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

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 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 Kauz, glasses? What glasses?

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  It's really

• 0:13John Coogan?

  This one.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  It's really tough because if, if a startup shipped these, everyone, like, they would, they would, they would be able to raise capital.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  After you've seen this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Honestly.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  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. 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, I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  I'd pick up a couple pair.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  If a startup launched this product.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  And was able to do the demos that they can do.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  We've tried this product.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  We've done, 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 they're, a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a, you know, public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three and a half billion dollars building this product.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Yet, the, the feedback from the market.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Has not been great from activists, has not been great.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  92% of the last five years and just in the last five days, down another eight and a half percent. And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. 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? 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, 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, the era, clearly a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early days when the stock was up.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  When the, when the market was booming 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.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Tyler in the chat says Snap down 92% since peak.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  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've 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 and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gurrell because Brandon Gurrell came up to me after writing the newsletter

• 3:09John Coogan?

  and said, I don't, I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll, we'll read through your piece. We'll, we'll take, we'll, we'll steal man it. I'll steal 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. The

• 3:54John Coogan?

  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 Gurrell 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 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.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear, he's training. He sees Zuck has, you know, 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 a, is this, is this something that has like badge value? If you pull out like a nice rangefinder, like a Titleist bag or something with a, 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.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so many cool use cases. But are any of them a killer use case? No, I'm just saying, I'm saying like, 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, I can, I do that.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Mentally.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Maybe once every couple of 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.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  You can buy rangefinders for around 150 bucks, they're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf, 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 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, going to 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. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  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.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  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.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, 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-inch TV. But 80-inch TVs are like 500 bucks now. And so you gotta 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. But in that world...

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  And that's like the biggest thing. Like, a $2,000...

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  A $2,000 device doesn't really align to their, what I believe is their core demo.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  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, 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 think, I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit." That's ridiculous. They're gonna sell a few to people that want to 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.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this post from A Capital, because this might be a

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you can watch this, this, this actually might be the killer feature, honestly.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs. You just unveiled. They cost $2,195. The stock's down more than $5.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  The sound effect is, the sound mix is really good.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new

• 9:16John Coogan?

  The sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really what does this. So, so funny.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  I feel really bad for the Snap team. I, I think like the, I want them to win, but I don't, I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're gonna need to justify further investment, is my current view. Unless your Spiegel just doesn't care and, you know, continues to double, double or triple down, which is totally possible. But I think at, at a normal company, this would, this would kind of be the, the last shot.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  It's tough. You're competing with these hyper-efficient Chinese companies. There's this company, XReel. 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, a screen that's like not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen, 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

• 10:39John Coogan?

  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 and I think that X real is on a path to like commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Lot to mention meta Ray ban displays are seven ninety nine.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure I do believe that these have more quite a bit like more features functionality that have a bigger developer network.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  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.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  And like all all this like again, it's it's cool, but I cannot. I don't know anyone that would do this.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users like. It 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. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your, it's like a velociraptor type thing.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's double check that.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  And 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 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 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

• 12:54John Coogan?

  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. 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.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  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. 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 the AI aesthetic, AI's aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  I want to talk to you about Taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me, take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you, and then I have a take about where the business.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  So I think the main thing is, main thing is people have Taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to hear that word.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Because for the last six months, maybe 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.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, even the conversation. We've never even like weighted that deeply into the conversation.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  And I'd like to keep it that way. That being said.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Just to set 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 tech.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  As being tasteful people.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  As being particularly tasteful people.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  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 optimized. It's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then I'll say one more thing and then, and then I'll steal man taste labs.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  But, so the main thing is like, when I think of, when I think of like taste, like, like product taste, like I think of like linear, right? Like linear has like always been very opinionated.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Very quality driven, they want to grow quickly because of how great the product is.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, 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, like copying you, right?

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  So then, there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right?

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  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, in my, in my view, right? Then it's not original.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  I think taste has, you know, you need some originality and to be able to combine, you know, do one plus one equals two.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  One plus one equals two.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  And another example is like.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Isn't one plus one equals three?

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. One plus one equals, one plus one equals two.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  One plus one equals eleven.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  One plus one equals two. That's, that's the ad.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  That fake startup ad.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Henry's.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  No, so, another example is like Squarespace.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Like Squarespace took like high-end website design and then just commoditized it.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Commoditized it, yeah.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Commoditized it, right? Anybody could have a pretty website.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  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, like, and not, it's not really that much of a knock, but like, it wasn't like the, the company's own taste that led to that output, or, or the people that they worked with.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  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 a, at least temporarily, a pretty big business.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about, right?

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that while Taste Labs, you know, 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.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  And very unclear what, what this business looks like in, you know, five years, like a lot of the other companies in the category, but I bet they, I bet they print in the short term.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  So the name, the name is like kind of perfect.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Rage bait.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Taste Labs, we're building.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Taste, yeah.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Taste in a lab. We built it. We made it.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  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? And some of that's been able to be, you know, 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.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  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, everything just, just doesn't collapse into 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 bad.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is like already extremely easy to clock.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Right now.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  And I got a deck last night, a friend of mine.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  But at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is gonna know that you just tried to one-shot this.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  You're slopping it up.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Which again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine, but it's gonna turn some people off.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, 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. Uh, that's sort of true, but, uh, just, just increasing the quality of design is valuable. Uh, but yes, it is, it is, it's a tall order, uh, 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, uh, buying Lionsgate potentially. Uh, sources familiar with the matter disputed Semaphore's reporting. There was a back, there was a whole bunch of back and forth about, is Netflix gonna

• 20:55John Coogan?

  buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for, uh, Roku? Uh, and, uh, they're taking shots at each other. Uh, 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. In market news, uh, more Fed officials have signaled a rate increase as the next move. The central bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Warsh is first meeting its chairman,

• 21:40John Coogan?

  but nine of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  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 Fasabis 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. 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, US 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 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 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.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  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, and 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 the key of the dust-up there. But we'll be continuing to follow that.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  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, in a

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Plane crash.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Plane crash.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  In Laredo.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  I guess, early, early this morning, coming back from Mexico to Austin.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I unfortunately never, never got to meet Joshua, but, uh, only heard, uh, tremendous things about him and he really was an important figure in the Austin, uh, startup community. So, sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, really, really tragic.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Rest in peace.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Rest in peace.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  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, uh, Bill Ackman shares a Hall of Fame opening sentence. "One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is." A tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is, uh, is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily, uh, with your public stock.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  And so, uh, there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it, uh, on the back of the cursor acquisition closing, or, or being announced that the option has been exercised. But, uh, it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there going to be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll-up? Will SpaceX buy NeoCloud assets, energy assets, chip assets? Like, TerraFab 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 the Intel market cap? But, there's so much that they could do. They, it's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600 billion company. So, uh, that would be a big one. But, there's a lot in the supply chain. There's a lot in the, in the AI world, in the space world, that they could partner

• 26:08John Coogan?

  up with if that's the direction that they want to 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.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye.