Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson

Is the metaverse actually dead or just badly branded?
On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Christian Venables, co-founder of Radical Realities.
Christian specializes in immersive technology and AI, staying at the forefront of emerging tools, platforms, and workflows. With a strong foundation in architecture and design, he has transitioned into extended reality (XR), exploring the evolving possibilities of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and spatial computing. He is the Co-Founder of Radical Realities, a global immersive studio of creative innovators operating entirely virtually. The studio delivers experiences that transcend the physical world, spanning metaverse development, gaming, AR/VR/MR, CGI, VFX, and AI consultancy. Throughout his career, Christian has led and contributed to immersive projects for globally recognized brands including Coachella, Universal, Disney, Cartier, and Hyundai.
Christian sits down with Geoff to break down why the metaverse will be rebranded and not abandoned. The real future isn’t cartoon avatars or fantasy worlds, but spatial computing, AR glasses, and ambient interfaces that blend seamlessly into everyday life. Despite years of hype, backlash, and false hope, the metaverse may finally be entering its most practical and powerful phase. Christian explains why the term itself may disappear, while the underlying technologies XR, spatial computing, AI-driven 3D design, and wearable AR glasses, are already reshaping how we work, learn, design, and collaborate. From Meta Ray-Ban display glasses and neural wristbands to Gravity Sketch, Unreal Engine, and AI-assisted worldbuilding; This conversation explores how immersive computing is moving beyond gimmicks into real-world utility, especially across architecture, engineering, education, and the creative industries.

In this video:
00:00 Intro
03:00 Is the metaverse dead or just misbranded?
06:00 Spatial computing vs virtual worlds
09:00 Why AR glasses matter more than headsets
12:00 Smart glasses: why this wave is different
15:00 Neural wristbands and gesture-based control
18:00 How quickly humans become dependent on tech
21:00 The split between human-made and AI-generated culture
24:00 Augmenting creativity instead of replacing it
27:00 Designing entirely inside VR
30:00 Gravity Sketch: true 3D creation explained
34:00 Why spatial collaboration beats screens
38:00 Real-world use cases: architecture & manufacturing
42:00 Why mouse and keyboard are reaching their limits
47:00 AI + XR: generating worlds in real time
52:00 What needs to happen before immersive tech scales
56:00 Should immersive computing be back on our radar?

Connect with Christian:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-venables-74542836/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/csavenables/
X: https://x.com/Csavenables

Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast
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What happens when the people building artificial intelligence quietly believe it might destroy us?

On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Gregory Warner, Peabody Award–winning journalist, former NPR correspondent, and host of the hit AI podcast The Last Invention.

Gregory Warner is a versatile journalist and podcaster. He has been recognized with a Peabody Award and other awards from organizations like Edward R. Murrow, New York Festivals, AP, and PRNDI. Warner's career includes serving as an East Africa correspondent, where he covered the region's economic growth and terrorism threats. He has also worked as a senior reporter for American Public Media's Marketplace, focusing on the economics of American health care. His work has been recognized with a Best News Feature award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Gregory sits down with Geoff for an honest conversation about the AI race unfolding today. After years spent interviewing the architects, skeptics, and true believers behind advanced AI systems, Gregory has come away with an unsettling insight: the same people racing to build more powerful models are often the most worried about where this technology is heading. This episode explores whether we’re already living inside the AI risk window, why AI safety may be even harder than nuclear safety, and why Silicon Valley’s “move fast and fix later” mindset may not apply to superintelligence. It also examines the growing philosophical divide between AI doomers and AI accelerationists. This conversation goes far beyond chatbots and job-loss headlines. It asks a deeper question few are willing to confront: are we building something we can’t control and, doing it anyway?

In this video:
00:00 Intro
03:00 AI models that already behave like elite hackers
05:00 Why the AI risk window may already be open
06:30 What AI safety actually means (and why it’s so hard)
12:00 Human-in-the-loop: safety feature or illusion?
15:00 AI as an alien intelligence, not a human one
19:00 The Silicon Valley AI arms race explained
21:00 OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI: who’s racing and why
25:00 The “Compressed Century” and radical AI optimism
27:00 Can AI actually solve humanity’s biggest problems?
33:00 Capital, competition, and the pressure to deploy
37:00 Is AI more dangerous than nuclear weapons?
39:00 The problem with comparing AI to past technologies
43:00 What happens to human agency in an AI-driven world?
45:00 How AI reshapes creativity, journalism, and truth
53:00 The quiet assumptions built into AI systems
55:00 Why optimism and fear both miss the full picture
59:00 What responsibility do users have?
01:01:00 The most important question we’re not asking about AI

Connect with Gregory:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radiogrego/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radiogrego/

Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcastFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

What happens to jobs, money, and meaning when intelligence becomes cheaper than labor and humans are no longer the smartest ones in the room?

On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and a leading voice in the global AI revolution.

Emad Mostaque is a businessman, mathematician, and former hedge fund manager. He is the co-founder and was CEO of Stability AI, the company behind the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. With a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Oxford, Emad Mostaque has significantly contributed to artificial intelligence. His vision for Stability AI was to “build the foundation to activate humanity’s potential” through open-source generative AI.

Emad sits down with Geoff to explore a future that may arrive far sooner than most people expect. He argues that within the next 1,000 days, artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape the global economy, upending work, capitalism, enterprise software, and even how we define human value. Drawing from his book The Last Economy, Emad lays out a stark and deeply thought-provoking framework for understanding what comes next when cognitive labor becomes economically irrelevant. This conversation explores the inevitabilities of exponential AI progress, including why intelligence is becoming “too cheap to measure,” how AI agents will replace many jobs done behind a screen, and the coming shift from human-plus-AI teams to AI-only systems. Beyond the economics, Emad also tackles the human question: where meaning comes from in a world where AI outperforms us at most cognitive tasks. He argues that resilience in the AI age will depend less on job titles and more on community, networks, relationships, and how deeply individuals engage with the technology itself.

In this video:
00:00 Intro
04:30 What is “The Last Economy”?
08:45 Intelligence becomes too cheap to measure
13:30 The three possible AI futures
18:00 Are humans becoming the weakest link?
22:15 The rise of economic agents
27:00 Digital doubles and the end of white-collar work
31:45 Enterprises racing toward zero employees
36:30 Why AI is cheaper than human labor (by orders of magnitude)
41:15 Software, SaaS, and the collapse of enterprise moats
46:00 The internet after AI agents
50:15 Who controls the “AI next to you”?
54:30 Open-Source vs Big Tech AI
58:45 The first one-person billion-dollar company
1:03:30 What humans are still for
1:07:00 How to prepare for the AI economy now

Connect with Emad:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emad-mostaque-9840ba274/?originalSubdomain=uk
X: https://x.com/EMostaque
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mostaquee/

Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcastFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Is artificial intelligence humanity’s greatest salvation, or the most dangerous force we’ve ever unleashed?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future concept, it’s a force already reshaping geopolitics, economics, warfare, and the human experience itself. In this year in review episode of Digital Disruption, we bring together the most provocative, conflicting, and urgent ideas from this past year to confront the biggest question of our time: What does AI actually mean for humanity’s future?

Across more than 40 conversations with leading technologists, journalists, researchers, and futurists, one theme dominated every debate, AI. Some guests argue that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence could trigger an extinction-level event. Others believe AI may usher in an era of total abundance, solving humanity’s hardest problems. And still others claim today’s AI hype is little more than marketing smoke and mirrors.

This episode puts those worldviews head-to-head.

In this episode:
00:00 The AI singularity is here
05:00 Existential threat or greatest opportunity?
10:00 Why no one agrees on ai’s future
15:00 The race toward AGI and superintelligence
20:00 The control problem nobody has solved
25:00 Intelligence has no morality
30:00 Capitalism, venture capital, and the AI arms race
35:00 Is AI just a marketing illusion?
40:00 Generative AI: Power, limits, and misuse
45:00 Autonomous weapons and modern warfare
50:00 Fear as the driver of dangerous innovation
55:00 Why AI is not like nuclear weapons
1:00:00 The first and second AI dilemmas
1:05:00 Handing decisions over to machines
1:10:00 Collapse, abundance, or course correction?

Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcastFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Are companies preparing for an AI-powered future or reacting out of fear of being left behind?
Looking ahead to 2026, Geoff Nielson and Jeremy Roberts sit down for an unfiltered conversation about artificial intelligence, the economy, and the future of work. As AI hype accelerates across markets, boardrooms, and headlines, they ask the hard questions many leaders and workers are quietly worrying about: Are we in an AI bubble? If so, what happens when expectations collide with reality?
This episode explores whether today’s massive investment in AI, GPUs, infrastructure, copilots, and generative tools is laying the foundation for long-term value or repeating the familiar patterns of past tech bubbles like the dot-com boom and the subprime mortgage crisis. Geoff and Jeremy break down why traditional metrics like price-to-earnings ratios matter, why Nvidia and big tech dominate the narrative, and why the real risk may not be collapse but widespread underperformance.
The conversation goes far beyond markets. They dig into the impact of AI on jobs, layoffs, and corporate restructuring, challenging the idea that AI is “taking jobs” versus being used as convenient cover for economic tightening. From IT, HR, and operations to customer-facing roles, they examine how AI could reshape workforce composition, accelerate automation, and create a new and potentially unsettling employment equilibrium. You’ll also hear a candid critique of how organizations are actually using AI today and what is to come next in 2026.

Tech Trends Report 2026: https://www.infotech.com/research/ss/tech-trends-2026?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=research

In this video:
00:00 Just add AI to everything?
03:45 Looking ahead to 2026: Nobody knows what’s coming
07:10 Are we in an AI bubble?
12:30 Comparing AI to the dot-com and 2008 crashes
18:10 Nvidia, GPUs, and the AI Gold Rush
24:20 Why AI infrastructure may be ahead of real-world use cases.
30:40 Markets untethered from reality
36:50 is AI really taking jobs or is something else happening?
43:30 The real employment question for 2026
49:40 Corporate bloat, back-office roles, and automation
56:10 Why most AI projects fail to deliver value
1:02:45 From productivity theater to real ROI
1:09:20 Faster horses vs. Real cars in AI
1:15:40 AI 2.0: Agents, experiments, and what comes next
1:22:10 The real risk ahead: Underperformance, not collapse

Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG