Kmart Just Settled the Smart Glasses Debate for Eighty-Nine Dollars
You almost certainly have a rule about phones in the boardroom. You may have one about recording calls. You have nothing at all about the person sitting across the table wearing glasses.
That gap didn’t matter much while the glasses cost five hundred dollars. At that price the people wearing them were enthusiasts, and enthusiasts are a manageable problem. You can spot them, you can ask them, you can make a policy about them later.
Last week Australia stopped having that luxury. Kmart put camera glasses on the shelf for eighty-nine dollars and sold out. Not a launch event, not a keynote, not a Silicon Valley product reveal with a stage and a countdown. A homebrand product, sitting somewhere between the towels and the phone chargers, in a store that most Australian families walk through without thinking about it.
We’ve spent five years arguing about who should be allowed to build this technology. That argument is over. It didn’t end with a regulation or a court case or a considered public debate. It ended at the register.
You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:
The signal is the price, not the product
When Phil Whelan raised this with me on RTHK Radio 3 on Tuesday, his first instinct was the right one, and it’s the instinct almost everyone has. He pointed out that if you’ve lived in Asia for any length of time, you’d shrug. You can buy covert recording gear on a street in Bangkok for pennies. Nothing about this is new.
So what’s the special Australian angle, he asked. It’s the price, and it’s who’s selling it. Eighty-nine dollars is cheap for Australia, and Kmart isn’t a niche electronics retailer. It’s where a vast majority of Australian families shop. Ours does. Something that was three or four hundred dollars and aspirational is now ninety bucks and ordinary, and that means mainstream Australia has ready access to this technology for the first time. That’s the whole of it.
He’s correct about the capability. He’s correct that this is not a technical breakthrough. And that’s exactly why it matters.
Nothing in these glasses is novel. Camera glasses have existed for years. Bone conduction audio, the technology that sends sound through the bone of your skull so only you hear it, has been in commercial products for well over a decade. I’ve worn a pair for years. They give me a headache within seconds of putting them on, which as far as I can tell is a quirk of my own physiology rather than a design flaw, and I still wear them, which tells you something about how good the experience otherwise is.
So the capability isn’t the signal. The price is.
Four hundred dollars is an aspiration. Eighty-nine dollars is an impulse. That distinction is not a matter of degree. It’s the difference between a subculture and an ambient condition, and it’s the moment worth paying attention to, because it’s the moment behaviour changes.
This is what I mean by Immediate Futures. Not what might happen. What has already arrived and is now sitting in a shopping trolley in Frankston.
What eighty-nine dollars actually buys
The product is Anko-branded, Kmart’s homebrand line, and it’s also on shelves at Target Australia. It takes stills and video, it has speakers and a microphone, and it pairs with a phone app. SmartCompany reported that stock cleared almost immediately.
Meta’s Ray-Ban range, the product these are chasing, starts at several times that. That gap is the entire story.
There’s an indicator light that flashes during recording. The manual asks users to respect local laws and other people’s privacy. Kmart’s own statement, when the coverage started, was that these are part of an established and increasingly mainstream category of wearable technology, that similar products are available globally, and that as with any device capable of recording images, they expect customers to use the product responsibly.
Read that carefully. Every word of it is true. That’s what makes it interesting. Kmart hasn’t done anything unusual. They’ve done precisely what they’ve built a multi-billion dollar business doing over the past decade, which is take a product that used to be aspirational and make it ordinary. Clothing, crockery, bikes, and now this. There isn’t a negative in this story for them. They’d be delighted with the coverage, because the coverage says exactly what they want said about themselves: that they give people access to things they otherwise couldn’t afford.
The pressure isn’t on the retailer. It never was.
Where it does sit is on a legal framework that was written for a different world. Australia has no single national rule on this. Every state and territory has its own surveillance devices act, and they differ on the question that matters most, which is whether one party or all parties must consent. Lawyers have publicly described the framework as ill-equipped for this technology. The Australian Law Reform Commission’s own review of surveillance devices makes the same point about fragmentation. Tom Sulston at Digital Rights Watch called the situation a privacy nightmare, and the phrase has stuck to the story.
But the law is the slow part of this, and I’d rather talk about the fast part.
We’ve done this before, and we drew the wrong lesson
Phil and I have had a version of this conversation for years, and it usually arrives at the same place: name a genuinely significant invention that can’t be used to hurt somebody. Sliced bread, maybe. Someone would find a way.
That framing feels wise and it’s a dead end, because it treats every technology as morally identical and leaves you with nothing to do. The useful question isn’t whether a capability can be misused. It’s what changes when the friction around it disappears.
I wrote a while back about the people who wore top hats to watch thirty lines of television, because that’s the pattern I keep running into. New technology doesn’t arrive and change everything at once. It arrives, sits inside old manners for a while, and then quietly rewrites them while nobody’s watching.
Here’s the version of that I lived through. There was a period, not that long ago, when wearing headphones on public transport was considered discourteous. You were shutting people out. It was a small social offence. Now it’s so ordinary that the opposite is true, and a person having a speakerphone conversation on a tram is the one committing the offence.
Nothing about the headphones changed. The friction went away, enough people did it, and the manners reorganised themselves around the new default.
Camera phones did the same thing on a much larger scale. The camera has been used for terrible purposes since the day it was invented. What changed was that a couple of billion people got one in their pocket. A small percentage of a couple of billion is a very large number of people, and it’s an entirely different governance problem from the one that existed when only a few hundred thousand had the equipment.
The mistake we made with camera phones was assuming that because the capability wasn’t new, the situation wasn’t new either. It was. We just noticed about a decade late.
The thing that breaks isn’t privacy. It’s candour.
Here’s where I want to push past the obvious reading, because the obvious reading is where most of this coverage has stopped.
The obvious concern is more filming. Somebody records you in a change room, a gym, a waiting room, a classroom. That’s real, it’s serious, and it deserves the attention it’s getting. In Australia the coverage has already produced an account from a sex worker who says a client tried to record her covertly with smart glasses and she very nearly didn’t notice them. That’s not a hypothetical, and the reason it lands is that these devices are genuinely hard to spot. Someone who knows the technology will pick them in a second. Everybody else won’t.
But the larger organisational consequence isn’t more recording. It’s the behaviour of people who assume they might be recorded.
Self-censorship doesn’t require surveillance. It only requires the plausible possibility of it. And the possibility just went from expensive to ambient.
Think about where your organisation actually learns things. Not the board pack. Not the quarterly survey. The corridor. The two minutes after the meeting ends and the real objection finally gets said out loud. The junior analyst who mentions to a colleague, not to a manager, that the numbers in slide fourteen don’t reconcile. The conversation in the car park that tells a general manager the restructure is about to fail six weeks before any dashboard shows it.
Every one of those exchanges runs on the assumption that the room is unrecorded. Take that assumption away and people don’t stop talking. They start performing. The words continue and the information stops.
That’s the second-order consequence, and it’s the one with a cost attached. Your risk register gets cleaner and less true. Your engagement scores hold up while your actual engagement erodes. Your early warning system, which was never a system at all but a set of informal human behaviours, quietly switches off. And you won’t notice, because the thing that disappears is the thing that was never written down.
Push it one level further. If candour retreats from shared physical space, it doesn’t vanish. It relocates to the places people believe are private, which are usually encrypted messaging apps you don’t control and have no visibility into. So the practical outcome of ambient recording in the workplace isn’t more transparency. It’s less. The honest conversation still happens. It just happens somewhere you can’t reach it and can’t act on it.
That’s a ripple effect that no privacy policy addresses, because it isn’t a privacy problem. It’s an information problem wearing a privacy costume.
A Trust Cliff forming in ordinary rooms
Trust doesn’t erode the way most models assume. It doesn’t slide gently downward in response to accumulated small disappointments. It sits flat and apparently healthy for a long time, then drops sharply the moment a gap opens between what people assumed was happening and what actually was.
That’s what I call a Trust Cliff, and this is a textbook setup for one.
Right now, in cafés and gyms and open-plan offices and school pickup lines, people are operating on an assumption they’ve never articulated: that being recorded is visible. That the phone has to come up. That you can tell. Our entire etiquette around being filmed was built on that one signal, and it has worked well enough for twenty years.
Remove the signal and you haven’t changed a device. You’ve changed the default state of every room, and you’ve done it without telling anyone.
Nobody has renegotiated any of this. Not workplaces, not schools, not clinics, not gyms. Which means the gap between assumption and reality is open right now and widening, and the drop happens the first time somebody in your organisation discovers they were recorded in a room they believed was private.
The reason this matters strategically is that cliffs and declines need completely different responses. A slow decline responds to slow reassurance. You can message your way back from it over a couple of quarters. A cliff doesn’t work that way. Once people have crossed the line, the communications approach that would have prevented a decline is worse than useless, because it reads as management of the problem rather than resolution of it.
The organisations that come out of this well won’t be the ones with the most confident internal messaging. They’ll be the ones that closed the gap before anyone fell through it.
The uses that are genuinely worth having
I always want to give the best case, because the best case here is real and it gets lost in the alarm.
Surgeons already use this class of eyewear. Not every surgeon and not every theatre, but it’s no longer unusual. It lets them see the patient, the imaging, and an increasing volume of live clinical data in the same field of view without looking away from the person on the table. That’s a genuine gain in a setting where looking away has a cost.
Warehouse pickers use a similar thing. The glasses guide them to the right aisle, the right shelf, the right item, and handle the tagging as they go. It works because it puts information where the eyes already are.
The pattern in both is the same. The technology earns its place when it removes a task that was never a good use of human attention, and leaves the judgment with the human. That’s the HUMAND question in its simplest form: what part of this work should sit with a person, what part with a machine, and what part with both together. The surgeon still decides. The glasses just stop making them turn their head.
The eighty-nine dollar version isn’t doing any of that. It’s doing something much simpler, which is putting a camera on a face in a public place. Same hardware category. Completely different question.
Three Things I Recommend You Do
The first thing to do is write the policy this month, not next quarter. Almost no Australian organisation has one, and the ones that do usually wrote it about phones and assumed it would stretch. It doesn’t. Name wearable recording devices explicitly. Say where they can’t be worn, which at minimum means change rooms, bathrooms, clinical spaces, and any room where confidential personal information is discussed. Say what happens when someone breaches it. Retail, healthcare, education, gyms, and any workplace with a duty of care to people who didn’t choose to be there should treat this as urgent rather than administrative. It walked into your premises this week for eighty-nine dollars.
The second thing to do is protect the unrecorded conversation deliberately. If candour is the asset at risk, then defend the asset. Designate specific forums as unrecorded and say so out loud at the start of them. Make it a stated norm rather than an unstated assumption, because unstated assumptions are exactly what a Trust Cliff eats. This costs nothing and it’s the single most effective thing on this list, because it restores the signal that the technology removed.
The third thing to do is decide your position before someone forces you to have one. Not the legal position, the human one. When a customer, a patient, a student or a staff member asks whether they can be recorded on your premises, there is going to be an answer, and it will either be one you chose or one that a junior staff member improvises under pressure in front of a phone camera. Work out what you actually believe about consent in your spaces, write it in language a fourteen year old could follow, and put it where people can see it. The organisations that handle this badly won’t be the ones with the wrong policy. They’ll be the ones caught without one.
The part that stays with me
Phil asked whether there’s a graph somewhere showing that the further forward we go, the more danger comes with it. There probably is. But I don’t think the danger scales with the technology. I think it scales with access, and access is a price question, which means it’s a retail question, which means it gets decided by a buyer at a homebrand product line rather than by a parliament or a regulator or an ethics board.
That’s the uncomfortable part. The most consequential decision about ambient surveillance in Australia this year wasn’t made in Canberra. It was made in a procurement meeting, on the basis that a product could be built for eighty-nine dollars and people would buy it. And they were right.
I don’t think that’s cause for despair, and I’m wary of the reflex to treat every one of these moments as evidence that things are getting worse. That reflex is doing a lot of damage at the moment, and I wrote about it separately in why the world feels so negative right now. The mood is not the same thing as the situation.
What I do think is that the norm arrives before the rule, every single time, and the gap between them is where organisations get hurt. Behaviour moves at retail speed. Law moves at parliamentary speed. You don’t get to choose the size of that gap, but you absolutely get to choose whether you’re standing in it unprepared.
This is not a prediction. It’s a preparation.
The glasses are already on the shelf. The only open question is whether you decide what they mean in your rooms, or wait for somebody else to decide it for you.
Choose Forward.
If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.
You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what is already arriving.
Choose Forward.
#SmartGlasses #Privacy #TrustCliffs #FutureOfWork #Leadership #AustralianBusiness #Surveillance #RippleEffects #MorrisMisel #RTHK #MorningBrew #ChooseForward
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the price of smart glasses matter more than the technology?
Because price decides how many people have the capability, and that’s what changes behaviour. At four or five hundred dollars, camera glasses are an enthusiast product and a manageable problem. At eighty-nine dollars they’re an impulse buy, which means they stop being a subculture and become an ambient condition. The capability didn’t change. The number of people holding it did.
What should organisations actually do about wearable recording devices?
Three things. Write a policy this month that names wearable devices explicitly rather than assuming your phone policy stretches to cover them. Designate specific meetings and spaces as unrecorded and say so out loud, so the norm is stated rather than assumed. And decide your organisation’s position on consent in your spaces before a customer or staff member forces you to improvise one under pressure.
Is it legal to record people with smart glasses in Australia?
It depends where you’re standing. Australia has no single national rule. Every state and territory has its own surveillance devices act, and they differ on whether one party or all parties must consent, and on how audio and video are treated. Lawyers have publicly described the framework as ill-equipped for this technology. If you need a position for your own premises, get advice on your specific jurisdiction rather than relying on a general answer.
What is a Trust Cliff and why does it apply here?
A Trust Cliff is what happens when trust doesn’t decline gradually but drops sharply, at the moment a gap opens between what people assumed was happening and what actually was. It applies here because our entire etiquette around being recorded was built on one assumption, that you could see it happening. Remove that signal and the gap opens quietly, and the drop comes the first time someone discovers they were recorded in a room they believed was private.
Are there good uses for this technology?
Yes, and they’re worth separating from the alarm. Surgeons use this class of eyewear to keep imaging and live clinical data in the same field of view as the patient. Warehouse pickers use it for guidance and tagging. In both cases the technology removes a task that was never a good use of human attention and leaves the judgment with the person. That’s a very different proposition from a camera on a face in a public place.
Does ambient recording make organisations more transparent?
It usually does the opposite. Candour doesn’t disappear when people think they might be recorded, it relocates to places the organisation can’t see, which are typically private messaging apps. The honest conversation still happens. It just happens somewhere you can’t reach it or act on it, which means your early warning system quietly switches off while your dashboards keep looking healthy.
Full Segment Transcript, RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 4 August 2026 ▼ Click to expand
Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew
Phil: There you go. Clock clock on Radio 3 out of the dark, which is quite interesting. Good place to start our little chat with business futurist Morris Miselowski. How are you?
Morris: I’m very, very good. Happy Tuesday everyone.
Phil: Yes, happy Tuesday to you. It’s quarter past 12, very nearly, here in Hong Kong. So interesting story, which is in the Aussie Guardian, and it basically says Kmart sells out of low-cost rival to Meta camera glasses across Australia amid warnings of privacy nightmare. And I do want you to sort of get into that a little bit from an Aussie angle, but if anybody’s lived in Asia for a long time they’d be like, yeah, whatever, you know, hold my beer, you can buy them for pennies on a street in Bangkok and off a certain, you know, shopping portal where everything costs pennies. So what’s the special Aussie angle to this, Morris?
Morris: Well, the Aussie angle is the price is cheap, Australia, that’s the first thing. So 500 Hong Kong dollars, but I think you’re not straight compared to Meta and the rest of them, being the other manufacturer that manufactures themselves. And there’re quite a few, so let’s put this back into context. So we’re talking about glasses. We’re talking about the equivalent of those Superman glasses where you can see the world through them. So this is a pair of spectacles you put on and you can hear music, you can do all the stuff, you can take video of people in front of you without them knowing it.
Phil: Do they look like normal glasses these days?
Morris: Absolutely. Ray-Ban for instance sells Meta, which is the Facebook company. Meta sells Ray-Ban, they have a relationship with them. All sorts of other spectacle and sunglass manufacturers, most of the big brands now have a version of these. So they’ve gone very mainstream. Now it’s going to get worse because Apple, that big Apple device, they don’t tell us anything and they certainly don’t ring me, but it’s been the worst kept secret that at some point they will bring out a pair of spectacles as well. And it’s been talked about this year, we talked about last year, it’ll be talked about next year, but I say that because if Apple does do what everyone believes they will do, this thing will become mainstream. So that’s not the price argument, that’s the machine argument.
Phil: What’s the legit use for these things? Let’s start there.
Morris: I think there truly are. So let’s forget all the horrible thing that our mind takes us to immediately, but let’s just say, you and I’ve had the discussion for so long now that I remember us saying, and very often it’s really impertinent of people to sit on public transport with things in their ears. I mean being headphones, and it was, at a period of time not that long ago, discourteous for that to happen and it’s become really ordinary. I say that because what this device does is it shifts the stuff off your phone and onto your head inside of a pair of glasses. It uses what’s called bone induction. So when you have them on nobody is hearing what you’re hearing, it literally goes through the bone into your ear and only you can hear, so you can be listening to your music or watching a movie or doing anything else.
Phil: Have you tested them out, Morris? What’s the audio quality like?
Morris: It’s actually very good. I mean, not for you, but for the rest of us mere mortals, it’s really not too bad at all.
Phil: I mean, I’m just curious what it’s like to hear, you know, music through vibrations, more than acoustic.
Morris: So I’ve been listening, well, this is interesting because I’ve been listening to bone induction for a long time. The technology’s not new. There are a whole lot of technologies that have been around, companies I should say, have been around for 10, 15 years that use this. And it’s very, very interesting. You know, the strange thing, and this is only about me because I haven’t found any more stuff that has this issue, is even though I like the pair I have and I actually wear them quite often, it gives me a headache. The second I put them on, it actually gives me an immediate headache. When I take them off, it disappears. So there’s something about the way it works on my physiology. But having said that, strangely enough, I still like them, I still wear them.
Phil: Well, bearing in mind it works on vibrations, there’s probably got to be some medical benefit for it somewhere.
Morris: Well, there must probably be, you haven’t got the stuff in your ear. You know, there’s nothing sitting on top really. When you buy them, they’re normally very lightweight. They are not cheap. I mean, again, not your version of them, but the proper versions are a couple of hundred Aussie dollars going up. They always have been. There hasn’t been many models around until about the last couple of years. There were a couple of manufacturers that were really, really good at it. They’re the ones that I bought last couple of years. I’ve seen more people getting into it. So it’s a new technology.
But going back to the glasses, you can actually see, so you can see the world, obviously, but you can also see digital world on top of it. So you can see photos, you can watch a movie, you can watch TV, you can do all kinds of things in there, depending on what the glass does. Not all of them do all these things, but you can get them to do all these things if you want.
Phil: It has some pretty basic downsides really, for the uninitiated, to just chuck out at you. I mean, one of them is fashion versus functionality. So the Meta ones apparently, they have a red light on and people can see if you’re recording. Well, of course, Joe Perve doesn’t want that, does he, basically?
Morris: No. And that’s the issue. I mean, that truly is the issue. It’s no different, I’m not downplaying at all, it’s no different from when mobile phones first came out and the camera became really transportable and really hidden. There are a whole lot of people that should never have them in their hands and should never be near anybody where they’re using them. Not a doubt in my mind or anybody else’s about them. But again, should the rest of the world not have the technology because some people use it for evil?
Phil: Well, that could be said about anything, couldn’t it?
Morris: Exactly. And that’s why I don’t have the answer for it. So, I mean, in Australia, some people are calling them pervert glasses.
Phil: But I can think of other things. You know, wisenheimers, they try and sort of wind up some people and it kind of goes wrong and it ends up on YouTube and, you know, just stuff to embarrass people, candid camera stuff. I mean, that opens all sorts of doors, doesn’t it?
Morris: It does, it absolutely does. And again, I don’t have a ready answer for it because the technology does it. I can give you, because I always give you the best-case scenario of these things. These sorts of glasses have been around for a while. It’s not unusual for a doctor in surgery, not every doctor, not every surgery, to wear these kinds of glasses and that gives them the ability to see the human that they’re operating on, to see the x-rays and also nowadays increasingly a whole lot of digital data that lets them do the operation better. That’s what I think is a great use of these things. Not everyday use here, but for those people in those professions. You also have similar sorts of glasses walking around warehouses on people’s heads so that when they’re doing the picking and packing they can see directly ahead, they know exactly, it’s guiding them to the right shelf, to the right product, it’s taking it off, it’s doing the tagging for them. So there are case uses where these things are being used really well and purposefully.
If you want to check this out, it’s in the Aussie Guardian, and just flicking through this article which Jarrod sent me actually, so it’s really good of him to do that.
Phil: They kind of look a bit recognisable, these specs, unless, we’re just looking at a few here.
Morris: Look, they do. I mean when you look at them they do. The better ones are not as easy to pick up. Anyone who knows the technology will pick them up in a split second, but people who don’t know about the technology most probably won’t pick them as easily. But yeah, they’re still moderately bulky and they look a bit strange. They kind of look the same.
Phil: So the Australian thing, at least they’re not buying absolute junk in Australia.
Morris: Well I wouldn’t go that far. So $89, it’s still $500 Hong Kong or just below. Now in Australia this is an interesting story beyond that because Kmart is a huge retailer. It’s not the American Kmart, this is the Australian one. They’re two separate, nothing to do with each other. They just have the same name. There was a history going back a long time ago, there isn’t any more, hasn’t been for a long time. But what Kmart is, is like the cheap version of most products. So they will build and they have built an empire. They’ve been around for, I won’t say a hundred years, but for decades and decades. They were a nothing brand. As a retailer example they are incredible. In the last ten years they have gone from zero to hero. They have become a multi-billion dollar. They’re owned by a very large corporation which has a lot of other retail arms in Australia. But it’s become zero to hero. They sell low cost, really low cost items that are borrowed from other companies, not the brands. I can’t be more polite than that. And they will sell everything from clothing to crockery to bikes to glasses to anything. Anything that they can make and produce, they will find a low cost way of doing it. Our family buys there. It’s unusual to find a family in Australia that doesn’t buy there. So it’s, I can’t afford the medium range or I don’t want to. And I can’t afford the upper range or I don’t want to. I’m going to go to Kmart and see if they have a copy of it. That’s where Kmart sits. That’s why it’s interesting, because Kmart is used by a vast majority of Australians for retail shopping.
Phil: The story, I suppose.
Morris: And the fact, exactly. And the fact that it’s gone from being something that was aspirational, you know, four or five hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, to something that’s 90 bucks Australian now means that mainstream Australia, literally still pricey for us, but mainstream Australia now has ready access to this kind of technology. That’s the problem in the article. They’re saying that when it becomes this mainstream and this available to everybody, that’s when it starts to have real issues.
It’s a PR nightmare for Kmart as well, but their spin has been quite good. So a bloke from Kmart said that they’re part of an established, increasingly mainstream category of wearable technology. True. Similar products available globally. True. As with any device capable of recording images, we expect customers to use the product responsibly. You can’t really knock them. They’re telling the truth.
Phil: No.
Morris: And Kmart would love this. I mean, really, I don’t see a negative in this for Kmart at all. They’re not doing anything unusual or different. People have a choice to buy or not buy. Kmart would be loving this publicity because this is exactly what they want to be seen for. Giving everybody the opportunity to have products and services they might not otherwise be able to afford. They would be lapping it up.
Phil: Every gadget we have discussed has had a potential downside. There’s got to be a scale, I don’t know, a theory or something with a graph going in several directions that says the more we go forward the more danger comes with it. Something like that.
Morris: Well, yeah, I’d agree with that. I think it’s also the more ready danger of it. You know, before it might be one or two people with a camera that did it. I would imagine that, you know, the camera’s always been used for terrible things ever since it was invented. But only a few people had it. All of a sudden a couple of billion people have it. A couple of billion people, a percentage of those is a lot of people.
Phil: Comes down to, it’s quite funny, isn’t it? I mean I’m racking my brains here to think of a sort of real paradigm invention that isn’t capable of damaging or hurting somebody in some way. And I suppose it goes back to the ridged one, sliced bread. But somebody somewhere would know how to do damage with sliced bread.
Morris: Most probably, most probably. The one that we always talk about, I mean you’ve missed what it’s all about, is the atom bomb. You know, splitting the atom was an incredible possibility technology, but then it went really like a million steps too far.
Phil: We’ve got about five minutes left. I would like you to tell us about one of your latest articles and cheer us up. Or not.
[Editor’s note: Morris refers below to Ipsos as a client. On review that is not accurate. The relationship is collegial, arising from a shared Microsoft panel and later conversations, not a client engagement. Ipsos is referenced here purely as the research organisation behind the survey.]
Morris: Oh, I don’t know, I’m not quite sure. So there’s a chart that came out today by a group that I love, I mean it’s called Visual Capitalist, and they put out really great charts here. Of course, I’m the kind of silly person who loves these, because to me it shows stats and things in a really easy way. Today’s stats, and it is from a brand new piece of research, only came out about, well, January, February, was when the research came out. It’s only been compiled and used. It’s used by Ipsos, it happens to be a client of mine. So they do really good research. In other words, I’m saying this stuff is generally okay. I believe it because generally okay, you know, these are two good companies.
What they’ve done is they do it every year, is they try and figure out how the world, you know, whether the world sees things better or worse. In other words, if things are going right or wrong. What scared me about this piece of research, it said that 41% of the world thought that we were going in the right direction. 59% of the world, this is 25,709 people across the planet, 59% of them thought the world was headed in the wrong direction. What that wrong direction is we don’t know, but 59% of the world thought we were headed to hell in a handbasket.
Phil: Is it one of those little phrases, in the right direction? It’s like going down the tubes and there’s, as Carlin said, big tubes, you know?
Morris: Yeah. It talks about the reality that most people think that the world is just not functioning in a great way, that things aren’t happy, things aren’t good, and it’s getting difficult. It’s interesting again for me because when you look at the top tier, you’ve got Singapore, Malaysia, India, you’ve got a lot of Asian countries that are actually very positive. Singapore has the greatest belief in the country’s headed in the right direction. 86% of people there think that it is headed in the right direction. And then you come to Australia, which is going through a real funk at the moment, which is what I’ve called the article. And Australia, only 44% of people in Australia think that we’re headed in the right direction. And that really feels like it when you walk around these streets.
Phil: What things get brought up as examples?
Morris: It doesn’t in this article. It does in mine. So in mine I talk about the reality. I talk about this as a global scar. It’s something that I’ve seen many times in my career, and I think of all experience that we see it in times of war, economic downturn. We see it when COVID hit, when there’s some kind of a crisis. Everybody tends to go insular. The world gets negative. Our decisions get negative. We only think about the worst, you know, catastrophising. That’s human nature.
Phil: There’s quite a bit of it going on at the moment.
Morris: And that’s my point. And that’s what I’m saying to my clients and audiences now, that you really need to be careful. If you’re making long-term plans based on the yuck of now and the horribles of now, it’s going to come back to bite you. Because I’m really confident two or three years, not quoting times, but two or three years, I think that’s about as much as we can stand of this. It’ll start to turn around and we’ll start to get positive again. The decisions, the things people will buy, the things they’ll want to have, are very different.
Phil: What has to change, Morris? Go on, dare to say it.
Morris: Human nature. Absolutely human nature. And that’s what I’ve put it down to. I don’t believe it’s economics. I don’t believe it’s politics. I believe all of those show it and they definitely exacerbate it. But to me, those things are all human. They’re humans coming together to buy, to sell, to have, to not have, to decide, to not decide. And collectively, we are in a really negative space and we need to be careful and mindful that we don’t make long-term decisions in this negative space that will impact us to remain negative ongoing.
Phil: I’m in a positive space now because I just saw you gave me a shout out in this article.
Morris: I did.
Phil: Tell us about that bit.
Morris: It’s about Hong Kong, not me.
Phil: What’s it say?
Morris: No, no, you’re getting a shout out too, further down. What was, I mean, it’s interesting because, you know, here you are in Australia, and as today we’re talking about those knockoff glasses and stuff, and somebody in Asia, yeah, it’s not the biggest story to hit the news. That’s why it’s fascinating to me because it sort of highlights Aussieness. And this does too, because at the moment we are going through tough times with politics. I live in St Kilda in Victoria. We’re about to have a state election in November. Our minister just resigned last week and she’s been replaced by a new head and he’s trying to get them righted for the elections. The other mob are getting into her. We have Pauline Hanson, who I assume you were talking about before, who’s going one side of, yeah. And you will. So I’ll leave that to Jarrod and you to have a conversation. But you know, she’s kind of stirring up stuff here. We are really in a negative space. I see it all the time talking to boards. I hear it all the time from audiences and on the media. People are just taking the really negative side to life at the moment and it concerns me greatly. Mental health, all kinds of things really come out of this in not a good way.
Phil: I love this most because it’s essentially based on feeling. It’s very hard to quantify a lot of this stuff. Oh, we’re going in the wrong direction. Well, how? It’s really difficult to say that. But people are strongly believing that this wrong direction is a thing, aren’t they?
Morris: They are. And for us, it manifests itself because our interest rates are going up. Everything is going in the wrong direction economically. And again, there’re reasonable, good or bad, believe it or don’t believe it, reasons for it. But for me, it’s that chicken and the egg. That I believe that if we could somehow just get happier, I know that’s harder to do than to say, if we didn’t believe it to be so bad, we might buy a little bit more, which would stimulate the economy, give somebody a job. All those things kind of happen. Employers aren’t employing because they’re just not sure. So we are just in this negative period.
Phil: Well, thanks, Morris. We’re going to leave it there for now. I’ll see you next week. Cheer up.
Morris: Lovely chatting to you. Take care for now.
Phil: That’s our Biz Futurist to the stars, Morris Miselowski. Live from St Kilda in Aussie.
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 4 August 2026.
