Snap Launches SPECS, Paramount Eyes Nashville Offices, OpenAI Explores $1.2T Valuation | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:Snap officially launched Spex yesterday. Some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there. I'm like, this is perfect. It's 3 p.m. Atlas Creatine Cycles in town. I want to meet up with him. I'm like, great. You're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there. Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30 minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge. Walk in. immediately, get a phone call. Hey, did they call me? I had another call. You got to hop on early.

0:36John Coogan:And then I have another 90 minute call. So I truly missed the entire thing, but I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin reporting on AI. And that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like why why did i think i could pull this off uh i failed but uh did the launch fail we'll see we'll talk to the folks who actually went tyler nick we're not asking for a full review i just want take us through the day i saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me i was on the street on the call you guys get waved around you valet walk me through your journey into the uh the launch like what you go in you have cocktails what happened uh yeah have a have a drink okay go in What are they serving?

1:26John Coogan:Screaming Eagle or, you know, seltzer water? Some kind of cocktail. Did they have the original Four Locos? Were they serving the original Four Locos? I wish, yeah. Multiple pints of Guinness. Did they have natural light available? You could totally see Evan cracking open the secret supply of original Four Locos. You know that guy has a bunkie with the original Four Locos. Yeah. So everyone's having some drinks, then you sit down. Yeah, chopping it up. Then you go into the amphitheater. And it's sort of like Steve Jobs' iPhone launch vibes, right? Yeah. He's standing in front of this big screen.

2:00There's beautiful images behind him. Walks out, black shirt, jeans. Okay. Yeah, then he starts doing live demos.

2:07John Coogan:He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been Photoshopped or AI to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large. Yeah, yeah. So he gives his demo. What's his pitch? Yeah, so there's a number of ways to... You kind of talked about it. One is position it against being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present. You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be looking up at the world. You want to look through the screen. Yes. Right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Close to your face.

2:35John Coogan:Yeah. And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone, but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, yeah, I'm more in touch with reality? It worked. Yeah, I've never understood that part of the pitch. I've actually been. Hey, we know you're addicted to your phone. So here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face. Yeah. Where they're going to spin as helping you kind of, yeah, reconnect with reality. It's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I like the barbell strategy of like brain rot and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world.

3:17John Coogan:I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in modern warfare for hours playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world. And then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world. And then I want to be fully in the virtual world. So like I want the VR, the fully like, you know, immersive thing and then zero immersion.

3:54John Coogan:I'm actually not looking for more things that are in the middle. And I'm wondering if people will – if that will resonate with people. I think that's mostly because you haven't seen like very good examples. And like right now the glasses are still like kind of big and bimby. If they're very minimal and like kind of, you know, they would show very small. They're the boys. People online were thinking that the guy in the center was Clapp. Yeah. It's actually Tyler. It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. So is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions? Yes. Or can you say, like, I want tinting on right now?

4:27So I think you can, like, increase the tinting. Okay. But there's also just. There's two SKUs? Yeah, I believe so. Okay, okay. So you got to get both, I guess.

4:35John Coogan:Anyway, when did you actually get to the. Dan says John raising a second family in VR. Trying to keep them separated. Yes. The COD lobby is my second family for sure. so so he gives a pitch yeah it does live demos and and are the demos consumer focused enterprise focused prosumer yeah so the live demos he did were all very consumer consumer um like live shopping and you could like he was going to look for a espresso machine then he pulls it and like puts it on a table in front of them you can like see how big it is and stuff like that any live demo failures any wi-fi issues there was kind of one where he tried to pull up a youtube video.

5:15Okay. And then, so he said like, Hey specs.

5:17John Coogan:So he's talking to a voice assistant. Yeah. He said like, yeah, pull up a video about, um, about specs. Yeah. And then it, it opens the, the like browser view goes to YouTube and then he like tries to click on a video to open it and it like doesn't really work. Okay. Um, but it eventually worked. It seemed like it worked. It was like a small pickup. Okay. It wasn't like a big, yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Uh, yeah, it makes sense. Okay. So then there was a very cool live demo of someone. There was like a kind of an interactive music creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds.

5:48And so she did this very cool live demo.

5:50John Coogan:So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements in the physical world. Yes. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Cool. So was there any enterprise pitch? There was, there were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Like one was, it's like, imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big like server box and you don't know where to, you know, plug in the wire and it would like highlight which plug you put it into. Yeah. Which I think is like, could be interesting. Yeah. That feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to like say like, yeah, that's what will solve the bottleneck in electrician.

6:29But like, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right? Yeah. you're building Ikea furniture or something, and it tells you what to do.

6:36John Coogan:Yeah. Yeah, but then Keynote ends, and then we go outside, and there's a bunch of places to do live demos. So yeah, the first one we did, we basically put on the glasses, and you do some kind of calibration thing. You figure out how the motion works. There's no little secondary. I think on the MetaQuest displays, there's that little wristband. There's nothing like that. Nothing like that. It's just hand-cracking. Yeah, it's just kind of flicking. It's similar to the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions. Yeah, that's pretty good. And then, yeah, the one I really liked was, it was like ping pong.

7:05So you're like, your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they played it.

7:12John Coogan:So the ping pong thing, do a little tier list for me of ways to do ping pong. Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life? Well, so like, obviously you would rather play in real life, but like, would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives a hundred miles away, I'm not going to be able to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right? So I think that boosts it. So it's also S tier. And then what about... I think it's like B tier. Because in the augmented reality, do you need a ping pong table? No. No, okay. So it creates a virtual ping pong table. Yeah, we can see, but I'm just waving my hand.

7:46Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is future right here. Yeah, and then this was... I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller. Oh, you don't have a waiter?

8:01John Coogan:anything. Yeah, it's a little bit... Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally, it's like, get rid of the controller. That's just extra weight, batteries, equipment. Yeah, I think for gaming, the controller actually works because you get really precise tracking. But typically, these systems allow third-party peripherals, so you can whip up a... You can wire up an Xbox controller, like what Oculus did, where they just... or MetaQuest, where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games. Yeah, I do think this was the coolest demo I did, and this is something that like really like no reason why this needs to be an AR.

8:31This could just be completely VR. Yeah. Because like I'm, I'm looking at the, the ball. I'm not looking at like people in front of me. It was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them.

8:40John Coogan:Oh, sure. Because I can like see them. So it's actually maybe better to just include the, the, the world. Yeah. Or do some pass through stuff. Yeah. I'm still, I'm still, uh, oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality where you're not recycling photons where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then reproject that on the inside of the headset so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things. But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible if you look at a bright light to put a dark object in front of it because the only thing that these glasses can do is add light to the scene.

9:25John Coogan:And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist yeah i mean i i found it was like bright enough i could clearly see everything that is pretty impressive yeah it was outside it was it was outside it was a bright day it's in la i mean sure there was like you were standing in shade but you could still see the holograms which i think is interesting yeah i didn't try watching any like movies or anything yeah um which i think would definitely be better in vr you should have been like you're gonna let me demo this can i just do one can i just do one demo real quick snap lawrence of arabia lawrence of arabia i i'd like to watch david lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me see you in three hours to me it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category like when technology industry was making the first like mobile phones like the bar was like can it make a call can you receive a call can you do that semi reliably yeah even if there's services body Because you were competing against the payphone.

10:21John Coogan:You had to stop and find money. Now it's like every new device competes with the smartphone. Yeah. And I just think the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world. Yeah. It seems like those are not doing well. I think this whole category is still going to be quite challenged. Yeah. Even just the basic Meta Ray-Bans, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods. And the Apple ecosystem is remarkably robust in terms of the MetaRayBand users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just take phone calls on them.

11:01John Coogan:I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk. And then occasionally I'll take a picture. And it's like, that's saving you five seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone and your headphones. I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the speakers up here as opposed to in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause, you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee. People are like, oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me. Kind of antisocial as opposed to like, oh, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio.

11:30So I don't have a weird reaction to it.

11:32John Coogan:So there's a little bit of benefit. But yes, it's very, very incremental. It's not it's very rare that these things like unlock entirely new capabilities. Smart glasses are like the most insane marketing dollars for years. So long. Yeah, for years. And so there's been so many like little pop-up VR experiences, integrations at theme parks. Like it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing. It's been on the cover of Time Magazine. Like there's been a lot of attention before getting to product market fit, whereas LLMs were like truly like in the research lab for like a decade. And then once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chatgpt.com.

12:10John Coogan:And then it was just like, boom, now it's like a thing. And then it was off to the races. Interesting. With every demo, it feels like we're once each of these devices is 10 times better, there might be a market. But I actually am not even confident that the end market is really going to be quite as exciting as everybody, as the excitement that you've had from Zuck and Evan and all these people. I just think it's like this sci-fi idea in people's brains. And I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of ambient computing, just sort of this always available personal assistant that aren't on your face.

12:50John Coogan:But we'll see. So Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from L.A. amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. The company is seeking roughly 400 ,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years. Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious, like it's just like a no-brainer, turn it into a data center, right? So I pulled it up.

13:33John Coogan:You know, I got 29 sound stages. They're already big buildings. A lot of power. Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50 ,000 GPUs anytime soon, certainly not 100 ,000 GPUs. There is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings. But you would need to connect Paramount to the more serious LADWP transmission infrastructure. But you could get it to 100 megawatts. And I think everyone in Hollywood would be like, fine, okay.

14:18John Coogan:We didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center. Well, I mean, we're also thinking about like on-site power generation. and maybe there's some kind of like, you know, natural gas play here. You can that's under L.A. Yeah. Kind of tap into. Yeah. I think I can. Well, we were thinking, you know, the little Bray of Tar Pits. Yeah. You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel. You're full of ideas. Yes. Do you think Paramount will actually leave or do you think L.A. will fight back and say, hey, OK, we're going to let you do this, but we want you to stay as somebody with very, very little knowledge of the situation and certainly no insider knowledge.

14:54I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there as just in the region. But it also, in the meantime, serves as a real bluff.

15:06John Coogan:Yeah, it does seem like there's a world where moving would be tough, but staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. whereas if you just rip the band-aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive continuously. The Social Reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film? We've got to figure out who's behind all of this. I don't know. Let's play it. Let's play it. We've got a clip from The Social Reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.

15:43And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore, but let's check it out. I'm not gonna risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs.

16:02John Coogan:Who does this? I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you've taken to do it. You're absolved. For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly.

16:27John Coogan:It's a big deal.

16:33Have a safe life back, Frances.

16:36John Coogan:I'm not going to risk my job. I'm playing.

16:42John Coogan:I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear? No. It's a good show. No, I'm sure the movie's great. I think people are going to be into this. It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not have so moved on from this story to such a degree. Yeah, but I think people are still thinking about life. I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on like phone addiction. This is that story loosely. It is. And I actually think this is, yes, yes, this doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI. And that's probably the more relevant story.

17:24But I do think that you can go into this movie, you can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like,