Who Profits When Everyone Is Recording? (ft. Kyla Scanlon)

A new show in the Prof G universe by writer and investor Jack Raines! Each week, Jack takes a big story in tech or money and asks what it means for your life and your wallet. In today's episode, Jack Raines explores the surveillance economy, from AI glasses and viral videos to police camera networks. What happens when someone else trades away your privacy – and who benefits when everyday life becomes content and data? Writer and economic commentator Kyla Scanlon joins him to discuss the tradeoffs between privacy, convenience, and safety, and whether AI is solving the problems people actually need help with. Have a question or a topic you’d like us to cover? Text or leave us a voicemail at (201) 472-3656. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Galloway?

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• 0:42Scott Galloway?

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• 2:00Speaker 04

  Hi, it's Scott Galloway. We're back with Jack Rains, writer and investor, who's joining us each Wednesday to unpack the big stories in money and tech and what it means for your life and your wallet. This week, smart glasses, always on cameras and the price of convenience. How much privacy are we giving up? And what happens when someone else makes that choice for us? Kyla Scanlon joins Jack to discuss. Here's Jack.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  Last week, I made a bold claim by stating I like targeted ads. One listener called me, quote, "a clown with a microphone." That's fair, but I stand by it. If I'm going to see ads, I would rather see ads for things that I actually want. But there's a difference between me giving a company my data and somebody else giving my data away for me. And that's the focus of today's show. How always on devices are eroding our consumer privacy? Essentially, when anyone can record you at any time, what does privacy consent actually look like? And when does the convenience of the surveillance economy stop being worth the privacy we give up? Later, Kyla Scanlon joins me to talk about where we draw the line.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  I'm Jack Rains, an investor at early stage venture capital fund Slow Ventures, writer of the Substack newsletter Young Money. In this show, we discuss how the biggest themes in Silicon Valley and Wall Street are impacting your life and your wallet.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Like I mentioned, I took a lot of heat last week for my apparently flaming take that I love advertising and I'm a massive proponent of giving away all my data to big tech companies so they can serve me better ads. The best benefit of targeted ads isn't just seeing better recommendations. It's that all of us benefit from a lot of free stuff or cheaper stuff that would otherwise cost a lot more money. Let's take Uber, for example. Yes, Uber's do seem to be a little bit overpriced now. I've also seen the price go up. Uber's ad business probably keeps the prices lower than they otherwise would be. Uber does $2 billion a year in advertising revenue versus in 2025, they did $25 billion total in mobility revenue, which is the revenue from you and me riding Ubers. So close to 10% of that rideshare revenue comes from ads.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Ad revenue is much higher margin to serve than other mobility revenue because you don't have the labor cost of the driver. It's the marginal cost of serving another ad through the app is basically zero. But because Uber can be more profitable with ads, you, they can afford to charge you less money to take your Uber. I, I like that my Uber is probably $15 cheaper to go to the airport because it's expensive enough to Uber to JFK. Amazon's the same way. Marketplace Pulse had a great piece back in 2022 about how advertising was masking the fact that Amazon's retail business isn't really profitable. In 2021, Amazon's retail operations made $6.3 billion in operating income. But if you backed out advertising revenue, they would have had a $25 billion loss for

• 5:01Speaker 05

  their retail operations. Again, ads have zero or close to zero marginal costs and most of that ad revenue is pure profit. In 2025, Amazon's ad revenue was about $69 billion, up 22% from the year before. Meanwhile, Amazon's operating income excluding Amazon Web Services was $34 billion. Again, e-commerce fulfillment, low margin, high cost business. Ads, high margin, low cost business. I get it. All those like Timu slop ads at the top of your Amazon search results can sometimes suck because I don't want to buy that like Timu shirt or couch from random Chinese drop shipping business. I actually like the like Crate and Barrel-esque couch.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  But because of the Timu slop, you can get that couch for much cheaper delivery cost. So again, this is the last time I'm going to bang the table on the ad business. But we get cheaper stuff because ads subsidize companies' abilities to give you things cheaper. I think that at least for my day to day life, that's probably when. I also think that if more people actually care about their data privacy, DuckDuckGo would have more than like 100 users and Chrome wouldn't have billions of users. So I digress. If you disagree with me, I recommend trying to use the internet in Europe. There's nothing worse than clicking through 27 different cookie consent popups just to read one article. Europe is very much an opt-in internet culture and America's opt-out.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  And European websites just really suck to navigate. And they feel like you're downloading malware by trying to avoid malware. Now, my caveat, I think sharing other people's data is where this line gets really blurred. We are quickly entering a world where thanks to everything from voice recorders to smartphones to AI wearables, the likelihood of you being in the background of somebody's video that becomes training data for AI or content that ends up online is quickly approaching 100% at some point in your life, if it's not already there. And I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. Like it's, it's never been easier to turn the world and the people around you into data for big tech. And that's pretty weird because I've opted into sharing my own data. That's a me problem, if you disagree with that.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  But I didn't opt into being in the background of a video on TikTok that says, what are the guys wearing in Montauk this summer? And video blows up and there I am, like walking across the street. I was wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, pretty, pretty normal white dude fit for the summer. And that feels a little bit odd because I had no say in that. But that's the world we live in today. We have these always on voice recorders. We have AI glasses. We have smartphones and there's just very little friction preventing somebody from capturing audio, video and image data of their surroundings, which includes a lot of people that don't realize they're in that and that data gets uploaded somewhere. So let's talk about AI glasses. The biggest players in the AI glasses race right now are tech companies Snap, Meta and Google.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  I actually bought a pair of Meta glasses back in May. I have them right here in the studio. So I'm a little bit annoyed because the, the battery has stopped working on these two weeks ago and I need to probably take them out to the store. But I had a normal pair of Ray-Bans. I lost them. I was walking through Soho back in May and one of my buddies and I popped into the Ray-Ban store and I figured I should like test these out and see if I like them. I also think a world where everybody is always wearing always on AI glasses is not necessarily a better place and there's a ton of problems with this. The pros, less antisocial than AirPods. Glasses are really convenient. They keep you out of social media doom loops. And the form factor is way quicker than instead of taking picture of thing on your phone and asking ChatGPT, how does this work?

• 8:43Speaker 05

  You can just like ask the AI about what you're seeing and it's just, it's just smoother and works better and it's cool. And candidly, the cons of. Thousands or millions of people just wearing these all the time is that the odds of you being caught in somebody's footage is basically 100% now, and that just really sucks. There's this fear of going viral on somebody's TikTok for the wrong reasons as a background character, or out of context video of you being drunk and somebody hitting you with a man on the street video. I do think this whole TikTok ification of society has actually just put a lot more people on edge because nobody wants to get flamed online. And now nobody is safe from potentially having that happen. And it like, you don't want to have to self censor 24/7. That sucks. There's also some

• 9:27Speaker 05

  potential legal issues. Filming is actually legal in public and filming in businesses open to the public is legal outside of private spaces like bathrooms or fitting rooms. And what you do with the footage afterward, like commercial use, harassment, whatever, carries separate liability. Let's also not forget that data is now worth its weight in gold to the AI labs. And AI labs have already trained on every piece of data on the web. And now everybody wants new data. And what's a really good way to get new data? Oh, well, I throw on these glasses and I'm, you know, recording videos and taking pictures. And well, there's a lot of net new data that Meta and Google and Snap and whoever didn't have access to. Now you do. What does consent mean in a world where there's zero friction

• 10:09Speaker 05

  to recording anything of anyone at any time? And at what point is the trade off between privacy and efficiency no longer worth it in our increasingly surveillance economy? Pre pandemic, the idea of recording every single meeting would have been taboo at best or disrespectful at worst. Outside of a journalist recording an on the record interview, the idea of showing up with a digital note taker or transcriber to a meeting would have been asinine. Like, I couldn't imagine meeting with an entrepreneur with a note taker running the whole time. But throw everybody on Zoom for a couple of years and boom, we normalized video calls. And well, AI is really good at transcribing words and we used to pay an

• 10:51Speaker 05

  analyst to take shitty notes while AI can get the same notes perfectly. But we should contrast what's going on in the business world with the most recent popular form of social media rage bait. One of the more annoying rage bait trends popping up in my Instagram feed lately, I say Instagram because I try to fade TikTok because I think it's cancer, is these videos of somebody wearing Meta Ray-Bans and they walk up to a girl and start hitting on her to get a reaction, or they clown some random guy in a store, or they prank people in a shopping mall by like throwing something and then pretending to be a mannequin and pausing. And then obviously, the whole thing is recorded by either them or somebody else with glasses on. This whole point of creating this content is to create engagement,

• 11:34Speaker 05

  which grows the user's platform, which can then be monetized through brand deals or ad revenue shares. The problem, of course, is that the engagement comes at the expense of somebody who obviously did not opt in to being punked on camera, who doesn't seek the benefit from this opt in. And in some cases, actually like faces issues from it because a video goes viral where, you know, they aren't portrayed in a favorable light and 10 million people saw it. And maybe somebody recognizes them. And then it's this whole just flywheel of bad stuff happening to somebody who was just going about their day. Turning the world into content has of course been possible for a long time. The 2020s, now that influencer is now one of the most desirable jobs in the world, and

• 12:16Speaker 05

  the internet has stopped being a medium to share your takes about the world or your content. And the world is now like a canvas for creating content that can be shared with billions. It's not, I am doing interesting things. Let me tell people about them. It's, oh, how do I manufacture virality from the people around me? Film everything, go viral. Other people are just props to be used for your virality. Phones removed all friction from turning your surroundings into content. But at least with phones, you could still see somebody recording you. Glasses have removed your ability to easily see if you're being recorded. You know, people just wear sunglasses and glasses and are they taking a picture? I don't know. And we're about to reach a point where you just have to assume that there's a very good chance that you're getting recorded at some point when you're

• 12:59Speaker 05

  in public, when everybody's wearing these things. Now you have to worry about folks asking Meta AI, what sweater is that girl wearing? Or what song is the guy in the subway station playing? Or what should I order off this restaurant menu when you see the chalkboard menu outside a restaurant? And the smart glass is being in a process, whatever you see. And all the images and videos taken as part of that processing become training data for an AI company. Per the website Engadget, Meta has long said that the actual content of photos you capture with the glasses cameras are not shared or used for training. But the company has allowed images and video captured while using Meta AI to be used for this purpose. Some of it does get viewed by third party contractors in other countries

• 13:43Speaker 05

  whose job is to just label images for AI training to make the models better. And it just kind of feels like a little bit violating. This is a concern shared with a lot of Americans. There's a security.org survey show of a thousand Americans showing that 72% worry about being secretly recorded by camera wearables, 85% support a law requiring a visible recording indicator, and 60% distrust manufacturers on video and data privacy. Two things that can be true at once. AI glasses are really cool products. There's a lot of stuff that you can just do better through glasses than through a phone. But they're also just this obvious vector for invasions of privacy. And finding the sweet spot between efficiency

• 14:23Speaker 05

  and privacy is really hard. Ring, who makes the, um, the cameras and doorbells that record what's going on outside your front door, had an all time bad Super Bowl ad this year where they were showing, it was supposed to be cute. Use Ring to help you find your lost dog. If you upload a picture of your lost dog to Ring, cameras all over town will use AI to help identify the dog. And the comment section immediately clocked it as George Orwell vibes because yeah, it's straight out of 1984. Big Brother can find your dog. That means that the cameras can just do stuff when you don't realize it. And they're always kind of recording. Like, that's not great. Police adoption of body cams spiked aggressively between 2014 and 2016 after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. And then

• 15:08Speaker 05

  police departments around the country mandated body cams en masse in 2020 after George Floyd's death. Increased body camera usage has yielded more robust evidence and cases of potential police brutality, which is good. Evidence from researchers in South Carolina appears to show that flock safety cameras were associated with an 11% reduction in car thefts in their first year. That's a good thing. There's also some really bad stuff with flock safety. The Washington Post reported that at least 50 police employees have been charged with or accused of misusing flock safety camera network, with 26 of those cases involving police officers spying on romantic partners. That's really bad. Crime going down, good. Bad actors using surveillance states to creep on people and stalk people, bad. So, um, we're

• 15:53Speaker 05

  about to have Kyla Scanlon come on the show. Kyla recently wrote a piece called, quote, surveillance is trendy now, where she talks all about her experience buying some of the Meta glasses, what she thought about them, and how she's thinking through all of these weird invasions of privacy and whether or not we should be wary of just giving, you know, all of our data and data of the world around us to big tech. So I wanted to get her take on where we should draw the line.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 16:33Scott Galloway?

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• 18:44Speaker 02

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• 19:25Speaker 05

  We're back.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Kyla, thanks so much for joining us. I had a very similar experience to you where you mentioned in this piece that you bought the, was it the Meta Ray-Bans, the Meta Oakleys? Which glasses did you buy?

• 19:38Kyla Scanlon?

  The Meta Adventures, yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Curious how you think about consent in a world where AI devices take the friction of just recording people and things and putting them in some cloud server to zero.

• 19:52Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if we have regulations that have kept up with social media, and then we certainly haven't had regulations that's kept up with AI. And I don't know if people are even really able to consent to being recorded. It's actually a pretty big issue on social media that a lot of people end up in videos that they didn't want to. It's even more so an issue with the Meta Ray-Bans. And now they have the light, so it shows you the recording, so you can have a better sense. And I think more people can be like, okay, those glasses are gigantic and they have a camera. Like, I know that that's maybe a person that I don't want to be in front of. But I just think that we have no real concept of how to establish regulation around privacy.

• 20:34Kyla Scanlon?

  And because more and more of our lives, you know, people, you know, I've tried out one of the AI assistants too, Instinct and Muse, and I got really nervous about sharing my data. And I didn't want to do it because it does feel like that's like the last barrier between you and this universe that you really don't have a lot of insight and transparency into. And so I think it's kind of a combination of we don't have regulations around privacy. We definitely don't have a way for people to consent into being recorded. And that's being worsened by the current atmosphere around AI, the AI assistants, where it does feel like you don't really own anything anymore. You don't own your image necessarily. You don't own your own data.

• 21:15Kyla Scanlon?

  And I think the combination of the Meta glasses, the AI assistants, it's really a complicated atmosphere. And it would be wonderful to get some sense of privacy for consumers, but it doesn't seem like any of the companies want to move toward that.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  I'm curious, like, in an ideal world, what would the correct regulatory framework look like to you of, like, getting consent frameworks, how these things should work, whether or not you can and can't record? I mean, it almost feels like we've kind of stumbled into this path. It's really hard to go back, but start of smartphones is only accelerating. But I'm curious what the ideal setup would look like to you.

• 21:55Kyla Scanlon?

  I mean, I think it's really difficult because it's one of those situations where you can have a law, right? Like, don't record people in public. You know, Japan has something like that. And people can follow it, or they don't have to. And there aren't really strict penalties, I think, for people not following certain laws similar to that one. And so I think you could just have something in place where it's like you have to have consent from the other person in order to record them. Or the social media platforms could do a whole lot of work here by making sure that the people posting these videos of other people have the consent to post those videos. But that's, again, you know, the social media companies have quite different incentives than the consumer in terms of content and what's being shared.

• 22:40Kyla Scanlon?

  So, I mean, it's just as simple as that. Just have consent to be recorded and make sure that when people are in public, they know when they're being recorded. But, yeah, that's complicated by things like the flock cameras, you know, the quote-unquote surveillance state. But, yeah, definitely at the consumer level, we could have some sort of law there. It really could be just that easy, but the social media companies would have to change some of their incentives, you know?

• 23:08Speaker 05

  And when engagement makes revenue go up?

• 23:11Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah, I think it reduces risk. So I think younger folks, I mean, really, all folks of all ages, I think a lot of people are much less willing to try stuff. There's definitely this big fear of being cringe. There's a fear of I'm going to get made fun of because it is, I mean, if you have, I've had a little, like, internet campaign where somebody was making fun of me, and it's really hard. And so I think there is this sense of, because of the power of the social media, the power of the algorithm, it feels very scary to put yourself out there, which is really the way that you grow and you try new things. Like, you have to kind of just take big risks and take big leaps.

• 23:54Kyla Scanlon?

  And because we're constantly being watched and because you never really know if somebody's going to be recording you and you're trying your new thing out, it can prevent you from trying and prevent you from taking risks that you might have otherwise if you were not being recorded, yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Do you think the wearables have a legitimate shot at replacing phones? Or at least, like, augmenting our total phone usage?

• 24:17Kyla Scanlon?

  I mean, I'll be curious for what's next for phones. Like, I'm not totally sure how long we can keep using this. It feels very archaic, you know, the phone compared to everything else that's going on. So I feel like we'll have some new iteration. I don't totally know what that'll look like. I mean, if you look at old movies, right? Like, it would be a hologram that pops up from your watch and then you talk to it that way. It might be eyeglasses. I find that a bit far-fetched, but, I mean, AirPods used to be far-fetched too, right? So I'm not totally sure what the future's gonna look like, but I do think we'll move away from phones, yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, my biggest issue with the phone is, and it's, AirPods have augmented this a little bit, where you don't have to, like, look at the phone to answer the phone call, for example. But just by nature of how addicting social media is and scrolling, anytime I grab my phone to do, like, useful or necessary thing, whether it's text back a friend, I need to order something on Amazon, the propensity to then end up on Instagram for 20 minutes or scrolling on Twitter or just, like, wasting time versus the thing I noticed with, I don't, it's not like I wear the glasses that much, but if I answer a phone call or even, like,

• 25:34Speaker 05

  ask Meta AI, like, something about restaurant I'm going to for lunch or whatever, the temptation to look at the little black box in your pocket is just, it's not there when you don't have to pick it up. So that's, the one positive externality I will give wearables is

• 25:52Speaker 05

  they don't, like, hit that same, right? Like, that's smartphone addiction. You can wean off of it a little bit. And I also think old people wearing glasses that can tell them, like, how to get from point A to point B, like, watching my grandparents try to use Google Maps is just, it doesn't work, right? Versus having some smart thing tell them walk there. You can see a world where people who, like, aren't as tech-native benefit from ease of use of that, but then what's the trade-off of that on all the data privacy stuff we just talked about? I, it's nuanced and weird, and I don't know. But I'm pretty anti-smartphone as a thing, and I'm open to next step that gets rid of a lot of those problems.

• 26:34Kyla Scanlon?

  You're anti-smartphone, but pro ads and pro wearables.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  I have, I have range on my opinions on things. And it sounds, it can sound somewhat contradictory. I, my biggest, my biggest, my biggest issue with the phone is I find it a little bit disgusting how much time I spend on it. I think it's like, I think it's a total time suck.

• 26:58Kyla Scanlon?

  It sucks you in, it really does. And if you think about the way our brains are designed, we've never, we're not supposed to be using things this powerful. Like, our evolutionary capabilities have not caught up to our current environment. And so, I mean, it's really, really hard to pull yourself from any form of tech. And I think you have to have good discipline, you have to have good frameworks for it. But it's hard, and it's designed by some of the smartest people in the world to keep you hooked. And so I definitely feel the same way with, like, you know, the trade-offs of social media, where you can, like, learn so much stuff, and then there's all this garbage that other people are posting, the slop. The trade-off with the phone, where we are so connected and you can, like, we're able to video chat right now, and that's, like, also a cool technology.

• 27:43Kyla Scanlon?

  But there are so many trade-offs that are, I think, we don't necessarily talk about how to navigate them or even really talk about the trade-offs too much in general. Yeah. In a way that's constructive, yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  My whole take on, I'm pro, within reason, pro ads, pro, actually, not within reason. I'm cool with targeted ads and have, better or worse, given access to most of my data. But I really hate using a phone is, I almost view those as, like, They get me closer to outcome I want without me having to spend way more time digging through this thing or just messing around. It's like, okay.

• 28:20Kyla Scanlon?

  That actually does make sense.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  Am I, am I willing to give up data sovereignty to reclaim time? I think so.

• 28:26Kyla Scanlon?

  Do you feel like you should have to?

• 28:28Speaker 05

  Like, I would like to have it both ways where you can opt out of this, but then you end up like, I, I had a joke before you came on the show talking about how like Europe has a very opt in. You could say Europe is like maxing on opt in versus American max is on opt out.

• 28:44Kyla Scanlon?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  And there's nothing worse than just navigating the internet when you're in like Poland. And you have to click through 27 different things. The website looks like, it looks like it's from 2005. I feel like I'm, it just feels gross and it doesn't really work that well. Is that a better, that's a way worse user experience, but like, I would rather give up my data than have that.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  So I don't know if there's a middle ground. It's, you know, maybe some of the agentic, I'm pretty bearish on the whole agentic shopping. I think people actually like to look at things they're shopping for.

• 29:18Kyla Scanlon?

  You think people like to shop?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:20Kyla Scanlon?

  I, I, I find that a little.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Shocker, shocker.

• 29:23Kyla Scanlon?

  That one, I, that one's hard for me when they start talking about that. I'm like, what, the guys, we need to stop, stop talking.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  It's like, yeah, I, I, I'm not even like the primary like shopper demographic, but you know what? If it's, if it's like a Sunday and I'm in Soho and I want to go buy some new jeans. It's like a fairly enjoyable experience. It's not like, oh, fuck, like I need to get back and start vibe coding more slop. So let's like minimize, let's minimize time in Rag and Bone. No, that's, that's the most like Silicon Valley brain rot take of all time.

• 29:50Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that right now coming out of there. Yeah. And I think also like they could have different, I'm not totally sure. Maybe it's like, they're just trying to get the primary users on first, like get the people who they think are going to be stickiest. But I really don't understand the restaurant reservation thing. I really don't.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  So dumb.

• 30:08Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah, not to keep harping on that, but like it, like I, for example, keep getting denied by my insurance. And I would love to have an AI assistant that could talk to my insurance and be like, hey, she pays you a ton of money. Could you please like get her into a primary care doctor? That would be the ideal use case rather than somebody booking me at Carbone at 5:00 PM or whatever.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  Okay, so, so here's a question. Are you willing to give all your health data to an AI assistant if you never have to deal with just health insurance? If you never have to deal with all the like health insurance, I need to get reimbursed. I need a doctor's appointment. Is this a network? If that's automated in to end because like Blue Cross Blue Shield has their own Muse assistant. Are you cool with that or not?

• 30:50Kyla Scanlon?

  I mean, if it was an internal bot, which I know a lot of, like, that big law firm, they're not doing a bot, but like they're developing their own model.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Morgan and Morgan.

• 31:00Kyla Scanlon?

  Is that them? Yeah, I think there's a couple of doing it, but I mean, I think a lot of the firms are going to start to develop their own versions of like chat bots and then also their own versions of these little assistants. So ideally it would be internal to the insurance company, but I just don't ever know if that's going to happen. You know, I feel like that's sort of what I pay them for is so they go and talk to doctors for me. So ideally there would be that interface, but I, I would be, I would be a little nervous about giving it to an AI assistant. Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  So if it was a, if your insurance company had its own version of Muse that stayed within the health sphere, fine. But having third party like chat GPT agent, right? Like you would not want another big tech agent coming in, seeing all that and going with it. But if it stayed siloed within the domain, it should be, and it's probably fine.

• 31:55Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah, I mean, but there's trade offs to that too. Like it could end up like the streaming situation where all of a sudden we have to talk to like 75 AI assistants to do anything. Like how we have to, you know, sign up for 75 streaming services to watch anything. So I'm aware that that's not a perfect solution to our problem. I mean, I don't know if it's just like one government bot that has access to all, all this stuff. I don't know. I mean, it could be like a sort of read write situation like Plaid.

• 32:27Kyla Scanlon?

  Where with financial data? So, yeah, I'm not sure. It's tricky.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  We, we talked before you came on a little bit about some of the, like, we, we spent most of this conversation talking about consumers, data, wearables. There's also bigger, call it societal privacy issues with like police forces. For example, flock safety has obviously been in the news a lot lately for a lot of different reasons. And you see on one side, you see, you see on one side, oh, it, there's early evidence suggesting crime rates are dropping in areas that have flock. And then on the other side, there's been multiple police officers stalking women by using flock, which is obviously really bad. I'm curious, like, how do you think about the trade off between? It's kind of like the, oh, GDP number is going up.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  That looks really good, but wait, everybody's miserable on an individual basis. Okay, like crime is going down, but also like these 26 women had their like ex-boyfriends stalk them or a cop thought they were cute at coffee shop and is looking them up. That's really bad. Like what's, where are you on the spectrum of this is preventing more crime? There's individual really bad cases, like net positive, net negative. Should we block it all? Do you accept some level of bad individual outcomes for broader safety? Like, what do you think?

• 33:51Kyla Scanlon?

  I mean, I think it's creating some reactivity. Like I, I've heard of stories where people will monitor the flock cameras. And then they'll see like a little thing happen and they think it's a crime and they'll go react. And it wasn't a crime. It was just a person doing something like, so I think it's creating a lot of situations that didn't have to exist in the first place. I think there's always been some elements of security cameras. A lot of stores have them, a lot of streets have them. But I think with flock, again, it's not totally clear where the data is going. It's not totally clear why a, a company, a private company would be doing this. And so I don't like that part. Again, I think like, you know, the, if anything, if we should have any element of surveillance, it shouldn't be done by a, by a private company.

• 34:36Kyla Scanlon?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Last question. What would have to change for you to feel comfortable wearing like the glasses?

• 34:46Kyla Scanlon?

  I would need a use case for them. I don't need to record my walks or where I'm going or the people around me. I just record my videos of me talking about economics. I just, I don't need them. So the thing that would have to change is I need them. Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  They actually need to be useful and not just performative.

• 35:09Kyla Scanlon?

  They need to be useful for me and they're not. Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  Well, Kyla, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 35:14Kyla Scanlon?

  Thanks for having me.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  This is awesome.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  For the last six years, aspiring influencers have tried to turn the rest of the world on content. And now recording devices are turning the world into training data. Don't get me wrong. I'll probably still wrap my meta glasses if I can get the battery to start working again. It's been a mixed user experience so far, but I am thinking twice about what I'm willing to record and when. And also candidly, like, like what is the perception that people around me have of guy with meta glasses on? Like the, the vibes are probably negative. So cool tool, good for society. I, you know, we'll see. So my question is, what do you think? Would you wear smart glasses? Would you be comfortable with somebody wearing these around you?

• 36:03Speaker 05

  Text or leave us a voicemail at 201-472-3656. And if there's another story you want us to break down, send that to. I'm Jack Rans. See you next week.

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