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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Snap Spectacles, we talked about it a little bit yesterday. Feedback has been mixed. Not good. People don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Khals.
Speaker 1:Glasses? What glasses?
Speaker 2:It's really This one. It's really tough because if if a startup ship these, everyone like, they would they would they would be able
Speaker 1:to raise half After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Honestly
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:The funny big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now. That not those. That's too much. But you flip back, I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the, oh, they're big because I saw a bigger version.
Speaker 1:And I like these. They're a little bit blocky. Yeah. But it's like a style choice. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm getting I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing.
Speaker 1:I might pick up a couple pair.
Speaker 2:If a startup launched this product Yes. And was able to do the demos that they can do. Yeah. We've tried this product. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We've done we've done a a number of the demos. That startup would be able to raise at, I would say, easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But their a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a, you know, public company that has spent somewhere in the range of 3 and a half billion dollars building this product.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the feedback from the market Yeah. Has not been great.
Speaker 1:From Stocks.
Speaker 2:Activists has not been great.
Speaker 1:2% over the last five years, and just in the last five days, down another eight and a half percent. And Evan Spiegels has had been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. We'll we'll we'll see where all this goes. The question's like, how how expensive is this effort? How how core to the business is it?
Speaker 1:How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect. Should be an AI winner. You know, just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation, and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era clearly, a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early days when the stock was up, when the when the market was booming.
Speaker 1:And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the AI era, not the wearables era. But
Speaker 2:Tyler in the chat says, snapped down 92% since peak
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For So you can imagine a lot of the a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much much much bigger company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But to be
Speaker 2:fair Bandwidth.
Speaker 1:Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. Know I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap. It must have been ten years ago. And they bought a couple of companies and have been working on this. And then, of course, they did have the first version of Spectacles, which were like the Meta Ray Ban displays or the Meta Ray Bans.
Speaker 1:No screen, but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received, but never quite got to escape velocity where it really moved the needle for the business. But very clear, you know, interesting R and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gorel because Brandon Gorel came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll read through your piece. We'll we'll take we'll we'll steal, man. I'll steal, man. No problem. So Snapchat showed off SPECS, its new augmented reality glasses at Augmented World Expo twenty twenty six yesterday.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver pair of glasses that you'd have on all the time, everywhere. Maps, HUD, review of restaurants in your visual field, prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards and more general AI powered assistance stuff like measuring distances for you so you don't have to use a tape measure. The broad mix of features combined with the fact that specs are fairly pricey, $2,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear.
Speaker 1:So Brandon Guerrelle is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs. The the what do they call that? The the bar? What's that thing on the on the glasses that goes in the back? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Whatever that thing is, it's a little thick. It's a little heavy. There's a battery back there, probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. Imagine wearing that for four hours.
Speaker 1:Maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how
Speaker 2:Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear. He's training. Really? He sees Zac is is, you know, gotten He into doesn't wanna be left behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we don't know. Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really gonna drop over two k so they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin? I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue.
Speaker 1:The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a is this a is this something that has, like, badge value if you pull out, like, a nice rangefinder, like a title list bag or something with a with a great brand. So it feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA tour. The the the heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so many cool use cases.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But are any of them Is that true? Killer use case. No. I'm just saying
Speaker 1:Is that true?
Speaker 2:I'm saying like that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is gonna fit into your room. I don't Yeah. I can I I do that Mentally? When I'm doing
Speaker 1:You do it in
Speaker 2:your Like, if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that. But that's like a specific moment in time. Yeah. Maybe once every couple years at most. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of people Yeah. Yeah. You know, some people are kinda constantly adding furniture here and there. But a lot of people, it's kinda you Yeah. Set it and forget it.
Speaker 2:Again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time.
Speaker 1:You can buy rainfinders for around a $150. They're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf got a lot of golf heads, they're out there for more than the battery life. They're more they're out there for more than three, three and a half hours. Three and half hours might be enough for nine on a busy course.
Speaker 1:They're doing six hours out there sometimes. You don't want be out there with your going to reality glasses and they die on you. Our DIYer is going drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects. Our startup is going be willing to drop 2 ks for every employee who wants to collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's SPECS page as things you can do with the glasses and the features do seem super cool.
Speaker 1:It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2 ks price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone.
Speaker 1:Like people were already carrying phones and the iPhone was like we debated this before, but had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone. Yeah. And then the fact that it also was an iPod was an was an extra feature, and then the fact that it was an Internet browser was another feature. But it replaced like very, very Yeah. Basic things.
Speaker 2:And My thing then is like I don't think as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I I think it needs to replace a very a very regular everyday interaction thing like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80 inches TV. But 80 inches TVs are like $500 now. And so you've got to get it to be better and you gotta have enough for everyone in your household to have one and it's gotta be a better experience.
Speaker 1:But in that world
Speaker 2:The other challenge is like a lot of these I mean, like a lot of these use cases, I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And that's like the biggest Big business. Like a $2,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A $2,000 device Yeah. Doesn't really align to their what I believe is their core Yeah. Demo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Google capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this? Again, I don't think they look that bad, but there is this question of, know, is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first.
Speaker 1:I guess the taste memo never made it to snap. You're enough of a dork to have these on your face and you won't even get the chance to say, May I meet you? Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says, I think I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit.
Speaker 1:That's ridiculous. They're gonna sell a few to people that wanna demo them. There's there's fans that buy every product. Palmer Lucky has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up pull up this post from a capital Yeah. Because this might be
Speaker 1:a Yeah. We can watch this. This this actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs.
Speaker 1:You just unveiled. They cost $2,195. The stock's down more than 5%. The sound effect is rest of it. The sound mix is really good.
Speaker 1:As well. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really what does this. Stock's down.
Speaker 1:So so funny.
Speaker 2:I feel really bad for the Snap team.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I I I think like the I want them to win, but I don't I I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're gonna need Yeah. To justify further investment Yeah. Is my current. No. You, unless you're Yeah.
Speaker 2:Spiegel just doesn't care Yeah. And, you know, continues to double double or triple down, which is totally possible. Yeah. But I think at at a normal company, this would this would kind of be the the last shot.
Speaker 1:It's tough. You're competing with these hyper efficient Chinese companies. There's this company Xreal. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler.
Speaker 1:Took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple $100 and you get screen that's like not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen inside, but then it projects like a 200 inch TV in front of you. And these are actually sort of it's more chopping at the daily use cases and less doing like frontier technology.
Speaker 1:So you can play video games on them because you just plug the HDMI from the Xbox into the device. And then you just have a big screen in front of you. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming, there's a whole bunch of different things. You can watch movies on it. Do do the basic things that people do with screens.
Speaker 1:And I think that Xreal is on a a path to like commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not Not
Speaker 2:to mention meta Ray Ban displays are seven ninety nine. Yeah. And I'm I do believe that these have more quite a bit, like, more features, functionality. They have a bigger developer network.
Speaker 1:But a lot of the a lot of the killer features of, like, on demand AI instantiating a generative UI, answering a question for you, that can be done with a Call of Duty HUD. That can be done
Speaker 2:a Call all this, like, again, it's it's cool, but I I cannot don't know anyone that would do this.
Speaker 1:And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because aren't that many users. Like, is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being, like, free, we're not seeing breakout Apple Vision Pro development. Like, the Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scott, he wants to demo it, comes with a really, really impressive demo where it it finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. And and through the wall, you see this like dinosaur land. You'd love it as a dinosaur expert.
Speaker 1:Kids love it. And then the dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into It's your like a velociraptor
Speaker 2:type
Speaker 1:Let's of double check that. And and a butterfly lands on your finger, and it feels like like it almost you almost feel it because it's so it's like tracking your hand and lands. Very cool. It's like a five minute demo that the Apple team clearly worked very hard on. That feels like something that could be expanded on very cheaply in the age of vibe coding, and yet no one sees it as an economic opportunity.
Speaker 1:Developers are just they'd rather build an app for the iOS App Store. And so no one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, where is the ecosystem going to come from if they're not selling millions and millions of units and people are ready to purchase games or see ads or do anything that could monetize a business built on the back of this platform? It's a very, very tricky proposition to get a platform like this up and running. Well, the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil, people going back and forth.
Speaker 1:So yesterday, a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup Taste Labs whose mission is to end AI slop. This requires turning a fuzzy subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design, her post says. More specifically, Taste says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of of vibe coded projects.
Speaker 1:They all sort of look the same. Of course, there are examples of really cool projects. But people were starting to say, Oh, this has like the vibe code look to it, or This model is not good at front end, etcetera. Her goal is to fix that. Ty's post her post was immediately went viral, generating tons of opinions on X and getting over a million views in twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the steel man is that the AI aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for a start up to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I want to talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable?
Speaker 1:Is it not? Give me Take me through some of the the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you, and then I have a take about where the business So I think the
Speaker 2:main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't wanna hear that word anymore. Yeah. I don't wanna hear that word anymore.
Speaker 1:Because the last six months, maybe last year, it's been like the the the code word. Like, what will we do when the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and so, yeah, think there's fatigue around the usage of the word Sure. The even the conversation. I I we've never even, like, weighted that deeply into the conversation
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'd like to keep it that way.
Speaker 1:That being Just said to set the the table and the critique, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important and the outsiders don't see Francisco As
Speaker 2:being tasteful people.
Speaker 1:As being particularly tasteful people. Yeah. From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or a curation perspective. It's sort of known as the t shirts and athleisure community and that's it's sort of it's it's optimized. It's devoid of taste by design.
Speaker 1:It's about efficiency, not taste. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then and then I'll say one more thing and then and then I'll I'll steal man Taste Labs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But so the main thing is like, when I think of when I think of like taste Mhmm. Like like product taste Mhmm. Like I think of like linear.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? Like Mhmm. Linear has like always been very opinionated Yep. Very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is.
Speaker 1:Yep. Like,
Speaker 2:you know, very very design driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste. Right? The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket copying it.
Speaker 1:Right? Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. There's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:From their website Yep. To the actual product. And so taste is something that people curate themselves. But then, as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally like not tasteful. Right?
Speaker 2:Then it's not original. Yeah. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality and to be able to combine, you know, do one plus one equals two. And another example is like
Speaker 1:Is there one plus one equals three?
Speaker 2:Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. One plus one equals one plus one
Speaker 1:equals equals 11.
Speaker 2:One plus one equals two. That's the that's the ad
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That fake start of that. No. So another example is like Squarespace. Sure.
Speaker 2:Like Squarespace took like high end website design Yeah. And then just it. Modetized it. Right? Anybody could have a pretty website.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then you started to just I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website or
Speaker 1:did
Speaker 2:this person make it? Okay.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:Squarespace website like and not it's not really that much of a knock but like the it wasn't like the the company's own taste that led Mhmm. To that output or or the people that they worked with. Mhmm. So it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Create better looking outputs Mhmm. And working on that problem Yeah. Feels like a pretty good way to build a at least temporarily a pretty big business Yeah. Because this is something that users really care about. The labs really care about.
Speaker 2:Totally. Hyperscalers Yep. Even care about. Right? Yep.
Speaker 2:And so I think that while Taste Labs, you know, got a lot of flack over the last twenty four hours Yep. Their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it. Yep. And very unclear what what this business looks like in, you know, five years like a lot of the other companies in the category.
Speaker 2:But I bet they I bet they print in the short term.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling
Speaker 2:So the name the name is like perfect
Speaker 1:page, baby.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Taste labs. We're building
Speaker 1:Taste. Final
Speaker 2:taste in a lab. We built it. We made it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful, and the end product would be exactly the same because you're just that's just your negative data set and everything else is positive by that design. But a lot of the data labeling projects have just been, does the button work? Does this render properly? Like, is this just is this functional?
Speaker 1:And some of that's been able to be looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded just tagging, okay, does the does the photo have six fingers or five fingers? Like, that was a useful, useful piece of data labeling that happened probably two years ago. Now, there's a bigger question about what actually looks good and then how do you represent like a diversity of tasteful designs such that you don't everything just just doesn't collapse until like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor. Like, the it's not this, it's that, but for design would be the back Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is like already extremely easy to clock.
Speaker 1:Right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I got a deck last night Mhmm. A friend of mine Yeah. His company. And my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design?
Speaker 2:Because it's totally possible the answer is yes. Yeah. But at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is gonna know that
Speaker 1:You're slopping it up.
Speaker 2:Tried to one shot this. Yeah. Which again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine, but it's gonna turn some people off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. People are going all back and forth on this. This highlights our fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed.
Speaker 1:Even if you make AI imitate taste, whatever that means, it still won't mean anything. Taste emerges from craft, context, meaning, subjectivity and genuine care. That's sort of true, but just just increasing the quality of design is valuable. But, yes, it is it is a it's a tall order when you use the word taste because so much baggage has been assigned to that. There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate potentially.
Speaker 1:Sources familiar with the matter, disputed semaphores reporting there was a back there was a whole bunch of back and forth about, is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for Roku? And they're taking shots at each other. Semaphore, what you got? Ben Smith says congrats on helping with the cleanup.
Speaker 1:They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this mean tweet means, Sharon. Cleanup on aisle semaphore, my dear Ben. All I'm saying is they are now saying on the record that they're not interested in Lions Gate. Never were.
Speaker 1:Would have been happy to amplify your scoop They're fighting. They're fighting. The timeline's in turmoil. Market news. More Fed officials have signaled a rate increase as the next move.
Speaker 1:The Central Bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Walsh's first meeting as as chairman, but nine of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase by year's end, up from none in March. And so the market is selling off down about a percent today based on that. There's also a g seven meeting that's happening between AI leaders. Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and, and Demis Vesabas from Google's DeepMind at a summit in France on Wednesday discussing AI export controls and all things AI. The AI leaders are huddling at lunch with the G7 in France.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure there'll be more things to come out of that. There's still more back and forth on export controls. The Fable five is still embargoed in some way, and they're working through that. There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also, US has held off on blacklisting China's deep sea, more than a 100 firms and more than a 100 firms that are deemed security risks.
Speaker 1:That was part of the the Fable five rollout was that there was a South Korean telecom company, according to the reporting, that had access to, one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. And, that firm, that Chinese that South Korean telecom company had potentially ties to the to China in some way. And so the US government was skeptical of that South Korean telecom company, and so there was a debate over that and whether or not that crossed a bright line. And so from The Washington Post, Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned, the list of companies that would be getting the most advanced models had ballooned, roughly 50 additional entities had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify new recipients for days.
Speaker 1:When Anthropic finally turned over names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company. The administration suspected, alleged, of having ties to China, officials said. And so that is the the the key of the dust up there. But we'll be continuing to follow that.
Speaker 2:In other news, much more tragic. Many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who Mhmm. Is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, in a in a
Speaker 1:Plane crash.
Speaker 2:Plane crash
Speaker 1:In Laredo.
Speaker 2:Guess early early this morning coming back from Mexico to Austin. Yeah. I unfortunately never never got to meet Joshua, but only heard tremendous things about him. And he really was an important figure in the Austin startup community. So Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends. Mhmm. And yeah, really, Yeah. Really Rest in peace.
Speaker 1:Well, we should close on a positive note in some way. There's a whole discussion over SpaceX potentially using the high share price, the incredible valuation to acquire more companies, create a roll up. There's a piece in the Financial Times we can we can run through another day. But, Bill Ackman shares a hall of fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.
Speaker 1:A tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that, while the stock price is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the Kursor acquisition closing, or being announced that the option has been exercised.
Speaker 1:But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there gonna be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll up? Will SpaceX buy Neo Cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets?
Speaker 1:Like, TeraFab has been talking. What what's involved in that? I mean, they're they're they're trading at, what, 10 times Intel at this point or something? I don't know. What is Intel market cap?
Speaker 1:But there's so much that they could do. They it's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600,000,000,000 company. So that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain.
Speaker 1:There's a lot in the in the AI world, in the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they wanna go. But it would be a very different direction, and so everyone will be watching it very, very closely. Anyway, thank you for tuning into TBPN today.
Speaker 2:And have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.