The AI XR Podcast.

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.

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