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This was the most unique and fun episode I’ve done in a while, and it starts in a very unexpected place…

With the art of clowning.

Strange I know, but stick with us, because we quickly connect that world to technology, robotics, and why it holds surprisingly powerful lessons for this moment in time; especially if we want to design intelligent, embodied systems that humans actually want to engage with.

Our guest today is Pasquale D’Silva, CEO of The Illusion of Life, a company building characters and personalities into robots to make them interesting, fun, warm, and worthy of trust.

This all starts with their partnership with Boston Dynamics, where they’ve taken the Spot robot dog and turned it into a character with a real personality, called Spark.

In this chat, we talk about the relationship between humans and machines, and explore all kinds of crevasses, including trust, presence, emotional intelligence, and why artists—not just engineers—may be the key to building joyful, human-centered robots.

If you’re curious about the future of human–machine interaction, you’re gonna love this one. It will stretch your imagination in all the best ways.

So with that, enjoy this episode with Pasquale D’Silva.

Apple Podcast Link

Spotify Podcast Link

What if machines could learn the world the way humans do?

Not by crunching data and predicting tokens, but by understanding the world and how it works?

Imagine a robot that doesn’t just see a chair, but understands it— its purpose, its relationship to the table, the way you might pull it closer before sitting down.

That’s the world Matt Miesnieks is building.

Matt is the CEO of Primate.AI, a new kind of physical AI company rethinking how machines perceive and interact with reality. His team is exploring what happens when perception stops being a math problem and starts becoming an act of intuition.

Before founding Primate, Matt helped shape the modern era of spatial computing. He co-founded 6D.AI, the company that pioneered the AR Cloud—a real-time 3D map of the world that made digital content persistent in physical space. 6D.AI was later acquired by Niantic, creators of Pokémon Go, where its technology now powers their next generation of AR experiences.

Now, with Primate.AI, Matt’s taking his biggest swing yet: building machines that perceive reality the way we do—not through pixels, but through concepts, memory, and innate understanding.

If 6D.AI gave AR its eyes, Primate.AI is giving machines a mind.

In this conversation, we explore the future of embodied intelligence, what comes after language models, and why understanding the world like a human may be the only real path to AGI.

Today’s guests are building one of the most ambitious startups in the entire spatial computing industry.

The company is called RP1, and we’re sitting down with co-founders Sean Mann and Dean Abramson.

On its face, RP1 is the world’s first true metaverse browser, trying to do for spatial computing what browsers like Mosaic and Internet Explorer did for the web.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath the surface, RP1 is so much more... They’re building all the infrastructure and protocols required for a truly spatial internet—one where immersive, persistent digital worlds stream on demand, where physical and virtual environments seamlessly merge, and where millions of users can interact in one, shared world, not a bunch of silo’d virtual experiences.

In this episode, we dive into what RP1 actually is, how it scales to millions of users, and why they believe app stores must die.

We also unpack their vision for the core backbone of this future, a Spatial Fabric—a kind of real-time, distributed protocol for the metaverse that manages everything from identity and maps to avatars and live services.

This one’s technical, philosophical, and wildly ambitious. Let’s get into it.