Podcast profile
By Charlie Fink Productions
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 (Forbes), Ted Schilowitz, (Red Camera, Fox, Paramount Futurist) & Rony Abovitz, (founder Magic Leap).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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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54 min
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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 char
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 f
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
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
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 collaps
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 alon
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
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 El
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
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
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
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 investors who collectively
As director of Keyhole, Dave Lorenzini delivered the 3D Earth zooms that ran on CNN during the 2003 Iraq War — netting five million users in a month. Sergey Brin was one of them. Google bought the company and poured in billions to build, fuel, and serve maps. As Google Earth, it forever changed how we relate to space.
The AI XR Podcast had a massive news week and one of its best guest conversations of the year. Caspar Thykier and Connell Gauld, CEO and CTO co-founders of Zappar, joined Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz to talk about something deceptively simple: helping people find stuff. Zappar's new product, Spaces, is app-free indo
Akash Nigam has been building Genies since 2017 with a conviction that avatars will be the visual layer of the internet. As CEO of Genies, he's assembled IP partners including the NBA, MLB, Sanrio, and Kakao, with more major studios and agencies set to announce before the end of May. The pitch: every app, game, website
Alan Lasky arrived at the AI XR Podcast straight from Las Vegas ahead of NAB. An MIT Media Lab graduate under Nicholas Negroponte, a veteran of Silicon Graphics and Amazon Web Services, and an advisor to investment banks on AI and media, he brings technical depth, industry history, and financial realism about where med
Ian Hamilton spent years as editor in chief of Upload VR before launching his own Substack, Good VR, and podcast at goodvirtualreality.com. He is one of the few people covering XR longer and more deeply than Charlie Fink, and his perspective spans platform architecture, business strategy, and genuine on-the-ground jour
Lucas Rizzotto is one of the most distinctive artists working at the intersection of technology and human experience. He built Where Thoughts Go, a VR piece that proved genuine connection was possible inside a headset when everyone said it wasn't. He followed it with Pillow, a mixed reality app designed around the bedr
Shelley Palmer,media technologist, advisor, and author with over 700,000 daily newsletter subscribers, returns to the show. He's one of the sharpest thinkers writing about AI today, and this conversation covers the full arc: from social media liability to the trust collapse coming for all of us, and into the real produ
Cathy Hackl, futurist for Nokia and advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), joins the podcast to discuss her fascinating work across the Middle East and her insights on the next generation of AI and connectivity. Learn how nations like the UAE and KSA are strategically positioning themselves to lead in spatial co
Co-founders Dr. Salman Avestimehr and Dr. Aiden He join the podcast to discuss their new "agentic" company, Teamily AI. They dive into how their platform is disrupting the social landscape by weaving multi-agent AI into group chats, enabling groups, friends, and families to interact with virtual friends, essentially cr
What does a Lion King–level director really think about AI “slop,” streaming wars and whether machines can ever tell great stories? On this episode of the AI XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz talk with Rob Minkoff, director of The Lion King, Stuart Little, The Haunted Mansion, Forbidden Kingdom and Paws of Fu
Vicki Dobbs Beck, the former head of ILMxLab and a 34-year veteran of Lucasfilm/Disney, joins Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz for a candid look back at her incredible career navigating the tech and cultural shifts inside one of Hollywood's most powerful empires. Though she announced her retirement, it wa
Enterprise XR hasn’t disappeared, it has quietly moved into places where it saves time, reduces errors and changes how people work every day. On this episode of the AI XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz talk with Boston Consulting Group partner Kristi Woolsey, who leads BCG’s immersive practice, about how XR plu
Our guest this week, Alvin Wang Graylin spent 35 years in senior leadership roles across HTC, IBM, and other major tech companies. He ran HTC's VR division, came out of the famous HIT Lab, now teaches at MIT, holds a fellowship at Stanford, and just published a paper called "Beyond Rivalry" proposing a seven-point plan