Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast.

Charlie Melcher:

Robert Tercek has a better understanding of the changes taking place in the digital age than most anyone I've spoken with. And this is in part because he helped to create them. Over the course of his varied and impressive career, he helped spearhead the first multiplayer games on the web, the first interactive game shows on television, and the world's first streaming video on mobile. While in senior positions at companies such as MTV, Sony, and the Oprah Winfrey network. He launched audience facing experiences on digital television, game consoles, broadband internet, and mobile networks. In 2015, Robert synthesized his years of experience into his book, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World. The book explains our shift from atoms to bits, from a tangible physical world to one replaced by software, the digital domain.

Charlie Melcher:

I'm excited to have him on the show today to share his critical thought and his remarkable ability to distill volumes of knowledge and experience into prescient forecasts for the future of the digital age. I think you'll particularly appreciate his insights about the potential and perils of the metaverse, a place that he describes as an attempt at dematerializing the entire world. Please join me in welcoming Robert Tercek to today's episode.

Charlie Melcher:

Robert, it's such a pleasure to welcome you to the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Robert Tercek:

Thank you, Charlie. I'm happy to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I've had the pleasure of reading your book Vaporized, which I must confess I just read, even though I know it came out in 2015, was that correct?

Robert Tercek:

Late 2015, early 2016. Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

So I thought maybe we could start with that and if you'd be so kind as to give us a quick overview of the thesis of that book.

Robert Tercek:

I started that book as an exploration, trying to understand what was happening in the world around us and also to recap 10 or 15 years of my own professional experience. At that time, I had been working in the mobile industry for about 15 years. And generally my whole career has been in media and entertainment and communications, but everything was going mobile by that point, when I started to write the book. What I didn't realize when I was writing was, I thought that it was a big trend at that time. What I didn't realize it was going to grow to become a utterly gigantic trend. And today, what I would say, is that this is the defining trend for the 21st century economy, and that is dematerialization. Dematerialization of physical things into software, or dematerialization into knowledge.

Robert Tercek:

That's a pretty sweeping statement, but I can back it up. And the most powerful and globe spanning companies today on the planet are the companies that are at the forefront of this trend to replace physical things with software. And when I say that, that sounds kind of scientific or maybe a little bit abstract. So let me put it in perspective for people who are listening. Every time you use your smartphone, you're vaporizing something. You're replacing a thing that we used to sell as a physical item, as a product sold, maybe shrink wrapped in a store. We've replaced all of that: the box, the store, the shrink wrap, the process of going to a store with your car and parking, all of that has been replaced.

Robert Tercek:

Now you have been conditioned, over the last 10 or maybe 15 years, you've been conditioned to this notion that you can have access to any kind of information that you want at a touch of an icon on your phone. That process is inexorable, and it's kind of insidious in the sense that it displaces your previous notions about how we access information. I would argue that there's a whole generation right now that isn't even familiar with the process of buying information products. But that used to be the way it was done for 500 years, 5,000 years.

Charlie Melcher:

I'll just say, I have such a personal experience with this, as does anybody of a certain age. My primary business has been in publishing. In fact, years ago, our most successful product of all time, the one that we sold the most copies of, and that I used to say was the one book we made that everyone I knew needed a copy of, and it was a road atlas. We had created a road atlas with National Geographic. We sold millions of copies of it, and now I couldn't give one away. Who would ever put a road atlas in their car?

Robert Tercek:

True. It's so cumbersome, right? It has one advantage, and it's a durable advantage, which is that the thing is there when you need it. So if you don't have a cell signal, if you're out of reach of the cell coverage, or if your phone battery dies, which does happen sometimes and then you're in desperate shape. And Charlie, the map is an excellent example of vaporization, because today in our smartphones, they come equipped with a free map that's so much better than any paper map. Why is it better? Well, it shows you where you are, even when you're moving. It also shows you where you want to go and the relationship between those things, which is always changing.

Robert Tercek:

So that's incredible utility in something that we used to have to pay for, a fair amount, a map, a book of the sort you're talking about. An atlas cost 20 or 30 dollars back in the day, and they were periodically updated, but they were also periodically out of date in which case there would be a road that was changed, parking that wasn't available, maybe the place that you were looking for had moved to a new location. These new maps are constantly updated and so they're always going to be current. And so what's happened now is a whole generation has grown up with smartphones and that generation will never know what it's like to be lost in a foreign city.

Robert Tercek:

But on the other hand, we're dependent on these things. So at the same time that we have this new superpower, we're never lost, that's only in the situation where you've got a smartphone handy with a battery and a cell signal. And if you don't have those things, well, then you're back to reading a map. And what I've noticed is a lot of people can't navigate without the phone. So we build in this kind of critical dependency on this external thing. So it's kind of a mixed blessing, right? Vaporization, replacing physical stuff with software, gives us new superpowers. It certainly does. And maps is just one of dozens and dozens of examples in the book, and the list goes on and on.

Robert Tercek:

But at the same time, it also builds in a dependency and with that comes domination. And so it's probably important for us to note that the companies that are driving this process and the companies that have been the primary beneficiaries, since I wrote that book... At that time companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft were valued in the range of about 600, 500 billion dollars. Since that time, they've doubled and doubled in value. And Apple today is hovering around 2.5 trillion in value, that's trillion with a T. Microsoft and Google are somewhere in the one and a half to 2 trillion range. The market's very volatile these days.

Robert Tercek:

So what we can say is that the companies that are driving this trend towards vaporization or dematerialization, those companies have become the largest and most powerful companies in the world today. And they have built globe spanning information empires, and they've built those empires on the back of the telecom network. The telephone companies don't control this, the technology companies that run the services on the network do.

Charlie Melcher:

No question, the trend that you identified and so aptly named as vaporization or vaporizing has just continued. And of course, there's so many examples of it all over the place. I was recently cleaning out my closet and came across my Sony Walkman and so many other consumer electronics goods that are now like antiques and literally were being taken out to the rummage sale. My question to you though is, would these companies continue to grow, are they actually the largest companies that have ever been in existence throughout human history?

Robert Tercek:

No. And that's a super interesting question because we tend to think they are, right? You think, "Wow, three trillion dollar company, or Microsoft at two and a half trillion. So as the tech companies invade and infiltrate new businesses, they blow up an old, good business like book publishing, and then they replace it with new economics where they dominate. This is a very disruptive process. And we tend to think it's all very modern and very new, but that's not really the case. It's probably good at this point to talk a little bit about Facebook because Facebook's gone through a wrenching transformation. They were in a very fast growth path from 2006 until about 2016. And then they started to hit some speed bumps. So they had a really good 10 year run, but then they started to falter.

Robert Tercek:

And if you look at their valuation, their market valuation, over the years, you'll notice that after 2016, it's very spiky, very bumpy. And they are the only company that did not touch a trillion dollars in value. And that's got to be incredibly frustrating. So you have to wonder, well, what did they do wrong? What happened there? Part of it is management blunders. They ruined our trust. They betrayed us as users. They sold us out. They sold us out to unscrupulous companies that manipulated our feeds with propaganda, lies and disinformation, and people generally got disgusted with it. And there's a large number of people today who dislike Facebook intensely as a brand.

Robert Tercek:

What Mark Zuckerberg did was he took a company that was worth 700 billion dollars and pivoted. He pivoted toward the thing called the metaverse. Why did he do this? He's spinning a story. He and his associates are saying, "Well, we're focused on the future. This is where things are going." Cynics observed that the Facebook brand was fatally tarnished, and they were jettisoning that brand because it was radioactive. And they're trying to move the company away from it to something new, something shiny, something bright, that's optimistic. Now Facebook has made a heroic investment in virtual reality. They acquired the company Oculus for a couple billion dollars.

Robert Tercek:

And they've continued to invest enormous amounts of money, more than any other company in building out, not just the hardware, the devices, the Oculus head mounted displays, but also all the software systems and infrastructure necessary to deliver a good VR experience. It has improved so much and that's largely because of Facebook's efforts to improve it. Now, I know what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking because there was an article that came out a few years ago by Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired. In that article, which is called Mirrorworlds. And I recommend it to people because if you want to understand where the dematerialized thesis goes in the future, well, you dematerialize the whole world and rebuild it as a digital twin. You rebuild it as a virtual world that's so high fidelity, so rich with detail, that it's unmistakable for the world that we live in.

Charlie Melcher:

We've passed over the uncanny valley.

Robert Tercek:

That's exactly it.

Charlie Melcher:

We are now able to create virtual characters that are indistinguishable from, or believable to be indistinguishable from real live actors.

Robert Tercek:

Okay, so that's the vision. The vision for Facebook is basically, "We're going away from social media. We got a bad rap. That brand is no good. We're going to jettison that. And we're going to pivot to this new cool groovy thing called the metaverse." And so I started to look into this and the more I read about it, the more I was thinking, "Wait a minute, these guys? This group of people who demonstrated absolutely no awareness of ethics, no awareness of philosophy, no awareness of any kind of social norms...," even though they were running a social network. I thought, "Are these really the right people to be building this irony here?" There is a ton of irony here, right?

Robert Tercek:

And so when I read that Kevin Kelly article, he talked about this idea of building a lifelike replica of the real world. And he said, "Whoever dominates this platform will be among the richest and most powerful companies in history." And I read that and I thought, "Well, wait a minute, isn't Apple and Google and Facebook, aren't these already the richest and most powerful companies in history?" And it turns out, no, they're not. They're the richest and most powerful companies of our time. But if you look over the longer span of history, the very first publicly traded companies in the world were the largest and most valuable companies. And they held that title for more than 100 years.

Robert Tercek:

And the companies I'm referring to are the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company. And these companies created colonies. These companies got a royal mandate from their king, at the time, to basically go conquer some other part of the world and build a monopoly, a trade monopoly, there. So they were trade empires, but they were astounding in several levels. First of all, the cruelty with which they invaded, depopulated entire places, or removed entire populations to other places. They were unbound by any kind of law. They were the law.

Robert Tercek:

So the second part is that they were the administrative apparatus for the colonies for hundreds of years before the governments actually came and took them over. Before there was a British empire, there was the British East India Company for a couple hundred years. And that was essentially the administrative apparatus for India and for many parts of Asia, and also for a period of time through the Hudson's Bay Company North America as well. They ruled without any kind of constraints or restraints. And they devastated populations, cultures, whatever economy had been there, whatever civilization had preceded it. And that's not all, they erased it. They erased those cultures as well.

Robert Tercek:

So there's a tremendous negative legacy of the colonial era. And they built the world that we recognize today. So if you think of many cities in the world, for instance, New York or Bombay or Buenos Aires or Hong Kong or Sydney in Australia, these cities did not exist before the colonial era. They are artifacts of the colonial era. They were trading ports, and then they grew from there. So the colonies also reshaped the world that we live in and they introduced globalization and global trade and they gave birth to the corporation. So the colonial plantation is the parent of the modern corporation. At any rate, when we talk about building virtual worlds-

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. And the huge amount of wealth extraction, right?

Robert Tercek:

Yes. That's what it's all about. That is it exactly. The business model of a colony is to conquer other territory, extract all the wealth in the process, degrade the environment. They don't put any effort into maintaining the environment. And you either enslave or dominate or subjugate the population there and control their government, or supplant their government, so that you can control the people as well.

Robert Tercek:

And if you think about the business model for the metaverse, well, what are they doing? They're going to define a virtual space and they're going to ask people to populate it, and they're going to control those people. And they're going to extract resources. They're going to extract information about you, your likes, your dislikes, your preferences, your connections, your friends, your interests, the content that you create, the content that you share, and so forth. Now, this is kind of important, I think, for your audience in a couple of ways.

Robert Tercek:

The first one is obviously social media is a giant storytelling platform, maybe the most powerful and persuasive storytelling platform ever invented. It's the most emotional software product ever introduced. People resonate with it. Sometimes they get angry at it. Sometimes they feel joy and they feel connection, right? So it's interesting for a technology product to instill that powerful, emotional response. And clearly, this move towards the metaverse is a way to intensify that, deepen that, and exert even more control. So we've sketched out a concept here of dematerialization or what I call vaporization. And now the new idea is to dominate that space and to do it in a colonial way.

Charlie Melcher:

Deep breath, this is quite disturbing.

Robert Tercek:

It's a mind bomb, right? When you think about it, and once you think of it that way, there's no way to think about the metaverse except as a colony, right? It's clearly a colonial project.

Charlie Melcher:

You know, I think about the original metaverse. We had Philip Rosedale on the show some months ago, talking about Second Life. And that was really the original metaverse. So many of the things that people are aspiring to now with the metaverse, where you can create your own space and have your own business. There's a currency. A lot of those ideas were originated in Second Life and, by the way, are still up and running. There's still a million people using it. They are pioneers who've gone in and built homesteads in that land.

Robert Tercek:

Homesteaders.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, homesteaders. When I think about the metaverse and how much work will need to be done to make it vibrant and come to life, it will require all of us creators to go in there and to do the equivalent of planting seeds and having livestock and building farms and homesteading. And then what are you going to do? If you're not happy with the rules, you're just going to walk away from the farm that you built?

Robert Tercek:

Yeah. First of all, I love Second Life and I've always been a fan. Second Life begins with community and community connection. That's at the core. Well, that's very different from today's metaverses. These new metaverses start with a business model and a financial plan, and they're going to figure out how to monetize you before you even get invited to join that world. I think they're making a big mistake, by the way, I think Second Life got it right. Get the community right and you can figure out the business model. If you get the community wrong and launch the business model, you're not going to have any people.

Robert Tercek:

And if you look at these prototype metaverses today, Decentraland, there's a couple of others, Sandbox. They're virtual ghost towns. You can see like digital tumbleweeds blowing through them. There's no one there. And that's because really they're designed as speculative land grabs for virtual space and they're selling off plots of land. So they started with a business model that was exploitative and extractive by design. And maybe they're succeeding with that business model, but what they're failing at is community. And that means that people will never show up, but they won't get in the habit of going there. They don't feel ownership.

Robert Tercek:

Now, Second Life did this like a pro, They really went for it. They made it wide open for people to be expressive, in some ways offensively expressive and crazy expressive, and super fun. The metaverses that we're seeing proposed today, they don't have that range of self expression and they certainly don't give the users that level of control. And I think that's another big strategic blunder, and it will be hard for them to recover from that blunder.

Robert Tercek:

And Second Life was smart. When people go into a virtual world, I think it's a mistake to assume they want to represent themselves exactly the way they look in the real world. That's always the default assumption of social networks, that I want to represent myself exactly the way I am. What if I want to experiment? What if I want to try on a different persona, maybe aspects of their identity or other avatars that they can't inhabit in the real world. And right now, I think that's under exploited. Well, Second Life did a great job of enabling people to explore that and that's why it's been so durable.

Charlie Melcher:

So how do we try to fix or prevent the evolution of the current metaverse concepts so that they are not colonial in nature, colonizations, but rather like real communities, real places for expression and creativity. Do you have any thoughts about how to influence this?

Robert Tercek:

I'm not sure there is one handy solution just as a headline, like spoiler alert. It's not clear to me that there's like a prescription, a handy prescription, like Fortune magazine like, "The three steps you have to do to perfect the metaverse." I'm not going to write that article because I fundamentally don't believe that's the case. The first thing is that there's more than a thousand companies today that are working on building a metaverse or some part of the metaverse. I think that's good. The more companies that try, I mean, competition is going to force different outcomes and different possibilities. That's good.

Robert Tercek:

The second thing is that there's already an industry coalition for standardization. Now, standardization is a way to exert control, but standardization also means it's possible for new companies to come in and compete. There's another group called the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, and this is not dominated by corporations. This is a group that's really seeking to endorse the kind of economics that I'm proposing, openness, a world that is perhaps decentralized and owned by no one in particular and dominated by no one company. That, I think, points in the right direction.

Robert Tercek:

The last idea I want to share with you is the one I'm most excited about, and that is decolonial theory. There are a group of scholars, principally from Latin America and the Caribbean, but there are scholars all over the world in Eastern Europe, Africa, South Asia who have written volumes of academic treatises on the subject of decoloniality. Decoloniality is the opposite of coloniality and coloniality is the mindset that you're left with after the colony ends. But after the colony ends, after the colonial country leaves, and the country is left to the inhabitants, the indigenous people, you're still stuck with coloniality, that's the residue.

Robert Tercek:

And that would be the legal system, the economic system, the infrastructure that is there, the rules, the tools for governing, and so forth. In many cases, the process of decolonization happened so fast that there was no peaceful transfer of power and there was no way to set up an alternate government. So you have a new group, which was usually an insurgent group, an activist group, or some sort of independence group, suddenly they're in charge. The colonial country, they pulled out and they left everything behind. It's like, it's up to you to figure it out. By the way, the history of this transition is generally pretty grim and pretty bloody and pretty violent.

Charlie Melcher:

Grim. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Tercek:

So it starts in trauma, right? You've got generations of trauma under colonialism, and then you've got this decolonial process, which is traumatic. And now you're left with the memory of that. I just want to reiterate that this process was going on in our lifetime. This is not ancient history. So the memory and the wounds are very, very fresh. And so what's happening now around the world in the southern hemisphere is a growing awareness and a growing discussion around decolonial theory, decolonialism, and this idea of the legacy of decolonization and what might come next.

Robert Tercek:

And here we get to some interesting subjects. What is a modern nation, other than a story that we tell ourselves about why we live together? If you think about the United States, I mean, what is it? It's a collection of people from all over the world, very few Americans are indigenous to North America. Most of us are the children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves. How do you integrate them into one thing? So you have to have a national narrative, but what's happened with the advent of digital media and the proliferation of new kinds of media and the disruption of traditional media is that that narrative has now been fractured and fragmented in many, many pieces.

Robert Tercek:

And so you can say, for instance, that cable TV news has fractured the mirror that we held up to ourselves and now each cable news channel holds up a different shard of the mirror and says, "That's who you are." And if you like that mirror, you like that image, then you buy into that story. And so what we're seeing now is the corrosive and divisive impact of this on national politics. We don't have politics of unity and we don't have messages of unity. Now we have messages of discord, animosity, adversity, and so forth. And we're living through that. And I personally find it exhausting and bewildering. It's really worth paying close attention to what's happening here as the national narrative gets fractured.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, there's so many things to touch on. One of the things that always comes up for me, when you realize just how, in an age of too much information when there's so many different channels and different places to take your information, your stories, that the power of storytelling becomes premium. It becomes more important. And so I've often encouraged and tried to talk about the need for storytellers to, one, understand that they are wielding some of the most powerful tools in human history, that we really are playing with like nuclear weapons here, it's so influential what we do and how we can shift things. We just have to think more about the moral compass and the larger civic importance of what we do, as opposed to just purely the short term financial gains of storytelling.

Charlie Melcher:

I almost feel like storytellers need to take a Hippocratic oath. We need one for our field as doctors do for theirs, that we are not going to do harm. Our job with stories is to use them to make our world a better place, not to create polarization, or strife, or hatred, or all the things. I mean, how many times have you heard that old expression, "If it bleeds, it leads."

Robert Tercek:

And particularly what drives an emotional reaction is what gets shared and so that becomes the most important thing. It's not so much about the information content or how accurate the story that you're telling is. It's more about, does it trigger an emotional reaction? It's sad to say the easiest emotional reaction to get from people is outrage and anger. Given the economics of the world that we're in today and globalization and other trends like inequality, there is a lot of pent up anger. People feel a great sense of frustration. So if you can point them in the right direction and say, "That's the thing to get angry at, there is the place to vent your frustration," you can get a big audience very quickly and they'll share that.

Robert Tercek:

But this notion that somebody can get angry about something and then share it with 50 other people who share it with 50 other people, that's obviously exponentially increasing impact for something that might be entirely fake, or worse, something that was deliberately placed there by someone who wants to destabilize society, and there are those actors. The fact is, these are for profit companies and they've got to do what's in their economic interest and that is garner more attention, it's an attention economy. So the stuff that triggers people the most is the stuff that's going to generate the biggest audience and thereby the biggest profit.

Charlie Melcher:

I think that one of the big implications, or byproducts, of the digitization of everything is certainly the empowering of people to have the means of production to tell their own stories. And certainly, this goes back to Facebook. I mean, all of a sudden, everybody has a platform. Everyone has a set of tools to publish with and to amplify their own message and a whole bunch of other... YouTube and TikTok and a dozen of other really powerful tools that all of a sudden makes it so that everybody can tell a story and get their own message out there and have a platform.

Charlie Melcher:

And on one hand, I know a lot of people say, well, that just means there's a ton of crap out there, right? Everyone is putting up all sorts of bad stuff, terrible storytelling. And I think that's true to some degree that there's a lot of, I mean, it's obviously true that there's a lot of bad storytelling or a lot of junk, but I think what it's also doing is training a whole generation or generations of people to be more aware of it as a craft, the appreciation for the finer art of storytelling.

Charlie Melcher:

And that ultimately that's going to lead to a better group of fans, right? That's going to create people who appreciate the really good stories even more because they have some better firsthand knowledge of what it means to tell a story, or how difficult it is, or a little bit more understanding of those crafts. And that maybe ultimately that will lead to a positive outcome. I mean, again, this is perhaps me just being utopian.

Robert Tercek:

No, no, I think you're onto something because there is a positive outcome here. Look, there's no question that 90% of what's made is not good, but there's some value there anyway. Because as you say, people are getting conversant with the tools, they have an understanding of how to use the tools. And as you pointed out, the smartphone gives us another superpower. We all have a video camera in our pocket. Lo and behold, social networks now are dominated by videos shot by people. We're now suddenly video storytellers. And that leads to a generation probably younger than you and me, but a rising generation that is quite comfortable telling stories with film. They're a generation of filmmakers. And that's really evident when you look at the quality of what's on television today. If you compare the quality of programming, the scripted programming, on any streaming service to programming on cable TV 20 years ago, the quality is infinitely better.

Robert Tercek:

And there's one more bright spot here. Even if you never produce a hit show, even if you're just somebody who tools around with this stuff to understand how it works and you're slightly interested and you post the occasional thing on social media, by virtue of the fact that you're a creator, and you're not just a consumer, it gives you an awareness of how creators can manipulate audiences. And it starts to instill in you an understanding of how to distinguish between real messages and fake messages, or what's truthful and what's not truthful. And frankly, Charlie, that's our only hope because we're awash in false information right now, we're living in a flood of fake information right now. Some of that is by design. Some of it's propaganda from other countries, some of it's our own country. The point is, there's a lot of fake information coming at us. It's a torrent and a flood.

Robert Tercek:

So the more we learn about how media's created, the more we learn how to express ourselves in it, the more aware we're going to be when we're being manipulated by media, and that's my hope. That a rising generation will be media savvy, and they'll be able to distinguish truth from false. I might be wrong because there's deep fakes coming and AI driven creation tools and AI generated stuff, and maybe we're just going to get overwhelmed by this infinite amount of content. And then we'll phase change into some kind of other species or life form. I'm not quite sure how to predict that future. I haven't written that book yet.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, Robert, I feel like we've raced around the planet, the various multiverses, and throughout all of time in about an hour. So thank you for sharing your deep knowledge and your really interesting thoughts about where things are headed. And I look forward to getting to spend some time in person at some point, and to anything else that you write, because I've really been inspired by your thinking. So thank you.

Robert Tercek:

Thank you for that. You know, Charlie, if people are listening and they want to hear more, they can check out my own podcast, which is The Futurists. And thefuturist.com is where I'm interviewing people who are defining the future and building the future. They're everything from science fiction authors, to people that make [inaudible 00:29:57], and decentralized infrastructure, to biohackers and artificial intelligence experts. It's a wide range of people who are on that show. So if you're interested in the future, that's a show for you, thefuturists.com.

Charlie Melcher:

I'll look forward to listening.

Robert Tercek:

Thank you very much.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks to Robert Tercek for joining me for such an interesting conversation. You can find links to his book Vaporized and to his podcast, The Futurists, in this episode's description.

Charlie Melcher:

And my warm gratitude to you our listeners. If you enjoyed the podcast and want more FoST in your life, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for our free monthly newsletter @fost.org. The Future of StoryTelling podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope we'll see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.