Cortney Harding | Navigating the Metaverse: Insights into Virtual Reality and the Future of Work

Srini: Courtney, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Cortney Harding: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Srini: Yeah, it's my pleasure to have you here. So you are on a long list of people who, our mutual friend Michael Schein has referred to me and everybody Michael refers as always phenomenal. So no pressure at all.

But before we get into your work, I wanted to start by asking you what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Cortney Harding: So my father was a school administrator and my mother was a public school teacher. They're both retired with those great pensions that baby boomers got from doing public service. I think a couple things that have informed what I do. One is I do a lot of adjuncting work. I teach at different universities and. I'm the only non full-time teacher in my family. My sister's a teacher. My parents did that. So I think that for me it was really about putting information out into the world was always very important to me. So I think that, I think also more in terms of just broad background, like my parents both came from very working class families.

My mother grew up in a mining town in South Wales, and my grandfather was a coal miner. Grandmother was a housekeeper before World War ii, and then she didn't really work on my father's side. His father was a disabled World War II veteran. His mother worked intermittently, like as a shop girl they didn't really have careers. My parents were the first in their families to go to college. And while they always encouraged me to pursue work that I enjoyed and work that I found valuable. I think there's also this sense of I should be doing something a little bit more stable. I think their goal was always like stability, stable income, playing it a little safe.

And so I feel very lucky that I can work on cutting edge technology that is not often the most stable work, right? There's peaks and valleys, especially when you do stuff that's very new. And so there's always that little corner of my mind that's okay, this has been a cute little experiment, but tomorrow you're gonna wake up and have to go get a real job.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. I can relate. I come from a family full of college professors and my dad just retired, so he just got that start. That pension started about a week ago.

So I totally understand. One thing with both your parents being educators, even, you alluded to a little bit of this, but what was the narrative about education in your household?

Because like in an Indian family education is it's one of those things we don't even talk about. It's just a given that you're gonna go to college, that you're ideally gonna go to graduate school, and if they have anything to do with it, it's gonna be the best damn college and the best damn graduate school you could possibly get into.

And I wonder what that was like for you?

Cortney Harding: So in my family, education was obviously very highly prioritized, very highly valued. That was a gi that I would go to. College was a. That I would go to in a elite college was less of a given. I went to Wellesley, which is a pretty highly ranked school,

but I think my parents would've been just as happy if I'd gone to University of Oregon or something like that. I think at the end of the day, they didn't put a ton of pressure on me to go to an Ivy League school, go to law school, any of this stuff. I think that was maybe a little bit outside of their realm of knowledge and the realm of thinking about the world. But yeah, I mean it definitely was getting, studying hard, getting good grades, working hard, accomplishing things like I was raised in a very accomplishment focused family. From a very young age. It was like, If you swim 50 laps at the pool, you'll get an ice cream. If you read a hundred books over the summer, you'll get a prize from Pizza Hutt. For some reason it's all about food. I'm like a dog. I'm like food motivated and I think that I learned very early on that, okay, you have to be committed.

You have to practice, you have to hone your craft. And those are skills that I'm glad I have.

Srini: Yeah. I gotta ask you, what are the negatives from that sort of achievement mindset? Because you, we just, we haven't aired this yet, and probably by the time people are hearing your interview, we will have, Jennifer Wallace recently wrote a book called Never Enough, which was all about how our achievement mindset is really becoming a problem for kids in schools today.

So I wonder in your own experience what were the pros and cons, but given that you are an adjunct, I think we have to talk about it from a student perspective as well.

Cortney Harding: Yeah. God, I feel seen with that book. I need to read that book. And I've read other sort of similar books. There's one called Wonder Held that just came out that I read. Yeah the problem with achievement mindset is it's never enough, right? So I tend to do this thing where I achieve something and I'm happy for a couple days and I'm like, yeah, whatever.

Next. What's next? What's next? So I think that is, The downside of this kind of high achieving mindset is you'll never be fully satisfied because there's always something else to achieve. The upside obviously is you want people to live up to their, potentially you want people to do good work. But I think that where a lot of the burnout that people are suffering from is not so much that they have quote unquote too much work or they're too busy, it is that they are working really hard, but they're not actually achieving what they wanna achieve. And then that sort of like endless work is where you start to run into these feelings of burnout and these kind of brick walls.

But yeah, I mean like the other thing is too, it's kind, there's a class issue, right? Like my parent, my grandfather went to work at a coal mine every day.

That didn't necessarily fulfill his soul. It wasn't his life's mission to be underground getting coal right? That was just what you did and that's how you fed your family. And that's and he liked, he had friends there. He was part of a union, like he was part of community there. So I think that stuff is all very positive. But yeah, I think the idea of doing work that feeds your soul is this kind of new agey very middle to upper middle class way of viewing the world. Whereas for the vast majority of humanity, work is the thing you do so that you don't starve.

Srini: I so appreciate that perspective because I think that like I, I've been wanting to explore this idea of the role that context plays in prescriptive advice. And which is basically starting out as a book title. Everybody's full of shit, including me. But I think you bring up a really important point because class is one of those contexts that really is not taken into consideration when we talk about this idea of work that feeds your soul.

If you look at all of the various books, like not to pick on some of these people, 'cause they've been my own guests. Let's say we using Simon Sinek as an example. Start with why that's a privileged place to be approaching your work from. To your point, why? Because I need to put food on the fucking table.

That's why Yeah,

Cortney Harding: totally.

Srini: a really different way of thinking about this, but I think that's so left out of so many of these conversations.

Cortney Harding: Yeah, and I think what's happened is really my gen, so I'm late Gen X, early millennial, depending on

How you.

Srini: You and I are in that same boat,

Cortney Harding: Yeah, I was born in 1980. I consider myself culturally and spiritually Gen X because I was raised with a lot of the early nineties pop culture.

Not so much late nights pop culture, which I think is more the millennial pop culture, but that's somewhat irrelevant.

Like we graduated into the same crappy post nine 11 economy. And I think that our, that generation, if you were raised in this kind of middle class and up household, The idea was like, work is gonna be this thing that fulfills you and you're gonna, you need to make an impact. And what I've seen is a lot of people feeling really disappointed and angry. Because they were fed this line. And then it turns out in fact that like most jobs are just manipulating spreadsheets, right? And most jobs are completely insecure, right? There's no one I know who has a secure job anymore, right? That's a thing that doesn't exist. The idea

of working for the same company for 30, 40 years and retiring at the Gold Watch and a pension that is functionally obsolete at this point. And you just see people who were they did everything right? They worked hard. They went to a good college, they went to graduate school, they took out student loans, blah, blah, blah. Like they, they followed the rules and now they're all oh, the payoff wasn't there.

And I think there's a lot of pushback now from that generation.

And I, what I see now with younger generations like Gen Z is this kind of. Almost anti work attitude, which I kind of love because they're not buying into this myth of just work really hard and you'll be successful.

Because yeah, hard work plays a part in it, but guess what? There's like a nepo baby out there who's just oh yeah, daddy, I wanna do this.

And daddy's okay, here's million dollars. Google we're, and I'm like, but I would also like,

Srini: Yeah.

Cortney Harding: yeah don't. The role that class plays in a lot of how people wind up with different careers or even how people experience the world. And I see that through a friend of mine who grew up very poor and is very smart. Went to Wesleyan and then went to Harvard for graduate school and has felt very much an outsider her entire life because she does not really know how to exist in these privileged spaces. And I think that you need to have skills to be successful. Obviously that's the foot in the door generally, not always. But you also need to know how to exist in spaces and how to exist with types of people and how to have casual conversations about, oh yeah, I was just in Paris. I hated such and such.

Oh really? I've been there. Like all of these things that are so class-based, people don't understand the importance of that and how limiting it is and how much of a barrier. It's for a lot of people.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. I, we had Scott Galloway here and I remember him talking about Elite College and he said, elite colleges have now become luxury. Brands. And to your point, like there's another book written by Yale professor and I can't remember his name, but I remember the book title because it was poignant and stood out to me so much called The Meritocracy Myth.

Cortney Harding: Oh yeah.

Srini: I realized that I am the person you're talking about. I went to Berkeley as an undergrad, did Pepperdine graduated with a mountain of debt, and, but when I finished graduate school, I looked at what was about, what was I was gonna be faced with, and I realized, I was like, okay, there's no jobs.

I'm like, I ended up here because I did exactly what people told me to do. Now I'm not gonna do any of that because otherwise I'm gonna end up right back here. Yeah, to your point, it came with a lot of risks, but I think that I also was able to take risks from a place of tremendous privilege. Like my dad was like, yeah, fine.

Stay at our house and work on your business for the next four years

without questioning me being as old as I am living at home. And that was really fortunate. Like I have never really, it took me a long time to realize how lucky I was to be able to have that opportunity.

Cortney Harding: Yeah, and that's a rare opportunity. A lot of people don't have that. And also thinking about where people grew up. So if you grew up in or near a major metropolitan area where there's a lot of jobs and you move back home, then that's one situation. If you grew up in the middle of nowhere and your options move back home where there's no economy and everyone's on fentanyl, then that's a different situation.

And having the opportunity to move home and the opportunity to be independent, I think. One of the great barriers that we really don't talk about for people my age is if you were in your forties, your parents are probably getting into their seventies or even higher, and what are their health outcomes like and what what type of care are they going to require and can they afford it? So you are now seeing a lot of people whose parents didn't have access to quality healthcare or who just for whatever reason, Smoked or drank excessively or have Associated with doing manual labor, like those parents are going to require their children to take care of them. Whereas fortunately, my parents are in like amazing health.

They're out there like running half marathons and they have savings so that if they do need care, they can take care of it. And so I think that's like a huge divide that we're not really talking about at this point that's gonna be really impactful for our generation coming up is whose parents give them independence and whose parents. Are going to require, are going to be dependent on them.

Srini: And I think there's the flip side of that argument

,

as well, right? Because there are a lot of us that I'd lived at home for a substantial period of time and I had to, I had no choice. And because like I remember growing up thinking I want to be far more wealthy than my parents ever are.

All this other stuff. And I remember I. I think probably mid thirties. I came into my parents' house and I was like, this place is a palace. This is insane. I'm like, even my sister was a doctor. She's we couldn't afford a house as big as our parents' house, cause she lives in la where she told me, she's the average price for a two bedroom condo is like a million dollars.

Cortney Harding: Oh, sure. Yeah. It's the same in New York. I've, I was very fortunate, and this is gonna sound insane when I say this, so I, my husband and I started dating in 2006. And in 2008, his grandmother passed away and left him some money. That was how we were able to afford the down payment on our first apartment.

And once we were in that door, then we were able to a few years later, buy a larger apartment and trade up. And we've been here for a while, but getting in the door is insane. And we live in a two bedroom apartment. It's a nice apartment. I like it. We've lived here a long time. But when I look at how much our apartment would sell for, and then I look at houses in other markets, I'm just like, oh my God, what am I.

Srini: Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah. There are times where I'm just like, God, if I would be willing to move to the middle of nowhere, I could live in a five bedroom house for the price I'm paying for a two bedroom apartment.

Cortney Harding: Sure. But the thing with that is honestly and I don't know, maybe there are people who are totally happy to live in the middle of nowhere. I'm not one of them.

I need a million options. I need to walk out my, within my front door, I have. Easily 15 to 20 restaurants within a three block radius. I have a grocery store. I have three grocery stores, and a 10 block, or 10 mile, 10 minute radius. I have two pharmacies. I have live music, I have art, I have I could not leave my neighborhood and be fully entertained for months on end. And I can also get on the subway and go two stops and have a brand new neighborhood to be fully entertained.

And so I, I am used to that. I need that. When I travel and I'm in the middle of nowhere, I like it for maybe a week or two. It's nice to chill out and then I.

Srini: Yeah talk to me about the trajectory that has led you to doing the work that you do. Because as you mentioned, you're basically working on inventing the future for the most part. Just so people have a background, we should probably give it to them, but walk me through how you got there, because I think you're so far ahead of the curve in terms of the way that people think about some of these things.

Cortney Harding: Yeah, I have a completely insane background. I, so I started doing a lot of like political activism in high school. I got very invested in it and I did a lot of internships and I basically spent, I. Ages 16 to 22 interning. So I did so much free work when I was in high school, when I was in college every summer. I really put my time in for the cause. And then when I went to find a job after graduating, everyone was like, just keep interning. Can't your parents just pay for it? And I was like, no, that's not how this works. You've already enough free labor out me. Like I'm not to get rich. Just pay me enough to. And I couldn't find that. And I had this really existential breakdown and I spent a year answering phones at a law firm and being depressed and feeling like I'd wasted my life. And then I found this nonprofit job that I really liked. And so that was great. At the same time I started, I had always written about music and been interested in music and put on benefit concerts in high school. And I thought, okay, it'll be fun to like freelance and write for local alternative weeklys. And so I started doing that and I wound up becoming the music editor in Alternative Weekly in Portland, which was great. So I was doing that, I was working for a nonprofit. I got into graduate school at N Y U and I thought, okay, this is now it's time to like really grow up and go to grad school.

And I have a master's in public policy. And I thought, okay, I'll do like policy analysis, I'll work in government. And I got about halfway through graduate school and I was writing more, and I thought, I really don't like public policy stuff anymore. I'm burned out on it. I'm bored with it, but I was like, but there's no way I could ever be a full-time music journalist and make a living.

That's an absurd thought. So I kept going. I finished graduate school and then I said, I'm gonna give myself the summer to look for a writing job. If I can't find a writing job by Labor Day Weekend, I'll get a policy job and I'll write on the side. In August of 2008, I got a job as a writer at Billboard Magazine, and I was a billboard for four and a half years.

I was a writer, I was the music editor there and I really loved it. And it was great, but there was a lot of churn at the top. I felt like I gone as far as I could. I also, that was when Spotify was coming to the US and I was really fascinated by this new sort of music and technology ecosystem that was starting up. So I took a leap and I started working for this. I left Billboard, I started working for this music technology startup. I. I did that for about three and a half years, and I got I got to a place where I was pretty good. I was, I wrote two books about it. I had a podcast. I was doing panels about it.

Like I, I got to a point where I was like, all right this is what I'm gonna do, and I'm an expert and I had these great clients and working for all these startups. And then maybe 2015, the bubble started to burst. There had been all this excitement about music and technology and Spotify and then Spotify I leveled out a little bit in terms of being the next big thing, and a lot of these small startups started going bust. The money was going elsewhere, and at the same time, I went to an art show that had a virtual reality piece, and I remember doing that VR piece and leaving the museum and walking to the subway and thinking oh my God, what did I just see? And getting really excited about it.

Srini: No.

Cortney Harding: so from there I was still on contract with this music startup, so I spent a year researching and writing and learning and building a groundwork. And in 2016 I was on a panel at South by Southwest with this guy who was a VR director, just starting a production company. And we hit it off. So I came and worked with him, and then that was the start of it. And I really have been doing different things, mostly running my company in the space since then.

Srini: Let's talk about VR in particular because it, it's funny 'cause I remember I was like I'm always an early adopter when it comes to any new technology. I'm just like, gimme the thing, I wanna try it. I don't care if it breaks everything. Like I'm willing to experiment. We started a podcast when everybody said podcasts were dead.

And I remember telling my friend about VR and he was like, dude, the things you're talking about are 10 years ahead. And I'm like, yeah, I know. When we started a podcast 10 years before anybody was listening to them, Major cultural trend. Trend, but I feel like when I watched the sort of landscape of vr, I feel like it's, it had this sort of like rise.

Then a plateau and then it fell. And then I feel like we're somewhere in between right now. Because I remember, I, I think if I remember correctly, it was a Samsung gear and I ended up getting a Samsung phone, even though I'm an iPhone guy specifically because they had a simulator for public speaking where I could load my slides into it and practice being on a stage.

I. In front of an audience. And the reason I did that was I remember reading in Ryan holiday's book Obstacles Away How Astronauts Train for their Missions. They go through the motions hundreds of times so that their heart rate stays normal et cetera, et cetera. Because those kinds of things are a matter of life and death when you're talking about going into space, obviously doing a speaking gig is not a matter of life and death, but I was

Amazed at how well it worked, because by the time I got on stage, it was like, I've done this a thousand times in my living room, even though it was just in front of the couch. Just having that. But then I feel like we took this dip. So talking about the current state of VR as it is today, and then we can start talking about actual application of where this is gonna take us.

Cortney Harding: So the joke that I've been making a bunch is VR is Schroeder's technology because no one knows whether it's dead or alive. And you can read a blog one day, it'll say that it's dead, and the next day it'll say it's alive. And It's been a lot of peaks and valleys. I think 20 16, 20 17 time period you're talking about was a really big upswing for virtual reality.

There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of money coming into the space and then there was it didn't get adopted as fast as everyone thought it would. So there was a bit of a valley, I think the start of Covid, there was some excitement around it because people thought, oh, this is the moment for this technology.

And

Srini: Yeah.

Cortney Harding: again, we weren't there in terms of the hardware and the hardware distribution specifically.

So there was a little bit of a downswing, but I think now we're in another upswing with the Apple Vision Pro announcement. That's

a huge deal. That was an incredibly exciting day. Meta who full disclosure is one of my clients. I like them and I like what they do. They are putting out new headsets, they are putting out really great headsets. There's a company called Pico based out of they're part of By Dance, which is the parent company of TikTok. They're bigger in certain markets, but they have high quality headsets as well.

So the hardware is getting to a point where I think we're gonna start getting towards mass adoption. And I think Apple in particular, to me that was really groundbreaking and I think a lot of the coverage that I've read of it has been silly.

Where people are saying, oh, it's so expensive.

Yeah it's a first version. This is Apple's whole playbook.

Like Apple, historically, for the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years, they put out a first version of a device. It's always very expensive. It's meant for a developer audience, an early adopter audience. Then those people build the killer apps and then 3, 4, 5 iterations beyond that. There's a device with all the killer apps on it, the price comes down a bunch and everyone all of a sudden has it. That happened with the computer, that happened with the iPhone. That happened with the watch to

a somewhat lesser extent. This is how Apple does it,

and so for someone to say, oh, it'll fail because the first version is expensive.

I was like, have you ever read any piece of history about Apple ever? I understand you used to feed the hot take machine, but can you make your hot takes correct, or at least informed? So yeah I think Apple getting into the market was a huge moment. And I think we'll look back and see it on par with the iPhone announcement or with the the iMac announcement

Srini: No, I, I remember when I saw it, I had a friend who used to say to me, he is apple doesn't invent things. They perfect them.

And I thought that was. Such a good way of putting it because I I had the Oculus Quest headset and I played with it for a while and I used it and I saw a lot of potential for it.

I it was one of those things where I was like, okay, there are really profound implications. In fact, speaking of Michael Schein, I remember when I got the Oculus, I was like, Hey, Michael. I was like, what do you say we do a, an interview in virtual reality. And we use your concepts from the Hype Handbook to hype this up, and I was like, but I gotta send you an Oculus quest, which I was like, I'm not gonna send you a $300 headset. But to your point, it's funny that people brought up the cost issue because I remember talking to my dad about this and I said look, you could argue that the cost is insane. Or the counter argument is, what if this eliminates the need for a tv, a computer, and laptop?

Suddenly cost is actually completely reasonable at that point, assuming that it can do all those things. Just based on what I saw, I was like, okay, I have to get my hands on this. This looks like the coolest thing in the world.

Cortney Harding: I would say

,

wait, maybe an iteration or

two, because

Srini: what my dad says,

Cortney Harding: That's, gonna be like the, when

it gets to be killer. If you look at the first iPhone, it was good, but it was expensive and it only had a handful of apps, right? The iPhone only became a really mainstream consumer device, maybe three on the iPhone, three or four. 'cause all those apps started to get built and now of course people can't live without their smartphones. Like it's very hard to function without one as a human being.

And yeah, I think that you are right. Like I've seen those images where people have a a desk full of stuff and now that's on your iPhone, right?

There's a computer and a phone and a map and a this and a that, and it's now it's all in one device in your hand. So the cost kind of equalizes out, and I think that's exactly what it's gonna be with the. The Vision Pro or whatever they wind up calling it. And I think that's what's really exciting is like in 10 years this will just be normal.

Srini: Let's talk about the implications of all of this for how we live, how we work, how we educate, because one thing that I think a lot of people are terrified about you brought up meta as being one of your clients is like, are we gonna be in a Facebook owned or a meta owned metaverse?

Is that we're gonna be living where we're seeing ads rolled through our virtual landscape? What are the implications

of that for. A civil society, which I realize we could probably do three hours on that question.

Cortney Harding: so lemme push back on that advertising point

specifically. Have you ever driven down a highway?

Srini: Yeah.

Cortney Harding: What do you see when you drive along the highway

on billboards ads everywhere. So we already live in an advertising saturated environment no matter what, even if you put down your computer and put down your smartphone and just went for a walk through New York City or through Los Angeles or drove down a highway somewhere, like you're gonna see ads everywhere.

So I don't think seeing ads is necessarily the issue. So Meta has been very forthright about the fact that while they are building for the metaverse, They are themselves, not the metaverse. Now obviously changing the name of the company to Meta was there clearly there was some confusion there.

And I don't know that was the best strategy, but that's outside my realm of expertise for sure. There are lots of other headsets on market. There will continue to be new headsets, there will continue to be new devices. There are certainly new Metaverse worlds like Horizon Worlds, which is Meta's platform is one of several. So I don't think the idea of like meta specifically being in the space is that big of an issue. I do think there we do need to have regulations and restrictions and good governance around this because this, like we've seen with the internet, if you don't regulate it in an appropriate way from day one. It's gonna be absolute chaos. So I think we and I'm people at Meta have said this, people at all these platforms have said this we need good regulations around this because we wanna make this a positive space for people. Right now, there's so much negativity and misinformation online, and we need to make sure that we are regulating these spaces in a way that, yeah, there's free exchange, there's free speech, people can spend time together. If I look at Twitter or X or whatever they're calling it these days, for more than five minutes, my brain starts to hurt because it's just such a cesspool.

Srini: Yeah. Yeah. I, this is something I like, I don't remember where the details were about this. Like I, it's just a memory that triggered when you mentioned sort of regulation. 'cause I remember reading about the horizon workspaces. Or even the metaverse and women talking about being sexually harassed in the metaverse.

And I was thinking to myself, seriously, and that's why I'd asked the question about what does this mean for a sort of civil society? But it got me I started thinking about VR from the very dating standpoint. And I remember telling a friend, I was like what if. Instead of these stupid swipe right, swipe left experiences, you actually could talk to somebody.

And I told somebody, I was like basically you could be like, let's go for a walk in Paris on our first date. Using virtual reality, which to me sounds cool in a lot of ways because. The, I've seen friends argue two sides of this coin in terms of what it will do to us. Some friends are like, oh, are we all just gonna be connected to our headsets?

And I was of the mind that, no, I actually think this might incentivize us to meet in person more. Because I think it was Peter Diamandis who had mentioned that as it gets better and better easy, there'll be a point at which you would be able to put on the headset. And so let's say for example, my parents have family members in India.

To be able to feel as if they're sitting right there in their living rooms like that, I think would be a really positive benefit. So talk to me about what are the potential pitfalls here when it comes to the way that we socialize? Because that was one of the huge issues with social media in and of itself, is that it turned us all into basically scrolling zombies.

I. Very distinctly remember this because this was right when the iPhone had started to get to that mainstream point. It was probably about 2011, and I came back from Costa Rica after being there for six months, and I was like every single person in the airport had their face buried in the screen.

Cortney Harding: So again I push back on some of these things because I think they're taken out of historical context.

So women get sexually harassed in the metaverse. That's terrible. I get sexually harassed on the street every day, almost like if I'm out running errands, some guy's gonna yell at me. Certainly on, have you ever been a woman on Twitter? It's not a fun thing, right? So yeah, look at a certain point, should we create Reasonable guidelines within the Metaverse so that doesn't happen or it happens less? Absolutely. Yeah. No question. But at the end of the day, like the Metaverse is people, and there are some people out there that are just awful and there's only so much we can do. The same with everyone having their face buried in a phone. Sure, but we've all seen that iconic shot of everyone on the New York City subway reading the newspaper. People have their face buried in a book. People like people are, will always distract themselves. Now the phone arguably is easier and it definitely is like lower quality content perhaps. But I don't see an I, I was flying to Portland last month to visit my folks and the woman sitting next to me on the flight. Watch TikTok for five hours straight. And I was like and again, look she was quiet. She had her headphones on. She just sat there. So part of me's cool, whatever do you. But part of me is like my brain would drip out of my nose

if that were to happen. But like I read books on my phone, I watched documentaries on my phone Phone as a just overall thing. You could be reading Proust on your phone, like that's very different than five hours of TikTok. So I, I think that just saying we're going to have these devices in front of our faces all the time is a little too simplistic.

I also think that look, no matter what, people need to go outside and touch grass. And I work in this all the time. I'm clearly very bullish on it. And when I finish up my workday today, I'm going to. Brush my teeth, put on some lipstick and go meet a friend for dinner and go see a concert and go walk around like these will not replace these experiences, but what they will do is add another dimension of sort of socialization interaction. And it's gonna be great for people who can't experience those things. I'm fortunate enough to live in New York City. If you are a trans teenager in southern Alabama this is a place where you could potentially be yourself and be safe. And I think that's what we need to look at.

Like too often I think we focus on the negatives and there are plenty of them you talk about kids who don't have any sort of connections because of who they are and where they live. And it's really important to realize that a lot of people have found a lot of community and a lot of safety and connection in these digital spaces.

Srini: Yeah. Yeah. I remember Jeremy Bason and his second book had talked about how this could have a actual positive. Ecological impact on tourism. So instead of flying to places, even though I'm not of the mind that we should replace going and actually seeing something with like a VR experience, but it was an interesting point that he brought up that could actually have a positive impact on our environment.

So talk to me about some of these things, like what is the actually possible now that people probably aren't even thinking about?

Cortney Harding: I like Jeremy and I think his work is really interesting. I'm actually teaching his book as part of class that I'm teaching this fall. But I don't, the travel thing I don't necessarily agree with. I think that

going to Paris and VR is not the same as going to Paris in

Srini: Yeah, obviously.

Cortney Harding: But I do think, so let's say a challenge in the US is a lot of people don't travel because, yeah, cost and all that stuff, but also they're intimidated, right? They might be scared to be in a place where they don't speak the language or they're concerned and allowing them to much earlier point, allowing them to experience it in vr in a safe space before they go can actually be really beneficial. So I think there's that part of it, right? I think that's fantastic. I think. Education is a space that I focus on, and it's a really important space and we're starting to see all this research about how much students are more engaged and they learn better, their learning outcomes are better. We talk about training in VR and that's something that I've worked on a ton, and the outcomes there are phenomenal. I think we can start breaking down sort of the positives, which are really you're immersed in space, you're not distracted. We are distracted all the time, and right now, like I'm on my laptop, I've got 20 tabs open. I'm looking out the window, I'm looking at my dog. I'm I'm here, there everywhere.

I'm on Zoom calls all day, and of course I've got stuff going in the background in vr. Like you are very present in the moment, and I think that's something that's really overlooked is the sense of presence you have and being in the moment when you're not super distracted. Is really important and that's something that current technology doesn't provide us with is the ability to just sit and focus.

And that's why I think the learning education outcomes in particular, are so strong.

It's because like I've been an adjunct since 2016. And yeah, all the students are behind laptops and I'd love to think that they're taking notes, but they're not they're goofing off, they're doing whatever. And so I think that that's a really huge benefit is the ability to be focused and present again.

Srini: Yeah I thought about what it would look like to teach an online course in VR as opposed to passively consuming, and I feel like what VR does is takes a passive consumption experience and makes it one that is actively engaging.

Cortney Harding: Yeah, and there's a lot of research. So there's a platform called Victory XR that has, that does exactly this, right? So teachers teach in the metaverse and it does a couple things. So first of all, the students are more present, they're more engaged. They can attend classroom anywhere, which is great. They also can be more hands-on. So if you talk about equity, right? There are schools in the US that have chemistry labs that rivaled out of an Ivy League institution, and there are schools in the US that have chemistry labs that are 30 years old and falling apart. But if you did that in a virtual space, everyone has the same chemistry lab.

Everyone has access to the same tools, everyone has access to the same heart dissection or mixing chemicals, right? So it's actually a really strong equity argument for making sure that everyone has access to this, whether it's going to a lecture at Harvard, even if you're in Duluth, Minnesota, whether it's you get the best in class chemistry set up, even though you are in the middle of nowhere.

Like, all of these things start. Up and having a really positive social impact.

Srini: Yeah I remember my biggest takeaway from playing with the Oculus Quest where you could just spawn random things. Like I, in a lecture hall pretending to be a professor, I was like, okay, here's a gigantic dinosaur and I could actually spawn a dinosaur and the thing, and I got the metaverse to my friend.

I was like, Matt, turn around. And he was like, holy shit, there's a line behind me. I'm like, I know. I put it there. But so in that sense, I think it's great. So this is another bizarre question. So we had an adult film industry actress as a guest here on the show, and I was asking her about VR and porn.

'cause obviously they're always at the forefront of a lot of these things. And like I've had friends, again, this is one of those two sides of the coin argument. It's they're like, oh, this is just gonna turn people into like perverts who

,

just sit around watching VR all day.

I said, yeah, but if it reduces sexual assault, wouldn't that be a good thing?

Cortney Harding: Like sexual assault at the end of the day is not about sex, it's about power. So I don't think any technology can fix that. That's just misogyny, , which,

you know so again, the whole, we're gonna turn into zombies thing. To me, that's like such a, lame argument because it's like, Look, we've been saying that's with every advent of new technology.

There's the famous clip of the dowager count is on Downton Abbey losing her mind because they put a telephone in and she's oh God, people won't come by and visit anymore. They'll just use this horrible thing called the telephone. To our modern ears, that sounds absurd, but at the time it was like the telephone will kill socialization. The television, right? You get a television set, you're just gonna stare at it like a zombie. Oh my god. I remember as a kid being really into the sort of no logo stuff and the ad busters and I'd meet people at parties in high school and they'd be like, I don't have a tv. Like it's this big point of pride and and now of course parents I know whose kids watch Netflix all the time.

They're like, oh wow, they actually watch tv. How cool is that? TV's this like cool retro thing, I think we can look at television, I think we can look at the internet, computers there's always these like. Horrible. What if rural zombies use cases that never, almost never come to pass?

Are there people who will struggle with addiction and vr? Yeah. Are there people who struggle with addiction to video games, to pornography, to alcohol, to marijuana, to name anything that is legal and that most people consume responsibly. And

there's always like an outlier set and those people should be treated and treated therapeutically.

And we need to solve for that For sure. But I I think that is completely, oh, it's just overblown. It's just lazy. It's God, come up with a better argument. We're gonna all be zombies. I'm like, yeah that's been done.

Srini: Yeah. I think that's a really narrow-minded perspective that's I always come back to the metaphor I saw tell one of Tiago Forte always says Technology is neutral. I'm like, yeah. If you think about it, a knife is a piece of technology.

You could use a knife to cut a chicken or you could use it to kill somebody.

Cortney Harding: Yeah.

Srini: think that's the way we have to think about this is to your point, are we gonna do good with it or are we going to do destructive things with it? So one thing, and you talked about to, to what's happening in education. Talk to me about what is actually possible, like what can we do? Obviously there's the ability to overcome physical limitations, like how is this gonna impact the future of work?

And how is it gonna impact people like me at creatives like the work that we do? Because to me, when I look at technology, I'm all my. First question always is, what can I make using this that I couldn't make before?

Cortney Harding: So I think a couple things. I think from a future work perspective, and I just wrote about this recently Now we're starting to see more return to office. So Bloomberg just today announced that they want employees back in the office four days a week. A lot of tech companies have gone back on their remote work forever plans. A lot of banks are really pushing people to come back to the office and employees. Generally don't like it. And so the argument from companies is one about oh, we want like serendipity and working together and co-location. Really that's a load of whatever. It's really because like they have expensive real estate holdings that they don't wanna lose money on.

But okay let's just say it's, they actually care about co-location. Fine. Let's just grant them that. I understand on Zoom. And on teams or Slack or whatever it is challenging to have these sort of serendipitous running into someone at a coffee, at the coffee station.

In the hotel ca in the cafeteria type of moments. In the metaverse you can do that. So you can be working in the metaverse in a workspace. you don't have to worry about commuting. You don't have to worry about fitting into an office culture. Remote work has been really great for women, for people of color, for non-traditional employees because they don't have to worry about oh, everyone in here is a white guy in a suit and I'm a black woman and I feel like I'm left out. So that has been great. You're working in the metaverse, you are wherever you're, wherever you wanna be. And then let's say you're in a meeting. So your avatar has a red light above its head. You're in a meeting, you're busy, you're working. Now your meeting ends and you're like, okay, I've gotta catch up on some emails and I've gotta do a few things, but I'm not like super busy. So you turn your light to green, your coworker sees and is oh, hey, I had an idea I wanted to run by you. Great. You and that avatar go into a little space. You have a chat, you have a little virtual coffee, amazing back to work. So there's a way that we can do this where it will actually enable a really cool distributed future of work culture.

That is what we thought we were gonna get post covid, but I think we can really do that. So I think there's that element, which is gonna be huge in terms of creativity. I. I was thinking about with the Vision Pro, I was like, you know what? If all of our media that we consumed was just 360 from now on we're so used to the flat two D screens.

That's how we've always consumed a lot of culture. What if we didn't have to? What if we had this really cool immersive storytelling and we are starting to see people build that, and I think that's only gonna continue as the devices get bigger and better. You know what if we experience the world with this really cool, customized. Overlays, like we don't you could have cityscapes that are blank canvases because there's no advertising anymore, and every ad in the glasses is custom for you. So you're not getting stuff that you don't want or don't care about or find intrusive. You're like, oh. I actually really like this. And so advertisers can like fully micro-target you to the extent where you're not getting ads that are useless, you're just getting ads that are like, oh yeah, actually I do want this. Perfect. So I think there's just there's just so much once you start thinking about it,

and none of this will happen overnight.

This will all happen at different time periods, but it's gonna be a huge shift.

Srini: I think that a lot of people are hearing this and I'm guessing that the average person probably thinking okay, yeah, that's five, six years from now. I don't need to think about this. But for somebody who is like really interested in starting to explore this, like tactically where can they begin?

Other than just saying throwing on an Oculus and like playing around with it, which is where I started and I thought to myself, okay. The, to your point, like I was like, the only issue with this is other people don't have it. Like the people that I want to be able to interact with don't have one.

So until then, and so it's just been sitting in my room.

Cortney Harding: Yeah, so I think there's a couple of places to start. One is obviously get a headset. You're gonna be hamstrung if you don't have a headset. So go on Amazon, go to Best Buy, go on eBay. There's used ones on eBay. If you don't wanna spend the. And then I would say just start building and you can start building communities in the Metaverse. So there are a lot of Metaverse platforms actually, where you don't need a headset to fully interact. So Horizon Worlds you do at this point. But Spatial or Roblox, any of, a lot of these other platforms, you don't need a headset. Like it's better in a headset, but you don't need it. So sign up for a spatial account, get your friends to sign up for one, start creating a world and hang out together.

It's. It's not that hard to do.

Srini: I created a world in spatial where I basically put up prints of podcast guest episodes. Like I put up their covers

And I went in there with a friend and he, I was like, yeah, go ahead and push that thing. And he was like, wait, it's gonna play the interview. And I was like, yeah. I was like, you wanna see the animated short with that person?

Go ahead and click on that YouTube video on the wall.

Cortney Harding: yeah. No, it's awesome. And Spatials like I, I. Professional connection to spatial. I just really liked them. And I did something for my friend's birthday recently where I created a spatial room. I uploaded all these photos of us and our friends and invited everyone in our friend group to come and create avatars.

And we're all distributed in different cities, so it wasn't like we could get together in person just for this birthday, but we had a great time. Like we had an awesome time and it took 15 minutes to make and everyone loved it. And so I think, yeah, there's that like super low hanging fruit. I also think that you could do something like get a 360 camera and shoot 360 video and watch it in your headset, and you'll learn very quickly what works and what doesn't. If you want to learn unity like a programming language so that you can build in vr, like that's fine. I'm not a unity person, but I am Always hiring people who are depending on what you want, like it's, the barrier to entry is fairly low actually.

Srini: Yeah. I, this is something that I, and I could be totally out of my mind to think this, but I remember after about a month of playing with the Quest thinking, you know what? Websites are gonna be obsolete. People aren't gonna have websites, they're gonna have virtual spaces. I. Are, we're going to need the way we need people to design websites now we're gonna need people to design virtual spaces.

Like I imagine a lot of jobs are gonna be created because of this.

Cortney Harding: Yeah. Oh, totally. And I, yeah, like people will need virtual world signers and they're gonna need somebody who understands how to build community, right? So it's not just about building a virtual space. That's fine. But it's about understanding how do you get people in that space and how do you get them to stay in the space.

So I really think, yeah, don't, you'll need people with technical skills to build those spaces, but you're gonna need people with community management skills to actually grow those spaces. And because that is such like a gendered profession, like most of the community managers I know are female and they're undervalued. I really feel like there's gonna be a big shift because that's gonna be the currency, like that's the currency of the next internet. Like we saw that with a lot of crypto and NFTs, and now with the Metaverse, it's really about community building at the end of the day.

Srini: Yeah. Wow. Wow. This has been amazing. You're like a wealth of knowledge about all this stuff. I feel like I could pick your brain for hours and where you'd go in a million different directions. But in the interest of time, I want to finish with my final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable.

Cortney Harding: Okay, unmistakable. Oh wow. That's a good question. The first word that came to mind when I thought of that was undeniable. And I feel like there's just a sense of presence that some people have. There are people, you look at them and they're like, you can do anything. I wish I was like that. There's a line in the the, what's it super pumped where Travis Knick says I just wanna convince everyone I'm undeniable. And I was and then he's certainly somebody who's had some issues and we don't have to get into much, right? Because I wouldn't be like, really Travis Knik, that doesn't seem like a great idea. But just the idea of this person knows what they're doing. This person knows what they're talking about. This person knows how to make things happen and how to create, be creative and pivot. So I think there's a real sense of it's one of those intangible things. You, it's the Supreme Court talking about pornography. You know it when you see it. I feel like there's just a quality that some people have where it's like no matter what happens, they just keep persevering and pushing forward and making stuff happen.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, and everything that you're up to?

Cortney Harding: I am in the metaverse, but also all over the current internet. Easy. The easiest thing to do is just search for my name. It's Courtney, and that's c o r t n e y. There's no u Harding, h a r d i n g. That's my handle on Instagram, on threads on Twitter as far as long as it's around. My website is courtney harding.com.

You can find my, that's where I put my speaking stuff, writing stuff, other stuff. My company website is friends with holograms.com and yeah, I'm like pretty easy to find on the internet, so I'm not, many people have the same spelling as my name, so I'm pretty.

Srini: Awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

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