Sending our avatars to work with Tracey Follows – episode 15

Episode 15 summary

March 4, 2025 // 29 min, 59 sec

Work has played a key role in shaping our identities and sense of self. By 2050, that single identity will have gone, replaced by a series of avatars: the representations of ourselves we mix and edit for different situations. We will be represented, not present. What does that mean for us, for our employers?​

In this episode:

Marissa is joined by one of Forbes Top 50 Female Futurists, Tracey Follows. Tracey is Visiting Professor of Digital Futures and Identity at Staffordshire University, a consultant to global businesses and a fellow podcaster with her series The Future of You. So, what is the future of you? A single human employee with a single job or a wardrobe of avatars shapeshifting for multiple different roles?​

• We are already less ‘singular’ than we like to imagine. Will this new world simply be a new way of presenting multiple versions of ourselves in different situations?​
• Will our avatars have their own experiences, resumes and CVs, or will we – the ‘original’ behind these copies – be what employers value?​
• With us controlling how our avatars show up at work, will the digital self finally see the end of discrimination on characteristics like gender and race? ​
• Or will neurotech allow employers to collect brain data and introduce a new kind of discrimination: cognitive speed?

Episode transcript

Marissa Geist 

Welcome to “The talent time machine,” the podcast for talent leaders that takes you on a trip to the world of work in 2050. We're going to think about trends, possibilities, and new realities for talent.  

Work has played a key role in shaping our identities, our sense of self. By 2050, that single identity will have gone, replaced by a series of avatars. 

Where will we look to define who we are in the world, our identity, instead?  

I'm Marissa Geist, and I'm joined by Tracey Follows, the visiting professor of digital futures and identity at Staffordshire University and host of her own award-winning podcast series, The Future of You. Welcome, Tracey.

Tracey Follows 

Hi, Marissa. Thank you for having me.

Marissa Geist 

Okay, well, before we jump in, will you give a little background on how you get into being a talent futurist or futurist in general? How did you get here?

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, interesting. So, I worked in advertising and marketing for about 20 years, both client side and agency side. And then I was working at Telefonica actually, and Telefonica Digital as the whole digital explosion was starting to happen a long time ago now. And the CEOs kept saying to me, “Right, next time you have a board meeting in three months' time, can you do like what's a VoIP?”

“Do you think you could do a thing about…” you know, and then it'd be, “What's this? What's that?” So I ended up finding out about all these new technologies. I've always worked in technology and marketing and sort of communications. And so anyway, I over time I kind of thought, oh, yes, I'm a futurist. And I found a way to get out of advertising, actually, through a kind of leadership for women course with Charlotte Beers.

She said to me, “You're an innovative person working in a 150-year-old ad agency. You really need to think about what you are doing.” I was like, “You know what? I do.” And I found futuring back in, I think, 2012/13 found the community sort of which was a bit underground then it's not like that anymore, as you well know, and went to study strategic foresight or future studies at University of Houston and reinvented myself as a futurist.

Marissa Geist

Well, I listened to a couple of your podcasts, and the phrase that struck me about your work is insight versus foresight. So, looking at what we have today versus the foresight of what's coming in the future. So, as you know, this is a podcast about 2050. So, I'm glad to push us forward and live in the future a little bit.

And I think one of the points that you've made in your podcast is about identity and probably not being singular, because you have avatars out there representing multiple aspects of who you are to different people, whether it's here's my social avatar and this is my work avatar, this is my one of my work avatars.

So, if you have an identity that's actually parsed out into different pieces, how does that actually change our idea of identity and identity at work? Which one of those is you? And then how do you decide who shows up where? What do you think that's going to do for just identity in general, that concept?

Tracey Follows 

So, this might be a slightly long answer in that I think we have to go back to thinking about, you know, the Western ideas, concepts of identity, which focuses on the notion of authenticity. There is one consistent, all-encompassing sort of meatspace, you or me, and that's an authentic self. And wherever it shows up, it should be congruent.

So, it behaves in a very consistent manner. There's an eastern philosophy of identity, which is very different to that which is much more to do with plurality and fluidity. And so, this idea, for example, like the Buddhist idea that you’re never really you till the end because you are the summation of everything that's happened to you and all the interactions you've ever had.

And these ideas that, of course, in the middle now, which are very interesting, kind of Western culture is struggling with this idea of a very fluid identity, particularly in terms of gender, but not just gender. You're a little bit more “this” sometimes in these contexts and a little bit more of “that” in other contexts. Now, I've, we've been following a lot of work on this, and I think we are making a leap from authenticity to what I would call “prolificity.”

And this is to echo some of the work by Hans-Georg Moeller, who's a philosophy professor in Macau. So influenced by the kind of Chinese and eastern culture, which is as you went to the sort of digital sphere, you can't have an authentic self because you're not in that physical world. So, if I'm sitting in front of you physically, you know who I am.

You can sort of see me touch me, smell me, whatever. And you know that I am authentic, but you can never really be totally sure about that in a digital space, because I'm not just a presentation. I am a re-presentation. And so I am some kind of version of an authentic self. But I think it's best to get away from the whole idea of an authentic self and embrace this idea of a plurality of selves.

There's a lot of work done by Hal Stone, for example, and that's an Indian philosophy around we have many selves within the self. There are multiple selves. And this also talks to the idea of sort of code shifting. So, we are slightly different, and we speak and behave in slightly different ways depending on the audience or the relationships or the context we’re in.

And I think that that is a good idea, and I think it's one to be pursued because I think it gives us back some nuance. We treat the individual that we're speaking with, with a little bit more respect. It's more respectful, I think, than just going into work, for example, and saying, “Well, this is my authentic self, take it or leave it, you know, this is how I behave.”

Personally, I don't know what you think, but personally I think it's the worst piece of advice you could ever be given. Bring your authentic self to work. My god no one should do that.

Marissa Geist 

Because we talk about the authentic, like being authentic versus bringing your entire self to work. Like, no, I don't bring my entire self anywhere. I mean, I don't even want that out in the open. So, I think that that is right. Having situational fluency isn't being inauthentic.

Tracey Follows 

Very nice way to say it.

Marissa Geist 

Yeah, it's just being present and connecting. And I think that's actually one of the things that makes us so human is that we can connect and shift the way we act and identify with different types of people. And I think that's going to be hard. And you mentioned that I can see you and I well, I can't actually right now.

Tracey Follows 

Not right now.

Marissa Geist 

I can see a version of you. So, I know am I talking to Tracey Follows? Am I talking to an avatar you created because you need to go feed your dogs and you needed someone to rock up and talk about your work? I know it's possible now, but will we have this reality where people create a different avatar that's fit for purpose for that situation?

Tracey Follows 

Totally. Do you remember that guy who went into that court hearing and it was all done on Zoom because it was during Covid, and he was a cat. And he said, it's very interesting to me because I picked up on it at the time. He said, “It is me; it is me. I'm a cat, but it's me.”

And he was right. So, he was both those things. It was him, whoever, whatever he is or whatever his name, but he was also a cat at the same time.

Marissa Geist 

Oh, I had that too. You can ask anyone on my team when the Snapchat filters came out, which that whole platform baffled me. I tried to download it and I ended up taking 52 pictures of my double chins. It was not a successful download, but I did on in the beginning of Covid download the Snapchat filters for just Teams and then I couldn't get it off.

I was a potato for many calls, and I could not get, I tried to uninstall it. And then I had to settle for just the least obtrusive filter I could find. So, I was like tan and sparkly for like a month until we could figure out how to get it off like my camera.

But it was like, I mean, you know, I was just like, should I have cat ears in this picture? Should I be, like, windblown from the beach? But there was a whole 48-hour period where I had to take every call as a potato.

Tracey Follows 

Can I just say you hit on a very interesting thing there. So, one of the things that I've been researching for a few years is the influence of the otaku and Japanese anime. And the Japanese anime, they don't only just love the character, it's not about the character is about the characteristics, the elements of the character that they call the “mo” elements.

So, if you've got mo characteristics like as you say, you know, cat ears, pink hair, stripy socks, little fluffy tail. These are mo characteristics. And I think the way we should start to think—people will probably hate this—the way we should start to think about ourselves is we are almost characters.

We are now characters on these different platforms, in these different worlds, eventually when we've got sort of metaverse or multiverses and we should be thinking much more about our characteristics and the way in which we mix, remix, arrange, rearrange those to represent ourselves in the right way, in the right context, in the right world.

And I think this is what I would say the big shift is away from a designed self, the authentic, sort of consistent self to a data-based self. If you think about yourself as a database, it's more plural and programable, and that's the way we're going to have to think about the way we turn up in these digital or at least non-analog sort of versions of the world now.

Marissa Geist 

That's really interesting because you're putting yourself out there with ears or scales or some superpower that you're designing into your avatar, and that actually could promote an emotional connection in a way that is very cold right now.

So, a Teams call is better than just a voice to voice or, you know, a webinar like this to be able to see your face, but it doesn't really tell me a ton about who you choose to be. I see that you have the same reading glasses that I do, so we have something in common.

But you know, really, how will this new world, how will you be able to forge connections outside of, I mean, that mo identity, I think is great. Two of my children are very, very into anime. So, like it's very interesting to see, like, why is that person nine feet tall and has six limbs? They just process that as like these are their internal attributes manifested in a physical way.

So, at work, is this a way that people will promote self-expression? I mean, you and I have the coaching that puts your background on. Make sure you have something non distracting in the background.

Is it all about like designing an avatar for work like they do for Fortnite or?

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, I think so. By then, I mean I know you're looking ahead to 2050, I've been looking at this for a long time that, you know, we won't have the devices we have, we won't have a screen like an iPhone or whatever in front of us because so much of it will be ambient. So, it'll be much more like a sort of Joi character in Blade Runner 2049 or whatever.

In this sort of ambient, it'll be around us rather than on a screen, which is kind of interesting in itself that it's not distracting. You're not looking away to a screen, it's in and around in your environment. So, I think it will be like that, and you'll be able to morph, I think, between versions fairly easily, hopefully.

I mean, the interesting thing is to think, I always say when I'm presenting, you know, ideas like this, I'm talking to people, “Oh, lucky you, you'll be able to be in three meetings all at once.”

And then people obviously always kind of groan because who wants that, but you can send out three different avatars. But the interesting thing about that is this whole thing does play with time and space completely, and it completely bends it. But the question is, if I'm in three different meetings all at the same time, how do I know my avatar is representing me in a fairly consistent way?

Am I saying, you know, “two plus two is four” in one meeting and “two plus two is five” in another? And how would each of my avatar's kind of know that? So, the whole interoperability between the versions is going to be interesting.

But to go back to the otaku is, as you say about your kids, you know, and what they're interested in, the thing about that is there is no original and there are no copies. It's all one of the same things.

So, in the otaku world or the database of Mo characteristics and all this sort of stuff, the parodies are as important as what we would call the original. It's all of them, much of a muchness. And I think that's one of the things we kind of losing the original, like the authorship of things, the origination, the original is gone.

It's only copies. And so, all of the copies can kind of exist all at the same time. And we shouldn't really necessarily be searching for the original, because I don't think it's going to be like that.

Marissa Geist 

It's not the “Is this an authentic?” That's not the question to ask in the future.

Tracey Follows 

If that's an old standard, I think. Yeah.

Marissa Geist 

And that I mean, as an employer, if you're thinking about in 2050 or getting ready for 2050, how do you even start to assess is, you know, what's our stance on having you have an avatar for every meeting and bending space and time, and then how do we even know is this your work? Does it matter if it's your work?

How does that whole performance management and who are we even hiring change when we're expecting you to show up with three different avatars? Is that like, that's a totally different work life employee-employer relationship.

Tracey Follows 

It's totally different. I was watching, have you seen that Keanu Reeves clip, its gone around the internet a while now but he's explaining, I think he's talking to somebody’s nephew or nieces about The Matrix. And they said, “What's the Matrix about?” And he starts to explain, “It's like, well, there's this guy, and he's like in a kind of virtual and there's a real world.”

And he says, “So we're trying to find out what's real.” And they say, “What do you mean, what's real? Why does it matter?” So I mean, it does to me. I'm Gen X. It matters to me what's real and what's not. But I think, you know, by the time Gen A are in the workforce, by 2030/2035, I think there'll be a slightly different mindset towards it.

It's not to say that nothing's real, but there are lots of virtual realities that pretty much are just realities. Like when I've talked to young teen girls who have got virtual influencer friends and things like that, they'll say, well, of course I want to be friends with a virtual influencer. And they look at me or other researchers who've been, that I've been involved with and go, almost like, “What's wrong with you?”

Marissa Geist 

Like, “Why are you even asking, that's such a weird question.”

Tracey Follows 

Yeah. And so, it is a bit of a shift that's quite hard to get your head around if you've already been conditioned to a reality and an artifice and you think the two are completely different.

So, when we think about, you know, an employee having one or more avatars, what does it mean for an employer and how do they organize themselves or really even approach this with an employee who is represented or is representing themselves in many different ways and many different times?

Marissa Geist 

It's really fascinating. We're already seeing AI take hold in resume generation and then resume review. So, it's actually artificial intelligence creating a CV for someone and then artificial intelligence reading the validity of that CV that was created by artificial intelligence. And then even in interviews now you can show up and there's monitoring of AI to say, “Is your cadence correct? Do they seem credible?”

So, it's almost a battle of the bots until you get to the end. And I think that those are some of the things that we have to rethink. Where and when do we really want to assess what? Because right now we could actually automate and replicate or re-present… to use your term, yourself and your skills in a way that actually just creates what a robot needs to see to be able to get a job.

So, I think when we talk about what is it that we're hiring, when you talked about what is real, that's a really big question we have to grapple with as employers, what type of skills and what type of outputs are we looking for employees, and what do we care about? Do we care? Do we expect that they're showing up with multiple avatars?

I can only imagine, you know, going back to my kids, they play three video games at one time on three different systems with three different virtual players. Are they not playing those games? No, they are. But are they in all of those games simultaneously? No. They sometimes have bots doing the spamming for to get coins.

So, it's how do we think about somebody doing work like that and expecting that they have access to tools, to environments where they can be in multiple projects at one time, they can access all of the AI that they need to.

Is that the skill we're looking for? I'm not sure. So, as a recruiter, as a company, what you're looking for, what you value from employees and how you hold them accountable has to totally shift. And I don't think as Gen X-ers like you said, I don't think we know how to hold people accountable for that.

Tracey Follows 

No.

Marissa Geist 

I don't.

Tracey Follows 

I totally agree with that. It's really interesting what you say about resume though, because I'm already see, like we call it a CV, I suppose in the UK same thing isn't it?

Marissa Geist 

Same thing.

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, but as far as I'm concerned, like that's dead now. So, what is going to replace it, as you will probably know with me, is a digital wallet with digital credentials in it.

So, every time you do a course, however that is accredited and assessed, you get your digital tokens, your credentials, and they go into your digital wallet. Now the interesting thing about that is what you just been saying about playing all these virtual games. You use credentials in the games don’t you? You know, you acquire a new weapon or whatever, and then you get to fight your enemy.

And so, our skills will be credentialized like that in the same way all these attributes are, and that is the way we'll think about ourselves. So we'll be this bundle of attributes which will mix and remix and rearrange in certain different ways to present in certain different contexts and different people. So it won't be that we'll have a resume which is like an authentic thing.

Again, we will have these different credentials that will mix and remix. And I said in my book The Future of You, that we’d be like polymorphic code. So that is code where the algorithm kind of stays the same at its core, but it shows up in lots of different ways. So, six minus two is four, but so is two plus two.

There are two different ways of getting to the same number at the end of the same result i.e. you. So I think this is the way we’ll be polymorphic if you like. And I think if we start to think about that, it gives us this sense of plurality. And that's the sort of the world we need to step into.

But I agree with you. I think it's very difficult for a Gen X-er to kind of work out how exactly this is going to be. We need these little Gen A’s and not even Gen Z, because they're quite old now, to pave the way and give us all that experience from Roblox and what not.

Marissa Geist 

It's fascinating to me because I'm also Gen X. Second Life came out when I was… I mean, you remember Second Life and we're like, “Oh, it's going to be a digital world.” And turns out Second Life is for corporations. So it's like the most boring digital world ever, where you needed games to create the second world.

But I do remember one of my colleagues, we all had to man the island. So we had this, our company created an island and people took shifts where you had to have your avatar stand on the… I mean, this is, it's hilarious in retrospect but this was so cutting edge. We're standing on the island and everyone took a shift, and one of my colleagues took a shift and somebody flew over to the island.

And the whole idea was, if they wanted to ask about our company, that we would be able to answer questions. And the next morning I came into work, and she called me, and she said, “I don't think I did the right thing on the island.” I said, “Tell me what you did.” She said, “I somehow sold my clothes to somebody and paid real money for fake pot.”

And I said, “I don't think that's what we were supposed to do on the island.” And you think about that, and then you fast forward to now, where my sons are begging me for money to buy clothes for fictitious people. To buy outfits to buy tools. And Fortnite and Sims and everything. It's just, and to me, that's fake, right?

Why do you care what your fake person is wearing? But to them, it's credibility. It's being able to do their job. And then I think about if I would tell my grandmother what I do, she's like, that's a fake job. What are you producing? Nothing. I'm professional services. There's no anything tangible that I do all day. I get on calls, I produce, you know, thoughts.

And so it is that far of a leap of somebody who wasn't in the Matrix and wasn't part of the internet trying to design systems for people that are native users. It's just incredible the things they don't think we should be doing that we do, and the elimination of work and the new types of work that are created by people that actually know how to activate and live in the system versus us sort of being a late to the game tourist, literally.

Tracey Follows 

So, here's a question, because I often get this question when I'm presenting to businesses or doing like full psych courses and things like this. How does a company try and absorb learning from a very young generation like this either before they're ready to come into work, obviously, or on the cusp of without doing something incredibly patronizing, like, “Let's have a junior board!” you know, or let's do a DOW or whatever it might be.

How do you connect and integrate that young experience?

Marissa Geist 

I think that's one of the biggest questions we have right now is the early generation knows how to do things intuitively that we don't know how to do, but some of the things they do are actually quite risky. So, if we think about them bringing gen AI into the workplace, if you don't ring fence that and you let them do whatever they would normally do in your environment, you could be risking your IP, your safety, you could be scaling a discriminatory practice without knowing it.

So, I think a lot of it is creating and welcoming younger generations to experiment and try in a ring-fenced area to say, “This is a core task to our company. How would you do it if you had no restrictions on how you did it?” Watch and see how we can replicate that in a safer and better way, versus locking everything down, because the things will grow in the shadows.

We know that people use tools. You know they'll use it on their Gmail if they can't use it through the corporate. I just had to have the parking meter here. My corporate one doesn't let me use Milwaukee Parking’s app. So I had to use my Gmail account. Okay, that stuff happens all the time and my device is an intermingled personal device and a corporate device.

So, I think one of the best things you can do is create an experimentation, a safe like almost observation, experimentation area safe—and area I mean as an old physical term—but place for people to show us how they would work if they used all the tools they know how to use.

And how do you have somebody who can bridge that into a safe way of working and then apply it. So, the old business transformation groups that were a lot about command and control watching, automating, time keeping, repurpose those skills and that critical thinking to observe, watch and innovate in a way that's more responsible.

But take those native users, because I really just don't think someone like us, unfortunately, can do that we just we just aren't going to be naturally fluent in that way.

Tracey Follows 

We're looking for different things.

Marissa Geist 

Yes, we're trying to reverse engineer into the future.

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, exactly. We're looking for different things and stuff that we should notice will pass us by because you're not tuned in. We're not focused to look for that thing. It's like, as you say, it's like an experiment. You can only do an experiment once you know what you're trying to observe for.

Marissa Geist 

Exactly and not try to bring us back into the past. And I guess more on the discriminatory practices or that idea that there will be people that know how to do things and people that don't, and ways to game the system. How do you think this new way of plurality of self helps or hurts discrimination? What's a good path and what's a bad path in that sense?

Tracey Follows 

Yeah. So, it’s definitely going to discriminate. I mean, if you know how to navigate this world you’re obviously going to be at an advantage. And there's lots of older users or maybe just different kinds of users or neurodiverse users who won't think or use this stuff in the same way. Although you could argue that actually people who are a bit neurodiverse, actually this is an advantage to them.

So I think it will be, it's like everything, if you can get a handle on this kind of technology in the same way that, you know, those that can use social media and can bash out all these social media sort of engagement posts and conversations that are adept at that can actually move through their career or their organization or their startup or whatever it is, quite successfully.

So, you're going to have to be adept at this, and lots of people won't be. But actually, there's another technology I think is going to bring more discrimination into the workplace. And that's neuro tech. And that's the idea of having neurotic embedded in your headphones, your earbuds, your cap, if you're a driver, your helmet, your construction hat, if you're a builder, all these sorts of things.

And it's already happening in China and elsewhere, and it will come to the West, obviously. This is a big discriminatory practice, because if your cognition is being monitored all the time, if your brain wave data is being collected, then all of the time your cognitive capabilities are under surveillance and potentially being monitored.

And that has some very big implications, but particularly for an older generation in the workplace. So, they might be very wise. They might have loads of experience. But actually, there are some indicators on the neurotechnology which is showing that actually there's a diminishing ability in cognition or something.

Then all of the sudden we haven't just got all the old discriminations that we've got, the usual ones that are out there and obvious, we've got these sort of new discriminatory practices where we're collecting brain data.

And actually, as an employee or user, you might not even have that brain data, but your employer has got it and he's making some kind of evaluation or judgment about you. And that's a big thing I'm worried about.

So, there are plenty of nation states who are looking at how do you protect people's mental privacy. So Chile, for example, they're trying to get a piece of legislation through the parliament might have already gone through, actually, I'm not sure whether it's successful, but trying to protect the modification of your memories and the protection of your mental privacy, because they know this kind of technology is coming along and actually who knows how it's going to be applied.

But it's all to do with improving productivity and improving the individual's performance, their focus, and trying to understand when they're distracted or not focused. And so that's obviously going to come into the workplace at some point. And I think that's the most discriminatory technology we could possibly think of right now.

Marissa Geist 

Just altering realities, right. Is that me is that, I mean, you're already co-creating with machines anyway. I don't know where I'm going without Google Maps. Is that my brain? No, but it's my process to get to a place. But then when you don't know what's real, that that's something that seems very human to be scared of.

Is this my memory? Is this a memory that has been rewritten? It's interesting because humans are notorious for rewriting history in their own minds anyway.

Tracey Follows 

Exactly.

Marissa Geist 

We just don't want anyone else to be doing it for us.

Tracey Follows 

Always a battle for the mind.

Marissa Geist 

It is, it is. Well, thank you, Tracey, for coming on. I took away some very interesting points from our discussion. One is that it's all coming faster, and the plurality of beings is something that we definitely need to keep in mind as companies, as humans, as leaders, as parents, and knowing that the true self, authentic self is not something that will be a relevant term in future.

So how do we think about that? So, I really appreciate your insights, and I want to ask you just three quick fire questions to end the session. So, one is we talked a lot about digital avatars at work. But will we have digital bosses?

Tracey Follows 

Yes. Quick fire!

Marissa Geist 

Ok! Definitive and good. How would that work?

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, because I think you can have a boss in the same way that you can have a politician that is just a pure representation that has been programed to deal with you, if you like. If you think about AI agents, one could have a boss, which is literally an agent, and there is no actual human being, or there might be a set or a team of human beings behind it.

I mean, in a funny sort of way, isn't Satoshi an avatar?

Marissa Geist 

Yes. Yeah. I mean, DoorDash's app is controlling hundreds of thousands of meals every day. I suppose that's a sort of boss.

And then my next one is a bit on the plurality. If you don't need to be physically present, will you be able to have multiple jobs, collect multiple full salaries?

Tracey Follows 

Yes, possibly. I mean, I don't think kind of full salary is necessarily the way it will be by 2050. I mean, some people will still be on full salary, but I think, with the technology that's coming down the road, there's no reason why I can't complete a task and then be immediately paid for it. And that's not just micro tasks.

If you think about people in sort of customer experience, they're kind of evaluated on customer satisfaction or reviews and recommendations. If they get a good one and they're in hospitality, let's say, five minutes later, they should be receiving that payment. So, I think actually the whole monthly salary or salary position is more vulnerable in the future.

Marissa Geist 

Interesting. The renumeration of how people are paid, how people make their money. It's mind blowing to think about your resume as something you wear, with the biometric technology you're talking about.

Since we won't have resumes, we'll just be wearing our collection of experiences all represented. Will you have any editing rights to it? How do you not just show up with everything you've ever done fully unedited?

Tracey Follows 

Yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know the answer to that.

Perhaps it's going to be a freemium model. Perhaps if you pay the premium, you will get editing rights. I don't know what your wearable “blue tick” equivalent is to be verified. It will be something in your digital wallet.

But that's very good question. I think it will probably be unedited and edited if you're willing to pay the price of it, which is what so many of these things are heading towards.

You know, access is everything and you'll get different experiences if you can pay for that access.

Marissa Geist 

Curating privacy, curating access. So, somebody in the future could have a job of protecting your full self from the world, and you pay for that. Interesting.

Well, Tracey, thank you so much for your time. It's been really enjoyable to talk to you and thank you again for coming on the podcast. Good luck in your next launch of your podcast and great success with your book as well.

Tracey Follows 

Great pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Marissa.

Marissa Geist 

And join me next time on the Trip to Work 2050, in “The talent time machine.” To catch the next episode or hear from my previous guests, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform.

This episode was edited by Matt Covarrubias and produced by Dusty Weis at Podcamp Media, with the support of Sarah Smelik, John McCarron, and Laura Pykett of Heavenly and the team at Cielo of Sally Hunter, Annamarie Andrews, and Susie Schuppel-Paul.

For Cielo, thanks for listening, I'm Marissa Geist.