Kushner & Iger’s $12.5B Lakers Deal, Grok 4.6 Launches, Anthropic’s Watermarking Move | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:First, we've got to talk about Josh Kushner. Bob Iger, they bought the LA Lakers. They're buying the LA Lakers. He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it. In the sauna this morning, I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever. Eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy so well. And it does, you know, people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like with all of the technology disruption happening, it just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today.

0:41Yeah, and I figured out how to put on a suit.

0:43John Coogan:Yeah, doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible. I cleaned it up. Yeah, super clean, looking amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Finally. Truth be told, when we started the show, I went from, we started hitting the gym. We did a little bulking season. It was bulking season. And I added some weight and I basically over - You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordy. And you lost 20 pounds of fat. I added a little weight and I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month for 18 months. It went exponential. It was a fast take. It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these suits.

1:26Suits are beautiful. That we had gotten made. But they got a little tight. I'm going to have to save them for wearing an elderly man. Yeah, maybe. Because at some point, we'll shed the muscle. Cutting season's coming. We'll be lean maxing. Summer's only. Cutting season is coming. Nine months away. In 40 years. In 40 years. Yeah. But it's good to be back. Yeah. It's good to be back.

1:48John Coogan:Yeah, looks good. Let me take you through the story so everyone has the facts straight about this incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessman Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record-breaking price of$12.5 billion. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN. So Kushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Buss family at a then record valuation of roughly$10 billion. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company TWG Global, officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal.

2:33John Coogan:The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's Board of Governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. They're not some random businessman coming in from out of town. And the seller is under federal investigation. Yes. For some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own, those affiliated transactions, if you originate the deal and then you put it on your insurance company's books, you need to disclose this.

3:12John Coogan:Now, you can actually do this. Berkshire Hathaway, about 46 % of their insurance assets are related party transactions. So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that he disclosed that only 3 % of the insurance assets were related party affiliated transactions. But in fact, it was much higher when you considered some of the other assets that had made their way through a third party. Capital allocator, bit of a bad boy. You and the bad boy thing. Yeah, maybe. But, you know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, these are just allegations he's just being investigated. And a nice return.

3:49John Coogan:Yeah. And he's denied all wrongdoing. But it does it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale. So so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about. So Kushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm Thrive Capital and co-founder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son in law. Kushner currently owns a minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal, and was previously a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Iger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in Los Angeles sports.

4:27John Coogan:He and his wife, Willow Bay, became controlling owners of the National Women's Soccer League's Angel City FC in 2024. The prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Luka Doncic said, being a Laker means everything to me, and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to L.A. I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work building something special in L.A.

5:00John Coogan:together. You'll love to see it. Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said, Lakers fans couldn't have two better owners, Johnson said. I've known Bob personally for over 40 years. He has always loved the Lakers and basketball, and he will bring championships back to L.A. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal. Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on L.A. overall. I've had a generally bad outlook. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is going to be very nice for a long time. But that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on. But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.

5:37John Coogan:And you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, the Pothole Company of Los Angeles, the Pothole Filling Company of Los Angeles. Huge opportunity. It's really palance here for potholes. Yes, yes. Hiring the best AI researchers. No, I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes quickly. I think it starts with its own satellite constellation. You have to put up 10 ,000 satellites in low Earth orbit with cameras pointed directly at small, small, effectively missiles fired at potholes. Yes. And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to fill in the hole. Yeah. It just kind of sort of you bring the molten asphalt up to space.

6:16John Coogan:It comes down, warms up as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole and smooshes in, fills it in. But, you know, people are always saying, oh, why is like you go to L.A.? Every other car is a G-Wagon. Well, you know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's four-wheel drive. Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time. I was talking to a Maybach owner a couple nights ago, and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I had blown out multiple tires last year. It's a disaster. Do we have a moment of silence? The Pothole Company of Los Angeles.

6:56John Coogan:It's a banger idea. It's a bang right idea. Yeah. I might become the Batman of potholes. Ooh. Just sneaking out late at night. Yeah. Look, I could go out in this suit. You could. You could. Yeah. Like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY corner call box. Like same thing. That's right. Potholes in LA. They're really, really bad. Every day I drive to work and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one on this one particular road that's just been a disaster for the last six months. Anyway, the last quote. related to this deal. As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world.

7:38John Coogan:Kushner and Iger said in a statement, they said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny Buss and intend to build on the family's legacy. I don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles. If approved, the deal would give the Lakers their third controlling ownership. Of potholes. I think he got something. Says DT. And Tyler says he's going to film the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 4 or 5, 2 a.m., just you and a nasty pothole and a little bit of traffic. And a little bit of asphalt slathering it in there, right?

8:15John Coogan:Is that what you're doing? Well, my big issue is when they fill in, they just do a really bad job. And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bumps. And you get a sinkhole. So then you just start a sinkhole company. That's a whole other problem. Yeah, that was crazy. Whatever happened with that in L.A.? It was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it. I would like to get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city. Somebody's got to ask the question. Sag Harbor Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple yet incredibly compelling case.

8:50John Coogan:Longevity. Sports is a portfolio diversifier. investment firms and wealthy individuals now view investing in sports properties as a hedge against higher risk investments. Very interesting. Everyone has always said sports investing is just, it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team, but you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting edge technologies, also building a portfolio with some things that are going to be around forever, no matter how many robots there are, makes a lot of sense. And so that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in sports investing.

9:25John Coogan:Do you agree with that? I do. It's a strategy. Yeah, Spore agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now. And we've seen hints and rumors of this for a while. Anything else on the Lakers? We're going to talk to Darren in just 13 minutes about it. Get him to explain. It's going to walk us through the whole rule set. Yeah. We're very excited about that. But apparently there's a solar eclipse going on right now. Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it.

10:00John Coogan:The last time, a couple of years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it. Yeah, so it's in Europe right now. Full solar eclipse. Full solar eclipse. Yep. Wow. Should have gone. I missed this one. When's the next one? What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler? What does it mean? It's a great omen for high beta AI stocks. That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the Eclipse is trying to tell you. Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable 5 Max at an 85 % discount, 80 % cheaper for input tokens and 88 % cheaper for output tokens.

10:48John Coogan:Pareto dominance as Gavin Baker. Grok 4.7 will be significantly better, as is a much larger model with the Cursor and SpaceX data included in pre-training. So the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopt it. Obviously, Cursor has huge, huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. Grok has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there. but the model seems to be catching up. The teams seem to be gelling, and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how, I mean, I'm sure on X, we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with Grok 4.6.

11:33John Coogan:There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There'll be a whole bunch more on benchmarks. Yeah, so seems incredibly impressive. Excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model. The price wars have definitely begun. We saw this with Meta. We're seeing this with Grok now. And then third, I would say trust in benchmarks has to be at an all-time low. There's been enough moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday, so they're building momentum. him sure spacex is up almost 40 just in the last five days that's a pretty yeah and i'm so curious i i wish i wish you could figure out a way to parse out what what's driving that is it the semi-analysis yeah um semi-analysis that felt like friday friday well yeah that was friday at the close it popped during the day though right so but then up 10 today yeah i don't know maybe it was leaking out cnbc says spacex short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30 % off.

12:47John Coogan:We're running out of ammo. I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying these prices. You got to buy more. Excited to release Grok 4.6. With each release, Grok is becoming a more capable digital colleague. The age of work is upon us. Grok for work, it's happening. 4.6 is significantly better at difficult tasks and knowledge work. It combines Opus class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed which people love even even just in the cursor workflow the more iterative approach instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on there's a lot of value to that workflow in particular grok 4.6 is a very impressive test time curve on cursor bench in a league of its own they did more mid slash pre-training on the grok 4.5 checkpoint and newer sft stages with grok 4.5 traces and model based filtering.

13:40John Coogan:Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is. Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with Grok. They also launched GrokBot. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign into your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. So I guess work isn't going to happen. It's going to be GrokBot, which actually, it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like GrokBot. Also, very good results on the Artificial Intelligence Index joining the Frontier at 61. Strong agentic performance. Lower cost, obviously. And the model wars are upon us.

14:19John Coogan:NVIDIA is also joining the model wars, selling weapons to both sides, potentially. Nemo Tron 3.5 Lightning, their open source model, came out. But they also launched a model router, Nemo Switchyard, to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient agentic AI. Switchyard. Switchyard's a good name. It's a good name. I like that. Kind of railroad connotations, which... Oh, yeah. Which is maybe... That's interesting, yeah. Maybe a concern. You've got to go through Ben Thompson's stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it does feel like if you're an organization that has NVIDIA chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid-scale, maybe not a hyperscaler, but you're pretty big, you know, being all in on the NVIDIA stack and then using their model router could make a lot of sense.

15:10John Coogan:It's a logical place for it to live. And then it has more integration with the rest of your NVIDIA stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs racked for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own NVIDIA work data center, basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropix watermarking? Yeah, dive into this. I don't know that I have a strong take yet. Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropics watermarking. So the basic news is that you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropics said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know.

15:56John Coogan:Now, they won't be watermarked. Like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was AI generated. Bill Gurley was making the point that traditional watermark on an image is very visible. Yes. It's just like immediately visible. Yes. And so it's not actually, it's more like basically we're going to leave evidence that this was generated. Breadcrumbs. Yeah, breadcrumbs. And so in theory, a LinkedIn or an X could integrate with an Anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on this is that this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union.

16:33John Coogan:So anthropic in theory could watermark, could only watermark text in Europe, but the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world, according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually, instead, I think the idea is instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation to add the watermark in, it's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier. Yeah, it's so interesting how much of their revenue is coming from Europe, given how compute constrained they are.

17:20I wonder if they ever considered, like, hey, let's just say, hey, if you're going to go forward with something like this, we're just going to exit the market entirely.

17:30John Coogan:But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropik cares about watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think it's a good thing. And then also I think business users don't care because they're like, yeah, I want AI generated code all over my code base. I want it to be clean and efficient and I want it to just do the job. And I'm totally fine with it. I'm not, that's not my business. And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor, like you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like what could be better about this?

18:13John Coogan:What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors? Did I make any spelling errors? If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in, and then you don't get credit potentially because people will be like, oh, this is AI, when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would read an essay by hand. we would throw it into chat to proofread it and it would put in a bunch of m dashes in the earlier model it was really heavy on m dashes and so people would just be like oh this is ai and it was like well like the last step but it's like but does that matter it does matter to a lot of people they do care about that but it's it's odd and ben thompson's point is saying what the eu is doing is stealing the last thing humans have creation and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI the credit.

19:13John Coogan:Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book, if you have AI edited it, if it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked. And people will be like, yeah, that was all, well, it was the prompt. And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea, and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration. At the same time, it does feel like there's ways to work around this if you become more collaborative with the AI system. You can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself.

19:47People have been going back and forth

19:50John Coogan:these all day long. He says, the human that gave AI the text to proofread or even the prompt to generate writing doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI. The EU is mandating it. That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What not only the actual underlying, the way they watermark it is public, but presumably it's basically during the sampling process when you're generating tokens, it generates some distribution over the tokens, like which one is it going to select, and then it uses a slightly different method than just choosing the most likely one.

20:23And that way you can see, oh, this is less likely, so it's probably written by AI. But if you basically have some essay that you wrote and you replace one sentence, then like 99 % of the tokens are still the same, then like it's like, it's, it's, it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being like AI written. That doesn't make any sense. Like only the sentence that you changed would be marked as AI written. Oh, oh, sure, sure, sure. If you look at the new hand grip or whatever, it doesn't like say the whole document is AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like this sentence of AI. No, no, no. Because these tokens are like very...

20:53John Coogan:People think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's either going to say it's AI or not. In fact, you're going to get a percentage. I think people are going to just look, you know, like the peanut gallery online is going to be it'll be very binary for them sure like if somebody puts out even an instagram caption they'll get dunked on even if it's one sentence right like if you look at the google synth id so yeah gemini has done this for like a few years yeah um if you look at their blog that like explains how it works it will like highlight specific basically words in the in the blog or whatever sure sure it's like okay this is probably yeah it's not saying the whole thing is is like yeah zero one yeah so yeah yeah i think i think this is kind of like blowing it out of proportion Yeah, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.

21:35How long until someone ships the Claude Watermark Remover app?

21:40John Coogan:I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter yesterday. Something where you take the text, you put it in this model, and then it reads 100 % human to Pangram because it rewrites it in a style that Pangram can't detect. And so now the Pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that. It's all a game of cat and mouse. Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce over at Listen Labs. He's been on the show before. Coming in with one of the hottest takes I've seen. He said, founders, only send investor updates. Give me the boat horn. When you're winning, Listen has sent three in its history all fundraise announcements.

22:22Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying.

22:26John Coogan:I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine. Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same. Yeah, this is just, I think this is terrible advice. Really? Except if you're winning. That's great. I think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates. Yes, I do think - No, it's just such bad advice because I've had so many, I mean, I've had instances like kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year. And I just assume the company is like dead and dying. And then they pop up with an update. I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even want to, I almost felt bad asking.

23:11It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for like, you know, a quarter of a billion. Updates are how you build trust. It's how people start to process, like, how is this team and this founder performing? Even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how, and if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money, like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the trust.

23:43People can't get a good read on like, okay, do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested, even though they haven't figured it out yet?