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

**John Coogan** (0:00)
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 Kows. Glasses? What glasses?

**Jordi Hays** (0:12)
It's really...

**John Coogan** (0:13)
This one.

**Jordi Hays** (0:14)
It's really tough, because if a startup shipped these, everyone, they would be able to raise capital. Now go back to the other photo.

**John Coogan** (0:24)
After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

**Jordi Hays** (0:28)
There you go.

**John Coogan** (0:29)
Honestly, 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.

**Jordi Hays** (0:52)
Okay, here's the thing.

**John Coogan** (0:52)
I might pick up a couple of pairs.

**Jordi Hays** (0:53)
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 three and a half billion dollars building this product. So yeah, the feedback from the market has not been great from activists, has not been great.

**John Coogan** (1:24)
92% of the last five years, and just in the last five days, another eight and a half percent. And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here.
We'll see where all this goes. The question is 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. 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 green lit in the early days when the stock was up, 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.

**Jordi Hays** (2:18)
Tyler in the chat says snap down 92% since peak.

**John Coogan** (2:21)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (2:22)
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.

**John Coogan** (2:29)
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 going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Garell, because Brandon Garell came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll read through your piece. We'll, we'll take, we'll, 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. The broad mix of features combined with the facts that specs are fairly pricey, $2,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear. Brandon Garell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs.