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.

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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"

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.