- Hi, friends. Welcome to episode 12. Today we'll talk about AR and VR and the metaverse, a technology that's been getting a lot of hype recently.

- My guest, Kristian Bouw, is a veteran in that space. I typically try to shy away from fads in marketing and sales, but having interacted with Kristian over the years, I know that AR, VR, and the metaverse go well beyond the noise that we get in the news. So I decided to invite Kristian to the podcast hoping he will help us unpack the metaverse and understand how it could apply to our day-to-day lives as marketing and sales executives.

- Before we get started with interview, a little more background about Kristian. I met him six or seven years ago at a tech event in Washington DC, where his company, NotionTheory, had made an installation demonstrating how AR and VR could be mixed to create hybrid experiences. We played virtual basketball, and I even managed to crash into one of the VR panels. And since then, I've often touched base with him to keep my fingers on the pulse in that space. We even brainstormed on ideas for applying AR/VR at healthcare technology trade shows.

- So, it is my pleasure to host him today. Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to welcome Kristian Bouw to the virtual stage.

- Hey Kristian, how are you doing?

- I am doing good, Emil, thank you.

- Hey, it's been a long journey. I've been trying to get you as an episode guest for several months, but I'm happy that we finally found time to organize that. And I'm excited to have a conversation with you about a topic that's a little different from the topics that I've discussed so far on this podcast. Before we get started, as usual, I'm just gonna point out that I have this little ticker at the bottom with a call to action for everyone interested to learn more about you, and also potentially find out about other podcast guests that I've hosted in the past, to go to cerebrations.info. That's the website for this podcast and find more information there. So, without further ado, I have already introduced you as a guest to this podcast in the intro to the episode, but you have a very interesting background in AR and VR. We met years ago and I was very impressed-

- Washington, DC.

- Yeah, back in DC. You had some installation at some event, and it was amazing, the way you were combining AR and VR together, and it was kind of like a hybrid reality, whatever you wanna call it. But since then we've kept in touch, and just curious, tell me how your journey has been so far through the metaverse, through AR/VR, how did you get started? What have you done so far?

- Sure, so I guess in regards to... Maybe a good place to start is I'll just give my definition of the metaverse, so that way we have an operational standard as we go through the talk and we reference on that. So if someone were to ask me what is the metaverse, I would more or less reference it as the next evolution of the internet and computing at large. And so what we're doing is transforming how digital information and communication is presented in the form of 3D spaces, 3D places, 3D objects, avatars, and more. And so just as we're kind of easily able to navigate the websites that we consume, or create or communicate the way we're doing now, the metaverse really provides the infrastructure and set of tools to instead move between different virtual spaces, which give us these entirely new ways of consuming, creating, and communicating. So going maybe back to when I was much, much younger, in the same way that I grew up in North Carolina, and funny anecdote, is that I had a 56 kilobyte dial up until 2008. So where I lived was really in the middle of nowhere. And oftentimes for me, a place to go explore other worlds and concepts and ideas was of course through the internet. And if you think about the internet, it was very much going from site to site to site. So jumping from a forum to maybe an how-to on GeoCities, and then looking at a photo album, or going to DeviantArt and looking at maybe concept art or renders people have made. And so in this case conceptually, to me that's kind of an earlier rendition of concept of the metaverse, where it was these websites. And again, same way today, there were these portals into these different worlds and locations, and some were more interactive, some were a little bit more passive in the consumption, but in all cases, I was going to look for something to explore, to find, to learn to do something. And so, kind of pulling that back to today, the more recent advancements in all the tech that's been going on, I think lends itself now to doing a lot of that same navigation, if you would, but instead through three-dimensional spaces, places, et cetera. And I started NotionTheory back in 2014, and back then AR and VR had kind of, I mean, they've been around for an extended period of time, but back in 2012, I think it was, when then Oculus was acquired by Facebook, now Meta. And in particular I had always taken an interest in those technologies. And one of the reasons I got into the tech is early on with NotionTheory, we were doing web mobile, but the future certainly seemed more multimodal, meaning that it wasn't just about mobile phones and desktop screens and being limited to this small screen real estate, whether it's a monitor or a laptop screen or a phone screen. But that there are other ways to extend that, again, via AR and VR. And so really the journey through the metaverse itself has been kind of on a quest of all sorts to uncover all of the possibilities of the new technologies, understand what all the emergent technologies are that are coming through, how those interplay with one another. Because the metaverse itself is inherently quite cross-disciplinary in terms of the amount of tech and infrastructure and tools that are necessary to facilitate all of the sort of actions that I would hope to get out of it, again, in traveling through these different spaces and places.

- Interesting. I mean, I love that you started with the story of your 56 kilobyte modem, and logging into spaces for that because I remember at the time when I also had a little modem back home, and I was going into BBSs and there was the, I am trying to remember, what were they, .mov files? They were basically like music files, but the actual instruments were pre-programmed. And they were pretty small files, but had some music in them. I mean, it sounds like ages ago, but it definitely exposed me to this mentality back then. And it's great to hear how things have emerged since then and where they are now. So if I understand correctly, based on what you were saying, is AR/VR is more like the engine, or the tools that make it happen, but metaverse is the space, the actual-

- Sure. Yeah. And I would even consider AR and VR are just like mediums for consumption, right? So just as we have a laptop, or desktop, or a mobile phone, or a wearable, or AR/VR, these are all just mediums for consumptions. And AR and VR in particular are these very interactive rich mediums into those other worlds, right? We're able to go into those other worlds via being on our phone, jumping onto a website and going through that. But AR and VR certainly increase the richness of those experiences by way of the affordances that they provide over the other mediums.

- So, the whole field has gone through several cycles of hype, if you will, and the metaverse exploded a couple of years ago. Seems to have fallen a little bit in favor recently, at least the way I see it, when I see more criticism than positive things being said. I think it's natural for a lot of new concepts to go through these phases, but maybe it's driven also by what's going on at Meta generally, and how this is affecting the whole concept. But help us separate the wheat from the chaff here. What is hype and what is real in the metaverse?

- Sure. And I guess I would preface this by saying, there's a part of me that's happy the hype has died down. I mean, we're seeing it now with large language models and generative AI in terms of hype cycles, and it's great for bringing about awareness. It's awful for getting real work done and having that real work exposed because you have all these kind of parasitic elements and individuals that come up and kind of undermine the actual real work that's being done itself. So I'll just preface by saying, I'm not entirely opposed or angry at the fact that the hype cycle has died down. But in regards to understanding value of the metaverse, it's always been there, it continues to be there, it still exists, it has gone nowhere. The only thing that shifted is just the market and the attention itself, right? But if we fundamentally look at these technologies and really try to understand them, when we're talking about technologies like AR and VR, these are, as I was mentioning earlier, they're these windows into these worlds and experiences that provide incredibly rich, but oftentimes more contextual experiences, that can have more profound connections with us. And I would even say, that I think part of the reason certain hype cycles rise and fall is one, technology is newer. And so new sorts of applications or technology advancements come through. But in the case of, like if we think about virtual reality, I mean, it is the only tool that I can think of that we have which is able to replicate any experience within the human domain. So if we want to do surgery, if we want to, common one's to go on an oil rig, if we want to go into space, if we want to travel back 3000 years and visit the Luxor temple in Egypt, if we want to shrink down to the size of a red blood cell and go inside the human body, there is no other medium or platform I can think of that's able to do that. And so the absolute truths of the value of these platforms still persists. It's not that any of that has changed, but as it comes with hype cycles there, I think it's a large subset of individuals that benefit from puffing up the potential of where these technologies will go. And for a lot of us doing the actual real work, we recognize the limitations, the constraints, where things are at the moment, the complexities of it, and just how far we have to go, and whether that next leap is maybe linear or exponential. A lot of these details get kind of lost in translation. And so one of the reasons why I'm not so angry that the hype cycle has died is the next time it comes around, we'll have made that much more progress, that when the hype cycle returns, it's because there will have been notable advancements in the technology and infrastructure and tools that we have. I also just wanna mention that, I think looking towards Meta itself for an understanding in terms of the value of the metaverse is probably not the best thing. They did rename to Meta. They have been at the helm of the Oculus Quest headset. And to their credit, I mean, they have pushed a significant amount of adoption into certainly AR, and VR specifically with the advancements in that headset and trying to actually make a full headset with inside-out tracking at a low affordable price point that people can actually buy it. But when we think about the metaverse as I kind of find it previously, if I'm still granted that assumption, then some of the best platforms that have really come from, that we would not necessarily coin as... Well, again, to say that something is the metaverse, I would just comment that the metaverse for me is kind of this singular entity, much as we might refer to the universe. So if we look at platforms that have done really well in the context of the metaverse, you have Fortnite, you have Roblox, you have Minecraft, like these are the ones that come to mind immediately where they did not set out to be the one to conquer it all in the same way that Meta had with their Horizons platform. But they've done incredibly well. Fortnite is just an awesome example in this, where it started as a multiplayer, battleground FPS game. And since then it's evolved into then doing concerts with all sorts of artists. And now it's extended itself recently into Unreal Engine, Fortnite Creator Mode, or sorry, no, they've had Creator Mode. UEFN is now their game-making suite. And so now they've extended Fortnite itself in the same way that Minecraft and Roblox has, where now it's a platform to create worlds, to create experiences that can easily be published to the web, or excuse me, to the platform. And then other people are able to jump on and consume. And so what's interesting there is just how organic those platforms have been. They didn't set out touting that they were going to be the platform for the metaverse or that that was their focus. Again, it was just this very natural evolution without forcing the attempt to be that platform. And some of the ones that seem to have not done so well are the ones that came out with this ideological notion of being the platform for the metaverse. And I think in general, the term itself metaverse, is still kind of up in the air. I gave my definition, but you ask 10 people, you're gonna get 10 different definitions. So yeah, I think inherently, as we were talking about before, again, if you buy into the concept that really it's just this evolution of the internet and you're trying to just transport between these different 3D spaces and places, and it's a new medium for consumption of things. Well yes, if you then look to Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft, they do a really incredible job at this in organically providing these sandboxes in places where people can create these worlds and all sorts of experiences, whether it be for entertainment value, for educational value, for storytelling, emotional value, it really runs the gamut there.

- Interesting. That's actually a very good way of thinking about it Because I mean, I'm obviously familiar with Minecraft, I'm familiar with Fortnite, I'm not a gamer, but obviously everyone has heard of them. And I never thought of them specifically as part of the metaverse. I just thought of them as specific worlds or environments where people go and experience what they want to experience. And like you said they're not trying really hard to push that notion and to tag themselves as metaverse just because of the hype, or raising their valuation or anything like that. But they're trying to just excel at what they're doing and keep getting their audiences more and more engaged in what they're doing. And then-

- And just a point there, all these platforms can coexist. So you may go to Fortnite for, they had a concert with Travis Scott, right? And just as you might go to Engage, Engage VR recently had a concert with Fat Boy Slim, and then someone might go to Roblox to play a certain game and then jump over to Minecraft to go visit, I don't know, the recreation of the Hogwarts castle. It's this concept that, again, the same way that the browser is just a series of portals into all these different worlds, and we just kind of traverse those. Again, if you buy into the concept that the metaverse operates in a similar fashion, well then it's a bit easier to see how all these platforms can coexist and the symbiotic relationship that they have. And... I think then where the value comes in then is not trying to make a singular platform that is the metaverse that connects into everything, but again recognizing it at the scale that it will probably achieve, in that there's just all these different places that we'll naturally go and we'll kind of jump into one and jump into another and jump into a different one, just kind of as and when needed, right?

- Yeah, no, it's a good frame of reference to establish a mental model when you think about that. So obviously the reason why I'm running this podcast is to help executives in sales and marketing become better leaders, managers, coaches, basically excel at what they're doing to lead their teams. And I always try to, whatever topic I pick, and whomever I invite to be a guest, I try to link it back to what does it mean for these audiences? So let's start with the more obvious parts, because marketing has a more natural connection, at least in my mind, to AR/VR, to metaverse. Both of these concepts are visual, they fit well within marketing's creative domain. And you and I have actually even worked on a few of these in the past conceptually about some applications in marketing. So, as a ACMO, as a chief marketing officer, why should I care about the metaverse? What should I think about it?

- Sure, so... I guess there's two parts that we can touch on there. So one of them might be, where have some of the problems been before with maybe CMOs or marketing in general as it relates to metaverse topics? And then, what things should they care about? So, in tackling the first question, in regards to the products that they're building, which means having a short shelf life and such, my perspective on that from having conversations on almost a daily basis is that the approach inherently is wrong. And at least it was the first time around where it was, okay, shiny new thing, people are excited, again, buying into the hype cycle itself. It was new, it was novel, people just wanted to try it and experience it. The friction was high, right? Especially with virtual reality, because the original headsets were quite cost prohibitive. And so naturally it was a great gimmick of sorts to get people to come to your booth, or come check out something that you had. But in those cases, I think one of the largest missteps that I saw was treating it as a fad. And it was the medium itself was treated as the marketing showcase rather than, fundamentally, the experience. And so it was like, hey, come to us, because we have VR, we have AR, we have this tech. But that's almost kind of where it stopped, right? It wasn't come try this experience, or do X, Y, Z, it was no, come try this medium. And it felt generally that was the focus. And then there was some tie in as it related to the company or something that they might have done, but it wasn't thought out entirely. And a second part of that is then, there were some groups that said, okay, well we're going to implement solutions with AR and VR, but we need to make something engaging and exciting. And so what they did is they then, of course, turned to gamification, which is not inherently a bad idea, but gamification and games are two separate things. And I think a lot of the companies in conversation that we talked to, they didn't really understand what a game was. And really games are just these mediums to manipulate human psychology to produce some desirable outcome, right? Whether that game is a board game, an actual sports game, video game, it really covers the gamut. And in general one of the consistencies is that they were just not good compelling experiences and there was too much focus on the medium itself being new and novel, and not creating new and novel experiences that best fit this medium. And in regards to the marketing side of things, there was just this really heavy focus on translating, just translating activities into the medium. So it's like... Whatever the company was already doing in regards to the way that they might have sold or marketed products, it was, okay, well let's just put this in AR, let's just put this in VR. And that's quite a lazy and boring approach to go, right? If you're just taking something that you've always done and translate it into a different medium so you can consume it there, I think there's a lot to be left on the table. And in general, I think the best thing marketers can do is recognize that the future of maybe marketing, and company brand engagement, and audience engagement is multimodal. So it is that there are, you have audience members on PCs, you have them on mobile, you might have them in AR, you might have them in VR. And so if you can, again, going back to the original definition that I made at the beginning of the metaverse, if you can view all of these mediums as just portals into this larger universe of experiences, the sensory connected world of experiences, well, all of a sudden, it starts to make a little bit more sense and the kind of investment that you make in one platform is not so isolated and singular. And you can start to try and tie that back into the larger suite of experiences that you might have to compliment. But also I think in general, in cases where we've seen that occur, the ROI has been higher as well, because it's not just a isolated experience on a new medium in a vacuum, but rather there's this kind of cyclical pass through nature where we're going into one experience, out into another, back into another one. And it's all complimentary, and there's this thread of continuity in the experiences themselves and the way that they're consumed by the audience or community members.

- So it's basically, if I understand correctly, it's just one of the dots, one of the many dots that you're trying to connect in the story that you're building as a marketer.

- Yes. And I think that's the best way to look at it. And I think fundamentally for you to really be successful, that's the way you have to approach it. I mean, if you're building an XR experience and it stops with that experience, so someone comes in, they consume the experience and it stops there. Then what? Of course you shouldn't expect to get a high ROI from that, of course you should expect that it's going to die within X amount of time because it's not inherently connected to anything else that it is that you are doing elsewhere, right? And so we can get into all sorts of conversations on the mediums and where the friction points are and how to do these multimodal experiences and connect the dots. But yes, I think you put it best, in that you should just view it as one more tool in the tool belt for marketing. And the more you can look at it through the lens of just being a medium of consumption to whatever the end experience is, then ultimately I think you'll be more successful because then you're thinking about the experience as a whole, right? Whether it's your product or your customer or whatever else. And so that's the target, right? That's the end objective, not just trying the medium. The medium, again, is just a different way to consume it. And then each one has its own affordances and trade-offs, but depending on what the objective is, there are better, the right tools, for the right job in a way.

- Yeah, I mean it just reminds me of years ago, we worked on a project where we brainstormed ideas for the company I worked for at the time. How to bring in some AR/VR experience to our trade show. And I think, now that you put it actually in context for me, better than I had at that time, but subconsciously I was thinking along the same lines that I wanted to add an extra layer that you can't get from anywhere else because you have all the case studies, you have all kinds of other documentation online where you can understand the ROI of what we're sending to you. You can understand how we compare to competitors. You can understand what are the security features, or the different functionalities, blah, blah, blah. But if you are the decision maker who's removed from the actual experience because you're not the end user, which happens a lot in large enterprise deals because you have some high level executive or several high level executives who are the ones that are gonna make the decision at the end to buy something, they're not gonna be the ones that use that product. How do you actually show them what really happens? Like how their teams are gonna benefit from that? And that's what I had in mind, that the VR/AR experience, being able to kind of put themselves in the shoes of the folks that will be using the product will close that last loop that they have in their mental model. If they're already convinced that financially that makes sense, that from a competitor's standpoint, that's probably the best offering. But they're still thinking, how is it gonna help my team? What exactly is it gonna do for them? Because I'm just too removed from that job. Okay, well come and experience in five minutes, and figure out what it does to you.

- Yeah, and to that point, another thing that's quite common, and I don't think people maybe ask the question enough, but if you're in a position of marketing and you've, I don't know, maybe been struggling to get the engagement that you wanted from individuals, too often I see this notion that, oh, if we put this activity in XR, well now it has a fun factor because maybe it's more engaging than it was before. And it's just kind of like the same thing with these meeting rooms in virtual worlds. It's like no one wants to put on a headset and just jump into meeting rooms that are as boring as the ones that we have today, but for some reason, and this can extend to all sorts of activities from a bunch of companies, but there's this, and I would argue it's probably a lack of imagination, but there's this desire for some reason to take the already boring things that we're doing today and just translate it into the different mediums so the same boring thing is accessible in more mediums, right? And it is just, there's so much more opportunity for how you can leverage these mediums to take the things that would normally be boring and people would not have not really engaged with, and kind of give it a fresh take and maybe pull people into something, right?

- Yeah, as you were telling me this now, I started remembering an experience I had a couple of years ago. My business school was organizing some sort of virtual forum for alumni. And I came into it, I was running late 'cause it was a busy day when they had it. And dialed in and it was supposed to be, we were supposed to be doing kind of like speed dating, where we'll get matched to, or we just invite someone from the list of people that we see in front of us and quickly introduce ourselves. We're different years, we don't know each other, even though we graduated from the same school, and professionally connect and maybe have some business plans for the future. Whatever, do some collaboration in the future. So, they could have done this, I mean, in a way it's boring enough, I mean it's a concept that happens a lot. But they could have done it easily just through some sort of a Zoom platform or whatever, but they actually decided to create this whole virtual world and they were using some platform that was still nascent. And you go in and you'll have literally different rooms and you enter these rooms and they'll show on the screen like a table, a round table, and people are sitting at this table who you're supposed to click on each of these images and then engage with them. The platform was so slow and there were so many rooms and tables there, I was the only person that basically took me 20 minutes to connect to someone to speak for two seconds because it's a speed dating thing, right? So you have only 60 seconds to connect with that person. And it was just, I mean, it felt like they're really forcing that concept just for the sake of the wow factor instead of actually creating an experience that would've made sense to everyone because we're all busy professionals. We don't have time for this type of stuff.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

- Let me switch gears a little bit and cover the sales side. And that's probably a little more difficult terrain, at least for me. I don't see necessarily a lot of direct connections, but in large enterprise deals, they're involving six, seven stakeholders, even more to close a deal. And it takes years sometimes to close the deals. Sales executives that operate in such environments, they have am innate distrust of new technology. There's so many moving parts and the deal is so fragile until the very end that they just don't want to get distracted. They measure everything in the dollars that will be generated by each activity, rightfully so. So as a chief sales officer, what parts of the metaverse could I potentially leverage in my day-to-day operations of my team? Or should I even pay attention to it at all?

- So day-to-day operations, like the sales team using these technologies for themselves to help sell, or these individuals are actually selling metaverse-related solutions to the customers?

- Oh no, let's say we're sending, I'm in healthcare technology, so we continue to sell our healthcare technology solutions software for hospitals, but is there a space for, is there a use case for metaverse, or any elements of the metaverse in what we do as a sales team? And it could be on the internal side or it could be an external, public-facing side.

- Yeah. Fundamentally, yes. And going back to an earlier comment I made, again, if you think about AR/VR, again, you can replicate just about any experience in the human domain. And that's a thing I keep going back to a lot of the time because I think part of the thought exercise and activity with trying to understand the impact and potential of these technologies is you really have to open the container up here and really expand out. And so, if you then think from the premise of, okay, well any experience is possible, you start to think of all the possible ways that these platforms can be used and regarding to sales, there's a few ways to pick that apart. And I guess we can touch on maybe three particular things. I think one is recognizing that these platforms offer consequence-free environments. And so as it relates to training, or making mistakes, or being in particular scenarios and trying to make certain decisions about what to do, whether that's specific to the sales team and the product they're selling, whether that is specific to the product and understanding what the product does to enable the sales team to sell it better. Maybe this is applying that product to different verticals. I mean in all of those cases, I think there's more than a few ways that this tech is applicable and viable there in regards to educational value, training value, and ultimately better equipping the sales individuals with the knowledge they need to close those deals, or maybe accelerate some of those timelines. And... I think, probably some other point to touch on that I think are just important for salespeople to understand, whether it is something internally, or whether a solution's being sold to another individual. The medium is really one of the most important things because it's where a lot of the friction lies. So when you're thinking about augmented reality, virtual reality, wearables, even new high-end games that come out, in all these cases, there's some sort of friction that occurs with the medium itself. And so if you're doing a high-end game, well, is it going to work with lower-end GPUs? That's a consideration. If you're doing a virtual reality experience, if it has a certain graphical benchmark, does it need to be PC-based VR, or can you get it onto mobile standalone with something like the Quest? Or maybe you need to get it out to a larger swath of individuals. And so you might make the VR experience and then render out a 360 video of someone actually playing through it so that way you can put it on YouTube and do mass distribution through a newsletter list. Same thing with augmented reality, right? Headset-based versus mobile-based AR. So I think one of the largest considerations, and certainly when we're speccing out any sort of project, is what is the demographic that's trying to be reached out to? And again, in sales, I'm aware that that is a lot of what's involved there, is understanding who the customer is and then figuring out which platform best supports the kind of outreach that you're trying to target and who that is. Now I'm not particularly a great salesperson, for the most part, so that's just going to be my limited advice there. The other two things I'll mention is that there's also, no solution is perfect. And that there's just constraints to the different mediums, which is why I keep harping on the future of all this being more multimodal. It's not that it is zero sum and it's all one versus the other, it's all AR or VR or web or mobile, but it's right tool for the right job. There are trade-offs associated with each of these. And so it's understanding the constraints of the different mediums, but also what it is that you're trying to achieve and ultimately the outcomes. You can try and balance the trade-offs and recognize which one might be best for that. And again, going back to multimodal, this is where there just might be a few dots that connect. And so it's one long process, and you start at this dot, and then you move to this one, and you move to this one, and there's just different parts where perhaps certain mediums are better suited. The last thing to note is that the work is also always front loaded. So XR experiences are different to web mobile in how we build them. And what I mean by that is XR is very content heavy, less feature heavy. And so when you think about, again, the platforms that we were mentioning before, Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, et cetera, you'll notice that really, it's largely the same set of features. It's not as though there's new features being released every week, but rather the focus is on content, to enable different experiences and different worlds to be consumed and created. Whereas with mobile and web, there it's very feature heavy, right? The team behind is very focused on adding new features because typically the content's expected to be user produced, whether it's a CRM or a social network or an HR platform. So one of the big benefits about XR experiences certainly is that yes, the work is front loaded, but once it is done, you generally scale with content. But in your case, you're talking about a healthcare tech company. Well, if you're building it around a certain product or a certain kind of, I don't know, surgical experience, well, one of the nice things there is that the content itself is also a little bit constrained. There's only so much that you need to cover in order to get something effective out of that. And as I was mentioning, they're not feature heavy. So once you've built it in, it's built in, and then now you have this platform you can tweak, you can kind of grow from there. And also, I'm thinking about if I had a sales team, and I had a healthcare product, what would be really valuable, if we take an example of a product that's used in a surgical manner, right? Well, there, if we build a VR experience, it's fascinating how the same experience can be used in a multitude of ways. So, it could be used for professionals themselves to actually train on the practice of what it is that they do with the tools. It could also be used to educate sales team on how the tool is used in a particular operation. It can also be used in a educational manner for people who aren't the surgeon, who aren't the salesperson, but just want a better understanding of the product itself and just a general process. Perhaps this is marketing, or maybe the product development team, who knows. But the singular experiences themselves generally, you can get a lot of bang for your buck in terms of how that product can be extended to a bunch of different organizations and departments within the same company.

- Great. All right. Well, I think you've provided a lot of really interesting points here and advice for both marketers and sales folks. So, I really appreciate it. Kristian, it's been a pleasure hosting you, and for those that are interested in exploring further, I definitely recommend connecting with you. Like I said, on cerebrations.info, I'm gonna have links to your profile and also you mentioned NotionTheory several times, so there'll be a connection to that, too. I definitely recommend for everyone to go and explore. There's a lot that you guys have done over the years and I've always been very fascinated following. So, thanks again. Thanks for joining me. And I hope we connect again in the near future.

- Yeah, likewise. Okay, see you.

- Thanks, Kristian. Bye.

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