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

Summary

---

TBPN Diet Podcast Summary

Episode: Snap SPECS, Taste Labs Timeline Turmoil, AI Execs at G7 | Diet TBPN
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: June 18, 2026
Format: Key discussion highlights around Snap Spectacles, the Taste Labs "taste" debate, major AI-related events at G7, and other trending tech news.

---

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the critical reception and market skepticism surrounding Snap’s latest Spectacles AR glasses, the viral debate over Taste Labs’ efforts to codify AI “taste,” and the tech world's response to AI leadership at the G7 summit. The hosts offer up candid opinions on hardware trends, developer ecosystems, and whether tech culture can—or should—turn taste into a scalable product. The conversation is peppered with industry insights, notable audience comments, and pointed asides about recent tragic and market developments.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Snap Spectacles: Launch Fallout and Market Skepticism

• Negative Reception & Visual Style
  • The hosts analyze audience and market reaction to Snap’s new AR glasses, focusing on their aesthetics, price point, and potential use cases.
  • “Honestly ... the funny, big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool. ...I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pack.” — Ben Thompson (00:29)
• Startup vs. Public Company Valuations
  • Speculation that a startup with comparable tech could “easily raise at a billion” but Snap’s history and public scrutiny make such investments harder to justify now (00:54).
• Product-Market Fit Doubts
  • Breakdown of potential users (e.g., golfers, DIYers, startups) and whether any use case justifies the $2,200 price tag.
  • “Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects?” — Ben Thompson (06:02)
• Comparison to Competitors
  • Cheaper alternatives such as Xreal and Meta Ray-Bans discussed as more practical competitors (09:54–11:03).
• Fashion & Culture Critique
  • Audience and chat reactions question whether Snap’s culture and leadership truly understand “taste” and style (08:03).
  • “The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap.” — Ben Thompson (08:03)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “If a startup launched this product ... 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.” — Brandon Gorell (00:54)
• “A $2,000 device doesn't really align to their ... what I believe is their core demo.” — Brandon Gorell (07:57)

---

2. Taste Labs, “Taste” Fatigue & the AI Aesthetics Debate

• Viral Launch & Industry Reaction
  • Taste Labs announced its mission to “end AI slop” by codifying subjective taste, sparking a viral debate (13:11).
• Fatigue and Skepticism
  • Hosts reflect on the overuse of “taste” as a tech buzzword and skepticism from outside the SF/tech bubble.
  • “Main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore.” — Brandon Gorell (14:38)
• Can Taste Be Codified?
  • Hosts steel man both sides: critiquing SF’s claim to arbitrate taste and suggesting there’s still short-term business value in improving AI-generated aesthetics.
• Commodification Cycle
  • Examples like Linear and Squarespace show how taste is quickly commoditized once a standard is set, eroding its cachet.
  • “As soon as it’s copied, then it's like fundamentally, like not tasteful in my view.” — Brandon Gorell (16:22)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Taste emerges from craft, context, meaning, subjectivity and genuine care.” — (Read by Ben Thompson, 20:11)
• “Just helping AI labs create better looking outputs ... feels like a pretty good way to build, at least temporarily, a pretty big business.” — Brandon Gorell (17:13)

---

3. Market, Regulatory, and Geopolitical Updates

• Netflix–Lionsgate & Industry M&A Rumors
  • Brief mention of back-and-forth on Netflix’s rumored acquisition targets and industry media drama (20:20).
• Fed Rate Hike Signals
  • Quick update: more Fed officials signal rate hikes, impacting the markets (21:30).
• G7 AI Lunch: Trump, Altman, Hassabis
  • Report on G7 events where AI exports and controls are discussed among world leaders (22:00).
• Export Control Tensions
  • The hosts review how the U.S. is monitoring AI model access—especially with concerns about technology exports to companies with China links (22:54).

---

4. Community & Industry News

• Tragic Loss: Joshua Baer
  • Somber mention of the passing of Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory, in a plane crash; acknowledgment of his impact on the Austin startup scene (23:56).
• SpaceX Acquisition Speculation
  • The episode closes with speculation on SpaceX’s potential to use its high valuation as currency for large-scale acquisitions or roll-ups in the tech and energy sectors (24:38).
  • “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” — Reference to Bill Ackman’s quote (24:38)

---

Timestamps – Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–02:28 | Snap Spectacles—initial reactions, product history, and competitive context | | 02:28–04:39 | Market performance, R&D strategy, demo features review, wearability/fashion debate | | 04:39–07:22 | Use case skepticism: golf, DIY, business settings | | 07:22–08:49 | "Daily driver" debate, lack of killer app, developer cold start problem | | 11:03–13:11 | Competitive landscape: Xreal, Meta Ray-Bans, Apple Vision Pro ecosystem | | 13:11–18:16 | Taste Labs introduction, “taste” as a business, fatigue and critique | | 18:16–20:19 | How design tastes commoditize, opportunities/limitations of codifying taste | | 20:19–22:54 | M&A rumors, market/fed notes, G7 AI meeting, export control tensions | | 23:56–24:38 | Community note on Joshua Baer | | 24:38–26:18 | SpaceX acquisition strategy speculation, episode wrap-up |

---

Notable Quotes

• “If a startup launched this product ... that startup would be able to raise at, I would say easily a billion.” — Brandon Gorell (00:54)
• “The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap.” — Ben Thompson (08:03)
• “Main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore.” — Brandon Gorell (14:38)
• “As soon as it’s copied, then it's like fundamentally, like not tasteful in my view.” — Brandon Gorell (16:22)
• “Taste emerges from craft, context, meaning, subjectivity and genuine care.” — Ben Thompson reading a critique (20:11)
• “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” — Bill Ackman, quoted (24:38)

---

Tone & Style

The discussion is lively, candid, and analytical—reflecting insiders’ blend of skepticism, humor, and thoughtful critique about the intersection of tech, culture, and business. Occasional banter and asides keep the episode dynamic, while moments of respectful seriousness are shown for personal news within the startup community.

---

This TBPN Diet summary captures the episode’s key insights, memorable moments, and major tech storylines without extraneous content or commercial breaks, providing a comprehensive resource for tech enthusiasts and podcast fans alike.

Transcript

[Ben Thompson]

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 Kao's glasses. What glasses? It's really this one.

[Brandon Gorell]

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

[Ben Thompson]

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

[Brandon Gorell]

There you go.

[Ben Thompson]

Honestly, there you go. 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 pack.

[Brandon Gorell]

Here's the thing.

[Ben Thompson]

Pick up a couple pair.

[Brandon Gorell]

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.

[Ben Thompson]

2% over the last five years and just in the last five days down another 8.5%. And Evan Spiegels has been having to defend his decisions, his investment. Here we'll see where all this goes. The questions 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.

[Brandon Gorell]

But Tyler in the chat says snap down 92% since peak ZIR. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

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, interesting R and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gorell. Because Brandon Gorell came up to me after writing the newsletter and said,

[Brandon Gorell]

I

[Ben Thompson]

don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine, we'll read through your piece. 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 assistant 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. So Brandon Gorell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bigger 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.

[Brandon Gorell]

We will see how other scenario he's getting some cauliflower ear. He's training. He sees Zach is gotten into mma. He doesn't want to be left behind.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Brandon Gorell]

So we don't know.

[Ben Thompson]

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 range finder, like a Titleist bag or something with a great brand, it feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA Tour. The heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really put together.

[Brandon Gorell]

Yeah. And so many cool use cases. But are any of them killer use cases? 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. Yeah, I can. I do that 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. Yeah. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

You can buy rangefinders for around 150 bucks. 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. 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. Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects. Our startup's going to be willing to drop 2k for every employee who wants to collect collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's spec's 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. 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 very, very basic things.

[Brandon Gorell]

And my thing is, I don't think as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.

[Ben Thompson]

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 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, the other challenge

[Brandon Gorell]

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 business. Like a $2,000.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brandon Gorell]

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

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. And so Bucho 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 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. 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 Lecke has a collection of Augment VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them.

[Brandon Gorell]

Let's put pull up this post from a capital. Because this might be a. Yeah, we can watch this.

[Ben Thompson]

This. This actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today.

[Brandon Gorell]

You're wearing your new stacks you just unveiled.

[Ben Thompson]

They cost $2,195.

[Brandon Gorell]

The stock's down more than 5%.

[Ben Thompson]

The sound effect, the sound mix is really good.

[Brandon Gorell]

Market.

[Ben Thompson]

Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new. The sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really what does this so, so funny.

[Brandon Gorell]

I feel really bad for the Snap team. 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 going to need to justify further investment.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Brandon Gorell]

Is my current. Unless your Spiegel just doesn't care and continues to double or triple down, which is totally possible. But I think at a normal company this would kind of be the last shot.

[Ben Thompson]

It's tough. You're competing with these hyper efficient Chinese companies. 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. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming there's a whole bunch of different things. You could watch movies on it, do the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that xreal is on a path to commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not.

[Brandon Gorell]

Not to mention meta Ray ban displays are 799.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Brandon Gorell]

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

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Brandon Gorell]

All this like again it's cool. But I don't know anyone that would do this.

[Ben Thompson]

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. 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's finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. 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 velociraptor. It's like a velociraptor type thing.

[Brandon Gorell]

Let's double check that.

[Ben Thompson]

And a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels, 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 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. 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 immediate, 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. 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.

[Brandon Gorell]

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

[Ben Thompson]

word because the last six months, maybe last year, it's been like the code word, like, what will we do in the AI can do all the technical stuff. Well, we'll have the taste.

[Brandon Gorell]

Yeah. And. And so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word. The. Even the conversation. I, We've never even like waded that deeply into the conversation. And I'd like to keep it that way.

[Ben Thompson]

That being said, 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 as being tasteful people, 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. And that's. It's sort of, it's. It's optimized. It's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not.

[Brandon Gorell]

Yes. Yeah. And then, and then I'll say one more thing and then, and then I'll steal man Taste labs. Yeah, 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, 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. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

Right.

[Brandon Gorell]

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 in my view. Right. Then it's not original. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality to be able to combine. You know, do 1 plus 1 equals 2. And another example is like, isn't 1

[Ben Thompson]

plus 1 equals 3?

[Brandon Gorell]

Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 plus 1 equals 1 plus 1 equals 3. 11. 1 plus 1 equals 2. That's the ad. Oh yeah, that fake startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace.

[Ben Thompson]

Sure.

[Brandon Gorell]

Like, Squarespace took like high end website design and then just democratized it, monetized it.

[Ben Thompson]

Right.

[Brandon Gorell]

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. Like, and it's not really that much of a knock, but like it wasn't like 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. Because 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 flak 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.

[Ben Thompson]

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

[Brandon Gorell]

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

[Ben Thompson]

Rage, baby.

[Brandon Gorell]

Taste Labs, we're building Taste in a lab. We built it, we made it.

[Ben Thompson]

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 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 the. It's not this, it's that. But for design would be the bad one.

[Brandon Gorell]

Yeah. Which is like already extremely easy to clock right now. And I got a deck last night. Friend of mine, 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 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.

[Ben Thompson]

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 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 mean Tweet means. Sharon clean up 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 timelines in turmoil in market news, more Fed officials have signaled a rate increase increase as 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 Demis Hassabis 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. There's been a little bit reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also US has held off on blacklisting China's deep SEQ. 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 US 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. 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 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. But we'll be continuing to follow that.

[Brandon Gorell]

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, plane crash in Laredo, 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.

[Ben Thompson]

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 run through another day, but 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 so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the cursor acquisition closing or being announced that the option has been exercised. But 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 Neo Cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets like Terrafab has been talking? What's involved in that? I mean they're trading at what, 10 times intel at this point or something? I don't know what is intel market cap but there's so much that they could do. It's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600 billion company so that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain, there's a lot in the AI world and the space world that they could partner 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

[Brandon Gorell]

today and have a wonderful afternoon and evening folks. We'll see you tomorrow.