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

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

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