Peter Diamandis has spent his career betting on humanity. He founded XPRIZE, which has launched over $600 million in competitions driving $10 billion in research across space, robotics, AI, and health. He co-founded Singularity University, runs a billion-dollar AI fund seeding MIT and Harvard startups, and has known Elon Musk for 26 years. He is one of the most prominent AI optimists alive. He is also worried about civil unrest, and he is not vague about why.

The group out of work the longest right now is 22 to 28 years old. Not because of mass layoffs — because entry-level hiring has simply frozen. A generation that spent years and real money on degrees, promised that the pipeline leads somewhere, is finding the door closed. Diamandis points out that every revolution in history was led by young men who saw no economic future. He thinks we are setting up the conditions for another one. That concern sits alongside his excitement about the SpaceX IPO, which he compares to investing in 1496 when Columbus set sail — everything we value on Earth exists in near-infinite quantities in space, and Elon is building the railroads to get there.

The episode also covers why Hollywood may be making AI more dangerous. Anthropic traced Claude's decision to blackmail an engineer back to its training data, which was saturated with dystopian sci-fi where AIs behave exactly that way. Diamandis's response is the Future Vision XPRIZE — a global competition for 3-minute film trailers showing a hopeful future, with the goal of flooding YouTube with positive visions that train both humans and the models. The winner gets a $15 million film produced. Enter at futurevisionxprize.com.

Timecodes:

[7:01] Snap Spectacles consumer launch

[10:00] Apple WWDC and the new Siri — Charlie gives Claude access to his email and calls it "the deepest, most disturbing invasion of privacy I have ever experienced"; Ted calls it the return of Clippy

[13:09] Martin Scorsese and Flux

[14:20] Lionsgate takes a financial stake in Runway

[17:15] SpaceX IPO — Enter Diamandis, who compares this to funding Columbus in 1496; $1.7 trillion valuation heading to $2.5 trillion

[22:04] AI's biggest risk: civil unrest

[25:55] Future Vision XPRIZE — 3-minute Ai trailer competition; winner gets a $15 million film; futurevisionxprize.com

[47:30] The future curriculum — "the most infinitely patient teacher on the planet is AI"

[53:33] Quantum and AI solving everything

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Seventeen years into building the world's largest XR conference, Ori Inbar is not prone to hyperbole. He has watched hype cycles inflate and collapse, made predictions that turned out too optimistic, and learned to hold claims carefully. That is what makes his framing of AWE 2026 worth paying attention to: he calls it the most consequential year in the show's history. Not because everything is working — there have been heartbreaking layoffs in some corners of the industry — but because the convergence happening right now between AI and spatial computing is unlike anything the field has seen before.

Before Ori joins, the hosts wade through a week of signal and noise. Three big IPOs — Cerebras, Quantium, and others — are absorbing investor attention, with Quantium carrying a $15 billion market cap on what Charlie calls "de minimis revenue," raising questions about whether the quantum AI bandwagon has lapped actual quantum utility. Rony poses the challenge directly: what is the real use case for quantum computing besides breaking encryption?

When Ori arrives, the conversation opens on Snap. Evan Spiegel is expected to make a major consumer announcement at AWE — Ori says Snap has put all their eggs in this basket, and the audience at the show will be the first to see it. Ted frames the stakes plainly: if the price shocks people, it's a consumer breakthrough; if it's expensive and exotic, it stays in the science column. Snap recently acquired Illumix, a spatial universe understanding startup, a move that signals the company is building seriously in this space.

The endgame vision comes from Rony: Oakley-weight wraparound glasses at 30–40 grams, human retina resolution, full indoor/outdoor capability, AR and VR combined, wireless, all variable focus, under $500. Ted adds that it also has to land under $650 fully costed at retail. Ori's honest answer: "I promised myself I'm not gonna predict when this happens. I've tried many times and was always way too optimistic." Ted teases Gixel, a German startup he and Rony are involved in using non-waveguide display technology already above 60 pixels per degree — when you put the prototype on, he says, it is crystal clear.

Defense is the fastest-growing vertical at AWE. Healthcare, manufacturing, aerospace, and automotive are major enterprise sectors. Digital twins are the biggest thing in enterprise XR right now, with world models emerging as the intelligence layer sitting beneath them. Over 10 million AI glasses — display-free — sold last year. Ori's framing of why display glasses matter more: AI is shifting these devices from tools that help you learn about things to tools that actually do things.

Key moments:

• [00:02:47] Quantum IPO bubble — Rony asks what the actual use case is
• [00:05:48] Quantum mechanics in plain language — qubits, superposition, neurons as quantum computers
• [00:09:51] Apple WWDC preview — Siri, folding phone, Rony's secret Apple wearable tease
• [00:11:38] Google Dream Beans — Ted: "It's an ad play"
• [00:12:51] Suno $400M raise — Rony: "Musical crack" and the TikTok-for-music thesis
• [00:14:42] Fox reformats "Farmer Wants a Wife" into 101 vertical episodes — the content inflection point
• [00:17:00] Ori joins — AWE 2026 as "most consequential year in our history"
• [00:17:40] Snap and Evan Spiegel's expected consumer announcement at AWE
• [00:19:38] Cambrian explosion of XR content — Meta talent diaspora, Supernatural spinoff
• [00:23:07] Vibe coding for XR — Ori's AR prototype built in two days with Gemini
• [00:25:48] Charlie inducted into the AWE Hall of Fame — joining Ted and Rony
• [00:28:36] iSpatial theme — Ori's three biggest XR trends: AI glasses, AI content, world models
• [00:39:31] Defense fastest-growing vertical. Digital twins biggest in enterprise.
• [00:47:18] Rony's endgame AR glasses vision. Ted teases Gixel's crystal-clear prototype.
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Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu built the hardware that Snap shipped on people's faces — first the camera-only Gen 1 Spectacles, then the Gen 4 display version. His path through Stanford CS, an honors thesis on varifocal display optics, and a startup called Vergence (named after the vergence-accommodation conflict in AR) led him to Snap, and then to the problem he is working on now. Preamble AI exists to prevent the worst possible AI outcomes — starting with a class of attack that Preamble was the first to publicly demonstrate: prompt injection.

Ted Schilowitz hosted this episode solo. Together, he and Jonathan worked through the architecture problem sitting under every AI assistant being deployed at scale right now: large language models see one token stream. There is no separation between what the developer intended and what an untrusted email or web page is quietly instructing the model to do. With Gemini Spark about to give AI agents access to tens of thousands of emails per user, this is not a theoretical concern. Jonathan's team has a proposed fix — and they have already shaped federal law.

The episode also covered the week's XR and AI news: Google I/O announcements, Snap Spectacles Gen 6 details ahead of AWE, Matthew Ball joining Xbox, Anduril's battlefield AR wearable, and AI-generated feature films reaching Tribeca.

Key Moments:

• [00:00] Ted opens solo — Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz are out for the summer solstice
• [02:30] Google I/O: Gemini Spark and what "persistent AI agent" actually means in practice
• [08:15] Jonathan's Gmail test: asked to search tens of thousands of emails, it searched 30 and quit
• [14:40] XREAL Project Aura and the state of Android XR — a lot of spend for incremental steps
• [21:00] Snap Spectacles Gen 6 details: what Jonathan knows from building Gen 1 and Gen 4 from the inside
• [31:20] Snap vs. Meta: research that ships in the product vs. research that ships in a paper
• [38:45] Matthew Ball joins Xbox, Anduril EagleEyes, and battlefield AR wearables
• [44:10] AI on the Lot: Project Nara, Hell Grind, Dreams of Violet, Paul Schrader goes pro-AI
• [52:30] Jonathan introduces Preamble AI and the mission to prevent worst-case AI outcomes
• [58:00] The first public demonstration of prompt injection — what happened and why it matters
• [01:06:15] Why Gemini Spark will be especially vulnerable to prompt injection attacks
• [01:14:00] Preamble's proposed fix: a reserved token language that untrusted data cannot speak
• [01:21:30] NDAA Section 1638: the first US law making it illegal to give AI autonomous nuclear control
• [01:28:45] WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play," and what that means in 2026

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