Episode 86 : The Future of Social XR - Christopher Stapleton
Christopher Stapleton is an award-winning creative developer of innovative guest experiences that define global brands using next generation talent, technology and techniques. Projects include product and venue development for theme parks, education centers, conventions, attractions, rides, shows, events, health services, food & retail venues. His influence crosses over commercial, civic and academic sectors to rapidly transform ideas into real-world innovations leveraging his pioneering work in XR (Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality).
Audio Title: Ep86 - Christopher Stapleton
Audio Duration: 01:37:44
Number of Speakers: 2
[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Heroes of Reality Podcast, a podcast about the game of life and the hero's journey we all experience. Let's jump in with our host, Dylan Watkins, as he introduces today's guest.
[00:00:18] Dylan Watkins: Welcome, young adventures, Dylan here. And on today's podcast, I have Christopher Stapleton. He is an award-winning creative developer and innovative guest experiencing – guest experiences that define global brands using the next generation of talent technologies and techniques. Projects include products and revenue, and venues developed for brands, are theme parks, education centers, conventions, attractions, ride shows, events, health services, food, retails, and he leverages social VR, augmented reality and mixed reality.
I'm very excited to talk to him. And without any further delay, I'd like to welcome Christopher Stapleton. Hey brother, welcome.
[00:01:04] Christopher Stapleton: Hi, Dylan. How are you doing?
[00:01:06] Dylan Watkins: I'm doing great. I'm excited to have you on. Thanks for being here.
[00:01:09] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah, cool.
[00:01:10] Dylan Watkins: Awesome. I recently came across a video of yours on LinkedIn, and you were talking about social VR, some of the education pieces of that. And I really resonated with a lot of the things that you're talking about, how like social VR is like the next epoch of like mankind, where we're going, where we're evolving into, and a lot of things that I totally believe, and I resonate with and some things that I also do and teach about. So, I really wanted to get you on here, to dive deep in the whole things of social VR.
So, with that being said, I'd love to kind of find out –
[00:01:46] Christopher Stapleton: Social XR.
[00:01:10] Dylan Watkins: Social XR. Sorry. You're right. You're right. Okay. There's virtual reality, there's augmented reality, there's extended reality. I come from a virtual reality background, even though I've done virtual reality and augmented reality, but I get what you're saying because we're blending the realities together. So, we'll dive more into that as we go through this whole podcast thing.
So I'd love to learn about, what was your journey getting into social XR, and why are you such a big proponent for it?
[00:02:15] Christopher Stapleton: Well, let me tell you what I think social XR is, because I think a lot of people are just using it as a catchall phrase. So, I've been working with virtual reality for 30 years, I've been working with illusion for 40 years, I've been working with mixed reality for 20 years. I was doing the, you know – what do they call that? Now it was on Star Trek to be the, kind of the –
[00:02:42] Dylan Watkins: Holodeck.
[00:02:43] Christopher Stapleton: A Holodeck. So, I was doing that for the army, 20 years ago, now it's popular. And we're really now at the tipping point of this virtuality. And all the things that we say, it's all together. So, we have that mixed reality, which just goes from reality to virtual reality. And then if we put virtual and real, it's augmented reality, put real into virtual, it's augmented virtuality, and that's the whole virtuality continuum that we call mixed reality. That is one axis of XR.
The other axis is the internal not – so, the external virtuality, the internal, is what we call imaginality, it's the magic behind the eyeballs. That's what I do with theme parks, and I do with military simulations and medical testing. And so, that's really what our mental model is. That is our reality, is what's behind the eyeballs. This external is, everyone's getting these sensory perceptions in all senses, all dimensions, all directions, but how do we know we agree? So that third axis, is what I call the sociality, and that all is extending reality in three different directions.
And that is the total XR, where you do not have to choose between real, virtual, or imagine, it is one world, and we have control over it all.
[00:03:59] Dylan Watkins: It's super fascinating. I totally agree that we're a weird thing as humans, right? We are both an individual self and we are connected to the whole, we both live in this reality where we can bang on it, but we also, we live in the reality of our own imagination. I mean, I always consider imagination to be OG virtual reality, right, because it is the thing that we have, and you can – and anybody can connect into it by just using the word imagine, right? Imagine there's a giant pink elephant sitting right in front of you, and you can feel it, but it's almost like it's – depending on your level of focus and your ability to crank up the power, you can really tap into, to where you – like basketball players, they can go through the patterns and behaviors of mental models, over and over and over again, while they're say laid up in a hospital bed, they can get better at the shots that they take by going through the mental exercises over and over again, it's just something that's harder to tap into. It's something that's more proactive.
[00:05:00] Christopher Stapleton: No
[00:05:02] Dylan Watkins: No? No, it's not?
[00:05:03] Christopher Stapleton: No, no. We make it hard. It's very simple and it's very easy. Our brain doesn't work like a computer; it works on story. Everything we remember is based upon a story. And with that story, play, is the other aspect of engagement. So, story creates the pathos, the play is the participatory, and the game is the procedural. All those mechanics fit together and equals experiential entertainment. And this is what I've been doing with mega theme parks around the world. But once I got to a point of saying, well, those stories are getting a little thin, I mean, there's only so many ways we can go into a simulator and say, oh, this is cool. Oh no, wait, we're going to crash. Oh no, we're saved. Exit to the gift shop. I mean, you know, it's wonderful. And we work with something like robotic arms and simulation, it's so cool to develop and work that 10 minutes, but can we transform lives? And so that's where I started the laboratory after the mega theme park.
So, my journey is 10 years of New York Broadway, feature films, computer graphics, music videos. Then I went to 10 years of mega theme parks around the world. Then I went to 10 years of developing a mixed reality laboratory at the university, simulation, at the University of Florida Institute for Simulation and Training, and then I did 10 years of being a social entrepreneur because I realized that getting into virtual reality so soon, and it's taking so long to kind of get into mainstream, you know, what do you do? I mean, the stuff that has never been done or the, you know, people saying, it's the first, I mean, I've seen it, been there, done that, maybe with slower, less resolution, but you know, it's there, we've been waiting.
And so, while I've been waiting all these terms, I've been really researching the human mind, the human experience and then realizing, well, how do we validate that? I mean, I go in and I can have $110 million budget to do a theme park attraction, and how do they know my decisions are right? I mean, besides the force of personality, which is what usually works, and you only – you’re only as good as your last project, and then your death. So, you know, you better – you deliver.
[00:07:20] Dylan Watkins: Credibility – persuasiveness and credibility, are the things that usually work together. And there's a whole – we could talk into the whole, how do people buy and how do people convert their mindsets? And that's a whole chasm thing, but the other thing that's really important, what you touched on, which I totally love, and one of the things I deeply resonate, one of my main missions and focuses, is, how do you use virtual reality as a transformational mechanism? And how do you make it something that is actually fun and engaging because most education is boring, and people don't want to do it, or play with it or touch it. But in the right way, if you can take transformation and play and combine that together, to where people are having transformation as the byproduct, that is really the power of the system. Not the way people that use Beat Saber, lose a whole bunch of weight. It's the greatest fitness game ever. And now everyone's trying to like reverse engineer what that looks like, because they understand when you're playing, the byproduct should be the transformation.
If you make the transformation the focus, people don't want to do that. We inherently want to tell stories, we inherently want to play, we inherently want to have games, we inherently want to do with our friends, right. And so that's – and so I love where you're going with this and I agree with you. I disagree with you with – I think it is harder to do the mental model by yourself in an environment.
[00:08:36] Christopher Stapleton: Oh, yeah. Once you say by yourself, absolutely.
[00:08:39] Dylan Watkins: Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Okay, so, we're on the same page. If you bring social people in the room, I think there's no better way to identity shift yourself than the cognitively – outsource your identity and willpower to the power of the group and the social presence. So, I want to get this.
[00:08:54] Christopher Stapleton: That's the third axis. That's the third axis, the sociality. And that stands the internal and external, where virtuality is on the external, imaginality is on the internal, sociality is that conversation between the two. And, yeah, so, if I said to you, go, tell me a story.
[00:09:13] Dylan Watkins: Yeah.
[00:09:17] Christopher Stapleton: Okay, so, one of the transformational part is that I went into – one of my colleagues had a stroke and got aphasia. Do you know what aphasia is?
[00:09:26] Dylan Watkins: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:27] Christopher Stapleton: Okay. This is actually aphasia awareness week – month, so this is good, that's the last day of the month. The issue is, aphasia is a loss of language due to a stroke or head injury. I mean, so, you know, people, you know, older people, you know, soldiers particularly, you know, more African-Americans have strokes because of the food deserts and have more aphasia. And aphasia with a loss of language, think about it, that I have – it’s loss of language, not of imagination or intelligence, and I'm trapped in my mind. I can't speak to you, I want to say something, but what comes out is be, be, be, be, be.
And I don't know, really, the difference. And so, from hearing, speaking, reading, writing numbers, any of those symbols, imagine that doesn't work, or it's scrambled. And so, that's what my colleague was, and it's just like, oh my God, a fallen colleague. I mean, how can I do – what can I do with what I do, to help him, or help everyone with aphasia?
So, another friend of mine was a leading trainer of aphasia pathologist, and we started going into these therapy sessions. And I have what I call real world laboratories, meaning that we embed ourselves into where the problem is, we don't wait for the problem to come to us, we don't create technology looking for a problem. We dive into the problem, and just to soak that up because that is where the solution is.
So, we have these things that we call, innovation play tanks, versus think tanks. You can think and talk all you want, talk is cheap, we can afford it. That's great. But let's do it. Let's find out, let's learn and have that conversation. And we have a conversation that person who can't work with words, what do you do? So, this is what we discovered. And so we realized, people with aphasia, don't have a disability, it's us who depend upon words too much, because communication is a wide river of expression, of gesture, of voice and tone and all these other things.
And so, this is where we created – everything I know about theme parks, video games, stories, Broadway, I put it into a little box, we call story trove, we put it in the middle of the table, and we say, find the story. And because of the way it was designed, and we did a lot of iterative kind of experimentation, a wonderful colleague named Dana Mott is who I helped create it with, is that, they went in there, no rules, no wrong answer, we just find a story. And it makes it so curious. They dive in, and then what – other people were thinking, because – with the imagination. This is what I do with the theme parks. So most of what your theme park, you never saw, you imagined, and you pull that in, you pulled your memories, your movies, your dreams, everything else, you pull that in, and that's where I do my painting.
I don't do it on the screen, I don't do it on the thumb twitchers, I do it in their imagination, and that is the main thing that we've been able to do. And when we take a video of this, of these people who have lost the use of language, working with other people around the table, with these story troves, you turn the sound off, you don't know who has aphasia or not. But without that, without that sociality, which works all by itself, I'm trying to figure out how I did it. So, we're looking at all new technologies to use perceptual computing and machine learning and all these other things, to really kind of extract and find measure and meaning to the measures of what we're doing, and how and why.
And that's what got me out of theme parks and into research, is, I wanted to know how, because I saw it working so well and intuitively and naturally, and that's a sociality that releases it. And this is what has happened to media in the Gig 1.0, is that, social media is so damn antisocial. Why? Because the algorithms are based upon economic kind of, you know, attention and our attention, and it's better to be antisocial, to bring up the numbers, than social.
So, now that even though we're more connected in humanity than ever before, we have the biggest epidemic of isolation, and this is what we realized was the problem, it wasn’t aphasia. We can always overcome obstacles. What we need is better ways for sociality or conversational competency or social resilience. All these things is what we look at. And we realize our natural way of doing things before COVID, really was not really that social. We're really bad, we're really bad at reading people, we're really bad expressing ourselves, we're really bad at continuing that conversation. And so that's what I'm working on. And COVID was, as FDR says, never let a good crisis go to waste. We've been able to kind of – now, the world understands what I've been researching for the last five years, and working with these obscure conditions that is opening up new things, and what we've been able to do, is transfer this to exploring life on Mars, because you know what the only psychological obstacle it is for putting humans on Mars?
[00:14:42] Dylan Watkins: Lack of a good Starbucks?
[00:14:44] Christopher Stapleton: Close. Isolation, and human connection, because, you know, transmission of communication, no real time interaction. And this is for extended amount of times, that we've never been able to measure. And as it is, we cannot send people to the Mars, whatever, you know, anyone can do with rocketry. We can't send it to them unless we know that we can handle this isolation. But how can we deal with isolation when it's a growing epidemic on earth? And everybody that is isolated, is invisible.
And we've been – how have we been isolated? Through prejudice, through disability, through hospitalization, through deployment, you know, or any of these things that rise on suicidality in rural areas and with military, and kids going to college, it is a serious issue that is all invisible.
So, what I'm doing, is bringing all that into what I call conversational story creation into the smallest package, working with the smallest communities and developing programs that suddenly we're going to transform that. And we're going to get to a whole another space where humanity is above economy, when we deal with innovation of technology.
[00:15:58] Dylan Watkins: Woo. I love that. I love humanity above economy. I think it's fantastic. And one thing is challenging as humans, we think we're good at the social – we think we're better than we really are at understanding other people and connecting with other people. And so, we get like, oh, I know what you're thinking. But then, what happens is, you are right, you do know a percentage of the time, but there is a giant percentage of the time that you don't know, and that you actually have this gap and much like going to the gym, social has a lag effect, right, so if you don't connect with people, it doesn't really bother you in that moment, but then it compounds over time. And then finally you're so neck deep much like if COVID is a good example of the situation, is that you're like, oh, this is great, but then it compounds and then you get stuck into these mental model neural pathway patterns that lock you into a behavior of living a life of quiet desperation, not knowing how to connect with people but also being the victim of that story and having the inability to actually being that, what I call the hero of your own story, and reaching out and connecting with others, to be able to kind of – to have that sense of connection, camaraderie and elevation. And I love the story trove, which is a really interesting concept you have of using this collaborative play model to find this story because story and play don't always, like, you know, in the world of video games –
[00:17:30] Christopher Stapleton: Yes, they do. They do. Gamers have torn it apart. Hollywood directors have been ignoring it, you know, toy designers, I mean, for toy designer, it's all play, for game it's all game, and Hollywood, it's all story. The issue is, it's story, playing game, the interplay of those and you got to read my publication. So, one of the things I'm going to be working on right now is going into doing social XR sessions that can understand all the concepts we've experimented, we've researched, we published on and no one reads papers anymore.
So I'm going to start doing these little sessions on social XR, with some of my colleagues who are neuroscientists and writers and illustrators, and pathologists, we've been discussing this for a long time and developing these things. And so, the gamer don't recognize the story, but the story has already been told by the time they design the game, with the marketing, with the movie that it's based upon, all those things have already been embedded, they're just exploiting it. And so, but it is there. We need to look at it. And movie directors don't understand the importance of the theater as well as the movie, because the movie it's not just the movie, the theater itself has as much effect on that being important. And as we start going back to theater, we start to understand, well, why is it – why can't I just stay home and watch it on Netflix?
There's a reason. And the issue is that, we don't understand that well enough because our system is just, you know, they come and they pay and they can enjoy it. But the thing is about human experience, we have to look at it in its totality, all senses, all directions, all dimensions in all realities as one world.
And so, how a theater works is that, it only uses your focal perception, not your peripheral, your tangential perception, and it's only in two dimensions. And so, the magic of movie, isn't the projection of light, it's the projection of your imagination through a portal. And so how that happens is that, you deprive your other senses in your periphery, and all the senses you're not using like old factory and haptics, and it pacifies those senses, with soft seats, acoustical space, even the carbonated sugar water and the – saturated fat popcorn carbohydrates are pacifying it so that you can focus your vision, hearing on that one little box, which is like looking. life, but when you deprive your senses, you heighten the senses that do work. And so that's a heightened sense.
But then also, you're being shoved in a dark room with strangers, which increases your emotional vulnerability, and so, that's where you start to kind of get to that position and you just can't get up, you know, without some embarrassment. And so, you know, all that context now, this is, you know, we've explored through that. There's different ways to get to that point. But when you start going spritzing and asking people to interact, you're destroying the cinematic experience, which is dependent upon depriving certain senses. And when you add them back, they don't work. And so you have to design it with those senses and those dimensions.
[00:20:40] Dylan Watkins: You’re right on those – there's a couple things on that. So, so one of the things being is this, is that, you're bringing them into a new reality, and by telling the story, you are a passenger on the journey, it is a non-interactive – but you always imagine yourself as generally being the hero of the story or whoever that person is, there's some sort of relatability. That's why they want to hook you in the very beginning, all that background noise, all that stuff, it amplifies your emotions, and that's what it is. The people around you is an emotional amplifier. It’s sociality, right? And that’s the thing. But there’s a background which – it's the amplification of the context of the story. Now you can go deeper into the immersion. I don't know if you've seen this.
I was talking to this crazy scientist guy, who builds deprivation tanks. You know, have you ever been into it? Do you know what a deprivation chamber is?
[00:21:34] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:35] Dylan Watkins: Okay. So you're inside – yeah, so they got them there, they're coming back up, but he was – he's this crazy mad scientist dude, and he was actually building out these high end custom ones. And one of things he started to do, is, he started to do projection screens on the top of them where you could actually take in learning situations because he goes, when you remove all of those variables, your skin, your touch, your everything, you are 100% on the immersion of the learning.
And so, that literally, much like a movie theater is just dark, but instead, you're literally floating that black bath and you're taking it all in. So it's another level. But then you remove the people.
[00:22:10] Christopher Stapleton: The deprivation of senses, heightens the sense you do use. And when you deprive all your senses on the external, you tap into your internal psychological senses. And that's where the dream space comes from. And so, that’s, you know, all that is working as it always has for thousands and thousands of years, okay, it's old, it's natural, it's intuitive to us. We just need to know how to tap into it. But we also have, when you talk about the immersion and engagement, there's the engagement continuum that I work with.
And this is usually up until now, there's been a special technology for each one of these nodes, because first you have passive, which all you do is absorb, okay, so you have to look at what the media is doing, and what the audience is doing. So on that end of the spectrum, I have – the media is passive, I am just absorbing. The next part is engaging, where I can start to, you know, not just absorb, I start to think and feel. And so, that's where murder mystery, and you're trying to figure out what's going to happen next, okay. But still in a movie theater, then you start to become active, like a ride that you described, but you're still – you're not making, you know, you you're going where they're taking you.
And then the next level is, from active to reactive, that's like a video game where I start to make choices, not just to feel it. And then you have the reactivity, which is not necessarily games, it's when I can create and contribute. That's the difference between reactivity and interactivity.
That's an RPG game. And once I start contributing, each one of these nodes are, you know, exponentially more complex, harder to do and more intuitive to do. And then you have at the far end, experiential, and the issue is that we used to always have a technology for each one of those nodes. Now, we have the continuum as a pallet, that we can work as creators and be able to make it whatever we want it to or whatever they want it to because your first rule of interactivity is choose your level of interactivity. Do I want to just sit down and be fooling around? Do I want to engage and start to work? When I start to have that agency in those worlds, there's no limits, but we are so in a small keyhole of immersive media, when we look at what's out there now, but it's going to explode.
[00:24:31] Dylan Watkins: What's really interesting about that and what's coming to my mind is like, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the whole flow paradigm of looking at like when something's too intense, people get anxious and it's too disengaging, you become bored, right, and you tone out, but it also depends on, it's you, your level of comfortability with the technology you're using, right, and your level of like personal energy, because you could be dead beat tired, and you don't want to – you don't want to create a wonderful world at 12 at night. What you want to do is go on social media and numb out to everything, right? Because that's like, that's that level of energy that you have for it.
But I could see that going up the things from super passive story, just sit down and take it and scroll through things like tiny bits, versus all the way at the top, which is like complete autonomy user generated content, here's the tools, go build a world right there. But that takes more energy and also takes more expertise. One of the things that why – Beat Saber, I'm going to bring it back is an amazing flow generator, it's super easy to understand you get in it, it's passive in terms of like things are coming at you, so you're just reacting to the situation and then you can choose to scale up over time. And so, it's very easy to understand, difficult to master, and you can progress up that flow. And what you're telling me, what I'm thinking of, is from super passive stories to complete autonomy user generated my proactive content creation is XR – sorry, I'm going to work at that. I do a lot of VR, I also do XR, but my terminology
[00:26:00] Christopher Stapleton: XR is adding all those other disruptive innovations, like machine learning and augment intelligence and, you know, internet of things and all these other things that it's leveraging a huge amount of other stuff, plus the brain research that we're doing.
And what's happening is that, we're using perceptual computing to read you as a person, very accurately, you know, in the sense of measure, but it has no meaning. We have to get other specialists into understanding. So, it's the analytics and the analogic working together so that human intelligence and machine intelligence come together so that it's more than the sum of the parts. And this is what we've been fighting AI in human intelligence, you know, what they call artificial intelligence, which is not much more than artificial stupidity, by the way. It's not there yet, you know, and we shouldn't be trying to replicate humans with machines, and we can't, we have to stop making humans act like machines. I mean, we got the equation wrong.
The machine needs to be the machine, the humans need to be humans, and this is the analogy I have, it's climbing a ladder for innovation, okay. So, imagine you're going to be climbing a ladder, and the issue is that technology is one leg, and humanity is the other leg. And when you climb that ladder, the technology you advance will help advance humanity, and the humanity’s advancement, will help advance the technology next step. And it's like climbing a ladder, but we tend to kind of climb a ladder with one foot, you know, with just the technology and not the humanity. But if you look back into the history of humanity, you realize there is that exchange and that's what's happening with also science fiction and in real science and working with – and when you're talking about these experience in entertainment world, now let's take a look at what if your life depended upon it
That consequence at a high risk is, I mean, in a theme park, you know, put in your seatbelt, you're safer than being on a grocery store parking lot. The issue is, when I want to get you out into, you know, into a plane or into an emergency response, or into a battlefield, and you'd have to do a tournik, in the middle of, you know, crossfire, you got to do the right thing immediate. And what is that? And virtual reality is providing a lot of false positives. If you don't have the mixed reality where you have the reinforcement of not only the physical and real, but also the social interaction, because you have to have what you have live simulations in the military terms, live simulation, you have the virtual simulation, but you also have what they call the constructive simulation, which is the mental model.
So, you have to know what's around me, I have to know what's around the corner that I don't see, I have to understand the entire platoon, I have to understand the whole thing. And everything is a competition of attention in that, but they need to know what I need to know when I need to know, as I need to know it, sounds like the internet, but you know, this is with life and death consequences.
And so, this is where we need to understand the importance advancement right now is with humanity and with that user interface, and this is where we're going to have to go to that next level of – and in fact, I don't even call it an interface. With social XR, we're talking about what I call a phygital interspace.
[00:29:14] Dylan Watkins: Phygital interspace?
[00:29:16] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah, that's a new engagement paradigm. So it's physical, it's digital, but we get to fidget with it because our hands, our extensions of our brains, and I'm not immersed in the virtual reality. The virtual reality has to come to me, and in between us, so that it's not the interface, like you suck in face with the monitor, but it's the interface between people that the sociality can come into. So phygital interspace.
[00:29:44] Dylan Watkins: Yeah. So is a piece of paper, people think on paper, people think on whiteboards, people, you think with your hand, you think – you are processing it all, and making those connections. And one of the things that you talked about, and I totally agree with you is, we have it backwards, and the military kind of re-flipped it again, but people think that we're thinking machines that feel, but we're really feeling machines that think, if you look the way our brain was created, we had the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex was built on top of that, to primarily deal with our social interactions as primates and saying, this is the way we need to interact in the system, because we want to find out how do I fit in this whole monkey hierarchy and how do I survive in this area, right? And so, you're right. But at the same time, military, they want to shut off humanity. They generally want to say, hey –
[00:30:32] Christopher Stapleton: You know, there's ugly things about military, but –
[00:30:37] Dylan Watkins: There's beautiful things too, but if you're going to go to battle with another one, the whole point is dehumanizing the enemy, the enemy is not a human. And so, you shut that off, and you have them respond as an automaton. Like you just respond in the situations. I'm not saying that we all need to – we are all large tribes, we go to war, it's a natural part of us. We're both bonobo and we're both chimpanzees, right? They’re two different creatures and they're going at it. I'm not saying it's a terrible thing, but it's a way to get a job done.
And the thing is, you got to learn to reconnect with yourself. A lot of people that get out the military, have to then find themselves again and reconnect with themselves, to find out, I'm actually a feeling person, I'm actually a connection – feelings are okay. And so, not dissing the military on this one, but it's an important thing to know.
[00:31:26] Christopher Stapleton: It's made a lot of advancements in the last, you know, 30 years, 40 years. I've been involved in looking at that combination. And so, you know, a lot, we invest so much in military. What I've been doing is, my cohort operation was to transfer as much military funding to humanity is responsible, because they weren't funding humanity, right? So, knowledge is transferable. So, it's all legal, it's all the other up, you know, but the issue is, if I can, you know, do it, you know, to save a life, I can also save a life in real life.
Same way we're doing the space program. The stuff I'm using with aphasia is going to help, you know, keep space astronauts when we have them. And so, this is what's been really an – in this aspect because our casualties have gone down, and there's more money spent on infrastructure of just getting, you know, feeding us and putting us into other people. You know, there lines, there are ethics, and we have to look at that as we, you know, just because we can invent it, doesn't mean we should. The issue is that we really have a complex problem here that they are darning to bite off into, because they're getting themselves into such dangerous situations, which there's no reason why we can put that to emergency response. And that's one of the things that's really amazing is in that emergency response.
So, the issue is that, we segregated, we siloed all our applications, all these disciplines. In this future, what we have to do, particularly in this next, you know, what I call the virtual native, which is just now being born, and this is not generation X, it’s not a generation thing. It's like the, you have the digital native right, now, you have the virtual native, they grew up with virtual reality, and I have a video online that's called, you know, how to think like a virtual native, I had – it's all speculative, naturally, but I'm an immigrant both digitally and virtually, but you know, I'm still farther along than most of the people coming up.
The issue is that, we're going to be able to look at all these different problems in so much more complex, but intuitive ways, because what we've been having is, we've been committed with a piece of paper or with the digital screen and it's just like looking at life through a keyhole. And, and we haven't been really focusing on advancing our humanity because if we don't, we won't be able to get to that next stage. The singularity thing is a misnomer because they're trying to retro engineer humanity. We need to really kind of push humanity beyond and into more of its potential.
[00:34:01] Dylan Watkins: 100% agree, but that's a natural progression. You look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? The reason why the military and other people have such a large budget is because if we're not safe and secure, we can't work on self-actualization, right? That thing is at the top. So, there's a reason why there's a trickledown effect because they have the large budget. It generally goes, technology goes; military, enterprise, consumer, right. And then, you know, and then democratization, generally speaking, with the technologies. And so, it has its benefits.
[00:34:34] Christopher Stapleton: It's switching, it’s switching right now. So, you know, beginning with the internet, we're flipping it. So, it's not industry driven, it's consumer driven. And the more and more mechanisms that come in there, it is in the process of realigning backwards to that. So, the thing is that, you know, 20 years ago, after 9-11, you know, we had to kind of get that technology in the way that the military got their technology readiness level was so slow and laborious. They realized that, you know, the soldiers getting frustrated and putting on getting their flip phones out or, you know, then their smart phones.
And then, you know, it's just like, well, how can we do that? And so what happened is that, we've been investing a lot in small business innovation research, which is fantastic, which is a percentage of all research funding from NSF to NIH to DOD and DOEd, and this takes some small businesses, because almost all radical innovation is done by small business and sustaining innovation is done by big businesses.
Now, it's more expensive to do radical innovation, but, in the big businesses that can do it, don't. Why? Because they're small markets, and as return on investment, but they don't know how to take that small market and make it that big. And then we have this stupid concept called the Gartner's hype curve, which is, if you reverse logic that, you basically say, oh, well we have to hype it up and then wait until these businesses die until we do it somewhere. But the issue is, that is just rationalization for investors to keep on waiting. It has no basis on reality. It's, you know, it's hype, it's a hype. The issue is that, we need to get that humanity more prepared to accept our technology.
And that's where we work with innovation play tanks, is that we really got to have this conversation with the user, and the user is going to start to have that constant state of innovation informing with the entrepreneurs, the smallest, because those are the ones at risk, and getting it so fast that, you know, the military will be following the consumer and entrepreneur. Yeah.
[00:36:50] Dylan Watkins: Well, I think, it's really much like everything, it's an ecosystem. Generally speaking, the big guys create a platform, and once they create a platform and they enable the smaller people with tools and abilities and things like that, so they can play on their platform. Oculus created – or Facebook created Oculus, floated them a brick of cash, and now, they made the Oculus store, which is in a highly successful place. That place had high wall garden, because they don't want the ET effect of people trying something that's terrible, getting sick and then the entire interest are getting taken. So, what happened was, SideQuest came out as a solution that goes, anybody can throw anything on here, you could be one random dude at your house and like – Pakistan, and you can throw that on there, and it's out the door, but you need to have a larger company that basically made the platform, Oculus, and the hardware, and then you had another company make another platform on top of that, called, SideQuest, and then the indie developers are doing that.
And the same thing is true with Steam and Valve, you look at Steam and Valve, again, they have the wild, wild west model where almost anything can go onto the Steam store. So, you need a sandbox. And really the value, the real value in an inflection point, is when you take these esoteric skillsets and these technologies and tools, and you democratize them and you make them available to the general public. And when you do that, that's when true innovation happens.
I have a buddy who has – he does every hype terminology you could think of, he has XR, he does social, VR, AR, biofeedback, designer drugs. He uses virtual reality and he partners with big drug companies where anybody can put on a headset and they can work on designing molecules and drugs in VR and XR and all those other realities. And then whatever gets made – yeah, it gets tracked on the – it gets hashed on the chain, on Ethereum. And then now, I have a piece of ownership and then the big company, goes, oh, that's a great job, look at that, will you look at that, floated by a big company developed by a stronger company, and then enable these tools inside the small.
That is how I think – I don't know if it's flipping, but it's more, it's now finding this synergistic relationship. And correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I see it.
[00:39:01] Christopher Stapleton: You’re right, yes, and – we've been studying as innovation broker – as an innovation broker, I've been all these levels in applications. So, I've taken a fine arts degree and taking it to more places around the world than any other fine arts degree or any PhD. The issue is, working from medical to entertainment, to education, to military, to whatever, also cross disciplines from science, you know, not only the stems, but the arts, humanities, you know, media. And so, we will look at it in this broader sense that will – what was I going to get to –
[00:39:43] Dylan Watkins: Thing flipping on its head?
[00:39:44] Christopher Stapleton: Oh, yeah, right. So, as an innovation broker, what I usually do in my real world laboratories, is, I embed myself, not only where the problem is, but also within these larger companies that don't know how to – we want to innovate like a small company, you know, how can we do that? Because I've seen so many failures and so many hundreds of millions of dollars invested into brilliant technology that flopped, because they made poor decisions on the huge level. And they had the money to bury their mistakes and not learn from their mistakes. And I wonder how innovation happens, is it's so damp – haphazard, but that's one of the things I wanted to go into in our research, is what, is innovation?
And I looked at innovation throughout the history of media, media, revolutions, and it is – we don't learn from our success. And one of the things that I've been able to do is take a look at the technology readiness level that NASA and the army systematically approaches innovation as a cycle and a constant cycle. And I have this matrix, which is a three by three matrix that is able to take the ideation, the invention and innovation, and then bring it down to, you know, the hardware, the software, and then the ecosystem. And there is a certain pathway. And if you take a look at Steve Jobs, he was a master at, you know, orchestrating those different cells and getting them in the right order. But you have to innovate on those three levels of what's the product, what's the product experience and how do you make money?
And each of those have to be the next generation of that. So, we're not all thinking in those terms because we separated our disciplines. And so, we really have to think ahead, if we change the technology, we're going to change the content, and we're going to change the economic model. And he was smart enough to think through that, first of all, and come up with a solution that is then self-generating that brought the user in, because you're right, the user is the innovator. It is not – Steve Job was not an innovator, it's the user.
[00:41:39] Dylan Watkins: It's a – machine – it's a hub and spoke design. So, you basically go off and you develop your own individual skill sets, and then you come together, and then you collectively build that thing up. I've ran, virtual reality XR hackathons for like USC, MIT, USC, like UCI, a bunch of them present, and I love it because you have all these interdisciplinary skills and then they come together, you stir up that pot and then innovation comes out of it because you go off, you kind of have your own skillsets, you've been thinking, but you come together and you co-create this reality. And one of the things that Steve Jobs crushed it with, on that innovation things, is the validation with the customer.
He was so customer focused, beyond even to the point of – in the past, being abusive to his employees, because he put his customer obsession above all else. And he learned over time and Pixar and, you know, got into meditation, all that jazz and got better at it as we grow. But I love the – you innovate as an individual and then you validate with the consumer or the customer, because that is what you need. Otherwise you end up being in this weird kind of like cave where you're making something, but that sub-story of like, whatever reason why you're not connected with the person, you're not providing value, you're just basically spinning in circles, you know?
[00:42:58] Christopher Stapleton: Do a favor?
[00:43:00] Dylan Watkins: yeah.
[00:43:01] Christopher Stapleton: When you run these hackathons, can you add a certain element? Because I do not think that they do innovation at all. I don't think they do innovation at all. They do invention, because every time I go there, and I ask the people doing their crazy stuff and doing the wonderful stuff that’s wonderful, and many times very exploitive, but that's beside the point, but the issue is, I'd ask this one question, oh, we've created something that would help nurses, we created something that would help, you know, so and so, well, how many of those did you talk to? Oh, we haven't yet. I said, how can you innovate if you haven't talked to them, if you haven't talked to the person, having the problem and bring it in, so if you – the favor is, every hackathon, you do, make sure there's that element coming into that, to really understand and relate with the problem, because that's where the innovators are.
[00:43:48] Dylan Watkins: I mean, man, we're on the same page. Like, I just ran last week or two, before that, I ran a transformational VR challenge, which I was teaching people how to get up and running and build transformational social VR applications that benefit humanity. That was the things that I was teaching. And one of the steps I had in the process, and this was my first one I haven't done in person. I was trying the whole online thing. No, second one, but point being is, I said, all right guys, you you've figured out this, this is what you got, now you got to go talk to your customer. You've got to go out and find your early player. You've got to go message them and find, and actually have a conversation to find out is this something that they want.
And it's funny, because some people, they went into it and then you could tell that there’s – sometimes, there's a barrier to the information. They might get feedback that what they want is not desirable, but they just completely – they're like this weird cognitive dissonance from them and the other person on the feedback. And they don't actually have that connection point. So I completely agree with you, but getting antisocial developers to go be social and connect with people, is like the – is the antithesis of why they got into computers in the first time. But I agree, it's super native.
[00:44:51] Christopher Stapleton: And there's that third level of, now, you have to create the next generation economic system with that, that product cycle. Okay. So bring that, not necessarily businessman, but entrepreneur into that discussion, so that they can pretty rapidly say, you know, if you, this or that, it would go into that, and this is the way it can scale, because you know, it's an invention looking for a problem, and so you need that product, that product experience and the product marketplace and that's why I call what I do, innovation play tanks. They aren't hackathons because it's – hacks are hacks, but the play tank is that, we start that sociality between these things, people who are normally siloed.
And so, yeah, well you need the computer scientist to understand what the cognitive scientist is talking about, which is what the nurse is trying to deal with. And so each of these, it's bringing the civic, academic and commercial together, and that's where innovation happens, but they all have different reward systems, all have time, different timescales. And that's what I've been trying to do as a social entrepreneur, is really try to bring these elements together. And so I've given up on the campus, of the academic and commercial and civic. And I'm starting this one approach where I'm going to create my own little innovation play tank, if you will, and I'm going to invite people in and I'm going to take the whole cycle. And I need to – for innovation to happen, it has to be international and you have to own the customer.
If you're not collecting the money, you get stuck into the, you know, the power play of money. And this is the other thing is capital, okay. You know, I call myself a creative venture catalyst, not a capitalist, a catalyst. And so, this opens up the whole gambit because we should look at capital in three ways. You have the financial capital, which is the easiest, and the last thing you should talk about. What it starts with is the creative capital, that's not only in the intellectual property, but it's in the intellectual capability that you have in your team, but you also have the social capital, and that is that relationship with that user. And so the only reason Oculus was bought out for a billion dollars, is because, they created a brand, that all technology existed before. And Palmer just kind of talked to everybody who was already doing it, and put it together and hyped it up within the gamers that were the customer, and made that lynchpin and then created the brand. And the thing is that, Facebook could have done all that technology.
They wanted that brand, because that is our – customer.
[00:47:31] Dylan Watkins: There's a couple of things. Yes, you're right, it was the brand, and that is one of the pieces of the elements, which is the creative, the brand, the micro successes that they had from Oculus and the kick start campaign. All of that is important, and they had John Carmack, John Carmack turned 2D into 3D, turned 3D into VR, and now, he's going to go birth the AI revolution in his own house, like some sort of gentleman –
[00:47:54] Christopher Stapleton: And these types – those types of people who can really, you know, really have what I call, pardon my language, shit detectors, is that they understand that point, that it won't work, buddy. So, Oculus, went and say, okay, what is that field, range of field, the vision that we have, that will make us feel present? You know, it's about 60 degrees, I mean, so, you know, that is important. What is it that I'm going to have to do to kind of go through that?
And so, there are points in our perceptual kind of experience that we need, and we need to feed to, and get that right combination, pull those points out so what they were able to do with the Oculus is cover some of those points of, you know, what's important, that sweet spot of resolution, of frame rate of, of field, of view, and all these things.
[00:48:44] Dylan Watkins: You're talking about like, almost like reality lubricant or some sort of presence lubricant that basically allows you to slip into another reality meditating for several hours, possibly on psychedelics, there's a lot of lubricant going on there, you'll slip right into that reality. If you're doing –
[00:48:59] Christopher Stapleton: Cyberdelics.
[00:49:00] Dylan Watkins: Cyberdelics too, that's an option. There actually are companies – my friend, Skip, Skip Rizzo and I know him – I work with him on a couple of projects.
[00:49:09] Christopher Stapleton: Say hi for me to him.
[00:49:11] Dylan Watkins: I will, I will. He's actually working with a new company, he's a part of now that's doing psychedelic therapy and virtual reality and they're testing out all stuff out right now to see how does that work out together for clinical use cases and stuff.
[00:49:25] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah. And these areas of exposure therapy, are really important, in the early, early thing, but I think that we really need to stretch our pallet to look at more applications that are trying, you know, more things besides, it's either distraction therapy or exposure therapy. And that's been going off for some time, Skip has made VR, you know, in PTSD, the dominant, you know, solution, which is amazing. That's beyond the tipping point. And so, he's dug into it deeply. We have to kind of go into these other applications and go in as deeply as Skip has done.
[00:50:06] Dylan Watkins: Let’s talk about that. What I'd love to talk about you with is, okay, I completely agree, humanity above economy. right? And the only way to do that is to inspire people that there is more opportunity in serving humanity than there is in the destruction of it and extracting resources. So, what I’d love –
[00:50:23] Christopher Stapleton: That's where you need to bring in not just the financial capital in the creative capital, but the social capital. And those three capitals together, you start with the creative capital, that will attract the social capital, and when you have those two, the financial capital will come by, you have it –
[00:50:39] Dylan Watkins: Attraction's huge, like, Oculus no longer takes pitch decks or any information, they want social approval. So, you're not going to get in with like a snazzy pitch deck. You have to go in, you put inside the story, you get a whole bunch of social approval, and that basically creates safety for them. It's all about for the capital, any capital person, it's all about how do I create safety for that investor, that person or whatever? And the way that you do that, is, you have the team, you have the technology, you have the social capital to progress.
My things that I've been looking at right now, is, what are the ways that we can leverage XR, technology, specifically social XR technology, to help humanity just elevate our consciousness. And there's a bunch of different areas you can go into, but I'd love to talk to you about what ones do you think are ripe for innovation using the technologies that we have right now?
[00:51:26] Christopher Stapleton: So, what I'm doing is looking at social cohesion, or isolation, I mean, it's a range. You have isolation on this side, social cohesion on this side, where do you fit on that? How can you draw that? How can you measure escalation and de-escalation? It's what I call the social Fitbit, if you will. And we need that feedback so that, that human intelligence and machine intelligence, can have that conversation for us to advance farther. So, sociality.
It is, once we start reversing the epidemic isolation, which we now have an idea that we need to do, that is going to be huge in every aspect. And that's the true sign of innovation, it has application in every market, every vertical market that really sees that. And so going to sales, we're going to training, whether you're going to, you know, fight wars or teaching in an urban classroom, all the things that I've worked on simulations for, that is sociality that breaks down, and that's the weak point. And that is the most potential. And again, we've done that technology step, we need to take that step on the ladder with humanity to see how that advances and the issue is that until we start to see media as all senses, all directions, all dimensions, and all realities, as one world, we're not going to get to that next step on.
[00:52:46] Dylan Watkins: And you're right. We're using tech – so, the best technologies ever are the ones that connect us, the airplane, the cell phone, the computer, the internet, all these things connect us in certain ways. So, sometimes with information, some other times with emotions, but those are the best technologies that actually help connect us. And if we can connect better, we can heal ourselves. If we can heal ourselves, we can heal the planet.
[00:53:06] Christopher Stapleton: Hold on, you jump into some of these conclusions. The issue is, the connection didn't do it, it’s the successful human connection did. And so, that's when the technology now becomes invisible. So, the phone I'm not looking and imagine the transmissions, all that became magic, you know, like – you know, significantly advanced technology is distinguishable from magic.
We haven't been able to kind of get that technology, and that becomes invisible once we fully engage the reality, imaginality, and sociality, those are the three points. And these are very physiological, cognitive, you know, creative things that we do. And so one of the things that I've been doing with a dear colleague of mine, Rick Stone, who just came out with a book called Story Intelligence, which is a really – one of the big things, is that, we try to do say, let's do your book launch in social XR, play around with it. You know, we made an attempt, we learned a lot, but the issue is, you know, we came up with this whole issue, this linear market of how an author finds his audience, has been so convoluted with the ecosystem that, you know, first of all, for anyone to listen to the author, my mother was an author. And at one point, you know, she went to her editor and she – I want to write another book. She said, well, what's your social media, you know, count? You know, it's like, what's that, I'm not – you know, is it an email? It's like, you know, it's like, forget it. She's out. You know, even though she has several books, unless you got your social media up – and what happens there is that how does an author engaged their audience?
And then you not only have the publisher making these decisions based upon your social media, then you have the Amazon coming in there and power playing their kind of, who gets what book and what exposures and what reviews. And in these corporate systems, starts to kind of troll and dominate and that free expression isn't there.
So, you know, that's always going to get in the way in how do we kind, feed the dragon at the gates, this money monster, to understand it is to your benefit that the other social capital and creative capital all work for you. So it's like, I work with a lot of real estate developers in developing theme parks and they make all the wrong choices, and so it's just so mediocre based upon, you know, what it could have been. And the issue is that they don't understand their return on investment, isn't the big, shiny thing that they create. It's the memories that they make. And the issue is, it's this moment makes the biggest memory, and creativity –
[00:55:43] Dylan Watkins: So, on that note, a couple of things real quick, one, Story Economy, great book, read it. If we had another half an hour –
[00:55:50] Christopher Stapleton: Not Story Economy –
[00:55:52] Dylan Watkins: Story Intelligence.
[00:55:53] Christopher Stapleton: Story Intelligence.
[00:55:54] Dylan Watkins: Story Intelligence, I have read it.
[00:55:57] Christopher Stapleton: Oh, you have?
[00:55:58] Dylan Watkins: Excellent. I have read it. I promise you, I've read it, I've gone through it. It's a great book. And it talks about the different types of Qs, right? You have the IQ, the EQ and the SQ, the story intelligence, right?
[00:56:08] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah, and that's a side because it's – seven powers of story that we're hardwired for. And the issue is that, he has a book, but how do you get that knowledge into people's hands? And it's all stuck up to the economic system of the story economy. And so, the issue is that, we need to better do the story economy so the author can have a better relationship with the audience and build that. And that's one of the things that we're going to start working on, is really understand how can we bring that story in, and we're trying to bring the audience into participating the author. He's an author trying to kind of engage the audience.
And that's one of the big areas that, because it's content that drives adoption for innovation. So, if you don't – so you have to find that next generation content, and we're far away from that.
[00:57:01] Dylan Watkins: Yeah. And if you look at the – what, we're creating here, and what you're talking about is, one thing is, there's the value that you get from the memory, but what is the memory, what's the power of the memory? It's the story, plus the emotional engagement from the thing that creates the retention, right? So, a situation where you almost died because you didn't put on your seatbelt and something, whatever the situation is, the more intense, the emotion from the memory, the longer the retention, the bigger impact and the more we use that as an anchor point for decision makings in the future.
And so, if you're looking at transformative effects, right, if we can digitize these things and actually create these kind of these feedback loops and what I call being the dungeon master in the game of life, by taking this stuff and integrating it into you, then you're going to be able to see how do you pull those levers so that you can actually make those, you can create those intentional memories and those intentional emotions?
Because ultimately what we're trying to go with, all of this, and what you're talking about, is the highest level of motion of humanity, which is unity, unity above all else, feeling like we are –
[00:58:04] Christopher Stapleton: One of the powers of story intelligence too, is unity. And so, DOD is a good example of the interplay of story playing game. So, you catch up on some of the videos or papers I’ve done on interplay strategy, but the story answers a question, why should I care? Play answers the question, what do I do? Games, is how do I make it work? Or how do I win? Or, you know – and it's those things that the authors today can't just be – it's not just words anymore, it is – I have to answer when I'm thinking of my audience in my what if story, what if, imagine if you will, I need to understand, well, how am I going to make it, so that they want to care, they want to jump in, and then they want to get involved and participate. And so, what you're talking is – and the interplay is not something I invented, it's I observed and processed and synthesized and understand our industry has separated it, it’s like our academic colleges has separated the disciplines, our entertainment industry has separated story playing game, and so they don't recognize each other anymore. And until they do, they're not because they're rewarded to, you know, do what they do, to get you addicted on deaths scrolls, or to twitching or to whatever, there's a whole another – the experience that you're talking about, this area is, we have to break down those walls, but not only between realities, between these industries and –
[00:59:33] Dylan Watkins: I 100% agree. I mean, that's the, I think one of the noble missions of people that innovate, is to understand how to break down those barriers, how do you unify, how to create that sense of comradery and unity, and bring those things together, and erase those divides, because it's a powerful force to do, it's just the challenge of the designer and the innovator to actually create the game for the people to play.
[01:00:00] Christopher Stapleton: So, here's the easy part. Here's the easy part. We're already hardwired for that. It's the industry has separated it, and you bring it together, they'll want it, you know, it's just – and the issue is that, you know, don't bother trying to erase something that people aren't going to get rid of. This are, you know, intergenerational kind of, you know, problems that they have to deal with themselves. We need to get to that experience, and capture that audience and have them tell us what it is. And that's one of the things why I went into looking at human experience modeling, and that is whenever I, after a big theme park, everyone loves it. Wow, this is the greatest thing I've ever had.
Oh, good. What do you want next? I don't know. Same thing, bigger, better. It's like – wants constant surprise and novelty, but they don't want to give up the familiar and building – and you have to meet their expectations. So that's the dilemma that we're in, is, how do you give them what they want when they don't know what they want, and what they want is what they don't know. It's, you know.
[01:01:06] Dylan Watkins: You have to super glue together novelty and nostalgia, nostalgia, plus novelty equals something that people resonate with. It's enough new to build new enough, familiar, to feel familiar. So, I totally agree. So –
[01:01:20] Christopher Stapleton: We passed our time.
[01:01:21] Dylan Watkins: We passed your time. Is there anything else you'd like to let people know about, before you tell them how they can get ahold of you and what you do?
[01:01:29] Christopher Stapleton: Yeah. I'm working on – my next stage is really looking at this social cohesion, the sociality that is work with imaginality and virtuality, to extend reality. And this social XR is an area that I'm going into. So, keep in line with my website on semiosis.com that hasn't been updated quite yet, because we've been years into development behind the scenes, but now, we're ready, going to step forward. We're going to start to, you know, get a play space an innovation play tank into some social XR experiences to really start to engage this and move this along.
And we're working with people from aphasia to looking these new storytellings on how history to face our present and reimagine the future, because there's a lot of lost forgotten dreams that we need to capture and help with education and learning, not education, learning is entertainment and learning will be bigger than entertainment in the next 10 years. So, we have to – that's the network cracking.
[01:02:38] Dylan Watkins: Love it. Mic drop on that one. Christopher, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you being here for your time. I love all the work that you do. I'm sure we're going to catch up later, but this has been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much, Chris, and have a beautiful day.
[01:02:52] Christopher Stapleton: You too. And I'd love to step in on some of your classes one day.
[01:02:56] Dylan Watkins: I'll shoot you some links, we'll connect more after this, but it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time.
[01:03:01] Christopher Stapleton: Excellent.
[01:03:02] Dylan Watkins: Take care. Bye.
[01:03:06] Outro: Thank you for listening to the Heroes of Reality Podcast. Check out HeroesofReality.com for more episodes. While you're there, you can also take the Hero's Quiz to find out what kind of hero you are, or, if you have a great story and want to be on the podcast, tell us why your hero's journey will inspire others. Thank you for listening. See you on the other side.
