Trying to Make a Nickel with Tech and Stories — Charlie Fink Pt. 1

Charlie Fink is a leading voice in the world of innovation, extended reality (XR), and technology storytelling. Best known for his Forbes column, the AI/XR Podcast, and a decades-long career spanning Disney Animation, AOL, and multiple startups, Charlie shares his insider’s journey from the VHS era of Disney classics to the frontlines of AI-generated media.

Key Takeaways:

• Decades in Innovation: Charlie started in Hollywood as a production assistant, quickly rising to become the youngest Vice President of Animation at Disney, working on classics like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.”
• Full-Circle Creative Career: Though he moved from animation to live-action (and learned the lessons of following one’s instincts in the entertainment industry), Charlie’s career brought him back to animation—now powered by AI and collaboration with industry legends like Rob Minkoff.
• Digital Media Trailblazer: At AOL, Charlie was among the first to shape original, interactive online content and recognized (ahead of its time) the potential for LinkedIn-style social networks within AOL’s platform.
• Hands-On with XR and AI: Today, Charlie produces the AI/XR Podcast, teaches at Chapman and ASU, writes a weekly Forbes column, and advises countless startups. He’s currently working on a new book and a series of animated shorts created with AI.
• Lessons for Innovators: Charlie highlights the importance of helping others without expecting anything in return, embracing the unknown, and not missing new waves of innovation—even if you’re already successful.
• Foundational Influence: As someone who’s both witnessed and helped shape pivotal shifts in media and tech, Charlie’s story is about the power of curiosity, adaptability, and community.

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About Charlie Fink ---

Charlie Fink writes a weekly technology column for Forbes covering AI and XR, and co-hosts its companion show, The AI/XR Podcast. He is the author of the critically acclaimed AR-enabled books Charlie Fink’s Metaverse (2017) and Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted With Data (2019). 

Fink teaches emerging media at Chapman University in Orange, CA, and at Arizona State University’s graduate program in Narrative and Emerging Media in Los Angeles. He is also CEO of Sprocketdyne, an AI animation studio he co-founded with film director Rob Minkoff. 

Fink's forty-year career at the intersection of storytelling and technology began at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where he famously conceived the idea for The Lion King and subsequently became the studio’s youngest-ever vice president of creative affairs. 

Fink's work in immersive technology began in 1992 as COO of Virtual World Entertainment, a groundbreaking location-based VR company founded by Tim Disney.

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Transcript

Nathan C Bowser: 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Nathan. Welcome to The Glow Up. We've got a really special episode for you this week. We're talking this week with Charlie Fink, you know him as a producer of worldwide entertainment properties. You know him as a podcast host. You know him as a bestselling author of some of the seminal books on spatial computing. He is an adjunct faculty. He is a columnist. He is a super fan and a serial innovative creator whose story I think you're really going to enjoy. We're gonna run two episodes this week and next week. We're gonna split the episode in half so you can hear an amazing story of Charlie's journey in innovation and the incredible projects and view that he's had on the development of immersive technologies, storytelling, and the current new media landscape. I think you'll really enjoy it. Now, let's dive in! Hello and welcome to The Glow Up Fabulous conversations with innovative minds. Today I am here with the one, the only Charlie Fink of Forbes, and so many other amazing projects. Charlie, it is so great to see you here today. Thank you!

Charlie Fink: 1:23

Thanks for the invitation, Nathan. I love nothing more than talking about myself.

Nathan C Bowser: 1:26

We've got a whole episode dedicated, so let's jump on in! I know you as somebody who has advised almost every startup that I've had the pleasure of working with and somebody who is a fixture at XR events. But you do a lot more than just advising. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about all the amazing things that you're up to?

Charlie Fink: 1:49

Sure. I'm a producer among other things, I produce the weekly AI/XR Podcast, which I co-host with Ted Schilowitz, a former futurist for Paramount and Fox. And Rony Abovitz, who is the founder of MAKO Robotics. And of course we all know him as the founder of Magic Leap. He is most recently the founder of an AI startup called SynthBee, which is focused on ethical AI, if there is such a thing. I teach at Chapman University and Arizona State University, on emerging media XR and AI. With regard to my other endeavors, I may be working on a new book. Of course I write my Forbes column every week, which is a news roundup with some commentary going on eight years. I'm sure I'm leaving something out. Oh! I'm working on an animated movie, a series of animated shorts for social media that are made primarily with AI, with an old friend, Rob Minkoff, who is the co-director of The Lion King, and directed Stuart Little and Haunted Mansion and Forbidden Kingdom and half a dozen other movies. It's really fun to be working with an old friend. I did not think I, I produced many things, books, podcasts, videos, but I never thought I would be back producing an animated content again but I guess that's where I started my career and I guess that's where it's gonna end.

Nathan C Bowser: 3:14

That's amazing! I wanna get back to that sort of full circle journey here in a second. Doing lots of innovative things across a number of categories and channels working with old friends who are quite accomplished, can you tell us a little bit more about your journey in innovation and how you got to where you are today?

Charlie Fink: 3:36

That's gonna involve telling my life story, which takes a little while when you're my age. Let me start out by saying I started out like every young person who wants to be in the entertainment business with no one and nothing to help me. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I went to art school. You know, I didn't have any other advantages except it was the eighties. And if you were a young Jewish guy on the make, you had plenty of people to hire you who are exactly like you. You know, and that's how I tended to hire people as well, much to my regret, because I can see clearly somebody like me is not a suitable employee for a big company. So I'm trapped in a consulting world. You know, as you said I consult with many companies. Some pay me, some don't. I write about some of them, some I don't. The money that I do make from consulting is de minimus. I don't charge very much when I do charge, although I am working with somebody now who's no. We're gonna turn this into a business." So that's exciting because I've never really professionalized, my consulting business. You know, there are people who make a pretty nice living from it who don't know as much as I do, but you have to package it up and you have to have somebody out there selling it. Getting back to my journey, so I broke into the entertainment industry. I started out as a PA and then I was a location manager. This is in Chicago where I went to graduate school. There were several Hollywood movies that got shot in Chicago at that time. It was a popular location, it was inexpensive. And it offered a fresh city and a fresh look that, other films did not have. There was a period there where a dozen well-known films, including"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and several films that I worked on, including"Nothing in Common" which was a Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason vehicle. Most students don't know who Jackie Gleason is, so it's so funny. You ask them about performers from the thirties, forties, and the fifties, or even the sixties that were so famous when I was growing up, they have no knowledge of them. Going back to my journey in Hollywood, I met on"Nothing in Common" Alex Rose, who was the producer of"Norma Rae" and she was producing this film for Gary Marshall and went on to do five films with Gary, so she lost her story editor. Typically, if you're a producer, some studio pays for your development assistant and you network your way through town meeting other assistants and people at events and you start building up a network and eventually you start hearing about jobs."Oh, do you know the Paramount's looking for this?""Did you know they're interviewing for that over at Columbia Pictures?" I heard from a friend of mine, Cynthia Sherman, who moved to LA and she had been working in Chicago Theater and I had friends in Chicago Theater naturally from going to grad school there, and they're like,"Oh, Charlie Fink moved to Hollywood.""When you get there, look him up." So we had lunch together and, she's a lovely person and had worked, you know, in the artistic director's office and had some sense of dramaturgy and she may have even had a degree in theater. In any event, like the day after we have lunch, Bette Midler and Bonnie Bruckheimer are walking out of Gary's office and Bonnie Bruckheimer liked me. So she stops at my desk and she raps on it, you know,'cause there's like a bullpen of six people sitting outside of Gary's office and she goes,"I need a Charlie. Anybody who knows a Charlie, have them contact my office." So I get on the phone and I call Cynthia Sherman, and that office at that time was on the Disney lot. So Cynthia goes over there, they hire her like the next day. So a couple weeks later, she's walking across the Disney lot and she runs into Peter Schneider, who she knew from Chicago Theater when she was an intern. Peter was one of the producers of the Olympics Arts Festival, so he got to know Jeff Katzenberg. When Katzenberg moved to Disney, he brought Peter with him as the VP of Animation. So she's walking across the lot and she runs into him doing development with Bette Midler, which probably meant exactly what I was doing for Gary, which was reading scripts and running out for lunch. And he says to her,"Do you know development people? I need to have a development person inside a feature animation." And she goes,"Oh yeah. I know a guy who went to art school." So I got a job as a junior executive, this was 1986 at Disney Animation. And my job at Disney Animation was to help them develop ideas for animated movies. And the ideas that we were working on that time were"Beauty and the Beast" and"Aladdin". And there were some other lesser pictures,"The Rescuers Down Under" which was a sequel to a very sweet, old fashioned movie. I worked on other things like the"Duck Tales" movie and prosaic titles like that, Mickey starring in"Prince and the Pauper" But, obviously working on those classic animated movies was you know,"Little Mermaid" wasn't in production when I was there. Alan Menken had an office next to mine where he would endlessly play that beginning vamp from"Aladdin" Boom, ba boom! So my first year at Disney was scored by the opening for"Aladdin"'cause I think he'd just bang it out while he was thinking.

Nathan C Bowser: 8:44

Oh my gosh, I have to take a minute and just celebrate, you're in that like large white box, VHS-cassette-era of Disney classics. You're speaking you know, to a generation, to my generations very specifically. This was foundational content that we're consuming. I also have to point out, the Aladdin Magic Carpet VR ride is often signaled as a lot of people's first entry or inspiration about virtual reality. I love that you're such an OG you were there when they were developing"Aladdin" as an idea!

Charlie Fink: 9:21

I was. They had a million consultants on that project, including Avi Bar-Zeev.

Nathan C Bowser: 9:27

Yes! There's

Charlie Fink: 9:28

a guy you should get on your show.

Nathan C Bowser: 9:30

Oh, we've talked with Avi on The AR minute and, it's been too many minutes since we've chatted with him.

Charlie Fink: 9:36

Like Rony. He knows a lot about a lot.

Nathan C Bowser: 9:39

I love this idea, Charlie, that as an art student with really not a lot of handholds to pull yourself up by, with community, with grit, and with being in the right place, being helpful, in the right moments gave you this opportunity.

Charlie Fink: 9:57

That's a great insight because you have to help people without expecting anything in return. So first of all, while a junior executive, I came up with this idea for Bambi in Africa. We were looking for boy movies and I said, let's do Bambi in Africa with African music and, you know, world music was really big then. Then I was into Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who ended up actually providing some of the score for the film because we wanted to make it feel authentic. They promoted me to Vice President of Animation. I was the youngest studio vice president. I was there two years before they promoted me. So I was the youngest studio vice president for a while, and I have coasted on that my entire career. I wanted to go work in live-action. I felt like that's where the action was. This is probably one of my first huge strategic mistakes in my career because I did not truly understand how huge animation was gonna become. I should have seen it, but I didn't see it. I had this sort of seventies, eighties vision of Hollywood and I wanted to be a big producer. I wanted to be a studio executive in live-action. You have to understand, this is back in 1991, animation was still viewed as a backwater for executives. I was working on"Fantasia 2000" in 1991, so I kind of felt like there's not a lot of action in animation for me. So when I got offered a job to move over to live-action, I took it. Unfortunately I was working for a sociopath, and a well-known sociopath in Hollywood. I won't name his name just because who knows who listens and what trouble, but everybody who knew Disney knows who this guy was. They kept him around for a long time because he was a brilliant film producer. And, like the old Woody Allen joke, they needed the eggs. But those were the days before HR departments where you could really be like Scott Rudin and throw telephones at people and just act out in a childish, vicious way. Eventually Roy Disney, who was a mentor, but also a friend and was with Peter, overseeing the animation department. He was, chairman. And we were having lunch. Oh God, Roy was a funny and so brilliant. But it was fun to have lunch with him except he ate with a burning cigarette in his hand. That's how addicted to nicotine he was, he couldn't stand the feeling of being full with food and all the blood rushing through his stomach, without diminishing the amount of nicotine in his body. He was in his late seventies until he died of stomach cancer. But Roy said,"You should team up with my son Tim. He wants to buy, a technology company or an entertainment technology company. You guys would be natural partners." So Tim and I started looking for a company to acquire, and we found this company in Chicago called Virtual World. it was called Virtual World Entertainment. The product was called BattleTech. And it was, essentially modified flight simulators. And instead of putting you in the sky where it's very difficult to find people and to interact with them you're mostly firing missiles going 600 miles an hour at things that are 10 miles away. But on the planet Solaris, where you were piloting a mech and you know, the other people in the simulation were piloting the other mechs you saw outside of your quote unquote"window." So we joined forces with them. We continuously improved that product until, you know, four years later. It was a fantastic cockpit experience and we built a lot of outposts for Dave and Busters, but it was a terrible business. And location-based entertainment generally is a terrible business. I see some companies succeeding with it but it is the kid's birthday party business, right? You've gotta fill that place up on Saturday during the day, not just Saturday night. Not to go down that rabbit hole, but that was the business that Tim and I were in. And as a result of being in that business, I came to be viewed as a digital media executive at a time when there were few of those beasts. So I got recruited by AOL to be their senior vice president of original content. So that was AOL Studios, AOL Greenhouse. Eventually I ended up running AOL's entertainment and lifestyle channels, including games. I did that for about a year. Then, you know, AOL was a company like many tech companies that did a re-org every year. So eventually a re-org came for me and I was promoted to being Vice President of Special Projects, which means I sat in an office by myself and I got to pitch things to my bosses until it was, you know, I had a big contract with severance and everything else. So they had to choose the right time to cut me loose and pay me off, which came with the Netscape acquisition. But my last act at AOL was to pitch a product called AOL Business Cards. So you'd put yourself on AOL with your resume and your work history and you'd be in a category like let's say dentists in Washington DC. So you could find all the other dentists and the dentists could find you, or you're a contractor and you wanna find carpenters in your area, or you know people who do framing or what's concrete, whatever. And so they said,"You can't sell advertising against business cards. It's a stupid idea!" In the next year Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn! But AOL had so many opportunities like that we really could not see the forest through the trees. AOL was the first social network and they didn't even realize it.

Nathan C Bowser: 15:23

This idea of being like a leading technology mega corporation. In the nineties, AOL was your internet service provider. It was a content provider. It was, music and entertainment. It was search. We thought we'd be in

Charlie Fink: 15:41

the banking business. We were like, you know Meta is today just so arrogant and so full of assumptions. It's actually made me rather timid as an investor because, you know, I know that the internal workings of these companies are quite different than our experience of them from the other side of the wall.

Nathan C Bowser: 15:59

That idea that a company so big and enigmatic might not necessarily understand the opportunity in front of it is a really juicy one, right? To know that even at the highest levels there could be blinders to what makes a successful business or how to bring an innovative innovation to the market. And it also shows like why upstart innovators can sometimes turn a whole industry upside down because they're paying attention.

Charlie Fink: 16:29

They turn the industry upside down, but they weren't the ones who benefited from it.

Nathan C Bowser: 16:33

Yep. Love it!

Charlie Fink: 16:34

They also could not sustain their advantage. We knew at the time that we had a temporary advantage, and the company was so anxious to show revenue at that point to show positive revenue that they couldn't focus on anything else. Wall Street had, run up their value as trading like crazy. We think a tech company today is 30x and a growth company, maybe like Nvidia was at some point like 100x. AOL was like that company, it was like 100x. So they had to show revenue, they had to show momentum, acquisitions. AOL passed on acquiring Google. Probably would not have won search had they done so. AOL was protecting the, unprotectable part of the business, which is ad sales, which just follows consumer activity, has no loyalty to a platform. Remember, we had good reason to think we were the internet, but we also knew that the web was a huge threat. AOL ended up losing the game to upstarts like Google and Facebook, who recognized that AOL was doing those things, but so poorly that an outside company would have much more success. And again, these were web-based companies, which, grown up on the early internet worrying about how to reach AOL's audience. So I left AOL and I immediately started a company based on an idea I had an AOL that had been shot down, called eAgents. And the idea is that you would fill out a form. You know, it was the Yahoo homepage, a customized Yahoo homepage delivered to you via email because the Yahoo homepage didn't exist. And the first place everybody went online was email. Nobody had a smartphone. Nobody had social media. Social media at that time was Instant Messenger. And then ICQ came along and was the web-based version of Instant Messenger. And of course, AOL acquired them not quite understanding how important messaging was gonna be on smartphones. And they should have been because email, was a huge innovation in asynchronous communication, right? It combined instant with asynchronicity. So it wasn't as long as getting a letter in the mail, but you didn't have to respond to it immediately, and that was a revolutionary change in communications. And again, I don't think AOL saw that. So I started eAgents I raised$3 million. We made a deal with Yahoo, which basically using opt out, gave us like 8 million users. So along comes American Greetings. It says you have 8 million users of your email thing. We want that product for our ad sales deal with AOL. So they bought the company. I became President and Chief Creative Officer of American Greetings in Cleveland. I commuted from Northern Virginia where we had moved while I was working for AOL and started commuting to Cleveland. So I'd, you know, be out Sunday night and be back Thursday night. And, you know, we lived that way for three or four years. But we, I wasn't gonna move to Cleveland. And so at a certain point, you know, I switched to a non-executive chairman role on the board. Eventually, American Greetings brought that company. When they bought our company, they were thinking they were gonna spin that off as an IPO as a separate company. But then 2000 happened and eventually in 2004, they went private with the company after negotiating with the outside investors like my VCs. after American Greetings, I felt you know what? I did not want to be an executive. I don't wanna move again. I don't want to do all the things you do when you take a job as a senior VP someplace. I started doing creative things. I joined the board of the New York Musical Festival. I ultimately became its producer and chairman. I did that for 10 years. And I kind of just watched the other kids play at around 2012 or 2013, I thought this kinda sucks. I need to get back to work. You know work is what really gives life meaning. And just, you know, theater is such a weird job. I was like, this is a weird job I gave myself, and all I do is spend money on it. So I wanted to get back into tech and it was too late, Nathan. I was a 53-year-old ex-CEO who hadn't been relevant in 10 years. So people were like, I went to see Jim Bankoff, who had worked for me at AOL and started Vox Media, right? He's chairman of Vox. So Jim and I are having lunch and I share with him that I wanna go back to work. And he goes, that's great. What can you do?" And I said you know what I can do." And he said I don't really, because the context then was that you were AOL's entertainment guy from Disney and you were super relevant and you knew all the Hollywood people and AOL needed you. But now that's not the situation, so what can you do?" You know, I guess that was took a lot of wind outta my sails in terms of getting another job. I started to think about things and I had started when I first went to college I wanted to be a writer, and writing has always been a big part of my career, right? We read and write more than we ever have because of smartphones. We're reading most of the day. I know people are listening to music and playing games, but at least for myself and I think people who are professionals, we're reading all day. In any event, I started writing and posting on Medium. This was a result of running into Gary Vaynerchuk, who I had worked with at AOL. When he was running Wine Library for his parents, he came to visit AOL. The account management people are like,"Should we bring him by? Do you wanna meet him?" I'm like,"Oh f#ck yes!" And he's 15! I am like,"How can you sell liquor?" He goes it's my parents' liquor store. They just didn't understand the internet." So that was Gary's start as becoming the biggest marketing expert on social media. So he wrote this book and I ran into him in New York and the first thing he says is,"Yeah, I can drink the wine now." And

Nathan C Bowser: 22:39

That guy's got a memory!

Charlie Fink: 22:40

We started talking. Yeah. Incredible! But a lot of guys are like that. Like, why would Gary you know, he's got so many people to remember! I said,"You know, I'd love to write a book." And he said how's your blog going?" And I said,"My blog?" He said if you can't write a blog, how are you gonna write a book?" So I thought, oh yeah, this is so obvious. So I started writing on Medium, this is like 2014 maybe, and I wrote about everything I had ever done. I wrote about film, I wrote about social media, I wrote about theater, I wrote about Disney. I wrote 30 articles on everything, and they were roundly ignored. And then I ran into a guy that I had worked with at Disney Imagineering, and he goes to me,"Oh, you're writing, that's great! You should write about VR! VR. Weren't you? Mr. VR in the nineties? Why aren't you writing about VR? Palmer Luckey just sold Oculus to Facebook for 3 million dollars. You should be Mr. VR again!" I'm like,"Oh, come on Brian." That was 25 years ago. And then my wife says if you don't like the results writing about what you think you should write about, maybe you should write about what Brian thinks you should write about." So I spent about two weeks doing research. I knew nothing about augmented reality at this moment, or AI. And I wrote this 2015 what is AR? What is VR? Is it valuable? Is it happening? What's with the Oculus story? Now that I'm an experienced online journalist and opinion writer, who's gonna read 2000 words in the New York Times anymore?! For whatever reason, that story got more hits in 24 hours than the previous 30 put together. I don't know why it was maybe the right keywords, but maybe it was in this young community, my voice and my perspective was welcomed. And I didn't really know that at the time. I just knew that I had a tremendous dopamine hit, so I did it again and again. And three months later, in less than three months, the phone rings and it's Lewis DVorkin, who's the Chief Creative Officer of Forbes. And he used to be a colleague at Disney. So he knew me better than I knew him, and he calls me up and says,"Hey, we see you writing about VR. We need somebody to cover VR. I'm like,"Oh, that's great. I'm not really, you know that much of a technology expert." He said,"Don't worry. When you're hired by Forbes, you're an expert." And, you know, basically I got a master's degree in XR from the people in the community.