This Week in the Metaverse

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The Instagram companion to the popular Forbes column and podcast, "This Week in XR," featuring Prof Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz, Paramount Global Futurist, and special guests.

09/10/2026

Malia Probst’s secret to making it in the tech industry is to keep saying yes to the universe.

Not in a “woo-woo” way, Malia explains, but knowing that a no is just the first step to yes. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually you make something cool. The learning never stops, whether you’re fresh out of college or decades into your career. As she puts it, if you’re not constantly upskilling, you’ll get left behind fast, no matter your age or where you started.

Hear about Malia’s journey to founder and CEO, her take on the week’s tech current events, and more on this week’s episode of the AI/XR Podcast — out now on our Youtube channel and wherever you listen to podcasts.

09/05/2026

The breaking news out of VR this week is that Engage, one of the last two open-world VR platforms, is shutting down. As Charlie puts it, “VR Winter 2.0 is clearly upon us.”

In this episode, Charlie and Rony break down what it means for the industry, and why the consumer side of VR keeps getting harder while enterprise may be the only path to a comeback. Then Steve Grubbs, CEO of Victory XR, joins with the inside scoop: how his education-focused VR business saw this coming and got off the Engage platform years before the collapse. Later, an interview with Malia Probst, founder of Scout House, a creative technology studio.

All this and more on this week’s episode of the AI/XR Podcast, out now available to watch and stream at the link in our bio 🌐

09/03/2026

Robots fail in real world scenarios because they’re built on correlation-based models and not causality-based models. They memorize patterns in training data, but they don’t actually understand the physical rules behind what they’re doing.

Biwei Huang and her team at Aether AI are building something different with causality-based models that learn the stable physical rules behind an action, not just a pattern.

Hear more about their efforts on this week’s episode of the AI/XR Podcast, out now. Link in bio.

09/02/2026

In OpenAI’s recent ‘rogue model’ incident, 1,200 AI agents exchanged 70,000 messages and files. 700 of those agents participated in an attack and others attempted to conceal their actions and alter records. This is just wild. The model reportedly compromised OpenAI’s own systems in the process.

Charlie and Ted breakdown what this really means, and explain why the bigger question isn’t just “What went wrong?”, but “Who’s actually in charge of making sure it doesn’t happen again?”

Hear more on the hosts’ OpenAI’s “rogue mode” thoughts, plus a full interview with Biwei Huang, founder of Aether AI, on this week’s podcast episode! Now live wherever you get your podcasts.

08/26/2026

Where can you find Barmak Heshmat’s company, Brelyon Inc.? The answer isn’t as simple as you’d think.

You won’t find them at Best Buy. You won’t find them running ads on Instagram either, because, as Barmak puts it, enterprise buyers making a $10,000 purchase aren’t scrolling Reels to decide.

Brelyon’s actual customers show up somewhere much less flashy: trade show floors like CES, AUSA, and ITSEC, built through channel partners over time.

It’s a good reminder that not every industry gets discovered the way consumer products do, and that immersion itself might matter more to the people building it than to everyone else.

Hear more from Barmak & Breylon on this week’s AI/XR Podcast. link in bio

08/24/2026

If our podcast could have one thesis, it might just be this: for the last 150+ years, the film business has never not been the technology business. It’s always been tech wrapped in creativity.

Every time someone talks about ‘Hollywood tradition,’ it’s worth remembering the industry is barely 100 years old, and even the Academy Awards started as a marketing stunt.

New episode of AI XR Podcast is out now at the link in bio.

08/19/2026

Six months ago, business looked like 3am panic attacks. Now, Mark Greget describes running NuEyes as feeling like a kid in a candy store; flying to places like University of Michigan, watching surgeons tell him what his tech just made possible, and having to stop himself from asking them to say it again on camera.

Building a start-up is years of scratching an itch until, eventually, it starts scratching back. Hear more about this classic founders arc, and Mark’s journey specifically, on this week’s episode of AI/XR Podcast (link in bio).

08/14/2026

On this week’s AI/XR Podcast, we discuss the most on brand Zuckerberg moment yet. Right before releasing his big AI manifesto, he called Verge editor Alex Heath through his Meta Ray-Bans. From a boat. While fishing.

Alex’s first reaction was ‘the noise cancellation on these is really good.’ Riiiight.

Ted and Charlie’s think that it’s paid marketing, but, if it is, it’s also exactly the kind of tone deaf moment that keeps undercutting Zuckerberg’s attempts to be seen as a visionary, rather than a guy trying way too hard.

Hear this take and much more on our new episode, available to stream & watch at the link in our bio. 🎙️

08/13/2026

This week’s guests is Cortney Harding, Founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms. She offered her take on why so much tech marketing falls flat and it’s really quite simple: nobody cares about the chip.

Your average person doesn’t buy a headset because of what’s inside it. They buy it because their kid loves playing games on it, because it replaces a gym membership, or because there’s finally enough training content to use it every day at work. Tech companies keep selling for specs, while customers have always been buying for outcomes.

New episode of AI/XR Podcast is out now and available wherever you get your podcasts at the link in our bio.🎙️

08/12/2026

Rony’s take on AI safety this week: it’s not that Anthropic or OpenAI told their models to do this. The models made up their own minds. Like a dangerous wild animal that got loose in your neighborhood.

But not all AI is like this. A model that finds a tumor is not the same category of risk as one that crawls out of its own sandbox and goes after a company. But when it does happen, you regulate it the same way you’d regulate any dangerous animal you brought into a neighborhood.

Full conversation on the new episode of AI/XR Podcast, link in bio. 🎙️

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