The AI XR Podcast.

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"

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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 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

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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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