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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 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya. A data labeler clocks in for his shift and lets out a heavy sigh. He does not want to be here this morning. He walks into a large room lined with rows of workers tapping away at computer terminals. He logs in, opens a program, and starts to watch a woman get undressed. She seems totally unaware that anyone might be viewing her. But this data worker can see everything because the video is being streamed live from a pair of Meta glasses sitting on her nightstand a continent away. The Kenyan man works for a data labeling company called Sama, a corporation that supplies the human labor behind the so called autonomous machine learning at the heart of AI. Every day in 10 hour shifts, his job is to review unfiltered video content and label what he sees by drawing bounding boxes around the images on the screen. He draws one box around a cluster of pixels and labels it a lamp. He draws another box and labels that a bookcase. He's training the AI to recognize everyday items so the algorithm can get better at doing it in the future. The labeling work is low paid and repetitive. But that isn't the worst part. Because this man doesn't just see lamps and bookcases. He often finds himself reviewing sensitive or graphic video content. Like the woman undressing. He sees strangers, credit card numbers. He sees people having sex. He even sees crimes being committed. All of it captured in first person video streamed by the people who have no idea they're broadcasting their lives to the cloud, much less that it's being reviewed by a human. And more and more of this footage now seems to be coming from one device, Meta's Ray Ban glasses. You might know them as Meta Smart Glasses or Meta AI Glasses. They have thick black frames equipped with a tiny built in camera and a voice enabled AI assistant that can describe what you're seeing, play your favorite music, and more. This wearable technology is designed to be seamless, painless and normal. Meta designed its Ray Bans to blend into the background and become part of your daily life. And in that way, it succeeded where almost every other Smart Glasses product has failed. Meta's Ray Bans are the first tech enabled eyewear to truly break through in the consumer market. But in going mainstream, Meta has also created something troubling. A tool that may be enabling mass surveillance built by one of the world's most notorious data brokers. So what happens next? This message comes from Betterment Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment takes the time consuming work out of smart investing.
- [03:37]
Dan Egan
I grew up learning about finance and investing myself and realizing that I needed to reinvest dividends and rebalance my portfolio and if there was an opportunity to tax loss over time. And then I realized that I was doing all of these things that were pretty straightforward to implement. I just needed to spend my time doing them. Betterment automates those same good practices so that I know I'm doing portfolio management and goal based planning in a way that makes sense and is responsible without me having to spend hours of my life doing it.
- [04:07]
David Brown
Learn more@betterment.com investing involves risk performance not guaranteed. Betterment does not offer tax advice. TLH may not be suitable for all customers. Learn more@betterment.com Toh terms
- [04:22]
Capital One Narrator
with the Spark Cash plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase and you get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven, Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of Sandcloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One what's in your wallet? Find out more@capital1.com SparkCashPlus terms apply.
- [04:54]
David Brown
For multiple originals I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Smart glasses with superhuman abilities have been part of the public's imagination for generations. Think of those X ray specs a kid in the 1950s could order from the back pages of a comic book, and they've been an obsession of the big tech companies since at least the early 2010s. But getting smart glasses right? That's proven surprisingly hard. The most notorious example was Google Glass, a product that was massively overhyped before going very wrong. Glass crashed and burned so spectacularly that some believe it set the entire category back by a half a decade. After that flameout, tech giants like Google, Apple, and Meta seem to pivot. They focus their hardware efforts on high priced, high tech virtual reality headsets designed for gaming, entertainment, and of course, the Metaverse. But now the Metaverse has collapsed and smart glasses have made a comeback not by doing more, but by doing less. The proof is in the numbers. Sales of Meta Ray Bans have more than tripled in a single year. In 2025 alone, Meta sold 8 million pairs. People seem to actually want these devices. And in cracking that code, Meta has finally solved a puzzle that eluded its fiercest competitors and its own research division for more than a decade. Now that smart glasses are everywhere, the competition isn't far behind. And neither are the questions urgent, uncomfortable ones about the mandatory sharing of user data to the cloud, the exploitation of human workers in the Global south, and government overreach, including reports about ICE agents using the glasses illegally. So if smart glasses are really here to stay, the question becomes, is that a good thing? This is Episode one Prize on the Eyes. It's 2011 and an overcast day on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California. Students John Rodriguez and Eric Miller stand on an elevated walkway and nod to their cameraman to start recording. They're making a pitch video, hoping to get their startup, Vergence Labs, into a prestigious Stanford incubator called Start X Acceptance into this accelerator can unlock everything for young founders, mentorship buzz, and funding for whatever they can dream up. Miller speaks to the camera first. He's got sandy hair, a round boyish face, and black framed glasses. In his hands, he's holding a bulky black visor with a face shield and several wires sticking out. Looks like a cross between a welder's mask and Darth Vader's helmet.
- [08:19]
Eric Miller
This is a prototype of a wearable computer that we built that has immersive hemispherical optics and it's running Android and when you look through does facial recognition.
- [08:33]
David Brown
Miller passes the helmet to Rodriguez, who has a long face, unruly black hair, and a wide grin when he gets excited.
- [08:40]
John Rodriguez
Right, so the prototype Foiler Britain is first of all really awesome. So to redefine the future of face to face interaction, the software that I've written talks to in real time talks to a cloud service to identify the person that I'm interacting with based on my Facebook friends.
- [08:58]
David Brown
You heard that, right? Miller and Rodriguez are pitching facial recognition goggles in 2011, long before anyone had heard of Meta Ray Bans or Google Glass. Their software leverages Facebook's existing facial recognition tech, which has been around since 2010, helping users quickly tag their friends in photos. But their visor promises to bring this facial recognition into real world interactions, delivering a live augmented reality experience. It sounds and looks like something out of a sci fi movie, but on the bright side, it's unlikely that you'd miss someone coming at you with a giant visor on their face. So at least it won't be happening in secret. But Miller and Rodriguez aren't done. Next they talk about the second prototype. They're developing a product that isn't immediately visible. That is, until Miller removes the simple black frame glasses he's been wearing and holds them up to the camera, showing off the hidden tech inside and these
- [10:01]
Eric Miller
glasses have a video recording device in them and a little video processing board with an SD card and a USB slot. Plug in and recharge your computer and so these glasses can be used to capture your experience and capture your first person point of view perspective and then share it socially online.
- [10:21]
David Brown
Miller and Rodriguez called this product their social video glasses. The idea behind these glasses is simple. They record whatever you're seeing, either for posterity or to live stream on your social feed without you ever needing to pick up your smartphone or a GoPro. The inventors envision these low key glasses folding seamlessly into everyday life. They may not realize it yet, but Miller and Rodriguez's two distinct prototypes, the helmet and the glasses, foreshadow the two diverging paths that will define tech enabled wearables for the next decade. One gives you high tech, high output features. It's essentially a computer system strapped to your head. The other, simpler, less ambitious tech that doesn't look like tech at all. One's high profile, one's low profile, one's maximalist, the other's minimalist question is which one will be the more lucrative path forward? Rodriguez and Miller's pitch works. Virgin's Labs get selected for the Stanford incubator class of 2012. Unfortunately, acceptance does not lead to easy funding for their prototypes. Miller, the CEO, finds it hard to raise money for wearables because in late 2011, most VCs are focused on mobile apps like Uber, WhatsApp or Instagram. No one really wants to bet on a high tech helmet, so instead Miller and Rodriguez focus on their more modest prototype, the glasses. Without investor backing, Vergence Labs turns to crowdfunding. They post their smart glasses, which they call Epiphany Eyewear, to the Indiegogo platform. And to their delight, it works. Epiphany Eyewear manages to raise $70,000 to develop the glasses for commercial sale. People seem genuinely interested in the product and it's easy to see why. The glasses, well, they look almost exactly like a pair of black Ray Bans. The camera is so well hidden at the top right corner, you barely notice it's there, which makes a compelling use case for everyday people. The crowdfunding success finally earns Virgin's lab some attention from the VC crowd, including from Adam Draper, son of notable VC Tim Draper, and from Charlie Cheever, co founder of the online platform Quora. When these guys make moves, Silicon Valley notices. Within a year, Vergence is taking pre orders on their website. The site boasts a hype video on its homepage featuring high profile tech writers and Silicon Valley execs trying on the glasses and saying nice things. And at 29 seconds in, a familiar face pops up. It's a pale white man with curly light brown hair grinning at the camera as he holds the epiphany glasses in his hands. The caption reads, awesome. This is awesome. And it's attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. this time, getting an endorsement from Zuck is like receiving a blessing from the Pope. 28 year old Zuckerberg is the most powerful social media mogul in the world. Facebook is just eight years old, with annualized revenue of over a billion dollars and a recent IPO that raised 16 billion. The Hollywood movie Immortalizing Facebook's Founding was recently nominated for eight Oscars. Zuckerberg is on top of the world and moving fast, having just bought Instagram for $1 billion in what will become a signature move for him when you see competition, buy it now. If you're wondering how Vergence Labs got their product into Zuck's hands, they had their methods. The early Vergence team includes a couple of former Facebook employees, including their investor Charlie Cheever. Co founder John Rodriguez briefly interned at Facebook before quitting to build Vergence full time, and Eric Miller. Well, he used to stalk the Facebook parking lot hoping to catch Zuckerberg and pitch him on the way to his car. But despite all of these connections, Zuckerberg doesn't seem to give Epiphany Eyewear much thought. At least not beyond giving the glasses a hasty thumbs up in a photo. He's got bigger fish to fry, like investing in Facebook's algorithmic newsfeed and in social gaming like Farmville and collecting data from Facebook's more than 1 billion global users. So it's entirely possible he forgot all about these social video glasses that look like classic black framed ray bans. On the other hand, it's also entirely possible he filed them away in the back of his mind as an idea to come back to later. It's February 2012 in Mountain View, California, and Google Co founder Sergey Brin is agitated. He stalks through the hallways of Google X, the top secret research and development lab affectionately known as the company's Moonshot factory. Or at least Google X used to be top secret until reporters from the New York Times blew its coverage a few months ago. The Times ran a feature on Google X after speaking with a dozen mostly unnamed employees about the type of moonshot projects they were working on. The list included far out purely theoretical concepts like space elevators that could send Cargo to a space station without a rocket. But it also included projects a lot closer to fruition, like the fleet of driverless cars that will one day become Google's Waymox. You might think Brin would be pleased. The article paints Google as a relentlessly innovative and future focused company. But for Brin, the piece also put an unspoken clock on Google X. Now that word is out, he feels pressure to produce something newsworthy and amazing. His co founder, Larry Page is laser focused on driverless cars, but Brin is. He's obsessed with a different project. A pair of tech enabled smart glasses that will free us from the bending, craning posture of constantly looking down at our phones. These smart glasses would do much more than just record video. They would take pictures, use voice commands, search, and essentially bring the functionality of a smartphone up into the user's field of vision using what's known as a head up display. Head up displays were first developed in the 1940s to help fighter pilots see their control panels without having to look away from the sky. Now Brin wants to bring this idea to anyone who's ever found themselves bent down over a screen. Instead of engaging with the world in front of them, Brin wants to move beyond just recording his ideal. Glasses would transform every day into an augmented reality or AR experience. You could use the glasses to interrogate your surroundings in real time, Google them, process them, or just stream them to a friend. Like Terminator vision from the movies, only less focused on apprehending John Connor. In a way, this is what the Vergence Labs guys from Stanford originally envisioned before their funding challenges made them scale things back. Remember that facial recognition helmet that was augmented reality? If Vergence had been fully funded right away, they would have tried to add those elements to their smart glasses. But they had to put their AR dreams aside. Google, on the other hand, has had no such problems. It has moonshot money. Anything anyone wants to dream up, it can at least try to create. Delivering an AR future becomes Brin's passion project. Let Larry Page have his driverless cars. He wants these glasses. Brin assembles a wearables super squad, hiring scientists who are expert in body worn computers. Initially, the wearables team is given the luxury of working at the pace of discovery with no hard deadlines. But after the New York Times piece exposes Google X, that changes. Brin desperately wants to produce something incredible. He wants to bring these AR glasses to market and stun the world, whether or not they're ready for their close up.
- [19:14]
Audible Narrator
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- [21:27]
David Brown
It's June 2012 in San Francisco. The Moscone center is packed. Google's I.O. conference, the company's annual conference for developers, is in full swing and backstage, Sergey Brin is pacing in his black pants and black long sleeve tee. He could pass for a stagehand except for the pair of charcoal colored asymmetric glasses balanced on his nose. As he walks back and forth, he waits for his cue. And then he hears it. Google's VP of engineering says the words new features. Brin bounds on stage and interrupts. Even though this interruption is something they've
- [22:06]
John Rodriguez
rehearsed many times, we've got something pretty special for you. It's a little bit time sensitive, so I apologize for interrupting. You've seen some really compelling demos here. They were slick, they were robust. This is going to be nothing like that. This can go wrong in about 500 different ways. So tell me now, who wants to see a demo of Glass?
- [22:31]
David Brown
But the uncertainty in Bryn's voice isn't entirely an act. As he speaks, he knows that a blimp full of skydivers is circling about a mile over their heads. He's keeping contact with them through his Google Glass headset, which communicates with their headsets. A live stream appears on the screen behind Bryn. The skydivers and their aircraft broadcasting live to the stage. And they keep broadcasting even as they jump into the open air. The audience watches in amazement as the skydivers get closer and closer to the ground, broadcasting their POV through their glasses. The effect makes the viewers also feel like they're plunging toward the earth. When the divers land safely on the Moscone center roof, their cameras keep going. The audience watches as the divers rappel down the side of the building, hop on some bikes and pedal triumphantly into the theater before embracing Bryn onstage. Google's strange asymmetric glasses captured every second of it. The demo is a success, and Bryn can finally breathe a sigh of relief. But that feeling doesn't last for long. Debuting Google Glass with a skydiving stunt was a masterclass in generating excitement, because the Google I O conference isn't just for developers, it's also for the press. And sure enough, a wave of breathless coverage follows, recounting every heart stopping moment of the demo. But on the heels of that coverage, Bren and his team face a real challenge. Glass isn't ready for consumer sale. Not even close. Remember, Brin fast tracked Glass through the Google X Lab. He was feeling pressure to bring something astonishing to market, something that could perhaps make him the next Steve Jobs. But Glass still has a ton of kinks to work out on both the hardware and software side. And that's before you even get into the challenge of mass production. Google tries to manage expectations. It warns that Glass likely won't be in retail stores for at least another two years. But it also provides a tantalizing caveat coming much sooner. By the following spring, Google plans to release what it's calling the Explorer version of Glass. The price is a cool $1,500, and it's only available to industry insiders, VIPs and members of the elite tech press. These so called explorers can sample the goods ahead of everybody else, as long as they're willing to pay. There's a reason Bren decides to roll the product out this way. He strongly believes in a core tenet of software development called the minimum Viable Product. That's the idea that getting product into your customers hands early, even if it's imperfect, is the fastest way to improve it. Real users will show you which features they care about, which ones they struggle with, which ones they don't need at all. This prevents you from developing your product in a vacuum, where you run the risk of putting your time, energy and capital into in all the wrong places. Of course, the minimum viable product strategy gets trickier when you're talking about software and hardware together, and Glass is both. With software, it's easy to push out patches overnight and fix bugs along the way. With hardware, a bug in the form factor or the physical material is much harder to fix. Actually, you know what? I'll take this proposition a step further and say the minimum viable product idea doesn't have a winning track record when it comes to expensive hardware, much less hardware worn on the face. Pretty unforgiving place for mistakes. This much is certain. However, if your early users feel like beta testers paying premium prices for the privilege, well, resentment can kick in and spread fast. What works for apps can backfire pretty badly for physical products. Brin figures the Explorers program as a way for Google to have its cake and eat it, too. If it only rolls out Glass to select people, repairing any hardware issues should be more manageable. And since the Explorers know they're getting the earliest version, they won't be so upset if something goes wrong. These folks are the early adopters, the people who get excited about trying the latest gadget and testing its limits. Even the name Explorers gestures at diving into the unknown, like those skydivers getting ready to land on a roof. The Explorers program also lets Google stay exclusive because so few will be available, demand will be sky high. Brin's hope is that Glass will become as coveted as the next iPhone precisely because it will be so hard to get. And while Brin is busy making Glass the most talked about gadget in Silicon Valley, a much smaller team is watching all of this very carefully and wondering if they might be sitting on something Brin doesn't have. It's March 2014 in downtown Los Angeles, a dense, gritty section of the city. In the cramped, overcrowded offices of Vergence Labs, the mood is tense. The air smells like cooking oil from the Indian restaurant on the building's first floor, and the constant wail of sirens from the police precinct across the street keeps interrupting their work. It's been around 18 months since their crowdfunding campaign put Virgin's Labs on the map, but the company can still only afford to employ about 10 people. CEO Eric Miller has been pushing everyone to the limit trying to get their sole product, Epiphany Eyewear, off the ground. Vergence was able to build their first generation smart glasses as a direct to consumer product in 2013, and early reviews were positive. But despite some favorable press, Epiphany glasses have been totally overshadowed by the launch of Google Glass. Few people outside the tech world even know Epiphany glasses exist. Burgence needs a partner to help them scale or they won't survive much longer. You know, a business can be right about the future and still lose for lack of scale. Timing, capital and distribution often matter as much as invention. Small firms frequently assume superior ideas will attract rescue capital automatically. Yeah, sure, being early is valuable, but only if you can stay alive long enough to matter. The team is working hard when the office door flies open. Miller enters in a jubilant mood, his boyish face lit up in a smile. He's got news and it's big. Hey, guys. I know I've been driving you pretty hard lately. You can say that again. Yeah, I know. That's fair. But it's all about to be worth it. We've been acquired.
- [29:47]
Vergence Labs Employee / Gracie Kanan
We have?
- [29:48]
David Brown
By whom? I can't tell you. What? That's crazy. How much is the sale for? I can't tell you that either. Come on, Eric, this whole company's like nine people. Who are we gonna tell? Okay, but you need to promise to keep it secret. We're not doing a press release, not putting anything on the buyer's website or ours. The guy in charge is very private. Okay, is everyone sitting down? Finally, Miller forks over the details. Vergence Labs is about to be acquired by Snapchat, the buzzy social media company that features disappearing photos and videos. Snapchat's 24 year old founder and CEO Evan Spiegel has agreed to pay Vergence's $11 million in cash and 4 million in stock to develop Epiphany Smart Glasses under the Snapchat banner. It will be Snapchat's first foray into hardware of any kind. And it marks a brand new direction for a company that's always defied expectations. Just one year earlier, in 2013, Spiegel had stunned the entire industry when he reportedly turned down Mark Zuckerberg's offer to buy his company for $3 billion and absorb it into Facebook. A lot of people said Spiegel was out of his mind for turning down this offer. After all, it's three times what Zuckerberg paid for Instagram and Zuckerberg does not take rejection well either. In fact, after being rebuffed by Spiegel, Zuck turned around and bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and some would say started plotting his revenge. You can hear about that bruising battle in our Facebook vs Snapchat series. But all that's still to come. Right now, Spiegel knows this much for sure. He wants to get into the smart glasses game, and to do that, he needs virgins. You might be wondering, why would Spiegel want to pursue this tricky sector now? After all, the conversation around tech enabled eyewear has been entirely dominated by glass, and the results have been mixed at best. Initially, Glass got off to a promising start. In late 2012, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg incorporated a few pairs into her Runway show. Shortly thereafter, Time magazine called glass one of 2012's best inventions. In spring 2013, Google started rolling out its Explorer program in a handful of cities. Pre approved purchasers could pick up their glass by appointment only in San Francisco, New York, London or la. The experience was high end. Buyers were given drinks and the royal treatment and a personal tutorial on the complex fifteen hundred dollar device. Glass stayed exclusive for most of the next year, too. The glasses were spotted on celebs like Oprah, Bill Murray and Beyonce, as well as world leaders like England's Prince Charles and Spanish President Mariano Rajoy. Glass did briefly be become available to the general public for a few isolated days in spring 2014, but the relatively limited stock sold out quickly. And then the backlash started. A small subset of Glass users started getting a bad rap for their entitlement, including recording in public without permission. In response, movie theaters and casinos swiftly banned the device, and a salty new nickname sprung up around Silicon Valley, the so called Glass Hole. Yep, the Glass Hole problem became so bad that Google itself had to issue a courtesy guide for its product, urging users to always ask permission before recording. It also advised you to stop spacing out and staring rudely at your display while ignoring the people around you. The courtesy guide didn't seem to help much. In February 2014, just one week after its release, a tech writer named Sarah Slocum brought her glass into a punk bar called Molotovs in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. She started filming and was soon accosted. The Glass device ripped right off her face. Now, in March 2014, with a backlash against glass holes only growing, why would Snapchat choose to pivot to smart glasses, which will theoretically have the same privacy issues? Here's the thing. The media's obsession with Glass. Both the hype and the backlash may be a blessing in disguise for hopeful competitors. Glass has certainly raised awareness of smart glasses as a product category, and in many ways the Epiphany glasses Snapchat just bought compare favorably with its rivals. Unlike Glass, Epiphanies are already available to the public. If you want a pair, you can order them right from the company website, no appointment needed. And Epiphany glasses start at just $300 compared to the fifteen hundred dollar price tag of Glass, while simultaneously looking far less conspicuous. Conspicuous Even Diane von Furstenberg couldn't disguise the fact that Google Glass looks, well, a bit silly, like a Star Trek costume someone whipped up for Comic Con. Epiphany glasses, meanwhile, look like normal Ray Bans. That form factor and the low price will make Epiphanies a lot more appealing, especially to Snapchat's younger, hipper user base. Of course, the reason Epiphanies can sell for this lower price point is that they don't have as many features. For now at least, Epiphany glasses are simply recording devices, not an attempt to replace your phone. They can't even take photos, they just record video. But interestingly, this distinction may be lost on the general public. After all, most folks think recording video is all that Google's Glass can do as well. Anything else is just details. Snapchat's Evan Spiegel may have snapped up Epiphany at just the right time. He believes the future of smart glasses is in looking boring instead of futuristic and doing less instead of more. All he needs to do now is wait for Glass to break.
- [36:29]
Leon Nayfak
I'm Leon Nayfak, best known as the co creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco. I had of course heard of OnlyFans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism. A silent judgment, you might say. Who is actually using this platform?
- [36:43]
Vergence Labs Employee / Gracie Kanan
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.
- [36:56]
Leon Nayfak
My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an OnlyFans account.
- [37:02]
Vergence Labs Employee / Gracie Kanan
I'm not his sister.
- [37:03]
Leon Nayfak
Just to clarify, it turns out a lot of what I thought I knew about OnlyFans was wrong.
- [37:08]
David Brown
I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for something that wasn't real.
- [37:12]
Vergence Labs Employee / Gracie Kanan
What happens when connection comes with a price tag? Listen to OnlyFantasy wherever you get your podcasts or Binge all episodes of Only Fantasy Ad free right now only on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app or on Apple Podcasts.
- [37:41]
David Brown
It's January 2015. The news out of Mountain View is everywhere. Google is pulling Glass from the market just two years after its debut. It plans to retool the product and re release it later, under the guidance of legendary product designer Tony Fadell. At least Glass will be in great hands. Fadel helped create the ipod, the iPhone, and the home monitoring system Nest. In the announcement, Google tries to put a cheery face on this decision. After all, Fadel is design royalty, a perfect choice to revamp the product. But even Fadel's name can't obscure the grim reality of this moment. Less than three years after those skydivers descended on the Moscone Center, Google Glass is effectively dead. And during that time, Glass completely failed to hit its targets. While Google never releases sales numbers, analysts once predicted Glass sales would be in the millions by 2016. Instead, even the most aggressive estimates for actual sales top out at less than 900,000 units total, with many analysts agreeing the real number is probably closer to 300,000. So what happened? Was it the Glass hole effect? Or is something else going on? At 2015 south by Southwest conference, the head of Google's moonshot factory, a man named Astro Teller, gives Glass a public autopsy. He says that Glass's real problem was in everyone's heightened expectations. Quoting here we allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention to the program. We did things to encourage people to think this was a finished product. His take? Glass just wasn't ready for prime time. It wasn't that people didn't like Glass, as he sees it. It was that they didn't ever get to experience Glass in its full glory. Still, one question hangs over the obituaries for Glass. Is this a death blow to wearables as a category or a win for Google's competitors who might be developing devices of their own? The folks at Snapchat are about to find out. It's November 10, 2016. Across the US headlines are dominated by election news. But if you're looking for a distraction and you live near Venice beach, you can take a stroll along the boardwalk, where you'll find a single gleaming yellow vending machine that appeared overnight. A long line is already formed in front of it. This yellow kiosk features a single eye on the front, like a camera lens that wakes up when it senses someone walking past. Gives the entire kiosk a Minion esque look. This is the launch of Snap's first hardware product, camera enabled sunglasses it's calling Spectacles, which is fitting because this entire launch is designed for maximum spectacle. Spectacles were first announced back in September, alongside the news that Snapchat would be rebranding as Snap Inc. To reflect a company that includes more offerings than just its app. Which seems important because just one month earlier, Snap's rival Facebook unveiled Instagram Stories, a brazen and aggressive copycat of Snapchat's entire format. Just like Snapchat, Insta's stories are short videos that disappear after 24 hours from a person's feed. This feels like Snap's payback for refusing to sell to Facebook, an attempt to imitate Snap into irrelevance. So now there's extra pressure on this Spectacles launch. CEO Evan Spiegel, now 26, tells the Wall Street Journal that he's operating on a principle of measure a thousand times cut once. Unlike Glass, this rollout can't be hasty. In fact, everything about Spectacles feels in direct opposition to Glass. Instead of a futuristic looking headband, these sunglasses look like novelty shades you might pick up at a gas station, though they're definitely sturdier. They have round circular frames that come in three colors, with a small yellow circle at each temple marking the cameras and a light to show that you're recording. Instead of fifteen hundred dollars, these glasses cost just $130, less than a tenth of the price. That price point puts Spectacles in easy reach of Snap users, most of whom are teens and young 20 somethings. Rather than promise the world, these glasses promise simplicity video recordings that max out at 30 seconds long. The video will be captured in a circular frame, which Spiegel says is closer to human vision. The footage gets uploaded right to a folder in Snapchat for easy editing and posting. And then there are the vending machines, which, like Snapchat's patented disappearing photos and videos, go away after 24 hours. The kiosks literally move to a new location the next day, which Snap users can track through an online map. The disappearing kiosk strategy is fun, quirky and the polar opposite of the tony Google Glass experience. With its White Glove service and appointment times booked months in advance, Snap is still doing a limited rollout. But unlike Glass, this one is no longer centered around the elite. What could be more populous than a vending machine, and what seems cosmetic may really be strategic. Google made access feel elite and technical, but Snap made access feel playful and casual. Same broad category, radically different emotional experience, and customers often decide whether something is for them before they judge the specs. No pun intended. Initial reviews of Spectacles are optimistic. The feeling of lightness and whimsy Snap is cultivating with a low price and friendly looking yellow vending machines seems to translate to Snap's target market. And despite the fact that Spectacles have the exact same capacity for creepy behavior and unauthorized recording that Glass did, no equivalent Snap hole narrative emerges. At least not right away. Ten days after the launch, Wired writes a glowing feature with the title Snap's Spectacles are the beginning of a Camera First Future. They interview a content creator who hosts hosts an online prank show, who freely confesses to filming people with his spectacles while putting a small piece of electrical tape over the glasses, recording light so he can comfortably film in secret. Here's a snippet of that content. How long you guys know each other for? Just now. Wait, you're being serious? Am I on Snapchat? No, you son of a. There's nothing on Snapchat. What are you feeling? Me? The person being filmed is obviously uncomfortable, but instead of ripping the glasses off the prankster's face, he laughs it off. Will this good humor persist around Spectacles? Will people start getting used to the camera first future, Wired predicts. Or will the novelty soon wear off? Unfortunately for Snap, the buzz around Spectacles is short lived. By October 2017, nearly a year after those yellow vending machines first appeared on Venice beach, sales are slumping. And so is demand. The influencers who embraced Spectacles start moving on to the next trend, which is what influencers do. And the broader public's appetite for Spectacles never really develops, despite Snap adding the product to E commerce sites like Amazon, as well as expanding to European markets, total sales of Spectacles since launch come in at around 150,000 units. And while Evan Spiegel points out that 150,000 units is better than Apple's first year selling the ipod, others counter that these numbers aren't as good as those of Google's Glass. By November, Spectacles are declared a flop, having lost the company around $40 million. To be clear, Snap doesn't stop making them. In fact, Snap releases a new version in 2018 with a whole host of quality improvements. But Spectacles are soon more or less forgotten by the mainstream public. The verdict is in. These glasses were a fad, not a forever product. They were too quirky, too fun to be taken seriously. While Google Glass may have tried to do too much, perhaps Spectacles tried to do too little. I'm not gonna lie, I'm getting a lot of Segway Vibes here. You remember Segway, the self balancing scooter we were promised that would transform transportation here on Earth. One of the hardest questions in innovation or in business more broadly is whether customers truly want a product or whether merely want to try it out. Early sales can be driven by curiosity, gifting hype, or fear of missing out. None of those are the same as lasting demand, continued use, word of mouth, people replacing the product when it wears out. If enthusiasm fades after the first unboxings, the market's probably smaller than the creator's conviction. Foreign It's September 2021 and Facebook has a big announcement. No, not that one. We're still a month away from the groundbreaking news that Facebook will rebrand to Meta embed everything on a virtual reality space known as the Metaverse. This announcement is more modest. Facebook has teamed up with Ray Ban manufacturer Essilor Luxottica to enter the smart glasses category. Here's CEO Mark Zuckerberg teeing it up.
- [48:24]
John Rodriguez
We've believed for a long time that glasses are going to be an important part of building the next computing platform and unlocking a whole new set of experiences for people. We wanted to build something that would enable you to easily capture and share experiences from your point of view. So I'm proud to introduce to you Ray Ban Stories.
- [48:44]
David Brown
One look at the form factor of these glasses and the inspiration seems obvious. Wired Magazine outright calls them copycats of Snap's spectacles. Even the name Ray Ban Stories seems to be a thumb in Snap's eye, since Stories is the name of the feature Facebook copied from Snap in the first place. Just like Snap's spectacles and Epiphany Eyewear before them, Facebook's glasses are simple looking frames with an embedded camera and a small LED recording light. Just like Snaps, Facebook's version sells at a relatively low price point, starting at $300. And just like Spectacles, these glasses produce video that integrates easily with your social media feeds, in this case on Facebook and Instagram. Rayman Stories do come in a few more styles and colors than Spectacles, and they have a speaker that lets you activate them by voice. But otherwise they seem to be executing one of Facebook's tried and true plays. Rip off its competitor as brazenly as possible and move on. Except to everyone's surprise, these smart glasses are destined to become something much more than a mere copycat, because one important addition is coming Generative AI. And that will change everything. They will become Meta's buzziest hardware product and open the door to a host of new concerns like who is actually receiving the images you're capturing with your face, and what happens to that data afterwards, and what it means when one of the world's most powerful data brokers is also the company making the very glasses on your nose. Meta is about to break away from the pack in the wearables race, but the price for victory is deceptively high. 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 one of Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses for Business Wars. A quick note about some of the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said at the time. 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 peace of AI is African intelligence, the workers who train AI are fighting back by Jason Kebler and Snap's spectacles are the Beginning of a Camera First Future by David Pierce For Wired, I'm your host David Brown. Katie Clark Gray wrote this story. Voice acting by Chloe Elmore. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Fact Checking by Gabrielle Joliet Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellowish. Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Sound design by Josh Morales Our lead sound designer is Kyle Randall, Executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, Head of Creative Development at Audible Kate Navig, 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.