Cortney Harding Transcript
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Lots of shifts and changes in my journey
I have a very non-traditional background, which I think is becoming more common, where I started going to college for politics and political science, thinking I was going to do that. Graduating into the post-9/11 recession, and not being able to find work and being very frustrated and so pivoting.
The first time I pivoted was into journalism, and I luckily for a while was pretty successful at that. I was the music editor at a weekly newspaper in Portland Oregon. Moved to New York, and became the music editor at Billboard Magazine after doing a lot of freelancing. But in 2011, 2012, I kind of could see the writing on the wall in terms of journalism, print journalism, music journalism specifically, and kind of knew, okay, this is not going to last forever.
So I pivoted into doing music technology, because at the time, Spotify had just launched, there was a really big ecosystem, a lot of companies in the space. And so I did that for a couple of years and did pretty well at it. I wrote two books. I sort of rose to prominence, and then that ecosystem started kind of fading, and I thought, “Okay, what next?”
And I, at the time, in 2015, I happened to see a virtual reality piece at an art museum, and I was blown away by it. It captured my imagination like very little else had. And so I pivoted into doing that, and since 2016 I’ve been working in virtual reality. So it’s been eight years and change, and lots and lots of ups and downs, and lots of moving around trying different things, adding different technologies to my repertoire. Now I do a lot of work with artificial intelligence as well. But yeah, it’s definitely kind of a path where I’ve had to just make a lot of shifts and changes.
Finding your zone of genius
The ideal vision for all of this is all the stuff you don’t want to do you outsource to AI, and then, you just spend all your time in your zone of genius, whatever your zone of genius is.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about finding your zone of genius.
Trending towards an immersive environment
CORTNEY
The terminology changes, but really, it’s just kind of, overall, this interactive, immersive environment that we are trending towards.
JANE
Well, I know the word metaverse was really popular for a while, it was really the thing. And I still remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg and his not very agile avatar on screen. Would you say the metaverse has been a flop?
CORTNEY
Nothing is a flop. Nothing’s a flop because everything’s an evolution. Go back and look at what the web looked like 20 or 30 years ago. The end of the internet was not GeoCities, thank God. So you could have said at the time, Web 1.0 was a flop, right?
I was talking to some friends over the weekend who were a little bit older than me. They both lived in San Francisco in the ’90s. They both went through Web 1.0. That was a disaster. Everyone got laid off. The money vaporized.
A lot of these companies were just too early, right? So if you look at the big companies in Web 1.0, Webvan was one of the historic failures of Web 1.0, that’s grocery delivery. That’s a thing everybody does now. That’s Instacart. That’s FreshDirect. That’s just a thing that people do. Pets.com was the other big flop of the early internet, that’s Chewy, which every pet owner that I know uses. Right?
So the metaverse that we talked about two years ago is going to evolve into something different. And if you look at younger audiences in particular, they’re all in Roblox, they’re all in Fortnite, they are all in there. So what Meta tried to do with Horizon Worlds, what some of these other platforms have tried to do, it’s going to evolve into something else. Things don’t ever really die, they just kind of change and move around and people find new uses for them. I mean, if you go back and look at Second Life, right? Second life is still around. It was a big thing for a while, it’s kind of evolved and changed. So when people use the term failure, I always kind of push back and say, “Well, very few things come and then disappear, they just kind of change into something else, and that’s good, that’s the evolution that we’re looking for.”
Offload to AI, spend your time in your zone of genius
JANE
There’s an article in the FT, the title of the article is Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices. And you were quoted early in the article, and one quote I take from you is you said, “AI-powered avatars and assistants to be a focus for metaverse builders with capabilities including realtime translation of discussions.” And what a powerful idea that would be for a lot of companies.
CORTNEY
That exists now. There’s tons of plugins. I use a plugin called Fathom. And there’s plenty of them in Zoom. And I happen to use Fathom because other people I know use it, but yeah, you finish a Zoom call, and within two minutes, you get an email that has the transcript, it has a summary, it has a recording, and it just like that’s the type of stuff that just is so basic to me, and it makes things easier for people. It’s not always perfect, you’d have to go back and re-listen sometimes, but it gets you 90% of the way there. And it’s the same with the AI-powered virtual assistants, they’re not perfect yet, but they’re pretty good for certain things. You can train them to do certain things. You can have them as a resource to sort of offload your busy work.
And I think that’s where the ideal vision for all of this is all the stuff you don’t want to do, you outsource to AI, and then, you just spend all your time in your zone of genius, whatever your zone of genius is. So for me, it’s doing my expenses, doing a lot of summaries and reporting, all of these sort of administrative tasks. That’s not a good use of my time, so if I can just have an AI do that, and then, just quick check it, prove it, make sure it got the receipts correct, boom, done, then I can spend time doing what I’m actually good at, not sitting here typing in receipts.
And so, I think that’s the real promise of this is to help people work better and work less because all the time you spend on busy work and all that stuff, you don’t have to do that anymore.
From excitement to fear about technology
That was the type of thing where like the technology of the future and people were so excited. And at a certain point, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, into this current day, we shifted away from an excitement about technology to a fear of technology, to a sort of being terrified about technology.
JANE
Why did that happen? What caused that shift, do you think?
CORTNEY
A lot of things. I think the sort of disruption of the economy. So when people had secure jobs, and this is kind of the thing we come back to talking about my work history, when people had job security, when the expectation was you would finish school, join a company, potentially join a union, work there for 40 years, work your way up, retire with a gold watch and a pension, you could be excited about technology because you saw it as aiding you. When all of those worker protections collapsed, then you saw technology as the enemy because all of a sudden, technology is displacing you. Now, that’s not often the case. The case is often like greedy companies are displacing you, but people don’t have that understanding.
So we’ve gone from a society where there was sort of a fixed American dream and a sense of you had some security, and again, this is very not for everyone, but for a certain group of people, you had some security. And there was like a bargain. If you showed up to your job, you did well, you put in your hours, you were a nice person, then you had security. That doesn’t exist anymore. That has vaporized. I have a friend who worked for a big tech company, did a great job, won them awards. They did a round of layoffs, 20,000 people, she was out. It doesn’t exist anymore. Loyalty is not a thing. So of course, people are going to fear change in growth and technology because where does it leave them?
Legal late to the game
A lot of the thinking that we do and the papers we produce in the committee that I’m on are really about what are the standards and norms that need to be upheld as we move forward.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about how legal is late to the game.
Health insurance companies basically run a scam
CORTNEY
So health insurance companies basically run a scam where they make mistakes. They put something in as the wrong code or the wrong this or the wrong that.
Now, most people, if they get a bill for $20, $50, they’ll just pay it, right? Because the alternative is you call them and you talk to somebody with two brain cells and you fight with them, and it’s not worth your time. My time has a value on it, right? I calculate an hourly rate. That’s how much my clients pay me. And then if it’s like 50 bucks, it’s like, “Yeah, it’s not worth my time,” right? It’s not worth the aggravation.
Now, those numbers sound small, but aggregated, they’re huge, right? So this is a profit center for health insurance companies to just do their jobs badly, and people will just pay.
Now, AI could solve this tomorrow, right? There’s enough pattern recognition in AI to be like, “This is a mistake. This is a mistake.” You don’t have to wait online for some idiot to talk to you. You can just talk to an AI. But what is the incentive for health insurance companies to deploy this?
What are the rights of avatars?
What are the rights of avatars? Right? How do we approach that? If somebody attacks you in the metaverse, they’re not physically attacking you, but it feels like an attack, right? And I think that’s one thing we have to be really cognizant of and mindful of as we move forward with this, which is right now, there’s so much online bullying on social media. How is that going to then evolve when it’s these avatars, right? Because you’re so much more personified.
So I think really setting norms, setting standards, creating communities that are self-policing, that’s going to be a huge part of what we need to do moving forward, because it’s going to shift and evolve and change. But-
JANE
It’s going to change the legal world, isn’t it?
CORTNEY
Yeah, totally. I mean, I taught at Barnard last year. I taught a class. And I had some students come up to me afterwards and say, “I’m getting ready to graduate. What should I do?” And I said, “Go to law school and become an expert in artificial intelligence and copyright, and give me a ride on your yacht in 10 years.” Right? This is the future. It’s going to be really interesting, really impactful.
I’m part of the World Economic Forum, and a lot of the thinking that we do and the papers we produce in the committee that I’m on are really about what are the standards and norms that need to be upheld as we move forward.
Growth roles are coded female
A lot of the roles that are growth roles, that are growth industries are coded female.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking to us about how growth roles are coded female.
CORTNEY
You also now have an economy, again, US perspective, where a lot of the roles that are growth roles, that are growth industries are coded female, right? So home healthcare.
JANE
Sorry, they’re coded what?
CORTNEY
Coded female. They’re coded as women’s work, right? So one of the highest growing sectors in the US is home health care workers. Because we have a rapidly aging population, we have a very sick population due to a number of factors that I can’t get into because we’ll be here all night. But the point is that work is for women and it’s especially for immigrant women or women of color, and it’s woefully underpaid. And you have these big, burly blue-collar guys who haven’t worked in five years because the factory closed and it’s like they could be retrained to do this work. There is no law that says only women can do this work. This is an employable skill, right? But they don’t do it because it’s coded as women’s work. So I think there’s a big rethink about that, that we have to have. I think there’s just a big rethink about skills and talent and what are people learning? And people really don’t want to change. They don’t want to retrain. They like what they like, they’re good at what they’re good at.
Learning never ends
Welcome to Imaginize World where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about how learning never ends.
One mistake we’ve made as a society
CORTNEY
One mistake that we’ve made as a society is to think education ends when you leave school, whether that’s high school, college, graduate school, that your education is essentially over when you get handed a piece of paper that says you’ve completed it. That’s not true anymore. You constantly need to be learning. You constantly need to be evolving, and it does get tiring. It does get to be a lot of work. I was talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday, and we were lamenting that there seemed to be, at this point, an invisible set of goalposts that are constantly moving, and the actual goalpost itself is gate-capped.
So you cannot ever say, “Okay, well, I’ve done this, that this is going to lead to X.” Because a lot of the time you do X, you win an award, you speak at Davos, you do… And it’s like, “Okay, that was neat.” It doesn’t actually go anywhere. And so I think there’s, for a lot of people, a sense of, “Well, I don’t know what to do next.”
Two extremes of education
It is interesting, and I like the idea of self-directed learning, but I think we need in particular to make sure we are empowering kids to be self-directed.
JANE
Yes.
CORTNEY
Because what I see is a lot of helicopter parents who don’t let their children out of their sight and they control everything so tightly, and again, it goes back to the middle-class displacement and fear. And then you get some of these homeschool parents who go too far and everything is self-directed. And it’s like, “No, your truck can’t just learn about YouTube all day long. They to learn math.” You do need to know math to function as a human. Whether you need to know AP calculus, maybe not, you need to know how to add and subtract and basics. But I think that allowing kids to have more freedom and flexibility to learn is really important, and to create and to feel empowered to direct themselves a little bit is something that needs to happen. But unfortunately, we’re stuck in a place where, again, a lot of the time it’s teach to the test. You have very disruptive classrooms. You have very overcrowded classrooms. You have parents that are suing the school district for this, that and the other, and it’s challenging. And it’s not going to serve anyone well in the end.
VR has a positive impact on lives
That makes it really impactful because you are able to feel for a few minutes what other people have felt for their entire life.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about how VR has a positive impact on lives.
CORTNEY
There’s a lot of projects that I’ve done in the social impact space. So the Child Welfare Project is a project where it helps child welfare workers practice asking questions of a family in crisis. So they’re learning two things. They’re learning how to have a conversation because it’s a branching narrative. They’re also learning what type of questions to ask, and then they’re learning how to talk to people who are hostile, who are angry, who are upset, who are potentially very intimidating. And sort of having that practice of just being in that space is very important. So there’s that.
And then there’s a piece that my company did on workplace inclusion where you are being excluded. So all you know is that you’re a manager at a company which was the audience, and you put on the headset and you go to this meeting and everyone kind of talks over you, dismisses you. They’re very clicky. Your boss gives you this contradictory advice and you participate in it by speaking, but nothing you say makes a difference. And so that piece is called Can’t Win because literally you can’t win no matter what you do. And that’s really meant not to teach people anything necessarily, but to evoke a feeling and create a feeling that people might not have felt before.
And we did the same thing with a racial bias piece where you, the user, are on the end of a bias incident and you don’t know why. This piece doesn’t start, you’re a middle-aged black man. It just starts like you’re at a store, you’re a customer, you’re walking around. And so that makes it really impactful because you are able to feel for a few minutes what other people have felt for their entire life.
A personal experience, not a documentary
So I’ve done pieces that I think are well-intentioned, and I certainly disagree with other people on this where if… I did a piece where you put on the headset and it basically says you are a young black man. And right there I’m sort of like, well, I’m not. So okay. The piece was well done. It was really interesting and it was very much about discrimination and systemic racism. It was an interesting, well-done piece, but I didn’t feel like it was me. I felt like I was watching a documentary and I was like, oh, this is terrible. Right? But it didn’t feel personal. And I think what you can do with VR is actually make it feel personal. So if you look at all the stuff that I’ve done, I never say, you are a woman. You are a person of color. You are this, you are that. I’ve done really interesting sort of subtle things where it was about people in wheelchairs and we didn’t say anything. We just put the camera height really low. That was it.
JANE
Very interesting.
CORTNEY
So you got to feel what it was like to be at the height of somebody who’s in a wheelchair, just living a day-to-day life and experiencing all the microaggressions. And we didn’t say, oh, you’re in a wheelchair. You were in an accident. We just were like, this is Bill’s day-to-day experience. Watch it and participate in it. That’s the type of thing you can do. And people came out and they were sort of confused and they were like, well, why did this happen? Why did that happen? Why did this person do this? And then we sort of say, well, think about it more, right? Why were you at that height? There’s all these cool tricks you can do in VR, but you have to have a good story and you have to also be willing to let people sit with that discomfort a little bit, which I think is really valuable.
Learning how to tell a story
Really kind of understanding what stories are we trying to tell, what feelings are we trying to evoke? Because you can’t just take what you would’ve done in a flat screen and put it in VR, that doesn’t work. So it’s really understanding how to tell a story in this medium. And I think that that’s such a new thing. I’m doing it and I learned stuff every single day. I look at back some of the pieces I’ve worked on, I’m like, oh, I really wish I hadn’t done that. But it’s again, a continuous learning and we’re going to start seeing that. And one thing that I’ve been working on the last couple of years is teaching other people how to do this because I had to learn everything by making sometimes expensive mistakes. But now I’ve kind of got some of it down at least, although I learn every day. And other people can do that too. And so that is going to grow the ecosystem of people telling their stories, people telling other people’s stories, creating this content. This is what essentially is going to move the needle and make this bigger.
The missing ecosystem
That’s my goal for the next however many years that I continue to do this, is creating that ecosystem because that’s where things are going to get really interesting.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Courtney Hardin talking about the missing ecosystem.
CORTNEY
Yeah, it’s a small community and I’m friends or friendly with a lot of people. It’s always great to meet new people who are doing this stuff. It’s a great community because people are very open. They share their ideas, they share their work, they share their learnings. It’s not gate-kept for the most part, which is fantastic. And there is a sense of collaboration. And there’s also a sense of the rising tide lifts all boats. So if somebody’s piece does really well, that’s going to spark interest in other work and then you create this flywheel of opportunity. So that’s the case. But again, it is a small community. So one of my big passions coming up is teaching other people how to do this and whether they get into it as just a hobby or whether it’s just something they do as part of their job or they make a change and pivot to doing it full-time, that’s kind of on them.
But it’s really the idea that the only way we grow this ecosystem is when everyone can participate. When the content is not just coming from a handful of 50, a hundred, 500 people at the top. Think of 2D screens, for a long time what we consumed on 2D screens was just professionally produced content. It was professionally produced movies and television, and that was it. And it was very limited. There were four channels on the tv, and if you didn’t like what was on any of those four channels, you didn’t have anything to watch. Yeah, too bad. Go read a book, go outside, touch grass.
So what we now have is this ecosystem where anyone can do it. So it is not uncommon. In fact, it’s extremely common to you spend half an hour watching a professionally produced series on Netflix, and then you turn off your Netflix and you look at your friend’s Instagram account, and then you watch some TikTok influencers and you go back and forth and it’s like… It’s all kind of flattened into one because it’s screen consumption time, but there’s gradations and levels of quality.
And so something like The Bear or Succession, no one would ever say your friend’s funny photo of their dog is the same level of quality at storytelling as Succession. And that’s fine. You need all these different levels to make it interesting and to make it relevant and useful to people.
With VR, we have the Succession level creators, we have the top tier award winners and people doing really good stuff. We don’t have the TikTok influencer level, and we really don’t have the ‘here’s a photo of my dog’ level. So my goal is to really start educating those two bottom levels.
The number one complaint I get about VR headsets is not about feeling sick. It’s not about the cost. It’s not about the, “Oh, it’s heavy on my face.” It’s about, I went out and got one. I thought it was cool. I used it for three weeks. I ran out of content and now it gathers dust on my shelf. I hear that weekly if not more. Companies say that to me. People say that to me. Everyone says that because we don’t have an ecosystem of content creators.
When the iPhone first came out, I have mine sitting right next to me. When the iPhone first came out, when smartphones first came out, everyone thought they were silly because people were like, “Well, this is just a phone.” Now we do everything on that phone. Our lives are on that phone. It’s harder to function without that phone than to function with it.
And that’s where we need to get to with VR. And we need to create that ecosystem of what is the Instagram of VR? Who knows? Somebody’s going to create it and make a lot of money. What is the Facebook of VR? What is this sort of social network? How do we get news? How do we get entertainment? How do we get all of these things? And so that’s my goal for the next however many years that I continue to do this, is creating that ecosystem because that’s where things are going to get really interesting.
Filming from your face, a game changer
If you have a thousand people marching for something, and they’ve all got their glasses on live-streaming, that’s the whole world is watching right there. That is a very different experience.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about how filming from your face is a game changer.
CORTNEY
The transition that’s going to happen from shooting with your hand and your phone to shooting with your face is going to be profound. And when I’ve shown people the Vision Pro, and showing them how to shoot content from the headset, they go nuts. They absolutely lose their minds. And these are not techie people. I showed it to my parents, who are older and who aren’t techie, and they went and shot video of my niece and nephew just playing and hanging out in the Vision Pro, and they were like, “You can’t take this with you. We’re keeping it.” Right. But Apple’s not really emphasizing that, I think because the Vision Pro is just so early and so expensive. But once that happens, that is going to be a game changer.
Normal VR glasses and public safety
If you have a thousand people marching for something and they’ve all got their glasses on live-streaming, that’s the whole world is watching right there. That is a very different experience. Or from a public safety perspective, right. I’m a woman. I’m very petite. I like to go out in New York City. I walk home late at night by myself from the subway. Luckily, I live in a pretty safe neighborhood. But still, if I had live-streaming glasses, how much better would I feel? How much better would I feel if I’m like, I get off the subway, I message my husband, “Hey. I’m turning on my live-stream.” I walk home. He can see. Or any trusted person can see. And if anyone comes into my field of view, oh, I’ve got their face. “Oh, hey, Palantir, what’s up?” We could reduce crime to nothing.
The “never figure it out” world
There’s no finish line. You’re never done.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about The Never Figure It Out World.
CORTNEY
I think we just have to kind of get away from a lot of these notions that we’ve had in the past and move towards, again, retraining, re-skilling, re-educating, up-skilling, moving to a skills-based economy. All of these things will, in the end, be a net benefit for everyone because it gives you more flexibility, more freedom, more of a chance to do different things, move around, learn more. But we’re still kind of stuck in this 1950s era. Like, “Oh, you graduated from high school, you go to the factory on Monday, you work at the factory for 40 years, and then you retire.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s not a thing.”
There’s no finish line. You’re never done. Yeah, you might finish a race, you might finish your training cycle, but if you are a runner, you’re finished when your legs fall off.
JANE
When you stop running, basically.
Continuous learning
CORTNEY
When you stop running is when you’re finished. But there is no finish line. And I think so often, and I see this with young people, because we have not done a good job educating young people about this. I see this constantly with people in their twenties and thirties. “When am I going to be settled?” “When am I going to have it figured out?” “When am I going to this?” And it’s like, “Never.” You’re never going to have it figured out. The day you have it figured out is the day that you are dead, basically. To have this idea of uncertainty and growth and constant movement, and I think people have just become so opposed to that, that we really just need to start again answering these questions of like, well…
Like, economic uncertainty, we need to solve for that as well. Right? I get it. But I also feel like if people can just sort of get comfortable with uncertainty and growth and change. And, I mean, look, I say all this, I’m not fully comfortable with it either. I found out that I was nominated for this pretty big award that I can’t talk about publicly because it’s not announced yet. But my first thought was, “Awesome. Yay. This is exciting.” My second thought was, “Eh, it’s not going to actually do anything. It’s not going to mean anything,” because nothing means anything at this point.
Lost in transition and the path forward
The last thing has kind of ended, the next thing hasn’t quite taken off.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Here’s Cortney Harding talking about being lost in transition and the path forward.
Lack of job security
There’s a number of jobs that people who do them now who are going to lose those jobs, don’t see how AI can help them in any way. I think there’s probably a gap between the reality of these people 40, 50, 60 years old and what can be done with AI today.
CORTNEY
Sure.
JANE
We’re probably in a phase that we’re sort of in the middle of a transition.
CORTNEY
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, it goes back to no one has job security. I don’t have job security. You don’t have job security.
JANE
No.
CORTNEY
The President of the United States doesn’t have job security. The guy who cleans the street outside my house doesn’t have… No one has job security. No one does. I think the idea of job security is just obliterated. That’s where we just have to start. And then, it’s with the AI stuff, it’s like, “All right, what do you do next?” Because the horse is out of the barn. The horse doesn’t go back in the barn. You couldn’t undo the industrial revolution. You couldn’t undo the internet. Think of how many people’s jobs were displaced by the internet. Guess what? Most of them found new jobs. It’s really about, again, we have an opportunity to start early retraining people, reskilling people, re-educating people, moving people around.
Fairness and hard work is over
I know people that have achieved everything. I have a good friend who is one of the most well known, well-respected people in my industry. She’s been unemployed for over a year and she’s just hasn’t found a job in over a year. The sort of idea of fairness and hard work that is also just kind of over at this point. It’s very much about dealing with this new world of work and technology. You have to be hungry and pivoting and working all the time. I think once people understand that and understand that the world we had 50 years ago is just gone, then we can at least start breaking through and changing things.
Over and under-estimate the impact
I hope I haven’t sounded too much like a doomer. I’m really not. I’m very pro technology and I’m very excited. I just think that we’re in this weird place right now where we’re kind of stuck. I mean, this is my final thought. So Web 2, if you look at Web 2 as kind of mid to late 2000s through COVID. Let’s just say that. 2006 to 2020, that was Web 2. That was the heyday of Web 2. Web 2 was largely predicated on free money. Venture capital was… The interest rate was nothing. Venture capital was free. It was cheaper and better for venture capitalists to spend money funding companies, even if the companies weren’t viable because they, at least, had a chance of a return. Whereas the money when interest rates were so low, was just sitting there. When the interest rates went up in the US, all of a sudden that changed everything. And now what you’ve got is all of these companies that everyone relied on and was trained to rely on are awful now. Food delivery services are terrible. Uber is bad because they now have to be profitable because the free money train is over because of interest rates, and now they suck.
And so, we’re at this stage where a lot of the stuff that’s happening is not new. It’s not that interesting, and it’s actually gotten worse. But we’re not at a place yet where VR, AR, spatial computing, crypto, AI, all of these things, they’re too new. They’re too nascent. And people both overestimate and underestimate them, but they’re not fully baked. We’re at this place where the last thing has kind of ended, the next thing hasn’t quite taken off, and we’re just sitting in this kind of weird middle space that feels very uncomfortable and kind of awful. I think, again, things are going to change. Things will flow and change, but it’s just this place right now where they haven’t quite yet, and that’s where we are right now. And so, I think, for me, it’s like, “Okay, how do we accept that a lot of these things have changed?” And then, figure out what’s the next path forward, because that’s where things get interesting again.
