My Little Cousin Got 2M+ Views in 24 Hours on Instagram

And You’re Still Afraid of Hitting “Post”?

Feb 05, 2025

A couple of months ago, my cousin came to me with an idea.

He’d spotted a gap in Brazil’s short-form content scene—something already blowing up abroad but not yet mainstream here.

I saw potential. But I wasn’t bullish on it. (More on that in a second.)

The Big Idea

The concept wasn’t groundbreaking: street interviews, capturing real people’s reactions.

Not exactly a revelation if you consume English-speaking content. There are tons of these videos—especially about social anxiety. Every young guy eats that content up, hoping it’ll make them more confident to be more social (wink wink).

But my cousin had something different. A MOAT.

The Moat:

A specific type of street interview video was going viral in the US, Australia, and beyond.

And it wasn’t just about what was happening in the video.

It was about novelty.
It was about the angle.
And—most importantly—it was about the HARDWARE used to record them.

(And this is where I wasn’t fully convinced. I saw potential. But when you’ve been immersed in content creation for years, nothing feels that novel anymore. Which, in hindsight, was a flaw in my thinking.)

I know you’re itching for me to get to the point, so here it is:

Record Short Videos with Meta Ray-Bans

**Get these cool Wayfarers with my affiliate link!**

Yep. POV-style videos shot with smart glasses. Who’d have known, right?

Why This Works (And Why It’s Not Just a Fad)

I have a theory, and it’s got nothing to do with the glasses themselves. It’s about human psychology.

Unlike shoving a phone or GoPro in someone’s face, wearing camera glasses doesn’t trigger people’s fight-or-flight response—even if there’s a light showing they’re recording.

That means:

More authentic conversations
More real, natural reactions
And exactly the kind of raw, unfiltered content people crave in the post-guru era.

And since my cousin’s whole thing was about “becoming more social” and its benefits… the pieces clicked together perfectly:

Less Triggered People → Better Interactions → Proof That You CAN Be More Social

(After all, weren’t we all gaslit by our moms to never talk to strangers?)

But Wait… Is Meta Boosting This?

One interesting point my cousin brought up: what if Meta is prioritizing content made with their glasses?

Instagram and Facebook have a vested interest in making their hardware relevant. That could explain why his videos absolutely exploded on IG—pulling over 2 million views in 24 hours—while still performing very well on TikTok, but at about a third of the scale.

To put it in perspective: