Beamable CEO Jon Radoff is one of the smartest people I’ve met in the videogame business. I remember meeting him in San Francisco at my favorite coffeehouse (shout out to Farley’s!) and enjoying his company while also feeling kind of dumb (in a good way). He’s one of those guys that has a deep understanding of many interesting subjects. One of those subjects is the metaverse.
Technologists, nerds, futurists, and geeks are all talking up the metaverse and how it’s the “next big thing” for the Internet. While the technology is exciting and potentially very cool, it’s also confusing and intimidating. There are many definitions of what the metaverse is and while some of them are from people that genuinely understand it, there are some people pushing dishonest definition of what the metaverse is for self-serving reasons. This makes the very concept of the metaverse difficult to comprehend for “normal” people.
With that in mind, I wanted to have a conversation with someone that’s highly intelligent, good at communicating heady concepts in terms that most people can understand, and heavily involved in the metaverse. Jon Radoff was the first person that popped into my head.
In the latest episode of RPadTV 3000, Jon Radoff talks about what the metaverse is and why it’s important. Some of the points we chatted about include:
- His definition of the metaverse
- How the cultural and social aspects of the metaverse are more important than the technology (though we all love technology!)
- Differentiating between The metaverse and A metaverse
- How Dungeons and Dragons was the first metaverse
- How Roblox and World of Warcraft are examples of successful metaverses
- How the current vision of the metaverse is different from when Second Life was getting a ton of hype almost 20 years ago
This episode of RPadTV 3000 was different from the others in that I don’t know Jon Radoff well enough to be my full, idiotic self with him. However, this episode was important to me because I want people that aren’t necessarily nerds or tech enthusiasts to understand the metaverse better. Having an astute and eloquent person like Jon on the show was exactly what I wanted. Hopefully you dig the conversation!