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 http://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

Brought to you 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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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

Brought to you 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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