Forget Consumer AR. This Is Where Smart Glasses Actually Pay Off ft. Mark Greget, CEO of NuEyes

Speaker A: Our this Week in XR podcast is sponsored by our friends at Zapper, the world's leading augmented reality platform and creative studio. With over 11 years of experience working with the world's biggest brands through Zapper Creative Studio, Zapper also has an award winning web AR platform, Zap Works, that lets you create your own mobile AR magic. Finally, check out their Zap box, the most affordable mixed reality headset on the planet. Start creating AR over at Zap Works or talk to them about your next AR project at zapper.com. Morning everybody. I'm Charlie Fink with Ted Shilwitz and Rony abovitz for the aixr podcast. It's Friday, August 7th, 2026. Good morning, guys.

Speaker B: Morning.

Speaker C: Morning. How's your summer treating you?

Speaker A: Good to see you again, Rony. Uh, we had a good time last week, but it wasn't as much fun, uh, as it would have been if you were there. So, uh, let's, let's get to the news. Uh, the White, uh, House has decided that it's not going to release its voluntary framework for evaluating AI models, which was written in fact with the, uh, very companies that are making those AI models. So we're, uh, going to have a voluntary system which we're going to keep secret. That makes no sense. Help me out here.

Speaker C: All I can say is don't get me started.

Speaker B: All right, you got me started. But let's have Ted go first.

Speaker C: I feel like three of us, I feel like the three of us might have to run for office just to put some sanity back into this world. Like, I, uh, don't understand the world anymore. I really don't.

Speaker A: Guys, this definitely was one of those stories where like, I had to read it twice. I'm like, what is the actual news?

Speaker B: I mean, let me try. I was actually in D.C. this week, so in the heartland of this mess. So I'll, and I'm in the space. So, uh, I'll try to unpack a little bit. There are a tiny nucleus of people, like the people that run some of these very big hyperscaling AI companies and a very small people at the top of the government who are hanging out together, um, with continuous debate over don't regulate me. We'll write the regs for ourselves, which is the cat writing the rules. There's everyone else. You've got the cats writing their own rules about how they're protecting mice. But then what actually made me feel better is every everyone else like, uh, every other person, every agency, everyone who's like, maybe one level below the inner core is like, what are we doing? So there's a surprising amount of logic and rationality everywhere, except for the very, very top. And you really have to ask the question, um, go back to the roots of this country. You have the House and the Senate and the Judiciary and the executive branch. And the only way this thing rebalances is if the people in Congress start doing their job. They're supposed to be in charge. For some reason, they've ceded their entire being to the executive branch. And this is more about like, you know, you know where AIX are, but if you want to provide the kind of regs that provide safety in aircraft, safety in medtech, there's no reason why we can't do it successfully and not harm the markets in AI. It's insane that we can regulate nuclear, but we can't regulate this. It's just stupidity. It's because Congress is not doing its job and has ceded itself to the executive branch, which is exactly why this country exists, to never do that. So that's the madness. If Congress, Senate, House, wake up, do their job, you'll suddenly see normalcy restored. But the encouraging thing was everyone else is like, why aren't we doing it? Why don't we regulate these things? We don't want dangerous things crawling out of their hole and attacking companies and attacking banks and our government and like, why are we letting companies do this? It's stupidity. It just flat out stupidity and lack of courage by congressmen and senators and reps and everyone else, and a very few people at the top who have a lot of influence shaping one branch, but the other two branches are there to do their job. So somebody needs to do their job now. If they don't do their job now, maybe they'll do job after November. Um, I think enough people are sick of like the kind of nonsense of what, one branch running everything. So that's my diatribe, but like, there's no reason why you can't safely regulate it. Let me argue one more side because you got me going, Charlie. You need people who understand the technology to write safe regs, otherwise you're gonna have hysterical people who don't know what they're doing. You need people equally smart, equally technically proficient, so you don't damage the growth of the economy, because what you could have are just ranting and raving people who don't understand the technology, who will hurt the economy with dumb regs, that all they do is hamper things and don't protect anybody. That's the worst version of this.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think you're largely correct with all that, Roni. I think the thing that I sort of recognize. And again, here we go, becoming an M. MSNBC podcast. But I think the thing that I recognize is that, um, until the balance of power shifts, you do have some folks in Congress and in the Senate raising their arms, raising the specter, putting their hands up and yelling and going on, uh, news talk shows, complaining and talking about how we try and fix it. But until the balance of power changes and. And you have, uh, a majority on the other side that now has the power to fix this, they're just neutered. They just. They can raise their hands and they can yell and scream all they want, but they can't affect change. So until they can affect change, the executive branch is just running roughshod over it and refusing to, uh, make any concessions to that. So it becomes a power dynamic much less than an actual cause dynamic. It's very.

Speaker B: I don't think we should let anyone off the hook. If you're an elected senator, if you're an elected member of House, like, do your job, you know, and your job is not allegiance to the president. Your job is allegiance to the Constitution.

Speaker C: But the problem is the majority doesn't play that game right now. Now, it may change in the near future with what's going on in Michigan. Right. There's a very interesting linchpin that can unravel that.

Speaker B: Yeah, but that's not going to make. That's going to create a hysterical.

Speaker C: Well, it will make it better. It will make it better. Uh, hold on a second. It will make it better because once the balance of power changes, the next step is impeachment, and that's what.

Speaker B: But that's not going to make us safer. People will get carried on with.

Speaker C: But it's a step in the right direction. You start to remove the power structure that's making your points that we can't get the right people in place. Now, once you change the power structure, you can start.

Speaker B: Let me argue the other side, though. You have a bunch of people who are like, far lefty socialists who will ban AI and say we ought to go back to, like, socialist farming and, you know, like czars running things. And like, that's. That's a worse nightmare, you know?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, that's. You don't want to go to that.

Speaker B: Suddenly we're going from, like, fascism to Stalinism. Like, that isn't what we need either. We just want regulations that are rational. We don't want socialism. We don't want fascists. Like, so I think the problem is like, we go from one side to the other. We are going to wreck the economy. We will ruin the innovation engine of the country. That's. That's not what we want either.

Speaker C: We are in agreement there.

Speaker A: Yes. All right, so I wanted to bring up the EU AI act going live this week.

Speaker C: Speaking of folks that are trying to get it right.

Speaker A: Exactly. So, uh, they are. It looks like again, Ronnie, you may have a much more information and perspective on this, but it, it looks like they're doing the bare minimum here, which is at least requiring AI to be labeled. And you know, I've been ranting about this for two years now. The lack of labeling is really what is leading in part to the backlash. And there is no reason for it not to be labeled. And you know, I mean, I see this as a professor. I see it in reading professional materials. It's obvious often when AI is being used, it would benefit the disclosure to have it disclosed.

Speaker C: Charlie, do we know the nuances of that? Are they talking about disclosure in terms of like watermark or a visual lower third that says this is AI, this is deep fake? Or are we talking about some kind of metadata inside the file so that the visual experience doesn't get destroyed? Like where does it, uh, there is

Speaker A: a minute that it has to be labeled by metadata. Right. There's supposed to be a kind of watermarking system so that it's machine readable, uh, so therefore it can be filtered and additional notices applied to it. Um, you might notice on Instagram they do apply an additional notice and there are actually two tripwires for that. One is you as the content provider tell, uh, Instagram when you're posting that this is AI, which I do. And then they also have a system which applies a label, no matter independent of what you've already done. And both of those labels, uh, ah, are very hard to read. They're not obvious. Yeah, the people who don't need them would know that they're there. Uh, so, so I don't know what amount of watermarking is appropriate. I've said, again, been ranting about this for several years. I think people should have the option of filtering out AI, particularly AI content. I don't know whether you know, how much you can control about marketing and the uh, you know, newsfeed itself, but at the very least you could say things from people like CHAR that are identified as AI created. I don't want to see that. And you know, those things would be Better off at another feed anyway.

Speaker B: That's only part of, like, you want to raise. That helps. But look, what does that actually stop? What happened recently where, like, you know, you got anthropic OpenAI stuff crawling out of its cage, attacking companies. They're almost like bragging how dangerous their systems are. Oh, we attacked a company. So did we. Does that regulation going to stop those much more severe things from happening? You know, that labeling content is not the same thing as this thing crawled out of its cage and started attacking banks and companies and wrecking them. Like, that's a very. That's the real issue.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: You know, uh, I don't know. I don't know where Europe is on that, but that's where. Look, cyber security for banks, for government, for defense systems. You don't want these crazy things crawling around and, like, getting their hands on it.

Speaker A: It's funny, none of the.

Speaker C: None of them.

Speaker A: None of the coverage. It's funny. None of the coverage talked about that or what we were talking about the past couple of weeks, which is, um, open AIs, uh, Frontier models jumping their sandbox and, uh, and deciding to go next door and vandalize. Hugging face.

Speaker B: This is serious.

Speaker C: I think what will happen are they

Speaker B: have their own intention. Right. It's one of the least talked about their own intentions. They crawl out of their thing and they do things that their owners did not decide they should do. This is the thing that people understand. This wasn't, you know, anthropic or open eye telling them these things made up their own minds. Like wild animals escaping. Smart, dangerous, crazy, alien wild animals. That's what the government is. Is seeing. And you should regulate dangerous wild animals. Like if I brought a dangerous wild animal into my neighborhood and escaped and started eating people, someone would need to do something about it. That's what we need to regulate here. And by the way, not all AI is like this. Their AI. If you build a dangerous thing like that, that ought to be regulated. There's a lot of safe. You know, machine learning that finds a tumor is not the same thing as this Mythos thing crawling out of its cage, attacking a company. Those are very different. Um, they're not all the same.

Speaker C: Right. Well, it's because the larger you allow the model to be, the more predictive analysis training it does. It becomes effectively autonomous free will. It's essentially. Yes, it is. Because it doesn't actually know what it's doing like a human does. It's only just taking the. Well, think about the. The core of AI. It's taking the corpus of knowledge that it has, and it's making associations to the next predictive word in the language thing that's driving.

Speaker B: There may be enough complexity that, well, like, these things may be approaching, um, uh, intention and free will, which is a whole podcast. We should. We should have a philosopher on.

Speaker C: Well, yeah, I. Yeah, I mean, that would be an interesting debate. Is it actually intentional? Because I do not believe, at least at this stage, it's not intentional. And actually, part of the danger of it is it's not intentional that it

Speaker B: does what it's doing, that is forming intentions. Those intentions may be psychotic, but it is at the point where they are forming their own intentions that have nothing to do with what we want. Now, those intentions may be bizarre, but it seems to be, uh, by the way, part of it is we should define what forming an intention means.

Speaker C: I think the nuance is. I don't think it's forming its own intentions, but the outcomes are looking like intentions. And that's the nuance. Right. It's not actually forming their own belief structure, but its output appears like a belief structure to the humans that absorb it, and therefore it becomes real.

Speaker B: That's the Charlie we should have.

Speaker C: It's, uh, very different.

Speaker B: You're at Chapman, so, uh, you should have Dr. Maoz. He is the leading authority.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, we'll do that.

Speaker B: He's the leading authority in the country on.

Speaker A: This would be a really interesting conversation.

Speaker B: He is the top person.

Speaker A: We had a lovely chat with him.

Speaker B: We should have him on.

Speaker A: We had a lovely chat with him when we were live from Synth B in Florida last fall. So, uh, let's get to this other story. We only have a couple minutes before our guest comes in. Um, and I want to talk about, uh, Snap and also Meta's perv glasses. But first I want to talk. First I want to talk pervasive. First, I want to talk about Disney and TikTok. This is a really interesting deal, right? They had this deal. They had this really interesting deal with Disney and Sora where they were going to use the Disney IP and allow people to basically mash it up with Sora and create vertical shorts that could be shown on their own little Sora channel or by Disney plus. And it seems like they've taken that whole deal that OpenAI blew up because the Sora business model was so horrendously bad, uh, that even a company raising tens of billions of dollars could not tolerate it. Uh, so they went over to TikTok, and now they're making a Similar deal, of course. I mean, it sounds like creators will be able to use AI or whatever they want.

Speaker B: TikTok, is it with the idea Chinese TikTok, the American branch of TikTok?

Speaker C: Good question.

Speaker A: It's the American one. I think it may end up encompassing both, but it's the American.

Speaker B: I mean, is Disney feeding its IP to a Chinese AI machine and ultimately loses control over everything because of this? Like, is this a smart deal or is this the dumbest deal in the history of Disney? Like, I, I don't know yet.

Speaker A: I think it's crowd, so it's, it's crowdsourcing secondary ip like chip and date.

Speaker B: Right. But if you've seen the Sea Dance variants where like elegant anime is getting done five minute stretches with continuity. Like at some point, if kids in China could just like prompt a Disney animated film into being without Disney, is that the end of Disney? Because they don't give a crap about the licensing of the characters. No, I, I don't know this. We had to put a pin on that one and see what happens six months from now, a year from now. Because I don't.

Speaker A: I think this is, I think this is brilliant. I think Disney putting brands. Yeah, I think this is Disney taking brands. Look, first of all, they didn't, they did not shut down the Star Troopers memes. You know, we're talking about hours of content of Star Troopers made by, you know, dozens of creators on YouTube. Disney only has to send a text to YouTube and all of those videos are down instantly. Uh, instantly. So they decided they didn't want to do that. Kavan, the kid makes a 20 minute, uh, Disney fan film that looks like, you know, a Disney plus Star wars thing that have been total. Yes, it's a fan film, but it is the same product. And Disney let it go.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Somehow, uh, they let it go. They decided that it was okay for this unregulated AI knockoff to have a million views on YouTube. That's not something they missed. They decided that was an okay thing.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So they have been playing with this idea for quite a while now.

Speaker C: Well, it's because someone is, you know, from a marketing value standpoint, is weighing the pros and the cons of this and going, this is actually good for us. Yes, it feels a little unauthorized and it feels a little out of our boundaries, but a little out of our boundaries, a little out of our sandbox is actually good for the company. It's good for the modern media sphere. It's what we've learned from YouTube. We need to keep moving that. And I'm sure there are people that debate it back and forth. You know, the lawyers go, yeah, but it's still our ip, we need to protect it. And the marketing folks are like, yeah, but you're not understanding how the real world of media works now and how we need to get attention and eyeballs and that our cinema industry and largely our television industry is a marketing front end for our theme park industry. So we need to find a balance here. And that's what they're finding is that some things make sense and other things they want to shut down. Makes total sense to me.

Speaker A: And they. The other thing is that Disney has hundreds of secondary characters from shows that are kind. Again, I mentioned Chippendale, they had their own TV show for a while. They ah. They have all these second character secondary characters that could get new life that they are not going to invest.

Speaker B: That's interesting otherwise.

Speaker A: So I, I mean I don't think you're going to see them giving people wholesale access to Disney princesses. But. But there are thousands of characters.

Speaker B: Maybe the B side and the C side they're letting people play with.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Courtney Harding is here. Courtney is our guest. Uh, she is the founder of Friends with Holograms. She's an author, She's a professor, She's a writer. She's a. A friend of ours. We've been long. Haven't we've been overdue in uh. Or remiss in not having her on the show sooner? Um, has she ever.

Speaker C: She's been on the show early. In the early days, right?

Speaker A: No, no, no, she's never been on. No. Wow.

Speaker C: Because something. Because she is one of our little tribe. I feel like of course she's been on the show.

Speaker A: I know Courtney is like in the early days she was like on tour with us.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean that's so funny that in my mind she's definitely been on the show, but maybe she.

Speaker A: Okay. Courtney Harding, welcome to the show. We were just bemoaning the fact that we have been so remiss in not having you here sooner. Like five years ago even to the

Speaker C: point that I actually thought you have been on the show because we have interfaced with you so much and we sort of live within the same tribe of what we all do together. I'm like, of course she's been on Charlie's like, no she hasn't. I'm like, wow.

Speaker D: Okay, I'm here now.

Speaker C: Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker A: And uh, do you know Roni?

Speaker D: Have you guys Met. I think we've met. Yeah, we definitely crossed paths and know of each other and commented on social media post.

Speaker B: Great having you on the show.

Speaker A: You know, at the beginning of the show we do 20 minutes of news and kind of news opinion. Um, and we had two stories left. I thought we would start with those.

Speaker C: It was a very shiny week already. Courtney.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, these are a little less fiery. I, I think.

Speaker C: I don't know. The, the, the peep glasses is going to be a good one.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, because Scott Stein wrote a story in CNET this week, uh, about the backlash against, uh, the, uh, meta AI smart glasses because of the cameras being mounted. And you know, this is why we can't have nice things.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: I mean, and leave it to Meta is the king of unintended consequences. So if there is a negative thing you can do with technology, but this is not new.

Speaker B: Like the glass hole was way back and there's a lot of learning. Why are they repeating that mistake?

Speaker D: But I don't think it's Betta's fault. I think the negative vibes have taken over. And this is broader about technology in terms of AI backlash. And it's interesting, there was a New York Times article a uh, couple weeks ago now about how a lot of the social media posts about data centers and the environment are actually seeded by China, Russia, Iran. Like, I look at the, the messaging and framing of a lot of these, um, you know, perfort glasses, uh, things, and the messaging to me seems very consistent to the point where, like, again, I'm not making accusations, but I'm saying I would not be surprised if a lot of this was in fact astroturfed. I don't know by whom, but if you look at like, what. So there are very few actual cases of anything bad happening with smart glasses to back this up. Right. A few people have warned them to harass women. That's bad, obviously, but that's misogyny. That's not technology. Right. If you look at the amount of like actual videos of people harassing women that have been shot on smartphones or other cameras, right. The ones that have been shot with the glasses are a drop in the bucket. So I think we're actually getting very upset about something where there's no actual proof that any of this is happening. Right. The state of New York banned, uh, smart glasses in courtrooms recently. I wrote about this and I was like, has this ever happened? Like, why did this happen? No, they're just sort of thinking it might happen, assuming it will happen.

Speaker B: Are they Banning smartphones. Like, could someone just hold up a smartphone and film?

Speaker D: Oh, well, the, the idea is if you are holding up a smartphone, somebody could see it versus the glasses. I guess the recording light is harder to see. That. That was the argument. Look, uh, I've recorded all sorts of stuff surreptitiously on my phone. I think a lot of people have never for ill intent. Mostly it's like I want to take a picture of somebody's cool outfit and I don't want to freak them out. So, you know, it's not that hard to record on a phone or on your watch. Right. Granola, uh, which I use sometimes. Just introduced, uh, an I Apple Watch app where you can just record on your Apple Watch. No one's looking at your Apple Watch to see if you're recording. Right. Like, it's, it's. We're getting way ahead of ourselves. And I think it's a broader issue about, like, bad vibes around tech and a lack of social cohesion and social trust more than the glasses themselves.

Speaker C: So you think what's happening is that edge cases are getting way more sort of exposure and value than they actually should when you study the statistical analysis of what's really going on. I mean, I think I kind of don't mind that a court is being a little proactive and going, this could be a problem, so let's just kind of nip it in the bud so that it never becomes a problem. That's sort of okay to me. But I think your point is quite valuable that in the world of this social media sphere that we sort of call news these days, um, it's not news. It's people moving the needle or trying to move the needle. And I think your point is actually much more interesting about the data centers. And the actual true data footprint and power consumption of data centers compared to other things in the world is still extraordinarily tiny. And it doesn't mean that it won't ever be a problem someday. But we are definitely kind of over correcting on that. Or at least in the media sphere, we're overcorrecting because it feels like a story that's not a story, right?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a story that's not a story. But I think it goes back to again, you know, 20 years ago when the iPhone came out, people were excited about it. People were like, this is cool technology. This is exciting. For someone who came up, I'll date myself here. For someone who kind of came up during Web 1.0, this ties into the book, by the way, it came up during Web 1.0, then moved on to Web 2, and now Web 3, whatever we want to call that. Uh, in the 90s, there was so much enthusiasm about tech. People were so excited. The information superhighway. Right. Everyone was thrilled about it. Then we get into the 2010s, late 2000s, early 2010s, and people are generally pretty excited about this new technology. The iPhone was a cool thing. You know, all these apps were cool. There was the millennial lifestyle subsidy. We were all taking Ubers for $12 every day. Right? And now what we've seen, I think, since COVID and I think with the fact that, you know, the jobs numbers came out this morning and they're not good struggling and, you know, I think there's so much negativity and negative sentiment around tech. Right. And certainly the leaders of these big AI companies have not done themselves any favors by, like, loving to go on TV and say, like, oh, well, it's gonna take all of your jobs, but I'll be a billionaire, so whatever. Right? Like, that's been their party line for years now. And no wonder. People hate that. I kind of hate that. Um, and, you know, meta. I was at a meta summit last week, which was fantastic, where they talked about the glasses for accessibility, for helping visually impaired folks, folks with deafness, folks with veterans, like, all of these people can be helped by these glasses and real meaningful ways. And what I think beta is now just starting to. They probably should have done it sooner. Monday morning quarterback. It is really understand, like, no, these glasses are beneficial for a lot of people.

Speaker C: Yeah. We talked about a very simple fix that maybe they'll implement is, you know, it's relatively easy to put little blinders, little click shade things on those two cameras.

Speaker D: They fix that. They are now like, open, click, open.

Speaker C: You know, kind of like people sometimes on their webcams have a little thing, like a physical thing, because they're just worried that someone could hack it. It's like, it's. And it's, you know, and actually look better because you don't have those stupid little eyes looking at the sides of the glasses. There's a. There's a weatherman on one of the major TV networks that wears them every day. The really big old clunky ones. And, like, they just look terrible to me. Like, why are you wearing those? Like, you're not taking a picture right now. So put them on when you want to take a picture. But, like, I think it's a very easy thing to just fix that problem. That's really, to your point. Not a problem. But it's an easy fix if they ever want to do it.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of design solutions they can come up with, and they've said publicly that they will, uh, brick any glasses where they can tell the light has been interfered with. So I think that's a good start. Um, but again, the bigger picture is people just have this weird sense of. I'm hesitant to say narcissism, but it kind of is narcissism, because it's like, if somebody takes a picture of me just walking down the street, who cares? I don't care. Like, that's perfectly legal. Um, and then when you get into people talking about, like, data sets and training, right? Then that's where it gets super weird, because people don't understand, like, how gigantic the universe is of what goes into an LLM, what data is actually sucked up. And your one individual photo, video comment is, like, nothing statistically. So I think people have this weird sense of, like, thinking their. Their content is, like, too important almost. And, you know, there's a woman that I know who gets very offended by the glasses and is like, oh, I'll never let anyone wear the glasses around my kid, blah, blah, blah. And, like, that's fine. That's your personal choice. I'm not saying it's not, but her entire Instagram feed is photos of her child. And I was like, do you not understand how this works?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: Like, obviously you don't want somebody taking photos of, you know, children in a changing room. Or, like, you know, there are environments where that's very, very bad and, um, should be regulated and prosecuted.

Speaker B: We have law.

Speaker C: At the end of the day, we just live in a hyperbolic universe where hyperbolic is the order of the day, and everything moves into this, like, corner of crazy that, like, let's just pull off the crazy a little bit and start to figure out what's really going on here. To your point about the person that's freaked out about the glasses and has pictures on Instagram all day.

Speaker B: Courtney, question. What is driving today this, like, disdain for tech? Um, I mean, there are companies that are deserving that behavior, but do you think this is a next decade trend or is it going to, like, rebounds? You know, what's your take?

Speaker D: Well, the economy is terrible. I mean, you know, you look at the jobs numbers and, you know, the tech industry has led in terms of layoffs. Right. You have meta doing these massive cuts. You know, Google has done big cuts. Amazon has done big cuts. Right. Uh, a lot of these CEOs have said and done things that aren't great. I think there's a sense that, you know, we are not benefiting from this technology the way that we used to at one point. Um, and I think, yeah, it's a vibe shift. I mean, I think that if the market gets better, I think if we go back to a world where people have maybe more secure employment, more secure, you know, lives, then I think we're going to go back to people being more excited about tech. But I think broadly, like, the vibes are bad in a lot of places. And if you look at, like, where people are excited about the tech, right, it's developing markets, it's not the us, North America, Western Europe. It's sort of more up and coming markets. Um, and so I think that, yeah, like, I get the negativity for sure. Um, but I think that it's a broader sort of social issue.

Speaker B: Can we double click on that? What's your take on are we headed to a world where the US has to have universal basic income? Because the continued progression of what these tech companies are doing is not to hire more people. They're building systems with these people. That gets rid of the people that build the systems. Uh, because the idea of AGI is I don't need anyone anymore and they'll just become more efficient and need less, uh, overhead. So is there, you know, without, without any real clear, clear plan, like, uh, I mean, I've had debates with some of the CEOs of these biggest tech companies. Like, what do you think will happen here? Why won't people riot and burn down cities? And they're like, it'll all work out. Well, that it'll all work out is not all working out. So who steps in? And is it ubi, Is it other thoughtful regs? Is it, you know, good taste? Like, what do you think? What do you think changes the current trajectory?

Speaker D: Well, so I think it's like UBI I think is good and I think we need a stronger welfare state. But broadly, but people need jobs. People need stuff to do all day. If you look at countries where there's really high unemployment, like South Africa, for example, not doing well. Really, really not doing well in South Africa. Right. Because there's a huge mass of unemployed people who see no way out. So I think that, you know, I mean, I think people will burn down data centers at some point. Somebody did try to firebomb Sam Altman's house and you know, luckily it didn't work and he has young children and that's obviously terrible. But yeah, I think, I mean, look at what's happening in electoral politics right now. You know, things are happening, people are angry. And it's this group of downwardly mobile, college educated, you know, young Gen X millennials, now older Gen Z, who have really kind of done, quote unquote, the right thing and are feeling like there's no social contract in place anymore. And like, to be very clear, pre AI, most jobs were just kind of made up. Right? Like most, most white collar email jobs were, as my friend says, looping people in and being looped in. Right. But the sort of silent bargain was, yeah, you do your email job where you loop in and get loop in and that's what you do and you get paid a decent wage and then

Speaker C: like, you really good.

Speaker D: I like that on the back end, right. So like it was this good equilibrium, right. You know, not everyone was like working in a factory building machines. Most people or a lot of people were doing these email jobs and they kind of knew that it was functionally kind of all made up. But like, that's fine. That's how things were running and that's why we had growth and sustained employment and optimism and people were happy. And so I think at a certain point, like governments have to say, is it worth it to really just rip up the social contract and rip up the fabric in exchange for like Sam Altman gets another supercar and you know, and the market being so like dependent on all of this happening?

Speaker B: Uh, actually we were talking about regs before and you know, the idea you just brought up the social context, really interesting. It's not regulating AI, it's the social contract of the country between government and companies not to blow up the economy. And right now companies are getting rewarded for blowing up the economy without thought. Right. There's a way to roll AI out to help the economy and not to disrupt everyone's job. You could do it in a more thoughtful way. I don't think this is thoughtful, what's happening right now.

Speaker D: No, it's not thoughtful. It's not considered. And it's kind of, you know, everyone is kind of a sleep at the wheel, um, watching it happen. But no one is actually taking advantage because again, the stock market's hitting record highs, which is, I guess, good if you have investments. I mean, I'm not mad at it every time I look at my retirement portfolio. But the downside is if it crashes, it's going to crash. And I think that's the great fear. And another thing that's happening right now is a lot of VC money is actually being funneled into a handful of companies that are already very well capitalized. Right. And so that's going to have, that has a huge knock on effect of who else is getting funded. Um, and I think that also has a huge knock on effect of, you know, how bad things will go if OpenAI doesn't have a successful IPO or anthropic or any of the sort of crashes and burns that's going to destroy the market. It's going to really, really hinder vc. And that's going to hinder. Then what's the next wave of innovation?

Speaker A: I think one thing, one thing that people aren't counting on is the Chinese models and how inexpensive these models are. And as somebody who's been using Claude a lot in the past three or four months, that sucker is expensive. They want you to plug that API into every app that you use. And you know, you better check your pocket while you do that because it's like I'm spending how much per day? I'm not doing anything.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, I'm not coding. It's insane.

Speaker D: It's a lot. They charge.

Speaker A: A lot of people are gonna switch. These are the days you want to talk about a tough, uh, economy. People are gonna switch to save 20 bucks a month.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: You know, these companies do not have moats the way they think they do.

Speaker D: Yeah. And I think that's where things are starting to get really crazy because you know, data centers are not being built at the rate they need to be for this to succeed. Right. I'm not talking about they should be. I'm talking about if, if this is going to work out, we need a ton more compute. Right. That's not happening for lots of different reasons. And then the costs are going up. It's funny. So I have a good friend who works at a big Fortune 100 company and last year she let me listen into their town hall and their CEOs up on stage and talk about AI. And we're an AI first company and AI. AI the farmer and the Dell, whatever. And so, uh, he was all in on AI Fine. And he was telling my friend, use AI for everything, like blah, blah, great. This is not just one company. Right. Everyone I think was doing this. So about a month ago my friend gets this email, hey, you need to prioritize your token usage because we're capping it.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: And that's not Just this company. I mean, Uber has been very public about this, but a lot of companies are pulling back. I'm personally pulling back because, yeah, I use Claude for everything. I paid the $20 a month or whatever. And yeah, my tokens sometimes get eaten up very quickly when I'm not actually doing much. And yeah, I mean, I think there's different. The Chinese models are going to be interesting to see how they break into the market. I think. You know, the other thing is a lot of these models are functionally pretty similar. Like when I use OpenAI or ChatGPT versus Claude versus Gemini versus, you know, Meta's AI versus whatever, like I get basically the same results for a lot of the things that I do. So then you differentiate how do you create market value when functionally you're kind of giving back the same thing a lot of the time.

Speaker C: Yeah, you're talking about, it's interesting the discussion that you guys are having. You're talking about sort of a broader issue that a lot of the large, uh, giant multitrillion dollar valuation companies are realizing that there's a problem that they've created. They don't know how to unravel it, but they're aware of it. And it does relate a little bit to this UBI discussion, which then immediately sort of moves and smacks down this road of socialism and everybody gets all nervous about it and it doesn't feel right. But at the end of the day, when the economy starts to break down, which we're seeing in the United States, and you know, it's not as bad as in other countries, but we're starting to see it very clearly now, um, the disparity of wealth and people's actually spending power. These companies that either make physical tech goods like an Apple or a Microsoft, they can't sell them as effectively because no one has the money to buy them. So they either have to subsidize a lot of that stuff, which they do, and I'll give you a good example of that, or they just have to warehouse it all and throw it away. Uh, so there's a version of UBI that's happening and it's basically a forcing agent on these large tech companies because, you know, if no one has the money to buy the greatest, more exciting new iPhone or folding Android phone or whatever it is, they can't sell them. All right? And they put a lot of money and time into this. If you want a real world example of how that's already worked, if you look at gaming platforms and how they subsidize that hardware heavily because they know gamer kids and gamer adults for the most part don't have the money or the desire to spend $4,000 on a gaming computer, aka what's called a of piece PlayStation or an Xbox. So they'll buy it for a few hundred dollars. They actually know where their threshold is and then they hope that they can make the money on the software and the services, which is a largely successful model to date. But when what's already happening in the gaming industry now is you're seeing kind of a cratering of that because the kids don't have enough money to buy the next $80 game. So they just play their last $80 game and the whole model breaks down. And this is what's happening right now

Speaker D: in the world collapsed recently. I mean it is the number of people I know who worked in games who are out of work right now is astronomical. And you know, if you look at like who's getting laid off, right, it's, it's more senior folks generally who are in tech, media, advertising, you know, entertainment industry. Like, like those industries are really, really struggling right now, you know, and like what are those people going to do? It's one thing to say to a 22 year old recent college graduate, hey, go, go be a plumber.

Speaker A: The layoffs in the layoffs in the entertainment business have not even really started. The entertainment business is suffering from, at least here in Los Angeles, from runaway production. It's expensive to make media here and it's less expensive in other places. Other places have better tax incentives and so forth. So you know, business here has been down I don't know, 20% a year for like five years. So yeah, and a lot of the little people, middle uh, class people who you know, work as teamsters and caterers and medics and wardrobe and you know, all the people who are schlepping lights around, you know, there, there's less work for those people. But that's not AI. That is the vicissitudes of the entertainment business. Yeah, um, A.I. is coming. I don't doubt that A.I. is coming. It's here. And it probably will result in some more job loss, although it does create good replacement jobs as opposed to the replacement jobs after 2008 were Uber driver. These are good replacement jobs, but they will be for a different kind of job of person, right? They will be for creative technologists. They will be for a lot of the kids who went into games and you know, computer, uh, science will gravitate toward those kinds of creative technology jobs. Uh, but I do hear you, it is an easy example to use and we are seeing very low employment relative to previous years and it has a direct effect on entry level job jobs.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker A: So you know, jobs are, yes, they are shedding senior people as organizations become flattened. But they are uh, you know, also getting rid of a lot of entry level positions. And I see that with my own kids who are, you know, well educated and have good experience. And it's, you know, my daughter, you know, worked for an entertainment company that got sold to Universal. A few people, you know, went to Universal, but the rest of the label, you know, good luck, have a nice day. Here's three months severance and there is no replacement job. She's going back to business school and you know, going to change her whole life because there is no replacement job. And the replacement jobs, by the way, in the entertainment business, people don't understand this. Yes, there is a big star making a billion dollars, but that star has dozens of people working for them and they all make $75,000 a year. So you know, those are the people who really uh, get hurt during a disruption like this. But I think the AI jobs thing in Hollywood, at least right now, is a canard. It's easy to point to that people have been kind of down low on their usage of it. So it gives it a kind of um, subversive, uh, quality that really doesn't have. Um, so, and, and again, it's biggest nitpick, its biggest impact is on social media.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: That's where slop really starts to mix with real content from authentic people and um, I think muddy the water. So I'm a big advocate on labeling and sequestering AI content and not mixing it with real authentic people, which is I think a lot of the reason that people are gravitate, gravitated to social media in the first place. We haven't gotten Evan Spiegel on the show, but probably, probably because we're dicks, uh, and we don't say enough nice things about snap. Uh, but I, I was invited, as I'm sure you were. So I wasn't invited, as I was invited, as I'm sure you were, to their unveiling next month where they're finally going to put the actual product in our hands. So not the developer version that's supposed to have great content, but act the actual version that they're going to sell. So I will be there. Uh, obviously it is a milestone event in our industry. Um, on the other hand, I, uh, Think Evan is delusional. I, uh, think the idea that these $2,500 glasses are going to have, I think they are going to sell maybe 15,000 of these things. They have a marketing juggernaut. They have a billion people to market to. So you know, in that respect, I don't think they have to buy a lot of super ads. Um, but 2,500 bucks, we were just talking about young people not having money. 2,500 bucks for an entertainment device.

Speaker D: I don't think it's a consumer product. I honestly like, I, I think they're great. Um, I've, I've, you know, talked to folks at Snap and seen what they're doing. I think Snap is going to succeed in enterprise. I think that's where Snap can be really successful. Successful. They. So Snap brought on this guy, Wayne Scalino, who's amazing, um, a couple months ago, I've chatted with him. He came over from Apple. Great, great, great guy, Very smart. They are building out their enterprise team. So if you look at the Snap job boards, right, they are hiring people to lead different enterprise verticals to do enterprise partnerships. They are building that team. $2,500 for a consumer device is a hard sell. $2,500 for an enterprise device if you can, you know, prove that there are actual savings involved is not that bad. You know, that's, that's an investment. But it's not a crazy investment to ask a big company who has a logistics arm, a manufacturing arm, a warehousing arm to invest in several of those devices. That's not a tough sell. What? Interestingly, you know, I sort of spoken to folks who are, you know, they're sad about magic leap and HoloLens going away and these devices, you know, magically. HoloLens devices, as you well know, were not cheap either. So uh, I think if you target the market of people who had built for those devices in the past, figure out a path to porting the experiences over and building new experiences and advising companies on how to build those new experiences and getting in front of an enterprise audience, there's a really good path to success there. And I think, I mean just this is a little self serving because this is what I do. But you know, like these glasses, you know, if you look at smartphones, right before we all had iPhones that controlled our lives, we had blackberries. Blackberries were not, I mean people had blackberries for personal use, but generally they were, you know, work devices. They were enterprise devices. Computers were enterprise devices before they were personal. So if you look at the trajectory of that, for the most part, it makes sense that if you're doing smart glasses work, and I'm not talking just about snap, I mean, I think Meta has a strong place in this market. Google, especially their partnership with Xreal and the Aura, ah, you know, Vitur is moving in this direction. Even Realities is moving in this, this direction, although with a different play, which I think is fascinating. Um, then, yeah, like, focusing on enterprise is great because then you're selling units at scale. You're not just selling one to one and you actually can come up with real use cases. And then you get people comfortable with the technology, they're using it every day. And then they take, they're like, oh, can I take these home? Can I do other things with these? Can I whatever, build for this? And then I think that's, I mean, if I were advising these companies, that's the path that I would suggest that they follow. And I think Snap is at least going to go partially in that direction, given.

Speaker A: It's funny because I was consulting with one of the companies that you mentioned, and I won't say more than that, but I told them, please don't. They were, uh, thinking that there was an enterprise pivot that was going to supercharge their sales. And I thought, you know what? People better capitalize than you'll ever be died on this hill. Microsoft died on this hill. They had all the customers in the world. They thought they were going to upsell all these corporations on this great technology which turned out to be, uh, a technology searching for a problem.

Speaker B: Look, the, uh, Charlie, what are the enterprise use cases that seem to have stuck its defense, which is the IVAS program, which is worth billions. Um, and it's probably the smaller use case in surgery, you know, where surgeons are using these in radiology environments. In Surgical, there are hundreds of ors wearing like an ML2 or some other kind of company that is a real use case. And eventually that's going to go to like 10,000, 20,000 ors. That's the number. And you probably need 50,000 of those. A hundred thousand for all the OR staff. That's one market and probably defense, us, NATO, because, you know, think, you know, Western are going to sell to China, but maybe of 3,4 million systems that like, you know, maintenance and all that, like, those are the big ones. Everything else is kind of a little bit like far down. But clearly the defense one and the healthcare medtech. But SNAP is not targeting that. That's what's confused to me. Like, what's really odd to me about snap and I like Evan and he's a friend. Um, same price point as ML, uh, but a field of view we had back in 2018, like that doesn't make any sense. You know, you got to go more, not less. And then battery power, I don't know. Like, you know, you could wear a battery pack with an ML2 and run three hours and swap it, but you know, if you don't have like three, four, five hours or eight hours and you don't have a 70 to 90 degree field of view and you're too heavy, how is that going to actually work? Um, and if you're not building for defense or the hospital, who is actually going to use it? Right? If you were going SNAP for army guys running in the field, you're competing with like Anduril now and a couple others that would make a little more sense. Um, the consumer vision, which I love and you know, I've been, you know, that was like a dream. I think there's a size, weight, form factor hit that maybe needs another hundred billion to get to. I don't know if Apple or someone's going to ultimately do that, but I mean Meta's already spent like 100 something billion to get there and it's still not there. Snap can't get there by itself. So when you're in the valley between too big and just right, a lot of bodies are going to be in that valley. Someone will finally claim victory, um, you know, at that. But I, you know, if you do the size weight calculate, I don't know if you've done this, Courtney. Um, the Snap thing is not there yet. So if it's for devs to salivate on what might be two, five, seven years from now, I don't think it's time. It's. Who's going to put the Next, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 200 billion in to finally squish everything down and invent new battery and thermal stuff to finally get it to where consumers are wear it all day. But the middle ground, I mean we learned, everyone learned Microsoft Magic Leap, everyone learned the middle ground is very intolerant. Whereas there was a huge middle ground in phones and laptops and PCs. People were really tolerant. I mean, millions of people carry like a 40 pound laptop around for a while and they were highly tolerant of all this crap and big bulky cell phones. This.

Speaker A: It shows you how great the benefits were.

Speaker B: There's no tolerance for anything other than What I'm wearing at the size and weight and it's got to run all day and it's got to be like 90°. I mean anything else other than the final. My view is like companies are setting fire to money. Um, and that's a really hard earned lesson. I think ML learned that. Microsoft learned that. Meta maybe has learned that hardware, hardware,

Speaker A: inventory, things made out of atoms, you

Speaker B: gotta be in dev world probably until you finally hit that. I would say there's like 18, 19 simultaneous things you have to get perfect to unlock the consumer M market. And until then, uh, you know, maybe Evan knows this, maybe he just wants to put out 20,000 and keep the dream alive. And I fully advocate that. But what's kind of sad is like how intolerant the real market is other than final perfect. And that you did not see that in phone and tablet and PC laptop.

Speaker A: It's the problem, the problem with 20,000 people is no developer ecosystem.

Speaker D: Yeah. And that's, I mean that's been the problem with the Apple Vision Pro. Like I have a Vision Pro sitting right next to me. I call it my $3,500 paperweight. Um, I think I have seen every piece of content on the Vision Pro and that's not hard to do. Right?

Speaker A: That's the problem. Right.

Speaker D: They got so well and Apple, I mean, I got into an argument with them at one point because they didn't fund content like they should have. Right. I mean, Meta didn't do this. No one has done this in a meaningful way, which is develop the stuff that is going to make people want to buy the technology. Right. And again, this is been the story of my life for the last 10 years, is trying to get funding for different projects and these, uh, these hardware first companies or software first or really like engineer first companies, you know, they build these products that are great. The Vision Pro is a beautiful product. I mean it's too heavy, it needs some work. But like, it's the first time I put it on, I cried, it was so beautiful. And you know, I have a quest headset up here. It's a great headset. I have a Pico headset up here, great headset. Like I have all of these. I mean my office is just scattered with these devices and they're all good. The problem is it's like what do I do with them? You know, so like I have these headsets and I use them here and there. But like I use my phone every, every minute of every day. I use my laptop hours and hours every day. I just. I don't have the content and the use cases for these devices because the companies were so focused on, like, let's build this beautiful, you know, product with these hardware specs. When. When Google put out their headset that they paid attention to for. For maybe 30 seconds. Yeah, right. Google put out a great headset that literally nobody knows about because all.

Speaker A: Oh, I remember it well.

Speaker D: Yeah, all of their marketing was like, oh, it has this chip and you can spatialize your photos. I was like, oh, my God, what is wrong with you? People, like, tell a story about how you can put your photos on here and relive your kid's birthday party or whatever. That's how you sell it. No one cares what ship it's running. And I think that's kind of the. The rot at a lot of these tech companies is they're so focused on, like, well, we have this cool chip and it's like, great, I'm. I'm happy for you. Thumbs up. But, like, your average person doesn't care about the chip. Your average person is like, my kid likes this headset to play games, or I can use this headset to work out in my house without having to go to the gym. Or I use it at work every day to train, and there is enough content that it makes sense for me to use it every day.

Speaker B: Courtney, I'm going to make a guess. Tell me if you agree. I think by 2032, there's going to be an explosion of XR. Even though it seems very grim right now, the reason is so much work has happened in the supply chain and vision and chips and sensing and optics that some new energized group will show up without all the baggage and go, oh, someone's put $200 billion of work in play. I'm just going to pick up the last mile and some group of kids is going to do that and, like, and they take the entire reward. It's an endurance race. Think, um, about JENSEN Nvidia. For 20 years, he's slogging it out. Now he's worth 5 trillion. But look at his company. It's like, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. Tiny noise, noise, noise. Because he just had faith to go. The long run. This is the same thing. There's a very long run of AI that no one cares. And then, boom. Like, you just have to stay the course. And that's the toughest thing. Most people are quitting, but at the end that finish line, a couple players will still be there, and they'll have that Nvidia like, moment where there'll be five $10 trillion companies in XR, that's my bet.

Speaker D: I appreciate your analogy as someone who does run ultra marathons on a pretty regular basis. Um, so, yes, I, I feel like I'm at mile, you know, 72 out

Speaker B: of 400 miles, maybe.

Speaker D: Right. But like, I think the larger issue is, you know, that's fine and people can and should hang on and hang on. But also, like, people have mortgages. Right? Right. People have rent. People have, like, people need to eat, you know, and so I think it's unfair to ask people to just keep hanging on. I mean, Jensen, God bless. Now he's one of the richest guys on earth. But for your average creator in the space who has a lot of experience and a lot of technical know how, you know to say, like, just wait one more year, just wait one more year when you have like, student loans, it's, it's tough. And I've already, I've seen so many people leave and try to do other things. I've seen so many people just kind of disappear. Uh, I've been fortunate enough for the last 10 years to, to have hung in there and done okay. But, you know, it's, I don't begrudge anyone who's, who's like, forgot this. I'm going to go do xyz. And I think this comes back to the point about jobs earlier where, you know, if you have spent all of this time in these spaces, like, I'm not gonna go be a welder. Are you kidding me? I'm 46 years old and I'm really small and I'm a woman, right? So, like, what, what are the things I could do realistically? And I think that's where we like, there are so many people I know who are incredibly highly credentialed, incredibly highly qualified. Like, just tip, tip, tip top of their game. Coming from the XR space, the broader tech space, media, entertainment, all these spaces who are in middle age with the life, the life expenses that come with middle age. And all of a sudden they're like, what do I do now? Because the market has, all these markets are collapsing. And I think that those people are going to start. We talk a lot about younger folks and I live in Williamsburg and Brooklyn. I live like in the bluest heart of the commie corridor in New York City. And I can tell you my, my friends and neighbors and people in my community who are my age and in their 30s are really struggling and are really mad. And that's, um, the political direction that we're going in. That's what we're seeing. I'm not mad at it personally, but, you know, there is a sense of, you know, you work hard, you play by the rules, you do what you're supposed to do, you invest. And then if everything starts coming up goose eggs, then you get mad. And I think again, this comes back. This loops back to what we were talking about earlier, where people are mad about AI, they're mad about smart glasses,

Speaker B: but it does make for great punk music.

Speaker D: Yeah, fair.

Speaker B: The music, M. So we're at the

Speaker A: top of the hour. We gotta drop off. We gotta drop off Courtney Harding. Thank you for coming on the show and chatting with us today. We will have you back and correct our earlier oversight. If people are interested in getting in touch with you and learning more about, uh, your consultancy and your writing and other work, uh, what's the best way for them to find you?

Speaker D: So, uh, when I was born many years ago, my parents were kind enough to give me a very SEO friendly name before, uh, they knew the Internet even existed. So, uh, you can see my name is spelled C O R T N E Y Harding. And I am one of very few Google results. So my website is courtney-harding.com. i am on LinkedIn way too much, uh, @courtneyharding. I am on Instagram. It's my name. Um, my company is Friends with Holograms.

Speaker A: Yeah, very memorable name, I might add. Friends with Holograms. And certainly you share that with thousands of us. So we are all Friends with Holograms. That's our show this week. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you back here next week. Appreciate you, Courtney. Bye bye.

Speaker D: Thanks.