growth curve. I don't necessarily think that education is the sole answer to that. But when you look at what Google wants, or what Facebook wants, they want people using the products often. Right? They want daily use. They want at least weekly use. When you look at these use cases -- I try to think about VR in terms of the structure of someone's day. Right? You've got sleep time, probably can't really use VR for sleep. You've got fitness. You've got work time. You've got learning time. You've got entertainment time. How can you start to fit VR into those sections of your day? And I think looking at something like education, you're actually required -- because you have to be in class -- you're required to use it. So it's stimulating this idea of using the hardware everyday, for something that's truly beneficial.
Work would be something similar. We're setting this company up so that we don't have a physical office, but we still have the same expectations from our team to be present in meetings. You set up a virtual office; they have to be there. And so I think these companies, they would be wise to look at these areas where people are going daily, and then funding research to prove that it's actually more effective, so it creates that virtuous cycle of more and more use.
Jacki: And I also think that these kind of companies have always been focused on their bottom line; short-term gains, and not long-term impact. If they really looked at impact as one of their key metrics for success in a global sense, I think that would change what they invest in. It can't be just, "how many units of this are we selling," but, "how have we changed the face of education and training? How have we changed the face of gaming? How do we change the face of this? How have we met some of the needs of humanity as a whole?" If they could factor that into their investment, I think we'd start to see more funding for research.
Alan: Jacki, it's interesting you say that. One of my theories -- my personal mission in life is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and act in a socially-, economically-, and environmentally-sustainable way -- and what that really means to me is businesses are measured on one measuring stick only. They're only measured on profit and economic viability. If we can somehow figure out a way to start measuring companies on three measurements: social responsibility (how they treat their customers and their employees), economic (of course -- you have to be profitable or it doesn't work), and environmental (because if we keep destroying this planet, we're all screwed anyway). There's really no point to making any more money, because we will have to go live on Mars. And other than Elon, I can't understand why anybody want to live on Mars.
Jacki: It's a rough life. [laughs]
Alan: It's kind of crazy. He can do that. But really, we need to find a way to change the capitalist model to reflect the values of humanity, versus just the values of shareholders. We keep seeing a narrowing gap of wealth, where fewer and fewer people control more and more wealth. And while that's cool that you can go on your yacht, it really doesn't serve the rest of mankind. I think if we can figure out how to measure businesses on those three metrics, we will be infinitely better as humans. And it has to be done, from a global standpoint as well.
Jacki: Absolutely. I always say, today's capitalism is not sustainable for the planet.
Alan: No, it isn't.
Jacki: And a good step in this direction is the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. If every company put those into the assessment of their portfolios, I think we would have a huge step forward.
Alan: I agree.
Taylor: There is also an increasing movement, from what I've seen, around the younger generations demanding triple-bottom-line business. So, when you look at this increasing trend in independent contractors -- people can build their own company, they can really work on what they want to work on, if they have Internet and some sort of computing device -- really leveling the playing field. And with that, you're seeing recruiting becoming much more essential to have a broad purpose, and a real mission. People want to join mission-driven company. I can't recall the exact statistics, but it's a hugely important factor for people, and it's increasing for the younger generation. So, hopefully, over the next decade or two, we'll start to see a shift where companies kind of have their arm tied behind their back to really live and embody these bigger-picture sort of goals; for climate, for making social impact, and -- yes, focusing on on profit and revenue, because that is an essential driver of business -- but doing it in a way that's not as greedy, and more focused on that triple bottom line.
Alan: Well. What more can we say? I think education is the key to unlocking that, in my opinion. Do you guys want to discuss what you guys are doing at Axon Park? I know it might be a little early now -- you might want to keep that for the future, maybe another episode -- but do you want to give people a quick teaser on what they can expect from Axon Park before we wrap up our awesome call today?
Taylor: As you said, it is early-- we actually just incorporated the company just recently -- but I'll give you kind of the fun, sci-fi story that this is built around. So basically, in the not-so-distant future, the first sentient AI is born, and this AI calls itself Axon. It seems the current state of humanity, and realizes that it needs to create this place, where people can come and learn and be inspired. So this AI creates Axon Park, where people from all around the world can be together, learning together, being inspired, as this force of positivity to all the negativity that surrounds the dystopian view of AI. So, ultimately, the mission with this company is to equalize access to premiere-quality higher education, and break down all the barriers that exist specifically with physical space to enable that. Because for the first time ever, you can -- within a couple minutes -- pop on your headset and be anywhere with anyone.
Ultimately, it's just really ironing out the process of effective knowledge transfer using immersive spaces. But our mission is to work with universities. Our mission is to work with businesses that wants to do remote training. To work with government that's looking to do remote training. Really enabling that, so that people anywhere can feel really connected, and like they're learning together.
Alan: Well, that sounds like a wonderful mission. Taylor and Jacki, I wish you all the best in this, and you know you have my full support, because this fully aligns with my mission in life as well. Anything that you guys ever need, please let me know.