Shifts In The Creator Economy, Kylie Jenner x Meta, GPT 5.6 Limited Release | Diet TBPN

0:00We're back.

0:00John Coogan:France. We miss you guys. We miss you guys a lot. Yeah, it was rough. It's genuinely brutal. We feel deeply unwell by around 1 p.m. if we haven't gone live, regardless of the time zone. Sweating and shaking is crazy. Yeah. It is a full withdrawal. Yeah, and the withdrawals. I mean, maybe it would get better after a few weeks. But yeah, the symptoms are brutal. Anyway, it was a high stakes trip. Of course, Jordi has battled with French President Emmanuel Macron in the past. And then what appeared to be a direct shot at me, France recently banned nicotine pouches fully. Very controversial. Pretty much all oral nicotine products banned.

0:41John Coogan:Yeah. As of April. Can Lions. It used to be mostly about creative advertisements, giving awards for creativity. And there's a big focus on the creator economy. It's not packed with A-list celebrities, but it feels like everyone has a following of some sort. And that was a big point of discussion. Like there was one level of conversation that was just like creators are the future. Everyone's heard this pitch a million times. But the bigger discussion was something that Andrew Ross Sorkin from Squawk Box CNBC Dealbook mentioned, talking about the tradeoffs between independence and consolidation.

1:13John Coogan:You've talked about this before, just the idea of a rollup of independent sub stackers. Where is the right economy of scale in the creator economy? Maybe not everyone should be independent. Maybe not everyone should be with a large organization. and this trade-off sort of interesting to dig into as we see both creators go bigger and produce more expensive shows. And then also the legacy media companies are getting better at social media type content. So we can kind of dig into this. I'm flying back from Cannes. Something I've been thinking about. I was taken aback by how some of what I thought were the most successful influencers say that they need to spend so much money to keep up that they're not making the kind of headline popping numbers we often read about and he asks for thoughts.

1:59John Coogan:I think there's a few things happening. One is the big transition from independent creators pivoting from making content to making shows. And you can look at Subway takes in this way. The other show is Keep the Meter Running, much more produced, much more edited, much more costly to produce. But you're still faced with some of the awkwardness around how do you actually monetize that. There isn't a logical ad break, although I think there should be in a three-minute Subway Takes video, a three-minute episode. I think that it would be fine to have a five to ten second mid-roll in the middle of that.

2:35John Coogan:But that has not been done. Like that floodgate hasn't opened yet. So most creators are doing – it's either a really polished vertical video about their own content, and then they'll do a promoted post that's another 30-second, 60-second, multi-minute vertical video in their same style, but purely sponsored content. And a lot of those videos don't go as viral. And so you have this awkward trade-off where the content that's great that people want can't be monetized. So you have to do one and one. It'd be a little bit tricky. Like part of the way our show works is that we're just talking about whatever.

3:08John Coogan:And then we'll tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences, a new value with Cisco. It would be different if we had to do every other episode. Every other episode is just purely about Cisco. And then we go back to about just the news and talking. And so that's something that's like starting to evolve. And those higher cost structures, I think that they still have more enduring value. Yeah, Forbes came out with their top creators list and their earnings. Mr. Beast was at the top with 300 million, I would imagine. But that's revenue. Yeah, like earnings is not the right word here.

3:44It should just be gross revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have no idea what Jimmy's margins actually look like on that$300. It would appear he's spending like$900.

3:54John Coogan:He's obsessed with reinvesting for the future and growth. Yeah, that's always been a part of his brand. As opposed to Joe Rogan, who has these big deals, and he seems completely content to be in a tiny set. And yeah, people are still breaking through, but they're breaking through with new, more polished products that, of course, have higher costs. Simultaneously, traditional media companies are starting to dial in content strategies for traditionally creator-led platforms. I think the New York Times has done a fantastic job here. You have the Ezra Klein Show and Ross Douthat, who are sort of like the left and right perspectives.

4:23John Coogan:And their shows have become really successful on YouTube, a lot due to the packaging. They understand how to get a good title and thumbnail together. The editing, the production values are really, really high quality. And so those podcasts do very well on YouTube in a way that other shows from legacy media companies, it's been hard for them to break through traditionally, but they certainly have. And it's interesting that it's recent. The other thing that was interesting, France appeared to put Brian Johnson on a pack of cigarettes. Pull up this image. That does look like Brian Johnson. Really out of pocket to take an asset.

5:07John Coogan:It works pretty well, though. Don't die. Don't smoke. It's his message. I think he would approve this but i saw i saw this and i had to take a picture because i was like is it actually uncanny he has like a lot of pictures of himself it does look down like that eyes closed also this looks like a man being put in a body bag but at the same time it looks like just a man who got a getting a beautiful night's sleep getting tucked in after a nice couple of hot heaters he ripped a couple darts had a couple years crushed a couple cold ones and now he's ready to get put to bed by someone. Yeah, this is actually much more tame than some of the other.

5:44Oh, some of them are

5:45John Coogan:gruesome, like so gruesome showing like the x-rays of cancer patients and like black lungs and stuff like this is pretty mild. If you look like this guy after you're smoking a whole pack, like you're doing pretty well. The end state of this debate, it's interesting. There's a little bit of grass is always greener on the other side going on with independent creators thinking, ah, maybe it'd be better if I was with a larger organization and then vice versa with a lot of the folks inside big organizations saying, ah, if I left, I could probably make so much more money. I don't think it's a one size fits all approach here.

6:16John Coogan:I think it's more of a sorting process. Some creators will find elegant business models outside of large organizations. Like those 80 to 90 % EBITDA margins still exist for certain categories, certain products. Yeah, look at obsession, right? It's like a low margin, highly competitive, but it's hits driven. So you can have one breakout hit and have insane margins. Yeah, so I think it's more of this like sorting process. Some creators will find elegant business models outside of traditional organizations. Others will probably wind up leveraging the possibility of going independent into more meaningful contracts within traditional media organizations.

6:52John Coogan:But it's increasingly clear that a one-size-fits-all approach, perhaps with a tagline like independent creators are the future. I don't think that quite fits anymore. To each their own. I think everyone sort of needs to find their own way and figure out what's right for them. Smart glasses are inevitable, but what or who are they for, says Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal. This is on the back of the new meta glasses that launched. Christopher Mims says, the deluge of smart glasses has begun. Has it? It feels like, I don't know if it's a deluge. It feels more like just a trickle or like a steady stream.

7:31John Coogan:But maybe I've been following it too closely. I think that's all of my problems with analyzing this category, and we'll get into that. But all my criticisms are very odd, technically. Yeah, and it's... So Meta has been selling a lot of glasses. The products are... Like dozens? Hundreds? No, they've been selling... I believe they're already in the millions of units of not the... Hundreds of millions of dollars? I believe so. Okay. Ben. I think it's getting... Work on fact-checking. I agree with you. I think it's getting material. I think it's getting material. What I was going to say is that it's for products that are functionally like a great pair of glasses with a camera attached.

8:06right these are not like i i don't see a lot of people talking about like oh i'm replacing airpods entirely with these even if even if that is one is that just and that is also with like having being able to sell through a one-of-one ad unit on the greatest distribution platform in history

8:25John Coogan:which they're going up against stiff competition like the apple vision pro is so good that like you know it's like we are jobs finished like we have the apple vision pro why it was so it was so funny so i never tried the apple vision pro until this trip and uh i asked john i was like hey can i can i take him for a spin and you were like oh it's like kind of a hassle to set up it is and you have to like put it in guest mode but john was like no i want jordy to experience this yeah and so we go through this whole like hassle of setting it up and i'm like 20 seconds into the dinosaur demo and the flight attendant comes up and is like tapping me on the yeah like actually Taking me out of virtual reality.

9:05It was like the audacity.

9:07John Coogan:And I think the question was just like, are those cool? Or something like that. It wasn't like, sir, you need to put on your seatbelt or something. It was like. I was fully immersed. Yeah. And it completely ruined it for me. And what's funny is like the whole pitch for the Apple Vision Pro was like, you don't need to take it off to talk to somebody because it will show the eyes. And no, Tyler's on his way back. You guys went to France for raising. Raising canes. Yes. Raising can. Raising can is good. Yes, Tyler got left at CDG. Yeah, yeah. Shoddy. But we got Timu. We got Timu, Tyler.

9:46John Coogan:I have the answer for the Meta glasses. Okay, yeah. How are we doing? So since 2025, there's been 7 million plus sold across Opie and Meta. $2 million was just the Ray-Bans. Okay. Wait, 2 million units. 2 million units. And that estimated gross retail sales was$2.1 to$3 billion. That's pretty good. Yeah, John, the way you were framing it, it was like, yeah, we've sold$7 million. And you're like,$7 million. And it's like, no, it's$7 million. It's a lot of units. It's a lot of units. Yeah, it's getting there. And if it wasn't meta, we'd be like, wow, this company has insane product market fit. Yeah.

10:24Selling 7 million units of a new consumer.

10:26John Coogan:Yeah, if it was ORA Ring or Whoop or something like that, we'd be very impressed. I think you're 100 % correct. And it would be like, it could probably be like a standalone public company. But people would still be slamming it for it, for being like way worse than the Apple Vision Pro in terms of watching old films. I watched Master and Commander on it. It was great. Anyway, let's go back to Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal. He says, at the low end, there's a new line of metaglasses which start at$299 and play well with vision benefit plans. Interesting. So you can buy them with insurance for another$100.

10:59John Coogan:there's a pair aimed at fans of Kylie Jenner. We saw these in action and they looked great. And I think reviews are very, very high quality. If I hadn't seen the launch, I wouldn't have noticed that they were meta glasses at all. Yes, yes. I would have just assumed they were like - It has this jewel. You can see it. It's that small white like glint right there. And I was so confused by this, but this is purely a me problem because I assumed that that was a recording light or some sort of display because if you look at the meta Ray-Ban displays, you'll see that there's slight grooves in the glass for forming the beams to show you the display.

11:42John Coogan:And so I was like, oh, that's a smart feature, but it's in fact not. It's purely aesthetic and people who are in the market love this. I was confused by it, but I think I might be the only person that is confused by it. So I don't think it's a problem. whatsoever. But Meta's is$800 and Specs from Snap is$2 ,200. They are so chunky, they look like something you might see in a Prada ad and never in real life. Silicon Valley has been trying to make smart glasses happen for more than a decade. Remember Google Glass, Facebook and Instagram parent meta platforms has captured more than 80 % of this market.

12:18John Coogan:Not bad. But in 2025, that meant selling just 7 million pairs of glasses. By comparison, the world buys more than 100 million smart watches a year and more than a billion smartphones. What does it say about the broad investor views on smart glasses overall if Meta has 80 % of this emerging category that's selling 7 million units and they get basically zero credit for it? When I see 7 million pairs of glasses compared to 100 million smart watches, I feel like this is perfect trajectory. This is great. Do you think that Meta ever makes a free pair of glasses that's ad supported? I don't know. I think that an ads business would actually be much more attractive.

12:59John Coogan:When you say, oh, they're making a billion dollars in revenue, that's not 100 % margin. I think about, well, what is Threads revenue going to be? And that's going to be much higher margin. Threads is probably more exciting to the core business and to the financial outcomes. Yeah, I just think if you... I understand it's exciting. I like hardware. It's cool. It's just like, it's hard to underwrite to some, oh, it's moving the needle on cash flow. So this is going to pay for another data center. I would expect to see, just like we saw the ad-supported Kindle, I think we'll see the ad-supported metaglasses.

13:32John Coogan:Are the ads on the inside for the wearer or on the outside for everyone interacting with you? For the user. So you're walking on a street and you walk past a restaurant, it pops up like, you know, get a free matcha. I don't like that. I like the other way. I want to be wearing the glasses and I want it to be barking ads at everyone around me while noise canceling those ads to me. So I don't have to hear that. You become a loud billboard. Exactly. I pay for the no ads version, but you didn't pay. And you're sitting next to me. You dress up as a guy on the street. And you're pretending to do like, what do you do for a living interviews.

14:05But then right when you get up, instead of saying, what do you do for a living? You just activate the ads. And you just try to bark like four or five ads.

14:11John Coogan:What is your intelligent cloud provider? Is it Railway? Which one is it? Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. That would be a great ad to bark out of your glasses. The idea of a face-worn computer has garnered skepticism, even hostility, which is understandable. When most of us are trying to reduce our time in front of screens, it seems absurd to mount them right in front of our eyeballs. Why should we be okay with everyone we meet pointing Internet-connected cameras at us?

14:44John Coogan:It feels like an assault on what little privacy we have left. This is why you carry a flashbang around. Then there's the built-in AI. artificial intelligence let these glasses identify objects in our field of view that is not a very compelling use case for me hot dog not hot dog it's just like i'm looking at a building what is this building it's a building like i'm looking what is this tree what do you see it's a tree like i don't know i do you care if it's a ficus tree or not it's pretty rare south african meerkat how often are you running into an unidentified meerkat like this is not that big of a problem The bigger one is that you're just able to talk to an AI agent and have it look up things for you, have it do whatever you want on your phone, in your world, in your agent.

15:28John Coogan:But it's very rare that you're seeing things in the real world. Oh, my God, what can is this? What is this? I need to know. It's like, come on. I know what a Diet Coke is. And yet there will be smart glasses, and you and I might even choose to wear them. They're technological inevitability, a new consumer tech arms race. for the last and best real estate on our bodies. I envision that someday all glasses could be smart glasses, said a man who should know. Zaid, who heads the division of Qualcomm, responsible for making the chips that go into the Meta, the Meta, Snap, and Samsung smart glasses.

16:00John Coogan:Well, Meta's working on a bunch of other stuff. They're working on artificial intelligence, you may have heard. Zephyr says, they seem to be pretty focused on coding right now. I'm pretty sure this is the largest coding training data generation effort in the world. They have the compute. 30 to 50 percent of engineers on core teams have been forcibly, forcibly reassigned to data labeling. Meta's radical plan to become a leader in AI will require vast amounts of capital. And her door was open to discuss innovative financing structures and partnerships. They might wind up raising billions more to fund the buildout of MSL and Meta's AI efforts.

16:40John Coogan:One engineer told this reporter that the whole situation feels like the movie The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment to something completely different. Except at Meta, many more folks are being affected with between three to five from a 10-person team going from building products used by hundreds of millions to giving human feedback on AI-generated GitHub repos over and over. So a wider impact than in the Hunger Games with less drastic consequences. Yeah, still air conditioned with free snacks, which they are improving apparently. So, Zuck, we're going to have Meta code.

17:15John Coogan:Yeah, it seems like they're trying to have a model that they would sell it on the API or something. I was expecting Meta to spend enough money to get the Meta AI, you know, chat, GBT, Gemini, Claude competitor to the top of the charts and keep it there because I expected Zuck to think like, Like, hey, if I get people asking questions all day long, I can just target them much better. Oh, you mean the app store charts? Yeah, so I expected them to go super hard on consumer. They don't have background in enterprise. They bought Manus, but even Manus was like sort of unclear what they were going to do over time.

17:49Maybe they would integrate it into Ads Manager. But I expected them to just say like, hey, I'm going to spend a lot of money. And I have billions of users already. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get a consumer chat app to the top of the charts, keep it there. And over time, just focus on this one thing. And the Meta AI app sitting at 17 in the app store right now, you know, not nothing. Like the market is clearly not like sending signals like, hey, we're really excited for you guys to like pivot into enterprise and spend hundreds of billions of dollars competing against Google, AWS, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, all the Chinese labs, SpaceX.

18:36This would be an absolutely incredible come-from-behind story, but I think it's reasonable that the market is saying, no, they're not pricing it in.

18:45John Coogan:Certainly. Well, there's other news. Zuckerberg directed Meta to build a prediction markets app, which is a wild shift. the experimental app internally called Arena would be independent of Facebook and Instagram it could compete for attention with Polymarket and Kalshi the biggest prediction markets Mike, Isaac I think sentiment is at near rock bottom sentiment on prediction markets is like I don't know if it's at an all time low I think users actually like generally like it's way lower when it was like oh we're going to find out who the next president is and now it's like it's a gambling thing for sports and it's like the vibe has very much shifted yeah and i think i think a lot of people have had like have benefited from using prediction markets as a data source like a lot of people have benefited from sports betting there's a story about a guy who won six million dollars on draft kings and built a mansion with a bowling alley in it so what i was saying is like prediction markets are that's what you're saying you know you know revenue's exploding yeah i think that's a sign that users like the product yeah i appreciate them as a data source.

19:51I always have. But sentiment around them broadly is just like bad.

19:55John Coogan:Yeah. And then sentiment around meta. Yeah. Is that almost an all time low, at least in the capital markets? People are very, very unhappy. And so maybe Zuck is just saying like, F it. I don't think it can get any worse. But feedback to the Kylie Jenner meta glasses has been way, way better. Wow, Silicon Valley finally figured out who controls consumer spending. This is not finally. Meta's been partnering with great celebrities for a really long time. This does not come as a shock to me, but it is the right person to partner with. And it's so, it's so, it's fascinating because we were trying to estimate like how much Meta spent on this like partnership campaign.