The Technofascist Urge To Never Turn Down a Brand Deal

Taylor Swift's wedding was on Friday I knew you know that I'd find a way to shoehorn that in here somehow well I found a way I found it Taylor Swift's wait I'm just gonna do that again do it as many times as you need you can never be too sure with your tone about Taylor Swift's wedding Taylor Swift's wedding was on Friday hello hello and welcome back to a bit fruity I'm Matt Bernstein Taylor Swift's wedding was on Friday it was held at Madison Square Garden the largest entertainment venue in one of the most crowded areas of Manhattan on top of the busiest train station in North America and I have no opinions on it at all what's notable though is that MSG Madison Square Garden has one of the most successful events in the United States and it's one of the most successful events in the United States and it's one of the most successful events in the United States and they only gotten worse since then. Yeah, they've benefited from Trump administration corruption extensively, right? They've hired people that previously worked in the CFTC or the SEC. They have pretty close ties to the Trump administration. They are a firm, you know, them and Polymarket technically are illegal in the United States, but are allowed to operate through ridiculous sort of loopholes. I mean, Polymarket, which is a similar venture to them, operated for a while, the same kind of loophole that these crypto casinos overseas would operate by where you'd have like these big firms that would do partnerships with streamers and essentially target children trying to be like, you guys should gamble on stream. We'll give you money for it. So you're not really losing anything and we'll give you a big payout on top. And you're not allowed to do that in the United States. And similarly, some of these, you know, for a while, if you weren't allowed to do it in the United States, whether it's digital gambling, gambling, you know, on these markets this way, but now it's coming home. Now we are, we're freeing the market to do God's work, which is to let people gamble on whether a town is going to get annexed by an occupying army or whether someone in your neighborhood is going to use a hair dryer to increase the temperature on a radar or on a sensor by two degrees so that they can get like a $30,000 payout. And it's been so demoralizing to see like the Oscars bring this right in. Like all of these major channels, like the Superbowl, the Oscars, like all of these CNN. Yeah. CNN did the Kalshi deal too, right? News and cultural institutions bending over backwards to facilitate the slightest profit from this like blatantly, not only illegal, also morally corrupt thing. And all these decision makers are just like, whatever, like it's Trump's America. We're going to do whatever we want. Yeah. And you know, I've teased this topic many times on this podcast because it makes me so, so angry and like emotional because it's gambling. It's gambling. And, you know, they'll say, oh, well, there's a difference between prediction markets and gambling casinos. And, you know, I would argue that that's like spiritually the same argument that people in multi-level marketing schemes make when they say we're not a pyramid scheme, technically. Distinctions without differences. And most importantly, people using these prediction market websites if the websites themselves want to say that it's not gambling. Well, the bottom line is the psychological impulse and the dopamine hits that you get from participating in it is the exact same as gambling at a casino. And the thing about casinos is if you go to Las Vegas and you walk into a physical casino or Atlantic City from my lovely home state of New Jersey, you see what gambling does to people. You see how it destroys people's lives. The thing with polymarket and Kalshi is it allows people to destroy their lives in the exact same way, to go into financial ruin, to develop these gambling addictions from the comfort of their own home. And, you know, in middle school, in many of these ad campaigns, look at what they're doing with Timothee Chalamet, target young men and boys gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate of any addiction. And so, you know, for Timothee Chalamet to be doing this, to me, it just for the sake of this podcast, it opens up a conversation that I am always wanting to have that I don't know if it's that interesting to people who aren't like content creators and or make money this way, but about saying no to brand partnerships, something that I think we, the three of us, right, as creatives, creatives, as creators, that we are all tasked with now to give you a sense of how rich Timothee Chalamet is before his fucking Kalshi ad and the rates that he commands. Timothee Chalamet was the face of a Chanel, Blue Day Chanel fragrance campaign in 2023, for which he was paid a reported $35 million. And, you know, that's one brand deal that is not to account for any of his movies, any of his anything. He's so rich. It's like we all have the capacity to draw lines for ourselves around what we will and won't do. I do a podcast. The podcast has sponsors. I have the task of deciding which sponsors I will and won't accept for this podcast. And I just think like, you know, for example, I said no to BetterHelp. And I don't think I'm like, you know, a model citizen for saying no to BetterHelp. I'm just like, you know, you get a certain amount of listens on your podcast, you get the BetterHelp sponsorship offer. And I looked up BetterHelp on Reddit because I don't know that much about the company, but I was curious about what other people said. And I saw enough bad or dubious stuff to be like, I'm going to say no to BetterHelp. I'm just like, if we can say no to BetterHelp on the fucking leftist podcast circuit, like, come on, Timothee, you can say no to Kalshi. I know you can. I know you can. Does that make sense? I mean, I think it does, especially I think like, you know, if you can say no to BetterHelp, you can say no to Kalshi. You can say no to Kalshi. But I also think it's a perfect example of sort of traps people fall for primarily thinking because something is digital, that it's a little bit different. Right. You know, what is the reason we have these online gambling markets? It's because we have physical gambling markets. And why are they interested in physical gambling markets? Because they're incredibly lucrative. Why are they lucrative? Because they're so intentionally designed to drain as much money out of you as much as possible to get you in a flow state there, to get you to lose sense of time and reality, to get you as comfortable and accommodated to spending as much money as possible, which is, you know, the design that we have incorporated into most of our digital interfaces and products. But it's just so silly that given the general antipathy I think the public has for digital goods and understanding that these firms don't have any of our interests in mind, and that they rarely, if ever, offer something that's, you know, pro-social. It is silly to say yes to something that combines the worst of all these worlds, right? Which is gambling addiction, insider trading corruption, political connections in the administration. But, you know, I guess you need like a second, third house or something. I don't really know. It feels like to me the physical infrastructure of the casino is important because if we're going to have like a market that we've created for this like social ill, which like people can participate in gambling and not have it be a, a morally negative act. But when you're in the casino, you can very obviously see what's happening, the downsides of it. If you go to like, I remember I stayed at the Rio in Las Vegas, because they were doing hotel rooms for like $14 a night. And it's really depressing walking past like all of the elderly folks who are sitting there at the slot machines and like you pass them at 9:00 AM and then you pass them again at 9:00 PM and you know they've been there for 12 hours. Like that is an important visual reminder of what gambling is with the prediction markets. And specifically the celebrity endorsements, it's now being morphed into just like a cool thing. And I also think that with Timothée Chalamet choosing to do this, he's also doing this very cynical calculus because he's not dumb. He knows this is going to be unpopular. He knows this is going to be controversial. I think a lot of these celebrities have wised up to the knowledge that like they're going to do these controversial ads and endorsements and people are going to get mad at them. They just know fundamentally it's not going to matter because they can afford to lose even thousands of fans. They know that the majority of people will not notice and/or will forget and/or will not care. So they're doing it purposefully. And I also thought it was very funny like after the Timothée ad came out, my little brother who is a college student who like is not like that tuned into any of this stuff, texted me and was like, "Timothée's not cool anymore." Like he's like can't believe he did this college ad. Like I don't ride for Timothée anymore. And I was like, whoa. So it's like I do think that there is there's blowback to this and that is real. I think Timothée is like by the time Dune 3 comes out, like no one's going to care anymore. And he's probably right. And like what have you to have of your own fans? What have you to have of the people who support you? That they're just like these lifeless sheep who will get over it. You know, I know a lot of people love to make fun of like the people who would like engage with something like Kalshi. But I don't. I think that they're all victims of, you know, an extremely predatory business model that Timothée Chalamet has handsomely profited off of. And you know, like Ed said, for what? That money could hit or not hit his bank account and it would not change a single thing about his life. That's what drives me crazy. We've been experiencing a wave of horrible celebrity brand partnerships from this to what we're about to talk about to Gwyneth Paltrow doing luxury apartments in Herzliya, Israel. And I'm like, for what? Yeah. That are filmed in New York. Filmed in New York. Crazy. For what? You guys all have so much money. I also find like gambling addiction and gambling marketing really interesting because it is so young, male dominated and focused. There was an Atlantic cover story that got a lot of attention a few months ago. And I think it's really interesting because it's so young, male dominated and focused. There was an Atlantic cover story that got a lot of attention about gambling, which was kind of an insane concept because they gave a Mormon label. reporter who had never gambled before because it's against their religion they gave him like ten thousand dollars to go gamble with and the cover story was basically just like outlining what happened and what happened is he got really into it and ended up losing a ton of money um but along the way like he was speaking to all of these like experts in gambling like like going through a lot of the science behind it and i learned from that article that like 93 percent of people with gambling addiction are men and that many men start gambling for the first time when they're like 14 years old sometimes it's because they gamble with their dads as like a father-son bonding activity which i find so sad and depressing other times though increasingly it's because kids are able to access these markets like polymarket and kalshi and start gambling and the fact that like that's part of the calculus of doing a timothy chalamet activity is that like it's like it's like you're like you're like you're like you're is they know that he is a popular figure for among these like young men and boys and i'm like that in particular i'm like that's one of those like how do you sleep at night knowing you're probably you're you've been chosen because they think that 13 year old boys look up to you and are gonna want to do what you did because it's cool like that is really really selfish yeah i mean these industries that's what they thrive off right to getting them while they're young i mean you know the natasha schold in her book addiction by design she's an anthropologist that studied these casinos and gambling and writes the book at a period where we're just about to be at the cusp of online gambling but the industries are anxious because they're realizing that they've had lifetime customers who have they've relied on using and engaging with casinos a very specific way and they're gonna die and it seems like they're not gonna be able to properly capture convince young people to move on to casinos or to you know to spend all their time in casinos so what are they going to do and and online gambling right emerges as a sort of solve but but it's also i think downstream of some of the same stuff that motivates the gambling and in of itself right you know post 2008 kind of desperation to make money the this this insistence on you know the way that we can you know make amends in one way or another rectify what happened with the financial crisis is you know don't trust the bankers trust the platforms you know trust the tech companies uh you should manage it and and this sort of constant march of you should democratize more and more of the financial system and bring it under your control and more and more of the world should be financialized right and it should be a casino you should be able to make money wherever you want you should be able to rent part of your home you should be able to rent your car you know to pick up other people rent your home to other people who are traveling you should be able to turn anything you can into an asset that can generate some rent or revenue for you and eventually of course we've come to one of the logical conclusions which is information that you come across you should be able to bet on it against other people thinking that you have an edge i love your cat meowing your cat your cat is like fuck this it really is i also like i think about the male the male lonely crisis as it has been termed and how for the right the supposed male loneliness crisis has been taken on as a project to like deny women's bodily autonomy to say like men are lonely because women's standards are too high or like modern feminism is the root of all ills and like it's the reason why young men are experiencing more depression why people are less likely to get partnered why they're less likely to get married why they're less likely to have children even if you were to you know complete this political project and ensure that like women are forced to like marry men and bear children at a young age like it would not tackle some of the roots of these issues which include things like gambling like an actual political project that truly cared about young men would address the corruption within this industry and address like the marketing that hooks men and boys onto this at a young age because it is such a male-dominated issue like i think that those numbers and the the way that this crisis operates is really staggering and we there isn't as of right now though certainly the right is not taking this on as a political project i also think it's like fertile ground for people who do want to like make the world a better place for the youth and beyond is to address this like crisis and the fact that it it's only happening because there is no regulatory teeth behind actually dismantling it i would like to take just a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the sponsors of this podcast which are hopefully comparatively normal i think we have uh food and soap this week but before we do that i wanted to tell you that i completely forgot while we were recording this episode that in 2024 i was asked by kalshi if i could do a kalshi sponsorship for this podcast and i went and i found the email exchange because i didn't even know what kalshi was it was better times and i wanted to read that email exchange to you i was asked if i wanted to do the kalshi sponsorship and i responded can you please explain exactly what this company is like i am 10 years old what they wrote back their sort of like one-liner thing was kalshi is a platform that allows you to bet on anything the outcome of the election the winner of the best new artist at the grammy awards or the rotten tomato score of new movies coming out it's a platform for people to place bets and potentially win money if they win the kalshi sponsorship if they are lucky slash know their stuff it's totally legal and is available to anyone over the age of 18 in the u.s and i just said passing on this i think if you have to like tell me in your initial pitch that it's totally legal that's got me asking questions about why you needed to say up front that it's totally illegal so in any event uh here are the sponsors of this podcast our first sponsor is blue land plastics don't just disappear they break up into smaller and smaller pieces that embed themselves within our environments within our water within our food these as you may know are called microplastics blue land is a line of home cleaning products on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic and they have everything any home cleaning product that you have including all sorts of soaps laundry pods you name it they have a plastic free replacement for it they have replaced those products in over a million homes including mine blue land is really simple for most of their products you just buy one of their forever bottles you fill it with water and you pop in a tablet for whatever product it is be it hand soap dish soap window cleaner multi-purpose cleaner and when you're done with that bottle you just fill it up with water again and pop in a new tablet and those tablets start for as low as two dollars and 25 cents so not just better for the planet but also better on your wallet if you'd like to try out blue land you can get 15 off your first order at blueland.com fruity that is blueland.com fruity this podcast is also sponsored by our friends at factor you know when you get home after a long day at work and you've got everything you need in the fridge to cook the groceries they're looking at you but you just you just don't have the energy to cook people who listen to this podcast a lot know that this is just me on most days i like doing a lot of things i don't like cooking or maybe you're a meal prepper and right up front at the top of the week you make chicken and rice to have for dinner for the next five days admirable truly but what if food could be easy and varied factor is a meal delivery service with chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy and the best part of course is that they are all ready to heat and eat in two minutes no more refrigerator dread factor has over a hundred different meal options on a rotating menu and a bunch of different sort of cuisines and dietary options so whatever your preferences are they can accommodate them if you'd like to try factor today you can head over to factor meals.com slash fruity 50 off with the code fruity 50 off to get 50 off and free daily greens with a new subscription that is factor meals.com slash fruity 50 off and now let's get back to the show this all reminds me of something that happened a few years ago which some people who are very online may remember which was when a small group of young mostly black and brown female influencers took a brand trip to china with the fast fashion slave labor brand she in the influencers were brought through a staged tour of one of sheen's factories where of course pre-planned employee slash actors told them how good their working conditions are next day we headed to the sheen innovation center this facility blew my mind it's over 600 000 square feet there's so much technology and sheen is just such a developed and complex company and it was so beautiful to see firsthand i was able to interview a woman that worked in the fabric cutting department and you guys know me she's an investigative journalist so i asked her all of our questions and she answered them honestly and authentically she was very surprised at all the rumors that have been spread in the u.s she told Tell me about her family, her lifestyle, her commute, her hour. And this was a mega controversy on the Internet. And for good reason. These influencers were being taken for a ride and themselves cashing in on an opportunity to launder the image of one of fashion's most notorious violators of labor laws and human rights. One of the influencers named Danny DMC, known colloquially as confidence activist, she became a meme and videos of her sort of like obliviously and unquestioningly nodding along to Sheehan's sweatshop propaganda circulate regularly three years later. And, you know, to be clear, I think these influencers deserved criticism for their lack of discernment. And a number of these girls, again. Mostly brown and black beauty influencers have said in hindsight that that was like the only brand trip they'd ever been invited on during an era where influencer trip marketing was a really big thing. And when splashy opportunities with brands like Tarte Cosmetics were overwhelmingly made available to white influencers, it felt like sad to me then that these Sheehan girls seemed uniquely poised to be doing this brand's dirty work. Which didn't make it okay, it just made it like complicated. And I bring all of this up to say that that Sheehan trip was the talk of the town in 2023. There were so many articles, so many YouTube videos, so many TikToks, the commentary, the discourse, it was endless. There are multiple videos about it on YouTube right now with between 500,000 and a million views. Comparatively, there was no widespread backlash to TikTok. And I think that's what made it so much more interesting. You know, that'll be good in the coming years. We have some more Metaglasses to smash because, like I said, up top, Kylie Jenner is the official face of the new Metaglasses launch. And I would like to enter this segment by watching a 60-second commercial that Meta put out for this Kylie Jenner collaboration that I don't think a lot of people really saw. They posted it to their, like, Metaglasses YouTube channel, which nobody watches. Kylie just, you know, to promote the partnership, she just posted, like, the photo shoot. This ad is highly bizarre. Here we go. Good morning. This new sample just came in. All right, let's move. Come on. Where did you want this? Over there. And then these flowers just came in from your mom. Here you go. Thank you. Hi. Hello. Oh. You're so cute. I love you. Can I just grab you for a quick? Wait. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, wheeling around a large art sculpture and asking her where she wants it, bringing her flowers to which she says unmuted, thank you. One word. A woman rushes in to put a moisturizer on her hand, which I suppose is meant to be a tester. Yeah. The most emotional she gets is when she like picks up a cat, which is, you know, relatable. It's just to me, it reads like a horror movie trailer. Like, I'm like, we're alone in a house. We're being watched. The desire here is clearly to create something aspirational. And the aspiration is like. What if you just woke up and made a series of decisions about where you wanted people to put things for you? Because that's literally how, that's her morning routine is like, oh, put this moisturizer on this hand, like move that $2 million sculpture over there, like, like clean my pool, like. Right, yeah, 15 minutes of it is like arguing with them as they put it in the place, a little bit to the left. It makes, like, and this, this type of aspiration as a brand. Has worked for the Kardashians for a long time. This is like a key component of their success. I do think like, as I was watching this, and as I saw like some reactions to it, I don't think we've entirely moved past that. I think it's probably still works for people, but the juxtaposition of like them showing this as her real life with also the widely publicized lawsuits from her employees against her, where like, I don't know if you both have seen this, but. I have. I have, but you should tell people. So basically, this has happened, I believe, to multiple Kardashian-Jenners, but as of late, a number of Kylie's employees have sued her and the company that like procures these employees for the Kardashians for just like horrific allegations of workplace mistreatment, including a woman who said she miscarried due to the strain of the labor that she was performing and was then told that she was making Kylie upset because she was too emotional about it. So you compare that to what's on display here, which is like, my employees love me versus like, my employees are literally suing me for the abject misery of my life. Well, I don't even think this commercial is arguing that her employees love her. I just think it's saying that she has employees. That's true. That's totally true. Because they're kind of just like, where would you like this thing, Miss Jenner? And I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I guess I'm so like New York. Socialists, some are pilled right now. Sorry, I really shouldn't be like talking like that. I don't know. Hey, listen. Until we stop winning, you know. New York right now is so high on its own community orientedness. Like it's such it's such good vibes in the city right now, which I think is a message that's really emanated across the Internet. And I've really been thinking a lot about like the ideal. Of like human happiness that like people like Zoran. But really, this whole movement has put forth where it's like we're in community with one another. We're out in the streets together. We're having fun with one another. We're like experiencing life and joy and the joy of like reaching out and touching other human beings, not just to put a moisturizer on their hand. And then I look at the idea of happiness that's put forth by Meta in this ad. And I'm just like, oh, no. Kylie Jenner is surrounded by people. She's surrounded by servants. But she's also very alone. Yeah. And this is what Meta seems to think we all want is just to be like in our secluded estates. It's such a misread of the moment. And it also I know we talk a lot about Jeffree Star on this podcast. I thought about the exact same thing. It feels so out of the era that made Jeffree Star really famous. When Jeffree Star was famously like always in his like pink house surrounded by 16. Dogs and like three pink Lamborghinis and a film crew and telling everyone where to go and what to do. And I'm so rich. I'm so rich. Look at all my beautiful things. And it's just like, you're right that I think that probably still works for some people. But as a culture, it so does not feel current. It also arguably has not always worked that well for Kylie. Like her, her aesthetic and her public persona had changed a lot after she got pregnant. For the first time, they launched a Kylie Jenner spinoff show called Life of Kylie back in the late 2010s. That was canceled after just one season, if I remember correctly, because I don't think people have are really that into like Kylie's version of this. And that is something that also came to mind for me when watching this ad was I was like, I don't think she needs to be like, like, I don't believe in like, oh, as a mother, you always need to be with your children. Like, absolutely not. But I did think it was kind of striking that as a mother of young children, they're not even like they're not. Present in this, you wouldn't even know that they existed in this. Like, it's so clear that, you know, her experience of parenting is to not have to be hands on because clearly there is a team of other people like taking care of her kids for her. No, almost no other young mother on the planet has that experience. So I think that a lot of people are sort of like, not really like on board with with the Kylie of it all. But it's more like there's a fascination with watching her because of her, the fact that her life. Is so surreal and that she has grown up in this like, bizarro world of wealth and privilege. And what a what a nice option for her to have to not include her child in the Metaglasses commercial. If only mothers everywhere could similarly have the option to not have their children filmed by these glasses. Right. Yep. On like such a base level, what would the general person really be using this for? Right. Just like filming the general day to day and comedy. I think it would constantly be what interfacing with checking in on the Metaglasses, capturing very specific moments or trying to set that up instead of just letting things happen. I think, you know, as is the case with a lot of Metas products, the goal is to kind of terraform social life and convince you that, yeah, of course, of course, it's nice to hang out with your friends. Of course, it's nice to be offline. Of course, it's nice to go outside and to have things spontaneously happen. But wouldn't it be better if you did it on the platform? In fact, here's some. Here's some reasons why it might be better if you did it. If you did dating, if you did, you know, meeting new friends, if you did events, if you did communication, you know, and phone calls. Here's why it would be better if you did an art ecosystem and trying to offload as much as that's possible. But, you know, you still by doing that, you have to convince people there's a reason why or you have to change the way that the experience happens. And I feel like the Metaglasses, part of the move, part of the pushes they're going to try to do. How do we convince people that it's normal, cool, and fun to not just film strangers in public, although that's already, you know, that we've kind of lost out war. But how do we convince people that they should also be filming their private moments completely and consistently all the time and always be online, right? There's no real reason to be doing this. Most people have more digital detritus than they can handle. You know, I mean, people have thousands, tens of thousands of photos. really need to sift through to the point where it's like, You have to make a decision, I'm not going to use some of these services because they encourage the sort of like thoughtlessness of perpetual piling on instead of being a little bit more present with the moment and cherishing it. I think these are attitudes that the technology encourages, but also that the company encourages because that makes for a more amenable and reliable customer for this product and others, right? Yeah, I think like along with that, the only people who I've really seen using these glasses so far and the only type of content that I've seen created with these glasses so far are influencers. Like when I'm watching like reels or something, I will see because it's being a meta product, they're using it as a form of advertising within the content. So like if someone films something with meta glasses and then uploads it to Instagram, there's a little label that says like filmed with, you know, meta AI. I can see why. For some content creators, the selling point is like you can go hands-free and you can just like literally just have this like instead of holding a camera and like setting it down, setting it up, it's like you're just filming everything around you. There's one woman who her whole shtick is she eats like a stack of edibles. Have you guys seen this woman? Okay. Like edible like THC? Yes, yes, yes. She's really, really popular and I don't have anything against her as a person, but I do have two problems with what she's doing. So the whole gimmick of her video is she shows you this massive stack of like THC gummy edibles. She puts them all into her mouth in one big bite and then she's like, let's go eat lunch together. And she films the content from what I can tell with some form of the glasses. She'll go into the restaurant and she'll be recording like her interactions with the people who work there and she'll ask them on camera, are you okay with me filming this? To which they'll say. Yes, but my issues are twofold. One, I don't think you should be eating that many edibles and then driving. Word. Yeah. I'm like, you should not be driving like under the influence, which I do think that a lot of the people who are doing this are. Second of all, and this is the bigger issue with the glasses and with content creators using the glasses, you're acting like you're asking for people's permission to be filmed, but you're already filming them and they're in a social position where they can't easily say no. If you are the customer and you're already filming the person serving you and you're like, can I film you? It's almost a jerk knee jerk reaction to be like, oh yeah, sure. Cause it's already happening. And it's like, there's so much, there's such a balance of power with like a paying customer and a low wage employee where I think a lot of people in that position would just say yes. So I'm like, I don't like the, like the, the way that I'm seeing these glasses sort of be used in people's content already. Yeah. Working customer service or retail. Well, half the time, it's most of the time, actually, it's just so much easier to say yes, then to risk stepping on some random landmine that activates a fight where you, you get, you know, disciplined, chastised or lose the job. You know, I can't, I can't think of how many times said no to a very innocent thing that I thought made sense, yelled at, and then get yelled at again by the boss. Like it's my fault. It is funny that it's like the one person who seems. To be asking is doing it after, you know, taking a million edibles to the face. I never thought I would yearn for the GoPro. Like bring, bring back tradition. Let's all put our GoPros back on. If this is what we want to be doing kids, but to do it with the glasses and to be like, just like asking the workers instead of just not filming them in the first place. I'm like, I don't love this because even if they do consent, they don't know you're not standing there. You're not even like telling them like, oh, by the way, I have a million followers. So like hundreds of thousands of people could see you. You just like, it just, it doesn't feel like these glasses and the function of filming with them in public or even in private, it doesn't feel like informed consent is even on the table. And mind you, these are all the problems we have with the edible lady who just by virtue of asking for people's permission, it sounds like the most ethical wearer of these goggles. Yeah. Like this is the best case. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the best case scenario. Kylie Jenner had a launch party for her meta glasses, which Timothee Chalamet attended, ironically, in a hoodie, which he had pulled the string. So you could basically not even tell that it was him because he didn't want anyone to see or film him, presumably, which I just thought was a beautifully ironic thing to do at the launch party for the surveillance goggles. Surveillance for thee, not for me. You know? That's usually how it is. What we don't know is that he was actually inside of that hoodie. He was on his own meta goggles, placing bets on Kalshi. Do you think he'll do a partnership with meta ray bands? Like a his and hers? I mean, they really, you know, I have to say, I have to say, people, I remember when Timothy and Kylie started dating, and this is sort of heterosexual business that I try not to get too involved with on this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I swear. But people were like, oh, my God, he like has these little chicken legs and she's a voluptuous, beautiful woman. What could they have in common? He's like this artsy baby girl, boy actor, and she's like this, like, shameless influencer. Like, what do they have in common? They, my friends, are perfect for each other. And I think as time goes by, we can see that crystallize. Right. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So I want to spend time talking about these. Glasses and the future that Meta's predicting we all want. And, you know, I disaffectionately call these pedophile goggles. Those in the industry call them wearable AI. Meta Ray-Bans, Meta's earlier AI glasses release sold seven million pairs in 2025. Entrepreneur.com called AI wearables the next big thing in personal tech. Is that true? I don't know. I hope not. I know Meta hopes it is. They've invested billions of dollars in that hope. But to better contextualize what Meta hopes is the future of everyone wearing glasses that talk to us in the voice of Kylie Jenner, which, by the way, just based on that commercial and how monotone she is, doesn't sound that fun. Over there. Just came in from your mom. Here you go. Thank you. But anyway, I want to first look back into a recent past that feels so, so long ago. The year is 2013. We've survived predictions of the world ending. Obama's once again president. Thrift shop by Macklemore is dominating the charts. Your host, Matt Bernstein, is a freshman in high school. And there's a new tech product on everyone's lips called Google Glass. Priced at $1,500, the original smart glasses looked less like glasses and more like orthodontic headgear, yet many at the time. And we're convinced that these would be the next big thing. Vogue published a 12-page editorial photo shoot devoted to them. Diane von Furstenberg, the designer and former wife of gay billionaire Barry Diller, it's a whole other thing, not only wore them to her spring 2013 runway show, but sent all of her models down the runway wearing Google Glasses. Yet the backlash was swift. The glasses did many of the. The same things that meta-glasses are trying to sell you on today. You could talk to them, tell it to take photos and videos. And people in 2013 did not like this. They thought it was creepy. They thought people who wore them were creepy. So much so that they were given a name. Glass holes. And so my question to the esteemed panel today is, do you think that meta-glasses can overcome many of these same concerns 13 years later or not? And why? I think that the problem slash the pro, like why I think that they are overcoming it or maybe will continue to, is that they are not as hideously ugly as these glasses were. And you cannot tell that they are recording you all of the time. And I think that with so many of these technological advancements around AI, it's like the whole point is that people have to be coerced into a world where they exist by simply not even. By not even knowing what is happening. Like if you saw someone wearing Google glasses, you'd be like, that, I can see those. Those are weird looking. Like I know that that's not like just a regular pair of sunglasses. If you see the meta-ray-ban sunglasses, I guarantee you most people probably don't even know that these exist yet. So there's not that like skepticism and disgust factor built into it. It's like almost like a gaslighting thing where it's like, these are just normal sunglasses. Oh wait, no, you've been surreptitiously recorded. This entire time. The lack of consent really is a huge through line, I feel like. Yeah, you know, also Meta tries to be like, hey, you know, we have implemented features that will let you know if someone is recording. We'll put a little dot. But I mean, the glasses are also relatively easy to get into and get rid of the dot. Or, you know, as you were sending me examples of this, you can get a vendor to give you a little dot. You can just put on it and it can blend in with the glasses itself. I mean, I've also seen. demos of people using it to dox people, right? You can use the glasses, scan faces, right? They have biometric code that you can upload or that's already, you know, on the glasses itself. Take publicly available information, voter registration, namely, and figure out where someone lives, you know, and repeat that information back to them as they do in the demo, right? So on a few levels, I think that there is enough of what can go wrong and enough of a tech leap that there's an opportunity to get people to react as sharply as they did to the glass holes. But it is possible that they'll win the war and that the perfect glasses will spread everywhere because there's been erosion of people's outrage, right? You know, as we've been talking about, we're just inundated with constant violations and revulsions. Facebook is constantly doing something that pushes a boundary and is constantly getting people to accept the boundary later. This sort of surveillance is increasingly pervasive and people are being taught to accept it as part of the price for living in a city. And I think that they are going to and have been doing a good job of trying to latch on to all the other ways it can be used outside of surveillance, outside of creeping on people, outside of secretly recording people without consent, right? They're trying really hard to graft it onto content. And as Kat was talking about, onto hands-free content, they're trying to also latch it onto this sort of personal, like, don't you want to fill out, you know, parts of your life and have these things as cherished mementos forever? I mean, this is similar to what they've been doing with the slow integration of AI features into photo albums that you already have, right? Don't you just want, like, an automatic Facetune or modification or adjustment of the photo? It's no different than what your phone already does, actually. When you take the photo, right, it already has to do some adjustments algorithmically. So what's the difference if we have an actual artificial intelligence or if we have an LLM that's interested in doing that for you as a product, right? And so there's been a lot of slow encroachments over the years that I think have eroded people's defense mechanisms. And these companies are also more desperate. They need as many lines of revenue as they can, especially as they're burning all this money on AI infrastructure, right? You need, they don't have another growth thing, right? We don't have another search. We don't have another new social media. The growth thing is supposed to be generative AI offered to consumers and chatbots and enterprise. And if that doesn't pan out, you need to put your money into a bunch of baskets, right? You need wearables, AIs, or, you know, you need, you know, what they tried to do with the metaverse and AR and VR, right? You need some sort of crypto thing. I think of this as all, also constantly trying to figure out how can we just pull people in for another growth product. I don't think it's going to work. I hope not. That's my prediction. Mark it. Hey, sorry. Should I kill myself? I don't think it will because I was reading all these articles from 2013 in preparation for this and all of them were like, the Google glasses are creepy. If someone around me is wearing them, I'm going to smash them. It was identical to the things that we're seeing today online, the sentiments that are going viral around the meta glasses. Did 7 million people purchase the meta glasses last year? Yes. Did 7 million people ever purchase Google Glass? No. Do I think like you said, Ed, that there has been an erosion in like, like the privacy that we feel we're entitled to in this tech landscape? Yes. But I also perhaps naively, maybe optimistically think that this moment generally over the last year, especially with the proliferation of AI data centers, everyone is feeling this like wake up of like, no, actually, I have agency and you can't just do this to me. There is such a through line of non-consent to all of this. It's just happening to us. I don't know. I think people are tired. I agree with that and I do think like one thing that has heartened me throughout like the force of AI like AI was forced onto people who did not want it. And I think you can tell that like one thing that I do to just like gauge like public sentiment about things is like go through all of people's Instagram stories, including people who I went to high school with, including my family members who are not like politically engaged, including like people who are relatively outside my bubble. And I have almost never seen anyone like organically within these like networks of people be like, I love using AI. In fact, all the time I see people like rejecting it and being like I hate AI. I hate that I'm forced to use this at work. I hate when my dad sends me like an AI generated picture. I hate all of this stuff. And I think that that will continue to be the case. Like we're already seeing that with these glasses. The way that people are kind of like drawn to it is when they when the companies can figure out a way to engineer some sort of like participatory meme. And the way that that the way that happened with generative AI was like the Ghibli challenge when Sam Altman. Do you remember the Ghibli challenge when everyone was putting their stuff into Chachi BT and telling it to make it look like a Ghibli film? They should have given Miyazaki a gun. Oh, and people would did that fucking stupid fucking bullshit yearbook shit. Yes. They're like fed photos of themselves. Do you know that people were paying money to do that? Crazy. People were posting those AI generated yearbook me as a jock in high school. They were like paying like it was like $8 or something. Or like the Barbie doll where it was like this is me as a Barbie doll and these are my little like props. My God. People can be, I think, convinced to do things via the power of like participatory memes and like participatory internet culture in general. The challenge with the glasses is if you aren't already a content creator, I don't really see how they're going to get people to do this. I'm sure they will try. I would not be surprised if especially around like the holiday season this year, we're going to see a lot of people being like, it's so easy to take a family video when I don't have to pick up the camcorder and I can just switch on. We're going to see a lot of cutesy videos of like caught this moment of my kid unwrapping his present or like look at this amazing surprise I captured with my Meta Ray brand glasses. But I don't think that this actually has a real utility for most people. And so I think it would be short lived. Yes. And I think many people have correctly pointed out that there really is one novel utility about these glasses, which is that you can film people basically undetected, which I think is useful for a very specific type of person and for a very specific reason. And the idea that these glasses are a tool for creeps isn't just speculative. It has materialized. I want to talk a little bit here about this idea that Kylie Jenner and you know, frankly, the many other women who have been hired by Meta and paid handsomely to do their dirty work are attempting to girlboss this digital panopticon for pedophiles. I mean, sorry, I'm just going to come out and say it. That's what it is that we're creating. And BBC has done some extensive reporting into stories about women who've been caught on camera nonconsensually by men wearing these glasses. And I'm going to read you some of their reporting. Joy Kolekye, a 19-year-old woman living in Nairobi, Kenya, was approached by a man on the street and did not know she was being filmed. She was one of many women filmed by this same guy who made content for the internet secretly hitting on women in public. Well, I guess hitting on them openly but secretly filming himself doing so. And the video that she was in went viral. She's told the BBC, quote, "It's like being a celebrity, but not in such a good way." It led to men harassing her in person. Slut-shaming her outside of her home, cat-calling, and the like. And the same thing happened to a woman named Dilara, a 21-year-old woman in London, who was shocked to see a first-person POV video of her getting hit on by the male creator of this video with 1.3 million views on TikTok. In the video, the man asks for Dilara's phone number, which was then made public in the video, and led to her getting spam-called for weeks, including in the middle of the night. The article said, quote, "On one occasion, she says she picked up the phone and a man said to her, 'Do you know how stupid you are? Do you regret it? Do you know how easy that made you look?' Men have also shown up to her workplace." And the same thing happened to a 56-year-old woman named Kim, who was filmed wearing a bikini in a video that got 6.9 million views on TikTok. Kim only learned of this when her son called her one morning at 5 a.m. to notify her that a video of her in a bikini had gone viral. She says she received thousands of messages from men, including, quote, "Name your price to see your naked body," and, quote, "Do you have an OnlyFans?" Six months later, the messages still have not stopped. She says she didn't even think there was any point in asking the man who uploaded the video to delete it because it It had so many views. that it didn't matter anymore and she had no recourse it's dark i mean i think that this is kind of like this is something that happens alongside a lot of technological advancements and i particularly i've seen this with ai like when deepfake technology was first being engineered and hitting the internet and hitting the public one of the original biggest purposes of this technology was to sexually harass women and girls by like deepfaking women and girls's faces into pornographic videos and today that's not the primary purpose of deepfaking technology although it is still a major one but i think you see a lot of times with like these sorts of advancements that is oftentimes like one of the mainstreaming purposes and these companies aren't really doing anything about it because they know that it serves them in the end like that's part of the profit incentive here like you want someone anyone to be buying these glasses so if your main target creeps and purveyors of sexual harassment and abuse i they'll do like surface level like condemn that type of behavior or not but they're not going to stop it because i just think that like they see that there's a market for it yeah i mean you know this is the thing you know facebook runs into this time and time and time again right it's it's profitable to have fraud on the platform right it's profitable to have sexual harassment and abuse on the platform right it is profitable to have as many people as possible to have sexual harassment and abuse on the platform right it is possible and eat a tiny fine because everyone more or less has either been made amenable to the regulatory frameworks that you've lobbied for or believes in you and your mission with products like this you know we have seen increasingly increasingly over time what is what are some of the the immediate use cases right it's you know how can i harass how can i abuse you know how can i stalk someone and these glasses in particular when combined with biometric surveillance and combined i'm sure with deep fake tech offer like a pretty frightening vector for people to be able to only expand this even further and is there going to be any real effort to impose guardrails on this sort of thing no of course not right i mean even recently right there was reporting from wired i believe i was talking about biometric code that was already present in one of facebook's products the they rolled out one of their chief pr people to basically call the journalists liars and say that this was slander this is bullshit they don't know what they're talking about and then eventually have to take all that back and apologize because it's true why because they don't care right they don't care that they're putting out anti-social products because in in a way it's actually good if it is anti-social there's a market for anti-social behavior and they've also been doing a lot of work on it and they've also been doing a lot of work on it but they've also monopolized so much or cannibalized so much of the social fabric that those who rely on it or those who integrate it as part of their lives when they're moving around interacting with people keeping in contact with family abroad through whatsapp keeping in contact with friends from earlier periods of their life through facebook or through instagram i mean they have been able to pull a large chunk of people's lives and communications onto the platform that even if it becomes a hostile place even if it becomes a toxic place even if you're subjected to harassment you're not going to be able to do anything about it you're not going to be able to do anything about it you're not going to be able to do anything about it and abuse still going to use it and now we have a secondary market that has not been properly tapped into you know i'm sure that they would say right which is perverts freaks and people who will use these technologies only to hurt other people so i think this is increasingly only going to get worse and worse because facebook has no real incentive to actually do anything about it it would cost them more to do this than it would to just simply profit from it and you know no government seems to take it seriously enough to actually bring down the hammer on something as simple as hey let's you know make sure that this technology isn't going to be used for surveillance for stalking for harassment and they're not going to do it because there's so many other things that it could be done for i mean we have this with these sort of ai license plate readers i mean they are used regularly to stop people what what's the reaction integrate them even further into the police systems yeah flock flock surveillance which if my memory serves uh is also integrated with ring cameras beautiful yeah every house a fortress hello hello editing matt here i fact checked this and what actually happened was ring cameras the ones that all of your parents have on their doorbells announced a collaboration with flock safety safety which is if you don't know it is a surveillance company that makes cameras and puts them all over the roads everywhere and collaborates with police departments so they can track all of our driver's license plates yay ring announced a collaboration with flock which was also in nature a collaboration with local police departments around the country and that announcement got so much backlash that they cancelled the collaboration before it ever went into effect so what have we learned here keep bullying these surveillance companies yay i should highlight that all those sort of vignettes of women being victimized by this technology that's just the women being surveilled without their knowledge by the government and by content creators the vast majority of people of all the genders of all of all the genders of all genders by the way who will have their privacy and bodies invaded by all of the glasses that won't be content that won't get uploaded but it's still just as bad that someone is now you know has that footage of you to do whatever you want and you know and and of children and there is a whole naturally what one redditor called a creep economy that has uh sprouted up a third party creep economy which like you said includes people making uh covers little black circle covers that can stick on to the glasses and cover the already very small light that pops on when you start recording which by the way most people don't even know what these glasses are won't know what the light means in the first place yep but you know and i and i was on reddit and i was in all these different forums and there's all these presumably men talking about how do you cover the light what's the best way to cover the light it's not a secret meta knows this they don't care and for kylie someone who has been you know i don't want to put all the weight on her she's being hired for a specific reason just like timothy chalamet was hired by kalshi for a specific reason selling gambling addictions to the people that kalshi knows are most likely to be receptive to developing them and in the case of meta meta knows that they have a women problem with this product just look at the public discourse about it right now they also know and i talk about this a lot that you need women to make a product a quote-unquote hero product you need women you need the women's market to turn a product into a blockbuster to make it worth all those billions of dollars that you've invested shareholder money into you know women through their own purchasing power to make it worth all those billions of dollars that you've invested shareholder money into you know women through their own purchasing power and also through their influence of other people's purchasing power forbes estimates that they control up to 70 to 80 percent of consumer purchasing power they need to convince women to get on board and you know who better to hire than the most famous woman on the internet who also happens to be not discerning whatsoever and completely willing to throw other women and girls under the bus of this technology despite kylie jenner being open about having her own sort of traumatic experiences being surveilled by paparazzi as a child but when i'm in la for some reason when i'm here it's hard for me to leave the house why do you think that is paparazzi or in la it's just easier to be spotted i think so the thought of like trying to find an outfit and like getting ready and present and then i go back and forth because that's a silly way of like trying to find an outfit and like getting ready to think about it but it's honestly the truth but do they just wait by your house for your car to leave no because i don't really leave got it so they don't really wait for me anymore it used to be so insane i don't even know how i'm like a normal person right now like what would it what was it like things that they would say to me and how they would treat me as a child is diabolical like inappropriate i would be coming out of a thing and they'd be like you fucking slut what when i was 16 you're lying i'm not lying the things that they would say to me i would never try to give them a photo so i would just jump in the car and then there would be like six of them and they would stand in front of my car as i was like 16 like turning my car on whatever and they would all stand out because i would just be like you know hiding and they would just be like i'm like you know mock me what they wanted to just make my more money off a scandalous photo and i was an underage girl by herself i didn't have security i didn't have security till after i had my daughter a lot of this comes down to like wealth and class because it's like people like taylor swift people like the jenner kardashians like they are able to pay for environments in which they are truly private and secure like they can create the conditions necessary to have a party where no one is allowed to talk about or take pictures of them or like what they want war what they said and what they did in a way by endorsing and sort of mainstreaming these projects they're creating an even larger divide between what they are able to create for themselves with their money and the rest of us they are actively participating in this project to create like new ways to define class and isolate themselves away from the rest of the masses being able to like prevent yourself from being recorded and surveilled in this way is part of that and it is ultimately really selfish i remember like a long time ago before again like before she had her first child kylie jenner did an interview where she literally said she would go off the grid if given the opportunity because she had never been allowed to have that type of a lifestyle only then to turn around and like like expose herself to the world like create a an economy around her like 10 times harder than before and i don't think that that is because she's like even necessarily contradicting herself i think it's because for her she actually has like freedom of choice that the rest of us don't have like we already have such a massive societal panopticon around just like people in the background of tiktoks like there have been so many controversies where so-and-so who doesn't even know they're being recorded becomes this like viral overnight villain for not smiling or not dressing in a certain way or not looking a certain way the potential with these glasses to like make that even worse i think is true and also like just the the social trust element of this is a big thing too because we've already seen this with the rise of generative ai there's there's been this erosion of social trust like teachers don't trust their students to be turning in original work like people don't trust that their friend or colleague is writing their own emails writing their own text messages like the the what if the not knowing is a big part of what is so like antisocial about all of this technology and whether you are wearing recording glasses or not you're not going to be able to trust the other person you're not that's a new area of social distrust because now like any time if this starts to become a big viral thing where like people are constantly being exposed if you see someone wearing sunglasses or glasses now that question is going to be in the back of your head like i wonder if they're recording me and i just think that is such like an enormous loss at a time when we really need to be building and reinvigorating social trust these technologies and these companies and these celebrities are actively working against it yeah i was at penn station funny enough the other night waiting for a train that wasn't me trying to coyly be like i was at penn station but i was sitting there waiting for a train and i found myself and i started to do this more and more anytime someone has like a black rimmed glasses of a certain shape i was like squinting trying to see if there was that little camera on the side and i'm like what the are we doing i don't have any faith that meta like cares about this at all if they actually did i'm like a little red light is not enough the they it should be like a blinking flashing red light and it should be a an audible sound yeah yeah literally you are being recorded yeah yeah yeah yes i personally think if you start filming with them that they should just spontaneously combust but you know i'm asking a little too much if i had a wand okay you know i i'm hopeful and i want to be optimistic also about you know us blocking these glasses from proliferating because i think downstream of them are a lot of other developments that i hate and i don't want to see happen and that would follow pretty quickly uh if they were used you know wide widely and i'm hoping also i mean think that something that encourages me a little bit is the fact that people do smash them you know i have read many reports of people taking them off people's faces and smashing them you're doing lord's work right okay and that's what he wants you to talk about practical solutions it's the it's what the pope wants is what we want i've seen more of that and heard of more of that than when i look back and see how people reacted to the google glasses that does give me hope i think but it does the the solution is really only going to come from us right because the company's not doing it and god knows the government's not got doing anything somehow figuring out a way to make it worse as long as you know trump is in control here instead they're going to pass a moratorium on legislating anything to do with ai surveillance glasses for the next five years that's gonna be great we have to let the tech develop and mature but this is why it's like we we need to look and imagine solutions bigger than the law because like these tech companies and products are moving faster than the law the law is moving especially slow as long as people are in charge of the people we currently have and so it's just like i don't know i think we need to use social ostracization as a skill i think we need to brand these as pedophile goggles even harder than we currently are yeah and speaking of all this we've up until this point talked about how this quote unquote surveillance creep as it's often referred to is being used to victimize women in the public sphere but who's taking care of all the data produced by these goggles including what's not posted publicly in february 2026 a swedish newspaper called svenska dog blood pronunciation that was really impressive i don't know if it's right but it was impressive released a bombshell report called quote she came out of the bathroom naked an employee says it described sama s-a-m-a sam altman also yeah not which is also sam altman's twitter handle but i don't know if proceed sam altman i think which is a quote unquote data training company headquartered in san francisco but the real work happens in africa in cities like nairobi kenya where thousands of employees sit in rows for 10 hours at a time and do something called data annotation essentially they are fed an endless stream of photos and videos stolen from internet users across the world and label what's in them those are hot dogs not legs these are legs not hot dogs that sort of thing quote on the screens they draw boxes around flower pots and traffic signs follow contours register pixels and name objects cars lamps people every image must be described labeled and quality assured all to make sure the next generation of smart glasses is a little more intelligent a little more human meta subcontracts companies like sama to quote unquote process your data so not only are the tech companies stealing our data our artwork our content what have you they're also hiring people across the globe and paying them pennies to label our data and identify its contents this is what machine learning really is swedish reporters interviewed nairobi-based data annotators anonymously these laborers revealed that on the daily they review footage from quote western homes of people using the restroom getting changed watching porn and having sex one worker who spoke to the journalist anonymously described a man hitting record on his meta glasses setting them on his nightstand and leaving the room before his wife enters the room to change her clothes while being unknowingly filmed if the workers speak up about their discomfort of having to review this type of content footage they risk expulsion and financial insecurity whenever you ask meta glasses to do anything all of that data is going to be sent to meta servers for processing so it's a process of sharing you can't turn off yeah another worker said quote you'd think that if they knew about the extent of the data collection no one would dare use the glasses two months after this investigation was published meta terminated its contract with sama quote because they don't meet our standards but meta subcontracts at least 30 companies globally to annotate user data so i don't know to me i think this one company got caught because a few of their employees spoke anonymously to journalists to say basically look we can watch these people go into the bathroom and meta was like this is a bad look so for pr cover-up we're going to ditch this one company but i think it's happening all the time they basically were like people spoke up about this anonymously to it so to chill that and make sure that never happens again we're gonna fire essentially like ensure that all these people lose their jobs and they did over a thousand of them this is a reliable method from pace look you know how many times have they had stories about uh working conditions for subcontractors and the response is we hear you we are listening we are going to fire every single fucker at that company we're never working with them again we're not going to fix the conditions and we're going to replicate them and and the firm also persists i mean this firm summit particular i i was wondering where i recognized that name and you know funny enough they work with open ai oh my gosh when in 23 uh 23 when there was that a story that had been reported about kenyan workers being paid a dollar to two dollars an hour to label the data was this firm sama uh these companies are used precisely because the understanding is you know we're going to offload everything onto you you know you're going to have to deal with you're going to get the psychic baggage and trauma and you're going to also get the brunt of the blame and the liability if something goes wrong right we'll cut you off you'll find another firm you'll find another hyperscale you'll find another. SaaS company, who cares, right? We'll be able to move on without much reputational damage. And it's a system that's like so cynically constructed. It's one of the things tech does best, right? They do this to distance themselves from unethical labor. They do this to distance themselves from slave labor. They do this to distance themselves from any sort of toxic sludge that's integral to their operation. It feels like deja vu from all of the amazing 2010s reporting on the content moderators and all of the horrific violence that these people had to see get uploaded to social media platforms 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But instead of addressing that, instead of doing anything at all to address that, we're going to make it worse. We're going to ensure that exponentially more of this horrific content exists because at the end of the day, they realized that to have all these problems in the world. Is like the greatest like boost to their net worth. And they just will steamroll over everything in their quest for more and more money. Yeah. And you don't want the threat of a good example either, because if you have some sort of precedent where it's like, okay, then we are providing for them. You know, maybe we create some workers fund. Maybe we hold ourselves accountable. Then that just gives a little bit of a legal scaffolding for more ambitious lawsuits to be brought up in places where we acted even more egregiously. I think. I think so many people who are relatively low information when it comes to AI, which is most people, which is me most of the time. I mean, this isn't my area of expertise, but they think that if they were to buy, for example, the Kylie Jenner meta glasses that talks to them in Kylie Jenner's voice, that it's like some algorithms that really smart people at meta wrote. And now I can talk to a fake Kylie Jenner inside of my glasses. And it's like more or less technological magic. But it's not the entire system that we're talking about here relies on a labor force. And this is that labor force based in Africa consuming the way that you're using these products and potentially consuming the first person videos of people who are having sex with these glasses on. Yeah. And telling the machine exactly what they're seeing to better train the next model of the machine. Like there's a lot of discussion. About the way that AI and the way that it's changing the American workforce and going to create a permanent underclass in, you know, the American labor force and all of that stuff is awful. And it has already in many ways created an underbelly in other countries where they can exploit workers for even less and do hideously traumatic things to them. I mean, not to be such like a downer, but it's like, again, it's just, it's all so unbelievable to me. I mean, this makes me think of the luxury surveillance idea from Chris Gillard, right? Where that, you know, there are populations that have surveillance forced upon them or are forced to interface with technologies that either scan their faces or monitor where they're going, whether that's because they're on probation or coming out of the corrections industry or because they are in a heavily policed area. But then there are populations that willingly subject themselves to surveillance. And then there are populations that willingly subject themselves to surveillance as a status symbol of some kind, right? And that's a lot of that is the wearables, you know, these sort of VR AR devices where the idea is, you know, by turning the camera towards myself and offering these companies free training data, free insights, I will also get a little bit more data for myself and, you know, the company will presumably get something in aggregate. And this sort of is a dynamic, I think also is. Overlooked like there was a little bit of an understanding that was being cultivated in the 2010s that none of this stuff is free. And in a very real way, you know, you are the product. And the question was, you know, product to what end, for example, with advertising, where it's like we're selling, you know, advertisers access to you and our value as an advertiser revenue based business, which Facebook is, is getting as many people as possible, getting as many groups as possible, getting as many. Insights in those groups as possible, which means moving almost all their lives onto this so that the advertisers can pay us some obscene fee to get that privilege of your eyeballs. And I think similarly, it feels like so much of the push to put this surveillance inwards, right, and integrate these sort of wearables constantly on, always recording, always learning devices. Some of it is, you know, how can we monetize this? How can we introduce advertiser revenue? Some of it is what other insights can we get to develop additional products and services that will get you to use? And if you spend all your time on it, then we'll get the answers we need to maybe tinker it and iterate it better. Right. But I think to your point where I when I think about are people low or high information, I think it's really like everyone is saturated in information, but it's propaganda. You know, we're just saturated in propaganda about how these things work. We're lied to. We're not telling you constantly about how they work, what their capabilities are going to be, what they're going to do to our livelihoods, you know, where you should use them. We shouldn't use them. The only people are really sending out messaging constantly is these companies were screaming about how they're going to destroy everything in our civilization. But they're also the greatest thing that we've ever made. You need to integrate them to get ahead of the workplace, but they're also going to take your job away in a few years. They're magical devices that are smooth and friction. But they also need a fleet of slaves to teleoperate or to, you know, label and to treat constantly. So I think that's the thing where it's like most of what people do know is just like, oh, usually a bold faced lie or misunderstanding that a company selling and on the flip and through a very thin layer on the flip side is how it's actually working. But it is hard to break through that barrier when every day, all day you go on the subway, you go on the highway. You know, you go on your phone, you go on your TV. There is some message about why it's okay to have this pervasive surveillance, why it's okay to have AI, why it's okay to port your life over to this or that platform. Yeah, I also feel like the way that we're being introduced to this technology is through the lens of like Kylie Jenner's morning routine or the woman who eats a shit ton of edibles and then goes to lunch. But also like the police. The police are going to be wearing these like police officers are going to have like these cameras all over their bodies. And 404 Media just did an amazing story this past weekend about a woman who was being stalked by a police officer. And they outlined how this police officer, he was working in private security at an event. He saw this woman. He went up to her and harassed her for her number. She told him no. She told him I have a boyfriend. This police officer, this who was working as a security guard, he then went to the station or wherever he had his technology. And he was able to use like Palantir-esque surveillance networks to track her license plate and then put out an active alert so that he was notified the next time she passed like a flock camera. And then he drove out and pulled her over to harass her more. So it's just like, yeah, it's just like when you outfit the police, when you outfit the military, when you outfit the private companies with this type of surveillance, like we're constantly bombarded with the message that it's done for our safety and for our safety. It's done for our benefit. But the reality is they're giving these abusive creeps and individuals the power to like torment us and make our lives hell. And at the end of the day, we do not have recourse. And I think the vast majority of people out there don't even know how interconnected these webs of surveillance are to the point where that creepy man who's harassing you at the event is going to be able to like track you down and flag you down like a few days later. Can I just put out a call before I conclude? Like, I don't think you need a ring camera. I don't think ring cameras do anything good for you. My parents have a ring camera. Your parents probably also have a ring camera. Everyone's fucking parents have a ring camera. Everyone loves ring cameras. This is like kind of a random side tangent. But but but not really, because ring cameras are tied in with all of this like police force bullshit amidst the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, Savannah Guthrie's mother, where Nancy Guthrie was killed. And Nancy Guthrie had a ring camera in the home that she was kidnapped from. Everyone was. Sorry. They're calling you, Matt. You've gone too far. Amazon's on the line. Stop. Would you like a brand partnership? Yeah, exactly. They're going to they're going to give me the Timothee Chalamet treatment. Everyone was like, oh, thank God she had a ring camera. So. She could have this footage of the men who kidnapped her. And this is like this is like the most sympathetic. This was like the most fleeting sympathy I ever had for the argument of like ring cameras are good. And what did the ring camera footage do? We never figured out the people who who kidnapped her because they were wearing masks. We got no recourse for her death. And even with my parents, I had this conversation with my parents. I was like, why do you guys have a ring camera? Has anything good ever happened? Like, have you ever? as the ring camera says, you can help find your neighbor's dog. That's how they that's how they spun it in the Super Bowl. And they said, well, no, but it gives us peace of mind. And I said, but has it ever done anything for you? I said, no, but it makes us feel safer. They did a great job convincing people to be paranoid in their own homes. I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Yeah. And it's like, I understand because this is the messaging that is like conditioned into us from birth. But like people are under the impression that surveillance makes us safer when the reality is that surveillance puts people in danger. Like surveillance does not equal safety. In most cases, I would argue surveillance equals like authoritarian danger and like the ability for people with power to like to track you and harm you in situations where you will not have recourse. I want to conclude by reflecting more broadly. on my experience with technology. And I don't know if you guys can articulate yours or articulate this feeling better than I could. But in the realm of new tech launches, nothing feels exciting anymore. I almost exclusively feel dread. And this is distinct, because back in the day, I remember watching iJustine, the YouTube queen of tech, iJustine. I remember watching her unbox all the new tech products with wonder. And I remember watching her unbox all the new tech products with wonder. and uh it's especially not cool to do that with fucking glasses that nobody will know that you're filming on if you are in a reddit forum asking people how to cover up the light on your glasses that signal that it's recording that the vast majority of people already won't even know what that means you have gone too far bro we all just need to you know if your friend if your family member gets these meta goggles like smash them throw them out throw them out throw them on the ground and beat them with your foot or hammer and hey if you need help finding a hammer a big hammer hit me up i know i know a guy i know a guy ed and kat thank you so much for joining me today it's never fun to talk about the uh techno feudalist encroachment that we are all living through but uh i i do have faith that knowledge is power and thank you for helping everyone understand it just a little bit better today and uh just remind people where they can find you i'm a big black jock i've been on twitter still still there until they ban me i guess um and uh the tech bubble uh newsletter and this machine kills is a podcast i co-host about technology and how it works and how it's developed and that's on patreon soundcloud spotify everywhere every every platform essentially and i am at spitfirenews.com that is my newsletter and you can also find me on blue sky and instagram at kat ten barge and soon youtube teaser oh we haven't talked about this coming soon that's very exciting to me specifically i love you all so much thank you for joining this episode of a bit fruity thank you for listening all the way uh if you need me i will be putting various moisturizers onto kylie jenner's hand and asking her which one she likes the most while she films me i love you so much and until next time stay fruity Thank you.