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Setting the stage
The last thing has kind of ended. The next thing hasn’t quite taken off.
JANE
I’m Jane McConnell and welcome to Imaginize World. Today, we need to focus on the future for new generations. What kind of world do we want them to live in and how can we help them build it?
Greetings. Today, I’m with Cortney Harding. Cortney is a leader in the virtual reality world. It’s a new territory that’s bringing changes in the near future, the more distant future, but even many changes already today. We’re going to talk not so much about technology, but more about how it enables people and change. How the web has evolved from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, and then to the metaverse and beyond. And we’re going to talk about what this means for our lives. Cortney describes the mindset we need today for lifelong learning and adaptability. Let’s hear from Cortney now.
Well, hi, Cortney. It’s great seeing you again.
CORTNEY
Yeah, absolutely. Great to see you again.
A non-traditional background
Something that I’d like to start with is to ask you a little bit about how you got to where you are today. I mean, you’ve been on quite a journey, I gather, and you’ve reached a point that intrigues a lot of people. Can you tell us a little bit about your path?
CORTNEY
Yeah. I have a very non-traditional background, which I think is becoming more common, where I started going to college for politics and political science, thinking I was going to do that, graduating into the post-9/11 recession, and not being able to find work and being very frustrated. And so, pivoting. The first time I pivoted was into journalism, and I luckily for a while was pretty successful at that. I was the music editor at a weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon. Moved to New York and became the music editor at Billboard Magazine after doing a lot of freelancing.
But in 2011, 2012, I kind of could see the writing on the wall in terms of journalism, print journalism, music journalism specifically, and kind of knew, “Okay, this is not going to last forever.” So, I pivoted into doing music technology because at the time Spotify had just launched. There was a really big ecosystem, a lot of companies in the space. And so, I did that for a couple of years and did pretty well at it. I wrote two books. I rose to prominence. And then, that ecosystem started kind of fading and I thought, “Okay. What next?”
And I, at the time, in 2015, I happened to see a virtual reality piece at an art museum, and I was blown away by it. It captured my imagination like very little else had. And so, I pivoted into doing that, and since 2016 I’ve been working in virtual reality. So, it’s been eight years and change, and lots and lots of ups and downs and lots of moving around, trying different things, adding different technologies to my repertoire. Now I do a lot of work with artificial intelligence as well. But yeah, it’s definitely a path where I’ve had to just make a lot of shifts and changes.
JANE
I think that kind of path is becoming more and more common today. That’s a little bit like The Gig Mindset, a book I wrote three years ago. At the time, it was mainly people with a certain mindset inside organizations, but it’s turned out to be pretty much the mindset of workers today, like you, who follow whatever it is that’s happening and you move into a new space and then into a new space.
Cortney, I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you are … Well, I know you’re an expert in virtual stuff, but I saw you use the phrase spatial computing. Could you tell us a little bit what you mean by spatial computing?
CORTNEY
Yeah. So, spatial computing is the phrase Apple uses when they talk about their headset and their technology. So, that’s the phrase that they use with the Vision Pro. And basically, it’s a lot of semantics at the end of the day, right? Virtual reality, extended reality, spatial computing, these are all terms that are … There’s differences here and there, but they’re all a little bit interchangeable. I tend to use them all, honestly, just for SEO purposes. Right? I want to be findable.
And I think the thing with spatial computing that’s a little bit different is with the Apple Vision Pro, you have the capability to record from the headset. So, that’s something I do a lot of and it captures it with this really beautiful depth and fidelity. So, it feels like you are so much more immersed than you would be in a just flat two-dimensional screen, because you just feel like you are interacting with people. The people feel very real. The objects feel very real as well. So, it’s just a different way of capturing and interacting with the world.
But again, these terms will all kind of shake out at some point. Right? People don’t really use the term Web3 anymore. The term metaverse has kind of fallen out of favor. When was the last time you heard somebody say the World Wide Web or cyber? Right? When I was a teenager in the ’90s, everything was cyber this, cyber that, cyberpunk, cybersex, “Hey, baby, you want to cyber?” All that stuff. I mean, now that’s antiquated and kind of silly. So, the terminology changes, but really it’s just overall this interactive, immersive environment that we are trending towards.
Nothing’s a flop, everything’s an evolution
Well, I know the word metaverse was really popular for a while. It was really the thing. Would you say the metaverse has been a flop, or would you say the word itself is no longer used?
CORTNEY
Nothing’s a flop because everything’s an evolution, right? Go back and look at what the web looked like 20 or 30 years ago. Right? The end of the internet was not GeoCities, thank God. Right? So, you could have said at the time, Web 1.0 was a flop. Right? I was talking to some friends over the weekend who are a little bit older than me. They both lived in San Francisco in the ’90s. They both went through Web 1.0. That was a disaster. Right? Everyone got laid off. The money vaporized. A lot of these companies were just too early. Right?
So, if you look at the big companies in Web 1.0, Webvan was one of the historic failures of Web 1.0. That’s grocery delivery. That’s a thing everybody does now. That’s Instacart, that’s FreshDirect. That’s just a thing that people do. Pets.com was the other big flop of the early internet. That’s Chewy, which every pet owner that I know uses, right?
So, the metaverse that we talked about two years ago is going to evolve into something different. And if you look at younger audiences in particular, they’re all in Roblox. They’re all in Fortnite. They are all in there. So, what Meta tried to do with Horizon Worlds, what some of these other platforms have tried to do, it’s going to evolve into something else. Right? Things don’t ever really die. They just kind of change and move around and people find new uses for them.
I mean, if you go back and look at Second Life, right? Second Life is still around. It was a big thing for a while. It’s kind of evolved and changed. So, when people use the term failure, I always kind of push back and say, “Well, very few things come and then disappear. Right? They just kind of change into something else, and that’s good. That’s the evolution that we’re looking for.”
JANE
When you mentioned Second Life, I know the first time we talked, I told you about my experience in Second Life. I was only there once or twice with a couple friends. I told you how I was being chased by someone and I was really scared. And another guy sitting up on this wall said to me, “Jump up here, you’ll be safe.” And I did. And I told you at the time, Cortney, that I have no memory really of what happened. All I know is I remember the feeling that I was suddenly safe again. And you see, look at me, it’s been like 15 years and I still remember that feeling of being safe. It’s a powerful feeling.
Legal is late to the game, raising challenges and potential dangers
Yeah. The embodiment that you get in those spaces is second to none, right? And that’s good, and also can be dangerous if you were in a dangerous situation. Right? And there’s been some really interesting research on this. A couple of people have written about what are the rights of avatars? How do we approach that? If somebody attacks you in the metaverse, they’re not physically attacking you, but it feels like an attack. Right? And I think that’s one thing we have to be really cognizant of and mindful of as we move forward with this, which is right now there’s so much online bullying on social media. How is that going to then evolve when it’s these avatars, right? Because you’re so much more personified.
And so, I think really setting norms, setting standards, creating communities that are self-policing, that’s going to be a huge part of what we need to do moving forward because it’s going to shift and evolve and change.
JANE
It’s going to change the legal world, isn’t it?
CORTNEY
Yeah, totally. I mean, I taught at Barnard last year, I taught a class and I had some students come up to me afterwards and say, “I’m getting ready to graduate. What should I do?” And I said, “Go to law school and become an expert in artificial intelligence and copyright and give me a ride on your yacht in 10 years.” Right? This is the future.
It’s going to be really interesting, really impactful. And I’m part of the World Economic Forum, and a lot of the thinking that we do and the papers we produce in the committee that I’m on are really about, what are the standards and norms that need to be upheld as we move forward?
JANE
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I’ve had a couple of conversations with people about climate change, in particular in Africa, and one is a legal specialist based in Kenya, and she told me the legal profession is not at all suited, the practices today aren’t suited to climate change. And I think that what you’re talking about is even further off in terms of what the legal profession imagines today. So, maybe your advice to your student was really good.
CORTNEY
I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, things move at very disparate speeds, right? And people are often having to catch up. And I think that’s a real shame when we don’t spend enough time focusing on the future, and then you have these people racing to catch up. Things don’t happen as they should. Right? You are behind the eight ball. So, the perfect example of this is the DMCA, which was passed in, I believe, the ’90s, right? About copyright and the internet.
JANE
Oh, right.
CORTNEY
And this is, again, sorry, this is a US perspective. I’m based in the US. I know you have global listeners. So, I just want to say a lot of what I’m going to talk about is US law. There’s obviously-
JANE
That’s fine.
CORTNEY
… [inaudible 00:10 :12] Europe and the EU and other countries, but the DMCA in the US was really kind of pushed everything back. Basically it said to companies, they weren’t legally responsible, right? For people posting certain types of material on their platforms. And so, that shaped how the internet was built. If the DMCA had gone a different way, we would have a very different looking internet, but they didn’t know at the time. Right?
So, now we have this accumulated body of knowledge. And we’re at this really amazing position where we know what’s happened with Web2. Right? And not a lot of it is good. Some of it’s been great, a lot of it hasn’t. And so, how can we then take that accumulated knowledge and move forward with Web3 and create something that’s better? And I think that’s where people haven’t really thought it through, is how do we take our learnings and make this better?
Using AI to find your zone of genius, save time and transform your life
There’s an article in the FT, was it in June? That you were quoted in. The title of the article is Meetings in the Metaverse: New Tech Draws Workers to Virtual Offices. And you were quoted early in the article, and one quote I take from you is you said, “AI-powered avatars and assistants to be a focus for metaverse builders with capabilities including real-time translation of discussions.” And what a powerful idea that would be for a lot of companies.
CORTNEY
That exists now. There’s tons of plugins. I use a plugin called Fathom, and there’s plenty of them in Zoom. I haven’t used Fathom because other people I know use it, right? But yeah, you finish a Zoom call and within two minutes you get an email that has the transcript, it has a summary, it has a recording, right? And that’s the type of stuff that just is so basic to me, and it makes things easier for people. Right? It’s not always perfect. You’d have to go back and re-listen sometimes, but it gets you 90% of the way there.
And it’s the same with the AI-powered virtual assistants. They’re not perfect yet, but they’re pretty good for certain things. You can train them to do certain things. You can have them as a resource to offload your busy work. And I think that’s where the ideal vision for all of this is all the stuff you don’t want to do, you outsource to AI, and then you just spend all your time in your zone of genius, whatever your zone of genius is. So, for me, it’s doing my expenses, doing a lot of summaries and reporting, all of these sort of administrative tasks, that’s not a good use of my time. Right? So, if I can just have an AI do that, and then just quick check it, prove it, make sure it got the receipts correct, boom, done. Then I can spend time doing what I’m actually good at, not sitting here typing in receipts.
And so, I think that’s the real promise of this is to help people work better and work less. Because all the time you spend on busy work and all that stuff, you don’t have to do that anymore. And also, the time you spend cleaning up other people’s mistakes, you don’t have to do that anymore. Right? Now, the other side of that is there are companies that profit off of those mistakes.
Companies playing scams
What do you mean?
CORTNEY
So, health insurance companies basically run a scam where they make mistakes. They put something in as the wrong code, or the wrong this or the wrong that. Now, most people, if they get a bill for $20, $50, they’ll just pay it, right? Because the alternative is you call them and you talk to somebody with two brain cells and you fight with them and it’s not worth your time. My time has a value on it. Right? I calculate an hourly rate, that’s how much my clients pay me. And then if it’s like 50 bucks, it’s like, “Yeah, it’s not worth my time. It’s not worth the aggravation.” Now, those numbers sound small, but aggregated, they’re huge. Right? So, this is a profit center for health insurance companies to just do their jobs badly and people will just pay.
Now, AI could solve this tomorrow. Right? There’s enough pattern recognition in AI to be like, “Oh, this is a mistake. Oh, this is a mistake.” You don’t have to wait online for some idiot to talk to you. You can just talk to an AI. But what is the incentive for health insurance companies to deploy this?
JANE
None.
CORTNEY
None. They’re making money off their mistakes. They don’t care, right? And they don’t care about customer experience because in the US, again, your health insurance is generally provided by your employer. You don’t have other options. So, the fact that you get terrible customer service, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. You can’t.
From positivity to fear about technology
So, this is the world we found ourselves in. It’s the same with airlines. Right? All the airlines melted down a couple weeks ago because of CrowdStrike. It’s like, they’re all bad, so you pick the least worst. But because they’re an oligopoly, they’re not incentivized to do any better. So, there’s all these problems that could be solved, but there are structural reasons not to solve them with this technology. So, that’s where things, to me, are going to get really interesting is like … I get really sad when I see consumers opposing AI or not understanding AI, because it could potentially be used to make your life so much better. But a lot of the times, every story you hear, it’s like, “It’s going to steal your job.”
All this stuff that is kind of made up, and rather than the sort of positivity, and I think there’s real … This is a little off-topic, but there’s a real historical shift from in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, a real positivity and curiosity about technology. If you look at the world’s fair, right? That was the type of thing where the technology of the future, and people were so excited. And at a certain point, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, into this current day, we shifted away from an excitement about technology to a fear of technology, to being terrified about technology.
JANE
Well, why did that happen? What caused that shift, do you think?
CORTNEY
A lot of things. I think the disruption of the economy. When people had secure jobs, and this is kind of the thing we come back to, right? Talking about my work history. Right? When people had job security, when the expectation was you would finish school, join a company, potentially join a union, work there for 40 years, work your way up, retire with a gold watch and a pension, you could be excited about technology because you saw it as aiding you.
When all of those worker protections collapsed, then you saw technology as the enemy because all of a sudden technology is displacing you. Now, that’s not often the case. The case is often greedy companies are displacing you, but people don’t have that understanding. So, we’ve gone from a society where there was sort of a fixed American dream and a sense of you had some security … And again, this is not for everyone, right? But for a certain group of people, you had some security, right? And there was a bargain. If you showed up to your job, you did well, you put in your hours, you were a nice person, then you had security. That doesn’t exist anymore. That is vaporized, right?
I have a friend who worked for a big tech company, did a great job, won them awards. They did round of layoffs, 20,000 people, she was out. Loyalty is not a thing. So, of course people are going to fear change and growth in technology because where does it leave them?
JANE
I wasn’t able to formulate it when I wrote my book about the gig mindset. Well, it was back in 2021, so it was a few years ago. But if I were going to write that again, I would talk about the kind of thing you’re talking about, where that idea of a steady employment simply is not the case anymore. I think people realize it now, but I think the problem, Cortney, is how do we educate people to realize what you’re talking about, it’s not AI taking jobs, it’s corporate greed taking jobs, it’s a variety of different things? But people need to think differently. How can we build a mindset that would be healthier today?
Changes needed in education systems
There’s a couple challenges. The first is the education system, again, US perspective, is woefully outdated, really in need of a lot of work. We ask kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Starting from a very early age. That’s the wrong question. The question is, “What do you want your life to look like? What is interesting to you? What are you steering towards?” And I think that’s the place to start versus, “I want to be a firefighter. I want to be an astronaut.” That’s cute. Right? And I think those jobs will exist, but a lot of jobs that kids will have in 20, 30 years aren’t even invented yet. No one knows what these jobs are. So, I think that’s part of it.
I think public schools in the US teach to the middle, which is a mistake because kids aren’t engaged, and they’re just teaching this very rote material, teaching to a test. And that’s the stuff that AI can do. The sort of higher level, higher order, creative thinking and strategic thinking and interpersonal relations and management skills, those are the things schools need to focus on. Right? But I think teachers in America are woefully underpaid. So, it’s a real labor of love for a lot of folks.
And I think politics in the US doesn’t do it any favors. Right? You see American politicians on both sides, honestly, A factory closes in Indiana and it’s like code red. Right? They’re like slapping tariffs on China to save 600 factory jobs. Meanwhile, by the way, Meta laid off 40,000 people and it was like, “Sorry, guys. Bye.” There’s no incentive for action. Right? And so, you also now have an economy, again, US perspective, where a lot of the roles that are growth roles, that are growth industries are coded female. Right? So, home healthcare-
JANE
Sorry, they are coded what?
CORTNEY
Coded female. They’re coded as women’s work. Right? So, one of the highest growing sectors in the US is home healthcare workers, right? Because we have a rapidly aging population. We have a very sick population due to a number of factors that I can’t get into, because we’ll be here all night. But the point is that work is for women, and it’s especially for immigrant women or women of color, and it’s woefully underpaid. And you have these big, burly blue collar guys who haven’t worked in five years because the factory closed, and it’s like they could be retrained to do this work. There is no law that says only women can do this work. This is a learnable skill, right? But they don’t do it because it’s coded as women’s work.
Learning never ends, we need curiosity
So, I think there’s a big rethink about that, that we have to have. I think there’s just a big rethink about skills and talent and what are people learning? And people really don’t want to change. They don’t want to retrain. They like what they like. They’re good at what they’re good at. And there’s not a sense of intellectual curiosity that I find in a lot of-
JANE
I was just going to say, curiosity was the word I was thinking when you were talking about education of children. Children are not taught to be curious and to formulate questions and to find answers on their own. That’s just not the way they’re taught. And that’s not just in the US. That’s true in France and probably other countries too. They’re taught to memorize.
CORTNEY
Right. And it’s insane because the number one skill is problem solving. That is a skill set that will never be replaced by anyone, because you have to be able to think on your feet and think really quick and solve problems really quick. That’s the difference between, in my mind, good and bad in any occupation, whether that’s service, whether that’s healthcare, whether that’s technology. I mean, I’ve run into so many people in service positions where I ask them a question and they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And it’s like, “Well, can you ask someone who does? Can you look it up? “I don’t know.”
And you remember the encounters that you have with people who went above and beyond, who were like, “No, but I can find out. No, but I’ll help you. No, but talk to so-and-so. No, but do this.” Right? Those are memorable and good, and those are the people that are good at their jobs and will be successful. Because if you’re just all like, “I don’t know.” Well, figure it out. Look, if somebody came to me and said, “Can you do open heart surgery?” I would be like, “No. Goodbye.”
JANE
Well, that’s different. That’s different.
CORTNEY
Right. Yeah. I’m not talking about, I can figure out how to cut somebody open by watching a YouTube, right? But I think it’s more the kind of like, but I can help you research doctors to find somebody who’s really good at that. So, I think, yeah, we don’t have a sense of curiosity.
I think one mistake that we’ve made as a society is to think education ends when you leave school, whether that’s high school, college, graduate school, right? That your education is essentially over when you get handed a piece of paper that says you’ve completed it. That’s not true anymore. You constantly need to be learning. You constantly need to be evolving. And it does get tiring. Right? It does get to be a lot of work.
I was talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday, and we were lamenting that there seem to be at this point, an invisible set of goalposts that are constantly moving, and the actual goalpost itself is gate-kept. So, you cannot ever say, “Okay, well, I’ve done this. This is going to lead to X.” Right? Because a lot of the time you do X, you win an award, you speak at Davos, and it’s like, “Okay, that was neat.” It doesn’t actually go anywhere. And so, I think, for a lot of people, a sense of like, “Well, I don’t know what to do next.” Right? And so, I think then we have to solve for that.
JANE
Are you familiar, have you met or talked to or heard of Sugata Mitra? And he’s the one who did the hole in the wall. He had a hole in a wall, put a computer in the hole and protected the computer. And little kids from India who were completely illiterate and didn’t speak English, came up and played with it. And within a few weeks, they were doing things that nobody could have imagined.
CORTNEY
Oh, I’m sure.
JANE
And so, he tried the experiment in different places. He built up a method called SOLE, self-organized learning experience. And he gave a TED Talk about it, I forget what year. And he got the TED million-dollar prize that year to use to spread this method. And the method did not spread very fast in the United States because teachers were uncomfortable with it.
And I interviewed him. One of my podcast episodes from him is one of the most popular ones. It’s very, very good when he talks about it. And at one point he talks about how we’re reaching a point where the internet will be in our heads. And when the internet is in our heads, then we don’t need to have books and places to look things up. We know and we can look and we can find answers to the questions we’re asking. And his whole method of teaching is very, very interesting.
CORTNEY
It is interesting, and I like the idea of self-directed learning, but I think we need in particular to make sure we are empowering kids to be self-directed.
JANE
Yes.
CORTNEY
Because what I see is a lot of helicopter parents who don’t let their children out of their sight and they control everything so tightly. And again, it goes back to the sort of middle class displacement and fear. And then, you get some of these homeschool parents who go too far and everything is self-directed. And it’s like, no, your child can’t just learn about YouTube all day long. They have to learn math. Right? You do need to know math to function as a human. Whether you need to know AP calculus, maybe not, but you need to know how to add and subtract and basics.
But I think that allowing kids to have more freedom and flexibility to learn is really important. And to create and to feel empowered to direct themselves a little bit is something that needs to happen. But unfortunately, we’re kind of stuck in a place where, again, a lot of the time it’s teach to the test. You have very disruptive classrooms. You have very overcrowded classrooms. You have parents that are suing the school district for this, that and the other. And it’s challenging, and it’s not going to serve anyone well in the end.
VR has a positive impact on lives, creates new experiences, tells stories
To move on a little bit, there was a subject I wanted to talk to you about, and that was something I think was on your website as one of the things, yeah, using virtual reality or augmented reality for social good. And you had a child welfare case, and I know you can’t talk about it specifically, but could you tell us a little bit about what it is and what you did and what happened?
CORTNEY
Yeah. So, there’s a lot of projects that I’ve done in the social impact space. So, the child welfare project is a project where it helps child welfare workers practice asking questions of a family in crisis. So, they’re learning two things. They are learning how to have a conversation, because it’s a branching narrative they’re also learning what type of questions to ask. And then they’re learning how to talk to people who are hostile, who are angry, who are upset, who are potentially very intimidating. And having that practice of just being in that space is very important. So, there’s that.
And then, there’s a piece that my company did on workplace inclusion where you are being excluded. So, all you know is that you’re a manager at a company, right? Which was the audience, and you put on the headset and you go to this meeting and everyone talks over you, dismisses you. They’re very cliquey. Your boss gives you this contradictory advice. You participate in it by speaking, but nothing you say makes a difference. Right? And so, that piece is called Can’t Win, because literally you can’t win no matter what you do. And that’s really meant not to teach people anything necessarily, but to evoke a feeling and create a feeling that people might not have felt before. Right?
And we did the same thing with a racial bias piece where you, the user, are on the end of a bias incident and you don’t know why. Right? So, this piece doesn’t start, “You’re a middle-aged Black man.” Right? It just starts like you’re at a store, you’re a customer, you’re walking around. And so, that makes it really impactful because you are able to feel for a few minutes what other people have felt for their entire life. And the response from that is incredible. And people get very angry, they get very defensive, they get very upset. But that’s the point. Right?
So, it’s really using this technology to sometimes make people very uncomfortable or very angry, because at the end of the day, that’s going to move the needle, that’s going to change things. And I think we saw a period of time in VR in 2017, maybe, 2016, 2017, where everyone’s going to a refugee camp and putting a 360 camera in a refugee camp. Some of those are incredible. There’s one called Clouds Over Sidra that is stunning and a beautiful example of storytelling. And then, a lot of them are just a young, British, white guy takes a vacation to Syria and talks over everyone. And I’m just like, “This isn’t it, man. Your heart’s in the right place. This isn’t it.”
And so, really understanding what stories are we trying to tell? What feelings are we trying to evoke? Because you can’t just take what you would’ve done in a flat screen and put it in VR. That doesn’t work. So, it’s really understanding how to tell a story in this medium. And I think that that’s such a new thing. I’m doing it and I learn stuff every single day. Right? I look back at some of the pieces I’ve worked on, I’m like, “Oh, I really wish I hadn’t done that.” But it’s again, a continuous learning. We’re going to start seeing that.
And one thing that I’ve been working on the last couple of years is teaching other people how to do this. I had to learn everything by making sometimes expensive mistakes, but now I’ve kind of got some of it down at least, although I learn every day. And other people can do that too. And so, that is going to grow the ecosystem of people telling their stories, people telling other people’s stories. Creating this content, this is what essentially is going to move the needle and make this bigger.
JANE
And so, the content is designed in a virtual way to create a feeling in the person, is that what you’re saying?
CORTNEY
Yeah, some of it is. Right? So, some of the stuff I work on is a little bit more just training how to fix a part at a data center, or training how to do compliance in a grocery store. Some of the training I do is more skills-based, for sure, and that’s really important and really valuable. I want to say that upfront.
Impact of VR filming is a game-changer.
But the stuff that I enjoy a little bit more is this feelings-based work, because you’ve never had the ability to do this before, to really embody somebody else and to do it in a way that is coming from a place of being you and having something happen to you, or being involved in something as yourself. That’s brand new. Right? And so, that’s what gets me really excited is the ability … The how you can make change with that is really, really exciting to me.
JANE
So, if I understand correctly, for example, you can get a person to be, I don’t know how to say it, embodied or to be in a situation virtually where people are treating him as if he were, for example, Black, not approved of, poor, whatever.
CORTNEY
Yeah.
JANE
And so, the person will actually feel that in the virtual context and understand for the first time what that’s like?
CORTNEY
They will, and they’ll feel it as themselves, because that’s the other really, really critical part. So, I’ve done pieces that I think are well-intentioned, and I certainly disagree with other people on this. I did a piece where you put on the headset and it basically says, “You are a young Black man.” And right there I’m like, “Well, I’m not. So, okay.” Right? And so, the piece was well done. It was really interesting, and it was very much about discrimination and systemic racism. It was an interesting, well-done piece, but I didn’t feel like it was me. I felt like I was watching a documentary and I was like, “Oh, this is terrible.” Right? But it didn’t feel personal.
And I think what you can do with VR is actually make it feel personal. So, if you look at all the stuff that I’ve done, I never say, “You are a woman. You are a person of color. You are this. You are that.” Right? I’ve done really interesting sort of subtle things where it was about people in wheelchairs, and we didn’t say anything. We just put the camera height really low. That was it.
JANE
Ah, very interesting.
CORTNEY
So, you got to feel what it was like to be at the height of somebody who’s in a wheelchair, just living a day-to-day life and experiencing all the microaggressions. And we didn’t say, “Oh, you’re in a wheelchair. You were in an accident.” We just were like, “This is Bill’s day-to-day experience. Watch it and participate in it.” Right? That’s the type of thing you can do. And people came out and they were sort of confused and they were like, “Well, why did this happen? Why did that happen? Why did this person do this?” And then we say, “Well, think about it more, right? Why were you at that height?”
And there’s all these cool tricks you can do in VR, but you have to have a good story, and you have to also be willing to let people sit with that discomfort a little bit, which I think is really valuable.
JANE
I guess, there’s a lot of experimentation to be done in that direction.
CORTNEY
Oh, yeah. It’s really fun.
JANE
I can tell. That’s one of your passions, I gather.
CORTNEY
It’s really fun. I mean, look, sometimes it goes horribly wrong. I’ve had-
JANE
What do you mean goes horribly wrong? What could go horribly wrong?
CORTNEY
Well, look, no one dies. I mean, it’s more like I spend a day shooting something and then I’m like, “Oh, that didn’t work at all.”
JANE
Oh, I see.
CORTNEY
I spent a day filming at this angle or that angle, and I was like, “Oops, that didn’t quite work.” Like, I had an idea and it didn’t quite work out. Or, you can’t get it to work from the camera angle or from the camera position. Technical things go wrong.
But I think, generally, yeah, it’s fun, it’s interesting. It’s really not that often that we get to do brand new things. And I think that’s what’s exciting to me is some of this is brand new stuff, right? And that’s what’s really fun and cool about it.
JANE
Cortney, are there many people doing this? You must be in contact, there must be a network of people like you.
CORTNEY
Yeah, it’s a small community and I’m friends or friendly with a lot of people. It’s always great to meet new people who are doing this stuff. It’s a great community because people are very open, they share their ideas, they share their work, they share their learnings. Right? It’s not gate-kept, for the most part, right? Which is fantastic. And there is a sense of collaboration. And there’s also a sense of the rising tide lifts all boats. Right? So, if somebody’s piece does really well, that’s going to spark interest in other work, and then you create this flywheel of opportunity. So, that’s the case.
The missing ecosystem of VR creators
But again, it is a small community. So, one of my big passions coming up is teaching other people how to do this. And whether they get into it as just a hobby or whether it’s just something they do as part of their job, or they make a change and pivot to doing it full-time, that’s kind of on them. But it’s really the idea that the only way we grow this ecosystem is when everyone can participate, when the content is not just coming from a handful of 50, 100, 500 people at the top. Right?
Think of 2D screens, right? For a long time what we consumed on 2D screens was just professionally produced content. It was professionally produced movies and television, and that was it. And it was very limited, right? There were four channels on the TV, and if you didn’t like what was on any of those four channels, you didn’t have anything to watch.
JANE
Too bad. Yeah.
CORTNEY
Yeah. Too bad. Go read a book, go outside, touch grass. So, what we now have is this ecosystem where anyone can do it. So, it is not uncommon. In fact, it’s extremely common to … You spend half an hour watching a professionally produced series on Netflix, and then you turn off your Netflix and you look at your friend’s Instagram account, and then you watch some TikTok influencers, and you go back and forth. It’s all kind of flattened into one because it’s screen consumption time, but there’s gradations and levels of quality. And so, something like The Bear, or Succession, no one would ever say your friend’s funny photo of their dog is the same level of quality and storytelling as Succession. And that’s fine. You need all these different levels to make it interesting and to make it relevant and useful to people.
With VR, we have the Succession-level creators, right? We have the top-tier award winners and people doing really good stuff. We don’t have the TikTok influencer level, and we really don’t have the, “Here’s a photo of my dog level.” So, my goal is to really start educating those two bottom levels. The number one complaint I get about VR headsets is not about feeling sick. It’s not about the cost. It’s not about the, “Oh, it’s heavy on my face.” It’s about, “I went out and got one. I thought it was cool. I used it for three weeks. I ran out of content and now it gathers dust on my shelf.” I hear that weekly, if not more. Right? Companies say that to me. People say that to me. Everyone says that. Because we don’t have an ecosystem of content creators.
When the iPhone first came out … I have mine sitting right next to me. When the iPhone first came out and smartphones first came out, everyone thought they were silly because people were like, “Well, this just an expensive phone.” Right? Now we do everything on that phone. Our lives are on that phone. Right? It is harder to function without that phone than to function with it. And that’s where we need to get to with VR, and we need to create that ecosystem of what is the Instagram of VR? Right? Who knows? Somebody’s going to create it and make a lot of money. What is the Facebook of VR? What is the sort of social network? How do we get news? How do we get entertainment? How do we get all of these things?
VR filming creates realities, brings safety
And so, that’s my goal for the next however many years that I continue to do this, is creating that ecosystem, because that’s where things are going to get really interesting. And I do think the Vision Pro is … And there are other headsets coming to market in the near future that are going to have similar capabilities, but the Vision Pro, you can shoot spatial video from the headset. I’ve done that every single day this summer. That was my summer project. And I’ve shot footage on that headset, or other headsets that I have access to, every single day.
Now, most of it’s junk, most of it’s just me learning. So, I had a friend of mine lie on the floor and make fake snow angels because I wanted to test depth and perception as I was standing above her. Right? I’m shooting insane stuff. And it’s fun. It’s fun because I made my friend do snow angels, and she was game and thank you. But it’s also, it’s learning. Right? So, I can write something at some point in the relatively near future and say, “If you want to shoot somebody on the floor from above, here’s the best practice. If you want to shoot somebody in the distance, shoot somebody in motion, shoot somebody doing X, in this light, in this whatever.” And understanding that, because the transition that’s going to happen from shooting with your hand and your phone to shooting with your face is going to be profound.
And when I’ve shown people the Vision Pro and shown them how to shoot content from the headset, they go nuts. They absolutely lose their minds. And these are not techie people. I showed it to my parents who are older and who aren’t techie, and they went and shot video of my niece and nephew just playing and hanging out, in the Vision Pro, and they were like, “You can’t take this with you. We’re keeping it.” Right? Apple’s not really emphasizing that, I think because the Vision Pro is just so early and so expensive. But once that happens, that is going to be a game changer.
JANE
But do you think it’ll be something simpler than the Vision Pro? Something smaller, lighter?
CORTNEY
Oh, yeah. I mean, the Vision Pro, again, if you look at every headset that we’ve had in the last 10 years, they’ve gotten lighter, smaller, faster, cheaper. It’s like, I have an Oculus Rift, which is an early headset, up on my top shelf, that thing’s a beast. It’s clunky. It needed a special computer. It had light houses that you had to set up. And I got that in 2018.
JANE
Not that long ago.
CORTNEY
Not that long ago. Right? And now I have my Quest 3 just sitting next to me. I just threw it in my purse. I’m just like, “Oh, I got to go to a meeting. All right, throw the…” And PICO does the same thing. PICO has really nice headsets. HTC has really nice headsets.
So, you have all these people kind of competing and pushing each other to get better. That’s really exciting. What I kind of see eventually happening is we have our everyday glasses, where these are the glasses we use to interact with the world. They’re very light. They look just like regular eyeglasses or sunglasses, but they don’t have the full functionality that a VR headset would. They don’t have the immersion.
So, then you go home, or you go to a third space and you put on your VR headset and you get that immersion. So, it’s like watching a movie on your phone versus on your laptop screen versus on a 80-inch TV. It’s very different experiences, but plenty of people, myself included, have all those three screens. It’s just going to be, you have different devices for different things, but it is going to be a much more heads-up world than what we’ve had the last 10, 15 years now, which is this world where you’re looking down all the time. And I think if no one else is happy, chiropractors-
JANE
It’ll be good for our necks and our backs.
CORTNEY
Good for your neck, good for your backs. Yeah, it’s good for not walking in front of taxi cabs, walking off the sidewalk, walking into people. Right? There’s all these kind of silly things that will improve.
And the other thing is too, when we look at it from a civil rights perspective, a cop can grab your phone out of your hand very easily. They can’t rip your glasses off. Right? If you have a thousand people marching for something and they’ve all got their glasses on live-streaming, that’s the whole world is watching right there. That is a very different experience.
Or, from a public safety perspective, right? I’m a woman. I’m very petite. I like to go out in New York City. I walk home late at night by myself from the subway. Luckily, I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, but still, if I had live-streaming glasses, how much better would I feel? How much better would I feel if I’m like, I get off the subway, I message my husband, “Hey, I’m turning on my live stream.” I walk home. He can see, or any trusted person can see, and if anyone comes into my field of view, oh, I’ve got their face. “Oh, hey, Palantir, what’s up?” We could reduce crime to nothing if we had these glasses.
JANE
That’s really interesting.
CORTNEY
And that’s where it gets really exciting and really fascinating. And that’s what I think about with, yeah, sure, you can be negative about this technology, but oh, if we reframe it … The thing that frustrates me with some of these AI devices, like Humane AI, that thing flopped, although I shouldn’t say that, maybe it’ll get reinvented to something else. These sort of live-streaming devices, everyone’s like, “Oh, look how fun and silly it is.” And it’s like, “No, this is a public safety device.” If you marketed that to women and were like, “Hey, if you wear this and somebody tries to attack you, it’ll capture their face and it’ll alert the cops and you’ll be safer.” Every woman-
JANE
A lot is a question of how these things are framed, as you say, how they’re positioned.
CORTNEY
Yeah. That’s the thing I don’t get. There are so many good day-to-day applications for this technology, and people just don’t even … It doesn’t even cross their mind.
We need to accept our era where we will never “figure it all out”
We were talking earlier about people who are concerned about their jobs. There’s a number of jobs that people who do them now who are going to lose those jobs, don’t see how AI can help them in any way. I think there’s probably a gap between the reality of these people, 40, 50, 60 years old, and what can be done with AI today. We’re probably in a phase that we’re sort of in the middle of a transition.
CORTNEY
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, it goes back to no one has job security. I don’t have job security. You don’t have job security.
JANE
No.
CORTNEY
The president of the United States doesn’t have job security. The guy who cleans the street outside my house doesn’t have … No one has job security, right? No one does. Right? So, I think the idea of job security is just obliterated. That’s where we just have to start. Right?
And then, it’s with the AI stuff, it’s like, all right, what do you do next? Because the horse is out of the barn. The horse doesn’t go back in the barn. You couldn’t undo the Industrial Revolution. You couldn’t undo the internet. Think of how many people’s jobs were displaced by the internet. Guess what? Most of them found new jobs. So, it’s really about, again, we have an opportunity to start early, retraining people, re-skilling people, re-educating people, moving people around.
We have this very strange attitude in the US that no one should ever have to leave. People come here all the time. There’s a situation in New York City where a lot of migrants, particularly from Venezuela and other Latin American countries have come here. And if you asked most of them, they’d be like, “No, I would much rather be in my ancestral homeland with my family, the place I was raised, speaking the language, enjoying my life. Guess what? I live in a fleabag motel in New York City because I had to move.” Americans just cannot grasp that concept, that guess what? Your job might go somewhere else and you might have to go with it. And that might be okay. And just thinking about how do we reorder the economy to again, be really skills-based? That’s going to be the direction we move in.
And I’m not the first person to say that, but it’s like, what are your core competencies? What are your core skills? How can they be applied in different ways? And then, let’s say you do customer service and you’re good at it. Yeah, AI might displace the job where you answer the phone to say, “Oh, I’m sorry, your bank account was compromised.” Guess what? Being good at customer service has a lot of other applications that you can move around and do other work that is people work. Right?
So, I think we just have to get away from a lot of these notions that we’ve had in the past and move towards, again, retraining, re-skilling, re-educating, up-skilling, moving to a skills-based economy. All of these things will, in the end, be a net benefit for everyone, because it gives you more flexibility, more freedom, more of a chance to do different things, move around, learn more. But we’re still kind of stuck in this 1950s era, like, oh, you graduated from high school, you go to the factory on Monday, you work at the factory for 40 years, and then you retire. And it’s like, yeah, that’s not a thing.
JANE
Well, you’ve sort of answered my last question for you, which was how you view the future. And if we don’t get involved with AR and VR soon, what could the consequences be? And you’ve pretty much answered it, in that we need to get involved in it in order to change the way we see ourselves and see our work.
Learning to manage, motivate, know there’s no finish line
Yeah. I mean, we really need to have a focus on continuous learning, continuous up-skilling, continuous growth, starting from a very early age. It’s going to be hard to go back and undo some of what’s happened. But for kids that are entering school right now, it’s incumbent on parents to ask, “Okay. Well, how are you teaching kids to question things, be curious, learn more, solve problems?” Those are skills that AI can’t really do right now and might never be able to do. AI can’t manage people. AI can’t motivate people. Right? How do you teach your kids how to do that? And really moving forward from there.
And I think there’s going to be a lot of hard questions we have to ask schools in terms of how they educate kids, how they group kids, how kids move through school together. Some of the stuff they’re teaching right now seems very outdated. Some of the way classrooms are organized is insanely outdated and weird in my mind. Nike has this really great campaign called There Is No Finish Line. I’m a big distance runner. I run a lot of marathons and ultra marathons. And the idea of this ad is there’s no finish line, you’re never done. Yeah, you might finish a race, you might finish your training cycle, but if you are a runner, you’re finished when your legs fall off.
JANE
When you stop running, basically.
CORTNEY
Yeah. When you stop running is when you’re finished. But there is no finish line. And I see this with young people because we have not done a good job educating young people about this, I see this constantly with people in their 20s and 30s, “When am I going to be settled? When am I going to have it figured out? When am I going to this?” And it’s like, never. You’re never going to have it figured out. The day you have it figured out is the day that you are dead, basically.
Lost in transition, between the old world and the new, not quite here yet
To have this idea of uncertainty and growth and constant movement. And I think people have just become so opposed to that, that we really just need to start again answering these questions of, well … Economic uncertainty, we need to solve for that as well. Right? I get it. But I also feel like if people can just get comfortable with uncertainty and growth and change. And I mean, look, I say all this, I’m not fully comfortable with it either. I found out that I was nominated for this pretty big award that I can’t talk about publicly because it’s not announced yet, but my first thought was, “Awesome. Yay. This is exciting.” My second thought was, “Eh, it’s not going to actually do anything. It’s not going to mean anything.” Because nothing means anything at this point. Right?
I know people that have achieved everything. I have a good friend who is one of the most well-known, well-respected people in my industry. She’s been unemployed for over a year. The idea of fairness and hard work, that is also just kind of over at this point. Right? So, it’s very much about dealing with this new world of work and technology. You have to be hungry and pivoting and working all the time. And I think once people understand that and understand that the world we had 50 years ago is just gone, then we can at least start breaking through and changing things.
JANE
Cortney, do you have any final words that you’d like to say?
CORTNEY
I think I’ve talked enough.
JANE
That’s the whole purpose of having this conversation, is to share your thoughts with the people who follow my work.
CORTNEY
No, this was great. Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been a really fun conversation. I hope I haven’t sounded too much like a doomer. I’m really not. I’m very pro-technology and I’m very excited. I just think that we are in this weird place right now where we’re kind of stuck. Right?
I mean, I guess, this is my final thought. So, if you look at Web2 as kind of mid to late-2000s through COVID, right? Let’s just say that. So, 2006 to 2020, that was Web2. That was the heyday of Web2. And Web2 was largely predicated on free money, right? The interest rate was nothing. Venture capital was free. It was cheaper and better for venture capitalists to spend money funding companies, even if the companies weren’t viable, because they at least had a chance of a return. Whereas, the money when interest rates were so low, was just sitting there.
So, when the interest rate went up in the US, right? All of a sudden that changed everything. And now what you’ve got is all of these companies that everyone relied on and was trained to rely on are awful now. Food delivery services are terrible. Uber is bad, right? Because they now have to be profitable because the free money train is over because of interest rates, and now they suck. Right? And so, we’re at this stage where a lot of the stuff that’s happening is not new, it’s not that interesting, and it’s actually gotten kind of worse. But we’re not at a place yet where VR, AR, spatial computing, crypto, AI, all of these things are still, they’re too new, they’re too nascent. And people both overestimate and underestimate them, but they’re not fully baked.
So, we’re at a place where the last thing has kind of ended. The next thing hasn’t quite taken off. And we’re just sitting in this kind of weird middle space that feels very uncomfortable and kind of awful. And I think, again, things are going to change. Things will flow and change, but it’s just this place right now where they haven’t quite yet. And that’s kind where we are right now. And so, I think for me, it’s like, okay, how do we accept that a lot of these things have changed? And then, figure out what’s the next path forward? Because that’s where things get interesting again.
JANE
Thank you very much, Cortney.
CORTNEY
All right. Thank you for having me.
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