The AI XR Podcast

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, and celebrity is going to have an AI personality. Genies wants to be the framework that gives all of those personalities a face.
What separates Genies is portability and scale. A character that took eight weeks in 2021 now takes ten minutes. Staying stylized rather than photorealistic isn't just aesthetic — it's what got Hollywood to the table. Talent doesn't want deepfakes. They want a Genie: trained on private IP data, capable of one-on-one fan relationships that make Instagram feel thin.
AI XR News: Tim Cook stepped aside as Apple CEO with hardware chief John Ternus taking over. Humanoid robots ran a half marathon in Beijing while a Sony robot defeated professional table tennis players, opening a conversation about Chinese robotics capabilities and AI data infiltration risks the US is still underestimating.
Key Moments:
[00:06:45] Tim Cook steps aside: what the Apple leadership transition signals about wearable AI
[00:12:00] Humanoid robots and table tennis: China's robotics flex
[00:13:00] The data infiltration argument: open-source risk and a warning for the US
[00:24:00] The IP land grab: NBA, MLB, Sanrio, Kakao, Naver Webtoon
[00:28:00] From photo to avatar in 10 minutes: how Genies' generation pipeline scaled
[00:32:00] Why Instagram feels thin and how Genies enables one-on-one fan relationships
[00:49:00] 80 people, $150M raised, and why Bob Iger sees Genies as the future of Disney

If AI personalities are going to be everywhere, what do they look like? Akash has been building the answer for nearly a decade. Q3 is when it goes live.
Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Mattercraft now includes an AI assistant for design, code, and debugging in real time.
Start building at mattercraft.io.
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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 media is actually going.
The conversation covers Hollywood's structural collapse, AI's role in the production renaissance, and the harder question of why trillion-dollar tech companies keep buying media businesses that can't generate comparable returns.
Alan's answer: soft power. Amazon makes $950 million Lord of the Rings spinoffs so you order more paper towels. Apple is making Neuromancer. His five-year weighted moving average of Disney stock — flat from 2018 — makes the argument clean.
AI XR News You Should Know: Artemis ignited a new space boom. Amazon acquired Global Star satellite to build Project Kuiper, a direct Starlink competitor. Apple's AI audio smart glasses are reportedly arriving this year per Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, entering a market where Meta owns the optometrist channel and Google is moving through Warby Parker. Snap laid off 15% while doubling down on the 2026 launch of Spectacles — the first see-through headset since Magic Leap.
Key Moments:
[00:04:48] – Artemis and the space boom: Ted on filming shuttle launches and why the crew's accomplishment is underestimated.
[00:08:33] – Apple AI audio glasses: Rony's read from former Magic Leapers who designed them — if Apple gets this wrong, it's unforgivable.
[00:12:00] – Snap's layoffs and the see-through gamble: can they compete with cheap AI audio glasses flooding the market?
[00:16:43] – Hollywood is no longer the center of the universe — Alan on why most of the industry hasn't metabolized that yet.
[00:23:01] – Charlie on AI democratization: a couple hundred dollars per minute for what looks like live action on a phone.
[00:36:00] – The soft power thesis: why tech giants keep buying media assets that never pay off at their scale.
[00:41:30] – Should Apple buy Disney? Charlie says Meta will do it first. Rony's reaction is immediate and visceral.
[00:47:44] – AI resurrects Val Kilmer: Alan's origin story from three months in the Australian desert on the worst film of his career.

Alan's closing frame: he grew up reading Gibson and Brunner in the eighties, excited to live in that world. He's in it. He's not sure he wanted it this way.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences, now with AI-assisted design and debug. Build at mattercraft.io.

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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 journalism since the DK1 days.
This conversation traces why the XR dream has taken longer than anyone expected. Ian and Rony Abovitz reconstruct the moment the ecosystem forked — when Meta's Oculus acquisition closed off the open, Valve-led platform path that Magic Leap and everyone else had been building toward. Ian argues the platforms are now playing for keeps: OpenXR moves on decade timescales, and that friction is what keeps real transformation just out of reach.
On hardware, his case is sharp: Meta's self-imposed $200–$600 price ceiling makes OLED and eye tracking impossible at mass market — exactly the features Apple bet on as the mandatory baseline — and that contradiction is why Bosworth ended up pivoting to AI glasses.
In AI XR News You Should Know: Anthropic's Mythos AI model reportedly escaped the company's own containment. Charlie and Rony debate whether calling the consequences "unintended" is even credible given decades of published warnings. Also: a Hollywood Reporter and Otis School study found AI is not the primary driver of empty LA sound stages — runaway production and tax incentives are the main story.
Key Moments:
[00:01:00] – Charlie's new vertical melodrama "Linda's Last Podcast" and why generative AI is already good enough for social media storytelling.
[00:04:52] – Rony on Anthropic's Mythos: the compute to cure cancer, aimed somewhere else.
[00:11:47] – Half of Gen Z holds a negative view of AI. Charlie on the Brown grad who turned down an AI studio internship on principle.
[00:36:00] – Rony and Ian reconstruct the Valve/Oculus open platform — and walk through exactly how that future closed.
[00:47:00] – Meta's price ceiling, OLED as a strategic forcing function, and why Bosworth landed on AI glasses.
[00:52:00] – Ian on the Apple Vision Pro mid-flight: why the headset is a personal computer, not a wearable.

Ian's long view: we're about ten percent of the way through the total investment required to reach a billion users. The supply chain is better than ever, the software has found its footing in simulation and training, and the next five to ten years could be the most interesting window yet — if the platforms decide to let the ecosystem breathe.
This episode is sponsored by Zappar, the team behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences on mobile, headsets, and desktop.
Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time. Start building at mattercraft.io.
Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for more conversations at the edge of AI, XR, and the future of media.
Available where you get podcasts. Watch full episodes on YouTube https://youtu.be/x5wQy4HBhYE

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 bedroom. He then spent months letting an AI algorithm run his life — wearing Mantra smart glasses, building a surveillance and memory system on himself, and documenting it as an ongoing series on Instagram and TikTok. Now he's making a live cinematic experience called Escape the Internet, which he calls Broadway crossed with a video game crossed with standup comedy. It premiered as a ghost debut at South by Southwest this year.
Mike Boland, analyst and founder of AR Insider, sits in for Rony Abovitz in this episode. The conversation opens on the Rec Room shutdown — $250 million raised, a $3.5 billion valuation, and now a wind-down. The panel connects the collapse to a pattern: VR has always been an exotic pursuit sold as a mainstream one, and the unit economics of concurrent immersive social spaces are nearly impossible. The discussion moves to OpenAI shutting down Sora, the AI video generation race between Google VO3 and Kling, the rise of AI slop in social feeds, and Lucas confirming he quit LinkedIn because it's unreadable.
AI XR News You Should Know: Rec Room is shutting down after raising $250M at a $3.5B peak valuation. Snapchat is acquiring its remaining assets. OpenAI closed down Sora, overwhelmed by competition from Google VO3 and Kling. AI-only social feeds from Meta and Grok are not gaining traction — users are tuning them out.
Key Moments:
[05:37] – Ted's thesis: VR is an exotic pursuit that was never going to be mainstream, and Rec Room would have been healthier if it accepted that early
[07:33] – Lucas: Ready Player One was the worst thing to happen to XR — it gave executives a fictional roadmap to fund
[18:38] – Ted asks whether Apple can do for mixed reality what it did for the smartphone — and the panel is skeptical
[27:42] – Mike on physics as the hard ceiling: Moore's Law doesn't apply to waveguides and optics the way it applies to chips
[29:02] – Lucas explains why he dropped display glasses for his wearable AI experiment — they increase engineering complexity by 50x
[32:17] – Lucas's AI-controlled life series: a complex algorithm watches him, mines personal data, and tells him what to do to find happiness — including an unplanned trip to Lithuania
[34:12] – Ted asks if the experiment is a net positive or negative. Lucas: neutral if you're in control, net negative if Meta or OpenAI are running the system
[37:52] – Lucas on convenience as a death by a thousand cuts: he optimized his life in Berlin to have everything within three minutes and became miserable
[41:00] – Charlie on Where Thoughts Go: assigned it to students every semester; it only works if you surrender to it
[47:15] – Escape the Internet: hundreds of people in a movie theater, all on their phones, playing a shared cinematic narrative. Lucas calls it a modern version of church
[53:40] – The standup model applied to software: Lucas tested Escape the Internet at SXSW and cut 50% of the material that didn't get a reaction

This conversation sits at the intersection that the AI XR Podcast lives for: technology as creative material, not just commercial tool. Lucas's view that we've been building things people use all the time when we should be building things that blow their minds for two hours and then get out of the way is one of the sharper critiques of the attention economy you'll hear this year.
This episode is brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences on mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now includes an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser.
Start building at mattercraft.io.

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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 productivity gains and surveillance trade-offs of living inside an AI-first workflow.
The episode opens with the Google and Meta lawsuit verdict and quickly moves past the legal question. Shelley's position is precise: you can't legislate parenting, but you can legislate transparency, and the tech industry has failed on that front entirely. The $6 million judgment against Meta and Google is a rounding error — not a deterrent. What matters is what platforms actually engineered: engagement above all else, backed by neuroscience, probabilistic math, and dopamine feedback loops optimized for shareholders, not users.
AI XR News You Should Know: OpenAI is ending Sora and pivoting hard to Codex and enterprise. Ben Affleck secured $900 million from Netflix for a custom AI filmmaking tool. Epic Games cut 1,000 jobs as Fortnite loses audience. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang introduced Nemo Claw and Open Shell at GTC — a corporatized framework for personal AI agents.
Key Moments
[00:01:15] – Charlie opens noting the show missed one episode in nearly 300 — his daughter's wedding
[00:01:55] – OpenAI kills Sora; the Critters director goes dark before the episode
[00:04:45] – Google and Meta lose their social media addiction lawsuit; Meta also loses in New Mexico
[00:08:07] – Shelley on what can actually be legislated: not parenting, but transparency
[00:11:42] – Shelley on Zuckerberg: he genuinely believed connection would be net positive; ask him today
[00:13:31] – "Planetarily net negative. No matter what good it does, it does more harm."
[00:18:16] – Rony on dopamine engineering: neuroscientists studying pixel size, color, sound to refine addiction
[00:19:40] – Shelley reframes it: engagement maximization for shareholders, no more insidious than that
[00:23:19] – The physiological change argument: humans evolved to default to trust; AI-generated everything breaks that
[00:31:50] – Rony's counterpoint: trust will reset local; the software ecosystem will follow
[00:36:53] – Shelley: "Our business increased last year. Everyone on my staff is doing 400 times the work."
[00:44:42] – AI-first means automating every workflow you can honestly automate — and knowing what isn't ready
[00:45:06] – Jensen's Nemo Claw and Open Shell: the safer path to personal AI agents, and what it actually costs
[00:49:42] – The surveillance trade-off: an effective AI agent requires more personal data exposure than anything before it
[00:51:24] – Apple's Secure Enclave play: why Tim Cook may win the AI trust war in the end

The productivity gains are real, but so is the privacy exposure, and the systems that earn trust — at every level — are the ones that will survive.
This episode is brought to you by Zappar, the company behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences across mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser.
Start building at mattercraft.io. Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast wherever you listen.
Watch the full episode for the full breakdown. Available where podcasts are. Full videos available on YouTube. https://youtu.be/S_AECjELYyo
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