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- [00:00]
David Brown
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business wars ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. It's June 2025. In a home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles Cypress park neighborhood, an immigration raid is under. Agents in dark sunglasses and bulletproof vests hop out of their cars, shouting orders as they look for people to apprehend. This site has become common around la. The Department of Homeland Security has sent swarms of federal agents into the city, some from Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, others from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In less than a month, around 2,000 local immigrants have been rounded up. It's a time of fear and uncertainty, made worse by the agent's anonymity. Many of the names and badge numbers aren't always visible, and their faces are often hidden behind baseball caps, hoods and masks. It's nearly impossible to know who the agents are. In this Home Depot parking lot, a crowd of observers has started to gather, recording everything they can to document what is happening. As the Border Patrol agents try to push them back, they keep recording, and that's when they notice something surprising about the sunglasses worn by one of the agents. Their meta Ray Bans. In the middle of an immigration raid, someone from Border Patrol is wearing a personal recording device. Observers wonder, is he recording right now? Will the glasses be used to identify protesters at the scene, or is he just wearing them for intimidation? Whatever the agent's intentions, this moment adds to the growing unease over Meta's AI glasses. When the company formerly known as Facebook jumped into the smart glasses race in 2021, few saw it as particularly newsworthy. There were much bigger stories breaking about Facebook at the time, like whistleblower Francis Haugen sharing thousands of internal documents with the Wall Street Journal revealing Facebook's knowing contributions to real world harms or Facebook's subsequent rebrand to Meta, meant to signal a pivot away from data collection and toward its metaverse. Against all of that, Meta's collaboration with Ray Bans seemed like a harmless side quest. But as interest in the metaverse faded and interest in AI boomed, Meta pivoted. And once it added an AI assistant to its glasses, it brought a host of new questions to about privacy, data security, and the modern surveillance state. To explain how we got here, we're going back to the exact moment Meta Ray Bans stepped into the spotlight and found their way into daily life in a way no other smart glasses ever had before. With that surge in popularity came hidden consequences. Because now the question isn't whether smart glasses are here to stay. It's what people should do to protect themselves from their ever widening reach.
- [03:34]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
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- [04:05]
Leon Nayfak
exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, autowell has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantasy series. Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true Crime podcast. However you listen, listen. Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be Fascinating.
- [04:47]
David Brown
From audible originals I'm david brown and this is business war. The origin story of smart glasses started before Meta and before Google Glass. With a pair of Stanford students who really wanted to impress Mark Zuckerberg. Their invention? A pair of black frame sunglasses with a small camera embedded in the frame. They envisioned a future where those simple camera glasses could one day do more like recognize faces and provide augmented reality displays. And while those students specific version of smart glasses didn't quite make it, the future they predicted did. It's here. Meta sold 8 million pairs of its Ray Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone, and similar products are rolling out from every major tech giant. The future of smart glasses has arrived, and so has the reckoning. This is episode two I'm a Creep. It's September 27, 2023, in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Meta employees are gathering for the annual Meta Connect conference, where the company unveils new products, initiatives and goals for the coming year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks onto the outdoor stage, the lush California greenery framing the screen behind him. He waves at the crowd, trying to look casual, but if you look closer, his posture is ramrod straight. Zuckerberg has a lot of careful messaging he needs to get right. Every major tech company has a conference like this. Think Google's IO. They've been a staple of the industry long before Steve Jobs revealed Apple's first iPhone. But ever since then every tech CEO has been chasing that iPhone moment. That moment when the crowd sees your new product and audibly gasps, knowing its debut will usher in a sea of change. And Zuckerberg is no different. He knows he's no Steve Jobs, at least where product reveals are concerned. His last two Meta Connect keynotes made that painfully clear. Both of those presentations had been hyper focused on one thing. The Metaverse. Remember those strange looking digital avatars with no legs? Zuckerberg presented them at Connect 2021 as the future of remote work. He predicted people would meet up in Meta's virtual realm called Horizon Worlds, a sprawling app that costs billions to. But Horizon Worlds and its legless avatars flopped, and Zuckerberg was roasted as an out of touch leader with no conception of what humans actually want. And by 2023, the entire metaverse gambit is looking shaky. Meta Reality Labs, the division behind all things Metaverse, as well as its smart glasses, lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and Meta's shares dipped 60%. Investors are losing confidence. One shareholder wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg saying, quote, meta needs to get its mojo back. So now, standing before a smiling crowd at Connect 2023, Zuckerberg has a delicate needle to thread. He needs to signal to investors that Meta has fresh ideas without abandoning everything he's built so far. He clears his throat and uses every ounce of charisma he can muster. In his presentation, Zuckerberg focuses on three main pillars. First, the Meta Quest 3 headset. These sophisticated virtual reality goggles have been a passion of Zuckerberg's ever since Facebook bought Oculus, a virtual reality gaming company, back in 2014. They're a key component to accessing the Metaverse, so naturally, Meta has been working on improving them every year. Zuckerberg still believes gamers will embrace them, even if he was wrong in his prediction that people would use them for work zooms. But if you're trying to pull off a Steve Jobs level reveal, you save your biggest surprise for the finale. So in his second pillar, Zuckerberg talks about Meta's foray into the latest Silicon Valley obsession. Generative AI. Zuckerberg reveals that his team has spent thousands of hours developing AI Personas you can interact with, styled after different celebrities. Want to get in shape? Ask Victor, a fitness coach that looks and sounds like Dwyane Wade. Want to play a Dungeons and Dragons style role playing game? Get help from a dungeon master who looks and sounds like a certain 90s rapper. I mean, who hasn't wanted to play a Text adventure game with Snoop Doc. The crowd's response is friendly enough, but no real gasps yet. So now it's time for the third pillar, his coup de grace. A new, improved version of Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses. Zuckerberg quickly lists the upgrades, which include improved audio, better cameras, a lighter frame, and more styles. But then he goes on to what he hopes will be the true iPhone reveal moment of this conference. But the most interesting thing about this isn't any of those specs. It's that these are the first smart glasses that are built in, shipping with Meta AI in them. So starting in the us, you're going to get this state of the art AI that you can interact with hands free, wherever you go. Zuckerberg hopes that out of the three pillars he's laid out today, at least one of them will catch fire. Who knows, maybe people will love Meta's Quest 3 headset so much, they'll give the Metaverse another chance. But given the way this keynote was organized, saving the AI glasses for last, the underlying message is clear. The Meta Corporation is starting to chart a new course away from horizon worlds and into the land of generative AI. There's a reason why Silicon Valley's so bullish on AI. In March 2023, just a few months before Zuckerberg walked on Stage at Connect, OpenAI debuted its latest large language model, chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. ChatGPT 4 took the world and the news cycle by storm, thanks to its uncanny ability to write code and approximate human conversation. Suddenly, no startup in the Valley could get funded without a pitch deck that included the words generative AI. Founders everywhere scrambled to cram AI functionality into every conceivable product. So adding generative AI to Meta's smart glasses wasn't just a good idea. It was practically a necessity to stay competitive. Technically, some artificial intelligence was already present in The Glass's original 2021 version, which was called Ray Ban Stories. Its voice activated could obey simple commands like call mom or play the Beatles White Album. Google Glass users had that functionality as well. All you had to do was say, ok, Glass. But the fluidity and speed of large language models come a long way since the early days of Siri. Now the responses are more natural sounding and can continue for longer than simply providing one answer to a query. It's not a true live conversation, but it resembles one. Here's Zuckerberg demonstrating the feature on an Instagram reel as he asks his Meta Ray Bans to help him braid his daughter's hair. Hey, Meta how do you make a braid? To make a braid, brush the hair to remove tangles, separate the hair into three equal sections, and begin a basic braid by crossing the right section over the middle. These new meta Ray Bans hit shelves in October 2023, shortly after their debut at the Kinect conference. And even though the Generative AI feature is still in beta and only available in the U.S. the new glasses make major headlines because the verdict among tech reviewers is they're actually good. Unlike Zuckerberg's obsession with the uncanny avatars of horizon worlds, these smart glasses seem like something a regular human would actually use. And a lot of humans do, starting with content creators. I bought the viral Ray Ban meta glasses and we're gonna find out if they're actually worth buying in 2024. So if you've been seeing this trend where people are recording without their phones, these are the smart glasses they've been using. You can livestream directly from these glasses. So if you're going live on Instagram, you can actually just click a button and switch to the glasses to get live pov. There's also the headliner design in addition
- [14:36]
Leon Nayfak
to Wayfair, and there are more colors. There are transparent ones like the one I'm wearing.
- [14:42]
David Brown
Those content creators are talking about the glasses themselves, but creators also start using the glasses to film their everyday content. One TikToker starts an entire trend by using her Meta glasses to record herself in her bathroom mirror lip syncing to a K pop song. Within weeks, the video racks up over 86.3 million plays and launches hundreds of copycats. People start filming hands free POV videos everywhere. the grocery store, on the driving range, even at a local lunch counter as they learn how to eat crawfish. One blind tiktoker named Sadie the Blind lady racks up half a million views by posting how the voice assistance features help blind and low vision people get around.
- [15:28]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
You can use the glasses to ask
- [15:29]
David Brown
Meta AI about almost anything that it sees, and you can get pretty specific with the questions too. Hey Meta, look. What section of the store is this? This is the dog treats section. Now to peek behind the curtain for a moment. Not all of these videos reflect organic interest in the product. Some do, of course, but others are created through Meta's robust affiliate program, which pays creators a commission on sales they generate from their content. Still, affiliate links only pay off if the content is popular, and in this case, it definitely is. The number of Meta Ray ban videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook explodes over the next few Months. And then something really interesting happens. Rather than peaking quickly as happened with Google Glass or Snaps Spectacles, interest in Meta glasses doesn't fall off a cliff. People don't suddenly get bored of them. From the Release in fall 2023 through the end of 20, Meta moves 2 million pairs of Meta Ray Bans. They're officially more than a passing fad. They're a certified hit. So what did Meta Ray Bans get right that its predecessors got wrong? Well, it wasn't just one thing. It was more like a combo platter. They found the Goldilocks path, the sweet spot between a device that feels like a gimmick and one that's too ambitious and too expensive to ever reach real people. First, they nail the functionality. Meta Ray Bans strike a balance between trying to do too much like Google Glass and doing too little like Snap's Spectacles, Glass tried to be a replacement for your phone. Spectacles, a fun novelty tool. Next, there's the price. Starting at $300, it's low enough to be accessible to a wide range of tech consumers. Costs about the same price as an Apple smartwatch. Compare that to the $1,500 price tag of glass. Or worse, the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, a souped up AR wearable that debuted to massive hype in February 2024, only to see disappointing sales and an embarrassing lack of demand. But $300 is also high enough to signal quality. After all, Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglasses without the Meta camera go for just under $200. Snap spectacles sold out of vending machines were just $130. When the price is too low, it can signal low quality, regardless of whether or not that's true. So $300. That's another Goldilocks win for Meta. And finally, the look. Partnering with a brand like Ray Ban gives Meta a massive leg up in the fashion department. These glasses don't have the strange robotic look of a glass hole or the whimsical toy like design of spectacles. They just look like regular glasses, which makes them a lot easier to work into your everyday life. In fact, without the tiny LED light that signals the glasses are recording, it's easy to miss that these Ray Bans have a camera in them. And that is about to set off a whole host of issues. Because the more common meta Ray Bans become, the more ways people are going to find to abuse them.
- [19:14]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
There are people you're told to trust. Lawyers, teachers, especially doctors. But what happens when you put your life in someone's hands and they betray you. The hit podcast Dr. Death is back. And this season is unlike any other. Dr. Death the Cowboy is the story of a charming neurosurgeon who rode into Western town selling a Persona of confidence and care. He wore cowboy boots in the operating room and became sought after by patients. He promised to heal them. Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies. This season is about a doctor who was never truly held accountable for the patients whose lives he ruined. A story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice that will leave you questioning who to trust. Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy wherever you get your podcasts or binge the entire series. Right now only with Audible.
- [20:13]
Leon Nayfak
I'm Leon Nayfak, best known as the co creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco. I had of course heard of of OnlyFans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism. A silent judgment, you might say. Who is actually using this platform?
- [20:27]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
Um, I am. Hi, I'm OnlyFans creator and comedian Gracie Kanan. I work from home now. I'm on OnlyFans. And in case you guys don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband.
- [20:41]
Leon Nayfak
My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an OnlyFans account.
- [20:46]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
I'm actually his sister.
- [20:47]
Leon Nayfak
Just to clarify, it turns out a lot of what I thought I knew about OnlyFans was wrong.
- [20:52]
David Brown
I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for something that wasn't real.
- [20:57]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
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- [21:27]
David Brown
It's September 2024 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two Harvard students named Anfu Nguyen and Kane Artifio are on a quest. Wearing a pair of meta AI glasses, they cruise the greater Boston area looking for strangers to talk to. They head down into the subway and approach a woman with curly brown hair and a red striped jacket who's waiting for her train.
- [21:50]
Leon Nayfak
Oh, hi, ma'.
- [21:51]
David Brown
Am.
- [21:52]
Leon Nayfak
Wait, are you a Betsy?
- [21:54]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
Yes.
- [21:55]
Leon Nayfak
Oh, okay. I think I. I think I met you through, like the Cambridge, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great to meet you. I'm Kane.
- [22:02]
David Brown
The train arrives and the interaction ends. Betsy goes on with her day, but the young man she just met doesn't actually know her. He got her information on the fly by scanning her face with his Meta glasses. Now, pay special attention here, because this is the point where a product crosses the line from useful to unsettling. Think Apple's Airtag, right? Designed to help you keep up with your stuff, not for someone to, say, track an ex partner, Right? But that's the thing. Once a tool exists, someone's going to test its edges in the real world, often on unsuspecting people. That's how new tech finds its limits. And if you're an innovator, what do you do when real world behavior starts rewriting the narrative around your product? To be clear, this Mission Impossible style face scan isn't one of Meta Ray Ban's native features. As part of a side project, Nguyen and Artefio set out to prove a point that the off the shelf consumer glasses, combined with freely available facial recognition tools, could be used to identify strangers in real time. To do it, they built a piece of software they call Ixray, which basically converts a pair of Meta smart glasses into a doxing tool. They pull this off in just a few days, too. On a budget of $400. Using the MetaGlass as video inputs, iXray uses publicly accessible third party facial recognition tools to dredge up personal data about strangers. How personal the information gets depends on the subject's digital footprint and how careful they've been about their identities. For some, it might turn up their Instagram account and the details of a recent vacation. For others, it might surface their ALMA material, their employer, their personal phone number, or even their home address. Nguyen and Artefio insist that the purpose of their project isn't to harm people, it's to warn them. They decline to publish Ix Ray's code, even though plenty of people are asking. Their point, they say, isn't to disparage the glasses, but rather to show how dangerous it is to leave too much personal information online. But this experiment in privacy invasion seems to be as much a promotional opportunity as it is a public service. In an interview with NBC News, Nguyen and Artefio reveal they've actually built their own AI assistant, which they happen to be wearing around their necks.
- [24:43]
Leon Nayfak
And then we're creating a wearable necklace with a camera on it.
- [24:47]
David Brown
Oh my God, that's cool. The necklace camera and AI scans people's
- [24:53]
Audible Advertiser/Announcer
faces and connects the wearer with profiles other users create and willingly share.
- [24:57]
Leon Nayfak
And we built it ourselves.
- [24:59]
David Brown
You built that yourself? I do think, like, the world is very lonely today. People don't really go up to people or like, talk to people or learn about others in real life anymore. The Ix Ray Doxing experiment is starting to seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a jumping off point because the more popular Meta glasses get, the easier it will be for people to follow in their footsteps and use Meta glasses for nefarious purposes. And that could be a problem for Meta, since trust in their company is already at historic lows. We mentioned that the company formerly known as Facebook integrated robust facial recognition tools into its products all the way back in 2010. Remember how Facebook pages used to suggest friends to tag in your photos? Those innocent seeming nudges worked because of facial recognition software. The same tech was also used on Facebook and Instagram as a way to help restore account access if a user got locked out. But over the next decade, as Facebook's reach grew, so did its mountain of tagged images. In 2012, Facebook hit a billion users. By 2017, that number was 2 billion. And along the way, those 2 billion users uploaded many more billions of photos year after year, until Facebook found itself sitting on one of the largest digital photo collections in the world. At the same time, the world beyond Facebook was waking up to the dangers of facial recognition. In the late 2000, teens, reports emerged that the Chinese government was using facial scanning to profile the Uyghurs, a persecuted religious minority. And in the US we learned that law enforcement agencies had been using facial recognition aggressively here as well. There have been wrongful arrests, prosecutions, and even deportations based on faulty algorithms. Suddenly, a company of Meta's size having the power to identify billions of faces started to seem like a very bad idea. To Facebook's credit, the company reportedly declined to sell its facial recognition software to third parties. But that was cold comfort once stories emerged about what Facebook was doing with user data on its own. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018? Facebook got caught selling the personal data of 87 million customers to organizations that weaponized it for political purposes. The result was a record $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019. Which sounds like a lot until you realize Facebook reported revenue of 15 billion for just the first quarter of that same year. In that context, $5 billion barely constituted a slap on the wrist. In fact, once the settlement was announced, Facebook's stock actually went up to its highest price that year. Then came the so called Facebook files in 2021. Leaked to the Wall Street Journal by former Facebook product manager Francis Haugen, These files revealed a range of alleged corporate misdeeds. From serving toxic ads to teen girls on Instagram to helping religious hatred and violence spread in the global South. Facebook's brand value went from shaky to toxic. Which might be the rationale behind the name change from Facebook to Meta. But in November 2021, the newly rebranded Meta did something interesting, something that didn't quite get as much press. The company discontinued its facial recognition system voluntarily. Here's an excerpt from a company blog post issued by Meta's VP of Artificial Intelligence, explaining the company's thinking, quoting here the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate. End quote Underneath this cautious corporate phrasing is a clear please trust us. But you know, trust isn't a feature you can toggle on and off whenever you need a little more. It's more like a running balance sheet. Meta has spent years drawing that balance down, so now every new product launches into that deficit. Even neutral innovations like glasses that can do cool things get interpreted through a negative lens. No pun intended. It's not enough to build something useful, you have to convince people you won't misuse it, and that's a much harder sell, especially when your business incentives haven't fundamentally changed. Meta hopes that voluntarily rolling back one of its most robust tools for data collection will help build trust in its products, including the coming Meta glasses. But even without facial recognition, as the glasses get more and more popular throughout 2024 into 2025, meta ray bans have been pushing right up against the very limits of social acceptability and conjuring the glass holes of Yore. It's summertime, 2025. A woman named Deena looks at herself in the full length mirror at her hotel. She's in her 40s, with long dark hair and is wearing a pair of Meta Ray Bans. She taps her glasses once and starts recording. Deena's on vacation and she wants to save her every moment. So she takes her glasses with her to her next destination, a group cooking class with her husband. She joins about a dozen other students in red aprons, chopping vegetables and searing scallops. She taps her glasses a few more times, recording as she goes. Everything seems fine until Dina starts watching her vacation footage and she notices something she hadn't picked up on at the time. The other people in her cooking class look uncomfortable. At one point, a classmate is actually glaring at her. Suddenly, it clicks. People could see that she was filming them and they didn't like it it's the glass hole effect all over again. Dina posts her mortifying discovery on TikTok with this caption quote I was an A hole who wore meta glasses in a public place, didn't disclose it, and unintentionally made people super uncomfortable. Meta glasses are of course, designed to be subtle, using just one small indicator like to show their recordings. This small light is supposed to provide the best of both worlds clear disclosure that someone is filming without being obtrusive. But as the general public gets more and more familiar with meta ray bans, they also get better at spotting them. A couple months after Dina's admission, another TikTok clip goes viral. This one shot on the New York City subway. A woman on the 6 train suddenly realizes she's being filmed. With a quizzical smile, she walks up to the person filming her and breaks his Meta glasses in half. The man posts the video under the title Help Me Find Karen, hoping someone will bring her to justice. Instead, hundreds of people rush to her defense. One commenter named princess gets nearly 90,000 likes with this good People are tired of Being filmed by strangers. Princess is right. People are getting tired of being filmed by strangers. But the strangers don't stop filming. On Instagram, self described pickup artists are flourishing. These accounts feature POV videos filmed with meta glasses in which men chat with women on the street, commenting on their outfits while secretly recording. Others pulled childish pranks on retail workers trying to get themselves kicked out of big box stores. Filming the entire time, exhausted floor managers and cashiers learned to watch out for teenagers in black glasses with little blinking lights. Remember in part one when a creator used his snap spectacles to record people for his prank show? Some Meta glasses users take this behavior as exponentially farther. Creator Gabriel west sums it up pretty well. You have a group of kids around the ages of 16 to 22 walking around with cameras that nobody knows is a camera. Oh, we got problems. We got so many problems. I saw a guy try to sign into Planet Fitness with a severed goat head. As soon as these kids put him on, I feel like they immediately get the sense that they have to do something stupid and it usually affects other people negatively. This bad behavior often crosses the line into harassment. In September 2025, the University of San Francisco issues a public notice that a man has been prowling their campus wearing Meta glasses, filming women without their permission. This kind of behavior is no longer being called a glass hole, it's being called a meta creep. The two main drivers of creep behavior are accessibility and engage more people buy Meta glasses, more people make content with them. And like other social media content, the more outrageous and uncomfortable the content, the better it tends to perform. So creators post more and more outrageous videos, often using affiliate links from Meta. The affiliate link takes viewers to Meta's online store, where people can buy Meta glasses, giving a small commission to the original creator, which just encourages them to post more bad behavior. And the vicious cycle continues. The incentives to keep posting obnoxious or criminal content are pretty powerful, so creators go even further. Since pranks work best when the person being filmed doesn't know it, creators share tips for covering or even removing the LED indicator light on their medical glasses. Naturally, this content goes viral too. It's already difficult enough to film in public.
- [35:49]
Leon Nayfak
I don't want to have a blinking
- [35:51]
David Brown
light on my face.
- [35:52]
Leon Nayfak
There is an easy solution to this. Let me show you exactly how to fix it.
- [35:56]
David Brown
When Meta is asked to comment on bad behavior like this, the company's response is usually what you'd expect. We don't condone any harassing behavior which violates our terms of service. And that includes responding to more serious instances, like Border Patrol agents bringing Meta glasses along on immigration raids. Other CPB and ICE agents follow suit as 2025 rolls on. The UK news outlet the Independent reports three instances that year of federal agents wearing Meta glasses while carrying out official operations. But beyond a few carefully worded statements, there's not much sign that anyone at Meta is overly concerned. It has finally created the feedback loop between product and platform that Snapchat was aiming for all those years ago. Meta's glasses are feeding a steady stream of content to Instagram, which raises the profile of its classes, which feed more content to Instagram. Why would they do anything to slow that down? On the contrary, Meta Ray Ban are just getting started.
- [37:15]
Leon Nayfak
Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy Romantasy series, Become your friend group's sci fi expert on the latest blockbuster book to screen adaptation, or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating all in one easy app. With plans now starting at $8.99, you'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible be fascinated, Be Fascinating. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantasy series, become your friend group's sci fi expert on the latest blockbuster book to screen adaptation, or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating all in one easy app with plans now starting at £5.99, you'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending best sellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible be fascinated. Be fascinating.
- [39:27]
David Brown
In September 2025, Meta releases an updated version of its Ray Ban smart glasses, which it calls Gen 2. Confusingly, the Gen 2s are actually the third iteration of Meta smart glasses, but who's counting? More than ever, the AI aspect of these glasses is front and center in its branding. Far from being dissuaded by experiments like the Harvard Students Doxing Project, Meta is fully leaning into the AI capabilities of its product. In fact, alongside the Gen 2s, Meta also debuts its upscale Big Brother Meta Ray Ban displays. Displays cost $800 and have chunkier frames to accommodate more tech. These are the ones you might have seen Mark Zuckerberg wearing during Keynote's impressive the Ray Ban displays aim to deliver the true promise made by Google Glass a decade earlier, an augmented reality head up display. When you turn it on, a digital hologram appears in the lens just below your normal field of vision. It can show you things like video calls, maps with turn by turn directions, and a digital user interface with buttons so you can control the glasses with hand gestures, not just voice commands to capture those hand movements. The glasses come with a stone colored wristband called a neural band like a bracelet that's also a Nintendo Wii controller. These Meta displays do add some complexity back to a product that was once defined by its elegance, so there's reason to wonder if they might fall into the same traps as Google Glass. But there are a few clues that displays might succeed in the same augmented reality space where Glass fades first, Displays looks a lot more like regular glasses, albeit thick ones. Instead of Google Glass's odd looking headband. Second, Meta took the time to work out the technical kinks that plague Glass. Here's Marques Brownlee, a prominent tech reviewer, expressing surprise at just how well Meta displays work. What Meta has to show me is actually shockingly advanced messaging and even video calls on your glasses are pretty sick. So if you're in a video call, you can see the person you're talking to. If you go to navigate somewhere, you can open up the maps and then get turn by turn directions and a rotating map that tracks with your head to match the direction you're facing. Brownlee points out that these glasses can even provide real life subtitling and live translation as a person's talking, which could be an actual game changer for someone who's deaf, hard of hearing, or who just doesn't speak the language. But for Meta, the real benefit of displays is what these upmarket glasses do with stock price. Shares of Meta jumped more than 1% in pre market trading just hours after the device is revealed at Meta Connect. Now, markets aren't just reacting to the product, they're reacting to the signal. A higher end version tells investors there's room to move up market, expand margins, reshape perception. It suggests this may not just be a novelty anymore, it might be a category with real depth. You don't always need mass adoption first. Sometimes you introduce a premium tier just to show the ceiling's higher. Do that and the whole business looks more of valuable. Naturally, Meta's success with smart glasses has inspired a lot of competition, having all but dumped the Vision Pro, Apple is rumored to be developing smart glasses of its own. Google has partnered with eyewear giant Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Android xr, Google's new extended reality platform built around its Gemini AI. Think of them as Google's real second shot at what Glass was supposed to be, only this time they looked like normal glasses. Google also announced a separate collaboration with Gucci, set to launch next year. And Chinese tech companies Alibaba and Xiaomi each debuted smart glasses in the summer of 2025. Those Harvard students, Anfu Nguyen and Kane Artefio. They're getting in on the game too. Only a year or so after their experiment, they've started their own smart eyewear company called Mira. Even ice, the immigration agency, has announced plans to develop smart glasses of their own. But you might be wondering, what about Snap Inc? You know, the ones who first cracked the stylish smart glasses trend from a few yellow vending machines? Well, it hasn't given up on wearables either. In fact, it debuted its own augmented reality spectacles in 2024. Yep, one year before Meta's ray ban displays. If you didn't hear about Snap's version, well, chalk that up to one more instance of Snap having the right answer just a little too early. But despite the subtle differences in all these competing smart devices, they all have one thing in common. A promise of ever expanding capabilities powered by AI. But this explosion in AI wearables has a real human cost. Because as you heard at the very start of our series, AI doesn't just mean machine learning. It means sharing volumes of data with a vast human network far from the public eye. It's February 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya. In a sun dappled stretch of the Nairobi Arboretum, a group of data workers sit in a circle in the grass. A speaker stands in the middle of the circle, holding a microphone and shielding a rise from the sun. This is a meeting of the Data Labelers Association, a workers rights organization that helps its members advocate for better labor conditions. Today's topic is Empowering Digital Workers to Know Their Rights and organized for Fair treatment. There are still people who actually do not know anything about AI in terms of the workings behind it. And this is actually very intentional. Like to make it invisible, to make it look like this shiny object that no one understands what it's like. It's like very automatic and, and beautiful and tech. Hiding the labor and hiding behind the scenes of AI. These hidden workers are the ones labeling the objects to train the AI models working on a layer of information technology that few people ever see up close. They are AI's human support system, clicking endlessly on object after object in a seemingly infinite stream of content. And yes, this labeling work has a purpose. It serves people like like Sadie, the blind lady whose glasses can help her cross the street or tell her which aisle she's in at the pet store. But the data workers also have to sift through every supermarket prank, every sexual harassment encounter on a college campus. Organizations like the Data Labelers association are a much needed tool to help them protect themselves. But that's a tall order when the demand for their services is only going up. The more that Meta and its competitors work on ever more powerful versions of its smart glasses, the more these workers in the Global south are put under the gun. And right now, Meta Ray Ban users don't have a choice in the matter either. In 2025, Meta quietly removed the option for users to disable cloud storage of its data, meaning that Everything you say to your glasses or film with your glasses is collected and kept by Meta. There's no way to opt out. And as if that weren't enough, Meta seems to be considering reversing its policy on facial recognition. Remember when the company made a big show of removing this tool from their platforms? Well, according to internal memos leaked to the New York times in early 2020, Meta has made plans to introduce the feature into both its Ray Bans and the sporty Oakley versions it introduced last year. So far, Meta denies using facial recognition in their products, but it's easy to see how, in reality, this would replicate the Harvard Doxxing experiment at scale. So why does Meta think this will fly, given how hard it fought to win back user trust? Well, according to that internal memo, the company feels like it has a unique window of opportunity. And that's because the consumer protection groups that normally act as privacy watchdogs are currently occupied by the civil unrest caused by the current administration. Here's how its memo puts we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. But Meta may have miscalculated how much those civil society groups care about the dangers of facial recognition and how closely Meta is being watched by human rights groups around the world. In late February 2026, two Swedish papers published a bombshell story on the Kenyan data labelers. The expose led to a class action lawsuit against Meta over privacy concerns. It's playing out as we speak. Meanwhile, privacy minded developers are pushing back with apps of their own, like Nearby Glasses, an app developed on the open source platform GitHub that lets its users detect whether facial recognition glasses are nearby. But even amidst all this pushback back, it's hard to imagine Meta doing anything but pressing forward with AI enabled smart glasses because it badly wants to hold its advantage in this ongoing war over wearables. Meanwhile, Meta's other wearables project, the Metaverse, is no longer viable. In late March 2026, Meta announced that Horizon Worlds its proprietary Metaverse playground is winding down after some $80 billion in losses. You know, there's an old idea, often tied to Steve Jobs, that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. And sometimes that's true. The ipod made music portable in a way people instantly understood. The iPhone rolled multiple daily tools into one and the value clicked right away. But those products solve problems. People already felt this. This is different. Smart glasses aren't answering a clear need. They're introducing a new way of behaving and asking everyone to adjust jobs. Insight works best when the benefit is obvious and immediate. But when people haven't been clamoring for some innovation and the obvious trade offs like privacy, social discomfort and trust are murky, that gap between invention and acceptance gets a whole lot wider, a lot more speculative, and, I'll be honest, a lot more dubious. What do you think Steve Jobs would say about these glasses? What do you say? Competitors are coming not just with rival smart glasses, with a host of other tech rich smart wearables from watches to pendants. In fact, the next battlefield for smart tech might be on your finger. There are rumors of an Apple Smart Ring, which would go up against the new Ivella Smart Ring, endorsed by NBA champions and Olympians and designed by former Apple designers. And don't count out the Samsung Galaxy Ring or the Aura, now in its fourth iteration with 5.5 million units sold. As for Meta, it seems to be sticking with Ray Bans despite the risks and potential misuse. Because these glasses are the first genuinely popular product Meta has had in a decade, it's too late to turn back now. The war over wearables isn't actually about the hardware. Whether it's Google Glass, Snap spectacles, Meta Ray Bans, or whatever comes next, the skirmishes over features are only part of the equation. The real war is over human behavior. How does your right to privacy stack up against my right to record? How much do we really want AI enabled lives, especially when they come with a human cost? What will our world look like when every face is scannable and everything we do is recorded? And moreover, is there any way to stop it? Follow Business wars on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Business wars ad free by joining Audible from Audible Originals. This is episode two of Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses for Business Wars. A quick note about recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said. Those scenes are dramatizations, but they're based on research. If you'd like to read more, we recommend the work of 404 Media, including the piece a CBP agent wore Meta Smart Glasses to an Immigration Raid in Los Angeles. By Jason Kebler and Cashmere Essential Reporting on facial recognition for the New York Times, I'm your host David Brown. Katie Clark Gray wrote this story. Our senior producers are Jenny Blume and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Fact checking by Gabrielle Jolie Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellowant. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock. Sound design by Kyle Randall, Executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of Creative Development at Audible Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates, LLC.