The Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

Trying to Make a Nickel with Tech and Stories — Charlie Fink Pt. 2

• Nathan C Bowser • Season 1 • Episode 32

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Part Two: 

Charlie Fink is a veteran of the extended reality (XR) and tech media industries, known for his Forbes column, the AI/XR Podcast, having attended AWE (Augmented World Expo) nine times, written three books, and taught as a professor at Chapman University. His work now blends XR, AI, and storytelling, with a focus on what’s new and breaking in technology.

Key Takeaways:

  • Shift to AI: Charlie’s focus has moved from XR to AI, which he believes represents a value creation opportunity on par with the internet and mobile revolutions.
  • Wearables and the Future: He sees unlimited potential in wearables, envisioning a future where humans merge more closely with machines, although he remains skeptical about the need for displays in smart glasses.
  • Unintended Consequences: While acknowledging the risks and unintended consequences of new technologies, Charlie is pragmatic about the industry’s trajectory, noting that developers and users will inevitably adopt new tools regardless of warnings.
  • Teaching and Community: He is passionate about teaching students to use AI effectively and remains deeply engaged with the tech community, both as a consultant and as a speaker.
  • Storytelling and Hollywood: Charlie is working on animated and AI-driven content in Hollywood, emphasizing the importance of balancing creative and business decisions to achieve transcendent experiences.
  • Podcasting and Media: His podcast, recently rebranded to “The AI/XR Podcast,” has grown significantly, with 50,000 downloads per month, demonstrating the value of longevity and adaptability in media.

Charlie reflects on the evolution of technology, the importance of timing, and the inevitability of most ideas failing despite the brilliance of their creators. He continues to explore new opportunities in tech, media, and consulting, driven by a desire to remain relevant and make a positive impact.

Subscribe for more inspiring stories of innovation. 

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. 

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Nathan C Bowser:

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 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!

Charlie Fink:

I've been to AWE nine times, so I'm a student of the medium. And eventually after writing three books, I am also a professor of the medium and it dovetails with my beat. I study XR all week long. My focus has shifted to AI as XR has matured. Because I'm more interested and I always have been more interested in my career to what's breaking and what's new. AI is unique in so much as I believe it is, I never thought I would see a value creation opportunity on the scale the internet again in my life. I thought that was the big change. The second change, and I missed this completely, was mobile. Mobile changed everything. It changed the internet, it changed everything. And now AI. The idea that we could have a third disruption on this scale over the course of 30 years to have lived through it does give me a unique perspective that makes my work, I think, unique. That said, I love this community. It's a relatively small community. It is maturing. It is still growing. I think the opportunity is, unlimited for wearables. I just think we are gonna merge more and more. As Pattie Maes famously said,"We are gonna become cyborgs." Maybe not in the way people think, but that general thought that we're gonna get closer and closer to our machines, is a hundred percent right. And of course, Pattie's perspective is: Not so fast. Right? Because unintended consequences. You know, they say, there's a Greek saying, which is"There is no gift from the gods that comes without a curse." You know, Pattie's perspective is before we rush into that, maybe we should take a beat and consider the unintended consequences. And I will tell you right now that there is no technology that man would not rush into headfirst regardless of the consequences, especially when the moneymaking opportunity is clear. So although Pattie is right, she is also wrong. That's what academics have the privilege of being wrong about. She's researching unintended consequences in the hope it'll reach somebody in some position of influence. But the truth is those people are so busy remaking the world in their image, they don't have time to hear about unintended consequences. You know, the users will just have to deal with that. And so that's where we are. That's what's gonna happen with AI. Deal with it. I'm a bit of an iconoclast at Chapman they're like,"It's ruining people's cognitive ability." Maybe? So is Google Maps. Deal with it. So we should be teaching our students how to be great at using AI. And a lot of them have the opposite view and I don't blame them. And I feel like here in Los Angeles and Hollywood, you know, there's a lot of resistance to AI and a lot of warning over the passing of one version of the industry into another. The silly thing about Hollywood, of course, is that everybody in Hollywood thinks Hollywood is the world.

Nathan C Bowser:

And

Charlie Fink:

Hollywood is a relatively small industry vis-a-vis, all the giant energy, transportation, all these categories that,

Nathan C Bowser:

Yep.

Charlie Fink:

that like Hollywood is like a little pimple. Apple could buy all of Hollywood and it'd be rounding error.

Nathan C Bowser:

So this is very interesting, Charlie. This theme of connection, inspiration and these, you know, community long-term relationships has really taken you through some really cool eras of media, of technology. This very relatable, big tech moment, in the early teens was just, startups were huge! Everything was growth! Unicorns was the way! And if you weren't new, data-driven and immediately viral, like just get out of the way. I heard so many people got disillusioned in tech, you know, with those exact same experiences that you had. Seeing all of these foibles and missed opportunities as well as being a part of some really dope shit, what keeps you coming back to an industry that is kind of small, too early, that has some of these challenges. What is it that like keeps bringing you back into the space and keeps capturing your attention?

Charlie Fink:

I feel like part of my mission is to follow this space. You know, part of my destiny is to follow this space. A lot of my attention has shifted to AI, as has a lot of my teaching. When AI hit at the end of 2022, I was first of all stunned at how small my thinking about AI had been. I was aware of ChatGPT and that these developments were going on, but my exposure to it made me think it was"meh". I didn't have enough imagination to understand what it was gonna become. But when OpenAI launched ChatGPT and DALL-E, I started to understand. And I actually, said to my wife at that point,'cause my first book was called"Charlie Fink's Metaverse" And it's the only technology book I've ever heard of that actually was a best seller. It was an AR enabled book. It was the first of those. And then Zuck started promoting the metaverse. He changed the name of his company, and it was great for a guy who had written a book called"Metaverse." But in the fall of 2022, I saw that the Metaverse gravy train was grinding to a halt. Partly because it had played itself out. It's after all that you mean the Metaverse is Roblox? Now that you mention it, yeah. I know if Matthew Ball were here, he has a much more elaborate and technology based view of the metaverse and that is happening in the background, but that's part of the natural development of these technologies like 5G anyway. The real reason Nathan, is that, and I've learned this about myself, and I had this epiphany when I was about 60, you'd think I would've learned about myself before then, which is that I need to be relevant. I need to be relevant to something. Typically something, you know, I've succeeded most of my career working in niches and working with technologies very early. VR has kind of stuck with me, AR as well. You know, it's been an exciting ride. I don't think our end place was anything like any of us thought we were looking at. My current perspective is that wearables have a big future. And glasses are a fantastic platform for sensors. And when those sensors are working with AI, feeding it contextual data connected to your phone, which has geolocation, you have a very powerful wearable ecosystem. Almost an operating system into itself. As far as displays go the expensive part of that, right? So I'm talking about the Meta Ray-Bans and what should have been Apple's glasses. They killed that effort in favor of the Vision Pro, which will certainly become a business school case study in stupidity. And of course Meta's, if you have a very specific use case like translation, you can see the argument for it. But again, it can also be done with earbuds or just with regular audio smart glasses. So I guess I would say where I've come down to on display is, first of all, you gotta have your phone with you or some puck. And you can put a display, this is a great freaking display. Most people consume all their content on this display. You're never gonna have a display that good on your face. So since you have to carry this with you everywhere, what is the point of putting the display in the glasses? It's hard. It's expensive. If I can have all that in frames, or maybe the sensors can be mounted another way, a lapel pin. I have no idea. If I can wear sensors in that way and have them work with my phone and AI and to give me, you know, and it's connected to the web. Tell me about restaurants on this street. Tell me about the history of this cathedral that I'm looking at. Oh, I've taken a picture of a foreign language menu. Please translate it for me. So all of that can be done without displays. So I am losing my religion on displays. We've been working on it for 10 years now. Google's coming out with one and Meta's adding it, doing a version of Ray-Bans with it. And so I, you know, my experience with Vision Pro is, nobody at Apple could tell me what the applications were other than what the device did. Whoa! 3D photography! So they had no idea what it was

Nathan C Bowser:

for. Productivity!

Charlie Fink:

It was just a disaster on every level.

Nathan C Bowser:

The broad spatial computing community spent decades just obsessed about degrees and nits and, how much of a screen, how bright of a screen, how full-color of a screen. And what you're pointing at is that when you're talking the only thing that I could think of that requires a screen in many of those instances, is that we have been trained that technology is so dumb that smart assistants are not very smart. We want a screen so that we can see the interface, so that we can see with our own eyes and trust that we know what's going on. And that to me is like a user experience problem. One of the major differentiator between all of the AR glasses that are out there and the one thing that Apple did to contribute to the conversation really was show elegant, considered user experiences that help people get into the technology in a blink so that they can start to ask those next questions and be like, useful. And you know, the laggards are some of the more sort of cutting edge. Like you, you put'em on, you don't know how they work. You have to fumble your way through. Just love this idea that like a screen might just be like a pacifier, you know? That's holding us back to this next layer. It seems like one of those areas where the worry about future malfeasance lost out, the unintended consequences lost out to the developers just really need this tool to move this forward.

Charlie Fink:

Yeah.

Nathan C Bowser:

Yeah.

Charlie Fink:

Let's see. You know, I'm hoping when those devices come out, they'll come with use cases. Google I/O is going on this week. They sent me a bunch of videos finally of what the experience is like inside of their headset, and it is the same prosaic stuff we've already seen. It's translation, it's directions. I don't know about you. I have a heads-up display in my car that I never use. I use the Google navigation system. It's perfectly fine for that purpose. I don't feel like glasses are gonna make that better. Reading text messages in your glasses happens to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People really wanna be interrupted whenever?! In their field of view? Really? And instead I'm gonna have to go up here to dismiss it. I would never choose that feature. Meanwhile, the features that would be really awesome, like facial recognition are gonna be totally illegal.

Nathan C Bowser:

You got, how do you opt in on a street level?

Charlie Fink:

There may be specialized apps that allow you to do that at a conference.

Nathan C Bowser:

AUR+A. Yeah.

Charlie Fink:

Something like that. And then they're useless after the conference. But not enough people are gonna have the glasses and people aren't gonna walk around in a conference going like this. But you know, at AWE many more people know me than I know. And so people start talking to me, the assumption is that I know them and in many cases they are familiar to me because we've all been doing this for 10 years. If I only could put in my glasses who they are, I would be so happy! What would work for me? Is the AI whispering in my ear."Oh, that's Nathan Bowser." People are gonna have crazy eyes inside of their glasses. You're gonna be talking to somebody in their glasses and they're gonna be like, looking down like this, and you'd be like,"Hello!"

Nathan C Bowser:

Like when somebody is multitask, when they're in a Zoom call on the Vision Pro and they're multitasking, they like turn away and like they're physically doing something else.

Charlie Fink:

Like being on a Zoom call and you see

Nathan C Bowser:

Yep.

Charlie Fink:

somebody there going like this, you know totally what they're doing.

Nathan C Bowser:

Amazing! Charlie, I'm having so much fun. You mentioned some things that, you were working on now using AI in media. I'm curious, looking forward how are these themes of like deep tech and storytelling and AI evolving in your work now?

Charlie Fink:

I'm working on a series of stories about AI in Hollywood and where I think all of this is gonna go in the next five to 10 years. And it has led me, investigating it and studying it has led me to working with my friend first on an animated series. And, then hopefully it'll lead to a movie or a streaming series. But if you can keep the cost low enough, you can make money on shorts on social media, YouTube, and Reels. But you have to keep your cost really low, like$500 a minute. You know, that means that you're gonna have to, choose content that is native to AI that takes advantage of AI. That's why it's an anime show. Because we all expect a little jankiness from anime. And if you make some shortcuts or have to do a scene where all you've got is mouth shapes for animation it's okay'cause it's gonna be on a teeny tiny little screen and everybody knows that anime can be very low budget and choppy. We'll see. It's a really interesting project. I love working with Rob Minkoff. You know, the guy's a genius creatively, he's great. He and I have been friends for 35 years, so we have a very deep basis of trust. And I completely, a hundred percent creatively defer to him. He's so much better than I am. I'm a guy with opinions, but so is every producer in Hollywood. The problem with producers is I will make the most expeditious choices in the interest of the project, and he will make the best artistic choices to service the project. And so the tension is always, you have to balance those two things. But if you go with the producer's way, you're just gonna end up with a serviceable, low budget project. And we don't want it to be serviceable, right? We want it to be transcendent. We want you to forget about how it was made and care about who's in it and what's gonna happen to them. If you're worried about how it was made, you've lost.

Nathan C Bowser:

Oh my gosh. Such great creative advice! I love this idea of a transcendent experience. It leads me to my next question where I talk about goals, right? The show is The Glow Up, which is a notable rebirth or a transformation. I'm curious, as somebody who has had many different lives and careers, in this tech and communication space, do you have goals for the next six months that you're working on?

Charlie Fink:

It would be great to see the thinking I've been doing about AI and Hollywood become a book. No one really reads books, but it's the fact of the book that matters and it hopefully could reignite the speaking business I enjoyed after"The Metaverse" was published.'Cause that was a really good four year run. I'd like to have a little bit more of that because you know, you make money flying to Korea and talking to Samsung or to Dubai and talking to government people. That was the kind of consulting and speaking I was doing. It was awesome! It paid well and it hurt that business ended for me. Fortunately I do have a small consulting business, helping tech companies tell their stories and sometimes do strategic planning. And oftentimes I do it for free because I just, I love people. I love the people in this community. It gives me great pleasure and satisfaction when I see people who are succeeding. Because I also see many people who disappear and you know, I know they were smart people with great vision. But you know, in this cruel world, so many things have to align with timing and everything else that it's just inevitable that most ideas fail. And I've had way more ideas fail than succeed throughout my career. In the next six months I'm hoping we can get through this social media series with Rob, and get it out there and see people's reactions and hopefully make enough money so that we can keep going and use that data to make it more and more popular. We have a big social media/movie star, who we've signed up, and we'll make a big announcement about these things probably in the next four or five weeks. You have to get all the deals closed in a Hollywood way, and believe it or not, that takes longer than it's gonna take to produce the actual content. So that's why people are like, Hollywood's gonna disappear. I'm like no! You know, you're gonna need celebrities more than ever because in a sea of undifferentiated AI content, it's hard to know what is a real work and what is just synthetic slop. That'll make your social media feed more entertaining and visual. But it also will clutter things up with special effects you know we see with Studio Ghibli or people folding themselves up using the Pika app and you know, these things are cute but it blocks content of deeper meaning. Having a celebrity is gonna make a big difference. Also, in general when you're producing cinematic AI you have human fingerprints all over it that have to be documented, right? So that you can protect the work. We're doing visual development offline. We're hiring artists to figure out the look and feel of the film because we want to be able to protect it, and it's difficult, it's not impossible, but it's difficult to protect AI when you don't document what the humans have done. That's the state of the art right now. And also more and more ethical models are hitting the market and those models are gonna get better and better. So that legal concern probably will be greatly diminished in the next year or two. And you know, I still write the column and do the podcast every week. I teach every semester. So all those things dovetail together. To teach I would have to basically write the column anyway and to do the podcast the first 15 minutes of the podcast is news and opinion, which we couldn't do if I hadn't written the column the day before.'Cause that's the script for the podcast. And then, you the format is like a Daily Show thing. So we do the kind of news roundup/opinion, the three of us together and then we bring in whoever the guest is for a 30, 40 minute interview. And we've been getting great guests. We've done 245 shows, I think we've had about 210 different guests. So there's some repeaters in there. But it's funny, I was just looking at our stats'cause we're getting like 50,000 downloads a month. So I'm better known at this point for the podcast than my writing on Forbes. When people come up to me at AWE they're talking about the podcast. When I met people at SXSW and they're like,"Oh, you're Charlie Fink! Can you say'Good morning everybody?'" It's like the signature line of the podcast."Good morning everybody!" And I've done it 245 times. And here's advice for your podcast. Longevity really counts with podcasts. The first year we were getting like 20 people listen to the podcast. Right now we see numbers like, oh shit! 35,000 people listen to that podcast?! You know, it's crazy! But I think that also is because we changed the name of the podcast from"This Week in XR" a year ago to"The AI/XR Podcast" And that has made a big significant difference. And I do think by the way, the conversation about XR, which is no longer new, is about AI.

Nathan C Bowser:

Yeah, but I think it's partly due to my decade in the space and just familiarity having built a number of prototypes and apps that I've started to see, immersive technology, spatial computing, more as a content channel and differentiator, rather than a'market to build in." I've always talked about, you know, is it MR or VR? It's just the kind of screen you're using and now there's a'goggle-less' category for VR too.

Charlie Fink:

There's Lightfield Labs Labs, which is gonna, you know, making beings made of light that are photorealistic. Chairs that look like you can sit in them, that come out of the floor. You know, that are projected out of the bending light against these panels I guess they're doing a giant stadium installation where the scoreboard is gonna float over the fricking field!

Nathan C Bowser:

That is the future!

Charlie Fink:

Bonkers! We ain't seen nothing yet! The next 10 years should bring as many surprises as the last ten has.

Nathan C Bowser:

Oh goodness! Charlie Fink you have been so generous with your time and your insights on this, long and storied career. I'm really taken by this sort of presence that you have as you've moved through these different eras of communications technology and this flexibility that you've had to you know, move into these different roles and opportunities, and even like identities as, technology and opportunities have changed. Hands down you win the award for the most, like name drops and just jaw dropping anecdotes. And also, as somebody who is a advocate for creators, really, you know, wants to see the designers, the UXers, the artists, the content makers, have a part, a voice, a place in, you know, the development of this technology, to hear somebody come from your background, scrape their way into that opportunity and still be, engaged and passionate in it so many decades later. Such an inspiring conversation! Thank you so much for joining on The Glow Up today. Thanks for having me Nathan! This has been amazing! Can't wait to hear more.