Snap SPECS, Taste Labs Timeline Turmoil, AI Execs at G7 | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan: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 Cow's glasses. What glasses? It's really tough because if a startup ship these, everyone, they would be able to raise capital. After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now. There you go. Honestly, the funny, big, exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now. 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.

0:45John Coogan:And I like these. They're a little bit blocky, yeah, but it's like a style choice. I don't know. I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair. Here's the thing. I might pick up a couple pairs. If a startup launched this product and was able to do the demos that they can do, we've tried this product, we've done 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 a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a public company that has spent somewhere in the range of$3.5 billion building this product. So, yeah, the feedback from the market has not been great.

1:23From activists has not been great.

1:24John Coogan:Stock's down 92 % over the last five years, and just in the last five days, down another 8.5%. And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. We'll see where all this goes. The question's like, how expensive is this effort? How core to the business is it? 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 market was booming.

2:10John Coogan: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. Tyler in the chat says snap down 92 % since peak. So you can imagine a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company. Yeah, but to be fair, Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. I know I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap. It must have been 10 years ago. and they bought a couple of companies and 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 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 &D thinking anyway Evan Spiegel is gonna have to defend himself from our own Brandon Garel because Brandon came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't think I get it.

3:13John Coogan:And I'm like, that's fine. We'll read through your piece. We'll take, we'll steel man it. I'll steel man it. No problem. So Snapchat showed off specs, its new augmented reality glasses at Augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. 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.

3:54John Coogan:The broad mix of features combined with the fact that specs are fairly pricey,$2 ,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear. So Brandon Gurell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs, the, what do they call that? The bar? What's that thing on the glasses that goes in the back? I don't know. 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. Maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how people - Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear.

4:33He's training. He sees Zuck has gotten into MMA. He doesn't want to be left behind. So we don't know.

4:39John Coogan:Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over 2K 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. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this something that has badge value? if you pull out like a nice range finder, like a Titleist bag or something with a great brand. It feels like to make it cool, it's got to be on the PGA Tour. The heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really put it together.

5:21Yeah, and so many cool use cases. But are any of them a killer use case? No, I'm just saying that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is going to fit into your room. I don't. Yeah. I can. I do that.

5:41John Coogan:Mentally. When I'm doing. 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. A lot of people. You know, some people are kind of constantly adding furniture here and there. But a lot of people, it's kind of you set it and forget it. Again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time. You can buy rangefinders for around$150. They're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf heads, they're out there for more than the battery life. They're out there for more than three, three and a half hours.

6:13John Coogan:Three and a half hours might be enough for nine on a busy course. They're doing six hours out there sometimes. You don't want to be out there with your algorithmic reality glasses, and they die on you. Are DIYers going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects? Are startups going to be willing to drop$2K 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. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2K price tag, especially because they look painful to wear.

6:44John Coogan: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. Like, people were already carrying phones, and the iPhone was like, we debated this before, But it had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone. And then the fact that it also was an iPod was an extra feature. And then the fact that it was an internet browser was another feature. But it replaced like very, very basic things. And then we got Uber. My thing 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.

7:22John Coogan:Yeah, well, I think it needs to replace 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-inch TV. But 80-inch TVs are like 500 bucks now. And so you got to get it to be better. And you got to have enough for everyone in your household to have one. And it's got to be a better experience. But in that world. 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. And that's like the biggest thing.

7:55Like a$2 ,000 device doesn't really align to their, what I believe is their core demo.

8:03John Coogan:Yeah. And so Buko 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, you know, is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap. if 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 legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit.

8:39John Coogan:That's ridiculous. They're going to sell. A few to people that want to demo them. There's fans that buy every product. Palmer Leckie has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them. Let's pull up this post from A Capital because this might be a... Yeah, we can watch this. This actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs. She just unveiled. They cost$2 ,195. The stock's down more than 5%. The sound effect. The sound mix is really good. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs.

9:16John Coogan:The sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset That is really what does this. So, so funny. I feel really bad for the Snap team. I think like the, I want them to win, but I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're going to need to justify further investment. Yeah. Is my current. No. Unless you're Spiegel, just doesn't care. Yeah. And, you know, continues to double or triple down, which is totally possible. Yeah. But I think at a normal company, this would kind of be the last shot. It's tough. You're competing with these hyper-efficient Chinese companies.

9:58John Coogan:There's this company, Xreal. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler. Took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple hundred dollars, and you get a 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. 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.

10:42John Coogan: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 the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that Xreal is on a path to, like, commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not perfect. Not to mention meta Ray-Ban displays are$799. Yeah. And I do believe that these have more, quite a bit, like, more features, functionality. They have a bigger developer network. But 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.

11:22John Coogan:That can be done with a call on the screen. And like all this, like again, it's cool, but I don't know anyone that would do this. And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users. It is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being free, we're not seeing breakout Apple Vision Pro development. The Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scottie wants to demo it, comes with a really, really impressive demo where it finds all the walls. And then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. And through the wall, you see this dinosaur land.

12:01John Coogan:You'd love it as a dinosaur expert. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your... It's like a velociraptor type thing. Let's double check that. And a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels like it almost, you almost feel it because it's so, it's like tracking your hand and it 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. Developers are just, they'd rather build an app for the iOS app store.

12:38John Coogan:And so no one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, where's 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. So yesterday, a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop.

13:20John Coogan:Quote, 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 vibe-coded projects. 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's not good at front-end, et cetera.

13:55John Coogan: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 24 hours. People's main complaint is basically, You can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the steel man is that AI's aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I want to talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you. And then I have a take about where the business is.

14:38John Coogan:So I think the main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore. I don't want to hear that word anymore. Because the last six months, maybe the last year, it's been like the code word. Like, what will we do when the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste. Yeah, and so yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, even the conversation. I we've never even like weighted that deeply into the conversation yeah and I'd like to keep it that way that being said just to set the the table on the critique like 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 san francisco as being taste as being particularly tasteful people from a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or curation perspective, it's sort of known as the t-shirts and athleisure community.

15:36John Coogan:And that's, it's sort of, it's, it's optimized. It's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste. Yeah. And then, and then I'll say one more thing and then, and then I'll, I'll steal man taste labs. But so the main thing is like, when I think of, when I think of like taste, like product taste, like I think of like linear, right? Like linear has like always been very opinionated, very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is. Like, you know, very, very design driven. Like that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste, right?

16:16The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you, right? So then there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right? From their website 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. It might be, right? Then it's not original. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality to be able to combine, you know, do one plus one equals two. and another example is like Is it 1 plus 1 equals 3?

16:54Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 plus 1 equals 3. 1 plus 1 equals 11. 1 plus 1 equals 2. That's the ad.

17:00John Coogan:Oh, yeah. That big startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace. Sure. Like Squarespace took like high-end website design and then just democratized it, commoditized it, right? Anybody could have a pretty website and then you started to just, I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website or did this person make it? Okay, it's a Squarespace website, and it's not really that much of a knock, but it wasn't the company's own taste that led to that output or the people that they worked with. So it commoditizes really quickly, and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs create better-looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to build at least temporarily a pretty big business.

17:49Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about, right? And so I think that while Taste Labs got a lot of flack over the last 24 hours, their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it. And very unclear what this business looks like in five years, like a lot of the other companies in the category. But I bet they print in the short term.

18:15John Coogan:Yeah, I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling. Also, the name is like kind of perfect rage bait. Taste Labs. We're building final taste in a lab. We built it. We made it. 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 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? And some of that's been able to be, you know, looped in a reinforcement learning environment.

19:01John Coogan:Some of it's been able to be encoded, just tagging. Okay, 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 everything just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor. Like it's not this, it's that, but for design would be the bad outcome. Yeah, which is like already extremely easy to clock. Right now.

19:39And I got a deck last night, a friend of mine, 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? Because it's totally possible the answer is yes, but at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is going to know that you just tried to one-shot this. Which, again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine, but it's going to turn some people off.

20:11John Coogan:Yeah. Yeah, people are going all back and forth on this. This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed. 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 increasing the quality of design is valuable. But yes, it is 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. Sources familiar with the matter disputed semaphores reporting.

20:52John Coogan: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. They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this 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 Lionsgate. Never were. Would have been happy to amplify your scoop, too. They're fighting. They're fighting. The timeline's in turmoil.

21:27John Coogan:In market news, more Fed officials have signaled A rate increase is the next move. The central bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Warsh's first meeting its 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 G7 meeting that's happening between AI leaders. Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and and Demis Fassabas 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 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 5 is still embargoed in some way, and they're working through that.

22:30John Coogan:There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also, U.S. has held off on blacklisting China's DeepSeek more than 100 firms and more than 100 firms that are deemed security risks. That was part of the Fable 5 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 South Korean telecom company, had potentially ties to China in some way. And so the U.S. 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.

23:19John Coogan: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 in 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. 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 key of the dust-up there.

23:54John Coogan:but we'll be continuing to follow that. In other news, much more tragically, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, was in a plane crash, I guess, early, early this morning, coming back from Mexico to Austin. I unfortunately 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 sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends. And, yeah, really, really tragic. Rest in peace. 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.