By Josh Gondelman — 27 Jul 2026

#194. Meta Glasses Wearers and You

Hi everyone,

The Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal held its prestigious New Faces showcases last week, spotlightimg some of the most exciting up and coming talent for a variety of influential entertainment industry figures. My own face (old) was elsewhere, but on Monday night at Frankenstein's Baby, three of the comics invited to the festival stopped by to run their six-minute sets before decamping to Canada for the week. Huge congratulations to all the New Faces, and especially to Gary Simons, Alon Elian, and Tessa Belle who all crushed in Brooklyn en route to Montreal. I first met Tessa and fellow New Face Freddie Shanel (and also they met each other) when they were both interning for Desus & Mero. I am so thrilled to see their great work and exciting careers, and I hope I was a decent boss!

Sometimes it can feel very pleasant to be one of Comedy's Young Old Guys!

On Thursday I embarked on a quick trip to Chicago for a Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! recording. My travel (in both directions) was almost unbelievably smooth. I hadn't flown in a month and a half, and my last few trips had featured massive delays, so it was a welcome surprise when both of my flights took off and landed on time, and I didn't hit any substantial traffic on the ground either.

Because of the efficient travel and perfect weather, I finally pried myself out of the hotel and made my way to the Art Institute of Chicago (approximately eight minutes away on foot) like I have promised myself I would for roughly four years. There were a whole bunch of paintings where the descriptions were like: "This chump owes everything to Caravaggio. Without seeing Caravaggio paint light and shadows, this loser would just be doodling big ol' shapes." which I found funny. It also occurred to me that "El Greco" is such a mobster-ass name for a painter. I knew, intellectually, that it basically means "The Greek Guy." But it's so funny to me that that's just how he was known. "I love that painting by Stavros Fetaman over there!"

Still life full of fruits and veggies in an ornate gold-painted frame with the card identifying the French artist Louise Moillon. — An iphone photograph of a still life, that's kind of it's own art form, no?

The radio show itself was a lot of fun. Faith Salie, Hari Kondabolu, and I have an easy chemistry and familiarity as panelists. Abbott Elementary's Tyler James Williams was an exceptionally charming guest. During the "Bluff the Listener" segment I made what was undoubtedly the joke with the longest walk to the dumbest payoff in my entire time working on the show. I will reprint it here because I am proud of dumb stuff like that.

The "Bluff" assignment was to make up a semi-believable story about a new publishing industry trend to try to fool a caller into thinking it's real. I chose to pitch a fake story about the made-up genre of "bromantasy," novels wherein men have platonic relationships with mythical creatures. Over the course of my bluff, I listed several fake books under the bromantasy banner, ending with: "The titular clay monster comes to life and reunites a group of childhood acquaintances at his weekly poker night in...No Limit Texas Golem."

Just an absolute master class in self indulgence. Thank you for indulging it here, and thanks to everyone who didn't throw their radio out the window after hearing it out loud.

Over the weekend, we had a nice visit with Maris's parents who mostly came into town to visit Maggie the Pug, and additionally to take us out to lunch and see our new apartment. We also had a brief hangout with our friend Steph and her adorable daughter who is very chatty and also possesses extreme toddler levels of candor. She pounded most of a can of seltzer (impressive!) and then said sincerely: "Can I please go to my house now?" I am always delighted by a little kid who is exceptionally verbal with their little kid thoughts, and I obviously did not take any offense. Outside of our very charming dog and small collection of picture books, our apartment doesn't have a ton of entertainment options for someone that teensy.

Here are a few more fun things!

Maybe my favorite podcast to appear on, Hey Riddle Riddle, had me back to solve riddles and joke around! I'm on Asher Perlman and Michael Cruz Kayne's new podcast But Also having a very good time. I laugh too much at a story of Michael's light recent misfortune and we all talk about being willing to accept basically any mistreatment.

My good buddy Andrew Mayer is recording his solo show Have Fun, Be Yourself THIS SUNDAY in Somerville, MA at The Rockwell (a venue I love). If I were in town I would be there with bells on TO SABOTAGE HIM just kidding I wouldn't wear bells that would be rude. If you're around, I super recommend checking out the show, bell-free!

Jo Firestone appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote her new book Sex On Murder Island (mentioned in previous newsletter installments), and she's so funny. Truly no one does it like Jo, who should be a massive celebrity just based on tv appearances like this one.

Just a quick reminder: I'm on the road through a lot of the fall! You can grab tickets to shows at my website or down at the bottom of this very newsletter!!!

If you are interested in a vision for a progressive/socialist Judaism, you are probably aware of Molly Crabapple's book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, but if you weren't aware four seconds ago...now you are!!!

Finally, my friend Aparna Nancherla, a legitimate standup genius and excellent actor and writer as well, invited me to compete against her in a New Yorker cartoon caption-off back in the spring, and the video is out now! As you can see from the thumbnail, I had a great time with this and was so appreciative that Aparna brought me along for the ride! The team from The New Yorker was so kind and professional. I hope you enjoy it! I did! (For anyone wondering – and a couple of people were on social media did ask – my sweater is from Coker Studio. Do NOT make any jokes about the brand's name, please and thank you!)

PEP TALK FOR META GLASSES WEARERS

Mark Zuckerberg looking like an absolute herb in Meta Glasses. (Reuters) — Is he...wearing...two watches?

The other day I was walking my dog while listening to a podcast, and there was an ad for Meta Glasses – the spectacles enabled with a video camera and wifi, two features that are, to put it in the gentlest possible terms, not the point of glasses at all. The advertisement featured a guy giving verbal commands to his eyewear: "Meta, find me a nearby restaurant with reservations!" etc. Which...why? (If you have no hands or no working hands...I think I get it. If you are behanded...this is not for you.) Finally, Mark Zuckerberg has done it. He's invented something that makes you look like more of a dweeb than talking to yourself in public.

Perhaps you have found yourself in possession of these glasses, which seem predominantly designed for sex offenders, stalkers, and (worst of all?) YouTube prank show hosts. I don't know why you acquired this accessory. Maybe you saw Kylie Jenner wearing them and you were like...hmmm, maybe those glasses would tell me whether that's Kylie or Kendall. Or maybe they'll help me meet Timothée Chalamet. Maybe someone put a pair of these clunky dorkgoggles on your face while you were asleep and you didn't notice for several days. It's none of my business (something no one wearing Meta Glasses has ever said or thought) how you got these suckers, but there is still hope for you.

Option 1: Leave the glasses activated on a table or your floor at home for use as some kind of pet monitor. Yes, it will look like Rivers Cuomo circa 1994 got raptured off of your coffee table, but it's functional. Maybe, best case scenario, someone will step on them.
Option 2: Sell them for cheap to a local sex criminal. The glasses will be out of your hands, and the creep will be grateful for the bargain and the surveillance apparatus. (Morally, not a great choice, but financially you can't do much better.)
Option 3: Drop them into the ocean and see if they discover anything that science hasn't found yet before they're lost forever. (Launching them into space is similarly recommended but that requires access to outer space which is much rarer, unless you're the kind of rich goober who thinks these glasses are the future, in which case you're probably going to hang on to them. Inadvisable.)
Option 4: Run the glasses over with a car, or if you're in dire financial straits, try to drop them surreptitiously under someone else's moving car and then collect the insurance (glasses insurance, if it exists, not car insurance).
Option 5: Taunt a bully of some kind until they knock the glasses off of your face and snap them in half like in an 80s movie.

As you can see, there are myriad ways to dispose of these miserable frames, and you are free to choose the option that works best for you! Regardless of which direction you go in, you are not destined to be a gross weirdo for your whole life, unless you keep the glasses after all.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I didn't really edit this request much, but I added the nickname!

I'm losing my optimism about there being a mass rejection of AI. I'm being pushed to use it at work more and am pretty concerned my job won't exist in 5-10 years. I'm terrified to think of what my kid's education will look like as I've talked to teachers that are using it to write their lesson plans. I'm even tired of finding new blogs and newsletters to read without the nagging feeling that the whole thing might be slop! (Maybe I've just spent too much time in the Substack comment sections since Pangram was integrated and watching people have to defensively fess up that they've been using it the whole time.) Or maybe the bubble is taking longer to burst than I expected.
- Bubble Bubble, Sora, and Trouble

The topic of AI has come up a bunch in this newsletter, and I'd been meaning to give it a break for a minute, but I was part of a really fun and informative panel discussion last Friday night and I wanted to pass along some of the reasons for optimism. My friend Tomas Delgado convened a group of experts on the topic and also me (I technically was in attendance as an art/labor expert given my work with the Writers Guild of America) to talk about the good and the bad aspects of the current state of artificial intelligence. The REAL pros on the panel were Angelina Wang (assistant professor at Cornell Tech and scholar of AI safety) and Olivier Sylvain (professor at Fordham Law) and they had lots of great insights!

I tried to approach the conversation in an open-minded way, despite my personal desire to drive a monster truck through the side of every data center that powers this software while firing roman candles. Fortunately, it turned out that the room was full of fellow haters. What a gift, to realize that you're surrounded by such a furious consensus. Especially when it comes to the aforementioned data centers, which are environmentally catastrophic, people are mad.

"But data centers don't even use as much electricity as agriculture [or whatever example they cite]!" say the AI enthusiasts. It's a dumbass argument made by dumbasses in hopes of tricking other dumbasses. Either they don't hear how they sound, or they don't think we hear how they sound. "Would you rather we use our available resources to CULTIVATE FOOD or to DESTROY ECONOMICALLY DEPRESSED NEIGHBORHOODS FOR THE SAKE OF POWERING CONFIDENTLY-WRONG SPELL CHECK?" Shut up, losers!

As Tom and Olivier pointed out during our chat on Friday, (and Cory Doctrow has written about), Generative Artificial Intelligence is a normal technology, meaning that it's not magical or inevitable. And as Angelina said, it's possible that there are some real use cases for limited and helpful applications of this technology. But as...someone said (it was three days ago and it was a fast, free-flowing conversation) it's not necessarily about what a technology can do, it's about what people are doing with it. And it's not being used as some great liberator from the toils of wage labor. It's being wielded to eliminate the premise of "having employees" for the sake of "keeping all the money." And I guess regular people are using it to write grocery lists, a task that feels weird to outsource to a computer, which has never eaten groceries in its life.

Olivier also noted that there are legal and legislative ways to attack this problem, and Angelina brought up the fact that people being exposed to subpar AI tools (in education and elsewhere) will ultimately reject them. The way to bring about these kinds of changes is by organizing people (in terms of voters, communities, and unions) to oppose the rising tide of the chatbot-based economy. The antidote to robots is, fittingly, people. You're being a person right now, and I am also a person, and we're doing people stuff right here. That's a part of it! Continuing to have these conversations and to join together with other people who feel the same way is the way to accelerate this change.

Even though crashing the Grave Digger through a big humming building sucking up all the water in Memphis would be WAY more satisfying in the short term.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Charli xcx - "Wink Wink"

While I did not begrudge anyone the joys of Brat Summer in 2024, I was certainly not the target audience. I'm just not a big go-out-dancing or taking-drugs-while-out-dancing type of guy. And brat's did not just consist of songs describing those occasions (which I can enjoy as a listener); they were made to soundtrack those events as well.

"Wink Wink" is kind of a cross between misunderstood party girl anthem "Shake It Off" (Possibly ironic? I don't know enough about her disagreements with Taylor Swift to weigh in conclusively.) and the I Think You Should Leave sketch about how Tim Robinson's character used to be a piece of shit, but people can change. Charli talk-sings sarcastically through the verses, and the chorus hits like a sock full of plastic baggies filled with powder being swing at your head. "I'm a good girl now, PSYCH!" is a fun premise for a summer jam, even though I mostly listen to it while folding laundry.

I've been zipping around the past few days and haven't had a chance to sit with (or do chores through) Charli's whole new album (or my pal Grace RoSo's analysis of it) yet, but "Wink Wink" has wormed its way into my ear enough times over the past month that it's worth a mention here.