Morning Brew Daily - Bob Iger, Josh Kushner Buys LA Lakers for $12.5B & The FAA is Run by Gamers

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

#910: The Los Angeles Lakers are sold for $12 billion to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger. July’s inflation report comes in just as expected. Roku has a 24/7 AI slop channel. Private equity is stuck with over 33,000 unsold businesses. Americans are traveling more than ever and they love traveling to Europe. The FAA nears a hiring goal thanks to a focus towards recruiting gamers. Finally, Count Binface captures the headlines in Britain’s upcoming election.  Learn more at https://www.rubrik.com/mb Grab tickets to our Performance Revue show! https://www.morningbrew.com/events/brew-performance-revue-2026?utm_campaign=performance_revue_2026&utm_source=mbd Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift. Morning Brew's new podcast with PWC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the intelligence shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning for Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Kyle Hagey.

Today, the Lakersale that Shocked the World. And why Roku is bringing AI slop to your living room, it's Thursday, August 13th. Let's ride. Good morning. Kyle Haggy is stepping up to the plate today since Toby is out getting married. Wow, what a loser that guy is. Kyle, you get a host on a special day. Left Handers Day.

And our warmest wishes go out to the 10% of humans and most kangaroos listening to this. From scissors to those deaths in lecture halls, this world was. not designed for you, but you persevered to produce the likes of Oprah, Sir Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Dantrell Willis, maybe Ben Simmons, and Bart Simpson. Don't forget to elbow someone at the dinner table tonight to remind them whose day it is. I didn't know kangaroos had motion like that. Most of them are left-handed. I love lefties. They're just, you meet someone who's left-handed, automatically cooler. And in a few sports, there's definitely an advantage to being left-handed. So I wish I was left-handed personally. And now a word from our sponsor,

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so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. To learn more about how Rubrik rewrote the industry rulebook, head to rubric.com slash mb. That's rubr-k-com slash mb. Bob Eiger has quickly gone from show business to showtime, that is the Showtime Lakers, after it was announced that he, alongside Josh Kushner,

will purchase the controlling interest in the LA Lakers, valuing the historic franchise at $12.5 billion. The sale, which still needs to be approved by the NBA's Board of Governors, would be the most expensive purchase valuation of any professional sports franchise besting the 2025 deal for, you guessed it, the Los Angeles Lakers, which valued this franchise at $10 billion just 14 months ago. And this is where the story gets even more interesting. The owner selling to Iger and Kushner, Mark Walter, had purchased the Lakers,

just over a year ago. Selling a franchise this quickly is exceedingly rare, with this asset class being viewed as one of the most prestigious and scarce out there. A potential factor, Walter is currently under investigation from the FBI, DOJ, and SEC for potential fraud across his business empire, with Bloomberg reporting that Walter has been in talks with investors to raise money to pay down the loans he's being investigated for. Now, Iger, the longtime CEO of Disney, is pretty familiar to the public.

Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, is a little less so. Kushner runs Thrive Capital, a VC fund, and is the co-founder of Oscar Health. He currently owns a minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he'd have to sell if the Lakers purchase goes through. The Lakers offseason has been an interesting one with LeBron James leaving the team and now an out-of-the-blue sale of the franchise. The athletic reporting, one agent who represents a Lakers starter, respond to the news with a simple message, what the F is going on.

So, Neil, what the F is going on here? It's a good question. One does not flip an NBA team like it's a house. And that's why this is being called the most shocking franchise sale in NBA history. And there was no indication that flipping the Lakers was Walter's intention from the beginning. He also owns the Dodgers. And he was kind of merging the two teams sharing staff and resources to seemingly create one super team in L.A. the Lakers and the Dodgers together.

And more reporting shows that this was not necessarily a fire sale, but it came together very quickly. Looks like just in the past few days, Kushner and Iger called up Walter, maybe even Sunday. Today is what, Thursday. So this came together just in the early parts of this week. Walter was not exactly shopping this around.

So it suggests that something else was at play here besides, okay, my time is up because, of course, there wasn't that much time that he was the owner of the Lakers to begin with. Meanwhile, Eiger and Kushner had their sights set on another NBA franchise, one that is coming to Vegas. They were the leading players to take over, become owners of the new Vegas franchise. So none of this went according to plan, which is why you had the entire ownership class in the rest of the NBA world saying, yes, what the F is going on. Seems like there are a lot of things going on beneath the surface. Yeah, there will definitely be more to come from this story because, as you said, this is just so out of the blue, so absurd.

No one buys a team and then sells it this fast. Yeah, you mentioned the deal came together in reportedly about 72 hours. It takes me long on the 72 hours to buy a screen, like, protector from my phone. Like the fact that someone flipped a franchise this fast is insane. And I got to say, like, venture capitalists, VCs are becoming the new big players in the sports world. Vinod Koshla of Kostla Ventures purchased the Seattle Seahawks. Now Josh Kushner is purchasing the Lakers. It's a good time to be a VC guy.

And Bob Eiger, you know, dominates the entertainment industry. I'm really excited for the Los Angeles Lakers halftime shows now. Like, are we going to see a little Mickey Mouse action? Like, this is a massive play in entertainment, and it's entertainment that might be AI-proof because people are craving these in-person experiences. Sports are still appointment TV that you have to see live. So it makes a lot of sense for Bob Lager to be evolved.

Yeah, very interesting you mentioned that, because Josh Kushner, who is the brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump, has this new fund called Thrive Eternal. that's focused on assets that can't be replicated by technology. Sports and big entertainment moments. He already bought a stake in the San Francisco Giants of MLB earlier this year. He was also in the running to buy a stake in FIFA's for-profit venture that eventually collapsed.

And now he, well, that's gone. But then he goes and turns the sites on the Lakers and becomes the owner of one of the most iconic franchises in sports. So it's really interesting to see where Capital is going. This is a really rich guy who's looking at the future of investing and saying, I don't know about all these other things that AI might replace. I'm going into sports and entertainment because people crave live experiences being there in person. So I thought that was a fascinating thing. And then there's Bob Eiger, the former CEO of Disney. He knows everyone.

He knows Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, because they've been a longtime broadcast partners with ABC. Who knows what Bob Eiger is going to do to this franchise already iconic, already known, globally. You can go to any country in the world. Somebody will be wearing a Lakers jersey. He could do things like call up Steven Spielberg or other big Hollywood names and add even more of a pizzazz to this franchise that everyone already knows. So very interesting move by Bob Iger at the end of his career. And I think for the current CEO of Disney, Josh, tomorrow, it's probably a good sign because the former CEO of Disney, Bob Chappek, who replaced Bob Iger, actually got booted by Bob Iger when Iger wanted to come back. So this may be a good CEO. So this,

solidifies Iger as saying, okay, finally, I'm not going to come back to Disney. You guys do your thing. I've moved on. I own the Lakers now. One little cherry on top of this story that has a little drama. Bob Iger was on J.J. Reddick's podcast before J.J. Reddick was the Lakers head coach, and they asked him who he cheers for in L.A. and he said, I grew up a Knicks fan, so I couldn't bring myself to cheer for the Lakers. So I'm a Clippers fan now. He's going to have to get over those comments some way because now he owns the Lakers. All right, moving on. The inflation report was a lot like House of the Dragon. If you set the right expectations, it's pretty good. Yesterday, the Consumer Price Index report showed inflation cooled on an annual basis in July,

up 3.4% compared to June's 3.5%. On a month-over-month basis, prices ticked up 0.1%. That 3.4% is still much higher than the Fed's 2% inflation goal, but overall, the numbers lined up exactly with projections and revealed a somewhat moderating inflation picture in the United States. Following energy prices, where the star of the show sliding for a second consecutive month after spiking during the most intense fighting of the war in Iran. As the attacks have slowed down, energy prices dropped 1.5% in July after falling 5.7% in June. Still, they're up 14.7% over the past year, and gas prices remain over $4 a gallon, almost a dollar more than a year ago. Other positive signs, slowing home

price growth and grocery costs falling for the first time since March. Sure, that probably was helped along by lettuce prices plunging 16% from the cyclospora outbreak, but sometimes you just need a little explosive diarrhea to tame inflation. That or Fed rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has been under pressure to raise interest rates to wrangle inflation back to 2%, but this mild report may give it a little wiggle room to hold off at its next meeting in September. Kyle, it's not hard to jump over the bar when the bar is low. And Neil, I think you might have just solved inflation with this diarrhea. Like, we tell people that gas causes diarrhea. Prices will go down. We might be on to something here. I think it's still important to zoom out to get a little broader perspective. Grocery prices

year over year still up. Prices for beef have risen 9.4% over the past year. Tomatoes and lettuce have risen 12.8% and 7.5% respectively, coffee up 10.3% higher in July than one year ago. And so we're still seeing food higher up in terms of cost compared to a year ago, although we're seeing some signs of relief, which is good. I think the big news here is all about the rate hike that you mentioned, and the odds of that rate hike going down now. The market as of late Wednesday morning was pricing in just a 38% chance of a move, which is down 10 percentage points from Tuesday and well below the 70% or so probability from a month ago. So we were very sure we were going to get a rate hike, and now it looks like we're not going to.

Right. The inflation report, which was cool and then also paired with the jobs report that came in weaker than expected on Friday gives Kevin Warsh and at the Fed a little more wiggle room, a little more flexibility to say, hey, in September, we maybe don't need to raise interest rates because inflation is moderating and the job market is weaker than we expected. There is going to be another inflation report, another jobs report before the Fed makes that decision. so more data will be incoming. My big takeaway is that inflation has been above this 2% target. I don't even know why it's a target anymore.

It's been above 2% for more than five years now, and that is eating away at Americans' incomes. Inflation is wiping out all wage gains now for the past four months. We just got wage growth statistics that came in at 3.2%. And the inflation report yesterday showed that inflation is growing at 3.4%. You don't have to be an economist to do the math there and say that, okay, actually, my real income, my income adjusted for inflation is actually negative. So inflation report, yeah, B, maybe. If I had to give it a grade, it looks like there are some

hopeful signs, but things need to come down to give Americans some relief. That's right. And I think with all of the geopolitical uncertainty as well, particularly geopolitical uncertainty that ties so heavily into the energy sector, it's hard to forecast where that is going to go and therefore where energy prices are going to go. So we'll have to stay tuned for these new reports to have a sense of what September might bring us. I have good news for you if you're one of the tens of people who have looked around and thought, you know what? I need more AI content in my life.

Roku has launched Fairground AI Creator TV, a 24-7 channel that only plays AI-generated content on a loop. That's right. While Netflix has stranger things and Hulu has Handmaid's Tale, Roku now has plot lines like chimpanzee smokes in zoo and gets arrested, or what if Sherlock was a woman? The key component here, users are not paying for this content. It's part of Roku's fast or free ad-supported TV roster. This channel, along with many other non-AI-generated channels, are available for free to all Roku users, and sometimes you do get what you pay for.

However, Roku's overall strategy of focusing on free content in a landscape dominated by streaming subscriptions has paid off handsomely for the company. Their user base now exceeds 100 million global households and Fox reached an agreement to buy the company in a deal worth $22 billion in June. Neil, it appears that it might just be the big screen that is the last screen standing when it comes to not having AI slop. The reviews of this channel and this content were so funny. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough. Futurism wrote Roku's giving the masses what they never asked for an undending conveyor belt of AI slop. But I think the Guardian takes the cake in terms of the king of bad reviews. They wrote, it was categorically, catastrophically awful.

The channel doesn't so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible. Then they write at one point the channel cut away to a commercial for Roku's Dr. Phil channel and the site of an actual flesh and blood human acting in an identifi human way almost moved me to tears. Now I had to do some investigative reporting here. I actually had to watch the Fairground Roku channel. I turned it on. It was a late night true crime documentary about you mentioned this, a chimpanzee in an enclosure in a zoo that was seen smoking a cigarette and it set off some nationwide panic for some reason. And you know what? It was really bad. It was really bad. It was almost so bad it was good, but it's very interesting to see what Roku is trying here by feeding us AI slop.

And I think it's important to mention, look, Roku cut its name by being your screensaver on your TV. Like Roku City, people just love having Roku City or Roku screensavers up on their TV. In many ways, this kind of resembles that because I don't think they actually want you to pay attention to this. They just want you to have it on in the background and see whether this kind of content plays because the most important thing here is, It doesn't cost anything to make an AI programming or 24-7. Imagine if you actually had to pay humans to make all this content instead you're going with AI, which costs nothing. And Roku's saying, okay, maybe if we can get viewership for this, then we can maybe extrapolate from there,

put more AI, and then we can pay people less. Yeah, I think you're spot on with the background assumption. This is just meant to be on, hopefully mute in the background. You look over, there's a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette. You're like, that's funny. You get back to doing what you're going to do in your living room. I do feel like they've created a solution to a problem no one had. I don't think anyone was necessarily asking for this.

However, I do view this as almost like a random, like art form, low art form. We're like, it's so absurd, it's so bad it might actually be good. And all of us, when we read the story, we're like, I have to go see what they're cooking up here. I also think this could be big at college. Can you imagine the AI Slop Channel drinking games would be absolutely incredible. I was thinking another kind of substance that people like to do at college. Maybe, maybe. Won't comment on that, but I think there's some potential here for universities to really embrace the Roku

AI channel. I will say it's easy to write off AI slop and the people won't watch it, but my mind goes back to AI fruit videos. Did you see these on social media? All over TikTok. People were watching these like crazy. Sometimes people do like watching AI content. I mean, AI Fruit Love Island got more viewers than the actual

love Island. People were obsessed. I don't know any of these people, but people were obsessed. So I wouldn't write this. It's easy to laugh. It's easy to say, oh my God, Dr. Phil, when I saw his face, I nearly cried because it was a human. People seem to like this content, at least some people. So we'll see where this goes. It's very easy to laugh it off, but we'll see where this goes. And the argument from Roku and Fairground has been every new art form in any, you know, TV streaming, YouTube is originally kind of laughed at. It feels so foreign and not what we're used to. Maybe not even what we're asking for as the technology gets better and people get more used to it, maybe there could be a hit upcoming and we'll definitely report on that if it happens. Okay, don't go anywhere. We'll be right

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Now it's time for Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will help you pretend you know things. For my first number, has someone told private equity about Facebook marketplace because it's hoarding a ton of assets it can't get rid of? Private equity firms held 33,575 unsold companies in their portfolios up 1,000 in the last eight months and more than double a decade ago, the New York Times reports. This unsold inventory strikes at private equity's business model, which promises, to return money to investors after selling a company or taking it public. But now those deals are drying up.

Since 2022, just 70 PE-backed companies have gone public in the U.S. compared to 424 from 2017 to 2021, according to the times. Meanwhile, PE firms have not found many buyers for these companies either because often they're selling to other PE firms that are going through the same struggles. Those struggles come from multiple sources, most notably, one, rising interest rates, and two, problems in the size. software industry. When it comes to interest rates, P.E. shops often rely on large amounts of debt to finance takeovers, so when borrowing costs rise like they have been, the whole proposition gets more

expensive. Second, many private equity firms loaded up on software companies back in the heyday of 2021. But since ChatGBT was released a year later, investors have soured on software over concerns AI will eat into the market. It all amounts to a private equity industry that has been lapped by broader stocks from July 1st, 2022 to March 31st, 2026. PE firms generated annualized returns of just 6.4%. The S&P 500 gained more than 15% over the same time span. Kyle, I'll see you taking out the world's smallest violin over there. You got to feel real bad for the PE guys.

I mean, it goes back to our Lakers story. You have VCs buying sports teams. You have PE people stuck holding an old CRM platform that's been rendered obsolete by AI. So my advice is to pick your field wisely. For my next number, Americans love to travel. You know that. You've probably been to Paris three times already this year. But some stats from the Wall Street Journal revealed just how astonishing the rise of the American tourist has been. Go back to 1990 and fewer than 5% of Americans had a passport. Today, the share of Americans with a passport stands at 50%. Last fiscal year, the U.S. issued 27 million passports a new record. And they're using it mainly to go to Europe. Visits to Porte. Portugal are up almost five times compared to a decade earlier. Greece saw four times as many American visitors as 10 years ago, and it's not their first time across the Atlantic either.

Just 6% of U.S. travelers to Europe said it was their first time flying abroad. One catalyst for all the traveling is flights are cheaper than they used to be. In 1984, a round-trip weekend flight between New York and London cost the equivalent of $2,150. These days, you can regularly snag a flight for less than one grand. driving the travel boom are wealthy boomers and Gen Z for whom travel is no longer a nice to have luxury, but a need to have essential. Kyle, it's hard to articulate just how profound a shift this has been. Americans used to think a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine was an exotic vacation. Now, if you don't visit Estonia's sixth largest city to try some TikTok viral pastry, you aren't living.

I mean, shout out to Estonia, for sure. It's interesting. There used to be this maybe stereotype that Americans didn't have passports. now more than half of Americans have one. And the U.S. issued a record 27 million passports in 2025. I just have to say one thing about the 24 million travels to Europe. I swear 22 million of them have been to Portugal. Every single person I know is going to Portugal, gone to Portugal, talking about Portugal,

getting married in Portugal. It's like me and three other people who haven't been to Portugal. So their tourism department is absolutely crushing it. It was me last year. I mean, you've got to try the fauna. That stuff is crack. the one thing that's interesting to me about this, and we're not going to belabor the point, but I'll just throw it out there is how much has Instagram played into this?

How much has the rise of Instagram, TikTok, social media created such a fomo atmosphere, highlighting various things that people can see that they feel are more authentic to these countries and how much that has driven all of this tourism by Americans going to faraway places, most specifically Europe. Just throw it out there. I think it's a big role that it played. For my final number, you know how there's been an air traffic. traffic controller shortage that periodically cancels your flight.

The FAA thinks it might have solved it by hiring video gamers. On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the FAA has hired over 2,000 people to control the skies the most in a single year after launching a campaign to recruit gamers. The agency says it's now 94% to its hiring goal, the fastest time ever to reach that target. But wait, if you're good at Halo, does that mean you're good at landing Southwest Flight 113 at BWI could be. When announcing the gaming recruitment drive in April, the FAA said, quote, with only about 25% of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented

young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity. To be clear, the FAA doesn't just pluck someone from their World of Workoff campaign, put them in the SFO Tower. There's an extensive training process and just 2% of applicants become certified controllers. Still, it's a testament to solving a problem by taking a more unconventional route. Yeah, honestly, I kind of love this move and I'll have to say a lot of moms looking real foolish. You said playing video games wouldn't land you a job. A lot of former eight-year-old

boys are extremely vindicated right now. And now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. British politics often borders on the absurd. They've had seven prime ministers in 10 years after all. today's parliamentary election in Clacton might just take the comedy cake. The main challenger to Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist party Reform UK, is Count Binface, a man in a trashcan costume who says he's an intergalactic space warrior from the planet Sigma 9. That man is a comedian John Harvey who created Count Binface to satirize the circus that is UK politics.

Binface is a familiar face, having run for Prime Minister multiple times as well as for Mayor of London. He hasn't made much of a dent with his best showing earning 1% of the vote. But this campaign against Farage has provided him his biggest stage yet with loads of media coverage, even if he's expected to lose in a landslide. Kyle, I'm not sure how BinFace doesn't pull off the upset today. Among his proposals, cut your taxes and raise everyone else's, arcade grabber games made fairer so players actually have a chance to win and nationalize Adele.

He has also promised to try and bring back Pluto as a planet. So all I have to say is, yes, we tin can. All right, finally, this Thursday I want to talk about integrity. And of course, it concerns a fake hole in one in golf. Zach Holland, an amateur golfer, has been booted as a member of a St. Louis area golf club after he claimed to have made a hole in one in a tournament when he didn't. And the details of this story are why it went super viral. Holland, who admitted to cheating, said that he made up a phone call with his supposedly

fatally ill grandmother, then told his playing part. he would go ahead to play the next hole, the par three-fourth, ahead of them to keep up the pace of play. When his group caught up to him, he told them he had mishit his shot and didn't know where it landed. Wouldn't you know when they got to the green there was this ball in the hole? Of course, it had been put there by Holland himself before the round even started in footage caught by security cameras. Holland has apologized saying, I made a bad decision and I have to suffer the consequences. I'm trying to move forward as best I can and it's been rough. Kyle, this is George Costanza level scheming.

You got to admire the chutzpah. I mean, I got to be honest, this was my go-to move in putt-putt golf, and he kind of stole it for me, so I'm going to have to talk to this guy. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Thursday. All right, I got to finish this speech for Toby's wedding, then head up to the venue.

So I will be off tomorrow morning, but you will be in the capable hands of Ray and Kayla. Then I'll see you back here Monday morning. Probably soar from dancing. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller.

Hair and makeup is amperestress. Yeah, hair is a lefty. Makeup is a righty. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Let's run it back tomorrow.