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

Episode Date: August 13, 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.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/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

First, we got to talk about Josh Kushner. Bob Eiger, they bought the L.A. Lakers. They're buying the 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. Like 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. Yeah, and I figured out how to put on a suit. Yeah. Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.

I cleaned it up. Yeah. I cleaned it out. Super clean. Looking amazing. 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. And I added, I added some weight, and I basically, over the last. You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it. And you lost 20 pounds of fat. Yeah. So, I added a little weight.

And I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month. Yeah. For 18 months. It went exponential. And it was a fast time. It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these, the suits. Soots are beautiful. That, uh, that we had gotten made.

But they got a little tight. I'm going to have to save them for one of 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. 40 years. 40 years. Yeah. But it's good to be back. Yeah. It's good. But it's good to be back.

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 Eiger for a record-breaking price of $12.5 billion. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN. So Kushner and Eiger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased a controlling

interest in the Lakers from the bus 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. 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 cellars under federal investigation? Yes. For some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions. transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own, those affiliated transactions. If you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance companies, on your insurance companies' books, you need to disclose this. 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. Even 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, nice little return. 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 soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about. So Cushner 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 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. Eiger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in Los Angeles sports. 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. Luca Donchick 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. 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 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. 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 palisier for potholes. Yes, yes. Hiring the best AI research. 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, effectively missiles. Oh, missiles. Fired at potholes. Yes. And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to the hole in the hole. Yeah. It just kind of sort of you bring the mold.

and asphalt up to space. It comes down, warms up as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pot hole and smushes 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, I was talking to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a Abak owner a couple nights ago, and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I've blown out multiple tires last year. It's a, it's a disaster. The pothole, the pothole company of Los Angeles. It's a banger idea, right? It's a bangor idea. Yeah. I might become the Batman of potholes.

Just sneaking out late at night. Yeah. Look, I could go out in the suit. You could. You could. Yeah. Like that guy who was cleaning up the. FDNY corner call box. Like same thing. That's right. Hot holes 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 Kushner and Iger said in a statement. They said they had

have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny bus 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. D.T. And Tyler says he's going to film the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 4.05, 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? 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. Oh, 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. 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. 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. Anyway.

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. 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. Tyler. Yeah, so it's in Europe right now.

Full solar eclipse. Full solar eclipse? Yep. Wow. Should have gone. I miss 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. GROC 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. Pareto dominance as Gavin Baker.

GROC 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 jump to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopted. Obviously, Cursor has huge, huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. GROC 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 jelling 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 GROC 4.6.

There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There will be a whole bunch more on benchmarks. Yeah. So seems incredibly impressive. Yeah. Excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model. Price Wars have definitely begun. You know, we saw this with meta.

We're seeing this with GROC now. And then third, I would say trust in benchmarks has to be at an all-time low. Yeah. Right. There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experiences is, you know, less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday. So they're building momentum. Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty good thing.

Yeah, and I'm so curious. I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what, what's driving that. Is it the semi-analysis? Yeah. Semic. That felt like Friday. Well, yeah, that was Friday. at the close? It popped during the day, though, right? 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 left. We're running out of ammo. We're running out of ammo. I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying these prices. I'm going to buy. You got to buy more. Excited to release GROC 4.6. With each release, GROC is becoming a more capable digital colleague. The age of work is upon us. GROC 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 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.

GROC 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 GROC 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with GROC 4.5 traces and model-based filtering. Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is. Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with GROC. They also launched GROC bot. We recently hired a new teammate.

Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign into your tools. You 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. It's 61, strong, agenic performance, lower cost, obviously, and the model wars are upon us. Nvidia is also joining the model wars, selling weapons to both sides potentially. Nemotron 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 from railroad connotations, which. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.

You've got to go to Ben Thompson stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it does feel like if you're a organization that has Nvidia chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid-scale, maybe not a hyper-scaler, 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. Like it's a logical place for it to live. and then you're you know it has more it has more integration with the rest of your Nvidia stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs rack for the lowest possible cost if you're cost optimizing you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own

Nvidia work you know data center basically anyway should we debate Anthropics watermarking yeah dive into this I don't 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. 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 that it was. Yeah, 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.

So Anthropic in theory could watermark, could only watermark text in Europe. But the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the EU. the world, according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually, instead, I think the idea is instead of, 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, like, how much of their revenue is coming from Europe, given how compute-constrained they are. Like, was there, I wonder if they ever considered, like, hey, let's just say, hey, if you're going to go forward with something like this. Yes. We're just going to exit the market entirely. But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic 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. 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? be better about this. 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 Chachapitit to proofread it, and it would put in a bunch of M 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. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book.

If you have AI edit it, if it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked. And people will be like, nah, yeah, it 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. People have been going back and forth of these all day long. He says, the human that gave AI the text a 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 do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, so I don't think the actual like underlying the way they water market is like public, but presumably it's like basically during the sampling process. When you're like generating tokens, yep, right, it generates some distribution over the tokens like which one is it going to select. And then it uses like a slightly different method than just choosing like the most likely one.

Yep. And that way you can like see, oh, this is like less likely. So it's probably, you know, written by AI. But like if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote and you replace like one sentence, then like 99% of the tokens are still the same, then like it's like 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 handgrave or whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't like say the whole document is AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like this sentence. Yeah, no, no, no. These tokens are like very,

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 Jim and I has done this for like a few years. If you look at their blog that explains how it works, it will like highlight specific, basically, words in the in the blog or whatever piece of text. It's like, okay, this is probably AI written.

It's not saying the whole thing is like zero one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think this is kind of like blowing it out proportion. Yeah, I don't, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it. How long till someone ships the Claude Watermark Remover app? I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter

like yesterday. There's 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 Wall Force over at Listen Labs. He's been on the show before. Coming in with one of the hottest takes. Yeah, got some pushback. He said founders, only send investor updates. Yeah, give me the boat horn.

When you're winning, listen has sent to read its history, all fundraising announcements. Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you is dying. 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. 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. It 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, 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, you don't have the trust. People 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? Okay. So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send. investor updates when you're a pre-seed company.

Like, purely in the idea may as very early stage, the revenue is zero every month. You're just sort of like, you know, out figuring out the first product. I mean, at that stage, it depends. Hopefully you only have like one or two investors. Yeah. But it's still important to see, it's still important to see, like, it's valuable to see a snapshot.

It doesn't have to be the, if at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super, super bearer. Yeah, yeah. Totally. But it's still better to just have like even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on. Yep. We'll have another update in a month. Okay.

So because Listen Labs is only a three-year-old company. And they raise their Series A in April of 2025. So, and he, and there's a, there's a rumored Series C going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April of 2025, January of 2026, and August of 20206, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly. It's not monthly.

But it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly. So it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more, like less like hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every three months. You're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically, every 24 months. It's a harder industry. And so as an investor with a series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runaway is actually left? Yeah. Because, but that's not the equation here.

So a little bit of a unique, this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates and still be emailing all your investors every six months. Yeah. So there's a little bit of that. Yeah. And a lot of those comes down to Alfred. Listen Labs has been crushing. I remember when they first came on the show. It seemed like the company made a lot of sense.

They quickly raised follow-on rounds from great investors. I'm sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you weren't winning. Still sure they're doing well. But just really, really bad, just really bad advice. It's not one-size-fits-all advice. I completely agree. The other thing.

Yeah, and the other thing I would say is like, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stop building in public. No, yeah, that's true. They haven't, like, I've seen. seen this like at least 10 times right now. You see the company that that's got all this momentum founders like, I'm sharing our, here's our investment. Because they're just proud of it. And they usually will string together like six months of that. Yep. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what,

what, what, what, you don't want to build in public when you're not growing anymore and, and revenue is declining or, or, um, you were, you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is. Yeah. If you're not updating somebody, like, I, I had, uh, one of the. 70 odd angel investments that I've made hadn't heard from them in a year. And then they, they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you, like, do a bridge round? Yeah. And it's like, yeah, if I, I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened

between now and when the investment was made. But it's so much different to be getting, like, those updates in real. time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, seeing how they're building momentum as a company. And yeah, so anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it. Don't do it in every case. Don't listen to Alfred the founder of listen to that. I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies. It's been an honor and a privilege. And have the best Wednesday ever. Please do. Goodbye. here.