Here’s my interview with Caitlin Krause, Founder of Mindwise, Writer, Speaker, Programmer, Educator, & Curator of Experiences, that was conducted on Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at Oculus Connect in San Jose, CA. This is part 1 of 2 of my conversations with Krause, you can see part 2 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with Caitlin Krause. And this is a vaulted, unpublished interview that I did with Caitlin back at Oculus Connect 6 in 2019. So some of the last gatherings we had as an XR community before the pandemic, and I'm So I had this kind of serendipitous collision with Caitlin and we fell into this conversation about mindfulness and all the things that she was working on at the time. And then, you know, I had a chance to catch up with her again at Augmented World Expo and do a deep dive into all the other things that she's been working on. And so this first conversation will be a little bit of like her early beginnings of her journey into the space, but Also looking at these larger questions of mindfulness and wellbeing. And later she will publish her book called Digital Wellbeing, Empowering Connection with Wonder and Imagination in the Age of AI. We'll be digging into much more of that book in the next conversation. But going back into 2019, we're sort of getting into lots of different things that she's working on. And then also what was interesting to me, at least, is that at the end, Caitlin turns the tables and asks all sorts of questions to me, which is, you know, sometimes happens. And then, you know, I try to respond to the moment and I see it as like taking these archetypal sample of whatever it was like on my mind at the moment. And so I was kind of leading up to doing the XR ethics manifesto. So a lot of things around those topics I was on my mind, but also these other conversations that I've been having across, not only in like VR world, but also like all these other topics in the realm of mathematics and philosophy and artificial intelligence and more esoteric topics. So there's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews that I've done that I haven't like published or made public yet. And so at the end of this conversation, I kind of get a little bit of a sneak peek of like, hey, I need to get all these published. And I've been thinking more and more that I want to get closer to starting to publish some of these other archives that are not published quite yet. Specifically, like the voices of AI is one that's coming up. Anyway, it's a little bit of a discursion, but I did want to just mention that in terms of it's interesting because this conversation at the end gets the tables turned and I'm like discussing things. And Caitlin has a real curiosity around what I think around a variety of different topics. But yeah, the topic of mindfulness and her journey into the space is also really quite fascinating. We'll be diving into that even more within the context of the next episode. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Caitlin happened on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at Oculus Connect 6 in San Jose, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:50.188] Caitlin Krause: I'm Caitlin Krause, and first of all, I think I just gravitate to curiosity types of fields. So curiosity led me into virtual reality, augmented reality, a while ago, at least several years. And I work with mindfulness, so applied mindfulness. I've been in education as a full-time teacher, and I have my own business now called MindWise. And I'm a speaker. I'm a curator of experiences in VR and in the real world, and I'm questioning a lot what that means, like what reality is right now and what people perceive to be real. I was a programmer just out of school, and then when I went into education, I thought a lot about how we're trained to think of learning in boxes, but often we don't think in categories. We think in the context of experience and how to make sense of the world around us i think we're always trying to see a pattern and then see how that pattern breaks so for me when i when i stepped into vr my first feeling was kind of like alice in wonderland like wow you know the world is so different in here and oddly i felt really close to myself you know in a mindful way just able to kind of dive down below the surface of whatever was happening, you know, in the outside world and really focus my thoughts and come out feeling refreshed. So I like to create those experiences in VR now for other people using mindfulness and social-emotional learning with the goal of a better world. Yeah, so.
[00:04:31.202] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm wondering if you could give me a bit more context as to your journey into virtual reality.
[00:04:37.782] Caitlin Krause: Sure. I started out just loving the experiences I had in VR, whether it was, say, a concert in the Wave or going into a VR space and creating something like in Tilt Brush. And I'd say several years back, I started thinking about how to be in VR and have an experience that would bring you closely connected to yourself and also to other people. So what mindfulness looks like when you're in VR, because I was having this feeling of being deeply connected. And that's my mission. That's the mission of my company, MindWise, empowering connection. So in VR, in addition to having these experiences myself, I started working with how to develop an experience in VR that would be mindful VR, whether it would be using biofeedback to inform bio-algorithm designs that would be around you in a space. And a friend and I created a beta version of what that looks like in VR and that exists. You know, people can experience it. And then in addition to the creation, I also started to do things in VR. Like right now, I'm starting a social space in VR where people can come in and learn about mindfulness in a group. So I'm the person who's the coach or the host of the experience leading the exercises. And people can come in just like they would take a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. They can have a class in VR where they come once a week, all shared space, live time. I lead it and they walk away with a better understanding of mindfulness and they're able to experience it in their body. So that's pretty powerful. That's just starting now in October.
[00:06:25.495] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know that there's many different meditative traditions. From my understanding of the mindfulness-based stress reduction is that it's trying to do a little bit of a secularized approach to mindfulness and trying to, I guess, boil it down to the essence of the mechanics of mindfulness. And so are you coming from any specific tradition? Or maybe you could talk a bit about your journey into mindfulness and how you're trying to take those principles and put them into VR.
[00:06:47.645] Caitlin Krause: Yeah, so that's a great question. Mindfulness itself comes from a Buddhist word, so it has this origin that is related to the spiritual. MBSR specifically was something popularized. You might have heard in, say, the late 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn was doing research at UMass. And he was at UMass Medical School and started doing research, especially with patients who had post-traumatic stress syndrome after serving mostly in the Vietnam War. And he was seeing that the therapy techniques that used mindfulness were saying, don't stuff down your feelings. Don't deny the fact that you had a traumatic experience and you're starting to have these emotions come up. What mindfulness teaches is his definition would be a deepened awareness of the present moment on purpose without judgment. So that power of that multi-layered approach to dealing with our feelings is almost like watching yourself having an emotion and then you're able to frame it and you're able to pull back from it and not feel the same attachment. So for Jon Kabat-Zinn and researchers like Richie Davidson, This was really transformative in helping people have more freedom and more well-being. And for me, as a teacher, I started using some applications that incorporate that type of MBSR and also a very simple mindfulness practice of awareness. I have a definition of mindfulness that's three A's, aware, advancing, and authentic. So how am I aware of my senses inside and out? Right now we're in a room that has a cacophony. We could pay attention to the carpet and the way our feet feel. We could also be aware of our emotions. As soon as I start to become more aware, then That advancement causes me to start to realize I can control certain parts of my experience and I can choose what to tune into and what to tune out of. For students, I could help coach them to appreciate certain parts of the stories that they carry that are wonderful. and let things go that have been burdensome and troublesome. So not to hold on to limiting beliefs. And then the third A of authenticity is kind of that level of levity and humor that gets us through the day as humans and makes a difference as we try to become more connected and more capable, but not superheroes in terms of putting on armor. So ironically, you know, that when the armor starts to come off, you start to feel like, OK, now I can breathe again. Now I can be again. And that's when relational trust is fostered. Yeah, so it's so multi-layered. I started to use mindfulness in my teaching practices. Then I started working with different corporate groups, leadership groups. And for me, it was always about connection first, like connection inside and out. How do you ground yourself? And then how do you be your best, most capable self in the world that you want to impact? And that's what I've been lucky to work on in different ways and projects. And I would add it led me to VR quite naturally because VR is that realm of possibility. It's a space where you go in and all of the things that you might have had as assumptions, you kind of have to hold on the side and say, wait, how does my body feel? One of the mindfulness tenets is to use your body as the experiential playground, like to check in with yourself and also to play all the time with how you're thinking and feeling in the moment. So for me, VR is the perfect place to epitomize that.
[00:10:33.922] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you're describing all these different aspects of paying attention to these different aspects of your phenomenological experience, it feels like that there's certain aspects in the VR industry that talk about presence. And I feel like that these meditative practices have been cultivating these refined ways of paying attention to your body and your experience in a way that is in a lot of ways independent of reality. the technology and sometimes it makes me frustrated when there's this kind of journey to try to quantify presence in a way of trying to measure it or put a number on it and for me it's always been more of an experience that it kind of transcends the quantification of it. Maybe there's a quality of it, maybe it's on a spectrum and so maybe it is on a whether or not you feel present or not present but I'm just curious, as you've been doing this cross-section of mindfulness and meditation and these Buddhist practices and your own sort of experience of presence, and then your concept of presence in VR and how that gets translated, or at least how you think of the concept of presence in VR.
[00:11:33.186] Caitlin Krause: Yeah, presence is such a strong word for me. I've given sessions about presence. I had a session at South by Southwest that was all about, the title was Virtual is Visceral, about how we can have a feeling of being there and what it means. And I think the more distance we put between ourselves and trusting our sensory engagement is a little bit dangerous because I've been looking at a lot of BCIs and a lot of, for me it's kind of funny, ironically, if I have a headband on and it's telling me how hard I'm focusing, it can stress me out because I want that number to increase to tell me that I'm at a very relaxed level and I'm very focused and I'm very mindful. But I would say sometimes the data that scientific tools can give us can help us. if we then take that and learn how to self-regulate and how to tune in in a more deeper way with what our body is naturally giving us as cues. And I think Jaron Lanier is the one who put it really well describing how VR can replace all of your senses and give you new inputs and new feeds But I think that that idea of wearing a second skin, it also incorporates our natural senses, too. So I'd be curious about what the whole room thinks here, how they would say they're using different data and inputs to both be present in VR and to trust it. Because for me, it is real. It is a real experience in VR, not just because my body is riding the ride, But because when I'm in there, that's the time that I choose to be on planet Earth in VR. It's not a time out for me if people say, oh, you're going away to another world. And in a certain sense, it is. But it's my choice to be fully present in that world. And for me, it's nice for me that I'm not hearing a lot of pings and bells and whistles. It's nice for me in VR that I don't have a lot of data popping up in my face. So maybe this stage is a beautiful stage where we get to be intentional about how we're receiving different sensory inputs and what type of information we want to show up in VR to give us clues. I don't know what you would say, but I would say it makes me conscious that it's something that should be talked about more often as we put up a lot of information and data into VR giving us feedback about our level of presence.
[00:14:12.423] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that it's something that is a bit of a buzzword in the VR community, even going back to the academic research into it. Because I feel like there's lots of different communications mediums. They all have their own affordances. And I think one of the affordances that people have identified with VR is that it does give you this sense of presence. And then for me, going to different academics and talking to people like Mel Slater and Anthony Steed and people from the research community, There seems to be a lot of focus on embodied presence as a primary sense, because that's the sensory motor contingencies that we're actually having all those sensors being hijacked. It's unique to VR. But I feel like there's other aspects of presence that already exist in other realms. And the words that I use are like the social mental presence, so being able to have the sense of being with other people in a shared space and to have our minds stimulated in different ways, like solving puzzles and the kind of mental friction that happens in video games in that way. but also our active presence and expressing our will and exploration and being engaged and active, but also emotional presence and see how our emotions are also going through this consonance and dissonance cycles. So I feel like, in a lot of ways, as we isolate to say, yes, there's a unique affordance of presence that you can get in VR, To me, you can still achieve those same levels of presence outside of VR, and that's just part of being human. And I feel like there's a part of the contemplative practices where you start to pay attention and be able to focus on these different aspects of our own direct phenomenological experiences. And then in some ways, I think in part what VR is doing is it's training us to sort of cultivate that sense of what is consistent as we go into these different contrived experiences, then what remains the same. and what's different so that we can start to really focus on these deeper aspects of these modes of being through these different levels of presence.
[00:16:02.333] Caitlin Krause: Yeah. I mean, what you just said inspires so much because I totally agree. I think presence right now, maybe it's becoming kind of mismanaged the term itself. People might be thinking of it like, oh, do you trust that something's real? If it's real, then that presence means that it simulates reality in a believable way. But I'm thinking about, well, how do I both be in that experience and presence in VR brings up all kinds of, I'm thinking about a pyramid of presence where if you're really there and you're being there in VR, there's also the question of, well, who are you when you're there then? Does presence incorporate identity? Does it incorporate you maybe questioning assumptions, the things that you took for granted? When you were there, say for the example today at this morning's keynote, the shared space with your family, is that presence when you're watching a football game with your dad? Or if you still have the same level of mental distraction, is that a lack of presence even as you're co-sharing a space? So for me, the word has many different interpretations, but I think with mindfulness in mind, if you bring up ideas about emotional intelligence and mental agility, like that real plasticity we're talking about with the ability to see from multiple perspectives and empathize with different situations, I think the more we're present with ourselves and in tune in different moments that VR can really amplify, That can be a skill that we use for life training in the future where people could use VR to have a better range of experiences to amplify their presence on a global scale in a way that you can't do right now maybe.
[00:17:47.984] Kent Bye: One of the things that I've noticed about meditation is that there's different concepts of Buddhism. One of them is the Sangha, so actually coming together in community. That's one of the main pillars and foundations of the Buddhist practice itself. So there's something about the interdependence of what's it mean for people to come together and meditate together. Because you can meditate by yourself and then you can go into a room with other people and meditate. And for me, it feels like a qualitative difference. And I don't quite know what it is or why, but it seems to happen. And I don't know if you can start to replicate that in virtual reality where you're co-present with each other in a virtual space. And if you feel like you have that same sense of social presence that then gets translated into a deeper contemplative presence as you're actually meditating.
[00:18:36.929] Caitlin Krause: Let's do a study about that. You know, like neurons that wire together, fire together, or the fact that we're... Or it could be the opposite way around. But I think that I'm smiling as you say that because you're right. This feeling is kind of vibrational when you're in a shared space and you're meditating in a group. You feel each other the same way that a live play feels different than a rehearsal. And it's not... When you gather people together in a room, there's an energy there. And I think the presence in VR, if I had to place a bet, I would say it would follow the same kind of feeling. Because when you're in that co-space, when your senses believe it to be true and you're in there, there's that vibrational energy. And I know that because I've had shared meetings in VR and shared experiences where people are getting together and going on some exploration where we're We're sharing moments, and that's a rare quality, I think, of placing your attention in the same space with the same people at the same time. And I would probably guess that both the quality of the experience is richer or... maybe not competing with mindfulness as a solo activity. But for example, when I get people together in October and I'm offering shared mindfulness experiences and social emotional learning, when you're together in a space, you feel the support, you feel the energy from other people. And there's also an element of the unknown, like the surprise of what could happen in the times before and after the meditation where people might start to share reflections or have a moment where they connect in some way that's unpredictable. And I think that's the beauty of human existence, that we're not operating on rehearsals. We're experiencing things in live time that come up. And that's part of the mindfulness tenet, too, just to be open to that, to be open to each experience as it unfolds and be more kind to ourselves, accept life's imperfections. Probably in a social VR environment, it's both more... Exciting in certain ways because you'll have that human interaction and also more genuinely compassionate for people to realize that everybody has different backgrounds, different ways of interpreting the same experience and also genuine care for each other.
[00:21:10.979] Kent Bye: I recently went to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. They had a workshop on the future of neuroscience in VR and there is a neuroscientist from McMaster Institute for the Mind of Music looking at how there's this live lab auditorium that allows them to sort of capture a very high level of music recording and then doing these tests of having the performers there and then sort of having the same audio that's piped out but not having their embodiment and having them watch it on TV and kind of sort of measure the different levels of abstraction and representation of 2D representations and full embodiment. So some of that research has started to happen and what I suspect is that my own phenomenological experience is that There's nothing as powerful as to be co-located in a room with somebody and to look them directly in the eye and to be physically co-located. I'm not losing any of the micro-expressions and being able to read body language and pick up on all these subtle cues and eye contact and all this sort of subtle movements of gestures and body movement that I feel like VR is able to replicate some of that, but not nearly at the same level of fidelity. And I guess one of the things I wonder is that once we start to add more of the eye tracking and more of this, like they showed today during the keynote, of trying to use machine learning to be able to capture these subtle movements but have a trained model that are then replicating these different micro-expressions in our full embodiment without being included with the headset to have these reconstructed expressions and avatars of ourselves that may be imperfect and have some communication loss, you know, like that'll be maybe some weird uncanniness or miscommunication of the AI misreading what we're really actually expressing. But I wonder if as we get to that point of having more of that So it feels like there's less of a boundary between it actually really feels like we're co-present with somebody without actually physically being there. If there is a certain element of the process of coming together as a group, if that helps build that same level of social presence or depth of that quality of being with other people.
[00:23:13.101] Caitlin Krause: Yeah. I wonder about things like the uncanny valley. I wonder about what's coming as we think that virtual reality has to get as close to reality as possible. When I'm imagining the situations you bring up, I'm thinking how beautiful and VR I'm not Caitlin Krauss here. I could maybe pick an animal as an avatar. I could pick a color scheme that I want or some geometric shape. I have a phrase that I use in mindfulness, lose yourself to find yourself. And that ability to lose yourself and be a transparent eyeball in VR, I think is part of what's beautiful about the capacity to be mindful and attend to what's really important. How are we attending to our emotions? And not to say that the bells and whistles and the features are not important, but when I think about connection, it gets me really excited thinking about new social spaces, new social spaces where people can basically be a version of their authentic self and the authentic self could take on any shape or form. So, for example, I'm in a book study right now with Howard Rheingold and he wrote a book called The Virtual Community And it came out at least two decades ago and points toward what makes us gravitate towards social spaces online, how the history of the internet informs social communities, and what builds social trust. And I do think about that with these shared experiences that you bring up and questions about the fidelity and does the rendering have to be absolutely pitch perfect? Is that what truth is in this day and age that we can really simulate each strand of my hair for me to really be there with you? And I'm hoping that there'll be a time in the future when we become like Mobius strips and We get to choose intentionally to blend our inner and outer worlds. I know that somebody builds social trust with me when we have a shared experience that is emotionally rich, is authentic in a way that might be vulnerable, and we trust each other. And that's the space that in my teaching in middle school, high school, I think those generations are craving situations in real life and in the digital world where they have that type of exchange, which is non-cynical. It's hard to get to because we're in a space right now of maybe a lack of social trust. But that level of engagement is something that VR can build. It takes more patience. It maybe takes doing some kind of experimentation with how it plays out and how it looks and feels. But even here, I've had so many conversations with people about the ways to empower and to give everybody a voice and to be that open and inclusive beyond the buzzwords. And for me, that's what I'm dedicated to, to being part of those projects and part of those experiences. So these conversations with you bring up the heart of both what's possible in VR and what's coming. And I think it could be a space for social communities to really look at human interaction in a new way.
[00:26:37.901] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago at the Extech conference, someone who was a part of the consciousness hacking movement where he's talking about wearing a sub pack, but being able to share heartbeats with each other. So being able to listen to some other person's heartbeat, but kind of feel it viscerally in your body and to see how, like, Synchrony happens sometimes, where you start to listen in that way, but have your deep level of synchronization with each other. So I mean, it starts to get really weird of what's it mean to be as so authentic and vulnerable and transparent, to have a level of trust with somebody as to share your biometric data. I mean, in some ways, it actually It reminds me of something that could be akin of a real-time polygraph test of maybe the data of your body doesn't lie. And so what would it mean to have a shared space with someone with enough privacy considerations to know that you could share that data with somebody? And what would it mean to radiate your inner life outward with somebody else? And what kind of level of depth of connection could happen and what type of authenticity and vulnerability and maybe like it would perhaps provide a forcing function that if people weren't in alignment and integrity, what if that would be represented online in some way and what would that do to be able to cultivate the level of trust that we have with each other and so what if it's possible that the most level of depth and authenticity and intimate connections comes in these types of intimate environments where we have our inner selves projected out into the environment and we're sharing these spaces with other people.
[00:28:06.206] Caitlin Krause: Well, imagine for leadership if that were part of a way that the interface worked between diplomacy, between countries. I mean, we talk about it now as almost a game or something that people are doing in a light way. I can see the fear factor. It could be scary at first just knowing that there's that possibility to connect in a deeper way. But I think that if our goals and outcomes You know, right now we're at the fourth industrial revolution. I'd say we're approaching the fifth, and people are talking about new metrics of well-being. Like, what does it actually mean to come together and talk about goals and talk about topics that are meaningful and what we might want to work together as teams? I think competition is moving. My hope is everything's moving toward a cooperative society where people are really engaging in both what it means to be human and how if I do open up and share a little more of the inner and outer worlds connecting how we could then turn and face some goal that we have together and say now how can we both use our strengths and weaknesses and help each other so this leads in a totally new direction when you think about trust and resilience because I've been working with a lot of different groups, some education, some business, but the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence is doing a lot of work on emotion, and their director was saying that resilience is really based on a community it's not an individual so we think about that bounce back and how we have to learn to be more resilient and i think people get in their minds that it means that i have to do it myself you know and and this was mark brackett He's directing the program there, and he was saying that, in his mind, resilience is a system. It's that we can have down days, we can have strong days, and how I am responsive to the people who are both on my team and other stakeholders that I want to enlist for support How I'm responsive to their needs and more transparent about my needs is really what's going to be a survival mechanism in the future if we look at biomimicry and some of the bio that can be our inspiration.
[00:30:34.374] Kent Bye: For you, what are some of the either biggest open questions that you're trying to answer or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:30:42.853] Caitlin Krause: So right now, some of the curiosity I have and the open questions I want to answer are about how people in creative worlds and science worlds are coming together to create solutions, to form decisions that have a positive impact on the world. I see creatives and science as hand in hand and not as two separate entities. So a lot of my research and my work has blended science and expression. So right now, problems that I want to solve are connection problems, like how people can better reach their audiences, how humans can get in touch with themselves and use some of these techniques involving creativity and innovation and mindfulness to really dig deeply into what's their story and what's the impact they want to have. So whether that's in education, working with teachers and students, or whether that's out in a world of, say, startups or some bigger business, I think there's a lot of disconnection right now in the world. And I'm wanting to get beneath the noise and see both what's happening in our consciousness and how we can really make a connection with others in a meaningful way. So this incorporates AI, it incorporates VR. Using all these elements, I'm really interested in what the future holds and how people are meeting that and using all these augmentations and capacities to be better, more connected humans.
[00:32:20.033] Kent Bye: Great, and finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:32:30.020] Caitlin Krause: I think the potential is just about as big as it could possibly be. I think that VR technologies are especially compelling right now because they have an ability to take us beyond and outside the limitations that we might have thought we had. So for me, I look 10 years in the future, Kent, and I see people not hiding in VR spaces, but using VR as part of their lifestyle, like part of their lifestyle in a really enriching way where that's like the forum where you would gather. So we have our space in our studios where we might be creating something and we have that solitary space. We have a social space that would be like a salon where you're sharing ideas and maybe meeting in smaller groups. And then you also have a bigger social space. It could be you on a stage. It could be people in a crowd. I see VR as an ability to bring people closer together and also maybe give them some peace of mind during the day if they're in a really dense community and starting to feel like they need their own space. So I think ultimately it just brings up more elements of choice. You know, John Carmack brought this up, I think, on the Joe Rogan show about how it's democratizing experience. And I don't say that lightly or ironically. I think that VR really does give each individual more freedom about the way they want to experience the world. And it's a possibility then for them to pick and choose and select and be deliberate about the type of VR experience they want to have.
[00:34:07.684] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:34:13.359] Caitlin Krause: I would just like to add that this is my first Oculus Connect so I've been overseas at other times that this was happening so I wasn't at OC6 when I was in Switzerland and I think it's always been something I've been curious to attend and people come back and say this is a place unlike others. I've heard from people that It's a very open environment. You're going to have a good time. And it surpassed my expectations. And I had high expectations coming in. This community is really wonderful. Lots of discoveries here. And I think to the general VR community, I would like to impart a message of solidarity that maybe now is the time. I feel like it's always been... the time to go into creative spaces and explore the realm of possibility. I would want to tell people to keep the why in mind and the dreams in mind and the goal and the vision of why they're experiencing VR in the first place. For me, it's It's a really multi-sensory experience and you don't have to tell someone that. You just have to see them have a wonder face when they have the VR headset on. People lose themselves. And for me, being part of that community is like being part of a big global family. I just want the family to grow. And on a side note, everyone's invited to come on October 14th and experience the launch of a mindfulness VR program that I'm hosting. So it's going to be open and up on CaitlinKraus.com. So if people want to take part, they can jump in. And I think the more we explore the ability to connect both with ourselves and with each other, it's a whole new world of possibility.
[00:36:06.181] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, I just wanted to thank you for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:36:10.353] Caitlin Krause: Thank you so much, Kent. This is a dream being here with you. And I think highly of both who you are as a person and all of your episodes. It's like you just feed that forward and put out that good into the world. So, you know, it's a ripple effect. But just thank you for what you're doing for other people and the ways that you always have a way of surprising, too. Like during your episodes, there's always some moment where I'm like, oh, I didn't expect that answer or that question. And I think... maybe that's a method of being present, you know, that you just ride the ride. And I think for all of us listening or tuning in, speak for myself. I enjoy riding the ride with you. So thank you.
[00:36:50.410] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really try to take this present approach of not even scheduling or planning, relying on these serendipitous collisions and trying to just listen. And I think that, I mean, it feels amazing for me just to kind of continue this conversation and feel like there's this larger conversation that feels like it's going somewhere. And I think we all everybody that's in this industry kind of sees another world that's possible. And we're all kind of dreaming the future that we want to live into that doesn't exist yet. So I just kind of pulling together all these future dreamers and creators and makers that are going to help change the world. And I really authentically believe that. I feel like that VR is this highly leveraged technology that is going to allow people to perhaps do the most potential ripple effect of their own actions of what they create and how that ripples out in the world. And so I think everybody in this industry, it's an opportunity to actually shift things and shift culture and to create artifacts and art and experiences that actually helps people change their behavior and to change their minds and become aware of just the plurality of many different perspectives and insights. And yeah, from my experience of covering the VR community is that it is one of the most interesting communities that I've found. And just bringing together all of my insatiable curiosities and to figure out how we can learn what we need to learn, but to make these experiences and to ultimately just follow our own intuitions for what we need to do in this time where we all need to be acting and doing what we need to do to change everything that's happening in the world right now.
[00:38:27.185] Caitlin Krause: I would say we are designers. I wrote a book called Mindful by Design, and the whole underlying principle is you get to choose. You get to choose how to design the experience. And for us, I see people going at things from different angles, multiplicities. We contain multitudes. Is there a mantra that you, or some kind of mission statement that you have? Because I know a lot of times you're listening to other people. talk about their angles and I feel like tonight you've you've asked all these questions that come from a really insightful place and I'm wondering what drives you like if you had a Kent by feel free to edit this out if you want to but if you had a Kent by bumper sticker what would it be?
[00:39:09.753] Kent Bye: I think that changes time to time. I mean, a big thing that I've been focusing on a lot lately is to try to hold loosely about what I think about things. I guess if there's anything, I'm making an argument. I'm making a philosophical argument, but I want other people to make the argument for me. And that whenever I let other people say that argument, they always say it differently and saying things that I didn't think of or maybe disagree with. But I feel like it's this challenge of trying to embrace the paradox and the plurality of many different perspectives. And so I think the challenge of our time is to be able to be comfortable with sitting in the uncomfortable aspects of that paradox and to just, with an open heart, listen and just kind of change from not having a singular authority of truth, but to allow you to listen to the stories and the oral histories and the personal phenomenological experience, and to let your own experience be the authority. And so what's a world look like where the authority comes from your own direct experience, but also listening to other people and trying to sort of tune in to that level of the stories and the recommendations and the experiences and to see if someone else's experiences matches yours and then how can that sort of help you navigate the world. So it's kind of taking much more of a phenomenological approach and decolonized approach of not trying to say that there's a singular truth, but to be comfortable in the paradox of the plurality.
[00:40:30.976] Caitlin Krause: I think it's beautifully said on your part, because our bodies are our experiential testing ground, and that absolutism might keep us rigid. You know, I see you, and we're standing here, and things are happening all around us, but I feel really calm and present in a sense, and I think... I think that idea of dropping down beneath the chatter that might be in our minds all the time to dwell in the fact that everybody you meet could be holding up a mirror for something that you can both look at in yourself and maybe, I don't know, change the way that you're perceiving what you might have assumed to be true or thought to be the one answer. I think it's beautiful the way you said it. we can't fit these things on bumper stickers. So, you know, it's okay.
[00:41:21.146] Kent Bye: Well, coming here at Oculus Connect, you know, there's been a lot of different connects. Oculus Connect 3, I think it was like, I got very angry about different stuff. And I feel like, There's different levels in which that recognizing my own unprocessed aspects of my own anger that I've felt around Facebook or Oculus over the years because there's, I feel like there's been a lot of, you know, I've been to each of the Oculus Connects year after year and so there's different things that will happen each year that kind of annoy me or things that doesn't seem like it's an integrity or it doesn't feel like it's completely authentic or it's not the full story and so I get like really agitated and then I'll sort of like, sometimes I'll let that get projected, but oftentimes it'll be aspects of my own psyche that is being projected onto other people. So it's kind of like trying to really do my own work and be as present as I can and be as integrity and alignment with who I am and then trust that I will just sort of bring to me the different conversations that I want to have. And if a conversation is not happening on stage, then I can have the conversations that I want to have on the floor and kind of explore the maybe the more nuances or the vision that I want to see. But just to kind of more focus on what we can each do as individuals And so in order to change the world, it's like you kind of turn inward and meditate and just really be present. And I feel like it's kind of a paradox for how that would work or why that would work. But I feel like the more that I become more deeply present with my own biases, my own anger, my own blind spots, my own traumas, that it allows me to not project things unnecessarily onto other people and to focus more on the generative aspects of what we can create and what we can make rather than to be in opposition to something that isn't going in a direction that I want it to, but just kind of like create my own reality and then like invite other people into the party and see what we want to make together. So that's sort of like the deeper vision that I have that if we don't like where things are going, well, let's just make a new version of that and actually make something and create something that's going to create the culture that we want to have.
[00:43:24.198] Caitlin Krause: Yep, and that's how I think the two of us came to be here because this world probably needs more of that openness and combinations of unlikely juxtapositions where we can stand here be open still be true to what is our integrity you know to have that but to also be like hey if you're passing by and you want to have a conversation here's Kent by and he's in a pineapple t-shirt and he's very you know you're visible so it's not hiding away saying I'm gonna be in a silo with all of the people who agree with me and join the club of my either fandom or i think people talk about tribes and that can be very empowering i also think that from my perspective the beauty is that there's a panoply of backgrounds and people and they're they might be the unlikely either allies or the people who are having a conversation with you that's disagreement personally i don't think that consensus is necessary to have real amazing progress because I love to exchange and see from different perspectives and I think here what I'm pointing toward is the fact that you're here and I'm here and we're in the room and we're part of the conversation and I think that's important at places that are as big as Oculus Connect because it shows that diversity and I would like to think that that makes Like listening and going inward is attending in a way that has a power beyond yelling, I would say. It's beautiful. It's my vision too, so I don't know. I feel it here. I feel that positive energy from people. And I think you're part of that ethos, that feeling. And you've been here since the beginning, so that says a lot to come back and stay open and say, drop by for a conversation with me. I'm going to be outside the keynote just hanging around in the hallways. You know, it's the little moments. It's the space between the notes, right? They can plan out a schedule, but for me, the best part of Oculus Connect has been the space between the sessions and what's on the schedule. when something happens and you have a great conversation and it surprises you and changes your perspective.
[00:46:02.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's sort of my whole philosophy that I realized very soon that I realized at some point that most memorable aspects of conferences were me in the hallway conversations. So it was like, how can I just like orchestrate and create my own conference and just have those serendipitous conversations that are like an endless stream of magic. And I feel like there's a reason why I don't go to too many of the sessions because I feel like I don't get that in the sessions. Some people, they learn like that, and that's fine. But for me, it's just being engaged and being able to fall into these kind of collisions in that way. So anyway, welcome to my world.
[00:46:37.514] Caitlin Krause: It's good to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Rock on. Wow. All right. So I have to just flip it again to you. What are you most looking forward to? Do you have anything on the schedule tomorrow that you think is going to be a highlight? Or even beyond Oculus Connect, I guess we could do the micro macro. What's coming that you're looking forward to in VR?
[00:47:01.622] Kent Bye: Well... So well, the only thing logistically I have tomorrow is I have a demo for the Horizon. And I'm going to have an opportunity to talk to someone from Oculus. I feel like the thing that I am looking forward to is, I guess, more honest conversations about some of the stuff that is like the elephants in the room that aren't being talked around, around ethics and around privacy. And I've been holding a number of different distributed conversations remotely. And so just trying to figure out how to, like, create a bit of a collection of some of those conversations and put them out there. And just to have more of a, you know, because Oculus is up on stage talking about, like, we're going to potentially read your mind. And it's sort of like, isn't it going to be amazing as sort of like the vibe and energy? And it's like, ah, I don't know if that's going to be amazing if you can read my mind.
[00:47:50.947] Caitlin Krause: I noticed during that part, too, it was showing the device but not actually the human. I feel like the reading your mind part often focuses on a piece that's non-invasive. It's not intimidating because they're not showing the actual process or maybe some of the more organic aspects. It's powerful. It's also... highly intimidating, I think, with the read your mind qualities that are amazing, but there's also serious implications and freedom and choice.
[00:48:26.297] Kent Bye: Yeah, and for me, I'm really interested in what the artists are doing, what the storytellers are doing, pushing forward the future of immersive storytelling. There's lots of questions I have about memory palaces and how to translate knowledge into space and to have people go to the Voices of VR memory palace and be able to have access to the multitude of many insights and a way to translate all that knowledge into space. What does that even look like? What could that be? To have a memory palace of all space and time that you could be able to do this So it's like this translation of space into language. And is it possible to use VR to create a universal language so that you could start to have cross-cultural communication that doesn't rely upon any nuances of any specific language? So there's a lot of ultimate potentials of where things are going. I think just day to day for me, the challenge is to figure out how to really sustain what I'm doing and to grow and to expand out into other podcasts about philosophy and mathematics and artificial intelligence and the decentralized future and different esoteric versions and visions of what consciousness even is. So all these other podcasts that I think, you know, it's like this interdisciplinary melting pot. So for me, what's so fascinating is that VR is giving me access to all these different people on the cutting edge of their discipline, and that the more time goes along, then the more and more I have opportunities to talk to a variety of different people from all the different disciplines. And I think the open philosophical question is, what's the sort of framework that allows all these different disciplines to really talk to each other through the modality of human experience? through the VR. So it's like, what is the design principles to actually bring all those things together? So it's kind of like those deep philosophical questions that kind of motivate me to kind of keep chipping away and having the conversations and trying to get one step closer to trying to figure out some of those answers.
[00:50:21.912] Caitlin Krause: I will say I became interested in maybe doing a Frankenstein VR experience two years ago, realizing it was the 200 year anniversary of Frankenstein and the question underneath of what makes a human. I think we're now again able to kind of look into those layers maybe more scientifically and AI is certainly part of the conversation now with maybe higher stakes about AGI, what we're trying to replicate. And I think VR is at the forefront of those philosophical questions that sometimes people take for granted as they're thinking about putting on the headset. It may be the qualities of reflection and thinking about both where we came from. You know, we go back to Shelley and to some of these questions that have existed for centuries about how we're belonging, how we're creating life. In the story the monster just wants to have a name and that causes a lot of the angst that he's not adopted and named and given belonging by the doctor. So I think about that as you express these wishes and visions for the future and what's happening with being at that crossing point of all of these conversations that are happening. And I think that VR is a beautiful space to both question and also maybe again back to intention, have some intention about the ways that we go about the design and tell the stories and invite people into experiences and also lead them to reflections afterwards. There's no right or wrong. I just I really do feel like sometimes I get chills just thinking about the possibilities that are coming and also the fact that some people in the different disciplines don't know that each other exists. So maybe this is a space that people have more conversations together and they're encouraged to collaborate. I think some of these solutions come when people studying computer science start talking with the people in bioscience and different research studies are shared. So that's part of why I'm loving what you do because it gets into that arena quite often in terms of memory palace. Great things happening.
[00:52:41.707] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. Well, I think we're getting kicked out. So I just wanted to thank you again for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:52:48.153] Caitlin Krause: You're welcome. Thanks so much. And thanks for doing this at Oculus Connect so that we could connect in this way. It's been a pleasure. Yeah. Cool.
[00:52:56.821] Kent Bye: Thank you. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
