The AI XR Podcast
By Charlie Fink Productions
Categories: Technology, News, Business News
Get the inside story on the biggest tech developments from founders, former executives, and industry veterans who built companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta Reality Labs, Apple Vision Pro, Microsoft HoloLens, and Unity. Join Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz & Rony Abovitz as they interview startup CEOs, ex-Google/Meta/Apple insiders, Hollywood directors, and AI researchers reshaping spatial computing. Every week we break down the latest tech news with our signature hot takes, then dive deep with a founder or industry leader. We cover artificial intelligence breakthroughs, virtual reality hardware, augmented reality applications, synthetic media tools, and how enterprises are adopting these technologies.We're industry insiders who have the connections to get the biggest names on the show, but we're not afraid to ask the tough questions about where big tech is heading. Our guests trust us because we've been in their shoes. Listen now to get ahead of the next wave of computing.
317 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- Why Smart Glasses Are So Hard to Build ft. Karl Guttag, Writer and Analyst
Charlie, Ted and Rony open with a packed news week, covering the election results and the growing backlash over data centers, the XREAL Aura finally shipping, and hands-on impressions of Snap’s Specs. They also discuss layoffs at Schell Games, Beat Saber dropping support for older Quest headsets…
- From Amazon Studios to Vertical Streaming ft. Roy Price, Founder of N1BW
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…
- Inside the Vertical Streaming Gold Rush ft. Angela Yu, CEO of StoReel
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…
- Audience Is Dead. Meet the ‘Actience'. ft. Charles Melcher, Author of "The Future of Storytelling"
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…
- A Four-Day Coma Couldn't Stop This Game ft. Johnny Monsarrat, Founder of Turbine (MMO)
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…
- How Quilty Is Opening Hollywood's Gates ft. Simon Horsman & Daniel Wood, Quilty.app
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…
- Peloton for Gamers: Virtuix Goes Public ft. Jan Goetgeluk, CEO of Virtuix
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…
- Revisiting "Cyberselfish": Silicon Valley's Libertarian Culture, Then and Now ft. Paulina Borsook
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…
- VR Winter 2.0 Just Claimed Its Biggest Casualty ft. Steve Grubbs (Victory XR) & Malia Probst (Scout House)
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…
- Causal AI: A Different Approach to Robot Intelligence ft. Biwei Huang, Founder of Aether AI
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…
- The Window to Virtual Reality That Skips the Headset ft. Barmak Heshmat, CEO of Brelyon
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…
- Forget Consumer AR. This Is Where Smart Glasses Actually Pay Off ft. Mark Greget, CEO of NuEyes
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…
- Meta's Glasses Aren't the Problem. Trust Is. ft. Cortney Harding, Friends With Holograms
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…
- Why the iPhone Beats the Headset for AR Characters ft. Mark Drummond, CEO of Pixi
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…
- Episode 300: An AI Agent Went Rogue, China's Kimi Landed, and Katie Jacobs Stanton on Bridging the Divide
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"…
- Meta's Problem Isn't Money. It's Imagination. ft. Irena Cronin, CEO of Infinite Retina
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…
- Why the Best Way to Train a Surgeon Is in Virtual Reality ft. Justin Barad, Osso VR
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…
- Why VR Arcades Died and What's Replacing Them ft. Kevin Williams
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…
- Meet the AI Actress Built by a Performer ft. Eline Van Der Velden (Particle6)
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…
- LIVE from AWE 2026 ft. Malia Probst, Mary Matheson, and Shelley Peterson
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…
- SpaceX, civil unrest, and the case for optimism. ft. Peter Diamandis
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…
- AWE 2026 Preview: The “Most Spatial Year Ever.” AR Moves From Showing to Doing Things ft. Ori Inbar
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…
- AI in Your Inbox Can Be Tricked Via Prompt Injection, This Team Proved It. Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu
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…
- Only AI XR News Mega Show: Teflon Sam Altman, Ponzi Schemes, Why Google Blew Up Search & More
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…
- Wall Street Still Runs on Spreadsheets. AI Is About to Change That ft Joshua Pantony (Boosted AI)
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…
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