Phil Libin argues that nearly every activity will soon blend in-person and online, real-time and pre-recorded content. He calls this "IRL+" (In-Real-Life Plus), where technology makes sales pitches, conferences, medicine, and hiring more interactive and effective than purely physical versions ever were.
Everything in the world right now is going to be hybrid. So everything is going to be hybrid across two dimensions. Everything is going to be hybrid across the dimension of in-person and online, meaning very few things in the future are going to be in-person only. Almost everything is going to be a mix, right, in-person and online. And hybrid across the dimensions of real-time and interactive pre-recorded, right? So if you imagine this like 2x2 matrix, The world is now hybridized across those two dimensions. And what we want to do is we want to make experiences in this hybrid world that are better than the old world experiences used to be. We call it IRL+, right? In Real Life Plus. So the idea is like, how do we make things, rather than trying to say, oh, you know, sales presentations aren't as good online as they are in person, but maybe if we use technology, we can make them almost as good. Say no, like that's doomed to failure. How do we make them better than they ever were in person? How do we make conferences better than they were in person? How do we do— how do we make, you know, medicine better than it ever was? How do we make hiring better than it ever was? How do we like make all of these things better in the new world than they were 6 months ago in the old world? And mm-hmm is a big step to that. Like we just want to make certain types of presentations better than live. More interactive, more fun, more dynamic. And then we've got, you know, similar concepts for a few other industries as well.
