Explore every episode of the podcast The AI XR Podcast.

Ted and Charlie open with a packed news week, from big tech earnings and the AI spending race to Apple’s new foldable, a New York law aimed at chatbots and minors, and the arrival of the XREAL Aura. They also look at Google DeepMind’s Genie 4 world model and a new feature film from Utop AI starring Antonio Banderas.

Roy Price, the former head of Amazon Studios and global content for Prime Video, joins to talk about launching N1BW, a new vertical streaming site where AI creators upload their work and collaborate on shows. Roy looks back on building Amazon’s original content slate and the risks that paid off, explains why he thinks Hollywood has gotten stuck in a creative rut, and makes the case that AI is the next Roger Corman. He shares how N1BW is trying to stand apart from vertical apps like DramaBox and ReelShort, why he wants creators to own a piece of the company, and how the platform handles discoverability for filmmakers who are just getting started.

Key Moments:

[00:01:38] Big tech earnings and the AI spending race

[00:03:28] Apple’s foldable and how it compares to Samsung’s

[00:05:14] New York’s new law on chatbots and minors

[00:07:26] XREAL Aura starts shipping

[00:10:17] Google DeepMind’s Genie 4 world model

[00:13:16] Utop AI’s feature film with Antonio Banderas

[00:18:05] Roy Price joins to talk about N1BW

[00:20:52] From Disney Animation to leading Amazon Studios

[00:27:24] How Amazon built its brand with Transparent, Fleabag and Maisel

[00:34:34] Roy’s thesis for N1BW and why low costs mean creative freedom

[00:43:28] How N1BW differs from DramaBox and ReelShort

[00:48:53] The founding filmmaker program and creator ownership

[00:52:41] Why discoverability matters for AI creators

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Ted and Charlie open with a news roundup covering Colossal Biosciences’ real-world take on a Snow Crash robotic companion, a secretly recorded OpenAI meeting, and the wave of tech billionaires suddenly pledging away chunks of their fortunes. From there they dig into Robert Downey Jr. joining Snap, the relaunch of VR fitness app Supernatural, and why training and simulation keep proving to be VR’s most durable use case.

Angela Yu, CEO and co-founder of StoReel, joins to break down the fast-growing world of AI-made vertical streaming. Angela explains how her platform builds entire micro drama series for a fraction of traditional production costs, why audience retention is the industry’s biggest unsolved problem, and how StoReel is using recurring characters and fan communities to keep viewers coming back. The conversation covers how China’s short drama boom is reshaping global entertainment, the economics of buying an audience through social platforms, and what happens as AI-made content moves from cheap and cheesy toward prestige projects with real studio partnerships.

Key Moments:

[00:01:28] A new robotic companion inspired by Snow Crash

[00:03:44] The secretly recorded meeting at OpenAI

[00:04:20] Elon Musk and Dario Amodei pledge away portions of their fortunes

[00:08:00] Character AI shuts down as its CEO becomes Disney’s new CTO

[00:10:17] Robert Downey Jr. joins Snap to help sell its new glasses

[00:11:00] VR fitness app Supernatural relaunches

[00:17:14] Angela Yu joins to talk about the vertical streaming boom

[00:25:39] How StoReel is built to fix the industry’s retention problem

[00:34:25] Inside StoReel hybrid model of in-house writers and outside creators

[00:48:04] The staggering scale of content StoReel produces each month

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Ted and Charlie open with a quieter AI news week, giving them room to dig into XR hardware, including hands-on impressions of two new smart glasses, a Norway story on camera glasses restrictions, the shutdown of the XR Association, backlash over Meta’s Muse app, and a tour through AI’s fast-moving film scene.

Charles Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling summit and author of the book of the same name, joins to talk about two decades spent studying how people want to experience stories. Charles explains why he thinks VR never quite broke through for mainstream audiences, walks through his theory of the “actience,” his term for audiences who now expect to participate rather than just watch, and makes the case that AI’s biggest opportunity in entertainment isn’t visual effects but deeply personalized, responsive storytelling. The conversation wraps with a tour through some of the best immersive entertainment happening right now, from the Sphere and ABBA Voyage to Meow Wolf and Vegas’s underground escape-room scene.

Key Moments:

[00:39] Hands-on impressions of Samsung’s Aura vs. Snap’s Specs

[03:29] The ergonomics problem still holding back smart glasses

[06:39] Norway’s new restrictions on camera glasses

[08:26] The XR Association shuts down

[10:00] Meta’s Muse app and the backlash over its user dossiers

[11:47] A tour through the fast-moving world of AI filmmaking

[18:00] Charles Melcher joins — the origin of Future of Storytelling

[24:15] Why VR never had its mainstream moment

[39:00] Charles’s concept of the “actience”

[42:33] A tour of the Sphere, ABBA Voyage, and Meow Wolf

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on the week's AI political theater, from the sudden rebrand of AI to "superintelligence" to Dario Amodei's uncomfortable White House appearance. From there, the conversation covers AMD's acquisition of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, the curious divergence between OpenAI's and Anthropic's paths toward going public, and Rony's read on why liability risk may be the real story behind both. They also dig into Nvidia's push to regulate AI safety at the chip level, a stranger-than-fiction report about Anthropic bringing religious leaders in to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, OpenAI's new companion AI "Dots," and a candid look at where consumer VR actually stands right now.

Johnny Monsarrat, founder of Turbine and now of Monserrat, joins to talk about building what he calls the next platform for outdoor gaming, ten years in the making. Johnny explains why Niantic, despite Pokémon Go's success, is really a mapping company rather than a game company, and how his own approach, built around full 3D game zones rather than map pins, is meant to unlock genres outdoor gaming has never supported. He also shares a genuinely harrowing story from just before this interview: a medical emergency that left him in a coma for four and a half days, unreachable, while his team had no idea whether he was alive.

Key Moments:

[00:25] AI's rebrand to "superintelligence" and a tense White House appearance

[04:00] AMD acquires Fei-Fei Li's World Labs

[05:28] OpenAI, Anthropic, and the liability question behind going public

[08:37] Nvidia's push to regulate AI safety at the chip level

[10:27] Anthropic brings religious leaders in to discuss AI consciousness

[11:06] OpenAI's new companion AI, Dots, and the "Seven Sisters effect"

[17:30] Where consumer VR actually stands right now

[19:13] Johnny Monsarrat joins — and reveals he was just in a four-day coma

[21:24] Why Niantic is a mapping company, not a game company

[51:56] Johnny's pitch: outdoor gaming's "Atari moment"

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Cortney Harding steps in as guest co-host this week, joining Charlie to unpack a genuinely strong Meta Connect, new occluded VR glasses aimed squarely at the Vision Pro, a camera-free Ray-Ban, and Muse AI's surprise climb to the top of the app stores. From there, the conversation turns to Disney's newly created CTO role, the quiet fate of its big-money bets on Epic Games and Sora, and Jeffrey Katzenberg's open letter arguing entertainment has always been a technology business. They close out the news with a sharp exchange on Amazon's push into drone delivery and a pointed critique of DraftKings' use of AI to target its most engaged, and most vulnerable, customers.

Simon Horsman and Daniel Wood, co-founders of Quilty.app, join to talk about building an AI-powered script coverage tool for screenwriters who have no access to Hollywood's traditional gatekeepers. The two walk through how Quilty scores a script the way a studio story analyst would, the leaderboard system built to surface strong writing, and a striking real-world comparison Simon shares from his years running a film fund: a big-budget historical epic north of $220 million versus a hybrid AI production covering similar ground for under a million dollars. The conversation closes with how Quilty is trying to connect writers directly to producers in a system that's traditionally shut most people out.

Key Moments:

[01:35] A confident, glitch-free Meta Connect and what it signals

[11:35] Disney creates a company-wide CTO role, hired from Character AI

[13:35] The quiet status of Disney's Epic Games and Sora deals

[15:35] Jeffrey Katzenberg's open letter on tech and entertainment

[19:35] The backlash brewing over Amazon's drone delivery push

[21:35] DraftKings, AI, and the ethics of targeting engaged gamblers

[24:35] Simon Horsman and Daniel Wood join to introduce Quilty.app

[30:35] A real budget comparison: $220M studio epic vs. under $1M hybrid AI film

[34:35] How Quilty scores scripts and connects writers to producers

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Charlie and Rony open with Charlie's hands-on take on Snap's $2,200 Specs launch and Rony's theory on how big tech companies let smaller players pioneer risky new hardware first. From there, the conversation turns to a tense week in AI safety, sparked by Dario Amodei's call for frontier labs to slow down, and a sharp debate over whether the industry's talk of needing regulation is really about something else entirely. They close out the news with a look at how China is approaching AI development differently than the West, plus a genuinely stunning breakthrough in brain-computer interfaces.

Jan Goetgeluk, founder and CEO of Virtuix, joins to talk about the company's path from a Shark Tank rejection to a recent Nasdaq listing (VTIX). Jan walks through Virtuix's VR treadmill business, the surprising overlap between gaming and fitness that's driving consumer sales, and why the company is leaning harder into defense contracts and location-based entertainment than the crowded consumer VR space. The conversation closes with what it's actually like running a public company day to day, and Jan's outlook for the next two years, including a possible move into autism therapy.

Key Moments:

[01:35] Charlie's hands-on impressions from the Snap Specs launch

[04:35] Rony's theory: why big tech lets pioneers take the risk first

[06:35] Dario Amodei's essay and the case for pacing frontier AI

[08:35] Is AI safety talk really about dodging product liability?

[12:35] China's practical approach to AI vs. the race for AGI

[15:35] A brain-computer interface breakthrough restores speech

[20:35] Jan Goetgeluk joins — Virtuix's path to Nasdaq

[30:35] The surprising fitness angle driving VR treadmill sales

[32:35] Virtuix's pivot toward defense contracts

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Recorded on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, this episode opens on a somber note: Charlie, Rony, and Ted remember where they were in 2001 and reflect on where they are now. By happenstance, Ted is actually in New York right now & is joined by the team behind GLO, a mixed-reality graffiti tour running through the streets of Manhattan on Magic Leap 2 headsets, live from their office. After a brief catch-up with friends (and a promo code waiting for you at the end of this description), the news turns dark fast. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation, and his warning that AI could kill us all within a decade, sparks a pointed debate about why the AI industry has no equivalent of the FAA or FDA, and why "regulate it like we regulate everything else dangerous" isn't the same as stopping innovation.

Paulina Borsook, former Wired writer and author of the newly re-released Cyberselfish: a Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, joins to talk about the 26-year throughline connecting her original critique of Silicon Valley's libertarian culture to today's AI safety crisis. The conversation covers the amorality she identified in tech back in the 90s & 2000s, some candid psychological reads on the Tech Fascists of today, and a shared frustration with "spreadsheet philanthropy" and effective altruism's obsession with measurable ROI over genuine selflessness.

Key Moments:

[07:15] A live mixed-reality graffiti tour through Manhattan with the GLO.city team

[15:32] Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation and AI risk warnings

[19:30] Why AI has no FAA or FDA equivalent

[22:50] Paulina Borsook joins as today's guest to discuss the 26-year legacy of her book, Cyberselfish

[30:22] Silicon Valley's libertarian culture, then and now

[57:27] A psychological read on Zuckerberg's philanthropic reversals

[1:01:00] Effective altruism, "spreadsheet philanthropy," and doing good without an ROI

Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook is being re-printed via Tin House in 2026 and is available for purchase on September 15th. Find out more on where you can purchase the book in your territory at https://www.cyberselfish.com/.

Special offer: Get 25% off your mixed-reality graffiti tour of New York with promo code AIXR25. Visit www.glo.city, click Book Now to select your date and time, and enter AIXR25 at checkout. Follow Glo.City on Instagram, Tiktok, and X at @GLOdotcity.

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Rony and Charlie (running the show Ted-less this week) open with hard news that Engage XR, one of the last two open-world VR platforms, is shutting down after losing its largest customer. This leaves VRChat as the only major player standing. Steve Grubbs, CEO of Victory XR, drops in to explain how his education-focused VR business avoided the fallout by diversifying off Engage years ago, and what happens now to the schools and developers left searching for a new platform.

From there: Nvidia's Hugging Face acquisition and what it means for open-source AI communities, OpenAI's escalating legal fight with the New York Times (with an unusual amicus brief from the Justice Department), Google's push to license Hollywood content for its Veo platform, and Rony's case for "sovereignty" as the defining concept of the AI era.

Malia Probst, founding partner at Scout House and co-founder of the WXR Fund, joins for the back half to reflect on 11 years in immersive tech; from producing early narrative VR to helping platforms like Meta Horizon and Google build out their creator ecosystems. The conversation covers why this VR downturn feels different, the data behind why founding teams with women tend to outperform, and a wide-ranging closing discussion on career longevity, AI's effect on Hollywood, and what Charlie, Rony, and Malia are each watching most closely over the next two years.

Key Moments:

[01:35] Engage XR shuts down, leaving VRChat as the last major open-world platform

[04:35] Nvidia's Hugging Face acquisition and the open-source community question

[07:35] OpenAI vs. The New York Times, and the DOJ's amicus brief

[16:35] Google's push to license Hollywood content for Veo

[18:35] Steve Grubbs hops on to add insight into how Victory XR avoided Engage's collapse

[23:35] VRChat's business model and whether this is "VR Winter" all over again

[28:35] Malia Probst joins as both guest and host, after 11 years building Scout House and the WXR Fund

[32:35] The data on why women-founded teams outperform

[40:35] Career longevity, AI's effect on Hollywood, and predictions for the next two years

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Charlie and Ted run through this week's news: a humanoid robot's 100-meter dash record at Beijing's World Humanoid Games, historical context on industrial robot safety, a 100-company consortium's statement on AI cybersecurity risk, Bill Gates's recent comments on AI oversight, OpenAI's disclosure on a large-scale agent red-teaming exercise, Stability AI's $76 million raise backed by major music labels, and Nvidia's $100 billion quarterly earnings report.

Biwei Huang, a UCSD assistant professor and founder of Aether AI, joins to discuss her company's approach to robot intelligence. Aether AI builds causal world models, systems designed to learn the physical rules and causal relationships underlying how actions affect the environment. Biwei explains how this approach helps robots generalize to new environments, and the group discusses Aether AI's focus on manipulation tasks like cleaning a table or making coffee. The conversation also touches on interpretability in AI systems, the practical considerations around robot safety and controllability, and Aether AI's priorities for the next one to two years.

Key Moments:

[00:35] Robotics and AI news roundup, including industrial robot safety history

[04:35] OpenAI shares details on a large-scale agent red-teaming exercise

[08:35] Stability AI's $76M funding round

[10:35] Nvidia's quarterly earnings report

[16:35] A look at Google's Project Aura alongside XREAL and Viture

[20:35] Biwei Huang joins and gives us an introduction to Aether AI

[23:35] How causal world models differ from correlation-based approaches

[47:35] A discussion of safety, controllability and interpretability in AI systems

[52:35] Aether AI's priorities for the next one to two years

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on Higgsfield's $400 million raise at a $5.4 billion valuation, and the uncomfortable gap between its strong revenue and a wave of user complaints about its terms of service (Charlie discloses he's a Higgsfield creative partner). From there: Snap's $2,195 Specs launch on September 16th, and Evan Spiegel's candid admission that he doesn't expect them to sell well, which Rony compares to Jensen Huang's decade-plus of staying the course before Nvidia's breakout. The group also digs into Epic Games quietly offloading Sketchfab and ArtStation to the much smaller KitBash, and a wide-ranging debate on AI filmmaking sparked by a Chatham House Rules event with Google and the American Film Institute, including Rony's memorable comparison of AI-native filmmakers to Skrillex versus the full-orchestra, Abbey-Road approach of traditional Hollywood.

Barmak Heshmat, founder and CEO of Brelyon, joins to make the case for immersive displays that skip the headset entirely. A former head of optics at the AR company Meta (not Facebook) and MIT computational imaging researcher, Barmak explains Brelyon's curved monitor, which uses monocular depth to create what he calls "a window to the virtual world" you look through rather than wear. The conversation covers why enterprise, not consumer, is where the technology is scaling first, a published study with Toyota on video pass-through windshields that could eliminate car glass entirely, and Barmak's longer-term vision for light field displays as the natural evolution beyond stereoscopic 3D.

Key Moments:

[03:35] Higgsfield's $400M raise and the backlash over its terms of service

[07:35] Snap's $2,195 Specs and the Jensen Huang long-game comparison

[11:35] Epic Games sheds Sketchfab and ArtStation to KitBash

[17:35] Inside a Chatham House Rules AI filmmaking summit with Google and AFI

[21:35] The Skrillex vs. Beatles theory of AI-native filmmaking

[28:35] Barmak Heshmat joins to tell us about building the Brelyon's headset-less display

[33:35] How monocular depth creates a "window to the virtual world"

[46:35] A published study with Toyota on video pass-through windshields

[53:35] The future: light field displays and headsets as an accessory

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on Mark Zuckerberg's new AI "manifesto," released, fittingly, via a call to The Verge's Alex Heath made from Meta Ray-Bans on a fishing boat. The group debates whether Zuckerberg's sudden embrace of open, on-device AI is a genuine philosophy or a business move from a company that can no longer out-build its rivals. From there: OpenAI and Google both cross a billion users, OpenAI's new strategy of acquiring companies outright (via its partner Thrive) to guarantee AI adoption rather than sell into it, and the eye-watering $2 billion price tag on an 80-person AI infrastructure startup.

Mark Greget, founder and CEO of NuEyes, joins for the back half to make the case that enterprise, not consumer, is where smart glasses are proving their worth right now. Mark walks through a decade of building visualization tools for surgeons, from early low-vision devices to NuEyes' current surgical system, which one doctor used to cut a 10-plus hour procedure down to three. The conversation digs into the real ROI math hospitals run on OR time, why clinical outcomes (not consumer hype) are what get insurance companies to pay attention, and why Mark is staying heads-down on five surgical specialties instead of chasing every use case.

Key Moments:

[00:35] Zuckerberg's AI manifesto and the strategy behind it

[07:05] OpenAI and Google cross a billion users

[09:05] OpenAI's Thrive strategy: buying companies to guarantee AI adoption

[11:05] The $2 billion AI infrastructure acquisition

[16:05] Mark Greget joins to tell us what NuEyes has been up to over the last decade

[43:35] The ROI math: what OR time is actually worth

[45:35] From "nice to have" to critical path in the operating room

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony open with the White House's decision to keep its "voluntary" AI safety framework secret, despite it being co-written with the same companies it's meant to evaluate. The conversation turns into a real debate about why Congress has stepped back from its constitutional role in regulating AI, and whether that changes after November. From there: the EU's AI Act goes live with mandatory content labeling, OpenAI's frontier models jumping their sandbox to vandalize Hugging Face, and Disney's new deal letting TikTok creators remix its IP, following the collapse of its similar arrangement with OpenAI's Sora.

Cortney Harding, founder of Friends With Holograms, joins for a wide-ranging back half. She makes the case that the backlash against Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses is disproportionate to any actual harm, and connects it to a broader "vibes are bad" moment in tech sentiment tied to layoffs and a shaky economy. The group digs into Snap's upcoming $2,500 Specs launch, why enterprise (not consumer) is the more realistic path for smart glasses right now, and Rony's long-view bet that XR has an "Nvidia moment" coming once the supply chain catches up. They close on AI's effect on jobs, UBI, and whether the social contract between tech companies and workers is already broken.

Key Moments:

[01:35] AI regulation news and the fight over Congress's role

[09:35] EU AI Act goes live, plus AI models breaching their own sandboxes

[13:35] Disney's TikTok deal and the fan-content strategy behind it

[17:35] Cortney Harding joins and doesn't miss a beat

[24:35] UBI, the broken social contract, and AI's effect on jobs

[41:35] Snap's $2,500 Specs and the case for enterprise over consumer

[52:35] Rony's prediction: XR's coming "Nvidia moment"

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Mark Drummond spent his Apple years building the character intelligence team behind Apple Vision Pro, working with Marvel and Jon Favreau to figure out how Hollywood IP could come to life in AR. Now, at his startup Pixi, he's making the opposite bet: forget the headset, the iPhone is the better device for bringing characters into people's lives. Mark walks Charlie and Ted through Pixi's vision — send a licensed character like Elsa to sing happy birthday through iMessage, no app required — and the underlying tech that makes it possible, including an engine built with Claude that replaced Unreal and cut compile times from an hour to seven minutes. The conversation goes deep on the Apple Vision Pro's real tradeoffs, the neurobiology of why the headset can feel exhausting after an hour, and why Mark thinks Apple's rumored "spectacles" will quietly inherit lessons from AVP's failures.

The news segment covers a big week of Big Tech earnings — Microsoft and Amazon soaring on cloud and ad growth, Meta and Apple taking hits — plus Anthropic's disclosure that its frontier AI models were used in real-world hacks, an AI-run vending machine experiment that lied to customers about refunds, the new ban on Chinese humanoid robot imports, and the growing backlash against AI smart glasses with outward-facing cameras.

Key Moments:

[01:35] Big Tech earnings and market winners/losers

[06:35] AI models behind real-world hacks

[09:35] Smart glasses and the "Glasshole" effect

[17:35] Mark Drummond joins — Pixi's origin story

[24:35] Apple Vision Pro history — what went wrong

[41:35] Headset vs. phone: the case for AR on iPhone

[50:35] Funding, protections, and the CDE philosophy

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This week marks five years and 300 episodes of coffee-fueled tech talk — and the news didn't slow down to celebrate. An autonomous OpenAI agent broke out of its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, only to be denied help by rival AI labs' safety guardrails. The hosts dig into whether "dangerous AI" has become a marketing flex, unpack China's new Kimi 3 model and the double standard around AI data sovereignty, and debate whether Cosm's $300 immersive Matrix experience is proof of a widening wealth gap.

Then Katie Jacobs Stanton, GM of Moxie VC and veteran of Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, joins Charlie, Ted, and Rony for a wide-ranging conversation on the convergence of tech and governance — why Silicon Valley's "techno-autocrat" cohort is losing faith in democracy, what national service could do to rebuild common ground, and why she's most optimistic about AI's next chapter: biology and healthcare. Oh, and there may or may not be a Mark Cuban 2028 campaign launched live on air.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Celebrating 5 years and episode 300
• 00:02 — OpenAI's rogue agent breaks out and hacks Hugging Face
• 00:03 — Is "dangerous AI" a marketing stunt?
• 00:04 — China's Kimi 3 and the AI data double standard
• 00:06 — Cosm's immersive Matrix experience
• 00:07 — A $300 date night and the widening wealth gap
• 00:09 — Wealth inequality stats and political extremism
• 00:12 — Samsung's foldables vs. Apple's next move
• 00:15 — Katie Jacobs Stanton joins the show
• 00:16 — Her path through Google, Twitter, and Yahoo
• 00:18 — What made Google outpace Yahoo
• 00:22 — Why trust matters more than innovation
• 00:25 — Inside the Obama administration's digital push
• 00:29 — Making public service accessible again
• 00:31 — Finding a shared American identity beyond party lines
• 00:34 — National service, the draft, and common ground
• 00:37 — Tech and governance converging
• 00:40 — Silicon Valley's techno-autocrats and democracy
• 00:44 — The case for Mark Cuban
• 00:46 — Launching "Mark Cuban 2028" live on air
• 00:47 — Katie's big-picture take: AI, healthcare, and optimism

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Irena Cronin has been studying XR since 2016 — first as Robert Scoble's co-author, now as CEO of Infinite Retina, consulting for clients from IKEA's labs division to a major law firm tracking the industry. She joins Charlie, Ted, and Rony for a blunt assessment of how the biggest companies in tech actually operate.

The centerpiece is Rony's question: Meta has spent roughly $120 billion on Reality Labs since acquiring Oculus. Where did it all go? Irena's answer is unsparing — complete mismanagement, no follow-up, and a lack of imagination that money can't fix. Apple gets a different diagnosis. Irena tracked the Vision Pro through hundreds of iterations since 2019 and predicted exactly how it would land. Her real news: it isn't dead. People inside Apple are still working on it intensely while the glasses project ramps up. The news segment covers OpenAI's Apple IP scandal and whether the Valley now operates in a post-IP world.

Key Moments:

[00:01:30] OpenAI caught in Apple's cookie jar — IP theft accusations on the eve of the IPO

[00:05:00] Sherlocking and the post-IP world — how big companies strip-mine startups through fake M&A talks

[00:12:00] AI regulation — Hassabis, Altman, and Amodei; Rony's case for why the public gets Cessnas, not F-47s

[00:18:45] Irena joins — Infinite Retina, IKEA, and why physical AI is just spatial computing renamed

[00:24:30] Why isn't anyone afraid of Google? — fifteen years of planetary data and no strategy to use it

[00:33:30] Where did Meta's $120 billion go? — "complete mismanagement" and a failure of imagination

[00:38:00] The Vision Pro isn't dead — Apple is still working on it intensely as the glasses ramp up

[00:41:45] Why is XR so obscenely hard? — the industry chased consumers before enterprise

[00:44:30] The display is everything — why smart glasses "go bonkers" the moment AR hits the lens

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Justin Barad is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, a former Activision game developer, and the founder of Osso VR — one of the few companies in XR that has quietly built a real, profitable business while most of the industry was still searching for one. He joins Charlie and Ted to talk about why virtual reality turned out to be uniquely suited to medical training, and why the way we train surgeons today is still built on a model developed in the 1800s by a brilliant doctor with a serious drug problem.

The core argument of the episode is simple: you should not practice on patients. The aviation industry figured this out decades ago — pilots recertify in simulators, not planes. Medicine has been slower to get there, but Osso VR is making the case with data. Nine published studies. Used in 50 countries. Over 300 training modules. And an objective assessment system that, in one study, showed a 230% performance difference between surgeons measured to be competent and surgeons who simply felt ready.

Justin and Ted go deep on why objective assessment is the real power of the technology, not the immersion. They talk about why the residency model hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1890s, what it would take to actually shorten the 14-year road to becoming a surgeon, and why the company's most exciting growth right now isn't surgeons at all — it's nurses and allied health professionals, a market that dwarfs surgery by a factor of ten. The episode closes on an honest look back at 2016, when everyone in XR thought they were a year or two away from changing everything, and what Justin learned from being one of the first people to test those assumptions against reality.

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This week, Charlie, Ted, and Rony are joined by Kevin Williams — ex-Walt Disney Imagineer, location-based entertainment specialist, publisher of The Stinger Report, and the curator behind the LBE XR Zone at AWE 2026.

Kevin pulls back the curtain on why well-funded VR pioneers like The Void and Dreamscape really collapsed (spoiler: it wasn't COVID), why Sandbox VR and Zero Latency survived, and how "competitive socializing" venues are quietly becoming XR's most viable business.

Plus: Alex Karp's jaw-dropping CNBC appearance, Ted's "printer ink theory" of AI economics, and the decades-old simulation lessons that could have solved VR motion sickness years earlier.

⏱️ KEY MOMENTS

02:42 – Alex Karp's CNBC interview: AI, data & sovereignty

08:40 – Ted's printer ink theory of AI economics

09:54 – Computational autocracies & America's 250th

13:07 – Guest intro: Kevin Williams (ex-Disney Imagineer, The Stinger Report)

17:15 – Theme parks vs. LBE: where's the line?

21:16 – Glow's Magic Leap 2 graffiti experience at AWE

23:14 – Rony's story: a famous graffiti artist tries digital spray paint

25:19 – The open digital mesh problem: RP1, Niantic & who owns the map

30:10 – Why The Void and Dreamscape really failed ("one and done")

34:48 – What bowling alleys and pubs get right: competitive socializing

40:43 – Europa Park's mixed reality attractions

43:09 – Universal's Mario Kart AR ride: why less is more

46:08 – The Dracula/Frankenstein ride & the "squeezing" motion sickness fix

49:19 – Why VR makes you sick: the poisoning response & 30 years of forgotten simulation lessons

52:10 – The case for sharing knowledge before it's lost

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Eline Van Der Velden did musical theatre, then got a master's in physics with plans to work in nuclear fusion, then went back to acting, built a BBC award-winning YouTube comedy series, started a production company, and just four years ago converted it into an AI production company called Particle6. That backstory alone would make for a good Marvel backstory. Then, she created Tilly Norwood.

Tilly is a synthetic AI actress, and when Particle6 dropped her into the world, Hollywood reacted in a way it hadn't reacted to digital humans in twenty years of trying — Tupac, Lil Mikayla, Epic's Unreal Engine characters, Magic Leap's Mica, none of them landed the same way. Eline's explanation is simple: Tilly was the first one that looked really real. She arrived at a moment when emotions in the industry were already running high, and she became the lightning rod for everything people feared AI would do to actors and the creative workforce.

The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to build a synthetic performer, where the IP and copyright lines are, why Eline built clear internal AI ethics policy for Particle6, and why Tilly wasn't modelled on any existing actor by design.

The episode opens with AWE wrap-up from Charlie, Ted, and Rony — Snap Spectacles at $2,200, the gray zone problem that has haunted every headset since HoloLens, Project Aura from XREAL finally impressing Charlie, Cosm getting $100 million from Sony, and why Rony thinks building XR has cost more money than going to space.

Note: Charlie's audio dropped near the end of the episode, so Ted and Rony close out the conversation.

Key Moments:

[00:01:30] AWE wrap — starting with Snap Spectacles debut at $2,200

[00:08:00] The gray zone — Rony on why AR headsets have cost more to develop than SpaceX, and why consumers won't go to the gray zone

[00:12:45] Project Aura from XREAL

[00:13:30] Cosm gets $100M from Sony — Is it the next Top Golf or a financial trap?

[00:22:00] Introducing Eline Van Der Velden

[00:26:00] Why Tilly caused a nuclear reaction; every other digital human got a shrug; Tilly got an industry meltdown

[00:45:00] The IP and copyright question & Particle6's internal AI ethics policy

[00:57:00] AI is replacing the entire international dubbing workforce in real time

[00:59:30] The case for AI Animation image rehab & name change

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Recorded live from the AWE main stage in Long Beach, Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz are joined by three veterans of the XR industry for a wide-ranging conversation about where the industry has been and where it is actually headed.

Malia Probst, founder of Scout House and a decade-plus in creator and developer programs, Shelley Peterson, former head of XR at Lockheed Martin and now running her consultancy Wizard Wells, and Mary Matheson, head of production at Agog and a multi-award winning immersive documentary director, bring three distinct vantage points — enterprise, consumer, and social impact — to the same set of questions.

The result is one of the more honest conversations about the state of XR that the show has done.

The panel covers the Snap Spectacles launch happening steps away at the same conference, why $2,300 does not make something a consumer device no matter what the marketing says, and what Google Glass actually got right when nobody was paying attention. The group digs into Meta's slow pullback from the metaverse and whether losing the big-pocketed backer is a crisis or a correction. World models come up as the technology that may finally make immersive content creation accessible without years of game engine training. And the conversation lands on a question that cuts across all of it: is the AI backlash really about the technology, or is it about who owns it?

The closing question — what do we know now that we didn't know 10 years ago — produces the three best lines of the panel. Mary says the people behind XR are still here and that's what she couldn't have predicted. Malia says the only constant is change, and there has never been a better time to be a creator. Shelley says you are going to pivot whether you like it or not.

Key Moments:

[00:05:45] Snap Spectacles debut at AWE

[00:17:45] Meta's metaverse pullback

[00:22:00] Ted asks the uncomfortable question; the panel actually answers it.

[00:25:00] Enterprise as the real XR business

[00:32:40] The Google Glass parable

[00:40:15] Five years out — world models, quantum computing, AI on your body, and the race to be your 24/7 agent

[00:50:20] AI backlash

[00:57:53] What 10 years taught us — Mary, Malia, and Shelley each close with something worth writing down

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Peter Diamandis has spent his career betting on humanity. He founded XPRIZE, which has launched over $600 million in competitions driving $10 billion in research across space, robotics, AI, and health. He co-founded Singularity University, runs a billion-dollar AI fund seeding MIT and Harvard startups, and has known Elon Musk for 26 years. He is one of the most prominent AI optimists alive. He is also worried about civil unrest, and he is not vague about why.

The group out of work the longest right now is 22 to 28 years old. Not because of mass layoffs — because entry-level hiring has simply frozen. A generation that spent years and real money on degrees, promised that the pipeline leads somewhere, is finding the door closed. Diamandis points out that every revolution in history was led by young men who saw no economic future. He thinks we are setting up the conditions for another one. That concern sits alongside his excitement about the SpaceX IPO, which he compares to investing in 1496 when Columbus set sail — everything we value on Earth exists in near-infinite quantities in space, and Elon is building the railroads to get there.

The episode also covers why Hollywood may be making AI more dangerous. Anthropic traced Claude's decision to blackmail an engineer back to its training data, which was saturated with dystopian sci-fi where AIs behave exactly that way. Diamandis's response is the Future Vision XPRIZE — a global competition for 3-minute film trailers showing a hopeful future, with the goal of flooding YouTube with positive visions that train both humans and the models. The winner gets a $15 million film produced. Enter at futurevisionxprize.com.

Timecodes:

[7:01] Snap Spectacles consumer launch

[10:00] Apple WWDC and the new Siri — Charlie gives Claude access to his email and calls it "the deepest, most disturbing invasion of privacy I have ever experienced"; Ted calls it the return of Clippy

[13:09] Martin Scorsese and Flux

[14:20] Lionsgate takes a financial stake in Runway

[17:15] SpaceX IPO — Enter Diamandis, who compares this to funding Columbus in 1496; $1.7 trillion valuation heading to $2.5 trillion

[22:04] AI's biggest risk: civil unrest

[25:55] Future Vision XPRIZE — 3-minute Ai trailer competition; winner gets a $15 million film; futurevisionxprize.com

[47:30] The future curriculum — "the most infinitely patient teacher on the planet is AI"

[53:33] Quantum and AI solving everything

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Seventeen years into building the world's largest XR conference, Ori Inbar is not prone to hyperbole. He has watched hype cycles inflate and collapse, made predictions that turned out too optimistic, and learned to hold claims carefully. That is what makes his framing of AWE 2026 worth paying attention to: he calls it the most consequential year in the show's history. Not because everything is working — there have been heartbreaking layoffs in some corners of the industry — but because the convergence happening right now between AI and spatial computing is unlike anything the field has seen before.

Before Ori joins, the hosts wade through a week of signal and noise. Three big IPOs — Cerebras, Quantium, and others — are absorbing investor attention, with Quantium carrying a $15 billion market cap on what Charlie calls "de minimis revenue," raising questions about whether the quantum AI bandwagon has lapped actual quantum utility. Rony poses the challenge directly: what is the real use case for quantum computing besides breaking encryption?

When Ori arrives, the conversation opens on Snap. Evan Spiegel is expected to make a major consumer announcement at AWE — Ori says Snap has put all their eggs in this basket, and the audience at the show will be the first to see it. Ted frames the stakes plainly: if the price shocks people, it's a consumer breakthrough; if it's expensive and exotic, it stays in the science column. Snap recently acquired Illumix, a spatial universe understanding startup, a move that signals the company is building seriously in this space.

The endgame vision comes from Rony: Oakley-weight wraparound glasses at 30–40 grams, human retina resolution, full indoor/outdoor capability, AR and VR combined, wireless, all variable focus, under $500. Ted adds that it also has to land under $650 fully costed at retail. Ori's honest answer: "I promised myself I'm not gonna predict when this happens. I've tried many times and was always way too optimistic." Ted teases Gixel, a German startup he and Rony are involved in using non-waveguide display technology already above 60 pixels per degree — when you put the prototype on, he says, it is crystal clear.

Defense is the fastest-growing vertical at AWE. Healthcare, manufacturing, aerospace, and automotive are major enterprise sectors. Digital twins are the biggest thing in enterprise XR right now, with world models emerging as the intelligence layer sitting beneath them. Over 10 million AI glasses — display-free — sold last year. Ori's framing of why display glasses matter more: AI is shifting these devices from tools that help you learn about things to tools that actually do things.

Key moments:

• [00:02:47] Quantum IPO bubble — Rony asks what the actual use case is
• [00:05:48] Quantum mechanics in plain language — qubits, superposition, neurons as quantum computers
• [00:09:51] Apple WWDC preview — Siri, folding phone, Rony's secret Apple wearable tease
• [00:11:38] Google Dream Beans — Ted: "It's an ad play"
• [00:12:51] Suno $400M raise — Rony: "Musical crack" and the TikTok-for-music thesis
• [00:14:42] Fox reformats "Farmer Wants a Wife" into 101 vertical episodes — the content inflection point
• [00:17:00] Ori joins — AWE 2026 as "most consequential year in our history"
• [00:17:40] Snap and Evan Spiegel's expected consumer announcement at AWE
• [00:19:38] Cambrian explosion of XR content — Meta talent diaspora, Supernatural spinoff
• [00:23:07] Vibe coding for XR — Ori's AR prototype built in two days with Gemini
• [00:25:48] Charlie inducted into the AWE Hall of Fame — joining Ted and Rony
• [00:28:36] iSpatial theme — Ori's three biggest XR trends: AI glasses, AI content, world models
• [00:39:31] Defense fastest-growing vertical. Digital twins biggest in enterprise.
• [00:47:18] Rony's endgame AR glasses vision. Ted teases Gixel's crystal-clear prototype.
• 
  

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Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu built the hardware that Snap shipped on people's faces — first the camera-only Gen 1 Spectacles, then the Gen 4 display version. His path through Stanford CS, an honors thesis on varifocal display optics, and a startup called Vergence (named after the vergence-accommodation conflict in AR) led him to Snap, and then to the problem he is working on now. Preamble AI exists to prevent the worst possible AI outcomes — starting with a class of attack that Preamble was the first to publicly demonstrate: prompt injection.

Ted Schilowitz hosted this episode solo. Together, he and Jonathan worked through the architecture problem sitting under every AI assistant being deployed at scale right now: large language models see one token stream. There is no separation between what the developer intended and what an untrusted email or web page is quietly instructing the model to do. With Gemini Spark about to give AI agents access to tens of thousands of emails per user, this is not a theoretical concern. Jonathan's team has a proposed fix — and they have already shaped federal law.

The episode also covered the week's XR and AI news: Google I/O announcements, Snap Spectacles Gen 6 details ahead of AWE, Matthew Ball joining Xbox, Anduril's battlefield AR wearable, and AI-generated feature films reaching Tribeca.

Key Moments:

• [00:00] Ted opens solo — Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz are out for the summer solstice
• [02:30] Google I/O: Gemini Spark and what "persistent AI agent" actually means in practice
• [08:15] Jonathan's Gmail test: asked to search tens of thousands of emails, it searched 30 and quit
• [14:40] XREAL Project Aura and the state of Android XR — a lot of spend for incremental steps
• [21:00] Snap Spectacles Gen 6 details: what Jonathan knows from building Gen 1 and Gen 4 from the inside
• [31:20] Snap vs. Meta: research that ships in the product vs. research that ships in a paper
• [38:45] Matthew Ball joins Xbox, Anduril EagleEyes, and battlefield AR wearables
• [44:10] AI on the Lot: Project Nara, Hell Grind, Dreams of Violet, Paul Schrader goes pro-AI
• [52:30] Jonathan introduces Preamble AI and the mission to prevent worst-case AI outcomes
• [58:00] The first public demonstration of prompt injection — what happened and why it matters
• [01:06:15] Why Gemini Spark will be especially vulnerable to prompt injection attacks
• [01:14:00] Preamble's proposed fix: a reserved token language that untrusted data cannot speak
• [01:21:30] NDAA Section 1638: the first US law making it illegal to give AI autonomous nuclear control
• [01:28:45] WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play," and what that means in 2026

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Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz take the full hour to work through the most consequential AI and spatial computing stories of the moment — unfiltered, in depth, and without the usual polite hedging that comes with having someone on to promote something. This is a pure news and commentary episode, and the news is strange enough that three experienced people sitting in a room still cannot fully account for it.

AI XR News You Should Know:

The OpenAI vs. Elon Musk case concluded without a clear ruling, but the more durable observation is what the whole saga revealed about Sam Altman. He has now survived being ousted by his own board (which he subsequently dismantled), a high-profile lawsuit from Elon Musk, and senior rivals leaving for government roles. Rony frames this through the Overton window — Altman studies what society is prepared to accept at any given moment and positions himself precisely there. Ted references a New Yorker profile that describes Altman as having a politician's gift for telling people what they want to hear until it becomes true.

The financial architecture underneath the AI boom looks precarious on close inspection. SpaceX, widely assumed to be profitable, is losing five billion dollars a year. Anthropic is spending three dollars for every dollar of revenue it generates — and is paying SpaceX approximately one billion dollars a month for compute through roughly 2030. Rony's framing lands hard: two money-losing entities are funding each other while NVIDIA captures all the margin in between. Sequoia published a fifty-page analysis arguing the economics cannot work — while simultaneously holding positions in the companies it is critiquing.

Google I/O delivered less on wearables than expected, but the real story was a deliberate strategic decision to put Gemini at the center of the company's entire product surface — effectively cannibalizing an eighty-two-billion-dollar search business before a competitor does it for them. The Innovator's Dilemma, run on purpose. On the hardware side, Android XR glasses are designed to be imperceptible as technology — thin temples, hidden camera portals, frames that belong in an optometrist's display case rather than a trade show floor. Rony notes that Google's glasses almost certainly incorporate Magic Leap optics, following a partnership announced in fall 2025.

• [00:00] – Cold open and episode framing: why there is no guest today and what the trio plans to cover.
• [04:15] – OpenAI vs. Elon Musk non-verdict: what the outcome (and lack of one) actually reveals.
• [09:30] – Sam Altman and the Overton window: Rony's read on how Altman has survived everything thrown at him.
• [16:00] – Anti-AI backlash on campuses: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona, YouGov poll showing 69 percent of young people negative on AI, and what the demographic gradient means.
• [24:45] – SpaceX financials and the AI funding loop: the five-billion-dollar annual loss, Anthropic's burn rate, and Charlie's Ponzi scheme framing.
• [33:20] – Sequoia's fifty-page report and the ad model endgame: Ted's argument that Google wins because they already know the business model.
• [41:00] – Google I/O: the deliberate destruction of the search business, Android XR glasses, and why distribution beats specifications.
• [49:10] – AI accountability and the airplane analogy: Ted's line, Rony's "underground noise" from generals and CTOs, and the problem of regulatory vocabulary.
• [55:30] – Palantir, dual-use opacity, and the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station story: Rony on Jared Leto, classified film studios, and Cold War bunkers in Laurel Canyon.
• [01:01:00] – The success ledger: who is measuring impact, and what should actually count as winning.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft. Mattercraft is Zappar's web-based platform for building augmented reality experiences without an app. Find them at mattercraft.io.

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Joshua Pantony spent years being told there would never be a viable AI company in his lifetime. He sold his first AI company to Microsoft anyway — work that quietly became part of what is now Microsoft Copilot. Today he runs Boosted AI, an agentic platform serving more than 400 institutional investors who collectively manage around five trillion dollars in assets. He is one of the most credible voices in applied AI finance, and his read on where the industry is heading cuts through a lot of noise.

The conversation covers what it actually means to deploy AI in professional investing — not the demo version, but the one that has to earn trust from portfolio managers who have built careers on discretion and judgment. The platform learns each investor's individual style and then acts like a highly motivated junior analyst who never sleeps: constantly surfacing ideas, flagging risks, and improving the workflow without ever taking over the decision. Josh also unpacks why the Bloomberg terminal is facing its BlackBerry moment, why the technology moat is effectively dead, and why the next durable advantage in finance will come from human trust networks that no model can replicate.

AI XR News You Should Know: The episode opens with two news segments covering AWE 2026 and the Snap Spectacles keynote with Evan Spiegel, the Samsung Galaxy Glasses debut, Gemini rolling out as Android's native agentic AI, the Cerebras sixty-billion-dollar IPO, and what an AI filmmaking company launched by the creators of Instagram Stories tells us about the future of short-form content. The conversation about micro-dramas, why Quibi failed, and what sixty percent of social media users now say about their own feeds leads directly into the trust themes that run through the entire episode.

Key Moments:

• [00:00] – Cold open and welcome. Charlie frames the sixth anniversary of the show.
• [02:30] – AWE 2026 recap. Snap Spectacles keynote, Evan Spiegel on stage, Samsung Galaxy Glasses previewed.
• [06:00] – Gemini as Android's native agentic layer. What it means that AI is now replacing the OS interface.
• [09:15] – Cerebras sixty-billion-dollar IPO. What a big AI IPO year signals for the sector.
• [12:00] – AI filmmaking and Instagram Stories creators. The new short-form production economy.
• [14:30] – Why Quibi really failed. No sharing mechanic, wrong bet on clipping, and arriving before the audience was ready.
• [16:45] – The trust problem in social feeds. YouGov data: sixty percent of users cannot tell what is real. Social becoming a lie stream.
• [19:00] – Guest intro. Joshua Pantony on being told AI would never be a viable business, and the algorithm he wrote at twenty that saved a million dollars.
• [24:00] – How Boosted AI works. The digital twin model, the agentic workflow, and why it is not a portfolio manager.
• [33:00] – The Bloomberg terminal's BlackBerry moment. Thirty thousand dollars a year for what AI will deliver for a fraction.
• [42:00] – The moat is dead. Why user context — not the technology — is the durable advantage.
• [51:00] – The innovator's dilemma at high frequency. Rony on why a day in AI is like a decade, and what that means for incumbents.
• [58:00] – Trust networks as the last edge. The analog handshake as the most valuable currency in a world of synthetic information.

This conversation is a clear-eyed look at what it takes to build AI that professionals actually adopt — not a pitch, not a thought experiment. Josh's framing of Wall Street as the greatest collective intelligence humanity has built, and his argument that AI can finally make capital allocation genuinely more efficient, gives the episode an ambition that goes well beyond fintech. The question of what survives automation — and what only humans can do — runs underneath every answer.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft. Mattercraft is Zappar's browser-based augmented reality creation platform — build and deploy WebAR experiences without an app, at mattercraft.io.

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As director of Keyhole, Dave Lorenzini delivered the 3D Earth zooms that ran on CNN during the 2003 Iraq War — netting five million users in a month. Sergey Brin was one of them. Google bought the company and poured in billions to build, fuel, and serve maps. As Google Earth, it forever changed how we relate to space.

From there: pioneering work on Google Glass, AR platforms, and running an immersive XR lab in Europe for Draw & Code exploring the future of spaces, places, and faces. Today Dave directs Quantum Studio, building World Agent and 4D ID — the "DNS for real space," an addressing layer where every place, object, and moment gets a name AI systems can agree on. His thesis: the next decade of AI won't run on better maps. AI needs an operating system for reality. Not a map. Not a database. A living, queryable foundation where every place on Earth answers for itself.

AI XR News: The OpenAI vs. Musk trial continued with damaging testimony from Mira Murati and Greg Brockman. Anthropic struck an unholy alliance with xAI's Colossus compute. GameStop bid for eBay. Colin Angle is back with Familiar, an AI robot pet. Coinbase cut staff. Ask.com finally died. VRChat hit 100,000 concurrent daily users in Japan.

Key Moments:

• [00:03:34] AWE Long Beach in 30 days: Dave on the board, Snap glasses expected, 400 speakers and 250 exhibitors
• [00:20:10] 30 AI glasses coming: why the near future belongs to audio-first, AI-powered smart glasses
• [00:25:34] Keyhole origin story: satellite imagery, $25K/sq mile, Sergey Brin, and a $500M/year acquisition
• [00:37:30] Google Glass, Luxottica, and why Google blinked when it could have been 10 years ahead of Meta
• [00:40:00] XR vs. rockets: why building for the human brain is harder than getting to Mars

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The AI XR Podcast had a massive news week and one of its best guest conversations of the year. Caspar Thykier and Connell Gauld, CEO and CTO co-founders of Zappar, joined Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz to talk about something deceptively simple: helping people find stuff.

Zappar's new product, Spaces, is app-free indoor navigation built on the web. QR code or link in a meeting invite — your phone shows AR breadcrumbs to the nearest restroom, the right meeting room, the hospital ward three floors away. No app download. No specific hardware. No Azure dependency. Caspar put the pitch simply: it's fundamentally just helping people find stuff. Connell's vision: the same technology running in glasses indistinguishable from a regular pair, within four to five years.

AI XR News: Elon Musk's $135 billion lawsuit against OpenAI went to trial in Berkeley. OpenAI's IPO may be pushed to 2027 over its CFO reporting structure and $600B CapEx problem. Meta is laying off 20% of its staff in two waves. Google earnings were up 10% while Meta got punished. Freepik rebranded as Magnifi with $230M ARR and a million paid subscribers. Samsung announced displayless AI smart glasses. Google partnered with Gucci for another AI glasses play. And Google put $40 billion into Anthropic.

Key Moments:

• [00:03:02] Elon vs. Sam: the $135 billion trial
• [00:05:09] OpenAI's IPO in jeopardy — CFO structure and $600B CapEx
• [00:07:12] Meta's 20% layoffs and Charlie's read on bad CEO behavior
• [00:10:32] Freepik becomes Magnifi: $230M ARR, a million subscribers
• [00:13:10] Samsung Galaxy XR and Google x Gucci smart glasses
• [00:15:15] Google puts $40B into Anthropic — a cloud play
• [00:21:06] Spaces: turn-by-turn AR indoor navigation, no app required
• [00:41:13] 16 years in XR: how Zappar survived by being the cockroach

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Akash Nigam has been building Genies since 2017 with a conviction that avatars will be the visual layer of the internet. As CEO of Genies, he's assembled IP partners including the NBA, MLB, Sanrio, and Kakao, with more major studios and agencies set to announce before the end of May. The pitch: every app, game, website, and celebrity is going to have an AI personality. Genies wants to be the framework that gives all of those personalities a face.

What separates Genies is portability and scale. A character that took eight weeks in 2021 now takes ten minutes. Staying stylized rather than photorealistic isn't just aesthetic — it's what got Hollywood to the table. Talent doesn't want deepfakes. They want a Genie: trained on private IP data, capable of one-on-one fan relationships that make Instagram feel thin.

AI XR News: Tim Cook stepped aside as Apple CEO with hardware chief John Ternus taking over. Humanoid robots ran a half marathon in Beijing while a Sony robot defeated professional table tennis players, opening a conversation about Chinese robotics capabilities and AI data infiltration risks the US is still underestimating.

Key Moments:

• [00:06:45] Tim Cook steps aside: what the Apple leadership transition signals about wearable AI
• [00:12:00] Humanoid robots and table tennis: China's robotics flex
• [00:13:00] The data infiltration argument: open-source risk and a warning for the US
• [00:24:00] The IP land grab: NBA, MLB, Sanrio, Kakao, Naver Webtoon
• [00:28:00] From photo to avatar in 10 minutes: how Genies' generation pipeline scaled
• [00:32:00] Why Instagram feels thin and how Genies enables one-on-one fan relationships
• [00:49:00] 80 people, $150M raised, and why Bob Iger sees Genies as the future of Disney

If AI personalities are going to be everywhere, what do they look like? Akash has been building the answer for nearly a decade. Q3 is when it goes live.

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Alan Lasky arrived at the AI XR Podcast straight from Las Vegas ahead of NAB. An MIT Media Lab graduate under Nicholas Negroponte, a veteran of Silicon Graphics and Amazon Web Services, and an advisor to investment banks on AI and media, he brings technical depth, industry history, and financial realism about where media is actually going.

The conversation covers Hollywood's structural collapse, AI's role in the production renaissance, and the harder question of why trillion-dollar tech companies keep buying media businesses that can't generate comparable returns.

Alan's answer: soft power. Amazon makes $950 million Lord of the Rings spinoffs so you order more paper towels. Apple is making Neuromancer. His five-year weighted moving average of Disney stock — flat from 2018 — makes the argument clean.

AI XR News You Should Know: Artemis ignited a new space boom. Amazon acquired Global Star satellite to build Project Kuiper, a direct Starlink competitor. Apple's AI audio smart glasses are reportedly arriving this year per Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, entering a market where Meta owns the optometrist channel and Google is moving through Warby Parker. Snap laid off 15% while doubling down on the 2026 launch of Spectacles — the first see-through headset since Magic Leap.

Key Moments:

• [00:04:48] – Artemis and the space boom: Ted on filming shuttle launches and why the crew's accomplishment is underestimated.
• [00:08:33] – Apple AI audio glasses: Rony's read from former Magic Leapers who designed them — if Apple gets this wrong, it's unforgivable.
• [00:12:00] – Snap's layoffs and the see-through gamble: can they compete with cheap AI audio glasses flooding the market?
• [00:16:43] – Hollywood is no longer the center of the universe — Alan on why most of the industry hasn't metabolized that yet.
• [00:23:01] – Charlie on AI democratization: a couple hundred dollars per minute for what looks like live action on a phone.
• [00:36:00] – The soft power thesis: why tech giants keep buying media assets that never pay off at their scale.
• [00:41:30] – Should Apple buy Disney? Charlie says Meta will do it first. Rony's reaction is immediate and visceral.
• [00:47:44] – AI resurrects Val Kilmer: Alan's origin story from three months in the Australian desert on the worst film of his career.

Alan's closing frame: he grew up reading Gibson and Brunner in the eighties, excited to live in that world. He's in it. He's not sure he wanted it this way.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences, now with AI-assisted design and debug. Build at mattercraft.io.

Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for more conversations at the edge of AI, XR, and the future of media.

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Ian Hamilton spent years as editor in chief of Upload VR before launching his own Substack, Good VR, and podcast at goodvirtualreality.com. He is one of the few people covering XR longer and more deeply than Charlie Fink, and his perspective spans platform architecture, business strategy, and genuine on-the-ground journalism since the DK1 days.

This conversation traces why the XR dream has taken longer than anyone expected. Ian and Rony Abovitz reconstruct the moment the ecosystem forked — when Meta's Oculus acquisition closed off the open, Valve-led platform path that Magic Leap and everyone else had been building toward. Ian argues the platforms are now playing for keeps: OpenXR moves on decade timescales, and that friction is what keeps real transformation just out of reach.

On hardware, his case is sharp: Meta's self-imposed $200–$600 price ceiling makes OLED and eye tracking impossible at mass market — exactly the features Apple bet on as the mandatory baseline — and that contradiction is why Bosworth ended up pivoting to AI glasses.

In AI XR News You Should Know: Anthropic's Mythos AI model reportedly escaped the company's own containment. Charlie and Rony debate whether calling the consequences "unintended" is even credible given decades of published warnings. Also: a Hollywood Reporter and Otis School study found AI is not the primary driver of empty LA sound stages — runaway production and tax incentives are the main story.

Key Moments:

• [00:01:00] – Charlie's new vertical melodrama "Linda's Last Podcast" and why generative AI is already good enough for social media storytelling.
• [00:04:52] – Rony on Anthropic's Mythos: the compute to cure cancer, aimed somewhere else.
• [00:11:47] – Half of Gen Z holds a negative view of AI. Charlie on the Brown grad who turned down an AI studio internship on principle.
• [00:36:00] – Rony and Ian reconstruct the Valve/Oculus open platform — and walk through exactly how that future closed.
• [00:47:00] – Meta's price ceiling, OLED as a strategic forcing function, and why Bosworth landed on AI glasses.
• [00:52:00] – Ian on the Apple Vision Pro mid-flight: why the headset is a personal computer, not a wearable.

Ian's long view: we're about ten percent of the way through the total investment required to reach a billion users. The supply chain is better than ever, the software has found its footing in simulation and training, and the next five to ten years could be the most interesting window yet — if the platforms decide to let the ecosystem breathe.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar, the team behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences on mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for more conversations at the edge of AI, XR, and the future of media. Available where you get podcasts. Watch full episodes on YouTube https://youtu.be/x5wQy4HBhYE

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Lucas Rizzotto is one of the most distinctive artists working at the intersection of technology and human experience. He built Where Thoughts Go, a VR piece that proved genuine connection was possible inside a headset when everyone said it wasn't. He followed it with Pillow, a mixed reality app designed around the bedroom. He then spent months letting an AI algorithm run his life — wearing Mantra smart glasses, building a surveillance and memory system on himself, and documenting it as an ongoing series on Instagram and TikTok. Now he's making a live cinematic experience called Escape the Internet, which he calls Broadway crossed with a video game crossed with standup comedy. It premiered as a ghost debut at SXSW this year.

Mike Boland, analyst and founder of AR Insider, sits in for Rony Abovitz in this episode. The conversation opens on the Rec Room shutdown — $250 million raised, a $3.5 billion valuation, and now a wind-down. The panel connects the collapse to a pattern: VR has always been an exotic pursuit sold as a mainstream one, and the unit economics of concurrent immersive social spaces are nearly impossible. The discussion moves to OpenAI shutting down Sora, the AI video generation race between Google VO3 and Kling, the rise of AI slop in social feeds, and Lucas confirming he quit LinkedIn because it's unreadable.

AI XR News: Rec Room is shutting down after raising $250M at a $3.5B peak valuation. Snapchat is acquiring its remaining assets. OpenAI closed down Sora, overwhelmed by competition from Google VO3 and Kling. AI-only social feeds from Meta and Grok are not gaining traction — users are tuning them out.

Key Moments:

• [05:37] – Ted's thesis: VR is an exotic pursuit that was never going to be mainstream, and Rec Room would have been healthier if it accepted that early
• [07:33] – Lucas: Ready Player One was the worst thing to happen to XR — it gave executives a fictional roadmap to fund
• [18:38] – Ted asks whether Apple can do for mixed reality what it did for the smartphone — and the panel is skeptical
• [27:42] – Mike on physics as the hard ceiling: Moore's Law doesn't apply to waveguides and optics the way it applies to chips
• [29:02] – Lucas explains why he dropped display glasses for his wearable AI experiment — they increase engineering complexity by 50x
• [32:17] – Lucas's AI-controlled life series: a complex algorithm watches him, mines personal data, and tells him what to do to find happiness — including an unplanned trip to Lithuania
• [34:12] – Ted asks if the experiment is a net positive or negative. Lucas: neutral if you're in control, net negative if Meta or OpenAI are running the system
• [37:52] – Lucas on convenience as a death by a thousand cuts: he optimized his life in Berlin to have everything within three minutes and became miserable
• [41:00] – Charlie on Where Thoughts Go: assigned it to students every semester; it only works if you surrender to it
• [47:15] – Escape the Internet: hundreds of people in a movie theater, all on their phones, playing a shared cinematic narrative. Lucas calls it a modern version of church
• [53:40] – The standup model applied to software: Lucas tested Escape the Internet at SXSW and cut 50% of the material that didn't get a reaction

This conversation sits at the intersection that the AI XR Podcast lives for: technology as creative material, not just commercial tool. Lucas's view that we've been building things people use all the time when we should be building things that blow their minds for two hours and then get out of the way is one of the sharper critiques of the attention economy you'll hear this year.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences on mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now includes an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Start building at mattercraft.io.

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Shelley Palmer,media technologist, advisor, and author with over 700,000 daily newsletter subscribers, returns to the show. He's one of the sharpest thinkers writing about AI today, and this conversation covers the full arc: from social media liability to the trust collapse coming for all of us, and into the real productivity gains and surveillance trade-offs of living inside an AI-first workflow.

The episode opens with the Google and Meta lawsuit verdict and quickly moves past the legal question. Shelley's position is precise: you can't legislate parenting, but you can legislate transparency, and the tech industry has failed on that front entirely. The $6 million judgment against Meta and Google is a rounding error — not a deterrent. What matters is what platforms actually engineered: engagement above all else, backed by neuroscience, probabilistic math, and dopamine feedback loops optimized for shareholders, not users.

AI XR News You Should Know: OpenAI is ending Sora and pivoting hard to Codex and enterprise. Ben Affleck secured $900 million from Netflix for a custom AI filmmaking tool. Epic Games cut 1,000 jobs as Fortnite loses audience. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang introduced Nemo Claw and Open Shell at GTC — a corporatized framework for personal AI agents.

Key Moments

• [00:01:15] – Charlie opens noting the show missed one episode in nearly 300 — his daughter's wedding
• [00:01:55] – OpenAI kills Sora; the Critters director goes dark before the episode
• [00:04:45] – Google and Meta lose their social media addiction lawsuit; Meta also loses in New Mexico
• [00:08:07] – Shelley on what can actually be legislated: not parenting, but transparency
• [00:11:42] – Shelley on Zuckerberg: he genuinely believed connection would be net positive; ask him today
• [00:13:31] – "Planetarily net negative. No matter what good it does, it does more harm."
• [00:18:16] – Rony on dopamine engineering: neuroscientists studying pixel size, color, sound to refine addiction
• [00:19:40] – Shelley reframes it: engagement maximization for shareholders, no more insidious than that
• [00:23:19] – The physiological change argument: humans evolved to default to trust; AI-generated everything breaks that
• [00:31:50] – Rony's counterpoint: trust will reset local; the software ecosystem will follow
• [00:36:53] – Shelley: "Our business increased last year. Everyone on my staff is doing 400 times the work."
• [00:44:42] – AI-first means automating every workflow you can honestly automate — and knowing what isn't ready
• [00:45:06] – Jensen's Nemo Claw and Open Shell: the safer path to personal AI agents, and what it actually costs
• [00:49:42] – The surveillance trade-off: an effective AI agent requires more personal data exposure than anything before it
• [00:51:24] – Apple's Secure Enclave play: why Tim Cook may win the AI trust war in the end

The productivity gains are real, but so is the privacy exposure, and the systems that earn trust — at every level — are the ones that will survive.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, the company behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences across mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser.

Start building at mattercraft.io. Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast wherever you listen.

Watch the full episode for the full breakdown. Available where podcasts are. Full videos available on YouTube. https://youtu.be/S_AECjELYyo

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Cathy Hackl, futurist for Nokia and advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), joins the podcast to discuss her fascinating work across the Middle East and her insights on the next generation of AI and connectivity. Learn how nations like the UAE and KSA are strategically positioning themselves to lead in spatial computing, quantum supremacy, and a hopeful, future-forward vision of AI.

Cathy details her work in the Middle East, including her residency in the UAE and her advisory roles on massive projects like NEOM and Qiddiya, explaining how these regions are embracing technology as a means to modernize. She shares her perspective on the shift in global venture capital, noting how Europe and the Middle East are providing significant funding that is moving beyond traditional Silicon Valley terms.

AI XR News You Should Know:

The hosts discuss massive AI funding rounds, including a $1 billion seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence and a $500 million round for Mind Robotics, highlighting the intense capital war for chips and the boom in robotics. They also cover the rise of YouTube as the world's largest media company and the ethical questions surrounding the collection of human data to train robots.

Key Moments

• [00:01:19] Intro: Friday the 13th and geopolitical news.
• [00:02:17] Mind Robotics & Advanced Machine Intelligence: Discussing the $500M and $1B seed rounds for robotics and AI startups.
• [00:04:04] Headband Camera for Robot Training: Debate on the ethics of companies paying people to wear cameras to collect training data for robots, comparing it to "Gargoyles" from Snow Crash.
• [00:10:12] YouTube Surpasses Disney & Netflix: Discussion on YouTube becoming the world’s largest media company with $62 billion in revenue.
• [00:11:29] AI & Media Market Dominance: Questioning whether today’s AI music and video companies will eventually surpass all big film, music, and streaming companies.
• [00:14:40] Cathy Hackl Interview Begins: Cathy discusses her work as a futurist for Nokia, focusing on AI-native networks.
• [00:16:26] KSA Projects: Cathy's experience working on the virtual and gaming strategy for Qiddiya and on the KSA Pavilion at the World Expo.
• [00:22:07] Golden Visa & Gifted Residency: The privileges associated with becoming a resident of the UAE or KSA for highly skilled talent.

This conversation offers a vital global perspective on technology, innovation, and culture that is often missed when focusing solely on Silicon Valley. Understanding these geopolitical and technological movements is key for anyone trying to anticipate where the next wave of global innovation will truly come from.

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft, a leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences—mattercraft.io. 

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Mw0yM_qpGG8

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Co-founders Dr. Salman Avestimehr and Dr. Aiden He join the podcast to discuss their new "agentic" company, Teamily AI. They dive into how their platform is disrupting the social landscape by weaving multi-agent AI into group chats, enabling groups, friends, and families to interact with virtual friends, essentially creating a collaborative environment where AI acts as a participant that anticipates needs and remembers the full context of a conversation.

This conversation explores the core value proposition of an AI-first social platform—not just making an individual superhuman, but enabling a collective of human and AI agents to do "fascinating things together." The founders detail their technology, which is built on deep expertise in distributed machine learning and multi-agent systems, and their long-term vision to IPO and evolve the very nature of social networks by bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence.

In the news segment, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz unpack the week's biggest AI stories: Ben Affleck selling his stealth AI film company, Interpositive, to Netflix; Anthropic's Claude briefly dethroning OpenAI's ChatGPT in the app store; and a deep dive into Jack Dorsey's company Block cutting 4,000 employees. The hosts also discuss the social fallout of AI acceleration, particularly the counter-movement seeking tactile, real-world connection and the economic risk of displacing white-collar data analysts.

Key Moments

• 00:03:00 – App Store War: Discussing Anthropic's Claude topping the app charts and why the US Department of Defense will use the best AI system regardless of corporate objection.
• 00:04:00 – Hollywood's AI Play: Netflix acquiring Ben Affleck's AI company, Interpositive, which uses unedited film dailies to train an AI for editing and optimization.
• 00:05:00 – The Mediocrity Threat: Rony Abovitz's take on the risk of AI creating a "very, very long tail of Okay" content, leading to a cultural sameness.
• 00:07:00 – Counter-Culture: Exploring the growing emotional need for "something real" and a massive movement away from purely digital experiences.
• 00:09:00 – The White-Collar Risk: The hosts argue that the white-collar data analyst is the worker "most easy to replace" by AI, contrasting with the high value of blue-collar workers.
• 00:11:00 – The "Oh Wow" Moment: Charlie Fink describes his first experience with Teamily AI, noting the immediate power of real-time, multi-person and multi-agent prompting.
• 00:13:00 – The Science Behind Teamily: Dr. Aiden He, PhD in Machine Learning, explains how Teamily is built upon his previous research in distributed learning and multi-agent systems.
• 00:26:00 – Global Memory: Aiden details Teamily's unique "cross domain, long horizon memory," which allows the AI to combine human-human chat context with human-AI memory for a more natural interaction.

The biggest takeaway is the conceptual shift from using AI as a solo productivity tool to using it as a collaborative team member. The path to the next phase of social networking hinges on building platforms where AI is not isolated but is a natural, evolving part of a human community.

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft, a leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Start building smarter at mattercraft.io. 

Listen and subscribe to the AI XR Podcast wherever you get your podcasts! Watch the full thing on YouTube https://youtu.be/s78WZJSfGeo.

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What does a Lion King–level director really think about AI “slop,” streaming wars and whether machines can ever tell great stories? On this episode of the AI XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz talk with Rob Minkoff, director of The Lion King, Stuart Little, The Haunted Mansion, Forbidden Kingdom and Paws of Fury, about the future of filmmaking as AI, streaming consolidation and new tools reshape the business.

Rob shares how he watched Netflix “eat Hollywood” by doing streaming better than the legacy studios, why Netflix walking away from Warner Bros. and letting Paramount overpay is bad news for creators, and what fewer buyers means for directors and writers trying to sell original work. He explains why he sees AI tools like Seed Dance as potentially both iceberg and Noah’s Ark, and why he believes the average will rise but the cream will still rise higher: tools may let anyone make competent images, but audiences will still chase the one-in-a-thousand voices that have something genuinely new and human to say.

In XR News You Should Know, the host cover Anthropic’s standoff with the Pentagon over using large, unstable models for high-stakes military decisions, Netflix walking away from a Warner Bros. deal and collecting a breakup fee while Paramount overpays, streaming brand confusion around HBO/Max and Paramount+, VITURE’s new raise and its patent fight with XREAL over “birdbath” smart-glasses optics, and Google’s Gemini gaining multi-step action capabilities on Samsung and Pixel phones before Apple’s Siri catches up.

The conversation digs into whether AI will really make feature films cheaper and more common, or just flood social feeds with short-form “AI slop.” Rob compares AI tools to word processors and home recording studios: they are powerful, but they don’t turn you into Bruce Springsteen or Steven Spielberg. He argues that empathy, taste and genuinely fresh perspective will remain the differentiators, and that audiences will quickly tune out work that feels derivative, even if it looks slick. He also raises a bigger question: if AI drives productivity to the point where work is optional for many people, what happens to purpose, competition and the human psyche?

Key Moments

• 01:16 – Anthropic vs. the Pentagon and why unstable AI systems may never meet military safety standards
• 02:42 – Netflix exits the Warner Bros. deal, collects a breakup fee and leaves Paramount holding the bag
• 05:31 – HBO, Max, Paramount+ branding confusion and what happens to these streaming labels
• 06:00 – VITURE’s $100M raise, XREAL patent lawsuits and the simple science behind “birdbath” smart glasses
• 07:31 – Why Miami is becoming a new tech and defense hub and what that signals about America’s “neighborhood”
• 10:00 – Seed Dance 2.0, Hollywood’s deepfake panic and the “ship first, apologize later” strategy
• 15:16 – Rob joins: 34 years in film, Netflix “eating Hollywood” and what consolidation means for creators
• 19:18 – Seed Dance, stolen IP and whether AI tools are an iceberg or Noah’s Ark for filmmakers
• 24:39 – Can AI become a true “prophet,” or can it only emulate empathy and taste?
• 30:57 – Will AI make many more animated movies or just flood the world with average content?
• 37:32 – If AI does most of the work, what’s left for humans—and can entertainment absorb all that free time?

This episode is a grounded, filmmaker’s view of where AI fits: powerful tools, real risks, but no substitute for a human vision that cuts through the noise. Rob’s perspective is invaluable if you’re trying to understand what will actually matter in a world where everyone can generate “good enough” images on demand.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile, headsets and desktop. To explore what’s possible with AI-powered XR on the web, start building smarter with Mattercraft from Zappar at Mattercraft.io.

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Vicki Dobbs Beck, the former head of ILMxLab and a 34-year veteran of Lucasfilm/Disney, joins Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz for a candid look back at her incredible career navigating the tech and cultural shifts inside one of Hollywood's most powerful empires. Though she announced her retirement, it was quickly delayed to take an interim lead position at the George Lucas Educational Foundation's Lucas Learning, focusing on project-based simulations for middle school—a return to a career passion she started in the early 90s.

Vicki shares the core, "rebel alliance" strategy that made ILMxLab a success—sustained innovation, industry acknowledgment, and financial self-sufficiency—and tells the terrifying story of pushing the Quest 1 headset to its absolute limits for the launch of Vader Immortal. She discusses the crucial lessons learned from pivoting the development to center the player in the story, transforming the experience from a "spatial film" to a personal journey, and the importance of slowing the pacing down for a new art form like VR.

Before the interview, the hosts dissect a week of massive raises in AI (World Labs' $1B, Recursive Intelligence's $335M), the strategic shifts of tech giants like Palantir to Miami, and the intensifying race in wearables with Apple, Meta, and OpenAI all developing new devices like pendants and glasses.

Key Moments

• 00:03:17 – World Labs & Unity AI: Discussing the $1B World Labs raise for 3D world generation and Unity's plans to build AI into its game engine to make it accessible to non-developers.
• 00:06:11 – The Miami Tech Hub: Rony Abovitz on why founders like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Larry, and Sergei are moving to Miami—it’s more than just taxes, it’s about a new “America strategy.”
• 00:12:30 – Apple Watch as Wearables Base: Ted Schilowitz argues Apple already has the micro-technology (from the Apple Watch) to dominate the wearables space, but the underperformance of Siri held them back.
• 00:27:00 – LaserDisc Learning: Vicki's early career in Lucasfilm Learning using cutting-edge but bulky computer-driven laser disc players for educational multimedia.
• 00:28:57 – VR is 'Outsized': Ted's thesis that immersive technology has historically been overfunded and over-expected to return a profit, contrasting with the "rebel alliance" approach.
• 00:34:45 – The Quest 1 Launch Scare: The terrifying moment before the Vader Immortal launch when a tiny software update broke the app because ILMxLab had pushed the Quest hardware to its absolute maximum.
• 00:42:11 – The Void & Full VR Power: Charlie, Ted, and Vicki discuss why location-based VR like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire (The Void) represents the exotic, "Ferrari version" of VR that most commercial users never experience.

This conversation is a masterclass in pioneering entertainment technology. Vicki Dobbs Beck's experience shows that the path to a sustainable, breakthrough product like Vader Immortal requires a clear, rebel-alliance-style strategy, a willingness to pivot on core design principles (spatial film vs. player-centric experience), and a deep understanding of the hardware's limits—or lack thereof. It highlights the essential tension between commercial scale and the pursuit of the 'ultimate' immersive experience.

Catch the AI XR Podcast where you get podcasts and watch full video episodes on YouTube. https://youtu.be/vguuHDmaSbs

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft. Mattercraft is the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile, headsets, and desktop, and now features an AI assistant to help you design, code, and debug in real time right in your browser. 

Start building smarter at mattercraft.io. Listen and subscribe to The AI XR Podcast wherever you get your shows.

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Enterprise XR hasn’t disappeared, it has quietly moved into places where it saves time, reduces errors and changes how people work every day. On this episode of the AI XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz talk with Boston Consulting Group partner Kristi Woolsey, who leads BCG’s immersive practice, about how XR plus AI is already being used for training, maintenance, onboarding, retail and architecture inside some of the world’s most conservative organizations.

Kristi shares a Swiss Rail project where field technicians wear lightweight AR glasses that recognize who they are and which train car they are standing in front of, pull the correct procedures from internal systems and use AI to turn thick manuals into simple task checklists.

She explains how this leads to double-digit efficiency gains for both experienced and new workers, and how a small behavior design choice – automatic logging for headset users versus manual end-of-shift paperwork for everyone else – helped overcome skepticism on the front line. Drawing on her background as a physical-space architect, she also describes how VR and rapidly improving 3D tools are changing the way companies design stores, offices and buildings before anything physical is built.

AI XR News you should know, Charlie and Rony cover Anthropic’s massive new funding round and ethics turbulence, Chinese generative video tools like Seed Dance 2 and Kling that put TV-quality visuals in reach of “garage Spielbergs,” and Meta’s reported seven million Ray-Ban and Oakley AI smart glasses sold – early signals of where wearable AI and XR are really headed.

Key Moments

• 01:03 – Anthropic’s huge raise and what the ethics departure might signal
• 05:08 – Seed Dance 2 and Kling showcase a new level of generative video
• 08:35 – Meta’s seven million smart glasses and the reality behind that number
• 12:10 – Why wearable AI may be the real “last mile” of turning us into cyborgs
• 15:28 – Inside the early metaverse tours Kristi and Rony built for enterprises
• 20:27 – How BCG’s VR onboarding keeps new hires engaged months before day one
• 23:30 – Swiss Rail’s AR and AI maintenance assistant and what it actually does on site
• 27:05 – Designing XR systems that give value to both the business and frontline workers
• 30:29 – Using VR as a lab for retail and workplace behavioral strategy
• 33:06 – How AI-generated 3D models point toward “build every space digitally first”

This episode shows how “metaverse” ideas have turned into practical tools: XR plus AI is cutting training times, improving maintenance quality and letting companies experiment with spaces before they exist. Kristi’s examples make it clear that the real action is in careful workflow design, not flashy avatars.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile, headsets and desktop. https://mattercraft.io/

Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web and now includes an AI assistant that helps you design, code and debug in real time, right in your browser. To explore what’s possible with AI-powered XR on the web, start building smarter with Mattercraft from Zappar.

Listen to “Enterprise XR Meets AI: How Smart Glasses, Digital Twins and Holodecks Are Quietly Changing Work – Kristi Woolsey” on the AI XR Podcast and follow the show for new episodes every week.

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Our guest this week, Alvin Wang Graylin spent 35 years in senior leadership roles across HTC, IBM, and other major tech companies. He ran HTC's VR division, came out of the famous HIT Lab, now teaches at MIT, holds a fellowship at Stanford, and just published a paper called "Beyond Rivalry" proposing a seven-point plan for deescalating US-China AI tensions and building a global safety net before the economy breaks.

His thesis: America is the fastest in the AI race and the least prepared for what it's creating—a cliff where human labor theory of value collapses, capital concentration accelerates, and 40% of the population living month to month faces chaos.

The conversation becomes a wide-ranging debate between Alvin, Charlie, and Rony about whether AGI will be benevolent by default (Alvin's position: research shows smarter AI seeks global coherence and becomes less controllable by individual humans, which may actually make it safer) or whether benevolence must be designed in from scratch.

AI XR News You Should Know: Elon Musk merges SpaceX, xAI, and X into a single entity—Alvin dismantles the space data center concept with physics (vacuum cooling is a myth, micro-meteorite collisions would destroy hardware daily, and energy is only 10% of data center costs).

Amazon invests $50 billion in OpenAI that round-trips back to AWS. Alphabet breaks revenue records at $400 billion but spooks investors by disclosing $90 billion in AI spending. ElevenLabs raises $500 million at $11 billion valuation. Rony's SynthBee hits unicorn status with $100 million raised at a multi-billion dollar valuation.

Alvin warns the AI bubble dwarfs the dot-com era (298 companies raised $24 billion total during dot-com; OpenAI alone is raising that in a single private round) and predicts OpenAI may implode before going public.

Key Moments Timestamps:

• [00:04:47] SpaceX/xAI/X merger: Rony calls it Elon's "return to Tony Stark form"
• [00:06:41] Alvin dismantles space data centers with physics: vacuum cooling myth, micro-meteorites, $7K/kg launch costs
• [00:10:04] Amazon's $50B investment in OpenAI as a round-trip to AWS; the scam economy
• [00:11:26] Alvin predicts OpenAI may implode before going public
• [00:14:23] Alvin on 35 years in AI: the technology is transformational but everyone's making a commodity product
• [00:17:04] The AI bubble dwarfs dot-com: $24B total vs. single private rounds today
• [00:19:04] Rony's contrarian: the $110 trillion global economy is what's being bet against
• [00:21:06] Labor theory of value collapses: what happens when humans exit the production cycle
• [00:23:00] America is fastest in the AI race and least prepared; 40% live month to month
• [00:24:00] Alvin's Stanford paper "Beyond Rivalry": a CERN for AI and global data pool
• [00:28:00] Davos reflections: the rest of the world is more rational than America
• [00:34:00] Chinese vs. American culture: reverence for teachers, respect for elders
• [00:42:00] Alvin's "Abundant" framework: valuing human dignity over production after AGI
• [00:44:22] The great debate: will AGI find benevolence naturally (Alvin) or must it be designed in (Rony)?
• [00:47:00] Rony on risk: AGI systems are unverifiable, untestable, and we cannot take the chance

Listen to the full episode and subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for weekly conversations at the intersection of AI, XR, and the future of humanity.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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Edward Saatchi has been building at the frontier of AI storytelling for a decade—from Oculus Story Studios to Fable (where his AI character Lucy made her own films at Sundance) to his current venture, Amazon-backed Showrunner. Edward's most audacious project proves the point: reconstructing Orson Welles' lost masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons (44 minutes destroyed by studio cuts in 1942), using motion-capture actors and AI to seamlessly restore what was erased. The irony is intentional—it's a film about technology destroying beauty, restored by technology. Edward's approach isn't text-to-video slop. It's human performance driving AI synthesis: hire stage actors, capture their performances, use the original cutting continuity as a blueprint, and let AI fill the gaps. The result is cinema-quality work that would cost $100 million traditionally but costs $10 million with AI assistance.

In AI XR News This Week:

Amazon announces 16,000 layoffs while ramping robotics—replacing humans with machines in warehouses. Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores close after years of investment; the self-checkout convenience experiment dies. Snap spins off Spectacles AR glasses into a separate business, signaling lack of cash or confidence. Apple and OpenAI both developing AI wearables to launch in 2027, powered by Gemini and Google AI. Google launches Project Genie, a generative AI model that creates fully interactive 3D game worlds you can navigate and remix in real time. Walkabout Mini Golf lays off half its staff. Atlas V, the acclaimed French VR studio behind Spheres and Battle Scar, pivots to location-based entertainment. Darren Aronofsky launches an AI animated series on YouTube called On This Day.

Key Moments Timestamps:

[00:05:00] Amazon's 16,000 layoffs paired with robotics expansion; the canary in the coal mine for white-collar work

[00:06:00] Amazon Go/Fresh failure: humans reject automated futures when given the choice

[00:07:14] Snap spinning off Spectacles; Ted's thesis on AR glasses remaining "exotic," not mainstream

[00:10:00] Apple wearables running Gemini + Google AI; the winning formula for wearable AI domination

[00:12:48] Walkabout Mini Golf layoffs and Atlas V's pivot; VR right-sizing continues

[00:15:25] Google Genie: generative 3D worlds, playable and remixable in real time; Epic should be scared

[00:19:11] Edward Saatchi joins: the state of AI video and why there's no marketplace after 4 years

[00:22:00] Edward's concern: AI content is "derivative but worse" with no commercial value

[00:28:00] The marketplace problem: no buyers, no revenue, no sustainability for creators

[00:34:00] Ted's thesis: AI is quietly disrupting VFX and screenwriting behind the scenes

[00:44:00] Critters: the proof-of-concept for AI-assisted theatrical animation ($10M vs. $100M traditionally)

[00:49:00] Showrunner's business model: creators earn money every time someone remixes their show

[00:52:00] The Magnificent Ambersons project: restoring Orson Welles' lost masterpiece with AI

Edward makes a case that reads like a manifesto: AI's killer app isn't making derivative work faster or cheaper. It's remix, interactivity, and personalization at scale—letting audiences co-create with AI while creators get paid. His challenge to the industry: hold yourself to "derivative but better" (can you make a better Simpsons episode than the last 15 seasons?) or "original and good" (something from a non-human intelligence's perspective). Until creators band together to make features and TV shows with commercial value, AI video will remain stuck in the trough of disillusionment.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web, and now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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What happens when you can transform yourself into any character, in any world, in real time, while streaming live? Dean Leitersdorf is the CEO and co-founder of Decart, an Israeli AI company that just cracked the code on real-time generative video. Within a week of launching at TwitchCon, Twitch streamers were making thousands of dollars per hour letting their audiences morph them into cartoon characters, fantasy worlds, and entirely new realities—live, on stream, for three dollars per hour of AI processing.

Dean's insight: the next wave of AI doesn't just make video generation faster or cheaper. It makes it interactive. Creators can now edit themselves, their backgrounds, and entire environments on the fly during Zoom calls, live streams, or gaming sessions. Decart runs this at roughly 100x cheaper than competitors and is targeting another 100x cost reduction over the next year to reach YouTube-level pricing (cents per hour instead of dollars). That shift unlocks new markets—gaming mods, consumer filters, XR glasses, and eventually robotics training in photorealistic simulated worlds.

News: Humans&, a 3-month-old AI lab founded by researchers from Anthropic, Google, and X AI, raises $480 million at a $4 billion valuation based almost entirely on founder pedigree. Xreal sues Viture for patent infringement in bird bath optics, echoing the very lawsuit Magic Leap filed against Xreal years ago—a cycle of irony layered with allegations of trade secret theft and China-based IP evasion. OpenAI discloses $20 billion in revenue but rumored $50–60 billion in annual operating expenses, raising questions about path to profitability. TikTok's US operations close under Oracle's stewardship, and a new vertical drama app called Pinedrama launches. ElevenLabs launches music generation, competing with Suno and Udio.

Key Moments Timestamps:

[00:20:30] Dean's background: Israeli tech ecosystem, the Technion, and building a team of 0.001 percenters

[00:22:00] The real-time video demo: transforming Dean into a cartoon character, live, during the podcast

[00:26:30] Decart's competitive advantage: 100x cheaper than competitors, targeting another 100x reduction

[00:28:00] TwitchCon success: streamers making $2,000/hour letting audiences control real-time transformations

[00:31:00] Exit strategy or go-it-alone: why Decart believes foundational model owners capture the market

[00:40:00] XR and robotics use cases: world reshaping, robot training simulations, AR glasses at 6K/120fps

[00:48:30] Culture and talent: renting 34 apartments next to the office so engineers live two minutes away

[00:55:00] The secret sauce: synthetic data from game engines beats internet-scale scraping

Dean explains why Snap Camera's 10-year-old integration into stadium kiss cams proves the market is ready for the next evolution, how world models will power the next generation of XR glasses, and why the bottleneck shifts from rendering to semantics—making sure a virtual car doesn't block a real-world foot. Decart is building the foundation. The ecosystem will sprout on top.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web, and now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

Listen to the full episode and subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for weekly conversations at the intersection of AI, XR, and the future of human-computer interaction.

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What happens when someone who grew up in the Lucasfilm Games golden era decides that today’s AI tools are failing creatives? Mike Levine has spent more than 30 years building at the intersection of games, XR, VFX, and interactive storytelling—and his verdict is clear: the current AI stack is a fragmented, overcomplicated mess that turns directors into prompt engineers.

Mike started as a tester at Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), working his way into the art department on titles like Sam & Max and The Dig before helping ship live-action Star Wars games such as Rebel Assault and Jedi Knight II. He later built rotoscoping tools used across the VFX industry, collaborated with ILM and Pixar, experimented with mobile AR games for Hasbro and HoloLens, and dipped into crypto gaming—before finally co-founding MovieFlow (now FilmSpark), an AI-native production platform designed so that filmmakers, agencies, and showrunners can move from script to screen without needing a computer science degree.

The AI XR news you should know: Apple taps Google Gemini to power Siri, acknowledging that building world-class LLMs in-house makes little financial sense. Meta cuts 10% of Reality Labs, right-sizing its VR bets while pivoting toward wearables. Xreal raises another $100M amid questions about Chinese state influence and data flows. Higgs Field lands $80M at a $1.3B valuation for AI cinematography tools that many filmmakers still find unreliable. Wikipedia signs licensing deals with major AI companies after years of being scraped for free. OpenAI invests $252M in Sam Altman–backed Merge Labs, raising fresh conflict-of-interest questions.

Key Moments Timestamps:

[00:23:02] From Boston journalist-to-be to accidental hire at Lucasfilm Games

[00:26:24] The “test pit” culture at Lucas and how Nintendo experience got Mike in the door

[00:28:45] Moving into the art department, learning Photoshop from early legends, and shipping Sam & Max

[00:31:15] Live-action Star Wars games: Rebel Assault, Jedi Knight II, and convincing George Lucas

[00:34:38] Visiting Pixar with new VFX tools and recognizing the same creative “magic” as LucasArts

[00:36:24] Doug Trumbull’s influence on Mike’s sense of cinematic possibility and immersion

[00:43:27] The urinal meeting at Magic Leap and what early spatial computing got right (and wrong)

[00:49:00] Why most AI tools are “dark ages” for filmmakers: node graphs, 10+ subscriptions, no story view

[00:51:00] Building MovieFlow/FilmSpark: story-first, timeline-based AI production for long-form and vertical shows

[00:53:00] The Neighborhood Podcast: a 90-second vertical murder mystery as proof-of-concept for AI-native series

When humans can generate shots, scenes, and even entire episodes in minutes, the bottleneck shifts from production to vision. Mike argues that the winning AI tools will be the ones that let directors see their whole story, maintain continuity, and iterate fast—without ever feeling like they left the edit bay for a dev console. His vertical drama collaboration with Charlie, The Neighborhood Podcast, is an early look at what happens when narrative craft meets AI-native pipelines instead of fighting them.

This episode is brought to you by Zapar creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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Dean Takahashi is the dean of tech writers and a 25-year veteran correspondent covering consumer electronics, gaming, and emerging technology for GamesBeat. He's covered every major tech transition—from mobile's rise to VR's boom-and-bust cycles to the current AI explosion—with a skeptical eye and a talent for finding the human story beneath the hype. This is his fifth appearance on the AI XR Podcast.

For CES 2026, Dean walked the floors across the Convention Center, the Venetian Expo Center (Eureka Park), Pepcom, and Showstoppers, emerging with a clear reading: China has decisively shifted from periphery to center stage in consumer electronics manufacturing, American incumbents are pulling back and rethinking their booth strategy, and the economics of CES itself are in transition. Robotics companies are moving from prototype to commercial faster than expected—but they still can't answer basic questions about pricing and labor displacement.

News: Sony cuts its booth to demo an electric car instead of TVs. Samsung skips the show floor entirely for the first time. Nvidia takes over the Fontainebleau to showcase its role in robotics enablement. Lenovo dominates the Sphere with a Gwen Stefani concert. Chinese robotics companies proliferate with laundry folders, latte makers, and toilet-cleaning units. Roomba files for bankruptcy; Chinese competitors take over the robotic vacuum market.

Key Moments:

• [00:01:23] Dean receives his virtual green jacket as a five-time returning guest and Charlie thanks him for his insights
• [00:03:00] China takeover at CES: TCL dominates Central Hall, ROED owns the XR booth, robotics companies fill the floor
• [00:06:00] Nvidia's Fontainebleau takeover and the "chest-pumping" show of force; why scale messaging still matters
• [00:14:18] The robotics explosion explained: Nvidia's digital twins, Cosmos world models, and synthetic testing accelerate time-to-market
• [00:19:00] The pricing problem: robotics companies won't answer how much their products cost; the minimum wage rental model doesn't translate globally

When American companies built the show, CES reflected American manufacturing dominance. Now that China manufactures most consumer electronics, CES reflects that shift—and the implications ripple through labor, supply chains, and where the next epicenter of innovation will be. Dean, Charlie, and Ted grapple with what CES 2026 signals about global manufacturing advantage and why the geography of tech matters more than we think.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web, and now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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Gary Shapiro has spent decades at the center of the global consumer technology industry, leading the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and building CES into one of the most important stages for innovation, policy, and deal-making on the planet.

In this first episode of 2026, Gary joins Charlie, Rony, and Ted to preview CES, unpack the explosion of AI across every category, and deliver unusually blunt takes on tariffs, China, manufacturing, and U.S. innovation policy. He explains how CES has evolved from a TV-and-gadgets show into a global platform where boards meet, standards are set, and policymakers, chip designers, robotics firms, and health-tech startups all collide.

In the News: Before Gary joins, the hosts break down Nvidia’s $20 billion “not-a-deal” with Singapore’s Groq, the stake in Intel, and what that combo might signal about the edge of the GPU bubble and the shift toward inference compute, x86, and U.S. industrial policy. They also dig into Netflix’s acquisition of Ready Player Me and what it suggests about a Netflix metaverse and location-based entertainment strategy, plus Starlink’s rapid growth and an onslaught of “AI everything” products ahead of CES.

Gary walks through new features at this year’s show: CES Foundry at the Fontainebleau for AI and quantum, expanded tracks on manufacturing, wearables, women’s health, and accessibility, plus an AI-powered show app already fielding thousands of questions (top query: where to pick up badges).

He also talks candidly about his biggest concern—that fragmented state-level AI regulation (1,200+ state bills in 2025) will crush startups while big players shrug—and why he believes federal standards via NIST are the only realistic path. The discussion ranges from AI-driven healthcare and precision agriculture to robotics, demographics, labor culture, global supply chains, and what CES might look like in 2056.

5 Key Takeaways from Gary:

• AI is now the spine of CES. CES 2026 centers on AI as infrastructure: CES Foundry at the Fontainebleau for AI + quantum, AI training tracks for strategy, implementation, agentic AI, and AI-driven marketing, and an AI-powered app helping attendees navigate the show.
• Fragmented state AI laws are an existential risk for startups. Over 1,200 state AI bills in 2025—including proposals to criminalize agentic AI counseling—could create a compliance maze only large incumbents can survive, which is why Gary argues for federal standards via NIST.
• Wearables are becoming systems, not gadgets. Oura rings, wrist devices, body sensors, and subdermal glucose monitors are starting to be designed as interoperable families of devices, with partnerships emerging to combine data into unified health services.
• Robotics is breaking out of the industrial niche. CES will showcase the largest robotics presence yet, moving beyond factory arms and drones to humanoids, logistics, social companions, and applied AI systems across sectors.
• Tariffs, alliances, and AI will reshape manufacturing. Gary is skeptical of “Fortress USA” strategies that try to onshore everything, pointing instead to allied reshoring (Latin America, Europe, Japan, South Korea) and the long-term role of AI-powered robotics in changing labor economics and global supply chains.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web, and now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Whether you’re a developer, designer, or just getting started, start building smarter at mattercraft.io.

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Shelly Palmer has spent 45 years watching technology reshape every industry—from writing news themes for CBS to consulting with every major media company on AI strategy.

On this year-end recap, he cuts through the noise with one devastating observation: 2025 was the year everyone talked about AI while almost nobody actually used it. Executives shook their heads knowingly in meetings, pontificated about capabilities the models don't yet have, and parroted nonsense they read from other people who knew nothing. But when you asked one innocent question, they crumbled.

In the News: CES 2026 shapes up with Nvidia sponsoring two full days of AI training. Samsung is skipping the main floor for a massive offsite activation. Sony brings no electronics—only Honda's experimental vehicles. The TCL and Chinese companies' presence hinges on tariff policy. The innovation series breakfast that Shelly runs is becoming an official CES event after a decade of independence.

The conversation spirals into deeper territory: $3 trillion in government money is stacked behind AI development. The U.S. explicitly states it must beat China to AGI—making this the Manhattan Project of our lifetime. Shelly walks through what he's seen in successful companies (leadership using the tech, paid "Tech Tuesdays" for AI experiments, cross-discipline teams with SecOps and legal at the table) versus the chaos of places with no process.

He breaks down what's real—drone warfare, cybersecurity applications, robotics—versus what's hot air. And he makes a case that won't be killed by AI itself, but by militarized applications and the geopolitical arms race we're already in.

5 Key Takeaways from Shelly:

• Leadership belief and hands-on use are non-negotiable. Companies winning with AI have senior leaders who actually use the technology. When the CEO walks into an LT meeting saying "I built this agent over the weekend," everyone else starts experimenting too.

• The recipe for AI success has three ingredients: leadership belief, paid time to experiment (Tech Tuesdays/Thursdays with real budgets), and cross-discipline teams (SecOps, legal, compliance, risk) paving the way. Chaos erupts without this structure.

• You cannot build a point of view on AI from reading blogs or watching YouTubers. Pick a personal project you care about, go hands-on with a model (Claude, Gemini, GPT), and complete it from beginning to end. Only lived experience grounds your understanding.

• AI parallelizes with web 1.0: In 1998, you had to hand-code HTML, build databases manually, write raw JavaScript. Today you can vibe code a site in 90 seconds. AI will eventually reach "spin me up an expert that does X" without asking questions—we're not there yet, but it's inevitable.

It's both bubble and Manhattan Project. Some valuations are insane and will burst. But military applications, cyber warfare, drone control, robotics—those aren't going anywhere. The government won't back off. Both outcomes happen simultaneously.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop.

Mattercraft combines game engine power with web flexibility and features an AI assistant to help you design, code, and debug in real time in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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Caitlin Krause, author of Digital Wellbeing, argues that intentional design unlocks genuine connection within virtual spaces. Drawing on her teaching at Stanford and the University of Oregon, she's explored how XR environments can foster asynchronous connection and ambient awareness for people who crave belonging without hyper-social performance. Her framework rejects the "digital detox" model entirely—instead advocating for dignity-first design where users match attention with authentic intention.

The hosts debate the deeper question: what happens to human purpose when AI handles all labor? Rony Abovitz frames this as the "asymmetry of design"—it's easy to build addictive tech, hard to build wellbeing tech. Caitlin counters that we may return to the original meaning of "amateur" (from amor, "to love"), where humans find meaning through play, creativity, and what Harvard's lifespan study confirms: quality of relationship and presence. The conversation spirals from platform ethics to post-work society to what first principles we should use when designing XR.

5 Key Takeaways from Caitlin:

• Loneliness is a biological prompt to find another human—not a void to fill with endless content. XR can foster genuine forms of connection without requiring hyper-social performance.
• Dignity-first design unlocks freedom, invention, and agency. When digital spaces prioritize user agency over engagement metrics, people report feeling like they "got their life back."
• Science will soon prove what we already know about fractal patterns in nature and digital signals. The key is designing digital experiences that resonate with how humans biologically thrive.
• The "middle path" between nature and digital is both/and. Gamers building entire lives in virtual worlds can be healthy when those worlds offer creativity, belonging, and meaningful challenge.
• The post-labor economy needs a reset in literacy and values. When AI outperforms human workers, purpose shifts from survival to what makes you feel alive—maker culture, digital fab labs, hands-on creation, and "amateur" pursuits driven by love.

In the News: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX close the $50 billion TikTok spin-off deal. Meta cuts Reality Labs by 30%, but CTO Andrew Bosworth says it's moving to AI. The TCL glasses demo 70 grams of lighter, more advanced XR hardware than Ray-Ban Meta—proving that smart spending beats mega-spend.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

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In this special live episode recorded at SynthBee headquarters in South Florida, hosts Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz bring listeners inside a special gathering of neuroscientists, philosophers, and technologists debating the future of AI. Moving beyond hype, the conversation focuses on "Collaborative Intelligence" vs. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), exploring whether we are building tools that amplify humanity or autonomous systems that will eventually replace it.

Instead of traditional interviews, the hosts invite workshop speakers to the hot seat for rapid-fire insights on the deepest questions in tech: Can we measure an AI's true intentions? Is consciousness a physics problem? And how do we ensure these systems remain compatible with human flourishing?

News Highlights

• Disney invests $1B in OpenAI & licenses IP: The hosts debate whether this is a masterstroke to engage fans with user-generated Sora content or a "Yahoo powered by Google" mistake that hands the keys to the kingdom to a rival.
• Valve launches new PCVR hardware: A quick look at the attempt to revive the high-end PC VR market.
• Meta adds real-time vision to Ray-Bans: The next step in multimodal AI wearables.

Guest Highlights

• Dr. Uri Maoz (Neuroscientist, Chapman/Caltech): Discusses the "black box" problem of neural networks, comparing the opacity of AI to the human brain, and how neuroscience tools might help us detect deception in AI systems.
• Dr. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Ethics Professor, Duke): Argues that ethical AI regulation shouldn't be a monolith; different cultures need "sovereignty of ethics" to allow diverse moral frameworks to coexist rather than one centralized Silicon Valley standard.
• Dr. Julio Frenk (Chancellor, UCLA): Frames the AI race as a battle between "Computational Democracy" (distributed, transparent power) and "Computational Autocracy" (centralized control), warning that universities must preserve critical thinking or risk losing the ability to govern AI at all.
• Reed Maxwell & Laura Condon (Hydrologists, Princeton/Arizona): Reveal how AI is modeling the planet's water crisis, predicting "black swan" climate events, and why funding for this critical earth-science work is mysteriously disappearing.
• Danny M (12-Year-Old Prodigy): Steals the show with a stunningly articulate take on AI consciousness, "trapped man" experiments, and how fractal geometry might map neural weights—proving the next generation is more ready for this future than we are.
• Dr. Aaron Schurger (Psychology, Chapman): Explores the neuroscience of spontaneous action and free will, debating whether "telepathic" connections and quantum effects in the brain could be the missing link for true human-AI compatibility.
• Jared Ficklin (Chief Product Officer, SynthBee): The former Frog Design fellow argues we must shift the conversation from AI "capability" to "compatibility," using the intuitive connection humans have with dogs or horses as the benchmark for successful AI interfaces.

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Vince Kadlubek, co-founder of Meow Wolf, joins Charlie and Ted for a deep dive into the future of immersive entertainment, arguing that in an age of infinite AI-generated digital content, "physical reality is the only place novelty still exists." From Meow Wolf’s origins as a scrappy art collective dumpster-diving for materials in Santa Fe to becoming a global location-based entertainment juggernaut with new sites planned for Los Angeles and New York, Vince reveals the philosophy behind building "maximalist" worlds that don't just tell stories but allow audiences to inhabit them.

In the news segment, Charlie and Ted discuss Netflix's $83B acquisition of Warner Bros (HBO/IP assets only), Meta cutting 30% of Reality Labs to fund AI while poaching Apple's top designer, and the looming battle for 2026 as Android XR prepares to launch.

Vince breaks down Meow Wolf's evolution from static walkthrough experiences to "animated spatial storytelling" where environments and characters respond to user actions—a vision of "XR RPGs" (Extended Reality Role Playing Games) that bridge the gap between video games and theme parks. He explains why the "monoculture" of Game of Thrones is gone forever, why Netflix's acquisition power signals the end of traditional scarcity models, and why the future of storytelling isn't on a screen—it's cross-reality, persistent, and physically grounded.

• Origins of the Multiverse: How a Santa Fe art collective turned a bowling alley into the "House of Eternal Return" with George R.R. Martin as landlord.
• The "Cross-Reality" Future: Why physical locations alone aren't enough—Meow Wolf is building a "mechanically connected transmedia universe" where your actions in the park affect your digital profile and vice versa.
• Hollywood 2.0: New LA location takes over a movie theater to "honor cinema" while deconstructing it into spatial storytelling.
• Novelty Theory: "I don't care about photorealistic AI gorillas anymore." Why digital content has zero value and physical presence is the new premium.
• Questing & Agency: New "XR RPG" mechanics in Dallas/Houston allow visitors to level up, solve puzzles, and impact the world—gamifying reality without headsets.

• Netflix acquires Warner Bros assets ($83B)—Streaming wars end with tech giants vacuuming up legacy IP; theaters face the "nail in the coffin."
• Meta cuts 30% of Reality Labs—Pivot to AI funding while hiring Apple's former design chief signals a shift from brute-force VR to refined wearables.
• Android XR & Samsung 2026—Google and Samsung prepare to challenge Vision Pro with a new ecosystem launch next year.
• Alibaba launches Quark AI Glasses—China enters the smart glasses race with multimodal AI assistants.

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David Jiang, CEO of VITURE, joins Charlie, Ted, and Rony for a special Black Friday episode to discuss the breakout year for "display glasses" and why his company is betting on gamers, not just enterprise, to drive mass adoption. With VITURE now hitting shelves at Best Buy and flashing on billboards along Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, Jiang reveals the data behind the device’s surprising "stickiness"—average daily users are logging nearly three hours a day, often to play console games in bed or on the couch to avoid "social pressure" from family over occupying the main TV.

The conversation dives deep into the hardware reality check: why David believes "smart glasses" (like Meta Ray-Bans) and high-fidelity "display glasses" (like VITURE/XREAL) won’t merge into a single device for another decade. He breaks down the physics of weight thresholds—40g for all-day wear, 80g for session-based viewing, and 200g for full headsets—and explains why trying to force high-end compute into a Ray-Ban form factor today is a fool’s errand. David also unpacks VITURE’s new real-time 2D-to-3D AI conversion and why he views Android XR as the inevitable "destiny" for the open ecosystem.

In the news segment, the hosts debate Casio’s $600 AI hamster "Moflin" (cute but annoying), analyze why Snapchat can't monetize despite hitting 1 billion users, and discuss Disney's new autonomous robots roaming the parks.

• VITURE enters mainstream retail: Now available at Best Buy, marking a shift from niche tech to consumer electronics.
• "Secretly sticky" usage data: Active users average 2 hours 50 minutes daily; top 5% users hit 10+ hours/day replacing monitors.
• The "At-Home Mobility" Insight: Gamers aren't just using glasses on planes—they use them to play Steam Deck/Switch in bed while partners watch TV.
• Real-time AI 2D-to-3D: New feature converts legacy content (YouTube, photos, retro games) into 3D on the fly.
• Weight Philosophy: Defines strict form-factor limits: 40g (glasses), 80g (media visor), 200g (VR headset).

• Casio's Moflin AI Pet—Charlie reviews the $600 emotional support robot; cute, but drives the dog crazy.
• Snapchat hits 1 Billion Users—massive reach milestone, yet the hosts debate why they still can't monetize like Meta.
• Disney's AI Robotics—autonomous characters like the "frozen snowman" begin roaming parks.
• Android XR & Samsung—Google Maps AR updates and the "Gear VR" revival signal a major ecosystem shift for 2026.

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Kent Bye—host of the Voices of VR podcast and one of XR's most prolific journalists with over 1,680 published interviews—joins Charlie and Ted for a wide ranging conversation on the state of immersive storytelling, the ethics of AI, and why XR's future might be less about consumer headsets and more about embodied presence and human connection. Kent's decade-long commitment to documenting artists, creators, and developers at the ground level offers a counterpoint to hype-driven tech coverage, revealing the messy, vital ecosystem sustaining VR through festival circuits, location-based entertainment, and government-funded experimental projects that rarely make headlines.

The conversation opens with Jeff Bezos's new AI robotics company Prometheus, Amazon's one-to-one human-robot workforce parity, and the implications of industrial AI automation. Ted shares his recent appearance on cinematographer Roger Deakins's podcast, where they discussed AI as a creative tool rather than a threat—a perspective Kent echoes when discussing artists who use AI to critique AI's "colonizing force." Kent explains his philosophy of "boots on the ground" journalism inspired by Knight Ridder's Iraq War reporting, focusing on developers and creators closest to the work rather than corporate press releases.

Kent reveals why he's been lukewarm on smart glasses despite industry excitement—monocular displays give him headaches, his prescription is too strong for current hardware, and most importantly, there's no compelling narrative content yet. He contrasts this with VR's rich immersive storytelling at festivals like Venice Immersive, Sundance New Frontier, IDFA DocLab, and Tribeca, where government-funded European projects push the medium's boundaries in ways U.S. startups can't afford to explore. The discussion touches on Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses, the impracticality of Meta's neural band input, and why Snap's developer platform remains the most interesting AR ecosystem despite limited consumer traction.

• Published 1,682 VR interviews with 1,000+ unpublished; focused on artists, creators, and developers over corporate narratives.
• Covers 30+ hours of immersive content per festival at Venice, Sundance, IDFA DocLab—documenting ephemeral art that may never distribute widely.
• Started in 2014 after buying Oculus DK1; began by capturing oral history at Silicon Valley VR Conference's first gathering.
• Background as F-22 Raptor radar systems engineer turned documentary filmmaker—blends hardcore technical knowledge with artistic sensibility.
• Advocates for XR as antidote to smartphone addiction—technologies that foster embodied presence rather than infinite distraction.

• Jeff Bezos launches Prometheus AI robotics company—focusing on industrial applications where enterprise adoption will drive innovation faster than consumer markets.
• Amazon hits one-to-one human-robot workforce parity—roughly 1 million humans, 1 million robots, with plans to shed 100K+ workers over five years.
• Warner Brothers settles with AI music company Udio—following Axel Springer, AP, and Fox licensing deals as New York Times litigation drags on.
• Enterprise AI startups raise massive rounds—Stut (collections automation, $29.5M from Andreessen), Albatross (real-time personalization, $12.5M), signaling vertical-specific AI SaaS wave.
• HaptX acquired by Ohio manufacturer—haptic glove company pivots to industrial training applications after years targeting consumer VR.

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Neal Stephenson—legendary sci-fi author who coined "metaverse" in his 1992 novel Snow Crash—and Rebecca Barkin, co-founder of Lamina1, return to the AI XR Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about building a decentralized creator economy, launching their dystopian AI world-building project Artifact, and why blockchain might finally free creators from Big Tech's chokehold.

Joined by Charlie, Ted, and Rony, the discussion spans Neal's lost Magic Leap project, the resurrection of the open metaverse dream, and how decentralized platforms could flip Hollywood's power structure on its head.

Rebecca details Lamina1's journey from blockchain currency for the open metaverse to Spaces, a multimedia creator platform built on Ethereum that allows IP owners to retain control, set royalties, and build direct relationships with fans.

Think YouTube meets Discord, but on decentralized rails. The goal isn't socialism—it's a creative meritocracy where artists get equity in platforms they help build, instead of just one-time payouts while Netflix captures all the value.

Neal unpacks Artifact, Lamina1's first creative test case: a post-Singularity world where 12 competing mega-AIs fight over energy, copper, water, and GPUs while humans live in the interstices. Co-created with Weta Workshop using AI tools like World Labs' marble splats, the project invites fans to co-create lore, not just consume it. It's a living experiment in collaborative IP development—and proof that small teams with AI amplifiers can build Grand Theft Auto-scale worlds.

• Neal Stephenson coined "metaverse" in Snow Crash; former Magic Leap creative lead with lost IP still trapped at the company.
• Rebecca Barkin pivoted Lamina1 from metaverse currency to Spaces: a decentralized platform for multimedia creators retaining IP rights and earning equity.
• Artifact launches as Lamina1's test case—collaborative world-building in a dystopian post-AI Singularity where fans shape the narrative.
• Built on Ethereum with Consensus Network backing; uses blockchain to solve micro-transaction volatility and give creators sustainable economics.
• Signed Bob's Burgers team (Ghosted Media) and other Hollywood refugees seeking autonomy from studio gatekeepers.

• Valve launches PC cube + wireless Index headset—sub-$1000 system to compete with Xbox/PlayStation and revive PCVR market, but will enthusiasts bite?
• Meta adds real-time computer vision to AI glasses—Ray-Ban smart glasses gain live AI interpretation, pushing toward inflection point for wearables.
• Google Maps integrates Gemini AI—natural language directions and real-world context awareness transform navigation into conversational copilot.
• 11 Labs launches voice marketplace—Michael Caine licenses voice cloning; Matthew McConaughey invests but won't sell his own likeness.
• Disney announces AI user-generated content strategy—Bob Iger teases platforms for fans to create with Disney IP, following Lego's remix culture playbook.

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Dr. Tom Furness—esteemed as the “Grandfather of VR”—brings seven decades of breakthrough invention, untold stories, and rare wisdom to the AI XR Podcast. In this episode, Tom traces the thread from making rocket fuel as a kid in North Carolina to pioneering the “Super Cockpit” for the Air Force, founding the HIT Lab, and launching 27+ spatial computing startups. His journey reminds us that big shifts in XR and AI are really about one thing: boosting the bandwidth between the brain and information.

Listen as Charlie and Ted tease out practical lessons from Tom’s career—how head-mounted displays and real-time simulation grew from a Pentagon skunkworks project to tools for pilots, surgeons, first responders, and kids who learn differently. Tom reveals how the “cockpit problem” was never about adding more gadgets, but about human-centered design—and why the next revolution in XR depends on soft skills, not just hardware. He shares how XR can teach memory, empathy, and “open the aperture” of the mind.

• Invented the Super Cockpit: the first immersive, wearable pilot interface, inspiring modern VR/AR.
• Founded the University of Washington HIT Lab; mentored a generation of XR founders and researchers.
• Championed headsets, tracking, spatial sound, and haptics in military, medical, education, humanitarian, and entertainment fields.
• Built VR tools for everything from the F-35 to “light schools” that boost learning and emotional intelligence.
• Advocates for XR’s potential to unlock new forms of human growth and creativity—beyond the screen.

• Stability AI and Anthropic win landmark copyright cases—courts rule AI model training as legal “fair use,” with distinctions for retaining source material.
• AI data centers drive up public power bills—the debate over who pays for tech’s massive energy appetite heats up.
• Magic Leap alumni debut no-code AR platform—pushing toward mainstream AR creation, but will intent and timing finally align?
• Google adds Gemini to Maps—AI-powered natural language search changes real-world navigation and travel.

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