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Every episode
The AI XR Podcast.
30 episodes
Forget Consumer AR. This Is Where Smart Glasses Actually Pay Off ft. Mark Greget, CEO of NuEyes
Aug 14, 2026 · 57 min
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 ad…
Meta's Glasses Aren't the Problem. Trust Is. ft. Cortney Harding, Friends With Holograms
Aug 11, 2026 · 57 min
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, a…
Why the iPhone Beats the Headset for AR Characters ft. Mark Drummond, CEO of Pixi
Aug 3, 2026 · 54 min
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 th…
Episode 300: An AI Agent Went Rogue, China's Kimi Landed, and Katie Jacobs Stanton on Bridging the Divide
Jul 24, 2026 · 48 min
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 ga…
Meta's Problem Isn't Money. It's Imagination. ft. Irena Cronin, CEO of Infinite Retina
Jul 17, 2026 · 47 min
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 mismanageme…
Why the Best Way to Train a Surgeon Is in Virtual Reality ft. Justin Barad, Osso VR
Jul 13, 2026 · 53 min
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 probl…
Why VR Arcades Died and What's Replacing Them ft. Kevin Williams
Jul 8, 2026 · 54 min
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…
Meet the AI Actress Built by a Performer ft. Eline Van Der Velden (Particle6)
Jun 29, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
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 wa…
LIVE from AWE 2026 ft. Malia Probst, Mary Matheson, and Shelley Peterson
Jun 25, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
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 immer…
SpaceX, civil unrest, and the case for optimism. ft. Peter Diamandis
Jun 22, 2026 · 57 min
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 ri…
AWE 2026 Preview: The “Most Spatial Year Ever.” AR Moves From Showing to Doing Things ft. Ori Inbar
Jun 19, 2026 · 52 min
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 conve…
AI in Your Inbox Can Be Tricked Via Prompt Injection, This Team Proved It. Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu
Jun 19, 2026 · 59 min
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 fir…
Only AI XR News Mega Show: Teflon Sam Altman, Ponzi Schemes, Why Google Blew Up Search & More
Jun 19, 2026 · 36 min
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 witho…
Wall Street Still Runs on Spreadsheets. AI Is About to Change That ft Joshua Pantony (Boosted AI)
Jun 19, 2026 · 54 min
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 nois…
An Early Builder On Google Earth Is Now Teaching AI to Understand the Physical World ft. Dave Lorenzini
Jun 19, 2026 · 50 min
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 d…
Find Anything In Any Building Using AR, Without Downloading an App ft. Caspar Thykier & Connell Gauld
Jun 19, 2026 · 51 min
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 floor…
Avatars Are the UI of the Internet: Why Every App, Game, Corp Will Have An AI Persona ft. Akash Nigam
Jun 19, 2026 · 57 min
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…
Big Tech Buy Hollywood For Soft Power: AI Film & The Cost of Empty Sound Stages ft. Alan Lasky
Jun 19, 2026 · 51 min
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 companie…
Tech Giants Have Spent $120 Billion To Own The Future Of Virtual Reality & XR ft. Ian Hamilton
Jun 19, 2026 · 55 min
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…
The Mad-Scientist of AI Smartglasses On Wearable AI, VR & Escaping the Internet ft. Lucas Rizzotto
Jun 19, 2026 · 57 min
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 ongoin…
Why Social Media Lost in Court and AI Agents Demand Total Surveillance ft. Shelley Palmer
Jun 19, 2026 · 54 min
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 questio…
What Spatial AI, World Models & Quantum Computing Mean For The Global Economy ft. Cathy Hackl
Jun 19, 2026 · 49 min
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 mass…
The Future of Agentic Social Networks & Why AI Will Replace White-Collar Work - Teamily AI Founders
Jun 19, 2026 · 46 min
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…
What This Lion King Director Thinks About AI Storytelling & How Hollywood Can Adapt ft. Rob Minkoff
Jun 19, 2026 · 43 min
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 th…
Using A “Rebel Alliance” Strategy To Elevate AI & VR Learning ft. ILMxLab’s Vicki Dobbs Beck
Jun 19, 2026 · 57 min
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…
AI Smart Glasses, Digital Twins & Holodecks Are Changing Work In The Enterprise ft Kristi Woolsey
Jun 19, 2026 · 52 min
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 pro…
America Is Racing Toward An AI Cliff With No Safety Net, Will AGI Hurt Or Harm? - Alvin Wang Graylin
Jun 19, 2026 · 49 min
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…
Can Interactive, Remixable Video Actually Pay Creators & Keep Audience Attention For AI Content - Edward Saatchi
Jun 19, 2026 · 57 min
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…
Real-Time AI Video Generation Is Changing Everything For Twitch Live Streamers - Dean Leitersdorf
Jun 19, 2026 · 58 min
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 A…
This Veteran Game Dev (LucasFilm Games) & XR Creator Built AI Filmmaking Platform for Creatives ft. Mike Levine
Jun 19, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
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…
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