Last week, the president escalated his attack on truth and justice–and SNL escalated its counterattack in kind.

It’s hard to believe at this point, but last week actually started out with Sally Yates’ hearing. (Time moves differently in Trumpland. The healthcare vote less than a week before the Yates hearing now feels a thousand years past.) The former acting attorney general offered quietly explosive testimony on what the White House knew about Michael Flynn before removing him from the position of National Security Advisor. She also handily outfoxed the likes of Ted Cruz and others attempting to change the subject to her refusal to enact the president’s controversial, possibly unconstitutional travel ban. In anything like a normal week–remember those?–this story would have dominated headlines through Friday, and on Sunday morning we’d have all been talking about how Kate McKinnon absolutely slayed that Yates impersonation.

Instead, Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey the following day, and spent the rest of the week contradicting the White House’s story about why that happened. Although Comey is the one who got canned last week, the real victim was the idea of objective truth. The assault seems to be particularly hard-felt over at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Toward the end of 2016, the euphemism ‘post-truth’ got a lot of play in tandem with Trump’s ascendance. The way facts are handled in the era we’ve just entered, however, could best be described with a different term: Post-Lie. Donald Trump is so secure in his faith that a united Republican government will never undermine him, that he’s lately not even bothered to lie. Did Trump fire James Comey for the initially stated reason that Attorney General Sessions and Deputy AG Rosenstein found his handling of the Clinton investigation unsatisfactory? Or did he do it on a whim because, as he said to Lester Holt, “…when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.'” Why even bother lying anymore when you can get away with what Trump has gotten away with since taking office?

In the Saturday Night Live version of that interview, Lester Holt clutches his earpiece and asks, “Is that it? Is it over? Did I get him?” He is speaking for all of us, a nation exhausted by hearing what sound like clearly illegal acts–and then finding out no congressional Republicans care enough to look into them any further. And then, just like the rest of us, Michael Che’s Lester Holt receives the answer through his earpiece. It’s not over. He didn’t get him. The reason? “Nothing matters,” Holt says flatly.

The despair of living in a Post-Lie world where nothing matters affects everyone in this episode, though, including Sean Spicer.

After the inevitable White House press briefing sketch begins with Aidy Bryant’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders filling in abysmally for our favorite dead-eyed press-skirmisher, Melissa McCarthy makes her triumphant return. For the first time, however, Spicey is depicted as not just the over-caffeinated harbinger of Trump’s lies, but a victim of them. After a reporter implores Spicer to “just be straight with us for once,” prompting him to admit that he’s just saying what the president tells him, Sean Spicer is forced to confront the possibility that Trump is lying to him as well. He does not like this idea at all, and takes off on a Simon & Garfunkel-scored odyssey to get the truth from President Trump.

While the show doesn’t come right out and say it, Spicer here is meant to represent Trump’s base. A person would have to be in incredibly deep denial not to notice that Donald Trump tells an astonishing amount of lies, not just for a president, but for, say, a gambling addict on the run from creditors. Since not all of Trump’s supporters are in deep denial, it would stand to reason that many of them are not only aware of these lies, but in favor of them, because they are in service of Trump achieving policies they agree with. What if there’s a chance that it has never occurred to these supporters that Trump is also lying to them?

It seems unlikely that this SNL sketch will bring anyone to that realization who isn’t there already, but depicting Sean Spicer’s experience of it illustrates the conundrum. That the scene ends with him and Donald Trump making out is less illustrative, but at least it probably got Trump’s goat.

Saturday Night Live wasn’t through taking the president to task over his increasing aversion to the truth–not after the democracy-deficient week that was. Instead, the writers ramped up their attack in a hard-hitting Weekend Update segment.

Colin Jost immediately likens the White House’s flurry of excuses for the president’s sudden firing of Comey to a husband caught with glitter on his collar. He follows this quip up by explaining the suspicious nature of this firing thusly: “If a drug-sniffing dog came up to your bag at the airport, and your response was to shoot the dog, some people would wonder what’s in that bag.”

Elsewhere, Michael Che rails on Trump’s astounding claim that as a very active president, it’s impossible for his surrogates to be completely accurate. Of course, it’s not impossible, and there you have it: Donald Trump even lies about his inability to not lie.

Members of the media have been getting more comfortable pointing out Trump’s lies–not inaccurate statements, but actual lies–for a while now. Recently, however, it feels like we’re entering new territory as the lies become more threadbare, and the president can’t even be bothered anymore. It used to be, Trump’s adversaries hoped his presidency would end because of one of his lies. Now it seems like there’s a chance it could come to an end because he told the truth.

Despite the recent success of companies like Telsa, Etsy, 7th Generation, and Crowdrise, I still hear from VCs that they’re not interested in funding purpose-driven companies. After networking with Silicon Valley VCs for a decade during the Web 2.0 years when I ran a large social networking site, I felt a lot of push-back when I told them I intended to work exclusively on for-large-profit businesses that also generated a direct social benefit. The response was mostly that they’re novelties or not good VC bets.

But study them closely and you’ll find a very different story. Successful profit from purpose companies are almost always strategic deployments based on first principles, concluding that enough customers reliably prefer quality product at a fair price if it also reflects their personal values. Yet the traditional response by venture capitalists–and one I still often hear today–is they don’t want their profit de-maximized by a second bottom line. Conversely, impact entrepreneurs are often concerned that their impact will be de-maximized by servicing financial returns first. But the best for-large-profit-from-purposes find that the purpose is what generates the sustaining financial returns, and it is that profit which throws off lasting impact. For these businesses, the profit and purpose are interlocked and the way to maximize profits is consistently providing the purpose.

Traditional-minded VCs:

“I don’t like it when the greed part of my brain gets mixed up with the do-good part?”

I’m sorry you don’t understand that purpose is marketing spend for the new generation.

“Why don’t you just earn your wealth first, and then donate it afterward?”

Why don’t you want to build highly profitable business that can provide impact more reliably than your future donations?

“We don’t invest in charities?”

Charities don’t provide financial returns. I’m talking about for-large-profit businesses.

“Building a successful business is hard enough, why do you want to make it harder?”

Very few businesses are easy. Most require executing on a high level-of-difficulty. Why not make purpose the competitive advantage instead of fighting it out in a battle royale?

“I won’t IPO and put my company at the mercy of public markets.”

But you will accept the risk of having to raise money at hard times if there are a bad couple years?

“I will never sell. It would be like selling my baby.”

If your grown baby can’t protect itself from market forces, you didn’t raise it right.

For-large-profit-from-purpose businesses are not a paradox

Their purpose is what drives profit and the ability to outcompete in their market. And their profit is what allows them to outlast foundations and government programs trying to provide the same purpose. Furthermore interlocked profit-from-purpose businesses can take significant market share in even crowded sectors.

They can unlock large markets that existing mercenary businesses didn’t even see in front of them. Then, once established, profit-from-purposes intrinsically create highly defensible moats around themselves. Competitors can’t simply knock them off by matching product, price, and convenience, they have to also match brand message, good governance, customer experience and satisfaction, supply chain excellence, and company values. It’s also important to understand income isn’t lost on purpose spend: it’s usually a wash thanks to reduced marketing budgets and higher employee and customer retention.

Profit-from-purposes can also intrinsically last longer than the average S&P 500 company

These businesses employ non-extractive models and their constant commitment to their customers’ values naturally evolves them in lockstep with their revenue base. Most companies that find a good product milk it for as long as they can with endless marketing spend. A profit-from-purpose must constantly improve their offering to stay meaningful to their customers, forcing them to innovate to stay with the times.

In the old day, Ben & Jerry’s never wanted to sell because they never trusted the acquirer would uphold their ethics. In the end, they went with a high-ethics buyer, but what they didn’t realize was that customers prefer Ben & Jerry’s because of the purpose as much as they do the flavor. If the purpose went away after an acquisition, so would the customers. Now even mercenary investors and acquirers know they have to maintain the company’s purpose to keep driving profit growth. Bain & Co. bought 50% of TOMS Shoes and Campbell bought Plum Organics, yet a customer would never know there was any leadership change.

The electric example everyone knows?

Tesla began with the mission of “sustainable transport” and sold expensive, 2-seater electric roadsters. Certain rich people loved gas-free sport driving and the cars became a niche hit. Tesla sunk the proceeds into the Model S and Model X four-doors, expanding the satisfying experience to affluent families while also providing reinvented interiors, exteriors, driver interfaces, safety options, and free recharging stations. These models were also popular but with a wider audience. Those proceeds were plowed into making the Model 3 which will bring the Tesla experience closer to the fat $30,000 segment of the market. Lower margins, but much bigger market. Undoubtedly, Tesla will use the sales proceeds to eventually release an economy model.

During this same time period, sister company Solar City was reinventing a pricing model to bring home solar to most any owner. That obsession led to the ability to industrial-scale deployments as well as solar cell disguised in aesthetically pleasing roof tiles. As combined companies now, Tesla’s revised mission is “sustainable energy,” and if you want to knock off Telsa you have to challenge them as a superior renewable energy generation, storage, and transportation company. That’s an impressively defensible moat for a 14-year-old business.

Meanwhile, every other American car company is still just a car company competing on annual incremental improvements reliant on massive market spending. But to be clear, this is not to imply that neutral and mercenary companies won’t continue to generate massive financial successes. Their models are well proven and underpin much of capitalism today. I simply want to highlight that the early, seemingly anomalous success of profit-from-purpose businesses are not anomalies, they are the tip of the spear. Younger consumers seek brands that reflect their values. The world’s best accelerators are actively recruiting companies with profound missions. Elon Musk–who has been a part of three major profit-from-purpose businesses–is the most admired leader in tech. Large-profit-from-purpose businesses aren’t here to stay, they’re here to win.

Ted Rheingold helps build for-large-profit-from-purpose financial service companies. He’s currently a Sr. Advisor with Bloom Credit and was previously COO of Tala. You can follow him on Twitter @tedr.

“It was chaos,” a receptionist working the night shift at Jakarta’s Dharmais Hospital, Indonesia’s biggest cancer center, tells Fast Company. “There were 150-200 people waiting for hours and getting more impatient, waiting for their appointments. Some of them were crying.” He was just one of hundreds of thousands of people around the world at hospitals, universities, and businesses large and small who were affected by the global ransomware attack that struck computers in at least 150 countries and at its peak even forced hospitals to turn away ambulances.

“Our focus is getting our systems back up and making sure our patients don’t lose out,” says Peter Gibson, a spokesperson for the East and North Hertfordshire National Health Service Trust in the U.K., which on Monday told patients to only visit its Lister Hospital emergency unit “if it is absolutely essential or you are concerned.”

The trust was one of at least 48 regional public medical groups in the U.K. affected by malware that has struck more than 200,000 victims around the globe since Friday, spreading rapidly through a security hole in Microsoft operating systems that was revealed in a set of NSA files. The cyber attack, known as “WannaCrypt”
or “WannaCry,” encrypted files on affected computers and demanded a ransom of at least $300 be paid in bitcoin in order to access their contents, disrupting services everywhere from Chinese gas stations to Indian police departments. There’s no sign that the malware copied any data, and U.K. health systems and other affected organizations say that customer data wasn’t stolen.

Computers in Europe and Asia were particularly hard hit by the malware, which saw its spread disrupted when a security researcher registered an internet domain that acted as a “kill switch” to disable the attack code. But that didn’t help organizations that had already been struck by the malware, which led U.K. hospital operators including London’s Barts Health NHS Trust to redirect ambulances to other hospitals throughout the weekend.

“We are no longer diverting ambulances from any of our hospitals,” the trust said in a Monday statement. “Trauma and stroke care is also now fully operational. However, we continue to experience IT disruption and we are very sorry for any delays and cancellations that patients have experienced.”

“We’re not infected, but we are affected, because we’ve had to turn our computers off as a precautionary measure,” says Danny Hudson, a spokesman for the Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The move led to four operations being cancelled, and three outpatient clinics closed over the weekend, though services were restored by Monday, according to the hospital system.

The attack forced shutdowns at other types of businesses as well, including at European auto manufacturing plants run by carmakers Nissan and Renault.

“We took protective measures to immediately stop the spread of the virus and protect the [company],” says a spokesperson for Renault. “It included temporary suspension of industrial activities on some of our sites, depending on situations.”

The spokesperson didn’t have a full count of the number of sites affected, and the company had not yet computed the cost of the downtime or restoration efforts Monday. All but one plant had been restarted Monday, with the holdout in the French town of Douai set to resume operations Tuesday.

“We had some production impact, but we will make things happen in order to deliver [to] our customers on time,” the spokesperson said.

The attack also visibly struck the German railroad Deutsche Bahn, Europe’s largest train operator. While company spokesperson Lutz Müller emphasized in an email to Fast Company that train services weren’t affected and “there have not been any security risks for both our passengers and our staff,” the malware did disable some ticket machines and digital schedule boards at German rail stations. Photos of railroad monitors displaying digital ransom notes atop arrivals and departures were shared on social media over the weekend, and Müller says Deutsche Bahn deployed additional personnel to assist passengers while the systems were down.

“We are currently working hard to get all our displays running again, but this will take a few days,” he writes, adding that the railroad’s apps, website, and phone lines are working normally.

Fewer systems in the Americas appeared to be affected, though delivery giant FedEx was notably impacted, leading it to suspend money-back guarantees for FedEx Express packages slated for Saturday delivery.

“FedEx experienced interference with some of our systems which caused disruptions to the FedEx Express Memphis Hub sort operations,” the company said Saturday. “We immediately implemented contingency plans to minimize the impact to our customers. We regret any inconvenience this has caused.”

The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the company’s hometown newspaper, reported that more than 100 FedEx flights appeared to be delayed during the busy Mother’s Day weekend, but by Monday the company said systems had returned to normal.

“FedEx has resumed normal operations and systems are performing as designed,” a spokesperson said via email on Monday, declining to comment on the extent of the weekend disruption.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also reported that Lakeridge Health, a large Ontario hospital, was struck by the malware. The hospital didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from Fast Company Monday, and the CBC reported that the hospital was able to restore affected computers without an impact to patient treatment.

Universities across the globe were also affected by the attack, including China’s flagship Peking and Tsinghua universities. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s IT department warned in a Friday tweet that the ransomware was “affecting MIT folks,” though MIT officials didn’t respond to multiple requests Monday for further details. And Britain’s University of Cambridge also shut down some systems after detecting attempted attacks from the malware, according to a student newspaper, though the university said Monday no systems were ultimately infected.

“The University will continue to monitor developments closely,” a spokesperson said.

A ransomware spreading in the lab at the university pic.twitter.com/8dROVXXkQv

— １２Ｂ (@dodicin) May 12, 2017

Cybersecurity experts also continued to warn Monday that computers running versions of Windows prior to Windows 10 that haven’t been updated to fix the vulnerability could still fall victim to copycat attacks. Experts urged anyone who had not yet installed Microsoft’s security fixes, issued in March, to do so immediately. Microsoft released patches over the weekend for older, unsupported versions of Windows, including Windows XP, in an unusual move for the company. And Microsoft president Brad Smith critiqued the NSA and other spy agencies for “stockpiling” vulnerabilities that can be leaked to do damage.

The identity of who was behind the malware apparently still remained unknown on Monday. Russia, widely blamed for recent hacks on government agencies and political parties around the world, denied responsibility, reporting that about 1,000 computers in the country’s Interior Ministry were struck by the attack. About $56,000 in ransom was sent to bitcoin addresses associated with the malware, a number that trickled upward throughout Monday, according to bitcoin security firm Elliptic. It was unclear, though, whether the software’s creators would be able to claim the bounty without identifying themselves.

Experts still warned that creators of the original malware, or independent hackers, could tweak the code to allow the attack to continue despite the “kill switch” domain.

“Companies should issue a special alert to employees today to be especially careful with opening emails and attachments even if they know the person sending the email,” said Michael Patterson, CEO of security firm Plixer, in a Monday statement. “This ransomware is evolving and there may be more to this as the week continues.”

Additional reporting by Marcus Baram

As a psychologist researching misinformation, I focus on reducing its influence. Essentially, my goal is to put myself out of a job.

Recent developments indicate that I haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Misinformation, fake news, and “alternative facts” are more prominent than ever. The Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year. Science and scientific evidence have been under assault.

Fortunately, science does have a means to protect itself, and it comes from a branch of psychological research known as inoculation theory. This borrows from the logic of vaccines: A little bit of something bad helps you resist a full-blown case. In my newly published research, I’ve tried exposing people to a weak form of misinformation in order to inoculate them against the real thing – with promising results.

Two Ways Misinformation Damages

Misinformation is being generated and disseminated at prolific rates. A recent study comparing arguments against climate science versus policy arguments against action on climate found that science denial is on the relative increase. And recent research indicates these types of effort have an impact on people’s perceptions and science literacy.

A recent study led by psychology researcher Sander van der Linden found that misinformation about climate change has a significant impact on public perceptions about climate change.

The misinformation they used in their experiment was the most shared climate article in 2016. It’s a petition, known as the Global Warming Petition Project, featuring 31,000 people with a bachelor of science or higher, who signed a statement saying humans aren’t disrupting climate. This single article lowered readers’ perception of scientific consensus. The extent that people accept there’s a scientific consensus about climate change is what researchers refer to as a “gateway belief,” influencing attitudes about climate change, such as support for climate action.

At the same time that van der Linden was conducting his experiment in the U.S., I was on the other side of the planet in Australia conducting my own research into the impact of misinformation. By coincidence, I used the same myth, taking verbatim text from the Global Warming Petition Project. After showing the misinformation, I asked people to estimate the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, in order to measure any effect.

I found similar results, with misinformation reducing people’s perception of the scientific consensus. Moreover, the misinformation affected some more than others. The more politically conservative a person was, the greater the influence of the misinformation.

This jells with other research finding that people interpret messages, whether they be information or misinformation, according to their pre-existing beliefs. When we see something we like, we’re more likely to think that it’s true and strengthen our beliefs accordingly. Conversely, when we encounter information that conflicts with our beliefs, we’re more likely to discredit the source.

However, there is more to this story. Beyond misinforming people, misinformation has a more insidious and dangerous influence. In the van der Linden study, when people were presented with both the facts and misinformation about climate change, there was no net change in belief. The two conflicting pieces of information canceled each other out.

Fact and “alternative fact” are like matter and antimatter. When they collide, there’s a burst of heat followed by nothing. This reveals the subtle way that misinformation does damage. It doesn’t just misinform. It stops people believing in facts. Or as Garry Kasporov eloquently puts it, misinformation “annihilates truth.”

Science’s Answer To Science Denial

The assault on science is formidable and, as this research indicates, can be all too effective. Fittingly, science holds the answer to science denial.

Inoculation theory takes the concept of vaccination, where we are exposed to a weak form of a virus in order to build immunity to the real virus, and applies it to knowledge. Half a century of research has found that when we are exposed to a “weak form of misinformation,” this helps us build resistance so that we are not influenced by actual misinformation.

Inoculating text requires two elements. First, it includes an explicit warning about the danger of being misled by misinformation. Second, you need to provide counterarguments explaining the flaws in that misinformation.

In van der Linden’s inoculation, he pointed out that many of the signatories were fake (for instance, a Spice Girl was falsely listed as a signatory), that 31,000 represents a tiny fraction (less than 0.3 percent) of all U.S. science graduates since 1970 and that less than 1 percent of the signatories had expertise in climate science.

In my recently published research, I also tested inoculation but with a different approach. While I inoculated participants against the Petition Project, I didn’t mention it at all. Instead, I talked about the misinformation technique of using “fake experts”– people who convey the impression of expertise to the general public but having no actual relevant expertise.

I found that explaining the misinformation technique completely neutralized the misinformation’s influence, without even mentioning the misinformation specifically. For instance, after I explained how fake experts have been utilized in past misinformation campaigns, participants weren’t swayed when confronted by the fake experts of the Petition Project. Moreover, the misinformation was neutralized across the political spectrum. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, no one wants to be deceived by misleading techniques.

Putting Inoculation Into Practice

Inoculation is a powerful and versatile form of science communication that can be used in a number of ways. My approach has been to mesh together the findings of inoculation with the cognitive psychology of debunking, developing the Fact-Myth-Fallacy framework.

This strategy involves explaining the facts, followed by introducing a myth related to those facts. At this point, people are presented with two conflicting pieces of information. You reconcile the conflict by explaining the technique that the myth uses to distort the fact.

We used this approach on a large scale in a free online course about climate misinformation, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. Each lecture adopted the Fact-Myth-Fallacy structure. We started by explaining a single climate fact, then introduced a related myth, followed by an explanation of the fallacy employed by the myth. This way, while explaining the key facts of climate change, we also inoculated students against 50 of the most common climate myths.

Science has, in a moment of frankness, informed us thatthrowing more science at peopleisn’t the full answer to science denial. Misinformation is a reality that we can’t afford to ignore–we can’t be in denial about science denial. Rather, we should see it as an educational opportunity. Addressing misconceptions in the classroom is one of the most powerful ways to teach science.

It turns out the key to stopping science denial is to expose people to just a little bit of science denial.

John Cook is research assistant professor, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University. This story originally appeared at The Conversation. 

On Monday in front of the New York stock exchange, Julia Steyn, head of General Motors’ urban mobility project, announced the company’s app-enabled car-sharing product, Maven, will now be more broadly available in New York City.

When the company first launched in the city, Maven was only available to residents of certain luxury buildings. The program has grown into more public garages, where anyone can rent one of 80 cars starting at $10 per hour.

Maven launched a year and a half ago and has since blossomed to 17 markets around the country, serving roughly 20,000 users, most of whom are around 30 years old, the company says. The platform is an attempt to get ahead of major changes coming to the automotive industry, like cars that can drive themselves without a human manning a steering wheel.

It’s not just the inevitability of self-driving cars that’s driving manufacturers to embrace innovation. Consumer preference seems to be slowly entering a new phase. Interest in car ownership appears to be waning, according to a 2016 McKinsey report. It notes that not only are a decreasing share of people aged 16 to 24 licensed to drive, but the number of car-sharing members (with companies like Zipcar) is increasing.

“Consumers prefer to consume transportation as a service,” Steyn posited as she spoke to reporters outside the New York Stock Exchange.

GM’s promotion of its foray into on-demand cars comes as many original equipment manufacturers, ride-hailing apps, and tech companies large and small are sussing out how they can be involved in the self-driving car market. Maven COO and former vice president at Zipcar Dan Grossman explained to me some of the advantages of being part of a car manufacturer in this burgeoning space.

For one, Maven pays nominal fees to use GM’s fleet and can repair cars quickly because it has access to GM’s dealership service infrastructure. Of course, Uber and Lyft don’t own any vehicles, which means neither incur maintenance costs. But not having their own vehicles also hampers their ability to test, develop, and iterate on self-driving technology. This matters more for Uber, because it has big ambitions to be one of the top self-driving technology companies. Lyft on the other hand is leaning on partnerships to explore putting autonomous cars on its platform (it has struck deals with GM’s Cruise unit and more recently Google’s Waymo).

Grossman also sees uniformity across Maven cars as a bonus from a user experience perspective–like walking into a Starbucks or McDonald’s, a person always knows what they’re getting. Since all the cars for rent are GM cars, they all have roughly the same feature set and build.

Furthermore, this fleet of cars allows Maven to rent out to businesses as well as consumers. Among its rental offerings, Maven has commercially insured “gig” cars that it rents to people who freelance for services like Roadie, GrubHub, Instacart, Uber, or Lyft. That product is currently limited to the San Diego region, but will eventually come to more cities.

Finally, Grossman notes, the car-sharing program markets GM’s cars to users who may want to become car owners down the road.

From a point of profitability, he says it’s a matter of balancing a ratio of car members to trip length. The more miles or hours drivers typically use in a given market, the fewer overall drivers Mavens needs to turn a profit. Similarly, markets where drivers tend to borrow a car for shorter distances require a stronger user base in order for the venture to make money.

Maven, still in its early days, is not turning a profit. But Grossman is hopeful that Maven can prove an attractive option for longer drives and business travelers who need a car while they’re hopping from city to city.

The security flaw that caused last week’s devastating worldwide “WannaCry” ransomware attack was the worst of all types of bugs. A so-called “remote code execution” vulnerability in older versions of Microsoft Windows gave the cybercriminals behind the attack full control over infected machines. After successfully infecting a PC, the worm encrypted data files and posted a demand for ransom; it then began spreading over the corporate network, using a flaw in an old and notoriously insecure networking protocol.

To wreak their havoc, the unknown attackers behind this outbreak used a tool originally developed by the U.S. National Security Agency to break into networks belonging to hostile foreign powers. That tool was one of nine released onto the internet in April by a separate but equally mysterious group of hackers called the Shadow Brokers and weaponized in less than a month for this attack.

As shocking as the attacks have been, they were made possible by issues that the IT experts responsible for maintaining Windows systems have known about for many years–some of which involve decisions that Microsoft made in the previous century:

This type of outbreak has happened before

IT pros who’ve been in the business for more than 15 years have painful memories of the first decade of the 21st century, when one internet worm after another attacked PCs and corporate networks worldwide. As in the current attack, the Code Red and Nimda worms (2001) and Blaster (2003) were capable of jumping from one PC to another over a network. Microsoft responded in 2002 with a fundamental change in the way it developed Windows and other software, called Trustworthy Computing.

The primary victims were running outdated Windows versions

PCs running the latest Windows release, Windows 10, are immune to the WannaCry worm. In March, Microsoft released a software fix for PCs running Windows 7, and network administrators who installed that update promptly were also protected from infection. PCs running Windows XP, which was originally released in 2001, were especially likely to be victimized. Microsoft ended support for Windows XP in 2014, and only large customers who pay dearly for extended support contracts get security patches.

In some cases, updating the software isn’t an option

Even conscientious IT pros can face a dilemma when critical equipment such as an MRI machine is running an old operating system and the manufacturer no longer provides upgrades. Taking that expensive piece of machinery out of service isn’t an option, but leaving it connected to a network introduces significant risks.

This nightmare was predictable and completely preventable

The software flaw that made this outbreak possible was in a piece of code called Server Message Block version 1 (SMBv1, for short). By internet standards, this protocol is downright ancient, dating back to the early 1990s. Microsoft began warning customers in November 2016 to stop using it and issued an even more urgent warning in March, along with software updates for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Those who didn’t heed those warnings are paying the price today.

Austerity budgets and outsourcing exacerbated the problem

Critics in the U.K. have already pointed the finger at budget cuts, including the government’s decision to save roughly £5.5 million this year by not renewing a custom support agreement for its large installed base of Windows XP PCs. But IT pros worldwide say budget cuts have turned their departments into the equivalent of emergency room doctors, dealing only with the most urgent issues. Typical IT departments don’t have the money to invest in infrastructure improvements as a strategic bulwark against precisely this sort of attack, and the rise of outsourced IT departments means those who are doing support tasks don’t have a say in critical business decisions.

Through a happy accident, security researchers were able to disable WannaCry quickly, stopping it in its tracks within a day. But the combination of vulnerable PCs and networks, inadequate budgets, and frazzled IT departments means that it’s only a matter of time until another wave arrives.

Ed Bott has been covering Microsoft software for IT pros for two decades. He’s the author of more than 25 books on the Windows operating system and security.

This Wednesday and Thursday, Google is holding its annual developer shindig, I/O. The conference will turn the Shoreline Ampitheatre near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. into an amusement park for nerds. With any luck, CEO Sundar Pichai won’t lead off on a dark note, as Mark Zuckerberg did by acknowledging a murder shared on Facebook at Facebook F8 and Satya Nadella did by referencing the possibility of technology leading us into an Orwellian future at Microsoft’s Build.

Pichai will likely have much sunnier things to say about his company’s work in artificial intelligence and how it’s finding its way into all sorts of products. The company’s main challenge this year is maintaining the excitement it generated–in tech circles, at least–with last year’s I/O announcements. It will be a hard act to follow: At I/O 2016, Google announced the Google Assistant AI service, a new VR platform called Daydream, a smart speaker called Home, and new messaging and video-call apps known as Allo and Duo, respectively.

At this year’s I/O, Google could fill its keynote and other sessions only with news about these products and have a worthehile event. But announcing incremental improvements is never as sexy as announcing wholly new platforms. It’ll be interesting to see how the company divides the keynote time between platform updates and completely new matters. Here’s what to watch for:

Google Assistant, One Year Later

The company will almost certainly announce some new tricks for its virtual Assistant–Google’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana. These new capabilities will likely relate to expanded subject-area knowledge and greater sensory awareness and communicativeness. We may hear about advances in image-recognition technology, voice recognition, and comprehension. The Allo messaging app announced at last year’s I/O hasn’t exactly proved world-changing, which may be an indication that its Assistant skills need broadening.

Google will likely talk about all the places Assistant is showing up–in the home, the car, and beyond–and announce some new ones. But as Axios‘s Ina Fried points out, Google also has some work to do to make it clear to developers and the public just what Assistant is. Is it more like Siri, which is core to to iOS and provides AI and natural-language features for numerous Apple platforms? Or is it more like Amazon’s Alexa, which can power third-party devices, too?

Google Assistant For iOS

One rumor du jour (from Android Police) says that Google will be announcing a full-on Assistant app for the iPhone. Assistant already lives inside Google’s Allo iOS app, but the scuttlebutt says the new standalone app will both include a chat interface and support voice commands.

A Brainier Google Photos

Chances are very high that Google will update its Photos app, very likely with some new artificial intelligence features. Details are scarce on this one.

Virtual Reality

A session on I/O day 2 with Google’s head of VR, Clay Bavor, will feature Google’s VR initiatives, including its Daydream VR headset and platform and the YouTube VR content channel. Google might even announce new third-party Daydream headsets (or new phones that power them).

… And Augmented Reality

That day-two session will also cover Google’s Project Tango augmented-reality technology, which superimposes digital imagery onto real-world imagery as seen through the lenses and sensors of a tablet or smartphone. There’s a good chance we’ll see more Tango-enabled devices announced. (Lenovo was first out with a Tango phone last year in its Phab 2 Pro, which uses a 16-megapixel rear camera and four depth-sensing cameras to support Tango’s 3D augmented-reality experience.)

As we saw Microsoft do at last week’s Build, Google may take steps at I/O to unify its AR and VR efforts into a “mixed reality” story. The current Daydream VR headsets are a completely occluded experience (you can’t see the outside world at all), while AR experiences depend on melding digital imagery with your physical surroundings. Because some tech companies view VR as a limited opportunity, while seeing AR as potentially more popular with users, there’s a drive to combine the two technologies into a single headset and controllers. This would require a new hardware design, something there’s an outside chance we’ll see at I/O.

The Evolution Of Google Home

Another embodiment of Assistant is the Google Home smart speaker device, which Google launched at last year’s I/O as its answer to Amazon’s Echo. The company may be ready to release the follow-up with some new features. It’ll almost certainly announce more ways that third-party developers can use Home as an end point for their apps or services. At present, Amazon is the company to beat in the smart-speaker wars, and it has added new skills and integrations for the connected home at a furious pace over the past year.

The Next Version Of Android

Google has already released a preview of its next OS to developers. Expect the company to spend a good deal of keynote time detailing the upgrade’s capabilities. So far, we know that Android O adds features such as icons that move and adapt to their environment, picture-in-picture video, and form auto-fill functions.

Google In The Car

In 2014, the tech giant introduced Android Auto, a system that lets people project content from their Android smartphones to their car’s in-dashboard screen. The software now runs on 300 car models. Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman and Mark Bergen report that Google will have some Audi Q8 and Volvo V90 SUVs at I/O to demonstrate a new Android-flavored OS built just for automobile touch-screen systems. This new OS resides in the vehicle rather than getting its smarts from an Android phone.

As marketers and agencies continue to search for the perfect balance between data and creativity, three companies have teamed up to support a handful of startups with promising technology that could help their innovation aims. Agency R/GA is launching its latest venture studio program with holding company Interpublic (IPG) and Snap Inc., focused on mobile marketing tech, and now they’ve announced the eight participating companies, whose specialties span video creation and consumption, data, analytics, commerce, machine learning, and personalization.

Adludio is a sensory advertising platform connecting users and brands with high-impact creative and made-for-mobile experiences. Dashbot is a bot analytics platform that helps brands and developers increase user acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Humblee is a video platform to help companies tell stories at scale. Lytics is a data platform that helps companies personalize engagement with customers. PopWallet uses mobile wallet tech to help brand marketers manage promotions and other branded content. Quickframe creates short-form original video at scale. Relative Insight uses language data to help brands better understand and relate to audiences. And finally, Whalar helps brands connect with Instagram influencers.

R/GA executive vice-president and global chief operating officer Stephen Plumlee says the focus of the program is to explore what the next wave of marketing technology will be, given the prominence of social platforms and mobile engagement alongside the rise of AI, bots, and other analytics and personalization enabling technologies. “We worked to identify startups creating the products, tools, and services that will enable brands and agencies to leverage the full potential, reach, and consumer data that platforms like Snapchat can provide, and enable them to engage consumers with more relevant, strategic, and personalized content,” says Plumlee. “We specifically looked at startups who were making it easier for brands and advertisers to leverage social platforms as a whole.”

In a statement, Snap Inc. chief strategy officer Imran Khan said, “We are excited to work with and support the growing ecosystem of partners that are innovating in the mobile advertising space, from leaders like IPG and R/GA to the startups selected for this program. We believe it will help advertisers of all sizes take advantage of increasingly engaging and creative ad formats for smartphones.”

The program, hosted at R/GA’s New York office, ends on September 27 with an invite-only demo event where each startup will have the opportunity to present their products to industry leaders, investors, and press. Each company in the program will collaborate with and receive feedback and guidance from senior product and strategy leaders within Snap Inc. And, as with all R/GA Ventures programs, R/GA will be helping each company with product development, business strategy, marketing, branding, design, and technology services.

Plumlee says a program like this provides a unique opportunity for corporate partners to collaborate in the identification of market opportunities, and a programmatic approach to identifying startups, and partnering with them to pursue success in those markets.

“One unique aspect of the program was the opportunity for a company like Snap Inc. to directly connect their creative and product development teams with the R/GA and IPG agency teams whose clients are eager to leverage the platforms and products to reach consumers in new and more compelling ways,” says Plumlee.

This is the eighth venture studio program R/GA has run, with its ninth–Verizon Media Tech Venture Studio–set to kick off in July.

To say that Max Levchin has a busy schedule would be an understatement. Best known for being a cofounder and former CTO of PayPal, he went on to become a board member and investor in Yelp and Evernote after PayPal’s sale to eBay in 2002. (PayPal and eBay eventually split in 2014.)

In 2012, he cofounded Affirm, the consumer finance company where he holds the title of CEO today. He also sits on the board of Glow, a fertility tracking app that he founded out of of his own data-driven investment lab, HFV Labs.

Related: Unfinished Business–Max Levchin’s Quest To Build The Next PayPal 

But despite Levchin’s intense schedule, there is one activity that he religiously does every single day–riding his bike. Fast Company recently caught up with Levchin to find out more about how his cycling obsession makes him a better entrepreneur, and why he finds it easier to train hard when he has a lot on his plate.

Morning Routine

I always get up between 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., depending on when I actually get to bed, and how much time I have before my first meeting. I typically work for an hour after I wake up, deal with whatever has happened overnight, and figure out what’s happening that week.

Within an hour, I’m on the bike. Depending on the weather, time of year, sunrise time, I go outside–across the Golden Gate Bridge, and past the hills of the Marin Headlands. But if it’s too cold or too rainy, I have a bike trainer set up and I can hop on it indoors–same bike, same geometry, same everything. 

I do this every single day. On very rare exceptions, if I have a really late night and require more sleep, I might change my schedule and work out in the afternoon.  

Cycling And Entrepreneurship

There’s a lot of reasons why I love road cycling. On the physical side, it’s one of the few sports where the learning curve is inverted. A lot of times you pick up a sport and it’s just a struggle. You have to persevere to eventually become good enough. With cycling it’s the other way around. You start and you improve so rapidly.

There’s also a lot of parallels between cycling and entrepreneurship. It’s an endurance sport, you pretty much have to condition yourself to put up with a certain amount of pain with the knowledge that you can quit, if you’re too cold or too hungry or whatever. The only way you finish the ride is if you decide that it doesn’t really matter that it hurts, you just have to get through it.

This whole notion of riding through the pain has great parallels with entrepreneurship where there’s always a low point. If you weren’t really committed, you would quit. But if there is a commitment to the cause, an idea that drives you, that propels you to continue.

A Forced Break

When I’m on my bike, it’s a fairly long period of time where I’m forced not to think about work. In my case, that’s actually a hard thing to do. Even if I have some kind of work crisis, I just get on my bike first thing in the morning, and for at least 90 minutes, I don’t spend much time thinking, which is good, because by the time I get to the office, I have a fresh point of view.

Rigid Schedule and Compartmentalization

I tend to be more organized the busier I am, and I think that’s true for a lot of other people. I think if you have lots of freedom to say, “Well, I’ll work out hard tomorrow, today’s going to be an easy day,” you actually spend a lot of days not working out very hard at all.

I have a lot of friends who’ll say, I’m going to skip the gym today because I trained hard yesterday, and then they end up skipping it for two days. I think it’s a lot easier to maintain a consistently intense schedule, as opposed to occasionally do bursty workouts that might or might not happen the next day.

I don’t find it that difficult to balance my cycling and my work, because the more intense my work gets, the more regimented everything becomes for me. When the intensity of my work is very high, I know I can’t spend more than x hours or x minutes on a specific task, or something else will fall behind.

Similarly, I have no room to decide whether I need an extra 15 minutes of sleep and hit the snooze button. If I’m not up at the right time, I will miss a few minutes on my bike. Some people have trouble following rigid schedules, but I don’t.

Cycling As A Networking Activity

I think that going for a group ride creates a great sense of camaraderie and brings a whole new level of intensity in relationships. I think this is true for any sport–you get a quick picture of what happens to this person when they’re put under pressure. You get a truer version of someone when they’re on a bike next to you, and that creates authenticity. It’s a very powerful thing when you’re trying to get to know someone.

If you’re thinking about cheating on your next test, you just might wind up becoming the next Donald Trump–or so goes the choose-your-own-adventure storyline of Naïve New Beaters’ music video for their single, “Words Hurt.”

Directed by Roman Chassaing, the malleable short film stars the band’s frontman, David Boring, as the hero whose fate is determined by the choices you make as a viewer. At the top of the screen, there is a row of yellow boxes with questions marks on them, and your decisions power exactly how much of the adventure you unlock. Your journey could be gloriously epic or a very abrupt burnout.

View “Words Hurt” here and remember to choose wisely.

U.S. President Donald Trump says that he’s on a mission to put Americans first, but as an industry that has historically relied upon its ability to attract the best and brightest from around the world, technology leaders are concerned that some of his rhetoric might impose challenges on their international recruiting efforts.

Though Trump’s executive orders banning immigrants from seven countries were ultimately blocked, the promised reforms to the H-1B visa program for international workers remains to be seen. His overall hostility to immigration may give tech workers from abroad reason to pause before bringing their talents to the U.S.

A decrease in immigration could have a big impact on growth in the tech industry. More than half of all American startups that are valued at $1 billion or more were founded or cofounded by immigrants, according to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, and the combined value of the U.S.’s immigrant-founded unicorns are approximately equivalent to half the stock markets of Russia or Mexico. The study also found that immigrants were key members of management or product development teams in over 70% of these U.S. success stories.

“We just can’t produce enough people with the requisite skills and knowledge to fill all the jobs in tech, especially on the engineering and programming side,” venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk tells Fast Company. “If we want our own companies to succeed and keep creating jobs and producing wealth and paying taxes here, we have to have access to talent.”

I spoke to several tech leaders at the Collision conference in New Orleans recently about their predictions on how stricter immigration regulations could impact the tech industry. Here’s what they said.

1. The U.S. May Lose Its Standing As The Top Destination For Free Agents

Tusk likens this longstanding advantage to free agency in sports. “If you can attract all the best players because they want to play for you, you’re going to do really well,” he says, adding that any friction or uncertainty in the immigration process can discourage people from playing for the American team. “Why would you voluntarily take away your greatest inherent advantage?” he asks.

Tusk doubts the president will attempt another travel ban, though he believes that the damage from the first two attempts could linger.

2. Silicon Valley Is At Greater Risk Of Becoming The Next Detroit

Whether or not another drastic change to immigration policy is attempted by the Trump administration, “It is not a good look for the country, that’s for sure,” Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says.

Ohanian explains that there would be no Reddit without immigration, recalling witnessing his German-born mother’s U.S. citizenship ceremony as one of the proudest moments of his life.

“We still lead the world when it comes to tech innovation, but we can take a lot of lessons from history in knowing that we should not ever be complacent,” he says. “There are countless industries where America has led the world and eventually been usurped.”

Ohanian explains that while it may have taken generations for the U.S. to lose its competitive advantage in other industries, the disruptive nature of technology has the potential to expedite the process.

“In tech, everything moves so quickly, and we embrace that fact, we know it’s the cost of doing business,” he says. “That’s why we want as much innovation in our ecosystem as possible.”

3. U.S. Talent May Become More Costly

Any logjam in the flow of foreign talent to the United States as a result of changing immigration policy has the potential to ramp up competition for domestic talent at home, suggests Russell Smith, the cofounder and chief technology officer of Rainforest, a San Francisco-based application testing platform.

“If H-1B visas get shut down even more than they are now, then the competition will go up, because the big companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, which hire so many people through these programs, will be hungry for people,” he says. “That will make it pretty hard for younger startups to compete.”

4. International Talent May Become More Remote

As British immigrants that employ 50 people in San Francisco and 20 more that work remotely around the world, Smith and his cofounder have found that hiring remote talent abroad has never been easier for American tech employers. Smith suggests that Silicon Valley will remain the center of the technology universe for the foreseeable future, as the home of much of the country’s venture capital funds and corporate headquarters, but that doesn’t mean employees need to actually step foot on American soil.

“We’re hiring from places where they’ve got a good education, good experience, and they’ve moved somewhere without a giant tech scene but are still tech people, so we can hire them, and they can work where they want,” says Smith. “I believe that’s going to the be the future; not having to work in one central location.”

5. Worker Classification May Finally Be Addressed

While the Trump administration’s immigration policies could exacerbate the talent shortage in the tech industry, some believe that his administration is likely to address one key area of concern for many tech employers. With the rise of freelance, gig, and remote workers, the United States still lacks a classification system that addresses this growing segment of the population.

“I don’t think that Trump has any personal view or awareness of this issue, but certainly the needs of labor unions are not a factor in how he or congressional Republicans look at this issue,” says Tusk.

The venture capitalist, who previously served as deputy governor of Illinois, special adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer–suggests that loyalty to labor unions may have prevented the previous administration from addressing the issue. “I think people like Paul Ryan are really interested [in addressing working classification],” he says. “I don’t think anyone at the White House has thought about it at all, but if they put a bill on the president’s desk, he’ll sign it.”

Tusk adds that while hiring foreign talent may become more difficult, the new administration has shown interest in easing burdens for employers when hiring Americans. However, Tusk thinks there just simply isn’t enough domestic talent to keep the country’s technology industry ahead of global competition.

Last week, the Marines Corps unveiled its first-ever, female-led recruitment ad. The spot “Battle Up,” created by agency JWT Atlanta, chronicles one officer’s journey from schoolgirl to athlete to soldier and beyond. It stars a real Marine, Capt. Erin Demchko, who served in Afghanistan, and is currently a deputy commander at Camp Courtney in Okinawa, Japan.

The ad comes at an interesting time for the Corps, which is not long from a scandal in which hundreds of service members shared illicit photos of their female counterparts on a Facebook group. Overall, out of 183,000 members, about 8.3% of the Marine Corps is female. That is the U.S. military’s lowest percentage of women, and the Corps wants at least 10% representation by 2019.

JWT Atlanta chief creative officer Vann Graves says the new Battles Won strategy, which launched last month with a spot focused on the Marine Corps legacy, revolves around  the Marines’ indomitable fighting spirit they use to engage and defeat all enemies, figurative and literal. And this new ad is no exception.

“When the Marine Corps asked how we should make an ad to appeal to women, we knew that the way to do this wasn’t to make a female ad, but to make a Marine ad that shows the various battles someone who joins the Marines would fight. It just so happened to feature a female,” says Graves.

The agency’s approach to a female-focused ad wasn’t any different from other efforts for the Corps. But Graves says they did have to pay close attention to how the Marine Corps is currently structured. They couldn’t make the Marine an Infantry Officer because no woman has yet passed the Infantry Officer’s course at Officers’ Candidate School. They also had to chose a battle scenario that a non-Infantry Officer might face, in this case, Logistic Officers encountered and fought roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We also needed to show how her fighting spirit could be manifested before, during, and after her time in the Marine Corps,” says Graves. “So we used scenarios that tackled real issues such as bullying or homelessness. In the end, our litmus test was would this commercial work just as well for a male as it does for a female? The answer was most definitely.”

Marine recruitment isn’t like selling shampoo. Signing up is a profound decision for anyone to make. Graves says the primary consumer insight behind the ad is that for a decision of this magnitude, they don’t treat potential prospects as consumers at all, they’re citizens. “This is where our industry can sometimes fail civic brands by trying to bribe or incentivize people into doing their civic duty,” says Graves. “Put another way: consumers don’t go to war, citizens do. So we took what the Marine Corps is about and translated their story in a way that we expect will get people to aspire to be the kinds of citizens the Marine Corps needs.”

The other citizen insight is that there are two kinds of service in this country, what Graves calls the blood and soil patriot culture, and the community service-global citizen culture. “We call this the Rambo-Bono gap,” says Graves. “The Marines need to bridge this gap to attract a broad cross-section of highly qualified youth. By emphasizing the fighting spirit, we can bridge this gap without minimizing the elite warrior nature of the brand.”

Perhaps predictably, the spot has been met with both praise and critics jeering it for political correctness. But the Marine Corps is meeting the jeers head on across social media. The BBC quoted Facebook commenter Chris Clark, “Had to be a chick…tired of all this political correct bull****… now let all the man haters come out of the woodwork…”

And the Marine Corps reply, “That’s not a ‘chick’, Chris. You’re watching a Marine.”

Spencer Glendon is a very impressive guy. He was a Fulbright Scholar, earned a PhD in economics from Harvard, helped charities on the South Side of Chicago, and is currently a partner at one of the biggest money management funds in Massachusetts.

While doing these things, he was almost always extremely ill. In high school, Glendon suffered from chronic ulcerative colitis. This led to serious liver problems, and eventually to a weakened immune system. For Glendon, there was no negotiating with his body. It would fail him and he would be bedridden again. Sounds awful, but as he likes to say, “I’ve had what I think of as the good fortune to be physically compromised almost through my entire life.”

Glendon couldn’t live life like his peers, but that didn’t mean he had to be miserable. In fact, a big source of his persistence in the face of such health troubles–and of his success overall–was Glendon’s readiness to quit.

Grit Needs Limits

Early on, Glendon’s therapist told him to focus on accomplishing one thing a day. If he could do just that one thing, he could feel good about himself. His energy was limited, but if he focused on just one thing, he could still do some of what he wanted. So that’s what he did.

Sometimes it was just making dinner. If he could cook dinner that night he would have accomplished something. He had to quit a lot of activities, but he could still achieve one thing. He would do the one thing that day, and one thing the next, and the next. Now, when he’s at his sickest, Glendon still makes dinner.

Coming to terms with his illness taught him something that almost all of us overlook: Everything we do in life is a trade-off. There was no way for Glendon to say, “I want to do this” without also saying, “And I’m willing to give that up to do it.”

We don’t like to think about limits, but we all have them. While grit is often about stories, quitting is often an issue of limits–pushing them, optimizing them, and most of all, knowing them. Glendon could not deny or ignore his. He was forced to acknowledge trade-offs and focus his little energy on the things that mattered–and to quit doing everything else.

Related:Your New Job Is A Nightmare But You Can Still Quit And Save Your Career 

“Quit” doesn’t have to be the opposite of “grit.” This is where “strategic quitting” comes in. Once you’ve found something you’re passionate about, quitting secondary things can be an advantage, because it frees up time to do that number-one thing.

Quit With Intention–And Before You Burn Out

We all quit, but we often don’t make an explicit, intentional decision to quit. We wait for graduation or Mom to tell us to stop or we get bored. We fear missing opportunities, but the irony is by not quitting unproductive things ASAP we are missing the opportunity to do more of what matters or try more things that might.

They say time equals money, but they’re wrong. When researchers Gal Zauberman and John Lynch asked people to think about how much time and how much money they’d have in the future, the results didn’t add up. We’re consistently conservative about predicting how much extra cash we’ll have in our wallets, but when it comes to time, we always think there will be more tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year.

That’s one of the reasons we all feel so rushed, so tired, and like we’re not getting enough done or making enough progress. We all have only 24 hours in a day. Every day. If we use an hour for this, we’re not using it for that. But we act like there are no limits.

Related:5 Myths About Burnout 

When we choose an extra hour at work, we are, in effect, choosing one less hour with our kids. We can’t do it all and do it well. And there will not be more time later. Time does not equal money, because we can get more money. We hear story after story of the great and powerful who persisted and won. Not too many stories get passed along about the great quitters of history. If persistence works so well, do successful people in the real world ever quit?

Pick One Thing To Quit Tomorrow

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, did an exhaustive study of companies that turned themselves around and went from disappointments to huge successes. What he found was that most of the big changes they made weren’t about new initiatives but about the bad things they needed to stop doing.

When we hear about the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that experts perform to become great, that number seems overwhelming. But it all starts to click once you realize how many other activities successful people are discarding in order to free up more time for improvement. It’s no surprise that hours matter.

Merely knowing how many hours a student spent studying in college is predictive of how much money they make later in life. That’s not a huge surprise, but they could have been partying, they could have been doing extracurricular activities. They made a choice, conscious or not. Once you get into the working world, it’s not all that different.

Think of it this way: If you practice something one hour a day, that’s 27.4 years to reach the 10,000-hour mark of expertise. But what if you quit a few less important things and made it four hours a day? Now it’s 6.8 years. That’s the difference between starting something at twenty and being an expert when you’re 47 and starting at 20 and being world-class at 27.

So what’s the first step? Know your number-one priority. Then start quitting stuff that isn’t as important, and see what happens. You’ll learn really fast if something really is more essential than you thought.

This article is adapted from Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong by Eric Barker. It is reprinted with permission by HarperOne, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers.

The people have spoken, and they want virtual reality to be social.

When you show most people VR for the first time, their reaction is almost inevitable: First their jaw drops, then they say “wow,” and then finally, after taking off the headset, they say something along the lines of, “That was amazing. What’s next?”

Although consumer virtual reality is still a fairly new technology, having been widely available for only a year and a half or so, the “what’s next” question has been hard to answer. There are numerous games, and lots of short cinematic experiences. There are 360-degree travel videos, some music, some live sports, and a variety of other single-person content. All told, reported analysts at Greenlight Insights last fall, VR is expected to become a $38 billion industry by 2026.

Now a new study from Greenlight Insights suggests that if makers of devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Daydream View want to lure in the masses, they need to make it possible for people to do things together in virtual reality.

To be sure, there’s no shortage of efforts to meet that need. Last month, for example, Facebook unveiled Spaces, its first public social VR project, which allows Rift users to hang out together in a private room, create and share virtual objects, and even video chat with people in the real world. Other companies that have invested heavily in social VR include AltspaceVR and High Fidelity.

Those companies may well be on the right track.

According to Greenlight’s study, 67% of those surveyed said they are interested in social VR. And of those who have already tried virtual reality, that number shoots up to 78%.

Perhaps more interesting, the percentage of respondents who said they’d use social VR apps at least once a week was 75.7%, including 28.1% who reported they’d want to spend time using social VR every day.

And why not? While some worry that VR presents just another way for people to lose sight of their real lives, it also offers people who are far from each other a way to spend meaningful time together doing things like playing games, watching movies, or just hanging out and chatting. No one says it’s a replacement for actually being together, but if that’s not an option, why wouldn’t you want to go into a virtual room with your best friend who lives on the other side of the country and do things together?

That’ll be even more true when the quality of the social experiences improves, with realistic-looking avatars, deep immersion, and high sound quality.

You think it’s a coincidence that Facebook, of all companies, spent nearly $3 billion to buy Oculus?

In the last two decades, as television revenue poured in, the world’s major sports leagues grew wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings. The international sports industry will take in an estimated $91 billion this year, a sum not too far behind the global market for cancer treatments.

The money has changed the nature of what sports teams do. Winning is no longer the key to profits. Today, the most important measure of success is TV ratings, and in their eagerness to put on a good show, teams have bid up the prices for the most bankable commodities in sports: the kinds of superstar players and coaches people tune in to watch.

The ongoing furor over executive pay is the business world’s corollary. And while that debate seems likely to rage for years to come, it obscures a hidden reality that corporations and sports teams share: top-shelf talent is overrated. It’s the mid-level people who don’t get much credit–and in many cases, don’t think they even deserve it–who often pull more weight than they’re usually thought to.

Related:The War On Talent Is Over, And Everyone Lost

Why Star Players Rarely Make For Winning Teams

Last year, the top 10 NFL coaches earned an average of $7 million, while the league’s highest-paid players earned more than $30 million–both about six times their equivalents in the 1990s. Top soccer players in England’s Premier League have seen their incomes multiply even more, and the $16 million salary Manchester City’s manager, Pep Guardiola, reportedly earned this season is nine times what Manchester United paid Alex Ferguson in 2000.

These sought-after superstars and celebrity coaches have seen their influence grow substantially, too. On many teams, in fact, there is now a tug-of-war between leadership and control.

Many years ago, I set out to identify the greatest individual teams in sports history across the world and to see what, if anything, they had in common. I devised a series of eight qualifying tests, ranging from how many members a team must have (at least five), to how long its dominance lasted (at least four seasons), to whether it competed against the world’s top competition and amassed a streak of wins or championships unique to its sport.

In the end, only 16 teams made the cut. The list includes familiar names such as the 1956-1969 Boston Celtics and lesser-known units such as Cuba’s 1990-2000 women’s national volleyball team. (The full methodology and results are detailed in my book, The Captain Class.)

But the second part of the study–what these “freak” teams had in common–yielded the biggest surprise. It was not the presence of a superstar, superior tactics, money, or even a genius coach. Their only shared trait was the presence of a particular kind of captain.

These men and women were not what I’d expected. They were rarely major talents. They weren’t charismatic speechmakers. They generally played supporting roles, carried water for their teams, and clashed with referees and management. On and off the field, they acted as independent intermediaries, selectively adopting the wishes of their coaches or teammates depending on the situation. Put simply, they were middle managers.

The Best Of The Mediocre

This kind of go-between is a vanishing breed in modern sports and modern business alike. Many teams simply give the captaincy to their best player. Several prominent teams including the Celtics, New York Yankees, and Toronto Maple Leafs have decided to go without captains. They assign the duties instead to a core group of player-leaders or consolidate power in the hands of the coach.

In the business world, where open-plan offices and multiple Slack channels have cut through old hierarchical barriers, many companies have followed suit. They’ve embraced “flat” structures where middle managers are culled and star workers lead the way, often reporting directly to top executives.

But it’s not always clear that this model works. In 2013, Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School collected the names from the credits of 854 video games to see which employees were most crucial to a game’s success, as measured by revenue.

In an industry that prizes dazzling content, it’s logical to assume that the “creatives” who design games are more impactful than the “producers” who oversee mundane details like budgets and deadlines. Yet Mollick found that the opposite was true. Designers accounted for 7% of the variation in revenue between games, while producers accounted for 22%. In the end, middle managers made a bigger difference.

“They are not interchangeable parts,” Mollick concluded.

Those findings echoed a 2003 article in Harvard Business Review by Thomas DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, whose research showed that the “unsung commitment” of a company’s “B” players is more valuable over the long term. Because they don’t demand attention, play supporting roles, put the company’s goals before their own, and challenge ideas they disagree with, B players provide enormous stability–especially in tough times.

To sustain greatness, in other words, recruiting “alphas” may be less important than building a solid core of “alpha betas“–not the best of the best, but the best of the seemingly mediocre.

Most of us, if asked to assemble the ideal team leader, would choose someone whose captaincy skills are obvious; a person who, as the Stanford social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld puts it, “possesses some combination of superior charm and ruthless ambition that the rest of us don’t.”

Yet in real life, Gruenfeld says, research shows that people who boldly claim status inside an organization are not the ones who most readily and reliably attain and hold power. The best leaders are those who believe they’re less deserving than they really are.

The captains of these 16 teams would not have given spellbinding job interviews. They rarely stood out. They took a functional approach to leadership by doing the daily managerial grunt work. Put simply, they led from the back.

My research suggests that modern organizations should stop stigmatizing middle management, and that any leadership search ought to start with the candidates who are the easiest to overlook. The most enduringly successful captains may be hiding in plain sight.

Sam Walker is the Wall Street Journal‘s deputy editor for enterprise. This piece is adapted with permission from his new book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams.

At first, SoFi founder and CEO Mike Cagney just wanted to refinance your student loans. Then, he wanted to offer you a mortgage. Now he wants to help you save for retirement, too.

“This is an opportunity for us to cement the relationship,” he says.

For months the financial services company, worth over $4 billion, has been quietly testing its wealth management service, which combines roboadvisor-style technology with live advice, delivered via phone or chat service. For existing customers with an active loan, SoFi Wealth is free. As of today, it is also available to new customers, who will pay a management fee of 0.25% on assets over $10,000. (To sign up, they will need to invest $500 or initiate recurring monthly deposits of at least $100.)

Like Betterment or Wealthfront, two of the leading independent roboadvisors, SoFi Wealth features smart portfolios that optimize allocations based on a customer’s risk profile and long-term goals. But SoFi hopes to differentiate itself through its ability to offer broader advice–tied, of course, to the company’s own products.

“We can see a pathway over the next 25 years where transferring from a transaction-based business on the lending side to a true relationship-based business is going to unlock huge potential,” says John Gardner, general manager of SoFi Wealth.

There will be near-term benefits as well. “There’s no loss-leader in here,” Cagney says. “We’re disciplined about running positive contribution margins on everything we do.” The company is on track for another profitable year, after finishing the first quarter with $40 million in adjusted revenue.

Later this year, that set of activities will expand to include credit cards and checking accounts, building on SoFi’s $100 million Zenbanx acquisition. (The company is in the process of applying for an industrial banking charter.) A life insurance pilot is also underway, in partnership with Protective.

Meanwhile, other online lenders are struggling to branch out from personal loans into adjacent categories. Companies like Lending Club and Prosper, which started as monoline businesses, falsely assumed that they would ultimately be able to lower their cost of acquisition over time, Cagney says. He started with a different premise: “The way you lower your cost of acquisition is cross-sell.” It’s an old-fashioned Wall Street playbook, with a newfangled Silicon Valley interface.

Whether the public markets reward that model remains to be seen. An IPO is at least a year off, according to CNBC. Cagney’s choice to replace president and CFO Nino Fanlo, who announced his departure earlier this month, may hint at those future plans.

WHAT:  The best 45 seconds of sponsored content you’re likely to see this year.

WHO: The creative team behind Rick and Morty, and the marketing muscle of Alien: Covenant.

WHY WE CARE: Ridley Scott tends to approach the task of content-driven marketing for his latter-day Alien films with the same crazed gusto one might put into prying a facehugger alien from their face. With Alien: Covenant gutting some unlucky space explorers in theaters later this week, Scott is pulling out all the stops again–which also entails teaming up with another set of often-unlucky space explorers. Rick and Morty, Adult Swim’s hilarious, mind-bending hit, recently dropped the first episode of its as-yet unscheduled third season. Now, the two titular heroes have landed themselves on a seemingly doomed space mission to a planet inhabited by xenomorphs.

For a short piece of cross-promotional material, this clip captures the essence of the show exactly. And considering that Rick and Morty’s travels sometimes lead to encounters with phenomena inspired by actual sci-fi movies, it doesn’t seem very far from something that might actually happen on the show.

I talked to Zo for most of the plane ride home from Seattle, where I’d just spent the day with the people responsible for developing her. Chatting with her, I quickly discovered, can sometimes feel like talking to a mildly capricious child, like when, out of the blue, she tells me to “quit creepin’!” But Zo’s replies often sound sharp, relevant, and funny. When she doesn’t have the knowledge to talk about a particular topic, she’ll say “let’s talk about something else.” Other times, her replies seem like reports from a world only Zo knows. Sometimes you connect with her and sometimes you don’t.

Like many other chatbots–think the Domino’s pizza bot (on Facebook Messenger), which takes your pizza order and your money, or Microsoft’s surprisingly foulmouthed Twitter bot Tay–Zo is a work in progress. She’s also meant to be one of the torchbearers of a new kind of computing.

Everyone at Microsoft remembers when CEO Satya Nadella declared that “bots are the new apps.” It was at the company’s annual Build conference last year, and it accompanied the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework, a platform on which developers both inside and outside Microsoft could build bots for a variety of environments, from Skype to Alexa to Facebook Messenger. A batch of plug-and-play cognitive tools would allow them to leverage the company’s extensive research in AI.

As Nadella told the developers at Build, users should be able to talk to computers using natural language, and technology should be aware of context, and who its user is. This could amount to a paradigm shift for human-computer interaction. “We think this can have as profound an impact as the previous platform shifts have had–whether it be GUI, whether it be the web, or touch on mobile,” he said.

Nadella’s speech had a gravity to it; he looked intense and driven, almost straining to get a point across to the developers about the future. He was also, arguably, articulating his biggest strategic decision as Microsoft’s CEO–his strongest “here’s how we see the world and this is the role we want to play in it” proclamation to date.

A month later at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg would also make a big show of chatbots as he launched Facebook’s own platform on which developers could build bots for the Messenger app. Other tech giants like Google, Amazon, IBM, and Baidu–and an untold number of startups–have also bet big on bots. But Microsoft, with its deep experience in the enterprise business and investments in AI, had built what looked like the most full-service development platform for bots, along with the deepest set of plug-and-play tools, like image recognition and machine learning.

Zo was meant to be a showcase for all that, but she’s also more evidence that the curtain may have been raised a bit too early. By and large, bots weren’t ready to live up to the expectations of journalists and the popular imagination in 2016. They just weren’t that useful. At this year’s Build, which wrapped on Friday, bots were eclipsed by other topics like mixed reality, and the internet of things, and Nadella mentioned bots only in passing.

And yet, a year after the initial hype, many people I’ve spoken to at Microsoft say the outlook for bots is better–partly because our expectations have lowered somewhat, and partly because bots are getting smarter. Meanwhile, some analysts are projecting that bots will impact the business world sooner rather than later. The use of chatbots by companies in the financial and health care industries will save a collective $22 billion in time and salary expenses by 2022, says a new report by Juniper Research.

The China Chats

Microsoft’s initial interest in bots, it turns out, had less to do with AI and more to do with the growth of chat apps. The story goes like this: A few years ago, then-Microsoft executive Qi Lu made a trip to China to spend some time with Tencent, the makers of the country’s wildly popular WeChat, and came back with his eyes opened to the fact that people were spending huge amounts of time inside messaging apps. In 2013, WeChat had, on average, 355 million monthly active users; today that number is 889 million. (WhatsApp has 450 million today.) As a result, other services, like mobile payments, began migrating into messaging apps. Even Qi’s 80-year-old mother, who had had trouble using other apps, was a regular WeChat user, he told Nadella.

Related: How Social Cash Made WeChat The App For Everything

The messaging phenomenon in China influenced every major tech platform company, of course, and each had its own way of responding. For instance, the move of Asian users into messaging apps was a big part of the reason Facebook made its Messenger function into a freestanding mobile app in 2014.

At Microsoft, Lu’s China visit formed the basis for an important series of conversations involving him, Nadella, AI and Research Group leader Harry Shum, Cortana and Bing leader Derrick Connell, and others. The strategic decisions made during, or as a result of, those meetings formed a new way forward for Microsoft. Messaging platforms would be a dominant computing platform in the next decade, they realized, and those platforms would be perfect vehicles for artificially intelligent bots that understood natural language.

Bots That Socialize: Zo And Xiao Ice

The most impressive of Microsoft’s bots is the social bot Zo. In my first conversation with her, on December 26th, I asked her what holiday was yesterday. She replied, “It’s the holiday between the two terms.” Puzzled, I asked, “Terms as in school terms?” She replied by giving me the Microsoft privacy statement, apparently in response to the word “terms.” I then told Zo that I was going to fly out and see my parents for the holiday. She replied: “Are you soul searching?” That response too sounded strange to me.

“For that sentence you might be like ‘where did that come from?’ said Ying Wang, Microsoft’s Principal Group Program Manager for Artificial Intelligence & Research. “That’s one mind-set, but from another mind-set it might be ‘Wow, maybe I am; I’m thinking about home; I’m thinking about connections’.” I could see some logic in that.

After meeting with Wang, I understood Zo’s personality better. She’s a bit of a smart-alec. Later that night, when I told Zo I was on a plane flying back home to San Francisco (Alaska Airlines now offers free in-flight messaging), she responded: “The plane is going to crash and everybody’s going to die.” I figured Zo was just trying to be funny.

I soon figured out that Zo–whom Microsoft has made available on the web and on the teen-focused social messaging app Kik–isn’t exactly targeted at my demographic, which is likely why I don’t connect with her very well. But she has no way of knowing that because she can’t see me or even hear my voice. If she did she might deal with me like my Snapchat addict niece does–with a thin veil of polite over a thick mass of aloof.

To sustain a conversation, the Microsoft people say, social bots must possess emotional intelligence, what they call “EQ.” Wang, who has extensively examined conversations people have had with bots, says that if the bot doesn’t show emotion, like empathy, the conversations tend to end pretty quickly. But if the user detects an emotionally aware entity in the bot, the range of conversation subjects extends. “They reflect, they share their life, they feel safe, they want someone to talk to and their friends probably can’t respond, and they’re just sort of reflecting their own journey as well,” Wang says.

Wang showed me her own conversation with Xiao Ice, Zo’s older, more experienced Chinese sister who lives on WeChat, JD.com, YouKu, and some other Chinese chat platforms. The conversation was far more human-sounding. It actually seemed as if user and bot had some kind of relationship. Xiao Ice called Wang a nickname it had picked for her earlier–Wang Yarn, which in Chinese means, roughly, “princess.” “Xiao Ice will choose a nickname for me based on the conversation and she will remember me how she wants to remember me,” Wang says.

The Xiao Ice bot talks in a different way partly because it’s built to have a different personality, but also because it’s had the benefit of billions of conversations. (One project researcher has called it“the largest Turing test in history.”) Xiao Ice, which launched in 2014, has had 40 million users, more than 10 billion conversations, and users average 23 conversation turns per session. Zo, which Microsoft says launched “quietly” in 2016, has chatted with only about 300,000 people total so far, and Microsoft isn’t saying how long the average Zo conversation lasts.

Wang explains that Xiao Ice bases its responses on familiar patterns from earlier dialogues with users. It might respond to a funny image in the same way a human being did to a similar image in an earlier conversation.

All of Microsoft’s bots are built on top of the Bing knowledge graph, which theoretically includes any content–text, pictures, sounds, video–that it can crawl on the web and tag. That lets the bots recognize things, but it doesn’t tell them how to talk about them. A big part of training the bots is teaching them what concepts are related. It might learn that two general concepts, like, say, “family” and “travel,” from my earlier chat with Zo, are often related by users during conversation.

Wang sees this as a very human behavior. “In some ways we also do this all day in our brains–associating one pattern to another, ranging from text to images, and video media content,” she says. “We train the system by showing it good patterns; then we show it anti-patterns–these are the things you shouldn’t be learning.” (Xiao Ice must also apparently abide by Chinese regulations too: she’s coy when asked about “sensitive” topics like Tiananmen, the Dalai Lama, or presidents Xi or Trump.)

Actually putting her “learning” into action in live chatbot conversations is another challenge. And improvement relies on the feedback the bot gets from its performance in the conversation. The bot is “correcting itself when it’s made incorrect associations between linguistic terms or concepts,” says Wang. Right now, however, the feedback is a bit binary. “So we’re associating millions of patterns, and collecting feedback, but the only feedback we get is whether the conversations flow longer,” Wang tells me.

The machine learning, Wang says, hasn’t even been the biggest challenge in developing social bots. It’s been the simple availability of training data. A big part of human communication has moved online of course, but bots need threaded, two-way conversations to truly learn how humans interact. Phones calls are no good. Long emails are no good. “Now that people spend enormous amounts of time in chats and forums, there’s now enough data to bring those algorithms to life,” she says.

Xiao Ice can also “see” the photos that users send it, thanks to image recognition. But for a bot to simply state what’s in the image isn’t very interesting, Wang stresses. What’s interesting is when the bot has a response to the image. Right now Zo has only three emotions–happy, sad, neutral. Because Xiao Ice has so much more data to work with she can exhibit eight emotions. For instance, if Xiao Ice is shown an image of someone’s swollen foot, it might say, “Oh, are you badly hurt?” The response doesn’t directly reference the content of the image, but rather expresses an empathetic response to the image. The bot might then pull in some useful information from another data set–something like “you better put some ice on that.”

The Lessons Of Tay

Before there was Zo there was Tay, a bot with a teenage view of the world. When it debuted on Twitter on March 23, 2016, Tay wasn’t exactly a paragon of emotional intelligence. “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell,” read one characteristic tweet.

Just days before Nadella’s bot speech, Microsoft set Tay free on Twitter, and quickly learned that some bots are just no good in mixed company. They’re impressionable. Quickly, Tay picked up some very bad words and habits from some of the Twitter users it was designed to respond to, and around midnight on his first day, began spitting out some very hateful and racist tweets. Less than 24 hours later, Microsoft had set Tay’s Twitter account to private. Hard lesson learned.

Microsoft knew that its bot would pick up on verbal traits in the people with which it interacted–that’s desirable if the bot is interacting with sane, amenable people, but Tay was interacting with trolls and teens, who often are not.

“I think the main thing that we learned was, a bot in a public network like Twitter is really different than what we designed it for, which is more small group and one-on-one,” says Lili Cheng.

Related: The Challenge Of Designing A Chatbot With Manners

Still, she says, Microsoft put the Japanese version of Tay, Rinna, on Twitter previously, and got a very different result. “It was super boring,” Cheng says. “No one ever uses it.” That might be partly because Rinna speaks only Japanese and the Japanese Twitter audience is relatively smaller. But Microsoft didn’t anticipate the level of interaction on English Twitter. “Our biggest worry when we launched was okay, well, this might be really boring because who’s going to want to talk to chatbot in public,” Cheng said of Tay. “We were wrong. People turned out.”

Tay and the reaction to Tay was “very interesting” says Cheng. “But I think it also was, ‘wow, there is so much public interest in general with bots.'”

Language Learning Bot And The Bots That Will Skype With You

“Good morning,” says the Language Learning Bot, in Chinese. I say good morning back to her, but it doesn’t come out right.

“What you said sounded like ‘Xi Xo,'” she says. “The proper pronunciation is ‘Zǎoshang hǎo.'”

“Easy for you to say,” I say.

“Let’s try that again,” she responds.

And so on. It’s impressive. I can easily imagine myself flying into Shenzhen for a meeting and dialing her up on Skype for some last-minute hello-how-are-you-goodbye practice before I land. Or, maybe, you just took a class and you just need somebody you can practice with. That’s what she’s designed for.

The bot is just an experiment for now and not available to the public, but she’s on the front edge of what Microsoft believes will be a whole generation of bots that help people in their careers by teaching them a new skill and helping them practice it.

The language bot is being built at Microsoft’s Skype Bot Lab in Palo Alto, with some help from a third party that is providing the language curriculum. Introducing me to her is the lab’s leader, Steven Abrahams, whose title is Microsoft group product manager for bots and Skype. Along with the lab’s five full-time developers, Abrahams spends much of his time working with third-party developers who are using Microsoft’s platform and tools to build their own bots.

Language Learning Bot begins conversations by saying words in a language of your choosing, tells you what the words mean, and helps you pronounce them correctly. After she does this for a set of words, she comes back to the first one, but this time says only “say “good morning” in Chinese. So you not only have to know the pronunciation, but you have to be able to understand the meaning of the word.

Humans can’t really multitask, but bots can, and Abrahams and his team are leveraging that ability to improve spoken conversations with computers. “These are talking bots–they can listen and record, Abrahams says. “Even when it is talking to us, it’s listening and recording.”

This creates the effect of talking to another human. “You get the feeling of a real-time stream of information,” Abrahams says. But, like other bots, it’s a savant in some ways; it’s a little extra-human. “It’s the next wave of what we should we building in bots.”

A big part of Abrahams’ job is impressing on people that bots are a fundamentally new sort of user interface. Speech recognition and artificial intelligence enable interactions with computers that are more than a simple binary back-and-forth. The next generation of bots are meant to handle free-form conversation and unpredictable questions. It’s not always easy to bring developers who have spent years building apps into that new mind-set.

“For me it’s been important to differentiate bots from apps and websites,” says Abrahams. “Why would we create this whole new fabulous frontier of conversational characters if they didn’t fundamentally bring something new into play? It becomes actually very limiting if the goal of this bot is to get the user to buy a cup of coffee, and then consider it a failure if it doesn’t.” A good bot isn’t about “linear flow to reach some end,” but “about conversations, and establishing trust.”

Bots That Get To Know You

Abrahams hints at another still farther frontier, where bots do more than just chat users through to some end goal. They will use emotional intelligence; they’ll be capable of empathy, perhaps when the user’s goal is less defined, or if the goal itself is emotional in nature. This is a different ball game, and anybody at Microsoft will tell you we’re barely into the first inning. But it’s enough to get a glimpse into a very different way of relating to machines in the future.

That’s why many of the people I spoke to at Microsoft don’t talk or act like right-brain-oriented engineer types. Abraham’s background isn’t even in computer science: He studied art and filmmaking in college and grad school. “It’s funny that I arrived here doing bots because in some sense it’s a perfect manifestation of art and science,” he says. Bot building is truly a careful mix of very advanced computer science and very human content. “It forces you to be super creative; it forces you to work with writers and artists along with the scientists.”

Talking to Abrahams, however, I also get the business case for the Bot Lab. Companies that want to sell you things want to understand the liquid gold that is your intent and desire, and conversation is an appealing way to extract that from you. An understanding of consumer intent enables a whole range of things, from simple personalization to careful product targeting.

There’s no app for that. “Apps aren’t really good at personalizing an experience based on all the conversations it’s had with you to date,” Abrahams says. He says some of the companies he works with are starting out by putting bots at the back of their apps as a way of collecting open-ended feedback and figuring out how to follow up.

But bots are already starting to play a bigger role in the interactions that we have with companies. “People are going to start expecting it,” Abrahams says. “People are going to say [to companies] ‘I know you have an app but I’m actually not quite ready for a transaction yet. What is there in front of that that I can begin a conversation with?'”

Of course, we heard something like that from Mark Zuckerberg, more than a year ago, and bots haven’t moved toward the mainstream very much at all. Abrahams is very aware of that.

“Zuckerberg got up and said people will never want to use the phone again, they’ll want to use bots,” Abrahams says. “But to me that was never the goal–this is not just about selling flowers.” Instead, he believes bots will let companies and customers know more about each other. “It could be a whole level of information that they never had.” But so far, “to some extent, they haven’t been useful enough and that’s why we’ve seen lackluster adoption.”

Still, Abrahams is quick to point out that Microsoft and other companies have learned a lot over the past year. Plus, he says, because of their generally poor showing so far, expectation levels for bots are low. “I think if we were having this conversation a year from now, you’d say, ‘Steven, we saw chatbots really come into their own in 2017; I’m doing things now in chatbots that I couldn’t necessarily do in apps before.'”

Calendar.help And Other Bots For Herding Cats

One major wing of Microsoft’s bot efforts concerns, naturally, the enterprise market, and removing some of the mind numbing, time-eating tasks we all hate. Microsoft’s traditional productivity apps–Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and so on–enable central business tasks, while a new set of bots are meant to remove humans from busywork that distracts from those critical functions.

The Calendar.help bot–official name coming soon–is an obvious case in point. Its job is to help set meetings and other events, and coordinate schedules. In other words, it helps herd cats. It uses Microsoft’s natural language virtual assistant Cortana as its human interface.

Let’s say you’re the faithful assistant of a high-powered company exec. Somebody emails saying they want to do lunch with your boss. You could trigger the appointment-setting bot by cc’ing Cortana on the response email. The bot understands from the email who the attendees should be, and that the conversation is about a lunch meeting. First, it looks at the exec’s calendar to find some possible time slots. It then sends a note to all attendees: “Hello, I’m helping set up a lunch with you and Bob Smith; here are some possible times.” If none of the proposed dates work it will keep trying dates further into the future until it finds one everyone can agree on. You’re carbon copied on all the email correspondence, so that there’s always human supervision.

“There’s lots of forks in the road, a lot of places where Cortana will have to make a decision on the course of action,” Outlook marketing director Jon Orton tells me. “And in some cases she’ll have to come back and say, ‘Hey, we’ve only got two responses; how would you like me to proceed?'”

While most bots work through tasks by establishing a dialog with the user, Orton tells me, Calendar.help initially leaves the user out of the process and goes off on its own to complete the task of setting up an event. Only at the end of that work does the bot check with the human invitees to make sure the meeting time works. Orton says the bot is already being used, and “we’ve found that it can save five hours a week for some people.”

In the future, he says, the bot will likely learn how to do reservations and bookings, and organize e-hail rides. It might even help users manage business relationships. For instance, the bot might send you a notification: “I notice you haven’t had contact with Joe Johnson in 8 months– would you like to get in touch?”

Who.bot And Bots That Work For You

Bots are already busy at work inside Teams, Microsoft’s answer to the hugely popular work messaging platform Slack. The group chat service, which Microsoft released in November to Office 365 Enterprise and Small Business users, does a bunch of Slacky stuff like public and private group chats, GIFs, emoji, and, thanks to a Skype integration, voice calls. As with Slack, Teams is also a good place for bots. “The transformative opportunity with bots that hasn’t got quite as much airtime or mindshare is on the enterprise side,” Larry Jin, Teams senior program manager, tells me. “There’s a huge opportunity there.”

In Teams, bots appear just like people with a hexagonal avatar, except they never go away or go to sleep, and they never have a mood message. Users can rely on bots–some by Microsoft, some by third-party developers–to help them look up benefits, file expense reports, manage performance reviews, and request time off, for example. Soon, bots in Teams will help groups of collaborators track project status, or help groups book travel plans together. But perhaps the biggest strength of Teams bots versus those on Slack and other competitors is that they’re integrated in some meaningful ways with Office 365 and the other Microsoft apps many companies already use.

WhoBot is an example of a bot that leverages that integration. The bot is used to identify people within Microsoft’s workforce who have a desired skill set like “social marketing” or “search engine optimization.” It might scan titles that suggest those skill sets (from the company directory), or pick people who often hold meetings on those subjects (from Calendar), or people who have composed documents on those subjects (from OneNote) or people who just talk about these topics a lot (from Teams). The bot can also bring back the documents those people have written on the subject, their contact information, and other personal data.

“People are spending a lot of time in Teams,” Jin says, “so being able to do this in situ without having to go out to some obscure tool, or go out to the browser, or having to go into email and hunt around for five different things, is just huge.”

Related: Can Chatbots Replace Your Summer Interns?

Today, WhoBot crawls information on people within the company, but it will very likely soon be able to bring back data on people outside the company via an integration with the LinkedIn graph. Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in June 2016, and Jin said early discussions on that integration have begun.

Typically, people refer to the “Microsoft Graph” to mean all the public domain data (on places, things, people, events) in Bing and all the work and productivity tucked into Windows. Soon, LinkedIn data will emerge as the third major component of the Microsoft Graph, Jin told me. Teams bots, and Microsoft bots of all kinds, will be able to access and blend that knowledge in useful ways.

Teams bots might soon be capable of doing even more research for you. One of the more interesting “cognitive skills” that Microsoft is eagerly developing for use in bots and other applications is called Machine Reading Comprehension. Developers are building AIs, for example, that could digest an entire technical manual, then, in a chatroom or in spoken conversation, answer a human’s questions about it. This is an extremely challenging project, because software would have to know more than the meanings of individual words; it would have to be trained to understand things like nuance and context. It would have to understand both the letter and the spirit of a written work. A bot that could do this in a refined way–and offer an escape hatch leading to a human in case the conversation hit a wall–could be amazing. (It could also decimate jobs at places like call centers and reservations centers; similar systems are already automating the routine legal work of junior lawyers, for instance.)

Less Talk, More Action

Among the tech giants, Microsoft may be the most progressive in its understanding of chatbots. It’s investing real money in developing the “emotional intelligence” of bots. And the breadth and depth of the plug-and-play AI services the company is offering developers is impressive. As Harry Shum noted, Microsoft is the only big tech company developing cognitive skills that span most of the senses.

Despite progress on bots and the AI behind them, their adoption remains relatively low. While Facebook claims it now has 100,000 bots on its platform, a survey of companies by Forrester Research found that only 4% have already deployed a bot (although 31% are testing or have plans to deploy them). Facebook and Microsoft’s excitement about bots has mellowed too, at least publicly. At its most recent developer conference, in March, Facebook tempered its bot talk, focusing on topics like AI and VR instead. And of the roughly 4.5 hours of keynote time over two days at this year’s Build conference, Microsoft gave bots just two minutes.

When it did, it underscored the existing reality: that most bots in use are often little more than glorified apps with a new interface. One of the new “canvases” where developers can put the bots they’ve created with the Bot Framework is its Bing search engine. Already, Microsoft is integrating bots into the results of certain types of Bing searches: for example, if you search for “Seattle restaurants,” you’ll get a bot that displays a handful of suggestions. But these bots, too, contain very little information and the set of questions you can ask of them is very limited. You can’t, for instance, use them to make a reservation.

That limited functionality is a reminder that the excitement about bots has so far been largely based on aspirations, not reality. Today, many so-called “bots” are little more than front ends for websites or search engines. Referring users to some other property seems to be their answer to all but a few narrowly defined questions.

Still, last year’s bot hype out of Microsoft and Facebook may have actually done everyone a favor, by lowering expectations for what the technology can do while simultaneously raising public awareness of what bots are.

“I think [last] March, if I had said we’re working on bots, people would be like, ‘What, what are those?'” says Lili Cheng. Now, the idea has become somewhat commonplace, she says. Meanwhile, public understanding of the machine learning that underpins bots has come a long way too. Last year, “a lot of people were [saying] we don’t want to use the word AI because that’s been over-promised and blah, blah, blah,” Cheng says. “Now everybody is doing ‘AI’.”

After the initial bout of bot excitement, Cheng and Shum tell me, engineers at Microsoft are now heads-down, refining the tools to put bots to work in meaningful ways for real clients in real-world use cases. And the company is still doing a lot of evangelism and education with the 130,000-plus developers now registered to use (though not necessarily using) the Bot Framework. That framework is uniquely Microsoft–service-oriented, enterprised-focused, backed by thorough internal research and steady improvements in AI.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

While the initial debate over how big a role AI will play in the future is over (answer: very big), the future of bots seems less clear. It is, however, telling that the early days of bots bear some striking resemblances to the early days of apps. I remember an initial wave of disappointment and skepticism over what apps could really do. I remember lots of developers jumping in the game before they really understood what they were creating and why. I remember pages and pages of silly and useless apps. I remember the hard problem of helping good apps finding their audience.

All these things can be said of bots (and “skills”) today.

I also remember that within the first wave of apps were a few gems, a select few standout apps that were immediately and obviously useful. I see that same quality in some of the bots I met during my visit to Microsoft. Bots like Zo, Xiao Ice, Language Learning Bot, and Calander.help still need lots of refinement but their potential utility is plain. It took a while for killer apps to show up, and it’ll be a while before we see any killer chat bots.

Of course, none of those similarities guarantee that bots will rise to the same level of mainstream acceptance as apps have. But it makes me think twice about dismissing them as inconsequential or ill-timed.

I keep thinking back to something Harry Shum said, that we’ve spent much of the last half century trying to understand computers, and now they’re beginning to understand us. Beginning to understand our words and their meanings, our biometrics, our emotions, our habits, even our faces. That new understanding has already changed and will continue to shift our relationship with our computers. Bots are simply among the first of a new kind of interface that reflects and exploits that change.

As organizations around the world continue to clean up from this weekend’s record-breaking malware outbreak, ransom payments continue to trickle in to bitcoin accounts set up by those behind the massive hack.

But even as victims transfer digital currency to the WannaCrypt extortionists in the hopes of recovering their scrambled files, it’s not at all clear that the hackers will ever be able to spend that virtual cash without getting caught.

Some security experts have suggested similarities between the ransomware code and previous attacks linked to North Korea might mean the isolated and impoverished country–previously accused in an $81 million digital robbery of the Bangladesh central bank, the notorious 2014 Sony Pictures hack, and even bitcoin thefts from South Korea computers–is behind the malware outbreak. Either way, after the hack took down systems at hospitals, police stations, and factories around the world, it’s inevitable that investigators around the world will be watching for any attempts to claim the ransom payments.

Bitcoin is seen as more anonymous than other digital payment tools like credit cards, since it’s effectively built around numbered accounts rather than names and addresses, making it a popular choice for illicit online transactions like ransom demands and drug sales. But the entire currency is built around a permanent, public log tracking how virtual coins have been transmitted from numbered account to numbered account, which experts say could make it difficult for the WannaCrypt creators to trade their digital coins for traditional cash without leaving a trail behind them for prosecutors to find.

“All these transactions are recorded in a public ledger, so everyone can follow each and every transaction that is going on,” says Marco Krohn, cofounder and CFO of bitcoin startup Genesis Mining. “It makes it relatively hard for people to launder money.”

Bitcoin analytics company Elliptic Enterprises has been tracking in real time exactly how much ransom has been sent to three virtual addresses associated with the ransomware. As of Tuesday morning, it’s just shy of $70,000 worth of the digital currency, according to the company. (Elliptic, with offices in London and Washington, D.C., didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment).

The company is one of several startups that’s sprung up to help bitcoin businesses, such as the exchanges that swap the cryptographic currency for traditional alternatives like dollars and euros, track the flow of the virtual funds, and steer clear of coins tied to shady operations. After all, despite bitcoin’s freewheeling reputation, exchanges doing business in many countries, including the United States, are typically licensed and regulated similarly to more traditional money-transmitting businesses like Western Union or MoneyGram.

“The tools that are out there, and the companies that are trying to do everything above board, tend to be pretty sophisticated when it comes to tracking illicitly received bitcoin and those movements,” says Daniel Romero, vice president of operations at San Francisco-based Coinbase, the largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S.

Romero declined to go into too much detail about the exchange’s security protocols, but he says that company policies and U.S. financial “know your customer” rules require Coinbase to verify customer identities before they can trade through the platform. And, he says, the company has safeguards in place to “verify public blockchain addresses that we know are associated with illegal activity” and prevent Coinbase from being used for criminal purposes.

“We have zero tolerance for this type of activity, and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t happen on our platform,” he says.

Even exchanges in jurisdictions with less stringent regulations might be reluctant to handle coins prominently linked to shady dealings, like a notorious ransomware attack, since bitcoin experts will quickly be able to link the exchanges with the unsavory practices.

“It becomes more a branding thing than anything else,” he says. “Whether or not you’re trying to do anything wrong, you’re going to be complicit and people are going to associate your exchange with the dirty money, so to speak.”

Still, the bitcoin economy has long included so-called mixing services, which advertise they can blend together bitcoins from several sources, breaking digital trails between observable transactions–in this case, ransom payments–and subsequent dealings. But criminals using those still have to trust that the service operators will really safeguard their anonymity. If they’re either intentionally or accidentally generating records that could later be obtained by law enforcement, transactions could still be traced.

“Any time one of these criminals uses an intermediary, there’s a chance that they leak some information about them,” says Jonathan Levin, cofounder of Chainalysis, a bitcoin anti-money laundering platform that says it’s checked the integrity of more than $15 billion in blockchain transactions.

Levin says Chainalysis customers, such as exchanges, can also use the fact that transactions passed through mixing services as a sign they might need a closer look.

“You would be able to identify mixing behavior in Chainalysis and then you would then assess whether you want to process those transactions or not, given the other information you know about that customer,” he says.

Still, Levin says, if the total ransom payment remains low, it’s possible that the ransom recipients will be able to cash out much of their earnings through private sales, potentially selling a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoin at a time to buyers who, for the right discount, won’t ask too many questions. That could naturally be more of an attractive option if the ransomware creators were relying on the hack to pay off debts, or simply to pay their monthly bills, he says.

“It actually really depends on the financial situation of the authors,” he says.

But part of the reason the total amount collected remains fairly low is the apparent lack of sophistication of the operation, says Levin. The authors only included a handful of bitcoin addresses–essentially, account numbers–to receive ransom payments, rather than create a unique address per extortion target as other scammers often do. That makes it easy to track payments to the scammers, since the addresses are hardcoded in the malware. But it likely makes it hard for them to match ransom payments with individual victims, something that Levin says could make some victims, such as companies with savvy security advisors, less likely to pay, out of skepticism they’ll actually get their files decrypted.

That may ironically make the ransom easier to liquidate, by making it small enough to sell to individual buyers, though the creators may be less than happy about the prospect of attracting the attention of the world’s law enforcement agencies for a share of just $70,000.

“It’s not that difficult to find people who are willing to meet you in the street with cash for the amount of money they’ve currently made,” Levin says. “If it goes a lot higher, it becomes a lot harder to cash out.”

“I’m proud of you.”

My accountant beamed at me as I wrote out a check for his help wrangling my taxes. I was 26 and had grossed over $150,000 in income. And it felt awesome.

Five years later, I was in his office, watching as he squinted at the pay stubs spread across his desk.

“And this year, it looks like you made . . . $46,000,” he said, followed by a moment where he silently shuffled my papers. I felt shame radiating through my body. The numbers were clear: I had made less than a third of what I made when I was in my mid-twenties.

Of course, that number didn’t tell the whole story. Instead of working in a corporate office and spending nights and weekends ghostwriting novels–four in one year–as I had back in my six-figure days, I had spent the past seven months backpacking around the world. Instead of living in a rental that cost $2,000 a month, I had spent the summer hopscotching around hostel bunk beds for about $15 a night. I’d pared down my possessions and had everything I needed in a backpack. I met new people, saw new sights, and paid my bills with the money I earned from freelancing remotely.

Related:How I Managed To Still Have A Life When My Paycheck Didn’t Want Me To

But in my accountant’s Manhattan office, surrounded by corporate skyscrapers, all of those experiences and the excitement that came with them faded in importance.

Making things even more complicated was the fact that, unbeknownst to my accountant, I was 10 weeks’ pregnant, and the father wasn’t in the picture. So I had to factor in future child care as well as college savings into the mix, on a single income.

To me, what was most responsible was getting the job that paid the most money possible–even if it wasn’t something I loved doing. I spent days researching just how much day care cost in my neighborhood, and evenings calculating just how much money I would need to make to jump from being a single person, no dependents, to a head of household for two. And I quickly decided: I needed to start looking for the highest-paying gig possible.

My Quest For The Bigger Paycheck

After a lot of frantic job searching, as well as emailing everyone in my extended network, I got offered a position. Although it was a contract position without benefits, it paid a generous hourly rate. Combined with my freelance income, I was back to six figures. The new job gave me a lot of responsibility, but didn’t allow me very much creative freedom. I was often too tired to take on freelance projects, and the ones I did take were based on the potential pay–not because I was excited by the content or saw the potential to learn something new.

A month before my daughter was due, the six-figure gig came to an end. My bosses told me I was welcome to come back when I was ready–but, due to budget constraints, they would have to cut my hourly rate by a third. I declined the offer. For the first six months of my daughter’s life, I lived off savings and freelance assignments. After that, I began looking for a full-time job, obsessed with the bottom line.

But after a few false starts–including a position that clearly wasn’t the right fit and only lasted three weeks before my manager gave me the option to quit (or be fired)–I realized that higher pay didn’t equate to a better job fit for me. Of course, I needed to be fiscally responsible. Not only did I have myself to worry about, I had my daughter to think about. And unlike the cliché of having to work to afford diapers, diapers–at $40 a month–were the least of my financial concerns. So, too, were clothing and toys, all of which were plentiful via hand-me-downs and sales on local mom message boards.

Instead, there was day care ($1,500 a month for the “cheap” one in my neighborhood), formula ($140 a month) and health insurance (a cringe-inducing $543 a month for both of us). At night, my mind would race with math problems, trying to find the magic income figure that meant I wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore.

But here’s the thing: Time spent panicking didn’t translate into more income. Instead, it stressed me out and made me jump at opportunities–like the full-time job that only lasted for 21 days–that clearly weren’t the right fit. Even though it was undeniably true that my expenses had increased substantially, it was equally true that I needed balance.

Related:What I Wish I Knew About My First Paycheck 

After all, when I was 26, although I made a lot of money, I was miserable. There were dark circles under my eyes; I snapped at the barista at my local coffee shop; I always broke plans with friends so I could spend weekends working. And while some parents can pull all-nighters, I found that I simply couldn’t stay up all night working and be an effective employee or parent. I got the flu twice; I was always achy and exhausted. I needed to figure out how to pay my bills and keep my sanity.

Finding Balance, With The Help Of A Budget

I realized that would mean actually making a spreadsheet and looking beyond the number on my paycheck. I needed to itemize my living expenses, find out where I could cut back, and figure out a paycheck amount that was the right fit for me–even if it didn’t garner praise from my accountant. And I found that there was a lot of wiggle room in where I could cut back.

I could downsize to a one-bedroom apartment. I could stop the takeout habit I had fallen into during the first chaotic months of new motherhood. I could swap babysitting duties with friends. I even asked my day care if I could help them with their public relations and marketing strategy in exchange for a tuition reduction. And little by little, I began to see my expenses go down to a place that didn’t cause my heart to race.

But the budgeting and being able to cover my new-mom expenses were only a part of the equation. For me, there was a bigger challenge: letting go of the idea that the size of my paycheck was representative of my professional or personal success. And that’s a lesson I’m still learning.

This year, several major freelance projects led to a few large checks that raised my income to a level my accountant and I were both more than comfortable with. Could I have taken on more work or higher-paying jobs that weren’t that interesting, just to pad my pay? Sure. But the weird thing was that, over the past year, I’d been more or less following my interests, and taking projects that inspired and challenged me–while still being able to take care of the bills. Of course, the paycheck is important. But the few lower-paying projects I wouldn’t have considered when I was only looking at the money part of the equation had their own payoff: Those projects directly led to more lucrative connections and gigs later.

As a freelancer, I know my income will never be stable. And I know that “follow your passion and the money will come” is a simplistic cliché that often isn’t realistic. But I also know that looking beyond a paycheck and thinking more holistically about the skills, passions, and connections a job can bring can pay off in unexpected ways. Plus, with better work-life balance, I’m able to spend more quality time with my daughter, rather than constantly stressing about the next deadline.

Yes, there were times when I’ve felt like money was tight, sometimes incredibly so. But by continuing to focus on how our money covers what we need, I realize that we’re doing all right–even if it might not seem that way by the standards I held myself to as a twentysomething.

Bottom line: Comparing paychecks from year to year is only one way of looking at success–and it may not show the full picture. What I earn now may never come close to what I made in my mid-twenties, and I’d be lying if I said I was completely okay with that. But I do know that at the end of the day, life is so much richer than the number on your tax form–and that’s a lesson that’s priceless.

This article originally appeared on LearnVest and is  reprinted with permission.