TBPN Live - Google I/O: Day 1 Reactions, Goldman to Lead SpaceX IPO | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

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.Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

We're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. People have been saying... They can't tell us part. Is that what you're saying? That. Okay.

But people have been saying I need something like a swear jar. Okay. When I don't wear a suit. Oh, okay. I'd like that. So, yeah, something to consider. It should probably be a pretty big jar. 20 bucks to the Open AI nonprofit.

That's what you got to do. No, we were in unheard. I mean, we can pull up the full post later in the show, But it's a good analysis of like, you know, what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key. My latest for Unheard is on why tech shows like TBPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by ESPN and why it's working. They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad.

But we don't always have matching suits. Usually, Jory's the casual one. But yesterday we were both casual. Today, we're both in suits. We do still get the brother thing a lot. But I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, we have to react to Google I.O., of course.

There's a whole bunch of announcements, some really exciting stuff, some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all. But first, we need to watch this video about humanoid robot. Ramp. Why is Ramp? No, I'm crying. Watch this video.

Let's get some stuff. You've got to go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You got to go to the beginning. Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. Little bit of a, oh, catches itself. Catches itself.

Not bad, not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. I'm liking it. And then, not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking because you would think that there would be some programming. Oh, they got to cut the music.

They got to cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your boys down. It just gets carried. It's just carried off like this. It's so crazy. Just carried off like this. Anyway, Singularity is delayed. Yeah, it's possible that the robot died from embarrassment.

Yeah, or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that like as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. Anyway, Google I.O. A bunch of different announcements. Brandon Grell on our team posted on the TBPN newsletter, some reactions, sort of bucketed it into four key areas. Intelligent Eyewear. This is an interesting one.

one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni, we talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemini LLMs. Those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, which is an interesting place with an interesting history. So let's start with intelligent eyewear. If you had to pick, Warby Parker, gentle monster. Have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I'm a fan of the business story. That's super familiar. I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market. but the Warby Parker's, I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand. And I've also been impressed by the way they built that business.

They were early to the D to C boom. And then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's? Is that the same team? Or is that a different thing? Maybe. They were certainly, when I think of D2C, I think of Warby. Yeah. I think of Allbirds.

I think of Everlane. Yes. But when you think of the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub a hundred million. Allbirds was trading at, what, 20 million or something? and then spiked because of the AI thing. But Albirds, Everlane, not really sustainable businesses. Warwick Parker, on the other hand, current market labs. Allbirds has pretty much been down only.

Down only. Since the pump, the AI pool. Neo-cloud, no surprises there. Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going, building their neocloud? Did they get allocation? Are they rack in cerebrous? Are they racking Gb200s?

What are they rack in? And how fast are they getting power? It would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about all birds on their earnings call today. Didn't they? Yeah. Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? It was it going to be like bird AI or all AI? Like they were moving on all birds still exist.

But they basically kept the public entity. And that's what they're building, the neoclout there. Fun. Lots of fun. Warby Parker, resilient. I mean, in 2021, it was a $6 billion company. Now it's a $3 billion company. Not the best scenario, but surprisingly resilient,

I think, in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct-to-consumer who was either get rolled into a bigger company or face the fate of the public markets. But Warby Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung. Google says we're partnering with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs

from this fall's upcoming collections. And people are... I like Futuronomics from Sam. Kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite mag 7 on your face now. You can. The gentle monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera.

I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance, also meta-ray bands have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see ray bands and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking,

oh, should I be looking for a camera lens? Am I being recorded? But the gentle monster design, the silhouette, doesn't scream technology. It doesn't scream wearable face camera. And so these are gonna be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parker's look nice, but the camera pump on this, you zoom on the Warby Parker one?

You know, it makes a lot of sense that Google's in the Meta's, have to go and partner on different silhouettes. My expectation, my uninformed expectation is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? They will probably, it's hard to see them taking the route at least early on of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language. But it makes a lot of sense that Meta would partner with Luxottica. First, look at the camera bump on this.

If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in the real world. But this was all from a joke from Abduh says, okay, so Apple has Carl Zeiss, meta, has Raybans and Oakley. Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. Boring, which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some three-earned.

safety glasses. Would you rock these, Jordy? I like that. Safety glasses. You know I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzz saw. I do know. Dust in your eyes. But these, these look cool.

These are sporty. I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit. Just go full clanker. Full cyberpunk. Full cyberpunk. Full, yeah, full saying, you clank out. Full cyberpunk. I think that's, I think that might be the move.

I don't know. For some company, a challenger company, could potentially do that, maybe friend or something. Anyway, what else? So Warby Parker traded down on the news, the news, which Shiel Monot was surprised by, why is Warby Parker down 14%. They announced a partnership at Google I.O. that's been in the works for a while is because they aren't available yet. And our friend Rat King, Mike Isaac says, okay, Google AI glasses with

Warby Parker are officially coming for Meta-Raband. Google also said it would bring Gemini to glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which work similarly to Meta-Raband smart glasses come with a camera, microphone. Yeah, at what point does Google just buy Warby Parker, right? It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well over the last six months. It's up 43% the last six months, although it's been almost flat this year.

I would say I expect that smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first, right? If you already have to wear glasses all day long for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there, it's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation, right? Yeah. And so, you know, Warby Parker's, you know, done quite well and has been surprisingly resilient,

but they have, you know, incredible distribution, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point. Yeah. I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like workflow. A lot of the Google I.O. We'll get into this, but it was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant. And when I think about... It's in Spark. It's an AIDA. I know, I know.

Oh, just look in Omni. Yeah, there's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products. You're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's in Gemini. Just created an AI studio. Oh, it's for your personal Google account.

For workspace, you need Gemini business. No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro now, unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents? You do that in Spark, actually. No, not Gemini API, I manage it, and it's the typical meme. The interesting thing is that I do think meta-ray bands, it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp, you have a deep integration with Instagram, DMs, maybe, Facebook Messenger.

Some people are still using that. But in terms of like wiring into your life, there are way more people that see Google Docs, Gmail as like the central node in their personal life. like people think of like my, all the stuff I have saved on the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think, okay, for the important stuff, I'll put it in Google Docs or Google Drive and then most things flow through Gmail. Most things flow through IMessage. There are some people that just are like, yeah, WhatsApp is the number one screen time for me. That's where I really organize things. But meta doesn't really have this like knock on a of like, oh, yes, you're, it's not necessarily an enterprise level productivity suite,

but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail, I message, I save my files and Apple files, you know, the cloud storage I use, my camera role is super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable, and an AI agent running through the Google's ecosystem can be valuable. The meta, smart glasses, it's a little bit trickier to go and do anything because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these meta-ray bands. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse. I don't know.

Raybands are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good. So we'll see. We'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground on the flip side. The Wayfarer is just such an iconic, it's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced, and that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade versus a century or something like that, however long. Rayban's been around a long time. Anyway, Genie 3, you can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with street view imagery. Google is sitting on a mother load of real world data. I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4 maybe in the future.

I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data-pilled. He seems a lot of the MagS7 CEOs seem very data-pilled. There's the story about Mark Zuckerberg, screen recording or logging all the computer use from all the meta employees. These important trove of data are increasing in value, and Street View certainly seems like. it's one of them. This is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be, how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take to be? Yeah, or did they allow people to build games on top of this? Yeah, I just think about, I don't know, I mean, Demis has a background

in games, and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point, or at least be able to, like, scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. Very fun story. But again, when I think about roller coaster tycoon, which was not, I think, I don't think he was actually working on that game. There's a similar theme park simulator, but we are moving back into the simulator world. But the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often. When I think about the games that I've spent a long time with, some of them have incredible graphics, AAA graphics. Some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so that is what gets me to keep.

I imagine Bobby Chipman in the X-Chats says, Can't Wait for Smart Glasses to fully replace my monitors. Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta-ray-Ban display, certainly going that direction, the Orion. I've been surprised. It wasn't the first episode we ever did we were talking about Orion, and they still haven't shipped it, right? I mean, they shipped the smaller version, the Meta-Raband displays,

which have sort of the Call of Duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting, I was expecting, we've demoed the Orion headset, And it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that, you know, everyone was saying, it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for prime time. But, you know, look at how fast things are going. In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next MetaConnect.

Maybe this summer we'll see it. But haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI CAPX might have taken a backseat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. I like AR and VR. I think we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro.

Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want, cheaper maybe, but lighter, and same screen. Screen was great. Anyway. We know, John. Gemini Flash, 3.5, looks pretty neat, according to Tenebris, and extremely fast. But still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google, generally a pretty disappointing I.O. Now, what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-trained,

felt like it had some of that big model smell, felt like it was really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here. And also... Yeah, we're still waiting for pro. Yeah, pro isn't out. But people are speculating that 3.5 pro won't necessarily be a new pre-trained. And so it seems like there's a little bit of research being at odds.

with like the product cadence. Like Google I.O. is scheduled probably like two years in advance. And whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the OpenAI Anthropic, the other labs, XAI. Like they're launching models very much like when they're done. And then they will like instantiate like something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post, a model card.

but if you're grinding towards a specific date and a specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really, really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January of 2025, right? Was that the date? Or was it December of 2025? Either way, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much cutoff dates matter because, you know, all these models, you know, can query the web and get update information. Yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good, not good at all.

Yeah, Perkosh here has it. Undewhelming. Cursor ranked it on Cursor Bench. It is below Composer 2. Is that a fair thing? I mean, I'd like to see you rank another live stream on TBPN Bench. It doesn't match up, you know? It's like.

No, I mean, they have, they have the other. They have all the other frontier. And some of them are ahead of cursor's own models on cursor bench. It's just one data point. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But here's the other thing. It's four times, it costs four times, it underperforms Composer 2, even though it's roughly four times more expensive. Interesting, interesting.

Yeah, I feel like for a long time Google's positioning was, you know, frontier or near frontier, but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy, perhaps. Yeah. Overall, starting to make more and more. more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic. Yeah. Rikash says, seems to indicate that deep mind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do, hence the TPU sales, rest of Google, now shipping their org chart.

Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit. And there was some context on like, you know, we were asking the question like, will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area? Allie K. Miller shares one of the loudestown. applause in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the gentle monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini, and all in one prompt said,

take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google I.O. 2026, and within seconds, the preview of the edited photo from Nanabanana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Very cool demo.

impressive technology, but Greg's gadget says these companies truly have no idea what regular people want. Because, yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case. You need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that because this is a very, it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that creative spark of like, yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time. If you're not doing a demo, his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature. Right. SpaceX IPO, we're getting more details by the day. The other thing that is, yeah, was going pretty viral.

The last thing on I.O. was that the Google anti-gravity team flashed a codex folder. Oh, yeah. In their actual demo video, Gergley says, I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for anti-gravity. You can see people use codex on the anti-gravity team. Did no one double-check the launch? video at the very least. Not a huge surprise. Obviously, Andy Gravity looks, a lot of people were saying, looks quite like Codex. So clearly, they're inspired. I feel like it would be,

like a, they would have just rebuilt wind surf. I don't know. We'll have to see. No. So, but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models and products internally. What was that drama with Steve Yegy going back and forth with Demis about like what teams are using, what models and stuff? There was a big back and forth, a big dust up on the timeline like a month ago about like whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are. And Demis chimed in and said like this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know.

It goes back and forth. There's also people are benchmarking Omni Flash, which looked amazing. when we saw the videos, there were a few, like, little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6. Yeah, it was missing two cylinders. But it looked good to me. I don't know.

But now people are actually comping it to C-Dance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions because I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China. I'm not exactly sure how that works. Because CEDAN seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe... Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to U.S. copyright law for a very, very, very long time. And it also might just take, like, years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate. Oh, yeah, you can just go, like, there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store.

Yeah. And Nike has nothing to do with it. And yet all the products... They've been selling swatch APs over there for decades. Yeah. Yeah, just ask, just as Rolex and Petac how they're... Sure, sure. Yeah, I've heard fake cars, too.

Like, you can get a full replica of, like, a G-wagon that's just made in a factory, and then you could buy it, bring it over here, and you take it to a Mercedes dealership, and they're just like, this is not a Mercedes. But it looks like one, like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside. Internally, it's just frauding. Anyway. C-Dance 2.00 looks great. Omniflash looks great as well.

These are both like super useful. We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, like at what point, like it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right. The last 90, like we're at 99% fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details,

when will we be in a, you know, paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video six minutes, 10 minutes like you would on YouTube. Very computationally expensive, very difficult to maintain the logic. Like what is the deep research report of Omni Flash? These eight second, 10 second, 20 second videos are impressive,

but not perfectly substitutable for a 20 minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into. Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes. And so that's the next benchmark. We gotta move the goalposts. SpaceX IPO, the prospectus is incoming

according to Zero Hedge as soon as, as May 20th. That's today. We will see Goldman lead left. This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth.

He went back to Morgan Stanley. There was a question about whether or not there would even be a lead left because there's such a big IPO. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously they're all gonna make a ton of money off of this. So good news from start to finish, but it is interesting that Goldman was selected.

Do you have a soundboard cue? I'm always ready, John. Okay. Katie Roof has a scoop. The scoop athlete of the century, Katie Roof. Has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever. Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than $60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia have more than $20 billion.

Yeah, was this somewhat of a reaction to D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week, right? They're set to generate roughly $20 billion in returns. and maybe some of these other funds thought to put their hand up and say, I don't think that at this scale, like there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates, and they've been, they've known the numbers for a long time, they've known the ownership, the holdings, and you do some back of the envelope, and you get some pretty huge numbers will be very interesting. Huge for Sean McGuire, huge for Luke Nosek and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund

and Antonio Gracios at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks. Yeah, look, Sequoia Founders Fund. They needed a win. They needed a win. I mean, you go back, like, you know, these investments were made like 2004, 2010. Like, it was not obvious. Certainly, there was no Starlink narrative when these were made. There was no space data center narrative.

This was a rocket company that was blown up rockets left and right and not quite getting to, you know, massive business. So you really had to be a believer in they were. Packy was having some fun on the timeline. He said, Megafons. are too big to generate returns. They're basically just the collectors. And of course, they're printing. Yes, they are printing.

Jensen Wong talked about the quarter that NVIDIA just had. He said, the buildout of AI factories. Boo. The largest infrastructure expansion in human history. Yay! Is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay!

Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that there is progress being made. Agentic AI has arrived. He says doing productive work, true, generating real value, true. And scaling rapidly across companies and industries, also true. Lots of good stuff. Invidia net income, it rose to 42.96 billion. They almost hit 43 billion.

Not too bad. A year earlier, they were doing just 18.8 billion in net income. income, huge, huge increase. Really wild. Really wild. Printing. Definition of printing. All good news.

The stock is sort of up and down, basically flat, but Nvidia revenue jumped 85% to 81.62 billion from 44 billion last year, the company said. Shocking. Yeah, great stuff. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple at Grand Valley State University. He talked about AI, and unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get boo-ozyk. off, boot off stage.

He actually got cheered for his comments. Wait, this was, uh, who was it, Tyler? Steve Washniak? Oh.

No, no, no, no. Shots fired. I'm a big fan of Steve Wasney. I love the waz. Shots fired.

Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State University on Instagram here. You all have AI. You all have AI. Actual intelligence. Oh, mic drop.

Knee slaper. Hey, playing to the crowd. He knows the audience. He knows the audience. We're trying to figure out how to make a brain, software, hardware, synapse chips. And I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain. It takes nine months. Yeah, knee-slapper.

But he knows the audience. He's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI-I-pilled? Is he super-intelligence pill? Probably not. But it is, regardless, I think. it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience.

And that is a way to bridge to a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post-AGI world. I don't know. We'll have to go watch the full clip eventually. Let's close it out with this video from Tyler that we can pull up. Okay. What is this? This is the video I was referencing with Marcus.

I'm very concerned about these gentlemen. and what they're doing. Pull it up. What's happening? Let's get... Like, this is... This is insane contact. I mean, the helmet is getting dented.

I think this is brain damaged. Not an issue. skill issue. They're really hitting that, aren't they? But we'll try it out after we... We have the gone ballot. Yeah. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

Cheers.